Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective

Intercultural Aesthetics

EINSTEIN MEETS MARGRITTE: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society Series Editor Diederik Aerts, Leo Apostel Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Brussels Free University, Belgium

VOLUME 9

For other titles published in this series, go to www.springer.com/series/5914

Intercultural Aesthetics A Worldview Perspective Edited by

Antoon Van den Braembussche Heinz Kimmerle Nicole Note

Editors Antoon Van den Braembussche Brussels Free University Brussels, Belgium

Heinz Kimmerle Foundation for Intercultural Philosophy Erasmus University Rotterdam The Netherlands

Nicole Note Leo Apostel Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies Brussels Free University Brussels, Belgium

ISBN 978-1-4020-4507-3

e-ISBN 978-1-4020-5780-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008935475 © 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com

Table of Contents

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Intercultural Aesthetics: An Introduction Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note

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An Intercultural Approach to a World Aesthetics Grazia Marchianò

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Living – in between – Cultures: Downscaling Intercultural Aesthetics to Daily Life Henk Oosterling

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Living (with) Art: The African Aesthetic Worldview as an Inspiration for the Western Philosophy of Art Heinz Kimmerle

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The Origins of Landscape Painting: An Intercultural Perspective Heinz Paetzold

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Nishida, Aesthetics, and the Limits of Cultural Synthesis Robert Wilkinson

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Identity and Hybridity – Chinese Culture and Aesthetics in the Age of Globalization Karl-Heinz Pohl

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The Rasa Theory: A Challenge for Intercultural Aesthetics Rosa Fernández Gómez

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Presenting the Unpresentable. On Trauma and Visual Art Antoon Van den Braembussche

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Contents

Visual Archives and the Holocaust: Christian Boltanski, Ydessa Hendeles and Peter Forgacs Ernst van Alphen

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A Distant Laughter: The Poetics of Dislocation Jean Fisher

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Where You End and I Begin – The Multiple Ethics of Contemporary Art Practice Pam Johnston

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The Ethics of the Wound Everlyn Nicodemus

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Name Index

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Subject Index

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Intercultural Aesthetics: An Introduction Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note

This volume is part of a new series called Einstein Meets Magritte Again, edited by the Center Leo Apostel of the Free University of Brussels.1 A very specific incentive to include this volume in a series dedicated mainly to the interdisciplinary study of worldviews was our conviction that a field such as intercultural aesthetics (formerly called comparative aesthetics) is indispensable to enrich the nature and scope of current concepts of worldview. According to Leo Apostel, one of Belgium’s most prolific philosophers in the twentieth century, ‘A worldview is a coherent set of bodies of knowledge concerning all aspects of the world. This coherent set allows people to construct a global image of the world and to understand as many elements of their experiences as possible. A worldview can in fact be perceived of as a map that people use to orient and explain, and from which they evaluate and act, and put forward prognoses and visions of the future’.2 This original definition is extremely valuable, but still largely privileges the role of knowledge and cognitive mapping.3 If we consider, however, that worldviews in general also reflect the pre-conscious and pre-conceptual experience of the world, and that such an insight is more prevalent in many non-Western cultures, intercultural aesthetics embodies an important tool to refine and expand our notion of worldview. Intercultural aesthetics also implies transcending the limits of current Western aesthetics, dominated as it is by Western categories of thought. In the last few decades, the main body of aesthetical thinking in the West has been fairly well established. Time and again, imitation theory, expression theory, formalism, theories about aesthetical experience, the interrelation between art and society, phenomenological and semiotic theories have been consolidated as standard items on the agenda of aesthetics.3 This has only recently been changed, and only to a certain extent, thanks to French thinkers such as Lyotard or Derrida. However, even this recent renewal is quite dependent on the older theories, as the most significant changes concern reinterpretations and deconstructions of the existing body of knowledge. So Western aesthetics, as it was invented and emancipated itself as a distinct discipline in the nineteenth century, became increasingly isolated from important intercultural developments within the international art world and even, to some extent, within philosophy itself. So, firstly, current aesthetics has become somewhat outdated and detached from significant developments within the international art world itself. One can hardly A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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ignore the increasing worldwide cross-fertilisation and interpenetration of different cultures, which is mostly referred to by using the umbrella term of ‘diaspora and art’.4 The traditional leitmotiv of cultures that are profoundly embedded in nationalism is increasingly being challenged by new modes of post-national or even cosmopolitan citizenship. This globalising tendency towards differentiation and heterogeneity seems to be driven by new notions, experiences and expressions of cultural identity. In this sense, contemporary art could be considered worldwide as a laboratory for building and exploring new hybrid worldviews. In this situation, one is not only confronted with multiple identities, with new aesthetic possibilities, strategies and in-betweens, but also with problems of estrangement and dislocation, with limits of representation and an ethics of the wound that challenges the translatability of the Other. Therefore, this book was conceived as an incentive to develop a truly intercultural aesthetics, which looks at art and the aesthetic experience in a cross-cultural setting, making room not only for new conceptual articulations but also for a new awareness of the pre-conscious and pre-conceptual ways of world making. Current aesthetics is also, as we already briefly suggested, estranged from recent developments within philosophy itself. Indeed, the prospect of intercultural aesthetics is also intimately linked with the intercultural turn in Western as well as in nonWestern philosophy. In our view, the whole enterprise of intercultural aesthetics remains indebted to both the Indian notion of rasa and Kant’s notion of sensus communis. In both theories, aesthetic judgments are not only seen as purely subjective, but also as universal. Therefore, the idea of the impersonality or transpersonality (sadharanikarana) presupposed in aesthetic experience is a real leitmotiv in Indian theory of rasa. It is this transpersonal nature of aesthetic experience that explains why aesthetic experience presupposes a shared experience. Alternatively, as Eliot Deutsch affirms, ‘this sharing is achieved in art only when there is an intense impersonality which, paradoxically because of its intensity, is at the same time highly individual. This is the case for aesthetic experience because aesthetic interest, in contrast to mere practical interest, is not given to the individual qua individual, but to the individual as it embodies, becomes, represents, expresses – whatever you will – a universal, inter-personal – and thereby – transcendent quality’.5 Important differences notwithstanding, this Indian viewpoint reminds us of Kant’s transcendental claim that aesthetic judgments are not a question of personal preferences, but implicitly call on others to share them. This presupposition about the subjective universality of all aesthetic judgments finally led to the transcendental postulation of a sensus communis, which guaranteed the universal communicability of aesthetic judgments. Both rasa and sensus communis refer to a consensus in the literal meaning of the word: a shared feeling, a consent, an agreement or Einstimmung, whether it is postulated as a transcendental presupposition (Kant) or as a transcendent realisation of unity (Abhinavagupta). Both point to a kind of universal, cross-cultural measure of understanding, a kind of pre-conceptual common ground. However, genuinely intercultural reflection should not take any universal ground for granted. In view of the conditions of contemporary thought, we can no longer maintain Kant’s claim that all others should share our aesthetic judgments. We have to find out the real or concrete extent of the claim to generality. We have to find out where we come upon

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the limits of cultural synthesis. We must continue to be sensitive to the particularities of aesthetic experiences within different cultures. Even then, a certain common background can help to determine which groups in the same culture or in different cultures are characterised by a relatively high or low commonality of aesthetic judgments, respectively. Intercultural aesthetic research could even come to the conclusion that there is sometimes a higher degree of common aesthetic judgements between certain social groups in different cultures than between different social groups in the same culture. There are still a large number of strategies to be explored. Anyhow, one can hardly deny that the older tradition of comparative aesthetics, which used to be rather marginal to mainstream Western aesthetics but showing an internal development of its own,6 has in the last decade become an extremely dynamic research field. Since a decade or so, the number of international conferences and books in this field has not only increased rapidly, but also introduced new perspectives. At the same time, new names have been given to the field, with the adjectives multicultural, transcultural and intercultural being widely used. An example of this ongoing renewal is, for instance, the intercontinental forum held at the University of Bologna in 2000, on Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics. This forum highlighted transcultural issues either in terms of aesthetic theories in East and West or in terms of hermeneutics and art criticism.7 This led to splendid syntheses of older and newer developments. Another, earlier, example is the international conference on Sensus Communis in Multi- and Inter cultural Perspective. On the Possibility of Common Judgments in Arts and Politics, held at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in November 1997, and organised by the Rotterdam research group on intercultural philosophy. In this conference, for instance, Hannah Arendt’s broadening interpretation of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgments in his Third Critique was elaborated and clearly related to politics. This gave rise to a new field of research, opening up critical perspectives in which political and social dimensions of aesthetic judgments are taken into account.8 This volume on intercultural aesthetics is divided into two main parts. In Part 1, Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics, authors either reflect on the history and foundation of an intercultural aesthetics and/or focus on the intertwinement and difference between specific worldviews and specific aesthetical points of view or traditions (Marchiano, Oosterling, Kimmerle, Paetzold, Wilkinson, Pohl and Fernandez). More particularly, authors look at the relevance of these specific traditions to intercultural aesthetics in general. In the first contribution, ‘An Intercultural Approach to a World Aesthetics’, Grazia Marchiano (University of Siena-Arezzo) discusses the intercultural approach to aesthetics in the historical context of the philosophical encounters between the Eastern and Western worlds. She underlines the immense but still underestimated value of Indian aesthetic theories, the rasavada, which are much older than the European endeavours in this field. They provide deep insights into the aesthetic experience and its embeddedness in a psychology, which, unlike traditional Western ways of thought, does not make a distinction between intellectual and sensory faculties as high and low functions, but distinguishes gross and subtle levels of perception, cognition and insight. Rather than brain-centeredness, it emphasises

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a heart-centred picture of inner life. If aesthetics based on this kind of psychology is taken into account, Eastern and Western philosophies are brought together at a turning point of their histories. After universalist and comparative encounters, the hermeneutic attitude makes an intercultural approach possible, which is in tune with Dante’s adagium of ‘intelligence out of love’. In ‘Living – in between – Cultures. Downscaling Intercultural Aesthetics to Daily Life’, Henk Oosterling (Erasmus University of Rotterdam) relates his own conception of radical mediocrity to Japanese aesthetics and French philosophies of difference. All this throws a specific light on Heidegger’s conversation with his Japanese visitors, among whom is Earl Kuki. The aestheticisation of life becomes a common issue in Western and in Japanese thought. On the basis of a detailed analysis of Japanese aesthetic categories, he argues that they are not, as such, translatable into Western languages. Nevertheless, Oosterling tries to show the precise ways in which French philosophers of difference have been inspired by the Japanese way of thought. This leads to the conclusion: ‘In Japanese aesthetics this turning inside out reveals the suchness of things in emptiness, in Western aesthetics of existence it exposes the emptiness in radical mediocrity’. However, he admits that ‘it is a long way from Shinto purification rituals and Japanese Zen ethics to the interactive imperative of current media and information society’. A third contribution to Part 1 is focused more specifically on African aesthetics. In his contribution, ‘Living (With) Art. The African Aesthetic Worldview as an Inspiration for the Western Philosophy of Art’, Heinz Kimmerle (Prof. em. of Erasmus University of Rotterdam and Director of the Foundation for Intercultural Philosophy and Art) argues that in traditional African communities art is not a separate domain of life but permeates all spheres of communal and personal life. In the cosmos as a whole, in nature on earth and in the human world, life is full of certain rhythms, of a specific sound. By dancing and by shaping their ways of life, especially by actions that are ethically relevant, humans answer to the cosmic sound and rhythm; they participate in the harmony of the universe and they share the responsibility to maintain it. In the Western tradition, Kimmerle finds comparable ideas in the aesthetics of early Romanticism, as it was worked out by young Schleiermacher, for example, who summoned everybody to make his life into a piece of art. In more recent debates, Marcuse, Beuys and, on a cosmopolitan level, Appiah have worked in this direction of not only living with art, but also living art. In the fourth contribution to this Part, ‘The Origins of Landscape Painting: An Intercultural Perspective’, Heinz Paetzold (University of Hamburg and current president of the International Association of Aesthetics) compares EuropeanWestern and Chinese landscape painting both historically and systematically. Chinese landscape painting is about 1,000 years older than the European landscape. Different cultural and philosophical embeddings of this kind of art in the West and in China have thus to be taken into account. Western landscape painting expresses a dualistic way of thought. On the one hand, nature is used for technical purposes, and on the other, it is seen as a source of aesthetic experience. In Chinese cultural history, however, humans remain part of nature. This unity is expressed in their landscape painting. Paetzold enlightens these differences by giving many examples

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and by analysing the art discourses in the West and in China. Comparing art practices and art theories of different cultures – as is also already done by the Dutch philosopher Lemaire – according to Paetzold is still not sufficient to bring about an intercultural aesthetics in the full sense of the word. Paetzold therefore pleads for the use of a methodology that is based on art discourses that take into account extensive viewing and conceptual thinking. His article as a whole practises this methodology. The fifth contribution, ‘Nishida, Aesthetics and the Limits of Cultural Synthesis’, by Robert Wilkinson (The Ferguson Center for African and Asian Studies at The Open University in Scotland, Edinburgh, United Kingdom) describes the aesthetic position of Nishida as similar to the Western ideas we can find in Kant, Fichte or the German Romantic movement. Nishida borrows the language of Husserlian phenomenology, but in the end, his way of thought is incommensurable with the main stream of Western philosophy. For Nishida’s philosophy, the point of departure is and remains during the different phases of his thought the experience of satori in the sense of Zen Buddhism. In this experience, there is no difference between subject and object. The one and the many form a contradictory identity. Aesthetic experience is part of this basic experience. It gives access to the intentionality of pure visual perception, which is prior to conceptual judgment. It is an autonomous dimension and different from religious experience. The concepts of beauty, artistic creativity, art, and of the relation between art, truth and morality have to be defined on the basis of this idea of aesthetic experience. Individuality, which is an ultimate reality in Aristotelian thought, is only of a transient value in an aesthetic conception that holds that all things manifest the Buddha nature and that conceives of them as being on their way to nirvana. Quite a different point of view is set out in the sixth contribution, ‘Identity and Hybridity – Chinese Art and Aesthetics in the Age of Globalization’, in which KarlHeinz Pohl (University of Trier) argues that Chinese art has actually undergone some significant influences from the West. Traditional Chinese art did not endeavour to imitate nature. Aesthetic productions created a reality of their own, presenting a meaning beyond words, and images beyond images. Strict regularity gives the impression of representing a natural picture. The encounters with Western thought, especially the influences of postmodernism, have resulted in an extensive Westernisation of Chinese aesthetics, and – in response to that – a reinvigorated return to Chineseness, which again becomes and remains a determining factor. After all, the Mao Tse-tung era has left traces that have not yet been wiped out. Finally, to show how hybridity characterises Chinese art and aesthetics in the context of globalisation, Pohl gives some examples of paintings that reflect a fusion of traditions and by the same token a rediscovery of traditional Chinese values. Following the intermediate discussions of Japanese, African, Western and Chinese aesthetics, the final contribution of Part I returns to Indian aesthetics. In her ‘The Rasa theory: A Challenge for Intercultural Aesthetics’, Rosa Fernandez (Malaga University) places rasa theory in the context of Kashmiri Shaivism. In her view, the experience of aesthetic pleasure or aesthetic emotion is embedded in an epistemological psychology, which is concerned with all levels of experience or consciousness. A unity of sensuous and super-sensuous experiences is presupposed

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and also the connection with theatrical magic performances. Bharata’s seminal text, especially the aphorism on rasa, forms the starting point. Abhinavagupta, synthesizing four other critical commentaries on this text, underlines that contradictory perceptions cause pleasure. Moreover, she rejects the statement that rasa is revealed by a special power. She adds to the eight permanent mental states, which have their correspondence in rasa, a ninth one. She calls it fantarasa, which aims at a state of joyous peace. Referring to Gadamer’s ideas about aesthetic consciousness as being immersed into the play of something much larger then individual consciousness, Fernandez suggests an expanding of the aesthetic sphere to make it a means to enjoy ‘the rasa of life’. The contributions thus far can be considered as fairly representative of the field of comparative and/or intercultural aesthetics. In Part II, the aesthetical reflection is brought much closer to existing intercultural practices in visual art. More particularly, the confrontation with dislocation, mass migration, displacements, exile and even extermination leads here to the broad, but much neglected theme of trauma and visual art in an inter cultural per spective. Here, specific problems about the (im)possibility of representation, the sublime and dislocation are addressed in several pioneering articles. The proposed texts are the revised lectures that were presented during an international symposium on The Limits of Representation. On Trauma, violence and visual art , organised on 27 November 2004 by the Cultural Center Strombeek (near Brussels). This conference was held on the occasion – and in honor – of Everlyn Nicodemus’ solo exhibition, Crossing the Void, at the same centre. In the first contribution, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable. On trauma and Visual Art’, Antoon Van den Braembussche (Philosophy of Art and Cultur e, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Art Criticism at the Free University of Brussels) first of all tries to elucidate the nature of historical trauma with a special emphasis on visual art. More specifically, he highlights what is at stake in the so-called politics of trauma. In such a politics, the real challenge is to remain faithful to the belatedness of the trauma experience, its inherent forgetting, a task that implies the theoretical commitment to the Other. In a second step, he focuses on the Rwanda Project of Alfredo Jaar and discusses this project in terms of the limits of representation. Dealing with this recurrent and resistant theme in the literature on the subject, he embarks – and that is his third step – on a more sustained philosophical discourse on the (negative) sublime, which Lyotard has called the ‘presentation of the unpresentable’. In a fourth step, the contribution concludes with some intercultural reflections on sensus communis, rasa theory and negative theology, respectively, in the works of Dōgen and Derrida. The second contribution is entirely devoted to the representation of the Holocaust and more particularly to the artistic use of the scholarly method of archive. Indeed, in his ‘Visual Archives and the Holocaust: Christian Boltanski, Ydessa Hendeles, Peter Forgacs’, Ernst van Alphen (University of Leiden) extensively discusses the archival work done by Christian Boltanski, Ydessa Hendeles and Peter Forgacs, respectively. Van Alphen aims to highlight that, rather than representing the Holocaust through a mediated account, both Boltanski and Hendeles produce

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‘Holocaust effects’ by re-enacting certain principles. Although they show different aspects of the archive, they both deconstruct the principles that underlie and define the archive. In fact, they finally seem to imply that the archive is ‘rotten from the inside out’. Is there still a future for the archive? Peter Forgacs’ artistic use of private home movies does not objectify or categorise, but re-animates and re-personalises. They not only rehabilitate personal history against its loss into collective or official history, but also contribute to the re-humanisation and reconstitution of subjectivity. In the third contribution, ‘A Distant Laughter: The Poetics of Dislocation’, Jean Fisher (Middlesex University; Royal College of Art, London) shows that the ‘poetics of dislocation’ is at the same time about ‘dislocution’. Those who have lost their homes, also lose their language. They find different ways to articulate themselves. They may choose to laugh at their destiny. This can happen within a culture, when certain groups are dislocated, like the Indians in North America. Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee Indian, expresses in his artworks the trauma of his people. Fisher departs from an analogy between Durham’s art and the concept of délire described by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Being a witness of the ‘never known’, Durham shows in his scripto-visual work the ‘trails of tears’ in the destiny of Indians in North America. Most remarkable is his ‘turn to humour’ as a way to turn around Western ideas about cause and effect, past and future, etc. In his view, humour is the art of the surface, opposed to satire and irony. It is a ‘distant laughter’ and a rebellious one. In Freudian terms, it represents the triumph of the ego and the pleasure principle. Moreover, it helps ‘against the unkindness of the real circumstances’. Also devoted to the artistic representation of indigenous people is the article on ‘Where you end and I begin – the multiple ethics of contemporary art Practice’, by Pam Johnston (Center for Research and Education in the Arts, University of Technology, Sydney). In her view, Western art and cultural theory on Indigenous peoples is characterised by a reductive and homogenous notion of the indigenous ‘other’ that appropriates and colonises the constitutive complexities of Indigenous peoples. More particularly, she tries to deconstruct existing preambles, policies and representations of Aboriginal lives in Australia. She does so by not only showing how dreadful the social inequalities of most Aboriginal people still are, but also by laying bare how well-intended policies harass and suffocate an important part of ongoing Aboriginality, dominated as they are by the cultural imperatives of the European-derived society of contemporary Australia. How do I have to proceed in representing Aboriginals when I am in the situation of power and control? Where do ethics end and imagination begin? To find a way out of this dilemma, Johnston argues that Indigenous politics is most successful when it is community based, when it comes from the inside. If not, any representation only perpetuates the terrible trauma and violence, and the resultant grief and dislocation. She concludes by discussing a project of her own to show how she managed not to appropriate the story of the Bandjalung people. In a final contribution, ‘The Ethics of the Wound’, Everlyn Nicodemus (independent visual artist and writer) writes about art and trauma on the basis of personal experiences. She examines the work of Wolfgang Schulze, who called himself Wols

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after his emigration to Paris in 1932. Detained by the Nazis, he chose to express his traumatic experiences through a kind of ironical daydreams. Like his friend and colleague Jean Fautrier, he became one of the founding fathers of informal art. In a series of paintings called Otages, Fautrier painted murdered hostages by using impasto technique and the colours of naked flesh, open wounds, and rotten decay. When Nicodemus analyses the work of the black South African Ezrom Legae in the period of the politics of apartheid and the work of the Colombian Doris Salcedo, who accuses politics of arresting and making disappear innocent citizens, her article acquires an intercultural dimension. Legae takes devious ways to criticise the cruel acts of the apartheid regime by showing slaughtered animals, for example in his Chicken series. Salcedo, in her installations, makes visible the unbearable void left in the midst of the families of disappeared people. She refers for her work explicitly to the ethical relation between the I and the Other in the writings of Levinas. We hope that the reader will enjoy the scope, variety and profundity of the different contributions to the two parts of this book. By bringing together both parts, we want to highlight that intercultural aesthetics not only needs theoretical reflections on its foundations and its possibilities, but also, and at the same time, critical and sustained assessments of relevant art practices. In this specific sense, we also want to illustrate that intercultural aesthetics is not only a matter of cognition and knowledge, but also a matter of exploring the senses, the body of living art. This book is a reminder to take into consideration this aporetic in-between, this double bind.

Notes and References 1. The first Series, Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society , comprised eight volumes, published by Kluwer from 1999 onwards. This first series was a long-term result of the international conference entitled Einstein Meets Magritte, which was organised in 1995 by the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) and Brussels Free University. The goal of the conference was to bring together leading scientists and philosophers from all over the world and to establish a forum for an unlimited and interdisciplinary discussion of the ‘state of the art’ in contemporary science and the humanities. 2. See for the quotation ‘Worldviews, Science and Us, Global Perspectives’ by Aerts, Diederik, Bart D’Hooghe and Nicole Note, in their World V iews, Science and Us. Redemar cating Knowledge and Its Social and Ethical Implications, New Jersey, World Scientific, 2005, p. 1. 3. See, for instance: Sheppard, Anne, Aesthetics: An Introduction to Philosophy of Art , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987; Caroll, Noel, Philosophy of Art , London, Routledge, 1999; Eldridge, Richard, An Introduction to Philosophy of Art , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Van den Braembussche, Antoon, Thinking Art: An Introduction to Philosophy of Art, Springer, 2008 (in press). 4. See, for instance: Mirzoeff, Nicholas (Ed.), Diaspora and V isual Cultur e. Repr esenting Africans and Jews, London/New York, Routledge, 2000. 5. Eliot Deutsch, Studies in Compar ative Aesthetics, Monograph no. 2 of the Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy, Hawaii, 1985. 6. See for a brief but excellent synthesis of this internal development, the contribution of Grazia Marchiano in this book.

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7. See for the proceedings of this conference: Marchiano, Grazia and R. Milani (Eds.), Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics, Turin, Trauben, 2001. 8. See for the revised versions of the lectures of this conference, Kimmerle, Heinz and Henk Oosterling (Eds.), Sensus communis in Multi- and Intercultural Perspective. On the Possibility of Common Judgments in Arts and Politics, Würzburg, Köningshausen & Neumann, 2000.

An Intercultural Approach to a World Aesthetics Grazia Marchianò

To the g entle memory of Sonja Servomaa, a valiant sc holar in Aesthetic East & W est, and a wonderful human being never-to-be-forgotten.

A Preliminary Remark How can a truly honest intercultural approach to aesthetics contribute to convert its once insulary horizons into planetary ones? Since this query was raised at an intercontinental conference at the University of Bologna 7 years ago1 and furthermore debated in scholarly gatherings in several countries,2 I am glad to contribute to the volume edited by Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note with a handful of scattered reflections covering the last ten years of my intercourse with this matter.3 In my introduction to East and West in Aesthetics, a collection of writings by various authors that I edited in 1997,4 I attempted to identify not just the roses that have fostered the enlarging of the aesthetic ecumene across the twentieth century, thanks to pioneering thinkers like Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Nakamura Hajime, Eliot Deutsch, and Belgian orientalist Ulrich Libbrecht, but the thorns as well, that is to say the different forms of resistance put up by the international aesthetic community to acknowledging Asian aesthetics as an intrinsic part of a common Eurasian heritage since its very beginnings. This attitude clearly has historical grounds. Martin Heidegger’s view that philosophy was the invention of the Greek mind has deep roots in European consciousness, and has been, to all effects, universally endorsed. To limit myself to one example, when Japan, at the beginning of the Meiji era (1868), took the historic decision to set under way the process of modernization after 150 years of isolation, it was obliged to adapt its traditional lexicon to Western concepts or even to coin new words. In the case of philosophy acknowledged in its original meaning of love of wisdom , the group of linguists guided by the statesman Nishi Amane, did not find a better solution than to adopt tetsugaku, a Japanese compound that is a literal translation of the Greek word philosophy. In the West, the critical reception of Eastern philosophies and aesthetics has occurred under the sign of otherness, with all that this term has come to mean in A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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cultural anthropology. The time presaged by Leibniz when Asian thought would illuminate the mental horizons of the West has not yet come about to the point whereby the spirit of an ecumene may be said to have successfully erased the stigma of otherness. It is, however, my firm belief that the development of intercultural studies is essential to bring about the ecumenicity of aesthetic research. Eliot Deutsch himself, in the entry ‘Comparative Aesthetics’ he contributed to the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998), underlines the two fronts on which the specialist in such studies works: ‘On the scholarship side…the comparativist is faced with a number of hermeneutic or interpretative problems, the most important of which is how to engage the aesthetic thought and art of another culture in ways which do not, on the one hand, superficially assimilate it to one’s own cultural experience and, on the other, alienate it…as an exotic curiosity’. And ‘On the creative side, the comparativist is faced with the task…of appropriating what one learns from another culture and tradition in such a way as to allow it at once to deepen one’s understanding of human aesthetic experience and extend the ways in which that experience can be enriched and made intelligible’. Although I agree with Deutsch in terms of the double-sidedness of the matter concerned, I am rather inclined to tackle it from a different angle, namely by enquiring first of all on the pregnant links – in fact a true osmose – between the ways of thinking and the ways of feeling of Eastern and Western people, since a comprehensive analysis of the aesthetic factor, i.e., its peculiar nature and dynamics, cannot possibly separate spheres of human experience such as thinking and feeling equally affected by the intercourse with art, living nature and any source of powerfully charged emotions. In this respect, it is worth to mention some relevant steps that have already been taken in this fecund direction. In the 1960s, the eminent comparative scholar Nakamura Hajime opened the way to a seminal approach with Asiatic thought, using Buddhist logic as a key to inspecting the ways of thinking of people influenced by the Buddhist religious worldview.5 A few decades further, the Belgian synologist Walter Libbrecht6 devised a mathematical looking model that provides comparative philosophy with a reliable instrument for recognizing ‘a certain order in the multiplicity of philosophical thoughts and theories from different traditions and cultures’ (Nagel7). Both Nakamura and Libbrecht have excellent reasons for relying on structures of abstract thought – logic and mathematics, respectively – in order to identify differences and correspondences between the speculative systems of East and West. In my opinion, however, the peculiarity of aesthetic thought, which has often been interpreted as its limitation, is that it explores the impalpable sphere of human feeling, the areas of consciousness in which the raising of emotions makes the poetic sense of things emerge along with wonder. Here, we touch on an intriguing point. Whether the Greek mind was inclined to see abstract thought as the most comprehensive way to explore outer and inner reality, for the Asian mind – allow me this generalisation – it is rather the sensitivity to things (Jap. mono no aware) that is believed to be the encompassing way to become aware of world reality, and discover multiple levels of reality inside the spectrum of our consciousness. May I quote a passage from Nishitani Keiji’s Religion and Nothingness where the Japanese philosopher says: ‘Wherever a thing is, the world worlds. And this, in turn, means that each thing, by being in

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its home-ground is in the home-ground of all beings; and, conversely, that in being on the home-ground of all, each is in its own home-ground’.8 In a frugal Zen-like style, Nishitani stresses the complementarity and interpenetration of matter and mind in the world of life. Scholars equally acquainted with Japanese and Indian traditional philosophy know very well that such an all-embracing vision at the core of Buddhist thought in Japan is rooted in the same terrain of Indian thought, Hindu and Buddhist alike, where a systematic aesthetic theory based on a logic of inclusion, as I am going to explain soon, took shape in Kashmir in the centuries straddling the first millennium. More than seven hundred years before a theory of sensory knowledge was identified in Europe as aesthetics, aesthetic phenomena in India were treated as the theme of an autonomous doctrine, defined precisely as rasavada, namely the path of rasa. Its background rests in an all-embracing vision of what is meant by enjoyment (bhoga). In the Vedic texts, bhoga recurs with the literal meaning of eating, feeding on, in parallel with the equally literal meaning of rasa as sap, lymph, liquor. From the basic meaning of eating, bhoga carries the extended sense of fruition, advantage, pleasure, delight, and sexual enjoyment. But, hold on! The opposite side of enjoyment too, namely, the enjoyment deriving from not allowing ourselves to become slaves of pleasure, is an intrinsic part of a similar all-embracing vision. And, this is only one of the paradoxes that we meet with along the Indian path of rasa. Happiness and grief, pleasure and suffering spring from the same waters of human experience, and a major task of pan-Indian thought was to develop a full theoretical cognition of the dynamics of mental processes in order to obtain a thoroughly dispassionate command of them.9 It is therefore not surprising that India, the motherland of one of the most cogent attempts in world philosophy to explore the roots of human suffering, has been equally the place where an unexhausted quest for higher pleasure developed into a comprehensive aesthetic theory and into one of the most luxuriant flowerings of every type of artistic practice and poetic style, ready to satisfy the need for both the sacred and the profane, the contemplation of the immutable and the seizing of what is fleeting, Nirvanic detachment and Tantric-like Dyonisian possession. ‘Categories such as sacred and profane, celestial and terrestrial, religious and mundane – says Kapila Vatsyayan – are always viewed in a relationship of complementarity rather than polarities. Thus, one element can be transmuted into the other and viceversa. The sensuous can become devotional, the devotional spiritual, the physical metaphysical’.10 It is never stressed sufficiently that in the traditional Indian psychology to which the theory of aesthetic enjoyment owes so much, a hierarchy between intellectual and sensory faculties is based on a distinction not between high and low functions, as has been characteristic in the dualistic Cartesian approach to the body–mind complex, but between gross and subtle levels of perception, cognition and insight. Indian doctrines are of one mind about the fact that at subtler levels of perception, the entire apprehension of the world picture changes and that the path to sensual refinement passes through an intensification of feeling. When in Europe, the troubadour poetry of courtly love was yet to take form the learned Tantric circles of Kashmir had already explored the whole terrain of aesthetic enjoyment from the layers of sensuous attachment to the shores of dispassion and selfless awareness. I shall cite three lines from the Vijnanabhairava,

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a treatise whose unknown author belonged to the lineage of the yogaja marga, the path of union or integration that had a vast following among the theorists of rasavada: He whose mind together with the other senses is merged in the interior space of the heart, who has entered mentally into the centre of the two bowls of the heart lotus, who has excluded everything else from consciousness acquires the highest fortune. Oh! beautiful one. Vijnanabhairava, 26, v. 49.11

In the traditional Indian vision, the physical heart on whose functioning life depends is also the poetic metaphor of the inner life, the focal zone where the microfluctuations of consciousness converge in an uninterrupted perfusion between perceptive stimuli and mental events. If we were to imagine the theatre of cerebral dynamics involved in the processes of perception descending into the cardiac zone, we would obtain a heart-centred rather than a brain-centred picture of the inner life. And, this would help us understand the substantial part which a complex and in many respects, esoteric philosophy of the mind–heart (Sanskrit citta-hrid) plexus has had in the framing of an epistemology of perception not limited to aesthetic doctrine alone. In The Advaita of Art Harsha V. Dehejia provides the essential know-hows to move into the jungle of rasa theories based on the six main Indian orthodox schools, the Upanishads and the Vedas.12 On one point Advaitic and Buddhist theorists agree, and it is on the selfless ground wherefrom springs the aesthetic shock (Pali samvega). Samvega – A.K. Coomaraswamy explains – is a state of agitation, fear, awe, wonder or delight induced by some physically or mentally thrilling experience. When in the presence of a poignant work of art, we are struck by it, ‘the blow has a meaning for us, and the realization of that meaning, is still a part of the shock. These two phases of the shock are, indeed, normally felt together as parts of an instant experience; but they can be logically distinguished, and since there is nothing peculiarly artistic in the mere sensibility that all men and animals share, it is with the latter aspect of the shock that we are chiefly concerned. In either phase, the external signs of the experience may be emotional, but while the signs may be alike, the conditions they express are unlike. In the first phase, there is really a disturbance, in the second there is the experience of a peace that cannot be described as an emotion (emphasis mine), in the sense that fear and love or hate are emotions’.13 This inevitably places the subject/object relationship in a light different from the one Western thought has accustomed us to. In particular circumstances that powerfully engage the sphere of heart, as in the case of aesthetic emotion, our feeling expands, and the greater the expansion of the sphere of our feeling, the greater the diminution in thickness of our subjectivity. Whoever deeply savours an emotion feels that hardened clot of one’s individuality dissolve. This is a crucial point that Arindam Chakrabarti highlighted in the panel of Indian aesthetics at the 2001 International Congress of Aesthetics in Makuhari (Tokyo). To quote: ‘In the West, subjective has meant personal. But once we liberate (ourselves) from the Cartesian prison of the singular first person, it becomes possible to recognise that in moral

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unselfishness as well as in aesthetic immersion, the frontiers of the individual ego can provisionally melt away, revealing an inner but shared space of the heart’.14 No one engaged in Eastern studies can fail to be aware of the importance in Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditional aesthetics of the concepts of sympathy, spontaneity, natural rythm, immersion in the intimate heart of things . In Chinese, the character xin (mind) is the same as that used to denote heart, almost as if mind/heart were a single organ with interweaving rational and emotional prerogatives.15 The texts of Taoist physiology tell us that just as breath rises from the heels, so thought rises from the heart and in the heart intention shapes ideas and meaning. The mind that guides and inspires the poet, the painter, the true man in the traditional Chinese sense, is a mind that has a heart, that thinks by way of its feeling. The Japanese word kokoro means the following: (1) mind, spirit, mentality, idea, thought; (2) heart, feeling; (3) sincerity, heartiness, friendliness.16 It makes no difference whether the aesthetic shock is brought about by a painting, a line of poetry, a dance movement, the branch of a cherry tree, a yellowing autumn leaf, a snowflake. Each of these events can open the way to what Sasaki Ken-ichi in that same conference called the beautification of beauty .17 What did the Japanese aesthetician mean by this expression? The dictionary informs that beautification means to make something or someone beautiful. It is made of two units, and the causative form the second one consists of, namely fication, acts as an intensifier of the first one, namely beauty. This indicates that out of the process of making beautiful, beauty acquires an additional flavour, an empowered capacity to be inwardly tasted, and this empowerment does not depend on the maker’s efforts only since it comes into being, so to say, as an extra gift, a miracle, a source of wonder whenever we open ourselves to the marvel of feeling the current of life pulsing within us. Thanks to reflections of this kind that take their leavening nurture from the encounter of traditional and post-modern views on the aesthetic factor in Asian thought, aesthetic theory in the last decades has got close to an important crossroad, and an extraordinary intellectual honesty is required from Western and Eastern researchers alike – as I said in my preliminary remark – to contribute to this turning point in a truly intercultural way. In a summer seminar coordinated by Julius Moravcsik at the University of Pecs (Hungary) in 2002, the focus of stimulating examination was questions preliminary to a Copernican revolution in aesthetic theory.18 Copernican revolution is the term I attempt to give to the abandonment of the substantialistic and anthropocentric vision, which in Western philosophy has exerted so powerful an influence on aesthetic thought from Plato onwards. In general terms, two related factors have favoured the prominent position gained by so-called process thought in twentieth century philosophies, beginning with A.N. Whytehead. The first of these has been the extraordinary development of the experimental sciences with the dazzling sequel of physico-mathematical theories that have irreversibly modified the scenarios of cosmology, micro- and macrophysics, and the common idea of reality in general. The second factor has been the impact in the West, and in Western culture and thought, of an East, which is finally considered not merely exotic, macaronic, or mannered. In his Oriental Enlightenment:

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The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought, Prof. J.J. Clarke examines the development of philosophical contacts with the East in the twentieth century on a sequence of three stages: the universalist, the comparative, and the hermeneutic, respectively. While, he says, ‘they do not represent distinct phases but overlap to a considerable extent both chronologically and conceptually, they are convenient labels for simplifying and making sense of the complex developments within this philosophical genre in recent times’.19 Clarke’s working hypothesis merits verification in the context of the history of aesthetics in the twentieth century. In fact, it is not hard to recognise the emergence of a universalistic phase with R. Tagore, H. Corbin and A.K. Coomaraswamy; a technically comparativist phase from the mid-twentieth century developed by thinkers like T. Munro, Archie J. Bahm, T. Izutsu and Eliot Deutsch in single works as well as in collectaneous contributions appeared in scholarly magazines such as the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (vol. XXIV, I, Fall 1965) or Philosophy East and West (vol. XIX, no. 3, July 1969); and again thanks to a growing series of international conferences covering the Eastern and Western aesthetic horizon, beginning with the memorable symposium held in Venice in 1956.20 Finally, the emergence of a hermeneutic phase in which general philosophical questions like, for example, François Jullien’s comparison between the concepts of Logos and Dao, and specific aspects of the theory of art in India, China, and Japan are analysed by scholars whose Western or Eastern background equally favours an intercultural approach to aesthetic issues. In the latter case, the names that I could cite are those of many colleagues, inside and outside the International Association for Aesthetics (IAA/AIE) with whom I have shared scientific projects in the most various academic contexts, from the University of Hawaii to those of Bologna, Siena and Tel-Aviv, from the Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute at the University of Sambalpur (India) to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute at Chongqing (China), to the national Universities of Beijing, Kyoto and Tokyo. These scholars, and a few advanced students of them, make nowadays a vital community engaged on pushing forward the horizon of aesthetic thought by equally adopting Western and Eastern hermeneutical instruments in a trans-historically and holistically oriented key. In this respect, there is another face of the Copernican revolution that I should like to focus on. I explored this facet at length in a book of mine, which came out in Italy in 1994.21 It is the notion of the Orient conceived as a metaphor of a latitude of the human mind brimming with sprouting inspiration, creativity and insight. In my book, I took the liberty to name this latitude orienti del pensiero (in Italian). Its English rendering, i.e., Orients of thought can be criticised from a literary point of view. Yet I am confident that the challenge implicit in the process of orienting one’s mind and heart towards the source of inspiration tangibly related to sun rising, can be sensed independently from our distinct geo-cultural backgrounds. The effort required to acknowledge the existence of this peculiar latitude of thinking is admittedly great. Yet I remain convinced that we should make such an effort. What is at stake is the reawakening, in theory not impossible, of what Dante and the Provençal poets of his time called intelligence out of lo ve (intelletto d’amore in Italian): an expression that I would place among the foundational concepts of a world aesthetics.

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Notes and References 1. Promoted by the President of the Italian Association for Aesthetics (AISE) and the Chair of Aesthetics, University of Siena-Arezzo, along with the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bologna, ‘Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics’ was an intercontinental forum where transcultural issues at stake in an age of transition were focussed either in the East and West aesthetic theory or in the contexts of Hermeneutics and Art Criticism. See the 524-page Proceedings volume by the same title, Marchianò G., Milani R. (eds), 2001, Trauben, Turin. 2. Among the most seminal ones immediately following the Bologna Conference, I would mention the XV International Congress of Aesthetics, Makuhari, Tokyo, 27–31 August 2001 where five distinct panels on Asian Aesthetics took place simultaneously. See The Great Book of Aesthetics, a CD-ROM including all the papers read at the congress, and the International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Sasaki K. (ed), vol. 5, 2001, Institute of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, The University of Tokyo, containing a selection of papers under the heading ‘Aesthetics of Transhumanity: Beauty, Nature, Universe’; the International Conference ‘Aesthetics and Culture: East and West’, promoted by the Chinese Society of Aesthetics, Beijing, 5–8 September 2002. See the bilingual Proceedings volume by the same title edited by Gao J., Wang K. (eds), 2006, Beijing; the Second Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics held by the SSLA and ANZALA Associations for Literature and Aesthetics at the University of Sydney (September 29 – October 1, 2004), the Proceedings of which are collected in Before Pangaea. New Essays in Transcultural Aesthetics, Benitez E. (ed), The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 15, Special Issue 2005; the 2005 Conference of The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, inclusive of a panel on Transcultural Aesthetics coordinated by R. Wilkinson; and the East and West Aesthetic Conference promoted by the Chinese Society for Aesthetics, University of Chengdu, June 2006. 3. As for interculturality in the scenario of general philosophy, reference should be made to R.A. Mall’s Philosophie im V ergleich der K ulturen. Interkultur elle Philosophie . Eine Neue Orientierung, 1995, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt (in Italian: Interculturalità. Una nuova prospettiva filosofica, Crapiz S. (ed), 2002, ECIG, Genoa). 4. This 200-page volume (1997, Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, Pisa, Rome) consists of two parts preceded by my essay: 1947–1997: The enlar ging of the aesthetic ecumene . Introductory remarks. Part I surveys some major aspects of aesthetic theory in Asia focussed on by Capriles E., ‘Steps to a comparative evolutionary aesthetics: China, India, Tibet and Europe’, Imamichi T., ‘The night as category. One angle of comparative study in aesthetics’, Sukla A.C., ‘Dhvani as a pivot in Sanskrit literary aesthetics’, Hashimoto N., ‘The semantic transformation of an axiological concept’, and myself, ‘The flowers of the Noh and aesthetics of iki’. Part II examines aesthetic topics such as beauty, the philosophy of architecture, the poetic relevance of oriental art as well as G.W.F. Hegel’s thought facing the East, in an interdisciplinary perspective by co-authors Oisteanu A., Mitias M.M., Servomaa S., and Dethier H., respectively. 5. In his Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India China Tibet Japan, Wiener Ph.P. (ed), 1964, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. 6. In his Inleiding Compar ative F ilosofie: Opzet en ontwikk eling van een compar atief model (Introduction to comparative philosophy. The construction and development of a comparative model), vol. I, 1995, Van Gorcum, Assen. 7. My quotation is from B. Nagel’s Feature Review: ‘A New Approach to Comparative Philosophy Through Ulrich Libbrecht’s Comparative Model’, Philosophy East and West vol. 47, no. 1, 1997, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. 8. Religion and Nothingness, Translated, with an Introduction by Van Bragt J., 1982, University of California Press, Berkeley. 9. I had the opportunity to develop this point in the General Introduction to the panel on Indian Aesthetics, which I chaired at the XV International Congress of Aesthetics, Makuhari

18

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

G. Marchianò (see earlier Note 2), and in my contribution to the panel: ‘A Quest for Higher Pleasure: The Indian Aesthetic Legacy’. The quotation is taken from K. Vatsyayan’s introduction to the exhibition In the Ima ge of Man. The Indian per ception of the Univer se through 2000 year s of painting and sculptur e, 1982, The Arts Council of UK, London, pp. 90–93. The exhibition took place as a major event of the Festival of India in the U.K. through 1982. Its success was such that a similar celebration of India’s visual and performing arts was proposed for the USA during 1985– 1986. Philippe de Montebello, the then Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, made arrangements for having the exhibition INDIA! Art and Culture 1300–1900 hosted in the Met. Museum from September 1985 through January 1986. The same items were successively displayed in sister exhibitions in Washington and other major cities in the USA. Quoted from Singh J. (ed), Vijnanabhairava or Divine Consciousness. Treasury of 112 Types of Yoga, 1979, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. Dehejia H.V., The Advaita of Art, Foreword by Vatsyayan K., 1996, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. In the sphere of the Great Tradition of the aesthetic theory in Kashmir, R. Gnoli’s studies and translations remain fundamental, starting with The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, 1969, Chowkhamba Sansrit Series, Varanasi. See also Ray P.R.R., Theory of Oriental Beauty (With special reference to Rg Veda), 1974, First All Orissa Sanskrit Conference, Sambalpur. Coomaraswamy A.K., ‘Samvega: Aesthetic Shock’ in Selected Papers, I, Lipsey R. (ed), 1977, Princeton University Press, Boston, p. 183. This passage is taken from Prof. Chakrabarti’s contribution: ‘Ownerless emotions in rasaaesthetics’. Along with him, the other participants in the panels were Maillard C., Wilkinson R., Singh R.R. and myself. See the entry in A Chinese–English Dictionary , 1990, Beijing, and in A Chinese–English Handbook of Idioms, 1991, Joint, Hong Kong. See the entry in Kenkyusha’s New Japanese–English Dictionary, 1991, Kenkyusha, Tokyo. See Sasaki K., ‘Beautifying Beauty’, International Yearbook of Aesthetics , Sasaki K. (ed), vol. 5, 2001, Tokyo. Also by the same author, Aesthetics of Non-Western Principles, Version 0.5, 1998, Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastrict. The 2002 Conference on Transcultural Aesthetics (Pecs, July 1–3, 2002) coordinated by Moravcsik J. from the University of Stanford, included six papers, by Casebier A., Marchianò G., McCormick P., Moravcsik J., Neumaier O. and Servomaa S., respectively, located in three sections: East-West Clash or Complementarity ?; Insight, Knowledge, and Objectivity ; Raw Intuition and the Qualified Observer. In his articulated comment addressed via e-mail to the participants (30 August, 8 and 13 September 2002), Moravcsik remarked that an epistemologically oriented approach to issues ranging from art history to aesthetic theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics of the aesthetic event acted as a common denominator in the six papers. The sharing of this approach has been instrumental to a fecund reconsideration of the issue Clash or Complementarity, which was central in the East–West debate. Once viewed from an epistemological angle, the varieties of aesthetic experience cease to be culturally incommensurable to each other on the basis of common dynamics of in-built mental/emotional processes. Moravcsik’s conclusive remark is that ‘we do not merely want to gather common elements across cultures, but will try also to find lawlike generalizations showing that some configurations in the plastic arts or music appear pleasing to all humans under normal circumstances, and others horrid and disgusting for all’. Clarke J.J., Oriental Enlightenment. The Encounter Between Asian and W estern Thought , 1997, Routledge, London, p. 118. For an historical survey of these matters, see my introduction to Le gr andi corr enti dell’estetica no vecentesca, Marchianò G. (ed), 1991, Guerini, Milan. The III International Congress of Aesthetics took place at The Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice. The Proceedings Volume was published in 1956 by the Institute of Aesthetics, University of Turin. Marchianò G., Sugli orienti del pensiero. La natura illuminata e la sua estetica , 1994, vols. i/ii, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli.

Living – in between – Cultur es Downscaling Intercultural Aesthetics to Daily Life Henk Oosterling

Rumsfeld is a dick Won’t flow the forces we need We will be too light

Colonel Steve Rotkoff, a Jewish intellectual and military deputy of Major General James ‘Spider’ Marks, who lead US intelligence from the end of 2002 in preparing the invasion in Iraq and the tracking down of Weapons of Mass Destruction, used the traditional Japanese 17 syllabic haiku style to express his feelings about the chosen war strategy. After an unannounced drill that was executed for preparing his unit for chemical warfare, he writes: This is not a drill … Mask + chem suit on quickly Try not to panic

The next six months Rotkoff kept what turned out to be a six volumes daily war journal. In July 2003 it ended with a simple haiku: We knew how to fight Not so; building a NATION We may lose the PEACE1

Rotkoff undoubtedly read Sun Tzu’s The Art of W ar, written over 2,000 years ago. War is an art. Japanese got acquainted with Sun Tzu’s text in the fifth century, when envoys visited China to acquire new insights in skills and to purchase tools and techniques. After the introduction of Buddhism the warrior class, bushi, started to write haiku as a meditative stylization of the now here experience, the core element of Zen: emptiness (mu, Sanskrit: sunyata) and the suchness of things (sonomama, konomama; Sanskrit: tathata). During the pacification of Japan after 1600, Yamaga Soko forged martial skills into a Zen Buddhist based, self-disciplining practice: The way (do) of the samurai class.2 While walking the bushido in peace time the samurai handled both sword and pen – bu to bun – to write and paint. And when their time had come to kill themselves so as to appease conflicting loyalties or pay their debts to their clan, before cutting (kiri) their bellies (hara) open, performing seppuku, some even wrote down their final haiku. The long trajectory from Japanized Chinese knowledge via meditative verse to the briefings of an Iraqibased American Colonel with a Jewish background is highly intercultural, because A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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of the temporal and spatial transformations that are presupposed in this process of cross cultural adaptation and cultivation. Less lethal than this martial performance was the formal aestheticization of everyday practices such as flower arrangement (ikebana) and tea drinking (cha no yu ) into aesthetic ‘ways’ (do) that forged skill by drill. Art and life were merged into a spiritual lifestyle. Francis Fukuyama – rephrasing Alexandre Kojève – qualified this stylization as ‘pure snobism’. But notwithstanding the pejorative tone, according to Fukuyama these ‘aesthetics of existence’ express a higher level of the human condition beyond the end of history. The megalothymia that once inspired warriors in both East and West has been pacified and stylized by art.3 Perhaps that explains Rotkoff writing haiku: In writing he transforms both artificially and critically the belligerent passions that sustain his less-peaceful endeavour.

Preliminary Remarks on the Inter To me Rotkoff’s trajectory of interculturally inspired aestheticization is an exemplary case. In the following section I will describe a much more complex trajectory along which Western discourse of aesthetics, the avant-garde experiment with its artistic media and Japanese awareness of the artificiality of life both coincide and diverge. I prefer the qualification ‘intercultural’ and will avoid ‘transcultural’. The latter – at least in one meaning of trans – suggest an overarching discourse that ‘unites’ in transcending West and East.4 I think processes of interculturalization are far more complex and layered. Not identity but differences trigger these processes of adopting and adapting, of informing through transformative performance. In the following intercultural exercise I will concentrate on ‘form’, not as the opposite of content or matter, but as a dynamic performance, i.e. as a literally a-voiding mediation that itself becomes self-containt, content. The carriers of this mediation are media. These media apparently translate, but this translation is always medium-specific. As an inter a medium seems transparent and neutral, but in inducing in the very process of translating its own materiality- in its effectiveness- a medium inevitably produces a surplus value. This gradually creates new meaningful experiences that demand cultivation – and commercialization. That is why Derrida has accurately shown that every translation is always an interpretation already. Marshall McLuhan’s slogan ‘the medium is the message’ has clarified that, once a medium really becomes transparent, i.e. once end-users no longer have an acute awareness of the ambiguous translatability, the medium has become their environment or mi-lieu – in its ‘absence’ that medium is all over the place. Nobody is prepared to throw his TV, pc and mobile phone out of the window on top of his or her car. In earlier research I coined man’s media embedded condition ‘radical mediocrity’.5 Now I want to connect this post-human condition to Japanese aesthetics so as to show how regained awareness of this condition enables us to critically ‘spiritualize’ our lives. ‘Interesse’6 as a configuration of the in between will be the key notion. Intercultural discourse is ‘a dialogue that does not incorporate difference

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and appropriate the other by becoming dialectical must repeatedly “speak” the outlines of the between.’7 In the final instance this inter is a productive in between, i.e. creative relation or, in its substantialized form, relationality. Of course, in presenting the inter as a creative substance the risk of reintroducing metaphysics or even theology is immense. However, in an intercultural exercise involving Japanese culture, one way or the other this metaphysical risk has to be faced. It has to be dealt with in due course of time. I will do this by reformulating the inter in evaluative and ontological terms. Once interests become interesse, everyday life is spiritualized. When this sensibilty enables us to distance ourselves from a substance-based materialism, so characteristic of consumer society, this spirituality can be qualified ‘critical’. This spirituality was once coined ‘atheistic spirituality’ by Apostel.8 On a geopolitical level inter resounds in ‘intercultural’, micropolitically it resonates in ‘interesse’. In Western aesthetics it echoes in ‘intermediality’. This is a generic term for contemporary art practices, the characteristic of which is interdisciplinary and interactive use of multimedia. Medial crossovers and interdisciplinary crossbreeding are performed so as to enhance artistic performance, open unexplored artificial spaces and create yet unknown reception–aesthetic sensibilities. This art condition is specific for a world in which space is virtualized and time globalized. But I am not talking about world music or fusion cooking. Intermediality focuses on the crossbreeding of conventional media, disciplines and technology: film with dance, painting with architecture, graffiti with literature, gaming with installations, and so on – in order to forge new alliances. For me Peter Greenaway’s oeuvre and the theatrical oeuvres of Dutch theatre groups such as former ZT Hollandia and RO-theatre are exemplary. But intermediality can also be found in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s relational architecture, or in retrospect in Dali’s oeuvre, Bauhaus’ endeavors, Buñuel’s work, William Morris’ project of Arts & Crafts, the Wiener Werkstätte or Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Discourse on intermediality has been inspired by French thinkers of difference who have developed a radical criticism on Western subjectivity and universal rationality.9 Their methodological and ontological analyses of the inter have been used frequently, not in the least because of their shared Nietzschean inspiration: Art expresses differences in a non-discursive, experiential way. It enables another communication. Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Barthes, Deleuze, Lyotard and Nancy also explicitly and regularly refer to Japanese Zen practices. Zennistic overtones, lend from Dogen’s Shobogenzo, are easily traced in Lyotard’s analysis of Kant’s sublime and his art-based proposal of an ‘immaterialist materialism’. Foucault was interested in martial arts as an explanatory model for his genealogy of power relations and at the end of his life he familiarized with Zazen practice. Moreover, in criticizing the exclusiveness of modern rationality and subjectivity philosophers of difference have gradually shifted their attention from the other to the in between, i.e. from respecting radical difference to the sharing of an in-between space, an inter. This is most explicitly formulated in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.10 But whomever one reads finally they end up connecting an ‘artificial’ inter with a lifestyle that Foucault coined ‘aesthetics of existence’.11

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This inter or in between turns out to be crucial for Zen Buddhist thought too, especially for Kyoto school philosophers Nishida (1870–1945), Nishitani (1900– 1990), Abe (1915) and thinkers like Nishida’s student Shuzo Kuki (1888–1941) and more recently Ohashi (1944). Once the living of ‘voided suchness’ is understood as expressive performance or style, this radical aestheticization gains an ontological importance. In Japan a-voidance not only constitutes socio-political conformity in daily life with all its ceremonial aspects, but also constitutes the formal aesthetics of the different ‘ways’ (do). In performing tea ceremony, cultivating bonsai trees or practicing martial arts, stylization of the skills becomes radical. In the afore-mentioned terminology, in fully identifying with media, radical mediocrity becomes affirmative as a being in between, once interesse enlightens the ‘artificiality’ of Western lifestyles. The key to the Zen affinity of philosophers of difference is also based on a Heideggerian inspiration, especially his talks with the Japanese scholar Kuki, who was dispatched to Europe by the Japanese government from 1921 to 1929. But the intercultural knot is far more complex. Heidegger debated with Kuki a Japanese aesthetic lifestyling of elegance called iki.12 In 1924 Kuki left for Paris, where he was influenced by Bergson and other vitalist thinkers through the mediation of the then 23-year-old Sartre. This French connection is often forgotten. At that very moment Hegel and Husserl were Japanized by Nishida in his effort to integrate Western philosophy in Japanese thought. Nishida not only corresponded with William James, but also had intensive contacts with Henri Bergson, who was visited by Kuki. Bergson’s notion of durée and his thoughts on contingency can easily be traced in Nishida’s notion of basho as ‘logic of place’, while Hegel’s ultimate sublation – Tilgung – is transformed into a non-discursive ‘pure experience’. Some decades later Nishitani reformulated Nietzsche’s nihilism as an affirmative force. By this complex knitting of an intercultural network, French philosophy of difference is related to the Kyoto school. The relation between their respective art discourses has not been researched systematically yet, although the aporetical quality of Nishida’s ‘place’ and Zen’s ‘emptiness’ are traced in Derrida’s notion of chora and différance and Deleuze–Guattari’s notion of striated and smooth space as well as Deleuze’s ‘pure immanence’ are also referred to. This more systematical approach is the main target of the following intercultural exercise. I want to highlight the specificity of the inter that is produced in the crossbreeding of contemporary art practices against the background of Japanese aesthetics. I will argue that (1) the phenomenon of intermediality enables us to revalue the relation between aesthetics and existence – art and life – after ‘the end of art’, (2) Japanese aesthetics can provide categories that enable a more accurate understanding of aesthetico-ontological stylization of a life, (3) connect the awareness of the necessary artificiality of life – the core wisdom of Zen Buddhist thought – to the global aestheticization of life, expressed in intermedial art, and (4) rephrase its ethico-ontological interesse as a critical awareness of our radical mediocrity in terms of an ecologically focused ‘critical spirituality’. Rotkoff’s haiku aestheticized his martial perspective. My philosophical endeavour counters this current culture of fear, based on an imaginary clash of civilizations with an interculturally and ecologically based interesse.

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Intermediality: The Invisible Supplement of Modern Avant-Garde’s ‘Shock and Awe’ Aesthetics is a philosophical discipline that aims at strict formulation of criteria under which artistic creativity can be acknowledged and aesthetic quality of works of art can be judged, communicated and debated. After Baumgarten and Kant aesthetics is developed in different directions, articulated on various levels and bifurcated in a variety of sub-disciplines. A great diversity of methodological approaches was adopted. I solely focus on one thread in this rich tapestry: Intermediality.13 This thread was woven into the modern art texture at the end of the twentieth century, when globalization entered a new – digital – phase and the end of art was proclaimed. ‘Ending’ does not entail ‘to stop’. It is rather an indication for the inadequacy of modern art theory to legitimate contemporary art practices. For some critics ‘the end of art’ is the result of radical self-reflectiveness, as is embodied in Warhol’s Brilloboxes.14 The implosion of a specific art discourse however did not factually stop individuals exclusively trained as artists to produce works that a properly educated audience is prepared to appreciate as works of art. Through integrating art discourse via television and new media in the daily lives of people – ads, branding, lifestyles – they also acknowledge that their own lives have become small-scale aesthetico-political projects. Intermediality thus also points at the aestheticization of the life of Western individuals, due to an ever-increasing mediatization.

Intermedial Research: Art, Politics and Philosophy The systematic reach of the academic research on intermediality is threefold. On a production-aesthetic level – artists – it focuses on artistic multimedial and interdisciplinary creativity. On a reception–aesthetic level – audiences – (micro)political sensibility and interactivity are the topics. On a work-aesthetic level – work of art – the focus is on creative production of sensibility and reflectivity that results from crossbreeding of disciplines and media. Intermediality reconfigures three former separated domains: art, politics and philosophy. In forging a sensitivity for tensional differences intermedial art practices enhance a reflective sensibility for differences, articulated in an in between. New fields of research are constituted. Given an art historical and art critical point of view, a genealogy of intermediality in avant-garde art shows in retrospect that intermediality was developed out of the self-reflective, avant-garde experiment with artistic forms, procedures and media.15 This experiment with forms lies hidden beneath the will to create the new and the urge to shock the bourgeois audiences out of their petty tastes. The sublime is the favorite aesthetic category for artistic shock and awe. The second field – politics – covers the aesthetico-political aspects of intermedial interactions and transactions within a mediatized information society. Shock

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and awe still happens – from Saatchi’s exhibitions with elephant shit sculptured Madonna to Madonna singing from the Cross – but intermediality as a form experiment is now enhanced by new media theory. The inter is rephrased as interactions and transactions determining dispositive: The digital screen. This interactive interface implicitly constitutes collective consciousness. But there is a non-informed residue that is more adequately formulated in Bataille’s informe than Kant’s sublime.16 The third field of research – philosophy – deals with the ethico-ontological quality of the experience of the ‘inter’. This field of research partly coincides with art criticism and art theory, and deals with political aspects of art as well, but its main focus is existential, ethical and ontological. It focuses on the nondiscursive, ethico-ontological quality of the being (esse) of this in-between (inter): inter-esse.

Interdisciplinarity and Multimedia How did it all start? In a 1965 article the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins adopts and adapts Samuel Coleridge’s term ‘intermedium’17 for artworks that make use of two or more artistic media.18 In art theory it takes another 25 years before intermediality becomes a topic of debate. In the first half of the 1990s research on intermediality is published in Germany.19 Monodisciplinary approaches are no longer taken as adequate models for analyzing and evaluating contemporary art practices. Most of these texts are dealing with the crossovers between literature, theatre, cinema and visual arts. Topics are hybrid genres as ciné-roman, ciné-poème and ciné-drama; hermeneutics and semiotics favorite methodologies. Some scholars focus on a symbiosis of media – words, images, sounds – and disciplines – literature, painting, photography, film; others stress tension and complementarity: ‘a medial product becomes intermedial, when it transfers the multi-medial togetherness (Nebeneinander) of medial citations and elements to a conceptional cooperation (Miteinander).’20 Conceptualization, cooperation and communication are the keywords. The hermeneutical claim is that artistic statements are always understood and experienced within a life-world (Lebenswelt): ‘Intermediality does not mean an adding of different medial concepts nor a situating-in-betweenmedia of separate works, but an integration of aesthetic concepts of separate media in a new medial context.’21 Life world and hermeneutics were also key terms for Kuki to explore the translatability of iki. The differential tensions of the in between and its reception–aesthetical specificity are not explicitly theorized in these integrative and communicative approaches. But some critics shift the focus to philosophy of difference. First intermediality becomes ‘a sadly neglected but vastly important subdivision of intertextuality’. Semiosis is used to rephrase intermediality as ‘the “intertextual” use of a medium (painting) in another medium (fiction prose)’.22 Differences are emphasized and Derrida’s différance is favored over Kristeva’s intertextuality.

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Reception–Aesthetic Sensitivity: The ‘Clash of Media’ and Intermedial Reflectivity Gradually the locus of the analysis changes: from intermedial ‘texture’ and ‘écriture’ to an intermedial ‘lecture’, from production and work to reception. Because of the work’s ambiguous experiential effects, intermedial art sensitizes its audiences for the expressiveness of crossbreeding. Barthes’ analysis of photography inspires analyses. Spectators are affected and moved by the ‘punctum’ as an experience of the singular that escapes the studious meditation on the image. Buñuel’s oeuvre ‘broadens the in-between spaces [Zwischenraum, inter stitium] between image and text’ and ‘makes visible the invisible and the eerie, the “other” space between the discourses, that Foucault qualified as heterotopy’.23 Conceptuality as the locus of reflectivity is dethroned once relations between thinking, images and bodies are accentuated.24 Crucial notions of French philosophers of difference are applied by theoreticians of intermediality. Not only Kristeva, Derrida and Foucault, but Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard are also referred to. Lyotard’s Le Différend clarifies that Buñuel’s intermediality deals with ‘a differend between media instead of a dialogue’.25 Differences cannot be objectified, and that is precisely where non-discursive art enters the stage. By implementing this aporetic core of philosophies of difference in reception–aesthetics the emphasis shifts from integration and symbiosis to ‘experiencing’ a differend in opening an unbridgeable gap between media and between disciplines. Dance cannot be translated into painting, but once they reflect upon each other, new aesthetic sensitivities are triggered. Intermedial art explicitly sensitizes its audiences for a ‘clash of media’. But how can we nevertheless communicate these differences? Is this sensibility reflective? Is it explicitly critical, perhaps even political? Why and how did for instance surrealist’s shock and awe therapy trigger protests? On aesthetic–production level their multimedial and interdisciplinary practices were explicitly enhanced by political statements. But the crossbreeding of media and disciplines also implicitly triggered bodily resistance in their audiences: in being intermedially ‘sensational’ art subverts and criticizes. Beyond explicitly applying political concepts, intermedial artists implicitly criticize the gaze and taste through sensations, i.e. percepts and affects.26 They position their audience in between media and disciplines. In body art, installation art, environmental art and performance art, artists explicitly think in and communicate with their media: bodies, brushes, cameras, language, space, digits, guitars. They are – immediately mediated – mediating immediacy. In producing awareness of supplementary tensions intermedial art acknowledges and surpasses their radical mediocrity.

Gesamtkunstwerk as Aesthetics of Existence In modernism, art and politics coincide, either geopolitically or micropolitically. Breton and Picasso embraced communism, but also aestheticized their own life by redefining this in terms of their artistic endeavor. They had an organicist inclination

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‘which wants to arrange the whole world (art, politics, religion, and science) into a coherent, harmonious structural network’.27 This inclination towards being a Gesamtkunstwerk themselves is reflected on a macrolevel, where three sorts of total works of art can be distinguished: the philosophical Gesamtkunstwerk (Schelling’s system), the political Gesamtkunstwerk (totalitarian Nazism and Stalinism) and the artistic Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner’s Bayreuther Festspiele). The project of the total work of art can be seen as a reaction against the separation of art, politics and science that dates back to the end of the eighteenth century. Wagner’s organicist effort to restore German cultural identity was philosophically legitimized by young Nietzsche. As in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk a diversity of media and disciplines is directed towards a cultural or political Idea(l). Gesamt-experiments of the last 150 years are regulated by an ‘inclination towards [Hang zum]’ as ‘the wish for salvation’, implying ‘fantasies and ideas of intended coherency.’28 In a Gesamtkunstwerk the use of disciplines and media remains instrumental. Before Riefenstahl’s films were appreciated for their innovative use of her medium, her aesthetics contributed to the glorification of Nazism. While in Nazi-Germany politics was aestheticized, in Stalinism art is instrumentally subordinated to the political culture.29 Whatever the totalitarian reduction, the experimental openness that was cherished by ‘entartete’ avant-garde, is destroyed. But even there, on a micropolitical scale the effort to synthesize the arts and totalize its effects was irresistible: from Wilde to Warhol and from Baudelaire to Beuys, artists have tried to totalize artistic creation as an aestheticized life. Once we acknowledge the historical failures of philosophical, political and artistic total works of art, and downscale this effort to lifestyle experiments of the avant-garde, intermediality comes to the fore as a creative and critical force. In other words, only the failure of the Gesamtkunstwerk opens our eyes for the aporetic political tension – being singularly part of the whole – that undermines every totalitarian endeavor to reduce politics to art or to instrumentalize art for politics. In affirming the irreducibility of tensions, intermediality gives a life its paradoxical coherence. That is why Baudelaire’s synaesthetic dandyism is more adequate an artistic project to counter the fragmentation of cultural life in autonomous domains than Wagner’s megalomania. Baudelaire’s dandyism is characterized by Foucault as an ‘aesthetics of existence.’30 But both Wagner and Baudelaire tried to relate life and art by medial reflectivity. Baudelaire micropolitically stylized ‘a life’, the tissue and texture of which, we can say with Deleuze, consists of ‘between-times’ and ‘between-moments’ that constitute the ‘pure immanence’.31 Lyotard concludes that avant-garde art has explored the tension of the incommensurable for sensitizing its audiences for the intolerable. To him Marcel Duchamp’s life is exemplary: ‘I won’t say that all that follows is false or true, even less that it is neither false nor true, nor false-and-true, nor a little false or a little true. But could it be that Mr. Duchamp or Miss Sélavy has looked after and found, in the field of space and time and in the field of matter and form, contrariety? Or do you prefer to say incommensurability?’32 Duchamp not only deconstructed ‘retinal’ art, i.e. art that pleases the eye more than the mind, in performing associative

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conceptuality he also crossed borders between media, disciplines, between him and his audiences, and lastly between his life and art. Duchamp lived his art. He played with disciplines, media and affirmed the artificiality of gender. His aestheticoexistential performance was above all, as Lyotard stated in Les TRANSformateurs DUchamp, a continuous transformance.33 Did Duchamp realize his life on an existential plane as a Gesamtkunstwerk? If so, his lifestyle was beyond romantic, nineteenth century dandyism and aestheticism. His eclectic use of artistic media, the application of new materials, the deconstruction of everyday objects and his self-reflective irony constituted an aesthetic lifestyle, like Schwitters, Dali, Picasso, Beuys and Warhol did. Duchamp however never explicitly engaged himself politically like Picasso and Beuys, but cultivated the ‘beauty of indifference’ as an ethico-aesthetic ascesis. Nevertheless his life ‘does not give rise to a mysticism’.34

Japanese Art: A-Voiding Aesthetics Can we ‘apply’ the Japanese way of art (geido) to understand Duchamp’s intermedial art practice as an aesthetics of existence? Relating his aesthetics to Japanese culture should not be done on the content level. From fin-de-siècle Japonism – Manet and Van Gogh copying woodprints in their paintings – to the Japanese dance intermezzi in Hollandia’s theatre peace Der Fall/Déponse, RO-theatres adaptation of Junichiro Tanazaki’s The K ey or the use of Japanese calligraphic tattoo aesthetics in Greenaway’s The Pillow Book , these images, once communicated to a Western audience, are already highly adapted to the Western visual regime. I do not want to focus on the image as such, but on the experimenting with expressive form of artistic media. How can Japanese aesthetics make us aware of the artificiality of life? It is not as easy as plainly adopting Japanese aesthetic categories. Japan lacks a strict categorization of art styles and disciplines, like visual and performing arts, literature and applied arts as design and architecture. This categorization does not suffice to describe Japan’s ‘artistic’ spectrum. Next to scroll painting, woodprints, sculpture, Noh and Kabuki theatre, court music, ceremonial dance, novels, verse forms like haiku, renga, and waka, we also have to include traditional skills of crafts that produced ceramics, swords and other tools. Traditionally there is no strict division between the artisan and the artist, between crafts and arts, so characteristic for modern aesthetics. Although Japanese ‘art’ tradition has its heroes – Zeami, Basho, Sen no Rikyu, Hokusai, Tanazaki, Ando – and creative innovation retrospectively can be traced easily, individual autonomy has never been an issue. After the sword smith ritually forged the blade, other craftsmen polished it, produced the handle, the shaft and the minor parts of the sword. The repetitive performance of technique and skills was always embedded in collective practices, in schools (ryu) that transferred their technical expertise from generation to generation. Not only a distinction between crafts and arts is inappropriate, we also have to include the aestheticization of tea drinking, flower arrangement, calligraphy, paper

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folding, cultivation of small trees, and martial techniques too, because by now these are valued as art practices in itself. In short, in Japan the aesthetic spectrum is either much wider than in the West or is not aesthetic at all.

Intranslatability of Art Categories Immense evaluative problems have to be faced. One is tempted to contrast Japanese art with modern Western art, because it lacks the urge to principally create the new.35 Western critics are eager to make a distinction between folk art and decorative arts on one hand and higher art that is executed for its own sake on the other. If this nevertheless is done for evaluating ‘higher’ art forms, crucial aesthetic categories such as beauty or the sublime are not available. Utsukushii means beautiful in the sense of pretty and small, but never acquired the theoretical esteem the West has endowed on the Kantian beautiful. Moreover, when beauty is an issue it is not the perfection of form – harmonious quality – but rather imperfection that counts. When Kant formulated his aesthetics in his third critique he endowed artificiality on the beautiful, not on the sublime. Describing the sublime experience he refers solely to natural phenomena: huge mountains, raging storms, and so on. Although overwhelming greatness can be assigned to the sculpted gate keepers next to the entrances of temples, these are not described in terms of sublimity. There is not even a straightforward opposition between nature and culture. Nature reveals itself through aestheticization. It sounds awkward to state that the bonsai tree is more natural than the ‘real’ tree, that flowers come to full life when they are cut and stone gardens like the Ryoan-ji are no symbolization of the universe, but ‘the real thing’. However, in Japan life as natura demands a crafty downscaling to proportionate measures to become natural. This stylization does not veil naturalness. It actualizes the suchness of things (tathata) as reality. In Japanese aesthetics neither the formal harmony of the beautiful nor the sublimity of unbiased natural phenomena are the real issue. Japanese aesthetic notions focus on the sensitizing effects of craftsmanship and the appreciation of suchness as the articulation of Buddhist emptiness (sunyata). Geido produced a highly subtle conceptuality on a reception–aesthetic level. But these evaluative notions are hardly translatable.36 One important feature of Japanese aesthetics is ‘the taste for suggestion rather than explicit statement’.37 Mono no aware refers to a deep, empathetic appreciation of ephemeral beauty, but the underlying discourse valuates the relation between appearance and being different. The implied metaphysics in this occidental opposition is absent in Japan. Sabi was first introduced to appreciate Japanese verse – waka – that describes ‘a sense of transitoriness of all things tinged always with sadness or melancholy’. However, it ‘is not equivalent to the English concept of loneliness’.38 It affectively senses the eternal in the temporal. As such sabi is akin to the Zen Buddhist enlightenment or satori. The aesthetic and spiritual are hardly distinguishable. Buddhist spirituality always aims at experiencing emptiness as no-mind (mushin) or no-thought (munen) in contemplating art.

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Some however stress the aesthetic dimension: sabi ‘contains inexplicable elements that raise the object in question to the rank of an artistic production’.39 In this way artisticity becomes a function of inexplicability. Sabi also became one of the cornerstones of tea ceremony aesthetics, indicating the feeling of appreciation for the old age, the worn out, the asymmetry and imbalance, but also for resignation, loneliness and tranquility. Wabi has a similar meaning. It is the taste for what has been worn out. But in accentuating wretched or shabby appearance, simplification and poverty, it mainly appreciates the fact of not being dependent on worldly things. This is further articulated by concepts like fuga and yugen. The latter is frequently used to explain the essence of Noh theatre. Yugen combines ‘depth’ or ‘secret’ (yu) and ‘darkness’ (gen) and is sometimes translated as ‘secretive depth’ or the ‘unfathomable’. This is also expressed in myo, but there the emphasis is on spiritual rhythm. These notions indicate that the perfect is suggested by the imperfect. A comparison with Aristotle’s catharsis would be inadequate: the implied pity and fear are too ego minded. Fuga is a poetological principle, triggering a specific mood in which mortality and uniqueness vibrate, but also indicating elegance and graciousness. This sensibility is specific for the genre of haiku. But ‘if one insists on an explanation, only a tautological formulation holds: fuga is fuga.’40 Fuga can acquire an existential dimension too: ‘A life of fuga starts from the identification of one’s self with the creative and artistic spirit of Nature.’41 It is through this identification that it transforms into a production-aesthetic category: fuga-no-makoto, as the famous poet Basho coined this genuineness of artistic creativity. But this identification, as will be clear by now, is only possible through stylized aestheticization: ‘It means that for them to aestheticize the world means always to make the world more natural.’42 All this illustrates the intranslatability of Japanese aesthetic categories, being a mixed breed themselves, consisting of Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism. For aesthetic appreciation their contextual specificity – the now here as performance – has to stay intact. What is sensed is this move in this Noh play, this haiku, this calligraphic line, this precise handling in tea ceremony and this sword cut. A dynamic now here excludes the universalized oppositions that are the core business of Western aesthetics. Japanese aesthetics concentrates on a contextualized differential tension between temporal and eternal, between appearance and being, and in the final between life (sho) and death (ji). The afore-mentioned categories are only comprehensible if this presupposed non-dichotomous spirituality and respective value systems are taken into account.

Kire and Kata: Cutting to the Appropriate Measure Against this historical background contemporary Japanese philosophers have tried to give an account of geido, using less-conventional categories, but staying within the spiritual framework of an ‘artificial’ awareness of shoji. According to Ohashi

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kire or ‘cutting’ is as central a category as the ‘beautiful’ in the West.43 In analyzing traditional and modern art practices from the perspective of craftsmanship the value of kire is explored for its application to contemporary art practices that are still in line with conventional crafts. Ohashi analysis culminates in a revaluation of the ceramics of Shiho Kanzaki and architecture of Tadao Ando. That he is not focusing on contemporary Japanese avant-garde art is evident: The evaluation of these art practices can be effectively executed in western aesthetic categories, intermediality being one of these. What is kire? The ‘cut’ is most dramatically articulated in Noh theatre. It is the sudden cut executed in the actor’s concentrated choreography: the ending of one stride by lowering his toes to the floor is at that very moment the launch of the successive step. This suggests a floating movement. The actor’s move is both cut and continuity, kire-tsuzuki: A discontinuous continuum like breathing. In the final instance it expresses the tension between life and death that are, to apply a qualification of Derrida, each others’ supplement. To Ohashi this is Japanese beauty in its highest intensity: ‘This kire-tsuzuki is, to make my point once more, an expression of the human condition with its shoji (life and death).’44 The musicians in the Noh play, especially the singers, accentuate kire in their staccato-wise pronunciation of every single word. This cut-continuum can be found in all Japanese arts. However, one should avoid interpreting it in terms of the Western opposition between being and appearance. There is ‘nothing’ behind the appearances, neither an essence nor a transcendent being. As the Noh mask in its being expressed by the actor, this aestheticization realizes unique naturalness. Ikebana, the art of flower arrangement, is most literally based on precise cutting. In artificially arranging the freshly cut flowers, nature is exposed. Through cutting, life comes to full bloom. It is the arrangement that creates naturalness. In stylization nature and culture, original and copy, impulse and mediation, being and appearance, organism and technique coincide. The clipping of tiny little tree trunks, placed in flat pots – bonsai – is based on the same principle. By kire nature unfolds itself: ‘The opposition of natural beauty and artificial beauty that plays an important role in European aesthetics, is canceled completely. Artificiality and naturalness penetrate each other.’45 As in yūgen the real and the unreal, life and death realize each other. Before things can be experienced in their suchness they need to be ‘cut off’ from their natural habitat. The kire in the Ryoanji stone garden is performed by the stone wall that surrounds the garden: ‘it builds the “inter” (ma) in between both worlds.’46 The color and texture of the wall triggers the sensitivity of the wabi. This atmosphere ‘colors’ the stone garden as a world of appearances that transforms the world into what it is. The garden therefore is not a symbol for another world. Time constitutes the supplementarity of shoji. The now here is its actualization. For this actualization strict stylization is needed. The strictness is articulated by simple building blocks: The basic techniques or forms, i.e. kata: ‘The setting of the exact measure surely belongs to those developments that contributed to the cultivation of kata, as it plays its specific role in the Japanese aesthetics of kire.’47 This

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exact measure is not the Aristotelean middle as the ethical outcome of balancing. Kata as dynamic form gains its quality in the performing of form, in performance. In an aesthetics of existence it can become a meditative form in itself that is no longer anticipating a meaningful totality. It is realizing the now here through performance in emptying the mind (mu shin) and still in totally being there. In performing kata suchness is realized. Emptiness – sunyata – reveals itself in this performance. ‘So I think that “everything is empty” may be more adequately rendered in this way: “everything is just as it is” (…).’48 In agonistic practices of martial arts these repetitive drills offer the spectator a performance that is as sophisticated as it is spectacular. Once stripped of the cinematographically desirable aspects, in semiotic terms kata appears to be the basic vocabulary of the craft. In performing kata, art is desubstantialized. The substance matter is literally a-voided: No effort is made to grasp an ‘inner secret’ of an activity or opponent, but by attaining mu shin, mediation, the medium, the skillfully performed technique, eventually the kill is avoided. As a dynamic meditation on the mediating forms martial arts is Zen in motion. In karate – empty (kara) hand (te) combat – or kendo as the way (do) of the sword (ken), in all other martial arts it is the void that is performed.49 In this stylization the aspect of play is crucial: ‘It is the essence of play to be in the midst of reality without being attached to it. Play is the final space that results from the “cutting” of ordinary naturalness.’50 But kata is not restricted to aesthetics of life or martial arts. The skills of craftsmen are also embedded in kata. It is the cutting quality of the kata that forms the school’s signature. Innovation is checked by repetitive drills that are transferred from master to student, generation after generation. Through these repetitive patterns creativity unfolds in a different way than in the West.51 However, we should not mistake kata with the Western ‘style’. Then there is the risk that ‘the kata, that contain the very creativity, always also has the tendency to become sheer formality’.52 These ritually based meditations still throw some light on everyday life in Japan. The compulsive behaviour of the Pachinko player or the repetitive drills of Japanese during lunch break, passionately handling sports utensils, such as golf clubs, tennis rackets, baseball bats, or bamboo swords or even the frenetically toying of digital gadgets, may no longer have a meditative intention, it still bears witness to this kata-minded mentality.

Emptiness, ‘Ma’ and ‘Basho’ As is stated in the Heart Sutra (Prajna-paramita-hrdaya-sutra) form (rupa) and emptiness (sunyata) coincide. Form, however, is not an abstract-emptied grid as in the Kantian aesthetics. It is the corporeal nature of things in as far as our body is form. It is the first of the five skandas – the constituents of being – next to feeling (vedana), sensual perception (samjna), mental formation (samskrta) and consciousness (vijnana). Via performance Zen – as an articulation of Mahayana Buddhism – and

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Japanese art are inseparable. ‘In other words, Buddhism’s basic truth is spread by art, which can also be seen as an intuitive and experiencing understanding of the single in the whole and the whole in the single. Following the Mahayana school this could be expressed as Sunyata in Tathata and Tathata in Sunyata.’53 This contradicts the Western idea of emptiness as lack, passivity and negativity. This Western perspective has been critically diagnosed by Nietzsche. Nishitani’s redefinition of nietzschean nihilism into an affirmative fullness again bares witness to the fact that culture can be spiritualized by art.54 Ohashi’s book ends with a revaluation in terms of kire of Ando’s architecture, especially Ando’s building ‘Time’s’ in Osaka, in which Western and Japanese architectural principles are applied to create a specific Japanese space, based on Shinto temple architecture. By cutting the building of from the urban space, the entrance located at the backside, by diffusing inside and outside and by given it a provisional quality, Ando realized an ‘innovation of the kata of Japanese beauty’55 that got its exemplary form in the traditional spaces for tea ceremony. The play of inside and outside – uchi and soto – is made possible, as Ohashi mentions describing the Ryoanji, by ma as one of the organizing principles applied in Japanese architecture. The character ma – pronounced aida – literally means ‘in between’. Etymologically ma is a Shinto-related concept of the space where the gods (kami) ‘descend’. These sacred spaces are marked by poles, gates or knotted ropes, which are also wrapped around the waste of the Sumo wrestling champions. The descent of kami is enacted to ‘install’ a relationship between nature, men and gods. As such ma can be defined as a time–space interval, a dynamic now here. In the course of Japan’s cultural history ma starts penetrating all arts, but initially it had a ritual, architectural meaning. In 1979 the architect Arata Isozaki curated an exposition on ma in the Museum of Decorative (!) Arts in Paris. It consisted of nine spatial, visual and sculptural installations. The catalogue circumscribes ma as ‘the place in which a life is lived’, ‘the sign of the ephemeral’, ‘the alignment of signs’, ‘maintained by absolute darkness’, ‘an empty place where all kinds of phenomena appear, pass and disappear’ and perhaps most lucidly as ‘the way to sense the moment of movement’,56 i.e. the kire-tsuzuki of Ohashi. Being neither Descartes’ extension nor Kant’s transcendental time–space, ma is a spatio-temporal interval: A dynamic in between that is systematically prior, but retrospectively co-originary to the installed entities. Ma constitutes relationality. The sacred time–space is not seen as an ‘empty’ container of things, but as a continuum animated by spiritual power (ki), a cut-continuum. In constituting relationality, ma however is not an a priori substance. It articulates the differential tension I already mentioned while criticizing Western dichotomies. It is a tensional field in which nature is performed. For Japanese architects the space–time interval is a primary medium. When Ohashi almost casually states that ‘the essence of the play is being in the middle of reality’ this ‘middle’ suddenly becomes a very charged concept. Ma becomes explicative for martial arts, ikebana and even for the films of Yasujiro Ozu: ‘Because the impermanent – the Japanese mu-jo (nothing-permanent) – captures the pure flow of time, the interval in between things, the ma, that is both emptiness and the “inter.”’57

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Is it possible to rephrase in philosophical terms the notions of emptiness as in between that Buci-Glucksmann is referring to? Or even lift ma to a meta-level in qualifying it as ‘intercultural space’ in itself.58 Here Kyoto school thinkers like Nishida enter the stage and the intercultural complexity unfolds. In adapting Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Bergson, James and Heidegger to Zen philosophy, Nishida developed a ‘logic’ fully focused on this in between: basho as ‘the logic of place’. This ‘spatial logic’ articulates the relation between the one who knows, that what is known and the act of knowing. This ‘self’ is not the unity of consciousness, but rather an ‘autonomy’ of the field of consciousness.59 Basho covers several axes. The experiential dimension is expressed as ‘pure experience’ (junsui keiken), a synthesis of phenomenological en zen notions, that conceives thinking as an active part of corporeal experience or Erlebnis.60 Epistemologically Nishida redefines the relation between general law and particular cases, which is also part of Kant’s aesthetics as a reflective judgment. In Hegelian terms he redefines the concrete universal as a ‘reflective’ inter that finally turns out to be an empty ‘space’ as an articulation of mu or emptiness. Pure experience presupposes an ‘acting intuition’ that can be conceived as an articulation of the pulse that directs kata. Here reflection and intuition coincide in a bodily awareness. But there are also explicit references to Heidegger’s ontic ‘mood’ or ‘attunement’ (Stimmung) and ontological ‘disposition’ (Befindlichkeit). On this existential axis basho ‘means nothing other than to exist as a humanbeing by virtue of one’s body; I exist in my body, occupying the spatial basho of here and now.…’61

Zen, Bushido and Art: Iki Let us return to this existential aspect and relate all the above developed notions to the artificiality in which man’s nature is expressed in its highest intensity. The intercultural exchange between Heidegger’s existential philosophy and Kuki’s notion of spiritual aestheticization – iki – then becomes highly instructive, especially when we take the following semantic observation into account. As all Japanese characters, ma can be combined with other characters. In combination with the character ‘man’ – nin – aida is pronounced gen. Ningen is the Japanese word for ‘man’. This combination expresses the idea that human beings are principally in between beings. More than being subject or object man is an ‘interject’. Thrown in between, individuals cannot but transform Geworfenheit into Entwurf beyond subjectoriented individualism. Kuki tried to explain to Heidegger what the Japanese notion iki exactly entailed. As I mentioned earlier to him, hermeneutics was the most appropriate methodology to connect iki to life world. Iki covers notions as style, play, elegance and although dandyism is rejected as an exemplary case, elements of Baudelaire’s aesthetics of existence are integral elements.62 Initially Kuki cross-culturally referred to Western concepts, but was warned by Heidegger to be cautious in this translating and transferring. ‘We might thus say that the “existence” of iki as an

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aesthetic, “disinterested play” is opposed to both a metaphysics of essentia and a metaphysical comprehension of existentia.’63 The Platonic being-appearance distinction is not reversed, neither is the Cartesian mind–body nor the Kantian subject–object opposition. Style is the performance that aestheticizes the tension between these bifurcated positions as a total awareness of the suchness of things.64 Although in Western perception it looks highly formal, iki is formless or informe: Form is completely devoid of abstractions that Western thought endows to it. Iki is a stylization that articulates the most concrete nature of the individual. It both negates and affirms everyday conventions. It is hard to understand this as long as we cling to the Western idea of an essence that has to be realized. The practice of the different aesthetics of existence is probably the most insightful. In full concentration on performance, a concentration that has to leave anticipation behind, and as such implies an active forgetfulness for the act to gain a meditative quality, in this affirmative fullness of the act, ‘nothing’ lacks. Spontaneity and creativity are results of totally being present in the now here. But stylization never is an individual enterprise: It is principally focused on connecting with the world and with others. Neither being yourself, nor becoming the other, it is focused on the in between. A shared practise connects and it is in performing kata that communication is possible beyond discursive reflection. In iki a sensibility is shared that needs constant cultivation. Its reflectivity coincides with the performance of kata. In kata conventional behaviour is substantially negated, but affirmed in its radical performance. Whether you shake hands, bow, hug or make a performance of greeting each other is not of any importance as long as the kata fits the situation and the awareness is affirmative. In being totally present we (re)present ‘our’ selves, not our ‘self’. Only in the now here everything is realized. But we should not forget that iki can only be understood against the spiritual background of Zen: ‘Everything is different from everything else. And yet while everything and everyone retained their uniqueness and particularity they are free from conflict because they have no self-nature.’65 In the final instance Abe excludes the differend. When Suzuki concludes that ‘the Zen-man is an artist to the extent that, as the sculptor chisels out a great figure deeply buried in the mass of inert matter, the Zen-man transforms his own life into a work of creation…’66 he should have added that being buried is an effect of iki. The egg and the hen are co-originary. For Kuki iki is most affirmatively performed in bushido. What he most appreciates in this do is resignation as an unconditional surrender to death: Ultimate disinterestedness as total awareness. It is highly seductive to ridicule this as a mixed breed of the Roman gladiator attitude expressed in the slogan morituri te salutant, stylized into a Christian attitude of both medieval momento mori and Renaissance carpe diem and aesthetically acted out in a post-modern Tarentino Kill Bill mentality. What interests me in the present context is a state of indifference as an in betweenness within a spiritual whole. It is not a negation of life but an affirmation of death in life, which concretely means that ‘in the martial arts there is no time to wait. (…)

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One has to live in an instant. It is exactly there that de decision of life and death falls.’67 In this ‘actuality’ matter instantaneously minds. Heidegger’s ‘beingtowards-death’ must have sound familiar to both Kuki and Ohashi for whom shoji is the ultimate sensibility of iki. This spiritual dimension is hard to grasp for Western individuals as long as they rationally strive for self-realization, especially when they furnish their materialistic egocentric endeavours with Eastern concepts. This ‘spiritual materialism’ has to be cut too.68

Intercultural Aesthetics: The Supplementarity of Art and Life ‘You and I are different. If one wants to find the solution to his own life, one starts out of an impasse. Here and now, how to create your life?’69 Full integration of Japanese geido in Western aesthetics is impossible. Given the humanistic presuppositions of the latter and the spiritual background of the former, only an intercultural aesthetics that respects differences is an option. Given these differences, how can both aesthetics be used to project an aesthetics of existence as an existential praxis, that structurally redefines the relation between individuals and the collective, between parts and the whole, and all this in a world that becomes more and more interdependent? How is an awareness of the all over mediatization of daily life realized? The intellectual challenge is to integrate the critical-reflective impact of Western art and the aesthetico-spiritual sensibility of the East. Can these be merged into a critical spirituality? This is of course impossible when both sets are completely alien to each other. This however is not the case, as I have already indicated several times. A specific intercultural complexity is already presupposed in Japanese spirituality and European continental philosophy.70

The Oriental Turn in Philosophy of Difference Philosophers of difference are profoundly influenced by Zen aesthetics.71 Foucault’s remark in the preface of History of Madness as to the non-translatability of Eastern thought in Western concepts is contradicted by his later acknowledgment of the parallels between East and West. Before him Bataille frequently referred to yoga and Zen and Barthes had already written on Zen culture. Jacques Lacan used Taoist philosophy to rephrase his notion of the Real. He was inspired by the famous §42 of Tao Teh King: ‘The Tao produced the One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things. All things leave behind them Obscurity (yin) out of which they have come, and go forward to embrace the Brightness (yang) into which they have emerged, while they are harmonized by the Breath of Vacancy.’ In the French translation the last sentence is translated as ‘L’harmonie naît au souffle du Vide-médian’, the harmony is born from the breath – ch’i – of mediating emptiness. This last notion – mediating emptiness – urged Lacan to reformulate his

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structuralist notion of the Real as part of the triad symbolic–imaginary–real in terms of the dynamic Void that inspired the reflections of Slavoj Zizek.72 Deleuze, Guattari, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Derrida also wrote about Japanese culture. Lyotard was most explicit on Japanese art. As early as 1975 he described a semiotics of Noh theatre. In his book on Daniel Buren’s marking of walls and objects with standardized colored strips, Lyotard’s topic is the ‘invisible’, non-discursive museal and public spaciality that Buren critically exposed: ‘But this paradox is visual, and not linguistic. It consists of making visible what on a visual level (especially in the art institution) is invisible, and this thanks to a simple mark, that of the material.’73 This material reflection sensitizes Buren’s audience for the unpresentable. When Lyotard co-curates Les Immateriaux in 1985 in Centre Pompidou, where the works of avant-garde artists are installed in a hi-tech environment that headphone wearing visitors crossed, he proposed a medial ‘materialism’, systematically discerning between ‘maternité’ (origin of the message), ‘matériau’ (medium of support), ‘matrice’ (inscribing code), ‘matière’ (referent) and ‘matériel’ (destination of the message). The medium’s message appears to be highly complex. These systematic aspects are all determining features of an ‘immaterial materialism.’74 Lyotard refers explicitly to the mindless state of mind (mu-shin) in Dogen’s Shobogenzo, which was translated in French a few years before. This mindless ‘faculty’ enables the subject to be moved and touched not by what happens (quid) but by the event itself (quod) – by the ‘il arrive’ or sheer presence of the ‘il y a’ – without anticipating its exchange value for future things to happen. What ‘matters’ is an unpresentable quod. ‘The matter I’m talking about is ‘immaterial’, unobjectable, because it can only ‘take place’ or find its occasion at the price of suspending the active powers of the mind.’75 The bottom line of aesthetics appears to be an ‘aisthesis’ that affects ‘a thinking body’, a ‘non-willing subject’ or ‘anima’.76 Western commentators on Zen frequently refer to Derrida’s aporetical use of Plato’s chora as the formless performer, the initiating ground,77 emphasizing its ‘aesthetic nature’.78 Some pass on to différance for a better understanding of Nagarjuna’s interpretation of emptiness.79 Referring to Kuki’s French connection a few concieve iki as écriture, because this too has ‘the self-foundational character of a game’.80 Instead of difference, some favor Deleuze’s concepts of affectivity, intensity and plateau or plane, giving a field theoretical reading of emptiness: ‘As the nature of the between (which is also a medium) loosens and become more flexible, it will eventually turn inside out, if only for a moment, reversing the relationship between thinking and affect, form and emptiness.’81 But whatever the proposed interpretation, the acknowledgement of the Oriental turn in French philosophy of difference is beyond doubt.

Aestheticization of Daily Life: Dasein is Design Interculturally the Western turn mirrors Nishida’s occidental turn. Recently basho has been actualized in different directions. It turned out to be a productive notion

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in scientific domains ranging from embryology to information technology.82 That it has been applied for an understanding of ‘the relational paradigm experimented within interactive arts’ affirms the idea that intermediality and basho, respectively an aesthetics of existence and iki interculturally overlap. Interconnectivity is the nexus, because it is ‘demanded by a society that will become more and more involved with information technology and network connections’.83 A reflection on this ‘inter’ has to go beyond its mere technological quality. I admit that it is a long way from Shinto purification rituals and Japanese Zen ethics to the interactive imperative of current media and information society. Nevertheless these transfers provide an understanding of the repetitive aestheticization of daily life in the ‘global village’, in which (spi)rituals have become routines and the experience of emptiness and the finite is triggered by a burn out. After the privatization and aestheticization of religious rituals by avant-garde artists, their aesthetics of existence now are democratized and available for everyone in global culture. Through mediatization globalized individuals are embedded in design. Not only has publicity connected public life to former avant-garde aesthetics, sauna, fitness and health food have transformed physical lifestyling into an art practice. On TV bodies are totally ‘made over’, becoming more natural than ever before. Plastic surgery, genetic engineering, nano-technological manipulation and pervasive computing have redefined its very existence. In thinking that a technological ‘make over’ has nothing to do with art, critics of technology implicitly reaffirm art’s institutional and the artist’s creative exclusiveness. I prefer to interpret Danto’s crypto-Hegelian, historicists’ argument of art’s ‘end’ differently: art indeed is ended, because it is omnipresent. Art performances of French artist Orlan have become normal practise. Art did not disappear because of lack of success; it penetrated every aspect of life as a result of its unrivalled success. Life becomes transaesthetic,84 once in designing bodies and identities the opposition between nature and technology is erased. Dasein is design, when our ‘mediocrity’ is radicalized, i.e. when our nature is fully ‘rooted’ in media and mediations. In a transaestheticized culture, mediatization can become anaesthetic. Man is hooked on mediatization, once he mistakenly identifies use value via sign value with his identity. Then the differing tension between art and life can no longer be experienced, let alone be stylized. To revalue the tensions that nevertheless result from determining influence of mediatization on collective consciousness and personal lifestyling, a discourse is needed that is beyond modernist aesthetics or technological determinism. In supplementing art to life their tensional differences stretches out as a hardly discernable zone between them. This ‘pure plane of immanence’85 as Deleuze qualifies this zone, is not erased by intermedial sensitivity, but enhanced. This state of ‘interbeing’ is coined by Lyotard ‘inhuman’. Whether this aesthetics of existence is post-human or inhuman is a matter of semantics. It is however never trans-human, because the ultimate option of trans-humanism is the externalisation and eternalization of a life through cloning and cryogen technology. In this godlike endeavour man’s finitude is fully neglected.86 With death no longer being an option the artificiality of a life is a dead-end street.

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Intermedial awareness, explored, enhanced and cultivated in intermedial art practices, can effectuate the reinforcement of an awareness of the necessary artificiality of a life, stylizing its ‘between-times’ and ‘between-moments’.87 The structural forgetfulness of these in betweens, caused by the substance driven repetitive routines of daily life – a forgetfulness that is institutionalized in Western quest for identity as a collective or personal past – has to be turned inside out.

Interesse: Critical Spirituality and Mental Ecology Let me return to the afore-mentioned phrase ‘turning inside out of form into emptiness’ as a characteristic of Zen spirituality. An analogous move is made in intermedial art, once mediating becomes the message. Relating to relations, mediating media not only formalizes the in between, it also empties radical mediocrity and turns it inside out. In Japanese aesthetics this turning inside out of form reveals the suchness of things in emptiness; in Western aesthetics of existence it exposes the emptiness in radical mediocrity. By artistically showing a medium as the performing of form, radical mediocrity of daily life can be supplemented by an awareness of its desubstantialized performance. Emptiness as the main substance of iki becomes productive in a western lifestyling as a critical notion. Can this critical awareness be qualified as spiritual? It is at this point that the work of Apostel can be helpful. His ‘intermedial’ orientation presupposes an ‘atheistic spirituality’. In his effort to counter the objections of atheists that spirituality is too religious a term to apply, he strips the notion to its bare features: spirituality presupposes (1) a situating within a whole and (2) an orientation on basic goals that regulate one’s life,88 within which bodily awareness as the result of repetitive performance is crucial. That he too explicitly refers to Abe and Zen practice as one of its articulations should not surprise us.89 Radical mediocrity has to be turned inside out in order not to unveil, but rather to enact or perform the inter. Ontologically spoken radical mediocrity becomes a being interested, i.e. literally an ‘interesse’.90 Ethically being interested becomes the central value of an aesthetics of existence that wants to affirm its being-towardsdeath in traversing its anxiety or angst. Once the subject is prepared to traverse its radical mediocrity – as the Lacanian subject has to traverse its fantasy – i.e. once a subject affirms a life as formal performance, it becomes an interbeing. In a cultural critical sense this transformation can be understood as a critique on both the pseudo-ritual perversions of xenophobic normality and a substance focused materialism, but also on a self-centered aestheticization of New Age lifestyle. In the final instance the whole in which a Western aesthetic of existence is situated in order for it to gain a critical spirituality cannot be a religious world. Here the Japanese option as such is impossible to incorporate. Interesse’s focus is not a transcendent being, but a ‘plane of immanence’. Having reached this final point of the analysis it is therefore instructive to remind ourselves of the current meaning of ‘milieu’: our environment as an ecological whole. In this ecological perspective an

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apparently marginal remark of a Western commentator on Eastern aesthetics becomes highly instructive: ‘It would be interesting to pursue the question of whether it is possible to render into eastern languages the western concept of environment, where this manifestly presupposes the idea of something radically discontinuous from the self; not an outlook in which self and not-self are regarded as a whole to be brought into harmony.’91 Here the intercultural exchange stops and is it up to the Western discourse to benefit from its results.92

Notes and References 1. See B. Woodward, State of Denial. Bush at War, Part III. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006, pp. 98, 102, 211. 2. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Transl. S. B. Griffith). Oxford University Press, London, 1963, p. 174. 3. F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man . Free Press, New York, 1992. 4. See also G. Lelli, ‘Transculturality: A Problematic Concept. Aesthetics between the Islam and the West’, in G. Marchiano & R. Milani (eds.), Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics. Trauben, Turin, 2001, p. 465. 5. H. Oosterling, Radicale middelmatigheid. Boom, Amsterdam, 2000. http://www.henkoosterling.nl/radmid/radicale.html. 6. The word ‘Interesse’ is German for ‘interest’. It also means ‘to be interested in’. In a philosophical context this connotation is used in a literal sense: being (esse) in between (inter). 7. M. C. Taylor, Tears. SUNY Press, Albany, 1990, p. 141. 8. See L. Apostel, Atheïstische spiritualiteit. VUB Press, Brussel, 1998. 9. See H. Kimmerle, Philosophien der Differenz. Eine Einführung. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 2000. 10. For further elaboration see H. Oosterling, ‘From Interests to Inter-esse: Jean-Luc Nancy on Deglobalization and Sovereignty’, SubStance, 106, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2005, pp. 81–103. 11. On this topic there is an indirect relation between French existentialists like Sartre and Camus and thinkers of difference. This existentialist tone resonates in texts of Japanese thinkers like Kuki and D.T. Suzuki. However an aesthetics of existence cannot be explained by applying the crypto-metaphysical opposition between essentia and existentia. See T. Botz-Bornstein, Place and Dream. Japan and the Virtual. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2004, pp. 31, 48, 68. 12. In fact Heidegger reworked Japanese aesthetics implicitly without any reference. See for this philosophical imperialisms: R. May, Ex Oriente Lux. Heide ggers Werk unter ostasiatisc hen Einfluss. Steiner, Stuttgart, 1989; see for a comparative discussion: Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., pp. 26–51. 13. Between 1997 and 2002 this was a research program of the Center for Philosophy & Arts (CFK) based at the Department of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. See for national and international symposia and publications: www2.eur.nl/fw/cfk 14. See A. C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, p. 209; The State of the Art. Prentice Hall, New York, 1987, p. 208. 15. See H. Oosterling, ‘Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse. Towards on Ontology of the InBetween’, Intermédialités, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 29–46. CRI Montreal. http://cri.histart. umontreal.ca/cri/fr/INTERMEDIALITES/p1/pdfs/p1_oosterling.pdf 16. This redirection can be situated in between two exhibitions in Centre Pompidou: Lyotard, Les Immateriaux (1985) and R. Krauss, L’Informe (1996). See for the latter: Y.-A. Bois & R. E. Kraus, Formless. A User’ s Guide . Zone books, New York, 1997. See further: H. Oosterling, ‘ICTheology or local interesse? Desacralizing Derrida’s chora’, in L. Nagl (ed.), Essays zu Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, Religion. Peter Lang. Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, New York, 2001, pp. 109–130.

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17. See T.M. Raysor (ed.), Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Folcroft Press, London, 1936, p. 33. 18. See D. Higgins, The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1984. 19. F. J. Albersmeier, Theater, F ilm und Liter atur in F rankreich. Medienwec hsel und Intermedialität. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1992; P. Zima (ed.), Literatur intermedial . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1995; J. Müller, Intermedialität. Formen moderner kultureller Kommunikation. Nodus Publikationen, Münster, 1996. Henk Oosterling & Ewa Plonovska-Ziarek (eds.), Intermedialities. Philosophy, Art, Politics. Rowland & Littlefield, Lanham, 2008. 20. Müller, op. cit., p. 83 [my translation]. 21. Müller, op. cit., p. 89 [my translation]. 22. P. Wagner (ed.), Icons – Texts – Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1996, p. 17. 23. U. Link-Heer & V. Roloff (eds.), Luis Buñuel. F ilm – Liter atur – Intermedialität . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1994, p. 4 [my translation]. 24. V. Roloff, ‘Einleitung: Buñuels reflektierte Intermedialität’, in Link-Heer & Roloff, op. cit., p. 6. 25. V. Borsò, ‘Luis Buñuel: Film, Intermedialität und Moderne’, in Link-Heer & Roloff, op. cit., p. 160 [my translation] 26. See G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique du la sensation . Éditions de la différence, La Vue le Texte, Paris, 1981, p. 27; G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1991, p. 200. 27. Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., p. 48. 28. H. Szeemann (Hrgs.), Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. Eur opäische Utopien seit 1800 . Verlag Sauerländer, Aarau und Frankfurt a/M, 1983, p. 16. 29. See the concluding remarks of W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Ag e of Mec hanical Reproduction, (1935). see: www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/modern/The-Work-of-Artin-the-Age-of-Mechanical-Reproduction.html 30. M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 2. L’usage des plaisirs. Édition Gallimard, Paris, 1984, pp. 16–17. 31. G. Deleuze, Pure Immanence. Essays on a Life. Zone Books, New York, 2001, p. 29. 32. See J.-F. Lyotard, Les TRANSformateurs DUchamp. Galilée, Paris, 1977, p. 13. 33. Lyotard, op. cit., p. 35. 34. C. Tomkins, Duchamp. A Biography. Henry Holt, New York, 1996, p. 429. 35. See M. Hamashita, ‘Taste and Novelty from the Viewpoint of Modernity in Japan’, in G. Marchiano & R. Milani, op. cit., p. 501. 36. ‘These like all other basic categories will be referred to in their non-translatable form, because these being multilayered don’t allow a simple translation,’ R. Ohashi states in Kire. Das ‘Schöne’ in Japan. Philosophisch-ästhetische Reflexionen zu Gesc hichte und Moderne . Dument, Köln, 1994, p. 161 [my translation]. 37. R. Wilkinson, ‘Aesthetic Virtues in the Context of Nirvanic Values’, in G. Marchiano & R. Milani, op. cit., p. 98. 38. Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 92. 39. D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture. Bollinger Series, Princeton, 1970, p. 24. 40. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 74 [my translation]. 41. Suzuki, op. cit., p. 258. 42. Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., p. 48. 43. Kiru means to cut with a sword and metaphorically ‘to end’. Kiri indicates a limit or end, kire a slice. In combinations like omoi kiru this cutting of thinking (omoi) means ‘to decide’ or as in hara kiri cutting the belly (hara). 44. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 16 [my translation]. 45. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 66 [my translation]. 46. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 75 [my translation].

Living – in between – Cultures 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73. 74.

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Ohashi, op. cit., p. 36 [my translation]. M. Abe, Zen and Western Thought. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1985, p. 233. See T. Deshimaru, Zen & Arts Martiaux. Editions Seghers, Paris, 1977, pp. 31, 145. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 80 [my translation]. To give one example, the different ‘schools’ (ryu) in karate are the result of adapting kata to the specific physical and mental qualities of the master, who after first having learnt the style of his sensei and having protected his master’s school, develops his own ryu. This threefold development is called shu ha ri. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 104 [my translation]. M.-H. Kim, ‘Aesthetics Disinterestedness in East-Asian Way of Thinking’, in G. Marchiano & R. Milani, op. cit., p. 485. K. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. SUNY Press, New York, 1990, p. 180. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 156 [my translation]. See I. Arata, ‘Ma: Japanese Time-Space’, in The Japanese Architect. International Edition of Shinkenchiku. no. 262, Feb. 1979, pp. 69–80. See Ch. Buci-Glucksmann, Der kartographische Blick der Kunst. Merve, Berlin, 1997, p. 166 [my translation]. See for an extensive exploration of ma: H. Oosterling, ‘A Culture of the Inter. Japanese Notions of Ma and Basho’, in Sensus communis in Multi- and Intercultural perspective. On the Possibility of Common Judgements in Arts and Politics. H. Kimmerle & H. Oosterling (eds.), Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, Part 7; Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., pp. 109–124. See S. Ueda, ‘Nishida, Nationalism, and the Question of Nationalism’, in J. C. Maraldo & J. W. Heisig, Rude Awakenings. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1995, p. 102. See K. Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990. See also: R. Elberfeld, Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945). Das Verstehen der Kulturen. Moderne japanische Philosophie und die Frage nach der Interkulturalität. Amsterdam, 1999, pp. 107–109. In Japanese ‘experience’ is either keiken or taiken, respectively ‘Erfahrung’ and ‘Erlebnis’. See Y. Yuasa, The Body. Towards an Eastern Mind-Body theory. SUNY Press, Albany, 1987, p. 49. Yuasa, op. cit., p. 39. Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., p. 29. Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., p. 35. Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., p. 48. Abe, op. cit., p. 233. Suzuki, op. cit., p. 13. T. Deshimaru, Zen and Arts Martiaux. Paris, 1977, p. 34 [my translation]. See the works of the American-based Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–1987), Cutting thr ough Spiritual Materialism (1973) and Shambhala. The Sacr ed Path of the Warrior (1984). Deshimaru, op. cit., p. 31 [my translation]. Ohashi thematizes this even more profoundly, when he concludes that Japanese culture is the result of an ongoing process of importing and adapting other cultures like China, Korea, Europe and recently the USA: ‘For the Japanese European influences were no longer an alien world, they became their own world’ (141) [my translation]. See for an extensive account: H. Oosterling, ‘Scheinheiligkeit oder die Heiligkeit des Scheins. Subjektkritische Beschäftigungen mit Japan’, in Das Multiversum der Kulturen. H. Kimmerle (Hrgs.), Rodopi Elementa, Amsterdam, 1996, pp. 103–120. See E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. Esquisse d’une vie , histoir e d’un système de pensée . Fayard, Paris, 1993, p. 456. See H. Oosterling, ‘Radikale Mediokrität oder revolutionäre Akte? Über fundamentals Inter-esse’, in E. Vogt, H.J. Silverman (Hrgs.), Über Zizek. Turia + Kant, Vienna, pp. 42–62. See J.-F. Lyotard, Que peindre? Adami, Ar akawa, Buren. Editions de la différence, Paris, 1987, p. 108 [my translation]. J.-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 45.

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75. Idem, p. 140. 76. J.-F. Lyotard, Moralités Postmodernes. Galilée, Paris, 1993, p. 204 [my translation]. 77. M. Yoneyama, ‘Creative Chora and Aesthetic of Place’, in G. Marchiano & R. Milani, op. cit., pp. 105–110. 78. K. K. Inada, ‘The Aesthetics of Oriential Emptiness’, in G. Marchiano & R. Milani, op. cit., p. 74. 79. M. C. Taylor, ‘On Deconstruction Theology: A Symposium on Erring: A Postmodern A/ Theology’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIV/3, 1986, p. 553. 80. Botz-Bornstein, op. cit., p. 46. 81. N. R. Glass, Working Emptiness. Towards a Thir d Reading of Emptiness In Buddhism and Postmodern Thought. Scholars Press, Atlanta, 1995, p. 94. 82. Yoneyama, op. cit., p. 106. 83. See E. Giaccardi, ‘Transcultural Vision and Epistemological Shift: From Aesthetics to HighTech Society’, in G. Marchiano & R. Milani, op. cit., p. 507. 84. ‘Trans’ indicates disappearance as a result of excess. See J. Baudrillard, La Transparance du Mal. Galilée, Paris, 1990, pp. 22–42. 85. G. Deleuze, Pure Immanence. Essays on A Life . Zone Books, New York, 2001, p. 26. 86. See for a critical comment, J. de Mul, ‘Transhumanism. The Convergence of Evolution, Humanism and Information Technology’, in Rhizome.org, Connecting Art & Technology. See www2.eur.nl/fw/hyper/index.htm 87. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 29. 88. Apostel, op. cit., p. 24. 89. Apostel, op. cit., p. 123. 90. In Belgian academic research two trajectories are relevant: W. Desmond, Being and the Between (1995) en Ethics and the Between (2001); for a social-therapeutic approach, L. Beyers, Conflict en inter-esse. VUB Press, Brussel, 1994. 91. Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 101. However, for Japanese this is not obvious. In his after word to Ohashi’s book on kire the translator warns the reader for an ecological interpretation of the Japanese mix of nature and technique. Ohashi, op. cit., p. 164. 92. ‘Mental ecology’ is an option. It is in the cooperative oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari that we find enough material to expand the idea that ecology has different dimensions: physical, social and mental. See F. Guattari, Les trois ecologies (1989).

Living (with) Art: The African Aesthetic Worldview as an Inspiration for the Western Philosophy of Art 1 Heinz Kimmerle

The Aesthetic Conception of the World in African Thought In the thought of the African peoples south of the Sahara, art is not something that can be dealt with as a separately existing subject. In the daily life of these peoples, art is not an autonomous area of its own, but it permeates all areas of life and more specifically, moral behavior. This is due to the fact that in these societies, as far as they stick to their traditional way of life, a separation of art from other areas of life has not – or as Jürgen Habermas would put it: not yet – taken place.2 The conception of Habermas is more adequate to the traditional way of life in those societies than the earlier position of cultural anthropologists, but also his conception cannot do right to this specific way of life. In a confrontation of mythical and modern conceptions of the world, Habermas tries to overcome what he calls the former discussion (between L. Lévy-Bruhl and E.E. Evans Pritchard and others) in which for the mythical understanding of the world in general more simple, primitive concepts were presupposed. Habermas differentiates within the mythical understanding an objective, socially cultural, and subjective relation to the world. However, he maintains the evolutionist basic idea of the former discussion. According to Habermas’ opinion, the rationalization of the conception of the world (Weltbildrationalisierung) in the sense of Max Weber leads to progresses in differentiation between things and persons and within the latter sphere between the socially cultural and the individual area. Through these progresses, the animistic and mythical conception of the world, which was not able to make these differentiations, has been overcome. The evolutionist model of thought and especially the devaluation of different or earlier conceptions of the world than the own one, which we still find in Habermas’ ideas, we want to avoid. The methodological starting points of dialogues between philosophies and philosophers of different cultures leave behind any evolutionist conception with regard to cultures. It is true that, in the cultural life in sub-Saharan Africa, although it has been changed deeply by colonization and modernization, we do not find a differentiation between art and other areas of life. Of course, for the making of objects, which are called art from a Western perspective, a special skill is presupposed, but these objects themselves are integral parts of daily life. This does not mean, however, that the cultural life of these peoples is less differentiated A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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than in the modern world of the West, but just in another way. I only mention the differentiations in age groups, professional skills, juridical, political, and ritual functions, medical knowledge, practical and philosophical wisdom, etc. By urbanization, industrialization, and participation in world trade, cultural life has changed and is changing rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa. The economic, social, and political problems, which are caused by these processes, can hardly be overestimated. The key words poverty, aids, civil wars, and corruption speak for themselves. It is an open question to what extent and how long the traditional values of life and also the aesthetic permeation of life as a whole will be maintained. What K.C. Anyanwu, a Nigerian philosopher, states in an article from 1987 is still valid today for large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. He writes: “The African world may be considered as that of artistic expression or vision.” At the end of his article, he summarizes his conception by saying: “The African universe is therefore that of aesthetic qualities.”3 In these statements, Anyanwu presupposes, like many other African philosophers, that there is a cultural unity for the whole area of sub-Saharan Africa, notwithstanding all the differences within this area. This cultural unity certainly must not be understood as uniformity, but as a correspondence with regard to some basic ideas, which does not exclude far-reaching differentiation. In this essay, we will speak, therefore, of African culture and African art in general, and at the same time, we will discuss studies, which are related to certain ethnic groups or peoples of Africa. That there is a comprehensive aesthetic worldview in Sub-Saharan African thought as a whole is worked out more in detail by Anyanwu in the following way. He departs from the position, which had already been defended by Placide J. Tempels, that the concepts of life and life force are basic for African thought.4 In the language of the Igbo, a people in the south-west of Nigeria where Anyanwu comes from, life is called ndu. And this notion corresponds with ntu, which means life and life force in many Bantu languages. Life in this sense is not only the first thing that has been created; it is omnipresent in the whole universe – also in things that would not be called living in Western thought. This conception is also expressed in the conviction that all things can be inhabited by spirits. That is not only believed of things in the human world, but also in nature. Therefore, it can be taken for granted that artistic objects are not lifeless or inert, but full of life.5 The idea of spirits dwelling in all things and also in objects of art implies that art is closely related to religion and to the worldview as a whole. The mainly aesthetic character of this worldview – compared, e.g., to a scientific–materialistic one – is expressed by the conception that sound is the model for all kinds of reality. To understand reality in its different dimensions means then to understand sound-structures and sound-differentiations. Sound in this sense always has a conjuring character; it makes the listener move with its rhythm.6 In a system of different African arts, if there would be something like that, music would be on the top of all kinds of art. Besides music, also dance has to be mentioned here immediately, for dancing means that humans move with the rhythm of the sound in the universe. Other kinds of art, as woodcarving or sculpturing in general, are also expressions of this sound. The artist creates a specific and unique sound-structure, which is determined by the

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dynamics of his/her personal life force. The Igbo speak in this connection of Chi. They have a saying, which runs: “Chi awu otu,” “no Chi is identical with another Chi.” Only by the intermediate instance of the language of the drums, sound becomes words, that is to say bearers of primarily rational meaning. Interestingly, to understand the messages of the drums does not presuppose that the sender and the receiver speak the same language. Moreover, it is noteworthy that in many African languages the meaning depends greatly on the intonation. Thus, poetry and narrative art are at low rank in the hierarchy of the different kinds of art.7 African art has as art in general a playful character. In the cooperation of the different forces of life, it creates some kind of free play. This is, however, not a play without obligation like the play of children, but it is highly serious. In the end, a play of pure sound and pure form is intended. Objects or pieces of art form dynamic parts in the cooperation of all life forces. The recipient of a work of art, therefore, is never a passive viewer or listener. He/she takes part in the (inter)play of forces and is at the same time actor and recipient, performer and participant. This is before all clear with music, for only in and by the memory of the listener, the different tones become a melody. Anyanwu stresses the fact that art expresses the continuous experience of the process of the world as a whole. It is “the model of experienced reality in African thought,” which means: “the principle of creativity, intelligibility, and rationality.” By this, the specific rationality of African thought can be described as aesthetic rationality.8

Morality as an Expression of Beauty A proof of the conception that aesthetic qualities are part and parcel of all domains of life, and therefore also of moral life, can be found in the ethics of the Akan, a group of peoples in Western Ghana and Eastern Ivory Coast. According to the ethical principles of the Akan, a good action has to be a beautiful action at the same time. This is meant as a dynamic unity of art and of daily life, as it is worked out by Anyanwu. Beauty is striven after in connection with good action as the beauty in motion; it is thought of as a structure of motion. C.A. Ackah from the University of Cape Coast in Ghana analyzes the moral language of the Akan and refers in the first instance to the notion nokware. As English equivalents to this notion, he gives the following: truth, truthfulness, faithfulness, honesty, and probity. This is the most basic notion of morality. In the second place follows ahoöfew with the English equivalents: beauty, handsomeness, grace, elegance, and prettiness. Aesthetic qualities are obviously on the foreground here. Also, one of the next moral concepts has clear aesthetic implications: nyansa, which can be rendered in English as knowledge, learning, wisdom, skill, dexterity, art, artfulness, craft, and cunning. This makes evident that there is no strict borderline between art and craft. The saying “inya a onnsa,” which is contracted to the concept of nyansa, means “when you possess it, it does not get exhausted.” Thus, knowledge and wisdom are connected with the creativity of handicraft and of art, which have to be exercised in a good way.9

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Beauty of motion is found with the body. It brings together body and mind. When it is there as a disposition, it can be developed by making it a habit. Exercise and imitation are helpful with that. The beautiful movements of a dance connect the personal habit with his/her answer to the rhythm of the sound of the universe. By exercising the beauty of motion, the person works at the same time on the goal to get a good character. And working on this, is a very important aspect of Akan ethics. The habit of good action is impressed into a person in the same way as graceful movement into the body. In both cases, the imitation of great examples is very supportive. A more detailed description of Akan ethics in its connection with aesthetic principles can be given by using the book of J.B. Danquah: The Akan doctrine of God, on which also the book of Ackah strongly is based.10 The central notion of a chapter in this book, which is primarily dealing with ethics, is the Akan concept of destiny. In fact, two Akan words, which are related to each other, are used as equivalents for destiny: hybea meaning arranged in a certain manner, and ukrabea meaning message of a certain manner. The Akan idea of destiny departs from the conviction that human life in its main traits (birth, character in general, position in society, and death) is predetermined. This does not mean, however, that a belief in destiny is predominant like in Islam. For the individual person and also for groups (families, villages, peoples) there is room for free decisions. Only the main traits are determined. The concrete decisions, which have to be taken more in detail, are free. In addition, a different position with regard to Christian faith has to be considered. The predetermination does not include an alternative for the good or for the evil, for eternal happiness or damnation. For the Akan, it is always a predetermination for the good. The evil originates from wrong decisions of a person and from the influence of evil forces. These are the spirits of ancestors who have been treated badly during their lifetime or in whose life the evil has been predominant. Also by accidental events, which are not fixed by the destiny, the good predetermination can be spoiled. Destiny is a framework, which can be filled in more in detail or broken open and spoiled in its positive intentions. Morality is related to the destiny, because every good action contributes to its fulfillment. “Every endeavor to do the good is saved as a merit in the ‘okra’ and contributes to the fulfillment (of destiny) by the individual.”11 This notion of okra, which cannot adequately be translated by soul, stands for the divine within the human being. There is no room for evil in it. The evil has no entry into this innermost core of the self. It originates in the sunsum, which is again not adequately translatable by the English equivalent mind. Decisions, which are taken in and by the sunsum, are not only rational, but also largely emotional. Here, evil forces can intervene. The relation between okra and sunsum can be imagined as two concentric circles. The inner circle of okra is closed up and denotes the own personal will. The circle around this inner one, sunsum, is more open for influences from outside, from the social world, and from nature. The good of the sunsum can grow. This happens, as we have seen, by making a habit of good actions, by exercise, and by imitation. The individual person has to make from his/her life a piece of art by striving after moral progress. Thus, he/she

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gets gradually a strong character and becomes more and more immune from bad influences. And the moral progress of the individual penetrates the community. The more important the role of the individual in the community is, in the family, the village, or the people, the more will the influence of his/her moral growth get through to it. This process does not stop in the close environment of the individual. It can penetrate a whole region and a whole continent. It brings about the tendency to influence mankind at large. By the extension of moral actions from the individual person via smaller and larger communities to mankind, the structure of art, which is connected to good actions, determines this process as a whole. This idea of Akan thought is linked to the actions of the individual person and the ongoing influence of them in increasing environments. It is different from the Western concept of a moral education of mankind, which departs from general principles of a philosophy of history that have already partly been or will in the future be realized.12 The moral actions of the human beings form together the destiny of mankind. They are part of the plan of the Supreme Being (Onyame) to fulfill the destiny. Nevertheless, the foundation of morality is not religious. What is good is not good because it has been commanded by God or a religious authority. K. Gyekye from the University of Ghana at Legon/Accra underlines this aspect of Akan ethics. This means that the human being is fully responsible for his/her actions. The freedom of the will is not that much limited that the evil would be inevitable. The evil forces that can influence (the sunsum of) a person do not have unlimited power over him/her.13 The domain, where the exercise of moral action mainly is practiced, is the family. Certain values are taught before all by the father. Especially the masculine values (skills, courage, justice, etc.) are handed down from the father to the sons. Correspondingly, the mother primarily gives through feminine values (beauty, equal treatment of all, broadmindedness, etc.) to the daughters. The example of the parents and the use of proverbs and folktales are very important in this practice. It can also be the case that a not very successful and not very highly estimated father is an incentive for the son, to become successful and highly estimated himself. An example for that is Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s famous novel Things fall apart.14 In the process of making of the individual life a piece of art, also artworks in a stricter sense of the word play an important role. Here is given one example for this. The tales of Kweku Ananse, a spider who is very clever and cunning and who can solve difficult moral problems, are often told in the moral education of the children. One of these tales runs as follows: “A leopard (sebo) one day fell into a pit as he went on his usual round in search of food. Soon a rat (kusi) that was also going round for food saw him in the pit, for rats are fond of pits and holes. As the latter stood at the entrance to the pit, the leopard begged him to help him out. Kusi quickly looked for a rope, tied one end to a tree, and threw the other end into the pit. Sebo then clambered out by means of the rope.” Instead of being thankful, the leopard ponders to kill the rat so that nobody can come to know that he has needed the help of an animal so much smaller and weaker than himself. At this moment,

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Kweku Ananse comes along and saves the rat by a trick. It pretends not to believe what has happened and asks the leopard and the rat to repeat the whole thing. When the leopard is again in the pit, Ananse says: “you shall remain where you are and there learn that evil should not be the recompense for good.”15 So far, the study of Akan ethics can show that in African thought building up a good and strong character is at the core of moral behavior, which is part and parcel of the process of making a piece of art of individual and collective human life. Communalism, the values of caring and sharing, or what is called ubuntu in some languages of Southern Africa, the principle of being human by other humans, are in the center of moral education, which leads to the growth of strong characters and thus to the fulfillment of destiny by giving predominance to moral actions. As we have seen, the families play an important role in this. When the families as extended families and the social structures, which are built on them, are dissolved in the course of modernization and urbanization of Africa, the moral values of traditional life are no longer functioning well. The question is whether and how modern conditions of life can be reconnected with these values so that they do not get lost, but can contribute to a moral renewal on a global scale, which is based on aesthetic principles.

Making of Human Life a Piece of Art in the Early Ethical Conceptions of Schleiermacher In the mainstream of Western philosophy, an equivalent for the aesthetic worldview, and the close connection between aesthetics and ethics in African thought cannot be found easily. It is true that the special meaning given in this context to the growth of a good character by African philosophers is also mentioned in the writings of Immanuel Kant. This is, however, not at the core of the Kantian ethics. Whether an action is good depends, according to Kant, on a rational judgment. The motivation for the action has to be so that any other person could be obliged to determine her actions in the same way. This is a purely formal reflection. No emotional motive is allowed. To acquire a character that is accustomed to act in a good way can support the purely rational good motivations of a person. This is desirable for everybody, although education, giving a good example, and advices (Erziehung, Beispiele, und Belehrung) cannot do much in this. At any rate, these are pragmatic considerations, which have their place in the margins of philosophical thought. We find them in Kant’s lectures on Anthropologie in pr agmatischer Hinsic ht (1798).16 More recently, Gernot Böhme from the Technical University at Darmstadt has given an interpretation of these lectures. He is giving the relation between ethical motives and emotions a more central place in this conception.17 The influential countermovement to Kant’s ethics in the twentieth century, with Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann as its main representatives, has stressed that not only a formal reflection, but also certain values, of which the contents (the matter) can be known, are presupposed for the determination of what a good

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action is. Their position is called materiale Wertethik, but this is not an equivalent to the aforementioned African ideas either. Scheler and Hartmann talk about emotions like sympathy or love as being ethically relevant. Humans can perceive these values, which exist in and make themselves known from a sphere that is independent from the human lifeworld. This idea of a relation between humans and the cosmic dimension of the ethical values differs, however, greatly from the African conception. This idea means that humans have an exceptional position in the cosmos, in that they have a value-perceiving (wertevernehmend) mindset.18 They are not an integral part of all the movements within the cosmos, which they take over and answer to them in a specific way, for instance by dancing. There is no exceptional position of human beings in the world as a whole in African thought. Cosmic forces influence the human sphere, and the human beings interact with them in continuous processes. Within Western ethics that is working in the Kantian tradition, there are obviously no direct points of contact with the African way of thought. We have to look for Western thinkers who are less in the focus of the general attention in order to come across some corresponding ideas to the aesthetic-ethic worldview of African philosophers. For this purpose, I want to refer to Friedrich Schleiermacher who calls his philosophy of culture as a whole “ethics.” At the other side of his philosophical system, he traces out a philosophy of nature or “physics.” Both parts of this system try to grasp the same cosmic and human history albeit from opposite starting points. In ethics, reason is the acting part that works on nature and transforms it to reasonable forms. And in physics, nature is acting and it modifies itself to certain forms, which are integrated in the ethical world. Thus, reason and nature penetrate each other in a progressing manner. The young Schleiermacher, who exchanges ideas regularly with Friedrich Schlegel and other members of the Berlin Romantic Circle in the late nineties of the eighteenth century, combines this philosophical system of ethics and physics as corresponding parts with an aesthetic worldview. In his Reden über die Religion (1799), he goes back to religion as a unity, which binds together culture and nature. By that, he wants to make religion acceptable among intellectuals who have been influenced strongly by the critical theory of knowledge during Enlightenment. Schleiermacher conceptualizes the universe as an acting instance that is effective in nature and in the human world. The two main forces of the universe are the general (das Allg emeine) and the particular (das Besonder e), which are put together (in Eins bilden) in different ways to individual forms (Individualitäten) in the history of nature and of culture. And these individual forms have immediate aesthetic qualities. The greatest piece of art , which emerges in these processes “is humankind (die Mensc hheit).” Humans thus have a special position in the universe. However, their position is not exceptional, as it is with Kant and Kantian ethics, because humankind is brought forth by the universe through the same play of its forces, the same way of having them put together as in the history of nature.19 The great piece of art “humankind” finds itself continued in the life of each and every human being. Everybody is making a piece of art of his/her individual life. One can also formulate it the other way round. Mankind is composed by the different

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individual lives. In the all-encompassing context of Schleiermacher’s system, his aesthetic worldview becomes evident: The actions of the universe lead via the interim stages of nature and humankind to the lives of individual persons, forming at every stage pieces of art. In his Monologen, a booklet, which appeared in 1800, one year after the Reden, Schleiermacher works out these ideas more precisely. Here, he makes a difference between the specific work of an artist and the making of a piece art of the individual human life. The artist creates a work of art, which shows the putting together of the general and the particular in the outside world. The normal persons try to integrate everything general and particular into their individual growth (Bildung). Thus, everybody presents in his/her life a modification of humankind. Great works of art in the outside world express more of what mankind is than the artist personally had intended. The same happens also in the individual Bildung of normal persons. On the one hand, it shows the specific character of the individual person. And on the other hand, he/she tries to integrate in his/her actions as much as possible of the infinite area of humankind. That means, not everybody is an artist in the strict sense of the word, but human actions as a whole have aesthetic qualities and in a broader sense, everybody is an artist.20 These conditions can be described more concretely by focusing on language. Language is the most pure mirror of a time, a piece of art, in which its spirit manifests itself . Working in language and on language means a lot to the individual speaker and to language itself. As a speaking person, everybody contributes to forming and developing language (Sprachbildung). The poet is Sprachbildner in an even higher sense. For himself/herself and for the language in which he/she writes, he/she creates essentially new possibilities of expression. Normal people can participate in that, because also for them the possibilities to express themselves are extended by poems or literary texts. The aesthetic-ethical imperative, which is implicated by that, means that everybody has to work at his/her Sprachbildung as much as possible.21 In his later writings, Schleiermacher has not stuck to this aesthetic worldview with its ethical implications, as we find it in his early ethical conceptions. When he works out his system of ethics (System der Sittenlehre) more in detail, art becomes an autonomous sphere of cultural life. It gets an important, but limited place in the actions of reason on nature. It is part of the symbolizing function of reason. Because it departs more from emotion than from conceptual thinking, it is classified closer to religion than to science.22 We are reminded of the African way of thought, when Schleiermacher gives special attention to “music and mimic art,” stating that the latter is a reaction to the excitation that originates from the former. In the system of different forms or disciplines of art, as he works it out in his lectures on Ästhetik (1819–1825) and Über den Be griff der K unst (1831–1832), these are the most elementary and lowest forms of art. They are accompanying arts and have an immediate impact on emotions. “The forming and speaking arts” (i.e., architecture, sculpturing, painting and poetry, drama, novel) range higher, because they have more general and more lasting effects on representations (Vorstellungen).23

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Living (with) Art in Contemporary Conceptions If I understand Anyanwu well, he wants to say that Africans stick to their aesthetic worldview also under the conditions of modernization. Many experiences in the big cities, however, make you doubt that the connection with ethic behavior is still valid. Especially young people who have left their traditional environment, often seem to be uprooted and morally without any commitment. The necessity of a moral renewal is discussed by Ghanaian authors such as Kwame Gyekye and Joshua Kudadjie. They look for possibilities to reconnect the life in the cities with the traditional values. And they are aware of the fact that these values have to be adapted to the new political and economic circumstances. According to them, economic and technical developments are not rejected, but in using these developments, they want to find their own way to modernity.24 The question is what the role can be of the aesthetic qualities of ethical behavior in the processes of modernization. A pursuit to teach values can often be noticed in African societies, but the all-encompassing aesthetic framework for that seems to be marginalized. The imperatives of an emerging industrial society leave little space for that. The artists are still highly productive, but their work is more and more commercialized. It may be possible in an African context that art can articulate itself by protesting against its being marginalized. This perspective, however, might be more adequate in the Western world, although we know since Marcuse, that this kind of protest is encapsulated by the mechanisms of a developed industrial society, and that it is used as some kind of valve for the feelings of discontent and thus is rendered harmless.25 Anyway, this brings us back to the Western conditions of life. The aesthetic-ethic worldview of the early romantic poets and philosophers has been in discussion during the 1970s and 1980s. There have been reflections on the connection between aesthetics and ethics,26 but what happened in history to the early romantic ideas is true for these contemporary reflections. They have not become part of the mainstream philosophy. This makes me think of Hegel’s definition of romantic art, which has its ideal of harmonic life only in the medium of yearning (Sehnsucht). It is an unconventional way of discerning different periods in the history of art, when Hegel characterizes all art since the ancient Greeks as romantic, but it seems to express correctly the meaning of art in the margins of culture in the European history.27 All the more, it is an essential task of contemporary philosophy to stress the importance of the connection between aesthetics and ethics. This is a counterforce against the total determination of life by industrialization, growing dependence on technical means, and commercialization. The struggle for an aesthetization of life by some contemporary philosophers and artists finds remarkable support in the works of Herbert Marcuse and of Joseph Beuys. In his Essay on Liber ation, Marcuse pleads for a “new sensitivity,” which combines the two meanings of aesthetic as being related to the senses and to art. He introduces a different principle of r eality from the one Freud had argued for.

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Not a sublimation of bodily moving forces is necessary, but a physiological and psychological experience of freedom. Marcuse thinks that the “idea of an aesthetic ethos” should be made relevant in politics as a model for the “possible form of a free society.”28 Without the political aspect of Marcuse’s thought, more recently Böhme has suggested an interpretation of aesthetics, which also departs from the original meaning of the word in its relation to the senses. In 1994, he has given lectures on aesthetics as a general theory of sensual perception. And he sees authors as Wolfgang Welsch and Martin Seel and also Karl-Heinz Bohrer, who has done considerable research after the early romantic ideas, in the neighborhood of his conception.29 A strong incentive to make of human life a piece of art comes from Joseph Beuys, especially from his initiative at the “Documenta” of 1982 in Kassel, when and where he started the project to plant 7,000 oaks. He focuses on the biological, cultural, and ecological aspects of trees and their meaning for life on earth. By an art-project like this, he tries to penetrate the public consciousness and political thought from an aesthetic point of view. His ideas are summarized in the concept of social sculptur e, by which he intends to give personal and social life an artistic dimension. The work of Beuys is continued among others by Shelly Sacks. Living with art thus becomes living art. Like in the present situation of Africa, where philosophers desperately try to heal the absence of moral standards in the life of the big cities by reconnecting it with traditional ethical values, the struggle for an aesthetization of life in the Western world meets big problems and is still marginalized by the mainstream philosophy. So a source of hope can be found in bringing together the weak forces in both cultures. In a joint venture may lay a strategic chance. The disintegration of aesthetics and ethics is not a problem in one of these cultures only, but in both of them. And even more can be said: it is a problem in the world at large. The dialogue between the philosophies of two different cultures thus moves into a cosmopolitan horizon. It is part of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s cosmopolitan “ethics in world of strangers” that the art of all cultures of the world should be accessible on the level of equality. According to him “each of us has an interest in being able…to live with art; and that interest is not limited to the art of our own ‘people’.” So he concludes: “If it is good to share art in these ways with others, the cosmopolitan asks, why should the sharing cease at national borders?”30 This statement can be extended to the appeal that it is good for each of us not only to live with art, but also to live art. What is difficult in one culture might become easier when the protagonists of two cultures join together and finally see it as a worldwide challenge.

Notes and References 1. This article is based on earlier texts in German: Ästhetik und Moral in der afrikanischen und in der westlichen Philosophie, in: H. Kimmerle, Die Dimension des Interkulturellen, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1994, pp. 169–186 and in Dutch: Esthetiek en moraal in de Afrikaanse en in de westerse filosofie, in: same author, Mazungumzo. Dialogen tussen Afrikaanse en W esterse filosofieën, Amsterdam: Boom 1995, pp. 134–149. Especially the last part has been rewritten to a large extent. 2. J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1981, Part 1, Chapter 2: Einige Merkmale des mythischen und des modernen Weltverständnisses, pp. 72–113.

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3. K.C. Anyanwu, The idea of art in African thought, in: ed. G. Floistad, Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 5: African Philosophy, Dordrecht: Nijhoff 1987, pp. 235–260, see especially p. 246 and p. 249. 4. P.J. Tempels, La philosophie Bantoue, Paris: Présence Africaine 19612, p. 30–32. 5. Anyanwu, loc. cit., p. 248. 6. Op. cit., pp. 250–251. 7. Op. cit., p. 253. 8. Op. cit., pp. 255–257 and 259. 9. C.A. Ackah, Akan Ethics, Accra: Ghana Universities Press 1988, pp. 25–27. 10. J.B. Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God , London: Cass 19862, see especially Chapter 3: Ethical canons of the doctrine, pp. 78–103; cf. Ackah, op. cit., pp. 8–19. 11. Danquah, loc. cit., p. 84 (The remark within brackets in the quotation is mine, HK). 12. G.E. Lessing, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, in: Lessing, Auswahl in drei Bänden, Leipzig: VEB Bibiliographisches Institut 1952, vol. III, pp. 465–484. 13. K. Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought. The Akan Conceptual Sc heme, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, pp. 127–146. 14. Ch. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, London: Heinemann 1958. 15. Ackah, loc. cit., p. 62 (Italicized words in the quotation are mine, HK). 16. I. Kant, Werke, Akademie Textausgabe, Berlin: De Gruyter 1968, vol. VII, pp. 117–334, see especially pp. 285–295. 17. G. Böhme, Anthropologie in pr agmatischer Hinsicht. Darmstädter Vorlesungen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1985, pp. 113–138. 18. M. Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, Frankfurt: Klostermann 1927; N. Hartmann, Ethik, Berlin: De Gruyter 1925; and Das Problem des Geistigen Seins, Berlin: De Gruyter 1933. 19. F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, sect. I, vol. 2: Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit. 1796–1799, ed. G. Meckenstock, Berlin: De Gruyter 1984, pp. 185–326, see especially p. 264. 20. Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe , sect. I, vol. 3: Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit. 1800–1802, ed. G. Meckenstock, Berlin: De Gruyter 1988, pp. 1–61, see especially pp. 19–21. 21. Op. cit., p. 37; cf. H. Patsch, Alle Mensc hen sind Künstler . F riedrich Sc hleiermachers poetische Versuche, Berlin: De Gruyter 1986 (Schleiermacher-Archiv, vol. 2). 22. Schleiermacher, Brouillon zur Ethik (1805–1806), ed. H.-J. Birkner, Hamburg: Meiner 1981, pp. 105–113. 23. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik (1819–1825). Über den Be griff der K unst (1831–1832) , ed. Th. Lehnerer, Hamburg: Meiner 1984. 24. Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity . Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience , Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997, pp. 205–215: The Concept of Moral Revolution; J. Kudadjie, Moral Renewal in Ghana. Ideals, Realities and Possibilities, Accra: Asempa 1995. 25. H. Marcuse, Der einimensionale Mensch. Studien zur Ideologie der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft, Neuwied: Luchterhand 1967, pp. 11–20. 26. G. Gamm, G.Kimmerle (eds.), Ethik und Ästhetik. Nachmetapysische Perspektiven, Tübingen: edition diskord 1990. 27. Hegel, Ästhetik, ed. F. Bassenge, Berlin: verlag das europäische buch 1985, vol. I, pp. 498–509. 28. Marcuse, Versuch über die Befr eiung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1969, pp. 43–76: Die neue Sensibilität. 29. Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, München: Wilhelm Fink 2001, p. 8. 30. K.A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a W orld of Str angers, New York: W.W. Norton 2006, pp.124–130: Living with Art, for the quotations see p. 127.

The Origins of Landscape Painting: An Intercultural Perspective Heinz Paetzold

In this essay, I would like to scrutinize the origins of landscape painting. The common opinion in Europe has it that the birth of landscape painting should be dated in the period of the Renaissance. However, I shall show that such an outlook is based on a restricted view. In order to reveal the limitation of such a view, I shall refer to the tradition of Chinese landscape painting. It is much older than the European one and it has a completely different appearance. Only an intercultural perspective can help us further, since it offers a more complete description of the origins of landscape painting.

The European View on the Origins of Landscape P ainting as Compared with the Chinese View Roughly spoken, this art developed in Europe as follows. On canvases, during the Middle Ages, the landscape was mainly a scene depicting an event relevant to the life and sufferings of Christ. Not earlier than during the epoch of the Renaissance, the landscape as such became a possible subject in painting. In his book Zeit-Bilder [Images of the Time], which has some importance for contemporary aesthetics, the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen wrote as follows: “The realistic shape of a painting that is without any religious connotation, only aiming at the recognition broke through around 1550, Altdorfer’ s first independent landscape painting of Europe (Munich) originated around 1530.”1 Gehlen obviously has Albert Altdorfer’s work, produced around 1532, “Donaulandschaft bei Regensburg mit Schloss Wörth und dem Scheuchenberg” [Danube landscape near Regensburg with Wörth Castle and the Scheuchenberg] in mind. This canvas is in oil. It measures 30.5 cm × 22.2 cm and hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. European landscape painting originated in modern times. It presupposes the possibility of a new and different attitude toward nature, one that is exempt from agricultural manipulation and from utilizing employment of nature. In a strict sense, it is a free and aesthetic attitude toward the surrounding nature. The genesis of this attitude can be traced back to the Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch’s description of his ascent of the Mont Ventoux in Southern France on April 26, 1335. On that day, Petrarch climbed up the hilltop with the aim to devote himself to the act of contemplating the surrounding A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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landscape. The experience of the landscape, which has been described by Petrarch in various details, is considered to be the deed of the first explicitly modern man, a deed that in turn is the presupposition of the beginning of landscape painting. Already a first short glimpse at the cultural history of China shows a picture that in many aspects is completely different. The basic experience of landscape, in a pretentious way, occurred in China nearly a whole millennium earlier. Michael Sullivan, for instance, attributes the paradigm of landscape experience in China to the landscape poet Hsieh Ling-yün (385–433): The “belief that the truth was to be sought in the mountains, inspired many poets and painters to go wandering. The landscape poet Hsieh Ling-yün… had a special pair of climbing boots… in which he would clamber up the hills of the beloved Kuei-chi…. Hsieh’ s expeditions took place nearly a thousand years before the time of Petrarch, who… was probably the first man in the West ‘to express the emotion on which the existence of landscape painting so largely depends…’…[N]o Chinese gentleman would feel that climbing mountains was anything but enjoyable, proper, and good for the soul.”2 The cultural difference between West and East is remarkable. Petrarch has a thoroughly ambivalent attitude toward the landscape experience. On one hand, he senses it as a great pleasure and even as a kind of intoxication. On the other hand, however, he pulls St. Augustine’s “Confessions” out of his pocket and judges the “celebration of the eyes” to be of evil for his spiritual salvation and a sin.3 Something completely different happened in China. In contrast to Petrarch, people there enjoyed the experience of landscape as an untroubled refreshment of the soul. Because, as Sullivan continues: “The landscape was not just a symbol of the Tao, it was the very substance of the Tao itself.”4 Of course, the experience of landscape and its poetic description is not yet landscape painting. With regard to not only the poetic description of landscape experience but also with regard to the beginning of landscape painting, a comparison between the Western and the Eastern culture is very revealing. For Gehlen, the first independent landscape painting came into existence around 1530. According to Sullivan, the peak of landscape painting in China was already during the Sung Dynasty period (960–1279). At that time, the whole gamut of stylistic and formal idioms was developed to which painters during later periods referred to again. Sullivan therefore speaks of “one of the great moments in the history of Chinese landscape painting.” The reason is that important artistic achievements should take full advantage of landscape painting. We have to think of the previous discoveries of nature and of the artistic creativity that happened during the time of the Six Dynasties (386–588) as well as the mastery of the stroke of the brush and the usage of ink as means of artistic expression. The latter can be traced back to the time of the T’ang Dynasty (618–906).5 To give for the present an overview of the phenomenon of landscape painting in China, we have to mention three further aspects. First, in ancient China there already existed something such as an art discourse. It can be traced back to Chang Yen-yüan’s “Record of Famous Painters of Successive Dynasties” [Litai ming hua chi] from the year 847. In this discourse, art is discussed under philosophical, technical, critical, genre-specific, or simply anecdotal aspects. It is remarkable that the art discourse in China came into existence 700 years prior to Giorgio Vasari’s Le

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vite dei pui excellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (1530), a book with biographies of eminent artists in early modernity. In the West, Vasari is given the title of father of art history (Julius von Schlossser), the first art critic, or artists’ critic (Heinrich Lützeler).6 What characterizes the Chinese art discourse is the fact that painters and poets along with theoreticians and historians were participating in it.7 Second, a cultural comparison is also instructive with regard to the societal status of art. In Europe, the fine arts (painting, sculpture and architecture) were recognized as autonomous art as differentiated from arts and crafts not earlier than and after the period of the Renaissance. Treatises by Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci amongst others substantially contributed to the legitimization of art. Art became emancipated step-by-step from religious cult and from the exhibitions in the court. In China, the process of “becoming autonomous” (Peter Bürger) happened much earlier. During the Sung Dynasty period, there were three different kinds of painting to be found. Artisans were manufacturing the traditional and popular art. The second type of work was derived from professional artists who were educated at the rising art academies. Both sorts of artworks were in their specific manner commissioned either by members of the imperial court or by private persons. Yet a new third kind of art came into existence. It was produced by “talented scholar-officials” and by “eminent recluses,” as the art critic Guo Ruoxu said. This was the art and especially the painting of the social class of the literati, that is to say, paintings by educated people, scholars, and officials. This type of painting appeared parallel to the academic art. The first was less bound to rules compared to the latter and in this sense autonomous. It proved to be more innovative.8 Third, some art historians in the West judge the nineteenth century to be the highlight of landscape painting. Kenneth Clark, for instance, has to be mentioned here. In such a context, one thinks of John Constable and William Turner, of Caspar David Friedrich, of Camille Jean Baptiste Corot or of the impressionists. At any rate, many historians considered landscape painting for a long period as subordinated in the field of the different genres of painting.9 In Europe, thus, landscape painting received its paradigmatic recognition belatedly. In China, on the contrary, the development took a different route. Prior to the Sung Dynasty period, most artists and critics held the view that portrait painting would be the most important branch of painting. The landscape painting ranged on the third position. It was placed beneath the art of making portraits, and beneath of animal and bird pictures. For instance, the art historian Zhu Jingxuan from the T’ang Dynasty period argued in this manner. During and after the Sung Dynasty period, however, the pre-eminence of landscape painting within the branches of fine arts was uncontested.10

The Steps of My Argument My argument in this essay is that only an intercultural perspective can grasp landscape painting in its completeness. I would like to develop this argument methodologically in three steps. In the first step, I shall remind the reader of the different

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stages of Western landscape painting. I am doing it through reference to a scheme suggested by the Dutch philosopher Ton Lemaire. In my second step, I shall deal with Lemaire’s presentation of the Chinese landscape painting. However useful and important Lemaire’s approach might be it reaches only the starting point of interculturality. I would like to explain in the third step of my exposition, the truly intercultural perspective of landscape painting.

A Historical Scheme of Phases of Western Landscape Painting This is my first step. In my historical scheme of phases in Western landscape painting, I am, as already said, drawing on the proposal made by Ton Lemaire in his much-discussed book Filosofie van het landschap.11 The first phase of development of Western landscape painting can be described as the disclosure of landscape as such. Painters, such diverse as Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, already mentioned Albrecht Altdorfer, Mathias Grünewald, Joachim Patenir, Giovanni Bellini, Tiziano, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Gillis van Coninxloo are tied together through a programmatic conviction. The landscape should be emancipated step-by-step from its formerly predominant amalgamations with religious meanings. The manifold semantics of landscape had to be laid bare. The landscape in its divergent appearances and aspects was to be disclosed. Given such a programmatic undertaking, the artistic technique of geometrical perspective proved to be important. It was namely supportive for the establishment of a rational setup of the landscape image. The use of the geometrical perspective enabled the artist to create the landscape as the model of a world that is completely transparent for experiencing aesthetic subjectivity. We can single out the Dutch School as a historical second paradigm in Western landscape painting. After the discovery of the landscape as such, it is now the celebration of the landscape as homeland (Heimat) that is at stake. Between 1550 and 1715, the paintings by Jacob van Ruysdael, Salomon van Ruysdael, Jan Vermeer van Delft, Jan van Goyen, Meindert van Hobbema, and Rembrandt van Rijn among others testify an extraordinary balance that can be labeled classical. These painters bring together on the one hand, the civil self-reliance and pride of autonomous men and women and on the other hand a deep feeling of dependence upon the surrounding nature. Moral autonomy and lasting dependency seemed to be reconciled with each other in an impressive way. Along with Lemaire, we can identify the Romantic Movement as the third period of European landscape painting. Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge deserve to be mentioned here. In their works, nature is deified and the divine localized in nature. The romantic cult of landscape, however, occurs exclusively at remote but precious places, on a mountain, at the seashore, or at a river. The romantic experience of the landscape is distressing. According to the structure of modern life, nature turns out to be deeply divided. On the one hand, there is the nature of the mechanical rules as they are discovered by the modern natural sciences. On the

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other hand, we find aesthetically beautiful or sublime experienced nature. It is only for the lonely wanderer to be attentive to the aesthetic nature. It is the task of art to prolong this experience by transforming it into lasting impressiveness and even into magic images. The fourth phase of landscape painting is the one of impressionism. Lemaire explains the impressionistic style by reference to the school of Barbizon. Jean François Millet, Th. Rousseau, Camille Jean Baptiste Corot, Jules Dupré, Charles François Daubigny, and Diaz belonged to this category. These artists aimed at the visual glorif ication of the world, and especially of the suburb. Impressionistic paintings – painters like Edouarde Manet Claude Monet and Camille Pissaro have been in regular contact with the Barbizon group – focus on the lived experience, the Erlebnis of the passing moment. The experience shivers to the very instant. In impressionism, the aristocratic gesture that characterized the romanticists vanishes. Parallel to impressionism, the democratic photography comes into existence. According to Lemaire, at fifth instance the end of the genre of landscape painting comes to the fore in surrealism and magical realism. Salvador Dali, Ives Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, and Willink among others testify in their works a reified world. It is a world that becomes more and more uninhabitable for human beings. A mediating passage to this final point is the turnover from impressionism to expressionism. It occurs with artists like Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. The cubism with George Braque or Pablo Picasso has to be referred to as another example of a mediating passage. The disclosure of the subterraneous microstructures of the visuality was part and parcel of the impressionistic artistic program. Two trends developed from this starting point. With Braque and Picasso, landscape is depicted as a kind of still life. By the radicalization of Cézanne, landscape comes to the fore in its emotionless inertia. With van Gogh, the landscape changes due to its internal dynamics into uneasy and threatening sceneries. No matter how one subdivides history, the scheme of Lemaire too, arouses many unanswered questions. What to say about the Englishmen Turner and Constable? Is the thesis convincing that landscape painting came to an end with surrealism and magical realism?12 Rather than dealing with these questions, here, I would like to take the next step in my essay. As a philosopher of human culture, Lemaire comes rather close to interculturality. He contrasts the Western European development of culture, which led to the experience of the landscape and later on to landscape painting, with the Chinese model of landscape experience and landscape painting. How does this model look like?

The Characteristics of Chinese Landscape P ainting in the Theory of Ton Lemaire Lemaire is correct in stating that the experience of landscape in China and subsequently the landscape painting have a much longer history than in the West. The latter emerged at first during the fourteenth century (Petrarch), and then during the

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sixteenth century (Altdorfer), whereas the former was already identified around 700 AC. As has been mentioned, the poet Hsich Ling-yün lived during the fourth century and the beginning of fifth century. Whatever the events, we find that landscape painting in China had developed already around the year 700. However, that is not all. Lemaire rightly underlines that the Chinese landscape painting reached its peak already during the Sung Dynasty period, that is to say, between 960 and 1279. Lemaire eventually is quoting from the work “An Essay on Landscape Painting” by the eleventh century painter Kuo Hsi. We will return to him later. Part of the quoted passage runs: “The din of the dusty world and the lockedin-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors, while on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what humans seek, and yet can rarely find.”13 Lemaire believes that the outstanding characteristic of Chinese landscape painting lies in the fact that humans appear to be subordinated to the surrounding nature and that the central perspective as means for the creation of paintings is missing. Chinese landscape paintings of the classical times were laid on scrolls. These had to be unfolded to be laid open to the view. To look at a landscape painting actually was a kind of meditation. For the viewer, the point in question was to become one with the landscape on the scroll. The question was not primarily whether or not the image was corresponding to that which was designated by it or whether it caused similar feelings as the original. The relationship between man and nature, man and landscape as it comes to the fore in Chinese landscape paintings can be called “connaturalitas” (Lemaire). To move within a landscape on the scroll means to communicate with that dimension of reality out of which also the human existence receives its power and dignity. Whereas Petrarch in his attitude toward the landscape is pulled to and fro between pleasure and fear, the Chinese attitude is one of openness and admiration. To wander around in nature and to view landscape paintings have something to do with worshiping. Although the relationship between man and nature, that is, between man and landscape is holistic in China, in Europe, since the Renaissance period a dualism has taken possession of the European mind. This dualism cannot be revoked. It is definitive. The Western man experiences nature as physical nature and as sublime nature. These two bifurcated modes of experiencing nature cannot be brought to coincidence again. According to Lemaire, in China, Taoism, Zen Buddhism as well as Confucianism have fostered thoroughly a holistic man–nature relationship. Lemaire, however, goes too far by claiming that in the Sung Dynasty period mainly Buddhist monks have produced landscape paintings,14 but that is out of the question. We have, according to Sullivan, to concede that at the beginning of the Sung Dynasty period the Buddhist monk Chü-jan was indeed along with Tung Yüan, a leading figure in landscape painting movement.15 Neither Tung Yüan nor Ching Hao (ca. 870–940) nor Li Ch’eng (919–967) were monks. They all played an important role at that time.16 In the time after Li Ch’eng, Kuo Hsi became the leading figure in landscape painting. He was not a monk either. Rather, he belonged to the class of the literati. It remains true, however, that during the end of the Sung Dynasty period, the influence of Zen Buddhism upon landscape painting was increasing. Artists like Li, the

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painter of the work “A Dream Journey on the Hsiao and Hsiang,”17 and Mu-ch’i (middle of thirteenth century) and Yü-chien deserve to be mentioned in this context. They all were strongly inspired by Zen Buddhism.18 Lemaire points to the fact that in the West, merely a minor mystical current is representing what is dominant in ancient China, namely a holistic view according to which the numinous, particularly the divine is conceived as being present in nature. The mainstream in Europe sticks to the dualism between God and the world, and there is, as already indicated, no way back available to the original unity with nature as a whole. The West is condemned, as Lemaire drastically says, to split the human into the engineer on one hand and the wanderer on the other, into the man who manipulates nature technically and the man who enjoys nature aesthetically. There is no longer any hope to reach a form of life in accordance with nature in a whole manner.19 The romantic wanderer and the Chinese wanderer seem to move through one and the same in nature. However, the difference is stunning. The Chinese wanderer experiences nature as enjoyable, proper, and good for the soul , as we already said. The romanticist, however, is a distressed person. He/she is troubled by the hypertrophy of his/her Ego as well as by the strangeness of nature that he/she so ardently is looking for and with which he/she would like to merge. He/she is tragically separated from nature with which to become one he/she desires with all his/her heart. The Chinese landscape painting is the pledge for another, more promising and fortunate man–nature relationship. Perhaps this is the reason why Chinese landscape painting is so attractive for people in the West.

Rough Description of the ‘Early Spring’ P aint by Kuo Hsi To take the step to the truly intercultural, I begin with the analysis of a painting by Kuo Hsi (ca. 1020–1080). The work has the title “Early Spring.” It is a vertical scroll and is painted in ink and slight color on silk. Its height is 158.3 cm. It is dated 1072 and hangs in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.20 Chinese landscape paintings are accessible for the viewer only by slowly meandering through the many details that is often merely alluded to. Chinese painting is as it were a great art of subtle hints. Only through intensive reading and rereading do the pictures begin to speak step-by-step. In the beginning, the works appear to be empty for the Western eye. On Kuo’s picture, we see a chain of mountains that consists of hills that are graded one behind the other. Behind, in the haze, powerful mountains arise. In the background, toward the lower portions of the painting to the left and right of the sparsely overgrown hills we see fishermen. If the view is concentrated toward the back where the landscape ascends upwards, then one notices a few houses to the right. If the view moves in the direction of the center of the picture, then one senses further buildings. The curved roof is probably pointing toward a temple. It is remarkable that the picture is not constructed according to the principles of the central linear perspective but with changing perspectives. For this reason,

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the viewer is stimulated to wander haphazardly across the picture. One involuntarily turns the head upwards to follow the contours of the steep mountains that rise out of the haze in the background and one concentrates on the mountain tops. As Sullivan rightly has underscored, the painting draws its appeal from the stark contrast of dark and light (“chiasosuro”), and from the “broad and dramatic contrasts of light and dark.” By doing so, the plastic relief of the mountains is strengthened. All details are subordinated to the impression of the whole.21 Here, a peculiarity of Kuo Hsi’s painting has to be given notice of. With Chinese landscape paintings one usually moves closer to the work to concentrate on the details and to wander through the landscape. In the case of Kuo Hsi one, on the contrary, one has to step back. Only in this way does one realize the composition of the whole and can store it in the memory to integrate the different emerging new aspects into the whole. On the other hand, one has to engage in the hidden details to discover their richness and multiplicity. The painting by Kuo Hsi draws much of its convincing power through the atmosphere the beholder is confronted with. It reflects the feeling of the beginning of spring. The haze in the middle and rear portion of the work contributes to the impression of early spring as well as the two torrents that fall into the sea in the right to middle of the picture. Furthermore, the scantily clad trees with leaves or cones are a symbol of the beginning spring. The trees are of irregular growth. Kuo Hsi was the leading figure of his generation, that is, the generation after Li Ch’eng (919–967). Kuo took over from Li, the art of drawing mountains as if they were clouds. Although Kuo Hsi was a trained professional and although he gained reputation at the imperial court, he nevertheless had at his disposal the taste expectations of an amateur and, as already said, a thorough classical education. For that reason, he, with his masterly touch of the brush, is bound to the circle of literati. It has to be mentioned that the style of painting mountains as Li and Kuo did, in later times of Chinese painting, influenced the style of many artists, for instance in the Yüan period (1264–1365) and later on.22

Basic Concepts in Chinese Art Discourses The turn to the intercultural is only then taken if one realizes that Chinese landscape painting originates from calligraphy. The philosopher Zong Baihua (1897–1987) once has sketched the implications of this for the aesthetics of painting in the following manner. He claimed that “Western painting originated from architecture and is therefore full of scientific implications, while Chinese painting originated from calligraphy and contains rhythms similar to that of music and dance; Western painting is composed by lumpish substance, while Chinese painting is formed by lines.”23 The claim of Zong Baihua concerning the origins of Western painting can be corroborated. It applies especially to the modern Western painting from the period of Renaissance. Observing paintings of that period, one is plainly struck by the joyfulness of the artists that they master the geometrical central perspective. This in

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turn demonstrates that the painters prefer to paint architectural buildings and rows of houses. Chinese painting is different. Similar to calligraphy, the work of a painter, too, is constructed through the lively stroke. It is decisive in calligraphy as a means of rhythmical ordering and of composing the whole. A view at modern philosophical aesthetics is instructive. Western aesthetics from Alberti who wrote on geometrical perspective to Kant and Hegel had the idea that painting consists in the fixation of a ground plan through lines that are illuminated with color on a second level.24 It is not correct to conceive of the traditional Chinese painting parallel to this line of thinking. Contrary to that, in China the stroke has a lead in the process of creating contour and in the process of encircling the subjects of the image. Here, as Ernest Gombrich has observed, writing (écriture) and image are thought of as belonging to one and the same root. Although, however, for Gombrich, in Western art through the antique Greek revolution, the painting becomes independent with regard to writing to enable to create an illusion of reality, painting and calligraphy in China remain constitutively related to each other.25 By making use of several art discourses that were written in the run of the centuries, Jianping Gao reaches at the following structure formula for Chinese painting and especially landscape painting. Painting is understood as the combination of yi, qi, shi, and bi.26 At the beginning stands yi that means something like idea, intent, or conception. Yi comes into existence in that the painter deals with the old masters along with engaging in an intense study of nature. The latter results in the artist’s communion with natur e. Yi can mean plan of construction, style, content of the image. It also includes the process of continuous adaptation to the specificities of paper and ink. Qi means breath, vigor, or vital force and aims at the energy and the quality of the stroke of the brush. What is at stake here can easily be realized while viewing Wu Chen’s work Bamboo (1350) from the Yüan period.27 One can see that Chinese painting has been fabricated.28 The process of painting as a bodily performance is not lost in the resulting product. Instead, it remains ever present at each instance during the process of painting. Shi follows at third place. It means momentum or impetus. In this case, the inspiration through the forms of nature is referred to. Shi constitutes the connection between the strokes of the brush. According to the Chinese art discourse, painting is not at all a merely intellectual activity but above all also a manual bodily activity. It is an execution of a performance. The succession and the chaining of the strokes of the brush are important. For that reason bi, that is the use of the brush has to follow. Bi is guided by yi, propelled by qi, and described by shi. In this way, Jianping Gao is summarizing the knotting of the various elements of painting. Each new stroke of the brush continues the already executed one and is anticipates the following one. The strokes of the brush are the instances in a specific sequence. The quality of the stroke, that is to say, its strength and intensity counts. It would be wrong to understand bi simply as the conversion of something that is merely thought. On the contrary, bi is present at each instance during the process of painting. It is inserted there, so that a circular movement from yi to bi and from bi to yi takes place. Furthermore, the scheme implies that the cycle from yi to qi, shi, and bi is repeated again and again during the process of painting.

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Summary At this stage, a summary of my ideas put forward is seasonable. Furthermore, some methodological consequences are to be drawn. My essay is intended as the application of the intercultural turn from contemporary philosophy to aesthetics, and especially to a section of aesthetics. I tried to show that the origins of landscape painting in China are much earlier compared to those in Europe. If we put the year 1532 with Altdorfer’s painting “Donaulandschaft” as the decisive date for Europe, then we have to concede that things in China happened centuries before. If we judge the Sung Dynasty period as the culminating point of landscape painting, then China was more than 500 years ahead. However, interculturality is not about a race. Rather, it is all about characterizing contrasts, differences, and overlaps (Mall) of the various cultural, artistic, and philosophical trends in the different cultures. To the Chinese thinking, the feeling of ambivalence was unknown, that what was so typical for the Europeans, the ambivalence toward the surrounding nature and by that toward the landscape. In China, the prevailing Taoism and Confucianism led to the breakthrough of another relationship between man and nature. A human understands him/her as part of nature rather than as its antipode. There are thus different background presuppositions and different philosophical convictions in the Chinese and European culture effective with regard to the conduct of human beings vis à vis the landscape. In my opinion, aesthetics, and especially if it is sensitive to cultural philosophy, has to be attentive to the development of the genuine characteristics of art. This is necessary to concretize the cultural background assumptions that are relevant for the understanding of works of art. For that reason, I in my essay relied on the art discourse. The specific Chinese art discourse, one will recall, had been established around 700 years prior to the one in Europe. Jianping Gao has reconstructed the Chinese art discourse in full length in as much as that is related especially to painting. As far as aesthetics claims to be interculturally well considered, it has methodologically to be based on the analysis of the art discourse. Exclusively, this discourse brings about the necessary close touch with the development of art in other cultures. My point is that the reference to the art discourse provides us the necessary internal perspective of any culture. Such a perspective is required for any not purely speculative approach to understanding art in the vein of a philosophy such as Hegel’s philosophy. The requirement of seizing the art discourse applies for the culture an author is closely known for. It must, however, be taken into account even more carefully for the understanding of the art of another culture. The intercultural understanding moves backward and forward between the internal point of view of the foreign culture and the view of the culture the researcher is acquainted with. In aesthetics, too, the intercultural problems and perplexities are brought to the foreground. How can one in the European–North American tradition trained viewing adapt to the Chinese image to meet a minimum of immanent requirements of understanding? Heinz Kimmerle was once asking for a methodologically trained

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listening to get acquainted with the style of philosophical thinking of another culture.29 I would like to ask for a methodologically trained viewing. The direction of this requirement is to follow the articulations of artistic problems in other cultures more adequately. The viewing alone, however, is not sufficient. Rather it is more promising to argue that all viewing has to be fuelled by the devises, the norms, and the structures put forward in the art discourse of the other culture. It is completely wrong to say that there would be an insurmountable gap between the viewing and the conceptual thinking. The contrary is true. It is much more the case that the viewing directed by the art discourse becomes more delicate and more refined. There is no innocence of the eye as Ernest Gombrich and Nelson Goodman over again have underscored. Our viewing is always already shaped by cultural and pragmatic standards.30 To put these shaping powers into brackets or to leave them out of the question, a methodologically refined viewing is necessary. It encompasses on one hand an acquaintance with the art discourse and on the other hand, an intensive viewing of artistic works deriving from foreign culture. The methodology that I introduced very sketchily seems to be promising also with regard to questions concerning the evaluation of works of art. The view from outside has to be combined with the dipping in the immanence. In that we follow the art discourse that applies to a given culture, we can acquire immanent standards of evaluation. Within this frame, the processes of evaluation take place. Of course, one follows in first instance the modes of viewing one is culturally acquainted with. Therefore, the turn of the view toward the immanence of the other culture is necessary. There must be, I believe, a third view in addition to the narrow mindedness taking the canon of the own culture as the absolute standard on one hand and the unlimited cultural relativism on the other hand. The latter standpoint is unconvincing since it leads into a dead end. It tends to level all culturally specific expressions. It favors indifference. To be dependent exclusively on the value of canon of one’s own culture proves to be too narrow. Foreign cultural framings of art appear in this perspective at best as exotic. An escape from these two extremes is only possible if one masters the understanding of art works of foreign cultures methodologically.

Notes and References 1. Arnold Gehlen: Zeit-Bilder. Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei [Images of the Time. Towards a sociology and aesthetics of modern painting]. Frankfurt am Main/Bonn: Athenäum 1965, 2nd edition, p. 36. Translation by Heinz Paetzold. 2. Michael Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, pp. 26–27. 3. Joachim Ritter: Landschaft. In: Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1974, pp. 141–163; here: pp. 141–143. 4. Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, p. 27. 5. Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, p. 56.

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6. Sullivan, Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, p. 43. Compare Robert Steiner in his epilogue to Giorgio Vasari: Lebensläufe der berühmtesten Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten. Zürich: Manesse 1974, p. 573 and Heinrich Lützeler: Kunsterfahrung und Kunstwissenschaft. Systematische und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Darstellung und Dokumentation des Umgangs mit der Bildenden Kunst. 3 Volumes. Freiburg/Munich: Alber 1975, Orbis Academicus, Volume 1, p. 121. 7. Compare Jianping Gao: The Expressive Act in Chinese Art. From Calligraphy to Painting. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Aesthetica Upsaliensia 7, 1996, pp. 37–39. 8. Gao: The Expressive Act of Chinese Art. From Calligraphy to Painting. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1996, pp. 23–26. 9. Compare Marc E. Blanchard: Landschaftsmalerei als Bildgattung und der Diskurs der Kunstgeschichte. In: Landschaft. Edited by Manfred Smuda. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1986, pp. 70–86. 10. Gao: The Expressive Act of Chinese Art. From Calligraphy to Painting. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1996, pp. 50–53. 11. Ton Lemaire: Filosofie van het landschap. Baarn: Ambo 1970. 12. I have discussed such questions critically in my book: Ästhetik der neueren Moderne. Sinnlichkeit und Reflexion in der konzeptionellen Kunst der Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Steiner 1990, p. 114. 13. Kuo Hsi: An Essay on Landscape Painting. Translated by Shio Sakanishi. London: Murray 1935, p. 30. 14. Lemaire: Filosofie van het landschap. Baarn: Ambo 1970, p. 79. 15. Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, pp. 57–59. 16. Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, pp. 59–63. 17. Ink on paper; 30.3 cm high. National Museum: Tokyo, reproduced in Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, p. 84. 18. Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, pp. 85–88. 19. Lemaire: Filosofie van het landschap Baarn: Ambo 1970, p. 81. 20. Reproduction in Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, p. 65. Also in Werner Speiser, Roger Goeppert and Jean Friborg: Chinesische Kunst. Malerei Kalligraphie Steinabreibungen Holzschnitte. Zürich: Atlantis 1965, p. 83. 21. Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, pp. 64, 67. 22. Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, pp. 107, 146. 23. Quoted by Jianping Gao: What is Chinese Aesthetics? In: Aesthetics and Culture. East and West. Edited by Gao Jianping and Wang Keping: Anhui Educational Publishing House 2006, pp. 24–40; here: p. 26. 24. Compare my book: Ästhetik des deutschen Idealismus. Zur Idee ästhetischer Rationalität bei Baumgarten, Kant, Schelling, Hegel und Schopenhauer. Wiesbaden: Steiner 1983, pp. 98–99 and my book: Ästhetik der neueren Moderne, Sinnlichkeit und Reflexion in der konzeptionellen Kunst der Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Steiner 1990, pp. 49, 75. 25. Compare Gao: The Expressive Act in Chinese Art. From Calligraphy to Painting. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1996, pp. 45, 48, 182–188. 26. Gao: The Expressive Act in Chinese Art. From Calligraphy to Painting. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1996, pp. 188–193. 27. Compare Sullivan: Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1979, pp. 90, 93.

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28. This is obviously an aspect that plays an important role, too, in the aesthetics of Theodor W. Adorno. 29. Heinz Kimmerle: Philosophie in Afrika – afrikanische Philosophie. Annäherung an einen interkulturellen Philosophiebegriff. Frankfurt am Main: Edition Qumran im Campus Verlag 1991, p. 8. Kimmerle: Die Dimension des Interkulturellen. Philosophie in Afrika – afrikanische Philosophie. Zweiter Teil: Supplemente und Verallgemeinerungsschritte. Amsterdam, GA: Rodopi, Studien zur interkulturellen Philosophie 1994, vol. 2, p. 12. 30. Nelson Goodman: Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett 1976. 2nd edition, pp. 7–8.

Nishida, Aesthetics, and the Limits of Cultural Synthesis Robert Wilkinson

Introduction In this chapter, my aim is to give a brief outline of the aesthetics that forms part of the Nishida tetsugaku (Nishida’s philosophy) and draw from it a more general lesson. In aesthetics as in the whole of the rest of his philosophy, Nishida has a special value for students of comparative thought. As my Japanese colleagues have told me repeatedly, Nishida was one of the last Japanese to be brought up in what they call the old Japanese way of thinking. What is unique to him is his sustained attempt, carried on at the highest level of philosophical endeavor, to try to articulate his interpretation of experience, an experience formed by Zen and centrally dependent on the ideas of the prajñaparamita- sutras, in terms of categorial frameworks drawn from the western philosophies that so fascinated him. What emerges from this lifelong task is a philosophy that, though articulated in different categorial frameworks, is manifestly unchanged in its essentials.1 It is a philosophy that (I would argue) articulates a view of experience that is simply incommensurable with that which informs the mainstream of western thought, especially as the latter derives from Aristotelian logic. It is a deeply different way of understanding the world and of being human. What makes the case of Nishida so uniquely valuable is precisely that he illuminates this deep difference by pushing western philosophical categories to their limit. In the end, he found that in order to say what he had to say, he had to disagree with western assumptions at their most basic level, including the law of identity and the principle of contradiction, among the bedrock laws of Aristotelian thought. To reinforce the case for incommensurability, at appropriate points below, I will refer to aesthetic theories developed by western thinkers, especially those with an idealist cast that might at first look quite similar to that of Nishida. The reason for doing so is to demonstrate that in fact the relation between Nishida’s view and close western analogues is in fact never, in the last analysis, one of identity. Ultimately, I will suggest that for reasons deep in metaphysics there must remain a final difference between an aesthetic based on Nishida’s premises and any based on what I term Aristotelian, individualist assumptions. The following exposition is based around the work by Nishida, most wholly devoted to aesthetics, Geijutsu to dotoku (Art and Mor ality, 1923), but I refer to other works by Nishida as appropriate. A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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I doubt if any of the thought about aesthetics which matters and which has lasted – certainly none of any depth – exists outside a well-articulated view of experience as a whole. This view is certainly borne out by the case of Nishida. The way in which he approaches the central topics in aesthetics – the notions of creativity, beauty, art, and so forth – are all consequences of or in some way conditioned by the view of human experience he tried constantly to articulate. Accordingly, I need to begin, however briefly and inadequately, by outlining the kernel of his thought. To repeat, this kernel remains invariant throughout his life, even though its conceptual articulation does change significantly. The conviction at the centre of Nishida’s worldview is the insight from the prajñaparamita- literature that the samsara and nirvana are one and the same.2 In the vocabulary of western metaphysics, the many are the one, and the one is the many, at the same time. They are not in any way synthesized. From the point of view of one who has undergone Zen training, this is a matter of experience, not speculation: this proposition is for them empirical, not a priori. It is the great matter, that which is experienced in satori. In the vocabulary of Nishida’s final categorial framework, reality has absolutely self-contradictory identity (zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu). Rightly experienced, each and every individual in the temporal world is at the same time absolute – infinite and eternal. What it is like to experience the world in this way is notoriously difficult to put into words, but a term which recurs in descriptions of the world as it is experienced post-satori is transparent as in this description by Nishida’s friend and contemporary, the great Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, describing how he felt after satori: I remember as I walked back from the monastery to my quarters in the Kigen’in temple, seeing the trees in moonlight. They looked transparent and I was transparent too.3

I take it that the term transparent is used to indicate the awareness that comes with satori of the hidden dimension of reality, which has been revealed by the experience of awakening, awareness that all the individuals who comprise the samsara (including oneself) are also simultaneously infinite and eternal. The enlightened, one might say, see through the individuals as ordinarily conceived, are aware of the infinite, eternal unity that they manifest. The real thus satisfies contradictory descriptions at the same time, and so it cannot be described in terms of Aristotelian logic. The law of identity and the law of noncontradiction are both held to be incompatible with Zen insight and so are boldly rejected by Nishida. In one sense, Nishida’s entire life was spent drawing out the implications of this insight and trying to find a set of concepts to do it justice. Every area of thought, from epistemology to ethics, is logically conditioned by such a starting point. It is appropriate in the present context, however, to notice only a few selected consequences. One of the most important – because it bears directly on the way in which aesthetic experience is analyzed by Nishida – concerns the relation of universal and particular in individual consciousness, an aspect of his analysis of the mode of being of the self: The particularity of the self is one that immanently includes the universal. It is transcendent in the sense that the self includes all kinds of objective worlds within itself and enters infinitely deeply into itself. The concrete self includes the plane of consciousness in general within itself. This may be a logical contradiction, but this kind of contradiction is the condition

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for the existence of consciousness and is the essence of the self. Life does not exist in the universal separated from the particular or the particular separated from the universal. There is true life in the horizon where the particular and universal intersect.4

In Zen vocabulary, the original face and the phenomenal ego are both present in consciousness all the time. They are not synthesized, but are contradictorily identical. As he was to put the same point much later: “…the self has an absolutely contradictory existence…absolute contradiction is the very raison d’être of the self.”5

Aesthetic Experience This is important as it forms the conceptual framework within which Nishida analyzes aesthetic experience. The commonest western analysis of aesthetic experience characterizes it as contemplative such that the contents of consciousness are experienced in a way that is without reference to the practical demands of the surface ego. We do not refer the contents of aesthetic experience, including our own emotions felt in the context of the experience, to the web of purposes, which dictate the goals of action in standard experience. The emotions we experience in such a state can be said to be in us but not predicable of us, what the Indian tradition calls rasas, emotions that are savored in a detached way.6 It is said that in such a state we are to some degree less self-conscious than usual. The Zen notion of the original face is of course absent from western analyses of contemplative states, and so it is to be expected that Nishida will analyze such states differently, as indeed – absolutely consistently – he does: …we attain to an even deeper self-consciousness in aesthetic intuition than we do in mere conceptual self-consciousness. It is an error to think that aesthetic intuition is unselfconscious or nonconscious in a sense similar to perceptive consciousness. In aesthetic intuition we transcend the plane of conceptual self-consciousness, include it internally, and truly attain to self-consciousness of the free self. Just as the content of consciousness in aesthetic expression arises as the content of this free self, it attains to a unique individuality.7

It is easy to be confused by the phrase free self into assimilating what Nishida is saying here to western analogues, but it has to be remembered that what he means by the term free self is not an individual self as ordinarily experienced at all. The free self is the original self, and what Nishida is claiming is that aesthetic experience properly so called is very close to what in his first categorial framework he calls pure experience, entirely free of the self/not-self distinction as that is present in standard experience. From the standpoint of the free self, there is no special aesthetic form of consciousness: Pure feeling, pure consciousness, is always aesthetic. It is not that the content of feeling is beautiful as mere sensory content. When there is immediate synthesis in the personal horizon – the horizon of absolute will, as pure act in which colors distinguish themselves, that is, in the intentionality of pure visual perception – colors suddenly some to life; they become living colors in themselves – that is, aesthetic objects. When we become eye and ear with our entire being, feeling passes over into things and is naturally accompanied by the flow of aesthetic emotion as expression.8

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It is very important to be clear about what Nishida means by feeling in this passage, as this concept and the assertions in which it is embodied are the key presuppositions in Nishida’s subsequent analysis of beauty. By feeling he does not mean to indicate one type of mental content among many, discrete emotions that can be readily introspected in standard consciousness and are discussed by psychologists as existing on a scale between happiness and unhappiness and whose varieties are distinguished by the qualities of the intellectual elements (propositional contents) that accompany them. By contrast, he comments, “I think that feeling is not just one aspect of mental phenomena; rather, I hold that it is the fundamental condition for the establishment of consciousness.”9 Feeling in this sense is what he calls pure feeling in An Inquiry into the Good, the root condition of consciousness as such, constitutive of consciousness. It is appropriate also to caution against a further possible misunderstanding. It may seem that Nishida is adopting a position similar to that found in certain varieties of European Romantic aesthetics in which aesthetic experience is in effect identified with mystical experience, a direct union with a personal god, an experience which is also described as one in which the self/not-self distinction does not apply. The following description of aesthetic experience by Wackenroder is quite typical of this approach. He is describing the experience of visiting an art gallery: I compare the enjoyment of the more noble works of art to prayer…That one is…a favourite of heaven who waits with humble longing for the chosen hours when the gentle, heavenly beam comes down to him voluntarily, splits open the shell of earthly insignificance with which the mortal spirit is generally covered, and releases and displays his more noble inner self; then he kneels down, turns his open heart toward the brilliance of heaven in silent rapture, and saturates it with the ethereal light; thereupon he stands up, happier and more melancholy, with a fuller and lighter heart, and applies his hand to a large, good enterprise.10

Nishida’s view, as will become clearer, is remote from this. One reason is that he does not believe in a god who is personal in any sense, and he denies firmly that his view of religion is mystical11: Nishida’s Zen was not other-worldly in the way in which Wackenroder’s mystical Christianity was, and this important fact distances his view of aesthetic experience from many accounts written from within the context of the Christian mystical tradition. The other reasons for his differentiation of aesthetic and religious experience will become clearer in the final section later. One further point needs to be made about aesthetic experience in Nishida’s thought. In analyzing aesthetic experience as he does – as epistemologically fundamental and prior to standardly conceptualized experience – Nishida is motivated by truth to experience, by empirical considerations, one can say, rather than by the demands of logic. His metaphysics of absolutely contradictory identity of one and many does not of itself entail that he has to analyze aesthetic experience in this way. He could, for example, regard it consistently as involving something much more like standard levels of conceptual processing, but with important elements of selfreference deleted. This would produce something much more like a western contemplative account, such as Bullough’s psychical distance view.12 The impulsion behind his account of aesthetic experience, I would argue, is rather an empirical one: he is reflecting on his own aesthetic experience and comparing it to other Zen-based experiences in his own life.

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Beauty In the previous section, we have seen that Nishida claims that pure consciousness (in his technical sense of that term) is always aesthetic, and that feeling is constitutive of that consciousness, not merely one element in it among many. The primary object of aesthetic awareness or pure consciousness is beauty. Now whatever is an object of this sort of consciousness logically cannot be a property of an object in the world in any straightforward way, for pure consciousness or feeling (these terms are interchangeable) is prior to the subject–object distinction. Accordingly, Nishida has to analyze the idea of beauty in a special way: he is logically excluded from identifying it with (for example) symmetry, or a particular type of line, or any combination of properties of objects, or (in the way proposed by the late Frank Sibley) that beauty is a noncondition-governed supervenient property of objects. All such theories of beauty presuppose conceptualizations of objects occurring at levels of consciousness much more superficial than that with which he is concerned. His Zen framework pushes him in another direction. He begins (as he must) by denying that beauty can be assimilated to ordinary properties of objects in the world. Beauty “does not qualify a thing in the same sense that red or blue does…needless to say, [it] is not an existential quality of things, for aesthetic feeling is a subjective state aroused by things.”13 The missing premise here is that beauty is always an object of feeling (in his sense) and so in a particular way requires consciousness before it can come into being. However, his premises allow him to agree with the Kantian view that this dependence on consciousness does not entail that beauty is radically subjective. Indeed, granted his analysis of the term feeling he must (and does) argue that the experience of beauty must include a demand for universality of a particular kind: I think the very fact that we say feeling is a kind of consciousness already implies that it is a transindividual, transtemporal, and transspatial intentionality in its own right…Every phenomenon of consciousness that immanently includes its object must be regarded as including a requirement of universal validity. This requirement of universal validity, which transcends space and time, is a sine qua non for the establishment of consciousness. The factual existence of such a requirement presupposes the existence of a transindividual consciousness.14

Pure consciousness is always aesthetic, and so the beauty that is its object or content must be universal, since pure consciousness is transindividual. However much he may agree with Kant on this point, however, he denies the Kantian view that there is a valid distinction to be made between purely formal beauty and beauty that depends on content: In my view, there is no beauty without content; in the beautiful, there must be an internal life that can be expressed, and the expression of pure internal life is always felt as the beautiful. If we understand the essence of formal beauty in Kantian terms, it cannot be said to be mere formal beauty, as Kant himself thought, but, rather, must express the content of our pure rational life. Must we not see a spiritual act of the power of understanding as the expression of the content of the act itself, which reflects from the standpoint of the act underlying all acts? Formal beauty must be a kind of beauty having content in such a sense. Various kinds of contents of life derive from our various intentional acts, and various kinds of aesthetic beauty similarly derive from these acts.15

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Nishida is, here, drawing consequences from the elements of Fichte’s philosophy, which he accepted during the second phase of his thought. The pure experience that underlies everything is not inert: if it were, then the existence of change would be inexplicable. At this period of his career, Nishida favored Fichte’s concept of the Act (Tathandlung or as he here puts it, the act underlying all acts) as the best way of conceptualizing the condition of pure consciousness. The latter must be a will, in some sense, and a will manifests itself by acting.16 Thus, what some may regard as purely abstract forms (like arabesques) Nishida construes as manifestations or expressions of acts. The suppressed premise in his argument is that whatever expresses or manifests a will cannot be said to be free of content. A will does not act randomly: it has a direction, and this (Nishida assumes) is enough to give any act of will a content. (One might debate, of course, whether the term expression is being used here in anything like its ordinary usage. In Nishida’s usage here, all acts are expressive. One can also question whether being a manifestation of a will entails that any act must have in an ordinary sense something we can call a content.) A further and related point on which Nishida insists is that, from a certain standpoint, all things are beautiful: In this standpoint there is nothing that is not beautiful. As Arthur Symonds states, everyone sees beauty in the human breast, but not in the shoulder blade; everyone sees beauty in the Alps at dawn, but few see beauty in a stagnant marsh. However, these are nothing more than forms of the same essential beauty…As the objective world of pure will there is nothing whatever that is not beautiful. Even in vulgar and ugly things we can discover profound beauty as expressions of human life.17

This is not a common view in the west and it is related to one of the aspects of Buddhist thought that westerners find it hardest to accept. If all things manifest the Buddha nature, then in a sense everything is all right as it is. This is a difficult conclusion to accept in moral terms, and it is no less odd to westerners in its aesthetic manifestation, as here. In Nishida’s case, the key premise once again concerns expression: the one is fully present in every manifestation as the many (one of the reasons, of course, why a haiku, which epitomizes an instant, can say all that needs to be said about the universe) and consequently all things must in a sense be equally valuable as expressions of the one. Provided we accept Nishida’s link between beauty and expression, he can make his argument.

Artistic Creativity Though as has been noted above the analogy is by no means perfect, at some points Nishida’s aesthetic does resemble that of the Romantic movement in Europe, especially as developed in the writings of German theorists at the end of the eighteenth century. Like Nishida, these latter conceived of reality as having infinite depth, and this depth could not be penetrated by the use of reason – only the creative imagination of the artist was capable of rending the veils which separate us from the real. This statement by Novalis is typical:

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We dream of travelling through the universe – but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us – the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity and its worlds – the past and future – is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows – it throws its shadow into the realm of light. At present this realm certainly seems to us so dark inside, lonely, shapeless. But how entirely different it will seem to us – when this gloom is past, and the body of shadows has moved away. We will experience greater enjoyment than ever, for our spirit has been deprived.18

Though (as has been noted above) the position taken on the one/many relation is not the same in Nishida’s thought as it is in most forms of European idealism, it is close enough for one not to be surprised at the special epistemic status he gives to the creative activity of the artist. A key concept in his analysis of this activity is what he calls intuition, about which something needs to be said. In common with a number of other philosophers, Nishida reserves the term intuition (chokkan) in his epistemology for a mode of awareness distinct from standard self-conscious experience, i.e., what Kant would call awareness experienced under the forms of intuition and the categories and subject to the transcendental unity of apperception. It is to be stressed that in Nishida’s usage it is distinct from sensation: …intuition is not the judging of the original consciousness by the later one, but simply knowledge of facts just as they are. Accordingly in intuition, erring or not erring is out of the question…‘Intuition’…does not refer simply to the activity of sensation. At the base of thinking there is always a certain unifying reality that we can know only through intuition. Judgment arises from the analysis of this intuition.19

Intuition for Nishida is the most fundamental mode of conscious awareness, epistemologically prior to conceptual judgment: …intuition can be considered to be the basic source of the establishment of consciousness, and its content can be considered to be what is given to us. That perception and expression are considered to be the foundation of aesthetic feeling must be in the sense of this kind of intuition. The intellectual content included within perception and representation does not become an aesthetic object; but the content of the union of act and act becomes the content of the beautiful.20

Since the ultimately real is a will, such intuition is not passive but active: “The content of artistic intuition is something in which act itself directly becomes content.”21 The content of an aesthetic intuition, it is to be stressed, is not what Nishida here calls the intellectual content of ordinary experience, that is, that aspect of the content which is standardly conceptualized under the Kantian categories (etc), but a more profound and basic level of experience. This basic level consists (if that is a suitable verb to use for what properly speaking does not have components) of the acts of the Will itself. What Nishida here refers to as “the content of the union of act and act” is nothing less than the activity of reality itself, contradictorily identical with its manifestation in ordinary experience but revealed without that overlay (as it were) in aesthetic intuition. Nishida regards the Act underlying all acts as creative, and indeed, it makes no sense to regard it otherwise: there is no sense to be attached to the notion that it follows any preexisting pattern or model, since it is in every sense ultimate. Accordingly, the creative activity of the artist becomes in this aesthetic (as in its European Romantic analogues) a manifestation of the fundamental activity of

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reality itself. This epistemological thesis underlies Nishida’s analysis of artistic creativity and his view of the nature and function of art: artistic creativity first. As has already been noted, one of the most frequently recurring features of descriptions of aesthetic experience, whether of the artist or the spectator of art, is that the demands, desires, and purposes of the phenomenal ego, the central feature constitutive of standard consciousness, are either greatly mitigated or disappear in the aesthetic state. Moreover, in the context of one/many metaphysics, it tends also to be the case that the aesthetic state is regarded as epistemologically privileged in some way over standard consciousness. Both these statements are satisfied by Nishida’s analysis of creativity, though the precise conceptual articulation he employs is his own. He begins by asserting that aesthetic creativity does not proceed by means of ratiocination (a property of more superficial levels of self-awareness) but involves a more direct grasp of what there is by the creative consciousness: there are few or no conceptual filters, as it were, between the lens (consciousness) and the object, because the whole conceptual apparatus which relates events to the needs of the surface ego is in abeyance: …when the sculptor is sculpting and when the painter is painting, each becomes a process of seeing only. Plotinus states that nature does not create by seeing, but, rather, that nature’s seeing is creation. In this way the artist becomes nature itself. If we consider that the visual act is one great élan vital, then art is the overflow of the surge of that greater life that cannot flourish completely within the channels of the ordinary eye.22

A great deal of the ordinary conceptual apparatus we deploy in standard experience has no role in this mode of consciousness, where even the most basic distinctions are in abeyance: “We ultimately cannot understand this kind of artistic standpoint, in which intuition becomes creation, if we think of the thing and the mind as independent realities or of knowledge and the will as independent acts.”23 Another way of putting this is that objects of consciousness need not always also be objects of cognition: The artist senses his special ‘knack’ as a kind of force, but is not cognitively aware of it – such awareness would destroy it. What the artist senses may elude conceptual grasp and verbal expression, but it is not therefore less clear and distinct than what the thinker thinks.24

Such a condition of consciousness is not easily articulable in terms of conceptual frameworks that ex hypothesi precisely do not apply when it obtains. Conceptually articulated standard experience rationally construed produces knowledge, whereas direct unmediated aesthetic intuition produces something deeper than knowledge, an experience of unfathomable significance. In common with many thinkers from traditions all over the world, Nishida found it impossible not to accept that in the experience of absolute beauty we are in the presence of some deep meaning: In the act of aesthetic creation, personal content appears in the world of immediate perception directly as reality, without, as it were, passing through the world of cognitive objects constructed by reason. In other words, personal content appears in the world of experiential fact without passing through the construction of the categories of thinking.…its expression has an immovable objectivity similar to that of nature itself, in contrast to our psychological self. As something that is grounded on a unity of action that is deeper than knowledge, it has unknowable significance, in contrast to knowledge.25

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Since Nishida defines the natural world as the world constructed by the categories of rational thought, he can deduce, strikingly, that: The act of aesthetic creation is not an event in the natural world. Of course, it may be viewed in this way from the standpoint of knowledge, but, if we think in this way, the universal validity of the beautiful must be lost. In the horizon of a pure act of aesthetic creation, experience is grounded on an a priori different from that which constructs the natural world, and we construct a different objective world; in other terms, we construct the objective world of pure will in the intentionality of pure will and construct the world of culture different from, and of an even higher order than, the natural world.26

Because it does not involve those levels (so to speak) of the self at which categorial processing of experiential data occurs, aesthetic creativity avoids certain forms of subjectivity. Put in epistemological terms what occurs is a mode of experience of unmediated directness, and there is every reason to regard such experience as of the utmost objectivity because in a real sense no subject is involved. Nishida accordingly, though by his own Zen route, arrives at a conclusion quite close to that of the European Romantics that the process of artistic insight delivers a level of truth beyond that available to reason: “The act of artistic creation is not merely the seeing of things subjectively; it is the seeing of things objectively, the discovery of profound reality.”27 He makes the same point in other works, e.g., One could not say that the painter’s or novelist’s study of…unique personality is unclear or contentless in comparison with the scientist’s knowledge of electricity, for the artist’s consciousness is no less determinate than the scientist’s, and may be superior in terms of its grasp of the real…Cognition is quantitatively objective but qualitatively it can be classed as subjective, while art is qualitatively objective and in immediate contact with the inner absolute will.28

This is a direct consequence of the epistemology and metaphysics of Zen (and indeed other logically analogous philosophies): cognition is an activity of the phenomenal self that articulates the world in relation to the needs of that self. Such cognition (normal experience) is not to be regarded as objective, since it ineludibly involves the point of view of a limited subject with specific interests. Objectivity in awareness is obtained only when there is awareness without a self, and aesthetic awareness, in Nishida’s view, is such a condition, albeit a temporary one.

Art Consistently with the view of creativity just outlined, Nishida regards art not at all as a means of diversion, nor as a pretty way of wrapping up subject matter which could be communicated just as well some other way, in plain prose (as it were) – he is as remote as can be from a dulce et utile approach to art. Nor is art a means by which to express private, subjective imagined worlds, as it is in some varieties of western Romanticism. On the contrary, since art is the result of a mode of experience that achieves maximal objectivity in terms of grasp of the real, it is to be regarded as a means by which we have access to the depths of reality:

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Art manifests “the truly objective viewpoint, wherein the universal contains the specific and the individual is immediately the whole.”30 In Nishida’s epistemology, as has been noted already, standard ratiocination does not result in knowledge of or acquaintance with the real; as he puts it, “…the light of reason cannot exhaustively illuminate the foundation of reality.”31 Such acquaintance is possible only via intuition in which the self/object distinction is either diminished or absent. Moreover – and this was a theme which was to become more prominent in Nishida’s thought as it developed – such intuitions are not inactive, contemplative states, but manifest themselves in action, since they are direct manifestations of a dynamic reality, what he calls a will in his Fichtean phase. In aesthetics, these ideas are what lie behind his insistence on the importance of both materials and technique in art. The artist thinks through action: The artist thinks through his technique. Each artistic thought has its own unique characteristic that cannot be expressed by another, and at the same time has its limitation therein. For example, in language the freer the means of expression becomes, the more deeply and superbly it can express the world of thought.32

Again “The artist does not think idly without taking up his brush. Only when he takes up his brush and faces the canvas does it become clear how he should paint, and an infinite direction opens up before him.”33 These remarks suggest a further example of the way in which Nishida’s thought now approaches and now distances itself from western analogues which at first blush might appear reasonably close, in this case the idealist aesthetic to be found in the works of Croce and Collingwood. In the earlier section on artistic creativity, we have seen that for Nishida this type of conscious activity can be described as noncognitive seeing, in which seeing is creating. This leads Nishida to have sympathy with one of the propositions that make up the Croce–Collingwood theory, namely that in artistic creation there is nothing corresponding to the idea of means and ends, no preconceptualized goal at which such activity is aimed. A work of art is not a gadget designed to embody a preconceived function or convey a preconceived meaning. As Nishida puts it, an artistic work differs fundamentally from a manufactured product. It is not made in accordance with a certain goal; it does not move from the many to the one. Rather, it moves from the one to the many.34

Yet in the earlier paragraph, we see Nishida adamant as to the importance of the medium in art, a point that Collingwood is committed to denying and that causes him severe problems of internal consistency.35 Nishida does not have this problem: since for him one and many are identical; he has no need to diminish the status of the many (the individual works of art) or what they are made of, and here, he certainly has the better of the Croce–Collingwood view.

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Nishida’s position on the degree to which the various arts have anything in common is not straightforward. At times, he writes (consonantly with the remarks quoted in the preceding paragraph) as if each art, and indeed each subgenre within the arts, has its own appropriate range of expression uncapturable in any other form or medium. Thus, in an essay on the line drawings of Max Klinger, he writes that, “In each medium of artistic expression there is a spirit peculiar to that material that cannot be expressed by any other material.”36 Line drawing is the best medium (Nishida claims) for a visual artist who wishes to follow his own expression, rather than merely rendering visible nature: “We are able to give free rein to certain spiritual moods only in line drawing.”37 Again, he claims that in music there is a truth that can only be expressed in music, and analogously for painting and literature.38 At other times, however, he is inclined to stress (if not in precise terms) a certain similarity between the arts, though he is manifestly remote from an essentialist view of art of the art is imitation/expression type: …I cannot help recognizing some internal unity among the various arts. Indeed, I view the various arts as expressions or aspects of one multidimensional and infinitely rich aesthetic world that follows the special characteristics of its sensory material.39

Since the real (the subject matter of art) is of infinite richness, it must follow that no single or particular art form can encompass it all: hence, Nishida can reasonably claim that each art form has its proper domain of expression. On the other hand, this reality is one as well as simultaneously many, and so its manifestations in art must also reflect this unity. Nishida is tracing out exactly the consequences of his metaphysics.

Art, Truth, and Morality Nishida has a number of points to make about the relationship of the true, the beautiful, and the good, but one has always to be careful, in construing his remarks, to bear in the mind the metaphysical and epistemological bases of his thought. By his own route, for example, he comes to his own version of the doctrine associated in the western tradition with Aristotle that art is more philosophical than history, in Nishida’s case because of its relation to a certain sort of truth deeper than the propositional: In something beautiful, we must come in contact with some immediately objective value at its basis. It goes without saying that art does not reproduce factual truth. Art, in essence does not aim at reproduction of conceptual, factual truth. It is not artificial in that it no longer has such goals, for artificiality which confesses to being artificial is not artificial. On the contrary, even in myths and children’s stories there are many profound, human feelings. From these we can discover more of the eternal truths of human life than from history.40

The assertion that art does not aim at conceptual truth (which includes propositional truth) follows from the previous assertions that creative aesthetic intuition does not involve the subject/object distinction, at least in anything like the way it manifests itself in standard consciousness. What is manifested in art, in Nishida’s view, is

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truth-to-reality, where reality is beyond conceptual articulation. The parallel with Aristotle, accordingly, cannot be pushed very far. Art is certainly a vehicle for truth in Nishida’s aesthetic, but not for conceptual truth. If truth is an aesthetic virtue for Nishida, it is truth in this special sense. Yet while this is so, Nishida is not inclined (as were some European Romantics) to identify art with religion, nor to make a religion of it, nor to claim that it is in any straightforward way an agent for moral good. The early Romantic view is summed up admirably by Friedrich Schlegel: The priest as such exists only in the invisible world. In what guise is it possible for him to appear among men? His only purpose on earth will be to transform the finite into the infinite; hence he must continue to be, no matter what the name of his profession, an artist.41

As he puts it more crisply later in the same work, artists “are Brahmins, a higher caste.”42 For the Romantics, art stimulates the imagination, and the imagination is our only means of access to the infinite, eternal, divine reality. Nishida takes a different view: Poetry and painting.…reflect only one aspect of human life. They offer no criticism of moral good or evil whatsoever; even evil things can become beautiful as objects of art. In moral behaviour duty faces the self as a unique duty that must be followed, whereas we can find infinite beauty in an object. In the beautiful we are free. Art ultimately cannot avoid a playful mood.43

Indeed, Nishida regards aesthetic intuition and moral awareness as forms of consciousness with very different properties, and to understand this properly it is necessary to say something briefly about his conception of morality. He disagrees with Kant over the latter’s assertion of the key importance of motive in moral conduct. For Nishida, mere motive cannot have moral value: what has moral value is our actual practice, our decision, a manifestation of our will. Like everything else, the moral will must be a manifestation of the contradictorily identical reality of Nishida’s metaphysics, but it takes a form quite different from aesthetic intuition: Reality entirely independent in itself is a unity, as well as infinite differentiation and development; it possesses infinite contradictions within itself – indeed, contradiction itself becomes the unity. The direction of unity in concrete reality is aesthetic subjectivity. The direction of its differentiation and development is the moral imperative. Thus both aesthetic intuition and the moral imperative take reality as their point of departure, but the moral will in such a direction is opposed to aesthetic intuition at the point of being an infinite endeavour to reach its ultimate point. Unity at the ultimate point of morality must no longer be art but religion. Religion transcends and includes knowledge; it transcends and includes morality, as well. Therefore, religion in one aspect resembles art, but, like morality, it is thoroughly rigorous and practical.44

Moral action only makes sense in the universe manifested as differentiated individuals: it can only arise in a universe that contains more than one individual. Hence, it follows from Nishida’s premises that consciousness of moral issues is diametrically opposed in kind to aesthetic consciousness: the former presupposes awareness of differentiation; the latter tends to experience in which differentiations are suppressed. Both the moral and the aesthetic standpoints are transcended by that of religion. To experience reality directly one must adopt the standpoint of religion: “Religion

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may be called the artistic standpoint of transcendental consciousness, while art is the religious standpoint within partial experience.”45 Works of art still embody a degree of categorial processing and cannot capture the wholly unconceptualizable dynamism of the absolute or pure experience. Only in religious experience is this dynamism experienced directly: “If art (pure perception) is the absolute affirmation of a content, thought is its negation, and the negation of this negation, or the absolute affirmation of the whole, is the standpoint of religion.”46

Nishida retained this thesis of the gulf between art and religion to the end of his life. The following remark is from his last book, Bashoteki r onri to shuk yoteki sekaikan (The Logic of [the] Place [of Nothingness] and the Religious Worldview) “There cannot be anything like an aesthetic religion. Persons may confuse the two through the word intuition, but aesthetic and religious intuition point in opposite directions.”47

Conclusion I hope it is clear by now why I claimed at the start of this essay that Nishida’s thought is not only of the greatest intrinsic interest but also has a special utility in the context of comparative philosophy. In his aesthetics as in the rest of his thought we find a genuine philosophy: this is no mere academic exercise, but a system of thought that is completely authentic, worked out with painstaking care at the deepest conceptual levels. Nishida’s thought, like that of Spinoza whom he so admired, is an attempt to articulate a worldview governed by a powerful and fruitful organizing intuition, in Nishida’s case an understanding of experience deeply indebted to Zen and epitomized in his notion of pure experience. Precisely because he chose to try to articulate this intuition in terms borrowed from the western philosophical tradition, and did it so thoroughly, Nishida came to realize that ultimately, western categories would not suffice, and that an new logic, Zen-derived, was needed if his experience was to be articulated accurately. There was a limit, he found, to useful borrowing, and the reason for this limit is an incommensurability, at the most profound level, between the basic assumptions of western philosophy, and the Zen experience, which formed his deepest convictions about the way the world is. This limit to conceptual adaptation is evident in his aesthetics. Even where there are western analogs to his thought, which are relatively close, the parallel is never quite complete, as I have tried to show my means of examples drawn from the aesthetics of the Romantic movement. It might seem at first glance, for example, that Wackenroder’s assimilation of aesthetic experience to religious experience (prayer in Wackenroder’s case) marks a major similarity between the Romantic view and Zen, but if one looks more closely this proves not to be the case. The underlying reason is that the conception of the divine and its relation to the individual in the West is not the same as it is in Nishida’s Zen, and it will be recalled that Nishida declines to assimilate religious and aesthetic experience for a number of

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reasons, not least because Zen is not other-worldly, as Wackenroder’s religion was. Again, at one level of description, it might seem that Nishida was close to the Romantics on the issue of the nature of the creative activity of the artist, but once more on deeper investigation the closeness is not as great as may at first appear. The one–many relation in Romanticism is not quite the contradictory identity of Zen, and the activity of the real in the latter – the unfolding of a unity fully present in every individual (the one-hand clapping) – is not that of partial western analogues. Again, as has been said, works of art for Nishida cannot be regarded as the embodiments of merely imaginary worlds, however agreeable they may be imaginatively to inhabit. For Nishida, works of art must reveal reality itself: they are a direct transcription of the real at its deepest level. Again, because for Nishida the many are no less real than the one, he does not have to minimize the role of the materials of which works of art are made, as is the case (for example) in the Hegelian aesthetics of Croce and Collingwood in the west. Equally, following from what has already been said, Nishida does not identify priests with artists, nor art with religion, as most of the major European Romantic theorists did. This finding with regard to Nishida’s aesthetics (i.e., that there is final limit beyond which western categories will not do), I would argue, can be paralleled from the other areas of his philosophy; indeed, in a sense his entire philosophical development is a record of his realization that no set of western concepts would articulate satisfactorily what he wanted to say. I will give one of the many examples that can be found throughout the stages of Nishida’s philosophical development, in this case from the phase of his thought dominated by reflection on Fichte, the neoKantians, and Bergson, the example concerning the last named. Nishida’s sympathy for the ideas of Bergson arises from their joint concern with certain issues in the philosophy of time. The only ultimate in Nishida’s thought is pure experience, the universal underlying all other universals: all aspects of reality marked by concepts, even space, time, and the Kantian categories (for example), have to be derived from it. This basic position entails that Nishida has to take certain positions with regard to time, notably that clock time is nonultimate. He was accordingly predisposed to be sympathetic to the Bergsonian notion of la durée with its accompanying thesis that clock time, conceived of as a uniform flow of equal instants, is not the basic form of time, but a sophisticated conceptual abstraction deriving from the assimilation of time to space. He was equally sympathetic to the Bergsonian conception of duration as a seamless flow of interpenetrative, qualtitatively varied experience, much as he had been in the Jamesian notion of pure experience at the start of his philosophical career. Yet once again, Nishida found that these western ideas did not go far enough, and to see why it is necessary to grasp a point in his analysis of the process of judgment. The neo-Kantian thinker Rickert maintained that there is an absolute and ultimate distinction between on the one hand transcendent meaning and on the other acts of judgment, and accordingly Rickert construes acts of judgment as expressions of a meaning distinct from them. Nishida cannot accept this analysis. For him, judgment is not the expression of meaning but its activity, the particularizing act necessary for meaning. Judgment is:

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a far more basic fact of consciousness than can be brought under the category of time, consisting, as it does, in the unity of two objects of thought, or rather, in the self-differentiation of a single object.48

The internal development of consciousness is more immediate and fundamental than temporal relationships, which are founded on it, and not vice-versa. So far, Nishida can agree with a Bergsonian analysis. However, he cannot accept every aspect of the philosophy of duration. Bergson contends that no later consciousness can in principle repeat an earlier one, since every later one must be colored by awareness of what has gone before. Nishida objects that assertions like this about the unrepeatability of contents of experience must presuppose the existence of transtemporal consciousness. What is unrepeatable is a sensation on which we have already reflected, not the original sensation itself: “…a little reflection shows that a consciousness of time which does not imply the transcendence of time is self-contradictory.”49 Thus, duration as Bergson conceives it is not quite ultimate enough (as it were) for Nishida. The internal development of pure experience transcends all forms of temporal awareness and conceptions of time which derive from it. My final contention is that this repeated pattern in Nishida’s thought is an instance of a general and profound division between the mainstream of western philosophy on the one hand, and a major strand in a number of major nonwestern philosophies on the other. By the mainstream of western philosophy, I mean all elements of the western tradition, which accept Aristotelian individualism, i.e., the metaphysical assertion that individuals are ontologically ultimate: individuals of all types are real, and not appearance only. This ontological assertion is often associated with a belief that human individuality is not only real but also valuable and is to be cultivated. So strongly wedded is the west to this belief in individuals that in orthodox Christianity, for example, we are held to remain individual in some way even after death, when lacking the material body that forms our readiest principle of individuation. This belief in individualism, both in its ontological and evaluative forms, is precisely absent from philosophies that regard the goal of life as nirvana or one of its extremely close analogues, notably the state of moksha or the condition of a Daoist sage or sheng. In these philosophies (of which Nishida’s Zen-derived thought is an example) individualism is believed in the last analysis to be appearance only, and the condition of being a human individual a state better sloughed off in favor of the dissolution of individuality in nirvana (and so on). Once the goal of attaining nirvana is understood and systematically aimed for, the raison d’être of many of the practices and institutions of eastern societies becomes perfectly clear.50 Now either individualism is true or it is not; and either it is a valuable condition to be cultivated or it is a burden to be rid of as quickly as possible: these beliefs and practices are not, at any level of depth, compatible. The choice between the two is a genuine one: to try to combine the two results in a farrago and a charade, so often exemplified in the assumption by westerners that a bit of meditation will do the trick. (How few of them notice that most of a Zen monk’s time is spent not in meditation but on shugyō or daily life practice, a grind of ego-suppressing activity, much like western monastic routine in

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that respect). Just as the moral goals of the pursuit of individualism and of nirvana cannot be practically combined, neither can the insights of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras be made to fit with the axioms of Aristotelian logic. Here, we are faced with two conceptions of the world and of how to be a human being in it, which are both thoroughly worked out and each of which grounds a mode of being which, manifestly, humans can live and prosper by, yet which are in the last analysis incommensurable, and between which, somehow, one has to choose. To what extent such a choice is or can be rational, and what implications such a choice has for the debate over whether rationality is compatible with pluralism, is a subject for another study. In this essay, I have sought to show only how Nishida, with great penetration and consistency, realized that this incommensurability obtains. That is why, in his aesthetics as elsewhere, it is always a question of so far but finally no further with regard to the adoption of western philosophical categories.

Notes and References In the following notes, the works by Nishida cited most frequently are referred to by means of the following abbreviations: AM: Art and Mor ality trans. D.A. Dilworth and V.H. Viglielmo, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973. IG: An Inquiry into the Good trans. M. Abe and C. Ives, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. IRSC: Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness trans. V.H. Viglielmo with Y. Takeuchi and J.S. O’Leary, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. NRWV: Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious World-view trans. D.A. Dilworth, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987. 1. Some scholars identify three major phases in Nishida’s thought, others four, the latter regarding the emphasis to be found in his last works on the historical world, as sufficient to differentiate this phase from the mu no basho phase. I would argue that this is to a degree a matter of intellectual taste: the categorial framework based on the place of nothingness remains unchanged in the last works though he does place there additional stress on the importance of the historical world – Nishida changes the emphasis rather than radically changing the basic categories of his thought. The earlier changes in Nishida tetsugaku are more radical: those from the pure experience phase to the Fichte-Kant stage, and from the latter to the place of nothingness phase, are much deeper. 2. This statement from the Heart Sutra is typical: “…form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.” Buddhist Wisdom Books Trans: Edward Conze, London: Allen and Unwin, 1958, p. 81. 3. Early Memories in M. Abe (ed.) A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki Remembered, New York: Weatherhill, 1986, p. 11. 4. AM, pp. 107–108. 5. NRWV, p. 77. 6. The idea that in the context of aesthetic experience emotions are in us but not predicable of us is to be found in R.K. Elliott’s Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art, 1966, reprinted in H. Osborne (ed.) Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 147. Elliott is following Plato’s distinction (Lysis, 217C-218B) between ignorance that is in a person and predicable of that person and ignorance that is in a person but not predicable of them.

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7. AM, p. 112. 8. AM, p. 15. In An Inquiry into the Good , Nishida uses aesthetic experience as a means to indicate what pure experience is like: “Just like when we become enraptured by exquisite music, forget ourselves and everything around us, and experience the universe as one melodious sound, true reality presents itself in the moment of direct experience.” IG, p. 48. 9. AM, p. 14. See also Nishida’s essay Affective feeling in Y. Nitta and H. Tatematsu (eds.) Japanese Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979, pp. 223–247 (a translation of Kanjό from Ishiki no mondai/The Problem of Consciousness, 1920). 10. Wackenroder: How and in what manner one must r egard and use the W orks of the Gr eat Artists of Earth for the Well-Being of his Soul in M.H. Schubert (ed. and trans.) Wackenroder’s Confessions and Fantasies, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1971, p. 126. The same point is made, for instance, in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Belles-lettres and Art (Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst), 1801: “In the solemn, steady movement of devotional movement, there is inherent in every instant a sense of harmony and perfection, a unity of existence which to Christians is an image of heavenly bliss,” and in P. LeHuray and J. Day (eds.) Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 195. 11. As he puts it in NRWV: “…the mystical has no use at all in our practical lives. Were religion some kind of special consciousness of privileged persons it would merely be the idle matter of idle men.” p. 115. The same careful and emphatic refusal to identify aesthetic experience with religious experience can be found in the thought of the great Kashmiri aesthetician Abhinavagupta, whose views can be fruitfully compared with those of Nishida on the one hand and relevant western theories on the other. There is an excellent summary of Abhinava’s views with full references to primary sources in Chantal Maillard and Oscar Pujol Rasa: El placer estético en la tradición India, Varanasi: Indica, 1999, pp. 88. 12. Edward Bullough ‘Psychical Distance’ as a F actor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle , 1912 reprinted in E.M. Wilkinson (ed.), Aesthetics: Lectur es and Essays , Westport (Conn.): Greenwood Press, 1977, pp. 91–130. 13. AM, p. 5. 14. AM, pp. 8–9. 15. AM, p. 185, cf. Kant Critique of Judgment, Analytic of the Beautiful, Third Moment. 16. Nishida stresses the dynamic nature of reality in many places, e.g., “the most immediate, concrete reality for us is a system of self-generating, self-developing experience.” IRSC, p. 64. 17. AM, pp. 15–16 and 162. 18. Novalis: Miscellaneous Observations , para. 17 in M.M. Stoljar (ed. and trans.) Novalis: Philosophical Writings, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, p. 25. 19. IG, pp. 39–40. 20. AM, p. 19. 21. AM, p. 20. 22. AM, p. 27. 23. AM, loc. cit. 24. IRSC, p. 131. 25. AM, p. 52. The thesis that what we ordinarily call the natural world is a constructed abstraction is present in Nishida’s thought from the start, cf. IG, Ch. 12, passim. 26. AM, p. 161. 27. AM, p. 187. 28. IRSC, pp. 145 and 153. 29. AM, p. 33. 30. IRSC, p. 156. 31. AM, p. 47. 32. AM, p. 103. 33. AM, p. 104. 34. AM, p. 26; cf. R.G. Collingwood The Principles of Art , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938, pp. 20–26.

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Cf. Collingwood, op. cit., Ch. XIV, passim. AM, p. 34. AM, p. 35. AM, pp. 35 and 103. AM, p. 164. AM, pp. 98–99; cf. Aristotle Poetics 1451b. Friedrich Schlegel Ideas para. 16 in P. Firchow (trans.) Friedrich Sc hlegel: Philosophical Fragments, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 95. Friedrich Schlegel Ideas para. 146 in Firchow, op. cit., p. 108. AM, p. 163. AM, p. 104. On the difference between the moral and religious viewpoints, see also Nishida’s remarks on Kierkegaard in NRWV, p. 96. (The reception of Kierkegaard in Japan, and the reasons for it, is a subject of considerable interest in its own right. A good starting point is Masugata Kinya Kierkegaard’s Reception in J apan, Memoirs of Osaka Kyoiku University, series 1, v. 38, no. 1, 1989, pp. 49–65, in which Nishida’s reaction to Kierkegaard’s thought, together with that of many other Japanese, is summarized). IRSC, p. 153. IRSC, p. 151. NRWV, p. 93. IRSC, p. 27. IRSC, p. 48. I have developed this idea at more length in an essay East is East and West is West in Cristina Chimisso (ed.) Exploring Eur opean Identities , Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University, 2003, pp. 230–262.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Identity and Hybridity – Chinese Cultur e and Aesthetics in the Age of Globalization Karl-Heinz Pohl

Introduction: Culture and Identity Thirty years ago (1977), Thomas Metzger published a book that became well known in Sinological circles: Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political Culture. In this book, Metzger discusses a serious problem Chinese scholars were confronted with at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century: the modernization of China without giving up 2000 years of culturally valuable Confucian teachings. From the 1920s on, Confucian thought was replaced by Marxist ideology and, with the beginning of the Peoples’ Republic in 1949, the latter was firmly established as the new order of discourse. Metzger argues persuasively, however, in spite of the new leftist ideology that poured into China after the May Fourth Movement of 1919, that Confucianism was not relegated to the museum of History of Philosophy in China as Joseph Levenson (in his Confucian China and its Modern F ate, 1958) had predicted. Instead, Confucian thought – as an integral part of the Chinese cultural psyche – survived and remained influential, though not visible, in shaping modern China. Even radicals of that time, such as Mao Tse-tung, although they attempted to give China a completely new ideological order, were formed by their cultural tradition in such a way that it also influenced their political action.1 The aforementioned historical example is significant for our theme. It concerns the question of persistence of culture in the face of cultural encounters – both of the hostile kind, such as the first clash of civilizations between China and the West in the nineteenth century (after the Opium Wars), as well as of the latest and somewhat more amicable sort, the process of mingling and interpenetration of cultures called globalization.2 Hence, the significance of culture and cultural identity in the age of globalization remains an issue to be addressed. In present day debates, we find a variety of opinions on this question – all reflect, in one way or the other, the broader and much contended issue of global versus local or universalism versus particularism (or cultural relativism). Whereas some postmodern theoreticians assume that culture, generally, will become a museum piece, others claim that it is no longer politically correct – in an age of global assimilation and universal standards (such as human rights) – to speak of national cultures.

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They warn of the trap of essentialism, point to the rise of fundamentalism and terrorism and advise, instead, to focus on hybridity, migration, multiple identities, and cross-overs – in short, the US immigrant experience and ideology of the melting pot on a global scale. Other critics again, who do not belong to the postmodernist camp, object that the notion of a global hybrid humanity, how ever politically correct it may be, might meet certain difficulties in practice. Michael Walzer, for example, warns: Societies are necessarily particular because they have members and memories, members with memories not only of their own but also of their common life. Humanity, by contrast, has members, but no memory, and so it has no history and no culture, no customary practices, no familiar life-ways, no festivals, no shared understanding of social good.3

Can we thus still speak of culture and cultural identity in this new context? Another question is, though, whether people in other parts of the world, let us say in the Arabian countries, in African countries, India, Oceania, or China, share the (post)modern Western man’s (and woman’s) anxieties to speak assertively about culture. Or is the postmodern focus on hybridity and multiple identities not something that belongs solely to the postindustrial and increasingly multicultural Western societies – a discourse that does not have much relevance to people who have not ventured from these regions to the new promised lands of Western civilization? Walzer only talks about the shared understanding of the “social good” but what about the shared understanding of art and aesthetics? Aesthetics, as an epistemic discipline, is part and parcel of sciences and humanities, which, though set up by Western academics, have now become systems with universal or global significance. But other than in natural sciences such as physics, where there can only be one global and common to all form, there are still significant differences in humanistic disciplines such as philosophy, literature, or aesthetics as well as in the arts, for they are much more bound to social conditions and developments in the respective countries. Arts and aesthetics form particularly significant parts of a culture: Apart from language, the cultural framework of myths, images, allusions, as well as references to literature, art, religion, and philosophy, in short, the symbolic and aesthetic orientation (shared literary or artistic sensibilities) have formed, thus far, the basis of any cultural identity. In the following, the way of Chinese aesthetics shall be pursued – integrating today’s discussions about culture and identity – from the traditional to the modern period. The first section deals with the main characteristics of traditional Chinese aesthetics, which were (and often still are) considered to be at the basis of a Chinese cultural identity. In the second, the position of modern Chinese aesthetics shall be explored with reference to new debates about Chinese culture in the context of postmodernism and globalization. In a third and final section, the tension between Chinese tradition and Western modernity will be exemplified by a work of Wei Dong, a surrealistic artist now living in the USA. His work shall illustrate the crosscultural and postmodern characteristics of dislocation and cultural hybridity in modern Chinese art.

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Traditional Chinese Aesthetics Traditional Chinese aesthetics is a modern perspective on premodern Chinese art that includes not only poetry, calligraphy, and painting (as the most prominent scholarly arts) but also architecture, pottery, bronzes, music, martial arts, and so on.4 Although it would be impossible to find common traits to all of these disciplines, the three aforementioned scholarly arts do share some common traits (particularly in the combination poetry and painting, on the one hand, and painting and calligraphy, on the other); and these traits did have an impact on a cultural identity for Chinese.5 A first characteristic of traditional Chinese aesthetics is to value suggestiveness as a poetic quality in a work of art. In poetry itself, this quality can be observed in a metaphorical language, which is, first of all, determined by images from nature; second, the focus is on meaning behind the language and the images. Hence, we find notions such as “meaning beyond words” (yan wai zhi yi ) or “images beyond images” (xiang wai zhi xiang ).6 A suggestive quality is also required in painting: Ideally, a painting should convey a poetic image, something that reverberates beyond the actual painted scene (miao zai hua wai – “the intriguing quality is beyond the painting”).7 Hence, traditionally, Chinese painting does not aim at mirroring the world in the sense of mimesis (realistic representation of a scene), and it thus lacks the feature of linear perspective, which became dominant in European painting since the Renaissance. Instead, the perspective, for example, in a hand scroll, unfolds from scene to scene as it is unrolled.8 A second characteristic is the demand for a “vital quality” (qi), which should convey a sense of liveliness in a work of art. Here, specifically painting and calligraphy are implied (although vital quality is also discussed in poetry). Such traits are not only in accordance with the first principle of Chinese painting: qiyun shengdong – “vital resonance and live movement”, formulated by Xie He in the sixth century AD,9 but also touch upon cosmological ideas concerning a work of art, i.e., notions of natural creativity: A work of art should – ideally – come into existence like a work of nature, by the workings of the inexplicable dao – the “Way” of the universe (of which the said force qi is only an agent). Intrinsic to this idea is the importance of the calligraphic line – the contrast of black and white and the preference for painting in black ink, which emphasize the dynamic liveliness of the brushstroke. Movement and dynamics in black and white are taken to be aesthetically more interesting than static color. A third characteristic refers to the cosmological ideas already mentioned, which promote the balance between binary opposites in a work of art. In poetry, for example, we observe a predilection for parallelism through which certain couplets in a poem are antithetically juxtaposed and connected. This inclination toward harmonizing mutually not opposing but rather conditioning forces derives from the pervading influence of yin-yang thought. This can also be observed in a Chinese landscape painting (called in Chinese shanshui hua – “mountain and water painting”): A landscape painting unites the two said

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forces yin and yang as mountain (shan, a manifestation of the male yang quality) and water (shui, a manifestation of the female yin). Hence, a landscape painting catches the harmonious cosmological order of the world and its forces in a microcosmic way. A fourth characteristic in Chinese poetics and art theory gives weight to two seemingly contradictory notions: to naturalness (ziran) and regularity (fa). The stunning aesthetic effect of this unity of opposites can best be observed and studied in the so-called regular poems (lüshi), flourishing in the golden age of Chinese poetry, the Tang Dynasty (seventh century to tenth century). These poems have to follow a strict set of rules concerning length and number of lines, tone patterns, parallelism, and the like. Yet, while reading the works of not only the greatest poets of that time, one has the impression of absolute naturalness and ease in style. Similar characteristics can be observed in Chinese painting, which also, traditionally, was defined by certain rules. Yet in the works of great masters, one experiences a sense of freedom from rules and restrictions. Thus, the painter Shitao (ca. 1641–1717) proclaims: “The highest rule is the rule of no rule (zhi fa, nai wei wu fa zhi fa ).”10 It basically means that all rules become so internalized that they turn out to be natural. The secret to this mastery lies in the notion of gongfu (Kungfu), i.e., excellence after arduous practice leading to a “perfect intuitive control”11 over the artistic medium that, traditionally, has been called “spiritual” (shen). It was particularly the so-called poet-painters of the literati class12 who laid down lasting standards of Chinese aesthetics. Because of their preference for calligraphic qualities and disregard of realism (mimesis), they not only appreciated scholarly characteristics such as painting in black ink (remindful of calligraphy), but also developed an amateurish unrealistic quality, which can be described as “cultivated clumsiness.” Because of their reverence of great past scholar-painters, together with their love for allusions (not only in poetry but also in painting), much of the art of the later centuries became what Max Loehr once termed “arthistorical art”.13 Traditional Chinese aesthetics, with its attributes of suggestiveness, liveliness, harmony of opposing (cosmolo gical) forces, cultivated clumsiness , and, lastly, a spiritual quality of naturalness and freedom achieved by strictly training according to set rules (fa), constitutes an entirely different world of art in comparison to the Western tradition (although there are certainly overlapping elements). It is no wonder, then, that these characteristics were understood by the Chinese themselves as the most sublime features of Chinese culture. These features served, well into the modern period, as fundamental elements of a Chinese cultural identity. Hence, in their monumental (though not completed) History of Chinese Aesthetics (Zhongguo meixue shi), Li Zehou and Liu Gangji marked as the last and most important characteristic of traditional Chinese aesthetics the idea that an “aesthetic consciousness” (shenmei jingjie) was regarded as the “highest and noblest consciousness to be attained in life”.14

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Aesthetics in Modern China – Encounters with Western Thought In modern times, aesthetics assumed a special place in China’s grappling with Western thought: First, aesthetics constituted a realm relatively free of politics. For this reason, it attracted Chinese to explore freely and without political restraint occidental thought. Second, philosophy of art as part of aesthetics offered Chinese intellectuals the possibility of linking up with their own traditional ideas. This was important because – unlike the mainstream of Chinese traditional social and political thought, particularly Confucianism – the Chinese aesthetic tradition had not been discredited by the reception of Western ideas and the radical antitraditionalism of the May Fourth period (1917–1923). Quite the contrary, when the Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth century began to define themselves in relationship to the West, they understood their own culture as an essentially aesthetic one. Thus, the encounter with Western thought, on the one hand, brought the Chinese a wealth of fascinatingly new ideas; it allowed them, on the other, to look for familiar concepts, which could be aligned with their own tradition. The president of the Peking University during the May Fourth period, Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), was one of the first to formulate the idea of the mentioned cultural aesthetic selfunderstanding of the Chinese. Through his studies in Germany, he was familiar with occidental philosophy, particularly with Kant. He regarded Westerners to be largely shaped by religion, whereas for China he held aesthetics (a combination of ritual, art, and ethics) to be the functional “spiritual” equivalent to religion in the West. For this reason, he demanded for modern China “aesthetic education in the place of religion”.15 As it was popular among culturally conservative intellectuals at this time16 to posit a Chinese “spiritual” against a Western “materialistic” culture, the affirmation of “spiritual” aspects in Chinese aesthetics added to this understanding of Chinese culture. A famous scholar, Wang Guowei (1877–1927), represents the early encounter of Chinese with European ideas. He coined basic aesthetic concepts for the twentieth century such as jingjie (“aesthetic state or consciousness”) or yijing (“aesthetic idea”)17 to denote a perfect aesthetic fusion of artistic idea (or feeling) with a concrete scene. Wang first used the term jingjie only with regard to poetry and without any theoretical explanation; but this term (as the earlier quote by Li Zehou and Liu Gangji illustrates) soon gained a general aesthetic meaning, signifying both an aesthetic idea as well as a most sublime state of mind. Wang Guowei derived his concepts from Chinese tradition (using Buddhist vocabulary), but they are also imbued with meaning that he found in Kant and Schopenhauer (Kant’s “aesthetic idea”); hence, they represent early intercultural exchanges of thought between China and the West. In his article, “The Spreading and Influence of German Aesthetics in China,” Liu Gangji showed that modern Chinese aesthetics was largely formed by the reception of German idealism.18 The discourse of Chinese aesthetics of the twentieth

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century, thus, was shaped by the questions of German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Because of many reasons (extensive periods of war, enormous problems of translation, etc.), this tradition of aesthetics – from Baumgarten and Kant to Marx – was received in China with a delay of about 100 years. As a result, and in a significant departure from their own tradition, modern Chinese aestheticians focused on categories derived from the European history such as beauty or tragedy, issues that had been completely absent in premodern Chinese thought on art. Hence, the encounter with Western aesthetics led Chinese scholars to unfamiliar ground, a situation that also resulted in a few creative misunderstandings of European ideas. Guided by the translation of the term aesthetics into Chinese as meixue: the “study of beauty,”19 much of modern Chinese aesthetics was to become – with the literal translation of the term aesthetics into Chinese – “beautology.”20 The prominent scholars in Chinese aesthetics in the middle of the twentieth century were Zhu Guangqian (1897–1986) and Zong Baihua (1897–1986) both of whom had studied in Germany and were quite familiar with Western thought. The former introduced Hegel’s aesthetic to China and tried to bridge Western and Chinese ideas; the latter, though a translator of Kant’s Third Critique and an admirer of Goethe, was equally focused on Chinese traditional resources and developed these ideas and concepts further (i.e., the notion of yijing which Wang Guowei had introduced but left without any theoretical elaboration21). Pursuing further the history of modern Chinese aesthetics, it is worth noting that, even in the ideologically rather rigid period of the 1950s (between 1956 and 1962), aesthetics was a field that allowed for a relatively free debate within the confines of a Marxist materialist approach to aesthetics.22 Apart from the concept of beauty, it was now also the Marxian idea of “practice” that was added to the discussion by Li Zehou (*1930), one of the leading scholars of aesthetics in China today. Taking his ideas from Marx’s “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” practice was for Li materially productive activity, such as making and employing tools.23 During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), aesthetics ceased to exist as a topic of discussion. Nevertheless, in the year this turmoil broke out in mainland China, one of the most influential books on Chinese aesthetics was published in Taiwan by Xu Fuguan: The Spirit of Chinese Art .24 It discusses Chinese art and aesthetics as it had been prefigured by Cai Yuanpei and others, that is, highlighting its spiritual dimension and its connection to a Chinese cultural identity. After the Cultural Revolution (in the 1980s), China experienced an unprecedented “aesthetics craze” mainly brought about by the writings of prominent aestheticians such as Zhu Guangqian, Zong Baihua and – most of all – Li Zehou. The latter was the towering figure of this period. On the one hand, he introduced new concepts such as subjectivity and practice, derived from a fusion of Kantian and Marxian ideas,25 and, on the other, he offered stimulating interpretations of the Chinese artistic tradition in his widely read The Path of Beauty (Mei de licheng)26 for which he had also employed ideas from Clive Bell and Susanne Langer. This craze was facilitated by the political thaw after the arrest of the “Gang of Four” in 1976: Having experienced a decade of chaos and disaster due to radical leftist politics, the Chinese Communist Party slowly departed from ideological notions

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such as class struggle and introduced the slogan “Practice as a sole criterion for truth” (shishi qiu shi ). Li Zehous idea of “practice” in the field of aesthetics only added to this new explorative climate. Furthermore, his coinage of other concepts, such as “sedimentation” (jidian) as a fusion of the social with the individual in a historical process, resulting in a “cultural-psychological formation” (wen hua xinli jiegou), significantly enriched the aesthetics debate of that period. These ideas led the way to a broader debate about aesthetics to include politics and culture – the “culture craze” (wenhua re)27 of the 1990s.

Aesthetics as Part of the Debate on P ostmodernism and Culture in China Today With the introduction of postcolonialism at the end of the 1980s, the focus shifted from theoretical aesthetics in the European tradition to culture.28 The 1990s saw a flood of assertive studies concerning Chinese culture (guoxue) of which arts and aesthetics, but also ethics, feature as prominent parts. Interestingly and ironically, this interest in Chinese culture was triggered again by new trends in Western thought: by the reception of Michel Foucault, and hence of postmodernism and poststructuralism, as well as the notion of “orientalism” by Edward Said and the ensuing postcolonial criticism. All this resulted in peculiar tensions, ambivalences, and ironies for aesthetics in China today – in the context of debates on culture and identity – that will be briefly looked at later with reference to the so-called postist craze (houxue re). A major thread running through the 150-year long history of Chinese modernity – from the Opium war up to today – is to “seek the ‘truth’ from Western ideas in order to ‘save’ China.”29 The “craze” about “postist studies” (houxue) in the socalled post-new-period (houxin shiqi) fits right into this scheme. The reception of postcolonial criticism led to the awareness of a hundred-year long self-colonization of the Chinese in terms of Western thought. As Zhang Kuan, one of earliest Chinese postcolonial critics (now living in the USA), puts it: “The main stream of Chinese modernity discourse has always been enchanted by the magical spell of the Western colonial discourse.”30 With the help of Western postcolonial thought, the focus of the Chinese debate thus shifted from defining Chinese modernity along the Western enlightenment paradigm (including ideas such as rationality, humanism, etc.) to recovering a Chinese “subjectivity” or “Chineseness” (zhonghuaxing). This “Chineseness,” as was now understood, had been buried and almost forgotten by a politically correct Western modernity discourse, which became the dominant new tradition since the May Fourth Movement (1919). Hence, the new cultural assertiveness led to a critique of the May Fourth paradigm – a delicate task, as the Chinese Communist Party defines itself with particular reference to this movement. Interesting in our context is the notion of “Chineseness” as it entails not only a specific Chinese way of thinking but, in particular, also Chinese ethics and aesthetics as part of a Chinese cultural identity.31

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This position, however, remained not unchallenged. Not only postmodern critics accused their postcolonial colleagues of essentialism – one of the gravest accusations possible in the postmodern discourse – but also New Humanists criticized the postcolonial position as neoconservative, and hence contradicting the Enlightenment paradigm of the May Fourth tradition, and, lastly, it was criticized (mainly from Chinese critics residing outside of China) for joining into the anti-Western rhetoric of the Chinese government. Regarding this last aspect, the charges are somewhat ambivalent, for the Chinese Communist Party considers itself, as mentioned, to be an essential part of the May Fourth legacy.32 As a result of this criticism, however, the debate lost some of its momentum. Through the depicted developments, however, and in contrast to the early phase of engagement with European philosophy, Chinese aesthetics, by now, has entered the sphere of politics. Summarizing, two characteristics are worth savoring: First, both positions in the controversy refer to Western thought – either promoting or challenging it. In the former case, we have a continuation of the discourse of “complete Westernization” (quanpan xihua ), prominent since the May Fourth movement; the latter can be called “expelling Western ideas with Western ideas” (yang paiwaizhuyi). Second, we can observe a phenomenon that Edward Said once labeled as “travelling theory”: A theory or a worldview, while being adapted at a place different from its origin, might not only change some of its features; it might be used to serve a completely different purpose than originally intended by its inventors.33 In China, postmodernism and postcolonialism as “travelling theories” serve to promote discourses on identity and even nationalism – a new “Chineseness” – with arts and aesthetics as its basis. This twist of thought is something that probably neither Michel Foucault nor Edward Said had in mind when they put forth their ideas. However, as their theories are also not without internal contradictions,34 this development can be taken as a natural course in the life cycle of a theory or as just another creative misunderstanding the way they are encountered frequently in intercultural loans and exchanges. After the 1990s, intellectual fashions (not only) in China changed again. With the turn toward the new millennium, Chinese debates on culture, art, and aesthetics are dominated by the notion of globalization. First of all, postcolonial critics, although they managed to put traditional Chinese aesthetics back on the agenda, did not succeed in ending the infatuation of the Chinese intelligentsia with the West. It seems that it is still mostly Western writings that attract Chinese scholars at the moment. Ironically, Western audiences, particularly concerning aesthetics, would be very much interested in ideas genuinely Chinese but, first of all, there seems not much to be published with a significant Chinese touch. Second, because of the language barrier, little has been translated from Chinese into Western languages. Instead, the Chinese, not only those who have studied abroad, are busy in what Gao Jianping calls the “translation industry.”35 Theoretical works in aesthetics and many other disciplines are frantically translated from Western languages (mostly English) into Chinese and are being just as eagerly sold and bought on the market. As a result of this predilection for Western theory, Chinese aestheticians feel a certain degree of isolation, as their work is not being acknowledged outside of

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China.36 Even a figure such as Li Zehou, who has in the meantime moved to the USA (he publishes in both English and Chinese) and whose popular books have been translated into other languages, hardly finds in the West an audience adequate to his acknowledgment in China.37 Surely, his concepts such as subjectivity and practice, as refreshing they might have been for a Chinese public in the 1980s, do not cause the same stir here in the West: After all, subjectivity had long been debunked by postmodern trends such as deconstruction, whereas practice as a Marxian idea lost its allure ever since the collapse of the Communist regimes east of the Berlin Wall after 1989. Thus, there is a certain risk facing these theoreticians to end up dealing with outdated concepts and to lag behind with their thought in comparison to the West, as there still is a considerable time lag in introducing the latest trends of Western theory to China. Therein lays, however, also a chance, that is, to pursue classical ideas without zeitgeist-conditioned anxieties and demands of the newest and most fashionable theories. Be that as it may, the Western centeredness will probably not be changing too soon. The West has defined the terms of discourse in the sciences and humanities, and thus also in philosophy and aesthetics; these disciplines are being practiced under conditions set up by European and American scholars, and it will still take a while until they might also be set by the Chinese themselves. Hence, there is no alternative for the Chinese to participating in the meanwhile global debates on aesthetics, culture, and identity, taking place mainly in the world of Western academics. A crucial question is, if they would be able to bring a particular experience or perspective to bear in these discussions, giving them somewhat of an exceptional point of view. As is well known, some Indian born intellectuals, such as homi bhabha or Gayatri Spivak, are now at the vanguard of postcolonial criticism, teaching at major US universities. With their Indian colonial background, in addition to being ardent deconstructionists, they were able to leave their mark in this field. What are the possibilities for the Chinese (and not just for them)? Will they only follow these intellectual fashions (as the postist craze suggests), or will they be able to criticize and challenge them, setting different marks, inspired, for example, by their own rich philosophical and aesthetic tradition? Chinese thought could (and should) be as much a common frame of reference as the thought of other local thinkers, from Plato to Derrida and Heidegger. After all, Western modernity is also nothing but a creative transformation of a long and rich local tradition, and modern Western theorists most naturally refer to this tradition in their writings, but they do not have a clue of non-European history of ideas. Another question is, however, if Chinese (or scholars from other non-Western countries) will have to move to the West for this purpose. Surely, no Chinese scholar would decline a professorship at Harvard or Columbia, as one can see by the many excellent Chinese already teaching there. The prospects are, though, that this focus will, in the long run, only further cement the Western centeredness in the humanities. Thus far, intercultural exchange – because of an asymmetric power relationship between the West and the rest – took place mainly on a one-way street; and in spite of all the emphasis on cross-cultural issues within the last decade, it will most likely remain this way for still a long time.

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Chinese Art and Aesthetics in the Context of Globalization There is a saying, “Art knows no borders.” This slogan appears to be appropriate for the new age of so-called global modern art. Yet, even in modern art, we might also only see what we know or, put differently, the more we know, the more we see. Modern artists, regardless of where they live, if in China, India, Africa, America, or Europe, seem to maintain similar ideas about art, derived from the Western tradition: A work of art should have an original concept; its purpose should be selfexpression and/or sociopolitical criticism. However, this is only the ideal side of global modern art; the real one is that art has become an integral part of the global market place. Hence, what can be observed around the most recent debates about postmodernism and globalization (not only) in China, is the trend toward consumerism: Art is a commodity much sought after. Although we can find a vibrant art scene in China, dominated by the aforementioned Western trends and characteristics, in terms of Chinese art, the Western audience with its money is interested in Chinese art “with Chinese characteristics” – how ever they may be defined. Moreover, where there is a demand, there is a supply. Chinese artists are moving along with the global streams of capital, that is, they move to the West, particularly to the USA, and thus it is not surprising that Chinese avant-garde artists, generally speaking, are known better in the West than in China.38 Here, they can supply local art (politically critical or not) for a global market and – on top of it – make a far better living than at home.39 Although the Western audience is interested in art with a native touch (one may call this predilection exoticom or not), sophisticated as it is, it also demands that this art has caught up with Western modernity. Hence, the supply must satisfy this double demand. At the end of these musings about Chinese aesthetics from tradition to modernity, a painting, dated 2002, by the Chinese artist Wei Dong (born in Inner Mongolia, now living in the USA) shall be discussed as an example of the trend toward a fusion of traditional Chinese and modern Western elements. It bears the title – not without relevance to our topic – “Culture Culture”40 (Fig. 1). Many of Wei Dong’s paintings, particularly those painted before 2003, show young half-naked Chinese women who pose in front of traditional Chinese landscape paintings, and the painting in question is no exception. In contrast to Western tradition, portrait paintings and depictions of human beings in general have never been considered prominent works of art according to Chinese traditional aesthetics (in comparison to landscape or bird and flower painting). “Culture Culture” shows a girl leaning on a Chinese garden rock in front of a monumental traditional Ming Dynasty landscape. The picture is a bewildering mix of details (Chinese landscape background, female figure, and her accessories), lacking fantastic Dali elements, but nevertheless appearing estranged and somewhat surrealistic. The female figure shows a number of remarkable features: Her scantily dressed body is painted in a realistic manner remindful of Renaissance paintings; the color of her skin appears rather white than yellow; blue veins are showing through the skin at many places, and the fingernails are colored red. She wears a skimpy pink outfit that somewhat resembles a loosely fitting bathing suit with many folds.

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Fig. 1 Wei Dong: “Culture Culture” (2002)

Altogether, the figure comes across as very female, except for head and face. Although she wears lipstick and has half open braids hanging at the sides of her head, the rest of the face appears rather masculine, with a broad nose, a big left ear, and the top of the head being half bald – the baldpate, in fact, is remindful of Mao Tse-tung (many of the women in Wei Dong’s paintings are half bald). There are a few interesting accessories: A red band is wrapped around her left arm indicating the “student on duty,” as was popular in the Mao period. A school bag with the red star of the Red Guards hangs over her left side, and a walking cane with a Mao head is squeezed under her right arm – it is the only object in the painting, which eerily casts a thin shadow on the ground. In her décolleté, she has – on one side – a bottle decorated with a traditional bird motif, which we usually find in the hands of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Chinese Buddhist goddess of mercy. In traditional iconography, Guanyin uses the bottle to sprinkle water to bless the believers; in Wei Dong’s picture, the bottle is sealed with a Communist red star. On the other side of her bosom, two bundles of 10-Yuan bills are exposed – some of the bills are flying around in the air on the left side of the picture. With her hands she clenches a book of which one can detect (when zooming into the picture) a few hints concerning title and content: a capital A and D – the insignia of Albrecht Dürer – as well as the last three letters of Dürer’s name (“…rer”).

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Thus, we have a medley of elements of traditional Chinese culture and religion, of the Cultural Revolution as well as of Western tradition and modernity – all in front of a traditional Chinese landscape painting. In the depiction of the figure, not only Western and Chinese elements, but also even male and female elements are fused together. Hence, the doubling of the term “culture” in the title of the picture might have an ironic meaning, suggesting a parody of culture or a postmodern cultural hodgepodge: a culture of bodily exposure, remnants of a cultural tradition (including art, an almost forgotten religion, and reminiscences of the Mao period), a culture of money and, finally, a barely detectable artistic homage to one of the greatest German Renaissance painters: Albrecht Dürer.41 The painting can probably be interpreted in different ways, depending on the focus – the meaning is in the eye of the beholder. If we give weight to its title then it successfully reflects the dislocated, hybrid, and transcultural (or cultureless?) situation of postmodernity. The picture does not, however, transmit any definitively negative or positive signals. Hence, the viewer is left with a strange but ambivalent impression of cultural alienation. In an earlier picture, interestingly, Wei Dong used the identical female figure but placed her in front of a different background. This painting (dated 1998) is part of a four-part polyptych with the title “My Attendants,” (Fig. 2) showing altogether four half-naked and half-bald young women (two of them armed!) in front of an overarching monumental traditional Chinese landscape painting.42 Another picture, dated 2000, with the title “Dragon and Businessman” shows a (business)woman, half-dressed in a traditional Chinese outfit and embraced by a

Fig. 2 Wei Dong: “My attendants” (1998)

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benevolent-looking dragon, hovering upside down on a Chinese garden rock in front of a largely empty traditional Chinese landscape.43 A few American accessories – such as Marlboro packages and playing cards floating through the air (in other paintings it is the motif of the American stars and stripes) – hint at the dislocation of Chinese culture, suggesting that Chinese culture has not only separated from its origins but has finally arrived in America or – vice versa – American culture has made it to China (Fig. 3). The above focus on (post)modern Chinese works of art, which, moreover, have not been painted in China but in the USA, do not offer any general conclusions concerning the situation of contemporary Chinese art and aesthetics. Yet, they illustrate, on the one hand, the trend toward a fusion of traditions; on the other, they also reveal a lasting preoccupation with aspects of the Chinese tradition. In the pictures discussed, there seem to be a few culturally relevant elements, such as allusion to the past, i.e., to traditional Chinese landscape painting, to the tension between emptiness and fullness, hints of a cultivated clumsiness, etc. The love for details in the painting is remindful of detailed depictions in the Chinese tradition of an aesthetics of fullness 44; in their combination with elements of Western style painting, they convey a surrealistic impression. In any case, these aspects of Chinese culture – even if they are dislocated, if they appear alienated, and if they are only ironically employed – suggest that they still possess a certain relevance for Chinese artists: as cultural memory, regardless of their residences in or out of China.

Fig. 3 Wei Dong: “Dragon and Businessman” (2000)

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Final Remarks Around the world, we now have Western priorities, also in arts and aesthetics. According to these standards, art has to be conceptionally innovative; it has to serve a liberating function or should, at least, be politically critical – not to mention the “achievements” brought about by Dadaism and such. In contrast to these tendencies, we have a – largely extinct – Chinese tradition with different priorities. There, a work of art, first of all, should possess suggestive poetic qualities – an enriching capacity beyond the actual work (painting or poetry). Moreover, an artist ought to have perfect intuitive control of the artistic medium through long and arduous practice (as in Chinese calligraphy), only then will he be able to create great works of art with a spiritual impact. The majority of Chinese artists – in and out of China – follow the Western trend, consciously or unconsciously.45 However, just as Western modernity is unthinkable without a constant re-engagement with its own long history and tradition, so too is there a possibility that China, on her way into global modernity, might also become more aware of her cultural tradition as an object of active engagement. Because of the increasing Western interest, the rediscovery of her tradition might even serve as a means for further cultural and artistic exchange. There is already an over hundred-year long history of stimulation of Western artists by East Asian art (from Art Nouveau in the nineteenth century up to Mark Tobey and others in the twentieth century). The encounter of cultures has not just begun in the last decade; it has only gained a new dimension in the age of globalization. It has to be seen how artists will arrange themselves in their moves between different cultures and traditions as well as in their gaining multiple identities. And thus only time will tell to which hybrid forms of art – and of aesthetics – this will lead to: if there will be great works of art resulting from this fusion, and whether or not the rich Chinese artistic and aesthetic tradition will still play a significant part in this encounter.

Notes and References 1. For this phenomenon, see also Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness. Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. 2. This is, however, only one side of globalization. As is well known, there is a dialectics of globalization at work bringing forth equally strong forces of localization such as the rising fundamentalism in many corners of the world. 3. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin. Mor al Ar gument at Home and Abr oad, Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, p. 8. 4. See Li Zehou’s overview on traditional Chinese aesthetics in his popular book The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 5. For a detailed discussion of Chinese aesthetics and literary theory, see Karl-Heinz Pohl, Ästhetik und Literaturtheorie in China – Von der Tradition bis zur Moderne, Munich: Saur, 2006. 6. See Maureen Robertson, “ ‘ …To Convey What is Precious’: Ssu-k’ung T’u’s Poetics and the Erh-shih-ssu Shih-p’in,” in: Susan Bush and Christian Murck (eds.), Theories of the Arts in China, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 3–26.

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7. Huang Yue, “Ershisi huapin,” in: Zhongguo gudai meishu congshu, Peking, 1993, Vol. 4, p. 23; Günther Debon, Grundbegriffe der c hinesischen Schrifttheorie und ihr e Verbindung zu Dichtung und Malerei, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978, p. 75. 8. Traditionally, the Chinese knew three “distances” (yuan) which can be likened to the European notion of perspective. Guo Xi (ca. 1020–1090) discusses them in his treatise “The Great Message of Forest and Streams” (Linquan gaozhi ), in Lin Yutang’s translation: “Looking up from below is called the ‘high perspective’ (gaoyuan); looking from the rim at the interior of mountains is called ‘deep perspective’ (shenyuan); looking toward the distance is called ‘level perspective’ (pingyuan).” Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art, New York: Putnam’s, 1967, p. 79. 9. Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art, New York: Putnam’s, 1967, p. 34. 10. Shitao (Daoji), Huayulu, Ch. 3, translated by Lin Yutang, p. 142. Lin Yutang translates fa as “method.” 11. Richard John Lynn, “Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Wang Shih-chen’s Theory of Poetry and Its Antecedents,” in: William Th. DeBary (ed.), The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism , New York: Columbia University Press, 1975, pp. 217–269. 12. Scholars had to be familiar with calligraphy and composing poetry; when they painted, they did so as amateurs and for pleasure (not for money), in contrast to professional painters. 13. Max Loehr, “Art-Historical Art: One Aspect of Ch’ing Painting,” Oriental Art New series 16 (Spring 1970), pp. 35–37. 14. Li Zehou and Liu Gangji, Zhongguo meixueshi (History of Chinese Aesthetics), I, Beijing: Xinhua, 1984, p. 33. 15. Liu Gangji, “Verbreitung und Einfluss der deutschen Ästhetik in China,” in: K.-H. Pohl (ed.), Trierer Beiträge. Aus Forschung und Lehre an der Univer sität Trier, July 1996 (Sonderheft 10), pp. 8–13. 16. Particularly influential was Liang Shuming and his book Dong xi wenhua ji qi zhe xue (Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies), Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922. 17. Adele Rickett, Wang Kuo-wei’s Jen-chien Tz’u-hua – A Study in Chinese Liter ary Criticism, Hongkong: Hong Kong University Press, 1977, p. 23, and Hermann Kogelschatz, Wang Kuo-wei und Sc hopenhauer: Eine philosophisc he Be gegnung – W andlung des Selbstverständnisses der chinesischen Literatur unter dem Einfluß der klassischen deutschen Ästhetik, Wiesbaden: Steiner 1986, p. 245 ff. 18. Liu Gangji, “Verbreitung und Einfluss der deutschen Ästhetic in China,” in: K.-H. Pohl (ed.), Trierer Beiträge. Aus Forschung und Lehre an der Univer sität Trier, July 1996 (Sonderheft 10), pp. 8–13. 19. Like many terms from Western thought, aesthetics as “study of beauty” was first coined in Japan and from there introduced to China. 20. Karl-Heinz Pohl, “Chinese Aesthetics and Kant,” in: Mazhar Hussain and Robert Wilkinson (eds.), The Pursuit of Comparative Aesthetics – An Interface Between the East and the West, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 127–136. 21. Liu Gangji, pp. 15–19. Representative is a collection of essays entitled Yi jing (Realm of Art), Peking: Peking University Press, 1987. The notion of yijing, (lit.: “realm [jing] of ideas [yi]”), in fact, goes further back in history than Wang Guowei (the yi in the title of Zong Baihua’s book has a different meaning: “art”). For Chinese aesthetics of the modern period, see also Zhu Liyuan and Gene Blocker (eds.): Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics, New York: Lang, 1995. 22. Gao Jianping, “The ‘Aesthetics Craze’ in China – Its Cause and Significance,” Dialogue and Universalism, Vol. 3/4, 1997, pp. 27–35. 23. Gao Jianping, “The ‘Aesthetics Craze’ in China – Its Cause and Significance,” Dialogue and Universalism, Vol. 3/4, 1997, p. 30. 24. Xu Fuguan, Zhongguo yishu jingshen, Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1966. 25. Liu Gangji, pp. 19–32. Particularly influential was Li Zehou’s book on Kant: Pipan zhexue de pipan: Kangde shuping (The Critique of Critical Philosophy: A Study of Kant), Peking: Renmin chubanshe, 1979. See also Jane Cauvel, “The Transformative Power of Art: Li Zehou’s Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 1999), pp. 150–173;

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26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

Karl-Heinz Pohl Woei Lien Chong, “Combining Marx with Kant: The Philosophical Anthropology of Li Zehou,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 1999), pp. 120–149. See footnote 4. See Jing Wang, High Cultur e Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideolo gy in Deng’ s China , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Gao Jianping, “Chinese Aesthetics in the Past Two Decades,” in: Wang Keping and Gao Jianping (eds.), Some Facts of Chinese Aesthetics , Peking: Chinese Society for Aesthetics, 2002, p. 41. Min Lin, The Search for Modernity. Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the PostMao Era, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 185. There has been a heated debate in (and outside of) China as to the relevance of postmodernism in China. For an overview see, for example, Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (eds.), Postmodernism & China , Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, as well as Min Lin’s book. Zhang Kuan, “The Predicament of Postcolonial Criticism in China,” in: Karl-Heinz Pohl (ed.), Chinese Thought in a Global Conte xt. A Dialo gue Between Chinese and W estern Philosophical Approaches, Leiden: Brill, 1999, p. 61. Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, Wang Yichuan, “Cong ‘xiandaixing’ dao ‘zhonghuaxing’ – xin zhishi de tanxun” (From ‘Modernity’ to ‘Chineseness’ – An Inquiry into New Knowledge), Wenyi zhengming 2/1994, pp. 10–20. The CCP was founded in 1921, i.e., during and through the intellectual forces of the May Fourth Movement. Edward Said, The Word, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 227. As a well-known historic example of a “travelling theory,” Marxism lost its internationalistic orientation when adopted by Mao Tse-tung; instead it served a nationalistic purpose in China, intending of ridding China of its domination by Western (and Japanese) colonial powers. The internal contradictions in the thought of Foucault and Said have been mentioned time and again by others. Particularly ironic is Foucault “flirtation” with Maoism during the Cultural Revolution; see Gao Jian, “Wenge sichao yu ‘houxue’ ” (The Ideological Trend of the Cultural Revolution and “Postist Studies”), Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-first Century ), 35 (June 1996), p. 116; see also Zhang Longxi, Mighty Opposites. From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 138, 207. As to Said, see Zhang Kuan, p. 64. Gao Jianping, “Chinese Aesthetics in the Context of Globalization,” International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol. 8 (2004), p. 65. Gao Jianping, “Chinese Aesthetics in the Context of Globalization,” International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol. 8 (2004). His book The path of Beauty (Mei de licheng; cf. aforementioned footnote 4) was also translated into German: Karl-Heinz Pohl and Gudrun Wacker (ed.), Der Weg des Schönen – Wesen und Geschichte der chinesischen Kultur und Ästhetik, Freiburg: Herder, 1992; but, with only one single edition, it has long been out of print. His work, does, however play a role in Sinological circles. For example, in 1999, the journal Philosophy East and W est devoted a whole issue on Li Zehou’s notion of subjectivity. See the articles by Cauvel and Chong mentioned earlier in footnote 25 as well as Timothy Cheek’s introduction as guest lecturer of this special issue: “Introduction: A Cross-Cultural Conversation on Li Zehou’s Ideas on Subjectivity and Aesthetics in Modern Chinese Thought,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 1999), pp. 113–19, and Li Zehou’s response to the article: “Subjectivity and ‘Subjectality’: A Response,” pp. 174–183. Gao Jianping, “Chinese Aesthetics in the Past Two Decades,” p. 43. Gao Jianping, “Chinese Aesthetics in the Context of Globalization,” p. 71. http://www.chinesecontemporary.com/art.php?image_id = 427 (May 2, 2007). On Wei Dong’s art, see also Henry Steiner’s introduction to “CrossEyes. Three Painters and a Designer,” Ex/Change (Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, City University of Hong Kong), No. 12 (February 2005), pp. 14–15.

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41. According to an interview, Dürer (next to Delacroix and Cezanne) belongs to Wei Dong’s models of the past. See http://www.jerseycitymuseum.org/exhibitions/virtualCatalogue/dong. html. Regarding Dürer’s insignia, see http://www.schaepp.de/duerer/in.html. 42. See http://www.chinalink.be/MCAF2.htm. The head of the second “attendant” from left – the only one without braids – is strikingly similar to that of Mao Tse-tung. 43. See http://www.plumblossoms.com/WeiDong/CX0141a.htm. 44. An example for aesthetics of fullness (in contrast to the aesthetics of emptiness, prevalent in much of Southern Song painting of the Ma-Xia-School) is the famous hand scroll: “Along the River on the Qingming Festival” (Qingming shanghe tu) by Zhang Zeduan (1085–1145). The ca. 10-m long scroll (now in the Palace Museum of Peking) depicts life in its fullness in the Song capital Bianjing (now Kaifeng). 45. The predominance of installations over paintings also illustrates this tendency.

The Rasa Theory: A Challenge for Intercultural Aesthetics Rosa Fernández Gómez

The rasa theory is widely known as the major contribution of Indian aesthetics to the field of aesthetics in general. During the twentieth century, first under the scope of the colonial approach of comparativist enterprises undertaken by Westerners as well as by Indians, and more recently from various post-colonial perspectives, the reflection on rasa or ‘aesthetic pleasure’ – the expression by which it has been popularized in Western languages – has been considered as one of the deepest legacies of Indian aesthetic tradition. However, the change of emphasis has been considerable and should not be underestimated: It ranges from the semi-idealized interpretations of the first scholars of the last century until the eighties to the more sociological readings from post-colonial perspectives, considering it as a typical product of the Sanskritized elite of the Brahmin caste.1 Trying to remain in the middle ground between these two extreme positions, I shall be content with suggesting some possible contributions made by this aesthetic theory to our modern aesthetic debate. I shall focus my reflection entirely on the first authors of the Kashmiri tradition, particularly on Abhinavagupta, and not on the subsequent reflections that were made from devotional perspectives, although, to a certain degree, I shall take the latter into account on the final part of my essay. In my view, one of the points that make this theory attractive to our modern eyes is the construal of aesthetic experience as a supra-individual state of expanded consciousness (ekaghanata-). The theory postulates the existence of a human ‘sensible reservoir’, a depository (as it were) for the lived emotions of individuals (va-sana-, lit. ‘latent impression’), nourishing a few emotional archetypes (stha-yibha-va, lit. ‘basic or permanent emotion’). These archetypes emerge into consciousness in a pleasurable form as universalized emotions (rasas), on the occasion of artistic performances. Towards the end of my paper, I shall also suggest, albeit in a tentative manner, some criticism of the excessively intellectualistic reading of the most conspicuous rasa theoreticians, questioning the fully-fledged distinction they are said to establish between life and representation, between ordinary and aesthetic experience on the basis of the notion of ‘disinterest’ and ‘aesthetic distance’; this is a reading that can be welcomed by Westernized audiences on the premises of Kantian and postKantian aesthetics, but which in my view, can reasonably be questioned on the premises of the metaphysical background of the Kashmiri rasa theoreticians (that is Kashmir Shaivism’s metaphysics).2 A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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Emotional Archetypes and Their Unconscious Abode: Aesthetics as a Part of Epistemological Psychology Before explicitly discussing rasa theory, some clarification needs to be made regarding the specific transdisciplinary approach developed in the Indian culture over millennia and which was subsequently applied to reflections on beauty (saundarya), art (Śilpa), and the senses and sensible knowledge in general. Vedic literature already includes a basic epistemological assumption, the fourfold division of cognitive states: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and transcendental state.3 The notion of a basic or permanent state (stha-yibha-va) depends on this postulation of four levels of experience or consciousness, since the permanent mental states that form the basis of rasa or aesthetic emotion, reside in us in a latent state due to its location in this level of consciousness, where we all become one and differences disappear. Many centuries after the composition of the upanis.adic literature, Abhinava will say that from birth human beings are provided with a few germinal mental or emotional states – grief, laughter, love, etc. – which reside in us in the form of latent impressions (va-sana-s) and that they emerge in our waking state when they are appropriately stimulated in the course of our existence. These very same permanent states, when appropriately conjured by theatrical magic performance, are meant to emerge into our waking state in a pleasurable manner. Here we can appreciate already a major trait typical of Indian epistemology in general but which will be particularly emphasized by Abhinavagupta, due to his idealistic, phenomenological affiliation in metaphysics: The non-opposition between the intellectual and the sensible domains in the typical aporetic terms that the Western tradition developed throughout the centuries. Further, the symbolic correlation of the microcosmic and the macrocosmic characteristics of Vedic literature is also a determining factor in understanding the position of sense perception in general as a vehicle connecting the gross levels of experience to more subtle ones, the sensuous and the super-sensuous. This is all the more obvious in numerous upanisadic passages where correlations are established between individual sense organs and sense faculties in general on one side and the cosmic elements on the other.4 Thus, from the framework of upanis.adic philosophy, we can conceive of the aesthetic sensible domain as a link between the gross levels of experience of the external individual sense organs and the more refined and subtle levels of a relish that awakens our inner sense organs and that, as Tripathi has said, conceives of beauty as ‘the experience of unity of the sensuous and supersensuous’.5 Only by taking into account these general epistemological cum metaphysical premises can we understand the specific theories of the Kashmiri rasa theoreticians.6

The Seminal Text: The Nāt. yas´āstra and the Aphorism on Rasa Unlike much of Western art theory, focused mostly on the visual arts, the importance of ritual in Indian culture since Vedic times helps us to understand why theatrical experience is so central to the later Hindu reflection on art and on aesthetic experience in general.

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The origin of the term rasa must be searched for in the R.g Vedic literature, where it has the meaning of ‘juice’ in general and, in particular, the juice of a plant, soma, the Gods’ elixir or nectar. Later on, the meaning of ‘flavour’ and the act of ‘savouring’ became the predominant sense of the term as a derivation of the meaning, ‘essence’. In the upanis.adic literature, the term acquired more abstract and mystical connotations designating the bliss derived from fusion with Brahman.7 The term was finally included in aesthetic debate in the text on dramaturgy traditionally considered as the foundational text of Indian aesthetics: The Nāt.yas´āstra, (NS´ ), attributed to a legendary author, Bharata (200 BCE – 200 CE). Its sixth chapter, devoted to the notion of rasa, contains the famous rasasūtra or aphorism on rasa, which forms the basis of the numerous commentaries that were made between the ninth and the eleventh centuries and that were combined by its latest exponent, Abhinavagupta (CE 10–11), in his Abhinavabhāratī (Abh), giving rise to what today we know as the ‘rasa debate’. A common translation of this aphorism runs as follows: ‘Out of the combination (samyoga) of the Determinants (vibha-va), the Consequents (anubha-va) and the Transitory Mental States (vyabhica-rin), the birth of Rasa takes place’.8 The text goes on to explain through a culinary analogy that basic ordinary emotions (stha-yibha-va) become rasa with the help of the constitutive elements of rasa (NS´ 6, 32, 5), the Determinants, Consequents and the Transitory Mental States. Like a gourmet, the attentive spectator will then savour the basic emotions evoked through the proper means of dramatic performance. This feeling is described as one of intense pleasure (hars.a). That is why rasas are called ‘the taste of theatre (na-tyarasa)’ (NS´ 6, 32, 10). Thus, according to Bharata, in real life there are eight basic or permanent (stha-yi) feelings, emotions or mental states residing in our minds in the form of latent impressions (va-sana-), and ready to emerge to consciousness on the conjunction of the right causes (vibha-va) (such as life situations), effects (anubha-va) (external manifestations such as gestures, body language) and other transitory mental states (vyabhica-ribha-va) (such as depression, suspicion, laziness). When these permanent emotions are represented on the stage, these elements become respectively the determinants, the consequents and the transitory mental states, mentioned in the rasasūtra. These eight permanent mental states together with their corresponding rasa are love (rati) and the erotic (śr.n.gāra), laughter (ha-sa) and humour (ha-sya), grief (s.oka) and the pathetic (karun.a), anger (krodha) and the furious (raudra), courage (utsa-ha) and the heroic (vīra), fear (bhaya) and the terrifying (bhaya-naka), aversion (jugupsa-) and the disgusting (bībhatsa) and admiration (vismaya) and the awesome (adbhuta). But there were many questions that this most succinct exposition of rasa or aesthetic pleasure left unanswered. What is the nature of rasa or aesthetic emotion? What is its relation to other emotional states (bha-va) and in particular to the ordinary ones? Who enjoys the performance, the actor, the character or the spectator or all of them at the same time? What is the process by means of which ordinary feeling generates or is transformed into aesthetic pleasure? A rich debate was generated a few centuries later, from about the ninth and the eleventh centuries CE, in the region of Kashmir, to try to answer these and other related questions in the process of trying to offer an illuminating and convincing exegesis of the rasas tra.

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Abhinavagupta (CE 10–11), one of India’s most brilliant thinkers, a metaphysician and a mystic besides being an accomplished aesthetician, assembled the positions of the main exponents of rasa theory and offered his own creative view on the matter, exerting through his work Abhinavabha-ratī a very deep influence over later thinkers on the theory of art and aesthetics until the present day. As we shall see, one of the central questions of the rasa debate is the relationship between life and representation, between ordinary basic emotions (stha-yibha-va) and their relishable aesthetic counterparts (rasa). The Kashmiri thinkers, including Abhinava himself, were mostly inclined to make an intellectualistic reading of Bharata’s text, underlining the radical separation between ordinary feelings and their perception through artistic representation, stating that the aesthetic emotion, although based on ordinary basic mental states, was absolutely non-ordinary (alaukika). However, although Bharata’s text is essentially a practical handbook for performance, the truth is that from the brief comments of Chaps. 6 and 7 there is no clear evidence for this distinction. In fact, it is suggested that ordinary basic emotions become rasa by a sort of intensification of its perceptual nature that takes place through dramatic performance. So, what logic of the emotions is being assumed when contemplating a classical Sanskrit theatrical piece?

The Abhinavabhāratī and the Commentaries on the Rasasūtra The Abhinavabhāratī of Abhinavagupta is the work that summarizes the interpretation on the rasasūtra by four authors together with the criticisms they level against each other and finally gives Abhinava’s own position on the matter. The first commentator to be considered is Bhattalollata (CE 9) who held the ‘theory of intensification’, that is, that rasa was only the intensification (upacita) of a permanent state because of its representation through the appropriate determinants, consequents, etc. He located it in the actor and the character by virtue of the power of realization or actualization (anusam dhāna), a power related with observation and recollection, and even more than that, a power of awareness, which allows the actor to identify and feel like the character, whereas at the same time not forgetting his real nature (Abh 7–9).  Śankuka, the second author to be mentioned, criticized this theory of intensification, drawing his argumentation from the Indian epistemological principle that holds that emotions can never be directly perceived but only inferred through the direct perception of the external signs associated with it. Permanent emotions cannot be regarded as being on the same level as the determinants, consequents, etc.,  and so rasa cannot be the result of combining them. Besides, says Śankuka, Bharata never mentioned permanent emotions as what had to be combined with the determinants, consequents, etc., but claimed that rasa emerges out the combination of these latter. Moreover, to understand rasa as arousal (nispatti) is not the same as to regard it as intensification (upacita) of something already arisen. Another criticism takes into account the infinite degrees of intensity that can be found in an emotion:

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In accepting Lollata’s theory one is compelled to admit an infinite number of rasas. But perhaps the most obvious critique levelled against this author by his successors is the absence of any account of the spectator’s point of view (Abh 14–15).  Śankuka himself said that rasa was the imitation (anukaran a) of a permanent state of mind, and that what explained the use of a different word, that is, ‘rasa’, had to do with this imitative nature. The spectator does not perceive the rasa since, due to its long-lasting exposition, she does not realize that the determinants, consequents, etc., that provoke it are artificial (Abh 16). Śankuka further justifies the absence of the word ‘permanent emotional state’ (sthāyibhāva) in the rasasūtra on the basis of one of India’s psychological aesthetic principles: In the same manner that an emotion can never be directly perceived but only inferred by its external signs, it can neither be directly communicated or transmitted through its verbal enunciation but only through the reproduction (anusamdhāna) of its external signs (Abh 17–24). An emphasis is clearly laid on the effects that words produce, analogously to the effects of other, different languages, such as body language and so on, in the context of theatrical performance.  Regarding the relation between art and truth, Śankuka makes also an interesting observation adapting it to that between actor and character: ‘[In aesthetic experience] there exists neither doubt, neither truth nor error, but on the contrary there emerges the notion that this one is that one and at the same time this one is not really that one.’ (Abh 33).9 These two logically contradictory perceptions indicate a transcending of ordinary reality, governed by logic and conceptual knowledge, and the transition to an epistemological aesthetic level of unmediated inferential processes. On this basis, Maillard vindicates the genuine aesthetic character of this inferential experience and holds that it is the perception of the work as if it were true or real that provokes pleasure in the spectator. It is this tension, referred to in Śankuka’s text, between ‘it-is-but-it-is-not’ that causes pleasure.10 It seems clear  that, as Maillard states, Śankuka did not understand rasa as pleasure but as the essence of drama and that he did not understand imitation in an analogic comparativist sense. However, his successors rejected his theory of imitation because they interpreted the term anuka-rana in a narrow analogical sense as mimicry and parody. Abhinavagupta himself did interpret the term in this sense. But, before Abhinava, his own master, Bhattatauta, criticized this theory from four different perspectives (Abh 35–98). (1) From the point of view of the spectator, we can say that if imitation presupposes the perception of the thing or character imitated, emotions cannot be imitated because, as said above, they cannot be directly perceived but only inferred from their causes. Through the means proper to theatrical performance, emotions are not imitated but properly ‘produced’ or ‘actualized’ in the sense of infused in the spectator. (2) From the point of view of the actor, he does not know the hero’s states of mind he is trying to imitate. So, how could he succeed in doing so? In any case, what the spectator perceives are the means of representation, the external signs. The permanent mental states (sthāyi) cannot be imitated on this account. (3) From the point of view of the facts themselves, imitation in real life lacks the intentionality that is so characteristic of fictional dramatic representation and of art in general. (4) From Bharata’s own point of view,

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in the whole NS´ we find no description of rasa as an imitation of a permanent mental state; the text, mostly devoted to quite artificial and codified theatrical devices that are absent in ordinary life, rather speaks of representing or imitating actions and not emotions. The fourth author dealt with in the Abhinavabhāratī is Bhatta nākaya (CE 10). He analyzed the term ‘birth’ or ‘emergence’ (nispatti) in the rasasūtra and held that rasa was neither a perception nor a manifestation nor a production (Abh 110) because these are mental operations belonging to ordinary life, whereas rasa, as Śankuka also held, does not occur in ordinary existence. For this author: ‘Rasa is revealed11 (bhāvyamāna) by a special power assumed by words in poetry and drama, the power of revelation (bhāvanā) – to be distinguished from the power of denotation (abidhā) – consisting of the action of generalizing the determinants, etc. (…) This enjoyment (…) is characterized by a resting (viśrānti) on one’s own consciousness (samvit) (…) and is similar to the tasting (āsvāda) of the supreme Brahman.’ (Abh 120).12 There are two main notions to be highlighted here and which will be accepted by Abhinavagupta: The idea of generalization of the determinants, etc., provoked by the evocative power of poetic language and dramatic presentation, and, in consequence, the enlargement of our consciousness, this enlarged aesthetic awareness being best described as consciousness ‘resting upon itself.’ In fact, for Kashmir Shaivism metaphysics, there is a universal ‘I-consciousness’ that is divided in infinite mirror-like limited ‘I’ consciousnesses. Whenever the limited ‘I’ comes to a rest, by a process of enlargement and absorption in the object, we can say, according to this metaphysics, that there is a repose of the limited self in its original source, hence the similarity between aesthetic and mystical experience. Absorption in the work itself is here the vehicle, the perception of the determinants, consequents and so on in a generalized, universal manner is the perspective from which we forget the ordinary self that governs our daily lives, become absorbed and our consciousness is finally enlarged and in a state of resting upon itself. Abhinavagupta, after comparing and commenting on his predecessors’ positions, inspired by the metaphysics of Kashmir Shaivism, made his own original contribution to the debate. As said above, he accepted from his master Bhattanāyaka the thesis of the generalization or universalization of emotions but rejected the claim that the power of evocation (bhāvanā) of the poetic word is the cause of the emergence of rasa in the spectator. To begin with, unlike Nāyaka, for Abhinava, rasa was a perception because, according to Kashmir Shaivism, anything that exists is a state of consciousness, that is, a perception; thus, pleasurable experiences are also states of consciousness, perceptions, according to Abhinava. But if aesthetic pleasure has a distinctive nature and if it is a kind of perception, what are the special features of aesthetic perception? Briefly put: that it neither affects us directly nor does it let us to remain indifferent. Here is a first enunciation of what recent scholars denominated ‘aesthetic distance’. On describing the fearful rasa and commenting on two of Kālidāsa’s works, he says that “the fear we feel contemplating them is different from the ordinary perceptions (‘I am afraid, he-my enemy, my friend, anybody is afraid’) (…) The sensation of fear above mentioned, on the contrary is the matter of cognition by a perception devoid of obstacles

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(nirvighna) and may be said to enter directly (niviś) into our hearts, as if it hovered (viparivrt) before our eyes: this is the Rasa of terror. In such a fear, one’s own self is neither completely immersed (tiraskr) nor in a state of particular prominence (ullikh), and the same thing happens with the other rasas”. (Abh 151–152).13 It is interesting to note how Abhinava interprets the direct perception of the work as a kind of intensifier of the universalization, since it helps to provoke a complete neutralization of the differences between real life and the stage acting as a result of mutual conflict between what really happens and the limiting causes proper to the poem such as spatio-temporal circumstances, characters, etc. (Abh 155). It is now that he mentions one of his key notions, which I shall analyze later on as one of his main contributions: The process of universalization brings about in all the audience a concentrated perception (ekaghanatā) and this state of communal unified awareness is due, Abhinava will hold, to the emergence of the latent impressions (vāsanās), residing in the spectators’ minds even from innumerable lives. Although the text may be a little long, I shall quote it all as it is important for my later argument: ‘In this combination, indeed – in that the real limiting causes (niyamahetu), (time, space, the particularized cognizing subject, etc.), on one side, and those afforded by the poem on the other, neutralize each other and then completely disappear – the aforementioned state of generality is readily nourished; so that by virtue of the very uniformity (ekaghanatā) of the spectator’s perception, it being so nourished, readily nourishes the Rasa in all of them: and this occurs, because the latent impressions of their minds agree with each other, their minds being coloured by these latent impressions from time immemorial.’14 (Abh 156, 157). This special joyful perception of a supra-individual nature is only pure unified consciousness (samvid) devoid of obstacles (Abh 158), an awareness that is equated with a state of wonder or embellishment (camatka-ra). Together with this, Abhinava will emphasize more than any of his predecessors the relevance of the suitability of the aesthetic spectator, reader (etc), requiring and ascribing to him almost yogic qualities and predispositions. First, on rejecting Bhattana-yaka’s theory of evocation, Abhinava will rescue for the rasa theory a concept from another key text of Indian aesthetics, the notion of dhvany or poetic suggestion that had been formulated by Anandavardhana (CE 9) in his work Dhvanya-loka. If the poetic word has the power to provoke suggestions, it is no doubt the spectator’s (etc) (rasika or sahrdaya) responsibility to cultivate herself in order to be able to ‘resonate with’ or ‘to be in tune with’ the work. A special state of mind, a special empathy must be cultivated by her as a condition for the emergence of the exact aesthetic distance.15 This special disposition of the spectator is what Abhinava calls ‘consciousness without obstacles’ (camatka-ra), a state of embellishment characterized by the absence of non-satisfaction. Obstacles can come from two sources: from the work itself and from the spectator. In the first class are the lack of verisimilitude, defective construction of the vibha-vas, etc., that is, non-convincing characterizations, lack of clarity in the expression, disproportion among the parts of the work and in the second class, immersion in spatio-temporal determinations perceived exclusively as one’s own or exclusively as alien to one’s own and being at the mercy of one’s own personal emotions (Abh 173).

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It is precisely on this point that he makes an explicit interpretation of the theory of generalization or universalization, already present in his master Bhattanaya, as we have seen, in a supra-individual sense, underlining how, in the context of dramatic performance, as in any ritualistic kind of spectacle, there arises a unified state of mind, one where the individual’s isolated conscious state is expanded and finally fuses with that of the others. As was mentioned earlier, this view agrees ultimately with the Kashmiri Shaivite postulation of a unique universal ‘I-consciousness’, which would account for why things appear in the same manner to different subjects who are located in the same spatio-temporal circumstances.16 In his Tantrāloka, Abhinava remarks how in large gatherings, such as artistic and religious ones, the previously isolated individual consciousness turns into a single expanded and unified state of consciousness: ‘The consciousness, which consists of, and is animated by, all things, on account of the difference of bodies, enters into a state of contraction. But, in public celebrations, it returns to a state of expansion – since all the components are reflected in each other. The radiance of one’s own consciousness in ebullition (i.e., when it is tending to pour out of itself) is reflected in the consciousness of all the bystanders, as if in so many mirrors, and inflamed by these, it abandons without effort its state of individual contraction. For this reason, in meetings of many people (at a performance of dancers, singers, etc.), fullness of joy occurs when every bystander, not only one of them, is identified with the spectacle.’17 Whereas on these occasions consciousness, which is made up of beatitude, enters a state of perfect fullness, on there being even a single bystander not fully immersed in the spectacle, this will cause disturbances that would inevitably lead to a contraction of consciousness. Finally, Abhinava examines the relationship between aesthetic and mystical experience.18 Among the four different states of consciousness that Indian epistemology recognizes, waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and the transcendental state, Abhinava locates the aesthetic experience in a first layer of the last one; it belongs to a transcendent state not completely free of objectivity. Mystic experiences are devoid of beauty (saundarya) because there is a desire to attain, possess or to be fused with the object of perception, thus preventing the emergence of the typical aesthetic distance (Abh 254). Here, the fact of being absorbed or possessed by the perceived object actually suppresses the distance between subject and object, the elimination of multiplicity, which is a necessary condition for aesthetic experience. There is also the additional important factor that the way the aesthetic spectator and the mystic approach or trend towards the state of pure awareness is entirely different. Whereas there is no intention at all on the side of the spectator who simply lets herself go, surrendering to the representation’s magic, the mystic has a very clear intention to gain access to that state. This is also – says Abhinava – the reason why aesthetic experience only lasts as long as the dramatic performance takes place, whereas the mystic experience, fruit of a permanent will, tends to persist through time. They differ, thus, in terms of duration as much as in the object of contemplation, which in the case of the mystic is beyond the world of differences. Finally, and in relation to the differences between aesthetic and mystic experiences, there arose a debate about the mention, at the end of chapter six of NS´ of

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a ninth rasa: Śantarasa, a state of joyous peace, having as its basic or permanent emotion to Śama (lit. ‘serenity’). This latter part has been considered as a later interpolation in the original text and has generated much scholastic debate. In sum, what it proposes is a solution for the problem regarding the location of the rasas, their origin and final end. In this sense, Śantarasa would be the state of in-difference or emotional neutrality that follows the experience of the eight remaining rasas, the original font from where all of them arise and then get submerged.

Expanding the Aesthetic Sphere: Ludic Implication as a Means to Enjoy ‘The Rasa of Life’ At first sight, it might seem that the exegetical efforts of the Kashmiri authors, realized at least seven centuries after the rasasūtra had been written, went far beyond Bharata’s initial intentions, these being probably more concerned, as is the case with the other of the chapters of his work, with practical instructions for a successful performance than with speculating about the theoretical foundations of drama. Would not Bharata have been content with admitting that rasa was simply the result of the intensification of an ordinary permanent emotion, as I initially pointed out, agreeing partially with Bhattanāyaka? Or, as Abhinava also seems to suggest at times, could rasa be understood as the intensified perception of any basic emotion, regardless of whether this one was taking place in real life or in dramatic performance? Were the exegetes too obsessed with distinguishing elements in the dramatic experience which, perhaps, are not so manifestly distinct? In my view, the criticism levelled against the excessively intellectualistic readings of the rasa authors, can be partially counteracted or minimized, at least in the case of Abhinavagupta if we draw not so much on the Abhinavabhāratī but on other of his works of a more metaphysical cum mystic nature or on other Kashmiri Shaiva authors, especially Vasugupta, whose mysticism was infused with devotionalism.19 Indeed, in the Abhinavabhāratī there is already an example that refers to ordinary life: ‘Indeed, in ordinary life also, women, even when they are immersed in the compact (ekaghana) gestation of the form of consciousness called sorrow, find rest in their own heart, for this very sorrow consists of, and is animated by, a rest without obstacles. Pain, indeed, is simply and solely an absence of rest. (…).’20 That is, there are occasions in life when we can find rest in our own emotional states and, thus, start enjoying them in a similar way as when attending to a dramatic performance. In the Vijñāna Bhairava, one of the most important tantras for Kashmir Shaivism, the following lines can be read: ‘at the commencement and end of sneeze, in terror, in sorrow, in the condition of a deep sigh or on the occasion of flight from the battlefield, during (keen) curiosity, at the commencement or end of hunger, the state is like that of brahma.’21 There are moments in our daily existence when our consciousness receives a sudden shock and as a consequence of it, it is thrown back into its source, spanda, ‘the creative pulsation of consciousness’.22

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And although these passages might remind us more of the romantic category of the sublime, I think it helps to see the notion of ‘aesthetic distance’ not so much in Kantian terms but within a wider perspective, such as the one I would like to adopt now in order to link art and life, representation and reality, by means of extrapolating elements of the dramatic world to real life. Actually, to attain such a state of intensified and unified awareness, the Kashmiri authors often referred to the metaphor of play ( krīdā, līlā) – in its double meaning of the ludic and the dramatic – as an appropriate attitude that in our ordinary existence helps us to enjoy what I have called here ‘the rasa of life’. Somewhere else I have tried, with the help of Gadamer’s hermeneutic notion of play, to suggest the possibility of applying an aesthetic attitude in ordinary life, understood not so much in terms of an intellectualistic ‘aesthetic distance’ but of ‘ludic implication’.23 What I am intending to show now is its connection with the important emphasis Abhinava places on the collective states of consciousness generated in ritual celebrations. Gadamer, in his foundational work on hermeneutics, written in the 1960s, Truth and Method , characterized play precisely as an activity that, besides its obvious artistic connotations of absence of finality; spontaneity and representation, had as a major characteristic the absence of a subject: in play, the participants lose the consciousness of being separate: the absence of their respective individual consciousness is what allows the spontaneous and effortless development of the game. The subject of the game is not the players or participants, yet through them the game becomes manifest. The game has a priority, so to say, with regard to the previous consciousness of the players. So it is not a matter of opening an ‘aesthetic distance’ in Kantian terms between the work and the spectator who receives it analytically. Indeed, the distance that the game allows to emerge is one between the now dynamic and collective spectator and his previous individual subjective consciousness. By virtue of this distance, the now emergent ludic spectator will participate in an experience of supra-individual communion with the work. It is significant that Gadamer provides two examples involving performance as paradigms to illustrate his idea of play: cult performance and theatrical performance. Since the spectator’s ludic attitude is so active and important, the hermeneutic circle that is being closed in aesthetic experience takes place regardless of whether it belongs to real life or to dramatic performance. As we read in Truth and Method, ‘He or she who can appreciate the comedy and tragedy of life is the one who knows how to refrain from the objectives hiding the game that is played with us. (…) Similarly, he or she who can see the entire reality as a meaningful complete circle where everything is fulfilled, he will talk properly about the comedy and tragedy of life.’24 This perennial metaphor of the comedy of life appears also in the Śivasūtra, dated around the eighth century and considered as the foundational text of Kashmir Shaivism, in the following terms: ‘The self is the actor. The stage is the inner Self. The spectators are the senses.’25 The commentaries made on these succinct aphorisms by an author who lived three centuries later, Bhāskarā, cannot help but make use of the rasa analogy, applying it to the realized yogi: ‘The experienced actor, who knows about (the forms) of sentiment (rasa), emotive states (bhāva) and acting and who

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possesses the correct state of mind (sattva), speech, physical appearance and dress is said to act his part well. Similarly, the Self manifests itself in accord with its own inherent nature everywhere (as every living being) by penetrating into the sentiment (rasa) of each emotive state (bhāva) it expresses and playfully behaving accordingly. (Thus the Self) is said to be an actor because it assumes every state of being.’26 For these authors, the jīvanmukta, lit. ‘liberated-while-alive’, is in a way the perfect aesthetic spectator, the person of a similar heart (sahrdāya) who is able to penetrate the varied ordinary emotional states (bhāvas) maintaining at the same time a certain actor-like distance so as not to feel fully attached to them. The eight basic emotions of the rasa theory, together with the remaining transitory states mentioned in the NS´ could be seen from this light as the infinite variety of forms in which the universal I-consciousness experiences herself. In conclusion, from the combination of the rasa notions and the Kashmiri Shaivite notion of play, I have tried to show that one of the most important contributions of the Indian rasa legacy is this possibility of considering the aesthetic subject in supraindividualistic terms, giving priority to the view of art and aesthetic experiences as processes (play) – rather than as an individual dualistic experience confronting a subject to a product-like object. And all this gained by virtue of a deep psychological introspection giving rise to notions such as latent impressions (vāsanās), which join the mental and the emotional domains of human sensibility in a way that Western tradition could only have formulated within the last two centuries.

Notes and References 1. From the first angle we can still distinguish a few different perspectives: From the so-called ‘traditionalist’ approach of one of the most prolific and foundational figures, Ananda Coomaraswamy, to the comparativist universalistic objectives of specialists in Abhinavagupta like K.C. Pandey (Cf. his 1959, Comparative Aesthetics , (II vols.), Chokhamba Sanskrit Series, Varanasi, and also his major work on Abhinavagupta: 1963, Abhinavagupta. An Historical and Philosophical Study. Chokhamba, Varanasi), and to other specialized books on rasa theory from the 1960s and 1970s like the two popular works by Masson and Patwarhan: Masson, J.L. & Patwarhan, M.V. 1970, Aesthetic Raptur e, (II vols.) Deccan College, Poona; and 1961, S´antarasa and Abhinava gupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics , Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, to mention just a few names of Indian origin, to studies by Western scholars mostly published in journals, such as Gerow, E., 1994, ‘Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics as a Speculative Paradigm’, in: Journal of the American Oriental Society , 114.2, pp. 186–208. Among the second approach, See for example the first essay of the entry ‘Indian Aesthetics’ by Gitomer, D.L., in Kelly, M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1998, Oxford University Press, Oxford, vol. II, pp. 482–490. This encyclopaedia, a recent and ambitious project, begins with an entry on Abhinavagupta and covers main topics of non-Western aesthetics. 2. There are numerous recent studies on this philosophy. See, for example, Mishra, K., 1999, Kashmir Śaivism. The Central Philosophy of Tantrism, Sri Satguru Publications, Delhi. 3. Although references to these states can already be found in ancient upanisads such as the Chandogya, the Mandukya Upanisad is entirely devoted to describe these four states relating them with the mystic syllable ‘aum’. See, for example, its English translation in: Radhakrishnan, S., [1953] 1996, The Principal Upanisads, HarperCollins Publishers, New Delhi, pp.695–705.

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4. See Aitareya Upanisad 1.2.4., where it is described how, at the request of the cosmic elements, the soul of the universe (ātman) determines their settlement in the different organs of the human body: fire, transformed into speech, enters the mouth, wind, transformed into sight, enters the eyes, space enters the ears, plants and trees, transformed in hairs, enter the skin, the moon, transformed into mind, enters the heart, death, transformed into expiring air, enters the navel and water, transformed into semen, enters the male sexual organ. 5. Tripathi, K.D., 1995, ‘From Sensuous to Supersensuous: Some Terms of Indian Aesthetics’, in: Vatsyayan, K. (ed.), Prakrti. The Integral Vision, vol. 3. The Agamic Tradition and the Arts (ed. Bäumer, B.), Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Motila Banarsidass, New Delhi, p. 75. 6. A more detailed account of Indian epistemological aesthetics has been made by Marchianò, G., 2004, ‘Una búsqueda de un placer más elevado: el legado estético indio’, in: Puelles Romero, L. & Fernández Gómez, R. (eds.), Estéticas: Occidente y Otras Culturas, Contrastes. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Málaga, pp. 155–164. 7. See R.gveda III.48.1, where it means ‘water’, IX.63.13, ‘soma juice’, I.37.5. ‘cow’s milk’, and V.44.13, ‘flavour’. In Atharvaveda III.13.15 we also find ‘taste’. These meanings were assumed but became more abstract in upanisadic literature, adding the connotations of ‘essence’ and ‘bliss’ (s. Taittirīya Upanisad II.7.1). 8. Gnoli, R., [1956] 1985, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, Varanasi, p. 25. It contains a transcription of the original Sanskrit version of the Abhinavabhāratī together with his own English translation and an extensive introduction. This was the first and foremost important Western translation of Abhinavagupta’s text into English. There is a Spanish translation directly from Sanskrit by O. Pujol and an introductory study by Ch. Maillard in Maillard, Ch. & Pujol, O. 1999, Rasa. El placer estético en la tr adición India, Etnos Índica, Varanasi. I shall base my reflections and comments mainly on this version, referring to the original text according to Pujol’s numeric divisions. However, when I have considered that the English rendering of Gnoli was adequate I have quoted from it. 9. This is Pujol’s translation, which differs entirely from Gnoli’s, actually quite obscure on this point.  10. Maillard makes her own creative reading of Śankuka’s position, understanding his interpretation of rasa not as pleasure but as the essence of drama. Commenting on the above, she distinguishes between analogical thought, characterized by the proposition ‘it resembles’ and based on logical comparison that presupposes a distance between two objects on one hand and aesthetic inference on the other, in which, ‘it is not the imitation that causes pleasure, but the fact that, without being what it represents, it is presented as if it were so’. What we have in aesthetic inference is no longer a regular analogy but a proper metaphor. Cf. Maillard, Ch. & Pujol, O. cit., p. 39–40. 11. Pujol uses here the verb ‘to evoke’ (Spanish ‘evocar’), which, in my view, is preferable to Gnoli’s ‘revelation’, since the latter has metaphysical dualistic connotations which the former avoids. 12. Gnoli’s translation, cit., pp. 48–49. I have omitted a few lines because they refer more specifically to terminology belonging to the sāmkhya-yoga philosophy. According to this system, which Kashmir Shaivitsm’s metaphysics accepted, there are two ultimate principles of reality: Purusa or the Pure Light of Consciousness, and Prakrti, the primeval material principle of existence, also translated as ‘Nature’. The world unfolds as a result of Purusa’s forgetting his own luminous mirror-like self-conscious nature and identifying with Prakrti. The common individual is already the result of the expansion of Prakrti as a consequence of this. His mind (buddhi), as well as anything in nature, is constituted by three ultimate elements (gunas): sattva (light, luminous and pleasant), rajas (mobile, dynamic and painful) and tamas (inert, obstructive and stupid). When sattva predominates, Bhattanāyaka says, there is expansion, when it comes into contact with rajas, there is fluidity and when it does so with tamas, there is contraction. 13. Gnoli, 1985, pp. 55–56.

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14. Gnoli, 1985, p. 58. 15. This can be illustrated by the very etymology of one of the Sanskrit terms used for ‘spectator’, sahŗdaya, meaning literally ‘one of a similar heart’. The other term, rasika, derives from rasa. 16. Utpaladeva, the teacher of Abhinavagupta, said: ‘When more subjects (…) are aware of a given thing, f.e., a vessel, in the same place and time, then about this thing, they come to make up an unity.’ Quoted in Gnoli, 1985, p. xxxvii. Two or more subjects can create a single psychic knowing subject when they meet in the same spatio-temporal conditions. When they separate, this state of epistemological unity dissolves. 17. Tantraloka, XXVIII, vv. 373 ff. Quoted, with Sanskrit transliterations, in Gnoli, 1985, pp. xxxviii–xxxix. 18. See Maillard, Ch., 1997, ‘La experiencia estética y la experiencia mística en la escuela de Cahemira’ in Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, vol. 5, Universidad de Málaga, pp.177–191. 19. A few centuries after the Kashmiri authors, currents of devotionalism developed a parallel debate about rasa, especially bhakti rasa, giving rise to what we know today as ‘vaisnava aesthetics’. As an introductory study, see, for example, Sharma, R.N., 1996, Bhakti in the Vaisnava Rasa-Sastra, Pratibha Prakashan, Delhi. 20. Gnoli, 1985, pp.72–73. 21. Singh, J., [1979] 1988, Vijňānabhairava or Divine Consciousness: A T reasury of 112 Types of Yoga, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, p.105. 22. Another popular text, the Spanda-Ka¯rika¯ s, also reads in a similar vein: ‘In that state is the Spanda-principle firmly established to which a person is reduced when he is greatly exasperated or overjoyed, or is in an impasse reflecting what to do, or is running for life.’ In Singh, J., [1980] 1991, Spanda-Kārikās. The Divine Creative Pulsation, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, p. 101. The commentary on the stanza recommends the yogi to concentrate on such states so as to become fully absorbed and by an act of introversion finally to be merged with the creative consciousness (spanda), which is acting through him. So we can appreciate in both classic texts of Kashmir Shaivism instructions for the yogi, which partially share one of the ingredients of the rasa experience: Absorption in intense emotional states. 23. Fernández Gómez, R., 1988, ‘El columpio de los dioses: hacia una estética comparada del juego’, in: Maillard, Ch. and de Santiago Guervós, L. (eds), Estética y hermenéutica , Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofia, suppl. 4, Málaga. 24. Gadamer, H.-G., 1977, Verdad y método (English: Truth and Method), Sígueme, Salamanca, p. 157. 25. Dyczkowski, M.S.G., 1991, The Aphorisms of Śiva. With a Commentary by Bh āskarācārya, Dilip Kumar Publishers, Varanasi, pp. 105–109. 26. Dyzckowski, M.S.G., 1991, p.105.

Presenting the Unpresentable. On Trauma and Visual Art Antoon Van den Braembussche

“Void may be empty but not be vacuum” (Toni Morrison)1 “Images have an advanced religion; they bury history” (Vicenç Altaió)2 “The only people who weren’t dead were the dead” (Ben Okri)3 “The patriarch asked: ‘Whence do you come?’ ‘I come from Tung-shan’ ‘What is it that thus comes?’ Nan-yüeh did not know what to answer. For eight years long he pondered the question, then one day it dawned upon him, and he exclaimed: ‘Even to say it is something does not hit the mark.’ ”4

Prelude In our present culture we are confronted with an excessive proliferation of and overexposure to violent images and information. Every day we are flooded with footage about war and terror, not only in the newsreels but also in every aspect of our culture. Images of a violent past, such as the Holocaust and colonial rule, are accumulated with a daily and rapid succession of images of mass killings, genocides and terrorist attacks, extreme poverty and famine. Moreover, violence has proved to be extremely productive of culture. Fiction films and computer games featuring violence are extremely popular. We seem to be seduced and fascinated by the horror and by the sheer energy released in scenes of destruction. Violence thus becomes an esthetical category, producing a pleasure, which transcends the human suffering behind the scenes. In a very specific sense, there seems to be hardly a distinction between fact and fiction: Also the violent images we see in the newsreels seem to be part of a giant spectacle and simulacrum of violence. They follow one another in such a rapid succession that the viewer is allowed hardly any time to digest the images. The overwhelming accumulation does not leave room for any empathy with the victims. Or, as one of the participants at a recent telesymposium on representations of violence puts it: “The quantity and frequency of these representations have stripped them of A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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the effect that they once had – the capacity to communicate an affective charge.”5 Have the representations of violence lost every power to move us deeply? Have they become part and parcel of a consumer culture in which violence has become a commonplace, an excellent commodity product in which sensation and spectacle have pride of place? Or should one speak of a massive way of numbing, in which the proliferation of violent images are not digested at all, but linger on in the collective unconscious on a subliminal level, a point of view which probably inspired Soshana Felman to postulate that the twentieth century is “a posttraumatic century.”6 Or have we to do with what Derrida in his Memoires for P aul de Man called an impossible mourning?7 In spite of the omnipresent violence in our visual culture and in spite of a rapidly growing literature on trauma and art, there is the striking fact that reflections on trauma and visual art are comparatively neglected. Indeed, in recent trauma studies by such authors as Cathy Caruth, Soshana Felman and Dori Laub, Lewis Hermann and many others,8 one is struck by the relative silence about visual representation of trauma. It is as if time and again literature emerges as the paradigm or privileged mode of expression for trauma, because, as Petar Ramadanovic argues, “literature as an art form can contain and present an aspect of experience which was not experienced or processed fully.” Very significantly, he adds: “Literature, in other words, because of its sensible and representational character, because of its figurative language, is a channel and a medium for a transmission of trauma which does not need to be apprehended in order to be present in a text or, to use Felman’s and Dori Laub’s term, in order to be witnessed.”9 In this article I will take four basic steps of thought. In the first step, I will try to delineate the nature of historical trauma with a special emphasis on visual art. In this section, I will try to elucidate what is at stake in the so-called politics of trauma. In such a politics, the real challenge of artistic representation is to remain faithful to the belatedness of the trauma experience, its inherent forgetting, a task which implies the ethical commitment in terms of the Other. In the second step, I will focus on the Rwanda Project of Alfredo Jaar to discuss the limits of representation, a recurrent and resistant theme in the literature on the subject. This is followed almost naturally by the third step: A more sustained philosophical reflection on the (negative) sublime, on what Lyotard has called the “presentation of the unpresentable.” In the fourth and final step I will conclude with some intercultural reflections on sensus communis and negative theology.

The Politics of Trauma The above arguments in favor of literature seem to be hardly convincing but center on the basic idea that language is akin to trauma because both are characterized by an original delay, le délai originaire, as Derrida calls it. In earlier publications,10 I emphasized that this original delay introduces an important analytical distinction between the nature of historical taboos and traumas. As a rule, historical

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taboos are rooted in current historical consciousness and the past is silenced retroactively because it threatens the current collective identity. Historical traumas, by contrast, are rooted in historical experience itself. The silence is part and parcel of the experience itself. Or, as Cathy Caruth writes: “It is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it (i.e., the traumatic event) is experienced at all.”11 The inherent latency lies within the experience itself and introduces a belatedness, which belongs to the very structure and nature of traumatic experience. Also, when it comes to define trauma, Cathy Caruth incorporates right from the start the acute question of delay within her definition: “In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”12 In a very specific sense, trauma, historical trauma, is not about forgetting. Time and again Cathy Caruth emphasizes that the traumatic experience is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs, a recurrent theme which remains faithful to Freuds initial theory of trauma.13 Because the overwhelming event breaks through the protective shield of consciousness, the afflicted person responds, according to Freud, by numbing, i.e., by retreating, almost immediately, “right on the spot,” into a kind of autohypnotic or half-hypnotic state. This numbed state embodies an attempt to avoid the event from causing enduring damage, from disrupting the victim’s emotional balance or integrity. So, it is already during the experience itself that the event is split off from consciousness (or at least from the spontaneous emotional involvement in it, with the victim merely looking at the event as a cool observer). The event is immediately suppressed in order for the victim to survive. Indeed, Freud frequently uses the notion of dissociation. According to his energetic model of the psyche this means that the traumatic event lingers on in the unconscious leading to a permanent alertness, a state of hyperarousal commonly associated with what was later to be called a “posttraumatic stress disorder” (PTSD). It is as if the event might return at any moment, as if the time stopped at the moment of the traumatic experience. This curious belatedness or Nachträglichkeit, as Freud called it, is at the heart of the traumatic experience. It also explains the repetitive intrusion of the event into the survivor’s life, a phenomenon called an idée fixe by Janet or the “fixation on the trauma” by Kardiner.14 The defense mechanisms, which systematically removed the traumatic event from consciousness, do not delete the subconscious traces, the deep imprints on the soul. On the contrary, they have a reinforcing effect. The suppressed “event” lives on vehemently, and typically re-emerges in the form of nightmares, flashbacks, hallucinations, and so on. It is as if the suppressed event is still there, more lively and threatening than ever. Be that as it may, it only and necessarily comes back in a disguised form through all sorts of detours and deformations. Moreover, the obsessive repetition or the “compulsion to repeat,” as Freud called it,15 is beyond the conscious control. Small, insignificant, reminders can also evoke the traumatic experience and provoke its return, often with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event.

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This suggests that memory does not function as usual at the time of traumatic experiences. Lawrence Langer made a crucial distinction between common and deep memory16: ●

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In common memory, the event is associated with other conscious recollections, so that the affect is no longer isolated from other recollections. The experience is thus embedded and integrated within a broader framework and becomes part of a story, a plot structure, and a narrative universe. New information is integrated and the overall story shows chronological unity, a linear progression. In deep memory, by contrast, the event is not integrated into a broader framework: It is not associated with other occurrences, but remains dissociated, isolated, and out of joint. In the absence of a broader framework, the focus is on fragmentary sensations, on images or sounds without conte xt or sense of place . Extreme details and the extreme closeness of the past constantly return in an endless cycle of obsessive repetition. It is as if there is an eternal now of the traumatic experience, or an eternal delay, which at the same time explains its compulsory repetition, its constant intrusion!

This distinction between common memory and deep memory seems to be extremely important and is reflected in the distinction between narrative memory and traumatic memory made by Janet and “mémoire ordinaire” and “ ‘mémoire profonde” made by Charlotte Delbo17! It also has enormous consequences for the artistic representation of major catastrophes, such as the Shoah and the catastrophes or genocides in more recent decades. Reading the extensive literature on deep memory is a puzzling experience. It would seem that deep memory in turn is subdivided, exemplifying two basic attitudes or tendencies, two basic “ideal types,” if you like, which seems quite antagonistic. The two tendencies are rooted in the two different types of emotional attitudes: ●

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Deep memory of the dissociation type . This attitude is characterized by a detached calm, a numbing of emotional involvement which at the same time allows for a cool and accurate registration, also called hypermnesia . The traumatic event is lived through as if the event is not really happening, as though the victim were an external observer. This experience is reflected in memory itself. The victim relives the event without any emotion at all, as if he was a bystander and not really involved at all. This leads to an extremely detailed, accurate, literal, seemingly unmediated, hyper-real, direct but at the same time cool description of traumatic events, which resists any transformation into a mediated and integrated narrative. An archetypical example from literature is the work of Primo Levi.18 Recent examples from the visual arts are the many photos of the newsreel featuring at the outset of the book of Documenta XI ,19 the Abu Graib Photos displayed at the exhibition Inconvenient Evidence at the end of 2003,20 and Arnout Mik’s double installation Raw Footage/Scapegoats in 2006.21 Deep memory of the intrusion type. The numbing is absolute in terms of perception, not emotion! The experience is marked by a lack of registration, also called amnesiac. That is why Dori Laub, with respect to the Holocaust, uses the term

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“collapse of witnessing.” This original delay takes the form of a belatedness, which explains why the experience irrupts into memory, being, as a rule, extremely confronting and emotional. In fact, the whole problem is caused by the very inaccessibility of the occurrence, which cannot be represented as such. This leads (right from the beginning) to a “mediated,” indirect, metaphoric, and at the same time emotionally involved evocation, which transcends or defies any attempt at direct representation, including visual ones. An archetypical example from literature is the poetic work of Paul Celan.22 Visual references are, for instance, the film Night and Fog by Alain Resnais,23 Shoah by Claude Lanzmann,24 many of the installations by Charles Boltanski,25 and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s contribution to the film project 11’09’01.26 Common memory seems to function as a model for healing processes. An important part of healing appears to be the challenge of integrating deep memory into common memory. Or as Lewis Herman testifies: “Breaking through the barriers of amnesia is not in fact the difficult part of reconstruction, for any number of techniques will usually work. The hard part of this task is to come face-to-face with the horrors on the other side of the amnesiac barrier and to integrate these experiences into a fully developed life narrative.”27 However, the politics of trauma is not about healing but about remaining faithful to the original experience of the traumatic event, its original delay. What is at stake here is to come to terms with an unbearable event, without any attempt at locking up, banalizing or trivializing it, or explaining it away on rational and/or historical grounds. No doubt historical explanations are valuable in themselves, and they are certainly vital to resist the so-called politics of memory, i.e., the many abuses, manipulations, and even crude revisionisms of major catastrophes. The question, however, is whether these historical and factual accounts yield an adequate representation of the traumatic experience as such. It is here that artistic representation comes in. But the task of art to produce adequate visual representations of trauma and violence is, right from the beginning, caught in a huge paradox or a huge dilemma. It embodies a real aporia or even a double bind. On the one hand, there is the urge to testify, on the other hand, the apparent impossibility to represent the traumatic event and experience as such. At the same time there is, as we will see, an ethical issue involved.

Limits to Representation. Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project A good example of the above dilemma is the work of the Chilean photographer and the visual artist Alfredo Jaar. Already in his earlier work Jaar appears time and again to be imbued with a distrust of the visual image. His works Turning Point (1989) and Europa (1994) show the photographic image only in a fragmentary or indirect way. Jaar’s iconoclastic experiments culminated with Real Pictures (1994– 1995), an installation about the Rwanda massacres in which the photographs of the

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genocide remain sealed in black boxes, never to be seen by the spectator. The installation was part of his Rwanda Project (1994–1998), a project which looked, at first sight, like a documentary one. Jaar took the pictures only after establishing a certain closeness with the people who survived the tragedy. To enhance the realism of the work – as well as to provide some relief – he photographed not only scenes of atrocity but also interlaced them with pictures of a sunset, a tree, or a plant. Jaar’s objective was to come as close as possible to reality. At the same time he realized that “the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at that moment. The camera always creates a new reality. I have always been concerned with the disjunction between experience and what can be recorded photographically. In the case of Rwanda, the disjunction was enormous and the tragedy unrepresentable.”28 Real Pictures was first exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in January 1995. Out of the 3,000 he took in Rwanda, Jaar made a very careful selection of 60 pictures to “show” the different aspects of the Rwanda genocide: the massacres, the refugee camps, the killing fields, and the destruction of the cities. In order to recover from the impact the images had, he stopped looking at them for some time. And…finally he decided not to show them but to conceal them. He literally “buried” each of these images in a black linen box. On the outside, each box top bore, in silk-screen printed writing, a brief depiction of the image inside. The boxes were stacked and arranged into “monuments” of various shapes and sizes. The completed work comprised 550 direct positive color photographs in 550 black linen boxes. The final selection consisted of pictures that had all been taken in various locations both in Rwanda and in Zaire, in late August, 1994. One of the prints runs as follows: Caritas Namazaru, 88 years old, fled her home in Kibilira, Rwanda and walked 306 kilometers to reach this camp. Her white hair disappears against the pale sky. Because of the early morning temperatures, she is covered in a blue shawl with a geometric print. Her white blouse cuts across her neck, adorned with a string of amber beads. Her gaze is resigned, weary, and carries the weight of her survival.29

Jaar described Real Pictures as a “cemetery of images.” Indeed, all spectators could hardly avoid feeling as if they were wandering through a graveyard, reading epitaphs. And because the images were not shown but only described by the prints, the viewers had no choice but to imagine the images, not to consume them. Jaar’s underlying motivation was to react against the overwhelming flow of images presented by the mass media on a daily basis, which has an anesthetizing effect and gives viewers only an illusory sense of being witnesses to what they are being shown. As Alfredo Jaar testifies: “My logic was the following: If the media and their images fill us with an illusion of presence, which later leaves us with a sense of absence, why not try the opposite? That is to offer an absence that could perhaps provoke a presence. This was the first step. The second step was to avoid showing these images because they would distract us from what was truly important: namely, that we let a million people die without doing anything. (…) This was a catastrophe that could have been averted. Therefore, my idea was to create a situation of absence in order to generate presence.”30

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The same dialectics between absence and presence can be seen in The Eyes of Gutete Emerita , an installation created in 1996. Gutete Emerita is the name of a woman, who Jaar met in Rwanda. In this installation, two “quad vision” light boxes are mounted on the wall, next to each other. At the beginning of the sequence, a block of text appears, which runs from the left to the right light box, and lasts for 45 s: Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, is standing in front of a church where 400 Tutsi men, women and children were systematically slaughtered by a Hutu death squad during Sunday mass. She was attending mass with her family when the massacre began. Killed with machetes in front of her eyes were her husband Tito Kahinamura, 40, and her two sons, Muhoza, 10, and Matirigari, 7. Somehow, Gutete managed to escape with her daughter Marie Louise Unumararunga, 12. They hid in a swamp for three weeks, coming out at night for food.

This text disappears and is followed by another, somewhat shorter text, which is shown for 30 s: Her eyes look lost and incredulous. Her face is the face of someone who has witnessed an unbelievable tragedy and now wears it. She has returned to the place in the woods because she has nowhere else to go. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the African sun.

This text too disappears and is followed by two more lines, which last only 15 s: I remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita.31

And finally, we can see, for only a fraction of a second, the eyes of Gutete Emerita. We are shown an eye in the left box, and an eye in the right box. Immediately after that, the boxes start projecting the first text again. The total duration of the sequence is thus no more than 90 s and a fraction of a second: the texts appear for one minute and a half, and the eyes only for a fraction of a second. As Alfredo Jaar explains: “A tension is created within the spectator, while he reads the story of Gutete Emerita and awaits the appearance of her eyes. When the eyes finally do appear, one feels a sense of frustration because the image is very, very brief. In that fraction of a second, I want the spectator to see the massacre through the eyes of Gutete Emerita . I think that this is the only way to see the massacre now, since we failed to see it in the actual images of the Rwandan genocide”32 (italics mine). What Alfredo Jaar tries to achieve is that we identify with Gutete Emerita. In fact, there is also an ethical issue involved. When he decided not to show the pictures he took in Rwanda, his motivation was not simply esthetical, but ethical too. He was clearly conscious that to show the images would be disrespectful toward the unnamable suffering of both the victims and the survivors of the Rwanda genocide. The eyes of Gutete Emerita symbolize the moral appeal: Her gaze evokes what Cathy Caruth called “a voice that cries out of the wound.”33 The fact that we are confronted with a gaze, with only the fragments of a face, remind us of Lévinas’ urge that we should respond to the moral appeal that is embodied in the face of the Other. The gaze of the Other invites us and even obliges us to transcend our egocentric worldview, which prevents us to establish a real encounter with the Other. By not showing the pictures themselves, but only showing the eyes of Gutete Emerita, Alfredo Jaar tries to withhold us from appropriating the suffering as our

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own, from seeing and trivializing it as an extension of our own ego, our own preoccupations, and our own worldview. What he aims at is that we, as spectators, open ourselves to the radical otherness of the Rwanda genocide, to its irreducible and hence unspeakable strangeness.34

Limits to Representation. Some Notes on the Sublime The examples of Alfredo Jaar show that there are definite limits to presentation. This recurrent topic seems intimately connected with deep memory, especially of the intrusion type. Also in trauma studies, the thesis that trauma resides “beyond the limits of representation” is omnipresent. Time and again it is said that trauma is inherently ineffable, unspeakable, and unpresentable. This leitmotiv is, as I will show, closely related to the belatedness or Nachträglichkeit of the traumatic experience discussed earlier. At the same time, this leitmotiv seems to defy any attempt at intercultural dialogue, for how can we communicate across different cultures and/or worldviews a feeling which as such is unspeakable or unpresentable? The first problem about belatedness and the unpresentable as such will lead me to a reflection into the sublime. The second problem about the universal communicability of the unspeakable will lead me to an intercultural dialogue about sensus communis and negative theology in Indian rasa theory, Japanese Zen philosophy, and Derrida’s thinking of difference. Let us first concentrate on the sublime. In dealing with the traumatic experience, I emphasized the original delay or belatedness. This Nachträglichkeit is characterized, according to Lyotard, by (1) a double blow that is profoundly asymmetrical and (2) a very peculiar temporality that definitely departs from the usual time continuum which is largely considered as constitutive of our subjective time in the phenomenology of consciousness.35 The double blow refers to the genesis of traumatic experience already touched upon. The first blow strikes the psychic apparatus to such an extent that the event is not registered at all, but suppressed without affecting the subject. It is, as Lyotard claims, a shock without af fect. It is already here that we can find the root of the limits of representation. The original force of the event lingers on in the unconscious, dissipating its energy without being able to take a definite form. It is this absence of a definite form that originates the unpresentable. The second blow is an affect without shock. This refers to the many seemingly insignificant events in daily life which may trigger the originally repressed energy, the layers and residues of the “initial” violence. Because these energetic layers are dissipated, they can be expressed only in a disguised form. Because of this kind of displacement, the original event returns in ever changing disguises so that the subject is caught in the logic of repetition, the obsessive compulsion to repeat. It is in the description of the second blow that Lyotard already introduces the peculiar temporality involved in posttraumatic disorders: the innocent daily event – the image of a face, a sound, a fragment of a melody – “informs consciousness that

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there is something, without being able to tell what it is.” It indicates the quod but not the quid.36 So what is experienced after the facts, the posttraumatic stress disorder, refers to – Lyotard would even say comes before – the first, initial blow of the traumatic event: the shock without affect! Anyhow, the temporality of the traumatic experience is profoundly different from the way time consciousness has been conceived in the phenomenology of consciousness, from Augustine to Husserl. In this phenomenology, time is conceived in the perspective of a past–presence–future continuum, in which the subject constantly anticipates the future. This normal time consciousness has been characterized as diachronic temporal ecstacy, the subject being literally distended over the time continuum. In this distention of the soul (Augustine: distentio animi) there is hardly a place for the Now, because the present moment is being devoured, as it were, by the (memory of) past and the (anticipation of) future. In the traumatic experience, however, there is so to speak a reversal of the normal diachronic, linear or chronological continuum. The future does not follow the past, as is normally the case, but, in a sense, precedes the past. Or to put it in terms of shock: the first blow, the affect without shock, allows the second blow, the shock without affect, to come bac k, or to “release” itself finally. The Now becomes extremely important, because it is through the present moment that the past finally “happens” in the present, although as such it continues to be not present, remaining absent, ungraspable, and even inconceivable! That is why Lyotard contends that the subject does not know what (quid) is happening, only that (quid) something quite indeterminate is happening. This reasoning about the quod and the quid returns almost literally in Lyotards considerations about the sublime, as we will see. Before going more deeply into this temporal affinity between traumatic experience and the sublime, I should want to make a few remarks. First of all, the above analysis of trauma explains why many writers and philosophers are opposed to narrative and realistic accounts of traumatic experiences. According to them, narrative representations describe an essential nonchronological experience within a chronological and diachronic framework, which, they argue, neutralizes the original delay of the traumatic experience. Narrative and realistic representation is therefore condemned as a downright betrayal of what is at stake in the traumatic experience. It is condemned as profoundly inadequate because it reintroduces the time continuum and thus completely misses the peculiar temporality of trauma, in which the presence precedes the past, or in which the presence is the past and vice versa. So – and this is my second remark – in order to cope with the limits of representation, it is argued, in sharp contrast to any naive realism, that it should be recognized that there are no neutral or unproblematic forms of representation, that all perception and thus representation is not merely passive, but active, conceptually and ideologically affected. In addition, it is argued, that the use of fragmented forms of narration should be used, adopting different and even contradictory time-shifts, even to the point of a downright simultaneity of past and present experiences. And, last but not least, it is argued that the medium itself should always be reflected in the process of creating, thus leading to what is commonly called the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of the medium, or, what recently has been called hypermediality.

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This hypermediality resists the transparence that usually enables us to completely forget the medium.37 So Jaar’s decision not to show the images is an esthetics of resistance, a resistance against the self-evidence and transparence of the medium. This leads me to a third remark. Indeed, the above distinction between the first and the second blow sheds some light on the difference between shock and trauma (…). In terms of the above analysis, shocking and unbearable images, so typical of today’s visual culture, are no representations of historical traumata as such. Quite the contrary. In all their directness and overexposure, which can at times be extremely confronting and even disgusting,38 they seem to embody only the first shock of trauma, namely a shock without affect. This could perhaps explain why, as a rule, they simply lead to indifference, to acceptance, to a blocking of the emotional appeal, and henceforth to an after image which is stripped of any traumatic effect in terms of spectatorship. One reason why Jaar decided to conceal his photos was that the mass media embedded the shocking images of the Rwanda genocide in a politics of image, depriving the images of their power and effectiveness. They anesthetized rather than sensitized spectators worldwide.39 However – and this is my fourth remark – violent images or shock-photos may move us deeply and induce or even provoke a traumatic after-effect. In that case, although the image is still not a representation of an original delay or deferral, it can in turn nevertheless induce such an original delay. Pictures of violence or atrocity can thus be shocking in that they challenge and even transgress existing taboos of representation. They may thus leave imprints without affecting us, with representation remaining largely unmediated. We see the images without any emotion, we simply register them, with our eyes wide open (or half closed!), but this does not prevent them from having a traumatic effect, suggesting what it means to experience a trauma. In other words, very direct, even disgusting and appalling pictures can constitute an assault on our psychic apparatus similar to a traumatic experience: It can likewise linger on in our subconscious, and even introduce an obsessive compulsion to be repeated. In this sense, violent images are far from innocent. And they partly explain why our visual culture is a culture of shock transcending the clear distinction between shock and trauma. But let us go back to the temporal affinity between traumatic experience and the sublime. This time, however, the emphasis is even stronger on the present, the Now, the moment, the instant. Lyotard refers to Barnett Newman’s well-known text The Sublime is Now from 1948, emphasizing that the Now of the sublime experience escapes the line of thought from Augustine to Husserl, because it is a now that disturbs, arrests, dislocates, and breaches the time continuum which is firmly rooted in normal time consciousness. Newman’s now is “a stranger to consciousness and cannot be constituted by it.” Rather “it dismantles consciousness, it deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate , and even what consciousness for gets in or der to constitute itself .”40 What we do not manage to formulate, Lyotard emphasizes, is that something happens. And again we meet the same reversed and curious temporality of the traumatic experience. Again we meet the discourse on the quod and the quid: “Before asking questions about what it is and about its significance, before the quid, it must ‘first’ so to

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speak ‘happen,’ quod. That it happens ‘precedes,’ (…), the question pertaining to what happens.”41 In both instances, in the experience of trauma and of the sublime, the reversal of time alludes to something which cannot be shown or presented (or, as Kant said, dargestellt). Thomas B. Hess, for instance, did not hesitate to associate Barnett Newman’s Now with the Makom or Hamakom, which holds pride of place in the Hebraic tradition, where it means the there, the site, the placeless place, one of the names used by the Torah to refer to the Lord or the Unnamable. This has inspired Lyotard to describe the sublime as “presenting the unpr esentable.” What Alfredo Jaar did in his Real Pictures was indeed literally attempting to show what cannot be shown, presenting what cannot, as such, be presented. Time and again, he testified that the Rwanda massacres were un(re)presentable, as we have seen. The impossibility of direct (re)presentation is already fully acknowledged in Kant’s original, transcendental analysis of the esthetics of the sublime. In the notion of the sublime, which Kant distinguished from the beautiful, the notion of being overwhelmed is initially related with a feeling of awe, pain, fear (Schreck). As such it cannot be presented. That is the reason why the sublime resists all possible forms of direct representation: there is no adequate form for it. It exceeds our capacity of representation, and it is all the more sublime the more it resists this capacity. Here we see how important the notion of transgression is. But still, Kant argues, we do represent the sublime, albeit in an inadequate or indir ect way. It is thanks to our ideas of Reason, or Vernunft, our metaphysical or noumenal ideas that we are able to represent it through analogy or symbols.42 The boundless ocean in a state of tumult becomes sublime as soon as it is associated with the idea of infinity or the absolutely powerful. In fact no object is sublime in itself, but it is thanks to our ideas that the sublime constitutes itself as an esthetical experience. But still, in spite of the immense power of ideas, the infinity or absoluteness cannot be represented as such; it “can only be revealed in what Kant calls a negative presentation, or even, a nonrepresentation. He cites the Jewish law banning images as an eminent example of negative presentation: optical pleasure when reduced to near nothingness promotes an infinite contemplation of infinity.”43 It is interesting to see that both Kant and Freud speak about Schreck, about anxiety and fright. In both the experience of the sublime and the experience of the trauma, consciousness appears to be confronted with something overwhelming for which it is not prepared. In both instances, the initial reaction is one of pain and displeasure. Also Edmund Burke emphasized – earlier than Kant – that, contrary to the experience of beauty, the experience of the sublime is rooted in pain and impending death, in what he significantly called terror. But in Kant and Burke the pain, the negative pleasure or displeasure, is ultimately transformed in pleasure. In Kant, this transformation is rooted in the transcendental “working” of Reason: It derives pleasure from the fact that imagination ultimately harmonizes its object with that of Reason. This transformation or even transfiguration induces the subject into a state of joy. In Burke, by contrast, the pain is mixed with pleasure thanks to a psychological process in which the terror-causing threat is suspended, a suspense which provokes a relief and ultimately ends up in what he calls delight.44 In Freud,

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by contrast, things are more ambiguous. Freud is puzzled by the compulsion to repeat, even to the extent that he sees in it a principle beyond – or even more primitive than – the pleasure principle.45 However, the compulsion to repeat still tries to master the original overpowering event and in developing the initial anxiety it seems time and again to repeat the initial numbing, which can still be viewed as a deferral, a suspending or an avoidance of displeasure.

Sensus Communis, Rasa Theory and Negative Theology. An Intercultural Perspective As we have seen, the experience of the sublime is characteristically made up of a mixture of pain and delight, of displeasure and pleasure, even to the point that, although both emotional states can be analytically distinguished and even divided into two phases, in real time they are simultaneous. It is interesting to see that non-Western esthetics follows similar lines of thought. The Buddhist notion of samvega, or esthetic shock, for example, also combines agitation, pain, anxiety on the one hand, and a feeling of wonder and delight on the other. According to A.K. Coomaraswamy, the esthetic shock is likewise divided into two phases, which can be distinguished analytically but are experienced as parts of one and the same instant experience.46 Also here, the initial shock is transformed through the esthetical experience itself, a transformation which results in inner peace: “In the first phase, there is really a disturbance, in the second there is the experience of a peace that cannot be described as an emotion in the sense that fear and love or hate are emotions.”47 It is in the deepest experience, especially provoked by a work of art, that our very being is shaken (samvijita) to its roots. This reference to the notion of samvega has set the tone for an intercultural perspective. Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda project already confronts us with the intercultural layers of contemporary visual art. Jaar is – as said – a Chilean artist, living and working in New York, influenced by contemporary Western art, but at the same time involved with an African genocide, which also confronts him with African identities. One is confronted here with different layers of identity, multiple identities. But at the core of the project stands the attempt to communicate by means of visual art the unspeakable and inconceivable suffering of the victims and survivors of the Rwanda genocide. It is thus not merely a protest against the aftermath of the colonial period during which the Tutsi domination was reinforced and the conditions of the Hutu peasantry deteriorated. It is not only a protest against the fact that, while 1 million people were murdered in 100 days, the international community hardly responded, with the US and Belgium even pressuring the United Nations to reduce the number of their troops in Rwanda. It is not only a protest against our collective indifference induced by instant televised horror, but also gives us the feeling that we are living in a better, superior, and safer world. It is also and above all an attempt to communicate a feeling which cannot be described nor shown, which cannot be represented at all.

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Alfredo Jaar emphasizes, as we have seen, that he wanted the spectator to see the massacre through the e yes of Gutete Emerita. Here Jaar seems to presuppose that art is able to communicate a negative sublime feeling across cultures and different world views. So he seems to presuppose a universal communicability of a feeling , a feeling, however, that as such is ungraspable and indeterminate. This is precisely what Kant meant by sensus communis.48 Although our judgment of taste is strictly subjective, at the same time it involves a claim to universal validity. This is the reason why we normally say “This Picasso is sublime.” We judge as if our judgment is a statement of fact; we believe that others ought to have the same judgment. This subjective universality presupposes, according to Kant, a subjective principle, which implies a determination by feeling rather than concepts, though nonetheless with universal validity, of what is liked or disliked. This principle, sensus communis, has to do with the communicability of sensus, the feeling; it concerns as such the mood, the state of mind (the Stimmung), the inner voice (innere Stimme), and the interior music within and across esthetical subjects. The rasa theory, the central doctrine in Indian classical esthetics, which is much older than Kant’s esthetics,49 contains similar ideas. The idea of impersonality or transpersonality (sadharanikarana) presupposed in esthetic experience is indeed a real leitmotiv in Indian rasa theory. It is this impersonal quality of the esthetic nature which explains “the sense in which the same poem is common to many readers. Viewed in its intelligibility and in abstraction from the different personal situations of different readers, the poetic world is common to all.”50 It is this transpersonality which explains why esthetic experience presupposes a shared experience. And, as Eliot Deutsch affirms, “this sharing is achieved in art only when there is an intense impersonality which, paradoxically because of its intensity, is at the same time highly individual. This is the case for esthetic experience because esthetic interest, in contrast to practical interest, is not given to the individual qua individual, but to the individual as it embodies, becomes, represents, expresses – whatever you will – a universal, interpersonal – and thereby – transcendent quality.”51 Moreover, rasa theory emphasizes that rasa or esthetic experience cannot be grasped intellectually. The universal communicability and intellectually ungraspable character of esthetic experience seem time and again to return in the discourse on art, even across time and across cultures and world views. On closer look we seem to touch here a universal archetype of experience, which runs through the most diverse cultures. It is as if all world views revolve around a deep layer or kernel, which remains unspeakable. This kernel makes that any world view consists mainly of a symbolic dimension, which may contain not only conceptual, cognitive but also expressive and ritual layers. The core problem of the unspeakable is that we touch here upon “something” which cannot be simply expressed or represented as such by the ongoing symbolic universes. The esthetics of the sublime seems to be one attempt to make contact with this deep layer. Another persistent and recurrent way to seek contact with this deep layer is the language of the unspeakable. Also here, as in the sublime, the via negativa is at stake: here one meets the negative theology as a counterpart of negative presentation.

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Three important challenges thus remain. A first challenge pertains to the universal communicability presupposed in sensus communis. This universal communicability is clearly neither rational nor cognitive, but grounded in the noumenal, whether as a higher regulative principle (Kant) or as an actual experience (rasa theory). Extremely important here is that the spectator must be a sahrdaya, “one of a similar heart,” capable of identifying him or herself with what is at stake in the esthetical experience. So sensus communis or rasa always refers, in one way or another, to a con-sensus, in the literal meaning of the word: a shared feeling, a consent, an agreement or Einstimmung. It is about attuning, which is even much stronger a challenge in the case of the sublime than in the case of the beautiful. Here, art and esthetical experience seem to open up a common ground, a middle ground, a sort of in-between or third space (Homi Bhabha), in which shared feelings can be communicated, even the most sublime about the most unbearable events. In terms of ongoing political, religious, and ethnic conflicts, this is an important value of art, one which lays bare the genuine ethical and political dimension of art. One has only to be beware of indulging into a kind of esthetical imperialism. It is indeed important to remain sensitive to specific cultural sensibilities and to remain conscious of the limits of cultural synthesis. In a sense, this is part and parcel of the sensus, the gut feeling which is presupposed by sensus communis! A second challenge pertains to the possible esthetization of major collective traumas or catastrophes. One could even speak of the inherent tendency toward sacralization and mystification. Even if one experiences Real Pictures in the silence of the gallery, the graveyard of tombs dimly lighted in a predominantly black space, one is struck by a sacral and mystical atmosphere. No doubt the esthetical experience of the sublime and the mystical experience show remarkable similarities and affinities. In mystical experiences, too, enlightenment is preceded time and again by the night or abyss of the soul. Also here one meets a mixture of displeasure and pleasure, leading to a kind of ecstasy and inner peace. The negative sublime seems to challenge any real parallel, however, especially in the ethical sense, except maybe insofar as it is able to cleanse our souls and to produce a cathartic effect. Thus while the negative sublime is esthetically analogous to the positive sublime and the mystical experience, ethically it is opposed to them, antithetical. Some, including Kant, would prefer to refer to radical evil as an inversion of the sublime into downward transgression. Are the positive and negative sublime two sides of the same coin, of the same abyss? On a purely esthetical level, they look indeed very similar. This similarity leads me to a third and last challenge pertaining to the unspeakable, the indeterminate, literally the unpresentable. Or, to put it in earlier terms, the impossibility to present or represent the sublime experience in a direct way. To present or to represent – terms I have used throughout this text – are in a way quite paradoxical because the real challenge here is to make present something which cannot be present at all, something which is by nature absent. Or should we say “something” which is neither present nor absent, and at the same time, present and absent? Do¯gen (1200–1253), the famous Zen philosopher, not only confessed that Zen meditation or zazen was directed toward the unthinkable and the unspeakable, or, as it is commonly called in Japanese Buddhism, to emptiness (sunyata), but also

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tried to think through thoroughly a nondualist vision on Buddha-nature. To him, Buddha-nature is not something unnamable, not something limitless or infinite; if it was something unnamable or infinite, it would still be determined by something that is namable or finite! Do¯gen was well aware that all binary distinctions and any choice made upon these distinctions naturally entail a dualist ontology of presence (and absence).52 Buddha-nature is thus unsubstantial, undetermined, and indeterminate. This implies that anybody speaking of something or somebody having a Buddha-nature or not, totally misses the point. Indeed, confronted with Sakyamuni’s assertion that “all sentient beings without exception have the Buddha nature,” and Ta-kuei’s statement that “all sentient beings have no Buddha nature,” D gen emphasizes that because Buddha-nature is an unobjectifiable and unobtainable “what,” it is totally wrong to speak of having or not having Buddha-nature!53 “Even to say it is something does not hit the mark,” as Nan-yüeh says in the famous k an figuring among the mottos of this article. Even to say that it is “something” inbetween, is saying too much because this manner of speaking still presupposes binary and dualist thinking! In order not to speak of something, in order to avoid binary thinking, Derrida, following Heidegger, would sometimes delete words such as “being.” Also about différance, a key term in his philosophy, Derrida empathically said it was neither this nor that, neither sensory nor supernatural, neither positive nor negative, neither active nor passive, neither immanent nor transcendent, neither a concept nor a name. And Derrida, like Do¯gen, tries to transcend the thinking in terms of presence and absence. In doing this, he immediately places his discourse into the perspective of presentation and delay, the subject of our discussion of trauma: “If the displaced presentation remains definitively and implacably postponed, it is not that a certain present remains absent or hidden. Rather, différance maintains our relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue, and which exceeds the alternative of presence and absence. A certain alterity – to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of the unconscious – is definitely exempt from every process of presentation by means of which we would call upon it to show itself in person.” Derrida does not even recur to the language of psychoanalysis but explicitly refers to the language of trauma and delay: “The alterity of the ‘unconscious’ makes us concerned not with horizons of modified – past or future – presents, but with a ‘past’ that has never been present, and which never will, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of a presence.”54

Notes and References 1. See Morrison, Tony, Unspeakable things unspoken. Michigan Quarterly Review, 28(1) (winter 1989), p. 11. 2. See Vicenç Altaió, “Europe or the Difficulty of History,” Europa Exhibition Catalogue, IFA, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, 1994. 3. See “A Prayer From the Living,” in: Jaar, Alfredo (Ed.), Let There Be More Light, Barcelona, San Sebastián, 1998, p. 2.

134 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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A. Van den Braembussche See the Dharma teaching of “What is it that thus comes?,” a question supposed to have been made in a conversation that took place at the first meeting between the sixth patriarch, Hui-neng (J. Eno-, 638–713), and Nan-yüeh Huai-jang (J. Nangaku Ejo-, 677–744); See: Abe, Masao, “Do-gen on Bhudda-nature,” in: A Study of Do-gen. His Philosophy and Religion, State University of New York Press, New York, 1992, pp. 35–76. See Telesymposia 3. Representations of Violence. Violence of Repr esentations, http://www. echonyc.com/~trans/Telesymposia3/Telesym[posia3introeng.html, p. 1. See Felman, Soshana, “Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in: Felman, Soshana and Dori Laub (Eds.), Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History , Routledge, New York, 1992, p.1; This article, which launched recent trauma studies onto the American scene, appeared in a first modified version in “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma,” a special issue of American Imago, 48.1, Spring 1991; Caruth, Cathy (Ed.), Explorations of Memory, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 1995. See Derrida, Jacques, Memoires for Paul de Man, Columbia University Press New York, 1989, p. 6. See the books by Felman & Laub and Cathy Caruth referred to in note 6. See also Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience . T rauma, Narr ative, and History , John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996, a classic in the field; The path-breaking book by Lewis Hermann, Judith, Trauma and Reco very. From Domestic Ab use to Political Terror, Basic Books, New York, 1992, is less embedded in literary theory than the others and more oriented toward a ground-breaking recovery program, based on 20 years of research and clinical work; The literary tradition is continued by Boheemen-Saaf, Christine van, Joyce, Lacan, and the Trauma of History. Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. The list could be extended at length. Ramadanovic, Petar, Introduction: Trauma and Crisis, htpp://www3.aath.virginaia.edu/pmc/ text-only/issue.101/11.2introduction.txt, p. 1. See for a similar point, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, op. cit., pp. 3–5. “ ‘The Silenced Past. On the nature of historical taboos’,” in: Wrzoska, W. (Ed.), Swiat historii. Festschrift for Jerzy Topolski, Poznan, Historical Institute, 1998, pp. 97–112; “History: Historical Taboos,” in: Jones, Derek (Ed.), Censorship: A W orld Encyclopedia , London, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, 2001, vol. 2, pp. 1060–1062; “The Silence of Belgium: Taboo and Trauma in Belgian Memory,” in: Labio, C. (Ed.), Belgian Memories, Yale French Studies, Number 102, 2002, pp. 35–52. Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience, p. 11. Caruth, ibid, p. 11. See Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, W.W. Norton & Company New York and London, 1989; See also his: Moses and Monotheism, Vintage Books, New York, 1939. See Herman Lewis, Judith, op. cit., p. 37. See also: Kardiner, A. and H. Spiegel, War, Stress, and Neurotic Illness, Hoeber, New York, 1947. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op. cit., pp. 19–20. See for this basic distinction his Holocaust T estimonies. The Ruins of Memory , Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991. Delbo, Charlotte, La mémoire et les jours, Berg, Paris, 1985. Primo Levi’s most important book is If This is a Man (Se questo è uomo, 1958). In the USA it is published under the title: Survival in Auschwitz (New York, 1996). See the first 30 pages, compiled by Tottner, Nadja in: Documenta XI, Ostflildern- Ruit, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002. These photographs and stills really show a blueprint from the newsreels from 1998 until 2002, ranging from the Valley of Tears to 09–11, from Milosevic to Osama bin Laden, from Albanian refugees in Brindisi, Italy, to Guantanamo Bay. Inconvenient Evidence was presented jointly at the International Center of Photography in New York and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The exhibition displayed 17 of the published pictures from the notorious prison. The exhibition was met with mixed feelings. Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote: “As for surviving detainees, how might they feel about being exhibited like this? Elsewhere, their images have become tools of political resistance, but here the detainees are in a sense twice violated, first as objects of the photographers’

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derision, then as objects of the audience’s detached contemplation.” For another attitude toward photographic evidence, compare my discussion of Alfredo Jaar. Raw footage, exhibited for the first time in Basis voor Actuele K unst, Utrecht, The Netherlands, consists of two juxtaposed projection screens simultaneously showing images from the war in former Yugoslavia. The images, from the media archives of Reuters and Independent Television News, were never used and are projected without the usual comments or screams. Raw footage is not unmediated, because the choice and sequencing of the images is edited by Aernout Mik. The deliberate choice for silence results in a more estranged and at the same time more committed spectatorship. In a very specific way Mik anticipates the second intrusion-type of deep memory and representation. The literature on Celan is vast. A very recent book comparing the visual work of Anselm Kiefer with Paul Celan’s poetic oeuvre is: Lauterwein, Andrea, Anselm Kiefer – Paul Celan, Myth, Mourning and Memory, Thames and Hudson, London, 2007. This a very fine and early example of indirect representation, representation of the intrusion kind. See for a subtle and deeply committed discussion: “Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour,” in: Caruth, Cathy (Ed.), Unclaimed Experience, op. cit., pp. 25–56. Claude Lanzman’s Shoah is generally seen as a groundbreaking work, especially in terms of deep memory type of representation. See, for instance, Felman, Soshana, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in: Felman, Soshana and Dori Laub (Eds.), Testimony, op. cit., pp. 204–283. The French artist Christian Boltanski makes use of archives to refer to the Holocaust, often in an indirect way. So in his Le Lycée Chases he photographed Jewish students of a French secondary school, who most probably did not survive the Holocaust. See for an elucidating interview: Renard, Delphine, “Entretien avec Christian Boltanski,” Exhibition Catalo gue, Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1984, pp. 72–85. 11’09”01 – September 11 was the first cinematographic reaction to September eleven. The French filmmaker Alain Brigand asked 11 directors from 11 different countries to give their interpretation of the terrorist attack. They were all given 11 min, 9 s, and 1 frame. Alejandro González Iñárritu from Mexico presented a short film consisting mainly of a black screen and noises. Lewis Herman, op. cit,, p. 184. See Telesymposia 3. Representations of Violence, Violence of Representations, op. cit., 12.31; Trans 3/4, p. 57. See Strauss, David Levi, “A Sea of Griefs is Not a Proscenium. On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar,” in: Jaar, Alfredo (Ed.), Let There Be Light. The Rwanda pr oject 1994–1998, Astar, Barcelona, 1998. For pictures of the Rwanda Project, see http://www.alfredojaar.net/ Telesymposia 3, Representations, 12.33. See Strauss, op. cit. Telesymposia 3, Representations, 12.35. Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience, op. cit., p. 2. For an original reflection on trauma and Lévinas, see: Elisabeth Weber, Verfolgung und Trauma. Zu Emmanuel Lévinas’ Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence , Vienna, 1990. Lyotard, J.-F., Heidegger and “the J ews,” University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis, 1990, pp. 15–16. See Lyotard, J.-F., op. cit, p. 16: “The essence of the event: that there is ‘comes before’ what there is (Freud, I, 215).” And further: “This ‘before’ of the quod is also an ‘after’ of the quid. For whatever is now happening in the store (i.e., the terror and the flight) does not come forth; it comes back from the first blow, from the shock, from the ‘initial’ excess that remained outside the scene, even unconscious, deposited outside representation.” See for this crucial distinction: Bolter, J.D. and R. Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001. See for instance Rotten.com and Ogrish.com, to name but a few websites famous for their disgusting images. Interesting are Kant’s remarks on that which excites disgust. After admitting that there are things which are by nature ugly or displeasing, he observes: “There is only one

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A. Van den Braembussche kind of ugliness which cannot be represented in accordance with nature without destroying all esthetical satisfaction, and consequently artificial beauty, viz. that which excites disgust. For in this singular sensation, which rests on mere imagination, the object is represented as it were obtruding itself for our enjoyment, while we strive against it with all our might.” See his Critique of Judgment, The Haffner Library of Classics, New York and London, 1951, p. 155. Already Roland Barthes warned us that it is not enough for the photographer to “signify the horrible for us to experience it.” Shock photos or pictures of real violence fail to have a political effect “(…) because, as we look at them, we are in each case dispossessed of our judgment: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing – except a simple right of intellectual acquiescence….” We are thus not really concerned, or disorganized: “The perfect legibility of the scene, its formulation dispenses us from receiving the image in all its scandal; reduced to the state of pure language, the photograph does not disorganize us.” See Barthes, Roland, “Shock-Photos,” in his: The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, Hill and Wang, New York, 1979, pp. 71–72. See Lyotard, J.-F., The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Polity, Cambridge, 1991, p. 90. See ibid., p. 90. Kant makes a distinction between concepts and understanding, on the one hand, and ideas and Reason, on the other. Ideas, such as infinity and the absolute, the world and God, are not be confounded with concepts, e.g., the concept of causality. Ideas refer to the suprasensible or noumenal world, whereas concepts refer to the sensible or phenomenal world! Kant frequently compares the beautiful with understanding and the free play of the faculties of imagination and knowledge, whereas he often associates the sublime with Reason, the immense power of ideas which highlights all the more the inadequacy and dislocation of our faculties. See Lyotard, J.-F., The Inhuman, p. 98. See Burke, Edmund, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op. cit., pp. 36–37. See Coomaraswamy, Rama P., The Essential Ananda K. Coomar aswamy, Bloomington, Indiana, 2004, pp. 196–197. Ibid., p. 197. See for a “Recent Symposium on Kant’s sensus communis in Intercultural Perspective,” in: Kimmerle, Heinz and Henk Oosterling (Eds.), Sensus communis in Multi- and Inter cultural Perspective. On the Possibility of Common Judgments in Arts and Politics, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 2000. For a broader reflection on rasa theory highlighting not only the similarities but also the differences with Kant’s esthetics, see my: “Sensus Communis. Clarif ication of a Kantian Concept on the Way to an Intercultural Dialogue Between Western and Indian Thought,” in: Kimmerle, H. and H.Oosterling (Eds.), ibid., pp. 17–30. Rasa theory reached its classical and outstanding zenith in the work of Abhinavagupta (11th century). See Honeywell, J.A., The poetic theory of Vivanatha, The J ournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXIV(1), 1965, p. 169. Deutsch, Eliot, Studies in Comparative Aesthetics, University of Hawaii, 1985, p. 5. See for instance “The Issue at Hand,” in: Sho-bo-genzo-, Zen Essays by Do-gen, Honolulu, 1986, p. 32: “In seeing forms with the whole body-mind, hearing sound with the whole body-mind, though one intimately understands, it is not like reflecting images in a mirror, it is not like water and the moon-when you witness one side, one side is obscure (own italics).” The translation is by Thomas Cleary. See Abe, M., Do-gen on Bhudda-nature, op. cit., p. 53. See Derrida, J., “Différance,” in: Margins of Philosophy , University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 24.

Visual Archives and the Holocaust: Christian Boltanski, Ydessa Hendeles and Peter Forgacs Ernst van Alphen

The archive occupies a privileged position within the cluster of genres by means of which one represents, teaches and commemorates the Holocaust. This cluster consists exclusively of historical genres. The genres that are considered to be the most appropriate to depict the Holocaust events are those that are historical par excellence, those that do not provide a fictional account of history, but that offer history in its most direct, tangible form. Testimonies, autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust and documentaries are the forms supposed to provide the best and the most responsible account of the Holocaust. Within this group of affiliated genres the position of the archive is emblematic as well as different. It is emblematic because its historical function is out of the question: it consists of leftovers, material traces of the past. But it also differs from the other historical genres, because it does not represent history by means of narrative; it presents it directly, that is unmediated, in the form of its remains. The hierarchy within the cluster of historical genres indicates what the issue is: that genre is considered most appropriate that stays closest to the factual events. In the face of the privileged position of the archive in discussions on how best to deal with the memory of the Holocaust, it is perhaps not really surprising that artists, too, have become interested in the scholarly method of the archive. This raises the question whether, as artists, they simply comply with the general pressure to adopt historical genres when dealing with the Holocaust, or does their use of the archive, instead, complicate the issue? I will discuss three such artists. First of all French artist Christian Boltanski, most widely known for the way he has since the 1980s evoked the Holocaust compellingly by means of archival installations. Often, but not always, these installations consist of found photographic portraits of Jews, plausible victims of the Holocaust. My second example is the installation made by Toronto artist, collector and curator Ydessa Hendeles, entitled Partners (The Teddy Bear Project). This enormous archival installation consists of found – or rather, purchased – family-album photographs collected on the basis of a single motif: somewhere in the picture there had to be a toy teddy bear. My third example will be Hungarian filmmaker and artist Peter Forgacs. His films and installations consist exclusively of material that he finds in an archive of home movies. These three artists share not only a common method, the archive, but also an area where the objects in their archives are situated, namely, the domestic sphere. A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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Interestingly, then, all three artists act upon the tension between personal memory and history. For, the archive is usually seen as an elementary tool for historical understanding, whereas the portraits and snapshots from family albums and home movies belong to the realm of personal time instead of history.

Deconstructing the Archive: Christian Boltanski In the face of this pressure to represent the Holocaust in the mode of the historian, or even better in the mode of the archivist, it is remarkable that the French artist Christian Boltanski so consistently presents his works as the products of an archivist. He gives the impression of being the most docile artist, since he appears to be giving in to the moral imperative of the discussions about Holocaust representations. Some of his works are explicitly titled Inventories, or Reserve. And although Boltanski did not approach the subject of the Holocaust head-on until 1988 with his installations Chases High school (1988), Reserves: The Purim Holiday (1989) and Canada (1988), one can argue that all his other works deal with aspects of the

Fig. 1 Christian Boltanski, Canada, 1988; installation view, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto; secondhand clothing

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Fig. 2 Christian Boltanski, Storage Area of the Children’s Museum, 1989; installation view, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; children’s clothing, metal shelves, lamps

Holocaust.1 The question that arises, then, is, what does this engagement with the favourite modes of the Holocaust historian mean as an artistic practice? The two modes of representation that produce Holocaust effects in Boltanski’s work are photographic portraiture and the archive. Both modes of representing reality can be seen as emblems of realism, the representational effect that is so much favoured by Holocaust commentary. The photographic portrait and the archive seem to have in common that they are both able to represent (historical) reality in an apparently objective way. In both cases there seems to be a minimum of intrusion or ‘presentness’ of the subject or medium of representation in the product of representation. Boltanski’s use of the archive reveals the consequences of the archival mode for our understanding of the Holocaust itself. In only one series of his works is the Holocaust directly evoked by means of reference to the historical event. In 1988 he made some installations to which he gave the title Canada. This title refers to the euphemistic name given to the warehouses in which the Nazis stored all the personal belongings of those who were killed in the gas chambers or interned in the labour camps. In the camps ‘Canada’ stands for the country of excess and exuberance where one wants to emigrate, because it can offer a living to everybody. In the works with the title Canada Boltanski showed piles of second-hand garments.

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Fig. 3 Christian Boltanski, Reference Vitrine, 1969-1970; various objects in wooden vitrine with Plexiglas, 120 × 70 × 15 cm

These installations not only brought to mind the warehouses in the concentration camps, but by the sheer number of the garments, it also evoked the incredible number of people who died in the camps and whose possessions were stored in ‘Canada’. Like Chases High School and Monument: The Purim Holiday , Canada evokes the Holocaust referentially. This time it is not the used ‘material’ – photographs that show European Jewish children before the war, and hence, targets of the Holocaust – which denote the Holocaust, but the title of the work. The garments of Canada represent a specific historical space: the warehouses in Auschwitz, because the title names the installation as such. But Boltanski’s other works based on the same archival, inventory principle do not refer to the Holocaust by naming a specific element of it, for, many of his archival installations use photographs of unknown or non-Jewish people. Still, they have ‘Holocaust effects’ as well. When I say ‘Holocaust effect’ I use that expression in contrast with ‘Holocaust representation’. In a Holocaust representation the Holocaust is referred to by means of a mediated account or representation of it. A Holocaust effect, on the contrary, is not brought about by means of representing the Holocaust, but by means of the re-enactment of a certain principle that defines the Holocaust. It is performatively re-enacted, producing an effect. This production of Holocaust effects explains why Boltanski’s archival installations that have no referential relationship to the Holocaust and do not contain objects or representations of Jewish victims can still evoke the idea of the Holocaust. In Boltanski’s archival installations, the archivist’s ambition to make history present in its remains is foregrounded as a failure. Part of the installation Storage Area of the Childr en’s Museum (1989), for instance, consisted of racks with clothing. The piles of clothes stored on the shelves refer to the incomprehensible numbers of victims in the Holocaust. But in contrast to the series of works entitled Canada, these works do not refer to the Holocaust as an event; they have a Holocaust effect

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because they re-enact a principle that defines the Holocaust as a method. There the principle of deprivation of individuality was applied in the most extreme and radical way. Deprived of their individuality, the victims of the Holocaust were treated impersonally as specimens of a race that first had to be collected and inventoried before they could be used (in the labour camps) or be destroyed (in the gas chambers). The Nazis inventoried not only the possessions of their victims, but the same principles were in fact applied to the victims themselves.

Nazism and the Archive Boltanski reminds us provocatively of the fact that the Nazis were master archivists and that the most notorious concentration camp, Auschwitz, the name of which has become synonymous with the Holocaust as such, was modelled on archival principles. These principles were crucial in the way the Nazis ruled most concentration camps and in their execution of the ‘final solution’. Let me explain in more detail which structural principles of the camps can be characterized as archival. In many concentration camps the Nazis were fanatic in making lists of all the people who entered the camps, of those who went to the labour camps and those who went directly to the gas chambers. Those lists are like the catalogues that enable the visitor of an archive or museum to find out what is in the collection. It is thanks to the existence of those lists that after the liberation it was, in many cases, possible to find out whether people had survived the Holocaust, and if not, where, in which camp and on which date they had been killed. One of the first things done to the people who entered some of the labour camps was that they got a number tattooed on their arm. They were transformed into archived objects. They were no longer individuals with a name but objects with a number. Like objects in an archive or museum, the inscription classified them as traceable elements within a collection. Entering the camps, they were also sorted into groups: men with men, women with women, children, old people and pregnant women to the gas chambers. Political prisoners and resistance fighters were not ‘mixed’ with Jews. Artists, musicians and architects were usually sent to camps such as Theresiënstadt. Selecting and sorting on the basis of a fixed set of categories are basic archival activities. Not only the people who entered the camps were selected and sorted, the same happened with their belongings. The belongings were sorted and stored in the warehouses called Canada. There were photographs not only of emaciated bodies but also of some of the categories used within these warehouses, that showed people after the liberation the truth of the Holocaust. Not only heaps of bodies, but also heaps of suitcases, of pairs of spectacles, of shaven hair, etc. On these photographs the camps looked like monstrous archives. This ‘archiving’ of the belongings was first of all done so that they could be re-used by the German population. But Hitler had also other purposes in mind for part of it. After liquidating the Jewish people, he intended to build a museum of the Jewish people, the so-called Central Museum of The

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Extinguished Jewish Race.2 For this museum he needed objects he would select from, among other places, the warehouses in the camps. I will return to this. In his artistic use of the archive, Boltanski evokes preposterously the objectifying and killing potential of the archive as exploited by Nazism. Hence, if most Holocaust scholars and students privilege archival modes of research, they seem to be unaware of the fact that their privileged medium at the same time creates Holocaust effects. Their archival practices not only have the Holocaust as object, they also uncannily re-enact the Holocaust in its deadly objectifying technologies. The notions of usability and uselessness are of crucial importance for an understanding of how Boltanski’s archival works produce Holocaust effects. The inventories or selections performed upon entering the camps, which also returned almost daily when one had the good luck to be allowed into the labour camps, were based on the distinction between usable and unusable. The mechanisms of the Holocaust were such that ultimately everybody had to end up in the category ‘useless’. It is precisely this idea of uselessness that overwhelmed Boltanski when, like many other artists in the 1960s and the 1970s, he became interested in anthropological museums. The Musée de l’Homme in Paris made the following impression on him: It was… the age of technological discoveries, of the Musée de l’Homme and of beauty, no longer just African art, but an entire series of everyday objects: Eskimo fishhooks, arrows from the Amazon Indians.… The Musée de l’Homme was of tremendous importance to me; it was there that I saw large metal and glass vitrines in which were placed small, fragile, and insignificant objects. A yellowed photograph showing a ‘savage’ handling his little objects was often placed in the corner of the vitrine. Each vitrine presented a lost world: the savage in the photograph was most likely dead; the objects had become useless – anyway there’s no one left who knows how to use them. The Musée de l’Homme seemed like a big morgue to me.3

Boltanski expected to find ‘beauty’ in the museum, an expectation that seemed to be inspired by the kind of eye cubist artists had for the objects of African cultures; he found instead lost worlds in the vitrines. He sees absence instead of presence. The anthropological museum did not become a fine arts museum; it was transformed into a morgue of useless objects. In the early 1970s Boltanski made two series of works in which he made use of the museological vitrine (Attempt to Reconstruct Objects That Belong ed to Christian Boltanski Between 1948 and 1954 and Reference Vitrines). One series of works, generically titled Reference Vitrines (1970–1973), consisted of museum-type showcases in which Boltanski displayed a sampling of the work he had made since 1969. He showed small piles of the dirt balls, some of the self-made knives and traps and some of the carved sugar cubes, pages from his books and parts of his mail-art. Each item in the glass cases had a label that usually listed the title and the date of the work. With this series of works Boltanski turned himself into the archivist of his own work. In his similar series Attempt to Reconstruct he was the archivist of his childhood.4 However, these ‘reconstructions’ utterly fail as reconstructions. They are not able to reconstruct either his childhood or his artistic career. Instead we see useless objects. The frame of the museological vitrine or the archaeological museum, in

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short the archival mode of representation, withdraws objects from the contexts in which they were originally present. In the vitrine, museum or archive they become subjected to principles that not only define the objects as useless, but were defining for the Holocaust practice. This brings us back to the Jewish museum that Hitler intended to establish after the liquidation of the Jewish people. One could wonder why he wanted to do this. Why was his goal not yet reached at the moment that all European Jews had been killed? It suggests that liquidation was not enough. Even after their destruction, the Jewish people could live on, not amongst the living but in memory, in living memory, that is. The remains of Jewish people in the form of memory had to be dealt with effectively, so that their possible continued existence in memory also was eradicated. Boltanski helps us understand why the museum can be such an effective tool, or perhaps I should now say weapon, in killing memories. Like archives, museums, especially historical museums, confront the viewer with de-contextualized objects. In this de-contextualization the objects become ‘useless’ and they evoke the ‘absence’ of the world of which they were originally part. It is in this respect that the archival museum can become a ‘morgue of useless objects’. We can only speculate that Hitler’s museum for the Jewish people would probably have looked like such a morgue. It would have objectified, killed and liquidated the Jewish people for a second and more definite time. Their remains would not have evoked their presence. They would not have kept their memories alive. Instead, the represented objects would have penetrated the viewer with a sense of absence and lost time. Boltanski’s archival art practice demonstrates the importance of preposterous history. He ‘argues’ something into the archival past (the categories of the sorting) that was not yet visible: the murder of memory.

Categorization and Objectification: Ydessa Hendeles 5 Whereas Boltanski’s archival installations deconstruct the archive by showing the deadly effects of objectification, whereas Ydessa Hendeles’s installation Partners foregrounds another aspect of the archive’s unreflected principles.6 The thousands of snapshots, each of which include the image of a teddy bear, are arranged according to over 100 typologies. The installation is structured like a presentation of natural history or cultural objects in a classic, traditional natural history museum. The meticulously framed snapshots completely and densely cover the walls. In the middle of the space there are several antique museum display cases. Along the wall, mezzanines have been built to permit closer inspection of those photographs that hang on the upper halves of the walls. When one enters the installation one wonders what all these images have in common. It takes some time before one becomes aware of the fact that there is a teddy bear in every photograph. The next discovery is, however, that the installation does not offer more of the same, just more pictures with teddy bears. One suddenly

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Fig. 4 Ydessa Hendeles, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002; installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich; variable installation dimensions; 3000 family album photographs, antique teddy bears with photographs of their original owners and related ephemera, mahogany display cases, eight painted steel mezzanines, six painted steel spiral staircases, sixteen painted portable walls, hanging light fixtures and custom wall lighting

realizes that the photographs have been categorized according to specific typologies. These categories are completely surprising: the installation, seemingly providing a history of the teddy bear, shows that the most different social and ethnical identities have used the teddy bear as totem to identify with. When the installation was shown as part of a larger exhibition in Hitler’s own former museum, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Hendeles wrote the following about the appeal of the teddy bear in the catalogue7: The teddy bear has appealed not only to children as playthings and as surrogate playmates, but also to adults as props to express whimsical fantasies at parties, in the workplace, at sports events, and in sexual play. In fact, teddy bears have attended every social function in society. They have been photographed at weddings, in schools, in hospitals, on battlefields, at births, deaths, and memorials.8

Her installation seems to provide evidence of this: when we start recognizing the different typologies, we suddenly see all the different groups. Soldiers with teddy bears, students with teddy bears, prostitutes with teddy bears, lesbian couples withy teddy bears, etc.; there is no end to the different identities that presented themselves with the teddy bear as their emblem and guardian. In this respect, Hendeles’ archival installation works as the opposite of Boltanski’s. Yet, I contend that her archival work is also a preposterous revisitation of the archive. In the case of Boltanski all individual differences dissolve within his

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Fig. 5 Ydessa Hendeles, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002; installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich; variable installation dimensions; 3000 family album photographs, antique teddy bears with photographs of their original owners and related ephemera, mahogany display cases, eight painted steel mezzanines, six painted steel spiral staircases, sixteen painted portable walls, hanging light fixtures and custom wall lighting

objectifying archives, whereas in the case of Hendeles one begins to see differences where one had not expected to see them. The thousands of teddy bear snapshots turn out to be extremely diverse. Within this corpus an endless number of individual categories can be distinguished. The pursuit of specificity and differentiation leads to amazing results in Partners. At first sight Hendeles’s ‘visual thesis on the history of the teddy bear’ conveys absolute trust in thorough, positivistic scholarship. She seems here to be on the site of most Holocaust scholars. But as she herself points out in her essay in the catalogue, this reassuring aura of scholarship is deceptive, ‘because the use of documentary materials actually manipulates reality. Creating a world in which everyone had a teddy bear is a fantasy, as well as a commentary on traditional thematic, taxonomic curating’. Hendeles further comments: Because of the relative rarity of photographs that include teddy bears, the resulting multitude of over three thousand pictures provides a curatorial statement that is both true and misleading. Viewers are inclined to trust a curator’s presentation of cultural artefacts. While these systems are not necessarily objective, they can be convincing and therefore of comfort.9

In this statement Hendeles uses in a very subtle way the characteristics of the teddy bear as such to describe the effects of the archive. Earlier in her text she described the teddy bear in terms of a duality:

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Fig. 6 Ydessa Hendeles, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002; installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich; variable installation dimensions; 3000 family album photographs, antique teddy bears with photographs of their original owners and related ephemera, mahogany display cases, eight painted steel mezzanines, six painted steel spiral staircases, sixteen painted portable walls, hanging light fixtures and custom wall lighting As a mohair-covered, stuffed, jointed toy, with movable arms, legs and head, a teddy bear can be cradled and hugged like a baby. But the wild bear referenced by the toy is an animal that can be threatening to human beings. Having a ferocious guardian at one’s side makes the teddy into a symbol of protective aggression, which is why, for the past hundred years, it has provided solace to frightened children and later to adults, who carry that comfort with them as a cherished memory.10

The duality of the teddy bear characterizes the archive also: comforting and aggressive at the same time. Comforting because it has the reassuring aura of objectivity and systematicity; aggressive because it subjects reality and individuality to

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Fig. 7 Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001; number two in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof; polyester resin,clothing, leather boots, human hair; 60 × 38 × 58,5 cm; installation view in Haus der Kunst. Munich

classifications that are more pertinent to the systematic and purifying mindset than to the classified objects. It imposes the ideal of pure order on a reality that is messier and more hybrid than the scholarly device of the archive can live with. Ultimately – and in this it reconceptualizes the archive preposterously – Hendeles’s installation Partners shows the utter arbitrariness of archival typologies. Her excessive differentiation within the corpus of snapshots showing teddy bears produces ultimately in the viewer a feeling of being lost. The rigorous systematicity of the archive suddenly shows its Janus head of total arbitrariness. The question that remains is, in which sense does Hendeles’s preposterous meta-commentary on the archive specifically apply to Holocaust archives, or to the Holocaust as such? Within the endless series of typologies in this installation, the category of Jews, and hence, of possible victims and survivors of the Holocaust, forms an important one. The feeling of melancholia hits you immediately when you enter the room. This excessive and emblematic archive shows us lost worlds in the extreme. Of course, teddy bears do not belong to the past; children and other groups of people still have them and play with them. But because of the fact that these snapshots are old and that they are presented as part of an archive, they automatically belong to the past, to a lost world. Within the metaphorical realm of ‘lost worlds’ the Holocaust figures as the most literal case. That is why the typology of Holocaust victims with teddy bears is central. But Hendeles activated the frame of the Holocaust in yet different ways. After the viewers had spent time in the Teddy Bear installation, they entered a space that,

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compared to the densely packed archival installation, was almost empty except for a small boy on his knees at the other end of the room. It turned out to be the sculpture titled ‘Him’, by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan from 2001. It is a puppet-like sculpture of Hitler with the body of a small, innocent boy and his adult, moustached face. The similarity between teddy bears and archives was already suggested, and now the awareness of the association between teddy bears and Hitler (and archives) is unavoidably also a case of similarity. Hitler, too, was aggressive as well as comforting. He offered a deceptive source of safety to the German people. I quote Hendeles herself again: The system of the teddy bear archive raises the notion of other systems created with strict stipulations, and how they can, because they appear to make sense, persuasively manipulate reality. The purity of race to which Hitler aspired was the application of a system of rules. Like the teddy bear, Hitler shares a duality of origin, where danger is domesticated.11

The framing of the teddy bear archive by the person of Hitler has especially disenchanting consequences for the archive as such. Is the archive – its system and its goal – complicit in Hitler’s ideal of a purity of race? Is it Hitler’s modelling of the concentration camps on archival principles that makes the archive suspect, or is it suspect no matter what, that is, intrinsically? A provisional answer to this question seems to have been given by Hendeles herself when she showed the teddy bear installation for the first time. It was then part of an exhibition in the Ydessa Hendeles Foundation, Hendeles’s own gallery in Toronto. That installation was entitled ‘Same/Difference’ and took place in 2002–2003. After the teddy bear installation the viewer entered a relatively narrow corridor. At the left side of this corridor were more framed snapshots of teddy bears. At the end of the same wall one noticed a small text panel, giving the description of an artwork, the name of the artist and the date. It turns out that the viewer had missed noticing an artwork. On the right side of the corridor, on a completely white wall was a wall text in light grey letters. The text was by the artist Douglas Gordon and was dated 1989. It ran as follows: Rotting from the Inside Out

After having read this text, the confined space of the corridor suddenly gave way to a much larger space where Mauricio Cattalan’s ‘Him’ was kneeling. The subtle sequentiality of artworks made each art work function as a framing device for the one that came before and after it. ‘Rotting from the Inside Out’ became a chilling comment on the teddy bear, on Hitler, as well as on the archival genre as such.

The Future of the Archive: Peter Forgacs Boltanski’s and Hendeles’s use of the archive provide preposterous deconstructions of principles that underlie and define the archive. Although they foreground different aspects of the archive, in both artistic practices the archive is exposed as ‘rotting from the inside out’. The unavoidable question now is, of course, is there still a future for the archive? And I would like to add: to related institutions as the

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Fig. 8 Peter Forgacs, The Maelstrom, 1997; 60 minutes; filmstill pulling faces before the camera

Fig. 9 Peter Forgacs, The Maelstrom, 1997; 60 minutes; filmstill preparing for deportation

museum? I will try to answer this question by addressing the work of a third artist, the filmmaker Peter Forgacs. Since 1988 Forgacs has assembled the Private Hungary documentary series from an archival collection of home movie stock dating back to the 1930s and up to the present. The films draw upon a film archive, established by Forgacs himself: the Private Film and Photo Archives in Budapest. It comprises more than 300 h of home

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movies and an additional 40 h of interviews with the relatives of the amateur filmmakers who shot the footage. For most of the films Forgacs collaborated with Hungarian minimalist composer Tibor Szemzõ. Forgacs also made some films that do not specifically focus on Hungary. One of them is the film The Maelstrom from 1997, which he made with the VPRO for Dutch public television. This film is also archival: it draws upon found home movies from diverse origins. For Maelstrom two sources are dominant. First, the larger part of the film consists of the home movies of the Dutch, Jewish family Peereboom, filmed by the oldest son Max Peereboom. These home movies cover the period of the early 1930s until 1943, the moment when the family was transported to Auschwitz. The second important source consists of the home movies of the Austrian Nazi Seyss-Inquart, who was appointed Reichs Commissioner of the Netherlands in 1940 as representative of Hitler. A third source Forgacs used more sparsely in this film is the home movies of a Dutch SS. Compared with most of his other films, the overall structure of Maelstrom is more conventionally narrative. It begins with the oldest footage in 1933 in Amsterdam, where the father of the filmer, Max Peereboom, is editor of the Nieuw Israelitisch Dagblad. Max himself lives in Middelburg, where he works for his future father-in-law. When the chronology reaches the late 1930s we get to see some of the footage of the Dutch SS. Having arrived in 1940, the home footage of Reichskommissar Seys-Inquart is introduced. We see him mainly on his estate Clingendael, not far from The Hague, where he moved with his family after being appointed by Hitler. In 1942 Max and Annie Peereboom and his family-in-law are forced to move to Amsterdam. Seys-Inquart has ordered all Dutch Jews to move to Amsterdam in order to facilitate their deportation to Auschwitz and other camps. For, their deportation was going to be much more efficient if all Jews were concentrated in one city. The film stops abruptly. When Max, the filmer of the Peereboom family, is transported and then killed (with the rest of his family and extended family), the family narrative comes to an end. The only person of this family who will survive is Max’s youngest brother Simon. Home movies form a particular genre, and as a genre they have specific properties in relation to memory. The genre focuses almost exclusively on the personal. The social dimension of human life figures only obliquely, if at all. We get to see anniversaries, weddings, family outings, the birth and growing up of children. These personal moments in the family are restricted because they are selective: they consist of memories of happy moments. But as Forgacs points out in an interview, the home movie is personal in yet another way.12 It is structured like a dream. It contains many strange ellipses and in the case of older home movies it is exclusively visual. There are no words spoken, there is no voice-over. Visual communication is absolutely central. Freud’s explanation of the dream work is also relevant for an understanding of home movies. Although the macro-structure of Maelstrom is narrative, the fragments of footage that form the building stones of this narrative are not so much telling but showing. Although the subtitle of Maelstrom is A Family Chronicle, the footage does not have the form of a family chronicle, but of externalized memory.

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Although home movies are almost exclusively concerned with personal time, Forgacs montage adds the big moments of history to it. History is present in Maelstrom, albeit in a de-centred way. Some Peereboom footage shows a visit of Queen Wilhelmina with Princess Juliana to the town of Middelburg, or the celebration in Middelburg of the 40th anniversary of Queen Wilhelmina. The fact that the family filmed this can be read as symptomatic for their assimilation into Dutch culture. They identified with the Dutch royal family. But the other insertions of history are by the hand of the director. Sometimes we hear a radio broadcast, or there are titles or texts written on the screen pointing out to us in which historical moment the filmed family footage is embedded. At other times, the historical moment is explained by a disembodied voice. The laws, rules or articles proclaimed by Seyss-Inquart stipulating how to kill warm-blooded animals, or stipulating who is considered to be Jewish and who is not, stipulating what the Jews who were going to be deported were allowed to take with them and so on, are sung by a voice in the mode of a traditional Jewish song. Whatever device to insert history Forgacs uses, it is never part of the personal time of the home footage but always superposed, imposed on it. The imposition of history on personal time never works smoothly. The completely different temporal dimension of the home footage again and again strikes the viewer. Personal time and historical time are in absolute tension with each other. We expect to see traces or symptoms of the dramatic history of those days in the home movie footage. But that is not the case. When the history of the World War II and the Holocaust progresses, the home movies continue to show happy family memories. Max Peereboom has also filmed the moment that his family prepared for deportation to Auschwitz. It is first of all remarkable that he decided to film this. We see his wife Annie and her stepmother around the table repairing the clothes they want to wear or take with them on deportation. They drink coffee and Max smokes a pipe. What they are doing (preparing themselves for deportation) is not conveyed by the footage but told by a written text imposed on the footage. What we see is a happy – the Dutch would say cozy – family situation. Nothing of the history that will victimize them in such a horrific way is able to enter the personal realm of the home movie. The temporal dimension of the home movie does not unfold as a collective narrative, but persistently as a personal narrative. In Maelstrom personal history is not represented as part of collective or ‘official’ history (as synecdoche of it); it is in radical tension with it. This has important consequences for the question I raised earlier: Is there a future of the archive? Or is it rotten through and through because of its objectifying mechanisms and its imposition of categories and pure order on a reality which is hybrid? As we saw in the case of Boltanski’s pseudo archives as well as the archival concentration camp, the imposition of the binary opposition useful vs. useless seems to define the rationale of the archive. Everything that is archived seems to become subjected to this distinction. Although Holocaust archives are also seen as memorials of the Holocaust, the memories stored in it are ultimately judged on the basis of what we learn from them, that is, in how useful they are.

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The Spielberg Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies and The Fortunoff Video archive for Holocaust archive are good examples. Geoffrey Hartman, director of the latter one describes the function of the Fortunoff archive first of all in terms of the process of conducting the interviews and not in terms of the products collected in the archive. To testify, he intimates, leads to a kind of re-humanization and reconstitution of subjectivity of the Holocaust victim. But the moment that the Holocaust survivor has given his testimony, the taped results becomes the object that is stored in the archive. It is almost impossible for the visitors of this kind of archive not to impose the distinction between useful versus useless on this material. The visitors are looking for something, they are usually scholars or students who want to learn something or hope that watching these tapes will be helpful in getting an idea of what the Holocaust experience was. In this respect the kind of categories used to make the archive accessible are significant. Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation indexes the archive by city and country of birth, religious identity and wartime experiences. The Fortunoff Video archive at Yale University indexes it by geographic names and topics discussed in the testimony. Forgacs use of the archive of home movies, however, resists the imposition of the useful and useless dichotomy completely. His archival films do not provide information, they do not tell history, but they show us that the experience of time in personal history is something that cannot be integrated in or translated into collective or official history. As Kaja Silverman argues in her essay on Forgacs’s work, his films are based on strategies of re-personalization instead of objectification or categorization.13 His films evoke the phenomenal world; they are about vitality and enjoyment, about activities such as dancing and playing. Whereas the archival mechanisms of objectification and categorization strip images of their singularity, Forgacs’s archival footage keeps insisting on the private and affective. Silverman writes that this is first of all done through the many direct looks with which people face the camera. This seems to be a defining feature of home movies as such. When people face the camera in a fiction movie, this kind of look is self-reflexive; for a moment it short-circuits the fictionality of the film by establishing direct contact with the viewer. The film shows its constructedness. In home movies the frequent looking into the camera is of a completely different kind of order. For here, there is no clear distinction between the camera and the person behind the camera. Maelstrom has many examples of that interaction. Especially Simon, the youngest brother of Max the filmer, makes fun of Max the cameraman again and again, by pulling funny faces before the camera. He does this not to spoil the film, but to make the cameraman laugh, or to make him angry. His funny faces function within an affective relationship between two human beings. There is another extreme example of this in Maelstrom, this time of a different order. At one of the many weddings, the 2- or 3-year-old daughter of Max and Annie is being filmed. When she turns her face to the camera, she expects to see the face of Max her father or one of her relatives. Instead she sees a monstrous object, namely the camera. She is clearly utterly terrified. This example shows in its negativity that people in home movies are not posing for the camera, but for the person who holds the camera. They let themselves be filmed not to get objectified into a beautiful or interesting image, but out of love for the

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person who films. According to Silverman, people in home footage do not just convey Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘this has been’ (‘ça a été’), but ‘I love you.’14 As Forgacs explains in an interview, there is a fundamental difference between looking at a photograph and watching moving images. He intensifies this difference by his manipulation of film time, by slow motion or even stopping the moving image, reducing it to a film still: The slow-motion technique and manipulation of the film time, the movement and the rhythm, give an opposite dynamic or an opposite possibility than in the example of the photo explained in Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. The frozen photographic second of the Barthes thesis is a good example why the photo is a tombstone, whereas moving image is not. […] If we made right now a black-and-white photograph of ourselves, we could observe the event as already-past time: history. […] But while we have moving images of the past, we always have the fluxes of life, the contrapuntal notion between Barthes’s photo thesis and the movement (=life) on film, which proves forever that we’re alive. So my viewers – and you – know that they (the amateur film actors, my heroes) are physically dead, but they are still moving. They are reanimated again and again by the film.15

Hence, the effect of re-personalization brought about by Forgacs’s films is the result of not only the specific genre of home movies, but also of his intensification of qualities of the medium of the moving image as such. His manipulation of moving images – the slow-downs, the movement back and forth, stopping the movement for a few seconds – creates a rhythm that makes the aliveness of the movements almost a sensorial experience. It creates a distance between real time and the time of the moving images. This de-naturalizes our reception of time and movement, as a result of which we become overwhelmed by the life embodied in these moving images. One could wonder now, if this is always the case in home movies. Or does it also depend on the filmmaker and the kind of family that is being filmed? In this respect, the difference between the Peereboom and the Seyss-Inquart home movies is revealing. The distinction I have used so far between personal time and historical time does not automatically apply in the same way or same degree to the SeyssInquart’s footage. Seyss-Inquart’s position in History is radically different from the Peereboom family. I am not referring to the fact that one family occupies the victim position in History, the other the one of perpetrator. I am referring to the fact that Seyss-Inquart was appointed by Hitler; he represents him in The Netherlands. He is the representative of Hitler, of History; one could say, he is History, or rather, the embodiment of it. This makes one wonder, can the embodiment of History make home movies of his family and friends? Or is the genre of the home movie disabled when History enters the realm of the personal? Whereas the Peereboom footage is so striking because of its vitality, the behavior of the Seyss-Inquart family is much more restrained. It seems that the Seyss-Inquart family members are all the time aware of the fact that not only the camera man but also anonymous, abstract or later viewers are looking at them. They embody history, and later history will be judged, their role in History will be judged. When I watch the home movies of this family, I cannot avoid mobilizing the distinction useful vs. useless. It is from the Seyss-Inquart footage that I get information. I become interested from a historical point of view when I notice that Reichs Führer’s SS Himmler visited the Seyss-Inquart couple at their Clingendael estate in the Netherlands.

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They were not only fellow Nazi leaders, they and their wives socialized with each other and played tennis. ‘Interesting information.’ The fact that Seyss-Inquart’s home movies evoke a mode of looking that is usually discouraged by this genre, only foregrounds, differentially that is, the more usual mode of looking at home movies. Forgacs’s combination and alternation of the Peereboom’s footage with the Seyss-Inquart footage, of personal time and of a personal time that is infected by historical time, sharpen our eye for the special qualities of the Peereboom home movies. Forgacs’s archival films do not objectify or categorize. Preposterously intervening in an archival object, they actually transform it: they re-animate and re-personalize. He is able to do this first of all thanks to the specific qualities of the objects collected in his archive: their nature of home movies. But in addition, he adds a rhythm to the movement of the moving image that infuses the home movies with reflexivity. This rhythm magnifies the nature of personal time as living, as affect, as movement and as moving. Within his artistic use of the archive the archive has future again.

Notes and References 1. I have argued this in my book Caught by History: Holocaust Ef fects in Contempor ary Art, Literature, and Theory , Stanford, 1997, Chap. 4: ‘Deadly historians: Christian Boltanski’s intervention in Holocaust historiography’. 2. In Czechoslovakia the Nazis brought Jewish religious articles from 153 provincial communities to Prague for the establishment of this ‘Central Museum of the Extinguished Jewish Race’. Included were 5,400 religious objects, 24,500 prayer books and 6,070 artifacts of historical value. After the end of the war these became the core of Jewish Museum of Prague. See I. Gutman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York, 1990, p. 1187. 3. D. Renard, Interview with Christian Boltanski, Boltanski (exhibition catalogue), Paris, 1984, p. 71, quoted in L. Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, Paris, 1994, p. 32. 4. In his site-specific work Missing House (1990) in Berlin, Boltanski has turned himself into the archivist of a vacant lot between other houses in a former Jewish neighbourhood. The Missing House consists of name plates attached to the firewalls of houses adjacent to the empty lot created by the destruction of a house in the Second World War. The plates included the name, dates of residence and professions of the last inhabitants of the missing house. For an excellent reading of this site-specific work, see J. Czaplicka, ‘History, Aesthetics, and Contemporary Commemorative Practice in Berlin’, New German Critique , 65 (1995), 155–187. 5. Ydessa Hendeles is one of the most important collectors of contemporary art and of the history of photography. She has her own museum in which she curates exhibitions out of her own collection: the Ydessa Hendeles Foundation in Toronto. For an analysis of her practice of collecting and curating, see R. Greenberg, ‘Private Collectors, Museums and Display: A Post-Holocaust Perspective’, Jong Holland, 1(16) (2000), 29–41. 6. The main title of this installation, ‘Partners’, refers to the intimate relationship between the owners of teddy bears and their playmate. 7. The Exhibition, which Hendeles curated for the Haus der Kunst in Munich, has the same title as her teddy bear installation: Partners. In case of the exhibition the title has several meanings. It refers to the collaboration between a public Museum and a private collector, between a German institution and a Jewish collector, between Hitler’s former museum and the daugh-

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ter of Holocaust survivors. For an analysis of this exhibition, see E. van Alphen, ‘Die Ausstellung als narratives Kunstwerk/Exhibition as Narrative Work of Art’, in Partners, C. Dercon and T. Weski (Eds.), Cologne: Walther König, 2003, pp. 143–185. Y. Hendeles, ‘Notes on the Exhibition’, in Partners, C. Dercon and T. Weski (Eds.), Cologne: Walther König, 2003, p. 212. Y. Hendeles, ‘Notes on the Exhibition’, pp. 211–212. Y. Hendeles, ‘Notes on the Exhibitions’, p. 211. Y. Hendeles, ‘Notes on the Exhibition’, p. 215. http://www.artmargins.com/content/interview/forgacs.html K. Silverman, in Flesh of my Flesh, Chicago, in press. K. Silverman, in Flesh of my Flesh, Chicago, in press. www.artmargins.com/content/interview/forgacs.html

A Distant Laughter: The Poetics of Dislocation Jean Fisher

It is necessary that, with great urgency, we all speak well and listen well. W e, you and I, must r emember e verything. We must especially remember those things we never knew. Jimmie Durham1

The subject of this essay began 25 years ago with a somewhat naïve curiosity about the centrality of the operations of language in the art practices of certain artists emerging from a traumatic history of colonialism. To be sure, by the late 1970s, the play between image and word in artworks had become common practice following its reintroduction by Pop art and Conceptualism. But for the culturally dislocated subject there seemed to be rather more at stake politically than gaming with language for its own sake, or as a strategy for challenging assumptions governing the institutions of art as such. The issue seemed to be one of agency: for the individual or collective to construct subjectivity it must acquire the language and power to act within the socio-political and historical relations that constitute its life-world. However, the histories of colonialism demonstrate that cultural dispossession sets in motion a catastrophic mutilation of communal identities and social structures. Where ancestral belonging to place, language, culture and history is violently interrupted the self is deprived of a ground from which to narrate itself in the world and imagine new possibilities of existence. Thus, to dispossess a people is in extremis to reduce them to what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’ or the ‘inhuman’, to alienate them from both the past and the future. For peoples now forced to speak in a foreign language that represented them as less than human within the Manichean hierarchies of colonialism, the reclamation of collective and individual agency entailed negotiating both a passage out of the impasse of traumatic separation and loss and a new sense of cultural identity from the discontinuities wrought by the imposition of an alien culture. The struggle of the self to extricate itself from the dehumanising effects of dominance meant coming to know the language of the coloniser better than he knew it himself in order to master and articulate the boundaries between seemingly incommensurable cultural codes and meanings. Thus, what is brought into play in the art of the dislocated subject is poetic invention as a critique of the abstract, instrumental languages of power that frame our everyday lives and coerce our thoughts and actions into A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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accepting its representations of reality, and as a means of offering new perspectives on existence. In this poetics, language is destabilised and re-embodied as a tactic of disarticulating received meanings and fixed identities, producing a space of undecidability in which everything has to be negotiated anew. Of particular interest here is the role played in overcoming traumatic loss by a certain kind of laughter that draws its force, like poetics, from the essential heterogeneity and instability of language. This chapter will outline some of the issues of trauma and art by reference to the exemplary writing and art practice of Jimmie Durham – sculptor, performer, poet and political activist – whose ‘practical wisdom’ offers insights into the relation between trauma and humour. The chapter goes on to propose an analogy between Durham’s work and the concept of délire, described by Jean-Jacques Lecercle as a ‘form of discourse, which questions our most common conceptions of language (whether expressed by linguists or philosophers), where the old philosophical question of the emergence of sense out of nonsense receives a new formulation, where the material side of language, its origin in the human body and desire, are no longer eclipsed by its abstract aspect (as an instrument of communication or expression). Language, nonsense, desire: délire accounts for the relation between these three terms.’2 Lecercle cites the writings of Louis Wolfson, an American of East European Jewish descent who, because the English language gave him such physical pain, resorted to translating it into a bricolage of other languages.3 As Lecercle demonstrates, for the sufferer, the writing of délire is a reflexive and creative act to accommodate the contradiction between being possessed by language and the attempt to master it: a symptom of the ‘dereliction of the linguistic order’ and a liberation.4 If the source of Wolfson’s pain was his mother tongue and the familial trauma that this implies, in the colonial scenario the source of pain and injustice is the dispossession of the mother tongue and possession by a foreign language, from which the self has the task of constituting new subjectivity and agency. As Houston A. Baker, speaking from an African American position, insists, ‘the birth of such a self is never simply a coming into being, but always also a release from being possessed ’; that is, a divestiture of the self’s inscription as other in the language of dominance, which he describes as ‘tunnelling out of the black holes of possession and “tight places” of old clothes, into, perhaps, a new universe.’5 Délire is one possible way of ‘tunnelling out of the black holes of possession’. Insofar as it privileges the body as the source of language, it enters the realm of humour – the pun, lapsus and incongruous associations through which the body ‘speaks’ its instinctual drives. Délire etymologically derives from the Latin delirare, meaning ‘to deviate from the ploughed furrow’, implying also a fall out of linear time, and hence a confusion of cause and effect. Whilst this is characteristic of pathological delirium, in Colebrook’s critique of irony, it is also a quality of humour: ‘Humour falls or collapses: “down” from meaning and intentions to the singularities of life that have no order, no high and low, no before and after.… Humour is not the reversal of cause and effect but the abandonment of the “before and after” relations – the very line of time – that allows us to think in terms of cause and intentions, of grounds and consequents.’6 Trauma also shares this fall out of time. As Caruth notes, ‘The shock

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of the mind’s relation to the threat of death is not the direct expression of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known.’7 If what is put in crisis in both trauma and humour is referentiality, then we can perhaps begin to build a picture of the relation between them.

The Witness and the Problem of Representation Durham’s insistence that ‘we all speak well and listen well’ and ‘especially remember those things we never knew’ raises the issue of witnessing, and situates us in the vexed debates on historical trauma and its narration: the issue of what is transmissible and representable of a catastrophe that demands, but at the same time defies the testimony of a witness. Most debates have centred on the experience of the Shoah, and amongst influential commentators, from Adorno to Lyotard and Claude Lanzmann, there is a tendency to impose a prohibition on representation and reference on the grounds that there is something in the Shoah that is unassimilable, ‘immemorial’ and irreducible to representation, unavailable except as a void of meaning; the only ethical response is silence. To witness is also to ‘mediate’, and one can appreciate the objection to certain forms of mediation common to documentaries or cinematic dramatisations that appropriate the singularity of suffering to the generalities of a set of dominant representational codes transferable across the landscape of atrocities. These risk empowering the already powerful through a voyeuristic and vicarious identification, thereby betraying both the past and the victim.8 The problem would seem to be one of affective transmission: how could one approach the interior of another’s suffering when this is precisely where language fails us? Whilst the objection to mediation would be consistent with Durham’s oft-repeated observation that narratives of ‘Indian sorrows’ are no more than ‘entertainment’ for White America,9 silence is inconsistent both with his insistence on witnessing and with the emphasis throughout his work on the necessity of establishing and narrating the ongoing socio-political realities of Native America’s traumatic histories against a distorting romanticism, or even, as LaCapra suggests with respect to the Shoah, a ‘sacralisation’ of suffering.10 The dominance of the Shoah in discussions of traumatic history has indeed overshadowed other human catastrophes, in part because to compare the Shoah with other historical atrocities risks accusations of a ‘revisionist’ denial of its uniqueness. However, if all genocides are to be dissolved into the silence of the Shoah, then that unjustly denies those other victims the dignity of remembrance. Some form of account is necessary to prevent not only suffering falling into oblivion, but also to make sense of the way the past haunts the present, to overcome the melancholic repetition of victimry, and to confront the issues of revenge, forgiveness and reconciliation.11 Whilst the Shoah indeed possesses its own uniqueness, all genocides, both before and since, are equally singular. Thus, to offer a few prior examples: the distribution during the 1700s of smallpox-infected blankets by the

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English to American Indians who had no immunity to the disease may be regarded as one of the first acts of biological warfare; the forced march in 1838 of the Cherokees from their homelands, known as the Trail of Tears, and the ‘relocation’ of the survivors to foreign territory a 1,000 miles to the west, as an early example of ‘ethnic cleansing’; the slaughter in 1915 of more than 1 million Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman government as one of modernity’s first expressions of statesanctioned violence against its own ‘citizenry’; and the German extermination policies against the Herero at the turn of the twentieth century in what is now Namibia as the crucible for techniques the Nazi regime would subsequently apply in Europe. We need to be reminded that these traumatic histories continue to frame the cultural memory and identity of contemporary survivors. Alas, it is a truism that neither the genocide and immiseration of indigenous peoples under colonial rule, nor the racial terror inflicted on African survivors of the Middle Passage fully aroused Europe’s consciousness of its own barbarism; the defining event was the Shoah, one suspects because it took place uniquely not ‘over there’, but in the very heart of Hegel’s pinnacle of western civilisation, thereby putting into crisis its entire metaphysical edifice. As Paul Gilroy argues, the rationalism of modernity’s Enlightenment project cannot be critiqued without acknowledging its complicity with racial terror.12 For Giorgio Agamben what made the Shoah unique was not so much the industrial efficiency by which corpses were produced,13 but that it produced in its victims a ‘limit situation’ in which the human crossed the threshold into the inhuman, exemplified by those prisoners described as ‘walking corpses’, whose extreme state of trauma left them incapable of experiencing or witnessing anything whatsoever, even their own death. Since there exists no voice in the disappearance of voice, and the outsider is by definition excluded from the experience as such, one could only witness the absence of witness. Nonetheless, for Agamben, witnessing the absence of witness is necessary because the act of testifying is the visible trace that links the inhuman, the living being of sensate experience that knows but cannot speak, to the pathos of the speaking subject as one who speaks but cannot know.14 Speaking and narration create the subject as a departure from this unknowable origin to which there is no return except through the silence of desubjectification. Cultural dispossession also produces a ‘limit situation’, from which the task of the survivor becomes not picturing catastrophe, but witnessing this ‘zone of indistinction’ between speechlessness and speaking. In this sense, the witness to trauma is less an invitation to us to witness in turn – or vicariously relive – the singularity of their trauma, but to witness our own, since surely this is a point of mutual human recognition? An experience that can only be grasped by listening and responding to what is felt but unknown between one traumatic history and another. It is towards this thought that Durham’s writing and artwork direct us, for they do not refuse communication or transmission – on the contrary, there is throughout his work a paradoxical excess or proliferation of meaning – but they ask, what form can transmission take to produce genuine understanding? Durham’s Not Lothar Baumgarten’s Cherokee, 1990, is a modest but enigmatic work on paper. It shows no more than the fragments of two juxtaposed scripts

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photocopied onto fine art paper and masquerading as archival documents: one is a few mutilated lines of Cherokee (torn from a copy of a letter written in the 1880s), the other is the artist’s handwritten transcription of a text referring to Cherokees published in the Finnish language. Both texts are at the outer limit of linguistic familiarity and decipherablility, and one might imagine at first that their opacity signals an obstinate insistence on the untranslatability of difference. Moreover, as photocopies, the texts displace artistic ‘authenticity’ to a facsimile, a surface effect. Not Lothar Baumgarten’ s Cher okee was a riposte to German artist Lothar Baumgarten’s The Tongue of the Cherokee, 1985–1988, which seemed suspiciously to reflect a neo-liberalist assumption of the right to ‘speak for’ the ‘other’ – another, subtle form of dispossession. Irrespective of Baumgarten’s probable good intentions, it was difficult to see this work as anything other than an aestheticisation of the native sign. The work was installed in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where each letter of the Cherokee syllabary, elegantly engraved in glass, was isolated and trapped in the structural grid of the ceiling. Thus frozen like prehistoric flies in amber and divorced from their potential as writing (i.e., their organisation into a thought), the letters (like indigenous peoples within the fantasmatic imagination of White America) were removed to a non-historical past and an inaccessible, quasi-transcendental space.15 By contrast, Durham’s work acknowledges the material life of language, albeit partially mutilated, at the same time as the ‘archival’ partial text is staged as witness to an indecipherable ‘past’. Looking again at Not Lothar Baumgarten’ s Cherokee, what separates but also unites the two scripts is the diagonal tear of the paper; in an unsettling, sensual way, I am drawn irresistibly to the tear, not as an image but as an imagined gesture. It is a gesture that rearticulates the performative and the cognitive dimensions of language; in their untranslatability we are confronted with a resistance to reference,

Fig. 1 ‘Not Lothar Baumgarten’s Cherokee’, 1990. Photocopies on archival paper.

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and redirected to the body. In this way, the work performs the uncertain relation between self and other as it is mediated through language. What thereby appears to be ‘communicated’ is the pain of a communicability approached only through the incommunicability of a dismembered body partially remembered: the only certain relation to be established amongst us is the aporia of non-relation. ‘Human beings’, as Bataille commented, ‘are never united with each other except through tears and wounds.’16 Not Lothar Baumgarten’s Cherokee opens onto the problem of representational languages. Representation tends to assume the transparent communicability of words and images, the assumption of a natural coincidence between the sign and its referent, which is to conceal its nature as an imaginary construction. It expropriates the thing represented, artfully producing the illusion that we possess it and control its meaning. It is a means of assimilating otherness to the comforting order of the selfsame. It is precisely in thereby forestalling the rupture in meaning threatened by the unassimilable that representation colludes in safeguarding our sense of coherent selfhood. But the act of representing always involves the violence of decontextualisation and estrangement. By contrast to the referential visions of mass media, poetics lies beyond reference, explanation and information: it suspends reference and induces a momentary sense of incoherence – or desubjectification – and thus presents an enigma. Enigma draws us into the work, as Alain Badiou says of the poem, ‘not in order to know what it means, but rather to think what happens in it. Because the poem is an operation, it is also an event’.17 In this way the viewer is disarmed of its certitude and compelled to engage with difference – its own as well as that of others.

Trails of Tears: Narratives of Departure In a study paper for the Native American Support Committee in 1974, Durham presented a critical outline of what he saw to be the problems and strengths for Native Americans still subject to the ‘most oppressive colonisation the world has ever seen’. He goes on: ‘Remember that oppression is more than skin deep; it is not exterior to a person’s inner life. It gives us confusion, self-loathing, and a natural urge to escape, which in some people takes the form of a ‘mental’ escape – into mysticism, alcoholism, suicide, reactionism.’18 That is, he succinctly outlines symptoms of what has since been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Durham’s paper was a call for unity and responsible action in the ongoing struggle for land and the retention of cultural values as a means to overcome the demoralising mix of romanticism, paternalism and racism that marked the United States’ relations to Native America. Although the paper is couched in the ‘liberation struggle’ language of its time, its subtle rethinking of the issues at stake differs markedly from the tendency of post-colonial criticism to define struggle in the accusatory terms of oppositional binaries – victim and victimiser, and so forth. Written under the umbrella of the American Indian Movement,19 and more than 80 years after

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total ‘removal’ to reservations, the paper on one level attests to the length of time it takes for oppressed people to work through trauma and develop a critical perspective sufficient to overcome the inertia of cultural catastrophe. In Freudian terms, it concerns forging a passage out of the impasse of melancholia – marked by ambivalence of the survivor to the ‘lost object’ leading to self-reproach, self-abasement and withdrawal from the world – and into the reparative work of mourning. Durham’s writing confirms that trauma, defined as a severe wound inflicted on the body or on the psyche, is not only a matter of experiencing a singular catastrophic event, but also haunts successive generations either through the repetition of personal or social dysfunction that trauma may precipitate among surviving family members, or through a sustained war of attrition by the dominant power structure against the surviving cultural remnants of subordinated people. As Durham writes in ‘8-Wounds’, one of a series of scriptovisual works entitled The 1986 Pinkerton’s Ag ency Manual , 1989: ‘A Wound is a break in the skin. WOUNDS ARE SUBJECT TO INFECTION and BLEEDING.’ Infected wounds do not heal; wounds that heal nonetheless leave a trace, a scar. In the colonial scenarios of African slavery and the conquest of indigenous peoples, dislocation meant not only geographic displacement, but also cultural dispossession through the prohibition of customs, beliefs and language in an enforced but partial ‘assimilation’ into the alien worldview of the coloniser: a double departure from the narratives of ancestral belonging. Significantly, Durham dwells at length on the issue of language – the distortions in translation between two incommensurable worldviews and the disastrous consequences of cultural dispossession, prefiguring what Agamben later identifies as the ‘limit situation’ of the inhuman. As Durham states, ‘A biologically human animal is not fully human without, for example, language which is a cultural/political phenomenon. To speak of an alienated society is to speak of a people robbed of their culture, always so that some political system can exploit them. That is what makes culture so important to liberation, and that is why it can never be considered a separate piece of human activity.’20 That is, colonial geographical displacement is also linguistic dislocation, aptly named ‘dislocution’ by Fritz Senn in speaking of James Joyce’s writings.21 In some respects, Durham’s artistic trajectory parallels that of Joyce: both emerge from histories of cultural displacement, rejecting the mutilated geographic homeland to shift restlessly from one European city to another: a constant repetition of departure where the only ‘home’ inhabited is a foreign language. The language that each artist uses therefore invites comparison. Joyce exiled himself from Ireland because he could find no place as a speaking subject under the conditions imposed by English colonial rule. Joyce sets the tone of betrayal, anguish and contradiction inherent in this experience in A P ortrait of the Artist As a Y oung Man , where Stephen, during his exchange with the English dean of studies, thinks, ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.’22 Joyce eventually ‘consoles’

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Fig. 2 ‘Caliban Codex’, 1992. Mud and pencil on paper.

this fretting soul by a violation of language in what Seamus Deane calls a ‘Babelian act of war’. Finnegans Wake – his ‘history of repression’, a ‘titanic exercise in remembering everything at the level of the unconscious because at the conscious level so much has been repressed that amnesia is the abiding condition’ – is a mischievous subversion of written English drawn through a heteroglossia of classical and modern European languages, Irish speech patterns and the scriptovisual labyrinths of the Book of Kells.23 The traumatic transfigured into ludic humour. A doubled glance: inwards towards self-reparation and outwards to confuse the enemy using its own tools of repression – language. Despite his errantry in Europe, Joyce never ceased to write through the experience and reflections of a lost homeland: ‘For myself I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’24 For Joyce, belonging was indeed be-longing, a departure from which there was no hope of return, except through an ambivalent remembering, and in which writing was not to be the foundation of a new subjective ground for the writer, but a re-founding of language itself through the inchoate sounds of speech – a listening and a speaking. Of interest here is the way both Joyce and Durham re-embody language: a concern with corporeal transmission, a shifting between the cognitive and the performative aspects of language that in turn demands a rearticulation of meaning from a subject who listens – a reclamation of the ontology of self and language insofar as one hears before one speaks. Hence, if language is foregrounded in Durham’s and Joyce’s work, it is because, in the imperfect translation between colonial English and native syntactical conventions and meanings, a disjunction arises which itself highlights the differential between instrumental and poetic uses of language: the

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normative forms of language are inadequate vehicles to transmit experience, requiring the search for a different way of speaking that could open up a different, responsive listening. Joyce lightens the burden of repressive language in the homelessness of ‘two thinks at a time’,25 a mental gymnastic that is also resonant in Durham’s work. Durham, now multiply dislocated from his Cherokee origins, once said, ‘One of the most terrible aspects of our situation today is none of us feel that we are authentic. We do not feel that we are real Indians. But each of us carries this “dark secret” in his heart, and we never speak about it.… For the most part we just feel guilty, and try to measure up to the white man’s definition of ourselves’.26 The sentiment is reflected in Caliban Codex, 1992, a series of anti-aesthetic, faux-naif pencil drawings, diary (‘dairy’) entries and notes in which Caliban, Shakespeare’s tricky ‘savage’ in The Tempest, whilst seeming to seek the approbation of his new mentor simultaneously complains that, since Prospero turned up, he can no longer see what his own nose looks like; that is, his selfhood has been arrogated to Prospero’s totalising worldview. The series finally devolves on a mask-like face composed of mud, two different animal glass eyes and a button for a nose: a conjugation of land, the animal and the ‘foreign body’. Caliban’s famous line, ‘You taught me your language and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse’, expresses a colonial resentment that for Durham is to be played out through a poetic and parasitical language game, in which narratives of the colonial past are brought abruptly into alignment with those of the present. The ‘white man’s Indian’ was not, however, a position that Durham was content to inhabit. His Self-Portrait, 1985, is a life-sized canvas cut out of his body outline like a figure for target practice or a flayed skin, bearing a face modelled on part of a skull and an overly large fluorescent penis. (The obvious connotations are to Indian ‘savagery’; but since whites introduced flaying, scalping and rape, this attribution is one of the United State’s mythic inversions about itself that Durham has attacked with a coruscating wit.) The figure is inscribed with a doubled language – English text and faux-Indian signs – and a doubled, first and third person address – ‘Hello, I’m Jimmie Durham… Mr Durham has stated that…’ In other words, in Self-Portrait Durham writes ‘himself’ through the reading of another, cultural text about ‘himself’ in an ambivalent, dialogical play between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the utterance. If one invokes other instances of body tattooing – for example, the Spanish practice of tattooing Amerindian slaves with successive owners’ names, the machinic tattooing of the body of Kafka’s prisoner in The Penal Colony, or the Nazi concentration camp number tattoos – then Durham’s inscriptions are also a metaphoric ‘death sentence’. Self-Portrait is not a self-representation, but a pantomimic parody, a performance of assumptions of ‘authentic’ Indianness, a surface that reflects back only the viewer’s fantasmatic projections of native identity. Indeed, it undermines any claim to fixed or authentic identity. Or, to put it another way, the displacement signalled by the effigy is a means by which the artist frees himself, or departs from an imposed identity and a body trapped in alien forms of economic exchange. Durham was embarked on a journey committed to challenging those forms of totalising knowledge that distort the true nature of human dwelling, which is not to

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be found in the domain of fixed identities. When asked recently about his voluntary and ‘nomadic’ exile, Durham replied, ‘It’s my ambition in life to become a homeless orphan. I don’t want to be at home’, when ‘home’ means, among other things, ‘secure knowledge’, ‘mastery’, ‘lack of doubt’.27 If, on the one hand, Durham questions those inauthentic criteria that fuel the American Dream and its rhetoric of racial supremacy, on the other, he asks for a more authentic language of being and agency. On a political level this parallels Frantz Fanon’s commentary in Wretched of the Earth , where he plainly states that to dwell nostalgically in a pre-colonial past of atrophied fragments was a recipe for political and cultural inertia, not the ground for action. Expressions of ‘lament’ or ‘recrimination’ may be temporarily cathartic, but were reactive responses to loss, primarily addressed to hegemonic power and too easily assimilated by it since it recognised that, alone, they presented no threat of insurrection and were ineffective in shifting the relations of power. It was the role of the intellectual to mobilise his or her imagination to conjugate cultural memory with the realities of the present towards a new national consciousness, ‘giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons’.28 Such memories, as Ricoeur maintains, are a telling otherwise: ‘There are different ways of dealing with humiliating memories: either we repeat them in Freud’s sense or, as Todorov suggests, we may try to extract the “exemplarity” of the event rather than the factuality (for exemplarity is directed towards the future: it is a lesson to be told to following generations… and towards justice).’29 That is, traumatic departure is also propulsion into the future. In narratives of departure from catastrophe, as Caruth notes, ‘trauma is not simply an effect of destruction but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival,’30 and as such is ultimately the enigma of history itself, which given the past’s relative inaccessibility, cannot be defined by simple models of experience and reference. In her close re-reading of Freud, particularly Moses and Monotheism, Caruth makes some important observations, for which I shall offer a rather crude precise. Freud analyses the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt and return to the lands of Canaan as also an arrival of the history of the Jews as a monotheistic nation, made available through the experience of a trauma (the forgetting – and return – of the deeds of Moses, through his murder and its subsequent psychic repression). The reason for the Hebrews’ return is not to preserve freedom but the monotheistic god; it is not so much a return to a past freedom but a departure into a ‘newly established future that is no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through a profound discontinuity… Freud resituates the very possibility of history in the nature of a traumatic departure.’31 Crucial to Freud’s discussion of life-threatening trauma is his concept of latency: the enigma lies not the forgetting of the event but that the survivor is not fully conscious of it as it occurs; the return of the traumatic experience is not the signal of the direct experience, but an attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place. It is precisely the survivor who suffers through the trauma of the missing other: as is recurrently mentioned in witness testimonies, the survivor is fraught with guilt, shame and bewilderment at having somehow survived unharmed an event whose enormity is beyond the self’s power of conscious incorporation – a temporal aporia in which the threat of death was missed through lack of consciousness of the

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experience, and which has to be constantly replayed through the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder as an ‘endless testimony to the impossibility of living… which may lead to destruction’.32 Thus, for the survivor the crisis of surviving death is also the crisis of surviving life. Insofar as the traumatic experience is inaccessible to the surviving victim’s consciousness, trauma resembles the inaccessibility of the past. As Caruth succinctly puts it, ‘The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all.… A history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence.’ Furthermore, history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own: ‘history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.’33 Hence, the voice of the wound is always that of an other: ‘the address of the voice here [is] not the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past, but the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.’34 Unlike the Hebrews’ exodus, in colonial dispossession we confront the involuntary departure of peoples from their homelands, into un-freedom and the severe mutilation of their belief and social systems. Nonetheless, what unites these disparate scenarios is that it is the ‘unconsciousness of leaving that bears the impact of history’35: in the colonial scenario, the ‘fall’ that marks the effects of trauma consists of the numbing, dehumanising effects of separation and loss from all that constituted individual and collective subjectivity, a suffering so acute that only succeeding generations may become capable of bearing witness to it, of beginning the task of remembrance, and of reconfiguring selfhood historically in conjunction with a foreign language: a departure into a ‘newly established future’ that now irrevocably included alien others.

The Turn to Humour Laughter – that is something very sacred, especially for us Indians. For people who are as poor as us, who have lost everything, who had to endure so much death and sadness, laughter is a precious gift. John (Fire) Lame Deer36

As LaCapra says, ‘for memory to be effective it must reach large numbers of people’; it must therefore find accessible form.37 With the rare exception of what LaCapra calls the ‘carnivalesque’ or ‘gallows humour’ of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the comic book on the traumatic consequences of the concentration camp, humour finds few expressions in Holocaust commentaries. Humour is, however, intrinsic to Native American hermeneutics, cultural survival and the recapture of collective agency. The Lakota lawyer and writer Vine Deloria, writing at the time of the founding of American Indian Movement, notes: ‘Humour has come to occupy such a prominent place in national Indian affairs that any kind of movement is impossible without it.… The more desperate the problem, the more humour is directed to

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describe it.… Often people are awakened and brought to militancy through funny remarks.’38 From the mid-twentieth century humour appears in Native American literature and art in the guise of trickster; remobilised from oral tradition, trickster is the boundary violator, cultural transformer, traditional survivor and figure of hermeneutics par excellence.39 As Gerald Vizenor says, ‘The trickster is liberation and survivance, and the historic ‘indian’ is the other measure of tragic victimry.… [T]rickster is a comic trope in a universal language game. The trickster narrative is a wild, imagic venture in communal discourse, an uncertain tease and humor that denies aestheticism, literal translation, and representation.’40 To indicate some of the force of trickster humour, it is worth digressing into an abbreviation of a twentieth century Brule Sioux version of a traditional trickster tale that, through sardonic wit, voices anxiety over the destruction of their life-world by the instrumental technologies of Western culture. The trickster Iktome relates to his trickster comrade Coyote that he woke up in a sweat after a bad dream. He dreamt that he spied a beautiful chief’s daughter in the distance, and, overcome by lust, his penis elongated and snaked across the road to impregnate her. Whereupon Coyote interrupts and says: ‘This sounds like a good dream to me!’ Iktome continues to describe how, in the process of accomplishing this act, a white man’s horse-drawn wagon, with its heavy ironclad wheels, suddenly appeared on the road, driving at full-tilt.… At which Coyote concedes, yes, this was indeed a nightmare.41 It is not gratuitous that this anxiety is related as a nightmare since it is one of the symptoms by which the traumatic event returns to haunt the sufferer. But this is precisely what is understood by the storyteller; the trauma is re-told as a tragicomic tale, which becomes the conduit for dispelling its negative effects, for sustaining hope and for ensuring that trickster (cultural memory) always lives to tell another tale. Nonetheless, the problem with invoking trickster is its co-option by anthropology, which limits the language by which we can express its broader cultural value. However, we can draw on another perspective. In his introduction to his correspondence with Thomas Mann, the mythographer Karl Kerényi suggests that Nietzsche’s dualistic division of human culture into the rational Apollonian and the non-rational Dionysian should be supplemented by a third aspect, the Hermetic: ‘a specific quality in the nature, achievements, and life patterns of mankind, as well as the corresponding traits of roguery to be found on the surface of man’s world.’ The Hermetic – one should note – is written with a capital H, and as Kerényi emphasises is ‘to be understood in terms of mythological antiquity and not in the Gnostic or alchemical sense, much less as a movement in modern poetry.’42 Of the at times paradoxical attributes of the Hermetic discussed by Kerényi we should note the following correspondences to trickster: artful prankster, deceiver and opportunistic thief; journeyer and transgressor of boundaries; the hinge, or keeper of the gate and crossroads; interpreter and inventor of language, associated with excessive bodily appetites, chance, memory and forgetting.43 The Hermetic spirit inhabits its world even as it creatively manipulates it and encompasses both the vitality of procreation and the enigmatic obscurity of death. The Hermetic association with creative transformation aligns it with art. Art is not autonomous from the socio-political circumstances from which it arises but neither

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is it reducible to them, which is why it does not illustrate a historical catastrophic event, but produces the enigmatic, ‘catastrophic’ event of art itself. In the face of trauma, art must engage a double manoeuvre: to transform traumatic material into a form of critical reflection that may advance the reparative work of mourning, and to find a language to connect with its interlocutors at the level of affect. If art has a transformative value it is because it possesses a different materiality and temporality from mediated representations; it has the capacity to tease us out of instrumentalised time and space precisely into a decelerated space-time of reflection. It is this deceleration that engages us in Durham’s laconic revelations of the absurd in the erudite and vice versa, or what we suggest is a humorous délire, where the syncope of laughter – the catch of breath, the momentary loss of selfconsciousness – is the triumph of body over abstraction and the disarming of instrumental time. To trace this pathway, we need to return again to Durham’s play with the scriptovisual. In ‘The Search for Virginity’, the artist presents a critique of the way the common usages of English reduce the world to binary, hierarchical opposites: they have no truth beyond the relations of power that determine them.44 His work consistently draws upon the dictionary itself as an archival resource of the transhistorical and transnational etymology of words to make uncommon polyphonic connections and slippages of meaning. For a recent artist residency in the north of England he produced both a book and a stone sculpture. The book – through which Durham teases out some of the more paradoxical elements of local history – includes a section on English words that also incorporates handwritten pages; one lists a series of words in the same phonemic family accompanied by simple illustrations; the second provides another list but with the instruction that readers make their own drawings. As in so many of the artist’s works, the viewer or reader is actively addressed, invited to ‘join up the dots’, as it were. The sculpture is a continuation of Durham’s current dialogue between stones (possessing the fond status of words as infinitely malleable) and European architecture (occupying the hierarchical and repressive role of instrumental language). In this installation, responding to its surface features, he animated a large boulder with painted eyes and a mouth, and placed it in a red-painted rowing boat named ‘Float Sam’. This was then lowered into the River Wear, to disappear with a wink at high tide, and to reappear with a smile at low tide. In his commentary on this piece, Durham recounts how one observer likened the boulder to Mr Potato Head. However, with a comic inverse logic, the artist retorted that it was quite the reverse: potatoes in the ground mimicked stones to avoid the attention of predators. What Durham turns around here are European assumptions of intentionality, cause and effect and the relationship between the animate and the inanimate. Continuing the tease between words and objects, one of Durham’s sculptures for the 2003 Venice Biennale consisted of two gold-painted pieces of wood: one a short, square-sectioned length of planed wood accompanied by the caption ‘A piece of wood sculpted by a machine painted by a human’; the other a gnawed twig with the caption ‘A piece of wood sculpted by a dog and painted by a human’. There is something comical about this, but what exactly is it? It is perhaps that we are sud-

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Fig. 3 ‘Float Sam’, from the River Wear installation, Sunderland, 2004, wooden boat and painted stone. Nicola Maxwell

denly shown a dynamic relational universe that induces our hierarchical one to fall apart. Durham interacts with objects, materials and words in the manner of an event of remembrance: finding, painting, gilding, inscribing, associating. In Deleuze’s terms these are ‘effects in the causal sense, but also sonorous, optical, or linguistic “effects”… ‘incorporeal effects on bodies’ that play on the surface – or at the border between depth and height,45 such that – as we see in Durham’s work – the concealed or overlooked becomes manifest. What is revealed in the délire of Durham’s sculpture is a paradoxical temporality embedded in the event itself: an undecidability between to cut or to be cut, to gnaw or to be gnawed, or to wound or to be wounded, that discloses the interchangeability of active and passive, cause and effect, past and future. ‘In paradox everything happens at the boundary between things and propositions.… Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit. Humour is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights.’ And, quoting Valéry, ‘What is most deep is the skin.’46 If Durham’s utterances and propositions seem ‘delirious’ it is not because they are inherently so, but because the way we linguistically structure the world makes them seem so. Our European languages possess tenses that divide up time as linear progression; history becomes a remote horizon, a creation of the present by a subject who assumes an omniscient and ‘objective’ point of view capable of

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‘A Piece of Wood..’ , 2007, gilded wood. Roman Marz

incorporating and distributing all cultures in a single plane of time. Native American perceptions of time, however, do not ‘fit’ this anthropocentric schema; they are cosmogonic, referring to a ‘mythic’ time of creation that understands the corporeal interconnectedness of all things, animate and inanimate, and that must be continually renewed and remembered through thoughts, speech and artistic endeavour. The present, the new, is always folded into the cosmic pattern; the past, including ‘historical’ remembrance, is spoken in the present tense. This is cultural memory, the ‘never known’ that Durham insists must be remembered, and that suffered the impact of colonial repression. From this point of view, history, as governed by abstract political and economic forces, could only lead to a catastrophic disfigurement of cosmic order. However, it is in this other temporal sense that we come to appreciate the defiant, cyclical disappearance and reappearance of Durham’s River Wear boulder, or the Venice sculpture in which the material ‘remembers’ the wounds of its past encounters. Humour, then, is a weapon by which Durham disarms the conventions of linguistic reference. A cursory glance of the artist’s oeuvre over the years suggests that it covers the entire gamut of Hermetic tropes associated with the comic: irony, satire, parody, sardonic wit, absurdity, apparent incongruous juxtapositions, non-sequiturs and puns with words, objects and images, an irreverent silliness. However, its background in Native American hermeneutics also cautions us to distinguish the intentions and effects of different comic tropes. On the face of it the very position of the dislocated/dislocuted subject, caught between the need to master the other’s language and being possessed by it, or between two incommensurable cultural

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positions, would seem to be ironic. Those aspects of Durham’s work that confront the ignorance and prejudices of Europeans might reflect this view. The installation ‘On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian’, 1985, included two small works, Types of Arr ows and Current Trends in Indian Land Owner ship. Types of Arrows consists of three hand-made arrows mounted on a canvas and descriptively labelled ‘tiny’, ‘wavy’, ‘short and fat’, whose absurdity, one would think, is selfevident, but, alarmingly, like the entire installation was taken by some viewers to be ‘authentic’. Current Trends in Indian Land Owner ship is a small work on paper, as if torn from a textbook, presenting a series of maps of the North American continent dated 1492, 1820, 1840, 1860, and 1978. Whilst the earliest map is totally blocked out in red, by 1978 the red has shrunk to a few tiny patches in a mass of white. The title is couched in the neutral language of sociology, belying both the human cost of this massive dispossession and that the language of ‘ownership’ itself imposes a western concept incommensurate with indigenous relations to land. However, an absurdist and occasionally self-deprecating tone also runs through the artist’s work, alongside a refutation of the western logic of time, not unlike that of the Brule Sioux trickster story. According to Colebrook, irony, like history, is temporal. Ironic detachment presupposes a transcendental, self-determining subject existing before language (and beyond the body and its affects) and hence capable of taking a distance from a point outside language and context, above and beyond the world. ‘It is through speaking that we have the sense of a subject who preceded speech and an original world that was there to be signified. We could only escape irony, and the point of view of the subject, if we could rethink this logic of time (and narrative).’47 The ironic position is, then, a fallacious one if we take the view that the subject is always constituted from an unknowable origin. Durham’s position, however, is never that of an ‘objective’ observer outside context; despite dislocation, like Joyce, he remains a survivor and witness to an experienced past that never ceases to return from the future.

Fig. 5 Current Trends in Indian Land Ownership’. Paper. Part of the installation On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian, 1985

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Amongst the most succinct summaries of humorous tropes is Lecercle’s gloss on Deleuze’s distinction between satire, humour and irony, equivalent to the spatial model of depth, surface and height. In this reading, satire expresses the ‘depth of the primary order, it deals with insults and obscenities, regresses to oral aggressive sex, excrement and food: it is the art of regression, and Swift.’ Irony is the art of heights: ‘its game of equivocation and metaphor is controlled by an all-mastering subject; it is a form of domination where the subject is placed in the elevated position of a God.’ Humour, however, ‘forces the subject to creep along the ground, on the surface: not going down to the satirical incoherence of depth, where objects are dismembered, but clinging to the discrete absurdity of surfaces, where sense rules over the serious games of paradoxes, and negation no longer denies but confuses: the place where Alice can no longer say whether meaning what one says and saying what one means are two different acts.… The classic philosophical concept of irony is overthrown with Platonism and its heights: it gives way to humour, the uncertain art of surfaces’.48 We may recall Kerényi’s description of the Hermetic as a particular quality to be found ‘at the surface of man’s world’, which is consistent with trickster as a liminal figure, occupying the shifting boundaries between the satirical obscene body and the hermeneutic play of language where bodies, things and words can enter into new relations with one another. It is also consistent with Durham’s methodologies: scavenging and collecting the littoral and the discard – mud, sticks and twigs, PVC piping for waste disposal and other things that are to be found on the ground, or just beneath the surface; manipulating texts and objects in a process of remembrance; and above all, disseminating confusion. Irony perhaps becomes a less appropriate trope because it depends on the hierarchical binary of high/low and hence is antagonistic to Durham’s suspicion of all hierarchies. It would also be inconsistent with Durham’s intentions for his work to open a space of doubt and confusion in which the viewer/ listener is not belittled or intimidated but encouraged to think. As Walter Benjamin remarks, ‘It may be noted, by the way, that there is no better start for thinking than laughter. And, in particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsions of the soul.’49 Durham’s is a very particular kind of humour, born perhaps of a rather melancholy view of humanity, but one that does not ne gate life . It differs from irony and Freud’s economy of the joke, because it is not concerned with aggression or mastery over the other but with the transformation of collective existence. As such it is more in keeping with a reparative departure from the effects of trauma. In his later essay on humour Freud expands upon what he had earlier described as ‘the humour that smiles through tears’,50 which approaches the tonality of the comic under conditions of cultural dispossession. From the outset, Freud associates this humour with trauma: ‘There is no doubt that the essence of humour [for the humorist] is that one spares oneself the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise and dismisses the possibility of such expressions of emotion with a jest.’51 In seeking to understand the dynamics of this deflection of suffering away from the path of repression, Freud returns to the topography of the ego and the super-ego that he elaborated in Mourning and Melanc holia in which the ego becomes the object of denigration by the disciplinary super-ego. In the scene of the joke (and, we might

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add, irony) the humorist functions as this paternal agency, adopting the attitude of a superior adult by which the other is reduced to the position of a child, its ego deflated.52 However, where the person adopts a humorous attitude towards himself in order to ward off suffering, the humorist treats himself as a child from an adult perspective. Freud proposes that this may be due to the release and transformation of psychic energies that might otherwise be directed to a melancholic self-abasement, such that the super-ego itself takes on a ‘comforting’ role and releases the ego into a degree of pleasure that, although serving an illusion, nonetheless is both ‘liberating and elevating’.53 This humour ‘is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is here able to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.’54 In his gloss on Freud’s essay, Simon Critchley notes that this form of humour ‘is a profoundly cognitive relation to oneself and the world… [that] recalls us to the modesty and limitedness of the human condition, a limitedness that calls not for tragic-heroic affirmation but comic acknowledgement, not Promethean authenticity but a laughable inauthenticity’.55 The ‘rebellious’ humour of Durham’s poetics of dislocation is profoundly ethical and political. It is a guide for surviving trauma and transforming life through recognition of the subject’s fragile relation to language, between non-sense and sense, impasse and passage, speechlessness and speech. It challenges the languages of dominance through the paradoxes of délire: against the structure of rational language, délire ‘is neither information nor communicative in a strict sense; it rejects the separation between language and the extralinguistic, between words and bodies; it is heterogeneous and cannot be accounted for through general rules […]; and it is the embodiment of the struggle of minor languages within and against dominant ones. But since these postulates are fallacious, délire is also the truth of language, its basic form.’56 Humour works to reveal the limits of life through the limits of what is representable. And it is through the experience of limits in our encounter with others that we also encounter the trauma of our own finitude, which reminds us that we have not yet lost the possibility of forging a new ground of human solidarity.

Notes and References 1. Durham J., 1988, ‘A Certain Lack of Coherence’, Jimmie Durham: Matoaka Ale Attakulakula Guledisgo Nhini [Matoaka and the Little Carpenter in London] , Matt’s Gallery, London. 2. Lecercle J.-J., 1985, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass, Open Court, La Salle, IL, p. 6. 3. Ibid. pp. 27, 39. 4. Ibid. p. 7. 5. Baker H. A., 1986, ‘Caliban’s Triple Play’, in “Race”, Writing, and Difference, H. L. Gates Jr. (Ed.), Chicago University Press, Chicago, p. 393. 6. Colebrook C., 2004, Irony, Routledge, London, p. 136. 7. Caruth C., 1996, Unclaimed Experience: T rauma, Narr ative and History , Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 62.

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8. Perhaps one recent media exception is the images of the collapsing World Trade Center, especially the shocking sight of people falling from the burning towers, transmitted ‘raw’ prior to any authoritative ‘explanation’. 9. See Durham J., 1993, ‘Savage Attacks on White Women, As Usual’ in A Certain Lac k of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics, Kala Press, London, p. 124; and ‘Cowboys and…’, ibid., p. 184. 10. LaCapra D., 1998, History and Memory After Auschwitz, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, p. 100. 11. For further critique of these points, see Kearney R., 2002, On Stories, Routledge, London, pp. 47–69; and Kearney R., 2003, Strangers, Gods and Monster s, Routledge, London, pp. 179–190. 12. Gilroy P., 1993, The Black Atlantic, Verso, London, pp. 46–58. 13. Given that technologies are relative to their time, the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets was equally deadly in its technological, rational intent and effect. 14. Agamben G., 2002, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, D. Heller-Roazen (Trans.), Zone Books, New York, pp. 87–135. 15. This reading was unfortunately enhanced by a temporary floor installation by the artist Alan McCollum, which consisted of casts of dinosaur bones. 16. Bataille G., 1992, quoted in D. Hollier, Against Ar chitecture: The Writings of Geor ges Bataille, B. Wing (Trans.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 67–68. 17. Badiou A., 2005, Handbook of Inaesthetics, A. Toscano (Trans.), Stanford University Press, Stanford, p. 29. 18. Durham J., 1974, ‘American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle’, in Durham, A Certain Lack of Coherence, op. cit., p. 11. 19. Formed in 1969, American Indian Movement marked the first proactive collective movement towards reconfiguring indigenous subjectivity and agency. 20. Durham J., 1974, ‘American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle’, op. cit., p. 12. 21. Senn F., 1984, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as T ranslation, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 202. 22. Joyce J., 1916 [1996], A Portrait of the Artist As a Y oung Man, Penguin Popular Classics, London, p. 215. 23. Deane S., 1992, ‘Introduction’ to James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939, Penguin, London, pp. vii–xlix. 24. Ibid., p. xix. 25. Joyce J., Finnegans Wake, ibid., p. 583. 26. Durham J., 1983, Columbus Day: Poems, Stories and Drawings About American Indian Life and Death in the 1970s, West End Press, Minneapolis. 27. Durham J., 2004, Jimmie Durham, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Edizione Charta, Milan, pp. 123–125. 28. Fanon F., 1985 [1961], The Wr etched of the Earth , C. Farrington (Trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 193. 29. Ricoeur P., 1999, ‘Memory and Forgetting’, in Questioning Ethics: Contempor ary Debates in Philosophy, R. Kearney and M. Dooley (Eds.), Routledge, London, p. 9. 30. Caruth C., 1996, op. cit., p. 58. 31. Ibid., pp. 14–17. 32. Ibid., p. 62. 33. Ibid., pp. 17–24. 34. Ibid., p. 8. 35. Ibid., p. 22. 36. Lame Deer J. (Fire) and R. Erdoes, 1972, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, Washington Square Press, New York, p. 226. 37. LaCapra D., 1998, op. cit., p. 139.

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38. Deloria Jr. V., 1969, ‘Indian Humour’, in Custer Died for Y our Sins: An Indian Manifesto , Macmillan, New York, pp. 146–167. 39. This is true of not only the Native America but also Africa and the African diaspora which also have a trickster tradition; to cite a few examples: the writers Amos Tutuola, Patrick Chamoiseau, Wilson Harris, the artist David Hammons, and from a more recent generation, Yinka Shonibare. 40. Vizenor G., 2000, ‘Trickster Hermeneutics: Curiosa and Punctuated Equilibrium’, in Reverberations: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/cultural Practices, J. Fisher (Ed.), Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, Maastrict, p. 145. 41. Erdoes R., and A. Ortiz, 1984, American Indian Myths and Le gends, Pantheon Books, New York, pp. 381–382. 42. Kerényi K., 1975, Mythology and Humanism: The Corr espondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi, A. Gelley (Trans.), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, p. 9. The term Hermetic, of course, derives from Hermes, the subject of a lecture Kerényi delivered in 1942 in Switzerland after having fled Nazi-occupied Hungary, later to be published as Hermes, Guide of Souls. 43. Kerényi K., 1996 [1944], Hermes, Guide of Souls, M. Stein (Trans.), Spring, Woodstock, pp. 140–145. 44. Durham J., 1991 [1988], ‘The Search for Virginity’, in The Myth of Primitivism , S. Hiller (Ed.), Routledge, London; republished in A Certain Lac k of Coher ence, op. cit., pp. 154–157. 45. Deleuze G., 1990, The Lo gic of Sense , M. Lester with C. Stivale (Trans.), Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 5–7. 46. Ibid., pp. 8–10. 47. Colebrook C., op. cit., p. 133. 48. Lecercle J.-J., 1985, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass, Open Court, La Salle, IL, p. 112. 49. Benjamin W., 1986, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Reflections, E. Jephcott (Trans.), Schocken Books, New York, p. 236. 50. Freud S., 1976 [1905], Freud 6. J okes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’ , J. Strachey (Trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 298. 51. Freud S., 1988 [1927], ‘Humour’, in Freud 14. Art and Liter ature, J. Strachey (Trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp. 427–433. 52. We may note here that from Andrew Jackson on, the policy of the United States towards American Indians hardened into a punitive paternalism, which treated them as wards of the state. In psychoanalytic terms, the native ego is crushed by a harsh super-ego, which as Durham’s 1974 essay suggests, then becomes internalised by the people. Hence one task of the survivors of cultural dispossession would be to somehow diminish the negative affects of this super-ego imposed by the language of repression. 53. Freud, 1988, p. 432. 54. Ibid., p. 429. 55. Critchley S., 2002, On Humour, Routledge, London, pp. 98–105. 56. Lecercle J.-J., op. cit., p. 189.

Where You End and I Begin – The Multiple Ethics of Contemporary Art Practice Dr. Pam Johnston

“There is nothin’ that I’d rather be Than an Aboriginal And watch you take my precious land away.”1

I sang this song at the start of a talk I did a long way from my land, my country. The day before I decided to sing this song I listened and watched as Venezualian born artist Javier Tellez presented his work “Usted esta aqui”.2 He spoke with belief and intensity, describing this project which he had completed sometime prior to this talk.3 Tellez’ work was located in a psychiatric hospital which was of particular interest to him. Following his submission of his work “La Colmena”4 for inclusion in the 50th Venice Biennial he chose to resign from this important artistic event “The Venezuelan pavilion today embodies a toxic en vironment”, the artist wrote in an open letter sent via E-Flux, “that would ine vitably contaminate the r eading of any work of art that deals with social inequality”. Tellez goes on to note the “corruption and struggle for power that ar e choking the country ”, a crisis that e xtends to the cultur al sector as well, which like so many parts of Venezuelan society is starved for resources. “When the vice-minister of culture suggests to the museums that the y reduce their electrical consumption”, the artist writes , “I can’t help reading this in a very symbolic way – without morals and light it is impossible to ima gine cultural endeavors”.5 Most significantly, in his letter of resignation Tellez writes; “This model of commitment can describe the foundations of an ethic based on respect of difference and the intention to incorpor ate ‘the other’. To participate in the of ficial selection in this situation, under the patronage of the state, would be in some way a betrayal of the principles on which I have built my body of work for o ver a decade, principles that have always placed me side by side with the excluded ones of our society, those ‘invisible’ subjects within the social fabric: the mentally ill conf ined in psychiatric hospitals, prisoners or the populations of shanty towns ”.6 Tellez had created a huge ball which was pushed by many hands up into the air, like a huge floating balloon. It was pushed from one section of the psychiatric hospital to the next, over gates and fences. The artist took a video of both the people within the institute, the inmates, as well as the ball and the barriers over which it was pushed. He videoed various inmates as they spontaneously engaged in the A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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process of keeping this huge ball in the air. This video also showed many of the inmates who did not engage in pushing the ball around. The majority of the inmates were clearly very disturbed and distressed people with nakedness, screaming and vacant staring as well as babble being part of the view. As I watched this video I wondered about these people. How aware were they that eventually, I, a stranger to them, would be staring at their image? As they were observed through the camera, jumping, screaming, crying, laughing, naked, dressed, and as this ball bounced around in this moment in their lives, how could there be any consciousness of me? Did they care about me, or what I thought? Was permission asked of them in any way? Were they able to make decisions or give permission even if they were asked? I had a lot of questions, clearly. As is clear from my questioning, I was deeply disturbed by this video. A discussion I had in relation to this feeling of unrest touched on subconscious definitions of insanity and “other”. I had been watching insane people and was I, despite my very real belief and desire to be otherwise, de-humanizing these people as a result of a lifetime of an ideological, cultural and historical mix made up of a myriad representational scientific, literary, juridical, linguistic and cinematic discourse? And, despite his desire to be otherwise as his letter of resignation clearly states, were Tellez and I, despite our so-called “good intentions” and “politics”, in the same ethical boat? I have been in this situation many, many times and my ethical thoughts have shaped my art practice. My starting point has always been about power and its relationship to history and culture. The relationship between Indigenousness – an historical and cultural construction – and Indigenous peoples, as a real flesh and blood subject of their collective histories – is one of the central questions of practice that art scholarship and cultural theory still seeks not to address, and the best illustration I could think of to explain this would be the video that I refer to of the people chasing the ball in the institution. This connection between the presumption of a right to video insane people in an institution, as art objects, fits well with the discussion of Indigenous as historical/ political subjects and the representation of the construction produced by hegemonic discourses is not a relation of direct identity, or a relation of correspondence or simple implication. In the case of Indigenousness it is an arbitrary relation set up in particular cultural and historical contexts. An assumption of privilege and ethnocentric universality on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of colonialism on the “first peoples” in the context of a world system dominated by the west on the other, characterize a sizeable extent of western art work and cultural theory on Indigenous peoples. An analysis of “other” in the form of a cross-culturally singular, monolithic notion of such things as patriarchy and male dominance, deprivation, the genealogy of knowledge, even time and history, lead to the construction of a similarly reductive and homogenous notion of what apparently oppresses most if not all the Indigenous peoples. It is in the production of this “other” that western art and cultural theorists appropriate and colonize the constitutive complexities, which characterize the lives of Indigenous peoples in their own lands as well as globally.

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The preambles and policies, as well as the representations of themselves, impact on Aboriginal lives in Australia. Comparisons with the “real life” day to day statistics of Aboriginal women’s lives in prison, and the trauma, grief and violence of dislocation and dispossession in ones own ‘country’ while trying to live in a number of damaging stated realities impacts generationally. This dislocation encases Aboriginal people on many levels inside a circle of pain that requires a further level of understanding in order to try and “represent” an approach to developing strategies that take into account this political, social and cultural community trauma that is played out not only inside the prison, but also within the educational, social and cultural contexts in which Aboriginal people in Australia work and live. To illustrate this it is worth taking a look at a number of statistics which impact on Aboriginal women’s lives. In her recent Draft Strategic Framework, Leatrice Todd, Acting Director, Women’s Unit, Department of Corrective Services, New South Wales, Australia, observes that because the population of women in prison overall is so small, the focus is often more on the management and needs of men in prison who account for a far greater prison population. For this reason the prison system frequently will fail to meet the specific needs of Indigenous women.7 When looking at issues such as classification, case management and provision of programs for women, there are certain characteristics that apply specifically to Indigenous women. The Strategic Framework also observes that Indigenous women are significantly over-represented in custody and that this rate is increasing over time. The Strategic Framework importantly notes that; “Generally, Indigenous women come from an environment and history of family violence , health problems, unemployment and poverty.”8

The following statistics are also part of the consciousness of Indigenous women inmates in Correctional Centers throughout Australia: ●

● ● ● ● ● ● ●

●

Indigenous women are 31% of prison population which represents an increase of 14% since 1995. 68% are between 18 and 32 years of age in 2001 70% left school before age 10 86% are mothers 29% care for children other than their own 29% provide care for other people 98% have experienced sexual assault, addiction and/or violence Indigenous women are 20 times more represented in prison than non-Indigenous women 104 Indigenous women were imprisoned in 1991 and that figure has increased to 370 in 2001, a 255.8% increase9

The following statistical information is part of the day to day reality of Aboriginal people in Australia that would not go away. These statistics define a relationship with Australia that is clearly unequal. Where Aboriginal people do not exist inside the statistics, their families, their friends and their community is still caught inside this awful and ongoing violence. This fact ensures that the resultant trauma and

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grief also continues in daily life. The statistics are an immutable part of definable Aboriginality and a source of immense and ongoing pain and suffering. Over the same period, and as a result of these and other sorry statistics, a number of policies and strategies have been drafted or implemented in recent years. Both Liberal and Labour Party preamble, as well as other Australian political preamble, recognizes the dreadful social inequities that are part of ongoing Aboriginality. Reconciliation11 dialogue has become an integral part of the Australian landscape and history, as well as a global discussion which has impacted on Australia’s diplomatic relationships. The statistics I have presented show a profound contradiction between the expectations and perceptions of policies and strategies, as well as non-Indigenous representation of Indigenousness, and the day to day reality of Aboriginal people. That these representations, strategies and policies are a recognition and a reaction to the statistics, shows both a concern, and also, it would be reasonable to assume, a changed reality as a result.12 A problem is that strategies and policies become the argument for proof of change in both situation of Aboriginal people in Australia, and attitude towards Aboriginal people, and non-Indigenous representations, both visually and otherwise, of Indigenous people become the perceived “truth” of Indigenous people. Aboriginal people are left between a rock and a hard place. Many feel that their communities are over-policed, and that they are being harassed as a result of Aboriginality.13 Their images and stories are taken from them with all the “good will” in the world, and shaped into non-recognizable perceptions, therefore continuing the terrible dislocation that started with the arrival of Europeans. Is it any wonder that life has no dreams, and babies are born in hopelessness? If the policies are in place, they are told, there is no reason to be in the position Aboriginal people, as the statistics reflect, are in. The statistical information offered also illustrates the shocking fact that most incarcerated Indigenous people experience the majority, if not all, education, art and culture inside a prison. Is it any wonder that they are rebellious, cynical and angry when the rhetoric says that everything is in place for things to get better, yet

Indig Life expectancy Infant mortality Total fertility Under 30 Living in major urban areas 16 Year old students Bachelor degree Unemployed Employed as labourers Household income per capita One parent family Renting housing

enous compared to Non-Indig 56.9 years 15.2 per 1,000 2.2 per 1,000 68.1% 30.3% 57.0% 2.0% 22.8% 24.3% $158 29.6% 63.8%

enous 75.2 years 5.0 per 1,000 1.8 per 1,000 43.7% 62.7% 83.5% 10.4% 9.3% 3.7% $310 14.5% 27.1%10

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nothing changes – it only gets worse! There is concern that these debates have been contained within a perspective that is dominated by the cultural imperatives of the European-derived society of contemporary Australia, and perhaps the policies and strategies referred to, are perceived as part of that imperative. As a consequence, the provision of and maintenance of “equity” programs for Aboriginal students carries with it the implicit expectation that Indigenous Australians will embark on study programs that engage the same curricula as non-Aboriginal students. The cultural heritage informing these curricula, and the teaching and institutional practices normally associated with this pattern of formal education, are taken as givens and thus not opened for critical review. The question one must ask is where does this leaves the majority of Indigenous Australians, who, statistically, are receiving a greater part of this education, as already stated, behind bars. Foucault talks about the development of the Western system – the growth of disciplinary society as a whole. He also reveals that the comparison between a school and a prison is not entire silly – prisons, schools, factories, barracks and hospitals all share a common organization in which it is possible to control the use of an individual’s time and space hour by hour.14 For Indigenous people being inside or outside prison is not so different. Aboriginal people accept getting moved on, taken over, and not belonging. We accept all institutional rights to own and control us and tell us who we are – they are all the same, prison or school, hospital or court. All the circumstances for Indigenous women in prison point to alienation and dispossession of life, in totality, not just a part of life. This totality illustrates a lack of power and control of how they live, how they are viewed, and how they are represented. This context has to be taken into account in a landscape that is dominated by the cultural imperatives of the European-derived society of contemporary Australia. The ongoing community trauma which is the result of the statistics presented, Australian history, artistic and cultural representation as well as the contradictions of the policies and strategies, which say in effect “everything is alright because it is acknowledged”, is everywhere. Aboriginal art produced inside prison then, is perhaps one of the few documentations of an Aboriginal relationship with prisons and for this reason alone it is remarkable that there is no ongoing collection of this significant work. The dialogue around the educational significance of art making notes that Aboriginal people in prison tend to work as much outside the classroom as they do inside the classroom – in fact it is difficult to have a “traditional” classroom where there are Aboriginal students. The Aboriginal approach to art, as observed, fits into the context of “hobby” and does not appear to impact in any way on the perceived “advantages” or qualifications of education or employment. It is suggested that this approach to art making seems to be a way for Aboriginal people to “waste time” – it has been suggested that Indigenous people are not learning in the way that educational structures are used to seeing people learn. Any comment that questions “the good” of these art practices or tries, artistically, to represent them in any way at all, necessarily denies the political history and identity of Aboriginal people. Land Rights discussion,15 the Protection Act,16 the

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Stolen Generations,17 expressions such as “culturally appropriate,” and “Indigenous Awareness” are a common component of professional language. Questioning any part of the significance of this language in its practice (i.e., Koorie18 Art) necessarily makes current awareness invisible, and also asserts professional or authoritative ignorance acceptable as a tool of power both in a prison as well as in the broader community. Inside prison, a number of imperatives operate that are primary to survival. For Aboriginal people these survival imperatives are exacerbated by the nature of their identity, history, culture and political relationship to the institution in which they find themselves. Survival strategies may include the ability to cut off emotionally, to not assert ones identity and “story”, to not be an observer, to isolate and so on. These survival strategies are applied in both men’s and women’s prisons, although women in prison tend to form more durable and emotional relationships and more developed emotional support systems. As an artist working inside this environment, I have access to every area, and given my longstanding commitment to the people in this environment, I have been encouraged many times to represent what I have seen, to make a visual language of it. I have never done so for a number of reasons. I have to state clearly here that for me, this is an ongoing discussion with myself. As person in a situation of power, how ethical would it be for me to use this access, with the best intentions in the world, to represent what is “hidden” in the normal course of events? I have written often about this dilemma – where do ethics end and imagination begin? In the end I have made a decision to never represent by documentation or by imagination, people who I clearly know have no power in society beyond what they can do for themselves. In the same way that Javier Tellez had access to the inmates in the psychiatric hospital, and easily for the same reasons as he has, I could develop a number of artistic projects that would be both innovative and challenging. My problem is I am not them. The prisoners do not have a voice – why would I take it? I am not them. I can only represent myself. For me, anything i can do deprives them of voice. My voice is “louder” if you like, even though I am a sister. I have had the privilege of education and, here is another question, perhaps my view is contaminated? I noted earlier, the disparity between the dreadful statistics presented and the various policy preambles on perceptions and experiences of Aboriginal and nonAboriginal people in Australia. When an Aboriginal person paints a picture she is getting in touch with a spiritual and cultural part of her identity that she is unable to find in the world she currently inhabits. This is an important healing – a way of “telling her story” that ensures that she exists in the world she inhabits. How? She paints the picture with her hands and her eyes about her Aboriginality – she looks at the picture – she exists because the picture is tangible as is she. The corollary of this art production is that a non-Indigenous person, such as a Corrective Officer or another inmate, observes the work and either asks, or notes, that it is an Aboriginal painting. Two realities meet – that of the Indigenous world which asserts its culture through art; and the non-Indigenous world, through its acknowledge of art as an Aboriginal cultural identity as well as the acknowledgement that an Aboriginal person produced it.

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Seemingly insignificant in its impact, this complimentary process is enormous in its ability to engender discussion and healing as well as an ongoing ability to represent oneself, to develop one’s own voice. That the art work continues to exist then, either separately from, or within the Aboriginal producers life, ensures the ongoing existence of a holistic process, education and healing, with its impact on the cultural, social and political life of Indigenous Australians. If we look at this art production as an important contributor to Australian history, and we could equally apply this view to any other situation where a people are “other” anywhere in the world, then the art releases itself from any other text, imposed or otherwise. The art exists in its own right and serves a function by the knowledge it contains; it ceases to become a compliment to an imposed knowledge or any other construction. The educational perspective that is dominated by the cultural imperatives of the European-derived society of contemporary Australia, and perhaps the policies and strategies referred to, then cease to become the interpreters of an alien world. The art, as an entirety in itself, becomes the interpreter of a world that is experienced. Historically, theories of feminism have ensured women’s visibility in history and current power politics (although always problematical while there is patriarchy). A vital relationship between the practice of craft, the documentation of craft, and the teaching of craft, historically often women’s art practice, has gone a long way towards the process of empowerment of women, and making women visible to themselves. While feminist theory and post-feminist theory does not often apply to Indigenous experiences, it is a valuable reference in understanding the process of visibility and invisibility. Within Indigenous communities, individuality is seen as innate while in Western society, individuality is constantly under siege. These differences reflect a disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous philosophy that is not reflected in the educational approaches used inside the prison system or in the society we as Aboriginal people occupy. If, as Indigenous philosophy reflects, individuality is innate; that is there is no need to assert it in the common world, then logically, community becomes the problematic issue. This is indeed the case. Indigenous tradition, Indigenous culture, Indigenous politics, Indigenous healing, Indigenous education, is most successful when it is community based, when it comes from the “inside”. This is the practical reflection of the philosophical base that has no need to deal with an individual as the strength of the group or community ensures the existence of the individual. Therefore, it is reasonable to posit, any representation, through the arts, or elsewhere, that does not come from inside, by its history, politics, culture and so on, must perpetuate the terrible trauma and violence, and resultant grief and dislocation. In his book, Paul Davies explores the close connection between gravity and the nature of space and time and examines the weird consequences of gravitational collapse. The sudden implosion of a star may result in a black hole with a singularity – a boundary or edge of space and time – located somewhere inside it. Under some circumstances, however, gravitational collapse could possibly produce a so-called naked singularity, unclothed by a black hole, with drastic implications for the future of the cosmos.19

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When does a life, a conversation, an event, a history, an image, a painting, become your own? When do you cease to be an observer, an interpreter? The ethical issues relating to appropriation continue for me to this day. These issues are not so much issues of the historical right of creativity and imagination so much as new issues that must be embraced in ethics and philosophy. In Australia, currently, these ethical issues present a whole new arena of understanding that has significant end results in a just and equitable reconciliation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. By continually placing discussions of representation and ethics in a creative or legalistic framework, there is an ongoing denial of a history of Aboriginal people, who are not equal in this country due to the very history that is denied in much of the discussion. That is not to say that the creative or legal context of discussion is not significant. It clearly is to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The substance of appropriation is an issue of power, of taking even more from those who have been dispossessed by the dominant society. However, the discourse from the Aboriginal point of view involves those attitudes relating to an oppressed, dispossessed and alienated people, colonized but not beaten, and holding on to what is left in order to have life. Without that point of view which acknowledges ongoing history and the consequences of that, these appropriations become a living death for Aboriginal people. Pat Torres, an Aboriginal author from Western Australia, said at the 1994 Feminist Writers Festival in Melbourne: “We are the custodians of our own culture, not the researchers and the academics. We are not dead. We are alive and we must hold our cultur e in our own hands to under stand our own identity and have power o ver it”.20

It is both an exciting and delicate time for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. While we all will make terrible mistakes in this ongoing discussion, in terms of hope and reconciliation, there are some perspectives that are known. Thus we can make a choice. Ignoring that knowledge results in those awful breakdowns of trust and goodwill that may set these reconciliations back decades. If I am to have that sort of ongoing accountability, my imagery is part of this continuing discourse which is not static, taking in as it does those emerging ethical notions of appropriation as they apply to Aboriginality. Contemporary Aboriginal experience is constantly changing according to the circumstances affecting daily life as it is lived and voices and stories as they become current. I see myself as very much part of this significant discourse and that is what has informed the development of my visual works. A further look at how my art practice came to incorporate ethics could be examined through my experience of travelling to Bundjalung country21 with my tribal mother, Ruby Langford Ginibi. During these trips to Bundjalung country I was given permission to photograph and document pretty much as I saw fit. It was then agreed that I would approach the Regional Gallery to see if we could organize an exhibition of these photographs to be called “A Journey into Bundjalung Country”.

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The development of this work allowed me to continue my understanding of the ethical issues of representation. My photographic images had already been directed to a degree. At the various missions, families would pull out old and scrappy photographs taken by mission managers of various individuals and groups of Bundjalung people. These people would stand in places and in ways that they did not normally. They were in clothes that they did not usually wear and the photographer in every case was a stranger. These Aboriginal people stared directly into the camera as they were directed to by the photographer. The photographs were heart gripping, wretched, and sad. They did not show a day to day life, relationships or place. I was asked to just get on and take the photographs and not get too many people posing because posing made them feel awkward and stupid, and they wanted the photographs to be in colour and big, not too many black and whites. As you can imagine, there were many problems to be solved, none of them technical. The problems were those of visual representation which Brenda Croft, another Indigenous photographer, also has had to deal with. It is a unique position.22 After all, however, much I say the story was not mine, it was my eye that was going to be looking at these people. These were Aboriginal people like me, it is true, but once again, I am not Bundjalung. The many issues related to the photographic representation of Aboriginal people of the preceding decades are part of what I had to take on board in terms of my visual representations.23 I resolved right from the start to let those I pointed the camera at know that I was doing it. Wherever there was a shout, “take one of us Pammy”, I focussed and clicked as though my life depended on it. I was desperate to not only get it right, but get it! I was constantly in the physical centre of that discourse I mentioned earlier. My creative decisions were directed by both ethical decisions of ownership, as well as by my daily relationship with those whom I was involved. I resolved as well to always take photographs in the company of such people as Ruby Langford Ginibi, Aunty Eileen Morgan at Box Ridge Mission, along with Aunty Patsy Morgan and Uncle Tubby Bolt at Cabbage Tree Island, Aunty Millie Boyd and Tita Gertie Williams at Mulli Mulli Mission, Granny Long among others at Baryulgil, and Aunty Mary Walker and Uncle Mick Walker at Tabulum. The reason I did this was to increase awareness and hold myself accountable as much as possible. I had ample chance to wander by myself and satisfy my own composition and aesthetic requirements. However, the question here for me was, how do I represent these people photographically? I recognized that I could not do it by myself. Not because I was not able to technically, but because whatever I did was accountable to history. Whether I like it or not, I was, through my photography, representing lives that lived in a time and a place and a history that was not my own. As others have done before, I could be a party to my own people’s genocide. Think about it! I had to recognize that at that time they had no voice and no audience. As I developed and printed each roll of film, I gave copies to Ruby Langford Ginibi and sent copies back to each of the communities as they became available. It cost me a fortune! However, the cost was not the issue. That was, simply, the

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dollar value. I had to pay it. The greater, and thus the more significant value was that the development of a consultative process had an inbuilt acknowledgement of both history and ownership. For the exhibition, rather than placing one photograph per frame, I chose three, four or five per frame. Thus incorporated into each frame was a more whole story, if you like, showing people talking, moving, sitting, reading and eating. In this way I felt that lives could be observed as interlinking, and current, with surroundings, clothing and utensils, that were “true” to a day to day life. I wanted to show a living people, a living culture integrated into the lives and times of that area right then, in the present. I showed people in each community the order and intent of this framing before framing was completed. I constantly consulted with Ruby, whose story it ultimately was. Along with these photographs, I developed a catalogue that was not just a list of the works. In fact the works were not listed. More photographs were included in this catalogue along with page by page stories related to the photographs.24 In as many ways as I possibly could, I organized this exhibition so that it was impossible for each visual work to be separated from a whole story. The visual works could not be separated and thus re-contextualized in any way. My concern was that lives and stories could not be “appropriated”. I was aware that these photographs and the access that I had to be able to do them was unique and extraordinary. I was aware that because the Bundjalung people’s voice was not part of the big voice of this country, I felt at this stage that their lives could be so easily “stolen” and represented for other purposes through these photographs. The exhibition itself opened in July 1991 following much pre-opening publicity and discussion.25 Bundjalung people came to the exhibition opening from every part of that country. It was moving to me that this exhibition was very much claimed as their own. Aunty Eileen Morgan sat beside the photographs of herself and went to great lengths to let everyone know it was her and what it was about. Ruby Langford Ginibi, who was represented in most of the photographs, was also telling her story to the many people there. The children from the Baryulgil School grabbed people’s hands and dragged everyone to their photographs to explain who was who and what they were doing. Uncle Mick Walker, Uncle Tubby (Henry) Bolt, and Ruby Langford Ginibi opened the exhibition. It was the first time Bundjalung people had been represented at the Lismore Regional Gallery and the first time any of these Aboriginal people had been inside the Regional Gallery, although most of them had lived in the region all their lives.26 Since that time there have been many Bundjalung art and cultural events, not just in Lismore, but right up as far as the Gold Coast and further. In the European way of things, the exhibition would have been presented as my series of photographs and my story. I was very much in the background in this case. If that exhibition had been presented in the usual way that exhibitions are presented, then I would have “appropriated” the Bundjalung story, and those lives that I had come to know and love. For me, it was done in the right way, and the Bundjalung people let me know it was so as well.

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I arranged for that series of photographs to be permanently stored at the Lismore Regional Gallery. I also arranged that no-one could have access to this collection, part or whole, without my written permission. When I am contacted about this collection I am then very much directed by the people of Bundjalung country. My reasons for this are that although the photographs as objects are very much mine in both an artistic and physical sense, the story they tell and the lives they represent are not mine. My understanding of “knowledge” and “research” prior to this was the academic understanding of all information and observations being available to everyone. The base assumption was that ultimately available and examinable knowledge was part of that democracy of ideas that advantage all – that knowledge was power. This had been the philosophy underpinning my academic education, particularly related to art. In many discussions we had at art school, both formal and informal, was an idea that in order to nurture our creativity, we had artistic right to those areas that were significant and inspirational to us. Yet in my discussions with Aboriginal individuals and communities I was hearing that the individual only had those rights hierarchically, after community and history. Strange days indeed! Research itself is based on all knowledge, accessible and inaccessible, being hunted out and made available to all. The personal understanding at that time of who the researcher is individually, culturally and historically, have been somewhat explored in theories of deconstruction. Christopher Norris says; “to ‘deconstruct’ a text is to draw out conflicting logics of sense and implication, with the object of showing that the te xt never exactly means what it says or says what it means.”27

However we look at it, whatever the discussion, knowledge is the product. My understanding is that if this knowledge, whatever it is, exists in a broad arena, then it is significant and accessible in many different ways. The Aboriginal views which I came to understand were that democracy was an absurd notion in any context if you were from a dispossessed minority and that knowledge was owned by a particular geography and history. As well, in a contemporary context, in the area I work in, the visual arts, this knowledge is unchangeable because the same history from which particular knowledge came, and is bedded in, continues to exist. Knowledge contained elements of birth, life and death in a holistic way that simply cannot be “taken” by a researcher or an artist, to be given to someone or something else. “What gives them the damn right?” says Ruby Langford Ginibi when once again she sees knowledge, based in European research mode, presenting our people in particular ways as though this were the whole truth. In this way our lives are stolen as is our history, our culture, and knowledge itself. Whose knowledge is it?

Notes and References 1. “Bran Nue Day” is a musical play that was written by Jimmy Chi, a singer and composer from Broome. It premiered at the Festival of Perth in February 1990 and later that year toured Australia. The story is about the travels of an adolescent Aboriginal boy who is searching for his identity. Although it covers many serious issues, the musical became well-known for being

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

P. Johnston entertaining and funny. It played an important role in helping non-Aboriginal Australians to understand something of the lives of many Aboriginal people. Javier Tellez “Usted esta aqui” (meaning ‘You are here’) 2002. Video installation. Colection Daros, Zurich. “The Multiple ‘Ethics’ of Contemporary Art Practice”, International Contemporary Art Experts Forum ARCO 03, 17th February, 2003. “La Colmena” (the beehive) was the work proposed by Javier Tellez for the 50th Venice Biennial. Open letter of resignation to Helen Erikson, 50th Venice Biennial, 3rd February, 2003, http:// lists.c3.hu/pipermail/artinfo/2003-March/001469.html http://www.universes-in-universe.de/ car/venezia/bien50/ven/e-tellez.html Ibid. New South Wales Department of Corrective Services Strategic Framework for Working with Women Offenders in Custody, Leatrice Todd, Acting Director, Women’s Unit, Department of Corrective Services, 2003. Ibid. Figures from research by Robynne Quiggin, “A Landscape of Risk” Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, UTS, 2003, and Rowena Lawrie, “Speak Out Speak Strong: Research into the Needs of Aboriginal Women in Custody”, Aboriginal Justice Advisory Committee, 2003. Year Book Australia 2001, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Number 83, pp. 473–474. Reconciliation dialogue has become an integral part of the Australian landscape and history, as well as a global discussion which has impacted on Australia’s diplomatic relationships. For example, “A.C.T.U. – INDIGENOUS BUSINESS IS UNION BUSINESS – Opening Statement 2000”. The Australian union movement faces perhaps its most challenging time and as such we have many competing priorities and demands. Notwithstanding this we acknowledge that the destiny of the Australian union movement is entwined with the destiny of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The fact the Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain at the bottom level of every economic and social indicator is unacceptable. We are clear that there is much work to be done and that the Australian Trade Union Movement must play a leading role in transforming the situation for our Indigenous peoples”. For example the killing of a young Aboriginal boy in Redfern, New South Wales, Australia, recently which resulted in an explosion of anger from the Aboriginal communities in the area who had enough of being “over policed”. As a consequence of this riot many Aboriginal people were imprisoned for a period of time. Some of these were the young boys’ relatives who, as a result of this imprisonment, were unable to attend the funeral. Other Aboriginal people who were imprisoned, were released some time later with no charges proved. Foucault, Michel, “Displine and Punish – The Birth of the Prison”, translated by Alan Íheridan (ed.), Penguin Books, London, 1977. Land Rights was ongoing as a result of the Guringi people’s presentation of a bark painting land rights claim to the then Labour Government in 1973. A continuation of Land Rights debate and Legislation is the introduction of the Mabo Legislation by the then Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1991 which was undermined by the Liberal Governments Wik Legislation further on. The Protection Policies as they applied to different States related to Governmental control of Aboriginal people including control of living locations, ownership of children, control of monies, inheritances and so on. The Stolen Generations is the term used to refer to those Aboriginal people taken from their families and communities as a result of the applications of various forms of Protection. Koorie is the word Aboriginal people use to describe those Indigenous Australians who live in the Eastern part of Australia from Tasmania almost to the border of Queensland. Davies, Paul, “The Edge of Infinity – Beyond the Black Hole”, Penguin Books, London, New York, Sydney, 1981.

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20. From Feminist book fair and writers festival documentary, Produced by Tony Levere, Flaming Stars, produced with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission 1994, and shown on Suzy Baldwin on Sunday ABC2 16.3.97. 21. Bundjalung country is located in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales, Australia. 22. Croft, Brenda, Blak Like Me, Art and Australia, 31(1), Spring, 1993. 23. Stephens, Ann, Hetti Perkins, Mitchell Avenel, “Repatriation, Race Representation – A Conversation”, Photophile 40, November 1993, p. 12+. 24. Johnston, Pamela and Ginibi, Ruby Langford, A J ourney Into Bundjalung Country , New South Wales Ministry for the Arts, Australia, July 1991. 25. A Journey Into Bundjalung Country, Lismore Regional Gallery, New South Wales, Australia, July 1991. 26. Ginibi, Ruby Langford, My Bundjalung P eople, Queensland University Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia, 1994, pp. 206–208. 27. Norris, Chirstopher, “Deconstruction, Post-Modernism and Visual Arts” from What Is Deconstruction by Christopher Norris and Andrew Benjamin (eds.), Academy Editions/St Martins Press, 1988, p. 7

The Ethics of the Wound Everlyn Nicodemus

“The ethics of the wound” is an expression borrowed from an essay by Jean Genet. Here, in the context of trauma and visual art, the title refers to art as testimony. The basis of the reflections that follow is the life experience of a diaspora artist who has survived what traumatized her and who continues to struggle with her trauma. This very personal background was presented to the attendants of the symposium and visualized in my next-door exhibition “Crossing the Void,” which provided the occasion for the conference.1 This is why I chose to omit it in the paper I presented. As a reminder, one image is included here from the Hidden Scars series “Birth Mask” about life forces being encaged by trauma, birth being intercepted. My investigations concern what is generally referred to as trauma studies, which developed in the USA in the 1990s as a multidisciplinary field of research covering a variety of cultural disciplines, with a particular focus on literature. Scholars in psychiatry and psychoanalysis joined colleagues in literary and cultural studies to analyze the origin and complications of literary and related works functioning as artistic testimonies to trauma. Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, and other pioneering researchers underlined how traumatic contexts could be understood to have influenced works by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Celan, Albert Camus, and others.2 My entry into this field of study – originally motivated by personal trauma experience and inspired by this relatively new discipline – subsequently determined my research into the visual arts in relation to trauma, in the sense that I focused on the visual in a way that has seen parallel approaches in Australia and the Netherlands.3 A wider perspective within the trauma studies has opened up by the observation that modernity, interpreted as a sharp turn in the collective consciousness, might be linked to a cultural trauma caused by the industrial revolution and overall radical changes breaking up conventional perception and traditional narrative. This is a view I found especially thought-provoking when applied to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s shock poetry4 and to what Toni Morrison says about traumatized black slaves, whom she perceives as the first modern people.5 I took it up in “Modernity as a Mad Dog,” an essay on trauma and visual art I wrote in 2001 and included in “Over Here,” published in 2004 by The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and M.I.T.6 Overall, psychological trauma as the painful aftermath of catastrophes and excessive stress used to be considered a psychiatric research specialty and, to a certain A. Van den Braembussche et al. (eds.) Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

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degree, concealed from the public until, in more recent times, it has become accepted as an urgent topic and entered common consciousness. It has in fact long been the subject of psychiatric research and its most critical form, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), has been clinically acknowledged since a quarter of a century. Since World War I, all war-inflicted traumas have played a crucial role in research, while traumatized Vietnam veterans in the US have actively contributed to a wider awareness of the cruel plight of PTSD sufferers. Other afflictions acknowledged as causing traumatic psychological disorders include HIV, child abuse, rape, and domestic abuse. PTSD was originally thought to be caused by a one-time overwhelming event. But Judith Lewis Herman convincingly showed that repeated and continuous traumatizing events – political oppression, crude persecutions, and racialist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or Islamo-phobic abuse, for instance – can have severe and long-lasting psychological repercussions, a fact that underlines the necessity of conducting trauma studies in our time.7 In considering trauma in relation to creative production – that is, the production of testimonies conceived within different branches of art – we should bear in mind that this concerns a human drama with two aspects. The author/artist is both a traumatized victim and a survivor of the traumatic event, struggling to overcome the blockages of memory inherent in trauma to bear witness. The latter aspect involves the key ethical responsibility of testifying before the world to horror and evil. I will illustrate this with the following recent account before I proceed with my subject proper, trauma and visual art. In the USA in October 2003, the President’s Council on Bioethics published a report entitled “Beyond Therapy. Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness.”8 One of its subjects was the way traumatic memories of situations of unendurable stress can be burnt into the mind and cause persistent psychological disorders. It pointed to certain beta-adrenergic blockers that can numb the emotional sting typically associated with painful memories. While until recently such pharmacological aids were comparatively feeble and nonspecific – insofar as they were available – new scientific breakthroughs may change the situation rapidly, the report pointed out. Much more powerful drugs may follow, pills that can make stinging memories harmless. Altering the formation of emotionally powerful memories, the report continued, risks falsifying our perception of the world and of ourselves. It raises large ethical and anthropological questions about memory’s role in shaping individual identity and the character of human life. Our memory is not merely our own. It is part of the fabric of society. Underlying this politicoscientific concern is of course the question of remembering and witnessing vs. forgetting and repressing, which is a burning question, also when it comes to testimonies to trauma. Overcoming the inner barrier of traumatic muteness can be said to mirror, as an act of resistance, the ongoing open warfare in the outer world between silencing and witnessing, the fateful conflict around freedom of speech and other basic human rights that are being jeopardized in our days of induced “war psychosis” in relation to terrorism. No one has for instance a greater interest in blocking the memory of

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evil than those behind the evil-doing. “In order to escape accountability,” writes Judith Lewis Herman apropos of the Holocaust, “the perpetrators do everything in their power to promote forgetting.”9 Consequently, pills blunting traumatic memories or erasing them altogether, if developed and marketed, would not only give relief to victims but also create the risk of harmful interference with their individual identities. It might also see perpetrators such as murderers and rapists, civilian or military, walk around doubly satisfied, both forgetting their own evil deeds and feeling safe, with general law enforcement, social debate, and the overall sense of responsibility being lulled. It is not my intention to discuss the report in further detail here. Biotechnology, its primary subject, is not my specialty. The report can be said to demonstrate that man is made up of chemistry, and in the end, this insight changes anything neither about the human drama of trauma nor about the associated creative activities of writing literature and producing visual art. I have dwelled upon it here merely to underline that it is ethical aspects that are at the heart of our subject matter. Trauma is a paradoxical structure, writes Christine van Boheemen-Saaf.10 While it manifests itself through its consequences, its aftermath and its effects, it is in itself not directly accessible to consciousness. I have often found this to be a valid statement for the impact of trauma on the production of visual art. The exact nature of its interaction continues to be an enigma. There is probably an explanation why so relatively few have written on trauma and visual art. It is a field into which few have dared to enter. Some years ago, in my essay “Modernity as a Mad Dog,” referred to above, I made an attempt to explore it, at least tentatively. I started by analyzing my own traumatic experiences in relation to my work as an artist. I then tried to identify and circumscribe some potentially trauma-related contributions to twentieth century art. I used an inverted method, first searching for what I perceived as plausible signs and consequences of traumatizing events in the artists’ works, and then examining their biographies to try and trace them back to particular circumstances in their lives at the origin of the traumatic experience. “The insight has emerged,” I wrote, “that the difficulties for the survivor to testify to severely traumatic experiences come from the fact that in the act of witnessing, not only are certain traumatic memories inaccessible, like being tabooed, but also thought processes and the implementation of language are themselves heavily traumatized.” Referring to Adorno’s much quoted and discussed statement about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz – a statement which I personally choose to interpret not as a death sentence to poetry and art but as a challenge to invent new forms of representation and also to develop a new sensitivity in reading texts and images – I drew the conclusion that works of visual art containing elements that testify to trauma could be expected to show signs of an altered visual language and of a certain kind of breakdown of conventional visual narration. Proceeding with the examples I want to comment upon here, I will start with works produced during and after World War II by the German-born painter and photographer Wols (1913–1951). His original name was Wolfgang Schultze. In exile in Paris, he adopted the less German-sounding artist name Wols.11 One of his

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works from the war period is a water-color with the title “The Wound” (1944), which is significant in this context. The image is abstract in the sense that it is its pictorial self that can be said to be the wounded victim. While it reveals an underlying geometrical structure, the informal and chaotic expressiveness of the painting completely disintegrates any pictorial (or representational corporal) order. I have chosen to interpret this extreme disintegration not just as a stylistic formal experiment but rather as a desperate gesture of a severely traumatized individual, i.e., as a traumatic breakdown of a visual language, a language that in earlier drawings and watercolors, though modernistic and sophisticated, was restricted to a prevalent idiom. This interpretation is supported by a photographic self-portrait by the artist dating from some years earlier. As a self-characterization, it represents – assuming we may read the face – a most graphic picture of a deeply traumatized human. We know that Wols was imprisoned in concentration camps in France from the beginning of the war. These circumstances might be assumed to have caused his trauma, if not for the fact that the photograph was taken in 1937. The short life story of Wols is about a long series of frustrating events. They may partly be summed up in a notion only too topical in our days of refugees and “illegal” migrants, viz. the notion of “les sans papiers,” people without papers. One early traumatic event in his life was the death of his father, which proved extremely painful and damaging. Another incident with far-reaching consequences was his removal from school after he stood up for a Jewish classmate. Nazi influence was rising in many parts of Germany and the authorities submissively denied him access to exams. Highly gifted and at the beginning of an intellectual career, he persisted and prepared himself by taking private studies. Even then, he was ostracized and denied exams. In his youth in Dresden, he had developed close relationships with such artistic and intellectual personalities as Otto Dix, the ethnographer Leo Frobenius and the modern dancer Greet Palucca. Carrying a personal introduction from the Bauhaus teacher Lazlo Moholy-Nagy to Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant, he moved to Paris in the summer of 1932. After Hitler took power the following year, he undertook a desperate expedition to rescue his inheritance and never returned to Germany again. But he now found himself virtually stateless, being looked upon as a deserter in Germany and as a foreigner without papers or working permit in France and Spain, and even suspected of spying for the Germans. In spite of all this, Wols managed to establish his name in Paris in artistic circles as a gifted photographer having joint exhibitions with some of the most famous Paris photographers. But in 1939, he was detained as an “enemy foreigner,” and he was kept for more than a year in different detention camps, partly under severe conditions. The water-colors that Wols produced in the camps do not narrate those horrors. In a language clearly inspired by Surrealism but also by Klee – a language a common inmate in one of the camps characterized as something totally new in art – they reflect an urge for self-preservation through a macabre sense of humor and ironical day-dreaming. He called one of his paintings from 1940 “The little bar of the camp.” Of course there were no bars. They existed only in his frustrated imagination. A PTSD seems to have set in somewhat later, after he was released from the camps because he had married. The few remaining years until his death in 1951

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were marked by persistent self-destruction of a kind often developed by sufferers of diagnosed PTSD. In the oil paintings from this period, the tendency to dissolve the body as well as the structure of the image into a convulsive disorder that is manifest in “The Wound” reached its extreme expression. It is this period that earned Wols the reputation of being one of the pioneers of what the French call “art informel.” Another pioneer of informalism, who had a somewhat similar personal background during the years of war and occupation, was the French artist Jean Fautrier (1898–1964).12 He and Wols held each other in high esteem. Fautrier had joined the resistance in Paris and was arrested by the German SS. It was a situation that often ended in summary execution. But an artist friend from the 1920s, the German sculptor Arno Breker, who was now a Nazi big wig, managed to get him released. Fearing for his life, Fautrier went into hiding. In January 1944, he was admitted under an assumed name into a mental hospital outside Paris. Hidden there, he continued to paint a series of informally abstract heads and bodies of executed hostages which he had begun during the occupation. He exhibited them in Paris in 1945, simply calling them “Otages,” Hostages. The exhibition has been considered the main moment of birth of “art informel.” Fautrier said he hated to be classified as an informalist. Still we have to accept that his and Wols’ esthetical turn triggered a tendency that was to characterize the 1950s. It is an open question if this tendency, the informal movement, should be considered as merely having been influenced by those two artists (and by Jean Dubuffet), or if we rather – or also – should look upon the whole informal period as representing a collective postwar traumatic disorder, in which every formal discipline was dismantled. It is a phenomenon that can be perceived as an inversion of the formalism of much of the interwar avantgarde and maybe even as a symbolic and self-denying rejection of a disgraced European order. But what interests me here, as an indication of Fautrier’s specific individual frustration, is the highly traumatized situation in which he painted his series of murdered hostages. The German terror politics of taking and executing mostly innocent hostages had been in place during more or less all the occupation. We can easily imagine Fautrier’s painful empathy with the executed victims, reliving in their fate his own potential destruction. A monograph to which the artist himself contributed, tells us that some months after he had been admitted to the mental hospital, from where, it is said, he could hear the cries of victims in the surrounding forest and the volleys of the executioners’ shootings, a most horrifying drama occurred. The retreating German army took the village Oradour-sur-Glane hostage, punishing it for resistance in the region. The Germans shot and burned all its citizens, men, women, and children alike. One of the paintings that Fautrier exhibited the following year bore a reference to Oradour. What we are confronted with in the series “Otages” is an impossibility. It is the psychological refusal to represent in visual images the slaughtered human bodies, the fright of a traumatized soul before the destruction, the dehumanization and the imagined decomposition of human beings, the frustrated incapability to imagine and to depict what death means from inside the reality of being slaughtered.

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This is, I believe, not so much a representational choice, the choice of abstraction, as it is a psychological taboo posed by the trauma. Trauma blocks the narration of difficult memories and thoughts. It causes, as Dori Laub writes, a gaping, vertiginous black hole of silence around the traumatic experience.13 It has been shown that authors who write literary texts as testimonies to traumatic memories sometimes have to invent new literary techniques and strategies to circumvent such obstacles. In a similar way Fautrier developed in the 1940s a totally new approach to representation through painting, a technique which he used in the Otages series. Instead of constructing a representation on the canvas with the help of “descriptive” strokes and touches of the brush in the traditional way, he applied to a paper glued to the canvas several layers of white paint stuff mixed with adhesives, an impasto, which “stages” (rather than represents) the presence of something almost corporal. He then powdered the surface with sweet pastel colored snow. The sculptural character and fleshy colorants of the informal “pâte” enhanced the strong sense of physical presence of a subject that was at the same time nonrepresentational and in an enigmatic way physically attracting/repelling and calling for our emotional interpretation. The French independent scholar Rachel Perry, in an essay in October Magazine,14 interestingly linked Fautrier’s testimonial “Otages” to the Holocaust by pointing to two early paintings in the series, which were not included in the Paris show, the titles of which indicate that the butchered victims were Jewish women. She hints to circumstances that may have caused Fautrier personally to identify with the persecuted and rounded up Jews in Nazi-held and widely anti-Semitic Vichy France. If this is so, these works add to the assumption of an empathic trauma behind the Otages series. However, I cannot follow Perry in her interpretation of Fautrier’s colors as ideologically motivated. They are sweet like Turkish delight and they evoke associations with the naked flesh, rose perfume and femininity in combination with violence (open wounds) and rotting decay in a most complex and disquieting way, producing a paradoxical expression of something at the same time sensual and horrifying. Perry claims they should be seen as a political commentary on Nazi anti-Semitic prejudices about alleged Jewish favorite colors that the Nazis considered perverted. In my opinion, she stretches her point of view beyond the reasonable. I have similar reservations concerning the authors of Art since 1900, when they try to explain the character of the “Otages” by arguing that it should be taken to reflect, not something seen, but something the artist heard in the forest.15 I see the “Otages” in the light of another interpretation with their peculiar “abstraction” as a way around a traumatic taboo. There has been a way around for artists who confront the personal impossibility or the psychological taboo to represent butchered human beings, namely by representing butchered animals as vicarious corpses. And this is the point where the three artists of reference meet, beyond their varying cultural backgrounds: Wols and Fautrier in Paris, and, in South Africa, the black sculptor and painter Ezrom Legae (1938–1999). In Wols’ photographic oeuvre we come across a most torturous image of a skinned rabbit, a kind of monster corpse, probably from his year of imprisonment

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in the camp, which I for my part read as a camouflaged testimony to the physical fear of naked extermination that was hiding behind his playful surrealist ironies. Fautrier carried with him memories of once having been wounded and probably traumatized in World War I. In the 1920s, he produced several painfully dark and rather brutal paintings of dead animals, sportsman’s game, it is true, but transformed into hanged corpses, which sometimes were compared to Goya. In 1943, when he embarked on his hostage theme, he suddenly took up this loaded subject again. I consider this choice of a formula that he had once used an attempt to take a parallel step toward the solution represented by the “Otages”. To Ezrom Legae, finally, animals, dead or dying, were crucial. They function as displacements and as camouflages of the references to the battered ordeal that his traumatized and politically endangering art deals with. Of special interest to us here is his famous “Chicken Series,” begun in 1977, produced in mixed media with brush and pencil drawing combined with oil wash on paper. In all these cases it is, I believe, not just about an evasive metaphor of human death but rather about something more physical and penetrative as well as more philosophical. It is closer to how Gilles Deleuze in his essay The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal describes death of the human being “as becoming animal, becoming molecular.” “In death we become meat-like.”16 Already the eighteenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz talked in his Monadology (1714) about dying in terms of an animal process, stating that “what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.”17 And Giorgio Agamben, quoting the French anatomist Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), writes that there are two animals in each of us, one living on the outside and interacting with the world, and another, the animal inside us, organic like a plant, which subsists long after the outer animal is dead.18 In the “Chicken Series” we see Ezrom Legae tear open the body of a slaughtered fowl, exposing its inside and outside at the same time, tattered and torn, feathers off, meat exposed, bones sticking out, and claws clutching. It is the epitome of destruction of life. Violent death surrounded the making of these drawings. He produced the first of several series in 1977, a year after the shaking moment of the murder of the black activist theoretician and leader Steve Biko, whose Black Consciousness philosophy filled South African black students with enthusiasm and with the spirit of revolt. Biko was savagely murdered by the agents of the Apartheid regime when held in detention. And it was likewise the moment after the dramatic demonstration of the schoolchildren in Soweto, a protest that was most brutally crushed with hundreds of children shot dead. The horrible event meant a wake-up call and a turning point and triggered a general uprising in the country, which 6 years of endless suffering among the Blacks later would lead to the collapse of apartheid. In “Animal bodies, absent bodies,” an essay on the “Chicken Series” by professor John Peffer of Columbia University published in Third Text in 2003,19 this connection to political events is rightly underlined as a starting point. Professor Colin Richards of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg specified in a letter to me that Ezrom Legae chose the title “Chicken Series” for the series, which initiated friends used to refer to as his “Steve Biko series,” as a camouflage and in order to

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make the series look like an allegory, because he otherwise would have exposed himself to specific repression from the general political censorship enacted by the apartheid regime. Analyzing the “Chicken Series,” Dr. Peffer writes that “they encode in the figure of a fragile domestic fowl the tragedy that befell hundreds of black children.” He also comments upon the association with a crucifixion, which appears in the series. He finds it heavy with significance but also absurd. “Why, one would ask, would anyone crucify a chicken?” And as an explanation of this link to religion, he continues by stating that “(i)n order to understand these drawings, one ought to consider the meaning of killing a small domestic fowl in the context of an African traditionalist worldview – a worldview broadly shared across ethnic groups in the rural areas of South Africa but also by those, like Legae, who grew up in cosmopolitan centers like Johannesburg.” Thus his analysis is firmly rooted in the idea that the “Chicken Series” should be about ritual sacrifices. Here, in my opinion, Dr. Peffer has gone completely astray. While trying to indicate cultural difference, a differing African worldview, he ends up in the crowded area full of prejudices where people in the West love to apply anthropological stereotypes about voodoo, witchcraft and animal sacrifices to whatever African phenomenon, without bothering to check historical facts. Arbitrary interpretations such as Dr. Peffer’s take us a long way from the extremely complicated artistic procedure that led to the “Chicken Series,” and impede us from gaining a true understanding of the genesis of these images, in which I try to trace the impulses, obstacles, and divergences often characterizing a traumatized creation. If we check history, we find that Ezrom Legae eminently represented the modern emancipation of black South African art. The cultural politics of Apartheid tried deliberately to keep the art of the Blacks in an enforced state of unsophistication, of “primitiveness,” while hardly any professional artistic training in a modern sense was made available to them. Legae is one of the few daring artists who actively contributed to the emancipation, especially in his function as a teacher in the 1960s at the pioneering Polly Street/Jubilee art centers in Johannesburg.20 The historical background that could help us interpret his works and artistic thinking includes his travel to Europe and to the United States in 1970, which had been enabled by an award. It gave him new insights into what was going on in the international (read Western) modern art world as well as perspectives of apartheid South Africa’s closed world from the outside.21 Likewise a journey to Senegal, independent since 1960, gave him the opportunity to observe a black Africa which was not trampled upon by a white minority regime. Important to my study here is the more encyclopedic knowledge he acquired. It allowed him to handle a richness of references, meanings, and allusions in his work in trying to say what could not be said. The trauma, that is the psychological traumatism experienced by a black South African and by a hypersensitive bystander facing the crimes done to his people, that trauma cries out in each drawing. And still the traumatism could not blur the sharpness of his thought, of his pencil, and his brush. Thus instead of jumping by association to ritual sacrifices, I find it much more plausible that a memory of Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim altar is inscribed in at

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least one of his “Chicken Series” drawings, the one Dr. Peffer comments upon. Christ’s clutching fingers, which seem to function like visual lightning rods for the unbearable tension in the painting, echo in the clutching claws of Legae’s crucified chicken. A contemporary potential inspiration, which comes to my mind, are the cruel and grotesque crucifixion paintings by the British artist Francis Bacon, much talked about in those days. That sense of death as butchered meat!22 Another reference, confirmed by later works of Legae, points, I strongly believe, to the famous photomontage of a bayoneted peace dove by John Heartfield. And finally, there is to my opinion a source of inspiration closer by, less directly connected as image but with a concentration of form in common and likewise loaded with vibrating pain, namely the famous photograph by Sam Nzima showing Hector Peterson, one of the students shot in the Soweto uprising in 1976, carried dying in the arms of a friend. If I say that this possible source of inspiration was “closer by,” I mean it literally. In the mid-1970s Ezrom Legae had moved with his family from the black township of Vredetorp at the outskirts of Johannesburg, where he was born, to the township of Soweto. And probably not by chance. His biography speaks eloquently of how uncompromisingly he dismissed any kind of escapism. In those years, Soweto was the main center of a brewing storm. The apartheid government had had to yield to pressure from an industry in need of a trained white collar working force produced by the black community. It had tripled the number of secondary schools in Soweto in a few years, only neglecting their outfit and competent staffing. To add offence to cynicism, it tried to subdue the black youth by introducing Dutch Afrikaans as educational language. The situation exploded in June 16 in 1976. Thirty thousand students marched in protest in Soweto. Hundreds of them were shot in cold blood by the police. To point out the unquestionable difference in cultural context between Legae’s traumatic works and those of the two French painters, one does not have to conjure any exotic rituals. It is enough to consider the political and politicocultural background. What we in trauma studies call “the traumatic event” was in the case of Wols and Fautrier connected to World War II. It included the European sense of guilt and self-reproaches concerning all its horrors. That, I believe, was the overwhelming collective wound! In the case of Ezrom Legae, the trauma event comprises not only witnessing killed and tortured black bodies but also the entire black African experience and consciousness of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, and oppression, culminating in the horrors of the apartheid system in South Africa. To these longtime, unspeakable horrors of apartheid of which his people were the victims, not the perpetrators. The internalized experience of all that history is a part of what I would call a South African worldview. Legae’s strong empathy as a close witness and his courage to speak out made him one of the few who dared to give many people a deeper insight. Political oppression and the psychological taboos of his trauma combined to make it impossible for him to represent the horrors in his art directly and openly. Instead, he searched for indirect ways to make the unspeakable itself talk in his art, to make the impossibility turn into testimony. This is what characterizes art works as testimonies, viewed from my personal experience.

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I will try further to elucidate this conclusion with something that the philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes in “Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive”23 – “We give the name testimony to the system of relations between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable in every language.” It goes also for the language of visual art. “Testimony,” he writes, is “a potentiality becoming actual through an impotentiality of speech.” This corresponds to the condition of a severely traumatized victim who in vain reaches for the language she used to possess but who only with utter difficulty finds words to testify to her trauma. Giorgio Agamben seems to aim at something even more fundamental. “The human being is the speaking being,” he writes, “the living being who has a language, because the human being is capable of not having a language” (my interspacing). And he concludes: “This is why subjectivity appears as witness, this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak.” In this particular analysis his words represent, I dare to say, the ethics of the wound. It is a central part of what signifies a testimony. It may be essential to make a distinction between visual art in general and trauma-related visual art, that is, art containing something of the urge to testify. The difficulty here is that this difference can sometimes be extremely subtle. It belongs to the nature of art to deal with human phenomena most often as complex as those of the trauma, without any specific trauma being involved. When we outline the area of trauma and art in order to be able to study it, we should keep that in mind and not be tempted to detach it as a separate category but rather treat the two categories as overlapping. If we agree to the definition of testimony which is implicit in the quotation above from Agamben, namely that it is applicable also when subjects speak for those who cannot speak, then in our discourse of trauma and art we should include authors and originators of visual testimonies who, themselves not being traumatized victims but empathic bystanders, take it upon themselves to enter into the trauma of the others to speak for them. This brings me as a last example to the installations of the important visual artist from Colombia, Doris Salcedo (b.1958), who is herself an eminent philosophical analyzer of the conditions of empathic visual testimonies. I will dwell here only on two sides of her visual testimonies to the terrifying and traumatizing silent drama of political disappearances in Colombia.24 The disappearances were one sad result of the repressive strategy of the Colombian dictatorship, with those affected being kidnapped, tortured, and killed. The oppression was directed not only against members of the opposition but also against liberal dissidents and involuntary suspects, mostly young men and women of a democratically progressive mind. The agents made them disappear without any trace, often dumping them in the sea. The aim of this government policy was to make their repression invisible and to silence in advance any protests and any manifestations of mourning. With no graves for mourning and with no commemorative monuments or places, the families left behind by those who had disappeared lived in complete traumatic

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isolation, unable to share their loss and sorrow with the community. The collective memory had been eradicated. Doris Salcedo’s installations aimed at restoring it, at least partly, by making the absence visible, palpable, and present. Consequently, the first aspect of her approach is the relation to the public space. If the outer public space was controlled, policed, and censored, the semipublic spaces of museums and galleries provided alternatives that were not supervized to the same extent. She used these public spaces to offer to the visiting audience installations making visible the unbearable void left in the midst of the lives of the families of the victims. Bolted and blocked doors, furniture partly cast in cement, all kinds of distorted parts of a living space, reminded the gallery visitors in an enigmatic way of the absence of the beloved ones. In this case, the sophistication of an avant-garde language seems to have managed to integrate into its communication a wider public, which it often used to exclude, partly thanks to the fact that in times of political oppression people become extremely sensitive to hidden meanings. And, not least important, these exhibits functioned as obvious obstructions, crying out against the devilish strategy of silencing and destroying a community’s memory. The other aspect of her empathic testimonies was her relation to the intimate, private sphere in her interactions with the families of the victims. It was illustrated for instance by her using personal belongings left by the victims and kept by the families as secret memories and talismans. For example, she placed their shoes in a complex of shelves reminding of niches for cinerary urns, sewing them with surgical thread. The identification that this kind of artistic work demands takes us to Emmanuel Levinas, her philosophical mentor. He talks about the ethical structures of proximity, the “I and Thou” relation, and he notes that our duty regarding the “Other,” who makes appeal to our responsibility, is an investing of our own freedom. The crucial point in Doris Salcedo’s procedures of making vicarious testimonies to hidden traumas is that she reaches beyond the subject–object position taken by most artists vis-à-vis their fellow humans, whom they tend to abuse, often in the middle of acts of deep solidarity, in the sense of treating them as objects. Avoiding this demands a long time of living in proximity with the Other and a close subjectto-subject relation. To me, Doris Salcedo’s artistic importance in relation to testifying to trauma lies to a great extent in her understanding of how to link art to life and to society and in the fact that she succeeded in reaching this intimate I–Thou relationship as an artist in such a way that it deeply touches us. That is her universal artistic strength. It could be challenging to analyze to what extent an artistic approach like hers is connected to specific historical, political, and cultural contexts in a Latin American country, to a worldview. But it would take me too far. To try to understand what is, if not “universal,” at least common, one way can be to focus on life experience. That was how I for my part in the 1980s used women’s experience of living in a male-dominated society as a common denominator in order to make intercultural explorations, which I organized as an in-residence project of interviews and exhibitions in Scandinavia, Africa and India and called Woman In The World. In a similar way, living with trauma and testifying to trauma should be thought of as globally a common human experience. This perspective was raised in Australia. “Given its Euro-American origins, can trauma studies

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provide a rubric for understanding the effects of the Stolen Generation (of Australian Aboriginals, my commentary), of Apartheid, and of other traumatic events such as those of migration, political violence, war, racism, and violence?”, wrote Jill Bennet and Rosanne Kennedy in their introduction to the published conference “Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives” at the University of New South Welsh.25 And they continued: “The work that has begun to be done on the cultural experience and the representation of memory and trauma promises to inform the study of culture in the postcolonial future in a much broader sense than was previously understood.” Since they wrote it, they seem to have been proved right in their belief that we live in a traumatic epoch in which studies into individual and collective traumas can contribute valuable insights to intercultural understanding.

Notes and References 1. I am thankful to Professor Antoon Van den Braembussche, who co-organized and chaired the symposium, for having introduced me to the literature in the field of cultural trauma studies and for having encouraged my further research. 2. Felman S. & Laub D. 1992. Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge, New York; Caruth C. (ed). 1995. Explorations in Memory. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 3. Lam J. 2002. Whose Pain? Childhood, Trauma, Imagination. Amsterdam University, ASCA Press, Amsterdam; Bennet J. & Kennedy R. (eds.). 2003. World Memory. Personal Trajectories in Global Time. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. 4. Newmark K. 1995. Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter. In: Caruth C. (ed). Explorations in Memory. See note 2. 5. Gilroy P. 1993. Small Acts. Living Memory. A Meeting with Toni Morrison. Serpents Tail, London. 6. Mosquera G. & Fisher J. (eds). 2004. Over Here. International Perspectives on Art and Culture. New Museum of Contemporary Art. MIT Press, New York. 7. Herman J.L. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Pandora, London. 8. The President’s Council on Bioethics. 2003. Beyond Therapy. Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. Chapter 5. Happy Souls. Published on the net. 9. Herman J.L. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. p. 8. See note 7. 10. Van Boheemen-Saaf C. 1999. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History. Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 11. Wols T. 2000. Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Notizblätter. Christians Verlag. 12. Fautrier J. 1980. Gemälde, Skulpturen und Handzeichnungen. Josef-Haubrich Kunsthalle, Köln. 13. Felman S. & Laub D. (eds.). 1992. Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. p. 64. See note 2. 14. Perry R.E. 2004. Jean Fautrier’s Jolies Juives. October, no. 108, pp. 51–72. MIT Press, Cambridge. 15. Foster H. et al. 2004. Art Since 1900. Thames & Hudson, New York, p. 341. 16. Deleuze G. The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal. In: Warr T. (ed.). 2000. The Artist’s Body. Deleuze’s essay was originally published in Paris 1981, Phaidon Press, London. 17. Leibnitz G. 1965. Monadology (1714) paragraph 73. Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays. Macmillan, USA.

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18. Agamben G. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive. Zone Books, New York, p. 152. 19. Peffer J. 2003. Animal Bodies, Absent Bodies. Disfigurement in Art After Soweto. Third Text. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture. Vol. 17. Issue 1. pp. 71–83. Routledge, Boston. 20. In a period before the Apartheid regime in South Africa made the total absence of professional training for modern black artists permanent, the Polly Street Art Centre, with artist Cecil Skotnes at the head, and its continuation at Jubilee Art Centre, both in Johannesburg, met a vital need as a meeting place and an informal art school for black South Africans. Ezrom Legae studied there 1959–1964 and then took over as an instructor and finally became head of the Jubilee Art Center. 21. A travel grant from The United States – South Africa Leadership Development Program enabled Ezrom Legae in 1970 to tour Europe and the USA. 22. It was about Francis Bacon’s art that Gilles Deleuze wrote his essay The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal. See note 16. A painting from 1946, considered one of Bacon’s masterpieces, was on show at The Museum of Modern Art in New York at the time Legae visited the USA. 23. Agamben G. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive. pp. 145–146. See note 18. 24. Within the rich literature on Doris Salcedo I am especially building upon Merewether Ch. 1993. Naming Violence in the Work of Doris Salcedo. Third Text. Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture, London, no. 24, Autumn 1993, pp. 35–44. 25. Bennett J. & Kennedy R. (eds.). 2003. World Memory. Personal Trajectories in Global Time. See note 3.

Name Index

A Abe, M. 22, 34, 38, 41n48–65, 84n3, 134n4, 136n53 Abhinavagupta 2, 6, 18n12, 105–117, 136 Achebe, Ch. 47, 53n14 Ackah, C.A. 45–46, 53n9–15 Adorno, Th. 67n28, 193 Aerts, D. 8n2 Agamben, G. 157, 160, 163, 175n14, 197, 200, 203n18–23 Albersmeier, F.J. 40n19 Alberti, L. B. 63 Alphen, E. van 6, 154n1, 155n7 Altdorfer, A. 55–56, 58, 60, 64 Anandavardhana, 111 Ando, T. 27, 30, 32 Anyanwu, K.C. 44–45, 51, 53n3 & 6–8 Apostel, L. 1, 8n1, 21, 38, 39n, 42n88–89 Appiah, K.A. 4, 52, 53n30 Arata, I. 41n56 Arendt, H. 3 Aristotle 29, 31, 79, 83, 86n40 Augustine 56, 127–8 Avenel, M. 189n24 B Bacon, F. 199, 203n22 Badiou, A. 163, 175n17 Baker, H. A. 158 Barthes, R. 25, 35, 136n39, 153 Basho 27, 29 Bassenge, F. 53 Bataille, G. 24, 35, 163, 175n17 Baudelaire, Ch. 26, 33, 191 Baudrillard, J. 42n84 Baumgarten, A. G. 66, 92 Baumgarten, L. 163 Bell, C. 92

Bellini, G. 58 Benjamin, W. 40n29, 173, 176n49, 193 Bennet, J. 202n3, 203n25 Bergson, H. 22, 33, 82, 83 Beuys, J. 4, 26, 51, 52 Beyers, L. 42n90 Bhabha, H. 95, 132 Bharata 6, 107–9 Bhattalollata, 108–9 Bhattanâyaka, 110, 112 Bhattatauta, 109 Bichat, X. 197 Biko, S. 197 Bin Laden, O. 134n19 Birkner, H.J. 53n22 Blocker, G. 101n21 Boheemen-Saaf, Ch. Van, 134n8, 193, 202n10 Böhme, G. 48. 52, 53n17–29 Bohrer, K.-H. 52 Bois, Y.-A. 39n16 Bolt, T. 185–6 Boltanski, Ch. 6, 123, 135n25, 137–43, 151, 154n3–4 Bolter, J.D. 135n37 Borsò, V. 40n25 Botz-Bornstein, T. 39n11, 40n27–42, 41n62–4, 42n80 Boyd, M. 185 Braembussche, A. Van den 6, 8n3, 134n10, 136n49, 202n1 Bragt, Van J. 17n8 Braque, G. 59 Breker, A. 195 Breton, A. 25 Brigand, A. 135 Buci-Glucksmann 33, 41n57 Bullough, E. 72, 85n12 Buñuel, L. 21, 25, 40n Buren, D. 36, 41n

205

206 Bürger, P. 57 Burke, E. 129, 135n44 C Cai, Y. 91f Camus, A. 191 Capriles, E., 17n4 Carroll, N. 8n3 Caruth, C. 120–1,134n6–7–9, 11–2, 135n23–33, 158–159, 166–167, 174n7, 175n30–5, 202n4 Casebier, A. 18n18 Cattelan, M. 147–48 Cauvel, J. 101n25, 103n37 Celan, P. 123, 135n22, 191 Cézanne, P. 59, 103n41 Chakrabarti, A. 18n14 Chamoiseau, P. 176n39 Chang, Y. 56 Cheek, T. 102n38 Chi, J. 187n1 Chimisso, C. 86n50 Ching, H. 60 Chirico, G. de 59 Chü-jan 60 Clark, K. 57 Clarke, J.J. 15, 18n19 Colebrook, C. 158, 172, 174n6, 176n47 Coleridge, S. 24, 40n Collingwood, R.G. 78, 82, 85n34–5 Conninxloo, G. van 58 Constable, J. 57 Coomaraswamy, A.K. 11, 18n13, 130, 135 Coomaraswamy, R.P. 136n46–7 Corot, C. J. B. 57, 59 Critchley, S. 174, 176n55 Croce, B. 78, 82 Croft, B. 185, 189n22 Czaplicka, J. 154n4 D D’Hooghe, B. 8n2 Dali, S. 21, 27 Dali, S. 59, 96 Danquah, J.B. 46, 53n10–1 Dante 16 Danto, A. C. 37, 39n14 Daubigny, Ch. F. 59 Davies, P. 183, 188n19 Day, J. 85n10 Deane, S. 164? 175n23–4 Dehejia, H.V. 14, 18n12

Name Index Delacroix 103n41 Delbo, Ch. 122, 134n17 Deleuze, G. 21, 22, 25–6, 36, 37, 40n26–31, 42n85–87, 173, 176n45, 197, 202n16, 203n22 Deloria Jr, Vine 167–168, 175n38 Delphine, R. 135n25 Derrida, J. 1, 6, 20, 21, 25, 30, 36, 39n16, 95, 120, 126, 133–4, 136n54, 202n10 Deshimaru, T. 41n49–67–69 Desmond, W. 42n90 Dethier, H. 17n4 Deutsch, E. 2, 8n5, 12, 131, 136n51 Diaz 59 Dirlik, A. 102n29 Dix, O. 194 Do¯gen 6, 21, 36, 39, 132–133, 136 Duchamp, M. 26, 27, 40n Dupré, J. 59 Duras, M. 135 Dürer, A. 97f, 103n41 Durham, J. 7, 158–174, 174n1, 175n9–18–20, 26–7 Dyckowski, M.S/G. 117n25–6 E Elberfeld, R. 41n59 Einstein, 8n1 Eldridge, R. 8 Elliott, R.K. 84n6 Emerita, G. 123, 131 Erdoes, R. 176n40 Erikson, H. 188 Evans Pritchard, E.E. 43 F Fanon, F. 166, 175n28 Fautrier, J. 8, 195, 202n12–14 Felman, S. 120, 134n6–8, 135n24, 191, 202n21 Fernández Gómez, R. 3, 5–6, 116n6, 117n23 Fiborg, J. 66n20 Fichte, J.G. 5, 74, 78 Fisher, J. 7, 202n6 Floistad, G. 53n3 Forgacs, P. 6, 7, 137, 148–53, 155n12–15 Foster, H. 20n15 Foucault, M. 21, 25, 26, 40n30, 93f, 181, 188n14 Freud, S. 12, 129–130, 134n13–15, 136n45, 150, 166, 173–174, 176n50–51–53 Friedrich, C. D. 57, 58

Name Index Frobenius, L. 194 Fukuyama, F. 20, 39n3 G Gadamer, H.-G. 6, 114, 117n24 Gamm, G. 53n26 Gao, J. 17n2, 63, 64, 66n7–8–10–25–6, 94, 101n22–3, 102n28–35–36–38–39, Gehlen, A. 55, 56, 65n1 Genet, J. 191 Giaccardi, E. 42n83 Gilroy, P. 160, 175n12 Ginibi, R.L. 185–6, 189n26 Gitomer, D.L. 115n1 Glass, N.R. 42n81 Gnoli, R., 18n12, 116n8–13, 117n14–16–20 Goeppert, R. 66n20 Goethe, J. W. von, 92 Gogh, V. van 27, 58 Gombrich, E. 62, 63 Goodman, N. 65, 67n3 Gordon, D. 148 Goya, F. 197 Goyen, Jan van 58 Greenaway, P. 21, 27 Greenberg, R. 154n5 Grünewald, M. 58, 198 Grusin, R. 135n37 Guattari, F. 22, 25, 36, 40n26, 42n92 Gumpert, L. 154n3 Guo, R. 57 Gutman, I. 154n2 Gyekye, K. 47, 51, 53n13–24 H Habermas, J. 43, 52n2 Hamashita, M. 40n35 Hammons, D. 176n39 Harris, W. 176n39 Hartman, G. 152 Hartmann, N. 48, 49, 53n18 Hashimoto, N. 17n4 Heartfield, J. 199 Hegel, G.W.F 17n4, 92, 22, 33, 37, 51, 53n27, 51, 63, 64, 65, 66, 82, 92 Heidegger, M. 4, 22, 33, 35, 39n, 95, 133, 135 Heisig, J.W. 41n58 Hendeles, Y. 6, 137, 143–48, 154n5, 155n8–11 Herman, J.L. 192, 193, 202n9 Hess, Th. B. 129 Higgins, D. 24, 40n18

207 Hitler, A. 141, 143, 144,148, 194 Hobbema, M. van 58 Hui-neng 134n4 Hokusai 27 Hollier, D. 175n16 Honeywell, J.A. 136n50 Hsieh, L. 56, 60 Huang, Y. 101n7 Hussain, M. 101n20 Husserl, E. 127–8 Husserl, E. 22, 33 I Inada, K.K. 42n78 Inˇárritu, A.G. 122, 135n26 Irigaray, L. 21, 36, Isozaki, A. 32 J Jaar, A. 6, 120, 123–126, 128–130, 133n3, 135 James, W. 22, 33, 82 Janet, P. 121 Jing, W. 102n27 Johnston, P. 7, 189 Jones, D. 134n10 Joyce, J. 134n8, 163–164, 175n21–5, 202n10 K Kant, I. 2, 3, 5, 21, 23, 24, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41n48, 49, 53n16, 63, 66, 73, 75, 80, 82, 85n15, 91f, 129, 131–132, 135n42 Kanzaki, S. 30 Kardiner, A. 121 Kearney, R. 175n11 Keating, P. 188 Kelly, M. 115n1 Kennedy, R. 202n3, 203n25 Kerényi, K. 167, 173, 176n42–3 Kiefer, A. 135n22 Kierkegaard, S. 86 Kim, M.-H. 41n53 Kimmelman, M. 134n20 Kimmerle, G. 53n26 Kimmerle, H. 3, 4, 9n8, 39n9, 41n71, 52n1, 64, 67n29, 136n48–9 Kinya, M. 41n44 Klee, P. 194 Klinger,M. 79 Kojève, A. 20

208 Kraus, R.E. 39n16 Kristeva, J. 21, 24, 25, 36, Kudadjie, J. 51, 53n24 Kuki, S. 4, 22, 24, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39n Kuo, H. 60, 61, 62, 66 L Labio, C. 134n10 Lacan, J. 35, 38, 41n, 134n8, 202n10 LaCapra, D. 159, 167, 175n10–3 Lam, J. 202n3 Lame Deer, John (Fire) 167, 175n36 Langer, L. 122 Langer, S. 92 Lanzmann, C. 123, 135n24 Laub, D. 120, 122, 134n6, 135n24, 191,196, 202n2–13 Lauterwein, A. 135n22 Lawrie, R. 188n9 Lecercle, J.-J. 7, 158, 173, 174n2–4, 176n48–56 Legae, E. 8, 196, 197, 203n20–1 Leger, F. 194 Lehnerer, Th. 53 LeHuray, P. 85n10 Leibnitz, G. 197, 202n17 Lelli, G. 39n4 Lemaire, T. 5, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66n11–19 Lessing, G. E. 53n12 Levenson, J. 87 Levere, T. 189n20 Levi, P. 122, 134n18 Levinas, E. 8, 123, 135n34, 201 Lévy-Bruhl, L. 43 Lewis Hermann, J. 120, 134n8, 135n29 Li, Ch. 60, 62 Li, Z. 90–95, 100n4, 101n14–25, 102n37 Liang, S. 101n16 Libbrecht, W. 11 Lin, Y. 100n1, 101n8–9 Link, U. 40n23–24–25 Liu, G. 90f, 101n14–18–21–25 Loehr, M. 90, 101n13 Long, G. 185 Lozano-Hemmer, R. 21 Lützeler, H. 57, 66n6 Lynn, R.J. 101n11 Lyotard, J-F. 1, 6, 21, 25, 26, 27, 36, 37, 39n16, 40n32–33, 41n73–4, 42n75–6, 126–7, 135n36, 136n40–41–43

Name Index M Madonna 24, Magritte 8n1 Maillard, Ch. 18n14, 109, 116n8–10, 117n18 Mall, R.A. 17n3 Man, P. de 134 Manet, É. 27, 59 Maraldo, C. 41n5 Marchiano, G. 3, 8n6, 9n7, 17n1, 18n18, 39n4, 40n35, 41n53, 42n76–7 & 83, 116n6 Marcuse, H. 4, 51–52, 53n25–28 Marx, K. 92 Masson, J.L. 115n1 May, R. 39n12 McCllum, A. 175n15 McLuhan, M. 20 Memling, H. 58 Merewether, Ch. 203n24 Metzger, Th. 87 Mik, A. 122, 135n21 Milani, R. 9n7, 17n1, 39n4, 40n35, 41n53, 42n76–7 & 83 Millet, J. F. 59 Milosevic 134n19 Min, L. 102n29 Mirzoeff, N. 8n4 Mishra, K. 115n2 Mittias, M.M. 17n4 Moholy-Nagy, L. 194 Monet, C. 59 Montebello, de Ph. 18n10 Moravcsik, J. 18n18 Morgan, E. 185–6 Morris, W. 21 Morrison, T. 119, 133n1, 191, 202n5 Mosquera, G. 202n6 Mu-ch’i 61 Mul, J. de 42n86 Müller, J. 40n19–20–21 N Nagarjuna 36 Nagl, L. 39n16 Nakamura, H. 12 Namarazu, C. 123 Nancy, J-L. 21, 39n Negel, B. 17n7 Newman, Barnett 128 Newmark, K. 202n4 Nicodemus, E., 6, 7–8 Nietzsche, F. 21, 22, 32, 33 Nishida, K. 5, 22, 33, 36, 41n59, 69–86

Name Index Nishitani, K. 22, 32, 41n54 Norris, Ch. 187, 189n27 Note, N. 8n2 Novalis 74, 85n18 Nzima, S. 199 O Ohashi, R. 22, 29, 30, 32, 35, 40n36–40–44– 46, 41n47–52–55–70, 42n Oisteanu, A. 17n4 Okri, B. 119 Oosterling, H. 3, 4, 9n8, 39n5, 39n10–15–16, 40n19, 41n71–2, 136n48–9 Orlan 37 Ortiz, A. 176n41 Osborne, H. 84n6 Ozenfant, A. 194 Ozu, Y. 32 P Paetzold, H. 3, 4–5, 65–6 Palucca, G. 194 Pandey, K.C. 115n1 Patenir, J. 48 Patsch, H. 53n21 Patwarhan, M.V. 115n1 Peffer, J. 197, 203n19 Perkins, H. 189n23 Perry, R.E. 196, 202n14 Peterson, H. 199 Petrarch, F. 55, 56, 59, 60 Picasso, P. 25, 27, 59, 131 Pissaro, C. 59 Plato 36, 84, 95 Plonovska,-Ziarek, E. 40nima, P. 40n19 Plotinus 76 Pohl, K.-H. 3, 5, 100n5, 101n18–20, 102n37 Puelles Romero, L. 116n6 Pujol, O. 116n8–11 Q Quiggin, R. 188n9 R Radhakrishnan 115n3 Ramadanovic, P. 120, 134n9 Ray, P.R.R. 18n12 Raysor, T.M. 40n17 Rembrandt van Rijn 58 Renard, D. 135, 154n3

209 Resnais, A. 123, 135 Richards, C. 197 Rickert, H. 82 Rickett, A. 101n17 Ricoeur, P. 166, 175n29 Riefenstahl, L. 26 Rinpoche, C.T. 41n68 Ritter, J. 65n3 Robertson, M. 100n6 Roloff, V. 40n23–24–25 Rotkoff, S. 19, 20, 22 Roudinesco, E. 41n72 Rousseau, Th. 59 Rumsfeld, D. 19 Runge, Ph. O. 58 Ruysdael, J. van 58 Rysdael, S. van 58 S Sacks, Sh. 52 Said, E. 93f, 102n33–34 Sakyamuni 133 Salcedo, D. 8, 200, 203n24 Sankuka, 108–110, 116 Sartre, J-P. 22, 39n Sasaki, K. 15, 18n17 Scheler, M. 48, 49, 53n18 Schelling, F.W.J. von 26 Schlegel, A.W. 85n10 Schlegel, F. 49, 80, 86n41 Schleiermacher, F. 48–50, 53n19–20, 22–23 Schlosser, J. von 57 Schopenhauer, A. 91 Schulze, W. 7, 193 Schwitters, K. 27 Seel, M. 52 Senn, F. 163, 175n21 Servomaa, S. 17n4, 18n18 Seyss-Inquart 150, 151, 153 Sharma, R.N. 117n19 Sheppard, A. 8n3 Shitao (Daoji) 90 Shonibare, Y. 176n39 Sibley, F. 73 Silverman, H.J. 41n72 Silverman, K. 152–53 Silverman, K. 155n13–4 Singh, J. 18n11, 117n21–2 Singh, R.R. 18n14 Soko, Y. 19 Speiser, W. 66n20 Spielberg, S. 152 Spinoza, B. 81

210 Spivak, G. 95 Steiner, H. 102n40 Steiner, R. 66n6 Stephens, A. 189n23 Strauss, D.L. 135n31 Sukla, A.C. 17n4 Sullivan, M. 56, 60, 63, 65n2–4–5, 66n6–15–22 & 27 Sun Tzu 19, 39n2 Suzuki, D.T. 34, 39n, 40n39, 41n66, 70 Symonds, A. 74 Szeemann, H. 40n28 Szenzo˘, T. 149–50 T Tanazaki, J. 27 Tanguy, I. 59 Tarentino, Q. 34 Taylor, M.C. 42n79 Tellez, Javier 177, 188n2–4 Tempels, P.J. 44, 53n4 Tintoretto, J. 58 Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) 58 Tobey, M. 100 Todd, L; 188 Tomkins, C. 40n34 Topolski, J. 134n10 Torres, Pat 184 Tottner, N. 134n19 Trier, L. von 21 Tripathi, K.D. 116n5 Tse-tung (Zedong), Mao 5, 87, 97f Tung, Y. 60 Turner, W. 57 Tutuola, A. 176n39 U Ueda, S. 41n58 V Vasari, G. 56, 57, 66n6 Vatsyayan K. 13, 18n10, 115n5 Vattimo, G. 39n16 Vermeer van Delft, J. 58 Vicenç, A. 119, 133n2 Vinci, L. da 57 Vivanatha 136 Vizenor, G. 167, 176n40 Vogt, E. 41n72

Name Index W Wackenroder, W. 72, 81, 82, 85n10 Wacker, G. 102n37 Wagner, R. 21, 26, 40n22 Walker, Mary 185 Walkter, Mick 185–6 Walzer, M. 88, 100n3 Wang, G. 91f Wang, K., 17n2 Wang, S. 101n11 Wang, Y. 102n31 Warhol, A. 23, 26, 27, Weber, E. 135n34 Weber, M. 43 Wei, D. 88, 96ff, 102n40, 103n41 Welsch, W. 52 Wiener, Ph. P. 17n5 Wilde, O. 26 Wilkinson, R. 3, 5, 17n2, 18n14, 40n37–38, 101n20 Williams, T.G. 185 Willink 59 Woei, L. Ch. 102n25–6 Wolfson, L. 158 Wols, T. 19, 202n11 Woodward, B. 39n1 Wrzoska, W. 134n10 X Xie, H. 89 Xu, F. 92, 101n24 Xudong, Z. 102n29 Yoneyama, M. 42n77–82 Yuasa, Y. 41n60–1 Y Yü-chien 61 Z Zeami 27 Zhang, F. 102n31 Zhang, K. 93, 102n30 Zhang, L. 102n34 Zhang, Y. 102n31 Zhang, Z. 103n44 Zhu Jingxuan 57 Zhu, G. 92 Zhu, L. 101n21 Zizek, S. 36, 41n72 Zong, B. 62, 92

Subject Index

A Actor 107–115 passim Aboriginal 7 art 180–1 people 179, 182, 184–5 and non-Aboriginal Australians 184 Aboriginality 179, 182–4, 187 Aesthetic categories 4 distance 105, 110, 112, 11 emotion 5 experience 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 71–2,110, 112 of existence 20, 21, 25ff judgments 2, 3 mystic experience, 110, 112 pleasure 105, 107, 110 perception, 110 pleasures 5 qualities 44, 45, 49–51 worldview 43, 44, 48–51 Aesthetics 1, 2, 4, 5 Chinese 88ff, 94, 96 Traditional 88ff, 94, 99 characteristics of 89f compared to Western tradition 90f Comparative 1,3 Japanese 4, 20, 22, 27, 28 Indian 105 intercultural 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 philosophical 63 Reception aesthetics 25ff, 28 Aestheticisation of life 4 Affect 126 Affect without shock 126, 128 Africa 48, 52 African art 44, 45 philosophers 44, 48, 49 thought 43–45, 48, 49, 53 Agency 157, 166, 167 Aida (in between) 32

Akan 45–48, 53 Altering memory 192 Alterity 133 see also Other, the Amnesia 122 Angst 38 Anthropological stereotypes 198 Anti-semitic prejudices 196 antitraditionalism, 91 Apartheid 197, 198, 199 Aporetic 8 Art, 5, 33ff, African 44, 45, 77–9 calligraphy, 89f, 100 discourse 5, 56, 57, 62, 64, 65 end of 23, 37 global modern 96 informal 8, 195 modern Chinese 88, 99 painting 89f, 96ff poetry 89ff, 100 practices 5 theory 5, 24 visual 6 testimony 191 Art Nouveau 100 Artificial 21, 22, 28, 37, 38 Asian aesthetics 11 Attunement (Stimmung) 33 Autonomous 43, 50 Autonomy 27, 33 Avant-garde 20, 23ff, 26, 30, 36, 37 A-void 20, 27ff, 31 B Bantu (Bantou) 44, 53 Beautiful, the 28, 30 Beauty 5, 45–47, 73–4

211

212 Belatedness 121, 123, 126 Between-moments 38 between-times 38 Bi (use of brush) 63 Biotechnology 193 Black Consciousness philosophy 197 Body 25, 31, 33, 34, 36, 41n, 46 Brilloboxes 23 Buddha nature 132–133, 134 Buddhism 19, 29, 31, 32, 41n Bundjalung people 184, 186 Bun to bu 19 Bushido 19, 33ff, 41n Bonsai 22, 28, 30 Basho (logic of place) 22, 31ff, 36, 37, 41n C Calligraphy 27, 29 Censoring public space 201 Ch’í 35C Cha no yu 20 Character 44–48, 50 China, 87f, 91–96, 99f Chinese Communist Party, 92ff Chora 22 Choreography 30 Ciné-drama 24 Ciné-poème 24 Ciné-roman 24 Clash of civilizations 87 Clash of media 25 Colonial dispossession, 157 departure and 166–167 Native America and, 162–163 rule 119 trauma and 157–158, 160, 163, 173–174 Colonialism 178 Community 47 Compulsion 126, 128, 130 obsessive compulsion 126, 128 compulsory repetition See Repetition Concentration camps 194 Conception of the world 43 Conceptuality 25, 27, 28, Confucianism 29, 60, 64, 87, 91 Consciousness 105–117 passim Consumer culture 120 without obstacles, 111 Consumerism 96 Copernican revolution 15

Subject Index Craft 46 Creativity 23, 29, 31, 34 artistic 5, 74–7 Cultural life 43, 44, 50 relativism 87 Revolution 92, 98 synthesis 3 Culture Chinese 88, 90f, 93, 95, 98f encounters and interpenetration of 87, 100 global assimilation of 87 national 87 persistence of 87 D Dadaism 100 Dance 44, 46 Dandyism 26, 27, 33 Dao 89 Daoism 83 Daoist 83 Dasein (Heidegger) 36ff Deconstruction 1, 187 deconstruct 7 Délai originaire, le 120 Delay 122 Eternal delay 122 Delight 129 Délire 7, 158, 169, 174; Design 27, 36ff Destiny 46–48 Dialogue 20, 25, 43, 52 Intercultural 126 reconciliation 180 Diaspora 2 Différance, la (Derrida) 22, 24, 36, 133 Difference 126 Thinking of Difference 126 Difference, thinkers of 21 Differences 20ff, 35ff Différend 25 Discourse 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 37, 39 Dislocation 2, 6, 7 Dislocution 7 Displacement 126 Dissociation 121, 122 Distentio animi 127 Do 19, 20, 22, 31 Durée 22

Subject Index E Ecology mental 38ff, 42n ecological 22 Écriture 25, 36 Einstimmung (Kant) 2 Emotion 48–50 emotional 46, 48 Emotional archetypes 105, 106 Empathic bystander 198, 200 Emptiness 4, 22, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36 See synyata Enforced primitivism 198 Enlightenment paradigm, 93f Zen Buddhist 28 Essentialism, 88, 94 Estetics 131 Ethics 45, 46, 48–53, 125, 182, 184, 185 Ethics of representation 185 Europa (Alfredo Jaar) 123 Evil 46–48 Experience estetical 131–2 see also sublime, the of landscape 56, 58, 59 mystical 110, 112 132 see also aesthetical shared 2 pure 22 traumatic 8 Exploring the senses 8 F Fa

See regularity Fantarasa 5 Fluxus 24 Force 45–47, 49, 52 life force 44, 45 Form 20 Freedom 47, 52 Fuga (no-makoto) 29 Fundamentalism 88 G Gang of Four, 92 Geido 27, 28, 29 Genocide 119, 122, 124–6, 130, 185 Rwanda genocide 124–6, 130 Gesamtkunstwerk 21, 25ff

213 Ghana 45, 47, 53 Ghanaian 51 Globalization 5, 23, 87f, 94, 96, 100 postmodernism and 96 and modern Chinese aesthetics 88 Gongfu 90 Good 45–48, 52 Guanyin Bodhisattva 97 H Haiku 19, 20, 29 Hamakom 129 Hara 19 Harmony 28, 39 Heart sutra 31 Hermeneutics 24 hermeneutic attitude 4 Hermetic, the 168, 171, 173 art and 168–169 Jimmie Durham and 171 Native American trickster and 168 Heterotopy 25 Holocaust 6, 119, 120 Hostage taking 195 Human rights 87 Humanism, 93 Humanisation 7 Humour 158–159, 167–174 the body and 169–170, 173 Brule Sioux trickster tale and 168 délire and 174 dispossession and, 173 Durham and 169, 171–174 irony and 158, 170–173 Native American hermeneutics and 167–168 trauma and 173–174 Hybridity 5 Hyperarousal 121 Hypermediality 128 see also self-reflexivity Hypermnesia 121 I Idée fixe 121 Identity collective identity 121 multiple identities 130 Igbo 44, 45 Ikebana 20, 30, 32 Iki 22, 24, 33ff, 37 Immanence 22, 37

214 Immediacy 25, 33 Impasto technique 8 Indifference 27, 34 Indigenousness 178, 181–3 representation of 180 Indigenous politics 7 Informalism 195 Information society 23 Informe 24, 33, 39n Inhuman 37 Intelletto d’amore 16 Inter 20, 21, 32 Intercultural 20, 22, 35ff, 126 practices 6 turn 2 see also dialogue see also aesthetics Interdisciplinary 21, 23, 25 Interesse 20, 21, 22, 38ff, 39n Interject 33 Intermediality 21, 22, 23ff Intermedium 24 Interstitium 25 Intertextuality 24 Interval, time–space 32 Intranslatability 28ff Intrusion 122, 126 Intuition 33 in Nishida’s philosophy 75–6 J Junsui keiken 33 K Kami 32 Kara-te 31 Kashmir Shaivism 105, 110, 113, 114, 117 Kata 29ff Ken-do 31 Ki 32 Kire 29ff Kire-tsuzuki 30 Kiri 19 Kongfu. See gongfu Konomama 19 Kyoto school 22, 33 L Landscape painting 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 89f, 96ff Language 44, 45, 48, 50, 158

Subject Index the body and 158, 161–162, 174 délire and,174 Durham and 163–165, 169–170–172, 174 James Joyce and 163–165; nonsense and, 158 the inhuman and 163 representation and 162 trauma and 158, 159, 160, 163, 174 trickster hermeneutics and 168–171 Latent impression (vâsanâ) 105, 106, 107, 111, 115 Life and death 30 Lifestyle 20, 21ff, 26, 27, 38 Life-world (Lebenswelt) 24 Loneliness 28 Lüshi. See regular poems M Ma 30, 31ff Mahayana 31 Makom 129 Mankind (humankind) 47, 49, 50 Martial arts 21, 22, 31 Marxism 95 in communist China 87, 92 Materialism 21, 35, 36 May Fourth Movement (1919), 87, 91, 93f Media 20, 23, 36 Mediation 20 Mediatization 23, 37 Mediocrity radical 4, 20, 25, 37, 38 Megalothymnia 20 Melancholy 28 Melting pot 88 Mémoire 122 mémoire ordinaire 122 mémoire profonde 122 Memory 122–3, 126 common memory 122 deep memory 122–3, 126 narrative memory 122 traumatic memory 122 Middle 32 Mi-lieu 20 Mimesis 89f Mind 46 Mind-body 34 Modern 88, 91f Mono no aware 12, 28 Monodisciplinary 24

Subject Index Morality 45–47, 79–81 moral action 47, 48 moral behavior 43, 48 moral progress 46, 47 Mourning 120 Mu 19, 33 Mu-jo 32 Multi-medial 24 Munen 28 Mushin 28, 31, 36 Music 44, 45, 50 Myo 29 Mysticism 27 N Nachträglichkeit 121, 126 Names and Fog (Alain Resnais) 123 Narration 122, 127 Nationalism 94 Naturalness (ziran), 89 Nazi influence 194 Nazism 26 Negative pleasure 129 Negative presentation 129, 131 New Age 38 New humanism 93 Nigeria 44 Nigerian 44 Nihilism 22 Noh 29, 30, 36 Numbing 120–1 O Opium Wars 87 Oriental turn 35ff Orientalism, 93 Orients of thought 16 Otages (Fautrier) 8 Other, the 25,120, 125, 177–8, 183 P Pachinko 31 Painting, Chinese 89f, 96–100 Parallelism, 89f Particularism 87 Performance 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, 31, 34, 37, 38 Person 43, 46–48, 50 Phenomenology of consciousness 126–7 Photography 25

215 Photographic representation 185 of Aboriginal people 185 Play 114, 115 Pleasure principle (Freud) 130 Poetics 157–158, 162 Poetry 45, 50 Political disappearances 200 Politics 23 Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 126, 162, 167, 192, 194, 195 Postcolonialism 93f Posthuman 37 Postist studies 93 Postmodernism 5 and Chinese modern aesthetics 88 and globalization 86 global hybrid humanity 88 reception in China 93f view on culture 87 in Western civilization 88 Poststructuralism 93 Power 183–4, 187 Power politics 183 Prajñaparamita¯ (Perfection of Wisdom) sutras 69, 84 Prajna-paramita-hrdaya-sutra 31 Presence 127 Presenting the unpresentable (Lyotard) 6, 120, 129 see also negative presentation Psychoanalysis 133 Psychological taboo 196 Punctum 25 Q Qi (breath, vigor, vital force) 63 see also vital quality Qiyun shengdong 89 R Rasa 2, 6, 105–117 passim theory 3, 5, 126, 130–3 Rasavada 3, 13 Rationality 21, 45, 93 rationalization 43 Real, the 36 Real Pictures (Alfredo Jaar) 123, 129, 132 Realism 90 Reason 49, 50 Reason (Kant) 129 Red Guards 97 Reflection 33, 34, 36, 37, 41n

216 Reflectivity medial 25, 26 Regular poems (lüshi) 90 Regularity 90 Relationality 21 Religion 44, 49, 50, 91 Remembrance 164, 166, 167, 170, 171 Durham and 157, 159, 162, 170, 171 James Joyce and 164 Frantz Fanon and 166 the Hermetic and 169 art and 168–169 Native America and 171 Renaissance 89, 96, 98 Renga 27 Repetition 120–2, 130 obsessive repetition 120, 121 compulsory repetition 122, 130 Representation 2, 7, 119, 126–9, 180, 185 limits to representation 126, 127 see also ethics Resignation 29 Retinal art 26 Rhythm 44, 46 Ritual 91 Romantic 49, 51, 52 Romantic Movement 58 Romanticism 72, 74, 75, 77, 81, 82 Rupa 31 Rwanda genocide see genocides Rwanda Project (Alfredo Jaar) 6, 124–6 Ryoan-ji 28, 30 S Sabi 28, 29 Sadharanikarana 2, 131 Sadness 28 Sahrdaya 132 Samjna 31 Samskrta 31 Samurai 19 Samvega 14, 130 Sans papiers 194 Satori 28 Self 29, 33, 34, 35, 39 Self-reflexivity 127 see also hypermediality Semiotics 24 Sensational 25 Sensibility 25 Sensus communis 2, 3, 6, 126, 130–3 Seppuku 19

Subject Index Shi (momentum, impetus) 63 Shinto 29, 32, 37 Shoah 122 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann) 123 see also Holocaust Shobogenzo 21, 36 Shock 126, 128, 130 esthetic shock 130 see also affect, samvega Shoji 29, 30 Simulacrum 119 Skanda 31 Skill 19, 20, 22, 27, 31 Sonomama 19 Soto 32 Sound 44–46 Space Japan 32 striated/ smooth 22 Spectator 107–117 passim Spirit 44, 46, 50 Spirituality 20, 28, 29, 33, 35 Spirituality atheistic 21 Spirituality critical 22, 35, 38ff Stalinism 26 Stolen Generation 202 Style 19, 22, 27, 31, 33, 34, 41n Subject 33, 36, 38 Subjective universality (Kant) 131 Subjectivity 7, 21, 92f, 95 Subject-object 33, 34 Sublime, the 6, 21, 24, 28, 59, 60, 127, 128–9, 131–2 Negative sublime 6, 120, 131–2 The Sublime is Now (Barnett Newman) 128 Suchness 22 Sumo wrestling 32 Sunyata 19, 28, 31, 32 Surrealism Suspense 129 Sword fighting 31 Synaesthetic dandyism 26 Synyata 132 T Taboos 120, 128 historical taboos 120 Tao Teh King 35 Taoism 60, 64 Tathata 19, 28, 32 Tea ceremony 22 Terror 129 Terrorism 88

Subject Index Testimony 193, 196, 197, 200 Theatrical performance, 109, 114 Theology 126 negative theology 126, 130–3 Third Space (Homi Bhabha) 132 Torah 129 Traditional life 43, 48 Tranquility 29 Transcultural 20 Transgression 129, 132 Transhumanism 37 Transparance 128 Transpersonality 131 Trauma 6, 7, 120, 126–7, 157–158, 160, 163, 166–167, 169, 179, 181, 183 and art 120 colonial dispossession and 157–158, 160, 163, 167 departure and 166 historical 6, 120–1, 128 humour and 173–174 language and 158, 159, 160, 163, 174 latency and 166–167 and listening, 160, 164, 165 Native America and, 162–163 politics of 6, 120–3 studies 191 Traumatic event 199 see also experiences travelling theory, 94 Trickster Native American 168 the Hermetic and 168 Truth 79–81 Turning Point (Alfredo Jaar) 123 U Ubuntu 48 Uchi 32 Universal 2 Universalism 87 Universe 44, 46, 49, 50 Unpresentable 132 see also presenting the unpresentable

217 Upanisadic literature 106, 107, 116 Utsukushii 28 V Value 44, 48–52 Vedana 31 Vernunft (Kant) 129 Via negativa 131 Vijnana 31 Violence 119, 128, 183 representations of 119–120, 134 pictures of violence128 Vital quality (qi), 89 Void 20, 22 W Wabi 29, 30 Waka 27, 28 Western aesthetics 1 Western perspective 43 Western thought 3, 44 Witness 7, 159–162 Durham and, 159, 160–162, 172 Shoah and 159–160 the inhuman and 160 Worldviews 1, 3, 126, 131 African 198 African aesthetic 4 Buddhist religious 12 hybrid 2 South African 199 Y Yi (idea, intent, conception) 63 yin-yang 89f yugen 29, 30 X Zazen 21 Zen 19, 33ff, 37, 69–86 passim, 126, 132 Zen Buddhism 5, 60, 61 Ziran. See naturalness