Who is not familiar with Aristotle's Poetics? Who is not familiar with modern poetics, if only Boileau's Art poétique? But apart from specialists, who is familiar with the poetics of the entire period between classical antiquity and modern times, between Aristotle and the Pléiade or Boileau? Yet, this period extended over two thousand years. Furthermore, it possessed its own poetics, governed by the strictest principles, worked out to the last detail. It may be divided into two great epochs: the end of Hellenic-Roman antiquity, on the one hand, and the entire Middle Ages, on the other. The poetics of these two epochs were very similar, since the second depended in great part on the first. Nevertheless, they present differences which oblige us to study them separately.

At least since Aristotle, and up to the end of the seventeenth century, the form of literary works, envisaged and appreciated for itself, independent of content, has never ceased to be one of the major concerns of critics and lovers of belles lettres. Theories of style, poetics, phraseology and grammar form an imposing and coherent collection; each generation has enriched it; opinions have changed but not methods or intentions: the formulation of rules of the art of writing is itself a genre with its own laws. All of this was true up to the day when there appeared, at first rather modestly, a new spirit manifesting itself in the nineteenth century by two tendencies, apparently contradictory but deriving from the same source, and each vigorously developing. On the one hand, the notion of style is widened, and the word expressing it, which up to that time only affected the domain of letters, is extended bit by bit to the fine arts, to all arts, to all kinds of activities. Diderot was the first to apply it to painting; today we speak casually about the style of a swimmer or of a tennis player. On the other hand, and concurrently, literary art found itself affected by a sense of inferiority.

The Greek theater produced not only a single triumphal procession of Dionysus. The god of tragedy made his way into the Renaissance and the baroque period through the story of Orpheus, given new dramatic and musical life. This was the theme of my study in Diogenes, 1959: “The Birth and Rebirth of Tragedy.” But the god of comedy was none other than the god of tragedy, and his path led, already in ancient times, to a particular dramatic genre: a genre which in its last, mild form became at the same time the vehicle of humanity, as the actual, great herald of Greek culture, and the model for European drama, inasfar as the latter did not purport to be a continuation of Greek tragedy.

The idea of decadence presents many variants of which two alone have a truly decisive importance. One is the biological, physiological and psychological variant; the other, the literary, esthetic and spiritual variant. The latter is so much more significant than the former that it often incarnates the very constant of the idea of decadence. This constant is eminently historical: everyone knows that when decadence, and nothing else, is being spoken about, it is not so much the degeneration of the species or of an individual that is under consideration, as the decline of a social and political organism or, more generally, of a society or a civilization. All modern speculation with regard to the notion of decadence derives from this principle.

By its very structure, the objective image tends to establish a new rapport between man and the world. One can hardly, if at all, speak of “image” in connection with photography. Originally the word signified: imitation, copy. The image which imitates the world remains distinct from it. In a drawing, faithful though it might be, there is always a distance, an interval between the object represented and its plastic transcription. This distance disappears entirely in photography. There, the image coincides so much with the given data that it is somehow destroyed as an image. It is this very data, magically repeated, covering the surface of the paper or of the screen with its presence, its double, so to speak. The photographic image is no longer a copy, but a statement of the world itself expressed in it, a simple opening into the world.

In the plastic image, either painting or drawing, the world was denied. I mean denied not in its forms or colors, but in its very essence, denied insofar as it was the world. It was a world trans-posed, trans-figured, abstracted from that exteriority in which it is displayed as the world. A world in which man made his mark by interpreting it in plastic terms. Van Gogh's Orchard is a picture before being the representation of an orchard. Man can gaze upon it as on a beautiful creation in itself, added to the world, and if subsequently he is referred to a real orchard, the spectator will discover it with Van Gogh's eyes, through the transfigurating vision of the painter. The image traced by man's hand acts as a transmutation: it appropriates the substance of the world in order to integrate it into the human domain. In a second phase, it shapes the world to our visual taste. The revolution accomplished by photography, on the contrary, depends on what the world henceforth predicates—in its autonomy and difference—in the very image which man forms of it. Where once there was an exercise of power, now there is nothing but submission. Photography is the total effacement before the real with which it coincides. It is the world as it is, in its immediate verity which it reproduces on paper or on the screen. It confers upon it, as it were, a second presence, effacing itself insofar as it is an image in order to be no more than a field open to this presence, repeated each time. To the denied world of plastic representation, there consequently succeeds the world affirmed as pure in itself, established in its difference before the observer. The objective image makes possible the paradox that the world unveils itself as it is in itself, pro-nounces itself, if I may say so, prior to all human language. Up to then, it was manifested as a world only via the mediation of the observer. It was the “given” matter of an observation: that of the man who simply was orienting himself or contemplating, or the creative gaze of the artist. In the photographic image, the world somehow precedes this observation: it determines its content, imposing a vision. The traditional schema is reversed: from pure matter to a discourse, the world becomes itself a language and “accosts” man in this language. The relationship between man and the world, summed up in classic vision, becomes, via the interpretation of the twin-image, a sort of relationship of the world to man.

Ever since there have been paintings and they have been framed, it is somewhat surprising that no serious research has ever been undertaken on the problem of the frame. To be sure, some scholars have published studies on the different types of frames employed, particularly in Europe during the last centuries; they have classified them according to certain criteria and traced out their variations through various epochs and countries. But the principal question has been avoided: why the frame? Perhaps because it is not capable of being answered; perhaps because located at the limits of esthetics, at the border between painting and furniture, it is considered to have lesser importance in comparison with theories of the visual arts, which have particularly drawn the attention of historians and art critics, not to mention essays full of good will by amateurs in the mood for writing.

In recent years it has frequently been pointed out that one of the salient characteristics of contemporary art, that is, abstraction, is the fact that it is not bounded by local traditions or cultures, but has rapidly affirmed itself and spread throughout the civilized world. This phenomenon, the international quality of abstraction, it seems to me, has not yet received the attention it deserves. In general, people have contented themselves with noticing it and, according to the circumstances, either enjoying or mistrusting it. Those who see in abstraction an elevated form of culture, to which the entire human race should adhere in order to achieve a rapid ascent toward a higher common destiny, are pleased. Their opponents also judge the phenomenon from a “cultural” point of view, but they find it a typical phenomenon of mass culture, of the sort of culture that breaks up true and proper culture into utilitarian and demonically hypnotic forms. Both optimists and pessimists make the same mistake: they attribute a merely mechanistic significance to what they call culture, considering it a means of transmission and diffusion. According to them, the internationalization of abstraction is due to the simple fact that today, with television, radio, airplanes and illustrated papers, ideas and novelties travel more quickly than in the past. It would be as valid to maintain that the people of the earth have not all in turn been simultaneously Platonists or Buddhists or Christians only because Plato and Buddha and Christ could not send telegrams or grant interviews to newspapers.

Forms are produced, it seems to me, by chance, by growth, by design or by imprint. The curves of a pebble, the elusive architecture of clouds, flames, cascades, the cracks in dried-out soil are the result of a variety of causes, or if you like, a variety of interacting accidents, compromises between concurrent forces, balances, wear, or varying degrees of inertia. These, though perhaps calculable, are hardly worth calculating. For we know ahead of time that the final outcome must be arbitrary, depending as it does on thousands of successive and transitory rivalries. No significant phenomenon can result from such a series. Forms generated in this way are the outcome of an infinity of varied accidents, which are conjoined, composed or cancelled out in an unpredictable manner. They are like dream images, and sometimes, just as ravishing. No law presides at their formation, which obeys too many laws at once, and, what is more, laws unaccustomed to one another and brought together by accident. The origin of this kind of form is properly assigned to chance, though I am well aware that such forms owe their appearance to a welter of determining causes, each of them tyrannical in their separate domain. But the welter, though in the end determinant, is itself accidental.