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.

Institutions

A former student got in touch to talk about “institutions”—which are important in Latour’s work, but rather “undertheorized” (as we used to say in the 1980s). At least not much discussed in An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, even as he chides “baby boomers” (278) for their knee-jerk hostility to them. The boomers “accuse” institutions “of being routinized, artificial, bureaucratic, repetitive, and soulless,” fatal “to the initiative, autonomy, enthusiasm, vivacity, inventivity, and naturalness of existence. . . . [T]here is life only on condition of getting out of institutions, even destroying them, or, short of that, getting as far away from them as possible in order to subsist on the periphery” (278). He locates institutions in the mode of existence called Habit—and sees them as a source of continuity and, hence, subsistence. To be hostile to institutions is to end up throwing away a focus on subsistence in order to pursue that phantom: substance. The hostility to habit partakes of the characteristic “iconoclasm” of the moderns, who keep thinking they can get behind appearances to reality, can pierce through the “Shows” of the world to the “thing itself.” We need (Latour argues), rather, to develop the healthy regard for habit we find in William James, recognizing its benefits, its ways of making us at home in the world.

So the moral for Latour is “that we should ‘learn to respect institutions.’ [Otherwise], it will be impossible to know, given that habit has so many enemies, whether you want to protect a value by instituting it or, on the contrary, whether you want to betray it, stifle it, break it down, ossify it. Now we baby boomers have drained that bitter cup to the dregs. Confronting the ruins of the institutions that we are beginning to bequeath to our descendants, am I the only one to feel the same embarrassment as asbestos manufacturers targeted by the criminal charges brought by workers suffering from lung cancer? In the beginning, the struggle against institutions seemed to be risk-free; it was modernizing and liberating—and even fun; like asbestos, it had only good qualities. But, like asbestos, alas, it also had disastrous consequences that no one had anticipated and that we have been far too slow to recognize” (278-79).

For all this, Latour has little to say about how we are to think about institutions, how we are to describe them and what they do (or don’t do). Maybe he does elsewhere. I will have to take a look.

In the meantime, here is what I wrote to my student as a first stab of thinking about what institutions are:

My latest blog post (thanks for reading, by the way) does a little Latour stuff that points toward institutions. I think, in fact, that what you can glean from his Science in Action or Reassembling the Social is most likely the best bet. In short, Latour is great in getting us to think about all “the players” that contribute to the production of something. Of course, he is interested in both human and non-human “actants” (to use his term). Institutions, then, are formal structures within which actants operate (establishing hierarchies, differential access to resources, lines of authority and of connection), but which also represent an effort to stabilize and enable the continued existence of networks that spring into existence and act in relation to some specific end. Institutions, in other words, put a public face on, and identity to, what might otherwise be ephemeral relations formed in the heat of action. The institution tries to enable repetition–the gathering of these actants in the next instance, the next attempt to produce something. This formalization of the actant network has its dangers/downsides (sclerosis is always a threat), but also its upsides (establishing relationships and procedures, so that re-invention of the wheel is not always necessary, and garnering resources). A continuing presence, an institution can also bridge the gap between one instance of action and the next. Finally, institutions can accumulate and store authority and/or prestige. They can become a name-brand, thus attracting resources and attention.

As I thought more about this, I found myself troubled by the thought that most of what I say about institutions could also be said of “organizations.” Yet in ordinary language, we do distinguish between the two. Congress is a political institution; the Democratic Party is a political organization. Amazon, Amnesty International, the New England Patriots, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) are all organizations. To my ear, at least, it would be odd to call any of them “institutions.” The Catholic Church, the University of North Carolina, and the Supreme Court are institutions. In common parlance, we can also say that “Harriet Jones is an institution in these parts,” but we would never call her an “organization.”

“Hollywood” is a collective noun that designates the film industry; the “studio system” refers to a particular way that industry was (is?) organized. But I don’t think we would normally call Hollywood an institution or an organization. It is a loose affiliation of various actors—sometimes interconnected enough for us to speak of “networks”—with (perhaps) habitual ways of doing its self-appointed tasks. But somehow it doesn’t rise to the status of “institution.”

Yet I feel as if Major League Baseball is on the cusp of being an institution—and is certainly an organization. Even as I feel that the National Football League is definitely an organization, but nowhere near being an institution. So can I make any sense of these contradictory intuitions?

Here’s a try before I go to the dictionary. An institution is the framework within which a variety of actants can practice (in any variety of ways, including cooperatively or competitively). The institutions lays down protocols—canons for a specific action being counted as an instance of the “practice” that the institution shelters/enables/presides over. The authority of the institution faces two ways: 1. Inwardly toward instances of the practice itself, judging the status and quality of those instances. And 2. Outwardly toward the world as it makes the case for the general benefit that practice can provide to non-practitioners. [In short, I am stealing here Bruce Robbins’ understanding of professionals; their guild establishes and maintains “professional standards,” even as their guild must legitimate to a wider public the usefulness of “professional practices.”]

Within that institutional setting, there can be a wide variety in the ways its practices are put to use—and there can be widespread disagreement and contestation about substantive matters. The institution provides “the rules of the game” and the certification of who gets to be “a player.”

And something, like Major League Baseball, becomes “an institution” when the it garners a widely acknowledged “authority” and respect in relation to its wider legitimating function.

An organization may establish a “brand” that is well-trusted, seen as reliable. But it will not have the “authority” that an institution has. Why? Because an organization is put together to facilitate the more efficient accomplishment of a single purpose. Everyone in the organization must get with the program; all of the members of the organization must contribute to its achieving its goal. The organization is not a framework for multiple uncoordinated actions; just the opposite. Its whole point is coordination, in making sure that actants work in sync, in tandem. An organization is never, like an institution, “above the fray.” It is never the enabler of the varieties of practice; instead, it harnesses energies toward a goal.

Hence, if the Supreme Court becomes the tool of one political faction, it loses its “authority” as the institution that enables political contestation, becoming instead just another piece of an organization. So maybe I can say that organizations exist to produce something; but institutions exist to enable the production of things, but do not produce things directly themselves.

Major League Baseball allows for the playing of numerous games of baseball; it does not do the playing itself. It is the integrity with which it plays that role, as guardian of the practice, that gains it the “authority” that leads us to think of it as an institution. But if the single-minded organizational goal of making money comes to dominate, then Major League Baseball will only be an organization, not an institution. Football seems much more directly commercial than baseball—and hence the National Football League is not an institution. This may be pure sentimentality, but it also has to do with how differently the two professional sports are related to the history of their games, and to the ways in which football players are interchangeable parts and constricted to a communal project. Baseball is much more individual, much less faceless (it takes a truly devoted fan to know the linemen on a football team.)

Anyway, I could be totally wrong about this baseball/football divide. More important is to recognize that the issue is not commercial versus non-commercial. Amnesty International is an organization because devoted to a specific goal. It is working for something substantive, not providing a framework within which a practice can unfold in myriad, even unexpected, ways. But Amnesty is not commercial. So the distinction I am trying to probe is not about the presence or absence of a profit motive.

It turns out the dictionary is not much help. Here’s my Random House dictionary on “institution”: 1. An organization or establishment devoted to the promotion of a particular object.

But # 4 might help us some: Sociology, a well-established and structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture, as marriage.

Followed by # 5: any established law, custom etc. and #6: any familiar practice or object.

Whereas the definitions offered for “organization” are not very useful either. #1 is “the action or process of organizing.” #5 is “a body of persons organized for some end or work.”

I would say that the dictionary’s deficiencies indicate a general difficulty in describing collective action. Organizations, quite obviously, act. Things get produced and decisions get made that could never be done by a single person acting alone—and the thing produced and the decision made is not fully controlled by one of the actors (actants) in the process that yields that result.

When it comes to institutions it can seem even trickier. If we are talking “habit” or “custom,” we can seem to be identifying a force that has no obvious origin. It is “just our way of doing things,” even as that “way” does not remain completely impervious to change. But the mechanisms of change are hard to identify and even harder to manipulate. We like to think we can tell an origin story about our political institutions—and we even have mechanisms for their being revised/amended/reformed etc.

But when it comes to relations between the sexes or between the races, the dead hand of the past, of cultural mores, proves incredibly resistant to direct intervention even as those relations do not remain immobile. If we deem racism “an institution,” then it is like the Supreme Court in that it provides a framework for a whole set of practices, but it is unlike the Supreme Court in that there are no procedures for adjudication among those practices. Racism as “an institution” is a product of various actions/practices in the past; but none of those actions/practices in itself had the power to establish racism. We have what is truly a collective product here, one that is only “deliberate” in a very attenuated way. No wonder conspiracy theories as so appealing; at least they identify agents powerful enough to serve as the originators or perpetuators of a particular state of affairs.

All of this is inconclusive enough. The term “institution” clearly encompasses apples and oranges. The more fruitful approach might be a version of Latour: consider particular instances of something you are tempted to call an “institution” and try to trace the actions that lead to its production. Then, “institution” is the end product, not the starting place, of an inquiry. And we don’t assume from the outset that one institution has much in common with another one. An escape from essentialism into particularities.

Retirement

I will be 67 in July. Most college professors (at least on my campus and among the ones I know elsewhere) do not retire that young. Seriously thinking about retirement at 70—and often taking a year or two past that to pull the trigger—seems the norm.

I make a very good salary and have a research fund that pays for books and travel to conferences. My students—god bless their cheerful hearts and inquiring minds—still seem to buy what I have to offer, even though I feel embarrassingly ancient as I stand before them. I can avoid almost all the tedious committee work in my department and around the university because I am not a “player” anymore. I cannot avoid the increasingly onerous paperwork, the endless forms and surveys required of us.

So why retire? My job is not terribly difficult, and often very rewarding. I still love the students (without reservation)—and my colleagues (in suitable doses).

For starters, I am tired. I don’t work anywhere near as hard as I did fifteen, even ten, years ago. I feel like I was a .290 lifetime hitter, with a few peak years at .310, and now I am batting .230. It’s time to hang up my spikes, even though the club would keep me on indefinitely as a veteran presence. He used to be something, so we tolerate him hanging around. Giving less than my best feels cheapening, even fraudulent. Better to walk away.

The tiredness manifests itself in various ways. In the past, I was constantly changing the courses I taught, the books I had students read. In the past five years, I have found myself stumped as to what to teach—and have resorted to recycling old standards.

When I had a year at the National Humanities Center two years back, I discovered that I didn’t want to write scholarly prose anymore. I simply wasn’t going to do the homework necessary. As any reader of this blog knows, it is hardly that I lack a continuing interest in intellectual questions. But I am no longer willing to make myself acquainted with the vast literature—some of it awfully good—out there on any given topic. I want to pursue my own lines of thought through writing, but I don’t want to bother to engage with the ongoing scholarly dialogue on my chosen interests. In short, my scholarly career was obviously at an end—and it felt fraudulent to continue to draw a salary while not doing that part of my job.

So much for all the negative reasons. Luckily, there are also positive ones. The Covid-19 shutdown has made those all the more obvious. Time is not hanging heavy on my hands—or on Jane’s. Even isolated from all our friends, the days aren’t long enough to do every thing we want to do. I am reading, writing, exercising, listening to music, tending to the daily chores of life; the need to finish out the semester on Zoom only distracts from all the things I want to be doing.

When I look back at my career as a professor, and at the life that Jane and I lived/created over the past thirty-plus years, I am astounded at how much we did. I can’t imagine how we did it. I want to say that the books wrote themselves; I certainly don’t see how it was possible, amidst everything else, to have put in the time and effort necessary to write them. It’s as if someone else did it—or as if I wasn’t present to my own life.

That’s the overwhelming feeling—no regrets at all, but a sense of having missed my own life. Was I even there? Getting through each day, with its piled up responsibilities and commitments, was the priority. There was no larger plan, no overall strategy. Just survival, putting one foot in front of the other, dealing with each day and its demands.

I loved every minute of being a parent—and am blessed with an ongoing good relationship to Kiernan and Siobhan (in such sharp contrast to my relationship to my parents). But it went by too fast—and they (I know) felt slighted at times in favor of all the other things I was also doing during those years.

That’s no way to live (really!). The virus shutdown has slowed Jane and me down—and it’s wonderful. We still have plenty to do, still have eyes too big for our stomachs. But all the sense of urgency is gone. We do the things we do out of pleasure, with all the pressure taken off. If something does not get done, so be it. It’s glorious. We should have retired years ago. The work world is crazy and crazy-making, with its absurd norms of productivity and ritualized scenes of public humiliation called “evaluation” (annual reports, promotion and tenure, and all the rest).

I will admit to a fundamental selfishness as well. A sense that it’s not my responsibility any more. I fought the good fight while employed—and lost most of my fights (for interdisciplinary curricula, for support of collaborative work, for expanded notions of what should “count” for promotion, for UNC to face up to its racist past and to the unspeakable Republicans who are ruining our state). Now I feel OK just washing my hands of it all.

I am going to spend my time in the ways I wish. Others will have to carry on the fight. I am tired of it in every possible way one can be tired. Enough. I have other—and I hope better—things to do. Certainly more sane things, ones that don’t pull me into the orbit of the crazies. (It is the relentless energy of those right-wing thugs, the way they work every angle and never let an opportunity to do harm pass them by, that amazes, frightens, and exhausts me. Yes, I hate to let them win, but nothing I have done to date has kept them from winning and now, like Thoreau, I feel—at least at times—that I have other matters to attend to.)

The fact that I am deeply ashamed of UNC plays a role in my decision to retire. I have given over 25 years of my life to this institution—and for most of those years, even as I fought those losing battles, I felt UNC had a fundamentally good heart, that it usually did the right thing when it came to the big issues. I may have been very naïve about that—but our wonderful students, my conscientious colleagues, and an approachable administration that listened to (even when it ignored) advice made me love this place. I was given the freedom to do what I believed in during the time I directed the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. More generally, UNC was good to me and Jane, giving us scope to pursue out interests, and paying us generously. We met (this is no exaggeration) hundreds of people—students, colleagues, alumni—during our years at UNC who inspired us in one way or another.

My work with interesting and committed donors contributed to my general sense of well-being. But then the university’s response to the athletic scandal of fake classes, its failure to address forthrightly the racial legacy represented by Silent Sam, and its supine self-prostration before a Board of Governors determined to destroy public higher education made me want to walk away. I made my public howls of protest, for which my fellow faculty thanked me and to which the administration turned a cold shoulder. I had had enough.

I hope that UNC is on a better path now. The current chancellor does understand how damaged the Carolina community has been by the events of the past eight years—and is trying to fix that damage. I wish him luck. But I am relieved to be walking away. I don’t want to be part of that effort. It’s been too discouraging to watch the lack of courage and honesty that got us to our current state.

So I retreat into a more private space. Writing my blog, riding my bike, seeing friends and traveling. Jane and I will become grandparents in the next few weeks, with our granddaughter in DC with her parents. I am committed to helping my daughter-in-law keep her theater company, We Happy Few, afloat—and thriving. We will also help with child care. Return trips to Italy, Cornwall, and New Zealand are highest on the travel list.

Inevitably, I will become involved in some kind of political work. I refuse (mostly) to give money to campaigns any more. (I end up donating to down-ballot races when I get a direct appeal from a friend involved in that campaign.) Contributions to the national races just seems like abetting a corrupt system. And I hate the way I get blackmailed into giving because the other side is spending so much. Instead, I give the money I used to throw at Democratic presidential and Senate candidates to local charities that I know are doing good work. Maybe I will also work for that kind of charity instead of for a more directly political cause. I would like to find something I believe in and that seems effective to throw myself into. The theater company has that appeal.

And this blog. It is strangely comforting to write posts that feel addressed to an audience out there, even if I know only a tiny few (ten or twelve maybe) are on the receiving end. The pressure of an imagined audience puts a little spine into the writing. But the knowledge that there isn’t really an audience (or certainly not a judging one) gives me the sense that I can write whatever I like, ramble, digress, indulge myself. It’s the perfect form for me, not utterly solipsistic, but relieved of any need to please an audience. I can just write to please myself—and let anyone who wishes listen in.

That’s the thing about writers. They always write far more than any reader could ever possibly read. Writing, a matter of so much pain and angst for many academics, is an addiction like any other for those of us who can’t stop pouring the words out. The blog will abide. It is pure pleasure, completely divorced from any sense of obligation or responsibility, just another indulgence in what I intend to be a blissful retirement in which I do the things I want to do. No more, no less.

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.