By way of a provisional conclusion to considering Alva Noë’s new book, (1) I’ll draw out the comparison between Noë’s and Danto’s philosophies of art and offer a diagnostic suggestion on the source of the structural similarities between the two. Then (2) I’ll try similarly to bring out a source for some of the possible problems with his general ontology of entanglement by comparing aspects of it with the philosophical anthropologies of Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen. And finally (3) I’ll briefly suggest a different line of thinking, perhaps an alternative, perhaps a supplement, to Noë’s and Danto’s accounts that might help overcome some of their difficulties.
Before that, I want to stress that the summary and analysis of Noë’s book that I’ve given so far is by no means comprehensive; nor does it seem to me to convey what it’s like to read the work, with its mixture of styles and kinds of address, slogans and subtle analyses, truisms and shockers, and generally the sense of being in the presence of an original and continually surprising mind and sensibility. I have also skipped what seem to me the book’s high and low points. The high point is the breathtaking criticism of what Noë calls ‘the trigger conception’ of artistic response, and which is itself embedded in an original and persuasive account of artistic response proper. The low point (for me at least) is chapter on ‘the writerly attitude’, which inherits all the problems and opacities of Noë’s account of first- and second-order organizations, while addressing the issue about the alleged simultaneous emergence of visual art, full language, and writing with some implausible speculative claims and some empirical claims so confused that I don’t see how they survived an editor’s red pen. With regard to what I’ve focused on here, the central point to which I draw attention and reflect upon is Noë’s seeming vacillation between between the sense of second-order organizations as a kind of ever-present conceptual possibility within first-order organizations, and the sense of second-order organizations as actual, that is, as practices and institutions with histories and traditions distinct from the first-order organizations out of which they arise.
1. Contemporary philosophy of art as an expression of contemporary art:
A striking feature of both Danto’s and Noë’s philosophies of art is their claim, or at least assumption, that the artworks are distinguished from other artifacts by the possession of a single feature (which perhaps exhibits internal complexity), for Danto ‘embodiment’ (of meaning), for Noë ‘display’ (of (aspects of) first-order organization). And for both the possible possession of the feature is decisive even and especially in cases where the artwork and the non-artistic artifact are otherwise indiscernible. Now, there is a great deal to be said about the differences in their conceptions of the distinguishing characteristic. For Danto, embodiment is fundamentally semantic, in that in every case it (potentially) induces an interpretation of a point-of-view and a manner of presenting the content of the artwork; if an artifact embodies what it’s about, it’s an artwork, and the criterion of its embodying its meaning is that it solicits and sustains a stylistic interpretation. For Noë, ‘display’ is non-semantic, and is rather the mark of the activity of a second-order organization, an activity that interrupts the normal and taken-for-granted functioning of a first-order organization, investigates the lower-level organization, and induces a re-organization of it. How might we evaluate these basic features of a philosophy of art?
One way of bringing these philosophies into focus is to ask the kinds of questions Georg Lukács asked of Kant’s moral philosophy, or Alasdair MacIntyre asked of liberalism: What is the ‘home territory’ of these philosophies? From what sort of artistic practices do they emerge, and to which do they seem appropriate and illuminating? The answers are evident: the philosophies are expressions of basic ideologies and features of contemporary art. In contemporary art Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’, wherein a non-artistic artifact is chosen and dubbed an artwork. The readymade both poses the problem cases of the perceptually indiscernible pair of ordinary artifact and artwork, and secretes that conception of artistic making as a unified, conceptually simple action. Moreover, the readymade does not fit under any inherited type of an artistic genre: it is neither painting nor sculpture nor drawing, neither comedy nor tragedy. Finally, in the conceptual modeling of artistic making as a kind of dubbing, there is no sense of history, no sense of a tradition, and no sense of individual and collective learning that feeds back into prior instances of dubbing.
Danto’s and Noë’s philosophies of art are evidently expressions of this cluster of conceptions central to the ideology of contemporary art. Does ‘dubbing’ institute embodiment of meaning and stimulate interpretation of point of view and manner? Or does ‘dubbing’ institute display with its interruption and investigations of our organizations and ultimately ourselves? Investigating these questions might very well be enormously illuminating, but the conjuring trick has already occurred in silently modeling art making as instituting a single relation. But is there an alternative to this trick?
2. Boredom as the motive for ontology:
Of the ontologies of human life of the great philosophers, Noë’s is surely closest to that of John Dewey, for Dewey stresses the fundamental openness and embodiment of human life, self-organization through habit, inquiry as an existential phenomenon, and the revisability of views and orientations in light of the results of inquiry. One of the most striking basic differences between Dewey’s conception and Noë’s lies in Dewey’s focus on experience as structured by a trajectory of anticipation, activity, and consummation. There is nothing of this in Noë. Rather, for him experience in its everydayness of habitual action is boring, a kind of shuffling under the constraints of pre-given conceptions, functions, and goals. It is striking too that Noë has claimed that his philosophy of art is unique in that it contains his recognition that a characteristic feature of experience in galleries and museums is being bored. So for him the passage from boredom to aesthetic responsiveness is the paradigm of ontological activity generally in the sequence organizationàinterruptionàre-organization; as choreography is to dancing, so all second-orderings is to first-orderings. Noë’s fundamental characterization of human life as fragile is in effect installing on the ground floor the ever-present possibility of that sequence, and with it the ever-available possibility of ‘emancipation’, that is, relief from boredom.
On this point it might help to bring Noë’s conception into focus by comparing it with two other philosophical anthropologies, those of Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner. Gehlen urged the fundamental conception of human beings as a ‘Mängelwesen’, a ‘being of lack’, whose lack of animalistic secure instinctual orientation to particular environments is compensated by their openness to environments and plasticity of responses. For Gehlen these basic characteristics of human beings are as it were in the service of survival, not of warding off boredom. Helmuth Plessner urged that human beings are in some sense fundamentally ‘eccentric’, whereas by contrast Noë argues that they are fundamentally ecstatic or ‘ek-static’. Plessner characterizes this eccentricity more strictly as an ‘excentric positionality’, which is meant to capture the fact that human beings simultaneously conceive and experience themselves as embodied organisms and as separate from their bodies in putting them to use in a field of possible projects. So like Gehlen, and unlike Noë, Plessner derives his ontological characterizations from basic facts about human embodiment and basic human needs and interests. As with Noë’s philosophy of art, it is hard to escape the thought that the home ground of Noë’s ontology of fragility and ecstasy is a very recent institutional complex, the social life of the more creative members of the iron cage of academia.--I can attest to this: the only times in my life when I have been afflicted by soul-crushing boredom are at academic faculty meetings.
3. The Alternative? A Suggestion:
I have suggested that Noë’s philosophy of art, like Arthur Danto’s, is an expression of contemporary art, but that perhaps neither contains conceptual resources sufficient for understanding contemporary art. One way of starting to fill out this suggestion begins by noting that these two accounts contain no account of what is quaintly referred to as ‘the artistic process’, that is, the temporally extended complex of activities that issue in an artwork, and that are further embedded in practices and institutions. Danto’s and Noë’s accounts of art are fundamentally spectatorial: for Danto it is the interpretative activity of a viewer that signals the presence of embodiment of meaning; for Noë it is the investigation of display and re-organization (nota bene: for the viewer, not the artist) that distinguishes the existential trajectory of an artwork from that of a non-artistic artifact. Interestingly, Danto seemed to recognize at the very end of his life his fundamentally spectatorial and so incomplete characterization of an artwork. In his very last book What Art Is, he suggests that his characterization of an artwork as an artifact that embodies its meaning needs to be supplemented by a second characterization, namely, that an artwork has the character of a ‘waking dream’; this is supposed to indicate that the artwork is a thing of appearance (and so dream-like), but also that it is something made in a sustained manner (and so a thing of wakefulness). In any case, whether as a replacement for or supplement to both accounts, some account that begins from the activities of the artist is needed. I am thinking of an account like that of artistic painting from Richard Wollheim, who starts from the conceptual scene of primordial painting where an artist deposits pigment on a surface and monitors the effects produced in order to create and heighten meaning. Another such account with regard to drawing comes from Patrick Maynard, who starts from a description of non-artistic drawing and shows how artists build up artistic drawing through a richer and fuller employment of the devices and manners of drawing within and around non-artistic drawing practices. Such accounts would additionally allow conceptual space for the historicity of art, the role of artistic practices, of genres and art kinds, etc., that seems lacking in Danto’s and Noë’s accounts. On such proposed accounts, perhaps contemporary art could seem the latest period in the long history of art, and not so much an unprecedented way of knocking out one-offs to ward off boredom.
References:
Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
-----After the End of Art (1996)
-----What Art Is (2013)
John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)
-----Art as Experience (1934)
-----Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)
Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1950)
Georg Lukács, History and Class-Consciousness (1923)
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Epilogue. 1953, 1968, 1995: Three Perspectives’, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (2008)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)
-----Strange Tools (2015)
Helmuth Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (1928)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)