Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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quality. The aesthetic revolution developed as an unending break with the hierarchical model of the body, the story, and action. The free people, says Schiller, is the people that plays, the people embodied in this activity that suspends the very opposition between active and passive; the little Sevillian beggars are the embodiment of the ideal, says Hegel, because they do nothing; the novel dethroned drama as the exemplary art of speech, bearing witness to the capacity of men and women without quality to feel all kinds of ideal aspirations and sensual frenzies. But it did so at the cost of ruining the model of the story with causes and effects, and of action with means and ends. The theatre itself, the ancient stage of ‘active men’, in order to draw itself closer to art and life, comes to repudiate action and its agents by considering itself a choir, a pictorial fresco, or architecture in movement. Photography consecrates the triumph of the gaze over the hand, and the exemplary cinematic body turns out to be the one that is constantly bombarded by events, none of which are the result of its intentions. The aesthetic paradigm of the new community, of men free and equal in their sensible life itself, tends to cut this community off from all the paths that are normally used to reach a goal. No doubt this tendency towards suspended action is constantly resisted. But this very struggle incessantly reproduces the inertia against which it rises up. In their search for an active theatre or ballet, Diderot and Noverre had to find models in pictorial composition. The same Rousseau who opposed the activity of the civic celebration to the passivity of the spectator in the theatre celebrated the farniente of reverie, and with The New Heloise inaugurated the long series of novels without action, devoted to what Borges later called the ‘insipid and idle everyday’. Wagner wanted a living poem that acted instead of describing, but this living poem, made to welcome the figure of the free hero, instead gave way to the figure of the god who turns away from action. The renovators of dance and theatre freed bodily movements from the shackles of a plot, but the emancipation of movement also distanced it from rational, intentional action directed towards an end. Vertov’s film, which sought to replace the plots and characters of yesterday with the living links of activities that formed the sensible fabric of communism, begins and ends in a cinema where the evening’s spectators seem to play with images that present them to themselves as the daytime actors of communism. Emancipated movement does not succeed in reintegrating the strategic patterns of causes and effects, ends and means.
Hasty minds will undoubtedly see this as the sign of an irremediable breach between aesthetic utopia and real political and revolutionary action. Instead, I recognized the same paradox in it as the one I encountered in the practices and theories of social emancipation. Emancipated workers could not repudiate the hierarchical model governing the distribution of activities without taking distance from the capacity to act that subjected them to it, and from the action plans of the engineers of the future. All these workers could easily have opposed the militants of the Saint-Simonian religion reinstating work, who came to recruit soldiers for the new industrial army, with the ingenuous words spoken by one of them: ‘When I think of the beauties of Saint-Simonism, my hand stops.’ The fullest expression of the fighting workers’ collective was called the general strike, an exemplary equivalence of strategic action and radical inaction. The scientific Marxist revolution certainly wanted to put an end to the workers’ reveries, along with utopian programmes. But by opposing them to the effects of real social development, it kept subordinating the end and means of action to the movement of life, at the risk of discovering that this movement does not want anything and does not allow any strategy to lay claim to it. Soviet critics responded to the filmmaker, who presented them with a vision of communism realized as the symphony of linked movements, that his so-called communism was doomed to an endless oscillation between pantheistic adoration of the irrational flux of things and pure formalist voluntarism. But what else could they oppose to this double defect except the return of artists to the old functions of moral illustration, whose inanity Rousseau and Schiller had exposed a century and a half earlier? Was the filmmaker effectively doing anything other than giving his judges a mirror in which they could recognize the dilemma of their science? Social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution, and was only able to deny this relation by transforming a strategic will that had lost its world into a policy of exception.
1 Jacques Rancière, Courts voyages au pays du peuple (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990), transl. James B. Swenson as Short Voyages to the Land of the People (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Abused and mutilated to the utmost, and without head, arms, or legs, as this statue is, it shows itself even now to those who have the power to look deeply into the secrets of art with all the splendor of its former beauty. The artist has presented in this Hercules a lofty ideal of a body elevated above nature, and a shape at the full development of manhood, such as it might be if exalted to the degree of divine sufficiency. He appears here purified from the dross of humanity, and after having attained immortality and a seat among the gods; for he is represented without need of human nourishment, or further use of his powers. No veins are visible, and the belly is made only to enjoy, not to receive, and to be full without being filled … In this position, with the head turned upwards his face probably had a pleased expression as he meditated with satisfaction on the great deeds which he had achieved; this feeling even the back seems to indicate, which is bent, as if the hero was absorbed in lofty reflections. In that powerfully developed chest we behold in imagination the breast against which the giant Geryon was squeezed, and in the length and strength of the thighs we recognize the unwearied hero who pursued and overtook the brazen-footed stag, and travelled through countless lands even to the very confines of the world. The artist may admire in the outlines of this body the perpetual flowing of one form into another, and the undulating lines which rise and fall like waves, and become swallowed up in one another. He will find that no copyist can be sure of correctness, since the undulating movement which he thinks he is following turns imperceptibly away, and leads both the hand and the eye astray by taking another direction. The bones appear covered with a fatty skin, and the muscles are full without superfluity, and no other statue can be found which shows so well balanced a plumpness; we might indeed say that this Hercules seems to be the production of an earlier period of art even more than the Apollo.1
This description of the Belvedere Torso figures, alongside ones about Laocoön and the Belvedere Apollo, among the memorable passages in The History of Ancient Art published in 1764 by Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He was certainly not the first to praise a statue that belonged to the Roman pantheon of Greek sculpture and whose perfection Michelangelo had extolled two centuries earlier. This admiration however was not free of paradox. Here is a statue of Hercules, the victor of the Twelve Labours, the athlete and wrestler par excellence, the one whom another illustrious sculpture, the Farnese Hercules, represents as a colossus leaning on his club and carrying the pelt of the slain Nemean lion. Now, what this one shows is a seated body deprived of every limb capable of performing any action requiring force or skill. Hence different artists tried to complete the figure by imagining the action accomplished by the hero: a reduction added a club, another a bow; a drawing by Hans Baldung Grien had placed Omphale’s distaff in its hands.2 Winckelmann took this tradition backwards. Instead of compensating for the lack, he transformed it into a virtue: there is no action to imagine. The mutilated statue represents the hero welcomed by the gods at the end of his labours, when they are nothing but a subject of joyful recollection and meditation. Yet you still need a head to recall and meditate. This Hercules is lacking that too: he is nothing but pure thought, but this concentration is only indicated by the curve of a back that assumes the weight of this thought, by a stomach that seems unfit for any digestive functions, and by muscles that do not tighten for any action, but whose outlines flow over each other like the waves of the sea.
Winckelmann thus carries the paradox to its extreme point. The accidental lack of the statue manifests its essential virtue. The apex of art is the mutilated statue that represents the greatest active hero miscast in the total inactivity of pure thought. Moreover, this pure thought only stands out as its exact opposite: the radical impersonality