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)