ABOVE:
Manned Flight. Simon Patterson, 1999
Early in On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795), Schiller declares: “Art is the daughter of freedom,” but “today,” he continues, “Necessity is master, and bends a degraded humanity beneath its tyrannous yoke. Utility is the great idol of the age . . . .”
Schiller writes at once from the middle of Enlightenment and Kantian philosophy in which “Reason” guides us through the world and also from the middle of the aura of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror (1793 when the first version of the Letters was finished). To their recipient, an enlightened Danish prince who was supporting Schiller in an illness, the poet-theorist exclaimed, “I shall regard the freedom of your mind as inviolable,” but in fact his book sets out to relieve its reader from the tyrannous yoke of necessity, Reason, and the French Revolution’s legacy of rebellion and revenge.
For Schiller, contemporary art must refuse to stay within its own domain: how to find “freedom” within the aesthetic sphere? Our mind, he says, works independent of our conscious, egoistic, control, under the sway of drives: first the drive of matter and history (Stofftrieb) and second the drive of form and the law (Formtrieb). In each instance, although each brings us into contact with vital aspects of our reality, we are bound, limited, by the terms of the drive, and thus do not stand in free relation to the terms that they present to us. Schiller then posits a third drive as constitutionally given to us but largely invisible, woefully under-exercised and, indeed, rejected by a society that wants to control us: the play-drive (Spieltrieb). Here we can break past Necessity that “bends a degraded humanity beneath its tyrannous yoke” and encounter all elements of our reality vividly and moreso because they are encountered in a state of play.
Drive This striking term, while associated in the 20th century more with classical Freudian psychoanalysis but for Schiller with the unstoppable source of revolutionary consciousness, desire, and eventual overthrow in France, indicates a force beyond its possible control of society, particularly capitalist society. Jean Baudrillard has said that in the modern western world efforts are made not to confront the drives as dangerous but to “ward them off,” to convince us that society can satisfy them if we satisfy it, a form of infantilization. For Schiller, the drive attempts to fulfil a need and a desire, and any resistance it encounters provokes not accommodation but confrontation. The drive is the internal source, intelligence propelled by desire, of revolution. Radical art, then, is the expression of the drive.
Historically, since Schiller, “play”--and cited in the Letters its sibling indolence, or idleness, or apathy, or indifference—can easily slip into an excuse for escape from reality and the use of mind, often rationalized as healthfully desirable; and why not? If play is relief from work and seriousness, that cannot at all be bad. Instead of either/or, why not have it both/and?
Jean Baudrillard, writing after Paris 1968, proposes that “the police” targets “play,” like “drive,” attempting to promote its regressive form as something that bourgeois capitalist society can accommodate: something you do in a carefully cordoned off “leisure time,” that finds its place comfortably in an overarching framework of exploitation of labor. His essay, “Play and the Police,” recalls Hazlitt’s 1818 declaration,” “the police spoils all,” where “police” means control over not only play, but dream, reverie, illusion, the assertion of these expansive attributes of mind becomes a fundamental intention of radical poetry.
BELOW:
Manned Flight. Simon Patterson, 1999
(in situ, Finland)
In Schiller’s notion of art, artist, art, object and reader/viewer do not simply have a relationship to one another but all participate in the same phenomenon. Moreover, art under what Rancière calls “the aesthetic regime” effects our intervention in the world. Echoing Schiller, Jacques Maritain (quoted by George Oppen) said about our ideal response that “We awaken at the same moment to ourselves and to things.” Too often the artists of democracy—for example, those writing the poetry of suppressed classes of people—assert or declare their needs as identities while tragically bypassing the play-drive as the way of dislodging those needs from the tyranny of the discourse and plot against which they are fighting. When poetry fights the battle against invisibility and suppression of race, class, and gender by taking on the poetry of supplement and free appearance, it undermines the very conventional expectations of resistance that tyrannies can absorb. The chains that need breaking come in the form of linguistic and syntactic and visual poetic convention and in what might be called the collaging of unpredictable traces of the world. At such moments, genuine awakening (Schiller, Shelley, Oppen) occurs.
Art, from the beginning of the Letters to the end, gains its significance from its encounter with what Jacques Rancière, writing about Schiller’s powerfully generative work of Romantic aesthetics, calls “non-art.” At the same time, the play-drive can revolutionize (occupy, deform, renovate) a “classic” work. Osip Mandelstam counterintuitively has said that “the classics” (in his case, Catullus, Ovid, Dante) can occasion the “true revolution” in poetry: to “play” upon them will be to bring them into the present for the first time, and in unimagined ways.
Child’s play is play, but it is also experiment and practice, about creative rearrangements. As Schiller sees it, play emancipates the mind from strictures. Mind doesn’t dwindle in play but searches, wanders, explores, in short, acts in its fullest capacity. Play incorporates rather than excludes and selects, and incorporation or inclusion opens mind to a newly enlarged frame for variety and diversity. Schiller calls this state of play filled infinity. Conceived in terms of the Imagination / Fancy duality, play equals the Fancy—a state of mind open to all encounters and objects, exploratory, centrifugal, and liberatory. Play and the Fancy are motivated by drives and desires at once impervious to control but consciously responsive to it, with an intended outcome in the public sphere.
These two terms, historically nested within the intensities of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, resistance to all forms of class, race, and gender hierarchies, and resistance to a culture of bourgeois acquisition, form a groundwork for a mind generative of critical and expansive experiments at times in Romantic poetry itself but more visibly and systematically in subsequent poetic movements.
Challenging the Enlightenment subordination of “sense” to “reason” as the ideal of mental activity and at the same time, on the side of the work of art, to the subordination of “content” to abstract “form,” the play-drive suffuses reason with sense and affect while art under its influence becomes a “living shape” or form (lebendige Gestalt). Experimental artists have knowingly or not taken Schiller most seriously here, and systematically, working from within the nexus of the sensuous mind, material, and form, not “above” it, to produce art that discovers its form as it proceeds (Coleridge’s “form as proceeding”). For them, it operates with an alertness of the senses and the fanci-ful play of the mind to let things into its domain by chance, which often startles in its results.
Careful to distinguish art from reality and yet intent on the former’s direct influence on the latter, the post-French-revolutionary Schiller considers art to come into being as a supplement, a “free appearance” that “educates” through its strangeness: non-possessive.
Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)
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