Diderot and Modernity

Abstract

The history of art in France is a recent discipline: it commands neither the secular capital of erudition nor an established institutional role, as is the case in Britain and Italy. These historical reasons explain in part the increasing tendency of current historiography towards connoisseurship: in France over the last twentyyears a rigorous erudition has developed which reveres the British model, is exclusively reliant on two complementary modes of a certain kind of learning attribution and the catalogue and defines itself above all by a reaction against a literary discourse on art, the latter being a kind of national tradition. This generation of neophyte connoisseurs has undeniable merits: they continue to devote themselves with inexhaustible zeal to the immense labour of cataloguing works in public collections. But what was initially a salutory reaction is today not sustainable without pernicious consequences: this new 'science' turns towards positivism. Thus it is that attribution, which should only be a (worthy) tool of knowledge, is in the process of turning into a veritable mystique of the right name, whose exclusive proliferation replaces the exegesis of works of art, with a fetishism which would make Morelli and Berenson blanch. By virtue of a pious reverence which would stupify historians themselves, the idolatry of the archive, of documents, of the pure fact, in the end sterilises commentary. In short, the dominant historiography is suffering from a generalised crisis of interpretation, which smacks of masochism: this suicidal disaffection is the very negation of its vocation, which is, unless we are mistaken, of an hermeneutic nature. There are at least three fundamental reasons for this evolution. Firstly, a dread of subjectivity obsessively haunted by a return to the obsolete style of great prose on art, which stretches from Elie Faure to Malraux. The second reason concerns epistemology: the formation of modern erudition began during the early 19th century around a series of elementary concepts naming, classifying, distributing which relate to a practical imperative: establishing an inventory of works in the public collections which had recently been created, multiplied by the art seized during the Revolution. In this way, and at the same time as for the other classificatory disciplines (botanical taxonomy, medical nosology ...) there was established what Michel Foucault, in Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things), called an epistemological base. This institutional requirement, which continues to be pertinent, was reinforced by the speculative mechanisms of the market collectionism is essentially patronymic: it is interested above all in artists' names. The third reason is more conjunctural: the conceptual regression of the human sciences, beginning with the critical disciplines, whose premises, inheritedfrom structuralism, have become subject to a dubious revisionism. Now, this has occurred at the same time as historiography, mastering the procedures of knowledge, required a reflexion on method in other words, at the moment when it should be passing from the pure stage of precritical erudition to the critical stage of a modern conceptualisation. It is thus easy to exploit the decline of Freudianism to forbid any reflexion on art which takes account of such essential contributions as those of Freud or Abraham, or more recently of Schapiro or Thevoz. The (legitimate) criticism of Marxism is equally a perfunctory argument with which to censure any research in social history which is inspired by the classic analyses of ideology (Gramsci, Althusser), or, more generally, of the relative autonomy of cultural phenomena (Lukacs, Marcuse). These are only two examples amongst many. The rise of positivism in France, in favour of what Lyotard, in La condition post-moderne, has called the crisis of great systems (of explaining the world), and of the infatuation for philosophers of empiricism (the belated vogue of Popper), objectively favourises the fixation of dominant historiography on Practices derived from straight philology. The article which follows was first published in the catalogue of the enterprising exhibition Diderot et l'art fran~ais de Boucher 'a David (Paris, H6tel de la Monnaie, 1984-85). Not, however, without eliciting polemic: its most conspicuous references (to Althusser) earned it some dyspeptic commentsfrom a certain quarter of the right-wing press, which easily confused anathema with discussion. Such controversy in no way encourages the progress of ideas, and is without interest. The sole objective of this article is to make a modest contribution towards encouraging what the history of art in France, at least most lacks: debate.