Michel Leiris and the Power of Art

Abstract

Art, for Michel Leiris, acquires its potential to re-enchant a rigidly rational and ordered world from its autonomous status, always at a remove from the laws and codes that govern society. (1) The autonomy of art, rather than disabling its political dimension, permits it to comment critically on the sociopolitical field. In Cinq etudes d'ethnologie, Leiris links the work of democratisation with artistic experimentation; revolutionary art does not propagate a certain ideology, but through its reformulation of, or break with, conventions, it can delineate the contours of the new. If art has to espouse a particular ideology, it loses its revolutionary spirit, since it ends up repeating stereotypical ideas that maintain rather than disturb the status quo. Leiris therefore stresses that we can only foster revolutionary art if we give free rein to investigation and experimentation: Travailler sans directives donnees de l'exterieur, sans idees preconcues--ou presque--et comme s'il allait a la decouverte, c'est sans doute le meilleur moyen pour l'artiste ou l'ecrivain d'echapper aux stereo. types et de faire ainsi oeuvre vraiment authentique et creatrice. (2) To demand that art should act as an expedient for a political cause risks weakening its force as an autonomous realm that can attest the radical difference that gets concealed by the attempt to understand and rationalise the world through a particular ideology. The relationship between art and politics constitutes a persevering theme in Leiris's writings. In Fibrilles, the third volume of La Regle du jeu, Leiris radically questions the overarching aim of the autobiography: that of discovering an ethics of poetry, the of the game, that would articulate artistic innovation and socio-political concerns. He doubts this aim, when he becomes aware of its potentially self-cancelling character. (3) Such an ethics, if it were truly possible, would convert the aesthetic process into a bureaucratic procedure where artistic effect could be calculated or predicted m accordance with a preestablished set of rules or criteria; this would destroy the inventiveness proper to art. However, Leiris fears that without this wider aim, artistic production risks slipping into pure solipsism or mindless play without wider relevance. He therefore has to conceive a way of giving up the desire to formulate the rules of the game in a concrete form, without giving up the promise held out, in a larger perspective, by aspiring to it. At the age of 68, in Frele bruit, the final volume of his autobiography, Leiris laments still being haunted by the friction between the demands of the voice from within and the need for political activism from without: 'rude epreuve pour qui l'affronte en poussant l'oubli de sol aussi loin qu'il peut mais, en aucun cas, n'acceptera de mettre en veilleuse ses capacites critiques [...]. (14) As Leiris implies here, unwavering commitment to a political project might involve suppressing personal concerns or desires in the name of the collective cause. Such an act of self-negation could prove problematic insofar as knowledge of social and political phenomena, for Leiris, can only be acquired by studying their impact on the self. His insistence on the link between social consciousness and self-awareness founds his innovative approach to ethnography which combines anthropological observation with the self-reflection of autobiography. (5) Leiris's understanding of the role of the ethnographer relates closely to his vision of the role of the poet in revolution. Leiris, in L'Afrique fantome, questions ethnographic assumptions about scientific disinterestedness, by foregrounding the constant interaction of subjectivity and objectivity, imagination and reality in any study of cultural otherness. (6) The self constitutes the ethnographer's sole instrument of observation and it is through recognition of the fallibility of this tool, ambiguously placed as it is vis-a-vis the other, interposed between identity and difference, that the ethnographer can begin to reflect critically on his object of study. …