The Quarrel of the Amateurs

Abstract

In my third and final lecture, I consider the conflict opposing Denis Diderot to Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus, on the faculty of judging works. The contemporary critic Jean-Louis Jam has called this conflict “the quarrel of the amateur.” I examine how this conflict anticipates from the eighteenth century, but in a kind of reversal in advance, the ambiguous fate in which criticism decomposes into philistinism—and in which the cultivated philistine comes to be interested and circumspect, and to repeat, with a serious, portentous air, “This is interesting … this is interesting.” With Diderot and the Encyclopédie, the Amateur becomes a figure on which there weighs a suspicion that imposes itself first insofar as the amateur represents a privilege typical of the ancien régime. But it also weighs on the amatorat, the bourgeois class of amateurs, as we shall see with Roland Barthes, and precisely as this bourgeois class, as an amatorat that is both philistine and cultivated. As for us, the hermeneuts of the twenty-first century, all more or less philistinized perhaps, mystagogues, mystifiers, and mystified, no longer believing in either myths or their demystification, we know now that we have come to know a new, quite uncultivated philistinism, though believing itself quite cultivated, and rather worse than that of all those bourgeois: a philistinism proper to our own time, a “bobo” philistinism, getting its honey from the buzz.

The Figure of the Amateur for a General Organology of Sound Art Practices

“…Their appreciation is based on knowledge, and in that sense, the amateur is clearly a connoisseur. Bernard Stiegler recalls the emphasis of the development of knowledge through a certain form of practice through Jean Louis Jam's discussion about Count Caylus, an historical figure of amateur elected at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Stiegler, 2017): "for the amateur, practice is not the simple deployment of a technique and the acquirement of a know-how to match the artist, but rather the initiatory path by which, having become aware of his insufficiencies as a practitioner, he can approach the reality of a creative act and, consequently, perceive all its grandeur and mystery" (Jam, 2000). Taking the particular case of an amateur of sound, one could define a person who develops a particular attention to the common properties of all the objects constituting of the class of object sound directed to first distinction then identification of particular qualities that serves a process of discrimination of objects into a hierarchical system.…”

“…The amateur as being historically "a mediator, a writer, and a curator" is particularly relevant in the assemblage of the different types of organs as he is "an active participant in social circle, a producer of new practices, new discourses and artefact" (Dillet, 2017). Stiegler also emphasizes the central role of the amateur in a general organology as he mentioned that "an amateur is a psychological individual whose psychological apparatus is augmented by a critical apparatus and who is organologically equipped with practical knowledge, with an instrument, and with a social apparatus supporting the circuit of transindividuation" (Stiegler, 2017). By experimenting, multiplying the experiences with sound, the amateur actively participates in inventing new possibilities of listening, new tools, and produces long processes of transindividuation, new sensibilities and knowledge.…”

Forest Semiosis

“…5 These technological conditions result in the ideological, negative protention where 'we do not believe that it is possible to change human behavior'. 6 Aligning this de-noetisation with entropy, and naming the Anthropocene an 'Entropocene' that closes off knowledge in closed entropic, exosomatic systems, Stiegler locates the overcoming of these conditions in affirming the power of a noesis generated in the openness of negative entropy or negentropy in the Neganthropocene. 7 Drawing upon Martin Heidegger, this noesis is aligned with care.…”