David Graeber on the Art World: Problems and Possibilities

A couple of weeks ago there was a national election in the United States, and since then a rare cheering event has the publication of a collection of essays by the great anthropological thinker and anarchist David Graeber. Most of the pieces were previously published, and I had read almost all of those shortly after their publication. Shortly before his death in 2020, Graeber, together with his wife Nika Dubrovsky, had written a three-part essay for the contemporary art journal e-flux, and at the time those pieces, together Graeber’s earlier essay ‘The Sadness of Post-Workerism’, struck me as offering a novel and deeply insightful account of the contemporary art world. The first part of essay in e-flux is included in the new collection, and so as a tribute to Graeber, to my mind one of the most interesting and imaginative thinkers of the past thirty years, I’d like to return to his account of the artworld.

     What is the artworld? My experience in teaching and conversations is that many people are surprised to learn how recently the term was coined, as well as the vicissitudes of the term’s early history. The genealogy is straight-forward and well-documented: In 1964 the philosopher and former Abstract Expressionist woodblock artist Arthur Danto returned to New York City from a year in Paris. He entered a gallery and saw the initial exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, which consisted of seemingly random stacks of boxes, painted with stencils so as to reproduce the appearance of the commercial boxes sold in stores. Danto was struck by the thought that Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were visually identical with the commercial ones, yet the former were artworks, and the latter weren’t. Why the difference? In an imaginative fancy of strained metaphors, Danto proposed that there was an entity he called ‘the artworld’ that consisted of an ‘atmosphere of theory’, that the theories in the artworld changed historically, and that the then contemporaneous application of these theories yielded the judgments of which boxes were and weren’t artworks.

      This is a peculiar incident in cultural and intellectual history, if for no other reason than the fact that Warhol’s boxes are in no way visually identical to the commercial ones. Anyone with normal eyesight and standing within ten feet of the Warhols can see that the paint is applied quickly and unevenly. But no fact has ever stopped a philosophical theory. If one sets aside the prima facie implausibility of Danto’s theory, a few questions immediately arise: To whom are the artworld’s theories addressed? Who cares about them? Who holds these theories, and who uses them to decide whether the artifacts are artworks or not? A few years later the philosopher George Dickie proposed that the artworld is an institution consisting of people, and so the sociological and currently common-sensical conception of the artworld was born. Dickie’s theory was quickly subjected to withering philosophical criticism, but the idea became entrenched that there is (a) a social entity called the artworld, (b) the members of this world are affiliated in countless ways formally (in institutions such as museums, galleries, and art schools) and informally (through social networks and family connections, cocktail and dinner parties, galas, etc.), and (c) they perform, individually and/or collectively, two kinds of activities: deciding what counts as art, and determining the quality and value of artworks.

     David Graeber’s analysis of the artworld is of a piece with his general anthropological views on the concepts of value, hierarchy, violence, and authority, and on methods of institutional analysis (I’ll consider his broader framework in a follow-up post). He accepts that there has been (at least since the early twentieth-century) and is something rightly called ‘the art world’, and whose ‘apparatus’ he flippantly characterizes as consisting of “critics, journals, gallery owners, dealers, flashy magazines and the people who leaf through them and argue about them in factories-turned-chichi-cafes in gentrifying neighborhoods”.  (G1, p. 93—I’ll refer to the earlier essay as ‘G1’, and the later pieces originally published in e-flux journal as ‘G2’ (as published in the new book), ‘G3’, and ‘G4’). He seems to think of the contemporary art world as quite stable and durable, and very largely (though, as we shall see soon, not entirely) continuous with the art world after the rapid decline of avant-garde movements after Dadaism. The most prominent ideological feature of the contemporary art world is its seemingly intractable belief in the Romantic conception of the valuable kind of artist as a ‘genius’ who single-handedly creates individual works of great artistic merit. These works in turn merit their high prices, both because of their artistic greatness but also and especially because of their scarcity. (G1, p. 96; G2, p. 291; G3, p. 01; G4, p. 01) This entrenched ideology of genius sits uneasily with two other aspects of the artworld. First, everyone recognizes that art, broadly construed, is also a kind of regular and routine production of artifacts, and so not obviously something that is only produced rarely by geniuses. Typically, when this broader conception is mobilized, the relevant term is ‘the arts’ (in the plural; the singular is reserved for the genius-conception). Second, there is a second Romantic inheritance in the art world, one that insists that genius is also ‘popular’ because everyone is already in some sense engaged in artistic expression. Graeber quotes the poet and philosopher Novalis saying “Every person is meant to be an artist”, and that “[a]rtistic genius is simply “an exemplification and intensification of what human beings always do.”” (G2, p. 300) Graeber seems to think that this tension between the genius conception on the one hand, and the popular and broader conceptions on the other, is to a degree defused with a society-wide institutionalization of a certain hierarchy: the art world and its genius-products are at the pinnacle of a social pyramid of the arts, and the art-world’s self-flattering self-conception becomes the criterion of value and quality generally: the arts outside the art world are ‘rightly’ considered less valuable and less meaningful. As for the point of this whole structure, Graeber seems to accept something like Hegel’s remark that freedom is the principle of the modern world, and so the art world too is always a way of trying to work out conceptions of freedom appropriate for modern people in their various major spheres of life.

     For Graeber there are two important, distinctively contemporary, aspects to the artworld in its most recent manifestation, the aforementioned one whereby the contemporary art world is post-avant-garde, and one marking the shift in the role of finance and money. The most general feature of the artistic avant-gardes in their heroic phase from the mid-1910s  through the 1920s (from Duchamp’s first readymades through Surrealism) was one of exploring ‘radical possibilities’ through “perform[ing], in rapid succession, just about every subversive gesture it was possible to make: from white canvases to automatic writing, theatrical performances designed to incite riots, sacrilegious photo montage”, etc.

This heroic phase marked the last moment at which it was possible to plausibly claim that breaking all the rules . . . was itself, necessarily, a subversive political act as well.” (G1, p. 86) The passing of the heroic era left the artworld not only with a depoliticized conception of art, but also “a kind of permanent institutionalized crisis”, wherewith everything seemed an attempt to answer the unanswerable question ‘What is art?’ (G1, p. 93).

     The second, and relatively recent, change in the art world is its increasing ties to what is usually referred to as the financialization of capitalism since the 1970s. The patron and his bags of money has always been a central figure in the art world, but more recently he has largely appropriated to himself the ontological and epistemological tasks Dickie first assigned to the art world. Graeber writes that contemporary art “holds out a special appeal to financiers, I suspect, because it allows for a kind of short-circuit in the normal process of value-creation,” (G1, p.95), that is, the normal process that occurs through labor, rent, interest, speculation, and financialization. It is now financiers who “can baptize, consecrate, through money and thus turn into art” the relatively inexpensive materials that proletariat-like artists fashion into artifacts. Graeber wryly comments that “It is never clear, in this context, who exactly scamming whom.” (ibid)

     I take it that anyone familiar with the art world and its shenanigans—the extremist claims constantly made despite, or perhaps because of, their absurdity; the depoliticization; the prominence of finance-- recognizes at least the partial truth of Graeber’s account. Graeber’s account contains a further element typical of his thinking: the imaginative search for alternatives. In my next post I’ll try to say a bit more about how Graeber conceives of value, compare his account with some major alternatives from Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker, and discuss his suggestion of how the art world might be turned into something that a sane human being would wish to be part of.

References:

Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, in Journal of Philosophy (1964)

George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974)

Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber, ‘Another Art World, Pts. 1-3: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity; Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value; Policing and Symbolic Order’, in e-flux journal, (2019-20), issues 102, 104, and 113

David Graeber, ‘The Sadness of Post-Workerism’, in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (2011)

--The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . (2024)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, 5.2: Conceptions of Body and the Idea of Tactile-Kinesthetic Invariants

     In previous posts I have argued that uncovering the capacities and resources that condition the possibility of artistic meaning in the visual arts can proceed on analogy with Richard Wollheim’s similar attempt with regard to specifically artistic meaning in painting practiced as an art. Wollheim argued that the core of such meaningfulness arises in artistic painting through representation, expression, and pleasure, as experienced by suitably attuned viewers of paintings. Each element is conditioned by the exercise of a certain perceptual capacity: representation requires the capacity for seeing-in, that is, for seeing something in a marked surface; expression requires the capacity for expressive perception, that is, to experience bits of nature or artifacts as embodying some mood, emotion, or feeling; pleasure (Wollheim calls it ‘visual delight’ (Wollheim (1987), p. 98)) arises, so Wollheim tentatively suggests, in the viewer’s shifting perspectives, from depicted subject to real subject, from figure to medium, from full-scale to detail. I have suggested that the conditions of artistic meaning in the visual arts are found first of all in human embodiment itself. But in what sense?

     Recall from Michael Podro’s account certain pervasive features of artistic meaning, its production and reception, that a basic mechanism of meaningfulness is an existential urgency to unify, especially to bring together in artifacts the semantic dimension, that is, what they’re about or their subject-matter, and their manner of presentation, which is first of all their material medium, and then broader elements such as orientation. And the motivation for the ceaseless operation of this mechanism is the archaic piece of human psychology that seeks to pursue similarity through difference. What does, or might, Aristotle with his hylomorphic account make of this?

      Perhaps the shortest route to Aristotle’s views, real or constructed, would be through his remarks on a ‘common sense’, especially at the beginning of the third book of De Anima. As with so much in that great book, there are tremendous conceptual challenges to understanding Aristotle, both because of the inherent difficulty of the topic, but also because of the compressed and seemingly ambiguous of the discussion. On one major line of interpretation, Aristotle claims in De Anima that the human psyche contains, along with the five canonical senses, a higher-order perceptual power, that is, a ‘common sense’, that grasps the ‘common sensibles’ of motion, shape, size, and pretty much any aspects of sensibles that are not the distinctive objects of the five senses. A different and recently prominent line of interpretation (for substantively different versions, compare Gregoric and Gendlin) urges that Aristotle’s remarks about a common sense aim to show that there is no such thing, and that the cognitive powers of grasping the common sensibles must be in some way located within the five senses themselves. Regardless of the variety of interpretations, Aristotle does say in a difficult line (425a19-20) that the senses are ‘one’, which must mean in part that in standard cases of object-perception the senses have a unified focus; for example, I perceive an apple qua single object as and via its color, shape, hardness, and smell. But there is nothing in De Anima, nor even in The Poetics, that attempts to come to grips with the kind of unity, or rather, striving for unity, that Podro has pinpointed as fundamental to artistic meaning.

     By contrast to Aristotle, the lines of reflection arising from Husserl’s account of embodiment do, I suggest, permit us to grasp the conditions and characteristic actions of artistic meaning at its most basic level. Here I follow a fundamental analysis from the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who surprisingly suggests that Husserl’s account can be seen as an expansion and development of Aristotle’s conception. She starts from two interpretive points: First, by appealing especially to Aristotle’s biological writings, she stresses that form and matter are not as it were two distinct ontological orders that are contingently brought together in any organism or its parts. Rather matter, at least at the level of human experience, is always adapted to the form that it embodies, and form inheres in only a certain range of matter. As Aristotle’s explanations are always ultimately teleological, one could put the point by noting that with the aim of keeping an organism sufficiently warm, not any matter will work, but only a range that includes fur and blubber. Second, Sheets-Johnstone argues that, despite the apparent anomaly of the sense of touch, Aristotle offers a unified account of the senses wherein in the operation of each sense there is something perceived, an organ of perception, and a medium of contact between the perceived and the sense-organ. Then she recurs to the fundamental point that Aristotle conceives of the action of perceiving in every case as an instance of motion (kinesis). So perception, like organic action itself, is always kinetic.

     With this bold interpretation of movement as always a fundamental characteristic of animation itself, the stage is set for Husserl’s account of the animate body. Husserl’s characterizations of the body read as if elaborations of Sheets-Johnstone’s Aristotle, for example, “given with the localization of the kinesthetic series in the relevant moving member of the Body is the fact that in all perception and perceptual exhibition (experience) the Body is involved as freely moved sense organ, as freely moved totality of sense organs” (Husserl, p. 61 (all italicized in the original)). Sheets-Johnstone gives further determination to Husserl’s conception of the animate body by speaking it as the bearer of ‘tactile-kinetic invariants’. Let us consider these three terms in reverse order. The invariants are features of human embodiment that are possessed by all human beings and have not changed since the emergence of human beings as a distinct species. Appeal to such invariants gives Sheets-Johnstone a short route to solving one of the seemingly intractable problems in the philosophy of the visual arts, namely ‘Why and how do we find so much of the great art of the Paleolithic both intelligible and moving?’ Despite our pretty much total lack of knowledge of the language, customs, and beliefs of the reindeer hunters of southern France and northeastern Spain, their art remains powerful. Part of the explanation must be that they are fellow human beings, and so much share with us a great deal of the features of human embodiment and the central mechanisms of artistic meaning-making. The philosopher Samuel Todes gave a similar insistence with “our body as source of our experience is cross-culturally and trans-historically invariant in the sense that it has not evolved in historical time” (Todes, p. 263).

     Sheets-Johnstone devotes hundreds of pages to arguing for the claim that the animate body is fundamentally kinetic, but the direction of her arguments should be reasonably clear from the brief indication above of her interpretation of Aristotle. By great contrast, she gives relatively little attention to the term ‘tactile’. I’m accordingly uncertain how much weight or importance to give to the term, and she even at times refers indifferently to ‘corporal-kinetic invariants’ or ‘bodily invariants’ (for example, at Sheets-Johnstone (2011), p. 333). In her most careful account, she distinguishes ‘corporeal uniformities’, such as having “two legs of a certain form, teeth of a certain kind, a tongue of a certain shape”, etc., from the invariants, which are founded upon such uniformities (Sheets-Johnstone (1990), p.368; alternatively, the invariants are characterized as ‘regularities’ (p. 369), and yet otherwise as ‘tactile-kinesthetic concepts’ (p. 380)). As I understand it, what is important here is not ‘tactile’ as opposed to ‘corporeal’, but rather something of the following line of thinking: human bodies must be grasped fundamentally as animate forms; animation is so to speak equiprimordial with movement (kinesis); basic (and fundamentally non-linguistic) concepts arise out of regular movements and actions (so the action of biting into something is part of the experiential foundation of the concept of hardness); and (I have not yet mentioned this point, which Sheets-Johnstone stresses) by analogical inferences based upon shared animate forms, we can securely make empirical generalizations across human life cross-culturally and trans-historically, and so attribute, say, our concept of hardness to the human beings of the Paleolithic. The term ‘tactile-kinetic invariants’ is a place-holder for the indeterminately large number of actions, concepts, and feelings that can be so inferred.

     Regardless of one’s estimation of Sheets-Johnstone’s precise views, her account seemingly provides the basis upon which we can consider the contents and structure of the basic features of human embodiment that are recruited into artistic meaning. So the next key questions here are ‘What are these invariants?’ and ‘What roles do they play among the conditions for artistic meaning?’ In my next post I’ll present considerations for thinking that among the most important relevant corporeal bases of artistic meaning are are those given in the conceptual pair inside/outside, the senses of uprightness, frontality, and rhythm, and that the key mechanism is a kind of projection.

 References and Sources Consulted:

 Aristotle, De Anima (mid-4th century B.C.E.)

Eugene Gendlin, Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Volumes 1 & 2 (2012)

-----A Process Model (2017)

Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on the Common Sense (2007)

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy II (1913-28)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1999)

Ronald Polansky, Aristotle’s De Anima (2007)

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (1990)

-----The Primacy of Movement (2011)

Christopher Shields, Aristotle: De Anima (2016)

Samuel Todes, ‘The Subject Body in Perception and Conception: A Brief Sketch”, Body and World (2001)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, #5: Against Hylomorphism and Presentism; Towards The Body

Having sketched the concept of artistic meaning, I turn to the consideration of the human capabilities and capacities whose exercise makes artistic meaning possible, and further which are mobilized in the seemingly automatic, everyday creation of artistic meaning in making and perception. Or so I shall argue. As stated at the end of my previous post, I’ll treat the basic sources of artistic meaningfulness through consideration of human embodiment, gesture, pointing, technics, and language. Each of these topics merits at the very least book-length consideration, but in the interest of finishing this book in my lifetime I’ll give highly schematic accounts of each of these, and always with an eye to how they are mobilized and employed in artistic meaningfulness.

     I’ll also try to bring out the distinctiveness of my account by regularly contrasting it with what I take to be two deeply entrenched ways of approaching the relevant issues. One way, and which I have already briefly discussed, is accounts that begin with the alleged distinction between form and content. The great originator of all such accounts surely is Aristotle, who in the first books of his Physics considers the problem of the intelligibility of change, and introduces the so-called doctrine of the four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final), and who goes on in many treatises to apply, develop, and adapt this type of account to a great range of phenomena in nature and human life. The basic distinction underlying the four causes is between form (morphe) and matter (hyle), and so in technical or scholarly philosophy this range of accounts is referred to as ‘hylomorphic’. The tendency in the twentieth-century to approach the arts through the form/content (or sound/sense, manner/topic, how/what, etc.) distinction is a late flowering of hylomorphism. The second manner of considering the arts that I’ll contest is harder to place, perhaps because of its omnipresence: I’ll call it ‘presentism’, by which I mean the tendency to treat artistic meaning as something that is given all at once—or not given--to anyone who happens to encounter and perceive the artwork. Presentism ignores and shields from consideration two basic features of artistic meaning. One feature is indicated in Richard Wollheim’s formulation that artistic meaning is perceived by a ‘suitably attuned’ viewer. Presentism ignores the conditions of suitable attunement, and so diminishes the role of tradition, dismisses training and apprenticeship, and is blind to sociological and anthropological dimensions of participation and audience. Secondly, presentism imagines that artistic meaning is all there at every moment, and so misses the frequent difficult and temporally extended ways in which artistic meaning is revealed and grasped. Above all, it misses a fundamental point that I first mention here: that artistic meaning is non-finite, in the sense that no one is ever in a position to give a definitive and exhaustive account of the artistic meaning of an artwork. (I shall argue for this claim later)

    I turn now to what I’ll call the first great reservoir of artistic meaningfulness, the human body. Extended philosophical reflection upon the human body as something other and more than a hindrance to intellectual and spiritual advancement begins with Aristotle’s late and great treatise De Anima (On the Soul). Along with a hylomorphic conceptualization of the relation between soul and body (412a19-20: “the soul is a substance as the form of a natural body”), Aristotle considers the characteristics of perception for each of the five (traditionally considered) senses, as well as the character of the perception of objects by more than one sense. (I’ll return to these latter two topics) Most of what I’ve read in the past half-century on human embodiment is in, or explicitly indebted to, the discussion of the embodied character of perception, movement, and self-awareness in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception; although in recent decades there seems to have a shift in interest to a discussion that Merleau-Ponty must have drawn upon, that is, the account of the body in Edmund Husserl’s manuscript Ideas II. Husserl opens with the statement that “The Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception”, and further is “the bearer of the zero point of orientation, the bearer of the here and now . . . each thing that appears has eo ipso an orienting relation to the Body” (p. 61) Husserl notes a two-fold aspect of the body, as so-to-speak a thing among things, but also as something that is mine as the localization of my perceptions and sensations. So as mine, it also admits of further conceptualization in terms of my perceptions: Husserl speaks of a ‘tactual Body’ and a ‘visual Body’ (pp. 158-9). And as the zero point of orientation, it is involved in all lived spatial distinctions (near/far; above/below; right/left) (p. 166).

     Independently of Husserl, the poet Paul Valéry proposed that each of us has four bodies, or, perhaps more carefully put, four fundamental conceptualizations of the body: (i) “the privileged object of which, at each instant, we find ourselves in possession (Valéry, p. 35) [so something like Husserl’s second sense]; (ii) “the one which others see, and an approximation of which confronts us in the mirror or in portraits” (p. 37) (something like the concept of ‘body-image’, which I’ll briefly consider in the next post); (iii) the body considered as a physico-chemical mechanism (p. 38); (iv) a conceptual construction, which could equally be called ‘the real body’ or ‘the imaginary body’, something upon which Valéry charges with solving all the dilemmas arising from reflecting upon the first three bodies: the origin of life, the nature of death, whether we’re free, etc. (pp. 39-40).

    In the most recent major statement known to me, the philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin proposed a four-fold distinction of the body, but more specifically of the body considered in relation to its environment. Gendlin asserts that the body and its environment are in some sense one (p. 4),and suggests conceptualizations of the body that focus upon its environment. First, if the environment is considered from the point of view of a spectator, the body is something that ‘interacts’ with its environment. Then if environmental processes are highlighted, the body and its environment are just functions of each other: the foot strikes the ground which resists the strike; the process of breathing is ”air-coming-into-lungs-and-blood-cells”. Thirdly, there is the environment considered as the accumulation of instances of the body-environmental processes of the second sense, and correlatively the body considered as “the result of the life process”.  Finally, there is the body-environment life process considered together with its non-actual others, its possibilities and impossibilities. There is everything that never happened and “the seemingly infinite richness of the unborn, something [that] may happen which has not yet” (Gendlin, pp. 4-7).

       Which of these conceptualizations of the body are relevant to our question of the resources for artistic meaningfulness? In my next post I’ll present and develop the suggestion that it will be not just the body-image as part of the material for artistic depiction, but more fundamentally of a mechanism of projection that is usually referred to as the ‘body-schema’.

References:

Aristotle, De Anima/On the Soul (mid-4th-century B.C.E.)

Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005)

Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model (2017)

Edmund Husserl, Ideas II (1912-28)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

Paul Valéry, ‘Some Simple Reflections on the Body’ in Aesthetics (1964)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft #4.5--Podro's Philosophical Anthropology

Having sketched and endorsed Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning in the visual arts in the previous post, I turn to the question: What sort of broader conception of human life motivates the account, or at least is consistent with it? In particular, what species-specific psychological mechanisms, if any, are required for the account to be so much as a candidate for the explication of artistic meaning? Podro provides bits of answers to these questions; because of both their intrinsic interest and for the illumination they cast on his account, here I’ll summarize and develop these indications.

     Taken together, Podro’s indications of the various psychological mechanisms presupposed by his account might well be considered a contribution to a largely German tradition of philosophical inquiry usually referred to as ‘philosophical anthropology’. In the standard presentation of this tradition in English, Axel Honneth and Hans Joas characterize it as an “[an] intellectual current [that] undertook, in a non-speculative manner, to grasp the ‘fundamental structures of humanity’ through comparison of man and animal, and through critical examination and appropriation of as many findings of the natural and cultural sciences as possible.” On this expansive conception a great many of the works that I’ll be drawing upon later in this book, works in the philosophies of body, language, and technology, as well as studies in cognitive linguistics, the anthropology of art, evolutionary accounts of language and art, etc., could likewise count as part of philosophical anthropology. Podro’s indications touch on four topics: the psychology of pictorial perception; the imagination; the psychology of the unconscious; and the aesthetic.

    As explicated in my previous post, Podro characterizes the process of creating artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’, where ‘recognition’ means the viewer’s seeing something (e.g. a lion) in a marked surface, and ‘sustaining’ indicates anything and everything, especially the material medium, but also orientation to the surface, relation to the environment, etc. etc., that the artist uses in enriching the bare recognition. These elements beyond the recognized subject ‘complicate’ the recognition, which is thereby ‘sustained’ in the sense that, because of the artistic use of the medium etc., the viewer’s engagement with the depiction is not exhausted by the (mere) recognition of what is depicted. The complications enrich the sense of the depicted subject, and simultaneously the psychological mobilization of the subject organizes the non-figurative pictorial elements into contributions to artistic meaning of that subject; as Podro puts it “recognition and complication are each furthered by the other, each serves the other” (Podro (1998), p. 5). There are two conditions for this to so much as be possible: human beings must be able to ‘recognize through difference’, i.e. to recognize that (e.g. a lion) not just when we are face-to-face with the beast, but also in a marked surface; and to ‘imagine’ (i.e. bring non-focal and non-perceptual elements to bear) what is present in perception. The use of these capabilities in artistic perception implies two further points: (i) We must be aware of the difference between the depiction and material surface upon which it appears (that is, we are aware of the distinction between the lion and the paper or canvas upon which the relevant marks and deposits are made), and yet we cannot say exactly where the boundary is between the depicted figure and its support. I take Podro to mean something like this: Imagine an outline drawing of a lion, then point to a spot within the enclosed pictorial space. Are you pointing at the surface, or are you pointing at (say) the lion’s belly? There is no principled answer to the question. (ii) We not only mobilize the imagination in artistic perception (in particular in proposing analogies between subject and medium), but also constrain it. As Richard Wollheim noted, the exercise of the imagination in the visual arts is undertaken with one’s eyes open. The imagination proposes, but what comes to count as part of artistic meaning is what can be seen in the artwork, or at the very least, is what effects how what is visible is seen. What the imagination proposes is part  contents of artistic perception if it rewards artistic perception. As Podro puts it, the use of the imagination “limits itself to what the painting affords; we do not freely project or associate round it but attend to what projections it corroborates or confirms—confirms through other aspects of the painting itself, or through the traditions of usage, which it brings into play” (ibid).

     Is there any reason to be confident that these conditions of artistic depiction hold for human beings generally? Podro’s answer is highly speculative, but nonetheless of great interest. He starts from certain phenomena that he considers undeniable: that depiction carries cross-culturally and trans-historically great expressiveness; that a ‘sense of urgency attends depiction’ ( p.148; I take this to mean that how people depict, and what they depict artistically, is not a matter of indifference, but is characteristically (somehow) tied to the artists’ and viewers’ sense of themselves, of who they are, and of what centrally matters to them); and (as noted early) a condition of artistic depiction is the uncertainty in principle of where to draw the boundary between figure and support. Podro draws from the post-WWII psychologists and psychoanalysts D. W. Winnicott, Hanna Segal, and Marion Milner to give the following account: The human “infant’s internal and external worlds are incompletely differentiated”. The infant has powerful and urgent physical and psychologist needs that it is unable to fulfill on its own, needs for nourishment, security, comfort, and (increasingly) agency in the world. The ‘mother’ (not necessarily a woman or a single person) communicates with the infant, responding to it, gesturing, making sounds and uttering simplified sentences in a sing-song voice (so-called ‘mother-ese’), and thereby for the most part satisfies the infant. The effect of this interaction, initially between mother and infant and then also between the developing infant and objects in the world (Winnicott’s famous ‘transitional object’), is that the developing infant gains a sense of ‘inner and outer reality [as] separate yet interrelated’ (ibid). This ontogenetically archaic sense of inner and outer as separate but interrelated becomes a permanent feature of the adult psyche, and provides the basic structure for the mechanisms of artistic meaning and their use: we project the internal order of the psyche onto a physical artwork, and as we pursue artistic meaningfulness the external (an artwork) and the internal (the psyche of the viewer) “pass into each other”. The crucial feature, Podro says, is that “the propensity to pursue similarity through difference—including the extension of recognition in depiction, would seem to rehearse an archaic urgency within us and its corresponding satisfaction” (p. 149). This pursuit of similarity through difference is a quasi-automatic activity of the imagination, and as such a piece of the unconscious activities that make up much of the mental life of human beings.

     Podro illustrates something of how this urgency plays out in artistic painting through examination of the works of Chardin. For example, consider Chardin’s profoundly unsettling painting ‘The Ray’ (1726).

What makes ‘The Ray’ so powerful? Whence “its psychological force” (p. 176)? Podro suggests that “we first assume that the interest of the work lies in some latent or suppressed materials”. Evidently there’s some sense of violence, but which “is surely responded to openly in the wit and delicacy of the painting.” This could only be possible, that is, paintable in a manner acceptable to an audience, because the painting resonates with “crucifixions and martyrdoms of [prior] history painting” (p. 178). Podro then breaks off the account and recurs to a summary of his speculative thought on the source of the urgencies in depiction. Is that all?

     Perhaps we might complete the short account of ‘The Ray’ with an invocation of the nature of aesthetics. One might ask a version of the old question in the philosophy of art of why tragedy gives pleasure:  Why might we accept the gruesome face of the ray as the vehicle of wit and delicacy? And would not the face of the ray, if seen in the flesh, induce merely a sense of gruesomeness? For while we might well pursue similarities across differences, surely we simultaneously recognize that there are differences, that the depicted ray is not after all the actual ray in the flesh. It seems to me that Podro also needs an account of the aesthetic dimension of the arts, some attitude or manner of sensibility wherein human beings withdraw from immediate contact and responses to depictions. Aesthetics is barely mentioned in Depiction, and plays not substantive role in any of Podro’s analyses. But there is, I think, a place in Podro’s writings where we can see what he might in response to this paragraph’s questions. A quarter of a century before Depiction, in his first book The Manifold of Perception, Podro surveys and analyzes Kant’s and Schiller’s  accounts of aesthetics along those of some of their nineteenth-century successors. At one point Podro gives qualified approval to the philosopher Stuart Hampshire’s statement that the experience of art “is by definition an experience in which practical interests, and the ordinary classifications that reflect them, are for a time suspended in the unpractical enjoyment of the arrangement of something perceived. Any strong aesthetic experience is necessarily an interruption of normal habits of recognition, a relaxing of the usual practical stance in the face of everything external” (Hampshire, p. 244, quoted in Podro (1972), p. 123 n.1). Podro then comments that in order for Hampshire to link art with the rest of human concerns, he must be taken to mean that the aesthetic attitude involves “an arrest of mere recognition, not suspension of recognition” (Podro, ibid). One cannot help but notice the seeds of Podro’s mature account in this much earlier book. Adapting the point to the later account, one can say that the aesthetic attitude is part of the response to meaning qua artistic meaning, as the viewer of the arts understands herself as pursuing similarity, not identity, across difference.

      This completes my initial sketch of Podro’s account. I’ll develop these points in later sections of the book, in particular in the account of the ideals of coherence and unity in the arts. Next I turn to the very basic human capacities exercised in the creation and perception of artistic meaning, which will involve exploring fundamental aspects of human life: embodiment, gesture, the hand, language, and technology.

 References:

 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)

Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (1959)

Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature (1988)

Marion Milner, ‘The Ordering of Chaos’, in The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987)

Michael Podro, The Manifold of Perception (1972)

-----Depiction (1998)

Hanna Segal, ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’ (1957), in The Work of Hanna Segal (1986)

D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971)

4.4: The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 4.4: Podro’s Account Sustained

     In my previous post I introduced Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning, an account that will provide the basic orientation in this book. In this post I’ll present Podro’s account as an alternative to traditional accounts, and try to give some sense of how the account is applied to particular artworks.

      As previously noted, Podro’s master term for artistic meaning is ‘sustaining recognition’. One helpful way to approach Podro’s point in coining this term is to consider the prevailing approach (with numerous variations) to artistic meaning in the 20th century. First, a basic contrast is drawn, most commonly between ‘form’ and ‘content’; variations for ‘form’ include ‘medium’, ‘manner of presentation’, ‘sound’ (with regard to poetry), while variations for ‘content’ include ‘subject’, ‘sense’, and ‘aboutness’. Next, one asserts that presentation of ‘content’ without ‘form’ is characteristic of a wide range of non-artistic artifacts or utterances. Correlatively, the presentation of ‘form’ without ‘content’ is empty, something like the presentation of a system of ordering without anything to order. Then, crucially, one asserts that the distinctive characteristic of art and/or artistic meaning is that in them form and content ‘fuse’. On this account, works of art aim at and, if successful, achieve a kind of unity wherein the content is somehow, in ways that are exceptionally difficult to explain, inseparable from the manner in which it is presented. The persistence of this kind of account perhaps testifies to the sense that it captures something of the central characteristics of art and artworks.

     Nonetheless, the problems with this class of accounts have shown themselves to be insuperable. For example, in the early twentieth-century the art critic Clive Bell had already noted that any content whatsoever is presented in some manner or other. In the grips of the form/content distinction, Bell was forced to conclude that what makes an artifact a work of art must be its possession of a special kind of form, which he called ‘significant form’. But what makes a form ‘significant’? Bell could do no better than suggest that a significant form is “form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality” (Bell, p. 46), and ‘reality’ is glossed as “that which lies behind the appearance of all things—that which gives to all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality” (ibid, p. 54). So Bell could offer no non-circular account of what distinguished significant form from non-significant form, and I would suggest that no later author has ultimately fared better. In any case the fundamental and to my mind definitive destruction of the account came from Richard Wollheim, who noted and analyzed the impossibility of distinguishing in a principled way form from non-formal elements in a visual work of art (Wollheim (1995), especially pp. 21-2), and so the very idea of a basic distinction between form and something else such as content, collapses.

     Podro’s account, it seems to me, cuts the Gordian knot of the form/content distinction and its attempted applications.. He starts from the very general notion of a recognition, which includes anything and everything involved in the perceptual, imaginative, and cognitive grasp of a subject matter; his book Depiction opens with the sentence “At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject” (Podro (1998), p. 5). I take it that the prototype of recognition in this sense is someone looking at a marked surface and seeing, say, a lion, but it could be much more elaborate, as when one looks at an inked surface and sees Hendrickje sleeping, while someone else only sees a young woman sleeping.

The account does not require that the subject matter be recognized under a particular description or with a particular degree of specificity: one person looks at a wall in the cave at Lascaux and sees an auroch, another looks and sees a cow-like beast.

Podro opposes recognition to ‘complications’, which are anything and everything that the visual artist uses to elaborate the interest, meaning, or significance of the subject matter as (merely) recognized. The recognized subject matter of a visual depiction is something seen, and the relevant complications, because they are something different than what is given to vision, are said to be ‘imagined’. And since the artistic meaning in a work of visual art is something more than what is given in (visual) recognition, artistic meaning generally for Podro is made with the employment of the imagination.

     Evidently, Podro’s account will only be convincing if it guides in an illuminating manner the interpretation of actual works of visual art, and most of the book is devoted to the analysis of such particulars, including works by Donatello, Rembrandt, Hogarth, and Chardin. To get an initial feel for how Podro’s account conceptualizes and explicates artistic meaning, consider his brief remarks about the ink drawing ‘Draughtsman and Model’ (c. 1639), one of the dozen-and-a-half works of Rembrandt he discusses.

Podro characterizes this drawing as part of group of Rembrandt’s prints, paintings, and drawings that possess “a low viewpoint which has the effect of occluding the middle ground and bringing foreground figures up into the picture”. A traditional account would likely identify this low viewpoint as a ‘formal’ feature; instead, Podro immediately notes how Rembrandt’s use of the low viewpoint transforms and enriches the viewer’s (mere) recognition of the depicted persons: “the figures that lie on the other side of the occluding ridge [i.e. the middleground which seen from a low viewpoint seems to rise up and block the sense of a continuous space between middle- and background] approach the main foreground group from the opposite side to the spectator, and we seem invited to conceive a symmetry between them and us, and to see their position on the other side of the dominant plane as the counterpart to ours” (p. 64). In ‘Draughtsman and Model’ this use of orientation and its effect is thematized, or, in Podro’s words “becomes highly explicit” (pp. 64-5), as the implied artist in the studio views the figure from the side opposite the viewer. Podro then asserts that this mirroring effect of implying a background viewer opposite the actual spectator of the piece is part of a general feature of Rembrandt’s style, where Rembrandt suggests “that the spectator’s view is one of several possibilities” and so “the subject is not felt to be absorbed or summated in the way it is represented, in the particular view” (p. 65).

     In the terminology I use in this book, I would say that the low viewpoint is the mechanism that in its particular uses contributes to the overall artistic meaning of the piece, which is the sense that there are multiple and non-exhaustive views of the subject. One can read Podro’s magnificent book for dozens of further examples of what almost seems to be the non-finite number of uses of a large number of mechanisms. One question that immediately arises is: if something like Podro’s account offers a viable and convincing way of thinking about artistic meaning, then what must human beings be like so that such an account may so much as fit human life, human psychology, human practices and institutions, and human cultures? What sense of the nature of art is involved in this account? And what of aesthetics? If these questions were put to the range of accounts using the form/content distinction, one could readily answer with something like Aristotle’s conception of human life, as the form/content distinction originates in the account of change in his book Physics, as developed in human psychology in On the Soul, in the arts in Poetics, etc. Does Podro’s account offer something analogous, or is it perhaps neutral among differing conceptions of human psychology and institutions? In order to develop this account of artistic meaning, I turn to Podro’s answers to these questions in the next post.

 References:  

Aristotle, Physics

-----On the Soul

-----Poetics

Clive Bell, Art, (1948), 5th edition (originally 1913)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, On Formalism and its Kinds/Sobre el Formalism i els seus tipus (1995)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 4.3: Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning

In my last two posts I’ve introduced Richard Wollheim’s account of artistic meaning in painting, and suggested that, whatever its merits (very great to my mind), it cannot be thought to exhaust the kinds of distinctively artistic meaning found in the visual arts generally. So in this post I’ll sketch an alternative, the account of artistic meaning offered by the philosopher Michael Podro in the late 1990s in his book Depiction, with some supplemental elaborations given by the philosopher Patrick Maynard a few years later. In the rest of the book I’ll adopt this latter account and treat Wollheim’s account as something of a special case of Podro’s more general account. I’ll argue that Podro’s conceptual framework, with further qualifications and supplementations, can provide a unified account of artistic meaning in the visual arts, including such prominent kinds of visual art as decoration and the performative use of visual props, such as masks.

     Both Wollheim’s and Podro’s accounts can plausibly be seen as originating in critical responses to a particular claim in the great post-World War II monument in art history, E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. As construed by Wollheim, one part of Gombrich’s large argument in that book was an assertion about the basic nature of depictive vision, that is, the visual perception of pictures qua pictures of something. Gombrich insisted that the viewer of a picture can either be aware of what is depicted (say, a lion), or of the physical surface or support of the depiction (say, a piece of paper with linear pencil marks), but not both simultaneously. Gombrich thereby assimilates depictive seeing to something like seeing the famous duck-rabbit drawing: however familiar the drawing, one either sees a duck or a rabbit, but not both at the same time.

     In introducing the concept of ‘seeing-in’, Wollheim asserted the opposite, that is, that in ordinary depictive vision the viewer is simultaneously aware of both the depicted figure and the physical, material support. Accordingly, the perception of depictions could not be captured with the duck-rabbit diagram as a kind of ‘seeing-as’, where the viewer sees the diagram now as one thing, now as another. As Wollheim put it: “Seeing-in permits unlimited simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the features of the medium. Seeing-as does not.” (Wollheim (1980), p. 212) This counter-assertion was the germ of Wollheim’s account of representational seeing as ‘seeing-in’; in standard cases of depictive seeing the viewer’s experience has the phenomenological character of ‘seeing-something-in-something’, e. g. seeing a lion in a marked surface. The kinds of artistic meaning that Wollheim surveyed in Painting as an Art presuppose and build upon this fundamental character of depictive seeing as seeing-in, as aspects of a picture’s medium—physical support and material marks—are recruited into the artistic meaning of the picture as a whole. In some of his most elaborated and insightful analyses, Wollheim argued that artistic paintings in many cases metaphorized their surfaces and the character of their marks, especially in terms of treating the material surface and/or the marks as (metaphorically) corporeal, and thereby contributed to the artistic meanings of the painting.

An especially powerful instance of this is the account of Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, wherein, so Wollheim claims, the material surface of the painting is conceptualized as a kind of skin, and trailing deposits of paint as blood.

     Podro accepted Wollheim’s counter-claim, but he did not treat seeing-in as the basis of artistic meaning in visual art. Something of Podro’s mature account can be seen already in his first book, The Manifold of Perception, a study of the German tradition of accounts of visual perception in the arts from Kant through Adolf Hildebrand in the late 19th century. In discussing Hildebrand’s account of sculptural relief, Podro notes that it “is surely characteristic of our experience not only of classical relief but of painting that we do distinguish between those paintings on the one hand in which we take the surface or medium for granted—so that we may be said to look through the surface to the subject represented—and those paintings on the other where we have the kind of involvement which we recognize as characteristic of art.” (Podro (1972), p. 87) Podro agrees with Wollheim in thinking that  artistic painting is distinguished from everyday painting in that the former bore richer kinds of meaningfulness, and further follows Wollheim in thinking that one major way in which an artist achieves this richness is by building up analogies between what is represented and the medium in and through which the figure is represented (see Wollheim (1980), p. 224 and Podro (1998) p. 6) achieved. But instead of starting from the perceptual capacity of seeing-in as basic to depictive representation, Podro starts the notion of visual recognition: “At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject” (p. 5). Podro then deviates from Wollheim in two ways: First, he generalizes the point about recruiting features of the medium into artistic meaning into a claim about any and all aspects of artistic meaning that are not inherently bound to the recognition of the subject. Anything besides sheer recognition of the subject that the artist incorporates into the artistic meaning of the work is treated as an instance of complicating the recognition. Second, he says that such recruitment is an instance of the use of the imagination.  

      So whereas Wollheim had treated the imagination as the source of important though partial kinds of artistic meaningfulness, Podro treats it as so to speak the perceptual organ of artistic meaning per se. Podro’s central claim is that artistic meaning should be grasped as what he calls ‘sustaining recognition’, and that recognition is ‘sustained’, that is not simply completed in the recognition that ‘this is an X’, is through the employment of the imagination. Podro will say that in artistic depiction we “imagine what we recognize in it” (ibid).  One might think that this is a mere terminological change or re-description. In my next post I’ll argue that on the contrary it is the conceptual breakthrough that allows Wollheim’s central points to become part of a general account of artistic meaning in the visual arts.

 Note: Another personal anecdote: When I publicly interviewed Wollheim in 2002, he asserted that artistic meaning in painting begins with the Renaissance Venetians’ leaving the brush stroke visible, producing ‘a certain ruffling of the surface’. Dumbstruck, I could only manage to ask “Well, then what was Giotto doing, if not painting as an art?” It didn’t seem to me that I got an answer.

References:

E. H. Gombrich, Art and Ilusion (1960)

Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception (1972)

-----Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, ‘Seeing-as, seeing-in’, in Art and its Objects (1980)

-----Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft Part 4.2: Limitations of Scope in Wollheim’s Account of Artistic Meaning

      In my previous post I first introduced very general recent characterizations of meaning in human life, and then summarized Richard Wollheim’s account of meaning in painting practiced as an art. My suggestion is that, with adjustments and qualifications, Wollheim’s account can be used as a model for the philosophical understanding of artistic meaning in the visual arts generally. Recall Wollheim’s three fields of concern: a characterization of the core of the artistic process qua meaning-making as thematization; the description of a variety of kinds of artistic meaning, including representation, expression, creating an implied viewer in a picture, borrowing, textuality, and metaphor; and the investigation of the psychological capacities (perhaps species-specific) that are presupposed for artistic meaning to so much as be possible, in particular seeing-in, expressive perception, and the capacity for certain kinds of pleasure in seeing. While Wollheim’s account of seeing-in has attracted a great deal of attention from academic philosophers of art, with numerous appropriations, qualifications, extensions, and/or rejections, and likewise to a much lesser extent his account of expression, most of his thinking summarized here, and the overall shape of the account and his guiding concerns, has been largely neglected. I’ll return to each of his points at some length, but for now my concern is with the general features of his account and its scope.

      One question that immediately suggests itself is: Why are these particular capacities (seeing-in, expressive perception, visual pleasure) invoked? By contrast, a broad range of accounts of the psychological sources and cultural origins of visual art have cited the ‘imagination’, with varying characterizations and emphases concerning what the typical operations of the imagination are, as the explanans (for a representative example, see Currie (2003)). A personal anecdote leads into the heart of the question: Wollheim’s Painting as an Art was based upon his Mellon Lectures, and he also delivered a revised version of the lectures as a graduate class at UC Berkeley in 1986. As a three-time college dropout those lectures at Berkeley; hearing them was one of the great intellectual adventures of my life. For me the most startling thing in the lectures was at one point Wollheim off-handedly saying that the paintings of Barnett Newman, though perhaps an interesting kind of conceptual art, were not artistic paintings at all, that is, they were not instances of painting practiced as an artform. 

The alleged reason they weren’t was because they did not present the viewer with any sense of depictive space; adapting Frank Stella’s remark about his minimalist painting, ‘what you see is what you see, and that’s all that you see: there is no figure/support, foreground/background, no part/whole elements or a fortiori relations’.

I’m uncertain what Wollheim would have said if pressed—one of his outstanding characteristics was making surprising and seemingly wrong remarks that, after one reflected for some minutes or years, showed themselves to be right;  but I think part of his point was that neither seeing-in nor expressive perception were exercised in seeing Newman’s paintings, and so they could not be among the vast number of richly meaning-bearing paintings that comprise the world’s artistic paintings.

     If something like this way of taking Wollheim’s point is right, then even if we were to agree with Wollheim that seeing-in is a basic psychological and perceptual capacity exercised in painting as an art, a more general account of visual art (which must include Newman’s work) will need to include other perceptual capacities among the conditions of the artforms introduced in my earlier posts. What further perceptual capacities are involved in the making and perceptual encounter with visual arts like decoration and masking? In pursuit of such conditions subsequent posts will start from much more basic features of human life than those proposed by Wollheim: those relating to embodiment, the use of the hand, artifact-making, and vision generally.

     Two further points where my account will differ from Wollheim’s are in the conception of and roles for imagination in visual art, and in the role of materiality. Wollheim has a great deal of interest to say about the imagination, but in this context our concern is that he sharply distinguished the exercises of the imagination from those uses of seeing-in that are basic to artistic painting. Wollheim’s general attitude was that the artistic uses of the imagination supervened upon the conceptually prior exercise of seeing-in. Wollheim restricted the artistic employment of the imagination to what he called ‘imaginative projects’, such as imaging what a particular depicted figure’s mental state is; and so unsurprisingly he does not take imagination under any conception to be among the basic perceptual capacities exercised in painting as an art. Secondly, by ‘materiality’ I mean both the sense that mark-making typically involves the depositing of paint and/or the inscribing of line, and that both the sheer physicality of the marks, and the ways in which they introduce senses of dynamism and intentionality, are insufficiently acknowledged and developed in Wollheim’s account.

     Accordingly In this book I’ll adopt and attempt to develop the account of meaning in the visual arts introduced by the philosopher Michael Podro in the late 1990s in his profound book Depiction, which was additionally developed with regard to drawing as an art by the philosopher Patrick Maynard in his book Drawing Distinctions. The points made in Wollheim’s account will then be treated as a part of Podro’s more general account. So in my next post I’ll sketch the basic features of Podro’s account of artistic meaning as a matter of what he calls ‘sustaining recognition’.  

References:

Gregory Currie, ‘The capacities that enable us to produce and consume art’, in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (2003), edited by Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye: The Philosophy of Visual Art First Draft #4.1: Towards Artistic Meaning

     In this post I’ll attempt to sketch my basic conception of artistic meaning, with the rest of the book attempting to develop and explicate the conception with regard to the visual arts. Readers familiar with the philosophy of the visual arts of the past half-century will recognize my great indebtedness to the thought of three philosophers in particular: Richard Wollheim on the nature of meaning in painting practiced as an art; Michael Podro on artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’; and Patrick Maynard on artistic meaning as the product of an artist’s conceptual and practical ‘tool-box’.

     One way to begin reflecting on the notion of artistic meaning might be to think about meaning generally. But isn’t this to attempt to explicate the obscure with the empty? Recall Dewey’s suggestion that we should dispense with talk of ‘meaning’, or the post-War attempt to give some determinate direction and content to talk of ‘meaning’ by treating it as a linguistic property that can be explicated in terms of truth-conditions of sentences or propositions. More recently some philosophers working within broadly pragmatic or so-called enactivist orientations have offered seemingly converging lines of reflection. In their recently published book The Blind Spot, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and the enactivist Evan Thompson write that “Autonomy and agency imply sensemaking. Organisms are sensemaking beings. They create worlds of relevance . . . Meaning resides . . . at the level of autonomous agency, which is to say at the level of the organism as a whole.” (Frank et alia, pp. 153-4) With a different emphasis, in a series of books published in the past twenty years, the philosopher Mark Johnson, drawing primarily from John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and incorporating recent work in cognitive science and linguistics, has attempted a number of overlapping characterizations. In an initial formulation he characterizes his pragmatist conception of meaning generally as the degree of relationality or connectedness in human experience: “Human meaning concerns the character and significance of a person’s interactions with their environments. The meaning of a specific aspect or dimension of some ongoing experience is that aspect’s connections to other parts of past, present, or future (possible) experiences. Meaning is relational. It is about how one thing relates to or connects with other things.” (Johnson (2007), p. 10; for similar formulations, see Johnson (2017), p. 19 and Johnson (2018), p. 14) Johnson further stresses that meaning in this pragmatist-phenomenological sense pervades the experiences to which it is attached, and that, while it may be unconscious, it must in some sense be felt.

    There are two overlapping emphases in the accounts of the enactivists and of Johnson. Both stress the embodied character of meaning, and both argue that the neglect of the body in main lines of Western philosophy occludes or distorts the philosophical understanding of central phenomena in human life. Additionally, both stress that meaning is grasped reflectively through the focal concern with meaning-making. Johnson provides the richer and more detailed account of the structures and mechanisms of meaning-making, and so his work will figure prominently in upcoming posts.

     I turn now to the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim, who has offered what seems to me the model for what an account of artistic meaning must include. Wollheim himself thought that what could intelligibly be said about art, and so also artistic meaning, in general was quite restrictive, and said what he had to say about it in his monograph Art and Its Objects, which opens with a sustained  discussion of the ontology of artworks, then moves on to and through a range of topics including representation, expression, and style, all guided by the thought that art is a ‘form of life’ (in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sense). When I interviewed Wollheim publicly in 2002, he firmly stated at the beginning that he did not wish to talk about art in general, but rather only about painting as an art. And indeed his extended account of artistic meaning is that laid out specifically for painting when, and only when, practiced as an artform. In Painting as an Art Wollheim begins by asking: “How is painting to be practiced as an art?” (Wollheim, p. 17) He immediately notes that it is uninformative to begin in this manner without having said anything about what it is to be an art, and then suggests that one start with an ‘imaginary development’ “of an activity that isn’t painting [as an art] but is like it, though more primitive”, which he calls ‘Ur-painting’. (p. 19) In Ur-painting intends to deposit marks upon a support with the aim of creating something that acquires “content or meaning”. (p. 22) In the pursuit of content or meaning, the Ur-painting undertakes a process of making which has four conceptually distinct phases: depositing or mark-making;

taking stock of this depositing or making;

abstracting an  (unintentionally made) feature from the existing deposit or mark; making a further deposit or mark guided by what was achieved in the first three steps. In practice these steps are typically fused, and the movement through steps one to four is nearly instantaneous. The first three steps make up the central mechanism of meaning-making, which Wollheim calls ‘thematization’ (p. 20), which is the core feature of the artistic process qua meaning-making.

     If the artistic process as the repeated undertaking of thematization in the service of producing meaning, then what is (artistic) meaning? Wollheim urges that there a variety of kinds of artistic meaning in painting. The most central are representation (what the painting shows) and expression, which Wollheim understands as the expression of some psychological state, some feeling, emotion, and/or mood. Additionally, Wollheim devotes a chapter to each of four further kinds of meaning: borrowing, where the artist incorporates some material from prior artifacts, especially previous artistic paintings; textuality, where the artist incorporates some bit of text (say, a piece of philosophical doctrine) into the painting; metaphor, where the artist metaphorizes some aspect of the painting (the surface, the way the paint is deposited, etc.); and by introducing the sense that there is an undepicted viewer within the painting, and so an implied viewpoint upon the subject-matter of the work (this is an exceptionally difficult conception that has not found much favor; Wollheim told me that he arrived at it from long viewing of the works of Edouard Manet, wherein he came to think that the persons in Manet’s work are shown as aware of being viewed from some angle other than that of the painter or canonical viewer in front of the work).

     Wollheim’s third concern in the philosophy of painting as an art is the exploration of what we might call the psychological conditions of the possibility of artistic meaning. In the best known and most discussed part of his work, he urges that the possibility of representational meaning in artistic painting presupposes a human, species-wide capacity for what he famously calls ‘seeing-in’, the capacity to see some figure in some marks on a surface. Someone adds a few lines to a paper, and a suitably attuned spectator can, for example, see a bull.

Expression presupposes the psychological capacity for expressive vision; one sees, for example, a misty landscape and finds it expressive of melancholy. [PHOTO]

A final capacity, one that is especially difficult to discuss and about which Wollheim says little, is the capacity to find pleasure in artistic pleasure. Without such a possibility, the enterprise of artistic painting would die out after the cultural conditions that gave it a point shifted (aiding magical spells; glorifying great princes; advocating social justice; etc.)

     So there are on Wollheim’s account three spheres of concern in the philosophy of painting as an art: the psychological mechanisms of meaning-making as thematization; the varieties of artistic meaning; and the psychological conditions of the possibility of the first two. Can Wollheim’s account fruitfully serve as a guide for a philosophy of the visual arts generally? In this book I argue that it can with suitable qualifications. I’ll start to sketch out how and with what qualifications in my next post.

References:

 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)

-----Art as Experience (1934)

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024)

Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007)

-----Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (2017)

-----The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art (2018)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 3.3: Artistic Meaning at Full Stretch

Aiming to provide a sense of the range of works that a philosophy of the visual arts should consider, I continue with my fourth initial piece, Rembrandt’s famous ink drawing ‘Hendrikje Asleep’ from around 1655. I choose this particular work, from among tens of thousands of possibilities, as an instance of a work that, unlike my previous examples, is produced for suitably attuned viewers outside of any decorative, ritual, mythological, or ceremonial context, and is offered solely for visual inspection. Such works are likely what come to most people’s minds as paradigmatic instances of visual art. As with my other choices, I consider this work along with an outstandingly penetrating analysis of it, that given by the philosopher Patrick Maynard in his book Drawing Distinctions. Maynard also there gives what seems to me the single most illuminating demonstration of the ways in which artistic meaning is built, and so provides a partial justification for the conception I previously referred to as the ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaning in Zafimanary carvings. The Rembrandt drawing is at the other end of the spectrum of artistic meaning as the presentation of artistic meaningfulness at what Maynard calls ‘full stretch’.

     As I draw heavily from Maynard, so Maynard in his account drew heavily from the art historian Philip Rawson’s magisterial book Drawing. A basic, negative stylistic feature of Rembrandt’s drawing was his avoidance of a continuous outline around a figure (“like a black wire around the form” as Rembrandt reportedly said). Instead, he would build up a depicted figure most typically with a series of rounded, convex strokes in order to “create rhythmical figures by means of continuous series of linked contour-unites, giving them fresh starts, breaks, and calculated overlaps so that the lines seem to end and begin again” (Rawson, quoted in Maynard (p. 209)). Another central negative aspect of Rembrandt’s style, one that he shares with Goya, is its ‘antianatomical’ quality (p. 172), where the size and placement of the torso and limbs are left indeterminate, as in Goya’s ‘Three Soldiers Carrying a Wounded Man’ (1812-23):

A third central, and this one positive, feature of Rembrandt’s, Goya’s, and also Titian’s drawing is the use of ‘autonomous’ shadows, partially unlinked from the light-occluding bodies that cast them and linked instead with other shadows to form structuring blocks as if orthogonal to the drawing’s depicted figures (p. 168) , as in Titian’s ‘St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) in a Landscape’ (c.1520),

or in Goya’s ‘Two Prisoners in Irons’ (1820-23):

     The rhythmic aspect is particularly salient in the clockwise drawn curved lines that form Hendrikje’s back and buttocks. The marks are varied yet readily grouped together as a distinctive bit of the drawing’s lexicon. The quasi-temporal aspect of these grouped marks is two-fold: First, as noted, they strongly exhibit the temporal ordering of their own making, as each stroke exhibits a passage from wet to dry where the loaded brush first touches the paper and then drains as the mark progresses. Second, and more ambiguously, the marks taken together form a larger temporal patterning from left-to-right, but with a suggestion of a counter-patterning of intensification, with the two darkest, centrally placed marks expressing a kind of climax.

     In Maynard’s book the analysis of the Rembrandt drawing is part of a much longer argument and set of analyses aiming to show that in artistic pictorial depictions the artist has evoked various kinds of ordering (depth, outline, field, etc.) that evoke both those that the visual perception of pictures shares with non-pictorial environmental perception, as well as those that are distinctive of pictures and their making. He calls the various sub-kinds of the latter ‘drawing’s own devices’. His central point with regard to the Rembrandt drawing is that one sees here an exemplary instance of how these two kinds are interwoven in any artistic depiction. Maynard’s point seems to me fundamental, and shall become the starting point (in my next post) of my initial attempt at stating what is meant by the term ‘artistic meaning’.

References:

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression (2005)

Philip Rawson, Drawing (1987)

The World in the Eye, First Draft, Part 3.2: Lévi-Strauss on Masks

     For my third example of visual art, I turn to an instance of a type of mask prominent among the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly referred to as ‘Kwakiutl’) of the Pacific Northwest, the mask depicting a giant ogress named Dzonokwa (initially referred to by the anthropologist Franz Boas as Tsonō’koa, and now alternatively as Dzunukwa). Among the Kwakwaka’wakw masks are typically the property of particular clans or secret societies, and are usually worn in ceremonial dances and ceremonies generally. Such masks are also instances of another of the world’s largest kinds of visual art, those whose primary use is as a prop in a performance or action. Boas noted in 1890 that the Dzonokwa masks were among the kinds that he encountered most frequently in his years studying the arts, myths, and social organizations of the Kwakwaka’wakw. The most extended and penetrating account of the masks known to me was given by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1975. Lévi-Strauss’s analyzes the Dzonokwa masks at considerable length as part of an astonishingly wide-ranging and detailed account of Pacific Northwest masks generally. Here I restrict myself to what he says about the Dzonokwa masks. These masks are typically prominently or entirely black, decorated with black tufts for hairs, and have half-enclosed eyes. The mouth is pushed forward and rounded, evoking the ogress’s characteristic cry “uh! uh!” (Lévi-Strauss, pp. 61-2)

     For Lévi-Strauss artworks generally, and so also this mask, both as a type and its instances, are unintelligible if considered by themselves. Artworks and their salient features become intelligible only if first placed in appropriate comparison classes, which permits the works and their elements to be seen as part of a nested series of broad semantic systems. Within such groups, instances and features are related as transformations and inversions of each other. He initially groups the Dzonokwa masks together with another kind of mask that he treats as the most proximal inversion of the Dzonokwa, the Xwéxwé.

These latter masks are typically predominantly white, topped with stylized feathers, and feature a hanging tongue, bulging eyes, and bird-head appendages (p. 41). Considered from “the plastic point of view”, the Xwéxwé mask is “full of protrusions” and is opposed to “the Dzonokwa mask, which is all cavities” (p. 67).

     How might one move beyond ‘the plastic point of view’? What, if anything, further can be said about the artistic meaning of such works? For Lévi-Strauss further meanings are retrieved by reconstructions, from the well-documented to the speculative, of the systems of which the masks are elements. First, ethnographic observation supplies the immediate context of use of the masks in dances and ceremonies. A dancer in a Xwéxwé mask is believed to shake the ground, and so is associated with earthquakes (p. 40). The wearer of the Dzonokwa masks “wraps himself in a black blanket and sways sleepily near the door” (p. 66), behavior that is explained through consideration of the myths and stories associated with the ogress. There is no need here to summarize further Lévi-Strauss’s immensely interesting and detailed account of the semantic systems; readers (if there remain any alive besides myself) of his four-volume ‘science’ of mythology will not be surprised to learn that he relates the relevant myths first to those of neighboring groups, then to all the major groups of the Pacific Northwest, and ultimately to a system so broad that it ranges from South America to Japan and China (!). Later in the book I’ll attempt an extended account of masks as visual art and consider instances from other continents. For now I end this short post with two strictures for the philosophy of visual art: Such a philosophy must incorporate Lévi-Strauss’s findings into its account of artistic meaning, or be able to explain why such kinds of meaning should be excluded from consideration. Second, a philosophy of visual art should contain conceptual resources to aid in the interpretive task that Lévi-Strauss ignores, that is, ways of explicating the artistic meaning of single instances of artworks. I turn next to Patrick Maynard’s account of a drawing by Rembrandt to introduce this concern for particulars.

 References:

 Franz Boas, “The Use of Masks and Head Ornaments on the Northwest Coast of America” (1890), in A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native American Art (1995), ed. Aldona Jonaitis

Audrey Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art (1979)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (1982)

The World in an Eye, Part 3.1: Nancy Munn on Walbiri Design

     For a second example of what I’ve termed the ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaning, as well as how this zero degree gains content, consider the astonishing drawings in the sand made by some Aboriginal groups in central and southwestern Australia. The artistic practice of drawing in the sand ranges from small, impromptu illustrations accompanying oral story-telling to large (six to eighteen feet in length) depictions of totemic animals rendered with parallel wavy lines and concentric circles. (McCarthy p. 32) The larger drawings are the work of many hours and illustrate the places, travels, and incidents of ancestor beings in Dreamtime, the timeless time of mythic, ancestral events.

     The classic account of such sand drawings was of those from the Aboriginal Walbiri (or Warlpiri) group given by the anthropologist Nancy Munn. Walbiri women practice a distinctive genre of sand drawing characterized by “the rhythmic interplay of a continuous running graphic notation with gesture signs and a singsong verbal patter.” (Munn, p. 59) The drawings consist of a small lexicon of lines and enclosures; each item has a range of possible meanings that are specified contextually in use.

Among the women’s stories are accounts of dreams, which use a smaller range of elements that are also painted onto women’s bodies; these figures are often elongated to fit onto body parts, especially shoulders and breasts, surrounded by additional lines, or subjected to further decorative elaboration. (pp. 103-09) [

     By contrast, much of the graphic design accompanying men’s story-telling of mythic travel uses marks of tracks indicating particular species-ancestors, lines for paths, and circles for places. (pp. 119-28) These circle-line designs are used also on boards and stones. (p. 136)

Likewise in partial contrast to women’s drawings, the men’s particular designs are typically part of a ritual context of communicating with ancestors and are closely associated “with a single ancestor and the songs detailing the events of his track” (p. 145). The associated designs and songs are “treated as complementary channels of communication; each is a repository of narrative meaning, and the production of one may evoke the other.”

     These design elements are further incorporated into “aspects of men’s ceremonial drama, and to forms of ceremonial paraphernalia” (p. 183). In the ceremonial dramas, decorated men represent the ancestors in a camp, travelling along a track, or coming into a camp. Thus the dramas are structured by the same site-path/camp-track framework that is utilized in the designs themselves. (p. 185)

     Munn ends with some general remarks about the sand drawings, their connection with stories, and their incorporation into broader frameworks, including the differing and complementary roles of men’s and women’s arts and lives, and ultimately the function of such meaning making. The visual elements and their uses exhibit “a high degree of repetitiveness”, which allows them to be key agents of a “connective” in “the dynamic through which such forms come to penetrate the imaginations of members of a community”. For both men and women, the designs and their incorporation into broader patterns of meaning cover individuals’ bodies, extend them, and connect them with the outer, social world, itself ultimately conceived as a part of a mythic cosmos. (pp. 215-17) Her conclusion is that the “visual forms are “multivocal” condensation symbols that can project an image of dynamic society unity in microcosm”. (p. 220) Part of the philosophical will be to make sense of how it is that visual artworks can so much as come to accomplish this.

References:

Frederick D. McCarthy, Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art (1962)

Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography (1986)

The World in the Eye, First Draft, Part 2: The Zero Degree of Artistic Meaning

     One problem that afflicts the philosophical consideration of art has been philosophers’ consideration of a narrow range and very few actual artworks. From among the greatest modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant’s consideration of particular artworks is contained mostly in some remarks on a poem by Frederick the Great, Martin Heidegger spun out his account of art largely from reflection upon the example of ‘the’ Greek temple, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered at length only stylistic features of Cézanne. Relatedly, most philosophers restrict themselves to one or two kinds of art: for the unmusical Kant it was poetry and emblems, for the unmusical Heidegger poetry and painting, for Merleau-Ponty painting and literature. No great classic philosopher has given any extended consideration to, say, dance. Here we restrict ourselves in advance to the visual arts, but then what range of artworks should a philosophical consideration of distinctively artistic meaning of visual arts consider?

     Here I’ll introduce and sketch the artistic meanings of a small number of visual artworks. From among thousands of possibilities I’ve semi-arbitrarily chosen a few from a range of cultures and of various types. One criterion guiding the choices is that in each case there is extended and insightful published interpretation of the piece; I’ll summarize the interpretations and treat them as part of the evidence that a philosophical account of artistic meaning must attempt to make sense of. I see no way of initially responding to the objection that the procedure begs the questions of what a work of art is and whether these pieces are artworks. One sign of the relative success of this investigation would be that by the end of the book the objection will have melted away in the face of the evidence of the works’ artistic richness.

1. The Zafimaniry are a group of Malagasy-speaking slash-and-burn farmers in the eastern forests of Madagascar. Like the Haida of the Pacific Northwest, they are renowned as carvers. Part of their traditional carving, according to the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, is making “low reliefs or engravings of relatively elaborate geometrical patterns which cover the wooden parts of their houses—especially the shutters and, most beautifully, the three main posts.” (Bloch, p. 39)

Bloch writes that people who have written about these works have in some cases asked various Zafimaniry what they meant, and already problems arise. The question is posed in French, where the phrase usually translated into English as ‘meant’ is vouloir dire (literally, ‘try [or want] to say’). Nothing readily translates ‘want to say’ into Malagasy, so the Malagasy-speaking Bloch suggests they must have understood the question as something that translates readily into one of four senses: ‘What is the point of it?’, ‘What is the root cause of it?’, ‘What is it [a depiction] of?’ or ‘What are you doing [in making this]?’ Bloch received “rather disappointing answers” when he asked these questions: there was no point to these carved depictions of nothing. Parts, but only parts, of the carvings were said to represent something, such as a circle representing the moon. But he did receive one seemingly substantive answer carving the wood “made it beautiful [and so] ‘honor[s] the wood’. (ibid, pp. 41-2) Bloch comes to realize that the significance of the carvings is not as it were given in themselves, either taken one at a time or as a whole, but rather only in the context of the houses and the Zafimaniry understanding of the role of houses in the trajectory of a life construed as an endless passage from relative undetermination to relative determination, a passage metaphorically conceptualized and made manifest in the hardening of a house’s wood. When first built, a house has central posts and a flimsy outer wall of reeds and mats. Over time the flimsy materials are replaced with massive pieces of wood. “The house is the marriage”, and when the original occupants die their descendants will inhabit it and continue the process. The hardening of the wood is endless, because even very hard wood is carved. Thereby carving gains a conceptualization: it is “a continuation of the process of hardening and transformation” that “’honours’ the hardness of the heartwood and makes it even more evident and beautiful.” (ibid, p. 43)

     Surely there is a great deal more to be said about Zafimaniry carvings. One would certainly wish to know how the Zafimaniry evaluate particular instances, and whether particular instances at least in some cases carry further kinds of meaningfulness beyond their decorative role in metaphorizing the hardening process. And what of the significance, if any, or the shallowness of house carvings as contrasted with the relative depth of other kinds of carving? Still, Bloch’s account provides the material for some initial remarks on artistic meaning. Like these house carvings, much of the world’s visual art is decorative, where ‘decorative’ indicates that artistic work is a (conceptually) secondary elaboration of some primary material, subject, or content; decoration is always ‘decoration-of-X’. (I’ll consider decoration at length later in this book.) There is no representational content; or, if there is (as in my next example), it is unretrievable by mere visual inspection, and is rather assigned by traditional usage (here the circle is a moon; in early Chinese art it is Heaven) or by the artist. Some salience and visual attractiveness is given through the combination of the skill in making and the forms, textures, and patternings within the work, all of which are perceptually evident and bear kinds of significance as expressive of human actions (scraping, cutting, digging, filing, smoothing, etc.).

     We can think of the Zafimaniry carvings as exhibiting a kind of ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaningfulness: they lack a subject or content, and offer, in themselves and taken individually, only (!) a display of skill and design. But already, even at the ‘zero degree’, they bear and continue a history of making, a style, and existentially serious conceptualizations of themselves and of that which they decorate, all of which are perceptually available to a suitably attuned perceiver.—In my next 1000+-word post I’ll present another instance of this zero degree, the sand paintings and totemic images of the Australian Aboriginal group the Walbiri (or Warlpiri), and then consider a further degree of artistic meaningfulness in a particular kind of mask of the Pacific Northwest group the Kwakwaka’wakw (or Kwakiutl). 

References:

Maurice Bloch, “Questions not to ask of Malagasy carvings” in Essays on Cultural Transmission (2005)

The World in Your Eye: Elements of a Philosophy of Artistic Meaning in the Visual Arts, Part One

The following is the first in a series of 40-50 posts that collectively will comprise the first draft of a book on the philosophy of the visual arts. I imagine the book will go through at least three drafts, but I’ll post the first draft in 1000-or-so word segments in hopes that some people will find it interesting enough to read and along and, hopefully, comment and especially criticize.

1. A great deal of philosophical thinking about the arts might well be thought of as offering answers to the question ‘What is art?’. The question is typically further focused and narrowed in one of three ways. One prominent way is to focus on a particular artform. So a philosophy of painting asks ‘What is painting (when practiced as an art)?’, a philosophy of theater wonders ‘What is theater (practiced as an artform?’. A second kind investigates the artistic process, the actions that an artist engages in in making an artwork. A third gives the initial question an ontological flavor, and asks ‘What is a work of art?’. The last focuses on the recipient of the art, and tries to uncover and analyze distinctive attitudes or kinds of response that an appropriately attentive person exhibits in encountering an artwork; this is the world of the ‘aesthetic attitude’ or of ‘aesthetic experience’, with the further assumption that it is a distinctive feature of artwork to solicit and reward these kinds of attitudes and experiences. Each of these four further investigations must presuppose some sort of answer to the initial question of what art is; otherwise there would be no distinctive topic to investigate, that is, no way to distinguish artistic from non-artistic ways of making and perceiving.

      But for many reflective thinkers, the appeal to the concept of art is an appeal to nothing at all. One broad and prominent line of thinking is that the very concept of art, and its use in intellectual contexts, is so ideologically tainted by its origin in thinking about visual artworks in Western contexts of galleries and museums that it is worse than useless in thinking about global arts, as the concept inevitably carries with it conceptions and criteria for applying the concept that demote the vast array of global, non-gallery arts from serious consideration. Typically, this charge is not followed by the attempt to offer a reformed, ideologically untainted conception of art, but rather with the quick and unargued implication that there is no viable concept of art generally. A different line of thinking urges that there is a viable concept of art, but its scope of legitimate application is restricted to modern gallery-museum arts. So on the first line, the whole attempt to metamorphose the question ‘What is art?’ into the questions ‘What is the artform of X?’ [where X is painting or drawing or sculpture or music or theater . . . ] can’t get going, as there is no way of picking out an artform from human practices generally; while on the second line artforms, like art itself, is restricted to works destined for the refined worlds of galleries and museums.

     In this book I present a course of philosophical thinking that has few if any models or predecessors: the nature of artistic meaning, in particular in the visual arts. What is artistic meaning? One might well think that the investigation of artistic meaning inherits all the problems of determining what makes an artform a form of art, while adding the further, notorious obscurity of the concept of meaning. As John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley put it, ‘meaning’ is “[a] word so confused that it is best never used at all. More direct expressions can always be found”. (Dewey and Bentley, p. 297) In a great deal of English language philosophy since World War II, invocations of ‘meaning’ accordingly are treated as something that can be replaced with more manageable and precise conceptions. The taming of the intractable concept of meaning into something admitting of philosophical analysis involves three steps: First, ‘meaning’ is restricted to language. Then language is conceived as consisting of sentences that can be analyzed one at a time. Finally, such sentences admit of truth-or-falsity, and whatever was meant by ‘meaning’ would be captured in considering the circumstances of and ways in which sentences can be true or false. As W. V. O. Quine put it: “You have given all the meanings when you have given the truth-conditions of all the sentences.” (Quoted in Platts, p. 53) Supposedly the analysis of truth-conditions thereby clarifies and replaces the muddle of meaning.

     I go a different way. To my mind this short route to the elimination of talk about meaning does nothing to preserve or clarify the intuitions that motivated reference to meaning in art. Among such intuitions, generalized and formulated as claims about distinctive features of human life,  I include at least the following: the sense that across almost all cultures the arts are central and important (the Centrality claim); the sense that whatever needs the arts address, whatever functions they fulfill, whatever desires they satisfy, etc, cannot in many instances be addressed and fulfilled and satisfied through other human practices, such as those in the realms of economics, religion, or politics (the Irreplaceability claim); and that the Centrality and Irreplaceability of the arts can be explained in part by their possession of certain kinds of meaning that are available to suitably attuned percipients of art works. ‘Meaning’ in the relevant senses is a heterogenous group that includes various kinds of representation, expression, symbolicity, metaphoricity, solicitations to participation and/or involvement, and resonances. There is no determinate limit to what can or cannot be a kind of artistic meaning; the sole determinant for inclusion is whether in fact something contributes to the distinctive kinds of meaningfulness exhibited by artworks. A striking feature of artistic meaning is its ineffability: it cannot be exhaustively put into words or captured in a finite string of sentences.

     This philosophical exploration of artistic meaning will have three major parts: first I’ll sketch a philosophical anthropology that aims to show very basic features of human life that are presupposed by the very existence of the arts, but even more so which are reservoirs of basic kinds of meaningfulness that artworks draw from and recruit. The first of these features is embodiment, that is, having a body that exhibits front-and-back, up-and-down, bilateral symmetry, and handedness. Then in order I’ll consider gesture, the human hand, and language. Although I envision this book as part of a general philosophy of the arts, my focus here will be on the visual arts, so I’ll further give a summary account of human vision. The second part will consider very basic aspects of the making of artistic meaning, in particular its ineliminable historicity, and how meaning arises from constraints, including the nature of an artistic medium and conventions of genre and style. The third part will try to show and analyze the further factors involved in bringing together the previously canvased kinds and mechanisms of meaningfulness in order to produce the rich, non-finite kinds of meaning characteristic of visual artworks.

     Next, I’ll introduce and give brief accounts of three works of art that will serve to orient the discussions in the book. I choose these three, from among tens of thousands of possibilities, because they are among my personal favorites, because they all have attracted bodies of high-level writing and reflection, and because collectively they give a sense of the range of the visual arts. The three are the sand drawings of the Australian Aboriginal group the Warlbiri, a mask from the Pacific Northwest group the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly referred to as the Kwakiutl), and a drawing by Rembrandt.

References:

 John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (1949)

Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (1979)

On Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (2024)

     Claire Bishop is one of the most prominent academics in the United States whose professional field is the study of contemporary visual art. And like many such academics, she views her professional activity as ‘theorizing’ aspects of contemporary art, with a particular focus on seemingly novel aspects of very recent art. Her new book Disordered Attention is very much of a piece with this orientation. The book consists of a lengthy introduction wherein she discusses the concept of attention and introduces her central concept of ‘hybrid attention’, then of four chapters each of which presents and ‘theorizes’ what she claims is some recently emergent genre of contemporary art. I am by no means certain that the book offers much insight into very recent visual art, but Bishop’s method, examples, and observations are at the very least symptomatic of contemporary reflective thinking on their topic, and so worth knowing by anyone who seeks orientation on and understanding of these novel kinds of art. In the following short review I’ll start with what I take to by a summary of her central arguments and analyses, and then offer some critical reflections. I note in advance that at many points in reading this short book I was unsure exactly what Bishop is arguing, as well as what the intended scope and force of her claims are; but of course I’ll try to state her points in what I take to be their maximally plausible and interesting form, though it seems to me entirely possible that I am misunderstanding her claims. I shall not resist the temptation to insert occasional marks of perplexity or exasperation in brackets.

     I take her to be arguing two central claims: 1. There is an historically novel kind of attention, ‘hybrid attention’, that is the mode of viewers’ engagement solicited in some recent art (Bishop calls this “the new conditions of spectatorship” (p. 4)); and 2. There are (at least) four very recently emergent genres in contemporary visual art: (a) ‘research-based’ art presented in installations; (b) ‘performance exhibition’ wherein lengthy live performances occur in museums and galleries; (c) ‘interventions’ wherein artists attempt, both within and outside of art institutions, to capture attention with ephemeral installations or actions in order to stimulate broad discussion and debate; (d) invocations, whether in collages, paintings, photographs, installations, or performances, of modernist architecture. [One immediately notices that these four emergent ‘genres’ are quite heterogeneous, and further that prima facie (d) at least does not seem to be anything like an artistic genre, but rather more a kind of concern or topic across genres; I’ll consider this point below.] Here initially I just note that Bishop considers claims 1 and 2 to be connected in that each of the four genres demands (in very different ways) ‘hybrid attention’ from the viewer for appropriate engagement with, and understanding and appreciation of, works that are classified as instances of the genre.

     I’ll now consider the claims in more detail. First, what does Bishop mean by ‘hybrid attention’? Bishop states that in this book “attention is understood not as a universal, deep-rooted faculty of the human mind, but as a capacity that is mutable—through technology, medication, and the presence of others” (p. 5). Bishop contrasts ‘hybrid attention’ with two other historically prominent kinds of attention: ‘normative attention’, which she characterizes as “an attention directed at objects (rather than subjects), that is intellectual and cognitive (rather than sensorial and affective), that is framed in terms of ownership (‘taking possession of the mind’ [here Bishop quotes from William James’s The Principles of Psychology]) and which is individual (rather than socially or collectively constituted) (p. 8)”; and the kind of absorptive attention that she thinks is characteristic of traditional approaches, both perceptual and scholarly, to visual works of art. Normative attention is, Bishop asserts, quite a nasty piece of business: it “conforms to Enlightenment conceptions of the modern subject as conscious, rational, and disciplined. This model is, of course [of course??], paradigmatically white, patriarchal, bourgeois, colonial. It is synonymous with ownership, property, and optical mastery” (p.8 [does Bishop know what the word ‘synonymous’ means?]). Further, normative attention “assumes a normative subject—privileged, white, straight, able-bodied, volitional [?]—who confers his attention onto an exteriority thereby constituted as an object.” (p. 15) The second prominent kind of attention, which I’ll call ‘absorptive attention’, is a sub-kind of normative attention that emerges prominently in the 1870s with new ways of hanging paintings in salons, newly silent and refined behavior in museums, and with Richard Wagner’s re-organization of theatrical space in the service of encouraging “optical surrender” and “ritual immersion” (p. 13) in his operas’ audiences. In the arts absorptive attention is bound to “the depth model of a fully present beholder”  and “a modernist aesthetics of rapt enthrallment and plentitude” (p. 27). Earlier in the book Bishop writes that a ‘depth model of culture’ is one wherein “cherished objects (‘masterpieces’) . . . elicit inexhaustible attention”, inciting scholars to “spend long hours writing about such objects”, thereby [?] associating “meaning and profundity” (p. 5). Perhaps one might phrase Bishop’s general point by saying that absorptive attention is normative attention in modern arts. Hybrid attention contrasts with normative attention and its artistic form absorptive attention in abandoning the latters’ modes of engagement in favor of the audience relaxing, chatting, looking at their phones, taking photos and putting them on Instagram, and so forth.

     I turn now to the four emergent genres of contemporary visual art. Bishop is not wholly consistent in her use of terminology. At one point she says that only the first three kinds of art considered solicit hybrid attention (pp. 27-8), and that the fourth kind is not a genre but a ‘citational practice’ (p. 30). However, in a schematic table (p. 32) she classifies all four as ‘genres of practice’ that solicit different ‘modes of attention’ that are manifestly hybrid in her sense, so for consistency with her most formal statement I’ll consider them all as genres involving hybrid attention. In a number of places Bishop states that she is ‘theorizing’ the different genres. What does this mean? Bishop gives some indications of her understanding of ‘theorization’, and her practice is reasonably consistent. A genre is ‘theorized’ when (a) a short characterization is given of its central features; (b) an intra-artistic pre-history and history of its central works are sketched; (c) central works are picked out and described; (d) something of the broader institutional, social, political, and/or economic background or context of the relevant works is indicated; and (e) the central works and the genre as a whole are assessed in light of the roles they play in sustaining, fostering, or hindering an array of broader concerns, especially those relating to the destructive effects of capitalism and presumptive social progress in ethics, social mores, and rights. On what I take to be a fairly standard understanding, inquiry consisting of (a)-(c) is the normal practice of art history, (a)-(d) is the social history of art, and the full ‘theorizing’ of (a)-(e) is a complacent, academic version of critical theory, unreflective in its failure to probe, historicize, or problematize the standards and criteria invoked in (e).

     Bishop’s remarks can readily be organized under the (a)-(e) schema, as follows:

--Research-based art is a kind of visual art that spatially exhibits a great deal of textual material, along with in many cases photographs, videos, and/or films, all of which are manifestly the product of the artist’s research into a particular self-chosen topic. In many cases the materials shown are so numerous and lengthy that no viewer/reader could reasonably be expected to look at and/or read all of it. No narrative is presented, and no conclusion is insinuated. The genre emerges as the confluence of three earlier though historically quite recent artforms: photodocumentary, the film essay, and Conceptual art (p. 41). There are as of now three phases of such art: an initial phase exemplified by Renée Green’s [profoundly dreary] Import/Export Funk Office of 1992, a mixed-media exhibition including books, magazines, newspapers, videos, cassettes, and various pedestrian wooden structures; a second phase that partially overlaps the first phase and is distinguished by its deployment of seemingly outmoded technologies such as slideshows and embrace of narrative, as exemplified by the work of Mario García Torres including A Film Treatment (Share-e-Nau Wanderings) (2006), which uses faxes, slides, and audio recording to present Torres’s attempts to locate a certain hotel in Afghanistan; and a third phase which largely restricts itself to internet research, and presents its materials as an aggregation of data that the viewer is expected to sift through, though to no particular end, and as exemplified by Wolfgang Tillmans’s ‘Truth Study Center’ of many iterations starting in 2005.

The social precondition of such [disheartening and excruciatingly boring] art is the rise of doctoral programs for artists (p. 38). Bishop for the most part evaluates this genre with two criteria: Does it or does it not undermine the presumptive authority of the artist and so ‘decenter the subject’? And is it worthwhile for a viewer to engage with it? The first and third phases do such undermining, the second doesn’t, but all of this is trumped by the fact that the work is so diffuse. Against these dispiriting works, Bishop counterposes the work of Walid Raad and Anna Boghiguian which involves some research, but which synthesizes the research with a personal narrative and presents the synthesis in such a manner that a viewer is allowed “a lived, sensuous encounter that has been digested” (p. 72). Good on Raad and Boghiguian, the reader sighs; but how do these works fit into Bishop’s three phases? And if they don’t fit, does that mean that they aren’t actually part of the genre? Or alternatively, does it mean that Bishop’s description is incomplete, and indeed omits what should be the central instances of the genre, that is, those that succeed artistically?

     In order not to overly try the reader’s patience, I’ll describe the quite similar accounts of the remaining three genres more briefly. Performance exhibitions emerge from the precedent of Merce Cunningham’s events, which were multi-media presentations of his choreographed dances off-stage in museums and other public spaces. An exemplary work is Maria Hassabi’s PLASTIC of 2015, consisting of lengthy  performances of very slow dances of crawling the floors and inching down stairs. Hybrid attention is particularly evident with viewers taking photos [and fleeing the museum?]. Bishop rather likes this, as the viewer is uncertain how to act (p. 109), and the whole thing is quite sociable with all the resultant photos and chatter online. Interventions are “self-initiated actions that address the polis through the use of public space, employing an everyday visual language, and harnessing the media to force an issue into public consciousness and spark debate” (p. 115) [In what sense is this an artistic genre? And what does Bishop intend in using the Greek term polis instead of, say, ‘city’ or ‘urban environment’?]

A recent and well-known such intervention was Pussy Riot’s Mother of God, Drive Putin Away in a cathedral in Moscow in 2012. Bishop seems to approve of many interventions because effective in their provocations, but is seemingly troubled by the fact that on her own account the storming of the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 might plausibly count as an intervention.

The final genre [or is it strategy?] involves contemporary artists’ invoking modernist architecture, such as in Kcho’s To the Eyes of History (1992-95) and Ai Weiwei’s Fountain of Light (2007), a genre-or-strategy that Bishop finds typically and lamentably nostalgic. Positive counter-instances are provided by the widely known ‘monuments’ of Thomas Hirschhorn, which provide a “collision of demographics and activities” that create “a social montage “ that is disjunctive and beautiful (p. 192).

     Having already signaled my dismay about a number of Bishop’s formulations—her unexamined and complacent use of fashionable clichés; her sloppiness in formulations; inconsistencies resulting from the failure to think through her basic points and concepts-- by way of criticism I’ll restrict myself to what I take to be a central conceptual problem with the book, namely her presentation and understanding of the concept of attention. She cites James’s formulation of attention as an aspect of human psychology that involves selection, focalization, and sustained awareness as somehow a distinctive mark of all the socially despised types of liberal academics—the white, the privileged, the bourgeois, the colonialist. But surely attention is an aspect of human psychology; and if James’s formulation is irredeemably tainted ideological, then how ought one formulate what attention is? I can see nothing problematic with James’s formulation as an initial orientation to the topic, and Bishop provides no reason, evidence, or argumentation to suggest otherwise, other than the bare assertion that it is of course white, bourgeois, etc. One might with equal justification retort that Bishop’s assertion is of course rubbish. Further, one might think that her inability to formulate the conception of hybrid attention as something other than looking at something + looking at one’s phone is evidence of her lack of an intellectually plausible conception of attention per se. And finally, on her own account successful works in her chosen genres, such as those of Walid Raad, do rely for their artistic effectiveness on synthesis of heterogeneous materials and perceptually graspable presentations. This suggests that hybrid attention is at most an aspect of contemporary sensibilities that may—or may not—be incorporated into and function as an aspect of a successful work of contemporary art, rather than hybrid attention being somehow the core manner of encounter with (some) works of contemporary art. Bishop needs to go back to the drawing board (or whatever its digital equivalent is), read the basic literature on attention and on aesthetic response, and re-think her points accordingly.

References:

Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (2024)

William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)

Review of Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, Part 3: Epistemic Retreat in Contemporary Poetry?

     Having in my previous two posts on Charles Taylor summarized his basic concerns and introduced some of his central concepts, in particular ‘resonance’ and ‘cosmos’, I turn to his philosophical history of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry. This occupies approximately three-quarters of the 598-page book, so my presentation is necessarily selective, though, I hope, not idiosyncratic. In my first post I gave the barest outline, and again: Taylor sees an epochal change in European cultures around the year 1800, a change that of course is neither instantaneous nor simple, but whose most basic feature is the loss of a secure and institutionally and culturally sustained sense of human beings living within ‘The Great Chain of Being’. Living with this conception provided human beings with a sense of the cosmos as a whole, their place within that cosmos, and a felt sense of their connection to both natural entities within the cosmos and of the cosmos itself. With the loss of that secure conception, human beings experience a kind of alienation, something they seek to overcome through re-connecting with the cosmos, if no longer in the old sense then at least under a new conception that is appropriate to their best understanding of themselves and of nature. Romantic poetry, in particular that of Wordsworth, Hölderlin, and Novalis, bears this cultural burden and cultural task of re-connection, and these poets present a kind of maximal response that offers a renewed conception of the cosmos, as well as some sense of how it can be and is experienced. Later, post-Romantic poets retreat from the demand to present a new conception of the cosmos into an intensified focus on the scene of poetry itself, and with it a new sense and rich sense of time as quotidian and/or historical. Recently, even this transformed and as it were post-cosmic sense of the whole as temporal is lost as our current conception of the whole, nature understood in an evolutionary and ecological manner, does not admit of presentation in poetry, and the cultural burden passes to certain kinds of reflective, descriptive, and personalized prose.

     Let’s move closer and consider first Taylor’s account of Romantic thought and its poetry. The most general features of what Taylor calls ‘the new Romantic outlook’ were the Romantics’ adoption of new conceptions of nature in its relation to human beings, a new conception of human freedom, and a new aim for humanity. Nature as a whole comes to be conceived as a developing organism. Human beings are part of this organism and have intimate communication, albeit usually latent, with other natural entities and with nature as a whole. In their activities humans develop themselves and contribute to the development of the whole of nature. The outstanding proximal human aim is to realize oneself fully, and this can only be done autonomously, where ‘autonomy’ is understood both ethically and politically as under circumstances freed from compulsion and coercion. The ultimate aim is to ‘reconcile’ human beings with nature where the seeming isolation of human beings from themselves, from each other, and from nature is overcome. The recognition that this reconciliation has not yet been and may never be achieved leads to a characteristic Romantic tone of irony. (pp. 5-7) One might well think that it is only its vagueness that saves this collection of conceptions from absurdity, and that with good reason post-Romantic poets abandoned parts of the Romantic outlook and devised successor conceptions. In any case Taylor finds the Romantic conception paradigmatically embodied first of all in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ of 1798. In a way that is typical of the entire book he only considers a few key lines, and indeed its most famous ones:

     And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of thought,

And rolls through all things.

These lines are the inaugural poetic moment of the epochal transformation. Of course not everyone may experience this, but Taylor claims that if ‘Tintern Abbey’ “as poetry works for someone then they are convinced that they are connecting to an “autonomous order,” which connection has deep significance for them. That is why they are moved. But there is a difference with earlier ages. There one could say that I am moved because I am convinced of this order (Great Chain, or concordia discors, or whatever). These two phases can be distinguished. But the reader of Wordsworth is convinced through being moved.” (p. 34) So Romantic poetry at its most serious neither primarily refers to some pre-existent order, nor merely state a new conception of order, but rather moves the suitably receptive viewer in such a way that they sense they are connected with some (perhaps largely or wholly indeterminate) order. The Romantic poems are a kind of modern epiphanies, “which both (partially) reveal the Plan/direction of things and put us in empowering contact with it.” Put alternatively, such works have a ‘transfiguration effect’ “on some scene, by which a deeper order becomes visible, or shines through.” (p. 40) This is “the domain of resonance” (p. 41). A general way of putting these fundamental points would be to say that, whereas pre-Romantic poetry may designate, represent, and/or reveal some prior order, Romantic poetry discovers the new order in creating it (pp. 43 and 126).

     Taylor goes on to give similar accounts of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Shelley, with Keats figuring as transitional to post-Romantic poetry. Taylor suggests that Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ offers something new in heightening and intensifying our experience not of the old or new cosmos, but rather of the fully ripened season, and with it “a more intense sense of the space enclosing us” (p. 134). Concern for the larger order is abandoned in favor of articulating and transforming the particular experience described and evoked; accordingly ‘To Autumn’ is an inaugural instance of the ‘epistemic retreat’ from the Romantics’ claim to create a new order in favor of the post-Romantic “poetic discoveries/inventions of epiphanic languages” (p. 137) whose foci shall be, as previously noted, particular natural scenes or objects, along with the various aspects of the human relation to time, and the transfiguration of these through poetry so that they become scenes of resonance.

     Although Taylor’s accounts of post-Romantic poets occupies approximately two-thirds of the book, I shall consider it only briefly, as there are many dozens of pages consisting simply of the poems in English, French, and German (the latter also with full translations), and the points Taylor makes mostly just illustrate his general claims about the already-stated character of the post-Romantics’ epistemic retreat. Taylor does introduce and develop the conception of ‘higher times’, which are moments that seem to stand out from the quotidian course of time, and which seem to gather, focus, and stabilize larger stretches of time in striking and memorable ways. Taylor thinks this conception emerges prominently in Baudelaire, but his extended account of such times is unsurprisingly through Proust’s evocation of the madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann and the paving stones in Le Temps retrouvé (Taylor’s turn to Proust to provide the exemplum of higher times reminded me of the great Chilean-Mexican novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño’s remark that of course poetry is a greater art form than prose, and the greatest poetry of the twentieth-century is the novels of Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner). Considering ‘higher times’ in Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, and Proust, Taylor suggests that it takes various forms, whether in the felt sense that the succession of time has disappeared when one is in the grips of an intensely felt event, or in the sense that one has transcended ordinary temporal succession and entered into a different realm, or in the Proustian sense of the fusing of the present and the past in a vivified memory (pp. 384-5).

     No one could be surprised to learn that there is a great deal more and of great interest in the book than I’ve discussed here. Some of the most important omissions are his discussion of the notion of a symbol as offering a kind of semi-transparent (or semi-opaque if you’re a pessimist) access to an otherwise hidden realm, his early discussion of the Romantic conception of translation, and the various moments and ways in which he connects his conceptions, narratives, and diagnoses to points in his very large body of earlier writings. And as mentioned early on here, I pass by entirely the penultimate chapter, ‘History of Ethical Growth’, as I do not see how it connects significantly with any of the major points elsewhere in the book. What, then, of Taylor’s diagnosis of our contemporary condition, wherein our conception of nature is such that it does not admit of poetic treatment?

     Taylor’s diagnosis is given in a very few pages in the short concluding chapter, ‘Cosmic Connection Today—And Perennially’. He writes oddly that there continue to be traces, but only traces, of concern for cosmic connection in the poetry of the later twentieth century, for instance in the work of Wallace Stevens (‘oddly’ because Stevens died in 1955, and Miłosz, to whose concern for such connection devoted an entire chapter, died in 2004). The reason for this loss of concern, Taylor asserts, is that our most prominent strand of sensibility regarding this concern comes from “the discoveries of science, and the more and more detailed grasp of the intricate orders, both macroscopic and microscopic, in which we live.” Crucially (it seems to me) for Taylor in our contemporary scientific cosmology “[t]here are no more higher and lower levels”; instead our awed vision is of “the whole structure and its evolution over eons [that] inspires awe”, and “[t]hese interwoven orders are not revealed in poetry” (p. 588). For something of our contemporary cosmic re-connection, we should turn instead to writing like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that offers careful descriptions of intense personal experiences of nature and place, or to the local religions of indigenous communities that locate some particular place within its larger environment and as a spiritual expression of some creator god or spirit. (pp. 589-93)

     There is nothing in Taylor’s great body of writing to suggest that he aims to shock his readers, but that was certainly my initial response to his diagnosis of our time. I cannot be the book’s only reader who thinks that, even if one grants his major claims, this diagnosis seems as wrong-headed as it is cursory. Like many readers my initial reaction is to sputter: ‘What about X, and Y, and Z?!’ By way of conclusion, I’ll briefly consider one ‘X’ and suggest that Taylor’s misdiagnosis reveals some problems with his conceptions. My ‘X’ shall be, in the manner of Taylor, a very few words from one of the greatest experimental poets of our time, Lyn Hejinian, who died earlier this year. Hejinian was the author of a great many short books of poetry over fifty years, with further work forthcoming posthumously; but among an audience broader than that for experimental poetry, her best known work is surely My Life, published in 1980 with further editions of supplemental material, and which has become a standard work in the academic study and teaching of contemporary poetry. The work consists of a number of sections, something like unindented paragraphs, each of which is headed by a separated, rectangular space on the page that contains a very short stretch of sub-sentential text in italics. The italicized text surely is meant to be understood as related to the accompanying section’s more sustained prose--but there is no certainty whether as caption, chapter title, epigraph, or counterpoint. The famous opening italicized phrase is ‘a pause, a rose, something on paper’. First consider the phrase in isolation from its context: An initial plain reading suggests a temporal sequence, with a perceiver/writer stopping herself—to notice, to reflect, to recall—and there’s a rose. If noticed, the rose is seen; if given through reflection, the rose is imagined; if recalled, it’s the memory of a rose (a particular rose, or a type of rose, or a generic rose?). But the poetic effect takes place, in something like the ways that William Empson memorably analyzed nearly a hundred years ago in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and semantic variations seem to wash over the words. One thinks: A pause arose, and that was/was embodied by something on paper. Or one thinks: Is ‘apause’ an archaic noun for ‘apposite’? Or one thinks: Does the pause arise within the things on paper? Is reading a (self-) interruption? And so on without end. Then the text induces the thought: How does this caption (title, epigraph) relate to the section of sustained text, itself consisting of a series of precise and chiseled sentences arranged in rigorous parataxis? The reader’s mind expands to infinity while anchored in something on paper.

     I cannot see why something like Hejinian’s text, and with it countless other recent poetic works, would not count for Taylor as a continuation under contemporary conditions of the post-Romantic epistemic withdrawal into a concern for the very interspace of writing and reading. My suggestion, which I adumbrated in an earlier post, is that a problem with Taylor’s account is his peculiarly restricted conception of ‘cosmos’. Recall that for Taylor the concept of cosmos seems to have only two characteristics: it evokes some sense of our largest context, and an all-embracing whole; and its elements are ordered in relations of higher and lower. Since our contemporary evolutionary and ecological conception of nature as cosmos does not admit of such a hierarchy, the relations of higher/lower can only be given in axes of resonance like Dillard’s place-based writing or localist, indigenous religions. But I cannot see any compelling motivation to restrict the relevant conception of cosmos in this way. The thought suggests itself that Taylor’s blindness on this point is of a piece with the most basic concern of his philosophical writing of the past sixty years: to show that the conception of life, human action and ethics, space and time, and nature itself cannot be exhaustively understood with the categories of Newtonian science or with the frigid tools of Enlightenment rationalism. This leads him to import higher/lower relations into the very concept of cosmos itself. But this wrong move condemns that aspect of his thought to archaicism. I cannot see why those of us who have for so long learned from and admired Taylor’s writings should follow him on this point. A richer conception of cosmos could only benefit Taylor’s analyses, as it would provide him with a richer range of conceptual tools.

References:

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)

Lyn Hejinian, My Life (1980)

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798)

Review of Raymond Geuss, Seeing Double (2024)--Stop Making (Total) Sense

      To my mind a new book by the philosopher Raymond Geuss is among the most welcome of publishing events. I’ve written several reviews of his books from the past two decades, books that have for some of us established and supported his position as the eminent philosophical essayist of our time. The new book consists of seven essays, two of which have been previously published in English, together with a short introduction; the topics, themes, manner of presentation, and tone will be familiar to Geuss’s readers. There’s the familiar concern with the nature of criticism, the suspicion of any claims to normativity, the genealogical approach to issues with an emphasis on their formulation in Classical Greek authors, the rejection of any claims to definitiveness or comprehensiveness in epistemology or inquiry generally, the emphasis on the contingency and empirical details of anything discussed, and the occasional flashes of mordant wit, especially when British politicians pop up. Most of the first half of the book consists of discussions of three of Geuss’s favorite figures, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Nietzsche. The latter four essays range widely. One essay, ‘Autopsy and Polyphony’, considers how historically varying appeals to the distinctively different human senses of sight and hearing buttress different conceptions of knowledge and ethical orientation. ‘Speaking Well, Speaking Correctly’ starts from the idea that a grammar provides for any language what it means to speak a language properly, then undermines the presumption of a grammar’s invariable authoritativeness through consideration of the various roles (and non-roles) of grammars and rhetorical handbooks in Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Succeed, Fail, Fail Better’ ends with the short discussion of Samuel Beckett suggested by the title, but is much more Geuss’s fullest statement of his often-expressed rejection of Aristotle’s claim that human lives can be judged successful or unsuccessful as a whole in light of a single small set of criteria. The short concluding essay ‘Hope’ sets itself against the idea that philosophy and human life generally are presented with an absolute dichotomy between either offering constructive solutions to problems that would offer hope to those concerned, or a cynical refusal to take a position.

     Aside from Geuss’s fullest statement of his rejection of Aristotle’s conception, does this collection offer anything to someone who is (unlike the author) not already a dedicated follower of Geuss’s fashionings? One way of getting the nature of Geuss’s philosophical contributions in this latest collection begins with noting his durable concerns and problems. The philosopher Alain Badiou in his book on ethics (praised by Geuss in 2001 as “by far the most interesting work of philosophy I have read in the past decade or two”) proposes that ethical life begins for any individual with their ‘events’, where in Badiou’s technical usage an event is a contingent and striking “occurrence that impresses itself on people in such a way that they experience it as imposing on them a positive commitment to it and what it represents, and bringing about a change in their lives so that they act in a certain (new) way” (Geuss (2001), p. 410). Geuss’s recent autobiographical book Not Thinking like a Liberal tells us that for him something like such key encounters were for him reading in the late 1960s the poetry of Paul Celan and the philosophical writings of Theodor Adorno. Surely part of what is so striking about Celan’s poetry, especially of his writing after the seeming success of his poem ‘Todesfuge [Deathfugue]’ in the 1950s, was the combination of unrelieved seriousness of purpose with its fragmentariness, allusiveness, and seemingly irremediable obscurity. On Geuss’s account he was struck by Adorno’s agreement with Celan in rejecting easy comprehensibility, and also Adorno’s rejection of the assumption that philosophy does or should produce ‘results’, that is, propositions or theses that are detachable from the process of reflection wherein they arise. (Geuss (2022), pp. 147-58). Elsewhere Geuss has stressed Adorno’s stance of relentless criticism and the refusal to feel comfortable in the world, together with his seemingly determined rejection of proposals for reform or improvement. It does not seem to me a great exaggeration to say that the encounters with Celan’s and Adorno’s writings are Geuss’s events, and that his philosophical writing, from the canonical The Idea of a Critical Theory in 1981 to the present, is, in Badiou’s technical terminology, his ‘process of truth’ wherewith he ‘maintains fidelity’ to those events.

      One can see more proximally models for his most recent essays in two of his greatest earlier pieces. ‘Outside Ethics’ of 2005 discusses successively the ways in which Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno attempt different kinds of radical practical thinking that cannot readily be subsumed under the label ‘ethics’. He notes in conclusion that one “might have the feeling that what I have described in this paper is a disorganized battery of various, very different, objections to different aspects of the way ethics has often been studied as an academic subject in the English-speaking world for the past hundred and fifty years, not a unified countertradition.” He immediately counters: “That this is no coherent countertradition is, I think, no objection. Rather it is a conclusion I welcome.” (Geuss (2005), p. 63) Why welcome it? Geuss does not directly say, but his thought seems to be that the something of the variety “could have the advantage of allowing people a glimpse beyond a monolithic and massively entrenched status quo” (p. 64). Further, Geuss notes that we have an “extremely weak cognitive grasp” on practical philosophy, but since “there is a strong aspirational or self-constructive element in practical thinking,” and that any or all of the ‘outside ethics’ approaches might induce us to move outside the cultivation of “the tiny garden of our own welfare” (pp. 64-5). In ‘A World Without Why’ of 2014 asks how it might be possible to escape from our ‘networks of institutionally anchored universal ratiocination’, in particular in academic philosophy with its “endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications, and quibbles” Geuss (2014), pp. 232-3). One way might be like Hegel and Heidegger to work from within academic philosophical discourse to turn the ‘why-game’ against itself. Another would be to abandon philosophy for action. Geuss says that neither of these ways suits him, so he’s left with a third way: inviting people “to observe, look at, or consider something”, then juxtapose that thing with something else in a way that “may cause someone to ask a question or to initiate a line of reflection, or even to develop some hypothesis or theory” (p. 234).

     So, following the methodological lines proposed in Geuss’s earlier writings, the seeming heterogeneity of topics in the new book and its lack of obvious focus are not prima facie objections to it, and the topics and points that are discussed fall comfortably within the ‘process of truth’ initiated by the events of Celan and Adorno. The book’s preface opens with a brief description of the famous rock garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto which, according to Geuss, requires the viewer occupy at least two different viewing points to see the entire garden. The sense of the garden as a whole is then an imaginative, and not simply perceptual, product, one that could only result from (at least) double vision. The garden’s design then seemingly express “a deep negative truth about the world, that vision always operates from a particular limited perspective and that human knowledge is like that, too, and can never encompass the world as a whole (certainly not in a single synoptic view)” (Geuss (2024), p. vi). I’ll briefly summarize two points in the book that strike me as of particular philosophical importance. The aforementioned attack on the idea that there is a single goal the attainment of which determines whether one has led a life ‘successfully’. Since “we are living creatures, which means that we are essentially active and teleologically oriented toward interaction with our environment”, we can always set up a single criterion of success in life: either we do or don’t succeed in, say, finding the food that will sustain us as living organisms (pp. 158-9). But since human beings are not just organisms, but also social animals, we have things like food taboos, based in cultures, ideologies, and religions, and that another criterion of success would be whether we succeed in following the strictures of those groups to which we find ourselves attached or committed (pp. 158-9). This necessarily introduces an irreducible multiplicity into criteria for success. Further, and more importantly for Geuss, even construing actions, and so the great collection of actions that make up a human life as a whole, as simply meeting any one of the pre-given relevant criteria is already an abstraction and idealization. Crucially, “[g]oals, motives, intentions, value criteria: all are not only complex, but in many cases antecedently indeterminate . . . My criteria for assessing success or failure in action in some domain with which I am not familiar may in the beginning be inchoate and indeterminate and may only gradually crystallize into something that has a particular shape and meaning”. Indeterminacy “is pervasive in our lives”, and the degree of determinacy required to so much as apply standards to actions will always only ever be a local, contingent, highly partial, and ephemeral phenomenon. (p. 162)

     Anyone new to Geuss’s thought would do well to begin with the earlier essays I’ve mentioned here. The new book is of course essential for the rest of us.

References:

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001)

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)

-----Review of Badiou’s Ethics, in European Journal of Philosophy (2001)

-----‘Outside Ethics’ in Outside Ethics (2005)

-----A World without Why (2014)

-----Changing the Subject (2020)

-----Seeing Double (2024)

Review of Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, Part 2a: Interspace, Cosmos, and Poetry

     In my previous post I introduced Charles Taylor’s general philosophical concerns and outlined what I take to be the two large arguments presented in his massive new book Cosmic Connections. Again, there is a philosophical argument about the nature and characteristics of the common space of human interaction, which Taylor here calls the ‘interspace’; and there is a much longer argument about Romantic poetry and poetics as a response to the loss of the sense of a shared, stable order of the cosmos in modern times, and then the presentation and analysis of post-Romantic poetry as an ‘epistemic retreat’ from some of the strong invocation in Romantic poetics of a reconfigured cosmic order in favor of kinds of poetry that focus upon the interspace itself, especially in its temporal dimensions of lived time and history. It seems to me that there is a great deal in the book of philosophical interest as well as engaging, but I cannot imagine that any reader would find the book easy going. Aside from the sheer length, there is a great deal of repetition, summarizing, shifting of terminology, invocation with little explication of others’ concepts and analyses, and (to my mind) peculiar emphases, such as the great length at which Baudelaire and Mallarmé are treated (about 90 pages each) while, say, Rimbaud is barely mentioned. For myself the hardest part was the idiosyncratic matter of taste: there’s little overlap between the poets Taylor considers with my own comparable list of ten or so key figures from roughly 1800 to 1990, which would be something like William Blake, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Akhmatova, Federico García Lorca, Wallace Stevens, and Paul Celan. I’ll proceed by considering in a bit more depth what seem to me the most intriguing aspects of the book: the concept of interspace; and the idea that an artwork implicitly presents a cosmos. On account of the difficulty of the issues (and the consequent length of this bit of blogging), I’ll hold off until the following post discussion of Taylor’s accounts Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, in particular of Hopkins and Rilke, and of his claim that contemporary poetry can no longer maintain the metaphysical dimensions of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, because our distinctively contemporary sense of nature allegedly does not permit poetic presentation or embodiment.

     1.Interspace: Taylor introduces the term ‘interspace’ casually in the course of a discussion basic kinds of meanings, and as part of an attempt to establish that there is a distinctive kind of meaningfulness in human life that is neither ‘merely’ psychological (as in “I like roses, not peonies”) nor simply ‘life meanings’, something related to objective, biological relationships between human organisms and their environments (“I need air, water, food). Taylor asks: “Are there human meanings which are founded on facts about the interspace between human beings and their ecological niche, comparably “objective” to the facts which found life meanings, but different than these?” He immediately answers to question with what seems to me a fundamental conceptual move in the book: “There seem to be: for instance, the joy we take in spring, in life, in nature; our sense of being (more than biologically fed by the life around us. But can we define the need/meaning here more fully? This is something we might try to with the term “resonance”: some movement of sympathy between us and our niche” (p. 50); and Taylor goes on to endorse and cite at length the account of resonance given recently by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa. It seems to me that Taylor here slightly under-characterizes Rosa’s conception, although he relies upon all of its major characteristics. What, according to Rosa, is resonance?

     2. Resonance: Rosa introduced and explicated his conception at great length in his major book Resonance, published in 2016 in German and in 2019 in English, and gives a summary account in his more recent short book The Uncontrollability of the World. Rosa begins by accepting a set of very general characterizations drawn from phenomenology and philosophical anthropology for conceptualizing human life: human beings exhibit various manners of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Martin Heidegger), are ‘world-open’ (Arnold Gehlen) or exhibit ‘world-openness’ (Max Scheler), and are fundamentally characterized by ‘eccentric positionality’ (Helmuth Plessner; that is, they are never wholly subsumed within any environment, as their technologies, social structures, and self-consciousness provide a partial transcendence of and independence from their environment). There are three major points embodied in beginning in this manner: negatively,  to reject from the start a social ontology that treats as fundamental isolated subjects; positively objects, and environments, which are as it were subsequently related in various ways; positively, social ontology instead begins from the thought that subjects, objects, and environments are always interrelated, and developing a social ontology involves describing and analyzing of various kinds of interrelations of the complex subject-object-environment; and finally (following Plessner in particular), on this understanding together with basic facts about self-awareness and -consciousness, a human being “is compelled to distance herself from herself and from her relationship to the world and, in a way, to observe herself from the outside”(Rosa 2020, p. 30). Rosa then proposes that there are two great classes of ways subjects relate to themselves, other subjects, objects, and their environment: resonance and alienation. The analysis of the conceptual and historical characteristics of resonance and alienation requires several hundred pages, but for our purposes it should be sufficient to recite Rosa’s brief summary. ‘Resonance’ refers to a kind of relationship wherein (a) a subject is affected, that is, experiences herself as marked, typically including emotionally marked, by something or someone other than herself; (b) the subject responds to this affectation in an individualizing way, typically experiencing herself as ‘having a voice’ or ‘having agency’ in her reaction to an affectation; (c) the subject thereby experiences both herself and the other thing or person as having adapted themselves mutually in being transformed; and (d) the entire experience characterized by (a)-(c) is marked by a sense of ‘uncontrollability’, that is, there was nothing rigidly determined or wholly foreseeable about the trajectory of the mutual relationship (Rosa (2021), pp. 30-8).

     Taylor’s key conceptual move is to fold the concept of resonance into the interspace. For Taylor the interspace, like all phenomena in human life, is marked by at least the possibility of a ‘strong evaluation’, that is, a judgment as to the role that the phenomena plays or might play in a good human life. So such-and-such an action is not just successful or unsuccessful at achieving some conceptually prior goal; it is further subject to culture-specific evaluations such as noble or base, graceful or clumsy, good or evil, etc. Some strong evaluations might be thought to be transcultural and transhistorical, such as courageous or cowardly. In Taylor’s philosophical anthropology, the pair resonance/alienation in strong evaluations is another such human universal. In historical analysis one notes that different cultures and different periods consider and arrange their typical resonant experiences in different ways. Rosa refers to any society’s characteristic rituals, practices, and institutions that typically stage the regular possibility of resonance as ‘axes of resonance’. There are three broad classes of axes of resonance: horizontal axes involving social relationships such as family and friends, and extending to political relationships; ‘diagonal’ axes of relationships to things, a heterogeneous category including work and particular relationships to bits of nature, and which is institutionalized most prominently in schools and sports; and vertical axes involving “relationships to life, existence, or the world as a whole or totality perceived as existing above or beyond the individual, in which the world itself maintains its own voice” (Rosa (2019), p. 195). In modern times the prominent vertical axes are religion, nature, art, and history, and, relevant Taylor’s book, poetry is among the arts, and so a prominent formation of the vertical axes of resonance. In a key passage Rosa characterizes the resonance distinctive of modernity as follows: “art emerges from the conflict or conversation between the capable and forming subject, who has at her disposal instruments, knowledge of form, and expressive abilities, and the independent source that confronts her. Art is a precarious call and response between these two authorities . . . the event of art is nothing other than an event of resonance: a precarious responsive relationship between two independent voices that are constantly contradicting, often diverging from, and transforming each other in creative struggle” (pp. 282-3).

     Rosa’s fascinating account of art as a modern vertical axis of resonance richly merits fuller exposition and consideration, but it is considerably more detailed than what Taylor takes up, and with the basic points stated we can move to Taylor’s use of them. Like Rosa, Taylor adopts an account of modernity pioneered by the sociologist Max Weber, with two major historical claims: (i) a distinctive feature of modernity is the ‘separation of the value-spheres’, whereby major dimensions of modern life (politics, economics, religion, art, law, etc.) develop their own distinctive institutions that embody their own distinctive aims, procedures, criteria of quality, sense of fair and foul, etc., and so exhibit a kind of relative autonomy vis-à-vis each other; (ii) modernity also is a process of ‘disenchantment’ wherein human institutions and environments no longer seem to embody transcendent or authoritative values, nature becomes things for use, and space and time come to be seen as homogeneous and featureless fields of mechanical and (merely) causal relations.

       Within this structure of concepts and claims, Taylor’s next moves are inevitable: a central cultural task in modernity is to ‘re-enchant’ the world; the primary sites and institutions wherein this re-enchantment is attempted are in the modern axes of resonances; and so major poetry of the modern period attempts re-enchantment by soliciting, invoking, maintaining, etc. relations of resonance.

     3. Cosmos: Taylor opens the book with a ‘hypothesis’ from his philosophical anthropology: there is a “human need for cosmic connection; by “connection” I mean not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration. My hypothesis is that the desire for this connection is a human constant”, and that this desire manifests itself in historically varying ways (Taylor (2024), p. ix). Throughout the book Taylor understands ‘connection’ on the model of resonance, but what does he mean by ‘cosmos’? Why should the connection be cosmic, rather than say with one’s fellow humans or family or dog? He initially writes that ‘cosmos’ is an older world for what people talk about now in terms of ‘Nature’ or sometimes ‘wilderness’ (ibid.). In Taylor’s account of pre-modern history the key feature of ‘cosmos’, aside from seemingly referring to something like ‘everything that is or exists’, is that it implies a structure “which distinguished higher and lower realities” (p. x). Although there is certainly a degree of stipulation in Taylor’s conception of cosmos, it seems revealing in terms of his purposes that he ignores further characteristics that might plausibly be thought central to the conception of cosmos, in particular the sense that the higher and lower realities exist is some ordered relationship to each other (see the classic account by Charles Kahn (1960) of the emergence of the explicit concept of cosmos through the Pre-Socratic Anaximander’s statement that the elements or entities within the cosmos come-to-be and pass-away ‘in accordance with the ordering of time’); and further that it is certainly characteristic of seemingly global conception of the cosmos as consisting of three tiers—below the ground, on the ground, above the ground—and that there are entities (snakes, birds, and shamans inter alia) that pass between and among the tiers. None of these latter points show up in Taylor’s account.

     4. Cosmos in pre-modern art: Taylor very largely focuses on poetry, although there is also occasional discussion of music. Poetry is characterized as a linguistic utterance that “affects us, moves us, on many levels” that for purposes of analysis we can group in three levels: “speech as sound, and its rhythms, meters, as well as its periods, and recurrences: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and so on”; ‘image music’, which involves “a music of thoughts or images, which is carried by the semantic force of the words, or other words they remind us of, and their multiple associations, in their combination and mutual impact”; and the semantic level of a poem insofar as it consists of “an assertion or series of assertions” (p. 81; surprisingly, Taylor makes no reference to Ezra Pound’s well-known and substantively identical account). Now Taylor is primarily interested in the new characteristics of emergent Romantic poetry at the end of the eighteenth-century, and so gives only the briefest characterizations of pre-Romantic poetry. This is typical: “Whereas previously, poets and artists in general drew on (what were seen as) ontically firm realities, as described by history, theology, philosophy (with its pictures of cosmic order, The Great Chain of Being, etc.), the new languages [of Romantic poetry] invoke entities whose ontic status is not clear. Earlier works invoked simply what was understood as a firm underlying account.” (p. 61) As with Taylor’s conception of cosmos, this strikes me as markedly under-describing the cosmic dimension (that is, that which invokes a culture’s broadest conception of what there is) of pre-modern poetry and the arts. This has been much studied, and so can perhaps be best seen, in architecture. A much attested feature of major works of pre-modern architecture is its placedness, that is, the sense that the work is sited in ways so as to invoke a larger order, to render that larger order available in highly charged experiences, and to induce a sense of participation in that larger order among those who experience the architecture, especially in ritual contexts. The manifest features of that larger order include astronomical phenomena (most famously at Newgrange and Stonehenge), features of the surrounding landscape (from ancient Greek temples (on Vincent Scully’s classic account) to Machu Picchu), to the more abstract features of points of the compass (see among many Paul Wheatley’s account of the early Chinese city or Stella Kramrisch’s magisterial account of the Hindu temple). It is no great leap to think that a vast range of pre-modern poetry, particularly in its ceremonial dimensions, participates in something like the kinds of meaningfulness evident in the architecture (consider, for example, the prominence of addresses to the sun in Indo-European poetry, as considered by among others Calvert Watkins). Taylor’s account restricts itself to consideration of the passage from pre-modern to Romantic poetry as (simply?) a matter of the status of the invoked entities and their ordering as high or low. It seems to me this restricted conception will come back to haunt Taylor’s account when he comes to consideration of contemporary writing.

     In the forthcoming Part 2b of the review, I turn to consideration of Taylor’s concrete account of the course of modern poetry.

References:

 Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1988)

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

Charles Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960)

Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (1946)

Helmut Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (2019)

Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (1934)

Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)

-----The Uncontrollability of the World (2020)

Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos (2009)

Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (1969)

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024)

-----‘What is Human Agency?’ (1977) in Philosophical Papers 1 (1985)

Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetry (2001)

Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’ (1915) in From Max Weber (1949)

Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (1971)

On Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, Part One: Poetry as Philosophy in the Wake of Romanticism

     In this and in two subsequent posts, I’ll attempt a critical review of the eminent philosopher Charles Taylor’s new book, a 598-page consideration of philosophical aspects of some major poetry of the past two centuries. A book of such length and sustained intellectual seriousness would be more than a lifetime’s achievement for most of us mortals, but it is hard to fathom how a 92-year old could write at this length in the eight years since his last major book, The Language Animal, a seemingly definitive statement of his central philosophical concerns of language, action and its explanation, and expression. The new book is explicitly presented as the often-promised companion study to his previous book, although Taylor only rarely refers to that earlier work, and Taylor’s thoughts on poetry should be, it seems to me, readily intelligible to anyone familiar with just a bit of Taylor’s thought.

      In this first post I’ll informally introduce some of Taylor’s core concerns, then summarize what I take to be the central argument of the book. It seems to me that Taylor’s philosophy, from the early-mid 1960s to the present, centers on the following claims: 1. There are pervasive aspects of human thought, expression, action, and language that do not admit of reductive explanation. Rather, phenomena embodying these aspects must be understood as intersubjectively emergent in on-going human life both individually and collectively. 2. These phenomena are context-dependent, where ‘context’ refers variously to a heterogenous range of features that are typically non-evident or non-focal in one’s experience of phenomena, including (a) human embodiment, space and time, and (b) place and history. 3. There are two decisive and orienting historical moments in human history which together make up the broadest historical context (claim #2) for humanity. The first is the so-called Axial Age, a global period c. 500 BC where universalist ethics and religions emerged in China, India, the so-called Near East, and Greece. The second is the period around 1800, where (at least in Europe) the traditional underlying cultural order of the so-called ‘Great Chain of Being’ (a fixed catalog and hierarchy of all that exists in determinate relations) was abandoned; this previous kind of broad ordering was replaced by an obscure, difficult, and internally contested ordering characteristic of Modernity. One way of thinking about the relationship between Taylor’s two recent books is that the earlier one deals primarily with #s1 and 2a generally, and the recent one with #s 2b and 3 with regard to poetics. Taylor occasionally uses the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ to refer to his project; and this term (usually associated with the German philosophers Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen) seems to collect any and all philosophical investigations that take up and reflect upon the materials involved in the three claims.

     I suspect that those who have not read Taylor’s work from the past quarter-century will be surprised to find in these two more recent books very little use of or even reference to prominent concepts from his writings of the 1970s and 1980s such as humans as self-interpreting animals, hyper-goods, or strong evaluation; in Cosmic Connections, for example, the term ‘strong evaluation’ is used only a couple of times in passing and in an unmarked manner (pp. 52 and 54) simply to indicate a judgment that some phenomenon is of exceptional significance is living a good or full human life. Still, conceptual points and problematics in the recent books will seem familiar to those who’ve read any one of his large books through A Secular Age, or his major essays from the twentieth-century. To introduce Taylor’s central concerns, let’s consider an example that I vividly remember Taylor himself presenting in his Hegel class at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. Imagine this: two people are sitting across from each other in the compartment of a train during a hot summer’s day in Spain. Both are red-faced and sweating profusely. For some time they glance at each other, each noting the ever-widening semi-circles of sweat under the other’s armpits. Now, Taylor asks, what do they know of each other’s awareness and state? A knows that she herself is hot; B knows that B himself is hot. A knows that B is hot; B knows that A is hot. A knows that B knows that A is hot; B knows that A knows that B is hot. And so on. Finally, A says “My God, it’s hot!” What has changed? It cannot plausibly be thought of as an attempt to communicate some information; A knows that B knows everything A knows about the heat. Taylor derives three points from the example: 1. Something emerges that cannot have been simply derived or foreseen from the co-presence and co-awareness of A and B; they now have an incipient relationship, something that may be taken up and developed in an indeterminately vast number of ways. 2. Accordingly, A and B have transformed themselves, and transformed each other. They are now related. 3. The utterance establishes, or at least contributes to the establishment, of a kind of space within which A and B are related.

     With the summary of Taylor’s central concerns and the example, we can now state the new book’s central arguments. The first, a shorter argument presented in the second chapter, is a piece of social epistemology; the second, much longer (approximately 450 pages) argument is a philosophical history, both conceptual and diagnostic, of major instances of modern poetry. First, Taylor calls the emergent space of the example an ‘interspace’, and characterizes it generally as “human agents in situations” (p. 62). Interspaces are saturated with meanings, both potential and actual, with the qualification that the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningful’ exhibit “a certain polysemy” (p. 76) that includes linguistic meanings such as reference, description, and semantic phenomena generally, but also non-linguistic senses of significance and felt emotional qualities. A background assumption from philosophical anthropology asserts that human beings generally aspire to live (relatively) full lives, and this implies more specifically that there is generally and trans-historically a human aspiration at work to articulate the meanings within and of interspaces. The central claim of the first argument is that certain interspaces “carry meanings which can only take shape for us, and hence fully enter our experience, thanks to their articulation in a work of art” (p.62). So along with poetry, Taylor also considers much more briefly some instances of music (Chopin mostly) and the visual art (Cézanne especially). Recapitulating and summarizing his contention at the beginning of the third chapter, Taylor writes that  “a crucial power of poetry is the ability to capture the meaning of an interspace . . . in such a way as to encompass and convey a powerful sense of its meaning for our purposes, our fulfillment, or our destiny.” Poetry has a “revelatory and connecting power”; that is, revelatory of our potentials and meanings, and ‘connecting’ in the semi-technical senses of connecting people with aspects of themselves, with others, and/or their physical, biological, social, and/or metaphysical contexts. (p. 85)

     In barest outline, the historico-philosophical second argument goes as follows: Like many others, and as noted above, Taylor asserts that around 1790 with the beginning of the so-called Romantic Era there was a major transformation (at least in Western Europe) in thought and sensibility (pp.3-4). This transformation expressed itself saliently in both philosophy and poetry, with both human beings and nature (or the cosmos) itself grasped as evolving in the direction of realizing their full potentials. A central imperative of the new sensibility was to give creative expression to their potentials (p. 5); further, since nature (or the cosmos) and human beings are inextricably linked, the sensibility secreted an ultimate ideal of full and mutual realization (or ‘reconciliation’) of the two.  In poetry this imperative was most fully worked out by Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis, where the connection between human beings and nature is grasped as lost, or at least threatened with loss under modern conditions, and this (re-) connection is something that must be made anew in poetry. In the service of this task poetry deploys (uses and itself embodies) ‘symbols’ in a sense initially developed by A. W. Schlegel, where something non-evident and otherwise inaccessible is disclosed through some communicative medium, and this disclosure is a creative act of some subject. In Romantic poetry this disclosure can take two forms (p. 96): in Hölderlin, Novalis, and also Wordsworth, what is disclosed is some very broad structure or force (nature, cosmos); in other instances, such as with Goethe, poetry offers an epiphany wherein some novel expression carries a peculiarly resonant and intense meaningfulness, but the larger context is indeterminate or unarticulated, at least in comparison with the full-blown expressiveness of the first form. After this initial phase of Romanticism, Taylor sees two great themes in post-Romantic poetry. The first he calls ‘epistemic retreat’, where poets as it were withdraw the claim to characterize nature or the cosmos, and instead focus on the interspace itself wherein the poetry is written and situated. So Goethe (and not the central Romantics) as it were points toward the future of poetry. Second, the Romantic concern with nature or cosmos is replaced with a concern for temporality, both the everyday passage of time and history. After a brief consideration of Keats and Shelley, Taylor over nearly 400 pages successively considers Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, and (a bit surprisingly) Czesław Miłosz. The book ends with a consideration of the idea of ethical progress (the relevance of which to the foregoing is unclear to me), and a conclusion that seems to suggest that poetry can no longer address the sorts of metaphysical concerns expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry because our contemporary sense of nature involves interacting and evolving orders and places that come to more effective expression in scientifically informed prose writing, and even in consideration of spiritual traditions and indigenous religions.

     Taylor’s two arguments obviously involve a pretty much unsurveyably vast number of claims, conceptions, analyses, and proposals. In my following posts I’ll pick and choose what strike me as the most interesting aspects of this sprawling book. In my next post I’ll consider one aspect of his philosophical anthropology (as yet unmentioned here) given through his adoption and use of the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s term ‘resonance’. Then I’ll consider in what sense the arts can present a ‘cosmos’ through consideration of aspects of religious architecture as well as in the tragedies of Aeschylus. Finally, I’ll present more fully and interrogate some of his accounts of the poetry, including Hopkins on ‘inscape’ and Rilke on celebration.

References:

Arnold Gehlen, Man, his nature and place in the world (1988)

Helmuth Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (2019)

Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)

Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (1964)

-----Hegel (1975)

-----Sources of the Self (1989)

-----A Secular Age (2007)

-----The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (2016)

-----‘What is Human Agency?’ (1977) and ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’ (1977) in Philosophical Papers 1 (1985)

Claude Lévi-Strauss on Visual Art, Part Three: Structure as an Aspect of Artistic Meaning

As part of an attempt to reflect philosophically on the idea of artistic meaning in the visual arts, in my previous post I reviewed Richard Wollheim’s strictures against the treatment of meaning in the visual arts as linguistic, and then sketched Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conception of a visual artwork. My thought was that Lévi-Strauss’s conception is not just underappreciated and intrinsically interesting, but also that the conception might offer a way of thinking about a linguistic or quasi-linguistic aspect of meaning in the visual arts that would escape Wollheim’s strictures, and so partially redeem the durable intuition that there is something like a ‘language’ of art. In the ‘Overture’ to his book The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss offers, in prose of formidable density and intricacy, that meaning in the arts results from the integration of two ‘levels of articulation’, a level of elements and a level of relations. Now, the idea of meaning as a product of elements integrated in relations is the target of the kind of analysis that Lévi-Strauss practiced, above all with regard to kinship systems and myths, a so-called ‘structuralist’ analysis, and he repeatedly drew attention to the way in which this analysis was modeled upon the linguist Roman Jakobson’s analysis of language. So, if Lévi-Strauss’s conception of the visual arts and his analyses of the meaningfulness of particular bodies of visual artworks are illuminating and defensible, we might have uncovered a sense in which there is a ‘language’ of art. So, in the following post I’ll first recite some of the central points concerning  Lévi-Strauss’s conception of (quasi-linguistic) ‘structure’, then present and analyze his two most sustained analyses of visual art, the face painting of the Amazonian Caduveo, and the visual arts of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest.

     Lévi-Strauss’s claims about the explanatory roles and range of types of structures are embedded in his major writings, with important clarifications in interviews; but his core conception, which is all that concerns us here, is straightforward: In the academic year 1942-43 he heard at the New York École libre des hautes études the linguist Roman Jakobson’s lectures on phonology. Jakobson there characterizes the idea of the phoneme as the idea “of the distinctive sound, or rather the idea of that in the sound which is distinctive”. (Jakobson, p. 33) The phoneme is the element of language whose ‘paradoxical character’ is to “simultaneously signify and yet [to be] devoid of all meaning.” In every case and with regard to every language a phoneme “can be dissociated into non-decomposable distinctive features” (p. 81), and each phoneme is itself “a bundle of differential elements”. (p. 82) The identity of a phoneme is given partly by its sound, but also by the roles it plays in a particular language in marking contrasts and oppositions. So the phoneme ‘yz’ might as uttered sound the same in two different languages A and B, but in language A ‘y’ is contrasted with ‘u’, and in language B it is contrasted with ‘w’ (this is of course a fictional example; in actual languages the oppositions are given by phonic contrasts such as closed/open, voiced/unvoiced, palatilised/non-palatalised, etc.) Phonemes are as such non-meaningful, but they are part of the mechanism wherewith meaning is generated in language. Meaning arises from phonemes in relations—as parts of words, and then as part of words in grammatical relations. Phonological analysis as part of the analysis of a language then has three basic aspects: the identification of the totality (the particular language); the identification of the elements (phonemes and the distinctive contrasts and oppositions of the language); and the meaning-generating relations within which phonemes occur in the so to speak space or region marked out by the language. In the preface to the lectures Levi-Strauss quotes Jakobson saying “’The important thing . . . is not at all each phoneme’s individual phonic quality considered in isolation and exiting in its own right. What matters is their reciprocal opposition within a . . . system’ (p. 76)” It is this model of an aspect of language, its phonology, that Lévi-Strauss will take over and apply first to kinship structures and then to myths.

    I turn now to Lévi-Strauss’s two most sustained accounts of the visual arts. His first major topic in the arts, one of great fascination for him and many others who have seen his photographs, was the face paintings of the Amazonian Caduveo that he saw in the mid-1930s. He wrote three substantive pieces on the paintings: one of his earliest publications, ‘Indian Cosmetics’  from 1943 (in English, recently translated into French and published in a collection of his early writings); a section in his most important publication in the visual arts, ‘Split Representation in the Arts of Asia and America’, included in his fundamental collection Structural Anthropology; and a famous chapter in his astounding book largely about his time in Brazil, Tristes Tropiques (the latter two are from the mid-1950s). The first publication is prior to his own development of the structural method of analysis, but it is consistent with the later two publications, of which Lévi-Strauss says the last complements and completes the middle one. I’ll treat all three as mutually consistent, proleptically illustrating the accounts of the visual arts from his major writings of the 1960s, and amenable to description with the structuralist method of analysis of the tripartite complex of (i) elements (ii) in relations (iii) within a system.

     The painted faces are reserved for women and seem to be a mark of relatively high status for the Caduveo over against serf-like groups who work for them. Lévi-Strauss considers the oddest and most striking feature of the Caduveo to be their seeming distaste for procreation and the raising of infants--they have a very high rate of abortion and infanticide, and typically adopt children from other groups—and he will ultimately interpret the as expressing something close to this feature. Starting with the earliest piece, he notes that there is a kind of quasi-magical charm to this art that carries a high degree of eroticism, and further that it conveys the ontological declaration that the adorned makers of this art are not merely natural beings or beings made in a prior divine image.  What are the elements of this art form? Since according to Lévi-Strauss there are two ‘levels of articulation’, we should expect elements at both levels. It would seem consistent with Lévi-Strauss’s conceptions to consider with regard to painting colors qua natural to be the first level elements, and the second level elements to be artistic deposits within a genre or artform (something like: this patch of blue, or this jagged line of red). In a tour de force, Lévi-Strauss identifies the natural, and so presumably first-level, element to be the human face itself, with the seemingly second-level of elements being the lines and arrangements of the painting. Again putting together the three discussions, we can summarize his account of the artform as follows: The Caduveo conceptualize the human face per se as natural and unformed. The application of paint to the face disrupts the face qua natural, and simultaneously symbolizes and enacts the transformation of the face into something formed and cultural. Formal analysis of the facial designs (each of which is unique) shows them to embody various dualities: symmetry/asymmetry; representational/abstract; curvilinear/geometric. The broader semantic universe within which the paintings are made is itself structured by dualisms: plastic/graphic; male/female; ternary [Caduveo social hierarchy]/duality [gender and moiety]; culture/nature.

     Lévi-Strauss’s account of Caduveo face painting, then, can without undue interpretive strain be slotted into his two-level schema of artistic meaning. But what counts as artistic meaning in this account? The account does not aim to offer or include fine-grained analyses of the artistic meaning of particular works, and Lévi-Strauss gives an explicit justification for this seeming omission. In the essay ‘Social Structure’ from Structural Anthropology he attempts to answer the question what is distinctive about the social structure which is the target of his analyses. Social structure for him is a conceptual model built from prior analyses of social relations, but which is not reducible to those relations. An appropriate model of a social structure must meet four conditions: it must be systematic and based upon elements none of which can be changed without changing the model; a model should be the sort of conceptual construction that can be placed among other relevant models so as to exhibit the relations among the models as part of series of transformations; the model must be sensitive to alteration of its elements in making it possible to predict how alterations of elements will alter the model; and the model should be so constructed that it can render intelligible all observed facts in the domain it models. (Lévi-Strauss (1963), pp. 271-2) How does the account of Caduveo face painting attempt to meet these conditions?

     Lévi-Strauss’s answer is in effect given in the essay on what he calls ‘split representation’. He recalls the classic evidence and interpretation presented by Franz Boas in the foundational work in the anthropology of art, Primitive Art. There Boas analyzes two paintings of a bear from the Northwest Coast, one Haida and one Tsimshian. Both paintings at first glance seem to present a highly stylized and oddly splayed frontal representation of the animal. Boast noticed that both are actually constructed from two profile views that are arranged symmetrically facing each other. This is ‘split representation’. Boas thinks that such representation is an artifact of and solution to the problem of representing the animal in a way that provides full information of its salient characteristics together with the fundamental requirement on representing something three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface. Lévi-Strauss accepts Boas’s account as part of an explanation of the art, but massively expands and deepens the account through the structural method. First, he notes that split representation is prominent not just in Northwest Coast art, but in widely dispersed arts including Maori tattooing, early Chinese Shang bronze decorations, and the Caduveo face painting.

     He then arranges these different arts as a conceptual series, ordered by the abstract conceptual dualism symmetry/asymmetry, with Maori decoration as wholly symmetrical, and the others combining in various degrees both symmetry and asymmetry. He transfers to all the artforms the point from the Caduveo that the face is treated as unformed and made to be formed and fulfilled with decoration: “Decoration is conceived for the face, but the face itself exists only through decoration. In the final analysis, the dualism is that of the actor and his role, and the concept of mask gives us the key to its interpretation.” (p. 256) Then he asks, why does split representation not occur among mask cultures generally, such as in the great masking cultures of the American Southwest or New Guinea?

     The answer is startling: split representation occurs not in masking cultures generally, where masks usually represent ancestors, but rather only in those wherein masked representation of ancestors is in the service of validating “social hierarchy through the primacy of genealogies” by actualizing a “chain of privileges, emblems, and degrees of prestige” (p. 258). As a mechanism of validating hierarchy, “split representation expresses the strict conformity of the actor to his role and the social rank to myths, ritual, and pedigrees. This conformity is so rigorous that, in order for the individual to be dissociated from his social role, he must be torn asunder” (!) (p. 259). We can now see that Lévi-Strauss’s two central and best-known analyses of art, those Caduveo face painting and Northwest styles, are central instances of a unique, though fundamentally anthropological, approach to the visual arts, which I attempt to capture as follows: First, a wide range of evidence is collected, initially from relatively well-defined cultures (the Caduveo, the Haida, etc.), consisting of an indeterminately large set of facts about artifacts, practices, and institutions. Then artistic artifacts are analyzed into the two structural levels, starting with something like the distinction between materials and genre-relative styles, and a model is proposed. Second, other relevant cultures are examined, and other appropriate models proposed. Third, the models are arranged in a manner where each can be seen as a transformation of the others. Fourth, a principle (e.g. split representation) governing the range of models is proposed. Finally, the principle itself is seen as derived from central features (e.g. validation of social hierarchy through ancestral connections) of the relevant societies. If these four methodological steps are taken satisfactorily, then the artistic meaning of the artifacts is ‘fully intelligible’.

     How might we evaluate Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to the study of the visual arts? In my final post on this topic, I’ll sketch the other, perhaps more standard, approaches of Franz Boas and Robert Layton, and then offer some philosophical reflections on all three.

References:

Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)

Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1978)

Robert Layton, The Anthropology of Art (1981)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Indian Cosmetics’ (1942) and ‘L’art de la côte nord-ouest à L’American Museum of Natural History’ (1943), in Anthropologie Structurale Zéro (2019)

-----‘Interview with Junzo Kawada’, in The Other Face of the Moon (2013)

-----‘Postscript to Chapters III and IV’, ‘Social Structure’, and ‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, in Structural Anthropology (1963)

-----The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume One (1969)

-----Triste Tropiques (1973)

-----‘Preface’ to Jakobson (1978)

Elements of Artistic Meaning, Part Two: Claude Lévi-Strauss on the Visual Arts

     In my previous post I raised the issue of the nature of artistic meaning in the visual arts, and then suggested a range of instances across global art that should be part of the explananda of a contemporary account of such meaning. How can one investigate and reflect upon artistic meaning? One line of thought that suggests itself is to consider whether there are ‘elements’ or basic units of artistic meaning, which then are perhaps combined and elaborated upon in artworks. Perhaps if we can make sense of the distinction between simple and complex instances of artistic meaningfulness and then consider a range of relatively unelaborated instances of the former, we might start to get a sense of what kinds and ranges of meaningfulness are distinctive of visual artworks, as opposed to natural objects, mere artifacts, and visual designs. This would be a so to speak bottom-up approach, as opposed to a top-down approach that starts from reflection upon the concept of artistic meaning and the possible distinctive characteristics of artistic meaning, and then uses the results as a guide for identifying actual kinds and instances of such meaning. The bottom-up approach will doubtless strike some people as an odd way of thinking about the minimal contents of visual works of art, but its strangeness is perhaps lessened by recalling, first, its motivation: the most prominent philosophical investigations for the past two centuries have typically assumed that there is a conceptual gulf between artworks and other artifacts, but also that the distinction can be explicated without references to artistic meaning. The more typical question is ‘What is (a work of) art?’, which is posed in abstraction from the question ‘What kinds of artistic meaningfulness are there?’. The sterility of the great historical sequence of answers to the question ‘What distinguishes artworks from other artifacts’—expression, form, artist’s intention, ‘atmosphere of theory’ (which in practice are just factories for generating counter-examples)—if nothing else indicates the need for a different approach. Second, one notes the persistent thought that there is a ‘language’ of art. Since languages have a range of basic elements—phonemes, morphemes, words, syntax, sentences—we can consider whether there is anything analogous in the visual arts to the ordered hierarchies of linguistic features.

     In my reading the most sophisticated developed account of the visual arts that aims to make good the art-language analogy across global art is that of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Accordingly, I’ll try to reconstruct and analyze his account as a stepping stone on the path of investigating artistic meaning. But before summarizing and analyzing the account, I’ll introduce what seem to me the most penetrating arguments against the idea that artistic meaning is language-like. In the 1980s the philosopher Richard Wollheim developed what was then a highly unfashionable account of artistic meaning, an account he typically restricted to artistic painting. It was then and still is unfashionable to think that there is a distinctive kind of meaningfulness in artistic painting.  The particular polemical target for Wollheim was a the range of fashionable approaches classified under terms like ‘structuralism’, ‘post-structuralism’, ‘semiotics’, ‘hermeneutics’, and ‘deconstruction’, all of which, he urged, assimilate pictorial meaning to linguistic meaning. But there are, Wollheim countered, three major arguments against the assimilation. Consider the following: “(1) the word ‘bison, and below it the sentence, ‘The bison is standing’; (2) a picture of a bison—say, a cave-painting of a bison; and (3) an actual bison.” (Wollheim, p. 185) The first counter-argument against the identification of pictorial meaning and linguistic meaning is that the word ‘bison’ and the sentence ‘The bison is standing’ gain their meaning through the application of rules: one rule that ties words to the world, another that ties sequences of words to the world where the meanings of words are fixed and the sequences are governed by principles of combination of grammatical parts, such as phrases and clauses. This differs from pictorial meaning in that (a) pictures and their meanings are not exhaustively analyzable; and (b) in pictures we cannot determine which element the pictures presents: is the cave-painting word-like in presenting a bison, or sentence-like in presenting the fact that there is a bison?

    The second argument highlights the arbitrariness of the relationship between words and what they depict. Whereas one can look at the cave-painting and see that there is a (depiction of a) bison (and this is similarly true across a vast range of depictive styles), one cannot do likewise see or otherwise discern the referent of a word merely by seeing or hearing the word.  The third argument insists that one can learn what an animal looks like from a depiction of the animal, that is, that knowledge of depiction partially transfers to knowledge of a referent, whereas even if one knows that the word ‘bison’ refers to something, one needs additional information to know what sort of thing it refers to, and a fortiori what that thing looks like. (pp. 186-8) Wollheim notes two further differences between linguistic and pictorial meaning: sheer perception shows one what a picture looks like and what a picture means in virtue of its looking like such-and-such; and pictures always depict from a particular point-of-view. Again, there is nothing similar to these in linguistic meaning. Wollheim concludes with the thought that these points are really common knowledge, and that the great range of theories that treat pictorial meaning as language-like are willfully mistaken: “We all know all of this from childhood, and theory needs to go back to school.” (p. 190)

     I cannot but agree with Wollheim’s points, but of course this does not show what no argument could show, namely, that there are no significant ways in which depictive meaning generally and artistic meaning in visual art in particular are analogous. Wollheim would surely agree that the characteristics of linguistic meaning he cites do not collectively offer an exhaustive description of everything bearing upon meaning in language, and so there is still the possibility that nonetheless other characteristics of language and meaning are also part of depictive or artistic meaning. With this in mind we turn to the formidable Lévi-Strauss. I set aside his general account of structuralism and its method, as well as his initial application of it to kinship and then to the mythologies of the Americas, and focus upon his remarks on visual arts. Lévi-Strauss’s writings give some sense of his knowledge of the European tradition of artistic painting, with a detail of a painting by the 16th-century portraitist François Clouet playing a central role in his central characterization of the nature of visual art. A late interview reveals that from an early age Lévi-Strauss collected Japanese woodblock prints, and that this artform was a life-long passionate interest. Most readers will know of two great topics in his anthropological writings (both of which were the subjects of two of his earliest (1942-3) publications): the account of Caduveo (Amazonian) face-painting in Tristes Tropiques, and his general interest in the visual art of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest. His central characterization of (visual) art in La Pensée Sauvage (formerly translated as The Savage Mind, and recently re-translated as ‘Wild Thought’) is crucially supplemented with his extended remarks on artistic meaning in the Introduction of his first volume on Amerindian mythology, The Raw and the Cooked.

     The relevant passages in both books are quite difficult with their intricacy and allusiveness, so in both cases I’ll start with summaries including extended quotations and then attempt to note the central points. In Wild Thought Lévi-Strauss begins with the thought that artists fashion “a material object that is at the same time an object of knowledge.” (p. 26)  He moves immediately to the analysis of a detail, the lace of a neck ruff, from a late sixteenth-century portrait by Clouet, and asks why this should arouse “very deep aesthetic emotion”. He then surprisingly suggests his highly counter-intuitive fundamental characterization, that “the very type of the work of art” is a scale model. How so? Lévi-Strauss offers the following: a scale model first of all allows us to grasp something as a whole and not, as in everyday acts of knowing, starting from something’s parts. The quantitative reduction of a thing inherent in a scale model makes the thing less daunting and it seems to us ‘qualitatively simplified’. Further, a scale model, even if life-size, “always involves giving up certain dimensions of the object: in painting, volume; in sculpture, colors, odors, or tactile impressions; and in both cases, the temporal dimension”; accordingly, the work of art projects “a property-space with smaller and fewer sensory dimensions than those of its object”. (p. 29) The fact that the scale model is an artifact, something constructed and made by people, implies that it is “not a mere projection, a passive homologue of the object: it constitutes an actual experiment on the object”. Returning to Clouet’s painting of lace, Lévi-Strauss notes that the depiction presupposes “inside knowledge of its morphology and its technique of construction . . . it cannot be reduced to a diagram or a blueprint; it achieves a synthesis of these intrinsic properties and those that belong to the spatial and temporal context. The final result is the lace ruff, such as it is absolutely, but also such as, at the same instant, its appearance is affected by the perspective it is presented from, making some parts stand out and hiding others, the existence of which nevertheless continues to influence the rest.” (p.30)

     Lévi-Strauss’s text here is extraordinarily condensed, but, if I understand it, his analysis turns on the point that an artist makes something external, an artwork in time and space, which also expresses or embodies something non-temporal and non-spatial, what he calls an ‘inner knowledge’, a ‘being’. He indicates that this ‘inner’ phenomenon is of ‘the order of structure’, while the ‘outer’ phenomenon (the spatio-temporal materiality of the artwork) is a piece of ‘outer’ knowledge or ‘the order of event’. (pp. 30-31) What is the point, then, of making or experiencing an artwork?  Initially, Lévi-Strauss had begun with the thought that Clouet’s depiction of the lace arouses a seemingly inexplicable “very deep aesthetic emotion” (p. 26), and he concludes his account with the claim that the “aesthetic emotion comes from this union of the order of structure and the order of event instituted within a thing created by man, and so virtually be the spectator, who discovers its possibility through the work of art.” (p. 31) The appeal to ‘the aesthetic emotion’ is wholly undeveloped, and so really functions only as a place-holder for an account of the effects of artworks.

     Lévi-Strauss goes on to add what seems to me a qualification of profound interest and insightfulness. He considers a Haida club carved with symbols. Where, then, is the order of the event in such a work? Everything “appears to be a matter of structure: its mythical symbolism as much as its practical function. More precisely, the object, its function, and its symbol seem to fold back on each other and form a closed system in which there is no room for the event.” (p. 31) The seeming counter-example of the club forces him to treat the order of ‘the event’ as an instance of a more general category which he calls the ‘mode of the contingent’. (p. 31) There are, he asserts, three aspects or ‘distinct moments’ of contingency in the process of artistic creation: “the occasion for the work, its execution, or its purpose”. Only the first aspect or mode being, that of the work itself, is of the order of the event. In that first aspect the artist “apprehends this contingency from the outside: an attitude, an expression, a distinctive light, a situation”, and the artist incorporates these contextual features into the work itself. In the second moment, the execution, the artist incorporates the material aspects of art-making—the characteristics of the material and the tools—into the work. And in the third moment, the purpose for which the work is made, the artist puts herself into the position of the destined user of the work and embodies that purpose in the work. (p. 33)

     A summary of Lévi-Strauss’s conception of art would perhaps be something like this: Works of art are (a) artifactual models wherein (b) elements of meaningful structures are integrated with contingencies of making, material, and/or occasion in such a way as (c) to elicit an aesthetic emotion in appropriately attuned recipients. This formulation suggests that to see whether and what sort of account of artistic meaning Lévi-Strauss offers, we need to investigate what he means by structures. I’ll take that up in my next post, and finish here with a reconstruction of his theory of art-kinds, and the different kinds of elements. For this purpose the key text is the ‘Overture’ that opens the first volume of his massive study of Amerindian mythology, The Raw and the Cooked. The second half of the Overture aims to explain and justify Lévi-Strauss’s use of musical terminology and concepts (‘sonata’, ‘symphony’, ‘toccata and fugue’, etc.) to organize his analysis. This leads him to give an account of the elements of music, and then further to contrast those with the elements of poetry and painting. As in Wild Thought, the prose of the Overture is dense and allusive; what follows represents my current best attempt at understanding his views: All three art-kinds present the integration of two distinct orders of elements in combination. At the first level, the elemental features of music are sounds and forms, of poetry words and forms, of painting colors and forms or designs. At the second level there is a “choice and arrangement of the units”, which are interpreted “according to the imperatives of a given technique, style or manner—that is, by their transposition in terms of a code characteristic of a given artist or society.” (Lévi-Strauss (1969), p. 20) Lévi-Strauss goes on to sharply distinguish the character of the first level of articulation in music from those of painting and poetry. The elements of music are sounds, not noises, and so are already cultural phenomenon; in the fullest formulation of this point, he writes: “The system of intervals provides music with an initial level of articulation, which is a function not of the relative heights of notes (which result from the perceptible properties of each sound) but of the hierarchical relations among them on the scale.” (p. 16) By contrast, it is nature, not a cultural system, that offers inexhaustible array of colors and so the relevant elements of painting. One consequence of this, he thinks, is that whereas a note carries no ‘natural’ resonances or meanings (a C# is not as such the sound of the nightingale or the freight train), colors bear a sense of their pre-artistic existence in nature—“midnight blue, peacock blue, petrol blue; sea green, jade green; straw color, lemon yellow; cherry red, etc.” (p. 19)—, so that there is a “congenital subjection of the plastic arts [of color] to [prior] objects”. (p. 20) Lévi-Strauss only gives the briefest of indications with regard to poetry, with the point that “the vehicle of poetry is articulate speech, which is common property. Poetry merely decrees that its particular use of language will be subject to certain restrictions.” (p. 18) I take this to mean that ‘articulate speech’ comprises all the elements of the first level of articulation for poetry, and the systems of verse—including quantitative stresses, rhyme schemes, meter, and genres—are its second level of articulation.

      Even this partial summary of Lévi-Strauss’s brief and dense remarks on art gives, I would think, a feel for the great interest of his artistic theory. Again, his central point is that all works of art are reduced models, and that meaning and/or ‘aesthetic emotion arises from the inaugural fact that any model is a reduction of that which it models, in that in necessarily leaves out an indeterminately vast number of characteristics of the model. The combination of levels of articulation results in an artifact, something made, that synthesizes perceptual and epistemic dimensions of what is modeled, and thereby gives rise to aesthetic emotion. Here I restrict myself to an initial comment: nothing in Lévi-Strauss’s account seems to violate Wollheim’s strictures on the non-linguistic character of pictorial meaning. And yet Lévi-Strauss insists that the arts are a language. In order to explore whether and how this conception of artistic meaning is sustainable, in my next post I turn to two points: What does Lévi-Strauss mean by ‘language’ and ‘structure’? And how does he conception of art account for actual artworks? To this end I shall turn to first his initial formulation of the concept of structure out of the linguistics of Roman Jakobson, and then will consider his two most sustained analyses of art, the face painting of the Amazonian group the Caduveo, and artworks of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest.

References:

Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Indian Cosmetics’ (1942) and ‘L’art de la côte nord-ouest à L’American Museum of Natural History’ (1943), in Anthropologie Structurale Zéro (2019)

-----‘Interview with Junzo Kawada’, in The Other Face of the Moon (2013)

-----The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume One (1969)

-----Triste Tropiques (1973)

-----Wild Thought (2021)

Richard Wollheim, ‘Pictures and Language’, in The Mind and its Depths (1993)