When we study the art of the past, it should be with an awareness as to how it questions us, how it removes us from our received assumptions; and this as opposed to appointing it to a premature ‘Universality’. Exemplary here are Hegel’s meditations on aesthetics.
Take his comments on the Greek theatrical mask. The mask functions to suppress character and make the actor the pure instrument of speech. In Greece the actor is no more than a ‘vitalised statue.’ ‘Character’ is not what we want to hear in the speech, we want, rather, to hear language. As Hegel puts it “words had full poetic rights”. Thus: the suppression of the actor as a means of sur-charging the voice> voice as disembodied power, de-subjectified and therefore not ‘borrowing’ its authority from that of the 'individual' in which it resides and from which it emanates.
As well as making us hear language, the mask also helps to isolate specific affects. The mask liberates affects and dispositions from the entanglement of a ‘who’. In other words, when we see an attitude, a pathetic feature embodied in an individual empirical person it is contaminated by the ‘flavour’ of that person, our sense of their personality and status – them as a totality colouring all individual manifestations. When you have a mask, by contrast, the attitude achieves an effectiveness of its own.. The ‘pathos’ of the mask (a fixed attitude of woe, horror etc) is not yet ‘particularized’, i.e., not woven into the fabric of an individual character/ psychology. It is free-floating, with its own efficacy unattached to a subject . The mask is thus in part a way of isolating and extraneating certain ‘characteristics’ – sundering these from ‘character’ and the contingencies thereof.
To read Hegel on the Greek mask, then, is not simply to recognise a common ‘universality’; nor is it to take antiquarian delight in quaint and obsolete practices. It is to revivify our thinking about the present, our psychological and aesthetic categories, notions of ‘expression’, ‘Subject’ and so on. It is to be made aware, also, of certain New potentialities, perhaps: not simply the empty re-staging of Greek forms, but potentialities of thought which these older practices urge and imply.