Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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""Social Choreography" is an intelligent, precisely argued new take on longstanding issues regarding the relationship of ideologies and aesthetics, one which invigorates those debates through its encounter with the visual and kinesthetic materiality of dance forms."--Jane Desmond, editor of "Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance"

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Social Choreography

Duke University Press

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

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...