The “I” and the “Eye” : The Verbal and the Visual in Post-Renaissance Western Aesthetics [1 ed.] 9781443830843, 9781443829243

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The “I” and the “Eye”

The “I” and the “Eye”: The Verbal and the Visual in Post-Renaissance Western Aesthetics

By

Pragyan Rath

The “I” and the “Eye”: The Verbal and the Visual in Post-Renaissance Western Aesthetics, by Pragyan Rath This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Pragyan Rath All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2924-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2924-3

“We are the Backyards” —Gayadri Devi G. Praise for the Book “In The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’, Pragyan Rath provides a perceptive analysis of the shifting dialectics of the verbal and visual arts ignited by Lessing’s Laocoön. Rath’s linking of word/image theories to political economy is fine-tuned, and it illuminates the under acknowledged role of intermedial aesthetics in the shaping of cultural attitudes, such as the privileging of mental over manual labor. This is a well-conceived and well executed scholarly work, which will be welcomed by intermedial scholars and cultural historians alike.” —Kathleen Lundeen, Professor of English, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225 “Clearly argued and well grounded, this ambitious study is particularly impressive both for its scope and for its ability to coordinate what might otherwise have been seen as ‘purely’ aesthetic issues with the social and political circumstances that they reflect, and that give them their cultural force. Its focus is on the question of identity through the intersection of visual and verbal representation, but this question is pursued along historical and philosophical lines that disclose the deeper issues at stake.” —Ernest B. Gilman, Professor of English, NYU Department of English “Pragyan Rath’s erudite critical examination of the dialogue that exists in the arts, history, and society between poetry and painting, the verbal and the visual, and between labors of the mind and the body is a tour de force of cultural knowledge. The author brings forth into contemporary aesthetics and cultural studies the discourse developed in Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1776). Lessing’s argument favoring the superiority of poetry over painting is subjected to critical examination and brought into the aesthetic debates of the Twentieth Century as initiated in the writings of the art critic Clement Greenberg and others. Taking the thesis a step further, the author’s analysis extends the discourse on this topic to contemporary Marxist cultural theory as in the writings of Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. This comprehensive study is a valuable contribution to contemporary aesthetics and critical theory.” —Curtis L. Carter, Professor of Aesthetics, Marquette University, USA



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“Dr. Pragyan Rath’s work, The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’, which is a revised version of her doctoral dissertation done at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, is a historical exploration of the relationship between the verbal and visual art since the Enlightenment in Europe represented in its philosophical and aesthetic tension in Lessing’s work Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), which inaugurated a long-drawn debate in the West between the social implications of this relationship based upon the hierarchization of aesthetic categories. By using Lessing’s valorization of the verbal over the visual as a take-off point Dr. Rath has explored the intricate trajectory of this distinction to understand the nature of social ideologies that determined such dichotomies. She returns to the question of art as ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’ celebrated in Horace to suggest the philosophical genesis of that tension. Through her readings of Walter Pater and Clement Greenberg, as representatives of the 19th and 20th centuries of art criticism respectively, she weaves her historical peregrination with critical references to Kant, Adorno, Benjamin, Peter Bürger, W. J. T. Mitchell and many others. She tries to understand Lessing’s valorization of the verbal over the visual arts in terms of the 18th century’s privileging of the mind over senses. Through her thorough examination of the various art movements and criticism she tries to understand the reasons for the difficulty in maintaining such a distinction in the face of the ‘loss of cultural hierarchisation of a class in …mass commoditization’.” —Prafulla C. Kar, Director, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Baroda, Formerly Professor of English, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India “This scholarly study examines the relative valuations made of poetry and painting from the late eighteenth century to the present. It combines aesthetic and social analysis which revolutionises our understanding of both. Pragyan Rath has done what few have achieved: re-written the history of art. A splendid work.” —Prof. Gary Day, Department of English and Creative Writing, De Montfort University Leicester “This is an ambitious project that explores some of the most difficult and enduring questions in modern aesthetics and political theory. Rath takes us on a journey that is very much alive to the special signature of an historical context and the way that context informs and cross-references all modes of production, including intellectual and art practices. With Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön as her departure point, we learn how word



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and image, poetry and painting, the verbal and the visual have been compared and evaluated over several centuries, their differences hierarchised and explained as the ‘natural’ limitations of the art genres themselves. Rath contests these seemingly innocent classifications by illuminating the political prejudice that informs them. Not only is there a valorisation of intellectual work over physical work in these arguments, but an insistence that these categories should not be confused. Rath follows the shifting genealogy of this way of thinking into the modern avant-garde movement and discovers a sustained attempt to dehistoricise value judgements so that they appear as universal truths. However the irony here, and it is a difficult one to grasp, is that these arguments tend to endure because they morph over time. Rath’s persistence in explaining how continuity can be maintained through apparent discontinuity is cleverly managed, and the implications of her insights have broad analytical application. In sum, this is an erudite and provocative argument about the cross-fertilisation of historical, economic, political and philosophical forces in all forms of cultural production, especially those that pretend to creative isolation.” — Vicki Kirby, Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, School of Social Sciences and International Studies, The University of New South Wales, Sydney “I have read this fine manuscript and consider it an original and very smart contribution to studies in aesthetics and the intersection of the verbal and visual arts. I am deeply impressed with the depth of research and the acuity of insight that Professor Rath brings to this discussion. This will be an influential study that will surely be referenced by generations of future scholars. I expect that The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’ will find a home in many research libraries and scholarly collections across the globe. I am happy to recommend it with great enthusiasm.” —Donald E. Hall, Jackson Distinguished Professor of English, Chair of the Department of English, West Virginia University





TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures............................................................................................. xi Executive Summary................................................................................... xii Preface ..................................................................................................... xxii In Defence of “Spectres” Acknowledgements ................................................................................ xxix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 The Dialectics of the Verbal “I” and the Visual “Eye” Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 1.1 Introduction: Lessing’s Laocoön 1.2 The Verbal vs. the Visual: Privileging the Verbal 1.3 Classical Background: Evaluation of the Arts 1.4 Post-Classical Aesthetics: Medieval Theology, Voluntarism and Modern Science 1.5 Legacy of Descartes: Locke, Berkeley and Kant 1.6 The Dialectic of Art and Class 1.7 Conclusion: Lessing’s Influence Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 46 Ut Pictura Poesis as “Anders-streben”: Walter Pater and the Late Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic 2.1 Introduction: Pater and The Renaissance 2.2 Lessing and Pater: A Comparison 2.3 Pater’s Contradictions 2.4 Resolving the Cartesian Dilemma: Kant, Hegel and Pater 2.5 The Nineteenth-Century Social Communities and Pater’s Community of Arts 2.6 Conclusion: Lessing and Pater in Greenberg



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Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 96 Ut Pictura Poesis vs. Pure Art: Greenberg’s Modernist Aesthetic 3.1 Introduction: Greenberg and “Towards a Newer Laocoon [sic]” 3.2 Greenberg’s Criticism of Lessing and Pater 3.3 Kant, Hegel and Greenberg 3.4 Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A New Criterion 3.5 Greenberg, Abstract Expressionism, and American Politics 3.6 Conclusion: Lessing and Greenberg in Defence of Traditional Priority Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 140 Art and Beyond 4.1 Greenberg and his Contemporaries 4.2 Rethinking “artistic labour” in the Myth of Icarus in Ovid, Bruegel and Auden 4.3 Greenberg and Benjamin: Deconstructing the “aura” 4.4 Benjamin and “aura”; Greenberg and “purity”; Adorno and the “new” 4.5 The Dialectics of the “I” and the “Eye”: A Rediscovery Epilogue................................................................................................... 191 The Choreographia of the Verbal vs. the Visual Dialectics Notes........................................................................................................ 197 Appendices .............................................................................................. 225 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 254 Index........................................................................................................ 269





LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1-1: Laocoön .................................................................................... 225 Fig. 1-2: Pope Leo X and Two Cardinals ................................................ 226 Fig. 1-3: Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife ............................. 227 Ex. 2-1: “Daffodils”................................................................................. 228 Fig. 2-1: Blake, The Laocoon (sic) .......................................................... 229 Fig. 3-1: Ingres, Paganini........................................................................ 230 Fig. 3-2: Delacroix, Paganini .................................................................. 231 Fig. 3-3: Constable, The Haywain ........................................................... 232 Fig. 3-4: Courbet, Burial at Ornans ........................................................ 233 Ex. 2-2: “Epilogue—To Lessing’s Laocoon [sic]”.................................. 234 Fig. 3-5: Dove, Seagull Motif (Violet and Green)................................... 239 Ex. 3-1: Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.................................................. 240 Ex. 3-2: Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar” .................................................. 241 Fig. 3-6: Van Gogh, Starry Night ............................................................ 242 Ex. 3-3: Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” ................. 243 Ex. 3-4: Shirley, “Death the Leveller”..................................................... 243 Fig. 4-1: Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus .............................. 244 Fig. 4-2: Comparison of Bruegel’s Ships with Dutch Herring Busses .... 245 Fig. 4-3: Raphael, The School of Athens.................................................. 246 Ex. 4-1: Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” ............................................... 247 Fig. 4-4: Bruegel, The Census in Bethlehem ........................................... 248 Fig. 4-5: Bruegel, The Massacre at Bethlehem ....................................... 249 Fig. 4-6: Portrait of the Duke of Alba...................................................... 250 Fig. 4-7: Bruegel, The Parable of the Blind ............................................ 251 Fig. 4-8: Duchamp, Fountain; Bottlerack................................................ 252 Fig. 4-9: Magritte, Treason of Images ..................................................... 253





EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

I confess that I make an ambitious attempt to historically explore the complex and ever evolving interaction between the verbal and the visual forms of art; a journey of interrogation that commences with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), then goes through Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) and finally culminates in Clement Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoon [sic]” (1940). Apart from being on opposite sides of the spectrum of modernity (Lessing in the late eighteenth-century, Pater in the late nineteenth-century, and Greenberg in the mid twentieth-century); Pater and Greenberg also serve as significant moments in the history of modern avant-garde aesthetics for their “strategic” reference to Lessing and his opposition to the phenomenon of ut pictura poesis (“as is painting so is poetry”). The phenomenon finds its genesis in the works of the Greek poet, Simonides of Ceos, as proposed by W. J. T. Mitchell in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986, 116). It is later formalised by Horace in “Ars Poetica” (19 BC–10 BC; 18 BC) and has since then maintained its classical aesthetic heritage. It is with Lessing’s Laocoön that ut pictura poesis regains prominence in a completely different way: Lessing disrupts the seemingly democratic fraternity of the verbal and the visual arts forever in the most poignant and critical manner. Lessing uses the antique sculpture and Virgil’s verbal description of the fate of Laocoön and his sons to formally divide the “verbal” and the “visual” into two separate aesthetic categories with distinct boundaries. In the light of Mitchell’s Iconology, Lessing’s argument is interpreted in the following manner: painting is a concrete expression of “degraded” sensory faculties, and poetry is the “sophisticated” representation of imagination through words. Thus, Lessing’s dichotomy establishes a “prejudicial” hierarchy between the mental or intellectual labour and the manual or physical labour. His valorisation of the verbal over the visual arts derives more from social valorisation of the mind over the body than from purely aesthetic criteria. My attempt has been to read the verbal-visual opposition as the “I” and the “eye” dialectic. The changing functions of the “I” (mental cognition/imagination, or content/subject) and the “eye” (visual perception or form) are identified as social functions within the larger spectrum of modernity. More specifically, the changing ideological functions of both



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these categories have been located within a historical framework of modern aesthetics that begins with Lessing, goes through Pater and then culminates in Greenberg. In this capacity, the verbal and the visual art forms also emerge as sites for forms of social conflicts. Both these positions become pervasive tropes for my work, which further raise the question of political engagement—or disengagement—of the artist with reference to the nature of social valorisation of artistic activities as intellectual and/or manual labour. I begin with the Introduction or The Dialectics of the Verbal “I” and the Visual “Eye”, which describes the over all effort of my work. Detailed research begins in Chapter One or The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic. I concentrate on Lessing’s opposition to the ut pictura poesis tradition within the larger philosophical and material tendencies of those times. Laocoön is discussed in order to identify the philosophical rationale behind the separation of the verbal and the visual arts into two mutually exclusive aesthetic provinces. In the process, I discover echoes of classical and medieval philosophies in Lessing. The role of classical poetics is examined—particularly as they are articulated by Plato in Republic (380 BC), Aristotle in Poetics (335 BC) and Horace in “Ars Poetica”—in shaping Lessing’s classification. While classical aesthetics attempts to distinguish good art from bad art on moral grounds, Lessing claims to understand the differences between the verbal and the visual arts as differences based on “natural” limitations of the medium of representation of the individual art form. With Horace, however, the criterion of “mutual relationship” between the art forms gains more popularity. The critical inquiry here is the “need” for Lessing to attack Horace’s ut pictura poesis at its very core, centuries later, with his definite fixation of artistic boundaries that must not be trespassed. Moreover, the Platonic debate between reason and passion is replaced by the soul-body conflict, as it emerges in St. Augustine’s and also in voluntarist doctrines of the medieval period. The resulting stress on the empirical as a source of non-empirical knowledge, particularly advanced by the parallel development of modern science, establishes a suitable historical lineage from which Lessing might have derived his aesthetic categorisation. My confidence in the lineage is strengthened when I realise how Lessing incorporates Descartes’s distinctively “modern”1 mind-body dualism into his (Lessing’s) aesthetic categorisation amidst the empiricist and rationalist debate on the same. I chart the course of Lessing’s rationality that draws from the Cartesian mind-body dualism emerging in Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) in Discourse on Method and the Meditations (1637, 53–54) and Burke’s sublime-beautiful



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debate in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Lessing also anticipates Kant’s sublimebeautiful debate from the Critique of Judgement (1790). He [Lessing] valorises the sublime potential in poetry and the arbitrary signs. He declares paintings and their natural or physical signs as incompetent in their capacity to represent the formless and limitless concept of the sublime. Though he indirectly anticipates Adam Smith’s labour theory from the Wealth of Nations (1776) in his consideration of “value” as labour acquired, it is also what kind of labour involved that decides the value in the case of Lessing: mental labour is valorised over the physical. In the light of such investigations, there is further questioning of the criterion that Lessing uses to legitimise his aesthetic valorisation of the verbal and also the criteria of (i) the larger philosophical appreciation of the sublime; and (ii) the economic interpretation of labour; both deeply reflected in Lessing’s aesthetics. In the process, the social division between “art” as liberal arts and “craft” as mechanical arts, also argued by David Summers in The Judgement of Sense (1987) and Malcolm Barnard in Art, Design and Visual Culture (1998), establishes the material tendencies of Lessing’s age. With the help of Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), E. P. Thompson’s Customs in Common (1993), Gary Day’s Class (2007) and David Hawkes’s Ideology (2007), I develop a social history of the conflict between the rising middle class and the reigning aristocrats, and thus evolve a study of the “patterns of valorisation” in a capitalist society that is infested with the bourgeois desire for social priority and the fear of the loss of traditional priority by the aristocrats. Occasions like the sumptuary laws that restrict mingling of classes inform Lessing’s aesthetic position against artistic trespassing, which also (seem to) privilege poetry. In the process, the denial of ut pictura poesis reproduces the underlying prejudices of the Enlightenment aesthetics: the sovereignty that Lessing seems to grant each of the arts is not, however, based upon any notion of a democratic and equitable division of labour and profit, but is in fact a defence of the entrenched capital of an aristocracy of hereditary powers and rights. In Chapter Two or Ut Pictura Poesis as “Anders-Streben”: Walter Pater and the Late Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic, I examine the fate of Lessing’s aesthetic hierarchy in Pater’s revaluation of the visual as a



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significant aesthetic category in The Renaissance, written a century after Lessing in 1873. While recognising the exclusivity of the arts and hence the critical prowess in Lessing, Pater also formulates the condition of “anders-streben,” in which: [. . .] in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben—a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces. (Pater 123)

In this regard, the visual art is compared with the verbal in its capacity to aspire for the condition of the ideal art—music—where the conflict between material medium (body) and mind (idea) is resolved, or in a Hegelian sense, the “ontic” separation of the Kantian phenomena and noumena is no longer “ontic” but relative and is finally synthesised in the Geist. However, even Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) posits Absolute Spirit as the highest level of consciousness, and in Aesthetics, romantic poetry is declared as the highest form of art: the incorporeal is valorised. In contrast, while following the Hegelian methodology of synthesis, Pater declares music as the ideal form of art. The ut pictura poesis earlier denied by Lessing is the basis for the confraternity of these arts that share a mutual or reciprocal frustration with limits, and where each one lends force to the other to achieve the condition of music. In effect, no form of art is declared as purely physical or mental: thus, Lessing’s hierarchy “seems” to dissolve. Music may be interpreted in Pater as a particular trope that holds all the arts together, such that the verbal and the visual become important in their capacities to attain that condition, and not for their existing circumstances. I locate Pater’s position regarding music within a larger historical context of what constituted intellectual forms of arts and their subsequent academic forms of institutionalisation: music has been the first of the arts to be included in the respectable community of the liberal arts because of its equation with mathematics, and subsequently, other forms of arts that entered the esteemed bower of the liberal arts had to prove their intellectual composition in similar ways. The question here is: in what capacity is music a better choice for Pater than poetry so as to be free from ideological imperatives that had imprisoned Lessing? I say it is not. The argument here is that the “need” for an ideal art stems from the “need” to democratise the verbal and the visual arts and such a ploy is also a defence of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic of the entrenched capital of a bourgeois class of powers and rights in the face of rising working



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class agencies. Using Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848); Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961); Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984); Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1988); Crossick’s “From Gentleman to the Residuum” (1991); Marcuse’s “The Affirmative Character of Culture”; Hawkes; Day and Donald E. Hall’s Subjectivity (2004), I reconstruct the conflict between social agencies of the working class and the dominant wealthy class of nineteenth-century England. The propagation of middle class virtues through fiction and other forms of art circulated amidst the working class is also a systematic conditioning of working class taste resulting in further division of that class into skilled and unskilled “selves”. Jacques Rancière’s The Nights of Labor: The Workers’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989) and the integration of Rancière in Patrick Joyce’s Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in NineteenthCentury England (1994) discuss the ambiguous relation between the proletariat and the intellectual. Pater also uses the concept of “virtues” (Renaissance x) in place of Lessing’s “limits” to show how different arts can aspire for the condition of music; just like the working class artisan, who internalises the middle class virtues to aspire for a higher social status or patronage by and inclusion into the dominant community of the society. In the process, possibilities of revolution or even protests are ironed out. Lessing has used the incidental prejudice of the physical labour as a rational estimate to realise the value of the verbal narrative, which apparently uses mental labour. Pater uses the incidental institutionalisation of socialism as a rational estimate to realise the intellectualism of the ideal art that equates both mind and body, like the political proclamations of equality propagating similar rights to every section of the capitalist society. However, in a capitalist system of production, which by virtue of being the competitive system it is, equality in economic status is not possible. In other words, “Anders-streben” becomes proxy for the condition of artistic limitations rather than artistic unity: Pater does not broadcast the establishment of an association of similar kinds of arts, but encourages the “need” for different art forms to reciprocate to and fulfill each other’s limitations in order to achieve the “Ideal”, so that the proclaimed limitations of lesser arts remain advertised. The underlying realisation is that the marginalised form of art is flawed; it has to be flawed, and what qualifies that art to be “flawed” is subject to the section of society that is privileged to idealise what it is to be “flawless”. In Chapter Three or Ut Pictura Poesis vs. Pure Art: Greenberg’s Modernist Aesthetic, there is a paradoxical inversion of Lessing in Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoon [sic]” written in 1940. He



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declares his defence of the visual as his modernist formalist aesthetic. His formalism in my account is preoccupied with Lessing’s questions of intellectualism and the fate of the artistic media in a market-driven world. He understands Lessing and the nineteenth-century aesthetic practices by understanding their historical emergence as predominantly a bourgeois enterprise. In this capacity, he unearths a “pattern” in Williams’s sense of the word from The Long Revolution (63), which also locates the visual in a certain state of subservience. While appearing to analyse the cultural context of the emergence of a certain kind of aesthetics in the eighteenthand nineteenth-centuries, his own conclusion of “pure non-objective abstract art” of the twentieth-century is an attempt to place his aesthetic at the end of a historical process and yet also beyond it: the abstract art in the Hegelian sense is the result of a historical process of aesthetic conflict; yet the purity of the abstract art arises from a Kantian judgement of taste. I have used Paul Crowther’s “Kant and Greenberg's Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism” (1984), J. M. Bernstein’s The Fate of Art (1992) and Stephen Melville’s “Kant after Greenberg” (1998) to demonstrate the Kantian and Hegelian conflicts in Greenberg’s aesthetic. Moreover, I also discuss the following texts in short; namely, Ingres’s and Delacroix’s paintings on Paganini, Constable and The Haywain; Courbet and Burial at Ornans, along with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar”, and also Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, to effectively depict the issues that emerge in Lessing and Greenberg. Greenberg reintroduces Lessing in his aesthetic formulations of faithfulness to artistic media. Like Pater, he also eulogises music as the most faithful of art forms and hence the most pure, though he does not take into account the likes of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, both of which include musical passages that effectively replicate urban street sounds. Unlike Pater, however, he denies the reciprocity of art forms to attain the condition of music. He claims that such reciprocity is a technical illusion and is actually an act of subservience, which also entails loss of artistic individuality. This propels Greenberg to defend the visual arts on account of that very limitation that Lessing prescribes for them: their natural affinity to their physical media. His interpretation of the verbal signs, as signs that determine culture and are socially conventionalised thus conventionalising culture all over again, also equates him with Saussurean theory about the conventional character of the verbal signs as argued in the Course in General Linguistics (1916) and Lévi-Strauss’s categorisation of the sign as primitive and/or modern in The Savage Mind (1962). Verbal signs are social signs and hence cannot



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free themselves of the oppressiveness of culture; “social” for Greenberg is the dominant bourgeois class. Thus, he understands the visual sign as a sign that can and must relinquish a known referent (the idea) by “pure” display of its physicality. Through David Cottington’s Modern Art (2005), Lawrence Rainey’s “The Cultural Economy of Modernism”, T. J. Clark’s “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art” (1982), Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) and Eros and Civilization (1966) and along with our usual suspects, Day, Hawkes and Hall, I manage to sketch the economic predicament of the bourgeois society in the times of the Great Depression. Greenberg’s denial of Pater’s utopia comes at a time when bourgeois culture is losing its exclusivity in the face of mass coexistence, already emerging from systematic integration of middle class taste, by and into the working class, over time. Technology (machine) converts “selves” into commodities measured against the value of money, such that, every individual is commoditised in economic terms. The underlying threat is the loss of cultural hierarchisation of a class in the face of mass commoditisation. However, the defence of the visual and the denial of ut pictura poesis in favour of purity of art form is a defence of the entrenched capital of an aristocracy of hereditary powers and rights: this time the intention is to create a new system with same hierarchies but represented differently; a new culture that is not accessible to the masses. Such a discussion is located amidst the cold war scenario between America and the Soviet Union and the political affinity of Greenberg and Abstract Expressionism with America as against the European avant-garde movements like Dadaism or Surrealism or, the popular art or “kitsch”. In Chapter Four or Art and Beyond, I raise the question of political engagement—or disengagement—of the “intellectual” in the light of my interpretations of Lessing, Pater and Greenberg. The relation between the critic and the artist becomes interesting, particularly amidst the cultural crisis in the face of neutralisation of class distinctions in capitalist and late-capitalist economic conditions. In this context, I discuss the plight of the traditional “intellectual” in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”, written a year before Greenberg in 1939. In the process, I also trace the evolution of the artist from the position of an artisan to that of a critic and a historian in an exploratory study of three works of art on the myth of Icarus, namely, one poem by Ovid, one by Auden, and a painting by Breugel; all contained in Auden’s poem. It is in Auden’s despair over the death of the intellectual that I question the demarcated roles assigned to the artist as the intellectual labourer and the ploughman as the manual labourer: I use Anthony Low’s The Georgic Revolution (1985); Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning



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Technology” (1977) and “The Origin of the Work of Art”; James Heffernan’s Museum of Words (2004); Alexander Nemerov’s “The Flight of Form” (2005); and Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (2006) among others to strengthen the argument. It is in the context of Greenberg’s differences with Benjamin, that I find a possibility to relate Greenberg’s “purity” to Adorno’s concept of the “new” from Aesthetic Theory (1970) as well as with Benjamin’s interpretation of the loss of “aura” in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). I conclude from Bürger that the modern artist and critic alike are obsessed with a desire for trans-historical categories: Greenberg’s “purity” and even Adorno’s “newness” are means of reaffirmation of the need for artistic “aura”. In the light of Bürger, I contend that the “newness” is in fact not “new” or the “purity” is not “pure” when it comes to the act of defining the category of art. Rather, “new” or “pure” are terms used for the packaging of the commodity status of the work of art (Bürger 61). Thus Lessing, Pater and Greenberg may be seen as entrepreneurs of intellectualism, who have been packaging art in a way that best provides maximum profit to their organization/institution/ society/culture/history. Or, in the light of Michael Kelly’s Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (2003), one may say that aestheticians like Hegel, Greenberg or even Adorno, who have arrived at a historical evolution of philosophical positions of the Absolute Spirit, or the “pure” non-objective abstract avant-garde art, or the category of “newness” for modern art, in their individual capacities, have also made an effort to realise, in the final position achieved, the trans-historicity of their philosophical interests that translate into universal truth claims. I argue that Lessing, Pater and Greenberg in their philosophical encounters with art attempt to be iconoclastic in their efforts to dehistorcise art and, in the process, develop a condition of artistic disinterestedness underlying which is their philosophical interest to develop a universal philosophy of art. My attempt has been to unearth the philosophical “interest” underlying Lessing’s universal physical laws of aesthetics, Pater’s utopian law of Ideal art, and Greenberg’s purified universality of the physical form or medium. And that is possible “only” if one attempts to historicise Lessing’s, Pater’s and Greenberg’s processes of dehistoricisation of art. In this capacity, I have looked at philosophical aesthetics as a history of diffusions, displacements and idealist reparations of class division. So is it possible at all to re-conceive art forms in any social space without hierarchy of classifications? With the help of Heffernan’s Cultivating Picturacy (2006), I use Magritte’s pipe painting to establish the possibility of interpreting the verbal and the visual as fluid



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categories. Moreover, through Vicki Kirby’s deconstruction of the Saussurean system of signification in Telling Flesh (1997), it is possible to understand the pluralistic nature of signification itself. And finally with Rancière’s “The Politics of Literature” (2004) and The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004/2007), we may also understand the nature of politics as inherent in aesthetics itself. Finally, in the Epilogue or The Choreographia of the Verbal vs. the Visual Dialectics, I summarise my entire effort and establish my agenda for my work as a post-script. On the whole, I have attempted to chart the course of the verbal and the visual arts (1) as disparate historical practices that emerge in their attempt to defend the entrenched capital of an aristocracy of hereditary powers and rights; or (2) as philosophies of the “I” and the “eye” that emerge as a history of diffusions, displacements and idealist reparations of class division. In the process, I have discovered Lessing and his struggle between the verbal and the visual as the proxy for a Laocoön struggling to save his two sons, in a particular history of acknowledgement of limits; the capitulation of those limits to perilous alterities; their attempt to then open the space of alterities without sacrificing the autonomy and agential power of the individual critic/artist always imagined exemplarily as the creative artistic subject; and their disastrous capitulation to totalitarian control which becomes the negative point of departure for the artistic tendencies usually grouped under the rubric of postmodernism. The verbal and the visual arts as sites for forms of social conflicts become a pervasive trope for my work in the act of aesthetic location of the autonomous, autotelic, self-certifying “thing in itself” in a work of art. Twentieth-century aesthetic developments all trace back to this critical post-Kantian starting point, which has long been anticipated by Lessing in the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Enlightenment. It is the postmodernist aesthetic that provides future vantage point when dealing with the issues outlined in this work. In Cottington’s words, no newer forms of counteraction and resistance towards controlling orthodoxies of the culture industry have developed in recent times of visual dominance in advertising, television and films, such that oversaturation of them in the visual and the print media has led to closure of any space from which they might be questioned (40). It would be interesting to think



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about the possibilities of the opening of such spaces or develop a theory of the failure to do so for future research.





PREFACE IN DEFENCE OF “SPECTRES”

There are two strands along which I try to steer my argument: one, which relates the word-image problematic to developments in the history of philosophy; and the other that relates it to socio-economic and political developments. Both are legitimate enterprises, but adopting both these very large adventures makes for a very large body of expectations from my work, because my readers will expect me to be thorough with my analysis of both. But inevitably, because of the enormity and perhaps discreteness of the two, there are gaps in my accounts of both, and these create problems for me, because I do not satisfy either of them fully. This is one of the questions that I need to address. It is true that my work is sketched on a very large canvas. My attempt has been, however, to combine broad strokes with detailed spot work—in other words, I have tried to formulate large arguments, but have always provided detailed sample analyses throughout my work. My attempt in this has been less any grandiose attempt at completeness than the attempt to historicise major turning points in the history of the relationship between word and image. My Occam's razor cut away all but a handful of issues in this complex and surely interminably exciting relationship. So I will not deny the gaps or lacunae, but I cannot feel guilty about them either, because for a short project like this, they are inevitable. I believe my work illuminates Lessing's distinctions in considerable detail and not only historicises them, but also sketches their career before his own statements and afterwards. This is in defence of my procedural parts. The two strands that the insightful reader/critic delineates are of course separate, and need individual and exclusive attention. But it has been my own conviction that a material history of cultural practices must also address the division of disciplines that cut into and disintegrate our own critical efforts. This division is particularly familiar to everyone in technological and managerial institutes, like the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where I completed my doctoral thesis, or the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where I am presently teaching Managerial Communications. The unequal size of the technology/management/



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humanities/social sciences departments and centres describes well our own fractured moment in history. Developments in philosophy and the philosophy of the arts are not just ideal or merely metaphysical abstractions, but have their roots in the same soil from which social, political, economic, and cultural life emerges. The second strand of my argument tries to integrate cultural production to social, political and economic production regimes, and I would say the first strand does the same to philosophical production lines. Together, these strands comprise the focal sharpening that makes us think we live in a world, a world naturally implying a collective whose parts exist always within the possibility of contact with every other part or parts. So yes, I believe the binaries that I have tried to foreground must be tethered to a fundamentally material history if our own senses and our minds must function to the fullest extent of their possibilities. This liberation into confluence must be the form in which we can envisage and redesign the collectivities in which we lead our lives if we are to avoid the costliness and wastefulness of authoritarianism and exploitation. There is also of course, the spectre of Marx to deal with? My arguments are very clearly and greatly influenced by Marxian modes of analysis. Marx never theorised explicitly about the specific problems that I try to address in my work, but his text was a good and symptomatic one, so I used it. In other words, my work uses Marxian analysis at times, but it is not necessarily Marxist; indeed, it is postmodern in many ways more than merely Marxist. Marx's general theory about the way the base and superstructure work informs my work as well as the work of the Marxists whose works I use in the course of my work. But, I know, this is a polemical point, and I would like the readers to keep this in mind. The work here draws a lot from other works and their fields and yet, I humbly state, this work still attempts to stand out. Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) discusses the social valorisation of intellectual labour over manual labour in contemporary service-oriented vocations and academies. I have a few sections on the division between “art” or intellectual arts or what came to be known as the liberal arts, and “craft” or mechanical arts. Crawford talks about the persistence of similar divisions or patterns in the contemporary education scenario of technical subjects. I am interested in developing possible “behind the scene” motifs of such divisions, and that is what I have been engaging with throughout my work. Crawford is significant not merely for his questioning of a certain kind of priority of labour, but more for the delineation of supplementary and infinitesimal divisions within technical and managerial labour itself,



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divisions that have affinities with traditional priorities. I have discussed the development of traditional priorities and what that might lead to. While Gillespie in The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008) does what the title prescribes, I look at the social conflicts that develop into aesthetic classifications; where theology is “also” a form of social conflict. I have been looking at art and literature in the context of socio-political issues. Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004/2007) argues, on the other hand, that the arrival of the flat surface of the canvas has its own politics, and is not necessarily the way the avant-garde proclaims is the case, i.e., through social politics. He further argues that aesthetic is the artistic phenomenon adhering to a particular regime of the sensible. The idea of such a regime has become foreign to itself, like Kant’s genius, who is unaware of the laws it (he/she) produces. Modernity is a poor name for this aesthetic regime of the arts. He therefore claims that the avant-garde attempts to define the subject who best fits in the new human vision and appropriates the connection of the aesthetic and the political to this new vision. I am interested in the politics of the avant-garde that makes such appropriations possible. Hawkes in Ideology (2007) succeeds in providing a review of the history of the term (”Ideology”) and in the process, also outlines the evolution of modern philosophy and thought. It goes into an interesting discussion about “ideology” and how it is used over different times. I provide a review of the history of classification of the verbal and the visual arts that starts in a particular way in Lessing. My attempt has been to read the verbal-visual opposition as the “I” and the “eye” dialectic, and also to locate them as changing ideological functions within a historical framework of modern aesthetics that begins with Lessing, goes through Pater and then culminates in Greenberg. In this capacity, the verbal and the visual art forms also emerge as sites for forms of conflicting ideologies. I have used Day’s work in Class (2007) as the base on which I build my social theory of aesthetic classification. I look at the conflict between the verbal forms and the visual forms of arts as possible sites of class conflicts. For Heffernan in Cultivating Picturacy (2006), while words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, he also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art. For me, the contestation is at a social/material/political level as well. Cottington’s work in Modern Art (2005) is a splendid introduction to the same, the central movements, ideas, and controversies. Mine is more about the politics of the avant-garde, but also the politics of aesthetic



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classifications that reveal the politics of the modern avant-garde movement. Bronislaw Szerszynski’s Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) helps me establish the larger connections between religious and economic history, so as to locate the verbal and the visual struggle in the larger struggle of human existence. Stallabrass’s Contemporary Art (2004) helps further the investigation of the issues raised in my work. He looks at contemporary art and not specifically the division of the arts. But his presentation of the cultural conflicts helps me theorise about the division of arts, a division that has been discussed at length in my work. If Heffernan’s Museum of Words (1993/2004) is a poetics of ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery, mine is a politics of the classification of arts from Lessing to Greenberg. Hall’s Subjectivity (2004) explores the history of theories of selfhood, from the classical to the present, and demonstrates how those theories can be applied in literary and cultural criticism. I explore the history of classification of the arts as begun by Lessing, which is also a history of such classifications from the classical era to the present. Thus, I demonstrate how such classifications can/have been applied to literary and cultural criticism. While Milind Malshe writes on the Aesthetics of Literary Classification (2003), mine devotes itself to the politics of aesthetic classification as developed in Lessing. In the lines of Kelly’s Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (2003), I contend that Lessing, Pater and Greenberg in their efforts to arrive at their philosophical position through historical analyses have nevertheless translated their ideologies into universal truth claims. In contrast to Richard Eldridge’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (2003), I have attempted to chart the course of Western philosophies of art as historical practices rather than leave them as pure history of philosophy. Jonathan E. Schroeder’s Visual Consumption (2002) has had a strong influence on my work. While he concentrates on the visual representation in the market, I concentrate on the verbal/visual dichotomy in aesthetics as an emerging practice from the social divisions produced by and in the market. Like Andrew Edgar, and Peter Sedgwick’s edition of the Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (1999), I am redefining key moments in aesthetic theory and history of the modern avant-garde, but through the conflict between the verbal and the visual arts.



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In the light of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1999), my work concentrates on the aesthetic classification between the verbal and the visual arts as also the aesthetic and by extension, the cultural logic of capitalism and late-capitalism. I go beyond Summers’s The Judgement of Sense (1987) to show how the rise of aesthetics culminates in the formation of the modern avantgarde. In the light of such co-relations, there is further questioning of the criterion that Lessing uses to legitimise his aesthetic valorisation of the verbal. In the process, the social division between “art” as liberal arts and “craft” as mechanical arts, as argued by Summers and also by Malcolm Barnard in Art, Design and Visual Culture (1998) establishes the material tendencies of Lessing’s age. I have used Kirby’s analysis of nature and culture division in Telling Flesh (1997) to understand verbal and visual division as also a part of the nature/culture dialectic. I have expanded Jay’s issues on the social position of “vision” in twentieth-century French thought in his Downcast Eyes (1993) into a history of the social valorisation of “vision” in modern avant-garde thought as and from the moment when Lessing developed his limits of “vision” way back in the Enlightenment. In the light of Thompson’s Customs in Common (1993), I am looking at aesthetic customs in common (similar issues packaged differently at different defining moments of the modern avant-garde movement). Similarly, when considering Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), I am also looking at the ideology of the aesthetic classification of the verbal arts and the visual arts in particular. Rancière problematises the category of the working class, which till then has been propagated as ideologically distinct from the dominant class, in his seminal work, The Nights of Labor (1989). I use a similar format to problematise class conflicts as also aesthetic conflicts. Mitchell in Iconology (1986) looks at Lessing in detail. I take up Mitchell’s analysis of Lessing to analyse the modern avant-garde movement. Wellbery does extensive work on Lessing in Lessing’s Laocoon (sic) (1984). I am also looking at Lessing’s Laocoon (sic) as semiotics in the Post-Renaissance Western Aesthetics, but more as the politics of the semiotics derived. I completely follow Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984). I am more interested in the division of the arts that eventually culminate in Bürger’s thesis on the avant-garde.



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I extend the verbal–visual controversy identified by Niklaus Rudolf Schweizer in The Ut Pictura Poesis Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany (1972) into the avant-garde controversy of the twentieth century. Williams’s Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1963), and The Long Revolution (1961) have influenced my work tremendously. I also look at the verbal and the visual clash within the framework of culture and society but within 1766 and 1940. I am particularly thankful to Ernest Gilman, Professor of English, from the NYU Department of English, for not merely being the external examiner of my thesis, but also for letting me know the basic problems inherent in my ambitious work. On his recommendation, I read Anthony Low’s The Georgic Revolution, Heffernan’s Museum of Words, Kelly’s Iconoclasm in Aesthetics, Donoghue’s work on Pater, and Steiner’s The Colors of Rhetoric. Donald E. Hall, the Chair of the Department of English of West Virginia University, has been very kind to provide insightful suggestions. I incorporated E. P. Thompson and Raymond Willaims. Kathleen Lundeen, Professor of English from Western Washington University, has been invaluable for me. Her recommendation of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris is very significant for my work. In my discussion of Keats’s urn and Stevens’s jar, I have also described the technological movement from a handcrafted urn to a massproduced jar as an illustration of Benjamin’s argument in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; a valid suggestion from her. I did try. She recommended Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, where both as a philosophy teacher and a motorcycle mechanic, Crawford grapples with the cultural discrimination that privilege “knowledge workers” over manual labourers, and, in Lundeen’s words, to a degree he succeeds in deconstructing that binary. I am particularly grateful to Rajiv C. Krishnan for helping me understand how to position myself when taking into account the problematic relation between my philosophical historicisation of the verbal and visual conflict, and the politicisation of the material history of times when these divisions were encountered. I am particularly thankful to him for helping me fend for myself when it comes to the specters of Marx. I have many people to acknowledge and thank, and that would require a separate section. I would merely say at this point that my work hopefully should make us think we live in a world, whose parts exist always within the possibility of contact with every other part or parts. In the words of



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Vicky Kirby, then, I attempt a synaesthesia of ideas, to which the reader contributes much more, even while reading, reflecting and interpreting.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I earnestly dedicate the following passage to my supervisor, Dr. Milind Malshe, Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple’s consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple—this disciple’s consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. Starting to enter into dialogue in the world, that is, starting to answer back, he always feels “caught in the act,” like the “infant” who, by definition and as his name indicates, cannot speak and above all must not answer back. [. . .]. He feels himself indefinitely challenged, or rejected or accused; as a disciple, he is challenged by the master who speaks within him and before him, to reproach him for making this challenge and to reject it in advance, having elaborated it before him; and having interiorized the master, he is also challenged by the disciple that he himself is. (Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, 31–32)

I shall always remain the disciple and a sincerely grateful one at that. I am very thankful to my panel members from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (H&SS) without whom this work would have been incomplete. Dr. V. Sarma has completely transformed my interpretation of Magritte’s pipe painting, such that I had to grapple with my basics in a completely new way. Dr. V. Sirola has encouraged me tremendously to pursue philosophical discourses in new ways. I want to particularly thank Dr. R. Panda for being very encouraging, kind and helpful to me. I earnestly thank Dr. P. C. Kar, Director of the Forum of Contemporary Theory Baroda, for library and workshop facilities. Thank you for your encouragement, generosity and enthusiasm. Mrs. Kar has been kindness personified and an enthusiastic intellectual in her own right. Nishat is the best librarian, and Devendra has always been helpful in a way that only he can. And all those books and theories that even the Forum cannot supply, Upendra can and has, anytime and anywhere.



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Arvind Da and Vidya Tai have been very kind to me during my stay in Baroda, and made it possible for me to see all those paintings in the Baroda museum. I am sincerely grateful to James Heffernan, Professor Emeritus of the Department of English at Dartmouth College and author of Museum of Words, who has always been ready to give me some kind of feedback for my work, though he does not even know me in person. He also recommended Dr. Gilman for my work. I also extend my gratitude to John Roberts, Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton, School of Art and Design, and Curtis L. Carter, Professor of Aesthetics from Marquette University. I am particularly grateful to Vicki Kirby, Alexander Nemerov, Peter Bürger, and Gary Day: their work showed me where I could go with my arguments. I am very grateful to Nandini for lending me articles from Cornell University and helping me just the way she did in my MPhil days. Anooja and I had different kinds of dissertations to produce, and she beat me at that! Madhavi has been the “Florence Nightingale” to me...do I need to say more than a warm “woof”? I have much to learn from Mythili. Had it not been for Sherline, I could not have got on with Lessing. Annapurna and I have a common destiny that ties us together. We joined together, fought together, and most significantly watched and almost wrote the most innovative theses on films (Khans and Vijay Thalapathy) that only we can watch. I particularly remember and miss Sharminda. If anyone knows how to write, format, and deliver a thesis, no one can do that as well as Chaitali. She taught me two most important skills, which I am still not familiar with—commonsense and self-independence. Gayadri has been the most consistent factor of my life in IITB apart from my work. She, apart from my mother, is my worst critic and my best appreciator. I am not good at digesting the criticism, but I wait for the praises, and they do come! I am privileged to do research in IITB. It has offered me the most convenient Internet service, wonderful library facilities, prompt medical services (I fell sick twice) and variety of activities to enjoy, and above all, a generous funding to take part in national and international conferences. It has offered me a sense of timeless and luxurious life that I shall always urge for. I am particularly grateful that I have been a student of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences; a department that perhaps houses the most computer literate and technically sharp students, most of them developing such acumen after coming here and all by themselves;



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may I say they learn to be more technically literate than the technical students themselves. I gained tremendously from my course work, from Dr. Talwar, Dr. Shastri, and Dr. Sharmila. I am also grateful to Mr. Kamble, Mr. Gawde, Mr. Santosh, Mrs Hema, Mr. Prabhakar and Sunil. I must include the most prominent part of my academic education in my acknowledgements and that would be my stint in the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages or C.I.E.F.L then (2000–2005) and now the English and Foreign Languages University or E.F.L.U in Hyderabad. My Masters and M.Phil have played the most important role in the development of my doctoral thesis, which is now available in this book form. The following people need special mention here: Dr. A. Bhalla, for introducing me to academic writing and European Drama; Dr. A. V. Ashok, for the most amazing class lecture experiences (almost a trance) and for investing his sympathy and good will in me unlike any other; Dr. Rajiv C. Krishnan, for fostering my interest in Postmodernist Literature; Dr. Lakshmi Chandra, for exciting classes on American Drama and for her personal encouragement always; Dr. Charumati Ramdas for her passion for Russian Literature and me; Augustine, for the Latin classes; and Dr. T. Sriraman, for perennially being there for me and for all his students. This book owes its genesis to C.I.E.F.L and the institute’s first ever attempt at a Masters Course in 2000; I am a product of that first beginning. I cannot get away without thanking Nandini and Anooja once again, and most importantly, Asmita Bagchi and Debjani for being Asmita and Debjani for me (whatever that might mean). Though unconnected with my thesis, I must mention Sushmita Mandal for her consistent support for me notwithstanding my almost zero level of communication, and my particular thanks to Sujata Trivedi, for backing me in most of my endeavours from my school days till now. I need to mention Prof. Dhal from my graduation days. If she does come across this book, she would be the happiest. It is futile to say that I am thankful to my parents because they have to support me in any case. But I know that had I been in their position, I would have lost my patience long back. My research has been their toughest task. To my sister, I am always grateful, and that goes unsaid. This work owes its existence to the World Wide Web and to two laptops and a few computers in the MPCL and the Linux lab of the H&SS department; and I owe mine to IITB’s DC++ and You Tube and Hostel 11.



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Prof. Malshe from IITB, and Prof. P. Bhatta from the Business Ethics and Communication Group of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC) have encouraged me to transform my research work into the present form. I am grateful to them for their vision for my work and for me. Last but not the least, Cambridge Scholars Publishing along with Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, and Soucin Yip-Sou in particular, has made it possible for me to transform my work into the present form. Thank you, Pragyan Rath



INTRODUCTION THE DIALECTICS OF THE VERBAL “I” AND THE VISUAL “EYE”

I argue that the opposition between the verbal and the visual arts as developed in Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) effects a significant shift in the way social, political and cultural issues have been analysed and debated.2 I shall explore some of the reasons why Lessing has been granted such prominence by aestheticians like Pater and Greenberg and assess the implications of this commitment. The course of my project will represent an introduction to this field of inquiry that will also question some of its more debatable aspects. The selection of texts, all with quite different theoretical perspectives, has one thing in common—each writer helps us to reconsider the foundations of knowledge and how an intellectual understands the world. In Lessing we wonder if systems of representation can be translated beyond social structures of meaning making: is there equivalence between the verbal and the visual systems of representation and how is it accepted? Pater refines this question in other ways by interrogating the relationship between the verbal and the visual representation as mutually reciprocal relations in their efforts to attain an ideal status of representation. This project questions whether the status of the ideal informs how we acknowledge/ ignore what goes into the emergence of such a category, and if we entertain this suggestion then what happens to truth claims based on the ideal? Greenberg argues that the act of representation is inherently historical and explores the political and cultural presumptions that inform binary divisions such as verbal/visual art forms, academic/avant-garde art movements, or kitsch/pure non-objective abstract arts. This project animates the notion of the “verbal” and the “visual” as the “mental” and the “physical” or the “I” and the “eye” dialectics, arguing that to see is also to think, to transform and to create. It (the act of seeing) is not a passive act of reception but an active reinvention, a productive practice with



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transformative political potential. In sum, this project is a selection of insights into the puzzle and complexity of the verbal-visual debate.





CHAPTER ONE THE DENIAL OF UT PICTURA POESIS: LESSING AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT AESTHETIC

1.1 Introduction: Lessing’s Laocoön The distinction between poetry and painting established by Lessing needs to be placed within its proper historical context: only such a context can justify the links which will be established between Lessing’s aesthetics and the modernist/early twentieth-century avant-garde. It is therefore necessary to focus on Lessing’s Laocoön in order to establish connections between philosophical models and socio-economic practices of those times. Two main questions need to be discussed: 1. 2.

How does Lessing systematise the distinction between the verbal and the visual arts? What place does Lessing’s aesthetic classification occupy within the larger intellectual and material tendencies of the Enlightenment?

Let me begin with Lessing’s analysis of the division of the verbal and the visual arts into two mutually exclusive aesthetic provinces in his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766).

1.2 The Verbal vs. the Visual: Privileging the Verbal Different parts of the human body are being “assigned” different functions with Lessing’s categorisation of the verbal arts (poetry) and the visual arts (painting) into distinct modes of artistic expression. W. J. T. Mitchell has argued in his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986) that Lessing’s dichotomy establishes a “prejudicial” hierarchy between mental labours of the mind and physical functions of the body.3 Lessing’s discussion of the distinction between the verbal and the visual arts betrays his bias in favour



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of the verbal arts/poetry. Though he maintains that poetry and painting are “two equitable and friendly neighbors” (91), he contradicts the “friendly” equation when he says that visual arts “in particular” need “close supervision by the law” (14). A certain prejudice against the visual arts is further manifested when he explicitly contends that painting works on the method of “reduction” (67). It is unfeasible for the artist to give that “extraordinary” size to the gods, and hence the gods “must in the painting sink to the common level of humanity” (68). Thus, all great gods “become exactly the same kind of beings, recognizable by nothing more than their outward conventional symbols” (68). Painting, with its allegiance to empirical experience and material limits, is thus a threat to the hierarchies that protect the numinous realm of the sacred. Lessing’s aesthetic position against artistic trespassing also (seem to) privilege poetry. He warns poets not to become common reductionists like painters. If a poet imitates a painter, he “trims” “that higher being into a puppet” (60). In contrast, if a painter emulates a poet, it is done in poor taste: “It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction [. . .]” (91). Poetry can thus only descend from its exalted status by attempting to learn from painting, while painting, though clearly impoverished, should nevertheless be well-bred enough not to steal from its more affluent neighbour. He also suggests how a poet should spend his/her labour, as is evident when he argues that a poet’s intrusion into a painter’s domain is “squandering of much imagination to no purpose [. . .]” (91). Thus, “imagination” is distinct from “outward conventional signs” and also more precious. Lessing’s aesthetic position also seems to necessitate a disciplined approach from society towards the appreciation of such arts. Moreover, different laws are required to govern his otherwise “equitable” forms of arts. In other words, society is expected to react in particular ways to individual art forms. I attempt to thematise the response of society towards these two art forms and also towards the need for social laws to guide such diverse responses. In this regard, there are echoes of classical aesthetic theories in Lessing.

1.3 Classical Background: Evaluation of the Arts I shall examine the role of classical poetics—particularly as they are articulated by Plato, Aristotle and Horace—in shaping Lessing’s classification. Plato’s ideas about art in his Republic (380 BC) soon provide the points of departure for a new poetics that is different from those of the sophists. His contention that philosophers “reason” and artists



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cater to “changing passions” brings to the fore the “reason vs. passion” contestation in a very charged manner. Lessing is important not merely for developing a “verbal-visual” aesthetic debate, which he does, but more also for camouflaging a pattern of hierarchisation of human qualities, a pattern that has played an important part in shaping classical aesthetics as well. Plato’s student—Aristotle—and his Poetics (335 BC) are important for our understanding of Lessing. His valorisation of art that he sees as a socially necessary and productive activity is clearly contrary to Plato’s own position on the social importance of art. He (Aristotle) helped contribute to the development of a systematic study of art as a valid academic activity. In fact, many neo-classical scholars have reinterpreted Aristotle’s concept of unities in drama in order to distinguish good from bad drama.4 Aristotle’s principle of classification of the arts, while based on formal methodologies, also imposes moral criterion to decide what counts as good art. Lessing, on the other hand, claims that his categorisation of the arts is not religious or moral but formal and natural. Lessing’s claim that he has followed strictly formal aesthetic categorisations is different from the classical emphasis on virtues. Horace’s concept of ut pictura poesis is of tremendous significance in the history of classical aesthetics. In Ars Poetica (19 BC–10 BC), Horace comments that poetry is like painting. Though Horace is not the originator of the principle of ut pictura poesis, he is formally credited with having popularised the phrase in his Ars Poetica.5 Lessing’s ultimate contradiction of the concept of ut pictura poesis is what makes the classical tradition of ut pictura poesis important for us. I shall now attempt to historicise and thematise three different issues in classical poetics, viz., reason and passion conflict; formal and moral agenda; and the tradition of ut pictura poesis.

1.3.1 Plato: Reason vs. Passion Plato’s criticism of the arts in the Republic rests on the criterion of the Ideal, which incorporates the moral. He posits the theory of the Ideas of which the material/natural world is a mere imitation. And the arts are further imitations of the material imitations of the Ideas. In Plato’s words: “[T]he work of the artist is at the third remove from the essential nature of the [Ideal] thing [. . .]” (Book X 320).6 Plato argues that the artist might represent a “shoemaker, a carpenter, or other workman, without understanding any one of their crafts”, while a good representation might “deceive a child or a simple-minded person into thinking [the work of



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art/the artist who pretends to be a carpenter] was a real carpenter [. . .]” (Book X 321). The arts are condemned for their ability to deceive. The hierarchy thus established is between that of pure Form and levels of representational forms, of which the artistic forms belong to the lowest by virtue of their mimetic and deceptive nature. It is from the deceptive character of the arts that I may derive Plato’s hierarchy based on moral criterion. In Plato’s words: We may call that part of the soul whereby it reflects, rational; and the other, with which it feels hunger and thirst and is distracted by sexual passion and all the other desires, we will call irrational appetite, associated with pleasure in the replenishment of certain wants. (Book IV 133)7

He alleges that the arts affected our passions and not our reason. In this regard, Peter A. White’s comments on Plato in his Psychological Metaphysics (1993) are illuminating: Thus Plato made a fundamental categorical distinction between reason and the passions. Through reason we aspire to virtue, to the condition of the gods; through passion we tend to be dragged down towards the condition of the beasts. Passion disrupts the otherwise perfect rationality of the faculty of reason. (287)

Thus, no reason can reside in passion. Plato argues that passion makes human species weak and subject to change. For instance, an emotional drama might disrupt the otherwise stoic countenance of the audience, thus suggesting the promiscuous nature of the audience. Reason controls passion and instructs an individual how to conduct himself/herself in public life: “What encourages [. . .] [an individual] to resist his grief is the lawful authority of reason, while the impulse to give way comes from the feeling itself [. . .]” (Book X 328). The person who bears misfortune with least display of emotions is considered to be a “man of high character [. . .]” (Book X 328).8 He criticises the arts for having the ability to affect the discreditable passions. In his words: “[The] other part which impels us to dwell upon our sufferings and can never have enough of grieving over them is unreasonable, craven, and faint hearted” (Book X 328–329). He criticises the poet and the painter alike when he contends that both create “poor things by the standard of truth and reality” and their creations appeal “not to the highest part of the soul, but to one which is equally inferior” (Book X 329). The artist is not qualified to be a part of the Republic since he/she “stimulates and strengthens an element which threatens to undermine the reason”



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(Book X 329). For Plato, even the actors who enact the villainous roles are in danger of being swayed by villainous passions. Thus, he condemns the unregulated display of passion. Plato’s criticism of art and passion may be historically seen as an extension of the fear of sophistry. David Summers in The Judgement of Sense (1987) tells us how Plato in the tenth book of his Republic accuses the “poet, painter and sophist” of superficiality, since they are merely concerned with “appearances, with colors and surfaces” (42). W. K. C. Guthrie in The Sophists (1971) explains the fundamental basis of sophist philosophy—truth is ambiguous. For instance, Protagoras, a famous sophist, teaches his students the use of rhetoric in order to practice arguing for both sides of a problem in his book Truth or Alethia, his representative best. Another sophist, Gorgias, justifies the use of deception in order to persuade successfully. Interestingly, it is the imperviousness of sophist philosophy to morality and truth that leads to the attack on sophist thought by Socrates and Plato. Plato has to propagate the concept of the Ideal as the ultimate truth. The arts, by virtue of their ambiguous nature, cannot be considered to be the right medium to acknowledge truth, since they are affected by passion, which is subject to change, and consequently leads to deception. On the other hand, we may aspire to the condition of the unchangeable and eternal truth through reason, the higher faculty of reflection that can even control passion. Plato’s division of the soul is deeply connected with the social division of the State.9 This is more so because the individual is considered to be a miniature version of the whole State. He divides the human soul into three parts: 1. 2. 3.

reason; spirited elements/passion; and appetite

Francis Macdonald Cornford in his notes to The Republic of Plato (1941) illustrates the hierarchy of human faculties in the “soul”: “In the perfect man reason will rule, with the spirited element as its auxiliary, over the bodily appetites” (Book IV 136). Moreover, each part of the soul has its prescribed desire and corresponding virtue: 1. 2.



for reason, desire has to be knowledge, to obtain the virtue of wisdom; for passion, there are desirable passions, like honour, to attain the virtue of courage; and

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3.

for appetite, there is desire of pleasure, which requires the virtue of temperance.

The kind of virtue predominant in an individual determines his/her social position. In Cornford’s words: The virtues in the state [. . .] are the qualities of the citizen, as such, considered as playing the special part in society for which he [. . .] is qualified by the predominance in his nature of the philosophic, the pugnacious, or the commercial spirit. (Book IV 136)

Thus, class divisions are dependent on the kind of virtues developed in different degrees in different citizens. The more prudent citizen is required to conduct the State affairs, and that has to be the philosopher-ruler. The warriors with their more pronounced passions are required to possess courage. For Plato, [the] power of constantly preserving, in accordance with [the State’s] institutions, the right conviction about the things which ought, or ought not, to be feared [. . .] [is courage]. (Book IV 120)

The philosopher has the insight to institutionalise the right form of conviction for the State, which the warriors have to protect. The commoners with their more pronounced virtues of appetite require the virtue of temperance. Temperance allows the willing subordination of “certain pleasures and appetites” to the institutionalised strictures on acceptable forms of passions (Book IV 121). In Cornford’s words: Temperance is not, as we might expect, the peculiar virtue of the lower order in the state. As self-mastery, it means the subordination of the lower elements to the higher; but government must be with the willing consent of the governed, and temperance will include the unanimous agreement of all classes as to who should rule and who obey. (Book IV 117)

It is the philosopher who, by virtue of wisdom, decides what pleasures and appetites need to be subordinate to the highest virtue of the State, which is justice. The arts on account of their affinity with fickle emotions and uncontrollable passions are considered dangerous for the maintenance of the laws of justice. In Plato, we therefore find that the social valorisation of human qualities (reason is better than passion) is related to the social hierarchisation of human activity by virtue of the human faculty involved (philosophers reason and hence should rule the State, while artists need to control their



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passions to set a good example to the State).10 It is however with Aristotle that a new hierarchy is imposed as the criterion to decide what counts as superior art: the moral justification of the “object of imitation” of the work of art becomes important, not necessarily the faculty involved. In other words, with Aristotle, the arts get a fresh lease on life; they are accepted as socially necessary and productive activities.

1.3.2 Aristotle: Dignified Actions vs. Meaner Actions Aristotle, like the sophists, recognises the probabilistic nature of truth. But, unlike the sophists, and like Plato, he believes in a singular truth. It is in his defence of rhetoric that we get to see the juxtaposition of probability and singularity of truth, which he also extends to his understanding of the arts: The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities. (Rhetoric)

If human beings have “sufficient natural instinct for what is true”, the representational arts would not mislead us (Rhetoric). An individual who makes a good guess at truth would also be able to guess the truthfulness or falsehood in art. He concludes that art “naturally” represents the truth. He further establishes hierarchies within the arts. It is a moral position that determines whether the “object of imitation” of a work of art is superior or inferior, notwithstanding the fact that he has other structural criteria for division of arts as well, like different media of arts.11 Aristotle’s Poetics attempts to separate the moral criterion from the formal. His formal classification uses the criterion of “medium of imitation”. The visual arts use colours and forms; the verbal arts use sounds or speech. But it is not the formal criterion that determines the hierarchy of art forms. A criterion of the moral, viz., the “object of imitation” is used to distinguish between higher and lower arts: dramatic verbal forms like the tragedy or the epic are required to imitate the dignified actions of noble heroes to become higher art forms; the comedy is the imitation of actions of meaner or mediocre persons, and hence is considered the baser form of art. Aristotle’s Poetics traces the origin of comedy to the phallic processions in the Dionysiac celebrations in the Greek countryside. These processions are marked with obscenities and verbal abuse, as is evident later in comedies as well. In contrast, tragedy



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arrives from Greek hymns sung to the god Dionysus, known as the dithyrambs. The social evolution of the two forms of drama also reflects the social status of human agency involved in the art form. Thus, tragedy is considered superior to comedy. Even in poetry, invectives and lampoons are composed about inferior people, while elevated style of verse is used in heroic poems to celebrate superior people. Aristotle considers Homer a great poet because he depicts superior people. Cleophon is a moderate poet since he depicts ordinary people. Hegemon of Thasos, the inventor of parodies, depicts inferior people, and is considered the least agreeable. Aristotle uses similar criterion of human agency while discussing the visual arts. Portraits are required to be finer than life-like ones. Paintings have to be much more than spectacles. In a Platonic manner, paintings have to develop the ethical character of figures and not merely stimulate the senses. He compares ancient Greek painters to prove his point. He is attracted to the Greek painter Polygnotus and his subject matter. Polygnotus is known for painting images of people with strong characters. There are painters like Pauson, who paint caricatures, which involves the depiction of defective or repulsive characters. Polygnotus deserves higher esteem than the Greek painter Dionysius, who paints people, as they are, that is, life-like. Thus, the delight felt when looking at images has to be proportional to the knowledge gained from such an act. A Greek painter like Zeuxis, who is famous for being a realistic painter, is disliked for the very reason that he is realistic and does not exhibit the idealistic and ethical character in his paintings like Polygnotus.12 Thus, for Aristotle, artistic representation has to be an ideal and universal form of representation. The Platonic tradition of idealisation still continues. Aristotle uses Plato’s mimetic theory of art to establish his own views on art. For Plato, the mimetic ability of art is equivalent to any condemnable act of deception. Aristotle, too, claims that imitation is the common principle of all forms of arts, like poetry, painting, music, dancing, or sculpture. However, unlike Plato, he establishes the act of mimesis as a valid human endeavour. The Platonic Ideal still retains its exclusive position, since Aristotelian mimesis is more than a mere act of imitating; it becomes an act of “idealization”—a term used by W. Hamilton Fyfe in his introduction and explanations to Aristotle’s Art of Poetry: A Greek View of Poetry and Drama (1952). In other words, the artistic feat must show what reality should be. The “objects of imitation” turn out to be the condition of judgement for social response to a particular art. Moreover, it is the tragic form of art that allows for “catharsis” of emotions like pity and fear. Fyfe shows how Aristotle’s concept of catharsis emerges as another point of departure from



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 11

Plato’s aggressive position against expression of emotions. In Fyfe’s words: Plato, who was more emotional than Aristotle, held that the effect of art on human nature might be a dangerous incontinence of emotion through the deliberate cultivation of violent feelings which ought in the interest of public morality to be discouraged. That, at least, is one of Plato’s views on Art. Aristotle, realizing the risks of inhibition, replies that this effect is not only pleasurable but also beneficial. Tragedy is a sort of nervous specific which provides a ‘Catharsis’—we might say ‘a good clearance’—of emotions which might otherwise break out inconveniently. It saves us from psychical distress by providing an emotional outlet. (15)

Consequently the arts perform the act of moral cleansing. It is with Horace, however, that the value of artistic skill—rather than the moral import of the artistic content that is central for both Plato and Aristotle— garners social significance. Horace’s emphasis on technique will later be utilised by Lessing to buttress his own aesthetics, though he does reject Horace’s conception of the relationship between poetry and painting.

1.3.3 Horace: Art as Skill Both Plato and Aristotle draw parallels between poetry and painting, while commenting on the overall conditions of “good” art. But their distinctions between the arts do not establish a “discoverable” hierarchy between them in the manner Lessing does, centuries later. Rather, their hierarchy is between good and bad art and even more between art and other disciplines of contemplation, viz., philosophy, with art falling short of critical valorisation. With Horace, however, the criterion of mutual relationship between the art forms gains more popularity. In “Ars Poetica”, he explains the concept of ut pictura poesis: “Poetry is like painting” (132). He further comments on the social reception of the art forms: “Painters and poets have always enjoyed recognized [. . .] rights to venture on what they will” (124). It is in the Greek schools of rhetoric that ut pictura poesis receives its name and its designation as an adjunct to the practice of the arts.13 The practice of ut pictura poesis is (finally) formalised into an important critical aesthetic concept in the Roman critic’s (Horace’s) treatise on the arts. Moreover, the criteria of “artistic skill” and “social responsibility to deliver pleasure” become important functional components of the art forms. On the one hand, he states that “there is no call to be ashamed of the Muse with her skill on the lyre [. . .]” (133). On the other, he argues:



12

Chapter One The Greeks have the gift of genius from the Muse, and the power of wellrounded speech. They covet nothing but praise. Roman boys do long sums 14 and learn to divide their as into a hundred parts. (131)

The Romans who conquered the Greeks revere their (Greek) traditions of knowledge and learning. Accordingly, Greek rhetoric is eagerly studied in Roman schools and also becomes a useful adjunct of the Roman political system. In other words, the Romans “acquired” the “skill” to translate aesthetic appreciations into practical services. In the context of social use, for instance, Horace justifies the pleasure criterion of the arts when staging a drama: the “ranks of elder citizens chase things off the stage if there’s no good meat in them [. . .]” while “the high-spirited youngsters won’t vote for dry poetry” (132). Art that is low in instruction (meat) or pleasure (dry) will not suffice. Centuries later, it is in Lessing that “artistic skill” and “artistic pleasure” refigure in the classification of the arts, while at the same time, his definite fixation of artistic boundaries attacks Horace’s ut pictura poesis at its very core in an age when new social boundaries emerge fast and old systems gradually decline.

1.3.4 Classical Influence on Lessing: Moral vs. Formal Classical aesthetic preferences percolate into the Enlightenment discourse of Lessing. The classical “reason-passion” contestation develops into a “science-arts” debate. Lessing claims that sciences need not be restrained by any laws, since science is the knowledge of truth, and ultimate truth is a “necessity to the soul [. . .]” (14). But the ancients also require that laws contain the arts because they [the arts] focus on pleasure. He does not find it peculiar that the ancients subject the arts to civil codes: “Hence it may be for the lawmaker to determine what kind of pleasure and how much of each kind he will permit” (14). The notion of “policing” pleasure thus becomes important. He explains why the Greeks have targeted the visual arts in particular for censure: such forms of arts have the potential of delivering pleasure. Lessing shows how for the Greeks the object of the verbal narrative is the dignified expression of Laocoön, rather than description of Laocoön’s physicality, which is left to the imagination (see Fig: 1ʹϭ in the Appendices): In poetry a garment is not a garment; it conceals nothing; our imagination sees right through it. Whether Virgil’s Laocoön wears robes or not, his suffering is just as evident in one part of the body as in another. To the imagination his brow is encircled but not hidden by the priestly fillet. [. . .].



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 13 His priestly dignity avails him nothing. Even its emblem, which assures him honor and respect everywhere, is soaked and desecrated by the poisonous slaver [the serpent]. (38–39).

In other words, with a poet a dress is no dress; it conceals nothing; our imagination sees through it at all times. Each part of Laocoön’s “desecrated” body is equally visible to the imagination, which obviates the need to give direct verbal expression to this “desecration”. In a sculpture, however, the object of representation has to be the dignified expression of Laocoön in pain. If the expression is not dignified, then the loathsomeness of that expression is visible and that kind of visibility is not respectable: The wide-open mouth, aside from the fact that the rest of the face is thereby twisted and distorted in an unnatural and loathsome manner, becomes in painting a mere spot and in sculpture a cavity, with most repulsive effect. (17)

Thus, he concludes that for the ancients the visual representation has been inherently capable of producing a repulsive effect by virtue of its visibility, and hence requires classical laws of dignity and beauty to control, that which is made visible to the society. For Plato, even the kind of stories told to young minds need censoring. However, Lessing illustrates how classical laws are stricter with the visual arts. The verbal narratives are spared from excessive censoring on account of the lack of physicality of the verbal written character (word). He (Lessing) contends that it would not matter whether the verbal attribution of a “wide-open mouth” to a screaming face makes the face uglier (23). Moreover, the poet would use a mere “pen stroke” to represent the screaming act (24), which is not physical enough. Both the stroke and the act it represents are “transitory” in their impressions (24). This is so because the strokes and the acts which precede or follow them would take over. In the visual work of art however the static impressions are permanently visible to the eye. Hence the visual work of art has the power to influence the mind by virtue of the permanence of its visibility. Lessing argues that for the ancients the visual arts in particular have an “inevitable influence” on the “character of a nation [. . .]”: “If beautiful men created beautiful statues, these statues in turn affected the men, and thus the state owed thanks also to beautiful statues for beautiful men” (14). Thus, what must be visible becomes an important issue. The moment of expression in the visual arts has to be wisely chosen. He cites the example of how painters depict the story of Medea who murdered her own children. He explains how the direct representation of the murder scene would have



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been “an affront to all nature” for a classical society (21). The murder of children by a mother could not and should not be truth, and hence should not be immortalised. On the other hand, a Byzantine painter Timomachus has presented Medea a few moments before her actual crime—when she is in dilemma or “perpetual indecision”; Lessing claims that “that” is a “pregnant moment” and “that” kind of artistic representation is an instance of high art (21). Thus, the content of representation and its manner of being represented must be of paramount importance for the visual artists. In other words, the visual arts have a “greater” moral responsibility than the verbal on account of the inherent limitations of their media. What makes Lessing important in the light of classical aesthetics is his claim to understand the arts and their moral duty in terms of the nature of their media. While classical aesthetics attempts to distinguish good art from bad art on moral grounds, Lessing claims to understand the differences between the verbal and the visual arts as differences based on “natural” limitations of the medium of representation of the individual art form. In other words, if the visual arts cater to pleasure, it is on account of the inherent nature of their media. A piece of sculpture is static and permanently visible to the audience and hence is permanently available to the passions/pleasures of the observers. And excessive freedom of passions/pleasures has the potential to rupture the moral fibre of a state, just like the passions that could threaten the classical virtue of justice. However, there is an underlying prejudice against the kind of limitation prescribed to the nature of the artistic medium. The kind of labour specific to the art form is related to the kind of medium used by that art, which is further related to the signs used by that medium. I began with Lessing admonishing the visual arts for reducing everything to “outward conventional symbols [. . .]” (68), which according to him even reduces the gods to the level of common human beings. Thus “outward” signs are condemned for their necessary corporeality; it is lowly to reduce the divine to base corporeal images that cannot do justice to the divine scale on account of the natural physical limitations of the images. Moreover, for Lessing, corporeal signs are mute. A mute object needs a voice to speak for it. He claims that a poet should not use such passive signs. In other words, he does not want a poet to even help a mute painting speak. This is an important conclusion to arrive at, since the inevitable consequence of such a conclusion would be a non-symbiotic relation between these two arts,15 which is again a very anti-Horatian position. Interestingly, his anti-Horatian logic develops from the point of view of the labour spent in the development of the work of art.16 For instance, Lessing states that when artists represent the muse of astrology, Urania,



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 15

they have to “show her pointing with a wand to a celestial globe” (59). A painter’s Urania needs more icons like the “wand” and the “celestial globe” for us to recognise her. This requires more space and time to represent a character. Thus, an artist needs to spend more labour to paint a character.17 But a poet is not required to describe Urania with her “wand” pointing to the “celestial globe”. If he does so, Lessing says, the poet’s art becomes equivalent to the mute signs used by voiceless eunuchs who guarded Turkish harems (59). He devalues mute signs. He adds that poets personify abstractions in that the personification is characterised by the name given or action performed. The name “Urania” should be sufficient to “imagine” the “wand” and the “celestial globe” without the need to exhibit their physical existence. The superiority of the poetic art is thus defined; poets need not adopt the necessities of the visual medium. The poetic representation “profitably” achieves what painting laboriously struggles to achieve. Moreover, the poet can show us the invisible which the artist cannot show or at most does so using cheap symbolic tricks.18 When a poet represents an invisible scene, mind is free to imagine the circumstance as extravagantly or as frugally as it likes, since “invisibility gives the imagination free reign to enlarge the scene [. . .] on a grander scale than the measure of ordinary man [woman]” (66). The poet uses the verbal sign, a sign that has been socially chosen to signify a referent without any physical resemblance to it. However, as stated earlier, a painter reduces the invisibility of massive scenes to the “indispensable” scale of conventional symbols (66). These are the visual signs in that they physically resemble the referent, and physical representations of divine characters are materially impossible. The visual representation and the materiality of their media are thus discriminated against on the basis of their innate physical limitations. Lessing is anti-Horatian when he denies the principle of ut pictura poesis on the grounds of the kind of “artistic skill” that is involved in the production of the said art forms. He suggests how a poet’s intrusion into a painter’s domain is “squandering of much imagination to no purpose [. . .]” (91). While a painter reduces gods into “outward conventional symbols [. . .]” (68), a poet invokes the imagination in such a manner that we do not feel the means of production of that particular imagination (85). Thus, “imagination” is different from “outward conventional symbols” and also more precious, as stated in Section 1.2. The distinction between the verbal signs and the visual signs is evident, as also the distinction between mental skill and physical skill (labour). In this regard, Lessing states that if a painter emulates a poet, it is done in poor taste: “It is an intrusion of the



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painter into the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction [. . .]” (91). In other words, the visual arts are censured for their inherent corporeality and verbal artists should not “waste” their imaginative labour over description of the corporeal. I have noted earlier in Section 1.3.1 how Plato’s aesthetic preference may be interpreted as a reflection of social hierarchisation of human faculty. The same interpretation may be applied to Lessing’s criterion of classification of the arts, notwithstanding his claim regarding the natural or scientific basis for his classification. It is finally possible to discern in Lessing’s hierarchisation a strong fear of crossing of fixed boundaries. All these ultimately get reduced to the fear of the rise of the corporeal at the expense of imagination; a rise that is deeply connected with the tradition of voluntarism of the medieval period that immediately follows the classical. The tradition of voluntarism not only develops a deeper interest in the corporeal, but also paves the way for the development of modern science and modern philosophy. These areas of historical discussion, viz., medieval voluntarism, modern science, modern philosophy, and Lessing’s aesthetics have different orientations and should, therefore, be viewed separately. At many points, however, they overlap and interpenetrate. Lessing’s classification must in fact be seen as rooted 1. 2.

in the acts of interpreting and evaluating these individual streams; and in the process of tracing the historical relationships between them.

The resulting theoretical formulation/s about the relation between the corporeal and the incorporeal must be seen as offering insights into Lessing’s methods of interpretation, comparison and evaluation of the arts. The following section will explore the interaction that I have just mentioned.

1.4 Post-Classical Aesthetics: Medieval Theology, Voluntarism and Modern Science Traces of corporeal devalorisation appear in medieval theology. The classical order changes into the theologically governed world of the medieval period. With the advent of Christianity, the Platonic Ideal is demolished in favour of a more engaged polemical and proselytising mode in Christian apologetics, polemics and scholastics. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1887) records the birth of



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 17

Christianity as the state religion in 380 AD (363–364). The Greek and Roman rhetoricians, who are now called pagan philosophers, get restricted to the schools of rhetoric. For the new religion, rhetoric is used only for the purpose of edifying the faithful and in fortifying their faith. It is a part of the homiletic training of Christian apologists and clergy. The decline of rhetoric is sealed when in 529 AD the emperor Justinian issues a decree forbidding pagan philosophers from teaching in public: the Platonic Academy is sealed.19 This leads to a slump in classical studies that persists throughout the middle ages and begins to clear only during the Renaissance. Rhetoric however survives as a sermonising tool for monks. By later middle ages, a varying group of thinkers or Scholastic philosophers (as they came to be known in their institutionalised forms) revive the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas while interpreting Christian Scriptures. The main contribution of Scholasticism is the use of pagan philosophy to prove Christian faith. Several such interpretations however have damaged the “divine” notion of the power of God, particularly through the Aristotelian methodology of systematic knowledge of the physical world. Stephen Menn in Descartes and Augustine (2002) recounts the influence of Aristotle’s teachings about the soul on some Christian followers. Aristotle in De Anima argues about the difficulty of acquiring “any confidence about [the soul] [. . .]” (qtd. in Menn 54). There is no definite separation of the soul from the body. Menn recounts how the Fifth Lateran Council20 condemns the doctrine that “human reason would lead us to conclude [. . .] that the soul is inseparable and perishes with the body” (54). Menn also writes: Aristotelian philosophy began with sensible things, and encountered the soul only at the end of its journey, as the last and most obscure question of physics: it is not surprising that the answers it gave were not always in accord with Christian faith. (54)

In the wake of St. Augustine’s theological doctrines, the reverse journey of Aristotelian philosophy begins. St. Augustine under some influence of the Platonist Plotinus (who hails from the Scholastic school of interpreters of Plato) learns about the superiority of the “rational soul to the bodily senses, and [. . .] discover[s] that it has a direct relation to God, as thing measured to measure and not as part to whole” (Menn 146). He learns that the soul has the “freedom” to depart from God to baser passions of the body as well as return to Him. Moreover,



18

Chapter One [. . .] God, in placing the soul in a mortal body, is dispensing goodness even to the lowest part of creation, allowing the corruptible body to receive perfection through a soul that is capable of following divine order [. . .]. (Menn 183)

The baseness of the corporeal body is well manifested in these doctrines. The soul is capable of freeing itself from the baser forms of the corporeal body, thus implying that the soul is separate from the body and has the freedom to choose its abode. Some Scholastic thinkers have also developed the voluntarist method of interpretation of Scriptures. The method proposed finally proves that the human will is superior to even reason, an idea running parallel with the Augustinian doctrine of “freedom” of the soul. Bronislaw Szerszynski in Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) chronicles the rise of voluntarism after the 1277 Vatican condemnation of several propositions circulated among Scholastic philosophers. As mentioned earlier, the philosophers use Aristotelian and neo-Platonic ideas to understand the cosmos and the maker of the cosmos or God. They use Greek philosophy to interpret the Bible. By using the Aristotelian method, Scholastic philosophers reason that God is also restrained by His own rules. God’s limitation develops into a source of worry for Christian theology. In Szerszynski’s words: For neo-Platonists, for example, to argue that there was anything arbitrary about the universe was to introduce the contingent into the sublime unconditionedness of the One. This not only meant that the world was necessary—was a plenum—and that its nature could thus be ascertained through scholastic reasoning; it also implied that God’s power was restrained. Against such ideas, the Vatican asserted the voluntarist doctrine that God could have created any world that he wanted. This gave support to the nominalist understanding of language—that only particulars exist, not universals. Natural objects were seen not as entities existing in their own right, with their own innate essences and the powers of development to realize them. Instead, they had no independent being, but were held in existence by God’s continuing activity. (43)

Thus, God wills that the world be so. It is God’s will that gives meaning to material things. So, one may question that if God wills, the world could be different. God could have created any world. Two propositions about voluntarism may be derived from Szerszynski. Firstly, if God can create any world, the possibility of other worlds dawns upon us. So, for each different world, there might be a different set of laws that govern that world. Moreover, God predetermines the world by means of laws. It is possible that these laws could change when God would change the world.



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A given truth is thus problematised; it is the truth functioning in that set of laws that works. The important inference is that the laws of each truth could be separately and individually observed to make that system of truth work.21 While God remains the supreme authority; the empirical world gradually becomes the primary means to help discover the laws of that authority. Thus, voluntarism encourages the qualities of will and freedom in the process of meaning making so that we may “will” to know the truth of nature which God alone knows.22 Thus, we have power over nature as well. Modern science emerges from this passive value that is assigned to nature. Direct mediation with the corporeal develops a scientific fervour that collides heavily with theological beliefs. However, it is always “stealing the Maker’s magic formula” syndrome that makes the corporeal interesting. For instance, William Gilbert traces magnetic lines back to the earth to develop the concept that earth itself is one giant magnet, and hence a compass that always points north.23 Francis Bacon propagates inductive reasoning, where laws are formulated from axioms and axioms from observable facts.24 Galileo observes the sky with a telescope and develops the heliocentric notion of the universe. His letter in defence of science is interesting. No theologian can rule the sciences: [T]his would be as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect but knowing himself free to command, should undertake to administer medicines and create buildings according to his whim—at grave peril of his poor patients’ lives, and the speedy collapse of his 25 edifices.

We may infer from Galileo that an independent authority is assigned to the medical practitioner or the architect, an authority at par and distinct from that of a theologian. Galileo has also been called the “father of modern observational astronomy” (italics mine).26 Johannes Kepler develops the Copernican theory into a harmonious theory of mathematics and geometry. For Kepler, God did things in perfection, order and harmony. So it is but natural that “God, doing only that which is most perfect, would use only the perfect geometrical figures, the regular solids and spheres, to construct a Universe”.27 Moreover, “Kepler believed himself to have surprised the secret of the architecture of the Cosmos”.28 If scientific method is based on empirical methodologies that requires all theories to be tested against observation of the natural world, where the role of evidence and sensory perception discounts the notion of intrinsic ideas, where knowledge (necessarily scientific) is discovered in experiments, the fact remains that



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the empirical world is a “source” to knowledge and not knowledge itself. The “perception” of an orderly world and the possibility of “representation” of such a perception are important for us in order to understand Lessing’s rather neat classification of the two art forms. Much before Lessing, Descartes develops a proper distinction between “perception” and “representation”,29 a classification that steers the age of Enlightenment into an age of prolific taxonomies. In fact, the issue of the incorporeal and the corporeal gets reflected in the larger philosophical theme of mind and body dualism that permeates all the Enlightenment thinking. Lessing adheres to this tradition. I shall now consider Lessing in the light of the Cartesian mind-body dualism.

1.5 Legacy of Descartes: Locke, Berkeley and Kant R. Harré’s (ed.) Early Seventeenth Century Scientists (1965) discusses Descartes and how he discounts the value of “proof” and by extension the physical world in the meaning making process: his critique of authoritarianism is that knowledge of anything on the basis of authority can only be on the basis of what the authority proclaims is knowledge.30 Thus he encourages the knowledge of all the stages involved in arriving at any proof of knowledge. Proof is important as and when we know the stages that lead to materialisation of the proof. So proof is not selfsufficient on its own. Descartes develops his methodological doubt of proof and authority in his later treatise Discourse on Method and the Meditations (1637). What we finally find in the Discourse is that notwithstanding God, there is a definite arrival of a modern subject—“I”— who is allowed to “doubt” authorities. The only authority that “I” cannot doubt is its inner incorporeal doubting self. In Descartes’s words: [. . .] I wanted to concentrate solely on the search for truth, I thought I ought to [. . .] reject as being absolutely false everything in which I could suppose the slightest reason for doubt, in order to see if there did not remain after that anything in my belief which was entirely indubitable. [. . .] I rejected as being false all the reasonings I had hitherto accepted as proofs. And [. . .] I resolved to pretend that nothing which had ever entered my mind was any more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I became aware that, while I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; and observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 21 could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. (53–54)

Thus, modern philosophy grants primacy to the human subject in a way the classical philosophies did not. Menn shows how David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and historian, a century after Descartes, critiques the prevailing division of philosophical history into the “ancient” and the “modern” (18). For Hume, the division is based more on the trend of thinking rather than on the historical time of existence. The ancients include the philosophical trends derived from Aristotelian philosophies; doctrines that are still prevalent in Descartes’s times in educational institutions. The modern philosophy is “modern” in that it contradicts the ancient philosophies and their stress on “sensible” things as a source of knowledge of God and the soul. On the contrary, modern philosophy has emerged outside the universities “through protracted struggle”31 (Menn 19) and advocates the autonomous status of reason and its methodological process of understanding God. Descartes finally proclaims reason as the right means to understand God, and not theology or physics, since, [. . .] method is concerned with the order of the propositions we entertain in our reasonings: to consider the questions of God and the soul according to method is to consider them in their proper order, without introducing considerations from sensible things into the study of the things that are known first and most clearly of all. (Descartes explained in Menn 55)

Thus, the process of doubting is itself declared a part of order, method, and discipline, which is further evidence that supports the claim that human mind, is methodical and rational, and by virtue of that rightfully governs the observable world. It is thus possible to make the disengaged “I” the “first principle of the philosophy”, or, as Menn claims, the “I” has “recognised its own autonomy [. . .]” (10). Descartes becomes the father of modern philosophy by virtue of granting autonomous status to human reason without disowning the existence of God. Donald E. Hall in Subjectivity (2004) shows how the arrival of a modern free subject does not augur well for existing authorities, religious or imperial, since personal freedom of inquiry also accompanies “a profound fear of moral lawlessness [. . .]” (23). The philosophers are compelled to defend the new independent subjectivity by making reason the autonomous provider of method, logic, and universal moral laws. Notwithstanding the significance of a visible corporeal world laid out for our observation (the favoured premise of the empiricists), the break from



22

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that very same world is required to support the trust in a new human agent who is free from religious (by extension, prejudicial) shackles. The existence of an intrinsic moral fibre in human species becomes essential for the advocation of autonomy and supremacy of human agency. Hall quotes a similar definition of the Enlightenment sentiment from Edgar and Sedgwick’s (eds.) Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (1999): eighteenth century has faith “in the ability of reason to solve social as well as intellectual and scientific problems” in order to free society from “the repressive influences of tradition and institutional religion” (qtd. in Hall 23–24). Thus, there is a need for a certain human faculty that must overcome traditional religious prejudices with a detached, universal and unprejudiced attitude; and for the eighteenth-century philosophers, the legacy of Descartes (reason) proves to be a safe bet. While modern philosophy tosses between the empiricists and the rationalists, the fundamental position for both philosophical views is the same: human “mind” perceives the outer corporeal world. For the empiricists, the sensory world is primary; knowledge comes from experience; for the rationalists, reason is primary; knowledge is gained independent of the sensory world. Notwithstanding the empiricist valorisation of sensory perceptions, it still requires that mind must formulate knowledge on the basis of sense perceptions. The famous British empiricist, John Locke, continues the Cartesian trend in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), where he writes: For, the mind having in most cases [. . .], a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires; and so all, one after another; is at liberty to consider the objects of them, examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty man has; and from the not using of it right comes all that variety of mistakes, errors, and faults which we run into in the conduct of our lives [. . .]. To prevent this, we have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire; as every one daily may experiment in himself. This seems to me the source of all liberty [. . .]. For, during this suspension of any desire, before the will be determined to action, and the action (which follows the determination) done, we have opportunity to examine, view, and judge of the good or evil of what we are going to do; and when, upon due examination, we have judged, we have done our duty, all that we can or ought to do, in pursuit of our happiness [. . .]. (127)

Locke’s concept of the detached reason is interesting in the light of his otherwise empiricist claim—the proposition that human mind is a tabula rasa upon which data derived from sensory experiences is inscribed/written.



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 23

Yet, derivation of meaning, judgement and wilful suspension of desires— all these powerful feats are performed by the mind. The Irish philosopher George Berkeley responds to Locke’s empiricist position of the tabula rasa with his claim that objects exist as long as we perceive them. Berkeley in “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge” (1710) describes the perceiving human being as “‘mind’, ‘spirit’, ‘soul’, or ‘my self’” (83). As for those things that the self or “I” cannot perceive, they have no existence. In Berkeley’s words: For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse [being] is percipi [to be perceived] [. . .], nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. (84).

He stresses the existence of perceived objects in the “minds or thinking things”. He also argues how those things, which are not perceived by us and hence are not in our “minds or thinking things” are perceived by the “spirit”: [. . .] all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit. To be convinced of which, the reader need only reflect and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived. From what has been said, it follows, there is not any other substance than spirit, or that which perceives. (85)

Thus when we don’t perceive, God or “spirit” perceives. Berkeley’s understanding of the spirit follows the Cartesian tradition of placing God as the centre within (human soul) and outside (that which only God can perceive) the structure of human epistemology, so that, as Derrida points out in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”, the “fixed origin” makes sure “that the organizing principle of the structure would limit [. . .] the freeplay of the structure” (247–248). In a similar fashion, Menn shows how Descartes, by making the knowledge of God and soul precede that of body, allows God to become the “suitable foundation” for knowledge of bodies as well (57). By making God the



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“fixed origin” of all knowledge, the derivation of basic truths about the existence of the material world is possible without any scope for deception. In other words, Descartes has used metaphysics to begin the “truly scientific” inquiry into the physical world “for the first time in the history of physics” as against Aristotelian physics (Menn 58). As mentioned by Menn, Descartes has attempted to garner theological approval for scientific inquiry. Historians and philosophers have grouped Berkeley’s claims under the category of subjective idealism, though he is also popularly grouped along with Locke and David Hume, the principle exponents of empiricism. Even Martin Jay contends in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” from Downcast Eyes (1994) that the “eye of the mind” syndrome haunts Enlightenment ocularcentrism. He attempts to show the “waning of the Enlightenment trust in sight” (106). For instance, though Voltaire defines an “idea” in his Philosophical Dictionary as the image that paints itself in the brain (Voltaire in Jay 83), it is however an “idea” that is an inner representation in the human consciousness. Jay calls the idea an “image in the eye of the mind” (84). He agrees that Voltaire is influenced by the “sensationalist tradition” (84) of Bacon, Locke, and Newton, where the perception of external objects is considered the source of human ideas and not any innate rational thought. But the defence of the rationalist position would be that it is rational thought that moulds sense perceptions into what we know as knowledge. It is however with Kant that the empiricist and rationalist methods find a productive confluence. Locke’s disengaged reason is taken up and further elaborated by Kant into a theory of pure and practical reason. Kant in his “Introduction” to his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) stresses centrality of the empirical experience of the world: There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. [. . .]. In the order of time, therefore, we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins. (Smith 41)32

For Kant, however, the rational mind organises the empirical world into observable entities: But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we perceive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge [. . .] supplies from itself. (Smith 41–42).



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 25

Kant further enquires whether it is possible for knowledge to exist independently without experience. It is “reason” in its pure form that has the ability to go beyond sense-objects in order to create universal concepts. In addition, in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant states that reason is capable of originating moral principles that need not have any prior existence in external reality. It does not need an object for its “will”. The essence of mind is no longer material; rather, it is rational and moral. It is from “law” that “we abstract [. . .] all matter, i.e., every object of the will [. . .], nothing is left but the mere form of a universal legislation” (26) (italics mine). The mind’s ability to formulate moral laws independent of nature establishes its freedom from nature. Mind is “practically” and “ethically” autonomous. The Kantian stance is that the human need to be moral is purely contingent upon fulfilling the requirements of the moral law. The law exists because it has to exist. And “I” who is the originator of this law is also subjected to it. Lessing’s devaluation of the corporeal thus continues the Enlightenment fixation with reason. While Descartes separates mind from body, and Kant makes reason autonomous, Lessing makes the “imagination” the most precious possession of human life. He openly condemns the act of “squandering” the imagination, as if it is an invaluable (material and nonrenewable) possession. What makes Lessing important for us is the peculiarity of his vocabulary. His vocabulary resonates with economic undercurrents that run parallel with socio-economic tensions of his times. His vocabulary, when historicised and contextualised within that milieu, reveals how the Cartesian theme itself responds to socio-economic valorisations of the Enlightenment. Let us look at the following lines from Lessing more minutely: “[The poets] [. . .] must not convert the necessities of painting into a part of their own wealth” (60) (italics mine). “From this comes the rule concerning the harmony of descriptive adjectives and economy in description of physical objects” (79) (italics mine). “It is an intrusion of the poet into the domain of the painter and a squandering of much imagination to no purpose [. . .]” (91) (italics mine). Words like “wealth”, “economy” and “squandering” are significant. It is important to understand the economic contexts/situation of Lessing’s times in order to understand the nature of the economic classification that he is looking for in the arts. I say economic classifications since I infer an underlying economic tension from the following positions: 1.



imagination (the incorporeal) is valued, and

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2.

art which is more imaginatively active is valorised, or, in economic terms, imaginative labour is precious and must not be squandered.

By now it must be evident that there is an attempt to evolve a typology of the verbal and the visual arts within a framework of socio-economic and philosophical relationships. In the following sections I propose to understand the historical conditions in which Lessing makes his classification.

1.6 The Dialectic of Art and Class I have discussed in Section 1.3.4 how Lessing’s aesthetic debate camouflages a pattern of hierarchisation of human qualities, a pattern that has played an important part in shaping classical aesthetics. The classical hierarchisation of human qualities is deeply connected with the prospect of an “ideal” social division of their times, as is very evident in Plato and to a great extent in Aristotle, as discussed in Sections 1.3.1 and 1.3.2. It is in Horace that (the status of) labour acquires a national character; the Romans are more practical in calculating their “as” than the Greeks (the “as” has been discussed in Section 1.3.3). With Lessing, the relation between his aesthetic classification and the social tensions of his times is more complicated, since the eighteenth-century social structure is very different from the classical ethos. It is noteworthy to take into account the impact of the growing population of the middle class and their multiplying economic invasions into the zone of the aristocrats upon the status of labour and its representation in society. Lessing’s stricture on inter-art relationships is deeply connected with similar inter-class relationships that are worth exploring.

1.6.1 Art vs. Craft Lessing tries to divide the verbal and the visual arts into mental and physical art forms. The mental and physical division takes into account the kind of human labour used by each form of art. In fact, even before Lessing, the artists of early modernity have been striving hard to regard their artworks as products of the imagination, reason, mathematics, and the sciences. In the light of Malcolm Barnard’s work in Art, Design and Visual Culture (1998), I may say that the Renaissance marks the most explicit demarcations between art as mechanical labour (craft) and art as



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 27

rational thought: “art” and “craft” develop into two distinct categories of human labour. Barnard traces the separation of “art” from “craft” in the following extract: Craft guilds began to be formed as early capitalist economies were developing, around the beginning of the fourteenth century. It should be noted that these are craft guilds, and not art or design guilds: art and design are terms that are introduced later, as capitalism evolves a more complex social and economic system which demands that art be distinguished from design and craft. [. . .]. In the Middle Ages, activities had been divided into the liberal arts and the mechanical arts. The liberal arts included grammar, mathematics, rhetoric, music and astronomy while the mechanical arts included the production of what this volume calls visual culture. [. . .]. After the Renaissance, however, the word ‘design’ entered the English language from the French dessiner and the Italian disegno. The word covered what would nowadays be called drawing and sketching as well as planning and designing. It meant the idea and the means by which the idea was communicated. There was, then, a new reference to something intellectual, the idea that was involved in an activity that had hitherto been a mechanical art. [. . .]. The painters, including people like El Greco, were looking for a way of increasing the status of the things they did, and setting up academies for the express purpose of teaching artists and teaching them the more intellectual aspects of painting was one way of doing this. They wanted to raise the status of painting from that of a mechanical art to that of a liberal art. (61–64)

Barnard explains that with the Renaissance and the setting up of academies, “art” becomes a scientific and intellectual pursuit of greater minds (the artist becomes a genius), while “craft” becomes mere mechanical labour like the work of the guild workers. As a result, “craft” becomes synonymous with physical labour, and “art” with mental labour. In his Notebooks (2008), da Vinci explicitly condemns the reduction of painting to a mechanical art (Wells, Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks). He explains at length how painting is a more intellectual form of art: You have set painting among the mechanical arts. Truly were painters as ready as you are to praise their own works in writing, I doubt whether it would endure the stigma of so base a name. If you call it mechanical because it is by manual work that the hands design what is in the imagination, your writers set down with the pen by manual work what originates in your mind. And if you call it mechanical because it is done for money, who fall into this error—if error it can be called—more than



28

Chapter One yourselves? If you lecture for instruction, do you not go to whoever pays you the most? (189)

Da Vinci takes pains to show that painting is not mechanical art, and therefore deserves respect. He further argues that painting is more “intellectual” than sculpture (195). The point, here, is to reveal the social commitment to liberal arts at the cost of mechanical arts. Wells, in her notes to Notebooks, records how poetry and music are included in the esteemed camaraderie of the “Liberal Arts” while painting is “relegated to the ‘Mechanical Arts’ or crafts which included manual work of various kinds and was considered inferior” (184).33 It is small wonder that Lessing would propagate imaginative richness in the verbal arts. Raymond Williams in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) chronicles the exclusion of engravers from the new Royal Academy in the eighteenth-century; where: [. . .] now [a] general distinction between artist and artisan—the latter being specialized to ‘skilled manual worker’ without ‘intellectual’ or ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ purposes—was strengthened and popularized. (33)

1.6.2 In Search of Middle Class Identity Lessing’s hierarchy of the arts runs parallel with the tension between the aristocrats (they mainly study liberal arts) and the merchant class (through mercenary feats they are gradually restructuring the liberal arts). In early modernity, with rise of mercantilism, two conflicting sections of society— the nobles by birth and the “new gentry” or the merchant or the middle class or the bourgeoisie emerge.34 For instance, scientists like Gilbert, born to upper middle class parents35 and Kepler, son of an impoverished soldier36; philosophers like Descartes, son of a high court judge37 and Kant, son of a German harness maker, a craftsman38; artists like Leonardo da Vinci, illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant mother39 and Michelangelo, son of a magistrate40; travelers and discoverers like Columbus, son of a wool weaver41; and Lessing, son of a country pastor42; all these intellectuals or propagators of liberal arts hail from the middle class. They did not want to follow the merchant tradition of their families and worked their way towards defining their contribution to the liberal arts of their times. It is interesting to observe the arrival of new messiahs of the liberal arts from such sections of the society. The point that needs to be made here is the need for some defining characteristic of the middle class as distinct from the others. There is thus the need to explore the interaction



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 29

between Lessing’s aesthetic distinction and the social class distinction of his times. 1.6.2.1 Lessing’s Sumptuary Laws The merchant class has developed from diverse trading activities. The aristocrats however do not have to work for their livelihood; in a sense, their existence depends on the labour of lower classes of their society.43 They hold the merchants in contempt, since the merchants aspire for respectable status in society with the power of money rather than “natural” noble birth.44 In this regard, it is important to observe how Lessing strives to advertise the limitations of the arts as “natural” limitations. Moreover, social respectable status is acquired by purchasing those goods that are integral parts of the aristocratic lifestyle, like their clothes, for instance. In the process, the growing wealth and population of this class alarms the nobles. The existence of sumptuary laws since the middle ages and way into eighteenth-century Europe is noteworthy in the light of Lessing’s classification. Though sumptuary laws aim to restrict undue lavishness of social lifestyle, the bourgeoisie, who imitate the lavishness of the aristocrats, are primarily targeted. For instance, Aileen Ribeiro in Dress and Morality (2003) writes about the English social body of those times: Sumptuary legislation, which in England existed from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries had as its avowed aim the protection of native textile industries, but the real purpose was to enforce class distinctions which it was felt were being eroded by dress. [. . .]. Although sumptuary legislation fizzled out in the seventeenth century [. . .], the ideas which informed it continued to be re-stated in later centuries. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moralists worried both about class struggle, as expressed in the desire of the lower classes to ape the manners and costume of their betters, and about the amount of money spent on sartorial display and emulation. (15)

Moreover, Catherine Kovesi Killerby in Sumptuary Law in Italy: 1200— 1500 (2002) discusses the system of penalty for transgression of such laws.45 Killerby writes: All the Italian sumptuary laws imposed some kind of penalty. The most common was a monetary fine. Many sumptuary laws have one standard fine for contravention of any part of the law. Sometimes, however, the law would specify a particular monetary fine for each section of the law. (137)



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With time, the merchants are able to buy their freedom from such laws. Two important forms of insecurities may be interpreted in relation to the sumptuary laws. On the one hand, the aristocrats are insecure that the nonaristocrats are buying their lifestyle with money. On the other, there is a desire for a new identity by the gradually emerging merchant class as well as for the external embodiment of that identity into a favourable social status. E. P. Thompson in Customs in Common (1993) chronicles how the middle class has been gradually developing into their own “shadowy civil society or public sphere” (32). Gary Day in Class (2007) describes Thompson’s record of the development of middle class civil society as a means of gaining freedom from “the patronage of nobility upon which they [the middle class] had previously relied for access to power” (96). Let me relocate Lessing in the context of the sumptuary laws. Lessing’s anti-transgression aesthetic laws may be interpreted as sumptuary laws of early modernity that disapprove the mingling of social class structures. He demolishes the vulgarity of symbolic display by calling it a “reduction” of gods to such lowly levels. That paintings reduce gods to the common level of human beings suggests an inter-mingling of the gods and the human beings in the same level; a feat that Lessing does not approve of. Moreover, physical symbols are considered necessary to express the invisible or imaginative powers of gods, which is not the case with the verbal arts. He also gives a contrasting picture to the same point: “When the artist adorns a figure with symbols, he raises what was a mere figure to a higher being [. . .]” (Laocoön 60). It is like the merchant buying fashionable clothes, putting them on, and “pretending” to be an aristocrat. The nobles however possess something beyond mere physical attires that set them apart from the imitating merchants. The noble is a noble by virtue of being a noble “naturally”: he or she is born into the noble class. Fashionable attires are mere physical symbols that stand for the aristocrat status. Yet, with monetary power, it is now possible to buy these symbols that represent the upper class, and hence also buy the social reception of that status through display of symbols.46 So representation itself is conspicuously purchasable.47 The need for sumptuary laws to contain the rightful ownership of the symbols of aristocracy is equivalent to Lessing’s non-exchangeable laws of the arts, or, in other words, his anti-ut pictura poesis stance. His sumptuary laws devalue symbols on the grounds that their conspicuous physicality stray them away from their basic duty: the duty to directly signify the referent and not dwell on their own conspicuous self-display. Thus, for Lessing, the sanctity of the high position of the gods lies in their incorporeal and elevated positions. The verbal arts, by virtue of their signs (words), directly signify the



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 31

imaginative referent without any lowering of the divine referent to that of a physical representation. The name “Urania” is enough to imagine her. Finally, we must note that Lessing emphasises the value of taste to restrict interactions between art forms, just like the sumptuary laws that regulate the exhibition of taste as per the social status of the individual: “It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction [. . .]” (Laocoön 91). On the one hand, taste determines the social status. On the other, Lessing also suggests how a poet’s intrusion into a painter’s domain is “squandering of much imagination to no purpose [. . .]” (91). Thus, taste is intricately related to the economy of labour spent/acquired, and we need to explore this relation to define Lessing’s role in the conflict between the aristocrats and the rising middle class. 1.6.2.2 Taste and the Bourgeois Economy In the light of Lessing’s relation with sumptuary laws, I conclude that Lessing represents a certain middle class desire: the desire to be “like” the aristocrats. The merchants are aware of the sarcasm produced by their economic purchase of what the aristocrats claim to be their natural rights. There is a search for a new identity that should evoke social respect for the new emerging class as well. The new identity of this class governs the kinds of goods bought and the monetary expenditure over such merchandise. What one buys showcases the inner choice of the buyer? And the depiction of the inner choice decides the social status of the individual who makes the choice. With the merchants emulating the nobles, valorisation of choices gains social importance. Let us understand the function of the arts in these times of social validation of choices. Trading activities of the merchants have displaced the earlier patronage system of religious and courtly production of arts into a more market driven world that also includes demand and supply of the arts. In this context, let me reproduce Peter Bürger’s historical study of the production and reception of the arts in Lessing’s age from his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984; 48):



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Table 1-1: Reproduction of Bürger’s Study of Production and Reception of the Arts

Purpose or function

Production Reception

Sacral Art (high Middle Ages) Cult object

Courtly Art (17th–early 18th century) Representational objectƔ

Bourgeois Art (18th century onwards) Portrayal of bourgeois selfunderstandingƔ

Collective craft Collective (sacral)

IndividualƔ

IndividualƔ

Collective (sociable) Ɣ

IndividualƔ

Index Ɣ

Not a very decisive change from the earlier ones.

Ɣ Definitely a decisive change from the earlier ones

Underlying the separation of the arts from religious and courtly intentions is also the separation of activities of production and reception of the arts as goods from religious and courtly concerns.48 In other words, the growth of bourgeois arts as independent means of production and reception of bourgeois choices is also analogous to the growth of independent forms of religion (Protestantism for instance) and also growth of independent market.49 Lessing writes in an age when the arts are transforming into economically purchasable goods that further represent a certain identity that is valued by the very same class that buys them. The identity encompasses what Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) describes as the “ultimate binding force of the bourgeois social order [which happens to be their] habits, pieties, sentiments and affections” (22). The dominant eighteenth-century arts therefore represent the middle class “habits, pieties, sentiments and affections”. In other words, the art product, a physical object in itself, is also a representation of the intrinsic nonphysical qualities of the middle class like their “habits, pieties, sentiments and affections”, by virtue of which, the art object acquires social value (value again is incorporeal).50 At the same time, the economic status of a middle class individual depends on the material possession of goods (corporeal) with economic value (incorporeal). The economic value of the



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 33

goods possessed decides whether the owner is rich or poor. And the economic value is judged by an economic representation of that value, which is money. Day in Class (2007) writes about the change in the value of paper money: Prior to the introduction of notes, the value of a coin, it will be remembered, was equivalent to the amount of gold or silver it contained. The value of money was intrinsic. With the introduction of credit and promissory notes, however, its value became nominal. Unlike coins, paper did not contain precious metal, it only represented it. Money passed from being value itself to the representation of value. The economy, which was formerly the basis of fact, was now coming to be identified with fiction [. . .]. (106–107) (italics mine)

It is now possible to surmise that it is the abstract quality—value—which decides the social status of the individual rather than the actual material owned. Thus, two kinds of values emerge in Enlightenment axiology. One is the artistic value that a growing middle class requires to serve as their universal identity. The need for a universal identity is more so because as Day argues, the bourgeois class is economically divided and not a unified class: Although we can identify a middle class in terms of its relation to production, this does not cover all who may qualify for membership, such as journalists or civil servants. These may belong to the middle class by virtue of their sensibility, but this characteristic, because it is associated with social cooperation, exists in some tension with economic competition. Such internal rifts inhibited the formation of the ‘middling sort’ as a coherent class. (96)

Day converts Eagleton’s “binding force” into an artistic force that holds the internal divisions of the bourgeois class together. For instance, he suggests that journalists and civil servants belong to the middle class by virtue of their “sensibility”. While artistic value holds together an otherwise economically disparate bourgeois class, the growing economic clashes within the class also beckons the need for a universal identity. The arts are thus required to subsume the “qualities of character” (Day 97) in that they represent what Eagleton claims to be “habits, pieties, sentiments and affections” or what philosophically may be called “taste”. We must remember that Lessing warns poets not to imitate painters, as it would not be in good taste. So taste turns into a discriminating quality that determines the social status of the subject. Summers shows how Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten uses taste as a criterion to understand



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aesthetics as the science of sense experiences in Aesthetica (1750), written almost a decade before Lessing.51 “Taste”, though a subjective criterion, serves as an objective parameter from which one could develop an objective and universal argument. After Lessing, Kant continues to establish a completely intrinsic value of taste with hardly any empirical correlative. For instance, Kant in The Critique of Judgement (1790) contends that experience of beauty is embodied in a judgement, which is “subjectively universal”; all the experiencing subjects accept it. Moreover, he argues that the quality of genius is mental as well: “Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature [the empirical world] gives the rule to art” (Judgement 168). The fact that such laws are innate mental capacities entails that the empirical world has no hand in shaping such laws. Likewise, for Kant, taste, a subjective criterion, is required to “estimate” objects of beauty, like genius, another subjective aptitude, that is required to produce such objects in their artistic forms (Judgement 172). Thus, both taste and genius become intellectual talents in the estimation and production of valuable arts independently. In a similar fashion, the arts become the universal rationale for the middle class, where the estimation of the arts also reflects the taste of that particular class. And even within arts, there are frictions that develop on account of their affinity with the kind of labour spent, and in turn, with the social estimation of the labour specific to the production of that particular art. A decade before Kant, Lessing too attempts to establish his artistic hierarchies in favour of innate mental capacities as the universal artistic value against which the arts may be estimated as higher or lower artistic forms, which also reflect good or bad “taste”, and that involves the kind of labour used, mental or physical. The other value is economic. With the rise of independent market, money, like “taste”, also becomes the universal constant that determines economic value of all goods. Both (economic and artistic) values have an underlying concept of universal rationale where each is assumed to be a constant against which things may be judged: Is this costly or cheap? Is he a gentleman or not? Day shows the etymological connection between reason and money in the word “rational”: the word is “derived from the Latin ratio, a reckoning” (102). It is significant that money itself is no value but a representation of value (Day 107). Day also proposes that what begins as split between mind and body is further strengthened in the eighteenth-century economic activities with “credit and financial speculation [. . .]” (107). He writes: The operation of credit means that a subject defers fulfillment of that which makes him or her a subject in an increasingly contractual society, namely his or her word regarding future payment, while financial



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 35 speculation means that the subject’s identity is tied to the future value of stocks, shares and investments. (107)

Thus, money is as incorporeal as “taste”. And it is an incorporeal standard that is used for “objective judgement” of social life, whether economic or artistic. Within a decade after Lessing, Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) formulates the labour theory of value. Smith claims that the “real price of every thing, what every thing costs to the man [woman] who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it” (47). In Smith’s words, “Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities” (47). In the light of what we have discussed, the following four premises may be derived from Smith: 1. 2. 3. 4.

goods bought are an objectification of human labour; the object (corporeal) and its value (incorporeal) turn out to be two different entities, like the body (corporeal) and the mind (incorporeal); value decides the fate of the object in the market; and value becomes labour spent/acquired.

Lessing too makes a distinction between the arts as if they are two different labour products. Though he indirectly anticipates Smith’s labour theory in that value is labour involved, it is also what kind of labour involved that decides the value in the case of Lessing.52 As per Smith, concrete possession of wealth, like land or other physical property, transforms into the dominant objectification of a subjective desire of wealth. David Hawkes in Ideology (2007) calls the above form of abstraction “a secular form of idolatry” or fetishisation of the works of our hand (96). Hawkes contends that Smith’s abstraction of finance and market is “secular” because the whole community on a “social” basis experiences the market effect. James C. Worthy in “Religion and its Role in the World of Business” (1958) illustrates how ethical rules have been practiced in a “secular” rather than a “religious” scenario, notwithstanding the evolvement of modern business practice “within a matrix of Judeo-Christian ethics [. . .]” (293). He contends that the “protestant ethic” of public good is filtered to us through a secular sift. Though he discusses the initiation of Modern American business in the Judeo-Christian ethics, his contention about the alienation of the “social” from the “religious” through what he terms as the “secular filter” (294) adds considerable value to my interpretation of Hawkes’s secular idolatry.



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Worthy argues that the “concept of self-interest as the generally accepted theory of business motivation” separates “business morality” from religion (295). In context of this section, one of the instances of “self-interest” is Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand”: By preferring the support of domestick [. . .] industry, he [the merchant] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. (456)

The end in question is that the community will experience overall profit, due to surplus production and consumption of goods along with immense monetary revenues for the whole community as well. The “secular” effect of market is thus pronounced. Hawkes further contends that subjective labour gets fetishised in the objective form of our labour. The objective form, which is merely a representation of subjective desire, acquires tremendous social reverence and becomes all the more real. In his words: Money is originally merely a symbol, which mediates between various objects, acting as a common denominator so as to facilitate exchange. However, when we sell our own lives for money, we lose sight of its merely symbolic role. (96)

We begin idolising money as real (concrete), when it merely represents a value. In a similar fashion, a decade before Smith, Lessing has also insisted upon the dangers of “losing sight of the symbolic role” of the visual signs on account of their physicality. They reduce higher beings (gods) into insignificant mortal images or physical idols that belittle the infinite and invisible powers of the gods. In the process, the visual images are in the danger of evolving as the real idols. Thus, the visual arts on account of their “outward conventional symbols” resort to some forms of idolatry. Mitchell in Picture Theory (1994) unearths the fear of idolatry in Lessing’s condemnation of a poet giving voice to a mute art: when a poet speaks for a visual work of art, the art object is in danger of gaining quasiverbal potential and thus may produce more power over the audience (155). I contend that Lessing’s preference of one kind of sign over the other betrays a prejudicial adherence to a particular kind of objectification of artistic human endeavour. While condemning the fetishisation of the visual signs, he inadvertently adores the “word” or the verbal sign. The



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 37

means of production of imagination or the “words” become objects of reverence, precisely because they negate their objective existence (written forms) to invoke imagination.53 Their negation of their physicality lies in their potential to invoke the “sublime”; the invisible; the incorporeal. The preference for the incorporeal is evident. The valorisation of imagination is itself a complex product of the “invisible hand” syndrome. I began this chapter with an attempt to thematise the response of society towards the art forms and, by extension, towards the need for social laws to guide such diverse responses (see Section 1.3.4). The notion of monitoring pleasure becomes an important issue here. Lessing refers to classical sculptures and their maintenance of dignity even in expressions of pain; a restriction that does not apply to poets, since they do not have to physically show the ugly expression “twisted and distorted in an unnatural and loathsome manner [. . .]” (17). I come across the notion of the loathsome. Unlike the classical contemplation of the beautiful as a pleasurable experience, a decade before Lessing, Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) argues that ugliness as an artistic quality encourages tremendous and unfathomable emotion, so much so that the object of emotion is obliterated. And the experience of such emotions is pleasurable. Thus Burke develops the aesthetic of the sublime in which 1. 2. 3.

the sublime could contain that which is loathsome, repulsive, and ugly; the object of such emotions is not visible, it is formless; and the experience of the formless and the unknown is pleasurable.

Burke claims that the “formless” always gripped imagination in the strongest manner: It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination. If I make a drawing of a palace [. . .], I present a very clear idea of those objects; but then [. . .] [the palace I drew] can at most affect only as the palace [. . .] would have affected in the reality. On the other hand, the most lively and spirited verbal description I can give, raises a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than I could do by the best painting. (60)

He further contends that the “eye” is like a “sphincter muscle” which strains to let light pass through it, and yet gets aggravated by the lack of light, or blackness, or darkness (146).54 Thus, Burke’s obscurity and



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Lessing’s invisibility or magnanimous power of the gods has a common quality, the quality of the sublime. Mitchell in Iconology rightly considers Burke as a “powerful and rather explicit precedent [. . .]” of Lessing (111). Burke, like Lessing, connects poetry and sublimity on the one hand, and painting and beauty on the other.55 Three decades after Lessing, Kant writes in The Critique of Judgement that the beautiful has a definite form, while the sublime is “limitlessness” (“Analytic of the Sublime” 90). He says that we are sensually inept to visualise the vastness of a sublime incident like a natural calamity. But, we are able to identify the event as a “thought of its totality” (90) and that establishes our cognitive powers. In the light of Burke’s and Kant’s analyses, Lessing seems to condemn the visual arts for their inherent repulsive representations because the object of loathsomeness is visible and striking; it is definitely not sublime. But poetry, by virtue of the verbal signs, can signify the object of loathsomeness, and yet not corporeally represent that object. Poetry is inherently sublime, since the object of sublimity is left to our imagination, and hence is physically formless. Thus limitless experiences, like the divinity of gods, are best represented in the verbal arts. I contend that class interests mediate the loathsome as well. If sublime allows for the contemplation of the ugly, then it is also associated with the lower class, or even the bourgeoisie; that is, if I may interpret the loathsome as the contempt of a growing bourgeois class. Yet, Lessing himself belongs to the middle class. So his allegiance to the aristocrats may be seen as an allegiance to a social status of esteem. The sublime plays a very important role in such allegiance. The middle class constitutes several sections, which are further dividing and growing into many other sections, so much so that it is not possible to visualise the whole class as one unifying section of the society. The need to hold varying sections of the new emerging class becomes very important, without having to prove its corporeal boundaries. Thus, the need to value the invisible in actual life becomes important to protect the ineptness of the class to visualise its own vastness. In Day’s words: The impossibility of viewing society as a complex unity discovers an alibi in an aesthetic which valorises whatever is limitless and unbounded. [. . .]. In short, the concept of class is both an answer to the eighteenth century problem of how society can be imagined as a whole and an endorsement of the sublime which exceeds any such whole. (100)

Lessing condemns the loathsomeness of the visual symbols in order to protect the ineptness of the verbal arts to physically imitate the bodily



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 39

impressions of the referent. The only way one may valorise such ineptness is by praising the sublimity of the verbal arts, and hence the sublime powers of human imagination. He anticipates Kant who writes that sublime as a concept belongs to the faculty of reason: the sublime “cannot be contained in any sensuous form [. . .]” (Judgement 92). The point that needs to be made here is that I am not simply locating few chosen texts chronologically. What is important for us is the identification of a chronological pattern in these texts. The hierarchy between the mental and the physical, or, the incorporeal and the corporeal, or, the imaginative form and the sensuous form has already been unearthed. At its basic level, the hierarchy is between the corresponding sign systems; the verbal signs vs. the visual signs. The following section will explore the nature of the sign systems.

1.6.3 The Arbitrary Sign vs. the Natural Sign Just like financial credits that become invisible mediating representations of the market, the verbal signs also become the incorporeal mediating signs of the sublime. The verbal signs, unlike the visual signs, do not physically represent a known referent. On the contrary, the signs used in paintings are visually closer to the physical. On account of their visible similarity with a known referent, the symbolic representation itself has the power to overcome our sensibilities. Hawkes shows how the original mediating role of money as a “common denominator” for exchange seems to be forgotten (Ideology 96) and money becomes real. In other words, the mediator has the power to be the omnipresent dictator of value, and Lessing is worried that the visual signs will overpower the verbal by virtue of their visibility. Let me stretch this point and say that Lessing is worried about the autonomous status that the visual symbols seem to be gifted with: they may be able to stand for themselves more than what they are supposed to signify or stand for. The visual signs hide their source of power; that they are also the product of our labour and exist to represent something else is forgotten in their concrete presence (though Lessing manipulates such a stand when he states that it is physical labour that goes into making them concrete). Thus, the visual signs have the potential to be autonomous ends in themselves. Urania’s wand itself gains devotional merit. We forget that the wand is merely representational of Urania, and not Urania herself. For the verbal signs however the attribution of the source of power is not hidden; we attribute value to that sign. We have agreed that the word “Urani” is Urania. We could have also agreed that any other word like “Venus” could



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have been the goddess Urani. As per Saussurean linguistics, an arbitrary sign system is built on social acceptability. He/she who understands language is already a social subject. If the arbitrary sign is forgotten, so are we. In other words, the “mediating” sign itself gets forgotten, and we, who devised language, also get to be forgotten. This almost calls for social extinction, which Lessing fears. He thus engages with the fullest social capacity of each sign system to compare and compartmentalise their value (by extension labour and hence faculties of the human species) on the basis of their social status. In this capacity, Lessing clearly states the winner: “Undoubtedly, for that which we find beautiful in a work of art is beautiful not to our eyes but to our imagination through our eyes” (Laocoön 41). In his attempt to valorise the social capacity of the verbal sign, he exposes his desire for a fascist control, and as suggested by Mitchell, “[i]f Lessing were to pursue this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion there would be no need for painting at all” (Iconology 107). In the context of the fascist claim, there is a need to review my point about social policing again, but this time through Mitchell and his Iconology. Mitchell summarises Lessing when he writes that the qualities of [. . .] immediacy, vividness, presence, illusion, and a certain interpretive character give images a strange power, a power that threatens to defy natural law and usurp the domain of poetry. Therefore painting must be held in check, as the ancients knew, by [what Lessing claims] ‘the control of civil law’. (108)

However, he also admits that Lessing at least does not allow the fascist control of the verbal arts to become a practical possibility: If Lessing were to pursue this line of reasoning [fascist reasoning] to its logical conclusion there would be no need for painting at all. And so he stops short of that conclusion and contradicts himself. Painting is allowed certain kinds of superior power: it ‘makes a beautiful picture from vivid sensible impressions,’ while poetry works with ‘the feeble uncertain representations of arbitrary signs’ [. . .]; it has ‘that power of illusion [. . .] in the presentation of visible objects [. . .];’ and at certain moments when ‘poetry stammers and eloquence grows dumb,’ painting may ‘serve as an interpreter [. . .].’ (107)56

Lessing’s declaration of superiority of the verbal arts and his contradictory admission of certain superior qualities of the visual arts allows Mitchell to arrive at an important conclusion: Lessing attempts to strike a balance by means of political diplomacy. He [Mitchell] contends that Lessing’s



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 41

aesthetic classification is at bottom an economic, political and religious classification. We have already discussed the possible nature of economic boundaries of distinction. The following section discusses the political and religious nature of Lessing’s classification.

1.6.4 Lessing as the “Impartial Enlightened Internationalist”57 Mitchell in Iconology states that apart from economic laws of distinction, Lessing also displays laws as “matters of political economy, directly related to conceptions of civil society, and beyond that, to a picture of stable international relations” (105). He translates the German word “Grenzen” in the subtitle of Lessing’s treatise as “borders” more than “limits” (105). Thus, the pattern that has been unearthed so far finds articulation in what Mitchell proposes is the “literal analogue” of “Lessing’s metaphoric borders [. . .] in the cultural map of Europe [. . .]” (105). Lessing is writing when England has already won the colonial power in the North Americas from France in the Seven Years War (1754– 1763). The eighteenth-century tension between the English and the French, two decades before the upstart of the French Revolution, is evident in Lessing. I read into Lessing’s political diplomacy Mitchell’s choreographia of Lessing’s racial leanings. He interprets Lessing’s limits in the light of the Burkean French and English demarcations. I have already discussed the relation of the sublime with the verbal arts. Burke in Enquiry has already announced the superiority of the sublime in the verbal arts over that of the beautiful in the visual. In Burke’s words: The abbe du Bos founds a criticism, wherein he gives painting the preference to poetry in the article of moving the passions; principally on account of the greater clearness of the ideas it represents. I believe this excellent judge was led into this mistake (if it be a mistake) by his system, to which he found it more comfortable than I imagine it will be found to experience. I know several who admire and love painting, and yet who regard the objects of their admiration in that art with coolness enough, in comparison of that warmth with which they are animated by affecting pieces of poetry or rhetoric. Among the common sort of people, I never could perceive that painting had much influence on their passions. It is true that the best sorts of painting, as well as the best sorts of poetry, are not much understood in that sphere. But it is most certain, that their passions are very strongly roused by a fanatic preacher, or by the ballads of Chevychase, or the children in the wood, and by other little popular poems and tales that are current in that rank of life. I do not know of any paintings, bad or good, that produce the same effect. So that poetry, with all its



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Chapter One obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the other art. (61)58

Mitchell considers the above passage as the defining aesthetic foundation of Burke’s view of the difference between the French [abbe du Bos] and the English [Chevy-chase] as nations of the eye and the ear, of painting and verbal—especially oral—expression, of system and personal experience, of cool ‘judgment’ and warm ‘passions’. (134)

It is necessary to explore these Burkean oppositions that may be seen as regulating Lessing’s discourse as well. I began this chapter in Section 1.2 with Lessing’s discussion of the classification between the verbal and the visual arts as “two equitable and friendly neighbors [. . .]” (91). I argued that he contradicts that “friendly” equation when he says that the visual arts “in particular” need “close supervision by the law” (14). On a similar note, while Lessing appears as a political diplomat, his inner prejudices are also markedly pronounced. Lessing’s political diplomacy has been discerned by E. H. Gombrich, who felt that Lessing’s argument is more like a [. . .] tournament played by a European team. The first round is against Winckelmann, the German, the second against Spence, the Englishman, the third against the Comte de Caylus, the Frenchman. (qtd. in Iconology 105)

Mitchell argues that Lessing’s criticism of the three national representatives appears to be like that of an “impartial enlightened internationalist” who is regulating the competition from an imperial position. He [Mitchell] however reveals Lessing’s “partisanship” behind his apparent impartial internationalist position: the French are the culprits with their: ‘false delicacy,’ their ‘difficulté vaincue,’ and their frigid neoclassicism [sic] who blur the genres by making poetry conform to the cold beauties and unities of classical painting and sculpture. (105)

In this regard, Mitchell contends that Lessing begs to differ from Wincklemann because Wincklemann, although a German, argues “dangerously” the French way: Laocoön does not cry out because the sculpture has to stoically repress his emotion (105). We must remember that the Germans were allies of the British (the Anglo-Prussian allies) against the French and its coalition of Austrian and Russian armies.59 I



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 43

find Lessing arguing against Wincklemann’s French obsession (restrained emotion) by stating that the natural necessities of the medium call forth such restrictions. As has already been noted in Section 1.6.2.2 about Burke and also in the beginning of this section, clarity of expression (unlike the obscurity of the sublime), coldness of judgement (unlike warm passions), bounded form of beautiful representation (unlike formlessness of the sublime) and the visual capacity of the “eye”; these qualities are all grouped together under the French banner. Lessing’s political affinity with the Englishman as against the Frenchman is well evident in his description of the insensibility and unfeeling quality of the French playwright Chateaubrun, who is also criticised for being characteristic of the “poor taste of his country” (27). In contrast, he [Lessing] describes Adam Smith, the Englishman, as “not readily suspected of false delicacy” (28). Moreover, in Mitchell’s words, Lessing “appeals to the examples of Milton and Shakespeare (borrowed from Burke’s Enquiry) against the French pictorialist poetic” (Iconology 105). We have already experienced the Burkean prejudice against the French in the beginning of this section; he [Burke] praises the English ballads of Chevy-chase and criticises the French abbe du Bos. On the political front, much before Lessing writes the Laocoön, England has already witnessed the admission of the ministerial rule with Sir Robert Walpole and the failure of it. Lessing writes when George III and monarchy are back. Monarchs now have limited powers; their decisions are monitored and approved by the Parliament. Burke also becomes a member of the House of Commons of the British Parliament from 1765. In a parliamentary form of government, speech and ear become very important. In contrast, Jay in Downcast Eyes records the French revelry and court before the French Revolution: [Louis XIV’s] court, at once theater and spectacle, was a dazzling display of superficial brilliance, bewildering to outsiders but legible to those who knew how to read its meaning. Here courtiers learned to decode the signs of power, distinction, and hierarchy in the gestures and accoutrements of bodies semaphorically on view. (87)

In other words, Jay emphasises the conspicuousness of physical symbols in the French court. With this background, Gombrich’s summary of Lessing’s racialism makes sense: [T]he conflation of various traditions: that of the paragone, the rivalry of the arts, interweaves with the classic distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, and these categories in their turn are seen in terms of political



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Chapter One and national traditions, liberty and tyranny, England and France. Shakespeare is free and sublime poesy, Corneille rigid if beautiful statuary. (qtd. in Iconology 106)

The political scenario overlaps with the religious. Mitchell contends: “Lessing’s alliance with the English against the French [. . .] is religious as well as political—a Protestant ‘holy alliance’ against Roman Catholic idolatry” (106). In the light of my analysis so far, the fear of idolatry in Lessing agrees well with Mitchell’s argument about Protestant alliance. Such a position is a far cry from Lessing’s apolitical declaration as follows: [. . .] I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in their case the artist did not create for art’s sake, but his art was merely a handmaid of religion, which stressed meaning more than beauty [. . .]. (55–56)

His restrictions have altered history into nature. My task has been to question the interests that are served by the naturalisation of particular convictions and values of Lessing’s times. In order to appreciate Lessing’s procedure of naturalisation, we must, at this point, formulate his agenda for his formal aesthetic classification. The concluding section of this chapter attempts to do just that.

1.7 Conclusion: Lessing’s Influence Barthes has argued in “The Death of the Author” (1968) that the concept of prioritisation of an individual is “already” a result of the formation of the middle class (merchant class) during the expansion of market economy in the medieval times and the Renaissance. Major scientific and philosophical movements of the Enlightenment, like Empiricism, which develops empirical methodologies; French Rationalism, that prioritises reason; and the Reformation, that demands a more democratic and hence individualised form of religion; they are all catalysts for and the result of the process of individualisation. In a similar mode, the aesthetic narrative also becomes a “copyright” of the individual author; else who uses it is in danger of committing plagiarism, which is a punishable offence. In this light, I contend that what Lessing finally does is prepare a “copyright” for the social valorisation of verbal expression: the verbal narrative on account of its verbal signs is propagated as a more profitable



The Denial of Ut Pictura Poesis: Lessing and the Enlightenment Aesthetic 45

genre; it economically sells human labour of imagination to its own community, here, the bourgeois community. The visual arts are expensive due to inherent limitations of the natural signs; they need more physical labour; physical labour is more common with craft. The word “copyright” entails the possession of legal right to be the “exclusive” producer: a right that rationally combats the fear of loss of ownership; hence, loss of power. In other words, a copyright is a “rational calculation”60 to realise personal profit and safety. Lessing uses the incidental prejudice of physical labour as a “rational calculation” to realise the profit of the verbal narrative, which apparently uses mental labour. My attempt has been to show that behind such a “rational calculation” lies a prejudicial motive to protect the social status of the verbal art against an onslaught of the visual, which may also be translated into a prejudicial motive to protect the social status of an aristocracy of hereditary rights and powers that have been co-opted by the economically rising middle class; a class fast rising against an onslaught of criticism by the ruling class or the aristocracy.





CHAPTER TWO UT PICTURA POESIS AS “ANDERS-STREBEN”: WALTER PATER AND THE LATE NINETEENTHCENTURY AESTHETIC

2.1 Introduction: Pater and The Renaissance The opposition between poetry and painting established by Lessing now needs to be placed within the historical context of Pater’s aesthetics in the late nineteenth-century: only such a context can justify the links which will be established between Lessing and Pater. I shall focus on Pater’s The Renaissance in order to establish connections between philosophical models and socio-economic practices of those times. The following questions will be raised: 1. 2.

How does Pater understand Lessing’s systematisation of the distinction between the verbal and the visual arts? What place does Pater’s aesthetics occupy within the larger intellectual and material tendencies of late nineteenth-century?

2.2 Lessing and Pater: A Comparison Pater, in many ways, recalls Lessing’s mode of aesthetic classification. In his “Preface” to The Renaissance, his defination of true criticism may be described in the following word: “To see the object as in itself it really is” (vii). This is particularly necessary in aesthetic criticism since “suggestive and penetrating things said by the way [. . .]” do not do justice to that which had been “well done in art or poetry [. . .]” (vii). There is a need for a “precise” mode of thinking that would “discriminate between [art and poetry] what is more and what is less excellent in them [. . .]” (vii). Lessing, in his “Preface” to Laocoön, has also assigned a similar task to a critic. Moreover, he (Lessing) also stresses that the critic’s task is different from that of an amateur or a philosopher. The amateur, by virtue of his/her



Ut Pictura Poesis as “Anders-streben”

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fine feeling, responds to the effect produced by the work of art. The philosopher attempts to understand the nature of the effect produced, which he/she finally terms “beauty” (3). The critic however examines the “value and distribution” of the quality of beauty and finds that some are more predominant in one form of art and some in the other (3), just like Pater’s “what is more and what is less excellent in them [. . .]” (vii). Thus, aesthetic classification of art works for both Lessing and Pater is proportional to the degree of “what is more and what is less excellent in them”. The task of the critic is to define “that” aesthetic quality and gauge its presence in a work of art. Both Lessing and Pater appreciate “aesthetic quality” as a discrete value in any work of art. Both contend that each form of art has “special manifestation” of pleasurable impressions that need to be defined principally for that art form (Pater vii). In Pater’s words, the aesthetic critic regards a work of art as “powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind” (ix). Thus “the true student of aesthetic [. . .]” is required to develop a “formula” that would effectively convey “that special manifestation” of an aesthetic experience (vii). He further stresses the importance of aesthetic criticism: “to realize [the aesthetic experience] distinctly” (viii). Similarly for Lessing what poetry does, painting cannot, by virtue of the “unique” aesthetic quality that is “unique” to that particular art form. That aesthetic quality is itself a distinct entity is something that both Pater and Lessing appreciate. It is finally in “The School of Giorgione” that Pater openly accepts Lessing as a commendable aesthetic critic. He condemns popular criticism, which ignores or rather is ignorant about the “special aesthetic manifestation” that is so immanent in a particular kind of art work. Their (the critics’s) ignorance leads them to group various forms of arts as mere translations of “one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought” in different artistic languages (120). Like Lessing, Pater believes that each particular form of art has its immanent qualities that are “untranslatable into the forms of any other” and accordingly has its own “special responsibilities to its material” (120). Lessing has already cautioned the critic to be sensitive to individual instances of aesthetic forms of art works, so as to maintain the uniqueness of the aesthetic abilities of individual forms of arts: The principle value of [. . .] [the critic’s] observations depends on their correct application to the individual case. And since for every one really discerning critic there have always been fifty clever ones, it would have been a miracle if this application had always been made with the caution necessary to maintain a proper balance between the two arts. (Laocoön 3)



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In Pater’s words, therefore, the major task of an aesthetic critic is “to define these limitations” or “to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special material [. . .]” (121). In this regard, he adds that Lessing’s Laocoön is “an important contribution” to aesthetic criticism (121). He appreciates Lessing for attempting to define that “exclusive” aesthetic manifestation of each art form that makes that particular work of art unique, distinct and autotelic in its own particular ways. That a work of art may be seen as distinct from other works of art and also from other forces of culture reinforces what Lessing hinted at almost a century earlier. In Lessing’s words: [. . .] I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in their case the artist did not create for art’s sake, but his art was merely a handmaid of religion, which stressed meaning more than beauty [. . .]. (Laocoön 55–56)

A century later, Pater describes the Renaissance as an aesthetic [. . .] movement in which, in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to but only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually realised. (6)

Notwithstanding the emphasis given to feelings and sensations unlike Lessing, the declaration of an aesthetic movement as independent of the spiritual system is decidedly an important link between Lessing and Pater. In Pater’s aesthetic theory, the aesthetic critic is required to appreciate the work of art for what it is, and not be spiritually (by extension, religiously) guided to determine the aesthetic potential of any work of art. Thus, for both Lessing and Pater, the essential requirement of the aesthetic critic is to recognise the autonomous status of a work of art. While Pater appreciates Lessing’s method of classifying the works of art on the basis of virtues of their individual media and the corresponding responsibilities of the works of art towards their material media, his [Pater’s] major interest in his treatise on the arts [Renaissance] is not about limits but about the possibilities of “transcendence” over such limits. Like Lessing, he also agrees that each work of art has specific qualities. He however reforms Lessing’s concept of artistic “limitations” into a concept of artistic “virtues”. The function of the aesthetic critic, according



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to Pater, is to “distinguish, to analyse, and separate” that particular quality from other adjuncts that make that particular art work aesthetic (ix). He calls that distinguishing quality a “virtue” (ix). Lessing appreciates the verbal art works on account of their more imaginative ability, while the visual art forms are not allowed to enjoy those virtues on account of their apparently physical limitations. The virtues of the verbal arts become limitations when they attempt to enter the rather physical domain of the visual arts. Poets should not be descriptive; the act of description is static and physical like those of the visual arts and hence is not qualified to be virtuous. For Pater, however, the tension between the verbal and the visual art forms is not a point of interest; he does not show any preference towards either of these art forms. Rather, he elaborately argues that the virtues of both these art forms are not necessarily the ones Lessing charted out for them. In other words, he does not agree with the nature of Lessing’s aesthetic limits for the verbal and the visual forms of art. He does not separate the sensual from the imaginative, the way Lessing does. No form of art is “allowed” to be either predominantly physical or predominantly imaginative. In fact, Pater in a very anti-Lessing manner “seems” to grant a distinct value to aesthetic sensations in their very rudimentary sensory forms. Pater “seems” to differ from Lessing when he values rudimentary sensory forms. I have used the word “seems” very often because I discover contradictions in Pater as well.

2.3 Pater’s Contradictions Pater makes it clear in the “Preface” itself that the aesthetic quality of “beauty” is not something absolutely abstract but is rather a very concrete realisation of a “specific” form of aesthetic manifestation. The emphasis is on the concrete “experience” of beauty—“[w]hat effect does [the aesthetic work] really produce on me” (viii)? In Pater’s words: And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation [is] to truth or experience—[these are] metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. [. . .] The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. (viii–ix)



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Moreover, the aesthetic sensation is also endowed with the “property” of “affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure” (ix). The critic need not “possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects” (x). I may thus conclude that Pater values the “subjective experience” of beauty rather than a universal abstract intellectualisation of the concept of beauty: this “seems” a departure from the neo-classical obsession with intellectual universalisation.61 But we must also remember that subjective experience has been the fodder for rationalisation of universal laws by neo-classical thinkers as well. For instance, as discussed earlier in Chapter One under Section 1.6.2.2, objective and universal arguments have been developed from the subjective criterion of “taste”. Pater differs from the neo-classical to the extent that a “particular” instance of aesthetic experience is extracted for the development of a subsequent aesthetic formula. But the activity of extraction of formula into an abstract space remains intact. Pater’s anti-neoclassical attitude towards abstract intellect is “apparently” evident in his support for temperament, sensations and emotions (“deeply moved”). But his need for abstraction nevertheless remains. Though he states that there is no need to derive a “universal formula” for the definition of beauty, he also stresses need for a “formula which expresses most adequately” that specific aesthetic manifestation in pleasurable sensations (vii). He gradually extracts an inner emotional experience from a corresponding external sensuality; he then extracts from that inner emotional experience a corresponding scientific derivation—a formula or underlying principle—for that particular aesthetic experience. In this context, I may say that Pater continues the tradition of scientific definitions of aesthetic analysis; a tradition that has been formally developed by Baumgarten, who has defined aesthetics as the “science” of sense experiences in his Aesthetica in 1750; I have already discussed Baumgarten in the previous chapter in Section 1.6.2.2. Summers in The Judgement of Sense shows how Baumgarten begins a “new historical life” for aesthetics by raising sensory perceptions to confusedly formed “ideas” and hence an intellectual position sensed “‘through the lower part of the cognitive faculty’ (per partem facultatis cognoscitivae inferiorem) [. . .]” (Baumgarten qtd. in Summers 197). Sensory perceptions have to be “raised” to “potentially intelligible” parts of human cognition, even if that be the lowest part, in order to be valued. On a similar scientific note, Pater calls the pleasant sensations that are peculiar to individual art forms “original facts” or “primary data” like in the sciences (viii).62 The aesthetic critic has to observe the “original facts” like “in the study of light, of



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morals, of number [. . .]” (viii). At the end of the critical process, the “primary data” are analysed and differentiated from other factors (that are not so primary) and a unique aesthetic “virtue” is accorded to them. The critic has to disengage the aesthetic “virtue” and record it like the chemist who notes down natural elements for himself and for others. I contend that there is an underlying paradox in Pater’s open support for the sensory; there is a denial of an absolute formula but a strong need to “abstract” an “active principle” from the impressions “felt” when examining an aesthetic work of art (xi). The “active principle” seems to be a combination of two contradicting conditions of cognition—an incorporeal or intellectual abstract standard and the “sensible” experience—such that each is not without the other. The juxtaposition of the sensory with the intellectual is what makes Pater different from Lessing. But the need for such juxtaposition provides us with an opportunity to understand the social implications of a post-Lessing aesthetics that is still not over Lessing. Pater illustrates the use of the “active principle” in a few genius poems of Wordsworth from his otherwise forgettable mass of work as proposed by Pater himself (xi). The “active principle” in Wordsworth is that which the “unique, incommunicable faculty” of the poet [by extension, the subjective incorporeal self] is able to extract from the sensation of the “strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things [. . .]” (xi). In other words, the sensuality of the natural world is “intellectually” activated by the mind into an aesthetic abstraction. It is “only” the incommunicable faculty of the poetic subject that can discern and abstract that particular mystical sensuality in and from the objects of nature. The significance of the incorporeal in the “active principle” cannot be dismissed. On a similar note, Pater in “The School of Giorgione” develops a new aesthetic criterion called the “imaginative reason”, which begs to be different from the pure reason of the Enlightenment. In Pater’s words: For, as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the “imaginative reason” through the senses, there are differences of kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves. (120)

Thus, each form of art, while maintaining its own responsibilities towards its medium, has its “own special mode of reaching the imagination [. . .]” (120). Lessing has disregarded the “mode of reaching the imagination” in the visual arts; they have been criticised for heavily depending upon “outward conventional symbols” (Laocoön 68). But for Pater true pictorial charm of a picture lies neither in poetical nor technical labour of colour and design. Rather, true pictorial quality –



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Thus, the handling of line and colour becomes an inventive and creative act for Pater. But it is also arguable that handling of line and colour involves the act of drawing and colouring, and these aesthetic functions have been much more than mere physical feats of labour.

2.3.1 Drawing vs. Colouring Pater’s discussion of the “pictorial” quality in the art of drawing and colouring is interesting in the context of my argument (122). He defines drawing as a “design projected from that peculiar pictorial temperament or constitution” that makes all “abstract” and “obscure” ideas including “all poetry” visible (122). Barnard, as discussed in Section 1.6.1 of Chapter One, argues that with the inclusion of “idea” in the activity of design, certain forms of arts hitherto considered as mechanical activities, begin to be socially received as intellectual activities. I repeat a section of Barnard here again: After the Renaissance, however, the word ‘design’ entered the English language from the French dessiner and the Italian disegno. The word covered what would nowadays be called drawing and sketching as well as planning and designing. It meant the idea and the means by which the idea was communicated. There was, then, a new reference to something intellectual, the idea that was involved in an activity that had hitherto been a mechanical art. (64)

Pater’s attempt to equate design with drawing may be interpreted as also an attempt to intellectualise drawing on account of the importance of “idea” in the visual representation. But the visual dimension of drawing becomes the “source” of our understanding of the “obscure” idea, and not the “idea” itself. While Lessing argues that plastic arts do not do justice to the magnanimity of the “obscure”, Pater defines drawing as making visual, that which is obscure. It is important to pause here and understand Pater’s consideration of the art of drawing as an interesting “event” in the changing notion of intellectualism from the Enlightenment to Pater’s times. Such considerations are possible because of Pater’s stress on the “obscure”. Such a synoptic historical observation is necessary (synoptic since that is not the intention of this chapter) to gauge Pater’s divergence



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from or his continuation of Lessing’s insinuations against the plasticity of the visual arts. 2.3.1.1 Drawing vs. Writing Martine Reid in the “Editor’s Preface: Legible/Visible” (1994) discusses the interesting history of the relationship “between the written text and its timid counterpart, problematical opposite, and unacknowledged twin: drawing” (1). That drawing is considered a timid, unacknowledged and problematic twin of writing is an affirmation of a striking resemblance between both of them. But the consideration of drawing as a “timid” counterpart of writing explains Lessing’s deliberate equation of writing with the verbal arts, even though done in the passing, along with his slight dismissal of the plasticity otherwise inherent in the act of writing (a flaw that could otherwise locate writing in the same category as drawing; a flaw that Lessing has to avoid). It is possible to recollect here Lessing’s passing reference to writing from the previous chapter in Section 1.3.4. He discusses the ability of the poet to surpass the limitation of an artist, who is otherwise compelled “to compress his picture into a single moment” (Laocoön 23). The poet can pursue the course of any action in “possible variations [. . .]” (Laocoön 24). It is in such an instance of comparison between the painter and the writer-poet that the favourable condition of writing is expressed: Each variation which would cost the artist a separate work costs the poet but a single pen stroke; and if the result of this pen stroke, viewed by itself, should offend the hearer’s imagination, it was either anticipated by what has preceded or is so softened and compensated by what follows that it loses its individual impression and in combination achieves the best effort in the world. (Laocoön 24)

In other words, Lessing does not discriminate between writing and speaking to such a great extent, since the aim in both is well attained with “supposedly” minimal complications: words must invoke imagination in such a manner that we do not feel the means of production of that particular imagination (Laocoön 85). In writing, the feeling of the means of production of the particular imagination is rendered minimal due to the temporal sequence of the actions verbally reproduced. Thus, writing is superior to painting (by extension drawing) for Lessing at least. However, by the time Pater begins to consider the art of drawing, such an art has gradually developed in a completely different light when compared to writing; a comparison that may be traced back to the Renaissance.



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Reid traces the changing phase of the conflict between writing and drawing to the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, the process of writing manuscripts, that involves the act of scribbling and rewriting and the kind, which Reid records as “extravagances”, is grouped under “the common denominator of typography” (4). Typography as a profession develops in quick succession along with the development of the printing press and the subsequent development of the profession of printing and selling of books. Reid shows how the act of printing a letter is almost like assigning a definite structure to a visual space, like in the case of drawing. With the development of styles of writing or calligraphy, the visual representations of alphabets or writing, in Reid’s opinion, seem to develop from drawing. Thus the typed, calligraphed or printed and styled letters—say “g”—start having a separate aesthetic identity of their own, thus refuting their role as mere transparent signifiers. Reid illustrates a few examples in this context. The Renaissance, in particular, witnesses the invention of cancellaresca or the highly stylised curvaceous representation of letters for aesthetic visibility of the text (5). Or the pen games or the jeux de plume have the written letter assigned a size that is derived from what Reid claims is the “anthropomorphic ideal canon used in painting” (5). With the development of a market for printed books, the conflict between writing and drawing becomes more acute, what with strong developments in the technologies and styles of typography and calligraphy. The original manuscripts are written in informal styles, with pauses, drawings, notes in the margins. Reid discusses the profession of the copyist, whose job is to copy the writing of the author in perfectly legible form while removing traces of writing processes like the crossings, the inkblots, the scribbles (or what may be termed as drawings). He further adds that the copyist copies the legibility of the manuscript and does not photocopy the scribbling and drawings that the writer must have penned while in thought process (8–9). Moreover, the printing press further complicates the writing and drawing conflict. Though the printed book has maximum legibility, the author feels distanced from his/her own work. Interestingly, the claim in defence of the activity of drawing in a writing experience illustrates the process of writing,63 while printed writing establishes another context of writing—the mechanical reproduction— which obliterates the “live” experience of the birth of writing and its subsequent processes of development. Pater’s age in particular witnesses tremendous growth in book publication. But the authors protest silently at the loss of “their” legibility. In other words, the “legibility” that is missed is something more than mere mechanical writing; it encompasses the activity of the illegible drawing as well, and illegible drawing becomes



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synonymous with subjective experience. Pater’s agenda for drawing assumes new significance at such a juncture. We need to understand this significance to understand Pater as a possible contributor to the writingdrawing conflict. Reid records how Pater’s contemporary and the French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, is unable to discern his own “consciousness” when he sees the printed reproduction of his work—Madame Bovary. He (Reid) records how, in his 1856 letter to Louis Bouillet, Flaubert expresses that the printed text has lost its legibility. This is more so because the printed words are black in colour, and hence the text strongly evokes the “singular ‘color’ of the printed character [. . .]” (Reid 9). Reid shows how the plasticity of colour or the blackness of the printed characters establishes a paradoxical conflict between blindness and light—the writer is condemned to blindness, while his work is brought to light in public. In fact, Serge Tisseron in “All Writing is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript” (1994) mentions that in the initial stage, graphic representation is “blind” in that it is “guided by muscular, tonic, and plastic sensations” (33). Thus, the conflict between physical labour and the mental is evident in the use of natural illegible signs and arbitrary, social or legible signs. Notwithstanding the conflict between blindness and brightness, there is an underlying paradox in the denial of and simultaneous desire for illegibility. On the one hand, the removal of drawings from the utterly legible writing in the uniformly printed forms establishes pure legibility. Reid quotes the French writer, Paul Valery, who states that printed legibility is a clear, loud and honest representation of the artist’s thoughts, thus exhibiting any weakness or strength that exists in his temperament, while also embellishing and honouring the author with uniformity, clarity and proportional arrangement of letters and lines. Valery however feels that the author does not deserve such embellishments because he/she has not organised the written characters so uniformly and proportionately on the page. What may be inferred from Valery is a sense of disappointment over the lack of experiential unity—a unity between consciousness and graphic representation of it. The printed letters stand detached from each other, unlike the pen strokes that are so intimately linked together. Pure legibility thus lacks drawing. On the other, the physicality of the colour “black” reduces the legibility of the text, since the monotonous black colour takes prominence, like the physicality of drawing. Reid recalls a similar paradox in typography: the printer’s type is expected to be close to the style of handwriting while at the same time desiring maximum legibility, that is, pure legibility without the drawings.64 The desire and fear of plasticity of drawing is evident. Yet the desire for drawing is also



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the desire for graphic representation of consciousness of the writing subject or the incorporeal. I find this desire for drawing in writing (to “reveal” the experience of writing) to be analogous with Pater’s statement on drawing as the visual revelation of the “obscurities” of imagination. The incorporeal still dominates, but there is a growing need to concretely pin it down. The intellectualism in drawing is thus more because of its signification of the intellectual experience of the process of writing. I contend that Pater defends drawing as an intellectual category; a category that defines the valorisation of imagination by including design and obscurity. 2.3.1.2 Colouring vs. Drawing: The Criterion of the Intellect in the Visual Paradigm Pater also attempts to respect the activity of colouring by virtue of its intellectual potentials. Colouring is what Pater calls the “weaving of light” or the “staining of the whole fabric [. . .] with a new delightful physical quality” (122). The open admiration (“delightful”) for the physicality of colour, unlike Lessing’s displeasure of the opacity of the visual arts, seems to point to an anti neo-classical support for the sensory, the physical, and the corporeal. However, Pater also states that the direct delight of sensuality is the pre-requisite “of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them in the intention of the composer” (122). Interestingly, poetry/science lies “beyond” the “new delightful physical quality” of colouring itself. I infer from Pater that any form of subjective refinement and artistic exquisiteness added to the initial physicality of light is a product of something more than nature, something that comes from “the intention of the composer”, and that intention is the poetic subtext in painting. Thus, the subjective is seen as “added” onto the physical and not inherent in the physical itself. So what is only physical colour in the beginning, as in Japanese fan painting, becomes a more complex play of shades and lines in poetical works of advanced painters like Titian. An influence of Lessing is found in Pater’s statement: when the “primary and essential condition” of colour is satisfied, “we may trace the coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards [. . .]” (123). Lessing does not allow “fine gradations upwards”, but Pater certainly considers poetry as graded above physical colour. From Baumgarten, through Lessing, to Pater finally, we witness a history of the changing criterion of what is intellectual and what is not.65 For Pater, the criterion of intellectualism lies in the synthesis of the division between the sensory and the intellectual to form the “imaginative reason”.



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Both Lessing and Pater have an ideal intellectual form: the superior art. Lessing argues that words must invoke imagination in such a manner that we do not feel the means of production of that particular imagination (Laocoön 85). But Pater contends that the ideal synthesis of “means of production” and “imagination” is possible in the musical form of art, which, by virtue of such synthesis, is the highest form of art. His criterion of the intellectual is therefore the obliteration of the distinction between the medium (corporeal) and the content (incorporeal). He contends that [. . .] in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben—a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces. (123)

“Anders-streben” is the answer to the new ut pictura poesis, where painting is not like poetry, but each can pass into the condition of the other. Thus, the anti-Lessing rule that Pater introduces is that “[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (124). In other words, all arts constantly work to “obliterate” the distinction between matter and form (124). He calls this the “abstract language” (125), wherein the poetic or the pictorial cannot exist without the form of their representation. For Pater, all art forms achieve this kind of abstraction “in different degrees” (125). Pater invents a condition of consummation of sensation and imagination to create the criterion of the “imaginative reason”, which is definitely not the neo-classical reason; something that has been discussed towards the end of Section 2.3. He clearly states that art is always striving hard to be free from mere reason, “to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material [. . .]” (127). He invents a “complex faculty” of “imaginative reason” which consumes the differences between content and material to give rise to the ideal art form. In Pater’s imaginative reason, however, we do find a hierarchy; imaginative reason is more valued in contrast to sensation or pure reason. Though he suggests that form should not purely strike the eye, and subject matter purely the intellect, the faculty of the eye or the intellect are individually not validated unless they strive to move out of their conditions to attain the ideal condition of “imaginative reason”, which synthesises both to produce “one single effect [. . .]” (128). It is in this capacity that the consideration of music as the superior art has historical antecedents in the context of social valorisation of the intellect. I now need to locate Pater’s position regarding music within a larger historical context of what constituted



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intellectual forms of arts and their subsequent academic institutionalisation. My aim is to show how Pater is very much a part of this history, albeit in different ways. 2.3.1.3 The History of Intellectualism: Liberal Arts vs. Mechanical Arts Hardy Grant in “Mathematics and the Liberal Arts” (1999) discusses the social value of music as a historical consequence of the sixth century BC Pythagorean equation between numbers and musical harmony—music is an “art” which also means “techne” or the Greek “IJȑȤȞȘ” and even more— it is a science (96). Science is respected because of its demonstration of what Aristotle terms as the “first principles” or “the necessary causes of [. . .] [nature’s] being” (Aristotle qtd. in Grant 96).66 Thus “art” has a different significance attached to it: it is a rationally abstracted formulation like mathematics, and the formula is required to be taught or imparted to another. The fifth-century BC sophists eventually give arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music what Grant describes as the “wide currency in education [. . .]” (97). He (Grant) discusses how the sophists emphasise practical education or education by instruction. In the process, oratory and subsequently rhetoric turn out to be indispensable “arts” as well; more so because the student is first required to master language or logos, which becomes the basic medium of instruction for all other subjects. The “academic arts” socially enjoy a different prestige when compared to mechanical occupations. In Grant’s words: Of enduring importance was a division set out by Aristotle, who separated the arts, and indeed all occupations, into “liberal” [. . .] and the opposite, by a rather complex set of criteria including both the tendency to promote virtue and the motive with which the thing is done. (96) (double quotes mine)

Christopher Flannery in “Liberal Arts and Liberal Education” (1998) states the difference between “liberal arts” and other arts more emphatically: Unlike the compulsory arts of war and economics the liberal arts are not forced upon us by the needs of mere life but are chosen for the sake of a good life. They are arts not for the acquisition or accomplishment of necessary things but for the use of choiceworthy things. They were distinguished traditionally, for this reason, from the manual or mechanical arts as well. That is, they are not merely instrumental arts but arts that are in some respect an end in themselves. They are arts to be exercised, as it



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were, after the battles are fought and won, and the fields are plowed, and the buying and selling are done. They are, as Aristotle would say, the “leisure” arts. [. . .]. [. . .] [O]ur words “school,” and “scholar,” and “scholarship” are derived from the Greek word “schole,” which means leisure—and that “schools” are places where “scholars” learn to make the best use of their “schole.”

The word “leisure” however has a more complex connotation: Flannery describes “liberal arts” as a paradoxical combination of “disciplined technique” and “freedom of contemplation”: The idea of the liberal arts involves a tension—inherent in human nature itself—between freedom and ruling purpose. [. . .]. It is not by chance that the various liberal arts are traditionally called “disciplines.” This suggests to us that leisure properly speaking is not mere idleness and that freedom is not random meandering or arbitrary willfulness. The liberal arts are, paradoxically, the leisure disciplines, the disciplines of freedom. They prepare us to deserve, by using well, “the blessings of liberty.”

What interests me is the varying criterion of various subjects that are declared “liberal arts” through time. Barnard also chronicles the kind of subjects that form the core of “liberal arts” in medieval times: grammar, mathematics, rhetoric, music and astronomy. However, as per Barnard’s research, there are additional entries into “academic arts” after Renaissance: these entries have been grouped under mechanical activities (see Section 1.6.1 of Chapter One). It is important to pause here again, and now understand the historical evolution of “creativity” as an intellectual human ability in the capacity of art, as compared to mechanical activity. Williams has succinctly discussed the history of “creativity” in The Long Revolution (1961; 2001). He describes the change in the concept of “creativity” in art from the classical period to that of the early modern period. In fact, he argues that the history of “creativity” actually begins from the Renaissance with potentials drawn from the classical. I have already discussed Plato and Aristotle and their take on art in Chapter One. Williams argues on similar grounds that “creativity” as a word has a different meaning for Plato and Aristotle: it is “mimesis”, which he (Williams’s understanding of Plato) describes as “doing what another has done” or “making something like something else” (20). For Aristotle, as Williams explains: [A]rt primarily [. . .] [is] a representation of some hitherto-existing reality. The artist imitates this, and by his imitation, which is akin to our first



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Williams thus shows that Plato understood the artist as imitating a “preexisting reality” (20). But he also agrees that both Plato and Aristotle draw different conclusions from their similar observations. Plato warns us of the dangers of imitation on the weaker minds, because of the imitation of appearances, as discussed in the previous chapter in Section 1.3.1. Aristotle, on the other hand, [. . .] develops his concept of imitation as a form of learning towards its definition as the highest form of learning, in that it shows, through its universal statements, the permanent and the necessary. (21)

In this context, Aristotle’s “idealization” theory of art has been discussed in the previous chapter in Section 1.3.2. Williams records four doctrines of art, as it emerges from the classical tradition of the Renaissance: the first is about art as “revelation” of hidden reality; the second is art as embodiment of the “Idea of Beauty” that also includes the Renaissance Humanist’s re-invention of the classical works of art, something that Winckelmann and Lessing have been doing; the third is art as moral doctrine that shows how nature ought to be, like the “idealization” of Aristotle; and finally, art as human creativity as similar to nature, which is also creativity of God (22). For the final category, Williams quotes Tasso: “There are two creators [. . .] God and the poet” (22). In this capacity, many of the early modern writers understand the poet as the mirror image of God, whether they are Sydney or Marvell. Williams also accepts that there has been corresponding skepticism regarding poetry as the means to the ideal world through theories about “delusions of imagination and the misleading elements of fiction and romance” (28). But such delusions have also been given a special category of illusion, which has been considered valuable by the artists (29). Two forms of creativity thus emerge: one is the depiction of reality as it is with the belief that there is no supernatural; the other is organisation of the reality into an ideal world. Williams describes the change in “creativity” in the following manner: Thus, the ‘creative’ idea has undergone a further development, the ordinarily inaccessible reality being placed within man himself, with the artist as a specially gifted person who is able to penetrate to this region. (31)



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Thus, on the one hand, there is the special material of art and on the other the ordinary material world. Williams argues that the “creative” has two conflicting positions in modernity. Basically, he describes the theory of art as imitation or creation that “attempts to define the relationship” between “‘reality’ and ‘art’” (35). In this capacity, art as mere imitation may be viewed by Plato or a Puritan or a modern Practical Man as inferior, while Aristotle, or a Renaissance theorist or a modern romantic/aesthetician may view art as superior experience of idealisation, inspiration or transcendence (35). Much further into modernity, a third category of art arrives, which is the abstract or the “pure” representation of the artist’s vision or aesthetic experience, and not the imitation of reality. In the context of Williams’s historical development of “creativity”, I understand the entry of the visual arts into the respectable sphere of intellectual arts only in its capacity to “create”: a capacity that is analogous to Barnard’s chronicle of the dual composition of “design” or the idea and the mechanical means of presenting the idea. Thus, the visual arts have been “raised” from mechanical to intellectual level only after incorporating the dual combination of “techne” and “schole” in the art of “design”. As argued in the preceding chapter, the artists of early modernity have been striving hard to valorise their artworks as products of imagination, reason, mathematics, and the sciences (see Section 1.6.1). It is interesting to note that while Williams records the commencement of the history of “creativity” from the Renaissance, Barnard chronicles the division of “art” from “craft” in and around the same period. There is also the value of the poet in this period, which is also equivalent to that of the “creator” in Williams’s documentation. Lessing carries this legacy forward. However, he does not make any attempts to “raise” the value of the visual arts: he concentrates on the verbal at the cost of the visual. I review our history again. Grant has illustrated how “music” in the Greek period is considered more rational by virtue of its mathematical manifestations when compared to poetry, which seems to develop from “nonrational wellsprings [. . .]” (96). Thus, poetry could not be taught rationally, like music, in academic institutions. Gradually we see how the sophists incorporated rhetoric as logos. Flannery defines logos as a combination of speech and reason, just like Barnard illustrates the dual combination of idea and the mechanical representation of that idea in design. We further witness Baumgarten’s attempt to “raise” sensory perceptions to the level of a lower form of “idea” in order to incorporate aesthetics as a scholarly discipline equivalent to science (see Section 2.3). What Lessing finally does is transform the value of reason as intellect (or what Burke would address as beautiful) into the value of imagination as



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intellect (Burke’s sublime) in order to incorporate poetry (and by extension literature) as an intellectual form of art. It is Pater who finally combines imagination, reason and sensations to develop a new criterion of intellectualism, which also allows him to “raise” the visual arts into intellectual aesthetic activities. I however contend that the issue of Lessing’s devaluation of the visual resurfaces in Pater’s judgement on the visual with wider repercussions notwithstanding his synthesis of sensation, reason and imagination. I situate Pater in his Lessing and anti-Lessing mode of conflicting aestheticism, viz., classification against unity, in the wake of larger conflicting interactions between the Kantian and Hegelian philosophies of the “self”. Although Pater wrote The Renaissance almost a century after Kant wrote his Critique of Judgement in 1790, and almost seven decades after Hegel wrote The Phenomenology of Mind in 1807, their philosophical interactions are strongly evident in Pater’s anti-Lessing stance in particular. I have proposed that Lessing predicts the Kantian autonomous reason; in this section, I contend that Pater goes beyond Lessing to incorporate the Hegelian idealism of subject-object synthesis, which is not possible in either Lessing or in Kant. Hawkes’s historical study of the eighteenth-century debates around idealism, Gillespie’s theological research on Enlightenment philosophies; Bürger’s critical study of social and political implications of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries and their philosophies; and Habib’s re-evaluation of Hegelian aestheticism have produced insightful analyses that will strengthen my argument. In the light of the analyses of the critics mentioned above, I relocate Pater’s aestheticism in the conflicting interface between the Kantian transcendental self and the Hegelian Absolute Spirit.

2.4 Resolving the Cartesian Dilemma: Kant, Hegel and Pater That Pater writes in a time that is safely distanced from the romantic age of revolutions that are so imminent in Lessing’s time is a historical fact of no small consequence. His Hegelian position is deeply connected with social implications of the after-effects of such political revolutions. Lessing’s essay is published in 1766, just before the age of revolutions that gets inaugurated by the American Revolution and the declaration of Independence in 1776, and the French revolution, which begins with the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The demarcations between the arts that Lessing advocates can thus be interpreted as an expression of concern over social and artistic mobilities and transformations that are already under



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way: both these revolutions usher in bourgeois political power that eventually replace crumbling feudal monarchies. Bürger in Theory argues that the seizure of political power by a bourgeois (Napoleon) is synonymous with the consolidation of the economic strength by the same (41). He equates the political triumph of bourgeois power (an instance of social validation of the autonomous status of the aforementioned class) with the impending establishment of aesthetics as a pedagogically validated autonomous sphere of philosophical discipline (41–42). Descartes—much before Lessing—and Kant—a decade after Lessing— proclaims that mind is a separate and independent order of human existence; a position that becomes the signature of modern philosophy. Kant, through his three Critiques (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgement) develops a triadic distribution of human mental capacities with apparently no moral or religious agenda for such divisions. In a similar fashion, we have already witnessed the seeds of aesthetic autonomy in Lessing’s declaration of art as separate from religious interests (Laocoön 55–56). It is however with Kant and his Critique of Judgement that Lessing’s “art’s sake” phrase gets established. Kant and his aesthetic autonomy find their inaugural moments in Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum”, as proposed in the previous chapter in Section 1.5. However, what makes Hawkes’s Ideology (2007) interesting, particularly at this point of the analysis, is his contention that Descartes’s erroneous act of “unwarranted” presumption begins a tradition of alienation of mind from body (63). Descartes’s conclusion that the cogito confirms the existence of thought necessarily includes the unified conceptualisation of a thinking “I” who develops into [t]he originary, unitary, transcendent Cartesian ego [. . .] [who provides] an alternative standard of certainty and coherence for a world in which the traditional conception of God as the source of all truth was rapidly being diminished. (63–64)

The obsession with an organic unified whole is already evident, much before Pater, though classifications are very much in vogue, viz., mind and body. It is interesting to note that Descartes writes during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) that shuddered most of central and northern European politics and religion. Michael Allen Gillespie in The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008) points out:



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Protestantism has been propagating the power of the independent Christian subject67 as against the strictures of what Gillespie identifies as the two great medieval institutions—the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church—amidst rapidly developing religious and economically consolidated regions and practices demanding political sovereignty. So the contestation of the autocratic Holy Roman God requires a formidable alternative as well. Gillespie discusses how Descartes in his Little Notebook develops the “I” as an “alternative standard of certainty”. For Descartes, when “I” doubts, that which is not there limits his/her “will”. This implies the feeling of self-consciousness in a manner that sets the “I” as distinct from that which is there, viz., the world around the “I”. Descartes argues that “that” cannot be the case with God, since God is never finite in his will or knowledge, and hence cannot be distinguished as separate from all that is there; thus God is no deception; God is nature; God is “pure intelligence”; God is “pure will”; God is “the mechanism at the heart of mechanical nature”; God is “the source of the motion of all matter” (Gillespie 204). In other words, God is the synthesis of all dichotomies. In this regard, Descartes must feel the need to develop a unified “I” who could perform like God. The need to synthesise dichotomies is evident in Pater in a magnified manner as well. In the voluntarist mode of the power of will, as discussed in the previous chapter in Section 1.4, Descartes suggests that the human self is infinitely wilful like God, or as Gillespie puts it, “I’s” desires are unquenchable. However, “I’s” knowledge is limited but not due to limits of human understanding but more because of “the consequence of the past misapplication of the will” (Gillespie explains Descartes 205). Descartes claims that rational application of the will of man (woman) will eventually master nature, which is equivalent to the qualities of the wilful creator of nature or God. Thus, the “I” functions like God. In more precise terms, “I’s” limitations are not explained as absolute or “given” but as “consequence of the past misapplication of the will”. Such a claim develops what Gillespie later summarises as “two great goals of modern thought, the mastery of nature through modern science and the realization of human freedom” (259). The post-Cartesian contradictions that do appear in the conflict between the empiricists and the rationalists accentuate the contradiction of the fundamental basis of the “two great goals of modern thought” viz., reason and freedom. The significant attack



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on the Cartesian subject comes from Hume on what Hawkes claims to be his (Descartes’s) neat exclusion of the soul from philosophy (66). Hawkes refers to Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739–1740), where the empiricist states that there is no sensual impression of our unified soul; we have arbitrarily imposed such a unified “self” as an ideal order on randomly perceived senses (66). Gillespie further describes Hume’s contention that the universal natural laws like that of cause and effect are instances of imposition of ideal orders on the natural world (256). Even Hawkes questions the Cartesian separation of mind from body by stating the “mutually defining” status of such opposing categories: the subject can “only” be defined as opposed to the object and same is the case with the object (65). Thus, if the very logic by which “I” substantiates its autonomous status can be questioned, the Cartesian philosophy would crumble. Kant and his autonomous reason develop into an even more emphatic philosophy that attempts to uphold the Cartesian stance of a unified reason or “I” that is advocated as the basis of knowledge.68 I further notice how Pater’s unified absolute art (music) is significant in the context of the unified concept of the Cartesian self. The need for a unified entity seems paramount, and interestingly the unified entity is strategically incorporeal, as we shall see in the following analyses of Kant and Pater.

2.4.1 Kant’s Solutions to the Contradictions of the Universal “I” If Hume and various other empiricists make the Cartesian “I” look like an arbitrary law or even fiction, Kant, as proposed by both Gillespie and Hawkes, does not underestimate their contradictions. The Kantian distinction between the “phenomena” and “noumena” is a good instance of recognition of such contradictions. We have seen how Kant, while agreeing that knowledge “begins” with experience, also argues that there is the possibility of knowledge “prior” to experience.69 Thus, knowledge obtained from the realm of “phenomena” or knowledge gained from experience is understood not as the knowledge of the object “as it is”, but “as it appears to us”. Interestingly, the realm of phenomena has rational framework underlying the activity of cognition. We understand the external world through certain inherent categories of understanding that precede experience, which Kant calls a priori. Hawkes explains the Kantian a priori through Newtonian geometry. That science in general contends that axioms are necessary for every human experience ascertains that such axioms must exist prior to human experience. The implication then is that certain non-empirical categories of the mind help us in perceiving the world. They are not material but incorporeal, so that we



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may recognise the material world within the framework of these categories. In other words, we perceive the object “as it appears to us” through transcendental and a priori categories of our mind. We perceive the object in space and time, the categories, which have no external existence, and hence they are not empirical categories. To quote Hawkes here: This is Kant’s “Copernican revolution”; he suggests that our knowledge need not conform to external objects but that, insofar we can know them, these objects must conform to our capacity for knowledge. (68) (double quotes mine)

Hawkes shows how Kant responds to Hume’s accusation of laws as fiction. If the transcendental laws appear fictional and arbitrary, then the study of the faculty through which we perceive becomes paramount, since that is our definite “given” through which we perceive a phenomenon. In other words, the fiction decides how we perceive and what we perceive. Thus, the legacy of predominance of the incorporeal continues. To give value to fiction, it becomes even more necessary for Kant to establish a transcendental reason—in Hawkes’ words: “[Kant] is concerned to demonstrate that we possess a continuous and coherent self, which transcends the random blur of representation” (67). It is our transcendental categories of the mind that structure otherwise random perceptions into forms of cognition. On the other hand, there is also the “noumena” or the realm beyond experience, which is empirically unattainable; it cannot be sensually felt or perceived; it is the realm of the object that is “as it is”. Kant is worried about the noumena that cannot be grasped within absolute laws, since absolute laws are the result of the a priori categories of the self, and there is a world beyond the given subjective categories as well. He attempts to bridge the gap or even contemplate the possibility of bridging the gap between the phenomenal and the noumenal world in the following manner. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant discusses the abstract rule or the “categorical imperative”, which has been examined in the previous chapter in Section 1.5; an abstract moral law generated in the mind, which will actualise in the material world into an actual action. The moral law in the realm of reason operates like an entity “as it is”, beyond space and time, like a noumenon. It is universal. In the phenomenal world, moral action is bound by the absoluteness of the law; the law determines the action. We are bound to follow the law since, like noumenal reality (law “as it is” and that which cannot be sensed), we can only believe in the existence of the law and not sense it as a phenomenon. Yet the self prior to the phenomenal



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actualisation of the law creates the law. Thus, the self postulates a “noumenal reality” of us in the conceptualisation of an abstract rule or the moral law, free of even time and space. The importance of the incorporeal is further enhanced. As a reply to Hume’s accusation of arbitrary laws, Kant deciphers the concept of the noumenal reality, where we are intellectually, conceptually, free, while phenomenologically we are “sensibly determined”. It is here that Kant must have felt the need to formulate the role of the faculty of aesthetic judgement, since, in Hawkes’s words, “there clearly must be some point of connection between the material and the supersensible spheres” in the act of adaptation of an abstract law into real action (71). On the one hand, reason has the freedom of will to formulate laws for the sensory world prior to its interaction with the same. The sensory world however has to accommodate itself to the rules of reason in order to be perceived and felt. On the one hand, there is freedom, on the other, necessary service. Gillespie best exemplifies the perennial tension in Kant in the following manner: “Humans were thus either mere matter in motion or they were gods, or to put the matter more clearly they constantly lived the contradiction of being both mere matter in motion or gods” (277). The unified Cartesian self does not remain unified in Kant. Yet, the unified nature of the self is evident in its aesthetic contemplations. The common faculty for both of them, the realm of reason and the realm of the sensory, is the aesthetic faculty: a classic case is evident in Wordsworth’s poem on the daffodils (see Ex. 2-1 in the Appendices).70 The aesthetic faculty is able to extract the quality of trance from rows of daffodils because it senses them through the visual sense organ or the “eye”, but also shares the “pensive will” of the mind that orders the trance-like display of daffodils within the framework of the binocular vision of the “eye”, to produce a universal feeling of trance for an entire humankind. The awareness of contradictions in Kant is evident in his analysis of aesthetic judgement, as is evident in Wordsworth—the “subjective” feeling of trance which Wordsworth “alone” feels becomes a “universal” aesthetic quality for all readers of the poem as well. Like the subjective criterion of taste, which turns into a universal aesthetic quality, the aesthetic quality of beauty is also experienced through a unique interaction of subjectivity and universality. By being subjective would mean that experience of beauty is all about whether the object is “perceptually” pleasurable to me “only”; more precisely, whether an object is “perceptually” beautiful or ugly for me “only”. To be perceptually beautiful or ugly refers to the phenomenal realm of experience. Moreover, for an object to be perceptually pleasurable, the criterion of



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pleasure or beauty is “disinterested” or not related to desire. There is no preconceived desire that the object be pleasurable to me for any ulterior motive. It is at this juncture, when calling an object beautiful, that the universal creation of categorically imperative laws by the self plays an important role—the judgement of taste requires a universal validation to be passed for an otherwise subjective aesthetic contemplation of an object of beauty. Just like the categorical imperative that proclaims an “ought” moral action for entire humankind, similarly, an aesthetic judgement claims that all people “ought” to agree that the rose is beautiful; hence it becomes a universal judgement. Kant therefore attempts to strike a balance between the phenomenal realm of nature that is bound by necessity and the noumenal realm of freedom and morality, by making aesthetic judgement a “free play” between the two; an oscillation between the two. The Kantian “free play” has strong resonances in Pater’s “active principle”.

2.4.2 The Kantian Legacy: Lessing vs. Pater The Kantian tension between the phenomenal and the noumenal is evident in Lessing and Pater in interestingly different ways. But the resolutions offered, if at all, are deeply connected with the social climate of their times. Lessing, in typical Enlightenment fashion, displays an almost “ontic” distinction between the verbal and the visual arts on the basis of the faculty supposedly responsible for the art form. Gillespie contends that Kant’s sole attempt to respect yet resolve the Enlightenment contradiction (empiricists vs. rationalists) is supposedly achieved by separating the phenomenal from the noumenal realm altogether. Lessing, before Kant, has already attempted to separate the verbal and the visual arts as two separate art forms with distinct boundaries, also propagated by Lessing as universal boundaries. Now, the preference for the verbal will make more sense when we relocate the Kantian stand on the sublime in Lessing again; something that has been discussed in Section 1.6.2.2 of Chapter One while concentrating on Burke, Lessing and Kant. There is in us the realm of desire, which remains unfulfilled; the realm of reason, which has the free will to conceptualise prior to any form of experience; the realm of the supersensible or the noumenal, which cannot be fathomed, though the desire to fathom is strong; and the moral order or the categorical imperative, where moral laws originate from the free will of reason and get actualised as actions performed in the phenomenal world. Hawkes discusses Kant’s use of the concept of the “sublime” to prioritise the power of the transcendental self over the limitations



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prescribed by the self through its inherent a priori categories. The feeling of the sublime cannot arise from an object of the senses, say, like the judgement on beauty, which needs an object. What about objects we cannot sensually conceptualise on account of their structural infinity, like Lessing’s “gods”? We “desire” to understand the infinite power of the gods, which is phenomenally impossible (unless we lower our tastes by submitting our senses to the visual fetishisation of “graven images”). Our reason can form an absolute truth that can be sensed “only” within the constraints of space and time. Within the phenomenal realm, that absolute truth or what Kant calls “absolute totality” becomes an absolute reality for us. However, temporal and spatial constraints cannot sense the godly infinitude beyond the limits of constraints. The “sense” of the sublime is thus the inability to estimate the totality of the infinity within the categories of space and time, while desiring to estimate the impossible. Yet this inability to sense the totality entails the ability to rationally (hence intellectually) think of an infinite totality, which we are unable to sensually feel in its wholeness. Thus, the mind has the “intuitive” ability to understand the underlying wholeness or the “noumenal reality” of the object of perception without actually perceiving the noumenal whole. It is similar to what Lessing has to say about the imaginative potential of the verbal forms of arts: words must invoke imagination in such a manner that we do not feel the means of production of that particular imagination (Laocoön 85), though they are “words” that evoke such an imagination, a statement oft repeated throughout this project. Hawkes contends that there are “quasi-religious” motives in Kant’s concept of the sublime. He writes: “It is a notable feature of The Critique of Judgement that Kant suggests that the impulse towards the noumenal is simultaneously a striving after ‘totality’” (73). Hawkes adds: “[There is] desire for an ultimate, unified reality lying beneath the disparate surface appearances of things” (73). We must remember that Kant writes prior to the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), which Gillespie contends to be the historical revelation of the Enlightenment contradiction. Gillespie shows how one of the philosophical pioneers of the French Revolution, Rousseau, has contended that the general human will is moral. He preaches the right of equality for human beings. This necessitates that all actions must obey the universal moral rule that must be realised as human freedom. In Gillespie’s words: To put the matter in Kantian terms, freedom and reason could only be compatible if each individual always willed only categorically, that is, in accordance with the general will. However, such a categorical will is only



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Thus, Gillespie extracts the conflict between the particular and the universal in the historical moment of the aftermath of the French Revolution; a conflict that is of great importance to my understanding of Pater’s philosophical position. Gillespie proposes that the point of contradiction in the Reign of Terror is between subjective corruption and universal moralisation. He puts forth the argument: While the Terror undoubtedly drew much of energy and vehemence from class resentment, political infighting, and opportunism, it found its continuing justification in the repeated need to eliminate corruption, that is, to eliminate the particular will. (277)

He discusses the impossibility of such a task, since human beings as finite beings are embedded in the particular. He cites the instance of the influential advocator of the Reign of Terror—Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794)—who is esteemed as the “incorruptible” (Gillespie 277) advocator of the philosophy of merciless punishment of oppressors. William Doyle and Collin Hayden in their 1999 edited Robespierre establish the advocator’s philosophy of the necessity of terror in a revolution: the need for terror as “legal terror” in revolution requires the “legal” revelation and “legal” punishment of unknown enemies of French democracy in the garb of patriots (12). The extreme method leads to condemnation of suspects in the court of law without the presence of witnesses. But eventually Robespierre has to defend himself against the charges of tyrannical dictatorship, only to end up being guillotined without trail. Gillespie writes: “The Terror was in this way the first modern example of the danger in ascribing divine attributes to human beings” (277). We may recollect the hints of dangers of fetishisation in Lessing as discussed in the preceding chapter in Section 1.6.2.2. Thus, as per Gillespie, a transcendental self (“transcendent God”) is the only possibility of “willing” in a truly universal manner, rather than assigning godly powers to any finite object or feat in the phenomenal world that eventually becomes a particular law with totalitarian dreams (277). Pater seems to allow the interplay of both the realms in both art forms. Though he admits that each art form has its unique limitations and it requires the art form to be responsible to the limits of its medium, he does not stop there. As expressed in the initial sections of this chapter, he discusses aesthetic virtues rather than limits of art forms. Moreover, he



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does not group art forms as purely sensual or purely imaginative. Or, the “ontic” distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms seems to be obliterated, when Pater proposes the possibility of poetry in pictorial art forms, and pictorial attributes in poetic art forms. In the beginning of this chapter, I have mentioned the manner in which Pater defines the task of aesthetic criticism: “To see the object as in itself it really is”. Such a statement seems to have a noumenal context. Both Lessing and Pater attempt to define a work of art in terms of what it supposedly really is: Lessing defines its limitations and Pater its virtues. But like Hawkes’s contention of a quasi-religious motive in Kant, Lessing’s preference for the sublime in the verbal art forms is well evident. Like Lessing, Pater too accepts that each work of art has specific responsibilities towards its medium. While Lessing advertises specific artistic responsibilities as absolute and universal, Pater chooses a different position. The value of subjective experience of artistic senses is an important criterion for Pater; he is interested in an “active principle” rather than a “universal formula”. Pater establishes his affinity with subjective experience quite early in The Renaissance, when he claims that aesthetic quality of beauty is not universal. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, the aesthetic critic need not “possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects” (Pater x). The Kantian stance is visible here: the object of beauty has to be “perceptually” pleasurable to the critic. Fang Po in the article “Walter Pater’s Re-evaluation of Early Modern European Visual Culture” (2004) illustrates the Kantian stance in Pater very forcefully: [. . .] Pater accentuates the need for each individual to construct a subjective view of the world, to define beauty, for example, not in abstract and universal terms, but in the way one perceives it in a particular object. Pater’s phenomenological view of reality is comparable to Kant’s Copernican revolution. If Kant can be considered [. . .] as breaking decisively with the metaphysical tradition and thus withdrawing philosophy from “the True and Eternal,” so as to concentrate on the here and now, Pater can be seen as carrying the heritage of Kant a step further by underscoring the centrality of the individual’s personal and sensory perception/interpretation of external reality. (113)71

From all this, it is not clear how Pater can at the same time claim to understand the noumenal aspect of reality viz., the work of art “as it is”, if he does at all. After all, he constructs the criterion of the “active principle”



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which is a “free play” between subjective and universal criteria. In Po’s words, “[. . .] Pater redirects our attention from objective reality as it is in itself to our conscious experience and reconstruction of that reality” (113). Pater has to go beyond Kant to accommodate the noumenal as well.

2.4.3 Beyond Lessing and Kant: Pater and Hegel Pater’s propagation of “Anders-streben”72 transcends Lessing’s artistic boundaries for good. He defines “Anders-streben” as “a partial alienation from its [the art form’s] own limitations [. . .]” (123). In the first place, the ability to “alienate oneself from one’s limitations” suggests the awareness of limits as well as the realm beyond limits. Kantian reason is conceptually aware of the realm beyond phenomenal limitations. But, Pater also adds: “[E]ach art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art” in such a way so as “not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally [. . .] lend each other new forces” (123). The ability to pass into another condition is also the ability to “negate” one’s own state to reach a desired position. In Pater’s words: “For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form [. . .], yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” (124). To desire another condition (each art “aspires” to achieve the condition of music) is also to establish a “relation” with the “other” from the self. The process of “negation” and “relation” are thus in constant dialogue with each other. In such a context, the independent existence of the “other” is negated, as “it” exits in relation with the self. Lessing does not permit such relations between the verbal and the visual art forms: he negates the relation itself. Even Hawkes illustrates the “tragic predicament” of Kantian knowledge of noumena, where we are “constantly impelled to chase after an unconditioned knowledge which is by definition unattainable” (75). But Pater does suggest a phenomenal experience of the noumena, where each art might alienate itself from its limitations to aspire for another condition. For Kant, the desire to “know” the unknowable is experientially unfulfilled. Contrary to Kant, Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) contends that desire is also self-consciousness (103). The moment we desire the “other”, the “other” becomes ours. He argues that Kant assumes phenomena as separate from noumena. If we do not know the qualities of noumena, it does not exist for us. Thus, our lack of knowledge of something makes that something non-existent for us. But, if we do know about noumena, the limitless realm exists in relation to us. In this regard, Pater suggests that no art form is limited, since its knowledge of its limits insists upon its knowledge of its virtues:



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Architecture [. . .], though it has its own laws [. . .] yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, as in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in the flawless unity of Giotto’s tower at Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted staircases of the châteaux of the country of the Loire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the actors in a theatrical mode of life might pass each other unseen [. . .]. (123–124)

Thus, the art of architecture is “virtuously” capable of passing into the condition of painting, sculpture, poetry and even theatre. Pater’s “imaginative reason” criterion subsumes and resolves the distinction between physical medium and imaginative subject to form the ideal art that is non-dichotomous and minus contradictions. He states: That the mere matter of a poem, [. . .] that the mere matter of a picture [. . .] should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. (124–125)

He calls this “spirit” that is an end in itself the “abstract language” of the ideal art (125). He exemplifies the superiority of “abstract language” in landscape paintings and lyric poetry. He argues that the rugged material conditions of a Venetian landscape in their actual visual details, like notes of music, present the “spirit or essence only of a certain sort of landscape—a country of the pure reason or half-imagined memory” (126). Thus, the sensory passes into the condition of reason. Similarly, true poetical quality is neither descriptive nor meditative. In lyrical poetry, in particular, matter cannot be separated from form without deducting something from the matter itself. Lyrical poetry is thus “artistically” the highest form of poetry (127). In other words, subject matter passes into the condition of form. Thus “imaginative reason” is that “complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol” (128). The thought therefore exists as its sensible symbol, or the sensible is thought. For Kant, the totality of the world is only a concept impossible to be experienced in its totality. For Hegel, the sensory world is an objectification of the spirit, such that the spirit negates “its” physical condition to pass into “its” condition of reason (the conceptual stage) to finally negate that, to reach the state of the Absolute Spirit: the condition of self-consciousness at “its” peak with no object-subject division. By this logic, Pater’s claim that music realises the “perfect identification of matter and form” (128) is derived from from the Hegelian notion of the Absolute



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Spirit. The underlying truth of the corporeal is thus its subjective totality. Pater, too, has claimed that poetic refinement of the physical light or colour comes not from nature, but from the “informing spirit” of the artist, as discussed in Section 2.3.1.2. Thus the incorporeal-corporeal, subjectobject, mental-physical, and culture-nature divisions are very evident notwithstanding the Hegelian and, may I say, Paterian synthesis: in this context, Habib’s sum of the Hegelian phenomenology in A History of Literary Criticism (2005) helps me: The ultimate goal of this movement is self-consciousness, the point at which spirit or consciousness confronts the world no longer as “object” but as itself; in other words, it attains to the recognition that it has itself for object and that its consciousness of objectivity is ultimately consciousness of self, of its own profoundest nature. (389–390)

It is no wonder that Hegel calls the process of total realisation of the self as the phenomenology of “spirit”; some translations say “mind”; the German word is Geist. Thus realisation is a process of consciousness; human knowledge is experience, which is also finally a continuation of the tradition of the incorporeal, the subjective, and Pater is as much a participant of this tradition as is Hegel. It is in this capacity that Hegel’s interpretation of art becomes very important in my analysis of Pater. Richard Thomas Eldridge in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (2003) writes about Hegel’s aesthetics: “G. W. F. Hegel argues that a central task of art is the expression of the spirit and the sense of what is highest that is held in common by a nation or people” (74–75). In other words, art is respected for being the “expression of the spirit”, which is also “the sense of what is highest that is held in common by a nation or people”. It is in this capacity that it would be worth comparing Hegel’s aesthetic hierarchy with Pater’s.

2.4.4 Beyond Hegel: Pater and the Ideal Art Bürger in Theory discusses the way “Hegel historicises aesthetics” such that “form-content dialectic realizes itself in different ways in symbolic (oriental), classical (Greeks), and romantic (Christian) art” (84). For Hegel, the content of a work of art and the form of the same have to complement each other to produce commendable art. But both artistic “content” and artistic “form” have Hegelian undertones. Content has to reveal the highest truth. In this regard, Hegel considers art higher than nature; physical appearances are not genuine, and art reveals the truth beyond those appearances. Form is not merely an external embodiment of



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the highest truth (content); it evolves from the nature of content itself. So “form” is important to the extent that it develops from the idea of truth (again, the incorporeal). Even Pater appreciates the “informing spirit” more than the physical medium (see Section 2.3.1.2). The fate of the physical media is reminiscent of the neo-classical times. In other words, even Hegel proposes a hierarchy of the arts. I summarise Hegel’s views on the ideal forms of arts from Aesthetics, and also from Habib and Eldridge’s summarisations. For the symbolic form, Hegel argues that the ideal (spiritual) content is vague; hence symbolic forms are in the process of searching for the apt form to represent the ideal truth, which they eventually could not and cannot. The oriental arts are relegated to the symbolic state, suggesting that the “orient” is not conceptually intelligent enough. Hegel considers architecture as a good example of such symbolic forms of arts. The inorganic material of architecture is more subject to mechanical laws. In the classical mode, the idea and the physical embodiment of that idea are well-matched. Unlike Lessing, Hegel hails the corporeal form of human structure that represents God. But that is so because human form derives its existence from the nature of the Ideal or God. In this context, Hegel celebrates Greek arts, since Greek gods are expressed in human forms. Each god has particular powers, and there is a particular human form for that particular god. The sculpture is best suited to this form, notwithstanding its inorganic material. The body (by extension, material) does not merely conform to mechanical laws but also to an ideal three-dimensional human form or what Hegel calls pure beauty. If we revert back to Burke and Kant in Section 1.6.2.2 of Chapter One and the Section 2.4.1 of this chapter, we will recollect the definition of beauty that has for its object a concrete and well-defined form (body). Hegel then goes on to describe the romantic form of art, which according to him is the highest form. In contrast to symbolic and classical forms of representation, the romantic form of art is an art of inward contemplation of the spirit. Hegel cites the instance of Christian religion. Christ is the Absolute Idea or universal spirit, unlike the Greek gods who are bestowed with particular powers in particular forms. Romantic art is that in which the image of God (sculpture) in the church (architecture) unites the society to form an ideal commune (Christian community). On a similar note, Habib explains that unlike the Greek form, the objects of nature in romantic art (like wind or nightingale) are symbolic in their existence; they express a universal idea; but in themselves, they are insignificant. The image of God then is merely a trope to unite many particular spirits with the Absolute Spirit. Amidst painting, music and poetry (all these forms of arts may be romantic in



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nature), poetry is the most inward searching form of art. Painting is better than sculpture because it connects to the audience with colour (a more inward connection) rather than a material body (a more external connection) like that of sculpture. In this regard, Hegel praises Titian; just like Pater. Unlike Lessing, Hegel values painting. Yet the hierarchy between painting and poetry is not reversed, as will be argued in the following paragraphs. For Hegel, music is even more inward-searching than painting because it completely renounces external space and hence projects subjectivity more directly. There are no visual expressions, only notes (sounds) that come and vanish. But poetry is the most inward-searching, and hence the most subjective of all the arts.73 It is necessary to remember Lessing here. For Lessing, a poet invokes imagination in such a manner that we do not feel the means of production of that particular imagination (85). For Hegel, sound as speech is sign of ideas and inner representations; it is the least physical of the signs of the other art forms. Musical sounds need not refer to ideas at all; then they cease to be art and become artistry. Hegel moves from the most concrete material (architecture) to complete annihilation of physicality. In this regard, Bürger’s assessment is illuminating. He shows how Hegel’s artistic preferences move towards philosophy: Classical perfection whose essence it is that “the spiritual was completely drawn through its external appearance” [. . .] [Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 517] can no longer be attained by the romantic work of art, because “the elevation of the spirit to itself” is the fundamental principle of romantic art. As spirit withdraws “from the external into its own intimacy with itself and posits external reality as an existence inadequate to itself” [. . .], the interpenetration of the spiritual and material that classical art attained disintegrates. [. . .]. With romantic art, art comes to its end and makes way for higher forms of consciousness, i.e., philosophy. (84)

Hegel very clearly states that religion and philosophy are more supreme forms, since they do not need to “conform to the larger pattern of the Idea’s development in logic and history” (Habib 398). And poetry is closest to the highest form of mental calibre, philosophy. Thus, the regard for art “still” depends on the incorporeal element that manifests itself as the corporeal; and the lesser the manifestation of the corporeal, the more intellectual the art form. In this capacity, Pater’s activity of “Andersstreben” is Hegelian in that he infuses the Hegelian procedure of evolution of arts into the ideal state; arts can pass into the condition of another art until they can reach the supreme form of art. Pater is Hegelian in that he



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accepts the disparity that exists between form and content, and also that there is a condition of art that subsumes the disparity. Pater is Hegelian in that the inner “informing spirit” of art gets precedence. Pater is Hegelian in that the material seems to be insignificant when one form of art may pass into the condition of another art, notwithstanding the limits of the medium. This boasts of an almost romantic spiritual evolution beyond the material. Like Hegel, there is a higher state to achieve for limited art forms. But Pater does not obey the Hegelian hierarchy of the arts. He has one ideal form in music; not the Hegelian romantic poetry. This dissimilarity with Hegel is interesting for me. On the one hand, the other art forms are required to function as a community that has to resound with the spirit of the ideal art form, which is music. In this way, he “seems” to avoid a Lessing-like hierarchy of the verbal and the visual arts, while still maintaining a Hegelian sense of unity of community in the arts. On the other, the importance of the subject, the incorporeal, and the abstract cannot be denied when Pater insists that an “informing spirit” makes the physical media meaningful; and gradations of hues give a poetic feeling to otherwise physical light (see Section 2.3.1.2). It is noteworthy to acknowledge Denis Donoghue and Walter Pater, Lover of Strange Souls (1995) here, where he claims that Pater is the mouthpiece of art for art’s sake movement or the movement for abstract art, and hence is “the” influence on modern art and even literature. He (Donoghue) argues that the effective characteristic of art is its abstract or formal quality. He describes Pater’s ideal model as instrumental or nonprogrammatic music, in which both form and content coincide, or more precisely, form becomes the content. Donoghue further asserts that Pater understands other forms of arts in their different proportions of form and content, a position that I have been discussing so long. But Donoghue goes beyond the scope of my project when he argues for the recovery of music criticism from the political: “If you are listening to a Beethoven quartet, you do well not to be thinking of anything else, even of sin, expiation, redemption, and God” (285). However, Donoghue is important for us in his insistence that Pater’s [. . .] aesthetic values—form, style, tone, pleasure, exercised in achieved freedom [freedom from moral and ideological imperatives]—[are] fundamental to the literature that we care about, carry around with us [a host of connections with the moderns]. (329)

What interests me is the capacity in which music and not poetry stands a better chance for Pater to be free from ideological imperatives. Had he



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chosen poetry, would he not be guilty of Lessing’s ideological imperatives? Does the choice of instrumental or non-programmatic music, which Donoghue claims has no content other than form itself, free Pater from a history of diffusions, displacements and idealist reparations of class division, a history that Lessing could merely suppress but not overcome. What is interesting, therefore, is the need for Pater to make music the ideal art form, and not poetry. Let me say that if the image of God becomes a trope to unite many particular spirits with the Absolute Spirit, similarly, music may be interpreted as a particular trope to hold all the arts together. This interpretation has strong social repercussions.

2.5 The Nineteenth-Century Social Communities and Pater’s Community of Arts When Pater in 1873 remarks that art is about beauty and not religion, he echoes various other such statements from other critics of art in that century, namely Edgar Allen Poe’s famous 1850 “The Poetic principle” (“poem written solely for the poem's sake”) or Gautier’s “Art for art's sake”74. In Section 1.6 of the preceding chapter, I have discussed the tension between the aristocrats and the rising merchant class. The aristocrats have a given “spatial” existence of social supremacy; the merchant class evolves in “time” to eventually buy, displace and even establish their social space of economic esteem. In contrast, Pater’s age has altered from a feudal–merchant class discrepancy to a conflict of relations between what Geoffrey Crossick in “From Gentleman to the Residuum” (1991) describes as the conflict between “relative position of groups within the productive system” (153).75 I have discussed Bürger’s argument in Section 2.4 of this chapter: the seizure of political power by a bourgeois (Napoleon) is synonymous with the consolidation of the economic strength by the same (41). Thus, the new social players are the owners of the means of production and their labourers. This context enlarges in the nineteenth-century with the merchant class working towards owning the means of production (like becoming factory owners or the bourgeoisie), and the workers becoming the “new” populated segment emerging from the section of artisans and guild workers. These workers have moved into towns and cities to work in factories, since they no longer depend upon their handmade craft for livelihood in the wake of machine made products. The nineteenth-century disparity between the owners and the workers is intense. I have pointed out in my discussion of the loathsome that in Lessing the verbal art forms are representative of the higher class, while the lowly paintings the lower class (towards the end of



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Section 1.6.2.2). However, by Pater’s time, the working class has been forming various unions and social organisations to protest against its ruling section, predominantly the owners who own the factories. In such a context, Pater’s realisation of “Anders-streben”, the conglomeration of arts that lend forces to each other, may be mapped onto the social conflicts of his times. Nineteenth-century England in particular has witnessed several working class movements and protests. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (1988) elaborately describes how the English working class actually develops between 1790 and 1832. He states that in the early period the working class used to be synonymous with the lower class; a class that is a heterogeneous mixture of working people, or what Thompson describes as “tavern life” (63). And one of the common occurrences of the “tavern life”, according to Thompson, is “the phenomena of riot and the ‘mob’, and the popular notions of an Englishman’s birthright” (64). Day traces the “notions of an Englishman’s birthright” to the Norman fictions and myths of the Saxons having a free parliament “based on manhood suffrage” (121). He [Day] discusses such myths that are used for possible recovery of antique rights. Thompson further asserts that with the influence of the concepts of parliamentary system of government and equality before law, the common Englishman from the “tavern life” “felt himself to be an individualist, with few affirmative rights, but protected by the laws against the intrusion of arbitrary power” or that the common Englishman was “not so much democratic as antiabsolutist” (87). It was only after the French Revolution that even the English mob “worked to create an organised public opinion” (English Working Class 78). Thompson records Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man as “a foundation-text of the English working-class movement” (99). It is Paine who voices the main evil of English society: a society that comprises of “two classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes” (qtd. in Thompson, English Working Class, 97). Thus, the English political self-consciousness of the working class as a community is instilled by Paine’s The Rights of Man, as early as 1791. For the first time, the people from the “tavern life” are claiming universal rights for themselves as a class, a phenomenon that awakens panic in the propertied sections of the society (English Working Class 114). On a similar note, Day claims that the French Revolution changes the political nature of a mob protest: “[I]t made the authorities more repressive, thereby helping to create a sense of solidarity between disparate groups of workers” (123). I am however interested in Day’s



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critique of Paine: the capitalist structure of economic division still remains notwithstanding the advocation of virtues like equality and rationality. What Day attempts to argue is that like the owners, the working class also inherits the problem of capitalism, viz., the inability of having a “comprehensive vision of society [. . .]” (123), or in other words, the inevitable consequences of division of labour; an argument that goes against Marx and Engels and their contention that the working class will be able to understand the social relations in its entirety, and hence will carry the hope of a classless society, as propagated in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), written three decades before Pater. Day reveals how the English working class consciousness is a product of bourgeois interests, and hence strengthens class distinction rather than actualise Marx’s dream of a classless society. And Pater does not escape from such paradoxes either. Let us see how. In a feudal system, the lord, by virtue of his inheritance, considers the worker in the field as born to serve him, and thus enjoys the privilege of owning the worker as a whole; the worker and his/her labour are one entity for him. The paradox of the owner-manufacturer is that, notwithstanding the disruption of the concept of feudal inheritance in the wake of free availability of capital for all, as a wage payer, he/she, ironically, owns the labour of another individual. He/she pays for the labour of the worker, such that labour emerges as a separate value in itself, and also separate from the worker; just like the Cartesian separation of mind from body, and Adam Smith’s commodification of labour into a value of exchange, as proposed in Section 1.6.2.2 of the preceding chapter. The worker earns a certain amount of money in exchange of a certain amount of labour. By being a wage payer, the manufacturer will inevitably work to preserve his economic superiority over the worker. By virtue of the capitalist selfinterest, it is economically incomprehensible for the manufacturer to rise above his economic function and perceive the social chain that he is a part of; he will inevitably attempt to sell the labour owned at higher price than the price paid to the labourer in exchange of the labour purchased from him [the labourer]. Marx contends that in order to “justify” class differences, the ruling class propagates that social disparities are a result of “relation between one individual and another [. . .]” (Marx explained in Day 127). Hence, the prioritisation of consciousness of the “self” is very important for the owner class; Hegel belongs to the same tradition. However, for Marx, consciousness can be false. The “false consciousness” of realisation of the “self” is its disregard for the economic relation between two economically disparate selves; the owner and the labourer.



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The disregard for economic disparity is camouflaged in the “invisible hand” syndrome; a syndrome I have discussed in Section 1.6.2.2 of the previous chapter. The syndrome assures us that the self-interest of one individual (owner) by means of an invisible force brings maximum profit to the whole community. But the whole community is in effect the consuming community, which again is the merchant community. It is like Lessing stating that words invoke the invisible without displaying the means of production of that imagination, notwithstanding the visibility of written words. Even for Hegel, the higher forms of art are more subjective and even the artistic form contributes to direct experience of the inwardness of soul rather than embodiment. Poetry is best suited to fulfil this purpose. By bestowing sublime powers to the market force and the verbal signs, both the merchant class and the verbal arts have justified the existence of their hierarchical positions in society.76 In contrast to the idea of division of society as a result of relation between selves, as proposed by the wealthy class, division of labour disallows the labourer to take full credit of the manufacture of a product, since it is produced by the machine. Marx contends in the Manifesto, that the machine obliterates all classifications of labour such that the labourer becomes merely an adjunct to the machine: Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. [. . .]. [. . .] The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.

The labourer, by virtue of being alienated from his labour, is thus able to recognise his separation from the owner and the owner’s community as a whole; first as an individual and then as a community of similarly alienated workers. Thus, Marx accepts the possibility of realisation of self, but in the working class, just like Hegel accepts for the same in the romantic art; both however accept the ultimate form of realisation of self in the incorporeal subject, thus carrying on the tradition of Lessing and the Enlightenment. The interesting point is that even Marx assigns social power to the lower class by making them the most subjective of all the classes. The realisation of the self is more in the sense that the worker feels exploited by the manufacturer through the exchange of his labour. In



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other words, he/she does not profit from his/her own ability to work, since he/she sells it to the owner of a factory, and consequently, the owner sells the product of that labour at a higher price, whose profit does not come to the actual producer of the labour. Similar realisations on the part of other workers in the same economic position inevitably lead to the formation of a united sense of alienation from the wealthy section of the society. However, Marx also contends that a section of the bourgeois class might be able to recognise the social injustice meted out to the working class, and will lead them to justice. In this context, Day criticises the ambiguity in Marx. The wealthy section seems to lead the working class revolution, rather than the working class itself, though that is the class declared the most subjective in its realisation of the evils of capitalism. And if that be the case, as per capitalist logic (that the manufacturer is by his/her economic position an owner always), the revolution of the working class will be economically constructed in a manner to help strengthen the social position of the manufacturer. How can two opposing social estimates, the preservation of the manufacturer’s economic function and the social ascendance of the working class, be realised in the same economic system? It is in this capacity that nineteenth-century art has an important role to play. The expression of self-realisation of working class communities in the form of associations and unions also derives from consequences of division of labour, since awareness is always awareness of rights and equality in relation to another position, but in the same economic system, which by virtue of being the system it is, is unable to guarantee such rights to all positions. In other words, the expression of political equality creates awareness of possible disorientation of the social order that will further compel the manufacturer to ensure his/her social order through political means, thereby reinstating his/her self-interest as a manufacturer. One of the political means of restrain is to support the autonomous sphere of art, or the art for art’s sake; art that claims itself to be free from other nonaesthetic aspects of existence; a phenomenon that started with Lessing and is reverberated in Pater as well. Bürger explains the autonomous sphere of art in a bourgeois estate in the light of Herbert Marcuse’s concept of the “affirmative character of culture”: All those needs that cannot be satisfied in everyday life, because the principle of competition pervades all spheres, can find a home in art, because art is removed from the praxis of life. Values such as humanity, joy, truth, solidarity are extruded from life as it were, and preserved in art. In bourgeois society, art has a contradictory role: it projects the image of a



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better order and to that extent protests against the bad order that prevails. But by realizing the image of a better order in fiction, which is semblance (Schein) only, it relieves the existing society of the pressure of those forces that make for change. They are assigned to confinement in an ideal sphere. Where art accomplishes this, it is ‘affirmative’ in Marcuse’s sense of the term. (50)

In this context, I present instances of the “affirmative” in the following practices. Day argues how some Evangelists (Christian preachers who preach ultimate salvation for the followers of Christ, thus attempting to convert non-followers into Christians) and Utilitarians (they believe in the utility of the end that justifies the means) devise “useful” literature for systematic integration of working class taste, thus further dividing that class into skilled and unskilled “selves”. Day’s records on the phenomenon of chartism, the working class labour movement of political reform in England between 1838 and 1850, is of significance here. The working class demands representation in the parliament so as to help improve their living conditions. A charter is drawn with enlistment of demand of rights for the working class. However, the Reform Bill of 1832 allots voting rights to a few male members from the class of the owners. I want to stress on the desire for inclusion into an establishment by an otherwise alienated community, which is significant for us in the later development of Pater’s interest in a unity of arts, where each art “lends force” to the other. The desire for inclusion is a desire that the owning section of the society has instilled in the working class through education. Day argues that the owner-class helps strengthen the divide within the working class by its propagation of the qualities that define good and bad taste. The qualification of skilled artisans depends on the kind of literature they are exposed to. In Day’s words: The former [skilled artisan] occupied himself with serious learning in the hope of improving his situation while the latter [unskilled artisan] remained ignorant of the world because [he/she was] distracted by the ‘lies’ of fiction. (130–131)77

The “improving of situation” would include the modelling of the artisan in the image of the “virtuous owner”; thus almost instilling the desire to be like the owner. Interestingly, an instance cited by Williams from many others in The Long Revolution is of significance in the context of the argument above. He discusses the popular fiction then and cites the example of Disraeli (he has discussed Gaskell, Kingsley, Bronte and



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Dickens, to name a few) who dramatises a love story between an aristocrat and, interestingly, a chartist girl, Sybil. Williams argues: “[B]ut Sybil, following the pattern of almost all poor heroines in such situations in the periodicals, is discovered in the end to be ‘really’ a dispossessed aristocrat” (84). The “pattern” that Williams discovers strengthens my argument: the “pattern” of desire for the upper class status. On the one hand, the artisan attempts to move towards the owningclass value system; on the other, the ruling class ensures that such literature makes “men more skilful, expert and useful in their particular kinds of work” (Brougham qtd. in Day 131),78 such that, they become further skilled in their labouring activities that also furthers the ruling class domination and the subsequent stabilisation of the social system. For instance, Day quotes John Thornton from Mrs Gaskell’s 1855 novel North and South: the working man, who can control “himself to decency and sobriety of conduct” and attend to his duties sincerely, may “raise himself into the position and power of a master [. . .]” (137).79 He lists a few such upper class virtues like restraint, frugality, self-mastery, or any form of self-discipline, such that an artisan is judged good or bad against such qualities. Williams in The Long Revolution also adds to the argument above. He argues that particularly around 1840s and 1850s in England, with the rise of railways, there develops “new reading needs” and “new points of distribution [. . .]” (73), since a wide variety of people started moving from their home towns to work places and a mingling of classes happened: Again, a large part of the impetus to cheap periodical publishing was the desire to control the development of working-class opinion, and in this the observable shift from popular educational journals to family magazines [. . .] is significant. Respectable schemes of moral and domestic improvement became deeply entangled with the teaching and implication of particular social values, in the interests of the existing class society. (The Long Revolution 73)

The realisation of such virtues is predominantly the ruling class technique that attempts to eternalise its social position by utilising the working class “goodness” to further the production of labour and subsequent suppression of revolt.80 In this capacity, Williams’s description of the 1840s and 1850s English “dominant social character”, which he describes as the “abstract of a dominant group” (78) is the relative social position of the class mentioned in relation to a weakening but still existing aristocrat, and a working class whose ideals enter “into a fruitful and decisive combination with middle-class ideals at their best” (80).



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It is interesting to note at this point how Williams in The Long Revolution reveals interesting inconsistencies involving propagated virtues that reconcile fictions to the actualities of the capitalist system of the times. Infidelity, for instance, is unthinkable of. So a virtuous formula has to be thought of as an answer to unhappy marriage. The unsuitable partner is represented as unworthy, alcoholic or even insane, so as to develop public sympathy for the suffering and worthy partner and his/her love for a worthy lover. But the sanctity of marriage still cannot be broken, whatever might the nature of sympathy be. In Williams’s words: “[A]fter the required amount of resigned suffering, there is a convenient, often spectacular death, in which the unloving partner shows great qualities of care, duty, and piety; and then, of course, the real love can be consummated” (The Long Revolution 82–83). So marriage is broken; but as provided by providence and after much restitution. Again, the ethics taught to the poor that the hardworking become successful goes against the prevailing capitalist norm that “money is central to success [. . .]” (The Long Revolution 83). For instance, legacies suddenly appear at the crucial moment from anywhere and fortunes are restored. Usually the notion of “empire” is used, where going to the new lands and earning fortunes is considered worthy and is a good instance of the virtuous activity of “selfhelp”. In Williams’s words: At a simple level, going out to the new lands could be seen as self-help and enterprise of the purest kinds. Also, in the new lands, there was a great need for labourers, and emigration as a solution to working-class problems was being widely urged, often by the most humane critics of the existing system. In 1840, 90,000 people a year were emigrating, and in 1850 three times as many. (The Long Revolution 83)

Thus, the colonial purpose is served well along with the propagation of “self-help” as a virtue; fiction, through propagation of virtues, also maintains its equivalence with the capitalist system of production. In fact, by Pater’s times, “[. . .] Imperialism had become a conscious policy” (The Long Revolution 83).81 Notwithstanding such discrepancies, the point to be noted is that value is given to the individual in an entire organisation, state, or imperial: the individual (the protagonist) is the practitioner of virtues in the fictional world as well as the propagator of the economic system of the times. I confess that the depiction of the history of the emergence of the “individual” in my project is a history of class division. But at the same time in exposing this, does not mean I expose aesthetics solely and only as the work of ruling class interests, as if workers themselves do not have an



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interest in the “aesthetic life”, or in possessing the great works of bourgeois culture in their own name. On the question of worker’s investment in the “aesthetic life”, I may want to look at Jacques Rancière’s The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989). But my reading of The Nights of Labor and the internalisation of his critical methods in Patrick Joyce’s Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (1994) further strengthen the overinvestment in my use of Day, Thompson and Williams in my recontextualisation of the nineteenth-century class conflicts. In fact, Rancière argues: My little story of odd proletarian nights would like to question precisely this jealous concern to preserve popular, plebeian, or proletarian purity [. . .]. What new forms of misreading will affect this contradiction when the discourse of laborers in love with the night of intellectuals encounters the discourse of intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the laboring people? (Nights of Labour x– xi)

In other words, workers do dream and engage in their own intellectual discourse; an intellectual discourse, which seems to have been declared a bourgeois property in this project so far. Yet Rancière does mention: [Workers seek] to appropriate for themselves the night of those who can stay awake, the language of those who do not have to beg, and the image of those who do not need to be flattered. (Nights of Labour xxxiv)

It is interesting to note that the worker intellectual that Rancière is interpreting is usually the mouthpiece of all the workers, as in Joyce’s words, “[t]he worker intellectual could feel in a heightened sense only what all workers felt [. . .]” (27). All workers feel the economic instability, and dream the ideal worlds “of those who can stay awake, who do not need to beg, and who do not need to flatter or be flattered” (Joyce 28). Or, Rancière argues “[t]he workers’ dream [is] a bourgeois civilization without exploiters, a chivalry without lords, a mastery without masters and servants. In short, the emancipation of the workers” (47). Thus, the emancipation that workers dream, even as interpreted by Marx as the dream of a classless society, is nothing but a reinforcement of an ideal bourgeois world. In this context, I take up Joyce’s interpretation of the consciousness of two representative British characters of the nineteenth-century: Edwin Waugh from the working class, and John Bright from the middle class. He



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argues in the light of Rancière’s derivation of the breakthrough notion of a proletariat as essentially a myth: Notions of the ‘artisan’ and ‘artisan work’, for instance, do not reflect real social entities (which ‘artisan’ is so often taken to be), but are myths designed to handle economic or political situations, such as the nature of work in the mid-nineteenth century, or the later elaboration of the myth of a genuine artisanal socialism built as a defence by labour spokesmen against new currents of political socialism. (Rancière from “the Myth of the Artisan” explained in Joyce, 25)

Let me cite a few examples from a large set of interpretations about Waugh’s life as derived by Joyce from his [Waugh’s] writings. For instance, Joyce records Waugh’s early reading habits: the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Wesley’s Hymns, Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and many others. Day is not wrong when he argues that the Evangelists’s religious preaching attempts to contain the members of the working class within the boundaries of the “virtuous”. Waugh writes: “I never knew better or happier people than the poor, hard-working folk among whom I lived” (qtd. in Joyce 34). Joyce writes: These worlds were not given to him simply through his direct apprehension of them. They were mediated through the imagination of a young man increasingly exposed to the world of high learning. (34)

After all, Waugh has been an errand boy to a local Wesleyan preacher. While discussing Joyce, I would like the reader to keep in mind Williams’s analysis of the impact of popular fiction on the masses, and the influence of popular myths on the “tavern life” by Thompson. Joyce continues with the instance of a schoolmaster’s son having written the Lancashire Traditions that depicts the legends of the locals. Joyce writes: These stories of old days, old knights, and old families and their halls [. . .], seem to have a powerful influence on the young Waugh, confirming him in his country and urban patriotism, but above all indicating to him that the common people out of which he came had their place in tradition. (34)

Yet it is interesting to note that the “intellectual” Waugh condemns his own wife on account of her “illiteracy”, notwithstanding her hardworking and poor status. The ambiguities in his feelings for a labouring class are further manifested in the following section from Joyce:



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Chapter Two In accompanying his friend [. . .], who went to deliver a lecture on ‘The Education of Lancashire’ to the Miles Platting Mechanics’ Institute in July 1849, Waugh contrasted the ‘dull-looking and uneducated factory workers’ with ‘a knot of men like handloom weavers’ who congregated after the lecture to sing Wesleyan hymns. [. . .]. It was into this cultural legacy that he was at once drawn [. . .] and his own childhood [was] flooding back to him. By 1849 handloom weaving was long in catastrophic decline. The men Waugh identifies [. . .] [seem] to have held on to some public signs of their calling none the less. He represents a living culture in decline therefore: his uncle Bob was a handloom weaver, and he reproduces his dialect speech with warmth and humour in the diary, but it is suggestive that this uncle is eager to take up with his nephew the possibility of a son getting a place in a counting house where he could be drilled in writing and business habits. [. . .]. (58)

Joyce insists upon the mythical status of a handloom group that Waugh imagines and presents, as it should appear: Whether the ‘knot’ of men Waugh saw [. . .] were weavers is unknown, but it is of some interest that if they were not, the spectator Waugh had a clear shape in his mind of how this occupation should appear. (58)

In fact, Waugh draws from his family background to describe the present scene. He and his mother are from the “working folks” who made a living by weaving flannel; and his family possessed a few pair of looms as well as hired a few workmen. Joyce writes: “His mother’s home he [Waugh] judged to be the best furnished and cleanest in the neighbourhood” (58). Joyce draws the following conclusion, which is very significant for us: [. . .] Edwin Waugh gloried in the independence which he believed marked his family back through the generations, and which if mocked by the poverty of his childhood was none the less the aspiration of his kind, particularly of his mother. In representing a culture already in decline by drawing on his own knowledge, Waugh was already mythologising work, already fishing in the past for its meaning. This process was in turn to underpin the mythologising of work that went on in his literature, and in the literature of all the other dialect writers who, often even more than Waugh, were responsible for the invented tradition of the handloom weavers. (58)

In this capacity, Waugh proclaims all “country labour” as “true labour” (Joyce 59). Thus, the concept of “true labour” paradoxically comes from knowledge of economic independence of sorts.



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Moreover, Waugh’s encounter with a few of the wealthy gentlemen assures us of his appreciation of the gentry, who offer him drink and cigar though they are teetotallers. Joyce writes: “He admires their courtesy, their delicate sense of his individuality, [. . .] in contrast to the ‘ungraceful and repulsive’ teetotal ‘crew’ [. . .]” (62). Thus, respectable recognition of individuality is associated with the gentry, notwithstanding the advertisement of the hardworking character of the labouring poor. In effect, in one of his [Waugh’s] prose works he represents the “classless idyll [. . .]” (71). He presents an economy where independence and noble labour are evoked simultaneously in the means of production itself: people make their own furniture. I want to make the following point from both Joyce and Rancière: though workers themselves do possess the great works of bourgeois culture in their own name, they are socially and culturally equally conditioned by bourgeois desires: they desire for independence from subservience but uphold the value of a mythic concept of labour: the virtuous and godly labour.82 From the “worker intellectual”, Joyce now moves towards the bourgeois intellectual fighting for the rights of the working class. Though John’s family background is farming, his father like a successful “industrial entrepreneur” makes his way from poverty to ownership of mills. Thus, while Waugh remembers his ancestral individuality, John Bright will remember the common people, to whom he once belonged. In a way, Joyce tries to show the common platform from which one may sketch histories of the working class and the bourgeoisie. Bright is a great sympathiser of the cause of the working class, and a great orator at that. Joyce writes how Bright’s oratory not only moves the audience, even Bright himself is moving. The orator becomes the living incarnation of what it is he has to say (Joyce 99). Bright becomes morality himself: One experienced with, alongside, the speaker: for instance, Bright’s oration on his great and lamented friend Cobden, in Bradford in 1877, found the audience ‘struggling under the influence of deep and strong emotion’, as the speaker told the ‘story’ of his grief. To hear Bright was to rediscover the novelty of long familiar emotions. It was also something unique in itself. In the sense, it was not the politics or the morality that mattered, but Bright himself. He was the experience: Trevelyan described his particular oratory as follows, ‘He was singular among orators for his want of gesture: there he stood foursquare, and sometimes raised his arm. [. . . ]. Thus he uttered his plain man’s prophecy to his fellow citizens [. . .].’ (98–99) (punctuations mine)

It is important to recollect Day and his criticism of Marx. The wealthy section seems to lead the working class revolution, rather than the working



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class itself, though that is the class declared the most subjective in its realisation of the evils of capitalism. In a stark contrast, it is Bright who compares his oratory to the work of a clerk. Joyce quotes from Bright: “I consider that when I stand upon a platform as I do now, I am engaged in as solemn a labour as Mr Dale [. . .] (the renowned Birmingham Nonconformist cleric)” (102). Moreover, he equates himself with his working class brethrens in the scope of finding that Inner Light, which is conscience, just like Pater equating painting and poetry in the scope of finding the Ideal Art, which is music. In this capacity, Day attempts to show how distinction between social classes has been promoted as “shortcomings” in individuals and not in systems (141)83 or what D. Musselwhite describes as the process of internalisation of class conflicts as “conflict between different parts of the self” (142) rather than conflicts of class.84 We see the example of Waugh. On the one hand, Day proposes that the ruling class internalises a certain section of the working class. On the other, the very same virtues help develop trade unions, cooperative societies, and such communities that propagate mutual improvement of social positions (143). Even in such societies, the skilled labourers as “respectable” excludes the unskilled or the “rough” from membership: he gives the examples of labours of building, printing and engineering (143). Thus, in Day’s words: “What was at issue was not the workers’ consciousness of themselves as a class but their difference as individuals” (144). In this context, I may compare Lessing and Pater in their propagation of limits and virtues. I have discussed the eighteenth-century witness of imposition of “limits” (sumptuary laws) by the higher class on the lower sections of their society. Pater calls the limits of arts as “virtues”. Interestingly, Pater gives emphasis to different kinds of virtues in different art forms, such that, each art form lends force to the other so that they may pass into the condition of the ideal art form. Similarly, in the case of bourgeois education, the ideal form is propagated in the form of virtues, morals, tastes, such that there are “respectable” artisans and “rough” or “unsophisticated” artisans. In a similar manner, the need for arts to aspire for an ideal condition becomes important too. While Hegel claims that poetry is the highest form of art, by virtue of using signs that transparently signify imagination, Pater attempts to dissociate himself from the Lessing and Enlightenment hierarchy in the light of his contemporary social movements. But by making music the highest form of art and also the ideal, he attempts to create an exclusive sphere for art that avoids the verbal and the visual conflict, but in the same system of production of such arts.



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While Hegel continues Lessing’s hierarchy by claiming the incorporeal experience in the form of poetry, Pater attempts to create a new ideal condition for art, so that both the verbal and the visual may have a chance to attain that condition. In a way, he accepts that both the verbal and the visual have conditions of each other: the verbal may be pictorial, the visual may be verbal; a position that Lessing does not propagate. But there are contradictions here on a similar “pattern” as in the relation between skilled artisans and the bourgeoisie. Both the artisans and the bourgeoisie practice similar virtues, but one educates the other, and the other gets educated. Similarly, the visual with “gradations of hues of colours upwards” develops poetical abilities, just like the “rough” artisan who has to acquire skills prescribed by the upper class and then aspire to become respectable. Even in Hegel, the climb is “upwards”; from physical to the complete subjective. But Pater chooses a higher state of the perfect art, which both the verbal and the visual have to achieve, viz., the condition of music. While Marx claims that a classless society is possible with the working class revolution, I contextualise Pater in the light of bourgeois fears of the reprisal of French Revolution: he (Pater) states that neither the verbal nor the visual is ideal; he chooses music. Habib demonstrates the power of music through Hegel: music is “the isolated unity of a single point, a movement or tremor of the material body in relation to itself” (406). Thus, isolation as a criterion of the ideal has an underlying notion of separation from every other aspect, such that “that” single point or experience is eternalised in space. In other words, any change is negated in such a space: all conflicts are frozen rather than synthesised. Pater intelligently maintains the bourgeois hierarchy by adopting artistic means that idealise their economic status, thus ensuring a social stability that maintains their social position. Art turns into the superlative museum of all that is considered true, good and beautiful, while remaining unfulfilled in economic exchanges. In other words, those needs which cannot be satisfied in life because of the “principle of competition” can be so in the sphere of art: “Values such as humanity, joy, truth, solidarity are extruded from life as it were, and preserved in art” (Marcuse in Bürger 50). The art of the late nineteenth-century has already maximised the bourgeois desire of eternalising its ideals, viz., the “art’s sake” ideal as proposed by Lessing way back in the eighteenth-century, and further strengthened by Pater in his understanding of art “as it is”. In the world of economic competition, where values keep changing, the insecurity of art is further enhanced by the effective introduction of photography in 1839, which proclaims a faster and more realistic imitation of the world.85 Williams in Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1963) has described the



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problem of the ideal art as a “self-pleading ideology” (63). For Williams, the paradox of the ideal art lies in this very fact that its desire to be art as abstracted from the functional is actually its self-preservation of its own valorisation as compared to its meritorious market competitors. Thus, abstracting art from social praxis and claiming that “art is for art’s sake” as a revolt against hierarchisation of human creative endeavours, further institutionalises aesthetics as a separate discipline altogether that isolates the bourgeois economic relations between itself and the working class into an ideal space. Thus, virtues “are assigned to confinement in an ideal sphere” (Bürger 50). I argue that Pater derives a new role for aesthetic labour that goes beyond Lessing’s formulations. In nineteenth-century, the trend of scientific labour continues with positivist philosophy of the 1830s and 1840s of Auguste Comte, as well as Wilhelm Wundt’s “psychology of consciousness” of mid- and late nineteenth-century: Comte emphasises the reduction of human experiences to scientific processes, like Pater’s chemist role for the critic; and Wundt projects empirical observation of human behavior in experimental set-ups, which Pater also propagates in his definition of the aesthetic critic as susceptible to impressions. The emphasis on objective investigation is already discussed by Matthew Arnold in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864),86 where he argues for the disinterested apolitical critic who observes a work of art “as it is”. Wendell V. Harris in “Arnold, Pater, Wilde” (1971) unravels the underlying contradictions of the objective investigation of art “as it is”. He shows how Arnold proposes “patient” criticism that “must redress the balance when any element of thought receives undue emphasis” (look at the criticism against undue emphasis) and there should be a “disinterested” attempt to spread the “best” (736). This reminds me of the English artisan, who is taught patience and self-mastery in order to achieve favourable recognition from the ruling class. The “best” for Arnold have been Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and other canonical figures of dominant literature, thus socially constructing a culture of aesthetics, and not aesthetics “as it is”. In fact, in Arnold’s “Epilogue—To Lessing’s Laocoon [sic]” (see Ex. 2-2 in the Appendices), he immortalises Lessing’s hierarchy of the arts in favour of poetry: No painter yet hath such a way, Nor no musician made, as they, And gather’d on immortal knolls Such lovely flowers for cheering souls. Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach



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To these, to these, their thankful race Gives, then, the first, the fairest place; And brightest is their glory's sheen, For greatest hath their labour been.

I read into the aesthetic rules of Lessing the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800; Acts that have prevented growth of working class reading groups and trade unions, or the Six Acts of 1819, or the Seditious Publications Act till 1836; Acts that also restrict publication and circulation, and working class expressions in low cost periodicals.87 The role of Arnold in the history of socialism is more like the early nineteenth-century British Parliament appeasing and controlling the working class chartist movements in the form of the 1832 Reform Bill, which finally allows parliamentary representation to some middle class members only. With and beyond Pater, the late nineteenth-century witnesses many more attempts at forming social communities like the Social Democratic Federation, Fabian Society, Socialist League, to name a few that Day lists, which attempt reformations. However, there is no attempt to obliterate or change the economic system in which these communities are formed. They demand recognition in the same system. Day claims that such social movements differ from the earlier chartist movement in their representations by predominant ruling class founders. Most of the founders of these socialist leagues are from the bourgeois class themselves: Henry Mayers Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation is the son of a wealthy businessman, and educated in the Trinity College;88 Sidney Webb, a law graduate from a professional family and Beatrice Webb from a political family are at the core of the Fabian Society,89 and William Morris, the founder of the Socialist League, is from a broker family.90 Not just that, even the legal description of the working class has a strong emphasis on manual labour, even in late 1875. Williams in Keywords records the legal definition of the “workman” in the Act of 1875: a person who is a “labourer, servant in husbandry, journeyman, artificer, handicraftsman, miner, or otherwise engaged in manual labour” and has “entered into or works under a contract with an employer” (56). Even the names of such groups, as listed above, strongly emphasise “labour”: “It was most specifically defined in Britain in the Labour Representative League (1869), the Labour Electoral Committee (1887), the Independent Labour Party (1893) [. . .]” (Williams, Keywords, 148). The difference, say from Lessing’s categorisation, is that notwithstanding the emphasis on manual labour, there is an attempt to provide protection to these groups. Many of these communities eventually break up into smaller



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leagues: for instance, Morris creates the Socialist League after breaking up from the Social Democratic Federation. In fact, Williams records in Keywords that around the 1860s “the middle class began to be divided into lower and upper sections, and later the working class was to be divided into skilled, semi-skilled and labouring” (56–57). A mass movement is never whole-heartedly developed in England, though the cause is “morally” propagated: what the “moral” constitutes is predominantly prescribed in middle class institutions.91 All such endeavours are small scale economic endeavours; they are not able to achieve mass scale or “sublime” objectives, like the capitalist economy of those times. I contextualise Arnold when I say that his history of the canonical texts that forms the bourgeois English culture transforms into Pater’s “Andersstreben” of intellectual activities of that century. I am able to say this when I take into account Pater’s valorisation of the “best thoughts” produced by an age (here, Pater refers to the Renaissance): The unity of this spirit gives unity to all the various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this ultimate alliance with mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of its grave dignity and influence. (Pater xiii– xiv)

For Pater, then, aesthetic labour is transcendence of individual human experience into the ideal or utopian experience. Harris suggests that with Oscar Wilde, Arnold and Pater reach their logical ends in “The Critic as Artist”. Wilde states that criticism itself becomes a creative activity: “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his [her] own, that need not necessarily bear any resemblance to the thing it criticizes” (Wilde qtd. in Harris, “Arnold, Pater, Wilde,” 742). Thus, the artistic labour in Lessing’s times transforms from its rational function of signification of the sublime as cognitive experience into a prophetic or magical function of experiencing the ideal in Pater, which finally is all about creation of a utopia in the spectator’s consciousness of the aesthetic object. And finally with Wilde, aesthetic criticism itself becomes a creative and artistic activity; it is the creation of an aesthetic experience.

2.6 Conclusion: Lessing and Pater in Greenberg In the previous chapter, I discussed Lessing’s use of the incidental prejudice of physical labour as a “rational calculation” to realise the profit of the verbal narrative, which apparently uses mental labour. It is possible to contextualise Pater in the historical emergence of socialism. Social



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equality may be used as a “rational calculation” to realise the profit of an ideal art that transcends and synthesises both the intellect and the sensory, like the political statements of equality. Such equalisation is propagated in a system of production, which by virtue of being the competitive system it is; (it) cannot grant equality. My attempt has been to show that behind such a “rational calculation” also lies a prejudicial motive to protect the social status of the upper class from an onslaught (revolution) of the working class agencies, particularly in England after the aftermath of French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. In the process, I may interpret the “Anders-streben” as the revival of the new ut pictura poesis, where arts may exist in harmony with each if not be similar. Such confraternity of arts erases the issues that cause the need to form such a harmony. In this regard, W. E. B. Du Bois’s exhibition of an African as well as an American identity from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) strengthens my entire stance: The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge this double self into a better and truer self. (Bois qtd in Hall 38)

I have attempted to show a similar desire in Pater’s and late nineteenthcentury aesthetics, which like Bois also announce their knowledge of freedom of the marginalised self, but also like Pater, such “liberating” knowledge is formed “only” in its capacity to search for a better self. The underlying admission is that the marginalised self is not “the” better self; it has to “be” the better self; and what qualifies the self to be “best” or even “better” is subject to that section of society that is privileged to idealise what it is to be the “best”.





CHAPTER THREE UT PICTURA POESIS VS. PURE ART: GREENBERG’S MODERNIST AESTHETIC

3.1 Introduction: Greenberg and “Towards a Newer Laocoon [sic]” The opposition between poetry and painting established by Lessing and the “anders-streben” of the arts by Pater need to be placed within the historical context of Greenberg’s aesthetic criticism of early twentiethcentury avant-garde art: only such a context can justify the links which will be established within Lessing, Pater and Greenberg. It is therefore necessary to focus on Greenberg’s aesthetic position in order to establish connections between philosophical models and socio-economic practices. The following questions need to be addressed: 1. 2.

How does Greenberg understand Lessing’s systematisation of the distinction between the verbal and the visual arts? What place does Greenberg’s aesthetic position occupy within the larger intellectual and material tendencies of early twentiethcentury?

3.2 Greenberg’s Criticism of Lessing and Pater Unlike his predecessors (here I mean Lessing and Pater), Greenberg attempts to historicise the development of the avant-garde art from Lessing onwards up to the twentieth-century. In this capacity, he becomes a cultural historian, in the light of Williams’s sense of “cultural history” in The Long Revolution: Cultural history must be more than the sum of the particular histories, for it is with the relations between them, the particular forms of the whole organization, that it is especially concerned. I would then define the theory of culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of



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life. The analysis of culture is the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships. Analysis of particular works or institutions is, in this context, analysis of their essential kind of organization, the relationships which works or institutions embody as parts of the organization as a whole [sic]. A key-word, in such analysis, is pattern: it is with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind that any useful cultural analysis begins, and it is with the relationships between these patterns, which sometimes reveal unexpected identities and correspondences in hitherto separately considered activities, sometimes again reveal discontinuities of an unexpected kind, that general cultural analysis is concerned. (63)

Greenberg attempts to understand Lessing and the nineteenth-century aesthetic practices by understanding their historical emergence as predominantly a bourgeois enterprise; a position that I have been investigating in all the chapters. In this capacity, he unearths a “pattern”, in Williams’s sense of the word, which locates the visual in a certain state of subservience to the verbal art forms. While Lessing places his aesthetic classification above the world of ideology, stating that physical laws of the media govern his classification; Pater locates his aesthetic in the transcendental world of utopia, again a world that is situated beyond history. Greenberg, however, is not only aware of the economic system of his times; unlike his predecessors, he defines the significance of the capitalist system in his aesthetic contemplation of Lessing and Pater. In other words, he attempts to show how Lessing and Pater are victims of socio-economic “patterns” of their times. His denial of disconnection with history “almost” frees him from Lessing’s aesthetic of “transcendence” of social into physical laws, and Pater’s aesthetic of “transcendence” of social into ideal art. I say “almost” because there is a contradiction in his historicisation, which eventually follows the tradition set by Lessing and Pater; it is a tradition that I have tried to define in the earlier chapters so far; it is a “pattern” that defends traditional priorities. In other words, while appearing to analyse the cultural context of the emergence of a certain kind of aesthetics in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcenturies, Greenberg’s own conclusion about “pure non-objective abstract art” of the twentieth-century as “pure” also locates his aesthetic position as free of cultural and hence historical connotations. In this capacity, he contradicts his own position of a cultural historian. By placing his own “pure” form of avant-garde art beyond cultural “patterns”, he unwittingly reverts back to the very same “patterns” he unearths in his critique of Lessing and nineteenth-century art that he wishes to surpass. But I continue to locate him in the “cultural history” of his times, in Williams’s sense of the phrase, to unearth those “patterns” that emerge with



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Greenberg in his denial of the same. The following sections will analyse his contradictions in detail. Greenberg contextualises Lessing and Pater in their local histories when deriving his conclusions about the definition of modern avant-garde art. But in his definition of modern abstract art as “pure” art, or art that has no recognizable referent; he “seems” to let art transcend beyond history, while claiming that art movements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries have been historical products. I conclude that his definition of true avantgardism (he considers some forms of artistic practices of his times avantgarde and some not) is very much subservient to historical practices, notwithstanding his emphasis on “purity” of the arts.92 Greenberg discourages the critic from metaphysical definitions of “pure” art: “Here the purist does not have to support his position with metaphysical pretensions” (296). He also insists that “pure” art is not subservient to dominant cultural practices; a subservience that Lessing and Pater have not escaped. On the one hand, he strives hard against the late nineteenthcentury idealism by attempting to understand artistic practices as historical products which emerge due to social tensions. On the other, he proposes possibilities of “pure” conditions of art. The following sections will illustrate how Greenberg historicises both Lessing and Pater in “Towards a Newer Laocoon [sic],” so that we understand his process of historicisation. That will better equip us to appreciate his position of “pure” art. That would also set the stage to critique his own derivations. Greenberg denies Pater’s proposition of the ideal condition of nonconflicting arts in his declaration that conflict between the arts is historically omnipresent, with one form of art always claiming the dominant position. Like Marx, he is also self-conscious of social conflicts in his declaration of the existence of a dominant class of art; he records how literature has been dominant in the seventeenth-century. My argument about Lessing in the second chapter is vociferously reinforced by Greenberg when he historicises the dominant presence of literature in the mercantile bourgeoisie’s “acquisitive energy” towards this art (297). His next assertion underscores my understanding of Pater. The dominant art becomes the “prototype” of all other arts; the other arts have to shed their inherent characters to imitate the efforts of the foremost art (297). For Pater, the foremost art is music. Moreover, dominant art forms are proclaimed as ideal forms when they “absorb the functions” of the other arts (297). Lessing does not wish to see the visual arts imitate the verbal: “It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction [. . .]” (Laocoön 91). But Pater defends the possibility of transcendence of art into an “ideal” form. By making music



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“ideal”, Pater provides an equal chance to both literature and painting to aspire for the ideal condition. In the process, neither the verbal nor the visual is accepted in its “purely” verbal or visual state; hence there is a subservience of one form of art to the higher art. Greenberg argues that the subservient art is botched in such ways that it acquires a degree of technical facility to pretend that it may transcend its medium: “In other words, the artist must have gained such power over his material as to annihilate it seemingly in favour of illusion” (297). The illusion, here, would be that the subservient art has achieved the condition of the dominant art form. By interpreting the process of transcendence as “illusion”, Greenberg openly accepts the undeniable and unchangeable existence of the medium of an artwork. Greenberg, however, shares some similarities with Pater when it comes to music. In a footnote, and the only place he actually mentions Pater, he contends: “The ideas about music which Pater expresses in The School of Giorgione reflect [. . .] [the] transition from the musical to the abstract better than any single work of art” (305). He argues that music in seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries has not been open to illusions of transcendence over medium by virtue of its inherent non-imitative functions, while painting and sculpture have been imitative arts “par excellence [. . .]” (297). Such an argument makes sense when we look at Lessing and Pater again. Lessing is aware of and also fears the imitative potential of the visual forms of arts, and in an effort to protect the supremacy of the verbal arts, he condemns the visual medium itself. The denial of ut pictura poesis is hitherto unavoidable. Pater is aware of the supremacy of music as the non-imitative art form. Moreover, his generation has the backing of their ancestral legacy of the verbal arts as physically less imitative when contrasted with painting and sculpture. Thus, by making music the ideal art, the task of imitation as an act of subservience is historically the heaviest for the visual. Greenberg writes: “Not only could painting imitate sculpture and sculpture, painting, but both could attempt to reproduce the effects of literature” (297). He laments over the dismal state of the visual arts where paintings have become “ghosts and ‘stooges’ of literature” (298). What he criticises as an act of subservience to a dominant form, Lessing has restricted that as a regulation that does not encourage crossing of artistic boundaries, and Pater eulogises that as transcendental virtues of artistic media. Let us see how Greenberg seriously critiques Lessing’s preference for the verbal arts in his [Greenberg’s] defence of the visual.



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3.2.1 Greenberg’s Three-Pronged Attack Greenberg’s critique of the arts discusses the fate of the verbal arts, the visual arts and the beginnings of the avant-garde art. In subsequent sections, I take up examples of Ingres’s and Delacroix’s paintings on Paganini; Constable and his painting The Haywain; and Courbet and Burial at Ornans; in order to simultaneously clarify Greenberg’s points and substantiate such clarifications with my own arguments. 3.2.1.1 The Visual as Subservient to Literature Greenberg argues that the romantic revival of the visual arts is a more imitative and subservient feature of those arts: artistic representation has to be deferential to the “immediacy of the feeling” of the artist and the representation of that situation or thing that arouses such feelings: To preserve the immediacy of the feeling it was even more necessary than before, when art was imitation rather than communication, to suppress the role of the medium. The medium was a regrettable if necessary physical obstacle between the artist and his audience, which in some ideal state would disappear entirely to leave the experience of the spectator or reader identical with that of the artist. (299)

He argues that poetry is considered the best form of art because its medium is not a “physical obstacle between the artist and his audience”, and hence is actually not a medium. In this context, he cites the example of Shelley who, in his Defense of Poetry, proclaims that poetry is the most imaginative form of art with least display of its physical medium (299). (See Section 2.4.4 of Chapter Two for Hegel’s understanding of poetry as the most subjective form of art). Painting suffers the most in the hands of the romantics because in its subservience to poetry, it “seemingly” escapes the problems of its own medium to take “refuge in the effects of another”, which Greenberg denounces as an act of “artistic dishonesty [. . .]” (299). Greenberg accepts that the romantic revolution in subject matter has affected painting styles as in the works of Ingres and Delacroix, to name a few. They develop newer forms to match their newer subjects: Greenberg claims that such developments are nothing less and nothing more than appropriating their styles to literary content. For instance, Ingres’s portrait of the violin maestro, Paganini, in 1819 (see Fig. 3-1 in the Appendices), requires the stylistics of clearly drawn figures after the neo-classical fashion, such that the central object receives its unambiguous bit of space on the canvas.93 Horst De La Croix, et al in Renaissance and Modern Art



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(1991) illustrate how Ingres’s portrait is “literal” in his depiction of Paganini’s social “appearance and public deportment” or “official likeness [. . .]” (876). However, in Delacroix’s Paganini (1832), the edges of the body seem to merge with the background of the canvas, so that the canvas begins to render uncertainties the full and exclusive ownership of pictorial space by the objects and figures in the painting (see Fig. 3-2 in the Appendices). According to Croix, et al, Delacroix depicts the maestro’s performance rather than his public office: as if his image quivers along with the quivering of the strings of the violin (877). The artistic mobilities in Delacroix are thus subservient to the subject matter of that time: his brush strokes run parallel with the social mobilities that are diluting the earlier defined social spaces. The subtext for Delacroix is the romantic revelation of inner imagination and emotion as against the neo-classical rigidity of form of the exteriors. Greenberg considers the painting styles inaugurated by Ingres and Delacroix as more academic than the kind of “academicism” that has existed before them (300). While painting gets a new lease of life in academies in the styles of Géricault, Morland, Greuze, Vigée-Lebrun, Corot, Theodore Rousseau, Daumier, Gérome, Leighton, Watts, Moreau, Böcklin, as well as the Pre-Raphaelites; it is however subservient to literary content. By Pater’s times, most of the younger romantics, particularly the poets, have died in exile. Keats dies in Rome in 1821;94 Shelley is in exile in Italy when he dies in 1822;95 Byron is involved in the Greek war of independence against the Turks, finally dying in 1824.96 The later romantics, like the French Symbolists, also prefer to travel to exotic locales in their attempt to break away from the capitalist mode of lifestyle or the “rationalist and scientifically-minded city culture [. . .]” (Greenberg 300). Baudelaire has taken part in the Revolutions of 1848;97 Rimbaud is off to the African continent notwithstanding his illness;98 to name a few. Greenberg would perhaps describe such efforts as attempts to develop “art’s sanctuary from capitalism [. . .]” (301), a predominant feature of Pater’s aesthetics, as discussed in the previous chapter. Greenberg adds: Yet it is true of Western painting that in so far as it has been the creations of rationalist and scientifically-minded city culture, it has always had a bias towards a realism that tries to achieve illusion by overpowering the medium, and is more interested in exploiting the practical meanings of objects than in savouring their appearances. (300)

All these art movements of mid- and late nineteenth-centuries have been exposing the realities of social life, but in fictional forms, through artistic innovative techniques. However, their techniques also depend on what



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Greenberg calls “the anecdote or the message” (301), which is also “literature” or “subject matter”. All these art forms do not live up to their expectations of artistic “purity”. It is interesting to note that he (Greenberg) discovers the seeds of the avant-garde in nineteenth-century visual arts, notwithstanding their subservience to literalness. 3.2.1.2 Discrepancies in Nineteenth-Century Avant-Garde Aesthetic Greenberg notices the seeds of modern avant-gardism in the nineteenthcentury French painter Gustave Courbet. Courbet, according to him, attempts to paint “purely” what the eye sees, almost like a machine. However, he notices a “subject matter” in Courbet but does not accuse him of having one: “As avant-gardists so often do, he [Courbet] tried to demolish official bourgeois art by turning it inside out” (302). The turning of bourgeois culture inside out is also a “subject matter”. Moreover, he (Greenberg) also concludes that the flatness of Courbet’s canvas and detailed attention to every inch of the canvas is a disregard to the “centers of interest” (302). He however avoids stating that the flatness is also subservient to the larger subtext of resistance to traditional artistic methods. Along with Courbet, the only other nineteenth-century painter that he seems to accept as the initiator of an avant-garde movement is the impressionist painter, Manet, who “was attacking subject matter on its own terrain by including it in his pictures and exterminating it then and there” (302). Greenberg must be applauded for stating the “problems of painting as first and foremost problems of the medium” as in Courbet and Manet (302). Thus, one of the tenets of avant-garde art is its formal acceptance of its medium. He accepts that nineteenth-century avant-gardism could not escape literary subtext. But what Courbet and Manet have achieved in understanding about the scope of the visual media perhaps makes way for Greenberg to understand about twentieth-century avant-garde art. He himself points out that the formal avant-gardes of the twentieth-century also do not accept nineteenth-century technical naturalism and realism as avant-garde for the very reason that naturalism also “succumbed to ‘ideas’” (302). But what makes him understand Courbet and Manet as less obedient in succumbing to ideas than their counterparts? Let me contrast the romantic painter Constable with Courbet, to better understand Greenberg. Though Constable depicts factual elements of the English landscape, like a farmer, a cart, the stream, the cottage and other such features in his 1821 painting “The Haywain”, but the depiction of “oneness” of



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humankind with nature is also the “subject matter” of romantic poets (see Fig. 3-3 in the Appendices). In Constable’s words, I hope to show that our profession as painters is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by comparison with realities. (qtd. in Croix 890)

The synthesis of humanity and nature is the ideal developed by the romantics as a denial of the “rationalist and scientifically-minded city culture”. I may say that though Constable is a realist painter in the sense that he, being a meteorologist, studies the atmosphere to reproduce atmospheric vibrations on the canvas by dabbing it with local colour and tiny white stipples (Croix 890); he however does not escape the prominence of his subject matter. This is perhaps what Greenberg would have argued. In contrast to the above position, what I find interesting about Greenberg is his understanding of Courbet as being more honest to his medium in a more “discoverable” manner. Courbet in Burial at Ornans (1849–1850; see Fig. 3-4 in the Appendices) depicts a landscape with “monumental scale of a traditional history painting” with “starkly antiheroic”, unrecognisable, expressionless and “unposed” models of people of the province, though there is an “officious clergyman” reading out the “Office of the Dead [. . .]” (Croix 897). But, unlike Greenberg’s statement, the faithfulness to the medium than traditional subject matter of provincial funerals is also a “literature”, as voiced by Courbet’s contemporary art critic Champfleury: “. . . it represents a small-town funeral and yet reproduces the funerals of all small towns” (qtd in Croix 898). In other words, Courbet abstracts a hypothesis or law, like in the sciences, from social systems of his times to define the very same. His artistic movement towards abstract representation contradicts his own “idea” about realism: “An abstract object, invisible or nonexistent, does not belong to the domain of painting [. . .]” (qtd. in Croix 897). In addition, Greenberg does not consider this in his eulogy over the “new” visual art movement and its celebration of “medium” over “idea”. What makes Greenberg further interesting is not merely his valorisation of the visual avant-garde art, but also his criticism of the verbal arts. It is in such a discussion that Lessing and Pater are revived in interesting ways.



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3.2.1.3 Limitations of the Verbal Arts: Rethinking Lessing in Greenberg Greenberg states that for the true avant-garde the pictorial medium is more important than the “subject matter”. And that is necessary because “the avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society” (301). He uses culture as synonymous with literature, which is also “subject matter at its most oppressive” (301). Thus, the only other way that the arts can avoid obedience to literature is in their efforts to imitate every other art other than literature: each art would have its sister art for subject (303). In this capacity, the tradition of ut pictura poesis is further problematised. That is so because now poetry has to work hard to deny its literary subtext in its efforts to imitate painting, sculpture and music. It is in this capacity that Wendy Steiner in The Colors of Rhetoric (1982) contributes majorly to the understanding of modern literature and its capacity for the ut pictura poesis phenomenon. In her chapter titled “A Cubist History”, she proposes that modern art movement in the form of cubism has been “the master current [. . .] in painting and literature [. . .]” (177). She takes the instances of Stein, W. C. Williams, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Gide, and many other modernist writers who have attempted to question the one-to-one correspondence between the word as a sign and its fixed meaning. She argues that modern ut pictura poesis is not about finding similarities of representation between the arts concerned. Rather, it is more about finding the parallels of creativity rather than representational calibers of the arts. Lessing has already shown that the verbal and the visual arts do not have similar structures. The knowledge of this discrepancy has been of tremendous interest to modernist artists in particular. In other words, the modernist desire is to find similar characteristics or effects in different artistic structures, but not necessarily resolve structural differences. In that capacity, Lessing is important because he has formalised the structural differences between painting and poetry. It is in this capacity that Steiner is important as well. She argues: [T]he imperfect structural correspondence of painting to literature does not in fact preclude or even severely limit the comparison of the arts. What it does is permit an ever-changing set of correlations by painters and writers, who are free to stress different elements of the structures of their art in order to achieve this correspondence. (68)



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She also argues: The programmatic tension between artistic medium and represented world so crucial to Cezanne, cubism, abstractionism, and surrealism [. . .] changed the meaning of the analogy. By claiming that a poem is like a modern painting one is no longer stressing their mirroring function but their paradoxical status as signs of reality and as things in their own right. (xii)

She claims that both arts use both signs: painters use words as both subjects and as signs and poets use words in the visual patterns (26). The cubist painters have developed a new method to represent what they think is reality: to look at reality in its “pure” formal existence, unwrapping all conventional strappings of bourgeois realistic representations like singular perspective, or three-dimensional illusions that create the feeling of depth on two-dimensional canvas. They also implement other popular cubist methods, like the representation of the empirical world through abstract geometrical shapes. Decades before cubism arrives, Oscar Wilde has already declared that aesthetic criticism is artistic creativity (I have discussed Wilde in Chapter Two towards the end of Section 2.5). While in Colors, Steiner discusses the synchronicities between literature and visual arts, in Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (1978), for instance, she compares Stein’s method of writing with the cubist method of painting: each is trying to create a “pure” form and a quintessential content; her [Stein’s] incoherent style of writing breaks referential meaning. For instance, in her Portraits, Stein “seems” to create a verbal equivalent of an existing person, which is very different from imitating the image of an existing person. Stein, in her creation of the verbal equivalent of painting, deliberately disrupts syntax, or use of rhyming of words devoid of semantic relation, and yet provides clues enough that would lead the reader to different levels of interpretation such that the reader would reconstitute the meaning of the portrait and discover “knowledge about” the subject (Exact Resemblance 101). But once her style becomes so abstruse that her thoughts are no longer available to her audience, her writing fails to signify anything in the proper sense of the word. Steiner thus is clear about the functions of the verbal signs. I recollect Steiner here because Greenberg is equally clear about the referential role of the verbal signs and hence skeptical about the power of words to overcome their referential meaning, which for Greenberg is also culture and that too the bourgeois culture (if I take Greenberg’s criticism of literalness to its logical end). For Greenberg, artistic representation has



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to be “pure” and literary reference is not so by virtue of being constituted by social signs. While Steiner allows the possibility of “cubist writing” in Colors, she also accepts in Exact Resemblance that writing is not exactly painting. In Stein’s attempt to contain a set of visual laws within a literary genre, Steiner argues that she [Stein] fails to appreciate that literary signs, unlike painterly signs, cannot be totally isolated and still refer to a subject. In other words, the verbal signs have to refer, to continue to be verbal signs. But their reference is the “literature” that Greenberg is against. He roots for the ability of isolation of the visual signs from reference when compared to the verbal signs that lose their sign-function if they no longer refer. In this capacity, he eulogises the potential of “pure” non-objective abstraction in the colours and dripping paints administered on the canvas by Jackson Pollock, the celebrated proponent of Abstract Expressionism. I am not interested in producing a theory that negates or accentuates Steiner or even Greenberg for that matter. Nor am I equating Steiner with Greenberg. Steiner is important for us because she depicts how modernist literature has attempted to follow the footsteps of modernist painting, a position that would be sternly rejected by Lessing in the Enlightenment era, or Pater would appreciate that both follow music in the late nineteenth-century, or Greenberg in the modernist period would demand freedom from literary subservience for the visual forever. I am interested in the inversion of Lessing’s laws in Greenberg. Lessing’s laws basically have been the following: 1. 2. 3.

If a poet imitates a painter, he “trims” “that higher being into a puppet” (60). “It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction [. . .]” (91). A poet’s intrusion into a painter’s domain is “squandering of much imagination to no purpose [. . .]” (91).

“Literary Cubism”, if there is such a thing, is all about a poet creating the method of a painter; a sanctioning of good taste in the entry of a poet into a painter’s domain; and the necessity to squander that much imagination for a poet to enter into a painter’s domain. In the chapter on Lessing, I arrived at certain conclusions from his semiotics: 1.



The verbal arts are more imaginative, since they use the arbitrary signs that do not display their physicality, which is supposedly at

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their minimum, and are more conceptual in their “social” emergence (the signs are social and conventional signs). The visual arts are more plastic, since they use the visual signs that display their physicality to the maximum, and are more physically imitative of the referent than act as conceptual signifiers of ideas.

What interests me about the modernist period, in particular, is the development of an intellectual valorisation of the visual. Greenberg’s criticism of the historical subservience of the visual to the verbal as also a form of class conflict (where the verbal stands for the bourgeois “acquisitive energy”) unearths his support for the visual and apparently for the suppressed classes? I am interested in the historical processes that could have possibly influenced the emergence of such a theory that inverses Lessing’s. What enables the inversion of such a hierarchy with the emergence of modern avant-garde art; an inversion that “apparently” proves costly for Lessing and his hierarchy as well? The answer lies in Greenberg’s aesthetic solution. To avoid subservience to literalness is also to avoid mimesis and hence be “pure”. It is in this context that music becomes very important in its relation to other arts: Because of its “absolute” nature, remoteness from imitation, its almost complete absorption in the very physical quality of its medium, as well as because of the resources of suggestion, music had come to replace poetry as the paragon art. (Greenberg 304)

Poetry, by nature of its arbitrary signs, cannot free itself from social conventions of its times, the very reason why Lessing hails it as the superlative art. In contrast, music is the most abstract of all arts; in Greenberg’s words: It was such because it was incapable, objectively, of communicating anything else than a sensation, and because this sensation could not be conceived in any other terms than those of the sense through which it entered the consciousness. (304)

He argues that an imitative painting may have non-visual identities, but music can never, even if it does try and imitate. Greenberg does not take note of the possibility of cultural connotations of sounds as in literature: a sound-note may sound sad or happy. In response to his claim that music is pure abstraction, a claim that Pater has already made in The Renaissance, I may refer to George Gershwin’s



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Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, both of which include musical passages that effectively replicate urban street sounds. Rhapsody in Blue, written in 1924 and performed around 1924 and 1926, receives tremendous mass popularity in its American premiere in the concert entitled An Experiment in Modern Music held on February 12, 1924, in Aeolian Hall in New York. An American in Paris, composed in 1928, brings back some Parisian taxi horns for the New York premiere of the composition, which takes place on December 13, 1928, in Carnegie Hall. And Greenberg, being a critique of modern art, particularly American modern art (I shall discuss the American aspect of Greenberg by and by), I may imagine that he must have heard of these concerts. But Greenberg’s abstraction is what Heffernan describes in Cultivating Picturacy as defiantly “a rite of purification” (25), unlike the reproduction of cultural “sounds”. It is interesting to note that American modernist painters like Arthur Dove, who has painted motifs with reference to Gershwin’s musical compositions, like in the “Seagull Motif (Violet and Green)” from “George Gershwin—‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” (see Fig. 3-5 in the Appendices), does not get approval from Greenberg like, say, Jackson Pollock, and hence his achievements get “buried, deemed provincial and minor”99. Greenberg is notably the proponent of the American art movement called Abstract Expressionism: he prepares an agenda for abstract art in which music and its pureness of form (no connotations whatsoever) become significant: Only by accepting the example of music and defining each of the other arts solely in the terms of the sense or faculty which perceived its effects and by excluding from each art whatever is intelligible in the terms of any other sense or faculty would the non musical arts attain the “purity” and self-sufficiency which they desired; which they desired, that is, in so far as they were avant-garde arts. (304)

The “intelligibility” that he is against is the intelligibility of language and the arbitrary signs. Possible cultural connotations of musical notes are not taken into consideration. Moreover, while each form of art is expected to be “purely” loyal to its medium, such that imitation of the condition of any other artistic medium is uncalled for resulting in a condition of anti-ut pictura poesis, the ut pictura poesis phenomenon survives in the capacity that both pictura and poesis have to be like music. In other words, the denial of ut pictura poesis is also the allowance of its existence when it comes to the imitation of the “condition” of music. If Steiner, as a contemporary critic, argues for an entire modernist period of the early



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twentieth-century, on behalf of literature of that period that attempts to imitate the condition of modernist painting, I find Greenberg as a critic of that period, proposing the need for paintings to imitate the “condition” of music, a condition of “pure” abstractness, which he feels would be difficult for the verbal art forms to imitate. Let us see how. Even Greenberg encourages compartmentalisation of arts into distinct artistic experiences corresponding with distinct and individual faculties of human beings, which is also very much in the lines of Lessing: each art form must be perceived by a fixed faculty. In Greenberg’s words: Guiding themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, by a notion of purity derived from the example of music, the avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a purity and a radical de-limitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its “legitimate” boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy. Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art. (305)

Thus, Greenberg is not against Lessing’s categorisation, but is against his hierarchy. I interpret Greenberg’s aesthetic compartmentalisation as set amidst the phenomenon of division of labour and division of social classes, just like his interpretation of Lessing’s hierarchy as set amidst the dominant bourgeois class oppression. Moreover, the very act of division allows non-musical arts to engage in the act of “borrowing” in order to be like music: “[I]f only they will look to music, not to ape its effects, but to borrow it principles as a ‘pure’ art, as an art which is abstract because it is almost nothing else except sensuous” (305). Lessing’s act of “squandering” turns into Greenberg’s act of “borrowing”. Moreover, Pater’s aesthetic formulation of passing into the condition of music echoes in Greenberg’s principle of borrowing the method of musical art. The underlying paradox of musical methodology as also discussed in the previous chapter is as follows: it has the inherent potential to freeze the existing division of labour in other arts, though it itself seems to remain free from that. Greenberg thus unwittingly falls into a capitalist trap, like his predecessors Lessing and Pater. I contend that his avant-garde position is as capitalist in its enterprise as it is in its denial of the same. Greenberg’s interest in “purity” leads him into a monopolising platform, a characteristic that almost got suggested in Mitchell’s analysis of fascist potentials in Lessing as discussed in Chapter One in Section 1.6.3: “The arts lie safe now, each within its ‘legitimate’ boundaries, and



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free trade has been replaced by autarchy” (Greenberg 305). Unlike Pater, for whom no art is “purely” one kind of sensation, he (Greenberg) is more like Lessing in his concept of individual art forms also depicting distinct boundaries prescribed by their material media: “It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself” (305). Unlike Lessing, however, he prefers Pater’s aesthetic of the verbal and the visual arts that may “borrow” (for Pater, it is “aspire”) the musical methodology. I must note in what capacity Greenberg argues that the verbal arts, if at all, have attempted to “borrow” musical methodology. Greenberg records a decisive development in the contemplation of the medium of poetry with late nineteenth-century symbolism. For Mallarmé, when poetry is read and not recited, sound ceases to be the medium; it becomes an auxiliary to the medium (Mallarmé explained in Greenberg 306). He derives the following conclusion from Mallarmé: “Poetry subsists no longer in the relations between words as meanings, but in the relation between words as personalities composed of sound, history and possibility of meaning” (306). Thus, the “medium of poetry is isolated in the power of the word to evoke associations and to connote” (306). He argues that poetry must deny the end product of these very qualities of associations, connotations, sound, history and possibilities of meaning, but not the qualities themselves: “The content of the poem is what it does to the reader, not what it communicates” (306). Moreover, “[t]he emotion of the reader derives from the poem as a unique object—pretendedly—and not from referents outside the poem” (306). The cubist element, that Steiner suggests, is evident in Greenberg’s valorisation of the possibility of “pure” poetry. I infer from Greenberg that “poetic” associations of the words should create a new history and hence new possibilities of meaning rather than be submissive to existing or preceding historical connotations and associations. In other words, a poem should begin a new culture. Now here lies the paradox. The poem is free from subservience to tradition by selfcreating a new work of art with possibilities of newer meaning; the reader’s consciousness must be subservient to this new culture. Thus, the act of subservience still remains. In this regard, I take up two texts as instances that help me elaborate my argument against Greenberg; namely, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; and Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar”; both from two different ideological periods, one from the Romantic period that Greenberg has critiqued and the other from the modernist period that Greenberg looks up to for the emergence of the avant-garde arts that have finally “achieved a purity and a radical de-limitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of culture”.



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3.2.2 Keats’s “urn” and Stevens’s “jar”: Explaining Greenberg Let me look at two poetic narratives that describe objects of use. In 1819, Keats writes “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; the urn might be a hand-crafted object from antiquity. A century later, Stevens writes “Anecdote of a Jar”, which is supposedly inspired from a mechanically mass-produced jar called the dominion jar. The urn is probably produced in the archaic guilds at a time when “art” and “craft” have not been discriminated.100 The urn might have been used for carrying ashes; its inner (content) and outer (designs on its surface) space carries “histories” of lives. The urn is the creation of human labour and also carries the ends of human labour within it. The outer carvings have tales from Greek myths, and hence narrate another cultural literature. So the urn has a “unique” value: a value that is not effaced with time. Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) discusses the “unique” value of works of art from earlier periods and how with mechanical reproduction of these works of art, their uniqueness diminishes. In “A Small History of Photography” (1931), Benjamin discusses “aura”: “[a] strange weave of space and time: the unique semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be” (250). Yet it is not possible that in actual history any object can remain immune to time. So aura must be an illusion created to garner public attention and reverence. But in the nineteenth-century the value of “aura” is problematised because of the advance of technology in the form of photography. In the light of Benjamin’s argument, I first compare the referents, viz., Stevens’s jar with Keats’s urn. While the urn is unique in an age when industrial production of objects is in advance, the jar is commonplace in the twentieth-century. Roy Harvey Pearce in “‘Anecdote of the Jar’: An Iconological Note” (1977) records that from 1913 onwards, dominion jars have been manufactured in Canada and widely distributed in the United States (65). The dominion jar is a fruit jar, and will look like any other fruit jar produced from the same Canadian industrial factory and sold to the United States. It is a “machine” product and is abstracted from direct human labour. There is nothing unique about the jar in itself, but that it is the product of a particular factory, which has to compete with many other such industries in the production of such jars. The jar is typically bare and plain, thus exhibiting nothing but space that has to be “used”: there are hints of these jars being used for the making of “moonshine” (a kind of alcohol) in domestic places (Pearce 65). The paradox of the referent is that though it is an object manufactured for human use, its mass production, mass availability, and mass visibility makes it a “dominant” rather than a “dominion” jar. So the urn is an



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extinct species, while the jar is a dominant consumer product; the urn is an artwork in terms of its artistic carvings on its surface as well as an object of use; the jar is definitely an object of use. I am interested in the way the narratives compete with the social value of the referents, and the means they adopt to overcome that competition. The form of the romantic poem is that of an ode; the title also pronounces the genre of the poem. An ode is a traditionally developed formal literary device that is meditative about serious aspects of human nature. As a form, it boasts of its proximity with music by virtue of its lyrical structure. However, Greenberg is right in his critique of romantic art: such an art is subservient to a “subject matter”, such that the form becomes the manifestation of that idea. The ode is a form that precisely suits the meditative “subject matter” of romanticism and Keats here (see Ex. 3-1 in the Appendices). There is lament over the loss of organicity of the Greek urn in the contemporary economic world of divisions. Keats attempts to advertise the organic world of the urn as that alternative organic realm, which is a stark contrast to his contemporary world of economic divisions. But such an advertisement involves the subservience of various forms of arts to the dominant form of language and hence poetry. While the poem attempts to form a community of arts (almost preceding Pater and his aesthetics of “anders-streben”), the underlying conflict between the arts and the final subservience of each to literature is obvious in the following paradoxes. For every “heard melodies” there are “unheard melodies”: “[. . .] ye soft pipes, play on; / Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, / Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone [. . .]” (lines 12– 14). The fact that Keats attempts to close the gap between “heard” and “unheard” melodies depicts the conscious realisation of his inability to bridge the gap between poetry and music. At the same time, he also displays an obsession with the “unheard” quality of melody. In other words, Keats is not able to bridge the gap between “heard” and “unheard” music, like the unbridgeable economic systems of his times. But he still has to own the music that he cannot actually hear. So he orders that the pipes play to an incorporeal ear (imagination) and not to the sensual one (physical body). The object “pipe” by becoming a proxy for imagination helps in the formation of a formal trope called the “romantic paradox”. The “romantic paradox” is a trope used to represent that which is beyond the grasp of representation, almost like presenting the sublime. Such a paradox exists by its very suggestiveness of ideas and denial of its physical referent. In a similar manner, the insecurity of poetry as temporal art is propped against the permanence of the spatiality of the sculptural form of the urn,



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as in: “When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man [. . .]” (lines 46–48); or, as in paintings: “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade [. . .]” (lines 17–19). The desire to “outlive” the ephemeralness of existence and in the process even “own” the systems that lead to the desired eternity of existence, though implicit, is frozen within a temporal silhouette of a sculptural or painterly art in which the amorous poses become eternally stagnant. Yet, these descriptions, like the Greek fables in the first stanza, the unsatisfied love of the “Fair youth” in the second, the voyeuristic illustrations in the third, or the fabula of an empty “citadel” and a “lowering heifer” in the fourth; all of them have inherent narrative impulses that the sculptural or painterly arts seem to resist: the bold lover and the fair maiden are figures in marble, and hence eternally stilled, and their story never gets fulfilled but is always in the process of getting fulfilled. Thus the narrative is stagnant and yet always in the process of narrating. By narrating the frozenness of the sculptural and painterly arts, the poetic art suggests the narrative potential of those arts through the “romantic irony”. “Romantic irony” is another formal trope of language that displays textual awareness of the poem’s inability to be like the marmoreal existence of the characters and incidents wrought on the surface of the urn. Yet, while accepting its defeat in its inability to be like a sculpture or a painting, it also exposes the subservience of painterly and sculptural arts to literalness by displaying their inherent narrative elements that are integral to the cultural epistemology of the urn as a whole. By that logic, poetry is itself language and hence narrative and the other art forms inevitably offer their subservience to it. The formal trope of the “prosopopoeia”, a trope used for giving voice to an inanimate object, is perhaps the most literal of the tropes used, so as to strategically clinch the battle between the arts. Keats gives voice to the urn, so that the urn appears to speak for itself: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (line 49). While this makes the reader feel the eternity of the urn or what Benjamin calls the “aura” and the subsequent “uniqueness” of the object, the “pathetic fallacy” (the literal trope that makes an inanimate object animate) is the logical unrealness of a sculptural urn coming alive and speaking. In a Paterian manner, the effective histories of the musical, sculptural and painterly aspects of the urn transcend into eternity or the ideal world. However, such transcendence is subservient to the autonomous right that Keats as a true romantic has exercised by allowing the urn to possess a spirit and hence speak for itself in accordance with the dictates of its creator. Keats thus becomes the creator of not an object but



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the idea of an eternal universe, where the “urn” is a proxy for the eternal romantic imagination of unchangeable truth and beauty. Howard Caygill in Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998) adds: Benjamin argues on several occasions that aestheticism, however fastidious or delicate, was effectively monumental in its refusal to acknowledge the passage of time within a work of art. For this movement the borders of the work of art were closed, fixed for ever at a particular time and place, making the work into an object of contemplation rather than use. The experience of such a work is contemplative, and since the borders of the work of art are inviolable, it remains the same whatever the gaze to which it is subjected. (92–93)

Keats’s urn becomes all the more “unique” such that its “uniqueness” furthers what Benjamin in “The Work of Art” describes as the power of fascination that is vested in objects surrounded by “aura”. Please recollect, here, Greenberg’s denouncement of subservience of art to literature, and more precisely, subservience to bourgeois “acquisitive energies”. I interpret the end result of Keats’s acquisitive energies as the production of “aura” so as to maintain the reverence for a system that allows such productions. As a modernist poet, and unlike his romantic counterpart, Stevens “openly” advertises his literary subject through the anecdotic nature of his narrative (see Ex. 3-2 in the Appendices). He claims that his poem, almost like a lyric in its form, is an anecdote, and hence a narrative. However, the lyrical value of the poem is subservient to the evolvement of a new work of art in the form of Stevens’s “jar”, unlike Keats’s “urn” which gets occulted behind romantic imagination. Thus, though Stevens’s poem narrates an anecdote, the reader is attracted to the “pure” physical medium of the poet’s “jar”. Moreover, the development of “pure” physicality is itself subservient to the desire for such a development, a desire that Greenberg does not consider in his assessment of “purity”. The narrative causality of events begins with Stevens and ends with his “jar” conquering the domain of Tennessee. The dominion jars have been economically conquering the culture of Tennessee. On the other hand, Stevens’s “jar” as an artistic creation competes with the dominion jar, a machine creation, in the same economic system, which is the domain of Tennessee, unlike Keats’s “urn” that in the first place originates from the past and is eventually raised beyond history into eternal space of artistic imagination. Moreover, Stevens’s “jar” in the poem is not the dominion jar of Tennessee, though its description (its rotundity, its sensuousness, its form) is like any such jar. With its physical descriptions, his “jar” reorganises the



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space around it, instead of transcending that very same space like Keats’s “urn”. Unlike Keats’s “urn”, Stevens’s “jar” does not have any literary record of its existence or any other history narrated by any other art form. It is a bare and plain jar, hence very “pure” in its singular medium. In Greenberg’s words, “[the pure arts] seek above all else to affect the spectator physically” (305). Thus, the description of Stevens’s jar is as follows: “And round it was [. . .]” (line 2); “The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air [. . .]” (lines 7–8); “The jar was gray and bare” (line 10). By virtue of being bare, Steven’s “jar” takes dominion everywhere. It’s enormous form and its impractical purpose is “abstracted” from that of a dominion jar, such that the referent ceases to exist in the poem. In contrast, Keats’s poem consciously reminds the reader of the grecianness of the urn. What the dominion jar does by numbers, Stevens’s “jar” does by its unique aesthetic form: the dominion jar serves its utilitarian value in multiplying itself in multiple numbers to satisfy the demands of its audience; Stevens’s “jar” creates a new demand for itself; it creates a new history of new possibilities of meaning rather than be subservient to the existing history of dominion jars and the dominant consumer’s demands of the times, such that the consumer now as the spectator is forced to supply his/her attention to it. In the process, the poem itself becomes a new realm that dares begin a new culture rather than be subservient to the existing one. But this is done by transforming the exiting culture into the new: “The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild” (lines 5–6). The form becomes a “space” that the wilderness clings to: it is the same geographical space of Tennessee but reorganised by the “artistic agential forces” arising from within the spaces of art objects. While Keats denies his own world to create the alternate organic realm, Stevens endeavours to create an artwork that in the same world can confront society and by extension the exiting “literatures” in Greenberg’s sense of the word, with its “unique” artistic form and reorganise the existing “literatures” around its formal existence. Greenberg has mentioned that the poem can attempt to escape from “literature”, if it decides that its medium is “essentially psychological and sub- or supra-logical” (305). Every time the consumer-spectator encounters Stevens’s “jar”, the “jar” evolves differently in the spectator’s consciousness but with its same physical description. Greenberg has also warned us that if any meaning is actually realised, in this case if the anecdote actually has one fixed moral, “the poem would lose the greatest part of its ability which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities say approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling into it” (306). And Stevens’s “jar” attempts



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to avoid just that. However, the “psychological and sub- or supra-logical” can also be conditioned by “literatures”. Moreover, Greenberg also does not notice the paradoxes in the denial of referent and celebration of “pure” physical media. That Stevens’s “jar” is all the more “unique”, notwithstanding its affinity with mass-produced dominion jars, also establishes the power of fascination vested in objects of mass appeal. In this regard, Benjamin in “The Work of Art” argues that massproduced images destroy the “aura” of that “unique” work of art. Stevens’s “jar” is itself “unique”, though it reflects the mass-produced objects from which it might owe its genesis, but has now transformed itself into its own kind. The modernist art movement in the form of Dadaism and their use of mass-produced referents is more reminiscent in Stevens’s “jar” rather than the Abstract Expressionism art movement, an American art movement that Greenberg has been a notable critic of. Greenberg, also as the proponent of American Abstract Expressionism, has eyed the Dadaist intentions with suspicion; a suspicion that will be further developed in the following chapter in Section 4.3. We must also note that Greenberg’s “purity” is very much against Benjamin’s concept of loss of “aura” in mass-produced images, an opposition that will be developed properly in the following chapter in Section 4.4. I have used the examples of Keats and Stevens to show the paradoxes that develop in the consideration of any act of artistic abstraction and perhaps also to suggest the foibles in the concept of “purity” and “uniqueness” and “aura”. I shall further contrast two more texts with similar referents: Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”. This time the contrast is between two different media.

3.2.3 Van Gogh’s “starry night” vs. Whitman’s “mystical moist night air” Greenberg, like Lessing, contrasts poetry with painting and unlike Lessing, argues in favour of the visual arts in the context of “purity”: It is easier to isolate the medium in the case of the plastic arts and consequently avant-garde painting and sculpture can be said to have attained a much more radical purity than avant-garde poems. (307)

In the context of Greenberg’s analysis, let me examine these two kinds of arts (one painting and the other poetry) with a similar referent—the starstudded night sky. One is Van Gogh’s 1889 painting Starry Night; the other is Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” from



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his Leaves of Grass (1855) collection. The intention is to intensify possible expectations of loopholes in Greenberg’s argument. If we look at the painting with care (see Fig. 3-6 in the Appendices), we will find that the representation of the social world (civilization) is infinitesimal when compared to that of the natural world (stars and the universe). Van Gogh’s natural signs are not imitations of the physical stars we are accustomed to see. The images of the “whirling stars” gradually distance themselves from any known referents. Thus, the abstraction of the image of the stars from real stars demands a new social value for the painting. Van Gogh’s “stars” become abstracted signs open to multiple interpretations, just like Greenberg’s infinite meanings. In other words, the unrealistic representation of “whirling stars” stands for Van Gogh’s pluralistic imagination and not for fixed social significations. In order to display its abstractions, the painting sports its “means of making” very astutely. The brush strokes are prominently visible. It is as if the painting is no longer ashamed to declare its medium to the world. The fear of the medium is dispelled. Frank visibility of brush strokes is a flamboyant advertisement of the visual medium, thus demanding a just value for physical effort. But the very act of exhibition of physical effort is also the necessary means of abstraction, and hence displays mental effort as well. My argument is that abstraction itself is a proxy for imagination. When I look at Whitman (see Ex. 3-3 in the Appendices), the words “figures”, “columns” and “proofs” in his poem suggest data, tabularisations, and regulations (a very neo-classical world). But Whitman says that he is “sick” and “tired” of them. So there seems to be a similar desire like Van Gogh’s; the desire for freedom from socially conditioned methods of significations. Note that the poet feels alienated from the physical world on account of the mediating rational symbols: there is a sense that the poet wishes for unmediated experience. Verbs like “add”; “divide” and “measure” and nouns like “columns” and “charts” already create a condition of alienation. I can feel Whitman’s strong anguish over the classificatory and quantifying actions of rational formulations. However, Whitman himself is unable to avoid classifications: he has to create a category of the “mystical” as separate from rational classifications, thus subjecting himself to further rationalisation. Van Gogh abstracts his “stars” by physical display of the visual media (heavy visible brushstrokes). Whitman abstracts his “stars” by describing an image of the night sky with adjectives “mystical” and “moist”. Until the final lines, he follows the temporal style of narration: “after” he heard the learned astronomer; “after” he saw the figures; “after” he saw charts; “after” he heard the lecture; “then” he felt lost, and “then” he wandered



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off. Throughout the poem it is commendable to study Whitman’s use of adjectives, which tries to emulate the painterly display of physical medium. An adjective is that which modifies the noun, but itself is not the object or action of discourse. In other words, it makes the noun more spatial rather than temporal, since it adds more to the look or feel of the noun. It is rather the verb, which helps the verbal narrative to construct time sequences. A double use of alliterative adjectives occurs in “only” one place in the poem: “mystical moist night-air”. The double adjectives doubly transform the noun “night” such that it now denotes something completely different from the natural night sky. The moistness of the night air “moistens” the conventional appearance of the sky. Probably, the sky will appear hazy when viewed through moisture (almost like the brush strokes of an expressionist painting). The word “mystical” further “defamiliarises” the night, thus giving it an ambiguous feel. In this capacity, I find Whitman producing a verbal equivalent of a painterly experience in a manner similar to what Steiner describes in Colors: By claiming that a poem is like a modern painting one is no longer stressing their mirroring function but their paradoxical status as signs of reality and as things in their own right. (xii)

My question here would be whether words as “signs in their own rights” can actually never be as “pure” as the abstracted physicality of the visual medium; and in the process, whether isolation of the physical from idea leading to abstraction in the form of “pure” medium is itself not an intellectual and thereby mental effort. For that, I need to understand how Greenberg deals with the basic Lessing categorisation of the verbal and the visual signs. I argue that Lessing valorises the verbal signs much before Saussure could actually formalise the verbal sign as a social sign. Moreover, I also argue that Lessing’s aesthetic position anticipates LéviStrauss’s categorisation of the sign as primitive and/or modern.

3.2.4 Prefiguring Saussure and Lévi-Strauss Lessing hails the imaginative ability of words and denounces the physicality of the visual symbols: words must invoke imagination in such a manner that we do not feel the means of production of that particular imagination (Laocoön 85). For Greenberg, the visual brushstrokes of Van Gogh would definitely be more physical than Whitman’s adjectives, and he hails “pure” physicality at the expense of idea. But is not “purity” of physicality (with no subservience to ideas) an abstract representation, and is not abstraction the basis of science and also a rational and mental work,



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thus replete with ideas, the very thing that Greenberg is against? In this regard, the Swiss linguist’s—Ferdinand Saussure’s—theory of signs in the lecture notes collected in the Course in General Linguistics (1916) is significant for my understanding of Lessing and Greenberg. Saussure argues that the verbal sign is a social as well as an arbitrary sign. It is arbitrary because “[t]he signifier, [. . .] [is] freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents [. . .]” (71). But it is social because “[t]he signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it” (71). Thus, a verbal sign is developed from the conventions that emerge in the speech community. Moreover, the meaning assigned to the sign is not intrinsic to the sign but is socially convened. In other words, the object “table” has no logical reason for being called “table” but for the fact that the linguistic community decides to call that object a “table”. Let us go back to Section 1.6.3 in Chapter One where I discussed Lessing, the arbitrary and the natural signs. As per Lessing’s argument, the visual forms use the natural signs or signs that physically resemble the given referent; in semiotic terms, they have a high degree of “iconicity”. A sculptural Laocoön will have to look like a human Laocoön trapped in his particular trappings of death to mean so much to that society. So a social consent of that extent is probably not required to fix the referent of the visual signifiers. But the word “Laocoön” will have to socially stand for him, since it does not physically resemble the image of Laocoön at all. Lessing seems to valorise this spirit and degree of social consent that is required for the verbal signs to operate in society. And Greenberg condemns that very act of social consent, since the consent is metaphorically the “acquisitive energies” of the bourgeois class. The anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, develops Saussure’s arguments in The Savage Mind (1962), which also has tremendous bearing upon Lessing and Greenberg. Saussure’s linguistic theory separates meaning from the sign. Lévi-Strauss argues that the modern world by virtue of modern science and the separation of laws from its object of study has separated matter from idea. Within this debate about subject-object dichotomy, Lévi-Strauss contends that the so-called primitive society differs from the modern because it understands meaning as intrinsic to the sign, unlike the modern world. In Lévi-Strauss’s words: “[I]t is [. . .] this intransigent refusal on the part of the savage mind [primitive mind] to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it [. . .]” (245). Lessing also anticipates Lévi-Strauss in the following manner. He argues that the verbal signs signify ideas, without inherently possessing those



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ideas; they transparently signify ideas: he anticipates Saussure’s meaning and sign division. In contrast to the transparency of the verbal signs, Lessing admonishes the visual sign because it displays its physicality when it signifies the idea. Display of the physical medium is a problem for Lessing because, as we have already seen in Chapter One, in Section 1.6.2.2, when physical display of a sign has the potential to be an idea, there is a fear of fetishisation of the physical symbol. Lessing creates the hierarchy between mental and physical signs by defining physical signs as primitive and the verbal signs as scientific and hence modern and thus intellectual. In this context, Greenberg’s defence of purity of the visual sign acquires significance. He attempts to “modernise” Lessing’s “primitive” visual sign. In other words, Greenberg understands the visual sign as more than a conventional visual sign: such a sign must relinquish a known referent (the idea) by the “pure” display of its physicality. In the process, he invests future possibility of developing ideas in the visual display of physical medium such that the medium may decide what meaning to define, what history to spin, and hence what structure to form, but in its future. These signs cease to be physical because they no longer physically imitate an idea. Yet they are physical in that they exist as physical objects with potential to eventually become socially meaningful signs. Contrary to the visual sign, a word is already social and has to first break itself from the idea, which also means that it needs to break away from the social structure that has decided what relation it should have with a particular idea in relation with other signs that signify other ideas. Words, now, have to empty themselves of their very ontologies, and by their very nature of existence as social signs, they cannot. Greenberg’s judgement on the verbal signs may thus be seen as similar to Lessing’s: both limit certain signs to their obvious referential duties. It is more difficult for words to abstract themselves from their social meanings to become empty physical entities that might produce infinite new signs. But again, do physical signs escape the fate of the verbal signs? In other words, the underlying abstraction of physicality from ideas is a legacy of modern science: the separation of science from its object of study and the subsequent separation of matter from idea. The object to be studied, though now revered as a “pure” object and not its conventional idea (hence Greenberg addresses that as non-objective), is also the reservoir of newer interpretations, ideas, values, and laws that it can generate while resisting generating its expected historicised idea, just like the verbal signs. Greenberg’s ingenuity lies in his camouflaging the possibility of countless “literalness” and infinite histories that the medium of the visual



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art is capable of producing in its very act of displaying its “pure” physicality at the cost of known history. However, in Whitman, we did see that words by virtue of being social signs also record the histories of society that produce multiple meanings, or change a conventionalised meaning into an ambiguous one. I argue that Greenberg’s inversion of Lessing in the twentieth-century is an extension of the larger material tendencies of the early twentieth-century, a tendency not very different from Lessing’s neo-classical times. The paradox in his (Greenberg’s) aesthetic of “purity” may also be seen as an extension of the larger philosophical conflict between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. Paul Barlow in “Clement Greenberg (1909–94)” writes to this purpose: “He [Greenberg] always claimed that his explanation of Modernism was historical, but that his defense of specific works arose from judgements of taste” (151).

3.3 Kant, Hegel and Greenberg It is possible to trace back Greenberg’s treatise on the “purity” of artistic media to the Kantian concept of “pure” aesthetic judgement and Hegel’s concept of historical progression towards the highest form of art. For Kant, the activity of aesthetic judgement is a reflective function. Let me start my reflection from Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” from The Critique of Judgement, the Kantian aesthetic position that I have left incomplete in Section 2.4.1 of the previous chapter. Kant describes the judgement of beauty as based on feelings of pleasure, where pleasure is disinterested. In other words, an object is pleasurable without the object having to entertain any prior desire of such feelings; in Kantian terms, the object does not satisfy any end purpose like in the judgement of goodness, where the end result of the action has to fulfil the conditions of the concept of goodness. J. M. Bernstein in The Fate of Art (1992) explains this point very lucidly: [T]hen in a pure judgement of taste the delight we take in the object is due to the mere estimate of its form; that is, the delight excludes all particular subjective sources of delight, as well as any pleasure that follows from the object falling under a particular concept. As a source for the feeling of pleasure this leaves only the ‘subjective finality’ of the representation of the object for the faculty of judgement, by which Kant means the suitability of the object to the faculty of judgement. (20)

On a similar note, Paul Crowther in “Kant and Greenberg's Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism” (1984) writes:



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It is here that Bürger also makes tremendous sense: “It is not the work of art but the aesthetic judgement [. . .] that Kant investigates” (42). However, Bernstein also makes a very interesting point about Kant and his [Kant’s] contradiction of himself. Kant states that the idea that every one ought to find the object beautiful is “represented a priori as a universal rule for the judgement and as valid for every one [. . .]” (Kant qtd. in Bernstein 19). In other words, the consideration of the object of beauty as that which ought to be beautiful for everyone becomes a universal concept, a concept that even Kant does address as an “indeterminate concept”. Moreover, there is also a “necessary” relation between pleasure and the object that draws out such feelings: every one ought to feel the pleasure. Whether I can approach the idea of “necessary” relation as an argument against “disinterestedness” and “non-purposiveness” is a highly problematic position that is beyond the scope of this project, and would require a separate thesis. I may as well satisfy my curiosity with Bernstein’s remarks: Despite the fact that in judgements of taste the object and the pleasure are connected without the mediation of concepts, which is what Kant means in requiring such judgements to be “disinterested”, he believes that in such judgements the connection between the pleasure and the representation of the object is a necessary one and hence universally or intersubjectively valid. (19)

Amidst such contradictions, Crowther illustrates Kant’s endeavours to maintain a position of aesthetic purity when he [Kant] discusses the work of art as different from an object of beauty. According to Kant, pure aesthetic judgement is disinterested appreciation of formal beauty of the object of nature without realisation of the purpose of the appreciation or the object. In contrast, when the object is a work of art, there has to be recognition of the object as a work of art or an artifice. Crowther admits that at one level, “Kant requires that our appreciation of the artwork must involve recognition of its status as a thing created-for-the purpose-ofappreciation” (443). In this case, the characteristics of “disinterestedness” and “non-purposiveness” of judgement of taste cannot be applied. But Crowther also proposes that there can be two ways of looking at a work of art. Kant may want to be aware of the work of art for what it is.



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But that would be entirely different from bringing “this awareness to bear in our estimation of its purely aesthetic qualities” (443). In other words, Kant is particular that even a work of art, though an artifice and not a direct product of nature, must appear free from social rules that makes it an artefact; as if it is a work of nature. Aesthetic appreciation for Kant is appreciation of the object without knowing the end of such appreciation or even making an abstraction of that object concerned in our judgement of it. But when the object concerned is a work of art, the end result has to be recognised. In this context, Crowther discusses Kant’s “distinction between free and dependent beauty” (443). He writes: For Kant, free beauty is apprehended and enjoyed when we attend to the formal qualities of an object, to the exclusion of all other considerations. The pleasure of dependent beauty, in contrast, arises from our appraisal of how well the particular object exemplifies the kind of thing it is, or, if it is an artifact, how well it fulfills the function for which objects of that kind are created. Hence, if we wish to do justice to the artwork’s “beauty” in the fullest possible sense, we must not only enjoy its formal qualities, but also (in a separate act of judgment) appraise its degree of success in fulfilling the purpose of appreciation for which artworks are created. (443)

Crowther argues that by making the artist a genius, Kant does not allow the work of art to be merely socially produced, but also share the effortlessness and spontaneity of the free beauty of nature (443). Thus, on the one hand, as Bernstein argues, Kant discovers “the autonomy of judgement of taste, and of what we call ‘aesthetics’ generally” (19). On the other, the form in a work of art has to fulfill the function for which it has been created, and thus is purposive for its own sake (dependent beauty) while simultaneously still retaining the non-purposive and disinterested purity of aesthetic judgement (pure beauty). When Greenberg discusses pure art, he stresses the “pure” physicality of the art object or, what he states is “the necessity of an escape from ideas [. . .]” (301). His emphasis is on the “objecthood” of the work of art (though he calls that “objecthood” non-objective abstract art because of its escape from ideas or objects; its “objecthood” also describes the “pure” physicality of the artistic medium), while for Kant it is the “subjective finality” that is significant. Crowther explains the reflective nature of Kantian aesthetics when he writes: Kant's influential approach, for example, is subject-centered, in that it is grounded fundamentally on an interplay between the aesthetic object and our perceptual faculties, which involves no interest in the ‘real existence’ of the object. (445)



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Contrary to Kant, Greenberg’s aesthetic, as per Crowther, is [. . .] object-centered and involves knowledge of the artwork as a significant development of artistic tradition. Here, an interest in the real existence of the object must be paramount, because if the artwork proved to be a fake or a copy, it would thereby lose that defamiliarizing quality of originality, which, for Greenberg, is a crucial element in aesthetic appreciation. (445)

The degree of defamiliarising quality for the visual arts is higher than for the verbal ones, though even the verbal “pretendedly” produce the effect of “objecthood”: “The emotion of the reader derives from the poem as a unique object—pretendedly—and not from referents outside the poem” (Greenberg 306). In the light of artistic “defamiliarising quality” of originality, Greenberg’s understanding of the methodology used by cubist painters makes a lot of sense, as does Steiner in Colors. He argues that cubists defamiliarise the “realistic pictorial space” of a canvas (308). The cubist, for instance, plays with academic methodologies involved in the art of colouring, like shading and perspectives, so as to demolish traditional illusions of threedimensional depth and volume of object represented on a two-dimensional canvas. In other words, geometrical lines break the canvas surface into “subtle recessive planes which seem to shift and fade into infinite depths” and yet are adamant about returning to the canvas surface (308). In Greenberg’s words: “As we gaze at a cubist painting of the last phase we witness the birth and death of three dimensional pictorial space” (308). I find Greenberg’s aesthetic association with Kant very interesting. I need to go back to Mitchell and Bürger to elucidate this point a little more. The former, in his Iconology, while critiquing Lessing as an intellectual companion of Newton and Kant, also argues how these neo-classical thinkers place their theories above “the realm of ideology” (111) or, rather, how they create a transcendental space for their laws, which they claim are governed by physical laws. In this context, Bürger’s criticism of the bourgeois desires of Kantian aesthetics cannot be eliminated. He argues that the Kantian demand for universal aesthetic judgement as against the particular does not free Kant from the realm of ideologies: “Kant also closes his eyes to the particular interests of his class [. . .],” since, “[t]he pathos of universality is characteristic of the bourgeoisie, which fights the feudal nobility as an estate that represented particular interests” (43). This argument has been strongly applied to Lessing, particularly in the first chapter.



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Greenberg, like Kant, also discusses the “purity” of aesthetic appreciation, but unlike Kant, he does not separate the work of art from the social, but endeavours to show how “pure” non-objective and abstract art has evolved in art history. Elsewhere, in the same article, Greenberg writes: I find that I have offered no other explanation for the present superiority of abstract art than its historical justification. So what I have written has turned out to be an historical apology for abstract art. [. . .]. It suffices to say that there is nothing in the nature of abstract art which compels it to be so. The imperative comes from history, from the age in conjunction with a particular moment reached in a particular tradition of art. (310)

There is thus a significant development of artistic tradition from the eighteenth- to the early twentieth-century in the history of European aesthetics. In such a tradition, Greenberg locates the subservient activities of imitation: paintings suffer the most in this case by becoming “ghosts and ‘stooges’ of literature [the dominant art form]”. Thus, an originality of the work of art is pressed for, which might be achieved if there is “pure” allegiance to the artistic media rather than subservience to a dominant form of art. It is in this account that the Hegelian aesthetic has considerable influence on Greenberg. Let me compare Hegel’s master-slave analysis with Greenberg’s prototype and subservient art analysis. Hegel in his Phenomenology explains that two selves or “I’s” in their primeval recognition of each other confront the “other” as threats to their particular ownership of their worlds. Each demands recognition of itself and its ownership from the “other”. In such a conflict, the self that submits becomes the slave. The master eventually depends upon the slave’s recognition of the masterhood. But the slave, who works, recognises its worth through the work done and hence has the potential to gain freedom from slavery through hard work and self-education. But the master remains slave to its desire for recognition of power; its desire for a slave. Moreover, for Hegel, self-consciousness is the consciousness of that which the self seems to lack. And the desire of that which it lacks is also a conflicting awareness, on the one hand, of its alienation from other selves, and on the other, its realisation of freedom to have a purpose to fulfill itself. Historical awareness is the progress of the conflict between alienation and fulfilment to finally attain the Absolute Knowledge of its progress and its final awareness of the totality of the syntheses of all its varying conflicts in its varying moments of the journey of progress.



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Hegel’s history of art, as discussed in the previous chapter in Section 2.4.4, also shows a temporal progress from the primitive to the highest or the most subjective form of art, viz., romantic poetry, in which the conflict between alienation and fulfilment is synthesised into Absolute Knowledge or philosophy. Or, in other words, the conflict between subject matter and medium is resolved into philosophy, the highest form of knowledge. Beyond philosophy there is no more art. Hegel calls that the end of art. The entire history of art becomes a system that finally ends as a product since, there can be no further awareness of itself; it has reached the pinnacle of awareness. On a similar note, Greenberg in a Marxist tone subverts Hegel and attempts to understand the history of the conflict of arts as a master-slave conflict as well, but based on material rather than spiritual tendencies. Thus one form of art is the prototype, the other is the slave. While he condemns the slavish art for imitating the prototype, the underlying philosophy of such condemnation can also be the continuous attempt of the slavish art to educate itself to become what it seems to lack, and learn to achieve what the master art seems to have. In the process, the master art (here it is literature), is actually slavish because it depends on the subservience of the visual, so as to emerge the prototype. He shows how the non-objective art becomes “pure” art by completely defying the prototype art. The visual signs have been camouflaging their physical surface to attain the transparency of the verbal signs. In the process, this experimentation with the physical has led to the formation of the nonobjective (non-imitative) or abstract or “pure” art. Interestingly, the “pure” physical display of the artistic media, for Greenberg, develops into the highest form of art, rather than the Hegelian self-conscious art of poetry and hence the verbal and the prototype. But I have discussed before that the non-objective “objecthood” of the work of art becomes a source of new consciousness: it is no longer subservient to existing consciousness of life, but produces possibilities of newer consciousnesses. Stephen C. Foster in “Clement Greenberg: Formalism in the ‘40s and ‘50s” (1975) describes Greenberg’s logic of art in the following interesting manner: “The logic of the history of art was conceived as a constant struggle for each of the arts to purify its means” (20). On the one hand, Greenberg, unlike Kant and like Hegel, chronicles the historical progress of art into “pure” art through a history of conflict between media and subject matter. On the other, the final product of such a history is the “pure” form of art, or art free of history itself, and hence like Kant’s judgement of beauty, it is purely formal. Yet, unlike Kantian disinterestedness, Greenberg’s “pure”



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art has a purpose: it creates a new history: “The [. . .] [work of art] still offers possibilities of meaning—but only possibilities” (306). In this context, and contrary to Crowther’s argument on Kant’s aspiration for experience of “pure” beauty in a work of art, Stephen Melville in “Kant after Greenberg” (1998) discusses the problem in Kantian aesthetics that resurfaces in Greenberg very distinctly. On the one hand, Kant suggests that work of art should aspire for the conditions of beauty (the disinterested non-purposive derivation of pleasure from purely aesthetic form). But he also suggests that it is the genius who can create a work of art or artifice like the object of pure and natural beauty. It is the genius who feels the beautiful but as a sublime experience (Melville 72– 73). Please remember the sublime powers of the Kantian genius discussed in Chapter One (Section 1.6.2.2). Kant argues that the quality of genius is mental as well: “Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature [the empirical world] gives the rule to art” (Judgement 168). Thus such laws, as innate mental capacities, require that the empirical world should have no hand in shaping them. We have to understand now that the work of art has to be produced within the social laws of an artifice, while simultaneously presenting itself as beyond arbitrary social laws of artifice: the work of art has to present itself as the work of the sublime. In Melville’s words: It may matter then to see Greenberg’s difficulties as unfolding the difficulties of art insofar as it is the inexplicit object of Kant's critique, suspended problematically between the beautiful and the sublime (between self-limitation and excess, between universality and history or culture, between two facts or faces of our nature—thus within the complexity of its facing and naming of itself). (72–73)

The following sections attempt to unfold Greenberg’s complexities as more than problematic suspension between the beautiful and the sublime; rather the suspension between “limits” and “limitlessnesses” may be seen as conflict between the limited boundaries of a dominant culture and a growing limitless mass-culture of early twentieth-century.

3.4 Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A New Criterion In Section 2.5 of Chapter Two, I have already discussed the bourgeois ploy that maintains divisions between skilled and unskilled labourers to continue their (bourgeois) social supremacy. While the ploy works in nineteenth-century England to some extent, it also develops the opposite of the desired end; there is an expansion of mass-society through extended



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literacy and the franchise, which is almost like eradication of cultural boundaries much to the agony of the upper class. I need to refer to Day again: he argues that modernist artists attempt to claim their cultural superiority over the unqualified mass (155). The modernist poet, T. S. Eliot, makes an interesting statement in this regard: “[I]n our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards” (Eliot qtd. in Day 155). On a similar note, Ursula from D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow states, I hate it, that anybody is my equal who has the same amount of money as I have. I know I am better than all of them. I hate them. They are not my equals. I hate equality on a money basis. It is the equality of dirt. (qtd. in Day 156).

Day’s inference is thus important for us: money is the sole measure of value rather than other forms of cultural attributes. Thus, human beings and their histories, societies, signs and values get “abstracted” as commodities and valued against what Day defines as their “common measure” and subsequently their great equaliser, viz., money (156). Thus money, which has arguably dismantled the supremacy of the aristocrats for the bourgeoisie, is an even greater neutraliser of the bourgeois and working class divisions than even “death”. The contrast is best evident when we juxtapose Ursula’s quote with the Renaissance poet, James Shirley’s “Death the Leveller” (see Ex. 3-4 in the Appendices). Ursula blasts: “I hate it, that anybody is my equal who has the same amount of money as I have” (qtd. from Lawrence’s The Rainbow in Day, 156). And Shirley proclaims: THE glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

It is in this context that we need to understand the agony of the bourgeoisie in their interaction with the literate masses.



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3.4.1 The Intellectual Individual vs. the Non-Intellectual Masses Greenberg’s critique of the academic arts is also an extension of the critique of politically institutionalised forms of cultural legislation. However, the initiative to critique the academic arts also comes from the bourgeois class. The underlying reason is interesting. In Section 2.5 of the preceding chapter, we have seen how the middle class uses art forms to propagate values; their method of propagation involves division of the working class into the worthy and the unworthy. On the other hand, with more advancement in technology and industry, the working class in the face of what Day calls “mass production techniques” (166) also realises the uselessness of concepts like worthiness and unworthiness. This is precisely so, because machine products are no longer representations of individual talents. And the bourgeois system of division depends upon its advertised division between better individuals and unskilled individuals. At the same time, they consider the learners as a non-intellectual mass. The agony of the bourgeoisie is their insecurity of the masses evolving from machine technology; they (the masses) just might obliterate them (the ruling class) and their cultural supremacy. David Cottington in Modern Art (2005) records that Napoleon III along with Salon juries sets up “Salon des Refusés” in 1863; the Salon houses all those paintings that academic institutes have discarded for public ridicule (27). Manet manages his first display in that Salon, and Greenberg traces the avant-garde movement to him. On the other hand, some historians have also argued that the Emperor’s encouragement of cultural entrepreneurship is also a means to shake the academia out of their traditional complacency (28). In Cottington’s words: Alongside his decision to set up the alternative Salon, Napoleon took measures to weaken the Académie’s hold over art education, and to boost the status of design and the decorative arts. [. . .] [H]is reasoning seems to have been that if a greater variety of artistic practices could be allowed to flourish, they would be able to meet the demands of an increasingly varied and expanding middle-class clientele with a multiplicity of pictorial and sculptural styles and products. (28)

Since Napoleon’s times, there has been a competitive spirit to produce something artistically new, but the actual implementation has taken some time. The middle class has been too conservative to appreciate the change. However, in Cottington’s words, such conservatism creates small social spaces that further nourish such activities. The reason for a Manet or a Courbet to develop against social derision and also be sustained in social



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spaces is due to their ability to provide an alternate practice to what Cottington describes as the rapid commercialisation of cultural practices. Glen Macleod in “The Visual Arts” illustrates how these derided artists, who have been frivolously called impressionists, go on to form the avantgarde or the anti-academic artists that gradually develop into PostImpressionists in the 1890s, Cubists, Abstractionists, Dadaists and Surrealists in the first four decades of the twentieth-century (194–195). Commercialisation of cultural practices also entails mass-production and hence mass-neutralisation of distinction between social classes, thus posing a definite threat to the dominant culture. Paradoxically, these artists sell their works to art dealers on the grounds of individual ingenuity (a virtue that stands out amidst mass-neutralisation of class differences). Their alternative practices have developed a market for modern art, and the development of various modern art movements also establishes the competitive nature within these art movements, thus continuing the culture of distinction and competition. They have been as “affirmative” (in Marcuse’s sense of the word) to capitalist market as scathing critiques of it. Thus, the alternative market camouflages the fear of losing traditional priority of the dominant culture in the face of a fast developing massculture. And traditional priority is synonymous with the dominant class or the bourgeoisie. The new culture the avant-garde artists develop is anti-academic, but nevertheless resistant to traditional interpretation by the masses. In other words, they rage war against traditional priority because that priority is getting commercialised: it has become everyone’s culture, earlier it was the culture of one section of society, predominantly the dominant. Thus, the only way that the bourgeoisie might display their difference is through their “unique” presentation of ideas that the masses should not follow nor produce. In other words, this “eliteness” is a requirement to set them apart from the uncultivated and mechanised approach of the masses. The avantgarde becomes a select higher breed that is estranged from the traditionally educated masses. However, they use a double-edged sword to masspublicise their creation of a new culture, while maintaining their art as esoteric, exclusive and elite. Cottington writes: Marinetti’s ‘Founding Manifesto of Futurism’ was published in February 1909 on the front page, no less, of Le Figaro, one of Paris’s leading daily papers of the time. But its real audience was private, and restricted. Those who had access to the meanings of its arts were inevitably few, and they came largely from the milieux within which this art was generated. (9)



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In this capacity, it would be interesting to see how the esoteric class deals with knowledge production in a system of wealth production, while claiming to be critiques of that same system.

3.4.2 The Avant-Garde Investment in Deferral of Meaning and Capital The existence of the avant-garde has heavily depended on rich patrons, gradually coming from the capitalist hub of the United States with the turn of the century. The advertisement and publication of manifestoes have created a public buzz in which the masses ironically hold the avant-garde artist as their new cultural hero fighting for their rights and betterment. Cottington however extrapolates from their heroic demonstrations in their manifestoes and advertisements of their ingenious creativity and erratic personal lives, the exclusion of one half of that society from their coterie, including women. Their heroic newness continues that very romantic tradition of the heroic individual artist: the heroism is more if their products are even more original and non-massy. In their fight for cultural supremacy, Cottington notes how “scores of artistic and literary ‘isms’” have been established and “[they] functioned as aesthetic trademarks, unrecognized (indeed ridiculed) in the mainstream, but sanctioned by this emergent ‘avant-garde’” (18). Social legislation of their existence comes from their own creed, which they also develop in order to survive: for instance, the Imagist group supports the art movement on Imagism, or they critique another movement, say, Futurism, and in the process of such criticism, Futurism gets accepted as a credible art movement. Lawrence Rainey in “The Cultural Economy of Modernism” suggests how economic legislation comes from “an elite of patron-investors” who have replaced the earlier aristocratic “patron-saloniers” (43). Moreover, the economic market for such rare products has been affecting a further division in commodity culture. He describes how the patrons with their endowments create spaces, even if small; and those spaces become submarkets of rare art works. There develops a new value of commodities whose “worth is deferred or sublated into the future as investment [. . .]” (44), just like my understanding of Greenberg’s avant-garde interpretations of “pure” art as deferred or possible meanings not yet realised. This allows the avant-gardes to be free from immediate commodity fetishisation, which they “seem” to critique by means of their demonstrated alienation from the capitalist market; but which, by virtue of their (artworks’) ability to be a future investment, also defers their capitalist exchange existence into the future. In Rainey’s words:



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It is important to note here that Greenberg is American, and as stated earlier, the avant-garde patrons mostly came from the United States; all these factors have an important part to play in the larger AmericanEuropean political conflict of the time, just like Lessing in the BritishGerman-French conflict and Pater in the British social conflicts of those times. Greenberg’s problem is that his aesthetic position is “thoroughly intertwined with his stake in the cultural politics of the New York art world of the 1940s through to the 1960s [. . .]” as professed by Richard Hooker in “Thoedor Adorno (1903–69)” (3). Beyond the nineteen-forties, Greenberg’s analyses may be examined in the light of Marcuse’s philosophical reorientation of American liberal politics. The following section will do just that.

3.5 Greenberg, Abstract Expressionism, and American Politics I need to review the New York avant-garde, which has developed, as per Macleod’s records in “The Visual Arts”, in the presence of French artists who have been in exile due to the outbreak of the First World War. Cottington adds that greater knowledge of contemporary art comes from “scores of [. . .] celebrated figures” who “arrived in New York through the 1930s and into the 1940s in flight from Nazism and Fascism” (30–31). While Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism and various other “isms” have already been in progress in the garb of the European avant-garde movement, the 1937 Museum of Non-Objective Art or the MoMA in New York emerges as the headquarters of the American avant-garde movement of Abstract Expressionism. And Clement Greenberg along with Harold Rosenberg emerges as the celebrated critic who writes about these artists and in turn makes sure that such movements flourish (Cottington 32). Interestingly, New York emerges as the home of the exiled artists who have fled from communist and fascist regimes. Thus, New York begins to give hope of freedom of expression in these parts, which have been earlier denied to them in their home towns for their alleged critique of their home



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institutions, proclamations and aesthetics. The American non-objective avant-garde arts, on the other hand, find newer forms of individual expressions, like in the case of the American Abstract Expressionism movement championed by Jackson Pollock. Thus, Greenberg as the “newer Laocoön” promotes the American avant-garde. The mythical Laocoön is a figure who visualises truth, which no one else could see. Thus, he stands for the unrecognised visionary who wishes to protect his community from extinction at the hands of the enemy by giving up his life. I argue that Greenberg’s “pure” avant-garde is the newer Laocoön that would protect the dying bourgeois culture, or what T. J. Clark in “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art” (1982) describes as attempts to avoid succumbing to mass-culture. The development of mass-culture is heightened in the Great Depression of the thirties, wherein Clark argues that there emerges [. . .] a leveling-down, a squeezing-out of previous bourgeois élites, a narrowing of distance between class and class and between fractions of the same class. In this case, the distance largely disappears between bourgeois intelligentsia and unintelligentsia [. . .]. (148)

Thus, Greenberg operates at a time when bourgeois culture is at risk. I compared the value of money and taste in Section 1.6.2.2 of Chapter One. Now I endeavour to compare artistic media with capital. The medium of art as the only concrete physical base like concrete money is raised to the level of artistic value like that of economic value, such that the medium becomes the greatest measure of all the arts. However, by virtue of a capitalist system, work is done by lower classes, while the owners of the systems of production gain wealth. For Lessing, the arbitrary signs by virtue of their social ontologies profit in imagination, while the visual arts by virtue of their physicality slave to resist the same in order to gain imaginative value: the value of the medium is thus inversely proportional to imaginative value. Greenberg alters Lessing’s activities by proclaiming that social signs are proxies to conventional imagination and hence available to an entire society (mass-culture). Rather, the non-imitative physicality of the visual art becomes a new proxy for a new idea yet to be vulgarised by mass-culture, since the meaning of the idea is deferred in its possibilities of development of infinite ideas. The physicality of the art form gains more imagination. The abstraction thus holds the power of newer cultural epistemologies. And literalness is now condemned to the position of the lower class or rather the unclassified masses, and the visual becomes the new elite. But it is an elite because of its proximity with the incorporeal, the abstract, and hence is mental labour all over again.



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If Lessing’s aesthetic is defined as that of an international diplomat, Greenberg has been unanimously declared as an American loyalist. In fact, beyond 1940s and the Second World War, the economic cold war between the US and the Soviet Union has allowed many communist artists to flee from the Soviet and freely express themselves in the US through their artistic practices. The politics of liberal democracy practised by the US in its allowance of creative freedom in the movement of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s is also its ploy to establish the Soviet Union as the enemy of creative freedom. Politically thus Abstract Expressionism becomes “proxy” for Americanism; and Americanism stands for free will and individual experience and freedom of creation. Abstract Expressionism, while being touted as freedom of individual subjective experience or artistic creation, also involves the politicisation of the “individual” as the representative of American culture through its institutionalised methods of publicity: Life magazine advertises: “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” (qtd. in Cottington 90–91). The artist becomes the prototype of culture itself, all over again; and what the artist stands for is the Americanism of his nation; thus Americanism becomes the prototype for all as well. Art is again used as a political institution such that the dominant forces of representation depend on the individual. For Greenberg, the European avant-garde movements, like Dadaism and Surrealism in particular, succumbed to communist and fascist regimes, because of their final subservience to larger political literalness; Greenberg addresses them as “kitsch” in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and also declares them to be “self-publicizing” and “stunt loving” in his essay titled “Surrealist Painting” (1944), as chronicled in Barlow (149, 151–153). Hence, his valorisation of “pure” and non-objective art (Dadaists use mass-produced objects as art works, and Surrealists use the method of automatism, which is the “seemingly” involuntary mode of expression) becomes the modus operandi for the newer avant-garde movement that begins in the United States. But the “pure” art strategy further claims another critic in his efforts to purify art from political affects. Greenberg succumbs to his criticism on national regressive arts in his denial of the same for American Abstract Expressionism. The Great Depression of the 1930s arouses the fear of an economic collapse in such a manner that European artists like Auden lament over the death of intellectualism with the rise of mass-culture. Thus, intellectualism becomes a copyright of bourgeois domination. Contrary to Auden’s lamentations, Greenberg advocates the “fallacy” of intellectualism and paradoxically proposes the alternate form of intellectualism again—the development of non-representational arts—to combat a disappearing



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elitism that is consciously paraded by the avant-garde as mass-culture. Beyond the Second World War however, the globe gets divided between the capitalist regime of the US and the Communist regime of the Soviet Union. In such a scenario, Auden’s lamentations become obsolete and Greenberg’s advocacy of non-representational arts in the form of Abstract Expressionism becomes an important political tool for a new America coming out of the mire of the World Wars. The tool is used to institutionalise mass-culture, since nineteenth-century class distinctions are no longer a reality of that kind in a post World War scenario. Mid- and late twentieth-centuries witness a society that is monopolised by technology. A technologically superior society seems to be a society of no contradiction, because it almost wipes the class characteristics of the bourgeoisie and the working class of the nineteenth-century, and gives birth to a “seemingly” cohesive world of affluence and homogenisation, which is strategically and politically contained. The highly advanced cultures are always more affluent with major technological profusions; a position vehemently put forward by Marcuse in his introductions and prefaces to some of his seminal writings on society and civilization (particularly One-Dimensional Man, and Eros and Civilization amidst others). In the event of various cataclysmic convolutions in the social, material and cultural scenario of the nineteen hundreds, and particularly in the aftermath of the post-fascist wars, the devastating effects of the Vietnam war, and the subsequent assassination of cultural icons of the likes of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the American youth of the sixties develop a growing restlessness towards and awareness of the power tactics of the Government. The younger generation wakes up to the horror of the Vietnam War; a war that is also perceived as a shield to protect the capitalist interests of an older generation. It is no surprise that Marcuse’s interpretation of the “false consciousness” of American democracy makes him the radical West Wind for the disgruntled youth and their resentment of the Vietnam debacle: “The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind” (lines 69–70)?102 Through Marcuse’s critical studies of post-war American politics, liberal democracy of the sixties may be interpreted as a veil to conceal the anxiety of a past generation of capitalists, fascists, and materialists to protect their totalitarian desires from the wings of changes that experiences of scarcity and need would inexorably propel. Thus, their intention has been to use technological advancement as a means to change the experience of scarcity into a pseudo-abundance state, while simultaneously preparing under-developed places like the Congo (which could be easily erased out



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of the maps) as potential military targets. Marcuse critiques the powerful democratic politician who actually disappears behind the technological shroud of productive and destructive apparatus, which he/she actually controls. Marcuse interprets the US popularisation of mass-culture as a political tool that institutionalises those very masses against the Soviet. The farce of homogenisation as a political device is possible through technology that also subsumes contradictions in the face of destructive nature of wars. He argues that this technological homogenisation of contradictions makes humankind “uni-dimensional”. This is evident in his introduction to OneDimensional Man (1964), the chapter which he significantly and reflectively subtitles “The Paralysis of Criticism: Society without Opposition”. In Eros and Civilization (1956), he argues that the resulting unity of the masses is also a unity for preparation of military excellence that also acts as safeguard against the enemy of their nation. Thus, unnatural environment of anticipation of the expected war represses the desire to emerge from a technical fog and realise that the needs fulfilled by technology and affluence are in fact needs inoculated into the individual by the powerful and the affluent for their productive longevity: the advanced, the affluent, and the technical are the politically dominant tyrants; their supposedly democratic rhetoric is a cultural diplomacy of lingering totalitarian and capitalist desires. Since terror in the form of figures, who had emerged in the war periods as romantic and revolutionary individuals and later went on to be proclaimed as autocratic evils (like Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini) was a recent past; now technology as terror minus these autocrats is the new ruler. Hence, the ostensible democratic powers that advance an era of sophisticated mechanisation, also kindles the greatest contradiction: while power technique camouflages the notorious individual, “true consciousness” is diluted when making individual choices; personal choices are camouflages of political choices, since choices are made for them by their chosen social powers. In the light of the argument above, Michaelz Rynn in the web article titled “Jackson Pollock and Marxism” (2009) writes: Pollock revolutionised American painting with his technique of application, in which he dripped, splashed and poured paint onto a large canvas on the floor, eschewing traditional methods of application such as the paintbrush (although he did use paintbrushes to drip and flick paint, the brush never touched the canvas) and the practice of using an easel.



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The free painting style has been conveniently used by America to represent its freedom and liberality to the whole world to justify its freedom of expression that is allowed to every subject rather than the “regimented, traditional and narrow social realist work that Soviet artists were being commissioned to paint [. . .]” (Michaelz). Barlow also chronicles Greenberg’s promotion of Abstract Expressionism as a political means that furthers the “institutionalization of Abstract Expressionism” and protects “the dominance of American Modernist art in the immediate post-war period” (“Clement Greenberg” 149). To further his cause, Greenberg rejects European avant-garde movements like Dadaism, Surrealism, and even post-war Popular Art on the grounds of “dogmatic advocacy of abstraction” (Barlow 149), which he (Greenberg) also terms “kitsch” and considers that as an extension of political subservience (I have repeated the point here). He perceives “kitsch” as “an almost inescapable characteristic of mass culture in modern conditions” (Barlow 150). He argues that Stalinism and Fascism use “kitsch” for propagation (Barlow 150). He further argues that “kitsch” is the consumer’s mechanised condition of passive comprehension of the “kitsch” effects without “self-conscious explorations of [the] cause” (Barlow 150) of the existence of that “kitsch”. In contrast to “kitsch”, he proposes that American Abstract Art is non-objective art and does not imitate any other referent; unlike Dadaist art objects that use masspopularised daily objects like wheels or urinals, or Surrealist art that owes its existence to the unconscious yet conditioned literalness of the “self”. In the Laocoön essay, Greenberg shows how “pure” avant-garde is a historical development, but like Kantian judgement of taste, “pure” art must be judged not for any purpose, but for itself (Barlow 151). But the concept of the “pure” that Greenberg praises is as politicised by American politics as the European politicisation of their avant-garde arts. To put it more simplistically, the general American public, which has now overtaken the early capitalist category of working class community, are made to feel that they could paint modern paintings as well, which is very different from what Benjamin in “Mechanical Reproduction” describes as the kind of “aura” and “awe” that a traditional artistic masterpiece creates in the consciousness of the public: “I cannot achieve this, the artist is a genius”. Contrary to the traditional “aura”, American Abstract Art with its colourful expressions on the canvas is subjective and presents individual expressions of freedom; freedom from every social, political, religious, economic and even historical constrains. The free drips do not stand for any deciphered cultural meaning, yet it vibrates with action. What Greenberg however would not admit is the political subtext:



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to recreate a new culture that can own a world that has come out scathed from the World Wars, and the country that did come out with limited scathing, and limited baggage of propagandist intellectualism and institutionalisation, now attempts to own a new culture and a new era with a new intellectualism, strategically propagated as different from the Fascist and Stalinist forms of intellectualism. If Michaelz writes that [. . .] Pollock’s skill is not the same as in realistically portraying someone in a portrait but it is still skill in manipulating the paint and creating something which is identifiably his own [. . .],

then America is probably exercising its skill as different from Europe and its culture, but it is still “skill” in that it manipulates the possession of capital and creates something which is identifiable as its own. That America has no culture is its culture and hence its “subject matter”. It has the maximum buying power and houses most of the artists and their art works that originated in Europe, thus establishing its liberal nature to the whole world, and yet manipulating the whole world in turn. Thus, Greenberg is as much subservient to politics as he accused “kitsch” to be.

3.6 Conclusion: Lessing and Greenberg in Defence of Traditional Priority I have attempted to understand Lessing’s valorisation of the verbal as his support for a social linguistic community, and the community in Lessing’s times may be seen as synonymous with the dominant culture. On a similar note, Greenberg writes: Lessing, in his Laokoon [sic] [. . .], recognized the presence of a practical as well as a theoretical confusion of the arts. But he saw its ill effects exclusively in terms of literature and his opinions on plastic art only exemplify the typical misconceptions of his age. (298)

Greenberg, in no uncertain terms, declares that literature has been the dominant art form of bourgeois society of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries (297–298). I contend that with Greenberg also, the concept of “purity” of the arts, particularly the visual, is as much an endeavour to protect traditional priorities by creating new traditions as distinct from mass-traditions. He prepares a historical medium for interpretation of artistic culture, thus refuting his own position of “pure” art or art that is free of representational role: history is representational as well, and Greenberg forgets to acknowledge that in the context of “pure”



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abstract art. He starts as a historian, but in his Kantian position of judgement of “pure” art, like pure beauty, he commits the same mistake that Mitchell accuses Kant of having committed: the problem of transcending beyond the world of desires is as a method as much a part of the world of desires as its stand against that world. In this regard, the critic as a law-giver in Lessing transforms into a creator of culture and hence an artist and cultural historian in Greenberg. In the process, I have discovered that both Lessing and Greenberg and their recounting of the struggle between the verbal and the visual arts are the proxies for a Laocoön struggling to save his children (by extension, traditional priorities) in a particular history of acknowledgement of limits.





CHAPTER FOUR ART AND BEYOND

4.1 Greenberg and his Contemporaries In the preceding chapters, the changing role of the intellectual has been placed within the historical framework that begins with Lessing and culminates with the late-Lessing position in Greenberg. It is therefore necessary to focus on the function of the intellectual as has been done with Lessing, Pater and Greenberg in order to establish connections between intellectual models and socio-economic practices of their times. Lessing, Pater and Greenberg have played the role of a newer Laocoön again and again in order to protect their traditional priorities in innovative ways. In this chapter I shall raise the question of political engagement—or disengagement—of the social category of an intellectual in the light of my discussions on Lessing, Pater and Greenberg. And for this purpose, I need to go to Auden, Greenberg’s contemporary, who has an interesting position that further highlights Greenberg’s contribution in defence of traditional priorities in newer ways.

4.2 Rethinking “artistic labour” in the Myth of Icarus in Ovid, Bruegel and Auden103 Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1939) is a lyric, which has been written between the twentieth-century Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. It is an intertext in the form of a commentary on Bruegel’s sixteenthcentury landscape painting titled Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558), painted amidst the growing economic and religious tussle of the sixteenthcentury Spanish-Dutch Civil War. Bruegel’s is also a visual rendition of the Roman and almost Medieval epic of Ovid in his Ars Amatoria/The Art of Love (1 BC) and Metamorphoses (1 AD–8 AD), written during Augustinian imperialism. And all these artistic forms written amidst severe political upheavals recount the story of the Greek myth of Icarus in their own ways. Interestingly, their texts can be seen as events in the



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history of European civilization that underscore the relationship between technological and artistic manifestations as interrelated human practices.

4.2.1 Ovid: The Crook and the Wax Wings The Greek myth of Icarus features in two of Ovid’s famous works; Book II of Ars Amatoria,104 and Book VIII of Metamorphoses as well as in Virgil’s The Aeneid (19 BC), Book VII. While Virgil concentrates on Daedalus and his story, what makes Ovid stand out is his inclusion of some “extra” characters who get replayed in Bruegel and Auden in major ways: apart from presenting Icarus, Daedalus and other characters who are necessary to the plot of the myth, the Ovid texts also present, even if only briefly, “minor” and “ordinary” characters such as the shepherd, the angler and the ploughman. Such characters are missing in Virgil’s narration. I concentrate on Ovid in order to develop the desired link between Ovid’s “extra” characters and Bruegel’s “major” characters (Bruegel portrays Ovid’s “minor” characters more prominently) and both Ovid’s “minor” and Bruegel’s “major” characters, the ploughman in particular, get majorly critiqued in Auden’s. Thus, my interest in Ovid’s depiction of Daedalus and Icarus is strategic: I find a way to connect them (Ovid, Bruegel and Auden) beyond the obvious coincidences of subject matter. Virgil’s description of the Daedalus story does have significance when compared to Ovid’s, but that would form a separate thesis. However, Ovid’s interest in the “minor” rural characters has some significance when compared to Virgil’s epic-eulogy of rural labour. A brief comparison between both in this regard would help me to contextualise Ovid and his possible intentions for such narrative divergence in the light of his difference from his senior contemporary Virgil, who has already composed The Georgics by 29 BC—an epic that eulogises rural labour. I need to understand Virgil and The Georgics a little better in order to do justice to Ovid’s presentation of rural labour. L. P. Wilkinson in his introduction to The Georgics discusses the rural conditions of Virgil’s Rome. The Roman Empire has been heavily dependent on agricultural taxes for its revenue. Thus, the role of a farmer is very important for its national economy. But the role of the emperor is far greater in holding together huge estates of conquered land. While The Georgics is a treatise on farming, it also marks the hope of Caesar’s “virtuous” emperorship, which would soon begin in 27 BC. The Roman Empire has been facing political turmoil for long periods, with subsequent annexations and simultaneous loss of agricultural estates. With the triumph of Caesar, there seems to be a promise of safety of ownership



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over property in otherwise hugely disoriented Roman territories. The sentiment is well expressed in Book 4 of The Georgics: This song of the husbandry of crops and beasts And fruit-trees I was singing while great Caesar Was thundering beside the deep Euphrates In war, victoriously for grateful peoples 105 Appointing laws and setting his course for Heaven. (lines 558–562)

That “great Caesar” is often repeated is a reflection of faith that Virgil has in the future emperor of Rome. In the light of my interpretation, I like to quote Markman Ellis from “‘Incessant Labour’: Georgic Poetry and the Problem of Slavery”: Despite Virgil’s declaration in the opening line’s invocation to the muse that his poem is “simply” about agriculture, it offers the reader a complex and sophisticated account of contemporary Roman politics and culture. Written against a time of great political instability after the death of Caesar [Julius], Virgil’s poem looks forward to the restored civic order and stability (the peace of Augustus) by describing the pacific virtues of rural life and manners. [. . .] [T]he bucolic delights of Roman rural life depicted in the Georgics depended on the labour of slaves. (46) (double quotes also mine)

It is interesting to pause here and note how the idea of labour, particularly farming, has been given a debatable stance in Renaissance England. Anthony Low in The Georgic Revolution (1985) argues that between 1500 and 1700, British literature depicts an aristocratic disdain for manual labour in the pastoral or picturesque accounts of countryside and agricultural scenes; a disdain that gradually changes in the wake of agricultural reforms discussed in the works of gentlemanly reformers like Arthur Young. Low claims that Virgil’s Georgics is the dominant literary influence on such a change, which he also connects with the Protestant ethics of work or the Christian empathy with the georgic. Or, in Ellis’s opinion, georgic becomes a major literary mode of that time that celebrates “the representation of labour (with toil and industry), and embeds a particular notion of the value of labour [. . .]” (45). But the political motive in Virgil’s Georgics does not go unread. Similarly, the “intensely ideological view” of such poetic forms and their idyllic content in the literature of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries has underlying tensions that separate “labour of slave” from that of “free workers [. . .]” (Ellis 46). For instance, Ellis depicts how James Grainger’s poem The Sugar-Cane (1764) in its very georgic form and content also



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describes “the wealth and prosperity that flows from industrious application to sugar husbandry”, and in the process “rationalizes” the need for slavery (46).106 In effect, Ellis chronicles the efforts of literary giants like Dryden and his translation of Virgil in 1697, as also mentioned by Low; or the likes of Alastair Fowler, who claims that the georgic is “‘the most creative mode’ of eighteenth-century poetry” (46), or John Phillips and his Cyder (1708), John Dyer and The Fleece (1757), and James Grainger and The Sugar-Cane (1764), to name a few. The interesting point is the “change” of attitude from an aristocratic disdain towards labour, as mentioned by Low, to the idyllic eulogy celebrated by Fowler, Phillips, Dyer or Grainger. Ellis argues: To an important extent, the revival of interest in the genre reflects its patriotic ‘Augustan’ attitudes: a celebration of the return of peace after civil unrest, in which the world of agriculture implies both a healthful attitude to work, and a culture of stable civility. Grainger wrote immediately after the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, which had seen the extent of British colonial possessions greatly extended. [. . .]. Describing this extraordinary growth (just before the rebellion of the thirteen North American colonies), the geographer John Entick estimated that: ‘The British Empire is arrived at that height of Power and Glory, to which none of the States and Monarchies upon Earth could ever lay the like Claim. Rome, in all her Grandeur, did not equal Great Britain; either in Constitution, Dominion, Commerce, Riches, or Strength.’ [. . .]. Pursuing the Augustan analogy (that the British Empire could be modelled felicitously on the Roman), the georgic was an appropriate mode to describe the prosperity and grandeur of the British Empire. [. . .]. (46–47)

Low argues that there has been a gradual development of the georgic concept of virtuous labour with the rise of new sciences, religious reform movements and the Civil War and parliament system (I interpret this development as the rise of the bourgeois political power). It is more interesting to note that Bruegel’s rendition of the Icarus and Daedalus myth may be seen as a catalogue of new agricultural technologies: for instance, I interpret the Breugelian plough as different from the earlier versions of ploughs used.107 I have already argued that the ruling class has used literature as a strategic tool to maintain political order in Section 2.5 of Chapter Two. While such a discussion has been more elaborate in my interpretation of the nineteenth-century British social system, my analysis of the lower classes and their internal divisions on the basis of skilled and unskilled labour is closely associated with Low’s analysis of the “georgic revolution” or Ellis’s analysis of the politics of the abolition of slavery in and around that period.



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Low shows that georgic kind of rigorous labour has been appraised as virtuous and significant in even canonical writers like Spencer or Milton, to name a few from Low’s catholic list. In Low’s words: [. . .] georgic is a mode that stresses the value of intensive and persistent labor against hardships and difficulties; that it differs from pastoral because it emphasizes work instead of ease; that it differs from epic because it emphasizes planting and building instead of killing and destruction; and that it is preeminently the mode suited to the establishment of civilization and the founding of nations. (12)

In other words, the “founding of nations” is an important motive in both ancient Georgics (we already know from Wilkinson’s that farming is important for Roman politics) and the “modern” georgic movement, particularly with the emergence of economic change and political conflicts between nations and systems of government, between monarchy and democracy in the seventeenth-century civil wars. In fact, Annabelle Patterson in “Hard Pastoral: Frost, Wordsworth, and Modernist Poetics” insists on more direct political query concerning: [. . .] the rather subtle contributions to the counter-revolutionary programs of the British government, promoting a conservative ideology based on the ‘georgic’ values of hard work (in others), land-ownership as a proof of worth [. . .], and above all the premise that hardship is to be countered by personal ‘Resolution and Independence’ rather than social meliorism. (74)

The propagation of georgic virtues may be seen as political means to develop a necessary relation between efficiency and nationalism. Rachel Crawford, apart from intersecting Low and Patterson in “English Georgic and British Nationhood” (1998), also associates Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics in 1697 with “the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, which made the notion of Great Britain possible” (124). The georgic, therefore, may be interpreted as a political form of propagation of nationhood at a time when economic and trade superiority decides a nation’s political position amidst competition. Though my concentration has meandered into Renaissance georgic politics with Low, Ellis, Patterson and Rachael Crawford, the significance of such politics influences my “pattern” of interpretation of the same in Ovid, Bruegel and Auden. It is Low who sets the “pattern” of argument: he recognises social agenda in literature. I am not interested in the Renaissance and the reintegration of georgic tradition in its literature. But I am interested in the methodology that Low has used to develop a social politics from Virgil to Milton. In the light of Low’s, Patterson’s and even Ellis’s work, I intend to understand



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the labour angle as it emerges in Ovid, Bruegel and Auden. Now, I am interested in the capacity in which Ovid transforms Virgil’s gospel of Caesar in the Georgics into a critical reflection on the Augustinian society. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there is an “angler”, a “mountain-shepherd” and a “plowman” (viii. lines 217–219).108 The shepherd is seen as stooping on his “crook” (viii. line 218)109 which is a tool used to tend the sheep. But the act of tending is not described. Similarly, the focus is on the angler who is presented at his workplace, which is beside the brook, and not on the fishing activity, of which he must be a part. The image of the worker in general seems to be inclusive of the tools and the work, unlike the image of the labourer in a capitalist society. Interestingly, the workers are shown not working but looking up at the flight of Daedalus and Icarus with awe. The stupor brought about in the lives of the workers by the miraculous flight may be a narrative technique to highlight the extraordinariness of the flying feat. The quality of extraordinariness is stretched to qualify the tools used as well. Daedalus’s instrument of flight conspicuously stands out when compared to the shepherd’s crook, since Ovid takes pains to describe the making of the wax wings, unlike a casual passing mention of the crook. Moreover, the wax wings are created and utilised by “only” extraordinary individuals, like Daedalus and his son. Ovid calls Daedalus the “famous architect” (viii. line 161).110 There are, however, no eulogising adjectives for the angler, the “lonely” shepherd (viii. line 218),111 or the ploughman. Daedalus, celebrated for his architectural skills, creates “magical” wax wings for both his son and himself. Thus, even in a myth, miracles seem particular to the domain of the “celebrated”, while ploughing, fishing, and farming are ordinary activities performed by ordinary people with ordinary tools. There seems to be a hierarchy in the social status of work determined by a hierarchy of the social position of the worker along with social valorisation of the particular tool used. Furthermore, I find that there is a hereditary transfer of tool and its attached social status; only Icarus gets the wings. Marcuse in “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1968) discusses both Plato and Aristotle and how they plead for “ontological classifications” between “highest truths” and “necessary” actions of life (91–92). The considerations of beauty and ethics as “highest truths” are the intellectual activities of privileged members of the society like the philosophers, as discussed in Chapter One in Section 1.3.1 (the discussion on Plato). In a different way, Daedalus is socially privileged by virtue of the higher status of his work—he is a skilful designer and inventor patronised by the king;



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the angler, the shepherd, and the ploughman belong to the rural section of society that perform the “necessary” functions of life. I find the image of a craftsman as well as that of an artist in the figure of Daedalus: Ovid calls Daedalus a “craftsman” (viii. line 205)112 as well as the inventor of “unimagined arts” (viii. line 189).113 Similarly, the wax wings function both as tools (Icarus uses them to fly) as well as an art work (the poet calls them “unimagined arts”). On the one hand, the manufacture of the tools is meticulously described (viii. lines 191–198).114 On the other, the same tools have the transforming power of “unimagined arts” that change “nature’s laws” (viii. lines 189–190),115 so that even wingless creatures can fly. Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977) defines technology as a mode of existence. Technology is not necessarily an “act of achieving”, but a “way of revealing”, a Heideggerian interpretation reinforced by Charles J. Sabatino in “A Heideggerian Reflection on the Prospects of Technology”. In Sabatino’s words, “revealing implies bringing something into the light of day [. . .]” (69). Thus, tools also have the power to reveal nature. But I am interested in the “need” for Ovid to call the wax wings “unimagined arts” and not merely restrict their functions to that of tools used for flight. Notwithstanding the failure of the tools (the wings melt), the wax wings as “unimagined arts” may be seen as illuminating the extraordinariness of nature. In other words, Ovid seems to foretell Heidegger’s notion of artistic emancipation; art reveals truths of nature.116 Here, the wax wings reveal the formlessness immanent within forms, thus disclosing the myriad forms of nature in a continuous state of flux. In Ovid, I notice the Heideggerian separation of technology from the arts by virtue of their tasks. Though both tools and works of art are developed from nature, their similarities seem to end there. The wax wings are special because they are “unimagined arts” and not merely socially useful functions; they have socially unimagined natural powers, something the crook has lost the moment it gets typecast as a fixed social use such that we no longer look at the nature of its materiality with wonder. Thus in Ovid the crook camouflages its materiality as a social function, while the wax wings reveal the transforming power of natural materials. Charles F. Ahern in “Daedalus and Icarus in the Ars Amatoria” (1989) describes the fall of Icarus into the seas (let me also say the melting of the wax wings) as a metaphor for descending into formlessness. Ovid perhaps suggests that every form is an illusion, a constructed structure, and the boundaries of those structures are constructed limits of art. The art form is the skill of revelation, strategically revealing space and function that is open to metamorphose into another form. In this regard, Ovid uses the



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epic form of art to reveal the underlying nature of social tensions of his times, which Virgil, by virtue of the imperial subtext, completely bypasses. Wilkinson questions The Georgics, when he says: “Indeed slavery, the basis of Italian [Roman] agriculture in general, is, astonishingly, hardly mentioned in the Georgics” (22). Thus, Virgil’s art camouflages its imperial function in the form of an aesthetic representation, while Ovid’s reveals the political strategies of his times. This is an important point when contrasted with Lessing’s distinctions passed for physical laws of nature and placed above political strategies. The relation between social politics and aesthetic representation becomes important. Virgil uses the literary form of the epic to instruct universal morals laws. In the Icarus myth, fate and laws of morality function like “didactic epics”.117 We cannot escape the Icarus myth as a serious meditation on pain and suffering that result from moral alienation: Icarus disobeys his father’s warnings; he commits a folly; he is alienated from society to die. Even privileged artists who perform miracles are not spared by fate when moral restrictions on human conduct are overstepped. The story of the fate is well maintained in both Virgil’s depiction of Daedalus in the The Aeneid and Ovid. But I must remember that unlike Virgil, Ovid has been banished from Rome because of his apparent follies.118 Most historians propose that Ovid propagates adultery in his works like Ars Amatoria.119 Much earlier, in 17 BC, the Lex Julia de Adulteriis Coërcendis (adultery punished by banishment)120 has had Caesar’s own daughter Julia banished to the island of Pandateria.121 So, whether fate in Ovid’s presentation of the Icarus myth is suggestive of Augustinian imperialism is debatable. However, the Augustinian laws eulogised by Virgil in the Georgics (“Appointing laws and setting his course for Heaven”) may be interpreted as strategic political tools for the sustenance of totalitarian regime. I interpret Ovid’s use of the epic form as an artistic (aesthetic) means to question rather than universalise the purposive legitimacy of fixed social spaces granted by didactic Julian (Augustinian) laws, something I could not have attempted in Virgil. For instance, the act of adultery is criticised under Julian laws precisely because it proves to be dangerous to the status of legal citizenship. The Julian laws of marriage, behind the camouflage of morality, are aimed at increasing births of legal Roman citizens. There are back-up laws in the form of the 18 BC Lex Lulia de Maritandis Ordinibus122 that restrict marriage across social classes, so that there are more upper class native Romans. The Roman political strategy involves the act of bestowing Roman citizenship to strategic subjects. Slaves are properties with no rights, and they pay no taxes. Strategically, some slaves are freed; they as “freedmen”



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hold lands and pay taxes to the emperor. Hence, the rights given to freed slaves are for commerce. The Right of Rex Julia de Civitate Latinus et sociis danda (proposed by Julius Caesar in 90 BC, much before Caesar)123 offers Roman citizenship to all those who did not raise weapons against Rome in civil wars. In the writings of the famous Roman orator Cicero, we come across the Jus Gentium (3rd century BC), a law for the legal recognition of provincial and foreign subjects. Gordon E. Sherman in his “Gus Gentium and International Law” (1918) writes: [Cicero] is referring rather to a system of praetorian jurisprudence which had slowly grown up, doubtless through many centuries, as a consequence of the actual necessities of Roman legal life, in whose commercial transactions the old actions of the strict civil law of the city had long failed to meet the demands of modern commerce, both among the citizens proper as well as amid the throngs of aliens (eregrine) who in ever-increasing numbers invaded Rome from Italy and more distant lands as well. (57–58)

Ovid himself belongs to an “equestrian”124 family, one of the wealthy business families of the Roman society, who are privileged to have specific Roman rights by virtue of their wealth. Note that Virgil, like Ovid, is not an original Roman citizen. He becomes one, and is later put to good use by Augustus, while Ovid is later exiled. Thus, Virgil’s art is used as a political tool to immortalise Caesar.125 I have seen how Lessing, Pater and Greenberg have used art criticism as political tools to protect their social priorities. On the other hand, it is possible to understand Ovid’s art as the revelation of the metamorphosis of forms of human practices that are passed for as artistic, technological and political didacticism.

4.2.2 Bruegel: Ploughing and Designing Bruegel’s 1558 painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a Renaissance representation of Ovid’s version of the Icarus tragedy (see Fig. 4-1 in the Appendices). The characters visible in the landscape are the working people and, interestingly, their locations and instruments of work as well. The ploughman, the shepherd, and the angler are distinguished; also the plough, the crook, and the fishing rod (the crook and the fishing rod probably not so prominently like the plough). The additional objects in the painting are the ships. John E. Coombes in his essay “Constructing the Icarus Myth” (1986) describes how Bruegel portrays two landscapes in the same painting—the Mediterranean Sea and the Flemish land of Netherlands. Donald Harreld, in his web article “Dutch Economy”126 states that the business of cloth industry and export flourishes in Flanders



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in the sixteenth-century Netherlands (see Bruegel’s juxtaposition of the shepherd and the woolly sheep along with the ships in the painting). Harreld tells us about the rise of the Baltic grain trade (see Bruegel’s tilled soil and the plough). He also writes that agriculture (see Bruegel’s ploughman in the forefront) along with animal husbandry (see Bruegel’s horse and sheep behind the ploughman) is the major foundation of sixteenth-century Dutch economy. The fishing industry (see Bruegel’s angler in the left corner of the canvas) also gives rise to Dutch shipping industry. The herring catch has its commercial counterpart in the shape of the herring buss, a “factory” ship. Harreld claims that such a ship has developed in the fifteenth-century (see Bruegel’s ships in Fig. 4-2 in the Appendices). Thus, the entire system of work is spatially represented in Bruegel by individual units of the work as well. Unlike Ovid, Bruegel’s workers are busy with their tasks. They do not stare with awe in their eyes, since the objects of aura are completely obliterated. I cannot see Daedalus in the painting. Perhaps there is a small indication of the flying feat when we look at what appears to be a ruminating shepherd (he seems to be looking up at a possible Daedalus), or a pair of legs disappearing into the waters in the extreme left corner of the canvas, which belongs to Icarus (we get to know that those legs belong to Icarus from the title of the painting).127 There is no extraordinary instrument like the wax wings; rather the painter painstakingly details instruments like the plough and the ships. In Bruegel, destiny, fate, and death are relegated to one portion while presenting the whole canvas of life. Each Bruegelian character appears to be oblivious at least partly of the mythical characters. The shepherd does look up, but that is all there is to that. The angler looks straight, but none of his “visible” features displays any reaction to the splash that must be so audible and so visible to him. There is a corpse lying near the furrowed field, but there is no suggestion of reaction from the ploughman. There are ragged rocks, but the ships show no signs of facing danger. Bruegel’s is a rendition of technological alienation unlike Ovid’s moral alienation. The Bruegelian farmer is depicted as strictly related to his labour and his tool but not to his other labouring companions. The shepherd does not seem to be in any form of relation with the ploughman, although they seem very close to each other. But all their productive work is related to the overall profit of the age. Thus, the painter seems to present the modern Flemish community as a society which provides for itself the material objects of its progress through the formation of a system of tools or technology. The purposeful juxtaposition of death and life in Bruegel does not go unread. There is a binary relation that infests Bruegel’s painting in



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particular: the plough and the skull, the ships and the rocks. Icarus represents the inevitable end of all human species—death. Icarus also represents the possible failure of technology. At the same time, the plough, the fishing rod, and the ships represent the strengthening market of a modern civilization. Moreover, a strengthening of market and technology entails the growth of ambition and possibilities of successful Icaruses who can finally make the flight. The ships are shown as on their way across the Mediterranean; while Icarus is shown drowning in the same waters. There is juxtaposition of hope and despair, success and failure. Icarus is the only life without his tool, and so his life is exterminated, or in the process of it. That a world without technology is incomprehensible is beginning to show. The resulting inequalities therefore seem to be between successful Icaruses and unsuccessful ones. There is a possibility of a paradox here. The predetermined hereditary order of Ovid’s times is gradually being wrecked by the modern policy of free commerce, with technology increasingly becoming available to all. But within the apparent sense of equality lies a more damaging form of inequality; there is a commercial, technical and performative hierarchy—the unsuccessful Icaruses are dismissed most effortlessly and without any hue and cry! If I consider the land in Bruegel’s painting as the material world (capital) and the ocean and sky as the imaginative world (art), the portrayal becomes even more poignant. Icarus is seen as part of the imaginative world in the painting. In Bruegel, the artistic representation of technology seems to be the dominant pictorial subject. The revelatory moment of art in Ovid’s Icarus seems destined for a small spatial exhibition (the drowning legs may be seen metaphorically as representing the artistic wax wings), while the practical value of technology becomes predominant. Interestingly, the worker with his tools emerges as the new significant character (unlike Ovid’s Daedalus), while the drowning legs function as the metaphoric representation of art that one should know but ignore. However, in a striking paradox, it is Bruegel’s “art” which “reveals” the worker and his tool as the main characters in the story. Bruegel’s is a landscape painting that comes at a time when Italian paintings of social and religious dignitaries are in vogue. Jane ten Brink Goldsmith in “Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Matter of Italy” (1992) informs us about the distinguishing characteristics of Italian paintings, viz., their grandeur of pictorial presentations and subject matters, as is evident in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and the others. These painters are patronised by various dignitaries who want to immortalise themselves through art, like Caesar has been through Virgil’s. The visual art in the form of paintings become a common source of



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spectacle in times of advertisements of possessions, (see “Sumptuary Laws” in Section 1.6.2.1 of Chapter One). Moreover, Italian artistic revolution propagates art as an intellectual activity; even their subject matters vary from grand biblical accounts (da Vinci’s The Last Supper) to illustration of great philosophers (Raphael’s The School of Athens). Goldsmith suggests that Bruegel conspicuously masquerades the grandness of Italian art works: he shows grand spatial distances of land, sky and oceans, rather than churches, palaces, banquet halls; he shows detailed spaces assigned to common working people unlike the fashionable concentration on the aristocrats. Bruegel’s period is the time of discoveries of new spaces and cartographies. While Italian artists are busy upgrading their social spaces in their self-advertisements of themselves as rebirths of the Greco-Roman grand narratives, Bruegel concentrates more on the representation of common working people or the peasants when painting such narratives. Goldsmith narrates Bruegel’s return to Antwerp from Italy in 1555 and how he begins his association with the printmaker and publisher Hieronymus Cock (205). Printers and publishers gradually replace the patronage system. Print technology has already become a major force of democratisation of information as against its monopolisation by the Catholic Church. Thus, landscape paintings become a metaphor for reinterpretation of natural spaces in the natural world. In this regard, Goldsmith quotes Dominicus Lampsonius, the Flemish Humanist: [. . .] the Netherlanders win praise for their landscapes, while the Italians excel in the representation of men and gods. [. . .] [T]he Italians have their brains in their heads, while the genius of Netherlands is in their hands. (208)

A good instance is Raphael’s 1509 painting The School of Athens (made for the philosophical section of Pope Julius II’s library, who is also Raphael’s patron128) when contrasted with Bruegel’s Landscape (see Fig. 4-3 in the Appendices). If the architectural space in The School of Athens is specifically prepared for the “brains” (the philosophers are lined up in every section of the painting), Bruegel’s landscape is a space for Ovid’s common people (the “hands”). The growing demand for portraits of the Italians and the desire to equate art with mathematical and scientific intelligence does imply conscious effort by the artists to distance themselves from “hands” or physical labour; a position well delineated in Section 1.6.1 of Chapter One. Bruegel is also mathematically precise in his detailed illustration of human and technological forms. Yet his choice of forms makes all the



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difference. Instead of Daedalus and Icarus, he details the working section of his society. In effect, it is the ploughman who tills the soil in various patterns. Bruegel seems to illustrate the labour of art as “craft”. See the demarcation of “art” and “craft” in Barnard’s analysis of the same in Section 1.6.1 of Chapter One and Section 2.3.1.2 of Chapter Two. While the Renaissance artists try to differentiate “art” from “craft” by virtue of the intellectual ability supposedly inherent in the arts, the Bruegel painting stands out for its obvious artistic presentation of manual labour. Alexander Nemerov in “The Flight of Form” (2005) develops a surrealist reading of Bruegel’s painting that “reveals” the birth of a new artist—the worker. In Nemerov’s words, Everything connected with Icarus reappears in the plowman’s space. The form of the ship is repeated in the plow and the blocky shape of the horse. Icarus’s legs, cut off by the water, match the splayed legs of the plowman cut off by his coat. [. . .]. These resonances, moreover, occur on the same horizontal plane. (799)

Thus in a Derridean sense, the “traces” on the soil left by the plough are a revelation of nature like the wax wings in Ovid. If the “splayed legs of the plowman” could be “Icarus’s legs”, the coat pleats on both sides of the ploughman could be the wax wings as well. The ploughman in Bruegel embodies a dialectical position; there seems to be a possibility of artistic emancipation from the feudal world and also a suggestion of technological hegemony in a fast emerging capitalist world.

4.2.3 Auden: The Ploughman and the Intellectual Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1939) is steeped in Bruegelian allusions (see Ex. 4-1 in the Appendices). The anonymous web article “Musee des Beaux Arts”129 along with Joseph Phelan’s on Bruegel130 and even Heffernan in Museum of Words (2004) has suggested that Auden’s phrase “miraculous birth” in the poem (line 6) refers to Bruegel’s 1566 painting The Census in Bethlehem available at Brussels Musée (Heffernan, Museum, 146). The Census painting situates the birth of Christ in the times of Augustus, who is adept in controlling his heterogeneous citizens through formal methods of tax consent. The painting depicts Joseph, who has to return to Bethlehem for the tax consent, with Mary. Towards the extreme right of the painting (see Fig. 4-4 in the Appendices), at the lower end, the tax business is visible. And towards the left, Phelan describes: “Then I notice a young woman on a horse led by a man on foot [Joseph]. The woman is almost hidden by her heavy winter clothing. But I realize



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this is Mary.” There is one tax ledger, yet he is in a position of power over two hundred people in the canvas (the number of people is proposed by Phelan). The power is with the fewer number and the majority is systematically controlled by that power. In a characteristic Bruegel style, the painting emphasises the everyday activities of common people rather than the event of the miraculous birth of Christ. The web article “Musee des Beaux Arts” and Heffernan (Museum of Words 146) further suggest that Auden’s line, “That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course [. . .]” (line 10) refers to Bruegel’s 1564 painting The Massacre of the Innocents or The Slaughter of the Innocents (see Fig. 4-5 in the Appendices and also Heffernan, Museum, 147). However, Heffernan does caution the reader when he points out that the painting is housed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorische Museum (Museum 147). He doubts the possibility of Auden to have “tacitly moved The Slaughter from Vienna to Brussels to join the other Breughels [sic] there in an imaginary exhibition hung for him alone” (147). Notwithstanding the anomaly of locality, I may interpret the artist’s depiction of the Biblical story of the children’s persecution by Herod (in the hope that one of them is Christ) as the sixteenth-century Spanish persecution of the Dutch. The anonymous web article “The Massacre of the Innocents”131 even identifies the bearded soldier in the middle of the massacre scene to be the aid of Philip II, Duke of Alba (see Fig. 4-6 in the Appendices), who in 1567 with his Spanish army and “Bloody Council” cruelly massacred many Dutch dissenters.132 For a massacre scene, the painting appears colourful, with no display of emotions, though Heffernan in Museum argues that “mothers are shown weeping for their slain or doomed infants while dogs indifferently leap about in the snow [. . .]” (147). The Bruegelian ambiguity is particularly reinforced by Auden when he says: “[. . .] the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree” (line 13). Though Heffernan claims that he hardly finds the torturers’s horses scratching their back in the painting (Museum 147), I do see several horses. The horses used in warfare become instruments of war, but they, on their own, look casual and appear innocent of the act of torture. What is visible then is the transition of natural resources into instruments of warfare used for suppressing dissenting masses. So the horses become precursors to war transport machines. Thus one may say that in the fight for survival, execution of methods of suppression seems to appear as natural as any other activity of life, as natural as a horse scratching its back against a tree. In this regard, I connect with Mitchell’s argument in favour of motives behind the process



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of naturalisation of laws by means of which even Lessing prescribes artistic limitations. Auden discusses the Icarus-Bruegel painting in the concluding lines of his poem. Heffernan again points out an anomaly. He argues that Auden has reduced the title of the painting—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus— into “Breughel’s [sic] Icarus” (Museum 149). He (Heffernan) states that there is another identical painting of Icarus in Brussels’s Van Buuren Museum like the one in Beaux Arts. However, there is one difference between both of them: the Van Buuren one has the winged Daedalus very much present in the painting, unlike the Beaux Arts one (Museum 149). The Van Buuren one shows what Ovid actually writes: agricultural men are staring at the winged creature. Notwithstanding this discrepancy, I concentrate on the one from the Beaux Art, since the title of the poem insists so. Moreover, Auden’s poem highlights the crowd’s nonchalant attitude towards Icarus, rather than discuss the presence of Daedalus. Auden’s poem does not merely describe Bruegel’s. The poet works persistently to recreate his contemporary Civil War in Bruegel’s. I interpret Auden’s image of the “expensive delicate ship” (line 19) as the transformation of Bruegelian ships into the German war marine ships, Kriegsmarine, or the light cruiser, the Köln. Machine culture has finally arrived, and the horses have disappeared. Moreover, I find Auden’s description of Icarus’s “white” leg (line 18) interesting in the context of the conflict between the Monarchy and the Anarchists (the democrats); the latter have been also called the “Red hordes”133 fighting against the monarch or the whites. Auden has been an ardent supporter of the democrats, and very much a communist at that particular time.134 While Auden uses colour to distinguish the commoners from the privileged, Ovid uses the emotion of aura associated with the artistic qualification of their tools to make the same distinction. I must recollect my analysis of Keats’s urn and Benjamin’s analysis of the loss of aura that I discussed in Section 3.2.2 of Chapter Three. Benjamin analyses the quality of aura that disappears in the wake of technological reproduction of the works of art. Bruegel’s world is the economic world in the wake of technology and its appendages: market, capital, wealth, profit; technology is no longer magical, but a necessity. Nevertheless, technology is still dependent on human labour. In Auden’s times, the Breugelian herring busses have been replaced by sophisticated war ships, which are operated by the press of a button. In this context, if we drift away from aura of the works of art, we might allow ourselves to discuss another form of “aura”; an aura camouflaged by technology. The paradox of technological “aura” starts when human species, who invented technology, become tools of



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technology, knowingly and even unknowingly. The replacement of manual labour by non-manual force has its consequences. Warships cause destruction, while the human individual operating the machine now replaces the torturer’s horse: he/she is innocent since he/she is alienated from the machine. I may recollect Marcuse and his theory of technology that creates the one-dimensional man from Section 3.5 of Chapter Three. The distinction between Ovid and Auden through Bruegel is striking here. The angler in Ovid stands for his tool; the ship (by extension, the machine) in Auden stands for a nation (German/Spanish monarchy); and Auden’s “ploughman” stands for the modern individual and his/her turning away from important political events. I must relocate Benjamin’s position on the aestheticisation of politics in the context of our interpretation of technological aura, which again is a takeoff from Marcuse’s analysis of the naturalisation of desires by technology. Caygill in Walter Benjamin argues that Benjamin’s analysis “rests on an alignment between fascist monumental self-presentation, aura and aestheticism” (92). In this context, let us look at Auden again. He writes during the era of fascism and is worried about the self-centredness of the ship: I may interpret the ship as 1. 2.

mercantile self-centeredness, or the Kriegsmarine.

But there is no depiction of aura in Auden: rather, there is depiction of naturalisation of even aura, whether that be aura of technology (no one stands and stares at the ship, but accepts it as the most natural occurrence like that of the scratching of the back of horses or that of the fall of Icarus), or aura of aesthetic (no one has time for what the “Old Masters” are saying). Yet, unlike Benjamin, Auden is not happy with the neutralisation of aura. He is against the self-centeredness of the ship; there is no doubt about it. But he argues for a similar self-centeredness in favour of the “Old Masters” and hence in favour of the category of art and the artist, and in the process in favour of himself and his breed. I can appreciate Auden’s argument in the poem in two ways. On the one hand, he seems to be against the closed and insulated walls of the museum and the limited boundaries of artistic presence. In a way, he is completely sardonic about the museum-goer’s twee reverence for the “Old Masters” in his depiction of the nonchalance of the world towards such reverence. Such a sardonic representation may be seen as parallel to Benjamin’s analysis of the loss of aura, as mentioned above. In other words, Auden is completely sardonic about the twee “aura” that the



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museum-goers grant the “Old Masters”. Contrary to such an interpretation of Auden, his sardonic criticism of the self-centredness of the ship or the ploughman might suggest his lament: the world has become oblivious about the “truth” the “Old Masters” say, a truth about the contemporary world. The conflict in Auden then is as follows. At one point, he argues in favour of the loss of aura of the artwork in the museum, and stresses the need for art to descend from its secluded and alienated realm and interact with the world, or in Caygill’s words, “if they are permeable and open, then the work is constantly in a process of transformation, becoming other than itself” (92). There is a need for the work of art and the artist to become more than a work of art or an artist. Is Auden against the autonomy of art and does he support the political function of an artist? But he also argues in favour of the eternal nature of truth as depicted by the “Old Masters”: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position [. . .]” (lines 1–3). That only the “Old Masters” know the truth; that only he (Auden) is able to appreciate that truth; that there is “only” one truth; that only the category of art is able to advertise such a truth; and that the ploughman and the ship do not know it or understand it or care for it; these interpretations also establish a seclusion of a certain breed of individuals who can see the truth. Auden is responsible for the aestheticisation of the category of the artist and his/her art, even if it is a permeable form of art beyond the museum. By universalising the content of the work of art, Auden does not allow for transformation of that content, or in Caygill’s words, “[i]f the borders of the work of art are impermeable and closed, then the work is immutable” (92). Here, the immutability comes because the truth function is allowed only to the category of art, and only intellectuals like the “Old Masters” and Auden and his likes appreciate it or may be even capable of producing it. I must also remember that “Musee” itself is actually a “galleria” poem about three paintings (and two museums, remember Heffernan), including also The Census at Bethlehem and The Slaughter of the Innocents along with the representation of the myth of Icarus, birth of Christ and slaughter by Herod. Thus, even Auden’s argument seems to rest on an alignment of “monumental selfpresentation, aura and aestheticism [. . .]” (Caygill 92), while seemingly opposing all of them: Auden presents himself as the “only” individual in the poem who understands the plight of Icarus and the “Old Masters”; he laments over that loss of reverence that the “Old Masters” should enjoy; he universalises truth as eternal (whether it is the sixteenth-century or the



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twentieth-century), and in the process also universalises art as the eternal carrier of truth values. In the light of the argument above, Auden’s Icarus is significant in many ways. Firstly, it is possible to interpret the public ignorance of Icarus’s fall as the public ignorance of political events. Auden witnesses the dawning of such political disengagement of common people in Bruegel’s paintings done centuries before his time. I repeat: he recommends the works of the “Old Masters” (line 2) to us, since they seemed to foresee human destiny.135 Yet depressingly, the art works which have the potential to foresee destiny are confined in a museum away from the practical affairs of life. It is as if the role of the artist is that of a soothsayer quietly speaking to a world that has no time to listen. Thus, Icarus also stands for artistic imagination disappearing into the seas or the museum, away from the land. Auden seems to question the relevance of this dying breed—the artists as intellectuals and critics who reveal truths. We can see the difference between Auden and Greenberg in this case, a difference that was discussed in short in Section 3.4.2 in Chapter Three. While Greenberg moves ahead to propose the new requirement of a work of art and the new social function of an intellectual so as to stand against mass permeation in the form of “pure” non-objective abstract art, Auden laments over the death of the intellectual in the face of what he considers is the rise of the nonchalant mass-culture, as in the figure of the ploughman. The insularity of a museum is also evident in Auden’s use of the lyric form of art. Clare Cavanagh in “Poetry and History” (2005) illustrates the Anglo-American academic disdain for lyric poetry as an apolitical aesthetic form, just like Auden, who illustrates the nonchalance of the ploughman as against the intellectuals or the “Old Masters” or even himself. For them, [t]he “aesthetic isolationism” of lyric poetry—its “refusal of life actually conducted in actual society”—has been described as complicitous “with class-interested strategies of smoothing over historical conflict and contradictions with claims of natural and innate organization.” (Frank Lentricchia qtd. from Criticism and Social Change in Cavanagh 185)

Interestingly, Auden uses a similar art form to express his dissatisfaction with the plight of art and artists in the modern world of warfare and technology. The lyric form does not offer a grandness of space as in the landscape or grandeur of expressions as in the epic. Rather, it had these many lines to express a personal emotion. Auden perhaps chooses such a form to articulate what he sees in a landscape—nonchalant characters busy in their “personal” or economic occupations.



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However, in the light of Nemerov’s consideration of the Bruegelian ploughman as the new artist, my analysis of Auden and how he might have viewed the ploughman improves. If Icarus is the artist, then art is drowning in the seas or museums. But if the ploughman is the artist, then in his isolated position he “engraves” lines on the ground seemingly unaware of the catastrophe that happens around him. In Nemerov’s words: As a figure of this cultivation, the plowman [sic] is Auden’s sign of the intellectual who can neither effect nor meaningfully comment on events. He is the person better off left, as Auden put it hyperbolically in 1939, “settl[ing] down to the cultivation of [his] garden and [his] own soul while the world perishes.” [. . .]. It is no coincidence, given the plowman’s [sic] apolitical posture, that Auden is the person credited with actually inventing the word “apolitical,” and in the year 1939, no less. [. . .]. The plowman [sic] is the original apolitical figure in the history of art. (Auden qtd. from The Prolific and the Devourer in Nemerov 798–799) 136

Auden contends that “art” as a storehouse of intellectualism (the “brains”) is fast becoming a lyrical space that one visited time and again to reflect upon, like the museum. Once out of that space, life continues and reflection dies. In other words, political engagement of artists is reduced to private and isolated artistic expressions. Nemerov interprets Auden’s lament in the following way: The plowman [sic] is the figure of the poet’s turning away from the political world, from its violence and suffering. Cut off, he is among the best examples of a rule Sedlmayr discerns in much of Bruegel’s art: “Figures are completely closed off from each other and from the space that surrounds and connects them. Their separation in outline is the visual equivalent of spiritual ‘detachment’ and isolation.” (796–797)

Auden’s choice of literary form suggests subjective individualism; his lament over the anonymity of art in the modern world suggests a desire for propaganda—that arts should be actively intelligible to the world. Auden falls into the trap of stereotyping intellectualism at the cost of questioning its function (which Ovid and Bruegel manage to escape): Nemerov shows how Auden does not want to see the birth of a new form of art, the modern abstract art, which actually is a surrealist “revelation” of politics and history. We have already seen that Nemerov reconstructs Bruegel’s ploughman as the new artist in Section 4.2.2. He further contends: “Yet the plowman [sic] is not as oblivious as I might think. Politics and poetry do not divide so neatly in the painting as Auden has remade it” (799). In this regard, the use of the lyric form of art is as political as Auden’s lament



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over the lack of political significance of art. Contrary to Nemerov’s position regarding the connection between politics and poetry, as seen in Section 3.5 of Chapter Three, Greenberg argues that pure abstract art is not subservient to history and by extension politics. Auden however condemns that very aspect. It is important to pause here and quote Michael Riffaterre from Heffernan’s Museum: For as a paradigm, they [“expensive”, “delicate”, “museum”, “beaux arts”] all refer to a detached aesthetic distance, to a preference for form, to an ideal of beauty, that presupposes eliticism and the trappings of social privilege, collecting fine arts, taste, and money lavished on artifacts. They all function as variants of academic.” (147)

I argue that Auden desires “that” value for the academic, but from everyone. He criticises the casual attitude of the masses towards the “expensive”, “delicate”, “museum”, “beaux arts”, or, in other words, he condemns the disappearance of these in the wake of gradual neutralisation of the elite by the masses. Interestingly, Auden’s criticism is also influenced by his experience of the “academic” circle, as is evident in his poem on Oxford. Auden’s lament over the death of intellectualism stems from his disillusionment with the European political breakdown in the 1930s. Sean C. Grass in “W. H. Auden, from Spain to ‘Oxford’” (2001) gives the example of the 1938 poem “Oxford” in which Auden describes the University “as an ‘enclosed’ and ‘isolated’ place, a ‘geographical sign of entrapment and enclosure’ that suggests the poet’s sense of solitude amid Europe’s social and political disintegration” (Mendelson qtd. from Early Auden in Grass 85). Grass adds: In “Oxford” we find Auden reflecting upon his bitter disappointment in Spain and finally blaming the university for inspiring the political idealism and naïveté that drove him to participate in the war. (86)

The universities are “enclosed spaces” in which young and spirited intellectuals perhaps read The Communist Manifesto, which propagates ideals of equality and justness: “capital is not personal but social power”. But ultimately, in Auden’s Civil War, the Nationalists win by virtue of wealthier support systems. It is an instance of paradoxical warring between the classes and the masses: a minority (monarchy) against the majority (workers). The Communist Manifesto states the paradox very clearly:



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All the paintings of Bruegel discussed in this section display the ninetenths of the workers. It is ironically possible to connect Auden’s intellectual isolation with the isolation of the nine-tenths in Bruegel’s paintings. It is ironic because Auden, who is fighting for a just world for the nine-tenths in poems like “Spain 1937”, is also lamenting over the indifference of those very nine-tenths towards 1. 2.

the political scenario in which they are leading their “personal” lives just like the horses who are scratching their backs against the trees, as well as the intellectual who is fighting for their cause and yet losing respect and aura amidst them.

Auden thus seems to be a continuation of the bourgeois manipulation of social movements, a position that has been argued in chapter two in the discussion of Pater and the bourgeois nature of the social movements of his times. In his lament over intellectual isolation, Auden becomes an integral part of the traditional philosophical hierarchy, where the “highest truths” seem the privilege of the philosophers, or the intellectuals; Auden’s artist has to be one of these. Even Heffernan in Museum of Words comments on Auden’s “generalization about the wisdom of the old masters [. . .]” (146). Interestingly, Icarus as the disappearing artist is white, and hence a privileged member of society. Auden does not want to acknowledge the furrows that the ploughman tills as also intelligible “traces” of social history. The ploughman as an artist, as proposed by Nemerov, is very much informed by the death near him, even if unconsciously. The “tilled” lines are artistic transformations of the “politicized suffering” of the times (Nemerov 802). The plough as a tool not only tills the land, but also designs the canvas of the land; it “reveals” a culture, thus retaining a Heidegerrian sense of technological revelation that is getting lost in the bourgeois habit of acquisition. Thus, the tool narrates as well. The isolation is important because it raises questions such as what is isolated and from whom or what, which makes isolation itself an important political activity. In this context, an isolated form of art like the lyric also has important political resonances.137 In the light of Nemerov’s analysis, I understand the ploughman’s furrows as well as his turning away from Icarus (isolation) as a historical



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and political activity. The expression of isolated unconscious designs foreruns the arrival of what Nemerov calls “liberal democracy” or the “embodiment of individualism in action” (809). Auden “makes monuments to fallen heroes” (Nemerov 810). But he does not see in the personal “art” of the ploughman, the quiet and intimate power of revelation. In 1963, John F. Kennedy honours the isolated artist stating “that poets and artists fulfilled democratic ideals and celebrated the nation most when they turned inward, exercising their own freedom of choice about subjects and methods” (qtd. in Nemerov 809). I find correlations between Greenberg’s praise for Abstract Expressionism and the ploughman’s traces. In this context, each and every trace is a deferred reservoir of history. What Greenberg denies, Nemerov illustrates in his interpretation of the traces on the field. In the context of such arguments, Williams in The Long Revolution argues that there are no ordinary activities; here “ordinary” would imply lack of “creative interpretation and effort” (54): Art is ratified, in the end, by the fact of creativity in all our living. Everything we see and do, the whole structure of our relationships and institutions, depends, finally, on an effort of learning, description and communication. We create our human world as we have thought of art being created. [The ploughman creates furrows for agriculture just as the artist creates strokes for art]. Art is a major means of precisely this creation. Thus the distinction of art from ordinary living, and the dismissal of art as unpractical or secondary (a “leisure-time activity”), are alternative formulations of the same error. If all reality must be learned by the effort to describe successfully, we cannot isolate “reality” and set art in opposition to it, for dignity or indignity. If all activity depends on responses learned by the sharing of descriptions, we cannot set “art” on one side of a line and “work” on the other; we cannot submit to be divided into “Aesthetic Man” and “Economic Man”. (54)

Moreover, Williams adds: The fatally wrong approach, to any such study, is from the assumption of separate orders, as when we ordinarily assume that political institutions and conventions are of a different and separate order from artistic institutions and conventions. Politics and art, together with science, religion, family life and the other categories we speak of as absolutes, belong in a whole world of active and interacting relationships, which is our common associative life. If we begin from the whole texture, we can go on to study particular activities, and their bearings on other kinds. Yet we begin, normally, from the categories themselves, and this has led again and again to a very damaging suppression of relationships. (55–56)



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I interpret Auden’s intellectual isolation as an essential historical moment in the context of the historical division between the age-old rivals, liberal arts and mechanical arts. Barnard has discussed the division between the two arts in medieval history, as explained in Section 1.6.1 of Chapter One and Section 2.3.1.2 of Chapter Two. I have also charted a historical development of these arts in Section 2.3.1.2 of Chapter Two in particular. The criterion for such academic pursuits is the refinement of intellectual labour. On the other hand, the mechanical arts involve instruction in the productive arts or “crafts” in guilds for future vocation. In the course of time, the institutes that train mechanical labour become important centres of vocation, since there are newer occupations demanding higher technical skills. In the process, liberal artists seem to get enclosed in academic spaces and academic vocations, notwithstanding their socially occupied intellectual positions. With the onset of the twentieth-century World Wars, engineers, mechanics and other “technical” professionals have been actively engaged, while traditional litterateurs, philosophers and the historically upgraded members of the liberal arts club, viz., the artists, could hardly voice their support or disdain, or, at the most, participate in the wars in the category of soldiers. More recently, in the era of globalisation and corporatisation, liberal arts seem to lose their unique position in the wake of service-oriented employments in a growing service economy, where the boundaries between mechanical and liberal studies are gradually getting dimmed. I look at Auden as prophesying the future of intellectuals in the wake of socio-economic validation of technical labour. But Bruegel’s ploughman, as described by Nemerov, may be seen as the “eternal” Daedalus, the labourer who has always been the artist as well as a historian in his/her personal capacity. It is important to pause here and take note of Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (2006), now developed into a bestselling book called Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009).138 He discusses the problem of “intellectualism” in even serviceoriented employments, like in the case of technical professions, and questions the inescapability of our increasing manual disengagement from the world as “mystified consumers”, a stain of thought that I have been engaging with throughout this project. He contends that educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers” rather than prepare them for actual mechanical labour. Thus, if the line is blurring between liberal arts and mechanical arts with the emergence of service-oriented activities, Crawford insists on the dominance of “patterns” similar to those in the intellectual dominance of liberal arts over the mechanical. If Auden worries about the death of the intellectual in the face of the rise of



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technical services (as I interpret), Crawford’s arguments on the same for the contemporary society is as follows: At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.

In other words, technical arts are not necessarily mechanical arts: “A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent” (Crawford). The problem of intellectualism still continues. Crawford appeals to the contemporary generation to develop “manual competence” and regard “material reality”, without which we become “more passive and more dependent”. He contends that the level of psychological fulfilment that a manual work generates is unmatched with any other kind of activity: I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence.

In other words, he asks for a non-division of labour, and that kind of experience is lacking in “pure” academic and intellectual work. In this regard, he quotes Alexandre Kojève: The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.

It is in such a statement that I decipher the potential of the abstract in manual labour. Crawford is interesting because he distinguishes between consumers, trades-people and crafts-people on the basis of their supposedly imaginative capacities. He summarises the sociologist Richard Sennett in his discussion on the challenge that craftsmanship throws at the ethics of



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consumerism. The craftsperson cherishes his/her object of labour, while “the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new”. In this capacity, the craftsperson is more possessive of “the dead incarnation of past labor”, while “the consumer is more free, more imaginative, and so more valorous according to those who would sell us things”. Where does this place the “tradesperson” amidst the manual craftsperson and the imaginative consumer? The ability to think materially about material goods, and hence critically too, also gives one some freedom from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a backstory intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous. Thus, the craftsperson occupies the lowest step of the social ladder of imaginative autonomy. It is in this capacity that political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned “the republican virtue of the mechanic, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good” (Crawford). This is more so because the craftsman has more to do with “the logic of things” than with “the art of persuasion”. The craftsperson, thus, stands against “fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political”. The craftsperson is seen to not be swayed by the “new” and that makes him/her stand at odds with [. . .] the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.

The devalorisation of manual labour, therefore, is very much a part of academics or even consultancies: The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out, and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry. (Crawford)

Crawford then goes on to show how the manual is also intellectual in its capacities, and to a degree he succeeds in deconstructing the dichotomy between the manual and the mental. He quotes Mike Rose from The Mind



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at Work, where Rose argues that skilled manual labour entails knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials. For instance, the steam engine has been developed by “mechanics who observed the relations between volume, pressure, and temperature”, that too at a time “when theoretical scientists were tied to the caloric theory of heat, which later turned out to be a conceptual dead end”. Crawford quotes even Aristotle in this regard: Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

Even cognitive scientists like Mike Eisenberg and Ann Nishioka Eisenberg from “Shop Class for the Next Millennium: Education through Computer-Enriched Handicrafts” (Journal of Interactive Media in Education) argue: Computational tools for crafting are entities poised somewhere between the abstract, untouchable world of software objects and the homey constraints of human dexterity; they are therefore creative exercises in making conscious those aspects of craft work [. . .] that are often more easily represented “in the hand” than in language. (qtd. in Crawford)

Crawford, in fact, does open a motorcycle repair shop, while continuing his academic work. My aim here is not to defend manual labour or dismantle the dichotomy. I am interested in developing possible “behind the scene” motifs of such divisions, and that is what I have been engaging with throughout this work. Crawford is significant not merely for his questioning of a certain kind of priority of labour, but more for the delineation of supplementary and infinitesimal divisions within technical and managerial labour itself, divisions that have affinities with traditional priorities. Coming back to Auden and in a way Greenberg, I may say that their fear of the loss of distinction between priorities continues. From Nemerov, I derive the political and artistic power of the ploughman; from Crawford, I may derive the intellectual capacity in the ploughman as well as in his manual labour. Thus, the confluence of a ploughman (labourer) and artist (also a labourer of sorts) in the toiling of the soil (designing a history) heralds the possible confluence of technology and art at its Heideggerian moment of disclosing what Karni Pal Bhati calls “the opening of a historical truth of people” (90).139 By extension, through Ovid, Bruegel, Auden, and their



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choice of art works, we get to see how artistic expressions are “the opening of a historical truth of people” that continuously get transformed by cultural and political practices. Inasmuch as artistic forms are inscribed by the category of the human, developments in the expression, ontology and historicity of human subjectivity find their reverberations in artistic practices. The artistic expression, the ontology of the art object, and the historicity of the art forms can be seen as continuously transformed by as well as being part and perhaps cause of such changes. This cycle of transformative interaction can be historicised and re-described in terms of a developing conception of the aesthetic critic (through Lessing, Pater and Greenberg) in its various definitional moments (political/technological), and of course, a narrative of their historical expressions. .

4.3 Greenberg and Benjamin: Deconstructing the “aura” Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), attempts to do something different from Greenberg, though he writes five years before Greenberg’s essay. He perhaps understands the negative power of trans-historicisation of ideas: such ideas gain autocratic powers. Even Greenberg suggests this. Any idea or form that is made the prototype will demand subservience from the rest. That eventually and inevitably leads to a totalitarian system ruled by the Ideal fixed in its abstract and hence unreachable form. Thus, the Ideal gets a status of the unique, and that creates a sense of “aura”. Benjamin attempts to understand the social function of “aura” and the category of art as “aura”. He argues that the quality of “aura” is not inherent in the object of art, but is produced by social factors surrounding the nature of the art object, like the nature of ownership, the limited availability and visibility of the work of art, and its subsequent attributes of uniqueness for the masses. Traditionally “aura” is associated with ritual, magic, super powers and other such models of structures of powers. For instance, Virgil attempts to create an “aura” for Augustus through his work of art, as discussed in Section 4.2.1. Greenberg laments over the loss of “purity” or “authenticity” of works of art because of their unfortunate subservience to the prototype. By “purity” or “authenticity” Greenberg means pure fidelity to artistic medium. I presume here that he might support this position because of the mass reproduction of works of arts in the age of mechanical reproduction, which for him accounts for the loss of artistic authenticity. It is in this position that he differs from Benjamin. Benjamin argues that with changing means of production of art objects, the category of “art” undergoes a change as well. The decisive



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change in the social approach to art (from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist world) is characterised by the loss of that “aura” of the art object. When the audience no longer addresses the art as unique or authentic, there develops irreverence for that kind of art. The loss of “aura” of the work of art is also the loss of “aura” of the cultural superiority or uniqueness of the dominant or prototype class. But in this very loss, Benjamin argues that there is the possibility of cultural redemption in the form of democratisation of social access to cultural objects as well as development of a critical attitude towards them. A work of art may now be accessible to everyone, rather than to the elite few, and in this capacity, photography and films as popular forms of art make a huge impact. In contrast, Greenberg condemns popular forms of art and calls them “kitsch”, unlike true avant-garde art. Apart from popular culture, even nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century avant-garde art movements like Dadaism and Surrealism are criticised as “kitsch”; a position mentioned in Section 3.5 of Chapter Three. I have interpreted Greenberg’s condemnation of “kitsch” as also a condemnation of the adulteration of superior culture, or what has developed into a mass-culture.140 I have also discussed that Auden laments over this irreverence. For Greenberg, “pure” and “authentic” art is completely and “purely” its physical media, and not a mode of subservience to any form of cultural literalness, which has also been interpreted as mass-literalness. In this capacity, Greenberg considers Dadaism and even Surrealism as impure and hence subservient to totalitarian desires: they use mass-reproduced objects of practical use as referents. Such referents also represent the capitalist and petty bourgeois forms of industrialisation and business, of which they are products. Let me explain this more lucidly. Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists have used ordinary and mundane objects as artifacts in exhibitions. The objects have mass-value and hence a culturalvalue as well. MacLeod in Wallace Stevens and Modern Art (1993) discusses Duchamp’s Fountain, which is actually a urinal, and also its artistic ambiguities (see Fig. 4-8 in the Appendices). In his words, “to place a porcelain urinal on its side atop a pedestal, [. . .] [is an] ambiguous (as well as strange) gesture” (22). The nature of the object is what creates the ambiguity: is the “machine-made object” which, on its own would lack aesthetic value, “a worthy example of utilitarian design” (22)? However, MacLeod also points out: “It is the nature of a readymade to inspire these questions without resolving them” (22). Similarly, he shows that Duchamp’s Bottlerack, which is also a mass-produced object in dull metal, is “gray and bare” (see Fig. 4-8 in the Appendices). At the same time, the critic, Robert Motherwell, has praised it as the most beautiful form of



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sculpture made in 1914 (qtd. in MacLeod 22). And it is this ambiguity that Stevens thinks is essential for poetry, as is evident in the discussion of the nature of a work of art in “Anecdote of the Jar”. To continue with Macleod, however, the Fountain is signed as “Fountain by R. Mutt” and then displayed in exhibitions (19). The placing of ready-mades with unknown signatures, as Bürger points out in Theory, is expressively a modernist attack on the romantic alienation of the artist and art as products of the category of “individual creation” or “individual production”: “When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects (a urinal, a bottle drier) and sends them to art exhibits, he negates the category of individual production [. . .]” (Bürger 51). After all, it is the signature that attests the importance of the individual creator or the artist. And when this signature appears on an “arbitrarily chosen mass product”, Bürger contends, “all claims to individual creativity are to be mocked” (52). Thus, Duchamp’s urinal reveals the fraudulence of the art market where the signature matters more than the art object—a very bourgeois characteristic (52). However, this “provocation” also has its limits in that we all know that it is the artist who has placed the urinal in the museum and then that becomes a Dadaist work of art and is able as a result to take control, just like Stevens placing the jar in Tennessee, which eventually takes control of that region. Duchamp by signing “Mutt” is successful once, but how long can he keep up that provocation, which will finally cease to provoke once this provocation becomes the accepted style of art (Bürger 52)? Remember Chapter Three and the avant-garde investment in deferral of value of capital? We know the value of the signature of Mutt (Duchamp) on the urinal in art museums today. In this capacity, remember Jackson Pollock as the epitome of the romantic individual and a hugely successful icon of his times. Greenberg’s criticism against the Dadaists is thus more because of the reproduction of a mass-produced object as an art object, though Duchamp’s urinal like Stevens’s jar is also an abstract “idea” of “objecthood”, but still not considered “pure” by Greenberg. Duchamp’s urinal or Stevens’s jar, though a new object in the category of art, has nevertheless developed from renewal sources of mechanically reproduced mass-objects. They are not free from traditional subservience to cultural forces by virtue of being mass-objects. In this capacity, a totalitarian regime manages to succeed by targeting mass-consciousness to develop their totalitarian government. I have argued in Chapter Two that the upper class education of the masses for their own betterment is in effect a method of totalitarianism, in that, the masses are taught to adhere to virtues propagated through aesthetic means, and these virtues further uphold the dominant class social position. The objects of aesthetic style



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are the masses, like Ruskin lecturing the Working Men’s college about the true ideals of art. When Greenberg talks about “purity” of art, it is possible to connect the notion of authenticity and purity with Hitler’s dream of “racial utopia” (10), a term used by Kevin Passmore in Fascism (2002).141 But Greenberg argues that there are fascist potentials in European avantgarde arts on the pretext that the objects of reference used, like the urinal, are very much a part of mass-consciousness, and are utilised to manipulate the masses. Thus, it is important for Greenberg to institutionalise American Abstract Expressionism as against European avant-garde by giving up artistic representation of objects all together: it is pure non-objective abstract art.142 On a similar note, Greenberg criticises Surrealist art because they are subservient to the unconscious. Barlow writes: [. . .] Surrealism was based on a fundamental act of self-deception—the fantasy of automatism. Artists who claim access to the unconscious merely deceive themselves about their own acts of control. (152)

Moreover, as Barlow rightly points out, [. . .] the seemingly wild manner of a Pollock was actually based on a profound practical understanding of the painting process, and of the extent of an artist’s control over it. (152)

I have discussed in the analysis of Auden, and Nemerov on Auden, that even the ploughman’s trace on the ground is very much a political activity (see Section 4.2.3). The unconscious is not completely outside the purview of human will; or we may remember here Jameson’s the “political unconscious”143. I have discussed in detail the political resonance in Greenberg in Section 3.5 of Chapter Three. I repeat my argument here all over again. Greenberg does not admit the presence of the political subtext. But he is as much subservient to politics as is “kitsch”. I have interpreted Greenberg’s propagation of democratic expression of subjectivity as an instance of totalitarian potentials under the camouflage of liberal democracy. In this capacity, what Benjamin argues is that the mass reproduced works of art not only question purity and authenticity of art works but also make works of art easily accessible to the masses, and hence assign some power to the masses, and these powers create the potential to make cultural changes, if at all. Benjamin attempts to grant intellectual powers to the masses, or obliterate the autonomous category of intellectualism, by dissolving the “aura” for that (but this dissolution is shown as emerging from history). But Lessing, Pater and



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Greenberg, and even Auden use the resource of renewal sources, like the abstract cultural definition of the intellectual, as a way of re-establishing intellectualism and fixing it as a trans-historical category of cultural reference: the intellectual safeguards the dominant cultural priority by propagating its supposedly unique and authentic value as against its fear of liquidation amidst mass-culture. Thus, if Benjamin declares art as a political category, because it is accessible in the form of copies to the masses, I argue in the light of Benjamin that Lessing, Pater and Greenberg, by separating art from politics, politicise aesthetics itself: the political order of their times have been frozen in the garb of autonomous transhistorical category of art. Hence, the eternal survival of the categories of art, intellectual, critic and their defined tasks are very important. It is here that Adorno’s “aesthetic theory” makes tremendous sense. Richard Hooker in “Theodor Adorno (1903 – 69)” argues: Unlike Greenberg’s theory, Adorno’s did not develop out of a rapport with an emerging category of art. [. . .]. Greenberg’s theory [. . .] is essentially an attempt to assimilate an emerging form into the tradition of the avantgarde. Adorno is clear that this function of the critic is actually counterproductive: This integration is not, as the progressiviste cliché would have it, some posthumous benediction that says this or that artistic phenomenon was meet and proper after all. Reception tends to dull the critical edge of art . . . Once art works are buried in the pantheon of cultural exhibits, their truth content deteriorates (Aesthetic Theory). (6)

In this context, it is worth delving into Adorno in the light of Greenberg’s claims. The following section will do just that.

4.4 Benjamin and “aura”; Greenberg and “purity”; Adorno and the “new” Adorno argues in his Aesthetic Theory (1970) that art as an idea is not trans-historical; it is historically produced as universal idea but suited to very local and particular phases of that history. Greenberg historicises the development of the avant-garde art, but finally also falls into the totalitarian trap by proposing “purity” of art as an essential character of avant-garde art, and “purity” may be interpreted as trans-historical, since it is perennially pure medium or form with no subservience to tradition. Adorno however claims that he is aware of the social function of art in that the production of art is necessarily its social dimension. In this context, he discusses the category of the “new”, which I pitch against the category of



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the “pure”. It is the category of “newness” that inherently defines the historical specificity of not just the work of art, but also the intellectual in his/her relationship to the category of art. That is because, in Bürger’s words: What distinguishes the category of the new in Modernism from earlier, perfectly legitimate uses of the same category is the radical quality of the break with what had prevailed heretofore. It is no longer artistic techniques or stylistic principles which were valid heretofore but the entire tradition of art that is negated. (60)

To negate an entire tradition also entails the definition of all that needs to be negated. When Lessing argues that the verbal art forms are more imaginative, he negates the imaginative potential of the visual. Similarly, the “newness” in art would be a denial of the preceding traditions. In other words, the category of art has to be redefined all over again by negating that very category. In such a process, how can the category itself exist if it is negated? Moreover, how is the category negated if it is redefined? Adorno also argues that the moment the “newness” is integrated into culture, the critical edge weakens. We have seen how the Dadaist movement of the avant-garde itself became a category of art, while attempting to negate that traditional category. Bürger contends: If an artist today signs a stove pipe and exhibits it, that artist certainly does not denounce the art market but adapts to it. Such adaptation does not eradicate the idea of individual creativity, it affirms it, and the reason is the failure of the avant-gardiste intent to sublate art. Since now the protest of the historical avant-garde against art as institution is accessed as art, the gesture of protest of the neo-avant-garde becomes inauthentic. Having been shown to be irredeemable, the claim to be protest can no longer be maintained. (53)

In other words, the intellectual in his/her attempt to devise a “newness” for the category of art is also integrating the category of newness into the existing culture. Once the newness is absorbed, it ceases to be new. Thus, non-integration would mean complete defiance of the social forces and tradition in an eternal capacity. For Greenberg, “purity” ensures that the art work always refers to itself and nothing else. But the work of art is itself a product of the very social forces it scathingly critiques to become new. The brush strokes, the consciousness of the painter, the materiality of the canvas, the cost of colour, the studio, and whatever else that goes into the making of the abstraction are socially embedded in the abstraction. In other words, an intellectual is always attempting to devise newness for the



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category of art by defying old notions of art or the traditional, and yet integrating the newness of the work of art into culture by virtue of the work of art being a social product. When Benjamin talks about “aura”, he shows how “aura” is illusion. Thus, the loss of illusion through means of mechanical reproduction is a way to understand art as a more social category, like laughing together when watching a movie. So the content of the movie as a mass-product can decide what the mass might laugh at. But Adorno feels that such kind of laughter is not revolutionary. He critiques popular art as inherently aura oriented, as is the case of the cult of Micky Mouse. Greenberg also criticised “kitsch” on similar grounds: “kitsch” is subservient to culture industry. For Adorno then, decline in aura is not due to technical reproduction, but lack of realisation of artistic autonomy. What he does is prepare an agenda for art where art is both autonomous as well as social and that is fulfilled by the category of the “new”. On the one hand, the work of art is a commodity by virtue of its means of production. On the other, the exchange value of modern abstract art is itself or what Julian Roberts in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” describes as “no longer pretend[ing] to be ‘for another’ or for the benefit of society” (98). Greenberg denies the commodity category for “pure” art, since work of art should not be subservient to social forces. Benjamin positively heralds the death of autonomy in the light of access of the masses to reproduced works of art. Adorno still feels the need for reflection in a work of art, which only an autonomous position will guarantee, and not its overtly political position. Yet, reflection cannot escape being fashioned by the political, since art is unable to free itself from ideology. Thus, the only way out for art is through its protest against cultural industry, protest in content as well as form, and that is possible by depicting the contradictions of capitalist society in the innermost structure or form of the work of art. Moreover, there is no pleasure when viewing the work of art; there has to be dissonance. So modern art has to constantly negate all that traditionally went into making such a category: hence the category of the “new” is integral to the function of protest at the level of form as well as content resulting in endangering the category of art itself. However, Bürger argues that the category of the “new” that Adorno proposes is also somehow an attempt to trans-historicise the category of art and hence is a part of the capitalist intellectual tradition. But how can one trans-historicise the form of art, which Adorno argues is the social function? He (Adorno) accepts that for a commodity society to exist, and exchange to happen between the consumer and the producer, the category of the “new” has to be eternal, in that



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[. . .] society can survive only if the goods that are produced are also sold, [and] it becomes necessary to constantly lure the buyer with the appeal the newness of products has. (Bürger 61).

Art succumbs to this exchange principle as well. So the category of the “new” like that of “aura” and that of “purity” has to be posited with all its trans-historical appendages in order to have some claim of truthness for its contemporary world. The protest should appear eternal and hence transhistorical at the moment of transaction. When Duchamp places the urinal in the exhibition, at that moment the work of art protests for all times. Yet the shock value of that protest decreases each time it is perceived. In the light of Bürger, I contend that the “newness” is not in fact “new” in defining the category of art, but is “new” in terms of the packaging of the commodity status of the work of art (61). Thus Lessing, Pater and Greenberg may be seen as entrepreneurs of intellectualism who have been packaging art in a way that best provides maximum profit to their organisation/institution/society/culture/history. Thus, art as an actual separate category is itself doubtful. What would be the future of the category of art when the very category is doubtful? In this capacity, I review my work at this point to understand the future of art and its classifications in a late capitalist society.

4.5 The Dialectics of the “I” and the “Eye”: A Rediscovery Western critical tradition, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, displays ideologies of narrative arts based on educational and moral grounds. Plato uses them to condemn the “mimetic” nature of art, and to banish the artists from the Republic. The story telling and theatrical genres are condemned for their falsity (they are mimetic) and also for their appeal to passion (“that” which requires control) as against reason (“that” which controls). The conflict is between reason and passion. Later, Aristotle separates the moral criterion from the formal. His formal classification uses the criterion of “medium of imitation”. But it is not the formal criterion alone that shapes the hierarchy of art forms. A criterion of the moral, viz., the “objects of imitation” are used to distinguish between higher and lower arts. Thus, while formally all art forms exist; the objects of their mimesis become the condition of judgement for social consent. In the medieval times, the question of “moral consent” becomes even stronger: there have been many church edicts against secular performance, and hardly any references to theatrical genre survive between 600 AD to 1001 AD. Christianity (religion) overtakes art; drama has to be “re-born” as a source of liturgical exercise in the form of moralities and miracles.144



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The classical hierarchies permeate into the Enlightenment discourse of Lessing. Lessing’s shaping essay on Laocoön formally sets the laws for artistic exchange by tabularising labours specific to the two regimes, the mental and the sensory. The famous comparison between the Laocoön sculpture and the poetic anecdote of Virgil by Lessing shows the differences between the verbal and the visual arts. His hierarchy of arts is a reflection of the domination of mental over physical labour. He seems to hint at a natural supremacy that poetry has over paintings. Notwithstanding his limiting principles on the visual arts, Lessing begins with a tradition that he himself represses: a critique of “visual hermeneutics” (the term is used by Burwick) for the approaching centuries.145 Lessing formally divides the activity of art into two forms of artistic expression: the mental and the physical. Major half of the nineteenthcentury fashions the “Romantic Image” (term used by Kermode) or what gets to be formally known as “symbolism”. Renaissance art has given rise to the concept of “perspective”146. The significance of “choice” that underlies the function of perspective (“who’s” and “what” perspective taken of an object are celebrated questions) establishes the importance of the “individual”. And romantic art is typically representative of a “detached individual experience” which, amidst the burgeoning world of reason, science and industry, tries hard to create a “separate identity” for itself. This is well reflected in Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”. Romantic art seems to get trapped in a paradox. It seems to despise the desire for rational mediation. However, to define itself as non-mediated, it feels the need to become an abstraction, thus falling prey to mediated forms of idealisation. Romantic art is seen caught in this “true” and “false” dialectics of idealisation: “true” because the desire for escape from the rational world is evident as that world does not satisfy the soul, it is too quantitative; “false” because artistic transcendence over the rational into the mystical is a poetic devise and not the real escape. After the poetic experience, you will have to return to the “learn’d astronomer’s” class. A learned astronomer by studying the stars gets paid in an academic institute while a lone observer cannot live by merely looking up at the sky. But what does the poet deliver? The romantic artist thus has to function like a “prophet”. Glen Tinder, in Political Meaning of Christianity (1989), states that the “prophet” is like an “exalted individual” who creates an “ideal community” as “a set of perfected relationships” (54). I may perhaps say that Whitman’s wandering off alone is like the journey of a prophet. The possibility of watching stars in “perfect silence” depicts a non-agonised and no-tension zone; as if



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differences have been dissolved. The romantic artist as an “exalted individual” appears as a “messiah” to a world divided by sinful charts and hence promises the vision of an “ideal artistic community”. Such a community is “a set of perfected relationships” (remember “perfect silence” and Pater’s “anders-streben”) between artistic tensions. Thus, the romantic symbol—“mystical moist night air”—is a vision of the romantic utopia of human experience. So the visual is elevated to the position of vision. And vision, I may perhaps say, is the imaginative visual. Romantic narrative, here, crosses Lessing’s limits. But the limits are crossed not because there is faith restored in the abilities of the visual narratives, but because the lack of faith is even stronger. This accounts for the need of utopia. Let me take the instance of Vicki Kirby in her essay “Quantum Anthropologies”, where she considers the “natural” act of lightning as “naturally” logical, scientific, and designed, even before scientific “language” defines the path of lightning. She quotes Martin Uman, who she claims is one of the foremost interpreters of the act of lightning: Much of what is known about lightning today has been discovered precisely because lightning does strike the same structure over and over again. . . . The Empire State Building in New York City is struck by lightning an average of about 23 times a year. As many as 48 strikes have been recorded in one year, and during one thunderstorm eight strikes occurred within 24 minutes [. . .]. (60)

Reading Kirby’s argument into Whitman, I may say that what the astronomer “reads” into the night sky is something already there in the sky. So the “charts” and the “columns” are already there in nature, even before the astronomer decides to interpret it in the language of science. In other words, before the sciences narrate the sky in the form of “charts”, the spatial sky is very much there with the possibilities of those “charts” and “columns”. Even after the “charts”, does not nature appear “ambiguous”? Therefore, the sky has not been completely rationalised; a sense of mystery still prevails; so, possibilities are there to be discovered. Is not a sense of mystery a narrative that continuously re-invents itself at the level of history and science? So, nature is full of “charts” and “columns” as well as “ambiguities” and “mysteries”. But Whitman considers the unaccounted mysteries as “opportunities” while pretending to accuse rational discoveries as unaccountable experiences. The romantic utopia is promoted as the unique experience of accountability; in other words, accountability of the “perfect harmony of spatial and temporal experience” by the highest form of imagination that only “art” can provide. The romantic utopia is a



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mediated product produced to combat technologies at the level of market society. The utility of art is its propagated spiritual harmony which technology cannot offer. That is how art is supposed to score over its competitors, by creating a community of harmonious existence of different arts. The romantic utopia is thus as much “institutionalised” as is the case with Lessing’s classifications. Let me say that romantic utopia is the aesthetic packaging for the nineteenth-century capitalist society. The modernists however did not want to package art as utopia so as to escape competition with the technological world. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, art seems an endangered species, what with heavy mechanisation and photography and now motion pictures. The modernist “newness” demands the collapse of the gap between art and life, between object and representation, between sign and meaning. This cannot be done by mere imitation, a popular device of medieval and Renaissance art. So art has to recreate itself. It has to “add” a “new” object to the already existing feat of mass-production. The “newness” is accomplished in abstract art that denies reference and subsequently attempts to achieve this impossible feat in an artistic way. The pureness or abstractness of art thus becomes its own generalisation and its own particularisation as well. It is in that capacity that it is art. It is its own signifier and its own signified. Moreover, the verbal signs have to break their association from past meanings to display their existence as signifiers rather than fixed signifieds. But it is again “I”/Stevens who develops the relation between the signifier, say Stevens’s jar, and its signified, say Stevens’s jar as a work of art. The art object now has agential powers. But again, it is “I” who grants the power of agency to the form of the art object. The form becomes the proxy for content; the “eye” becomes proxy for “I”. The role of the artist cannot be done away with. The “new” packaging of modern art is dependent on the modernists transferring the creative ability of the romantic “I” onto the form of the art object. The “pattern” that has emerged so far cannot be complete without Michael Kelly’s arguments particularly on iconoclastic philosophy in Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (2003). He argues that [. . .] there is still a problem with philosophy’s disinterest in art, because it entails an abstraction of art from history (both art’s history and general history) in an effort to isolate the philosophical interest in universality and to ensure its realization. (7)

Kant in the Critique of Judgement has formally laid the foundation for evolving the notion of disinterestedness and purity in aesthetics. But aestheticians like Hegel, Greenberg or even Adorno, who have arrived at



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a historical evolution of philosophical positions of the Absolute Spirit, or the “pure” non-objective abstract avant-garde art, or the category of “newness” for modern art in their individual capacities have also made an effort to realise, in the final position achieved, the trans-historicity of the philosophical interest in a certain universal truth. Kelly states the irony of philosophical “disinterestedness”: Abstraction [. . .] is as much the effect of the interest in universality as it is its condition, because it is the realization of that interest that requires the abstraction. (8)

Though Kelly investigates the conflict between interest and disinterest in the aesthetic conclusions of Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, and Danto, his thesis problem informs my investigation of a similar conflict in the aesthetic conclusions of Lessing, Pater and Greenberg along with the influences from Kant and Hegel in particular. For Lessing, the categorisation of the verbal and the visual arts into distinct aesthetic provinces is informed by “seemingly” universal physical laws of media. For Pater, there is a possibility of transcendence of individual arts into a utopian and hence eternally non-conflicting realm of artistic cognition. For Greenberg, though it has evolved as a historical condition, “pure” nonobjective abstract avant-garde art is beyond history in its non-subservience to literature (history). In other words, if art has emerged as a certain condition in its historical particularity, then to abstract art from history is also to dehistoricise art. The systematic dehistoricisation of art is, in the light of Kelly’s work, a philosophical interest in universality. Lessing, Pater and Greenberg in their philosophical encounters with art attempt to be iconoclastic in their attempt to dehistorcize art and in the process develop a condition of artistic disinterestedness, underlying which is their philosophical interest in developing a universal philosophy of art. My attempt has been to unearth the philosophical “interest” underlying Lessing’s universal physical laws of aesthetics, Pater’s utopian law of Ideal art, and Greenberg’s purified universality of the physical form or medium. And that is possible “only” if one attempts to historicise Lessing’s, Pater’s and Greenberg’s processes of dehistoricisation of art. In this capacity, I have looked at philosophical aesthetics as a history of diffusions, displacements and idealist reparations of class division (I repeat myself here).



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4.5.1 Erasing and Redefining the Boundaries A historical survey from the Enlightenment to the modernist period depicts an attractive dialectics of Lessing’s verbal narrative and visual narrative as interesting social categories engaged in conflicting hierarchies due to the changing conditions of capitalism. So, is it possible at all to reconceive art forms in any social space as without hierarchy of classifications? Let us look at Magritte’s pipe painting “This is Not a Pipe” (the title has been translated into English from the French Ceci n’est pas une pipe). It is also known as The Treason of Images. Heffernan in Cultivating Picturacy (2006) traces the painting back to the year 1929 (23). Let us imagine the canvas space of Magritte’s painting as a “particular” space; the image of the pipe is visual; the statement “This is Not a Pipe” is verbal. Yet the “statement” narrates a strange dictum: it says that the image is not that of a pipe. However, we recognise the image to be that of a pipe; it imitates the referent very well. It is this anomaly of relationship between the statement and the image that allows for problematisation of the verbal and the visual traditions in many ways (see Fig. 4-9 in the Appendices). 4.5.1.1 Possibilities of Postmodernist Art in Magritte The image pipe is a virtual pipe, in that it is not the real object pipe. Thus, the painting is extremely self-conscious of its own materiality: it advertises the fact that it is not a “real” pipe. Heffernan makes a significant point here: Since the pipes we see in the real world do not usually present themselves in perfect profile or hang suspended in midair with no visible means of support, we must conclude that this is not, after all, a picture of a pipe but rather, as Michel Butor observes [Les Mots dans la Peinture (Geneva, 1967), p. 77], a picture of depiction, a picture of the way pipes are commonly represented in advertisements and textbooks: isolated, radically decontextualized, and labelled “pipe” [. . .]. (23–24)

But the common point between the image and the object pipe is also an “image”, since the real pipe is an object and also the image of itself. It is the image in the painting then that reminds us of the image of the object pipe. Let us look at the “sentence” inscribed in the painting: “This is Not a Pipe”. A written statement like the spoken words is an externalisation of the speaker, but a visual one. A spoken statement is a “specter”147 of the speaker; the speaker is absent, but the absence of the speaker is evident.



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The visually written statement is the “specter” of the spoken statement, which again is the externalisation of the speaker. Similarly, the painting minus the title is the “specter” of the image of the object pipe; so it reminds us of the presence of the absent object pipe. The point is to show how the “original” object of mimesis gets more and more distanced from the images. Moreover, Heffernan also argues that Magritte’s title goes against the usual function of a “title” or a “label”: labeling implies that any picture identifies a particular object. Magritte’s labeling disturbs that singular correspondence between the painting and the object of the painting. In the process, the picture becomes an arbitrary sign, and Heffernan calls that a pipe-picture, like Nelson Goodman would have called (Cultivating Picturacy 24). Thus, Lessing’s definite distinction between the arbitrary and the natural signs is disturbed, when Heffernan proposes the following argument: Its [pipe-picture’s] meaning is no more bound to a particular object than is the meaning of the word “Ceci” below it, which can mean any one of several things: “this” image above it, “this” whole painting in which it appears, or “this” very word itself, “Ceci,” which presents itself not only verbally but visually. “Ceci” is at once a sliding signifier and a graphic sign, the carefully drawn picture of a written word. In fact the calligraphic shape of the c’s in this word makes them visually rhyme with the pictured shape just above them. Thus Magritte deconstructs the opposition between the “natural” meaning of images and the arbitrary signification of words even as he cuts the cable binding images to real objects, to determinable reference. (Cultivating Picturacy 24)

Now let us place the pictorial space in the market. A pipe is an object of use, like the dominion jar. So its market value cannot be disregarded. The object pipe is used for smoking; hence, it has a primary “use-value”.148 But in a market, the object pipe becomes a “commodity”; i.e., it has an abstracted value that makes it possible for the pipe to be sold for something else of value (“exchange value”).149 So, the commodity pipe is a value rather than an object, hence a “specter” itself. Now for the role reversals: on the canvas, the image pipe signifies the image of the object pipe, which signifies the “exchange value” of the object pipe in a market space; the object pipe is itself and also its commodity value. So a labyrinth of signifiers is revealed, because the “sentence” propels us to question what we see. So the “sentence” shows that the image pipe is not what it claims to be: an image of an object. It is rather the image of an image. The “statement” is written, hence is as much visual as verbal. Verbally, it reminds you of the “voice” of the speaker,



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and hence the presence of the absence of the speaker, who is the signifier of the voice as well. Visually, the sentence is signifier of the signifier (voice) of the speaker, and hence the signifier of the absence of the presence of the “voice”; it is written, so a “voice” which should have been heard is absent, which is again the signifier of the speaker, and hence the signifier of the presence of the absence of the speaker, who is again the signifier of the “voice.” The sentence does not start with “I”. Hence it is not a prosopopeia. Again, the speaker perhaps is the “implied author.” The confusion of the categories of signs is implied in the meandering interpretations made above. Jean Baudrillard in his “Simulacra and Simulations” argues that a sign is an exchange for meaning, and in the theological world, God is the guaranteer of such meaning. But God himself is “reduced” to signs, and his attestation loses its sacredness with changing times. On a similar note, we may say that Magritte’s attestation of the non-pipeness of the pipe is a continuous parody of the conventions of words and images, and hence a satire on the origin of classifications of representations. The functions of the verbal and the visual are simulacra functions: they do not stand for any larger reality. In effect, Lessing’s classifications are not merely declassified but also new boundaries are developed, which are again questioned and debunked; hence there are no stable boundaries on which any hierarchy may build its structure: boundaries as limitations are essential for any form of hierarchy. What Magritte’s narrative does here is allow us to question the enmeshed nature of the verbal and the visual representations. In other words, there is no such thing as the purely visual. Meaning making process can only operate because of the archaeology of associations, the poesis of life experiences that informs an image with meaning. So far, we have seen how the verbal and the visual are not fixed aesthetic categories. They are morally, politically and ideologically charged as well. I may perhaps say that the philosophy of the aesthetic best lies in its artistic occupations with synaesthesia: the verbal and the visual are synaesthetically associative in that they are forever engaged in an involuntary symbiotic relationship with each other as well as with life. Magritte brings us in contact with our involuntary narrative processes by debunking the prescribed, hence conscious processes, so that we are more cognisant of the “polyphonic” and “pluralistic” nature of the process of signification itself. In this capacity, it is interesting to note that Saussure proposes a modern version of linguistic sign system, which I argued that Lessing has anticipated. But Kirby deconstructs Saussure in a manner that helps me place my debate in her larger debate regarding the culture and nature division.



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4.5.1.2 Saussure and Kirby: Nature/Culture Debate For Saussure, the signifier is a sound image and the signified is a concept. Kirby in Telling Flesh (1997) argues that the arbitrary relation between the two puts forward a theory that the outer reality, which the sign is supposed to signify, is a known substance: For if any number of signifiers can be anchored in the same signified, then Saussure has reaffirmed the axiomatics of nomenclature—namely, that meaning has a given, universal pre-existence that different languages merely capture in their various vocabularies. (17)

In this way, language (culture) seems to make us realise the world, and its boundaries and limits help us realise the boundaries and limits of the referents, which otherwise we would not know. She quotes from Saussure: “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula” (17). Thus, it is culture that “worlds” nature. So culture is superior to nature. In Chapter Two, we have seen how Pater identifies with this position: poetry develops gradations upwards from mere physical colour/light when informed by the artist. Kirby then uses Beneviste to continue with her debate with Saussure. Beneviste however argues that if Saussure wants to show that a sign contains the outside reality, the relation between the signifier and the signified cannot be arbitrary, but has to be necessary and motivated. After all, it is culture, which finally decides meaning. Yet a sign always discovers its identity only in a referral. But for Saussure the referral and the concept are always different; a position that even Lessing maintains when he contends that a sign must transparently signify the meaning. So where does that leave the referral? It is the frame of reference within a culture that defines the meaning of a sign, but again culture itself is regulated by the frames of reference that determine the meaning of signs. Thus, if something appears unintelligible, illegible, it is so within a particular frame of reference and unintelligibility is also a meaning made, and hence intelligible. And every other meaning that is intelligible is so because when compared to the intelligible meaning of unintelligible, it is labelled intelligible. I may be able to comprehend this with Nemerov’s analysis of the intelligible traces made by the ploughman as opposed to Auden’s lament over the death of the intellectual in his indifference to the ploughman’s designs. If Lessing wishes that the verbal signs should not be like the visual signs because they are more “intelligible”, the visual signs are themselves a product of the same culture that requires them to be more physical so



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that the verbal signs become more mental. Thus, what is natural as against what is cultural is as much a product of the same system. The meaning of intelligibility is given more cultural value. And value is always a relative term. For Saussure, the “most precise characteristic” of value “is in being what the others are not” (qtd. in Kirby 28). This is clearly understandable in my analysis of the value of art in society in modern times. Thus, a sign can only make meaning in a system with other signs when its identity is its differential value from the other signs. So there is no fixed identity itself, and the system of language is all the time making identities and hence making meanings. So a word “cat” means something which “rat”, “tat”, and “fat” do not mean. But the stroke of a drawing in its process of striking the paper is also differentiating between the unstroked position of the paper and the stroked position of the paper. It is in the process of strokes that a concept is given visuality. There is a frame of reference here too. Just as the word “rat” has to sound different from the word “cat”, the image rat has to look different from the image cat. So what happens to the individual “will” in a system that has values that are shifting all the time? Saussure writes: The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. (qtd. in Kirby 35)

Kirby argues that [. . .] the speaking subject may entirely feel possessed of free and individual choice regarding language decisions, this apparent agency is the determined articulation of language itself. Ironically, perhaps, what is heard as the self-present immediacy of voice is, in the final instance, the articulation of history, informed by the living burden of infinite mediation. (35)

In this capacity, even Greenberg’s “pure” art cannot escape history or apparent impurity. Derrida in “Structure, Sign and Play” argues that western philosophy erects a transcendental signified for a system to work. But such a signified exists for that system so that the signifier and the signified and their relationship appear constant. If the ultimate signified is removed, then every sign signifies another sign, since no final signification (authority) is there to proclaim that this is the final signification. Hence, when Saussure makes writing secondary to speech because writing exists solely to



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represent speech, Derrida derives another system of hierarchy. The primary signifier is the psychological entity, and then comes the sound image and then the spoken word. Thus the idea or concept is privileged. But, as discussed in the writing/drawing section of Chapter Two, it is in writing that there is a drawing in the sense that there is a trace that is inclusive of the linguistic component (in its ability to become a sign) as well as beyond that (when it becomes illegible) in its efforts to always defer the meaning making process.150 Modernist abstract art prefers “traces” of writing, coloured or inked, to traditional drawing or writing. It is as if “traces” of infinite signifiers are being presented. The signified itself is a signifier of some other signifier in that no recorded or conclusive meaning is possible. Here writing becomes traces of meaning making processes which cannot be identified as particularly the verbal and/or the visual.151 In this context, I have discussed in Section 2.3.1.1 of Chapter Two that a printed book is no more the author’s written work. So the author feels isolated from his work. The printing of the book however is itself a process of history. The final book then signifies many signifiers including the unconscious and subconscious writings of the author, the machines, and the cultures. And meaning happens when the reader with his set of signifiers reads the entire phenomena of the book having been made. Thus, every form of discrimination, difference, boundary, or limit is itself not a naturalised innocent existence; it is a trace of many signifiers acting as many significations. Kirby argues that even the DNA is a written script of our body. Even in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, the detective reads a charred paper by bringing back the inscriptions on it by placing the paper on fire. Thus, even materiality is not constant but changing all the time, like the human body. The body is never the same again. Rashes develop on the body and disappear. The canvas that is not painted is similarly a storehouse of possibilities. The canvas painted stores the traces of the brush strokes, the maker of colours, the painter, his/her life and body. Thus, is there anything, which exists for itself and is autonomous? Kirby reminds us of Judith Butler’s argument on matter: that matter is a surface that is waiting to be interpreted or written upon by something other than itself. But if matter can regenerate itself through re-presentation and regeneration, then how is it that it cannot have thought process? Let us look at Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. The sea waves write and re-write on the sand. Is that not abstract art, just like the traces by the ploughman in Bruegel as proposed by Nemerov? Kirby quotes Benjamin: even traces on the fossils are considered “intelligible” by this very culture; hence they are



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political. Thus, if matter itself may not be passive then the visual arts are as “intelligible” as the verbal arts and the verbal arts as material as the visual arts. Let me return to the point from where I began: I inverse Plato when I say material itself is idea, and hence political. In that capacity, even nature itself is also political, as revealed in the discussion of Whitman and Kirby. So if nature is political, would it not be possible to see aesthetics having an inherent politics? Maybe, Rancière will answer that question for us. 4.5.1.3 Rancière: Politics in Aesthetics vs. Social Politics Till now, I have been looking at art and literature in the context of political issues. But Rancière in “The Politics of Literature” (2004) has a different argument. He clarifies what it means to be political: Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking. (10)

Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004) gives the instance of a slave who understands its rulers’s language but is not allowed to participate in that kind of communication (8). That is social politics. In the same capacity, like matter that can transform itself (Kirby), politics in literature would also mean that “literature is involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world” (“The Politics of Literature” 10). Rancière argues that fiction is also framing of spaces, much before it can be related to the politics of any governing body. He cites the instance of the stage, which according to Plato is an ambiguous space that could be “a locus of public activity” and also a space that exhibits fiction (The Politics of Aesthetics 13). Rancière applies the same theory to the act of writing: By stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space. (The Politics of Aesthetics 13)

In other words, writing plays its own formal politics: it structures the surface of signs (The Politics of Aesthetics 14). He argues that “aesthetic



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regime of politics is strictly identical with the regime of democracy, the regime based on the assembly of artisans, inviolable written laws, and the theatre as institution” (The Politics of Aesthetics 14). Rancière gives more interesting examples that show the anomaly in the relation between social politics and aesthetics. Both “The Politics of Literature” and The Politics of Aesthetics discuss the fault that lies in placing Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education as democratic forms of literature: Flaubert, after all, conforms to an aristocratic position in society. His literature is considered democratic because it depicts or portrays and does not instruct. I have discussed the ambiguous nature of democratic ideals being proposed by the bourgeoisie in the light of Day’s arguments in Class. Rancière does not do that. He goes on to show how writing makes available everything equally to everyone, thus forming a community of readers that do not need legitimacy (The Politics of Aesthetics 14). In other words, a community is formed by “the random circulation of the written word” (The Politics of Aesthetics 14). Moreover, Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics also argues that the arrival of the flat surface of the canvas has its own politics, and is not necessarily the way the avant-garde proclaims is the case. It is in the Renaissance that the three-dimensional space in painting is required to imitate an act of living speech. But for Plato both writing and painting are surfaces of mute signs. In this case, Rancière argues that flat surfaces are not opposed to three-dimensional space, but to the living. If modern art develops the value of “pure” media, that is so, because of the interaction of various media in a time when new structures and objects surround human vision, like flatness of pages, posters and tapestries. He further argues that aesthetic is the artistic phenomenon adhering to a particular regime of the sensible. The idea of such a regime has become foreign to itself like Kant’s genius who, is unaware of the laws it produces. Modernity is a poor name for this aesthetic regime of the arts. He therefore claims that the avant-garde attempts to define the subject who best fits in the new human vision and appropriates the connection of the aesthetic and the political to this new vision. Without going into any more details, I broadly present his argument: “[L]iterature [is] conceived [. . .] as a historical mode of visibility of writing, a specific link between a system of meaning of words and a system of visibility of things” (“The Politics of Literature” 12). In this capacity what I have attempted to interpret in Lessing is how “representational power of doing art with words” is “bound up with the power of a social hierarchy based on the capacity of addressing appropriate



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kinds of speech-acts to appropriate kinds of audiences” (“The Politics of Literature” 14). But Rancière would find fault with this very argument. He rather contends: Literature did not act so much by expressing ideas and wills as it did by displaying the character of a time or a society. In this context, literature appeared at the same time as a new regime of writing, and another way of relating to politics, resting on this principle: writing is not imposing one will on another, in the fashion of the orator, the priest or the general. It is displaying and deciphering the symptoms of a state of things. It is revealing the signs of history, delving as the geologist does, into the seams and strata under the stage of the orators and politicians—the seams and strata that underlie its foundation. (“The Politics of Literature” 18)

I want to argue that though I call Lessing the law-giver, I have also attempted to “display and decipher the symptoms” of the laws given; and also “delve as the geologist” into the “seams and strata that underline the foundation of those laws”. In a way, I declare that if Lessing, Pater and Greenberg have been aesthetic entrepreneurs of sorts, my placing them in such positions is also “resting on this principle”: my criticism is not imposing my will on another, though I do fashion Lessing as a law-giver, Pater as the transcendentalist, and Greenberg as the purist, it is rather because I want to understand their method of deciphering the symptoms of the state of things in their times; their take on the revelation of signs of their histories; and finally I delve into the seams and strata under the stage of these aesthetic entrepreneurs, critics, artists, law-givers, transcendentalists, purists and politicians—the seams and strata that underlie their foundation. In other words, I let them decipher the symptoms of their times, and I finally attempt to decipher the symptoms of state of things that they have symptomatically deciphered. So if pure art frames “the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that [further] frames a polemical common world”, its way of framing is relevant to me in my understanding of the placing of the so called avant-garde subject who best fits in the new human vision and what all goes into his/her appropriation of the connection of aesthetics and politics to this new vision. Rancière would probably argue that the framing of the visual as a possible democratic self-display is its own politics as well. I am not refuting Rancière. But he would find fault with me in the way he finds fault “in Marxian or Freudian key, in Benjaminian or Bourdieusian key [. . .]” (“The Politics of Literature” 20). That is so because they



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[. . .] disclose the political import of literature, to spell out its unconscious discourse, to make it confess what it was hiding and reveal how its fictions or patterns of writing unwittingly ciphered the laws of the social structure, the market of symbolic goods and the structure of the literary field [. . .]. (20)

It is as if literature itself has no politics. But he also claims: The political dimension of literature has been usually explained through social science and political interpretation. By turning matters upside-down, I have been unwilling to account for politics and social sciences through the mere transformations of poetical categories. My wish has been simply to propose a closer look at their intertwinings. (24)

My attempt has also been to look at the intertwinings of political dimension of literature and transformations of aesthetic categories, but not by debunking Marxian or Freudian key, or Benjaminian or Bourdieusian key. I have presented Rancière here as I did with Kirby and Magritte to show the possibilities of counter-arguments of classifications such as the verbal and the visual, culture and nature, aesthetic politics and social politics; classifications that have emerged in my readings of Lessing, Pater and Greenberg. But I have clarified earlier and still do that I develop no theory like Kirby or Rancière to establish the nature of binaries. I am interested in a historical perspective of the nature of the verbal and the visual classification as it emerges in Lessing, Pater and Greenberg by contextualising them in their historical milieu. That is not exactly a Rancièrian interpretation. Nevertheless, in the light of Rancièr, I do investigate the avant-garde attempt by Lessing, Pater and Greenberg: their efforts to define the subject who best fits in the new human vision of their milieu and what all goes into their appropriation of the connection of the aesthetic and the political to this new vision.

4.5.2 The Future of Art and its Categories Let me take Hegel’s death of art to its logical end, an end that makes sense in a time addressed by Jameson as the cultural logic of late-capitalism. The problem with the condition of late capitalism is infinite heterogeneity of forms, and the impossibility of preparing a singular generalisation of art for a possible homogenisation of multiple cultures. Taking Nemerov’s ploughman to a logical end, real life praxis is already art. Thus, we must obviate the need to develop art as a separate institution, unlike the modernists, who with all their collapsing of art and life have been still



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defining the autonomous category of art. There is then a need to accept multiplicity of experiences and heterogeneity of forms. There is no need for generalisation; it is more like living day-to-day “spontaneously” without the need for comfort of generalisation. There is thus no need for aesthetic theory, since theory is repetition, as is generalisation. And repetition is a desire to go back to the original stage, but the contemporary world has become a world of representations such that the original is no more a possible category; something that Baudrillard has already discussed as the phenomena of simulacra and simulations. There is then a gratuitous play between different structures; there are negotiations between different positions; and each structure or position is itself changing constantly. If we consider Magritte’s pipe painting, it may be seen as anticipating the post avant-garde scenario where nothing is constant or eternal, not even as a social function. Magritte liquidates the dichotomies so far by showing the changing processes of all representations. John Cage perhaps states it best when he says: We don't need government We need utilities. Air, water, energy Travel and communication means Food and shelter. We have no need for imaginary mountain ranges Between separate nations. We can make tunnels through the real ones. Nor do we have any need for the continuing division of people Into those who have what they need And those who don't. Both Fuller and Marshal McLuhan Knew, furthermore That work is now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that we have no need to do anything What shall we do? Looking at Fuller's geodesic world map We see that the Earth is a single island, Oahu.



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We must give all the people all they need to live In any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the poor. If there are to be laws, we need ones that Begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the world safe for poverty Without dependence on government.

The future possibility of research in this area arises when I question whether it is actually possible for artistic communication to be free from categorisation and government, and yet exist. Julian Stallabrass in Contemporary Art (2004) describes the paradox of political globalisation: Under neoliberalism, the language of free trade is spoken but the global regulatory bodies (the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO) enforce rules that protect industries and agriculture in wealthy nations while opening fragile economies to unregulated trade (including the dumping of belowcost goods), privatization, and the dismantling of welfare provision. The general results across the globe are low wages, insecure employment, high unemployment, and the weakening of unions. (9)

Thus, there is something in late-capitalist period that does constitute a disastrous capitulation to totalitarian control; let me say the consequences of the US becoming the global super power. In contrast to totalitarian control, contemporary artistic representation is seen as supporting demolition of cultural barriers as analogous to development of free trade across political borders. Stallabrass writes: [A] rash of art events peppered the globe, while artists of many nations, ethnicities, and cultures, long ignored in the West, were borne to critical and commercial success. (8)

Yet the paradox of contemporary art, according to Stallabrass, is that “greatest effect on art has not been on its economy but its rhetoric” (9); just the way Day insisted upon the bourgeois emphasis on “individual talent” rather than the “economic disparity”. Stallabrass uses many examples to show how art exhibitions in lesser-known localities cater to foreign tourists or those who are part of the cosmopolitan crowd while neglecting the local population. In order to cater to foreigners, the innovativeness of art forms reflects the freedom offered in their production



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and their reception, such that they do not cater to local traditions alone. There is however a viable contradiction. This freedom also conceals the economic considerations of “business, state triage, and war” (Stallabrass 134), and hence is unfree. “That” particular state needs to attract foreign collaboration for its own economic existence. In this context, it would be interesting to study the polyphonic states of all that (the verbal and the visual for instance) goes into the making of contemporary artistic representations as forms of negotiations between the cosmopolitan sections of society and the insular or local or particular sections of society.





EPILOGUE THE CHOREOGRAPHIA OF THE VERBAL VS. THE VISUAL DIALECTICS

This project began in Chapter One where Lessing’s aesthetic classification of the verbal and the visual arts was placed within its proper historical context—as established in the chapter itself—only such a context justified to me the links established between Lessing’s aesthetics and the modernist/early twentieth-century avant-garde. It was therefore necessary to focus on Lessing’s Laocoön in order to establish connections between philosophical models and socio-economic practices. In this regard, I first discussed Lessing’s Laocoön in order to identify the separation of the verbal and the visual arts into two mutually exclusive aesthetic provinces. It was important for me to show how such a categorisation was influenced by classical and medieval philosophies. The next step explained how Lessing incorporated Descartes’s distinctively “modern” dualism (see Executive Summary) into his (Lessing’s) aesthetic categorisation amidst the empiricist and rationalist debate. I also reviewed Lessing in relation to Burke, Kant and Adam Smith. I argued that Lessing heavily derived from Burke and anticipated Kant and Smith in their philosophical argumentation, but within larger intellectual and material tendencies of the Enlightenment. Finally, keeping Lessing in mind, I briefly outlined the nature of the Enlightenment aesthetic. The larger theme of the chapter has been the historical description of the hierarchical division of the two art forms in question as it has emerged in Lessing and the Enlightenment. A century after Lessing, when Pater, in the late nineteenth-century, referred back to the eighteenth-century Lessing and his aesthetic classification, an interesting dynamics of literary, philosophical, economic and political conflicts was visible. To understand Lessing’s relationship with Pater was also to perceive the verbal-visual debate over a century of naturalisation of a history of human desires that evolved in Lessing and finally emerged as the position of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic of the art for art’s sake movement or in French the l'art pour l'art. I would also remind my readers, here, that the



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origins of the slogan did appear in Lessing’s declaration of the creation of the work of art for “art’s sake” (Laocoön 55). Through this chapter, I examined the social prejudice that informed Lessing’s naturalistic and formalistic classification of art. My intention was to outline the scope to develop a history and critique of the process of individuation of the verbal and the visual art forms into distinct social categories of human desires embedded in a capitalist economy that did later effectively culminate in the modernist avant-garde tradition. I began Chapter Two by placing Lessing’s aesthetic tradition within the historical context of Pater’s aesthetics in the late nineteenth-century: again, I repeat, only such a context justified the links establisheded between Lessing in the late eighteenth-century and Pater in the late nineteenth-century. I focused on Pater’s Renaissance in order to establish connections between philosophical models and socio-economic practices. I first discussed Pater’s “The School of Giorgione” from The Renaissance (1873) in order to examine his relationship with Lessing. I further contextualised various aesthetic debates emerging from Pater within a larger historical context of such distinctions, viz., drawing and writing; colouring and drawing; liberal arts and mechanical arts; verbal and visual arts, and music. In the process, I also discussed Pater, in his aesthetic categorisation, transforming the Cartesian dualism into a Hegelian synthesis. The concluding step included the discussion of the nature of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic in relation to Arnold and Wilde. Finally, keeping Pater in mind, I briefly outlined the nature of the late nineteenthcentury aesthetic in relation to Lessing and the Enlightenment aesthetic. The larger theme of the chapter has also been the historical narration of the hierarchical division of the two art forms in question as it has emerged in Pater and the late nineteenth-century. Almost six decades after Pater, when Greenberg, in the early 1940s, referred to Lessing in the eighteenthcentury and Pater in the nineteenth-century, an interesting dynamics of literary, philosophical, economic and political conflicts emerged. To understand Lessing’s as well as Pater’s relationship with Greenberg also meant to understand their aesthetic categorisations as processes of naturalisation of a history of human desires that evolved in Lessing and finally emerged as the position of the aesthetic of the early twentiethcentury or the modernist avant-garde. In this chapter, I examined the social prejudice that informed Pater’s confraternity of the arts. In the next chapter, the position identified in Lessing was duely and concretely established in Greenberg. I began Chapter Three by placing Lessing’s aesthetic tradition and Pater’s tradition of community of arts within the historical context of



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Greenberg’s aesthetic criticism of early twentieth-century avant-garde art. It was therefore necessary to focus on Greenberg’s aesthetic in order to establish connections between philosophical models and socio-economic practices. I first discussed Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoon [sic]” (1940) in order to identify his aesthetic standing in relation to Lessing and Pater. Then, I showed how Greenberg mapped the journey of aesthetic contradictions of late eighteenth- and late nineteenth-centuries with his own times. In the process, I identified Greenberg in the philosophical contradictions of Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. While discussing his (Greenberg’s) position, the following texts were discussed; namely, Ingres’s and Delacroix’s paintings on Paganini, Constable and The Haywain; Courbet and Burial at Ornans; along with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar”, and also Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”. These texts helped me display a whole set of positions developed by Lessing and Greenberg. In the light of Lessing and Greenberg, I further refered to the positions of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss on semiotics and modernity. Finally, keeping Greenberg in mind, I briefly outlined the nature of the avant-garde aesthetic of early twentieth-century. The larger theme of the chapter, just like the preceding chapters, was also a historical outlining of the hierarchical division of the two art forms in question, as it emerged in Greenberg and early twentieth-century avantgarde aesthetic. The attempt was to unearth the political motive that propelled Greenberg to support “pure” non-objective abstract art. I situated Greenberg in what he professed was his anti-Lessing position and what I proposed was his late-Lessing position.152 However, with reference to the avant-garde, the historical transition from the aesthetic law-provider in Lessing to the cultural historian in Greenberg was characterised by several changing categories of social functions. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”, a lyric poem written around the same time as Greenberg’s “Laocoon”, helped me locate the historical and philosophical significance of the changing social functions of several categories that emerged in this historically parabolic description of the emergence of the aesthetic critic: social functions included the function of the artist, the critic, the historian, the intellectual, the academician, the technologist, the autocrat, the democrat, the upper classes and the masses. In the following chapter, I used Auden’s poem in order to chart this historical evolution of the above mentioned social categories from the pre-capitalist to the late-capitalist period: a scope that Auden’s poem allowed so easily by virtue of the resonance of Ovid and the pre-capitalist social system; Bruegel and the beginnings of the capitalist social system; and Auden and his anticipation



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of a late-capitalist social system in that single lyric poem. On the whole, I attempted to delineate an extensive scope of the process of individuation and differentiation of all these categories as distinct social categories of human desires embedded in a capitalist economy that effectively culminated in the modernist avant-garde movement; a position that I have suggestively mentioned in all the chapters so far. The concluding chapter of this project situated the changing role of the intellectual within the historical framework that began with Lessing and culminated in the late-Lessing position in Greenberg. It was therefore necessary to focus on the criterion of the intellectual, as I did with Lessing, Pater and Greenberg in order to establish connections between intellectual models and socio-economic practices of their times. In this chapter I raised the question of political engagement—or disengagement—of the social category of an intellectual in the light of my discussions on Lessing, Pater and Greenberg. The relation between the critic and the artist had also to develop in an interesting way. I used Auden’s lyric “Musée des Beaux Arts” as a platform on which I could inscribe an entire trajectory of the changing role of the artist and the critic as categories of social functions in such strategic ways that would help me establish critical connections between 1. 2. 3. 4.

Auden and the critics of my concern; the changing categories of the artist, critic and historian; the verbal and the visual arts as intellectual or manual tasks; and the arts and the technologies as intellectual or mechanical disciplines.

I began this chapter with the discussion of Auden’s intertextuality in the form of a commentary on Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which was also a visual rendition of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses. All these artistic forms recounted the story of the Greek myth of Icarus in their own ways. I discussed the role of Ovid as an intellectual of the pre-capitalist society while discussing the social functions of intellectual and manual labour, as and when they emerged in his work; a discourse on such social functions was extensively developed through Bruegel and Auden. Ovid’s discussion commenced with a comparison between the use of the technological object—the crook—and the artistic object—the wax wings—within the larger philosophical discussion of the division of labour and its influence on the classification of the intellectual and the manual. I used Heidegger’s notions of art and technology to elaborate these points. Following Ovid’s discussion, I



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discussed Bruegel in the light of two social activities; the manual activity of ploughing and the artistic labour of designing. My discussion about the social functions of intellectual and manual labour culminated in Auden and his critique of the role of the ploughman as against that of celebrated artists or those he addressed as the “Old Masters” (line 2) in his poem. In this way, I attempted to question the demarcated roles assigned to the categories of the artist as the intellectual labourer and the ploughman as the manual labourer through my analysis of the conflict between the social valorisation of artistic activities as intellectual and/or manual activities. I also contextualised Greenberg’s critical position amidst the growing social demand for technologically reproduced art objects in the light of Benjamin’s analysis of the same. My discussion of Adorno thus reoriented the value of art as developed by Lessing, Pater and Greenberg into a historical specificity of their individual aesthetic positions and their relationship to art as a category. It was finally with Vicki Kirby that the conflicting binaries that emerged in Lessing, Pater and Greenberg, viz., intellectual and manual labour, and the verbal and the visual arts, were analysed in the light of the larger philosophical debate on the culturenature division. I used Magritte’s pipe painting to question the “proper” demarcation of the verbal and the visual in art; the corporeal and the incorporeal in philosophy, and the object and the commodity in the capitalist exchange system. I thus conclude this project with the statement of the aim of this project: to provide a historical exploration of the complex and ever evolving interaction between the verbal and the visual forms of art as they have emerged in Lessing and culminated in Greenberg. I have finally described my argument in the light of the myth of Laocoön trying to save his two sons from the fangs of the serpents. This project attempted to chart the course of the verbal and the visual arts as disparate historical practices that have emerged in their efforts to defend the entrenched capital of an aristocracy of hereditary powers and rights, just as Laocoön defends his off-spring. My research takes its leverage from the paradoxes and contradictions that have emerged in Lessing’s, Pater’s and Greenberg’s analyses. This also allowed me to appreciate why several movements of modern art are indebted to the Lessing legacy and why they cannot simply break with such commitments. For modern art movements, “there is no outside of art.” Yet, I have argued that the notions of representation and artistic media are no longer confined to what we might call natural art, definite forms of representation or aesthetic theory. I have explored the implications of this expensive inflation of aesthetic criticism to discover why its political and intellectual challenges



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effectively rewrite what we mean by the verbal and the visual classification of art; the “I” and the “eye” dichotomy of human cognition; the distinction between intellectual and manual labour; and finally the social class divisions and indeed, all the foundational categories or terms that have made analysis and judgement possible in this project.





NOTES

Note: I have followed standard format prescribed by the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, the Fifth Edition; and the Cambridge Scholars Publishers’ Submission Guidelines. 1

I add the word “modern” because then there will be an explicit progression from classical and medieval to the modern. 2 Lessing’s text stands out in his formulation of an aesthetic classification that has begun much before him. David E. Wellbery in Lessing’s Laocoon [sic]: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (1984) states that such aesthetics “had not before been formulated with such clarity or systematic rigor” (201). He claims that Lessing formally clarifies a semiotics that has long before emerged in Christian Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier and Moses Mendelssohn, an aesthetic of semiotics that favors a theory of representation rather than expressiveness. Frederick Burwick in “Lessing’s Laokoon [sic] and the Rise of Visual Hermeneutics” (1999) provides us with a lucid summery of the immediate precursors to Lessing’s “exposition of art in terms of its efficacy as a semiotic construct” (222). Abbé Du Bos writes Rélexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture in 1719: “[Bos] addressed the presumed capacity of language to conjure visual images by appealing to the mediation of signs” (Burwick 222). For Bos, the natural signs belong to “pictures and paintings” and are “immediately perceived”. Words are arbitrary signs that involve perception of ideas. After Bos, James Harris in 1744 writes Concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry. In the second of his Three Treatises, he argues that poetry cannot have “that” natural an affinity with objects imitated, as is possible with portrait or even musical composition. Words, even in their onomatopoeic functions, are arbitrary. Burwick accepts that the distinction between the natural and the arbitrary signs is evident in a classical text as ancient as that of Plato—Cratylus—but it is Bos and Harris who have been the first applicants of these signs to the individual “provinces of painting and poetry” (222). Even Meier in Versuch einer allgeneinen Auslegungskunst (1757) makes use of semiotics to understand a text. For more detailed information, see Burwick 221–225. 3 Mitchell in Iconology (1986) warns us about the dangers of advertising “regulative principles” as “natural, necessary, or literal”, since such advertisements are crucial in shaping “value judgments, canons of acceptable works, and formulations of the ideological significance of styles, movements, and genres” (103). Mitchell attempts to show how Lessing “interprets” limitations of artistic media as universal flaws of particular art forms; here the art forms in question are the visual forms of art. In other words, the “natural” limits of art forms



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“prescribed” by Lessing are themselves mediated constructions with an underlying agenda. Lessing’s redundant use of synonyms for “images” like “‘dumb,’ ‘mute,’ ‘empty,’ or ‘illusory [. . .]’” (113) may be interpreted as the fear of “intelligence”, “dialogue”, “eruditeness” and “sensuousness”: these “flaws” may be seen as advantages of the visual media over the verbal that Lessing wants to suppress in his defence of the verbal art forms. 4 Thomas Kaminski shows how the Renaissance and neo-classical authors endeavour to “rationalize” Aristotle’s concepts into rigorous rules (in Kallendorf, ed., A Companion to the Classical Tradition, 64). Kaminski calls the neo-classical interpretation of the three unities of drama the most “notorious” example of reintegration of Aristotle into the Enlightenment ethos (64). He gives the instance of the Italian critic, Castelvetro, who adds “psychological justification” to Aristotle’s principles of the unities (64). Castelvetro feels that the stage must represent the audience’s sense of real time and place in order to allow the audience to connect with the dramatic sentiments. Kaminski shows how a critic like Thomas Rymer condemns Shakespeare’s Othello in A Short View of Tragedy (1693) on account of the playwright’s dismissal of Aristotelian unities. It is however Johnson who in his “Preface to Shakespeare” appreciates the dramatist to have followed the basic Aristotelian principle—art imitates nature—while dismissing the “intermediaries of ‘art’” like the rules of unities (Kaminski 65). 5 John Graham describes the origins of ut pictura poesis in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. The most noted forerunner of Horace is the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, whose famous statement “[p]ainting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture” is recorded in another famous Greek biographer Plutarch’s magnus opus De gloria Atheniensium (348 BC). For further information, see Graham. Mitchell in Iconology also names Simonides of Ceos as the legendary initiator of the tradition of ut pictura poesis (116). Schweizer, in The Ut Pictura Poesis Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany (1972), also discusses the origin of the ut pictura poesis doctrine. See Schweizer 10–13. 6 See Cornford, trans., The Republic of Plato. 7 David Summers in The Judgement of Sense (1987) shows how Plato “strongly associated the realm of sense with the irrational [. . .]” (42). Summers writes: [Plato’s] definition of the relation between reason and sense had the broadest and deepest influence, and largely on his authority it was assumed and believed that no wisdom, or even knowledge, was to be found in the realm of sense. (42) 8 It is possible to juxtapose the eighteenth-century philosopher Winckelmann and his praise of Greek dignity in the tormented yet stoic appearance of Laocoön with Plato’s version of admirable countenance. Lessing begins his essay on Laocoön with Winckelmann’s description in order to show how critics before him use classical laws to judge the credibility of the arts. Winckelmann describes the Laocoön sculpture in the following manner: The pain of body and the nobility of soul are distributed and weighed out, as it were, over the entire figure with equal intensity. Laocoön suffers, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles; [. . .] his anguish pierces our very soul, but at the same time we wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well as this great man does. (qtd. in Lessing 7)



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The inter-relation of classical aesthetics and probable social divisions of the classical times needs some description in the scheme of this chapter, since Lessing’s aesthetic classification will be connected with the social divisions of his times in order to explore the scope of aesthetics as more than an autonomous sphere of critical discipline. 10 What we must note here is that Lessing’s criteria for the classification of the arts, while based on formal principles, will also reveal the process of social validation of human faculty involved in the particular artistic practice that will eventually determine the superiority of the art form as well. 11 For further schematisation of Aristotle’s methods of classification of the arts, also see Malshe 34–41. 12 There is an anecdote cited in “Zeuxis” (Britannica Online Encyclopedia) about the accuracy of Zeuxis’s realism. Many birds come to eat the grapes painted by Zeuxis, because they appear so real and sensual. 13 See note 5. 14 An as would be worth approximately three dollars. See Horace 131. 15 Lessing’s subordination of muteness to vocalily/audibility is embedded in the late Enlightenment subordination of sight to ear. Martin Jay in his Downcast Eyes (1994) discusses the subordination of sight to ear in the age of Enlightenment. He writes about the Dublin lawyer, William Molyneux, and his letter written to John Locke in 1693. The lawyer asks whether a person born without sight would be able to see the world by virtue of his eyes alone, after a miraculous regaining of sight. Apart from such skeptical questions regarding the power of sight, instances like the 1728 incident (a blind youth from birth after regaining sight finds it difficult to reorient himself to his surroundings) further strengthens such skepticism. Finally, Diderot in his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (1749), and his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751), attempts to show the interdependence of senses and the primacy of sensation of touch. Jay shows how later German thinkers like Johann Georg Hamann “chose to privilege the ear over the eye, placing its faith in the spoken word over the image” (106). In this regard, Jay recommends Isaiah Berlin’s “The Counter-Enlightenment” from Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (1980) and Harold Stahmer’s Speak That I may See Thee: The Religious Significance of Language (1968) to us. He further mentions that even Johann Gottfried von Herder subordinates sight to touch and hearing (106). He writes that primary practitioner of modern hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, has also acknowledged “the primacy of hearing [which] is [also] the basis of hermeneutical phenomenon” (qtd. in Jay 106). 16 I must credit such a logic to Mitchell, who says in Iconology: “The propriety of space and time in painting and poetry is at bottom a matter of the economy of signs, the difference between cheap, easy labor, and costly ‘pains and effort’” (102). He goes on to prove how flawed is “the space-time differential as the basis for the generic distinction between painting and poetry [. . .]” (102). I am not interested in the “space-time differential [. . .].” Rather, the labour angle has been taken up for further consideration.



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17

Lessing writes that each variation of representation in the visual medium “would cost the artist a separate work” but for a poet it would cost “a single pen stroke [. . .]” (24). 18 Lessing shows how painters “erase the distinction between visible and invisible beings” which according to him “destroys all those characteristic features by which [the invisible] higher order is raised above the [visible] lower order” (66). This is how he argues his case: If the poet wants to say that a body disappeared in the mist, we can imagine that. But the painter has to make the clouds visible as a conventional symbol to let us know about the invisible action. So the cloud is a paradoxical sign in the painting. Here, it is not a natural sign, a sign that physically resembles the referent. It is an arbitrary sign, a sign created by human beings to stand for something specific, though having no logical relation to what it stands for. The mist is an arbitrary sign in that it does not logically stand for invisibility, and hence it makes the visible invisible. But there is a gimmick here. The painted mist is also a natural sign in that it will always represent the invisible and hence makes the invisible visible: Thus it is not only that in painting the cloud is an arbitrary and not a natural sign; but this arbitrary sign does not even possess the definite distinctness which it could have as such, for it is used both to render the visible invisible and the invisible visible. (69) It is this problematic/confusing fusion of roles that Lessing wants to avoid and hence proposes that signs should have distinct tasks to perform. 19 See the online Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “Scholasticism”. 20 The webpage on “Fifth Lateran Council 1512-17 A.D” describes the council as a group of the ecclesiastical supported by the King of France, Louis XII. The council held its first session at Rome in the Lateran residence on 10 May 1512. Giles of Viterbo, the general of the order of Augustinian hermits, addressed the issues of evils of the Church. For more information on the Lateran Council, see “Fifth Lateran.” 21 J. Haldane in “Voluntarism and Realism in Medieval Ethics” (1989) gives a succinct account of the varying schools of medieval voluntarism. The major premise is that if everything is predetermined, it also means that every object in the material world has no significance of its own; it is rather a sign of something else. So, God is the guaranteer of meaning. But again, if faith allows the materials on earth to signify truth and only the truth, since there is but one truth: it also shows that God’s truth operates within the same laws that govern the process of knowing the truth. Thus, the material world becomes an important text for medieval theologians. It is St. Thomas Aquinas who is responsible for the “Realistic” view of human nature and Godly wonder. For him, and the “Realists”, natural facts determine moral propositions of the human subject. Haldane gives an illuminating example: Inhaling solvents causes damage to cells thereby impairing the proper functioning of the human body with the result that the addict is unable to realize his or her natural potential. These empirical facts explain why gluesniffing is a bad practice, a vicious habit, and are evidence for the normative judgement that it ought not to be engaged in. (40)



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Thus God favours good habits, but observable facts from a non-moral order of nature elucidate why that habit is good or bad. Duns Scotus made some changes to Aquinas’s “Realism”. For him, as reported in Haldane, natural facts may elucidate why something is bad, and why something is good; but they cannot decide moral questions like duties. It is here that voluntarism and its concept of the divine will play their role. However, Haldane also points out, “God is presented as entirely transforming the moral character of an action; not merely ceasing to command the good but apparently commanding the bad” (41). Thus, the complex proposition of voluntarism defines itself in the following manner: natural laws are necessary truths, which even God cannot command otherwise. For example, Haldane says that murder is necessarily bad and God cannot change that. Haldane’s following conclusions become very important: 1. God cannot perform a logically impossible feat. 2. It is logically impossible to make a contradiction true. 3. The negation of an ethical axiom, for example murder is wrong (thus: it is not the case that murder is wrong) is a contradiction. 4. Therefore, God cannot dispense with, i.e. negate, ethical axioms. (42) William of Ockham however argues that God is free and so is His will: Certainly God cannot do what is logically contradictory but this is not a limitation on His part. Any statement purporting to be a description of God’s performing a logically impossible feat is itself a contradiction and, therefore, not possibly true. For example, to say that it is logically impossible that 2 + 2 = 5 is to say that there is no possible world in which 2 + 2 = 5. If God could do the logically impossible then the following statement could be true: God made a world in which 2 + 2 = 5 and there is no possible world in which 2 + 2 = 5. However, this statement is contradictory and hence could never be true; consequently it is simply incoherent to suppose that anyone, even God, could achieve the logically impossible. (42) In other words, the theologians endeavour to value the empirical world only in a limited sense in that God has absolute power but chooses to be ordained lawfully, and the endeavour on the part of the theologists is to observe that law. 22 For Menn, in Descartes and Augustine (2002), Descartes’s underlying methodology of his “conceptions of the soul and God” and their relation to the body have strong similarities with St. Augustine’s and more so because “both Descartes and Augustine develop strongly voluntarist accounts of both divine and human action” (5). The basic voluntarist statement is that [. . .] God freely decrees the laws of nature, rather than recognizing them as intellectual necessities to which he must conform; and the human mind too, made in God’s image, has a freedom that makes it superior to the lawgoverned natural order, even while it is limited by the constraints of its natural environment. (Menn 5). 23 See Harré, Early Seventeenth Century Scientists, 1–24. 24 Ibid., 25–47. 25 Ibid., 61. 26 See Singer, A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century, 217.



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27

See Harré, Early Seventeenth Century Scientists, 83. Ibid., 83. 29 Copleston in A History of Philosophy (1994) explains Descartes in his (Descartes’s) Notes against a Program: “What is perceived is in the mind, though it represents what is outside the mind” (125). 30 Descartes discusses “authority” and “proof” in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Seeking Truth [Regulae ad directionem ingenii in French] (1626–1628). See Harré 159–168. 31 Donald E. Hall writes in his Subjectivity (2004): [The] forthright break from a philosophy of existence based on obedience to social and religious institutions and divine law led the Catholic Church to put Descartes’ works on its list of banned books in 1663. Even though Descartes goes through a process of sketchy and tortured reasoning to prove God’s existence in his Meditations (1641), his reasoning from doubt is, as Thomson observes, “clearly non-authoritarian. It liberates the individual to seek for himself or herself. In this way, it carries the spirit of a new age and is powerful politically [Garrett Thomson qtd. in Hall]” (20). [see Garrett Thomson, On Descartes (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2000)]. 32 I am using Smith’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. 33 Summers gives a succinct history of the aesthetic classification of mental and manual labour in Lessing’s times in The Judgement of Sense (1987). He shows how the “status of these lower faculties rose to find a new relation with pure, speculative intellect in a development loosely paralleling the change in the idea of intellect itself [. . .]” (235–236). It is in John Scottus Erigena and his De nuptiis philologiae et mercurii (ninth century) that Summers discovers the first use of the term “mechanical arts” (244). The distinction between liberal arts and mechanical arts is a distinction between internal and external perceptive powers of human faculty, where the internal is of a higher faculty and the external is of a lower one. Summers derives the following conclusion: “The mechanical arts deal with the world of sense and subjection to circumstance, the liberal arts deal with the mind and the autonomous rational soul” (244). With encouragement from St. Augustine and Hugh of St. Victor, the need for practical arts makes way for the institutionalisation of mechanical arts. The liberal arts still retain their superior positions. Summers records Romano Albeti, the sixteenth-century painter, as the initiator of the argument that would distinguish painting as a liberal art. For Alberti, Mechanikos comes from “machination” which also means “[n]ew discovery, or effort (sforzo)”; thus, for the first time, the word evokes the feeling of “wonder” in a mechanical feat (253). Alberti showed how the mechanical arts have gradually separated themselves from the liberal arts (particularly geometry) and become manual practices and hence subjected to scorn. So the golden age of mechanical arts for Alberti is when these arts are closest to the mental arts like geometry. It is with Robert Kilwardby, the archbishop of Canterbury (thirteenth-century) that the modern distinction between sciences and mechanics pave the way for distinctions in the arts as well. Summers writes: “[T]rue sciences deal with the universal and admit of absolute proof; ethics and mechanics, on the other hand, deal with 28



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singulars, with human works and operations, with contingent things that proceed from human will” (257). He says that Kilwardby is able to develop a relation between sense and intellect in a new way: he rejects the idea that the sensible is not intelligible: “It is intellect that reasons and discourses, not sense; but seeing that we reason and discourse about sensible, particular things [. . .] it must be that intellect apprehends sensible particular things in some way” (259). It is in the middle ages that Aquinas compared the mechanical arts with the “body” and the liberal arts with the “soul” (259). All these ideas, both classical and medieval, are adopted by the Renaissance humanists for their own benefit. Leonardo da Vinci has often argued that painting is not a mechanical art, but he also praises mechanics. Summers also shows how Michelangelo takes pains to distance himself from a sculptor who owned a shop, while also validating the need of practical and physical character of his art. So the powers of mechanical arts are validated in the validation of the “reputation of the mental powers necessary to the performance of these arts [. . .]” (264). It is however in Gianozzo Manetti (De dignitate et excellentia hominis) that poetry provides “the common point of contact between the liberal and mechanical arts [. . .]” (264). The value of the verbal arts is already evident, and Descartes perhaps makes it even more evident, when he says that [. . .] in order to perceive, the mind need not contemplate any images resembling the things that it senses . . . We must not hold that it is by means of this resemblance that the picture causes us to perceive the objects, as if there were yet other eyes in the brain with which we could apprehend it. (qtd in Summers 326). Summers adds that with Descartes, “the relation between the mind and sensation is more like that of the mind to words, which are conventional and arbitrary, than to images” (326). With Descartes, the mind and nature separation is finally sealed. And I want to show that a similar sealing is performed by Lessing in his classification of the arts. 34 The division that I have assumed so neatly for the eighteenth-century European society (between aristocrats and merchants) is a hodgepodge of many subtle social divisions over time. It is beyond the immediate aim of this work to reproduce the conglomeration of classes and their divisions in early modernity. There have been quite a few works in this area that illuminate the complexities of class systems of those times. Gary Day in his engaging account on European class structures in his 2007 reprint version of Class (1988) has summarised various works to this purpose. Some of the works referred to include A.L. Beier’s Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (1985); P. Bourdieu’s 1979 and 1984 published Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste; J. Frow’s Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995); A. Giddens’s The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (1981); H. Kamen’s The Iron Century: Social Changes in Europe 1550–1660 (1971); L. Stone’s The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558–1641 (1967); L. B. Wright’s Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935 and 1958); K. Wrightson’s “Estates, Degrees and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England” in P. J. Corfield’s edited Language, History and Class (1991); M. Ashley’s England in the Seventeenth Century (1968); W.



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Dimock’s and M. Gilmore’s edited Re-thinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations (1994); J. A. W. Gunn’s Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (1969); M. Kishlansky’s Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714 (1997); E. Lipson’s The Economic History of England, Vol. 3: The Age of Mercantilism (1964); B. Manning’s Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England (1996); W. R. Owen’s edited Seventeenth–Century England: A Changing Culture: Vol. 2: Modern Studies (1980); M. L. Bush’s edited Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500 ; R. Porter’s English Society in the Eighteenth century (1990); E. P. Thompson’s Customs in Common (1993), and Models of Value: Eighteenth Century Political Economy and the Novel (1996); to name a few. For a summary on eighteenth century European class structures, see Day 37–112. 35 See Harré 1. 36 Ibid., 81. 37 See Rodis-Lewis, “Descartes’ Life and the Development of his Philosophy,” 21–57. 38 See Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, 27–28. 39 See Wells xiii. 40 See Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 5–7. 41 See Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus, 90. 42 See Leitch, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: 1729–1781,” 551. 43 Day in Class summarises John Seed’s 1992 essay “From ‘Middling Sort’ to Middle Class in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century England”, which also appears in M. L. Bush’s edited Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500 (114–136). In Day’s words: John Seed gives a minimal definition of the middle class in this period when he says they were distinguished from the aristocracy and gentry ‘by their need to generate income from some kind of active occupation’ and from the laboring majority ‘by their possession of property’ [. . .]. This class was made up of a number of different elements: merchants, traders, businessmen, shopkeepers and professional groups such as lawyers, doctors and teachers. (95–96) 44 Williams in Keywords records the “earliest adverse meanings” of the bourgeois class in the eighteenth-century coming from [. . .] a higher social order: an aristocratic contempt for the mediocrity of the bourgeois which extended, especially in C18, into a philosophical and intellectual contempt for the limited if stable life and ideas of this ‘middle’ class [. . .]. (38) He further describes the social position of the middle class or the bourgeoisie in the following manner: There was a steady association of the bourgeois with trade, but to succeed as a bourgeois, and to live bourgeoisement, was typically to retire and live on invested income. A bourgeois house was one in which no trade or profession (lawyers and doctors were later excepted) could be carried on. [. . .].



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Before the specific Marxist sense, bourgeois became a term of contempt, but also of respect from below. The migrant labourer or soldier saw the established bourgeois as his opposite; workers [after industrialisation] saw the capitalized bourgeois as an employer. The social dimension of the later use was thus fully established by 1C18, although the essentially different aristocratic or philosophical contempt was still an active sense. (38) 45 Though I have cited instances from different European countries, the main intention is to illustrate the nature of sumptuary laws in practice then. 46 In this context, let me look at the history of the status of the “gentleman” as presented by G. D. Squibb in The High Court of Chivalry (1959). A gentleman is “recognized” by “court of arms” that further establishes his gentlemanly qualities as well as his noble legacy; but such a status is only “recognized” and not “created” (170–177). With economic power and influence, Day shows how “titles and offices” or “symbols” of gentry have to be sold in the seventeenth-century reinforcing the fact that anyone with money power may avail themselves of such titles, and consequently such status (97). Thus abstract entities like “status” could be bought. That meant that economic prosperity became an illusory identity of a gentleman. In Day’s words: This was particularly pronounced with the ‘nabobs’, the name given to men who, having made their fortune on the slave plantations of the West Indies, were able to buy their way into Parliament. Consequently, property was no longer deemed to be a reliable guide to gentlemanly status and instead the emphasis fell on qualities of character. (97) 47 Agostino Chigi, the Italian banker of the Renaissance often serves as an example for the two phrases coined by the American economist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class—“conspicuous waste” and “conspicuous consumption” (42–51). Rembrandt Duits in “Art, Class and Wealth” (2007) relates the expenditures of patronage to the modern concept of “conspicuous consumption”. For instance, “conspicuous waste” is explained as deliberate use of unnecessary resource to exhibit wealth and prosperity. The story goes that Agostino Chigi throws silver tableware into the Tiber after a banquet. The throwing of the silverware is an act as it gets retrieved the very next day from the net into which it was thrown. On a similar note, “conspicuous consumption” is defined as acquirement of property and wealth beyond one’s basic needs. Chigi hires renowned painters like Raphael to construct his pleasure villa. Duits writes that such show of wealth is as much a display of taste. Good and bad taste is judged as per adherence to prescribed social patterns. Any deviation from them results in show of wealth with no taste. In fact, the sumptuary laws are there to restrict such shows of wealth. 48 Bürger shows how the middle class and the mercantile system of market change the role of art and the artist over the ages. The medieval art has a cult status by virtue of being religiously institutionalised. But in the courts of Louis XIV (1638– 1715), art becomes representational and “serves the glory of the prince and the self-portrayal of courtly society, [. . .] just as sacral art is part of the life praxis of the faithful” (47). Bürger calls the detachment of the courtly arts from the religious



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rituals as “a first step in the emancipation of art” (47). The arts are gradually received “sociably” (47) rather than “sacrally”. It is commendable to recollect Lessing in this context: [. . .] I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in their case the artist did not create for art’s sake [. . .], but his art was merely a handmaid of religion, which stressed meaning more than beauty [. . .]. (55–56) The Norton Anthology contends that Lessing’s views on the freedom of the arts from religion can possibly be “the first use of the expression ‘art for art’s sake’” (Leitch 560). By the eighteenth-century, the middle class has already started playing a prominent role in defining market trends. Bürger states: Only to the extent that the bourgeoisie adopts concepts of value held by the aristocracy does bourgeois art have a representational function. When it is genuinely bourgeois, this art is the objectification of the self-understanding of the bourgeois class. (47) From A. Hauser’s The Social History of Art (1999), Bürger infers that the phenomenon of bourgeois objectification of art works is a result of the development of “new seigneuries”, “principalities” and “wealthy cities” which eventually became “sources of an ever-increasing demand for qualified artists who were capable of taking on and executing important orders” in the sixteenth century (38). Bürger writes: In this context also, Hauser speaks of a demand on the art market, but what is meant is not the “market” on which individual works are bought and sold, but the growing number of important commissions. This increase resulted in a loosening of the guild ties of the artists (the guilds were an instrument of the producers by which they protected themselves against surplus production and the fall in prices this entailed). (38) 49 The growth of the middle class notion of individuality is well articulated in the history of the growth of mercantilism and religious individualism, as succinctly presented by Richard Hooker in his web article “Discovery and Reformation”. The growth of trade disrupts the “given” order of medieval society. Trading involves easy economic activities, where goods common in some regions are bought to be sold in those places where they are not in plenty. But these goods are sold at a higher price in the places that need them, resulting in profit. This is how mercantilism develops. Lending of money for such purposes is considered unethical by the church, and hence is not practiced widely. It is from Turks and Muslims that the credit system is acquired. In fact, the word “tariff” and “traffic” comes from the Arabic. Around the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries, the traffic system establishes the role of money, or, the new value of exchange. Islamic traders are middlemen; they bring spices to European countries. The Portuguese and Spanish merchants, in particular, attempt to find routes to reach the spice lands and conduct business “directly” with the spice owners. Moreover, they are



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interested in conquering the settlements so as to annihilate the Muslim spice trade. Their aim is to attain complete monopoly over trade. Hooker writes: These actions, however, radically changed the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. Until the Portuguese pursuit of the spice monopoly, European powers approached Muslim, African, and eastern states and cultures with a high degree of respect. From the Portuguese, the Europeans learned a new, aggressive type of relationship and the nonEuropean countries adjusted accordingly. Hooker strives to show that while trading activities separate themselves from religious activities, they are nevertheless manifested in church practices as well. The traffic-like manifestations are also catalysts to the development of more individual forms of religious activities. The churches are against traffic, but they are themselves strong centres of economics. One such system that is equivalent to traffic system is the “sale of indulgences”. Here, the sinners are made to repent, and even confess their sins in the shape of some monetary retribution, which they have to pay to the Church. They can pay the clergy to do good services on their behalf. In other words, the internal feeling of repentance needs an external corporeal sign so that the society should “witness” such a transformation; whether spiritual transformation actually happens is a matter that does not need to be questioned. The medieval Catholic Church is the centre for social welfare, and their charities need money. So they invest in the system of indulgences. Just like money, which is value substituted for some other thing (it itself has no value), similarly, someone else’s good works are substituted for the good works the sinner is required to do. It is in the nascent stage of the Renaissance, that such “sale of indulgences” trigger off the Protestant movement that fights for removal of mediators like the clergy, and hence paves the way for direct communication with God, or, what develops into individual reception of God. In this context, a brief recollection of the historical development of the term “individual” as analysed by Williams in The Long Revolution is important. In medieval thinking, “individualism” means “inseparable” and that too, in the context of the Holy Trinity. Williams argues: “The effort was to explain how a being could be thought of as existing in his own nature yet existing by this nature as part of an indivisible whole” (90). He argues that the contradiction in the term “individual” is its separability as identity, yet an identity seen as conforming to particular group, kind, species and even class. The realisation of identity is the “fact of common status” (90). The modern sense of the “individual” is what Williams describes as an absolute; the individual is absolute “without immediate reference, by the very structure of the term, to the group of which he is a member” (90–91). Williams traces this change in the term to the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries in England. This kind of a change, argues Williams, may be seen in the historical development of changes in the perception of the soul, particularly with the development of Reformation. It is possible due to Reformation “to pass from seeing the soul’s destiny within an ordered structure, of God and the Church, to seeing this destiny as in a different way personal: a man’s direct and individual relationship with God” (The Long Revolution 91). Moreover, “[a] change in the conception of relationships—crudely from man–church–God to



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man–God—is recorded by the new sense of what it is to be ‘an individual’” (The Long Revolution 91–92). From Williams, I return to Hooker’s narrative again. The individual reception of God also has tremendous political impact. Hooker depicts how the growing number of dissenting churches develops into religious camps and results in subsequent wars. The dissensions of the Catholic Church also affect the status of monarchies, who are initially catholic kings and representatives of the Church. The French War of religions (1562–1598), the Spanish civil wars, the Thirty Years war—they are all based on the rivalry between the Protestants and the Catholics. In the French War of religions, the Protestants are called Huguenots. In the St. Bartholomew massacre, the royal armies execute more than twenty thousand Huguenots in 1572. Catholicism is then regarded as a reincarnation of the devil. Much later, Henry III has to become a tolerant catholic king by passing the Edict of Nantes on April 13, 1598, which allows the Huguenots to publically worship as well as take up administrative offices. In the Spanish civil wars, the defeat of the Spanish naval force—the Armada—gives European Protestants great incentive to strengthen their armies against the Spanish monarchy, which has been losing its powerful post in world politics towards the end of the seventeenth-century. The Thirty Years War ends with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648; it allows each state within the Holy Roman Empire to decide its own religion. In such a historical context, the production and reception of arts also witnesses historical changes. Let me compare some instances of patronages and commissions the artists enjoy from the aristocrats as well as the merchant class. Raphael’s (the famous Renaissance painter) painting, Pope Leo X and Two Cardinals (1518– 1519, Uffizi, Florence), strategically depicts his famous patron, Pope Leo X, in the middle, along with the Pope’s cardinal nephews as his escorts (see Fig. 1–2 in the Appendices). Leo X is originally Giovanni de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo de’ Medici; he is thus a representative of a strong papal and political force. More than his role as clergyman, he is known to be an extravagant patron of the arts. On the one hand, his artistic extravagances made Renaissance “the” age of art and architecture. Even the painting depicts rich clothes and golden coloured bell that consciously reflect the exquisite taste and wealth of the Pope. On the other, the Pope’s huge artistic projects, like the re-building of St. Peter’s Basilica and the pomp of his court, indirectly heralds the Reformation movement. The web article “Leo X” shows how [t]he ever-pressing financial undertakings of the papacy kept Leo X in constant need of new means of raising revenue. The wars with France, his lavish support of the arts, the construction of St. Peter's, and a projected crusade against the Turks all contributed to the financial needs of the papacy. One important source of revenue had long been the dispensing of indulgences (remission of the temporal penalty for sins) for money. [. . .]. In response to this preaching, Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses. [. . .]. On June 15, 1520, Leo issued a document condemning Luther of heresy on 41 accounts and ordered him to submit to the authority of Rome within 60 days or suffer excommunication. Luther, who by this time had gained the support of influential figures in Germany, openly defied the



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Pope. Thus, Leo was left no alternative but to issue a papal bull (Decet Romanum Pontificem) of excommunication on Jan. 3, 1521. The church represents the failings of a bureaucracy; the Medici family represents the self-seeking, extravagantly indulging, and tyrannical patrons of art; and the subsequent Reformation becomes the symbol of the revolt against the tyranny of Roman ecclesiastical despotism as a whole. See Sporre 246–252. Contrary to papal commissions, there are instances of merchant commissions. Take the famous case of Jan van Eyck’s marriage portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his bride of 1434 (see Fig. 1-3 in the Appendices). It is an imitation of the matrimonial union of the young Italian merchant, Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanni Cenami, the daughter of an Italian merchant. The realistic imitation is remarkable since the fold of the dresses, the carpet, the rosary, the slippers, the mirror, the bed and all other objects in the room have been painted with immense exactitude and details. It is as if van Eyck is a witness to the marriage. This is a typical bourgeois painting in that Arnolfini’s status as a merchant is being well exhibited and also witnessed. His objective belongings describe his wealth, which also includes his bride, who is also a merchant’s daughter (there is a suggestion of annexion of property). Moreover, the presence of a convex mirror in the room celebrates the detailed principles of optical reflections on the mirror, also including the mirror. Along with the groom, the bride and the notary, the mirror also reflects Eyck himself. That is his miraculous self-portrait. The painting is reserved here for a twofold purpose: at one level, the painting captures the display of Arnolfini’s possessions; on the other, the painting acts as a witness to the betrothal. Moreover, the reflection of the artist has a double edged function. The painting bears his signature: “Johannes de Eyck fuit hie. 1434 (‘Jan van Eyck was here. 1434’)” (the individualised artist and his individual product); the artist is also the witness to the marriage. See Sporre 255. 50 Jan van Eyck’s marriage portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini, as discussed in the latter half of note 49 is a good example. For a more detailed analysis of this important painting, see Sporre 255. 51 See Summers 195–197. 52 In Lessing’s times, the arts have become purchasable commodities, and hence have a certain economic value. In fact, I repeat Leonardo da Vinci (nearly two centuries before Lessing) from the Notebooks, where he defends the economic intentions of the arts: And if you call [. . .] [painting] mechanical because it is done for money, who fall into this error—if error it can be called—more than you [Liberal Artists] yourselves? If you lecture for instruction, do you not go to whoever pays you the most? Do you do any work without some pay? And I do not say this in blame of such views, for every labour looks for its reward. (qtd. in Wells 189) Also, see Section 1.6.1. 53 For Lessing, the written word though visual does not become a case of idolatry since, the letters of the word do not have any sustainable individual existence in themselves other than their contribution to the formation of the word:



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[I]f the result of this pen stroke, viewed by itself, should offend the hearer’s imagination, it was either anticipated by what has preceded or is so softened and compensated by what follows that it loses its individual impression and in combination achieves the best effect in the world. (24) 54 A point already made by Mitchell on Burke in Iconology, 126. 55 Mitchell in Iconology discusses the gender prejudice in Burke and Lessing as well. Sublimity is the “masculine aesthetic mode” and beauty, the feminine (129). 56 The single quotes within the indented quote have been taken from Laocoön. 57 See Mitchell, Iconology, 105. 58 Also qtd. in Mitchell, Iconology, 124. 59 For a detailed understanding of the complicated role of Prussia in England’s fight for colonial supremacy over the French, see Anderson’s Crucible of War (2000). 60 See Hooker, “Capitalism.” 61 The neo-classical intellectual universalisation is well explained by Mitchell in Iconology, when he states how Lessing is the intellectual companion of Newton and Kant: He places himself with Newton and Kant above the realm of ideology and sexuality in a transcendental space where the laws of genre are dictated by the laws of physical nature and the human mind—and there he has remained. (111) 62 Raymond Williams in Keywords (1976) discusses the emergence of the “modern” definition of “aesthetics” as different from that of the classical Greek interpretations. He writes how “aesthetics” in Greek mainly caters to material things or “things perceptible by the senses” rather than immaterial things (27). Baumgarten establishes a new use for the word by emphasising on “subjective sense activity” and on “the specialized human creativity of art [. . .]” (27). Kant continues the “modern” tradition, but by defining “aesthetics” not merely in Baumgarten’s sense of the word, but also as the science of “the conditions of sensuous perception” (27). In 1879, Lewis is recorded to have proposed a variant definition of aesthetics: “abstract science of feeling” (27). 63 Reid explains how graphic representation that intervenes in the writing process in the forms of gestures like “additions, scribbles, and the excessive embellishment of letters, the transformation of words, lines, and inkblots into heads, animals” reveals the “pauses and hesitations of the thought process” (7). 64 The contrast of desires is strongly evident in the juxtaposition of Colette’s embarrassment over his “childish counterwriting” and non-serious nature of his manuscripts with drawings of caterpillars in and around his written words, with Flaubert’s discomfort over the printed text that removes the notations of thought processes and hence the experience of writing as a subjective process altogether. 65 It is noteworthy to understand that what drawing has been to writing, colouring is to drawing in the art academies. In the eighteenth- and a major part of the nineteenth-century, these academies have appreciated strictly outlined drawings, the cause of which has been championed by the French neo-classical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Georges Roque in “Writing/Drawing/Color” (1994) quotes the French neo-classical artist: “Drawing is the probity of art. Color is art’s



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charm and its seduction—a siren of whom the prudent person should beware” (Roque 48). Ingres definitely represents the neo-classical period in his support for strict and “legible” drawing as a more intellectual work of art than coloring. Now, I come across a category called the legible in drawing. While drawing is reduced to the level of a “problematic twin” of writing on account of its writing illegibility; within drawing itself there is the need for legibility. Roque explains how pen strokes in drawing seem to be completely faithful to the idea and hence the intellect. It is interesting to note that the criterion of transparency of signification that Lessing holds true for verbal arts is also used as the criterion for drawing in order to institutionalise its feat in academic institutes as equivalent to the intellectual arts in the eighteenth-century. Lessing states that words must invoke imagination in such a manner that we do not feel the means of production (the corporeal or the physical) of that particular imagination (Laocoön 85). Drawing achieves a similar feat in its strict outlines of forms. In contrast, if the same idea is painted on a canvas, “colour” will not be able to delineate the contours of the idea. Moreover, the plasticity of colour is more evident than the signified of which it is a signifier. Lessing’s condemnation of the visual arts as a whole may be applied to the art of colouring in particular. But towards the dawn of the nineteenth-century, the introduction of unruly, lavish, vividly contrasting and colourful show of brushstrokes by a new entrant Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix creates an uproarious division in the Musee de Louvre in Paris (see Rewald). Instead of looking at Delacroix’s visible strokes as “purely” a form of romantic defiance of neo-classical rules, I contend that there is possibility of an underlying neo-classical fascination with abstractions and sciences. In fact, around 1880, grammars on colours have begun to appear: they are all in favour of the act of abstraction. In Roque’s words: Bourgoin’s Grammaire élémen taire de l’ornement, for instance, defines the elementary traits or strokes of the “graphic alphabet,” and then proceeds to study its “rules of conjugation,” by considering, “the figures of the ‘graphic’ alphabet no longer as signs of graphic figurations, designed to write forms as letters write words but rather as distinct figures, objects which exist in and of themselves. And what is true for drawing also holds true for color. A grammar of color is possible if it is based on the models of drawing’s elementary traits: “As by the deflection of a point in space may be generated all the elementary figures and forms of geometrical and constructive science, so from a like deflection of a spot in place may be generated all the elementary and compound hues of colous; the science which is called Chromatics” (60). (double quotes mine) So colour is also made intellectual by breaking its parts into grammar, alphabets and syntax to elevate it from a position of subjugation when compared with drawing. Colour then is no more “wayward”, but a scientific abstraction of rules of hues and their several combinations. Thus colour has its own legibility as well. In fact, Pater states that fine gradations of colours and hues provide the poetic aspect to pictorial representation. No wonder that impressionism, pointillism and other such modern movements in the arts have been scientific in their approach.



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66

Grant has used Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to understand the value of science in Aristotle’s times. 67 See note 49. 68 Interestingly, historical evidence in the hopeful future of rational government of people furthers the cause of the modern advocation of reason as the new order of existence. In Gillespie’s words: While [ancient versus modern] criticism did not go unheard, European intellectuals were still overwhelmingly committed to modern thought in the broadest sense in 1789, in large part certainly because the power of modern rationality seemed to have been borne out by the success of the Americans in peaceably establishing their own laws and choosing their own leaders in the aftermath of American Revolution [. . .]. This example led most European intellectuals to conclude that human reason could give order to human life if only given a chance. As a result the critique of modernity often fell on deaf ears. (256) 69 See Smith, trans., Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 41–42. 70 See Wordsworth “Daffodils”. 71 I agree with Fang Po in her major argument that Pater is influenced by both, the empiricist Hume, and also by Kant. Po finds out from Inman’s Walter Pater’s Reading (1981) that Pater in Queen’s College has read Hume and Berkeley by 1858, two decades before he wrote The Renaissance. It is from Berkeley that Pater learns that objects in reality appear as they are perceived. But in the two decades between reading Berkeley and writing The Renaissance, Kantian studies further transform Pater’s seemingly empiricist stance of perception. Po chronicles from Inman again that Pater reads Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1858 in Heidelberg and again in 1861. In Po’s words, “Yet Pater modified Hume’s empiricism with Kant’s view that our mind actively organizes our experiences derived from sense perceptions” (116–117). Kant stresses that the activity of thinking involves “making judgments about what we experience” (Po 117). 72 Harris in The Necessity of Artspeak (2003) criticises Pater for his misuse of the term “Anders-streben”: he finds it more of an “interlinguistical” or “fanciful indulgence in metaphor” (90–91). I am not interested in the correctness of Pater’s terminologies, but in influences that might have made Pater use such terms for his version of aesthetic theory. Notwithstanding the nature of Harris’s criticism, his admission to the fact that “long in advance of Picasso or the Dadaists or James Joyce” or what we know as the modernist art, Pater’s “intellectual technique” becomes “pivotal to the success of later generations of artists and critics” (91). That is an important point for me notwithstanding Harris’s criticism of Pater’s “intellectual technique” as “the more inexplicable, the better” (91). 73 I am not discussing different types of romantic poetry that Hegel lists in his lectures on aesthetics. The aim is to establish the position of poetry in Hegel’s aesthetics. 74 See Bell-Villada 54. 75 I owe the knowledge of reference of Crossick to Day, who has a commendable bibliography in this regard. Crossick also quoted in Day, 114.



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In this regard, Day summarises Lukács from History and Class Consciousness: “Consequently, the bourgeoisie never sees society as a whole but confronts it as a blind force beyond its control” (127). See G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (1968; London: Merlin, 1990), 50, 63. 77 Day quotes from P. T. Murphy, Towards a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals, 1816–1858 (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1994). 78 Brougham is cited in D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Working-Class Autobiography (London: Europa, 1981). 79 See E. Gaskell, North and South (1855; London: Everyman, 1993). 80 Hall shows how Charles Kingsley, member of the middle class, proclaims through his literature that he is also one among the oppressed. He claims, “I am a chartist” (qtd. in Hall 56). In Hall’s words: [. . .] Kingsley’s “Christian socialism,” [. . .] was in fact an attempt to placate and manipulate the working class, and, finally, to keep them in their place. In his essays published under the pseudonym “Parson Lot" in the workingman’s weekly Politics for the People Kingsley recommended to his working-class readers patience, sobriety, and above all “self”mastery, with that last quality depending upon a conquering of all selfinterest and, in fact, a renunciation of oppositional subjectivity: be content with “the patient abiding of the meek” rather than resort to the “frantic boasts of the bloodthirsty,” [. . .]. (qtd. in Hall 56) Hall further contends: “And the most telling aspect of Kingsley’s participation in the social dialogue on Chartism is that by all indications, he thought he was being helpful and was serving as an ally of the oppressed [. . .]” (57). 81 To see all the possible ways fiction and the economic world are related in the mid nineteenth-century, see Williams 57–89. 82 I do not insist like Joyce that “godly labour” or noble labour is a complete myth. If I take Blake into consideration, he prints, etches, paints as well as writes poetry; all these activities are performed by him as against division of labour. I reproduce a section of my work on Blake from my M.Phil dissertation. Blake attempts to solve the paradoxical problems that have been raised in Lessing’s Laocoön in a short discussion of his text-and-picture etching titled “The Laocoön” (1826–27; for a reproduction of Blake’s Laocoön-etching see Fig. 2-1 in the Appendices). In a strange transfer of roles, I find that the figurative sculpture of Laocoön takes the centre stage of the parchment and the literal words are made to run round and fit themselves in and around the space permitted by the figure. It is as if the words are the figurative embellishments, while the figure is the arbitrary sign. Blake is not ashamed to identify himself with a figurative representation of a mythical hero; again notice the importance of myth. Moreover, this gesture of true will to spatial art is strengthened by his moderation of any sexual tension; he carves in one corner of his painting: “chastity and abstinence are gods of the Heathen.” Thus desire itself becomes part of the godly process of creation: “The Unproductive Man is not a Christian, much less the Destroyer.” Hence, politics of desire are removed. Blake in his Jerusalem prophesies, “sexes must vanish & cease to be”, and he condemns the demarcations of time and space as “Vanities of Time and Space”. He



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establishes in his “A Vision of the Last Judgment” what Lessing refrains from saying: “Time and Space are Real Beings / Time is a Man Space is a woman.” He allows equal roles to both man and woman: “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.” So art becomes religion, with all the forms of art equally constituting art as a whole. Thus, the paradox between part and whole is also solved: “Jesus: we are his Members.” Our mortal body is thus a part of the eternal body of God, and we have to produce as part of the eternal process of creation of God himself. Blake led a life of poverty, and considered money a curse. He wanted England and France to become one. He was against racialism. Blake’s solution of paradoxes therefore is a utopian simulation of all contraries (whether innocence or experience) without disturbing the conventional status of the categories: time remains male, space female, Reason Satan and Imagination God, black slavery and white freedom. In his poem “The Chimney Sweeper”, where the boy is sold by his father when he could hardly speak (power of speech presiding over the mute), Blake associates the entire class of enslaved peoples with the colour black and that of free peoples with white. And he then goes on to show that the black sweepers, when they have their coffins unlocked by the Angel, will run naked and white in heaven with their bags left behind. This clearly establishes the supremacy of white over black but also suggests the utopian translation of all blacks into whites. The historical exchange value is hence not changed: time, reason and white still would reign supreme. But his experience as the dominated and his elevation of art to the abstract allows him to reverse values otherwise declared unequal: thus words are etched around the Laocoön image making time act like space; black becomes equivalent to white in Heaven; practice becomes art. In other words, the inferior become superior in art. And art is religion: the visible is raised to the spirit or mind and again the mind portrays itself by its visible creations. The spirit is living; hence its images are also living, not dead. And death does not stop creativity since artists are part of Jesus, the one who does not die. Thus the part is raised to the whole. In this way, Keats’s nightingale stands for all nightingales, Shelley’s skylark stands for all skylarks, Wordworth’s daffodils stand for daffodils all over the world. And Joyce’s and Rancière’s “worker intellectual” becomes the mouthpiece of all the workers; or Waugh’s “country labour” stands for all true and noble labour. Blake like Pater creates a utopian world, but differs from Pater in his practice of role reversal of artistic categories. We must remember though that Pater comes at the end of the century; Blake happens in the beginning. But the conception of the ideal does not get rid of the hierarchy; rather the emancipation from hierarchy is paradoxically promised by virtue of noble labour and simultaneous social recognition of individuality. See Rath, “Aesthetic Problems in Literary Ekphrasis,” footnote 13 & 18, 141–146. 83 Day quotes Crossick to describe the nature of moral discourse in the 1850s and the 1860s: [T]here is less talk of ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’, and more of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’, of ‘respectable artisans’ and ‘gentleman’, as a good proportion of society (including much of the



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working class) came to concentrate on divisions which emphasized moral rather than economic criteria. (141) In this regard, Day cites the example of massive sales of self help books, like Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help of 1859. 84 Day summarises D. Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: Methuen, 1987). 85 See Croix 885. 86 The essay is discussed in Harris, “Arnold, Pater, Wilde” (1971), 734. 87 See Day 124. 88 For more information, see Crick, “Appendix A Biographical Notes,” The History of the Social Democratic Federation, 307. 89 For more information on the emergence of the Fabian Society, see Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (2007). 90 See Noyes, William Morris, 1. 91 Hall illustrates some instances of such bourgeois hailing of the marginal groups of society. He gives the example of writings of slaves like Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince to [. . .] demonstrate [. . .] [that] contemporary theories of identity, selfcultivation, and self-actualization [English abolitionist groups against slave trade] were far from universal, for they still concerned only the rights, roles, and responsibilities of a relatively few individuals of privilege. (36) Even in the case of gender prejudices, the voice of freedom raised by women thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft is not without similar problems. Hall quotes David Glover and Cora Kaplan, who point out in their Genders (2000) that Wollstonecraft’s “ideal for women is more or less the ‘eighteenth-century ideal of masculinity’” (Hall 40). Hall writes: “Like that of the commentators on race [. . .], hers is a new perspective on marginalized subjectivity from the inside of oppression, though admittedly from a position of economic privilege as well” (41). He calls Wollstonecraft as one of the first theorists of social construction (42). He goes on to show how liberal feminists fought for political rights for women. But, as Ruth Robbins points out in Literary Feminisms (2000): “liberal feminists sometimes forget that their allegiance to the liberal individual is also an allegiance with competitive capitalist economics, and that wherever there is competition, there are losers as well as winners” (qtd. in Hall 42). Socialists like John Stuart Mill in “The Subjection of Women” (1869) still believed in ideal utopian theories where “existing social relations between the sexes” is equated with “principle of perfect equality” (qtd. in Hall 44), something that Pater attempts to do. Through Day we have shown how the English bourgeois played a part in dividing the political consciousness into skilled and rough artisans. Hall shows how even Durkheim in his propagation of specialisation in The Division of Labor in Society (1893) states how such activities take place in “higher” societies (58). And in such a case, there is a need for “organizational and instrumental [. . .] role in the new array of discretely defined disciplines and individualities [. . .]” (58). 92 This chapter does not concentrate on the development of the debate between non-objective avant-garde art and avant-garde art as art object (like Dadaist art objects) because such concerns will have larger implications in the following



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chapter. There is no point in cluttering this chapter with these implications at the moment. In this chapter however I understand non-objective art work as nonimitative art work, and will request the reader to keep the Dadaist background in mind for the present. 93 Georges Roque in “Writing/Drawing/Color” (1994) quotes the French artist Ingres: “Drawing is the probity of art. Color is art’s charm and its seduction—a siren of whom the prudent person should beware” (48). Ingres is neo-classical in his support for strict and honest drawing, which is considered more intellectual than the intermingling of boundaries as in the act of coloring. See Roque, “Writing/Drawing/Color,” 43–62. Also see note 65. 94 For more information on Keats’s life, see Bate. 95 For information on Shelley’s life, see Cameron. 96 For more information on the life and times of Byron, see Gross. 97 See Richardson, Baudelaire, 127. 98 See Buisine, 95–117. 99 See the web article “Arthur Dove: A Retrospective.” 100 We need to recollect Barnard and his distinction between “art” and “craft” that was discussed in the first chapter in Section 1.6.1. 101 Crowther attempts to critique Deane W. Cutin’s 1982 essay “Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism” to show how Cutin produces “misleading analyses of Kant and Greenberg” (442). I am not interested in Cutin’s mistakes. Rather, the interest is more about the issues of aesthetic formalism in Kant and Greenberg, which emerge in Crowther’s criticism on Cutin. Moreover, Crowther discusses another essay of Greenberg, while I am interested in Greenberg’s “Newer Laocoon [sic]”. The essence of Crowther’s argument is what matters at the moment. 102 See Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” 54. 103 This section has been published as a scholarly article titled “From Artists to Labourers: The Myth of Icarus in Ovid, Bruegel and Auden.” See Rath 77–93. 104 See Ovid, The Love Poems. 105 See Virgil, The Georgics, 143. 106 Ellis provides the following bibliography: James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764). 107 In my M.Phil dissertation, I have referred to the use of “latest” technology in Bruegel’s painting and compared them to the earlier technologies. Lynn Jr. White in Medieval Technology and Social Change (1966) analyses the late medieval period’s technological discoveries and their subsequent effects on society. With the help of White’s analysis, I may review Bruegel’s representation of the plough in the landscape: The replacement of the simple scratch-plough by the heavy plough, which was composed of a coulter, a horizontal share, a mouldboard and wheels (White 43), effectively transformed the productivity of farming as it did also land ownership patterns. [. . .]. Interestingly it is the heavy plough that we see Bruegel’s farmer using.” See Rath, “Aesthetic Problems in Literary Ekphrasis,” 97. Also see White, Medieval Technology, 43. 108 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, 177–178.



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Ibid., 178. Ibid., 176. 111 Ibid., 178. 112 Ibid., 177. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 15–86. 117 Monica Gale defines the didactic epic as a sub-genre of the epic, which took its name after its instructional style of narration. See Gale 101–115. 118 E. J. Kenny in “Historical Sketch”, writes: In Ad 8 Ovid, who was by then, since the deaths of Virgil and Horace, indisputably the premier poet of Rome, was suddenly sent into exile at Tomis [. . .] on the Black Sea. The sentence was decided and pronounced personally by Augustus, the two causes of offence being carmen, a poem, the Ars Amatoria, and error, an unspecified indiscretion. The mystery surrounding this episode has never been cleared up; though Ovid in his exile poetry is sometimes surprisingly bold in pleading his case, and many of his contemporaries must have been in the secret, he nowhere allows a clear inference as to the nature of the error. The picture that emerges from such hints as he does give is that of involuntary complicity in some scandal, in which politics and morals were interlocked, affecting the Imperial house and Augustus in particular. (ix–x) See Kenny, “Historical Sketch,” viii–x. 119 Kenny in his “Introduction” to The Love Poems suggests that while Ovid maintains “clichés” from The Georgics, he however mocks and parodies the Virgilian situations [. . .] with a kaleidoscopic sequence of vignettes, painted with affectionate malice, of contemporary men and women in (or out of) love—or rather playing the game of love according to the rules of the elegiac affaire, now, we are told, reduced to a science. (xxiii) 120 See Smith, ed., “Adulterium.” 121 For the history of Julia’s banishment, see the web article “Agrippina the Elder (14 BC–AD 33).” 122 See the web article “The Julian Marriage Laws [. . .].” 123 See the web article on “Roman Timeline.” 124 See the web articles on “Equestrians” and “Ovid.” 125 Christopher Kelly in The Roman Empire discusses various instances of institutionalisation by Roman imperialism and Roman reconstruction of histories of conquered territories in the light of the autocratic rule of Augustus. One such instance is the celebration of Aphrodisias as Roman. Their architectural designs incorporate the god-like representations of the Roman emperor such that [. . .] the provinces could attempt to make sense of their own subjugation. Their own non-Roman past could be linked, in a seemingly unbroken progression, with a very Roman present. In Aphrodisias, even conquest— the hardest fact of empire—was incorporated into the long-standing 110



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religious framework of the Greek world, its brutality dulled by a series of images that argued for a connection between Greek myth and Roman history, between Aphrodisias and Rome, and between Olympian gods and naked Roman emperors. Viewers of this sculptural programme were able to glory in the further advance of Roman rule. (26) Another instance is that of Mytilene and its citizens. They “passed a decree instituting four-yearly games in honour of Augustus and sacrifices on his birthday” (26). Kelly adds that their texts were [. . .] proudly inscribed along with the instructions given to the envoys charged with informing the emperor in person. In their speech before Augustus, they were to emphasize that the Mytileneans recognized that their proposals were of little importance to those ‘who have attained heavenly glory and possess the pre-eminence and power of the gods’; but they were also to make it clear that, if any additional honours for the emperor could be devised, they would be immediately instituted, since ‘the enthusiasm and devotion of the city will not fall short in anything which can make him even more of a god’. (26–28) Kelly wants to drive home the point that the “explicit joining of ancestral gods and Roman emperors [. . .] demonstrated the dynamic capacity of traditional systems of belief to respond creatively in finding new ways to understand the nature of conquest” (28). 126 See Harreld, “Dutch Economy in the ‘Golden Age’ (16th–17th Centuries).” 127 Heffernan in Museum of Words (2004) points out an anomaly. He states that there is another identical painting of Icarus in Brussels’s Van Buuren Museum like the one in Beaux Arts. However, there is one difference between both of them: the Van Buuren one has the winged Daedalus very much present in the painting, unlike the Beaux Arts one (Museum 149). The Van Buuren one shows what Ovid actually writes: the agricultural men are staring at the winged creature. Notwithstanding this discrepancy, I concentrate on the Beaux Art one. Centuries later, Auden discusses Beaux Art as depicted by the title of his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”. 128 See Phelan, “The Philosopher as Hero: Raphael’s The School of Athens.” 129 See the web page “Musee des Beaux Arts.” 130 See Phelan, “The Census in Bethlehem, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.” 131 See Bruegel, “The Massacre of the Innocents.” 132 See Jones, “The End of Innocents.” 133 See Preston, “Alfonsist Monarchism and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War,” 110. 134 To know more about Auden’s life and political engagements, see Thomas, ed., Twentieth Century Verse, 344–345. 135 Here, I need to note Heffernan’s ironical remark about the “righteousness” of the great masters, whom Auden seems to praise: If they were “never wrong” about the juxtaposition of suffering with signs of indifference to it, what would Auden say of Breughel’s [sic] Parable of the Blind [see Fig. 4-7 in the Appendices] [. . .], which he could certainly have seen in Naples and which depicts a row of blind men tumbling



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miserably into a ditch while not a single animate creature—neither man nor beast—is shown anywhere else in the pictures, let alone shown displaying indifference to their plight? Viewed in light of the museum where this poem is nominally set, and more specifically of the paintings to which it alludes, Auden’s grand generalization about the Old Masters is at best idiosyncratic. (Museum 147) 136 Nemerov argues that Auden considers the ploughman as the disinterested intellectual; we have interpreted the ploughman as representative of the masses, but educated enough to be the “common intellectual”. 137 Cavanagh shows how Polish history has interpreted lyric poems in very historical and political contexts unlike the Anglo-American critical tradition: To give one particularly vivid example: the Warsaw student riots of 1968 were sparked by the closing of a production of Mickiewicz’s verse drama Forefathers’ Eve (part 2), which contained, so the authorities feared, inflammatorily anti-Russian sentiments. Romantic verse dramas are rarely performed in the West—works like Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound or Byron’s Manfred are read, in graduate seminars, as if they were lyric-poem sequences. The Romantic tradition is, on the other hand, central to Polish society at large: workers quoted Slowacki, Mickiewicz (and Byron in Polish translation) in support of the Solidarity movement of the eighties. (187–188) Thus, for the Polish communists, the lyric is “necessarily [a] historical and social genre” (Cavanagh 188). 138 I have used the World Wide Web version of the article that has later come out as a book. 139 See Bhati, “Art as Emancipation, or Truth and Community in Heidegger’s Conception of Art,” 89–112. 140 Way ahead in 1960, Greenberg writes “Modernist Painting” [from Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism], where we may witness his condemnation of the adulteration of superior culture, or what has emerged as mass-culture. He writes:”The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (85). I interpret his “entrenching it more firmly in its area of competence” as an effort to entrench traditional priority in its area of competence or in a separate and distinct realm from that of mass-culture. Such an interpretation is further strengthened with Greenberg’s separation of the category of “art” from what he condemns as “entertainment”: We know what has happened to an activity like religion, which could not avail itself of Kantian, immanent, criticism in order to justify itself. At first glance the arts might seem to have been in a situation like religion’s. Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated, like religion, to therapy. The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of



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experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity. (“Modernist Painting” 85–86). In other words, art has to be more intellectual than being merely and passively useful to the masses in the form of religion or entertainment; two forms that the masses cater to for obviously not the most amazingly thought-provoking or critical purposes, as per Greenberg. Even Auden laments over the plight of the intellectual; such minds are not allowed to take important political decisions like decisions in wars, as is evident in the discussion of his lyric poem. Art seems to be relegated to the enclosed space of museum, where it quietly critiques its contemporary world in vein. While Auden laments, Greenberg develops a “new” understanding of reverence when he prepares an agenda for modernist paintings in particular, viz., their irreverence to tradition. In Greenberg’s words: Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. [. . .]. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance. (“Modernist Painting” 86) (double quotes mine) 141 I interpret an instance of “aestheticization of politics” and “politicization of aesthetics” in Benjamin’s sense of the phrases. Post-First World War, the Jews in Germany are heavily taxed, persecuted, and massacred. Why the Jews? I pause here to acknowledge the work done by Arthur Kemp in his book March of the Titans: A History of the White Race (1999). The Community Television for Southern California has also put up on the World Wide Web a commendable treatise titled The Great War: And the Shaping of the Twentieth Century. One of its articles “Hatred and Hunger” is helpful here. The Russians propagate the communist ideas, heavily supported and financed by the Jews. Kemp claims that it is “instinctually” inevitable that the Germans develop dislike for the Jews. He gives some striking historical facts to back the above contention, which is also his. The American Jewish banker, Jacob Schiff, has financed the 1917 Russian Revolution of the peasants that broke the feudal order in Russia (see “The Racial State”). The Bolshevik revolution has a large number of Jews in their governing body. Leon Trotsky is a Jew whose real name is Lev Bronstein. Even Lenin is of Jewish ancestry from his mother’s side. Even the father of communist ideology, Karl Marx, is of Jewish origin, his real family name being Levi (the origins of Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and many others are recorded in Kemp, “The Suppressed Link”). So Kemp asserts that the Germans are anti-Jewish. Moreover, the Jews use the technology of media to publically declare war against the Germans: the Daily Express in London runs a bold headline “Judea declares war on Germany” on 24 March 1933 (a fact exposed by Kemp in “The Racial State”). The Germans decide to intern their Jewish population within their territories.



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In the First World War, Germany supports all states that are against Russia and Communism. Germany and Austria, however, lose heavily and have only two options for survival: total annihilation or armistice. Germany chooses the second but in humiliation. On the ninth of November 1918, the German monarchy is broken and Germany is declared a Republic, while Austria and Hungary sign separate armistices in the wake of the fall of Spanish Hapsburg Monarchy (dates available in “Hatred and Hunger”). The First World War witnesses the end of several monarchies. A Communist future is visible, and the world sees the possibility of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (The Communist Manifesto); but for the defeated empires it is the “Bolshevik menace” (“Hatred and Hunger”). That the German monarchy could fall made it possible for the servile Dutch and Spaniards to dream of a new world, a world that Auden as a Communist calls “the just world”; courtesy his poem “Spain 1937”. But, if I go beyond the 1940s, Auden’s dreams are definitely not realised. Kemp in “The Racial State” shows how the Germans smart under the First defeat, and their hatred for the Communist allies grows stronger. The temptation is to get back the old German glory: the glory of pure blood and undiluted soil of the Germans as a first approximation; a deeper desire would be monopoly of European market as suggested by Kemp. And this required the breaking of the powers of the main financers behind the Communist triumph: the Jews. This is what the Nazi policy concludes to be their “Final Solution” (Kemp). It is the defeat of the Spanish Republicans in the Spanish Civil War that finally gives the sinking Germans the confidence to start their next attack, which then comes to be known as the Second World War. The point I want to drive home is that an entire German population wants another war after the disaster of the first one: the German death toll from the First World War is unimaginably harsh. The paradox of modernism for me is therefore the juxtaposition of the Dolchstosslegende with the Concentration Camps, genocides and the holocaust. The Lexicon from the web site of the “History of the Holocaust” describes the Dolchstosslegende as a legend; the word means “stab in the back”. I know that the Holocaust, the Genocides and the Concentration Camps are representations of modern technology and rationality. But what is interesting is that German technology creates “legends” through the innovation of an aesthetic myth rather than mere machine. The difference between the theocentric use of myths and the homocentric use of the same is interesting. If modernism is about rationality, science, logic, and perhaps its greatest product technology, the medieval age is not without technology; but it is technology subservient to a larger concept of human existence—the human destiny, as is evident in my analysis of Ovid. That there are transcendental powers that govern the human rational is the basis of the medieval “awe”. With modernism, the medieval “awe” seems to be questioned, or rather rationalised. The performative value of human life is emphasised upon, as discussed in Bruegel. But, interestingly, the value of “awe” never changes; only the context and content change. Destiny and fate go backstage as machine takes the front stage. But it is machine that produces “awe” through manipulation of irrational forces of human condition. Let me explain the “irrationalities” of rational technology with the help of historical facts. The Germans decide to disown the armistice that states they had



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lost the war. They propagate that their nation is not united in their effort for the cause of Germany, on account of which they lost the war. They blame the reformers, the anti-nationalists and the Jews. The desire to invoke the spirit of patriotism is the propagated German cultural value. The desires they want to arouse are those of hurt, anger, envy, and bitterness. The Dolchstosslegende is then a fine product of an instance of rationality manipulating the irrational. It is also the finest excuse for the use of destructive technology. The Icarus myth certainly teaches the Greek workers the value of humility and caution. The Dolchstosslegende myth spreads the urgency of racism and nationalism. To quote from the germanNotes: The official birth of the legend can be dated to November 1919, when Hindenburg attempted to exonerate himself and the German army as a whole by placing blame specifically on a Dolchstoß by troops stationed within Germany who joined soldiers’ and sailors’ unions during the Spartacist uprisings. The term “November criminals” refers both to the statesmen who signed the Treaty of Versailles and to a vast Jewish-Marxist conspiracy that was often interpreted as including Germans who were not considered sufficiently patriotic or militaristic. It was also applied to those who participated in the revolution that overthrew the imperial government and instituted the Weimar Republic. (double quotes mine) It is an “impressionable Hitler” (germanNotes) who exercises the full use of the Dolchstosslegende effect to start the fascist reign of Germany that leads to the Second World War. His powerful speech-making abilities always have insinuations delivered against the “November Criminals”. Modernism may thus stand for the rationalisation of irrational forces by aestheticising them, while appearing to denounce those very forces: there is an organised creation and manipulation of inherent human desires by the powerful through the use of non-manual force. Modern technology thus creates a spectrum of desires of fear, ambition, and many more. Behind the advertisement of the modern rational, lies the inherent fear of the irrational. Even a Kriegsmarine needs Dolchstosslegende. Hence, the “psychodynamics” of technology (I have taken the word from Ong Walter’s Orality and Literacy, where he writes a chapter “Some Psychodynamics of Orality”) shows technology as not merely a scientific human product but also a system of actualisation of irrational force of desires like ambition, insecurity, fear and pride, just like Lessing’s laws. That desire is already there in the consciousness from whence the idea of the machine comes cannot be disputed. May I say that machine technology is methodical apparatus of desires? And the concrete machine itself mass reproduces human desires. Thus, technical reproduction results in mass reproducibility of desires. 142 Lyotard in The Postmodern Explained (1992) argues that a work of art has to be postmodern first to then become modern (13). He argues that in the modern concept of the sublime, the unrepresentable is “invoked only as absent content, while the form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader material for consolation or pleasure” (14). In this capacity, Greenberg’s criticism of the European avant-garde seems well informed. The object of reference, say the urinal, depicts a “form” that is well realised by the spectators, as it is a common



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object of use with high mass recognisability quotient. In contrast, Pollock’s action paintings with drips of colours arrested on the canvas, for Greenberg, have the potential of the postmodern sublime; the abstract drip “invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself” (Lyotard 14). In other words, both “form” and “content” of representation are challenged. For instance, the urinal as “content” must have challenged the category of art at the level of “content” in its initial exhibition of itself as a work of art. In that capacity, it is postmodern. But with time, its gradual acceptance by art institutions and galleries as a work of art does not allow it to challenge the notion of art even at the level of “content”, since its initial challenge has been internalised; it is an example of modern sublime now. For Greenberg, the problem is “form”, since “content” has been shocking the world for quite some time. But the “form” used has always been symbolic of some cultural asset or the other. The urinal is a common object of use. Or, in the case of popular art, objects that are popularly known, like comic strips of film stars are used. That is known “form”, even if in its initial stage; but such “form” may shock the audience at the level of artistic experience. But outside the category of art, the “form” is recognised. By denouncing reference completely, abstract expressionism only refers to itself, and thus its pure physicality is non-objective and thereby it challenges the notion of recognisability itself. The “form” itself is problematised because one cannot recognise the “form” as any known form, and any known “form” for Greenberg is tradition and tradition is bourgeois totalitarianism. But I interpret in Greenberg’s possible postmodern sublime, his fear of tradition as fear of mass-culture and desire for “pure form” as unrepresentable, unrecognisable but sublime declaration of totalitarian intentions in the form of American liberal democracy; an intention difficult to pin down and yet very much there. Action painting need not necessarily be the postmodern sublime that Lyotard discusses. The surrealist undertones or the politicised or acquired unconscious motives in abstract expressionist representations cannot be dissociated from their emergence as the Jamesonian “political unconscious”. 143 See Jameson, The Political Unconscious. 144 See Brockett 85–89. 145 See Burwick, 219–272. 146 The concept of “Perspective” in paintings is invented by Brunelleschi. See the Web Page article “Brunelleschi and the Origin of Linear Perspective.” 147 Powell 139–146. 148 Ibid., 145. 149 Ibid. 150 Reid in “Editor’s Preface: Legible/Visible”, also makes a poignant point about the “literate” eye in this regard. Writing, according to Reid, is the representation of a recognised set of signs. A certain letter and a combination of letters into a word will signify certain signifieds in a fixed manner. The “literate eye” would then mean the “social” eye, which has been trained to learn the relation between the word and its meaning; in other words, the language, through which we understand the world in a manner we have been taught to understand. In contrast, illegible writing, as per Reid, is anti-social, since it confuses the “literate eye”, which then cannot recognise what is expected to be recognised: the knowledge of the world as



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represented by language itself becomes obscure. Reid shows how the category of the illegible [. . .] is at least an indication of the tenuous, fragile nature of this legibility of the most basic kind. It shows the legible to be a category that is forever under threat, forever in danger of disappearing, of becoming lost; despite appearances, in a paradoxical obscurity where writing can be seen and recognized, but can no longer be read. Illegible writing indicates in fact that the sign has been remorsefully eaten away by its own figurative nature, and that it does indeed take almost nothing at all for the figure to resort back to its status as a mere drawing. (6) 151 I have derived the following conclusion from Derrida in “The Violence of Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau”, where he deconstructs Lévi-Strauss’s points on the category of “intelligibility” of the Nambikwara tribe in “A Writing Lesson”. For Lévi Strauss the marks made on the barks by the tribe are illegible, and hence like some abstract drawing. But for the tribe, the English alphabet is illegible. But again, drawing has to represent an idea, which again has to be an established one. But if the drawing of anonymous lines is not “legible”, it becomes merely visual. So, the visual is not necessarily legible, but legible is definitely visual. But the illegible scribble has the potential of legibility for some, and not for some. So, every line drawn could be writing or drawing and legible or illegible as per what goes into defining the category of writing, drawing, legible or illegible. So every visual is also legible when compared to what is considered as illegible or literate. 152 For Jameson, “post” is a break from the past; “late” is a continuation of the past, but in a different way. See Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.





APPENDICES

Fig. 1–1: Laocoön

(See Agesander, Athenodorus and Polydorus, Laocoön)



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Fig. 1-2: Pope Leo X and Two Cardinals



(See Raphael, Pope Leo X and Two Cardinals)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 1-3: Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife

(See Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife)



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Ex. 2-1: “Daffodils” I wander’d lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, They stretch'd in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed— and gazed— but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. (See Wordsworth, “Daffodils.”)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 2-1: Blake, The Laocoon (sic)



(See Blake, The Laocoon [sic])



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Fig. 3-1: Ingres, Paganini

(See Ingres, Paganini)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 3-2: Delacroix, Paganini

(See Delacroix, Paganini)



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Fig. 3-3: Constable, The Haywain

(See Constable, The Haywain)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 3-4: Courbet, Burial at Ornans

(See Courbet, Burial at Ornans)



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Ex. 2-2: “Epilogue—To Lessing's Laocoon [sic]” One morn as through Hyde Park we walk’d, My friend and I, by chance we talk’d Of Lessing's famed Laocooen; And after we awhile had gone In Lessing’s track, and tried to see What painting is, what poetry— Diverging to another thought, “Ah,” cries my friend, “but who hath taught Why music and the other arts Oftener perform aright their parts Than poetry? why she, than they, Fewer fine successes can display? “For ‘tis so, surely! Even in Greece, Where best the poet framed his piece, Even in that Phoebus-guarded ground Pausanias on his travels found Good poems, if he look’d, more rare (Though many) than good statues were— For these, in truth, were everywhere. Of bards full many a stroke divine In Dante’s, Petrarch’s, Tasso’s line, The land of Ariosto show’d; And yet, e’en there, the canvas glow’d With triumphs, a yet ampler brood, Of Raphael and his brotherhood. And nobly perfect, in our day Of haste, half-work, and disarray, Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, Hath risen Goethe’s, Wordsworth’s song; Yet even I (and none will bow Deeper to these) must needs allow, They yield us not, to soothe our pains, Such multitude of heavenly strains As from the kings of sound are blown, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn.” While thus my friend discoursed, we pass Out of the path, and take the grass. The grass had still the green of May, And still the unblacken’d elms were gay; The kine were resting in the shade, The flies a summer-murmur made. Bright was the morn and south the air; The soft-couch’d cattle were as fair As those which pastured by the sea,



The “I” and the “Eye” That old-world morn, in Sicily, When on the beach the Cyclops lay, And Galatea from the bay Mock’d her poor lovelorn giant’s lay. “Behold,” I said, “the painter’s sphere! The limits of his art appear. The passing group, the summer-morn, The grass, the elms, that blossom’d thorn— Those cattle couch’d, or, as they rise, Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes— These, or much greater things, but caught Like these, and in one aspect brought! In outward semblance he must give A moment’s life of things that live; Then let him choose his moment well, With power divine its story tell.” Still we walk’d on, in thoughtful mood, And now upon the bridge we stood. Full of sweet breathings was the air, Of sudden stirs and pauses fair. Down o’er the stately bridge the breeze Came rustling from the garden-trees And on the sparkling waters play’d; Light-plashing waves an answer made, And mimic boats their haven near’d. Beyond, the Abbey-towers appear’d, By mist and chimneys unconfined, Free to the sweep of light and wind; While through their earth-moor’d nave below Another breath of wind doth blow, Sound as of wandering breeze—but sound In laws by human artists bound. “The world of music!” I exclaim’d:— “This breeze that rustles by, that famed Abbey recall it! what a sphere Large and profound, hath genius here! The inspired musician what a range, What power of passion, wealth of change! Some source of feeling he must choose And its lock’d fount of beauty use, And through the stream of music tell Its else unutterable spell; To choose it rightly is his part, And press into its inmost heart. “_Miserere, Domine!_ The words are utter’d, and they flee.



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Appendices Deep is their penitential moan, Mighty their pathos, but ‘tis gone. They have declared the spirit's sore Sore load, and words can do no more. Beethoven takes them then—those two Poor, bounded words—and makes them new; Infinite makes them, makes them young; Transplants them to another tongue, Where they can now, without constraint, Pour all the soul of their complaint, And roll adown a channel large The wealth divine they have in charge. Page after page of music turn, And still they live and still they burn, Eternal, passion-fraught, and free— _Miserere, Domine!_” Onward we moved, and reach’d the Ride Where gaily flows the human tide. Afar, in rest the cattle lay; We heard, afar, faint music play; But agitated, brisk, and near, Men, with their stream of life, were here. Some hang upon the rails, and some On foot behind them go and come. This through the Ride upon his steed Goes slowly by, and this at speed. The young, the happy, and the fair, The old, the sad, the worn, were there; Some vacant, and some musing went, And some in talk and merriment. Nods, smiles, and greetings, and farewells! And now and then, perhaps, there swells A sigh, a tear—but in the throng All changes fast, and hies along. Hies, ah, from whence, what native ground? And to what goal, what ending, bound? “Behold, at last the poet’s sphere! But who,” I said, “suffices here? “For, ah! so much he has to do; Be painter and musician too! The aspect of the moment show, The feeling of the moment know! The aspect not, I grant, express Clear as the painter’s art can dress; The feeling not, I grant, explore So deep as the musician's lore—



The “I” and the “Eye” But clear as words can make revealing, And deep as words can follow feeling. But, ah! then comes his sorest spell Of toil—he must life’s _movement_ tell! The thread which binds it all in one, And not its separate parts alone. The _movement_ he must tell of life, Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife; His eye must travel down, at full, The long, unpausing spectacle; With faithful unrelaxing force Attend it from its primal source, From change to change and year to year Attend it of its mid career, Attend it to the last repose And solemn silence of its close. “The cattle rising from the grass His thought must follow where they pass; The penitent with anguish bow’d His thought must follow through the crowd. Yes! all this eddying, motley throng That sparkles in the sun along, Girl, statesman, merchant, soldier bold, Master and servant, young and old, Grave, gay, child, parent, husband, wife, He follows home, and lives their life. “And many, many are the souls Life's movement fascinates, controls; It draws them on, they cannot save Their feet from its alluring wave; They cannot leave it, they must go With its unconquerable flow. But ah! how few, of all that try This mighty march, do aught but die! For ill-endow'd for such a way, Ill-stored in strength, in wits, are they. They faint, they stagger to and fro, And wandering from the stream they go; In pain, in terror, in distress, They see, all round, a wilderness. Sometimes a momentary gleam They catch of the mysterious stream; Sometimes, a second's space, their ear The murmur of its waves doth hear. That transient glimpse in song they say, But not as painter can pourtray—



237

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Appendices That transient sound in song they tell, But not, as the musician, well. And when at last their snatches cease, And they are silent and at peace, The stream of life's majestic whole Hath ne'er been mirror’d on their soul. “Only a few the life-stream's shore With safe unwandering feet explore; Untired its movement bright attend, Follow its windings to the end. Then from its brimming waves their eye Drinks up delighted ecstasy, And its deep-toned, melodious voice For ever makes their ear rejoice. They speak! the happiness divine They feel, runs o'er in every line; Its spell is round them like a shower— It gives them pathos, gives them power. No painter yet hath such a way, Nor no musician made, as they, And gather’d on immortal knolls Such lovely flowers for cheering souls. Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach To these, to these, their thankful race Gives, then, the first, the fairest place; And brightest is their glory’s sheen, For greatest hath their labour been.”

(See Arnold, “Epilogue—To Lessing's Laocoon [sic]”)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 3-5: Dove, Seagull Motif (Violet and Green)]



[See Dove, Seagull Motif (Violet and Green)]



239

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Ex. 3-1: Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunt about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought



The “I” and the “Eye” As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (See Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”)

 Ex. 3-2: Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar” I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion every where. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. (See Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar.”)



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Fig. 3-6: Van Gogh, Starry Night

(See Gogh, Starry Night)



The “I” and the “Eye” Ex. 3-3: Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. (See Whitman, “When I heard the learn’d astronomer.”) Ex. 3-4: Shirley, “Death the Leveller” THE glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. Some men with swords may reap the field, And plant fresh laurels where they kill: But their strong nerves at last must yield; They tame but one another still: Early or late They stoop to fate, And must give up their murmuring breath When they, pale captives, creep to death. The garlands wither on your brow, Then boast no more your mighty deeds! Upon Death's purple altar now See where the victor-victim bleeds. Your heads must come To the cold tomb: Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust. (See Shirley, “Death the Leveller.”)



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Fig. 4-1: Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

(See Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 4-2: Comparison of Bruegel’s Ships with Dutch Herring Busses



(See “Caravel”)

(See “Dutch Herring Buss”) 1480



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Fig. 4-3: Raphael, The School of Athens

(See Raphael, The School of Athens)



The “I” and the “Eye” Ex. 4-1: Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. (See Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”)



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Fig. 4-4: Bruegel, The Census in Bethlehem

(See Bruegel, The Census in Bethlehem)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 4-5: Bruegel, The Massacre at Bethlehem



(See Bruegel, The Massacre at Bethlehem)



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Fig. 4-6: Portrait of the Duke of Alba



(See Portrait of the Duke of Alba)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 4-7: Bruegel, The Parable of the Blind



(See Bruegel, The Parable of the Blind)



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Fig. 4-8: Duchamp, Fountain; Bottlerack

(See Duchamp, Fountain; Bottlerack)



The “I” and the “Eye” Fig. 4-9: Magritte, Treason of Images



(See Magritte, Treason of Images)



253



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INDEX

A A History of the Arts, 267 Absolute Spirit, 62, 73, 75, 78, 177 Abstract Expressionism, 106, 108, 116, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 161, 169 Adorno, Theodor, 254 Adulterium, 217, 267 Aesthetic Theory, 170, 254, 265 aesthetics, 3, 5, 11, 14, 16, 26, 34, 46, 50, 61, 63, 74, 86, 92, 95, 97, 101, 112, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 133, 170, 176, 177, 184, 185, 186, 197, 199, 210, 212, 220 aesthetic categories, 180, 187 Aesthetics of Literary Classification, 263 An American in Paris, 108 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 22, 263 “Anecdote of a Jar", 110, 111 Anthony Low, 142 arbitrary signs, 40, 106, 107, 108, 133, 197 aristocrats, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 38, 45, 78, 128, 151, 203, 208 Aristotle, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 17, 26, 58, 59, 60, 61, 145, 164, 165, 173, 198, 199, 212, 254, 259 Arnold, Matthew, 254 Ars Amatoria, 140, 141, 146, 147, 217, 254 art, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 20, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78,



81, 82, 83, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 146, 148, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 197, 198, 199, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219, 220, 222, 235, 236, 240, 254, 257, 264, 265 Art, Design and Visual Culture, 26, 254 artisan, 28, 83, 84, 87, 91, 92 artist, 4, 5, 6, 15, 27, 28, 30, 44, 48, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 74, 99, 100, 123, 131, 134, 137, 139, 146, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 165, 168, 169, 171, 174, 176, 181, 200, 205, 206, 209, 210, 216 autonomy, 21, 22, 63, 123, 156, 164, 172 autotelic, 48 avant-garde, 1, 3, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 116, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 167, 168, 170, 171, 177, 185, 186, 187, 188, 215, 222 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, 134

270

Index

B Barnard, Malcolm, 26 Barthes, Roland, 255 Baudelaire, 101, 216, 265 Baudrillard, Jean, 255 beautiful beauty, 13, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 50, 61, 67, 68, 71, 91, 122, 127, 167 Benjamin, Walter, 255 body, 3, 12, 13, 17, 20, 23, 25, 29, 34, 35, 63, 65, 75, 76, 80, 91, 101, 112, 183, 184, 198, 200, 201, 203, 214, 220 Bottlerack, 167, 252, 258 bourgeois bourgeoisie, 32, 33, 38, 45, 63, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 102, 105, 107, 109, 114, 119, 124, 127, 128, 129, 133, 134, 138, 143, 160, 167, 168, 189, 204, 205, 206, 209, 215, 223 Bronislaw Szerszynski, 18 Bruegel, 140, 141, 143, 144, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, 162, 165, 183, 216, 218, 221, 244, 245, 248, 249, 251, 255, 257, 259, 263, 264, 265 Brunelleschi, 223, 256 Burial at Ornans, 100, 103, 233, 257 Burke, Edmund, 256 Burwick, Frederick, 256 Byron, 216, 219, 260 C capitalist capitalism, capital, 27, 80, 82, 85, 94, 97, 101, 109, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 145, 152, 166, 167, 172, 173, 176, 189, 215 Caravel, 245, 256



Cavanagh, Clare, 256 Christianity, 16, 173, 174, 267 Christopher Columbus, 204, 264 Civil War Spanish, 140, 143, 154, 159, 221, 265 Class, 26, 28, 30, 33, 79, 162, 165, 203, 204, 205, 213, 256, 257, 258, 267, 268 classical, 4, 5, 13, 14, 16, 21, 26, 37, 42, 50, 56, 57, 59, 60, 74, 75, 76, 100, 117, 121, 124, 174, 197, 198, 199, 203, 210, 216 cogito ergo sum, 63 commodities commodity, 35, 128, 131, 209 Communism, 221, 262 Constable, 100, 102, 103, 232, 256 Contemporary Art, 189, 267 Courbet, 100, 102, 103, 129, 233, 257 Course in General Linguistics, 119, 266 craft, 26, 27, 32, 45, 61, 78, 111, 152, 165, 216 critic, 11, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 71, 92, 94, 98, 103, 108, 116, 134, 139, 166, 167, 170, 198 Critique of Judgement, 34, 38, 62, 63, 69, 261 Critique of Practical Reason, 25, 66, 261 Cultivating Picturacy, 108, 178, 179, 260 Culture and Society, 28, 91, 268 Customs in Common, 30, 204, 267 D Dadaism, 116, 132, 134, 137, 167 Daedalus, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 162, 218, 254 “Daffodils.”, 212, 228, 268 David Cottington, 129 David E. Wellbery, 197 David Hawkes, 35

The “I” and the “Eye” “Death the Leveller”, 266 dehistorcize, 177 Delacroix, 100, 101, 211, 231, 257 Democratic Subjects, 86, 261 Derrida, 23, 177, 182, 224, 255, 257, 262, 265 Descartes, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 63, 64, 65, 201, 202, 203, 204, 257, 258, 263, 266 dialectic, 1, 74 Didactic Epic, 259 Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 20, 258 Dolchstosslegende, 221, 222, 259, 262 Donald E. Hall, 21 Dove, Arthur, 258 Downcast Eyes, 24, 43, 199, 261 Duchamp, Marcel, 258 Dutch, 140, 148, 153, 218, 221, 245, 258, 260 E E. P. Thompson, 204 Eagleton, Terry, 32 eighteenth-century, 22, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34, 41, 62, 90, 91, 143, 198, 203, 204, 206, 211, 215 empiricist, 22, 23, 24, 65, 212 Engels, 80, 263 entrepreneurs, 173, 186 “Epilogue—To Lessing's Laocoon.”, 254 Equestrians, 217, 258 Eros and Civilization, 135, 136, 263 Eyck, Jan van, 259 F Fascism fascist, 132, 137, 169, 264 “From Gentleman to the Residuum”, 78 G Gary Day, 30, 128, 185, 203 Geist, 74



271

Gershwin, 107 Gibbon, Edward, 259 Goldsmith, Jane ten Brink, 259 Grant, Hardy, 259 Great Depression, 133, 134 Greenberg, Clement, 121, 126, 132, 133, 137, 219, 254, 256, 259, 263 Gus Gentium, 148, 266 H Harreld, Donald, 260 Hegel, 62, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 90, 91, 100, 121, 125, 126, 176, 177, 187, 212, 260, 266 Hegelian Hegel, 62, 74, 76, 77, 121, 125, 126 Heidegger, 146, 177, 217, 219, 255, 260 hereditary aristocracy, 45, 145, 150 Herring Buss, 245, 258 hierarchy, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 28, 39, 43, 57, 74, 75, 76, 77, 90, 91, 92, 107, 109, 120, 145, 150, 160, 173, 174, 178, 180, 183, 185, 214 High Court of Chivalry, 205, 267 Hooker, Richard, 261 Horace, 4, 5, 11, 26, 198, 199, 217, 261 I Icarus, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 216, 218, 222, 244, 247, 254, 255, 257, 265 Iconoclasm in Aesthetics, 176, 262 iconoclastic iconoclasm, 176, 177 Iconology, 3, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 124, 197, 198, 199, 210, 263

272

Index

ideology ideological, 77, 78, 104, 110, 116, 142, 197 Ideology, 3, 32, 35, 39, 63, 255, 258, 260, 263 imagination, 4, 12, 13, 15, 25, 26, 27, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 45, 51, 53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 69, 76, 81, 87, 90, 101, 103, 106, 112, 114, 117, 118, 133, 157, 175, 210, 211 Immanuel Kant, 212, 266 Ingres, 100, 101, 210, 216, 230, 261 intellectual, 1, 3, 22, 27, 28, 34, 46, 50, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 76, 86, 87, 89, 94, 96, 107, 118, 120, 124, 129, 140, 145, 151, 152, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 171, 172, 181, 201, 204, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216, 219, 220 Italy, 29, 94, 101, 148, 150, 151, 256, 259, 262 J J. M. Bernstein, 121 Jackson Pollock, 106, 108, 133, 134, 136, 168, 266 Jacques Rancière, 86 Jews, 220, 221, 222, 262 Julian Stallabrass, 189 K “Kant after Greenberg”, 127 Kantian Kant, 25, 62, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 137, 139, 212, 219 Keats, 101, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 154, 214, 216, 240, 241, 255, 262 Key Concepts in Cultural Theory, 22



L Laocoön, 1, 3, 12, 13, 30, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 57, 63, 69, 98, 118, 119, 133, 137, 139, 140, 166, 174, 198, 210, 211, 213, 214, 225, 254, 262 Lawrence Rainey, 131 Leo X, 208, 262 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 204, 262 Lessing’s Laocoon, 92, 197, 268 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 262 liberal arts, 27, 28, 58, 59, 162, 202 limitations limits, 14, 15, 29, 45, 48, 49, 57, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 109, 154, 180, 197 Literature and Painting, 267 Locke, John, 263 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 263 M Magritte, Rene, 263 Marcuse, Herbert, 263 Martin Jay, 24, 199 Marx, 80, 81, 82, 86, 89, 91, 98, 220, 262, 263, 265 mathematics, 19, 26, 27, 58, 59, 61 “Mathematics and the Liberal Arts”, 259 Matthew B. Crawford, 162 mechanical arts, 27, 28, 58, 162, 163, 202, 203 medieval, 16, 44, 59, 64, 162, 173, 176, 200, 203, 205, 206, 207, 216, 221 Medieval Technology and Social Change, 216, 268 Michael Allen Gillespie, 63 Michael Kelly, 176 Michelangelo, 28, 150, 203, 204, 256 middle class, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 44, 45, 87, 93, 94, 129, 204, 205, 206, 213, 214

The “I” and the “Eye” Milind Malshe, 265 mind, 3, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 34, 35, 48, 51, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 74, 80, 87, 88, 94, 119, 201, 202, 203, 210, 212, 214, 216 Mitchell, W. J. T., 3 Modern Art, 100, 129, 167, 257, 259, 263, 265 modernity modern, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 35, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 70, 77, 98, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 118, 119, 120, 130, 137, 144, 148, 149, 150, 155, 157, 158, 172, 176, 177, 180, 182, 185, 199, 202, 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 221, 222, 223 modernism, modern, 26, 28, 30, 61, 116, 203, 212 moral, 5, 6, 9, 11, 14, 21, 25, 60, 63, 66, 68, 69, 77, 84, 94, 115, 147, 149, 173, 200, 201, 214, 215 Museum of Words, 152, 153, 160, 218, 260 music, 10, 27, 28, 57, 58, 59, 61, 65, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 90, 91, 98, 99, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 234, 235, 236 myth, 87, 140, 141, 143, 145, 147, 148, 156, 213, 218, 221, 222, 257, 262 N natural, 5, 9, 14, 16, 19, 29, 31, 38, 40, 43, 45, 51, 55, 65, 117, 118, 119, 127, 146, 151, 153, 155, 157, 174, 175, 179, 182, 197, 200, 201 Nature, Technology and the Sacred, 18, 267 newness purity, pure, new, 131, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177



273

nineteenth-century, 46, 78, 82, 86, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 102, 106, 110, 111, 127, 135, 143, 167, 174, 176, 210, 213 noumena, 65, 66, 72 O "Ode on a Grecian Urn.”, 241, 262 One-Dimensional Man, 135, 136 opposition, 1, 46, 96, 116, 161, 179 Ovid, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 158, 165, 216, 217, 218, 221, 262, 264, 265 Oxford, 159, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268 P Paganini, 100, 230, 231, 257, 261 passion, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 173, 235, 236, 240 Pater, Walter, 46, 71, 77, 212, 255, 258, 261, 264 Patrick Joyce, 86 Perspective, 223, 256 Peter Bürger, 31 Peter Sedgwick, 258 physical signs natural, 120 Plato, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 26, 59, 60, 61, 145, 173, 184, 185, 197, 198, 257, 260 Pleasure Principle, 172, 265 Poetics, 5, 9, 144, 256, 260, 264 Poland Polish, 256 politics political, engagement, disengagement, 1, 2, 12, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 62, 63, 64, 70, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 87, 93, 95, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 148, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161,

274

Index

164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 172, 184, 185, 187, 189, 208, 215, 218, 219, 220, 223 Pope Leo X, 208, 226, 265 Portrait of Duke of Alba, 264 Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife, 227, 259 prejudice, 4, 14, 43, 45, 94, 210 priority, 130, 165, 170, 219 proletariat, 81, 87, 221 Psychological Metaphysics, 6, 268 purity pure, 86, 98, 102, 108, 109, 110, 114, 116, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 138, 166, 169, 170, 171, 173, 176, 220 Q “Quantum Anthropologies”, 262 R Raphael, 92, 150, 151, 205, 208, 218, 226, 234, 238, 246, 264, 265 rationalist, 24, 101, 103 Realism, 200, 201, 260 reason, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 34, 39, 44, 51, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 102, 107, 119, 129, 171, 173, 174, 198, 203, 212, 214 “Religion and Its Role in the World of Business.”, 268 representation, 1, 5, 10, 13, 14, 15, 20, 24, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 39, 43, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61, 66, 75, 83, 93, 100, 103, 104, 105, 112, 117, 118, 121, 122, 134, 142, 147, 148, 150, 151, 155, 156, 169, 176, 189, 197, 200, 210, 211, 213, 216, 223 Republic, 4, 5, 6, 7, 173, 198, 221, 222, 257 Rhapsody in Blue, 108 Rhetoric, 9, 17, 104, 254



Robespierre, 70, 258 Roman Empire, 16, 64, 141, 208, 217, 258, 259, 262, 264, 267 Romantic Image romantic image, 174, 262 S Saussure, Ferdinand de, 266 Scholasticism, 17, 200, 266 Seagull Motif (Violet and Green), 108, 239, 258 Shelley, 100, 101, 214, 216, 219, 256, 266 Simonides of Ceos, 198 “Simulacra and Simulations”, 255 Smith, Adam, 35, 43, 80 social conflicts conflict, 79, 98, 132 Sophists, 7, 260 soul, 6, 7, 12, 17, 18, 21, 23, 65, 81, 158, 174, 198, 201, 202, 203, 207, 236, 238, 240 St. Augustine, 17, 201, 202, 267 Starry Night, 116, 242, 259 Steiner, Wendy, 267 Stephen Melville, 127 Stevens, Wallace, 267 Subjectivity, 21, 202, 260 sublime sublimity, 18, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 62, 68, 69, 71, 81, 94, 112, 127, 222, 223 Summers, David, 7 sumptuary laws, 29, 30, 31, 90, 205 Surrealism, 132, 134, 137, 167, 169 T T. J. Clark, 133 Telling Flesh, 181, 262 The Aeneid, 141, 147, 268 “The Affirmative Character of Culture”, 145 The Census in Bethlehem, 152, 218, 248, 264 The Colors of Rhetoric, 267

The “I” and the “Eye” The Communist Manifesto, 159, 221, 263 The Fate of Art, 121, 255 The Georgic Revolution, 263 The Georgics, 141, 147, 216, 217, 268 The Haywain, 100, 102, 232 The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 32, 258 The Judgement of Sense, 7, 50, 198, 202, 267 The Julian Marriage Laws, 217, 267 The Long Revolution Raymond Williams, 59, 83, 84, 85, 96, 161, 207, 208, 268 The Nights of Labor, 86, 265 The Phenomenology of Mind, 62, 72, 260 The Politics of Aesthetics, 184, 185, 265 “The Politics of Literature”, 184, 185, 186 The Renaissance, 46, 54, 62, 71, 107, 212, 264 The Savage Mind, 119, 262 The School of Athens, 151, 218, 246, 264, 265 The Theological Origins of Modernity, 63, 259 The Treason of Images, 178, 263 The Ut Pictura Poesis Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany, 198 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 111 Theory of the Avant-Garde, 31, 256 “This is Not a Pipe”, 263 totalitarian totalitarianism, 70, 135, 136, 147, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 189, 223 “Towards a Newer Laocoon”, 96 twentieth-century, 3, 96, 97, 102, 109, 111, 121, 125, 127, 130, 140, 157, 162, 167



275

U Ugliness, 267 ut pictura poesis, 5, 11, 15, 30, 57, 95, 99, 104, 108, 198 utopia Ideal, 94, 97, 169, 175, 176 V Van Gogh, 116, 117, 118, 242, 267 verbal, 1, 3, 5, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 26, 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 49, 53, 61, 68, 69, 71, 72, 77, 79, 81, 90, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 118, 119, 120, 124, 126, 138, 139, 171, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 187, 190, 198, 203, 211 Vicki Kirby, 175 Virgil, 12, 92, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 150, 166, 174, 216, 217, 268 virtues, 5, 8, 48, 49, 70, 71, 72, 80, 84, 85, 90, 91, 92, 99, 142, 144, 168 visual, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 26, 27, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 61, 62, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 90, 91, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 126, 133, 138, 140, 150, 158, 171, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 190, 197, 200, 209, 211, 224 Voluntarism, 16, 200, 260 voluntarist voluntarism, 18, 64, 201 W W. H. Auden, 159, 259 Wealth of Nations, 35 Wells, Thereza, 268

276

Index

White, Lynn Jr, 268 White, Peter A, 268 Whitman, Walt, 268 Williams, Raymond, 28 Wordsworth, William, 268 working class, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 128, 129, 135, 137, 213, 214



Worthy, James C, 268 Writing Drawing, Color, colouring, 53, 55, 210, 216, 223, 224, 256, 265, 266, 267 Z Zeuxis, 10, 199, 268