On the Aestheticization, Institutionalization, and Dramatization of the Concept of Nature Conversation with Olivier Surel and Charles Wolfe Do we need a concept of Nature to have anything to exhibit? From Baruch Spinoza to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is made clear that “Nature exhibits itself,” and that one simply needs to draw one’s attention to the very productivity of Nature to unravel it. But because Nature exhibits itself, its concrete exhibition could be seen as a denaturalization, a corruption of what was naturally given to perception, sensation, and understanding. As such, the apparatuses of exhibition of Nature throughout scientific modernity are a particularly suitable space to understand the constructivism of modern thought and to grasp the economy of what we could call its “ontological engineering”: its symmetrical making of subjects and objects, spectators and artifacts. In these apparatuses, the concept of Nature found a spatial scenography in which it acquired a certain ontological weight, notably through the emerging distinction between what might be exhibited as its atypical monsters, and what might be displayed as its truthful tokens. In the early modern sense of wonder, the collection, dramatization, and aestheticization of natural beings deemed to be in excess of classificatory categories foregrounded monstrosity as the living proof of the boundless creativity of Nature: beyond beauty and ugliness would lie another, superior aesthetic concept, namely that of natural singularity. Yet, the modern institutions of exhibition of Nature relied concurrently on the staging of type-specimens or generic exemplars of species, genders, and classes of natural or artifactual beings grounded in a renewed science of Nature. Naturalism thus seems to have always been a common theoretical ground for the exhibition of both rules and exceptions, norms and anomalies, as showed in early modern curiosity cabinets and natural history displays. This conversation with Olivier Surel and Charles Wolfe, whose historical and philosophical works share a common interest for classical age naturalism, the institutionalization of natural history, and the dramatization of the concept of Nature, traverses this brief history of the exhibition of Nature. From natural history described by Charles Wolfe as a project to understand and show Nature as a whole, including the place of humans therein, to a possible “multinaturalism” challenged by Olivier Surel, the modes of aestheticization, institutionalization, and dramatization of the concept of Nature may provide a ground for understanding naturalism itself as well as its history. TRISTAN GARCIA & VINCENT NORMAND: Taking naturalism in its broad sense as an “openspace desert,” a “conception without foundation,” as Charles suggested in his talk at ECAL,1 one should always wonder how to comprehend what is comprehending one. But how can we reverse an immanent Nature, in which we are taking place, to a possible limited object of perception, that we could stare at? Denis Diderot has emphasized the impossibility of taking Nature (everything) as an object of knowledge. Considering that very impossibility, one seems to be forced to pretend to get out of Nature, in order to make it a possible object of knowledge or contemplation. Is this what the earliest devices of exhibition of natural beings in modernity such as Wunderkammern were about: the building of an artifactual point of view outside Nature on Nature itself, as an object or a set of objects? CHARLES WOLFE: The question raises a rather difficult, implicit meta-question: Is naturalism the default view of Homo sapiens, or the opposite? That I cannot answer, and anthropologists like Philippe Descola have presumably offered a vast taxonomy of possible relations to Nature as mapped by different human populations, with the bonus suggestion that we “Occidentals” by definition oppose “man to Nature,” or the human to the natural. My immediate response to that view is that most of the interesting heterodox thinkers of the “West,” like Lucretius or Spinoza, and in different forms, John Dewey or Willard Van Orman Quine, reinscribe the human in Nature, and have paid the price for it—like Giordano Bruno on the Campo dei Fiori in 1600. This reinscription is not fueling (or fueled by) a vision of some giant, thinking cosmos, a sort of total mind or Gaia, but rather looks toward those 141 desert vistas, in which everything is still yet to be developed. As to natural history cabinets, Wunderkammern, and other material apparatuses in which humans and their fervid imaginations could “meet” productions of Nature, like giant Cornell boxes devoid of cinematographic potential but rich in naturalism, they exhibit the paradox I have described elsewhere, following some provocative suggestions made by Diderot in his article “Cabinet d’histoire naturelle”: The order of a cabinet cannot be that of nature; nature affects everywhere a sublime disorder. Whichever side we approach it from, we find masses (clusters, heaps) which transport us with admiration, groups which call for our attention in the most surprising manner. But a natural history cabinet is made to teach us; there, we must find in detail and in order, that which the universe presents to us as one piece.2 Nature can only be grasped as such in various localized, constructed, indeed artificial environments. Now, if Nature is too vast to be grasped by our finite intellects, the naturalist-encyclopedist response is not to create internal “memory chambers” or Benjaminian collages of urban past experiences, but to seek to “plug” our intellects into the flux of natural history via these cabinets, in order to be connected to this vast natural world. Although as a good vital materialist, Diderot also emphasizes that a cabinet is merely a “draft” [une esquisse] of Nature, a kind of Madame Tussaud chamber filled with the dried imitations of Life. But as regards the introduction of the “cabinet” into the space of naturalism, it may be that this can count as an instance in which naturalism recognizes artifice rather than naively denying it (like those neuro-aestheticians seeking to “explain” art in neurological terms), or conversely, as a moment in which our phantasia or Einbildungskraft (imagination) reenters the causal natural world rather than contemplates its navel. OLIVIER SUREL: I think it is sobering and useful to start with a working definition of naturalism as an ontological position according to which literally nothing is super-natural. This has not always been so simple to affirm, and many conceptual strategies have been available to make the point, before or beyond the hyper-ideologization of the scientific method which produced the current known as “New 142 Conversation with Olivier Surel and Charles Wolfe “Elephant Man” and “Winged Monster,” from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Opera omnia Bononiae, (1599–1668), 431, 370. © Wellcome Collection. Atheism.” If you read Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), and accept that his system supports such a minimalistic working definition of naturalism, you witness a full use of the constructive capacities of the Euclidian geometrical method to expel all kinds of occult qualities, or the seventeenth century placeholders of the “supernatural.” If you follow the tracks of a “disguised or overt” Spinozism in Diderot, the conceptual strategies of such a naturalism turn toward what we nowadays call the biological sciences. I would also say that in this sense, beyond the choice of method and the interplay between conceptual construction and experiments, instruments such as the “cabinet d’histoire naturelle” may well have served the eighteenth century productive imagination in its grounding of the concept of Nature into a biological register. As contemporary dwellers of such museums, what we witness is the fulfillment of an educational function oscillating between “edutainment” and a sort of a “necroaesthetics.” The latter is something that I never fully realized until I got close enough to smell the damaged specimens, while sharing pizzas with the staff of the Harvard Museum of Natural History in a defunct classroom, a section of which was used as a temporary shed for the “dead dead” beasts (to borrow the title of one of Etienne Chambaud’s pieces, The Dead Dead Fox, 2014). I treated myself to an “odorama” beyond the dioramas, which after a slight moment of disgust made me wonder how scratch and sniff cards would modify our experience of the museum! At any rate, it is the case that such institutions, such “pantheons” of animals, strike us as the repositories of a certain genre of European art, or to extend this point, as per the early Donna Haraway (in her critique of the American Museum of Natural History in New York), as something that can be more akin to an implicit history of race, gender, and class in the nineteenth century than to a “natural history.” It is a long way from the playfully subversive sensibilities of Jean Painlevé’s dreamy naturalistic films of the Science Is Fiction series, or more obscure, of May Theilgaard Watts’s highway botany in Reading the Landscape of America (1975). But the museum of natural history is also increasingly challenged in popular culture as a repository of trophies from a mythologization of “primordial wilderness.” I here think of how BBC producers recently attempted to challenge ideological conceptions of wilderness in the Unnatural Histories mini-series. Marcus Owens and I attempted to synthetically include this in the “Multinatural Histories” show at the Harvard Museum of Natural History at the end of 2013, by critically drawing from the conceptual experiments of the “ontological turn” of anthropology (in Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro et al.) to parasitize the museum with artworks. At any rate, one can notice how, at different levels, the “dramatization” or staging of the critique of the concept of Nature as tantamount to that of myth (pace the young Theodor Adorno) hesitates in choosing to negate or to internally pluralize the adjective “natural.” Back then (in 2013), and drawing in return from the development of our Harvard curatorial experiment, I took the concept of “multinaturalism” as an essentially polemical concept: Contemporary anthropology, all the while translating the variety of “non-Western” relationships of production into a second-order statement for which “Nature” is not “one” but “many,” also aimed at operating modifications on the productive imagination of the Western reader of a philosophical corpus dominated by a purportedly underdetermined, Eurocentric concept of Nature. I am no longer sure how such an operation should be staged, also because being faithful to such an anthropological corpus, which more importantly served a strategic essentialization of cosmologies for indigenist environmental activists in Latin America, supposes more crucially to rethink the function of institutions like ethnographic museums along the lines of a critique of the institutional racism attached to their “narratives of colonisation,” as Alexandra Sauvage recently put it.3 Looking back, I think that our use of the concept of “multinaturalism” had more to do with a twist in the dramatization of the concept of Nature than with a strict subversion of the taxonomical display that is proper to Western museums of natural history. In some way, our curatorial intervention partially embraced a wish to put the emphasis on the value of an aesthetics in which a peak consciousness of our alienation from unadministered environments, as well as a resolutely popcultural affect, could be manifested. To give you a few examples: Kassel Jaeger’s immersive sound pieces instantiated an exploration of the sonic filtering of iron meteorites, sidelining the senses of sight and touch, and unfolding on a musical sensibility proper to the alliance of field recordings and drone / doom genres; Rometti Costales’s piece involved a superimposition of Soviet state scientific imagery and On the Aestheticization, Institutionalization, and Dramatization of the Concept of Nature 143 a vegetal exemplar (Monstera deliciosa) denoting exoticism in the bureaucratized spaces of the global West; Joey Holder’s installation put the emphasis on the expressive alienation embodied by the retrieval of “natural” imagery through the internet (including a series bearing on the limit between natural-historical and culinary regimes of images), etc. TG & VN: Tracing the origins of materialism, the third dialogue of Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream (1769) appears as an interesting foundational scene. There, the philosopher puts his encyclopedic program to a test by picturing a scene almost resembling a situation of exhibition: wondering what the classificatory attitude of the materialist philosopher should be in front of a stone. Should the stone be infused with the qualities of life and thus considered part of a greater sensitive being, or should it attend to pure quantity, thus, by extension, potentially negating the possibility of regarding the human as a sensitive and qualitative being? It can be argued that this historical distinction within materialism between a “stonified” life and a “vivified” stone is something the modern apparatuses of exhibition of Nature aimed at regulating, something they transformed into a proper scenography (by organizing the ontological “edge effects” between the “worlds” portrayed by the various natural specimens), or even into a specific necroaesthetics (the presentation of the dead as alive). Interestingly enough, in the context of the so-called “geological turn” we witness today, Diderot’s question has taken the form of a somehow caricatural alternative between, on the one hand, the sublimation of Nature as an entirely dead sphere (through radical reductionism and the deepening of anthropocenic “humiliations”) and, on the other hand, the whimsical embracing of a living, vengeful Earth (through neovitalism and the figure of a wounded Gaia). How do you locate the modern apparatuses of exhibition of Nature (natural history collections, zoological gardens, anatomical theaters …) in this picture of materialism and its contemporary avatars? OS: I have to admit that I have a lot of trouble in understanding what is meant by “philosophies of life” or “vitalism” nowadays, beyond the wellstabilized categories in the history of eighteenthcentury philosophy and some critical discourses around Georges Canguilhem’s analysis of normativity through the epistemology of the life sciences. My best guess is that some theorists actually call 144 Conversation with Olivier Surel and Charles Wolfe “vitalism” an over-extension of a utopian content that has been projected back onto Marx’s concept of “living labor,” in a way that the concept of “life” and its extensions feed a normative ground from which to rebuild a critique of capitalism. Under such a heading of “vitalism,” some might also place a more intricate set of theoretical moves in ecological thought, consisting in a sometimes mythological overextension of the category of agency to natural environments (through what you call “the figure of the wounded Gaia” for example), in lieu of a more nuanced critique of post-Enlightenment conceptions of juridical personality as the sole locus of agency itself. In the last instance, and including the most political aspects of a Canguilhemian legacy, I think that the question of what pertains or not to “life” in such debates could be systematically translated into what we could call, after Etienne Balibar, a capitalistic perversion of the principle of utility, a structural “ultraobjective violence,” through which humans and “nonhumans” alike are valued inasmuch as they are also deemed to be disposable. I am inclined to think that such a critical ground is of the order if we are to think about the ontological distinctions you mention, and how they operate in ethnographic and natural history museums, which can in return be seen as the popular scientific by-products of colonial expansion in Western metropolitan areas. CW: As regards the purportedly foundational moment of the character Diderot seeking to convince the character D’Alembert that stones can sense, I will make just one observation: that right there, in a then-unpublished, provocative manuscript in 1769, you have the total destruction of any solid distinction between a world of mere matter (what materialist ontology supposedly opens onto) and a vivified world of life, sensation, thought, eros, … (an ontology supposedly belonging either to “vitalism” and / or to “new materialism”). It is a moment of pure, unadulterated “new materialism,” 250 years ago. Diderot’s sensing stone, or living statue does not imply by its existence that New Materialism was theorized in 1769 so that no one should have bothered to rearticulate it in recent decades. However, I will add a comment on the latter and its newness (even if New Materialism is actually not a well-defined position with a stable set of core claims). It is not so interesting here to rehearse the historical weaknesses in the “old versus new” claims of the new materialism. As I have suggested elsewhere, ironically the New Materialists are returning to an Engels-and-Sartre critique of mechanistic materialism, which was itself both historically off-kilter and somehow dated. But as to the emphasis on vital powers, embodiments, agency and a kind of neo-paganism: If one thinks “thingly power” is liberating, perhaps it can be liberating for some. But the reason I became interested in materialism in the first place, actually while reading the Marquis de Sade in my late teens, was not to find out that the material was the virtual (for some new materialist theory—not all—is enamored with the virtual as a spark of life), and that Bergsonism was the deepest form of this philosophy! TG & VN: In his talk at ECAL,4 Olivier rightly presented the Descartes depicted by a lot of contemporary critical theory as a straw man, because of his alleged conception of an almighty human subjectivity, submitting nature to its will and desire, being “like master and possessor” of it. One could also think of Bacon, and its apothegm “scientia potentia est.” This is all about knowing and empowering, but not about showing. The question of not having a knowledge of nature, but of staging it, showing it, and exhibiting it, seems to be merely absent of most of the discourses pro or contra Descartes, and Bacon as well. Why is rationalism not conceived as natureshowing, instead of just nature-knowing? OS: Indeed this vision of Descartes leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the time, the polemical critiques of Descartes as theorist of the ego cogito see him as the defender of the model of an almighty rationality, as someone who provides a starting point for a totalitarian “administration” of Nature through its mathematization. Accordingly, he is caricatured through what is probably the most famous passage of Part VI of his Discourse on Method, where he opposes practical and speculative philosophies and affirms that through the former, we can render ourselves, “as it were, the masters and possessors of nature.” The temptation here is almost to read into Descartes’s epistemology what Crawford Brough Macpherson saw in the political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke as a species of “possessive individualism.” But it is never expressed as such, and only in more careful analysis of the socioeconomic context of elaboration of Cartesian philosophy do we find challenging arguments regarding what we could call the “politics” of early modern rationalism, also vis-à-vis its mobilization of the concept of Nature. I think here of course of Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes (2007), but also for Spinoza of his The Savage Anomaly (1991). Now prominent Descartes scholars insist on the fact that he was sidelining the field of natural history in his scope of experimental science, as natural Ferdinando Cospi’s curiosity cabinet, Bologna, from Lorenzo Legati, Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua patria dall’illustrissimo Signor Ferdinando Cospi (Bologna, 1677). Etching. © British Museum. On the Aestheticization, Institutionalization, and Dramatization of the Concept of Nature 145 Cabinet of invertebrates, department of zoology, Museum of Natural History, Paris, ca. 1930. All rights reserved. history proceeded from a mere registration and nomination of existing species, and still lacked a more articulated methodological framework, a commitment to the experimental method. (Note that Descartes made a rare excursion into botany, notably after having witnessed the perplexing case of the extreme sensibility of the Mimosa pudica—known in English as the “sensitive plant” or the “shy plant”— over the course of seed exchanges with Marin Mersenne, between Leiden’s Hortus Botanicus and Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, as he was attempting to assess the compatibility of botany with physics).5 To follow up on Charles’s remark, the time of early modern rationalism was indeed a time of emergence of what we now know as botanical gardens and museums of natural history—but to my knowledge, no Cartesian has ever expressed something equivalent to what Samuel Quiccheberg, a century before (in his Inscriptiones of 1565), had defended as the epistemological importance of Kunst- and Wunderkammern, from a point of view that was full of the Renaissance ideals related to a mnemotechnics, to an art of memorizing an order of artifactual or natural productions through their spatial disposition. CW: Something that this question brings up, I think, is the connection—now almost lost to us, except, perhaps, in the space of certain museums (science and industry, natural history, “arts et métiers,” etc.)—between an early modern libido sciendi, or “rage to know” (the pillars of Atlantis on 146 Conversation with Olivier Surel and Charles Wolfe the frontispiece of Bacon’s Novum Organum, 1620) and indeed the museification of things. In that sense, whether or not we use the heavy label of “rationalism,” the birth of early modern science and the (later) birth of museums seem oddly related. What I would remark is that curiously Descartes, and after him the materialists reflecting on the pertinence of artificially designed environments like cabinets for inducing—what? Knowledge of the world? Oneness with the One Substance? Perceptual leaps à la James Turrell?—are not so far removed from Denis Hollier’s bon mot playfully misquoting Freud while confronting the figure of Georges Bataille with the then-new Cité des sciences et de l’industrie at the Parc de La Villette (a former slaughterhouse): Wo Es war soll Museum werden (Where Id was, Museum shall be). TG & VN: Before the emergence of museums was the early modern fascination for wonders, monsters, beings whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined. In cabinets, anything nongeneric would deserve to be seen, heard, or touched as an aesthetic singularity. On the contrary, modern exhibition apparatuses of natural history would rely on the staging of type-specimens or generic exemplars of species. Could we say that this was a first dialectical tension at the core of the emergence of exhibition practices in the western world: exhibiting something taken from Nature because it is absolutely singular versus exhibiting something because it is absolutely generic? In other words: Nature as a force of production, as a law beyond all laws, versus Nature as a product, ruled by laws? CW: Perhaps. The word missing here is “freak show” (in all seriousness). Monsters are a kind of boundary or crossover object because they are, or were, both a key item of “pure scientific inquiry” (teratology, embryology, etc.) and an object of morbid fascination-and-repulsion. Missing from the duality I alluded to in my response to the previous question (the kinship between science and the museum) is another space or topos: the circus, the Luna Park, the gallery of dwarves and bearded ladies, and “smallest horses in the world” (as Coney Island would advertise, when it could no longer show “people”), which itself is reminiscent of the cabinet of curiosities … What is fascinating about monsters, especially in the context of naturalism and its potential “Others,” including the question of museification and / or scientific reification of odd, marvelous, or more broadly living objects, is the way in which they are a kind of ontologically double entity. In opposing machines to organisms in his famous essay “Machine and Organism”, Georges Canguilhem notes in one of his typically sibylline formulations, “There are no monstrous machines.” 6 That is, in the world of the organic, of development, of reproduction, of embryos and teratology, there are accidents, anomalies, abnormal forms, dysfunction. The disturbing possibility of the existence of (actual, biological) monsters is, in Canguilhem’s view, (for we might imagine mechanical monsters?) not a feature of the world of the inorganic, of machines. Long before Canguilhem’s essay on monstrosity and the monstrous, writers such as Montaigne and Diderot observed the “destabilizing” potential of monsters for our ideas of order, of Nature as something either benevolent and / or intelligible, as I stressed also in my contribution to the Monsters and Philosophy volume.7 As one eighteenth-century surgeon observed, they are the “place” where Nature seems to go against Nature. This destabilizing potential could of course also be sacralized, with monsters serving as “portents,” “omens,” or antiheroes—figures of a kind of sacred marginality (as they are in the rather messianic reappropriation of the monster figure in Toni Negri, for example, which I sought to critique in a short paper on “L’anomalie du vivant”).8 But it ultimately gets subsumed in a process of naturalization, in which monsters become statistical “anomalies” to be understood in merely quantitative terms: this is Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s project for a positive teratology, in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In a sense the ontological potential of monsters is even more than double, because there is the “marvelous” dimension, then its appropriation and perhaps nullification in the name of a positive, quantitative science, but there also remains a kind of contra naturam potential there. Additionally, and thinking back to the more “vitalistic” possibilities in naturalism or materialism, monsters of course are key figures (stand-ins, harbingers, figureheads) of embodiment, of what is uniquely embodied and alive. Diderot could very well have endorsed Canguilhem’s dictum that “there are no monstrous machines.” TG & VN: During the Cartesian momentum of Western philosophy, by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, or Malebranche, it is quite difficult to find any proper aesthetic text. This is as if Cartesianism had been a glorious parenthesis between the aesthetics of Platonism (The Republic, The Symposium, Ion), Aristotelianism (Poetics), Neoplatonism (from Plotinus to Marsilius Ficinus), and British empiricism (Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, “On the Standard of Taste” by David Hume) or German criticism (the third Critique by Kant). One could think of the few remarks of Leibniz about music, in the famous letters to Christian Goldbach, or the Cartesian examples of engravings and perspective in The Dioptrics (1637), but that is pretty much all there is. How should we think about this lack of interest of European rationalism, which was at the core of the modern devices of the separation and exhibition of Nature, for both aesthetics and the works of art? OS: I would venture to say is that there is something, in Platonism and in Aristotelianism, that we can properly recognize as supporting a reflection on aesthetics only a posteriori, mainly because the definition of aesthetics as the study of the judgments from sense-perception bearing on artworks was not yet stabilized. In Plato’s and in Aristotle’s philosophies, we do not yet encounter aesthetics in that sense, but a mobilization of concepts which will be remobilized as parts of the history of aesthetic inquiry after the “founding” work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: pathos, poetics, inspiration, technique, mimesis, catharsis, et cetera. And taking On the Aestheticization, Institutionalization, and Dramatization of the Concept of Nature 147 Andreas Ervik, Jellyfish in Fiji Water, 2013, as part of the event “Multinatural Histories,” Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge, MA, October 12, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. 148 Conversation with Olivier Surel and Charles Wolfe the ancient Greek framework as a point of reference from which to judge the relative silence of early modern rationalism on aesthetics can indeed lead us to wonder what has happened to the aforementioned concepts. Some of them are still present, but they are in no way central to the endeavor of the “three greats” (Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche) nor in the works of the maverick, Spinoza. Only in the eighteenth century, in Scottish empiricist and German idealist frameworks, will we encounter what we call “aesthetics” proper. Again, proceeding somehow differentially: what do the latter retain of rationalism? One can find a family resemblance between Spinoza’s account of the imagination and Hume’s associationist psychology (when I see the trace of a horse shoe in the sand, I think of horsemen at war, but I can also be led to think of the peacefulness of stables, of the apocalypse, or of Freud’s Little Hans), and it is a psychology that is foundational for the arguments contained in Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste (1757). Regarding Descartes himself now, one of his very first pieces of writing, the 1618 Compendium musicae, contains an analysis of musical beauty in a Pythagorean fashion, in terms of just proportions with the organs of hearing. The most fascinating part is his conjecture that a correspondence of musical intervals with a catalogue of the passions they elicit could be established, but he abandoned the whole project. Nevertheless, there have been complex attempts at reconstructing from there a Cartesian aesthetics without sidelining the rationalism of his “mature” mechanistic philosophy, aiming at the conceptualization of what Pascal Dumont deemed an “art of wonder.” As for Spinoza, it is more the case that contemporary Spinozists very occasionally reflect on the use of certain propositions for aesthetics. I think here, of course, of proposition 38 in Book IV of the Ethics: Whatever so disposes the human Body that it can be affected in a great many ways, or renders it capable of affecting external Bodies in a great many ways, is useful to man; the more it renders the Body capable of being affected in a great many ways, or of affecting other bodies, the more useful it is; on the other hand, what renders the Body less capable of these things is harmful. One can hardly think of a better place to start a reflection on the “utility” of aesthetic experience than Spinoza’s “proportionalist” theory of the magnitudes affecting the mind / body. In return, it allows us to define what we find useful in the aesthetic domain as something of the order of a maximization of the ways our minds “perceive” things. And yet, such an argument from utility could well be deemed too narrow, not specific enough in terms of the elaboration of an aesthetics which considers judgment on what is or not aesthetically relevant. Besides, a category like beauty, just like good and evil, is too relative a term for him. But as Ariel Suhamy recently remarked, the scholium of proposition 45 of Book IV of the Ethics develops an interesting physiological consequence of Spinoza’s local affirmation of aesthetic relativism: it can teach us why certain bodies are “positively” or “negatively” affected in certain ways and not others, which is a great gain from the epistemological point of view (to acquire “common notions” about said bodies), correlatively giving an immanent norm of sorts to artistic practices. But again, we can only conjecture that Spinoza felt that the discourse on artworks, their appreciation, and the specificity of their production, was a landmine of occult qualities (and the twentieth century still counted attempts as numerous and different as those of Walter Benjamin and Nelson Goodman to counter the “negative theology” of sorts that is attached to art as an ontological domain). Let me add that if one was to think in terms of the economy of the normative principles related to aesthetic experience, one could say that such Spinozism—were it properly mediated on the conceptual plane—could constitute a variation on, for example, Jacques Rancière’s position (who, in The Distribution of the Sensible, 2000, combined aspects of Schiller’s aesthetics, replacing its developmental theory with Marxian class theory). But that might be missing the point of Rancière’s endeavor, which also has to do with analyzing specific works politically, in what he deems our contemporary “age of aesthetics.” Which is also to say that this rationalist quasi silence on aesthetics as we define it is startling for people who have been exposed to more than three centuries of discourse around it, with an increasingly higher degree of specificity regarding the treatment of artforms and artworks from Hegel on. In the early modern period, it seems that the quasi-aesthetic concepts that we find in Renaissance Neoplatonism, for example, have been repurposed, or have fallen into argumentative frameworks in which they have been subordinated On the Aestheticization, Institutionalization, and Dramatization of the Concept of Nature 149 to the study of pleasure, displeasure, and correlated passions. But some scholars of German rationalism, such as F. C. Beiser, make the point that one of the founding works, Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750), is itself grounded in the terminology, the psychology, 1 2 3 150 Charles Wolfe, “Materialism and Artifice: Natural History and the Cultured Brain,” (lecture, ECAL, Lausanne, February 2016, https://youtu.be/r9euKKzEkz0). Denis Diderot, “Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle,” Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Dieckmann, J. Proust, and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 240. Translation here by Charles Wolfe. See Alexandra Sauvage, “Narratives of Colonisation: The Musée du Quai Branly in Context,” ReCollections 2, no. 2 (September 2007): 135–52, https:// 4 5 6 and the epistemology of the rationalism of Leibniz. In this sense, there is no full-blown aesthetics in Leibniz’s rationalism, but an aesthetics fueled by his rationalist conceptual apparatus ensued. recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2 _no2/papers/narratives_of_colonisation. Olivier Surel, “On Some Aspects of the Definition, Institutionalization, and Dramatization of the Concept of Nature,” (lecture, ECAL, Lausanne, May 2016). See Fabrizio Baldassari, “Between Natural History and Experimental Method: Descartes and Botany,” Society and Politics 8, no. 2 (2014): 43–60. Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Conversation with Olivier Surel and Charles Wolfe 7 8 Ginsburg (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 90. Charles Wolfe, “The Materialist Denial of Monsters,” Monsters and Philosophy, ed. Charles Wolfe (London: King’s College Publications, 2005), 187–204. Charles Wolfe, “L’anomalie du vivant. Réflexions sur le pouvoir messianique du monstre,” Multitudes 33, no. 2 (2008): 53–62.