Art [1] nm (ar; le t ne se lie pas: l'art oratoire, dites: ar oratoire, et non l'ar- t oratoire; au pluriel l's ne se lie pas, les arts et les sciences, dites: les ar et les sciences; cependant cette liaison plaît à quelques- uns, qui disent: les ar- z et les sciences).
In the 1848 Discours sur l'ensemble du positivisme (A General View of Positivism), published in the middle of the June Days of the 1848 Revolution, during an apogee for positivism as a movement, Auguste Comte proposes a dual, complex role for art and the artist of the positive age.2 First, he says, art will lose the towering, if excentric, place it holds in the current social system: it will lose its autonomy, irregularity, exuberance and power, the separate realm through which artists engage and influence social activity. But, second, art will acquire a new force, and the artist, having come to accept his dependence on science, industry and technique, will become the figure who outlines the future.
In his efforts to accomplish this object, the Positivist poet will naturally be led to form prophetic pictures of the regeneration of Man, viewed in every aspect that admits of being ideally represented. And this is the second service which Art will render to the cause of social renovation; or rather it is an extension of the first. Systematic formation of Utopias will in fact become habitual; on the distinct understanding that, as in every other branch of art, the ideal shall be kept in subordination of the real. (Comte 2009: 335)
It is an astonishing formulation. One might expect art to decline in the positive age, to become incidental or ornamental, a genre of comfortable if pointless pictorial speculation that enlivens without genuinely affecting. It is not merely, as Mary Pickering (3: 204) notes, that in the positive future “the mind would gain satisfaction in directing its energy toward the arts.” Comte proposes, in fact, that not only will art participate in the regeneration of society and, indeed, that of human nature itself— not only will it come up with depictions of the present and the future, of ideals to follow— but it will indeed form systematic utopias.