Clearly, Joseph North’s book has been left pretty far behind at this point. But I will keep the heading in order to indicate that the thread, however tenuous, is still being pursued. There will be a seventh post on this track—and then a stop.
In Latour, the different modes constitute different quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. Perhaps the “quasi” is meant to indicate that both objects and subjects under-determine their identities because nothing becomes a “thing” except through the relations in which it is entangled and the “paths” it traverses or the “scripts” to which it contributes. The solidity of “thingness” is only a momentary achievement—or, perhaps, embalming. There is more than a little here of Deluezean vitalism, of “flows” or energies taking form, but only briefly before dissolving back again into motion.
Many years ago I formulated the phrase: “nothing is necessarily anything, but every thing is necessarily some thing.” I have never quite dared to use this potted metaphysics in print, although I do think I have used the phrase “metaphysical egalitarianism.” The idea—very Latour—is to grant all the components of “a situation” or of a network equal status as contributors to how that situation is judged—or to what that network is seen to produce.
At the same time, the first statement points to the fact that the judgment, the act of naming, will take place. We will refer to the product of the network; we will describe what we take to be the situation. Coming into the network, no component is pre-determined to play any specific role; its possibilities are not infinite, not completely unconstrained, but they are plural, more than the “one” of “necessity.” The “existent” will become “some thing” through its acting and being acted upon in the network—and the full ensemble of relations will constitute the “situation,” or the “state of affairs” the inquirer encounters. (Latour’s use of the word “Inquiry” in his title comes straight from Pearce and Dewey; it is not a term as dear to James as to those two other pragmatists.)
To return to the aesthetic object, it is fairly easy to fit Van Gogh’s Sunflowers into Latour’s model. The painting has its existence as a painting by virtue of a whole set of institutions, traditions, canons of evaluation, methods of reproduction and circulation, that are complicated, but can be traced. It “subsists” as an art object in and through these relationships. But it also exists as a legal object through a different set of relationships—those of property, provenance, copyright, plagiarism, inheritance etc. It just a obviously exists in an economic mode: the art market, the auction houses, the thousands of objects on which it is reproduced for sale in museum gift shops etc. And we can also imagine it in Latour’s “political” mode, being taken up in ways meant to reinforce or to dismantle the formation of a “we,” of a community united around common goals/aspirations/values, or as a weapon wielded to undermine a “we” that is experienced as oppressive, exclusive, or unjust.
My worry, just to repeat from last time, is that, no matter what the mode, there is still a recognizable object: the painting Sunflowers by the man we know as Vincent Van Gogh. I don’t see how we get ontological pluralism here; there is one object. That object can be “taken up” in various ways. Multiple modes does not, as far as I can tell, yield multiple objects. Yes, the painting has to be constituted as “an economic object.” But there is still a stubborn persistence across modes. I don’t know if we have to identify the source of that persistence as “substance.” But I guess I do believe that there is a material presence there: a thing to be perceived, handled, “taken up.”
All this brings me back to “meaning” and “aesthetic judgment.” My intuition (what I am struggling to cash out) is that the aesthetic is particularly focused on “meaning,” where meaning means both how this thing (or this situation) is understood at this moment and what this thing or situation “means” to me in terms of the intensity of my interest, my care, my need for it. That we have a “judge” here does not, I think, doom us to a spectator theory of knowledge. The judgment is produced from the interaction with the thing, from the immersion in the situation to be evaluated. But the judge does stand in a particular location within the network. I do feel it can make sense in certain circumstances for me to feel unworthy of a situation, to feel that the situation is judging me along with my judging the situation. But I find it harder to believe that the situation can itself feel unworthy of me, that a painting (no matter how mediocre) can feel embarrassed by being in the same room as the Van Gogh.
There is also, when it comes to aesthetic judgment, the asymmetry between the artist and audience to consider. Aesthetic judgment for the artist is fully interactive, is a perfect example of Dewey’s insistence that ends emerge through the engagement with means. The artist makes a thousand small judgments as she proceeds in the act of creation—and those judgments are produced by the tensions experienced in her manipulation of her means and her projection of her audience’s reactions. The work produced is never the work imagined at the outset. In fact, if my own writing practice is any indication, at the outset there is a vague sense of ground to be covered, of ideas to be explored, but what is actually going to end up being said on the page is a surprise. I don’t know where my train of thought will go; the act of writing brings those thoughts into existence. The thousand of small judgments produces the final product.
It is different for the audience. It is a cliché by now that the work is completed by its audience. So we don’t have to see that spectator in the art museum as a passive observer—or the painting on the wall as a passive object. And, in fact, it seems that “meaning” is more obviously involved in this interaction than in the work of the painter herself. The painter is trying to create a thing; the relation of those difficulties of creation to “meaning” are not clear-cut or obvious. (That will be the subject of my next—and final—post in this thread.) But the viewer’s judgment is, inevitably I would say, one of value.
Traditionally, this has been said (by Kant and many others) to take the form: is this work beautiful or not? That focus on “beauty” seems a very bad mistake. For one thing, it sets up one standard of value where in fact there are many. It is also leads, surprisingly quickly, to a connection between art and the numinous. Art gets transported away from the ordinary—and is burdened with the expectation that it will somehow provide some special insight into realms of value normally hidden from us. To invest the world we inhabit with meaning, with a vitality or glow, that attracts our interest, our attention, even our care (as in Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”) is a very different matter than offering us intimations of some all-encompassing, all-explanatory account of it all. Worst of all, is when that art-conveyed message is somehow meant to “redeem” this world, to “save” us from some projected despair of “meaninglessness,” or from the all-too-real fact of suffering.
Instead of beauty, I will settle for intensity and affirmation. (Pater and Nietzsche are certainly lurking in the shadows here.) If art alerts us as to what we might care for, then it is giving us specific instances of experiences, ideas, emotions, human achievement—in short, examples—that make life worth living. Good art energizes; it awakens us (Pater’s metaphor) to what the world has to offer. That’s how a work as dismal as King Lear can be utterly exhilarating to read. To think that a human being was capable of producing such a magnificent work.
Here is where, following William James, I retain a stubborn, irreducible, subjectivism. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink—as every teacher knows. Granting everything Latour has to say about the complicated networks and multiple interactions required to get King Lear into my hands; granting everything Bourdieu has to say about the social determinants of taste; there remains the fact that King Lear speaks to me in ways Hamlet does not. I teach the one almost every year, and have taught the other twice, most recently over twenty years ago. I can’t light up Hamlet for my students because it does not light me up. And even when I feel like my classes on Lear have gone well, I know there are students that the play does not reach. It leaves them cold (a great metaphor in this instance).
To repeat: I think I am on the right path to think that aesthetic judgment is not so much about beauty as it is about meaningfulness. Some thing (and it does not have to be something deemed “a work of art”) is experienced as shot full of meaning. That’s the aesthetic mode. I want (like Dewey in Art and Experience) to make that judgment of meaningfulness mundane. We are not being given some key to the universe, some access to the numinous, by the work of art. We are simply (simply!) able to see, through the work, that our world (at some times and in some ways) is luminous.
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