Review of Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, Part 3: Epistemic Retreat in Contemporary Poetry?

     Having in my previous two posts on Charles Taylor summarized his basic concerns and introduced some of his central concepts, in particular ‘resonance’ and ‘cosmos’, I turn to his philosophical history of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry. This occupies approximately three-quarters of the 598-page book, so my presentation is necessarily selective, though, I hope, not idiosyncratic. In my first post I gave the barest outline, and again: Taylor sees an epochal change in European cultures around the year 1800, a change that of course is neither instantaneous nor simple, but whose most basic feature is the loss of a secure and institutionally and culturally sustained sense of human beings living within ‘The Great Chain of Being’. Living with this conception provided human beings with a sense of the cosmos as a whole, their place within that cosmos, and a felt sense of their connection to both natural entities within the cosmos and of the cosmos itself. With the loss of that secure conception, human beings experience a kind of alienation, something they seek to overcome through re-connecting with the cosmos, if no longer in the old sense then at least under a new conception that is appropriate to their best understanding of themselves and of nature. Romantic poetry, in particular that of Wordsworth, Hölderlin, and Novalis, bears this cultural burden and cultural task of re-connection, and these poets present a kind of maximal response that offers a renewed conception of the cosmos, as well as some sense of how it can be and is experienced. Later, post-Romantic poets retreat from the demand to present a new conception of the cosmos into an intensified focus on the scene of poetry itself, and with it a new sense and rich sense of time as quotidian and/or historical. Recently, even this transformed and as it were post-cosmic sense of the whole as temporal is lost as our current conception of the whole, nature understood in an evolutionary and ecological manner, does not admit of presentation in poetry, and the cultural burden passes to certain kinds of reflective, descriptive, and personalized prose.

     Let’s move closer and consider first Taylor’s account of Romantic thought and its poetry. The most general features of what Taylor calls ‘the new Romantic outlook’ were the Romantics’ adoption of new conceptions of nature in its relation to human beings, a new conception of human freedom, and a new aim for humanity. Nature as a whole comes to be conceived as a developing organism. Human beings are part of this organism and have intimate communication, albeit usually latent, with other natural entities and with nature as a whole. In their activities humans develop themselves and contribute to the development of the whole of nature. The outstanding proximal human aim is to realize oneself fully, and this can only be done autonomously, where ‘autonomy’ is understood both ethically and politically as under circumstances freed from compulsion and coercion. The ultimate aim is to ‘reconcile’ human beings with nature where the seeming isolation of human beings from themselves, from each other, and from nature is overcome. The recognition that this reconciliation has not yet been and may never be achieved leads to a characteristic Romantic tone of irony. (pp. 5-7) One might well think that it is only its vagueness that saves this collection of conceptions from absurdity, and that with good reason post-Romantic poets abandoned parts of the Romantic outlook and devised successor conceptions. In any case Taylor finds the Romantic conception paradigmatically embodied first of all in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ of 1798. In a way that is typical of the entire book he only considers a few key lines, and indeed its most famous ones:

     And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of thought,

And rolls through all things.

These lines are the inaugural poetic moment of the epochal transformation. Of course not everyone may experience this, but Taylor claims that if ‘Tintern Abbey’ “as poetry works for someone then they are convinced that they are connecting to an “autonomous order,” which connection has deep significance for them. That is why they are moved. But there is a difference with earlier ages. There one could say that I am moved because I am convinced of this order (Great Chain, or concordia discors, or whatever). These two phases can be distinguished. But the reader of Wordsworth is convinced through being moved.” (p. 34) So Romantic poetry at its most serious neither primarily refers to some pre-existent order, nor merely state a new conception of order, but rather moves the suitably receptive viewer in such a way that they sense they are connected with some (perhaps largely or wholly indeterminate) order. The Romantic poems are a kind of modern epiphanies, “which both (partially) reveal the Plan/direction of things and put us in empowering contact with it.” Put alternatively, such works have a ‘transfiguration effect’ “on some scene, by which a deeper order becomes visible, or shines through.” (p. 40) This is “the domain of resonance” (p. 41). A general way of putting these fundamental points would be to say that, whereas pre-Romantic poetry may designate, represent, and/or reveal some prior order, Romantic poetry discovers the new order in creating it (pp. 43 and 126).

     Taylor goes on to give similar accounts of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Shelley, with Keats figuring as transitional to post-Romantic poetry. Taylor suggests that Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ offers something new in heightening and intensifying our experience not of the old or new cosmos, but rather of the fully ripened season, and with it “a more intense sense of the space enclosing us” (p. 134). Concern for the larger order is abandoned in favor of articulating and transforming the particular experience described and evoked; accordingly ‘To Autumn’ is an inaugural instance of the ‘epistemic retreat’ from the Romantics’ claim to create a new order in favor of the post-Romantic “poetic discoveries/inventions of epiphanic languages” (p. 137) whose foci shall be, as previously noted, particular natural scenes or objects, along with the various aspects of the human relation to time, and the transfiguration of these through poetry so that they become scenes of resonance.

     Although Taylor’s accounts of post-Romantic poets occupies approximately two-thirds of the book, I shall consider it only briefly, as there are many dozens of pages consisting simply of the poems in English, French, and German (the latter also with full translations), and the points Taylor makes mostly just illustrate his general claims about the already-stated character of the post-Romantics’ epistemic retreat. Taylor does introduce and develop the conception of ‘higher times’, which are moments that seem to stand out from the quotidian course of time, and which seem to gather, focus, and stabilize larger stretches of time in striking and memorable ways. Taylor thinks this conception emerges prominently in Baudelaire, but his extended account of such times is unsurprisingly through Proust’s evocation of the madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann and the paving stones in Le Temps retrouvé (Taylor’s turn to Proust to provide the exemplum of higher times reminded me of the great Chilean-Mexican novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño’s remark that of course poetry is a greater art form than prose, and the greatest poetry of the twentieth-century is the novels of Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner). Considering ‘higher times’ in Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, and Proust, Taylor suggests that it takes various forms, whether in the felt sense that the succession of time has disappeared when one is in the grips of an intensely felt event, or in the sense that one has transcended ordinary temporal succession and entered into a different realm, or in the Proustian sense of the fusing of the present and the past in a vivified memory (pp. 384-5).

     No one could be surprised to learn that there is a great deal more and of great interest in the book than I’ve discussed here. Some of the most important omissions are his discussion of the notion of a symbol as offering a kind of semi-transparent (or semi-opaque if you’re a pessimist) access to an otherwise hidden realm, his early discussion of the Romantic conception of translation, and the various moments and ways in which he connects his conceptions, narratives, and diagnoses to points in his very large body of earlier writings. And as mentioned early on here, I pass by entirely the penultimate chapter, ‘History of Ethical Growth’, as I do not see how it connects significantly with any of the major points elsewhere in the book. What, then, of Taylor’s diagnosis of our contemporary condition, wherein our conception of nature is such that it does not admit of poetic treatment?

     Taylor’s diagnosis is given in a very few pages in the short concluding chapter, ‘Cosmic Connection Today—And Perennially’. He writes oddly that there continue to be traces, but only traces, of concern for cosmic connection in the poetry of the later twentieth century, for instance in the work of Wallace Stevens (‘oddly’ because Stevens died in 1955, and Miłosz, to whose concern for such connection devoted an entire chapter, died in 2004). The reason for this loss of concern, Taylor asserts, is that our most prominent strand of sensibility regarding this concern comes from “the discoveries of science, and the more and more detailed grasp of the intricate orders, both macroscopic and microscopic, in which we live.” Crucially (it seems to me) for Taylor in our contemporary scientific cosmology “[t]here are no more higher and lower levels”; instead our awed vision is of “the whole structure and its evolution over eons [that] inspires awe”, and “[t]hese interwoven orders are not revealed in poetry” (p. 588). For something of our contemporary cosmic re-connection, we should turn instead to writing like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that offers careful descriptions of intense personal experiences of nature and place, or to the local religions of indigenous communities that locate some particular place within its larger environment and as a spiritual expression of some creator god or spirit. (pp. 589-93)

     There is nothing in Taylor’s great body of writing to suggest that he aims to shock his readers, but that was certainly my initial response to his diagnosis of our time. I cannot be the book’s only reader who thinks that, even if one grants his major claims, this diagnosis seems as wrong-headed as it is cursory. Like many readers my initial reaction is to sputter: ‘What about X, and Y, and Z?!’ By way of conclusion, I’ll briefly consider one ‘X’ and suggest that Taylor’s misdiagnosis reveals some problems with his conceptions. My ‘X’ shall be, in the manner of Taylor, a very few words from one of the greatest experimental poets of our time, Lyn Hejinian, who died earlier this year. Hejinian was the author of a great many short books of poetry over fifty years, with further work forthcoming posthumously; but among an audience broader than that for experimental poetry, her best known work is surely My Life, published in 1980 with further editions of supplemental material, and which has become a standard work in the academic study and teaching of contemporary poetry. The work consists of a number of sections, something like unindented paragraphs, each of which is headed by a separated, rectangular space on the page that contains a very short stretch of sub-sentential text in italics. The italicized text surely is meant to be understood as related to the accompanying section’s more sustained prose--but there is no certainty whether as caption, chapter title, epigraph, or counterpoint. The famous opening italicized phrase is ‘a pause, a rose, something on paper’. First consider the phrase in isolation from its context: An initial plain reading suggests a temporal sequence, with a perceiver/writer stopping herself—to notice, to reflect, to recall—and there’s a rose. If noticed, the rose is seen; if given through reflection, the rose is imagined; if recalled, it’s the memory of a rose (a particular rose, or a type of rose, or a generic rose?). But the poetic effect takes place, in something like the ways that William Empson memorably analyzed nearly a hundred years ago in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and semantic variations seem to wash over the words. One thinks: A pause arose, and that was/was embodied by something on paper. Or one thinks: Is ‘apause’ an archaic noun for ‘apposite’? Or one thinks: Does the pause arise within the things on paper? Is reading a (self-) interruption? And so on without end. Then the text induces the thought: How does this caption (title, epigraph) relate to the section of sustained text, itself consisting of a series of precise and chiseled sentences arranged in rigorous parataxis? The reader’s mind expands to infinity while anchored in something on paper.

     I cannot see why something like Hejinian’s text, and with it countless other recent poetic works, would not count for Taylor as a continuation under contemporary conditions of the post-Romantic epistemic withdrawal into a concern for the very interspace of writing and reading. My suggestion, which I adumbrated in an earlier post, is that a problem with Taylor’s account is his peculiarly restricted conception of ‘cosmos’. Recall that for Taylor the concept of cosmos seems to have only two characteristics: it evokes some sense of our largest context, and an all-embracing whole; and its elements are ordered in relations of higher and lower. Since our contemporary evolutionary and ecological conception of nature as cosmos does not admit of such a hierarchy, the relations of higher/lower can only be given in axes of resonance like Dillard’s place-based writing or localist, indigenous religions. But I cannot see any compelling motivation to restrict the relevant conception of cosmos in this way. The thought suggests itself that Taylor’s blindness on this point is of a piece with the most basic concern of his philosophical writing of the past sixty years: to show that the conception of life, human action and ethics, space and time, and nature itself cannot be exhaustively understood with the categories of Newtonian science or with the frigid tools of Enlightenment rationalism. This leads him to import higher/lower relations into the very concept of cosmos itself. But this wrong move condemns that aspect of his thought to archaicism. I cannot see why those of us who have for so long learned from and admired Taylor’s writings should follow him on this point. A richer conception of cosmos could only benefit Taylor’s analyses, as it would provide him with a richer range of conceptual tools.

References:

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)

Lyn Hejinian, My Life (1980)

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798)

Review of Raymond Geuss, Seeing Double (2024)--Stop Making (Total) Sense

      To my mind a new book by the philosopher Raymond Geuss is among the most welcome of publishing events. I’ve written several reviews of his books from the past two decades, books that have for some of us established and supported his position as the eminent philosophical essayist of our time. The new book consists of seven essays, two of which have been previously published in English, together with a short introduction; the topics, themes, manner of presentation, and tone will be familiar to Geuss’s readers. There’s the familiar concern with the nature of criticism, the suspicion of any claims to normativity, the genealogical approach to issues with an emphasis on their formulation in Classical Greek authors, the rejection of any claims to definitiveness or comprehensiveness in epistemology or inquiry generally, the emphasis on the contingency and empirical details of anything discussed, and the occasional flashes of mordant wit, especially when British politicians pop up. Most of the first half of the book consists of discussions of three of Geuss’s favorite figures, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Nietzsche. The latter four essays range widely. One essay, ‘Autopsy and Polyphony’, considers how historically varying appeals to the distinctively different human senses of sight and hearing buttress different conceptions of knowledge and ethical orientation. ‘Speaking Well, Speaking Correctly’ starts from the idea that a grammar provides for any language what it means to speak a language properly, then undermines the presumption of a grammar’s invariable authoritativeness through consideration of the various roles (and non-roles) of grammars and rhetorical handbooks in Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Succeed, Fail, Fail Better’ ends with the short discussion of Samuel Beckett suggested by the title, but is much more Geuss’s fullest statement of his often-expressed rejection of Aristotle’s claim that human lives can be judged successful or unsuccessful as a whole in light of a single small set of criteria. The short concluding essay ‘Hope’ sets itself against the idea that philosophy and human life generally are presented with an absolute dichotomy between either offering constructive solutions to problems that would offer hope to those concerned, or a cynical refusal to take a position.

     Aside from Geuss’s fullest statement of his rejection of Aristotle’s conception, does this collection offer anything to someone who is (unlike the author) not already a dedicated follower of Geuss’s fashionings? One way of getting the nature of Geuss’s philosophical contributions in this latest collection begins with noting his durable concerns and problems. The philosopher Alain Badiou in his book on ethics (praised by Geuss in 2001 as “by far the most interesting work of philosophy I have read in the past decade or two”) proposes that ethical life begins for any individual with their ‘events’, where in Badiou’s technical usage an event is a contingent and striking “occurrence that impresses itself on people in such a way that they experience it as imposing on them a positive commitment to it and what it represents, and bringing about a change in their lives so that they act in a certain (new) way” (Geuss (2001), p. 410). Geuss’s recent autobiographical book Not Thinking like a Liberal tells us that for him something like such key encounters were for him reading in the late 1960s the poetry of Paul Celan and the philosophical writings of Theodor Adorno. Surely part of what is so striking about Celan’s poetry, especially of his writing after the seeming success of his poem ‘Todesfuge [Deathfugue]’ in the 1950s, was the combination of unrelieved seriousness of purpose with its fragmentariness, allusiveness, and seemingly irremediable obscurity. On Geuss’s account he was struck by Adorno’s agreement with Celan in rejecting easy comprehensibility, and also Adorno’s rejection of the assumption that philosophy does or should produce ‘results’, that is, propositions or theses that are detachable from the process of reflection wherein they arise. (Geuss (2022), pp. 147-58). Elsewhere Geuss has stressed Adorno’s stance of relentless criticism and the refusal to feel comfortable in the world, together with his seemingly determined rejection of proposals for reform or improvement. It does not seem to me a great exaggeration to say that the encounters with Celan’s and Adorno’s writings are Geuss’s events, and that his philosophical writing, from the canonical The Idea of a Critical Theory in 1981 to the present, is, in Badiou’s technical terminology, his ‘process of truth’ wherewith he ‘maintains fidelity’ to those events.

      One can see more proximally models for his most recent essays in two of his greatest earlier pieces. ‘Outside Ethics’ of 2005 discusses successively the ways in which Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno attempt different kinds of radical practical thinking that cannot readily be subsumed under the label ‘ethics’. He notes in conclusion that one “might have the feeling that what I have described in this paper is a disorganized battery of various, very different, objections to different aspects of the way ethics has often been studied as an academic subject in the English-speaking world for the past hundred and fifty years, not a unified countertradition.” He immediately counters: “That this is no coherent countertradition is, I think, no objection. Rather it is a conclusion I welcome.” (Geuss (2005), p. 63) Why welcome it? Geuss does not directly say, but his thought seems to be that the something of the variety “could have the advantage of allowing people a glimpse beyond a monolithic and massively entrenched status quo” (p. 64). Further, Geuss notes that we have an “extremely weak cognitive grasp” on practical philosophy, but since “there is a strong aspirational or self-constructive element in practical thinking,” and that any or all of the ‘outside ethics’ approaches might induce us to move outside the cultivation of “the tiny garden of our own welfare” (pp. 64-5). In ‘A World Without Why’ of 2014 asks how it might be possible to escape from our ‘networks of institutionally anchored universal ratiocination’, in particular in academic philosophy with its “endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications, and quibbles” Geuss (2014), pp. 232-3). One way might be like Hegel and Heidegger to work from within academic philosophical discourse to turn the ‘why-game’ against itself. Another would be to abandon philosophy for action. Geuss says that neither of these ways suits him, so he’s left with a third way: inviting people “to observe, look at, or consider something”, then juxtapose that thing with something else in a way that “may cause someone to ask a question or to initiate a line of reflection, or even to develop some hypothesis or theory” (p. 234).

     So, following the methodological lines proposed in Geuss’s earlier writings, the seeming heterogeneity of topics in the new book and its lack of obvious focus are not prima facie objections to it, and the topics and points that are discussed fall comfortably within the ‘process of truth’ initiated by the events of Celan and Adorno. The book’s preface opens with a brief description of the famous rock garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto which, according to Geuss, requires the viewer occupy at least two different viewing points to see the entire garden. The sense of the garden as a whole is then an imaginative, and not simply perceptual, product, one that could only result from (at least) double vision. The garden’s design then seemingly express “a deep negative truth about the world, that vision always operates from a particular limited perspective and that human knowledge is like that, too, and can never encompass the world as a whole (certainly not in a single synoptic view)” (Geuss (2024), p. vi). I’ll briefly summarize two points in the book that strike me as of particular philosophical importance. The aforementioned attack on the idea that there is a single goal the attainment of which determines whether one has led a life ‘successfully’. Since “we are living creatures, which means that we are essentially active and teleologically oriented toward interaction with our environment”, we can always set up a single criterion of success in life: either we do or don’t succeed in, say, finding the food that will sustain us as living organisms (pp. 158-9). But since human beings are not just organisms, but also social animals, we have things like food taboos, based in cultures, ideologies, and religions, and that another criterion of success would be whether we succeed in following the strictures of those groups to which we find ourselves attached or committed (pp. 158-9). This necessarily introduces an irreducible multiplicity into criteria for success. Further, and more importantly for Geuss, even construing actions, and so the great collection of actions that make up a human life as a whole, as simply meeting any one of the pre-given relevant criteria is already an abstraction and idealization. Crucially, “[g]oals, motives, intentions, value criteria: all are not only complex, but in many cases antecedently indeterminate . . . My criteria for assessing success or failure in action in some domain with which I am not familiar may in the beginning be inchoate and indeterminate and may only gradually crystallize into something that has a particular shape and meaning”. Indeterminacy “is pervasive in our lives”, and the degree of determinacy required to so much as apply standards to actions will always only ever be a local, contingent, highly partial, and ephemeral phenomenon. (p. 162)

     Anyone new to Geuss’s thought would do well to begin with the earlier essays I’ve mentioned here. The new book is of course essential for the rest of us.

References:

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001)

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)

-----Review of Badiou’s Ethics, in European Journal of Philosophy (2001)

-----‘Outside Ethics’ in Outside Ethics (2005)

-----A World without Why (2014)

-----Changing the Subject (2020)

-----Seeing Double (2024)

Review of Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, Part 2a: Interspace, Cosmos, and Poetry

     In my previous post I introduced Charles Taylor’s general philosophical concerns and outlined what I take to be the two large arguments presented in his massive new book Cosmic Connections. Again, there is a philosophical argument about the nature and characteristics of the common space of human interaction, which Taylor here calls the ‘interspace’; and there is a much longer argument about Romantic poetry and poetics as a response to the loss of the sense of a shared, stable order of the cosmos in modern times, and then the presentation and analysis of post-Romantic poetry as an ‘epistemic retreat’ from some of the strong invocation in Romantic poetics of a reconfigured cosmic order in favor of kinds of poetry that focus upon the interspace itself, especially in its temporal dimensions of lived time and history. It seems to me that there is a great deal in the book of philosophical interest as well as engaging, but I cannot imagine that any reader would find the book easy going. Aside from the sheer length, there is a great deal of repetition, summarizing, shifting of terminology, invocation with little explication of others’ concepts and analyses, and (to my mind) peculiar emphases, such as the great length at which Baudelaire and Mallarmé are treated (about 90 pages each) while, say, Rimbaud is barely mentioned. For myself the hardest part was the idiosyncratic matter of taste: there’s little overlap between the poets Taylor considers with my own comparable list of ten or so key figures from roughly 1800 to 1990, which would be something like William Blake, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Akhmatova, Federico García Lorca, Wallace Stevens, and Paul Celan. I’ll proceed by considering in a bit more depth what seem to me the most intriguing aspects of the book: the concept of interspace; and the idea that an artwork implicitly presents a cosmos. On account of the difficulty of the issues (and the consequent length of this bit of blogging), I’ll hold off until the following post discussion of Taylor’s accounts Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, in particular of Hopkins and Rilke, and of his claim that contemporary poetry can no longer maintain the metaphysical dimensions of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, because our distinctively contemporary sense of nature allegedly does not permit poetic presentation or embodiment.

     1.Interspace: Taylor introduces the term ‘interspace’ casually in the course of a discussion basic kinds of meanings, and as part of an attempt to establish that there is a distinctive kind of meaningfulness in human life that is neither ‘merely’ psychological (as in “I like roses, not peonies”) nor simply ‘life meanings’, something related to objective, biological relationships between human organisms and their environments (“I need air, water, food). Taylor asks: “Are there human meanings which are founded on facts about the interspace between human beings and their ecological niche, comparably “objective” to the facts which found life meanings, but different than these?” He immediately answers to question with what seems to me a fundamental conceptual move in the book: “There seem to be: for instance, the joy we take in spring, in life, in nature; our sense of being (more than biologically fed by the life around us. But can we define the need/meaning here more fully? This is something we might try to with the term “resonance”: some movement of sympathy between us and our niche” (p. 50); and Taylor goes on to endorse and cite at length the account of resonance given recently by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa. It seems to me that Taylor here slightly under-characterizes Rosa’s conception, although he relies upon all of its major characteristics. What, according to Rosa, is resonance?

     2. Resonance: Rosa introduced and explicated his conception at great length in his major book Resonance, published in 2016 in German and in 2019 in English, and gives a summary account in his more recent short book The Uncontrollability of the World. Rosa begins by accepting a set of very general characterizations drawn from phenomenology and philosophical anthropology for conceptualizing human life: human beings exhibit various manners of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Martin Heidegger), are ‘world-open’ (Arnold Gehlen) or exhibit ‘world-openness’ (Max Scheler), and are fundamentally characterized by ‘eccentric positionality’ (Helmuth Plessner; that is, they are never wholly subsumed within any environment, as their technologies, social structures, and self-consciousness provide a partial transcendence of and independence from their environment). There are three major points embodied in beginning in this manner: negatively,  to reject from the start a social ontology that treats as fundamental isolated subjects; positively objects, and environments, which are as it were subsequently related in various ways; positively, social ontology instead begins from the thought that subjects, objects, and environments are always interrelated, and developing a social ontology involves describing and analyzing of various kinds of interrelations of the complex subject-object-environment; and finally (following Plessner in particular), on this understanding together with basic facts about self-awareness and -consciousness, a human being “is compelled to distance herself from herself and from her relationship to the world and, in a way, to observe herself from the outside”(Rosa 2020, p. 30). Rosa then proposes that there are two great classes of ways subjects relate to themselves, other subjects, objects, and their environment: resonance and alienation. The analysis of the conceptual and historical characteristics of resonance and alienation requires several hundred pages, but for our purposes it should be sufficient to recite Rosa’s brief summary. ‘Resonance’ refers to a kind of relationship wherein (a) a subject is affected, that is, experiences herself as marked, typically including emotionally marked, by something or someone other than herself; (b) the subject responds to this affectation in an individualizing way, typically experiencing herself as ‘having a voice’ or ‘having agency’ in her reaction to an affectation; (c) the subject thereby experiences both herself and the other thing or person as having adapted themselves mutually in being transformed; and (d) the entire experience characterized by (a)-(c) is marked by a sense of ‘uncontrollability’, that is, there was nothing rigidly determined or wholly foreseeable about the trajectory of the mutual relationship (Rosa (2021), pp. 30-8).

     Taylor’s key conceptual move is to fold the concept of resonance into the interspace. For Taylor the interspace, like all phenomena in human life, is marked by at least the possibility of a ‘strong evaluation’, that is, a judgment as to the role that the phenomena plays or might play in a good human life. So such-and-such an action is not just successful or unsuccessful at achieving some conceptually prior goal; it is further subject to culture-specific evaluations such as noble or base, graceful or clumsy, good or evil, etc. Some strong evaluations might be thought to be transcultural and transhistorical, such as courageous or cowardly. In Taylor’s philosophical anthropology, the pair resonance/alienation in strong evaluations is another such human universal. In historical analysis one notes that different cultures and different periods consider and arrange their typical resonant experiences in different ways. Rosa refers to any society’s characteristic rituals, practices, and institutions that typically stage the regular possibility of resonance as ‘axes of resonance’. There are three broad classes of axes of resonance: horizontal axes involving social relationships such as family and friends, and extending to political relationships; ‘diagonal’ axes of relationships to things, a heterogeneous category including work and particular relationships to bits of nature, and which is institutionalized most prominently in schools and sports; and vertical axes involving “relationships to life, existence, or the world as a whole or totality perceived as existing above or beyond the individual, in which the world itself maintains its own voice” (Rosa (2019), p. 195). In modern times the prominent vertical axes are religion, nature, art, and history, and, relevant Taylor’s book, poetry is among the arts, and so a prominent formation of the vertical axes of resonance. In a key passage Rosa characterizes the resonance distinctive of modernity as follows: “art emerges from the conflict or conversation between the capable and forming subject, who has at her disposal instruments, knowledge of form, and expressive abilities, and the independent source that confronts her. Art is a precarious call and response between these two authorities . . . the event of art is nothing other than an event of resonance: a precarious responsive relationship between two independent voices that are constantly contradicting, often diverging from, and transforming each other in creative struggle” (pp. 282-3).

     Rosa’s fascinating account of art as a modern vertical axis of resonance richly merits fuller exposition and consideration, but it is considerably more detailed than what Taylor takes up, and with the basic points stated we can move to Taylor’s use of them. Like Rosa, Taylor adopts an account of modernity pioneered by the sociologist Max Weber, with two major historical claims: (i) a distinctive feature of modernity is the ‘separation of the value-spheres’, whereby major dimensions of modern life (politics, economics, religion, art, law, etc.) develop their own distinctive institutions that embody their own distinctive aims, procedures, criteria of quality, sense of fair and foul, etc., and so exhibit a kind of relative autonomy vis-à-vis each other; (ii) modernity also is a process of ‘disenchantment’ wherein human institutions and environments no longer seem to embody transcendent or authoritative values, nature becomes things for use, and space and time come to be seen as homogeneous and featureless fields of mechanical and (merely) causal relations.

       Within this structure of concepts and claims, Taylor’s next moves are inevitable: a central cultural task in modernity is to ‘re-enchant’ the world; the primary sites and institutions wherein this re-enchantment is attempted are in the modern axes of resonances; and so major poetry of the modern period attempts re-enchantment by soliciting, invoking, maintaining, etc. relations of resonance.

     3. Cosmos: Taylor opens the book with a ‘hypothesis’ from his philosophical anthropology: there is a “human need for cosmic connection; by “connection” I mean not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration. My hypothesis is that the desire for this connection is a human constant”, and that this desire manifests itself in historically varying ways (Taylor (2024), p. ix). Throughout the book Taylor understands ‘connection’ on the model of resonance, but what does he mean by ‘cosmos’? Why should the connection be cosmic, rather than say with one’s fellow humans or family or dog? He initially writes that ‘cosmos’ is an older world for what people talk about now in terms of ‘Nature’ or sometimes ‘wilderness’ (ibid.). In Taylor’s account of pre-modern history the key feature of ‘cosmos’, aside from seemingly referring to something like ‘everything that is or exists’, is that it implies a structure “which distinguished higher and lower realities” (p. x). Although there is certainly a degree of stipulation in Taylor’s conception of cosmos, it seems revealing in terms of his purposes that he ignores further characteristics that might plausibly be thought central to the conception of cosmos, in particular the sense that the higher and lower realities exist is some ordered relationship to each other (see the classic account by Charles Kahn (1960) of the emergence of the explicit concept of cosmos through the Pre-Socratic Anaximander’s statement that the elements or entities within the cosmos come-to-be and pass-away ‘in accordance with the ordering of time’); and further that it is certainly characteristic of seemingly global conception of the cosmos as consisting of three tiers—below the ground, on the ground, above the ground—and that there are entities (snakes, birds, and shamans inter alia) that pass between and among the tiers. None of these latter points show up in Taylor’s account.

     4. Cosmos in pre-modern art: Taylor very largely focuses on poetry, although there is also occasional discussion of music. Poetry is characterized as a linguistic utterance that “affects us, moves us, on many levels” that for purposes of analysis we can group in three levels: “speech as sound, and its rhythms, meters, as well as its periods, and recurrences: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and so on”; ‘image music’, which involves “a music of thoughts or images, which is carried by the semantic force of the words, or other words they remind us of, and their multiple associations, in their combination and mutual impact”; and the semantic level of a poem insofar as it consists of “an assertion or series of assertions” (p. 81; surprisingly, Taylor makes no reference to Ezra Pound’s well-known and substantively identical account). Now Taylor is primarily interested in the new characteristics of emergent Romantic poetry at the end of the eighteenth-century, and so gives only the briefest characterizations of pre-Romantic poetry. This is typical: “Whereas previously, poets and artists in general drew on (what were seen as) ontically firm realities, as described by history, theology, philosophy (with its pictures of cosmic order, The Great Chain of Being, etc.), the new languages [of Romantic poetry] invoke entities whose ontic status is not clear. Earlier works invoked simply what was understood as a firm underlying account.” (p. 61) As with Taylor’s conception of cosmos, this strikes me as markedly under-describing the cosmic dimension (that is, that which invokes a culture’s broadest conception of what there is) of pre-modern poetry and the arts. This has been much studied, and so can perhaps be best seen, in architecture. A much attested feature of major works of pre-modern architecture is its placedness, that is, the sense that the work is sited in ways so as to invoke a larger order, to render that larger order available in highly charged experiences, and to induce a sense of participation in that larger order among those who experience the architecture, especially in ritual contexts. The manifest features of that larger order include astronomical phenomena (most famously at Newgrange and Stonehenge), features of the surrounding landscape (from ancient Greek temples (on Vincent Scully’s classic account) to Machu Picchu), to the more abstract features of points of the compass (see among many Paul Wheatley’s account of the early Chinese city or Stella Kramrisch’s magisterial account of the Hindu temple). It is no great leap to think that a vast range of pre-modern poetry, particularly in its ceremonial dimensions, participates in something like the kinds of meaningfulness evident in the architecture (consider, for example, the prominence of addresses to the sun in Indo-European poetry, as considered by among others Calvert Watkins). Taylor’s account restricts itself to consideration of the passage from pre-modern to Romantic poetry as (simply?) a matter of the status of the invoked entities and their ordering as high or low. It seems to me this restricted conception will come back to haunt Taylor’s account when he comes to consideration of contemporary writing.

     In the forthcoming Part 2b of the review, I turn to consideration of Taylor’s concrete account of the course of modern poetry.

References:

 Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1988)

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

Charles Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960)

Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (1946)

Helmut Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (2019)

Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (1934)

Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)

-----The Uncontrollability of the World (2020)

Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos (2009)

Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (1969)

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024)

-----‘What is Human Agency?’ (1977) in Philosophical Papers 1 (1985)

Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetry (2001)

Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’ (1915) in From Max Weber (1949)

Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (1971)

On Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, Part One: Poetry as Philosophy in the Wake of Romanticism

     In this and in two subsequent posts, I’ll attempt a critical review of the eminent philosopher Charles Taylor’s new book, a 598-page consideration of philosophical aspects of some major poetry of the past two centuries. A book of such length and sustained intellectual seriousness would be more than a lifetime’s achievement for most of us mortals, but it is hard to fathom how a 92-year old could write at this length in the eight years since his last major book, The Language Animal, a seemingly definitive statement of his central philosophical concerns of language, action and its explanation, and expression. The new book is explicitly presented as the often-promised companion study to his previous book, although Taylor only rarely refers to that earlier work, and Taylor’s thoughts on poetry should be, it seems to me, readily intelligible to anyone familiar with just a bit of Taylor’s thought.

      In this first post I’ll informally introduce some of Taylor’s core concerns, then summarize what I take to be the central argument of the book. It seems to me that Taylor’s philosophy, from the early-mid 1960s to the present, centers on the following claims: 1. There are pervasive aspects of human thought, expression, action, and language that do not admit of reductive explanation. Rather, phenomena embodying these aspects must be understood as intersubjectively emergent in on-going human life both individually and collectively. 2. These phenomena are context-dependent, where ‘context’ refers variously to a heterogenous range of features that are typically non-evident or non-focal in one’s experience of phenomena, including (a) human embodiment, space and time, and (b) place and history. 3. There are two decisive and orienting historical moments in human history which together make up the broadest historical context (claim #2) for humanity. The first is the so-called Axial Age, a global period c. 500 BC where universalist ethics and religions emerged in China, India, the so-called Near East, and Greece. The second is the period around 1800, where (at least in Europe) the traditional underlying cultural order of the so-called ‘Great Chain of Being’ (a fixed catalog and hierarchy of all that exists in determinate relations) was abandoned; this previous kind of broad ordering was replaced by an obscure, difficult, and internally contested ordering characteristic of Modernity. One way of thinking about the relationship between Taylor’s two recent books is that the earlier one deals primarily with #s1 and 2a generally, and the recent one with #s 2b and 3 with regard to poetics. Taylor occasionally uses the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ to refer to his project; and this term (usually associated with the German philosophers Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen) seems to collect any and all philosophical investigations that take up and reflect upon the materials involved in the three claims.

     I suspect that those who have not read Taylor’s work from the past quarter-century will be surprised to find in these two more recent books very little use of or even reference to prominent concepts from his writings of the 1970s and 1980s such as humans as self-interpreting animals, hyper-goods, or strong evaluation; in Cosmic Connections, for example, the term ‘strong evaluation’ is used only a couple of times in passing and in an unmarked manner (pp. 52 and 54) simply to indicate a judgment that some phenomenon is of exceptional significance is living a good or full human life. Still, conceptual points and problematics in the recent books will seem familiar to those who’ve read any one of his large books through A Secular Age, or his major essays from the twentieth-century. To introduce Taylor’s central concerns, let’s consider an example that I vividly remember Taylor himself presenting in his Hegel class at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. Imagine this: two people are sitting across from each other in the compartment of a train during a hot summer’s day in Spain. Both are red-faced and sweating profusely. For some time they glance at each other, each noting the ever-widening semi-circles of sweat under the other’s armpits. Now, Taylor asks, what do they know of each other’s awareness and state? A knows that she herself is hot; B knows that B himself is hot. A knows that B is hot; B knows that A is hot. A knows that B knows that A is hot; B knows that A knows that B is hot. And so on. Finally, A says “My God, it’s hot!” What has changed? It cannot plausibly be thought of as an attempt to communicate some information; A knows that B knows everything A knows about the heat. Taylor derives three points from the example: 1. Something emerges that cannot have been simply derived or foreseen from the co-presence and co-awareness of A and B; they now have an incipient relationship, something that may be taken up and developed in an indeterminately vast number of ways. 2. Accordingly, A and B have transformed themselves, and transformed each other. They are now related. 3. The utterance establishes, or at least contributes to the establishment, of a kind of space within which A and B are related.

     With the summary of Taylor’s central concerns and the example, we can now state the new book’s central arguments. The first, a shorter argument presented in the second chapter, is a piece of social epistemology; the second, much longer (approximately 450 pages) argument is a philosophical history, both conceptual and diagnostic, of major instances of modern poetry. First, Taylor calls the emergent space of the example an ‘interspace’, and characterizes it generally as “human agents in situations” (p. 62). Interspaces are saturated with meanings, both potential and actual, with the qualification that the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningful’ exhibit “a certain polysemy” (p. 76) that includes linguistic meanings such as reference, description, and semantic phenomena generally, but also non-linguistic senses of significance and felt emotional qualities. A background assumption from philosophical anthropology asserts that human beings generally aspire to live (relatively) full lives, and this implies more specifically that there is generally and trans-historically a human aspiration at work to articulate the meanings within and of interspaces. The central claim of the first argument is that certain interspaces “carry meanings which can only take shape for us, and hence fully enter our experience, thanks to their articulation in a work of art” (p.62). So along with poetry, Taylor also considers much more briefly some instances of music (Chopin mostly) and the visual art (Cézanne especially). Recapitulating and summarizing his contention at the beginning of the third chapter, Taylor writes that  “a crucial power of poetry is the ability to capture the meaning of an interspace . . . in such a way as to encompass and convey a powerful sense of its meaning for our purposes, our fulfillment, or our destiny.” Poetry has a “revelatory and connecting power”; that is, revelatory of our potentials and meanings, and ‘connecting’ in the semi-technical senses of connecting people with aspects of themselves, with others, and/or their physical, biological, social, and/or metaphysical contexts. (p. 85)

     In barest outline, the historico-philosophical second argument goes as follows: Like many others, and as noted above, Taylor asserts that around 1790 with the beginning of the so-called Romantic Era there was a major transformation (at least in Western Europe) in thought and sensibility (pp.3-4). This transformation expressed itself saliently in both philosophy and poetry, with both human beings and nature (or the cosmos) itself grasped as evolving in the direction of realizing their full potentials. A central imperative of the new sensibility was to give creative expression to their potentials (p. 5); further, since nature (or the cosmos) and human beings are inextricably linked, the sensibility secreted an ultimate ideal of full and mutual realization (or ‘reconciliation’) of the two.  In poetry this imperative was most fully worked out by Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis, where the connection between human beings and nature is grasped as lost, or at least threatened with loss under modern conditions, and this (re-) connection is something that must be made anew in poetry. In the service of this task poetry deploys (uses and itself embodies) ‘symbols’ in a sense initially developed by A. W. Schlegel, where something non-evident and otherwise inaccessible is disclosed through some communicative medium, and this disclosure is a creative act of some subject. In Romantic poetry this disclosure can take two forms (p. 96): in Hölderlin, Novalis, and also Wordsworth, what is disclosed is some very broad structure or force (nature, cosmos); in other instances, such as with Goethe, poetry offers an epiphany wherein some novel expression carries a peculiarly resonant and intense meaningfulness, but the larger context is indeterminate or unarticulated, at least in comparison with the full-blown expressiveness of the first form. After this initial phase of Romanticism, Taylor sees two great themes in post-Romantic poetry. The first he calls ‘epistemic retreat’, where poets as it were withdraw the claim to characterize nature or the cosmos, and instead focus on the interspace itself wherein the poetry is written and situated. So Goethe (and not the central Romantics) as it were points toward the future of poetry. Second, the Romantic concern with nature or cosmos is replaced with a concern for temporality, both the everyday passage of time and history. After a brief consideration of Keats and Shelley, Taylor over nearly 400 pages successively considers Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, and (a bit surprisingly) Czesław Miłosz. The book ends with a consideration of the idea of ethical progress (the relevance of which to the foregoing is unclear to me), and a conclusion that seems to suggest that poetry can no longer address the sorts of metaphysical concerns expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry because our contemporary sense of nature involves interacting and evolving orders and places that come to more effective expression in scientifically informed prose writing, and even in consideration of spiritual traditions and indigenous religions.

     Taylor’s two arguments obviously involve a pretty much unsurveyably vast number of claims, conceptions, analyses, and proposals. In my following posts I’ll pick and choose what strike me as the most interesting aspects of this sprawling book. In my next post I’ll consider one aspect of his philosophical anthropology (as yet unmentioned here) given through his adoption and use of the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s term ‘resonance’. Then I’ll consider in what sense the arts can present a ‘cosmos’ through consideration of aspects of religious architecture as well as in the tragedies of Aeschylus. Finally, I’ll present more fully and interrogate some of his accounts of the poetry, including Hopkins on ‘inscape’ and Rilke on celebration.

References:

Arnold Gehlen, Man, his nature and place in the world (1988)

Helmuth Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (2019)

Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)

Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (1964)

-----Hegel (1975)

-----Sources of the Self (1989)

-----A Secular Age (2007)

-----The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (2016)

-----‘What is Human Agency?’ (1977) and ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’ (1977) in Philosophical Papers 1 (1985)

Claude Lévi-Strauss on Visual Art, Part Three: Structure as an Aspect of Artistic Meaning

As part of an attempt to reflect philosophically on the idea of artistic meaning in the visual arts, in my previous post I reviewed Richard Wollheim’s strictures against the treatment of meaning in the visual arts as linguistic, and then sketched Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conception of a visual artwork. My thought was that Lévi-Strauss’s conception is not just underappreciated and intrinsically interesting, but also that the conception might offer a way of thinking about a linguistic or quasi-linguistic aspect of meaning in the visual arts that would escape Wollheim’s strictures, and so partially redeem the durable intuition that there is something like a ‘language’ of art. In the ‘Overture’ to his book The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss offers, in prose of formidable density and intricacy, that meaning in the arts results from the integration of two ‘levels of articulation’, a level of elements and a level of relations. Now, the idea of meaning as a product of elements integrated in relations is the target of the kind of analysis that Lévi-Strauss practiced, above all with regard to kinship systems and myths, a so-called ‘structuralist’ analysis, and he repeatedly drew attention to the way in which this analysis was modeled upon the linguist Roman Jakobson’s analysis of language. So, if Lévi-Strauss’s conception of the visual arts and his analyses of the meaningfulness of particular bodies of visual artworks are illuminating and defensible, we might have uncovered a sense in which there is a ‘language’ of art. So, in the following post I’ll first recite some of the central points concerning  Lévi-Strauss’s conception of (quasi-linguistic) ‘structure’, then present and analyze his two most sustained analyses of visual art, the face painting of the Amazonian Caduveo, and the visual arts of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest.

     Lévi-Strauss’s claims about the explanatory roles and range of types of structures are embedded in his major writings, with important clarifications in interviews; but his core conception, which is all that concerns us here, is straightforward: In the academic year 1942-43 he heard at the New York École libre des hautes études the linguist Roman Jakobson’s lectures on phonology. Jakobson there characterizes the idea of the phoneme as the idea “of the distinctive sound, or rather the idea of that in the sound which is distinctive”. (Jakobson, p. 33) The phoneme is the element of language whose ‘paradoxical character’ is to “simultaneously signify and yet [to be] devoid of all meaning.” In every case and with regard to every language a phoneme “can be dissociated into non-decomposable distinctive features” (p. 81), and each phoneme is itself “a bundle of differential elements”. (p. 82) The identity of a phoneme is given partly by its sound, but also by the roles it plays in a particular language in marking contrasts and oppositions. So the phoneme ‘yz’ might as uttered sound the same in two different languages A and B, but in language A ‘y’ is contrasted with ‘u’, and in language B it is contrasted with ‘w’ (this is of course a fictional example; in actual languages the oppositions are given by phonic contrasts such as closed/open, voiced/unvoiced, palatilised/non-palatalised, etc.) Phonemes are as such non-meaningful, but they are part of the mechanism wherewith meaning is generated in language. Meaning arises from phonemes in relations—as parts of words, and then as part of words in grammatical relations. Phonological analysis as part of the analysis of a language then has three basic aspects: the identification of the totality (the particular language); the identification of the elements (phonemes and the distinctive contrasts and oppositions of the language); and the meaning-generating relations within which phonemes occur in the so to speak space or region marked out by the language. In the preface to the lectures Levi-Strauss quotes Jakobson saying “’The important thing . . . is not at all each phoneme’s individual phonic quality considered in isolation and exiting in its own right. What matters is their reciprocal opposition within a . . . system’ (p. 76)” It is this model of an aspect of language, its phonology, that Lévi-Strauss will take over and apply first to kinship structures and then to myths.

    I turn now to Lévi-Strauss’s two most sustained accounts of the visual arts. His first major topic in the arts, one of great fascination for him and many others who have seen his photographs, was the face paintings of the Amazonian Caduveo that he saw in the mid-1930s. He wrote three substantive pieces on the paintings: one of his earliest publications, ‘Indian Cosmetics’  from 1943 (in English, recently translated into French and published in a collection of his early writings); a section in his most important publication in the visual arts, ‘Split Representation in the Arts of Asia and America’, included in his fundamental collection Structural Anthropology; and a famous chapter in his astounding book largely about his time in Brazil, Tristes Tropiques (the latter two are from the mid-1950s). The first publication is prior to his own development of the structural method of analysis, but it is consistent with the later two publications, of which Lévi-Strauss says the last complements and completes the middle one. I’ll treat all three as mutually consistent, proleptically illustrating the accounts of the visual arts from his major writings of the 1960s, and amenable to description with the structuralist method of analysis of the tripartite complex of (i) elements (ii) in relations (iii) within a system.

     The painted faces are reserved for women and seem to be a mark of relatively high status for the Caduveo over against serf-like groups who work for them. Lévi-Strauss considers the oddest and most striking feature of the Caduveo to be their seeming distaste for procreation and the raising of infants--they have a very high rate of abortion and infanticide, and typically adopt children from other groups—and he will ultimately interpret the as expressing something close to this feature. Starting with the earliest piece, he notes that there is a kind of quasi-magical charm to this art that carries a high degree of eroticism, and further that it conveys the ontological declaration that the adorned makers of this art are not merely natural beings or beings made in a prior divine image.  What are the elements of this art form? Since according to Lévi-Strauss there are two ‘levels of articulation’, we should expect elements at both levels. It would seem consistent with Lévi-Strauss’s conceptions to consider with regard to painting colors qua natural to be the first level elements, and the second level elements to be artistic deposits within a genre or artform (something like: this patch of blue, or this jagged line of red). In a tour de force, Lévi-Strauss identifies the natural, and so presumably first-level, element to be the human face itself, with the seemingly second-level of elements being the lines and arrangements of the painting. Again putting together the three discussions, we can summarize his account of the artform as follows: The Caduveo conceptualize the human face per se as natural and unformed. The application of paint to the face disrupts the face qua natural, and simultaneously symbolizes and enacts the transformation of the face into something formed and cultural. Formal analysis of the facial designs (each of which is unique) shows them to embody various dualities: symmetry/asymmetry; representational/abstract; curvilinear/geometric. The broader semantic universe within which the paintings are made is itself structured by dualisms: plastic/graphic; male/female; ternary [Caduveo social hierarchy]/duality [gender and moiety]; culture/nature.

     Lévi-Strauss’s account of Caduveo face painting, then, can without undue interpretive strain be slotted into his two-level schema of artistic meaning. But what counts as artistic meaning in this account? The account does not aim to offer or include fine-grained analyses of the artistic meaning of particular works, and Lévi-Strauss gives an explicit justification for this seeming omission. In the essay ‘Social Structure’ from Structural Anthropology he attempts to answer the question what is distinctive about the social structure which is the target of his analyses. Social structure for him is a conceptual model built from prior analyses of social relations, but which is not reducible to those relations. An appropriate model of a social structure must meet four conditions: it must be systematic and based upon elements none of which can be changed without changing the model; a model should be the sort of conceptual construction that can be placed among other relevant models so as to exhibit the relations among the models as part of series of transformations; the model must be sensitive to alteration of its elements in making it possible to predict how alterations of elements will alter the model; and the model should be so constructed that it can render intelligible all observed facts in the domain it models. (Lévi-Strauss (1963), pp. 271-2) How does the account of Caduveo face painting attempt to meet these conditions?

     Lévi-Strauss’s answer is in effect given in the essay on what he calls ‘split representation’. He recalls the classic evidence and interpretation presented by Franz Boas in the foundational work in the anthropology of art, Primitive Art. There Boas analyzes two paintings of a bear from the Northwest Coast, one Haida and one Tsimshian. Both paintings at first glance seem to present a highly stylized and oddly splayed frontal representation of the animal. Boast noticed that both are actually constructed from two profile views that are arranged symmetrically facing each other. This is ‘split representation’. Boas thinks that such representation is an artifact of and solution to the problem of representing the animal in a way that provides full information of its salient characteristics together with the fundamental requirement on representing something three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface. Lévi-Strauss accepts Boas’s account as part of an explanation of the art, but massively expands and deepens the account through the structural method. First, he notes that split representation is prominent not just in Northwest Coast art, but in widely dispersed arts including Maori tattooing, early Chinese Shang bronze decorations, and the Caduveo face painting.

     He then arranges these different arts as a conceptual series, ordered by the abstract conceptual dualism symmetry/asymmetry, with Maori decoration as wholly symmetrical, and the others combining in various degrees both symmetry and asymmetry. He transfers to all the artforms the point from the Caduveo that the face is treated as unformed and made to be formed and fulfilled with decoration: “Decoration is conceived for the face, but the face itself exists only through decoration. In the final analysis, the dualism is that of the actor and his role, and the concept of mask gives us the key to its interpretation.” (p. 256) Then he asks, why does split representation not occur among mask cultures generally, such as in the great masking cultures of the American Southwest or New Guinea?

     The answer is startling: split representation occurs not in masking cultures generally, where masks usually represent ancestors, but rather only in those wherein masked representation of ancestors is in the service of validating “social hierarchy through the primacy of genealogies” by actualizing a “chain of privileges, emblems, and degrees of prestige” (p. 258). As a mechanism of validating hierarchy, “split representation expresses the strict conformity of the actor to his role and the social rank to myths, ritual, and pedigrees. This conformity is so rigorous that, in order for the individual to be dissociated from his social role, he must be torn asunder” (!) (p. 259). We can now see that Lévi-Strauss’s two central and best-known analyses of art, those Caduveo face painting and Northwest styles, are central instances of a unique, though fundamentally anthropological, approach to the visual arts, which I attempt to capture as follows: First, a wide range of evidence is collected, initially from relatively well-defined cultures (the Caduveo, the Haida, etc.), consisting of an indeterminately large set of facts about artifacts, practices, and institutions. Then artistic artifacts are analyzed into the two structural levels, starting with something like the distinction between materials and genre-relative styles, and a model is proposed. Second, other relevant cultures are examined, and other appropriate models proposed. Third, the models are arranged in a manner where each can be seen as a transformation of the others. Fourth, a principle (e.g. split representation) governing the range of models is proposed. Finally, the principle itself is seen as derived from central features (e.g. validation of social hierarchy through ancestral connections) of the relevant societies. If these four methodological steps are taken satisfactorily, then the artistic meaning of the artifacts is ‘fully intelligible’.

     How might we evaluate Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to the study of the visual arts? In my final post on this topic, I’ll sketch the other, perhaps more standard, approaches of Franz Boas and Robert Layton, and then offer some philosophical reflections on all three.

References:

Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)

Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1978)

Robert Layton, The Anthropology of Art (1981)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Indian Cosmetics’ (1942) and ‘L’art de la côte nord-ouest à L’American Museum of Natural History’ (1943), in Anthropologie Structurale Zéro (2019)

-----‘Interview with Junzo Kawada’, in The Other Face of the Moon (2013)

-----‘Postscript to Chapters III and IV’, ‘Social Structure’, and ‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, in Structural Anthropology (1963)

-----The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume One (1969)

-----Triste Tropiques (1973)

-----‘Preface’ to Jakobson (1978)

Elements of Artistic Meaning, Part Two: Claude Lévi-Strauss on the Visual Arts

     In my previous post I raised the issue of the nature of artistic meaning in the visual arts, and then suggested a range of instances across global art that should be part of the explananda of a contemporary account of such meaning. How can one investigate and reflect upon artistic meaning? One line of thought that suggests itself is to consider whether there are ‘elements’ or basic units of artistic meaning, which then are perhaps combined and elaborated upon in artworks. Perhaps if we can make sense of the distinction between simple and complex instances of artistic meaningfulness and then consider a range of relatively unelaborated instances of the former, we might start to get a sense of what kinds and ranges of meaningfulness are distinctive of visual artworks, as opposed to natural objects, mere artifacts, and visual designs. This would be a so to speak bottom-up approach, as opposed to a top-down approach that starts from reflection upon the concept of artistic meaning and the possible distinctive characteristics of artistic meaning, and then uses the results as a guide for identifying actual kinds and instances of such meaning. The bottom-up approach will doubtless strike some people as an odd way of thinking about the minimal contents of visual works of art, but its strangeness is perhaps lessened by recalling, first, its motivation: the most prominent philosophical investigations for the past two centuries have typically assumed that there is a conceptual gulf between artworks and other artifacts, but also that the distinction can be explicated without references to artistic meaning. The more typical question is ‘What is (a work of) art?’, which is posed in abstraction from the question ‘What kinds of artistic meaningfulness are there?’. The sterility of the great historical sequence of answers to the question ‘What distinguishes artworks from other artifacts’—expression, form, artist’s intention, ‘atmosphere of theory’ (which in practice are just factories for generating counter-examples)—if nothing else indicates the need for a different approach. Second, one notes the persistent thought that there is a ‘language’ of art. Since languages have a range of basic elements—phonemes, morphemes, words, syntax, sentences—we can consider whether there is anything analogous in the visual arts to the ordered hierarchies of linguistic features.

     In my reading the most sophisticated developed account of the visual arts that aims to make good the art-language analogy across global art is that of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Accordingly, I’ll try to reconstruct and analyze his account as a stepping stone on the path of investigating artistic meaning. But before summarizing and analyzing the account, I’ll introduce what seem to me the most penetrating arguments against the idea that artistic meaning is language-like. In the 1980s the philosopher Richard Wollheim developed what was then a highly unfashionable account of artistic meaning, an account he typically restricted to artistic painting. It was then and still is unfashionable to think that there is a distinctive kind of meaningfulness in artistic painting.  The particular polemical target for Wollheim was a the range of fashionable approaches classified under terms like ‘structuralism’, ‘post-structuralism’, ‘semiotics’, ‘hermeneutics’, and ‘deconstruction’, all of which, he urged, assimilate pictorial meaning to linguistic meaning. But there are, Wollheim countered, three major arguments against the assimilation. Consider the following: “(1) the word ‘bison, and below it the sentence, ‘The bison is standing’; (2) a picture of a bison—say, a cave-painting of a bison; and (3) an actual bison.” (Wollheim, p. 185) The first counter-argument against the identification of pictorial meaning and linguistic meaning is that the word ‘bison’ and the sentence ‘The bison is standing’ gain their meaning through the application of rules: one rule that ties words to the world, another that ties sequences of words to the world where the meanings of words are fixed and the sequences are governed by principles of combination of grammatical parts, such as phrases and clauses. This differs from pictorial meaning in that (a) pictures and their meanings are not exhaustively analyzable; and (b) in pictures we cannot determine which element the pictures presents: is the cave-painting word-like in presenting a bison, or sentence-like in presenting the fact that there is a bison?

    The second argument highlights the arbitrariness of the relationship between words and what they depict. Whereas one can look at the cave-painting and see that there is a (depiction of a) bison (and this is similarly true across a vast range of depictive styles), one cannot do likewise see or otherwise discern the referent of a word merely by seeing or hearing the word.  The third argument insists that one can learn what an animal looks like from a depiction of the animal, that is, that knowledge of depiction partially transfers to knowledge of a referent, whereas even if one knows that the word ‘bison’ refers to something, one needs additional information to know what sort of thing it refers to, and a fortiori what that thing looks like. (pp. 186-8) Wollheim notes two further differences between linguistic and pictorial meaning: sheer perception shows one what a picture looks like and what a picture means in virtue of its looking like such-and-such; and pictures always depict from a particular point-of-view. Again, there is nothing similar to these in linguistic meaning. Wollheim concludes with the thought that these points are really common knowledge, and that the great range of theories that treat pictorial meaning as language-like are willfully mistaken: “We all know all of this from childhood, and theory needs to go back to school.” (p. 190)

     I cannot but agree with Wollheim’s points, but of course this does not show what no argument could show, namely, that there are no significant ways in which depictive meaning generally and artistic meaning in visual art in particular are analogous. Wollheim would surely agree that the characteristics of linguistic meaning he cites do not collectively offer an exhaustive description of everything bearing upon meaning in language, and so there is still the possibility that nonetheless other characteristics of language and meaning are also part of depictive or artistic meaning. With this in mind we turn to the formidable Lévi-Strauss. I set aside his general account of structuralism and its method, as well as his initial application of it to kinship and then to the mythologies of the Americas, and focus upon his remarks on visual arts. Lévi-Strauss’s writings give some sense of his knowledge of the European tradition of artistic painting, with a detail of a painting by the 16th-century portraitist François Clouet playing a central role in his central characterization of the nature of visual art. A late interview reveals that from an early age Lévi-Strauss collected Japanese woodblock prints, and that this artform was a life-long passionate interest. Most readers will know of two great topics in his anthropological writings (both of which were the subjects of two of his earliest (1942-3) publications): the account of Caduveo (Amazonian) face-painting in Tristes Tropiques, and his general interest in the visual art of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest. His central characterization of (visual) art in La Pensée Sauvage (formerly translated as The Savage Mind, and recently re-translated as ‘Wild Thought’) is crucially supplemented with his extended remarks on artistic meaning in the Introduction of his first volume on Amerindian mythology, The Raw and the Cooked.

     The relevant passages in both books are quite difficult with their intricacy and allusiveness, so in both cases I’ll start with summaries including extended quotations and then attempt to note the central points. In Wild Thought Lévi-Strauss begins with the thought that artists fashion “a material object that is at the same time an object of knowledge.” (p. 26)  He moves immediately to the analysis of a detail, the lace of a neck ruff, from a late sixteenth-century portrait by Clouet, and asks why this should arouse “very deep aesthetic emotion”. He then surprisingly suggests his highly counter-intuitive fundamental characterization, that “the very type of the work of art” is a scale model. How so? Lévi-Strauss offers the following: a scale model first of all allows us to grasp something as a whole and not, as in everyday acts of knowing, starting from something’s parts. The quantitative reduction of a thing inherent in a scale model makes the thing less daunting and it seems to us ‘qualitatively simplified’. Further, a scale model, even if life-size, “always involves giving up certain dimensions of the object: in painting, volume; in sculpture, colors, odors, or tactile impressions; and in both cases, the temporal dimension”; accordingly, the work of art projects “a property-space with smaller and fewer sensory dimensions than those of its object”. (p. 29) The fact that the scale model is an artifact, something constructed and made by people, implies that it is “not a mere projection, a passive homologue of the object: it constitutes an actual experiment on the object”. Returning to Clouet’s painting of lace, Lévi-Strauss notes that the depiction presupposes “inside knowledge of its morphology and its technique of construction . . . it cannot be reduced to a diagram or a blueprint; it achieves a synthesis of these intrinsic properties and those that belong to the spatial and temporal context. The final result is the lace ruff, such as it is absolutely, but also such as, at the same instant, its appearance is affected by the perspective it is presented from, making some parts stand out and hiding others, the existence of which nevertheless continues to influence the rest.” (p.30)

     Lévi-Strauss’s text here is extraordinarily condensed, but, if I understand it, his analysis turns on the point that an artist makes something external, an artwork in time and space, which also expresses or embodies something non-temporal and non-spatial, what he calls an ‘inner knowledge’, a ‘being’. He indicates that this ‘inner’ phenomenon is of ‘the order of structure’, while the ‘outer’ phenomenon (the spatio-temporal materiality of the artwork) is a piece of ‘outer’ knowledge or ‘the order of event’. (pp. 30-31) What is the point, then, of making or experiencing an artwork?  Initially, Lévi-Strauss had begun with the thought that Clouet’s depiction of the lace arouses a seemingly inexplicable “very deep aesthetic emotion” (p. 26), and he concludes his account with the claim that the “aesthetic emotion comes from this union of the order of structure and the order of event instituted within a thing created by man, and so virtually be the spectator, who discovers its possibility through the work of art.” (p. 31) The appeal to ‘the aesthetic emotion’ is wholly undeveloped, and so really functions only as a place-holder for an account of the effects of artworks.

     Lévi-Strauss goes on to add what seems to me a qualification of profound interest and insightfulness. He considers a Haida club carved with symbols. Where, then, is the order of the event in such a work? Everything “appears to be a matter of structure: its mythical symbolism as much as its practical function. More precisely, the object, its function, and its symbol seem to fold back on each other and form a closed system in which there is no room for the event.” (p. 31) The seeming counter-example of the club forces him to treat the order of ‘the event’ as an instance of a more general category which he calls the ‘mode of the contingent’. (p. 31) There are, he asserts, three aspects or ‘distinct moments’ of contingency in the process of artistic creation: “the occasion for the work, its execution, or its purpose”. Only the first aspect or mode being, that of the work itself, is of the order of the event. In that first aspect the artist “apprehends this contingency from the outside: an attitude, an expression, a distinctive light, a situation”, and the artist incorporates these contextual features into the work itself. In the second moment, the execution, the artist incorporates the material aspects of art-making—the characteristics of the material and the tools—into the work. And in the third moment, the purpose for which the work is made, the artist puts herself into the position of the destined user of the work and embodies that purpose in the work. (p. 33)

     A summary of Lévi-Strauss’s conception of art would perhaps be something like this: Works of art are (a) artifactual models wherein (b) elements of meaningful structures are integrated with contingencies of making, material, and/or occasion in such a way as (c) to elicit an aesthetic emotion in appropriately attuned recipients. This formulation suggests that to see whether and what sort of account of artistic meaning Lévi-Strauss offers, we need to investigate what he means by structures. I’ll take that up in my next post, and finish here with a reconstruction of his theory of art-kinds, and the different kinds of elements. For this purpose the key text is the ‘Overture’ that opens the first volume of his massive study of Amerindian mythology, The Raw and the Cooked. The second half of the Overture aims to explain and justify Lévi-Strauss’s use of musical terminology and concepts (‘sonata’, ‘symphony’, ‘toccata and fugue’, etc.) to organize his analysis. This leads him to give an account of the elements of music, and then further to contrast those with the elements of poetry and painting. As in Wild Thought, the prose of the Overture is dense and allusive; what follows represents my current best attempt at understanding his views: All three art-kinds present the integration of two distinct orders of elements in combination. At the first level, the elemental features of music are sounds and forms, of poetry words and forms, of painting colors and forms or designs. At the second level there is a “choice and arrangement of the units”, which are interpreted “according to the imperatives of a given technique, style or manner—that is, by their transposition in terms of a code characteristic of a given artist or society.” (Lévi-Strauss (1969), p. 20) Lévi-Strauss goes on to sharply distinguish the character of the first level of articulation in music from those of painting and poetry. The elements of music are sounds, not noises, and so are already cultural phenomenon; in the fullest formulation of this point, he writes: “The system of intervals provides music with an initial level of articulation, which is a function not of the relative heights of notes (which result from the perceptible properties of each sound) but of the hierarchical relations among them on the scale.” (p. 16) By contrast, it is nature, not a cultural system, that offers inexhaustible array of colors and so the relevant elements of painting. One consequence of this, he thinks, is that whereas a note carries no ‘natural’ resonances or meanings (a C# is not as such the sound of the nightingale or the freight train), colors bear a sense of their pre-artistic existence in nature—“midnight blue, peacock blue, petrol blue; sea green, jade green; straw color, lemon yellow; cherry red, etc.” (p. 19)—, so that there is a “congenital subjection of the plastic arts [of color] to [prior] objects”. (p. 20) Lévi-Strauss only gives the briefest of indications with regard to poetry, with the point that “the vehicle of poetry is articulate speech, which is common property. Poetry merely decrees that its particular use of language will be subject to certain restrictions.” (p. 18) I take this to mean that ‘articulate speech’ comprises all the elements of the first level of articulation for poetry, and the systems of verse—including quantitative stresses, rhyme schemes, meter, and genres—are its second level of articulation.

      Even this partial summary of Lévi-Strauss’s brief and dense remarks on art gives, I would think, a feel for the great interest of his artistic theory. Again, his central point is that all works of art are reduced models, and that meaning and/or ‘aesthetic emotion arises from the inaugural fact that any model is a reduction of that which it models, in that in necessarily leaves out an indeterminately vast number of characteristics of the model. The combination of levels of articulation results in an artifact, something made, that synthesizes perceptual and epistemic dimensions of what is modeled, and thereby gives rise to aesthetic emotion. Here I restrict myself to an initial comment: nothing in Lévi-Strauss’s account seems to violate Wollheim’s strictures on the non-linguistic character of pictorial meaning. And yet Lévi-Strauss insists that the arts are a language. In order to explore whether and how this conception of artistic meaning is sustainable, in my next post I turn to two points: What does Lévi-Strauss mean by ‘language’ and ‘structure’? And how does he conception of art account for actual artworks? To this end I shall turn to first his initial formulation of the concept of structure out of the linguistics of Roman Jakobson, and then will consider his two most sustained analyses of art, the face painting of the Amazonian group the Caduveo, and artworks of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest.

References:

Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Indian Cosmetics’ (1942) and ‘L’art de la côte nord-ouest à L’American Museum of Natural History’ (1943), in Anthropologie Structurale Zéro (2019)

-----‘Interview with Junzo Kawada’, in The Other Face of the Moon (2013)

-----The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume One (1969)

-----Triste Tropiques (1973)

-----Wild Thought (2021)

Richard Wollheim, ‘Pictures and Language’, in The Mind and its Depths (1993)

Are There Elements of Meaning in Art? Part One: Issues and Explananda

     In a recent series of blog posts I explored what sense we might give to the claim that in some obscure way Muqi’s 14th century painting ‘Six Persimmons’ was about ineffability. This motivated consideration of whether artistic meaning generally is ineffable, that is, cannot be put in words; and in turn raised question of whether and in what ways or senses there are kinds of meaning that are distinctively artistic. Each of these questions is of considerable difficulty, and seem to raise, if not beg, further questions: Do all works of art, including abstract paintings, absolute music, and decorative artworks, have meanings? Is possessing artistic meaning partly criterial of something being a work of art, or is there a conceptual divorce between something being a work of art and it having meanings of a certain kind or in a certain manner? And if we offer an answer to any of these questions, should we think that the answer is a kind of explication and articulation of what people implicitly recognize in responding in an appropriate manner to an artwork, or are the answers partly stipulative and/or reconstructions of what are in practice sets of messy, fuzzy, and/or incoherent responses to works? In the following series of three blog posts I’ll try to bring a very partial clarity to some of these issues by considering a few questions: 1. Can any sense be given to the idea that some artworks are the simplest works, that is, works that exhibit only the most minimal set of features, and with those features presented without elaboration? Such works, if there are any, would merit particular attention in thinking about distinctive features of art and artworks. 2. Can we make sense of the idea that there are elements of, or elemental forms of, artistic meaning? And at what level of abstraction should we look for such elements? If we consider poetry, would the elements be at the level of sounds, of words, or of basic patterns and rhythms? If we consider painting, would the elements be lines and deposits of paint, or of Gestalt-type figures possessing inherently dynamic qualities, or again would the elements be conceptual features such as representation and expression? 3. One persistent intuition about artistic meaning is that it is language-like, and yet across a range of conceptions and aspects of language there seems to be no sustainable analogies with artistic meaning. What ideas is the analogy between art and language, or between artistic meaning and linguistic meaning, aiming to articulate? And can these ideas be articulated independently of the seemingly intractable problems in the art-language analogy? Here I turn to the first question: are there simplest artworks?

     A first thought would be that the simplest artworks are those that seem unelaborated. Simplicity in this sense does not attach to the content, but rather to the (appearance) of efforts of elaboration of the content and its presentation. Poems such as Wallace Stevens’s ‘The river is moving/The blackbird must be flying’ come to mind. In a lecture given in 1965 the philosopher Richard Wollheim coined the term ‘minimal art’ for works where it seemed as if the artist had done less than what one seems to look for or expect in an artwork. Wollheim’s examples were works of visual art including Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Ad Reinhardt’s all-black paintings. One aspect of such visual works is that they are inconceivable without a presupposed rich background of artworks, against which they stand out as provocations: why do we need all that messy paint, all that appeal to the sensuous eye, all that furious gestural expression?

     As my concern is initially to elicit and reflect upon intuitions of simplicity with regard to artistic meaning, I set aside the sophisticated works of Duchamp and Reinhardt, and turn to the artistic red squares proposed by Arthur Danto as a thought-experiment, then to three instances from world art: the so-called Blombos pebble of perhaps 80,000 years ago, drawings in the dirt by Australian Aboriginal group the Walbiri, and carved house posts of the renowned carvers of the Amiramy people of Madagascar. But before proceeding to the putative instances of ‘simple’ art, I’ll briefly consider an argument from the musicologist Leonard B. Meyer that foregrounds the difficult issues in isolating relatively simple kinds or instances of artistic meaning.  In an article from 1967, ‘Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music, Meyer addresses the question ‘What makes music great?’ His proposal attempts to illuminate, though not answer, the question in a two-fold manner: he investigates how value is ascribed in non- or extra-musical areas, and he attempts to transfer the findings to music; and he emphasizes music as a kind of communication that can be understood in light of so-called information theory. He begins by dismissing the idea that evaluation is limited to comparison of instances within genres and sub-genres of music, with the corollary that evaluation across genres is illegitimate; he asserts that saying Bach’s B Minor Mass and ‘Twinkle, twinkle’ are ‘equally’ good or good ‘each in its own way’ is “preposterous and false.” He immediately adds that “length, size, or complexity as such” are not criteria of value, though “complexity does have something to do with excellence.” (Meyer 1967, p. 24) To bring out the connection between complexity and excellence, he asks ‘What is the fundamental difference between sophisticated art music and primitive music?’ Relative to sophisticated music, primitive music is “employs a smaller repertory of tones”, “the distance of these notes from the tonic is smaller”, and “there is a great deal of repetition, though often slightly varied repetition”. Keeping in mind that ‘primitive’ music is not generally a feature of small-scale or ‘primitive’ societies, but rather is characterized relative to the fuller realization of musical possibilities in sophisticated music (tin-pan alley is primitive in relation to jazz), Meyer takes the connection to value to be the following: primitive music seeks ‘almost immediate gratification’ and is intolerant of uncertainty. But, following information theory, Meyer thinks that information increases with deviation from patterns or expected outcomes. His linguistic examples are that the sentence ‘She is as tall as Bill’ is more expected, and correlatively less informative, than the sentence ‘She is as tall as blue lilacs are’, and that ‘She is as tall as Bill is’ is less informative than ‘She is as tall as Bill is wide’. (p. 31) Meyer then asserts that in communicative situations information is ceteris paribus valuable, and so the greater value of sophisticated music is that, in comparison with primitive music, it uses and exploits uncertainty and deviation from norms and patterns. He of course recognizes that not all complexity is valuable (p. 36), if for no other reason than that some kinds of complexity are fundamentally unenjoyable. What, then, do we enjoy in music? There are three aspects of musical enjoyment: “the sensuous, the associative-characterizing, and the syntactical” (p. 36), and it is syntactical organization that is the basis of ascriptions of value. 

     For our purposes it is particular interest how Meyer attempts to deal with the objection that, all the same, some relatively simple works, such as Schubert’s song ‘Das Wandern’ are especially valuable because of their simplicity, which gives them a charm unattainable by relatively complex works. In a later essay Meyer qualifies this explanation which “now seems to me, if not entirely mistaken, at least somewhat confused.” Then in a suggestion that remarkably echoes Karl Marx’s notorious suggestion that we can still enjoy works of the Ancient Greeks because we associate them with the childhood of humanity, Meyer writes that “it seems probable that the charm of simplicity as such is associative rather than syntactical, that is, its appeal is to childhood, remembered as untroubled and secure.” (p. 37) Rather, for the purpose of evaluation one must distinguish materials and relations among materials, and “[w]hat is crucial is relational richness, and such richness (or complexity) is in no way incompatible with simplicity of musical vocabulary and grammar.” (Meyer 2000, pp. 56-7) Meyer goes on to analyze at great length the density of musical relations in a seemingly simple piece, the Trio from the third movement of Mozart’s G-Minor Symphony (K.550) I take it that Meyer thinks the earlier account was not entirely mistaken because he continues to maintain a tight connection between musical value and complexity, but that it was confused in not distinguishing kinds of complexity, and especially in not recognizing that (only?) relational complexity is relevant to the evaluation of music.

     It seems to me that this latter account is superior to the earlier in relieving the explanation of the appeal to childhood, and particularly in recognizing that evaluations of simplicity and complexity attach to multiple aspects of an artwork. But questions immediately arise: Does the distinction between materials and relations exhaust all the aspects of an artwork relevant to its evaluation? Why would an artist choose relatively simple materials, and couldn’t that choice be part of what is valuable in a work (one thinks of Bertolt Brecht at his desk with a picture of a donkey captioned ‘Even I Must Understand’)? If Meyer were to respond that choice of relatively simple materials might be valuable for non-musical reasons (such as ready intelligibility to large numbers of people), how does one draw a line between the musical and the non-musical?

     I put these questions on hold until latter posts, and now introduce a small number of artworks the evaluation of which raises the issues of simplicity and complexity, what aspects are relatively simple or complex, and whether and how one can with regard to artworks draw the line between artistic and non-artistic meaningfulness. A major part of my reason for choosing these examples is that they seem to me to be among a small number of works of global art that pose particularly difficult problems a study in the philosophy of visual art that I’m working on:

Example #1: Indiscernible Red Squares

     The example of course comes from the opening chapter of Arthur Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. In the manner beloved of analytic philosophers, Danto sets up a thought experiment: Imagine a number of square, red monochrome canvases. They are ‘indiscernible’ in the sense that there is nothing about them that visually differentiates one from the other; they are the same size, same shape, same weave of canvas, same color, same saturation, etc. What differentiates them is their histories. One is a work of abstract art, another a kind of conceptual piece aiming to show a work about nothing, another a Romantic work entitled ‘Kierkegaard’s Mood’ that depicts the Red Sea after it has swallowed the Egyptians pursuing the fleeing Jews, yet another is merely a store sample, etc. Danto urges that merely posing and reflecting upon the example induces one to think that nothing (visually) discernible differentiates the artworks from the mere artifacts (such as the sample), and nothing (visually) discernible differentiates the very different meanings of the different artworks (the abstract painting, the conceptual piece, the Romantic work). I suggest that a philosophy of visual art ought either to make sense of the differentiations among the works, or explain why the thought experiment fails in some sense.

Example #2, The Blombos Pebble:

     Starting in the 1990s the archeologist Christopher Henshilwood excavated a cave in South Africa. He uncovered a number of artifacts made by early humans, including one dated to approximately 80,000 years ago that might plausibly be considered the earliest known work of art. The work is a small, roughly rectangular piece of ochre. Two sides are abraded, as if rubbed. One side bears incisions of a rectangle that echoes the shape of piece of ochre, and within the inscribed rectangle are evenly spaced, diagonal crossing lines. The incisions form a design, that is, a perceptually graspable form with at least three differentiated elements (outline, field, and patterned internal marks). Whatever the uses to which the piece of ochre was put (A crayon? Sunscreen? Insect repellent?), the meaning and purpose of the design (if any) must be conceptually distinct from the use(s) of the piece of ochre. I suggest that a philosophy of visual art should offer some illumination on the question of whether the Blombos Pebble is an artwork, and, if so, what range of distinctively artistic meanings is might bear; or, if not, why not, or why the question of its artistic status and meaningfulness is of little importance in understanding the world’s visual art.

Example #3, Walbiri Graphism:

     In the mid-late 1950s the anthropologist Nancy Munn did field work among the Walbiri people of central Australia. She came to focus upon the ‘graphic representations’ of these people, which were of three types: drawings made in the sand primarily by women as illustrations and visual props in story telling; drawings primarily by men on paper supplied by Munn that illustrated distinctively Walbiri iconography relating to their myths and cosmology; totemic designs painted by both men and women on boards, stones, and their own bodies. In the opening paragraph of the book she refers to these graphic representations generally as ‘art’ (Munn, p. xiii) , but thereafter the term drops out, and the concept of art plays no overt role whatsoever in the remainder of the book. As analyzed by Munn, Walbiri graphism has three key elements: 1. The designs are guruwari, which refers simultaneously to ancestors and “the power of generation, which is an essentially abstract or invisible potency left by the ancestors in the soil as they traveled through the country” (p. 29); these two conceptually distinct kinds of elements that are invariably fused in the design. Along with the use of guruwari in story telling, they accompany songs in rituals, where the signs lack the otherwise customary precise reference to a location, but rather combine with the song to infuse the ceremonial event with ancestral meanings. (p. 148) So the visual designs are not so to speak stand-alone elements, but are characteristically combined with language or song; Munn stresses throughout the point that Walbiri representations in use are multi-modal. 2. All (uses of) designs are wiri, that is, strong, powerful, and important. (p. 33) The power of the designs is context-specific, and is typical effect is, as noted above, to saturate the context of their use with ancestral meanings, in particular those of generativity and fertility. (p. 55) 3. At their most basic level, the Walbiri designs “are “the “visual sedimentations” of a movement connecting individual consciousness or bodily being and the outer, social world” (p. 217), and “are “multivocal” condensation symbols that can project an image of dynamic societal unity in microcosm.” (p. 220) These characterizations are of a piece with the representations’ multi-modality, their general importance, and their evocation of the existential significance of the ancestors.

     I suggest that a philosophy of visual art offer some illumination as to whether and in what sense Walbiri graphic representations are a kind of visual art, and, if so, help explicate how and why their meanings are always specified linguistically in their context-specific uses.

Examples #4, Amiramy Post Carvings:

     In the 1960s the anthropologist Maurice Bloch did fieldwork among the Zafimaniry people of eastern Madagascar, a group renowned for their woodworking. In one of his essays on this people, he notes that for much of the twentieth-century the Zafimaniry were asked by anthropologists, including Bloch himself, what their carved designs meant. Or, rather, they were asked in French and in the indigenous language Malagasy a cluster of related questions: What do the designs vouloir dire (literally in English, ‘want to say’)? What is the point of this? What are they pictures of?  What is the root cause of this? Bloch writes that when he asked ‘What are those pictures of?’, he “triggered the ready-made phrase that there was no point, and when I asked what people were doing I was told ‘Carving’.” (Bloch, p. 41) Other writers have claimed that they were told that “various parts of the carvings are representation; that, for example, the ubiquitous circular designs represent the moon and that some of the designs, which appear like shading, are rain.” (ibid.) Bloch’s subsequent fieldwork that these identifications of content were in fact just names that indicate a trivial visual similarity, like the name ‘herringbone tweed’ for a abstract pattern of cloth that contains no reference to the skeleton of a small fish.

     Bloch comes to think that the question ‘What do the designs mean?’ is the wrong place to start in trying to understand them. Rather, one needs to start from the fact that the designs are typically decorations of houses, and ask about the significance of the houses. For the Zafimaniry houses are “the basis of ordered society and the mark of a successful life”. (p. 42) The key feature of the house is that it is built at the beginning of a marriage, the young man puts up “central house-posts and a flimsy outer wall of reed and mats, [and] the young woman will bring the furniture of the hearth.” A marriage is as it were ‘flimsy’ at its outset, but if successful the marriage, as well as the house, will ‘harden’. Reeds are gradually replace by wood, which is called the house acquiring bones. The hardest available heartwood is used, and it is this wood that is carved. Carving is conceptualized as a continuation of the hardening process of wood, and is said to ‘honor’ the wood. Bloch concludes that the carvings are not referring or signifying, not ‘pointing outwards’ or ‘trying to say something’, but rather are “a celebration of the material and the building and of a successful life which continues to expand and reproduce”. (p. 44)

     I suggest that a philosophy of visual art should treat Zafimaniry carvings as central instances, and make conceptual room for the idea that across a range of cases works of visual art ‘mean’ nothing in the sense that the question points in the wrong direction (that is, towards representation, reference, and signification), but rather that the meanings that arise in visual artworks should be understood as elaborations of materials in the service of their embodying and making vivid central social, cultural, and even cosmic meanings of their makers and their primary audiences. Now, with the questions in mind about simplicity and complexity in artistic meaning from the first half of this post, and the examples from the second half, I turn in the next post to a consideration of what seems to me prima facie to be the prominent account of art most responsive to these points, that of the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. A point of further interest is that Lévi-Strauss offers a way of trying to make sense of why the thought that artistic meaning in visual art has a language-like quality.

Maurice Bloch, ‘Questions not to ask of Malagasy carvings’, in Essays on Cultural Transmission (2005)

Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857-58)

Leonard B. Meyer, ‘Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music’, in Music, The Arts, and Ideas (1967)

-----‘Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio of Mozart’s G-Minor Symphony’, in The Spheres of Music (2000)

Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (1973)

John Rapko, ‘How Might We Understand the Ineffability of Muqi’s Four Persimmons?’, in academia.edu at https://www.academia.edu/112887614/How_Might_We_Understand_the_Ineffability_of_Mu_Qis_Four_Persimmons

Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art”, in On Art and the Mind (1973)

Review: On Tim Ingold’s The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024)

      Why are things as bad as they are, and what if anything can we do to improve things? If there is an area where philosophy, political thinking, social theory, artistic imperatives, and ethical reflection meet, surely it is in asking these questions. Different people with different concerns and interests will conceive of ‘things’ in different ways, with diagnoses of what is ‘bad’, and consider different kinds of potentially ameliorative actions. The questions are, if not perennial, certainly deeply entrenched and durable in Western thought; without great strain or ingenuity one could view Plato, Augustine, and Dante as offering comprehensive answers to both questions. The political philosopher Michael Rosen has reconstructed and analyzed a relevant strain in modern European thought, beginning with Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse of Involuntary Servitude in the sixteenth-century and continuing into the twentieth-century with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, that focuses on the question ‘Why do people (seem to) consent to their own subordination, existential misery, and unfreedom?’, the force of which presupposes a particular answer to the first general question.

     The philosopher Raymond Geuss’s The Idea of a Critical Theory gives the classic exposition and evaluation of the sorts of claims that provide the scaffolding for Adorno’s and also Jürgen Habermas’s diagnoses and proposals. On Geuss’s reconstruction, an Adorno-Habermas-type ‘critical theory’ would start from the diagnosis that we are in some self-imposed initial state of false consciousness, error, and unfreedom, and that if we come to recognize both that our current condition is flawed and that it is self-imposed, we can be both enlightened, i.e. free from error, and emancipated, i.e. freed from self-imposed coercion. (Geuss, p. 58) Geuss goes on to distinguish sharply between Adorno’s and Habermas’s version of what criteria an agent might appeal to in order to gain the requisite self-understanding: for Adorno the relevant criteria are inevitably historical and specific to the agents’ social context; for Habermas the criteria are transcendental and so available to any rational human being who reflects upon the conditions of successful communication. (pp. 63-8)

     Although as reconstructed by Geuss critical theory has a sophisticated account of the conceptual framework and claims surrounding the two questions, it has no monopoly on diagnoses and proposals for progress. One of the most prominent of alternative lines of thinking involves anthropological research and reflection, where an anthropologist considers some small-scale societies or groups and offers their manner of life as an attractive alternative to the political, social, economic, environmental, artistic, and/or existential problems that plague capitalist modernity. One quick way of dismissing such anthropological reflection comes from the philosopher Bernard Williams, who noted that the manner of life of small-scale societies is not really something we can imagine as a liveable alternative for those who live in large-scale industrialized societies. But one might further think that Williams’s dismissal is too quick in begging the question as to how extensive, deep, and/or urgent our problems are, and accordingly great the changes we might make after reflection, enlightenment, and emancipation; the fact that, say, the massive use of fossil fuels is deeply engrained in contemporary life is no argument against a rapid, planned global abandonment of such fuel.

     Over the past three decades, in a publishing career that began in the 1970s, the anthropologist Tim Ingold has been to my mind the most interesting and challenging figure pursuing an anthropological response to the two questions. In his most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, he turns his attention to the peculiar phenomenon of ‘generations’, that is, social reality that across a broad range of Western societies for the past couple of hundred years people tend to think of themselves as part of a ‘generation’ that shares certain kinds of experiences, points of orientation, sensibilities, defining collective events, and sense of which phenomena are salient and important. Sociologists since the late nineteenth-century have investigated and tried to conceptualize ‘generations’, most prominently Karl Mannheim in his canonical essay of the late 1920’s ‘The Problem of Generations’. There Mannheim characterized a generation as (a) a ’concrete group’, that is, a number of individuals unified through naturally developed or consciously willed ties; who are further (b) socially located; so that (c) given basic facts about human life and its rhythms (life and death, limited life span, ageing); are (d) predisposed to certain characteristic kinds of thought, experience, and action. Finally, within any generation there are (e) units that are united by a common destiny (so Mannheim says, following Heidegger), but which adopt differing and opposed attitudes, for example the way that groups after the French Revolution adopted Romantic-conservative vs. Rationalist-liberal attitudes towards that complex event. So far, so good. Ingold’s distinctive diagnostic thought is recent generations conceptualize themselves as what he calls ‘Generation Now’; that this assumes or entails a further set up supporting images, metaphors, and conceptualizations of very basic aspects of human life, such as attitudes to the past and future, a shared sense of the shape of a worthwhile human life and associated sense of purpose, and a particular conceptualization of the proper interaction between generations, especially with regard to education; and that this set of conceptualizations is wholly malign.

     Ingold proposes that Generation Now’s most fundamental self-conceptualizations relate to time, temporal succession, and the relationships among past, present, and future, and all this both of the macro-level of societies and on the micro-level of individuals’ courses of life. Generation Now’s model is stratigraphic: each generation is like a thin layer laid on top of an indeterminately large pile of previous layers of generations, and the future is qualitatively distinct only in being in different, though unknowably so. Each generation is as it were on its own, with its own distinctive problems, concerns, and sensibilities. There is no interaction among the layers, other than the availability of the results of previous generations for the later generations. For any generation, previous generations can be nothing other than a deposit of resources (p. 9). At the level of the individual, the pressure of the stratigraphic model imposes the shape of a tri-partite bell-curve on the course of life: life is a short period of education in preparation for work, then centrally a long period of active work, then a short retirement with its purposeless waiting for the end. Ingold considers the imposition of the stratigraphic model a disaster, especially because on this model young people and old people have nothing to say or to do with each other: “[y]oung and old now find themselves irrevocably divided on opposite sides. For the young, the present holds up their coming; for the old, it recasts their passing as a retreat. This separation of young and old, I believe, is one of the great tragedies of the modern age.” (p. 26)

     As an alternative to the stratigraphic model, Ingold proposes an image of a rope, and then point-by-point gives contrasting conceptualizations of time and temporalization. Like a stack, a rope is made of individual finite elements in determinate relations. But the rope gains an integrity and tensile strength by virtue of the intertwining of its overlapping elements. The key feature of the contrasting images is their implied conceptualization of a new element to the pre-existing structure. Whereas there is a fundamental discontinuity between any new layer and the pre-existing strata upon which it is laid and superimposed, any new strand introduced into a rope takes up, models itself upon, and extends a pre-existing pattern of striations. Extensions of a rope are fundamentally continuous with its prior elements. In a rope, the past is active; it is in Faulkner’s phrase, not even past. So the project of the book is to diagnose the ways that the metaphor and image of strata in modern life has impoverished fundamental existential concerns--tradition and heritage, conservation and extinction, sustainability and progress, and art and science--, and to show how reconceptualizing these concerns with the metaphor and image of the rope might re-orient human life in more sustainable and meaningful ways.

     Given Ingold’s claim about the separation of the young and the old in modern times, one can readily imagine that his proposals for explicating the existential dimensions and social transformations implicit in the rope metaphor turn on the idea of the collaboration of generations. Like so many who have been struck by the Australian Aboriginal conception of Dreamtime, Ingold notes that in the Dreaming of the Pintupi, there is no sharp separation among past, present, and future. Instead, in the Dreaming there is only existence, where every thing is everywhere and everywhen, and there is only “pure possibility. Thus, every actual creature, as the incarnation of the ancestral power from which its vitality is derived, effectively finds itself on the inside of an eternal moment of world-creation.” (p. 53) This contrasts with the modern sense of the stratigraphic person as a creature of potential, ultimately fulfilled or not, and if fulfilled something with “nowhere further to go. That’s it; life’s up.” (ibid) In a striking corollary Ingold contrasts the relevant conceptions of the natural world and its denizens: instead of them embodying the active ancestral powers of the Dreaming, for moderns it’s something set apart for oneself, either available as a resource or ‘preserved’ as an item in the catalog of biodiversity.

     The book’s concluding discussion of education offers Ingold’s most sustained and also most pointed contrast of metaphors. The diagnostic target is the recent re-orientation of higher education towards the so-called ‘STEM’ subjects (science, technology, engineering, math). Ingold skips the standard humanistic lament of the alleged recent loss of centrality of humanities in higher education, and instead notes the loss of the disciplines of science, engineering, and mathematics. In each of these disciplines “is a lineage of begetting, wound like a rope from the overlapping scholarly lives of its numerous practitioners. And, as a student, your task is to carry it on.” (pp. 112-13) By contrast, STEM is first of all an acronym, and as such it “rouses no passions, no memories, no sense of longing. It betokens nothing but sterile, detached instrumentality,” one which is “an index of [traditional disciplines’] wholesale takeover, in the name of research and development, and their subordination to the logic and interests of Generation Now.” (p. 113) Ingold notes an especially malign development wherein a major art school, the Rhode Island School of Design, added an ‘A’ for arts and initiated the hyper-Generation Now proposal of an arts education that “aims to prepare future generations to compete in today’s innovation economy” (p. 114).

     Ingold’s proposed alternative for the arts is that they “recover the sense of correspondence, of going along with things and learning from them.” (for an explication of Ingold’s conception of correspondence, see my review of his recent book of that title (noted in the references below)). This invocation of ‘going along with things and learning from them’ refers back to an earlier section of the book where Ingold presents what seems to me the philosophical core of his thought. He starts by noting the progressivist self-understanding of Generation Now: on its (stratigraphic) understanding, a Generation Now views itself as it were as a planner and problem-solver, and thereby projects a sense of the future as the time and space of a problem solved, or a plan realized. Against this conception, Ingold recalls John Dewey’s account of experience as an undergoing: in doing something, one not only experiences something but also transforms oneself. The self prior to the experience and the ‘same’ self after the experience are not in every way identical. Further, following the psychologist J. J. Gibson, Ingold changes the focus from of a human being’s primary involvement in the world from intention and action to attention, which involves exposure and attunement to some situation. (p. 56) Exposure, Ingold urges, involves a sense of fundamental vulnerability, a being-affected by a situation, while attunement implies a kind of skillful or at least achieved knowing-one’s-way-about. So the undergoing which is part of every experience is also a ceaseless passage from vulnerability to achievement. Generation Now’s self-conception of agency is not just culturally disastrous, but a kind of philosophical mistake.

     There’s much more in this short book. I have neglected two major motifs: Ingold’s constant invocation of a ‘longitudinal’ understanding, where concerns cut across the conceptualization of time as a series of points or uni-directional paths and trajectories; and his use of Walter Benjamin’s famous conceptualization of the ‘angelus novus’ or Angel of History, which he re-interprets against Benjamin as a way of thinking about movement in time that “gazes towards ancestral ways” and “longs to regain the path of tradition, with its promise of renewal for a future everlasting.” (pp. 24-25, and then throughout the book). It seems to me that Ingold’s basic claims can be readily grasped without these motifs, both of which are articulations and elaborations of the attempt to conceptualize ways in which previous generations might be thought of as part of a continuous, collective project undertaken with a current generation. I offer only one comment: Ingold’s conceptualizations here are immensely attractive, indeed self-evidently so; some offer a basic conceptual re-orientation, and others, particularly the remarks about education, suggest certain readily implemented practical proposals, all of which touch on the diagnosis of a distinctively modern malaise of as it were generational loneliness. I wonder, though, whether Ingold hasn’t made too much of the claim that progressivism is a central feature of Generation Now’s self-conceptualization. It seems to me that progressivism has passed (recall Jean-Francois Lyotard’s once-influential conception of the so-called Postmodern Condition); what remains is rather an aimless and unhinged drive of change qua change. Does anyone imagine that it’s for the better?

References:

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), in Illuminations (1968)

Étienne de la Boétie, Discourse of Involuntary Servitude (1577)

John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934)

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)

James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)

Tim Ingold, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024)

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)

Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’ (1927-28), in Karl Mannheim: Essays (1952)

John Rapko, ‘Review of Tim Ingold’s Correspondences’, at https://www.academia.edu/65136814/Critical_Review_Tim_Ingolds_Correspondences_2021_

Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: On False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (1996)

Bernard Williams, ‘The Truth in Relativism’, in Moral Luck (1981)

On Muqi's 6 Persimmons, Part 3: Ineffability and The Art of Finitude

     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)

How Might We Understand the Ineffability of Muqi’s Six Persimmons?—Part Two: The One with Cézanne

     In my previous post I introduced the difficult thought that Muqi’s painting 6 Persimmons is about ineffability, that is, our pervasive inability—in our perceptions, thoughts, abilities, and orientations—to put something that matters to us into words. I then offered a formal analysis of the painting centered upon the compositional arrangement of the persimmons and their puzzling spatial distribution. Striking features include Muqi’s particularization of each of the persimmons (except for the two ‘ghostly’ ones on either end), his care to avoid occlusion and with it ready indications of the precise spatial relations between and among the fruits, and the astonishingly precise and eventful placement of the sepals on the forward persimmon (#3), a micro-stroke that induces a major re-orientation of the viewer’s implied position. In this post I’ll sketch some of the religious and intellectual background to the painting, and then try to get it into sharper focus with a comparison with Cézanne, a comparison guided by two of Rainer Maria Rilke’s characterization of the seeming metaphysical implications of Cézanne’s later works.

     But first, what does it mean to say that the work is a Chan Buddhist painting? And why might we think that anything more than this bare identification of the work as Buddhist is relevant to understanding its seeming ineffability, or indeed anything of its meaning and significance? The standard account of the work goes something like this: Chan Buddhist painting exhibits a distinctive style that is expressive of its doctrine. The most distinctive feature of Chan Buddhism in relation to other kinds of Buddhism is its emphasis on the ‘suddenness’ of Enlightenment. The last words of the scroll of the central canonical statement of Chan, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng, identify it in one of its earliest extant manuscripts as ‘Southern School Sudden Doctrine Platform Sutra of the Supreme Mahayana Vehicle, one roll’. This advocacy of suddenness is contrasted with an orientation towards ‘gradual’ Enlightenment that is attained through meritorious thoughts and actions. Chan painting, then, exemplifies Chan doctrine in its stylistic renunciation of mediating and elaborating elements in painting, such as virtuoso display of a variety of refined brushwork, any concern for gracefulness, reverence for past masters, or learned allusions. And it was Chan paintings’ stylistic bareness, its simplicity, and its cultivation of the sense of spontaneity that found no favor in China, but was prized in Japan.

     As an instance of a text-book style classifactory schema of a text-book put to explanatory use, the standard story can scarcely be denied, but one notices that it tells us nothing about the distinctiveness of 6 Persimmons, nor does it intend to. To understand the distinctiveness of the artistic meaning of 6 Persimmons, we need to go further and ask how artworks might variously embody textual meanings. And this in turn requires some sense of how artworks embody any meanings, and of what kinds of meaningfulness are distinctive of textual meaning. The only philosophical account known to me that asks and proposes an answer to these questions with regard to textual meaning was given by the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim in the mid-1980s. Wollheim proposes the following schema: (i) with the aim of producing an artwork, an artist (Wollheim explicitly restricts his account to painting as an art; I see no reason not to expand it to include the arts generally) considers a range of existing works artworks (including perhaps her own) and notes that they are replete, in the sense that they embody an indefinite number of properties and an indefinite number of kinds of properties; (ii) in what Wollheim calls ‘reflexiveness’, the artist notices that there are previously unused or underexploited properties and/or kinds of properties that she might put to use in her own work in the service of creating a novel kind of ‘fit’ between perceptual properties and kinds of meaning; (iii) in what Wollheim calls ‘thematisation’ or ‘putting reflexiveness to work’ the artist the treats certain properties and/or kinds of properties as bearers of meaning and places them into relation with other such properties in an artwork in the service of creating or enhancing the meaning of the work; examples of thematisation include the High Renaissance’s use of facial expressions, the Venetian Cinquecento painters’ use of brushmarks, the use of edge and support in Degas, or the Cubists’ use of applied materials. Wollheim then argues that textual meaning in the arts enhances the conceptually more basic kinds of meaningfulness, representation and expression. Wollheim calls the latter kinds of meaning ‘primary’ meanings, and textuality as one of an indefinite class of ‘secondary’ meanings wherewith the artist expresses what the primary meanings mean to her.

      Keeping in mind that our goal is ultimately to try to understand what it might mean to say that 6 Persimmons is ‘about’ ineffability, we now ask how Wollheim’s account might aid us in clarifying what sense Chan Buddhism might be part of the content of Muqi’s painting. In one sense it is easy to state the core conceptions of Chan Buddhism as a development of Mahāyāna Buddhism that emerged very roughly two thousand years ago. In another sense it is quite impossible to state the conceptions, both because they are of tremendous conceptual difficulty and subject to different manners of interpretation and understanding up to the present.

     The best I can do here is to offer a short account based upon the founding document of Mahāyāna, a philosophical work of considerable greatness and even greater difficulty, Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamikakarika (interested readers are advised to consult the enormous secondary literature on it, starting perhaps with Paul Williams’s study of Buddhist thought, and Barry Allen’s book on Chinese epistemology for Chan specifically). As I (uncertainly) understand it, its core claims are stated in chapter 24. Nāgārjuna has asserted that all things are ‘empty’; this is standardly glossed as the assertion that all things lack ‘self-being’ or a subsistent nature or a substantive essence. The chapter opens with him presenting the objection that if all things are empty, then the Buddha’s teaching too is empty, and “it follows that/ The Four Noble Truths [i.e. all cyclic existence is suffering; suffering is caused by a craving resulting from ignorance; there is a release from suffering; the path to release is the eightfold Buddhist path of right view, right mindfulness, right action, etc.] do not exist” (XXIV:1) Nāgārjuna replies that this objection is based upon a misunderstanding of emptiness (XXIV:7), and crucially “Without a foundation in the conventional truth,/The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught./Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,/Liberation is not achieved” (XXIV:10). As Jay Garfield explicates this in his commentary, the key aspects of these claims are that part of “understanding the ultimate nature of things is just to understand that their conventional nature is merely conventional,” and that emptiness itself is to be explained and understood through the technical Buddhist doctrine of ‘dependent co-origination’, roughly that all things are impermanent, inter-dependent, and arise from (a web of) causes also so characterized. On some of Nāgārjuna’s formulations emptiness is dependent co-origination. Nothing in Chan Buddhist doctrine varies from these core formulations of Nāgārjuna; Chan gains its distinctiveness over against the alternative Buddhist claim that liberation is gradual, and in rejecting the doctrines of so-called Pure Land Buddhism that declare that after death a person of merit goes to an idyllic Western paradise. As Barry Allen puts it, “Chan is many things. It has roots in Mahayana Buddhism and the ideas of Nāgārjuna; it appropriates from the Daoist classics, as well as from earlier developments in Chinese Buddhism; and it is a Sinitic critique of Indocentrism, impatient with a Buddhism of translated sutras, imported relics, and foreign traditions” (Allen, p. 143).

     So, still following Wollheim’s schema, we ask: what aspects, if any, of Mahāyāna Buddhism’s philosophy of so-called Madhyamika (the ‘middle way’ between thinking that substances, especially the soul, are eternal and that the soul is annihilated at death) generally, and Chan doctrine specifically, did Muqi render as the textual meaning of 6 Persimmons? To try to get this question into focus, I’ll make a comparison between the works of Muqi and those of Cézanne in the late phase of his final two decades. In letters to his wife in 1907, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke offered perhaps the first penetrating characterization of the nature of Cézanne’s achievement. Two of his remarks might be thought to apply equally to Muqi. (Here I follow the account in the art historian Kurt Badt’s canonical study, The Art of Cézanne, as translated into English by Sheila Ann Ogilvie; the translations in the standard volumes of Rilke’s selected letters, as well as those in the little volume published as Letters on Cézanne, markedly differ from each other, though hopefully not in ways that effect the points I’ll make). Badt quotes two of Rilke’s characterizations of the mysteriousness of things in Cézanne’s works, both of which might seem apt in characterizing Muqi’s: first, that the ‘mystery of things’ in Cézanne is their ‘perfect transcendence’, as Rilke wrote that these things ‘become so very objectively real, so simply indelible in their obstinate presence’” (p. 52); and that the purpose of Cézanne’s work was to induce ‘the process of making a thing “become” a thing, the reality which, by [Cézanne’s] own experience of an object, was intensified until it became indestructible’ (p. 58).  Let’s set aside the last clause, as any talk of ‘experiences becoming indestructible’ is out of place in an account of Madhyamika or Chan ontology.

     As Badt suggests, it’s easiest to see Cézanne’s procedures and artistic ideologies at work in his watercolors. Consider a minor and incomplete work, ‘Trees’ (1985) at the Barnes Foundation. What carries the sense of ‘obstinate presence’ and of a thing ‘becoming’ a thing? Typically Cézanne began with a light sketch of outlines, then began working from the darkest areas. A stark instance of this is the rendering of the largest and most prominent tree. The major work is in rendering the patches of shadow line the tree’s right edge. Badt, like other writers on Cézanne including Philip Rawson and Patrick Maynard, refer to this basic compositional technique as the creation of ‘shadow path’. This foundational use of the path carries two major senses. First, the path provides a basic order that does not respect the depicted contours of things. The shadowing combines what are both shadows on the objects and shadows cast by objects, and the line between the two is perceptually indiscernible. Further, the shadows will tend to link with other shadows, whether through contiguity or through separated rhyming or resonance. Second, the paths introduce a sense of the temporality of making with the perceptual distinction between relatively dark shadows and areas and relatively light ones. The chronology might be unrecoverable, but the sense of some temporality, some before-and-after is certain. Color is likewise applied sequentially, with blending largely avoided. Highlights are given through unworked areas; hence the overall subdued quality of the work, and one reason for the sense in Cézanne of an unusually close and intimate association of the nearest parts of the things and the material support.

     Now Rilke’s remarks say nothing of the shadow paths, despite their centrality to Cézanne’s poetics, but perhaps we can explicate something of how they contribute to the formation of the sense of his objects’ ‘obstinate presence’ and of the exhibition of ‘things becoming things’ as follows: Cézanne’s use of shadow paths foregrounds the sense of the process of painting as temporal and constructive. Everything in the process seems to unfold so as to dramatize the sense of objects emerging from a broader, as it were trans-particular structuring force. The visibility of the individual marks and the quality of slow progressive build-up simultaneously self-dramatizes the act of making. What is made and what is seen are one, and each occurs through the other. As has been noted countless times, an effect of this is that the world of Cézanne’s paintings and drawings, the made-and-depicted world, seems to exclude the viewer. Cézanne’s world is other. This quality of otherness perhaps is part of what Rilke means by the objects’ ‘obstinate presence’: they seem to subsist through and beyond the limited act of viewing them. The sense of fused drama and self-dramatization likewise could plausibly be part of what Rilke meant with the sense of seeing things becoming things: an object is a product of broader forces, though locked in place by a web of compositional, inter-related forces.

     Muqi’s six persimmons are shadowless, which together with the avoidance of occlusion analyzed in my previous post gives them their placelessness, largely unmoored quality even in relation to each other. One might apply Badt’s paraphrase of Rilke to them in one respect: they do seem to exhibit ‘perfect transcendence’ in the sense that they seem to be beyond all webs of physical causality and spatial placement. Muqi limits self-shadowing to the edges of the two ghost persimmons and the lower edge of the most forward piece of fruit, and in all three cases he permits the delimiting stroke to stand revealed, so as to subordinate shadow to brushstroke and translate and subsume the spatial implications of shadow into the determination of contour.

    The comparison with Cézanne can now focus the question: What in Muqi’s piece is the compositional equivalent of Cézanne’s shadow paths? What holds the six persimmons together? Recalling Nāgārjuna’s claims, and Garfield’s explication of them as requiring the recognition of the conventional qua conventional, that is, the conventional in its very conventionality, one is led to the thought it is a convention, namely the classification of, and the habitual act of classifying, persimmons as persimmons that holds the fruits together. The function in Muqi of Cézanne’s procedures is carried not by seeing and shadow paths but by projecting and isolating.

     I don’t doubt that this account seems to explicate the difficult with the irredeemably obscure. In my final blog post, I’ll try to clarify this sense of conventionality in Muqi and then show how it leads readily to the explication of the claim that 6 Persimmons is about ineffability.

References:

Barry Allen, Vanishing into Things (2015)

Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne (1956, translated by Sheila Ann Ogilvie (1965))

Hui-neng, The Platform Sutra (late 8th century, translated by Philip Yampolsky (1967))

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakākarikā (The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way), (1st-2nd century C.E. (translated with a commentary by Jay L. Garfield (1995))

Philip Rawson, Drawing (1969)

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne (1985, translated by Joel Agee)

-----Selected Letters 1902-1926 (1946, translated by R. F. C. Hull)

Paul Williams, Buddhist Thought (2000)

Richard Wollheim, ‘On the Question ‘Why Painting is an Art?’’, in Proceedings of the 8th International Wittgenstein Symposium (1984)

-----Painting as an Art (1987)

How Might We Understand the Ineffability of Mu Qi’s Four Persimmons? Part One:

     One persistent thought about works of art is that they offer us something significant that cannot be put into words. One very general way of putting this point, a way that ranges across the arts from the abstract arts of absolute music or non-figurative painting to the most concrete arts of portrait painting or epic poetry, is that art is ineffable. That which is ineffable is that which cannot in principle be put into words, and yet that which is ineffable is seemingly also what is most important in our experience of the arts. If what mattered in the experience of the arts were effable, if it could be put into words, then it would seem to follow that the arts and artworks are unnecessary; a description of a piece of music or a poem would convey whatever we would need or want to know and experience. Nor is ineffability limited to the arts: major lines of Christian theology, for example, treat God as ineffable in the sense that we cannot say, at least not fully, what His nature and characteristics are. The best we can do is approach God through consideration of what He is not, that is, not finite, not limited not subject to causality, etc. The thought of ineffability is centrally carried in the West by the use that Saint Augustine made of Plotinus in characterizing God as a successor to the Neoplatonic One that the soul arrives at only with sustained, strenuous efforts on the rarest occasions. As Augustine put it in a sermon, however we might try to understand God through analogies and comparisons, we nonetheless can and must maintain the sense of “the ineffableness, the unutterable quality of the divine greatness”. Indeed, major aspects of human life, such as the physical abilities, and aspects of perception, such as qualities of light or gradations of textures, seem to ‘ineffable’ in the sense that we cannot exhaustively describe what we are acquainted with.

     Another way in which the thought of ineffability arises distinctively in the arts is when an artwork seems especially successful—poignant; moving, meaningful, etc.—while also seeming markedly simpler than what usually counts as an instance of its genre. So an artistic painting that consists of a few strokes is simpler than a ‘typical’ representational painting of, say, a landscape, which will consist of hundreds of brushstrokes, a focus or several foci, secondary features, details, a foreground, middleground, and background, ordered spatial relations among objects, etc. etc. One can readily think of analogous examples in poetry and music. Here the thought is that a typical work will offer a great deal of material for recognition, analysis, and reflection, while the simple work just ‘is what it is’, and so offers no footholds for exploration, just bare recognition and perceptual confrontation.

    Among the world’s greatest artistic paintings, one stands out as supremely ineffable in the sense of offering only a simple, bare recognition of seemingly trivial objects: the 13th century Ch’an Buddhist painting of Muqi known as 6 Persimmons. In the following I’ll offer an account of this incomparable work that aims to show in what senses the work is ineffable. My claim will be that the work’s meaning is both ineffable and that the work is about ineffability. The account will be in three parts: first, I’ll attempt to analyze the work formally, that is, to describe its composition and handling of materials; second, I’ll sketch the cultural and philosophical background of the work as an artistic expression of aspects of Ch’an Buddhism, as well as of its roots in Mahayanist philosophy; third, I’ll introduce recent philosophical work on ineffability, in particular significant contributions by Graham Priest, A. W. Moore, and Silvia Jonas, with the aim of showing how Muqi’s manner of composing the picture and handling the ink express core concepts of Buddhism and generate the picture’s heightened effect of ineffability.

Formal Analysis of 6 Persimmons:

     6 Persimmons is traditionally attributed to Muqi, a Chinese Ch’an (Buddhist) painter of the mid-13th century during the later part of the Southern Song dynasty. Little of Muqi’s work survives, and what survives is in Japan, as Muqi’s work and Ch’an painting generally, with its seeming simplicity of subject, lack of refinement, and rejection of major aspects of traditional Classical Chinese painting, found little favor in China, though was greatly appreciated in Japan, where Muqi is considered one of the supremely great East Asian artists.

     The sides of the painting are all a little over a foot long, with the vertical sides approximately an inch and a half longer than the horizontals. The painting depicts six persimmons arranged in a horizontal near-line approximately a third of the way up the surface. The background is wholly left untreated, although there are small incidental and seemingly accidental markings, most prominently some short diagonal drips on the far right. In its current state the painting is mounted on a long cloth scroll whose upper and lower sections consist of identical floral patterns, and whose middle section is a bare brownish-beige fabric. Immediately bordering the painting on its horizontal edges are swaths of a brown floral patterned cloth. The upper swath is approximately twice the thickness of the lower, and this, together with the placement of the painting uncentered and somewhat towards the lower edge of the beige background, gives the sense that there’s a kind of nesting of a dynamic balancing of depiction with blank spaces: the fruit is below the center line of the painting, and the painting is lowered from center, so that emptiness as it were gains a kind of compensatory quantitative strength over against objectness. The large-scale ordering principle accordingly seems to be a balancing, weighting, and/or counter-posing of object and emptiness. Considered as a group, the persimmons are positioned off-center towards the right, with an impression of their self-containment and a kind of relaxed or neutral relationship with the left edge of the support; while on the right the persimmons seem to impinge upon the area governed by the canvas’s edge.

     I’ll refer to the six persimmons by numbers counting from left. At a glance all but #3 seem to be arrayed on a line. #3 is plainly a short distance in front of the line, and there is a gap between #1 and #2 on the left, and #4-6 on the right, though the gap is too small to accommodate #3. #2-#5 are all rendered with interior washes, all different, that provide some sense of surface color and texture. Although only monochrome black ink is used, the thin wash of #2 renders it nearly naturalistic, with some sense of the fruit’s volumetric swells. Setting aside the two ends, the ghostly #1 and #6, one notices upon close examination that there is no occlusion among #2-#5. The avoidance of occlusion is particularly striking at two points: oddly straight on the vertical, the left edge of #5 seems to have retreated in order to avoid touching #4; and, in comparison with the mostly slightly oblique stems, the stem of #3 seems to have rotated counter-clockwise, again as if to avoid occluding the bottom right of #2.

     By contrast, there does seem to be some sort of occlusion at the ends between #1 and #2 and between #5 and #6. But the ‘ghosts’ lack of surface color largely dissipates what would other be the firm spatial relation established by occlusion; one cannot straight off tell whether a blank solid is in front of or behind a colored solid when their areas seem to overlap. On the left the sense that the ‘ghost’ is slightly behind #2 is cued by the relatively backward placement of its bottom edge, stem, and especially its sepals. Yet on the right, where the cues and so the placement of the ghostly #6 are similar to the left’s, Muqi has #6’s sepals in front of the colored body of #5! This is the single instance in the painting of occlusion that unambiguously cues the spatial relation between persimmons.

     What then is the spatial ordering near-to-far among the persimmons? #3 is unambiguously closest. Our initial impression that the other five are in a line is unsettled first of all by the ghost’s play of (non-) occlusion. #2 looks to be slightly forward of the remaining four, although that impression is haunted by transferring the force of the right ghost’s spatial dis-location to the left end. The relation between #3 and #4 is a further puzzle, due to the #4’s saturated ink surface, which seems to flatten it into a near-2-dimensional shape. The saturation in #4’s flattened, quasi-rectangular outline effects a visual spread that is intensified by #5’s seemingly retreating left edge (for an account of this sort of dynamic see Arnheim pp. 438-40).

     Each of the four non-ghosts is saturated with ink to a different degree. It was commonly asserted by Chinese painters and connoisseurs that “if you have ink, you have all five colors” (Silbergeld p. 27), and the most naturalistically rendered, #2, in particular seems to induce a hallucinatory sense of seeing orange in the black ink. The dramatic individualizing variety of the depictions of the four central persimmons participates in the perennial interest in Chinese painting for diversity within sameness (p. 46) with the spectrum of differences between the relatively naturalistic #2 and the near-flat plane of #4, but the addition of two ghosts puts pressure on the conception of sameness: what do the two ends have to do with the four middle fruits? What makes a persimmon a persimmon? And how is sameness secured through perception?

      A crucial final (and as far as I can tell hitherto unremarked) feature concerns the implied viewer’s point of view. One’s first impression is that the persimmons are observed from a single, unmoving point of view perhaps two or three feet from the support, with the eye slightly above the fruit. However, as with #6, Muqi has rendered #3’s sepals so as to unsettle the seemingly fixed spatial orientation. For more of #3’s sepals are shown, so as to induce the sense that the viewer’s eye is marked higher in viewing that one than in viewing the other five. This could only mean that the implied viewer is quite close to the canvas, perhaps six inches to a foot, so as to see more of the top of #3 than of the others. Noticing this, the implied viewer rushes forward. Consequently, the space between #3 and the rough line of the other persimmons increases, and again the lack of occlusion serves to unsettle the spatial relations.

     So in a preliminary way we can say that 6 Persimmons is very much of a piece with Ch’an painting and of Classical Chinese painting as a whole, with the qualification that Ch’an painting presents itself as rejecting the elaborations and sense of refinement in the tradition. Multiple viewpoints and some sense of spatial consistency are typical features of Chinese landscape painting, much attested in Northern and Southern Song works (Silbergeld p. 37). As previously noted, 6 Persimmons’s diversity in sameness is likewise traditional, as is its virtuoso ink handling and its presentation of strokes reminiscent of writing with the stems. Perhaps enough has been said to explain the sense of the work’s great achievement and of its celebrated status, at least in Japan. But if we leave it at that, we have said nothing as to why the painting seems to embody to a supreme degree a sense of artistic ineffability, for the features noted and briefly analyzed are shared with countless other Chinese paintings. Is it possible to give a further account of its ineffability? In order to make sense of that, in my next blog post I turn to the question of how the issue of ineffability arises in Ch’an Buddhism and its arts generally.

References:

Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (1974)

Augustine, Sermon 117 (418)

Silvia Jonas, Ineffability and its Metaphysics (2016)

A. W. Moore, Points of View (2000)

Plotinus, Enneads (3rd Century)

Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (2003)

Jerome Silbergeld, Chinese Painting Style (1982)

What Contribution did Leo Steinberg Make to Understanding Contemporary Art?

     I am infrequently cheered by any book published on contemporary art, most of which seem to me consisting of oddly insipid cocktails of snobbishness, bullying, philistinism, and bluff. A spirit-boosting exception is the recent publication of the last volume of Leo Steinberg’s collected essays, entitled Modern Art. On the tremendous strength of his writing on two foundational figures in contemporary art, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, his contribution to the understanding of recent art is immense and widely acknowledged. Most of his substantive writing on these two was already collected in 1972 in the volume Other Criteria. But while he pursued his studies of especially Renaissance art, especially Michelangelo, as well as Picasso from the 1970s until his death in 2011, on a few occasions he also gave lectures on recent art, most substantively a lengthy reflection on Rauschenberg again that is included in the recent volume. What seems to have been his last word on the topic was a lecture entitled ‘Art Minus Criticism Equals Art’, which reviews some of his earlier work and then struggles and self-admittedly fails to understand, or at least to appreciate, the work of Jeff Koons. The lecture, now published as the last essay in the volume, perhaps offers a final, and indeed novel, insight into contemporary art. How might the admission of a failure to understand a prominent contemporary artist contribute to the understanding of recent art?

     Recall Steinberg’s titanic struggle in the early 1960s to understand the work of Jasper Johns. In the essay ‘Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public’ Steinberg recalls his initial reaction to Johns’s first major exhibition in 1958: “I disliked the show, and would gladly have thought it a bore. Yet it depressed me and I wasn’t sure why. . . I was angry at the artist, as if he had invited me to a meal, only to serve something uneatable, like tow and paraffin . . . [but] the pictures remained with me—working on me and depressing me. The thought of them gave me a distinct sense of threatening loss and deprivation.” (Steinberg 1972, p. 12) He reflects on his initial reaction in light of Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955), which presents a target painted in encaustic and largely occupying a two-foot square canvas. Atop the canvas is a shelf with four niches containing plaster heads, oddly cut so that what remains is the area from the upper chin to half-way up the nose. The mouths are closed and the lips expressionless. On top a hinged flap is raised, which if closed would cover the shelf and so also the faces. Steinberg begins to think that the sense of deprivation stemmed from Johns’s rejection of illusion, the transformation of physical paint into something that was not literally there; illusion in that sense is a constitutive part of the great tradition of Euro-American painting from Giotto to de Kooning. To accept Johns’s work as a signal instance of new art would then to accept simultaneously the end of something of inestimable value, the appreciation and study of which merits the work of a lifetime.

     Yet after repeated viewings and reflection, Steinberg began to find the piece expressive: “And gradually something came through to me, a solitude more intense than anything I had seen in pictures of mere desolation. . . I became aware of an uncanny inversion of values. With mindless inhumanity or indifference, the organic and the inorganic had been leveled.” (ibid) He then notes a second inversion of values: the target is ‘here’, the faces are ‘there’, and this inverts our characteristic “subjective markers of space”. (p. 13) In his lengthy essay on Johns Steinberg went on to characterize Johns’s typical subject matter—targets, flags, maps—as “things the mind already knows” (p. 31) And when at the end of that essay he addresses Target with Four Faces, he asserts that “The content of Johns’s work gives the impression of being self-generated—so potent are his juxtapositions . . . As if the subjective space consciousness that gives meaning to the words “here” and “there” had ceased operation . . . What I am saying is that Johns puts two flinty things in a picture and makes them work against one another so hard that the mind is sparked. Seeing them becomes thinking.” (p. 54) So ends Steinberg’s account of Johns, and surely its reader finds herself thinking that Steinberg has shown a way of thinking that Johns is not just painting in a new way with new subjects, but also has re-invigorated artistic painting under contemporary conditions and tastes, including the audience’s taste for abandoning ‘illusion’ and with it the conception of the artist ‘magically’ transforming materials and contents, and instead offering something to its taste for a new kind of realism in subject-matter. Further, and deeper, Steinberg’s account shows a way of thinking about Johns, and with him contemporary art generally, as renewing under contemporary conditions perennial aspects of art. Kant, for example, had suggested that ‘aesthetic ideas’, that is, the contents of artworks, ‘give rise to much thought, without giving rise to any particular thought’. Or more specifically with regard to linguistic arts, Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson have suggested that the ‘poetic effect’ occurs when an utterance induces “a wide array of weak implicatures’ (Sperber and Wilson, p. 222), that is, an unresolvable plurality of ways of taking what is uttered. In light of these suggestions, Steinberg’s conclusion could be put by saying that Johns has ‘sacrificed’ central and durable aspects of artistic painting in the service of renewing and fulfilling part of its aim, which is to present a painted artifact as a kind of ‘thought-object’ that does not convey a paraphrasable meaning, but rather induces and rewards repeated perceptual encounters and reflection. 

    In ‘Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public’ Steinberg went on to generalize his struggle. Recent art, he suggests, asks that one sacrifice one’s acquired tastes, while further offering nothing secure to guide understanding and appreciation of its novelty. It’s a function of modern art generally to create “a genuine existential predicament” (p. 15) for the viewer, so that there’s a quasi-Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ demanded from the viewer in attempting to understand, appreciate, and enjoy such work. Nothing guarantees the success of the leap in even a single instance. What if one leaps, and there’s nothing there?

     In his early 80s, Steinberg leapt again. In 2001 he was invited to give a talk in connection with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s show ‘From Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons’, whose contents were selected from the recently donated collection of money-bags Eli Broad. Steinberg hesitated, as he had given no serious thought to many of the artists in the show, and also didn’t like some of their works. Reassured by Broad himself, Steinberg went ahead with the lecture ‘Art Minus Criticism Equals Art’. Steinberg recalled his account of Johns and declared that it had been superseded by the work of Kenneth Silver, who found in Target with Four Faces a ‘homosexual thematics’ and the expression of a project of ‘mapping gay desire’. (Steinberg 2023, p. 158). Then Steinberg rehearses his earlier writing on Roy Lichtenstein and Hans Haacke, and notes that both are part of an urge characteristic of modern art towards abjection by “capitalizing on the pulling power of incompetence and low-level taste” (p. 167), a pull also evidenced to a heightened degree in Gilbert & George’s Naked Shit Pictures (the title tells you exactly what you need to know) and New Horny Pictures, which present newspaper ads of male prostitutes together with the posed photographic portraits of the two artists (pp. 168-69).

     Steinberg then turns to a lengthy consideration of the hardest nuts of contemporary art, the work of Jeff Koons. Steinberg declares Koons to be a master in competitive ‘one-downmanship’, where the line of artists prominently including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Gilbert & George seek to out-do each other in “promot[ing] a general degradation” (p. 169) Koons found the most insidious subject-matter, kitschy figurines in the 1980s and pornography in the early 1990s. Steinberg acknowledges his inability to understand Koons, and returns to his remark in ‘Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public’ that modern art continually shakes off its admirers, but with the difference that he now includes himself among those who have been shaken off. Is anything different about the case of Koons, other than that he could appreciate new art as a youth in his 40s and 50s, but not as a senex in his 80s? Steinberg recalls a remark from Jacob Burckhardt’s Cicerone that he had read in the 1950s on the effect of the concave fluting on an Ancient Greek column--“It suggests that the column thickens and hardens inward, as thought collecting its strength”—and says that the remark helped him see not just what the ancients had done, but also what art criticism could do: “you could stay with the outward form; or see all the way through” (p. 175). This ‘seeing all the way through’ becomes a fixed part of Steinberg’s taste, which “enjoys the complexity of simultaneous surface and depth more than in-your-face shallowness” (p. 177); the latter is of course Koons’s métier. Steinberg ends with contrasting close-ups of Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles and one of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, declares the contest “a standoff, a draw” (p. 177), and ends with a startlingly bland comment: “Michael Jackson and Koons make a good match: you can dance at their wedding, or go mope with Rodin. You can shuttle between them, to suit the occasion, your temperament, or the time of your life.” Well, I suppose you can.

But I would suggest that what you can’t do is to find a way of thinking about Koons’s work that makes it bear anything of the seriousness, complexity, and eternal provocation that one finds in countless instances of the world’s art over the past 40,000 years. Steinberg’s final remark seems to wish away the necessary sacrifice that is preliminary to any enthusiasm for Koons’s work, that is, the sacrifice of the skills and pleasures of expressive seeing, of sustained looking, of seeing depths within surfaces, and of much else.  Perhaps it was not Steinberg’s declaration of a draw between Rodin and Koons that was his final contribution; rather, Steinberg’s contribution to the understanding of contemporary art was his lack of understanding of it.

References:

Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone (1873)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

Leo Steinberg, ‘Art Minus Criticism Equals Art’ (2002) in Modern Art (2023)

-----‘Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public’ (1962) in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (1972)

Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1995)

Crisis? What Crisis? Reflections on Sean Tatol and Ben Davis on contemporary art criticism, Part Four: Less Judgment, More Analogy and Metaphor

     As I indicated at the conclusion of my previous post, I turn now to the question of how contemporary criticism of the arts might be improved. But first, why should we think that criticism stands in need of improvement? Both Sean Tatol and Ben Davis appear to think that contemporary criticism of the visual arts is afflicted by a kind of collective failure to offer ‘judgments’. Already twenty years ago the art historian James Elkins had offered a similar diagnosis. What then is a judgment? If I understand the complaint, a ‘judgment’ is an evaluative statement made by a critic, whether explicitly or implicitly in a manner that can readily be made explicit, of the goodness or badness of an artwork or of an exhibition or of an artist’s oeuvre. In its simplest recognizable form, it’s ‘X is good (or bad)’. If one then asks, ‘Good in what sense(s), and relative to what?’, the negative responses are more evident: Tatol thinks that the relevant judgment of a critic is not to say that a work is good because it seems to express and endorse the sort of flabby liberalism of the New York Times or of ‘social justice’-type sentiments generally; whereas Davis thinks, very much in line with the contemporary consensus, that the critic should not judge a work good because it merely seems to exhibit to a high degree the kinds of skill and meaningfulness characteristic of ‘Western’ or mainstream modern or contemporary art. For both, again, a critic’s judgment should be the expression of the critic’s ‘mature’ sensibility, whether maturity is understood as the achievement of a process of self-education of the critic’s sensibility through encounters with canonical works in ‘best of’ lists (Tatol), or as the successful expression of the application of the virtue of curiosity to work’s outside of the critic’s customary range of interest and experience (Davis). So, finally, for both the lack of ‘judgment’ in contemporary arts criticism is the mark of immaturity, and so of a lack of personal-cum-cultural seriousness. Is this pervasive condition a crisis, as Elkins had already suggested early this century?

     I don’t doubt that Elkins, Tatol, and Davis are right in noting a lack of ‘judgment’ in contemporary visual art criticism. However, I’m unmoved by the thought that this lack is a crisis, and further that the crisis might be dissipated by a return to critics routinely ‘judging’ the works they discuss. It seems to me that there are many considerations and reasons that count against the diagnosis of ‘lack-of-judgment’. One familiar point from the history of the philosophy of art is that the idea of criticism as partially though significantly consisting of ‘judgments’ strikes me is an unworkable throwback to the idea that there is a sharp distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’, and more particularly to something like mid-20th century emotivism, where philosophers imagined that statements could be cleanly divided into the factual and the expressive; the equivalent distinction with regard to art criticism would be between the descriptive and the evaluative/judgmental. As numerous philosophers have shown (Dewey, MacIntyre, Cavell, Putnam, etc.), the emotivist distinction between purely descriptive statements and merely evaluative statements collapses upon examination in both the realms of ethics and aesthetics. How, for example, could one sort out the descriptive and the evaluative in an aesthetic observation such as ‘his hesitant movements, connected in that passage with sudden dips, take on a peculiar poignancy against the slow-motion torso twists of the other four dancers’? As I suggested in a previous post, Isenberg’s formulation of the core of an act of art criticism as consisting of three moments—V (verdict); R (reasoning, including descriptions); N (norm)—is itself of a piece with emotivism if V, R, and N are treated as conceptually distinct and separable moments; the moments would then float free of each other, with R becoming purely descriptive, and V and N both purely evaluative, distinguished only by their sources of the individual uttering V and some collective sustaining and institutionalizing N.

     One way that suggests itself to capture the force of Tatol’s and Davis’s complaint about lack of judgment, without relying upon problematic emotivist conceptions, would be to reframe their point as rather a lack of consideration of the point of the artwork. For both the lack of judgment indicates the incompleteness of the criticism. So instead of tacking on a judgment, the critic might consider the point or points of the piece, that is, what it aims to accomplish and whether it does so, but also the quality of the aim, whether the aim is worth accomplishing: whether, for example, the work is sufficiently capacious or responsive to recent art or in touch with current audiences.

     A second attractive feature of replacing ‘judgments’ with ‘questions of worth’ is that the latter, but not the former, is integral to the practice of the arts. To see what this involves and how it might matter, consider the philosopher Paul Woodruff’s account of theater. Woodruff proposes a broad conception of the art of theater as “the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching, in a measured time and place.” (Woodruff, p. 18) As Woodruff notes, this is an inclusive definition, or beginning of a definition, in that it counts the spectacle of “a frisky Christian . . . fight[ing] off a lion” as theater, though it excludes as non-theatrical watching a comatose Christian being devoured by a lion” (no human action there), as well the typically less sanguine activity of bird-watching. (p. 19) This simple proto-definition immediately raises the question of what makes something worth watching; Woodruff responds by noting first that ‘being worth watching’ is mostly a matter of finding and presenting human characters worth caring about, and that this is of a piece with our psychological need to give attention to and to be the object of attention of others. (p. 22) The art of theater then has as part of its elements and mechanisms the ways in which we capture the attention of others. This can be done well or poorly. (p. 24) Theatrical art tries to solicit and engage the audience’s emotions, and to do so in a way that contributes to what Woodruff calls ‘cognitive empathy’ or, simply, understanding. (pp. 181-83) Theater is good to the degree that engages emotions and cognitive empathy, bad to the degree that it fails to so engage, or to engage them in such a way that emotions and cognitive empathy conflict with, obscure, or undermine each other. (pp. 179-80) Now, if we were to approach and conceptualize the visual arts in something like Woodruff’s manner, we might first offer a proto-definition of such arts as ‘artifacts that exhibit visual interest that is worth looking at’, and mutatis mutandis with the other points from Woodruff’s explication. On such an account of visual arts, the aim of art criticism would be to draw the reader’s attention to what is of visual interest, that is, of what is worth looking at; further, art criticism supplies anything and everything guides and educates the viewer towards the points of visual interest, and then intensifies that viewer’s emotional and cognitive engagement with the work. Adopting a Woodruff-like account of the visual arts would in our context throws light on another problem with the ‘judgments’ advocated by Tatol and Davis: their conception of detachable ‘judgments’ misses the ways in which critics’ evaluations are necessarily rooted in the critic’s understanding of the nature of the art form and its characteristic mechanisms for soliciting the audience’s engagement and sense of worth. Instead of art criticism consisting of something like a factual description, an invocation of relevant norms, and a judgment, art criticism is the expression of an ongoing engagement with an art form, the recognition of its history, mechanisms of meaningfulness, and characteristic values, and some sense of the relative poverty or richness, and the relative harmonization or discordance, of how a particular new work takes up these resources.

     A third attractive feature of replacing the question of judgment with the question of worth stems from the tighter connection between the latter question and some characteristic contents of a piece of art criticism. Judgment floats free of description; and, since norms do not apply themselves, but rather are applied by the critic guided by her sense of relevance and importance, any judgment in art criticism is necessarily under-determined: it requires further acts of ‘judgment’ to determine what norms should be applied, and how to apply them. Isenberg’s schema, with its schema shaped by the background emotivist assumption of a sharp division between fact and value, or description and norm, is silent on this, and so misses the sense in which judgment is not an isolable moment of art criticism. As with Tatol’s and Davis’s complaints, contemporary critics may neglect or suppress the judgment of goodness or badness, but on pain of engaging in an altogether different activity they cannot avoid ‘judging’ the relevance and pertinence of the descriptions they offer and of the norms they invoke. Pace Isenberg, Tatol, and Davis, there is nothing in a piece of art criticism that is not a piece of judgment. Orienting criticism to the question of worth, by contrast, avoids the fiction of an isolable and distinct judgment. If a critic writes about a piece at any length greater than a single sentence, the critic de facto asserts that the piece is worth looking at, and again the question immediately arises as to why and in what ways and senses it’s worth looking at. Now, if the piece discussed is or is presumed to be an artwork, one question that also immediately arises is how fruitfully to place the work in the history of art and the arts. And this question points us to the great importance of among other things analogy and metaphor in art criticism.

     In an analogy one says ‘X is like Y in such-and-such ways’. A metaphor (‘A is B’, where the sentence ‘A = B’ is spectacularly false or trivially true (‘Juliet is the sun’; ‘No man is an island’)) is similar to an analogy in that in both cases the referent of one term (Y or B) is treated as relatively well-known and relatively determinate, and aspects of those terms’ characterization are mapped onto a relatively poorly known and less determinate referent of the other term (X or A). In the typical use of analogy and metaphor in art criticism, it is the artwork itself, or some aspect of the piece, that is treated as relatively indeterminate, and the critic draws a term from the presumed cognitive stock of the audience and applies it to the artwork. So a critic might say: ‘the painting is a window onto a bourgeois interior’ or ‘the surface is like a patch of parched skin with its cracks, creases, and boils’ or ‘the installation is a dungeon wherein the viewer finds herself oddly at home’. Now, as James Grant has argued with regard to metaphor, two major reasons that this figurative language is prominent in art criticism is that are that the critic wishes to capture the attention of the audience, and that the reader’s induce effort in imagining and understanding the figurative language offers a kind of engagement analogous to the imaginative work of seeing the piece in person, and perhaps also the imaginative work of making the piece itself. It is hard to see how the addition of ‘judgment’ in Tatol’s and Davis’s sense would similarly induce the a reader’s imaginative participation in an artwork. There is perhaps no close connection between raising the issue of whether a work is worth seeing and the use of analogy and metaphor in criticism, but asking in what ways and senses the work is worth seeing would seem to lend itself more to vivifying the work for a reader than pronouncing a judgment upon it. A judgment is summative and definitive; the question of worth is open-ended, and subject to revision in light of new contexts and concerns.

     How might art critics’ uses of analogy and metaphor be part of the practice of art criticism oriented towards the question of ‘worth’?  Recall Monroe Beardsley’s remark that in viewing recent art one often has the sense of seeing a ‘one-off’, something striking and strikingly unfamiliar in its materials, manner of handling, and point. Contemporary art prominently contains among other things works consisting of used tires, of paint dripped in a line, a pile of candy, and so forth. Beardsley suggests that such works defeat criticism in its usual practice and purpose. But also recall Richard Wollheim’s remarks about what he calls the ‘bricoleur problem’. Claude Lévi-Strauss has proposed the distinction with regard to the design and meaning of artifacts between an engineer and a bricoleur, where the former generates and design and working specifications prior to the construction of an artifact, and the latter takes up whatever heterogeneous materials are at hand to improvise and cobble together into a work. The bricoleur problem is to understand how a work, made without a plan and without prescribed ingredients, gains intelligibility and meaning. Wollheim remarks that with regard to artistic making and artistic meaning, there are two basic and different situations. (Wollheim 1980) Much of the world’s art is part of an established art form: drawing, painting, sculpture, and so on. As Kant remarks, artworks are not the products of strict application of rules; but they are nonetheless typically instances of some genre, some sub-genre, and some tradition(s) of making and viewing, and a suitably attuned viewer can reliably place such works in their relevant genres and traditions, and thereby have a rich and focused set of expectations of how to engage with the work. The other situation is when an art form or genre begins: how does, say, the first drawing, the first Greek tragedy, the first piece of video art gain intelligibility and meaning? This is the acute problem of the bricoleur, who uses materials in the absence of inherited and accredited ways of working them. Wollheim suggests that a primary way in which both the artist makes novel works meaningful and the audience comes to find such works meaningful will be through the use of analogies, in particular analogies between the new work and prior artworks and art forms. If so, this suggests how to relieve Beardsley’s remark of its sting: the ‘one-off’ will be made and understood in terms of some prior works. The audience will not be utterly disoriented in the face of novel works, as the art critic can propose and explicate some relevant analogies. The use of analogies, then, facilitates the transfer of worth from established art forms and exemplary artworks to contemporary pieces.

     Important roles for metaphor in art criticism differ somewhat the central role of analogy as a response to the bricoleur’s problem because, I would suggest, metaphorical meaning is a fundamental part of artistic meaning generally. One version of this claim was advanced by Arthur Danto with the thought that a work of art is always a metaphor for the viewer herself. Danto attempts to explicate this with Hamlet’s thought that the plays the thing wherein one might catch the conscience of a king: one sees (aspects of) oneself in an artwork. I mention Danto’s account because it is given in the single most influential book in the philosophy of contemporary art, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace; but I have never been able to work out his suggestion to my satisfaction, and it is no part of what I mean. Rather, I would suggest, along the lines introduced by Wollheim in his Painting as an Art, that a major way in which artists build meaning into their works is by introducing and/or developing metaphors for their works and its parts. One kind of such metaphors are the basic ones that prevail in different eras, such as ‘painting is window’ in the Renaissance, ‘painting is material object’ in Modern art, and ‘painting is commodity’ in Contemporary art. A second kind arises when artists metaphorize parts of their work, such as ‘canvas is skin’ (Titian) or ‘brushstroke is furrow’ (Van Gogh) or ‘paint is gesture’ (Pollock) or ‘paint is cosmos’ (Pollock again). The invocation and description of both kinds of metaphor, especially the first, would likely induce some of the effects noted by Grant in criticism, and additionally carry something of the sense of inheritance of past and recent kinds of worth into the criticism of contemporary artworks.

     To conclude, I’d like to make a final and perhaps highly controversial suggestion on the superiority of orienting art criticism to worth as opposed to judgment. Davis urges that re-introducing judgment into art criticism, along with Tatol’s use of a rating system, has the signal merit of ‘getting people talking’ about contemporary exhibitions, especially of smaller or relatively modest shows that would not be otherwise reviewed or widely discussed. But what sort of talking is this, if as Davis suggests the judgment declares the show good (or bad)? Issuing such judgments invites disagreement, and especially one might think of the disagreement so prominent on social media, where positions rapidly polarize and harden, and yeas and nays become purity tests for in- or out-group membership. Davis mentions that most art that is shown is, almost be definition, mediocre. Is it plausible to think that regularly issued judgments of mediocrity would be an important part of a restored public sphere? If one reflects on what sort of art criticism has as it were survived the test of time, that is, remains worth reading for later generations, it seems to me irresistible to think that such criticism arises when a critic articulates the distinctive poetics and values of a novel or underappreciated art form. Among many examples of such I would include Gilbert Seldes on Krazy Kat, C. L. R. James on Dick Tracy comics, Edwin Denby on Balanchine, Robert Warshow on Hollywood Westerns and gangster movies, Meyer Schapiro on Romanesque portals and statuary, and Leo Steinberg on Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Seeking value and articulating new kinds of poetics and modes of engagement is perhaps a worthier occupation than issuing judgments.

Monroe Beardsley, ‘What are Critics For?’ (1978), in The Aesthetic Point of View:

Selected Essays (1982)

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)

Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (1986)

James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003)

James Grant, The Critical Imagination (2013)

C. L. R. James, The C. L. R. James Reader (1992)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1949) in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1988)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage (1962)

Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (1999)

Meyer Schapiro, The Sculpture of Moissac (1985)

Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (1924)

Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th Century Art (1972)

-----‘Art Minus Criticism Equals Art’ (2002) in Modern Art (2023)

Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)

Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (1962)

Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects (1980)

-----Painting as an Art (1987)

Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theater (2008)

Postscript: In previous posts I promised that I would consider some of my own work as instances of the kinds of art criticism I recommend. That promise has been broken, for now. These posts on Tatol and Davis are meant for myself to be part of working out issues that I hope to address in an introduction to a short book of my selected criticism. The promise shall be fulfilled then.

Crisis? What Crisis? Reflections on Sean Tatol and Ben Davis on contemporary art criticism, Part Three: Dancing in the Dark

     Having sketched Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts of contemporary art criticism and placed their accounts in a template of conceptual points advanced by Arnold Isenberg and Monroe Beardsley, I now turn to criticism of their accounts through consideration of central features of art criticism suggested by an alternative account and by major instances of criticism. In order to provide some perspective on their accounts, I’ll introduce two further points: first, the often-urged point with regard to visual art criticism that it is rightly thought of, and rightly practiced, as taking place in the presence of the artwork; second, an example of an ideal critic of the arts, or at least by universal acclaim the closest that there is of such in the twentieth-century.

     ‘In the presence of the work’: One sub-genre of Classical literature and rhetoric is ekphrasis, a virtuoso description of a work of art. In some cases these were descriptions of actual works of art, in others of imagined works. The art historian Michael Baxandall has noted that it’s impossible to reconstruct the work with any determinacy based upon such descriptions. A lengthy piece of detailed ekphrastic description from the fourth-century writer Libanius of a Council House in Antioch “seems calculated to enable us to visualize the picture clearly and vividly”, but “we could not reconstruct the picture from his description. Colour sequences, spatial relations, proportions, often left and right, and other things are lacking.” (Baxandall, p. 3) Now one could further describe something of those elements that are lacking, but even so what would result in the readers’ minds would necessarily differ according to each reader’s prior experience, as each person’s resulting image would vary according to which painters and styles they mobilized in the service of the visual realization, and according to each individual’s tendencies and dispositions. On Baxandall’s account ekphrastic description is not oriented to or guided by the thought of a particular actual object; further, in ekphrasis the description is indifferent as to whether what is referred to is a depicted or an actual object or scene, as in sentences like ‘The horse is on the left next to the barn’ or ‘The river is beyond the field and fades into the distance’.

     Baxandall contrasts ekphrastic description with description that takes place in the presence of the artwork. ‘In the presence’ (Baxandall’s actual phrase is ‘in tandem with’ (p. 8)) includes not just the actual artwork, or its reproduction in an engraving or photograph, but also “a rough visualization derived from knowledge of other objects of the same class.” (ibid) One might object that ekphrasis might in some cases evoke such a rough visualization, and one surely wants to know more about what kinds of classes are relevant, and what are the criteria for something being of the same class as something else. But the key point that Baxandall wants to make is that when seemingly descriptive language is used in the presence of a work, it is not so much descriptive as ostensive: it points, and what it points to is an aspect of the visual interest of the artwork. (p. 9) With such pointing, the piece of language gains greater determinacy, and what is pointed at gains some conceptualization and articulation. Baxandall insists that language necessarily generalizes (p. 3), and this much be true just as much of descriptive language as of ostensive language. But with ostensive language the point is to draw someone’s attention to something, and this is part of a larger process of seeing, reflecting upon, interpreting, explaining, and understanding something, namely the visual interest of the artwork; and in entering into this process the viewer/reader necessarily draws upon her knowledge of human life, human embodiment, the nature of agency and of making, and sense of artistic achievement. The point of using language is to grasp, and to aid others in grasping, the distinctive visual interest.

     As Baxandall stresses, in using such ostensive language (such as: look at this—this object, this scene, but also this texture, this stroke, this color, this shadow, this detail, etc.) we do not point to some bare thing, but rather the thing together with some conception of the thing (Baxandall refers to the concepts of and thoughts about the thing). Crucially, the conceptualization that ostension introduces is of a conception of the pictorial role of the thing (broadly conceived), that is, of how the depicted thing ‘works’ in relation to other depicted or presented things, and so finally of the relation of all of these ‘things’ to our sense of the artistic depiction as a whole. The aim, then, of the use of ostensive language in art writing is for Baxandall the explanation of the visual interest of particular depictions; and it is when language is used to some degree ostensively and not (just) demonstratively that it reliably contributes to fulfilling this aim, an aim plausibly thought to be shared by both art historical writing about past artworks, and art criticism of contemporary works. To say that art criticism takes place ‘in the presence of’ or ‘in tandem with’ its object then is really to say (on Baxandall’s account) that it initiates or contributes to the process of the explanation of the visual interest of particular depictions. Here I just note for now that nothing in Tatol’s or Davis’s accounts, concerned as they are with the narrow issue of ‘negative’ criticism, registers Baxandall’s points about this distinctive use of language in criticism. The ostensive use of language in art criticism is neither ‘negative’ nor ‘positive’; rather it aims to explicate the artistic achievement that a particular artwork embodies. I would further note that the pervasive use of ostensive language in criticism is not well captured either by Isenberg’s schema of the core of art criticism as Verdict + Reason + Norm, or by Beardsley’s models of art criticism as a Consumers Union or a Press Agent.

     For the second point, I begin by asking: ‘Who is it that practices art criticism, and under what conditions? Who is it that might plausibly be thought to be an ideal art critic, and what do they actually do?’ Now, the starting point for countless discussions in the philosophy of art of the proper roles and vital characteristics of an art critic is David Hume’s essay ‘Of The Standard of Taste’. Hume famously urges two central points: that criticism in the arts rightly understood invokes a ‘standard of taste’ that consists of the ‘joint verdicts’ of ‘true critics’; and that such rare ‘true critics’ possess “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice”. These claims and the essay have unsurprisingly induced a large body of critical commentary, with the widespread rejection of the assumption that, even if these claims capture what we mean by an ideal critic, and that we can identify some such critics, the views of such critics would form a consensus view sufficiently stable and coherent to function as a standard for currently practicing critics. In terms of the schema introduced by Isenberg of a piece of art criticism (again, consisting of V (verdict) + R (reason) + N (norm)), Hume’s conception would specify N as the overlapping consensus of ideal critics. This is similar, though only partially, to Tatol’s view of his self-education as a critic, as he urges that part of how a critic’s taste is formed is through consulting and testing ‘best of’ lists which are themselves the products of the considered judgments of ideal critics like Robert Christgau. Davis’s view is harder to recover; he seems to think that the relevant norms are collectively instituted by the particular group out of which an artwork arises, and that the art critic can with effort learn to read the norms off from the work.

     Perhaps some progress could be made by considering who might be plausibly thought of as an ideal critic. In my reading of the major critics of the arts in the twentieth-century and their reputations, one stands as universally acclaimed as the greatest in English with regard to a particular art form: the American dance critic Edwin Denby. His criticism spans the mid-1930s through the late 1960s, with the bulk of it consisting of short reviews published in magazines in the 1940s into the early 1950s. Denby’s father was a diplomat, and accordingly Denby grew up and was educated in China, and parts of Europe and the United States. After a couple of short stints at Harvard, and a period in New York City where he saw Isadora Duncan perform, he moved to Europe, where he studied various kinds of bodily expressiveness, including dance, near Vienna. He read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, saw productions by Meyerhold and the Bolshoi in the Soviet Union, the Ballets Russes in Vienna, and danced in Germany. He returned to New York City in the mid-30s and shortly thereafter began writing dance criticism. He wrote about the range of dance that was available to him, from the Kabuki to flamenco to Fred Astaire, but his focus was upon ballet, and by acclaim he was in particular the great writer about the work of the choreographer George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet. What are the supposed great virtues of Denby’s criticism?

     Denby’s collected criticism runs to nearly 600 pages, every one of which in my experience rewards careful reading and re-reading. One striking condition of this criticism is that Denby cannot assume that his reader is familiar with the work discussed; some of his readers will, and many won’t, have seen the live performance during its short run in New York City. Consider a short passage chosen nearly at random describing a performance of the ballet ‘Billy the Kid’ in 1943:

     “The eye gets snagged on [the pantomime movements], one at a time, as by sign language. In the “March,” for instance, the energetic horizontal arm thrusts with open palms look as if our ballet dancers were mimicking “pushing back the frontier.’ The “Come on out West” gestures back to the electricians offstage, the praying, digging, running, housekeeping, ever westward, ever westward are meant as a frieze of history; but it is history like that shown us in the slick-paper ads. The technical fault is that the gesture does not lead out into space and relate to the full dimensions of the stage; it only leads back into the dancer’s figure. It makes the stage close in on the dancer, instead of showing him boldly taking possession . . . On the other hand, the “Street Scene” that follows is most interesting. The wandering individual floor patterns by not emphasizing a fixed place on the stage and the gestures by not emphasizing a climax in rhythm give the sense of unfenced spaces and of all the time in the world. Nothing could be more characteristically American or more original as a dance conception.” (Denby, p. 165)

     There is much to be admired in this excerpt. Consider just the first two sentences: Denby begins with the assertion of a particular effect upon the viewer in ‘the eye gets snagged’; then with a mundane piece of description (‘one at a time’); followed crucially with a simile that provides a frame for the ensuing descriptive, evaluative, and veridical remarks (‘as by a sign language’). The framing simile as it were metaphorizes and charges what follows, and provides a means for the reader to engage in a richer and more determinate imaginative act of visualizing what’s to be described. He then wards off crude evaluations by mixing ‘negative’ with ‘positive’ criticism: the section’s sense of history is trivializing (‘like that shown us in the slick-paper ads’), while another’s “is most interesting”. Compositional complexity is indicated together with its effect: ‘floor patterns . . . and the gestures . . . give the sense of unfenced spaces’). Cultural significance is stated (‘nothing could be more characteristically American) together with something of the piece’s place in the unfolding history of an art form (‘nothing could be . . . more original as a dance conception’). One upshot of this typical bit of virtuoso criticism from Denby is that he finesses the issue of whether the reader has seen or not seen the piece: the framing provides a novel conception for even the most careful viewer, while providing some basis for imaginative engagement for those who have not seen the piece.

      This helps make sense of Baxandall’s thought that a piece of art criticism can take place ‘in the presence of’ or ‘in tandem with’ an undepicted work unknown to the reader: the critic must invoke some shared cultural conceptions (e.g. what counts as most ‘characteristically American’) and some sense of the art form (dance) together with its history and central characteristics, that is, must do so if something of the effects of the use of ostensive use of language is to occur. In other words, a reader might be ‘in the presence of’ an unseen and unknown work if she possesses the relevant cognitive stock and the critic invokes such stock relevantly and vividly.

     Moving to criticism in the visual arts, let’s consider one of the few pieces of occasional art criticism by the art historian Leo Steinberg. While a graduate student in art history Steinberg wrote art criticism for Arts magazine for a little less than a year. He stopped writing criticism, he said, because he succumbed to exhaustion of taking on the ‘preposterous challenge’ of writing about “a life’s in a week’s writing” (Steinberg, p. vii) His first piece was a review of one of Monet’s Water Lilies at the Museum of Modern Art. After quoting Monet as saying that he was trying to do the impossible, Steinberg writes:

     “And it is wonderful to look at for an hour or so at a time, for you can do things to it with your eyes—tip it into a horizontal plane, then let it snap back to an upright sheet; gaze along placid surfaces, then look through them, five fathoms deep. Search opaque waters for diaphanous shrubs, and find a light source at its destination. You can invert the picture or yourself at will, lie cheek to cheek with the horizon, rise on a falling cloud, or drift with lily leaves over a sunken sky. And yet this is no daydream; every inch is true, so that one looks and stares with a sense of discovery.” (Steinberg, p. 235)

     Steinberg’s passage reads as if a proleptic demonstration of Elaine Scarry’s claim that a major way that writers impart vividness to a description is to induce the reader to engage in a series of imaginative exercises on the described object, what Scarry calls ‘teaching paper birds to fly’. As Freud pointed out, the daydream is freed from the reality principle, but just for that reason untested against perception and liable to be saturated by wish fulfillment. The guided exercise by contrast is constrained by the descriptions introduced and then by a pressure to be consistent with itself as it unfolds and elaborates. Steinberg’s piece does contain a reproduction of the painting, but nothing in the quoted passage depends upon the illustration; the imaginative operations can be carried out by any reader with even a vague sense of the overall look of Monet’s late work. This is rare writing, but the point with regard to the possibilities of inducing a Baxandall-like imaginative employment of ostensive language in art criticism is general.

    Now, to return once again to Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts, I note that nothing of what one sees in Baxandall’s theory or Denby’s and Steinberg’s practice of art criticism is acknowledged in the contemporary concerns with reviving ‘negative’ art criticism or with exhibiting therein some sort of ‘intellectual maturity’.  Rather, the point in those great pieces is as it were perennial: the aim is to induce a perceptual and/or imaginative process in the mind of a reader that aims towards explaining, understanding, enjoying, and/or appreciating the visual interest of a particular work of art. Concerned as they are with ephemeral contemporary conditions and the current pervasiveness of blandly affirmative criticism, Tatol and Davis have lost the thread. As with so much of contemporary art criticism, Tatol and Davis imagine that art criticism ought to proceed in the absence of knowledge and understanding of the history of art, of the history of the art forms discussed, as well as in the absence of anything and everything from psychology, sociology, and philosophy that concerns the arts. But it’s not obvious how criticism can proceed without presupposing something of this knowledge and understanding, at least if it is to aim at the explication of the visual interest of visual artworks. Tatol’s and Davis’s neglect of the fundamental point given by Baxandall and exemplified variously by Denby and Steinberg is of course not an individual failing on the part of these two contemporary critics, but is another symptom of what Davis gestures towards with the idea of ‘the degeneration of the media environment’.

     Might one learn something further from the historical practice of art criticism that addresses the bare and seemingly barren slur on the present as a kind of degeneration? Rather than leaving the topic with the stark and fruitless juxtaposition of an allegedly rich past and an impoverished present, one might instead take a hint from the claim of so many alleged absences and ask: How might such conceptual resources be re-introduced into contemporary criticism? In my final post on the topic I’ll suggest a renewed set of roles for analogy in criticism, and try to illustrate this with some examples from my own writings.

References:

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (1985)

Monroe Beardsley, ‘What are Critics For?’ (1978), in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (1982)

Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (1986)

David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757)

Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)

Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (1999)

Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th Century Art (1972)

Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)

Crisis? What Crisis?? Or, What can the philosophy of art criticism contribute to art criticism? Part Two: On the Alleged Problem of So-Called Negative Criticism

     In my previous post I noted that there recently appeared an unusually interesting and intelligent piece on the state of contemporary visual art criticism by Sean Tatol, a 34 year-old critic who has been publishing for a little under four years. His sole venue is an on-line publication called The Manhattan Art Review, and he is its sole writer. Tatol’s piece ‘Negative Criticism’ briefly describes and reflects upon his art criticism, diagnoses basic problems with typical contemporary art criticism, and offers an account of what art criticism rightly considered, and free from its current debilitations, can and should be. In response the art critic Ben Davis has given a set of reflections that partially enthusiastically agree, and partially disagree, with Tatol’s. The most striking aspect of Davis’s response is his rejection of Tatol’s model of what contemporary art criticism should be, and his suggestion of an alternative. Here I’ll first summarize Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts while briefly commenting, and then place them within the field of concerns articulated in the post-World War II Anglophone philosophy of art criticism. In my next post I’ll introduce criticisms of both accounts, suggest a further model that incorporates elements that survive the criticisms from both authors, and try to indicate ways in which the third model fits pieces of art criticism I especially admire.

     Since shortly after he began publishing The Manhattan Art Review, Tatol’s criticism has largely, though by no means exclusively, been part of a section he calls ‘Kritics Korner’ wherein Tatol gives short reviews of as many as ten exhibitions. The reviews range in length from about two full paragraphs to a few sentences, with most towards the shorter end of the spectrum. Additionally, each exhibition is given a rating of from 1 to 5 stars, often nuanced with a ‘.5’; so a ‘3.5’ rating indicates something better than the mediocrity of a ‘3’ but insufficiently achieved to merit the sign of rating of thorough-going goodness, though not greatness, which is a ‘4’. Tatol’s rating system is loosely modeled upon that of the music critic Robert Christgau, who used the scholastic F through A system, which permits an even more nuanced rating with its pluses and minuses, and so could allow an even more secure sense of relative quality and so better determine which album by Bruce Springsteen or Bananarama to buy with one’s allowance. Davis and others assure us that these short pieces have been a ‘hit’ in that they have been widely ‘shared’ and discussed, and not just by art aficionados in New York City, and Davis unqualifiedly considers such discussion a virtue.

    The rating system, so Tatol asserts, immediately introduces a ‘judgment’. What sort of judgment? Tatol says that it involves a judgment of ‘quality’ and with it, one must think, a sense of relative quality. That is, the endpoints of the numerical spectrum are the abominably bad (a ‘1’) and the superlatively good (a ‘5’), and so a ‘3.5’ is better than a ‘3’ and worse than a ‘4’. But what is the point of giving a numerical rating? As Tatol notes, it cannot be closely analogous to Christgau’s advice to a consumer to buy or not buy something, as the rarity and expense of an artwork in a Manhattan gallery or museum are incomparably greater than a copy of Frampton Comes Alive. One predictable effect of such rating would be to encourage or discourage gallery visits; if I trusted the seriousness and taste of the art critic, her rating one show a ‘4’ might get me on the ‘A’ train to Chelsea, whereas a ‘1.5’ rating would keep me at home listening to ‘Do You Feel Like I Do?’. But perhaps more importantly, a rating might provide a first-time viewer of an exhibition with something analogous to a statement of what the show is ‘about’. That is, just as the viewer might be aided by a critic’s claim that the show is ‘about’ X, and so keep X in mind as she views and reflects upon the works; so the viewer might keep in mind the show’s rating, and search for the kinds of goodness or badness the rating indicates.

     In any case, for Tatol what immediately arises with the use of numerical ratings is the specter of ‘negative criticism’; anything below a ‘4’ is characterized as mediocre, boring, flawed in parts, or worse. Tatol thinks that any negative criticism offends against a contemporary ideology that he calls ‘subjective universalism’, whose motto is given in the meme ‘let people enjoy themselves’. It is perhaps too much to call subjective universalism an ideology, as from Tatol’s description it seems like little more than a small set of self-satisfied, defensive, and reductivist prejudices, a tight cluster of neurotic symptoms. Any negative criticism of anything threatens to spoil people’s enjoyment of their cultural activities; negative criticism insinuates the existence of other and better cultural worlds; and the typical enjoyments of contemporary people are familiar, easy, and/or popular, and so ‘guilty’ in that there is no aspirational dimension to the pleasure. (But if something like this is generally true, who’s feeling ‘guilty’?)

     The alternative to this subjective universalism, Tatol thinks, arise from reflection upon the aim of criticism, which is ‘education’. But surprisingly he explicates this not in terms of the audience’s, but rather in terms of his own, education. He says that he’s learned more about visual art in the few years of writing criticism than he knew when he began writing. He describes his own passage from youthful tastes to a more mature taste through wide reading, particularly from consulting ‘best of’ lists and following up their suggestions. But, again surprisingly, he acknowledges that such lists cannot plausibly be thought to present the results of the application of ‘objective’ standards; rather, as with Christgau’s lists, they ‘crystallize the critic’s sensibility.” And surprisingly for a third time, what is particularly valuable about the critic and her sensibility is its ‘consistency’, and not, say, its rightness or accuracy or learnedness or penetration.

    After flailing contemporary art critics, in particular the New York Times’s Holland Cotter, for writing approvingly and uncritically of artworks that seem to embody some fashionable ‘social justice’-type attitudes, Tatol concludes with a final surprising move: he takes what he calls a ‘quasi-theological’ turn in asserting that what makes an artwork good is that and how it enacts “a channeling of an external sense of life into an artwork”; and “good criticism seeks to recognize this good as much as it can.” Tatol fails to discuss whether ‘external senses of life’ are, as far as equal as far as art is concerned: Does it matter whether the sense of life is profound or trivial, clairvoyant and or self-deluded, compassionate or vicious? And it is not clear to me how this is consistent with his earlier statement that art critics rightly understood are guardians of quality and judgers. Then one wonders: how does the use of a numerical rating to the critic’s, and by extension the audience’s, recognition of the good?

     So Tatol’s piece presents four concerns, which I shall wrench into the form of claims: 1. His practice of using numerical rankings in art criticism is defensible, in that it re-introduces and highlights ‘negative criticism’, which supports the art critic’s proper mission of defending ‘qualify’ and offering judgments. 2. ‘Negative criticism’ is typically blocked in contemporary art criticism on account of the widespread adoption of the ideology of ‘universal subjectivism’. 3. The aim of art criticism properly understood is education. 4. The ideal art critic is in her criticism instigating and embodying a kind of self-education whose terminus is intellectual (or cultural?) maturity. Ben Davis’s response is a string of loosely connected ruminations on one or another of Tatol’s points. As noted above, Davis generally expresses an enthusiasm for the effect of Tatol’s art criticism, which is that its high volume of weekly batches of short reviews and ratings has ‘got people talking’ about exhibitions that otherwise would not have been reviewed, and further that part of this talk is induced by Tatol’s re-introduction of negative criticism, which stimulates agreement and disagreement from readers. Davis nonetheless disagrees with Tatol’s emphasis on judgment, and seems to suggest that a chief task, or at least virtue, of contemporary art criticism is the critic trying to make sense of (and not necessarily judge or evaluate) novel kinds of expressiveness. Davis further seems to endorse claims 3 and 4, but strongly disagrees with Tatol’s characterization of maturity in claim 4. Davis takes Tatol’s characterization of the idea critic as exhibiting consistency in her criticism to mean that the critic’s views and tastes should be fixed and unvarying (unsurprisingly, Davis offers no textual evidence for this, and it flies in the face of what Tatol says about the critic’s self-education; taken more charitably, ‘consistency’ for Tatol must mean something like a kind of consistency in the exercise of interpretive virtues such as charity and seriousness). Davis accordingly thinks that Tatol’s conception of maturity involves a kind of faithfulness or responsibility to oneself; to this Davis counterpoises maturity as responsibility towards others, and bound to a sense that others, not so much one’s readers as the communities out of which new kinds of artistic expressiveness emerge. On Davis’s conception intellectual “maturity” [Davis’s scare quotes] involves Tatol’s sense but is “also about knowing yourself in relationship to others.” So in criticism one should have, to use Max Weber’s famous terminology, not (just) an ethic of conviction, but rather (also) an ethic of responsibility. A basic impulse in contemporary art criticism is and ought to be finding out about others, and thus the most central virtue of contemporary art criticism then is curiosity, curiosity about others’ artifacts and lives.

     Davis’s insistence that curiosity is something like the cardinal virtue of contemporary art criticism seems to be of a piece with three other criticisms of Tatol. First, Davis dismisses Tatol’s insistence on the importance of judgment or evaluation. Judgment, according to Davis, “is not actually the hard part”, which seems to suggest that for him what is the hard (and more valuable) part is achieving and conveying some understanding of unprecedented artworks. Second, when Davis criticizes what he views as an unsuccessful review by Tatol, he says that it “doesn’t reflect what the works look like or what they are trying to do.” So the harder part of criticism seems to be descriptive and interpretive, that is, conveying a sense of the works’ appearance, the artist’s aim, and how the former partially fulfills the latter. Finally, Davis suggests that Tatol misses the central reason for the current poor quality of art criticism, which he says is the ‘degeneration of the media environment’ into something that demands a ‘quick take’ on things, which presumably includes Tatol’s weekly batch of short, numerical reviews. The exercise of curiosity is demanding and time-consuming: “It definitely takes time to do the work of thinking about each show as an individual thing, to find out enough to check your preconceptions and do justice to the work, either positively or negatively. It takes time to do the actual writing.”

     I’ll conclude this post with a sketch of how to place Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts within the schema and concerns provided by canonical bits of the philosophy of art criticism. Recall that Isenberg had offered a model of the core act of art criticism as involving three conceptually distinct and mutually reinforcing moments: V (verdict) + R (reason) + N (norm). And Beardsley claimed that there are two distinct models of the critic’s activity, CU (the consumer union which carries the constitutive aim of art criticism as a kind of evaluative guide for recipients) and PA (the press agent who carries the important though non-constitutive aim of supporting and endorsing artists’ works).  For Tatol the act of criticism is consummated in V, while R is minimal, or even occasionally non-existent. He seems to think that N is fixed is for any given critic at any particular time, but that the critic must also understand that N develops over time as the critic’s sensibility matures. Davis in marked contrast considers V easy and typically routine, while the action is in the struggle to produce R and establish a kind of local determinacy and validity for N. Once R and N are established, V either follows trivially or is otiose. With regard to Beardsley’s models, Tatol ignores PA and offers an idiosyncratic version of CU, in that the recipient remains unconceptualized and amorphous, and the focus instead is on whether and how a piece of art criticism might contribute to the critic’s maturation. Davis likewise ignores the audience, and counters Tatol with a strong version of PA, with the proviso that the artist for whom the critic advocates is not something or someone given in advance of criticism, but rather something one arrives at through a long process of looking, investigation, and reflection. For Davis N is already there prior to criticism, which must be fundamentally conceptualized as the revelation and clarification of N. Davis’s appeal to ‘pluralism’ turns into the claim that there are multiple N’s, each of which has as it were a regional validity where it governs the interpretation and evaluation of works from its district, but whose scope is strictly limited.

     It seems to me that this brief placing of Tatol’s and Davis’s accounts is illuminating, at the very least of helping clarify why one might think they are talking past each other. Is there then nothing more to say than to note that they agree on some points and sharply disagree on others? In my next post I’ll try to advance philosophical reflection on these accounts with an appeal to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, and a re-formulation of the point of art criticism as not primarily to produce evaluations or interpretations, but rather to bring the reader to see why the art is worth viewing. I’ll then try to show how this model fits the practice of some of the great critics across the arts.

 References:

Monroe Beardsley, ‘What are Critics For?’ (1978), in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (1982)

Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)

Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)

Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)

Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919)

Crisis? What Crisis? Or, What can the philosophy of art criticism contribute to art criticism?--Part One

     About 45 years ago I developed a strong interest in contemporary art in the San Francisco Bay Area. A major expression of this interest was of course going to lots of shows of recent art in galleries. For the most part museums did not show contemporary art, although the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art regularly had exhibitions of living artists; it was there that I saw for example the last show of Philip Guston that opened when he was alive. The Berkeley Art Museum’s so-called Matrix shows likewise presented contemporary art, and focused not on venerable figures like Guston but on up-and-comers; so it was there that I first saw works by a great many contemporary artists including Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Additionally an interest in contemporary art expressed itself in reading a great deal of art criticism, that is, reviews of temporary exhibitions of works by (for the most part) living artists. At first I read a California publication called Artweek, and then expanded to the national publications Art in America, Artforum, and Arts magazine (this last one struck me as superior to the other three, although a particular critic might publish in more than one). Throughout the 1980s I found much of this reading at the very least informative, and occasionally helpful in understanding particularly odd works (What did Bruce Nauman mean by hanging up all those plastic animals?), but it never occurred to me to imagine that this body of writing offered any authoritative guide to taste or the understanding of the arts. Nor did I look for guidance from the artists and art enthusiasts I knew, as I found their judgments manifestly biased by personal relations of friend-or-foe, as well as a kind of taboo against negative remarks about emergent art forms like video and installation art. For such guides I looked to the great art writers of the past—Baudelaire on the Salons, Walter Pater on the Renaissance, Proust on Chardin, Michel Butor on Monet and Mondrian--, certain art historians—especially Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg--, and some philosophers of art—especially Aristotle, Kant, John Dewey, R. G. Collingwood, and Richard Wollheim--, although again it never occurred to me to treat some judgment about older art as unqualifiedly right because it came from one of these great figures.  By 1990 it seemed to me that I had sufficient knowledge and understanding of at least the contemporary visual arts to write my own art criticism, and so I began publishing in Artweek.

     Along the way I’ve encountered various evaluative remarks about art criticism, remarks that evidently do not form a consistent set of views. So one remark is that, at least on some occasions or with regard to certain art forms or particular artists, such-and-such a critic is ‘too negative’. So the San Francisco Chronicle’s long-time critic Kenneth Baker was said to be ‘too negative’ about photography. Around the year 2000 I was on a panel on improvisation sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department. I tried to give a summary account of the characteristic virtues of improvisation, and then cited and discussed some criticisms of improvisation from John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Anthony Braxton, and Theodor Adorno. The other panelists’ brows knit as I introduced criticisms, and my fellow panelist Mary Lovelace O’Neal, the chair of the department, immediately denounced me as a typical art critic and theorist who didn’t understand the artistic process and so made pointless and unfounded ‘negative’ remarks about art.

     But at least this century, it seems rather more common to criticize art criticism as ‘too positive’ and/or culpably lacking negative criticism. About twenty years ago in two separate publications the art historian James Elkins and the art critic Raphael Rubenstein lamented the loss of ‘judgment’ in recent art criticism, whereby they seemed to mean ‘negative judgments’ claiming that the works discussed were artistic failures, and perhaps also ethical or political or spiritual failures. And just in the past months there have been publications from two of the finest American art critics now active, Sean Tatol and Ben Davis, raising the issue of the seeming current lack of ‘negative’ art criticism and suggesting diagnoses and remedies. Tatol’s and Davis’s pieces strike me as thoughtful, informed, and so eminently worth reading for anyone interested in the state of current American art criticism. I was a bit surprised by the prominence in both cases of what are for all the world philosophical issues about evaluation and explanation; consequently I began wondering whether the philosophy of art criticism, and particularly a small number of writings that count as its recent canonical texts, might throw some light on Tatol’s and Davis’s remarks, and further on contemporary art criticism generally. By way of introduction, I’ll very briefly summarize the course of debates and introduce the key concepts in the field since World War II, and then in my next post try to apply some of them to the most recent discussion.

     A great deal of discussion in Anglophone philosophy of art criticism is oriented towards ideas, analyses, and issues in a piece derived from a lecture in 1948 by the philosopher Arnold Isenberg, published as ‘Critical Communication’. I’ll paraphrase and partially elaborate the account, while relieving it of some dated emotivist formulations: Isenberg suggested that a typical conceptual core of art criticism consisted of a three-part claim (Isenberg, pp. 155-56) The first part was a judgment or evaluation of the work(s) discussed, called ‘V’ (for Verdict or value judgment). The second part offered some description of the relevant work(s) that functioned to (at least partially) justify the verdict; this is called ‘R’ (for Reason). Thirdly, there is an invocation of some (set of) standards, criteria, or norms in light of which V + R claims some non-idiosyncratic authority; this is called ‘N’ (for Norm). The critic offers, explicitly or implicitly, some inductive reasoning for choosing the relevant N, and N is presented as if ‘backing up’ V + R (p. 158) One immediate consequence of this analysis is that a purported instance of art criticism that lacks a judgment or evaluation is not really art criticism at all. So on Isenberg’s account, if a purported piece of art criticism lacks an evaluative judgment and restricts itself to, say, explanation, interpretation, and/or description, it limits itself to at most explaining, but not justifying a critical evaluation; such a piece of language is not a critical communication (and so not an instance of art criticism proper), but rather an ordinary communication (pp. 164-5). I pass over much of this great essay, most of which argues for the claim that critical communication takes place between two parties, both of which are in the perceptual presence of what is being discussed (on this point see also Baxandall (1985)).

     A second canonical bit of analysis came in a series of essays by Monroe Beardsley in his essay ‘What are Critics For?’ Beardsley suggests that there are two major models for art criticism, each of which is accompanied by distinctive conceptions of the purpose and primary content of criticism. (He mentions and dismisses without explication a third model, the ‘judicial’ model, as ‘dead’ (Beardsley, pp. 159-60)) The first model, which Beardsley thinks captures much of the activity of art criticism, both in actuality and rightly considered, is the “Consumers’ Union model of (professional) criticism”, of ‘CU’ for short (p. 150) Beardsley says that on this model “the critic’s primary obligation is to the consumer of art—the audience, the viewer, the reader, the listener . . . [the critic] tells us, as best he (sic) can, what we need to know to make intelligent choices about works of art” (ibid). So such an art critic does engage in an evaluative activity—they tell you, for example, that one bank building is better than another as a work of architecture (that is, I take it, as an instance of artistic building)--, but do not make your (ultimate) decisions for you, as those further depend upon your particular circumstances of what morality you hold, how much money you have, what you consider safe and healthy, etc. Beardsley considers a number of prima facie objections to this model, two of which seem to me particularly relevant to the practices of contemporary art criticism. One objection is that in CU the critic offers no interpretation of the artwork; but surely it is part of the critic’s role to help, if not enable, receivers of artworks to interpret them correctly (p. 152) Second, Beardsley notes that there are difficulties for criticism arising “from the nature of certain avant-garde developments” (p. 153), including the sense that anything like traditional judgments of quality miss the point of the artistic activity (Beardsley cites John Cage’s 4’33”), or even that conceptualist gestures, while allegedly creating an artwork, offer no object upon which to fix one’s gaze or to interpret.

      For Beardsley the other major model of art criticism is “the press agent (or PA) model of criticism” (p. 155). On this model “the critic’s primary obligation is not to the consumer, but to the producer—that is, to the artist and, indirectly, to the art itself as a form of enterprise involving many artists, present and future.” The critic does not judge, but rather their “central tasks are analysis and exegesis” that aim to help us “see the underlying structure and texture of the artwork” and “help clear up our puzzlement about the meaning or meanings of the work” (ibid). Whereas ideal critics on the CU model are competent judges, on the PA model they are competent interpreters. Beardsley goes on to urge that the CU and PA models are substantially consistent; their sole substantive difference is that the former demands, and the latter refrains from, judgment. Beardsley claims that CU with its judgments captures the primary character of art criticism, while PA “calls attention to important but secondary roles” of the critic (p. 156). CU also helps us grasp and articulate certain characteristic failures in art criticism. The critic may error in discussing trivial or irrelevant matters that divert attention from judgment; critics may stick with the PA model of (mere) interpretation and explanation and so be derelict in their central duty; and they may dogmatically offer judgments without reasons for the judgments (pp. 161-63). Such failures are not infrequent, and the CU model helps one spot them and provides a way of reminding the critic of their proper task (p. 164).

      There are of course many more considerations, insights, and arguments available in the Anglophone philosophy of art criticism. Perhaps most relevant to these sketches of some of Isenberg’s and Beardsley’s points are counter-arguments to the claim that judgment or evaluation is central or even indispensable to art criticism proper. Arthur Danto, for example, argued that under contemporary conditions that critics ought to refrain from judgment and limit themselves to explicating the ideas embodied in art works and analyzing the ways in which artists in fact managed to embody those ideas (see Danto 2005). More recently James Grant has argued that although evaluation and judgment are prominent aspects of much art criticism, what he calls the constitutive goal of art criticism is to present the features of artworks that are rightly appreciated, and that the non-constitutive goal which occupies much of actual art criticism is to provide imaginative ways of helping the reader grasp what and how to appreciate. Still, I would think that anyone familiar with recent discussions of art criticism will sense how much of Isenberg’s and Beardsley’s points resonate with typical contemporary concerns and complaints. So in my next post I turn to Tatol’s and Davis’s recent pieces, and will attempt to explicate and interpret their various claims in light of these conceptual resources from the philosophy of art criticism.

References:

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (1985)

Monroe Beardsley, ‘What are Critics For?’ (1978), in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (1982)

Arthur Danto, ‘The Fly in the Fly Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of Works of Art’, in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (2005)

Ben Davis, ‘Negative Reviews? Part 1 & 2’ in Artnet (2023)

James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003)

James Grant, The Critical Imagination (2013)

Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’ (1948), in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973)

Raphael Rubenstein, ‘Why Don’t Critics Make Judgments Anymore?’ in Art in America (2003)

Sean Tatol, ‘Negative Criticism’ in The Point (2023)

Why are Frank Bowling’s Horizontal Paintings better than his Vertical Ones?

     For me one of the outstanding artistic discoveries of the past five or so years has been the work of the octogenarian painter Frank Bowling. I first became aware of Bowling, at least as more than a name, and his work through posts on Facebook by the Engish art critic Matthew Collings. Bowling had taught Collings in art school; and it seemed as if Bowling, who long maintained studios in both London and New York City, was much more prominent in England that elsewhere. Then Bowling had a major retrospective in Germany in 2017, and the reproductions in that exhibition’s catalog gave the strong impression of a major artist. A few years ago the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired Bowling’s large, horizontally formatted abstract painting ‘Elder Sun Benjamin’ (2018), a rare spirit-lifting event and subsequent oasis in the artistic desert of the Bay Area artworld. Most recently the SFMOMA hosted a large exhibition of Bowling’s works, largely from 1965-75, together with a few more recent paintings and some works by artist contemporaries and mentors who were important to Bowling. This show seemed to confirm my sense that Bowling is the greatest living abstract painter, or at least the greatest known to me. But each viewing of the show left a peculiar and puzzling impression: Why is it that Bowling’s paintings in a horizontal format, especially very large abstract works organized in a few broad bands of color, almost invariably seemed more interesting and engaging than those in a vertical format, whether abstract or containing one or more of the maps of continents that were the focus of the show?

     Along with the greatly increased exhibition of Bowling’s art internationally in the past decade, there has been an accompanying efflorescence of writing on Bowling in monographs and catalog essays. The emphases of this literature are unsurprising—the issues surrounding a Black Guyanese painter finding his way in London and New York City--, while equally unsurprising (at least to me) is the near-complete neglect of Bowling’s own published writings that are not directly relevant to his ethnicity and country of origin. Bowling has repeatedly stated that an early reading of the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim’s essay ‘On Expression and Expressionism’, published in 1964, was and is the touchstone of his artistic thinking. This point is unmentioned in what seem to be the most widely read, or at least cited, pieces on Bowling, those of German retrospective’s curator Okwui Enwezor and some pieces by the cultural theorist and critic Kobena Mercer. It is likewise no surprise that no published consideration has been given to the question of (possibly) varying quality in Bowling’s work.

     In a zoom lecture of 2021, ‘Expression in Contemporary Art’ I sketched an account of Bowling’s artistic practice, and suggested what roles Wollheim’s essay might have played in Bowling’s thought. That essay was the first of several major writings by Wollheim on artistic expression published over three decades. In that first attempt Wollheim was concerned to stress two negative points about expressiveness in the visual arts: First, that there is no secure, context-unspecific route from the character of a mark to the kinds of expression it embodies or evokes. This strikes at the root of a range of artistic ideologies associated with Abstract Expressionism, where for example one might be tempted to infer from an ‘agitated’ mark to an ‘agitated’ state of mind of the mark-maker. Second, that there is no context-free set of rules or norms or procedures that can reliably produce any particular kind of expressiveness: broad strokes do not necessarily evoke broad thoughts. Although Bowling is reticent in describing how he understood and appropriated Wollheim’s essay, it is irresistible to think that the first claim broke any allegiance to Abstract Expressionist ideologies, and the second rendered incredible any thought that there was one particular route towards whatever kinds of expressiveness the artist wished to achieve.

     If Bowling took something like these thoughts from Wollheim’s essay, it becomes intelligible how he might wish to continue to use both vertical and horizontal formats: neither format carries any determinate kind of expressiveness, and the sustained searching quality of Bowling’s oeuvre, the never-satisfied search for yet more materials that bear the sense of fecundity and possibilities of transformation is is a constant in Bowling’s work across the past half century. But this only intensifies the problem: what of my impression of the consistently richer and more successful expressiveness in Bowling’s abstract paintings of the horizontal format? To help make sense of this, I’ll consider two works c. 1970 in the exhibition: the vertically formatted ‘Night Journey’ (1969-70), a chromatically rich acrylic containing maps of Africa and Central and South America; and the horiztonal ‘Looking at Barney & Mark’ (1972), a large painting of roughly three horizontal bands, the lowest an orange-red then topped by two chromatically similar blue bands, and evoking something of a landscape, especially as the two blue bands are separated by a relatively narrow cloud-like band of dull whites and greys.

     ‘Night Journey’ is the more immediately appealing of the two, as it offers a spectacular though wholly instance of Bowling’s way with primary and secondary colors. The canvas is largely stained with an atmospheric wash of dark reds, which burst in the upper left into a brilliant pinkish red, like the crown of a cumulus cloud irradiated by a setting sun. Bowling has lain a vertical swath of blue on the right side, which obscures some of the red underlayment while repeating in a more confined and restrained way the drama of red. The left side shows the map of Central and South America, dark and partially haloed with an aureole of grayish-blue. The right side displays the map of Africa, likewise dark but an overlay of blue and a horizontal deposit of red pigment rendered as if blown through a small tube. But the key structural element, one that makes it natural to speak individually of the painting’s left and right sides, is a rough vertical plane of yellow, seeming to emerge from a pale greenish ground, and again exhibiting something of the red’s and blue’s efflorescence into pure color. What more could one want?

      The description so far ignores a feature that is invisible in reproduction, but massively determining in actuality: I mean scale. It is not enough to be told that Bowling’s works are large—‘Night Journey’ is roughly 7 feet by 6 feet. It is perhaps irresistible but too easy to characterize this as ‘monumental’, for what is the vertical format roughly bisected, and so invoking relations of symmetry, metaphorizes is the surely the human body. Despite the size, the painting seems instantly grasped as a gestalt, and something with clear, impermeable boundaries, bilateral symmetry, and a dynamic, internally differentiated richness. One of Bowling’s basic painterly mechanisms is echoing the edge’s of the canvas with narrow bands, in many cases with colors and markings that seem alien to the styles and rhythms of much of the canvas. In ‘Night Journey’ the bands of red along the bottom edge, differentiated left and right as light to dark, seem to have been spilled up against and so are contained by the edge of the canvas; they serve only to reinforce the sense of the surface’s rigid boundedness.

     Contrast these effects with those of ‘Looking at Barney & Mark’. Keeping the upper two bands closely similar induces the operation of what seems to me Bowling’s most basic artistic mechanism, the play of boundaries in a relatively unbounded field. So here one looks and reflects and looks: Are there two or three bands? Does the lower red band ‘balance’ the upper two? Are the upper two bands abstractions of the sky, or is it sky and water? Is the lower band a thing of warmth from the smudged iciness of the sky, or is it something rather scalding whose effects are relieved by the cooler blues? And on and on. Bowling here eschews the somewhat forced drama of ‘Night Journey’’s efflorescences in favor of the more closely valued continuity and mild contrast between the relatively, but only relatively, darker blue of the middle band and the lighter blue of the upper. Then consider the edges: the long horizontal format (roughly 5.5 by 9.5 feet) makes it impossible to keep the painting as a whole in sight from any normal viewing distance, and so the sense in the vertical formats of a bounded gestalt does not arise. At the bottom right corner, some of the upper bands’ blue has stained a triangular pool that seems to extend far beyond the physical edge of the canvas. Searching for elements that rhyme with this play of edging, one notices that the middle blue flows to the edge, while the lighter upper blue seems to be in the process of being repelled and collecting itself into a more bounded pool or cloud. Perhaps the upper band is more a whitish-grey solid cloud across which a blue pool drifts? And finally there’s the non-pictorial element of Bowling’s stenciled name in the upper left, reversed as if to indicate the play of order and perhaps to insinuate a mechanism of the bands attached to horizontal, so-called ‘piano’ hinges, as if the canvas could be folded in and out. The maker names himself, and plays with his name as with the painting’s broad structural elements.

     In his Mellon lectures on abstract art, published as Paths to the Absolute, the art historian John Golding notes two striking features shared by major 20th century artists including Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky. Where such artists begin as figurative painters and move to abstraction, one can see across their artistic trajectory that their abstract works emerge as if from the imagined viewpoint of the artist-viewer of their figurative works having ‘moved up’ (Golding, p. 14) to a figurative work until the pictorial elements carrying the recognizability of the figure lose their role in representation, and gain heightened non-semantic qualities of rhythm, color, and texture. Golding further notes that such artists begin with either portrayals of human figures or of landscapes, and not still-lifes (pp. 19-20). Golding suggests that still-life didn’t carry a charge of symbolic meanings and resonances transferred into the resulting abstract paintings sufficient to sustain aesthetic interest. Bowling was never strictly a figurative painter nor a landscape painter; his early work was rather collage-like in combining both figurative and abstract elements. This earlier work thereby insists on a relatively heightened temporality of looking, as the viewer considers part-to-part relations grouped through small-scale projections. If something like the contrast I’ve drawn between Bowling’s later vertical and horizontal formats is right, then the former might be thought to inherit the symbolism and the resonances of figurative portrayal, and the latter of landscape. But only the latter, the abstracts plainly evoking landscapes, carry over Bowling’s concern with the duration of looking populated by framing and re-framing. Likewise these artistic mechanisms more distinctive of the horizontal than the vertical format seem more of a piece with the negative directives Bowling would have drawn from Wollheim’s essay, directives which incorporated into Bowling’s theory of his artistic practice would have charged him with the task of introducing order and hierarchy while simultaneously maintaining the constant sense of their reversibility and undoing.

      So if something like these suggestions and interpretive points are right, then the general superiority of Bowling’s horizontal paintings is intelligible, indeed predictable, as they give fuller play to Bowling’s imagination and interests, and the artistic mechanisms that articulate them.

References:

Okwui Enwezor and others, Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi (2017)

John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (2000)

Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling (2021)

Kobena Mercer, ‘Atlantic Errancy’ in Frank Bowling’s Americas: New York, 1966-75 (2022), Reto Thüring  and Akili Tommasino with Debra Lennard

John Rapko, ‘Expression in Contemporary Art’ (2021), pdf of images on academia.edu

Richard Wollheim, ‘On Expression and Expressionism’ (1964)

A Partial Review of and Remarks on Edward Winters’s Architectural Aesthetics:

     For much of the half-century after World War II, the philosophy of art in English took music, the visual art of painting, and the verbal arts of fiction and poetry as its focal topics. The prominence of these foci is plausibly construed as part of the inheritance of the so-called ‘system of the fine arts’, a construction influentially characterized by the history Paul O. Kristeller as emergent in Europe at the end of the 18th century which divided the arts into the ‘fine’ and the ‘mechanical’ or ‘applied’, with poetry, sculpture, music, painting among the former, and embroidery, ceramics, landscape gardening and much else among the latter. With the emergence of ballet in the early 19th century, dance was included among the fine arts. What made an form of art into a fine art was never clear, and historically successive attempts at clarification were unsuccessful. Architecture was problematic; in some formulations it was a fine art, in others a mechanical art because it constitutively included reference to particular functions and uses, such as providing shelter or housing a bank. The system of the fine arts is fortunately a thing of the past, and recent writing is dominated by accounts of such things as street art, computer art, comics, etc; but the shadow of the concept of fine art lingers in seemingly intractable difficulties in conceptualizing the relationship between artistic practices and the needs, interests, desires, uses, and functions to which they answer.

     The one recent monument in the philosophy of architecture in English is surely Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Architecture, and there have been significant contributions from a few other authors including Karsten Harries, Edward Winters, and Gordon Graham. The new publication of a book by Winters offers a chance to consider the state of philosophical reflection upon architecture as an art form.

     Winters’s short book ranges widely, and includes historical material, some polemics against the work and thought of the architect Peter Eisenman, and an account of some time spent drinking beer in a bar in Paris. Nonetheless, the core argument is not difficult to state, as it consists of a short series of interconnected claims. Winters claims the following: 1. Architecture is a fine art. 1a. Although most fine arts exhibit what Kant calls ‘pure beauty’ (a beauty undetermined by concepts), architecture exhibits ‘dependent beauty’ (a beauty determined and constrained by at least one concept, in the case of architecture the concept of function or use). 2. A fine art is a practice that regularly produces works that merit aesthetic appreciation. 3. A fine art is a practice that possesses what Winters, following Dominic Lopes, calls a ‘medium-profile’. 3a. A ‘medium-profile’ consists of procedures for technically transforming materials so that the resultant artifact communicates a distinctive kind of meaningfulness, namely what Kant called ‘aesthetic ideas’ (characterized by Winters as “a presentation that cannot be formulated using concepts of cognition, or else we could exhaustively spell out the meaning of a work and its beauty would evaporate” (pp. 117-18)).

     Evidently Winters’s account is markedly traditional, as a great deal of it agrees with and indeed simply re-states Kant’s undeveloped points scattered about the first half of the Critique of Judgment. His use of Lopes’s so-called ‘buck passing’ account of art (wherewith Lopes claims that philosophical attention to the concept of art per se is fruitless, and that philosophical attention is more appropriately directed to the individual arts and their distinctive media-profiles) only reinforces Kant’s prior characterization of architecture as a fine art of adherent beauty without offering any further conceptual materials relevant to analyzing and understanding individual art forms. So as far as I can tell, Winters in effect attempts to up-date Kant’s views in only two aspects: (a) he claims that the materials which are transformed in the artistic practice of architecture are fundamentally of a piece with those of ‘dwelling’ in Heidegger’s sense; (b) Winters claims that the way in which artistic works of architecture acquire aesthetic ideas, and so artistic meaning, can be understood on analogy with the way in which on Richard Wollheim’s account artistic paintings acquire meaning. I’ll comment on these two points, and then offer a couple of concluding thoughts:

     Dwelling: A number of architectural theorists, including penetrating writers of recent decades like Karsten Harries and Christian Norberg-Schulz, have looked to the conception of dwelling in the later work of Martin Heidegger as a guide to thinking about the fundamental needs, norms, and kinds of meaningfulness native to architecture. Winters makes no reference to these earlier discussions, and contents himself with some brief indications. First, in the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger raised two questions with regard to dwelling: what is it, and what is the relationship between dwelling and building. Winters then paraphrases Heidegger as claiming that ‘to dwell’ means “‘to live well’ or ‘to flourish’ or ‘to be’. And this ‘being’ is connected to building.” (p. 18) Oddly, Winters fails to note the Aristotelean resonances of this formulation, and moves immediately to the thought that “building belongs to dwelling by way of our habitation of the world, more specifically our world.” (ibid) He summarizes Heidegger’s account with the single sentence “Dwelling relates us to the world in such a way as to operate within it as participants.” Then, as if continuing the explication of Heidegger’s account, Winters offers a lengthy quote from Heidegger’s slightly later essay ‘The Thing’ that attempts to read off the significance of a clay jug, otherwise unspecified, as exhibiting ‘the four-fold’, a prominent bit of later Heideggerian poetry (or hokum, depending upon one’s taste) that urges the thought that certain ways of making, building, and living embody distinctive conceptions of the relationship both between the earth and the sky and between human beings and gods or immortals. Unsurprisingly, the concept of the four-fold has elicited a great deal of interpretation; surprisingly, Winters leaves it unexplicated and abandons it as soon as he has introduced it.

     From very brief indications scattered later in the book, it seems that what Winters wants from this scamper through the later fields of Heidegger is the thought that there are ‘needs’ bound to the practice of building, and that architecture is a cultural elaboration of (the need for) dwelling: “We might say that ‘dwelling’ has developed into a cultural practice. The art of architecture has arisen out of our fastening critical aesthetic projections onto the ‘lived world’ in which we (naturally?) [Winters’s parenthesis and italics] accommodate ourselves.” (p. 30) Later Winters hints that something like Carl Jung’s conception of archetypes might offer a way of specifying the need for architecture in that positing archetypes helps make sense of “the view that we are pre-dispositionally given to mythical accounts of those aspects of experience we cannot understand” (p. 76) and “that there are anthropological convergences which are to be accounted for by our condition as pre-disposed persons.” (p. 78) Winters’s discussion is fragmentary and allusive in the extreme, but I take it (perhaps wrongly) that he means that our need for dwelling, and hence for architecture, is psychologically and culturally expressed in and through our ‘pre-disposition’ to make sense of ourselves as people who inhabit a place through building. Into this Heideggerian-Jungian conception Winters folds Gottfried Semper’s account of the four elements of architecture. In the mid-19th century Semper argued that all architecture stems from and articulates four ‘elements’: the hearth around which people gather; the enclosure or walls that separate inside from outside; the roof that protects from sun and rain; and the mound upon which structures are built. Winters urges that Semper’s “elements are to be seen as our responses to pre-dispositional needs . . . [t]hey provide suitable response to a more general motive [i.e. the need for dwelling.” (p. 155)

     Architectural Meaning: As noted above, for Winters the kind of meaningfulness distinctive of works of art is that of ‘aesthetic ideas’ in Kant’s sense. How does artistic meaning, that is, the possession of aesthetic ideas, arise in the case of architecture? Winters approaches it by analogy with Richard Wollheim’s account of how artistic paintings acquire meaning (see p. 159). According to Winters, Wollheim claims that “[t]he medium of painting is such that the materials of the painter are mobilized toward representational ends” (p. 115); and Winters later re-states this point without elaboration as “the application of paint to a flat surface in order to develop representational content explains the medium through its exploitation of properties of the paint-as-applied” (p. 199), where the properties of ‘paint-as-applied’ are that a viewer of such paint is aware both of the material properties of the paint and of what the paint represents (p. 96, with reference to Wollheim (1987)). Since Winters accepts without qualification the Kantian conception of artistic meaning across the individual arts as consisting of works’ embodying aesthetic ideas, he must be identifying the representational content of artistic paintings as a type of aesthetic idea. But Winters offers not a single word of explication on this point, and instead turns to asserting and re-asserting that a work of architecture’s having some function in no way blocks its status as a work of fine art, since architecture as an art form is an instance of adherent beauty.

     Responses on dwelling and artistic meaning: As is evident from my summaries, on both points Winters’s accounts are so brief and unelaborated that first of all one just wants fuller statements and elucidations. Further, I have no sense at all of how Winters might respond to criticisms, in particular of any involving a rejection of the Kantian framework. Another major discontent with Winters’s account is perhaps pedantic, but inevitable: his explicit statements of both Heidegger’s account of dwelling and the fourfold and of Wollheim’s account of the artistic medium of painting are highly idiosyncratic and at best misleading in their very partial character. For example, what Heidegger actually writes about dwelling in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ is: “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that cares-for each thing in its own nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this caring-for.” (I give the translation from Julian Young (2002), a book that gives a careful, documented account of Heidegger’s conception of dwelling and its internal connection with the doctrine of the fourfold). Nothing of this ‘caring-for’ shows up in Winters’s account. With regard to Wollheim, Winters writes as if unaware that for Wollheim artistic painting possesses not just representational content, but also expression as kinds of what Wollheim called ‘primary’ meaning, as well as an indeterminately large class of kinds of ‘secondary’ meaning arising from the ways in which artistic painters elaborate primary meaning.

     General responses: Abstracting from problems that arise from exceptionally brief and fragmentary statement of his claims and failure to provide explications, one might still raise a number of significant objections that point to ways in which the philosophy of architecture might be pursued differently. First of all, one might object to the untroubled adherence to the conception of the fine arts and of Kantian aesthetics as the most fruitful way of thinking about architecture as an art form. The modern system of the fine arts was, as famously diagnosed by Kristeller, an artifact of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and has been widely criticized and mostly rejected, in practice, in institutions, and in philosophical aesthetics, for over half a century. Winters’s quasi-Kantian conception of the arts as having ‘beauty’ for their goal is quaint, to say the least.

     Secondly, one might raise a host of questions about Winters’s conception of use or function. He writes as if unaware of a large and heterogeneous body of philosophical writing that puts pressure on the simple understanding of artifacts as things made to have a single function or use, a corpus that includes works by Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Barry Allen, and Beth Preston. Moreover, in following Kant on adherent beauty, he writes that the centrality of function to architecture necessarily introduces conceptual constraints upon artistic building, but he misses the point that in art constraints characteristically play a role in the creation of a range of kinds of artistic meaningfulness (on this see, for example, Elster (1983)).

    On account of these massive problems with Winters’s book—the fragmentary argumentation, undefended and seemingly obsolete framework, idiosyncrasy without illumination, failure to consider a great deal of obviously relevant literature—there is little to recommend. The good news perhaps is that there’s a great deal of work to be done in the philosophy of architecture.

References:

Barry Allen, Artifice and Design (2008)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (1983)

Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion (2007)

Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997)

-----Review of Winters (2007) in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2008)

Martin Heidegger, The Turning’ (1950), in The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays (1977)

-----‘The Thing’ (1951) and ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1954), in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)

Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

Paul O. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts” (1951-2) in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (1980)

Dominic Lopes, Beyond Art (2014)

Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (1985)

Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind (2013)

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (2002)

Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture  (1851)

Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention (2022, originally 1965-66)

Edward Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture (2007)

-----Architectural Aesthetics: Appreciating Architecture as an Art (2023)

Richard Wollheim, “Are the Criteria for Works of Art Aesthetically Relevant?” in Art and its Objects (1980)

-----Painting as an Art (1987)

Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (2002)

Reflections and Responses: On Tay Tay

     Recently I learned from Freddie DeBoer’s blog that NYU has a Taylor Swift question on its application form. This reminded me that about a decade ago, the wisest of men, Felipe Gutterriez, told me that my ignorance of Swift and her music was culpable, and that I really should get with the 21st century program. So I watched one time on YouTube the video of her hit ‘Shake It Off’. Alas, I couldn’t get past the fact that it looked like someone had daubed Audrey Hepburn with lipstick after she’d fallen into a vat of liquid white chocolate. Though Voltaire warned me with his truism when he was invited back to an orgy for seconds--“Once a philosopher, twice a pervert”—I decided to risk perversion and give Swift a second try. A trip to Los Angeles, with long hours sitting in traffic, was the perfect setting for listening twice to Swift’s canonical album 1989.

       By the sheerest and most fortunate of chances, I returned to find a Taylor Swift questionnaire. Of course I filled it out immediately and sent it off to NYU. I post it here, knowing that my answers will likely go viral. Having just read Jarett Kobek’s i hate the internet, I know my fate:

1.     How many thousands of hours have you listened to Taylor Swift?

Answer: .05

2.     What is your favorite Taylor song?

Answer: I haven’t heard it yet.

3.     What is Taylor’s greatest virtue as a songwriter?

Answer: She finds the hooks in the patter. In 1932 George Gershwin wrote: “The rhythms of American popular music are more or less brittle; they should be made to snap, and at times to crackle.” Swift don’t got rhythm, but she do got snap and crackle.

4.     Who orchestrates Taylor’s songs?

Answer: The love child of Phil Spector and General Jack D. Ripper. It’s as if in every song there’s a war in the distance: attack helicopters, raiding bombers, and a charging brigade all playing synthesizers and drum-kits. I kept expecting the songs to end with the 1812 Overture.

5.     Everybody says that Taylor’s songs are all about her break-ups. Comment:

Answer: You can’t shake that one off. My idea is that love songs are on a spectrum with ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ in the middle, and ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Why don’t we get drunk and screw?’ at the ends. There’s no passion, no yearning, no life-affirming vulgarity, no grief, no regret in Swift’s songs. Instead it’s as if the sentiments of a jaded 25 year-old woman are expressed in the vocabulary and emotional armature of a 15 year-old girl.  Swift’s persona sings as if ‘relationships’ are nothing but persistent irritants in an otherwise Instagrammable life.

6.     When do you expect to next listen to Taylor?

Answer: On Monday after my lobotomy.

On Alva Noë’s The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, Part Four: Beyond Boring

     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)