For the “savants” of the universities to consider popular culture worthy of academic interest, a change in consciousness was essential, George Gusdorf (1912–2000), French historian of knowledge of the very first hour, noted in “Les Origines de l’herméneutique”. Taking Gusdorf’s reference to the history of social history as a starting point and drawing on empirical studies into verbal-visual sketching and caricature in nineteenth-century illustrated journals, this talk argues that the indicated change in intellectual consciousness must be contextualized in the change in nineteenth-century visual culture, to which literary and graphic journalists of the time, most notably the two Honorés, i. e. Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) and Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), genuinely contributed to, sketching their everyday observations, disseminating social knowledge, and raising the awareness for modern knowledge societies.
“You have done me, dear Sir, a great service. Your admirable sketch, displayed everywhere in Paris, has shed more light on the question than ten thousand articles.” These personal words by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) to Daumier, whom he had just met in person for the first time, dating back to a letter from 30 March 1851, not only express special recognition of a contemporary; they indicate Daumier’s general significance in shaping the social imagination in intellectual culture at the threshold to modernity. Indeed, Daumier’s “admirable engravings of the Charivari”, as Michelet wrote in another letter, had already impressed him several years before his personal encounter with Daumier, as both Michelet’s published journals and his early social history “Le peuple” (1846) give proof of. In its preface, Michelet emphatically emphasized the importance of art and literature in the “investigation of life”. “It is through you in particular”, we can learn from another of Michelet’s letters to Daumier, “that the people can speak to the people”.
Against this background, the talk will 1) present selected sources of nineteenth-century illustrated (caricature) journals, 2) reflect on social caricature as an unacknowledged form of knowledge in the modern history of social knowledge and thought, and 3) pay special attention to the Greek-French intellectual Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) and his theory of a radical imagination, to uncover in there an “iconic unconscious”, placing Castoriadis’ “work on the riddle of one ‘self’” in-between the two Honorés.