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Chapter One  Prose Regnant: World, State, and Subject in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics As the reader of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics soon notes, the figurative use of the terms “prose” and “prosaic” is a recurring leitmotiv in this text. Prose plays a crucial role in Hegel’s understanding of art, showing up at each step along the way as art’s other and bringing together different , seemingly contradictory aspects of what lies beyond art: the abstract thought of philosophy, the preoccupation of science with the natural world, the limitation of the natural in comparison with art, the bourgeois social order, and the limitations on freedom posed by the state. One might say that prose offers Hegel the tool with which to delineate the shape of art negatively, drawing its borders in different directions. This makes “prose” into a slippery but very useful term in the lectures, a term that defines the modern world with which art, and its consumers, are confronted in the present described by Hegel: the world of the bourgeois social order as upheld by the state, a world in which the individual can act only within certain strictures. The lectures on aesthetics, which were delivered in Berlin in the 1820s and transcribed by Hegel’s students, combine two of the most salient and recognizable features of Hegel’s philosophy.1 First, they move along a historical narrative in which art becomes the reflection of a process undergone by spirit, going through three stages: the symbolic, the classic, and the romantic. Second, the description is anchored in a series of binary oppositions such as matter/form, sense/intellect, truth/appearance, finitude/ infinity, interiority/exteriority, and abstraction/concretion.2 This last opposition is instrumental to the rhetorical construction of the lectures, and in particular in the figurative description of prose. Prosa and prosaisch, as well as other terms such as Raum (space) and Welt (world), are harder to map onto the system of oppositions; they are rhetorical, rather than conceptual, metaphors used more loosely in order to explore through language some of the problems that interest Hegel. In the first part of the lectures, prosaisch is chosen as the key term to 4 Chapter One describe the present in distinction from the past. In two following sections , Hegel describes two sets of conditions or states of the world (Weltzust ände): “Individual Independence—Heroic Age,” and, in contrast, “The Current Prosaic Conditions.”3 The term Weltzustand—condition or state of the world—is rooted in the structural logic of Hegel’s system and specifically in the lectures on aesthetics.4 Hegel sees the world as undergoing constant transformation in history, and he describes it as moving through different states of affairs, constellations of the sensual and the spiritual, of matter and form. The historical development of art is part of this spiritual development, but it is also conditioned by it. A Weltzustand hence determines the possibilities of the production of art at a given epoch , but art also functions as an indicator through which the observer can determine what the condition of the world is. Accordingly, Hegel’s “current prosaic conditions” are a description of the political and spiritual conditions of the present, a picture of the now that Hegel establishes before he embarks upon a detailed consideration of art in order, ultimately, to raise the question of what forms are available to art in the present. In other words, this is a description of a set of pragmatic conditions that constrain art in all its forms. At the center of this description lies a claim about the possibilities for action open to a modern subject. All citizens of the modern state, Hegel claims, operate not from their individual subjectivity, but within a system of obligations and laws. Thus, even though there is some freedom for action in particular matters or situations, the individual is ultimately part of an established order . Though he may “twist and turn,” he “does not appear himself as the independent, total, and at the same time individual living embodiment of this society, but only as a restricted member [Glied] of it.” (VA 1:254–55; ALA 1:194). Hegel’s description of the modern monarch is emblematic of this new condition, which limits the possibilities for action.5 The contemporary king is no longer “the concrete apex [Spitze] of the whole” as were the heroes of mythical times. Instead, he is transformed into a “more or less abstract midpoint [Mittelpunkt] of institutions already...

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