Nicholas Wolterstorff
"Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying"
(2003)
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I
From Friday, March 15 through Sunday, March 17, 2002, the Vienna Philharmonic performed four concerts in New York City, three in Carnegie Hall, and one, on Sunday evening, in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Two of the three Carnegie Hall concerts were enthusiastically reviewed inside the Arts section of the
New York Times
of Tuesday, March 19, by one of the
Times
regulars, Allan Kozinn. The heading for the review was "Fresh Power in Familiar Works." In his review, Kozinn writes that Bernard Haitink, the conductor of the Carnegie Hall concerts,
imposed order and an almost narrative sense of drama on [Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8] without taming it or smoothing its raw emotional edges. The Vienna players were in their element: the brass and winds produced the textured chords that are central to this orchestra's trademark sound, but it was the dusky, dynamically fluid string playing that gave the performance its soul.... The Schubert Ninth, on the Saturday program, was appealing in a similarly visceral way. Its familiar themes were writ large and driven hard, yet there was also sufficient transparency in the orchestra's sound that details of the music's inner lines sometimes shone through and altered the perspective.
The review of the concert in St. Patrick's Cathedral took up three columns on the front page of the Arts section, and then continued inside with three columns at the top of page 5, side by side with the two columns of the other review. The concert was described as a "free program to honor the victims of Sept. 11"—this being the date, in 2001, that a terrorist attack destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. The review was headed "A Somber Memorial from the Vienna Philharmonic." The reviewer, another of the
Times
regulars, James R. Oestreich, wrote,
The memorial program anchored a basic sense of mourning in the Christian season of the Passion, centering on Haydn's unrelentingly somber "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross." The evening opened with the solemn Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. It ended with Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," a simple consolatory choral work, performed without applause and with everyone in the audience holding a lighted candle.
One concertgoer was quoted as saying afterward, "After all the angst and the anger and the hassles of the last few months, the Mozart was like a benediction. It seems O.K. to let go a little, to let the dead rest in peace." Another attendee was quoted as saying, about the whole evening, "It is a warm, wonderful gesture [on the part of the Vienna Philharmonic]. It is very generous and very healing."
How unthinkably rude it is, even within the social norms of New York City, Planet Earth, ca. 2002, to subject this
attendee's
pronouncement to the scrutiny of
analytic philosophy!
The mere reluctance to accept such a statement at face value, and the temerity to express any such reluctance, in whatever manner and to whatever degree, is just
rude,
whether or not it is also
analytic.
When someone says that there has been
healing,
it is rude enough to ask,
"How do you know that?"
We can easily name standpoints from which the statement "I have healed" is much more difficult to evaluate than the statement "X politician took a bribe," yet the latter is conventionally far more amenable to cross examination than the former.
Further, we have (so far) no definition of "healing." We probably do not
need
such a definition if we have, instead, sufficient familiarity and context with which to construct one (probably tacitly). It seems unlikely that the person harvesting the quote (presumably the critic) knows the source sufficiently well to claim this kind of
de facto
access to a tacit definition. It seems less likely yet that our author here is in such good stead. In the daily run of things this is unproblematic; in the analytic environment, it would be conventionally be assumed, I think, that
the reader cannot possibly
know the source of such a statement well enough to do without some more rigorous defining of terms and parsing of utterances.
The pragmatist rejoinder that
"everyone knows what "healing" means . . . , asshole,"
fails out here in Professorland, even if it ought to be (must in any case be) sufficient just to get through the parts of the day that come in between bouts of analyticity.
Ideally I should next offer a comprehensive and sophisticated parsing of "healing" which pulls together the best medical, semantic and pragmatic accounts of the concept; then I should apply this in depth to the case at hand in order to see if the declaration above can be firmly accepted or rejected, or at least deemed plausible or implausible. The bad news is that I'm not competent to do this. The good news is that, even so, there is plenty that can be said short of such a tedious exercise.
Because the title of the paper references observable behaviors, and because "healing" is, it would seem in this instance, less amenable (though perhaps not wholly un-amenable) to that kind of observation, I can't be sure that the admonition to philosophy that it
handle
more of these things (and handle them better) was actually intended to point up the similarity of a concept like "healing" with so many other central concepts in analytic philosophy of art; but I do think this is the result. We face one of the same problems with "healing" as we do with "contemplation," "distance," and "beauty." Cognitive accounts of these things are elusive, and if we do chance upon a convincing one it hardly ever resolves the old philosophical questions for us anyway, and we are thus thrown back upon those questions, now armed with at least one newly minted piece of empirical data, certainly, but on the whole facing much the same impasses.
I think this is why we seem always thrown back upon
the problems approach.
One need not believe in a
Platonic heaven of philosophical problems
to develop an aversion to pragmatism. For me all it has taken is to have lived long enough to have developed some rich tacit understandings of my conspecifics, to have fielded plenty of
"generous and healing"
sorts of ascriptions
vis-à-vis
some artifact of social action, and to have been utterly unable to take seriously the vast majority of them.
We can perfectly well cobble together a pragmatic definition of "healing" that will apply better the closer we remain to the empirical data that informed it (and less the further); but if so, then we have neither begun nor ended with a
principled
account of the concept; the only route to principled or deductive thinking, if we cannot take the empirical route, is to enshrine some pragmatic account as a (Platonic?) "problem," and then to "approach" it. This sounds circular, but it need not be. What I mean, using the present example of "healing," is that we can always begin by doing exactly what I, slightly "rude" and socially inept as I am, have opened this discussion by refusing to do: we can simply accept, from the outset, that
everyone knows
what is meant by the attendee's statement; we can pretend that this meaning is principled or Platonic or deductive. We cannot actually prove that the pragmatic account is principled; instead, we are faking it. That is the
logical
flaw in the maneuver. But there is no circularity. I think we can assume we have avoided that pitfall. Why? Because our ostensibly universal "pragmatic" account is inherently broader than the context in which this remark was made. We seemingly do not have very much context, but we have more than enough of it, actually, to not have to worry about circularity. And so at that point we have reduced all of this to a simple, age-old problem: the problem of alignment (or lack thereof) between
word
and
action.
In remarks delivered during the concert, "Clemens Hellsberg, the orchestra's president, elaborated on the idea of art as a gift of God, holding out 'a sense of eternity and with it an idea of the fulfillment of our desire for peace and harmony.' Mr. Hellsberg cited the Mozart in particular, 'without a doubt, a gift of God.'" I think we can safely infer that Mr. Hellsberg made no such comments at the Carnegie Hall concerts.
The significance of making or not making such
comments,
once again, hinges entirely upon what the comments mean! And who could find much meaning in the above?
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The reviewer of the cathedral concert observed, "amplification in echoey acoustics made it hard to judge tone quality"; he was willing, though, to give the benefit of the doubt to the players. And he noted that the fact that the audience extended well beyond the orchestra's usual following at Carnegie Hall, a wonderful thing in itself, was evident from the applause between movements of the Haydn and even during one movement. A shame," he added, "for although such enthusiasm should in most cases not be discouraged (and no one thought to do so here), the intense mood of this piece does not wear interruption or celebration well."
There was one note that was struck by both reviewers. Until a year ago, the Vienna Philharmonic had never allowed any women into the orchestra; now it has two in their first, trial year. Allan Kozinn took note that, "as always, when the Vienna Philharmonic performs, protesters outside Carnegie Hall held placards and distributed leaflets deploring the orchestra's disinclination to hire women. Their complaints have had some resonance." And James Oestreich quoted Mr. Hellsberg, the orchestra's president, as saying about "the women's issue," as well as certain humanitarian efforts on the part of the symphony, "For me, it is not a question of what we have to be but of what we have to do." (I find it an odd choice of words to describe the Vienna Philharmonic as having had, all these years, a "disinclination" to hire women. "Refusal" seems more apt.)
One of my theses in this paper is that although our prominent philosophers of art of the past two and a half centuries have been very articulate in theorizing about concerts of the sort that took place in Carnegie Hall, they have been tongue-tied in speaking of concerts of the sort that took place in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Or more precisely: they have simply taken no notice, in their theorizing, of such concerts. You will not find them trying to understand why people would hold candles at a concert, you will not find them trying to understand what would lead someone to say that the music was "like a benediction," and that it was very healing. The fact that the "amplification in echoey acoustics made it hard to judge tone quality" would have destroyed for them the worth of the concert.
Well, to
hold candles at a concert
is of course a very different kind of thing than
to say
that one has done so. Start there.
Let me emphasize that when I make this claim about our prominent philosophers of art of the past two and a half centuries, I do not just mean our prominent analytic philosophers of art, I mean our prominent philosophers of art, period. I mean to include the continentals. It may just be that had
Theodor Adorno
been visiting
Monroe Beardsley
in New York City on Sunday, March 17, 2002, they would have decided to go together to St. Patrick's Cathedral. But
the theories they had developed would not have enabled them to theorize about
what went on
. Neither of them ever theorized about the significance of
commemorative art
or
memorial concerts
.
Neither of them ever theorized about why an audience would find it appropriate to hold lighted candles during a concert performance of Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus."
The statement that Adorno
never
theorized about
this sort of thing would be very interesting to litigate. It would be easy enough to argue that
what went on
at the Cathedral
does
instantiate any number of Adorno's
theories quite overtly, e.g. it evinces precisely the "fetish character." That ascription really is no more or less plausible than the ascription of generosity and healing, and the path to evaluating it is just as fraught.
In rebuttal, it could be shown that this is a jaundiced view: it would be
quite rude,
once again, to
theorize
about
the Cathedral concert
only
as an Adornoist; it could be argued (successfully, I think) that one has accomplished little and neglected much this way; but I don't think it could be argued that an Adornoist could not or would not turn up anything actionable here. That statement is a bit fishy. It arrives with a long list of hidden premises attached, e.g. that if people have held candles, that means these people have
found
it appropriate
to do so in this instance. They may merely have arrived and quickly "found" that everyone already present was holding candles, that the candles were provided by the institution rather than by the patrons, and that the local news crews did not just happen to wander by on a slow news day.
By that time this is definitely "not even philosophy," and that is okay. Wolterstorff will eventually argue for the necessity of
a sociopolitical analysis of contemporary society
as a necessary companion to whatever "philosophy of art" is to be done. He would do better to start more modestly with a complete and empirically verifiable "analysis" of candle-holding.
...
It cannot be that the memorial use of music is too bizarre for the theorist to pay attention to; there is no indication in Oestreich's review that he found it bizarre. He did not like the clapping, and the sound quality left much to be desired; but he does not suggest that he found it bizarre. Nor can it be that this use of music is too minor for it to be worth the theorist's time. Three thousand people were in attendance at the cathedral, many more than ever listen to a concert in Carnegie Hall, and Oestreich tells us that the cathedral concert attracted a larger cross-section of the population than Carnegie Hall concerts typically do. So here is one of the questions that I will be pursuing in this paper: Why have our theorists ignored the memorial and commemorative uses of art?
If the
uses
of art are themselves a question for the
theorists,
then we have many fewer questions to answer once we've decided that we
already know
the "uses."
With each very confident statement about what has happened, the question I find ever more pressing is:
is this actually what has happened?
When you go to Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC—I was ready to say, "when you go to
see"
the memorial; but that did not sound right—when you
go to
the Vietnam Memorial,
Well...
If you don't expect to
see
it, you don't
go
.
And if you don't
see
it, you haven't really
gone.
"TE-ddy . . . ? Oh, TE-ddy . . . ?"
you descend into a gash in the earth, with the names of those killed in the war inscribed on the wall of the gash. When I entered the memorial one day, what struck me immediately was the silence. And then, that I was mirrored in the wall, darkly. Shortly I saw people searching for names. When they found the name they were looking for, typically they would touch it; some of them kissed it.
Typically
you don't
kiss
something
if you can't
see
it;
although I suppose you could just kiss
whatever
happens to be in front of your lips whenever you feel that "healing" is occurring;
and
that's
how we'll know
it's real this time!
Most were in tears. I personally did
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not know anyone killed in the Vietnam War; and I was opposed to the war. But I too was in tears. Our philosophers of art of the past two and a half centuries have not talked about touching and kissing as ways of engaging art; they have not talked about tears in the presence of a sculpture—
real tears
, I mean. They have talked about
art tears
.
Well,
there are many things that people do
(and an infinite number of things they
might
do)
in the presence of art
that
our philosophers of art
have not talked about.
The question is:
why
talk about
one thing or the other?
To what end?
Once again, if we
already think we know
why people have
engaged,
and if we can see them
kissing, touching, and crying
with our own two eyes, then there are not many interesting theoretical questions remaining. I can't imagine there is much left to be said about the psychology and aesthetics of "memorial" or "commemoration."
The only interesting development would be if some aspect of this outward impression had misled us; or the obverse, as I suggest above about "healing": if
there is no
outward impression to work with, or if it is difficult to detect, delicate to handle, easy to misconstrue, etc.
II
Let me begin my discussion by observing that philosophers in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy have seldom discussed, in any thorough and systematic way, the intersection of art and politics, in spite of the fact that the philosophy of art and the philosophy of politics have both been areas of lively activity within analytic philosophy over the past thirty or forty years. By contrast, when one looks outside Anglo-American philosophy to Continental philosophy, and to adjacent domains of the humanities in American universities such as literary studies, film studies, cultural studies, art history, and the like, one finds researchers avidly exploring the connections of art, politics, and philosophy. My opening question is: Why is this?
Because the value of
the humanities
is not self-evident to administrators or legislators; therefore, humanities people have to give it the old
hard sell
just to stay in business.
Why have Anglo-American analytic philosophers, unlike their fellow philosophers on the Continent and unlike their fellow scholars in the humanities in American universities, been so reluctant to explore the intersection of art and politics?
I think we've gone question-begging again, as with the statement that Adorno "[n]ever theorized about the significance of commemorative art." Perhaps these philosophers did not set up camp at
the intersection of art and politics,
perhaps they did not plant or wave any flags there, but it is possible to say plenty (everything, actually) about the ol' "intersection"
without
being a flag-waving theorist of political art. If the
connections
have not been articulated so explicitly, that does not mean they have not been made at all.
I don't know much Beardsley, but
his last appearance in this space
seemed to me to draw some very explicit "connections" between art and politics. The defect, if that's what it is, is not that no such connection has been made; rather, it is that such connections, per Wolterstorff's sensibilities, are not
poignant
or
salient
ones. If it is to be shown that our man's instincts here are generalizable principles rather than mere ideological commitments, that argument awaits its excursus.
Similarly, the passage from "The Intentional Fallacy" which contains the line, "The poem belongs to the public," seems to me quite overtly "political," it's just not the same political
orientation
as the coded language of "intersection" denotes, and it's not half as poignant as crying and kissing,
I do not think we are dealing here with a happenstance anomaly: it is not accidental that Monroe Beardsley, John Rawls, and all the rest of us who are analytic philosophers working in philosophy of art or political philosophy have failed to say anything significant about the intersection between art and politics. It has to do, on the one hand, with the dominant character of analytic philosophy, and, on the other, with the ideology of art that is taken for granted by almost all the philosophers who have reflected on art over the past two and a half centuries, be they analytic or Continental.
I recognize that it is foolhardy to try to give a brief characterization of analytic philosophy—or even a lengthy characterization. It has not been a movement in the usual sense;...
On the other hand, I do not think it is just a certain habit of mind or rhetorical style. Many analytic philosophers would say that analytic philosophy is distinguished by the high value it accords to clarity and rigor, they would quickly go on to draw an invidious contrast with the mushiness and impenetrability of Continental philosophy.
I'm happy enough to work with the affirmative statement and leave the
invidious contrasts
to others!
Some Continental philosophers bridle at the charge that the analytic philosopher sets higher store by clarity and rigor than they do;...
I find this whole argument pointless in general and irrelevant to our purposes here.
Me too. Can we get on with it?
The reason analytic philosophers have paid so little attention to the intersection of art with politics is not that they think so highly of rigor of thought and clarity of expression.
There are two quite different ways that one could set about answering the question, "What sort of philosophy is analytic philosophy?" One way is the narrative way, the other, the systematic way. I think the narrative way is all-in-all better.
Ugh.
What makes a person an analytic philosopher is that she places herself within a certain philosophical story—...
UGH!!
For our purposes here, the narrative would be a diversion, however; what is relevant are certain systematic features of analytic philosophy.
I interpret analytic philosophy as shaped, above all, by the answer it offers to the following question: Given the growth of the empirical and hermeneutic
Wissenschaften,
what is left for the philosopher to do?
Wissenschaft on Wikipedia
The question was first articulately posed by Kant although there are adumbrations in Thomas Reid. In its
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essentials, the answer of the analytic philosopher to the question is the same as the answer Kant gave:
what is left over for the philosopher to explore is the realm of necessities.
Admittedly, that is not sufficient to differentiate philosophy from all other
Wissenschaften;
mathematics and logic also deal with necessities, so one has to go on to explain what differentiates philosophy from those. But the point is that
the philosopher does not deal with
the contingent.
That is left to
the nomological and hermeneutic disciplines.
The philosopher deals with
the necessary, the eternal.
Thus it is that "What is it?" questions loom so large in analytic philosophy, along with the relentless offering of counterexamples to the answers proposed; witness all the ink spilled in philosophy of art by analytic philosophers over such questions as, What is a work of art? What is expression? and What is representation? Socrates was the first analytic philosopher. And thus it is that questions of entailment among propositions ("judgments," in Kant's language) loom so large in analytic philosophy.
One thing I'm gathering from digging into this literature is that, indeed, these are vexing questions; and yet, irony-of-ironies, they are not always
necessary
questions. You may not always need to have these answers simply to go about your art-day; you may not even need them in order to proceed
quite
analytically
on some question of import; and this is itself demonstrable analytically, some of the time.
As best I can tell at this (my own) early juncture, this seems to be the shortest route around the insistence on
clarity and rigor: to find that it's unnecessary to take the trip in the first place. This comports nicely with my own peculiarly divided loyalties between practice and theory. I'm the one who has dismissed most of art theory as "answers in search of questions."
For me, however, "the intersection of art and politics" is a particularly grisly crime scene. The primal offense of theory has been its deficit of rigor, and it is for precisely this reason that the analytic accounts, e.g., of
representation,
and
expression,
are actually necessary
to engage with. Most of the questions asked by theorists of the "intersection" have already been answered. But the theorists don't like the answers, and those few among them who have actually bothered to look will find plenty of filibusters close at hand.
When Richard Rorty tells the story of analytic philosophy, he tells it as the story of a movement whose fundamental Kantian premises were systematically undermined in such a way that Darwinian pragmatism is now its only viable heir. The distinction between the necessary and the contingent—or as he would put it, between the analytic and the synthetic—was fundamental to analytic philosophy; Quine "showed" that the distinction is untenable, so that now it is only the ignorant or befuddled who still work with the distinction. The great bulk of analytic philosophers, myself included, would hold that Quine showed no such thing. Pragmatism was and remains a minor movement is Anglo-American philosophy.
Here is an example of the contrast with those not so shaped by Kant: most Habermas scholars regard his early (1961) book,
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
as one of his most important contribution—in spite of the fact that it took thirty years to be translated into English. It is a book of social analysis, dealing with certain features of bourgeois society. The dyed-in-the-wool analytic philosopher would say that it is not "really" philosophy. He would have to admit that it sounds very philosophical; it uses the jargon of philosophy. But it is not really philosophy; it is well,—sociology
Even I have trouble believing that this could never be a meaningful distinction!
Another prominent feature of the analytic tradition of philosophy is its near exclusive devotion to what Gadamer calls
"the problems approach" to philosophy.
The analytic philosopher talks and acts as if the questions he asks, concerning the analysis of concepts and the entailments among propositions, were located in some Platonic heaven of philosophical problems; and that their only brush with history is that they are discovered by someone at a certain time and that there is a temporal series of attempts to answer the problem. Look at almost any course anthology composed by an analytic philosopher and you will see what I mean. I have here at hand a fine anthology...
The first rubric is "The Nature and Attributes of God"; under this rubric there are selections ranging from Anselm and Aquinas to Nelson Pike and Robert Adams—the assumption being that all these authors were addressing the same problem, namely, the problem of the nature and attributes of God, with each giving a somewhat different answer.
...
Likewise, a staple rubric in anthologies in aesthetics is "The Nature of the Work of Art," with selections typically ranging from Plato to Tolstoy, through Collingwood, and on to Danto and Dickie.
Allan Bloom (I think?) says something profound on this, which I assume is not original to him: the intellectual absents himself from the immediate world and makes community with long-absent minds across history. It is
precisely
the tension between the play of contingencies, on one hand, and some irreducible human nature on the other, which gives this exercise its mandate and which is, in a sense, its implicit user manual. So this way of anthologizing actually makes perfect sense to me in the context of that sort of project; what actually ends up frustrating me about anthologies is when they contain mutilated excerpts rather than complete texts.
But Bloom is something worse even than an analytic philosopher. He's a conse—. . . a co— . . .
This habit, of
thinking of the questions philosophers ask as atemporal denizens of some Platonic realm,
is
not required
by the focus on conceptual analysis and propositional entailment.
Of course not. But I fear we have willfully talked past all manner of other reasons why the discourse has, for so long now, evinced a tendency to return and re-return to so many of the same impasses.
It would be quite possible, for example, to acknowledge that our concept of "work of art" was an eighteenth-century construction (as I think it was), to go on to ask why the concept emerged, and to conclude with some attempt to articulate the concept.
Shouldn't
an eighteenth century construction
have
dis-emerged
by now?
Likewise it would be possible to ask why some people have thought it important to have arguments for God's existence when others, even if they believed in God, thought it unnecessary or even insidious, but then go on to ask whether this or that argument
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for God's existence is in fact sound. In fact, however, such historicizing of the philosophers questions is atypical of the analytic philosopher.
That's because
to ask why some people have thought
what they have thought only ever reveals what the questioner thought when they asked the question; whereas assessment of the
soundness
of
this or that argument
is much more amenable to direct parsing and conclusive resolution. It's a simple case of analyzing only that which
can be
analyzed. That is certainly a problem, but I'll choose it every time over the psycho-voyeuristic tack, which seems more likely to end in violence than in enlightenment.
A third feature of analytic philosophy that is relevant to our purposes is that analytic philosophers are not only typically unconcerned with why figures in the history of philosophy asked the questions they did ask using the concepts they did use; they typically also do not reflect on why they themselves ask the questions they do ask and use the concepts they do use. They are unreflective about their own intellectual, social, and political location.
Well, now we're just playing pomo laser tag.
This guys counts
himself
among the analytic philosophers but will not countenance
soundness of
argument
apart from
location?
Of course location must be at least partly determinative. But if you don't like the questions being asked,
you
need to relocate, not the questioners.
They are that because they do not think it is relevant. Philosophy, if done properly, is not perspectival but objective; it tells how things look from nowhere. Qua philosopher, the analytic philosopher has no political views, philosophy is not a normative enterprise. And qua philosopher, he has no sociopolitical analysis of contemporary society. No doubt Monroe Beardsley did have political views; for all I know, he even had what might be called a sociopolitical analysis of contemporary society. But if so, I have no idea what it was, though I have read almost every- thing Beardsley wrote. Contrast him with that other great philosopher of art of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno. Sociopolitical analysis is everywhere in Adorno.
As are myriad baseless and long-debunked ascriptions of thought and belief to people he never met! Don't ask for questions to be asked if you don't want to be accountable for the answers!
The reader no doubt sees where this is going. The relative absence of discussion by analytic philosophers of the intersection between art and politics is no accident; it is exactly what one would expect.
Yep.
So when's lunch?
Suppose one assigned a typical analytic philosopher to write a paper on "The Political Significance of Art" or "The Political Significance of the Aesthetic." He would first grumble about being asked to spend his time on the margins of real philosophy, its center being metaphysics and epistemology, plus, nowadays, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language (these last developed in such a way as to be special cases of metaphysics). But if pressed, he would proceed by asking "What is a work of art?" or "What is the aesthetic?" He would go on to ask, "What is the political?" And in the time remaining, he would distinguish various senses of significance.
Well...if the professor has
assigned
the paper
without doing any of this
first, then I suppose it necessarily falls to the student to fill in the blanks! And so far that's exactly where we're at here!
Altogether, scarcely an illumination of the intersection between art and politics. I suggest that a genuinely illuminating discussion of that intersection would have to engage in sociopolitical analysis, the output being what the analytic philosopher would say is not "really" philosophy.
Well . . . indeed it probably is not
"really" philosophy
if we cannot define our terms.
If I'm not mistaken, by now the philosophers have had even more to say about what, exactly, might constitute
sociopolitical analysis
than they have about art. It's hard for me to imagine that a perusal of that literature would leave our man's assumptions here untouched!
III
I well remember my experience of reading for the first time, about forty years ago, the chapter on evaluation in Monroe Beardsley's classic book,
Aesthetics.
It was like peeling an onion.
Comments about the artist's intention in producing his work are irrelevant to aesthetic evaluation, said Beardsley. Suppose you are told that the artist achieved exactly what he intended; do you thereby know anything about the aesthetic quality of the product? Of course not. Comments about the artist's skill in producing his work are likewise irrelevant to aesthetic evaluation. Suppose you are told that the pianist played very skillfully, do you thereby know anything about the aesthetic quality of the performance? Of course not. And, in general, all comments about the genesis of a work of art are irrelevant to aesthetic evaluation.
But
aesthetic evaluation
per se
is the most
irrelevant
of all! The shortest route is open!
"In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art."
Suppose you are told that the work had a powerful emotional impact on its readers. Do you thereby know anything about its aesthetic quality? Of course not. Suppose you are told that the poems had a great political impact on those who heard the poet read them. Do you thereby
I reach for my proverbial revolver. But please, continue . . .
know anything about the aesthetic quality of the poetry? Of course not. And, in general, comments about the causal effects of works of art are irrelevant to aesthetic evaluation. Suppose you are told that the painting dealt with large and important political themes. Do you thereby know anything about the aesthetic quality of the painting?
Well . . . you definitely don't know that
dealing
with
some purported
theme
is a
cause
or an
effect
or both at once. Rather, you
are told
of the settled fact of
dealing
in
themes.
Of course not. Suppose you are told that the theme of the novel was offensively racist. Do you thereby know anything about the aesthetic quality of the novel? Of course not. And so it went, for many pages, until finally we arrived at that tiny heart of the onion, pure aesthetic qualities.
Nowhere did Beardsley ask where this idea of the aesthetic comes from, or why it is so important to isolate aesthetic qualities from other qualities. He just assumed that to treat a work of art as a work of art—rather than as a sign of your child's rapidly developing skill as a piano player, or as an item in a web of social forces, or whatever—to treat it as a work of art, you have to attend to its aesthetic qualities.
Of course it's indefensible to deny that this or that
work of art
is
in fact any number of
other
things as well; in whatever sense of "is" and "things" you prefer.
There is something to the
pragmatist
synthesis with ecology (Reybrouck's "ecosemiotics") which is essential to bring in here, even if it ultimately is not very explanatory on its own. Objects do have something to do with their own reception by subjects; my sources tell me that this can be demonstrated empirically, not for just any subjects and objects, certainly, but for plenty of them. A fixation on parsing visual symbolism and literary displacement really does do a disservice both to the point Wolterstorff is trying to make here
and
to the disagreements I have with it, because it immediately lands us in pragmatic finger-crossing and endless re-interpretation. The examples given above steer clear of this; they do so by being more "ecological" than "symbolic"; but they are also unhelpful: parents are infamous for seeing
developing skill
that no stranger would agree to recognize as such; the
web of social forces
is impossible to glimpse in its totality and is in constant flux anyway. For all the handwringing over modernism and its undue pretensions, I'm not sure that a monochrome canvas, to take the obvious example, really can just be collapsed into the ol'
web
alongside these others. In order to effect that collapse, you actually have to
selectively deny
the affordance/entrainment ascription to any objects that won't play along. To unleash the "web" theory, first you have to explicate the "web," and there are more ways for that to go wrong than right, certainly; but the more important point is that
even then
there is an "ecological" aspect to reception which is not exactly "autonomous" in the old sense but certainly has
some
autonomy from social forces,
as all "cultural traditions" do.
I have only limited knowledge of Beardsley's aesthetic, but I'd say, for now, that it doesn't seem worth salvaging, not even for me. On the other hand, the admonition to
attend to
aesthetic qualities
and the absolute equation of this with
treatment
as a work of art
seems to me to have acquired all manner of newfound justification now that so many artworks arrive pre-interpreted (Sontag's
"good taste of irony"
to the letter). The old aesthetic is perhaps more in need of a mere
explanatory inversion
than of wholesale revision: we have spent too long trying to explain (really prescribe)
how
the "aesthetic" way ought to be carried out, when the real question is: what conditions are conducive to its manifestation? And of course, we already know plenty of ways for conditions to militate against it. The classic "explanatory inversion": it is not
poverty
that needs to be explained but rather
wealth.
Here, every kind of reductionist gloss, every kind of self-interest, all solipsisms, all pervasive media images, all of these stand as obvious and unequivocal examples of "ecological" destruction of "aesthetic" possibility. We can safely assume that nothing like Beardsley's aesthetic can survive for very long in that kind of environment.
True dat.
But what would a more conductive environment look like? Let's not pre-emptively decide that we don't want to live in it before we've understood what it would be!
And
[22]
as to the benefit of doing that, the answer he gave is that we get a certain kind of pleasure, delight, satisfaction, from so doing.
A questionable assertion but a noble aspiration!
Some years back I would have said the reason we get no discussion of the intersection between art and politics in Beardsley, apart from the fact that he was an analytic philosopher, is that he placed himself with great insistence in the aestheticist tradition of philosophy of art. Given his relentless attention to the aesthetic dimension, of course we will not get from him uny discussion of art's political significance. He will, of course, notice the political content of, say, Diego Rivera's and Ben Shahn's paintings: Who could miss it?
If you stopped
telling people it was there,
then eventually
a few people would
miss it;
and then
other
people would start to question
whether it was there at all;
just like
aesthetics.
He may even agree with that content. But as a philosopher of art in the aestheticist tradition, he will remind himself that political content is just irrelevant to the aesthetic qualities of the work.
I no longer think I was right about that. One of the things that made me change my mind was reading Herbert Marcuse's
The Aesthetic Dimension.
[fumbles around for notes...]
Marcuse obviously had a great deal to say about the political significance of art. To my surprise, however, I found him focused just as relentlessly on the aesthetic dimension as was Beardsley—witness the title of the book. In Marcuse, there was nothing quite like the onion-peeling passage in Beardsley; but the same ideas were at work.
The major figure in Continental aesthetics of the past half century is, of course, Adorno. But since the conclusions on the matter at hand yielded by an analysis of Adorno's work would be essentially the same as those to be drawn from Marcuse's book, and since Marcuse's book is much more accessible than anything by Adorno, let me state briefly what goes on in it.
Marcuse, along with Adorno, was a member of the Frankfurt School. As with all the prominent members of the school, he moved slowly but surely in his sociopolitical analysis from an early Marxism to a position combining Weber with Marx. The social analysis in The Aesthetic Dimension, written late in Marcuse's life, is Weberianized Marx. Or perhaps Weber is the substantive and Marx the modifier. In any case, Marcuse no longer holds that art, to be authentic, must express the consciousness of the ascending class in a given society, specifically, then, the consciousness of the proletariat in a capitalist society; he does not hold that art must be an instrument in the proletariat's revolutionary praxis.
So what then? Art must serve
humanity,
he says, specifically, humanity's comprehensive goal of liberation from every form of social repression and natural constraint. The victory of the proletariat is no more than a phase in the attainment of that goal. This is how Marcuse puts it:
The permanent transformation of society under the principle of freedom is necessitated not only by the continued existence of class interests. The institutions of a socialist society, even in their most democratic form, could never resolve all the conflicts between the universal and the particular, between human beings and nature, between individual and individual. Socialism does not and cannot liberate Exos from Thanatos. Here is the limit which drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom: it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced. (pp. 71-72)
Art is called to serve, and much of it does in fact serve, human liberation in all its dimensions. "If art 'is' for any collective consciousness at all, it is that of individuals united in their awareness of the universal need for liberation—regardless of their class position" (p. 31). "By virtue of its transhistorical, universal truths, art appeals to a consciousness which is not only that of a particular class, but that of human beings as 'species beings,' developing all their life-enhancing faculties" (p. 29).
How does art do this? How does it serve the cause of human liberation in all its dimensions? It does so by its
form.
With literary works mainly in mind, though intending what he says to hold for all the arts, Marcuse says, "We can . . . define 'aesthetic form' as the result of the transformation of a given content (actual or historical, personal or social fact) into a self-contained whole: a poem, play, novel, etc. The work is thus 'taken out' of the constant process of reality and assumes a significance and truth of its own" (p. 8). If this transformation "is to pierce and comprehend the everyday reality, it must be subjected to aesthetic stylization: it must be made into a novel, play, or story, in which every sentence has its own rhythm, its own weight. This stylization reveals the universal in the
[23]
particular social situation" (pp. 22-23). The essence of aesthetic form consists in a transforming stylization of reality, the result being a unified entity having a significance of its own.
If the artist has succeeded in creating a genuine world for her work of fiction, by way of transforming ordinary reality, that world of her work then constitutes both a criticism of the established order and a sign of release from its dominance by its evocation of an alternative. "The aesthetic transformation turns into indictment—but also into a celebration of that which resists injustice and terror, and of that which can still be saved" (p. 45). Marcuse writes:
The radical qualities of art, that is so say, its
indictment of the established reality
and its
invocation of the beautiful image of liberation
are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art
transcends
its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence. Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible: the world formed by art is recognized as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality . . . . The inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and semibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions.
Under the law of aesthetic form, the given reality is necessarily
sublimated:
the immediate content is stylized, the "data" are reshaped and noordered in accordance with the demands of the art form, which requires that even the representation of death and destruction invoke the need or hope—a need rooted in the new consciousness embodied in the work of art. (pp. 6-8)
Art challenges the monopoly of the established reality to determine what is "real," and it does so by creating a fictitious world which is nevertheless more real than reality itself. To ascribe the nonconformist, autonomous qualities of art to aesthetic form is so place them outside "engaged literature," outside the realm of praxis and production (p. 22). The distance and estrangement from praxis constitute the emancipatory value of art. (p. 19)
The resemblance to Beardsley and the difference from Beardsley are equally striking. The focus on the aesthetic qualities of the art object is as relentless as it is in Beardsley; Marcuse and Beardsley alike are located in the aestheticist tradition. They divide when it comes to the point, the benefit, of our engagement with the aesthetic dimension. Beardsley follows Kant: the point of the engagement is that peculiar pleasure that one experiences in beholding the aesthetic qualities of things. Marcuse is closer to Hegel: the point of engagement with the aesthetic is that thereby one is confronted with the organic unity of the aesthetically excellent object, this unity functioning as a critique of extant social reality, as a symbol of what that reality might be instead, and as the assurance that social reality can indeed be different.
What makes such a vision possible for Marcuse is that he has a sociopolitical analysis into which he can fit his reflections on art, and that he does not view that sociopolitical analysis as not "real" philosophy.
In that last regard, it is again Hegel who is his forebear rather than Kant.
Well . . . I'm not sure how we ever could philosophically justify labeling art (a particular work or the institution broadly) as just such an
indictment
or
invocation.
Art
may
be those things, or it may not be. How to say whether or not? First we have to say what these things mean in the first place! And we have already been treated to a strawman caricature of the effort to do so. Where to go from here?
(I happen to suspect that such rhetoric is basically meaning-less. Saying exactly why is rather difficult...)
Similarly, there's no need to get all huffy about whether
sociopolitical analysis
counts as
"real" philosophy.
We can be perfectly fair to the analysts thus implicated by meeting them where they live, and asking: is this "sociopolitical analysis" either valid or true? And how would we know?
(Almost none of it is either valid or true, but again, saying precisely why is very difficult. It's the "bullshit asymmetry principle,"
perhaps
avant la lettre
in this case.
IV
Suppose we take Monroe Beardsley as a typical member of the analytic tradition of philosophy of art in the latter half of the twentieth century, and suppose we take Herbert Marcuse, in his late book
The Aesthetic Dimension,
as a typical member of the Continental tradition of philosophy of art in that same period. Then what accounts for the fact that in the Continental tradition we find rich discussions of the intersection between art and politics, whereas in the analytic tradition we find almost nothing of that sort, is that these two traditions are working with very different understandings of the task of the philosopher.
Qua philosopher, Marcuse has a sociopolitical analysis of society in general, and of contemporary society in particular, into which he can fit his reflections on the aesthetic and the political.
Qua philosopher, Beardsley has no such analysis.
Hmm . . . But as our man himself has already theorized, there is at least one item missing from this combo platter: a philosopher
could yes
have
an analysis of society in general
and (s)he
could also
have plenty of
reflections on the aesthetic and the political,
and yet (s)he may not be able to
fit
those "reflections" into that "analysis."
The reason for lack of "fit" may be . . .
exactly what lack of "fit" implies
here about the "analysis" and about the "reflections";
exactly
what it implies about them both separately and together; and it may be that the philosopher neglects to "fit" them together because this, for once, is an
honest
philosopher, one who understands that these are incommensurate levels of analysis and it that is impossible to have equally high confidence in the conclusions reached by an analysis of society as in those reached by an analysis of art.
To simply assume that this thesis of ill fit is
dis-honest
is quite the
un-analytic
maneuver indeed!
At the beginning of my discussion I observed that Anglo-American writers outside the field of analytic philosophy have in recent years proliferated reflections on the intersection of art and the political. The reason, as I see it, is that they too have been working with one and another sociopolitical analysis—
usually not Marxist analysis any more, but African American analysis, feminist
[24]
analysis, colonialist analysis, Deweyan pragmatist analysis, cosmopolitan analysis, and so forth.
That's a lot of
analyses
of
society!
And they don't all reach the same conclusions! But they are all equally well fit to "fit"?
V
On the other hand, the reader can also begin to see why, on my analysis, we are no more likely to get from a Marcuse than from a Beardsley an analysis of the candles, the consolation, and the healing at the St. Patrick's Cathedral concert, or of the touching, the kissing, and the crying at the Vietnam Memorial. Let me become explicit.
The first chapter of Clive Bell's
Art
is one of the most stunning examples of English prose that I know of—rather overwrought, I concede, but stunning. The chapter is titled "The Aesthetic Hypothesis," and it closes with these famous words:
The perfect lover (of art), he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of time and place. To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent. If the forms of a work are significant is preven ance is imelevant. Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures in the Louvre he is carried on the same flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more than four thousand years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried. It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal. Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; . . . the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great art remains stable and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstary
What is coming to expression here is obviously the aestheticist tradition in its Kantian rather
than its Hegelian version.
I suppose that when I first read this passage, many years ago, I felt confirmed in what I then believed. I now think it is a pack of nonsense. I do not doubt that the ancient Chaldeans were filled with emotion when bebolding those immense bas-relief figures. But one thing we can be certain of is that they were not carried away on floods of aesthetic emotion. "Oh great is the king" is what they felt and thought; probably they fell down on their knees and touched foreheads to earth.
Why would an intelligent, reflective person like Bell say such a foolish thing, assuming that he had not simply allowed himself to be carried away on the floods of his own rhetoric? For some years I thought it was because those members of our cultural elite who write about art—Bell being an example of the species—have had their eye almost exclusively on our modern Western institution of high art, and on art as it functions within that institution. If we are talking about the art of that institution, then what Bell said is roughly speaking correct—hyperbolic, yes, but on the right track. I still think there is truth in that explanation, but it is incomplete. What has to be added is that we who belong to the cultural elite of our society have done our thinking about art with an ideology, originating in the eighteenth century, that legitimates the institution. It is our embrace of that ideology that leads us to think about then Institution as we do.
Before I describe the ideology, ever so briefly and without offering evidence to support my claim that this is in fact our ideology, let me give credit where credit is due. Although the presence of the ideology now seems obvious to me, it was in fact two writers who opened my eyes: M. H. Abrams, with his two books,
Natural Supernaturalism
and
The Mirror and the Lamp,
and Tzvetan Todorov, with his superb essay, "The Romantic Crisis," in his
Theories of the Symbol.
The cornerstone of the ideology is the conviction that in the eighteenth century, art finally came into its own, freed from the dictates of princes and prelates to follow its own internal laws and dynamics. Now finally the possibility of artistic freedom opened up. Now finally it was possible for the public to treat works of art as works of art rather than as instruments in the service of one and another extraneous interest. Now finally there was art for its own sake—art for art's sake—rather than just art for the sake something other than art.
In the
eighteenth
century?
Now finally an
[25]
authentic artworld began to emerge—distinct from the world of the church, the world of the academy, the world of politics, and so forth.
The phrases that I am using here—"coming into its own," "treating a work of art as a work of art," "artistic freedom," and all the rest—can be found hundreds of times over in the writings of theorists about art from the middle of the eighteenth century on into Danto, Dickie, and their present-day progeny. But when I use the phrases, I do not only have in my mind's eye all those underlinings in my copies of books and essays on philosophy of art; I also have in mind
Max Weber.
For this is of course paradigmatically Weberian thought and language.
The hallmark of modernization for Weber is the
differentiation
of society into distinct sectors,
with activity within each distinct sector liberated from external influence and freed to follow its own internal laws and dynamics in pursuit of its own distinct value.
Well . . .
the dictates of princes and prelates
are a very specific kind of
external influence!
Who wouldn't need to be
freed
from that?
The old unity of an undifferentiated society is destroyed; modernization is fragmentation. Economic activity is liberated from the restrictions of political and ecclesiastical institutions to follow its own internal dynamics in pursuit of its own inherent value, namely, "the bottom line";
Wissenschaftlich
activity is liberated from princes and prelates to follow its own internal dynamics in pursuit of its own inherent value, namely, ever more comprehensive explanations of fact; and artistic activity is likewise liberated from external influence to follow its own laws and dynamics in pursuit of its own inherent value. What might that value be? The aesthetic, of course. Art comes into its own when the aesthetic becomes its governing value. When that happens, then artistic freedom takes its place alongside economic freedom, academic freedom, and all the rest.
Even more fundamental in Weber's theory of modernization than his claim that a modernized society is a differentiated society, is
his claim that rationalization is both what accounts for the differentiation and what, in turn, accounts for activity within the differentiated spheres.
Having driven the political sphere to differentiate itself from the economic, the ecclesiastical, the academic, and so forth, rationalization then proceeds to rationalize activity within the political sphere; governmental bureaucracy, with which everyone in the modern world is exquisitely familiar, is the principal manifestation of such rationalization. So too, each in its own way, for the academic sphere, the economic sphere, the legal sphere.
It is obscure to me whether Weber thought that activity within the artistic sphere is also rationalized. Most definitely that is not the view of our reigning ideology of art.
My own
view
is
one form of this, I suppose, for which I can go to Rank for the basic tenets: "aesthetic" is a matter of reception and leaves all matters of
creation
untouched (as does, oddly, this rabidly contra-aestheticist paper); and for Rank it is progressive "concretization" of the formerly "abstract" that is the ultra-long-term trend which begins long before
modernization
and will, presumably, survive it.
"Concretization" is not "rationalization," but I think we can point to many obvious examples where it is the
necessary first step
down that road!
Art is the social other. Here, in the sphere of art, we are freed from the heavy hand of rationalized fragmentation that is laid over everything else in the modern world. Here, imagination has free play. Here, our impulses are liberated from oppression. Here, organic unities are created. Such rationality as is to be found in art is not the instrumentally rationalized activity that pervades society generally but that distinct "interior rationality"—Kant's phrase—to be found in the organically unified work. It is on account of its social otherness that art bears salvific potential.
This is where I have to punt and read some more books. It seems clear enough to me that "a measure has become a target" here: this purported
salvific potential
has indeed been absorbed into people's "ideologies,"
so much so that all manner of rationalized interventions are deployed in order to optimize it. Asking whether or not
activity within the artistic sphere is also rationalized
doesn't quite frame that problem in the way I think it needs to be framed.
Given the aversion of analytic philosophers to sociopolitical analysis, this way of thinking of the place of art in society is taken for granted without ever being "thematized." There is no sach shyness in Continental philosophers of art. Consider some of the things Marcuse said in the passages quoted above. Art, he said, "transcends its social determination," it "emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior. The work of art is "'taken out' of the constant process of reality." It is "outside the realm of praxis and production." "The inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions."
Perhaps the best argument that there is a grain of truth to the
transcendentalist line is precisely the fact of "rationalization." i.e., The fact that we can identify a
process
of rationalization suggests awareness of a time before the change. (Yep, I've been reading Danto's pre-de-conversion work lately . . . ) And of course there sometimes is
concretization-in-order-to-rationalize
that is crude enough as to be noticeable as it is happening. But this does not
create
the work. Rather, it is a
process of change;
if not concrete change to the very form of the work, then dialogical or ontological change, projected or imposed from afar. Because (sorry to be the one to say it) as hard as this sounds, it actually is very easy;
far easier
than making art that anyone actually desires!
"The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text,
is
altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text..., they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there."
Of course Sontag's examples are arcane . . .
or are they really?
In the beforetime, before the given
"ancient texts"
had become
"unacceptable,"
they were, presumably . . .
quite
acceptable?
It is by virtue of this social otherness that "art challenges the monopoly of the established reality to determine what is 'real.'" Art's "Indictment of the established wality and its invocation of the beautiful image of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art
transcends
its social determination." It is by virtue of its transcendence of social determination that "art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible."
Art fulfills its salvific potential by stylizing reality "under the law of the Beautiful" (p. 62). It creates an organic unity in which all the particulars live together in the harmony of the
[26]
organic universal. Thereby the work is inherently both a critique of existing reality, where repression rather than organic harmony is the order of the day, and a pointer toward an eschatological future. The distance and estrangement from praxis constitute the emancipatory value of art." The Weberian ideology and language are unmistakable.
VI
It is true that in Continental philosophy of art there is more discussion of the intersection of art and politics than in analytic philosophy of art. What I trust is becoming clear, however, is that the discussion is kept by the Continental philosophers on a very tight rein. The Continental philosopher of art focuses her attention just as much on the art of our institution of high art as does the analytic philosopher, for her; too, what is all-important about such art is the aesthetic dimension thereof. For both, contemplation is that mode of engagement with art that they theorize about. Admittedly, Adorno wrote rather extensively about art other than high art, but his theme was always that such art suffers from systemic distortion. It is not being allowed to come into its own; it is suffering from economic and political pressures.
Where Continental and analytic philosophers disagree is not on the priority of the aesthetic but on the benefit to be gained from our contemplative engagement with the aesthetic dimension of works of art.
Even that disagreement should be seen within context, however. On this point there has always been disagreement within the aestheticist tradition; it is, I would say, the principal point of dispute among those who share the aestheticist ideology. Schiller, Hegel, Langer, Collingwood, Gadamer, Beardsley, Adorno, Goodman—each has his or her own view.
Let us now return to the matter of memorial art. Memorial sculpture and architecture is all about the Mall in Washington, D.C. In addition to the Vietnam Memorial, there is the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Holocaust Museum, and, most recently, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. Such art sits on the border between architecture and sculpture; call it "architectural sculpture." Is the architectural sculpture in and around the Mall art that has not yet come into its own?
Ok, cool trick. Good one, bro.
I think the answer is: The post-George Floyd monument controversies show one way (arguably among the worst-case scenarios) that all of this can go. There's no reason to heap all of that baggage on, say, the Vietnam Memorial. But clearly enough, to work with the given examples, the Vietnam Memorial is everything Marcuse's ideal artworks are not. It wears its "social determination" on its sleeve. It is firmly "situated"
within
"the given universe of discourse and behavior." Now, I'm the one who so oftens thinks that these sorts of ascriptions are unsupportable in principle. But monument controversies don't usually turn on technical questions of representation; they turn on questions of meaning. The question has not been whether or not a statue represents Robert E. Lee, but whether a statue that does represent Robert E. Lee ought still to stand in a particular place-and-time? and, Who is a legitimate stakeholder in such a question, where and when it arises?
Few of us want to have to think about that ever being remotely possible for the monuments Wolterstorff has mentioned here.
How rude!
But
we have to think about it,
at least as a remote possibility, because
it is
a possibility; and what makes it possible for
ideology
to turn violently against a monument is precisely the same set of deeds and qualities which cause people to spontaneously kiss a piece of cold marble.
That is the game that this art is playing.
You don't get to enjoy only the privileges and none of the obligations. And you don't have to look very far at all for case studies. Moreover, you can't argue that the only way to "heal" is to build a monument or hold a candle at a concert; and I
would
argue (I'm a bit of a rude one sometimes) that the public and highly symbolic nature of these spectacles increases the likelihood that the trauma will merely be
recirculated
in the onlooking
society
rather than disspated, modulated, or (yes, ideally)
transcended.
We desperately need to find an aesthetically Puritan alternative without all the Puritan guilt.
To play the transcendentalist-aestheticist game is not to outright preclude all of this. Any work could, however improbably, become important enough to a whole ideological faction that the stakes are raised. I'll take my chances with aesthetics!
These memorials do of course have aesthetic qualities; critics have commented on the aesthetic qualities of Maya's Lin's Vietnam Memorial. But the people whom I witnessed descending silently into that gash in the earth, caressing the wall where they found a name they recognized, kissing it, and quietly weeping—
those people were not engaging the aesthetic qualities of this piece of architectural sculpture.
They were doing something else.
As were the protesters elsewhere!
Frankly, I find it unacceptable to say that the Vietnam Memorial represents art not yet come into its own.
Who is saying that?
Adorno is dead!
When does an artifact
come into its own?
It comes into its own
when it is used for the purpose for which it was intended.
This seems demonstrably false as a general principle.
But the intended purpose of memorial art is precisely not contemplative engagement with its aesthetic qualities.
"The best laid plans . . . "
And, the longer you give them to go wrong, the better (worse?) your chances!
Were the day to arrive, off in the distant future, when engagement with the Vietnam Memorial was confined to contemplative engage ment with its aesthetic qualities, then it would no longer be coming into its own. The Vietnam Memorial comes into its own when it functions as a memorial; the touching, the kissing, the weeping are signs that it is so functioning.
So, our anti-prescriptivist author is actually hiding in one of prescriptivism's back rooms.
This is one of the funny things about "intentionalism" that "intentionalists" seem not to get. Intentionalism leads very easily to the "prescription" that intentions be
honored,
in whatever manner depending on the form-and-content of the given work. Merely being able to say
that there was
an intention, perhaps even being able to say speficially what the intention was, this is already quite a lot! But it is not yet "intentionalism"! Because deduction, comprehension, intuition . . . these are not ways that you
honor
someone or something; they may more easily be dis-honoring mechanisms, e.g. by showing exactly how something was done, by therefore taking some of the mystery and impressiveness out of the accomplishment.
Memorial art comes into its own when we engage it as memorial art rather than contemplatively engaging it for its aesthetic qualities. So too, work songs come into their own when we sing them to accompany our work rather than when we listen to them in our living rooms nicely performed on CDs; liturgical art comes into its own when it is used in the liturgy rather than performed in a concert hall or hung in a museum. And so forth. But is it perhaps the case that although these alternative modes of engagement with art cannot be said to represent art not come into its own, nonetheless, the contribution to our flourishing of these alternative modes of engagement is inferior to the contribution made by contemplative engagement with art for its asthetic qualities?
I have argued here that you had better well
hope
that whatever
contribution
you
experience is the
only
one, because if it's not then you won't get to have any say in the others, not even if you are an erudite "intentionalist."
I fail to see it. I fail to see that the worth—whatever one thinks that worth to be—that the worth of contemplatively engaging the aesthetic qualities of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony in Carnegie Hall is superior to the worth of engaging the Adagio of his Seventh Symphony as a memorial to the dead of September 11, in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
All perfectly fair, and probably speaks well for the author as a person! But there's no generalizable principle here. None at all.
Speaking for myself, as someone who has never even taken a philosophy class, there's nothing at all implied in the above assessment about what is and is not "real" philosophy. There's nothing implied about the superiority of kissing or contemplating. It is a question, rather, of a certain "transformation of the public sphere," which may be (though my stack of Habermas books remains untouched as I write this) why that work of Habermas', if I am to judge it solely on its title, has become so important for so many philosophers.
I fail to see that the worth of contemplatively engaging the aesthetic qualities
[27]
of Alexander Calder's "Grand Vitesse" in its plaza in Grand Rapids is superior to engaging Maya Lin's architectural sculpture as a memor ial to those who fell in the Vietnam War.
VI
Where does this leave us? In disarray? Not necessarily so. I think the way forward is to take as the fundamental reality in our theorizing about the arts not the individual artifacts but the social practices of art—practices of composition, practices of performance and display, practices of engagement. And then, secondly, to note that the social practice of contemplatively interacting with the aesthetic qualities of a work of art is but one among many of our social practices for engaging art. Interacting with works of art as memorials or commemorations is another such social practice of engagement. Once we have taken these two steps, of
establishing the social practices of art as the fundamental context for our theorizing about art,
and of
recognizing that focusing on the aesthetic qualities of a work is but one among many engagement practices,
then the step that remains to be taken is the one that may in fact prove the most difficult for most of us: we must free ourselves from the assumption that contemplative interaction with the aesthetic qualities of a work automatically makes a more important contribution to our flourishing than any other mode of engagement.
My argument has been: it's not
more important,
it's just cleaner.
Once we have taken these three steps, we will have broken the hegemony of the aesthetic. We will then be free at last to theorize both about what was going on when the Vienna Philharmonic played its memorial concert in the cathedral, and what was going on when it played its regular concert in Carnegie Hall.
Theorize
away, my man! But are we ever going to
test
the theories, or are we just going to intone them?
And lest the thought still be lurking that memorial art is acceptable but minor, let me now call attention to the fact that memorial art is all about us: images on memorial stamps and coins, memorial sculptures, memorial buildings, memorial paintings, memorial music.
Suppose we do establish the social practices of art as the fundamental context for our theorizing about art, then many of the ways in which art intersects with the political will leap out at us. We will not have to work hard at finding connections. In the nature of the case, the social practices of art are intertwined with the political. "Intertwined," I say. The Continental philosopher of art affirms the influence of art on the political but is dismayed by the influence of the political on art; "systemic distortion," he says. Setting aside the memorial architecture and sculpture in and around the Mall in Washington, almost all of the architecture in the center of Washington is political architecture, in its function and meaning alike it serves political purposes.
What would it be for governmental buildings not to do that?
We're coming to the end, but this is way too interesting a question to serve merely as a throwaway hypothetical.
Indulge me to answer by inverting the question:
If this
is
what
governmental buildings do,
then
we cannot achieve the ideal
of
"a government of laws, not of men";
and we may just get stuck
with
a government of
buildings,
which is not
something
anyone
really wants.
The Weberian category of systemic distortion is useless. What we have to discuss are better and worse ways of architecture serving political purposes, as well as better and worse political purposes—along with better and worse ways for decisions to be made concerning the character of a people's governmental architecture.
My annotations here lay out my position on these questions.
Art and justice would be the theme. Not
the aesthetic
and justice, that would be a mere subtheme. Art and justice. Of course it is not just governmental architecture that has political significance. After September 11, 2001, we know that urban architecture in general is loaded with political meaning.
