Every epoch produces a specific form of phantasmagoria. How is this not ideology? The difference appears when one employs the tools Benjamin and Althusser developed to illuminate each one in particular. The former, the ragpicker of History, reconstituted the phantasmagoria of nineteenth-century France by examining details or detached pieces; Althusser, in turn, dismantled the ideology of the present by starting with massive objects: ideological state apparatuses. To state matters summarily, phantasmagoria is a matter of culture, and ideology a matter of politics – even though these categories intersect at more than one point, and even though they both entertain a murky relationship to fiction. Without collective narratives to feed them, they languish. They both speak ‘behind our backs’, as Althusser puts it. Like dreams, they both have the power to pass themselves off as true. Contemporary art, however, approaches ideology by way of its concrete effects – that is, via the norm: the ensemble of cultural, social and political conventions and obvious facts (évidences) structuring daily life. In committing themselves to the analysis or disruption of (seeming) logic, artists take a position – sometimes without knowing as much – within the realist project inaugurated by Gustave Courbet. Such realism does not involve seeking points of resemblance with reality; rather, it refutes established norms in the name of an Ideal – thereby bringing mechanisms of expulsion to light. It may be defined with the pointed words Althusser used to explain materialism: not to indulge in storytelling – and especially where the domain of dreams is concerned. In other words, it means taking ideology, phantasmagoria and the unconscious of the times head-on – confronting the Angel of the Masses.
III
The Realist Project
The early 2000s witnessed the advent of Google, which promoted aleatory information searches; its associative logic achieved such dominance that other types of human activity became contaminated. Then, Web 2.0 entered the scene, along with social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Tumblr, which all represent the drive to document and archive even the least gestures of everyday life – anything at all that an individual might experience is placed within reach of everyone else. Today, documentation professionals must devise veritable screenplays, because reality is documented by all, not by one. If photography accompanied the colonialist ambition of showing the faraway and bringing it back to Western metropolises in authentic form, Web 2.0 sounded the death knell for the ethnographic drive which animated the nineteenth century. Now, every group-subject – and on a planetary scale – can directly attest to the real of its experience by immediately producing objects and documents reflecting it in detail. This distinction between reality and the real corresponds to what separates optical realism (which may be called ‘verism’), or art that aims to expose (a) reality, from a wholly different pursuit that may be traced back to the aesthetic position taken by Gustave Courbet.
Reality is the phenomenal world inasmuch as it offers a support for representation; here, we live as subjects of ideology, in a mode of membership/belonging and subjugation. The real, in contrast, may be defined as this same phenomenal world, but freed from ideology and idealizing impulses. What will be described in the following as artistic realism, then, has nothing to do with artists’ ability to depict a reality that is visible or intelligible. It must not be confused with the documentary format, or genre, that has passed for providing the nec plus ultra in restoring/reproducing reality since the end of the twentieth century. The Real is another matter altogether … Equally, such realism exceeds the narrow frame of twentieth-century pictorial realisms that, alas, have claimed the title for their own projects.
Courbet and the Big Toe
In 1855, Gustave Courbet exhibited his works outside the official salon, in a ‘Pavilion of Realism’ he had had built to this end. A huge painting captured general attention, in part because of its title: The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory for a Seven-year Phase of My Artistic Life. The canvas does not represent a workplace so much as a space-and-time of production; according to its creator, it depicts ‘the moral and physical history of my atelier’.1 On the right, a small crowd of characters surrounds the painter, who is busy working on a landscape; these are his ‘shareholders, by which I mean friends, workers, and art lovers’. On the left stands social reality, represented by personages Courbet had encountered at one point or another. We should note that each of these figures was inspired by a person who really existed, instead of merely representing a type. There is no abstraction in Courbet’s painting; each figure is singular. Likewise, metal, stone, wood, fur, water and foliage – matter in general – is always rendered with utmost care.
Stressing the artist’s contemporaneity with the invention of photography, Youssef Ishaghpour has advanced a convincing hypothesis about the attention paid to different surfaces and textures:
Courbet is situated precisely at the moment when art detaches from imitation of the idea, form and antiquity – when the very existence of photography marks their end – and must affirm the materiality of nature, not by reproducing it (wherein it differs from photography) but through the proximity and identity of its own pictorial power to nature.2
The fundamental difference between these two ‘realisms’, Ishaghpour continues, stems from the fact that ‘photography presents the trace, the effect, and the realm of light, whereas Courbet’s painting proceeds as the unfolding of matter’.3 In consequence, we should not view such realism as a mere depiction of how the poorer classes live; nor should it be viewed as visual propaganda of socialist inspiration. Courbet’s political project does not lie here. To be sure, as Linda Nochlin observes, L’Atelier is an allegory portraying ‘the Fourierist ideal of the Association of Capital, of Labor, and of Talent’,4 and Courbet certainly meant to paint the world he inhabited politically. Still, it is not just a matter of presenting left-wing symbolism – which would amount simply to setting one ideal against another. What is more, this rejection of the ‘painted idea’ provoked a disagreement tainting his amicable relations with Proudhon: the theorist of anarchism – although very attached to Courbet – hardly understood what was at stake in his pictures. Proudhon held that art should seek to capture ‘what is True’ and, to be sure, ‘the Idea’; it should be critical and edifying. ‘Art is nothing except through the Ideal; it has no value but for the Ideal’, he wrote.5 How many of his contemporaries also failed to see art in terms other than ‘content’ and ideal value?
If the realist movement, of which Courbet declared himself the leader, did not pursue an Idea, it also did not seek mere resemblance; instead, the aim was a direct pictorial relation to the real as it is lived. In the artist’s own words, the goal is ‘aesthetics founded on action, engagement, and the capacity for transformation’:6 in other words, it stands at a vast remove from what would come to be called realist art in the following century. In shorthand, it is closer to a Joseph Beuys than to a Lucian Freud. Courbet already voiced the modernist demand that adequation between art and the state of the world be achieved through ‘objective’ ways of transferring painting onto a support – a mode of production contemporaneous with the prevailing economic and political system.
From Malevich to Jackson Pollock, Ed Ruscha and Frank Stella, modernist painters were obsessed with establishing a compelling relationship between their practice and their times. This prompted them to explore the real instead of validating official narratives. Such is the realism at issue: to open, by formal means, a path outside of ideology (that is, outside of all idealism), whereby the artist enters into dialogue with the world as it is, from a standpoint as close as possible to its historical, political and social materiality. ‘Historical art’, Courbet explained, ‘is by nature contemporary.’7 In other words: our vision of the past is not primarily a relation to the ideology of the present; being realistic – which is synonymous with contemporary for Courbet – means devising a channel connecting artistic practice and the real of one’s historical context. Whether such practices are ‘figural’ or ‘abstract’
does not matter.
Courbet developed the idea at the Antwerp Congress in 1861: ‘Through my affirmation of the negation of the ideal and all that springs from the ideal I have arrived at the emancipation of the individual and finally at democracy. Realism is essentially the democratic art.’8 ‘Democratic’ ambition begins with refusing the traditional hierarchy governing genres and subjects; above all, however, it means refusing to idealize or ennoble reality as perceived along the uniform lines dictated by power. The ‘negation of the ideal’ undertaken by Courbet, which provides the theoretical key to his realism, occurs by affirming pictorial matter and representing beings and things such as they are – that is, outside the role the reigning ideology assigns them. Courbet sensed that the ‘Ideal’ – on which academic painters and Proudhonian anarchists agreed, even if they differed on matters of content – conceals an ideological machine serving to legitimate preconstituted political representations. His paintings do not draw their force from his willingness to depict labourers breaking rocks or sharpening tools in the same way that kings or aristocrats were represented at the time. His art is revolutionary in its capacity for dismantling the ideology that orders their symbolic position – as in L’Atelier, which reorganizes social life in terms of the painter’s ‘real’ instead of aligning it with verisimilitude or a respectable narrative. Another manifesto of realism, The Origin of the World, declared war on the ideal of the classical ‘nude’ by showing what might well constitute its ‘real’: a vagina unaccompanied by any narrative, unadorned by a mythological pretext, literary reference, or content exterior to itself.
Inasmuch as ideology, according to Althusser, ‘function[s] … to ensure the cohesion of the social whole by regulating the relations of all individuals to their tasks’,9 the ideology governing the aesthetic in Courbet’s day determined painters’ relationship to their subject matter. His paintings provoked scandal because they revealed the gap between the real and the ideal, between matter and ideology. In a word, Courbet’s art does not ‘indulge in storytelling’ – which is how Althusser defines materialism. In turn, Édouard Manet experienced the same rejection with his Luncheon on the Grass: inasmuch as the ideological basis legitimating the painting had been removed, history and myth expelled, and the idea of the ‘pastoral concerto’ banished, the public could no longer see anything but two students in the company of women of ill repute. Manet reduced ideology, which speaks behind the public’s back, to silence: the only remaining option was to take offence at its prosaic reality in order to avoid exposure to the Real of the painting. Olympia met with a comparable outcry. Hans Belting perceptively observes:
Manet put on view not only the real body but the actual painting. This is a confusing double strategy that invites the following conclusion. Just as the woman sells herself in the boudoir, so the painter sells himself in the Salon, for his picture too has a price and lays itself bare before a buyer.10
The collective blindness provoked by modern painting, the dogged refusal to see painting for what it is (that is, according to Maurice Denis’s famous definition, ‘shapes and colours arranged in a certain order’), amounts to the denial of commerce, a veil of modesty cast over the market value and material reality of art. Such realism, to use Georges Bataille’s expression, ‘twists the neck of eloquence’ and all idealizing rhetoric: it dispels thick clouds of ideology by making breaches through which the Real bursts in.
From the inception, modern art’s destiny has been tied to déclassement. First of all, this concerns the subject: the will to depict modern life instead of rooting around in the mythological, historical and edifying repertoire that once authorized painters to represent the world. Second, it concerns trades (métier): the public perceived the ‘unfinished’ quality of impressionist canvases as a double affront to artisanal craftsmanship and industrial objects. The visible presence of the painter’s hand – brushstrokes – was all it took to plunge modern art into the universe of refuse and cast-offs. Expelled from the collective phantasmagoria, such ‘trash’ developed into a supplementary world where the objects that society devalues or rejects can be redeemed and transfigured by artistic intervention. The Impressionists’ suburban views, African masks collected by Derain, Matisse or Picasso, industrial objects to which Marcel Duchamp lent a ‘new idea’, the bicycle seat and handlebars that Picasso made into his Bull’s Head in 1943, and the supermarket packaging of pop artists share the feature of being without value as subject matter until the artist intervenes and transfigures them.
The history of modern art is summed up by the progressive splitting of natural Beauty and artistic Beauty, abandoning the ideal sphere where grandeur and the sublime had evolved, and embracing the ‘anything at all’ that came along and furnished a subject and raw material. At least in part: between Marcel Duchamp and Kazimir Malevich – between the sceptical, materialist path and the road taken by pictorial metaphysics – a gulf emerged, and two distinct artistic families were created. Two other figures also embody these two sides of the debate: Georges Bataille and André Breton.
In response to the latter, in whom he saw the epitome of surrealist idealism, Bataille invented the concept of heterology, ‘the science of what is completely other’.11 At the time, Bataille hesitated between this term and agiology, even scatology, for he meant to found a ‘science of excrement [ordure]’ that would explore the excremental dimension of man and the universe. Ultimately, he chose the term hetero (‘entirely other’) to designate what resists all homogenizing efforts. Bataille defined heterology as ‘what opposes any homogeneous representation of the world, in other words, any philosophical system’.12 It is the domain of the inappropriable, of what escapes ‘all possible common measure’ and defies all transcendence: in a word, it is a war machine against idealism, launched at the ‘wondrous’ the surrealists held so dear. The big toe wading in the mud assaults the body’s nobler parts. An avid reader of Hegel, Bataille sought out what cannot provide the object of synthesis, what resists all ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung).
As Bataille viewed matters, every thought produces a residue – an element that remains unclassifiable within the finite chain of propositions constituting a theory. Every methodological form of appropriation (whether it involves labour or knowledge) frees up a ‘heterogeneous excremental object’.13 He meant to base his thinking on the inassimilable, all that has been cast off. In other words, his thought is founded on the excluded, and its theoretical objects come from the sphere of the socially inappropriable: eroticism, luxury, waste, potlatch, the abject, the sacred. There is no ‘Idea’ of waste in Plato, nor could there be. Bataille, in contrast, wanted to account for epistemological refuse and to delimit the domain of the unmanageable. His project, then, concerns the science of the limits inherent in all processes of appropriation; it sets into relief the movement of expulsion that occurs in the formation of all knowledge. In a word, it offers a ‘theory of the tension between the homogeneous world and what finds no place in it [ne s’y résorbe pas]’14
Bataille’s anti-idealism centres on a profound reflection on the sphere of the useful and labour, understood as a tool for cutting up and dividing reality. Here, nature is put in the service of productive ends – first by making something the object of exchange, and, ultimately, through activity that yields sums of information. Labour segments reality infinitely. It is always subordinate to an end, organized in view of a final state. Bataille’s effort to theorize uselessness proves all the more timely for clearly identifying an immense domain of reality that, before him, had never been taken into account as such. He demonstrated that all thinking remains tainted by idealism if it fails to account for refuse and loss, religious ecstasy and erotic pleasure, tears and bodily fluxes. The ludic, eroticism, mysticism and art all connect to sumptuary waste, which proves irreducible to the ‘sphere of the useful’. Human activity does not necessarily have any ‘gain’ at its horizon; it may refuse to put itself in the service of a purpose. For Bataille, the first economic principle is
not the accumulation of goods, but potlatch – the name for the ritual in which certain Native American tribes compete to destroy their most luxurious possessions. Such is the ‘accursed share’ of the human economy: this practice of ‘loss’ cannot be boiled down to the binary of production and consumption; it borders on the irrational and means placing one’s very life at risk. In this sphere, Bataille includes ‘luxury, mourning, war, worship, games, spectacles, art, perverse sexuality (i.e., not for reproductive purposes) …’.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, artistic modernity has taken form around the central division between the useful and the useless. Essentially, this has occurred in opposition to the dictates of the former, fighting to preserve a poetic zone within a functionalist world. Sometimes, however, it has identified with the forms and principles of this world – as when the Bauhaus or Russian constructivists integrated general production into everyday decors. At any rate, the presence of art in a given society, its recognition by operative ideological and institutional apparatuses, depends on local inflections of this problematic of utility, which traces a line of demarcation between the product, which is socially useful, and waste, which is supposed to be rejected and held at a distance. This line, invisible yet active on all levels of social organization, draws the contours of a shifting zone whose borders are ceaselessly crossed in both directions: waste represents a temporary category – one that is largely arbitrary and prone to infinite renegotiation. In the intellectual domain, as we have seen, cultural studies has set up shop on the traces of this line of division. An airlock, as it were, between the realms of the exalted and the paltry, the valuable and the worthless, it recycles and constantly questions the validity of judgements that have consigned a given item to the dump.
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