To conclude my consideration of Muqi’s 6 Persimmons, I return to my intuition that part of the great achievement of this painting is that it is ‘about’ ineffability. In my first two posts I tried to set out some of the conceptual resources and analyses that might help explicate the intuition. First, I offered a formal analysis of the work that demonstrated the unparalleled inventiveness and mastery of technique that resulted in the sense that the six persimmons are spatially unlocatable: Muqi has not only set the persimmons against a background of indeterminate depth, but he has largely avoided occlusion, the readiest clue to spatial distribution among depicted elements; and further in the rendering of the two ‘ghost’ persimmons on either end has given mutually contradictory clues as to the precise location of the ghosts to their adjacent fruits. Second, I introduced Richard Wollheim’s account of textual meaning in painting so as to give some content and precision to the truism that the work is an instance of Chan Buddhist painting; specifically, I suggested that part of the core conceptual content of the Buddhist Madhyamika tradition (including Chan) is that the ‘conventional’ (roughly, our non-Buddhist understanding of the world as consisting of independent items in webs of causal relations, together with the concepts and conceptual frameworks through which we identify and classify those items) is ‘empty’, in the sense (again, roughly and controversially) that such items have no independent existence (in Buddhist terminology, no ‘self-being’ or ‘self-substance’), but rather are simply (?) characterized by ‘co-dependent origination’, that is, part of webs of causal dependencies. So I suggest that part of the point of the Muqi’s rendering and treatment of the persimmons, that is, his stripping them of spatial relationships and causal webs, is meant to isolate the persimmons qua persimmons, to highlight their phenomenal characteristics together with their identification and classification as persimmons, and so finally to exemplify the doctrinal claim that phenomena are ‘empty’; and that, as I put it in the terminology of Madhyamika, the conventional is (merely) conventional, and is not ontologically basic or expressive of how things really are.
With regard to the interpretive claim, ‘6 Persimmons is about ineffability’, let’s first consider generally what it means for an artwork to be ‘about’ something. Any attempt to clarify what is meant by the term ‘about’ immediately leads to complex and controversial claims, reconstructions and stipulations. The closest thing to a consensus would be, I take it, something like this: ‘Artwork X is about Y’ is synonymous with (a) ‘(Part of) the meaning of Artwork X is Y’ and (b) ‘(Part of) what someone who correctly or appropriately understands Artwork X grasps is (part of) its meaning’. So ‘(artistic) aboutness’, ‘(artistic) meaning’, and ‘(artistic) understanding’ are mutually defining terms. The best known account of aboutness with regard to visual art is that first offered by Arthur Danto in 1981 in his foundational work in the philosophy of contemporary art, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and then repeated and summarized with little elaboration over the next forty years. Danto claims that the core characteristics of a work of art are that it (a) is ‘about’ something, and (b) ‘embodies’ its aboutness, where (b’) ‘embodying its aboutness’ means that a work of art possesses a range of meaningful features, in particular rhetoric (a sense of address to an audience), expression, and style. Danto’s account is afflicted with a number of unclarities and is vulnerable to counter-examples, problems that Danto occasionally and tentatively addressed. One seeming problem is that he fails to anchor artistic meaning (rhetoric, expression, style, etc.) in what the artist actually does and makes. I pass over those problems here and return to Richard Wollheim’s account which I introduced in my previous post. Wollheim’s account is oriented to the question of how the artist generates artistic meaning, and what kinds of meaning are regularly generated. On that account, the artist first ‘thematizes’ some element(s) that she has noticed and selected from a reservoir of possibilities, then works on the element(s) so that it/they bears meaning of the right kinds (representational, expressive, historical, textual, metaphoric, etc.). Although Wollheim thereby directly addresses and seemingly dissolves the problem of the gap in Danto’s account between what the artist does and ‘aboutness’, Wollheim nonetheless leaves unclarified the relationship between thematisation and making. One wonders exactly what thematisation is, whether thematisation is itself a kind of artistic meaningfulness, and whether the standardly understood kinds of meaningfulness (representation etc.) must be thought of as thematising every element upon which the artist works.
Another point to keep in mind in thinking about artistic ‘aboutness’ is implied by the thought that aboutness, meaning, and understanding are mutually determining. So to say that artwork X is about Y in no way precludes that X is also about A, B, and/or C. As the philosopher of art Peter Lamarque has recently put it with regard to poetry, “[s]pecificaiton of what a poem is ‘about’ comes in degrees of finegrainedness according to the interests served in making the specification.” (Lamarque p. 28) So one would expect that in light of some particular interpretive interest, aboutness would be specified in one way at one level, and in a different way at a finer or coarser level. And again there is no reason to think that there is only a single topic that an artwork is about at any level.
Again passing over these issues, I’ll introduce what seems to me an illuminating account of thematisation, or something very like it, from the anthropological theorist Dan Sperber (Sperber 1975), then apply it to the problem of ineffability in Muqi’s painting. Sperber’s account is offered as an explication and analysis of the process of symbolization generally, but seems to me illuminating mutatis mutandis with regard to the formation of artistic meaning. Symbolization emerges when one or more items (words, gestures, images, etc.) are offered in a context and in such a way that they do not seem readily intelligible within everyday frameworks of understanding (any metaphor would be a handy example). The relatively unintelligible item(s) are thereby ‘put into quotes’, that is, they take on a marked quality that draws attention to themselves and solicits a special effort or style of understanding. The items are as it were defective but stimulating, and the addressee seeks to construct a sense of the latent condition or cause in light of which the item becomes intelligible. With a metaphor that condition would be the framework of metaphorical mapping: in, say, ‘man is a wolf to man’ the framework involves conventionalized conceptions of the behavior of wolves, and mapping these conceptions onto the behavior of men, with the resulting thought that wolves are (conventionally) ferocious and pitiless, and so by transference are men in their treatment of other men. Sperber says that in the process of symbolization the background conditions and causes are ‘focalized’. The third aspect of symbolization, along with putting in quotes and focalizing, is evocation, an individualized process wherein the addressee searches her memory for phenomena that can be attached to the symbolization process. So on Sperber’s account symbolization is “a triad: the putting in quotes of a defective conceptual representation—focalisation on the underlying condition responsible for the initial defect—and evocation in the field of the memory delimited by the focalisation.” (p. 123)
Now, and again restricting Sperber’s account to the artistic process, one notices that this account might help explicate what Wollheim meant by thematisation, and also close the gap between thematisation and artistic meaning. For on Wollheim’s account there are two crucial steps in the process of making artistic meaning: thematisation of elements and then working them so as they become bearers of meaning. But if we interpolate Sperber’s analysis, there are three steps: elements are put in quotes or marked, background conditions are focalized, and the elements together with their frameworks of intelligibility are worked upon.
It seems to me that Wollheim’s account enriched with Sperber’s analyses provides sufficient conceptual resources for finally clarifying what might be meant for Muqi’s painting to be about ineffability. Recall from the first post that ineffability is plausibly thought of as a pervasive phenomenon in human life. A standard way of characterizing ineffability is that it’s the sense that there are non-trivial phenomena that cannot be (exhaustively) ‘put into words’, that is, expressed in linguistic statements. Silvia Jonas has recently argued that there are at least five kinds of ordinary ineffability: know-how or capabilities; basic kinds of knowledge, especially of the applicability of logical constants; indexical knowledge, as given through statements like ‘I mean that thing’; phenomenal knowledge of what things are like; and self-acquaintance, such as how I know and identify that I myself am writing these words now. With regard to ineffability in the arts, perhaps the most recent authorative statement comes in Roger Scruton’s ‘Effing the Ineffable’, wherein Scruton discusses the sense with much non-programmatic music that something important is expressed that cannot be put in words. There have been many influential statements of the ineffability of poetry, such as Cleanth Brooks’s ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’ where even with the verbal arts what matters about the artwork does not admit of paraphrase, and so is in that way ineffable.
Now with all the interpretive machinery in place, the sense in which Muqi’s 6 Persimmons is about ineffability can be readily demonstrated. If one grants the claim that 6 Persimmons has as part of its content the textual meaning described above of Madhyamika/Chan doctrine on conventionality, then the know-how (as indicated by Jonas) involved in knowing Chan is also part of the painting’s content, for Chan doctrine is not something known as it were in the abstract or (merely) through propositions, but is a matter of ineffable and sudden insight into how it is, namely, that all things are empty. Merely knowing-that all things are empty is idle; Chan doctrine is practical, not theoretical.
But one might find this too easy a solution, and it hardly needed the long march through Wollheim and Sperber to arrive at this thought. To see how that account of artistic meaning helps, consider what surely is a widespread sense that, even in the cases where the viewer lacks anything more than the vaguest sense that 6 Persimmons is a Buddhist painting, she might well think that the painting is peculiarly about what cannot be expressed in words. The spatial dislocation and virtuoso formal arrangements I’ve described seem in the service of presenting each fruit as a particular, mysteriously distinct from each other, with the two ghosts differing by virtue of the precise spatial location. The particularizaton, this precision, is itself a kind of visualization of the very process of thematization and focalisation: something is isolated, put in quotes, presented as marked, and becomes richly resonant while offering nothing determinate as to what is implied by this thematization: it just is, ineffably. Accordingly, the sense that the painting is about ineffability is available to any viewer who has a familiarity with the latent artistic process of generating meaning, which is to say, to pretty much everybody.
And there is I suggest a final sense in which it’s about ineffability. The painting bears the sense of existential profundity in its sense of the suddenness of beauty, of coming to radiant expression in a moment. The very achievement which is this particular painting models a kind of project in human life, that of coming to terms with finitude, of oneself as living now (and not eternally). Coming to terms with the finite is an infinite project, not one that can be exhaustively put in words, and that, I suggest, is the ultimate subject of 6 Persimmons.
References:
Cleanth Brooks, ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’, in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947)
Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
-----After the End of Art (1997)
Silvia Jonas, Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (2016)
Peter Lamarque, ‘Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value’, in The Philosophy of Poetry ((2015) ed. John Gibson)
Roger Scruton, ‘Effing the Ineffable’, in Confessions of a Heretic (2021)
Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism (1975)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)