Age: ours/ Rail against/ Lament that it isn't poetic/ Call it a "period of transition--of decadence!"

The debate on the crisis of art and the worthlessness of contemporary art that has been simmering for some years now certainly encompasses the idea behind this conference. People have talked about the alleged decadence of art, its lack of meaning, the loss of illusion, and the impossibility for art to represent. It has been said that all art did was exhibit, exhibit itself, and push empty signs around. It has also been said that art was no longer capable of questioning itself, that its meaning was about to emerge, etc. I use the "people have..." and "it has been said that..." formats on the one hand because all this is already part of rumour and, on the other, because this meeting has not been planned as a defence or reply, but as a question. We must also be included in the rumour.

And I wholeheartedly thank those taking part for having taken the risk of coming to speak about "the stupidity of art" without uttering curses, without thinking in terms of a manifesto for or against stupidity, and for having agreed to reflect about the way we-and they--deal with stupidity. So the idea behind these discussions does not, at least, involve pointing to the stupidity of others, inthe certainty that "seeing the stupidity of others" never freed Bouvard and P‚cuchet from theirs. Seeing stupidity is not the same as avoiding it. The term "stupidity" calls for a definition. In the critical discourse we actually hear terms which, in an initial phase, appear to be equivalent. We read "idiocy", "stupidity", and "foolishness" in Cl‚ment Rosset. "Nonsense" and "stupidity" in Gilles Deleuze. "Worthlessness", "nothingness" and "meaninglessness" in Jean Baudrillard. "Imbecility", worthlessness" and "nothing" in Maurice Blanchot. The same approximate terms can also be read elsewhere, in Michel Adam, Nietzsche, Robert Musil, Jean-Luc Nancy, etc.

Give the degree of indeterminacy, it seems important to further specify what I am referring to when I talk of stupidity, even if knowing, nowadays, that I am stupid, rather than idiotic, rather than foolish or imbecilic, brings me a very relative satisfaction.

It would thus seem that the terms "stupidity", "foolishness", "idiocy" and "imbecility" appear to belong in the same arena. There is a sort of common vacuousness, a boundary of meaning. A stupid or idiotic thing is not reflexive. There is something that makes no reference, that refers only to itself.

Dictionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the Encyclopaedia, are all quite quiet when it comes to the concept of "stupidity". In the dictionaries of FuretiŠre and Richelet, we can read: "Stupidity: state of being stupid, foolish". In the 19th century Larousse, "stupidity", "foolishness", "idiocy" "imbecility" and "na‹vety" all seem equivalent. The indeterminacy thus has to do with stupidity. If I try to get away from notions and define and reference these terms, I realize that I can say "an imbecile", "an idiot", "a fool" and then there is the French term "une bˆte" meaning, literally "beast" or "animal", hence "stupid (nitwit)". But the expression "une bˆte" refers more to bestiality and to stupidity, from which animals, and their specific nature, are actually protected. "Bˆte" or "stupid works as an attribute and adjective, in other words as a term that needs a noun to work as a reference.

Because the adjective does not have any definition, strictly speaking, stupidity thus has to do with the undefined, the absence of outlines. It is a kind of limitless place, bounded by its own existence. A limitless place for which metaphors like "mud", "cesspit", "bottom" and "ocean" are evidence. A solid that is enclosed by nothing. It is not possible either to define or gauge a "substance" which excludes all connection, because a gauge is always a relationship between at least two things, and stupidity only has a relationship with itself.

But a case does exist where "bˆte"/"stupid" is substantive, and where the presence of the adjective removes the term from its link with bestiality by giving it an indulgent connotation. In this case what is involved is a term such as "grosse bˆte" or "brave bˆte"--"big fool" or "affable fool". Indulgence and sympathy for major stupidity, blunders and bloomers, the mistake that needs putting right and correcting. But the stupidity that Flaubert talks about is not error, it is not the flipside of truth. When I fail to recognize something, I am nevertheless in a line of thought to do with recognition, where it is a matter of identifying what is repeated. When I make a mistake, I have misunderstood, failed to appreciate, misjudged, but the form of the error is that of truth. Needless to say, I think therefore I am, and when I get things wrong, I still am.

Error is not stupidity which is the B-side of nothing. Just as evil does not need good to exist, so stupidity has no need of truth, either.

In Flaubert, stupidity gives rise neither to indulgence for what might be an error, nor to outwardness or ironic distance. Pain and anger in Flaubert, as opposed to stupidity, are associated to the awareness that this stupidity might have to do with otherness, with what we are made of. Stupidity is not external to us, and has nothing to do with idiocy, with strangeness and the exception which merely, needless to say, proves the rule.

We are acquainted with the adventures and mishaps of Bouvard and P‚cuchet, those two imitators who become involved at once in an encyclopaedic grasp of the knowledge of the time, a summary of the knowledge of the day and a repetition of the experiences about which they have read descriptions and conclusions in the 1200 books they have read, 1200 books read, annotated and also quoted by Flaubert (because the copy of Bouvard and P‚cuchet is Flaubert's copy). We all know what happens next: the results do not comply with theories, the contradiction cannot be bypassed, this staking out of a body of knowledge brings on a sense of failure, then the examination of another form of knowledge, then a new sense of failure. The two imitators would thus study gardening, farming, tree-growing, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, dietetics, hygiene, cosmology, geology, archaeology, mythology, history, literature, politics, economics, gymnastics, magnetism, hypnosis, philosophy, religion, and education.

Areas of knowledge and experiences are juxtaposed, they pull apart a total entity that was presupposed by the encyclopaedia and led the two heroes to start copying. They buy old paper by weight in a paper factory and they start copying. Let me remind you of the end planned by Flaubert: "Conclusion. "What are we going to do?"-- Don't think about it! Let's copy! The page must be filled, "the monument" must be finished--Equality of everything, good and evil, Beauty and ugliness, the meaningless and the typical. The only true things are phenomena."

It goes without saying that the stupidity of the two heroes lies in their stubborn imitation, in the way they are incapable of discriminating and classifying. The stupidity here resides in their clumsiness, in their inability to go beyond a contradiction. Often, two texts in the same group that they have copied separately will clash with one another, they copy them out again from one end to the other in the same way".) The stupidity here also lies in their inability to learn lessons from their series of failures. This much is all obvious. Needless to say, our two fellows may also come across like thoroughly human men, "mediocre and sublime, devoted to endeavour and failure" (Blanchot). Because they are thoroughly human, and not simply and permanently imbeciles, they acquire, at a given moment, a real lucidity, and a real competence.

"So a pitiful faculty developed in their mind, that of seeing stupidity and no longer being able to put up with it. Meaningless things made them sad."

This lucidity gives rise, on their part, to no irony or silence, but rather a modernity initiated by Baudelaire, Flaubert and Mallarm‚, and dedicated to the re-examination of the end of a story come full circle, and in a world that has survived its accomplishment (here, I am not talking about nostalgia on the part of those talking about origins and hence of lost legitimacy. Let me quote Blanchot: "There is no original any more, but an everlasting sparkle where the absence of origin is dispersed, in the burst of detour and return."). What sadness is Flaubert talking about? That of an art aware of the emergence of chance and hence the absence of history and doomed thereby to repetition. But sadness more surely that stems from a perception of stupidity and the certainty that it is no longer outside of us: (I quote Deleuze): "Perhaps it is the origin of melancholy that weighs on the most beautiful figures of man: the hunch of a hideousness peculiar to the human face, of a rise of stupidity, of a deformation into evil, of a reflection in madness."

Sadness and stupidity thus seem to be connected. Stupidity dispossessed Flaubert of his being and stirred up a huge rage within him. Stupidity is (and I quote Flaubert) "that indefinable something [which] separates you from your own persona and attaches you to non-being".

When this "indefinable something" is included, one leaves ones being, one is outside of oneself. One abandons being and finds oneself "attached"--is this what Flaubert is saying? What Flaubert experimented with was the attraction of stupidity. Stupidity that clings and sticks. Nietzsche spoke, on this same topic, of "gravity" and "heaviness". There is also talk of "cesspit, mud, ocean" in Flaubert and Renan. "It is hard to describe these depths and the terror and lure that it arouses at the same time. Stirring up these depths is the most dangerous of occupations, but also the most tempting in moments of stupor of a dull desire", Deleuze tells us.

With regard to this range and this attraction, let me quote from Flaubert's correspondence:

"We suffer from but one thing: stupidity. But it is formidable and universal". (1885).

In 1852, when he was busy writing Madame Bovary, he wrote about this imminent book: "In it I shall attack everything... I shall sacrifice great men to all the imbeciles, martyrs to all the executioners, it will the apology of lowdown human trickery in all its guises, ironic and howling" [...] "I don't want to die before I've tipped a few pots of shit over the heads of my peers." [...] "My spirits are quite good, because I am thinking about a book where I shall let out my anger... I shall vomit on my contemporaries all the disgust they make me feel." [...] "Bouvard and P‚cuchet fill me to such a degree that I have become them! Their stupidity is mine, and I'm bursting with it".

Bouvard et P‚cuchet (the book), as we know it (however, 350 pages were to make up the preface to the Dictionnaire des id‚es re‡ues, on which Flaubert had been at work since the 1840s). The scenarios and drafts shed some light on this absent book. It was to have been a listing of stereotypes and clich‚s -- a collection of howlers. This book, which was intended to "flabbergast the reader" and "make him mad" (I quote Flaubert), and also make him say nothing for fear of saying something that might be in the book, is a purely alphabetically arranged classification, with no hierarchy, which does not form a system, or world, but rather an endless declension, a juxtaposition of snippets of speech.

In the stereotype, the subject is not grounded, it is placeless, its utterance has no origin, we are in something impersonal--one. And the interlocutor is also caught up in this "It is said..." He is not individualized, he is not a subject conceived in its differences and distinctive features. He is in a place where everybody knows that... and so nobody can deny that... A place where, unfortunately, people live in an over intelligent way with sameness.

This does not involve a word whose subject has become absent but whose presence is included in the negative--a subject that can still be read, and read above all as absence.

It is not a matter of being spoken by the other, but of no longer appearing as subject, of not being able to think any longer. It is not a matter of absence but of something over-full that hampers thought and word. "I don't expect anything any more of life except a sequence of sheets of paper to daub with black."

In this moment of modernity, Flaubert is not the person who might have achieved obliteration, and the quest for the place of the other, where nobody talks any more, where the person called person speaks, where the writer vanishes in the "infinity of clamour", in the infinity of signifiers.

I am not talking about failure. I mean that, to bring on "the absolute of form" which Flaubert mentions in his correspondence, to attain the "idea", to disappear as "I" in favour of some absolute idea, detached from everything, "a book about nothing" and without" any external attachments", work merely brings on the contingency of an ensnared, smeared subject, which cannot think, articulate or dispose, and which can only forever copy, erase and daub.

To free himself from the "I infatuated", Flaubert feels it without any serenity, in a state of deep sadness and anger. It no longer involves self-effacement, but dying. The artistic question is still: who's talking? and what are we up against?

Flaubert's sadness and anger are profound because the other whom he meets, who speaks it is not the endless hubbub of language, the ceaseless murmuring echoed by the author, but stupidity. And Flaubert elected to convey and embody stupidity. Unlike Ulysses, he agrees to listen to that "sirens' song".

"It is that which, in things, forms the inconceivable basis of their reality, the permanent remnant, which will never disappear, which is impossible, despite all endeavours to grasp the real through the intelligence, and which remains eternally at the bottom. It is from this absence of intelligence that, strictly speaking, intelligence has arisen [...]. To encourage man to aspire with all his might to the light, we do not however know of any more powerful stimulant that an awareness of the deep night from which existence came forth."

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

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