It would be considered an absurdity to leave it to practical law to divide up capital equally. Yet jouissance is divided up in this manner as a way to administer death in increments, as a way to ward off and manage the catastrophic kind that would kill you all at once. One of the results of practical law in relation to the management of already existing privations can be illustrated via Seurat’s method in Bathers at Asnieres in terms of its effect. Critic Craig Raine suggests the work is just less than sufficient in conveying transcendence in its subjects:Bathers at Asnieres is the suburban scene in a trance of torpor. Its figures are not spiritually naked but nearer a banal vacancy. Seurat evokes the idea of epiphany, a transfiguration of the ordinary, then settles for a mildly hedonistic vapidity. (Writers on Artists 200) Did the painter Seurat expect variety to emerge from a methodology of sameness? Or does his method point precisely to this lack? It’s doubtful something elusive about humanity as it is lived could be discovered via the aggregate collection of rigid identity markers such as class e.g., a working class. Yet, perhaps in spite of itself the all-at-once lifting effect of the work in its finality therefore also is a denial of that aspect of practical law which advances the method of thrift as a poverty management device, an acquired middle-class virtue that Banerjii discerned as at work in his Bengali village circa mid-1920s. There, a sleight of hand was necessary to shift the discourse from poverty to an adjacent position where it no longer collapsed under its own weight of self-awareness (of misery) and in this way there is a possibility to lift oneself out of one’s subjection (to poverty linked death). While privation cannot be redeemed later in every circumstance, it can be presently managed where a system of management is a historical response to earlier privations concentrated rather than distributed more evenly, therefore more or less catastrophic outwardly. The issue could also be with a narrowly conceived subjectivity in itself, where that fault is expressed other than in suffering. Individual satisfaction with private consumption is what’s intolerable, even if you’re being ironic. Negative characterizations of personal enjoyment as vapid, banal, outwardly ridiculous, and so on, give expression to this underlying rejection. If the standard interpretation of the work is to be consistent with the artist’s depiction of his subjects’ productive use of leisure time to elevate themselves via contemplative activity, any epiphanic moment resulting therefrom does not render the scene more grandiose outwardly. Yet, such a reading merely continues rather than surmounts the practice of disciplining the body discursively. ‘Inwardly’ felt epiphanic states, particularly those that can’t be communicated through speech, looks ‘outwardly’ like vapidity, a sensuous stupidity on one level. The reading parallels the conclusion of excessive passivity in victims only and not the victors, therefore it ceases to become a question of fortune. Practical law distributes death as but an ‘army of death.’ Pointillism gathers through painstaking labor the divided up little deaths in which the reassembly post-division reveals a vacuous state. By now we’ve progressed to individual character. Where laborers are advised to relinquish their past privations, this is in exchange for what? Nothing. The nothing is supposed to give lift. Yet there must be something said for guilty pleasure that mimics, mocks, or else instructs unconscious passive reception. This could be why Rainier locates Seurat’s greatness in the discovery that great art is not necessarily synonymous with beauty. “There is love and there is sex. There are other, less obvious satisfactions. Think how powerful the idea of obscenity is,” he says. Foucault asked what else might be done with qualitative limitations. Against universality, this could be building activity that constructs another governing principle.Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2018 Shumi Ferguson