Lessons in Futility: Francis Alÿs and the Legacy of ... - Grant Kester

“crude, lawless instincts”. 5 “We must continue to regard every attempt at political
reform as untimely” Schiller writes, “and every hope based upon it as chimerical,
as long as the split within man is not healed”. 6 The split is between the “cultivated
classes,” possessed by a cold, calculating rationality, and the violent, impulsive
lower orders, lacking in self-discipline and reason. The state can’t impose a
reconciliation of these two opposed forces via external compulsion. Rather, it
requires a subtler re-programming; a form of experience that reaches us through
our senses and feelings, providing a point of mediation between the rational and
the sensual. It requires, in short, an aesthetic education that will simultaneously
bring compassion to the cultivated classes and self-discipline to the lower
orders. 7
The Letters present all the conventional features of modern aesthetic
autonomy. They are less discrete terms than serial moments in an unfolding,
syllogistic chain, each leading inexorably to the next. First we have the
postulation of a singular moment of historical decline or degradation (the new
“reign of material needs”). 8 Second, we encounter a profound skepticism
regarding the ability of the people (with the exception of the poet or artist) to
transcend these constraints, and the presumption that any form of conventional
social or political action will founder on the shoals of an undeveloped human
nature. And finally, we have the contention that the solution to this impasse
involves a fundamental reconfiguration of the human spirit, which can only be
provided by aesthetic experience. It requires, more specifically, an encounter
with a work of art that is radically autonomous. In order to produce this
6