Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/58

50 assumptions were appropriate to a period throughout which scientific knowledge was experienced as akin to astronomy: as "viewing" a fixed and given universe. They were appropriate to that kind of materialism in which, as Marx puts it,


 * things, reality, the sensible world, are conceived only in the form of objects of observation, but not as human sense activity, not as practical activity, not subjectively.

It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that it became impossible any longer to ignore the fact that the objective world was not fixed but fluid, and that science and technology were transforming beyond recognition the world in which man lived. It was only then that this process of transformation—previously something which had taken place only piecemeal, and like a natural process independent of anyone's will—began to be experienced as something which "We", the entire human race, were actively doing.

This new "subjective" experience of the world percolated by obscure routes into the realm of art, turning the premises of Renaissance painting upside-down. To begin with, it was merely a matter of a new "subjectivist" sensibility—a new emphasis on the active role of the eyes, ears and senses in any experience of the world. For the French Impressionists, it was not what the subject "was" that mattered-not how it corresponded with a fixed mental stereotype—but how its colours, shapes and texture were experienced by the eye. To Van Gogh, a poor wicker chair was a thing of extraordinary beauty. Like all the Impressionists, he refused to paint "important subjects". The manner of seeing the object took primacy over the "importance" of the object itself. The activity of the painter—the dynamic movement of the brush-strokes and the activity of the eye in following them—became as important as (and in a sense inseparable from) the life of the world he portrayed. The invisible window had dissolved.