Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 4—Part 2

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

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Part II
The aesthetic dimension

Aesthetic experience revisited

...   the aesthetic theory of art is not a comprehensive theory of all art. However, the notion of aesthetic experience pervades our discussion of art. ...

... the most popular conception of aesthetic experience claims that it is

the disinterested and sympathetic attention and

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contemplation of any object whatsoever for its own sake.

... Our responses to artworks—let us call them art-responses—may encompass things other than aesthetic experience. Yet what is it when we experience an artwork aesthetically? ...

We can have what we call aesthetic experiences of artworks, or of everyday things, like nature. These experiences involve

attention

and

contemplation

as their most characteristic elements. ...

Moreover, what are called aesthetic experiences are

sympathetic,

at least in this sense

: that we

take cognizance

of the object in question and we attempt to let it

guide us where it will.

 

I think that, ideally, we would not attempt so hard. Ideally, we would only realize later (if at all?) that we had been guided.

If so, then we might as well go ahead and define 'interestedness' as 'whatever is preventing us from being "guided"'. And this, of course, includes trying so hard to be guided that we can't even breathe.

Yes, this all sounds too gooey and romantic. In one sense it is extreme. Why go quite so far? Because,

"Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."

(Freud)

 

...   [The work] may be intended to lead us where we do not wish to go. It may

alienate our sympathies.

However,

our experience can still be called aesthetic

so long as we approach the work openly, ...

...

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... We would not typically call an experience of a work aesthetic that altogether ignored the structures of the work and what they were intended to do.

 

I would hesitate to call an experience aesthetic if it made too much of intentions and not enough of structures . . .

 

... what of disinterestedness? Disinterestedness is generally regarded as the most important element of aesthetic experience. But is aesthetic experience really disinterested?

...   The existence of such a state is often inferred by considering certain examples and by proposing disinterestedness as the best concept for explaining them. For instance, if someone goes to a school play because her daughter is in it, and she spends all her time nodding beamingly at her offspring's performance, proponents of disinterestedness will suggest that we all agree that her experience is not aesthetic. What is wrong here? The proponent of disinterestedness explains: her attention is guided by her personal interests; it is not impartial; it is not disinterested.

Likewise, if a patron of the arts admires his recently acquired painting because he is sure it will make him world famous, his attention is motivated by his personal interests; ...

Finally, where a Bolshevik commissar reads a novel solely to confirm that all the references to Stalin are adulatory, he was not reading in a manner that most would call aesthetic. ...

Surely in these cases, there is something

wrong

or

deficient

about the way in which the audience members in question are responding to the relevant artworks.

 

As a friend of aesthetics, I ask: What tf is really, truly wrong with these cases as given? It's clear enough that they are deficient, if we insist on wording things that way. It's clear how they are "deficient," and in what they are "deficient." But what's really wrong with being deficient in just this way?

A parent may be smothering, a patron may be vain, and a commissar may be morally bankrupt and unfeeling, but of course this is not at all what Our Man means to suggest, and he is correct, presumably, that the (un)wisdom of these various stances is no more what is at issue in the diagnosis and consideration of "interested" attention than it is in the construction of ideals of "disinterested" attention.

What is at issue? It's a question of what is or is not happening. It's a simple question, really. The dialogue around it is so complex only because so many people, so much of the time, don't like the answers.

When the "happening" is cognitive rather than behavioral, it is extremely difficult to catch any glimpse at it at all; but that also is not what is at issue above. No matter on what side of the issue we have situated ourselves, by entering capital-P debate we presume to apply some deductive rigor to the problem as we see it; and if empirical investigation is difficult or impossible in the given case, that is no deterrent to such nonempirical methods as the capital-Ps deploy; if anything, a problem's intransigence to empirical methods actually validates the appeal to nonempirical methods.

So, speaking for a theory in which he does not personally believe, a theory which he has in fact made a career of opposing, Our Man Here professes surety that the Aesthetic Theorist thinks there is something wrong with "interested" attention paid to an artwork which (let us just presume) also affords the attention-payer the opportunity for aesthetic satisfaction. But how could there really be some big-picture moral principle at stake here? If there is such a principle at stake, then pretty much everyone who believes in a Judgment Day is in for a much tougher time than they realize, since pretty much everyone has been "wrong" about art in precisely this way, if not all the time then at least some of the time. Why? Because we are profoundly interested creatures. It's necessary, actually, that we reset ourselves to "interested" in certain situations! The above-given examples, each in their own way, suggest a few of the more salient human situations in which "disinterest" would be pathological.

Where I think friends of aesthetics have erred most often and most egregiously is in characterizing the effort to achieve "disinterest." For the longest time it seems this was construed as an effort of the aesthete to achieve some stance vis-a-vis the object of interest. I've never been sure how that would even work, since it seems . . . very "interested," explicit, and self-conscious to put forth just that much effort toward the taking in of some artwork. It seems possible to me only in the abstract that "effort" could be "disinterested"; in reality, I don't see how I could evince "effort" and "disinterest" together in a single thought or action: should this be demanded of me, then the demand itself has simply created an "interest"; or, if there is no real demand, then there can be nothing like "effort" either.

But the artist, conventionally speaking, makes an effort too: the artist can make an effort to entrain the subject into so-called "aesthetic" subjectivity; or they can make no such effort, or they can make some other effort, or (this one really caught on for a while) they can make great, valorous effort to entrain the subject into non-aesthetic subjectivity. If we really do think we can place a given artist on such a continuum, then we have surely identified one kind of "intent"; and then, for any "intentionalists" among us, there is the semblance of a principled reason for declaring there to be "something wrong" with the doting mother or (Urmson's example seized upon by Dickie) the greedy impresario. Something seems intuitively "wrong," or at least unfair, about all that noble art-effort coming to nothing on account of such base motives as attachment or greed.

Our Man does seem to believe in intent, and in intent-ional-ism. He seems actually, i.e. personally and professionally, to believe in it.

I do not believe in intentionalism.

I do believe that "disinterestedness" and "interestedness" both happen, and that the distinction between them is a coherent distinction, both abstractly and empirically.

I believe that "disinterested" aesthetic experience has an indispensible social function. However, this does not simply stipulate by implication that its "interested" counterpart is "wrong," either in general or in given cases, as above.

What is wrong? Intentionalism is wrong. Stuffed-shirt art-papistry is wrong. Calling a mother "wrong" for being unable to "distance" herself from her young daughter's school theater production is definitely super wrong! Labelling her connoisseurship of kid-theater as "deficient" is closer to the capital-P truth, but this is a bit rude and misdirected even for my tastes.

What can we say about the latter case? We can say much that will get us in equally hot water with a whole other department of the institutional Boomersphere leviathan. That is, we can refuse to agree that "disinterest" is in evidence when we have good reason to think otherwise, and we can refuse to agree that "interestedness" is not in evidence when it very clearly is.

We can simply notice

that this silly little example actually is fully paradigmatic;

that mother-to-daughter is only the most powerful of many particularistic attachments;

that these attachments do not need to be half this powerful to be, nonetheless, fully destructive of "disinterest" and constitutive of "interest";

that culture is "a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value" (Becker again), and that this is an "interest" that lives in every single human being, sometimes sublimated, other times exploding above the surface;

BUT, all the same, that such "interest" does not simply come and go at the same time, to the same degree, with same consequences, for everyone alike;

that every particularlistic attachment, every self-conscious tribal identification, every pang of hunger for "a feeling of primary value," every single one of these is a tidal wave of explicit "interest" countervailing any implicitly "disinterested" practice;

and that it is not possible for "disinterest" to simply push back with equal force, since the very essence of "disinterest" is that it is implicit, unspoken, and yes, therefore intensely fragile.

 

Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (i)

Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)

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[21] During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schönberg, and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. The general cessation of musical activities during the war resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous, but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of literature. ...

[22] Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was, though the intellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective in character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed.

Richard Maltby—Coherence, Benevolence, Significance

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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"WHAT IS REAL?" ... PART ONE: COHERENCE

"Can I tell you a story, Rick?"
"Has it got a wow finish?"
"I don't know the finish."
Bergman and Bogart in
Casablanca

The dual sense of "perfect reproduction" describes both the intent and the effect of the industry's operation of technology. The strictures of the Production Code, the obligations imposed by the duty to entertain, and the idealist nature of Hollywood's adopted ideology meant that it represented the world not as it was, but as it should be. To describe an aesthetic so committed to illusion, artifice, and idealism as "realist" seems a perversity sanctioned only by tradition. To call The Wizard of Oz a "realist" film seems bizarre. The aesthetic strategy employed by the cinema of the consensus was not concerned with the philosophical or perceptual presumptions behind its imitation of life, only with the technical expedients necessary to sustain its illusion. In its presentation of perspective, for example, it was opportunist and inconsistent. Set design in the 1930s assumed

That the Long Shots would be taken with a 40mm lens. For closer shots a 50mm lens was ... the usual choice, and of course for Close-Ups something like 75mm.

The quite visible variation in apparent object relationships between the foreground and background of shots taken with lenses of such different focal length fell within the tolerance levels of a loosely-defined normative perspective, but hardly suggested that Hollywood cameramen recognized realism as a perceptual system governing their work.

However awkward a term it may be, however, realism cannot be altogether discarded. Perfect reproduction engineered a style which concealed its mediation of the narrative it presented. However conventional and codified it may have been, it offered itself as natural because it assumed, as part of the cinematic contract, a fixed relationship between film and audience, and did not seek to question that relationship. If a text and its consumers share the assumption

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that a fixed and mutually known set of conventions represent external reality, and neither seeks to challenge the efficacy of those conventions of representation, then we may describe the text as "realist," regardless of what perceptual systems it operates. The conventions of representation that Hollywood's consensual cinema employed provided its audiences with the means by which they could treat what they saw as if it were real, and order their emotional responses accordingly. Hollywood's realism operated at two levels. Perfect reproduction effaced the techniques by which it produced a seamless flow, and concentrated the audience's attention on the contents of that flow, the narrative. The spatial construction of narrative placed the spectator in the film, while the ordering of events attached the spectator emotionally to its characters as benevolent sources of meaning and significance. Despite the opportunism of its techniques, the cinema of the consensus was committed absolutely to the maintenance of continuity as the primary ingredient of its realism. As a result it was firmly attached to the articulation of a coherent narrative structure.

The narrative of Casablanca (1943, Warner Bros.; dir. Michael Curtiz)--which may indisputably be regarded as "classic Hollywood text" of the consensus--is constructed to support and clarify the story of the film, aiming at a coherence in the revelation of the plot in order to concentrate attention on the story as it is revealed. The audience is attached to the film by the process of the revealing of the story , not by the facts of the story's revelations . One example among many is the introduction of Ingrid Bergman, and the establishment of her previous relationship with Bogart. Up to this point the film has concentrated on establishing its locale, Bogart's cynical isolationism ("I stick my neck out for nobody"), and the apparent major plot device of the theft of the letters of transit and the arrival of Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Henreid and Bergman first appear entering Rick's Cafe in a long medium tracking shot, which takes them past Sam (Dooley Wilson) at the piano. Wilson and Bergman seem to recognize each other, and Wilson looks worried and shakes his head. A signal to the audience's attention has been provided, but it is not immediately pursued. Henreid and Bergman are joined first by Berger (John Qualen), a member of the Resistance, and then by Captain Renault (Claude Rains), in conversations about Henreid's situation. Bergman asks Rains about Wilson--"'somewhere I've seen him"--a remark whose significance is signaled by its delivery in extreme close-up. Rains

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supplies an enigmatic description of Bogart, and its impact on Bergman is again shown in close-up when the group is joined by Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). However, the subject is not pursued and conversation returns to Henreid's politics and future. But the disruptive influence of Bogart's presence is registered by the repetition of close shots of Bergman, detaching her from the men's conversation. When Rains and Veidt return to their table, a female guitarist begins a song, during which Bergman and Wilson exchange looks of recognition, and Wilson repeats his concerned expression. Once more, the cue is left hanging while Henreid joins Qualen at the bar. Bergman calls Wilson over to her table. Wilson tries to convince her Bogart has another girl, but she tells him "you used to be a much better liar, Sam." He replies, "Leave him alone, Miss Ilsa, you're bad luck to him." In its ordering, her next line encapsulates in microcosm the mechanism of the narrative:

Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake ... play it,
Sam, play, "As Time Goes By."

Richard Maltby—The Cinema of the Consensus

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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CHAPTER 7

UNITED WE STAND:
THE CINEMA OF THE CONSENSUS

The social condition and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover, certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which is easy to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the soul, to fix them exclusively on that of the body; and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought: in a word they put the Real in place of the Ideal."--Alexis de Tocqueville

Tain't what you do, it's the
    way that cha do it,
'Tain't what you do, it's the
    way that cha do it,
'Tain't what you do, it's the
    way that cha do it,
That's what get results.
  Sy Oliver and James
      'Trummy' Young

THE INVISIBLE POLITICS OF STYLE

An ideology which refuses to distinguish between the good of the individual and that of society discovers democratic compromise not in the resolution of conflict between opposing interest groups, but in the achievement of a con-

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sensus among the body of enlightened individuals.   Populist ideology inclines towards status concerns against interest politics as consensus transcends compromise. While the progression to a consensus over issues through compromise is a common democratic activity, once again the individualist orientation of a populist democratic sentiment

!!