Having sketched the domain of artifactuality as a major resource for artistic meaningfulness, and prior to addressing the great resource of language, I pause to consider the question of the basis of artistic meaning in elaborations of artifacts. On a simple hylomorphic model, one might think of the course as involving two conceptually distinct steps and one consequence: 1. The maker produces an artifact by imposing some form upon some matter. 2. The maker-artist imposes some further form upon the artifact, a form that embodies the artistic meaning of the artifact. 3. This artistic meaning is itself understood hylomorphically as the fusion of two conceptually distinct elements (sound and sense; content and manner of presentation; the ‘what’ and the ‘how’; etc.) I have urged replacing this two-fold hylomorphism with, first, a model of artifactuality adopted from Gilbert Simondon and Tim Ingold, and second a model of artistic meaning taken over from Michael Podro and Patrick Maynard, which treats artistic meaning as the result of an enormous range of ways in which in artistic perception recognition is sustained. Maynard in his book on drawing argues that Podro’s conception of artistic meaning implies that the appropriate way of investigating artistic meaning in a particular art form is through considering non-artistic artifacts and art works as on a continuum, where on one end non-artistic artifacts exhibit a zero- or low-degree of artistic meaning, and on the other end great works of art like Rembrandt’s drawing of Hendrijke sleeping exhibit artistic meaning ‘at full stretch’, that is, where a variety of resources and mechanisms of artistic meaning are mobilized and integrated in the service of producing a maximally meaningful work. The questions arise: How does the artist work the artifact so that it moves as it were from the zero-end of the spectrum of artistic meaning? Indeed, how does the process of artistic meaning-making get going?
The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim once remarked that, contra fashionable theories of art, one must think that in some sense the artist (and not some other agency—the viewer, theorists, ‘social energies’, etc.) puts the artistic meaning into an artwork; the alternatives are unintelligible. But if this putting is not well grasped hylomorphically as the imposition of form onto matter, leaving the matter in Simondon’s ‘dark zone’, then what conception of the inception of artistic making is consistent with the accounts I’ve introduced from Podro and Maynard? I suggest we introduce the conception of ‘proto-art’, a construction that is to some degree attested in hominid and early human aesthetic artifacts (one might well also refer to the historical instances as ‘paleoart’) as a bridge between artifacts and full-blown artworks. In order to see the range of relevant issues connected with the concept of proto-art, as an introduction I’lI sketch briefly the recent discussions of ‘protolanguage’ (which will also help introduce the imminent discussion of the next great artistic resource, language). The linguistic Derek Bickerton introduced the concept of a protolanguage as a tool in thinking about the evolutionary emergence of syntax. Bickerton hypothesized that prior to the emergence of full language (something like a lexicon + syntax + syntax (+ pragmatics + tenses)) hominids utilized a ‘protolanguage’ consisting of words but lacking any syntax, that is any meaning-bearing ordering of words (as in uninflected languages) and/or markers of relationships between words (as in inflected languages). Then sometime after 300K BP there occurred “an event, presumably a mutation of some kind, that affected a single female living in Africa” (Bickerton p. 165, quoted at Collins p. 117) and which permitted the introduction and development of syntax. Bickerton’s proposal has not found wide favor—the renowned linguist Daniel Everett points to the cultural achievements of Homo Erectus a million years earlier, and suggests that to accomplish these they must have had something like full language; many others accept the idea that some pre-human hominids had a protolanguage, but dispute Bickerton’s characterization of it and/or the hypothesis of a single, sudden mutation--, but some conception of a protolanguage is needed to make sense of the evolutionary passage from the unstructured vocal and gestural communications of great apes to human language.
So too with art: we need some conception of the highly aesthetic artifacts produced by hominids prior to the emergence of the full art of Paleolithic drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Currently the best known and most discussed instances of such proto-art are the engraved piece of ochre from Blombos Cave and the engravings ostrich shells of the Diepkloof Rock Shelter (both mentioned in earlier posts, and both to be discussed at some length later). My suggestion is that there is an illuminating, though limited, analogy between the conceptions of protolanguage and proto-art, specifically in an analogy between the emergence of syntax and the development of artistic meaning. Artistic meaning in the visual arts is not analogous to linguistic syntax in the sense that there is no meaning-bearing, determinate relationship between elements of artistic meaning, as there is between lexical items and syntactical ordering. But the analogy does draw our attention to the fact that there must have been some process of emergence of artistic meaning from the zero degree to the relatively simple to Maynard’s full stretch. The passage from the zero degree to the relatively simple kinds of artistic meaning must have been very early in the evolution of humanity, and would reasonably be further conceptualized as something that remains part of the human repertoire of behavior as something both meaning-making and pleasurable. What might that be?
I suggest that the renowned ethologically-informed and evolutionary theorist of art Ellen Dissanayake has provided the key conceptual resource for understanding the emergence of artistic meaningfulness with her conception of artistic behavior as ‘making special’ (Dissanayake 1995), with her recent writings replacing that term with the semantically equivalent coinage ‘artifaction’ (Dissanayake 2014 and 2018). Like a number of anthropologists and thinkers concerned with human psychological and cultural evolution, Dissanayake abandons appeals to the concept of art in the investigation of human behavior, on the grounds that ‘our’ concept of art is irredeemably infected with modern, ‘Western’/Eurocentric conceptions, including a prejudice against behavior in favor of artifacts, an exaggerated concern for ‘meaning’ conceived as representational subject-matter, and the assumption of a normatively non-participatory and disinterested attitude as solicited by and appropriate to artworks (as is evident, I do not follow her in this). Instead of attempting to explain and understand the concept of art and its instantiating artifacts, Dissanayake urges that we focus on a particular kind of behavior that she considers a human universal, namely ‘making special’ or ‘artifaction’. Such behavior is attested in the human archeological record and in all human cultures. Artifaction has two characteristics: First, human beings exhibit a variety of behaviors wherein they move from an ordinary, routine, prosaic, habitual, and/or goal-oriented attitude towards the world and shift into a different attitude. One sees this kind of shift in pervasive human phenomena including play and ritual. Second, there is a realm of such extra-ordinary attitudes and behavior that is distinct from, though frequently overlapping with, the realms of play and ritual, which is artifaction proper. Artifaction and its behavior exhibits one or more of the following characteristics: formalization; repetition; exaggeration; elaboration; manipulation of expectations (paradigmatically by unexpected placement or unusual, strong juxtaposition) (Dissanayake (2018), p. 34). One of Dissanayake’s examples of making-special/artifaction is the full festive display of a dancer in New Guinea; here is a similar example:
The philosopher Stephen Davies has criticized Dissanayake’s initial formulation of making-special with the claims that the behavior of making-special is neither restricted to the arts, nor does it provide sufficient conceptual and practical material for making sense of the evaluative and historical dimensions of all art (see Davies 2007). Dissanayake has responded (rightly to my mind) that it was no part of her intention to identify and characterize the distinctive features of artworks, but rather to show the kinds of species-specific behavior out of which art arises. Similarly, I am not taking Dissanayake to have uncovered the full range of artistic meaningfulness, but rather to have identified pervasive ways in which artifacts are elaborated and brought to the realm of proto-art, which then in turn admit of further elaboration into the artistic meaningfulness at full stretch with the use and integration of mechanisms from a great range of possibilities of the kinds identified by Podro, Maynard, and many others.
In a very different way than Dissanayake, the theoreticians Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson have identified in their seminal book on relevance a kind of basis of artistic meaningfulness that seems more specific to language, though can plausibly be thought to apply to the full range of arts. In my next post I turn to Sperber’s and Wilson’s thought, and then go on to sketch the great artistic resource which is human language.
References and Works Consulted:
Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (1990)
Christopher Collins, Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (2013)
Stephen Davies, ‘Ellen Dissanayake’s Evolutionary Aesthetic’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Art (2007)
Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1995)
--‘A Bona Fide Ethological View of Art: The Artification Hypothesis’, in Art as Behaviour: An Ethological Approach to Visual and Verbal Art, Music and Architecture (2014), ed. Christa Sütterlin et alia
--‘The Concept of Artifaction’, in Ellen Dissanayake and Ekkehart Malotki, Early Rock Art of the American Southwest (2018)
Daniel Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention (2017)
W. Tecumseh Fitch, ‘Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution’, in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2017)
Tim Ingold, Making (2013)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1995)
Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)
Maggie Tallerman, ‘The origins of the lexicon: how a word-store evolved’, in The Prehistory of Language (2009), ed. Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight