Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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museums still present works of art today. It would also dominate all the thinking about art in the romantic period, and be systematized by Hegel as the passage from symbolic art to classical art, and from classical form to its romantic dissolution. Many of our contemporaries still see this as an historicist ‘derailing’ of art. But this ‘derailing’ is nothing other than the route through which the concept of Art as its own world came to light. Art exists as an autonomous sphere of production and experience since History exists as a concept for collective life. And the person who formulated this conjunction was no sociologist spitefully trying to cut down the sublimities of art to the prosaic conditions of their production. He was a hopeless lover of ancient sculpture, hoping to provide it with the most suitable sanctuary for its veneration.
It is true that this love itself is suspicious, and the argument is easily reversed. If Winckelmann is easily exonerated for having codified neoclassical frigidity, it is only to accuse him, on the contrary, of giving rise to the mad fervour of romanticism and German idealism. According to this accusation, his History invented a German Greece, an ideal land where art was born from the soil and expressed the very life of the people. This German Greece, sister to the Rome dreamt of by French revolutionaries, nourished the utopia of art’s destiny, which destined it to negate itself in order to become what it used to be once again: the fabric of sensible forms of a people’s life. It would feed the ‘totalitarian’ dream of identification between the life of art and of a people celebrating its unity.
However, how can one ignore the paradox that places the supreme embodiment of this Greece in a statue lacking its head and limbs? How can one ignore the mode of adoration it excites? It is in the past, Hegel would teach, that art will have been the manifestation of the life of a people. But Winckelmann already claimed he had followed the destiny of Greek art ‘just as a maiden, standing on the shore of the ocean, follows with tearful eyes her departing lover with no hope of ever seeing him again, and fancies that in the distant sail she sees the image of her beloved’.15 A torso for a body, the uniform movement of the waves for every action, a sail for the lover whom the ship carries away: the Greek body Winckelmann bequeathed to posterity is a definitively fragmented body, separated from itself and from every reactivation. Quite a different body, then, from the chorus of Spartan warriors, old men, and ephebes that Rousseau invoked during the same period in his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre. Rousseau’s polemic attacked the coherence of representative logic differently. Winckelmann ruined the presupposition of a harmony between expressive capacity and formal perfection. Rousseau displaced the question onto ethical territory, in the proper sense of the term. Ethos means ‘way of being’, and Rousseau’s polemic can be summed up as follows: theatre’s way of being, comprising actions and emotions fictively experienced on stage, is contradictory with its pretention to positively educate the population’s ways of being. For theatre gathers crowds only to dispossess them of the virtues that form a community. It takes the form of ‘these exclusive entertainments which sadly close up a small number of people in a gloomy cavern, which keep them fearful and immobile in silence and inaction’.16 Separation and passivity are the proper, antisocial features of the performance stage. Rousseau opposes this to the festival in which everyone participates, where all become actors and communicate emotions to each other, which the stage transformed into its simulacra. This was what continuous Spartan festivals were like, according to him. And this is what the civic festivals of modern republics could resemble, seeds of which were contained in the pastoral and nautical pastimes of Genevans. Such were the great dreams of performance turned into collective action that would later inspire the celebrations of the French Revolution and flourish once again at the beginning of the twentieth century: the staging of Orpheus and Eurydice in 1913 in Hellerau with Appia’s set design and the choirs trained in Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s rhythmic gymnastics, mixing the children of the European artistic elite with those of the workers from the ‘German Workshops for Art in Industry’, founded by a philanthropist and modernist industrialist; Romain Rolland’s Quatorze Juillet, planned to end in a civic festival leading the theatre hall into collective action; Meyerhold’s performances mixing the telegraphic news from the civil-war front with the Soviet war slogans at the turning points of plays performed, and so forth. No doubt these forms of collective mobilization in the name of art and revolution are far from the ‘innocent’ entertainments Rousseau promoted. Marx, Wagner and Nietzsche have left their mark here. Yet it is the same logic transforming ways of being that they oppose to representative logic: one must destroy the passivity of those who attend a show, separated by the performance from their individual and collective potential; they must be transformed into direct actors of this potential, acting together and sharing the same affective capacity. I call this alternative to representative logic ‘ethical’ – one that proposes to transform represented forms into collective ways of being.
But Winckelmann did not dedicate his history of art to such a resurrection of the collective festival. He opposes representative mediation not to ethical community, but instead to aesthetic distance. Separation and inaction – the two vices condemned by the Letter to d’Alembert – are, on the contrary, the paradoxical virtues of the mutilated statue, according to him. Not that he is less a lover of ancient virtue than Rousseau. The path that leads Greek statuary towards perfection, and then away from it, is strictly synchronous with the progress and decline of this freedom. But the way he saw this freedom embodied is strictly the opposite: it is not a matter of making the spectator active by suppressing the passivity of the performance. On the contrary, what matters is to negate the opposition between activity and passivity within the very figure of the god or the superhuman hero. Democratic Greece emerges through this negation. It does so retrospectively, of course. Modern republicans, relying on their reading of the Stoics, invent such freedom, symbolized by a god or a hero who does not do or control anything. And Greece thus restaged is only present in the form of a lack. The impulse that leads to its embodiment in the new ceremonies of the republican people is strictly opposed to the metonymy of the sail that disappears from the lover’s eyes. This sail takes the place of both the loved object and the ship carrying him away. It makes antique marble a figure in the double meaning of the word: a sensible presence that embodies the power that forged it, but also a deferral of this presence. The force of the whole is no longer in the gathering of a functional and expressive body. It is in the contours that melt into one another. It is everywhere and nowhere on the surface that withdraws what it offers. Figure is presence and deferral of presence, a substitute for lost presence. Winckelmann’s statue has the perfection of a collectivity which is no longer there, of a body that cannot be actualized. The beautiful inactivity of the god of stone was the product of the free activity of a people. From now on, the indifference of the statue alone lends a figure to this free activity.
Indifference means two things: first, it is the rupture of all specific relations between a sensible form and the expression of an exact meaning; but it is also the rupture of every specific link between a sensible presence and a public that would be its public, the sensible milieu that would nourish it, or its natural addressee. Rousseau wanted the people to regain control of its sensible potential for action, emotion and communication, alienated in the distance of representation. But Winckelmann’s Greek freedom is entirely enclosed in a block of stone. If the latter represents this for us, it is in its distance from its nurturing milieu, in its indifference towards any particular expectation from any specific public. The head of the Juno Ludovisi Schiller praised thirty years later was as follows: a head separated from any body, but also from everything a head is normally supposed to express: a will pursuing an end and commanding an action, a concern altering pure features. For him this expressionless head embodied free appearance presented for the enjoyment of pure aesthetic play, separated from any cognitive appropriation as well as any sensual appetite. But it did so as a thing of the past, a product of an exemplary art that can no longer be recreated. Moreover, he characterizes this art as ‘naive’ poetry: poetry that does not try to be poetic, but expresses an immediate agreement between a collective, lived universe and singular forms of invention; an art that is not an art, not a separate world, but a manifestation of collective life. This is indeed what the mutilated Torso, the indifferent Niobe, or the will-less head of the Juno Ludovisi bear witness to. But they only bear witness by establishing an exactly opposed sensible configuration: by becoming works of art, lent to a ‘disinterested’ gaze, enclosed in the separate