Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 1 (Part 2 of 2)

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

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[33]

Part II
What is representation?

Pictorial representation

...

...

...

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...

Traditional approaches to
pictorial representation

... The resemblance theory of representation states that x represents y just in case x resembles y. ... the illusion theory of pictorial representation maintains that x represents y just in case x causes the illusion of y in spectators. ...

...

... Plato thought painting to be strictly analogous to holding a mirror toward an object. ... [hence] Plato held what we are calling a resemblance theory of representation. ... Note that this theory claims two things. First that resemblance is a necessary condition for representation—that x represents y only if x

[35]

resembles y. But it also claims something else, namely that if x resembles y, then x represents y. ... The first occurrence of "if" here signals that resemblance is a sufficient condition for representation—... The "only if" portion of the formula states that resemblance is a necessary condition for representation. ...

... if x resembles y, does it follow that x represents y? This seems false; ... Imagine two [identical] automobiles... They roll off the assembly line one after the other, ... These two ... will resemble each other maximally, but neither represents the other. ...

... Resemblance is a

reflexive relation.

... But

representation is not reflexive:

I resemble myself in every respect, but I do not represent myself. ...

... resemblance is a

symmetrical relation.

That is, if x is related to y, then y is related to x in the same way (xRy if and only if yRx). If I am Pat's brother, then Pat is my brother. ... But

representation is not a symmetrical relation.

If a picture of Napoleon resembles Napoleon, it follows that Napoleon resembles his picture, but it does not follow that Napoleon represents his picture. ... Thus,

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resemblance cannot serve as a model for representation, ... there will be many cases of resemblance ... that will not warrant attributions of representation. ...

One might try to get around this objection via amending the resemblance theory by stipulating that x must be a visual design. ... Thus, even if Napoleon resembles his portrait, we will not say that he represents it because Napoleon is not a visual design. But this calls attention to a[nother] problem ...

What most visual representations
resemble most
are other visual representations.

A picture of Richard Nixon looks more like a picture of Bill Clinton than it looks like Richard Nixon. ...

...

...

Resemblance, then, does not appear to be a sufficient condition for representation. But is it a necessary condition? ...

... When we say that

one object represents another object,

we mean, at the very least, that

the first object is a symbol for the second object.

... But what is a symbol? ... Peirce

[37]

defined a symbol as

a sign
"whose special significance or fitness
to represent just what it does represent
lies in nothing but the very fact
of there being a habit, disposition or other effective rule
that it will be so interpreted."

...

Consider a military map. A thumbtack can stand for an armored division, but it does not resemble an armored division. ... In a context like this one, what stands for the armored division is arbitrary. ... But

if the symbol relation (denotation) is the core of representation,

and if denotation can obtain without resemblance,

then resemblance is not a necessary condition for representation.

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 1 (Part 1 of 2)

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

---

[19]

1
Art and representation

Part 1
Art as representation

Art, imitation and
representation

... In the course of outlining his utopia, [Plato] argued that poets—particularly dramatists—should be outlawed. ... According to Plato, the essence of drama was imitation—the simulation of appearances. ... he believed that appearances appeal to the emotions and that stirring up the emotions is socially dangerous. An emotional citizenry is an unstable citizenry, ready to be swayed by demagogues ...

Arguments like Plato's against poetry are

still heard today

when it comes to discussions of the mass media.

How alike are these arguments, really?

Often we are told that TV with its seductive imagery ... makes for an unthinking electorate.

Because seductive TV imagery makes us ready to be swayed? Because this imagery appeals to the emotions? Who is making that argument quite like Plato?

...

Aristotle, however, believed that Plato's case was overstated. ...

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... Tragedy evokes pity and fear in spectators, but, he said, it does this for the purpose of catharsis—that is, for the purpose of purging the emotions. ...

... Aristotle also thought that Plato was mistaken in presuming that drama did not address the mind ... He maintained that people can learn from imitations, ...

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree in their diagnosis ... Both take poetry to be involved essentially in the imitation of action. ...

What painters try to do, on the Platonic-Aristotelian view, is to reproduce the appearances of things—to copy them— ...

... Plato and Aristotle primarily thought of dance and music as accompaniments ... They were parts of drama, ... Thus, along with drama and painting, Plato and Aristotle thought of music and dance as primarily imitative or representational arts.

[21]

When the Greeks used their word for "art," they had a broader conception in mind than we do today. For them,

an art

was

any practice that required skill.

Medicine and soldiering were arts on this conception. ... [they] would not have defined the arts, in their sense, as solely involved in imitation. However, it is clear that ... [they] thought that these [today's fine arts] shared a common feature: ... imitation.

... the theory of art that we find presupposed [here] ... We may state it thus:

x is an artwork only if it is an imitation.

...

Today, after almost a century of abstract painting, ... the theory that art is imitation appears to us to fail as a general theory of art, ...

...

... in deference to Plato and Aristotle, we should also add that ... When they went in the theater, or when they went to the unveiling of a new sculpture, what they saw were imitations ...

[22]

...

So, in their own time, the imitative (mimetic) theory of art advanced by Plato and Aristotle had some initial plausibility. It coincided with the dominant examples of Greek art and it also

informed readers about
what to look for and to appreciate

in the art of their contemporaries,

Seriously, Boomer?!

Lasch—Theatrical Possibilites

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[336]
The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bankhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap-
[337]
pealed to the same sense of manly independence and the same love of combat to which syndicalism appealed in France and Italy. Here too, workers experienced industrialism and the wage system not only as a decline in their standard of living but above all as a drastic infringement of their control of the workplace, of their very status as free men. The company towns that sprang up in the mining states seemed to make "wage slavery" a literal description of the new order, not just a rhetorical analogy. The company controlled not only the workplace but housing, credit, and all the other necessaries. The worker who could remember life as a prospector or cowboy now found that he owed his soul to the company store. He felt literally sold into slavery, and he embraced the philosophy of "direct action" as the only way out.

While social conditions in the West bore some resemblance to those created by the early stages of industrialism elsewhere, the cultural tradition that workers were trying to defend obviously differed from those that underlay European syndicalism. In the American West, the ideal of independence was associated not with the small proprietor's control over his household, his land or shop, and his tools but with the wandering life of the unattached male. It was not surprising that the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter, the "nomadic worker of the West," in the words of its newspaper, Solidarity. The West was still a "man's country," according to Charles Ashleigh, an English radical who emigrated to the Pacific Northwest and became a "hobo and a Wobbly," like the hero of his novel, Rambling Kid. Ashleigh admired the "reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull city-paced existence." Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet and songwriter, was attracted to the movement by its "glamorous courage and adventure," which he too associated with the West. Those who admired the Wobblies from a distance likewise emphasized its western origins. The Lawrence strike was a "western strike in the East," Lincoln Steffens wrote; "a strike conducted in New England by western miners, who have brought here the methods and the spirit employed by them in Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada.

European syndicalism was informed by an austere ethic of thrift and self-denial. In America, the syndicalist movement came to be associated with an ethic of self-expression and defiant irresponsibility—the new "paganism" of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals saw the Wobblies as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits, rebels against re-
[338]
spectability. They sensed the affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW. Having absorbed from modern literature an image of the "beauty of the essentially homeless and childless and migratory life," as Floyd Dell put it, they recognized the Wobblies as soul mates. "Anarchism and art," said Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, "are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason." Hutchins Hapgood, the personification of the bohemian intellectual, called anarchism the fine art of the proletariat. He compared the Armory Show, which brought modern art to New York in 1913, to a "great fire, an earthquake, or a political revolution."

The Wobblies did not object to this assimilation of art and revolution. They too saw themselves as artists. "I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist," said Joe Hill before his execution for murder. Bill Haywood allowed himself to be lionized by Mabel Dodge and other members of her famous salon. He regarded the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913—the fruit of his rapprochement between the IWW and Greenwich Village—as the high point of his career. Conceived by Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to dramatize the workers' exploitation by capitalism, but it exposed them to a more insidious kind of exploitation by turning radical politics into entertainment. "Life passed over insensibly into a certain, simple form of art," said Hapgood. ". . . That is the great thing about it, the almost unpredecented thing." Papers opposed to the IWW gave the pageant enthusiastic reviews: what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater. Both Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most flamboyant orator, had earlier turned down invitations to put themselves on the lecture circuit or stage. In her case, the offer came from no less an impressario than David Belasco, who could see the theatrical possibilities of revolutionary activism as clearly as John Reed. At the pageant, Reed led the Paterson strikers in a song he had written for the occasion, "The Haywood Thrill." Haywood thus resisted the lecture agents only to fall into the clutches of the avant-garde, leaving Flynn to wonder whether the distractions of the pageant had not contributed to the defeat of the strike itself.

Matravers—Representational vs. Expressive Qualities

Matravers and Levinson
"Aesthetic Properties"
(2005)

[196] Many terms that have an aesthetic use, also have a use in what I shall call 'central cases'. For example, in the central cases 'sad' refers to a particular mental state, or objects and events reasonably connected to such a state. There is an aesthetic use in which it refers to representations of situations which, if the situations were actual, the term would be appropriate... However, there is also an aesthetic use where it does not refer to the propositional content of objects (broadly construed), but to their expressive quality. Most
[197]
familiar from the literature, some pieces of purely instrumental music...are sad. Although this case is the most familiar a little reflection shows that a vast range of predicates have both central and aesthetic uses. The overwhelming aesthetic feature of Liverpool Cathedral, after all, is that it is big. Here is [Roger] Scruton's argument.

Consider the application of an emotion term —such as 'sad' — to a work of art (or, for that matter, to an event, or a letter, or anything that cannot literally be in the emotional state of sadness). To understand the word 'sad' is to know how to apply it to people in order to describe their emotional state. The criteria for the application of the term 'sad' concern the gestures, expressions and utterances of people on the basis of which I describe them as sad, and to grasp the concept of sadness is to know how to apply it on the basis of these criteria. When we apply the concept to art, however, it is arguable that these criteria are not, or need not be present. Does this mean that the term 'sad' is ambiguous?

Scruton points out that if the term were ambiguous, it would follow that someone could grasp fully what was meant in applying 'sad' to a work of art, whilst having no grasp at all of what it meant in the central case. This he rightly takes to be impossible. Hence, any view which entailed such ambiguity would be in trouble.

[emailed to self, 26 April 2021]

Representationalism as Certainty

Evidently this has been making the rounds:

Rittenhouse

When I look at this image, I see a concept made perfectly transparent and rendered powerfully with a high degree of technical and aesthetic skill alike. I see a devastating and pessimistic statement made pleasing to look at. Like a "beautiful" but "sad" piece of music, this makes for a particulary powerful combination.

All of this is familiar, though it is not to be taken for granted. It is unusual to find the technical skill and the powerful conceptual sense merged in the same artist. (This in itself is no dig at conceptual art; it's just simple math.) But backing up a step, another thing this image makes clear is that the artist has total confidence and total certainty vis-a-vis his "message." A mere unconscious twinge of doubt would make the creation of this particular image impossible. Artists customarily are praised for such displays of fortitude, for "really going for it." But this is far more admirable in the realms of abstraction and aesthetics than it is regarding concrete politics. When political actors assume this degree of certainty, bad things tend to happen. And history is littered with artists whose certainty about individual political figures later turned to equally intense regret. If all it takes for us to lose sight of this is for us to agree with the "message" we are receiving in a particular moment, then we will not get very far (and we won't deserve to).

Images are uniquely powerful vehicles for any "message." That power is a responsibility. It is not a toy. McLuhan's hypothetical piece of cloth with "American Flag" printed on it has, as he indeed argued, nowhere near the power of the genuine imagistic article. There is much more to this aspect of images than their being worth "a thousand words," or any number of words. The point is, they are totally different than words. And as powerfully as the above image conveys its "message," and as strongly as I am inclined to agree with that message, all of this nonetheless reinforces for me a deep uneasiness with this kind of political art. I am not certain enough of anything in the world, not even of the beliefs I've spent the last 15 years writing about in this space, that I would be comfortable making this kind of statement against another person using a caricature of their own image as its basis.

The poverty of words as against images is precisely what makes words suitable (and images unsuitable) vehicles for political dialogue. That entire line of argument is summed up concisely and profoundly in this image, as it is also by many of the images of George Floyd which have been installed on sides of buildings and freeway underpasses over the last year and a half. In seeking to put an individual human face on issues which remain too abstract to too many of us, these images also, perhaps unwittingly, signal a retreat from decades of hard-won intellectual and legislative momentum toward understanding racism as a structural problem. Instead, we are treated to, alternately, the beatification or the condemnation of individual social actors who cannot possibly be, not even in these two cases I don't think, reducible to such either/or judgments. If you think that anyone is so reducible, then I question your fitness for political participation (and I urge you to stick to words in any case).

These are images which obfuscate and mystify the underlying structural factors as viciously and totally as any piece of government or media propaganda ever could. I can only hope this is because these artists take that awareness for granted, not because they are woefully ignorant and/or incapacitated (far too easily) by rage, and not because their identification or contra-identification with the skin-deep traits of any given person is as deep of a political analysis as they are capable of making or understanding.

The transparency of "concept" here is a double-edged sword. It ensures that the "message" cannot be lost in aesthetic translation, but it also traps the artist on a level of crudity which is totally unbecoming of the issues at stake here. What is this work, really, but a very sophisticated piece of name-calling? Rather than modulating legitimate anger into a mature and nuanced political statement, aesthetics and technique in this case serve merely to amplify the visceral sentiment while leaving its infantile quality intact. A pencil-drawn moustache-and-glasses overlay involves far less craft but operates, conceptually, on the same level of (im)maturity, the same level of historical and political understanding. This is the trap that conceptual brute force lays for all political artists.

(This post was written in an hour (i.e. tonight) after germinating for many months.)

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn's Distrust of Photography

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...distrust of the prefabricated image in fact led him [Jorn] at first to dismiss—shortsightedly—the artistic and critical potential of photography. Jorn writes that excessive faith in the progress and objectivity of science leads to the view that photography is the best art form, because it is the most objective and realistic. But there is no objective reality even in science, he argues, since it is always tied to the needs and interests of those who fund it. Rather than make art more objective, Jorn argues for the subjectivity of science. Writing in the late 1940s, he warns of the danger of considering photography a substitute for reality, the equivalent of armchair traveling instead of real experience. Jorn argues that the close connection of photography to reality is precisely what makes it the least artistic. He was unable to see the potential of photography as a creative medium because of its associations with impersonal, mass reproduction. Jorn reductively associated photography with the culture industry... While hopelessly limited for any contemporary understanding of photography, these views were typical of the 1950s. (198)

It seems once again that an opportunity has been missed and an opponent talked past rather than hit where it hurts: is "artistic" or "critical" potential really the issue, or is it rather that both potentials are in fact so shockingly vast in relation to the type of agency required that a certain devolution in the latter respect was now simply inevitable? The vast power of representation had in fact been democratized, and this rather directly and drastically cheapened initiative, intent, vision, subjectivity...it is hard to name an "artistic" or "critical" value that was not cheapened this way; that is, for the abundance of those potentials rather than their lack. Photography, in the moment that it was new, was too easy in proportion to the power inhering in it. This is not a denial that photographic skill exists, but rather that it was now both harder to distinguish from the ordinary and more widely dispersed and rather less scarce. Seems to me that these are material questions susceptible to material validation, whereas I cannot imagine successfully teasing out the objectivity/realism/science question raised here (certainly not only on the broadest of strokes painted here). The "substitute for reality" seems equally absurd on the surface, but I think it ultimately has been materially validated; in this case people can tell the difference but even so don't seem to care about the difference. But even here, the given discussion has suddenly shifted entirely to the consumption side of things; nothing is said about initiative, accessibility, technique, etc. as this pertains to creators, whereas it seems to me that the accounts of Jorn's chosen mediums throughout center around creation rather than reception. Continuing on, the word "impersonal" is used; this also demands that creation and reception both be explicitly accounted for; otherwise the impression is that of reactionary bluster rather than considered critique.

Jorn suggests that abstract art addresses our imagination more directly that the "indirect and superficial" art of photography. He writes that "visual art means first and foremost visual effects, and the most elementary, direct visual art is that which effects our power of imagination by means of colors, forms, and direct visual effects." (198)

Now we're talking! But there is again an unsatisfying, overgeneralized aspect betokening another missed opportunity. Is it photography itself which is "indirect," or is the photograph in fact the intermediary begetting an unduly "indirect" response in the subject? Is the problem in fact that the photograph is so direct (or perhaps simply suggests/imposes this conceit whether or not it is true) that the subject's imagination is subdued not for lack of "direct" stimulation but in fact for (the conceit to/impression of) an overabundance of it, thereby constraining the imagination inside thick walls of information rather than inviting it on an open-ended journey guided only by the occasional signpost? This analysis certainly is available re: representation and reproduction, as against abstraction/nonrepresentation and singularity. We may well read "elementary" as "leaves something to the imagination"; of course it is not just photorealism which fails this prescription precisely where nonrepresentation succeeds, but also language properly construed which fails where non-/pre-/supra-linguistic cognition succeeds. This is indeed a role (dare I moralize and say a Function?!) for abstract art and music; yet that aspiration to utilitarianism hits a snag if the ultimate, final, exalted end product of whatever particular process we are talking about remains representational, photorealistic, linguistic, communicative, etc. Seems that those types of thought are necessary, by definition, for any social intercourse at all, hence serial abstractifying exercises can be only a means, never their own ends, and in fact uniquely vulnerable to the conquering dictates of social ends which are contingent rather than absolute.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Détournement and Sexual Objectification

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn
p. 186—in an endnote

Baum ["The Sex of the Situationist International", 2008] defends the SI's use of erotic images of women as critical détournements. I would argue that those images fail to accomplish the SI's critical goals, however, because even out of context they continue to function as heterosexist images of the female body as passive object of desire.

Without yet having read Baum's article, I'm predisposed to agree with KK's assessment here. In fact this is quite an excellent test of the theory of détournement which it fails very much because of the exceptionally Spectacular nature of the source material rather than in spite of it. The uniquely loaded question of sexual objectification hence proves less rather than more susceptible to diversion; and in any case, there's nothing stopping the onlooker from simply gawking if that is what they choose or are inclined to do.

There is besides these occasional cameos by objectified women of course plenty of classically male energy baked right into Situationist theory via Debord's fascination with war, his rather direct application of its historical strategies to his practical political projects, and his conception of it as ineluctably two-sided and zero-sum. Hence the feminized, open-ended, festival-esque stagings by Class Wargamers rather soften this aspect of theory to a, debatably, unfaithful degree, though the festival idea was probably more central to Situationist thinking anyway and hence itself poses a possible practical contradiction once the theory is read in a gendered way.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xv)

"As against a single person who could use a brush passably, there were thousands who could take reasonably good photographs. Here the first effect of the machine process was to deliver people from the specialist and to restore the status and function of the amateur. Thanks to the camera, the eye at least was reeducated, after having been too long committed to the verbal symbols of print. People awoke to the constant miracles of the natural world, like an invalid long secluded in a dark room, able for the first time to breath fresh air... But though the art of taking pictures is necessarily a selective one, the very spread and progress of that art, not least with the invention of the motion picture, was in the opposite direction; it multiplied the permanent image as images had never been multiplied before, and by sheer superabundance it undermined old habits of careful evaluation and selection. And that very fact, which went along with the achievement of a democratic medium of expression, has raised a whole series of problems that we must wrestle with today, if, here as elsewhere, we are not to starve in the midst of plenty." (94-95)

"What has been the result of the mass production of esthetic symbols that began in the fifteenth century? ... [The good:] By means of our various reproductive devices, a large part of our experience, which once vanished without any sort of record, has been arrested and fixed. Because of the varied processes of reproduction that are now at hand, many important experiences, difficult to transpose into words, are now visible in images; and certain aspects of art, which were once reserved for the privileged, are now an everyday experience to those who make use of the resources of printing and photography." (95-96)

In other words, reproduction is also, in many instances, record-keeping. All of the oppression and dispossession which inhered in denial of the right to have a past, a heritage, a discrete culture, and indeed the very right to collective introspection vis-a-vis these identifications, to have a hard look in the mirror on the cultural level, all of these privileges have been progressively democratized by the ever-increasing ease and ubiquity of this "mass production of esthetic symbols."

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xiv)

"As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of the early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended upon the photographer's respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before his eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice--which sometimes occurred at the point when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints--the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit." (93)