10PROLOGUErecognize themselves immortalized in paintings. Renaissance realism
was therefore defined by an erotic appeal shaped by socioeconomic and
political forces. But most importantly, and despite appearances, realism
has never equated to transparency, nor to objectivity—it has always
been in one way or another an ideologically charged aesthetic tool
designed to awaken the senses, trick the mind, attract attention, cause
wonder, and narrate. Its overlaps with opticality are transitory—they
come and go through the intersections of different histories of visibility
and phenomenology.
But during the nineteenth century realism became a more complex
agent. That which had been used to essentially please the gaze turned into
an abrasive tool charged with renewed political values. The invention of
photography in 1826, and its uncontainable popularity that followed
the release of the daguerreotype in 1839, gave way to new ontologies of
realism for the modern age. Photography freed representation from the
rhetorical burdens of exclusivity that dominated painting, thus expand-
ing the scope of representation itself. Simultaneously, the French Realist
movement tampered with the classical canon by elevating the struggles
of the working classes within the dramatic upheaval of the industrial
revolution to the level of historical and religious representation. New
registers of realism thus emerged from the heightened interest in op-
ticality and the political criticality these new conceptions of reality in-
scribed. In this context, the realism of the mixed materiality of the Little
Dancer embodies more than eroticism in its denunciation of a social ac-
tuality that involves not gods and heroes from the past but vulnerable
groups who lived in specific socioeconomic milieus.
However, it is important to notice that no form of realism, not even the
kinds that rely on material challenges to unravel new semantic structures,
can reach, in Hegel’s words, “a reality that lies beyond immediate sensa-
tion and the objects we see everyday.”^13 What Degas’s material register of
realism effectively entails is a speculative dimension gesturing toward the
possibility of surpassing the traditional constraints of human perception
and enabling a political kind of agency to emerge from the encounter
with works of art. It is therefore not much of a surprise, given the impor-
tance it plays in our conception of reality and in our ability to co-form
reality along with the other co-agents, that today realism is again central
to contemporary artistic and philosophical debates alike.