Seuratâs Warp and Weft: the Facture of Images and the Fabric of Society

Daniel Smyth

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Chapter 13 Seuratâs Warp and Weft: the Facture of Images and the Fabric of Society

In: Philosophical Engagements with Modernity: The Legacy of Robert B. Pippin

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Daniel Smyth

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 227â252

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004737204-014

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Abstract

The conspicuous, âbrokenâ brushstroke of Manet and high Impressionism announces the spontaneity and autonomy of the artist. The depictions of modern life that emerge from those broken brushstrokes, by contrast, interrogate aspects of urban bourgeois society that threaten the sovereignty and authenticity expressed by the artistâs hand. Thus runs a prominent story about nineteenth-century avant-garde painting. I argue that Seuratâs pointillist technique replaces this ideal of autonomous authenticity with a model of âlateral agency.â Seuratâs points are not dots but stitches in a âpatient tapestry.â They are not sites of self-assertion but indices of self-effacement: testaments to a mode of activity that is skilled and adaptive but impersonal and unreflective. Seuratâs hieratic, absent-minded, and typologized figures are similarly engaged in a kind of agential drift. The modern person, Seurat suggests, is not an authentic, self-determining individual but a coalescence of generic social forces that he enacts without authoring.

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Philosophical Engagements with Modernity: The Legacy of Robert B. Pippin

Series:Â New Research in the History of Western Philosophy, Volume: 16

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004737204

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 Apr 2026

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - General
  - 19th & 20th Century Philosophy

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Chapter 13 Seuratâs Warp and Weft: the Facture of Images and the Fabric of Society

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Philosophical Engagements with Modernity: The Legacy of Robert B. Pippin

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Chapter 13 Seuratâs Warp and Weft: the Facture of Images and the Fabric of Society