The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

David Roberts

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801461453
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism.

In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

PART I

THE ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE

1

REFOUNDING SOCIETY

Ancients and Moderns: Rousseau’s Civil Religion

Rousseau stands at the beginning of what we might call the passage of modernity. In Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right) (1762) he constructs the imaginary history of the foundation of society through an act of association that effects “the passage from the state of nature to the civil state” (1.8). This founding act, through which the “Republic or body politic” gains its unity, common identity, life, and will, points to a second act of self-institution: the recovery of the republic, of the sovereign body politic, through the refoundation of society. Rousseau’s appeal to the eighteenth-century imagination springs from what Jean Starobinski calls this mythic figure of the rebirth and regeneration of society.1 This second passage—the passage of modernity, from slavery to freedom, from despotism to democracy, which announces the death of the old divinity, the Christian God, and the birth of a new divinity, humanity2—draws its inspiration from the archetypal image of the republics of antiquity, Sparta and Rome.

For Rousseau a Christian republic is a contradiction in terms, since the kingdom of God is not of this world. He declares: “True Christians are made to be slaves” (4.8). Rousseau condemns the Christian separation of the theological and political systems as a perpetual source of social dissension inimical to social unity; he acknowledges at the same time, however, that there can be no state without a religious basis. Rousseau therefore seeks a new unifying principle of social cohesion. The social contract must be completed by a civil religion, by a purely civil profession of faith, designed to preserve the unity of the body politic. The civil religion of the republic demands the moral adherence of each citizen just as each citizen participates in the moral universality of the General Will. Rousseau’s political religion accordingly replaces impiety with antisocial behavior, to be punished by banishment, and apostasy with its civil equivalent, perjury—the repudiation of the profession of faith to which each citizen has sworn—to be punished by death (4.8). In Robespierre’s republic of virtue, all opponents of the General Will are by definition guilty of atheism.

But what form is the civil religion to take? In its general form as the religion of man, based on natural divine right or law, it possesses neither temples nor altars nor rites. In its particular form as civil or positive divine right or law, the religion of the citizen is good in that it equates the divine cult with the state, and bad in that it encourages superstition, “drowns the true cult of the Divinity in empty ceremonial,” supports tyranny, and unleashes murderous intolerance (4.8). Rousseau does not provide an answer in the Social Contract. We note, however, that as with the General Will the religion of man precludes representation in the double sense of political and/or theatrical representation. The religion of man consecrates the General Will as the invisible spirit, the indwelling divinity of the republic, that can never be represented but comes to presence (is instituted and constituted) in the general assembly of the citizens, whether in the political forum or in the public festival.

We find the same sentiments in the contrast that Rousseau draws in his Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre (1758) between the public spirit of the festival and the private vices indulged by idle theatrical amusements. Rousseau’s ire was aroused by d’Alembert’s suggestion, at the prompting of Voltaire, in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopédie that a dramatic theatre be established in the city republic so that “Geneva would join to the prudence of Lacedaemon the urbanity of Athens.” Like Plato, Rousseau, the citizen of Geneva, refuses dramatic art a place in the republic. Not only would it ruin our “antique simplicity”; it threatens public liberty. But when Rousseau turns from his review and moral condemnation of French classical theatre to the entertainments fitting for a republic, an unacknowledged tension between two conceptions of the festival appears. In the Letter to M. D’Alembert and the Social Contract Rousseau’s interest is the same: “to transform each individual who, in isolation, is a complete but solitary whole, into a part of something greater than himself, from which, in a sense, he derives his life and his being; to substitute a communal and moral existence for the purely physical and independent life with which we are all of us endowed by nature.”3 But is this communal existence the task of the legislator or the spontaneous act of the people? The latter, declares Rousseau in the Letter to M. D’Alembert: the festivals of the citizen are not those that enclose a few spectators in the gloomy confines of the theatre. “No, happy peoples, these are not your festivals. It is in the open air, under the sky, that you ought to gather and give yourselves to the sweet sentiment of your happiness.” A happy people, united by bonds of joy and pleasure, will be drawn naturally to the free and generous atmosphere of festivity. Unlike the theatre, the entertainment of the people needs neither spectacle nor spectators.

But what then will be the objects of these entertainments? What will be shown in them? Nothing, if you please. With liberty, wherever abundance reigns, well-being also reigns. Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united.4

Rousseau gives color and body to these sentiments through his description (in a footnote) of a spontaneous gathering that he had experienced as a child, set in motion by the officers and soldiers of the local regiment dancing together in the square after their exercises.

A dance of men, cheered by a long meal, would seem to present nothing very interesting to see; however, the harmony of five or six hundred men in uniform, holding one another by the hand and forming a long ribbon which wound around, serpent-like, in cadence and without confusion, with countless turns and returns, countless sorts of figured evolutions, the excellence of the tunes which animated them, the sound of the drums, the glare of the torches, a certain military pomp in the midst of pleasure, all this created a very lively sensation which could not be experienced coldly.

Soon they are joined by their women folk, wine is brought, and the dance is suspended.

There resulted from all this a general emotion that I could not describe but which, in universal gaiety, is quite naturally felt in the midst of all that is dear to us. My father, embracing me, was seized with trembling which I think I still feel and share. “Jean-Jacques,” he said to me, “love your country. Do you see all these good Genevans? They are all friends, they are all brothers; joy and concord reign in their midst.”5

These often-quoted passages breathe Rousseau’s nostalgia for the lost community of childhood: “Ah, where are the games and festivals of my youth? Where is the concord of the citizens?” There, in the suspension of social distances, in the one body of the dance, in the sense of universal gaiety, Rousseau found his dream of communal transparency, in which the abolition of the distance between desire and pleasure excluded representation. The spontaneous festival “actualizes what is perpetually denied to social man but what is intended everywhere and always in a gathering of persons: the affective community, the integration of the members who love and recognize each other, the joy felt in rediscovering a hidden common belonging.”6 Nevertheless, Rousseau finds it necessary to bring back the legislator to direct and supervise popular festivals precisely in relation to the young people of Geneva, for whom he proposes periodic balls, open to all the marriageable young, to be presided over by a magistrate appointed by the council. Suitably conducted, such balls would serve many useful purposes, from training the young to the enhancement of social concord. The aim of training citizens for the republic allows Rousseau to slide imperceptibly from spontaneous to regulated activities, taking the “modest festivals and games without pomp” of the Spartans as his model. In Sparta, the citizens, “constantly assembled, consecrated the whole of life to amusements which were the great business of the state and to games from which they relaxed only for war.”7 The rapid passage to the great business of state appears to indicate that Rousseau is scarcely conscious that his contrast between republican entertainments and those of the theatre brings into play two very different types of festival. The patriotic games and festivals of the Spartan model seem scarcely compatible with the utopian moment of community of childhood memory, where the reciprocal opening of hearts realizes a sense of presence of each to all and “a collective soul is formed amidst the raptures of joy.”8 Doubtless in Rousseau’s mind it is this aesthetic and ethical model of community that is intended in the public festivals that will make up the civic religion of the Social Contract. But where the utopian moment of community suspends and transcends the social hierarchies and distances of the social order, the public festival serves to cement and reinforce the social order. The one dispenses with representation, the other in its instrumentality restores spectacle and theatricality.

Rousseau’s dream of a world without differences and divisions, of the transparent community beyond all social contradictions, defines the spontaneous popular festival as a liminal experience in a double sense. It creates an interregnum that suspends and transcends the social order. The interregnum belongs to times of transition and renewal: festivals that celebrate the death of the old and the birth of the new year, times of “disorder” between the old and the new king, times of the carnivalistic inversion of the social order, which recall the perennial image of a lost golden age of equality and bring back the originary space of the social to which societies can return to renew themselves. The revolutionary festivals of federation in 1790 came closest to this liminal experience of the suspension of the social-symbolic order, the consciousness of the dissolution of old social identities in the utopia of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And here too in the Revolution a gulf opened up between the festivals of 1790 and the public festivals of the Republic.

Rousseau’s mythical figure in the Social Contract of life recovered through death, of the abolition of the past and of the recovering of the original transparency of the body politic present to itself, this dream of origin and of refoundation was played out in the French Revolution. It would reveal the double face of instituting/instituted power: the never forgotten dream of Saturn’s golden age of equality, and the drama of the Revolution consuming its own children, like Saturn. To this double mythical image corresponds Michelet’s distinction between the spontaneous festival of the people, charged with the religious creativity so important for Durkheim, and the Jacobin usurpation of the General Will in the festivals of the state religion. The tension between these two ideas of festival brings to the fore the contradictions of representation, in theatrical and political form. The fatal passage from the universal relig...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. The Artwork of the Future
• Part II. The Spiritual in Art
• Part III. The Sublime in Politics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography