National Matters

Materiality, Culture, and Nationalism

Geneviève Zubrzycki, Geneviève Zubrzycki

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503602762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

National Matters investigates the role of material culture and materiality in defining and solidifying national identity in everyday practice. Examining a range of "things"—from art objects, clay fragments, and broken stones to clothing, food, and urban green space—the contributors to this volume explore the importance of matter in making the nation appear real, close, and important to its citizens. Symbols and material objects do not just reflect the national visions deployed by elites and consumed by the masses, but are themselves important factors in the production of national ideals.

Through a series of theoretically grounded and empirically rich case studies, this volume analyzes three key aspects of materiality and nationalism: the relationship between objects and national institutions, the way commonplace objects can shape a national ethos, and the everyday practices that allow individuals to enact and embody the nation. In giving attention to the agency of things and the capacities they afford or foreclose, these cases also challenge the methodological orthodoxies of cultural sociology. Taken together, these essays highlight how the "material turn" in the social sciences pushes conventional understanding of state and nation-making processes in new directions.

PART I

Materiality and Institutions

CHAPTER 1

Artisans and the Construction of the French State

The Political Role of the Louvre’s Workshops

Chandra Mukerji

Accounts of state formation in the social sciences tend to focus on institutional transformations, such as military and legal reform, or the capture of the elites, treating what are functional outcomes of state formation as causes. They do not seek explanations of how institutional restructuring became possible when it had not been possible before. They assume that early states could only become institutionally effective by capturing or organizing known forms of power (Adams 2005; Beik 1997; Brewer 1989; Kettering 1986; Mettam 1988; Wallerstein 1974). Yet this is precisely what weak states could not do. Their empowerment depended instead on a shift in political logics that made entrenched political formations less compelling. It required a cultural change.

In the seventeenth century, the French state went from being particularly weak (Machiavelli and Donno 1966) to particularly strong—an absolutist state according to Perry Anderson (1974). The administration achieved this shift not by wresting control of the army from nobles or impoverishing those at court, but rather by constructing an art world (Becker 1982). Long after Louis XIV ascended the throne, nobles still supplied troops to the army even as the state trained them (Lynn 1997), and nobles in favor with the king at Versailles gained special economic opportunities (Cole 1964). It took an organized program of cultural production—an art world nestled in the administration—to advance state power. Political change required a change in political imaginaries, and the state’s art world did the imagining.

The artists, artisans, and scholars who contributed to this program used classically inspired art and artifacts to craft images of imperial power for France. The sense of political possibility embedded in the art inspired political aspirations in elites that could only be fulfilled by a strong state—like that of Rome. Ambition lured high nobles into new relations of power.

The inarticulate objects of desire created in the art world were more effective than political discourse. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of the treasury and navy as well as director of the king’s household, first tried to promote his patron’s imperial ambitions through propaganda, but it failed. People laughed at the idea that a weak king could follow in the footsteps of Augustus and build an empire in the model of Rome (Burke 1992). But the program of classical revival in the arts made no claims; it simply made it plausible that France could revive Rome’s heritage, including its political heritage.

The cultivation of political desire through the arts was part of a broader program of logistical governance instigated by Colbert (Mukerji 2009, 2010), and one with a particular goal. The classical revival at Versailles was addressed to France’s high nobility, the great military elites necessary to the king’s dreams for empire. The royal residence where these nobles were invited to live was turned into an immersive environment where classical revival echoed in the art, architecture, furniture, gardens, statuary, and multiday royal festivities known as divertissements. Nobles dressed up in costumes and enacted roles as classical gods and heroes, moving through elaborate sets representing Mount Olympus or other classical sites. The semiotic reverberations across statues, stage sets, murals, painted ceilings, costumes, furniture, and clocks built up the sense that France could achieve something more.

Norbert Elias (1983) has already drawn attention to culture—including material culture—as an important element in French state formation. But he ended up focusing on the expense of life at court, arguing that the nobility was impoverished by their cultural obligations at Versailles and so became dependent on the king. Elias underestimated the cultural power of Roman revival at Versailles. He did not seem to recognize how art could shape thought, or how desire could have social effects—as sociologists do today (Benzecry 2011; Hennion 1993; Hennion, Maisonneuve, and Gomart 2000). He sensed that material life at court mattered, but missed that the pursuit of pleasure could be turned into a serious game (Ortner 2006).

Historians and cultural analysts of Louis XIV’s court have been clear about the power of court festivities and the classicism of Versailles (Apostolidès 1981; Marin 1981; Néraudau 1986), but have argued that structures of meaning in the arts and rituals at court, not the inarticulacy of artworks, were the source of its political effects. But the nobles at Versailles were not well educated and were unlikely to recognize the “meaning” of particular classical myths, gods, heroes, or events in classical history. Walking among statues of Bacchus, Hercules, Diana, and Aurora, or acting out classical roles in plays and ballets, they surely felt more than understood the glory of the Roman Empire. Figures like Hercules and Diana conveyed warrior virtues even to those who could not name them: Hercules with his large frame, tight muscles, animal skin, and club, and Diana with her bow and arrow, helmet, and physical aggressiveness. The gods and heroes depicted at Versailles looked capable of building and destroying empires, and they were beautiful—something to desire. Nobles did not need a good education to be seduced by the passion in the art. And the inarticulacy of the cultural forms made them seem innocent. Nobles could become attached to dreams of Roman revival (Benzecry 2011; Hennion 1993) without being sure what it meant or what it implied politically.

The political seduction of nobles through classical culture at Versailles was delegated to the members of the academies given space in the Louvre, and to the artists and artisans housed in workshops and lodgings there (Ronfort and Museum 2009). They constituted an unusual set of administrative figures. Officials of the state were traditionally nobles who exercised personal powers through offices without clear jurisdiction. The members of the administration’s art world—both scholars and artists—were overwhelmingly not noble and had only contingent authority, acting like modern bureaucrats in Max Weber’s (Weber, Roth, and Wittich 1978) terms. They were servants of standing without independent voices, but still exercised enormous impersonal powers even over court nobles. They demonstrated what a state could do in imitation of Rome, and what an imperial France might be if the state could pursue that goal.

FIGURED WORLDS OF POWER

To make sense of how artists and artisans wielded their power, we need some understanding of material pedagogy. Figured world theory (hereafter FWT) provides a basis for it because it discusses cultural artifacts as cognitive tools (Holland et al. 1998; Mukerji 2010, 2012). FWT is an activity theory of learning from the psychology of education that explains how children learn to become members of their culture by building up repertoires of action around cultural imaginaries: enacting roles, organizing and inhabiting sets, using props, and putting on costumes that scaffold cultural imaginaries about who they could be and what they might do in the world. FWT argues that participants adopt roles they see in their social and cultural environment, and through their actions try to manifest the realities they assume to exist. In this way, they learn how to produce the figured worlds of their culture, both the activities and the imaginaries that make sense of and guide social action. The majority of the learning is performative, participatory, but it is scaffolded with material culture that makes it easier to enact some roles rather than others and conjure up some realities rather than others. The cultural program at Versailles was a means of constructing a new figured world, changing political imagination and action by material means. The artisans and scholars working for Colbert collaborated on the design of sets, costumes, and props that supported performances of Roman revival. The art world erected pedagogical scaffolding for a new political logic that foregrounded not patrimonial autonomy (Adams 2007; Mukerji 2012), but rather imperial power.

The figured world of France-as-Rome provided the French court with novel expectations about governance as a practice, suggesting new performances they could try. As Howard Becker (1963; Becker, Faulkner, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006) writes about art worlds and jazz communities, social worlds are brought into being and sustained through coordinated forms of improvised social action that are not scripted, but guided by expectations. Cultural imaginaries or figured worlds, I would argue, give form to expectations, providing guidelines for imagining what is expected and building social worlds to meet expectations.

Cultural imaginaries are experiential expressions of what people can do, how social life works, and how social action unfolds. They are forms of inarticulate knowledge, intuitive understandings of what exists. Social worlds embody those expectations in improvised actions and pursue those dreams. At Versailles, dreams of Rome provided the framework for making the French court seem an imperial center, turning play into novel performances of power (Ortner 2006) that encouraged courtiers to see their official powers as less wonderful than imperial glory.

Figured world theory is interesting not only because it describes inarticulate patterns of pedagogy, but also because it has a complex relationship to G. H. Mead’s (1964) behaviorism in describing social constructions of reality. FWT attributes mental capacities to people (imagination), but supports Mead’s anti-idealism by denying that ideas (articulate discourses) guide social life. It suggests that “behavior” rests on and builds on cultural forms of coordinated imagination: dreams, aspirations, and anticipations that are both vague and unspoken. In Mead’s famous example of a baseball game (Mead and Morris 1962), the game is not a set of rules but a cultural imaginary about playing based on experience with games that people try to make real. To play, participants improvise and coordinate action as Mead describes, but they perform according to a sense of the game as they imagine it to be—building their imaginaries from multiple experiences or iterations of practice.

Figured world theorists generally focus on practices of cultural reproduction rather than change. Nonetheless, FWT is useful for analyzing the transformation of French political life at Versailles through art. It explains how inarticulate things could make new desires imaginable, and worth treating as real (Néraudau 1986).

As Elias (1983) has argued, the high nobles who came to Versailles had no reason to give up powers to the king. But the king needed to reduce the autonomy of nobles to have a stronger state (Beik 1944; Elias 1983; Kettering 1986). So the art world in the Louvre invented the Sun King, blurring the boundary between personal and impersonal rule, patrimonial authority and state power. Louis XIV as Sun King was simultaneously a king with the right to exercise personal will and a force of nature whose authority was impersonal and whose dominance over the earth was inevitable. The Sun King was not just any king, but one who ruled the earth because it was in his nature to do so, bringing fecundity and glory to his domain (Quintinie 1692). There were no limits to his power, and his destiny was assured. Louis XIV did not say, “l’état, c’est moi,” but if he had, he would have been claiming not simply personal authority as king, but also impersonal powers as the natural inheritance of a Sun King. This cultural figure, not Louis XIV, could assume new social powers without appearing to threaten patrimonial traditions. He was a figure from the classical past brought to life to lead the new empire.

THE WORKSHOP LOUVRE AND CLASSICAL REVIVAL

The Louvre became the administrative center for the cultural program, and an art world filled with practitioners, critics, historians, and support personnel (Becker 1982). Louis XIV at first functionally and then formally moved his court to Versailles, and the noble officials that had traditionally inhabited the Louvre followed the king, leaving large parts of the old castle empty. Colbert tried repeatedly to remodel and expand the Louvre, enjoining the king to reestablish his court there, but to no avail. Finally, uncomfortable about leaving large parts of the palace vacant, Colbert allocated space to academicians, artists, and artisans. He gave meeting spaces to the academies, and workshops and lodgings to artists and artisans. In this way he made the Louvre (and nearby buildings in Paris) into an administrative center and art world (Goubert 1974; Le Roy Ladurie 1996; Soll 2009; Sonnino 1990; Becker 1963).

The artists and artisans of the Louvre inhabited a wing along the Seine—an area that had been redesigned by Louis Le Vau with large galleries for connecting the Louvre to the Tuileries Palace (Bordier 1998) and workshops and lodgings below. The Académie Française, the Académie de peinture et sculpture, and the petite académie, also known as the Académie des inscriptions et belle-lettres, were assigned space in older sections of the Louvre. Thus installed physically, both artisans and academicians contributed to the figured world of France as heir to Rome.

The academies were charged with deciding how the classical past would be used as a basis for French culture. Their members articulated connections between past and present, debating standards, codifying principles, and outlining the most appropriate ways to present Louis XIV as the Sun King and France as heir to Rome. The scholars understood that the classical heritage was a material legacy embodied in ruins, artworks, coins, and infrastructure, and they collected and curated ancient things, thereby designing a material legacy for Louis XIV that would link his reign to Rome and working with artists and artisans to make these objects into objects of desire.

The Académie Française worked not just on purifying the French language but on creating a dictionary, rooting the French language in Latin and embedding its authority in printed artifacts. The Académie de peinture et sculpture not only debated and taught aesthetic principles, but also curated juried exhibitions and awarded the prix de Rome to young artists to study at the French Academy in Rome, where they were expected to copy classical pieces. The antiquarians of Colbert’s petite académie collected small artifacts like coins and small sculptures from the ancient world, using their inscriptions and imagery as models for glorifying Louis XIV in contemporary artifacts. In these ways, the academies in the Louvre took material objects seriously as key to ancient history and French destiny.

The artists and artisans, as members of the administration and bound to the state, were not members of Parisian guilds and bound by their constraints. In this sense, they undermined the guilds as autonomous institutions even as they used skills from artisanal traditions. Still, they took appointments in the administration or in the academies because those were badges of honor and respect. They became the equivalent of Weber’s faceless bureaucrats (1968) in the sense that their work was treated as an effect of the Sun King, not their personal talents. But they ended up achieving what the king could not: engineer a historical transformation with an immersive environment of imperial desire.

The Royal Print Shop and Mint

The Louvre workshops where this dream world was brought to life included not just studios but also the royal printing house (Imprimerie royale) and the mint (Monnaies royales). The printing house and mint stayed at the Louvre because they required only relatively small spaces for producing artifacts like books, prints, coins, and medals. The large pieces like tapestries for the royal household were mainly made elsewhere in larger royal manufactures like the Gobelins. In addition, the printing house and mint were particularly important to the cultural program of the Louvre because they produced small artifacts that circulated broadly, and could disseminate public images of Louis XIV, his court, and classical revival. The Imprimerie royale had its own typefaces, including Greek and Roman type to further and foregr...