Category: aesthetics

On Judgment

In an essay on Gerhard Richter entitled “The Master of Unknowing” [New York Review of Books, Volume LXVII, No. 8, May 14, 2020], Susan Tallman quotes Richter:

“Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.” A good picture “takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view” (4).

Tallman then writes: “Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. . . . Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us” (4). She concludes her essay by saying that Richter’s art is “an assertion of endless possibility” (8).

I read this assessment of Richter as pointing toward an attempt to suspend judgment. The aim is to arrest the movement from perception (‘looking’) to naming—what Kant calls “determinate judgment.” Judgment, it would seem, can not be avoided altogether. Notice how Richter’s statement—with its hostility to “meaning”—reintroduces “significance” in the very next sentence. The real stakes rest (it seems to me) on the contrast between the “manifold” (a pluralism that generates multiple possibilities) and the singular (a “name” that would designate the object as one, and only one, thing, with a clear and determinate “meaning”).

The hope of arresting judgment, of deliberately frustrating our habitual rush to designate some thing as this or that, does seem characteristic of much modern art. First, there is the continual desire for “pure”perception, for a perceptual experience that is not directed or shaped by conceptual judgment. Second, there is the attraction to difficulty and ambiguity, both of which make a singular judgment difficult to make. The artist wants to resist having his work easily digestible, easily categorized. A glancing look should not suffice. We should be made to pause before the work, to see its multiple possibilities. It should arrest the eye—but, even more importantly, arrest the mind.

Is judgment just slower to arrive in such cases—or can the urge/need to judge (to name) be frustrated altogether? Can we just have the “looking” and stop there? A perceptual experience relieved of any act of naming what we are seeing/touching etc.? Perhaps that perceptual experience is linked to an inchoate emotion, a kind of “raw feel” to go with the “pure perceiving”—and we get no further, not naming the experience and not feeling any need to name it, just resting in it.

In any case, that seems to me one version of the modern artist’s hostility to—or, at least, suspicion of –“meaning.” And one version of the strategies adopted to frustrate the processes through which “meaning” is assigned.

However, as detailed in Florian Klinger’s essay “To Make that Judgment: The Pragmatism of Gerhard Richter” (in Judgment and Action: Fragments Toward a History, ed. by Vivasvan Soni and Thomas Pfau [Northwestern University Press, 2018], 239-67], Richter does expect “judgment” to play a crucial role in the act of creation and the act of reception when it comes to works of art. Richter’s method (as he describes it) is “to paint without a plan,” “to smear anything I want on it [the canvas].” But as the process continues, “each step forward is more difficult and I feel less and less free until I conclude there’s nothing left to do. When, according to my standard, nothing is wrong anymore, then I stop. Then it’s good.” (249). The criteria is not meaning, but some sort of aesthetic quality. There is a “standard” of judgment, even if that standard is vague. When his interlocutor tries to press him to be more specific about what “good” means, Richter replies: “It just doesn’t look good. Then it’s wrong.” The interviewer presses on: “Can we dig deeper than looking good or bad?” to which Richter responds: “It’s extremely difficult. We’re all completely equal here. The producer and consumer, artist and observer, both must have one quality: to be able to see if it’s good or not. To make that judgment” (249).

I don’t really know what to do with this, except to make three observations. First, the issue of “taste,” or “sensibility,” keeps rearing its (ugly?) head. What’s this “quality” of being able to see if something is good or not? Where does it come from? How do you tell when someone has it—or does not have it? Classical conundrums that keep recurring. Presumably there are many ways to be “good”; that’s why one keeps producing new works—or keeps going to view new ones. But still there is dichotomous judgment to be made. This one is good; that one is not. And we receive little guidance as to how that judgment is to be made.

Second, Richter (throwing up his hands; “it’s extremely difficult”) asserts an equality between artist and audience (even as his words acknowledge a distinction of roles). The judgments made by the artist is the process of creation are guided by the same standard—of goodness—that guides the spectator’s response to the work.

Third, can this judgment of goodness occur without a judgment as to meaning? Can there be that suspension of interpretation, of naming, that seems to be the goal? It seems easier to say that it is not the artist’s business to concern herself with the meaning of what she produces. The question of meaning may never arise in her practice—and the possible meaning of her work for its audience may be of no interest or concern to her. It is also possible to say that the meanings that her finished work calls forth for its audiences were not consciously controlled or produced by the artist. The work encompasses things outside that artist’s control; part of the pleasure of artistic creation is precisely that. As Richter puts it, “Something happens spontaneously. Not by itself, but without plan or reason” (249). [Here we get the “interactive” understanding of artistic creation.]

Still, even if we can see the process of artistic production as unfolding apart from the question of meaning, can we say the same of the process of reception by the audience? Can the audience judge the work good or not apart from also judging what kind of thing it is (naming) and understanding its significance in relation to that name? We are in Kant’s territory again since it would seem a judgment of goodness in the absence of any act of naming would be a “reflective judgment” (not a determinate one) because the work would be viewed as utterly singular (the only one of its kind, thus not “a kind” at all. Only a proper name, not a generic one, would be adequate to it). And to finish up by returning to the Tallman passage: it would seem that to have no determinate name, to have no determinate meaning, would be to have multiple possible significances. The paradox would be that the “singular” (by escaping categorization) becomes plural. It gets to be a shape-shifter.

Joseph North Seven—Two Problems

I see two substantial problems with the line of inquiry I have been pursuing in this thread.

Problem # 1: A significant movement in the arts since at least 1860 hates tying art to “meaning.” In various forms, the argument is made (or the position taken) that the arts should not deal in meanings, but in the creation of brute things, or an event, or an experience. Meaning is perceived as ethereal, non-material, as something other than the work, something that gets substituted for the work. William Gass’s “six regularly scheduled trains out of the text” is my favorite explication of this stance against meaning. But there is Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” and the New Critics’ “heresy of paraphrase” and any number of other versions. Jeff Nealon offers his own diatribe against meaning in his forthcoming book on the performative, wanting to shift the focus from meaning onto force, working from Austin and Derrida.

For starters, I want to endorse the pluralism of artistic practice. So I certainly wouldn’t want to impose some kind of straight-jacket of meaning on the arts—or think that I could set up a theoretical account of “art” that would encompass everything that artists do. Such a theoretical account would be vacuous if sufficiently general to cover the whole field. All the interest would lie in the specifics that the theory would leave untouched. If all works engaged meaning, that would tell us nothing about our judgments that some works are enlivening and others not.

More consequential, I think, is the question of whether there are purely perceptual objects. That is, when I see the Ellsworth Kelly canvases, am I having a particularly intense perceptual experience that has no meaning at all? It is just a sensual experience—thus referring back to the etymology of the word “aesthetic.” Within my catch-phrase, “every thing is necessarily some thing,” the transcendental blackmail is to say that I judge the Kelly paintings as “art.” I know that some things exist (and are created) to offer sensual sensations—and such things are called “art.”

That knowledge sets me up to view the Kelly paintings in the right spirit. Art “means” sensual activation in a certain contemplative mode, without asking for anything further in the way of communication or purpose. Without that identification of this thing as “art,” I would be disoriented, not knowing how to process or judge what I am seeing. There must be some kind of “determination” (in Hegel’s sense of that term) in order for there to be understanding—and understanding guides perception. This is the prison-house of language approach; no perception absent the categories supplied by language. We must make a judgment about what something is before we can know how to view it.

Do I believe this? I don’t know. I certainly am attracted to the artists who want to get out from under meaning, who want to get to some kind of “innocent” or “primitive” sensual/perceptual experience. But that effort to sidestep all mediation does also seem doomed to failure. Modern art, especially, seems enthralled by constant efforts to do what is impossible. As Clement Greenberg insisted and as Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” wittily alerts us, modern art’s moves seem to announce continually: “this is a work of art.” The rest, how we are to judge it etc., follows from that opening declaration. In Latour’s language (borrowed in this case from Whitehead), modern art seems to think (at least in many cases) that the first move has to be to guard against “category mistake.” The art needs to alert us that we are in the “mode” of aesthetics so that we know how to perceive it.

In a somewhat similar fashion (at least in the ballpark of similar concerns), much modern art tries to move things from one category to another. “Alienation” (Brecht) or “defamiliarization” (Russian formalists) point to techniques that attempt to lead the viewer to see things differently, often by shifting the category in which that thing is placed. A thing’s significance, its relation to the viewer is altered, if it is judged as an instance of this rather than that category. Pushing against habitual (or received) categorizations is often the explicit goal.

One might object that this is an awfully attenuated concept of meaning. The riposte would be: to change the viewer’s relation to some thing, to have him see that thing “as” this rather than that (back to Wittgenstein), is to change the thing’s meaning, since meaning is constituted through relationships. We don’t need the thing to be conveying an elaborate message; the thing doesn’t need to be a “sign” of something or other; we just need to the thing to be a different thing, taken up in a different mode, for “meaning” to come into play.

Still, there seems something intuitively correct about saying that the Kelly paintings have no meaning. They just are. In a world “where the trail of the human serpent is over all” (William James), there can be a fierce hunger for reality, for some brute facts. Paradoxical, of course, that these brute facts would be fashioned by human hands. But a desire to confront “the thing itself,” divested of all meaning, makes sense to me. Even if it is impossible to actually achieve.

Problem Number Two: The Humanities

Here’s a definition of the humanities that I like:

The humanities study the meaning-making practices of human culture(s), past and present, focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation, with a special interest in particular instances and, thus, an ineliminable focus on the singular, the eccentric, the subjective.
–Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (OUP, 2014), p. 6.

DIGRESSION: Small goes “meta” in her definition, which I think is a mistake. Yes, the humanities ponder “meaning-making practices”—as these Joseph North posts do—but they also, more significantly in my view, also engage with first-order meanings per se, and aim to contribute to the stock of such meanings. Because the real stakes, it seems to me, are always on the level of the first-order meanings. The “meta” reflections are “academic” in the negative sense of that word if not motivated by a commitment to particular first-order commitments. What commitment, what value, drives my speculations here? Most generally, a refutation of individualistic models of creation, of significance, of social relations. Our entanglement with others–our ongoing and inescapable vulnerability and precarity (to use Judith Butler’s terms or indebtedness (to use David Graeber’s terms) has direct political consequences in my view.

So what’s the problem? I don’t know how to think about the belatedness that this definition establishes for the humanities. “The meaning-making practices” must come first—and then the humanities study them. The object/subject split here is too drastic. I’d want to say something more Latour-like: meaning emerges as the humanities take up various cultural phenomena. Or, to go back to my thoughts about close readings, the humanities “actualize” (even “realize”) their objects of study, creating meanings that were not evident before. The idea (as with Kant’s claim that one example of “genius/orginality” spurs the originality of others) is that meanings produce meanings; of the making of meanings, there is no end. Meanings proliferate. No word is final—but (in fact) occasions the production of more words. Bakhtin seems the best guide here, with his sense of how every word calls forth an answering word. That also means that we are always already immersed in a field of meanings–Kenneth Burke’s ongoing conversation. So belatedness just comes with the territory.

Still, the problem is whether there is a distinction between the arts and the humanities. As just described, the humanities could be seen as the same as the arts; it is just that the artist works with paint, and the humanist works with cultural meanings.

That doesn’t seem right to me: i.e. that the humanities are the same as the arts, just working with a different material. The humanities do seem intensely meaning focused. Their bread and butter is the elaboration of meaning—far beyond acts of mere categorization. If the humanities entail getting you to see something “as” this rather than that, or in shifting an object from one “mode” into another, those alterations of how something is judged/understood require much more than simply changing the label from “painting” to “property.” The relationships involved are entanglements that the humanist tries to trace in all their complexity.

Maybe that’s one place of difference. The humanist complicates, bringing more and more things into dialogue with the object of study, almost always adding to the “context” that is deemed to constitute the meanings of the “text.” But the arts are often (hardly always, but certainly sometimes) drawn to abstraction, to the intensification of our encounter with a thing by focusing on it, by taking it out of context in order to make it “stand out.”

The arts (again, in some instances) are interested in “singularity”—as part of that effort to get to the “thing itself,” its singular integrity, its being stripped of meanings piled onto it by its relations. Escape from family (all those relations!) Conatus? And maybe that’s why the humanist’s accounts of the artist’s work can so often be processed by the artist as a betrayal. The humanist will pull the art work back into the circle of relations, will even dare to “explain” how and why the art work came to be what it is. Those six trains out of the work that Gass deplores. The humanist just can’t let things be. She must pile more words on top of those things.

In short, the humanities cannot help but trade in meanings. But it is not so obvious that the arts must do the same. Certainly lots of modern artists have desired to side-step meaning altogether. So an account of the arts that insists “the aesthetic” is the “mode” attuned to meaning can seem like foisting the priorities of the humanities upon the arts—or an attempt to claim the arts and the humanities are (basically) the same. I find myself unable to untangle this knot. I am, it seems, overly susceptible to Merleau-Ponty’s pronouncement that “we are condemned to meaning” and thus keep pulling everything back into processes that produce meaning.

Joseph North Six–Latour and Aesthetic Judgment

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.

Joseph North Five—The Aesthetic (Interactive Version)

My first stab at characterizing the aesthetic gave us a weak version of pluralism. The aesthetic viewed things in a particular dimension, it “saw them as” meaningful, where that term covered their import and their importance. Significance in both senses of the term: what some thing meant or conveyed and how (why?) that thing was of significance or value, worth caring about and for.

Such an understanding leaves the thing itself untroubled. In Nicholas Rescher’s book Pluralism (Oxford UP, 1995), he accepts that there are multiple possible descriptions of a thing, what Wittgenstein calls its “aspects,” but insists there is still only one “reality.” You and I are both seeing the same thing when I marvel at the color patterns in the fire and you worry about the people who might be trapped inside the building. We are both responding to the fire.

I think (I’d have to go back and check the relevant texts carefully) that Richard Rorty, the most notorious anti-realist of late 20^th century philosophy, would still hew to Rescher’s position. Rorty focuses on “redescriptions” as a site of creativity, and as proof that “reality” under-determines the ways that human understand it, utilize it, and can creatively re-script their relations to it. As Nick Gaskill points out in his essay on Rorty, one particularly dominant theme is Rorty’s work is anti-authoritarianism. And that theme extends to “reality.” Rorty writes against the authority that “reality” acquires in more traditional philosophical metaphysics. He denies to “reality” the last word; humans can always—and are constantly—saying new things about the world. And, following Kenneth Burke, we can claim that new things said open up new possible courses of action.

But what if we take a more radically interactive approach? Such an approach is certainly suggested in the pragmatism of James and Dewey. Debates about the “two pragmatisms” (H. O. Mounce’s term) in fact often center around the extent to which pragmatism is “realist.” For Mounce, Rorty is the enemy, and we must return pragmatism to Charles Sanders Peirce’s metaphysical realism. [Howard Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms (Routledge, 1997).] (Peirce, by the end of his life, was very close to a Platonic realist.) This battle then gets fought over the body of Dewey; was Rorty’s radical reading of Dewey accurate or not? And in most of these debate, James (and his radical empiricism) barely figures at all. He is not taken seriously as an epistemologist or an ontologist.

Today, however, James’s radical empiricism has come to seem a fruitful approach to a variety of writers, none more prominent than Bruno Latour. In his recent major tome, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Harvard UP, 2018), Latour offers what we might call radical pluralism. “Modes” is, in fact, a slippery term—and Latour himself often seems unsure just how far he wants to push his ontological claims. There are mountains of books trying to figure out what Spinoza meant by “modes,” although I think it fair to say there is general agreement that his “modes” are secondary to, dependent upon, “substance.”

Latour quite clearly wants to jettison the notion of “substance” altogether. But still the term “mode” is never in and of itself sufficient. It must be a mode of something. And what we get is “an inquiry into modes of existence.” But to what does “existence” refer? The general metaphysical condition (i.e just another name for “reality,” even if that reality is more inchoate, more open to various manipulations, multiple shapings than some other versions of “reality.” It is unclear, since despite the prominence of the term in the title, Latour never explains to us what he means by “existence.”) But he does rely heavily on the term “existents,” and its meaning is quite clear. Latour wants to substitute “subsistence” for “substance”—and refers throughout his book to “existents” (y which he appears to mean “things that subsist.”) There are identifiable things (existents) that subsist. (It seems to me, although Latour only mentions this term once, that he has his own version of Spinoza’s conatus. Latour seems to posit a fundamental drive to subsist, a fundamental energy devoted to subsisting.) In this framework, “a mode of existence [is] a way of being that cannot be substituted for any other and that no other can replace” (268). “A way of being” for what?–presumably for “an existent.”

Where Latour moves toward a more radical, ontological pluralism is in his insistence that to subsist requires change. If there is a fundamental reality in Latour’s recent work, it is the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of ceaseless “flux,” a Jamesian conceit if there ever was one. [“in fact, there is neither real continuity of courses of action nor stability of subjects” (370).] Against the relentless tide of time passing, an existent must exert itself to maintain itself. It must be ever adapting to the novelties that time’s passage throws at it. So are “modes” different strategies of subsistence? Latour doesn’t go that way.

Instead—and here is where a Latour inspired version of “the aesthetic” would dovetail with North’s desire that the aesthetic provide us with images of and models for collectivity—Latour focuses on what “assemblage” of participants (“actants”) must work together to allow an existent to subsist. [The “malign inversion” that elevates a persistent “substance” over the struggle for “subsistence” is malign because it “loses the thread of the means that could have ensured subsistence” (279)] In the case of science, concentrating on “the means of subsistence” requires attention to the procedures, the instruments, the experiments—in short, the whole range of interactions between the scientist and both the “thing” studied and the scientific community. Some existent is only “known” and only continues as an object of scientific discourse when it can be discerned by the procedures/instruments, fit into a causal story that the community (the peer reviewers in the first instance) buys, and remain an object of interest for subsequent inquiries.

Science, in Latour’s terms, grants us “access” to various existents—and it takes a village to secure such access. But it remains unclear (at least to me) to what extent the “existents” pre-exist these interactions with them. There seems to be some raw material out there, even if Latour is very specific that he wants to banish the reification called Matter (with a capital M). Latour’s commitment to the primary flux is such that he battles against all reifications: Matter, Society, Truth, the Economy. In their stead, he offers processes of assemblage in which “gatherings” (interactions) produce things. It would be better to say “produce states of affairs” (rather than produce things) because things always and only exist in relations. (That’s a major lesson of James’s radical empiricism.)

Thus, things emerge out of the flux, take on solidity as a result of interaction–and gain subsistence, plus any identity they might temporarily possess, in and through their relation to others. Latour is insistent that the path to being is through the detour of otherness; I only become myself through my relations–which are never stable, always unfolding–to others. But (here’s my nagging worry when it comes to science—and I think Latour actually is inconsistent on this score) what then are these existents, with their will to subsist? It seems as if he posits not just an originary flux, but also some existents lurking within the flux. Now we might say those existents are inchoate; he does at times use the term “articulation.” So we could say that existents are articulated, take a specific form, through specific processes of assemblage. And then we could say those specific forms are “modes.” But that would still mean they are “modes of” something more primitive—of a non-solid stuff (substance?) that needs a lot of help to keep subsisting. And that non-solid stuff has a will to subsist. Specific objects emerge from communal processes, but those processes work upon some mysterious stuff called “existents.”

But the aesthetic (to get there at last) may not have science’s handicap. There is little reason to think the aesthetic object pre-exists the act of artistic creation. Certainly, in the kind of common sense view that Latour is at pains to validate against the wrong-headed metaphysics of “the moderns,” that artist works upon her material (words, musical sounds, marble etc.) and shapes it into her art work. The interactive model works perfectly here. The material offers various affordances and resistances. It is hardly, as every artist knows, a passive participant, supine before the artist’s vision. It has its own contributions to make, its own ways of frustrating or enabling the artist’s desires. So this is not the Wittgensteinian interpreter who is seeing or highlighting “an aspect” of the finished thing he contemplates. Rather, it is the very creation of that thing through an interactive process. And it is not just the creation of the art work, but also the creation of this person as “an artist.” You don’t get to assume the identity of artist until you have done the act of making. It is not a pre-existent identity, but an emergent one–and it depends not just on the act of making but also on the community’s recognition of what you have made as a “work of art.”

Such a description immediately raises the question of whether or not there is a strong distinction between the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the creating artist and the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the audience. I am going to leave exploring that question to my next post.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic. In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work. That act hardly takes place in a vacuum. The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work. Once the work has been created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works. Roland Barthes, in an epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.” The canon is one way works of written art subsist. A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read. Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

In short, as Latour is always trying to get us to see, the number of actants involved in the subsistence of any activity and its products is almost always more numerous than we first suppose. And thus the outcome—the artistic work that emerges from this activity—is always shaped by inputs from all of these actants. No wonder artists continually dream of “artistic freedom.” Images of heroic individualism push back against the inevitable entanglement in complicated webs (networks) of relationships that defeat any idea of mastery, of sovereignty over, the field.

The aesthetic, precisely because it entails the creation of new objects, seems particularly suited to serve as an instance of radical pluralism. Its conditions for creation can be specified—and can be seen as distinct from the conditions of existence in other fields (such as science or, to cite some of Latour’s other examples, politics, law, and economics.) Those conditions can be described (Howard Becker’s work is exemplary here, but we can also think of Bourdieu as well). And we can even take a stab at trying to describe the factors that contribute to making judgments about the quality, importance, and/or significance (in all its senses) of aesthetic works. That’s where I want to start in my next post.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic. In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work. That act hardly takes place in a vacuum. The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work. Once the work has bene created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works. Roland Barthes, in a epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.” The canon is one way works of written art subsist. A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read. Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

’t go that way.

Instead—and here is where a Latour inspired version of “the aesthetic” would dovetail with North’s desire that the aesthetic provide us with images of and models for collectivity—Latour focuses on what “assemblage” of participants (“actants”) must work together to allow an existent to subsist. In the case of science, that means thinking about the procedures, the instruments, the experiments—in short, the whole range of interactions between the scientist and both the “thing” studied and the scientific community. Some existent is only “known” and only continues as an object of scientific discourse when it can be discerned by the procedures/instruments, fit into a causal story that the community (the peer reviewers in the first instance) buys, and remain an object of interest for subsequent inquiries. Science, in Latour’s terms, grants us “access” to various existents—and it takes a village to secure such access. But it remains unclear (at least to me) to what extent the “existents” pre-exist these interactions with them. There seems to be some raw material out there, even if Latour is very specific that he wants to banish the reification: Matter (with a capital M). Latour’s commitment to the primary flux is such that he battles against all reifications: Matter, Society, Truth, the Economy. In their stead, he offers processes of assemblage in which “gatherings” (interactions) produce things (probably saying “produce states of affairs” would be better).

Thus, things emerge out of the flux, take on solidity as a result of interaction. But (here’s my nagging worry when it comes to science—and I think Latour actually is inconsistent on this score) what then are these existents, with their will to subsist? It seems as if he posits not just an originary flux, but also some existents lurking within the flux. Now we might say those existents are inchoate; he does at times use the term “articulation.” So we could say that existents are articulated, take a specific form, through specific processes of assemblage. And then we could say those specific forms are “modes.” But that would still mean they are “modes of” something more primitive—of a non-solid stuff (substance?) that needs a lot of help to keep subsisting. And that non-solid stuff has a will to subsist. Specific objects emerge from communal processes, but those processes work upon some mysterious stuff called “existents.”

And it is not just the material the artist works with that is transformed in the process. So is the person doing that work. Her identity as “an artist” only emerges through doing that work–and depends not only on what she produces, but also on how others are willing to view her. We all know people who want to call themselves “writers,” but who do not feel entitled to claim that self-description because the community has not yet bestowed it on them. That identity can only be achieved through the “means” of the others–the material worked on, the community to whom the work is presented.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic. In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work. That act hardly takes place in a vacuum. The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work. Once the work has been created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works. Roland Barthes, in a epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.” The canon is one way works of written art subsist. A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read. Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

In short, as Latour is always trying to get us to see, the number of actants involved in the subsistence of any activity and its products is almost always more numerous than we first suppose. And thus the outcome—the artistic work that emerges from this activity and “the artist” who also emerges from it—is always shaped by inputs from all of these actants. No wonder artists continually dream of “artistic freedom.” Images of heroic individualism push back against the inevitable entanglement in complicated webs (networks) of relationships that defeat any idea of mastery, of sovereignty over, the field.