Category: the ordinary

Dewey, Art As Experience (3)

I am now ready to offer an account of the aesthetic that is inspired by Dewey but departs fairly drastically from him as well. The key point of contention is the continuity between artistic endeavors and ordinary experiences. My account will make much of the peculiar powers and capacities art acquires precisely because it is discontinuous with everyday life.

Where Dewey helps me is his description of the work that the artist does upon the materials offered to her by the everyday. Here are some of Dewey’s helpful statements on that score. My “conception . . . of esthetic experience,” Dewey writes, “is, indeed, that the work of art has a unique quality, but that it is that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences” (84). “[M]aterial is not subordinated to some particular and antecedent meaning . . ., but it is reconstructed and reorganized to express the artist’s imaginative vision. . . . Drawing is drawing out; it is extraction of what the subject matter has to say in particular to the painter in his integrated experience” (92, Dewey’s emphasis). “Art . . . carries further, through selection and concentration, the reference to an object, to organization and order, beyond mere sense” (126). “Through art, meanings of objects that are otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted, and resisted, are clarified and concentrated, and not by thought working laboriously upon them, nor by escape into a world of mere sense, but by creation of a new experience” (132-33). “Emotional energy continues to work but now does real work; it accomplished something. It evokes, assembles, accepts and rejects memories, images, observations, and works them into a whole toned throughout by the same immediate emotional feeling. Thereby is presented an object that is unified and distinguished throughout” (156).

The artist achieves intensity (a focusing of attention and of energies) through a “work” of concentration, compression, unification, selection, and reduction. I can accept that we all might perform a similar work in our everyday lives—since we attend to only part of what lies in front of us and we strive to understand it and be responsive to its features by deploying strategies of concentration, unification etc.

Thus it is not the features of artistic work that I want to highlight. Rather it is the conditions under which that work is done. I have five I want to consider.

Framing. Drawing boundaries around any activity can increase its intensity. In part, this is an effect of concentration/selection, of only admitting within the frame things that are pertinent. The banishment of the non-relevant focuses matters.

But there is also the effect of deliberately and self-consciously stepping into the bounded arena. We are here in this space now to do this and only this. Framing creates a kind of unity of purpose that is hard to achieve in daily life. Games, classrooms, the operating room, and the bounded canvas of traditional paintings are only some examples of the power of spaces designated to one purpose—and one purpose alone. Everything else is to be checked at the door.

Such spaces are artificial; they must be constructed. The natural world does not come to us in bounded chunks or with sacrosanct spaces. Dewey’s aesthetics neglects both the rationales for and the processes through which framing occurs. Framing, I am suggesting, is a powerful and deliberate device erected against the “disordered heterogeneity” (157) that characterizes much of ordinary experience.

It is worth saying here that modern art has been very self-conscious about framing and its effects—and has often tried to deconstruct frames. From Duchamp’s Fountain (calling out attention to the institutions of art and the semi-sacred space of the museum) to Jo Baer’s paintings, artists have highlighted the artificiality of the frame, sometimes in the name of being more real, more attentive to a non-exclusionary heterogeneity, at other times in order to simply increase self-consciousness about framing effects.

Reflection/Self-Consciousness. Precisely because the artist works upon material provided by the world (whether that material be the emotions and thoughts arising out of experience or just the material stuff—paint, words, rock, sounds—the world affords), there is a stepping back from the flow of experience to this deliberate fashioning of something out of it.

Maybe what I am saying here is that there is a difference between “working” and “living”—and that Dewey (perhaps pragmatism as a philosophy) is blind to that difference. Does the interaction model imply that we are always working, that we are always fashioning what the situation provides in relation to needs and purposes? Isn’t walking through a landscape taking in its sights and sounds different from working up those sights and sounds into a painting or an essay? Is Thoreau’s living in his cabin distinct from Thoreau’s writing about that experience, striving to derive and communicate that experience’s meanings?

In other words, are we self-conscious in every moment? Or, alternatively, is it possible to do work without being self-conscious? Work is the quintessential case of Deweyean “intelligence”—the movement toward a desired end in relation to the means afforded by the materials at hand, the resources available to the worker.

My question here has two parts. A) Are we always working? One way of understanding the Darwinian interaction model would answer that question Yes. I am not so sure.

B) Doesn’t work require a kind of self-consciousness, a kind of deliberate action, that also requires certain enabling conditions—conditions that ordinary experience often does not provide? For starters, work might require a dedicated, framed space: a room of one’s own (or, at least, a workplace). The pandemic, of course, is challenging that spatial division, but doing one’s job on-line in the kitchen or the bedroom (the complete collapse of a distinction between domestic space and work space) is an experiment whose results are still undecided. More globally, I am suggesting that there is the sense of crossing a border from one way of being in the world to another way of being when one sits down to work. The artist as well as the engineer self-consciously takes up her tools. We don’t live every moment so self-consciously focused or so oriented to getting a specific thing done.

I suspect that Dewey thinks self-conscious focus and achievement are the most fulfilling form of human life. There is a deeply buried work ethic in Dewey, with his emphasis on “consummation,” on bringing things to “fulfillment.” Yes, he wants to celebrate process over product, but the process is always ends-driven, and engaged intelligence is his version of both Socrates’ “the examined life” and Mill’s pleasures of a higher animal.

A crucial—and to me truly decisive—discontinuity between art and ordinary experience is the relation to time. In our everyday experience, time cannot be stopped. There is not, pace Prufrock, time for visions and revisions.

The artist gets to step outside of time and work on the materials that ordinary life provides. Yes, there are deadlines—and there are the assorted pressures that a life in time presents—but the artist can work on his novel or his painting for eight years, striving to get things right. The framing inherent to the aesthetic is not just spatial, but also temporal. The luxury of reflection, of intense self-consciousness, requires not just a room of one’s own but expansive amounts of time. Both, needless to say, are luxuries not available to a majority of the world’s inhabitants. The relation to the materials provided by experience is radically different if one must react in real time or if one has the ability to step back, mull things over, revise one’s first (and second and third) responsive move, and manipulate various inputs to achieve an integrated whole. Art’s ability to achieve unity and coherence—not to mention the eloquence of its expressions of emotion and insight—is directly related to this slowing down of time.

Art is not entirely non-temporal. Art forms like the novel and music are explicitly temporal—but they demonstrate (and glory) in a kind of dominion over time that cannot be achieved in “real life.” To miss the discontinuity between the arts’ relation to time and the way we all must live temporally in our ordinary lives is to miss a distinctive reason art is so powerful.

Games and work benefit from the intensification effects of framing. But it is not obvious that they have the same relation to time as the arts. Yes, a musical or dramatic performance, like a baseball game, is a “one-off”—and thus subject to irreversible results (well-played or marred by errors). But the creative artist gets “do-overs” in the way that performers or the players of a game do not. Revisions and mulligans come with the territory of creating an art work.

Furthermore, not only does the artist step out of “real time,” but the artist also works in the realm of “fiction.” On the one hand, it is not surprising that Dewey, who really had barely an aesthetic bone in his body, missed the fictional nature of the arts. But on another hand, it is shocking that he did so—because of his life-long advocacy for “experimentation.” In a certain way, the space of the arts is not very different from the space of the laboratory. In both cases, the practitioner gets to assemble various materials, see how they interact with one another, and not have to worry about the results of that interaction having immediate real world consequences. (I will worry about the indirect, non-immediate, consequences in my next post.)

Thus, Shakespeare’s King Lear can consider the consequences of dividing up a kingdom without a real civil war occurring. We can call his play a cautionary tale, a plea to his fellow countrymen to maintain unity, through his vivid depiction of the awful alternative. But no one gets killed—even though he fictionally represents people getting killed. So we can add to the powers that art possesses by virtue of its special relations to space and time, its ability to step aside from “real life” into a controlled space we call “fiction” to conduct thought experiments about various alternative ways of living (or perceiving or thinking or reacting emotionally) in ordinary existence.

In short, most art works—even the ones that call themselves “realistic”—exist in a hypothetical universe, not in the universe you and I must live in. Again, modern art has sometimes chafed against this constraint, sometimes embraced it (“speculative fiction”), and sometimes played with it in various ingenious ways (Philip Roth’s The Counter-Life for just one of many examples). Still I am arguing that this discontinuity—a distinction between the hypothetical and the real—is endemic to the arts, for better and for worse.

I will consider the issue of how art impacts ordinary life in my next post. For today, I will conclude with a summary statement that will come as no surprise for readers of my earlier posts on Dewey. What I am repeating here is that the everyday does not come to us (in my opinion, but not in Dewey’s) endowed with form. The aesthetic’s work is to derive form, to create form, out of the material life provides. Dewey calls the art work “formed matter” (114), which seems right to me.

Here is his fullest discussion of form.

“In a word, form is not found exclusively in objects labeled works of art. Wherever perception has not been blunted and perverted, there is an inevitable tendency (my emphasis) to arrange events and objects with reference to the demands of complete and unified experience. Form is a character of every experience that is an (Dewey’s emphasis) experience. Art in its specific sense enacts more deliberately and fully the conditions that effect this unity. Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment. (Dewey’s italics; my underlining). The connection of form with substance is thus inherent, not imposed from without. It marks the matter of an experience that is carried to consummation. . . . The problem of discovering the nature of form is thus identical with that of discovering the means by which are effected the carrying forward of an experience to its fulfillment” (137).

Perhaps there is “an inevitable tendency” to attempt to organize the materials presented by the daily round. In that sense, the aesthetic impulse and our responses to everyday experience would be continuous. In both cases, we seek fulfillment or consummation through the achievement of form. I do think this is too mono-causal an account of the multiple ways that humans respond to experience—or, to be more fundamental still, simply experience. I don’t think our ways of being in the world are “perverted” if we fail to strive to “form” the heterogeneous stuff the world throws at us on any given day. Furthermore—and I have beaten this horse many times already—I don’t believe that situations and events and scenes have an “integral fulfillment” lurking within them.

What this post adds to these worries/objections is this: Even if there is a fundamental continuity between the aesthetic effort to achieve form and similar efforts we make in our everyday lives, it is a mistake to miss that the aesthetic possesses resources for that effort that the everyday lacks. Living forward in real time is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to doing the work of selection, concentration, clarification, intensification, and unification that the aesthetic performs in order to whip the matter of experience into shape. The aesthetic’s ability (its constitutive ability?) to step aside from the flow of experience grants it capacities that everyday life simply does not possess.

It is worth adding that the aesthetic’s various resources are not unique to art. In various ways, other forms of human activity (from games to specialized pursuits) avail themselves of the capacities activated by creating separate spaces, by selecting out only relevant features of a situation, by developing techniques of working upon and shaping available materials, and by focusing attention in various ways. Some of these other enterprises even possess strategies for stepping outside of time’s relentless forward flow.

Dewey, Art As Experience (2)

Dewey hates dualisms. He is (shades of Hegel again) always trying to cross conceptual and existential divides. Thus, it comes as no surprise that he hates modernist aestheticism, even as he (a fact Nick has made abundantly clear to me) embraces the modernist commitment to a non-representational art that is an experience in and of itself (not the representation of some experience external to it). And he clearly (it seems to me) wants to make the kind of experience that would qualify as “aesthetic” continuous with ordinary experience.

Yet—he also is committed to the aesthetic experience accomplishing a “consummation” that many ordinary experiences do not achieve. The aesthetic is connected to “fulfillment.” That is why the aesthetic in Art As Experience offers a template for the kinds of experiences that everyone should strive to have—and attending to the aesthetic motivates a critique of the social, economic, and psychological conditions that make so much of ordinary experience unfulfilling. The goal is to make more of our experiences “aesthetic”—that is, fulfilling and consummatory. Our lives could be more intense and more coherent and more satisfying than they currently are.

This distinction between ordinary experience and aesthetic experiences produces a number of dualisms in Art As Experience. There is the foundational distinction between “experience” and “an experience.” Then, when we move onto the discussion of emotion, we get a distinction between an emotion that is “discharged” and one that is “expressed.” Finally, in the chapters on “form,” there is the distinction between (mere) “shape” and “form.”

So this my objection number two to Dewey’s book. He maintains a set of dualisms that stand in unresolved tension with his commitment to unity. In thinking about the aesthetic in my next post, I will be inspired by Dewey to consider the discontinuity between art and ordinary experience—which goes against his fundamental desire to make them continuous. But his dualisms give me a way of thinking about discontinuity.

Here’s a clear statement of the distinction between “discharge” and “expression,” a statement that (from my perspective) makes clear the “work” that must be done to render something aesthetic. “The emotion that was finely wrought out by Tennyson in the composition of ‘In Memoriam’ was not identical with the emotion of grief that manifests itself in weeping and a downcast frame: the first is an act of expression, the second of discharge. Yet the continuity of the two emotions, the fact that esthetic emotion is native emotion transformed through the objective material to which it has committed its development and consummation, is evident”(78-79). [This position has the unfortunate implication that the grounding emotion has to be really felt by the artist. But actors—and poets for that matter—may artistically express emotions that they don’t actually have. Throughout, as I will discuss at some length in my next post, Dewey neglects the “fictional aspect” of the aesthetic—a neglect that is not surprising given his investment in the continuity between the aesthetic and ordinary experience.]

In each case of these dualisms, it seems clear that some kind of work is done upon the material that experience offers. That work is necessary to move from “experience” to “an experience.” What seems obvious to me is that the “aesthetic” in Art As Experience becomes another mode of “reconstruction”—which, of course, is Dewey’s characterization of the work philosophy does (or should be doing).

My point is that we need then to attend to how that work gets done. A lot of Art As Experience does that descriptive task, but Dewey is hampered by his desire to keep the aesthetic and the ordinary continuous. I think his aim is to render all experience aesthetic. The ordinary transformed—or reconstructed. On the one hand, “aesthetic education” teaches us how to perceive, how to take in what experience (or the experienced work of art) has to offer. “There must be indirect and collateral channels of response prepared in advance in the case of one who really sees the picture or hears the music. This motor preparation is a large part of aesthetic education in any particular line. To know what to look for and how to see it is an affair of readiness on the part of motor equipment. . . . [I]t is necessary that there be ready defined channels of motor response, due in part to native constitution and in part to education through experience” (98). “Education through experience” needs to be guided. Dewey should say more about the role of the teacher here. You don’t learn how to listen to a Beethoven sonata—or how to play it—without a teacher. And I am willing to entertain the notion that the same holds true for ordinary experience. We can learn how to pay attention to, how to understand, how to value various elements of experience that might pass by unnoticed without the nudges education provides.

Dewey insists throughout that it can never be a matter of immediate experience. “The other factor that is required in order that a work may be expressive to a percipient is meanings and values extracted from prior experiences and funded in such a way that they fuse with the qualities directly presented in the work of art” (98). There is no immediate perception in Dewey, and no self-enclosed present moment. How we understand (judge) what is in front of our nose is always “funded”—and presumably some of that funding is a product of education. But another part of the funding is more individual, a product of one’s own distinctive experiences, purposes, desires, and temperament. One’s interests (a word that works beautifully in this context) predispose one’s present moment interactions. (Acknowledgement to Nick required here since he keeps reminding me of the temporality built into Dewey’s key notion of “experience.” It is not just our “funded” response—this bringing the past to bear—but also our orientation toward desired consequences—thus bringing the future into the relation—that is present in the present moment.)

Chapter Five of Art As Experience concludes with a stirring statement of what aesthetic reconstruction can accomplish. I am going to quote from it at length.

“[T]he process of living is continuous; it possesses continuity because it is an everlasting renewed process of acting upon environment and being acted upon by it, together with institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone. Hence experience is necessarily cumulative and its subject matter gains expressiveness because of cumulative continuity. . . . Yet apathy and torpor conceal this expressiveness by building a shell about objects. Familiarity induces indifference, prejudice blinds us; conceit looks through the wrong end of a telescope and minimizes the significance possessed by objects in favor of the alleged importance of the self. Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us it in its varied qualities and forms. It intercepts every shade of expressiveness found in object and orders them in a new experience of life” (104, my emphasis).

We get here the romantic, vitalist Dewey. Art re-vivifies the world and the self. It quickens. Crucial for Dewey is that art works upon actual experience; it awakens us to this world; it is not offering us a refuge in some alternative universe (the house of art). I certainly thrill to these kinds of claims for art, for the seductiveness of the intensity it offers, for its ability to render the ordinary luminous, and replace routine with intensity. How it manages to do that revivifying work will be the subject of my next post.

But Dewey doesn’t stop there—with this account of how the arts quicken individual consciousness and experience. He also proclaims that art is the best way to establish the most complete and the most satisfactory communication between people.

“Those who are moved [by a work of art] feel . . . that what the work expresses is as if it were something one had oneself been longing to express. Meantime, the artist works to create an audience to which he does communicate. In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between mean and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience” (105).

Dewey’s meditations on democracy turn more and more to the theme of “communication” in the 1930s and 1940s. Two examples, the first from “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939): “For every way of life that fails in its democracy limits the contacts, the exchanges, the communications, the interactions by which experience is steadied while it is also enlarged and enriched” (p. 245 in The Political Writings [Hackett, 1993]). The second from “John Dewey Responds” (1949): “Many years ago I read something written by an astute politician. He said that majority rule is not the heart of democracy, but the processes by which a given group having a specific kind of politics becomes a majority. That saying has remained with me; in effect it embodies recognition that democracy is an educative process; that the act of voting is in a democratic regime a culmination of a continued process of open and public communication in which prejudices have the opportunity to erase each other; that continued interchange of facts and ideas exposes what is unsound and discloses what may make for human well-being”(p. 248 in The Political Writings). [Read this statement in the context of 2020—and weep.]

The claim that art works offer the most “complete and unhindered communication” possible in this sublunary world seems to me overboard. But I don’t want to deny that artists do (at least in some instances) pay particular care to communicating, while I accept (again, with some reservations) Dewey’s conviction that emotionally charged communication has a potential effectiveness (and impact) denied to more austere pronouncements.

I will end with anticipating a bit my next post. That art works can revivify one’s relation to the world, express emotions more successfully, render the elements of experience more fulfilling, and communicate with others more completely depends on a certain kind of self-conscious work upon the materials offered by experience. That work is connected to the creation of “form” out of those materials, as Dewey suggests in his closing words to Chapter VI.

“[Whatever] path the work of art pursues, it, just because it is a full and intense experience, keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness. It does so by reducing the raw materials of that experience to matter ordered through form” (133). The world’s fullness needs to be reduced in order to achieve form. The artist must select out of everything that experience provides for just those elements that she will concentrate upon.

Futility and Despair

Like Tristram Shandy, I can’t write fast enough to keep up with all the things swirling in my head. So much is going in—all the reading I am doing plus the daily gleanings from the web—that I have lots that feels like it needs to go out. I keep falling behind.

However, it is not the futility of my getting it all down or despair over time’s finitude (and its resultant cruelty) that is my topic today. The topic is contemporary art.

Nick and I had our second zoom conversation about John Dewey’s Art As Experience on Monday. Dewey argues (both in that book and in a chapter entitled “Qualitative Thought” in Philosophy and Civilization) that humans intuitively grasp situations in their “qualitative unity” before proceeding to any kind of analysis of the components of the situation. He also (it seems to me, but Nick would disagree) appears to claim that situations actually possess that qualitative unity. We have satisfactory or fulfilling experiences when we are best aligned with what the situation affords, or when we can work on what it affords to shape it to better suit our needs. Art is important because it models this fulfilling alignment; it offers instances of creative interaction that brings “form” to the interaction, crafting the situation’s elements into “equilibrium” or “harmony.”

There are features of this view of what art does which, in fact, I find helpful to my ongoing desire to consider the connection between art and meaning. But I am going to leave that aside for the moment in order to address a different point here—basically the observation that Dewey’s picture of art as stated in the previous paragraph seems utterly antithetical to much artistic practice since 1910. (On or around 1910, Virginia Woolf told us, human nature changed.)

Much art—and most “high” or “serious” art—of the past 100 years has displayed the futility of all attempts to apprehend or craft “unity.” “These fragments I have shored against my ruin” can be written over the portals of modern (and postmodern) art—an updated version of “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Dewey looks old-fashioned and naïve with his talk of unity and harmony. Of course, that Dewey is old-fashioned and naïve is a standard critique. Like Whitman, he lacks any idea of evil.

Many modern paintings are cluttered. They are not “composed,” but scattered, with no clear pathway for the eye to follow, no “form” that brings all the elements into order.

But, for my primary example, I will take the contemporary “serious” novel. Experimental fiction is pretty much dead, but those avant-garde narratives are all about fragmentation. The same goes for avant-garde poetry.

More “realistic” fiction, it seems to me, comes in primarily two forms. There are the domestic novels (think Julia Glass, Rachel Cusk, Tessa Hadley, Jonathan Franzen), rooted in upper middle-class life and its romantic and family problems. Updated Updike and Cheever.

And there are the novels about social injustice. These novels (interestingly enough) are, more often, than not “historical”—and tell the tale of how the downtrodden are trodden down, with the rich and powerful escaping scot free. Colson Whitehead (I have pasted at the end of this post the relevant passages from a recent interview with him) sums it up: “the guilty escape punishment, the innocent suffer.” This glum conclusion fits any number of novels by Toni Morrison, Sebastian Barry, James Welch, Edward P. Jones, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others; these victim tales appear to confirm Whitehead’s glum conclusion about “human nature” and the inevitable (?) “tendency” of the “powerful . . . to tyrannise and bully the weak.” These novels are committed to witnessing, to telling the tales that the powerful would rather remain untold. They can hardly be faulted for the desire to bring injustice to the light. But they have nothing to offer beyond witness, beyond indignation. They don’t imagine (because, it seems, they don’t believe in) any way to move beyond injustice. Injustice is an old story that is bound to occur again and again.

I think these novels of despair come close to Nietzschean nihilism. Nietzsche wants to enlist art in the difficult effort to “affirm” this life, even with all its imperfections. Finding the grounds for affirmation is hardly easy, but giving into despair is, for Nietszche as much as for Christian orthodoxy, the ultimate sin. For Nietzsche, the solution was the masochistic embrace of suffering, his amor fati. But James Baldwin offers a different path; his story “Sonny’s Blues” displays his hope (his reliance) on love (a recurrent term in Baldwin) and on art to allow us to endure, perhaps even rise above, the inevitable suffering that life is going to deal out to us.

When talking about my frustration with these novels, Nick reminds me I am just repeating my desire for “liberal comedies.” I want plots that move us toward more just, more humane societies. Plots that imagine reform, melioration, in the right direction. Steps toward a better world—an idea that fits not only with William James’ “meliorism,” but also with Dewey’s concrete account of adjustments to a situation. The problem with despair is that it is too abstract; it insists that only a global transformation of the whole system (of “human nature”?) can do the job—and then hasn’t a clue about what steps might even be taken to get you closer to such a transformation. It’s magical thinking, tied to an all or nothing vision. Either we are living in hell or in heaven—and since it’s obvious we ain’t in heaven, we are clearly in the other place.

Among the non-realistic novelists the same despair is prevalent. Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee have an equally bleak view of human nature and certainly don’t offer any vision of more just or desirable social arrangements. In speculative fiction (David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood), some grand catastrophe does bring about the kind of complete transformation more realistic fictions don’t dare to imagine. But those transformations only deliver a world even worse than the contemporary one. When it comes to imagining an alternative society, it seems variants of the one offered by The Lord of the Flies is the best we can do. Ursula LeGuin’s work offers a welcome exception to this generalization about imagined post-catastrophe futures.

There have been some “serious” realistic novels that have attempted to locate their characters in contemporary political/economic context (unlike the domestic novels I mentioned above). Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December; Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens; John Lanchester, Capital; Joseph O’Neill, Netherland. The first three are “ensemble” novels, tracking a variety of characters. And those characters end up with a variety of outcomes—which does avoid the powerful/victim dichotomy of the witness novels. These novels seem less driven by a need to indignantly call out injustice and more focused on the multiple ways people survive or fail to survive contemporary conditions.

O’Neill’s novel is interesting because it combines the domestic novels focus on family relations with the more sociological interests that drive its portrait of post-9/11 New York City. Liberal comedy (from Shakespeare to Anthony Trollope to 1930s screwball films and beyond) often rests on a homology between the central couple whose endangered love relationship is the focus of the plot and a reformed society. If the couple can successfully consummate their love that is because the society which thwarted them has been reformed in the course of the play/novel/film. (This is basic C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye on the theory of comedy.)

From the start (as recognized by Walter Scott in his commentary on his own novel Waverly), the great problem faced by the “historical novel” (or by any novel attempting to portray individualized fictional characters caught up in events of historical significance) was to make the connection between the character’s eventual fate and what those events wrought. That Prince Andrei dies in War and Peace is fitting; to be in the Napoleonic Wars would very likely lead one to death. That was the impact those wars had on individuals. But the novelist can hardly just march all his characters off to death.

How, then to align the fate of the characters who survive with the state that society reaches after the events of the novel? The happy marriage of Pierre and Natasha is discontinuous with the reactionary course followed by the Russian state after 1815. They escape into a separate peace—and that kind of escape (also enjoyed by Waverly in Scott’s novel) becomes the norm in most realistic novels, even the ones that import historical events and historical figures into their plots. The battle of Culloden destroys Scottish Highland society, but Waverly gives the battle a miss and his life is not destroyed. In O’Neill’s Netherland, the protagonist saves his marriage precisely by renouncing the public world of New York City’s financial industry. He can have one or the other, but not both. The corruption of the financial world makes a genuine and sustainable romantic relationship impossible. The primary character who remains behind in that world after the protagonist abandons it is doomed.

One way, then, to describe the lack of unity that prevails in “modern” art is precisely the ever-widening gulf between public and private. We live utterly fragmented lives. Domestic comedy abounds; we can imagine the joys and tribulations of family life and friendship. We can even imagine the joys and tribulations of the workplace (Parks and Rec; Thirty Rock; The Office), but we can’t translate the comraderies, the necessary tolerances of how others annoy us, the ability to shrug off (even enjoy) differences and eccentricities, into the public sphere.

We can’t connect, as E. M. Forster urged us to do in Howard’s End. Forster at least had the country house—a domestic space that carries a larger social import—for his effort to bridge the gap between public and private. We have no apparent bridges of any sort. We stand dismayed by the nastiness of our politics and the brutalities of our economic order, even as we carve out loves and friendships we can affirm. No wonder our art is all about disconnection.

Nick’s way of describing modern art’s lack of unity was very different from mine. He attributed it to art’s becoming more and more entangled in, focused on, its own institutions. Going that route also highlights disconnection—but now the alienation of art from the “lifeworld” (to resurrect Habermas’ way of talking about this issue). The idea in Habermas was that modernity tended to segregate various activities (the scientific/technical; the aesthetic; the economic; the scholarly) into relatively autonomous spheres (we could call them “professions,” although he does not) which end up mostly speaking to themselves—and hence divorced from the “lifeworld” (understood as the daily life of social intercourse and domestic relations). Certainly, Dewey is all about re-integrating the aesthetic back into the ordinary; he wants the aesthetic and the ordinary to be continuous, even though (the topic for a future post) he still wants the aesthetic to be distinctive.

So what Nick is pointing out is that artists speak more and more only to other artists, other insiders. The practice of art is increasingly self-referential in the sense that works are best understood in dialogue with previous works, with prevailing discussions in the field. This self-enclosure is mirrored by the creation of institutions specific to the practice, and to a primary desire to impress (communicate with) those positioned within the field.

This development of specific institutions and a set of recognized practitioners fragments art in two ways: one, no work can be a self-sufficient unity because it refers to, stands in relation to, other works. (Dewey actually seems to accept this fact since he is adamant that the present always stands in relation to the past; but that acceptance does seem a problem for his insistence on the “qualitative unity” of a situation.)

Two, more crucially, the more any pursuit becomes closed off from the comprehension of outsiders (the less it engages in fruitful interchanges with different pursuits), the less likely we are to find bridges across the divides between pursuits—and the divide from the lifeworld. We get here another version of the old Lukacs and Jameson diagnosis: we (and the fate of the novel since Tolstoy and George Eliot is one symptom of this fact) are less and less able to comprehend totality—where “comprehend” means not just “to understand,” but also to capture or contain within any aesthetic or intellectual form. Fragmentation is the order of the day because unity is now, quite simply, beyond our capabilities.

I have a bit more to say on this topic. But will stop here for today.

Here is the interview with Colson Whitehead. I have given you about half of it—but pretty much all the substantive parts. But here’s the link to the whole thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/21/colson-whitehead-we-invent-all-sorts-of-different-reasons-to-hate-people

“It is a story,” says Whitehead, “about how powerful people get away with abusing the powerless and are never called to account.”

He uses the term “human nature” more than once and one senses that the writing of his past couple of books has reinforced his essential belief that, as he says at one point, “people are terrible – we invent all sorts of different reasons to hate people. We always have and we always will.” Does he really believe that? “Well, in terms of human nature, the powerful tend to tyrannise and bully the weak. I really don’t think that will change very much. In fact, I think we will continue to treat each other pretty horribly in the way I described in The Nickel Boys for all eternity.”

For all that, The Nickel Boys, despite passages of dark, almost gothic horror, is a tentatively redemptive fiction, a survivor’s story. I wondered if the creation of the wounded characters in his most recent novel and the tracing of their traumatised lives took a psychological toll on Whitehead.

He tells me that, throughout the writing of the book, he would open a file on his computer every morning and see a note he had posted there when he began. It read: “The guilty escape punishment. The innocent suffer.” He had put it there to remind him what the story he was telling was really about. “And yet,” he says, “the last third of the book is really about all the other stuff that is not in those two lines: what do you do with that? How do you live with that knowledge? And, how do you make a life?”

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.