Arte Vida y Finalidad Ranciere PDF

Art, Life, Finality: The Metamorphoses
of Beauty
Jacques Rancière
How can we understand the common logic that sustains, within the
aesthetic regime of art, ideas of art and beauty that seem to stand in abso
lute contrast: beauty as an object of disinterested satisfaction and beauty
as the adaptation of a thing to its function; art as a practice defined by its
own ends and art as a practice whose destination is to become one with
prosaic life? My contention is that life is the notion that allows us to over
come those contradictions by bridging the gap between the varying and
contrasting ideas of finality that the two ideas of art and beauty carry out:
life or—more precisely—a certain idea of life. This idea of life, proper to
the aesthetic regime of art, works by disconnecting and rearranging the
relations between the notions at play in the definition of the ends of art
and the criteria of beauty; it disconnects the power of the form from the
implementation of a concept, the appearance of the beautiful from the
perfection of an organism, and the use of a thing from its utility. Those
disconnections and rearrangements create the unity between two appar
ently incompatible ideas of the relation between life and art—life as the
inner power animating the autonomous mode of being of the beautiful
and life as the external reality to the ends of which art must be subdued.
However, this unity of life and art, which is a unity of life and life, is man
ifested through a specific separation; it always presupposes a lack or a sup
plement, something that is aside, imperfect, supplementary, useless, or
endless. Let us call it the aesthetic separation.
This text was presented for the first time as a public lecture at the invitation of the Pembroke
Seminar and the Cogut Centre for Humanities at Brown University in April 2015.
Critical Inquiry 43 (Spring 2017)

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598 Jacques Rancière / Art, Life, Finality
To show this global logic and the metamorphoses that it undergoes, my
paper will be something like a narrative in three episodes: three historical
moments that present us with three forms of entanglement of art, life,
and finality. The first episode starts from the text that problematized, for
the first time, the contradictions and paradoxes through which art and
beauty, finality and lack of an end are connected in the aesthetic regime,
namely, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement.
As is well known, life appears in the first paragraph of the “Analytic of
the Beautiful” as the principle of a radical disjunction. The representation
of the beautiful is not referred to the object; it is referred to the subject or,
more precisely, to his or her feeling of life. This is the first formulation of
an idea that will return again and again as a refrain in Kant’s analysis: the
finality of the beautiful is to animate the life of the faculties in the subject,
to produce a consciousness of their free play, to strengthen this state of
animation and allow it to reproduce itself. In short, the subjective finality
of the beautiful is to make life feel life. But what kind of life is this? What
does this kind of life imply? The answer is given by the example of beauty
that comes in Kant’s Third Critique: the “free beauties of nature.”1 What
is important in this notion is not the association of beauty with nature.
It is the disjunction that splits “nature” by separating its “free beauties”
from the model of nature that underpinned the representational model
of beauty; the model of the organic body. The most concise formulation
of this model had been coined long ago in the Platonic definition of the
living logos: “Every discourse must be constituted as a living being, having
a body of its own so as not to be devoid of a head and feet but to have
a middle, a beginning and an end arranged in mutual accordance and
in accordance with the whole.”2 The natural or the normal model of life
regulating the representational order is the organic body with its head and
its limbs. It is the whole within which a principle of unity, a principle of
proportion and concordance, governs the multiplicity. Life is the life of an
organism. Beauty was defined by the adjustment of the parts of the organ
ism that makes them concur to the same end. But the new “free beauties”
of nature stand in exact contrast with this model of the living beauty:
1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (New York,
1952), p. 72; hereafter abbreviated C.
2. Plato, Phaedrus 264b.
J ac q ues R anci è re is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Paris‑VIII, St. Denis.

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2017 599
Flowers are free beauties of nature. Hardly anyone but a botanist
knows the true nature of a flower, and even he, while recognizing in
the flower the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to
this natural end when using his taste to judge of his beauty. Hence no
perfection of any kind—no internal finality, as something to which
the arrangement of the manifold is related—underlies this judgement.
[C, p. 72]
The success of the feeling of life provided by the flowers implies the dis
missal of any knowledge or consideration of their constitution and final
ity as living organisms. The representational idea of beauty—unity within
diversity—and the organic model of this unity are dismissed at once. The
pleasure taken in the appearance of a form implies a split inside the very
idea of form: the form that pleases is not the form given to that object by
the concept of what it must be. In the free beauty of the flower, life mani
fests itself as a global power indifferent to the differentiation and harmo
nization of its functions. But this break within the very idea of form raises
a problem. How can the exemplary form be the form of a flower? And
how can we conceive of this form? It is not that easy to figure out what the
form of a flower could be because Kant dismissed not only the consider
ation of its botanical structure but also its colored appearance—an appear
ance that is for him merely a charm that only appeals to sensation, whereas
the aesthetic judgement only deals with form. This paradox however al
lows Kant to separate aesthetic finality from any kind of objective finality,
any perfection of the object.
Such is the issue at stake in the third moment of Kant’s “Analytic of the
Beautiful.” The subjective finality experienced in the aesthetic judgment
must not only be distinguished from the external finality, which is its util
ity, but it must also be distinguished from what is readily contrasted with the
criterion of utility, namely, the criterion of internal perfection of the work,
seen as the achievement of an artistic will. Beauty, says Kant, has nothing
to do with the internal finality or the perfection of the work. On the con
trary, it points toward a form of harmony that cannot find its achievement
in itself. It points toward an improvement, an intensification of life whose
destination is to be communicated, to take part in an improvement of a
collective form of life based on the intensification of a capacity to share.
As we know, a tremendous consequence must be drawn from this. The
success of beauty is not the success of art. The point is not simply that
beauty cannot be produced by the observance of rules. More radically,
beauty cannot be the achievement of the end that has been present in an
artistic will. The feeling of beauty presupposes that there is no concept

determining our judgment. This condition is easily fulfilled with those
flowers whose vital organization we ignore. But, in the case of the artwork,
our judgment on the form of the representation is mediated by the con
sideration of another form, the form that the artist has wanted to carry out
on the canvas or in the block of stone. In that sense, artistic beauty always
has something impure about it. What rescues it in fact is another imper
fection; art is the practice in which the knowledge of a thing does not in
clude the capacity of achieving it. “To art that alone belongs for which the
possession of the most complete knowledge does not involve one’s having
then and there the skill to do it” (C, p. 163). This incapacity is compensated
by the genius whose operation is to provide not the form but the material
that both unites and separates two forms—the form in the mind of the
artist and the form pleasing the viewer. It is this material that prevents
the aesthetic form from coinciding with the necessarily failed implemen
tation of the artistic will and of the artistic knowledge. This means that,
in spite of all that has been said, the autonomy of the aesthetic judgment
and the operation of the genius do not involve the autonomy of the art
work. On the contrary, they witness the impossibility of such autonomy.
The artwork can only approximate beauty and foster the aesthetic feeling
inasmuch as it escapes itself, as it is not defined by its own perfection but
by the imperfection and the supplementation that make it the vehicle of
an enhancement of life, which also includes a specific form of socializa
tion. In the distinction of the three forms of finality—external objective
finality, internal objective finality, subjective finality—the most important
aspect might be Kant’s dismissal of what has so often been intended as
the proper end of art: internal objective finality, the existence of the work
of art as the artifact achieving in its own perfection the autonomy of the
artistic will. Apparently subjective finality alone remains as the principle
of the aesthetic feeling. But the very dismissal of internal objective finality,
the dismissal of the model of perfection provided by the paradigm of the
organic body, opens the possibility of a still unheard-of form of conjunc
tion between subjective finality and external objective finality or utility. It
opens the possibility of a conjunction between the absence of the end of
the beautiful and the commitment of art to the production of a collective
life where utility is no more governed by the principle of subordination
of the means to an external end, where utility becomes use and when use
becomes the blossoming of a form of life.
This possibility is opened by the way in which Kant identifies the “free
beauties.” Skipping, as it were, over the perfection of the artwork, the no
tion of “free beauty” connects the natural beauty of the flowers to a free
beauty produced by the means of art, the beauty of the designs à la grecque

and foliage used in the decoration of the walls of houses. Decorative art—
the kind of art that was outside the domain of pure art—proves able to
reconcile art and beauty by producing the same effect as the “free beauties
of nature.” It proves able to enhance a life that is not only the life of the
mind but also of social life, as it creates a space for living and for sharing
the pleasures of an intensified life. As Kant thinks of it, this intensified life
is the life of an enlightened society that associates the pleasures of aes
thetic judgment with those of conversation. But decorative art can con
tribute to this self-enhancement of life to the extent that its artifacts are
felt the same way as the free beauties of nature, that they are not judged
as the product of an artistic will. There remains a gap between the expe
rience of the beautiful, which is the experience of life feeling life, and the
implementation of the artistic will. Life feels itself through the detour of
a nature that is not perceived as an object of knowledge and a form of art
that is not perceived as the achievement of a will.
In Kant’s time, however, another view of the relationship between artis
tic will and free beauty seemed able to bridge the aesthetic gap. Those who
shared it did not find their inspiration in the elegance of the foliage dec
oration in the salons of enlightened aristocracy; they found it in antique
sculpture and architecture, the mutilated remains of which expressed for
them the vitality of free Greek people’s collective life. From their point of
view, there was no need to pit the life of the flowers and the vitality of the
free play of the faculties against the limitations of an artistic will unable
to achieve what it knows. It was possible to locate the vitality of life in
the artistic will itself by conceiving this imperfect will as the mediation
through which a collective life expresses itself, even unconsciously, in the
stone. This is how Friedrich Schiller set out to overcome the Kantian gap
by making the free play of the faculties meet the collective life of the free
Greek people expressed in the free appearance of its statues. Life could
then feel the expression of life in the products of art. But it still did it
through a separation; where there had been the expression of free life,
there was now the free play in front of the free appearance of an artwork.
As is well known, two consequences could be drawn from this disjunctive
conjunction of art and life. The first one is the Hegelian statement that art
is a thing of the past because it has now lost the vitality that went along
with its very incapacity to know what it did. The second is the Schillerian
affirmation that it is the promise of a future, the promise of an art of living
incorporating the sense of freedom and the equal capacity experienced in
the aesthetic free play.
But what interests me here is not the global narrative of the destiny of
art. It is the logic of the forms of conjunction between the autonomous

life of beauty and the values of external objective finality opened by the
dismissal of the organic model of objective finality. I’d like to show how
the reconciliation of the terms set apart by Kant could happen by way of a
process that could be described as an internalization of external finality. It
is this reconciliation that made the program of fusion of art and life pos
sible. But it made it possible through a logic of lack and supplementation
that made the aesthetic gap between the forms of finality reappear again
and again in the very attempt to erase that gap.
In a sense the whole affair revolves around the notion of use. Kant ruled
out of the domain of pure beauty the forms of art that are determined by
the concept of what a thing must be. Now this expression “what a thing
must be” puts together two ideas that in fact are independent: the idea
that the thing is destined to be used and the idea that its usage implies a
concept of the thing with which the thing is compared. Kant stated that
such a comparison limits the imagination of the artist and prevents the
judgment of the viewer from being aesthetic. Every objective destination
entails mediation, and beauty can only be perceived immediately by for
getting the destination of the thing. “Much might be added to a building
that would immediately please the eye, were it not intended for a church.
A figure might be beautified with all manner of flourishes and light but
regular lines, as is done by the New Zealanders with their tattooing, were
we dealing with anything but the figure of a human being” (C, p. 73).
The argument is not that clear. What kind of ornaments does the desti
nation of a church exactly prescribe or exclude? How can we assert that
the viewer looks at the figures sculpted on the porch of a church with
regard to the destination of the building? And how ultimately do we think
of that destination itself ? Kant’s argument implies that this destination is
to serve as a building for Sunday morning prayer. But it can be answered
that its true function is to be a home, a place destined to gather a living
community. From this point on the opposition between the constraint of
the function and the free blossoming of the aesthetic form vanishes, and
the church—with its ornaments—falls under the general definition of an
art that doesn’t know the difference between aesthetic contemplation and
utilitarian function. This is the kind of art that William Morris defined
in a formula that sums up the vision of the Arts and Crafts School: “the
dwelling of some group of people, well-built, beautiful, suitable to its pur
pose, and duly ornamented and furnished so as to express the kind of life
which the inmates live.”3 Art and beauty can be reconciled only if art is
3. William Morris, “The Arts and Crafts of To-day,” The Collected Works of William Morris,
ed. May Morris, 24 vols. (New York, 1992), 22:360.

given a specific utilitarian destination, the destination to build a place for
life. This destination cancels the hierarchy opposing pure art to decorative
art. Before Morris, John Ruskin made the point that true art is decorative
art, an art destined to the use of sheltering life and adorning it. True art
is art fixed to a spot. Bad art is art made independent of any place, what
Ruskin calls “portable art,” the piece of art only destined to be seen: the
“little Dutch landscape, which you put over your sideboard today, and be
tween the windows tomorrow.”4 There is only one art, the art that builds
and adorns buildings for the use of a community. And use means two
things. Serving the life of a community means much more than serving
its utilitarian needs. It means serving to maintain and enhance the lively
sense of common life that makes it a community. This is what the orna
ment adds to the architecture: the expression of life that goes along with
the shelter given to life. That’s why the church or the temple—the house
of the community as such—is the symbol for the double function of art,
a symbol that will become paradigmatic for all kinds of art, from theatre
to cabinetwork and even industrial construction, until the 1920s. The op
position of objective finality and finality without end, along with that of
pure art and applied art, is abolished by the unity of life, which is, at the
same time, the end of art and the principle that it expresses.
In such a way art can include in its own process the Kantian disjunc
tion of art and beauty. It can make it the supplement that life gives to
itself. This supplementation is at the same time an addition and a lack.
On the one hand, the ornament is the addition that symbolizes the kind
of life that the building both shelters and strengthens. This is why its free
dom needs not be expressed by designs à la grecque or of stylized foliage.
It is expressed as well by the stone figures carved on the porches of the
churches. For Ruskin those figures express the freedom of the craftsmen
who carved them, the freedom of men who added not only their fantasy
but also their very clumsiness to the plan of the architect. This is how
Ruskin both took up and subverted Kant’s critique of the ideal of per
fection. The work of the craftsmen is oriented towards an end that is not
the perfect implementation of the concept of the architect but the self-
enhancement of life. Therefore the aesthetic freedom is no longer located
in the apparent lack of finality of the “free beauties of nature.” It is located
in the very distance between the concept and the thing. Perfection is not
only a limit to the feeling of the beautiful. Much more radically, perfection
is the contrary of the nobility of art. Perfection and slavery, according to
4. John Ruskin, “A Definition of Decorative Art,” in Quotations and Sources on Design and
the Decorative Arts, ed. Paul Greenhalgh (New York, 1993), pp. 5–6.

Ruskin, are strictly connected to each other. In the antique tradition, the
perfection of the work existed in the plan of the architect, and this plan
had to be strictly implemented by people deprived of any capacity but the
capacity of carrying out orders. Conversely, freedom exists where the plan
of the architect does not bear in itself the perfection of its achievement
and when craftsmen bring their own idea of the way to achieve it and the
effort to achieve it along with the imperfection of the result. Imperfection
is not a mark of inferiority. It is a mark of freedom. This freedom of the
artisan is in line with the very law of life—perpetual imperfection, per
petual birth and decay, progress and change. Ruskin illustrates this idea
with a flower whose very form turns Kant’s argument against itself: “The
foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full
bloom,—is the type of the life.”5
Life is the movement of infinite self-expansion that needs to perpetu
ally symbolize itself, and, by so doing, this movement perpetually equates
progression with imperfection. It might seem however that the identifi
cation of life and art is enclosed within the universe of handicraft, which
is the universe of the preindustrial age. It might seem a nostalgic dream,
bound to vanish with the rise of mechanization and the shift from deco
rative art to industrial design. The point is not that mechanization and big
industry are opposed to art and beauty. It is that they apparently eliminate
the imperfection that is the mark of free life. The new engineer-designer
of the industrial time is an artist who can exactly achieve his will with
the help of the machines. The architects and designers of the Werkbund
and the Bauhaus at the beginning of the twentieth century clearly em
phasized the utilitarian function of their work. For them, the beauty of a
form is defined by its adaptation to the use of a thing: building, furniture,
household goods, and so on. The precision of the machine perfectly fits
this destination, and it allows the work of architecture and the products of
design to transform the life of the masses, to introduce in that life, along
with functional artifacts, the principles of a rational way of living. This
shift can be illustrated by a spectacular example. In 1906 the designer and
architect Peter Behrens, who had been a protagonist of the German artist
colonies and their symbolist ceremonies, became the artistic adviser of the
German Electric Company. Not only did he design its lamps and kettles,
its logo and its catalogue, but he also made the plan of the factory pro
ducing its turbines (fig. 1). And yet his contemporaries did not hesitate to
recognize in the turbine hall, with its well-lined working spaces, “Ruskin’s
5. Ruskin, “The Nature of the Gothic,” “Unto This Last” and Other Writings (New York,
1985), p. 92.

FIGURE 1 . Peter Behrens, turbine factory, Berlin.
words come true.”6 As a matter of fact, the factory is still a cathedral of

work, destined to function as art—to serve not only the utilities of life but
its self-enhancement and self-expansion. And the unity of life with life
still needs to be expressed and can only be expressed by a supplement. The
logo of the AEG on the façade of the factory may seem a quite minimal
ornament (fig. 2). But its alveoli bear witness to the continuity between
the symbolist dream of art enlightening life and the practical production
of bulbs, kettles, and heaters. Those geometric alveoli are the simplified
and rationalized version of another kind of geometric figure: the polygon
of the diamond designed by Peter Behrens and solemnly exhibited a few
years before, during the inauguration ceremony of the artists’ colony in
Darmstadt, as the sign of the union of art and life (fig. 3). It is the power
of this symbolic diamond that has been transferred to the images of the
bulbs on the posters designed by Behrens (fig. 4). Nothing is more pro
saic than an electric bulb. Those posters, however, create a magic atmo
sphere as they show us both the cause and its effect, which is not simply
to light up a room but bring light into life, create an enlightened life or an
enchanted life (the radiating bulb obviously evokes Karl Schinkel’s stage
6. Adolf Vetter, “Die stattsbürgerliche Bedeutung der QualitätArbeit”; quoted in Frederic J.
Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New
Haven, Conn., 1996), p. 58.

FIGURE 2 . Behrens, logo AEG.
setting for The Magic Flute) (fig. 5). The same goes for the heaters whose
design makes it clear that they not only heat apartments but also life. It
might be said that this is just a matter of aestheticizing the commodity
the better to sell it and that the design of the kettles and of the images
tended to become more and more functional, so that everything should
appear as the coupling of the capitalist rationalization of the production
of commodities and of the aestheticization of their consumption. Such
a Marxist argument simply forgets the community of concerns between
the engineers and designers of capitalist Germany in the 1910s and those
of the Marxist Soviet Union in the 1920s. Vladimir Lenin’s lamp is both
the practical mode of lighting that must change peasants’ life and the

FIGURE 3 . Behrens, Das Zeichen, in Ein Dokument Deutscher Kunst (1901).
symbol of the revolution that can be brandished as the weapon that an
nihilates by its radiation the forces of the counterrevolution (fig. 6). And
if so many Soviet artists, both trained to paint pure abstract lines and
enthused by the workers’ revolution, dedicated themselves to the design
of posters, it is because the poster was much more than the embellish
ment destined to make an object desirable; it was a way of visually con
structing the common sensorium within which that object took place, the
sensorium of a new form of life and a new place for living. This common
concern can be illustrated by the trade-fair stand designed in the 1920s by
Bauhaus’s designer Herbert Bayer for a toothpaste producer. It would have
been enough to celebrate the hygienic virtue of the toothpaste and the

FIGURE 4 . Behrens, posters for AEG.
charm that it adds to a woman’s face. However, Bayer thought it necessary

to associate this virtue with the geometric form of the square, the modern
technology of the loudspeaker, and even an evocative factory-like puff of
chimney smoke (fig. 7). This trade-fair stand is part of the same dream as
the propaganda kiosks designed at the same time by Gustav Klucsis in the
Soviet Union for diffusing not only Soviet propaganda but also the forms
of the new life (fig. 8). The new life announces itself as the concordance
of vitality, geometric form, functionality, and technology. Not incidentally
did the great revolutionary moment coincide with the great moment of
the design of buildings, utensils, and posters, which was also the great
moment of cubist, abstract, futurist, formalist, and constructivist experi
ments in art. In all those artistic, industrial, and social experiments there
is a common aesthetic concern—the concern for a culture of use that
would overcome the separation between the economic rationality of a pro
duction of things oriented toward the abstract production of exchange-
value and the artistic production of works of art destined to their own
perfection, which actually meant destined to the specific consumption of
“portable” art by an elite of rich consumers. There was the project of a
culture of use-value that could only oppose the capitalist primacy of
exchange-value by dismissing the Kantian opposition between the aes
thetic pleasure in the form of the object and the rational or empirical
interest in its real existence. In that context the same idea of form could
unite the apparently diverging practices of industrial rationalization, ab
stract painting, functional design, new architecture, or advertising. The

FIGURE 5 . Karl Schinkel, stage setting for The Magic Flute.
form of the object summed up the form of the process that produces it,
the form of its use and the form of life that it expressed and that it con
tributed to enhance. That’s why the first project for the building of the
Bauhaus strangely reminds us of Behrens’s diamond.
But the same logic that makes this unification of the internal dynamic
of life and of its external ends possible also imposes that this conjunc
tion should be represented and symbolized as a supplement. And the logic
of the supplement involves a logic of distance—and possibly lack—that
splits this unity again. This is how, for instance, the concordance among
the geometric abstraction of the forms, their functionality in practical life,
and their power of symbolization of a new form of life needs to be repre
sented by specific forms that in turn make this very union enigmatic. This
is best illustrated by El Lissitzky’s Prouns (projects for a new life): abstract
arrangements of lines and colors that can play several roles—from their
use in propaganda posters where the red triangle becomes an arrow in
the fight against the white to their use as models of possible architectural
projects (fig. 9). In the latter, however, it seems that the third dimension
represented on the two-dimensional surface is the future of the new life
rather than a space for actual building. At other times, the geometric
forms appear to tell their own story, to compose a narration of their own
role in the new world. At the end of the day, those forms find their right
use in the construction of art exhibition spaces. We can also think of the

FIGURE 6 . “Electrification and Counterrevolution,” Russian poster (1923).
use of geometrical forms in Oskar Schlemmer’s ballets. In a sense those

ballets are intended to signify the kind of life to which the art of the Bau
haus is devoted—not simply the “organization of needs” in the age of
mechanization but the pleasure taken in the artificial as such—which en
tails the revival of “the brightly colored masquerades once so popular with
the people. . . . For human beings will always love bright games, disguises,
masquerades, dissimulation, artificiality, as they will always love any fes
tive, eye-catching, colourful reflection of life.”7 Now, it is remarkable that
the geometric aspect of the costumes should express this “festive reflection
of life.” In Schlemmer’s view they are destined to symbolize the harmony
between the power of expansion of the human body and the geometry of
the space. The harmony between the liveliness of the masquerade and the
geometric rationality of the costumes, however, can only demonstrate it
self by impending another form of vitality and functionality, the one that
allows the free movements of the dancing body. It transpires as though
the unity of life could only be symbolized by supplements that produce
new gaps between lively expression, geometric perfection, and utilitarian
function. The movement of the dancers of the triadic ballet serves life to
7. Oskar Schlemmer, “Diary,” Letters and Diaries, trans. Krishna Winston, ed. Tut
Schlemmer (Middletown, Conn., 1972), p. 196.

FIGURE 7. Herbert Bayer, design for a multimedia trade-fair stand.
the extent that it is impeded by the supplement that symbolizes this ser
vice (fig. 10).
This tension becomes still more visible and more significant when the
work of the artist presents itself as the manifestation of a collective life
that annuls the very distinction between artistic practice and the prac
tices of everyday life. Consider Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
(dir. Vertov 1929). The film is based on two strong affirmations. First, the
work of the filmmaker is affirmed as a form of activity homogeneous to
all the activities that are performed every day in the streets, the factories,

FIGURE 8 . Gustav Klutsis, design for a radio announcer.

FIGURE 9 . El Lissitzky, “Proun 19 D.
or the offices. The task of the artist is to connect all those activities. But
the task can connect them only to the extent that their activities are sim
ilar to those in the film. That similarity, the one of the gestures of the
cameraman or the editor with all other gestures of work, is emphasized
by the film’s montage. Second, the action of the body is made homoge
neous with the activity of the machine. This homogeneity is symbolized
by the two advertising posters designed by the Stenberg brothers. The eye
of the woman is coupled with the eye of the camera and her legs with
the legs of the tripod. More radically, the ecstatic vitality of the body is
expressed through the very dismemberment that makes its limbs look like
the pieces of a machine. Vitality is expressed through fragmentation. The
dismemberment of the body on the still image of the poster symbolizes
the work of the cinematographic montage, which expresses the vitality
of the new life through the extreme fragmentation of the shots showing

FIGURE 1 0 . Oskar Schlemmer, Triadic Ballet.

all the gestures that cooperate to weave the fabric of a new life, the fabric
of a living community identical with a working community. But the very
assimilation of holistic vitality with rational fragmentation gives rise to a
radical ambiguity. For it refers to the industrial model of the Taylorist di
vision of labor. But it actually works the other way around. In the Taylorist
division of labor, one task is divided into a given number of different tasks
that are done separately in order to produce more efficiency. But Vertov’s
montage does not fracture a task into many parts. On the contrary, it
makes all kinds of heterogeneous tasks similar: packaging of cigarettes on
the assembly line of a factory, doing nails in a beauty salon, and inserting
and removing the jack plugs in a telephone exchange. They are similar
because they are all the gestures of industrious hands. And that homo
geneity is emphasized by the extreme fragmentation of the montage that
makes them go at the same accelerated rhythm and penetrate each other.
This similarity and interpenetration make them part of a great symphony
of movement, a great manifestation of the new collective life innerving all
activities. But, of course, this interpenetration is the exact opposite of any
functional division of labor. The most famous image of the film is a dou
ble exposure showing us the cheerful face of a woman whose vitality seems
to reflect the dynamism of the spinning wheel with which she is coupled.
This is the point: the movements of the machine are neither connected
with the work of other machines nor related to their industrial outcome.
They are connected with smiles on the faces of women whose offhand
gestures seem to make their work a play. As a matter of fact, the produc
tion of cigarettes does not seem to be a top priority in the planning of the
Soviet economy. To make all the activities identical to the demonstration
of the common movement of the new communist life, the filmmaker had
to disconnect them from any functionality in a planned system of pro
duction. The symphony of the machines is a symphony of movement. It
presents the movement of the new life as an autonomous movement and a
movement that has no end—in the two senses of the word: no final point
but also no purpose, except the purpose of vitality, the purpose of self-
enhancement. The artist wants to show that the practice of art is exactly
the same as the practice of industrial life. But this identity is shown by
absorbing the ends and means of industrial life within the short circuit
of life expressing itself and enhancing itself. It is in that sense that the
accusation of formalism that was leveled against such films must be un
derstood. Formalism did not mean at all the concern with pure form or
the pursuit of art for art’s sake. It is not incidental that the accusation was
leveled against the artists who wanted to produce forms of life, not works
of art. It was precisely that project of fusion of art and life that implied the

absorption of the external objective finality in an idea of use that made it
identical with the subjective finality of life enhancing life. The logic of use
was supposed to fuse together the external service of the needs of life and
the expression of life as an inner force. But the fusion had to symbolize
itself in the form of a supplement. In Vertov’s film that supplement took
on the form of a double exposure—a term that I use here not only in its
strict cinematographic definition but also in a wider sense. The double
exposure exposes both life’s unity and its splitting. The fusion of life as
utility and life as self-production takes on the form of a play that makes
the tension of the opposites reappear. This is how life as utility parts again
with life as vitality. We know how this splitting undid the modernist proj
ect of identity between the forms of art and the forms of life. On the one
hand, the Soviet authorities stated that the task of artists was not to create
forms of life and that they only had to care for one kind of utility: making
artworks to give the workers energy at work and entertainment after
work. On the other hand, the so-called modernist theoreticians affirmed
that artists had to commit themselves to the sole exploration of the possi
bilities of their own medium and material and that their only utility con
sisted in the defense of high culture. By so doing, both reinstated a divorce
between the opposite forms of finality and cast confusion on the whole
history of the aesthetic regime of art. But art, for its part, kept on playing
on the multiple forms of conjunction and disjunction opened by the ten
sion among the three forms of finality. At the very moment when Bayer de
signed the Regina Fair Stand and Klutsis designed the Soviet propaganda
kiosks, the French surrealists found in the disused objects, old-fashioned
advertisements, and outmoded window shops of the Parisian passages the
specimens of a new beauty announcing a new life. This was just one of the
many adventures of finality on which art would thrive in the future up to
our present.


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Art, Life, Finality: The Metamorphoses

Critical Inquiry 43 (Spring 2017)

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J ac q ues R anci è re is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of

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FIGURE 1 . Peter Behrens, turbine factory, Berlin.

words come true.”6 As a matter of fact, the factory is still a cathedral of

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FIGURE 2 . Behrens, logo AEG.

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FIGURE 3 . Behrens, Das Zeichen, in Ein Dokument Deutscher Kunst (1901).

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FIGURE 4 . Behrens, posters for AEG.

charm that it adds to a woman’s face. However, Bayer thought it necessary

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FIGURE 5 . Karl Schinkel, stage setting for The Magic Flute.

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FIGURE 6 . “Electrification and Counterrevolution,” Russian poster (1923).

use of geometrical forms in Oskar Schlemmer’s ballets. In a sense those

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FIGURE 7. Herbert Bayer, design for a multimedia trade-fair stand.

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FIGURE 9 . El Lissitzky, “Proun 19 D.

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