The Death of the Subject in Art - Part VI: The Ironic Subject and Modern Realism

The ideal of the subject that appears as fully real in Romantic thought and in German Idealist philosophy never truly materializes in concrete reality. It is no accident that Hegel devoted such extensive thought to the dialectic of "Master and Slave", which he himself saw as a central, fragmentary stage in the becoming of Spirit.

When the Romantic individual looks out of his window at the landscape - at his own self-created world - he can go to sleep calmly, in full confidence in the power of his spirit, his reason and the possibility of his freedom. Yet in those same early morning hours, a hundred kilometers away, another person wakes up to begin a long day of hard physical work in a factory producing frames for Delacroix's paintings. These frames are not made for himself, and they are certainly not his creation. The frame is a mold he must fill in order to complete his task, receive his wages and buy food for his family. This man does not construct his world with a transcendent object, but with coal, iron, gas, a gun, a ledger and a newspaper article. There is no genuine self-activity here, no free, creative or Romantic work at all - perhaps such things are reserved for those whose social position and surroundings are comfortable enough to allow them to think in terms of ideal imperatives.

The individual lives in a society, in a state, under a regime, within relations of economy, politics and nationality. A person cannot ignore his reality and sink entirely into the musings of his imagination. He has to eat and drink, to speak and understand, to live, to support his community and his state. True, the revolutions that swept across Europe in the mid-19th century (the "Spring of Nations" in 1848) created the sense that the historical dialectic of freedom was being fulfilled. But when the concrete individual looks at his concrete world, he does not see a "sense" and does not see a "consciousness of freedom". He sees his own life, the material stuff of the world. That material includes extreme class differences, enslavement, alienated relations, competition over private property - in short, capitalism. Even the French Revolution, like other revolutions, was supposed to promote the interests of the individual. Instead, it consolidated bourgeois power. "The transformation of history into world history is not a purely abstract act of 'self-consciousness' [...] but a material, empirical and clearly demonstrable act; and every individual, just as he is and what he is, in the way he eats, drinks and dresses, is evidence of it."

Young thinkers such as Marx and Feuerbach look out of their windows and try to identify the material from which the new subject is being forged - the modern subject. More than any of his predecessors, the new human being must ask about the forces and reasons that led to his present social condition, for this change is more radical than ever before - modernization. He must ask: out of what material is contemporary reality constructed? What is the kind of thinking from which society and its history produce their ideological, economic and political world? How did it happen that political economy (the embodiment of the bourgeoisie in the state) and the state itself came to stand above concrete life? How did the state become the bodyguard of systems of private property, the regulator of intersubjective relations?

Marx himself stands in a room whose walls are French socialism (Rousseau), German Idealism (Hegel), English utilitarianism (Mill) and the materialism of d'Holbach. He claims that if the intellectual world truly seeks justice and solidarity, it must extract the idea from the conditions of human existence itself, not from outside it. All those ideas about the organization of individuals in society for the sake of a priori moral values are beautiful, but in practice the organization is of utilitarian, egoistic individuals oriented toward material economic praxis. Hence Marx's historicism: he proposes to view human history from a practical vantage point - from human material activity, from what is reflected in praxis and in human needs. The activity of the working person, his life and his very being are nothing but the means of his survival. Life itself becomes the object. It is not only the individual who "creates" concrete products - society does that even more. Society transforms nature through its industrial and economic processes of production. Consciousness is a social product. Humans and societies are all enslaved to the forces of production, and these converge in the worker's direct (alienated) relation to his product. Every supposedly "personal" act is an act for the sake of the other who dominates him or for the sake of a synthetic object. "The worker is the subjective expression of the fact that capital is the human being who has wholly lost himself, whereas capital is the objective expression of the fact that labour is the human being who has lost himself."

Material production itself is the way in which human beings are realized in history. Their physical existence is the condition for the movement of the world - life as sheer means - not their spirit or their "being". In the circle of reality the worker produces his capital and the capital produces the worker. The worker's life and physical existence are perceived as a stock of commodities, for he is a worker, a producer of property, a buyer and a seller, even before he calls himself a human being. Capital is the worker's life, and his wage is "the grease on the wheels" that turns the mechanism of capitalism. The relation between the human being and reality is the same relation as that between consciousness and the general, concrete production of history as a whole. If the individual subject in his full self-consciousness and will is an inseparable part of the absolute, universal Subject, if he participates in the great collective effort toward progress, then he inevitably becomes a product and producer of the colossal project of modernization. Once political economy generates a fetishism of commodities, it conceals the injustice of social relations. The market absorbs every private spiritual system, every ideal human essence, into its cosmopolitan needs. The human being becomes a thing. The bourgeois centers import workers from foreign countries and from villages for one purpose only - labor. The only possibility open to the human being is to earn money and thus magnify capital. The authority of the bourgeois class is not a divine or traditional authority - it is self-produced. The bourgeoisie itself sets the pulse of constant change in every sphere of life. This is the bourgeois need, the bourgeois economy. Everyone is in competition and obliged to develop constantly. Whoever is not in the competition finds himself passive and subject to the demands of the dominant market. Bourgeois society cannot remain without producing new means of production. The products must be fully integrated into the totality of life - productive relations among all, relations of exchange. These are the social conditions. The drive for progress and the development of the individual is what powers the economy. The feeling is that without this drive, society and its people will simply wither. Marshall Berman calls this the "revolutionizing of production". Everything that can become solid is changed or reshaped. In such a world, stability itself is decay.

From all this, a new analysis of the subject emerges - one that is aware that matter produces spirit, and that the object of intellectual work is also material. For example:

"The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. A society of commodity producers, whose social relations as a whole are expressed in the value-relation of their products, and in which, therefore, the relations between men as producers take the form of a social relation between the products of labour, has a religion whose god is money. Christianity with its cult of the abstract man is the most fitting form of religion for such a society."

The new analysis also understands the historical process in which the subject collapses into its predicate until the predicate becomes the subject's only truth. "The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself [...] in order that man may live." If the founding act of human history, of human activity in the world and of the establishment of social and political conditions is "the creation of needs and the instruments for satisfying them", then in order to understand the human being one must return to this act. Every social activity produces commodities and social functions of those commodities. In Marxist thought, Hegel's absolute subject becomes moving matter. Human consciousness is an actual object. The unity of the world is material. Matter cannot exist without movement, and movement cannot exist without matter. Human beings, like Adam and Eve, are wanderers in this material, becoming and developing within it. We must investigate how humans use the material of their consciousness - that is, investigate the commodity (paper, machine, explosive, etc.) in terms of its utility and mode of use. Only then can we arrive at knowledge of the historical process. "The labor process, considered as the unity of labor process and the process of creating value, is the process of producing commodities. Considered as the unity of labor process and the process of valorization, it is the capitalist process of production, the capitalist form of the production of commodities."

There is a direct relation between the craving for property, exchange-values and political economy on the one hand, and the depreciation of the human being on the other. The worker descends to the rank of a thing. The new concept of the object is that of a commodity, and in a simple equation the human being and his labor-power become commodities as well. The person is a subjectum of his productive power, and as such he becomes "the most wretched of commodities; the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production." "The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates." The object that is produced through his labor confronts him as something alien to him. The worker's existence is denied at the very moment his labor becomes an object that he himself can acquire only under harsh conditions. "This realization of labor appears in the conditions of political economy as the de-realization of the worker, the objectification as the loss and subjection to the object."

If the human being is his labor, and his labor is not his own, if his activity does not arise from an inner, authentic, subjective striving and does not belong to his essence, then the being of the economic subject - as object - takes place outside his body, as if it stands over against him, independent and foreign. His work becomes an independent force confronting him; the life he has given to the object stands before him as hostile and alien. Thus the human being becomes a stranger to himself, to his life; he has less and less of himself, of his personality. It follows that in every action, even the most ideal, insofar as it takes place within the sphere of "work", the person does not fulfill himself but denies himself. Life is possible only through the satisfaction of economic survival; life itself appears only as a mere means of subsistence. Because the person is enslaved to his objects - to the means of his subsistence - and because he functions as an automatic machine of value-production without reflecting deeply on the ethical or social nature of those values, he "creates palaces for the rich and hovels for the worker". Through his "barbaric" labor he builds the spectacular cultural, intellectual and spiritual world of the bourgeoisie and thereby disintegrates his own reason and increases his own stupidity. When he no longer finds satisfaction in bourgeois "intellectual" pleasures, he seeks it in his most basic human functions - in animality, sexuality, gluttony - and even these are already drawn into the sphere of consumption. "In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active function, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man; it turns for him the life of the species into a means of his individual life. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being."

The abstract objects of human nature - freedom, thought, creativity (art) - are supposed to be the spiritual nourishment of the human being. When these themselves become commodities, the person becomes alienated from his own nature. Alienation from nature - from his origin - is the primary source of human suffering. The concrete agent of this suffering is difficult to identify as an idea, and so every other concrete person appears to the worker as an oppressor, as an enemy. If we add to this the competitiveness and brazenness that the capitalist world of economy offers, we see in all this the bleak future of human relations.

This picture of humanity and society seems gray and hopeless. Yet Marx does not see only darkness. The human being can revive his own essence through critical thought - Kantian critique, not Cartesian meditation. Critical thought is a kind of small, individual revolution that always acts freely. The critique is not merely theoretical - it is practical, like matter, like spirit. In a revolutionary act - critical thought that in its very nature realizes human reason - a person can compare his human essence (freedom, reason) with his present reality and thereby attempt to abolish the predicates of capital. Marshall Berman, in his book All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1981), draws our attention to the fact that Marx is the great developer of modern critical thought. (Later I will demonstrate this in relation to structuralism, critical theory and postmodernism.) In general, says Berman, the entire conceptual language in which we think is itself a development of Marx: a language of classes, critique, attention to signs, the registration of concrete reality, social and revolutionary thought, the cry of the contemporary left. Marx exposes the underworld of the system; he shows how in every aspect of the bank or the factory dark forces operate in broad daylight. Emancipation must be advanced by philosophy, but no longer in the theoretical sphere, rather in the concrete one. The proletariat must become the central subject of philosophy, its material, while philosophy in turn becomes the spiritual material of the proletariat. In this way, the identity between the human being and the conditions of his life can be constructed - the realization of theory in practice.

The human being is not an empty datum of nature. He moves and wanders with nature, changing and being changed. In this sense, he can, at any moment, cast his critique upon any mode of production and any law that allows class division. A new ideal begins to take shape: in a dialectical-historical process, the human being builds his concrete reality. When he sees that this reality threatens his being - through oppression and suffering - he will destroy it by his critical, revolutionary activity. The first destruction will be the abolition of alienated relations between members of humanity. The second, as a consequence, will be a change in the relation to property. If the capitalist conception of private property changes, the chasm that formed between the worker and his reality will be bridged. The praxis that will be created will be that of the human being, not of his product. The object will again become a human object. The revolutionary - the communist - will restore fraternity, a relation in which a person needs the other out of a social impulse, not a territorial, dominating one. He will transfer the idea of private ownership to the sphere of the commons, and thus free human beings from extreme fetishism toward property and commodity. "Marx seeks a comprehensive sphere for human life in which all these aspects of life are integrated and in which the moral idea as freedom is realized. This comprehensive sphere is not the state but society." Human society will replace the state. This society will not base its relations on the production of objects but on forms of social life. The human being is his society, and his interest is the general interest. The experience of personal development will be liberated from the demands of the market and will be able to move more freely and spontaneously. After the revolution, in the name of development, wealth will receive a new dimension, the privileges of classes will be erased, education will be free and universal, and workers will determine the form of labor organizations. The aim of communism is to cultivate the totality of the individual's capacities. Only in association with others does the individual obtain the means to direct himself in his own ways. Only the commune enables the freedom of the individual.

"In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all... To give up the quest for transcendence is to erect a halo around one's own stagnation and resignation, and to betray not only Marx but ourselves [...] In Marx's syntax, 'the bourgeoisie' is the subject - in its economic activities that bring the big changes about - modern men and women of every class are object, for all are changed."

Marx hopes to heal the wounds of modernity through a deeper and more complete modernity - social individualism.

Like the realism of his time, Marx paints the picture of modern life. He sees in modernity a totality in which physical, spiritual, political and industrial lives move together. The working human being, processes, communication, association, development, the human being reorganizing nature and himself - these are the new forms that the bourgeois age has brought into the world. Within them he shows how capitalism transforms the relation of the human being to himself and to others, how it reshapes his most elementary drives to suit the needs of the bourgeois. The human being becomes an object of transformation. Marx arouses the discourse on capitalism and its ceaseless movements. He shows us that we are part of something, part of the process, swept into the current without control, dazzled and threatened by progress. The phrase "All that is solid melts into air", which Berman extracts from the Communist Manifesto, is every solid halo - sacred or human - being torn from every dignified human existence: the doctor, the poet, the preacher, the scientist, the canon, the historical marvel - all become wage workers. Capitalism destroys the experience of the aura above the anxiety or glitter of life. Cultural jewels - pyramids, cathedrals, books, artworks - are replaced by industrial modern arrogance - canals, gigantic buildings, bridges, factories, journals. Everything that can become solid is shattered tomorrow only to reappear the day after in a more profitable form. If nothing is more sacred - nihilism - "if God is dead, then everything is permitted" - the modern human being can continue to advance his personal, economic interest without fear of any sacred (moral, ethical) barrier that will stop him. The bourgeois, who has full access to nature, has dissolved feudalism, dissolved the human being from his natural sources and authorities, and has left no natural ties between one person and another. But the phrase "All that is solid melts into air" has a continuation in the Manifesto:

"...all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind."

The destiny of the bourgeoisie is to melt itself down in the heat of developmental energy. The human being will stand before the bleak image of his life and demand a new life. He will wean himself with his entire being from the synthetic self constructed by the capitalist world. He will strengthen the truth of his own self - an anticipation of Nietzschean ideas - and develop his personality.

After reading Marx, it is impossible not to be persuaded by him, not to understand his truth and his prophecy regarding the economic and social condition of the subject, even without a complete realization of the final stage of pure communism. The individual is enslaved to matter, to political economy. His life is his work and his work is his life. His history is an economic and power process, and his relations with his peers are relations of interest and utility. His culture, his reason, his art and craft are, before anything else, commodities. "We are subject to the rule of modern confusion." If this is the situation, if indeed the individual's praxis is alienated from him and the material of the world is foreign to him, then the only tools with which he can fight this corrupting reality must spring from that initial, natural datum - his subject, his capacity for judgment, his spirit, his faith in necessary self-freedom, his belief in the existence of a good essence. At this point the individual returns to the basic, fateful questions of his existence. He stands "with fear and trembling" before the possibility of a real answer, as Kierkegaard puts it. Perhaps there is another way to realize freedom. Perhaps the mysteries of faith have not been properly interpreted. The enlightened world and its modern offshoots have tried their strength with the torch of progress, science, economy and reason, but the concrete result has been war and human enslavement.

"The present age is one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose... If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that, twisting in dark passions, produced everything great or inconsequential, if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?"

It is precisely the material world that awakens the individual's crisis, his existential questions. "Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here? What is the world? How did I come into the world? Why has no one asked me, why was I not consulted? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into it, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come here? What is this thing that is called life?" Only when the most troubling questions about the meaning of the world for the self, and the meaning of the self for the world, arise does the "inner human being" burst forth. He demands clarification, a testimony that will give him a clear picture of the meaning that all being has for him and of his own meaning. This testimony must grant him clarity about God, who in his eternal wisdom unites the whole into a single community and appoints the human being as lord of creation by making him the servant of God. Kierkegaard will say that a person cannot advance beyond his faith. He may advance economically, culturally and in power, but his last station will always be his faith - that inner feeling which, even when attacked by the most powerful weapon, cannot be annulled. Here I speak of "faith" in a general sense, not necessarily religious faith. Faith has its source in human existence, in the individual, who does not live only the material of a world with an end, with death, but also his relation to the infinite, to spirit. The worst thing is the lack of spirituality. From the certainty of the existence of something beyond, something necessarily good, perhaps the person will gain the possibility, the inspiration and the courage to stand before his external existence, before his enslavement.

The dialogue of the human being with "his God" is first of all a dialogue with himself, the most inner speech. In this dialogue the person attributes to himself his existence, his essence. He chooses himself as an existing personality. "Cares and sorrows may indeed harass a man, may unremittingly pursue him, may overwhelm him until he is so bowed down under them that he can scarce draw breath - yet this life can still be beautiful and noble, for it is not cares and sorrows that make a man wretched, but he himself who is wretched in willing to be wretched." Melancholy, perdition, the difficulty of spirit are part of the everyday human condition. They are the result of the failure of immediate spirit to break through. The source of suffering is lack of a certain self - something already recognized by the thinkers of the "rational subject". The existential difficulty expands when the abyss from truth (which cannot be fully known) deepens through the "external lies" of the modern spectacular world, the wild whirl of appetites. Yet spirit always strives to break through. The essence of the human being is to find satisfactions for this inner spirit against the synthetic satisfactions offered by the external world. Spirit wants to open a path within him, wants him to grasp himself in clear self-consciousness. But often the person cannot do so, spirit is driven back, and a new storm of rage gathers within him. He does not grasp himself, does not hold himself. He fears the world that is not his, fears the person who will enslave him, fears the reality that will diminish him. All this is easy for the one who does not let his immediate spirit lead his consciousness, for the one who has not chosen, in a deep inner way, to exist in his tranquil faith. "The serious thing is that the hearer, by himself, with himself and to himself, in the silence and in the hearing, shall speak with God."

When Faust (Goethe's Faust) sinks into doubts about his existence, he records all his torments as a human being. Who is Faust if not doubt itself, the great enemy of the human being? He is the fear of spirit, the unrest, the despair of the person who doubts his own faith and free will, the dread of freedom itself, of the freedom to bear his fate, of the freedom to carry his necessity. Here Kierkegaard formulates, in 19th century thought, what he calls the "ironical subject". "For the ironical subject, reality as given has lost its validity; it has become everywhere a defective form that provokes shame. Yet he does not grasp the new. He knows only that the existing reality does not correspond to the idea, and he is the one upon whom it has been imposed to execute the judgment."

The ironist longs for the future offered him by his modern world, yet he has no idea what that future is. He knows only that he must, with all his might, promote that future and destroy what is no longer relevant - the present moment. He has neither peace nor rest in the coveted project. He serves the spirit of his public, his state. His unending feeling of guilt is the dissatisfaction he experiences when measuring himself against the objective, universal world. Though the age is one of progress, reason and intellect, it is also an age of indifference, apathy, "enjoyment of the instant" and helplessness before the material. That is the irony, the absurd, the comic. The modern generation is a generation of irony, laughing for the pleasure of the moment, laughing at its own incapacity to know either meaning or essence, laughing at its lack of real personality, and above all laughing at the death of its passion and its intense yearning for its spiritual source.

"At a jest that has no substance existence itself laughs... To be witty without inwardness is to live in luxury while lacking necessities. An age without passion has no momentum, because everything exists only as a show. The present age yearns for originality, for a hero, a thinker, a despairing man who is at once the friend of his age, for a knight of faith. Joking is invited to be our daily bread. Originality is divine, hidden and unknown. Joking nowadays becomes so common that it will be a lucrative branch of trade to gather jokes, prepare them, cut them out and then sell them - what a dreadful epigram that would be on the joking age."

Everything already exists, yet no one believes in it. Hence the whole age is both tragic and comic: tragic because it is nullifying spirit, comic because it still exists. When science is merely human or bodily and no place is left for inner spirit, the world becomes flat, unbearably boring, devoid of the fullness of the self's and the world's spirit. The ironist surrenders to some abstract idea of pure humanity. Thus he invents a new spirit, an illusion, a phantasm - "the public", "the citizens". The public is not real, it is not a people, not a community and not a concrete epoch. "No single individual who belongs to the public is essentially related to it... Only when there is no true community of life does the abstraction called the press create a public, consisting of individuals who are incapable of uniting, yet are held together as a whole." In times of passion, the people entered a real state by themselves and were obliged to take upon themselves the responsibility of the individual within them, and the individual was obliged to submit to the court of his time - a full faith. Irony sets "the public" as the individual's entire concern. This synthetic abstraction cancels the individual's confidence in becoming something as a single person. The newspaper, the spectacle, the speech, the ideology - everything that "unites" - distances the human being from himself, the opposite of Marx. Literature, thought, critique depend on the public. When they take their place as timeless interpreters, interpretation cannot help but shift the emphasis from the essential, from what is truly serious, to interpretation itself. Human spirit, which once dwelt in philosophical delusion or religious confession, is suddenly spoken as if memorized by a schoolboy or recited by a politician in his speech. There is in this copy neither spirit nor meaning, only idolatry, a fetishization of idols.

This is modern controversy, and here too Kierkegaard, before Nietzsche, prophesies postmodernism:

"A passionate age will overthrow everything, overthrow everything, but a reflective age, devoid of passion, lets everything stand but cunningly empties it of significance. It leaves everything standing but has secretly substituted something else in its place. Everything continues to exist, but meaning has vanished."

Life without a path, without hope, without a sacred bond that ties humanity together is an empty life. The faith of which Kierkegaard speaks is love and trust toward oneself, toward the other and toward God. The human being struggles not only with his reality but with himself, with his doubts, with his past that will not let him rest. He must come to terms with himself, create himself anew, return to himself through his artistic power. Only in rejoining the omnipotent power can the human being truly find his freedom, his independence from his earthly, passionate ego, from his finitude. He must grasp the eternal with all his inner seriousness, not fear it, not sink into the limited, uncertain present that seems like a fleeting, purposeless life. When a person is swept along, he clings only to what is near and easy, asks no questions and misses meaning. He does not understand how a life of faith can saturate external things. "If a man can participate in the dance, if he can take part in the dance for one single day, then he is living. Then all the others, who are not born at all but are turned upside down into the world and continue to be turned, will envy him for it." In the self, in the subject, lies human life. Only in the silence of the self's whisper, against external noise, can the person hear himself. The self is a divine idea, again in a Cartesian sense. This idea is like a cup of intoxication; when one drinks from it, loneliness and despair dissolve. Through the intoxication of the idea the person sobers up from the controlled lawfulness of reality. He understands his true meaning and essence. He stands before the absolute, before his God, out of absolute duty. In surrendering to the absolute he surrenders to himself, and thus reaches self-knowledge. When a person stands before his God, he stands before himself, returning to himself, to his divine image. This return is not a pagan or Christian act of recollection. Recollection, in its fatalistic form, is the main cause of passivity, of purposeless existential boredom. The economic reality produces similar passivity, a cultural fatalism. Rather, the return is an act of hope in oneself - an awareness that life itself is this return to one's divine image, to oneself. True, the self changes over time, but it always preserves its origin (hypokeimenon). Therefore awareness - the return - must always be to the self of the present, not of the past or future. Unlike memory, which usually lulls and accuses, return makes the person happy, because necessarily this independent self is alive. "The place of the scene is eternity, and if he hears truly (and if not, the fault is his), he stands at that moment before God." In "return to oneself", Kierkegaard establishes the concept of authenticity and its happiness, a concept the later existentialist will want to develop and which the early Idealist already sought to formulate. In returning, the person fulfills his authentic essence and does not surrender to disciplinary constructions. Happy is the person who recognizes "return". That is the "answer" when he asks his God "why all this?" If he understands the answer, he will have no need to run here and there and seek in all the worlds what is already within him. He will return, reconcile with himself and live his life in tranquility. The returning person will desire justice and solidarity as duty, as a constant realization of his chosen faith. Happy will be the one who finds the positive in the infinite; wretched will be the one who fears it.

So far in this chapter I have learned that modern economy and its bronze wheel attempt to crush all the values and visions of the primordial, pure subject. The drive toward progress pulls the modern human being toward his existential neurosis. Marx, Mill, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and their companions illuminate the dark corners of modernism. They are the ones who bring together bourgeois economy, industry, modern culture, individual utility, the idea of public society and existential panic into a single meadow called modernization. Modernism becomes a place where all values are spun in the depths of the irony of relations between worker and bourgeois, individual and society, I and self, spirit and matter, ideology and faith. These tensions will be reflected in the artistic expression of the modern subject - in movements such as Expressionism, Avant-garde, Absurdism, Impressionism and more. In modernism as an artistic movement the tension arises between materialism, idealism and relativism in the realm of thought on the one hand, and autonomous aesthetics and social-political realism on the other. The artist is the "hero of his time". He works like a scientist, a philosopher, a statesman. He takes a significant part in the modern project in order to build and improve his society, as Baudelaire suggests. All the artist has to do is open himself to his reality. The multiplicity of modern experience already offers him an endless world of anxieties, upheavals, hopes, fetishes, fantasies, intercultural encounters, destruction, construction, suffering, alienation, joy, drunkenness, love, spirit, matter and so on. As the heir of Idealism and Classicism, modern society regards cultural development as no less important than industrial development. It opens its gates to artistic beauty, to literary creation as a shaper of culture. The modern human being is saturated with philosophy, culture, ideologies and theories. He operates the great machine and the great machine operates him. The creative person is given a unique opportunity to look deep into the social abyss and into himself. "There is a rich abundance of poetic and marvelous subjects in the life of Paris. The marvelous envelopes us and saturates us like the air, yet we do not see it."

"...give modernist art and thought a new solidity and invest its creations with an unsuspected resonance and depth... In the course of time, modernists will produce a great array of cosmic and apocalyptic visions, visions of the most radiant joy and the bleakest despair. Many of the most creative modernist artists will be simultaneously possessed by both and driven endlessly from pole to pole; their inner dynamism will reproduce and express the inward rhythms by which modern capitalism moves and lives."

In his role as thinker and social critic, the artist will present his political positions against all practices of enslavement and injustice, staging them through his inner world, his stormy spirit and unconditional emotions. "Passions, judgments, politics and the great social forces never pause to examine the state of the human being they are about to crush." Already in Goya's late paintings, as I noted in the previous chapter, we can see the realistic recording of the horrors of the political world, the artistic protest against the suffering caused by the corruption of monarchies - for example What More Can One Do? (1812). Madness, evil, lust, human exploitation, suffering - all this is the world of the human being. Such words are inscribed in Courbet's self-portrait The Desperate Man (1845). Here is a naked, despairing human being who clings to his own selfhood, staring at us, at the world, out of the full controversy and irony of his soul.

The utopias of Rousseau and Marx - which many tried to bring down into concrete reality in 19th century and early 20th century Europe - in which communism and socialism are meant to replace every modern sphere, quickly collide with human nature itself. This nature has been known to humanity since time immemorial - from Cain through Abraham, through Homer, Hobbes and Montesquieu - as instinctual, totalitarian, proprietary, narcissistic, egoistic and so on. This collision too creates an entire world. The artist cries out for change, for different creation, for a different humanism. He wants to abandon the laws and logic of past art. He wants truth, and truth is painful. Kierkegaard writes beautifully in Either/Or that the poet's cry and pain appear as beautiful music to the listener, who asks him for more and more of his suffering in order to try to understand the world as it appears in its nakedness - the same point Sartre will later make. The personal subject stands here before every hegemonic or social interest. Reality is not Michelangelo's sculpture. It is not perfect. It consists of the many advantages and deficiencies of human existence, of its society and its politics. With this in mind, the same fear that Marx had - that capitalism would rob human beings of all creative ability - returns. Where will we find the most precious pearls of creativity if not in the books of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, Mann, Gogol or Dostoevsky? Where will we recognize human experience if not in Kafka or Tolstoy? How will we imagine human thoughts if not through the paintings of Gauguin, Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet, Renoir, Munch, Malevich or Kandinsky? It does not matter whether "art must contribute to the development of human society, to the improvement of the social order" or whether "art is an end in itself". Art exists, seethes, cries out, changes form. The subject creates against a dogma that demands passivity. Thus the art of the alienated-ironical subject becomes the exclusive guardian of the world of spirit.

Against these artistic ideals, as against those of the Idealists, 19th century art critics sought to define a specific role for art. Ruskin writes:

"...ideas of truth are the foundation, and ideas of imitation, the destruction of all art. Ideas of beauty, let it be remembered, are the subjects of moral, but not of intellectual perception. By the investigation of them we shall be led to the knowledge of the ideal subjects of art."

In reproducing the object as it is in itself - classical art - the artist does not allow room for interpretation. The viewer is passive. The artist must expose the lie, paint the true face of the phenomenal world and of the object. Yet, above all, in surveying 19th century works as a whole, we can see that the modern artist was asked by the human spirit to convey the sense of the structure of modern life, while he himself leans on positivist and psychological theories in a spontaneous apprehension of nature, "by implication condemning canonical forms of composition and representation for their mediation of truth". The feeling is that every subjective creation of the past served mystification too well. What is required now is a creation more suited to material reality, to the subject's concreteness. What is required is realism - not ethos, pathos or ideal, but existing truth. In every painting by Courbet we can see something of the truth of human life. The painting is not supposed to whisper its meaning, not supposed to serve up the creator's full intention on a silver platter, but to be a dialogue of truth-disclosure between the artist and the ordinary viewer. In Courbet's The Artist's Studio (1851) we see precisely the world of the artist in modern experience. Courbet sits and paints a landscape while on either side of him his world of inspiration unfolds. On one side stand simple individuals - workers, clergy, craftsmen. On the other side of the room stands bourgeois, intellectual society. Both sides are busy with their occupations - the first with survival and preaching, the second with books, with existential thought and with Romanticism. The center is illuminated compared to the sides, as if the figures are waiting for him to paint them with his colors so that they may receive their lives. Courbet says:

"...all I have tried to do is to draw, from complete knowledge of tradition, a reasoned sense of my own independence and individuality... to record the manners, ideas and aspect of the age as I myself saw them - to be a man as well as a painter, in short to create living art - that is my aim."

Courbet, like many artists of his time, believes that the artist's task is to reveal truth, and that only through truth will social differences be erased. This truth is given in material reality, in nature, in the human figure, in the street, in the home, in society, in the everyday, in the present. To emphasize this, let us look at Ford Madox Brown's Work (1852). It is impossible not to see the modern artist's preoccupation with the social problem. Workers work and bourgeois watch them. Yet this is not a merely gray, alienated world. The world depicted is full of color: yellow, red, the sun shining on them; the workers drink, laugh, suffer; children run about; the streets are full. In such realism we see all the ideas of a creative subjectivity - a subject who shows, with his ironic brushstrokes, the connection between art and politics, the synthesis of a throbbing soul and capitalist reality. The world is the simple worker, the peasant, the cripple, the prostitute, the mentally ill, the poor - not only the world of the book and Romantic thought, of science and the smile. Herkomer's Hard Times (1885), for example, expresses the same. Realist art is where the new heroes of modern reality appear. Not kings, not commanders, not visionary heroes, but real people - neither too active nor too passive, neither too violent nor too fearful. The poor bourgeois and the rich peasant, the lazy nobleman and the mad peasant woman, the child in the poorhouse, the idealistic woman, the ambitious doctor, the neurotic family, the girl who learns only facts, the frustrated artist, the man who simply cannot create, the man who stays young forever but rots within, the innocent idiot, the perpetual drunkard, the cynical thief. These characters fight with their ironic swords against bureaucracy, stupidity, Idealism, positivism, chauvinism, exploitation and the evil of human nature. The art of the present is what must speak the life of the individual, against all academicism and artistic mannerism. 

"Our literature was the fruit of conscious thought. It appeared as innovation, beginning as imitation only by making art base itself exclusively on real life, eschewing all ideals. To do this it was necessary to make an exclusive study of the crowd, the mass, to depict ordinary people and not merely the pleasant exceptions to the general rule which always lead poets to idealization and bear an alien stamp."

Artists like Whistler, in turn, argue against Ruskin's school and realist manifestos for a purely aesthetic, emotional enjoyment without any intention of moral education. They want to speak of art as a science of beauty. In Whistler's Symphony in White (1862), for example, the woman is absorbed in herself, in thoughts that cannot and need not be deciphered. There is no clear narrative or history. The aesthetics and vivid colors address the eye for the sake of harmony. The colors are like music; they move the viewer's soul. "I do not like logical painting. My stormy temperament must seethe, erase, try other ways before it attains the goal I must reach wherever I turn... If I have not writhed like a serpent in the hands of a sorceress..." True, the artist will grasp the spirit of the age, give the viewer some of the naked truth, but above all he must feel reality and move the viewer and the epoch. "With us the natural painter, like the natural poet, is almost a monster. The exclusive pursuit of the real." Exact reproductions of reality, like photography - the enemy of Romantic and expressive arts - choke every tendency to beauty. They bring the uniqueness of imagination, of subjectivity, of humanity, down to earth. As we saw in Brown's painting, color itself, like art, can color the gray street and garment, can paint human suffering in vivid hues.

Here, with Baudelaire, the artist returns to Kant's "transcendental aesthetic". In beauty the human being knows that he has disinterested pleasure in the object. "...in order to say that the object is beautiful... the main thing is what I do with this representation in myself, not what depends on the existence of the object... Beauty is what is represented as the object of a universal delight without a concept." Or again: "Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a representation by means of a delight or aversion without any interest. An object of such a delight is called beautiful... Neither sense nor understanding exerts any constraint here. There is no freedom in the understanding or in the senses, only we ourselves, as free, find in beauty the occasion for a feeling of pleasure."

True, art has a social and political role, but its primary function is the production of delight. The artist's only loyalty is to his canvas, to his palette, to his pen and ink. "To the belief that brush strokes and color patches themselves, not what they stand for, are the artist's primary reality." This is the doctrine of "art for art's sake": there is pure art, and the modern painter has the means to achieve it. Indeed, in Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) we see the same experience of modern life that realism presents - the bourgeois enjoying nature, cafés, city prostitutes. But Manet's depicted figures are no longer their own reality; they are their reflection through Manet's own independent colors and soul. The lines are not straight or accurate, the colors are very different from reality. Manet writes to Baudelaire: "One of the most beautiful, strange and terrible spectacles to see is a bullfight. When I return I hope to put on canvas the glittering and yet dramatic effects of the corrida that I witnessed." This is the same attempt to grasp the moment of which Fichte speaks, the attempt to depict the impression of the passing instant, the phenomenon as it appears in its movement. Claude Monet writes: "...one can paint only what one sees and what one understands, and it seems to me, as I look at nature, that I see a completed product that is only waiting to be recorded... Therefore we must think only of one thing: through contemplation and thought we discover it." We see these words precisely in his Springtime or Impression (1872), or in every painting by Renoir (By the Water, 1880, for example). The captured moment is blurred, with a profusion of colors and the natural synthesis of the artist's personal experience from the scene he has recorded. The figures are like patches of color that dissolve into the landscape; the object has no clear outline. The soul does not see the harmonious structure of reality. "The rule is according to the law of irregularity," says Renoir. The world is not regular. There is no absolute circle, no absolute square, no identical people and no identical nature. This is the moving world that serves as the perfect referent for representation. One does not need full imagination, but must learn to contemplate, to see clearly the movement of creation, of light, of shadow, of water, sky and human. In his impression the artist must create in himself the capacity for pure contemplation, to see the depth of things, the world invisible to the ordinary eye. We cannot force nature to shout its secrets. We must try to guess them, to contemplate beauty, to interpret it, to give it time to unfold into its true form. Only then can the artist create instinctively, out of his taste, without excessive thought. In excessive thought the world of objects will guide his hand, not his soul. In this way Monet distances painting from mechanical photography. The work will not be representational unless it contains the artist's will, the color with which he chooses to awaken the object.

All this is evident also in Edgar Degas's The Absinthe Drinker (1876). At first glance we see an ordinary situation: a couple sitting in a café. But there is a deep moment here, a moment Degas has succeeded in capturing and recording - a world full of loneliness and gloom. The couple do not look at one another. Their faces are sealed; their thoughts about the suffering of their condition are inscribed in the dark, muted colors Degas used. As Balzac writes in The Unknown Masterpiece (1832):

"The mission of art is not to copy nature, but to express it... We must seize the spirit, the soul, the character of things and beings."

Against all commissioned art - against painters like George Hicks, for example, whose works dictate Victorian demands, or any artist who conveys the messages of royalty and political hegemony - Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and their peers will struggle. They will ask art to cause a spiritual ascent, an elevation of spirit, to reach the sublime. Art is supposed to arouse feeling.