Ornament and Order

Author: Jacques Soulillou Year: 2006 (Intimus printing; original: "Ornament and Order," trans. Mark Heffernan, in Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos, eds. Bernie Miller & Melony Ward, YYZ Books, Toronto, 2002, pp. 87–99; © Jacques Soulillou, reprinted by permission of YYZ Books of Canada) Source type: chapter (the Intimus: Interior Design Reader selection, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 313–322) Raw file: raw/chapters/soulillou-2006-ornament-and-order.md

Summary

Soulillou's philosophical reflection on the "crisis of ornament" argues that ornament is not decoration added to a pre-existing order but the medium through which order appears — "as one says that something appears in the light" — while simultaneously being "essentially chaos" that undermines the very order it illuminates: the history of their relation is "permanent combat." Order appears in ornament through a "ground plan (or original matrix)" of double polarization — the transversal male/female opposition and the vertical superior/inferior hierarchy — so that ornament encodes sex and power ("sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan"), and the ornamental economy (kosméō: to adorn is to produce order) is a "general economy" of symbolic expense in which excess, judged legitimate or illegitimate by status, is a requisite condition of order's endurance. Against this stands the decorative: "that which escapes the encoding that order practices on ornament, a kind of wild outgrowth that order seems unable to tame" — ornament's "eternal double," whose spectral logic endlessly displaces and re-divides the founding oppositions (man/woman, free/not-free, atticism/orientalism). The essay's historical claim is that the nineteenth-century "detour of rationality" — the reformers' and modernists' rational re-founding of ornament, reaching its apogee in the modernist movement "with which one was to associate design" — was a doomed "coup d'état" (no rationality could found ornament, "which was anti-rational in its essence"), whose actual operation was to stigmatize as "decorative" whatever opposed a new ornamental order: the decorative is thus "the invisible mark of the crisis of ornament," and design's rationality claim (the Mies armchair "more 'rational' than a Bergère Louis XVI") is the illusion that keeps opening Pandora's box.

A note on the editors' headnote: the headnote states that Soulillou "proposes that ornament is necessary for order's appearance but does not itself have an ordering function," while the essay's opening states the opposite of the negative — ornament "has an ordering function… in the sense of allowing the order to appear" — and the middle of the essay introduces a secondary ordering function working through abundance, affectation and rarity. The text's actual position is two-level: ornament has an ordering function, but not "in the obvious sense, as in the grid format of wallpaper or a carpet"; the headnote flattens this structure. This source note follows the text, not the headnote.

Key Claims

Ornament's ordering function is not the imposition of order on pre-existing chaos: "Not in the sense of putting a room back in order, for that would assume that order exists before ornament. If ornament has an ordering function, it is in the sense of allowing the order to appear, as one says that something appears in the light" (pp. 313–314). Ornament is the medium of order's appearance, not order's instrument.
The metaphysical hierarchy inverted: ornament is primary "not in the naive chronological sense, but because it does not superimpose itself on a pre-existing order, as accident on essence in traditional metaphysics. It might rather be order that is viewed as accident in relation to ornament" (pp. 313–314). Order, not ornament, is the accident.
Ornament is polymorphous and inherently anarchic: it assumes "a polymorphous appearance, without hierarchy, without order, insofar as everything is potential material for decorating – flowers, bone, rock, glass, metal, plastic, paper, etc. – and… these forms are infinite in number" (pp. 313–314). Everything is potential ornament; ornament has no intrinsic order.
Ornament is order's double agent: "If order requires ornament in order to appear, this ally may just as well turn out to be its most dangerous enemy. For ornament is essentially chaos that threatens to subvert order if the latter does not pay attention" (pp. 313–314). The order that appears through ornament is "at once lit up and flooded from all sides by the ornament's powerful illumination, at the heart of which order looks like an island of precarious stability" (pp. 313–314).
The grid as containment: "One of the formal means of preventing ornamental display from degenerating into chaos is by containing it in a more or less defined grid system (grille ou maillage)" (p. 315). Minimalism laid bare this formal substratum: "The absence (le vide) of the ornament is not nothing, it is the grid" (p. 315) — the abolition of ornament reveals ornament's skeleton.
Symmetry and repetition are power's modalities, not ornament's necessities: "To reveal itself, ornament has no need of symmetry and repetition, which form specific modalities of appearance, related to power in accordance with the double orientation of rationality and economy. Order, through the ornament, gives itself an air of symmetry and repetition. This signifies simply that it takes the path of least resistance, consistent with the objectives of power" (p. 315). When ornament is reduced to its formal properties, order has already been "surreptitiously introduced."
Two ordering functions: the primary function lets order appear; a secondary ordering function works not through grids but "through abundance, affectation, rarity" — fashion is its exemplary art ("the ordering function does not depend on the materials themselves, but in how they are used"), and its common effect is distinction: "the distinction of pure otherness as embodied by the famous photograph… showing a Melanesian man wearing a Kellogg's box by way of finery, or hierarchical distinction" (p. 315).
Authority is the convergence's precondition: "The convergence of the primary and secondary ordering functions, as can be observed in interior and exterior architecture, presupposes the constraint of an authority, primarily that of the sponsor" (p. 315). Architecture's ornament is sponsor-ordered before it is anything else.
The ground plan: "The appearance of order in ornament is produced according to what I would call a ground plan (or original matrix), traversed by a double polarization: transversal in one respect, as in the male/female opposition, and vertical in another, as in the superior/inferior opposition" (p. 315) — "sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan," and "order initially appears through that feature of the ground plan where the sexual relation is intersected by the power relation" (p. 315).
The traditional ornamental scheme: "from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women; from upper to lower, with hierarchy, ornaments for the prince, the nobles, free men in general, and the slaves" (p. 316) — the transversal axis unordered (sex) and the vertical axis hierarchized (power), both legible in who wears what ornament.
The decorative defined: "The decorative constitutes that which escapes the encoding that order practices on ornament, a kind of wild outgrowth that order seems unable to tame" (p. 316). The decorative is not a subspecies of ornament but ornament's escapee — the wiki's strongest theoretical definition of the concept.
Ornament's sociality: Kant's desert island is the limit case — confronted with "neither the inter-sexual differentiation, nor the intra-sexual differentiation of hierarchy," the castaway has no ornament at all. "To ornament there must be two. Ornament is born under the gaze of another, as a flower blossoms under the light. It is the mark of socialization" (p. 316). Ornament is relational before it is aesthetic.
The ornament appropriates the individual, not the reverse: the mark should be taken "in the sense of something impressed (imprinted) on the flesh because, for epochs past, it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but, on the contrary, the ornament that appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order" (p. 316) — which "explains why ornamentation has so often been inseparable from cruelty."
Ornament as memory-making (Nietzsche): "By means of a practice which is sometimes extremely cruel – of which our 'body piercing' is a distant ancestor, leaving ineradicable marks on the body – ornament has played a central role in the creation of memory" (p. 316), the marked acquiring "access to social individuation and desire (desire for the Other)".
Beauty is mediated by order: "The ornament is beautiful, even as mutilation, if it registers one in an order with implicit or explicit laws" (p. 316) — the link between ornament and beauty "is intelligible only through the mediation of order," and the proof is the equivalence of registrants: "the woman of ancient China whose feet have been bound, the middle-class person who hangs a Warhol print in his living room, the Western man of the seventeenth and eighteenth cent[uries]" (p. 316).
Cosmetics as economy of order: "Kosméō in ancient Greek means 'I adorn,' 'I decorate,' and in doing so I produce order… And all this happens at the same time: not just decorate, then order, or order then decorate, but decoder if I may so put it" (p. 316). Adorning and ordering are one act — and the expense is governed by "a symbolic rationality, in keeping with the status of the person," a "general economy" against the "economy of restraint" (pp. 316–317).
The courtly warrant (Elias): "A high social circle obliges a member to own a house and ensure it is beautiful. Although bourgeois morality sees this as nothing but waste… it is in reality an expression of the ethos of lords" (Norbert Elias, La Société de Cour, quoted p. 317). Ornamental expense that bourgeois morality calls waste is status-reproduction.
Permanent combat: "Order can never ultimately establish itself because ornament works to undermine it. The history of relations between order and ornament is one of permanent combat, of constant eruptions" (p. 317). Order must perpetually re-found itself through "the double movement of election and exclusion… to reaffirm certain divisions, certain hierarchies judged indispensable to its perpetuation" (p. 317).
The free/not-free genealogy of the decorative: from Plato's Gorgias (dress vs gymnastics under the theory of flattery) through eleutheros — the free man whose "exterior appearance and the ornamentation that goes with it" cannot be dissociated from his status ("In Hegelian terms one might say that the appearance is the essence") — to the liberal/mechanical arts split that produces "the arts (sometimes called 'noble')" against "the applied arts, also called decorative"; Kant's "art is that which is realized through freedom… carries in itself the age-old opposition between the free and the non-free" (pp. 317–318). See free-and-not-free.
The decorative oscillates between both poles: in Kant the pure decorative gravitates to the free (beauty "not subject to the demands of a concept"); for Gleizes, Metzinger and Léger the decorative (art "subject to a specific space") is drawn to the not-free; Ruskin read medieval artisans' ornaments as "imprints of a free man" against the Greeks' perfection that "betrays a servile origin," while Worringer read abstract ornament as enslavement and Greek realism as freedom — constructions Soulillou names "veritable fantasies" (p. 318).
The oppositions displace themselves endlessly: status and sex oppositions undergo "a new displacement caused by the territorial opposition noted in rhetoric between atticism (Western) and the orientalism characterized by ornamental abundance, excess of show – in short, bad taste" (p. 319). Two logics result: "the logic of ornament… serves to establish oppositions (man/woman, free/not-free, appropriate/inappropriate, etc.), whereas the logic of the decorative serves to displace and endlessly re-divide them, by intercalating additional terms" (p. 319).
Modernity replays the structure: the post-war Abstract Expressionism/School of Paris polemic is unintelligible except through the same play — "Abstract Expressionism proclaiming itself as the pole of virility in opposition to the decorative mannerism of the School of Paris, the new West in relation to a decadent, effeminate orientalism" (p. 319).
The ground plan's modern distortion is asymmetrical: with the decline of the aristocracy, the free/not-free opposition "gradually lost its meaning" — but "the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes (the sartorial image of nineteenth-century man seems, on the contrary, to go one better in the abandonment of showy ornamentation)" (p. 319). Sex persists as an ornamental ordering axis after class-dress dissolves.
Reason as the new tool of re-founding: "For the first time the rationality of the ornament was asserted outside all consideration of 'class.' Thus it was no longer said that ornamentation admired by workers was in bad taste because it was of an inferior class, but because it was not 'rational'" (p. 319) — the "detour of rationality" emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century and reaching "its apogee in the modernist architectural movement, with which one was to associate design" (pp. 319–320).
The coup d'état thesis: "This is the coup d'état attempted by the reformers of the applied arts and the architects after them. For in effect, this movement, which took as its object the totality of the visible, first belonged to these 'minor' arts. But the coup d'état was doomed to failure, because what these upholders of the new pretended to forget was that no rationality could found ornament, which was anti-rational in its essence. On the other hand, despite its chaotic character, ornament could be exploited by rationality to establish its will to power" (p. 320). Design reform is the minor arts' failed seizure of the totality of the visible — rationalized as will to power.
The decorative as eternal double: "the decorative appears as the eternal double of ornament, which the latter agrees at regular intervals to denounce, to prevent it from threatening order" (p. 320); "Like a phantom, the decorative always walks in the tracks of ornament, which it doubles and ends up blurring. From which comes ornament's call to order: 'Down with the decorative!'" (p. 320). The betrayal is structural: "In facilitating the appearance of order, ornament simultaneously betrays it, by failing to prevent the proliferation of the decorative along the very trails it had opened" (p. 320).
The spectral logic and the excess paradox: when the hierarchies anchoring the ground plan fail (Europe, eighteenth–nineteenth centuries; "the idea of propriety… gradually emptied of all meaning"), a "spectral" logic of the decorative emerges, doubling the logic of the visible. Its classic form is "the denouncement of the excessive use of ornament" — yet "the denunciation is paradoxical inasmuch as… the excess is a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure"; within the general economy "nothing appears to be excessive" — expense is judged legitimate or illegitimate by status (Ruskin, Gombrich and Elias: in the religious context "there were never enough ornaments… to pay homage to the divinity"; "magnificent" originally meant largesse of expense, not beauty). "The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert is one of the last great Western texts to recall this – at the very moment it had run its course" (p. 321). See ornamental-excess.
The decorative's invisibility: examining the reformers' artifacts, "although supported by rationality, they are no less weighted with ornament than those that they put on trial" (pp. 321–322). "I never verify visually the rationality of the reformer's discourse. I simply observe two different orders of ornament, one of which calls the other too decorative. This 'too decorative' does not refer to a set of visually verifiable signs, but to an internal organization of the discourse, consigning to the decorative whatever opposes it in its hegemonic strategy" (p. 322). The decorative is a discursive operation, not a visual property.
The crisis named: "The decorative is the invisible mark of the crisis of ornament, which results from the loss of authority of an order whose 'justice' does not depend on rationality to make its views prevail" (p. 322).
Design's continuing illusion: "when rationality claims to dictate the rules of ornament and it turns out it lacks the means – the illusion that design still upholds, for those who believe that the armchair of Mies van der Rohe is more 'rational' than a Bergère Louis XVI – the Pandora's box of the decorative is opened" (p. 322).

Connections

Concepts: architectural-ornament (ornament re-theorized as order's medium and order's enemy) · the-decorative (the page's strongest theoretical definition: what escapes order's encoding; the eternal double; the spectral logic; the invisible mark) · ornamental-ground-plan (the source's central analytic device: the double polarization of sex and power) · ornamental-excess (the general economy of ornamental expense; kosméō; the excess paradox) · free-and-not-free (eleutheros and the genealogy of the decorative arts' subordination) · call-to-order ("Down with the decorative!"; the denunciation of excess; the debate's own reflexive mechanism) · ornament vs purity (the debate the essay re-frames as permanent combat between order and ornament) · dual-symbolic-classification (left/right and upper/lower as ornament's encoding axes) · gendered-space (the transversal axis: "from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women") · gender-and-the-interior (the man/woman opposition that outlasted the ground plan's collapse) · woman-as-decoration (foot-binding, make-up, and the woman as order's registered ornament) · corporeal-inscription (the mark "impressed (imprinted) on the flesh"; ornament that appropriates the individual) · fashion (the secondary ordering function: abundance, affectation, rarity; distinction) · gaze ("Ornament is born under the gaze of another") · otherness ("the distinction of pure otherness," the Kellogg's box) · repetition (symmetry and repetition as modalities of appearance related to power) · proportion (the grid; symmetry as order's "air," the path of least resistance) · separate-spheres (the sartorial sex opposition that survived modernity's distortions) · symbolism (ornament as the mark assigning "a place in a social or cosmic order"; symbolic yield) · semiotics (encoding; "too decorative" as discourse-internal rather than visually verifiable) · power ("sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan"; strategies of power; will to power) · memory (ornament's central role in the creation of memory) · the-double (the decorative as ornament's "eternal double," the phantom) · taste (bad taste as orientalism; the reformers of taste; "too decorative") · beauty ("The ornament is beautiful, even as mutilation, if it registers one in an order") · aesthetic-judgment (Kant's free beauty vs the beautiful of buildings; judgement carrying the free/not-free opposition) · modernism (the rational re-founding's apogee; the Mies armchair illusion) · modernity (the socio-economic distortion of the ground plan) · white-cube (minimalism: "The absence of the ornament is not nothing, it is the grid") · spacing (the decorative's logic as "the very spacing between these pairs of opposites") · design-reform (the coup d'état; the reformers' artifacts "no less weighted with ornament") · ornament-vs-purity (debate) · universalism-vs-relativism (debate: is the free/not-free horizon Western thought's own?) · interior-design-vs-architecture (debate: the liberal/mechanical arts ancestry of the noble/applied split)

Authors: Jacques Soulillou — the author · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors framing the selection · Immanuel Kant — the desert island; the pure decorative at the pole of the free; art realized through freedom · Friedrich Nietzsche — the creation of memory through cruel ornamental practice (The Genealogy of Morals) · Plato — the Gorgias flattery-passage (kolakeia; dress as pernicious substitute for gymnastics) · G. W. F. Hegel — "In Hegelian terms one might say that the appearance is the essence" · E. H. Gombrich — with Ruskin and Elias, on excess without meaning in the religious context. Cited without pages (see log): John Ruskin, Wilhelm Worringer, Norbert Elias (La Société de Cour), Gleizes & Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Quintilian (Institio Oratoria VIII), Cicero (The Orator XXIII), Mies van der Rohe, Diderot & D'Alembert (Encyclopédie), Antiphôn.

Debates: Ornament vs. Purity — the essay's seventeenth position: ornament as the medium of order's appearance and the terrain of permanent combat; the denunciation of ornament/excess as a call to order tied to power positions; the rational re-founding (design reform → modernism) as failed coup d'état · Universalism vs. Relativism — the closing question whether the free/not-free horizon "belongs specifically to Western thought – an idea determined by metaphysics – or… is an horizon encompassing all understanding of ornament" (p. 318) · Interior Design vs. Architecture — the liberal/mechanical arts genealogy as the discipline split's deepest (class-and-slavery) layer.

Related source notes: Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the sibling selection: Drobnick's essay also originated in Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos (YYZ Books, 2002), the Loos-shadow anthology from which both Intimus selections are drawn · Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the editors' suppression thesis ("the identification of the female body with the domestic and with the decorative"), which Soulillou's ground plan theorizes from the anthropology side · A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the natural/applied convention as one art-historical instance of the "two different orders of ornament" Soulillou theorizes · Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — Le Corbusier's Rappel à l'ordre ("the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments") as a textbook call to order; the Purist drift "from art to mere decoration" as the stigmatizing operation in action · Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the woman as registered ornament (the ground plan's transversal axis in its industrial-age form) · The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the right/left and top/bottom oppositions Soulillou's ground plan deploys for ornament · Rethinking Histories (Rice 2004/2006) — the bourgeois interior's nineteenth-century emergence as exactly the period Soulillou dates for the ground plan's unraveling and the "detour of rationality" · The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006), Repose in Decoration (Dresser 1876/2006) and Suitability (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the reformers of taste whose discourse Soulillou's coup d'état thesis names, and whose "rational" artifacts he observes to be "no less weighted with ornament than those that they put on trial".

Direct Quotes

"Essayist and art theoretician Jacques Soulillou offers a philosophical reflection on the crisis of ornament and fear of excess, suggesting that ornament has an ordering function. To this extent he proposes that ornament is necessary for order's appearance but does not itself have an ordering function, whereas the decorative is that which escapes or opposes the ordering system, indicating loss of an order's authority." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 313)

"Central to Soulillou's thinking is the shift from ornament as visual elaboration to understanding it as a catalyst of cultural upheaval and perpetual reordering." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 313)

"What is the purpose of ornament? Above all, it has an ordering function. Not in the sense of putting a room back in order, for that would assume that order exists before ornament. If ornament has an ordering function, it is in the sense of allowing the order to appear, as one says that something appears in the light." (pp. 313–314)

"Ornament is primary not in the naive chronological sense, but because it does not superimpose itself on a pre-existing order, as accident on essence in traditional metaphysics. It might rather be order that is viewed as accident in relation to ornament." (pp. 313–314)

"Among ornament's salient properties is a tendency to assume a polymorphous appearance, without hierarchy, without order, insofar as everything is potential material for decorating – flowers, bone, rock, glass, metal, plastic, paper, etc. – and that these forms are infinite in number." (pp. 313–314)

"If order requires ornament in order to appear, this ally may just as well turn out to be its most dangerous enemy. For ornament is essentially chaos that threatens to subvert order if the latter does not pay attention. With respect to ornament, order will always have to be on guard, so to speak." (pp. 313–314)

"the order that appears through ornament is at once lit up and flooded from all sides by the ornament's powerful illumination, at the heart of which order looks like an island of precarious stability." (pp. 313–314)

"One of the formal means of preventing ornamental display from degenerating into chaos is by containing it in a more or less defined grid system (grille ou maillage). Without such a system, which we often notice implicitly in ornamental display – in particular on the superficies – the display would run off in all directions." (p. 315)

"In twentieth-century art, which has done much to eliminate all ornament, minimalism laid bare this formal substratum like no other movement before it. The absence (le vide) of the ornament is not nothing, it is the grid." (p. 315)

"To reveal itself, ornament has no need of symmetry and repetition, which form specific modalities of appearance, related to power in accordance with the double orientation of rationality and economy. Order, through the ornament, gives itself an air of symmetry and repetition. This signifies simply that it takes the path of least resistance, consistent with the objectives of power." (p. 315)

"With the emergence of order in the ornament, it does not follow that the ornament has an ordering function in the obvious sense, as in the grid format of wallpaper or a carpet. The appearance can maintain its chaotic, disordered, anarchic character, even while forming a favourable context for the purposes of the ordering function." (p. 315)

"More than any other art form, fashion exemplifies this connection whereby the ordering function does not depend on the materials themselves, but in how they are used. The most common effect aimed at by this secondary ordering function could be characterized as distinction: the distinction of pure otherness as embodied by the famous photograph taken at the beginning of the twentieth century, showing a Melanesian man wearing a Kellogg's box by way of finery, or hierarchical distinction." (p. 315)

"So it is not by means of systematic presentation, in a grid for example, that the ordering function is realized, but rather through abundance, affectation, rarity. The convergence of the primary and secondary ordering functions, as can be observed in interior and exterior architecture, presupposes the constraint of an authority, primarily that of the sponsor." (p. 315)

"The appearance of order in ornament is produced according to what I would call a ground plan (or original matrix), traversed by a double polarization: transversal in one respect, as in the male/female opposition, and vertical in another, as in the superior/inferior opposition." (p. 315)

"Expressed another way, sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan. Or, if one prefers: order initially appears through that feature of the ground plan where the sexual relation is intersected by the power relation." (p. 315)

"In traditional societies ornament is revealed according to this plan: from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women; from upper to lower, with hierarchy, ornaments for the prince, the nobles, free men in general, and the slaves. Every anthropologist knows that, in this plan, order is anything but decorative." (p. 316)

"The decorative constitutes that which escapes the encoding that order practices on ornament, a kind of wild outgrowth that order seems unable to tame." (p. 316)

"Thus Kant was justified in saying that a man abandoned on a desert island would not enjoy the pleasures of ornamentation. Why would he decorate a building or adorn himself, in a solipsistic situation where he is confronted with neither the inter-sexual differentiation, nor the intra-sexual differentiation of hierarchy?" (p. 316)

"To ornament there must be two. Ornament is born under the gaze of another, as a flower blossoms under the light. It is the mark of socialization." (p. 316)

"This word 'mark' should be taken in the sense of something impressed (imprinted) on the flesh because, for epochs past, it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but, on the contrary, the ornament that appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order." (p. 316)

"By means of a practice which is sometimes extremely cruel – of which our 'body piercing' is a distant ancestor, leaving ineradicable marks on the body – ornament has played a central role in the creation of memory. The performers of these 'ornamental' mutilations and deformations were able to find beauty in them. They were willing to be marked on their flesh by them, to ensure access to social individuation and desire (desire for the Other)." (p. 316)

"This shows how the link between ornament and beauty, which seems self-evident, is intelligible only through the mediation of order. The ornament is beautiful, even as mutilation, if it registers one in an order with implicit or explicit laws." (p. 316)

"Cosmetics are an economy of order, administering the ornamental costs to produce a symbolic yield. Kosméō in ancient Greek means 'I adorn,' 'I decorate,' and in doing so I produce order, I reproduce an order in initiating the appropriate expenses to honour a certain situation or figure. And all this happens at the same time: not just decorate, then order, or order then decorate, but decoder if I may so put it." (p. 316)

"As an economy of order, cosmetics are a general economy in which the level of expense is set according to a symbolic rationality, in keeping with the status of the person." (pp. 316–317)

"'A high social circle,' says Norbert Elias in La Société de Cour, 'obliges a member to own a house and ensure it is beautiful. Although bourgeois morality sees this as nothing but waste ("If he's going to fall into debt, why doesn't he lower his standard of living?"), it is in reality an expression of the ethos of lords.'" (p. 317)

"Order can never ultimately establish itself because ornament works to undermine it. The history of relations between order and ornament is one of permanent combat, of constant eruptions. Order is obliged to not only re-found but also to re-establish the rules of hierarchy, to proceed to exclusions, to affirm precedents." (p. 317)

"This permanent re-founding of order, behind which loom the stakes of power, results in the double movement of election and exclusion; it aims, through ornament, to reaffirm certain divisions, certain hierarchies judged indispensable to its perpetuation." (p. 317)

"When Socrates says that dress (kommô = to decorate, which we could compare with kosméô) is a pernicious substitute for gymnastics, he is simply contrasting the natural with the artificial, or perversion with integrity, illustrating an opposition that, from ancient society to the beginning of modern times, is of fundamental significance: the opposition between a free man (eleutheros) and he who is not." (p. 317)

"The character of he who is free cannot be dissociated in Greek language and thought from the exterior appearance and the ornamentation that goes with it. In Hegelian terms one might say that the appearance is the essence; there is no appearance which could conceal or contradict the essence." (p. 317)

"In the West, an entire genealogy is expressed in this opposition between the free and the not-free in the visual field. To begin with, there is the basic opposition between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts, the development of which produces the opposition between the arts (sometimes called 'noble') and the applied arts, also called decorative." (pp. 317–318)

"And when Kant says that art is that which is realized through freedom, this declaration – apparently exempt from all social considerations – carries in itself the age-old opposition between the free and the non-free." (p. 318)

"In fact, if the opposition between the free and the non-free is a fundamental given of Western aesthetic judgement, the decorative will come to occupy the pole of both the free and the non-free." (p. 318)

"For Ruskin, the ornaments produced by the artisans of the Middle Ages are beautiful because one can decipher in them the imprints of a free man. These imprints can no longer be discerned in the ornamental production of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, or Romans – a production that, in its very perfection, betrays a servile origin." (p. 318)

"These constructions of Ruskin and Wörringer form veritable fantasies, raising fundamental questions which we can here only pose: Can one imagine the decorative outside the horizon which delineates the opposition of free and not-free? And this horizon itself, does it belong specifically to Western thought – an idea determined by metaphysics – or is it, on the contrary, an horizon encompassing all understanding of ornament?" (p. 318)

"Book VIII of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria thus established an opposition between strong and pure ornamentation, which is said to go well with the orator's discourse (and the orator is always a man …), and that which is attached 'to the effeminate refinements' and 'the deceiving effects of make-up.'" (p. 318)

"these oppositions of status (free man/not-free) and sex experience a new displacement caused by the territorial opposition noted in rhetoric between atticism (Western) and the orientalism characterized by ornamental abundance, excess of show – in short, bad taste." (p. 319)

"One could say that the logic of ornament, as the illuminated space at the heart of which order appears, serves to establish oppositions (man/woman, free/not-free, appropriate/inappropriate, etc.), whereas the logic of the decorative serves to displace and endlessly re-divide them, by intercalating additional terms." (p. 319)

"These ancient debates are not foreign to the debate about modernity. Even the post-war polemic opposing Abstract Expressionism to what was called the School of Paris cannot be understood except in reference to this play of oppositions that we have just evoked: Abstract Expressionism proclaiming itself as the pole of virility in opposition to the decorative mannerism of the School of Paris, the new West in relation to a decadent, effeminate orientalism." (p. 319)

"Although the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes (the sartorial image of nineteenth-century man seems, on the contrary, to go one better in the abandonment of showy ornamentation), the opposition between free man and not-free gradually lost its meaning." (p. 319)

"Reason was one of the new tools to be promoted in this context. It was new not only with respect to order, but in the way it was used to justify the precedence of a certain type of ornamentation. For the first time the rationality of the ornament was asserted outside all consideration of 'class.' Thus it was no longer said that ornamentation admired by workers was in bad taste because it was of an inferior class, but because it was not 'rational.'" (p. 319)

"As a result, there occurred a detour of rationality, which gradually emerged in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. It reached its apogee in the modernist architectural movement, with which one was to associate design." (pp. 319–320)

"This is the coup d'état attempted by the reformers of the applied arts and the architects after them. For in effect, this movement, which took as its object the totality of the visible, first belonged to these 'minor' arts. But the coup d'état was doomed to failure, because what these upholders of the new pretended to forget was that no rationality could found ornament, which was anti-rational in its essence. On the other hand, despite its chaotic character, ornament could be exploited by rationality to establish its will to power." (p. 320)

"First, in conformity with the double movement of selection and exclusion that accompanies the continuous re-founding of order, the decorative is situated on the side of that which is an object of exclusion: dress and rhetoric in the Gorgias for example. From this perspective the decorative appears as the eternal double of ornament, which the latter agrees at regular intervals to denounce, to prevent it from threatening order." (p. 320)

"Like a phantom, the decorative always walks in the tracks of ornament, which it doubles and ends up blurring. From which comes ornament's call to order: 'Down with the decorative!' In facilitating the appearance of order, ornament simultaneously betrays it, by failing to prevent the proliferation of the decorative along the very trails it had opened through these fundamental oppositions." (p. 320)

"Historically, with respect to Europe, the need for a call to order was felt most urgently in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hierarchies, which appeared to guarantee the stability of the ground plan, were no longer tenable, and leaks began to appear almost everywhere, especially in the idea of propriety, which was gradually emptied of all meaning." (p. 321)

"The spectral logic of the decorative emerges when the logic of the ordering function of the visible is no longer able to halt the re-dividing of the founding oppositions, endlessly displacing them. One of the classic calls to order that sanctions this displacement is the denouncement of the excessive use of ornament. Each time this denunciation appears in ancient or modern texts this call to order involves positions of power." (p. 321)

"The denunciation is paradoxical inasmuch as we know that, from the point of view of the general economy, the excess is a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure. It would be pointless for order to appear in the ornament if it had to deprive itself of the possibilities of excess, which is why the ornamental expense is exclusively thought of in terms of legitimate or illegitimate, in keeping with a certain status." (p. 321)

"Ruskin, Gombrich and many others, including Norbert Elias, have clearly shown that excess does not have any meaning – except perhaps a blasphemous one! – in the religious context, and that there were never enough ornaments, neither in quality nor quantity, to pay homage to the divinity (the original meaning of 'magnificent' does not refer to beauty, but to the largesse of the expense)." (p. 321)

"From the viewpoint of the logic of ornament, the evaluation of excess only makes sense in relation to the general economy, according to which it acquires legitimacy, predicated on the worth of the consignee or the sponsor. In other words, nothing appears to be excessive." (p. 321)

"The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert is one of the last great Western texts to recall this – at the very moment it had run its course." (p. 321)

"What strikes us when we examine the ornamental artifacts of the reformers of taste in the applied arts of the nineteenth century is that, although supported by rationality, they are no less weighted with ornament than those that they put on trial." (pp. 321–322)

"I never verify visually the rationality of the reformer's discourse. I simply observe two different orders of ornament, one of which calls the other too decorative. This 'too decorative' does not refer to a set of visually verifiable signs, but to an internal organization of the discourse, consigning to the decorative whatever opposes it in its hegemonic strategy." (p. 322)

"The decorative is the invisible mark of the crisis of ornament, which results from the loss of authority of an order whose 'justice' does not depend on rationality to make its views prevail." (p. 322)

"Thus when rationality claims to dictate the rules of ornament and it turns out it lacks the means – the illusion that design still upholds, for those who believe that the armchair of Mies van der Rohe is more 'rational' than a Bergère Louis XVI – the Pandora's box of the decorative is opened." (p. 322)

Open Questions

The two-level ordering function vs the headnote. The text holds that ornament has an ordering function — but not "in the obvious sense" (pp. 313–315): a primary function (allowing order to appear) and a secondary one (realized "through abundance, affectation, rarity"). The headnote's claim that Soulillou "proposes that ornament is necessary for order's appearance but does not itself have an ordering function" flattens this into a single negative. Is the headnote summarizing a different part of the French original, or misreading the two-level structure — and does the distinction (appearance-function vs obvious/grid function) matter for how the wiki's ornament pages treat the "ordering" claim?
Bataille's unnamed presence. "Cosmetics are a general economy in which the level of expense is set according to a symbolic rationality" (pp. 316–317); "the excess is a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure" (p. 321); the contrast with "the economy of restraint in which the expense is incurred in function of an economic rationality" (pp. 316–317). "General economy" and "restricted economy" are Georges Bataille's terms — but Bataille is nowhere named in the text. Is Soulillou's ornamental economy Bataille's part maudite at the scale of the room, and what would the wiki's capitalism and consumerism clusters make of an economy where "nothing appears to be excessive" (p. 321)?
The Kellogg's box photograph. "The famous photograph taken at the beginning of the twentieth century, showing a Melanesian man wearing a Kellogg's box by way of finery" (p. 315) — unattributed in the text. Can it be identified (photographer, date, colonial context), and does its colonial provenance complicate the "distinction of pure otherness" reading — who is the otherness for?
The asymmetrical survival of the ground plan. The free/not-free axis "gradually lost its meaning" while "the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes" (p. 319). If the ground plan's vertical axis dissolved but its transversal axis persisted (the nineteenth-century man's abandonment of showy ornament "goes one better"), is the modern interior's gender coding the residue of a collapsed hierarchy — and does separate-spheres' "instability" thesis describe the transversal axis's afterlife?
The Western horizon. "Can one imagine the decorative outside the horizon which delineates the opposition of free and not-free? And this horizon itself, does it belong specifically to Western thought – an idea determined by metaphysics – or is it, on the contrary, an horizon encompassing all understanding of ornament?" (p. 318). The essay poses but does not answer: is the ornamental encoding of status and sex a human universal (the anthropologists' dual classification) or a Western metaphysical artifact? See universalism-vs-relativism.
The "decoder" neologism. "not just decorate, then order, or order then decorate, but decoder if I may so put it" (p. 316) — is this a translation artifact (the French original's pun on décorer/décoder?) or a deliberate coinage for the simultaneity of adorning and ordering? The essay's French original would settle it.
The falsifiability test. "I never verify visually the rationality of the reformer's discourse" (p. 322). If "too decorative" is discourse-internal and unverifiable, what would count as evidence against Soulillou's own thesis — is the argument self-sealing, and does that matter for its use as a critical tool (cf. Batchelor's self-blinding paradox on the wiki's white-cube analysis)?
The grid thesis against the purity regime. If "The absence (le vide) of the ornament is not nothing, it is the grid" (p. 315), then minimalism and the white interior are not ornament's abolition but its formal substratum laid bare — does this reframe the wiki's white-cube, whiteness and sterility material as ornament's concentration rather than its absence, and does design's "rationality" (the Mies armchair "more 'rational' than a Bergère Louis XVI") survive as anything but the illusion Soulillou names?