Popularisation and Populism in the Visual Arts

Attraction Images

Anna Schober

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429885969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

This book investigates the pictorial figurations, aesthetic styles and visual tactics through which visual art and popular culture attempt to appeal to "all of us". One key figure these practices bring into play—the "everybody" (which stands for "all of us" and is sometimes a "new man" or a "new woman")—is discussed in an interdisciplinary way involving scholars from several European countries. A key aspect is how popularisation and communication practices—which can assume populist forms—operate in contemporary democracies and where their genealogies lie. A second focus is on the ambivalences of attraction, i.e. on the ways in which visual creations can evoke desire as well as hatred.

1 The Popular in Philosophy

Notes on a Pluralistic Concept of Democratic Enlightenment

Marc Rölli

The popular in philosophy has it hard. Shallow, not serious, politically suspect—it belongs in the same box as the cultural industry and the mass media. Good enough for guidebooks, newspaper supplements and talking heads, but nothing for the venerable chairs at the universities. The rabble on the street, the gullible, hypnotisable, unconsciously acting masses who are blindly taken in by the prevailing ideologies; the man with everyday worries, who seeks employment and wants to be entertained; popular cultures that make what decency and character once were disappear; the Homo economicus, who has forfeited his moral sense; right-wing conservative nationalisms and Kulturkampf conspiracy theories—all of these and many other popular tropes make it clear that popularity has no place in philosophy.

But is it true? Doesn’t the popular have a place in philosophy, because if there is to be an ascent to light and sun then there must be a cave and its inhabitants? The pathos of the past and the crisis of the present—or the miracle of the future? Is a metaphysical concept conceivable without talking about the empirical surface of what is comprehensible to everyone—and about an essential depth that transfigures the empirical into the illusory? One might also think of the great subject of ideology, which keeps the structures of subjugation alive—or of everyday life, which is opposed to actually resolute existence. Are these not all conceptions of the popular that are philosophically not just constructed, but needed—in a sense that stabilises the whole enterprise?

In the following I turn to the topic of the popular in philosophy initially by placing it in the “popular philosophy” of the Enlightenment (I). In a second step I come to Heinrich Heine, who, in his notorious text on the history of religion and philosophy in Germany, rehabilitates the popular philosophy that had been discredited in German idealism from Kant to Hegel (II). Finally, I would like to draw a line to the present and argue in favour of perceiving the popular in all its ambivalence, not least its historically determined ambivalence. But this means finding criteria that make it possible to distinguish between pluralistic-democratic processes and their merely antipluralist-populist blockage (III).

I

In the history of philosophy of the Enlightenment it is not unknown that Kant reacted to a review of his Critique of Pure Reason in the Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeigen (19 January 1782), which originated from Christian Garve (and was shortened and sharpened by Johann G. H. Feder as editor of the Anzeigen), with his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science (2014 [1783]). The conflict between Kant and Garve sheds a bright light on the popular in philosophy. With these Prolegomena, which are a preface raising the question of the very possibility of metaphysics before discussing it—with these preliminary considerations or “preliminary exercises” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 11) undertakes to counter the “complaints of lack of popularity”.

Kant takes these complaints seriously by executing his plan, already communicated in a letter to Marcus Herz in May 1781 (Kant, 1999, 181), “according to which even popularity might be gained for this study [metaphysics]”. Only at the beginning does this popularity seem “ill-timed” to him, since first “the foundations needed cleaning up”. To “clean up the foundations”, that is: to be thorough, to allow for doubt, but to overcome it critically, thought through from the bottom up. Popularity does not come first, at most second. Anyone who develops “a completely new science” cannot entrust themselves to traditional language habits. If only for this reason will it seem “nonsensical, because one does not thereby make the author’s thoughts fundamental, but always simply one’s own, made natural through long habit” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 12). “Scholastic exactitude”, “dryness” and “obscurity” are deficiencies that one can complain about (Kant, 2014 [1783], 11, 12). But they can only be eliminated in a popular representation after the critique has already done “the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken in the field of metaphysics” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 10). In this sense Kant understands the Prolegomena as a plan to emphasise the “building of links” of the critique of reason more clearly. However, he also states: “Whosoever finds this plan itself […] still obscure may consider that it is not necessary for everyone to study metaphysics” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 13).

Popularity in philosophy may therefore justifiably be demanded for didactic reasons. From a Kantian point of view, however, there is also a popularity that is presumptuous and incapable of penetrating the obscurity that belongs to the essence of the thing (here: metaphysics). If obscurity is hastily “decried”, then it is “a familiar cloaking for one’s own indolence or dimwittedness” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 13). The real critical principles are therefore usefully obscure, because they discourage those who are not given the corresponding “talents” and “intellectual gifts” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 13).¹

According to Kant, the popular belongs in its proper place. Critical philosophy is both thorough and obscure, even if it has “the interest of human reason in general” on its side (Kant, 2014 [1783], 7). On the other hand, the complaints about lack of popularity are inadmissible if they simply ignore the difficulties that arise from the real philosophical problem. Kant combines what he sees as an inadmissible position with the more general phenomenon of a crisis in metaphysics, which has not only undermined its scientific core but has also produced a new kind of fictitious everyone. In the present situation

it [metaphysics] has lost a great many of its adherents, and one does not find that those who feel strong enough to shine in other sciences wish to risk their reputations in this one, where anyone, usually ignorant in all other things, lays claim to a decisive opinion, since in this region there are in fact still no reliable weights and measures with which to distinguish profundity from shallow babble.

(Kant, 2014 [1783], 2).

With this description of the situation Kant refers to the fact that Christian Wolff’s school metaphysics is also losing influence and reputation in the German-speaking world in the face of an increasingly prevalent empiricist and materialistic way of thinking. His main focus is the “Göttingen Enlightenment”, which was primarily responsible for the upswing of popular philosophy in Germany (since the 1760s). It “provides a thinking that can become that of the people”—and in this sense sees itself as the real Enlightenment (Binkelmann and Schneidereit, 2015, iv). Popularity here means various things. On the one hand, the term aims at a generally understandable form of presentation—and thus also at new literary, aesthetic and rhetorical strategies (form of dialogue, essay, speeches to the reader, allegories, doctrinal poems, fictitious correspondence). They are associated with structures of a new kind of public (salons, magazines, review organs). On the other hand, the popular stands for a content that concerns everyone (in Johann Jakob Engel’s case: a philosophy for the world), as well as for the level of justification that is discerned in the common sense. And Kant becomes polemical at the last point mentioned. In the Prolegomena he comes to say that David Hume “was understood by no one.” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 5) Hume’s “problem”, however, is one that cannot be ignored because his scepticism does not stop at all at the beliefs of common sense. Kant can rightly point out that Hume’s opponents are content to invoke “common sense”: “this appeal is nothing other than a call to the judgment of the multitude; applause at which the philosopher blushes but at which the popular wag become triumphant and defiant” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 9). Finally, Hume had shown that the demonstrations of the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and free will common in school had become impossible. “All of its cognitions allegedly established a priori would be nothing but falsely marked ordinary experiences” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 7f.). Consequently, from Kant’s point of view, a critical reason is necessary that “keeps the ordinary common sense in check, so that it does not lose itself in speculations” (Kant, 2014 [1783], 9). The ideas of theoretical reason only acquire their practical—or, as Kant says in Logic (1988), their “cosmopolitan” relevance in the passage through critique. And also experience as a scientific objectivity can only be guaranteed if it is possible to justify the concepts of the mind as a priori categorical units (in transcendental deduction).

Here two things become clear. First Kant problematises the reference to a common sense to be observed in the reaction to Hume in Reid (1764) and Beattie (1779), and then also in the popular philosophy of the Göttingen Enlightenment. In his eyes, this reference suffers from not being able to keep up with the sceptical considerations employed by Hume. Hume’s radical empiricism makes it impossible simply to maintain traditional assumptions about categories of substance and subject, deontological moral teachings and theological views. Secondly, by questioning these traditional assumptions, the limits of popular philosophy are drawn where it proves incapable of formulating an alternative to school philosophy. A popular philosophy ex cathedra, which could, for example, bring to bear its eclectic method against systematic philosophy according to its school concept, does not exist. In the German-speaking world Kant had some success with his criticism of the popular Enlightenment. Research literature points out that the popular philosophical enlightenment in its own understanding of itself after 1780 generally aimed to bring the heavy Kant text closer to a larger audience of the educated bourgeoisie (Emundts, 2000). With Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, published in 1798, Kant once again makes clear what it means to develop a popular philosophy. Anthropology follows the school, i.e. it presupposes the principles and essential insights of school philosophy—and in this context this means systematic philosophy in theoretical and practical orientation. It does not address the transcendental structure of will, recognition and feeling, but only the empirically comprehensible exercise of faculties in the world.

Kant’s famous text to answer the question “What is Enlightenment?” (1991b [1784]) once again intervenes unconventionally and effectively in the debate about the popularity of philosophy. Enlightenment, correctly understood, serves the political progress of humankind in the historical-philosophical sense. Anyone who frees themselves from self-inflicted immaturity understands it correctly (Kant, 1991b). The Kantian motto of being courageous and thinking for oneself is initially addressed to everyone. And yet, correctly understood, criticism must precede the Enlightenment. This ambiguity manifests itself not least in the way Kant separates the public from the private use of reason. Ultimately, it is a matter of leaving immaturity behind by making free public use of reason—while its private use can be “very narrowly restricted” (Kant, 1991b, 4). “Thus it would be very harmful if an officer receiving an order from his superiors were to quibble openly, while on duty … He must simply obey” (Kant, 1991b, 11).

Obedience to civil duty (i.e. the private use of reason not at all in the sense of a mere examination of conscience) is opposed by the free (and public) reasoning of the scholar—and the legitimised law results from this freedom. Perhaps one can say that at this point the impulse to leave immaturity behind is linked to a criticism of the authorities, which itself claims to be an authority. In any case, Foucault saw it this way when he proposed radicalising transcendental critique genealogically in order to make it accord with the spirit of the Enlightenment (Foucault, 1997).

II

After Kant, the critique of popularity, which already in Kant tends to inform the rationally founded Enlightenment, turns into an idealistically motivated critique of the Enlightenment. This starts with Reinhold and Fichte and does not end with Schelling and Hegel. In the Ankündigung des kritischen Journals (1802), which Schelling and Hegel supposedly wrote together, the esoteric nature of philosophy is played off against its exoteric appearance. In the introduction Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt und ihr Verhältnis zum gegenwärtigen Zustand der Philosophie insbesondere Hegel (1802) says: “The Enlightenment already expresses in its origin and in and for itself the meanness of the intellect and its vain elevation above reason, and therefore no change in its meaning was necessary to make it popular and comprehensible.”² This at least drastic, if not arrogant assessment of the Enlightenment is repeated and systematically consolidated by Hegel in the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1979 [1807]).

Against this background,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Popular in Philosophy: Notes on a Pluralistic Concept of Democratic Enlightenment
• 2. From Marianne to Louise: Three Ways of Representing the (European) People in Democratic Societies
• 3. Becoming Ordinary: The Ludic Politics of the Everyday
• 4. Particular Faces with Universal Appeal: A Genealogy and Typology of Everybodies
• 5. The Mask and the Vanity Wound: Contemporary Populism through Canetti’s Insight
• 6. Facing Everybody? Composite Portraiture as Representation of a Common Face
• 7. Contemporary Newsreel and New Everybody Figures as Mediators in Late Democracies
• 8. The Making of a Common Woman Figure: Convergence and Struggle of Visual Practices around Gezi’s Icon
• 9. Duane Hanson’s Man on Mower: A Suburban American Everybody in the Mid-1990s
• 10. Devenir Tout le Monde: A Deleuzian Perspective on the Everybody between Political Practice and Visual Culture
• 11. Contagion Images: Faciality, Viral Affect and the Logic of the Grab on Tumblr
• 12. The Usual Difference: Everybodies as Participants in Contemporary Art and the Spectacle of Changing Relations
• Index