"This book is alive": On Charismatic Art and Vitalist Criticism

In this lecture, Stephan Jaeger discusses a theory of representation that relates art to the charismatic presence visible in an art that idealizes aura. Citing examples as varied as Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 messianic self-portrait to movies like Forrest Gump, Jaeger shows how the technique of overlaying individuality with divinity in depictions of the human face and being can have a powerful hold over the imagination in life as in art.

Jaeger writes about this lecture: 

The sense that books, pictures and statutes are alive or can come to life is rooted in a Western tradition that defines all forms of representation as ideally “mimetic” or “realist”.  The desire of Pygmalion for his statue overcomes the boundaries between reality and its imitation, and that desire is present in every response to “charismatic” art.  Charismatic representation draws the viewer/reader into a world that is more seductive, alluring, charming, than reality.  It creates the illusion of a higher and grander reality; the viewer wants to live in it and take on the values of that higher world.  Don Quixote drawn so completely into the realm of the courtly romance to transform his identity, is a drastic example of the charismatic attraction of fictional worlds.

Western philosophy of art has tended to ground art in abstraction, and that means, aesthetics assimilates to metaphysics, a move especially apparent in the German philosophical tradition: “Beauty is The Idea shining forth visibly” (Hegel).  This lecture proposes a philosophy of representation that relates art to the human body and the human presence, which “shine forth” in charismatic art either visibly, or sublimated.  The associated mode of reception is not aesthetic judgment, the exercise of taste, or the enjoyment of pleasure, interested or disinterested, but rather participation, an emotional engagement that numbs rational judgment and subjects the viewer to the will of the artwork, as love authority (to name only two charismatic forces) subjugate those in their spell.

Charismatic art has its own mythology, conveyed for instance in the stories of Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice, Narcissus.  I discuss some modern works that reflect on art/literature and its grounding in physical presence: Proust’s Swann in Love Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.  Writers, artists, actors regularly fantasize their “becoming” art.

The move away from realistic representation in modern art has left charismatic effects by and large to popular culture.  They are found in abundance in movies, advertising art, pornography.  I analyze the movies “Forest Gump” and “The Matrix” as examples.

An art that aims at the participation of the viewer also aims at emotional control, manipulation, indoctrination – or, more neutrally – education, as reading of the two films just mentioned will show.  Political movements will always show a strong interest in participatory, mimetic art, since it can easily be coopted by ideology.  Vitalist criticism exposes the motives of charismatic representation and holds them up to rational, critical judgment.  It is “activist” criticism; it has an important role in the shaping of social and cultural values, or in those conflicts and contentions around such values.  It is more directly engaged in those conflicts than the culture of irony, undermining, and subversion that has dominated critical theory in the past decades.