The President and Fellows of Harvard College Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

The Ethnographic Sublime Author(s): Matthew Rampley Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 47 (Spring, 2005), pp. 251-263 Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20167669 . Accessed: 24/09/2013 01:58
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The ethnographic
MATTHEWRAMPLEY

sublime

Introduction:

Sublimity

at the end and the beginning

In 1925 the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky visited on the city as follows: New York, and commented

Lights go on all along the entire twenty-five mile

Broadway .... This is, the Americans say,

long
White

the Great

in contemporary societies defeat the exchange a in any intuitable of total representation possibility notions of also humanist and thus destabilize form, was out this borne Indeed, by W. J.T. subjectivity.2 recent comments events of 9/11, the Mitchell's regarding which stated that "The flood of images overwhelms that the Event itself seems language so completely defies It is not the enormity of the event that for Mitchell, but its subsequent representation dissemination through the channels of mass-media unnameable."3 broadcasting. More generally, the sublime quality of urban society has become a familiar contemporary theme in aesthetic and cultural theory of the past fifteen to twenty years. As Paul Crowther has put it: "... the image of the twentieth-century city as a vast anonymous domain of mysterious and violent multitudes figures large in the subject matter of literature, painting and the ... we find a fascination with vastness and cinema power that transcends any immediate practical relevance for us. We experience the sublime."4 at the If the sublime makes its appearance it is equally of late modernity, culmination however, more at its or, present beginning precisely, at the inception of culture per se. The sublime functions as a fundamental trope in theories of primitive culture, and in particular, in theories of primitive and prehistoric art. I term it the "ethnographic" it continues sublime because to play a role, too, in ethnographic and anthropological writing on art. In part, this article is a foray into the of a concept, but it is also concerned historiography with thinking through some of the consequences various ethnographic discourses might have for an I start, therefore, with a of the sublime. understanding modernist for quest origins, and as such begin typically

Way. It is really white and one really has the impression that it is brighter there at night than in the daytime .... The street-lamps, the dazzling lights of advertisements , the glow of shop windows and windows of the never-closing stores, the lights illuminating huge posters, lights from the open doors of cinemas and theatres, the speeding lights of automobiles and trolley cars, the lights of the subway trains glittering under one's feet through the glass pavements, the lights of inscriptions in the sky. The brightness, brightness,
brightness . .J

paean to Manhattan and, in particular, Mayakovsky's to the electric cityscape is an exemplary instance of what David Nye has termed the American technological is primarily with the period sublime. Nye's concern Distinctive the late nineteenth century and the 1960s. to this period is the way inwhich the a of sublime underwent the transference, experience from nature?obvious examples being, perhaps, or Melville's Moby Dick?to the Thoreau's Waiden between

sublime astonishment sociotechnical sphere. Hence, was not merely found in natural phenomena such as the Grand Canyon or the Niagara Falls, but also in human constructions such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hoover or the Dam, Apollo Space Mission. This shift was not unique to the United States; it became a widespread trope in twentieth-century in Europe and North America. Associated with it also prefigured the the advent of industrialization, formulations of the post-modern sublime, which, while a Kantian of thematics of the constituting revisiting societies mathematical in the social A notable Fran?ois and the dynamic sublime, locate sublimity and political formations of late modernity. attempt to articulate this condition was Jean

in Art and Text 2. See Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, "Les Immat?riaux/' 17 (1985):47-57. in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, Translated and (London: Routledge, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions Sandy Nairne, 1996), pp. 3. W. Analysis 4. 159-173. J. T. Mitchell, :6. "9/11 :Criticism and Crisis," in Situation

Les Immat?riaux, Lyotard's 1985 exhibition to which the complexity of the networks of according and social and economic communication, technology

1 (2002)

Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime (Oxford: Oxford and Postmodern Press, 1989), p. 165. See too "Sublimity University in Crowther, Critical Aesthetics Culture. Lyotard's Les Immat?riaux," and Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1993), pp. University recent exploration 162-176. A more of the sublime and its relation technology Contemporary can be found Sublime in Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty (New York: Allworth, 1999). and the

to

1. Cited (Cambridge,

in David Mass.: MIT

Nye,

The American 1994),

Press,

Technological p. 193.

Sublime

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252

RES 47 SPRING 2005

with

a modern

Sandars's

fairy tale. It is taken from Nancy study of prehistoric art:

of and a stage when

K.

It is likely that there was, at some time, probably before the

emergence language reflection, things

is a well-established intellectual genealogy account. Itdraws on a tradition Sandars's underpinning immersion of primitive man that stressed the of writing There in nature. A wide variety of authors, from Edward Tylor to James Frazer, Lucien L?vy-Bruhl or Walter Benjamin, of mimetic the prevalence all emphasized thinking in among "primitives."8 Thus, for Frazer this was evident reliance on sympathetic magic amongst the widespread primitive and ancient cultures, while for L?vy-Bruhl primitive cultures operate under a "pre-logical" mentality governed by the "law of participation."9 to this mentality, the notion of abstract logical According is entirely absent, and relations between subjects objects drawn and instead entities?events, people, things?are a series bonds and of occult "mystic together by connections."10

existed for the "\" only if and as they affect itemotionally. The creature experienced an indeterminacy of feeling in which certain impressions are set off from the common background of feeling by their special intensity. To these, and not to conscious reflection, probably correspond the first mythological images.5 she recognizes Sandars admits that this is speculation; that even among "the songs of some of the most primitive people still living, the aboriginals of the creature Man no longer lives in such a Arnhemland," state of undifferentiated unity with nature. Even our most primitive neighbors are cut off from that remote as "before [Man] was aware of his own personality past is The difference of nature."6 from the whole separate for Sandars, altered an constituted by ritual which, of instinct-driven way of life into the beginnings this is seen existence. And while socialized cultivated, as "progress," retrospectively event. As Sandars states:
However we account for

In addition, Sandars's reference to the art is reminiscent of Walter of magical origins famous essay on art, its cultic ar-forms, and Benjamin's their afterlife in the age of technological reproduction, of her written thirty years or so before the publication own volume.11 Thus, for Benjamin, an artwork was "first and foremost an instrument of magic which only later came to be recognized as a work of art," and the trace of this magical origin lived on in the historical and aesthetic aura that accrued to art in secular modernity.12 Sandars's account belongs, therefore, to a long tradition of writing about primitive culture and the origins of art that brings into play aesthetic and ethnographic discourses. One can perhaps identify four principal this tradition: (1) The idea of art as ideas underpinning the response to a primitive terror of nature; (2) The idea to confused and of primitive art as giving expression origins indeterminate religious beliefs; (3) The idea of the of art as being based in abstract ornamental and

was it

itself a traumatic

it, each

new

advance

creates

new environment, the impact of which on the human being is like experiencing the terrors of a metamorphosis such as we feel today from the impact of sub-atomic physics. The
first creation with traditional of the work ways, and of art is itself such another of terror, break until possibly a source

it has been brought

into the same formality of ritual . . . /

It is a well-rehearsed story. The distant origins of man are to be located in darkness, in a terrifying state of in the arbitrary chaos of nature, escape from immersion of culture. is only attained through the emergence which Art is one emergent cultural form but even here it bears the marks of its origins in a terrifying past in the fact that contemporary "primitive hunting the Eskimos [sic], the and Sandars names as examples the Samoyeds? and the the Buriats, Yakuts, Lapps, rests in the hands of the artistic skill and production It is perhaps shaman. Art is still inseparable from magic. that for Sandars the most potent of no small significance this traumatic wrench of the simile for describing is the terror of the most recent modern civilizing process technology: nuclear physics. inmost societies"?

8. See, for example, Sir Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: into the Development of Mythology, Researches Religion, Philosophy, (London: John Murray, 1871); Sir James Frazer, The Art, and Custom (London: Macmillan, Religion Bough. A Study in Comparative Lucien L?vy-Bruhl, How Natives (London: Think, trans. L. Clare "On the Mimetic Allen & Unwin, 1926); Walter Benjamin, George, in Vol. 2: Walter Selected Writings. [1933] Benjamin, Faculty," Golden 1932); trans. 1927-1934, Harvard University 9. L?vy-Bruhl H. Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: 1999), pp. 720-723. (see note 8), pp. 69-104. and Alterity. 10. On this tradition see Michael Taussig, Mimesis of the Senses Particular History (London and New York: Routledge, E. Jephcott, Press, 1993). 11. Walter Benjamin,

5. N. K. Sandars, Prehistoric 1962), p. 23. Penguin, 6. 7. Ibid., pp. 23-24. Ibid., p. 25.

Art

in Europe

(Harmondsworth:

Reproducibility," Vol. 4: 1938-1940, Mass.: 12. Harvard

"The Work of Art in the Age of ItsTechnical in Benjamin, Selected Writings. 1939] [third version, trans. E. Jephcott, H. Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, pp. 251-283. Press, 2003), University

Ibid., p. 257.

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Rampley: The ethnographic

sublime

253

decorative form; (4) The idea of primitive as driven by a formal horror vacui.

decorative

art

Primitive

terror

A recurrent trope within theories of primitive art was was driven by the attempt to "ward off" nature, or that it to come to terms with nature, driven above all by a fear of the Real. Perhaps the best known such theory was Friedrich Nietzsche's its reading of tragedy?and a cultural On the one primitive origins?as prophylactic. hand, Birth of Tragedy (1873) tore apart the humanistic of classic civilization and questioned the understanding on roots rational of Western the culture; purportedly other it reiterated a widespread trope that equated the Nietzsche's primeval with a helpless horror at existence. famous assertion that art "alone can turn those nauseous thoughts about the horror and the absurdity of existence into representations with which one can live: these are the sublime, as the artistic harnessing of the horrific, and the comic, as the artistic breaking of the nausea of the to absurd,"13 was shocking only due to his willingness describe classical Greek art using terms more usually associated with discussion of the art of Africa and the even here he was advancing a South Seas. Moreover inVico's The New Science position that had precedents (1725) or Bernard de Fontenelle's On the Origin of accounted for the origin of Greek myths by drawing on the situation of like the Greeks, lived in a contemporary "savages" who, state of ignorance and barbarism: "In the first centuries of the world, amongst nations which had never heard of the traditions of the family of Seth . . . there must have been an ignorance and barbarism almost in excess of what we were capable of imagining. Take the example of the Kaffirs, the Lapps or the Iroquois, and even then (1690).14 to the fact that since these peoples are give due weight some degree of ancient already they have achieved men did not and which the first knowledge civility have."15 To compensate for such ignorance the ancients invented myths, to give meaning to an otherwise and fearsome world. strange, mysterious, Fables Fontenelle

equation of the Greeks with the of America and elsewhere was a "primitives" in its reversal of the weight hitherto step revolutionary lent to Greek and Roman culture, and he anticipated the more substantial works of comparative and religion such as Pierre Lafitau's Customs of the ethnography American Primitive Savages Compared Times (1724).16 was therefore it Although with the Customs of

Fontenelle's

less original than often the basis for a claimed, Nietzsche's work became recurrent modernist culture's primitive theory of Western inwhich art played a fundamental role. Many origins, In an early essay written followed his position. in 1904 on "The Birth of Tragedy" Bronislaw Malinowski concurred
horror of

with
life

Nietzsche
. . . are . . .

that "the elements

disgusting,

of the
and

nerve-wracking

. . overwhelming. Only a specific creative act. changes them into tragic elements and this is the first task and Wilhelm difficulty for the tragedian."17 Three years later, account of geometrical in abstraction Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1907), a seminal work in the of modernist read the aesthetics, development and the of abstraction crystalline prevalence geometric in "primitive" art as a mediated to construct attempt some form of order when faced with the terrifying chaos of the real. As Worringer stated, "primitive man" order through art "because he produces geometrical stands so lost and spiritually helpless amidst the things of the external world, because he experiences only in the inter-connection and flux of obscurity and caprice the phenomena of the external world."18 Other of such as Aby Warburg, also contemporaries Worringer, as a art or of to kind of terms spoke coming disputation with nature and the real. To cite (Auseinandersetzung) ". . . primitive man is like a child for Warburg, example: in the dark. He is surrounded by a menacing chaos which constantly endangers his survival; art served as a means of giving some kind of form to this chaotic and menacing Likewise for Ludwig experience."19 who counted Binswanger, among Aby Warburg his

16. with 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, (Harmondsworth: 14. Giambattista M. Birth of Tragedy, 1993) ? 7. The New Science, trans. S.Whiteside trans. T. G. Moore

Pierre Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared the Customs of Primitive Times, trans. W. N. Fenton and E. L. of Bronislaw UK: Cambridge

H. Fisch Press, 1948) originally University in 1725. Bernard de Fontenelle, "De l'Origine des published in Fontenelle, Texfes Choisis [On the Origin of Fables, 1724] Gamier, 1966), pp. 223-238. 15. Fontenelle (see note 14), p. 223-224.

Vico, (Ithaca: Cornell

Bergin

and

(Toronto: Champlain 1974-1977). Society, Bronislaw Malinowski, The Early Writings trans. L. Krzyzanowski Malinowski, (Cambridge, 17.

Fables" (Paris:

Press, 1993), p. 83. University 18. Wilhelm Abstraction and Empathy, trans. M. Worringer, Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), p. 18. 19. Aby Warburg cited in Sir Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg (London: Phaidon, 1986), p. 216.

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254

RES 47 SPRING 2005

of the patients: modem man, anxious at the nothingness ". . . stares fear-stricken at the inescapable and all world, and pain now depend upon the possibility his happiness the Horrible, the Uncanny. of conjuring the Dreadful, His one and only desire is to become as familiar as the the Horrible, possible with the Dreadful, a notion This considerable lifespan. enjoyed Uncanny."20 of the Itplayed an important part inAdorno's discussion Theory (1970), which equates origins of art inAesthetic archaic "ugliness" with the imitation of fear.21 Mastery of the unknown was not attained by the creation of in it, and for Adorno, distance, but rather by immersion art was the residue of an earlier primitive mimetic eclipsed by the rise of modern impulse that had become instrumental scientific reason.22 Likewise for Hans the creation of myth was motivated by the Blumenberg overcome to the human for the need species "absolutism fundamental environment of reality," and in particular, the problem that is lived in a physical was not biologically it for which adapted.23

of the poetic primitive origins of explanation of thought; in particular, the personification in ancient myth and poetry is not merely an but derives from an inability to aesthetic ornamentation, as nature but animated by anything comprehend . . all the tropes . . . which ". have agents: personal writers inventions of hitherto been considered ingenious were necessary modes of expression of all the first this poetic state is linked to poetic nations."25 Moreover the fact that primitive man acted purely on impulse, isVico's human nature lacking any sense of distance toward himself or his own into nature: ". . .when [man] actions, projecting himself he makes the things out of himself does not understand, them by transforming himself into them."26 and becomes itsmost systematic Such a notion attained perhaps in the work of articulation and complex philosophical art For and the fates of religion were Hegel, Hegel. intertwined and the most potent symbols of religion were also frequently the most of important monuments at most is its art. Thus at the origins, where religion and abstract, art exhibits a primitive unmediated set of forms. As Hegel similarly frozen and crystalline is the states: "The first form, because it is immediate, is not and the work abstract form of the understanding yet in its own self filled with Geist. The crystals of of parts . . . simple combinations pyramids and obelisks, these are the works of this artificer of rigid form ... the into them only as an alien ... or receive Geist works they have an external relation to Geist as something is itself there externally."27 The same logic is also which present, Hegel notes, in the "still simple darkness, the at the black formless stone" of the Qa'aba unmoved,
Mecca.28 Later, as human consciousness comes to see

Primitive

religion

The positing by Victorian authors such as Edward Tylor and Herbert Spencer of animism as the first basic "belief in spiritual beings" to useTylor's religion?the the use of idols and fetishes, definition?also explained seen as the consequence of a "craving of the human mind for a material support" to religious beliefs.24 The often tortuous forms of such idols reflect the "insect to cite Spencer, which the primitive metamorphoses," sees on a daily basis. The spiritual resides everywhere take on any possible and its external manifestations form. This is also the function of a basic lack of reflection; primitives are driven from one conceptual to another. The origin of this notion appearance fleeting

it searches Geist than mere material presence, the forms of objective for adequate expression?but nature of its conceptions results only underdeveloped distorted shapes: the hybrid Egyptian gods such as as more Anubis bulls of and Horus, and the human-headed or the Apkallu, bird-headed the winged, sages East. Hegel set inmotion a logic of the ancient Middle that persisted for more than a century. As late as 1964 in his study of the origins of Siegfried Giedion, Sumeria

in

inAnthony Vidler, Warped cited Space Ludwig Binswanger MIT Mass.: 2000), Press, p. 47. (Cambridge, trans. C. Lenhardt 21. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic [1970], Theory 70. 1984), (London: Routledge, p. 20. 22. On Aesthetic London: see Lambert Zuidervart, Adorno's inAdorno mimesis and of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass., Theory. The Redemption Adorno MIT Press, 1991) p. 110 ff. On the relation between Nicholsen, in The Semblance of

see Shierry Weber on this question and Benjamin of Walter "Aesthetic Theory's Mimesis Benjamin," Subjectivity. Zuidervart, 55-91. 23. Hans

architecture, argued in relation to Egypt and Assyria that "the indeterminate, longing for all-pervasive primeval contact with invisible powers found an echo in the new

Huhn and L. TheoryT. Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic and London: MIT Press, 1997) pp. ed. (Cambridge, Mass, 25. 26. Vico Ibid., G. W. (see note ?405. F. Hegel, 14), ? 409. of Spirit, p. 421. trans. T. M. Knox

trans. R.Wallace Work on Myth, Blumenberg, 1979. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). First published, of Mankind, into the Early History 24. Edward Tylor, Researches 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1878), p. 120.

27. Phenomenology Press, 1977), (Oxford: Oxford University 28. Ibid., p. 423.

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Rampley: The ethnographic

sublime

255

Itappeared conditions of the archaic high civilisations. most directly in ceaselessly changing hybrid forms with human bodies and animal heads."29

Ornament

as aesthetic

origin

to (1889), coined the term "skeuomorph" Psychology" in that had originated designate ornamentation utilitarian design, but which, through a process of of artists, had evolved generations copying by successive into aesthetic forms, its original purpose either forgotten or misunderstood.34 As Phillip Steadman has argued, such accounts skeuomorph was parallels between were widespread, and the notion of the important for those seeking to draw natural evolution and artistic

arts had long been regarded as The decorative to the secondary high arts of painting and sculpture, but came to occupy an essential ornamentation nevertheless art in the of and aesthetic experience, conception place in terms of the discussion of the and most particularly origins and the of art.30 Hegel treated ornament, as an in link essential arabesque particular, mediating between organic form and rational construction.31 of the transition from the rigid geometries Specifically, art the architecture of pre-classical, (the symbolic crystalline forms of the pyramid) to the temples of classical Greece

However the second, competing theory development.35 of ornament was to prove more influential still, and this of a primal interpreted ornament as the expression instinct. Thus, in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Friedrich Schiller argued that one of the "visible signs of the savage's entry into humanity" in a "propensity to ornamentation consists and play."36 This idea was even held by Semper, despite his association with a competing tradition of thinking on the a on In "the Formal lecture Principles of subject. (1856) Semper spoke of the basic instinct" (Schmucktrieb) "decorative that could be seen in the wearing of masks, body scarification, and not too "it such that would be great a paradox tattooing

in organic ornament is encapsulated and acanthus leaf decoration), which mediates (palmette between nature and culture. Hegel's interpretation was the historian Carl Boetticher, architectural repeated by saw Tectonics of the Greeks whose (1849-1852) ornament as a structural element mediating between the aesthetic and the functional dimensions of architecture.32 In the nineteenth century there were two principal and function of theories to account for the meaning ornament. One, usually associated with Gottfried Semper and his followers, was to see it as originating functional aesthetic forms that had become motifs. into transformed As Semper argued in Style (1860 of the patterns formed by textile the eventually forgotten and became of ornamental practices both in in other media.33 A similar notion was

Ornament"

the origin of certain traditional surface to the art of tattooing."37 InAnalysis of Ornament (1860), a technical handbook on techniques to be of ornamentation, held ornament Ralph Wornum "one of the mind's necessities,"38 while in the more in in the famous The Grammar of Ornament, published same year as Semper's Jones claimed lecture, Owen ornament was the natural and spontaneous expression of a primal aesthetic drive.39 For Jones, this was evident in the facial tattooing of the Maoris of New Zealand, and for other authors, too, the inhabitants of Australasia

to ascribe ornaments

1863), the origin manufacture was basis for a range architecture and in proposed by the British author H. Colley March, who or ItsArchaeology "The Meaning and Its of Ornament,

or Its 34. H. Colley March, 'The Meaning of Ornament, in Transactions of the Lancashire and Its Psychology/' Archaeology 7 (1889):160-192. Cheshire Antiquarian Society 35. Phillip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs (Cambridge:

and

of The Eternal Present. The Beginnings Siegfried Giedion, Architecture (London: Oxford Press, 1964), p. 53. University in aesthetics 30. For a general account of ornament of the period see Franz-Lothar in der Kunsttheorie des 19. Kroll, Das Ornament 1987). (New York and Hildesheim: Jahrhunderts Georg Olms 31. Georg Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford ff. Press, 1975), p. 674-675 University Die Tektonik der Hellenen [Tectonics of the Boetticher, Greeks] (Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1849-1852). 33. Gottfried und tektonischen Semper, Der Stil in den technischen Carl K?nsten: ein Handbuch f?r Techniker, oder, Praktische Aesthetik, K?nstler und Kunstfreunde, 2nd ed. (Munich: F. Bruckman, vol. I: "Die Textile Kunst f?r sich betrachtet und in 1878-1879), Beziehung zur Baukunst." First published in 1860-1863. 32.

29.

Press, 1979). University Cambridge 36. Friedrich Schiller, Lectures on the Aesthetic of Man, Education trans. E. M. Wilkinson and LA. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 191-193. 37. Ornament Gottfried and the Formal Principles of Semper, "Concerning as Artistic Symbol," Its Significance in Isabelle Frank, of Decorative Art. An Anthology of European and 1750-1940 (New Haven: Ornament. Yale University Press, of Art & Son,

ed., The Theory American Writings 2000), p. 93.

38. Ralph Wornum, of Analysis to the Study Styles: An Introduction and Hall, (London: Chapman 1860) 39. Owen Jones, The Grammar 1856).

The Characteristics of Ornamental

of the History p. 6. of Ornament

(London:

Day

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256

RES 47 SPRING 2005

of Stereotypie representatives unable to pass beyond a development, basic primitive urge to bodily adornment. Thus, Alfred in Art (1895) focused on New The Evolution Haddon's case for the study of the Guinea as an exemplary in of primitive art and design,40 while, development such arrested Problems of Style (1893), Alois Riegl also put forward Maori tattooing as a prime example of the same basic ornamental instinct, arguing furthermore that "since we ... to can consider ourselves justified regard primitive as remnants of long gone the rudimentary peoples cultures of the human race, it appears that geometric ornament... is likewise a long superseded phase in the . . ."41To these views arts of the decorative development can be added those of the Expressionist art critic Wilhelm Classical: (1920), "violent in The Barbarian and the Hausenstein who, A Book on the Sculpture of Exotic Peoples claimed that the Maoris were still marked by the impulse of savages," their "ornament merely

and the South Pacific were

that the earliest surviving "artistic" L?bke recognized from prehistory were not of an ornamental productions nature, and while he held to the notion of the primordial to function of ornamentation, he at least attempted construct a historical schema that would accommodate the archaeological evidence. A similar approach was de R?cy who fully acknowledged, adopted by Georges in The Evolution of Ornament (1913), that the earliest art in Europe consisted of the figurative cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux.46 In contrast, however, Henry held fast, in The Evolution of Decorative Art, same as in the of Problems year Style, Riegl's published to the notion of the originary nature of ornament.47 Like de R?cy, he recognized that the earliest art in Europe consisted of figurative representations, but he did not as to his claim. this counterevidence regard offering Balfour Rather, he argued that early cave paintings, despite their of a much antiquity, had to be the later development older tradition of artistic activity, of which no example survived in Europe. In order to see examples of this was therefore necessary to it originary artistic practice arts of contemporary Australia the decorative South and the Pacific. it is those of Riegl that Of these writings on ornament most the critical have enjoyed sustained interest,48 but it was to note is also important for a long that his work time eclipsed by the celebrated invective against modern ornament by his younger Viennese in part driven by a Adolf Loos. Although contemporary examine to repudiate the eclecticism of late nineteenth Loos's famous equation of modern century architecture, ornament with criminality was based on a more general inwhich view of human development "the evolution of is culture synonymous with the removal of ornament."49 while the "urge to ornament one's face Consequently, and everything within reach is the start of plastic art," now tattoo their bodies. only criminals and degenerates desire Yet while in their Loos and Riegl stood opposed of ornament?Riegl urging an aesthetic of Loos's relativism at odds with the dogmatism the same nevertheless essay?they employed evaluation schema.

sculptural tattooing."42 The idea of the primordiality of ornament was thus a in nineteenthand twentieth-century commonplace accounts of primitive art.Wilhelm L?bke, author of a of the History of Art popular history of art, Outlines was also widely read in Britain and North (1860), that For America, offered a slight variant of this account.43 L?bke the earliest artificial structures, such as the in Brittany or Cornwall, were barely from the "causal formations of nature," distinguishable "rather the results of the and were consequently law of nature than the conscious of a general workings menhirs efforts of individual man."44 The "craving for ornamentation and decoration" was, for L?bke, the result of a secondary development, by which man first distances himself from the state of nature, the earliest instance of this distancing being sculptures of pre Columbian Peru and Central America.45

Histories

in Art: As Illustrated by the Life Evolution Haddon, of Designs (London: Walter Scott, 1895). 41. Alois Riegl, Stilfragen [Problems of Style] (Vienna: Georg 1893), p. 4. Siemens, Ein Buch von und Klassiker. Barbaren 42. Wilhelm Hausenstein, 40. Alfred Exotischer Book on the Sculpture and the Classical: V?lker [The Barbarian of the Exotic Peoples] (Munich: R. Piper, A 1920),

evolutionary
46. Picard, 47. Percival 48. Alois

der Bildnerei p. 59. 43. Wilhelm

Georges 1913)

de R?cy, p. 23.

L'?volution

Ornamentale of Decorative

(Paris: Alphonse Art (London:

of Art, trans. R. Sturgis of the History L?bke, Outlines of the 11 th (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1922). This is a translation der Kunstgeschichte edition of Grundriss (1891 ). The first edition was in 1860. published 44. L?bke (see note 43), 45. Ibid., p. 11. vol. I, p. 2.

Henry Balfour, & Co., 1893). See, for example,

The Evolution

Margaret

Olin,

Riegl's

University 49. Adolf 289.

Theory of Art Press, 1992). Loos,

(University

in Forms of Representation State Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania in Frank (see note 37), p.

"Ornament

and Crime,"

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Rampley: The ethnographic

sublime

257

Horror

vacui

saw ornament not Riegl and his contemporaries a as aesthetic of basic the manifestation instinct, merely of an impulse to cover every but also as the expression "We know available surface, a primal horror of absence: of savages who scorn every form of clothing, but who cover the entire surface of their skin with tattoos . . . even today we come across this artistic horror vacui that cannot tolerate any empty spaces . . ."50Riegl also mapped out the logical progression of spatial experience, beginning with a primitive orientation a towards haptic proximity (Nahsicht)?with concomitant visuality a modern repression of spatial distance?to oriented towards optical distance. This could be traced, for Riegl, changing spatial experience in the artistic treatment of the figure-ground relation in or or in tectonics the of friezes, paintings sculptural

through visual and other symbolism.54 This between primitive horror and the fear of space highlights what Anthony contemporary Vidler has identified as a widespread trope of distance connection inmetropolitan culture of the early agoraphobia twentieth century.55 Indeed, the primitive became an arena for the projection of of the psychopathology with all its ambiguities and urban modernity was civilization ambivalences. If, forWarburg, space, by the creation of a cognitive was the site of a dangerous disruption modernity spatial experience, through the invention of the or railway travel and the airplane.56 telegraph, This concern with the invention of space?and constituted loss?has then of

its

architectural space.51 the image This notion of the horror vacui confirmed of the primitive as driven by basic aesthetic impulses but also as living in a state of terror. As the English Vorticist in 1913, "primitive writer T. E. Hulme commented ... live in a world whose lack of order and people must arbitrariness inspire them with a certain seeming of what fear. One may perhaps get a better description must be their state of mind by comparing it to the fear which makes certain people unable to cross open Edward Likewise for Hulme's contemporary, an was same to of it attitude this adopt ability Bullough, to the objects of consciousness that psychic distance to occur.53 enabled art and modern aesthetic experience spaces."52 barbarism could be equated with Overcoming a fear of spatial distance. As Aby Warburg overcoming in the stated opening of his cultural atlas Mnemosyne: creation of distance "One may consider the conscious between oneself and the external world as the basic act . . . ," and his atlas consisted of a of human civilisation the of historical attempts to create such a mapping

into the present, and continued subsequent a in of late has played central role the self-diagnosis modernity. Hence the "non-places" of supermodernity analyzed by Marc Auge: the railway stations, the airport departure lounges, hotels and large stores inwhich no one is at home.57 Italso recurs in Deleuze and Guattari's which, analysis alternating space and a sedentary "striated" space, consciously recalls ancient distinctions between the nomad and the maps the difference onto farmer, and unexpectedly of the spatiality of the capitalist city, between a disorganized "smooth"

and Guattari's distinction.58 Deleuze Riegl's haptic-optic a of theme revisiting recurring in many of Riegl reprises the authors outlined above: an articulation of the as to reference present by primitive origins. Moreover, or Auge indicate, this ismore the examples of Deleuze than merely a trope of modernist primitivism.

54. Aby Warburg, "Mnemosyne?Einf?hrung" Institute, No. 102.1.1, p. 2. Warburg 55. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space (Cambridge, 2001). states at the conclusion 56. As Warburg of his Pueblo modern

in Warburg Mass.: MIT

Archive, Press,

lecture on

the

50. Alois

Riegl,

Volkskunst,

Hausflei?

und Hausindustrie

in 1894. First published (Darmstadt: M?ander, 1978), pp. 9-10. 51. See, for example, Kunstindustrie Riegl, Sp?tr?mische (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche 1992), first published Buchgesellschaft, in 1901 ;Die Entstehung in Rom (Darmstadt: der Barockkunst Wissenschaftliche 52. in 1908. 1987), first published Buchgesellschaft, T. E. Hulme, and the Speculations. Essays on Humanism of Art (London: Routledge, Philosophy Kegan & Paul, 1949), p. 87. as a Factor in Art and 53. Edward Bullough, Distance' "'Psychical an Aesthetic Bullough published (London: in 1912. in Aesthetics. Principle," Bowes and Bowes, Lectures 1957) and Essays, pp. 91-130, ed. first E.

threaten to lead the planet back into chaos. The are destroying the telephone the cosmos. Mythic and . . . space for devotion or reflection, space symbolic thought create is then murdered which connection." electric by the instantaneous Aby Ein Reisebericht (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1996), Warburg, Schlangenritual. p. 56. who telegram and to an Anthropology of Introduction Auge, Non-Places. trans. Howe (London: J. 1995). Verso, Supermodernity, 58. Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux. trans. B. Massumi and Schizophrenia, (London: Athlone, Capitalism 57. Marc 1988), p. 474 ff.

dirigible of distance,

Indian serpent rituals: "The modern Prometheus and the invented the Icarus, Franklin and the Wright brothers, who are precisely of the sense those ominous airplane, destroyers

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RES 47 SPRING 2005

Sublimity Warburg,

at the origins

and others offer a Hulme, Riegl, Worringer, a that modern combines moving myth nostalgia for the man with activities of the wild spontaneous primeval to Western of the the release Enlightenment's gratitude to nature from servitude and the unknown. The subject man turns to art to to nameless wild terror, an give form event in achievement that prefigures the Enlightenment's own from its past. creating distancing pre-modern is faced with an experience of Clearly the primitive the sublime, but what kind of sublimity? A dominant notion it with representational of the sublime equates "a break or inadequacy, as, to quote Meg Armstrong, the ideal of the whole and the rupture between of the real."59 This is the sublime incoherent experiences

on the other side, the realm of the external as such which, released from its a fixedly secure unification with the spirit, now becomes . . ."62 empirical reality purely For Hegel, however, the sublime is to be found not at the point of the culminating elsewhere; dissolution of artistic beauty but at its origins. For it is art that is the art of sublimity, and as iswell symbolic reconciles itself within and under known, symbolic art ismarked by conceptual an to determination?art find appropriate struggles external form, not because that Idea exceeds the bounds as pure, non-negated of representation, but because, evident it lacks content.63 This becomes of being, in various ways, but the basic logic of the in Hegel's situation is best described, perhaps, comments about the pantheistic character of the For here the indeterminate Absolute is symbolic. immanent in all existence, which means that, on the affirmation

...

the bounds of Kant, inwhich certain phenomena exceed or size their of representation complexity. Or, as through Kant states: "a feeling of displeasure arising from the in the of the aesthetic inadequacy imagination . . . ."60 Yet this boundlessness estimation of magnitude to these accounts, for is essential does not grasp what seem more to with establish the drive concerned they there is none, rather than the struggle to meaning where come to terms with an experience of overwhelming sees Kant sublime experience complexity. Although when one is faced with the empty expanse occasioned an experiential of the desert or the ocean, overcoming lack is generally distant from his concerns. Malinowski's in essay again offers a clue to the kind of experience sees as to art linked for there he question, inextricably "a state of dislocated modified to "[fill] the void which sober
its breast."61

of the hand, every empirical being is an emanation Absolute but is, at the same time, no more significant than any other. As Hegel states, ". . . since the One is this thing and another and another again and rolls through all things, the individuals and particulars and for this very reason appear as superseded leads to numerous [. . .]."64This problem vanishing turns to the theogony solutions; Hegel most immediately of the Bhagavad Gita, and Sufic mystical poetry, but the is the prevalence best-known manifestation of hybrid or in the of India the Hindu sphinx of sculpture figures Egypt.65 to trace the origins of art back to the Hegel's decision biblical lands of the Fertile Crescent, together with the Persia other old-world cultures of India and Zoroastrian is curious. Itappears to be peculiarly limited, for it excludes North America, and the South the objects of becoming in the early nineteenth attention increasing ethnographic can In this exclusion be seen as a century. part, China, Africa, Seas, all of which were reflection of the colonial nineteenth-century stated that Africans "do for example, Hegel notoriously not attain to the feeling of human personality, their mentality is quite dormant, remaining sunk within in early views widespread In the (1817) Europe. Encyclopaedia

one

consciousness" reality always

that seeks in contains

it is necessary In order to address this kind of sublime to turn to Hegel. The sense of a dislocation within in Hegel ismost often associated artistic representation with romantic art, that stage where Geist has progressed sensuous to a point where the Idea exceeds Sensuous thus no longer embodiment. representation with the content of the Idea but enjoys congruence instead suffers from a relation of pure externality. Or, to cite Hegel, "in romantic art we have two worlds: a spiritual realm, complete in itself, the heart which

itself

59. Meg the Sublime Aesthetics

Armstrong, inAesthetic

"The Effects of Blackness: Theories 54 of Burke

Race and Gender, and Kant," Journal of trans. P. Press,

62. 63. without

(3) (1996):214. 60. of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant, Critique University Cambridge (Cambridge: Guyer and E. Matthews 2000), p. 141. 61. Malinowski (see note 17), p. 73.

and Art Criticism

Georg Hegel "The sublime

finding for this representation." adequate 64. Ibid., p. 365. 65. Ibid., p. 367.

(see note 31), p. 527. to express in general is the attempt the an object which in the sphere of phenomena Ibid., p. 363.

infinite, proves

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Rampley: The ethnographic

sublime

259

and making no progress."66 Africa cannot take part in the historical development of Geist because Africans have not yet progressed beyond the first negation of in the immediacy of sense consciousness's immersion can be found, too, in the comments Similar certainty. Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1830-1831 ).67 a he offers rather different Elsewhere, however, account. In Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion about Africa, the Mongols, (1827) disparaging the and "Eskimos" China, abound, too, but it is notable that Africa at least has a place in the scheme of the history of religion, in contrast to the Lectures on Fine Art was simply absent. it In addition, it is (1823), inwhich in terms of a logic parallel described art. Thus, practising the first stage of religion, which Hegel terms "religion "Negroes have an endless multitude to that of symbolic determinate of magic," the comments

non-conceptual when notional

reality

is something

which

emerges

gets caught in an self-development to itself."69 and becomes inconsistency, non-transparent The sublime is thus no longer a relation between the a its and but within dislocation the subject object subject itself. This clarifies both the relation between Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art and Kant's Critique of

life of the (1790), and also the subsequent Judgement modern tale of In For Know Not What fairy origins. They Do some Zizek of the various (2002) They explores fantasies of the origins of civil society, including Rousseau's social contract. Founding fantasies try to articulate (and cover over) the void at the heart of the social order which is itself a magnification of the fact that the subject is in turn merely the name for the "missing link" in the signifying chain. To cite Zizek . . fills out a void himself, "the fantasy object. constitutive of the symbolic order, its vicious circle; it serves to obscure the fact that any given field of in a way always structured meaning symbolically and precedes itself."70 This last point is presupposes crucial, for fantasies of a primal scene do not simply fill in a missing "gap," they also instantiate the fact that the can never be covered over without void, as constitutive, involved in contradiction. While such becoming fantasies attempt to place the void on the exterior of the signifying chain, the impossible goal of this enterprise entails an uncanny return of the repressed. Zizek into the origin interprets Kant's interdiction on enquiry as driven by the inability to face the of law, for example, act of violence out of which the civil "pathological constitution men of "unruliness" is which grew"?the neither nature nor fully culture. Civil law, which for Kant divides nature from culture, turns out not to be a of nature at all, for the latter, as pure disciplining stands outside the domain of morality. Rather, instinct, human unruliness, the capacity for evil, which the law has to restrain, is a denaturalised nature. At the point where it requires reining in by civil law, the "natural" unruliness of men is already culture. A parallel point has been made by Susan Buck-Morss in a discussion of the relations between the state, the law, and state-violence. The one thing that cannot be legitimized by reference to the law, argues Buck-Morss, is the state's ability to set ultimately the law. The state's monopoly on legal power is hence in its "wild zone," in its capacity to grounded

of divine images which into their gods or fetishes .... The they make nearest stone or butterfly, a grasshopper, a beetle, and the like . . . and if something does not work out or some befalls them, then they throw this fetish unhappiness another."68 As with symbolic away and get themselves art, so the image of the divine in the religion of magic rolls constantly on from one form to another. One for another, in a process of signifier is substituted infinite slippage. locates the origins of art in the Hegel consequently not to attempt simply give sensuous form to the Absolute?that is the definition of all art?but also to find some substitute or replacement for the missing content of the Absolute. The origins of art are driven by a kind of horror vacui?in which of representations existents too both not much and empirical signify in these terms, the logic of described enough. When art the symbolic suggests reworking of Hegel by Slavoj Zizek. The latter stresses the difference between the on of one the absence, Hegelian sublimity hand, and the Kantian sublimity of excess on the other. As Zizek argues, "The standard notion of reality is that of a hard kernel which resists conceptual grasp; what Hegel does is simply to take this notion of reality more literally:

66. Georg Oxford

Hegel,

Philosophy

of Mind,

trans. W. Wallace

(Oxford:

67. man show him as living in a state of savagery and barbarism, and he remains in this state to the is an example of animal man in all his savagery present day. The negro . . . ." and lawlessness Lectures on the Philosophy of Georg Hegel, trans. H. Nisbett History Press, (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1975), p. 177. 68. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy trans. R. F. of Religion, Brown (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 235.

Press, 1971), p. 43. University "All our observations of African

69.

Zizek,

For They Know

Not What

They Do

(London: Verso,

2002), p. xxix. 70. Ibid., p. 203.

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260

RES 47 SPRING 2005

to enforce its legal will: the state is employ violence source and the both lawless of law.71 in the fantasies of the Similar contradictions abound scene of the sublime. On the one hand, the most primal primitive aesthetic urges are seen as arising out of a in nature, on the other, out of a will mimetic absorption to decoration distance that creates a basic and abstraction from nature. Primitive man seeks to create

ornament the parergonal is both logic of ornamentation, outside the circuit of aesthetic experience and also its most basic primitive expression.74 The myth of the sublime origins of art is one of the The many founding fantasies of the Enlightenment. transition of the primitive man from the state of nature is one of that of culture through aesthetic sublimation the most persistent examples of what Zizek terms retroactive causality?Enlightenment its reconstituting own origins after the event. Following Zizek's reading, is reframed. No longer occasioned the sublime by the encounter of with the the (primitive) subject alleged of nature, it is integral to the formation of and interaction. The networks of social signification scene traumatic that primal gives birth to culture turns out to be its aesthetic sublimation through chaos inescapable consequence. to

distance; Warburg speaks of the creation of cognitive at the same time is struck by a but (Denkraum) space fear o? space. For Hegel, Africans are both sunken in nature and also on the first steps on the journey of Geist It is also instructive to analyze Kant in this context. As Gayatri Spivak has pointed out, in the Critique of Judgement Kant sees the sublime as a faculty of modern man; he rules out the "raw man" of New enlightened Holland and Tierra del Fuego from the world of aesthetic "raw man" remains within the judgement. This so-called

to the overwhelming experience abyss of fear, beholden to to the awareness of the rise of nature, unable supersensible within himself: deprived of the "moral the ideas" of culture, the "raw man" experiences sublime merely as terrible.72 This echoes a similar inAnthropology from a Pragmatic Point of assertion View (1798) that places the sublime, as a judgement of taste, beyond the reach of the savage; taste is "a power that confirms one's free of making social judgements" to a community, and the tendency to form belonging social relations is,while natural, also the consequence In contrast the raw man remains in a of cultivation. "crude state of mere private force."73 The ability to transform terror into the ambivalent pleasures of the one of the founding acts of is consequently sublime culture, but it turns out that one needs already to be in order to effect the step from nature to acculturated culture, from terror to the sublime. For Kant the capacity is terror into an aesthetic experience for sublimating the of acculturation; both natural and a consequence the primitive both is and is not capable of experiencing is evident contradiction sublime. A similar constitutive in theories of the primitive origins of ornament. both of a basic is the expression Ornamentation in signification and also of a terror of the lack pleasure we adapt Derrida's identification of of meaning. And if

Anthropology

and the sublime

is a recurrent trope in accounts the sublime Although a the limits of the "primitive," crucial question concerns It therefore becomes of sublimity. urgent to address not racist overtones of Kant, Hegel, and simply the obvious is perhaps the more obvious point of others?this also the limits of a theory formulated to critique?but account for the experiences of theWestern subject. What happens to these notions when they are taken out of the comfortable domain of Enlightenment men? which is, after all, Zizek's primary object of interest? In fact while there are many obvious difficulties with the and modernist sublimity of origins, there are unexpected between Zizek's rereading of the striking congruencies instantiation of the constitutive sublime, as the aesthetic in the of the social, and recent work contradictions literature on art. anthropological In a recent essay on dance among the Mende of the Sierra Leone, William Murphy has explored of applying the notion of the sublime to the possibilities power structures and display.75 In analysis of charismatic particular, Murphy explores the centrality of the notion inMende aesthetics. This alone of kab?nde or "wonder" note not be of except that Murphy specific might can also denote "magic, observes that kab?nde?which to Mende marvel"?is central mystery, political culture.

71. See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe pp. 2-11. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), Reason of Postcolonial 72. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique Press, 1999), pp. 12-13. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 73. Immanuel trans. Mary Point of View, from a Pragmatic Kant, Anthropology 1974), p. 108. (The Hague: Martinus J.Gregor Nijhoff,

74.

Jacques

Derrida,

The Truth

in Painting,

trans. A. Bass

(Chicago: An 25

Press, 1986). University Chicago 75. William Politics: "The Sublime Dance of Mende Murphy, in American African Aesthetic of Charismatic Power," Ethnologist (4)(1998):563-582.

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Rampley: The ethnographic

sublime

261

is endowed with a certain aura of agency marvel, and this is linked, for Murphy, to the charismatic basis of power. In one sense this might be seen as little more than a parallel to the aestheticization of politics Political culture, from the to the Baroque splendour of ancien r?gime absolutism mass artwork of the Nuremburg rallies.76 But something more complex is at work here. Murphy draws on Max explored notion of charismatic Weber's power, central to which the opposition between charismatic power and the aesthetic display of Versailles or routine.77 Where Nuremburg
order,

the king, incarceration, and inmany kingdoms symbolic as the embodiment of divinely sanctioned force, is forbidden from leaving the palace. Nor can he converse with through intermediaries. The king of omniscience and a fool, the model of bodily perfection yet treated like an invalid, unable even to walk without being carried. The king is also a restorative healer and a transgressive sorcerer. In one of the most prominent the case of the Mende, is the son of a (Little Moses) mythic heroes, Musa Wo chief but is also guilty of fratricide, parricide, genocide, mutilation, fraud, incitement to murder, and vagrancy.80 In his multiple identities and transgressions he is the as trickster Zinta Konrad has stereotypical figure and, how what appears to argued, the trickster "demonstrates be marginal or socially peripheral is, in fact, central."81 symbolically This presents a series of founding myths that seek not to mask or stitch together the social quilt, to use Zizek's but rather to lay bare the constitutive wound metaphor, of the social. Far from offering an image of order, such myths present the social as based on irresolvable A similar phenomenon contradictions. has been explored by Suzanne K?chler in the analysis of knots in Ireland.82 As a "knowledge Tahiti, Hawaii, and New knots for for are, K?chler, "responsible technology," a in externalising non-spatial logical problems distinctly In particular, the knot is a metaphor spatial manner."83 for the unfathomable, and contradictory social complex, bonds sustaining various societies which were also linked to questions of social authority. InHawaii, for example, traditionally played a key role in knot-weaving the ceremony of the installation of the king and during his subsequent the role of the king reign. It symbolized as a "braider" of the social strands of society. Indeed, not only did the knot symbolize the social relations it also perpetuated between the king and his subjects, them. As K?chler argues, "The capacity of the knot to fashion a decentered is of paramount spatial cognition importance for understanding how knotted effigies his subjects except is both the embodiment

in analyses

of Western

is

served

to confirm
in contrast,

the existing
". . . refers

political
to the

charisma,

that break through the regularities of the eruptions . . . ."78 One can thus speak of a political world political in inwhich dance, of wonder Mende economy culture, in particular, plays a crucial role as a sublime symbol. And everything about Mende dance in is shrouded mystery dancers and wonder: the energetic movements of are held to derive from occult wellsprings of can be power, in some contexts the feet movements heard as rhythmic poundings but not seen, many dances are permitted to be seen only by initiates of secret In other words, charismatic political authority and power are given aesthetic form, awe a to sense of and astonishment, primarily highlight and for Murphy this can be equated with an aesthetic politics of the sublime rather than with a classical societies, of political order and beauty. Other studies of royal art inAfrica, for example, have examined the way the legitimization of royal authority and tradition in a number of West African kingdoms from Benin to Kongo and Kuba is based on constitutive is paradoxes.79 On the one hand, royal authority in a sublime aura; as the mediator between shrouded the human and the divine, the king's face is shielded, not only to ward off impertinent onlookers but also to commoners on the his Yet from protect deadly gaze. other hand, the king is figured as sinner, as a disruptive aesthetics force. The ornate costume of the king equally serves as a and so forth.

76. See, for example, T. Cochran (Minneapolis: 77. See Max Weber, Organization, trans. A. M. 1947), p. 358 ff. 78. William Murphy 79. Suzanne Preston Form (London: Laurence

University The Theory

Culture Jos? Maravall, of Minnesota of Social Henderson

of the Baroque,

trans.

80. Myths

Donald

Press, 1986). and Economic Parsons (New York,

of Chaos/'

and Talcott

(Washington: 81. Zinta

and Mende Cosentino, "Midnight Charters: Musa Wo in Creativity of Power, ed. W. Arens and I. Karp Smithsonian, 1989), pp. 21-38. Ewe Comic 135-136. of pp. Heroes (London and New York: pp.

Konrad,

(see note 75), p. 566. Blier, The Royal Arts of Africa.

1994), Garland, 82. Suzanne The Majesty Fraser and University of of Mathematics," Enchantment, 57-77. 83. K?chler,

King, 1998). See, too, Douglas Herbert Cole, eds., African Art and Leadership (Madison: Wisconsin Press, 1972).

K?chler, "Why Knot? A Theory of Art and in Beyond Aesthetics. Art and the Technology ed. Christopher (Oxford: Berg, 2001), Pinney op. cit., p. 71.

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262

RES 47 SPRING 2005

can visually that appears

in nature."84

effect a 'body politic' and conceptually at once phenomenal and yet also mystical

warfare."90 category

Art is a "technology of enchantment," "all those technical that encompasses

a key work of recent considering in this aesthetics context, Alfred Gell's anthropological Art and Agency Gell (1998).85 explores a number of wish to focus on his comments issues of relevance, and I on ornamentation. In particular, he focuses on the It is also worth formal, and of decorative ornamental complexity specifically to the the viewer's exceed organize ability practices not in it describe visual field. Although Gell does quite these terms, the crucial factor is the presence or absence Iam using "redundancy," of redundancy. following frequency with which the technical, Gregory Bateson, to denote the repetitive and logical from a pattern that enables one to infer a larger whole small interrupted part, and which permits the distinction to be drawn between information and mere noise, Bateson himself and non-meaning.86 between meaning uses the notion to interpret the formal and structural hierarchies of Balinese painting,87 and Gell argues that it of the principle of redundancy is through a destabilizing ". . .what really functions: that ornamentation art objects is the way they tend to characterizes transcend the technical sch?mas of the spectator, his . . . ."88Using a well normal sense of self-possession of art, the known example within the anthropology canoe prows of the Trobriand Gell argues they islanders, his "are supposed to dazzle the beholder and weaken in art its on founded of is The himself."89 efficacy grip overwhelms and it seduces function as a cognitive trap;
the viewer.

art, music, dances, rhetoric, gifts strategies, especially in order to secure the etc., which human beings employ in their intentions or of other people acquiescence And their and formal complexity technical projects."91 are taken as indices of their having been produced by
magic.

the modernist reading saw ornament as an come to terms to with or fill out the chaotic attempt the semantic void of the real, Gell sees it as precisely secure to it introduces opposite: instability in order Where of social projects and a tool in securing and certain kinds of social hegemony. Yet it does maintaining it also not simply enforce certain social hegemonies, social relations. Gell looks at the example of mediates acquiescence transactions. in the furtherance Ornament becomes function lime containers of the latmul of New Guinea. These as prosthetic extensions of their owners, as

this of their owner's personhood. What objectifications as decorative sch?mas is suggests highly revealing. First, the open that are never exhausted, they communicate is in some sense ended nature of personhood?it of social relations, Second, as mediators incomplete. these and other objects are indicators of the incomplete nature of the social. Conceived of as a chain of as a binding essence of exchange, interactions, "the or transactions social force, is the delay lag between if the exchange relation is to endure, should which, never result in perfect reciprocation, in some but always are Such residual imbalance."92 renewed, objects process of social analogs of the never-to-be-completed are in a process of transaction. As such, they themselves or They are never fully possessed becoming. possessable. is driven by a conscious Gell's writing attempt to art in than aesthetic rather think of anthropological on as a in art mediator terms. Hence the emphasis social relations, but he is clearly also indebted, either in or unconsciously, to Kantian aesthetics consciously in art. his emphasis on the function of cognitive excess Against the notion of the primitive artist as trying to order in the face create some sort of aesthetico-magical of chaos, Gell puts forward the ?mage of art as actually confirming the open-ended, unstable basis both of

It is to is the purpose of such a destabilization? or to in even attain "the order intimidate, dazzle, in the network of of individuals acquiescence or to inwhich intentionalities they are enmeshed" What conduct, in extremis, what Gell terms "psychological

84. 85. 1998). to

Ibid., p. 73. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency

(Oxford: Oxford

University in Bateson, Press,

Press,

and Coding," 86. Gregory Bateson, "Redundancy of Chicago an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University pp. 416-431.

5teps

1973),

87. Gregory Art," in Steps to 120 ff. 88. 181. 89. Alfred Alfred

in Primitive and Information Bateson, "Style, Grace See especially an Ecology of Mind, p. pp. 101-125. The Art of Anthropology (London: Verso, 1999), p.

Gell,

90. 91.

Ibid., p. 43. Alfred Gell, Today/ Gell

and the "The Technology of Enchantment Gell, Art and Aesthetics, in Anthropology, of Technology," Enchantment and A. Shelton Press, 1992), p. 44. (Oxford: Clarendon J. Coote

ed.

'Anthropology 2002), p. 282. 92. Alfred

and Magic," "Technology ed. Jonathan Benthall 85), p. 81.

in The Best of (London: Routledge,

(see note

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Rampley:The

ethnographic

sublime

263

and of the social as a whole. The personhood and one's interaction individual social, personhood, with artworks are, to use Gell's phrase, perpetual "unfinished business." is The notion of distributed or "fractal" personhood to art in of small-scale much of Gell's key reading societies. A striking instance of this can be seen in a individual well-known Polynesia, one of the few relics of the indigenous religious practices that existed before they were wiped out by missionary activity, and represents a god made of many on gods. In addition to the proliferation of homunculi idol from Rurutu in the Austral which has been in London since Isles in 1822. It is

Far from astonishment, indeterminacy, incompleteness. art it an of such makes the "void" the Real, covering up in it the operative principal, contradictory internalizing of dance, the aesthetic myths of kingship, the wonders function of figure of the knot, or the destabilizing
ornament.

For Zizek everything hangs on the traumas of the in its Western attempting to come to terms with subject own constitutive a Is lack. structural there, perhaps, inwhich is connection between cultures subjectivity the link in an unfinished chain, thought otherwise?as as incomplete, as relationality to others?and the terms would in Enlightenment positive courting of what of the impossible kernel of the real? be an experience This remains open to further investigation beyond the it raises limits of this article. Undoubtedly, however, an for of important questions potentially understanding the sublime and its cultural and political functions.

the external surface the idol is also a container, and it is now empty, there are good reasons for although small figures similar to that it once contained supposing those adorning the surface. It is tempting to see this simply as positing the god as somehow ruling over the as symbols of the tribe, clans, or individuals. as homunculi that Except they are replications of the a in the case and pattern observable repeat larger figure in from of genealogical elsewhere representations homunculi of other bodies ad Polynesia. The god is composed infinitum. What these indicate, Gell argues, is a fractal one person is simply a link in an notion of personhood; ongoing chain: "any individual person is 'multiple' in the sense of being the precipitate of a multitude of is instantiated each of which relationships, genealogical in his/ her person."93 Being a person is being in relation to an infinite chain of others. Ibegan this article by considering the myth of in the work of Hegel and others, sublime origins which, formed one of the founding fantasies of Western in general. Zizek aesthetics and of the Enlightenment inverts the meaning of this primal scene; the terrifying encounter of "primitive man" with the meaninglessness of nature, his attempt to render life bearable through is now the Enlightenment's aesthetic sublimation, attempt domain at sublimating its own traumatic kernel. The of the sublime is thus the founding void at the heart of the social. Yet while this modern fairy tale may seem no more than that, the sublime has found a peculiar afterlife in recent anthropological theory and

writing. Not through the revival of some aesthetic, but through the recognition of neoprimitivist in which the social role of art inmany small-scale ways societies depends on the aesthetic foregrounding of ethnographic

93.

Ibid., p. 140.

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