I turn now to Noë’s account of art in his new book. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book he writes that shortly after the publication of Strange Tools in 2015, he began to use the term ‘entanglement’ to capture “that book’s central concern: how art loops down and changes that of which it is the representation and how this is productive and potentially emancipatory.” So the new book is a sequel to that earliest book, but also one that “makes a new beginning, and ends up covering very different ground” (p. 225). Although I find every aspect of Noë’s thought interesting and very much worth reading and pondering, my primary concern is his distinctive philosophy of art; and so I focus on that here. I must right away note that I do not see any major changes in the accounts of art between the two books. Previously I have briefly written on Strange Tools’s account of art in a review of Noë’s Learning to Look, a slight collection of his art criticism and opinion pieces. There I claimed that one could see a problem with the account as a background for and applied to art criticism: the lack of some reckoning with the fact (if it is a fact) that all art is a historical phenomenon—that all art arises at some particular time, that all art is part of some tradition (even if only to challenge or break with its tradition), that all art is part of some or other type and genre, etc.—perhaps directed Noë’s critical attentions away from the historical meanings that are in a range of cases part of an artwork’s central meanings (on this dimension of meaning, see Richard Wollheim’s Painting as a Art), and so impoverishes his accounts of particular works of art. Here I’ll try to set out Noë’s account more fully in light of his general ontology of human life (sketched in the first post) and his full statement on first- and second-order organizations (outlined in the second post).
In the new book Noë addresses in two early chapters specific art forms: there is a chapter on Choreography or (capital ‘D’) Dance as an art, as opposed to the first-order organization and activity of dancing; and there is a chapter on seeing and picture-making wherein he seems to refer to what is usually thought of as the visual arts as consisting of ‘artwork pictures’ (p. 42) The latter chapter has very little to say about art directly, but rather ranges the nature of picture-making as a first-order activity and the ineliminability of style in pictures and in organized activities generally. The chapter on Dance/Choreography and dance, as Noë explicitly notes, is a re-working of material from Strange Tools; and the primary re-working is presenting the ‘looping’ relationship between Choreography and dance as an instance of entanglement and in light of what the ontology of human beings as fundamentally ‘ecstatic’ (for this, again, see the last part of the first post).
Again, for Noë art and philosophy are second-order kinds of organization (and, as far as I can tell from his account, the only ones). The general formula for them is ‘X displays Y’, where Y is a first-order kind of organization, X is a second-order kind, and ‘displays’ refers to an activity whereby X interrupts and arrests, isolates, calls attention to, and holds up for investigation (some aspect of) Y. Because of the looping relation between X and Y, in and through displaying Y, X alters Y. With regard to art (but, as far as I can tell, not philosophy), Y ‘informs’ X; as Noë succinctly puts it in his central example, “Dance [i.e. Choreography, which he also calls ‘meta-dancing’ (p. 29)] alters dancing and dancing informs Dance.” (p. 30) The claim that in entanglement or looping Y informs X is of great importance for Noë, because it explains the importance of the arts. Human beings are fundamentally self-organizing sets of organizations and re-organizations who make their way through life with their basic first-order organizations of nursing, walking, talking, seeing, picturing, dancing, etc. Choreography is important in human life because dancing is important; artistic pictures are important because first-order picturing is. The arts inherit the importance of the first-order organizations they display and (help) re-organize.
In the new book Noë says next to nothing about what artworks are, and it is a peculiar feature of Noë’s writing that he never gives any account at all of what distinguishes art and philosophy. In Strange Tools he says that art “is a philosophical practice” (p. 75; see also p. 134f). In his sloganistic style he there asserts (italics in the original) that “Choreography is philosophy”, (ibid, p. 16) in that “both philosophy and choreography aim at the same thing—a kind of understanding that, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, consists in having a perspicuous representation—but they do it, so to speak, in different neighborhoods of our existence Philosophy is the choreography of ideas and concepts and beliefs . . . Choreography, in turn, is the philosophy of dancing (or of movement).” (ibid, p. 17) In the new book he explicates the sense in which philosophical understanding consists in having a perspicuous representation with the example of the logician Gottlob Frege’s analysis of number. A decade ago Noë had discussed Frege’s analysis in order to show that philosophy does not offer definitive proof of claims, but rather a type of shareable understanding of something—some field, dimension, practice, etc.-- that is potentially persuasive (in Varieties of Presence, pp. 135-151). Now Noë repeats that account of Frege with the addition that what Frege’s analysis of number as a kind of concept, and adds that Frege there “is working to give us an overview, a “perspicuous representation”, of ourselves, of ourselves insofar as we are inside, embedded within and owners of a range of habits, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that we find ourselves antecedently saddled with . . . Frege is offering us a new way of understanding or positioning ourselves in relation to a practice structure in which we already find ourselves.” (p. 178) Beyond this, Noë offers no further explication or clarification of what he means by (the Wittgensteinian phrase) ‘perspicuous representation’, which is purportedly the result of both artistic and philosophical activity. Accordingly, it seems to me that the reference to the technical term is otiose, and the work of analysis of philosophy and art is done through and exhausted with the discussion of second-order organizations as interrupting first-order ones, investigating them, and inducing re-organizations, that is, entanglement as looping. Surprisingly, the chapter of picturing, which includes an extended discussion of style, likewise offers no thoughts on distinctively artistic style; rather, the sense of style that Noë considers is a matter of basic features of human embodiment, perception, and organization.
So, as Noë himself suggests, with regard to his philosophy of art, The Entanglement represents an extension and re-framing of the account given in Strange Tools, with the earlier account now embedded within and articulated in terms of the phenomenon of entanglement or looping purportedly shown to be fundamental and pervasive in human life. How might Noë’s startlingly original and thought-provoking account be assessed? As in the previous post, where I compared Noë’s understanding of looping with that of Ian Hacking, here and in my next post I’ll attempt to clarify Noë’s philosophy of art through a comparison with that by Arthur Danto. In 1964 Danto published his path-breaking essay ‘The Artworld’, followed in 1981 by his justly famous fundamental book in the philosophy of art, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. In the barest outline, Danto argues as follows: Artifacts are distinguished from mere things by virtue of the fact that they are ‘about’ something. Artworks are distinguished from mere artifacts by virtue of the fact that they ‘embody’ what they’re about. The distinction between mere artifacts and artworks is a conceptual distinction, not a distinction given through perception and perceptible characteristics. The authoritative agency that makes this conceptual distinction is called ‘the artworld’, which is not a sociological entity of people, their roles, and institutions, but is rather ‘an atmosphere of theory’, theories that at contemporaneously held and operative at the time that the work is made, and which inter alia provide the criteria in light of which the decision is made. Danto offers no exhaustive account of what it means for an artwork of ‘embody’ what it’s about, but he urges that central to embodiment, and so to what makes an artifact an artwork are the possession of rhetoric (some address to an audience), style (a meaning-bearing manner of presented content), and expression (a complex notion in Danto’s view, but very crudely and somewhat circularly put, it is some basic metaphor the application of which transforms the material properties of the artifact into vehicles of artistic meaning). Starting in the mid-1980’s, and culminating in his book After the End of Art, Danto offers an historical account of the passage between modern and contemporary art: modern art was ‘historical’ in the sense that it presented an intelligible trajectory wherein the question ‘What is (a work of) art?’ was made focal and increasingly stringent. The question ‘What is (a work of) art?’ is a philosophical question. With the work of Andy Warhol, the question is posed as clearly as possible, and so art as a philosophical enterprise comes to an end. The question, seemingly the only serious one with regard to art, is then taken up by philosophy. Contemporary art, the period that follows modern art, offers then an art of non-finite possibilities of meaning, presentation, and genre, but it is fundamentally unserious because unphilosophical.
By conclusion here, and as a preliminary to my final post on Noë’s book, I note a number of structural similarities between Danto’s and Noë’s accounts. Whereas the philosopher Hegel in the 1820s treated art and philosophy together with religion as forms of what he called ‘Absolute Spirit’, each with a distinctive way of embodying the ‘Absolute’ (very roughly, our most serious concerns as given in historically varying ways in thought, practice, and institutions), the more recent accounts silently drop religion and treat philosophy and art together and alone as vehicles of reflective seriousness. Both treat the difference between art or artworks on the one hand, and everyday artifacts or organizational habits on the other, through a single characteristic: for Danto, ‘embodiment/embodying ideas’; for Noë, ‘display’. Both practice art criticism wherein they often repeat points made in their general philosopies of art, but where they also draw in an eclectic and ad hoc manner from other kinds of philosophical and art historical accounts of artistic meaning. Both insist upon and make central cases where artworks are not perceptibly discernible from correlative artifacts. For neither do evolutionary accounts play any important role, nor is the historical dimension of art central to their accounts. Like many philosophers of art, both treat one kind of art with particular attention and understanding: for Danto, the visual arts; for Noë, dance.
What if anything is significant and revealing about these close structural parallels between Danto’s and Noë’s basic conceptions in the philosophy of art? In my final post, I’ll reflect on these common characteristics; then compare Noë’s ontology of human beings with some other prominent accounts of philosophical anthropology from the twentieth-century, those Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Blumenberg; and finally sketch an alternative account of art and artistic meaning that might plug the gaps in Noë’s and Danto’s philosophy of art with regard to artistic meaning, history, and institutions.
References:
Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’ (1964)
-----Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
-----After the End of Art (1996)
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1820s; first published posthumously in 1835)
Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)
-----Learning to Look (2021)
-----Strange Tools (2015)
John Rapko, ‘Review of Alva Noë’s Learning to Look’, academia.edu
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)