8.1.1 Partial approaches, all powerful

The study of works of art has historically unfolded all its complexity, which is paradoxically reflected in both the reductionism of approaches and the use of a thaumaturgic idealism. Indeed, on the one hand, a specific aspect of the work has been emphasized while forgetting the others: (1) its independent, even autotelic nature, homologated on the basis of the model of the allographic arts, and therefore of a notational score dissociated from the historical context of production; (2) its establishment on the basis of a technè and an executive performance, which links it indissolubly to a biography and a sociocultural environment; (3) its expressive capacity to shape what was not yet one on the cognitive and emotional level; this would guarantee art an unrivalled communicational potential.

On the other hand, a kind of Aufhebung (therefore conciliation and elevation) of its multiple and contradictory aspects was carried out in order to exalt alleged contents of truth: here is then the opening of the worlds capable of rooting values of the absolute, the guaranteed manifestation of beauty or harmony. To this can be added the most formal version of idealism, namely the institutional theory of art. Through the observation that an object’s access to artistic status is a performative act in the art world, this theory seems to render the analysis of the work and even its actual subsistence almost useless, in favor of a mapping of poetics that manages to be validated and admitted to the supermarket of contemporary aesthetics.

While the historical-institutional theory of art (Levinson 1979) seeks to safeguard at least the historical genealogies of the “artistic proposition and social validation” couple according to the reconstruction of intentional and conventional frameworks of relevance, in the most nominalist postmodernist version, the critical aspect is totally lost.

As for semiotics, it has often risked mixing its radical textualism¹ with the idealistic prejudice of the autotelism of the work of art and reducing the aesthetic quid to a specific linguistic functioning: for example, the projection of the principle of equivalence from the paradigm plane (axis of selection) to the syntagmatic plane (axis of combination). Self-reflexivity was then conceived as the internal play of art without the need for any hetero-referential scope, down to a formalistic reduction (appreciation of the plastic composition as such, possibly correlated to very general semantic components, of a mythical or cosmological order).

This reductionist and partly idealistic, even romantic, vision of the (poetic/artistic) work has not failed to leave us interesting results and still significant theoretical directions, such as the fact of grasping in the Jakobsonian principle of projection a search for analogies and homologies internal to the work, according to a desperate or joyfully unsuccessful attempt to remotivate the arbitrariness that intertwines the plane of expression and the plane of content².

As for Nelson Goodman’s theory, with its distinction between autography and allography and its “symptoms of aesthetics”, it could only belatedly meet with interest and development in semiotics, in view of a critical reexamination of the identification between text and work (Genette 1997) and a broader spectrum of specific semiotic functions. At the same time, with the concept of implementation, Goodman (1984) has both supported and exercised an implicit critique of the “institutional theory of art” that is incapable of prolonging reflection on the forms of meaning of the work when it is inserted in a specific space of aesthetic experience.

It was not until the 2000s that semiotics finally saw a systematic shift in semiotics from the isolated study of the work to its insertion within a corpus, even if diachronic studies were still very little developed. Thus, although art has been the preferred field of application of the semiotic method, there are still remarkable delays.

The semiotics of the arts to come will have to recognize its implications in the reductionisms and idealisms of yesteryear without making the mistake of repudiating its past and globally delegitimizing the currents of contemporary aesthetics. On the contrary, even an author like Collingwood, with his Principles of Arts (1934), beyond aesthetic idealism, has shown how to approach art according to an articulation of method and discovery that would be internal to his practices. Today, we could link this articulation to a theory of art in which one would postulate either a refusal of any method a priori (free invention) in order to make semiotic organizations emerge afterwards, or a scrupulous process in order to meet the inflections of chance or the unexpected answers of the matter. This dialectic is an implicit criticism of a demiurgic vision of art in order to inscribe it in a paradigm of semiotic ecology.

8.1.2 A hermeneutic paradigm for a semiotic ecology

The link between semiotics and the arts could only be consubstantial to the common defense of a cause: the capacity of verbal and non-verbal languages to offer a meaning of their own, but autonomously and differently. At the same time, they enter into a productive relationship of reciprocal translation that cultivates meaning but also senses. Yet, in the eyes of other human sciences, an attempt by the semiotics to legitimize the ambitions – even theoretical and philosophical – of non-verbal languages has turned into a pretention to reduce their expressions to sets of figures and signs, to detect codes in their textual repertoires, to guarantee an unambiguous interpretation of the works. Thus, even today, we wish to underline the resistance of the arts to the “clinical” view of a semiotic science that is incapable of dealing with matter and expressive media (for a discussion of Elkins’ 2017 theses, see Basso Fossali (2018)) as well as with the spectator’s embodied perception because of an overly cumbersome legacy from the theory of the linguistic sign.

Undoubtedly, semiotics was tempted to make its procedures easier and to operate a series of reductionist hypotheses, but this approach was counterbalanced by the complexity of the modeling already required for analyses with reduced or even basic “granularity”³. Although today’s semiotics is no longer linked to the reductionist, albeit operative, visions of the 1960s, aesthetics, with a few exceptions, has increasingly distanced itself from a discipline that is still discredited as “sign and code sciences”. in other contributions, we have tried to thematize the reasons for the misunderstanding between semiotic and aesthetic theories and the potentialities of their possible dialogues (Basso Fossali 2002, 2011). Beyond the observation of the uselessness of persevering in the same critical path, it is highly probable that the future perspectives of a semiotics of the arts are no longer linked solely to the confrontation with the proposals of analytic aesthetics or neuroesthetics. Keeping up with current events, or even intellectual fashions, implies the risk of forgetting meritorious traditions of thought and the always opportune dialogical complementarity between different theoretical perspectives in the face of the complexity of the corpus of study.

The need to go against the tide can be embodied today by the defense of a hermeneutic paradigm banished by chronic consumption patterns or by a manipulation of meaning ad libitum in episodic consumption that no longer needs the critical devotion of interpretation. A phenomenology of standardized receptions can do without the attestation of privileged encounters between works and interpreters and without attesting to the catalysis of new meanings in the coupling that binds them. This is why meaning is, on the one hand, grasped as an activation and expenditure of values, according to an economic reason of corporality and society, on the other hand, objectified as an attribution of semantic potential according to a statistical approach⁴. It is clear that considering meaning as a constantly renewing issue that requires a diagnostic evaluation of its finalizations risks no longer being accepted either as a scientific task or as an ethical requirement. In spite of everything, a semiotic ecology of culture remains a project that is still poorly digested and widely depreciated because it does not guarantee immediately homogeneous and repeatable results; moreover, it requires a strong problematization of the relationships between the social actors concerned, their fields of practice and their environment.

Semiotic ecology is rooted in a rather basic aspect of experience: perception, act of utterance⁵ and interpretation can only select a limited number of values (economy) in relation to the “density” of (i) the sensible world, (ii) the social-historical framework and (iii) the textual space. However, the intended meaning must also face the totality of the confrontation with the environment that includes it (dependence extends the capture of values). Ecology shows a kind of double bind of signification: at the same time, it is necessary to choose, that is to say, to make selections in order to “make a difference”, and to accept being overwhelmed by the complexity of the environment, which qualifies the coupling between the subject and his milieu. On the semiotic level, ecology shows that, despite the limitations of relevance of our points of view, indeterminacy or the “not-yet-relevant” haunt our choices (spectral dimension of discourse, see Basso Fossali (2017, section 6.4)).

Once it has been decided to attribute a form of life to the subjects – a form of life that cannot be superimposed on identities forged and exchanged through language games – the same must be done with cultural objects. In this regard, Rastier emphasized that “the artwork never discovers its finality, and even when completed, remains unfinished, inasmuch as it can be indefinitely reworked by other artworks” (Rastier 2016, p. 27, author’s translation). An immediate consequence of this idea is that a nominalist attribution of artisticity (Eco 1989, p. 172) to an object cannot resolve the questioning of its form of cultural life.

8.1.3 Skepticism and responsive aptitude

In relation to the exercise of performative statements that can establish, by a kind of “blessing”, the artistic object as such, we can assume a skeptical position. Stanley Cavell, in his book on Shakespeare Disowning Knowledge, has shown that skepticism is above all: (i) a distancing from what one possesses; (ii) a critique of knowledge, the latter being constructed normally under optimal conditions of experience. At the same time, skepticism does not accept the separation of otherness, just as it does not accept the construction of a transcendent horizon that is distant and intangible, even virgin. Even beyond the relevance of his interpretation of Shakespearean skepticism, Cavell proposes to recognize paradoxically combined aptitudes in art: on the one hand, its responsive and emancipatory character; on the other hand, its propensity to recognize a shared involvement and constant interpenetration between identity and otherness. This double bind only reveals a critical, uncomfortable, even paradoxical position of the discursive and interpretative instances mediated by the work of art. One can immediately appreciate the contrast with the so-called aesthetic distance.

Cavell underlines the mise en abyme of skepticism: from the possible world of Shakespearean characters, he returns to the instance of discourse and vice versa. This should guarantee the positional power of art, which translates above all into an uncomfortable invitation to awaken perceptive potentialities and to mobilize as responding subjects. On this point, we can find full convergence with Cassirer’s lesson: if theory demands evaluation and possibly adequacy (conformity of use), art demands response, a “delayed” response (Cassirer 1944, p. 43). The interpellative power of art is a driving force of history, a history made of reappropriations⁶.

Reappropriation – found in Wollheim’s aesthetics (1980) under the concept of retrieval – does not concern the reappropriation of the artist’s intentionality as such, but the vocation to play the role of wise or skilful mediator between institutions of meaning and the artwork. Of course, there is no need to favor the cognitive over the emotional or the opposite: the aesthetic trait proves to be frequently concerned with the attempt to ward off any somnambulistic or apathetic state in the face of historical drama.

Art is not entrusted to shallow aestheticism if its attachment to in vivo experience means the actuality of the link with a present that is historicized because of the artwork; and in this link, we should not see the transparency of a truth, but the need to reconstruct a double bind with the present: to be responsive, by taking advantage of a spatio-temporal distance, and to be involved, by refusing to believe oneself separated.

In the approach to interpretation, the very attitude of skepticism reveals itself as a willingness to recognize one’s own aporias and blindness: more generally, a proactive skepticism seeks to grasp the patterns of social meaning so as not to learn it too soon or too late – as the figure of Macbeth, studied by Cavell, shows very well. Prophecy as well as ex post commentary and announcements as well as farewells must be discarded, accepting an ecology of non-knowledge (Luhmann). Thus, in order to be an interpreter of the present, art must most often accept to be untimely, to present itself as a work out of play in relation to the apparent self-understanding of social matters.

8.2.1 A non-ethnocentric aesthetics

A welcome reentry of the skepticism of about our argument is the recognition that a general idea of art cannot be abusively imposed. Any working hypothesis in the field of art should accept to go through a critique of this generalization, and if it is finally possible on some levels, it is because its validation has passed through comparative studies concerning other cultures and times. Clearly, this task goes beyond the limits of this contribution and of our competences as well, but we do not want to give up proposing a promising path of questioning.

Despite the strong ethnocentrism and idealism that characterizes thinking about art, the comparative and skeptical approach to our certainties is not new. One example, which is both revealing and memorable, can be found through the figure of Ernst Grosse, which we will use to begin our investigation. He worked in Freiburg im Breisgau toward the end of the 19th Century on a highly articulate and ambitious project to establish an ethnological aesthetic. In his book Die Anfänge der Kunst, published in 1894 and translated into English in 1897 under the title The Beginnings of Art, Grosse presented the following theories:

1. a) there is no people without art;
2. b) the science of art must extend its studies to all populations;
3. c) all civilizations and all forms of art have an equal right to science;
4. d) any work of art taken in itself is only a fragment. To be complete, the artist’s work needs the spectator’s ideas; only in this way is born everything that the artist wanted to create;
5. e) it is impossible to excuse a scholar who in our time is constructing theories about art without knowing that European art is not the only art that exists, art in itself;
6. f) we have never even been bothered to ask the natives for the signification of their drawings⁷.

Reading Grosse’s book, beyond certain initial biases for functionalism (the social utility of art) and for mimesis (the imitation of nature guides all works), one is faced with a very polemical intellectual project against ethnocentrism. This project is : (i) open to all the arts (for Grosse, ballet or popular music are part of artistic expression); (ii) characterized by scientific pretensions that require a comparative approach according to a balance between – we would say today – an etic approach and an emic approach; (iii) animated by an intersubjective vision of artistic creation that defends the theory that the life form of the works is established and can evolve through its spectators or readers.

In 1927, Boas (1955, p. 14) presents the work of Ernst Grosse, emphasizing that Grosse highlighted the articulation in art between practical purpose and aesthetic function, the latter not being ornamental. On the contrary, even “primitive ornament is by origin and by its fundamental nature not intended as decorative but a practically significant mark or symbol”. Boas considers that Grosse indicates a “practical significance [implying] some kind of meaning inherent in the form” (Boas 1955, p. 15). However, it must be understood that this form is an exercise of the nature (a vital attitude) or of the technique (an instrumented behavior), in short, a significant expression of a search for finality.

If welcoming the “art of earliest times” into aesthetics means finally acknowledging that it “is at one with the art of all times” (Grosse 1897, p. 307), then the autonomous and purposeless character of Romantic art is only an ideology that has, in reality, had its techniques (rhetorical as well) and its forms of participation in a more global semiotic ecology. Comparatism must integrate difference and try to understand the role of art in the evolution of civilizations and in the sensitive forms of socialization of material and intangible values.

For Grosse, art has two characteristic modalities: the ability to activate an “immediate emotional factor” (Grosse 1897, p. 48) and the ability to translate other social issues (politics, religion, economics, etc.). Added to this is the conviction that art is not the latest elaboration of an emancipated culture, but the strongest contact with nature: abstraction is also mimesis of nature, to extract forms as a learning process about the stability and complexity of organizations, and to develop techniques that can be used elsewhere (Grosse 1897, pp. 311–12; 2009, p. 315). But the most remarkable consequence of art’s closeness to nature is that in its practice, even if it is devoted to elevating minds, there is still a trace of its original vocation: to participate in the struggle for existence, a resistance (Grosse 1897, p. 314).

Beyond the evolutionary ideology that inscribed Grosse’s thought in his time and which was the element strongly criticized in 1928 by Moritz Geiger (Geiger 2005, p. 189), there is the idea that the search for aesthetic and technical forms was merely a framework of convergent, interdependent values. This is Grosse’s (1897, pp. 311–312) fundamental argument against Herder and Taine for rejecting the determinism of biological and climatic factors on the evolution of culture. Art is a production capable of its own evolution and a partially emancipated response to external factors, in short, capable of distinguishing itself from natural evolution. Art would then be involved in a kind of negative evolutionism, a programmatic and punctual deviation of culture from any form of pre-organization, even if it is natural or linked to an autonomous social domain. Art seems to generate a new symbolization waiting for an answer, because the work is only a fragment that calls for the integration of a new design. For this reason, foreign art can only enter aesthetics as a squared fragment, both autochthonous and cross-cultural.

8.2.2 The (un)manageable nature of primitive art

While the ethnological aesthetics proposed by Grosse is sometimes marked by an excess of generalization and by some questionable preconceptions, the debate on the primitive art that succeeded him has often shown a discreetly reductionist vocation by dealing, on the one hand, with African masks in Picasso’s work and, on the other hand, with the dubious character of the nominal label “art” applied to non-Western aesthetic productions. The discussion on the content of legitimate practices – through a scholarly makeshift job one can reframe the “primitive” – and on the social functions of Western art has given as a paradoxical result the nominalist drift of art, any object being able to follow a protocol of candidacy to aesthetic appreciation. And even this candidate-object was soon dismissed as a now useless prejudice in view of the legitimization of conceptual or relational art.

In her book Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989), Sally Price attempted to present the art of the Maroons of French Guiana and Suriname, based on the reconstruction of the “legitimate aesthetic framework”, i.e. with “its own history”. But this philological attempt implied or induced rejection: (i) by Western art museums, because “any ethnographic contextualization” was considered “alien to the aesthetic character of the objects”; (ii) by ethnographic museums, because classifying objects on the basis of the nominal label “art” was an ethnocentric abuse (Price 1989, pp. 89–122).

However, primitive art was able to serve, on the one hand, to claim an instinctive sensibility below cultural knowledge⁸ and thus to exemplify a liberation of the eye of the connoisseur as an “organ of tradition”⁹; on the other hand, to note the lability of cultural status and functions of art, to such an extent that primitive art is easily reduced to an “exotic curiosity”. The latter is, moreover, the only possible valorization in the face of the loss of the object’s genetic context or its postcolonial contamination. Moreover, if the original implementation framework of the primitive work is reconstructed, it is then perceived as a useless crutch that shows in itself the inadequacy of the object in relation to the concept of art.

Fortunately, after Grosse and Boas, an ethnological aesthetic has developed that has not failed to give some good scientific contributions¹⁰. That said, a whole series of questions have not been satisfactorily answered. Can comparatism escape the project of finding lines of convergence, some properties shared by all aesthetic productions, or even a specific status for art within the semiotic ecology specific to each culture? Is art a symptom of an institutional paradox that is part of the history of each culture? Is there a structural nature of art that can be studied, without claiming to generalize the narratives of legitimation and the practices of enjoyment and evaluation that each culture seems to shape throughout its history? Is the cosmopolitanism of art a federative project of distancing the institutions of meaning internal to each culture?

In relation to these questions, the contribution of semiotics is still of the order of desiderata: at the same time, we would like to find a specific and stable symbolic role for art, but we can only note the gaps that prevent a positive, articulated and reliable answer. As far as the anthropology of art is concerned, the teachings of semiotics are despised and thus non-verbal languages still need tutoring. In this regard, in the catalogue La fabrique des images, Descola argues that “images do not speak for themselves” (Descola 2010, p. 11, author’s translation), which is why their readability is usually entrusted to “conventional categories that are purely descriptive” (Descola 2010, p. 11) of a historical or geographical nature. The risk of reproducing the defects of an iconography that projected literary content onto images in such a way that the visible was merely an illustration with at most a few variants. Having said that, the subjection of the image to literature can be dispensed with by attributing to it a revealing power.

Descola’s idea is that the task of contemporary anthropology is to reconstruct the ontologies underlying cultural practices in such a way as to make explicit the true perception of reality on the part of a given community, a perception that is always filtered through institutions of meaning. In his major scientific contribution Beyond Nature and Culture (2013b), Descola notes that what changes between naturalism, animism, analogism and totemism is the inferential regime of meaning, as there are different presuppositions in the constitution of a world of reference. This idea is applied to the world of art and in particular to the meaning of images, as shown in the exhibition La fabrique des images, held at the Musée du Quai Branly:

The idea that structures this exhibition is that identity judgements are not only expressed in statements, that they are visible in images, that to depict, in short, is to show the ontological framework of reality. (Descola 2010, p. 17, author’s translation)

Cultural type is predictive of a representational and intentional regime, which gives us access to the “system of qualities expressed in images” (Descola 2010, p. 17, author’s translation). Yet each image has the capacity to interpret this value system in the sense that it allows it to manifest itself more or less effectively.

Thus understood, figuration does not refer to formal recipes, iconological archetypes or procedural systems; it makes manifest the links between the structure of an ontology and the means used to make an image represent this structure and make it active. In short, it is a morphology of relationships that we are trying to highlight here, not a typology of forms. (Descola 2010, p. 17, author’s translation)

Beyond this cultural enaction of the ontological framework promoted by images, Descola (2010) admits that there are “expressive functions, if not absolutely universal, at least extremely common” (p. 17, author’s translation). These functions are those relating to pictograms and coats of arms, where there is a strong codification. Apparently, it is the rate of conventionality that reduces ontological differentiation and systemic divergence between one culture and another, which could be counter-intuitive.

The explanation is as follows: the image that does not respond to strong codes is not “mediated by a discourse”, because it is “directly visible in form and content”. Thus, visual art can exploit its “active causality”, its effectiveness being the recognition of an “echo of the ontology with which it is familiar” (Descola 2010, p. 18, author’s translation).

It is clear that primitive or contemporary works are merely multiple reflections (echoes) of an underlying ontological structure without linguistic mediation and endowed with directly accessible signifying power.

Despite this epistemological vision of the meaning of images, which is apparently contrary to a semiotics conceived as a science of mediations, Descola’s lesson had a remarkable impact on this disciplinary tradition. By discussing the specific roles of “culture” and the semiosphere in our civilization, given their opposition to “nature”, we want to show that there are other possible conceptions, well attested in other civilizations. While this objective is laudable, although not new, we should question the status of culture in other civilizations or the very abuse of this category (which reproduces the question of primitive art on another scale); then we should clarify whether we intend to recognize the weaknesses of the institutions of meaning in other civilizations, or whether we prefer to think of a monolithic ontological architecture that frames any production of meaning.

8.2.3 In search of a meaningful place

The concept of art remains rather implicit in this debate on the manifestation and evocation of the ontology underlying the culture of reference. In any case, it should at least be understood whether art is simply interpreted by ontological regimes or whether, on the other hand, it actively participates in their elaboration and renewal.

In the past, with a classic formula of contemporary anthropology, art has already been attributed a very general function, that of displaying the symbolic structure of a civilization. But by stressing that art imposes itself as a “deep play” – to use a typical formulation of Clifford Geertz (1973) – one can only run the risk of acknowledging that this general function (displaying the symbolic structure) is also exercised by practices that have no aesthetic vocation.

Moreover, in the eyes of Descola (2013a, p. 36), Geertz is only the “talented advocate of hermeneutic anthropology” who nevertheless made the mistake of talking about an adaptation of man to his environment, thus reifying the presence of “nature”. In reality, this defender of interpretative anthropology has upheld a vision of man as an “unfinished animal” (Geertz 1973, p. 49) that finds in the inextricable relationship between culture and nature its only condition for survival.

Specifically regarding the subject of our investigation, Geertz has clearly denied that art is a modality of exhibition and consolidation of social values. In this regard, he used passages from an article by Goldwater¹¹ (1973) to argue that artistic texts are “primary documents; not illustrations of conceptions already in force, but conceptions themselves that seek – or for which people seek – a meaningful place in a repertoire of other documents, equally primary” (Goldwater 1973, p. 10 quoted by Geertz 1983, pp. 99–100).

As an aid to research rather than stabilization, art plays an equal role with other social domains, but enhanced where there is no institutional sense that saves the third-party role and the illusory founding character that they would like to embody. The “primary” character belongs to an instituting institution always in paradoxical search for what it has actually instituted, exactly as in the case of an invention in the face of its future symbolic effectiveness, which is still imponderable (even the law has its unpredictable perlocutionary effects).

Another important element in Geertz’s work is that art is conceived as an articulation between complementary and “appropriate skills” (Geertz 1983, p. 103), and in particular as a meeting between technical and analytical capacity¹². This may help to clarify the relationship between the diversity of “primary” documents in search of their “meaningful place” (Goldwater 1973). By operating both a synthesis (technical integration of diverse materials) and an analysis (critical discrimination of normally joint values), the arts signal the path of a possible redevelopment of a cultural landscape through a transfer of relationships, valences, modal loads. But if there is only a “passing of the baton” in a coupling between works and interpreters, both in search of their renewed place, it is because, in general, any totalization of a landscape of meaning is impossible¹³.

There is a real appropriation of the work, against any act of consumption, when the recognition of a dose of fallibility in the interpretation is articulated with the aim of the interpreter to characterize the object analyzed as accurately as possible, according to a competence that remains to be built and a new place to be attributed to it, which the work redefines each time. As for the analyzed object, the work alone can guarantee the balance between the two sides of appropriation (“appropriating” and “being proper to”), but only on the condition of escaping from what the spectator already knows (Geertz 1986, p. 132, quoting Baxandall 1972, p 48: “The public does not need [...] what it has already got”). Moreover, looking inside the object under analysis does not mean participating in a space of homogeneous and self-explanatory values, but finding a distance between primary sources that are not yet reconciled. In art, technè is not satisfied with itself but with its capacity to problematize the conditions of apprehension and conceptualization of a cultural component, to act as a catalyst for an aesthetic, affective and epistemic movement.

What the “period eye” (of the Quattrocento, according to Baxandall’s 1972 study) teaches us is to make oneself available to look at what shows a negative posture, a resistance, a fracture that stimulates participation in other forms and measures. This is a good explanation of a paradigm of complexity in the approach to art. Our view of the otherness of an artistic era cannot be satisfied by reconstructing the competence and ontology of reference, because the recognition or the correct inscription in the institutions of meaning was not the specific goal of the experience mediated by art.

Beyond the various manifestations and civilizations, one may ask whether the structural role of art is merely that of displaying the emancipatory capacities of a culture in relation to its institutions, which are normally very concerned with having to show sooner or later their secondary, even internal, self-referential facade. But what kind of emancipation would art be the manifestation of?

In our opinion, the crucial problem of art cannot be limited to figuratively enacting the ontological regimes of an épistémè and thus accompanying a regulated distribution of the phusis and psyche. Art seems to be exploring semiotic regimes used by practices whose legitimacy should never be taken for granted, even if they self-affirm the meaningfulness of their operations. In this sense, art wants to question the privileged relationship between linguistic mediations and institutions, a relationship that functions as the cornerstone of symbolization systems. Actually, art is not an epistemology in the strict sense of the term, but would nevertheless indicate the possibility of a different life of signs, an alternative ecology in which any rigid (coded) symbolization cannot claim to frame and saturate the meaning of forms of life through fixed, ontologically determined identities. The risky ambition to generalize the role of art in relation to cultural differences would then be partially motivated by the fact that art precisely proceeds to an erosion of founding ambitions of codes, with deviations, tensions, subversions of the administered or attributed meaning.

Thus, access to art could be grasped as a kind of anti-institutional pedagogy, as it is the constant search for meaning that explores an innovative exemplification, not its binding stabilization. At the same time, through art, we show the primary dignity of the semiotic instauration in the face of its vulnerability and uncertainties. Moreover, the interpretative care intended to preserve the precarious complexity of the art object is merely the resumption of a primary task of symbolization: its retroactive significance, which has nothing to do with reproduction, with the representation of an already given order.

If we want to see art as a sensitive version (visible, tangible, sound, etc.) of the profound ideas of a culture, this aesthesic translation would only weaken their institutionalization. Art would only be an institution that proceeds in a direction contrary to institutional interests. As such, it also proceeds against itself, against its self-fulfilling institutionalization. Trying to escape its own “prisons” is a way of showing that there is further meaning beyond the law¹⁴.

Nevertheless, art is not a carnival, a simple reversal of morals, but it reloads a hiatus that needs to be analyzed in depth: a decoincidence (Jullien 2017) that activates a critical separation between interpretative posture and the instituted horizon of living in order to bring about new conditions of thinkability (Ingold 2013, p. 304) and of sensitive apprehension.

8.3.1 Art as a displayed vulnerability of institutions: maestria in minor mode

What may have emerged as a form of general manifestation of the emancipatory vocation of culture, art, would question the dialectic between institutions of meaning and epicenters of creativity, working on gaps that promise further significations before the conquest of a full epistemic mastery of the field. Thus, the technical mastery of art (synthesis) is appreciated as inversely proportional to its possibility of self-observation of its inscription in a previously mapped terrain (analysis). Its experimental vocation is the result of a shift in the coupling between the instances promoting meaning and the reference semiosphere of a controlled skid leading to new balances and “prehensions”. Always wanting to test new nodes of meaning transversal to other social domains, art does not dissociate aesthetic valences to free them from their connections with other “primary documents”, but simply proposes alternative couplings or the recovery of old couplings, after the provocation an episode of cultural vertigo. The “re-coupling” is one with the symbolic effectiveness of art, its positional, cathartic and sometimes therapeutic power, beyond institutional oppositions.

Art can be seen as an exemplification of a symbolic equilibrium that displays the internal play of language games, beyond the performative social scopes, the programmatic discourses that characterize the spirit of the time. If art is a “deep play”, its mission would be to test the very seriousness of games.

In contemporary Western societies, art seems to occur, on the one hand, under a concessive regime of divergence, differentiation of objectives and testimonies of alternative and marginal forms of life; on the other hand, it seems to be a strongly integrated field to protect general aspirations and in particular the ambition not to make us prisoners of our own games.

Behind facade idealisms, art has very limited powers, being reduced to the maestria of a resemiotization capable of drawing new couplings and new solidarizations between valences governed by different institutions. Beyond strictly aesthetic questions, in terms of a symbolic ecology, art would show the cultural assumption of a double bind: to value internal difference beyond programmatic functions and to suggest an increase in the rate of institutionalization in order to defend this internal production of difference. It is a way of saying that art invites us to institutionalize what can compensate for the neurosis of the instituted organization. But this can only have a paradoxical result.

Art would play against the simple administration of values. In this sense, faced with the distribution of the modal loads of programming discourses, art would display “reloading” paths that can find their foundation in the languages themselves. Resemiotization takes advantage of the constitutive vulnerability of languages, in the face of a perception that is insubordinate to any programmatic election of a plane of expression; as much as it takes advantage of the internal virtualities of semiotic systems, which are not only largely unexplored, but are also indicative of an organizational project that is still unfinished.

8.3.2 Art as a fracture of proximity

Our working hypotheses here have the task of criticizing initial assumptions: while today’s emphasis is on modes of instauration, this theoretical emphasis risks overlooking the blanks in meaning and the institutional flaws that art constantly points out. As the promoter of an instituting power, art is also its critic, even its palinody. Art would then have the symbolic power to signal the costs or losses hidden behind institutions by displaying itself in a semiotic state even more vulnerable than ordinary practices of managing meaning. Art would signal endangered potentialities by embodying them. This means that the work of art would not be promoted as a cultural product that takes precedence over other semiotic productions, but as an example of what needs extra care, cooperation and acceptance in order to develop its meaning. Art as a “primary document” must be conceived above all as the risk of a “new beginning”, and not as a claim to primacy.

At the bottom, in a celebrated artwork, there is also a reflection of a practice in constant suffering, with its failed attempts and forgotten products. Strongly anti-economic, the artistic project calls for a semiotic ecology based on heteronomous criteria in relation to the host organization, in order to promote its response and to envisage, despite the initial “irritation”, “significant places” and previously unknown relationships with other “primary documents”.

Using Rastier’s (2001) theory of anthropic spaces, one might note that art proposes a proximal, almost intimate space, while having its foundations of legitimacy in a distal horizon. It turns its back on what has given it a social existence. But not only: art would not accept the vocation of societies to elect their ideals and represent them through idols. on the contrary, art haunts institutions with a divergent otherness that activates contiguous unexplored selections and under an unreconciled regime, i.e. it does not accept the same staging of coded practices. Art is a fracture of proximity that remains heterogeneous according to an allopathic regime, that is to say, the exemplification of a sensitive “other” constitution; an otherness non-negotiable because it is unavailable to be substituted by the spectator’s body or to become a collective experience. Art digs into the antinomy of sharing: dividing and having in common, distributing roles and supporting a person in his or her feelings.

The act of weighing involvements and the aesthetic distance of art need to be institutionalized because the challenge is not to eliminate a fictitious, fractured proximity, a reflection dissociated from the institutionally displayed signs. A hyperesthesia, an unthinking activation of the senses, a homeopathic promotion could only reconstruct a direct implication and a ritual continuity, even agonistic, in relation to the social scene (in this sense, these experiences are outside the boundaries of art).

8.3.3 Allopathic regime and the vulnerability of art

Defending an autonomous domain of art and giving it edges, though porous, means distinguishing it from a diffuse aesthetic. Thus, art would propose itself as the intensive concentration of an aesthetic involvement that must make the gap between, on the one hand, the institutionalized meaning and, on the other hand, a call for an “other” meaning, i.e. sensitive. The latter belongs to us in a negative format of critical unavailability and open existential contiguity.

Certainly, the hetero-referential scope of art does not fail to articulate with the self-referentiality of art, its stratification of praxis, genres, forms of internal mediation, in short, an institutionalization of specific meaning. On the one hand, the problem of a homogeneous scenery, of an agonistic attitude between self-referential forms must be averted. On the other hand, the vulnerability of art in relation to other institutions must continue to be exemplified through respect for the interpreter’s autonomy, for his “proximal” but distinct and singular enjoyment.

It is then necessary to insist on the opposition of art to communicative empathy; already in Aristotle’s work, the allopathic regime of art is affirmed as a condition of true catharsis, which is not promoted by immediate adherence, but by the resistance of a mediating otherness. In art, this seems to be clarified through the refusal of the response of a “naked” flesh of a body (Körper) that does not yet have the cover of a proactive and fully assumed experience (Leib). This resistance to the aesthetic/empathetic fusion is motivated by the demand to obtain the critical encounter between forms of life and to show them, by way of example, the potential but also the vulnerability of their semiotic resources.

The Hamletic problem of art is the upstream choice of presenting a fictitious space to bear witness, in return, to an experiential truth or to indicate a repressed implication. And this testimony does not accept the limits imposed by other social domains.

In turn, the instituted institutions find themselves criticized by the presence of an institution – the art – that fails to go beyond its instituting desire. Indeed, in artistic production, there is always at least a partial discrepancy between the inherited heritage and the promoted forms; and the arbitrariness of languages is exploited as a terrain for a search for an “other”, externalized motivation, oriented toward heteronomous care.

The state of health of the art world is paradoxically characterized by its need to continue to call for help, beyond complaints about its condition of institutional dependence. And yet, art, in its destitution, shows the institutionalizing spirit, its constitution of alternative worlds, although not immediately available for consumption. With the insidious proposal of a fractured contiguity, art obviously escapes from the evidence of the negotiation of meaning. As an institution of meaning resistant to appropriation, art possesses, in its institutional housing, the museum, a space of implementation that has the sole function of continuing to preserve its vulnerable unavailability.

Between abusive exploitation and oblivion, the artwork is penetrated by unresolved tensions that alone allow the preservation of its history and the topicality of its appeal. The ritual of the museum visit should in fact celebrate the anti-procedurality of the approach to the work, the circumstance of a specific relationship that withdraws into a space that is neither that of the institution nor that of the dialogue of private negotiation. The unavailability of the work has been interpreted as an autotely, a “monadological” concentration on one’s own existence, or as the reflection of the artist’s narcissistic aura. Against this romantic idea of an impenetrable depth of identity, the work on the other hand promotes a subversion of the spaces of circulation of values, a disassociation which, internal to traditional genealogies, may well symbolize the emancipatory capacities of a culture.

It is from this re-interpretation of contemporary Western art that we could now question a comparative aesthetics. Beyond ontologies, can we find in other semiotic ecologies practices that question the paradoxes of institutions of meaning by displaying the vulnerabilities and subsequent potentialities of their semiotic resources through “other” sensibilities? Are there products of these practices that function as artworks?

8.4.1 The work and its spaces of relevance

Our working hypotheses have the objective of posing the question of art differently in a comparative framework. Through such hypotheses, the specific character of the current conception of art in the West can no longer be identified with institutional procedures or coded communicative functions.

But epistemological reflections must find a methodological horizon as well. This passage can be appreciated through the semiotic reconceptualization of the notion of artwork: indeed, the latter can appear to us as a text that negotiates the continuity of the modality of public implementation of the object that manifests its identity. Continuity seeks to guarantee respect for an interpretative approach to the detriment of free use. This means that the artwork stabilizes a public transmission of its identity through a pre-organized articulation between the discursive space of the text, the space of implementation that accompanies its modality of social presence and the space-time that has accompanied its material and statutory establishment.

Seeing the work of art in the relations between these three spaces of relevance (discourse, implementation, instantiation) is not an unnecessary complexification, but the attestation of the care it requires in the face of its constitutive vulnerability. Indeed, each space poses its resistances to the integrations suggested by the others, which explains why the identity of the work is not just a package of values to be deciphered, but rather a series of tensions between (i) linguistic rootedness, (ii) form of public circulation, and (iii) historical genealogy. This outlines the “form of life” of the work in which we can recognize identity polarizations that transform and resist over time through fields of integration: material, communicational and genealogical.

In particular, it can be emphasized that a dialectic is established between the fields of integration so that the strong and restrictive codification of two identity polarizations is opposed, because of a system of compensations, to the density of another polarization. For example, an autographic work with a single copy (the genealogical integration of a painting that links it to the history of its production), subjected to a rigid implementation (the communicational integration of the painting into a decorative and evangelical plan of a church), does not fail to oppose such restrictions with an exaltation of the density of its iconic (pictorial) features, its texture, the material mediums and the discursive gestures (brush strokes), everything that makes the work singular.

But what can be noticed for the restrictions imposed by integration fields is also valid for the excessive freedoms they claim, freedoms that will then be compensated by other polarizations. For example, a plural autographic work, such as a lithograph, tends to place restrictions on its relevant textual qualities (in relation to its medias and the accidents of its preservation as a specimen) and its plural implementation in the same space is deemed abusive.

The relationships between the spaces of integration would deserve a more detailed description, but what interests us here is to present them as a critical framework for accessing the “form of life” of the artwork.

Obviously, behind the spaces of discourse, implementation and instantiation, one could recognize intentionalities; however, it is the system of multiple integrations that prevents intentionality from becoming a projection of unilateral and decisive meaning. The stakes of meaning are distributed and the “form of life” of the artwork is connected with different meshes of an open and evolving cultural environment.

8.4.2 Cultural identity between analysis and interpretation

Finally, we can propose a new distinction between analysis and interpretation: analysis can only separate investigation from discourse (semiotic enactment), implementation and instantiation, which implies the use of different methodologies and the crossing of disciplinary boundaries¹⁵. Interpretation, on the other hand, can only triangulate the fields of integration, through possible “anamorphosis” of its view of the work, which can be assumed as a document (dominance of instantiation), as a discourse (dominance of semiotic enactment) and as an institutional object (dominance of implementation). Anamorphic tensions and the three axes of negotiation never exempt interpretation from maintaining its integrative character in order to:

• – look at the local organization of discourse through the general framework of implementation;
• – take into account the past of production from an archaeological perspective (Foucault 1972) that starts from the “present” of the discursive traces of the semiotic enactement;
• – grasp the discursive formations that set up a space for implementation through the transmission of a cultural object rooted in a genetic past.

Naturally, we must admit that there are many tensions at play, but these remarks already lead us to change the traditional conception of “cultural identity”; the latter would be immanent to a single manifestation only through a combination of neutralizing effects of its possible reproduction and transcendence of manifestation. What always underlies such neutralizing operations is a coupling relationship that reveals the impossible isolation of any immanence. To illustrate this conclusion on the immanence of coupling, we can think of the question of fidelity to the unique copy of the work of art; although there is the concrete, or theoretical, possibility of a substitutive manifestation totally indiscernible from the original, the exclusive legitimacy of the authentic copy depends on the coupling with the author during the productive history of the work. In the same way, the possibility of accepting the fragmentary condition of a work depends on coupling with an uninterrupted chain of witnesses; the delimitation of the relevant copies for a multiobject sculptural work, or the number of legitimate variants of the same poetry, is acceptable only in coupling with the intentionality of the artist and the attestation of his/her performative acts.

The autotelism of the work of art, capable of forever setting the conditions of its experience, has been an aesthetic mirage that has sometimes become the exemplary model of the cultural object. On the other hand, the very defense of a material immanence that does not allow reproduction or reintegration depends on a series of coupling and neutralization operations.

8.4.3 Methodology and knowing anew

We can then end our development with the idea that a science of art is skeptical about the critical scope it should exemplify. Without doubt, science should not celebrate the work of art, but, if it does not have the vocation of maximizing the presumed values of the artistic object, it must recognize the dignity of the latter as an operator in history and in the present, which means that we must both philologically reconstruct the conditions of its form of life and understand the creative impulse to which it bears witness.

A science of art is called upon to be critical because its object of study is the exemplification of the paradoxical cohabitation of antinomic characters in cultures. The task of art is not to resolve paradoxes, but to attest how they are displaced and rearranged in cultures and in their historical phases. Only a science of complexity can deal with art, a science that seeks to reconnect links, unnoticed implications, not to deploy meaning, but to put it in tension. Its critical perspective is constructed in contrast to the transmission understood as a simple conveyance, a transport of information. This vision can ward off the temptation of the human sciences to propose themselves as an ars magna, a pragmatics of optimal conduct, with its analytical protocols as a unilateral, even exclusive, example of validated rationality.

On the other hand, if science can analyze works of art, art may well question the meaning of science. Aristotle stressed that “poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” (Aristotle, Poetics, IX) as a science of facts. The mimétikè poïésis would have an interpretative primacy which, in our opinion, is in the paradox of a fiction that offers itself as a competitive, alternative model of coded self-understanding protected by an autonomous domain of regulated values. Obviously, art does not want to go beyond history, but only to anticipate a characterizing vision where each passage through the same cultural topos requires a reconfiguration, in short a new critical interpretation. Art reminds history of a critical requirement in the face of the coming present and the past, which must continue to be “born” in its most proper origin: and this does not happen through a search for purity, but through the recognition of instruments of objectification, mediation and internal modeling. By representation, imitation does not concern things, but the practice of knowing and producing them. One does not imitate the vase but the potter’s art (Melandri 2014, pp. 55–56).

Melandri stressed that Vico is not Dilthey, and the distinction between natural and civilizational sciences is not the same as the distinction between Natur and Geisteswissenschaften. For Vico, the human sciences are not based primarily on epistemic principles, but on techniques and arts: this is the scienza nova. In the Yale seminars, Cassirer asserted that “we can regard the introduction to Vico’s work as a new Discourse on the Method” (Cassirer 1988, p. 121, author’s translation) and “there is no other field, he says, in which the human mind is closer to itself than in history” (Cassirer 1988, p. 121, author’s translation).

The factum is not a datum, but what has been produced and experienced in a solidarity between facticity and comprehension (Melandri 2014, p. 58). Thus, science in the humanitas is only responsibility squared, res gestae that insist on other res gestae: double implications, increased focus on the acted and on the preconceptions that reveal their successes or their disasters. There is no renunciation of an apprehension capable of objectivizing relationships, but it must be considered that these relationships develop additional links.

Naturally, there are only “recoveries” of a truth to be understood, mimesis being necessarily a dynamis, but this recovery requires a re-involvement according to the two focal points of knowledge: scientific distance and the art of managing relationships, given the interpenetration between the observation system and the environment, between identity and otherness.

The term “resipiscence”, suggested by Melandri, is interesting in this respect; it indicates a “re” (again) “sipere” (know), knowing anew, return to a correct view according to a progressive emendation of the text (singular) and a possible amendment of the laws (general). If we conceive art as a symbolic form, it should be stressed that this emendation is quite paradoxical, because it invites the recognition of a methexis, therefore of a participation, but only on the condition of having previously given an exemplification, suggesting an appropriation of values through an “other” form of life.

If a work of art is intended to have a passional efficacy, it must be based on an allopathic signification, i.e. a manifestation of affection mediated by a fictional alterity (the character is the “pathetic focus”, not the actor as such on stage). In art as a symbolic form, separation and stimmung (common tonality) can cohabit as tensive and dualistic semiosis, framed by genres and registers that express differently the cohabitation of the singular and the institutional in a discourse with a constitutive polyphonic vocation. Art is always “bilingual”, as Lotman liked to point out. If the result of art is not a sterile scepticism, in parallel, we can affirm that it will not be of the order of sophism, because the smallest possible world housed within the discursive framework, insubordinate to linguistic government, will be able to make us discover a core of meaning “offscreen” and thus affirm itself as a revealing interpretant of the discursive attitude itself.