Andrew Hewitt is Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary and Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.

Social Choreography

IDEOLOGY AS PERFORMANCE IN DANCE AND EVERYDAY MOVEMENTBy Andrew Hewitt

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3502-3

Contents

Introduction: Social Choreography and the Aesthetic Continuum………………………………..11 The Body of Marsyas: Aesthetic Socialism and the Physiology of the Sublime………………….372 Stumbling and Legibility: Gesture and the Dialectic of Tact……………………………….783 “America Makes Me Sick!”: Nationalism, Race, Gender, and Hysteria………………………….1174 The Scandalous Male Icon: Nijinsky and the Queering of Symbolist Aesthetics…………………1565 From Woman to Girl: Mass Culture and Gender Panic………………………………………..177Notes………………………………………………………………………………….213Index………………………………………………………………………………….249

Chapter One

The Body of Marsyas

AESTHETIC SOCIALISM AND THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SUBLIME

Dance historians have generally regarded the nineteenth century as a low point in the development of dance as a serious aesthetic form in Western Europe. It is assumed that the balletic tradition, originally developed in Italy and then transported to the French court, effectively disappeared into Russian exile where it was nurtured under the anachronistic absolutism of courtly and state protection. Meanwhile, in Western Europe-after the period of high romanticism when the ballerinas Taglioni and Elssler were feted by the literary and artistic world-dance was reduced to the status of divertissement, or popularized and vulgarized in the music hall. However one might tinker with this broad historical account, it nevertheless seems undeniable that the post-romantic period did, indeed, see a decline in dance’s prestige and in the quality of aesthetic reflection accorded it-that is, until Mallarm took up the critical tradition kept alive in the mid-century by Gautier and made dance a central trope for the poetic endeavor. In this chapter I will begin by outlining what I take to be the stakes of a broad shift from tropes of play to tropes of harmonious social labor in figurations of dance, before arguing that this shift mirrors a broader social rationalization for which dance provided a perfect aesthetic and ideological vehicle. The figures I cover here are essentially literary intellectuals, and thus this chapter will offer little of immediate import to the historian of dance. In order to recontextualize the institutional and aesthetic decay of dance in Western Europe, I demonstrate that the idea of dance nevertheless carried a particular charge for social and aesthetic theorists of the period.

Instead of questioning the accepted dance historical narrative of nineteenth-century decline on empirical grounds, I wish to recast the question in the broader terms of social choreography. What structures of social experience were being theorized or projected in an almost subterranean discourse on choreography, even as dance itself seemed to languish as a high cultural form? I would argue that there was a migration of cultural interest in dance away from the “high” cultural forms toward the newly emerging forms of public amusement and mass entertainment, on the one hand, and toward an emerging discourse of anthropology on the other. The idea of choreography retained its importance, I will argue, by virtue of a fundamental shift in its significance. In brief, my thesis here is that the nineteenth century saw a shift in writings on dance from a Schillerian concern with “play” as the (pre)condition of human freedom to reflections on “work” or “labor” as (respectively) the realization or the alienation of embodied human potential. By the end of the century, the ideal of choreographed labor had become an important component both in social modernization and in the aestheticization of social and political thought. I argue that by the late nineteenth century, reflections on dance centered around the question of work in two important ways.

First, dance was invoked as a way of thinking about the kinds of work, both material production and ideological reproduction, necessary to the production of a cohesive social order. Meanwhile, in the social sciences of the time, increasingly complex Western societies began to confront “primitive” and supposedly “integrated” social orders through the prism of anthropology. Whereas moral judgments of “primitive” societies led to condemnations of uncivilized savagery, a focus on dance allowed for viewing such societies in terms of their ritual enactment of a social cohesion that was singularly missing from the rationalized, and increasingly mediatized, West. As industrial society fractured across class lines and the growing political hegemony of the nation-state made any internal fissure seem dangerous to the welfare of the commonwealth, it seemed that the production of social cohesion had become increasingly hard work. Dance would serve to figure a kind of work-again, both material and ideological-that might actually be pleasurable. In a second sense, however-as an aesthetic phenomenon-dance also served to foreground the problematic nature of the idea of work when applied to the arts. What work does dance produce? Is dance useless-or, more charitably, “disinterested”-because it produces no object, or is the absence of an excess or residue that might be characterized as the “object” of the dance rather the realization of an aesthetic ideal of self-immanence, as the symbolists hoped? In short, is dance more, or less, legitimate as a form of art because it produces no object? I wish to argue that these questions presaged debates within the twentieth-century avant-garde concerning the problematic nature of the (fetishized) art object. I wish to argue also, however, that these two parallel debates in fact intersected in interesting ways in a tradition of what I call “aesthetic socialism.” The figures making up this tradition-as presented in this chapter, primarily the literary sages of nineteenth-century Britain-envisaged a social choreography that cannot simply be conflated with the forms of aestheticized politics produced in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Although by the end of the nineteenth century dance had been eclipsed both as a respectable aesthetic form and as a figure for democratic social order, it nevertheless reemerged in various compromised, “eurhythmic”-and, indeed, eugenic-forms. By the end of the nineteenth century, strikingly contemporaneous with the emergence of anthropology as a defined and respected discourse, there emerged a new, conservative strain of thinking about social choreography across Europe. Inspired by a Schillerian vision, this stream of thought nevertheless took quite antiliberal forms. Thus, for example, Herbert Spencer in an article from 1895 would cite dance in support of a hierarchical and vertical social order quite different from the horizontal interlacings of Schiller’s “English dance.” Referring to “those savages who have no permanent chiefs or rudimentary kings,” Spencer notes that such societies generally lack any professionalized or theatrical conception of performance-“among them these incipient professional actions are scarcely to be traced.” Spencer’s linkage of dance to the process of social distinction and differentiation, or to what we might, in technical terms, refer to as rationalization, perhaps indicates an answer to the demise of “democratic” social dance as a cohesive social trope. The social order implicit in Schillerian dance was no longer relevant to a century in which modernization would turn on the emergence of technology and the rational operation of a technological rather than simplistically “democratic” order. Spencer is concerned with the absence, in savage societies, of any theatrical dance. The social differentiation necessary to establishing a class of dancers-necessary, one might say, to the institutionalization of the aesthetic-is lacking, thereby serving as a signal of a society’s backwardness. Thus, we might argue that from Spencer’s perspective the reappearance of dance in the early twentieth century as a highly specialized and professionalized phenomenon-in the form of the Ballets Russes-reflects a process of discursive rationalization that both isolates the aesthetic and deploys social and performative distinctions to reconfigure social order.

Although my focus in this chapter is on a tradition of British thought running from Carlyle through Ruskin and Morris to Wilde, the logic of the argument turns on a theoretical distinction between the categories of work and of labor that can most usefully be constructed retroactively. Although I focus here on questions of cultural politics in Britain, I will begin by briefly sketching out the social import of dance in anthropological and sociological writings in Europe in order to highlight a broader choreographic shift from play to work. A wide variety of late-nineteenth-century labor theorists turned to the example of dance in their writings to explicate their notions of a natural labor that might harness and regenerate labor power rather than simply use it up. In brief, they sought to harness the energy and enthusiasm that went into the “playful” performance of dance-particularly in those primitive cultures that were becoming the objects of anthropological investigation in the age of imperialism-to the performance of more legitimate social and economic labor. In the energies both consumed and produced in the enthusiasm of dance they saw a sublime “beyond”-a regeneration of entropic social forces through a vitalistic labor power that passes through and uses the individual. Dance-which for Schiller troped a utopian yet historical possibility, a “sublation of time in time”-now figured instead the anthropological condition of labor.

In The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity Anson Rabinbach, whose historical concerns run parallel to the literary analyses I offer here, has pointed out that questions of production and productivity were central to the work of scientists and social scientists on the continent at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Rabinbach, from the middle of the nineteenth century through, arguably, the end of the twentieth, “the metaphor of the human motor translated revolutionary scientific discoveries about physical nature into a new vision of social modernity.” “The laboring body,” he argues, “was thus interpreted as the site of conversion, or exchange, between nature and society-the medium through which the forces of nature are transformed into the forces that propel society”. By tracing a troubling move from the Helmholtzian optimism of the 1850s-which posited the ultimate conservation of all energies-through to Clausius’s discovery of the laws of entropy, Rabinbach aims to demonstrate how entropy, figured as fatigue, shaped social revolutionary thinking in the latter nineteenth century by taking the form of a materialist idealism or, as he calls it, a “transcendental materialism”. During this same period-the 1850s-we see the emergence in Marx’s writings of an abstract category of “labor power” as opposed to simple manufacture. Tracing these shifts as constitutive of modernity, Rabinbach contrasts them with an eighteenth-century Enlightenment form of materialism:

The old mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century, as Engels never tired of pointing out, was based on the principle that there had to be something beyond matter to explain its movement … With the doctrine of energy, finally, there was nothing beyond matter to explain its motion, no homunculus beneath the table. There was only matter in motion, with energy claiming true universality as the reservoir of perpetual motion of the universe, the source of its labor power. The old dualism of spirit and matter was overcome by a transcendental materialism with its own monadic conception of reality-the unity of matter and energy-as energumen.

I wish to argue that this search for the energumen was also central to discourses of social choreography in the nineteenth century and would culminate in a discourse of what I will call the “physiological sublime.” Rather than tracing the transcendentalism of symbolist and postsymbolist writings on dance to purely aesthetic precedents, I believe that-with reference to Rabinbach’s notion of “transcendental materialism”-we can see this transcendental imperative in the context of a broader late-nineteenth-century search for the origins of social energies. What I propose, then, is an analysis of the resolution of matter and spirit not in an aestheticized spirituality, which is the most common frame of reference for thinking about the relation of dance to literature, but in a materiality redefined through aestheticism. Aesthetic discourse provides a frame for thinking about social phenomena, no less than those phenomena shape our thinking about the aesthetic.

It would seem undeniable that the growth of an anthropological interest in dance at the end of the nineteenth century was related to concerns about the limits of human labor and its status as a component of human nature. In this respect, as in so many others, dance acquired a rather aporetic position because it seemed to indicate the existence of an urge or instinct toward activity among primitive peoples when the working hypothesis of most anthropological labor theorists was the natural idleness or inertia in man. In The Human Motor Rabinbach summarizes this puzzle nicely in his treatment of an essay by the social theorist M. G. Ferrero, who collaborated with his father-in-law, Cesare Lombroso, on groundbreaking works of criminology. “How,” Rabinbach asks, basing himself on Ferrero’s observations, “could the ‘inertia’ so frequently observed among those savage peoples be ‘natural’ given their readiness to self-exertion and energy in dance?”. We shall encounter this philosophical and anthropological confrontation with the problem of “inertia” later in this chapter, where it serves as the crucial counterterm to Ruskin’s very definition of art: ars-as Ruskin frames it-is the very opposite of cultural and bodily inertia. Before we even reconstruct Ruskin’s aesthetic, however, Rabinbach’s analysis serves to remind us that aesthetic questions as to the possibility of a natural culture (such as Schiller posits through dance) were directly implicated in a broader project of political economy that sought to locate the origins of labor power. I wish to argue that this influence of political economy on aesthetic theory was, however, a two-way street. The very terms and taxonomies of political economy, as we shall see, were in part structured by categories derived from the discourse of idealist aesthetic theory.

For the anthropologists of this time, dance was in some ways analogous to the incest taboo in that it constituted a cultural and yet universally occurring phenomenon. With regard to the puzzle of dance as a naturally occurring cultural form, Rabinbach argues that Ferrero and others “found the answer not in the utility nor purposefulness of work, but in the natural rhythms of the body”. Anthropological research into the choreography of “primitives” fed into concerns about labor insofar as it sought to demonstrate, in vitalistic fashion, the existence of a human instinct toward activity, exemplified by dance. In Ferrero’s argument, for example, dance potentially served to refute a basic assumption that “the human spirit tends by nature to inertia.” In other words, the natural-cultural phenomenon of dance promised to reverse a growing cultural pessimism at the fin de sicle that linked physical and social entropy. Dance was an activity that produced a greater social energy than it consumed: it was potentially self-regenerative, it seemed.

Even the hugely influential German labor theorist Karl Bcher-who otherwise took issue with Ferrero in the study Arbeit und Rhythmus, which went into many editions-concedes that “nevertheless, one thing is certainly valuable in the work of this Italian scholar … the premising of his study on an activity that is not a form of work, but to which man in the state of nature dedicates himself with great gusto and diligence: dance.” This instinct, however, was to be thought physiologically rather than psychologically; and, indeed, one of the concerns raised by the idea of dance as a spontaneous activity was the bypassing of free human will that this suggested. As Bcher notes with regard to Ferrero: “Of all the elements that Ferrero deems important in native dances, there is only one that meets my criteria: its automatic character”. Dance was of interest because it promised-or threatened-a human laboring subject deprived of will. In other words, if thinkers and artists on the Left criticized alienated labor as unfree, anthropological research at the same time suggested that dance-which had been used to figure free, organic activity-was, in fact, unfree because it involved no activity of will.

(Continues…)

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