The Life of the City: Aesthetics of Existence in Finde-Sicle Montmartre

Julian John Alasdair Brigstocke

A dissertation submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements for award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human Geography in the Faculty of Social Sciences, September 2010.

79, 958 words

Abstract
This thesis is a contribution to a history of arts of urban life. It documents a series of creative practices which aimed to transform the limits, characteristics, and experience of urban life in 1880s France. It turns to the example of fin-desicle Montmartre and describes the characteristics of a stance towards the interfaces between art, life and the urban environment that was developed within the neighbourhoods cabarets artistiques. Notwithstanding recent attempts to use the name of Montmartre in support of neo-liberal culture-led urban regeneration policies, this stance was wholly alien to the instrumentalism of recent liberal approaches to culture and urban creativity. Three elements of this ethos towards the modern city were predominant: its commitment towards affirmation through the use of irony and pantomime humour; its forms of counter-display and its parodies of dominant forms of urban representation; and its experiments with unworking the senses and the perceptual limits of the healthy body.

Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been completed without the inspiration, support and advice of dozens of colleagues, friends and family. A special thanks to J.-D. Dewsbury for his unfailing ability to provoke new ideas and his detailed and insightful readings of endless drafts and redrafts, as well as for his encouragement and friendship. Robert Mayhews advice at critical stages of the thesis transformed the end result. Keith Bassett and Veronica della Dora contributed useful ideas during the upgrade process. Many of my theoretical ideas were sparked in the non-representational geographies reading group, which was always a source of provocation and inspiration. Thanks also to all my friends in Bristol for countless happy hours of debate and speculation, and especially to Sam Kirwan and Pawel Paluchowski for their assistance at the very end. My parents Hugh and Anthea, as well as my sister Sophie, went out of their way to support me in every way they possibly could. David and Lynda Blencowe offered an idyllic refuge at moments of stress and crisis. Above all, thanks to Carol and Danny Doran, whose extraordinary hospitality, generosity and good company transformed what might have been a nightmarish final few months into a hugely enjoyable period in which I came to feel part of a new family. Finally, it feels far too trite to offer thanks to Claire Blencowe, whose love, ideas and encouragement drove every stage of the thesis, and whose humbling intellect is matched only by her generosity of spirit.

Declaration
I declare that the work in this dissertation was carried out in accordance with the requirements of the University's Regulations and Code of Practice for Research Degree Programmes and that it has not been submitted for any other academic award. Except where indicated by specific reference in the text, the work is the candidate's own work. Work done in collaboration with, or with the assistance of, others, is indicated as such. Any views expressed in the dissertation are those of the author.

SIGNED:

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Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ v Declaration ................................................................................................................. vii Contents ...................................................................................................................... ix List of Figures ............................................................................................................ xiii Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Research Questions ...........................................................................................................2 Situating the Thesis ...........................................................................................................4 Non-Representational Geography ....................................................................................6 Philosophical Approach ..................................................................................................13 Alienation, Life, and Experience ....................................................................................14 Art and Life in Nineteenth-Century France ...................................................................19 Thesis Outline..................................................................................................................23 Chapter One: Arts of Urban Life: Modernity, Space and Creativity .............................. 27 The Urban Avant-Garde ..................................................................................................28 Dada, Surrealism and Situationism.................................................................................28 Theorizing Art and Everyday Life: From Saint-Simon to the Situationists ...................30 Contemporary Avant-gardes............................................................................................36 Reproblematizing the Avant-Garde ................................................................................40

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The Myth of Montmartre ................................................................................................41 The Arts in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris ....................................................................44 The Chat Noir Cabaret Artistique...................................................................................46 Urban Montmartre ..........................................................................................................52 Chapter Two: Urban Experience and the Art of Life ................................................... 57 Ethics and the Critique of Reason ..................................................................................58 Life as a Work of Art ........................................................................................................59 Ethics and Subjectivity .....................................................................................................61 Desire and Pleasure .........................................................................................................64 Combating Subjectivity ....................................................................................................66 Ethical Practice and the Truthful Life............................................................................68 Telos .................................................................................................................................71 Transformable Singularities ............................................................................................76 Chapter Three: Sources and Analytical Method: Names of History .............................. 79 Archives and Primary Research Materials ......................................................................80 The Life of the Past .........................................................................................................83 The Aesthetics of History ................................................................................................86 Thinking History..............................................................................................................91 Time, Memory and the Selection of the Past .................................................................92 Names of History .............................................................................................................94 The Life of the Past: Percept or Concept? .....................................................................96 Writing Names of History: From Theory to Practice .....................................................98 Chapter Four: Defiant Laughter: Humour, Pessimism, and the Experience of Place . 103 The Free and Proud City of Montmartre .....................................................................103 The Destruction of Place ...............................................................................................106 The Holy City .................................................................................................................110 The Vitality of Humour .................................................................................................114

Irony, Contradiction and Experience...........................................................................116 Pierrot and the Modern Carnivalesque ........................................................................118 Fin-de-Sicle Pessimism .................................................................................................122 Affirmative Pessimism ....................................................................................................124 Economies of Life ..........................................................................................................128 Chapter Five: Counter-Display and the Exhibition of Error ........................................ 133 Scattering Time..............................................................................................................134 The Chat Noir as Anti-Museum ....................................................................................137 Displaying Error .............................................................................................................141 Colonizing Paris .............................................................................................................144 Exhibiting the World-as-Exhibition ..............................................................................148 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................152 Chapter Six: Life Beyond the Senses: Shadows, Ghosts and Silhouettes ..................... 155 Landscapes of the Dead ................................................................................................155 Modernity and The Organization of the Senses ..........................................................158 Shadow Theatre and the Disorganization of Perception ............................................161 Parody and Totality........................................................................................................164 All and Nothing: Unworking the Work ........................................................................167 Conclusions............................................................................................................... 171 Motivations and Background of the Thesis ..................................................................171 Summary of Arguments .................................................................................................175 Assessing the Findings ...................................................................................................181 Between Montmartre and Neo-Bohemia......................................................................182 References ................................................................................................................ 185

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List of Figures
Figure 1. Eugene Bataille (Sapeck), Mona Lisa With Pipe. .............................................47 Figure 2. Theodor Steinlen, poster for the Chat Noir's touring 'ombres chinoises'.........49 Figure 3. Eduard Manet, 'Olympia', 1863............................................................................51 Figure 4. Front page of Le Chat Noir journal, April 21, 1883. ..........................................80 Figure 5. Rodolphe Salis, Poster for municipal elections, April 1884. ............................104 Figure 6. Anon., illustration in Le Chat Noir, vol. 1, January 14, 1882............................112 Figure 7. Adolphe Willette, Pierrot Fumiste, in Le Chat Noir, March 18, 1882. ..........120 Figure 8. Adolphe Willette, Pierrot Amoureux, in Le Chat Noir, April 8, 1882. ..........121 Figure 9. Adolphe Willette, 'Passage de Venus sur le soleil', in Le Chat Noir.................122 Figure 10. Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, cover of La Vache Enrage, vol. 1, 1896. ..........127 Figure 11. Anon., 'Le Coup d'Etat du 2 Novembre 1882', in Le Chat Noir ....................138 Figure 12. Adolphe Willette, 'Parce Domine', 1884. .........................................................140

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Introduction
This thesis is an historical and theoretical investigation of arts of urban life of creative activity devoted to altering the limits of, and relations between, life, experience, and the city. In doing so, the thesis turns to a period in history in which the life of the city was starting to be problematized in a way that was distinctively modern. It was during the last decades of the nineteenth century that the roots of modern French urbanism, involving an ideal of the planned city as a regulator of modern society, and an aim to transform the socio-natural milieu into a healthy and stable environment, were laid down (Rabinow, 1989). It was also during this period that the notion of an urban and cultural avant-garde started to emerge. The thesis charts aspects of the urban culture of 1880s Montmartre, and in doing so, challenges an influential social-scientific narrative in which the rich history of nineteenth century urban culture is reduced to a story of ongoing spectacularization, abstraction, and aestheticization of everyday life. In the narrative which the thesis contests, embodied experience becomes reduced to abstract discourse, active citizens are reduced to passive spectators, and life is reduced to representation. The thesis will argue that the urban culture of 1880s Montmartre cannot usefully be understood in such terms. By viewing late nineteenth-century French culture, not in terms of an economy of representation, but in terms of an economy of life and lived experience as the theoretical frameworks of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy require tired analytical contrasts between popular and avant-garde culture can be replaced by a more productive set of distinctions. Chief amongst these is a contrast between practices that aim to proliferate life and lived experience by relating them to established knowledges concerning their

true nature, and practices that find new forms of life and experience outside the established limits of these terms. This distinction opens up a set of questions which bring a novel perspective to the heavily researched field of fin-de-sicle urban culture. The subject of the thesis is a name of history that has recently been adopted as a marker for an influential set of neo-liberal ideas and values. This name is Montmartre a name evoking, for some, a space of unconstrained creativity, energy, and excess. This name is frequently cited in neo-liberal urban planning discourses which celebrate neobohemian city space, and which strive to harness the energy of creative, dynamic and edgy urban neighbourhoods in order to stimulate economic growth. Bohemian Montmartre has become a marker for a political rationality co-ordinating the interactions between life, experience and creativity, celebrating the imposition of a market rationality upon every aspect of social and cultural life. The thesis contests this neo-liberal myth of the role of culture in the economic vitalization of Paris, which relies upon an historical narrative in which Montmartre culture opens with an initial eruptive event, a burst of a pure avant-garde creativity, which is quickly followed by the birth of a parasitic cultural industry devoted to converting this creative energy into economic profit, thereby deforming this creative life into an empty celebration of consumption, spectacle and representation. This narrative does not bear close scrutiny. By viewing the culture of Montmartre in terms of an economy of life and lived experience, rather than an economy of exchange or representation, it becomes clear that what occurred was not the brief emergence of an avant-garde that became quickly incorporated into the emerging culture industry. Rather, what occurred was a series of literary and performative experiments on the limits of urban life and subjectivity experiments which deliberately and self-consciously intermingled elements of popular and avant-garde urban culture. During the 1880s Montmartre gave place to a series of new experiments with stylizing arts of living in the modern urban milieu.

Research Questions
The principal aim of the thesis is to offer a detailed empirical analysis of the ways in which cultural experiments in 1880s Montmartre stylized new modes of engagement with the modern city by intervening in the distribution of life and lived experience, as well as to explore in detail the theoretical and methodological problems that arise from

these issues. In order to achieve this, the thesis poses several more specific questions, which roughly correspond to each chapter of the thesis. 1. How has cultural geography contributed to knowledges concerning the relation between art, life and the city, and experiments to reconfigure them? What are the theoretical and methodological presuppositions of this research, and how productive are these presuppositions for developing thought capable of testing the limits of modern subjectivity and experience? How will questioning these presuppositions enable this study to depart from existent histories of fin-de-sicle urban culture? 2. What kind of empirical field is opened up by the Foucauldian notion of an art of life or aesthetics of existence? What theoretical stance towards life, experience, subjectivity does it commit itself to? What sort of account of individuation does it rely upon? What role might the urban environment play in the development of new arts of life? 3. What is the most appropriate historical and analytical methodology for a study of arts of living? To what extent do the theoretical commitments developed above invite a reconsideration of the historians methodological and analytical practice? In what respects, if any, might a history of arts of living provoke a questioning of the present? 4. In what ways did Montmartre culture intervene in the affective life of the city? What role did the experience of place play? What was the role, for example, of affective states such as humour, melancholy and pessimism in developing this attitude, and how did this stance towards the urban environment challenge established relations between subjectivity and the experience of the city? 5. What kind of stance did Montmartre culture take towards canonical forms of urban representation? How did they undermine dominant ways of linking life and experience in the modern city? To what extent did their critique of representation open up new ways of experiencing the city? 6. What means of making life perceptible did Montmartre culture develop? What were the links between these new modes of perception and the space of the city? How did their cultural experiments challenge dominant knowledges concerning health, environment, and the limits of experience?

7. Finally, how can the overall attitude towards the life of the city in fin-de-sicle Montmartre culture be characterized, and in what ways did this attitude diverge from the ethos adopted by advocates of the neo-liberal creative city?

Situating the Thesis

A significant amount of historical research has been conducted into fin-de-sicle Montmartre and, in particular, the artists who lived and worked there (e.g. Chevalier, 1995; Parisot & Buisson, 1996; Thomson et al., 2005; Weisberg, 2001b). The literature on late nineteenth-century French popular and avant-garde culture in general, moreover, is vast (e.g. Clarke, 1985; De la Motte & Przyblyski, 1999; Gluck, 2005; Henderson, 1971; Roslak, 2007; Schwartz, 1998; Shattuck, 1968; Terdiman, 1985). The thesiss claim to originality, therefore, is not its focus on a previously ignored topic, or its unearthing of undiscovered historical sources. The thesis does, however, offer an original and significant contribution to knowledge in a number of respects. Firstly, the thesis analyses the production of creative space in Montmartre in a way which, rather than seeing it as a passive container for the social and cultural practices that occurred there, sees it as an active, dynamic, and embodied agent in the production of these creative practices. This stance being one of the basic doxa of contemporary human geography, this amounts to saying that the thesis is the first extended study to take up a specifically geographical approach to Montmartres cultural history. Historical accounts of Montmartre writers and artists have typically portrayed Montmartre as a passive, static landscape, a source of visual ideas and creative energies that were reproduced in art and literature. Little scholarly attention has been given to the role played by the neighbourhood of Montmartre itself in the production of creative subjectivity. Moreover, cultural historians have not analysed the specifically urban qualities and values of Montmartre culture. This study, therefore, contributes to knowledge of fin-de-sicle Montmartre culture by developing a perspective through which the area becomes visible as an active, material and experiential space, a milieu harnessing novel forms of perception and affective energy, as well as by uncovering the novel relationships that emerged between Montmartre, the urban environment, and the life of the city. Secondly, the thesis contributes to theoretical debates surrounding the spatial politics of urban culture, as well as to debates around the ethical and political possibilities of

stylizing life through aesthetic means. It builds on recent efforts to rethink dominant categories by which nineteenth-century culture has routinely been understood, such as the distinction between popular and avant-garde culture, the contrast between routinized everyday life and transgressive creative life, and the narrative of the spectacle that supports these divisions (e.g. Gluck, 2005; Hetherington, 2007; Vasudevan, 2007). It does this by arguing for the need to turn the theory of the avantgarde away from analytical categories based upon the economy of spectacle and representation, and to refocus it through categories based on the distribution of life and lived experience. In addition, following the call from non-representational theorists for a body of research capable of understanding the aesthetics of everyday living, the thesis offers an original exploration of the architecture of the notion of arts of life or aesthetics of existence in the work of Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. The ethos of modernity explored by Foucault and Benjamin, it argues, involves isolating historically specific conditions of singularity, the conditions from which the weight of history can generate creases and points of weakness through which singular events can emerge or be created. Finally, the thesis makes a theoretical case for giving historical research a greater role in the experimental research agendas of non-representational theory, and discusses one way of writing a non-representational history. Thirdly, the thesis is an oblique form of intervention in recent debates surrounding the creative city (e.g. Florida, 2002b; Hannigan, 2006; Peck, 2005; Pratt, 2008). Within economic geography there is an often-repeated narrative that describes the emergence of a creative space of avant-garde creativity, which plays a pivotal role in driving the economic revitalization and regeneration of an urban area, at the cost of encouraging processes of gentrification and normalization, consequently driving out the artists to other, less fashionable areas. Creativity, in this formula, is reduced to its instrumental role in developing an attractive, buzzy environment for the kinds of modern and trendy businesses which city planners are particularly keen to attract, and thereby injecting new economic life into previously inactive areas. What the example of Montmartre culture reveals, however, is that its creativity did not lie in this kind of liberation of life. Rather, its creativity lay in the challenge that it posed to the life of the city, and its attempt to imagine a wholly new form of urban vitality, a form of life emerging from a space outside life as it was specified through dominant epistemological frameworks. Fin-de-sicle discourses tended to envisage the good city as a city in which natural life circulated freely in stable, functional equilibrium. The vital city was

understood to require: an atmosphere of sobriety, reason, and optimism in science; forms of urban representation capable of ordering excessive natural life; and modes of perception in which experience was synthesized into an organized whole. The cultural experiments of fin-de-sicle Montmartre, by contrast, approached life as something capable of disturbing the citys functional equilibrium. They celebrated affective atmospheres of anarchic humour and affirmative pessimism; forms of representation that exposed the inadequacies of dominant forms of urban representation; and forms of synaesthetic perception that, by disorganizing the senses, parodied the forms of perceptual disorder that were believed to be symptomatic of a failure of human bodies to adapt to the milieux in which they lived. These experiments, rather than accepting the accepted forms in which the life of the city was made visible, enacted a redistribution of the visibility the epistemic and phenomenal structure of urban vitality.

Non-Representational Geography
Since the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, which started in the 1970s and gathered full pace during the 1990s (Barnett, 2004), human geography has continually problematized and re-problematized the question of the subject, the selfgrounding, rational author of practices and behaviours (see Pile & Thrift, 1995; Pratt, 2009; Probyn, 2003). My approach here is one which refuses to view the human subject as something stable, unique, fixed or universal, but does not attempt to eliminate subjectivity altogether from its vocabulary. It views individual and collective subjectivities as specific knots in which modern forms of force and power converge, but does not see subjectivity as the sole or dominant agency in the world, and views its achievement to be necessarily contingent, unstable, and open to modification. The thesis takes experience as a central concept, for experience is something which does not necessarily either include or exclude the subject. Experience can belong to a human subject, but equally it can exist in separation from it, as a singular intensity, an experience with no experiencing subject. Subjectivity can slip in and out of a single experience. In this respect, the thesis is situated within the school of geographical scholarship often referred to as non-representational theory (Anderson & Harrison, 2010; Thrift, 1996, 2007a). Broadly, non-representational approaches place emphasis on bodies, experience, and practice over meanings, knowledges and intentional attitudes (i.e. subjects beliefs, reasons, wishes and desires) in their analyses of the production and reproduction of space, place and environment. They also emphasize the power of

theoretical analysis to extract political relations of power and force from the details, rhythms and performances of everyday life. Many different statements of the commitments and presuppositions of nonrepresentational theory exist, and these commitments have mutated, fragmented and dispersed over time. Here I will focus specifically on the ways in which Nigel Thrift has characterized the field. Three of the most important themes that occur in his work are of particular relevance to the thesis, and so I will briefly rehearse them here. Firstly, non-representational geography has taken up life as one of its basic ontological units. In itself, this is nothing new; it is part of the long tradition that defines geography as the study of mankinds relation to natural life. Carl Sauer, for example, wrote in 1925 that the task of the human geographer is to comprehend land and life in terms of each other, adding that human geography could equally be referred to as human ecology (Sauer, 1963:322, 342). In his descriptions of non-representational geography, Thrift also frequently evokes its ecological outlook (e.g. Thrift, 1999). Rather than seeing geography in terms of human ecology, however, Thrift refuses to allot a privileged place to human culture as something that is separate from, and imposes itself on top of, the life of the natural environment. Moreover, Thrift does not just see life as an organizing concept of human geography, but also takes it up as a normative value. Nonrepresentational approaches, he suggests, are concerned with summoning life or striving to make dead geographies live (Thrift, 2001; Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000). They aim to revitalize a literature on spatiality which now ... presents (or rather pasts) us with a kind of tomb, full of dead, dead, dead geographies (Thrift, 2000a:235). In this respect, non-representational theory has often supposed life and representation to function as roughly antithetical terms. Representation is what reduces the movement, energy and dynamism of space to static, immobile images. Life, on the other hand, is what escapes representation, and is the quality that ensures that space always remains dynamic and fugitive. Life is excessive, indeterminate, and irretrievable, and it is these qualities of space that non-representational theory addresses (Dewsbury, 2000). A characteristic assumption of non-representational theory, then, is that geographical analysis must avoid reducing life to representation, thereby reducing movement to stasis, qualities to quantities, and embodied experience to abstract discourse. One motivating factor for these assumptions is non-representational geographys interest in, and commitment to, creativity. This interest seems to move between what might loosely be termed as an absolute and a tactical commitment to creativity. The

first sees creativity as an essential ethical and political value, and consequently places an emphasis on activating powers of invention and, especially, the invention of new means of occupying, usurping, and producing spaces and times (Thrift, 2000a:216). Rather than stifling creativity, according to this standpoint, human geography must both pay more attention to non-representational creative practices such as dance and performance art, which demonstrate the skills we have but cannot ever articulate fully in the linguistic domain (Thrift, 2000a:235). Creativity is a political value because it is a way of multiplying alternatives to the present: non-representational theory wants to make things more political, much more political, in that, above all, it wants to expand the existing pool of alternatives and corresponding forms of dissent (Thrift, 2003:2021). However, a more critical approach is also evident in some areas of non-representational research which recognize that a remorseless pressure to be creative has come to pervade much of social life (Thrift, 2000c:676). Echoing the arguments of Walter Benjamin (2002), who in the 1930s discarded creativity as a value that had been commandeered by reactionary forces, this perspective recognizes that creativity has come to play an increasingly important role in the neo-liberal forms of reason whose implementation serve to drastically widen social inequalities (see also Osborne, 2003a). Creativity, here, is not understood as a fundamental value in and of itself, but as a tool that is too powerful to be allowed to be monopolized by capital. Thus, nonrepresentational theory is concerned with attempting to hone existing practices and invent new ones that can provide performative counters to the prevailing notions of what constitutes knowledge and creativity (Thrift, 2005:10). Thirdly, non-representational theory, continuing earlier traditions in feminist and humanistic geography, has placed an emphasis upon embodied experience. Experience, here, refers at once to sensory experience and to emotional experience, although the most sustained focus has been on the latter. Most often, this has been framed in terms of what Thrift calls the spatial politics of affect (Thrift, 2004). This concept of affect is developed from Benedictus de Spinozas [1677] (1996) Ethics, which distinguishes between passive affects or passions most importantly, joy, sadness and desire and active affects, which pertain to reason (Allison, 1998). According to Spinoza, a life lived under the sway of the passions is a life of bondage. Liberation, by contrast, involves using reason to free the mind from its submission to the passions, which it achieves by showing events to be necessary rather than contingent. Nonrepresentational theory echoes this theory of bondage by highlighting the ways in which

contemporary political technologies have become proficient at controlling pre-cognitive affective response. We are living in a time of greater and greater authoritarianism, Thrift worries, and this is partly a result of a proliferation of new techniques by which affective response can be designed into space (e.g. design, lighting, event-management, logistics, music, performance) (Thrift, 2007a:222). However, drawing on a more Romanticist interpretation of Spinoza derived from Gilles Deleuze (1988, 1990), nonrepresentational theory has also highlighted the political potential of the passions and the possibilities of engaging a productive, forward sense of life which strives to engage positively with the world, resulting in a new politics of emotional liberty that is not reducible to a romanticizing maximising of individuals (Thrift, 2004:68). One of the points of convergence of this threefold emphasis upon life, creativity and experience is the notion of an art of life or aesthetics of existence: the idea that individual, collective or non-human life might be worked upon as a work of art something to be stylized creatively, rather than through reference to scientific, religious or metaphysical truths concerning the nature of life. If the aesthetic is understood as the arena of embodied experience, then styling life is necessarily an aesthetic ethics or politics. Insofar as life is understood as a corporeal force that inevitably exceeds representation in discourse, creating life as a work of art involves working upon the body and its lived experiences both perceptions and affections. Thrift and Dewsbury (2000) recall Henri Lefebvres claim that, On the horizon, then, at the further edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species ... on the model of what used to be called art (Lefebvre, 1991:422). Non-representational theory, then, both implicitly and explicitly celebrates the possibility of developing a new art of life. This idea of creating life as a work of art has been explored in a variety of ways throughout western history, from Ancient Greece (Hadot, 1995) to the Renaissance (Greenblatt, 1980) to Romanticism (Adams, 1995), Marxism (Sayers, 2003), the historical avant-garde (Brger, 1984), and contemporary consumer culture (Bauman, 2008). In recent philosophy, it is Foucault (1990, 1992) who most thoroughly explored the idea, and I will discuss his ideas in detail in Chapter Two. In order to introduce the theoretical stance of the thesis, however, it useful to note the ways in which Thrift distances his theories of art, life and experience from Foucaults. This will enable me to demonstrate some of the ways in which the this thesis departs from Thrifts interpretation of non-representational forms of research.

According to Thrift, life and experience are important systematic and ... politically disabling blind spots in Foucaults thought (Thrift, 2007b:53). Foucault, he writes, has an aversion to discussing phenomenological issues surrounding perception and the ontological correlation of human beings and world. He also has an aversion to discussing affect. In addition, although Foucaults work is sensitive to the role of space, it remains blind to spaces aliveness. Moreover, as Thrift remarks elsewhere, Foucault also underplays the role of creativity, something that is evident in his overly pessimistic characterization of power. Thrift observes that, though he embraced a positive notion of power, the fact is that Foucaults world view is not very positive (2000b:269). However, he continues, I [Thrift] have been sketching out a rather more optimistic view of the world, one in which power is undoubtedly present and hurts but is neither everywhere not all-pervasive. In particular, this has meant that I have sought for those elements of life which continually and chronically undermine all forms of power (Thrift, 2000b:269). Foucault, he writes, was clearly pessimistic about the room for manoeuvre to be found within technologies of government, and sceptical about what might lie beyond power (Amin & Thrift, 2002:108). True creativity or liberation, then, for Thrift, is something that occurs outside power. These comments are surprising. Foucault, after all, wrote rather a lot about perception, affect, life, power and resistance. Reading The Order of Things, it is impossible to agree that Foucault ignored issues surrounding perception, ontology and phenomenology; and readers of The Use of Pleasure, The Care of the Self or Foucaults (2000d, 2000e) essays on Blanchot and Bataille would be bewildered to hear that affect has no role in his writing. Certainly anyone familiar with The Will to Knowledge, or his recently published lectures on biopolitics (Foucault, 2007, 2008a) will not give any credence to Thrifts lamenting of Foucaults general avoidance of economy, except as an episteme or, later, as the circulation of people and goods (Thrift, 2007b:56). Thrifts critique of Foucault, therefore, can appear to rely on a reading that excludes the majority of his oeuvre. What explains this, perhaps, is that Thrift is not really suggesting that Foucault literally does not discuss these issues; rather, his argument is that when Foucault discusses perception, affect, life and creativity, he is really analysing something else and what he is really talking about is language or discourse. When Foucault claims to be discussing life, experience and creativity, he is simply exploring representations of them, and not the things-in-themselves. He inscribes everything within relations of power, where power is

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also defined in terms of language and representation. What Foucault is blind to, therefore, is the material, living world outside language and power. Such an argument wilfully refuses to take Foucaults arguments on their own terms; indeed, as an argumentative strategy it bears a disquieting similarity to a characteristic technique of positivist analysis. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer were fond of uncovering the real logical structure underlying philosophical and ordinary language (e.g. Ayer, 1936; Russell, 1914). They purported to show that when someone appears to be discussing one thing, they are really talking about something else. Their arguments, the positivists believed, need to be tidied up, their ambiguities clarified and their inconsistencies exposed. When they say one thing, they really mean something else; and when this something else has been made visible, its shortcomings will become obvious. Now Thrifts theoretical stance aims as far away as possible from this kind of position; and yet his argument against Foucault uses a very similar device. There is a clear and unambiguous border demarcating reality from representation, Thrift implies, and any philosophical position (such as Foucaults) that troubles that border must be analysed into a more coherent position that respects this border. When this has been achieved, it becomes clear that Foucault, whatever he says, is not really interested in experience, life or creativity at all; all he is really interested in is the capture of these things in representation, and reality itself escapes. The presupposition of this strict border between ontology and epistemology, between representation and reality, is most readily apparent in Thrifts influential article on the politics of affect. Here he notes how a new space of government has been discovered and colonized. This space is articulated is unmistakably territorial terms. Thrift announces that an undiscovered country has gradually hovered into view the space of a half-second delay between action and cognition (Thrift, 2004:67). This could hardly be a more explicit or more simplistic spatialization of the relation between the cognitive and the non-cognitive. The space between action and cognition, in fact, Thrift reveals, is not a country, but a whole continent outposts were already being constructed in this continent of phenomenality back in the seventeenth century (2004:66). The main phase of colonization of this newly discovered territory, we learn, was the midnineteenth century (2004:67). At the same time as imperial powers were colonizing the furthest reaches of the globe, they were also colonizing the most intimate spaces of biological life. The politics of affect, in Thrifts analysis of it, is reduced to a territorial politics in which virgin land is occupied and now, presumably, needs to be liberated.

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As I noted earlier, Thrift approvingly cites Lefebvres evocation of a collective art of life in The Production of Space, and indeed Thrifts description of the politics of affect, with its language of colonization, occupation and capture, clearly recalls the influential theories of everyday life of Lefebvre and Guy Debord. Central to their theories is the idea that everyday life has literally been colonized (Lefebvre, 2002:11); that the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life (Debord, 1983:42). In doing so, however, they impose a binary between a form of control imposed from above and varieties of resistance emerging from below, in spaces of creativity and spontaneity in which a freedom from capital, spectacle and power can temporarily be forged (see Chapter One). In other words, they entertain a fantasy about the creation of a free, unoccupied space, liberated from power, in which life might be lived as a work of art. The problem with this is that it retains a vision of an art of living as a set of practices whose condition of possibility is the conquering of space and the liberation of life. It regards daily life only as something that should be overcome, that must, in a sense, be freed from itself (Maffesoli, 2004:205). Occasionally, Thrift rejects this kind of romance of escape (Amin & Thrift, 2002:124). Yet by theorizing the space between representational and non-representational forms of thought and experience as a territorial space, with clear borders, to be conquered and re-conquered, he commits himself to precisely such a romance. Critical responses to non-representational theory have often either asserted the continuing importance of representation in the play of power and domination, or else argued for a more balanced analysis that takes account of both representational and nonrepresentational elements (e.g. Cresswell, 2006; Laurier & Philo, 2006). Both these responses, however, uncritically accept Thrifts territorial framing of the relation between representational and the non-representational forms of practice and cognition. One of the aims of the thesis is to find a different way of approaching this issue. It aims to avoid characterizing the boundaries between representation and the nonrepresentational, between language and reality, and between epistemology and ontology according to a fixed territorial image. In describing the interfaces between life, experience and creativity in fin-de-sicle Montmartrois culture, it will not assume a metaphysical picture of the relation between life, experience and representation, but will show how life and lived experience emerged as entities to be stylized by creative means. The space between representation and reality is not ontologically fixed but is itself enacted, performatively, through practice.

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Philosophical Approach
In order to develop this way of approaching the interface between art, life and experience, the thesis takes up a number of theoretical vocabularies. Its starting point is Foucaults conceptualization of the possibilities of creating new interactions between life, art, and experience. In order to explore different aspects of the relations between art, life and experience, however, it also makes use of arguments developed by a number of other philosophers. Two of these Benjamin and Deleuze were explicitly read by Foucault as thinkers of arts of life (Foucault, 1992:11; 2004a). Another, Jacques Rancire, directly addresses the history of attempts to unite art and life (e.g. Rancire, 2002), and despite his disagreement with several aspects of Foucaults thought (Rancire, 2000), nevertheless adopts an overtly Foucauldian characterization of the aesthetic as a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience (Rancire, 2004b:13). Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, finally, take up once more the thematic of the intersection between life, art an experience, most directly through their writings on community, Romanticism, and the aestheticization of politics (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990; Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1988; Nancy, 1991). Differences exist between the approaches of each of these theorists, and the thesis will bring out some of these points of divergence. One thing that they do all share, however, is a similar problem. The origins of this problem, in some respects, are Nietzschean, although the thesis does not directly address Nietzsches own writings. (Despite certain affinities between Nietzsche and the stance of Montmartre bohemians, there is no causal link. There is no evidence in any of the historical material to suggest that they were aware of Nietzsches writings, and, as Christopher Forth has shown, Nietzsches ideas did not spread into France until well into the 1890s.) This problem is the problem of how to conceptualize the contours of a stance towards creativity that is clearly distinguished from those of both totalitarianism and (neo)-liberalism. To put it another way, it is the problem of how to bring art and life together to create new kinds of practice and new modes of being that do not defer to any form of external authority, whether the authority of expertise, experience, or capital. Finally, it is the problem of how to map the political disfigurations and reconfigurations of the sensible, where sensible refers both to what makes sense and also to what can be sensed (Panagia, 2009:3). Each of the theoretical approaches taken up in the thesis explore this problem in certain ways.

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Alienation, Life, and Experience

As an investigation of arts of life, two concepts occur throughout the thesis: life and experience. The two concepts come together in the linked notions of lived experience and alienation. In contrast to Marxist and phenomenological standpoints which lament the alienating separation between life and experience and, ask how they might be reunited in lived experience, the thesis takes the separation between life and experience as a given, and asks what different kinds of relation can be stylized between them. These ideas are explored in more detail over the course of the thesis, but here it is useful to indicate briefly exactly how I understand each of these terms, and in particular, how I wish to distance myself from phenomenological accounts of lived experience. The aim here is not to set out a metaphysics of life or experience, or to say exactly what they are. Rather, it is to approach the concepts in such a way as to retain an openness to the possibility of their being stylized and modified, and to avoid constraining in advance the possibilities of their transformation. Histories and theories of modernity often outline a characteristic experience of modernity (e.g. Berman, 1983; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989). As well as offering accounts of the experiences that belonged to certain people, they also show how forms of experience belong to a particular historical epoch. My assumption, however, is that experience does not necessarily belong to anything, or at least not to any given form of subjectivity. Perhaps the most frequent way in which experience is understood is as something punctual, a moment of sensation which can be isolated in time, existing in the present tense, and enveloped by some kind of experiencing subject. This empiricist conception of experience roughly identifies it with the bodily sensation of an individual human subject. Such a form of punctual experience is what I refer to as lived experience. Lived experience is experience which is owned by a living subject; it is experience which is lived in the present by an experiencing subject. By referring to this as lived experience, I am leaving open the possibility of forms of experience which are not lived by an individual subject of an experience outside the subject (see Jay, 2005). For example, I am holding open the possibility of forms of anonymous experience such as Benjamins new Erfahrung, for example, or what Foucault calls a foyer dexprience which are not located within a subjective interior, but conversely, exist as fields of potential from which subjectivities emerge (see Chapter Two). I am also holding open the possibility of the kind of experience which Gilles Deleuze calls sensation: a form of intensity which,

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rather than being possessed by a subject, functions to unravel the subject, to force the subject to change itself (Massumi, 2002; Smith, 1996a). Similarly, I am maintaining the possibility of a form of life which is not structured as a stable, self-organizing organism, but as something which escapes or exceeds the organization of the organic subject. Experience, then, while most often characterized as a form of temporally punctual sensation that is owned by a human subject (i.e. as a lived experience), can be both more extensive than this, existing as a field of potential beyond individual subjectivity, and also more intensive that this, insisting as a point of intensity that precedes the organization of sensation into the experiences of a stable subject. As Nancy puts it, experience decides a limit, and thus at the same time ... decides its law and its transgression, having in sum already transgressed the law before setting it, making it exist without essence, transcendent without a transcended immanence (Nancy, 1993b:85). For Deleuze, experience is a form of embodied intensity that takes three main forms: affects and affections; percepts and perceptions; and concepts and representations (Deleuze, 2003; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). In each case, where the former term denotes experience in its pre-personal, non-subjective state, the latter term denotes the same kind of experience that has been appropriated, through representation, by a stable subject. Percepts are modes of experience relating to the sense organs; affects are modes of experience connected with the emotions; and concepts are modes of experience connected with thought and language. Perception, emotion and thought, whilst generally occurring together, are all specific forms of experience with their own practices and politics. In the thesis, I devote a chapter to each of these modes of experience. Experience, as I use the term, is not necessarily something that occurs punctually in the present moment. Certainly it is possible that it will be a momentary flash of intensity, but conversely, it may linger or endure over extended periods of time. Because it can exist outside the subject, experiences are capable of having a duration that is longer than the life of an individual person. That is to say, death is not necessarily the limit of experience; impersonal experience can incorporate death into its interior by moving across individual lives. Experience can inhere in objects as well as subjects, and be actualized in different ways over different spans of time. Artworks, for example, can be seen as particular constellations of experience which persist over centuries, and can be

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actualized by individuals at different times in connection with different practices. Concepts, similarly, persist over long periods of time. In each case, however, every time such experiences are re-actualized, they are repeated in a different way, being incorporated into different forms of practice. Experiences can be repeated, therefore, but are always transformed through their repetition. This way of approaching experience is opposed to a phenomenological notion of lived experience. The importance of this lies in the fact that this phenomenological understanding of experience underlies the social-scientific critique of modern alienation. The term lived experience was popularized in the 1870s by Wilhelm Dilthey (e.g. Dilthey, 1985), and is now associated with phenomenology. The English term lived experience is a translation of the German Erlebnis (often just translated as experience), as well as of the French exprience vcu (sometimes translated as actual experience). In philosophical discourses, the word was adopted as a response to critiques of empiricist theories of experience in which experience is theorized as an accumulation of individual, atomistic sensations. The problem with such forms of empiricism, it was argued, is that they divorce experience (and hence knowledge) from peoples actual lives. Empiricism treats experience as if its subjects were mere machines, mechanically taking measurements and accumulating a series of individual sensory readings. The concept of Erlebnis was intended to correct this mechanistic conception of the experiencing subject with a new concept which would emphasize the role of subjective life in experience. As Hans-Georg Gadamer explains, Erlebnis is a secondary formation from the German verb erleben, which means to be still alive when something happens, thus suggesting the immediacy with which something real is grasped (Gadamer, 2004:53). At the same time, however, the form das Erlebte means the permanent content of what is experienced; it is the yield that achieves permanence and significance from out of the transience of experiencing. Erlebnis brings both meanings together: the immediacy which precedes all interpretation; but also its discovered yield, its lasting result. Something becomes an Erlebnis not just by being experienced, but insofar as its being experienced makes an impression that gives it lasting importance. Gadamer stresses that although the word Erlebnis only came into use in the 1870s, it is rooted in Romanticist life-philosophy and the Hegelian philosophy of Spirit, both of which protested against the mechanization of life in modern industrial society. The concept of lived experience

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was created in a social climate of worry concerning the destruction or mechanization of experience in everyday life. Both Hegel and Romantics such as Schlegel argued that every act, as an element of life, remains connected with the totality of life that manifests itself in it. Reality itself has the structure of organic life, in that every part is functionally related to the dynamic whole. This kind of pantheism is also implicit in the concept of lived experience. What Dilthey stresses through his use of the term is that what is given to knowledge is not atoms of sensation, but an experience that already finds a unity in life (Dilthey, 1985). Erlebnis is not mere individual sensations, but a manifestation of unitary life. An experience is not merely something that flows past in the stream of conscious life; it is a unity, a way of being one. Life, then, is the ultimate foundation of experience. Whereas empiricism sees life as a mere accumulation of experiences, Dilthey sees experience to be grounded in life. Phenomenology would later make the same point by arguing that, by adopting a reflective attitude towards lived experience, it is possible to discover essential features of the Lebenswelt (lived world or life world). For my purposes in this dissertation, the most important problem with this phenomenological approach to lived experience an approach which sees lived experience to be an expression of a unitary life has to do with the theory of alienation. (As I noted earlier, one of the aims of the thesis is to develops a critique of the theory of the urban spectacle, which is the dominant way in which the theory of alienation has been explored in human geography.) The concept of alienation derives from the Hegelian theory of experience (Erfahrung). For Hegel (1977), the highest good is what he calls unity of life (Einheit des Lebens) (see Beiser, 2005:37). The highest good consists in achieving unity, wholeness or harmony in all aspects of our being with oneself, with others, and with nature. The biggest threat to this unity is division or alienation, where the self finds itself divided from itself, from others, and from nature. Its goal is to overcome these divisions and achieve unity, so that it is once again at home in the world (in die Welt zu Hause) and can achieve full self-knowledge. Since the unity of Spirit is based upon the structure of organic life, the theory of alienation is conceptually tied to a critique of mankinds fall from life. Alienation is a form of separation between self and other, between subject and object, and between knowledge and experience. When experience is no longer a manifestation of life, but is separated from life, then man becomes alienated. When a distance emerges between life and experience, man can no longer be at home in the world.

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Whether being at home in the world in this way (i.e. participating in the organic immanence of life or the Absolute) is either desirable or possible, however, is questionable. One way of reframing the matter is to reconceptualize life, not in terms of a stable equilibrium between a living body and its environment (a way of being at home), but, as Georges Canguilhem does, as a form of error (Canguilhem, 1978; Foucault, 2000a). In response to the arguments of ethologists or molecular biologists that life is tightly programmed by milieu and genetic code, Canguilhem focuses on living beings errors and victories over error. Many such errors arise from a difficulty with adapting to a milieu (see Canguilhem, 2001). According to Canguilhem, Mankind makes mistakes when it places itself in the wrong place, in the wrong relationship with its environment, in the wrong place to receive the information needed to survive, to act, to flourish (Rabinow, 1994:20). To survive, it errs it moves and adapts. And this is perhaps a better characterization of life: not an equilibrium between organism and milieu (the creation of a home in the world), but organisms errors, their creative responses to finding themselves out of place, in an environment that is indifferent to them. When life is theorized like this, alienation insofar as it is defined in the Hegelian manner as the separation of experience from the unity of life becomes less a fall from life than the very condition of possibility of life. This is precisely the point of Deleuze and Guattaris characterization of life in A Thousand Plateaus, for example, when they say that, rather than inhering in organisms, life is everything that passes between organisms (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004b:550). Healthy life is not an organisms stable existence within an ordered, pre-formed milieu, but an aggregate of consistency that disrupts orders, forms, and substances (2004b:370). Life is not being at home, but deterritorializing. Rather than self-organization towards a state of equilibrium, it is a state of dis-equilibrium which forces a change in the relation between an organism and its milieu, such that both organism and milieu are forced to (partially) decompose and recompose themselves. By avoiding analysing experience as something which is necessarily immanent to the life of a stable subject, therefore, it becomes possible to do justice to this sense of life as a form of error, something that errs and wanders. Correspondingly, it becomes possible to explore an empirical study of the different forms of separation or relation between life and experience. Whereas the theories of alienation in Marxism and phenomenology lament the separation between life and experience and ask how they might be reunited (be it through communion, mysticism, revolution or war), the approach of this study is to take the separation between life and experience as a given, and ask what different

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kinds of relation can be stylized between them. The question will not be one of contrasting immanence with transcendence, therefore asking what is internal to life and what is external to life. When life is viewed as a form of erring, life in effect becomes external to itself. The question will not be how to create experiences that are immanent to life rather than distanced (alienated) from it, but what different kinds of texture or consistency can be created between life, as a process of error, and experience, as form of impersonal intensity.

Art and Life in Nineteenth-Century France

The theoretical stance of the thesis, then, refuses to view the intersections between art and life in terms derived from the theories of everyday life derived from Lefebvre, Debord, Michel de Certeau, or other writers who set up an opposition between an imposition of power from the top down, and forms of resistance that move from the bottom up. For this reason, it attempts to gain some distance from the narrative that charts the emergence during the nineteenth century of a society of spectacle and passive consumption. Numerous historians have given accounts of a growth of consumer culture in which active participation in social life gave way to a passive submission to the seductive power of the spectacle of commodities (e.g. Bowlby, 1985; Clarke, 1985; Crary, 1999; Richards, 1990; Schwartz, 1998; Sennett, 1977). This culture is often described in terms of an ongoing aestheticization of everyday life (Featherstone, 1992; Goonewardena, 2005). As Kevin Hetherington argues, one problem with the framework of the spectacle is that it effectively denies individuals existence as a creative force in the world with a selfreflective consciousness and imagination (Hetherington, 2007:70). He stresses the need for researchers to engage with the ways in which individuals act in and engage with spaces of consumption in complex and heterogeneous ways, not simply being possessed by the commoditys witchcraft, but instead taking possession of it, and creating something new out of it. Such a perspective requires a rejection of the simplistic distinction between consumer culture, which exists as a set of activities that are wholly complicit with the dominant forms of subject-formation, and an oppositional culture which carves out temporary enclaves that are free from the power of capital. Many accounts of the development of the avant-garde, however, have uncritically accepted the terms of the consumer culture/avant-garde culture opposition. For example, histories of nineteenth-century bohemianism have engaged in a debate concerning the particular

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kind of space occupied by bohemian culture. Elizabeth Wilson (2000), for example, locates nineteenth-century bohemia as an explicitly political, even utopian space, existing outside bourgeois culture, a space from which dominant forms of authority could be challenged. Jerrold Seigel (1986), by contrast, sees bohemia as a space in which the conflicts and contradictions of modern individualism could be acted out and negotiated. He sees bohemianism to have been an integral aspect of consumer culture, and to have been more or less complicit with it. Both Wilson and Seigel tend to revert to another territorial image in which bohemian culture is located either inside or outside the everyday spaces of consumer culture. Mary Gluck (2005), by contrast, makes the case for seeing nineteenth century bohemianism in terms of a far closer and more complex interaction between popular culture and the urban avant-garde. In particular, she distinguishes conventional notions of a sentimental bohemia from another, ironic bohemia that has largely fallen from view. Gluck argues that this bohemian avant-garde used parodic contextualization, not just to oppose the dominant values of the bourgeoisie, but also in a positive sense, to absorb and transform the creative potentials of modern life (2005:21). Her analyses point to the ways in which these bohemians, rather than simply rejecting popular consumer culture, took it up in order to transfigure and transform it. Her approach, therefore, moves beyond the tired theoretical approaches that are premised upon an opposition between a consumerist aestheticization of everyday life and a creative, avantgardist art of life. For this reason, my approach in this thesis is broadly sympathetic to hers. However, the thesis complements Glucks approach in one crucial respect. Avant-gardism is often defined as the attempt to reunite art and life. In this respect, it is viewed as a counter-tendency to modernism, which set out to gain for art the greatest possible autonomy from everyday life. Glucks analysis of the nineteenth-century avantgarde accepts this definition, focusing on the ways in which art was used in attempts to transform everyday life. However, it is art, rather than life, which is the object of the most sustained attention in her analyses. Yet, as many historians have followed Foucault (1998, 2007) in demonstrating, life during the nineteenth century and in particular the life of the city was hardly a pre-given, stable object, but was itself a crucial problem of nineteenth-century government (e.g. Aisenberg, 1999; Huxley, 2006; Murard & Zylberman, 1996; Rabinow, 1989). Analysis of the avant-garde attempt to transform life, therefore, cannot take life as an unproblematic object of analysis, but has to be alert to the ways in which the struggle to transform everyday life was also a struggle over the

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multiplicity of ways in which life itself was conceptualized as a biological entity, as a social entity, and as a value. The city was a vast laboratory in which to experiment with the economy of life, and if these experiments were primarily conducted by engineers, urban planners, doctors, architects, statisticians and cartographers (Osborne & Rose, 2004:210), they were also conducted by artists, writers and musicians (Vasudevan, 2007). The city was a privileged arena in which art, everyday life and biological life intersected, and it is partly for this reason that the historical avant-garde was an irreducibly urban phenomenon. Partly for this reason, the life of the city was the subject of impassioned debate during the 1880s. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a way of understanding the city became predominant in which the city was theorized as an organic milieu that was to be controlled ecologically rather than mechanically or deterministically (Foucault, 2007). Participating in certain currents of Romanticism, which aspired to achieve a harmony between mankind and the natural world, this biopolitical discourse saw the city essentially as an immanent naturalistic domain; one which, left to itself and with the right conditions, could compose itself as a benign social order(Osborne & Rose, 1999:741-742). If an increasing priority for government was to protect the health of the population, and society was to be evaluated according to its health and vitality, then securing the health of the urban milieu was to be a key way of ensuring the vitality of the population as a whole. Following the dramatic renovations of Parisian infrastructure during the Second Empire (Choay, 1996; Harvey, 2003a; Loyer, 1988; Pinkney, 1958; Van Zanten, 1994), the naturalization of the city continued and evolved during the Third Republic. The impacts of the concern for the health of the urban environment were very widespread (Aisenberg, 1999; Murard & Zylberman, 1996). For example, it was the renewed emphasis on the natural environment that led to vigorous efforts to combat the problem of overcrowded proletarian housing, since there was a deep concern about the pathological environmental effects of urban slums (Shapiro, 1985). Similarly, the renovation of the Paris water system was precipitated by concerns about the malign effects of bacteria and germs on urban health (Barnes, 2006; Gandy, 1999). Phenomena that were labelled social diseases such as prostitution and alcoholism were subjected to scrutiny that at times came close to hysteria (Corbin, 1990; Prestwich, 1988). Consequently, the citys cafs and cabarets, long a haven of proletarian sociability, were demonized as milieus of alcoholism, vice and degeneracy (Scott Haine, 1996). Women

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bore the brunt of this process of naturalization, and feminist arguments for birth control, for example, were dismissed out of hand as a risk to population growth, as the nations declining birth rate became a matter of feverish hand-wringing (Cahen, 2008; Offen, 1984). Despite all of these measures, however, a deep pessimism pervaded fin-de-sicle France, emerging from a sense that the nation had exhausted its energies and allowed itself to degenerate into an enervated population of sickly weaklings who would never regain the strength and vigour to avenge their humiliation by Prussia in 1870 (Bernheimer, 2001; Pick, 1989). As Paul Rabinow has shown, these issues were fundamental in the transformation of discourses surrounding the nature of the city during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Rabinow, 1989). As the modern notion of society as a whole way of life, rather than high society, developed from its initial formulation within the life sciences, leading to the emergence of the social question in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the city came to be understood in neo-Lamarckian terms as an ecological milieu, a natural environment for the evolution of a human population. When people were no longer regarded as isolated individuals but part of a social whole, governmental intervention came to focus on the most important milieu of that whole the city. The result of this was the citys emergence as a privileged object of technical intervention, as it became the object of the expertise of engineers and urban planners, rather than of the aesthetic sensibilities of architects in the Beaux-Arts tradition. This eventually led to modern urbanism a vision of the planned city as regulator of modern society. As Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose observe, as a milieu of liberal government, the city became in the nineteenth century a kind of laboratory of conduct (Osborne & Rose, 1999). The city became dense, opaque, and unknown, and hence an object of endless fascination and investigation. The government of the city now became a question of the security of the natural processes of society within the unnatural space of the city. In the city, the immanent social processes of population could be isolated, measured and calculated. Thus the city became the main field of operation for those procedures. Moreover, the role of the state was transformed, as it became a political configuration committed to the liberty of the individual, the rule of law, the principle of an autonomous public sphere, a series of market relations between enterprises, and the shaping of these public realms in order to secure the responsibility that was essential for liberty. And the privileged site for this complex of relations Osborne & Rose observe,

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was the life of the city (1999:741). The life of the city the circulation of bodies, diseases, crime, vice, degeneration, destitution and delinquency became a crucial focus of nineteenth century government. It thus also became an important motif of late nineteenth century urban culture. It is the set of attitudes towards the experiential life of the city that are the principal object of investigation of this study.

Thesis Outline
In addition to the Introduction and Conclusion, the thesis comprises: a literature review; two self-contained chapters addressing theoretical and methodological issues raised by the problematic of the thesis; and three empirical chapters tackling the main historical substance of the study. Chapter One, Space and the Avant-Garde, reviews geographical literature exploring the role of space in creative experiments with stylizing new arts of living from the late nineteenth century, and offers a working definition of avant-gardism as the commitment to overcome institutional boundaries separating art and everyday life. It highlights a key problem that was common to many of these practices, which is their tendency to operate through a series of normative oppositions, celebrating, for example: life over representation; bodily experience over discursive abstraction; immediacy over distance; and temporal flux over spatial immobility. These normative oppositions find their clearest expression in Lefebvres critiques of everyday life and Debords theory of the spectacle, and much research on the avant-garde remains faithful to these theories. What is needed instead, I suggest, is to draw attention to different kinds of art of living, which, rather than attempting to liberate life, inhabit space in such a way as to transform specific elements of the economy of life and lived experience. In Chapter Two the thesis moves on to develop a better theoretical understanding of exactly what the problem of how to style new arts of urban living entails, taking it in a direction that is far removed from Debords and Lefebvres construction of the problem. The aim of the chapter is to post the problem of the thesis in as much detail as possible, in order to explore answers to them with the greatest possible specificity. It explores the issue through a critical comparison of Foucaults work on the history of ethics with Benjamins reading of Baudelaires city poetry. Despite the differences in emphasis between their work, I argue, it remains possible to excavate a shared theoretical response to the question of the relations between life, subjectivity and experience. For example, both set out to uncover the points at which the web of power relations that

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function to individuate modern subjects can be modified, worked upon and unravelled to create new forms of experience whereby subjects become capable of escaping themselves and becoming something other. Chapter Three addresses the methodology of the thesis, and explores the possible implications of the theoretical arguments in Chapter Two for the historians approach to the life of the past. The emphasis within non-representational geography upon expressing the liveliness and dynamism of space is in danger of leading to a presentist, ahistorical outlook. History can appear condemned to sift through remnants of the dead past rather than participating in the dynamic unfolding of present life. The chapter argues that the past has its own life, and the more productive question is what is the most productive way of styling this historical life. It contrasts two means by which historical narrative might achieve this, a literary strategy and a conceptual strategy, coming out in favour of a way of narrating the past through the assembly of conceptual diagrams of what Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari call names of history. Chapter Four moves on to the empirical content of the thesis, exploring the ethos of modernity expressed in art and literature associated with the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre. Starting with an analysis of interventions in the affective life of the city, it discusses the Chat Noirs emphasis upon humour, parody and pantomime buffoonery. Relating these experiments to Romanticist life philosophy and Baudelaires theory of the grotesque, the chapter argues that humour was a means of cultivating a new sense of place in Montmartre, one in which the contradictions of modernity could be accommodated in experience, and in which a defiant spirit of affirmative pessimism could be developed that would transfigure a life of suffering into a life where joy was found in the processes of will and desire. Humour, here, was connected to a furtherance of life and vitality, and was used as a means of expanding the possibilities of life beyond the lived suffering of the world. Moving on to the representational life of the city, Chapter Five considers the approach that the cabaret, through the arrangement of space and in its literature, took towards the representational organization of the life of the city. It argues that by constructing the cabaret as a space of counter-display, the Chat Noir exposed the failure of representation, a lack of vitality within the representational spaces of the metropolis, and offered a vision for a new form of experiential life in Montmartre. The possibilities of

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life, it suggested, were not confined to the experiential limits of the modern metropolis, but could be enhanced through a new life of sensation. It is this perceptual life that is the focus of Chapter Six, which draws upon debates concerning the phantasmagoria in fin-de-sicle popular culture. Analysing poetry associated with the Chat Noir which evoked spectral landscapes of death and phantoms, as well as synaesthetic shadow theatre which aimed to disorder the senses, the chapter argues that the perceptual experiments of the cabaret aimed to interfere in biopolitical rationalities that linked perception to the vitality of the urban milieu. Via a discussion of Jean-Luc Nancys theory of the body and embodied experience, the chapter concludes that the Chat Noirs literary and theatrical experiments with the organization of the perceptual field were ways of creating forms of sensory life that went beyond the perceptions of the organically ordered, natural body. Finally, the Conclusion draws these arguments together to suggest that the Chat Noir developed an ethos towards the life of the city that involved a stance of affirmation, of counter-display, and of a disordering of the organic body. The Chat Noirs stance towards life, it concludes, was one that insisted upon the possibility of creating forms of life that were outside life, and hence of locating the conditions of singular events of transformation in the specific networks of historical power relations.

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CHAPTER ONE Arts of Urban Life: Modernity, Space and Creativity

The term modernity, with all its ambivalence and polysemy, is at once suggestive and disturbing. It troubles with its evocation of alienating forces of rationalization and homogenization: the imposition of geometric grids; the sterilization of urban environments; the violent elimination of ambiguity. Yet something about it retains a certain allure: the technological production of unimaginable new powers and capacities; the thrill of the new and the unexpected; the production of dramatically new forms of experience and subjectivity. Implicit in each of these responses, perhaps, is a certain attitude towards creativity and difference. Some aspects of modernity seem violently to close down creativity, but others provide the means for an enormous proliferation of new forms of creativity and difference. In modernity, the potential for stylizing new arts of life new ways of creating subjectivity and experience can appear almost unbounded. The role of this chapter is to review geographical accounts of urban creativity and arts of urban life in modernity, moving on to assess the current state of knowledge concerning fin-de-sicle Montmartres urban culture. The chapter analyses dominant ways of approaching modern arts of life, and discusses the urban culture of fin-de-sicle France. It introduces many of the questions, themes and arguments that are explored more fully in later chapters. Such issues have hitherto been explored most thoroughly in literature documenting the spatial practices of what might loosely be termed the urban avantgarde. Many of these practices exhibit an admirable commitment to bringing new forms of creativity and difference into the city, as well as to asserting a right to the city shared by all. Yet on closer examination, these practices can be seen to lie on shaky theoretical

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and political grounds. Many discussions of new modes of urban life have been dominated by teleological Marxist theory, whether deliberately or accidentally, explicitly or implicitly. Moreover, the avant-garde has itself become thoroughly institutionalized, meaning itself. that reactivating the avant-garde ethos towards overcoming the institutionalization of creativity requires overcoming the institution of the avant-garde

The Urban Avant-Garde

Avant-garde cultural experiments have always involved unique and sustained engagements with space, place and environment. The ethos of the avant-garde requires rejecting the professionalization of creativity, and so moving creative practice out of specialized artistic institutions and into the spaces of everyday life (Brger, 1984). As I use the term in the thesis, the avant-garde refers to practices that aim to reject, destroy or transcend the institutional artistic environments of the museum, gallery, theatre or concert hall, and instead to operate directly in and upon the spaces of everyday life. It commits itself to inventing new arts of life which bridge the divide between the autonomy of the modernist artwork and the messy plurality of everyday experience. Although the avant-garde is still widely interpreted as a temporal concept, geographers have played an important part in challenging this idea, offering innovative and distinctive perspectives on the spatial preoccupations of practices that invent new interfaces between art and life. It is part of the spirit of the avant-garde to explore how specific places and environments can be transformed creatively to develop new forms of life.

Dada, Surrealism and Situationism

The birthplace of the historical avant-garde is often regarded as the Paris Salon des Refuss of 1863. This was an exhibition space set up by Louis-Napolon for artists whose work had been rejected from the official Paris Salon (Boime, 1970). Alternatively, in emphasizing the radical politics that is intrinsic to the avant-garde sensibility, an alternative genealogy might trace it to the destruction of the Vendme Column by the realist painter Gustave Courbet during the 1871 Paris Commune. As Malcolm Miles argues, this form of anarchic anti-art was a gesture towards the destruction of modern aesthetics, a creative performance of reclaiming public space from the power of urban capital (Miles, 2004). This idea is supported by Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre, who interpret the Commune to have been the first great attempt collectively to reclaim

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public space and to re-model everyday life on the model of an artwork (Debord et al., 2006; Lefebvre, 1965). The Paris Commune, they argue, marked the invention of a novel form of politics, one that attempted to bring into practice a new concept of revolution as festival an eruption of creative life and energy. The movements most commonly referred to as the historical avant-garde, however, arose in the opening decades of the twentieth-century (Berghaus, 2005; Deak, 1993; Henderson, 1971; Shattuck, 1968; Ward, 1995). As Alastair Bonnett records, Dada, Surrealist, and Situationist groups celebrated the possibilities of destroying the institutional settings of art and imposing their art directly upon everyday life (Bonnett, 1989, 1992). The Dadaist critique of art, for example, involved a diverse range of experiments with performing, amongst many other things, simultaneous readings, insane dances, natural sound, and phonetic poems (Melzer, 1981). However, Bonnett argues, these performances, which aimed at the fragmentation or destruction of all artistic forms, proved unable to move beyond the conventional artistic media of the poem, painting or recital. Surrealist practice went further, taking an interest in randomly walking the streets and markets of Paris in order to open up individual experience to surprising events, emotions and encounters, thereby liberating the raw life buried beneath layers of sedimented culture (Harris, 2004). However, the Surrealists retained a notion of the artist as a uniquely imaginative, eccentric genius with a natural instinct for creativity, and legitimated the figure of the artist by assigning him or her the task of expressing the kind of hidden, primordial desires that less adventurous, less gifted individuals are supposedly unable to discern or too repressed to explore (Bonnett, 1992:75). In this way, they proved unable to overcome the divide between art and the everyday. Bonnett argues that whereas the Dadaists and Surrealists remained tied to conventional artistic oppositions between performance and audience, and between art object and everyday space, Situationist psycho-geographies directly confronted the city in pursuit of social liberation. The Situationists attempted, through instinctual exploration of the emotional energies of urban environments, to discover or create playful and antiauthoritarian places and journeys. The Situationist practice of the drive (drift), for example, involved an unstructured wandering through the landscape, allowing oneself to be drawn consciously and unconsciously towards those sites and movements that heighten ones experience of place and disrupt the banality of ones everyday life (Bonnett, 1989:136). Although Situationist experiments had their limitations, they

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nevertheless displayed an impressively unswerving concern with the problem of developing a creative practice beyond the terrain of art that was largely lost with the subsequent move towards postmodernism (Bonnett, 1992:79). In line with these arguments, the most sustained scholarly attention on creative urban practice has centred around Situationism and its politics of interruption and flow (see, for example, Merrifield, 2004; Pinder, 1996, 2004, 2005b; Sadler, 1998). However, Erik Swyngedouw worries that the renewed academic interest in the Situationists has coincided with a tendency to present an intellectualized, aestheticized, and depoliticized version of the Situationist city. The academic and commercial recuperation of these avant-gardes has become big business, he writes, and the recuperation of these projects silences, ignores and forgets the profound theoretical and political insights that underpinned these excursions into new forms of urban practice and living (Swyngedouw, 2002:154). Prestigious museums now stage well-attended exhibitions on the Situationist revolutionary spirit, and yet [t]he very essence of [the Situationists] activities was the annihilation of representation, of the museum, of art-for-arts sake, of the separation of art from life, and of redressing the alienating conditions that pervaded everyday life. It is arguable, however, that precisely the opposite is the case that the problem is less that the Situationist interventions in everyday space have been depoliticized, than that their politics have become entrenched and taken for granted. As I will explore a little later, contemporary avant-garde practices have often repeated many of the themes of Situationism without adequately discussing or acknowledging the political presuppositions to which such practices are tied. This means that whilst Swyngedouw is in a sense right to worry that the theoretical and political underpinnings of their project are in danger of disappearing, the result of this is not that the politics of Situationism are no longer present, but that they are becoming invisible through their ubiquity. Urban avant-gardes have not done enough to challenge the basic political presuppositions of Situationism, as set out by the two most prominent theorists associated with them, Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre.

Theorizing Art and Everyday Life: From Saint-Simon to the Situationists

Perhaps the most well-known statement of an avant-garde sensibility within urban theory is Henri Lefebvres comment in the closing paragraphs of The Production of Space, cited earlier:

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On the horizon, then, at the further edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species the collective (generic) work of the species on the model of what used to be called art; indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an object isolated by and for the individual. (Lefebvre, 1991:422.)

There exists a wide variety of definitions of the artistic avant-garde (e.g. Brger, 1984; Clinescu, 1987; Murphy, 1999; Osborne, 1995; Poggioli, 1968). One theme that runs through them is the determination to overcome the separation between art spaces and the space of everyday life. Avant-gardism is the dream of overcoming the specialization and the compartmentalization of creativity into distinct spheres which are only accessible to established creative professionals, and whose worth is thereby implicitly valued according to quantitative (e.g. monetary) rather than qualitative criteria, since to recognized as a professional is to be accepted as someone capable of making a living out of their work. In this respect, the avant-garde is resolutely utopian, not just in the sense that it attempts to imagine better possible worlds, but in the sense that it attempts directly to create, here and now, its visions of the good life (Miles, 2005; Pinder, 2005b). Avant-gardism involves the commitment to create what Michael Watts calls real utopias (Watts, 2001). As an analytical concept, the avant-garde is often either simply conflated with modernism, or else reduced to a more generalized notion of an artistic cutting edge. It is widely interpreted as a temporal notion that fits easily into the modernist celebration of progress, denoting a practice or group that considers itself to be ahead of its time, impatiently waiting for laggards to catch up before darting away towards fresh innovations. David Harvey, for example, sees the avant-garde to fit easily into the framework of modernism, suggesting that an avant-garde has usually played a vital role in the history of modernism, interrupting any sense of continuity by radical upsurges, recuperations, and repressions (Harvey, 1989:12). This perspective is supported by the history of the term, which was first used in a nonmilitary context by French utopian socialists in the early nineteenth century. In 1825 Henri de Saint-Simon suggested that in order to transform society for the better it would be necessary to assemble a vanguard of artists, scientists, and industrialists to help realize the ideal society. Saint-Simon expresses his vision of avant-gardism through the words of an artist who exclaims:

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Let us unite. To achieve our one single goal, a separate task will fall to each of us. We, the artists, will serve as the avant-garde: for amongst all the arms at our disposal, the power of the Arts is the swiftest and most expeditious We aim for the heart and imagination, and hence our effect is the most vivid and the most decisive. (Cited in Wood, 2002:216.)

Although he is best known for his utopian celebration of industrialism, science, and the conquest of nature, it is worth dwelling briefly on Saint-Simon to note the privileged role granted to organic life in his theorization of the artistic avant-garde. He envisaged a natural social order, hierarchical, harmonious and voluntarily accepted because of its mutual benefits. The hierarchical organization of the social body and the healthy distribution of functions would produce a thriving totality within which each individual could happily and willingly find his place (Rabinow, 1989:28). Society, as a natural order, should observe the biologist Xavier Bichats three basic capacities of the living being intellectual, motor, and sensory meaning that society should be divided up into a scientific lite, a mass industrial class, and a group of artists, poets and ethicalreligious leaders. The role of the artistic avant-garde, in this first formulation of the term, was to contribute to the natural equilibrium of a society structured as an organic body. The term continued to be used by subsequent utopian groups such as the Icarians, who in 1848 formed a group called the Avant-Garde and founded a socialist colony in Texas, USA (Pitzer, 1997). It has also come to be associated with Marxism, particularly through Vladimir Lenins [1902] (1973) theory of a vanguard revolutionary party. By the early twentieth century, however, when the movements now generally referred to as the historical avant-garde first emerged, the term had taken on new resonances, and had shifted in emphasis from a political to an artistic register. Peter Brger suggests that by this time, the avant-garde meant not just any kind of advanced form of art, but, more specifically, a form of creativity that deconstructed the institution of art itself. The avantgarde, he argues, turns against both the distribution apparatus upon which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy (Brger, 1984:22). Reacting against modernist arts pursuit of aesthetic experiences that are wholly autonomous and set apart from everyday life, avant-garde protest immerses creative practice in the messy heterogeneity of the everyday. Jacques Rancire has developed similar arguments, arguing modernism and the historical avantgarde to have occupied two extreme poles of a more general contradiction in modernity

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between the values of autonomy and heteronomy a tension which has characterized western culture since the birth of Romanticism (Rancire, 2002, 2004b). A central point of reference for the theory of arts of urban life is Charles Baudelaires [1863] (1964b) essay The Painter of Modern Life. I explore Baudelaire in detail in the following chapter. In his essay on modern life, he describes the stance of the flneur, the urban explorer who creatively transfigures the everyday spaces of the city (see BuckMorss, 1986; Tester, 1994; Wolff, 1985). Baudelaires image of taking creativity to the streets inspired early avant-garde movements as well as urban theorists such as Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin (Frisby, 1988; Leck, 2000). More recently, however, some theorists have taken a more critical stance on his legacy (e.g. Amin & Thrift, 2002; Hubbard, 2006). One reason for this is that the urban creativity Baudelaire celebrates is a highly gendered affair: for much of the nineteenth century, the public woman remained associated with the prostitute (Wilson, 1992). Another is that it is hard to disentangle from a humanism that privileges the acts of specific individuals who take to the street at a single moment in time. When avant-garde culture remains tied to the practices of isolated individuals in this way, it risks lapsing into mere heroic individualism, celebrating momentary interruptions created by talented individuals, rather than exploring the possibilities of creating spaces of collective selfinvention, spaces which provide creative environments fostering new possibilities of community, subjectivity and shared experience. What this means is that if avant-garde culture limits itself to practices that are localized in space and time, and which offer experiences that are intrinsically non-reproducible as Phelan (1992) characterizes contemporary performance art, for example it risks being unable to offer anything in political terms that amounts to more than a momentary disruption of the habits or experiences of a tiny audience or public. In setting out to understand better the contours and limits of efforts to stylize new arts of living, therefore, it is necessary to see a way beyond the practices of specific individuals, and to ask what role different kinds of spaces and institutions might play in fostering creative environments in which experiments with transforming the possibilities of everyday life can be multiplied. It is precisely this kind of analysis that is lacking, however, in Debords and Lefebvres critiques of everyday life. Debord, the leader of the Situationist avant-garde, was closely associated with Lefebvre (Merrifield, 2008; Ross & Lefebvre, 1997). Whilst several important differences between

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their theories do exist, here I want to emphasize their similarities and their commensurate political goals and aspirations. One key emphasis for both of them was upon the geography of the city. Writers such as Kevin Hetherington and David Pinder have drawn attention to the key significance of geography and urban space in Debords The Society of the Spectacle (Hetherington, 2007; Pinder, 2000). Although the word spectacle is often used loosely in connection with specific sites trade fairs, exhibitions, department stores, and so on for Debord the spectacle signifies a total occupation of social space. In Debords theory, [t]he spectacle dominated social life and space, homogenizing and fracturing space, unifying and separating, and becoming the perfection of separation within human beings (Pinder, 2000:365). Debords theory hinges upon a categorical contrast between life and representation. The capitalist spectacle reduces life, as a dynamic, direct, richly embodied form of energy and experience, to immobility, abstraction, and lifelessness. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation (Debord, 1983:1). The spectacle assimilates all the fluid aspects of human activity so as to possess them in congealed form, and urban planning contributes to this petrification of life (Debord, 1983:17, 95). For this reason, Situationist avant-gardism took to inventing new routes through the city and creating alternative maps that would enable new journeys, atmospheres, and flows to come into being. What connected many of these sites was their marginality ... and the way they occupied a shadowy relation to notions of spectacle. In effect, they represented countersites within the urban spectacle (Pinder, 2000:372). These counter-sites could momentarily liberate life, as well as directly lived bodily experience, from the shackles of spectacle and representation. The politics of Situationism, then, celebrates life, fluidity, and embodiment over representation, abstraction, and immobility. A similar politics is also discernible in Lefebvres urban theory. His critique of everyday life develops a corporeal politics committed to the creation of moments of potential (Lefebvre, 2002). Moments include such varied phenomena as love, games, rest, knowledge, poetry and justice. A moment is a fleeting but decisive sensation, an activity in which a temporality of rupture and spontaneity tends towards a unification of the festival and everyday life (Simonsen, 2005:8). A radical urban politics of culture, according to Lefebvre, must aim at the uniting of the Moment and the everyday, of poetry and all that is prosaic in the world, in short, of Festival and ordinary life, on a higher plane than anything which has hitherto been accomplished (Lefebvre, 2002:349). This politics relies upon Lefebvres

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sociological adaptation of Henri Bergsons vitalist philosophy of experience (Bergson, 1911). Lefebvre rejects capitals reduction of qualitative temporal rhythms to a linear, homogeneous temporality, as well as the reduction of living processes to abstract quantities (Fraser, 2008). Progressive politics is focused upon interrupting the mechanical, linear rhythms of abstract space with the organic, natural rhythms of embodied, corporeal space, liberating the temporality of natural, organic life from its artificial constraints in everyday life. The avant-garde interrupts the mundane repetitions of everyday life with a burst of vital, creative life. The political programme of the Situationist avant-garde, for all its revolutionary passion, was based upon an overly Romanticist critique of urban abstraction and alienation, and a correspondingly uncritical celebration of life, embodiment, and movement. Their creative cultural experiments aimed to discover or create spaces in which movement and unalienated experience might be recovered from a sterile, lifeless city dominated by consumerism and a culture of dumb mass consumption. One problem with this, however, is that such a celebration of flux and contingency relies upon an extremely one-sided view of modern urban culture. It insists that the frenetic speed and mobility of the city is simply a mask for an ossified, unchanging social structure which functions to eliminate contingencies and retain control of the future. A number of theorists, however, have argued that many techniques of government orient themselves towards working with, rather against, fluidity and contingency (e.g. Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, 2004a; Foucault, 2007, 2008a; Stiegler, 2009). Many strategies of urban government do not aim or function to suppress life, experience or dynamism, but rather to maximize them. They modify urban space, not to deaden affective experience and to reduce life to representation, but to engineer directly lived, affective experience, and to channel it in specific directions (Thrift, 2004). With the invention of advanced techniques for calculating movement, flow and probability, for example, modern techniques of rule have been able to govern through, rather than against, contingency. Neoliberal political techniques, with their renewed emphasis on the experience economy, have intensified such processes, functioning not to destroy affective experience, as the Surrealists and Situationists believed capitalism to be doing, but rather to intensify it and control it. Taking up this kind of stance, therefore, requires an approach to the politics of culture that distinguishes between many different economies of experience, rather than a binary contrast between corporeal experience (i.e. life and dynamism) and representation (i.e. artifice and stasis).

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Moreover, the Situationists approach to urban culture relies on an implausibly pessimistic theory of social structure and power. It sees capital as a stable, almost unassailable system of power, and views effective resistance in terms of practices capable of recovering bursts of life and creativity that momentarily escape this all-encompassing system. Yet this serves to emphasize the structural stability of social systems, and neglects the fact that power is continually and creatively constituted in fleeting contextual encounters (Rose, 2002:395). By taking up an approach to power that refuses to operate through a contrast between dominance and resistance (the imposition of power, on the one hand, and escaping from power, on the other), it is no longer necessary to assume that new forms of creative practice can only ever achieve a momentary freedom from the powers that function to reduce it to lifelessness, at the same time as condemning every other form of culture as a mindless repetition of capitalist ideology. Once the aim is no longer to escape power, it becomes possible to experiment with creating new forms of urban environment which are not merely brief enclaves of freedom from capital, but which can be styled over a sustained period of time in order to transform the practices that occur through it. The point of these arguments is not to denigrate the Situationist experiments with everyday life, or to deny the continuing relevance and inspiration of their critique of everyday life and their assertion of rights to the city. Rather, the point is that in attempting to re-actualize the subversive ethos of the Situationists (and related movements such as Surrealism), more recent avant-gardes have often also replicated their problematic theoretical presuppositions.

Contemporary Avant-gardes
To take up the metaphysics of Situationist politics, I have suggested, is to risk remaining blind to the ways in which recent forms of liberalism appropriated key elements of their ideas. As Foucault observes, post-war neo-liberal theorists, disgusted at the Nazis intensification of the massification of society, based their ideas upon an impassioned critique of mass society, one-dimensional man, authority, consumption, and spectacle (Foucault, 2008a:113-114). For this reason, the many contemporary artistic interventions in the urban environment that remain faithful to Situationist politics or similar movements such as Surrealism (see Fenton, 2004, 2005) risk becoming increasingly ineffective.

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The continued influence of Situationism is evident in contemporary practices of creative urban walking (Pinder, 2001, 2005a). One example of such practices is a treasure hunt that was set up in the Kings Cross area of London as a supplement to an exhibition by Richard Wentworth called An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty (Battista et al., 2005). The exhibition was a response to a 200 million redevelopment of the area, involving various artworks and installations evoking memories of the areas past. What was distinctive about this exhibition was that it was clearly unspectacular It instead paid tribute to the ebb and flow of urban life (Battista et al., 2005:434). The aim of the treasure hunt was to uncover temporary bursts of dynamic energy, briefly injecting a sense of times past, present and future into the Kings Cross cityscape. Just like the Situationist practices that were rooted in a nostalgia for the authenticity of times past (Bonnett, 2006), the treasure hunt aimed to recreate a sense of time, movement and life in an otherwise spatialized, static and lifeless urban spectacle. Its politics, following the legacy of Situationism, aimed at interrupting the linear, artificial rhythms of everyday life with a fragment of natural, vital, dynamic experience. Another prominent theme in research on the contemporary urban avant-garde, inheriting the legacy of the Situationist critique of the visual spectacle, is anti-ocular explorations of the city (Butler & Miller, 2005; Pile, 2005a; Pinder, 2001). Toby Butler, for example, celebrates the ability of sound art to overflow conventional spaces such as museums, art galleries, and recital rooms. Whereas the visual can be spatially contained, noise tends to bleed over boundaries; it is fluid and in its plurality is uncontrollable (Butler, 2006). London-based sound artist Graeme Miller, for example, used sound art to evoke a bulldozed community, creating an urban walk that moved near to a motorway that had replaced the community, and which enabled the walker to listen to elusive and fragmentary narratives of the lost community. This kind of practice remains premised on familiar assumptions: that liberating a brief burst of temporal life might serve as a form of resistance against the homogenizing processes of contemporary urbanism. Much research, however, indicates that such practices, rather than forming any kind of significant transformation of urban space, merely contribute to the institutionalization of the avant-garde itself. The celebrated post-graffiti artist Banksys Peckham Rock is an engaging example of such processes (Dickens, 2008). In May 2005, Banksy slipped a rock engraved with a Neanderthal figure pushing a shopping trolley into the prehistoric display section of the British Museum. As well as being a jibe at modern consumerism,

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Bankys intervention was a critique of the undemocratic, lite nature of the art world. Yet the rock was soon to find itself a piece of institutionally legitimated art. When it was discovered, the British Museum, aware of the value and significance being given to Banksys art, soon ended up according it a full official place in its archive. In the end, the rock had become transformed from illicit object with uncertain origins into a prized addition to the public collections of a national museum (Dickens, 2008:487). An innovative and subversive form of anti-art had been quickly re-integrated into the institutional art world. Such forms of appropriation have always been part of the motivation for the avant-garde continually to create new forms and techniques. More novel, however, are the kinds of aestheticization of entire urban areas that are associated with neoliberal policy drives towards the creation and marketing of creative cities, communities and neighbourhoods (see Hubbard, 2006:207-246; Peck, 2005). By aestheticizing whole urban areas, according them artistic status in their own right as creative neighbourhoods, any avant-garde practices that operate within such areas can easily come to contribute to, rather than challenge, the commodification of culture and the institutionalization of creativity. Such aestheticization practices make ready use of the cultural capital of the rhetoric of avant-gardism. Street art, for example, despite being conceived as a form of creative practice capable of working directly in the spaces of everyday life and thereby evading artistic institutions, has not just been incorporated into the aestheticization of creative neighbourhoods, but indeed can be a key driver of such processes. The explosion of contemporary forms of street art in Hackney suggests such practices are as instrumental in the drive to become a creative city as they are critical of it (Dickens, 2008:481). A key aim of avant-gardism has always been to reject official or institutional standards of aesthetic value, setting out instead to create social and political value in the sphere of everyday conduct itself. However, the emphasis currently placed in modern forms of urbanization upon art, creativity and innovation means that such practices often directly enhance property prices and the local economy. Rather than disrupting the everyday flows of commodified urban life, they reinforce them. This means that any form of contemporary avant-garde culture that remains tied to a Situationist politics risks being incorporated into a distinctively neo-liberal art of urban life.

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Central to this neoliberal avant-garde is a focus on (neo)-bohemianism (Brooks, 2000; e.g. Florida, 2002a; 2005; Wojan et al., 2007). The historical avant-garde developed out of distinct bohemian communities in major European urban centres such as Paris, Barcelona, London and Berlin. These were shared laboratories, not only for the creation of new forms of art, but also for the development of new styles of living, novel kinds of ethics, and new modes of political radicalism. However, neo-bohemians reject these radical politics, seeing bohemianism not as a rejection of the cultural capital of the artworld, but as a confirmation of it. The buzz of such edgy bohemian neighbourhoods, consequently, has become an important resource in urban regeneration projects. Such urbanization projects aim to appropriate the value of avantgardism without fulfilling its promise of a radical intervention in the art of living. These arguments indicate that aestheticization processes can no longer be understood as surface-effects (Jacobs, 1998; Ley, 2003). Aestheticization processes do not stultify the flows of everyday life through a distracting play of surface images. They dont stifle life, movement, and experience, as Debord and Lefebvre believed them to do. Rather, they ensure that forms of everyday creativity and innovation can be incorporated into economic processes that contribute to, rather than evade or critique, neoliberal regeneration policies that exacerbate power inequalities. For this reason, the kinds of avant-garde politics that stress momentary interruptions in the conduct of everyday life, interruptions that are enabled by operating in and on the city itself rather than in the art gallery, risk losing their potency. As Alastair Bonnett puts the matter in relation to the contemporary avant-gardes that revel in street happenings and other incursions to everyday space, such practices are part and parcel of a venerable institution, the avantgarde, that has been trying to aestheticize politics and perpetuate romantic notions of spontaneous action and personal genius for so long that artists street performances/interventions are now accepted by most people as just another part of the urban scene (Bonnett, 1999). The avant-garde has become a revered institution in its own right, and if the ethos of avant-gardism can be characterized as the rejection of the institutionalization of art and creativity, then research devoted to understanding the political opportunities of creating new links between art and life must commit itself to rethinking how avant-gardism might creatively overcome itself.

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Reproblematizing the Avant-Garde

The presuppositions that have guided many of the attempts to forge new arts of urban life over the twentieth century, therefore, need to be rethought. When the avant-garde has itself become a revered institution, it has to commit itself to destroying itself not just by inventing new creative techniques and tactics, but by reconsidering the basic presuppositions of its own goals and aims. In other words, there is a need to reproblematize the attempt to unite art and urban life (see Chapter Two). One prerequisite for doing this will be to reject any simplistic distinction between the interior and exterior of capital, power and domination and hence between any unequivocal celebration of either immanence or transcendence. Following from this, it is necessary to reject the avantgardes usual insistence upon novelty, flux and interruption. In its place, it might be more useful to understand better the kinds of creative spaces which are constructed to facilitate a more patient, methodical and sustained set of experiments with arts of living. Rejecting the avant-gardist fantasy of escaping the institutional confines of art and everyday life requires taking up a position that asks, not how to destroy the spaces in which art and everyday life are practiced, but how to transform them, making them into spaces in which the possibilities for life are expanded. New arts of living do not only emerge out of the destruction of artistic and social institutions, but by building new collective spaces in which experiments with transforming the limits of experience, subjectivity, and everyday life can be performed. The theoretical framework of Situationism, as we have seen, is focused on a critique of the reduction of life to representation. It operates according to a rigid distinction between the spectacular culture of representation, on the one hand, and unification of art and life, on the other. If the ethos of the avant-garde can be drawn away from its insistence on destroying the institutions of art, however, then this unproductive distinction can be redrawn. Creative transformations of the everyday need not just involve momentary interruptions of an economy of representations with bursts of life, freedom and vitality. They may involve long, hard, and disciplined work upon the limits of life and subjectivity. This means, however, that rather than viewing the politics of urban culture solely in terms of the circulation of representation and spectacle, it can instead be interrogated in terms of its role in the economy of life and lived experience of circulations of life, as a process of bodies creative responses to the changing demands of their environments, and of lived experience, as the intensities that are captured within such dynamic processes. The city, perhaps, should be viewed as a vital, dynamic, 40

heterogeneous system, an arrangement of spaces and places that teem with life and possibilities for novel modes of experience (Amin & Thrift, 2002). The question, therefore, should not be how to liberate life from the shackles of spectacle and representation, but how to intervene in the flows of life and lived experience so as to transform the possibilities, capacities, and limits of urban life. One example of such an approach is given by Alexander Vasudevan (2007). Vasudevan revisits the avant-garde groups of Weimar Germany, analysing their performances, not as challenges to an urban spectacle, but as experimental embodiments, through which they experimented with and challenged dominant biopolitical knowledges concerning the life of the city, the population and the individual subject. Vasudevan argues that these artistic performances were critical aesthetic interventions that were themselves tasked with performing scientific experiments with their own alternative regimes of truth (2007:1814). The performances venues became alternative laboratories, charged with developing new experiences of urban life that did not defer to the authority of scientific expertise. It is a similar approach to arts of urban living which I explore and develop in this thesis. In order to do so, it might well be useful to revisit urban arts movements that emerged before the oppositions between mass culture and avant-garde had yet become taken for granted movements preceding what is generally referred to as the historical avantgarde, but infused with a related ethos towards creatively transforming the limits of urban life. By focusing attention on a series of aesthetic experiments which cannot be assimilated into the avant-gardist celebration of liberated life, fluidity, and movement, it is possible that a different ethos towards creatively transforming urban life might be discernible, one which retains a commitment to difference and creativity, whilst cultivating these values through attitudes or practices that are not part of the avant-garde canon. That, at least, is the wager of this thesis.

The Myth of Montmartre

The artistic community associated with fin-de-sicle Montmartre seems a promising place to look for such a stance. The 1880s was a period of dramatic change in French cultural life. A new republic, which was to prove the most stable since 1789 Revolution, now seemed secure (Mayeur & Rebrioux, 1984; Weber, 1986). With it came a number of new practices and rationalities of government. A crucial one was the development of

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discourses concerning the city as a social environment (Rabinow, 1989). The city slowly went beyond being an economic, technical, and moral problem; it also became a social problem, the milieu of a social body, and modelled through biological vocabularies. After law, medicine was the most commonly practiced profession amongst the legislators of the Third Republic (Ellis, 1990). The life of the city was beginning to be modelled in a distinctively modern way. It is easy to speculate, therefore, that one of the most prominent cultural movements of this period, the new cabaret culture of Montmartre, might have developed a coherent set of responses to the new knowledges and discourses concerning the modern city and its role as an ecological environment for a fragile social organism. The urban avant-garde, I have suggested, has now become part of the very institution it is committed to overcoming. By turning to the creative community of fin-de-sicle Montmartre, perhaps it might be possible to gather new insights into the possibilities of spatial arts of life that do not share the avant-gardes commitment to liberating life, contingency, and bodily experience, or an unhelpful opposition between popular and avant-garde cultural forms. In the remainder of the chapter, therefore, I want to focus more specifically on Montmartre itself, making clear how the thesis will develop knowledges concerning Montmartres place in the history of nineteenth-century urban culture. As a form of urban identity, bohemianism is undergoing something of a renaissance, thanks to the kinds of regeneration agenda that cultivate creative cities, creative quarters, the creative industries and neo-bohemian urban milieus. Such regeneration programs aim to foster an areas affective buzz in order to attract tourists, large companies, and creative, economically dynamic individuals. One thing that is still strikingly lacking in the literature on creative space, however, is an historical or genealogical perspective that might challenge the ways in which the names of iconic nineteenth and early-twentieth century artistic neighbourhoods in cities such as Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Vienna and New York have been assimilated into neoliberal regeneration narratives. It is important to recognize that the gentrification field has an historical geography that provides precedents and codes that continue to shape the present, creating a need for research that might offer a more critical historical perspective on current writing lauding the rise of the cultural economy and the creative city (Ley, 2003:2527). By allying themselves with famous sites of artistic production such

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as Montmartre, El Raval and Greenwich Village, the creative city advocates garner significant appeal for their projects. There is a pressing need, therefore, for research capable of demonstrating how the real histories of these neighbourhoods departed from the narratives of cultural regeneration into which they have now been incorporated (see Chapter Three). For several years, creativity has been an important buzz-word in urban planning. Writers such as Charles Landry have argued for the need to make cities more competitive and more attractive to investors by increasing their creativity (Landry, 2000). Others like Richard Florida celebrate the emergence of a new creative class, and emphasize that cities need to attract these creative workers, who act as a magnet for modern, hi-tech and rapid growth industries in search of a labour force (Florida, 2002b; Hannigan, 2006; Hubbard, 2006; Peck, 2005; Pratt, 2008). The kinds of environment that this creative class are attracted to, Florida argues, are bohemian areas with a buzz, vitality and cuttingedge feel, meaning that city planners need to be wise to a new geography of bohemia (Florida, 2002a). Whereas earlier cultural regeneration projects focused on the creation of large-scale, flagship art galleries or opera houses, with the intention of attracting tourists and, perhaps, corporate chief executives looking to relocate their head office, what is needed now, he suggests, is to plan neo-bohemian urban quarters. As Richard Lloyd puts it, in neo-bohemia smaller scale cultural offerings and offbeat elements of street level culture are not only important amenities for particular urban consumers, but resources for cultural and new media enterprises (2002:157). Indeed, he remarks elsewhere, elements of bohemia, surprisingly durable through subsequent generations and still most obviously found in increasingly ubiquitous urban districts, generate dispositions and competencies among adherents that are surprisingly amenable to neoliberal and postindustrial capitalist practices (Lloyd, 2008:206). The narrative upon which this kind of argument draws, based in some respects upon Sharon Zukins seminal account of the arts-led regeneration of the SoHo district of New York during the 1960s and 1970s, is familiar (Zukin, 1988). Firstly, non-established artists discover the existence of cheap spaces to rent in unused or run-down buildings. As they start to gain a reputation, art-dealers follow suit, installing their galleries in the neighbourhood. Other private entrepreneurs start up alternative amenities such as fashion shops, bars and restaurants. Eventually, perhaps, the district gains more official status though the arrival of larger museums, theatres or public art centres. The result of all this is rocketing property prices and a less authentic atmosphere, causing artists to

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flee to another, cheaper and edgier neighbourhood. For Florida this is not a serious problem, as he sees creativity to have a largely instrumental role as a magnet for desirable workers and lucrative industries. Indeed, as with neo-liberal urban thought more generally, here gentrification becomes celebrated as a principal goal, rather than being critiqued for its displacement of the urban poor (Slater, 2006; Smith, 2002; Wacquant, 2008). Against this kind of neo-liberal, carefully planned form of bohemian urban space, several writers have contrasted another more authentic, spontaneous bohemianism. This is the bohemianism of fin-de-sicle Montmartre. Hans Mommaas argues that, [I]t is important to note how famous creative quarters such as 1900s Montmartre ... were never planned as such. Instead, they developed more or less spontaneously, out of favourable conditions only identified retrospectively, conditions which were, in many ways, related to their status as marginal spaces (Mommaas, 2004:521). Similarly, Deborah Leslie argues that creative districts such as Montmartre emerged spontaneously out of urban cultures of dissent, conflict and disorder, concluding that, [a]rtists seek out authenticity in marginal districts the antithesis of a planned cultural ghetto (Leslie, 2005:405). In this way they position the debate squarely within the terms in which the contrast between avant-garde and mass culture is usually framed: the one planned, reproduced and wholly under the sway of capital; the other spontaneous, authentic, and relatively autonomous. Montmartre, therefore, becomes either the prototype of a new kind of culture industry that reduces entire neighbourhoods to aestheticized, inauthentic neo-bohemian playgrounds, or else becomes reduced to a myth of genuine creativity, spontaneity and unalienated forms of urban experience. Both sides of this debate, then, remain tied to a distinctly problematic form of binary thought.

The Arts in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

Two important analyses of the geographical and sociological reasons for Paris status as a hub of creative activity during the late nineteenth century are given by Peter Hall and Paul Claval. Clavals analysis explores the unique set of market conditions that enabled a thriving artistic culture in Paris (Claval, 1995). After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, artists could no longer rely on state patronage, and art became fully immersed in market forces. This was partly a result of Haussmanns well-known transformations of Paris, which had a decisive impact on the arts, because they were responsible for an enlargement of the upper class living in or visiting Paris. As the wealthy congregated in

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Paris, so the demand for artistic production grew. A new art market appeared, one which was no longer dominated by the traditional aristocracy. Paris was now a city of newcomers and self-made men, and this new lite differed from the old one in that it had less respect for Academic formulas. This created the market conditions for the avantgarde celebration of the new which was at the heart of Pariss emergence as the leading centre of the arts. In addition, according to Claval, artists new position in the market meant that they were no longer tied to the aristocratic centre of Paris near the Louvre and the Academy. Many of them started to summer in cheaper and more serene rural environments. As the art market became more competitive, however, and it became increasingly important to foster links with buyers, artists came to settle along the border of low-income and high-income Paris. Here they could enjoy the low prices and workingclass, counter-cultural atmosphere whilst retaining proximity to their market. The principal reason that they settled in Montmartre, therefore, was its useful position outside the centre of Paris, with an atmosphere of popular rebellion, but still close to Pariss bourgeois heartland. Whereas Claval looks at the geography of Parisian creativity almost entirely through the lens of the changing set of market conditions, Hall takes up a more plural approach to the question. In Cities and Civilization, Hall takes up the ideas of the nineteenth-century Darwinian historian Hippolyte Taine in order to analyse some of the factors underlying Pariss emergence as the centre of the modern art world (Hall, 1998; Taine, 1864). Taine was one of the first to articulate a concept of a creative milieu, and argued that culture is determined by a threefold influence of race (i.e. biological descent), milieu (ecological environment) and epoch. Hall accounts for Pariss success, similarly, in terms of the citys unique history of artistic patronage, the emergence of a milieu of interpersonal artistic networks, and the specific time of political, technological and economic transition. According to Hall, the historical inheritance of the Beaux-Arts tradition was of paramount importance in the creativity of fin-de-sicle Paris. During the seventeenth century, Paris became the first city in the western world to have a coherent system of artistic training and patronage, and this persisted into the nineteenth century. This legacy was the single most important reason why, by the mid-nineteenth century, Paris possessed the largest concentration of painters, sculptors, actors and opera singers in the world. A second factor, according to Hall, was the specific time: a period of transition between an ordered, centralized, hierarchical age and a less structured individualistic one. This made the market more sophisticated, more open and more experimentally

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minded than elsewhere. A final factor, however, was the emergence of sophisticated interpersonal networks, in particular the emerge of a caf or cabaret culture that enabled artists to share ideas in a hospitable environment. This final question of the artistic milieu, however, needs to be explored in more detail. Halls vision of the creative city, as I have indicated, takes some of its theoretical directions from Hippolyte Taine. What Hall does not discuss, however, is the fact that by invoking the question of the milieu, Taine was directly linking creativity to the life of the city. His use of the term milieu directly evoked a set of ideas concerning the social implications of altering mankinds link with the biological environment. A creative milieu was a healthy milieu in which human bodies had successfully adapted themselves to their surrounding organic environment. A creative milieu, therefore, relied on a finely balanced urban ecology. Taines ideas concerning the creative city, that is to say, drew directly upon a biopolitical set of ideas concerning the correct administration of the life of the population. His ideas, moreover, were enormously influential in the opening decades of the Third Republic, during which Montmartres creative community emerged. By decontextualizing Taines ideas, therefore, Hall fails to consider the ways in which ideas such as the creative milieu formed part new biopolitical strategies of urban governance. In assessing the development of Montmartres cabaret culture, therefore, it is necessary to understand the ways in which it positioned itself in relation to new knowledges and techniques of government relating to the urban environment. This is what I will attempt in the remainder of the thesis, focusing in particular upon a cabaret called the Chat Noir, which was at the heart of the new cabaret culture in the area.

The Chat Noir Cabaret Artistique

According to the conservative historian Daniel Halvy, who penned a withering attack on the end of the notables precipitated by the Third Republic, it was Montmartre, and the explosion of popular festivities immortalized by the Moulin Rouge (Red Mill) dancehall, that played a pivotal role in this withering of true French spirit and vitality (Halevy, 1930). In Halvys Pays Parisiens, he names one key event as the focus of this decadent spirit: the opening of the Chat Noir (Black Cat) cabaret on November 18, 1881 at 84 Boulevard Rochechouart, at the foot of the hill of Montmartre (Halevy, 1929). This area had a long history of popular entertainment and disorder, because the boulevard traced the old octroi, a tax wall where a duty had to be paid on goods passing beyond the wall

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into the city of Paris. The area beyond the wall, for this reason, had long been a place of popular entertainment where drink could be enjoyed more cheaply than in the city.

Figure 1. Eugene Bataille (Sapeck), Mona Lisa With Pipe.

After the wall had been demolished, the area retained something of this popular spirit. The Chat Noir was not a conventional cabaret (a proletarian drinking venue), but a cabaret artistique, a novel kind of caf where artists would come to perform and display their works, as well as exchange ideas, in a relaxed and convivial environment (Oberthur, 2007). Curious publics could also come to watch, and the cabaret form would soon prove to be enormously popular. The first Chat Noir building was tiny, comprising only two rooms. By 1885, however, its success enabled it to move to larger premises, with three floors, at 12 Rue de Laval (now rue Victor Mass). Before long, imitations started cropping up, first around Montmartre, and later, as it became more and more famous, in the provinces and finally as far away as Barcelona, St Petersburg and Krakw (Segel, 1987). In fact, however, the Chat Noir was not the first cabaret artistique. The Grande

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Pinte opened in 1878, and other venues such as the Rat Mort, the Caf Guerbois, the Bon Bock, and the Nouvelle-Athnes were also popular gathering spots, attracting Impressionists and other artists and intellectuals of their generation (Cate, 2005). What the Chat Noir added to the mix, however, was its sending up of established aesthetic and literary values and debates, and its propagation of a spirit of anarchic humour, parody and satire what was often called fumisme (Cate, 1996; Whitmore, 2001). In this respect, it cultivated an anarchic spirit that was to be central to later avant-garde movements such as Dada most obviously, the work of Marcel Duchamp (see Figure 2). The adjective chatnoiresque was coined to describe the cabarets unique blend of humour, irreverence, political critique, and artistic creativity. The cabaret was the result of a meeting between a former art student called Rodolphe Salis, and a talented poet called mile Goudeau. Salis, the son of a brewer, had moved from Switzerland to Paris with ambitions to be an artist, and had spent some time studying at the Ecole des BeauxArts before being rejected at the official Paris Salon (Auriol, 1926). Taking an entrepreneurial turn, with the financial backing of his father, he decided to open a small caf at the foot of the butte Montmartre. The name he chose, the Chat Noir, evoked the literature of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe, the paintings of duard Manet, classic French folktales, and the supernatural world of witches and magic. The term chat noir was also a sexual double-entendre. This combination of art, literature, mystery and sexual suggestion suited Salis aims perfectly, and the black cat, with all its innuendo and mystery, was to become an enduring symbol of Montmartre, immortalized by Thophile Steinlens well-known poster (see Figure 1). By chance, Salis met the leader of the Hydropathes group of bohemian writers and artists, mile Goudeau, at the Grande Pinte cabaret in November 1881. The Hydropathes were no longer welcome at their former meeting venue in the Latin Quarter, and Salis and Goudeau quickly came to an arrangement that the artists would come to the Chat Noir to meet, drink, and share work and ideas. The success of the Chat Noir would arise out of a combination of Goudeaus artistic talents and Salis genius for promotion. Its first successes came from word of mouth. Soon, taking advantage of the republics newly liberalized press laws, Salis and Goudeau set up a literary journal, Le Chat Noir, to be distributed across Paris. The journal, edited by Goudeau, was at once an outlet for the groups artistic and literary ambitions, and also a means of promoting the venue across Paris. One advert in the journal proclaimed, with characteristic hyperbole:

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The Chat Noir is the most extraordinary cabaret in the world. You mingle with the most famous men in Paris, who meet there with foreigners from every corner of the globe. [Novelists] Victor Hugo, mile Zola, Barbey DAurevilly, the inseparable [zoologist] Mr Brisson, and the austere [politician] Gambetta chat informally with [art critic] Gaston

Figure 2. Theodor Steinlen, poster for the Chat Noir's touring 'ombres chinoises'.

Vassy and [banker and collector] Gustave Rothschild. People hurry in and press themselves inside. Its the greatest success of the age! Come in! Come in! (Anon., 1881.)1

The paper was an important publicity organ, establishing the humorous tone and spirit of the cabaret through the irreverent style of the articles and the illustrations by Montmartre artists such as Thophile Steinlen. The cabaret soon became a favourite destination for writers, poets, musicians, and artists, who were both the clients and the
1

LE CHAT NOIR Est le cabaret le plus extraordinaire du monde. On y coudoie les hommes les plus illustres de Paris, qui sy rencontrent avec des trangers venue de tous les points du globe. Victor Hugo, mile Zola, Barbey dAurevilly, linseparable M. Brisson, laustre Gambetta sy tutoient avec MM. Gaston Vassy et Gustave Rothschild, on sy foul, on sy presse. CEST LE PLUS GRAND SUCCS DE LPOQUE ENTREZ ! ENTREZ !

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entertainment, since they lost no opportunity to donate pictures, recite poetry, and play music. Salis managed to obtain permission to put a piano in the cabaret (something that was usually banned), and thus started the tradition of popular song which is now strongly associated with Montmartre (Bercy & Ziws, 1951; Veber, 1889). Something of the atmosphere of the cabaret is captured by Charles Rearick:
As a refuge from the workaday world, the cabaret imparted the illusions of theatre, but with much more spontaneity and interaction between audience and spectacle, clients and performers. Salis was a virtuoso of impromptu banter and wit, as he greeted the customers, introduced the performers, and commented on their songs. When not performing, the artists mingled with the customers; a kind of festive fraternity took the place of rigid roles and hierarchies entrenched in everyday society outside. (Rearick, 1985:59-60.)

It is useful to dwell briefly on the iconography of the black cat itself. To anyone familiar with recent French arts, the name might have brought to mind three associations: Edgar Allen Poes story The Black Cat (Poe, 2008); Manets controversial canvas Olympia; and the cat poems in Baudelaires Fleurs du mal. In Poes story, which Baudelaire translated into French in 1857, the black cat stands for the malevolent side of unknowable supernatural forces. The cat haunts and unhinges the narrator, driving him to murder and eventually to the gallows. Here the black cat is an emblem for the Janus face of modernity. It is forever double: at once overbearingly intimate and aggressively aloof; seductive and repellent; affectionate and violent. It is the material incarnation of immaterial, occult forces. Similarly, in Manets painting Olympia, a scandalous depiction of a naked Parisian courtesan (see Figure 3), the black cat at the foot of the bed is an emblem of the corruption of nature. Through the double entendre of chat and chatte, the cat designates what Olympias left hand refuses to the spectators gaze, whilst at the same time introducing ambiguous phallic imagery through the cats emphatically erect tail and arched back. The cat is not just an emblem of sexuality, however, but an emblem of corrupted sexuality: a modern sexuality that is commodified and denaturalized (Bernheimer, 1989:230; Reff, 1976:96-101). Whereas Poes black cat presents forces beyond nature, then, Manets cat figures the corruption within nature. These are two kinds of violation of natural life: one transcending it towards a more encompassing, mystical totality; the other an immanent force attacking it from within, revealing the emptiness and disease within the interior of modern life.

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Figure 3. Eduard Manet, 'Olympia', 1863.

Most of all, perhaps, the black cat would have brought to mind Charles Baudelaire, who devoted three poems to cats in Fleurs du mal. Baudelaires cat poems evoke directly the sensual qualities of nature in modernity. The poems traverse all of the senses. In each case, sensual exuberance is matched by a disquieting sense of danger: the cat, once again, is a double. Its gaze, for example, is magnetic, irresistible, but also violent and piercing: its glance is deep and is cold, and it splits like a spear (Baudelaire, 1993:71). To the sense of touch it offers a giddy intoxication: the narrators hand becomes drunk with the pleasure it finds / In the feel of electricity, but only after he has had to beg the cat to please let your claws be concealed. Its smell is gentle and calming; yet this too is accompanied by a palpable sense of peril: a subtle and dangerous air of perfume / Floats always around her brown skin. Finally, it is sound that most thoroughly penetrates the narrators being: the cats voice filters down / Into my darkest depths of soul. It delights me as a potion would and puts to sleep the cruellest ills (Baudelaire, 1993:103). The cat stages the sensual hedonism, but also the existential danger, of the

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five senses. Yet this sensory extravagance is haunted by a mysterious gulf that lies inaccessible to organic perception. This is clearest in the poem Les Chats, in which cats are great sphinxes with mystic eyes, who seek the silent horror of the night (1993:135). Here the sensuality of the cat moves beyond the five senses altogether, towards the mysticism of the night a nothingness that is impenetrable and secretive. The cat doesnt just stage the modern plenitude of sensory stimuli, then, but also a blank vacancy within the sensual abundance of modernity, a void that possesses its own life, mystery, and creativity. The cat is at once totality and absence, infinity and nothingness. Symbolically, the black cat is of nature sensual, sexual, and instinctual; but it is also against nature maleficent, cold, and corrupt. The experiments with urban experience that were performed at the Chat Noir, as we will see, can only be understood in reference to these two domains: the first, a sensual domain of organic plenitude; the second, a mystical domain that passes beyond natural perception via practices considered decadent, perverse, or beyond nature.

Urban Montmartre
Much writing on fin-de-sicle Montmartre has been descriptive and anecdotal, with little or no social or cultural analysis (e.g. Buisson & Parisot, 1996; Jullian, 1977; Oberthur, 2007; Rearick, 1985). In recent years, however, researchers have contributed to a more social scientifically nuanced approach to the history of the neighbourhood (Agulhon, 1998; Hewitt, 1996, 2000; Jackson, 2006; Kenny, 2004). Cultural historians, in addition, have observed the extent to which Montmartres cabaret culture anticipated the movements that are often referred to as the historical avant-garde. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, in particular, have uncovered a fascinating collection of art, music and literature that evidences a clear rejection of the established principles of art, and whose implicit challenge to the very possibility or value of art marks it with a distinctively avantgardist spirit (Cate & Shaw, 1996). What they fail to achieve, however, is to relate these artistic experiments to the social environment in which they were performed. Research into the artistic culture of Montmartre has generally focused upon specific individuals. As Gabriel Weisberg observes, the examination of these individuals has been heavily reportorial and often devoid of the larger context of the very culture of Montmartre of the pervading social environment that encouraged and rewarded experimentation (Weisberg, 2001a:2).

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The collection of essays in Weisbergs Montmartre and Mass Culture goes some way to addressing this, highlighting, for example, the anarchist political culture of Montmartre (Sonn, 2001); the place of women and religion in Montmartre life (Jonas, 2001; Menon, 2001); and popular concern for the physical health of Montmartre children and the population at large (Miller, 2001). In addition, the exhibition catalogue Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre offers portraits of the social environment in which Toulouse-Lautrec, the most well-known painter of everyday Montmartre life, lived and worked (Thomson et al., 2005). An account of the longer history of Montmartre, finally, is offered by the historian Louis Chevalier in his Montmartre du plaisir et du crime, which traces the development of Montmartre society and culture from the early nineteenth century to the Second World War. Chevalier describes the Montmartre of the early 1880s as a festival of spirit (Chevalier, 1995:152). The opening of the Chat Noir, he notes, marked a shift from calm conversation about art and literature to an unquenchable verve and a knack for improvisation. An eloquence of buffoonery and incoherence (see also Bercy & Ziws, 1951).2 Chevalier describes the unique character of Montmartre during this time as resulting from an unusual symbiotic relationship between three different classes of people: impoverished artists; wealthy bourgeois; and an underworld of pimps, prostitutes, vagrants and criminals. The culture of Montmartre has been interpreted as anticipating both the historical avantgarde (Cate & Shaw, 1996; Whiting, 1999) and modern mass culture (Gendron, 2002; Weisberg, 2001b). On the one hand, it witnessed a host of innovative experiments with destabilizing conventional aesthetic codes and sensibilities, and questioning the very possibility or desirability of art in modernity. On the other hand, its rapid successes resulted in the establishment of financially lucrative venues such as the Moulin Rouge, and contributed to its growing reputation as a space, not of artistic creativity and originality, but of hedonism, decadence, pleasure and profit (Rearick, 1985). The multi-sensual shadow plays or ombres chinoises of the Chat Noir, in addition, anticipated the development of the cinematic moving image, and became a draw to audiences throughout Paris (see Chapter Six). Accounts of Montmartre culture, therefore, have either failed to place it within its wider social, economic and geographical context, or else have framed it within old debates concerning the relation between creativity and financial profit. The scholarly debate, in other words, often comes
2

Une fte desprit ... Si les artistes aimaient se retrouver et discuter avec calme et littrature la Grande Pinte, il nen fut pas de mme au Chat Noir ... [Salis] y prsenta lui-mme ses camarades avec une verve inlassable et des dons prodigieux dimprovisateur.

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down to whether or not Montmartre bohemia contributed to an anti-capitalist, genuinely avant-gardist challenge to the interface between art and life, or whether instead it marked the final submission of art to market forces, and the final betrayal of the principles of the Paris Commune. One striking omission from these accounts is a clear analysis of the ways in which Montmartre culture positioned itself with respect to its urban environment. No studies, for example, have discussed the emergence of the Montmartre creative milieu in relation to the powerful new discourses, which dominated French urban government during this time, relating to the health, vitality and life of the modern city. There is little understanding of how Montmartre writers and artists depicted and conceptualized the urban environment, either of Montmartre itself, or the rest of the city from which Montmartre fiercely disassociated itself. What analysis does exist makes use of simplistic motifs of marginality and transgression (e.g. Sonn, 2001), and fails to offer any insight into the ways in which Montmartre artists experiments with urban community meshed with new strategies of urban governance that emphasized the pluralization of individual freedom, the impossibility and undesirability of total government control, and a vigorous concern with the health, vitality and dynamism of the population and its urban environment. In a new republic with a love of individual liberty, Montmartre quickly emerged as a semi-mythical urban area in which exciting new freedoms were seen to be freely at hand. In order to understand the ways in which these freedoms emerged and were transformed, however, it is necessary to look at Montmartre culture, not just in terms of its place in the market economy, but also in terms of its interventions in an economy of life, lived experience, and urban vitality. That is to say, it is necessary to ask how the creative community in Montmartre attempted to alter the urban environment, intervening in the life, vitality and experience of the city, and thereby contributing to experiments with novel arts of urban life. In order better to understand the political and communal aspirations of the Montmartre community, in other words, it is necessary to situate the culture of Montmartre, not in an economy of representation which places it inside or outside dominant frameworks of power, but in an economy of life and lived experience. The question of the life of the city, as the thesis will demonstrate, was at the very heart of the concerns of the Montmartre artists. Until the present study, however, this dimension of Montmartre culture has remained unexplored and unrecognized.

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Before approaching this question in its historical detail, however, it is necessary first to cover some important theoretical ground. In this thesis I want to explore an historical and theoretical problematic that I have so far only sketched out in fairly general terms. In order to pin down more precisely what questions I am asking of fin-de-sicle urban culture, it is necessary to explore exactly what is meant by a term such as art of life, and how it relates to theories of experience, ethics, and the life of the city. Critical thought is as much a question of posing problems and is it a matter of offering solutions to them. It is necessary, then, first to describe the problem that the thesis is addressing in as much detail as possible, before moving on to tackle solutions to that problem in later chapters. In the next chapter, therefore, my aim is to unravel the complex theoretical issues inhering within the deceptively simple sounding notion of an art of life.

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CHAPTER TWO Urban Experience and the Art of Life

This thesis, as a contribution to a history of arts of life, takes up, develops and modifies a Foucauldian problematic. First, then, it is necessary to set out the contours of this problematic. In order to do this, this chapter addresses Foucaults writings on Greek ethics, but draws them into a new set of questions surrounding the ethics of the city, a motif which in some respects leads far from Foucaults own concerns. Although much of Foucaults writing showed a keen sensitivity for the role of space in modern techniques of domination and subjectivation (Crampton & Elden, 2007; Philo, 1992), the city plays almost no role at all in his studies of Ancient Greece ethics. In the empirical analyses of this study, however, I intend the experience of the city to come to the foreground of the analysis. In this respect, the substantive concerns of the thesis seem in some ways to move closer to Walter Benjamins history of Second Empire Paris than they do to Foucaults study of Greek self-mastery. Perhaps, however, the problems developed by Benjamin and Foucault are not as different as they first appear. Indeed, my contention is that Foucaults and Benjamins problematics share several common traits. A prima facie case for the plausibility of such a reading of Foucault and Benjamin is made by observing that in a footnote in The Use of Pleasure, the first volume of Foucaults history of ethics, Foucault observes that it would be wrong to say that the study of arts of existence has been entirely neglected since Jacob Burckhardts (1878) account of Renaissance Italy (Foucault, 1992:11). As well as Stephen Greenblatts (1980) work on Renaissance self-fashioning, Foucault suggests, it is possible to read Benjamins writings on Charles Baudelaire as a useful contribution to a

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history of arts of life. If we are to believe Foucault, Benjamins problematic is the same as his own: the genealogy of arts of life.

Ethics and the Critique of Reason

Before considering Foucaults relationship with Benjamins work, it is worth remembering a couple of the issues that emerged from debates surrounding the relation of his thought to Frankfurt School writers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jrgen Habermas. As Thomas McCarthy argues, one of the most important positions binding together Foucault and the Frankfurt School is their radicalization of Kantian critique (McCarthy, 1990). Both transform the Kantian project of establishing a critique of reason by relating reason, not to transcendental conditions of subjectivity, but to material socio-historical practices. Foucault himself expressed an allegiance with the Frankfurt Schools critique of reason (Foucault, 1988, 1991, 2000a), suggesting that central to each is the problem of domination through reason a worry that the promise of Aufklrung [Enlightenment], of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason, has been, on the contrary, overturned within the domain of Reason itself, that it is taking more and more space away from freedom (Foucault, 1991:118). This admiration, however, was returned more reluctantly. Habermass Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, for example, denounces Foucaults theory of power on the grounds that it forecloses the possibility of making normative distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power (Ashenden & Owen, 1999; Kelly, 1994). But it is really the earlier generation of Frankfurt School theorists such as Adorno to whom Foucault can most readily be compared. In contrast to Adorno, Habermas neglects what Agnes Heller calls the sensuous, the needing, the feeling human being. Unlike Adorno, Habermas, she argues, problematically identifies the structure of personality with cognition, language and interaction (Heller, 1982:22). Adornos critique of modern experience, moreover, took a pessimistic stance that was thoroughly alien to Habermas. These concerns place Foucault, with his emphasis on bodies, perception, and the history of experience, as well as his pessimism concerning the notion of human progress, far closer to Adorno than to Habermas. Thomas Osborne highlights the emphasis in both Adorno and Foucault on the ethical critique of subjectivity (Osborne, 2008). This is a pessimistic ethical stance which avoids giving any positive account of what man is or should be, and insists instead on a continual refusal of the historical specification of subjectivity.

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This in turn invites comparison with Benjamin. Benjamins critique of reason, like Adornos and Foucaults, privileges the role of experience, sensation and the body. Benjamin also conceptualizes politics as the organization of pessimism (Benjamin, 2005). There are three key additional aspects of Benjamins thought, moreover, which make the comparison with Foucault even more pressing. Firstly, Benjamin (like Foucault) was vehemently opposed to Hegelian speculative philosophy, and insofar as he took up Marxist materialism, he went to the greatest possible lengths to release it from the Hegelian theory of progress. This distrust of dialectics is the main reason why Benjamins relationship with Adorno, and the Frankfurt School more generally, could often be uncomfortable (see Jay, 1973). Secondly, Benjamin saw in the practice of history a highly potent medium for the critique of modern reason. Here, again, he departed from the Frankfurt School, whose lack of interest in historical research was one of Foucaults main worries about it (Foucault, 1991:124-125). Thirdly, Benjamin went further than any of the Frankfurt School writers in the strength of his anti-humanism and his rejection of what Foucault (1998) calls the repressive hypothesis. Although it is true that Benjamin did make use of psychoanalytical concepts (see Cohen, 1993; Pile, 2005b), there is little evidence in Benjamin of a desire to free mans hidden nature or to recover its lost self-identity. The issue for Benjamin is not that capitalism represses mans natural capacities, but that it changes nature itself, and thus demands an ethics and politics capable of responding to natures altered capacities (Buck-Morss, 1989:58-77). Several points of convergence, therefore, make the critical comparison between Foucault and Benjamin an important one. Both engage in an historical critique of reason. Both account for reason in such a way as to take account of its production through the material practices of sensing, feeling, experiencing bodies. Both adopt pessimism as a methodological principle. Both reject Hegels speculative theory of experience and the theory of historical progress that it supports. Finally, both refuse to see power and domination in terms of a repressive hypothesis according to which modernity is responsible for the repression of mans natural, creative essence. These initial points of intersection invite a more detailed analysis of the relation between Benjamins and Foucaults approach to the art of life.

Life as a Work of Art

Foucault initially explores this problematic through a Nietzschean vocabulary, although he refuses to endorse Nietzsches metaphysical vitalism (Revel, 2009). In The Gay Science,

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Nietzsche asks how we might become poets of our own lives (Nietzsche, 1974:125). Foucault interprets this as the problem of how one might stylize ones life as a work of art, creating it according to its own immanent criteria of beauty, rather than deferring to external standards of truth or morality. Foucaults response to this problem leads him to become preoccupied with Ancient Greek ethics (Foucault, 1990, 1992, 2001, 2005, 2008c, 2009). For hundreds of years, Foucault suggests, the practice of everyday life has been tied to a hermeneutics of the subject that ties ethical conduct to truths about the nature of the self in particular, the nature of desire. It is necessary to go as far back in history as Ancient Greece, he argues, in order to find a clear example in western thought of a moral system that does not tie moral conduct to a true self. The basic ontological unit in Greek morality was not the self (as it has been since the emergence of Christianity), but a life or bios. Greek ethics involved, not the tekhne of the self, but the tekhne of life, the tekhne tou biou, how to live (Foucault, 2000c:260). In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault makes a key contrast between morality and ethics (Foucault, 1992:25-32). By morality, he means a set of values and rules of action that are imposed upon individuals. These rules are mediated by prescriptive institutions such as the family, the school, the church, and so on. However, within any code of actions, there exist different ways for an individual to act, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of this action. An ethos is not a set of rules, but a style of living, a relationship between subjects, their selves, and their conduct. It involves an irreducibly aesthetic component. Foucault highlights four aspects of a system of ethics. First is the ethical substance [substance thique], which is the part of oneself that is taken as the relevant domain for ethical judgement; it is the material of moral effort. For the Greeks the ethical substance was not desire, but pleasures, or aphrodisia. The second aspect of an ethics is the mode of subjection [mode dassujettissement], the way in which individuals establish a relationship to moral obligations and rules, and the ways in which they recognize themselves to be obligated to put them into practice. For the Greeks, this was proper use, or chrsis. Individuals had to employ a proper use of their pleasures, where proper use was defined according to need, timeliness, and social status. Thirdly, the selfforming activity [pratique de soi] is the work performed to turn oneself into an ethical subject. In Greece this was the practice of continence, enkrateia, which involved a kind of combative relationship with pleasures and with oneself. Through enkrateia individuals engaged in a battle, an agonistic relationship with themselves. Finally, an ethics involves a telos [tlologie], the mode of being at which an individual aims in behaving ethically. In

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Greece, the moral goal was to achieve a state of freedom through self-mastery (sphrosyn). It is not only the Greeks who have practiced arts of living, however. Foucault picks out Baudelaire as an exemplary thinker of the possibilities engendered by modernity for creative invention of life (Foucault, 2000f). It is Benjamin, however, who explores most thoroughly Baudelaires art of living.

Ethics and Subjectivity

Benjamin has been read in a number of different ways as a philosopher, a literary critic, a cultural historian, and a sociologist. Seldom, however, has he been read as an historian of ethics or arts of living. Several possible reasons could be given for the reluctance to bring Benjamins work on Baudelaire and nineteenth-century Paris into a Foucauldian constellation of concepts. The most important, perhaps, is Benjamins focus on the city as a revolutionary political arena, a space of radical collective action. Such a reading of The Arcades Project as a sociology of collective action is explored, for example, by Joseph Lewandowski, who demonstrates the dialectical urbanism uncovered by Benjamin, where the modern city can be both an administratively structured objective site or force-field of planned relations and a reflexively structuring subjective space of collective dwelling, improvising, appropriating, dreaming, innovating, struggling and transforming (Lewandowski, 2005:294). There is no need for this recognition of the citys role as a site of collective action, however, to foreclose the possibility of extracting from The Arcades Project a welldeveloped individual ethos towards the life of the city. Certainly there is no need for such a reading to perform what Esther Leslie calls an ethical domestication of Benjamins work, of the sort that she observes in Axel Honneths (1993) reading of Benjamin (Leslie, 2000:225). Whereas Honneth shoehorns Benjamin into the Habermasian quest for universal ethical principles that might underlie a theory of justice, a Foucauldian reading of Benjamin makes it possible to recognize the ways in which the contours of the political are intertwined with the individual practices of selftransformation through which political subjectivities are created and reproduced. The subject is not a stable term of reference within the field of the political, and to interrogate the limits of subject is also to address the political possibilities of creatively stylizing new interfaces between and beyond subjectivity and objectivity.

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This beyond subjectivity, however, is another motivation for suspicion towards reading Benjamin as an historian of ethics. Max Pensky identifies in Benjamins work a rejection of the subject that was far more pronounced that that of his Frankfurt School associates. He highlights Benjamins refusal to speculate on the role of subjectivity in the critical process and his unwillingness to regard contemplative subjectivity as constitutive in the critical discovery of truth (Pensky, 1992:61). Similarly, Adorno commented that Benjamins target is not an allegedly overinflated subjectivism but rather the notion of a subjective dimension itself. Between myth and reconciliation, the poles of his philosophy, the subject evaporates (Adorno, 1981:235). This rejection of the subject is given its most direct expression in Benjamins On the Program of the Coming Philosophy, which states that, the task of future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object (Benjamin, 1996:104). This radical elimination of subjectivity from the concept of knowledge seems at odds with the supposed return to the subject of Foucaults late work on ethics. This worry concerning the different roles of the subject in Foucaults and Benjamins work is usefully framed in terms of Peter Hallwards opposition between singular and specific forms of individuation (Hallward, 2000a, 2000b, 2001). A specific individual is one which exists through relations to a context, to other individuals, and to itself. A singular individual, by contrast, creates the medium of its own existence, transcending all material relations. The singular knows no limits, existing in a wholly autotelic relation to itself, whereas the specific exists only in the medium of relations with others, and therefore turns on the confrontation of limits. The two most characteristic forms of singularity are thus God and the subject, which is why the two most fully developed philosophies of the singular in western philosophy are found in Spinoza and Hegel (Hallward, 2001:3). The singular invokes an implicitly theological concept of individuality, seeing material individuals to be expressions of a singular creative life or divine energy. The specific, by contrast, requires a fully historical view of the individual, seeing individuation to emerge through historical, material networks of relations. A key aspect of the difference between individual and specific accounts of individuation, according to Hallward, is their relation to critique. Specific accounts of individuation are critical, in the Kantian sense that they suppose experience and knowledge to be constrained within specific limits. Singular accounts, by contrast, are speculative, in that they account for experience by relating it to processes that have no limits, since they

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create their own conditions of possibility. Whereas specific individuals are inherently limited, singular individuals are limited only contingently, by their material form, and exist as limited expressions of an unlimited form of life or creativity. The result of this is that contesting historical forms of individuation requires leaping out of the material world into a speculative arena of pure creative or differential energy, rather than acting upon the material world in order to transform it. Foucaults ethics, Hallward argues, are based upon a fully specific conception of the individual (Hallward, 2000a). Thus they belong to a neo-Kantian school of critical philosophy. In Foucault, the individual is specified through networks of power which are composed out of material power relations. The individual is created within, rather than outside, history. Thus Foucaults ethical aim is to despecify the subject, rather than get rid of it entirely. As Foucault puts it,
Refusing the philosophical recourse to a constituent subject does not amount to acting as if the subject did not exist, making an abstraction of it on behalf of a pure objectivity. This refusal has the aim of eliciting the processes that are peculiar to an experience in which the subject and the object are formed and transformed in relation to and in terms of one another (Foucault, 2000b:462).

Hallward does not discuss Benjamin, but it would be easy to suppose that Benjamin is better read as a theorist of the singular than of the specific, given his interest in theological concepts such as redemption, illumination and the Messianic, and his commitment to a speculative theory of experience. Such a view is certainly implicit in Warwick Mules analysis of Benjamins theory of creativity, for example, according to which creativity is an originary release of singularity, the making of a something out of nothing, where nothing is defined as what remains in experience after the subject has taken leave of it (Mules, 2007:277). This understanding of a creativity wholly exterior to the subject is reminiscent, as Mules acknowledges, of the vitalist accounts of writers such as Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophy of singularity, according to Hallward (2006), retreats into a vitalist celebration of pure creative energy that exists outside the material and historical world of power and domination. Following this reading of their writings, it is possible to drive a wedge between Foucaults and Benjamins ontologies and ethics through this distinction between singular and specific theories of individuation. To do so, however, would be to misunderstand one of the most important aspects of their ethical work. In order to see why, it will be

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illuminating to perform a brief experiment with reading Benjamins writings on the nineteenth century city within the conceptual framework of Foucaults theory of ethics. This reading takes Benjamin far away from the standard contexts in which his thought is placed. It also, as we will see, invites a question as to whether Foucaults and Benjamins approaches to ethics might not trouble the very terms upon which Hallward draws this contrast between specific and singular forms of individuation.

Desire and Pleasure

Foucault sees an ethics to have four different aspects: an ethical substance; a mode of subjectivation; ethical practices; and a telos. In relation to ethical substance, he invites speculation as to whether taking pleasure as the material upon which an individual might not open up more possibilities than the usual focus upon desire. During modernity, he argues, desire has come to play an ever more central role as the ethical substance of morality. Christian culture started to see desire as an index to the truth of the self. During the nineteenth century, desire became interpreted by philosophers such as Hegel as a form of creative, dynamic life that moved inexorably to the absolute. Desire started to become a central site through which the machinery of power could penetrate the body (Foucault, 1998). By refusing to advocate an ethics of liberating desire, as a rebellious form of energy that is checked by repressive power or law, Foucault refuses the image of a transgressive economy of desire as a form of true life beyond power. One of the aims of his history of Greek sexuality is to demonstrate the possibility of relating to sexual conduct, not through a hermeneutics of desire, but through aesthetic criteria concerning the use of pleasures. Unlike Foucault, Benjamins interpretation of Baudelaire in The Arcades Project does take desire as the focus of his ethos towards the life of the modern city. In this work, Baudelaire emerges for the first time as the quintessentially modern alienated, spatially displaced, saturnine (Jennings, 2003:90). This alienation is expressed through the corruption of desire. The postures of Baudelaires hero of modernity, such as the flneur or the dandy, are all defiant celebrations of solitude. Baudelaires isolation, his alienation from humanity, was intense. The key expression of this isolation, according to Benjamin, is Baudelaires impotence. Impotence relates not only to erotic desire, but also to desire for a better nature the desire for utopia which Benjamin reads everywhere in the phantasmagorias of the nineteenth century (Buck-Morss, 1989). Impotence, Benjamin observes, is the key figure of Baudelaire's solitude. An abyss

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divides him from his fellow men. It is this abyss of which his poetry speaks (1999a: J60a,5). In modernity, it becomes impossible to form vital relationships with other people, and Baudelaire finds himself utterly alone, saturated with conflicting and unrealizable desires. In modernity, everything promises to satisfy desire, but nothing really does. Modern moralities demand that individuals liberate themselves by liberating their desires and satisfying them through consumption. This is the morality of the commodity fetish. Commodities are literally fetishized, in the sense that, as inanimate objects, they become invested with an inhuman life (Marx, 1976). Dead commodities appear to come alive. Thus, when individuals search for new kinds of life and creativity in desire, and attach that desire to the commodity, desire becomes deeply entangled with death. Modernity becomes a love affair with death (Chow, 1989). Modern desire is not a creative energy binding living subjects, but something rampantly destructive, oscillating furiously between objectified subjects and fetishized objects, never achieving satisfaction. Through the commodity fetish, the modern city comes alive. This vitality motivates the flneurs fascination with the city, a fascination which soon becomes translated into the consumers fascination with the commodity. Capitalism expertly manages and subverts the desire, and desire becomes devalued and corrupted. Like Foucault, Benjamin refuses to see in desire a force of life and liberation. He stresses Baudelaires angry rejection of the modern tendency to seek life in desire. Instead, the poet links desire directly to death, resulting in a startling intimacy between Eros and Thanatos in his poetry. A lovers kiss, in Baudelaire, is a deadly poison: your saliva, girl ... bites my soul, and dizzies it, and swirls it down remorselessly ... to the underworld! (Baudelaire, 1993:101). The poet finds no hope of liberation of desire. Women hold little appeal for him: the modern woman has lost her aura, her religious and cultic presence, her absolute unity, her feminine body as an announcement of the celestial beauty of love (Buci-Glucksmann, 1986:225). In fact, she becomes desirable only when she is lifeless. Baudelaires only desire is for prostitutes for subjects reduced to objects. And love for the prostitute, as Benjamin observes, is the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity (1999a: J85, 2). That is, it is an empathy with the dead not a vital force of life. Both Benjamin and Foucault, then, attack an ethics that takes desire, understood as a form of creative life, as the substance upon which the individual might focus his or her

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ethical conduct. Foucault associates desire with Hegelian notions of lack and negativity, and looks instead to pleasure as a productive object of ethical work (Grace, 2009). Whereas desires can be true or false, pleasure is removed from truth judgements. Pleasure is, as it were, exhausted by its surface; it can be intensified, increased, its qualities modified, but it does not have the psychological depth of desire. It is, so to speak, related to itself and not to something else that it expresses, either truly or falsely (Davidson, 2001:46). Unlike desire, which is related to something desired, pleasure is a singular experience, an experience that is autonomous from truths concerning the true life of the subject. Pleasure is not something that can be liberated, but an experience which has to be created. This is one important element of Foucaults and Benjamins shared ethos modernity. The material which they work upon is not a form of life which stands in need of liberation, but forms of experience which must be transformed and worked upon.

Combating Subjectivity
Although Benjamin and Foucault reactivate ethical attitudes which refer to different materials, they explore very similar modes of subjectivation, or ways of relating to their ethical substance. Both writers characterize this relationship as a form of combat. For Benjamin, Baudelaire wields his pen as a weapon. It is through poetry that he develops a combative relation with the deathly force of desire. This emerges most explicitly in Baudelaires image of poetic creation as a curious kind of fencing, a form of solitary swordsmanship:
When shafts of sunlight strike with doubled heat On towns and fields, on rooftops, on the wheat, I practice my quaint swordsmanship alone, Stumbling on words as over paving stones, Sniffing in corners all the risks of rhyme, To find a verse Id dreamt of long ago. (Baudelaire, 1993:169.)

Benjamin emphasizes the martial element of Baudelaires vocabulary, making liberal use of words of passive self-defence (parry, armour, protection, shield, preserve, cushioned, screen, intercept) and active aggression (combat, duel, cutting, stabs, blows) (Ramazani, 1996:205). Benjamin emphasizes Baudelaires violence, his impatience, and his anger, from which sprang the ever-renewed attempt to cut the world to the heart (Benjamin, 1999a: J50,2). This combative attitude towards the city the exemplary space of modernity for Baudelaire, provoking a torrent of unrealizable

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desire is Baudelaires mode of subjectivation, his way of establishing a relationship with desire. Rather than liberating desire as a form of life, Baudelaire attacks it through a form of combat which is improvisatory and experimental. Recognizing the labour that he devoted to his problems under the image of fencing Benjamin writes, means learning to comprehend them as a continual series of tiny improvisations (Benjamin, 2006b:41). Improvisations are practices which are not decided in advance of their practice. They evade, rather than sublimate, the stark contradictions of a Hegelian dialectic of desire. This combative stance is passive and absent-minded. It evades the authority of the conscious subject, emerging from the bodys affects rather than from conscious reason. Poetry is a means by which Baudelaire attempts to free himself from the grasp of subjectivity. The improvisatory quality of Baudelaires poetry, Benjamin argues, is a function of his habit of absent-minded, distracted drifting. Unlike the flneur, for whom the joy of watching prevails over all, Baudelaire traversed the city absently, as it were, lost in thought or worry (Benjamin, 2006b:41). Baudelaires poetry records a way of engaging with the city, the space of deathly desire, which evades the boundaries of the desiring subject. Such a combative stance towards the boundaries of the self is no less present in Foucault. In his essay on Nietzsche and genealogy, Foucault suggests that humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination (Foucault, 1984a:85). Power is omnipresent, and the existence of domination inescapable. Politics is inherently combative (Foucault, 2004b; Hanssen, 2000). Similarly, ethical relationships also require a combative stance towards individuals ethical substance. Foucault emphasizes the fact that that, in Antiquity, making proper use of the pleasures required establishing a combative relationship with them. Ethical conduct in matters of pleasure was contingent on a battle for power, Foucault insists. The inferior pleasures were perceived as a formidable enemy force, resulting in a correlative constitution of oneself as a vigilant adversary who confronts them, struggles against them, and tries to subdue them (Foucault, 1992:66). The experience of pleasure cannot merely be undergone, but must be continually worked upon and transformed.

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This theme of a combative ethical relationship re-emerges in Foucaults writings on parrhesia, or courageous truth-telling. According to Foucault, the practice of parrhesia, where an individual speaks a difficult truth against a powerful authority, was at the heart of the spiritual experience of truth in antiquity. Parrhesia was grounded, not in the content of the parrhesiasts speech, but in its manner. Parrhesiasts had to be willing to embrace risk. By courageously speaking the truth, the parrhesiast risked his relationship with his interlocutor, and perhaps even his life (Frank, 2006:118). In a way highly reminiscent of Benjamins emphasis upon the fantastical fencing of Baudelaires poetic combat with the spaces of desire, Foucault characterizes the relationship between the individual and his ruler, in the practice of parrhesia, as a joust (jote). In Antiquity, truth emerged through combat: it took the form of a joust, of rivalry, and confrontation (Foucault, 2010:174). As with Benjamins characterization of Baudelaires poetic truth-telling, Foucault characterizes parrhesia as a non-dialectical, non-teleological form of combat. What matters in parrhesia is less the outcome than the process. This process must establish the vulnerability of both parties in order to work upon the soul of each. Only then can the ruler trust that the parrhesiast is not speaking words of flattery or self-interest, and only then can he trust the parrhesiast enough to allow his words to influence, care for, and transform himself (Luxon, 2004:474). As a form of combat, the point of parrhesia is not the outcome of the contest, but the way in which each combatant is transformed in the process, and the degree to which they become better able to govern themselves and others. Like Benjamin, Foucault explores the possibility of an ethics whereby individuals establish combative relations with themselves in order to change themselves in their singular being.

Ethical Practice and the Truthful Life

An art of living is a form of life which does not defer uncritically to the authority of preestablished truths. Foucault makes it clear, however, that he does not envisage a way of living that is simply removed from the truth. In his work on the government of the self and others, he reactivates a modern ethos towards a specific form of truth-telling, a form of truth-telling which possesses the weight of experience. The variety of parrhesia which Foucault evinces most sympathy with is that of the Cynics (Foucault, 2009). With the Cynics, the principle of parrhesia became transformed, so that rather than only involving telling the truth, it came to be a question of living a truthful life. The Cynic was to reject, through his own style of living, the false principles that were socially accepted.

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Thus a Cynic such as Diogenes lived a life of scandal through a series of public demonstrations, from verbal excoriation to extreme asceticism to public masturbation, in order to reveal the artificiality of conventional morals (Foucault, 2009; Luxon, 2004:469). Whereas the modern experience of truth, with its debt to Christianity, is rooted in an ascetic attitude towards rejecting the self and obeying external rules, the Cynics created an experience of truth founded upon a willingness to take responsibility for their actions and the way they determined the good and the just (Macmillan, 2011). Living a truthful life, for the Cynics, was not a question of deciphering the self, but of finding truth in their own experiences of the world, and then transforming their lives in order to make those truths as visible as possible. Foucault is interested in ethical practices, a form of ethical practice (pratique de soi) through which individuals strive to live a truthful life. According to Benjamin, Baudelaire stylizes his life in such a way as to enable him to become as intense an expression of modernitys violences as possible. He stylizes himself as a palimpsest, exposing himself to the full force of modernitys shocks, in order to enable him to transform his life, through poetry, into a manifestation of truth that possesses the weight of experience. In his final lecture series, Foucault, echoing these ideas, suggests that Baudelaire, along with other major modernist artists, participated in a modern form of Cynical parrhesia. The modern art of which Baudelaire was an exemplar, Foucault suggests, involves the courage of art in its barbarous truth.
Modern art is Cynicism in culture, it is the Cynicism of culture turned back toward itself. And I think that if this does not take place only in art, it is especially in art that it is concentrated, in the modern world, in our world, the most intense forms of truth speaking that has the courage to take the risk of wounding. (Foucault, 2009, cited in Tanke, 2009:184.).

It is modern artists such as Manet and Baudelaire, then, who have most clearly reactivated the Cynics ethos of fearless truth-telling. Whereas modern morality has been organized according to the power of scientific expertise to define the truth of the subject, artists such as Manet and Baudelaire explore a different form of truth telling whose aim is not to tell the truth for its own sake, but in order to transform the life of the subject. Foucault presents an ethos by which the modern subject transforms himself in order to live a truthful life, changing himself so as to become capable of telling a truth grounded in the authority of experience, and thereby intervening in the distribution of power and domination.

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Reading Benjamin through this Foucauldian framework, Baudelaires heroism emerges as his willingness to adopt a specific form of truth-telling. Baudelaires hero of modern life is not only a flneur or dandy; he is also an artist. Capable of observing the world in keen detail, he can also transform this world. He experiences it to the greatest degree possible in order to saturate his life with truth and, and hence be able to stylize his life as a form of truth-telling. Baudelaires ethical practices involve living modernitys fetishes and phantasmagorias, its false life, and through poetry, making its destructiveness palpable. Rather than merely representing modern life, he has to enter as closely as possible into its false appearance. Poetry is not just a question of writing, but of living. The index of heroism in Baudelaire, Benjamin argues, is to live at the heart of irreality (of appearance) (Benjamin, 1985:43). This is the heroism of Baudelaires flnerie, which is very different to that of the normal flneur. The flneur immerses himself within modernitys flows of false life. For the flneur, the modern metropolis teems with life, and it is this life which fascinates him. Out he goes and watches the river of life flow past him in all its splendour and majesty (Baudelaire, 1964b:10). The flneur, however, merely harvests the life of the city as a series of isolated experiences, just as the modern consumer does. Baudelaire, by contrast, sets himself in violent opposition to this false appearance of life. He immerses himself within the life of the city in order to expose its lifelessness, the motionlessness within its semblance of speed and discontinuity. Unlike the Romantics, he refuses to take flight from modernity, but exposes himself to it in all its ferocity. He allows modernity to stamp itself upon his experience, a self-alienation that he redeems by transforming it into allegorical images capable of making visible modernitys destructiveness, and destroying its false semblance of life and vitality. The majesty of Baudelaires writing, writes Benjamin, lies in its destruction of the organic and living (Benjamin, 1985:41). In the opposition to nature announced by Baudelaire, he adds, there lies primarily a deep-seated protest against the organic (1985:45). Whereas modern capital does its best to portray itself as natural and unalterable, the progressive tendency that Benjamin finds in Baudelaires allegorical poetry is that allegory has to do ... with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all given order, whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable (1999a: J57, 3). For Benjamin, the fundamental characteristic of allegory, as Michael Jennings observes, is its brokenness and, thus, its resistance to a mimetic representation of things as they

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appear to be (Jennings, 1987:171). What distinguishes allegory is its artificiality, its unnaturalness, and its consequent inability to achieve any kind of direct, unmediated relationship with truth. This makes it perfectly suited to enter into the irreality of capitalist modernity. In allegory, nothing appears as natural or inevitable, because as a mode of expression allegory relies entirely on convention. Allegorical method is based upon the principle that anything can be made to stand for anything else. Transformed through Baudelaires rage at modernity, modernity becomes revealed, through allegory, as an image of death, decay and ruin. In poetic allegory, capital becomes revealed as the most powerful allegorist of all, destroying life, nature and creativity and replacing it with the false life of the commodity. All this means that Baudelaires ethical practice involves a destructive act of truth-telling. By basing his poetry upon his flnerie a mode of observation which places him at the heart of the most destructive currents of modernity Baudelaire at once alters himself, living the truth of modernity as an ongoing process of self-alienation, and also alters the world, creating allegorical images with the potential to create a revolutionary shock. Allegorys ability to destroy, to reduce things to ruin and rubble, destroys historys pretension to totality and progress. Allegory makes it possible for individuals to see their own alienation, to recognize the fragmented, oppressive character of history (Jennings, 1987:172). Baudelaire stamps his poetry with the experience of a subject whose experiences have been devalued to the point of annihilation.

Telos
If truth-telling is Baudelaires most important ethical practice, its aim is not to contribute to the worlds stock of knowledge by demonstrating the modern destruction of life and experience. Modernitys problem is its excess of information, not its lack of it. Benjamin is clear about the telos of Baudelaires poetry. To interrupt the course of the world that was Baudelaires deepest intention In this intention he provided death with an accompaniment: his encouragement of its work (Benjamin, 1999a: J50,2). Baudelaires aim is not merely to record the destruction of life, but to make visible the possibility of another form of life, an historical life in which the continuity of time is interrupted to make way for something genuinely new. Benjamin is explicit that the concept of life should be tied, not to nature, but to history:
Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality ... The concept of life is given its due only if everything

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that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. (Benjamin, 1999c:72.)

Baudelaires poetry records modernitys destruction of nature, and the resulting devaluation of experience. Experience no longer enjoys an organic relationship with truth. Under the conditions of modernity, natural life and the sensations of the organic body are sundered from genuine knowledge. Yet by eliminating this connection between truth and nature, allegory offers glimpses of another kind of truth, a truth that is indexed, not to nature, but to history. By demonstrating the corruption within nature, and refusing to see the organic as a genuine form of life, Baudelaire makes visible the possibility of another kind of life, a genuinely historical life from which all organic continuity has been destroyed. Baudelaires allegories perform the critical function of revealing the limits of modern experience and knowledge. On its own, however, this is not enough to interrupt the world. What is also needed is a way of critiquing critique itself. Critique demonstrates the limits of experience, but it also demonstrates those limits to be timeless and necessary. It presents the limit as something unlimited, and hence cannot put into question the temporality of critique itself. This, however, is the precise aim of Baudelaires poetics, as Benjamin understands it: not just to expose the limits of modern experience by revealing modern temporality as the endless repetition of the same, but to reveal, in its negative image, the possibility of an historical life beyond these transcendental limits. Baudelaire, according to Benjamin, is not a philosopher, but a brooder [Grbler], someone whose use of reason involves a reflection on his own mode of reflection (Benjamin, 1999a: J79a,1). As a brooder, Baudelaire is not just concerned with making visible the limits of modern experience, which would be a philosophers stance, but with exposing modernitys characteristic mode of visibility and making it visible as something incomplete, something replete with loss. In that sense, at the same time as performing a critique of modern experience, Baudelaire also saturates his images with absence a sense of something lost, the trace of an experience beyond its present limits (for example, the experience of synaesthetic correspondences). Through this trace of an experience that is presently impossible to experience, critique acquires an historical index, so that critique no longer determines the necessary, timeless limits of experience, but only the limits of experience as they are determined by history. Whilst experience

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remains specified by historical relations, there remains an excess, a cipher of something beyond the historical limits of the present. It is useful here to return to Hallwards distinction between specific and singular accounts of individuation. One result of Benjamins thought is that it enables a way of thinking the modern specification of experience the individuation of subjective experience through historical power relations in a way that does not foreclose the possibility of a singular experience that transgresses the present architecture of subjectivity and objectivity. Baudelaire, as understood by Benjamin, sees that modernity might be made to reveal the historical contingency of its own limits. This would be a true interruption of the world. Although the modern city is dominated by an experience of presence of forms of temporally punctual sensation captured by individual subjectivity this onslaught of sensation threatens an annihilation of subjectivity which makes it impossible to eradicate from experience a trace of absence, a lost memory of an alternative relationship between experience and truth. Poetic images can make that absence perceptible, and thereby demonstrate that the present limits of capital are not identical to the historical limits of experience. The specification of experience in modernity makes possible a singular experience an experience which, by entering into the qualitative temporality of history, escapes the limitation of modern experience to merely quantitative change. The goal of Baudelaires ethics is to find a means of isolating, within the specific, historically constituted architecture of modern subjectivity, the conditions of possibility of a singular experience capable of bringing about a revolutionary interruption of the course of the world. His ambition is to make visible the historically and materially specific conditions of singularity. And it is this aspect of his ethos of modernity which brings his thought into close proximity with Foucault. In his writings on Enlightenment, Foucault develops an understanding of

Enlightenment as an exit or way out [Ausgang]. Modernity is not an epoch, but an attitude, a determination to transform it into something other than what it is. Baudelaires writings on modernity, Foucault adds, are indispensable exemplars of this ethos towards interrupting the world.
For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an

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exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. (Foucault, 2000f:311.)

Historical research participates in the ethos of modernity by uncovering the singularity of events (Foucault, 1984a). An historical sensibility is particularly useful in opening up points at which the present might be interrupted, because becoming is not a vital, metaphysical force, but an historical force. History is the concrete body of becoming, Foucault writes, directly echoing Benjamins critique of Bergsons anti-historical theory of becoming (Benjamin, 1999b; see Blencowe, 2008). Interrupting the world, as we have seen, requires a form of critique which makes visible the historically and materially specific conditions of singularity. Foucaults thought has the same goal. In a preface to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault outlines succinctly his approach to the history of subjectivity:
[C]riticism understood as analysis of the historical conditions which bear on the creation of links to truth, to rules, and to the self does not mark out impassable boundaries or describe closed systems; it brings to light transformable singularities. These transformations could not take place except by means of a working of thought upon itself; that is the principle of the history of thought as critical activity. (Foucault, 1984b:335, emphasis added.).

This indicates that Foucault is indeed concerned with isolating the conditions of singularity. When thought works upon itself, interrupts itself, it is capable of making visible singularities: non-relational points of creativity and differentiation. But how can reason achieve this kind of Ausgang where are the points at which reason might escape itself? In order to answer this, Foucault turns, as Benjamin does, from the critique of reason to the critique of experience. Foucault describes his historical oeuvre as a history of thought, where:
*B+y thought I meant an analysis of what could be called focal points of experience in which forms of a possible knowledge (savoir), normative frameworks of behaviour for individuals, and potential modes of existence for possible subjects are linked together ... these three things, or rather their joint articulation, can be called, I think, focal point of experience. (Foucault, 2010:3.)

This identification of thought with a focal point [foyer] of experience is highly suggestive. As a definition of experience, it could hardly be more open: a focal point of experience brings together possibilities, matrices, and potential. Experience is not

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some kind of vital creative energy, but a point of articulation between different practices and forms of reason. Reason does not escape itself in reason, but in experience, the point at which it is confronted by practices which contradict it. It is in experience, one can surmise, that there exists space for new singularities to emerge which exceed the specification of knowledges, norms, or moralities. In a detailed critique of Foucaults theory of experience and its relation to his theory of ethics, Batrice Han argues that this sort of objective characterization of experience clashes with another, more subjective notion, in which experience is reconceptualized in terms of self-recognition and the active constitution of the self by the self. This results, she argues, in a tension between two inherently conflictual theories of subjectivation:
On the one hand, the subject appears as autonomous, as the source of the problematizations of what he is and as a free actor in the practices through which he transforms himself. On the other, he is shown by the genealogical analyses to be inserted into a set of relations of power and practices that are subjecting to various degrees, and that define the very conditions of possibility for the constitution of the self. Foucaults analysis of the subject is affected by the fundamental ambivalence insofar as it is very difficult to say if, for him, the subject is constituting or constituted. (Han, 2002:172.)

What is lacking in Foucaults genealogy of ethics which might resolve this tension, Han argues, is an adequate account of individuation:
*I+n order for the idea of a genealogy of the subject to be coherent, an analysis is needed of what the individual (as not yet formed subject) is as point of departure for subjectivation. However, such an analysis cannot be found in Foucaults work ... Thus, the individual features as the blind spot of the process of subjectivation, that which makes it understandable but which cannot be thought (Han, 2002:166-167.)

As we saw earlier, Foucault is read by Hallward as offering a fully specific theory of individuation, a theory which sees the individual to exist entirely through their relations with other individuals. However, Hans argument, without directly addressing Hallwards claims, can be interpreted as effectively accusing Foucault of prevaricating between a singular and specific theory of individuation. The subject is specified within a network of power relations, but at the same time acts as an autonomous, self-constituting singularity. Foucaults understanding of subjectivity thus remains unable to break free from the Kantian conceptualization of man as an empirico-transcendental couplet, a being which is at once an object of knowledge and the condition of possibility of knowledge

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(Foucault, 1970, 2008b). Foucaults work is at once critical and speculative, both determining the limits of experience and also venturing beyond them. In Hans reading, Foucaults subject emerges as both singular and specific, at once relational and nonrelational. Han is correct to argue, contra Hallward, that singularity does play an important role in Foucaults thought, for example in his attempt to uncover singular events that might interrupt the course of history. Singularities, in Foucault, occur in experience, in the points of articulation between different ways of specifying the individual. For Han, this contradiction between specific and singular kinds of individuation is something that Foucault simply fails to resolve. But in fact, there is no need to see Foucault as having resolved this tension. Rather, we can read in his work a demonstration that this contradiction is a key structural feature of modern living, that one of the ethical tasks of modernity must be continually to work through this point of tension, attempting to uncover the possibilities for creative singularities in the face of a multiplicity of techniques of specifying the individual. The task must be to bring out points of tension and weakness at which new events and new singularities can emerge. Pleasure, as we have seen, is one surface of experience which Foucault believes to hold open the possibility of creative transformation. Pleasure, as a wholly singular form of experience which cannot be judged true or false, can evade contemporary forms of domination which specify the subject by decoding its true nature. The point, however, is not to see this as a solution to the problem of modern subjectivation. Rather, Foucaults aim is to repeat the ethical work, the continued search for a form of experience in which a new constellation of knowledge, norm and ethos enables something new to emerge. Like Benjamin, Foucaults critical project is to isolate the ways in which subjectivity is specified in order to locate points of possible fracture, to wrest from the specified subject the possibility of novel forms of singular individuality.

Transformable Singularities
Despite the differences in empirical and political emphasis, conceptual vocabulary, and philosophical tradition, Foucaults and Benjamins writings on modern ethics do converge on a number of fundamental points: the refusal to see experience and desire as phenomena that are repressed and in need of liberation; an insistence upon seeing an art of living as a form of combat; a fascination with the possibility of developing the attempt to develop a novel relationship with truth; and the hope of interrupting the

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course of things by creating singular events of temporal difference. Despite Benjamins emphasis upon the material urban spaces of the nineteenth century, in contrast to Foucaults dismissal of the city as an important element of the ethics of Antiquity, this novel co-reading of the two authors work leads to useful insights into the nature of the problematic of the art of living. Firstly, researching the problem of the art of living requires uncovering the ways in which people have modified the specific, historically constituted networks of power in which they find themselves in order to create novel, singular forms of experience experience that is autonomous and not owned by a stable human subject. Although Foucault is sometimes criticized for being overly concerned with representations and discourse (see p. 11), Foucaults own arguments actually imply that it is in experience, as a point of intersection between discourse and non-discursive forms of practice and sensation, that new points of singularity will emerge. Researching the history of arts of life, then, requires taking experience, and not representation, as the primary object of historical analysis. It requires an analysis of the points at which representations, perceptions and affections converge and diverge, and an account of the ways in which different relationships between these forms of experience are created. Secondly, the problematic of arts of life requires a stance that refuses to celebrate life, as a creative force of differentiation, over representation, as a static form of repetition. As interpreted by Foucault and Benjamin, life is not something that can be liberated, but something that is circulated, distributed, and transformed. Analysis of the repression of urban life through spectacle must give way to analysis of economies of life and experience, and the ways in which these economies are altered or interrupted. Life and the life of the city is not something to be liberated through art, but something to be created, recreated, and creatively transformed. Correspondingly, histories of arts of life cannot rely upon a fixed distinction between spectacular and anti-spectacular forms of urban culture, but must chart the ways in which life, representation, perception and emotion are combined into novel textures of experience through novel ethical practices and new ways of relating to the substance of ethical conduct. Finally, taking up the problematic of the art of life, as it emerges in Benjamin and Foucault, involves an ongoing repetition of an attempt to isolate the points at which new kinds of singularities can be created out of the relations of power that function to specify subjects and their modes of experience. An art of life requires creating points of

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autonomous singularity where individuals escape themselves, lived experience is torn away from the subject, and something new interrupts the world. It requires creating experiences where, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, the one who experiences it is no longer there when he experiences it, is thus no longer there to experience it (Blanchot, 1988:19). It is relation to such an attempt to isolate new possibilities for creative singularity within the historically specific networks of subjectification that I address the experiments with the life of the city in fin-de-sicle Montmartre. Before doing so, however, it remains necessary to consider how the problematic set up in this chapter impacts upon the thinking of history and the life of the past. The concept of life is intimately linked to the concept of temporal difference, and a history of arts of life has to confront the methodological implications of its theoretical and ethical commitments. It is to this task that I turn in Chapter Three.

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CHAPTER THREE Sources and Analytical Method: Names of History

The first two chapters of this thesis have described the theoretical architecture of its main problem (the possibilities of transforming life and lived experience through creative practice), arguing against a reading of the art of life that interprets it, as Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord do, in terms of an imperative to liberate life from its shackles in representation. Instead, we have seen, the art of life might more productively be understood in terms of an attempt to isolate the possibilities of singular forms of life from within historically specified networks of power relations. Having made these claims, my focus now turns to methodology and analytical technique. As we will see, the notion of a creative ethos towards life and experience raises important questions and problems for the writing of history. The thesis is an historical enquiry into arts of life. The historian, however, cannot simply approach life as an unproblematic object of analysis, since understanding the capacities and limits of life and experience inevitably raises questions about the role of history as a particular form of knowledge or thought. Historical methodology is often conceptualized in terms of historys ability to record the experiences of the past with the greatest possible fidelity to bring the past, in some sense, to life in present experience. However, the notion of an art of life threatens to disrupt this understanding, since experience becomes something, not to be replicated, but to be stylized, meaning that present and past cannot be brought into some kind of structural isomorphism. After exploring these issues, the thesis then focuses back on the implications of these theoretical arguments for the methodological and narrative techniques of the thesis. First, however, I will record the main primary sources made use in my research.

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Figure 4. Front page of Le Chat Noir journal, April 21, 1883.

Archives and Primary Research Materials

The main research for the thesis was undertaken at the Bibliothque Nationale, the Bibliothque Sainte Genevive, and the Bibliothque du Centre Pompidou, all in Paris. A small amount of additional research was undertaken at the British Library and the V&A library in London. In addition, online research was undertaken through the Bibliothque Nationales digital library GALLICA. The main primary sources which I have used are publications associated with the Chat Noir literary cabaret. First and foremost of these is Le Chat Noir, a weekly literary journal containing a mixture of poems, lyrics, stories, political commentary, satire, graphic art, and advertisements (see Figure 4). In addition to the journal, the cabaret also produced occasional individual publications, of which the most useful was George Auriols (1887) Chat Noir Guide.

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The main problem with using the Chat Noir journal was the issue of scope and selection. The journal was four pages long (occasionally six pages), was produced every week, and was published continually between 1882 and 1897. In total, therefore, close to 3000 pages of the journal were created too much to analyse comprehensively. For this reason, it was necessary to develop a principle of selection. In the first place, I devoted a length of time to browsing early issues of the journal and to developing a clear understanding of the type, tone, content and variety of articles and graphic art. In particular, I focused on material possessing a clearly geographical content, such as poems describing Montmartre, accounts of the city of Paris, and cartoons satirizing important geopolitical events. In addition, I noted its responses to major political issues or ruptures. Having gained a good understanding of the material, I then browsed through each edition of the journal and selected articles to examine more closely, chosen by their title, after deciding on some major themes which the thesis would focus upon: Montmartre; the city of Paris; social hygiene and urban vitality; modernity; nature; death, phantoms and the uncanny; and anarchism. The result still being too large, I decided to focus on earlier editions of the journal, between 1882 and 1885. This was for three reasons. Firstly, it was during this period that the journal focused heavily on depictions of Montmartre and accounts of Montmartre life. By 1886, the myth of Montmartre had already been constructed, and there was less need to develop it so insistently. Secondly, it was during this period that the cabaret made its reputation and delivered most of its cultural innovations. In later years the style and content of the articles become markedly more repetitive and predictable. Focusing on earlier editions, therefore, enabled me to focus on the articles that had the greatest impact in creating the myth of Montmartre that the journal tried so hard to cultivate. Thirdly, while planning the research, I had speculated about the engagement of the Chat Noir with anarchist political ideals during the 1890s, since the resurgent anarchist politics of this period found its home in many of the cabarets of Montmartre (Sonn, 1989). I quickly discovered, however, that the journal took up an expressly anti-political stance, condemned anarchist acts of violence, and in general avoided discussing anarchist themes. For this reason, there was little reason to focus on the later issues of the journal. By these principles of selection, I narrowed the focus down to a couple of dozen articles and images which I would later analyse in detail. The Chat Noir also produced some one-off publications. These included a catalogue to an exhibition of arts incohrents in a special supplement to the journal (1882a), two

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collections of humorous stories by Chat Noir writers (Salis, 1888a, 1888b), and a parody of a museum guide to the cabaret (Auriol, 1887). Of these, I did not focus upon the collections of stories, since they did not contain substantially different material to the journal itself. I also set aside the catalogue, since this exhibition has been explored in detail in Cate & Shaw (1996). I did focus on the Guide, however, since this source provided valuable material, both describing the decoration and art displayed in the cabaret itself, and also expressing the kind of ethos which its creators wished the cabaret to express (see Chapter Five). In addition, I also examined some other publications by major artists of the Chat Noir, such as volumes of poetry by mile Goudeau (1885) and Maurice Rollinat (1886a), and a book of cartoons by Adolphe Willette (1887). Supplementary reading here also included more general browsing of newspapers such as the Courrier Franais, which focused heavily on the entertainments of Montmartre during this time, and the organs of other Montmartre cabarets such as the Gazette du Bagne. This reading provided background and contextual information, and enabled me to understand what was distinctive, and what was more generic, about the Chat Noir style and ethos in Montmartre culture. Whilst these texts provided important general background which aided my analysis and understanding, I have not discussed these sources in the thesis. Another major source of information concerning the Chat Noir was contemporary newspaper accounts of the cabaret, as well as memoires written by its major artists (e.g. Auriol, 1926; Goudeau, 1888). The digital library GALLICA was very helpful in finding these articles. The library has archives of many French newspapers and journals, and has a comprehensive search facility, making it easy to locate newspaper articles with Chat Noir, cabaret artistique or fumisme, for example, in their title. This enabled me to find several articles describing the cabaret and its performances (e.g. du Seigneur, 1885; Goudeau, 1886; Taharin, 1891; Veber, 1889). Secondary literature on the cabaret, in addition, also gave useful pointers to other descriptions of the venue and the occurrences within it (e.g. Oberthur, 2007). Where no English translation was available, translations from the French are my own. In the case of literary texts such as poems, I have kept my translations on the functional side, giving fairly exact translations rather than trying to convey literary effects. Having already acquired a good knowledge of French, and supplementing this with intensive language training in Paris, navigating the French source material was, for the most part,

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relatively straightforward. The frequent use of argot (proletarian vernacular language) in the journal Le Chat Noir did make progress through that source material rather slow, but a Dictionnaire dargot fin de sicle (Virmaitre, 1894) was very useful in deciphering problematic phrases. One use of French that did cause me more serious problems, however, were infrequent poems or articles in Le Chat Noir which were written in a pastiche of mediaeval French, in the style of Rabelais or Villon. I found it impossible to get beyond the bare gist of these articles and decided to omit them from my analysis, as, from what I could understand of them, they seemed to offer little promise of developing the themes upon which I concentrated during my research. These texts were few and far between, and I do not see their omission from my analyses to have compromised the scope of the thesis to any significant extent.

The Life of the Past

The case for the possibility and usefulness of a non-representational historical geography has not yet been made with enough force (though see, for example, DeSilvey, 2007; Edensor, 2005). Here I wish to make that case. The thesis, as we have seen, addresses a stance towards taking life and lived experience as objects of creative transformation. However, this requires careful reflection on analytical and narrative method. History does not just describe or repeat the life of the past, but also establishes, through its language, archive, and analysis, a specific relationship with the life of the past. Since the thesis approaches life as something to be stylized, created or transformed, rather than something to be freed or repeated, this raises the question of what kind of analytical method is best suited to approaching historical knowledge concerning arts of living. In other words, it is necessary to reflect theoretically on the extent to which approaching life as a medium of creative transformation requires reading, arranging and narrating the past in certain ways. In doing this, my aim is not to make large-scale claims about what a non-representational historiography could, should or must look like. Rather, it is to explore some theoretical arguments capable of provoking some tentative and provisional ideas concerning the possible ways in which the thesis might engage with the life of the past. In terms of the philosophy of history, these issues relate to debates concerning the postmodern approach advocated by writers such as Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White, as well as to the new historicist approach within literary studies (e.g. Ankersmit, 1989; Gallagher & Greenblatt, 2000; White, 1973). The postmodern approach is an

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aesthetic stance that insists on the literary qualities of historical writing. As Ankersmit puts it, what is needed is a connoisseurship of historical writing, a historiography that is sensitive to aspects of the text that may even have escaped its author, and that knows how to find the secret key to the text not in its alleged correspondence to the actual past but in its textual organization (Ankersmit, 1990:294-295). Ankersmit lists some key features of the postmodernist position on history:
That narrative language has the ontological status of being an object; that it is opaque; that it is self-referential; that it is intensional and, hence, intrinsically aestheticist; that the narrative meaning of an (historical) text is undecidable in an important sense of that word and even bears the marks of self-contradiction; that narrative meaning can only be identified in the presence of other meaning (inter-textuality); that as far as narrative meaning is concerned the text refers but not to a reality outside itself; that criteria of truth and falsity do not apply to historical representations of the past; that we can only properly speak of causes and effects at the level of the statement; that narrative language is metaphorical (tropo-logical) and as such embodies a proposal for how we should see the past; that the historical text is a substitute for the absent past; that narrative representations of the past have a tendency to disintegrate (especially when many rival representations of the past are present.) (Ankersmit, 1990:295-296.)

Postmodern history, therefore, refuses to put history to the test of truth and falsity, and instead adopts an aestheticist approach that dwells on the status of the historical narrative as a text. Historical language, it asserts, is just another kind of literary language; history is another kind of fiction (see Clark, 2003; Southgate, 2003). It would be a mistake, however, to assume that post-structuralist theory inevitably leads to these conclusions. In the previous chapter, I explored how commitment to an art of life might require an emphasis upon new practices of truth-telling. Certainly it is not necessary to abandon criteria of truth and falsity, for example, to insist that knowledge is inevitably produced within webs of uneven power relations. Nor is it necessary, in order to challenge objectivist claims to an unfettered access to reality, to lapse into the absurd Idealism of a claim that reality is only a text. Indeed, much recent post-structuralist theory has taken precisely the opposite stance. As writers coming from the perspective of non-representational geography have argued, the problem with objectivist approaches to social science is not that they want to capture too much reality, when in fact they are fated to navigate an endless sea of texts. Rather, its problem is that by using conventional representational means, objectivist social science cannot capture enough reality; it allows

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important aspects of reality to slip from view. What it misses is the liveliness of the world. By pinning down the world into static representations, it becomes unable to capture the worlds dynamism, vitality and intensity. The kind of post-structuralism advocated in such non-representational approaches, therefore, is one that, rather than reducing reality to texts, strives to capture or express societys dynamism and excessiveness. For an historian interested in arts of life, however, a problem emerges. It is easy to suppose that life, as a form of creativity, dynamism, and experiential intensity, can exist only in the present and history, of course, necessarily inhabits the dead past. It can seem impossible for an historian interested in nineteenth-century urban culture to document its life, when life is defined within non-representational theory by its irretrievability and excessiveness (e.g. Dewsbury, 2000). The historian, it might appear, can only access transitory life in its reduction to stable representation. For the historian, in fact, non-representational approaches risk leading to a rather traditional form of scepticism which acknowledges that there exists an external reality, but maintains little confidence in our means of accessing it. Historians interested in an art of life, and wishing to remain faithful to the theoretical commitments of such a concept, need a material to work upon, but because they are working with the dead past, their material life escapes them. One way out of this is to challenge the assumption that life exists only in the present tense, and to insist that the past retains its own forms of vitality, and that to study the past is not necessarily to study life as reduced to representation. This requires seeing experience, not as something punctual that only endures in the present instant, but as something capable of enduring and being reactivated retrospectively. It requires viewing the past as containing experiences that can be actualized after the event. As Michel Foucault puts it, an experience is neither true nor false: it is always a fiction, something constructed, which exists only after it has been made, not before; it isn't something that is true, but it has been a reality (Foucault, 1991:36). Experience is not just the sensation of the living moment, but something that is necessarily something lost, something retrospectively constructed. The task of the historian, perhaps, is to reconstruct the past in such a way that past experience can be reactivated usefully in the present. Two theorists who have explored this issue of the life of the past in detail are Jacques Rancire and Gilles Deleuze. Although they are very different, and in some ways

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opposed, thinkers (see Rancire, 2004a; Wolfe, 2006), common to both is an approach to experience which, while emphasizing the importance of approaches that do not reduce life to representation, nevertheless avoid dismissing the past as something intrinsically dead and lifeless. As we will see, the two writers diverge on one crucial point. Nevertheless, both offer a way of understanding what Davide Panagia calls the political life of sensation, and its place in history (Panagia, 2009). Both develop theories of experience wherein sensation is irreducible to the experience of a pre-individuated subject or consciousness. Sensation, they argue, cannot be contained by our representations of it, since there exist vital, living, dynamic experiences and sensations that exceed the representational architecture of individuated subjects. The two writers share a common standpoint according to which there exist regimes of perception [that] constitute a common world of the sensible which, at one and the same time, distributes legitimacy and endorses the convictions that bring that sense world into being (Panagia, 2009:23). Deleuze and Rancire, then, are both thinkers attuned to the dynamics of interruption and reconfiguration of sense making that the experience of sensation afford (Panagia, 2009:23-24). Both are tackling, in certain respects, the same problem. Their ways of doing so, however, are very different, and by unpacking this difference, it is possible to understand better the different ways in which non-representational history can approach the life of the past, and thus which method might be most appropriate for the present study.

The Aesthetics of History

Rancires solution to the problem of how to narrate the life of the past is to make it perceptible. This is, then, an aesthetic solution, in the sense of the word aesthetic that relates to the presentation of the world in sensation. Rancire accuses structuralist and empiricist historical science of having unwittingly functioned to police the excessive life of the people (peuple). One of the founding axioms of social science, he suggests, was that, it is the excess of life that makes life sick ... It is the excess of life that provokes death. And the excess of life among speakers united in a society is first of all the excess of speech (Rancire, 1994:22). Structuralist social science, he concludes, and in particular historical social science, has functioned to regulate this excessive life of speakers (1994:23). It has fulfilled a policing role, organizing the living multiplicity of the masses into ordered identities, categories and representations. A more effective historical science, by contrast, he believes, will be one that is capable of liberating this excess life and speech of the people.

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Although the usefulness of Rancires thought for geographical analysis is increasingly well recognized (e.g. Dike, 2005; Dixon, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2007), the historical commitments of his thinking remain under-developed (though see Bell, 2004; Hewlett, 2007:86-95). Yet history is a key practical and theoretical concern of Rancire, and he wrote several books and essays on it (e.g. Rancire, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996), as well as cofounding a journal of the social history of labour called Les Rvoltes logiques. Rancires focus is upon the history of subjectification and, in particular, in the ways in which historical writing can pose a challenge to the ordering of what is visible and sayable in the contemporary era. Rancires conception of history derives from an idiosyncratic definition of thought, whereby, there is thinking [only] when one authorizes oneself to think within the context of a different time and place what that particular time considered illegitimate to thinking (Rancire & Panagia, 2000:122). One result of this definition is that the role of historical thought is no longer to repeat the experiences of the past, but to make perceptible the experiences that were excluded from the shared distribution of what was visible, sayable, and perceptible at a certain time and place. Such a history would repeat the past, but in doing so would repeat a past that was never experienced. It would continue in the tradition of Walter Benjamins attempt to read what was never written (Benjamin, 2006a:405). Developing these ideas in empirical histories such as The Nights of Labour and The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancire explores them in most conceptual detail in his more philosophical work The Names of History (Les noms dhistoire). In this work, the historian Jules Michelet emerges as a key figure in the development of modern historical approaches to the life of the past. In the figure of the people, Rancire argues, Michelets histories introduce a wholly new kind of subject onto the stage of history. In order to do this, they invent the character of the silent witness: subjects who, since they were allotted no power to enter political discourse in their own time, can now only inhabit the past as mute, silent figures. Michelet invents a novel solution to the problem of giving voice to such mute witnesses: he uses literary devices to enable the people to speak as silent people, making their silence perceptible in the present. At one point in his History of the French Revolution, for example, Michelet refuses to repeat the words of the revolutionary Joseph Chalier. To do so would allow the heterogeneous voices of the people to be unified into a single voice, and consequently frame them as a single, homogeneous political subject. No one individual voice, Michelet insists, spoke through

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Chaliers mouth. Instead, Michelet allows the revolutionary life of past to speak through the voice of the impersonal space of the city:
What speaks is a whole city, a whole bleeding world the agonized cry of Lyon. [Chalier] is the voice of the deep dark mud of its streets, silent since the beginning of time. Through him the ancient, dismal darkness, the damp and filthy houses begin to speak; and hunger and fasts; and abandoned children and the women dishonoured; and all those heaped-up, sacrificed generations. (Michelet, 1973:vol. 6, p. 156, cited in Rancire, 1994.)

In doing so, Rancire suggests, Michelet allows a new form of political life to come into view, a heterogeneous subject whose speech cannot be reduced to the speech of a single representative. This new political subject is nothing other than all the persons and groups who died mute, unnoticed, and unheard but whose voices continue to haunt history with their repressed presence (White, 1994:xv). The truth of this political subject cannot be captured by representational means, but only through literary techniques that, by poetically creating a new speaking subject, enable the excessive life of silent speakers to become perceptible. Fulfilling historys promise to disturb the partition of roles, places and visibilities requires a literary operation capable of making perceptible something that was previously imperceptible. Through Rancires arguments it is possible to make the case for a non-representational form of history which, rather than giving voice to marginalized voices, makes perceptible the silences of the past, the voices that never possessed any voice. The power of this approach is its egalitarianism its obsessive refusal to allow the historian to speak for, or in place of, the oppressed subjects to whom she gives voice. By adopting poetic forms of historical narrative, history need no longer be reducible to a history of subjects and subjective experiences, but can make visible forms of illegitimate subjectivity that were excluded from view in their own time. Thus history can act as a mode of nonrepresentational thinking, in Rancires distinctive sense of the word a way of thinking something that was illegitimate to thought in another time and place. One result of this insistence upon making the life of the past visible, however, is that Rancires histories, despite their contestation of representational regimes of knowledge that function to keep subjectivities in their place, still miss something of the work of time itself. The difference between past and present often seems to be in danger of

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collapsing. In other words, there is a danger of this literary approach lapsing into a wholesale aestheticization of history. There are three reasons for this. The first has to do with Rancires way of privileging a certain form of experience in the practice of thinking. Politics, in Rancire, is a matter of the distribution of experience, of what can be seen, heard, or otherwise perceived. Individuals political capacities derive from their place within the present partitions of sense and sensation. This means that to redeem the silent voices of mute speakers, historical writing must use literary devices in order to make these witnesses directly perceptible in the present to create a present experience of something that was excluded from experience in the past, and thereby to create a clash between different distributions of experience. The silent witness, in order to play a part on the stage of history, must be made directly visible on that stage. It must be brought, blinking, into the clear light of the present. In this sense, however, in a curious way it only gains power inasmuch as it leaves a past in which it was mute and invisible, and enters the present. The silence of the silent witness is only perceptible in the present; in the past, it remains hidden. The difference between past and present is eclipsed; what was imperceptible in the past becomes perceptible in the present, but in doing so, the past itself disappears from view. Rancires analytical method does make difference visible; but this is the difference between the present and itself, not between the past and present. Times work, therefore, remains obscured. This way of approaching history results in spatial histories which, rather than setting up a space of difference between the past and present, create a homogeneous space in which the life of time is obscured. Secondly, this way of approaching the life of the past is premised upon the fundamentally ahistorical assumption that there has always existed, from Platos Greece to the present, what Rancire calls a supplementary part or part-with-no-part that exceeds any given distribution of political identities. In any historical formation, according to Rancire, there always exist subjects who are, politically, imperceptible. This is what he calls the people or poor, terms which refer to the supplement that disconnects the population from itself, by suspending the various logics of legitimate domination (Rancire, 2001:6). What links the study of the past to the present is that historical enquiry can, as Michelet did, make visible the existence of a people: the existence of an imperceptible supplement which exists today just as it did yesterday (albeit with a different composition). The social whole always exceeds the sum of social roles and identities: politics is the sphere of a common that can only ever be

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contentious, the relationship between parties and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole (Rancire, 1999:14). For this reason, as Michael Dillon has argued, politics, in Rancires sense of the word, always involves the expression of both historical and supra-historical elements (Dillon, 2005). A political event is the historical actualization of a supra-historical, unchanging supplement. This politics of history is premised upon a rigidly ahistorical ontology of excessive life or speech. History, therefore, is used as a means by which to access something that exists outside of history. The difference expressed by the life of the past, paradoxically, becomes a unitary, singular, non-historical phenomenon. Finally, Rancires use of the concepts of life and excess is itself shorn of any historical context. Unlike Foucault, for example, Rancire does not take into account the historical specificity of life as a form of knowledge, and, more importantly, as a fundamental value in western society. In Disagreement, Rancire makes much of Aristotles characterization of man as a political animal, thereby positioning life as a key stake of politics across history (Rancire, 1999:1-8). Michel Foucault, by contrast, insists that life, as it is understood today, only came into existence in the eighteenth century (Foucault, 1970). Likewise, in Foucaults histories, contingency, excess and indeterminacy emerge as values that are historically specific to modern biopolitical rationalities. Rancire, however, explicitly withdraws his use of notions of life and excess from any historically inflected conceptualization of the terms. Contemporary politics, he argues, against Foucault (and perhaps Deleuze), is not ordered by a theory of life or the problem of how to regulate life (Rancire, 2000). In other words, life, excess and contingency exist over and above any historically specific biopolitical discourse. They have no historical context: the life about which Aristotle wrote, it seems, is the same life that we can talk about today. The values upon which Rancires non-representational thinking of history rest, therefore, are fundamentally ahistorical, meaning that once again, the work of time disappears from view. Life is something that must be liberated, not something that must be altered or transformed. For a study such as the present one, which approaches life as an object of creative transformation, to take up such a position would be obviously incoherent. This form of non-representational history, then, which strives to make perceptible in the present the imperceptibles of the past, is in danger of degenerating into an ahistorical affirmation of timeless values, such as life, excess, contingency and indeterminacy, which have rich histories and politics in and of themselves. By celebrating life and excess as

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irreducible values, they become timeless, static, and lifeless. For this reason, this approach to non-representational history risks creating a static, lifeless space between the present and the past. It risks celebrating a petrified, deathless life. Perhaps what is needed, therefore, is to see the life of the past not as something to be liberated, but something to be assembled. It is this kind of analytical and narrative approach which Deleuzes leads towards.

Thinking History
A different solution to the problem of how to stylize an historical art of the life of the past is to make that life thinkable, not by representing it through historical science, but by drawing it into philosophical vocabularies. Both approaches invite the historian to ask what lies beyond the bare facts of the historical archive. Whereas Rancires approach demands the non-representational historian to make perceptible a pre-existing historical life, however, Deleuze and Guattari invite the historian to use philosophical concepts in order to assemble new forms of historical life in the present. Deleuze and Guattari were no historians themselves. Nevertheless, it remains possible to extract from their writings (together with Deleuzes individually authored works) a fully formed theory of history (Bell & Colebrook, 2009; Lampert, 2006). Deleuzes philosophy invites the historical geographer to reassess the ways in which empirical history might stage the life of the past. Rather than making an imperceptible historical life perceptible in the present, as Rancires philosophy demands, Deleuzian thought invites the historian to perform the opposite operation, making a perceptible historical life imperceptible, but in doing so make it thinkable in new ways. It is sometimes suggested that Deleuzes philosophy is profoundly ahistorical in outlook (e.g. Hallward, 2000a; Osborne, 2003b). Christian Kerslakes observations concerning Deleuzes enthusiastic use of the concepts of Bergsonist historian Arnold Toynbee, however, indicate that this is far from the case (Kerslake, 2008; Toynbee, 1934-1961) . Deleuze, it is true, often delivered withering put-downs of a certain form of historical writing (see Sibertin-Blanc, 2003). History isnt experimental, he writes, but is just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history (Deleuze, 1995:170). History is always written from the sedentary point of view (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988:21). Deleuze and Guattari were always concerned with forms of time that escape discrete, sequential chronologies, and hence dismissed forms of history which are wedded to such chronology. This leaves

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open, however, the possibility of a form of history which experiments with nonsequential forms of chronology, and thereby places itself in opposition to the kind of traditional history which, as Foucault puts it, composes the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself (Foucault, 1984a).

Time, Memory and the Selection of the Past

One common sense picture of history sees historical events to be linked through a chain of cause and effect, in a linear flow from past to future. The life of the past, in this picture, is its sequential movement from past to present, and presenting the life in the past through historical narrative is a question of capturing that past. In Difference & Repetition, however, Deleuze problematizes this picture by analysing time in terms of three different passages between past, present and future. Time, here, effectively becomes a composite of three different forms of time: habit, memory, and eternal return. Each form of time possesses its own movement from past to present to future, and hence its own kind of life. The problem for the historian thereby becomes, not how to inhabit the past, but how to inhabit a multiple and internally differentiated past. Deleuze argues that time is initially founded through a synthesis of repeated instants (Deleuze, 2004:91). Past and future are contracted into the present, creating a linear series of time, drawn from the experience of everyday habits and perceptions, which results in measurable, chronological time. Here, the past is what remains in the present of previous events that have affected a body. In this sense, however, the past is only ever a dead past, since its effects have already happened. Its energy has dissipated. The past created here is a visible, experienced, ordered past that is finished and dead. In order to discover the life of the past, according to Deleuze, it is necessary to address a second synthesis of time. Here Deleuze takes up the Bergsonist notion that there exists a living, virtual past that coexists with the dead, chronological past (Deleuze, 2004:103). This virtual past is not connected in a linear series to the present, but coexists in its entirety with the present (Deleuze, 1999). The synthesis of time involved here is the synthesis of memory, since it is in memory that the past can coincide with the present. This means that it is memory that accounts for the passing of the present: Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass) (Deleuze, 2004:101). In memory, the past is not separate from the present, but exists within the present. Unlike the chronological past, which imprints itself on the

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material body, this past exceeds any material state of affairs. It exists as the presence of difference in the present. It is the temporal life that creates difference and change. The first synthesis of time, then, organizes time as a chronological, ordered series, meaning that historical memory must involve a linear movement back through the stages of the series. In the second synthesis, by contrast, the past co-exists with the present as a living, differentiating force. To respond to the life of the past, therefore, it is this kind of time, rather than the chronological time of the first synthesis, to which the historian must address herself. The problem in this case, however, becomes how to search or select the past. After all, if the entire past coexists with the present, then it seems to follow that historical memory, when entering this past, could end up anywhere at all. This is the precise problem posed by the third synthesis of time: whether or not we can fully penetrate the passive synthesis of memory; whether we can in some sense live the being-in-itself of the past in the same way that we live the passive synthesis of habit ... How can we save it for ourselves? (Deleuze, 2004:106-107). In order to answer this, it is necessary to turn from Bergson to Proust. Proustian memory does not search the chronological past: it does not recall past events as they actually happened. Nor does it, however, guide itself through the virtual, non-chronological past. Rather, it involves an embodied encounter with the virtual past, an encounter over which it has little control. Whereas voluntary memory can move back and forth along measurable, chronological time at will, it is only through involuntary memory that it is possible to enter the pure past. The virtual cannot be accessed at will, but only through an uncontrollable encounter with the world. When this happens, the result is not a mere repetition of the past, but the emergence of a past which was never present (Deleuze, 2004:107). In Prousts la recherche du temps perdu (Proust, 1961), for example, what reappears after Marcel tastes the madeleine is the in-itself of his childhood village Combray, which reappears, not as it was or as it could be, but in a splendour which was never lived, like a pure past which finally reveals its double irreducibility to the two presents which it telescopes together (Deleuze, 2004:107). This might seem to make a genuinely vital history impossible when thought through Deleuzian ontology. If the encounter with the pure past can only be involuntary and contingent, then it would seem that history, inasmuch as it involves a deliberate, voluntary exploration of the past, is condemned to travel in dead, actual time rather than living, virtual time. Certainly many critics assume this to be true, and it is probably

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for this reason why few historians have engaged with Deleuzes work. In fact, however, this conclusion is too hasty. For Deleuze, encountering the life of the past is not simply a question of waiting until an involuntary memory happens to strike. Rather, what is required is an active ethics, an ethics capable of affirming life as an eternal repetition of difference (Deleuze, 2004:153). The passive, involuntary memory that leaps into the virtual past is only made possible by an active, voluntary affirmation of the life of the past. The question to ask, therefore, is not how to access the life of the past but, rather, how to affirm it. Clues as to how this might be possible are given by Deleuze and Guattaris neglected concept of names of history.

Names of History
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari develop a concept of names of history which offers clues as to how it might be possible for the historian to stylize the life of the past in this way. This concept may share a common vocabulary with Rancire (both developing ways of thinking noms dhistoire), but it diverges strongly from Rancires use of the term. Here Deleuze and Guattari imagine a form of schizophrenic art of life where individuals, rather than identifying themselves with pre-existing images of subjectivity, instead identify with dynamic forces of life and becoming. One form that this kind of creative dissolution of the self can take is to identify with a name of history (see Lampert, 2006:1-11). Deleuze and Guattari list many names of history: Joan of Arc; Heliogabalus; the Great Mongol; Luther; the Commune; the Dreyfus Affair; the Spanish Civil War; Fascism; Stalinism; the Vietnam war; May 68; and so forth. Identifying with a name of history is not a question of taking on the specific characteristics of an historical personage (as in having a Napoleon complex, for example). Proper names, Deleuze and Guattari argue, ought not be understood in terms of representation. Rather, they refer to the class of effects (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a:95). The closest analogy here is to physics, where proper names dont refer to a person, but designate effects within fields of potential: the Joule effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect, the Doppler effect. This means that a form of historical analysis is possible which, like physics, documents a Joan of Arc effect, or a Heliogabalus effect, and so on. Identifying with this kind of name of history, an individual does not simply repeat an actual past event, person or epoch; rather, she enters into the array of forces that a name of history diagrams. This kind of identification with the past is not a matter of identifying with various historical personages, but rather identifying the names

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of history with zones of intensity (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a:23). When a subject identifies with a name of history, it is not to repeat a fixed identity, but to identify with a dynamic effect a gathering of forces. There is no space here to explore Deleuze and Guattaris ethics in detail (see, for example, Goodchild, 1997; Holland, 1999; Smith, 2007). Rather, here I want to depart from Deleuze and Guattaris text and consider the role that the historian might have in this ethics of creative identification with names of history as constellations of forces. My suggestion is that narrating names of history can be viewed as a way of multiplying the possibilities for encountering the past in novel and unpredictable ways, and thereby making possible an involuntary jump into the virtual past of temporal difference. Involuntary memory cannot be engineered, calculated or controlled. But this is not to say that it is simply in the hands of fate. The historian can create the conditions for a reader to be shocked into a destabilizing encounter with history. By narrating a name of history as a gathering of dynamic, virtual forces, rather than as a sequence of dead, lifeless occurrences, the historian can multiply the possibilities for a reader to encounter the past in a creative, dynamic way. This means that theory acquires a unique and important role in historical analysis and narrative. Theory is not a lens through which to view empirical material (e.g. Kearns, 2007), but a means by which to re-order empirical materials in novel ways. This is why Deleuze and Guattari (1994) insist that philosophical concepts have a unique role in thought one that is not reducible to generating better descriptions of the world. Philosophical concepts, they argue, need not be descriptive, but can instead be expressive. That is, rather than representing the world (which is the task of science), they can extract the virtual forces that circulate in empirical events, and in doing so create new ways of thinking difference. In relation to the past, theory can enable the historian to write the pure past, the non-chronological life of the past, rather than the actual, chronological past. By extracting theoretical concepts from empirical events, the historian can create a name of history, a constellation of forces, which can be useful in the present, since it expands the possibilities for an ethics devoted to creative identification with forms of becoming and differentiation. That is, the historian can contribute to arts of living in the present by increasing the possibilities for developing new relationships in the present subjectivity, temporal life, and experience.

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Names of history, then, are best seen as theoretical abstractions from a specific historical context. Or rather, to be more precise, actual historical events are best seen as abstractions from the material, dynamic forces that names of history express. The theoretical work that a non-representational history performs in writing names of history is to take up and develop philosophical concepts that express novel or interesting forms of creative differentiation. In doing so, they increase the possibilities for individuals in the living present to encounter the virtual past of difference-in-itself.

The Life of the Past: Percept or Concept?

Seeing the potential of non-representational history to lie more in its ability to think the life of the past, as Deleuze does, than in its ability to make the life of the past perceptible, as Rancire does, has several advantages. Firstly, approaching the writing of nonrepresentational history in this way avoids the danger of collapsing together past and present. Whereas Rancires literary approach to the writing of non-representational history obscures the difference between past and present in his attempt to make an imperceptible past perceptible in the present, a Deleuzian theoretical approach leads to a way of approaching past events with a fidelity to the distance between past and present. This is because, rather than drawing historical events into the clear light of present experience, names of history instead assemble a life in which events exist, not in the space of the dead past, nor that of the living present, but in a virtual space in which the present is differentiated by the past. Difference is neither in the past nor in the present, but is the process by which one becomes the other. This Deleuzian solution to the problem of narrating the life of the past, therefore, preserves the distance between past and present, and thereby attends more carefully than Rancire to the spacing of time in historical analysis. Secondly, unlike Rancire, Deleuze doesnt rely on any notion of what the life of the past is. The life of every event, in Rancire, is the same: it is an anarchic liberation of excess speech. In the reading of Deleuzes thought that I have developed here, by contrast, the historian, each time she researches a new name of history and orders it via a novel configuration of concepts, thereby assembles a new form of life. The possibilities for writing history, therefore, become multiplied far beyond Rancires framework. Historical life is not something that must be harnessed or liberated; rather, it is something that must be assembled each time it comes into being. Deleuzian ontology demands that the historian contributes to an art of life: the historian must narrate the

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life of the past in such a way as to enable new life (i.e. difference) in the present. A nonrepresentational history, as Foucault observes, must be a transformative experience (Foucault, 1991). This means that creating possibilities for new kinds of subject, as both Rancire and Deleuze wish to do, will not be as easy as making perceptible a torrent of excess meaning. Rather, the historian can only piece together her materials with the aim of multiplying the possibilities. In this way a diagram of forces might, through a dynamic connection of energies, result in a novel, vital encounter between the reader and the past. Deleuzes vision for the historian is far less heroic than Rancires. The historian is no longer a quasi-divine redeemer of dead life, but takes on the more modest task of assembling the remnants of the past into a new kind of life in the present. By taking up Deleuzes philosophy of history, an analytical method might be devised that could be as faithful as possible to the heterogeneity and multiplicity of the life of the past. Finally, unlike Rancire, Deleuze and Guattari do not take up life as a value that is shorn of historical context. Indeed, in A Thousand Plateaus, for example, they demonstrate a great sensitivity to biological debates concerning the nature of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is true that they do describe Anti-Oedipuss politics of life in terms of a universal history, which might be taken to imply that life is an ahistorical precondition of history. However, they do not mean to imply that life is the a priori condition of historical change. Deleuze and Guattari are no Kantians. Their universal history is a history of contingency, meaning that contingency is the only necessity of historical life (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a:244). Since the historian creates a new diagram of life each time she maps a name of history, the life of the past that emerges is always contextually situated within present knowledges and discourses concerning the dynamics of life. The way in which the life of the past is assembled will depend on the particular problem being addressed. How well this is achieved will inevitably rely on the historians own skill and scholarship. Fundamentally, however, life, as the pasts differentiation of the present, is always something that is created in the present and for the present. The life of the past is neither universal nor ahistorical, but is assembled in different ways according to the problem to which it is addressed. Nonrepresentational history will not remain tied to a fixed past, but will be multiple and adaptable to present problems. It will involve an art of life, a commitment to creatively transforming the life of the past.

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Writing Names of History: From Theory to Practice

So how do these theoretical arguments impact upon the writing of history in this thesis? Most importantly, the thesis attempts to use historical narrative, not just to represent the past, but to extract a conceptual diagram of an ethos towards the life of the past. Starting from a commitment to empirical historical detail a fidelity to history as a form of truthtelling I extract conceptual diagrams of the forces and energies inhering within sequences of events, in order to map an ethos, a way of relating to the life of the city, that might be reactivated in the present. In practice, this process involved several different stages. Before moving on to the main analysis, I want briefly to reflect on the ways in which the actual writing of the thesis differed from my initial plans, and on the ways in which this difference impacted upon the end result. This is in recognition of the fact that an important element of the findings of a piece of writing or research is the critical reflection upon the authors own methodology, analysis, and ethics that it provokes. In this case, I want to consider the challenges of putting an abstract methodological principle into concrete practice. In the first place, I collected and organized my empirical material in the usual manner. My aim was not to work, as others have done, from a non-representational archive (e.g. Lorimer, 2006; Patchett, 2008), but to work with conventional sources and to integrate them into a non-representational form of analysis that draws upon representational material and narrative and extracts from it a conceptual diagram of forces. Drawing on the theoretical presuppositions of the thesis (considered in the preceding chapters), I decided to organize the material according by arranging it into three intersecting motifs the affective, representational and perceptual life of the city. First I arranged this material and described it through a straightforwardly representational historical narrative, the aim being to ensure that the main arguments and narratives of the thesis emerged fully from the historical material itself. I was keen to ensure that the conceptual ideas drawn from the historical material would emerge as fully as possible from the historical detail, rather than being artificially imposed upon it (as Marxist historiography, for example, has often done). The aim was to extract theoretical concepts from empirical series of events, not merely to make events exemplars of pre-existing theoretical concepts. It was to perform what Eric Laurier and Chris Philo call an undefined investigation, one which does not begin by defining its object of study, but seeks instead to learn from the investigation what its object might be (Laurier & Philo, 2004).

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In constructing the conceptual diagram of the Chat Noirs ethos towards the modern city, a second aim was to integrate the conceptual work as fully as possible into the representational historical narrative. Rather than dividing the narrative into empirical and theoretical sections, the aim was to perform the theoretical work, as far as possible, through the historical material. Each element of the historical material, in other words, would start to be linked to an emerging map of forces, such that a relatively complete and self-contained conceptual diagram could emerge by the end of each chapter. The concepts would be drawn from the material. This is not to say that these concepts would simply emerge naturally, or to negate my own role in choosing and developing the material. The conceptual work was always intended to respond to a present danger in this case, the usurpation of urban creativity into neoliberal regeneration agendas. The aim was to extract concepts that might come to hold some purchase upon the present, in response to a diagnosis of the present. In other words, its aspiration was to use history, as Paul Veyne puts it, to make a diagnosis of present possibilities and to draw up a strategic map with the secret hope of influencing the choice of combats (Veyne, 1993:6). It is not my place, of course, to judge to what extent the thesis succeeds in these methodological and analytical aims. Inevitably the execution differed from the ambition, however, and, not wanting to make unjustifiably lofty claims for the methodological achievement of the study, I will reflect a little on the extent to which the end result matched up to the original intention. I started writing with three principle objectives in mind: to allow the theoretical concepts to emerge from the historical material itself, rather than superimposing themselves upon it; to avoid dividing the analysis into empirical and theoretical sections, but to narrate the empirical material in such a way as to build a theoretical argument; and to create a conceptual map of an ethos towards the modern city that could potentially be reactivated in the present, in response to a current danger. In relation to the first objective, in practice, generating the theoretical material required a far more makeshift procedure than I had first envisaged. Rather than inventing philosophical neologisms, I took up concepts from thinkers whose ideas I found useful in thinking the life of the city, and adapted them to develop my own theoretical arguments. This, of course, is fully coherent with an understanding of the concept as something whose value lies, not in its innate properties, but in its usefulness in

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expanding thought (Foucault & Deleuze, 1977). The thesis, I hope, never merely repeats concepts, but modifies them in its repetition of them in order to enable them to do something different. This has its dangers, however: firstly, of applying those concepts in a way that reduces the complexity or richness of the concepts in their original context; and secondly, of allowing these concepts to determine the organization of the empirical material, rather than the other way round. In relation to the first worry, I did everything I could to make my use of these concepts as rich and accurate as possible. In relation to the second, writing up the material did involve a far more dialectical interaction between empirical material and theoretical concept than I had initially envisaged. The issue became one of finding concepts that could most clearly and succinctly express the kinds of ethos towards the life of the city that I observed in the empirical material, but once I had decided to run with a certain constellation of concepts, it also became a matter of organizing the material in such a way as to be able to develop these concepts adequately. I modified the aim of making the empirical material entirely determine the nature and structure of the theoretical concepts, and adopted a more pragmatic approach that involved locating concepts which seemed particularly apposite to the historical material, and drawing those concepts as closely as possible into the texture of the narrative. Concerning the second objective, of integrating the non-representational theoretical work as far as possible into the representational narrative, the thesis is more successful in some places than others. The problem is that to describe conceptual vocabularies in enough detail to avoid reducing their complexity and usefulness, it is necessary to devote significant space to purely theoretical arguments. The result of this, in some places, is a greater separation between theoretical and empirical material than I would have liked. However, I hope that the analyses have remained faithful to the basic premise of this analytical methodology that the theoretical concepts should be an expression of the empirical material, rather than something that is simply applied to it. Nevertheless, in most cases, it is only at the end of each chapter that the conceptual diagram of the analysis really emerges, with the earlier parts of the chapter remaining, for the most part, closer to an orthodox representational account. In relation to the third objective, of describing an ethos towards urban space that might be reactivated in the present, the thesis leaves an explicit reconsideration of the present to the Conclusion, and the comments there are brief and speculative. Time and space do not permit a detailed analysis of the implications of this historical work for the

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diagnosis of the present. However, I do not see this to render the historical work useless. The point is not to use the past in order to answer concrete questions concerning what should be done in the present. Rather, it is to experiment with the past in the hope of opening up, in some small way, a new possibility, a new form of becoming, a new kind of identification with the past. One of the main points that I take from the historical example of Montmartre is that urban creativity and vitality is something that emerges from outside life, rather than from its interior, and hence that urban regeneration techniques (such as creative cities movements) which merely replicate established knowledges concerning the nature of urban vitality in the twenty-first century can do little to bring genuine life back to urban communities. The point has been made before, but it remains important. And it has not been made before in this way by contesting the past with which creative cities advocates identify, by challenging the nature of the realms of memory upon which they draw (Agulhon, 1998; Nora, 1998). In achieving this, I hope that the thesiss experiment with finding novel possibilities for identifying with the past might contribute, in a very modest way, to challenging established ways of thinking the present. The thesis has now described the theoretical problematic which it is exploring, as well as the methodological and analytical principles by which it attempts to do so. It remains to be seen, then, exactly how Montmartre culture explored the problem of the art of modern urban life. It is to its particular solutions to this problem, then, that the thesis now turns.

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CHAPTER FOUR Defiant Laughter: Humour, Pessimism, and the Experience of Place
In uncovering the distinctive elements of the ethos towards the modern city that the Chat Noir developed, I will start with its attitude towards humour, and the way in which it used humour to create a distinctive kind of place-identity for Montmartre as a whole. Montmartres culture of humour, or what they called fumisme, was perhaps its most distinctive quality, and was particularly influential in later avant-garde movements, as well as providing the draw for large numbers of customers. Humour is notoriously difficult to write about, since the essential element of humour laughter inevitably escapes analysis. Nevertheless, the experience of laughter was tied to a key set of knowledges concerning life and subjectivity during the fin-de-sicle, and in order to understand the new intersections between art and life that Montmartre bohemians stylized, it is necessary to determine the seriousness of intent behind their apparently frivolous antics. Affective forms of experience played a central role in the Chat Noirs ethos towards the life of the city. In particular, it was through the humour that Chat Noir artists developed a unique form of affirmation, a way of saying yes rather than no to life, despite the many injustices and hardships involved in living it. Through humour, Montmartre could be transformed from a lifeless neighbourhood that had witnessed none of the supposed benefits of modernization, into somewhere that was lively, dynamic, and intensive. Humour was a means of bringing new life to the urban environment.

The Free and Proud City of Montmartre

In 1884 a poster for the municipal elections could be seen displayed throughout Montmartre:

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Figure 5. Rodolphe Salis, Poster for municipal elections, April 1884.

The day has finally come where Montmartre can and must claim its rights of autonomy against the rest of Paris ... Montmartre is rich enough in finance, art and spirit to lead its own life. Electors! This is no mistake! Let the noble flag of Montmartre flutter in the winds of independence ... Montmartre deserves to be more than an administrative ward. It must be a free and proud city. (Goudeau, 1888:274-275.)
3

The candidate in question was Rodolphe Salis, patron of the Chat Noir cabaret, which had opened three years earlier. His campaign promises were short and simple:
1. Separation between Montmartre and the state; 2. Nomination by the Montmartrois of a Municipal Council and a Mayor of the New City;

Le jour est enfin venu o Montmartre peut et doit revendiquer ses droits dautonomie contre le restant de Paris ... Montmartre est assez riche de finances, dart et desprit pour vivre de sa vie propre. lecteurs ! Il ny a pas derreur ! Faisons claquer au vent de lindpendance le noble drapeau de Montmartre ... Montmartre mrite dtre mieux quun arrondissement. Il droit tre une cit libre et fire.

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3. Abolition of the local area tax and replacement of this hurtful levy with a tax on the lottery, reorganized under the direction of Montmartre, which would allow our district to meet its needs and to help the nineteen mercantile or miserable districts of Paris. 4. Protection of public food. Protection of workers nationwide. (Goudeau, 1888:275.)
4

Salis campaign was more of a publicity stunt than a serious political campaign his campaign slogan was Serious as ever and he missed election by a wide margin. One thing that is interesting about the poster, however, is the fierce attachment to the neighbourhood of Montmartre that it proclaims. Montmartre was not just a place, but the expression of an ethos, a style of life. It had become an emblem of autonomy, freedom, and creativity. And it was this intensely felt sense of place that made Montmartre such an attractive area for cultural and political radicals, who saw Montmartre as an alternative society where creativity would be rewarded and eccentricity tolerated, a highspirited realm where art rather than lucre determined status and social relations (Sonn, 1989:94). Montmartre:
remained an ideal that in many ways embodied the anarchist version of utopia, not only in its championing of free creativity or local autonomy, but also in its balancing of the rural and the urban elements, the gardens and the cabarets it preserved its own sacred space from which to gaze down upon the metropolis, countering its economic dependence with cultural autonomy and radicalism (Sonn, 1989:94).

What was special about Montmartre, then, was its vigorous assertion of a distinctive place-identity and its fierce protection of local autonomy. The Chat Noir, and the poets, artists, and musicians attached to it, was at the heart of attempts to create a new kind of urban space and a deeply felt experience of place. Their use of humour and laughter in order to achieve this sense of place is particular striking. As this chapter will argue, the writers and artists of Montmartre set out, consciously and carefully, to engineer a new, intensely felt experience of place, and their use of humour was a means by which to work upon the life of the city in order to stylize a dynamic, open, and experientially rich sense of place. This was a response to a widely felt destruction of place that the

1. La sparation de Montmartre et de ltat ; 2. La nomination par les Montmartrois dun Conseil Municipal et dun Maire de la Cit Nouvelle ; 3. Labolition de loctroi pour larrondissement, et le remplacement de cette taxe vexatoire par un impt sur la Loterie, rorganise sous la rgie de Montmartre, qui permettrait notre quartier de subvenir ses besoins et daider les dix-neuf arrondissements mercantiles ou misrables de Paris ; 4. La protection de lalimentation publique. La protection des ouvriers nationaux.

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urbanization of Paris, the all-devouring life of the capitalist metropolis, was felt to have inflicted upon Montmartre.

The Destruction of Place

For the Romantics of the mid-nineteenth century, the village of Montmartre, not yet annexed by Paris, had been imagined as a rural idyll: an authentic refuge from the alienation of the Metropolis (Jullian, 1977). Grard de Nerval wrote in 1855:
I lived for a long time in Montmartre, where one enjoys very pure air, varied prospects and discovers magnificent views There are windmills, cabarets and arbours, rustic paradises and quiet lanes, bordered with cottages, barns and bushy gardens, green fields ending in cliffs where springs filter through the clay, gradually cutting off certain small islands of green where goats frisk and browse on the thistles that grow out of the rocks; proud, surefooted little girls watch over them, playing amongst themselves (Nerval, 1972).5

These comments evoke a typically Romanticist nostalgia for a purity of place and environment, isolated from the corrupting influence of urban industrialism. Place here, represents an affinity with life Montmartre is an area, teeming with natural vitality, in which life can be experienced in a more direct and pure fashion than is possible in the metropolis. The processes of modernization, however, quickly led Montmartre to acquire less idyllic characteristics. The area, largely proletarian, was formally annexed into the city in 1860. mile Zolas 1877 description of lower Montmartre portrays it in terms of a natural world that is now irredeemably corrupted:
They walked up side by side towards Montmartre *and+ came to a piece of waste land. Lying between a sawmill and a button factory, this last remaining strip of green had yellow patches where the grass was scorched; a goat, tethered to a stake, was bleating as it circled round and round, while on the far side a dead tree rotted away in the sunshine ... [T]hey gazed dreamily into the distance at the drab slope of Montmartre amid the tall forest of factory chimneys streaking the horizon, in that chalky, desolate

J'ai longtemps habit Montmartre; on y jouit d'un air trs pur, de perspectives varies, et l'on y dcouvre des horizons magnifiques ... Il y a l des moulins, des cabarets et des tonnelles, des lyses champtres et des ruelles silencieuses, bordes de chaumires, de granges et de jardins touffus, des plaines vertes coupes de prcipices, o les sources filtrent dans la glaise, dtachant peu peu certains lots de verdure o s'battent des chvres, qui broutent l'acanthe suspendue aux rochers; des petites filles l'oeil fier, au pied montagnard, les surveillent en jouant entre elles.

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city outskirt where the clumps of greenery growing round disreputable taverns moved them to tears (Zola, 1995:251-253).

Nonetheless, during the 1870s Montmartre became a fashionable area for artists to meet. The art world was undergoing a rapid change during this time, as the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870 precipitated the end of the close relationship between artist and state. In 1880 control of the annual salon was relinquished by the government and taken over by the Socit des Artistes Franaises. In the years following this, the systems of patronage were further undermined by the emergence of increasing numbers of commercial alternatives such as galleries, illustrated journals, and the new cabarets artistiques, which supported and provided publicity and funds for emerging artists (Cate, 1996; Mainardi, 1993). By the 1880s, artists were no longer protected by the state, and found themselves fully immersed in market forces. For all the insecurities that this created, it did allow them a new freedom to criticise both the state and the established institutions of art upon which they had previously relied to survive. New artistic groups such as the Hydropathes and the Incoherents set to this task with zeal (Charpin, 1990; de Casteras, 1945). Eventually they found their home in the Chat Noir, which quickly became the loudest public voice of the spirit of Montmartre. During the 1880s, a number of texts in Le Chat Noir offered poetic landscapes of Montmartre, playing on its marginality and depicting it, in highly melancholy terms, as a place of the placeless of vagrants, prostitutes, artists and degenerates. A poem by Jean Moras evokes a typically Montmartrois landscape, a landscape in which modern life and vitality becomes discernible only through its absence:
The absence of luxury hotels sparkles, And the pimp is seldom splashed By an English horse, lighter than the wind, Carrying the upper crust and obese opulence.

Here there are no lords with ancestors in Westminster, No [Russian] boyards, or Slavic princes. No does with painted eyelashes and wild hair, The Madonnas of clubmen and fat bookmakers.

Over there, on the pavement, where a dyke is loitering To pay some grease to a debased pimp,

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A dashing model shows off her thin head, Her two large lapis-lazuli eyes lost in dream.

Over there, pale daubers, little Rubens on grass, Drag their feet on the toothless paving stones, Dreaming of Venus, blond as a sheaf of wheat, Or some nymph with beautiful, shameless breasts (Moras, 1882).
6

This sense of estrangement from the pleasures of modernity and the bustling life of the boulevards was heightened by the prevailing bitterness at the failure of the Paris Commune. The Commune was strongly associated with Montmartre, and it was to Montmartre where many of the inhabitants of New Caledonia, imprisoned there for their role in the uprising, settled after their release in the amnesty of 1880 (Munholland, 2001). A poem titled Ballade dun Communard, for example, evoked the melancholy of the collapse of the uprising. A young revolutionary survives the semaine sanglante (bloody week), but finds his dreams shattered:
Ah the eight great days of battle ... It's truly malicious what they did: Two months after the good fight What was left? ...

We had to fight from barricade to barricade

Les htels somptueux brillent par leur absence, Et le marlou nest pas clabouss souvent Par le trotteur anglais plus lger que le vent Tranant la haute gomme et lobse opulence. Pas de lords ayant des aeux au Westminster Pas de boyards, ni de princes plus ou moins slaves Pas de biches aux cils peints, aux tignasses fauves, Madones de clubmen et de gros bookmaker. L, sur le trottoir o raccroche la gouine Pour payer du ptrole, au dos vert avili, Le modle fringant montre sa tte fine O rvent deux grands yeux en lapis-lazuli. L, de ples rapins, petits Rubens en herbe, Tranent la gutre sur les pavs dents, En rvent des Vnus blondes comme la gerbe Ou quelque Nride aux beaux seins effronts.

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to [the Cimetire de Pre-] Lachaise; And we had many comrades Who can no longer boast of being there.

When the narrator finds his dead lover, he remembers a Montmartre, now lost forever, that was innocent and carefree:
And before this girls body I saw again the enchanting dances Where brass and clarinets Made dancers twirl; And to see the dead girl with withered features Take her place at the ball, Adorned with roses, in a craze, I would have made all of Paris burn! .... (Anon., 1882b)7

In this melancholic nostalgia for the fires of revolution, these literary landscapes took up a very different position to the dominant Impressionist avant-garde. The Impressionists, following a more general attempt during the years after the Commune to erase its memory (Wilson, 2007), excluded any trace of the revolt from their urban landscapes, portraying instead a solidly bourgeois Paris from which the Commune (and social conflict more generally) had been erased (Boime, 1995; Clarke, 1985). In the majority of Impressionist art, the life and bustle of the city emerges out of the circulation of commodities and fashions. In the literature of the Chat Noir, by contrast, the life of the city emerges from somewhere rather different. By sympathizing with the Commune,

Ah ! les huit grands jours de bataille !.. Cest bien malin ce quils on fait : Deux mois de suite de mitraille Les bons, quest-ce quil en restait ?... De barricade en barricade Jusqu Lachaise on dut lutter ; Doit y avoir des camarades Qui ne pourront pas sen vanter. ... Et devant ce corps de fillette Je revis les bals enchanteurs O les pistons, la clarinette Faisaient tournoyer les danseurs ; Et pour voir, de roses pare, La fille morte aux traits fltris Prendre place au bal, affole, Jaurais fait flamber tout Paris !...

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Montmartre bohemians were implicitly also siding with a pathological, excessive form of life. The Commune and by extension, Montmartre was frequently described in terms of an excess or perversion of natural life. Communards were feminized and bestialized, in particular through the very widespread images of Communard ptroleuses (gangs of women incendiaries who were alleged to have deliberately set the city aflame during the suppression of the revolt). As the mayor of Montmartre, Georges Clemenceau, described the outbreak of the revolt:
All were shrieking like wild beasts without realising what they were doing. I observed then that pathological phenomenon which might be called blood lust. A breath of madness seemed to have passed over this mob women, dishevelled and emaciated, flung their arms about while uttering raucous cries, having apparently taken leave of their senses. (Cited in Gullickson, 1996:53.)

By the 1880s, then, Montmartre, through its association with poverty and revolt, was widely associated with being an unhealthy milieu in which natural life was dangerously excessive or perverted. It was viewed as somewhere isolated from the healthy flows of the modern city, a neighbourhood in which any genuine sense of place had been destroyed. By turning to humour, however, the Montmartre artists sought a way of transforming the life and vitality of the Montmartre environment, and by doing so, of creating a new sense of place that was distinct from the bourgeois celebration of fashion, commodities and the boulevard.

The Holy City

On January 14, 1882, the first edition of the Chat Noirs satirical house journal was printed and distributed. From the start it aggressively promoted a new, modern myth of Montmartre. Its opening article, entitled Montmartre, posed a humorous challenge to the Church, the emblem of traditional authority:
It is high time to correct an error which has weighed down on more than sixty entire generations. The writing which we call holy I dont really know why has done nothing more, to put it politely, than make a mockery of the people (Lehardy, 1882b).8

The authority of religion was a particularly pressing matter for the inhabitants of Montmartre at this time, since the Basilica de Sacr Coeur, a much-hated symbol of Pariss collective penance for the revolt of the Commune, was in the process of being
8

Il est grand temps de rectifier une erreur qui a pes sur plus de soixante gnrations compltes. Lcriture que lon dit sainte je ne sais trop pourquoi, na fait pour parler poliment, que se moquer du peuple.

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constructed there (Harvey, 2003a). It was intended to expiate Montmartres sins, purifying an urban environment that had become diseased and dangerous. The basilica was part of an attempt by monarchist-sympathising politicians to create a new identity for Montmartre as a place of sacred pilgrimage, thereby undermining its association with working-class revolt (Jonas, 2001). In explicitly setting itself against the Church, the article immediately contested this new, externally imposed religious identity. In opposition to the new spiritual outlook envisioned by the state, it opposed a different vision, one involving the rejection of traditional authority and a celebration of a new version of modernity and modern experience. The article evoked an interestingly ambiguous spatial imaginary of the area. As well as portraying it as a place of anti-clericalism and anti-traditionalism, it also depicted Montmartre as the exact centre of the new modern world. The Biblical tradition, the article claimed, had erroneously neglected to identify Montmartre as the original soil of humanity. Through a series of word plays leading from Mont Ararat, via Montmarrte to Montmartre, the article proved that after the flood, Noah had in fact cast his anchor, not at Mount Ararat, but at Montmartre. The texts ironic standpoint is obvious: religious imagery is used in order to assert the centrality of an emphatically secular ethos, one that was to be given place by Montmartre. Rodolophe Salis habitually referred to Montmartre ironically as the holy city, and in doing so, he proclaimed the areas fierce rejection of religion and, by extension, all forms of traditional authority. Montmartre was to be the centre of a new, anti-authoritarian world. Thus Montmartre is the cradle of humanity ... Montmartre is the centre of the world ... It is Montmartre where the first city of humanity was built (Lehardy, 1882b).9 Indeed, Montmartre was to be more than a centre. The humour of the Chat Noir journal portrayed it as a dynamic, centripetal force, drawing the rest of the world inexorably towards it. An illustration in the journal shows a line of bourgeois people, depicted as farmyard animals, waiting outside the Chat Noir (Figure 6). Nobody move!, the caption reads. Everyone must pass through here.10 The message was clear Montmartre was to be the new centre of modernity.

Montmartre est le berceau de lhumanit ... Montmartre est le centre du monde ... Cest Montmartre que fut construite la premire ville de la humanit. 10 Le Chat Noir, January 14 1882, p. 3. Ne bougeons plus ! Tout le monde y passera !

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Figure 6. Anon., illustration in Le Chat Noir, vol. 1, January 14, 1882.

At the same time as possessing an irresistible magnetic force, however, Montmartre was to retain a fierce autonomy from the rest of world:
Montmartre is isolated, because it is sufficient in itself. This centre is absolutely autonomous. It is said that in a small village located a long way from Montmartre, which travellers call Paris, a local academy is discussing the conditions of municipal autonomy. It is a long time since this question was resolved in Montmartre (Lehardy, 1882b).11

11

Montmartre est isol, parce quil se suffit a lui seul. Ce centre est absolument autonome. Dans une petite ville situe a une grande distance de Montmartre et que les voyageurs nomment Paris, une acadmie locale discute, dit-on, les conditions de lautonomie municipale. Il y a longtemps que cette question est rsolue Montmartre. Les peuples qui pullulent la surface du globe nont qu venir sen assurer.

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Readers would not have needed reminding that eleven years earlier the issue of municipal autonomy had indeed been settled during the semaine sanglante that brought the Commune to an end. The message of the article was clear, though. The suppression of the Commune spelled the end of one form of local autonomy; but Montmartre was committed to finding a new solution to the problem of local autonomy. This ghost of the Commune was evoked again a few issues later, in a rumbustious article titled The Assault of Montmartre:
Today, April 1st, at a quarter past four in the morning, an attempted assault was launched against Montmartre. In defiance of the most solemn promises, Lon Gambetta, at the head of the troops of the Chause-dAntin, has infiltrated the country of Montmartre ... The call has sounded out on the mountain; the Moulin de la Galette has been put in a state of defence; the soldiers of the Sacr Coeur have been confined to their church ... The Montmartre homeland is not in danger; it is simply threatened. The henchmen of tyranny want to undermine our immemorial hills at their foundations. No! The strength, the muscular elasticity of the autochthons of the Mount of Martyrs are the guarantees of the future success of our armies (A'Kempis, 1882b).12

In an imaginary conversation with Gambetta (the recently ousted Prime Minister, suspected by his adversaries of planning to engineer an executive dictatorship; see Bury, 1982), who asks why Montmartre has revolted against Paris, a leader of the insurrection insists: Rebellion? Know, ignorant traveller, that this is a just revindication of the rights of the first aboriginal people against its oppressor. Montmartres aim is to win independence, autochthony (Chanouard, 1882).13 Three principle features are discernible in these explorations of a novel sense of Montmartrois place. Firstly, Montmartre was portrayed as neighbourhood in which traditional authority both Church and State was to be rejected and undermined at
12

Aujourdhui, 1 avril, quatre heures pour le quart du matin, une tentative dassaut a t faite contre Montmartre. Au mpris des promesses les plus solennelles, Lon Gambetta, la tte des troupes de la Chausse-dAntin, a pntr dans le pays Montmartrais ... Le rappel a sonn sur la montagne ; le Moulin de la Galette a t mis en tat de dfense ; les soldats du Sacr-Cur sont consigns dans leur glise. La patrie Montmartre nest pas en danger, elle est tout simplement menace. Les suppts de la tyrannie veulent saper dans leur base nos buttes immmoriales. Non ! La vigueur, llasticit des muscles des autochtones de la montagne des Martyrs sont les garants des futures succs de nos armes.
er

13

Moi (vivement). Rbellion !!! Sachez, voyageur ignare que cest la juste revendication du premier peuple aborigne contre loppresseur. De quel droit la plaine veut-elle gouverner la montagne ? Gambetta. Je ne discute pas, jinterroge. Quels sont vos projets ? Moi. Conqurir lindpendance, lautochtonie.

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every opportunity. Secondly, it was a place that was to be at the centre of the modern world, the point through which it would be necessary to pass to be part of the most dynamic and subversive forces of modernity. Thirdly, Montmartre would also be a place that was autonomous from the rest of the world and, above all, from Paris. Even as the world passed through its gates, its borders would be fiercely protected. This humorous representation of the spirit of Montmartre, then, was highly ambiguous. How could it be, on the one hand, a place that required every modern subject to pass through it and, on the other, a place that was fully isolated and autonomous from the outside world? The paradox is embodied by the frequent references in Le Chat Noir to the autochthons of Montmartre. An autochthon is a son of the soil, a dweller with the deepest possible roots in the area that he lives in. So the idea of autochthony is one linking place to the richest possible depth of time and tradition. To be an autochthon is the very opposite of being an inhabitant of modernity, a celebrator of the fleeting moment. Here, however, the portrayals of Montmartre in Le Chat Noir proclaimed an intention, saturated with contradiction, to create a distinctively modern form of autochthony, a sense of place born of the most fleeting, unstable and iconoclastic impulses.

The Vitality of Humour

Place, construed in the broadest terms, can be defined as the ways in which geographic areas are experienced and made meaningful. It is often considered to have three necessary and sufficient features: a geographic location; a material form; and an investment with meaning and value (Cresswell, 2004; Gieryn, 2000). Since this meaningfulness is often achieved through tradition, authenticity and rootedness, some critics have seen place politics to involve an inherent conservatism (e.g. Harvey, 1993). Others have formulated visions for a new, progressive politics of place (Amin, 2004; Massey, 1994). Local identity, such writers insist, can be as much about welcoming the other as about excluding it. Such new visions of place are attractive and powerful. Yet when attempts are made to put these spatial imaginaries into practice, success can be hard to achieve (Darling, 2009). One reason for this is that the politics of place is not simply a question of negotiating competing discursive, considered political representations, but involves the production and channelling of forms of experience and affect, and such experiences can be far more contradictory and ambiguous than any determinate representation of place. It is not enough to examine the ways in which clear

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representations of place are produced and contested; a proper analysis of place must understand how an experience of place is produced which may not be reducible to a single, coherent representation of it. The example of fin-de-sicle Montmartre makes it clear that humour is one powerful way in which experience of place is produced (see also Macpherson, 2008). Humour, like place, often functions as a way of creating and consolidating an inside and outside. Humour has the power to include and exclude, since in order to work it relies upon very nuanced sensitivities to shared histories, traditions or codes (Lockyer & Pickering, 2005a, 2005b). However, there is also more to it than this: humour will not be understood properly when it is only viewed as a kind of social glue. Many commentators, for example, have observed how it can function as a form of resistance (Weaver, 2010). Humour cannot be a static force, since the experience of laughter seems to involve an irreducible dynamism, an experience of vitality and energy. Laughter is the expression of an affective energy: it literally moves us. Kant put this by saying that the gratification of laughter is a corporeal, animal pleasure, one emerging from the furtherance of the vital bodily processes and causing a feeling of health (Kant, 2000). This association between humour and biological vitality was explored widely in late nineteenth century philosophy (particularly Spencer, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson). Alexander Bain, for example, argued that laughter is an expression of a physiological increase of vitality and a heightening of the powers of life (cited in Billig, 2005:95). Laughter, Bain suggested, emerges out of a release from constraint, since such a release produces pleasure and an increase in nervous energy (Bain, 1859). He saw in laughter an anarchic destructiveness, a rebellion against order a temptation to a dangerous moment of anarchy against the severe demands of social constraint (Billig, 2005:98). By the late nineteenth century a discourse was emerging in which laughter was becoming understood in distinctively biological, corporeal terms as an increase in life, health or vitality. As something vital and close to nature, it was also associated with the primitive and the animalistic (Gordon, 2009:141-145). Charles Darwin had chosen laughter as the first demonstration of his thesis that humans share expressive gestures with animals such as monkeys, and that the reason for this is their descent from a common progenitor (Darwin, 1872). Laughter was also associated with hysteria, a muchdiscussed fin-de-sicle psychological malady. By taking up humour as their most characteristic form of expression, then, Montmartre bohemians were harnessing a form of affective experience that was deeply intertwined with biopolitical discourses

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surrounding emotion, health, and corporeal life. Through humour, place could be invested with new life and vitality.

Irony, Contradiction and Experience

The Chat Noirs evocations of Montmartre, as we have seen, drew upon a paradoxical affirmation of both autochthony and exile, both rootedness and mobility. It was ironic humour which they saw to be the most appropriate way of expressing this paradoxical stance. In order to understand why, it is necessary to situate the aesthetic sensibilities of Montmartre bohemians in relation to Romanticist philosophy. Bohemianism is essentially a Romanticist concept, and the creative community of Montmartre identified with the parodic bohemianism of writers such as Thophile Gautier, rather than the more well-known sentimental bohemianism of Sebastien Mercier (Gluck, 2005). Romanticism was concerned with the creative processes of nature, subjectivity and experience. This concern with life, nature and vitality let directly to the interest in concepts such as irony, wit and buffoonery that was characteristic of early (Jena) Romantic thought (Beiser, 2003; Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1988). By unpacking elements of the Romanticism philosophy of humour, the seriousness of intent behind the humour of the Montmartre popular avant-garde can come into focus. One of the cardinal virtues in Romanticism was creativity. This partly motivated its interest in the natural world, since nature, the Romantics believed, possessed a creative vitality that was absent from the mechanized world of the modern metropolis (Oerlemans, 2002) . Yet the aim of artistic creation was not to achieve a unity with nature. Although nature was creative, it created according to its own innate tendencies. In contrast to this, humanity had the capacity to present itself as something other than its immanent self-development. Unlike natural life, human life was capable of being other than any fixed nature. The need to raise itself above humanity wrote Schlegel, is humanitys prime characteristic [1800] (1991:96). However, this also meant that human creation would always involve a fall from nature, a slowing of life into inert objectivity. This meant, in turn, that irony and buffoonery were fundamental features of the human condition: irony, because humanity is always something other than what it is; and buffoonery, since humanity is always falling from creative life into inert objectivity, like a clown slipping on a banana skin (Colebrook, 2004). Through irony and buffoonery, human subjectivity distinguished itself from natural life and affirmed its distance from it as the condition of a specifically human and therefore higher form of creativity.

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By evoking an experience of place through ironic humour, therefore, the Montmartre artists were already asserting Montmartres modernity, and they were also making a specific statement about the character of that modernity, as well as their attitude towards it. Irony is a difficult word to define; it is sometimes characterized as a figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant. In such cases, irony implicitly affirms the stability of an underlying world of meaning secured by the context of a speaking subject. In nineteenth-century Romanticism, however, irony developed greater complexity, becoming not just an opposition between what is said and what is meant, but a way of saying one thing at the same time as allowing for the possible validity of its contrary (see Garber, 1988). In Romanticist irony, the world itself becomes dynamic, mobile, and contradictory. Indeed, the order between world and concept is reversed: it is no longer a case of life being interpreted through language and concepts, but a case of language and concepts being effects of an infinite, dynamic life force that goes beyond any context (Colebrook, 2004). Such a life cannot be known, for knowledge works through static concepts. However, it can be experienced, and irony, with its ability to speak the contradiction by which the world both is and is not identical with itself, is particularly well suited to making the dynamism of the world perceptible in experience. Through irony, life as a dynamic, creative force becomes available to experience. For this reason, in Romanticist thought irony becomes less a figure of speech than a style of life an ethos towards the world. This aspect of irony was brought out by Charles Baudelaire, who was a revered figure amongst Montmartre bohemians. Being modern, for Baudelaire, as we have already seen, involves not just accepting the dynamism of modernity, but adopting a position towards it and capturing something eternal in it (Baudelaire, 1964b). It involves a will to heroize the passing moment. The aim, however, is not to preserve this moment, but to transfigure it. For this reason, irony is modernitys mode of being it grasps the reality of the present in what it is, but also confronts this reality with a practice that violates it (Foucault, 2000f; Hannoosh, 1992). A Baudelairean stance towards modernity, then, is ironic because it sets out at the same time to grasp reality and to transform it, and so affirms the paradox that the world both is and is not identical with itself. Understood in these theoretical terms, it becomes apparent that the usefulness of irony for developing a new experience of place, for Montmartre bohemians, lay in its ability to allow the contradictions of modernity to coexist in experience, rather than resolving them or sublimating them. Through irony, an ethos towards the life of the city could be

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explored which, while unrepresentable, could still be expressed in experience. Understood in this way, it is possible to see the serious intent behind the ironic stance of the Chat Noirs artists and writers. They used irony in order to articulate a specific attitude towards their urban environment. Firstly, irony was a way of making the life of Montmartre perceptible in experience. Ironic humour offered a way of bringing new vitality to the area. Secondly, irony made it possible to develop an experience of place that incorporated contradictory elements: on the one hand, a celebration of modern cosmopolitanism, anti-traditionalism, and anti-authoritarianism; and on the other hand, a celebration of the authority of rootedness, autochthony, and autonomy. The use of ironic humour served to reconcile these contradictory elements, not through a discursive or logical resolution of their differences, but through an experience that could unite the two different imaginaries in a way that discursive reason could not. Ironic humour was a means of creating a new experience of place in which the destruction of tradition and autochthony could coexist with a nostalgia for authenticity and rootedness. Authenticity, then, had to be found in creativity, and rootedness was to become the experience of exile. This paradoxical stance could not be apprehended by representational means, but it could be felt, through laughter, and experienced. Even as it undermined the authenticity and self-identity present in conventional experiences of place, however, the use of irony implicitly spoke to another form of authenticity. This was the authenticity of a linguistic subject delimited sharply from other forms of life and subjectivity. The ironic attitude is a human stance, since it celebrates the ability of human creativity to step outside itself through language, in contrast to a natural form of creativity that is locked in an entirely immanent form of organic evolution. The natural world, in Romanticist theory, is incapable of irony because it cannot step outside itself. By using irony to express a contradictory experience of place, therefore, Montmartre artists risked lapsing back into an affirmation of discourse and representation. Their response to this risk, however, is evident in their exploration of a different kind of humour the animal humour of slapstick and pantomime buffoonery.

Pierrot and the Modern Carnivalesque

It was through the carnivalesque buffoonery of the pantomime character Pierrot that the writers of the Chat Noir moved towards a more directly physical, corporeal, and libidinal experience of place. Whereas irony was a predominantly linguistic form of expression,

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pantomime was the exact reverse: it was the art of dramatizing silence, and spoke to the bodys convulsions, violences, and unrestrained appetites. The artists of the Chat Noir explored such forms of humour both within their literature and cabaret performances and also in the streets of Montmartre itself. In doing so, they developed a novel way of transforming the experiential economy of Montmartre and developing a new sense of place identity. In Adolphe Willettes cartoon depictions of Pierrot in the Chat Noir journal (see Figures 7, 8 & 9), pantomime was converted for the first time into comic strip form. Importantly, in order to do this, Willette rejected the tradition by which cartoons were accompanied by explicative captions, leaving his drawings as histoires sans paroles (stories without words). When readers complained that they could not understand the stories contained in these often ambiguous depictions, Willette replied: Comprenez lcriture Pierrotglyphique! Understand Pierrot-glyphic writing! (Kunzle, 2001). The spirit evoked by Pierrot involved a direct corporeality that would brook no linguistic mediation. It explored a life of sensation rather than representation. As the Chat Noir became increasingly well-known, Pierrot came to be recognized as the symbol of Montmartrois creativity. He was considered to stand for a whole community, persecuted but joyous. Pierrot was a timeless hero of French pantomime, and as a figure of the lowest form of art, he offered fin-de-sicle bohemians an alternative identity, an ironic disguise for their creative ambitions. In a bourgeois world in which true art and beauty went unrecognized, according to this way of thinking, such art had to disguise itself in base forms such as pantomime. This was not new as such. French Romanticism is full of situations in which a great hero is forced to adopt an ignoble disguise (Jones, 1984:12). Victor Hugos Hernani was forced to become an outlaw because his legitimate claims to public recognition were denied; another of Hugos heroes, Ruy Blas, strived to maintain honour in a valets uniform; Mussets Lorenzaccio was a noble rebel who disguised himself as a pander and a cheap, often comic entertainer (Hugo, 2004; Musset, 1995). Baudelaire had described the hero of modernity as a secret agent, a traitor to his own class (Benjamin, 2006b). The figure of Pierrot evolved through the century, however, and Willette was the first to depict Pierrot as a bohemian artist (and, conversely, the bohemian artist as Pierrot). In doing so, Pierrots iconography changed: he became noticeably paler in face and started to dress in black. His pallor, resembling that of moonlight, emphasized that he was an outcast, a child of the Moon. His black

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clothes were a parody of those of the bourgeois class: he was to present the bourgeoisie at once with a degrading parody of itself and with an image of its victim (Jones, 1984).

Figure 7. Adolphe Willette, Pierrot Fumiste, in Le Chat Noir, March 18, 1882.

Pierrots behaviour in Willettes cartoons is exuberant, playful, violent, and lascivious. Occasionally his adventures end in success, and he ends up in the arms of a beautiful

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woman (Figure 8). More often, however, he is abused, ignored, and sacrificed to the bourgeois god of money (Figure 9).

Figure 8. Adolphe Willette, Pierrot Amoureux, in Le Chat Noir, April 8, 1882.

There was a clear spirit of Carnival invoked by this form of humour. However, it is too quick a step to associate the humour of the Montmartre avant-garde, as Michael Wilson does, directly with the kind of Renaissance carnivalesque spirit evoked by Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1984; Wilson, 2001). Certainly Montmartre writers did exhibit a fondness for Rabelais, whose literature exemplifies the anarchic spirit of Renaissance carnival. Yet the Montmartre carnivalesque was a distinctively modern one. In fact, it

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should be regarded as a response to the overwhelming pessimism of the two dominant cultural movements of the time, Naturalist and Symbolism.

Figure 9. Adolphe Willette, 'Passage de Venus sur le soleil', in Le Chat Noir December 9, 1882.

Fin-de-Sicle Pessimism
The official political culture of the Third Republic was one of cautious optimism. Its values and beliefs were based upon science, reason and progress. The converse of this emphasis on progress, however, was the worry that rather than pro-gressing, society might instead be re-gressing. To many, Frances humiliation by Prussia in 1870, as well as the

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civil war that followed it, provided firm evidence that the moral vigour and vitality of the population was seeping away. Naturalism was a literary movement that explored these fears, and took a deeply pessimistic stance towards modern life (see Baguley, 1990). Best associated with the novels of mile Zola, Naturalism was heavily influenced by the Darwinian theory of Hippolyte Taine. It strived to make visible the invisible natural forces, such as heredity and environment, which determined the possibilities of modern subjectivity (Carroll, 1995). Naturalists did not see nature to be inherently benign, as the Romantics had done. Instead, they perceived it to be blind, powerful and destructive. They took a deeply pessimistic attitude towards the modern urban environment, seeing it primarily in terms of its dangerously malign effects upon health, vitality and vigour. Modernity, the Naturalists believed, risked becoming a sterile age that had exhausted its energies and was sinking into an era of decadence. Similarly, the new Symbolist avant-garde figures such as Mallarm, Maeterlinck and Moreau took, if anything, an even more pessimistic stance towards the modern age (Lucas, 1977). Their perspective was influenced by the saturnine philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote that:
I cannot refrain from stating that optimism, if not the thoughtless babble of men who have nothing but words in their thick skulls, seems to me not only an absurd but also a downright ruthless way of thinking, a bitter mockery of mankinds untold sufferings (Schopenhauer, quoted in Lukcs, 1980).

Schopenhauers pessimism resulted from a philosophy that viewed the will, rather than reason, as the metaphysical root of life (Schopenhauer, 1883). As Georg Simmel notes, this ontological emphasis on the emotions enabled the deep and irrevocable suffering of the human condition to find one of its first and most profound expressions in western philosophy (Simmel, 1986:60). Desire, Schopenhauer believed, is an endless striving that can never be fulfilled, and since unfulfilled desire is painful, life is constant suffering. On the few occasions where desire is fulfilled, pleasure quickly lapses into boredom. For these reasons, life is a pendulum between boredom and pain. The only solution to this, he argued, was a complete denial of the will, and aesthetic experience offered the most promising route by which to achieve this. Art could offer a welcome refuge from the strife of the Will by elevating experience to the level of pure perception. Only through such wholly internal perception, isolated from life, could suffering be alleviated. The Symbolist avant-garde took up with enthusiasm this Schopenhauerian call for a subjective purity of perception that was abstracted entirely from the will and the

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objective world . The result was an insistence upon the absolute autonomy of art an aestheticizing doctrine of art for arts sake and some of the first experiments with creating wholly non-representational forms of poetic expression. The two dominant avant-garde movements of the 1880s, then, both saw life as something to be feared and suffered. The bohemians associated with the Chat Noir, however, whilst not denying lifes hardships and suffering, took up a new stance toward life, adopting the buffoonery of pantomime humour in order to find a way of transforming life from something blind and destructive into a dynamic force that could be celebrated and affirmed.

Affirmative Pessimism
Artists associated with the Chat Noir cabaret saw the use of carnivalesque humour to offer a way of breaking both with the Panglossian optimism of Republican politicians and the humourless pessimism of their Naturalist and Symbolist critics. Symbolists inspired by Schopenhauer were in pursuit of mystical forms of experience that existed beyond Will, life, and the body. They searched for a wholly abstract space of experience, one in which the destabilizing dynamism of time could be put at bay. The writers of the Chat Noir, by contrast, by insisting on giving place to experience in the new creative quarter of Montmartre, asked whether it might not be possible to find a solution to this problematic of endless striving and suffering that could be approached through, rather than against, the dynamic forces of desire and the body. As a route into understanding this, it is necessary to return to Baudelaire. In his essay On the Essence of Laughter, Baudelaire offers a theory of the grotesque, or what he refers to as the absolute comic, of which Rabelais was one of the great exemplars. This kind of humour, Baudelaire argues, is a humour that speaks directly to the body: There is but one criterion of the grotesque and that is laughter absolute laughter (Baudelaire, 1964a:157). One of its great exemplars, he observes, is the raucous violence of English pantomime, and it is here that true comic savagery is found. This makes the essence of laughter its diabolical element readily apparent. Laughter, Baudelaire writes, is satanic: it is thus profoundly human (1964a:160). It is in this motif of redemption via a fall that Baudelaires analysis added a distinctively modern sensibility to the thinking of carnivalesque humour. The Garden of Eden, Baudelaire observes, was devoid of laughter and tears. When mankind enjoys a unity with God and with Nature, laughter and tears are not possible: they exist only after

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mankind has fallen from innocence. The pantomime clown, his laughter veiling his tears, embodies both of these emblems of humanitys fall from life. Pantomime humour, then, stages the distance created in modernity between man and natural life. Refusing to mourn this fall, however, Baudelaire instead insists on celebrating it, finding new forms of beauty in the corrupt fragments of modernity. For Baudelaire, the product of the Fall becomes the means of redemption, and the historical, contingent, fleeting, and ugly becomes the source and matter of the poetic, absolute, eternal, and beautiful (Hannoosh, 1992:310). And it is this kind of optimism in the face of the evils of modernity that makes the grotesque, according to Baudelaire, such an important form of laughter. Despite being continually abused by fate, its characters never cease to affirm their existence. Baudelaire describes characters of the pantomime, who:
feel themselves forcibly projected into a new existence. They do not seem at all put out. They set about preparing for the great disasters and the tumultuous destiny which awaits them, like a man who spits on his hands and rubs them together before doing some heroic deed ... Every gesture, every cry, every look seems to be saying: The fairy has willed it, and our fate hurls us on. (Baudelaire, 1964a:.)

Seen in this way, it becomes possible to account for the ways in which pantomime humour was used by Montmartre bohemians as a way of developing an experience of place. Like Baudelaire, the artists of the Chat Noir identified themselves with such pantomime characters. However, whereas Baudelaire merely used the clown as a metaphor for the modern artist, this later generation cultivated a way of living as such clown-artist hybrids. As artists, they were destined to suffer, but by becoming artistclowns, they could find a way to transfigure a life of suffering and affirm it, just as the characters of the pantomime do. And Montmartre was to be the home in which such a life of buffoonery could be practised. Figures associated with the Chat Noir, then, experimented with creating a new, dynamic experience of place through an ethos towards modernity based upon the affirmative stance of pantomime humour. Performances at the Chat Noir involved a continual succession of japes and practical jokes. One typically macabre hoax, for example, involved advertising the death of Rodolphe Salis. When mourners arrived at the cabaret to join the funeral procession, they found the cabaret open due to a bereavement, and Salis, posing as his brother, welcoming them in to enjoy a drink (Goudeau, 1888). Other writers and artists, in addition, also carefully cultivated this pantomimic persona. The

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poet Gustave Kahn described Willette (Pierrots illustrator in Le Chat Noir), as a real life Pierrot character:
Willette is ... the very pavement of the Paris streets, come alive with all its blague, all its wit, lit up by tenderness, giving off smoky glimmers of passing political passions. Willette is patriotic, Willette is working-class. He will be generous, he will be cruel, he will be sympathetic, he will be hateful, according to the direction of the wind ... There is in Willette a figure who will man the barricades for the fun of it (cited in Jones, 1984:194).

This impulse towards confusing art and life is also discernible in several masked balls, processions and festivals that were organised on the streets of Montmartre. One procession, for example, took place by torchlight on the night when the Chat Noir relocated to larger premises. Salis gave an account of the parade, populated by characters dressed in strange costumes and musicians creating a cacophony with bizarre instruments:
My two footmen in short trousers opened the procession, followed by our gold banner and my Swiss Guard, whose magnificent livery was worth at least 3000 francs ... Walking next was my major-domo in the garb of an under-prefect and myself as a prefect, very dignified, dispersing gaping onlookers and saying to the astonished audience: keep order. We were followed by seven or eight musicians from the Conservatory, making a racket, and by my waiters dressed up as Academicians. The procession was closed by a group of friends carrying torches (Salis, 1896).14

Some years later, in 1896, an anarchic festival was organised by Willette called the Fte de la Vache Enrage, rivalling an official Parisian festival on the same day, and dedicated to those inhabitants of Montmartre who were reduced to hunger and starvation, or, in the popular idiom, forced to manger une vache enrage, or eat an angry cow (Bihl, 2001; Datta, 1993). It asserted an affinity between workers and bohemians, both reduced by the bourgeoisie to penury, and both proud of the independence and anti-authoritarianism of their neighbourhood. As the poster for the festival claimed: Citizens of the Butte [Montmartre]. Noble children of the sacred hill.
14

Mes deux chasseurs en culotte courte ouvraient le cortge, puis venaient notre bannire dor et mon suisse, dont la livre magnifique valait au moins 3000 francs. Elle tait reste pour compte un tailleur auquel elle avait t commande avant le 4 Septembre (1870) par un ambassadeur de France, et je lavais eue peu de frais. Marchaient ensuite mon majordome en costume de sous-prfet et moi-meme en prfet, trs digne, faisant ranger les badauds et disant aux gens ahuris : assurez lordre . Nous tions suivi par sept ou huit musiciens du Conservatoire, faisant rage et par mes garcons habills en costumes dacadmiciens. Le cortge est ferm par une bande damis portant des torches.

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Artists and merchants, artisans and poets. Everyone, especially in Montmartre, knows what the vache enrage is. Against the charge that the festival was simply a romanticizing celebration of poverty, one organiser of the festival wrote: By dedicating a parade to the Vache Enrage, we are scoffing at misery. Our laughter is not a grimace of submission or of complicity but rather one of defiance (cited in Datta, 1993). Henri de

Figure 10. Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, cover of La Vache Enrage, vol. 1, 1896.

Toulouse-Lautrec, the painter who produced the most evocative images of Montmartre popular culture, created the front cover of a journal that was published in conjunction with the festival (see Figure 10). The poster encapsulates the sense of place embodied by the festival: a joyous Pierrot accompanied by a masked beauty, leading a revolt against a terrified bourgeois, who flees down the hill to the safety of Paris. The bohemians of Montmartre, then, used carnivalesque humour, drawn from the tradition of French pantomime, in order to create an experience of place that was

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rooted in a sense of exile, suffering and oppression, and yet at the same time was capable of transfiguring this suffering into an affirmative attitude of joy and autonomy. The intimate connection of such forms of humour with bodily desires and forces enabled them to conceive of a modern form of humour which incorporated a connection with the soil of Montmartre. This degraded, animal form of humour was to be an experience that created the form of dynamic autochthony that they were searching for a deeply felt, embodied connection with a place in continual flux.

Economies of Life
The writers and artists of the Chat Noir, as we have seen, found in humour a means of developing a new, modern and dynamic sense of place in the modern city. As their realist literary depictions of Montmartre indicate, they saw Montmartre as an urban area that was saturated with poverty and faded dreams. In these texts, Montmartre emerges as a placeless, sterile, melancholy space of exile. By adopting the posture of the ironist and the clown, however, the Chat Noir bohemians were able to harness affective energies that entirely transformed the landscape of Montmartre and, eventually, of Paris itself. The success of Montmartre as a cultural quarter after the successes of the Chat Noir in the 1880s was confirmed by the opening of the Moulin Rouge dance hall in 1889, whose huge popularity confirmed Montmartres new role as a dynamic, creative, and economically successful region of Paris. Through the life and dynamism of humour, Montmartre artists and entrepreneurs succeeded in investing Montmartre with renewed energy and vigour. Part of this affective energy was an experience of place which recognized modernitys ills at the same time as celebrating the possibility of an affirmative stance to the world that might transfigure life from something moribund and stifling into something joyful and creative. Through humour, as a way of organizing contradictory semantic meanings and a means of exploring corporeal, affective ways of inhabiting space, they created an experience of place that was open, heterogeneous and mobile. The Chat Noirs relentless celebration of Montmartre was certainly in part an exercise in place marketing to lure a bourgeois class who were titillated by the idea of encountering the danger of a genuine working-class neighbourhood (Koven, 2004), and who actively enjoyed being ridiculed and insulted as a safe expression of proletarian revolt. At the Chat Noir cabaret, bourgeois customers could be confident that this expression of revolt would never go from throwing insults and jokes to wielding daggers or bullets. This

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compliance with the laws of the market easily invites a swift dismissal of their experiments as forming one of the earlier manifestations of what Theodor Adorno pejoratively termed the culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997). Certainly the Chat Noir did not entertain the modernist dream of isolating artistic experience from the spaces and places of everyday life, as Adorno argued believed genuinely critical art to have to do (Adorno, 2004). Indeed, a critique of its complicity with capital was voiced in the very architecture of the Chat Noir. A stained-glass window by Adolphe Willette, created for the new Chat Noir premises, made a barbed reference to the cabarets quick descent from an authentic space of bohemian poverty and artistic purity into a compromised commercial attraction for Paris ruling classes (Verhagen, 2004). What needs to be added to this observation of the Chat Noirs inability or unwillingness to intervene in the market, however, is an acknowledgement that its experiments intervened in a different economy: an economy of life and affective experience. The humour of Montmartre bohemia was not just the humour of frivolity or submission; it was a defiant humour, a way of altering the life of the neighbourhood, bringing new vitality and buzz into Montmartres hitherto dead environment. In this respect, Montmartrois humour acted as a way of intervening in the biopolitical economy of life and lived experience. Rather than adhering to the dominant republican framing of urban vitality in terms of organic health and free circulation, the Chat Noir experimented with alternative experiences of place based upon irony, buffoonery, and an ethos of affirmation. These arguments concerning the role of humour in Montmartre culture make possible a first step in constructing a philosophical diagram of Montmartre as the name of a certain ethos, a stance towards life, experience, and subjectivity. Montmartre is the name for a specific form of affirmation. In this, there was a certain Nietzschean element present (see Dienstag, 2001), even if there is no evidence to suggest that Montmartre bohemians had ever read Nietzsche, who only became known in France during the 1890s (Forth, 2001). This variety of affirmation had four key features. Firstly, it was an affirmation of varieties of experience which exceeded the type of cognition that operates according to a logic of either/or. It was a commitment to saying yes to an experience that exceeds the necessity to judge, an experience in which difference, mobility and change could be invested with the weight and richness of autochthony. It was a commitment towards expanding contradiction rather than resolving it, and living this contradiction in the affective responses of the body.

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Secondly, it was a form of affirmative pessimism. It involved a refusal to accept that modern life would have a successful outcome if it continued as it was doing. It recognized that power and domination would always exist, that desires would remain unrealized, and that it would never be possible to gain an unalienated unity with life. Instead, it recognized mankinds inevitable fall from natural life, its necessary alienation, and searched for ways of making productive use of this fall, of creating new forms of life from outside life. Thirdly, it was an affirmation of the will in and of itself. Rather than judging desire according to criteria around the satisfaction of desire, for example an enterprise which is destined to lead, as Schopenhauer discovered, only to pain and misery this attitude involved a celebration of desire as an active process that is creative, dynamic and open. Pierrots continual failure successfully to live the modern life, as he suffered violence, poverty and thwarted dreams, was met not with bitterness but with joy in the next adventure. Thus will and desire emerged as energies which created new possibilities and opening for life, regardless of their fulfilment or satisfaction. Fourthly, living life as a pantomime character was a certain form of truth-telling. It called the lie to modernitys pretence at being rational, reasonable, and progressive through steady evolution. It exposed a world in which values had been turned upside down, in which the artist was forced to wear a disguise because true creativity, life, and place had been sacrificed to the gods of money, commerce, and empire. It revealed modern life as a form of absurdity, a life that was impossible to live, a life in which nothing could come to fruition or completion, and true creativity was stifled and stamped upon. The heart of modern life, it proclaimed, was not rational enlightenment through technological progress, but a chaotic series of chance encounters with power and domination. By living life as a pantomime character, Montmartre artists insisted that mankinds fall from life could never be corrected. Finally, then, this ethos towards the affective life of the city reactivated in novel ways Baudelaires attempt to extract points of creative singularity from the relations of power which functioned to specify of subjectivity and experience (see Chapter Two). This search for points of singular escape from the present structures of experience and subjectivity, as Pierrot demonstrates, may have resulted in failure, but it demanded the heroism of a continual search for points of escape or exit in the face of their apparent impossibility. Living life as a modern Pierrot, a pantomime character out of step with the

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modern world, was a way of using the bodys affects in order to search for possible points of weakness and fracture within the modern web of power relations. Through humour, Montmartre artists stylized a specific relation between

representational and affective modes of experience. The turn to humour and laughter was not merely a celebration of irrationalism or a retreat from the real world, but an attempt to create new forms of reason that were infused with the cognitive qualities embedded within irony and pantomime. Their aim was not to destroy representation, but to modify it. In the following chapter, I will take up in more detail the approach to representation explored at the Chat Noir. The fin-de-sicle saw a proliferation of representational spaces that attempted to express the life of the city. At the Chat Noir, however, it was the failure of representation to transform life that became the key target of its urban landscapes.

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CHAPTER FIVE Counter-Display and the Exhibition of Error

One important element of the Chat Noirs intervention in the life of the city, we have seen, was its dissemination of an ethos of affirmation, a way of somehow saying yes to modern life for all its cruelties and violences. Such forms of affirmation, however, required rejecting the current ordering of everyday life and, in particular, the ways in which life was mastered through representational means. A key focus of the Chat Noir, for this reason, was a critique of urban representation and its tendency to exclude the untidy, excessive, or transgressive elements of life. My intention in this chapter is to move on from the affective life of the city to its representational life, uncovering the ways in which Montmartre culture attempted to expose the failures and hypocrisies of modern representation, and to extract new forms of life from these failures. Nineteenthcentury urban culture is routinely described in terms of the emphasis it placed upon images, the eye, and scopic regimes of modernity (e.g. Crary, 1990; Jay, 1993b; Levin, 1993). The nineteenth century, in other words, was preoccupied with questions of visibility and invisibility, depth and surface, and thus with the relays between what is hidden and what is open to view, between esoteric and exoteric knowledge and experience. As we will see, the Chat Noir contested the established role of representation in securing a certain relationship between the visible and the invisible. And this involved a distinctive ethos towards the life of the city. We have already seen that central to the Chat Noir was a creative culture of parody, satire, and something akin to what Gustave Lanson, in his seminal history of French literature, termed lesprit gauloise a culture of ribald, transgressive, anarchical humour (Lanson, 1912). Two forms of representation, in particular, emerged as

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prominent targets of parody. The first was the culture of museum display, which was becoming an ever more important governmental space during the Third Republic, and which created totalizing displays of historical and evolutionary progress, making visible the invisible forces of time and life. The second was the culture of imperialist display, exemplified by the growing taste in popular newspapers for heroic tales of exploration in savage and uncivilized lands. These travellers narratives served to make life and time visible in a slightly different way, imposing strict distinctions between savage, unordered life and civilized, orderly life, organized through representational visual display. As I will show in what follows, the Chat Noir opposed these practices of making-visible by exploring forms of counter-display, ways of making the failures of representation visible and extracting new forms of vitality from these failures.

Scattering Time
The Chat Noir cabaret captured a popular anti-bourgeois spirit that ridiculed the republics obsession with self-improvement, progress and positive knowledge. In contrast to the orthodox republican values of scientific progress, financial profit, and moral respectability, Montmartre bohemians took up other values better associated with aristocratic or proletarian culture such as heroism, beauty, sensuality, laughter and revolt (Cate & Shaw, 1996; Seigel, 1986; Weisberg, 2001b; Wilson, 2000). The Chat Noir valued, above all, pleasure, humour, and esprit intended as a stark contrast to dreary republican asceticism. Bourgeois Paris was at once captivated and appalled by it. This ambivalence is nicely expressed in an article in La Construction moderne, a serious architectural journal, which celebrates the exuberance and playfulness of the Chat Noir at the same time as relegating it, in the final sentences, to a mere distraction from serious matters.
[T]he Chat Noir is the temple of architectural and decorative eclecticism; all styles are welcomed in its dcor ... the current movement of art and construction is more chatnoiresque than you think; the facades of our homes are dull, empty and terribly uniform and boring to see, and we find that it is necessary to enlighten them, rejuvenate them, with something unexpected, picturesque, bizarre even, which cannot be obtained by the concentration of a style or strict compliance with an aesthetic rule. The Chat Noir has put into practice, without doubt, one of the most ardent aspirations of our epoch ... tomorrow the whole of France will understand that the broken line is less dull than the straight line, that liberty of architectural form must be in direct accord with the liberty of the political form ... Excuse me, serious people, look at the thermometer, take into

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account that I have been occupied for long weeks on the most difficult and serious architectural problems; ... consider also that the holiday month has arrived! (du Seigneur, 1885:517-518.)15

This response to the Chat Noir clearly perceives it as a threat to established aesthetic values, a threat to be embraced only by allowing it space at the margins of aesthetic concerns, rather than allowing it directly to challenge established ways of arranging space. Playfulness could be accommodated, as long as it did not interfere with serious matters. However, in the material arrangements at the Chat Noir, a direct challenge to this bourgeois solemnity was perceptible. One effect that Salis achieved in the decoration of the cabaret was a sense of a displaced present. The cabaret was decorated as a representational space that announced the inadequacy of representation, thereby challenging discursive models that cemented individuals place in time. He elaborated the Chat Noir as a kind of anti-museum, a parody of an urban institution which had acquired a privileged role in representing both the life of time and the time of life. In his decoration for the cabaret, Salis carefully arranged a heterogeneous collection of oddments and trinkets, some antique, some modern, some valuable, others valueless. The effect was a rich bric-a-brac style that was intended to be different from anything contemporary and bourgeois. The furnishing comprised an odd assortment of dark oak antique chairs and tables, old copper pots, swords, coats of arms, and paintings of artists associated with the cabaret. Emile Goudeau described it thus:
A cat on the post; a cat on the window; wooden tables; massive, square, solid chairs (sometimes ballistics against attackers); huge nails, called the nails of the Cross; ... extended tapestries along the walls, above jewelled signs torn off old chests; ... a chimney stack, which seemed fated never to be lit because it sheltered under its mantle, and carried on its andirons, all manner of trinkets: a pan, gleaming as if painted by Chardin; a genuine skull (perhaps Louis XIII); giant tongs a jumble, but no firewood at

15

[L]e Chat noir est le temple de lclectisme architectural et dcoratif ; tous les styles ont t convis son ornementation ... le mouvement actuel de lart et de la construction est plus chat-noiresque que vous ne pensez les faades de nos demeures dont ternes, vides, effroyablement uniformes et ennuyeuses voir, et nous trouvons quil faut les illuminer, les rajeunir, les ragaillardir par un je ne sais quoi dimprvu, de pittoresque, de bizarre mme, qui ne peut tre obtenu par la concentration dun style ou la stricte observation dune rgle esthtique. Le chat noir a mis en pratique, sans sen douter, une des aspirations les plus ardentes de notre poque ... demain la France entire comprendra que la ligne brise est moins maussade que la ligne droite, que la libert de la forme architecturale doit tre en raison directe de la libert de la forme politique ... pardonnez-moi, gens graves, regardez le thermomtre, rflchissez que je me suis occup pendant de longues semaines, des questions archologiques les plus srieuses et les plus difficiles ; pensez aussi que voici venir le mois des vacances !

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all. On a corner of the counter, a bust, Unknown Woman, from the Louvre, and, above, a huge cat's head, surrounded by golden rays, as one sees in churches around the symbol of the trinity. (Goudeau, 1888:255-256.)16

To observers, the decoration seemed mediaeval or Renaissance. In advertisements for the cabaret, Salis declared the style to belong to the age of Louis XIII:

LE CHAT NOIR
Cabaret Louis XIII FONDE, EN 1114, PAR UN FUMISTE 84, Boulevard Rochechouart Styling the cabaret as a mediaeval hostelry conjured up a disordered world of vagabonds, criminals and other low-lives, a spirit of carnivalesque excess of the kind celebrated in the writings of Villon and Rabelais. Referencing the pre-modern past was a way of expressing hostility to the cultural and aesthetic sensibilities of a prosaic age preoccupied with science, technology, and commerce (Emery & Morowitz, 2003). On closer scrutiny, however, this turn to the distant past was not simply a nostalgic celebration of pre-modern values. Rather, the arrangement of objects within the space of the Chat Noir appeared to scatter time altogether. Salis styled the cabaret as a temporal space in which elements of an ostentatiously inauthentic pre-modern past were superimposed upon other elements of a resolutely modern present. A pastiche of the past, a fragmented present, and a sensationally imagined future were juxtaposed in a single representational surface. A sign outside the Chat Noir proclaimed that the cabaret was the height of modernity, exhorting: Passer-by Be modern!.17 On entering, however, the passer-by would discover that the height of the modern was not technological wizardry or the latest fashion, but a bizarre jumble of pasts, presents and futures. At the Chat Noir, it seemed, modernity was not to be equated with the living

16

Un chat en potence, un chat sur le vitrail, des tables de bois, des siges carrs, massifs, solides (parfois balistes contre les agresseurs), dnormes clous, appels clous de la Passion ... des tapisseries tendues le long des murs au-dessus de panneaux diamants arrachs de vieux bahuts (que Salis collectionnait ds sa tendre enfance), une chemine haute, dont la destine sembla plus tard tre de ne sallumer jamais car elle abrita sous son manteau et porta sur ses landiers, toute sorte de bibelots : une bassinoire, rutilante comme si Chardin leut peinte, une tte de mort authentique (Louis XIII peut-tre), des pincettes gigantesques un fouillis ; mais de fagots, point. Sur un coin de comptoir, un buste, la Femme inconnue, du Louvre, et, au-dessus, une norme tte de chat, entoure de rayons dors, comme on en voit dans les glises autour du triangle symbolique. 17 Passant Sois Moderne!

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present. Within its walls, audiences were immersed within a self-consciously artificial historical temporality. The Chat Noir displayed a present in disguise as something else. Rather than making the present visible, as the point leading from a known past to a progressive future, it made the present disappear, dissolving into a chaos of disjointed objects. An article in the Chat Noir journal exemplified this kind of dispersal of time, reporting the sensational news of a coup-dtat, reminding the reader of Louis Napolons 1851 coup following the 1848 revolution (Figure 11). The article, however, reports an event occurring five days after it was published (on October 28, 1882):
The Coup dtat of November 2, 1882 Last night the President of the Republic, yielding to the solicitations of his entourage, committed the ultimate crime: the violation of freedom! Without concern for a past honoured until now, in violation of the most holy and sacred commitments, distancing himself from the memory of 48, which his white hair might recall to him, the president has forfeited his honour. Imitating the conduct of Bonaparte, he has let himself be taken on a reactionary path ending in a coup dtat which will cover his name with shame and disgrace forever ... The blood in the streets cries vengeance against gold in the coffers! (A'Kempis, 1882a.)18

Temporal experience at the Chat Noir, then, was represented as an experience in the present, but a present that could occupy multiple points in the past, present or future. What mattered was not its place in relation to an historical past or present, perhaps, but the nature of the experience to be undergone there.

The Chat Noir as Anti-Museum

Charles Rearick observes of the cabaret that the royal rustic interior was extraordinary enough that it could attract curiosity seekers as a museum draws tourists (Rearick, 1985:59). Indeed, Salis actually did everything he could to emphasize the cabarets museum-like character, going so far as to publish a catalogue to guide visitors around

18

Coup dtat du 2 Novembre 1882 La nuit dernire le Prsident de la Rpublique, cdant aux sollicitations de son entourage, a commis de dernier des crimes : violer la libert !!! Sans souci dun pass jusqualors intgre, au mpris des engagements les plus saints et sacrs, loignant de lui jusquau souvenir de 48 que ses cheveux blancs auraient de lui rappeler, le prsident a forfait lhonneur. Imitant la conduite des Bonaparte, il sest laiss emporter dans la voie ractionnaire jusqu commettre un coup dEtat qui couvrira son nom dopprobre et de honte tout jamais ... Le sang dans les rues crie vengeance contre lor dans les caisses !

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the venue. The Chat Noir Guide took the visitor on a tour of the cabaret, describing it in terms that ostentatiously parodied the vocabularies of the bourgeois art museum. The

Figure 11. Anon., 'Le Coup d'Etat du 2 Novembre 1882', in Le Chat Noir October 28, 1882.

book was a pastiche of the kind of museum catalogue with which middle-class visitors would have been easily familiar. In the Guide the writers painted a humorous portrait of the cabaret that expressed something of the cabarets spirit and values, and ridiculed many of the core values and presuppositions concerning the role of culture in the life of the modern city. The Guide offered a very detailed, grandiloquent description of the cabarets interior and exterior furnishings, drawing attention to the scattered exhibits on display. It exaggerated wildly, inventing the provenance of most of the objects, and often associating them with celebrated figures from Frances cultural past and present. A

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description of what Salis named the Salles de Gardes (Guard Room), for example, captures the tone and style of the Guide, which took the pompousness and selfaggrandizing tone of the bourgeois museum catalogue to absurd proportions:
What strikes the eye of the visitor from the start, when he enters the Great Guard Room of the Chat Noir Hostelry, is the monumental chimney. This Roman chimney, which carries at its summit the arms of the house of Salis Saul on a field of blue assisted by a cat armed for war is one of the most beautiful in France, and the model, illuminated by Grasset, was deposited in the National Library, on the orders of the Ministry of Fine Arts. Two heavy byzantine columns, at the top of which two hieratic cats gaze with large golden eyes at the Swiss Steps, support the entablature. Climbing on the missals, two other cats frolic on top of a coat of Genoese velvet, vainly searching for the moderns, to turn the others from their holy mission. But the two sacred cats, like two sphinxes, remain mute and immobile at their post, overseeing the proud motto of the nobility of Chatnoirville: Mount-joy [Montjoye] Montmartre! (Auriol, 1887:9.)
19

Having briefly introduced each of the rooms, the Guide listed various objects, ornaments and paintings that were used to decorate the cabaret. Like a museum catalogue, the book outlined the objects provenance, and furnished a description which would guide the aesthetic judgement of the reader. The following entries give a feel for the typical character of the catalogue:
15. Small 15th century chest, originating from the collection of General Galliffet, offered to the Chat Noir by Monsieur the Marquis de Puyferrat. 16. Florentine dresser, offered to the Chat Noir by the Legation of Italy. 17. Chinese vase, brought from Nanjing by Monsieur Janvier de la Motte and offered to the Chat Noir by Monsieur W. Bouguereau. 18. Large Norman chest previously belonging to Monsieur Barbey dAurevilly; offered to the Chat Noir by Captain Travers of Mautravers.
19

Ce qui frappe tout dabord lil du visiteur, lors quil pntre dans la Grande Salle des Gardes de lHostellerie du Chat Noir, cest sa chemine monumentale. Cette chemine romane, qui porte son sommet les armes de la maison de Salis Saule sur champ dazur servi par un chat arm en guerre, - est un des plus belles qui soient en France, el la modle, enlumin par Grasset, en a t dpos la Bibliothque Nationale, sur les ordres du ministre des Beaux-Arts. Deux lourdes colonnes byzantines, surmontes de deux chats hiratiques qui dardent sur le Perron des Suisses leurs larges prunelles dor, en soutiennent lentablement. Grimps sur des missels, deux autres chats sbattent au-dessus du manteau de velours de Gnes, cherchant, mais en vain, les modernes, dtourner les autres de leur mission sainte. Mais les deux chats sacrs, ainsi que deux sphinx, demeurent immobiles et muets leur poste, veillant sans cesse sur la fire devise des sires de Chatnoirville : Montjoye-Montmartre!

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Figure 12. Adolphe Willette, 'Parce Domine', 1884.

19.

16

th

century lantern, originating from the cabaret de Piot qui chante, once

frequented by the master Franois Villon. This superb windowed lantern was bought in 1846 by Monsieur Champfleury, who kept it until 1885, the date when it was offered to the Chat Noir by King Oscar of Sweden. (Auriol, 1887:12-13.)20

Such entries made outlandish claims, both for the provenance and quality of the trinkets on display, and also for the social status of the cabarets patrons. Ironically portraying itself as a temple of the bourgeois arts, the Guide parodied the bourgeois pretensions of the art museum to act as the arbiter of cultural authority, taste and expertise. Pride of place in the catalogue was given to a painting by Adolphe Willette (see Figure 12). Its entry reads:
1. Parce Domine, superb canvas of Willette (5m by 3m). It is, in the opinion of all amateurs and artists, Willettes masterpiece. It brings together all the grace and all the poetry that are sow in such exquisite compositions. To describe this painting would be a crime; before a canvas like this the emotions are so diverse that it is impossible to
20

15. Petit Bahut du XV sicle, provenant de la collection du gnral de Galliffet, offert au Chat Noir par M. le marquis de Puyferrat. 16. Dressoir florentin, offert au Chat Noir par la Lgation dItalie. 17. Vase de Chine, rapport de Nankin par M. Janvier de la motte et offert au Chat Noir par M. W. Bouguereau. 18. Grand Bahut normand ayant appartenu M. Barbey dAurevilly ; offert au Chat Noir par le capitaine Travers de Mautravers. 19. Lanterne du XVI sicle, provenant du cabaret du Piot qui chante, autrefois frquent par matre Franoys Villon. Cette superbe lanterne fentres avait t achete en 1846 par M. Champfleury, qui la conserva jusquen 1885, date laquelle elle fut offerte au Chat Noir par le rois Oscar de Sude

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record them. We can thus only say this: Come and see it, or rather: come and see it again, as there is not a man of spirit in Paris who hasnt already admired this vertiginous poem. Ordered by the Grand Duke Alexis, Parce Domine was offered to the Chat Noir in 1884, at the request of the tsar. (Auriol, 1887:39.)
21

What is immediately clear from the Guide is its light-hearted challenge to the austere bourgeois equation of culture with civilization and the cult of secular, progressive self-development which this idea of culture entails (Eagleton, 2000:9). The nineteenth century museum was an exemplary space in which culture was used for education, selfimprovement, and moral reform. By parodying this kind of repository of official culture, the cabaret rhetorically positioned itself as the seat of a very different form of culture, one which was not best encountered through dry representational techniques such as a catalogue, but as something to be directly experienced. Rather than offering a representational narrative of historical progress, it would offer a more direct experience of a present, a present which, defined neither by its relation to the past nor to its future, would be definitively modern.

Displaying Error
The Chat Noirs anti-museum emerged during a period in which the museum was becoming a major urban institution of public instruction. The museum spoke to the new Republics renewed emphasis upon reason, education, and progress. New city museums were built in many of Frances provincial cities, and a new kind of museum, the ethnographic museum, came into being. These museums were not neutral spaces for the display of knowledge and cultural riches. Rather, they formed an important part of the late nineteenth-century reform of behaviours and morality. One way in which they achieved this was by using representational techniques to make visible life biological life, urban life, and temporal life in specific ways. The origins of modern museum display can be traced back to the 1789 revolution (McClellan, 1994). On August 10, 1792, the Tuileries Palace was overrun and Louis XVI was captured, imprisoned, and eventually sentenced to death. Just nine days after the kings capture, an official decree was passed that asserted the importance of collecting

21

Parce Domine, superbe toile de Willette (5 mtres sur 3). Le Parce Domine est, de lavis de tous les amateurs et de tous les artistes, luvre maitresse de Willette. Il y a runi toute la grce et toute la posie quil a semes dans tant dexquises compositions. Dcrire ce tableau serait un crime, devant une page comme celle-l les motions sont si diverses, quil nest pas Paris un homme desprit qui nait admir ce vertigineux pome. Command par S. A. I. le grand-duc Alexis, le Parce Domine fut offert au Chat Noir, en1884, sur la demande du tzar.

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artworks and displaying them to the public in the former royal palace. Republicans saw this public display of culture to be a symbol of revolutionary egalitarianism and of the cultural benefits of liberty. Following the states appropriation of property of the church and aristocracy (and later from foreign territories), it acquired a vast national patrimony. The new Louvre was to display these cultural riches in the hope of making Paris the centre of the worlds cultural life, the Athens of the modern world. In 1793, the new museum was opened to the public, developing an approach to the cultural life of the population that would expand dramatically during later decades of the nineteenth century. What was specifically modern about the new Louvre was, first of all, its democratic gesture of opening its doors to the general public, rather than a privileged lite. Another specifically modern feature was its innovative techniques for displaying its objects (McClellan, 1994). This was markedly different to royal and princely collections, which displayed sovereign power through an abundant arrangement of paintings whose effect was designed to be dazzling and overwhelming, and which made attention to individual paintings virtually impossible. In the displays of the Louvre a new system of display emerged, one which made visible historical evolution within national schools. This system explicitly referred to the method of classifying plants and animals by genus and species that was introduced by Linnaeus and Buffon in the mid-1700s. By creating an equivalence between cultural life and natural life, and classifying artworks in terms of their place in a linear narrative of evolutionary progress, the new republic could displace the politically problematic iconographic content of the pictures (much of which depicted religious or aristocratic themes), and incorporate them into a form of temporal life governed by reason and natural order (McClellan, 1994:80-81). This new mode of representation testified to a growing belief that history followed an organic evolutionary path, and that by displaying it in terms of evolutionary progress, culture could be rationally classified and made to serve a useful purpose through well-ordered public exhibitions. The modernity of the new forms of exhibition, therefore, lay in their use of representational classificatory devices in order to present culture as a form of organic life. This form of representation was adopted by the many public museums that were created in provincial cities during the early decades of the nineteenth century (see Sherman, 1989). By the 1880s, as greater interest was taken into the governmental possibilities of the museum, the museum acquired a prestigious role in the urban

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environment. This was due in large part to the interest in using education as means of creating progressive Republican citizens (Chadwick, 1997; Lehning, 2001). The influential political theorist mile Littr argued that education was an essential tool for strengthening the hold of the government upon the people, and undermining the grip of both Catholic ideas, at one extreme, and socialist ideas, at the other (Scott, 1951:103). Education was a means by which to mould the nations citizens and inculcate in them a desirable model of modern citizenship. Only properly educated individuals would become capable of participating fully in the life of the nation and the historical passage of civilization and progress, and the museum was a crucial means of extending education into adulthood. One important function of museums was their disciplinary effect the ways in which they acted as spaces in which the visitors themselves were put on display and learnt to reform their own morals and behaviours (Bennett, 1995; Crimp, 1980; HooperGreenhill, 1992). Here, however, it is the museums mode of representation that is of most interest. The museum not only made life visible as something ordered, coherent, and with a clear telos; it also used specific representational means to promote a specific form of knowledge. The nineteenth-century universal survey museum promised to the visitor a direct encounter with reality (see Duncan & Walloch, 1980). In the museum, reality would be allowed to speak for itself in a way it could not in the chaotic spaces of everyday life. The method by which it could be made to speak for itself was a principle of representativeness. The museum would create a display of total knowledge, leading the visitor along an historical path on which representative samples of every major step in the evolutionary process (whether of art, history, or nature) would be displayed. In this kind of museum display, the whole of history could be taken in at once. A museum visitor would rehearse a performance where knowledge of natural or cultural life would be gained through encountering representative samples of life as a totality. Museums displayed knowledge as a finished product, hiding the processes that created it, along with its tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities. The museum was a space in which reality would not just be described to the visitor, but visually presented to them, supposedly offering the visitor a direct, first-hand experience of reality. The work of curatorship, therefore, had to be made invisible, so that the experience of the visitor could appear pure and unmediated, rather than artificially controlled and constructed by institutionally sanctioned experts.

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Whereas the museum operated according to an aesthetics of knowledge which privileged direct visual presentation according to a principle of representativeness a form of making-visible which relied on making invisible the relations of power, authority and expertise inherent in the production of these presentations the Chat Noirs antimuseum at the Chat Noir brought the work of curatorship to the forefront. Its scattering time satirized the hubris of museums pretensions towards organizing the whole of history in one coherent display. By pretending to exert a greater control over time than even the bourgeois museum would lay claim to, the plurality of ways in which the past inevitably escapes any given representation of it could become apparent. Moreover, by creating a museum catalogue which was obviously and elaborately erroneous, they sent up the claims of the universal survey museum to offer an objective and unmediated encounter with reality. In other words, they drew attention to the ways in which museum representations necessarily mediated the relation between object and viewer, and the possibility that these relations might not be disinterested. By drawing upon representations that were obviously filled with errors or falsehoods, the Chat Noir museum sent up bourgeois pretensions to have privileged access to truth and knowledge. Rather than hiding the processes behind the production of representations, then, the Chat Noir put the processes embedded within the production of representation at the forefront. Experience, at the Chat Noir, was not a direct experience leading to a privileged knowledge of reality, but an indirect, mediated experience capable of disrupting established distributions of knowledge and experience. The Chat Noirs forms of display evoked forms of experience that was not safely ordered through representational codes, but which, through error and artifice, escaped this representational matrix. They gestured towards a form of life which, rather than being individuated through orderly representations, came into being as a form of error, a wandering away from established knowledge into different modalities of experience. This emphasis on error was equally apparent in a different set of literatures devoted to giving an account of the fin-de-sicle urban landscape.

Colonizing Paris
Perhaps the most important stage for the display of the temporal life of modernity was the city itself. For this reason, Montmartre artists could not just retreat to a neighbourhood whose reputation as a rural refuge from the modern city still lingered

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on; they had to venture forth into the metropolis itself. In a number of articles in Le Chat Noir journal, the writers of the Chat Noir created a series of humorous urban landscapes in which they adopted the posture of the colonial explorer, venturing forth from the advanced civilization of Montmartre into the primitive, savage land of Paris. The series of articles, titled Voyages de Dcouvertes and Lettres d'un Explorateur, parodied the heroic arrogance of the modern explorer, casting their powerful gaze, not on overseas territories, but upon the city of Paris, the self-proclaimed seat of modernity, civilization and progress. The first article is an explorers account as he leaves the free city of Montmartre:
Having taken in the rue des Martyrs, the travellers vermouth-cassis, I put on once again my otter-skin cape, and taking hold of my arms my stick and my purse I struck out at low speed (hardly three knots an hour) to the famous Lorette pagoda [i.e. the church Notre-Dame-de-Lorette]. I passed through the place which all navigators call Carrefour Drouot, and exclaiming to myself: All right! I launched myself into the unknown. For the traveller there is truly a moment, at once cruel and sublime, when, after having embraced all his nearest and dearest, the Montmartrais finds himself lost in the immense. All right! (A'Kempis, 1882d.)22

Paris is imagined here as virgin territory, encountered for the first time with a gaze impervious to the auratic power of the citys monumental buildings and boulevards. In doing so, the traveller enters a city which had in recent decades become semantically over-coded. The new urban architecture was designed according to a strict representational architectural code, serving to make the spaces of the city legible at a glance (Loyer, 1988). The new urban fabric, with its rigid straight lines and carefully architected vistas, conveyed an impression of uniformity, order and authority. Through its geometry, the hierarchical relations between different areas of the city were immediately visible, and allowed no room for interpretation or doubt. The built environment was invested with a rich layer of representational code, demarcating the
22

Aprs avoir absorb rue des Martyrs, le vermouth-cassis du voyageur, jai revtu ma pelisse orne de loutre, et mtant muni de mes armes : ma canne et mon porte-monnaie, jai atteint petite vitesse ( peine trois nuds lheure) la fameuse pagode de Lorette. Jai relev en passant la position que tous les navigateurs dsignent sous le nom de Carrefour Drouot, et mcriant : All right ! je me suis lanc dans linconnu. Il y a vraiment pour le voyageur un moment dmotion la fois cruelle et sublime, quand, aprs avoir embrass tous les siens et les siennes, le Montmartrais se sent perdu dans limmensit. All right !

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exact role, function and status of every inch of public space. The result of this was that the entire city became a vast exhibition of power, wealth and desire, of endless fascination to those who were granted the leisure and status to enjoy it. Impressionist artists, for example, celebrated enthusiastically the buzzing vitality of the bourgeois spaces of the modern city, largely overlooking any spaces which did not testify to a capitalist utopia of leisure, display and consumption (Boime, 1995; Clarke, 1985). Mary Pratt highlights three frequent tropes of imperial travel narrative: aestheticization (making aesthetic pleasure the sole value and significance of the journey); density of meaning (representing the landscape as rich in material and semantic substance); and the relation of mastery predicated between seer and seen (Pratt, 1992:204). The Chat Noir explorers made liberal use of each of these techniques. The humour of their accounts, however, emerges from the explorers failure to translate this representational code into practical experience. In these imaginary landscapes, the passage between experience and knowledge continually goes awry, becoming diverted and leading to absurd new situations. Once in the alien territory of Paris, the explorers, throwing their orientalizing gaze upon the lofty monuments and institutions of the city, implicitly challenge the modernity of the emblematic sites of Parisian culture its museums, opera houses, churches and boulevards. Most often, the civilized explorers reveal their inability to decode the city, becoming hopelessly confused as to the identity and function of the different monuments.
I approached a large monument with no style, with wide doors and large windows. I was assured that this building was called the Louvre and had served old painters who made paintings for the government there. I was curious to visit this establishment, on the door of which, by a quirk of bad taste, has been written: Finance. I found a kind of gallery where people were locked in cages decorated with tiny doors on which one could read guichet, like the money changers on the rue Orsel at home. Other individuals with blue, yellow, green or white papers appeared at the windows and took money. These must be the modern painters of the countrys government, but when I saw plastered on the walls varieties of poster, covered with numbers, I had very little desire to see the works which this enormous building must conceal ...

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You can reassure our friends in Montmartre, there is not a painting here that can compete with theirs. These number tables lack any taste, and reveal in their creators an absolute lack of idealism and selflessness. (A'Kempis, 1882e.)23

One frequent narrative device in these urban landscapes was to portray lite cultural spaces supposedly the great expressions of the life of the city as spaces of death or decay. For example, coming across Charles Garniers Paris Opra, the crown of Haussmanns urban renovation, the explorer mistakes the building for a tomb also associating it, to make matters worse, with two overtly anti-republican symbols, the monarchy and Germany.
Then ... I saw a very tall monument, gilded, with a polychromatic appearance, with funeral urns, crypts, rostral columns, groups of women dancing in an infernal and necrologic circle, reproducing very exactly certain frescoes which we know in Montmartre, and signed by two ancestors, Albert Drer and Holbein. This must be an immense sepulchre in which the mummies of this countrys ancient kings are entombed. Confirming this opinion is the title of the monument: Academy nationale de musique. It is easily understood that the priests here teach cantiques [religious songs] to young girls, and give back if needs be to the young eunuchs of the country, charged with celebrating in high-pitched tones the merits of dead monarchs (A'Kempis, 1882c).
24

23

Je me suis rapproch dun gros monument sans style, avec de grandes portes et de grandes fentres. On ma assur que cette btisse sappelait le Louvre et avait servi a de vieux peintres qui y faisaient des tableaux pour le gouvernement. Jai eu la curiosit de visiter cet tablissement sur la porte duquel par une bizarrerie de mauvais gout on a crit : Finances. Jai trouv une manire de galerie o des gens taient enferms dans des cages ornes de toutes petites portes sur lesquelles on lisait guichet comme chez le changeur de la rue dOrsel, chez nous. Dautres individus munis de papiers bleus, jaunes, verts ou blancs se prsentaient ces guichets et touchaient de largent. Ce doivent tre les peintres modernes du gouvernement du pays ; mais quand jai vu placards sur les murs des espces daffiches, couvertes de nombres, jai eu un trs faibles dsir de voir les productions informes que doit recler cet norme difice ... Vous pouvez rassurer nos amis de Montmartre, ce nest pas encore cette peinture-l qui peut leur faire concurrence. Ces tableaux chiffrs sont dun got atroce et indiquent chez leurs auteurs un manque absolu didal et de dsintressement. 24 Puis ... japerois un monument trs haut, dor, dallure polychrome, avec des urnes funraires, des cryptes, des colonnes rostrales, des groups de femmes tournant une ronde infernale et ncrologique, reproduisant trs exactement certaines fresques que nous connaissons Montmartre, et signes de deux anctres, Albert Durer, et Holbein. Ce doit tre un immense spulcre o sont enferms les momies des Rois Anciens de ces pays. Ce qui me confirme dans cette opinion, cest le titre mme du monument : Acadmie nationale de musique. On comprend aisment que des prtres se trouvant l, apprennent des cantiques aux jeunes filles, et rendent au besoin eunuques les jeunes gens du pays, chargs de clbrer en notes aigues les mrites des monarques dfunts.

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One effect of these literary landscapes is to challenge the citys self-appointed role as the motor of global modernity. Travel writing was an important means by which colonial imaginaries of modernity were communicated and embedded (Duncan & Gregory, 1999; Pratt, 1992; Youngs, 2006). The heroic explorer was typically represented as an allseeing master, able to make sense of everything he encounters. Furthermore, such travel writing was not always confined to the colonies. Within the emerging social sciences, the western metropolis was frequently described in terms evoking exploration narratives (Driver, 2001). The Chat Noirs humorous landscapes of Paris, by contrast, adopted the posture of the imperial explorer as a way of undermine the claim of bourgeois Paris to be the pinnacle of modernity and progress; and in doing so they positioned Montmartre as an alternative seat of modernity. In addition, however, they undermined the epistemological formation that linked colonial forms of display to the temporal life of the modern city.

Exhibiting the World-as-Exhibition

As Timothy Mitchell observes, the nineteenth-century culture of urban representation was inextricably entangled with the logic of colonialism (Mitchell, 1988, 1992). The more the city presented itself as artificial representation, the more powerful became a picture of a natural world existing outside this space of representation. The construction of what he calls the world-as-exhibition had the effect of dividing the world in two: on the one hand a material dimension of things themselves, and on the other a seemingly separate dimension of their order or meaning (Mitchell, 1992:302). He highlights the colonial implications of this binary: the material world of things themselves, lacking the meaning and order supplied by the exhibition, was an essentialized and exotic Orient. The vast volume of travel writing produced in the nineteenth century served to make that chaos legible, turning the Orient itself in a vast exhibition. Derek Gregory cites travellers descriptions of Egypt as an open-air museum where temples and tombs are arranged like shop windows for public inspection (Gregory, 1999:134). Travel writing emphasized the wild and untamed nature of the Orient at the same time as heroically exerting its visual mastery over its domain and creating a legible order out of it. Such travel writing reduced colonized space to a vast open-air museum, and colonized people became exhibits in an enormous exhibition of the real. The most extraordinary examples of this reduction of living peoples to representational exhibits (and clear exemplars of the intersecting logics of museum display and imperial

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display), were the Expositions Universelles. These vast spectacles presented to the public supposedly complete, encyclopaedic displays of art, science, history and anthropology (Greenhalgh, 1988). Like the museum, the exhibitions offered universal surveys of comprehensive, authoritative knowledge. Crowds were to be educated, not by selective instruction, but through exposure to a complete representation of a certain area of knowledge in one spectacular exhibit. One example of this was Charles Garniers popular History of Human Habitation exhibit at the 1889 Exposition, which displayed a street of 39 houses, each constructed in authentic manner, and each representing a specific culture and a stage in world architecture, from prehistoric times onwards. By wandering along a single street, visitors could take in at glance the entire history of human architecture, presented in linear, evolutionary terms. A similar insight was supposed to be drawn from viewing entire villages of peoples from colonized territories who had been brought to Paris in order to make visible the path of human evolution. By exhibiting these peoples, evolutionary temporalities were presented to urban dwellers, and the place of the French population on this evolutionary scale of natural life made visible. The repetition of the world-as-exhibition in travel writing, then, supported techniques which made the historical life of the nation visible in the passage between raw, chaotic nature and the orderly representations of the modern metropolis. The travel writing of the Chat Noir turned this masterful gaze back upon the city. However, it did not simply reverse the binary opposition between life and representation, adopting a vitalistic celebration of unadulterated nature in opposition to the modern culture of artificial representation a stance would be taken up in later years by avant-garde movements such as Surrealism (Sheringham, 2006:66-70). Nor did its landscapes merely portray Paris as an inchoate and primitive space of uncivilized nature. Rather, by drawing once again on an aesthetic of failure and error, continually deviating from the smooth passage between sensation and representation, they troubled the epistemological framework upon which these distinctions were built. This can be made clearer by considering the Chat Noirs Parisian landscapes in terms of the ways in which they modified the posture of the flneur. The figure of the flneur had first emerged in the early to mid-nineteenth century as an archetypal dweller and observer of urban space, an heroic individual with the leisure to wander, watch and browse, and supposedly possessing a heightened ability to decipher the dense web of the urban text (Buck-Morss, 1986; Tester, 1994; Wilson, 1992). The flneur embodied the

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epistemic framework of the world-as-exhibition, with his ability to exercise a visual mastery of space, and his ability to transfigure the city into a museum-like, wholly legible space of exhibition and display, a representational space to be read and decoded. Mary Gluck argues that, following Haussmanns modernization of Paris, and the citys transformation into a rationalized, predictable, easily legible urban fabric, the role of the flneur changed, transforming from a popular flneur to the kind of avant-garde flneur celebrated by Baudelaire (Gluck, 2003, 2005). The new kind of avant-garde flneur no longer used his imagination in order to make the urban experience legible; instead, he defended the imagination against the citys over-determined semiotic web. He no longer created representations out of a chaos of sensation. Rather, his skill was to harvest the dynamic sensations embedded beneath the dead weight of the urban text. The history of flnerie in the nineteenth century, then, replicates the binary structure of the world-as-exhibition. The popular flneur created representations out of chaotic sensations; the avant-garde flneur extracted sensations from the citys iconographic layers of meaning. The posture of the Chat Noirs travel writing, however, was different to each of these stances. By adopting the posture of the colonist, the explorers portray the city of Paris as a chaos of sensation, needing to be made intelligible by the heroic explorer. They take up an attitude, therefore, that resembles that of the popular flneur. The humorous element of the writing, however, results from the failure of the explorers to make the city legible. They undermine the citys claim to possess a legible layer of meaning testifying to its modernity, authority and power. In this respect, then, the explorers are akin to the avant-garde flneur, taking apart the representational fabric of the city in order to encounter the more vital layers of experience bubbling underneath. Yet the explorers fail in this task as well: rather than encountering a life that is more primitive and vital, they encounter only death and sterility. They find themselves immersed in a space that is dead, alien, and hostile to the capricious navet of the native Montmartrois. Their roving gaze reduces the citys most important monuments to spaces of death. At one point, for example, the explorer encounters the symbolic heart of Paris, the Cathdral Notre-Dame, which occupied a site close to the Morgue itself a popular fin-de-sicle spectacle (Schwartz, 1998) and conflates the two.
One morning, I was gazing at a strange and low monument, built at the bifurcation of two branches of the Seine, just behind a proud and elevated monument, decorated by a large belfry and two immense towers pierced by high windows. I addressed myself to an

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old woman ... and asked her in Parisian this dialect has become familiar to me What is this building (pointing to the building on the right), and what is that construction (indicating the one on the left)? ... The aged person replied: This is Notre-Dame, and that is the Morgue. We put stiffs in this one, and say their mass in that one. I thanked the old woman, and left her, wondering why these two buildings possessed, the one a female name, and the other, a complete absence of amenity for its fellow citizens. In Paris, cadavers have the morgue, proof of the complete barbarity of Sequanaise populations; and in addition they have Notre-Dame. I believe that, in order to save saliva, the inhabitants of Paris might say, in speaking of these two buildings, built on the same ground: Our Lady of the Morgue (Lehardy, 1882a).25

The explorers, then, fail at either form of flnerie. They are incapable either of extracting sensations from representation, or representations from sensation, and the humour of their exploits results precisely from this interruption of the passage between the two. The effect of this is to problematize the passage itself, and the epistemological framework of the world-as-exhibition that it presupposes. The construction of the worldas-exhibition relied upon a contrast between life and representation, nature and culture, which naturalized the passage between the one and the other and made invisible the power relationships involved in this passage. Imperial travel narratives portrayed the landscapes they encountered as wholly natural (and thus apolitical), but also as wild, chaotic, and only graspable through conversion into coherent representations. Here natural life was assumed to be something that required organization through representation in order to be made coherent and graspable just as Kant had theorized nature in the Critique of Judgement. Here the power of representation appeared as something necessary, thus enabling the relations of authority implicit in it to remain invisible. In both cases, techniques of making-visible were at the same time techniques of making-invisible. It was this process of makinginvisible that the landscapes of the Chat Noir, in turn, made visible once again. Through
25

Un matin, je contemplais un monument trange et bas, construit la bifurcation de deux branches de la Seine, juste derrire un monument fier et lev, orn dun grand clocher de deux immenses tours perces de hautes fentres. Je madressai une vieille femme ... et lui demandai en parisien, - ce dialecte mest devenu familier : - Quelle est cette baraque ? en dsignant le btiment de droite, et comment nommez-vous cet difice ? en indiquant la maison de gauche. La personne ge me rpondit : Ca, cest Notre-Dame, et ca, cest la Morgue. Ici, on met les macchabes, et l, on leur dit la messe. Je remerciai la vieille dame, et je la quittai en me demandant pourquoi ces deux constructions portaient, lune un nom fminin, et lautre celui dun dfaut constitu par une absence complte damnit envers ses concitoyens. A Paris, les cadavres ont de la morgue, preuve de la barbarie complte des populations squanaises ; puis ils ont Notre-Dame. Je crois que, pour conomiser la salive dans leur locutions, les habitants de Paris pourraient dire, en parlant de ces btisses, construites sur la mme terrain : Notre Dame de la Morgue.

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its performance of error both the failure to create a legible space of museum display, and also the failure of its explorers to decode the city and demonstrate the distance between nature and civilization the Chat Noir ridiculed bourgeois claims concerning the possibility of organizing life through representational means. Through its constant and deliberate lapse into error and misunderstanding, it evoked a life outside represented life, a vitality generated from wandering or erring.

Conclusion
The Chat Noir Guide and the Voyages de Dcouvertes imagined the Chat Noir in terms of a very specific approach to the nineteenth century culture of display. From these texts it is possible to extract an ethos towards representational life best characterized as a form of counter-display. The Chat Noir portrayed Montmartre as a theatre in which a dispersal of the modern ordering of time (exemplified by the museum) and nature (exemplified by travel writing) could be staged, and new forms of direct, modern, dis-organized experience created. Its ethos towards urban life was oriented towards disrupting the techniques by which life was organized and ordered into a functional, stable totality. Rather than representing life as something that could be organized, through representation, in an rational, ordered evolutionary sequence, this was an ethos towards exposing the arrogance and hubris of a faith in positive knowledge and scientific and industrial progress. However, this ethos was not oriented towards uncovering a purely non-representational, dynamic space of authentic lived experience. Through its parodies of colonial exploration, the literature of the Chat Noir revealed the emptiness, sterility and attenuation of experience within the citys most modern monuments and boulevards. Not only did modern urban representation fail, but so did modern experience. Paris, as a representational space, was exposed as an empty shell, a life with no life an experience of nothingness. Above all, then, the Chat Noirs use of counter-display was oriented towards exploring a different experience of life, not as something stable and ordered, but as a form of error, an interruption of the given ordering of visibilities and representations. Through humorous counter-display, a novel form of urban vitality could emerge, a vitality that existed outside life as it was specified within the power relations of modern urban display. The Chat Noirs forms of counter-display refused the Kantian model by which life is only perceptible when organized through representation,

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replacing it with a model where life could be experience as precisely what departed from its dominant forms of representation. This stance of counter-display, encompassed a rejection of the dominant attitude that saw representation as the most appropriate means by which to engage with and organize the life of the city. It was opposed, for example, to the stance of the museum curator or the heroic traveller. Rather than merely reverting from representation to the nonrepresentational and thereby confirming the epistemic divide between reality and representation, these Chat Noir texts exposed the failures of the mode of visibility to which they were opposed. Rather than using representation to organize the world or non-representational techniques to dis-order the world, they exposed modernitys dominant mode of presentation itself, and, in doing so, made apparent the existence of relations of power and authority within the inherent within this mode of presentation. The Chat Noirs forms of representation focused heavily upon the failure of representation to achieve what it claimed it could to create total orderings of life, time and history and, in doing so, revealed the cracks and fissures within this mode of experience. By bringing the act of representation itself to the foreground, they made clear that no direct, unmediated bridge between representation and reality was possible. They presented the act of presentation itself, and in doing so, revealed it to be, not just an act of making-visible, but also an act of making-invisible, of hiding the relations of power and authority involved in the production of knowledge and the representation of history and nature. Their forms of counter-representation, therefore, were aimed at making visible representations ability to make things invisible as well as invisible. The counter-representational stance towards the life of the city was a stance which made visible a life that emerged from the outside of life as it was specified within dominant forms of representation.

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CHAPTER SIX Life Beyond the Senses: Shadows, Ghosts and Silhouettes
Two elements of the Chat Noirs attitude towards the life of the city the affective life of the city and the representational life of the city, respectively have now come into focus. Beyond these emphases upon affirmation and counter-display, however, Montmartre culture also focused heavily on the perceptual life of the city. Indeed, it was these experiments that gave the Chat Noir its greatest successes. In this chapter I am interested in the relationship between artistic performance, the life of the city, and the organization of the senses. Investigating ghostly, supernatural and synaesthetic literary and theatrical landscapes, the chapter will explore how these landscapes cultivated forms of experience that moved outside sensory life and the life of the city. Its experiments with the distribution of the senses interfered with biopolitical knowledges concerning the healthiness of embodied perception and its relation to the urban environment, and were a challenge to the terms by which urban life, and the forms of sensation appropriate to it, could be experienced. The literary and theatrical landscapes of the Chat Noir, as we will see, oscillated between two different forms of extra-sensory experience: an experience of nothingness, of an incorporeal and ghostly urban milieu; and an experience of totality, a synaesthetic experience of a sensory unity beyond the natural body. Through these forms of experience, the Chat Noir established a novel stance towards the unworking of the sensory body.

Landscapes of the Dead

In contrast to the usual emphasis in the culture of the Third Republic on the life and organic vitality of the modern city, the writers of the Chat Noir constructed disturbing poetic landscapes of dead, sterile, anaesthetized urban space. These writings explored an

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experience of death, of nothingness, questioning the understanding of life that was being mobilized in the republics urbanization projects. A poem by Edmond Haraucourt entitled The Dead City (La Cit Morte), for example, is characteristic of this attitude. It expresses a way of seeing urban space that is far removed from that of the dazzled roving eye of the flneur or the modern consumer. Its gaze strips the city of every thread of life:
Under a tranquil, flatly blue sky Where the air sleeps, without warmth or vital force, A deserted city with pale walls spreads out, Sad as Death and vast as God. No grass; no flowers; no green-leafed trees: Everything is petrified in a giant slumber, And you seem to see black nothingness gaping In the deep frame of open windows.

Nothing is shut up; in a flash, life has departed this fantastic world, where crowds once made a din; The large thresholds wait for throngs of people, But those who pass over them are dwellers in eternity (Haraucourt, 1882.)26

If at first the reader supposes that this ghostly city of the dead exists as a purely imaginary urban landscape, one which bears no relation to that of the real city, then this supposition is rejected in the final two stanzas. Here the narrator reveals that this anaesthetized space is actually an emotional landscape of modern urban subjectivity. The city of the dead becomes entangled with the Paris of modernity:
Oh my heart! Empty, lifeless and desolate city,
26

Sous la tranquillit dun ciel platement bleu O lair dort, sans chaleur et sans force vitale, Une ville dserte, aux murs plis, stale, Triste comme la Mort et grande comme Dieu. ... Point dherbes ; point de fleurs ; point darbre aux feuilles vertes : Tout sest ptrifi dans un sommeil gant, Et lon croit voir bailler les noirceurs du nant Dans le cadre profond des fentres ouvertes. Rien nest clos : cest dun coup que la vie a quitt Ce monde fantastique o bruissait la foule ; Les grands seuils inuss attendent quon les foule, Mais ceux qui passaient l sont dans lternit.

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You will sleep unremittingly, for as long as I live: My boredom will supervise your troubled slumber, Like a plaintive marble at the side of a mausoleum.

Sleep in the calming forgetfulness of once-loved dreams: Let us await the death which brings new blood to things, Since all of our hopes, opening their rosy wings, Have departed forever in fearful flight! (Haraucourt, 1882.)27

This pessimistic landscape of a phantasmic, lifeless city posed a question mark over the claims of the Republic to be engineering a city of life, vitality, and energy. Modern urban life, the poem claimed, was really a space of death and sterility, a space in which genuinely lived experience was impossible. This is made explicit in a poem by Maurice Rollinat entitled Nothingness (Nant). In this poem, life itself becomes a drain on the vitality of the individual:
Life, rapacious entomber, Inhales you like a siphon; It empties you to the greatest depth, And leaves you a shell Which Time blows around in space (Rollinat, 1886b.)28

One of the achievement of these ghostly poems, with their evocation of a sensory life beyond natural life, was to challenge discourses that emphasized the natural vitality of the city. In these emotional landscape of the city, the only circulation of life was a deathly life, something motionless, static, and sterile. The life of the modern city, they implied,
27

- O mon cur ! cit vide, inerte et dsole, Tu vas dormir sans trve et tant que je vivrai : Mon ennui veillera sur ton sommeil navr, Comme un marbre plaintif au bord dun mausole. Dors dans loubli calmant des rves que jaimais : Nous attendrons la mort qui rajeunit les choses, Puisque tous nos espoirs, ouvrant leurs ailes roses, Dans leur vol effray sont partis pour jamais!
28

La vie, enterreuse rapace, Vous aspire comme un siphon; Elle vous vide au plus profond, Et vous laisse une carapace Que le Temps souffle dans lespace

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was not real life, but only a ghostly abstraction of it. This idea raised another question, however. If the supposed life of the modern city, rigidly controlled and organized, was really a kind of death, a form of nothingness in which genuine experience was impossible, then might the best way to stylize new forms of urban life not be to wrest it from the mysterious abyss of death itself? Might a form of singular, autonomous experience be possible that exceeded the specification of experience through the natural architecture of the senses?

Modernity and The Organization of the Senses

According to one oft- repeated narrative of the modern city, modernity involves an everincreasing reliance on the eye at the expense of the other sense organs. In this narrative, the processes of European urbanization brought about a dramatic shift in the distribution of sensory experience, resulting in an alienating shift towards visual forms of experience and knowledge. The writings of German critics such as Simmel, Benjamin and Kracauer are seminal in this regard, although there also exists a long tradition of suspicion of the eye in French theory (Frisby, 1988; Jay, 1993a). Some of the most important analyses of the sensory organization of modernity, however, are found in work associated with the Situationists, in particular the theories of Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre. According to Debord, as discussed in earlier chapters, modernity is characterized by the dominance of the visual spectacle, which renders individuals passive by mediating every social relation with images over whose construction they play no direct role (Pinder, 2000). As social relations come to be enacted through visual means, they become abstract and disembodied. The passive consumers of spectacle lose the ability genuinely to experience anything at all: Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation (Debord, 1983:1). Thus the spectacle and the hegemony of the eye destroys individuals relationships with their bodies and with the natural world. As Lefebvre puts it, [i]t is becoming impossible to escape the notion that nature is being murdered by anti-nature by abstraction, by signs and images, by discourse, and also by labour and its products (Lefebvre, 1991:71). Grounding this way of understanding the distribution of the senses in modernity is a phenomenological assumption that the most natural and unalienated forms of perception are those fully embodied forms of sensation in which the experience of the different senses is integrated into a unified, organic whole. It relies, that is, upon a phenomenological assumption that the unalienated body senses as an organized unity,

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and that each of the senses is organically, internally connected with the other. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:
Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel. (MerleauPonty, 2002:266.)

According to Debord and Lefebvre, the modern emphasis on the eye leads to a degeneration of natural, organic, syn-aesthestic perception into abstract, mechanized, anaesthetic perception. The goal of avant-garde resistance to the spectacle, therefore, becomes to reverse the artificial disjunction of the senses, recovering the unified, synaesthetic body from the spectacular hegemony of the eye. The natural, organic sensing body, in other words, must be liberated from its repression by modern forms of urban life. This history of modern urban perception relies upon a worryingly ahistorical understanding of the body and the organization of the senses. This leads to a nostalgia for lost, more authentic and complete registers of perceptual experience (Bonnett, 2006). The politics of sensation becomes reduced to a Romanticist opposition between the natural rhythms of embodied experience and the abstractions of alienated, discursive reason. This approach to the body, however, neglects the ways in which, during the nineteenth century, the senses were incorporated into biopolitical discourses concerning the life of the city. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, new knowledges of the somatic subject emerged that focused on the active power of the body to create experience (Crary, 1990, 1999). What took shape in the last two decades of the nineteenth century ... were notions of perception in which the subject, as a dynamic psychophysical organism, actively constructed the world around it through a layered complex of sensory and cognitive processes, of higher and lower cerebral centres (Crary, 1999:95). The body came to the fore as something that played an active role in perception, synthesizing the input of its different sense organs into a perceptual whole. Perception was no longer something that enabled knowledge of the body; it was something that was created by the body. At the same time as this body of knowledge concerning the nature of perception started to accumulate, a large number of pathologies of perception were discovered, in which this

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capacity of the body to synthesize sensory inputs became impaired, meaning that the unity of perception became liable to collapse: contemporary research on newly invented nervous disorders, whether hysteria, abulia, psychasthenia, or neurasthenia, all described various weakening and failures of the integrity of perception and its collapse into dissociated fragments (Crary, 1999:95). The ability of individuals to synthesize different units of sensory experience into a unified perceptual field was seen to be in danger. The bodys ability to organize experience was in continual threat, as evidenced by the rapidly accelerating number of people diagnosed with such perceptual disorders. This danger, however, was not just a medical matter. It was also seen as a distinctively social problem, because the failure of an individual body to synthesize sensations was a result of a problem with the environmental milieu in which that body dwelt. Successful synthesis of sensory experience, it was believed, was ensured when a human organism adapted successfully to its social environment (Crary, 1999). The proliferation of syndromes where the unity of sensation collapsed into fragments, therefore, was directly related to the alienation of the body from its urban milieu. The fragmentation of perception was not merely a question of the health of individual bodies; it reflected on the health of the city itself. The question of the unity of sensory experience was directly and explicitly linked to the relation between the individual and the life of the city. The rise of nervous disorders was linked to the demands of the modern city upon the senses, as the city continually bombarded the body with perceptual information, leading to a sensory overload that risked overwhelming the organization of perception altogether. The disintegration of the senses was understood as being symptomatic of the impossible demands of modern urban life. The worries that Debord and Lefebvre took up in relation to the alienation of perception, then, were already widespread in late nineteenth century biopolitical discourse. As I discussed in the Introduction, an enormous amount of energy during this time went into creating an urban environment which would remain healthy and natural, thereby making it easy for sensing bodies to adapt to their surroundings (Aisenberg, 1999; Murard & Zylberman, 1996). In a healthy environment, embodied perception would remain unified, organized, and multi-sensual. The experiments of the Montmartre bohemians, however, were directed against this kind of way of understanding the life of the city.

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Shadow Theatre and the Disorganization of Perception

During its first years, the Chat Noir was a very small institution with a marginal place in the cultural topography of Paris. Although it soon became a fashionable space for bohemian artists to gather, it was only with the invention of its shadow theatre, or ombres chinoises (Chinese shadows), that the Chat Noir became a widely popular, commercially successful venue. These shadow plays proved so successful that they would eventually go on tour around the country, forming an important element of fin-de-sicle popular culture (Jeanne, 1937). These shadow plays, like the ghostly landscapes discussed above, evoked an urban landscape beyond the senses. This time, however, they gestured, not towards the nothingness of the dead city, but towards a new form of sensory totality, a totality beyond the natural unity of the sensing body. The technique of shadow plays was invented by a Chat Noir regular called Jacques Rivire (see Cate, 1996:58-59). It involved placing silhouettes of buildings, crowds and other elements of an urban landscape within a wooden frame at several distances from a screen. The closest created a completely black shadow, and the next ones created successive gradations of grey, thereby conveying a sense of recession into space. The silhouettes, made first from cardboard and then from zinc, were moved across the screen on runners. Behind them were glass panels, also on runners, which were painted with a variety of transparent colours. Finally, behind these was an oxyhydrogen flame that served as a light source. Using large numbers of backstage assistants, Rivire conjured up highly complex, impressionistic arrangements of colour, sound and movement. The resulting shows were ghostly performances in which moving image, music, and poetry mingled and coalesced. Everything was indistinct and muffled; colours, shapes and sounds mingled to create a synaesthetic atmosphere, an excess of sensuality and decadence. These multi-sensory performances contrasted strongly with the scientific, organized, hierarchical conception of healthy embodied perception that was dominant in the Third Republic. There was nothing natural or organic about this form of perception. Instead, it gestured to a space beyond natural life. The shadow theatre seemed, to awe-struck observers, to open a window onto a new mystical realm of reality. Jules Lematre, for example, observed that, the Chat Noir contributed to the awakening of idealism. It was mystical the luminous wall of its puppet-theatre formed a bulls-eye opening onto the invisible (Lematre, n.d.). In addition, he wrote, the shadow theatre of the Chat Noir proved that mysticism is able to combine, very naturally, with the liveliest strength and

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the most Greek sensuality.29 Such mystical experiences, with their promise of opening sensation beyond the limits of the organic senses, were rapturously received. The following account in Le Magazine franais illustre evokes the magical effect created:
I saw the strangest nocturnal landscape that one could imagine. In the distance, mysterious shadows passed and passed again from the windows of weakly illuminated houses. Everywhere, from chimneys pitching their fantastic silhouettes and shaking their baroque weather veins; downstairs from frightening bays of light, green and yellow; from trees suddenly appearing here and there, twisting their black branches; from hanging gardens that seemed to have been abandoned for a thousand years; and from a great distance a vague music but coming from where? I wont try to describe it, as I think I was dreaming. Portcullises raising and lowering, fitted with 101 electric lights; the panoramic sky unfolding as if under a fairys wand; the blue sparks of the switches; the noise of lightning; the storm of mosses; the sets flying from the centre with the speed of an eagle the monks singing mass at the foot of the ancient cloister, and the route songs of the soldiers (Taharin, 1891:385-386.)30

What is palpable in accounts such as this is the giddy excitement of experiencing a disordering of the senses: an intoxicated and hedonistic sensual voyage in which the natural divisions between the senses seemed to melt away, opening onto another kind of nonnatural life beyond the organic life of the body and the urban milieu. The author of this account characterizes the mlange of swirling sights and sounds called it a symphony of colours, echoing various poems in Le Chat Noir with titles such as Symphony in Grey (Krysinska, 1996). This kind of sensory disorder had already been evoked in avant-garde poetry: first by Baudelaire in Fleurs du mal, and then by Rimbaud, who in 1871 wrote that, the poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses (Rimbaud, 1957). Moreover, by the 1880s the controversial figure of Richard Wagner, with his ambitious dream of synthesizing the arts, unifying the sensing
29

[L]e Chat-noir contribuait au rveil de lidalisme . Il tait mystique Lorbe lumineux de son guignol fut un il-de-buf ouvert sur linvisible [Il] nous a appris que le mysticisme se pouvait allier, trs naturellement, la plus vive gaillardise et la sensualit la plus grecque.
30

[J]aperus le plus trange paysage nocturne quon puisse imaginer. Au loin, des maison faiblement illumines derrire les fentres desquelles passaient et repassaient de mystrieuses ombres. Partout des chemines dressant leurs silhouettes fantastiques et agitant leurs girouettes baroques ; en bas dinquitantes baies de lumire, vertes et jaunes ; des arbres surgissant dici, de l, tordant leurs rameaux noirs ; des jardins suspendus qui semblaient abandonns depuis mille ans, et trs lointaine une vague musique mais venant do? Je nessaierai pas de dcrire cela, car je crois avoir rv. Les herses montant et descendant, munies de 101 lampes lectriques ; le ciel en panorama se droulant comme sous la baguette dune fe, les clairs bleus des commutateurs, le bruit de la foudre, lorage au lycopode, les dcors fuyant au centre avec la rapidit de laigle Les moines chantant la messe au fond du vieux cloitre, et la chanson de route des guerriers.

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body, and creating a modern form of Greek tragedy, was becoming an ever more influential force in French cultural circles (Huebner, 1999). What was the appeal of the Chat Noirs synaesthetic theatre, and why did it prove so popular amongst the Parisian middle classes? One explanation would situate the shadow theatre within the old tradition of the phantasmagoria, which occupied a central position in the Marxist critique of mass culture and the spectacle. The phantasmagoria was a kind of magic lantern show in which the projectors were hidden, so that the visual effect emerged in the middle of the room as if by magic (Clarke & Doel, 2005; Hetherington, 2007:62). Phantasmagorias were normally populated by ghosts and spirits entities with an uncanny presence whose origin could not be discerned. Marxist thought saw this hiding of the productive forces as a metaphor for the ideological functions of capitalist culture at large, which obscures the true relations of production of society from view. One approach to such phantasmagorical culture, then, is to dismiss it as an ideological distraction from reality. Yet, as Steve Pile argues, cities are as much emotional as physical spaces, and require a form of analysis that is capable of taking seriously the imaginative, fantastic, emotional the phantasmagorical aspects of city life (Pile, 2005b:3). One such aspect of the urban is its ghosts and hauntings (Hetherington & Degen, 2001). Part of the significance of urban ghosts lies in their embodiment of heterogeneous temporalities and their ability to disturb senses of place. Most importantly, ghosts demand something of the living, and take on an ability to question the limits of life itself. Ghosts possess an incorporeal presence, threatening to create a deathly absence, a hiatus within the heart of the living moment. In contrast to this impulse to see ghosts and phantasms as images of illusion and false reality, then, it is possible instead to approach them as very real elements of the urban environment. Ghosts, spirits and shadows acquired a significant presence in fin-de-sicle popular and artistic culture (Forgioni, 1999). Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that with the ongoing conquest of nature during modernity, many people saw the supernatural world as the next domain of reality which could be captured and controlled (Harvey, 2003b). The supernatural, in this case, was simply an extension of nature, a domain of reality which was still be conquered. However, it is hard to explain the appeal or the aesthetics of the Chat Noirs shadow theatre in this way. Rather, its performances had the effect, not of synthesizing the different senses into an organic, organized whole, but of disorganizing them, evoking something beyond natural life, as well as deliberately mimicking the unhealthy forms of perception associated with hysteria, neurasthenia,

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and so on, in which the body lost its ability to synthesize perceptual experience into a single whole. Their aim, in other words, was not to fulfil the republican desire to create a harmonious state of equilibrium between the body and its urban milieu, but instead to affirm the bodys alienation from its environment, and in doing so to stylize a new art of urban life. Rather than being an extension of nature, its ghosts and shadows aimed to interrupt nature, opening up a form of life beyond organic life.

Parody and Totality

This contrast can be drawn out be comparing the artistic experiments of the Chat Noir, with their insistence upon bringing painting, poetry, music and theatre together under one roof, with Wagnerian total theatre, which had a similar aim. Theodor Adorno marked out Wagners operas as perfect exemplars of the spatialization of time characteristic of the modern phantasmagoria (Adorno, 2005). The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk drew the arts together into a far closer weave than had been seen since ancient times. Often seen as the climax of Romanticism, Wagners total theatre attempted to bring about a reunification of the senses, and hence to lead mankind towards a closer tie to nature than had been possible before. Rejecting modernity and embracing myth, it sought to regain an authentic relation with nature. In this respect, Wagner wished to use art to bring humanity into a closer relationship with totality. Since the birth of Romanticism, the concepts of nature and totality had been closely related. Kant, for example, referred to nature as two forms of totality: the totality of appearances and the totality of rules under which all appearances must come in order to be thought as connected in an experience (Caygill, 1995). The experience of the dynamical sublime the Romantic experience par excellence was the overpowering feeling of the incapacity of sensibility and understanding to create adequate representations of nature as a totality. Wagnerian total theatre took this infinite dynamism of natural life as its ultimate model. Man will never be that which he can and should be, until his Life is a true mirror of Nature, he wrote [1849] (2004:3). This means that, as man becomes free when he gains the glad consciousness of his oneness with Nature; so does Art only then gain freedom when she has no more to blush for her affinity with actual Life (2004:4). The artists of the Chat Noir, however, conceived of a very different artistic project to Wagner. In the Chat Noir journal, they frequently mocked Wagners portentous solemnity (Georgette, 1882). The synaesthetic shadow performances, moreover, certainly did not share Wagners lofty ambitions. They scorned metaphysical pretension, and were full of

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Rabelaisian, scatological humour (Menon, 2001). Whereas Wagners operas are set in mythological lands of dwarves and dragons, a shadow play by Henri Somm, for example, was set in a public lavatory, complete with stage directions for intestinal noises (Somm, 1885). The most notable feature of another notorious play was an elephant walking onto a desert landscape, and defecating. The content of many of the Chat Noir plays, then, was in some degree of tension with its form. Its phantasmagorical production and ghostly, impressionistic aesthetic contrasted with a sense of humour that was as grounded, material and corporeal as possible. The result was not just a phantasmagoria, but a parody of a phantasmagoria. Rather than imitating Wagnerian aesthetics, the artists of the Chat Noir, by parodying them in synaesthetic shadow play, attempted to transform them into something else. In Romanticist thought, because art was considered to enjoy a privileged access to life, this meant that the world itself, insofar as it aspired to become more dynamic, creative and affective (that is to say, inasmuch as it turned itself towards life), had to become an artwork (Beiser, 2003; Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1988). It is this totalizing idea that was Romanticisms most dangerous legacy. Precisely in this spirit of Romanticism, the totalitarian aestheticization of politics of the early to mid twentieth century mobilized an organic conception of political subjectivity whereby it is the community itself, the people or the nation, that is the [art]work following the conception acknowledged by Romanticism of the work as subject and the subject as work: the living artwork indeed, though this in no way prevents it from working lethally (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990:70). The Wagnerian ideal of unifying the senses and making of the plural arts a singular art, then, is symptomatic of a drive towards totalization towards unifying the world into a singular, living, endlessly expanding organic artwork. As Jean-Luc Nancy interprets this, the dream of Romanticism taken up by any number of artists and politicians, from Bakunin and Marx to Mallarm and Wagner was of a political community based in certain respects on the model of Christian communion: humanity sharing the life of God and thereby accessing a field of pure immanence (Nancy, 1991:10). Romanticist aestheticization involved an ethos towards creating a world in which life might be accessed as a unified, yet infinitely creative, totality. In opposition to a Romanticist emphasis upon recovering the experiences of the natural body, Nancy outlines an alternative understanding of the body that views it in terms of an ontologically fundamental being-with. The body, for Nancy, is not an immanent, selfcontained system, but only exists at all in its exposure to other bodies. The world is not

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just composed of a population of individual bodies; instead, the incessantly recreated world is a world of bodies that come to presence in a circulation of sense through its contact with other bodies (Hutchens, 2005:54). According to Nancy, bodies are always shared, meaning that no body enjoys a self-sufficient, wholly individual presence. Body really means what is outside, insofar as it is outside with an other body (Nancy, 2000:84). The body is always plural; it always stands apart from itself, and its parts do not combine into an organized totality.
Each part can suddenly take over the whole, can spread out over it, can become it, a whole that never takes place. There is no whole, no totality of the body but its absolute separation and sharing out. There is no such thing as the body. There is no body (Nancy, 1993a:207).

When the body is approached in this way, it becomes impossible to speak of an experience of the body; instead, the body itself is experience (Nancy, 1993a:200). This means that the body cannot be a point at which the different senses are unified into an organic whole, as Romanticism (and Situationism) envisaged. Despite the efforts of philosophers (e.g. Kant, Schelling and Hegel) and artists (e.g. Wagner) to reduce the multiple arts to a singular artistic essence, art always re-emerges as a plural phenomenon. This plurality is frequently explained away by reference to the plurality of the senses the senses are suggested to constrain, carve up and delimit artistic expression. Such an explanation forecloses the possibility, however, that the senses themselves have a history, and that the arts might play a role in the production of a sensory geography of the body. In this case, it would be possible that the distribution or distributions of the senses, rather than sensibility as such, would themselves be the products of art (Nancy, 1996:10). The role of art, then, would not be to recover an authentic experience in which the different senses achieve an organic, living, synaesthetic unity. Rather, it would be to experiment with altering the distribution of the sensory zones of the body. In Romanticist philosophy, true sensation is a sensation of totality, a wholly immanent form of experience from which nothing is excluded. True sensation incorporates life, as totality, into its interior. When bodies are approached in terms of a fundamental beingwith, however, this understanding of sensation is foreclosed. Life is not immanent organic connectivity; rather, life involves an exposure to a transcendent other which interrupts it. Consequently, sensation, as Nancy argues in The Muses, becomes a sense

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that there are other, unsensed, zones of sensing, overlooked by the zone that is sensing at the present moment. Sensation is born of a difference between a present zone of sensation and another, unsensed zone of sensation which cannot be assimilated to it. As Nancy puts it: Each sensing touches on the rest of sensing as that which cannot sense (Nancy, 1996:17). Sensation is never sheer presence; it is never an experience of immanent totality. In order to sense, there must always be an absence, a hiatus, in the interior of experience. The point of this for my argument here is that, when approached in this way, the problem is no longer the Situationists question of whether or not a given cultural form is capable of opposing the separation of the senses caused by the modern urban phantasmagoria with forms of creative practice that recover a natural unity of embodied perception. Adopting Nancys ontology of being-with, every form of culture is, in a sense, spectacular or phantasmagorical. If the spectacle is an aesthetic of separation (Separation is the alpha and omega of spectacle, Debord writes), and if phantasmagoria is an aesthetic in which absence is made present, then spectacle and phantasmagoria are the condition of possibility for sensation in general, in Nancys thought. The very possibility of perception arises out of a fundamental separation between the senses, so that experiential presence is always simultaneously the presence of an absence. Experience is experiences difference, it is the peril of the crossed limit that is nothing other than the limit of essence (and therefore existence) (Nancy, 1993b:86-87). The question, then, is no longer whether a given experience is tainted by spectacle or else participates in the immanence of natural life. Rather, the question becomes: in what ways does a given performance or artwork transform the life of sensation? The most important implication of Nancys thought is that the arts are first of all technical, and must be interrogated in terms of the technical operations that they perform upon the spacing of bodies zones of sensation (Nancy, 1996:24).

All and Nothing: Unworking the Work

In his campaign to become mayor of Montmartre in 1884, Rodolphe Salis proclaimed in an election poster: What is Montmartre? Nothing. What should it be? Everything (Salis, 1884).31 One critic has interpreted this in terms of an apocalyptic binary: all or nothing (Shaw, 1996). Perhaps, however, remembering the affirmative use of contradiction discussed earlier in relation to the experience of place (see Chapter Four),
31

Quest-ce que Montmartre? Rien! Que doit-il tre? Tout.

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it might be better to understand it in a different way, as a conjunction: all and nothing. Doing so makes it possible to see better how the Chat Noirs experiments developed a specific ethos towards challenging the organization of life, nature and the senses. The aesthetics of the Chat Noir, as we have seen, drew on a strange intersection between an experience of nothingness (the spectral void at the heart of urban subjectivity) and an experience of totality (the mystical, synaesthetic experience beyond the limits of the natural body). In addition, we have seen how the experience of nothingness gestured towards another form of totality, and how the experience of totality was interrupted, through parody, and left as a form of nothingness. One thing remains unclear, however: the precise relation between the one and the other, between nothingness and totality. It is from this relation that it is possible to extract the final aspect of the Chat Noirs ethos of modernity and see how the shadow theatre challenged one form of circulation of life and replaced it with another. Unlike Wagner, who created works of dizzying length and complexity, the cabaret culture of Montmartre produced no great works. This is not to consign it to mere historical curiosity, however. This absence of works was a important element of their approach to the life of sensation. In their landscapes of death and sensory disorder, in fact, it is possible to discern an impulse to take the absence of works as their very goal. If their interest in synaesthetic perception shared with Romanticism a certain drive towards totality (towards the all), then their attempts to harness new forms of non-organic creativity from the abyss of nothingness was utterly alien to the Wagnerian phantasmagoria. This counter-Romanticist spirit would transform the notion of artistic accomplishment from the idea of completion to the idea of beginning. As a result, its experimental embodiment of synaesthetic perception would aim not to complete the natural order of the body and the immanent circulation of organic life, but to interrupt the circulation of natural life in order to stylize the experiential life of the city in new ways. The artists of the Chat Noir did not reject Romanticism altogether. Rather, their experiments recalled a strain of it that was (at the time) neglected. This is a kind of attitude towards life, derived from the Jena Romantics, that sought to interrupt the experience of totality in order to uncover another, more vital form of life that was born of a proliferation of beginnings. This is a strain of counter-Romanticism, which, rather than affirming the infinite expansion of immanent communal life in the absolute work, instead aims at the suspension of such immanent life. Romanticism, it is true, ends

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badly, observes Maurice Blanchot, but this is because it is essentially what begins and what cannot but finish badly (Blanchot, 1993:352). For this reason, he argues, the most productive strain of Romanticism involves introducing a new mode of fulfilment, one which can affirm at once the absolute and the fragmentary, affirming totality, but in a form that does not realize the whole, but signifies it by suspending it, even breaking it (1993:353). The goal of this subversive current of Romanticism is not the achievement of a great work, but the unworking (dsoeuvrement) of the work (see Hoolsema, 2004; James, 2010). Unworking, here, is not the opposite of the work (i.e. a process of fragmenting a complete whole). Rather, it is literally nothing: the unworked work closes and interrupts itself at the same point (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1988:57). It is not the dismantling of the artwork but its suspension; not a mechanical dismemberment of organic structure but the suspension of the divide between organic self-creation and mechanistic repetition. Art, Blanchot suggests, involves the simultaneous inhabitation of these two poles, nothingness and totality, all and nothing: a movement which proceeds without pause, almost without transition, from nothing to everything (Blanchot, 1993:318). The goal of art cannot be to access totality through completion, but only to access it through nothingness itself. Consequently, the goal of art will not be to complete the organization of the senses, but to access totality through an unworking of the senses that makes impossible their integration into a functional, unified whole. In their staging of a movement between two poles, nothingness and totality, the performances of the Chat Noir experimented with a similar ethical commitment towards finding a totality in nothingness, rather than moving from nothingness to totality. This is the mysticism that Jules Lematre referred to: the mysticism of a singularity that transcends the specified natural world, in which there is no nothingness because it always produces its own ground, a non-natural world that is groundless. The performances of the Chat Noir were indeed both nothing and everything, totality and nothingness. Its performances were always nothing: ephemeral, transitory, unrecorded and unrepeatable. They exploited a groundless, ghostly absence that their literary landscapes made visible at the heart of the modern city. They dismantled their own verses and paintings with wit and sarcasm. Within this nothing, however, they found a vital everything: an abundance of disorganized sensation, as well as a dissolution of the organized perceptual body. In this way, it wrested a new form of creativity and vitality from a form of life outside life, a life not reducible to the sterile life of the modern city.

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This ethos towards unworking sensation, then, was the final aspect of the Chat Noirs attitude towards the life of the city, complementing its emphasis on affirmation and on counter-display. The performances, art and literature of the Chat Noir intervened at various levels of experience, from affective experience to representational experience to perceptual experience. In doing so, they worked upon the limits of each form of experience in order to transform its relation to the other. Representations were undermined and transformed into affects. Affects such as laughter were used in order to alter the limits of perception, making visible forms of sensation that moved beyond the natural limits of the senses. Perception was used as a way of troubling the limits of representation, making visible the possibility of new kinds of knowledge concerning the nature and limits of the life of the city. Central to all of these experiments was a commitment to drawing upon forms of life and creativity that were situated outside life as it was specified as a socio-biological entity. This outside, however, was not something existing beyond the limits of knowledge and experience, but an outside that was simultaneously inside, a hiatus within the stable structure of experience what Michel Foucault calls an infinitesimal gap (cart infime) that keeps open a space between the living and itself (Lawlor, 2006). In response to a wide variety of biopolitical techniques of specifying individual and shared life, the experiments of the Chat Noir expressed an ethos of finding new possibilities for singular forms of individuation, and novel forms of experience not wedded to the organic subject, from within the historically specified relations of power within which they found themselves encompassed.

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Conclusions
This thesis has explored, theoretically and empirically, a series of cultural experiments in intervening in the life of the city. It has developed theoretical arguments concerning the relation between life, experience and subjectivity; it has explored analytical and methodological issues surrounding the implications for historical methodology of nonrepresentational geographys emphasis upon life and creativity; and it has given a detailed account of the certain aspects of the arts of life that were practiced at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre, in terms of its experiments with the affective, representational, and perceptual life of the city. One aim of this has been to reactivate an ethos towards the pursuit of forms of singularity, moments of creative difference where urban life escapes itself, decomposing the relations of power which individuate it, and become something other. In Chapter Three, I suggested that one aim of this was to create new possibilities in the present, and in this Conclusion I will offer some thoughts about the possible impact of this study on how we might think the present. Before doing this, however, I want briefly to zoom out a little, to regain a handle on the overall motivations and aspirations for the thesis, as well as reprising its main arguments, before moving on to assess the ways in which the end result has fulfilled those ambitions, and thinking about the implications of these results for the present.

Motivations and Background of the Thesis

One key motivation guiding the thesis has been to understand better how the urban experience can be transformed, transfigured or re-imagined through creative practices such as literature, art and performance, and how these transformations might create new forms of urban vitality and give new life to the city. Rather than adding to the accounts of the production of, and the characteristics of, an experience of modernity,

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in the manner of David Harvey, for example, I wanted to ask questions, following Walter Benjamins alternative approach to the history of the nineteenth century city, surrounding the transformation of experience, and the way in which new relationships between subjectivity, art and experience become possible in modernity. The one approach asks what experience is and how it is created, whereas the second (with which this study has aligned itself) asks how experience is created and restyled through intervening in relations of power and authority. The advantage of the latter approach is its openness to transformation, its ability to think the possibility of recreating the urban experience in new ways. It is also an approach which shares much in common with Foucaults account of modernity as an ethos rather than epoch. Foucaults later work on ethics highlights a commitment to understanding how the modern specification of subjectivity creates new possibilities for a refusal of what we are and for a creative engagement with developing new possibilities for life, experience and subjectivity. It is this way of understanding modernity as an attitude or ethos which I wanted to develop in this research project. Such an approach would be one that refused any temptation to approach the history of modernity in a way that universalizes modernity as an epoch or as a characteristic form of experience (a feeling of the discontinuity of time, for example). That is, it would not give in to the temptation to formulate, explicitly or implicitly, any theory of modernity. Rather, it would contribute to an analysis of modernity as an attitude, a way of stylizing the relationship between the subjectivity, life, and urban experience. It would contribute to a history of arts of life of attempts to develop different styles of living and alternative relationships between thinking, feeling, and perceiving. In thinking about how to do this, the first point of reference was Baudelaire, whose exemplary stance towards modernity is explored by both Foucault and Benjamin (see Chapter Two). The space of modernity which Baudelaire inhabits is the Paris of the Second Empire. Yet in many respects, Louis-Napolons Paris has a far greater affinity with the modernist, authoritarian city than it does with the contemporary liberal city. Haussmanns city was a proto-modernist city in the sense that it was, for the most part, a city of discipline, order and visibility. Technically, Haussmanns principal problem was how to increase circulation: circulation of air, light, water, traffic, commodities, people and money. He conceived of Paris as a political, economic and technical entity. What creates a considerable distance between Haussmann and the present, however, is that he did not conceive of the city as a social entity (see p. 22). He took little interest in

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proletarian housing or education, for example, and hygiene and health remained something tied to the physical environment, rather than the social environment. The majority of construction work remained unregulated and was left to the natural laws of the market. The biopolitical logic which would open up the city as a social entity, a milieu for a biological population, did not express itself fully in Haussmanns city. It was only in later years that this biopolitical rationality, with its emphasis on the city as a social environment, would come to the fore. Moreover, although Romanticism had long seen art in relation to biological life (following Kants theorization of beauty in terms of organic teleology), only now, due to the influence of figures such as Hippolyte Taine (see pp. 45-46, 123), did culture also begin to be understood in relation to the life of the national population (Bennett, 2004). This led me to consider the possibility of designing a research project that might isolate a way of stylizing life that was taken up, not in relation to the disciplinary and authoritarian city of the Second Empire, but in relation to the city as it was conceived during the Third Republic, which would form the basis of the modern French state. It was during this period that society really emerged as a privileged object of governmental intervention. The notion of securit sociale (tempering the revolutionary connotations of the sociale with the respect for law and order evoked by securit) became accepted; the social sciences took shape; and the city was reconceived as a social environment, the milieu of a population of living bodies. Even if the physical shape of the city was now largely in place, the city was emerging in political, popular, and literary discourse in very new ways. And it is this Republican city, rather than Haussmanns city, which is repeatedly cited in relation to contemporary urban movements. Neil Smiths condemnation of the neo-liberal city as a revanchist city, for example, is a reference to the reactionary Revanchist movement of the early Third Republic (Smith, 1996b). Similarly, advocates of the neo-liberal creative city frequently reference forms of neo-bohemian space which they identify, rhetorically at least, with places such as fin-de-sicle Montmartre (see pp. 4244). In contemporary liberal rationalities, the life of the city is measured in predominantly economic terms. After the Second World War, societies could no longer be judged according to biological standards, and in the following decades, the conceptual gap left by biological life would be occupied (though not without considerable changes) by economic life (Foucault, 2008a). When neo-bohemian spaces are cultivated in order to promote economic vitality, therefore, they are being manufactured in order to enhance

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the contemporary life of the city. They are intended, not to alter or transform the life of the city, but merely to increase or protect it. An areas buzz, its affective energy, becomes indexed to its economic vitality. If creativity and the arts are increasingly being made use of to promote neo-liberal regeneration agendas which do little to alleviate urban poverty or the socially malign effects of gentrification, one response to this the response of this thesis is to isolate approaches to the life of the city that interfere with the way of understanding and experiencing the life of the city that these agendas are based upon. By turning back to the experiments with urban life of fin-de-sicle bohemia, I hoped that it might be possible to extract the contours of a stance towards the modernity that would take the life of the city as a key focus of such opposition. The artistic community of Montmartre, as an obviously biopolitical governmental space, a laboratory for new forms of freedom in the newly liberalized Republic, seemed a likely site in which an oppositional stance towards the life of the city might be isolated. The thesis would investigate the urban culture of Montmartre, not in a nostalgic effort to uncover the true, authentic bohemian experience in contrast to the false neo-liberal bohemia, but in the hope of isolating, with as much specificity as possible, an attitude or ethos towards the city a way of thinking and feeling, and a mode of relating to reality that might potentially be reactivated in the present. This immediately posed several problems. The first was a series of theoretical problems. Firstly, the thesis was starting from a problematic that is shared by Foucault and Benjamin. However, this shared problem had not been isolated in the critical literature, and many recent theoretical arguments seemed to create a considerable distance between the two writers. Nigel Thrifts interpretation of non-representational theory and the politics of affect, in particular, draws a strong line between their two approaches. Foucault is seen to be too interested in discourse, too inattentive to experience, and overly critical of the vitalist celebration of life as creativity and difference. The thesis needed to defend the theoretical premises of the project, then, and to show how a history of arts of life could address non-representational theorys focus on perception, experience, creativity, and difference. Closely related to this problem is the question of history itself. Non-representational theorys emphasis on life, and the related Bergsonist distinction between the chronological (dead) past and the virtual (living) past, poses important methodological

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problems. Given that history necessary engages with the dead past, and given that nonrepresentational approaches commit themselves to uncovering the dynamism and liveliness of the world, the very idea of a non-representational history can seem incoherent. An important part of the project, then, would have to be to develop an analytical and methodological framework which would demonstrate that the past cannot be dismissed as something intrinsically opposed to life. The thesis would need to develop a clear understanding of where the life of the past lies, and what methodological and analytical approach might best narrate that life. Conceptually, life and experience have been closely tied together in western thought at least as far back as the eighteenth century (see pp. 1617). Experience, of course, can be parcelled up in many ways. Martin Jays history of the concept, for example, divides it up into different modes such as historical experience, religious experience, aesthetic experience, and political experience (Jay, 2005). Engaging with debates in nonrepresentational geography, however, I decided to take up a slightly more Deleuzian understanding of experience, which essentially divides experience up into affects and affections, percepts and perceptions, and concepts and representations (see p. 15), while remaining attentive to the ways in which experience continually crosses from one to the other, and transforms itself in doing so. The thesis, then, would aim to achieve three main goals. Firstly, it would develop theoretical arguments concerning the nature, scope and architecture of the problem of the art of life (Chapters One and Two). Secondly, it would explore methodological issues surrounding this issue (Chapter Three). And the bulk of the work would go into a detailed historical investigation of arts of living in fin-de-sicle Montmartre, with the hope of isolating an ethos towards modernity which might usefully be reactivated in the present (Chapters Four, Five and Six).

Summary of Arguments
Chapter One is a review chapter that recounts the way in which practices creating novel intersections between art, life and the city have been researched in and beyond human geography, as well as the theoretical suppositions that lie behind this research. Dominating the literature on practices devoted to creating novel intersections between art, life and the city has been research upon avant-garde cultural practices that frequently repeats a romanticizing account of creative urban resistance derived from the practices of groups such as Dada, Surrealism and, in particular, Situationism. The

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theoretical prop for this research tends to be Guy Debords and Henri Lefebvres accounts of revolutionary arts of life. These theories celebrate arts ability to reappropriate urban space from the spectacular technologies which give a surface gloss to a relentlessly alienating and homogenizing process of commodification. In doing so, however, Debord and Lefebvre continually draw upon a reductive opposition between, on the one hand, a monolithic and stable centre of power, and on the other, creative practices which recover difference, vitality, and authentic experience from the anaesthetized spaces of the modern city. They uncritically privilege experience over representation, movement over stasis, and immersion (i.e. immanence) over separation (i.e. the transcendent). Lived experience, movement, and immanence as expressions of creative life are seen as irreducible values. The problem is that this neglects the fact that lived experience, flux, and immanence are all values that can just as well lead towards conservative as to progressive ends. A central theoretical position of the thesis is that life must not be equated with lived experience, as Debord and Lefebvre do. A common theme in philosophies of life is to view lived experience as a direct expression of life (e.g. Bergson, 1911; Dilthey, 1985). But this results in a politics of experience that is dangerously inattentive to the different ways in which experience can be organized as a political force. If lived experience is seen as an expression of life, then undergoing new experiences becomes a privileged way of accessing life as a creative, dynamic force. Experience becomes something that is creative in and of itself; and the goal becomes to acquire as many new experiences as possible. Even when viewed as a force of qualitative differentiation, experience nevertheless becomes something to be gathered quantitatively: more experience equals more life and more creativity. In capitalist modernity, seeing lived experience as an expression of life inevitably supports a particular ethical relationship with reality: an attitude devoted to the accumulation of fleeting experiences. This is the posture of the flneur, which Foucault and Benjamin both warn against. What is needed instead is the development of an ethical attitude towards individual experience which, rather than harvesting novel experiences, instead aims to shape experience, to transform it in such a way as to create an experience that evades the individuated subject, and hence enables the subject to escape itself or destroy itself. Both Foucault and Benjamin reactivate this kind of attitude, exploring an ethos whereby individuals: refuse the modern morality of liberating desire; establish a critical, agonistic relationship with their own selves; stylize their lives in order to bring truth into the

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greatest possible proximity with experience; and uncover singular events in which the continuous course of the world is interrupted. The stance towards modern life which they draw out is one of searching for points of weakness within the relations of power and authority that function to specify the individual, thereby enabling a singular, immanent, non-relational experience of creative transformation to emerge. This is not an attempt to access a form of creativity outside power, but to work at the limits of power in the hope of creating the possibility of something new, a total innovation. The empirical chapters of the thesis explore how this Baudelairean attitude was taken up and transformed by later artists. They attempt to achieve this through a methodological approach to a non-representational history which, rather than attempting to repeat the past as it was, maps the past as a name of history. The notion of a name of history derives from Nietzsche, a thinker who was acutely aware of the capacity of history both to destroy and to create life (Nietzsche, 1983, 1996). Every name in history is I, he proclaims (Nietzsche, 1969:347). He poses the question of the different ways in which individuals in the present can live the past. Several distinctions immediately present themselves to us. One form of ethical encounter with the past is to repeat it; here, the past acts as a form of authority, something that justifies the present through tradition, descent and inheritance. Another is to forget the past altogether. Here, authority emerges not from the past but from the present; by destroying the past, the present becomes identical to itself, temporal difference is destroyed, and the possibilities of the future are defined by the inequities of the present. A third kind of relationship, however, is a repetition of the past, not as a sequence of empirical events (and an accumulation of lived experiences), but as an abstract sequence of forces which are immanent to past experience. This kind of approach to the past sets out to inhabit a position between life (as a virtual, abstract, non-chronological force of difference) and lived experience (as an empirical, lived, chronological experience of identity). It achieves this by taking empirical sources, not as records of past experiences, but as expressions of an attitude or ethos a series of dynamic relations between subjectivity, life, and experience. It uses philosophical concepts in order to extract, out of empirical material, an art of life or aesthetics of existence that could potentially be reactivated in the present. As an historical study, the thesis assembles a diagram of one specific name of history: the Chat Noir. As well as being the name of important modern stories and poems (by Poe and Baudelaire), this is the name of the performance space in Montmartre which is the empirical focus of the thesis. Three aspects of the stance towards the life of the city

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developed by the Chat Noir are apparent. Firstly, the Chat Noir exemplified a way of engaging with space and place through humour. It was through humour that Montmartre culture succeeded in creating an affective vitality which enabled a distinctive sense of place to emerge, despite the pessimism concerning Montmartres place in modern life. Irony was a means of creating an experience which allowing contradictory impulses towards modernity and autochthony, rootedness and flux, to coexist. Buffoonery was a form of disguise, a way of recognizing a fall from natural life and vitality, but at the same time celebrating that fall, and taking up a search for a form of life beyond life. As a name of history with which the present might identify, this stance was an ethos of affirmation, a way of saying yes to the world despite its cruelties and violence. This affirmation involved a pessimistic recognition that life was damaged, desire unrealizable, and power inescapable. Conversely, however, this ethos required a refusal to condemn this damaged life, but instead to continually search for something outside life, something beyond the limits of the present. The affirmative ethos of the Chat Noir was staged by the figure of Pierrot a libidinous pantomime character, dominated by uncontrollable desires, urges, and hungers. Despite his continual knocks, failures and humiliations, he draws on a life in desire and laughter which exceeds the suffering of individuals inability to fulfil their desires. It is a life emerging from a distinctive sense of place and sense of autochthony a rootedness to the ground, but a mobile, experientially rich ground. Joy and pleasure become the ground upon which Pierrot styles life through affirmation. The philosophical contours of this ethos of affirmation are based upon a metaphysics through which affective forces such as desire, rather than cognitive forces such as reason, emerge as the metaphysical root of life. Pierrot manifests a distinctive position with respect to an ontology of desire. The material out of which he would stylize new forms of life are his affective urges, his unreflected desires. One response to such an ontology of desire would have been Schopenhauers: seeing life as continual suffering, a pendulum between boredom and pain, since desire is an endless striving which can never be fulfilled. Pierrot, by contrast, exemplifies a refusal of the denial of the will that is the inevitable result of such a stance. Rather than denying the will, he affirms it as something productive. Desire is valued not for its satisfaction, but in and of itself, meaning whilst the outcome of his exploits invariably lead to suffering, the process of willing itself is an experience of joy and laughter. Desire is styled not as luck, but as something positive and productive. Experiencing at first hand the impossibility of living

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in modernity, Pierrots stance is a relentless search for extracting new possibilities for a singular form of life, a point of creative transformation, from within the tight web of power relations that always foreclose the possibility of such singularities. Secondly, the Chat Noir developed a stance towards working on life through what I have called counter-display. The nineteenth-century city was a space dominated by new forms of display. Art museums displayed art as a form of historical and national life; history museums displayed the progress of civilization; natural history museums displayed the varieties of non-human life; anthropological museums displayed the evolution of the species. Waxworks museums and assorted panoramas and dioramas were devoted to displaying the life of the modern city, a function shared by vast quantities of newspapers, literature, and art. Many of these spaces functioned both as educational spaces, transmitting specific forms of knowledge of life, and also as experiential spaces in which urban viewers could experience themselves as being part of a dynamic, affective, collective form of life. They both defined a certain form of life, as a form of knowledge and experience, and also cultivated a certain stance towards that life enhancing it and vitalizing it through trade, education, knowledge production, and imperial civilizing processes. In opposition to such a stance, the Chat Noir gave place to the performance of a form of counter-display. As a performance space, it was arranged, and discursively framed as, a form of museum display. Its display, however, was at odds with the usual conventions of exhibitionary display. Time was not arranged in an evolutionary sequence, but haphazardly, with old juxtaposed with new. Its exhibits renounced the claim to authenticity, with their labels obviously at odds with their true identity and provenance. It also renounced the hierarchy of market value: valueless trinkets were arranged side by side with relatively valuable objects dart. Through its fictitious travel writing in Paris, parodying the exploits and attitude of the heroic colonial explorer, it revealed the most important spaces of urban vitality as spaces of death and sterility. Continually stumbling and making errors, it satirized bourgeois pretensions to be able to create clear and unmistakable representational codes, and thereby fully organize and codify the life of the city. This form of counter-display took up an experience of life and vitality as a form of error. Rather than approaching life as something calculable and controllable, the Chat Noir explored forms of creativity emerging from mistakes, failures, and wanderings. That is, it approached the creativity of urban life as something occurring beyond the limits of representation, at the points at which representational codes and logics fail, stall, or

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break down. Its ethos towards the life of the city was one involving a search for forms of singular life which were not specified through representational urban forms. It achieved this by exposing modernitys characteristic mode of display itself, and the ways in which such modes of display forestalled the potentials of life and urban living. It involved an ethos towards creating new interfaces between life and representation which would enable novel textures of lived experience, neither pure chaotic flux nor organically ordered totalities, to come into existence. Thirdly, the Chat Noir developed a novel stance towards the perceptual life of the city. The life of the city expressed itself in characteristic modes of urban perception, most often discussed in terms of the spectacle, meaning that in order to develop a new kind of relationship with the life of the city, it was necessary to stylize novel forms of perceptual experience. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a number of knowledges had been developed which demonstrated the active role of the body in the creation of perceptual experience. Since the body was in turn increasingly viewed in relation to its ecological milieu, however, this gave rise to knowledges concerning a number of perceptual disorders, where the functional unity of the senses started to collapse as a result of human bodies failure to adapt to a hostile urban milieu. By stylizing forms of synaesthetic perception where the organic unity of the senses appeared to unravel, the theatrical performances at the Chat Noir displayed a distinctive stance towards the life of sensation. By creating, in perception, an experience of sensory disorder, they deliberately mimicked an unhealthy, pathological experience, an experience foreign to the immanent life of the city as natural environment. As an ethos, this was a stance towards modes of perceptual disordering: a way of unworking the natural senses, and exploring the potential for novel forms of sensation both within and beyond the limits of natural life. Scientific expertise had come to delimit increasingly precisely the nature of life, lived experience, and their relationships with the urban milieu. The spectacular performances of the shadow theatre, however, exhibited a commitment towards creating forms of perception which were not tied to life as an object of scientific and technical expertise. They did not address life as an organic totality, or aspire to create artworks modelled on the model of organic immanence. Instead of creating experiences of life as a totality, they cultivated ways of perceiving life as a form of nothingness, a force that was exterior to natural life as an expansive, immanent force. This was a stance towards finding new forms of singular life from outside specific forms of individuated life, and searching for novel forms of

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creativity whose parameters were not decided in advance. The Chat Noirs experiments with synaesthetic theatre discovered a sensory life beyond the organic body. They sought a form of perceptual life that came from outside life as it was normally understood and experienced. As an ethos towards the life of the city, then, the Chat Noirs creative culture had three major characteristics. It was, first of all, an ethos of affirmation, an insistence upon the creative potential of will and desire as singular, creative forces. Secondly, it developed a ethos towards forms of counter-display which would expose the dominant ways in which life is made visible in modernity, and thus make visible the limits of that form of display and those forms of life. Finally, it was an ethos towards perceptual disordering, an experimentation with varieties of perceptual experience that might exist beyond the organic, functional totalities of the individual or collective subject. It was an ethos towards cultivating forms of life outside life, and forms of experience which transgressed their own conditions of possibility. It was an ethos, finally, towards isolating the weaknesses within the web of power relations that functioned to specify experience and subjectivity, with the intention of creating new points of singular, creative life.

Assessing the Findings

In the opening pages of the thesis, I outlined three aims for this history of urban arts of life. Firstly, the thesis would avoid replicating any narrative of modernity that pits, in simplistic terms, an opposition between popular culture and avant-garde culture. Correspondingly, it would avoid replicating a plot in which a contest is staged between the relentlessly homogenizing, deadening and spectacular forces of capitalist modernity, on the one hand, and the differentiating and vitalizing activities of a creative urban avant-garde, on the other. Secondly, it would aim instead to analyse the ways in which Montmartre culture intervened in the circulation of life and lived experience, attempting to re-activate an ethos towards transforming the limits of life by isolating the historically specific conditions for the creation of singular, autonomous forms of experience. Finally, the thesis would explore an historical methodology which, rather than repeating the past as a dead, completed event, extracts the past as names of history as conceptual diagrams of a specific stance towards the life of the city. Firstly, then, this study has not used the theory of spectacle as an analytical framework, and has avoided pitting the deadening forces of capital against the vitalizing practices of avant-garde resistance. It has argued that spectacle, inasmuch as it is an aesthetic of

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separation and distance (as Debord theorizes it, for example), is not a destructive modern technology, but a condition of possibility of experience in general (see pp. 165 167). It has also shown how the alienating fall from life can be affirmed rather than denied (see Chapter Four). The thesis has shown how the creative practices of Montmartre artists attempted to stylize a new economy of life and lived experience, rather than attempting to liberate life from its repression through spectacle. Secondly, the historical substance of the thesis has been devoted towards uncovering ways in which Montmartre artists developed practices which functioned to locate points at which the specification of experience through biopolitical rationalities could be undermined and overturned in order to locate forms of singular experience that escaped the limits of modern urban life. Through humour, Montmartre artists celebrated the modern fall from life, and located new forms of dynamic life that came from outside life as it was specified through dominant biopolitical knowledges and technologies. Pantomime buffoonery was a way of living beyond the accepted limits of life, and hence of going beyond the established boundaries of subjectivity. Through counter-display, Montmartre artists exposed the failings of modernitys characteristic modes of visibility, thereby uncovering the possibility of new kinds of autonomous experience that were not reducible to the epistemic framework of the world-asexhibition. Through sensory disordering, the artists of the Chat Noir attempted to cultivate forms of sensation that existed beyond the natural senses, and hence uncovering forms of life that came from beyond the natural limits of the living body. Finally, the thesis has experimented with a novel analytical approach to nonrepresentational history. It has constructed an abstract diagram of the Chat Noir as a name of history a conceptual diagram of an ethos towards modern life and experience. It has described this ethos in terms of three interlinked stances: a commitment towards the affirmation of desire and will; the crafting of techniques of counter-display that make visible the limits of life, with a view to moving beyond them; and experimenting with disordering the senses, and hence, the limits of the organic body. What remains to be seen, then, in conclusion, is how this stance towards the life of the city might be reactivated in the present.

Between Montmartre and Neo-Bohemia

The life of the contemporary city is not the same as it was in the 1880s. It is no longer a form of biological life, but a form of economic life. The life of the city is no longer a

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natural given, to be given as much freedom as possible, but something artificial and malleable. The goal of modern forms of urban governance, then, is no longer to remove artificial impediments to natural processes of circulation of goods, people, markets and so on, but to spread a specific form of economic rationality into as many spheres of life as possible. The life of the city is now not a natural given, but an artificial construct. Neoliberal theory insists that the life of the city must be constructed through the imposition of an economic rationality by which homo economicus makes choices as a rational selfentrepreneur (Foucault, 2008a; Harvey, 2005; Peck & Tickell, 2002). The laissez-faire attitude of classical liberalism has given way to the interventionist stance of contemporary liberalism. Neo-liberal urban governance, in other words, promotes a specific ethical stance, one which insists that various forms of social agents including individuals, communities and cities, stylize their natures in conformity with preestablished forms of economic reason. Fundamental to the creative ethos towards urban life of the Chat Noir was its challenge to the ways in which the life of the city was rationalized, experienced, and worked upon. It was an ethos towards making visible different forms of urban life, not reducible to life as it was administered by dominant governmental powers. One prominent neo-liberal urban strategy, as we have seen, is to create novel neo-bohemian spaces which create an affective environment that is attractive to tourism, hi-tech industry, and other sources of economic vitality. This kind of urban space is one which is oriented towards using art and creativity in order to maximize the economic life of the city, rather than to pose a challenge to it. One crucial element of contemporary liberalism is its portrayal of itself as the only possible form social, economic and cultural organization in the modern world. Given the widely recognized social effects of this form of government, where inequalities continue to widen, war remains omnipresent, and natural resources are over-exploited to the point of annihilation, this is a deeply pessimistic stance. Giving new life to the city is likely to involve the affirmative stance required to continue to search, in the face of its apparent impossibility, for new forms of urban living. This will require moving beyond the representational strategies that continue to operate at the heart of neo-liberal governance. Urban life continues to be organized in important ways through representational strategies. Place marketing, for example, becomes a crucial element of urban policy. Cities compete in league tables and competitions showing the best cultural cities, the most creative cities, the greenest cities, the best shopping cities, and so on.

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There is a continuing need for counter-representational strategies capable of exhibiting the sterility of life organized in such ways, and to make visible new forms of urban vitality that emerge from outside life as it is specified through these representational techniques. Cities, moreover, continue to be organized through techniques devoted to channelling desire through an ethos of self-invention via consumption. Whole urban architectures are devoted to enhancing consumer experience. There remains a need, therefore, to find new ways of affirming desire, not as something which can be satisfied through consumption (leading to an oscillation, in the manner described by Schopenhauer, between boredom and suffering), but as something to be affirmed in and of itself as a dynamic, creative and vital force. Finally, cities are governed according to specific perceptual logics. The life of the city becomes clearly visible, acted upon as a form of visibility, as an economic entity. It is perceptible in shiny new buildings, expensive modern technologies, and public spaces which, by removing any signs of disruptive political conflict or opposition, make urban life perceptible as something victimless, accessible to all, and consented to by all. Since political dissent might interrupt flows of consumption, the aesthetics of contemporary liberalism relies upon making politics as a form of dissensus invisible (Rancire, 1999). There remains a need, then, finally, to stylize an urban aesthetics which enables non-economic forms of practice to become visible as genuine forms of dynamic and experientially rich life and, correspondingly, enables political dissent to become perceptible as a form of creative vitality, rather than something inimical to it. New forms of life and creativity need to become visible that come from outside forms of life that are limited to neo-liberal economic rationality.

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