Philosopher and artist, Quebecer Hervé Fischer worked for decades on his monumental sociology of colors before deciding to submit the table of contents of his book proposal to the NRF collection of Gallimard editions in Paris, one of the most prestigious in the world. . Its director, historian Pierre Nora, was interested and wanted to read more. His secretary raised the scarlet flag upon seeing the size of the Fischer file.
“Pierre Nora told me the number himself: it was 3,755,512 characters. He therefore went back on his promise, explains the author. He asked me to cut in half. It was impossible for me. I had worked my whole life on this. I therefore restructured the text to publish it in two volumes at Gallimard: the first deals with the sociological codification of colors; the other of their irreducible irrationality. »
The first essay titled The colors of the West. From prehistory to the XXIe century, published in 2019, offers a socio-historical analysis of the systems and chromatic codes of Western societies. It follows the slow, long and very complex transformations of the modes of control of colored language by religious, political and economic powers. An example: Catholics speak of the canon of colors to describe the choices associated with liturgical times: white at Christmas and Easter, red for Passion Sunday and Good Friday, purple and pink for Advent and Lent, green on ordinary days…
“When the Reformation was activated against the colors of the clergy and the aristocracy, it imposed black, the refusal of the sumptuous side by an assumed achromatism, explains the specialist. The bourgeoisie adopted this reformed position. A notable, a judge or a credible merchant does not dress up like a dandy, does not choose colorful socks like Justin Trudeau. There is therefore always a link between the transformations of these signs and social developments. »
The second part of the scholarly investigation that spans millennia at a leisurely pace now appears under the title Mythanalysis of color. It deals with the irrationality of the chromatic world linked to founding myths and social imaginations. Powers want to reduce this colorful universe to codified and sanctioned systems while underground forces celebrate chromatic freedom in shamanism, chromotherapy, poetry, arts, revolts and countless manifestations of subjectivity.
“Colour operates in tension between the rational and the irrational,” sums up Mr. Fischer. It is moreover because it is a dangerous irrational that society codes it and makes it an integrating language. The irrational subsists and resists. We don’t understand the irrational, of course, but I wanted to map it, again according to different times and societies. »
Everything is done with dizzying erudition, including the explanation of color schemes or the discussion of scientific theories of light. “When Newton splits color, he makes geometry unacceptable to Christianity, which sees in transparent light the image of God. Goethe will say that the colors are not in the light, but in the eye and that, if you rub your eye, they show themselves. The inventor of the Polaroid will rather say that it is not in the eye, but in the brain. I say that the color depends on the stories, the myths of a given society. This means that white can be the symbol of virginity in the West and of mourning in China. »
A brainy artist
Hervé Fischer was met last week at his home in Old Montreal, in his apartment filled with books and works of art (often his own paintings). His life has always oscillated between practice and theory, between painting and philosophy. He was trained in France in the 1960s and was marked by the Situationists. He taught the sociology of art at the Sorbonne in particular because he could not earn his living with art.
“I fought with this Aristotelian labeling all my life, and it’s not over: even today, I have difficulty doing work with the two hemispheres, says the young octogenarian who still piles up the books and the paintings in his apartment. It’s never been very easy because when you’re an artist you’re a bad intellectual and when you’re an intellectual you’re a bad artist. »
His career proves otherwise. The Center Georges-Pompidou in Paris devoted an exhibition to him in 2017. He held a chair in digital technology at Concordia University, and Gallimard continues to consecrate the intellectual at the moment.
“My reflection on colors began around 1970 when I came into contact with Durkheim’s ideas on suicide,” explains the former professor. He shows that the suicide rate of a society depends on its degree of organic integration: there are fewer suicides in times of war than in times of peace; fewer suicides in Jewish families than in Catholics; etc I told myself that I could do similar work on colors by sociologizing them. They seem subjective and elusive. Everyone cares about their personality and expresses it with their make-up or their clothes. But as a sociologist, you discover a strictly coded language in all the societies of the world. »
The comparison with the works of the medievalist Michel Pastoureau on different colors becomes inevitable. “I pay homage to him in both books. I read it a lot. He is in an impressive fragmentary erudition. But Pastoureau himself says that one cannot make a sociology of color. He thinks it is impossible to have a global theory. I claim this possibility. I picked up his stones and I built a building to say that there are chromatic structures as there are social structures. The colors work as a system. »
The recoding of the world
Recent times have developed a subjectivity of color partly under the influence of individualism and psychoanalysis. This is an exception in the history of human societies, and the parenthesis even seems to be closing. Capitalism is indeed responsible for imposing a globalized code. The chromatic range of automobiles is compressed into metallic grey.
“It tells us that society is in the process of restructuring, that the exception is disappearing, says the sociologist. We still think we live in the paradise of subjective individualism and we still enjoy it so much but, without our being aware of it, society is controlling us again. We are not yet in the Chinese system, but the restructuring is necessarily developing. The trend tells us that we will find ourselves in the situations that have prevailed for millennia, when the chromatic language was a language of integration and control. »
So what ? “And so, that worries me. Color also remains a space of freedom, of energy. In an increasingly tagged and controlled society, it is fundamental to have a space that is incompatible with mathematical rationalization. »
The great demonstration leads to a contribution to the sociology of knowledge. Ideologies therefore make the colors, and the next book will look at how social myths influence other more or less colorful real or conceptual objects. Another Fischer file of a few hundred thousand characters…