Tag: aesthetics

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (2)

I left off in the last post on Danto’s book wondering just what to make of his identifying the essence of art as the material embodiment of a meaning to be communicated from artist to audience. Just what that meaning is (how an audience is supposed to grasp it) is radically context-dependent in Danto, which explains the historicism that exists side by side with his essentialism. (See my previous post, where I quote the passage on page 95 where Danto explains how he is both an essentialist and a historicist.)

Starting with the essentialist part, Danto is (as I read him) substituting an emphasis on “meaning” for any attempt to describe the material features that reveal a thing as a work of art. “Modernism,” he tells us “came to an end . . . when it became imperative to quit a materialist aesthetics in favor of an aesthetics of meaning” (77). The difference “between works of art and mere real objects could no longer be articulated in visual terms” (77).

Quoting a long passage here will provide Danto’s understanding of 1) how his essentialism and historicism co-exist and 2) how he believes art works are to be recognized as instances of art. (He doesn’t use the word “recognize,” but I think its Hegelian echo appropriate for understanding his position.)

Here’s Danto:

The difference, philosophically, between . . . Dickie and myself is not that I was an essentialist and he was not, but that I felt that the decisions of the art world in constituting something a work of art required a class of reasons to keep the decisions form being merely fiats of arbitrary will. And in truth I felt that according the status of art to Brillo Box and to Fountain was less a matter of declaration than of discovery. The experts really were experts in the same way in which astronomers are experts on whether something is a star. They saw that these works had meanings which their indiscernible counterparts lacked, and they saw as well the way these works embodied those meanings. These were works simply made for the end of art inasmuch as there was very little to them in terms of sensuous presentation, and a sufficient degree of what Hegel terms ‘judgment’ to license the admittedly somewhat reckless claim I sometimes made that art had nearly turned into philosophy.

There is a further consideration bearing on the institutional account, and which has played a considerable role in my thinking about art, namely, that an object precisely (or precisely enough) like one accorded the status of artwork in 1965 could not have been accorded that status in 1865 or 1765. The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is historically indexed—it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history, which is part of what Wofflin may be taken to have implied in saying, ‘Not everything is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development.’ History belongs to the extension rather than the intension of the concept of art, and again with the notable exception of Hegel, virtually no philosophers have taken seriously the historical dimension of art. . . . [B]oth content and means of presentation are themselves historical concepts, though the faculty of the mind to which they answer is not perception but, once again, ‘judgment.’ (195-96, my italics).

As I complained in my last post, the “essence” seems vapid, an empty container into which the historical contents (the actual meaning and the means of its presentation) are poured. Especially since humans have multiple ways of conferring and communicating meanings, many of which ways we don’t call art and all of which arguably require “judgment” in order to be interpreted and understood. But this passage clarifies why Danto wants to be an essentialist. He wants to avoid “arbitrary” judgments and seems to think only essentialism offers such a guarantee. The historical conditions prevailing at any given moment are not enough since, obviously, such conditions can and do change. But whether such changes are “arbitrary” (surely Hegel wouldn’t find them so) and whether the fact of their existence means chaos reigns is debatable, to say the least.

But I want to focus here on the conditions that would trigger or underwrite the “judgment” that something is a work of art. The search is for what Wittgenstein would term the “criteria.” Danto it seems to me offers three candidates for those conditions.

The first is context. Here Danto goes very far in Wittgenstein’s direction, even as he tells us that his essentialism means he stands “resolutely against the Wittgensteinian tides of the time” (194). However, he embraces Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life” when he comes to fleshing out what he means by context.

Here’s Danto:

The expression ‘form of life’ of course comes from Wittgenstein: he said, ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.’ But the same thing must be said about art: to imagine a work of art is to imagine a form of life in which it plays a role. . . . I want heavily to stress a philosophical point about forms of life: a form of life is something lived and not merely known about. For art to play a role in a form of life, there has to be a fairly complex system of meanings in which it does so, and belonging to another form of life means that one can grasp the meaning of works of art from an earlier form only by reconstituting as much of the relevant system of meanings as we are able. One can without question imitate the work and the style of the work of an earlier period. What one cannot do is live the system of meanings upon which the work drew in its original form of life. Our relationship to it is altogether external, unless and until we can find a way of fitting it into our form of life. (pp. 202-203).

Not only is this position radically historicist, but we get here context on steroids. The ‘judgment’ that allows us to grasp a work’s meaning is utterly dependent on a “complex” set of background assumptions and understandings. And this complex set is not something known, but something “lived.” Meaning emanates like mist from a swamp—a swamp that is the murky (never fully cognized) water we live in.

For me, this kind of historicist rendering of “form of life” (with its hint that one form of life is incommensurable with all others) pushes me toward nominalism rather than essentialism, especially when it comes to cultural (as distinct from biological) phenomenon. If a work is to be understood as “art” in relation to the “role” it plays in a form of life, then it seems to follow that different forms of life will call something “art” in relation to different criteria. (Danto would not dispute this point; he just doesn’t think it undermines essentialism.) So, for example, (following Walter Benjamin here), things are produced for and embedded in ritual practices in certain cultures, but then cross over into being thought “art” when abstracted from their original context of production and use to be placed in a Western museum. In such cases, the effort seems less to reconstitute the system of meanings in which the object once had a role than to identify some features of “beauty” that can float free of context altogether. It is a sign of our times that such abstraction from context is now frowned upon and museums displaying such objects nowadays at least gesture toward indicating the original context.

Additionally, accepting this understanding of the holistic determinism wielded by “form of life” commits one (I think) to Wittgenstein’s insistence on “meaning as use”. Danto’s reference to the “role” a work plays points in that direction. A work’s meaning is revealed by the “use” to which it is put within a form of life. So an object being used in a ritual has a different meaning than an object placed on a museum wall. That, again, seems to me to point in a nominalist direction. The same painting displayed in a museum or displayed on the wall of the billionaire’s mansion communicates different meanings. The “essential” fact that it communicates a meaning, that it is put to some use, seems incapable of constraining its radical shape-shifting.

Although he touches on it only lightly in After the End of Art, Danto’s second criteria for art has been “the transfiguration of the commonplace.” Think here of James Joyce—and transubstantiation. What the artist does is take the ordinary (a Brillo box; life in dull, dreary Dublin) and transform it (like the priest turns wine and bread into the godhead) by some magical derring-do. Art transforms the mundane into the sacred. It reveals the divine that lurks within even the most neglected, even despised, items of everyday life. Danto (to my knowledge; I haven’t read all his work by a long shot) does not indulge himself in such transports. And what gives Joyce his dizzying edge is how we are left uncertain as to whether he celebrates such priestly powers in his art or mocks the pretension of artists to possess such power. Is Joyce stealing for the artist religion’s power, or telling us the artist has no such power–and religion never really had that power either? It’s delusion–and disillusion–all the way down.

But to return to nominalism. (Again, perhaps Danto goes in this direction in his book on the transfiguration of the commonplace.) It seems to me the transfiguration effect is very dependent on the conditions of display. In other words, the aesthetic is a bounded sphere. Its actual boundaries at any given moment are a matter of social convention. But an object is transformed into an art work when it is moved into that sphere. Once in that sphere, the object’s possible uses (to go back to meaning as use) are also changed. You don’t put steel wool pads into Warhol’s Brillo Box even if you can. And that box is in a gallery or a museum not a grocery store. Different social conventions apply in these different spaces. Danto’s historicist point is not just that different social spheres co-exist at one time, but the same physical spaces mean very different things at different historical moments. Going to visit Santa Croce in Florence in 2025 to view the Giotto frescoes is vastly different from being in the same church in 1515.

That the boundaries and significances of various social spheres are thus susceptible to change explains much of the point of Brillo Box—and of many of the avant-garde practices from 1890 to the present. The aim is to reconfigure the space that is “art.” In some cases, as in much of avant-garde practice, the goal is to eliminate the distinction between art and other spheres (often just designated generally and vaguely as “life”) altogether. Collapsing the distinction will lead, in the most utopian visions, to a glorious transformation (for the better) of life itself. The end of art will liberate art and its users from the constraints of art’s being limited to a bounded sphere. Everything that leads us to cherish art can be brought into every moment of our lives.

A more limited ambition is to expand what gains admission to the sphere of art. That seems to me a better way of understanding Warhol. His is a protest against the exclusions that define “high art.” He is thumbing his nose at such snobbery—in a sly, ironic, and close to cynical way no doubt. It’s all a species of joke, aimed at deflating the Arnoldian “high seriousness” of the gatekeepers of culture. That a philosopher like Danto then writes volumes of philosophy spurred on by the Brillo Box can look like one of the high serious ones taking the bait. His inability to see the joke becomes a new addition to the joke.

In any case, the notion of display, and of a bounded sphere in which the art works resides and is thus recognized as an art work), points to an institutional or conventional understanding of “art.” Danto in Chapter Ten of After the End of Art has shrewd things to say about museums—and certainly understands the crisis they face under attacks about their elitism, their gate-keeping role, and their extraction of works (often stolen outright) from their original contexts. It is striking, however, how long this crisis has lasted (well nigh upon fifty years now) with no resolution. Well meaning (and sometimes well executed) efforts at “public art” aside, the effort to displace the museum as the primary site of display have not gained much traction, partly because no feasible alternative has been found, and partly because our billionaire art collectors are in love with the museum as the suitable site to display their Verblenian grandeur.

Danto’s third criteria is narrative. He seems to understand the necessity of narrative in two different ways, one fairly parochial, the other very wide-ranging. The parochial sense is easily stated. It is, Danto insists, impossible to judge the significance of Warhol’s Brillo Box unless you know how it is in conversation with abstract expressionism. In other words, to state Danto’s point in Bahktin’s idiom, every utterance is a response to a prior utterance. Words—and works of art—are not created ex nihilo, and they do not stand on their own. Danto here fully agrees with various theoretical attacks on the notion of autonomy, on the false belief that anything can stand on its own two feet, disconnected from others, from context, from institutions, from (in short) history. Hence truly understanding something means locating it within the narrative of which it is part. Most museum visitors, in Danto’s view, have no idea of what they are looking at because they lack the relevant knowledge. They don’t know the narrative.

This more specialist knowledge, however, yields to a more global claim about knowledge. Here’s the version of that large claim in relation to museum visitors. This “is knowledge of a different order altogether than art appreciation of the sort transmitted by docents, or by art historians, or by the art education curriculum. And it has little to do with learning to paint or sculpt. The experiences belong to philosophy and to religion, to the vehicles through which the meaning of life is transmitted to people in their dimension as human beings. And as this point I return to Adam Verver’s [a character in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl] conception of the thirsting millions. What they thirst for, in my view, what we all thirst for, is meaning: the kind of meaning that religion was capable of providing, or philosophy, or finally art—these being, in the tremendous vision of Hegel, the three (there are only three) moments of what he terms Absolute Spirit. I think it was the perception of artworks as fulcrums of meaning that inspired the templelike architecture of the great museums of [Henry] James’s time, and it was their affinity with religion and philosophy that was sensed as conveying knowledge. That is, art was construed as a fount rather than merely an object of knowledge” (pp. 187-88).

Although this passage mentions neither “narrative” nor “form of life,” I understand it in relation to those two concepts. Meaning for Danto, as we have already seen, only arises within the context of a form of life. And I take it that a “form of life” (given Danto’s historicist leanings) is neither static, nor of a single moment. It is dynamic and constituted (at least partially) by its history, by the unfolding of multiple relations over time. In the exalted passage just quoted, art becomes a concentrated focal point, a resonant embodiment, of a form of life’s possible meanings. The art work becomes a “fount” when it grants us insight, provides an opportunity to grasp meanings previously hidden. Art is a means for a Hegelian coming to consciousness, even to self consciousness.

I will end by saying I am deeply attracted to such an exalted view of art. Certainly, I am very inclined to see art works as instances of communication. And often what the artist wants to communicate is a fairly (or even unfairly) grandiose vision of how a form of life hangs together (or fails to hang together)—as well as a vision of how a life can be lived ethically and meaningfully within a form of life. Explaining the hold that art has over us who are addicted to it as related to the insights it affords makes sense to me.

Except. There is also another feature of the experience of art works that seems separate from, albeit not necessarily antagonistic to, a focus on the communication of meaning. That feature is the more mystical sense of participation in some fundamental, hard to describe (hence mystical) communion with forces (energies) greater than the self. Rather than providing access to meanings, there is what Nietzsche saw as the Dionysian collapse of meanings and of the self offered in ecstatic states that art provokes. Danto’s neglect of that side of art goes hand in hand with his rejection of the material, of the sensuous. His is a very intellectual understanding of art, one that drains it of some elemental powers that cannot be easily captured by or reduced to philosophy.

Perhaps it is possible to mute the mysticism of the prior paragraph by returning to Danto’s insistence that a form of life is something lived not merely know about p. 203, quoted above). If that is the case, and if art works provide a focal point for experiencing a form of life, then an emphasis on what knowledge the art work conveys somehow misses the point. Such an emphasis sustains too great a distance between art work and audience. What we want to capture is the immersion in the work that is the experience of encountering it, not some nugget of insight we extract from it. New Criticism’s “heresy of paraphrase” is not just about trying to convey the art work’s meaning in terms different from those of the work itself, but also about standing apart from a work instead of leaping into it, which may be a way of saying one has prioritized “judgment” over experience.

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art

I have recently finished reading Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997).

What follows are some fairly non-systematic reactions. There will be a second post on Danto that follows up on this one.

For starters, the title is odd since Danto strongly distinguishes art from aesthetics, and his thesis (it seems to me) is that art after modernism is still art but has jettisoned the aesthetics. That is, we haven’t seen the end of art, but the end of aesthetics. Or perhaps more accurately, the severance of art from aesthetics. Thus he writes: “art before and after the ‘era of art’ shows that the connection between art and aesthetics is a matter of historical contingency and not part of the essence of art” (25).

This all suggest a very de-materialized notion of art’s essence. He is very clear that art after modernism can no longer be distinguished by its visual “look” or by any other sensuous quality. Modernism “came to an end when philosophy was separated from style because the true form of question ‘What is Art?’ emerged . That took place roughly around 1964. Once it was determined that a philosophical definition of art entails no stylistic imperative whatever, so that anything can be a work of art, we enter what I am terming the post-historical period” (46-47, my italics). “Greenberg believed that art alone and unaided presents itself to the eye as art, when one of the great lessons of art in recent times is that this cannot be so, that artworks and real things cannot be told apart from visual inspection alone” (71).

Strange that he wants to talk of a “post-historical” period since he is very Hegelian in the belief that certain ideas can only arise and certain questions can only be asked at specific historical moments. Unless he is saying (super-Hegelian if he is) that reaching the historical moment when the question of what is art can be asked in its “true form” means history has come to a close. There will be no further progress, no future paradigm shift (Danto invokes Kuhn several times). Art will now only and always be pondering the question of “what is art?” Really?

Danto does seem to accept that one can practice aesthetics and thus sidestep being an artist who concentrates on the philosophical question. [See p 33 and its discussion of impressionist painting as “aesthetically pleasing,” a source of “immediate enjoyment” that is separate from (innocent of) any “philosophical theory.”] At this point, Danto seems to favor asceticism over aestheticism, coming across as a stern philosophy master who has no truck with mere “enjoyment.” But he does, begrudgingly, admit that one can apprehend art, even “post-historical art,” apart from any engagement with the philosophical questions that animate his relation to art works. “It is always possible to learn to respond sensitively and with discrimination to works nothing in one’s experience especially prepared one for. For someone whose interaction with art is of this order, a theory about the end of art makes no sense at all: one continues adjusting and responding to whatever comes along without benefit of theory” (56). The tone of this passage is very difficult to describe—and priceless as well as comic.

In any case, to move away from art’s sensuous qualities facilitates a move toward something non-material. We need, Danto says, “a general theory of quality” (95). And then immediately thereafter, we get his most explicit statement of what he wants a philosophy of art to achieve: “As an essentialist in philosophy, I am committed to the view that art is eternally the same—that there are conditions necessary and sufficient for something to be an art work, regardless of time and place. I do not see how one can do philosophy of art—or philosophy period—without to this extent being an essentialist. But as an historicist I am also committed to the view that what is a work of art at one time cannot be one at another, and in particular that there is a history, enacted through the history of art, in which the essence of art—the necessary and sufficient conditions—are painfully brought to consciousness” (95)

So much to unpack here. But to be schematic. 1) Note the word “painfully.” What kind of pain are we talking about here?

2) If something can be an art work in 1965 that could not have been an art work in 1765, then what kind of “essence” are we talking about? A version of historical or cultural relativism seems much more likely. In fact, Danto will go on to invoke the Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life” (see 202-203).

3) So why the fervent attachment to essentialism? Why is “philosophy period” undercut if one does not believe there are entities (concepts? practices? truths?) that are “eternally the same”? Wittgnestein, for one, was trying to cure philosophy of this (to him fruitless) search for eternal verities.

4) Finally, there is the commitment to a kind of Hegelian progress. History has a direction and leads to a clarification of some idea, follows a path toward bringing that idea to consciousness. A pretty dubious assumption—and one that requires a rigorous pruning of the canon, so that one can tell a story about how Giotto leads to Massachio and so on down to Van Gogh yielding Pollock. Works that don’t easily fit into this narrative are sidelined, they are not part of the “mainstream.” Since, as we will see in my second post, Danto is strongly committed to pluralism of practice in “post-historical art” and also adamant that “narrative” plays a crucial (dare I say “essential”) role in our understanding of art works, why not entertain the idea of multiple different narratives co-existing at any historical moment. Why think there is only the one grand Hegelian narrative leading “painfully” to be sure but apparently inexorably to a destined end?

It seems that the “essence” Danto finally offers us is one centered on “meaning.” Here Danto once again leans heavily on Hegel. “[A]s Hegel puts it in speaking of the work of art, ‘It is essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and spirit.’”(97-98). To which Danto immediately adds: “And that is true of Morris as of Warhol, of Pollock as of Mondrian, of Hals as of Vermeer” (98).

Danto elucidates: “Hegel speaks of intellectual judgment of ‘(i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation.’ Criticism needs nothing further. It needs to identify both meaning and mode of presentation, or what I term “embodiment” on the thesis that artworks are embodied meanings” (98, my italics).

It really does seem that that’s it. The essence of art is that it is embodied meaning. There are several consequences of this “thesis.” For starters, it brings the material back in. Meaning may not be visual, but it is also not fully spiritual. It has a physical presence in the world, at least in works of art. We might very well wonder, however, if it is possible to speak of meaning, especially of a meaning that is communicated, apart from some kind of physical embodiment. And that raises the question of what is distinctive about art all over again. Because if embodied meaning is the focus, language itself qualifies. Words spoken and/or written are embodied meanings.

From my perspective, Danto’s discussion of meaning and of art’s communicative aim is way too passive. He is not interested in what works do, what motivates a person’s desire to communicate, and what means they use toward that end. That’s partly unfair since Danto is in fact a truly gifted commentator on individual works of art. But my comment is meant to illustrate how general—and to that extent, in my view, vapid—his identified “essence” is. Knowing the “essence” does very little to contribute to the work of understanding. And surely understanding is the goal of communicative acts. The speaker wants to be understood; the auditor wants to understand.

To be told that an act of communication is taking place and that it uses material means to gets its message across does very little, it seems to me, to advance the work of understanding. It does, as Danto tells us, lead us to focus on just what material means the person chose to employ. So we would want to know why this means, rather than that. Why painting instead of words? Why abstract painting rather than mimetic? Beyond that interest in means, the work of interpretation still needs to unfold. Yes, it may help to know that here we are dealing with a work of art rather than a medical report, but concentrating on what makes it a work of art is separate from considering what the artist is using art to convey. And if the artist is using art to consider what makes something art or not, well and good. That’s one thing to be thinking and communicating about. But surely it would get tiresome rather quickly if all art were devoted to navel gazing about what art is, what’s its true or essential nature is. That seems like contemplating the essence of love as opposed to the practice of living out love, with all its joys and difficulties, in a relationship with another person. Which is to say that Danto, even as he considers art as a communicative act, rarely talks as if the practice of art is a two-way street, one in which an audience is a crucial as a producer.

Kenneth Burke

I am working my way through old thumb drives and came across this introduction to Kenneth Burke’s work that I wrote for some sort of Blackwell Companion. I do not know if it ever was published. But the essay strikes me as a useful overview of Burke’s work. So I offer it here for what it’s worth.

Kenneth Burke is an American polymath whose work offered an alternative to the New Criticism by focusing on the pragmatic ways that literature serves as “equipment for living.” His resolute refusal to understand the literary as a distinctive use of language or literary criticism as a discipline separate from wider sociological analyses anticipated the move away from formalism and return to context characteristic of literary theory in the 1980s and 1990s.

Ever the maverick, Burke never graduated from college. He quit Columbia after a year and took up residence in Greenwich Village in the early 1920s, where he associated with American modernists such as William Carlos Williams. He served as editor of the important modernist little magazine The Dial, wrote poetry, novels, and criticism, and also took up various social science research jobs to pay the rent. His work is influenced by such an eclectic assortment of figures—from medieval theologians like Duns Scotus through to Nietzsche and the social psychologist G. H. Mead—that it comes as no surprise that he has proved uncategorizable. He belongs to no discipline and founded no school, even though his books are endlessly suggestive and have proved particularly important to academics in rhetorical and communication studies. Burke never held a formal academic position although he did teach for many years at Bennington College and lived long enough to bask in the acclaim when a new generation of literary theorists discovered him at the end of the twentieth century.

Burke’s work relevant to literary theory is best divided into three phases. This division is somewhat artificial, but it helps to organize an overview of his long career. The first phase encompasses his work during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the key texts Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes Toward History (1938), as well as the essays collected under the title The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941). During these years, Burke did not offer a handy name for the kind of work he was doing, but he can be seen groping toward a dynamic account of literature that can do justice to its expressive and social power. On the expressive side, Burke argues that literature allows for the hypothetical examination of “attitudes,” of possible ways of relating to the self, to others, and to the world. Attitudes, Burke insists, are “incipient actions.” To take a stance toward the world is to relate to it in a particular way and, subsequently, to act on the premises embedded in that relation. Literature offers the fullest possible play for an imagination of possible actions and their potential consequences. What particularly catches Burke’s attention—and defines his genius as a literary critic—is the way literary texts “convert upwards and downwards” by changing names and contexts. Hence, for example, by conversion downward, Aschenbach’s desires in Death in Venice can be rendered as the lust of an old man for a young boy. But conversion upward would read his desire as a love that opens up to him realms of insight previously unavailable.

Crucially, the “logic” of literary texts is never straightforward, but rather tied to the development of tropes, doubling of fictional characters, associations triggered by puns, and flights of fancy that often defy explanation. Thus, literature illustrates the ways humans create values and “reasons” (motives) for action, while also providing the means foe personal and social transformation. The various metamorphoses and associational pairings in texts extend outward from the author or the protagonist to include the audience and, through them, the social. Partly through his affiliations with “Popular Front” leftists who were trying to forge mass political movements in the 1930s, Burke becomes interested in “rhetoric,” in the ways that artistic works can serve to constitute communities. Literature has real-world impacts both by priming selves to act and by creating groups that cohere through “identification” with the same goals, same leader, or same overarching vision (ideology). By 1941, partly through his famous essay, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” on Mein Kampf, Burke had become fascinated by the plot and figurative dynamics through which a text identifies (produces) a “foreign” element, a scapegoat, and sets about to purge it. This interest in scapegoating persists throughout the rest of Burke’s career.

The second phase of Burke’s career sees him attempting to systematize his insistence that “literature is symbolic action.” Following in the footsteps of pragmatist social theorist George Herbert Mead, Burke tries to develop a full-scale philosophy of the act. (The parallels to the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin are striking, but Burke, like others in the West at the time, did not know Bakhtin’s work.) Burke calls his theory “dramatism” and planned to expound it in a trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and A Symbolic of Motives. This last work was never completed, although pieces of it were published in a volume entitled Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives (2006) after Burke’s death. By “motives,” Burke means the attitudes, values, and beliefs that move a person to act. His “grammar” attempts to identify the necessary conditions of any action, of which there are, he says, five: the act, the agent, the scene of action, agency (means), and purpose. A Grammar of Motives offers what amounts to a history of philosophy in terms of which of the five elements a particular philosophy emphasizes. To take “the scene” as most crucial, for example, leads to naturalism and other kinds of determinism that view the environment as dictating what actors do. To place the greatest emphasis on the agent would mean the kind of voluntarism we associate with certain extreme versions of existentialism. The “ratios” that try to weight the different roles played by the five elements can be quite complex and Burke traces out these intricacies through commentaries on a dizzying array of figures from the history of Western thought.

Presiding over the whole enterprise, although this is never explicitly acknowledged, is Hegel, partly because Burke in this middle phase aspires to the kind of all-encompassing system that Hegel also strives to produce. But most importantly because the mode of thought is relentlessly dialectical. For Burke, any philosophy that highlights one element of the pentad at the expense of another will inevitably produce a reaction, a new theory or philosophy that picks up the neglected item. His philosophy, by way of contrast, will try to be inclusive, to do justice to the roles played by all five elements. I think it fair to say that Burke’s does not realize his systematic ambitions. A Grammar of Motives is usually accounted Burke’s masterpiece, but that is for the wealth of insights it offers on an astounding range of topics and figures, not because he constructs a grand synthesis. In fact, despite his aspirations, Burke is not a systematic thinker. He is constantly chasing side thoughts. His digressions are famous and his distinctive style—full of italics, scare quotes, and parentheses—reflects the almost manic quality of his thinking, always on the edge of skittering completely out of control.

A Rhetoric of Motives then considers “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents.” Rhetoric is the social component of language, focusing on its use to form communities and foster action in concert. It involves “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” Burke especially emphasizes “identification” of a recognizably Freudian sort. The rhetor aims to get his audience to identify with, to feel themselves “consubstantial” with a group or an ideal. One effective way to achieve this goal is by processes of association that link the group or ideal the writer wishes to promote to already cherished values. So, for example, I might try to liken the effort to combat global warming to the program that sent human beings to the moon. I would try to transfer the positive feelings about the mission to the moon to a willingness to get enthusiastically involved in this new effort.

Presumably, the final volume of the trilogy was going to examine the specific symbols that language utilizes as human agents form their motives. The reasons Burke failed to complete that third volume are unknown. Obviously, he struggled with it since he went over ten years before publishing his next book, The Rhetoric of Religion (1961). And that new book introduced another shift in his work, from “dramatism” to “logology,” Burke’s third phase. This new vision picks up a major theme in A Rhetoric of Motives and pushes it to its logical conclusion. Burke argues that any linguistic account that aims to describe a scene comprehensively will inevitably produce a hierarchy of terms that leads from the smallest particular up to the highest, most inclusive term, which Burke labels a “god-term.” For example, physics moves from sub-atomic particles up through atoms and molecules to something called “matter.” For Burke, “matter” is physics’ god-term, which functions, crucially, both as the motive of the whole enterprise (to offer an explanation of matter) and to exclude certain considerations (physicists do not acknowledge spiritual causes). “Logology,” then, would be the analysis of any system of linguistic ordering that details its hierarchy and thus understands what it aims to achieve and what it serves to exclude. The problematic claim is that every use of language, no matter what the field or the occasion, has precisely the same structure. Burke appears, in his final works, to adopt a tragic determinism. Humans are always and everywhere addicted to hierarchy and to monistic, mono-theological, modes of thought that always produce excluded victims, punitive orthodoxies, and the conflicts generated by various heresies. The essays collected in Language as Symbolic Action (1966) reinforce this tragic vision by offering sweeping definitions of “Man” and of “Language.”

Paradoxically, Burke’s vision narrows as a result of his attempt to be all-encompassing. The universalism of the claims made during his “logology” phase makes everything look the same—and this from a writer whose greatest strength was his unsystematic, even chaotic, enchantment with particular cases. Seen this way, Attitudes Toward History becomes Burke’s strongest book since it focuses on their being plural possibilities, a variety of different attitudes (with an “s”) that humans might adopt as they face the world and decide how to act, how to live, within it. Similarly, the resources upon which humans can call as they take up this task are many. The book offers a catalogue of those resources without ever claiming that any must be chosen or that any choice has inevitable consequences. Not surprisingly, in surveying this open field, Burke comes to announce that his own perspective is “comic,” a perspective, he claims, that “by astutely gauging situation and personal resources . . . promotes the realistic sense of one’s limitations” yet does not succumb to a “passive” fatalism. Human action cannot carry all before it, but it is not utterly futile as well. Learning to roll with the punches is the great comic virtue, an adaptation of attitude to circumstance. Burke at his most magnificent awakens us to full glory of human resourcefulness—and highlights how literature especially puts that ingenuity on display while also putting it through its paces.

What Can Poetry Do?

Here’s a review I wrote of a book on modernist art by Charles Altieri. Of interest because Altieri is a vigorous opponent of the notion that art can be directly political, even as he offers a distinctive vision of what art does have to offer us in the way of resources to reflect upon and act within the present moment. The review appears in symploke Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2 (2022) ISSN 1069-0697, pp. 335-341.

Review of Charles Altieri, Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory: The Importance of Constructivist Values (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021), viii + 280 pp.

What can modernist art offer the present? Over the past thirty years, many readers have sought to mine that art for insights into the conditions of modernity and the forces that shape those conditions. Art represents or reflects the society in which it is produced—and thus enhances our understanding of the world and (perhaps) offers alternatives to taken-for-granted prevailing modes of existence. More recently, this brand of political materialism has morphed into a “new materialism” that purports to replace sociology with ontology. The world is replete with active forces whose interaction produces specific situations. Capacious art works capture the constant flows and surprises of the dynamic scenes we all inhabit.

In both cases, critics look to the descriptive power of the arts to deliver insights into the world. In his new book, Charles Altieri sees this “descriptive, epiphanic” mode as dominant within contemporary poetry specifically and in what literary studies generally looks to the arts to impart. Altieri’s goal is to offer a strong alternative, one that depends on an allegiance to the non-representational work done by the modernist artists (Braque, Picasso, Malevich, Pound, Moore, Stevens, Eliot, Ashbery, and Geoffrey O’Brien) he calls “constructivists.” These artists explore how “objects and persons might be able to display the force of their presence, and they establish a range of subject positions for which finding the appropriate concepts was less important than imagining how a responding consciousness might cooperate in making those modes of presence emerge. This imagining had to orient itself toward a questioning of who members of the audience might become by virtue of participating in what the making elaborates as possible distributions of subjectivity” (22). It is what the arts can create, the possibilities that they can open up, rather than any report about the way things are that is important.

Not all artists are constructivists; it would be foolish to deny that many works of art do aspire to some version of realism, to tell us something about the world. (In what follows, then, take every statement about “art” to only apply to constructivist art.) But Altieri thinks we lose perhaps the most valuable and distinctive thing the arts can do if we neglect how the arts can exemplify and celebrate the creative powers of the imagination. In addition, the arts display the various subtle ways that self-consciousness registers its encounter with the world and its experience of its own capacities. Political materialism, he believes, is mired in an inescapable ironic dissociation from a world identified as cruel and unjust, thus missing the affirmations that art can offer. Here is Altieri at his most exalted and most inspiring: “Poetry as a theory of life involves demonstrations that the imagination is not an evasion of the real but a way of complementing it by aligning it with our most intimate structures of desire. Such demonstration has to replace interpretation by celebration, or, more accurately, by the performance of celebration that aligns our capacities for affirmation to the world of fact” (150). Against the world-weariness and despair generated by our political obsessions, Altieri wants to offer the triumphs of art’s engagement with its materials and its successes in constructing those materials into works that astound and delight us even as they invite us to join in the creative process.

The new materialism, with its focus on activity, might seem more aligned with Altieri’s constructivists. Certainly, in the current debates about “critique,” writers like Bruno Latour and Rita Felski mobilize the new materialism to distance themselves from the kinds of political criticism that Altieri also wants to decenter from prevailing critical modes. But Altieri argues that the new materialism is reductive. It simply has no vocabulary or theoretical armature to handle the intricacies of consciousness and self-consciousness. No third person scientific account can capture “the phenomenal awareness of what it is like to be in a given state” (231); “what is known [on the basis of that phenomenal awareness] cannot be reduced to the result of a cognitive judgment” (233). We enter deep waters here—and I will only cite Altieri’s allegiances rather than detail the arguments he advances for them. He is committed to the view that the arts can deliver experiences that are not well understood if we try to assimilate our “take away” from such experiences to models or modes of cognition. And he is committed to a base level humanism: we cannot do justice to human experience if we do not attend to “how the mind can structure what it confronts” (230) and how consciousness can experience phenomenally the emotions and pleasures that its structuring exercise generates. Furthermore, the artist can then develop modes of expression that display that structuring activity, modes that invite an audience to participate in that structuring, and that call self-conscious attention to the emotions, pleasures, and difficulties that accompany that activity. These human expressive and conscious capacities are not shared by creatures or objects that do not produce art works. Any materialism that does not take into account what art displays about these capacities fails the test of inclusiveness. There is a vital part of human phenomenal experience that such materialisms miss.

Wisely, Altieri devotes himself almost exclusively to elaborating his alternative instead of getting mired down in polemics against materialism. (The polemics are offered only in the Introduction and the Epilogue.) What the reader mostly gets is a bracing and thrilling articulation of an aestheticism that aims “to model the force of self-conscious affirmation” (154). Where many contemporary readers turn to the arts for a denunciation of modernity and all its works, Altieri looks to the arts to mobilize powers of imagination that simultaneously celebrate human capacities and “enable us to participate in establishing a full sense of the real” (155). The encounter of selves with “the necessities of living” (154) is the scene for a poiesis that activates emotions and apprehensions that the artist composes self-consciously into a relationship to the non-self (the real and others). “[T]he imagination becomes simply a means of attending to possibilities inherent in observation and dwelling on them as opportunities for adjusting one’s sense of an inner life” (155). Through this second-order artistic exploration of the meeting of self and non-self, both are articulated, are intensified, come into focus.

Crucially, for Altieri, this exploration is dynamic and open-ended, manifested as a process not a product in the modernist works he cherishes. In displaying this process, the work invites the reader/audience to participate in it. The work does not deliver a message; it explains nothing. Rather, it displays or exemplifies modes of relating selves to otherness (of all kinds)—and offers the satisfactions of what those modes enable in the way of felt emotions and/or the pleasures of activating, putting into practice, our imaginative powers. “Construction must elaborate fields of relation that can align imaginative labor with what would be without it utter poverty” (166). Art vivifies the world and the human in that world, thus providing the grounds for affirming the world and our habitation in it. Constructivist artists highlight “the satisfactions of a freedom of mind seeking to play a fuller part in how the world emerges” (167).

If all this sounds vaguely (or even precisely) Hegelian, that’s because it is. Altieri clearly believes that the non-human only comes to realization through the apprehensions of consciousness. His explicit invocation of Hegel comes in a somewhat different register. The modernist artists he calls “constructivist” “dramatized the power to make meaning” by foregrounding “’the powers that do the forming’ rather than ‘the final forms themselves’”(74; the quoted passages are from Paul Klee). “And these modes of significance depend in turn largely on how the work invites self-conscious identification with the force of that making” (74).

Altieri mobilizes Hegel’s concept of “inner sensuousness” (from Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Arts) to capture this focus on the mind’s activity of composing the work. What constructivist artists do is try to make concrete, try to embody in apprehensible forms and images, the invisible work of mind, of imagination, of self-consciousness. Such art makes “the process of reflection both the subject and sensuous object that we produce as readers” (205). We might want to think of “objective correlatives” here, but that would miss just how “sensuous” Altieri finds the exercise of mental capacities and the emotions that such exercise unleashes. Inner sensuousness is achieved by a work when that work “so embodies the activities of the maker that the making itself takes on a concrete objecthood available to all those willing to participate in how the work organizes its energies” (44). The great pleasure and great triumph of Altieri’s book comes in his intricate and thrilling readings of selected paintings and poems, his way of tracking the artist’s way of organizing energy and the ways in which the artist invites us to participate in that work of organization. What those readings invariably impart is the full glory of stretching oneself to the limits of one’s abilities. The poverty of a life in which one doesn’t participate in the making of meanings and the elaboration of possibilities shadows the exuberance of the play in which artists engage.

In his eleven previous books, most of them focused on twentieth-century poetry, Altieri has amply demonstrated his ability to illuminate even the most difficult material. Stevens might be called Altieri’s lodestar, bringing out his best, while surely no commentator makes a better case for Ashbery’s claim on our attention. In his current book, to accompany Altieri as he reads Moore’s “A Grave” is to follow a master in slow motion so as to savor every move. The characteristic Altieri reading identifies what the poet is striving to attain, and then explains the poem’s twists and turns in relation to the obstacles that must be overcome to achieve the desired end. Of course, not all poems get what they want, but their dynamism, their energy, the logic of their unfolding rests in their striving, and readers best enter into the poem when they follow the path of those efforts while identifying (if only provisionally) with its aims. When he turns to Eliot, Altieri eloquently shows how Eliot’s religious poetry aims to make “Christian principles visible as concrete states of self-consciousness, despite the domination of secular attitudes toward what constitutes experience” (116). The “post conversion poetry and plays” foreground “the capacities of self-consciousness to establish relational fields responsive to something other than any natural order shaping the contours of experience” (117). Hence Eliot partakes in the more general dilemma of the limits of a stringent naturalism. Nature gives us hurricanes and cancer, so it cannot itself serve as a standard for what one values and what is good. But developing other grounds for judgment is not easy and, under modern conditions, does not yield any stable foundations. The poet must work his way to his values laboriously and tentatively—and the reader is invited along on the journey. Altieri’s chapter on Eliot made at least this reader more open to the strivings of the portentous Four Quartets than ever before.

The “high modernists” (Frank Kermode’s term) Altieri finds inspiring have not had a good run lately. They are accused of a multitude of sins, some of which they actually committed, and attention has shifted to less canonical figures or to readings that don’t take the high modernists on their own terms. And Altieri’s brand of aestheticism can look both all too familiar and depressingly inadequate when posed against the challenges of our bleak time. His insistence that art should eschew “practical understanding” can look like Auden’s defiant insistence that “poetry makes nothing happen”—a position that can seem to doom art to ineffectual irrelevance. Certainly, many modernist artists and (arguably) most contemporary literary critics are trying to secure art’s practical significance, not its non-practicality. Altieri insists that “we submit to practical understanding only at a substantial cost” (11). We lose art’s ability to “disrupt” the “smooth flow from particular to concept to action” (11). An art that doesn’t aspire to “guide action” is always throwing sand in the gears, endeavoring to get us to attend to what in the situation might not “fit our conceptual schemes” while also inviting self-conscious attention (and possible revision) of “guiding attitudes and investments” (11). Art of the kind Altieri favors makes us pause, makes us re-think and re-evaluate and reconsider our received opinions and feelings. Art’s distance from the practical can make what seems “poverty . . . become a virtue if the poets produce modes of attention to how language might fuse with experience to provide momentary senses of liberation from our fate as social beings” (181). We can wriggle out from under—if only momentarily—the weight of received meanings and attitudes.

Hardly a satisfactory formulation of art’s political impact if you say you want a revolution. I think Altieri’s book strongly implies, without ever explicitly stating, that asking art to be directly politically effective is to court inevitable disappointment. Contemporary literary studies wants the wrong thing from art—and thus misses the wonderful, precious things art can deliver. But there are moments when Altieri hopes for something more from art than momentary liberation. In stressing the way that the works he discusses invite “participation,” Altieri reprises another familiar modernist concept that can be traced back to Eliot: “impersonality.” Despite their concentrated attention to the self’s (to a particular mind’s) encounter with the world, Stevens, Eliot and the others he discusses, in Altieri’s view, reach for articulations that cross the boundary between self and other. They do so by “treating the work as involving participation in the activity of the maker” (17).

“Impersonality” limns a desirable politics in two ways. First, the imperative of impersonality is embedded in any artist’s need to use forms and materials (words, color, canvas, poetic forms etc.) that pre-exist her and are socially (i.e. non-individualistically) possessed. The purely private can make no claim on an audience’s attention—and certainly will have great difficulty in inviting that audience’s participation. It seems fair to say that all the modernists Altieri celebrates were “devoted to displaying how the private in fact can become a public force” (96). Thus, Marianne Moore’s use of quotations in her poems offers “a striking emblem of sociality, since the world experienced is a world held self-reflectively in common with numerous other commentators” (99).

The second point is related to what we might call the problem of “uptake.” If the poet activates meanings that depart from practical and received understandings, will those alternative meanings be picked up by readers? Once taken up by others, those meanings are no longer personal or idiosyncratic. Because he emphasizes so strongly the co-production of meaning by writer and reader, Altieri builds in a model of how the arts might create new social relations. Altieri touches very, very lightly on this possibility, as if nervous of making too extravagant a claim about art’s powers at a time when we commonly ask the arts to do too much. His modest account of how poetry might be political comes through his discussion of Geoffrey O’Brien’s method and aspirations. O’Brien writes of an “’immaterial commons’ in which ‘we read not of things but of dispositions toward the thingly.’” Altieri comments: O’Brien “sees himself facing two antagonists—a capitalist social system that wants to repress the effects of inequality by treating injustice as written into something like historical necessity, and an engaged poetry that makes promises of political effectiveness it cannot sustain. Poetry might be able in the long run indirectly to influence social change because we can find in that commons the sense that our cares and responses to those cares have a great deal that is shared. And we find in this space the possibility of celebrating one another’s freedom because these freedoms are grounded in this group awareness” (210).

Poetry, then, can contribute to the creation of a commons, to the establishment of a magnanimous sociality, only by being impersonal and intersubjective—not the word handed down by the poet, but in the words co-created by poet and reader in a process of coming to meaning. It is not what the poet tells us (hence Altieri’s resistance to seeing art as representative and to approaches that emphasize art’s cognitive benefits for understanding the world), but the activities to which the poet invites us.

Put that way, Altieri’s vision seems anything but modest, even if it is not directly or particularly political. He is at one with the most exalted modernist aspirations to re-word the world even as their work would re-establish basic social relations on an entirely new basis. This project lies somewhat buried in Altieri’s book because he slides from “meaning” to “value” occasionally, but never takes up their relation explicitly. I think, however, that basically he believes that what we find meaningful, what we deem worthy of attention and appreciation, is what we affirm as valuable. The invitation that the modernist poets offer us, in his view, is the opportunity to self-consciously consider our values and the processes (pleasurable in themselves) by which we create those values. And the hope is that participating together in those processes will lead us to recognize what we hold in common and to cherish/promote the goods required to make participation available to all. We don’t need artists to tell us the world is unjust. We have ample evidence of that fact all around us. We need artists to introduce us to the joys of exercising our imaginative capacities and, through that exercise, to discover our deep connections to, and care for, others with similar capacities.