In my previous post on Georg Bertram’s book Art as Human Practice, I began to set out his positive account of art by explicating his claim that art is an ‘unassured practice’. The backing for that claim is in essence (a) an account of human practices as historical phenomena, in particular as phenomena that are constitutively part of traditions, combined with (b) the thought that what is distinctive about art in contrast to other human practices is art’s constitutive possibility of failure, itself bound to art’s central activity of attempting, without the regular assurance of rules and rule-governed procedures, to realize the ever-changing character of artistic value. I called that the ‘shorter’ route to his positive account. Here I’ll attempt to sketch and explicate the longer route. The goal of the longer route is not simply the claim that art is an unassured practice, but, rather more fully and informatively, that it is a practice characterized, as I noted in my first post, by (i) practical reflection, (ii) self-referentiality, (iii) articulation of meaning through working and re-working what Bertram calls ‘constellations’, resulting (when successful) in (iv) ‘permeating’ other practices with something of the sense of the particular realization of human freedom that is first of all instantiated in art. I shall attempt to explicate each of these features in turn.
‘Art is a kind of practical reflection’. Early on Bertram introduces the claim that art is “not simply a specific kind of practice, but rather a specific kind of reflective practice, a specific formation of practices by means of which we take a stance towards ourselves in the midst of practicing our culture.” (p.3) This formulation strikes me as somewhat opaque, partly because Bertram has just introduced the notion of practices generally as things that necessarily involve a element of reflection. He seems to take ‘reflection’ as roughly synonymous with ‘taking a stance’ with regard to what it means to be human. This thought is recognizably Heideggerian; very loosely put, in Being and Time Heidegger had argued that all human (or, more precisely, all of ‘Dasein’s’) activities involve ‘taking a stance’ on the question of Being, that is, on what there is, and on what is salient and meaningful in life. All human practices, then, are reflective. So the point of this claim centers on the characterization that art is a specific kind of (reflective) practice. One way in which art embodies a distinctive kind of reflection is that art is “a practice that takes up a relation to other practices.” (p.101) Further, art has a characteristic practical effect in relation to other practices: it is a means by which “other different practices get renegotiated.” (ibid) Still, this does not seem to distinguish art in many cases from practices of, say, law or religion. So wherein lies art’s distinctiveness? Bertram’s answer is:
‘Art is a (reflective) practice centrally characterized by self-referentiality.’ The explication of this claim is the topic of the third chapter of the book, roughly a quarter of its length. Bertram’s most concise statement of this characteristic is this: artworks manifest themselves as containing an internal dynamic, wherein, in the appropriately attuned experience of them, certain elements emerge as significant. This happens because “an artwork relates to itself. It contains relationships in which it relates to itself and gives determination to itself.” (p.120) Artistic ‘self-referentiality’, then, refers to the distinctive dynamic wherein patterns of meaningful or significant elements emerge within a work; these elements are ordered in forms of “repetitions, variations, and other such patterns.” (ibid) Bertram adds that artworks then do not exhibit self-relations that are “central and comprehensive” (p.121), that is, they do not so to speak treat every aspect of themselves as significant, but rather they always treat as meaningful only some subset of the (potential) elements they contain, “a localized circle of elements” (ibid). This point is particularly important to Bertram because it is in this way an artwork manifests itself as “self-determining in the sense that it negotiates what is determined within it and upon what it has a determining effect.” (ibid) Artworks then exhibit a sense of autonomy, understood as self-determination, through their distinctive characteristic of dynamic and meaning-generating self-referentiality.
But, Bertram insists, the self-referential aspect of artworks is not something that can arise in a single work taken in isolation from other works of its genre, nor even from many works in other genres. One of the themes in the book is that the arts are necessarily plural, not just contingently so. One reason, already mentioned, is that the arts are necessarily historical phenomena, in that they always arise within and in some sense actualize a tradition. To this Bertram adds that intriguing thought that for works of art to so much as exhibit significant, meaning-laden elements, they must again exist within traditions. Their self-relationality would be unable to so much as get started if it were simply the case that the emergent connection of relations and elements had to arise in works taken in isolation. But why? Why couldn’t a single work of art, considered in complete isolation from all other art works, be richly meaningful?
In order to answer these questions and to explicate how meaning in art is coeval with its self-relationality, Bertram introduces the difficult notion of a constellation, or, more typically, of a generic constellation. If I understand Bertram, he reasons as follows: Any art work is an historical phenomenon, and part of what this means is that any and every artwork adopts some prior artwork(s) as a model. But no artwork adopts a prior artwork as a model wholesale; rather the prior work, in its adoption, is conceptualized as having certain exemplary elements in particular relations. These elements in particular relations comprise in part a constellation, though a constellation is a trans-individual phenomenon. Each work actualizes a constellation in some particular way. When a constellation is a model, it is what Bertram calls ‘generic’, and he defines as generic constellation as “a model for establishing constellations of elements and relations to other aspects in the [art]work. It arises through various readaptations of the constellations in question.” (p.173) This reviewer does not find Bertram’s characterization wholly clairvoyant, and so looks to Bertram’s examples. Bertram writes, for example, of a generic constellation of rhythm (p.175), and, perhaps more helpfully, of “the rhyme structures of lyric poetry.” (p.178) This makes the notion of a constellation seem to overlap with the notions of style (expressive nodes of elements in relations), on the one hand, and genre (characteristic clusters of themes, styles, and modes of organization) on the other. Perhaps what most clearly differentiates clusters from these related notions are the particular claims that the notion of a cluster is meant to bring together and stabilize. As partly suggested above, I take these to be (i) all art is historical and traditional, in particular in that all artworks take (some) previous works as exemplary; (ii) artistic meaning cannot in principle arise in so to speak a single work; part of how meaning arises necessarily involves the artist not just working, but also re-working, materials; (iii) there are dimensions of artistic meaningfulness that are not exhausted by relations that arise within artistic media; there are also dimensions of meaningfulness that arise across artistic media. For example, though the artistic homeland of ‘swing’ is jazz music, there are also ways of swinging in poetry and painting. Bertram is keen to insist on this third point as a way of capturing Adorno’s late thought in the essay “Art and the Arts” that artistic media have a tendency to ‘surpass’ themselves and to ‘infringe’ upon other media. Bertram’s thought, then, must be that neither the notion of style nor that of genre can saliently capture these three points.
With this account, Bertram can then explicate the sense in which art is both autonomous and heteronomous. It is ‘autonomous’ in the sense that for artistic meaning to so much as arise, artworks and the practices of art generally must exhibit self-relationality. And coeval with the process of meaning-generation in art, artworks develop a sense of what counts as their own success (p.198) But at the same time the autonomous emergence of artistic meaning poses a kind of challenge to other practices. For Bertram a central way in which this occurs is through the development of appropriate styles of interpretation of works. These styles can in turn be used in non-artistic practices, and, to the degree that such further use is successful, practices of artistic interpretation permeate other practices. (p.148)
There is much more detail to Bertram’s account, as well as a number of succinct and remarkably penetrating critical accounts of other philosophers of art from Kant through Danto and Menke. In my upcoming final post, I’ll attempt a short evaluation and critique of Bertram’s views.