CENTAUR AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST. HEGELIAN ART HISTORY AND TEMPORAL DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE Текст научной статьи по специальности «Искусствоведение»

Zhumatina, M.-S.D. 2023. "Centaur at the Edge of the Forest : Hegelian Art History and Temporal Discursive Violence" [in English]. Filosofiya. Zhurnal Vysshey shkoly ekonomiki [Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics] 7 (4), 143-172.

Maiia-Sofiia Zhumatina*

Centaur at the Edge of the Forest**

Hegelian Art History and Temporal Discursive Violence

Submitted: Oct. 16, 2023. Reviewed: Nov. 24, 2023. Accepted: Dec. 04, 2022. Abstract: The study is devoted to one of the most relevant topics in art theory and philosophy of art—the search for principles for constructing a world history of art that would not be Western-centric. Since the very emergence of a general history of art as a discipline was influenced by Hegel's philosophical system, attempts to develop a new history of art from its beginnings in the 1960s to contemporary decolonial initiatives, have focused on deconstructing various aspects of its Hegelian foundations. In its most radical form, Hegel can be seen as the cause of the "white colonist" view of the art history of "Other" cultures, which are attributed traits such as "primitiveness," "backwardness," or are completely denied a place in history. This paper examines three ideas that underlie traditional art history (linearity, the principle of significance, and monochrony), as well as three philosophical questions that create any such history (what concept of history is chosen, how the principle of movement through history is understood, and what the principle selection of art history records is). These ideas and questions will be examined in relation to Hegel's philosophy, along with how their many practical interpretations deviate to varying degrees from the original. All of them are connected by the fact that they presuppose a certain philosophy of history and time. To reconsider the critique of Hegelianism, this study proposes to examine it through the concept of temporal discursive violence, which is constructed by applying the anthropological concept of the denial of coevalness to the Other to the context of temporal relations in the history of art. It will be shown that the rejection of Hegelian principles may lead to a large number of paradoxical situations, in which the history of art turns into a meaningless catalog or even into big data. Next there will be an attempt to prove that (a) the problem with Hegelianism in the history of art can be translated into the problem of temporal discursive violence, however, (b) this problem is not solved by relativization, the rejection of Hegel, or the selective preservation of his principles.

Keywords: History of Arts, Philosophy of Time, Hegel, Discursive Violence, Timeline, Monochrony, Coevalness, Postcolonial Studies. DOI: 10.17323/2587-8719-2023-4-143-172.

A chronology of important events, navigating through the order of artistic styles and many series of works arranged in a linear timeline are what we

* Maiia-Sofiia Zhumatina, Research Assistant at the Laboratory of Transcendental Philosophy; MA Student at the Faculty of Humanities, HSE University (Moscow, Russia), mdzhumatina@edu.hse.ru, ms@maiiasofiia.com, ORCID: 0000—0002—1516—621X.

**© Maiia-Sofiia Zhumatina. © Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics.

Acknowledgements: The study has been funded within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program.

are accustomed to seeing in most traditional books that claim to be guides to the general (worldwide or universal) history of art.1 One can identify three ideas that lie behind this practice:

(1) The idea that art, in the course of its development, successively passes in time through different epochs and styles2 (linearity3);

(2) The idea that in this development one can identify important key events, great works and their creators4 (principle of significance5);

1Kubler, in his revolutionary attempt to rethink the writing of art history, argues that the "history of things" (in which "history of art treats of the least useful and most expressive products") began only in the Italian Renaissance (Kubler, 2008: 1). In an attempt to describe the history of art history, Ch. Wood chose the Middle Ages as the first significant period to talk about (Wood, 2019: 9-10). For this research, however, it is accepted that the position according to which the first full-fledged history of art should be considered is one in which (a) its historicity is consciously reflected and set forth as a principle, and which (b) strives for universality. In this case, the first history of art may be found in the works of J. J. Winckelmann (History of Ancient Art, 1764) and G.W. F. Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics, 1820-1829); cf. Gombrich, 1984: 51; Elkins, 1988: 354; Karlholm & Moxey, 2018: 1-2. Gombrich, however, gives primacy to Hegel, since only the latter fully complies with the two criteria we have noted. It should be noted that the phrase "history of art" is used by Hegel in his "Aesthetics" in the context of criticism against "scientific ways" of treating of art "from the outside": "...we see the Science of art only busying itself with actual works of art from the outside, arranging them into a history of art, setting up discussions about existing works or outlining theories which are to yield general considerations for both criticizing and producing works of art" (Hegel, Knox, 1988: Vol 1. 14). The phrase is rarely used in the context of Hegel's own endeavor (cf. e.g. ibid.: Vol 2. 787).

2As noted by Karlholm & Moxey, 2018: 1, "the unquestioned assumption of the discipline of the history of art since its creation in the late nineteenth century is that time unfolds chronologically, in an orderly manner leading somewhere. The chronological shape of historical writing has its ancient roots in natural metaphors of birth, maturity, and decay, as much as in the purposive direction ascribed to the passage of time by Christianity". The fact that "schools and styles" are an invention of the 19th century (and thereby of what we will call traditional art history) was noted by Kubler, 2008: 2.

3In a large study on the cartography of time there is an interesting case, stating that a type of line that is not straight, but clumsy, is no longer linear — there, linearity means "straightness," but we understand linearity in a more general sense (Rosenberg, 2018: 20).

4 For a description of this possibility of highlighting the most important works as fundamental to the creation of art history, see e. g. in Kubler, 2008: 1-2.

5"Principle of significance" is my concept, in which I cover and generalize different approaches to assessing the significance of events in some of the areas of Hegel's "histories of the Spirit" (world history, art, religion, philosophy), owing to which it can be classified as important. For example, in view of the principle of significance, Hegel can, within the framework of his philosophy of world history, talk about "world-historical importance and significance", "world-historical nations", "world-historical events", and "world-historical individuals", etc. Hegel considers the question of significance in "Aesthetics" as well, and says that the "significance of a work of art" is that it "disclose[s] an inner life", i. e. that it should not be "exhausted" by what can be seen (Hegel, Knox, 1988: Vol 1. 20).

(3) The idea that all embodiments of art, from prehistoric "beginnings" up to the 20th and 21st centuries, somehow belong to the same timeline and one history6 (monochrony).

All these points are united, consciously or not, by a certain vision of history as a temporal phenomenon, and thereby by certain prerequisites from the fields of philosophy of history and philosophy of time.

In works on the theory of art, one can find statements that posit, with minor variation, that the father of art history as a meaningful presentation of the entire artistic heritage of humankind is Hegel (see note 1). In this connection, numerous other characteristics of traditional art history, including variations of the aforementioned linearity and monochrony, are called "Hegelian,"7 along with the related idea of development. In accordance with these vague characteristics, traditional art histories—textbooks, monographs, etc. — are often called "Hegelian." In the first part of our study this attribution practice will be reconsidered.

6In this study, it is essential to separate "linearity" and "monochrony." Despite the fact that passing through different styles may seem "ornate," a path full of "regressions" and "dead ends," it will always be linear if it "ends," for example, with what is commonly called "contemporary art." In other words, monochrony and the idea of progress practically guarantee linear development. As will be shown below in this text, traditional art histories are criticized precisely for this way of understanding monochrony. Even if art itself is not attributed with "linearity" in the temporal sense, it is implicit in histories of art: for example, Wood says that in the period after 1800, "art history protects art as one of the few places in modern life where disparate ways of thinking about time are protected: eternity, flow, reversals, and switchbacks. All around art is linear time, directed and convergent, the time of mere experience that governs modernist progressivism. This is realist time—time as just what it seems to be. Classic art history with its discontinuous, anachronic story lines was in this respect antirealist [...]." (Wood, 2019: 392).

7Of course, this does not mean that in practice all these books are a correct reflection of Hegel's ideas. In this article a terminological distinction will be made between (a) what refers to Hegel himself (English "Hegel's," Russian "гегелевское"), (b) what consciously reflects the ideas of Hegel (English "Hegelian," Russian "гегельянское") and (c) what belongs to the tradition formed under the influence of Hegel, and which bears traces, often distorted, of his ideas (English also "Hegelian," Russian also "гегельянское"). The meanings (a), (b) and (c) in Russian and English are often confused. In the literature attempts to separate the meanings (b) and (c) can be found: for example, in Elkins, 1988 they are designated as Hegelian and "Hegelian" (with quotation marks —ibid.: 359-360); moreover, "Hegelian" refers to a specific understanding of Hegel's influence in Gombrich's prominent book (Gombrich, 1984). The author believes that using quotation marks is not the best solution, because quotation marks can create the impression that Hegel's ideas are being used incorrectly in the indicated cases, that this is false Hegelianism. I therefore propose to use the triad of concepts Hegel's—Hegelian— Hegel-inspired. A similar but slightly different division is proposed in Gombrich, 1979.

The traditional, Hegelian and Hegel-influenced way of conceptualizing art history has been the subject of one branch of criticism and revision of traditional art historiography for more than half a century. This criticism often intersects with the contemporary tendency to liberate the study of culture in all its manifestations from the traditional Western-centric approach—which, in turn, is seen as a legacy of colonialism.8 The above-mentioned characteristics of traditional art history are seen as a consequence of colonial thinking: the conceptualization of history as linear and monochronic,9 as well as the principle of recording important events, impose on the whole world a single, Western vision of history and the very passage of time. Consequently, and expectedly, Hegel is often seen as the source of colonialist discourse.

Based on the Hegelian and Hegel-inspired aspects of traditional art history and their criticism, discussed in the first part of the study, the second part of the study will be devoted to considering the criticism of such Hegelianism as that which generates temporal discursive violence10 in general history of art towards anything that does not belong to it, remains on its outskirts, is traumatized by it. In this discussion, the key focus are the following questions:

(a) Is the "Hegelianism" of art history the cause of the production of temporal discursive violence?

(b) How can this violent practice be prevented in order to make art history non-colonial and non-violent?

(c) What problematic places have possible "anti-/non-Hegelian" solutions?

(d) What will happen to the history of art if it is dismantled from the Hegel-related principles discussed in the first part of the study?

I introduce the concept of temporal discursive violence as a special type of discursive violence in relation to artistic practices that do not fit into the

8 One of the first fundamental works to challenge this attitude is certainly Kubler's "The Shape of Time" (Kubler, 2008). Postcolonial discourse entered the academic world in the 1970s. Postcolonial discourse and decolonial thought differ in that "for decolonial thinkers, writers, artists, activists, postcolonial discourse is not radical and critical enough." The "decolonial turn" emerged approximately a decade and a half later than the entry into the arena of postcolonial studies. Decolonial thought is characterized by the rejection of claims to a single truth. Cf. Tlostanova, 2020. Within the framework of our study, we can say that the discussion Hegel's role was part of the postcolonial "condition," and calls for liberation from Hegel were an attempt at a decolonial choice.

9Monochrony as an important characteristic of the traditional description of art history was introduced (in order to be criticized) relatively recently: Karlholm & Moxey, 2018: 2).

10The concept of discursive violence (regardless of art) was introduced in the anthropological work "Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object" (Fabian, 1983).

Western-centric concept and timeline of the general history of art, because in the matter of writing art history, as stated at the beginning of the study, it is the temporal aspects that are fundamentally important.

In the conclusion I will try to show that the struggle with the "Hegelian" history of art, perhaps unintentionally, has turned into a struggle with the Hegelian concept of world history.

***

The traditional understanding of universal history in the history of art is connected in contemporary theory with the origins of the discipline itself, which stem from the end of the 18th century, when, influenced by the events of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, philosophers developed concepts of history that implied the idea of progress. Among these philosophers, the brightest figure was Hegel with his philosophical concept of world history: it was under its inspiration that the history of art as a discipline was formed.11 However, the very link of art history to Hegel is often a set of rather vague ideas, called Hegelian very loosely: for a long time in the theory of art, Hegel as a mythical "centaur" lived "at the edge of its forest" of history and theory of art,12 and it seems that he still resides there.

In order to examine in more detail how Hegel can be considered the inspiration for the formation of classical art history, an analysis will be conducted, consisting of three philosophical questions, without the answers to which it is impossible to create a universal history of art:

11 Cf. Karlholm & Moxey, 2018: 1-2. According to the authors, "the use of Hegelian ideas by the first generations of art historians therefore served to consolidate a developmental form of chronology as the model of temporality on which the discipline unfolded."

12Elkins, 1988: 354, 356. In his article on the problem of a frivolous attitude towards "rigorous theory" in art theory, Elkins cites Burckhardt (Burckhardt, Nichols, 1943: 80) and his thesis about the uselessness of theory as the inspiration for such practices: "We shall, further, make no attempt at system, nor lay any claim to 'historical principles.' On the contrary, we shall confine ourselves to observation. ... Above all, we have nothing to do with the philosophy of history." Elkins comments on the consequences as follows: "When Jacob Burckhardt made this assertion he was thinking of Hegel, whom he described with the image of a centaur 'at the edge of the forest of history?' Today we might hesitate to claim that the centaur does not trespass on our domain or that he could be repelled by such a warning. Instead what is often called 'Hegelian' theory—but is, more precisely, a set of vague propositions loosely referred to as 'Hegelian' has become a central concern in several disciplines." Elkins believes that "sustained theoretical arguments in the body of art historical texts have become uncommon [...], and theoretical issues are taken up instead at the close of articles—as envois—in prefaces, and in introductions to books. [...] It [theory. — M.-S. Zh.] seems to live at the edge of the forest of our texts" (Elkins, 1988: 355-356).

(1) What concept of history is taken as the basis for the world history of art?

(2) How does the historical movement of world art history occur?

(3) According to what principle is the history of art recorded, i. e. How are events selected as worthy of being part of the world history of art?

(1) Concepts of history and general history of art. The idea of "linear time" (and therefore of linear history) was created against the background of the contrast between Christian teaching and Pagan traditions, in which ideas of "cyclic" time are often found.13 It is therefore not by chance that the idea of the linearity of time and history and the teachings of Hegel turned out to be connected: the theory often places Hegel's philosophy of history in the vast range of secularized historical concepts of the West.14 It is no coincidence that the period of formation of traditional art history as a discipline (which is thought of here as influenced by Hegel's ideas) coincides with the formation of historical thinking in a linear time paradigm,15 where the Gregorian calendar is used as a unified time calculation system.16 In traditional art history, no deep elaboration of Hegel's authentic philosophy of time can be

13Cf. Raju, 2003: 45-46. As can be seen later, the old opposition between Christian and Pagan has acquired a new dimension in the context of decolonial studies, where any concept of time that does not belong to the white colonizer turns out to be "Pagan," in the sense of inferior by value.

14 Hegel preserves the most important moments of the "beginning' and "end" of history, but gives them a completely different meaning. In Hegelian history, instead of Christian eschatology as the collapse of "untrue" history, the movement of Spirit in history is understood as its breakthrough to its own Being; the end of history is not the beginning of "true Being," but the ending through Spirit's realization of all its tasks; instead of a personal Christian god— a philosophical god. Cf. Perov & Sergeyev, 1997: 25-27.

15As Karlholm put it, "when history emerged as a collective singular around 1800, as a new conceptual formation— 'history itself' — corresponding to a 'new time' (Neuzeit) a. k. a. modernity, the past was artificially separated from the progressing present, with which Western modernity identified, not least to distance itself from nature and the cultures of the world" (Karlholm, 2018: 15).

16The Western-centricity of the Gregorian calendar is primarily visible in the fact that it counts from the birth of Christ; it claims to be universal through the fact that it counts the revolutions of the Earth around the Sun. The Western-centricity of time calculation does not end there. As Brettkelly-Chalmers writes: "While the 24-hour timescale and the seven-day week derive from the Babylonian sexagesimal system and Gregorian calendar, the global time standard is a relatively recent temporal convention. At the International Meridian Conference of 1884, a quorum of world powers agreed to measure time at the point at which the sun passed the Prime Meridian marker in Greenwich, England, thereby establishing a global standard that united a variety of independent and local timekeeping systems." (Brettkelly-Chalmers, 2019: 21).

found, rather the borrowing of some key ideas from his philosophy of history and art, which will be "pasted" onto simple linear time and the Gregorian calendar. This is evidenced by the favorite way of visualizing the chronology of history in traditional art history books — the timeline—in the form of a single line (no matter how "ornate" and complex), going from past to future and from left to right, on which marks have been made.17 As Walter Kaufmann neatly put it,

Hegel, like Augustine, Lessing, and Kant before him, and Comte, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee after him, believed that history has a pattern and made bold to reveal it (Kaufmann, 1951: 473).

One of the basic principles of Hegel's general philosophy of history, which the history of art borrows, is that

.universal history exhibits the stepwise progression in the development of that principle the content of which is the consciousness of freedom (Hegel, Alvarado, 2011: 51).

In traditional art history, this principle can be seen as connected with the chronological linear calculation of time, a timeline, which resembles a "thread" on which art history strings its "beads": art history unfolds as a chain or a set of parallel chains within one timeline, where each link is somehow connected with the previous and subsequent ones. The evidence of this idea is also present in the idea of the continuity of styles, in tracing the influence of artists from the past and of their works on younger creators. Even technically, in books on the history of art, a single series of works appears as a series of illustrations arranged in a certain order—Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3—which visually supports the concept of a linearly successive history of art.18 In its most radical form, the "collapse" of the history of art

17As has already been said, linearity can be understood in a narrower sense, for example, that a line always implies the moments "to" and "from," and thus the goal. Compare, for example, Zizek's interpretation of the Hegelian historical movement: ".progress is never a linear approximation to some pre-existing goal since every step forward that deserves the name 'progress' implies a radical redefinition of the very universal notion of progress" (Zizek, 2023). In other words, Hegel's visualization of history is more like a spiral of spirals that unfold. Nevertheless, in our interpretation, even such a spiral, which does not have a given goal but constantly grows it from its inner self, is also a line, a self-revealing line.

18For such an example of a timeline, see Gombrich, 2006: 656-663. Even if parallel "threads" with their own "beads" appear somewhere (as if we simultaneously trace the events of the art world in different parts of the world, e.g. ibid.: 656-657), they either eventually merge into a single whole, or all together are actually organized as one big thread (because, for example, in the case of Egypt, we are only interested in its ancient art). Kubler objected

into a single chain unites the historical horizon of various arts, which leads to the fact that the history of art of all countries, peoples and cultures is seen as located in the same temporal dimension of world history— linear and monochronic.

Contemporary art theory criticizes this understanding of universal, unified time and history. The first serious challenge to this vision of time in art history was made in the 1960s by Kubler and Gombrich. Kubler, in his The Shape of Time, instead of a single time chain, proposes a chaotic internal structure, which in its visualization resembles what in mathematics is called "networks or directed graphs" (Kubler, 2008: 123-124^); the points of this polychronic structure have many alternative "predecessors" and "successors." Kubler believed that the task of the historian is "to portray time" ("the shapes of time are the prey we want to capture"; ibid.: 29), and that the simplified "portrait of time" that traditional art history painted was a consequence of the use of biological metaphors of development and growth (ibid.: 11), which are inappropriate in the world of things. Instead, he proposed manifold shapes of time, a new portrait of art history, in which the analysis of the "meaning" of art objects (a legacy he attributed to Kassirer; ibid.: ix) is abandoned, and replaced by looking on the art object as a "historical event" and a hard-won "solution to a certain problem" (ibid.: 30). As K. Wood described it,

The "fallen," like Gombrich and Kubler, are realists about art. The fallen are those who have decided that they were not interested in art in the first place; that their real object of study is image, object, thing, matter, power, flow. Fallen art history accepts that the base, material world is all there is, which does not rule out entertaining the fancy that base material things are alive, or "want" something. [...] Today that unbelief [in the traditional vision of art. — M.-S. Zh.] is commonplace, especially among non-modernists, and so no longer radical (Wood, 2019: 400).

Nowadays, the greatest stream of criticism of linear and monochronic art history comes from postcolonial and decolonial studies, which, in our opinion, is the logical conclusion of Kubler's project and the fight against

to this approach to non-Western cultures, according to which they are treated as one-time, randomly picked "beads" on some part of a monochronic thread. He introduced the concepts of "open sequence" and "arrested sequence" instead of the concept of "important" works of art. For example, he attributed the artistic practices of Australian and African aborigines to the first type of sequences (it doesn't matter whether they are ancient or modern—the distinction is not made in principle), because "their possibilities are still being expanded by living artists"; The second group includes, for example, ancient Greek vases —images of the Hellenic world did not receive a revival in new artistic practices (Kubler, 2008: 31, 99).

the "idol of the timeline"19 — replicated and hegemonic, becoming more than just a tool, something that determines thinking. Monochrony is criticized as a standardized system for conceptualizing the history of the white male colonizer. Linear time in such a system is Christian time, which is to cover the whole world20 (Mark 16:15-16). The position of postcolonial and decolonial researchers will be discussed in detail in the second part.

From the perspective of contemporary theories, the imposition of the concept of linear time goes along with a certain axiologization of temporal concepts: linear time served to consolidate the superiority of a Western man, the Christian, over Others and their ways of conceptualizing time and history. It is no coincidence that it was medieval Christian thought that made an important contribution to the development of the concept of synchronizing the histories of different countries and peoples,21 holding Western European history as a model for this synchronization. This universal history itself was seen as part of a larger divine history—from the creation of the world to the Last Judgment—in the context of which the imposition of Christian time on the Other was seen as the concern of the "big brother-colonizer" about salvation of the Other (which will be discussed in the second part).

The new proposed optics of viewing the temporality of the historical process, which attack the linearity of the historical narrative dominating in recent centuries, can, in the author's opinion, be summarized as heterochronic theories and strategies. They draw attention to the problem of repressed "local temporalities" and alternative understandings of history. From the perspective of postcolonial theorists, this problem is ignored in the colonial optics of history—the time and history of the colonialist coincides with

19Rosenberg, 2018: 60. The concept of an "idol of the timeline" is introduced by D. Rosenberg. He also reconstructs the origins of the visual timeline, noting that in the mid-18th century the timeline was not yet widely understood and required explanation, until Joseph Priestley popularized it in 1765, when he "published a chart representing the lives of famous men by means of lines arrayed chronologically against a scale of 2950 years."

20In this sense, the idea of monochrony can be considered as embedded in the missionary imperative of Christianity: "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned."

21 The history of the timeline begins in the ancient world, but in a form familiar to us it appears in the "Chronicle" of Eusebius of Caesarea (4th century), in which one can discern the first attempt to establish the place of Christianity in world history: "He also planned to synchronize with this central narrative the histories of several other nations that had maintained their own records and had their own conventions of chronology, and that had figured prominently in the history of ancient Israel or the modern church": Rosenberg & Grafton, 2010: 26. A detailed examination of the timeline visualization itself is beyond the scope of this study.

universal history, while in non-Western cultures such monochronic linear time comes into conflict with local tradition and therefore leads, for example, to the fact that in such countries two parallel systems exist: global Western European and local.22 In addition, contemporary theories also criticize the visualization of linear monochrony as timeline: Serres and Latour, for example, propose a "more intuitive" visualization through "a kind of crumpling," a multiple, foldable diversity.23

(2) Universal art history movement. Hegel's philosophy of history implies "that time is self-motivated and that its passage coincides with the workings of the 'Spirit' as it wends its way through the ages" (Karlholm & Moxey, 2018: 1). Hegel's historical concept is teleological, the history has a goal: the movement of the Spirit is the same as its development. Hegel considers the goal of the Spirit its knowledge of itself, which it accumulates in the course of the movement of history:

World history is progress in the consciousness of freedom, a progress which we must recognize in its necessity. [...] the purpose of the spiritual world, and [...] if the final goal of the world, the consciousness of spirit of its own freedom and thereby the reality of its freedom in general, is given. [...]. At the same time, it is freedom in itself which includes within itself the infinite necessity to bring itself to consciousness (for it is, in terms of its concept, knowledge of itself) and thereby to reality: it is itself the goal which it executes, and the only goal of spirit (Hegel, Alvarado, 2011: 17-18; italics — M.-S.Zh.).

Hegel emphasizes that development (and therefore the history) is inherent only to the Spirit, but not to the unspirited or physical world:

The abstract changes which history presents have been long characterized in a general manner, as an advance to something better, more perfect. The changes that take place in nature—how infinitely manifold soever they may be — exhibit only a perpetual cycle; in nature, there occurs "nothing new under the sun," and in this respect the multiform play of its phenomena induces a feeling of

22So, for example, the chronology of India was built following the model of the West: scientists "turned to the standard European historical schema of the ancient, medieval, and modern periods, but with added cultural refinements: Buddhist and Early Hindu (ancient); later Hindu and Islamic (medieval); colonial (modern)" (Mitter, 2018: 67).

23Serres & Latour, Lapidus, 1995: 164. The favorite philosophical proponents of new historical-temporal paradigms, which cannot be discussed in detail within the framework of this article, are the philosophical opponents of linear time—Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze. Increasingly, the attention of the theory is turning to what has been taken out of the timeline: the stratification of historical time and the time of art history is being comprehended, as well as the geographical stratification of temporalities, thanks to which such phenomena as the "Northern Renaissance" or "Asian Art Nouveau" exist.

boredom. Only in those changes which take place on a spiritual foundation does anything new arise. This phenomenon in spirit brought to the fore an entirely different purpose in man than in merely natural things, in which we find always one and the same stable character, to which all change reverts; namely, a real capacity for change, and that for the better — an inclination of perfectibility (Hegel, Alvarado, 2011: 49).

[...] It must be observed at the outset that the phenomenon we investigate, world history, occurs in the domain of spirit. The term "world" includes both physical and psychical nature. Physical nature also meshes with world history, and from the start attention will have to be paid to the fundamental natural relations thus involved. But the spirit, and the course of its development, is what is substantial (ibid.: 15).

The principle of development and progress in the history of art is reflected in the idea of development and change of artistic styles,24 where each is marked by a certain innovation. For Hegel, innovation involves an increase in "consciousness." As Gombrich described it,

What precedes the art of Antiquity is a less conscious stage: Oriental art. Hegel calls this pre-art (Vorkunst) and, following the Neoplatonist Creuzer, he attributes to it a particular form of symbolism which is not yet adequate to the spirit (Gombrich, 1984: 56).

One of the most important consequences of this approach is that the old is in a sense devalued, while "the great masters must be ahead of their time, for if they were not they would not be great masters" (ibid.: 67), and that public opinion "will eventually accept it, recognize it, and make it one of its own prejudices" (Kaufmann, 1951: 479).

The "myth of the future," based on the concept of "progress," reached its apogee at the end of the 19th - the first half of the 20th century;25 this myth, inspired by the ideas of Hegel and Marx, implied that the future could only appear after the present had been rejected ("negate to create": Cuevas-Hewitt, 2021: 178). Artistic theory and artists of the second half of the 20th century sought to free themselves from the paradigm of "killing" their ancestors: as A. Groom described,

24Karlholm & Moxey, 2018: 1: "The founders of art history similarly sketched a developmental history of art, where each period contained the seeds of that which was to come."

25As F. Berardi notes, this myth became "more than an implicit belief: it was a true faith, based on the concept of 'progress'" (Berardi, Bove, 2021: 167-168).

once the twentieth century's fetishization of teleological progress is abandoned, history's time reveals itself as a concoction of chance encounters, arbitrary inclusions, systematic exclusions, parenthetical digressions, abrupt U-turns, inherited anecdotes, half-remembered facts, glossed-over uncertainties and forgotten back-stories (Groom, 2021: 12-13).

However, in the second half of the 20th century, Hegel's ideas appeared in a different context— in the concepts of the "end of art" and "art after philosophy." At the same time, curiously, the ideas of "art after philosophy" are based on the same idea of progress and a kind of "increasing in consciousness": as J. Kosuth argues, art should each time question the nature of art and thereby expand that what art is; the criterion of true art is to be its own not-yet.26 A feature of Hegelian teleology that is important to emphasize is the idea of progress as a single impersonal historical process (cf. Mitter, 2018: 68). The active force of the Hegelian system was no one living in time, but the historical process itself. Also, despite the impersonality of Hegelian progress, it manifests itself as total axiologization of temporal narratives: what seemed progressive, innovative, and modern at a certain point in history was more valuable than what was "lagging behind" at the same point in time.

As with the question of the concept of history in the context of the general history of art, the issue of the method of historical movement naturally faced postcolonial and decolonial studies: some new art "knocked on the door" of the world history of art, and it did not fit into the Western-centric "movement of the Spirit" and into a single monochronic timeline of coherent art development. Through the prism of a single and universal teleological paradigm, colonized culture has traditionally been defined by the colonizer as backward:

post-colonial scholarship diagnosed belatedness as one of the most pervasive forms of discursive violence of colonial contact in the modern period (Roberts, 2018: 82).

For current research, two types of "backwardness" of colonized cultures are of interest:

(a) Their conceptions of time are "backward" in regard to the Western European understanding of chronology and history;

26According to Kosuth's radical conceptualism, "the 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying 'what they added to the conception of art' or what wasn't there before they started" (Kosuth, 1991: 18, 25-26). That is, borrowing Heidegger's vocabulary, we can say that conceptual art is its own not-yet.

(b) The "backwardness" of art in relation to Western European art history.27

The critique of Hegelian art history thus turns into an accusation of the cult of progress and the hegemonization of the understanding of con-temporaneity.28

(3) The principle of selection and recording of world art history. According to Hegel, not all events are equally important parts of world history. Therefore, there is a certain principle of selection of what should be captured in world history as its significant part. Only "world-historic" episodes and "world-historical individuals" fall under Hegel's criterion of significance. According to him, in great historic relations

(in this sphere) are presented those momentous collisions between existing, acknowledged duties, laws, and rights, and those contingencies which are opposed to this system, which injure and even destroy its foundations and existence; which at the same time have content which might seem good, largely advantageous, essential, and necessary. These contingencies become historical; they involve a general principle of a different order than that on which the existence of a people or a state depends. This general principle is a moment of the producing idea, of truth striving and urging towards itself (Hegel, Alvarado, 2011: 27).

The same feature of universality, according to Hegel, should be inherent in historic world personalities—they are those "in whose aims such a general principle lie" (ibid.).

This method of selecting important events and personalities is characteristic of the traditional form of general art history: the classical theoretical model represents art world events as points on a timeline of linear history, placing on it only what is considered significant and consistent with the idea of some important contribution and qualitative novelty of the artistic work or event. It included what had innovative significance for the development of art history according to the colonialist writing it, which is another

27Mitter, 2018: 63: 'Time lag and delayed growth are the two complaints frequently leveled by western art historians and critics against modernisms from outside the West."

28 Probably the most popular strategy in criticizing the teleological concept of history is that it is always in opposition to a huge number of facts and events that remain outside the brackets of this scheme. Elkins (Elkins, 1988: 356) refers to Derrida and his concept of "theoretical fragility" as a feature inherent in texts in which the theoretical apparatus is presented in a very compressed form and abbreviated settings. As Derrida writes, such books "are composed along the same lines: a philosophical and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems in a few pages; one passes next to an exposition of facts. We have a contrast between the theoretical fragility of the reconstructions and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical wealth of information" (Derrida, Spivak, 1974: 28).

subject of criticism of postcolonial and decolonial theory. A special type of axiologization of temporal narrative, associated with the idea of progress, was embodied in connection with religious aspects: for classical colonial logic, "'linear' time represents progress, human freedom, and so on, while 'cyclic' time represents stagnant societies, fatalism, etc." (Raju, 2003: 45-46). Thus, the Other's alternative idea of time received the image of inability to progress as such, and, consequently, the impossibility of being part of a progressive contemporaneity.

However, this "progressive" monochronic narrative can also be seen within one state, including the state of the colonizer himself: one can observe examples of a "time lag" in moving from its center to the periphery, which imposes similar (self)repressive processes more strongly the further one moves away from the center:

Modernism, as well as more recent global contemporary art, carry this legacy

so that art from the periphery is always viewed as trying to "catch up" with the

innovations of the metropolitan center (ibid.: 63-64).29

From all the above, it is clear that the principle of selecting important events and recording the traditional world history of art is predetermined by its linearity and monochrony. As Kubler wrote, the word "style" has become a metaphoric ligne des hauteurs, "the Himalayan range composed of the greatest monuments of all time, the touchstone and standard of artistic value" (Kubler, 2008: 3-4); in other words, in the linear history of art, "peaks" are selected, which, in turn, also compose a line.

As in the previous paragraphs, it is easy to see why the struggle with the traditional way of choosing what to include in the history of art and

what not to can easily turn into a direct struggle with Hegel.

***

To summarize the three questions addressed to traditional art history, the Hegelian and Hegel-inspired answers to them and their criticism, it can be noticed that a common motif everywhere is an accusation of the implementation of discursive violence concerning temporal and historical aspects towards what is not included in the values system of the world

29The author notes that this idea can be traced back to the works of Giorgio Vasari (16th century), where he "raised the issue of temporality when he defined the relationship between center and periphery as dependent not only on spatial but also on temporal factors," right up to the Nobel lecture of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1990), in which he said that he "suffers from a case of delayed time" and that Mexicans "have been expelled from the present."

history concept. This can be generalized as a manifestation of temporal discursive violence.

Temporal aspects of discursive violence first became the subject of analysis in works of Fabian in 1983, in the context of anthropological research (Fabian, 1983: 16),30 where he analyzed ways of conceptualizing the Other. Fabian described the attitude typical of most anthropological research of the i8th-i9th, and even 20th century (ibid.: 21), as a situation in which the anthropologist-colonialist relates himself to the Other being studied as the "modern, advanced" to the "belated and primitive." Fabian noted this situation as "schizogenic use of Time" (ibid.)31: for example, a field researcher, despite being face to face with the object of the study, classifies him/her as belonging to a primitive communal system or using Bronze Age tools. The use of such classifications defining the "development level" of the Other, inevitably places them in the column of the table32, which is the "past" for Western European history. Thus, the explorer-colonizer seems to deny the Other the right to be "peer" or "coeval" in the sense of time ("coevalness sharing the present Time": ibid.: 32), to be part of a common present with the researcher, separating the "contemporaneity" of the Other from the "contemporaneity" of the researcher, which is taken as the standard of "universal contemporaneity." As a result, the Other enters into the "past" due to someone's privileged power to produce narratives, often under the pretext of seemingly neutral classifications (ibid.: 16-17).

Taking the refusal of temporal coevalness and the associated "schizochrony" as a starting point for talking about the discursive violence in the context of time in Hegel-inspired art histories, I will try to consider these situations of

30"In other words, the socio-cultural evolutionists accomplished a major feat of scientific conservatism by saving an older paradigm from what M. Foucault called 'the irruptive violence of time'. [...] the temporal discourse of anthropology as it was formed decisively under the paradigm of evolutionism rested on a conception of Time that was not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spatialized." (Foucault, 1973: 132) Ever since, Fabian argues "anthropology's efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affination of difference as distance."

31 Fabian calls the use of time "schizogenic" if a study uses a concept of time different from those that underlie reports of his discoveries.

32The visuality of the line is disrupted and changes to the visuality of the table when we need to include the Other in the narrative of the general history of art — this is "what M. Foucault calls 'tabular' space, i. e., the kind of taxonomic space that must be postulated if cultural differences are to be conceived as a system of semiological constructs, organized by a logic of oppositions" (Fabian, 1983: 54).

intersection between the critique of Hegelianism in art history and temporal discursive violence.

The first intersection of the critique of Hegelian art history with the manifestation of temporal discursive violence arises in connection with the issue of contemporaneity of the colonizer and the colonized — most obviously and directly related to the original meaning of the Fabian's concept. Here the place of the colonizer is taken by the white man creating the narrative, and the Other is represented by the Fabian's Other and his/her artistic practices. The table in which the colonizer determines the place of the Other is the linear, monochronic and teleological history of art. As a rule, this is a schizochronic situation in which the art of the Other in this table of the world history of art is given a very modest place (if any at all), because he/she does not fall under the Hegelian criteria of "historic events" and "historic personalities."

If, in the case of the refusal of temporal coevalness in Fabian's understanding, one talks about the "belatedness" of the colonized countries in relation to world history, then in relation to the history of art, many artistic practices of the colonized countries do not at all have the status of art for most of Western historiography, and would rather be recognized as works of decorative art or cultural practices in a more diffuse sense. Since the concept of art for a Western researcher implies certain forms, their hierarchy (for example, fine arts and applied arts) and includes the artist's intention to produce art, the artistic practices of the Other can enter traditional world history only as art in the Western sense and more often according to formal characteristics that happen to coincide with the Western idea of art. Traditionally, the art of the Other fell into the column with the designation "primitive," being measured by a Hegelian-type value scale: ideas about style are determined by the chronological position of the author.33

Due to all this, Hegel's philosophy of history, whose influence is being considered, is routinely accused of a colonial, repressive approach to the Other. In the most radical version, Hegel is accused of the concept of "anti-historic peoples" and for the creation of a philosophical method based on

33Cf. Elkins, 1988: 369. A similar case of distribution is found in "an example from art historical practice—the study of Chinese bronzes. [...] When bronzes first attracted the attention of the West in the 1930s, archaeologists and art historians were faced with a radical absence of normal [...] data: [...] their origins were usually unknown; and practically nothing more remains of the civilization that produced them. [...] Therefore, the first researchers proposed a chronology in accordance with their own ideas about the style."

the exclusion of peoples, cultures and races from history;34 therefore, the progress of the World Spirit is seen as "the history of the exclusion of the East by the West" (Boubia, 1997: 417-32). Such practice of "exclusion" correlates with "politics of invisibility" in postcolonial theory. Its manifestation in traditional art history is the practice of excluding the art of many cultures and countries as insignificant. Postcolonial theory in this regard

was concerned to make visible areas, nations, cultures of the world which were notionally acknowledged, technically there, but which in significant other senses were not there, rather like the large letters on a map (Young, 2012: 23).

"Invisibility" is seen as having a certain connection with the homogeneity that colonial thinking strives for. These ideas correspond to the approach of working with history, where the homogeneous is seen as violent. To overcome this type of violence for the general history of art means solving a difficult problem—to be inhomogeneous: universal, but not uniform. Naturally, this solution will be non-monochronous and non-linear, and an alternative principle of significance to the traditional one will be applied.

If one of the strategies of traditional art history in working with the artistic practices of the Other is radical exclusion, then another frequent practice is the refusal of modernity through placement in the "belated" classification section.35 Calling art "primitive," "late" and saying it has "lost its relevance" or not yet "matured," often implies that its viewer has "not matured" for some progressive innovative practices — thus setting them in the position of a child: it is this view of the Other that Fabian characterized as colonial and violent (Fabian, 1983: 61-62). If the denial of the art of the Other is recognized in coevalness as temporal discursive violence, what remains to be found is a means to prevent it.

The most important question here is value criterion — to recognize the coevalness of the Other for the history of art means to recognize their value system, and the "contemporaneity" of their art as relevant to the practice of the Other. The history of art could leave it to other cultures, countries and peoples to determine for themselves what is valuable to them, and thereby make a choice.

^Boubia, 1997: 417-418. The author straightforwardly accuses Hegel of denying Africans any "ethical customs" (Sittlichkeit); moreover, Hegel not only places Africans at the bottom of the hierarchy of human beings, he completely excludes them from the sphere of humanity.

35 For example, Gombrich presents in the same context a prehistoric drawing from the Lascaux cave, ritual artifacts from the 3-5th and 14-19th century (Gombrich, 2006: 41-52).

However, in accepting this way of writing history, one might encounter the risk of creating a lot of Hegelian "bubbles" ("bubbles" are value systems within which a principle of significance similar to the traditional Western one is applied, as well as Hegelian criteria of a historical event and the idea of progress). This problem was noted by Elkins, among others, — he argued that Hegelianism will not be overcome by reducing or splitting the single great into heterogeneous small parts. The "Hegelian wheel" remains in action, even if it is small:

In studies whose subject is not a progression or period but an individual or a particular work, the "Hegelian" wheel may not be dismantled or avoided, but merely shrunk to a tiny version of itself. Instead of large spokes with labels "art," "religion," "customs," there are small spokes, with idiosyncratic labels "beginnings of oil technique," "Catholicism," "fifteenth-century Burgundian courts" (Elkins, 1988: 364).

Another strategy suggested by postcolonial theory for equalizing the Other, understanding them as coeval in the matter of forming a universal history of art and for abolishing the "humiliating act of alienation on the part of the dominant group" is radical elimination of Others as such.36 This means removing this very concept: not just learning to comprehend the Other, but deconstructing the "Othering" (Young, 2012: 36). This need is justified by the fact that

the term "the other" has come to designate both the individual and the group whose unknown, exotic being remains the object of postcolonial desire [...] The concept of the other, in short, simply comprises the modern form of the category of the primitive (ibid.: 38).

Instead, it is proposed to consider only "other people" but not as the colonial Others. However, in my opinion, the same question arises here, tied to the danger of falling into the trap of homogenization again, just on a new level — the risk of destroying the Other's authenticity by denying them their difference.

Regardless of the solution to this dilemma, for an inhomogeneous universal history of art there will need to emerge a new, non-violent type of unity in order to avoid the existence of many unrelated art histories, whose temporal

36 R. Young reminds us that the Other that postcolonial studies speak of should not be confused with the "other" from Hegel's philosophy of consciousness, in which "the other is essentially not the other, but the very means through which the individual becomes aware of himself" (Young, 2012: 37).

concepts and principles of significance will be mutually untranslatable; in other words, to avoid a radical, anarchic polychrony. To paraphrase, in order to assemble a single history of art from different temporalities, it is necessary to provide them with some kind of translation system (which is actually the intuition of a single timeline): as Fabian said, "somehow we must be able to share each other's past in order to be knowingly in each other's present." The problem may also be that

Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time as the others (Bloch, Plaice & Plaice, 1991: 75).

This can be viewed as the Procrustean bed of the new theory. Contemporary theory is quite skeptical about all-encompassing historical concepts or systems: any system is seen as colonialist and as producing temporal discursive violence, so the rejection of Hegel and Hegelianism is seen as a solution to the problem.

However, in my opinion, — and this is the key idea here—it is Hegel's system that offers a huge variety of types of unity, within which the differences of what is united are preserved. In other words, the idea of a universal Hegelian historical dimension can be considered not only as a repressive instrument of homogenization, but also as a solution to the problem. Hegelian universal history can offer the idea of a common temporal dimension as an adjustment of communication: in this perspective it can be seen as including the right goal, but it is actually criticized for the exact realization of constructing this single dimension of communication. Its very existence

seems to be a necessity for the general history of art.

***

At this point in our analysis it becomes clear that the rejection of Hegelian ideas in the construction of a universal history of art is fraught with several problems, or even paradoxes. Some of them arise if postcolonial theory tries to apply its anti-Hegelian arguments to itself, and some arise from the idea of completely abandoning the Hegelian foundations of art history. Developing the argument from the previous paragraph, I will try to present them according to their growing paradox-generating potential.

(i) The paradox of the "primitive": violence through definition. If, in the spirit of Hegelianism, "primitive forms of art" are not introduced into the world history of art, this is, unambiguously, violence. However, their inclusion in the new general history of art may also be seen as violent,

because the very concept of art is Western. In the most radical version, the rejection of a single temporality should lead to the rejection of a single concept of art. And if "primitive" peoples have no such concept as art at all, and their way of conceptualizing their practices does not translate into Western concepts, there is a risk of making a violent reverse move37 in trying to insert their cultural practices into the supposedly advanced and postcolonial history of art?

(ii) The paradox of the "beginning" of art. A similar problem, arising from the previous one, appears in relation to representatives of the "beginning of the history of art," primeval people. To what extent do modern-day people have the right to consider them the "ancestors" of art history? When referring to the past art of all civilizations, cultures and peoples (including our own) as "childhood" or "cradle"— is this not another form of discursive temporal violence which operates within the same Hegelian idea of progress?38 It is obvious that the earliest art was created by people who had no concept of art.39 There arises a paradox: how can one talk about such ancient practices as the "childhood" of art history, if the status of the historical phenomenon of the first work of art calls into question the status of subsequent works of art?40 It turns out that at the very beginning of the traditional theory of

37What is meant here is precisely the untranslatability of practices, not implying that the absence of the concept of art is bad. The problem of untranslatability is not identical to the problem of "epistemic violence"— a form of violence in which the knowledge of a certain society is erased because mutual communication is disrupted due to ignorance. G. Ch. Spivak noted that "to ignore or invade the subaltern today is, willy-nilly, to continue the imperialist project; in the name of modernization, in the interest of globalization [...]. All speaking [subalterns], even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception" (Spivak, 1988: 51).

3s Cf. Davies, 1993: 328-329. Since the construction of an art history timeline always comes from the "now" of the researcher, it tends to construct its beginning and end. In the concept of linear-successive history of art, the phenomenon of the first work of art—what lies under the "fig. 1" in almost any illustrated book on art history. On the one hand, "Fig. 1" also implies "2," "3," etc., which confirms the idea of art as a series of continuity, repetition and variation. However, on the other hand, the presence of "Fig. 1" also speaks of the presence of a first work of art that is irreducibly primary, original or emergent.

39For an argument in favor of this thesis, see Davies, 2015: 375. About the ancients the author writes that they "almost certainly did not possess the concept. In one sense they did not know what they were making. They could not bring their activities and artifacts under the relevant concept." Also, the author notes that in the works "ethologists, paleoarchaeologists, evolutionary psychologists, and the like" he found "only one person who claims we cannot know if these paintings are art, namely, Whitney Davis (1986)." Such statements confirm that the problem of the "first work" is problematic and undeveloped by researchers.

40The so-called problem of "recursive definitions of art" (when something is recognized as art in relation to previous art) is also noted by researchers: ibid.: 376.

art, something directly contradicting it breaks through — the anti-historical.

(iii) The paradox of "other people" from the "small periphery." In an attempt to completely reject the other as the Fabian's Other, and to assume that there are only other people (in the sense suggested at Young, 2012: 38), research falls into a rather strange situation as far as art is concerned. If the denial of temporal coevalness to the Other as a representative of the "big" periphery is recognized as temporal discursive violence, then the next place of attention will be the "small" periphery. It should be noted that the general history of art for the most part is concentrated not just on the art history of the colonial countries (these consist of the history of art from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, before which primarily the "great" ancient, Mesopotamian, Egyptian artistic achievements are included), but on the artistic achievements taking place in the largest cultural centers, capital cities, locations of iconic art schools, etc. Weaker art schools often existed on the periphery of states; trends reached them later, and they had the status of imitators rather than innovators. Thus, the general history of art is just as ruthless in refusing a place in history to "lagging" works of art of its own periphery.

This situation is almost identical to the one Fabian described. Artists of the "small periphery" are considered "belated," "lagging behind" the actual art of their time. For example, despite the timeline of art styles, workshops of obsolete styles keep working for a long time, but are usually considered third-rate—these names are not included in condensed art history books. If working within the terminological framework outlined in the first part of this study, then research is dealing with another form of temporal discursive violence, along the center-periphery axis.

The problem of including local schools and artistic practices in the general narrative of art history faces a principle of significance, which, as has already been noted, traditionally has a Hegelian form (whether talking about the general history of art, or some kind of "bubble"— for example, the art of Native Australians will still be forced to somehow choose the "best and the most meaningful" of what they have). If, in order to avoid temporal discursive violence, one abandons the principle of significance altogether, they may fall into the problem of value relativism.41 Any mechanism for preventing such

41Wood, 2019: 11. "Since 1800 [...] the modern paradigm of art history: intercontinental, ecumenical, nonpartisan. Relativism expanded the canon, revealing that great art has been made in all times and places. [...] For a long time, to prefer or even grudgingly admire the art of little-understood cultures, such as India or Africa, was for the European (as for the Chinese, for that matter) unthinkable. But those obstacles fell away, and relativism of historical form —

total relativism (majority opinion, expert opinion, traditions...) can easily be considered a covert version of the well-known colonialist arrogance.

If in the previous paragraph we could include the works of "primitive" cultures in the general history of art, then we could still focus on the local value system and include something significant. If we recognize the very scale of values as a form of temporal discursive violence—even within one culture, explaining what is actual and advanced and what is backward and secondary— then the question arises about values as such: whether it is possible to apply a value hierarchy to at least some group of works or artists? Without it, all the ideas of "genius," "innovator," "good art," "kitsch," etc. will disappear into the colonial past.

Thierry de Duve writes about a possible solution to this problem, introducing the concept of "glocality," similar to the Hegel-style "suspending" of the opposition of the local and the global. This is the idea of finding a compromise—not to lose the local, but not to be cut off from the global:

We have a responsibility in drawing a line between the things we judge as deserving the name of art and the things sheltering under the name of art as if under an umbrella. This entails that it is our aesthetic judgement, expressed liminally by the sentence "this is art," that draws the line and makes the difference (I am not saying accounts for the difference) between works of art and mere cultural goods. Works of art are the outcome of aesthetic judgements —the artist's, in the first place, then ours, members of the art community—whereas cultural goods are not, or not necessarily. Granted that glocal citizenship can be construed as the present-day version of cosmopolitanism, the question, then, where the art community is concerned, is how to conceive of aesthetic cosmopolitanism (De Duve, 2007: 684).

This interesting idea leads to a point that will be elaborated on in the conclusion: that the possible source of solutions to problems lies within Hegel's philosophy itself.

(iv) The catalog paradox: big data instead of art history. If any hierarchiza-tion of creative practices is considered on the basis of their "contemporaneity," "relevance," "outdatedness," and "primitiveness" as discursive violence, and for this reason different artistic and creative practices are seen as equal in their representation in universal history, then in this way any unified

though not relativism of artistic value itself— became the principle of the Musée du Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Under the modern, relativist paradigm of art history, artworks of lesser quality are not discarded. But they are segregated." The author claims that the differences between paintings in one museum and applied arts items in another lie in their "artistic quality." But if they are simply in different museums, we still need to choose which of them to contribute to the history of art.

hierarchy of art forms, styles, genres, production methods can be cancelled. If the axiology of the concept of "traditional creativity" is removed from the art of colonizing countries, and this "traditionality" is not considered as something inherent in the "past," but included as an equally important part of the contemporaneity of the art world, then the big question arises: will this be the denial of coevalness to practices of colonialist countries whose characteristics coincide with those of decorative and applied art of the natives, but are not included in the narrative of art? If two objects of the same type produced at the same or different times in different parts of the world—a pair of outwardly similar works of art by a colonialist and a colonized creator — are classified in the world history of art as art and non-art, is this a denial of coevalness, i. e. discursive violence? In my opinion, from the point of view of the concept of discursive violence, this can be calculated as a denial of recognition from its "contemporaneity." Should a line even be drawn between art and what is called creativity, creative arts, and other cultural practices?42

In all such cases, history will be replaced by a catalog, "a list with an unnamed purpose." Elkins gives an interesting example of what art history might look like without "Hegelianism": the list "of Chinese bronzes in the possession of the Emperor Hui Tsung," whose "catalog, completed in 1111 A. d., each represents a vessel by a line drawing and records its dimensions, capacity, weight, and description" (Elkins, 1988: 374-375). In his words, in this catalog we observe a complete absence of not only the principles of hierarchization and systematization, but a complete absence of a synthetic.

In its most radical form, the difference between collections of objects made by man and the history of art disappears (cf. Kubler, 2008: 1). And in the 21st century, we could call Elkins' "catalog without a goal and a principle of synthesis"— big data. This is an extreme case of the absence of theory and

a grotesque example of the absolute realm of temporal discursive nonviolence.

***

A general history of art must be different from big data, and this cannot be done unless something is taken away from the totality of what all the people in the world have done. Some type of reduction is needed.

42Cf. Wood, 2019: 16-18. Local ideas of art also imply local criteria of value. In this case, the art historian can only accept them, and not evaluate them himself. Wood refers to this as all attempts "to attribute timelessness to art, even unsuccessful ones."

One can agree with Wood that modern theory has adopted simple relativism as the only viable strategy against all the problems that Hegelian art history brings (Wood, 2019: 42-44). In practice, this means less and less "blame" and an expansion of the sphere of "praise" (which was previously limited to the classical ancient world and the resulting history of Western art, but now easily covers the Bronze Age, Africa and everything else that was previously ignored). On a philosophical plane, this relativism manifests itself as a rejection of the central significance of form; the history of art has ceased to be a "biography of forms" (ibid.: 380). Because of this, there are calls to preserve one or another element of Hegelianism or Hegel-inspired tradition. Kubler proposed retaining the category of meaning (cf. ibid.: 397). Elkins believed that "Hegelianism" should be preserved, because without it there would be no art history at all, but some other discipline; without Hegelianism, art history would collapse under the weight of the inconsistency of its own presuppositions (Elkins, 1988: 377-378). Gombrich proposed to retain the "religious element" from Hegel's philosophy, since almost all great art was religious:

The historian of the art of our century has to study Hegel much as a student of the ecclesiastical art of the Middle Ages must get to know the Bible (Gombrich, 1984: 68).

In contrast to all these approaches, I believe—and I have tried to show this throughout the study— that (a) the problem with Hegelianism in the history of art translates into the problem of temporal discursive violence, however, (b) this problem is not solved neither by relativization, nor by rejection of Hegel, nor by selective preservation of his principles. As research has shown, without the three principles that underlie traditional art history and which were listed at the beginning of the text (linearity, the principle of significance and monochrony), there is no universal history of art.

In my opinion, criticism of these principles as Hegelian confuses Hegel's means and ends. Hegel's means were crude, but his goal was quite different: to direct minds to the universality of the human Spirit and the history of its self-creation through human creativity. Therefore, the three underlying principles should be modified, turning them into means of communication, through their careful purification of what has been designated as temporal discursive violence. A new linearity, a new principle of significance and a new monochrony should become a means of mutual translation of the unique languages of art of different civilizations throughout history, without

artificial and humiliating relativization, both external and internal, and without isolating them into their own "bubbles."

In other words, the conclusion serves to point out the reasons why the discourse of art history and its philosophical foundations should reconsider the role of Hegel in its own self-formation, and that the problems that postand decolonial scholars rightly point out will not be solved by completely abandoning Hegel. The points of this analysis can be summarized as follows: o Three characteristics of traditional art history (linearity, the principle of significance and monochrony) are of Hegelian origin, but in practice they have become simply Hegel-inspired and have "forgotten" important features of their original, and this has given rise to much notional and conceptual confusion. Hegel has turned into a "centaur at the edge of the forest": "linearity" is interpreted as the opposition to "cyclicality," opponents of "linearity" are everyone whose philosophy of time is not Hegelian and are considered "opponents of linear time," etc., according to the increasing number of misunderstandings. o Through critique of the Hegel-inspired features of traditional art history, Hegel personally came to be seen as the originator of the white colonialist attitude that placed vast swathes of non-Western creativity outside the general history of art. o The proposed non-Hegelian solutions often retain the fundamental

features of Hegelian art history. o This paper's proposed idea is to look for the connection between the Hegelian roots of traditional art history and the idea of discursive violence, which gave rise to the concept of temporal discursive violence, through which the Other is denied coevalness and considered backward. A detailed analysis of temporal discursive violence showed that the origin of its problems go far beyond those depicted by post- and de-colonial studies, and that, at the very end, it faces the much broader question of the very axiology of art. o The rejection of Hegel leads to a paradox and the rejection of any axiology.

o The principle of significance I have proposed may be seen as the most fundamental Hegelian feature of traditional art history (despite being often overlooked). It is this feature of Hegel's and Hegelian general history of art that can save a new, non-collateral history of art from the 4 paradoxes that have been described.

o The answer to the question "why is something included in traditional art history" was Hegel-inspired (these were different ideas of ligne des hauteurs, described above43), but not Hegelian. The practice found in the literature of treating any principle of importance as bad leads to the transformation of art history into big data. o The best solution to this problem is to return to Hegel himself. What is new in this work is that I find his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History" to be even more important for this task than his "Lectures on Aesthetics"— as was demonstrated in my research.

To have such a founder (or father of the discipline, as Gombrich called him) like Hegel is an honor and a kind of luck for the general history of art. Today, when civilizational and artistic horizons have expanded, one can return to the origins of the discipline and find a way to look for ideas for creating "one, but not homogeneous," "glocal but not Western-centric" in the huge diversity of thought structures of the founding father. Hegel is a philosopher of expanding horizons, seeing all the spiritual efforts of humanity as a single whole.44

In addition to the fact that Hegel's philosophy has enormous potential to expand the methodology of the traditional general history of art in its eventual liberation from the legacies of colonialism and Western-centrism without sacrificing the idea of "great" and "good" art, it has a huge and as yet little explored potential to serve as a starting point to expand another horizon — the analysis of new forms of art that appeared in the 20th century. The very ideas of abstract and conceptual art, for example, combine surprisingly well with Hegel's ideas that art should "depart" from "objectivity" and be a manifestation of the Idea (through the work of the Spirit), in which its material "carrier" is only a moment along the way to new forms of life of the Spirit.45

43These hauteurs were themselves sometimes focused on formal qualities (novelty, "consciousness," etc.), and sometimes were a disguised form of arrogance on the part of the white colonizer.

44It is just as pointless to criticize, for example, Aristotle, for a calm attitude towards slavery because for our civilization he comprehended the idea of freedom, which ultimately became the reason for the rejection of slavery. We find similar ideas even among Hegel's critics: "Hegel was not a prisoner of the limits of understanding of his time, of the less-evolved mental capacities associated with that epoch, as some of his admirers, who want to defend his World Spirit, thought him to be" (Boubia, 1997: 430).

45 The idea of Hegel as the herald of the "end" of (traditional) art has been discussed a lot (cf. e.g. the landmark study Danto, 2004 and consequent discussion in Houlgate, 2013), but

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Майя-София Жуматина

стажер-исследователь

Научно-учебная лаборатория трансцендентальной философии

студентка магистратуры

Факультет гуманитарных наук, Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики» (Москва); оясго: 0000-0002-1516-621х

Кентавр на опушке леса

ГЕГЕЛЬЯНСКАЯ ИСТОРИЯ ИСКУССТВА И ТЕМПОРАЛЬНОЕ ДИСКУРСИВНОЕ НАСИЛИЕ

Получено: 16.10.2023. Рецензировано: 24.11.2023. Принято: 04.12.2022.

Аннотация: Исследование посвящено одной из самых актуальных тем искусствоведческой теории и философии искусства— поиску принципов построения всемирной истории искусства, которая не была бы западоцентричной. Поскольку на возникновение всеобщей истории искусства как дисциплины повлияла философская система Гегеля, попытки построить новую историю искусства—от первых трудов в 1960-х до современных деколони-альных исследований—сосредоточены на деконструкции разных аспектов ее гегельянских основ. В самом радикальном виде Гегель видится причиной формирования взгляда «белого колониста» на историю искусства «Других» культур, которым приписывается примитивность, отсталость или вовсе отказывается в месте в истории. В этом исследовании анализируются три идеи, лежащие в основе традиционной истории искусства (линейность, принцип значимости и монохрония), а также три философских вопроса, определяющих вид такой истории (какая концепция истории выбирается, как понимается принцип движения через историю и по какому принципу отбираются записи истории искусства). Мы рассмотрим, как эти идеи и вопросы связаны с философией Гегеля и как

множество их практических интерпретаций в разной степени отходят от первоисточника. Все они связаны тем, что предполагают определенную философию истории и времени. Чтобы пересмотреть критику гегельянства, мы предлагаем проанализировать ее через понятие темпорального дискурсивного насилия. Последнее мы конструируем через применение антропологической концепции отказа Другому в «ровесности» (coevalness) на контекст временных отношений в истории искусства. Будет показано, что отказ от гегельянских принципов приводит к большому ряду парадоксальных ситуаций, в которых история искусства превращается в бессодержательный каталог или даже в big data. Мы попробуем показать, что (а) проблема с гегельянством в истории искусства переводима на проблему темпорального дискурсивного насилия, но что, однако, (б) эту проблему не решают ни релятивизация, ни отказ от Гегеля, ни выборочное сохранение его принципов. Ключевые слова: история искусства, философия времени, Гегель, дискурсивное насилие, таймлайн, монохрония, ровесность, постколониальные исследования. DOI: 10.17323/2587-8719-2023-4-143-172.