STATEMENT 1
Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.
STATEMENT 2
Art is not science. The aesthetic effect is not an effect of knowledge. However, as differentiating realization and denunciation of ideology, art is closer to science than to ideology. It produces the imaginary reality of that which science appropriates in its real reality.
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STATEMENT 3
We must conceive of the aesthetic process not as a redoubling but as a reversal [retournement]. If ideology produces an imaginary reflection of reality, then the aesthetic effect produces in return [en retour] ideology as imaginary reality. We might say that art repeats in the real the ideological repetition of this real. Nevertheless this reversal does not produce the real; it realizes its reflection.
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STATEMENT 4
What the aesthetic process transforms is differentially homogeneous to that which does the transforming. The ‘raw material’ of aesthetic production is already in itself aesthetically produced. The history of art thus possesses a regional autonomy. But this history by no means corresponds to the history of creators or their works. It is the theory of the formation and deformation of aesthetic generalities.
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STATEMENT 5
By ‘aesthetic mode of production’, we understand the combination of factors whose effect is to operate the reversal. To operate the reversal means to give an ideological function to certain real-imaginary elements that are regionally produced by a historically determined state of the aesthetic process.
STATEMENT 6
To be more precise: an aesthetic mode of production is an invariant and invisible structure that distributes ways of linking real elements in such a way that these elements can function as ideological.
STATEMENT 7
An aesthetic mode of production is manifested in a double articulation:
• that which assembles the operators of transformation (presence-effect).
• that which concerns elements transformed by the place prescribed to them by the operators (effect of signification).
But the structural reality of the mode of production lies in the mechanism by which the first ‘encounter’ the second. Indeed, the operators are nowhere given other than in the elements, since the structure as such is invisible. There is thus a vectoral, or oriented, reality to the process of production: one can figure it as a ‘field’ in which are distinguished two hierarchical regions. One is the region of the operators, the other the region of the thematic elements. But the operators are themselves thematic so that their presence in the structured field is simply given as the encounter, or double function, with the characteristic asymmetry that makes it such that the first function renders possible the second, according to a rule (the visible i) that is the structure itself.
STATEMENT 8
The theory of an aesthetic mode of production supposes:
I) The definition of its elementary articulation.
II) The synchronic law of its effect (production of a new reality as ideological).
III) The diachronic law of the conditions for the conservation of its efficacy. (A real element that is ‘ideologized’ indeed risks henceforth becoming ideologically repeated, that is, non-transformed. In that case, it remains undoubtedly ideological, but the process that integrates it into ‘the work of art’ is itself ideological and not aesthetic. Or again, within the aesthetic process itself, the ideological element functions as such on its own).
STATEMENT 9
The complete intelligibility of an aesthetic mode of production presupposes that one conceives of its genealogy, that is to say, the process of the dissolution of the mode, anterior or contemporary to it, whose elements are rearticulated in the mode under investigation. (The Age of the Poets)