This chapter considers Watteau’s creation of a distinctive figure for Pierrot and the monumental representation of this figure in the large painting, Pierrot. Watteau encountered Pierrot at the Parisian fairs, where the Comédie Italienne had migrated following its expulsion from an official stage in 1697. The fair theatre, which was based on the repertoire of the Comédie Italienne, fixated on the relationship between costume and social identity, a relationship vital for understanding Pierrot’s identity as vested in his costume (‘mask’). Departing from previous emphases on the fair as a melting pot for social class, this chapter considers it an opportunity for visual scrutiny in which differences were manifested through social appearances. In light of the significant differences between the large Pierrot and the smaller fêtes galantes, for which Watteau was known, I suggest a more appropriate category, the fête marchand, in part by establishing the relationship between the composition of the large painting, the disposition of its central figure, and the repertoire of printed images known as costumes, modes, or habillemens. This chapter also explores forms of fairground architecture, the stall (loge) and the counter (comptoir), which structured social encounters at the fair according to a theatrical model.

The fifth chapter considers the third-quarter-century synthesis of the two rival “Freudian” and “Marxist” Modernisms considered in the preceding chapters, and ways in which post-war theory and practice designated “Late Modernist” would be (very successfully) demonised by successive waves of post-modernist critics, particularly in relation to architecture. This chapter will consider the profound reaction from Brutalist architecture that anticipated the general turn to post-modernisms in other disciplines and question many of the widespread assumptions that have developed with regard to this. The ferocity of the debate suggests that the issues at stake here are not merely practical. Those for and against seem to share an irrational faith in the power of the buildings to exert control over the communities they contain, whether for good or for ill, in a manner that must recall the fantastically weird responses to Hawksmoor’s baroque churches in psycho-geographical fiction of this era. The underlying causes of this uncanny effect are identified, analysed, and traced back to the architectural theory that designed such spaces and to the economic theory that required their production. Finally, a peculiar subgenre of the anti-socialist dystopia is defined that is, specifically, anti-Keynesian.

In the backstage drama Children of Paradise (1945), written by Jacques Prévert and directed by Marcel Carné, Nadar’s Pierrot is re-embedded in a fantastically detailed historical environment, the nineteenth-century Boulevard du Temple and the Théâtre des Funambules. The chapter argues that the film registers elements of a conservative cultural backlash against the relationship between the marketplace and creative artistry. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Pierrot had become increasingly politicised, a mascot for conservative and reactionary figures like the artist Adolphe Willette and the mime Séverin. An aesthetic of whiteness, luminosity, and clarity was cast as distinctly ‘French’, as opposed to a piecemeal culture of the second-hand, which anti-Semitic critics cast as the fruits of ‘Jewishness’. In the film, the latter is represented by the old-clothes seller Jericho, Pierrot’s nemesis, while Baptiste Deburau, who plays Pierrot at the Funambules, imagines artistry through the figure of the Moon. Baptiste recasts his relationship to his role as a matter of essence rather than costume, thereby rejecting Pierrot’s mobile identity as a front. Nevertheless, the film proves to be a multi-vocal text, which registers its ambivalence to the politics of purity through its bric-à-brac décor and its densely and textured visual field.

The sixth chapter will trace the persistence of Promethean horror tropes beyond the apparent collapse of the Late Modernist paradigm, into the neoliberal and post-modernist era. Expanding on issues relating to the crisis in Enlightenment humanist thinking raised in preceding chapters, and addressing concerns central to post-humanist theory relating to the consequences that must follow for human identity arising from the development of artificial intelligence, this chapter outlines an entirely new approach: suggesting that the famous Turing Test has been consistently misinterpreted, and that we are now in a position to see that it is designed to gauge an “uncanny” effect – that is, the extent to which a system for modelling social behaviour can outperform an older, tried-and-tested system for producing such models (i.e. human personalities: a social construct that each of us attempts, with varying success, to perform). The consequences of failing to recognise this are that we are likely to remain “taken in” by such models when they are applied to other aspects of our lives, limiting our freedom of action. While systems for predicting political and economic phenomena are widely believed to have fallen out of favour in the final quarter of the twentieth century, this chapter will demonstrate that such systems actually remain integral to our contemporary economic system, in the form of scenario planning and computer modelling, with the failure to recognise this having often devastating effects.

The third chapter traces this “architectural uncanny” back to London’s earliest inter-war Modernist architecture, showing that this “functionalist” architectural aesthetic is as ripe for uncanny sensations as the eighteenth-century “rationalist” architecture considered in the previous chapter, and for much the same reason: being committed to an act of dissimulation in order to see off a perceived threat to Enlightenment values posed by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud: the rival tradition of Modernist theory and practice that emerges from what one might call the radical empiricist or Romantic tradition of Western philosophy.

The introduction will discuss the significance of the Prometheus myth, beginning with its most familiar manifestation in English literature, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Having noted that Promethean horror is relatively rare in English-language literature, where the term gothic is near synonymous with horror, the introduction will note the proliferation of Promethean tropes over the course of the twentieth century and suggest that changing perceptions towards Modernism are the primary reason for this shift, outlining some of the approaches developed in the chapters.

The fourth chapter shows how the tradition of Modernism in which one might place Lubetkin (with writers T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis) would itself be demonised by writers within the Romantic-Modern tradition, exploring how fear and hostility provoked by the Promethean energies of the USSR (and by the New Linguistic Doctrine of the Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr in particular) manifest themselves in perhaps the most memorable demonisation of a symbol of Enlightenment: the all-seeing Eye of Sauron on its pyramid. Deeply committed to the discipline of philology that had inspired Schopenhauer (and the radical empiricism that followed), J. R. R. Tolkien is revealed to be an unlikely combatant in the great culture war between these two estranged philosophies that defined the era of High Modernism.

The second chapter considers the repertoire of rococo ornament and decorative arts, in which Pierrot plays a starring role. Watteau’s Pierrot was liberally copied by rococo artists and designers, from sought-after decorative artists like Jacques Lajoue to lowly painters of inexpensive faience. Rococo artists relied upon printed repertoires in order to build decorative ensembles, in which motifs were borrowed and reassembled in a mode of découpage. The repertoire of objects and motifs would become a foundation of rococo retail strategies, from the merchant mercers to female fashion merchants to dealers in painting. A related kind of marketing was initiated by the amateur and collector Jean de Jullienne, who commissioned four volumes of etchings after Watteau’s oeuvre, including two volumes reproducing Watteau’s drawings. Pierrot appeared six times in these two volumes. As a collection that addresses both the marketplace and the ‘disinterested amateur’, The Figures of Different Characters can be understood as a tool both for remembrance and for marketing.

This locates Pierrot at the Exposition Universelle (1855), where Nadar and his brother Adrien Tournachon exhibited photographs of Charles Deburau dressed as Pierrot. The photographic repertoire of this period was inhabited by actors and actresses, political celebrities, and the literati. The Exposition became the stage for this glittering performance of photography as a star-maker. Nadar, who had only recently begun to experiment with photography, was an experienced promoter of literary celebrity, to which he applied a distinctive, theatrical style. Intended as publicity for Adrien Tournachon’s studio, the photographs launched Pierrot as a distinctive silhouette, whose appearance shared features with magic lantern slides. Walter Benjamin’s comparison of the Universal Exhibitions to a phantasmagoria offers a key to understanding the figuration of Pierrot in the Tournachons’ photographs, and the significance of their display at the Exposition. During the fin-de-siècle, Pierrot becomes increasingly weightless and groundless, a condition that favours his role in optical technologies like animation, projection, and photography, the convergence of which would lead to the invention of cinema. Given the theatrical address of the Cinema of Attractions, Pierrot was suited to thrive in this medium, the fairground associations of which returned him to the fête marchande.

This chapter situates the disiy of Watteau’s large Pierrot within post-Revolutionary Paris. The first recorded owner of Pierrot was Dominique Vivant Denon, a connoisseur who was also Napoléon’s Director of the Arts. Denon’s career and practices as a collector exemplify post-Revolutionary attitudes towards artworks: often displaced and neglected, sometimes piled in heaps. Moving between Denon’s disiy and Édouard Manet’s breakthrough painting The Old Musician (1861–2), which cites Watteau’s Pierrot in the form of a gamin de Paris, this chapter argues that the painting depicts a range of types with meaningful relationships to the marketplace for old things. These types, drawn from the repertoire of the contemporary physiognomies, attest to a ‘panoramic’ mode of envisioning Paris as a marketplace. This chapter explores several iterations of the bric-à-brac aesthetic as a way of making sense of the post-Revolutionary art world. A related poetics was used by Jules Janin and Champfleury to promote a new, theatrical instantiation of Pierrot: Baptiste Deburau’s performances of the role at the Théâtre des Funambules. By including a ragpicker and an old-clothes seller in The Old Musician, Manet populates the painting with figures who both deal in the second-hand marketplace and clothe themselves from it.