The time of the real: paradigms of realism in the history of ‘Modernity’

Abstract

At various times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, realism became the most important imperative of “modernity”. The real, like a ghost, keeps coming back in different conceptual guises and under different names. Reality/actuality became not only the subject of reflection but also a principle, a criterion, a value, a key argument. Hence the polemical variation of the concept: “most realistic” versus “realistic”, “real” art versus “realism”, “real” versus “reality”, etc. Today in philosophy, political thought, ethics, and aesthetics we again observe a tense reflection on the real. But this reflection often lacks historicism. And working with the real through the optics of intellectual history is highly problematic, exposing the risks of this approach itself. The task of the paper is to raise a number of questions, not obvious in the author’s view, from an integral historical perspective. What are we facing – a concept (semantic feld) or an ideological complex? When we talk about the realisms of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-frst centuries, are we talking about the development of the same paradigm? What is the identity/homology of the search for reality in different felds of thought and artistic practice? Is there a principle that allows us to construct a typology of historical forms of thinking about reality? What role does research distance play in the reflection of these forms, since often one realism acts as a theory in relation to another? Is it possible to construct a periodization of realist formations of “modernity” by declaring modernity an “age of the real”? What role in the fate of realism is played by the ruptures of historical tradition and the reinterpretation of previous legacies?