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Joyce & Wagner

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:01:00 +0000

Stephen’s Ashplant, Siegfried’s Sword

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Many characters in Ulysses feel as though they belong to other works of art. They see themselves as characters out of plays, operas and novels. Blazes Boylan, the impresario of Molly Bloom’s upcoming recital, is repeatedly identified with Don Giovanni. Leopold Bloom is often considered along with Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, which in turn implies Heine’s Wandering Jew. In his young, hyper-Romantic and not-altogether-uncharmingly-arrogant mind, Stephen Dedalus aligns himself with Hamlet. He devises a grand theory of Hamlet and tries to make sense of his life alongside the sad prince of Elsinore; however, the greatest way in which he parallels the melancholy dame is in his near-complete paralysis. The other figure with which we see Stephen most prevalently aligned is the tragic hero of Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle, Siegfried. To be certain, the identification with Siegfried is far less overt than with Hamlet, a fact which may often lead the reader to suspect that this is more Joyce’s imposition than Stephen’s actual belief.

In the following paper, I will examine the parallels between Wagner’s Siegfried and Joyce’s Stephen and the possible implications of a conflation of these two personages. The text of Ulysses provides numerous allusions to the Wagner’s operatic tetralogy, Ring Cycle. These references can be either strikingly overt or bafflingly vague; and Joyce’s skillful deployment of them proves helpful in tracing the Siegfried-Stephen parallel throughout the novel. Additionally, I will turn a critical eye to those places in Ulysses (as well as certain passages in Portrait of the Artist) where the identification – or overlaying of character – seems presaged or connected in a meaningful way.

One place I will spend a fair amount of time examining is the climactic bordello scene in Chapter 15 where Stephen breaks Bella / Bello Cohen’s chandelier by lashing out with walking at his mother’s ghost. As Stephen brandishes his walking stick, he cries out “Nothung!” The word is a false cognate for the English “nothing,” German for “needy” and the name of Siegfried’s sword. Appearing at the center of the book, there can be little doubt as to the importance of this allusion. Yet the lack of critical attention to this perplexing yet highly climatic moment is striking. It is easy and fair enough to see the outcry as yet another in a series of Joyce’s never-ending allusions. But I will argue that the moment represents the culmination of a systematic strategy of identification between Stephen and Siegfried, one that has far-reaching implications for the book as a whole. For while in a book as multi-faceted and at-times obscure as this, it is tempting merely to acknowledge the allusion and move on casually; to do so, however, would be to miss something key to the character of Stephen as well as an essential component of Joyce’s intent.

Before we ruminate about the value of the Stephen qua Siegfried identification, it appears to be prudent to give a basic character sketch of Siegfried and his place in Wagner’s epic. Standing firmly at the center of the third day of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Siegfried’s eponymous hero is the bastard offspring of the sister-brother coupling of Sieglinde and Siegmund, the half-human children of the God Wotan. Known as the Walsungs, they are kin to the God and favored by him, even though they eventually will bring about the Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung). Siegfried is raised by an evil dwarf named Mime, whose only motive for showing the orphan kindness is the knowledge that he will grow up one day to steal back the Ring from the dragon Fafner. For only one such as Siegfried who has never known fear can slay the dreaded beast that keeps guard over the ring of the Nibelungen. In the first act of Siegfried, the young, ardent, tempestuous youth who has never known fear finds the splintered shards of his father’s sword, Nothung, which was destroyed by Wotan’s shield (in Act II of Die Walküre). All the other swords that Mime forges for him are inadequate to his purpose and Siegfried asks for a sword that he cannot break. Mime is unable to forge Nothung from the fragments, but Siegfried forges the sword anew and goes forward to slay Fafner and win the gold for himself.

On a path, Siegfried encounters Wotan in the guise of a Wanderer. They cross blades, but Nothung destroys the God’s spear. The Götterdämmerung has begun. At opera’s end, Siegfried awakes the Walkure Brünnhilde (who rescued his pregnant mother from Wotan’s wrath) from atop the mountain where she’s spent decades in a deep sleep. We’ll stop our summary here; suffice it so say that – despite the rosy ending of Siegfried - things end very badly for Siegfried and Brünnhilde and all the Gods in Valhalla.

James Joyce was himself an avid opera buff and even considered a career as a tenor. His love of music comes across in both the rich musicality of his prose and his constant alluding to composers and their work. But no other figure in the history of music fascinated Joyce quite so as much as Richard Wagner. Even a cursory glance at any concordance of Joyce’s work shows the homage he pays the great German composer with the author’s incessant – almost compulsive - allusions. But on a deeper level, this love is manifest in Joyce’s unique style, technique and purpose.

Through his artistic output and his voluminous critical writings, Richard Wagner practically invented the notion of the “Artistic Genius” whose distinctive oeuvre bears the stamp of an inimitable artistic personality; a personality who defines both his generation and his culture. The dark underbelly of this artistic revolution was the creation of “the cult of the artist” and the slave-like worship that so stroked Wagner’s hyper-inflated ego. Along every post-Wagnerian artist, Joyce strove to create a unique artistic identity through his literary output: despite the extreme formal and stylistic differences between Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners and Ulysses, Joyce is forever treating the same themes. Indeed, many episodes in Ulysses bear a striking resemblance instances in Portrait. In this conscious striving for artistic integrity, we find a portion of Joyce’s debt to Wagner. Unlike Wagner, however, Joyce was not an artist who strove to attain, or even expected, a mass following.

Wagner’s artistic project was an intellectual and national attempt to merge high culture with popular beliefs. He incorporated Norse myths and German legends into his operas in order to achieve both artistic and propagandistic goals. Wagner saw himself as a messianic figure come to redeem both the impoverished state of German art and culture, and, more generally, the state of European music (which had fallen into the hands of Judaic composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer). While Joyce is certainly more subtly about advancing any national agenda through his work, there can be no doubt that he too sees his literature as playing some vital role in reinvigorating both Irish culture and the state of world literature as a whole.

Wagner’s antidote to the general decline of musical and artistic standards was his formulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, “total artwork,” a total, all encompassing operatic experience wherein drama is no longer subordinate to music. Wagner’s main complaint against opera of his day was that composers ignored the dramatic content, delivering rather a string of pleasant yet frivolous tunes in place of one coherent piece of music. Wagner sought to elevate drama to the level it had enjoyed in Greek Tragedy, by fully integrating it with music. His response to previous operatic traditions (opera buffa, bel canto, grand opera) was a network of interweaving musical themes, which later came to be known as “Leitmotifs” (Wagner himself disapproved of the term). Wagner tagged both the characters and thematic material or his operas with short melodic phrases - at times, no more than a couple of notes – that repeat over and over either in isolation or along with other leitmotivs. The leimotivic structure of Wagner’s operas enabled his music to break the boundaries of traditional opera (with its aria-recitative-aria form) and become gloriously integral songs lasting upwards of six hours. These themes are fairly easy to identify when encountered alone, but harder to spot amidst densely orchestrated material or in tandem with other themes. At times, a given leitmotif may only be present in one melody-line (say, the violins): Wagner’s brilliant integration of his thematic material can at times make it difficult to analyze his work.

Through his dense web of recurring images, themes and allusions, Joyce is inventive enough to apply the Wagnerian leitmotif to literature. Many objects and references come with intense symbolic weight attached. The leitmotifs of Ulysses are as broad as Don Giovanni or Hamlet or as specific as Bloom’s potato or Stephen’s ashplant. They function in much the same way as Wagner’s melody-fragments, alerting us to the import of certain tropes and providing a means for us to keep a track of them as they float around in Joyce’s radically original prose.
Joyce’s narrative inventiveness is systematic of modernity’s attempt to synthesize it’s artistic inheritance from the 19th century and extending backwards and to expand upon the innovations of the various artistic schools of romanticism, naturalism, impressionism and symbolism, among others. Richard Wagner’s construction of the Gesamstkunstwerk (which he called the Art of the Future) forever changed the face of music and his opera Tristan und Isolde opened the door for the radical modernist experiments of Stravisnsky and Schoenberg. The so-called “Tristan Chord,” the four-note figure that opens that opera, cannot be technically classed as a chord; the notes that comprise it (F, B, D# and G#) together sound like a chord, whereas in reality they can’t be considered one. With the “Tristan Chord” Wagner instigated the reevaluation of tonal harmony that would reach its apogee in the 12-tone system of Arnold Schönberg. Quite unwittingly, Wagner opened a Pandora’s box of musical experimentation that would attack the very fundamentals of Western Music.

In his wildly complex and original prose, Joyce is engaged in a similarly revolutionary act of changing the face of literature by assimilating all the literary traditions of the past and stretching the written word to its logical extreme. Among Joyce’s strategies is the integration of other artistic genres and media into his prose. Thus music notation, verse and a one-act play invade the novel as if one genre alone cannot capture all that Joyce wants to communicate. We find in this a similarity with Wagner, whose unique combination of drama, music and theatrical spectacle make his the first ever multi-media artist. Wagner relied on a host of techniques designed to enthrall the audience entirely, forcing them to concentrate on the completed opera. While the more dictatorial of Wagner’s innovations have been discarded, many of the procedures he introduced - such as dimming the house lights and banning all interruption to the opera, such as eating and talking - have since become common practice. Analogous to this, Joyce relies on a host of techniques devised to force the reader to concentrate by working with the text and struggling to figure it out and extract meaning.
Joyce also aims to mimic and subvert Wagner’s project of building up a national epic. Many examples of the epic form are held up either to be exalted or lampooned or both. In the case of the Ring Cycle and its source material the Norse mythology of the Nibelungenlied, what Joyce seems to be going for mostly is parody.

The role of Siegfried is sung by a heldentenor, and he is meant as the embodiment of Wagner’s Teutonic ideal. He is the ultimate tragic hero of Wagner’s intricate and epic racial mythology. By aligning Stephen and Siegfried, Joyce is engaged in a very wry attack on Wagnerian notions of nationalism and racial supremacy. As the aspiring author of the Irish national epic, Stephen is one of two outsider characters who stand firmly at its center.

The extent to which Stephen can be said to resemble Siegfried is primarily in his naiveté and lack of experience. By suggesting that Stephen will be to Ulysses (the great Irish epic) what Siegfried is to the Ring (the great Germanic epic), Joyce is dealing Wagnerian mythology a striking blow.

Throughout Ulysses, Joyce seems to invite the reader to dislike Stephen. Stephen is arrogant, self-absorbed and unable to relate to those who show him kindness, including Bloom himself. It is important to bear in mind that the action of Ulysses takes place shortly after we last saw Stephen at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen has been away from home living in Paris for a little over a year when he is summoned back by his dying mother. Though the various interactions Stephen has throughout the course of the day, we come to understand that he’s essentially the same ambitious yet arrogant aspiring-artist who so boldly proclaimed at the end of A Portrait: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (p. 197).
I’d like to suggest this passage as a key point in the text where Joyce initiates a strand in Stephen’s thought that will be prevalent throughout Ulysses. The fire imagery of the smithy and or forging brings to mind Wagner’s tragic hero struggling to weld together the fragments of his father’s broken sword. It’s almost as if Joyce, as early on as at the end of Portrait is already laying the groundwork for the eventual understanding the Stephen of Ulysses by deploying overtly Wagnerian language. Furthermore, it’s not implausible that the young Stephen of Portrait would have familiarity with Wagner, especially being the young aesthete that he is. Joyce is giving us a clue into the nature of his protagonist.

When we get to Ulysses, we see Stephen struggling to deal with the recent death of his mother. His hyper-romantic Weltanschauung allows him to imagine himself as any number of historical and fictional characters, most obviously Hamlet. Stephen’s affinity for this vicarious association is mirrored by the fact that he is disguised throughout the day. His hat is a “Latin quarter” hat, that doesn’t seem to really suit him. His boots belong to Mulligan. And his sole accoutrement, a walking stick is referred to only as an “ashplant.” It is this walking stick which will magically transform – even if only temporarily – into Siegfried’s indestructible sword, Nothung. Joyce sets up for this eventual transformation by ascribing the walking stick with sword-like characteristics.

It is important to ponder a moment the importance of making Stephen’s walking stick out of the ashplant. As it happens, the ashtree occupies a central position In Norse mythology. The centrality and cosmic significance of the ashtree in Norse mythology is a topic that would merit a paper of its own. Suffice it to say that it serves a grand metaphysical purpose of connecting the various worlds of Norse mythology. The ashplant naturally feeds into many of the currents present in Wagner’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied; Wagner even inserts an ash-tree - “Welt-Esch” – theme into Das Rheingold to describe Wotan’s spear.

Stephen’s ashplant comes up time and again in the text and it would be untenable to provide the reader with an exhaustive list of all the allusions. What follows are some of the salient, meaningful places where Stephen’s ashplant is thought to become a sword. The first of these takes the form of a seemingly meaningless aside in the conversation between Mr. Deasy and Stephen. The reference to the Ring and to Wagner is ever more evident when one considers the parallel to Act 3 / Scene 2 of Siegfried, wherein Siegfried breaks Wotan’s spear. “I like to break a lance with you, old as I am” (2.424). This can be considered a moment where the characters seem forced into an epic that they can’t quite fathom. If Mr. Deasy is simply aware of the fact that he’s unaware that he’s in an epic makes an allusion that is lost on Stephen. He just doesn’t get it.

By following Stephen’s ashplant around with him, we see that it often becomes a sword-like object for an utterly inert and paralyzed (a la Hamlet) young man, as in “My ash sword hands at my side” (3.16), “He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly” (3.489), “Stephen looked down on…his ashplanthandle over his knee…my sword” (9.295-6). And “Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots. Stephanos, my crown. My sword” (9.946-7). In the final of these citations, Stephen’s imagination transforms his “Latin Quarter” hat and his walking stick into the accoutrements of Hamlet and Siegfried respectively.

The evolution of walking stick qua sword and Stephen qua Siegfried comes to a head in the Circe episode. In the nightmarish world of Ulysses’ 15th chapter, amidst all the enchantment, delusion and drunkenness, the walking stick momentarily becomes Siegfried’s indestructible sword, Nothung. Stephen’s invocation is not merely another allusion for the reader to put into his cap. Rather, the conflation of these two heroes serves to aid us in how we ought to understand Stephen in the throes of this climactic scene.

Here, in Nighttown where everything is possible including magical transformations, the identification of Stephen with Siegfried is complete and betrays to our hero the hubris and absurdity of the stature he’s given himself in his mind. For any number of reasons, it is telling that Joyce sets the scene as a play. One would like to think that he had Wagner - who calls theater “the epitome of the arts of representing” in his essay “The Music of the Future” – in mind.

In this pivotal scene, the connection with Siegfried extends past the identity of his walking stick. We first see the ashplant early on when Stephen “flourishes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light all over the world.” Here, Stephen recalls no one as much as Siegfried sampling all the swords that Mime forges for him, but which ultimately prove inadequate. The aforementioned stage-description also brings to mind an argument between Stephen and MacCann in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden sword?” (p. 197). Here, we see Stephen asserting the superiority of his weapon over those of his opponents. The metaphor chosen shows us the extent to which Stephen has constructed a fantastical model in his mind. The retort MacCann gives cannot do much but bring him back to reality: “Metaphors! Come to facts!”

Back to the Circe episode, Lynch alludes to Siegfried when he calls Stephen, “the youth who could not shiver and shake” (15.3660). What makes Siegfried the pure hero who is able to slay Fafner and claim the ring for himself is precisely that he hasn’t known fear. Coming as it does during this moment of palmary, Lynch’s comment serves as dire prologue to Zoe’s proposed sorcery. While Siegfried is ignorant of fear (and also love), Stephen is deeply ignorant of the real world and blind to the degree of his own self-absorption. Thus, the implication of lacking works in the case of Stephen. Or perhaps, the reference to Siegfried is here to underscore just how far Stephen actually is from reaching that Teutonic ideal. He would like to be able to live free from fear, free from guilt. Yet, when his mother’s ghost appears before him, he cannot simply attack as Siegfried attacks Fafner. We get a sense of Stephen’s deep-seated instability and needfulness. Stephen so wishes he could conquer his fear and guilt and sense of having betrayed his mother as easily as Siegfried, now so blessedly free of bad conscience. Yet he is unable. This handicap is what ultimately makes him realize the dead-end nature of the hyper-romantic view in which he equates himself with Siegfried. He goes to the ghost to seek enlightenment and puts it to her the word known to all men. The answer remains unspoken and Stephen unenlightened. In his ignorance he charges at the ghost; “Nothung! (He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier)” (15:4242).

By the time Stephen hallucinates his mother he is intoxicated. There is a question of whether or not he is actually bewtitched. Here too, Joyce subtly plants a suggestion of identification between Stephen and the destructive Siegfried of Götterdämmerung who inadvertently brings about his own death and the twilight of the gods. In the heat of the moment, Stephen raises his walking stick and smashes Bella Cohen’s chandelier. Whether or not this is an intentional or an accidental action, Stephen seems to want to be in control of the situation any way he can. His preference would be to imitate the Wagnerian model. It’s possible he thinks he’s slaying his own dragons, his mother, his upbringing, his past; but inadvertently he brings about the twilight of the gods, at least symbolically. In the direct aftermath, we are told in stage directions: “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (15: 4244). The scene described seems nothing less than complete and utter Armageddon-like annihilation. Yet the only thing that’s really coming to an end is June 16, 1904.

The Siegfried motif of Ulysses also proves useful and fertile in analyzing Stephen’s relationship with Bloom. Calling Stephen a Walsung makes him a demigod or at least of some sort of divinely privileged lineage. This can be twisted either way when it comes to interpreting how Bloom might fit into all this. The type of paternity that Bloom harbors for Stephen is a complicated issue. For sure, the connection is strengthened and reinforced by Stephen being the age of Bloom’s dead son Rudy, had Rudy not died. But the question of paternity is complicated, as it is in the case of Siegfried (at least on the surface). He is the spawn of an incestuous yet divinely sanctioned union, which links him to Wotan. He is also the adoptive son of Mime, the evil dwarf who is among Wagner’s most virulently anti-Semitic caricatures. Bloom is thus – at least temporarily – aligned with both the stereotypical, seething, conniving Jew who plots Stephen’s ruin or the great hero Siegmund, son of the god Wotan. Bloom is, of course, neither, yet Joyce suggests these identifications by the force of their Jewish association. (Joyce would not be the first to draw a parallel between the Volsungs of Wagner and German Mythology and the Jews. Thomas Mann did this somewhat more provocatively and overtly in his short story “Blood of the Volsungs”).

Of all the characters in the novel, Bloom comes closest to naming Siegfried. In chapter 12, we find Bloom thinking about Siegfried earlier in the Cyclops episode. In the midst of a long and puzzling list, the narrator imputes the thought to Bloom: “Kriegfried Ueberallgemein” (12.569). The German term is roughly cognate with Siegfried. The suggestion that Siegfried might – even in the most unconscious way possibly – be on Bloom’s mind adds to the general feel that a meeting between the two is preordained.

Bloom shows himself to be musically inclined towards Mozart and Meyerbeer. But the atmosphere of Nighttown has the effect of fomenting an affinity between Bloom and Stephen. For the first time in the novel, we find Bloom making a Wagnerian proclamation: “That’s the music of the future. That’s my programme” (15.1368). I suggest we see this sudden, almost impulsive admiration of Wagner as a clue into an almost preternatural attraction of Bloom to Stephen. It’s as if, in claiming Wagner’s ambitions for his own, were in some crude sense claiming some sort of ownership over Stephen.

After the disastrous climax inside the brothel Stephen surrenders his walking stick to Bloom, in whose hands the magical sword resumes is mundane identity as a walking stick. In the first line of Chapter 16 Bloom unceremoniously returns the walking stick to Stephen. By this point, Stephen seems sufficiently shaken by recent events to reevaluate his worth and character as measured against personages like Hamlet and Siegfried. The matter-of-fact way he has of reclaiming his walking stick indicates that Stephen may have relinquished, at least temporarily, his imaginative hubris and come to a sort of honesty about himself.

Though, initially in Chapter 16, the relationship between Stephen and Bloom seems to grow stronger we eventually witness the series of misunderstandings that occur later that same chapter. This lack of communication is reinforced through Bloom’s revised thoughts on Wagner’s music. “Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go-off” (16.1735-7). This admission seems almost like reevaluation in light of Stephen’s increasing opaqueness. In other words, while pretending to assess Wagner’s music, Bloom is really scrutinizing Stephen.

An analysis of the overlay of Stephen Dedalus and Wagner’s tragic hero Siegfried bears particularly ripe fruit for understanding the infinitely clever and intricate text of Ulysses. Joyce uses the conflation between Stephen and Siegfried to subvert epic and genre conventions. Furthermore, Stephen qua Siegfried adds depth to our understanding of Stephen and his limitations. The identification with Siegfried, present in a latent sense, is only realized ultimately amidst the transformative power of Theater that the characters experience in Nighttown in the Circe chapter. When Stephen cries out “Nothung” to banish his mother’s ghost, he conjures the two acts of violence Siegfried performs with his father’s sword; the slaying of Fafner and the breaking of Wotan’s spear. Symbolically, this brings about Götterdämmerung. Yet, the only twilight it signals is the twilight of Tuesday, June 16, 1904. This is a false epiphany, a hallucination, brought about either by magic or intoxication (possibly both). In this regard, Stephen is similar to Siegfried, who will under an enchantment bring about his own demise in Götterdämmerung. Finally, understanding Stephen as Siegfried also adds an extra dimension to the father-son relationship of Bloom and Stephen.
It is the challenge of the attentive student of this work to probe the manifold allusions and themes therein for what they will yield. If in examining this particular aspect of a relationship more hinted at and intimated than declared outright I have contributed in a small measure to the decoding of the text, then I will have succeeded in my task.

Henry James and the Art of the Striptease

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:50:00 +0000

Keeping Us Unsatisfied, Holding Our Hands:
A Barthesian Analysis of the “Figure in the Carpet”

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Many of Henry James’ shorter works initiate the reader into a perverse game of suspense and frustration. Among these attempts, we can locate novellas like “The Aspern Papers,” and “The Author of Beltraffio” and short stories like “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Lesson of the Master.” These works, which represent an important cross-section of James’ shorter writing, all hinge on keeping the reader maddened yet sufficiently intrigued to continue reading past the point where he realizes that the author has no intention of providing a definite resolution. This strategy of seducing the reader through a game of suspense compounded by frustration reaches its apogee in “The Figure in the Carpet.” As in the aforementioned stories, here James provides a beguiling state of affairs and some vital quest for which a character is willing to struggle to the death. James hooks us - the readers - with the eccentricity of this challenge and goads us on until we teeter on frustration’s brink. Devilishly, James teases us with a donné that may or may not exist. Henceforth he further limits our capacity for knowledge and discovery at every turn by thwarting our ever attempt to get at it.

This paper looks at “The Figure in the Carpet” and offers a Barthesian analysis of the story’s main elements. I will look at the nature of the game as constructed by James and analyze his technique in terms of what the reader and writer gain from playing it. The contention I hope the paper bears out is that James is aiming for something he dramatizes early on in the bedroom scene (more on that later) between Vereker and the narrator; a certain admission of the narrator’s after learning for the first time of the vague “figure.”

Allow me to begin with a brief summary. An unnamed critic who fancies himself a shrewd reader is dismayed by the dismissive attitude with which a respected author brushes aside his review of the writer’s latest book. The author, Hugh Vereker, piques the critic’s interest in a grand scheme that runs through his entire body of work, yet one which no critic has ever managed to discern. The unnamed narrator sets about the task of discovering this underlying secret, this “figure in the carpet” but soon gives up in frustration. His best friend, Corvick, however, refuses to surrender. Along with his fiancée, Gwendolyn, the couple devotes their lives to deciphering the figure that runs through all of Vereker’s novels. Corvick is sent to India and, after several months cables London that he’s discovered the secret in a blinding flash. Unfortunately, Corvick dies before he makes know his secret to the narrator. Shortly afterwards, Vereker – having confirmed Corvick’s theory – dies as well. Gwendolyn claims to be in possession of the secret, yet refuses to impart it to the narrator. The narrator lives on in mystery. Gwendolyn remarries (to a literary rival of the narrator’s) and dies in childbirth. When the narrator approaches the widower and pleads with him to divulge the great secret, the widower displays genuine shock and surprise: Gwendolyn never uttered a word to him. The narrator is left feeling that Gwendolyn’s sin of omission is some small solace for his torment and frustration.

In a story so full of bizarre coincidences and startling double entendres, I see James harboring two interlocked objectives. He wants to keep the reader unsatisfied yet intrigued, while at the same time desiring communion with the reader. I see this double notion dramatized in the story at the end of Chapter III, when the narrator clings to Vereker begging him to stay and explain himself: “I was unsatisfied – I kept hold of his hand.” Roland Barthes’ musings about the pleasure of the text provide us with a vocabulary to discuss the elements of suspense and frustration, pleasure and teasing that are so prevalent in this story.

In “The Pleasure of the Text,” Barthes’ employs an erotic vocabulary in discussing literary pleasure. Barthes’ conception of such pleasure is similar to what Corvick describes early on as the unnamable experience he gets from reading Vereker. Here, we get an intimation that Corvick knows somehow of the figure since reading Vereker gives him a pleasure he can’t quite explain. As he tells the narrator: “’He gives me a pleasure so rare; the sense of’ – he mused a little – ‘something or other’” (James, p. 359). I don’t think its reading too much into this passage if we find some coy erotic suggestion.

We see James in this text engaged in cruising the reader and creating what Barthes calls a “site of bliss,” which is the author’s first objective. Regardless of whether the act of writing brings pleasure to the author, the author must further solicit from his reader:

Does writing in pleasure guarantee – guarantee me, the writer – my reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out the reader (must “cruise” him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. In is not the reader’s “person” that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility to a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game. (Barthes, p. 4)

By initiating a game with the reader, James hopes to create such a site. He would like to be able to provoke in us a response as strong as that which the narrator feels for Vereker, that is, to create a site of bliss equal to the sites Vereker dangles before the eyes of our frustrated narrator: “[Little] by little my curiosity not only had begun to ache again, but had become the familiar torment of my days and nights…[L]iterature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life” (James, p. 380). Failing to inhabit a site of bliss in Vereker’s work, he tries to eke one out in the intellectual life of the Corvicks.

After Corvick’s death, Gwendolyn preserves this site of bliss by refusing to share her knowledge with the narrator. In a sense, it’s as if she’s exchanged her virginity for this knowledge: this is suggested by the reference to her marriage as “the last barrier to their intimacy” (James, p. 391). In refusing to divulge Vereker’s general intention, Gwendolyn is compensating for Corvick’s loss. Thus it is up for James to provide for us an alternative one; one where the lack of clear resolution does not dampen, but rather heightens the pleasure we find in the text.

We must inquire into the nature of this site of bliss and of the game itself. We turn to Barthes again and his discussion of the “gapes,” an analogy he applies to literature. It is the “intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing” that seduces; the pleasure of literature is by its nature tantalizing.

The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. In these cases, there is no tear, no edges; a gradual unveiling: the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy’s dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction). (Barthes, pp. 8-9)

Exposure and concealment come up in the story relatively early. In the first chapter, the narrator is certain he’s pinned Vereker down, exposed him: he fancies himself responsible for bringing Vereker’s brilliance to the light of day: “We had found out at last how clever he was, and he had had to make the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly tempted, as I walked beside him, to let him know how much of that unveiling was my act.” (James, p. 360) In the subsequent tête-à-tête with Vereker, however, it is the author who after complaining that, “no one sees anything” will of his own accord “unveil” a bit of himself. The story will hitherto bear out the extent to which this cleavage obsesses the narrator.

We find that the game James invites us to play is indeed erotic, akin to an elaborate and protracted seduction. By refusing us any resolution or answer, James is able to make the game go on forever. What James succeeds so masterfully at doing here is keeping the whole fifty-page-long story in a liminal state where we allow ourselves to be seduced despite the increasing sense that we will be denied a conventional satisfaction. James drives home this strategy in all the double-entendres he uses and the coy, coaxing manner in which the story progresses. The analogy with sexual pleasure here seems apt, as James is for certain engaging in a wily seduction of his reader.

Despite first appearances, we soon realize that the ideal reader of Vereker is not our narrator but rather Corvick. Despite his untimely death, Corvick wins the secret, the girl and – perhaps most importantly – the author’s admiration. Even the way in which Gwendolyn explains Corvick’s break smacks of a sexual suggestion. “[I]t’s the thing itself, let severely alone for six months, that has sprung out of him like a tigress out of a jungle” (James, p. 381). This language makes it sound like literary orgasms are erupting around us. The pleasure to be gained from Corvick’s insight seems boundless. Corvick becomes a man intoxicated, drunk on his own discovery: “his ecstasy only obscured [his triumph],” which leads him to surrender all else (James, p. 382). Additionally, Corvick’s message to the narrator certainly has orgasmic implications: “Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you’ll make!” (James, p. 383)

The heavily sexualized language serves both to communicate the pleasure of the text created in this site of desire and to underscore the narrator’s failure to inhabit it. The narrator relates Corvick’s pleasure of knowing the secret it is put in deliriously intoxicating terms:

He had found Mr. Vereker deliriously interesting and his own possession of the secret a real intoxication. The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that it was there it seemed to grow and grow before him; it would have been, through all time and taking all tongues, one of the most wonderful flowers of literary art. Nothing, in especial, once you were face to face with it, could show for more consummately done. When once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that made you ashamed; and there hadn’t been, save in the bottomless vulgarity of the age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every sense stopped, the smallest reason why it should have been overlooked. It was great, yet so simple, was simple, yet so great, and the final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart. He intimated that the charm of such an experience, the desire to drain it, in its freshness, to the last drop, was what kept him there close to the source. (James, p. 384-5).

James understands how great is the pleasure to be gained from a text. This point is strengthened by him presenting us with characters that are obsessive in their text-based quest. Of Gwendolyn, the narrator tells us, “It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed on her, and in her presence I felt almost tepid.” Thus, our frustrated narrator is unable to enjoy this sort of pleasure. In that, James seems to label him something of a failure. And this failure renders him impotent.

This game is addictive and upon giving it up, the narrator seems to go into a sort of withdrawal: at the thought of Vereker’s death, the narrator feels grief: “there rolled over me a wave of anguish – a poignant sense of how inconsistently I still depended on him.” (James, p. 394) In the final pages James reinforces how painful and maddening this must be for him: “I was shut up in my obsession forever - my gaolers had gone off with the key” (James, p. 395). Interestingly enough, however, this admission we get somewhat earlier: Gwen’s refusal to share her knowledge constitutes the “final nail in the coffin” on his luckless idea, which would be converted “into the obsession of which I’m for ever conscious” (James, p. 391). Such foreshadowing is effective precisely because it reveals at the same time it conceals, adding to the volume of cleavage James includes to draw the reader further in.

Why does James choose to play this particular game? The answer, perhaps, we can see in Barthes’ musing on erotic texts:

“So-called “erotic” books (one must add: of recent vintage, in order to except Sade and a few others) represent not so much the erotic sense as the expectation of it, the preparation for it, its ascent; that is what makes them “exciting”; and when the scene occurs, naturally there is disappointment, deflation.” (Barthes, p. 58)

That this is central is evident by the fact that all the value in the story for Corvick and Gwendolyn is in discovering it for yourself and keeping the game going. The game must not stop. For the couple, there is a private pleasure to be gained from this inquiry: “a too precious to be stared with the crowd” (James, p. 374). The narrator almost envies them and wishes he were on their team, since “[Corvick] could say things to her that I could never say to him” (James, p. 375). For them, the nobility and worth of playing the game comes across as almost even its own award. In a sense, then, they are playing the game for it own sake: “I felt humiliated at seeing other persons deeply beguiled by an experiment that had brought me only chagrin.” (James, p. 375) At this point, the narrator has ceased to get pleasure from the story he’s recounting. He can only envy.

James peeks through the narrator’s description of how Gwendolyn and Corvick go about their quest: “They would take him page by page, as they would take one of the classics, inhale him in slow draughts and let him sink all the way in” (James, p. 375). At the same time, the narrator tempers it by sounding a note of doom for Corvick, (“had he lived”), eager to use his powers of prophecy where he can.

As a writer, James wants to ensure that he has our complete and undivided attention. As such, he tries to curtail the extent to which we might be tempted to skim. There is a connection to be made with Barthes, who goes on to explain how we don’t read everything at the same pace, with the same amount of attention (Dickens, Balzac and Proust figure as especially prominent targets):

[W]e boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is…the author… cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasures of the great narratives. (Barthes, pp. 9 -10)

No, James cannot choose to write what will not be read. He would, in fact, like if we were to read his every word with extreme care, recognizing in them a grain of what’s precious and essential to the story. To prevent us from giving into the temptation of skimming, James sustains the tension throughout the story, leaving open the (absurd) possibility of a resolution, despite the hints we get increasingly from out narrator. That the elusive figure might still be revealed forever lurks in the far corner of the realm of possibility. The story becomes not about the gradual unveiling of the secret, but about subsisting that state of tantalizing, frustrating yet pleasurable ignorance: this is one of those rare cases where ignorance is true bliss! However, James is, I feel, conscious that his efforts to divert in order to build suspense are among the least interesting – most expendable – sections of the story. The pages that detail the narrator’s travels with his brother or discuss Corvick’s trip to India are filler. These are the parts James gives us permission to skip.

James sets up these “skimmable moments” for us in earlier scenes where characters appear uninterested. At one point, Vereker himself starts getting bored (p. 368). The winking implication seems to be that this is a place for him to skip. A similar moment occurs when early on the narrator decides to renounce his quest: “At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion – perversely I allow – by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose” (James, p. 370).

The perversity of the game in “Figure” is rivaled only by the perversity of tragic texts. James’ objective here is to keep us tantalized and intrigued by setting up a site of bliss unfamiliarly situated between knowing and not knowing.

Many readings are perverse, implying a split, a cleavage. Just as the child knows its mother has no penis and simultaneously believes she has one…so the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but all the same…Of all readings, that of tragedy is the most perverse: I take pleasure in hearing myself tell a story whose end I know: I know and I don’t know, I act toward myself as though I did not know... (Barthes, p. 47)

As in tragedy, the end of “Figure” is practically given us in advance; or rather we know that we won’t know the end and this we know in advance. Barthes is also reiterating the idea of cleavage: the knowing and not knowing. This is the state of heightened desire and suspense in which James hopes to successfully keep us. This notion comes across in the sexualized words that characters use to describe the mysterious figure and what they know of it. The obtuseness and perversity of this language spills out over the entire story. Especially since the narrator – especially in the later pages – can’t help but reveal the end of the story early, through various clues and asides.

Much of the story’s perversity consists in how James takes pains to inflate a mystery he has no intention of resolving. Just look at the way in which Vereker describes his “little scheme” which was become the great amusement of his life. “I live almost to see if it will ever be detected,” he tells the narrator (James, p. 367). All the clues Vereker gives us are dead-ends, they tell us nothing. Yet the sense we get from them is that perhaps Vereker himself is imprisoned by his “little scheme.” He compares it to a bird in a cage, or bait on a hook, cheese in a mousetrap, a foot in a shoe and calls it the “organ of life” (James, p. 368). Later on, he expresses extreme pride and jubilation for it: “It is the joy of my soul!” “The loveliest thing in the world” (James, p.369). With such admissions, James is forever tantalizing us, ever flashing the reader.

Knowing and not knowing is seen earliest in the character of Corvick, who hints at something in Vereker that forever eludes his grasp. This liminal knowledge is put in highly sexualized language by the narrator: “He had hold of the tail of something: he would pull hard, pull it right out. He pumped me dry on Vereker’s strange confidence” (James, p. 371). Engaged in this literary game, they are quite literally playing with themselves; the intimation of onanism seems appropriate here, seeing that both the readers are out for pleasure.

After showing why and how James goes about keeping the reader sufficiently unsatisfied yet tantalized, it remains for us to explain the second half of James’ grand intention. We might inquire into the possible motives James might have for keeping the game going. I refer here to James’ desire to “hold hands” with his reader: the sense in which the author needs the reader. It is helpful to discuss this in relation to Barthes and his idea of how the text itself becomes a fetish object that desires the reader. Here the discourse of seduction is especially pertinent:

“As institution, the author is dead; his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared; dispossessed, they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account of literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author; I need his figure…as he needs mine.” (Barthes, p. 27)

The interdependency of reader to writer emerges as one of the story’s major themes. In such a symbiosis, both parties contribute an equal share of interest; something they are willing to stake. We find this thought reflected in something the narrator tells us early on, while hoping that Vereker will be more charitable that Corvick was: “I reflected indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even than the appetite of the scribe” (James, p. 359).

This is primarily what I mean by drawing attention to the fact that the narrator wants to hold Vereker’s hand. The writer wants desperately to guide the reader from beyond the grave. The author is also in the text, lost in it – not behind it! We can thus see certain aspects of the relationship between reader and writer as wish fulfillment on James’ behalf.

Instances of the author desperately trying to pop out of the text abound. We see this aspect of the story most clearly in Vereker’s interactions with the narrator. A double-seduction seems to be operating here on both ends. At the start of Chapter III, for instance, we find Vereker “cruising” the narrator in a similar way that James is cruising the reader. The language he uses is full of sexual suggestion: “It’s quite with you rising young men…that I feel most what a failure I am!” (James, p. 365). It’s not hard to hear this as a confession of impotence. Here the sexual language is covering up the narrative impotence, for the pleasure that the text gives goes unnoticed by his readership.

As we’ve seen already, Vereker’s explanation of his “little point” is riddled with erotic suggestion. He calls it, “the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely.” After a potentially offensive statement, Vereker “laid his hand on my shoulder to show the allusion wasn’t to my personal appearance” (James, p. 366). In such interactions, what come across are both the care and the desire of the artist to find a reader.

Likewise, the desire of the author to find a reader to fetishize is also represented. The extent to which James sees the relationship as reciprocal can be seen in the language – much of which can be read as a sexual come-hither – as when the narrator tells Vereker, “But you talk about the initiated. There must therefore, you see, be initiation” (James, p. 366).

The language of seduction is everywhere in the scene between the narrator and Vereker. He tells us that “the only effect I cared about was the one it would have on Vereker up there by his bedroom fire,” during the scene of physical intimacy where Vereker has somehow transgressed by crossing the threshold of the narrator’s room (James, pp. 363-4).

James ends the chapter with a deliriously sensual and precise description that raises more questions than it answers. We are left with a view of a supple, obliging author offering himself coyly to a young admirer. The admirer takes the bait, without knowing what he’s getting into:
I can see him there still, on my rug, in the firelight and his spotted jacket, his fine clear face all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth…I think the sight of my relief touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from far within…The hour, the place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn’t have done anything more intensely effective” (James, p. 364).

While we can read this as a cliffhanger to sustain the reader’s interest until the next installment (it was published originally in Cosmopolis during January and February of 1896), as the next chapter seems to take up exactly where this one ends, we might also be tempted to wonder after what transpires in the blank space between the two chapters? Certainly, one wouldn’t be that far gone to read an erotic suggestion into this. The desired state of affairs is achieved when the narrator is unsatisfied and holds Vereker’s hand. In this act – or state of affairs – James’ whole technique of thwarted seduction crystallizes. Again, James wants us to hold him hand and be unsatisfied; but by no means does he want us to give up the game.

Soon after making his confession, Vereker seems to realize that he’s mistook the narrator for the ideal reader, and relents. When they meet again, Vereker – still cordial – repents of his admission in a manner that starkly contrasts against the tenderness of their previous meeting: “I was accidentally so much more explicit with you than it had ever entered into my game to be, that I find this game – I mean the pleasure of playing it – suffers considerably” (James, p. 372). We see a further deterioration of their relationship. Here, the language makes it sound almost like a break-up. “He had been free with me in a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now in a mood he had turned indifferent” (James, p. 373). After that, the narrator is not only unable to enjoy Vereker’s company but also develops a dislike for his books: “Not only had I lost the books, but I had lost the man himself; they and their author had been alike spoiled for me. I knew too much which was the loss I most regretted. I had taken to the man still more than I had ever taken to the books.” (James, p. 378) The reader is left to wonder: are we too going to start losing interest?

James has yet another motive for keeping us unsatisfied. Late in the story, the narrator speculates that now that Gwendolyn knows the secret, “The writer might go down to his grave: she was the person in the world to whom – as if she had been his favoured heir – his continued existence was least of a need” (James, p.394). This can be read as an argument against being understood in one’s lifetime, and forms a part of why James wants to keep us unsatisfied: so to live on in mystery in our imagination. Once the author can be pinned down and is understood, he’s as good as dead. But it is equally true that after Vereker’s death, Gwendolyn will never have the satisfaction of his blessing: “I had above all to remind myself that with Vereker’s death the major incentive dropped. He was still there to be honoured by what might be done – he was no longer there to give it his sanction. Who alas but he had the authority?” (James, p. 397)

In James’ desire for a reciprocal relationship, we also glimpse something that approaches a moral dimension. If we understand the narrator’s quest and his obsessiveness in Barthesian terms, then he is an extreme pleasure seeker. His quest, however, makes him oblivious to a whole code of values. Nowhere in the story do we really see him as much as communicating sincerely with another human being or making a moral choice. He’s living for pleasure alone and in this is callous to all values:

Pleasure’s force of suspension can never be overstated; it is a veritable époché, a stoppage which congeals all recognized values (recognized by oneself). Pleasure is a neuter (the most perverse for of the demonic). (Barthes, p. 65)

In his choice of narrator, James warns us against this very danger. James wants a reciprocal relationship with the reader, the very kind that our narrator is unable to provide. The narrator starts out wanting to hold the author’s hand, but ends up alienating himself and even relishing in the despair of a rival. This is opposition to the moral obligation that the narrator has as a critic (and which is previously laid out by Vereker), that the “figure” is just the critic’s “responsibility;” “the thing for the critic to find.” But the obsession makes him cruel and heartless. All he thinks about is how he can possibly uncover the secret until at last all he is able to do is relish in is the pain he causes Gwendolyn’s widower. At story’s end, the unnamed pleasure-seeker finds satisfaction in his dissatisfaction; he gives up the game and lets go of the author’s hand.

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text., tr. Richard Miller. New York; Hill and Wang, 1975.

James, Henry, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. London; Penguin Classics, 1986.

Uniting / Divorcing Ethics and Aesthetics

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:47:00 +0000

Our informal exploration of aesthetics comes to an end with an in-depth look at Hume's Aesthetic Theory as outlined in the Treatise of Human Nature and other writings. I hope you've enjoyed reading. Stay tuned for more...

David Hume provides a strikingly similar account of how moral and aesthetic judgments are formed. While Hume’s aesthetic theory is incomplete, we can turn both to passages in the Treatise of Human Nature, The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and his late essay “Of the Standard of Taste” to reconstruct an aesthetic theory with telling parallels to his moral one. This paper explores how Hume treats moral and aesthetic judgments analogously and hopes to explain Hume’s reasons for doing so.

Morality enables men to live peacefully with each other. The goal or purpose of art is less obvious. In attempting a comprehensive theory of human nature, however, Hume assigns a certain role to aesthetic judgment. The psychologist in him, however, makes Hume discuss taste to the absolute exclusion of ontology. In this sense, Hume’s concern for how aesthetic judgments are formed comes at the expense of a proper definition of art. Hume is up to more than simply accounting for human nature using the fewest possible terms. He regards aesthetics as a suitable subject for inquiry and his theory of human sentiment acknowledges art as a vital part for human nature.

The analogous treatment of morality and aesthetics imply similar views on both. What would motivate such an analogy between art and morality? Is it merely the general utility of human nature that suggests this parallel? Is the analogy between art and morality a complete one? Is Hume building a moral system on analogy to his aesthetic one; or is the relationship the other way round? The goal of this paper is to offer a plausible explanation of what Hume is up to suggesting and employing such striking analogies between ethical and aesthetic judgments.

Hume has been accused by some of confusing morality with mores and aesthetics with morals. Attempting an aesthetics of human nature, he has been accused of aestheticizing human nature. One such accusation is that Hume doesn’t tell the difference between moral and aesthetic values (think of example of being ashamed of a long nose). I will attempt to rebut such criticism and show that despite what might seem a potential confusion of aesthetic and moral categories, Hume does in fact promote a workable and robust division between aesthetics and ethics. My contention, however, is that by treating judgments of “moral and natural beauty” analogously, Hume actually is providing us a way of distinguishing between moral and aesthetic cases. In this way, he can be seen as responding to the age-old strife between art and philosophy that began with Plato and offering a possible way out.

Hume attempts to deal systematically with such a subjective discipline. He wants to show that both aesthetic and moral judgments, object and subject, share the same basis. He wants this in part because he care deeply about both morality and aesthetics, even if his aesthetics is incomplete. Still, Hume struggles and engages with the two in strikingly similar ways that I will examine below.

The aesthetic issue is troubling to Hume, who attempts to work it out systematically. However, his aesthetic theory is incomplete. In the Avertisement to volume one of the Treatise, he writes: “If I have the good fortune to meet with success, I shall proceed to the examination of morals, politics and criticism; which will compleat this Treatise of human nature.” (Treatise, p. xii) Criticism here means aesthetics. Another unfulfilled promise comes in the appendix, where he announces his intentions to consider “in what sense we can talk either or a right or wrong taste in morals, eloquence, or beauty” (Treatise, 3.2.8 547, n.1). Alas, we are never privy to such a conversation and must make do with the little that we have.

Hume holds that human nature is on the whole reliable and stable. This is the basis of his whole theory of human nature. This allows him to pronounce universality on issues of individual judgment and enables a standard. Since we are all fundamentally similar, our aesthetic and moral feelings will be similar. The axiomatic claim that the “minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations” is foundational to his whole philosophy.
In various places in both the Treatise and in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume defines his view of moral and aesthetic judgments on analogy with each other. Not surprisingly, given his interest in the “feelings and operations” of men’s minds, Hume proves a better psychologist than metaphysician. We will see this as we turn to examine his account of how aesthetic judgments are formed.

Hume’s famous pronouncement about reason being slave to the passions, bases our faculty for moral and aesthetic judgment in sentiment. Since reason depends on relations of ideas, it cannot be the source of morality, for this would mean that morality would be applicable to inanimate objects. “If these moral relations cou’d ever be apply’d to external objects, it wou’d follow, that even inanimate beings wou’d be susceptible of moral beauty and deformity” (Treatise, 3.1.2. 465). Hume escapes from what he considers to be an absurdity by grounding morality in sentiment, which is also the basis for aesthetic judgments, which apply to nature and to inanimate objects.

Hume consistently grounds both moral and aesthetic taste in sentiment. He writes that “all kinds of beauty, and tastes and sensations” resemble each other insofar as “our approbation is implied in the immediate pleasure they convey to us” (Treatise, 3.1.2. 471). The measure of moral and aesthetic beauty is the pleasure or disgust that it causes in the subject. In the case of art, Hume holds that the same quality of beauty can arise from multiple considerations of categories that inform our moral judgments: it sometimes be derived from mere species and appearances of the objects; sometime from sympathy and “an idea of their utility” (Treatise, 3.3.5, 667).

Before we turn our attention to these considerations, it is fruitful to point out a paradoxical claim that Hume makes about sentiments. While claiming that every pleasure is “of itself” equal, Hume also tells us that some tastes are more desirable than others (Gracyk, p. 186). The apparent contradiction inherent in this conviction is the basis for his later essay, “Of the Standard of Taste.”

In this famous and much-glossed essay, Hume argues for the possibility of aesthetic judgments. Everyone admits the variety of tastes. Yet, at the same time, people are equally convinced by their tastes. The paradox here is that all sentiments are equal and some art is better than others. Hume tantalizes us talk of a standard by which to judge art properly, since all definitions of beauty are vacuous. Such a standard is a prerequisite for all types of aesthetic judgment. However, Hume abandons the quest for a standard and instead ends up focusing on the criteria for a discriminating judge.

Hume’s definition of aesthetic experience is consistent with what he writes in the Treatise and the Enquiry. Basically, it is a matter of standing in relation to an object such that there is sympathy between your feeling and the form of the object. Here, as elsewhere, Hume insists that the capacity for appreciating beauty is innate: we’re naturally wired to find some things beautiful and others ugly.

The most famous portion of the Taste essay involves an episode from Don Quixote, where two wine connoisseurs are called on pronounce on the quality of a flask of wine. Though both are discriminating, they both identify different things. When the wine is poured out, both opinions are corroborated by the presence of the objects they identified. However, these extremely discriminating judges can only get it half-right. The point of this story as Hume retells it is that we can’t ever pour out the art to get a type of chemical analysis and to the bottom of things. The only objective basis for judgment we have is the ability to cultivate our sentiments and communicate our opinions.

The criteria for qualified judges that Hume does provide are rather vague and none-too-unexpected. These include delicacy of sentiment, practice, comparative judgment, freedom from prejudice and good sense (Taste, 145). The goal is to cultivate a “delicacy of taste,” where “the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition.” (Taste, 141)

Hume’s belief in the perfectibility of our faculties for aesthetic judgment, or at least, the striving to perfect such faculties, is somewhat at odds with his view on how we make moral judgments. The question of how these two relate has been a matter of much concern to many aestheticians. Can morality be cultivated the same way as taste? Though the issue is thorny, Hume does imply that we refine our moral sense by refining our taste in judging “of the catholic and universal beauty” and says that “a quick and acute perception of beauty must be the perfection of our mental taste” (Taste, 142).

One of the greatest difficulties about aesthetic judgments is that despite a common discourse, the “sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds” (Taste, 134). But while we tolerate such idiosyncrasy in art, we expect a greater conformity in morality, where the need for a common language for discussing values is more pressing.

The limits that Hume places on reason render it incapable of ever being an active principal. This active principle becomes the passions as regard the ethics. The consequence of holding this view – intended or not – is that a person without a capacity for pleasure cannot be a moral agent. While this implication is potentially troubling, it also discloses the premium that Hume puts on sentiment and, in particular, on beauty, that have led some to conclude that Hume is merely aestheticizing morality.

Reason, “the discoverer of truth or falsehood,” cannot cause morality, as an active principle can never be founded on an inactive one. “As reason can never immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it, it cannot be the source of moral good and evil” (Treatise, 3.1.1, 458). Shifting the base of morality from reason to sentiment seems more a logical consideration and less of an arbitrary one. Most unexpectedly, however, the chief sentiment upon which moral judgments are based is beauty. Along with its antithesis, deformity, beauty works analogously in forming both moral and aesthetic judgments. In accordance with Hume’s general theory of sentiments, beauty is said to reside in the judging subject rather than in the object or action being judged. Thus the phrase X is beautiful is mere convention; what we really mean is X causes a feeling of beauty in me. Hume’s starting point here is the unanalyzed fact that humans enjoy perceiving certain objects. Again, such a conviction befits a metaphysician who shows a greater concern with psychology than ontology. As such, we must remain satisfied with the theory that certain qualities of objects are naturally fitted to produce particular feelings in us, even though Hume never offers a systematic account of how this is supposed to work.

In other places, Hume makes the link between beauty and pleasure even stronger. “Pleasure and pain are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence” (Treatise, 2.1.8, 299). He says this with regard to beauty construed generally, in both the aesthetic and moral senses. The implication here is that all objects and actions that provoke a response of beauty or disgust are liable to moral or aesthetic valuation. In a sense, he is suggesting that moral and aesthetic judgments are themselves implied by our responses to beauty. That this can be so is partially due to Hume’s inability to entertain a beauty that is purely disinterested (à la Kant) and unattached to a person, object or situation.

Hume suggests a similar treatment of moral and aesthetic beauty in order to arrive at correct judgments. He writes that moral beauty “demands the assistance of our intellectual faculty in order to give it a more suitable influence on the human mind” (EPM 1, 137 / 173). This sentence echoes Hume’s recommendations for qualified judges in the “Taste” essay in its insistence of the intervention of reason in order to broaden its effect. While the feeling of beauty is about immediate sense, morality – though grounded in sentiment – is about intellectual discrimination.

In the Taste essay, Hume admits the impossibility of defining beauty. It isn’t surprising, then, that the definition he gives in the Treatise isn’t all that helpful. In the Treatise he writes that beauty is “such an order and construction of parts” that “is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul” (Treatise, 2.1.8 299). In other words, beauty depends on the arrangement of the parts that appear in an idea. Here, Hume implies that beauty is relative to the object or event itself. Elsewhere, however, Hume in discusses painting stresses qualities of balance and proportion, without which a painting would convey painful ideas. This rather conservative analysis, while in keeping with the artistic conventions of his day, does not necessarily mean that painting that lacks a center of gravity or realistic perspective would be an aesthetic failure. Rather, Hume’s subject-based concept of beauty leaves no reason for us to deny that such a work could produce a feeling of pleasure in one for whom off-kilter compositions is a source of beauty. Hume’s subject-based theory of sentiments implicitly allows for evolving standards of beauty. Does Hume’s theory allow for a similar treatment of morality?

Though Hume does speak of “moral beauty,” he often sets up “virtue” as the ethical correlate to aesthetic beauty. “Virtuous” is the name we give to actions that provide satisfaction. Virtue has the power to produce love and pride, while its antithesis, vice, has the power to produce humility and hatred. This multiplication of sentiments can enter into our moral judgments.

Another base of both aesthetics and morality is pride. Beauty is a universal feeling that produces pleasure in the possessor. Distinct from hubris, pride is a pleasure associated with the idea of oneself and makes one become a source of pleasure to oneself (Treatise, 3.3.1, 627). This needn’t be vanity or hubris: rather, simple pleasure in one’s appearance or one’s possession is a sufficient base for the development of moral sentiments. According to Hume, when your own actions look good to you, this becomes a source of pride, and will inspire you to do more good. This rosy picture of human nature implies that we naturally enjoy performing good actions. Likewise in the case of aesthetics, the pride that one takes in one’s appearance or in the construction of a house lead to an appreciation of beauty in external objects not related to you.

Beauty and deformity, virtue and vice: these are hard and steady distinctions, founded in “natural sentiments of the human mind” which can’t be “controuled or altered by any philosophical theory or speculation whatsoever” (EHU, 8, 80 / p. 103). Thus, Hume sets up very solid, objective-sounding parameters for his sense-based moral and aesthetic theory. His instance that beauty always brings delight and deformity always pain in both “animate or inanimate object{s}” seems to clash with the aforementioned case that we used to illustrate how Hume’s theory can accommodate different standards of beauty (that is, unless we want to say that Beauty can ever stop being beautiful) (Treatise, 2.1.8 298).

In another sense, however, beauty is often relative and can please us in proportion to the favorability of its ends. For Hume, utility is both a moral and aesthetic quality irrespective of whether we actually make use of a given object (Korsmeyer, 207). Like in the painting example above, Hume links utilitarian beauty to formal design in discussing the “order and convenience of a palace” (Treatise, 2.1.8, 299). Hume contends that the palace should give a sense of stability, because otherwise it would merely produce uneasiness in the viewer. For Hume, the suggestion of inutility or operative deficiency is sufficient to influence our aesthetic and moral judgment. In the moral case, this would lead us to act in ways that maximize the benefits for others and ourselves. In the aesthetic case, the suggestion of utility can enhance the beauty we feel towards an object. This relative sense of beauty grounded in hypothetical use-value is one of the quaintest-sounding of Hume’s proposals regards aesthetic judgments. Still, it shows how committed Hume is to extending the analogy between these two cases and makes it more pressing to discover the underlying reason for such a sustained analogy.

Also standing behind our capacity for aesthetic and moral appreciation is sympathy. Sympathy with others brings pleasure and shows our concern for the wellbeing of society. Hume uses the term in an unconventional sense that implies an actual transfer of sentiments from one person to another in a profound and powerful way. The sentiments of others, he writes, can both oppose and encrease our passions. In like manner, we respond automatically to the beauty around us sympathetically and allow it to influence our aesthetic judgments. This raises, however, a perplexing question for the aesthetician: can we ever call the pain or pleasure that a work of art produces morally good or bad?

Having explicated some of the similarities between Hume’s treatment of moral and aesthetic judgments, we should point out the differences between these two types of decision-making. There is a famous quote from the Enquiry when Hume writes, “No man reasons concerning another’s beauty: but frequently concerning the justice or injustice of his actions” (EPM, 1, 135 / 171). This worry gets to the heart of the matter when we’re discussing aesthetic and moral judgments. It also connects to the “Taste” essay and Hume’s defense of the infinite variety of opinions. It also implies a related topic: could we train ourselves morally the same way Hume thinks we can aesthetically?

Before approaching that topic, we need to examine how moral and aesthetic judgments differ. Moral judgments are of greater immediate concern for society. But despite Hume’s admission that men reason about the “justice of [another man’s] actions,” the Hume of the Treatise writes that such judgments are “moral perceptions” rather than “conclusions of reason” (Treatise, 3.1.1 456). The approval and disapproval of character are just perceptions. In distinction, aesthetic judgments, which are of lesser concern to society, do not concern themselves with approval or blame, merely with the felt qualities of beauty that an object can provoke.

Despite this difference, though, Hume feels that we can refine our moral sentiments just like our aesthetic ones. The example he brings to illustrate this point is rather bizarre, He ends by saying that “the more we habituate ourselves to an accurate scrutiny of morals, the more delicate feeling do we acquire of the most minute distinctions between vice and virtue” (EPM, 5, 176 / 217). The language here is very similar to the description of “delicacy of taste” that Hume provides in the Taste essay. Perhaps this is to be expected as both aesthetics and morals depend on the “movement” or stirring of sentiments that are not any inherent qualities in objects but rather “perceptions in the mind” (Treatise, 3.1.1 469).

Thus Hume makes the case for this analogy between the aesthetic and moral cases by showing its logic, utility and elegance. To quote Densby Townshend, “Hume compares moral beauty to natural beauty and ends up with a theory that applies to both” (Townshend, p. 156). One curious side effect of his system, however, is that is becomes very difficult to imagine a morally good person who lacks good taste. On the other hand, Hume foresees a scenario in which the two senses are united: An individual who is both highly morally and aesthetically refined is able to separate out his moral and aesthetic judgments: By deploying both his superior aesthetic and moral judgments, a “man of temper and judgment” would be able to recognize the musicality of an enemy’s voice (Treatise, 3.1.2 472). This example will prove useful much later when we consider the potential confusion between art and morals that can arise as a result of Hume’s system.

Hume shows himself to be much better at psychology than ontology. He is not, however, entirely blind to matters of ontological significance. Hume’s system relies on an understanding of art that can only be concerned with objects, and a morality that is solely concerned with actions.* By bringing Hume’s moral and aesthetic schemes into a closer union, we can understand what exactly is motivating Hume to treat these two seemingly unrelated categories so analogously.

Under Hume’s system, can a work of art be considered morally good or bad? The musical enemy example shows that it is possible to separate out own moral from our aesthetic judgments: it does not, however, help us decide whether a work of art could be considered moral in the same sense that it might be considered beautiful. However, for all its parallels to the aesthetic system, Hume’s moral system is restricted to the realm of action. Even in the case in which a work of art could provoke a morally dubious action (and Hume is willing to allow such examples), it seems doubtful that the artwork itself could ever be labeled morally bad. The inherent inability or inaccessibility of moral categories to inanimate objects would insure that morality remains in the domain of action.

What then do we make of the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s proclamation that the 9/11 attacks were “the greatest work of art in the cosmos?” Is there something morally blamable about this type of aesthetic judgment? Or can we blame the composer for making an aesthetic judgment in lieu of a moral one? As we have seen, both moral and aesthetic judgments have an essentially sentimental basis. The musical enemy example suggests that Hume feels that it is possible have an aesthetic feeling of beauty and a moral feeling of deformity at the same time. The reason for this, Hume would conclude, is that you’re judging two different types of thing simultaneously. For all their implied similarities and common bases, aesthetic and moral judgments are two very different perspectives on human existence. These two sides of our faculty of judgment are analyzed analogously in a large cross-section of Hume’s writing. However, judging from the results of his own system, it appears that the philosopher is committed to keeping these two realms very separate. Art and action can move us strongly. This “movement” of our sentiments, regardless of the perceived similarities and proximities, is fundamentally different in each of these cases. The difference between morality and aesthetics is therefore a categorical one for Hume.

Hume admits that art can stir one to action in such instances when the moral sentiments are already excited. Furthermore, he acknowledges the power of art, “the raptures of poetry and music frequently rise to the greatest heights” and that cathartic power of poetry (Treatise, 2.1.1, 276; EPM, 263). But a violent reaction to a work of art remains aesthetic in nature. Such a reaction can never become moral. Even in cases when the emotional force of a performance would inspire someone to go out and commit a crime, Hume would resist connecting an immoral action to an aesthetic experience and label it a confusion arising from the conflation of objects and actions.

Hume illustrates these two sides to our faculty of judgment and a robust distinction emerges. We are moved by our sentiments to respond morally to a given situation or action. When an object moves our sentiments, however, the resulting response will be aesthetic in nature. The chain of analogous reasoning that Hume sets up between the moral and aesthetic cases is pretty suggestive of understanding both judgments as essentially the same power, just applied to different things. While this might appear at first glance to lead to moral and aesthetic confusion, it in fact provides a very compelling argument for the exact opposite: for separating art and morality. By doing so, Hume’s system can be harnessed to rid us of a slew of thorny aesthetics-related questions – Can the Mona Lisa be appreciated morally? Can abortion be judged aesthetically? – by insisting on a clean division between moral and aesthetic judgments.

On the second page of the Enquiry, Hume writes that the ancients “seem to consider morals as deriving their existence from taste and sentiment.” Hume says he wants to get back to such a view, which is opposed by the modern approach, where “metaphysical reasonings” and “abstract principles” have led to confusion on the subject of “the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice” (EPM, 1, sect. 134). By examining ethics and aesthetics analogously, Hume is restoring this ancient link and providing a psychologically based explanation for our behavior and judgments as they relate to actions and inanimate objects. While he never works out a comprehensive aesthetic system, the same way he does for ethics, he uses his ethical theory to enrich his aesthetic one and grant the latter autonomy.

In attempting to explain human nature comprehensively using the fewest possible terms, Hume also wants to show that the same basic principles underlie both our objective and subjective judgments. Hume’s theory of judgments provides a way to sort our potential ethical and aesthetic confusions. Identifying the common traits that inhere in both types of judgments makes it easier to distinguish between the two. Hume helps eliminate the age-old suspicion of art operating clandestinely under the aegis of morality or immorality that caused Plato to expel the artists from his Republic*. By pointing out the common basis for these two types of judgments, Hume is revealing our mistaken reasons for wanting to conflate the two and giving us a way of differentiating between them. Once we recognize that the similarities in the structures of both these types of judgments can themselves lead to a confusion between aesthetics and ethics, we’ll know better than to ascribe moral judgments onto art and aesthetic judgments onto issues of morality. Acknowledging these commonalities has the effect of providing an argument for art as connected to life: aesthetic judgment is made the twin-sister of moral judgment where aesthetic judgments are object-based and moral judgments pertain only to action.

By basing both types of judgments in sentiment over reason, Hume’s analysis can help erase the false conflation of art and morality. Hume wants to preserve this fundamental distinction even as he insists on the structural similarities between moral and aesthetic judgments. These similarities pertain to beauty, utility and sympathy. By basing both judgment types in sentiment and passion, Hume is relating aesthetics and morality to experience and tangible results.

It is a fact of human nature that we all have the capacity for aesthetic and moral judgments, senses of artistic and moral beauty. Ultimately, we are left with the question of what role education and culture can play in the cultivation of a man’s aesthetic and moral judgments. Do we cultivate morals the same way in which we cultivate taste? Is a consequence of this system is that a philistine couldn’t be a moral person? The implication is yes, that we can refine the detection or stimulation of sentiments that stay the same. We need to recognize, however, the ontological differences. The capacity for making moral and aesthetic judgments is hardwired in us. Our moral sense comes more naturally because we act as moral agents all the time while we’re only aesthetic agents in the concert-hall or at the museum. Hume has some idea of human perfectibility. With sufficient training and practice, we can discern between good and evil, beauty and deformity, and aesthetics and ethics.

---

Bibliography:

n.b – I have consulted two edition of the “Treatise.” Page numbers, where they appear refer to the Selby-Bigges edition.

Cohen, Ralph “David Humes Experimental Method and the Theory of Taste,” EHL, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec. 1958), pp. 270-289

Gracyk, Theodore A., “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 2. (Spring, 1994) pp. 169-182

Halberstadt, Willian H. “A Problem in Hume’s Aesthetics” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 1971), pp. 209-214

Hume, David A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978

&

Hume, David A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Ernest C. Mossner. Penguin Books: Middlesex, 1985

Hume, David “Enquiry into the Principles of Morals,” in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988

Hume, David “Of the Standard of Taste” in Selected Essays, ed. Copley and Edgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 (pp. 133 -153)

Jones, Peter “Another Look at Hume’s Views of Aesthetic and Moral Judgments,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 78. (Jan., 1970), pp. 53-59

Korsmeyer, Carolyn W. “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 1976), pp. 201-215

Sugg Jr., Redding S. “Humes Search for the Key with the Leathern Thong” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Sep., 1957), pp. 96-102.

Townsend, Dabney. Hume’s Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge. 2001

The Well Announced Sound of the Stradivarius

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:44:00 +0000

Nelson Goodman and Theodor Adorno on the relationship between authenticity and aesthetic merit.

This paper uses the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Nelson Goodman to elucidate the relationship between authenticity and aesthetic merit. While these are issues pertinent to all artistic media, my discussion with focus specifically on the example of music. Both thinkers address this issue from very different angles. Goodman commits himself to offering an ontology of art based on semantic considerations, while Adorno’s criticism is far more historically and socially rooted and takes more into account the reception of a given artwork. Goodman does not find any universally-binding link between the authenticity and aesthetic merit of a work of art. In distinction, Adorno’s entire discourse implies that the two are inherently linked. Where Goodman consciously resists making value judgments, Adorno expresses highly pointed and acerbic criticisms.
In “The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno offers a critique of modern music and of the musicality of modern man. It is debatable whether Adorno is entirely sincere in his sweeping condemnations as the polemical force of his rhetoric can obscure his message. For the purposes of this essay, I will engage seriously with Adorno’s criticisms as if they are meant in earnest. To my mind, the specificity of his targets and the stringent application of Marxist and Lukacsian ideas suggest that Adorno is offering more than a caricature of an arch-conservative stance.
Though Adorno rarely, if ever, speaks in terms of forgeries and fakes, his rhetoric implies a discourse of authenticity that will allow us to link his essay to Goodman’s. In fact, we can read Goodman on fakes and forgeries as a response to Adorno’s discussion about the pernicious effects of modern musical practices on the ontological status of musical works. Goodman would find Adorno’s view of arrangements as instances of musical fraud aesthetically unsatisfactory. We can view his chapter on Art and Authenticity as his attempt to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between originals and copies.

There are two parts to Adorno’s essay. In the first, he addresses the adverse changes is music and musical performance in modern times. In the sequel, he addresses the reception of such music in a world where the arrested development of the human ear prevents sophisticated listening. Adorno addresses such issues as the shrinking repertoire of music that is found on concert programs and the fetishism attached to particular voices and instruments, the tyranny of the Maestro and the fetishization of concert tickets. All these lead to a “mistaken view of art” that turns the audience into consumers who react, the same way to “Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or to a bikini” if at all (p. 278).
One can read a discourse of authenticity into a great deal of what Adorno writes about mass music and how it is received, but there are a few points where comparison with Goodman seems especially fruitful. These include Adorno’s discussion of musical arrangements and the barbarism of perfection; additionally, Adorno’s discourse of authenticity implies an ideal listener who could detect the authenticity or fraud of any performance.
Arrangements, Adorno writes, have pretensions to authenticity and can confuse the public in its approbation of art. The “vulgarization” of music spread by popular arrangements has “colonized large areas of music” (p. 281). Arrangements create a false totality and promote the reification of a musical work by taking “the reified bits and pieces out of their context and sets them up as a potpourri. It destroys the multilevel unity of the whole work and brings forward only isolated passages” (p. 281). Adorno’s analysis shows that he is unwilling to accept popular arrangements as works in their own rights: merely as bastardized musical commodities. He links the popularity of arrangements to the popular demand that musical works be appropriatable. This, however, is an insistence runs contrary to the music’s nature for, “A Beethoven symphony as a whole, spontaneously experienced, can never be appropriated” (p. 281).
Most strikingly – and puzzlingly – Adorno suggests that the vulgarization of music can actually affect its ontology. He asserts that “the works which are the basis of the fetishization and become cultural goods experience constitutional changes as a result.” This is a move that Goodman would resist entirely, since he separates the theory from the practice of art. Adorno discusses these changes in heavily-valenced language: “They become vulgarized. Irrelevant consumption destroys them.” The false totality that is created by over-exposure stands in for the true “organization of the whole” that the listener fails to grasp. In this way, the internal structure of the musical work is threatened by reification. The incorrect reception and appropriation of art can, therefore, be harmful to the artwork itself. This point helps explain Adorno’s insistence on authenticity as a marker of aesthetic merit (p. 281).
At the other end of the spectrum is the ideal performance whose pretenses to authenticity contribute to music’s reification. Adorno analyzes the “iron disciple” of ideal performances. He compares this “new fetish” to a perfectly-oiled apparatus that produces mechanized accounts of musical works that are devoid of meaningful content. “Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the work at the price of its definitive reification.” He sums up his analysis as follows: “It presents it as already complete from the very first note” (p. 284). Here, the exaggerated claim to authenticity affects the aesthetic value of the performance. The barbarism of perfection with its exaggerated claim to authenticity is inimical to the aesthetic value of the musical work.
The stance and tone that Adorno adopts throughout the piece often implies an ideal listener (the author, perhaps) who is able to appreciate the music stripped of its fetish-character caused by reification. One could level an elitist charge against Adorno for holding that the “capacity for conscious perception of music” was “from time immemorial confined to a narrow group” (p. 286). This notion implies that there are “authentic” and “inauthentic” modes of listening. Adorno perpetuates a view where the authenticity of art is bound up with the availability of qualified critics that resist the regressive listening that affects the collective ear of society.
While Adorno allows a glimmer of hope for the future (with Schoenberg, Webern and the Marx Brothers), his general tone is one of pessimism. He writes that “as a result of the displacement of feelings into exchange value, no demands are really advanced in music anymore” (p. 290). This type of point is very different from many earlier one. Instead of telling us what art is, he is telling us what art no longer can be. We’ve come to accept the barbarism of perfection and the vulgarity of arrangements so uncritically that all that we can accept are substitutes for genuine works of art. “Substitutes satisfy their purpose as well, because the demand to which they adjust themselves has itself already been substituted.” Here, Adorno links the false demands of capitalism to the false substitutes of mass music.

We find a very different view of the relation between authenticity and aesthetic merit in Goodman. Unlike Adorno, Goodman is concerned with theories of ontology rather than modes of reception. He resists the notion of an ideal listener and that a work of art’s reception can result in “constitutional change.” He is entirely opposed to Adorno’s notion of such change as brought about when art becomes a cultural good. Unlike Adorno, he thinks that modes of reception can never alter the ontological status of an artwork. He would also object to Adorno’s claim that music has become “vulgarized” through arrangement and the barbarism of perfection.
While much of Goodman’s discussion of Art and Authenticity is devoted to painting, Goodman asks what it might mean to produce a forgery in music. Goodman answer constitutes a discussion of authenticity, aesthetic merit and purity of performance that hearkens back to Adorno’s essay. Goodman’s discussion about fakes and forgeries vis-à-vis painting shows the difficulty of basing aesthetic judgments on arguments about authenticity. For Goodman, one need not imply the other: it is perfectly reasonable for a fake or copy to have a greater aesthetic impact than the original on which it is based. This is very much in contrast to Adorno, for whom authenticity is directly linked to aesthetic merit.
Goodman holds that aesthetic experience depends on more than what merely meets the eye. A work of art carries with it the entire history of its conception and production, including non-visual qualities that can make an aesthetic difference in how we come to appreciate or understand a given work of art. Goodman’s insistence on taking into account a work’s history and non-visual qualities, leads him to conclude that “a forgery of a work of art is an object falsely purporting to have the history of production requisite for the (or an) original of the work” (p. 122). The case is somewhat different when we turn to music, which Goodman says cannot be faked in quite the same way as painting.
Goodman distinguishes between autographic and allographic art. Autographic art is art were the difference between an original and a forgery is significant, such as in painting. However, in allographic art, such as music, the difference between an original and a forgery is not intrinsically significant (p.113). Goodman tries to get at a more nuanced and sophisticated account of the relationship between these two types of art. He suggests that all art started out as autographic and certain genres became allographic by developing a language or notational system in order to transcend the limits of the individual and of time (p. 120). While it makes little sense to speak of a forgery of a Beethoven symphony, Goodman allows that a performance of Beethoven’s fifth can be said to be inauthentic is if contains a false note or is performed by a fraudulent musician or a fraudulent instrument.
Both Goodman and Adorno use the Stradivarius as illustrative examples of their theory. In discussing the fetish attached to voices, tickets and instruments, Adorno writes about how an audience “goes into raptures at the well-announced sound of a Stradivarius or Amati” (p. 277). For Adorno, the “cult of the master violins” illustrates how the fetish character of musical performance makes “conscious perception of music” impossible.
Goodman is up to something very different when he brings in his own Stradivarius example to illustrate what a forgery of a musical performance might look like. The hypothetical he presents is of a performer claims falsely to be playing a Stradivarius. Such a performance would count as a forgery, “not of the musical composition, but of a given performance or class of performances” (p. 118). But on the next page, Goodman reminds us “not to confuse genuineness with aesthetic merit. That the distinction between original and forgery is aesthetically important does not mean, as we have seen, that the original is superior to the forgery” (p. 119). In other words, to base aesthetic judgment solely on a work’s authenticity would be as wrong for Goodman, as going into raptures at the well-announced sound of the Stradivarius would be for Adorno.
Goodman provocatively asks about the status of a musical performance that contains one wrong note. Can this be said to be a genuine or authentic instantiation of the composer’s idea, and hence, a genuine performance? Though Goodman admits that conventionally we would affirm this suspicion, the theory complicates matters. Goodman uses the example to pose an aesthetic conundrum and show how “ordinary usage gets us quickly into trouble” (p. 186). Since a performance of a musical work is an instantiation of the composer’s musical idea made intelligible through a series of notational markings on a score, a performance with one wrong note could not, theoretically speaking, be considered an authentic instance of that work. Hence, “Beethoven’s Fifth” would become “Beethoven’s Fifth plus an extra G flat.” Goodman maintains this position so that Beethoven’s Fifth cannot morph into Three Blind Mice via a success of tiny alterations, à la Sorites’ Paradox (p. 186).
Undercutting – or at least complicating - the possibility of authenticity in musical performance is the example of musical conventions such as cadenzas and figured bass. In these instances, nominal musical notation serves as a basic guideline for musical performance (p. 184). Goodman throws this our way in order to remind us of even the difficulty of making judgments regarding authenticity in the first place, even before we begin to judge a music work for its aesthetic merit. Thus, he provides a compelling justification for divorcing questions of genuineness from questions of value.
In fact, Goodman allows that a technically incorrect performance of a musical work could in fact be superior to a technically perfect one. “An incorrect performance, though therefore not strictly an instance of a given quartet at all, may nevertheless – either because the changes improve what the composer wrote or because of sensitive interpretation – be better than a correct performance” (p. 120). So thorough is the line that Goodman draws between authenticity and aesthetic merit that he allows an ontologically non-genuine instantiation of a musical work to be the aesthetically superior one.

What accounts for the fact that these two thinkers are at opposite ends of the interpretive spectrum is the vastly different natures of their projects. While Goodman offers up ontology of art in semantic terms that will be universally binding, Adorno has a very definite target: music made vulgar by commodity fetishism and by reification. And though Adorno never speaks in terms of forgeries and fakes, his rhetoric abounds with concepts such as “purity” and “vulgarity,” which implies a latent discourse of authenticity.
Goodman’s analytic approach shows the problematic nature of value theory. His discussion of autographic versus allographic art can be helpful in trying to differentiate ontologically between various genres but is thoroughly impotent as far as making judgments is concerned. Adorno, on the other hand, provides us with a radical and perhaps overstated case for supposing that the value of art is bound up in the authenticity of the artistic product.
Whereas Adorno constantly asserts that the commoditized musical product is a debased aesthetic work, Goodman tirelessly advocates separating value judgments from questions of authenticity. Thus, when Adorno writes that “appearance is no longer valid as verification of essence” it is in a spirit of disenchantment (p. 285). Goodman agrees with Adorno that it is impossible to verify art’s essence via mere looking or listening: he just doesn’t think it’s a bad thing.

Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor W. “The Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening” in Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism (pp. 270-299)

Goodman, Nelson Languages of Art (pp. 99-123, & 177- 192)

Art and the Public

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:35:00 +0000

We now leave the Frankfurt School with their irritating insistence on a connection between art and politics, and journey to the purely aesthetical concerns of Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty.

Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both reject the Romantic notion of the artist summoning up his private ruminations and reflections to share them with the world. In his own way, each thinker postulates a communion that occurs between the artist and his public. Both advocate breaking the barrier between artist and public and allowing the public to have a hand in the creation of art howbeit in very different ways. To understand their arguments, it’s essential to understand that both hold art has little to do with mimesis. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “Art is not imitation, nor is it something manufactured according to the wishes of instinct or good taste. It is a process of expressing” (p. 17).
Merleau-Ponty also sees art as essentially a communicative enterprise. In the prologue to Sense and Non-Sense, he writes: “[T]he work of art begins to transmit an uninterrupted message.” But it becomes clear that his views on the matter are a far cry from Collingwood’s. “But the meaning of the work for the artist or the public cannot be stated except by the work itself: neither the thought which created it nor the thought which receives it is completely its own master” (p. 4). Thus, there is no message standing behind the artwork that can be divorced and independently toted around. The proof is in the pudding.
Who’s an artist? “The artist is the one who arrests the spectacle in which most men take part without really seeing it and who make it visible to the most ‘human’ among them” (18). Again, we detect the quasi-religious register of what he’s saying. The communion undertaken is almost mystical in its effectiveness and uniqueness and ineffability. Regarding this transformative originality, Merleau-Ponty writes: “he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before…‘Conception’ cannot precede ‘execution’….he returns to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built in order to know it” (p. 19).
Collingwood lingers on Eliot and calls “The Waste Land” the one great English poem of the century. He even returns to it at the end of the book and his reading of the poem furnishes Collingwood an elegiac and powerful coda. Merleau-Ponty looks to Cézanne’s paintings for an explanation of his life and theory of art. He focuses on the artists constant doubts regarding the success of his art. For since he was not omniscient, how could he hope to create universally valid work that expresses the world? He essayed to encapsulate the whole of experience in a brush-stroke.
As an example of “pure poetry“The Waste Land,” as an example of “pure poetry” teaches us what art must contain if it is to rise above the levels of entertainment and magic. “It must be prophetic” in the sense that it tells the audience “the secrets of their own hearts.” Here, Collingwood shatters romantic notions of what art means to artist. In doing so, he brings art into a more kinetic and alive symbiosis with the audience. “What he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets.” Rather, the artist becomes the “spokesman of his community.” He is necessary because “no community altogether knows its own heart and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils which come from that ignorance, the poet as prophet suggests no remedy, because he has already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness” (pp. 335-6).
On the one hand, the example he makes of the “Waste Land” shows that “pure” art acquires meaning when the prophetic potential of the poet is realized. Is this way, art functions – ought to function – as social critique. Thus, while Collingwood seems to ennoble the audience, he also diminishes their import. The prophetic function of the poet is part of what makes art “pure,” but it also deprives the public of any choice in the matter. The public remains an anonymous receiver of the poet’s condemnation and the cure. It’s tough medicine to swallow.
For Collingwood, then, the artist is to take on the role as a “public spokesman” who both diagnoses society and provides the antidote. The antidote is in the work of art itself. “Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness” (p. 336). Art, thus, is imbued with a critical social function in Collingwood’s system. The implication of this interpretation is that the antidote to a dead society is more art. Collingwood makes art curative. Could there be a more direct interaction between art and audience?
Collingwood uses “The Waste Land” to show that art must become prophetic if it wants to be more than merely entertainment or magic. It must condemn and warn and tell the audience the “secrets of their own hearts.” Here, we learn that the artist must be a man of his time and it touch with his public in a way that puts him in position of prominence. This is very different from what Merleau-Ponty has in mind. Yet Merleau-Ponty would agree with Collingwood when he goes against the Romantic concept of the artist by saying that, “what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets” (p. 335).
To be certain, Collingwood allows that letting the audience share in the aesthetic experience is potentially enriching for a said work of art. Following from his earlier arguments, Collingwood writes: “The aesthetic activity is an activity of thought in the form of consciousness, converting into imagination an experience which, apart from being so converted, is sensuous.” This activity is one in which an entire community participates: the artist or collective of artists, all his forbearers and the audience. These relations “strengthen and enrich” his work. Thus the audience is “not merely receptive, but collaborative too” (p. 324). But as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty takes the idea of audience-participation much further, by postulating that the audience’s interaction with the artwork is essential if it meaning is to be revealed.
There is a striking similarity in the optimism of both Merleau-Ponty and Collingwood. Both feel that art is capable of transforming society. For Collingwood, this is a curative function that art performs through behaving like prophecy. For Merleau-Ponty, the example of Cézanne, succeeding despite all his doubts, gives man hope. We can win if we accurately measure our “dangers and our task.”
In discussing Cézanne’s project, Merleau-Ponty’s language has an almost-religious quality at times. In distinction to Collingwood, he considers art to express the ineffable. As he writes: “The meaning of a work of art or of a theory is as inseparable from its embodiment as the meaning of a tangible thing – which is why the meaning can never be fully expressed” (p. 3): “Cézanne felt powerless because he wanted to express everything and yet was not God, as not omnipotent. He wanted to ‘make visible how the world touches us” (p. 19). Furthermore, Cézanne was impelled to express the meaning that lay hidden in objects: “Cézanne merely expressed what they (the objects{ wanted to say” (p. 21).
As such, Cézanne’s paintings express something hitherto unsaid. “The painter captures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things” (pp. 17-18). This is a move that Collingwood seems to resist. Instead, he writes that the poet more generally represents an experience. “The poet converts human experience into poetry not by first expurgating it, cutting out the intellectual elements and preserving the emotional, and then expressing this residue; but by fusing thought itself into emotion: thinking in a certain way and then expressing how it feels to think in that way” (p. 295). The ideal state that we reach is the “total imaginative experience.”
Fascinatingly enough, in discussing the “total imaginative experience,” Collingwood – writing ten years before Merleau-Ponty - takes Cézanne as his exemplar: “Cézanne began to paint like a blind man,” and showed the world that painting wasn’t a visual art since “Man paints with his hands, not with his eyes” (p. 144). But while they both hold Cezanne in high esteem, their views on how the audience partakes of the aesthetic experience have some crucial differences.
Though he claims that it’s impossible to read an artist’s work off his life, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t go as far as some later thinkers will. Ingeniously, he says that instead of reading an artist’s works off his life, we read his life off his works: “If Cézanne’s life seems to us to carry the seeds of his work within it, it is because we get to know his work first and see the circumstances of his life through it, charging them with a meaning borrowed from his work” (p. 20).
Merleau-Ponty seems to afford the public more power and decision-making authority than Collingwood. By empowering the audience’s role for the success of the artist and the artwork, Merleau-Ponty situates the artwork halfway between the creator and the receiver. In contrast, Collingwood is content to let art be the intellectualizing of emotion, which therefore makes it possible for Eliot to so effectively communicate society’s own secrets to itself.
His project, therefore, to “make visible how the world touches us” amounts to another perspective on viewing the world, if one with a strong affinity to philosophy. Though Merleau-Ponty doesn’t explicitly advance a relation-theory between the two in this essay, his entire project for this essay can be interpreted as a move to turn art into philosophy: to derive a metaphysics from art. Indeed, the implications that art holds for him indicate that a metaphysics lies behind every theory of painting (too strong!). But whereas Merleau-Ponty endorses and works off of this linkage, (this is perhaps just an axiom of his) Collingwood – also aware of its force – attempts to differentiate art from philosophy.
Cézanne’s work is rich with interpretive possibility. It can have radical even cataclysmic implications: for instance revealing “the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself” (p. 16). \This is the sort of radical meaning that a Cézanne painting can have and we understand. Art is far from impotent. As Collingwood says of the “Waste Land”: it expresses “the idea (not his alone) of the decay of our civilization, manifested outwardly by the breakdown of social structures and inwardly as a drying up of the emotional springs of life” (295), Merleau-Ponty finds similarly chilling meaning into Cézanne’s work: however, whereas it matters little to Collingwood whether or not this meaning is successfully communicated (it only matters what Eliot wrote with the intention of communicating), the artwork isn’t complete for Merleau-Ponty until its meaning has been successfully communicated.
A good reader or critic who follows the “obscure clarity” of a particular artist’s style, will discover “what the artist wanted to communicate” (pp. 19 -20). But he goes even further and suggests that the audience takes part in the work’s creation: “The painter can do no more than construct an image: he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives” (p. 19-20).
The most crucial point is that Cézanne for Merleau-Ponty isn’t the prophet that Eliot is for Collingwood. Rather, Cézanne is less of a preacher and more of a guide. The artist has been brought down to a very base, human level. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, is breaking from the Romantic tradition even more forcefully than Collingwood.
Where Eliot is a preacher, Cézanne is a visionary guide. In both of these cases, freedom is what allows the artist to communicate with his public. Furthermore, the logical consequence of this is that through the artwork, freedom is communicated to the public. By communicating freedom to the public, the artist endows them with the critical apparatus to appreciate his work. The relation between art and public couldn’t be more collaborative. “Yet, it was in the world that he had to realize his freedom, with colors upon a canvas. It was on the approval of others that he had to
wait for the proof of his worth” (p. 25). For Collingwood reading Eliot, the only option in the face of the death of civilization is to create more art. For Merleau-Ponty interpreting Cézanne, in the face of potential failure, the only option is to strive to create.

***

Bibliography:

Collingwood, R.C. The Principles of Art

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Sense and Non-Sense

Changing Technologies, Altered Perceptions and the Call to Action

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:28:00 +0000

Yet again, an essay that deals with using aesthetic representation to achieve political ends. This time with technology thrown in.

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer take the developing technologies of film and photography seriously. Both thinkers find in these new media of technological reproduction the potential for a radical shift in thought and human perception. While Kracauer does inject some social criticism, the political content of his essay, “Photography” is tamer than the up-front, revolutionary attitude we find in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Both thinkers give voice to epistemological speculations that accompany their assessments of technology in shaping and reshaping human perception and leading to revolutionary action.
Kracauer sees a dialectic operating between memory and technical reproducibility: “memory images are at odds with photographic representation,” as competing bearers of truth content (p. 50). In turn, photographic images have the power to create and shape memory. This is just one of many ways that technology threatens to alter perception. With photography “a person’s history in buried as if under a layer of snow” (p. 51). Photography’s increasing power to alter consciousness and perception, and its insidious wiggling into to the memory image, threatens to alter our perception for the worse, concealing and obscuring the true nature of things by insisting too strongly on their mere appearance (p. 51).
Having voiced this danger, Kracauer gangs up on the illustrated newspapers, in which he sees technology as changing people’s perception for the worse. The illustrated newspapers aim for “the complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus” (p. 57 – 58). They represent reality “from every possible angle.” Kracauer is very mistrusting of this overabundance of images and disparages the illustrated magazines for their superficial depictions of reality, and the ascendancy of the spatial over the temporal. Somewhat histrionically, he claims that “the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,” thus articulating the danger that photography poses. “The spatial continuum from the camera’s perspective dominates the spatial appearance of he perceived object; the resemblance between the image and the object effaces the contours of the object’s ‘history.’” His conclusion is emphatically dire: “Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against the understanding” (p. 58).
Nothing is innocent about these illustration magazines. Even the layout is reactionary, as the “contiguity” of images precludes the possibility of them penetrating consciousness the way memory does. The illustrated responds to the fear of death by representing the world as a “photographable present” that has been “entirely eternalized” (p. 59). If the illustrated magazines represent to Kracauer a counterrevolutionary mode of replicating and envisioning reality, the antidote is to be found in film. At this junction Kracauer’s tract, which started out as an innocent ontology of photography, gains the character of political manifesto.
With more than a little Romantic wistfulness, Kracauer discusses the role of the symbol in nature and how it is altered by representation. His conclusion rounds out a political theory. “No different from earlier modes of representation, photography, too, is assigned to a particular developmental stage of practical and material life. It is a secretion of the capitalist mode of production. The same mere nature which appears in photography flourishes is the reality of the society produced by this capitalist mode of production.” Kracauer’s conclusion is that photography needs to become progressive via film and play the “go-for-broke game of history” (p. 61). In contrast to the illustrated magazines, which are an analogue to the historicist film fantasy and seek merely to cheapen memory with a proliferation of images, film can alter reality by its fantastical techniques and elements. This is something that can be used for political ends.
The serious and progressive function performed by abstract, non-mimetic film is librating to the masses. “A consciousness caught up in nature is unable to see its own material base. It is the task of photography to disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature. For the first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon; for the first time, the inert world presents itself in its independence from human beings.”
He addresses the ways in which photography has altered perception in such a way as can be harnessed for political ends. “Photography shows cities in aerial shots, brings crockets and figures down from gothic cathedrals…The photographic archive assembles in effigy the last elements of a nature alienated from meaning” (p. 62). This “warehousing of nature” has the power to provoke “confrontation in every field.”
His hope at the end of the essay for film to carry on this go-for-broke-game of history is linked to film’s dream-like nature. “The capacity to stir up the elements of nature is one of the possibilities of film. This possibility is realized whenever film combines parts and segments to create strange constructs. If the disarray of the illustrated newspapers is simply confusion, the game that film plays with the pieces of disjointed nature is reminiscent of dreams in which the fragments of daily life become jumbled” ( pp. 62 – 63). Thus, Kracauer ends his essay by privileging montage and surrealistic proclivities in film. He revolts against the realistic and merely mimetic uses of photography, finding proto-revolutionary practice in abstract and artificial art. There is an interesting connection to the expressionism debate here. Kracauer’s position allies him with Benjamin in his essay.
Benjamin’s essay has a more overtly political intent than Kracauer’s. If Kracauer’s text starts from purely aesthetic propositions and then develops into a political project, Benjamin starts and finishes his essay with political proclamations, peppers the argument with various political observations and anecdotes, but nowhere develops a sustained political argument.
One key difference is that Benjamin plays closer attention to the mode of aesthetic reception than Kracauer. Benjamin attaches importance to the ways that technology has changed the reception of art in the modern age. He uses examples both of the photography and the gramophone: “The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room” (p. 103).
Benjamin is clearly less interested in offering a pure ontology along the lines of Kracauer. He analyzes the loss of the aura and diagnoses it as a social necessity. Technologically reproducible art loses its here-and-nowness and substitutes a “mass existence for a unique one” (p. 104), which is responsible for the decline of the auratic. In film, Benjamin finds both a desire and a promise to liquidate the traditions of a culture. A limitation of Benjamin’s thought is that he doesn’t consider the mirror image of this possibility: the creation of a new culture through propaganda.
Benjamin is more explicit that Kracauer in asserting the relationship between changes in human perception and social changes. To explain the decay of the aura, Benjamin looks for a “social basis.” The decline reflects the mass’ desire to “get closer to things” and “overcome each thing’s uniqueness” (p. 105). For Benjamin, technology can respond to social needs by altering perception. Reproducible art represents a social desire to find the sameness in what is unique; thus, he interprets technology as aligning reality with the masses and vice versa.
Tracing the social history of the photograph through the aesthetic movements of the 19th century, he discusses the crucial role that photography played in the formulating of l’art pour l’art by severing art from its basis in cult. With film, technology finds a way to reinvigorate art: film can re-enfranchise art and imbue it with political relevance and power. By altering perception based on social need, art is rendered serviceable to revolutionary goals. By making the masses aware of their own alienation and estrangement, film can become a powerful weapon. This means that film can become a powerful weapon. As he writes, film, which contains “new social opportunities, is being clandestinely exploited in the interest of a property-owning minority” (p. 115). The task is to wrest the cinema from this property-owning minority and harness it for revolutionary ends.
Benjamin’s enthusiasm for the “hitherto unimaginable spectacle” of film connects to Kracauer’s totalizing historicist cinematic fantasy. Benjamin discusses in detail the various film techniques that can alter our modes of perception, such as close-ups and slow motion, techniques which “bring to light entirely new structures of matter.” Of slow motion, he writes that it “not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them – aspects “which do not appear as the retarding of natural movements but have a curious gliding, floating character of their own.” The film-sphere resembles a dream; the camera discovers the optical unconscious. “This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis” (p. 117). This analogy between optical and instinctual unconscious is perhaps the strongest indication in the text of the radical and revolutionary potential film has for altering human perception.
Benjamin claims that film has affected a Fourth Copernican Revolution. He describes the unconscious eye of the camera as an instrument for collective dreaming. He is advancing a pawn on the chessboard of Kracauer’s go-for-broke-game. While Benjamin anticipates the dangers of technology in mass media, he sees positive uses for it; for instance; as “psychic immunization against…mass psychoses,” through practices like collective laughter. (p. 118)
Benjamin’s discussion of Dada as a forerunner of film shows that he sees film’s revolutionary potential residing not merely in its mimetic usage, but in its capacity for abstraction and surrealism as well. He applauds the aggressive assault and irreverence of the Dadaists, their “ruthless annihilation of the aura in every object they produced” and their commitment “to outrage the public.” When Benjamin writes about the “successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator” he endorses montage for its revolutionary potential, much like Kracauer does.
My subject here has been how Kracauer and Benjamin envisage the political implications of the changes in perception that arise from new media and technology. For the purposes of this paper, I have concentrated on those elements of their arguments that directly pertain to the topic at hand, since neither Kracauer nor Benjamin offers a top-down, systematic argumentative chain, but rather a constellation of arguments that work with varying success.
It is remarkable how fresh these arguments sound even today. The passion and rigor with which they quarrel and theorize about these technologies would have you believe that cinema and photography had only recently been invented. In fact, both technologies had undergone significant and extensive experimentation and change by this time. And while some of what they say might strike us as backwards and wrongheaded, we can still learn a lot from them in our own over-technologized epoch. At the same time, we eagerly need the Benjamins and Kracauers of the present age to analyze and diagnose the effects and implications of art in the digital age.

Popularity in the Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:20:00 +0000

With this post we say goodbye to the stuffy 1800s and turn to examine the Expressionism Debate between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht. This is, incidentally, the first essay were the connection between politics and aesthetics is made explicit...

Nowadays, “popular” is a dirty word. It signifies for us whatever caters to the lowest common denominator, appealing with cheap ease to our emotions. This distrust of the popular is hardly anything new. So it may strike us as peculiar to find Brecht and Lukács arguing heatedly about popularity, both as an aesthetic and a political category.

In Lukács’ essay (“Realism in the Balance”) and Brecht’s direct response, (“Against Georg Lukács”) emerge a debate about the nature of popularity in art that is itself a vehicle for revolutionary change. This paper examines Lukács’ notion of the “great social mission of literature” in relation to Brecht’s “aggressive concept of what is popular.” This debate amounts to more than a quarrel about tactics. Indeed, framed within the context of Lukács’ theory of literature and Brecht’s less systematic theories as a playwright and dramaturge, this popularity debate has implications about the nature and limits of art itself. We shall determine the issues on which these two thinkers most greatly diverge, on which they most closely agree and where they ultimately rest.

The ways in which both Lukács and Brecht define the limits of accessibility points to their
broader agendas. It isn’t merely that Brecht is willing to give the masses more credit while Lukács uses their simplemindedness to buffer his reactionary argument against Expressionism. Indeed, Lukács’ definition of the popular in entrenched is his theory of the supremacy of the realist novel. Brecht’s own views are part and parcel a reflection of his own agenda as a man of the theater first, and a Marxist second.

Writing in a broader context of revealing proto-fascism latent in Expressionism, Lukács distinguished between popular art and “genuinely popular culture” The art he sees as “genuine popular culture,” has an explicit link to the program of the Popular Front (p. 57). Genuine is used to distinguish revolutionary works from the merely popular consumables represented by the Krimi. The reason Lukács provides for drawing this distinction has to do with the current difficulty of defining the popular. According to Lukács, capitalism has introduced a feeling of political and economic uncertainty into the world and confused people’s moral and artistic judgments. The exact transformation is not really spelled out. In addition to the Krimi, he excludes contemporary fads in art from being genuinely popular. Rather, the only art that can become genuinely popular are works that live up to what he calls the “great social mission of literature.”

This mission forms the crux of his argument and follows from his general views on literature and ties into the simplistic binary he draws between Realism and Modernism. Only works that participate in Realism and Cultural Heritage can realize this mission. Thomas Mann is cited as an example of a genuinely popular author, an author whose tone and content…grow out of the life and history of [his] people.” Mann and authors like him “are an organic product of the development of their nation. That is why it is possible for them to create art of the highest quality while at the same time striking a chord which can and does provoke a response in the broad masses of the people” (p. 54).

Realism is seen first as a tool at keeping German literature alive. “Popular, realistic” literature of the past will need to come back into fashion in order for German literature to once again be relevant. He contrasts the broad sweep of the realist masters with the “one dimensionality” of the avant-gardists, and offers a none-too-concrete analysis of how realist literature points the way for the Popular Front.

A living form of humanism prepares [the masses] to endorse the political slogans of the Popular Front and to comprehend its political humanism. Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history. This will prepare it for the new type of revolutionary democracy that is represented by the Popular Front. (p. 56 -7)

In contrast to the “infinite multitude of doors through which entry in possible,” Lukács calls the avant-garde a “narrow doorway” though which only a privileged few can pass. “The broad mass of the people can learn nothing from avant-garde literature (p. 57).” As such, no matter how much it revolutionizes artistic form, it remains “devoid of reality and life” can never be truly revolutionary and hence, never genuinely popular. The “ordinary people who try to translate these atmospheric echoes of reality back into the language of their own experience” are left wanting.

Much of Lukács’ hostility to the avant-garde seems directed at what he interprets as elitism, since their work requires significant glossing. The genuinely popular, genuinely realistic novel that takes part in this “great social mission” requires no glossing. Art should reflect and make manifest the “correct dialectical unity of appearance and essence” (p. 33). “What matters is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without the need for any external commentary” (p. 33 – 34). The external commentary he refers to is the alienating or formalistic techniques of the avant-garde that will mask the manifest content. He is arguing for a popular literature with no latent content whatsoever, a completely transparent literature that can play a didactic and inspiring role in the development of world history. As such, “a trenchant analysis of the decadent manifestations of this period – political, cultural and artistic – is an essential prerequisite for any breakthrough to a genuinely popular culture” (p. 58). The word “breakthrough” as used in this context is crucial since it reminds us of Lukács’ overarching mission of creating a popular culture commensurate with party politics.

“Popularity is unpopular,” writes Brecht, thereby showing his ambivalence to the notion of popular art. Yet, after this initial and not-humorless caveat, he commits himself to a rather strict definition. We have seen a similarly ambivalent attitude in Lukács, when he speaks of the difficulties defining popular culture in late capitalist society. Yet Brecht is subtler in his assessment, since he acknowledges that the definition he uses is itself conditioned by the historical reality of his time. “Our concept of the popular refers to a people who not only play a full part in historical development but actively usurp it, force its pace, determine its direction…we have in mind a fighting people and therefore an aggressive concept of what is popular” (p. 80). Brecht furnishes us with a systematic definition: yet it is difficult to conceive of any work of art ever living up to the attributes he enumerates (see p.81).

Like Lukács, Brecht sees the need to meet the masses, to “speak their language.” “There is only one ally against growing barbarism – the people, who suffer so greatly from it. It is only from them that one can expect anything. Therefore it is obvious that one must turn to the people, and now more necessary than ever to speak their language” (p. 80). This formulation of a popular aesthetic actually implies a more participatory model (than does the Lukáscian formulation) while sharing Lukács concern for accessibility. (This comment seems both appropriate and reasonable in a way that an earlier admission about “stepping back into the masses” does not.)

Several important implications follow as well as a defense of experimental artistic techniques. “With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes, we must not cling to ‘tried’ rules of narrative, venerable literary models, eternal aesthetic laws” (p. 81). Here, Brecht opposes the rigidity present in much of Lukács’ discussion; in doing so, he also shows his belief in new manifestations of the popular. For if representing reality in the Weimar Era means something very different from what it meant in the time of Balzac, the standards by which a work will be judged popular likewise change. He continues: “Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change” (p. 82). Thus, we see Brecht espousing and advocating a progressive view of the popular, one that is connected (still rather abstractly, it must be admitted) to the changing nature of reality and its modes of representation. The simple mimesis that might have proved adequate for previous generations is found to be lacking. Brecht asserts that recycling old styles and strategies would result not only in failure, but incoherence; “Were we to copy the style of these realists, we would no longer be realists” (p. 82).

Brecht gives the masses more credit than does Lukács. After citing successful usages of heightened stage techniques, Brecht boldly pronounces: “The people understand this” (p. 83).

Whereas Lukács asserts that the masses need the mirror held up to nature, Brecht writes:

“One can arouse a sense of outrage at inhuman conditions by many methods – by direct description (emotional or objective), by narrative and parable, by jokes, by over-and under-emphasis.” The modernist aesthetic does have something to offer the masses. It can speak their language. At the same time, Brecht admits that objective criteria for both popular art and for realism ought not to be considered as fixed variables; the distinction he draws at the very end between “being popular” and “becoming popular” is a direct response to Lukács’ reified notions of “genuine” popularity.

The revolutionary project of Brecht’s theater, which tries to make an audience think critically about what’s happening onstage, aims at similar goals as Lukács’ theory of popularity. The abyss that opens between their two views can be seen vividly in the ways they label their projects. The term “great social mission of literature” allies Lukács with an established realist cannon. Contrast this to Brecht’s “aggressive” notion of the popular. Where Lukács calls for order, classicism and a gradual coming to consciousness of historical determinism and the mechanisms of the capitalist apparatus, Brecht advocates revolutionizing the means of representation to match a changed reality.

Bibliography:

Jameson, Fredric, ed Aesthetics & Politics. London: Verso, 1977.

Wagner vs. Rossini: Round One - FIGHT!

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:13:00 +0000

We turn from literature and visual art to music for this next essay. It deals with Schöpenhauer and Nietzsche's philosophical reflections on opera.

Opera was the defining popular entertainment of the nineteenth century. An innovative multimedia spectacle, it flourished in various schools and styles, most successfully in the Italian bel canto tradition of Rossini and Donizetti and the French grand Opéra tradition of Meyerbeer and Gounod. Neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche can overlook the undeniable significance of the medium and thus, they both incorporate discussions of opera into their aesthetic theories.
Schopenhauer takes an overall positive approach to opera and notes Rossini as representative of the medium’s success. At the other end of the spectrum lies Nietzsche, who takes opera to be a destructive force, by its insidious nature positioned to abort the re-birth of tragedy in the modern age.
Both thinkers treat opera as a historically important phenomenon and allow their ruminations on opera to permeate, match up and play a vital role in their aesthetic theories: which both center in large measure around the status of music. Nietzsche accepts Schopenhauer’s theory of music as the supreme expression of Will, yet doesn’t share his philosophical forbearer’s rosy attitude towards opera: a genre wherein he finds the thorough debasement of opera by means of music’s enslavement to the word.

In § 52 of World as Will and Representation (Vol. I), Schopenhauer presents his mystical metaphysics of music. While he doesn’t necessarily privilege music over the other arts, he certainly ascribes enormous power to it and underscores the unique position it holds in the system of the arts. Central to Schopenhauer’s thought about music is the idea of the Will being expressed in its purest form through the abstract medium of music. He writes that, “music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 257)
It is characteristic of music to only express generalities and never particulars. Music can never treat of a particular pleasure or displeasure, but rather of feeling itself. In our desire to bring the will down to earth, we attach words and plot to music. The origin of opera, according to Schopenhauer, is our desire to relate the fundamentally eternal emotions of music to a particular sensation: “it arises that our imagination is so easily stirred by music, and tries to shape that invisible, yet vividly aroused, spirit-world that speaks to us directly, to clothe it with flesh and bone, and thus embody it in an analogous example.” (ibid, p. 261)
Yet, even in the newly-formed constellation of text and music that is born in opera, the libretti “should never forsake that subordinate position in order to make themselves the chief thing, and the music a mere means of expressing the song.” (ibid) Due to its transcendent and deeply metaphysical status, music always remains supremacy over the spoken – or sung – word.
Schopenhauer warns against music that follows after words too closely. Since music everywhere only ever expresses the “quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves,” music should steer free of the influence of particular circumstances and events. The “universality” and “precise distinctness” of music is precisely what allows it to become the “panacea of all our sorrows.” He writes that “if music tries to stick too closely to the words, and to mould itself according to the events, it is endeavouring to speak a language not its own.” (ibid)
It appears to be a real danger for Schopenhauer that music can get bogged down by trying merely to accompany plot. There is, however, at least one composer who has steered clear of this “mistake:” Rossini. Somewhat opaquely, Schopenhauer claims that Rossini’s music “speaks its own language so distinctly and purely that it requires no words at all, and therefore produces its full effect even when rendered by instruments alone.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, pp. 261-262)
Music’s power to illustrate plot effectively is part and parcel with its power to express “the metaphysical to everything physical in the world.” What Schopenhauer has in mind by such a statement is a conception of music as infinitely more than mere accompaniment or background music. He even suggests we could call the world “embodied music” as easily as we call it “embodied will.” Music so appropriately reflects and comments on being in the world that it adds heightened dimensions of clarity to existence. As he writes: “music makes every picture, indeed every scene from real life and the world, at once appear in enhanced significance.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, pp. 262 – 263).
Since he ascribes such profound metaphysical significance to music, Schopenhauer rejects out of hand all music that merely tries to imitate observable phenomena and to stir up the appetite. “All this is to be entirely rejected,” he writes in a discussion that parallels his earlier musings on Dutch paintings that merely make the mouth water with their depictions of prepared food. (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 264)
Opera can be “expressive” only in those cases “when the composer has known how to express in the universal language of music the stirrings of will that constitute the kernel of an event.” Since both the perceptive expression (representation) and music (will) express the same “inner nature of the world,” the two can be linked elegantly in opera. (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 263) Still, music remains supreme for Schopenhauer, an “independent art” and “far from being a mere aid to poetry.” It is capable of achieving its ends “entirely from its own resources” and without needing recourse to verbal and dramatic effects. (Schopenhauer, vol. 2, p. 448) Indeed, Schopenhauer admits that lyrics are often little more that the expression of “silly and insipid verses.” But even when serious, words remain for music “a foreign extra of secondary value” (Schopenhauer, vol. 2, p. 448)
Something different is at work in an opera that is composed for a specific libretto. In these cases where the music is custom tailored, as it were, to a specific libretto, the music can provide, “the most profound, ultimate, and secret information on the feeling expressed in the words, or the action presented in the opera.” This discussion relates back to an earlier one about the metaphysical capability of music to provide “the thing in itself to every phenomenon.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 262 -263 and vol. II, p. 448-449)
Schopenhauer talks about the genesis of operas and the value accrued to music by the addition of libretti, which usually precede the music and act as “as a means for exciting [the composer’s] musical imagination.” While music expresses general sentiments, words can identify their objects, namely “the motives that give rise to that feeling.” (Schopenhauer, vol. II, p. 449)
Nevertheless, “the music of an opera” can be ”completely effective even without the text.” When, however, music is composed “with respect to the drama,” the music becomes the “soul” of the drama, “since, in its connexion with the incidents, characters and word, it becomes the inner significance of those incidents, and of their ultimate and secret necessity that rests on this significance.” (ibid)
At the end of the day, however, Schopenhauer still holds strong to the indomitable and irrepressible free force of music. Schopenhauer recognizes the “heterogeneous nature” of music and its “complete indifference to everything material in the incidents,” (which inspired man to create opera in the first place and places its value above that of the libretto) since the same music can be used to good effect in expressing varied and different situations. This consideration leads him to conclude that opera “never assimilates the material, and therefore, when it accompanies even the most ludicrous and extravagant farces of comic opera, it still preserves its essential beauty, purity and sublimity; and its fusion with those incidents cannot drag it down from its heights to which everything ludicrous is really foreign.” Thus, even the tritest and most banal of operatic subjects poses no threat to music, which is and shall always remain was it is most basically and metaphysically: a pure copy of will. (ibid)

Against this optimistic and non-threatening view, Nietzsche diagnoses opera as nothing less than a cardinal danger to the spirit of music out of which tragedy struggles to be reborn! In chapter nineteen of the “Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche disparages the “culture of the opera.” (The object of his critique is most probably the French Grand Opéra as it was for Wagner). The public enthusiasm for opera symbolizes the “innermost substance” of Socratic culture, whose rationalizing and enlightened attitude he sees as in direct opposition to the tragic condition that was borne out of the spirit of music. (Nietzsche, p. 89)
Turning briefly from condemning the modern age, Nietzsche speculates on the origins of opera in late Renaissance Italy. He is shocked that the same age that produced the “sublime and sacred” music of Palestrina produced the recitative style of stile rappresentativo, an “extra-artistic tendency” which he sees as the true origin of opera. The recitative is “extra-artistic” since it is intended for the listener who desires to hear the words amidst the singing: the singer “intensifies the aesthetics expression of the words” by “half-singing.” He calls it “unnatural” and “inwardly at odds” with the Appoline and the Dionyiac drives and say that one is “bound to conclude that the origin of recitative lies outside all artistic instincts.” (ibid, pp. 89-90)
Nietzsche claims that opera is an attempt to rediscover of the music of Ancient Greece and that the culture of opera perpetrates a myth of the rediscovery primordial human music: “Recitative was thought to be the rediscovered language of those original humans.” In fact, however, opera merely arose to satisfy an “extra-artistic need.” (ibid, p. 90)
This critique of opera (the representative art form of the late nineteenth century) is bound up with Nietzsche’s critique of the modern age. Opera is not the work of the genuine artist, but rather the Socratic individual: “Opera is born of theoretical man, of the layman as critic, not of the artist.” As such, the culture of opera is symptomatic of the modern world, which is built on predominately optimistic Socratic principles. The desire to make out the words is proof that for “un-artistic listeners,” the rebirth of music could only be expected through music in which “the words of the text governed the counterpoint as a master governs his servant.” For these un-artistic laymen, the “word was supposedly nobler than the accompanying system of harmony.”
The un-artistic laymen who created opera were “crudely unmusical” in their discussion of artistic terms and were incapable of understanding the “Dionysiac depths of music.” There is more than a little elitism in Nietzsche’s subsequent claims that the precondition of opera is “the idyllic belief that every man of feeling is actually an artist.” He calls this the “cheery optimism of theoretical man.” (ibid, 90-91)
By making every man of feeling into an artist, opera threatens to collapse the distinction between art and entertainment. The “Dionysiac depths of music” are no longer present. Opera becomes “un-tragic,” since there “the ideal is not felt to be unattained and nature is not felt to be lost.” The pleasure derived from opera bears little relation to the “elegiac pain caued by eternal loss” that tragedy evokes. Rather, as a product of pure entertainment, it presents the illusions of “eternal re-discovery” and the “comfortable delight in an idyllic reality.” (ibid, p. 92)
In opera, music – which is fundamentally the pure expression of will - is thus reduced to illusion and artifice. In consequence, Nietzsche is deeply pessimistic about this “art which does not originate in the aesthetic sphere” (since it privileges the word over the tone) and has “stolen into the territory of art from a semi-moral sphere,” and which “can only occasionally disguise the fact of its hybrid origins.” (ibid, p. 93)
Viewed in this light, opera becomes extremely problematic for Nietzsche and threatens even to abort the rebirth of tragedy in the modern age. “What will become of the eternal truths of the Dionysiac and the Apolline,” in the “mixture of styles” that is at the heart of “the stilo rappresentativo? – where music is regarded as the servant and the libretto as master, where music is compared to the body and words to the soul?” (ibid)

Nietzsche talks about the “fateful influence of opera on music.” Opera severs music from its Dionysiac origin and deprives it of its “true dignity, which consists in being a Dionysiac mirror of the world.” Instead, opera makes music into the “slave of the world of appearances.” It can do nothing more than “imitate the forms of the world of appearances and to excite external pleasure in the play of line and proportion.” This “pleasurable play with form” has succeeded in “divesting music with frightening speed of its Dionysiac purpose in the world.” He takes this to be representative of the “optimism” that lurks in the “genesis of opera and at the heart of the culture it represents” (ibid, pp. 93 - 94)
Yet he places hope in the German musical tradition and “the mighty, brilliant course it has run from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.” The towering figure of Wagner (and Schopenhauer as well) represents the “mysterious unity of German music and German philosophy.” And calls the “birth of a tragic age” nothing less that the “return of the German spirit to itself.” (ibid, pp. 94-95)
The Socratic optimism of the word is betrayed most bluntly by opera. Our modern view of life is without myth and guided by the concepts; art is debased to the level of mere entertainment. “Music and tragic myth both express, in the same way, the Dionysiac capacity of a people, and they cannot be separated from one another. Both originate in an artistic realm which lies beyond the Apolline; both transfigure a region where dissonance and the terrible image of the world fade away in chords of delight.” The music of Wagner in particular attempts to tap into the “primal pleasures” of the Dionysiac, and thus restore the tragic sensibility to music through the use of dissonance. It can be said that Nietzsche here privileges Wagner in a similar way that Schopenhauer privileges Rossini as the supreme of opera composers, albeit for entirely different reasons. (ibid, pp. 114 – 115)
Wagner’s utter rejection of the culture of opera in favor of rediscovered Dionysiac principles puts him at odds with the mainstream critics of his day. Nietzsche berates these “bad critics” who get as afar as “the entrance hall of musical perception” without reaching “the innermost sanctum.” He offers a mystical analysis of Tristan und Isolde to show how Wagner’s music dramas differ so sharply from the opera of his day. Here, the words and images are required to insure that the listeners don’t “suffocate as their soul attempted, convulsively, to spread its winds.” The “thoughts and words” are necessary protection against the “unchecked outpouring of the unconscious will.” With characteristic hyperbole, Nietzsche rhetorically asks in relation to Tristan: “How could anyone fail to be shattered immediately, having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will?” (ibid, pp. 100-101)

In has been the object of this paper to examine and contrast the role played by opera in the aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Greatly impressed by the perfect fusion of word and melody that he finds in Rossini, Schopenhauer articulates an enthusiastic and positive account of opera where in which music always reigns supreme over the word. His assessment of the genre falls squarely with his general theory about music as the supreme expression of will. Under the great sway of Wagner, Nietzsche directs his attack against opera at the modern “opera culture’ that treats art as entertainment. He incorporates this attack on modern culture with his parallel project of defining and delineating the origins of Greek tragedy out of the conflicting drives of the Apolline and the Dionysiac: a task of philosophical analysis which is directed at bringing to consciousness the task of the modern artist in re-awaking in birth tragedy in a rational, “Socratic” world and society. In his final, mystical analysis of Tristan, Nietzsche’s philosophical debt to Schopenhauer is supremely evident. And although Schopenhauer would probably be flattered, he’d still prefer the Barber of Seville.

Mimesis of the Ugly

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:07:00 +0000

Aesthetics is alternately defined as the philosophy of art and the philosophy of the beautiful. But is there an aesthetics of ugliness too? The following paper explores what Aristotle and Lessing have to say on the matter.

How can one derive pleasure from watching suffering? How is the ugly transformed into the beautiful? What is the aesthetic impact of mimesis of the ugly, the horrific and the deformed? Can the ugly heighten a work’s aesthetic reception? In Aristotle and Lessing, we find a theory of the ugly in the service of art, along with concerns about built-in risks.

In his Poetics*, Aristotle lays the seeds for a discourse of the aesthetics of the ugly, which will bloom in the nuanced analysis in Lessing’s Laocoon**. Though Lessing expands this discourse to the realm of visual art; he remains very committed to Aristotelian principles. Like his philosophical forbearer, Lessing warns against the misuse and abuse of the ugly, the horrific and the disfigured. Like Aristotle, he makes room for the ugly in art, finding in art a cathartic power similar to what we find chez Aristotle. The ugly provides something similar yet different for both Lessing and Aristotle. For both thinkers, it can provide an indirect way to experience the horrific. For Aristotle, the experience of tragedy serves an exemplary function; for Lessing, art carves out a place where man can experience terror the horrors he dare not confront directly in the world.

The discussion of the ugly in Aristotle is imbedded in his wider analysis of tragedy. For Aristotle, tragedy serves a very human function; through mimesis, tragedy allows us to understand the logic of an action and makes us virtuous citizen through catharsis.
In chapter four of the Poetics, Aristotle discusses the origin of poetry, while showing artistic invention to be a fundamentally human activity. He refers to morbid fascination:
“Mimesis is innate in human beings from childhood- indeed we differ from the other animals in being most given to mimesis and in making our first steps of learning through it – and pleasure in instances of mimesis is equally general. This we can see from the facts: we enjoy looking at the most exact portrayals of things we do not like to see in real life, the lowest animals, for instance, or corpses. This is because not only philosophers, but all men, enjoy getting to understand something, though it is true that most people feel this pleasure only to a slight degree.” (1448a: 4)

Aristotle links mimesis to our desire for knowledge, a desire so bottomless that it delights even in the ugly and rotting: in worms and corpses. “Exact portrayal” of the natural is how he views mimesis as operating. And while his theory of tragedy does contain more complexity than the merely imitative, imitation is the unshakable base on which the entire discourse is constructed. As such, it may not come as too much surprise that Aristotle feels ugliness – which is very present in the world – has a rightful place in mimesis. The guidelines he sets to tragedy have the effect, first and foremost, of providing a manual for constructing an effective drama; but they also provide a warning against a misappropriation of the ugly in art. In other words, Aristotle want to put ugliness in its right place.

Aristotle speaks of the six mimetic elements of tragedy: plot, character, verbal expression, intellect, spectacle and song writing. These first three are here of interest to us, and Aristotle discusses them all in one breathless sentence.

“Well then, a tragedy is a mimesis of a high, complete action (complete in the sense that implies amplitude) in speech pleasurably enhanced, the different kinds [of enchantment] occurring in separate sections, in dramatic, not narrative form, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.” (Poetics 1449b).

A thorough discussion of catharsis is beyond the scope of this paper, although I will make reference to it now and again. First, however, a word of explanation for the following terms: “complete action,” “speech pleasurably enhanced” and “pity and fear.”

By “complete action,” Aristotle means that the proper subject of tragedy is a “complete, whole action” that will make clear the nature of the characters’ moral choices. This completeness requires, by necessity, that ugly elements be exhibited. In plays like Oedipus and Medea, the actions which are the subject of mimesis – infanticide, incest – ain’t pretty. Thus, Aristotle is providing an justification for the horrific in tragedy. Certainly, this need not be made explicit on stage (i.e., Medea doesn’t need to chase her children around with an axe), but Aristotle is carving out a space for the horrific in art while at the same time remaining committed to the idea of art being in the service of the beautiful.

Equally influential for later theoreticians like Lessing, is the notion of “speech pleasurably enhanced” to smooth over the rough-spots in the drama. We find here a claim about the sanitizing role of art. Art can dress the ugly up, transform and transfigure it. It can provide its own unique vision of the ugly: pleasing to the eye and the ear. The case of tragedy, especially, illustrates that this is both a privilege and duty of art.

Pity and fear are the pleasurable emotions that tragedy aims to stir up. Ideally, these two emotions should be aroused directly by the mimesis of the action; when things occur “unexpectedly but because of each other” (1495a). The perfectly ordered and designed parts of such a narrative are the flipside of the ugliness and horror of the plot itself. Thus the tragedy gains in power from the ironic coexistence of beautiful form with horrific content.
Pity and fear can be aroused by peripeteiai, recognition and pathos. These first two, Aristotle calls the “most attractive parts of tragedy” since they are elements fundamentally of plot. The third source is pathos, which he defines as “an act involving destruction or pain.” In other words, pathos is the element in tragedy directly linked to the ugly and horrific. It is the domain not only of the poet but also of the stage designer, whose art “contributes more to the spectacle than the poet’s does” (1450b). But though fear and pity may be aroused by spectacle alone, he claims that it is more effective when the poet has a hand in it. Aristotle’s fear of a gruesome spectacle (think: a chamber of horrors) overwhelming the narrative and poetic elements of a production are undeniable. He warns that a misappropriation of the ugly will result in something “merely monstrous,” rather than genuinely tragic.

Through an analogy with painting, Aristotle advocates mimesis as a heightened state of imitation. When applied to the concept of the ugly in art, this analogy provides a rationale for the sanitizing effects of exaggeration in art upon the horrific.

“Since tragedy is a mimesis of people better than are found in the world, one ought to do the same as the good figure-painters, for they too give us the individual form, but though they make people lifelike they represent them as more beautiful than they are. Similarly the poet too in representing people as irascible and lazy and morally deficient in other ways like that, ought nevertheless to make them good, as Homer makes Achilles both good and an example of harsh self-will.” (1454b)

Like “speech pleasurably enhanced,” art is to soften and smooth over the features of true ugliness.

After discussing mimesis, pity, fear and pathos, we come to catharsis, which is the telos of tragedy. For Aristotle, tragedy serves a very human function; it allows us to understand the logic of our actions and makes us virtuous citizen through catharsis born of mimesis. Mimesis is of course the fundamental point of departure for art and tragedy. By making us aware of the logic of our actions, tragedy develops our virtue. As we have seen, the ugly can and often does take part in this project.

Much of Lessing’s discourse of the ugly in art maps on to Aristotle. Lessing quotes the passage in the Poetics where Aristotle talks about mimesis of the ugly and calls it “no argument in favor of the imitation of ugliness.” The dead bodies that Aristotle spoke of can excite terror that can heighten aesthetic sensation. “This terror, not their ugliness, may be made to produce sensations of pleasure through imitation” (p. 155). Lessing makes a distinction between the “ugliness” of the animals and the corpses and the “terror” that is excited through that ugliness. This may ultimately be a false dichotomy, but it serves Lessing well in his purpose, which is to show the instances in which ugliness may be mobilized by art to produce an aesthetic sensation. “Ugliness in itself can be no subject for poetry,” yet it can contribute to art’s overall effect.

“The poet can make ugliness his theme only because it acquires through his description a less repulsive aspect, and ceases in a measure to produce the effect of ugliness,” Lessing writes (p. 148). Art has a sanitizing effect on the ugly similar to the one Aristotle suggests when he speaks of “speech pleasurably enhanced.” The idea of art enhancing and transforming is pervasive throughout the Laocoon.

Lessing particularizes about art to a degree that Aristotle does not: discussing the ugly in relation to the built-in limitations of the mediums. In his lengthy exegesis on the Laocoon sculpture he discusses the limitation of the medium for exhibiting the ugly. At one point, he puts it thusly:

“If it be true that a cry, as an expression of bodily pain, is not inconsistent with nobility of soul, especially according to the views of the ancient Greeks, then the desire to represent such a soul cannot be the reason why the artist has refused to imitate this cry in his marble.” (p. 7)

This quote is all about the need to sanitize art by stripping it of its unsavory elements. “Pain, in its disfiguring extreme, was not compatible with beauty and therefore must be softened,” he writes. Had the sculptors depicted the scream, the statue would lack the “beauty which alone could turn our pain into the sweet feeling of pity for the suffering object” (p. 13-14). In other words, just like Aristotle’s over-zealous stage director, a more gruesome Laocoon, would have resulted in “mere monstrosities.” Ugliness, in other words, should always be deployed in the service of tragic beauty, and not for its own sake.

The suggestion that the ugly and horrific threatens and constrains the laws of the beautiful becomes central for Lessing. This is manifest in the example of the Laocoon itself and many other examples drawn from poetry, painting and statuary. How to deal with the ugly in the visual arts has to do with concealing the actual ugliness and relying on the imagination to fill in. The Pregnant Moment, the moment “most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow” arrives to solve this difficulty (p. 92).

Lessing illustrates this through the example of the Laocoon, as well as a painting of Medea at the moment just before her infanticide. “We anticipate the result and tremble at the idea of soon seeing Medea in her unmitigated ferocity, our imagination far outstripping any thing the painter could have shown us of that terrible moment” (p. 18). Through a veil of concealment, the horrific and ugly are amplified above and beyond what mere revealing could have accomplished.

The role of the ugly and the horrific is no doubt central to the power of the Medea painting. That this ugliness need be hidden in order to become manifest is seen by Lessing as another limitation of art in dealing with the ugly. It arises from the natural fact that the “poet shows us in the process of creation, what the painter can only show us as already existing” (p. 100). Aside from this example of being vs. becoming, there are further limits imposed by medium. Often, one need sacrifice “expression to beauty” and even “conventionality to expression” (p. 41). Lessing, like Aristotle, understands the value and instrumentality of exaggeration. These sacrifices are therefore forgivable and unavoidable, mimetically-speaking.

Throughout the essay, Lessing details the ways in which painting may make use of ugliness and deformity without offending or nauseating the audience. Ugliness and the horrific can evoke the ridiculous, the terrible and the fascinating (p. 156). When they do so, “they never arouse pure pain:” rather the bitterness is always mixed with satisfaction (p. 158).

Lessing concludes that it is possible for the poet to produce “mixed sensations” that can be “strengthened by the use of ugliness” (p. 161). At the same time, however, he wants to limit its role and scope. The ugly is a strong spice and the artist must take care not to overdo it: “Painting does not employ loathsomeness for its own sake, but, like poetry, to give emphasis to the ludicrous and the terrible. At its peril!” Lessing goes on to define this peril as a cheap sensationalist trick whose shock value wears off quickly leaving nothing but abject disgust, “loathsome in all its crudity” (p. 167).

This warning brings us back to Aristotle and his caveat against the stage designer hijacking a play. Lessing, no doubt, opens the door a bit wider for the ugly, horrific and loathsome than Aristotle does, but he will not lend it his unconditional endorsement. At the end of the day, both Aristotle and Lessing maintain a rather precarious stance towards the ugly in art. Though they both realize its instrumentality and utility in realizing the telos of mimetic art, they remain wary of whole-heartedly endorsing it. But their studies provide insights into the nature of art that complicate our ordinary concepts of the beautiful and the good. Through the analyses of both thinkers, we come to a position where we acknowledge the utility of the ugly for art, as well as its dangers.

For Aristotle, the ugly plays a crucial role in tragedy and the evocation of fear and pity. These emotions, brought about by peripeteiai, recognition and pathos, produce moments of catharsis, where the elements of tragedy culminate in a deep understanding of the logic of our actions. Tragedy can be seen as an attempt at making sense of the world and, in the process, of edifying the public. In more ways than one, the ugly takes part in this demystification and edification.
Lessing picks up and elaborates on Aristotle’s discourse on the mimesis of ugliness and its cathartic value. Although he contributes a much richer and more nuanced theory of the ugly, he can be said to still be operating very much in an Aristotelian framework. Catharsis is very much at stake in his assessment of art. Like Aristotle, Lessing sees art as a way of confronting horror indirectly. In this, he is much more explicit than Aristotle in this and treats the broad problem of the ugly more closely.

Who, indeed, would deny that, “things horrible are not wholly devoid of charm” (p. 165)?

Return to Aesthetics

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:02:00 +0000

We're jumping back in time and back to the Western hemisphere to reclaim aesthetics with Hegel, whose come to tell us that art is dead.

An End to Art?

150 years before Arthur C. Danto announced his “End of Art” thesis, G.W.F. Hegel made a similar proclamation. Neither of these two thinkers would go so far as to claim that good and worthy art isn’t possible anymore. In order to understand Hegel’s stance, it is necessary to put this view in the context of his entire project. What he means by saying that Art has come to an end is something like, “art no longer has the ability to represent absolute spirit.” We find Hegel articulating his view more explicitly in his Lectures on Fine Arts: “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Fine Arts, p. 10). Hegel gives a crude and incomplete account of his aesthetic theory in the Encyclopaedia, the one work to which we will confine the rest of our discussion.

Hegel considers Art one of the modes we have for expressing Geist, the absolute spirit that is both “implicitly existent and objectively self-unfolding” (Ency, 571). Art, he writes, is “the concrete contemplation and mental picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the Ideal” (Ency, 556). It is important for Hegel that Geist can only express itself by externalizing and seeing itself in the world. Art is one such externalizing movement, and proceeds according to a dialectical progression, much like other historical phenomena. Part of what’s unique about art is the way in which it tries to bring absolute Spirit to consciousness. Art is “the sole organ in which the abstract and radically indistinct content – a mixture from natural and spiritual sources – can try to bring itself to consciousness” (Ency, 562). These “natural and spiritual sources” can be thought of as natural forms of representation, and inspiration (respectively).

Hegel divides art into three different conceptual stages (conceptual rather than chronological): symbolic art; classical art; and romantic art. Each stage shows art in some way struggling with the notion of how to bring Geist into the world.

In symbolic art, the content (meaning) of the artwork is distinct from its form and the incommensurability between the artwork’s form and its content, brings about a certain level of abstraction. Here , he names the artist’s theme as “abstract God of pure thought” which is unable to find coherent expression in the finished product (Ency, 561). An example of this symbolic art is architecture, where the function of the edifice bears only a highly abstract relation to its form. To illustrate the inadequacy of symbolic art, Hegel describes it rather desperately as, “a restless and unappeased effort which throws itself into shape after shape as it vainly tries to find its goal” (Ency, 561). The problem from which all this arises seems to be a primitive and limited understanding of Geist: “The meaning or theme thus shows it has not yet reached the infinite form, is not yet known, not yet conscious of itself, as free spirit” (Ency, 561).

Classical art, which is next in the progression, seems to be the stage favored most highly by Hegel. Although hardly the perfect medium for Geist’s gradual unfurling, Hegel finds much that’s commendable and beautiful in this stage of the development of art. At times, he even calls it simply “Beautiful art.” For instance, in expressing the thought that beauty is the form by which art expresses the absolute, he seems to have classical art very much on the mind: “In this ideal, or the concrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a sign of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone: - the shape of form of Beauty.” (Ency, 556)

The paradigm of classical art is Greek statuary, whereby the divine is represented through the human form. Hegel explains the rationale behind this: “For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires not only an external given material – (under which are also included subjective images and ideas), but – for the expression of spiritual truth – must use the given forms of nature with a significance with art must divine and possess. Of all such forms the human is the highest and the true, because only in it can the spirit have its corporeality and thus its visual expression” (Ency, 558).

The advantage to classical art over symbolic art is that it exhibits harmony between form and content. It’s limitation, however, is that as an essentially polytheistic medium, it can’t grasp at the unity of Geist. Thus, the “reconciliation” achieved in classical art between “the expression of the God” and “the enthusiasm” or “genius” of the artist may seem “self-confident” and “of good cheer” (Ency, 560-561). However, it fails to grasp at the true nature of Geist; its “depth” and the “sense of its antithesis to the absolute essence” (Ency, 561). As Hegel writes, Absolute mind can’t be made explicit via the nature-form: “In and to art therefore the spirit is a limit natural spirit whose implicit universality, when steps are taken to specify its fullness in details, breaks up into an indeterminate polytheism” (559). Elsewhere, Hegel seems to be discussing classical art when he says, “Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its condition the self-consciousness of the free spirit – the consciousness that compared with it the natural and sensuous has no standing of its own: it makes the natural wholly into the mere expression of spirit, which is thus the inner form that gives utterance to itself alone” (Ency, 562).

Hegel calls the final stage in the development of art “romantic.” While Hegel may be said to consider the classical period as the aesthetic apex of art, romantic art is clearly the spiritual high point. It is in this stage that art becomes aware of its own limitation, namely that Geist is an abstract entity closer to thought than to the human form (the beauty of which was lauded so by the Greeks). Thus, in romantic art, “God is known not as only seeking his form or satisfying himself in an external form, but as only finding himself in himself, and thus giving himself his adequate figure in the spiritual world alone” (Ency, 562).

Romantic art is thus conscious of its shortcomings, and for this reason it always removed from the spectator. Here, a new dialectic between form and content emerges. With media like music, painting and poetry, the content (the expression of Geist) becomes detached from its form since the hyper-conscious artist has doubts about the suitability of the form in expressing the content. Romantic art can only come about with an advanced understanding of Geist that acknowledges that absolute spirit cannot be captured fully by art. This runs contrary to the way we picture the relationship between form and content in symbolic art. There, the concept of Geist that the artist maintains is completely unbounded and vague. Having realized the incompatibility of “the Idea” with “the sensuous figure it appears in,” “Romantic Art gives up the task of showing him as such in external form and by means of beauty; it presents him as only condescending to appearance, and the divine as the heart of hearts in an externality from which it always disengages itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards its significance.” (Ency, 562)

Romantic art need not be overtly beautiful, since the artist understands the impossibility of ever adequately expressing Geist. This makes for a marked contrast to classical art, since here art can has given up hope of adequately representing the absolute: “Beauty in general goes no further than a penetration of the vision or image by the spiritual principle.” (Ency, 559)

However, this reflexivity has one negative consequence that propels art into crisis, only to hand over the task to religion, and then philosophy; it is a breeding ground for irony. Through the power of irony, art manages to disconnect from the world. An ironic attitude is symptomatic of an advanced consciousness who, failing to grasp the true nature of Geist, fashions himself into a cynical creature incapable of rendering serious observations and judgments, all under the pretense of sophistication. “Irony, which can make every objective reality nought and vain, is itself the emptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and its own good pleasure, gives itself direction and content, remains master over it, is not bound by it – and, with the assertion that it stands on the very summit of religion and philosophy, falls back into the vanity of willfulness.” (Ency, 571)

The more we realize that Geist is far closer to thought than any object with material existence, the less reliance we place on sensuous forms to help us accomplish that recognition. This process, Hegel calls Erinnerung - inwardness and memory, and it is by this that Geist is able to retreat from reality in Romantic art. Poetry brings us out of the media of aesthetics and into ordinary speech and thought. It is thus the harbinger of religion, to which Romantic art eventually gives way. It is this transition from romantic art to religion that Hegel has in mind when he pronounces art at an end. Art comes to an end when it realizes its inadequacy for representing the “genuine objectivity.” As Hegel writes: “The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought – the medium in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence – is still absent in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness” (Ency, 562). Art will continue to happen; it’s merely that people won’t turn to art to see Geist reveal itself.

Since all along the goal of art (whether consciously or unconsciously) has been to represent Geist, there’s a sense in which art was always implicitly, indeterminately religious. As Hegel writes, “Beautiful art can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is not yet absolute” (Ency, 562). This makes the transition from romantic art to religion rather smooth. Eventually, philosophy takes over and brings to maturity, what “mere piety” could only hint at and represents the most radical externalization of Geist. The dialectical progression between art and religion has the consequence of lifting “religion away over its limitation” (Ency, 562). We get a similarly laudatory take on art in comparison to philosophy: “Beautiful art, for its side, has thus performed the same service as philosophy; it has purified the spirit from its thralldom” (Ency, 562). “The restricted value of the Idea,” which was first expressed in art, passes to the realm of religion, and then to philosophy. Art may have come to an end in 1830, but it persists in its chameleon-like behavior, by which it serves to edify faith, reason and spirit (Ency, 563).

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Bibliography:
Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Tr. by T. M. Knox. Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1975. p. 10
Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Tr. By William Wallace. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971. p. 293–297, 301–302

Experiments with Autobiography

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:56:00 +0000

For the next post, we travel farther East and forsake aesthetics near-entirely for a discussion of epistemology and historiography in Gandhi's "My Experiments with Truth."

This paper looks at Gandhi’s unique approach to the genre of the autobiography. In particular it examines how he responds to a general philosophical problem about the nature of autobiographies, as well as how his guiding principles in writing contribute to the ultimate purpose of the work. By analyzing the answers and principles Gandhi himself lays out in the work’s introduction, I will show how he reinvents the genre of autobiography to suit his own philosophical and spiritual purposes. In short, I will demonstrate the appropriateness of his method to the work as an intellectual autobiography and a guidebook for those questing after truth.

Gandhi wrote his autobiography while in his 40s, the full title of which is An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. This title provides us many clues into the unconventional nature of Gandhi’s project. One is immediately struck by the unorthodox use of the indefinite article, which the author employs in order to avoid sounding entirely-authoritative. Already with the first article, Gandhi is subverting the traditional notion of autobiography by labeling it something other than the definitive account of his life so-far. With Story, Gandhi hints at the both the narrative aspect of his account and the historical pitfalls of narrativity. In this, he seems profoundly aware of the artificiality and impossibility of presenting a life in a total and comprehensive account. Most fascinating, however, is the formulation, My Experiments with Truth, which implies that Gandhi doesn’t view life primarily as a causal chain of events (born in India → studied in Britain → went to South Africa), but rather as an attempt to reconcile oneself to (the divine] truth. The title also bears out what Gandhi expounds time and again in the book; he sees his life as a quest for absolute truth, where truth is defined as “the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles.” We clearly see this commitment to truth in the way he describes the purpose of the book: “[I]f every page of these chapters does not proclaim to the reader that the only means for the realization of truth is Ahimsa [non-violence, one of several virtues that Gandhi considers crucial to virtue], I shall deem all my labour in writing these chapters to have been in vain” (pp. 503-504).

That Gandhi’s work is unconventional can be seen by way of a brief comparison to two Western examples that inhabit opposite sides of the autobiographical spectrum. One the one hand, Gandhi shies from the sort of autobiography St. Augustine presents us with in his Confessions. In that book, Augustine relates his spiritual trials and tribulations that culminate in his conversion to Christianity (in a garden, no less!). The focus of the book is merely on Augustine’s encounters with religion and all other aspects of his life are dropped and omitted. While Gandhi’s book is likewise the record of a spiritual quest, how he conceives of his quest makes it an altogether different project; since the subject book and the quest for truth itself - which he can see manifest in everything – he excludes nothing from the equation, with the result that it is much more episodic than the Confessions. The episodic nature of Gandhi’s work feels closer to something like Casanova’s encyclopedic multi-thousand-page History of My Life. However, it needs little proving that Gandhi is somewhat less out to glorify himself and to boast than the Venetian lover is. Indeed, Gandhi is even somewhat ashamed of the fact that he’s been asked to write an autobiography. The way Gandhi combines the scope of Casanova with the spiritual purpose of Augustine makes Gandhi’s work utterly unique.

Another unique feature is that he is working in what is essentially a Western idiom. Early on – in fact on the very first page – he cites a colleague who objects to Gandhi’s dabbling in a Western genre: “Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the east having written one, except those who have come under Western influence” (p. xi). This objection is trivial to Gandhi since he remains open to all types of truth from any source. But a far more serious philosophical objection about the nature of autobiographies anticipates and influences Gandhi’s own approach: “Supposing you reject tomorrow the things you hold as principles today, or supposing you revise in the future, your plans of today, is it not likely that the men who shape their conduct on the authority of your word, spoken or written, may be misled?” (pp. xi-xii). Gandhi finds this argument compelling and rejects the idea of writing a “real autobiography.” Instead he opts to details only his “numerous experiments with truth,” as his life consists of nothing but those experiments. He offers the following response to the above autobiographical quandary, in which he proposes an analogy between his own experiments and those of science: “I claim for [these experiments] nothing more than does a scientist who, though he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them” (p. xiii).

To call life a series of “experiments” can also be seen as a way to simplify experience. Gandhi, concerned as he is in pursuing the quest for knowledge and truth, embraces simplification as it is allows him to focus on what truly matters in life: not who you are or what you do; but the ways in which you actively seek out truth. In this context, all the episodes of Gandhi’s life take on significance beyond being merely parts of his narrative. They are transformed from individual tales to backdrops against which his various experiments with truth take place. Though himself a highly engaging writer, Gandhi wants the reader to come away from his book with an understanding of what it means to pursue truth. This consideration naturally affects the way in which Gandhi narrates to us. Thus, when we read of his childhood marriage and later of his vegetarian activities, they are not merely tales of Gandhi’s life distilled for our enjoyment, but rather all episodes to which Gandhi has applied morals. All in all, he seems to take a very synthetic approach to all that he encounters in his life, weighing them against each other and opining this way or that depending on what his experience has taught him. On the whole, Gandhi’s point seems to be that the judgment counts more than the experience that precipitated it. Or to state the point differently, judgment - or ability to judge - is what gives experience meaning.

Gandhi sees the account of his own attempts at finding truth as something that could potentially help others on their quests. Gandhi feels that since the world is familiar with his experiments in the political sphere, it could benefit from learning of the “spiritual experiments” that have enabled those political experiments. And if he can show his experiments with truth to be of a purely spiritual nature, then he will avoid all accusations of self-praise.

His book isn’t merely about academic principles, but rather how to apply those principles practically. Thus, he proposes that his autobiography be read as a guidebook. “Let those, who wish, realize how the conviction has grown upon me; let them share my experiments and also my conviction if they can,” writes Gandhi (p. xiv). This purpose of the work is can also be seen in the uniform clarity and simplicity of style and Gandhi’s conscious choice not to burden it with difficult religious concepts. As he writes, “If I can narrate them in a dispassionate and humble spirit, many other experimenters will find in them provision for their onward march” (p. xiii). Still, he reminds the reader time and again not to take his conclusions as authoritative, but merely to regard his experiments as “illustrations.”

In order for his book to serve is purpose both as a philosophical autobiography and a guidebook for truth, Gandhi adheres to certain guiding principles of honesty, modesty (about himself and the quality of his judgments), and accuracy. He intends this to be a “warts and all” autobiography, as he writes: “I am not going to conceal or understate any ugly things that must be told. I hope to acquaint the reader fully with all my faults and errors. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of Satyagraha, not to say how good I am. In judging myself, I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be” (p. xv). Gandhi’s concern for modesty is clearly seen in the conclusion of his introduction, where he speaks to the possibility of his ego creeping into the book from time to time: “If anything that I write in these pages should strike the reader as being touched by pride, then he must take it that there is something wrong with my quest, and that my glimpses are no more true than mirage.” He expresses his commitment to accuracy in the concluding chapter, “Farewell.” He writes, “I set a high value on my experiments…I can only say that I have spared no pains to give a faithful narrative. To describe truth, as it has appeared to me, and in the exact manner in which I have arrived at it, has been my ceaseless effort.” (503)

In this paper, we have examined how Gandhi redefines the autobiographical genre to suit his own spiritual and philosophical project as well as the sense in which the work may be considered his intellectual autobiography, its raison d’être being the illustration of one man’s journal towards truth rather than a simple first-hand account of a life-lived. Though hugely entertaining, Gandhi certainly intends it to serve a didactic purpose. It is thus crucial to understand that Gandhi intended his work as a guidebook to lead others on the path to truth. This can be seen clearly in comments he makes throughout extolling the virtues of Ahimsa (non-violence), Brahmacharya (self-purification) and Satyagraha (passive restraint), all of which he sees – as all truths are – as unified and inseparable. All of Gandhi’s experiments are about the pursuit of truth and revelation. This is no different as regards his experiment in autobiography: a work whose message can be summed up as follows: “Any number of experiments is too small and no sacrifice is too great for attaining […] symphony with nature” (p. 321)

Historiography, Epistemology and Religion in Ibn Khaldun’s “New Science”

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:49:00 +0000

Now we throw in some epistemology and religion to the mix, in order to discuss Ibn Khaldun's masterwork, the Muqaddimah.

This paper explores Ibn Khaldun’s attempt at creating a new science of historiography as it relates to his theory of knowledge. In what follows, I will address Ibn Khaldun’s approach to history and explore the epistemological features of his thought that would commit him to this view. Once I have done this, I will show how Khaldun has utterly transformed the meaning of history through this marriage of historiography with a religious understanding of human intellect.

The Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun’s prolegomena to history, is an attempt to get at the “inner meaning of history” (p. 5). As such, Khaldun devotes his energies to explaining the evolution and origin of political and social organizations, which he considers the proper objects of historical investigation (p. 35). This quest “involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things and a deep knowledge of the how and why of events” (p. 5). These, Khaldun feels, are issues that earlier histories have ignored. A lack of critical thinking is to blame for the overall failure of most historical tracts.

Throughout this sprawling and encyclopedic work, Khaldun criticizes past histories, which contain much information that is “remote from the truth. It is rooted in baseless and erroneous assumptions.” (p. 15) He also objects that history is frequently used for purposes of partisanship and that too often one finds the history of a specific dynasty, and that history is merely self-serving, for the purpose of glorification; in this, most histories are too narrow to be considered universal. Additionally, he contends that the character of a given historian can make him an unreliable authority.

Khaldun lambastes historians who “do not care to consider the factual proofs and circumstantial evidence that require us to recognize that the contrary [to what they are saying] is true” (p. 23) In order for history to become a true science, historians must start applying their faculties or reason and judgment to the evaluation of historical data.

After discussing all theses problems, Khaldun explains the task of his book, which stands as a corrective to previous historiography. ”In this book I lifted the veil from conditions as they arose in the various generations. I arranged it methodically in chapters dealing with historical facts and reflections. In it I showed how and why dynasties and civilization originated” (p. 7). Concerning a new method of doing history, he prescribes “numerous sources and much varied knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness, which lead the historian to the true and keep him from slips and errors.” (p. 11)

Khaldun’s chief innovation is in producing a guidebook for future historians; he therefore feels justified in calling his work “an exhaustive history of the world," Underscoring this notion is the fact that he dubs the book “A Book of Lessons,” rather than “A Book of Facts.” As he writes, “[The Muqaddimah] turns out to be a vessel for philosophy, a receptacle for historical knowledge.” (p. 9) Khaldun is highly aware of the fundamental novelty of what he’s doing, and calls it “an entirely original science.” (p. 39)

What, in fact, accounts for the newness of what he’s doing is the way in which he allows his theory of knowledge to guide his theory of history. His concern for the method of historical thinking as directly related to mankind’s capacity for critical thinking is seen in his notion of a “yardstick,” to correct the mistakes of past historians and prevent those of future ones.

[T]he normative method for distinguishing right from wrong in historical information on the grounds of inherent possibility of absurdity is to investigate human social organization, which is identical with civilization. We must distinguish between the conditions that attach themselves to the essence of civilization as required by its very nature; the things that are accidental and cannot be counted on; and the things that cannot possibly attach themselves to it…We shall have a sound yardstick with the help of which historians may find the path of truth and correctness where their reports are concerned. (p.38)

This view is reinforced by what he says about the mental abilities and types of knowledge historians must have.

“[T]he scholar in this field needs to know the principles of politics, the nature of things and the differences among nations, places and periods with regard to ways of life, character qualities, customs, sects, schools, and everything else. …His goal must be to have complete knowledge of the reasons for every happening, and to be acquainted with the origin of every event. Then he must check transmitted information with the basic principles he knows.” (p. 24)

Motivating Ibn Khaldun’s exploration of the inner workings of history is his view of human knowledge as a gift from God to mankind. But while he exalts human knowledge as capable of deriving philosophical systems of gnosis (in this case, history), he constantly reminds of the restricted scope of our understanding: For instance, when he quotes from the Koran, “God knows better. “And you were given but little knowledge” (p. 40). Among the things of which we can have no knowledge is the notion of “cause.” In connection with this, Khaldun actually admonishes us not to speculate on the nature of cause, lest it lead to heresy. (p. 249 – 250)

God has given mortals but little knowledge which we can in turn use to derive a system of guidelines to approach history with greater accuracy. With the understanding as our guide, we run less the danger of giving ourselves over to superstition and prejudices. While the facts of history will never be wholly accessible to us (due to the limited scope of our understanding), it is within out power to derive the proper way of doing history. Thus we find that Khaldun’s theory of human knowledge stands as the strong motivating principle for the creation of a system of historiography.

So now let us now inquire after the features of human thought that enable us to do history correctly. According to Khaldun, our intellect is not merely what distinguishes us from beasts, and enables us to form social organizations (x, 42). Rather, what he calls the “speculative instinct” allows us to make sense of existence through perceiving and apperceiving. As he writes, “[Speculative Instinct] consists of both perceptions and apperceptions…The end of the process is to be provided with the perception of existence as it is , with its various genera, differences, reasons and causes. By thinking about these things, man achieves perfection in his reality and becomes pure intellect and perceptive soul. This is the meaning of human reality” (p. 334). The implication here is that “intellecting” is somewhat on par with godliness as it can lead to “perfection.”

Lest we get too enthusiastic about the empowered capacities of our reason, Khaldun reminds us time and again of our fallibility (““God is the ultimate repository of all knowledge. Man is weak and deficient”) (p. 30). He is careful never to put human reason on par with divine revelation. All objects of historical knowledge require outside verification, in marked contrast with the Koran, which “is its own proof” (p. 73). Khaldun’s insistence on constant verification is geared toward making us aware of the gulf between divine revelation and the human intellect. That said, the notion that we can derive meaning in life through “perceiving and apperceiving” implies a link between human understanding and divine wisdom. We clearly see Khaldun agreeing with the idea that there is a prophetic element to all human reason when he writes, “We…were inspired by God. He led us to a science whose truth we ruthlessly set forth.” Any success that he meets in regards to producing a sound historical tract “is due to divine guidance.” (p. 42)

As concerns the functioning of the human mind, Khaldun connects the intellect’s quest for meaning with religious strivings.

[The soul] wants to be free from the grip of (the lower human) powers and the human kind of preparedness. It wants to proceed to active intellection by assimilating itself to the highest spiritual group (that of the angels), and to get into the first order of the spiritualia by perceiving them without the help of bodily organs…It exchanges all humanity and human spirituality for angelicality of the highest stage, without the help of any acquired faculty but by virtue of a primary natural disposition that God has placed in it.

Khaldun’s insistence on the realm of human intellect as connected to the divine is further fortified when we writes, “[T]he world of the intellect and the spirits is shared by us with the angels, whose essences are of the same kind as the essences of that world.” (p. 338)

Despite this link between the spiritual and the intellectual, there remain many limitations to what our minds can derive, just as there are many limitations on what can be derived through prophecy. Khaldun remains as skeptical of the supernatural element of prophecy as he is of the dubious methods employed by earlier historians. As he writes, “All [the] ways of perceiving the supernatural are based upon no proof, and are not verifiable” (89). Elsewhere he writes, “Things of the future belong to the supernatural and cannot be known unless the causes for their happening are known and we have trustworthy information about it” (p. 89).

This discussion of prophecy and its limitations underscore the reasons why we can never get a fully sound account of history. The proper way to go about doing history is to devote our powers of thinking and reasoning - powers that have a link to prophecy – to our best efforts. Since the human intellect is limited, all wisdom comes through the grace of God. As we can never get at the fundamental causes of things, the most effective way to go about historicizing is to turn our powers of reasoning to examine critically what historical knowledge we have so we have a “yardstick” for future generations of historians. This yardstick will do more than instruct us how to do history; in the quest for spiritual meaning that Ibn Khaldun has made of history, its implementation can aid one to “perfection in his reality.”

Three Contributions to a Philosophy of History

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:39:00 +0000

Continuing in a historico-philisophico-aesthetico vein, here's a paper that examines the responsibility of critics and historians using Wollheim, Popper, Berlin and Danto.

In “Art and its Objects,” Richard Wollheim writes that, “anachronism arises not when critics characterize the past in terms of their own day, but when in doing so they falsify the past.” Wollheim poses the question in regard to art, but we can apply it without much difficulty to the discipline of history. The philosophers Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Arthur Danto all speak to Wollheim’s concern. The definitions they provide open up a conversation as to the proper domain of historical interpretation and its possible abuses. Considered together, these thinkers can be seen as making a valuable trio of contributions to a theory of historical interpretation.

Both Popper and Berlin formulate their philosophies of history in opposition to treating history like a science. Popper insists on history in the service of life, where it is incumbent upon every generation to reinterpret history for themselves. We can see his enthusiasm as a defense mechanism against historicist “misinterpretation,” of history as totalizing and objective. Berlin sustains the attack on historicism and speaks of the need for “sympathy and imagination” in order to engage in historical interpretation. He introduces a rumination on the role of language in history writing. Berlin’s semantic concerns anticipate Danto’s theory of narrative sentence with its insistence that language is always about interpretation. In demarcating the proper limits of historical interpretation and reinterpretation, Popper, Berlin and Danto tacitly assume that, philosophically speaking, we can know the past more perfectly than the present. We engage in historical analysis in order to escape the ignorant present.

In chapter 25 of The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper argues against viewing history as a natural science and advocates constant reinterpretation to safeguard against the dangerous “misinterpretation” known as “historicism.” Popper decries attempts to find eternal laws of historical development by which one can predict the future and holds any and all attempts at “objective history” to be not only flawed, but also dangerous. As he writes, “There can be no history of the past as it actually happened; there can only be historical interpretations, and none of them final; and every generation has a right to frame its own” (Popper, p. 255). He speaks of the possibility to having different yet complimentary viewpoints, “for since each generation has its own troubles and problems, and therefore its own interests and its own point of view, it follows that each generation has a right to look upon and re-interpret history in its own way, which is complementary to that of previous generations" (p. 254).

The danger with applying scientific techniques to historical thinking is the problem of misrepresentation. He traces this danger back to the logical positivists and talks of how their notion of progress in nature and science quickly spread to encompass other disciplines. Popper is willing to admit that, “history stands it a certain relation to science” and recommends we test our theories for falsifiable content. But he doubts strongly that applying scientific techniques will enable us to interpret history in a healthy fashion. "We see, therefore, that those universal laws which historical explanation uses provide no selective and unifying principle, no ‘point of view’ of history” (p. 252). Popper writes that history is by definition selective. This it appears in an inevitable result of the confrontation between infinite events and finite language: “In order to describe this infinite wealth, we have at our disposal only a finite number of a finite series of words” (p. 248). In history, we always take sides; we always have a point of view.

Interpretation is defined by Popper as a collection of facts that support a theory. Interpretations can never yield historical laws and Popper admonishes us to give up the "naïve belief that any definite set of historical records can ever be interpreted in one way only” (p. 253). He writes further, "“our only authority may give us just that information regarding certain events which fits with his own specific interpretation. Most specific interpretations of these facts we may attempt will then be circular in the sense that they must fit in with the interpretation, which was used in the original selection of facts. If, however, we can give to such material an interpretation which radically deviates from that adopted by our authority, then the character of our interpretation may perhaps take on some semblance to that of a scientific hypothesis. But fundamentally, it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that it is a very dubious argument in favour of a certain argument that it can be easily applied, and that it explains all we know; for only if we can look out for counter-examples can we test a theory” (253-4). Nonetheless, Popper is careful not to allow his pluralism cripple him against condemning the historicists, who he faults for setting out to find “the Path on which mankind is destined to walk; it is out to discover the Clue to History” (p. 256).

What do we expect from history? “We want to know how our troubles are related to the past and we want to see the line along which we may progress towards the solution of what we feel, and what we choose, to be our main tasks” (p. 255). According to Popper, we want knowledge of where we’ve been and indicators as to where we’re headed. History qua history has no meaning. It only assumes meaning when we interpret it. “Although history has no ends, we can impose these ends of ours upon it; and although history has no meaning, we can give it a meaning…it is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history.” In response to the historicists, Popper says, “History can’t progress, only we can.”

In his essay, “The Concept of Scientific History,” Isaiah Berlin writes that history is about ‘prediction and retrodiction’. Berlin lectures us on how to engage most effectively in historical interpretation. Theory confirmation is not the place of history. It is the disciple of inclusion, rather than exclusion. We look for differences, rather than similarities. Those patterns we perceive in history, says Berlin, are founts of knowledge. History is the discipline of generalization and selectivity. That said, Berlin is not anti-historicist to the extent of Popper and he reserves some kind words for Marx and Kant, whom he calls men of “deep insight and genius.”

Perhaps the most surprising element of Berlin’s analysis is his definition of history. He defines history as doing all we can to make the past make sense. In order to engage in true historical interpretation, though, we need an ample capacity of sympathy and imagination. “[W]e cannot evade the task of interpretation, for nothing counts as an historical interpretation, unless it attempts to answer the question of how the world must have looked to other individuals or societies if their acts and words are to be taken as the acts and words of human being neither wholly like ourselves nor so different as not to fit into our common past. Without a capacity for sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physician, there is no vision of either past or present, neither of others nor of ourselves; but where it is wholly lacking, ordinary – as well as historical – thinking cannot function at all” (p. 44). This turn recalls Collingwood’s empathy theory to a point. Berlin seems to be painting in broader strokes by prescribing sympathy and imagination as transcendental preconditions for any sort of historical knowledge whatsoever.

The meaning of history for Berlin is much less grandiose than a Popperian injunction: “The immediate purpose of narrative historians (as has often been repeated) whatever else it may be besides this, is to paint a portrait of a situation or a process, which, like all portraits, seek to capture the unique pattern and peculiar characteristics of its particular subject.” (p. 31) Elsewhere he writes, “History is merely the mental projection into the past of this activity of selection and adjustment, the search of coherence and unity, together with the attempt to refine it with all the self-consciousness of which we are capable, by bringing to its aid everything that we conceive to be useful” (p. 41).

Like Popper, Berlin is fascinated by the relation between language and history. He speaks of how history requires that language aid it, and make it coherent and interpretive. He writes: “In a developed work of natural science…the links between the propositions are, or should be, logically obvious…This is very far from being the case in even the best, most convincing, rigorously argued works of history. No student of the subject can, I think, fail to note the abundance in works of history of such phrases as ‘Small wonder if, ‘It was therefore hardly surprising when,’ ‘The inevitable consequences swiftly followed,’ ‘events took their inexorable course,’ ‘In the circumstances,’ ‘From this is was but a short step to,’ and most often of all, the indispensable, scarcely noticeable and deeply treacherous ‘thus’, ‘whereupon’ ‘finally’ and the like.” (p. 21) These concerns anticipate Danto and his theory of narrative sentences.

While Arthur Danto’s essay Narrative and Style” is concerned primarily with art, we can easily apply what he says about narrative sentences to the realm of historical discourse. The main point is that language is always about interpretation. It stands to reason, then, that history, defined as a form of representation with the aim of bridging past and present, must rely on language to an extent unsuspected by Popper and Berlin.

Danto’s theory of narrative sentences is elaborated via a distinction between fixed causal continuity and an ever-changing semantic continuity with a deep interpretive element. Danto defines narrative sentences as “sentences by which an earlier event is described with reference to a later one, yielding thereby descriptions under which events cannot have been witnessed at the time of their occurrence, for whatever reason it is that their future was hidden to those who might have witnessed them” (Danto, p.201). In case we are troubled by the seemingly hopelessly anachronistic flavor of this language, Danto reassures us that “We have no difficulty with them, however, since their future is our past, which the narrative sentence serves to organize under narrative structure.” He further allows that certain narrative sentences can make claims on the future, without making historical claims. In order to make historical claims on the future, however, one requires either hindsight or revelation! As he writes, “The difference between a future we feel we have a right to expect and a future we have no right to expect and cannot even formulate, may merely be indexed to different levels of ignorance rather than difference orders of change” (Danto, p. 203).

Danto makes much of the basic narrative structure of history, contrasting it carefully with a causal chain: “There has to be a difference, one feels, between the end of a narrative and the latest link in a causal chain, even if the causal chain terminates with it” (p. 205). Danto draws our attention to the fact that “Historical knowledge always seems more than human knowledge” (p. 204). That this is so is testament to the incredible force of narrative. He writes that, “ends of stories belong to stories, not to reality” and quotes Carrier as saying “You can tell a story ending wherever you choose about whatever you wish.” The idea here is that depending on the goals we have in store for history, our starting and end points will be different.

Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences has telling implications for our understanding of historical interpretation. The very notion that there can be times in the present when we can’t utter certain sentences implies that all our interpretation must be, in a sense, reinterpretation. The moral Danto seems to formulate is that we can know where we have been, but never where we are.

While this seems a far cry from both the Popperian duty of “re-framing” history and infusing it with meaning, as well as the “prediction and retrodiction” of Berlin, we mustn’t see the move in Danto as removing history from the service of life. Rather, the narrative inevitabilities and constraints he illuminates for us are a further means of distinguishing between proper and improper modes of historical interpretation. Here a common goal emerges for this triumvirate of thinkers: to steer us clear of the error of misinterpretation and anachronism.

History's Blank Pages

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:30:00 +0000

I'm going to shift gears now. We turn slightly from aesthetics and towards philosophy of history to examine Hegel's metaphor of history's "blank pages."

In Carol Reed’s 1949 film, The Third Man, Orson Welles delivers one of the all-time greatest screen monologues to Joseph Cotton.

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

While these lines are not lacking in humor, they raise a serious and legitimate concern for the philosophy of history. Harry Lime’s historical observation implies the following questions (1) What role does happiness play in the unfolding of history? and, (2) Is it not, in a sense, antithetical to greatness? In this essay, I will present G.W.F. Hegel’s position that happiness is irrelevant to history. I will then offer an alternate view that all of history is nothing but successive stages of happiness attuned to the perfection of contentment itself. I will argue for this conclusion via an analysis and rethinking of Hegel’s claims about the place of happiness in the scheme of historical development.

In chapter three of the “Introduction to the Philosophy of History,” Hegel claims “periods of happiness are empty pages in history, for they are the periods of harmony, times when the antithesis is missing.” This assertion must be understood in the context of his larger argument about the nature of historical development and his obscure teleology. The whole of human history is the history of the contradiction between universal order and individual chaos, or destiny versus the barbarism of mankind. Hegel argues against habit and routine and for dialectic. He feels that one must understand all phases of history in relation to each other, and appreciate conflict is a necessary – though not a sufficient – condition for progress to occur. The premises on which this outlook rests come from his notion that all history is, in fact, the history of struggle of ideas and their antitheses. The goal of metaphysics, as he sees it, is to understand this struggle.

The end of history, for Hegel, is the perfection of Reason, or Spirit, in the world. He considers it an a priori supposition, observable through the course of history that Reason is in the process of being slowly revealed to mankind. It is fitting that we should ask what practical good the unfolding of reason would have for mankind, whether it would produce lasting happiness. Though Hegel doesn’t really respond to this explicitly, I feel we must understand the Spirit arrived at self-knowledge as a time of true happiness brought about by the ultimate fulfillment of reason and liberty. Individual happiness, prior to this, is achieved through accommodating one’s existence to one’s particular character: that is to say, by reconciling one’s individual existence, which is arbitrary free will, with the universal essence, which is the substantial totality of things. This is the only sort of happiness Hegel feels we can achieve in our present state, one that is limited to the realm of private lives. (p. 33)

Another argument Hegel brings against happiness is based on the biographies of the great, “historical” men. These monumentally looming figures – Napoleon, Frederick the Great - who make history progress by bringing reason into the world, do not lead happy lives, nor is that their lot. Ruled, by their master-passions, they toil relentlessly and fall into obscurity once their goals are achieved. They are prophets of reason, meant to suffer for the sake of the truth it is their destiny to carry into the world. Hegel writes of Alexander the Great and Caesar, “[the] great men in history are those whose particular aims contain the substantial will that is the will of the World Spirit” (p. 32). These great actors are in touch with the Idea unconsciously and have “insight into what was needed and what was timely…the very truth of their time and their world” (p. 33). That this inner sense never rises to the level of consciousness is seen if how these men, who were called upon “to manage the affairs of the World Spirit,” worked to satisfy themselves. “Thus these men seem to create from themselves, and their actions have produced a set of conditions and worldly relations which seem to be only their interest, and their work” (p. 33). But despite operating out of self-interest and catalyzing history, great men cannot be considered happy. Hegel finds a “horrible consolation in the fact that these historical men did not achieve what is called happiness” (p. 33).

In response to Hegel’s views on the worthlessness of human happiness to history, several criticisms can be made about the premises and conclusions of his theory. Hegel doesn’t present us with a compelling reason why we ought to consider the middle step of synthesis irrelevant (except insofar as it becomes the subsequent thesis), where a temporary equilibrium is achieved. Antagonism is just as fleeting as happiness, and the tranquil synthesis rears its head just as frequently as its antithesis. Secondly, if Hegel’s interested in describing a historical process, why is he so coy about admitting that role that happiness plays in decision-making? Surely, the will to be happy drives human behavior much more immediately and clearly than the will to bring Reason into the world. The will to happiness is the most observable drive in human nature, into which is coded the desire for comfort and freedom from pain. We strive to actualize and perfect this in any way possible. It could be said that the driving force in history is the promise of greater happiness. Hegel is reluctant to understand the revelation of Spirit merely as the gradual unfolding of happiness because he wants to say that there’s more driving history than an eye to individual or general welfare and that history is actually interested in evolving in accordance with Reason. Obviously, this is non-falsifiable claim. To say that Hegel’s conception of historical development does not correspond with the real world would be arrogant, but he does seem to take his cues from areas anterior to concrete history, such as religion and art. There’s a sense that Hegel can be seen as hiding behind an analogy with art. In referring to the “empty pages of history,” he is using a literary metaphor that reveals a certain mode of thinking. Is he not comparing the historian’s craft to that of the novelist? If History is a great book waiting to be written, does not the historian read conflict into history in much the same way a playwright creates antagonisms on the stage or a novelist on the page? Lastly, in what position is Hegel to estimate how happy or miserable Napoleon’s life was? He assumes that happiness is opposed to antagonism by definition, and that conflict automatically renders the individual unhappy.

There is no compelling reason why we ought to regard happiness in history as merely stagnant, moments when the project of realizing Spirit were put on hold. We ought rather to see periods of great harmony as those wherein reason and freedom were achieved most fully. Periods of happiness are not the empty pages of history, but rather those epochs when reason is best equipped to know itself, and produces happiness in proportion to the amount of reason currently in the world. “Happiness” and “harmony” cannot admit of the antithesis, Hegel claims, and hence are not the proper objects of history. Au contraire, let us turn our examination to those moments of happiness to see how we can learn from them. Instead of studying the political upheavals and terrors of the Renaissance, why don’t we examine the political and social alliances that lead to tranquility in Switzerland for 500 years? Why shouldn’t this be a legitimate form of historical inquiry?

In The Third Man, Orson Welles is Harry Lime, a con artist who sells penicillin on the black market in post-war Vienna. Though hardly a da Vinci or a Michelangelo, he uses the Hegelian cuckoo-clock argument to rationalize his life based on violence and corruption. The argument for antagonism based on genius is a dangerous road to go down. Even those who find the argument intriguing must concede the possibility of buying into a Post Hoc Ergo Procter Hoc fallacy. In this instance, a rejection of Hegel restored philosophical dignity to the concept of Happiness and deprives the Harry Limes of the world of their intellectual ammunition.

----

Bibliography:
Hegel, G.W.F., Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company; 1988

Essays on Aesthetics: Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:18:00 +0000

Dear all,

In the next few days, I shall be posting a number of essays dealing with problems in aesthetics on this blog. I inaugurate this new direction with an essay about the Whistler / Ruskin controversy and the fascinating case of Hans van Meegeren. the I appreciate any and all feedback.
Thanks,
-Adam

Artist vs. Critic

The picture that emerges from the Whistler / Ruskin and van Meegeren cases is one of a confrontational relationship between the artist and the critic. Is this relationship, by its very nature, adversarial? In this essay I will argue that to view this delicate and important symbiosis as purely adversarial would be limiting and unfair. I will argue that the critic, while often in conflict with the artist, is by no means obliged to take on a belligerent role vis-a-vis the artist. Rather, he must function as an intermediary between the artist and the public as a publicly elected arbiter of taste.

To view the critic merely as the artist's inevitable afterbirth is to imply a state of affairs where Ruskin can lunge at Whistler with a slanderous notice and van Meegeren can parry by turning out a fraud. To a certain extent, the critic and the artist need each other. Both have pretensions to a paradigm of taste; the artist seeks to create a work of beauty, and the critic evaluates that beauty. At stake here, is much more than an individual artist's reputation. The quarrel between artist and critic is in essence a debate over about ownership; both of the audience and of taste.
I will argue this through an examination of the Whistler / Ruskin and van Meegeren cases, both of which pose challenges to the fundamental relationship between critic and artist. I will round out my conclusion with insights from David Hume's essay on the "Standard of Taste" as well as Henry James' response to the Whistler controversy.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler would have us believe that the artist and critic are completely at odds. Chief among the critics' transgressions is the constant tendency of critics to moralize art. In his 10 O'clock Lecture, Whistler claims that nowadays "Beauty is confounded with virtue, and, before a work of Art, it is asked: what good shall it do?" (p. 30). One of Whistler's more outrageous claims is that criticism is less a means of evaluating art than a way for failed artists to gain intellectual ownership over an artwork erudite prose. On this point, Whistler writes that "[the critic] finds poetry where he would feel it were he himself transcribing the event...and noble philosophy in some detail of philanthropy ...meanwhile the painter's poetry is quite lost to him (p. 34)."

At bottom. Whistler holds that the only person qualified to judge an artwork is another artist. He imagines an age where the artist was able to channel their purely aesthetic message to the audience without the need of an intermediary, the dread critic whose influence "while it has widened the gulf between the people and the painter, has brought about the most complete misunderstanding as to the aim of the picture...the work is considered absolutely from a literary point of view...[he] degrades art by supposing it a method of bringing about a literary climax (p.33)."

In addition, he lambastes the critic as performer: "Exhorting -denouncing - directing. Filled with wrath and earnestness. Bringing powers of persuasion, and polish of language to prove -nothing...Impressive - important - shallow. Defiant - distressed -desperate (p. 35)."

There are many ways to counter Whistler's rather paranoid claims. Perhaps none is more apt that Stuart Culver's analysis of Whistler's nemesis. According to Culver, Ruskin wasn't an across the board conservative, he just thought that Whistler's was a "decadent aestheticism that failed to be offensive in the correct, politically productive way (p. 42)" and in "outrageous defiance of representational standards" (p.43) . More broadly, Culver sees the whole affair as an outgrowth of Whistler misconstruing the critic's intentions: "Ruskin's mistake. Whistler believed, was to imagine that by teaching the public how to read moral allegories into paintings he could bridge the gap between the painter's intentions and the public's reception, (p. 46)" It's true that Ruskin was a particularly moral-minded critic. But extrapolating from this point to a general condemnation of criticism makes no sense.

Furthermore, we find ourselves faced with a formidable challenge if we try to resolve Whistler's desire to connect to his audience directly and his insistence on the autonomy of the artist. The logical extension of his autonomy principle was that "the very presence of the public or the critic in studios and galleries [was] a threat to rational composition, (p. 46)" For Whistler, autonomy seems to be synonymous with isolation.

Han van Meegeren took a similarly adversarial view of the artist / critic relationship. Unlike Whistler, though, his strategy for exacting revenge was to beat the critics at their own game. His extensive knowledge and familiarity of Vermeer's technique and themes enabled him to create a new period and style for Vermeer. In the words of one of the critics who testified at his trial, once "the Emmaus was declared authentic by world-renowned experts...the rest were linked in the same chain, (p. 95)"

By transgressing the critic / artist boundary, van Meeregen thought to expose the hypocrisy and snobbery of the Dutch art establishment, chief among them Dr. Brendius. Lessing contends that van Meeregen brought Holland's art critics to their knees by proving their judgments to be "historical, biographical, economic or sociological, instead of aesthetic." The conclusion van Meeregen wanted the critics to reach, namely that he's as great an artist as Vermeer, reflects an unsound reason at work. Nevertheless, the challenge he posed to the critics is valuable and provocative (p. 122). However, van Meegeren's own admission reveals that he was motivated primarily out of personal spite: "I had been so belittled by the critics that I could no longer exhibit anywhere. I was systematically damaged by the critics, who knew not a thing about art (p. 96)."

While one can view both Whistler and van Meegeren as performance artists who are reaching out directly to the audience for appeal, it's essential to remember that both artists had scores to settle. Thus both artists seem to act more out of anger and frustration than out of a serious desire to seriously question the role of the critic. The Whistler and van Meegeren cases are too personal to persuade, generating far-fetched arguments that cast the artist's sanity into doubt (consider Whistler's warped view of critic qua jealous artist).

Critics themselves, Henry James and David Hume help us understand why exacerbated artists challenge the artist / critic relationship in an effort to reach the audience directly. It is true that critics mediate between the audience and the artist in priestly fashion, ^-^ bridging the gulf between artist and public in order to deal with artistic distance. Based on what their testimony, it makes little sense to call the critic / artist relationship adversarial in any fundamental way.

In the "Standard of Taste," Hume suggests that we all would do well to be first-rate critics, as a refined taste leads naturally -according to the logic - to a refined sense of virtue. He holds belief in an "ideal" to which all criticism should aspire. He accounts for the diversity of opinion among critics and acknowledges that certain modes of critical inquiry are flawed On the first point, he is willing to acknowledge particular disagreements that exist among critics, saying
that though critics agree on the universal concepts we incorporate into our understanding of beauty: "but when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions. (Hume #2)." On the second point, he argues that we should be charitable with criticism whenever we encounter a principle that clashes with our aesthetic experience. In such a circumstance, we shouldn't blame criticism in general but rather "those particular rules of criticism which would establish such circumstances to be faults, and would represent them as , universally blameable. (#9)"

In answer to the question of why we need critics to begin with, Hume contends that, "when objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or the imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused. (#18)" The notion that certain people are better and more qualified to form aesthetic judgments than others underlies the notion of criticism in general. How, then, should a critic comport himself? "He must preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination. (#21)" Hume seems to set an impossibly high bar for the ideal critic, who must always view a more of art from the audience's point of view (this is especially important when viewing art from a different age or culture). It is from this identification
with the audience in addition to "strong sense united by delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison and cleared of all prejudice" alone that a critic can comprehend the "true standard of taste and beauty (#23) ." Thus, the critic for Hume occupies an essential role in society, by pointing the public towards the true and beautiful.

We find a similar idea by way of Henry James, whose notion of the critic in the modern marketplace is explained by Culver as "fundamentally sacrificial. It is his job to understand and experience for others too busy or too distracted to encounter art themselves. The critic is then the artist's exemplary audience and, increasingly, the public consumes only vicariously through him. (p. 46)"

This approach to the critic / artist relationship tears all adversarial notions asunder. This conception of the critic is the artist's ideal viewer may also raise questions about the accessibility and functionality of art. James is careful not to let his opinions on the role and purpose of criticism play too great a role in the greater meaning of art. He wants very much to grant art its autonomy. Towards this end, he writes: "Art is one of the necessities of life; but even the critics themselves would probably not assert that criticism is anything more than an agreeable luxury, something like printed talk" (p. 29).

James' insight in this matter is closely related to the Whistler / Ruskin trial and the two ideas about art and art criticism which it upheld: that you can have art for art's sake, but not criticism for its own sake; and that there are both legitimate and illegitimate modes of criticism. As the critic's function is to "master the practice of consuming art," the glance he casts in art's direction must be involving and detached, being that he is both an emissary of the public and, on a certain level, possessed of a keener sense of refinement and finesse.
In essence, Whistler and van Meegeren stage their revolts over a question of access. They represent artists who, fed up with critics opt to transgress boundaries and become performance artists in an attempt to communicate directly with the public. The belletristic nature of these cases is particular to the nature of the conflicts and to view the artist / critic symbiosis as purely adversarial is to do a disservice to a beneficial and essential relationship. For while Hume and James disagree on whether to consider the critic a necessity or a luxury, they both ascribe to him the responsibility and power to impart an appreciation of art onto the audience. If Hume sets an impossibly high bar for the true critic, this is because he considers a true critic to be as rare as he is vital. In the end, artist and critic alike need to answer to a standard of taste.

Opera into Film

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:33:00 +0000

The Cinemoperatic Imagination

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have been irresistibly drawn to opera. From Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 silent version of Carmen to Kenneth Brannagh’s forthcoming film of The Magic Flute, the impulse to blend these composite art forms has tempted and frustrated an array of film artists. This is hardly surprising, as both art forms are mass spectacles that use a variety of media to communicate dramatic and emotional content.
Yet, opera rarely translates well to the screen without the feeling that something has been lost. There are many challenges to creating a successful Film-Opera. A director has to find his own solutions to issues of theatricality, spectatorship and ways to deal with what is basically a struggle for supremacy between music (in opera) and image (in film).
This paper explores various techniques and strategies that have been used by filmmakers who have attempted to mend the languages of film and opera together, over the past half-century. It examines such issues as naturalism, artifice, the use of diegenic sound, theatricality, and self-referential mise-en-scène. I also address considerations of genre and the role of actors and singers: the unity or separation of voice and body and the effect this has the effectiveness of a cinematic production. I mention common themes and threads that I find running through the films I explore and note any outstanding features that set certain works apart from others.
The successful Film-Opera is a rare thing and deserves to be treated as a valid work-of-art in its own right. Some feel that live opera has much to fear potentially from a mechanically reproducible art that has the potential to replace it. My own feeling on the matter is that Film-Opera ought to be appreciated in harmony, rather than in competition, with live performance. These issues are only starting to garner serious attention. The rapidly expanding home video and opera DVD markets makes this an especially great time to explore the blending of these two different conceptions of Gesamtkunstwerk.

I. Monumental Opera

By this term, I designate those films in which the filmmaker essays to create a realistic and natural-feeling cinemoperatic world. The hyperrealism of this style has the potential to clash with the extreme artificiality of opera as a medium. Nonetheless, this monumental impulse is far and away the most common one among Film-Operas, in evidence with many of Zeffirelli’s films from the 1970s and 1980s as well as more recent films such as Benoit Jacquot’s Tosca (2001) and Frédéric Mitterand’s Madame Butterfly (1995). It is also the hardest to pull off well. These films utilize either real locations or lavish sets to create a sense of naturalism. This sense can often come into conflict with the naturally very artificial demands of opera and the audience’s expectations.

One of the earliest attempts to make a monumental Film-Opera is Clemente Fracassi’s 1953 film of Aida. Not much more than a selection of famous scenes from the opera, it stars the great Italian actress Sophia Loren, who lip-synchs the title role to a recording made with Renata Tebaldi. The result is a splashy cast-of-thousands epic with stiff and poorly dubbed arias. It seems that Fracassi was channeling both Cecil B. DeMille and Rogers and Hammerstein: the result is the pinnacle of kitsch. Film-Opera would need to wait twenty years until Zeffirelli showed that monumental conceptions could work on screen.

Franco Zeffirelli’s sumptuous 1986 film of Verdi’s Otello was both a critical and popular success at the time of its release (Citron, p. 69). His film version, very much in keeping with his overblown theatrical aesthetic (see any of his production’s at the Met), illustrates both the successes and dangers of the monumental approach. Zeffirelli assembled a first-rate cast, including Placido Domingo and Katia Ricciarelli under the baton of the reliably traditional Lorin Maazel. Zeffirelli very much wanted his Otello to be appreciated as Film first and Opera second: a desire supported by his belief in “music as handmaiden to the camera” (Zeffirelli quoted in Citron, p. 74). To this end, he made substantial cuts to the score and even reordered some of the arias. While this strategy threatens the purity of Verdi’s work, it is of little concern to the success of the film qua film. In fact, the cuts insure that the film remains under two hours, the standard running time for a film screened without intermission. But despite Zeffirelli’s statement of his aesthetic intentions, much of the film does seem custom tailored to the music: he takes advantage of editing to create a fluid rhythm that matches and illustrates the drama of the music.
Zeffirelli makes extensive use of diegetic sound, including the storm in the opening scene, footsteps, closing doors and even a chilling groan from the dying Desdemona. Here and elsewhere, natural sound is used to take the edge off the artificiality of operatic techniques that are already several levels removed from us. Zeffirelli tries to collapse the distance between singers lip-synching to a pre-recorded soundtrack and the audience sitting in the darken movie theater, using tight close-ups and medium shots of the singers (who do a careful lip-synching job). This has the effect of reinstating a measure of the corporeality that can potentially be lost in any mechanically reproducible medium. Working with a crisp and well-mixed soundtrack (which can be fully appreciated on MGM’s recent DVD release) and using the actual singers in his cast, Zeffirelli’s film – though far from consistent (it drags in places and have some very awkward transitions) – offers some valuable solutions to the problems posed by Film-Operas.

Similar monumentalizing impulses are behind Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an ambitious film undone in large measure by a poorly mixed soundtrack. Like Zefirelli, Losey uses singers (in this case Kiri Te Kanawa and José van Dam) as screen actors. However, the performances are often leaden as well as poorly synchronized to a stilted studio recording of the score (conducted again by Maestro Maazel). One exception are the recitatives, which were recorded live and feel fresher and more vibrant than anything else in the film. Given these pitfalls, the many visual merits (stunning lighting and on-location cinematography in Palladio, stunning architecture and interiors) struggle to be appreciated, and the film as a whole suffers. The most arresting thing about this Giovanni are the opening and closing credits, which are presented to the sound of roaring waves: this hearkens back to Kierkegaard, for whom waves become a metaphor for the Don’s elusiveness. Thus, while Losey is by no means is by no means blind to the potential of film to layer an opera with added meanings, the clunkiness of his film makes it difficult to appreciate his subtler touches.

Perhaps the most successful attempt at monumental Film-Opera is Francesco Rosi’s 1983 film version of Bizet’s Camren. Rosi’s use of diegetic sound is even more radical and pervasive than Zefirelli’s, and even includes music other than Bizet’s. The most striking example of this is the credit sequence at a bullfight with a folksy Spanish fanfare playing in the background. Rosi also defies expectations by breaking up the overture, and playing the second section – which introduces the fate music – to a nighttime procession for the Virgin Mary. The treatment of the chorus is interesting, and often what appears to be purely background music turns out to be sung by onscreen performers. By playing with the audiences’ expectations about film and opera, Rosi lures us into his cinematic world.
Like Zefirelli and Losey, Rosi opts for making his singers act. Both of his leads, Julia Migenes-Johnson and Placido Domingo give incredibly physical performances. The performances are often captured in close-up, which helps preserve the link to live performance. This approach succeeds immensely in the Act II duet between José and Carmen and José subsequent Flower Aria. The small and gamine-like Migenes-Johnson lies on a bed suggestively beckoning to Don José, exposing her thighs and rubbing her foot against Domingo’s hairy chest. Her restless seductiveness and careful lip-synching create a perfectly believable and erotically charged scene. The camera follows Domingo to the windowsill, where he sings his aria. The tight close-up captures the energy and feeling in his face and neck, adding to the illusion of live performance.
Yet, Rosi exhibits some ambivalence towards Film-Opera and uses the spoken recitatives of Bizet’s original performing version as diegetic sound that disturbs the flow of the music. The inclusion of spoken dialogue has the effect of taking the audience out of the operatic space it creates. Consequently, the film can feel more like a musical than opera. This is not to diminish Rosi’s achievement; a successful film- musical is also a fairly difficult thing to achieve.
Another important element is the film’s use of natural scenery: in this case the colorful vistas of the Catalonian countryside. This setting has been interpreted in contrary ways. Reviewing the film for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that the natural settings are “never merely naturalistic.” “They’re both theatrical and austere, and the striking perspectives provide something that filmed opera needs: the recognition that the singers are not ordinary people performing ordinary tasks – they’re part of a ritualized performance” (Kael, 124). Citron feels that the naturalism comes at the expense of the purely operatic element: “Music is asked to yield some of its functions to other elements, especially noise, spoken dialogue, scenery and movement” (Citron, 192). Both agree, however, that Rosi has come up with compelling solutions to the problems of filming opera. In this way, Rosi’s Carmen represents the fullest success of the totalizing monumental impulse: the most dominant, but by no-means exclusive, impulse in Film-Opera.

II. Opera as Dream

At the opposite end of the interpretive spectrum is the attraction to present opera as a purely aesthetic, hyper-artificial phenomenon. The films that have treated opera in this way do not try and reconcile the visual and the music elements that vie for supremacy but rather use the visuals to provide a wildly imaginative interpretation or illustration of a musical work. This is in distinction to Monumental Opera, where the music seems to be actively realized in the onscreen performances. There is no attempt here to replicate the experience or sensation of a live performance; rather, cinematic contrivances and mise-en-scène are used in synch with the music. In other words, the film animates the music rather than the music animating the film. The two operas that I discuss in this section - Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann and Wagner’s Parsifal - both have heavy magical content that certainly suggested them as suitable candidates for fantastical and dream-like cinema.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1951 film, The Tales of Hoffmann represents the most successful example of this approach. Powell told his conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, that he wanted a “performance, not a recording,” and used non-operatic singers performing in English to give the film a more down-to-earth feel (Michael Powell, quoted in Citron, p. 116). On the commentary track to the Criterion Collection’s DVD release of The Tales of Hoffmann, Martin Scorsese suggests that this helps the audience to get use to the disorienting effects of the nonstop singing (Scorsese, Hoffmann).
Unlike the advocates of the monumental approach, the filmmakers here have no qualms about using non-singing actors and dancers and have no real concern for synchronization. The film historian Bruce Elder suggests that Hoffmann is the perfect marriage of film and opera, since it divorces the singing from the physical demands of the acting. This is turn allows the purely visual elements – choreography, special effects, make-up, sets and so forth – to regain their supremacy (Elder). Ian Christie perceptively suggests that Powell and Pressburger “virtually reinvented the freedom and fantasy of silent cinema while making full use of Technicolor and a stellar cast of dancers and singers” (Christie, Hoffmann).
A connection could also be made to animation, which has been interpreted by some (included Walter Benjamin) as the purest type of filmmaking. The set design by Hein Heckroth is full of colorful and unexpected touches and trompe d’oeil effects, including a disorienting staircase painted onto a stage. The extensive and intricate choreography for Moria Shearer (Olympia) and Robert Helpmann (The Four Villains) as well as dazzling surreal and disorienting effects make Hoffmann an oversaturated and unforgettable visual spectacle. All this visual richness is possible not in spite of, but because of, the operatic music which it animates.
This visual richness, however, doesn’t’ come at the expense of the music: Powell and Pressburger never forget that they are making a Film-Opera. The opening credits begin to the accompaniment of an orchestra tuning up and playing melody fragments from the opera. The film uses diegetic sound effectively, if sparingly (no howling Zeffirelli-esque storms). Mostly, the filmmakers are concerned with finding the perfect way to match the music and the visuals. Hoffmann succeeds by resisting most of the strategies that Monumental Opera harnesses: natural scenery; imitation of live-performance; and stark, expressive close-ups. Instead, Hoffmann gives us complete artifice, music that seems to come from the ether, and restrained full and wide-shots of the singers, dancers and actors.

A total rejection of monumental tendencies also lurks behind Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film of Wagner’s five-hour-long final opera, Parsifal (1982). But where Hoffmann dazzles and entertains, Syberberg’s film assaults the senses and dulls the intellect with heavy-handed symbolism and an visual artistic conceit that doesn’t translate well to the screen.
Hoffmann is treated by Powell and Pressburger as bittersweet fantasy, full of gaiety and wonder, alongside its more tragic elements. Parsifal, on the other hand, is a heavy and ponderous meditation on German and Christian mythology and Syberberg interprets it as a dead-serious peek into the German psyche. Whatever exhilarating and vibrant effects fantasy has in Hoffmann become menacingly ponderous and stern in Syberberg’s Parsifal.
Though the visual conceit of the film is arresting (it takes place inside a giant death mask of Wagner and includes back projections of scenes and locations throughout German history), Syberberg doesn’t really know how to mobilize his concept for an exceptionally long film. Like Powell and Pressburger, Syberberg doesn’t use actual singers to act in the film. He pays less attention to synchronization that Zeffirelli and Rosi yet gives us many close-ups of poor lip-synching. Robbed of a reference to the real world and the simulated feel of live-performance, much of Parsifal ends up feeling tortuously static. The exceptions here are the chorus scenes (especially the flower maidens) and orchestral interludes, where a fluid camera moves along with the music and injects some life into the film.
There is one inspired and highly successful ingredient in Syberberg’s film, and that is a female Parsifal who materializes mid-way through the film (and replaces the male Parsifal). The effect of hearing a heldentenor voice emanate from a young women’s mouth is mesmerizing and beguiling. An uncanny and unnatural sight, this female Parsifal is yet one more argument against naturalism in Film-Opera.

III. Hybrid Opera

Between the two extremes of Rosi’s Carmen and Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann is a happy medium of naturalism and artificiality that may be represented by two very different works, Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute (1975), from the Mozart opera, and Götz Friedrich’s film of Strauss’ Elektra (1982). Both these films mobilize opera’s theatricality for a successful cinematic product by preserving a close-link to live performance and giving the impression of a world being created.

Bergman frames his Magic Flute as a theatrical performance playing to a live audience. The production he recreates on a movie set is meant to evoke the original production of 1791 at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna (Cowie). In her review, Pauline Kael praised this theatrical conceit: “Filmed operas generally ‘open out’ the action or else place us as if we were spectators at a performance, looking at the entire stage. Bergman has done neither – he has moved into the stage” (Kael, 169). The film ushers us onto the stage and into the opera, cutting between the audience and the quaint production and gradually leading us deeper and deeper into the opera.
Bergman handles the overture differently than the filmmakers we’ve examined, with a montage of faces from the audience. The rhythm of the editing only approximates the rhythm of the music film, but establishes the quick tempo of the film. This is a sign of things to come; throughout, Bergman resists the urge to edit the film exactly to the music as if refusing to subjugate the visuals to the soundtrack.
While Bergman gives us a proscenium arch, his film feels far from stagy. Slowly, the action moves further and further backstage until the stage has become the world. Bergman uses arresting close-ups and profile shots of his singer-actors, often training the camera on characters who react rather than act (The Queen of the Night aria is a terrifying example of both devices). The singing seems three-dimensional and alive thanks to a marvelous audio track where “voice emanate from exactly the right positions on set” (Cowie, Flute).
There is a fair amount of spoken dialogue in Mozart’s Singspiel, which Bergman makes his singer-actors whisper in a way that both slows things down and reminds you of film’s power to capturing subtle human psychology. That Bergman marries this potential to opera’s searing emotionalism is part of what makes his Magic Flute one of the finest of all Film-Operas.
While there is no proscenium in Friedrich’s terrifying and unrelenting Elektra, the overtly theatrical set design implies an arch hidden from view. Friedrich uses harsh diegetic sounds – rain, whips, scrubbing – a gray-blue palette with jarring interruptions of red, and shocking instances of violence and bloodletting to create a perfect visual accompaniment to Strauss’ relentless and visceral music.

The recording is conducted by Karl Böhm and features the fiery Leonie Rysanek in the title role. Rysanek and her peers also act with an expressionistic and heightened manner that gives the film - which is impeccably dubbed – the feel of a live-performance. Through the electrifying soundtrack, effective use of flashbacks, gripping violence and intensity of the performances, Friedrich uses theatrical and cinematic devices in tandem to create an aesthetically and emotionally overwhelming experience. His insistence, along with Bergman, to “move onto the stage,” (borrowing Kael’s language) shows a third way in which the artificial stylized of opera and the realistic demands of cinema can be reconciled.

Having explored these three modes of making Film-Operas, we might acknowledge that genre can play a role in determining which of these approaches a filmmaker chooses: it might be as difficult to imagine the Magic Flute being treated as monumental as it is to imagine Otello treated like fantasy. The modes that I have outlined have been the dominant options for filmmakers of the past sixty years, but they are by no means the only options. Advances in technology and changing styles of opera production and filmmaking all the potential to influence how Film-Operas is made. Already, there is a wildly original and highly successful film of John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer (2003) shot in a pseudo-documentary style that brings to mind the gritty drama of directors like Paul Greengrass and Alejandro González Iñárritu. A handheld camera captures the singer-actors, who sing in the naturalistic, often-declamatory style of Adams’ music. The razor-sharp editing and crisp sound keeps the tension rising and rising. Call it Opéra Vérité.

The new HD broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera point one way to the future of Film-Opera. The richness, color-saturation and crispness of HD Video could theoretically bridge the traditional gap between opera on film and on video. Technology has the potential to can greatly enhance Film-Opera, but only if mobilized along with a host of established cinematic contrivances and strategies. For without artistry, one ends up merely producing a document of a live performance.
Given the historical and aesthetic similarities that exist between film and opera, it is surprising that the subject hasn’t enjoyed greater scholarly interest. Perhaps this is due to a lingering ambivalence towards the status of Film-Opera as well as the danger of it replacing live performance altogether. In Opera on Screen, Marcia J. Citron airs a related query: “When a Film-Opera tends so strongly toward realism, does in run the risk of self-destructing?” The question assumes that the stage is the proper domain of opera. It is hospitable to the notion of Film-Opera being treated as legitimate opera in its own right. If anything, I feel that the history of Film-Opera over the last half-century gives the lie to such a view.

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Bibliography

Citron, Marcia. Opera on Screen New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1987

Kael, Pauline “The Current Cinema” The New Yorker Nov. 17, 1975 (pp. 169-171), Oct. 29, 1984 (pp. 122-125)

Filmography

Aida Dir. Clemente Fracassi. Perfs. Sophia Loren et al. 1953 Film.

Carmen Dir. Francesco Rosi. Perfs. Placido Domingo et al 1983. Film. Gaumont. 1983

The Death of Klinghoffer. Dir. Penny Woochick. Perfs. Sanford Sylvan et al. Film 2003. BBC 4

Don Giovanni Dir. Joseph Losey. Perfs. José van Dam, Kiri Te Kanawa. Film. Gaumont. 197?

Elektra. Dir. Götz Friedrich. Perfs. Leonie Rynsanek, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. 1982. Deutsche Grammophon. Film

The Magic Flute Dir. Ingmar Bergman. 1975. Sveriges Radio AB. Criterion Collection DVD 2004. Essay by Peter Cowie.

Otello Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Perfs. Placido Domingo, Kattia Ricciarelli 1986

Parsifal. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Film. 1982

The Tales of Hoffmann. Dirs. Michael Powell, Emerich Pressburger. Perfs. Moria Shearer, Robert Helpmann. Film. Studio Canal. 1951. Criterion Collection DVD 2006. Essay by Ian Christian. Commentary by Martin Scorsese and Bruce Elder

Art / Porn I

noreply@blogger.com (Adam J. Goldmann) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:33:00 +0000

It has long obsessed me, the attempt to come to a clear-cut understanding of how erotic art and pornography differ. I thus inaugurate this crudely titled blog (Scholarshit) with my own nocturnal musings on the topic.
Any comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

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In 2004, the Swedish Academy awarded an Austrian writer known for her painfully explicit prose the Nobel Prize for Literature. Amid a flurry of controversy, Elfriede Jelinek was given the coveted prize, prompting at least one member of the academy, Knut Ahnlund, to step down. He described Jelinek’s work as “whining, unenjoyable, public pornography” and said that the decision to award her the prize had “confused the general view of literature as art.”

Many of the 20th century’s most celebrated novels were brought out amid shock and scandal. Though public debates about pornography today are more muted, issues of sex and art continue to provoke, resonate and perplex.

Jelinek’s 1989 novel “Lust” is perhaps the author’s most explicit and controversial text. I turn to a comment the author made clarifying her intent (from the German magazine Stern 37) “The distancing, critical function of aesthetic mediation is to replace direct consumption of lust that typifies pulp pornography: Lust should not be consumed like commercial pornography. Through aesthetic mediation, it should, as it were, be thrown back into the face of the reader. What I aim to achieve is that the reader no longer can roll around in lust, like a pig in its sty, but instead grows pale in the process of reading.”

Many of the issues Jelinek raises are relevant for discussions about Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Réage, or Bataille, et al, authors who, along with Jelinek, blur the boundaries between literature and pornography. “Lust,” enables the reader to explore this fragile (possible shifting) boundary between art and pornography. These boundaries may in part be fixed by notions of imagination, collusion, pleasure, embarrassment and fear. All these are relevant to a discussion of Jelinek’s work.

Through their transgressiveness, cruelty and obscenity, Jelinek’s books also often offer social critique. (In this sense, her work falls under Deleuze’s category– along with Sade and Sacher-Masoch – of the pornological.) It is interesting to note that she straddled both sides of the pornography debate in the 1980s, which may hint to her desire to be viewed both as a pornographer and an anti-pornographer. We can see this tension clearly in her work, which present her bleak view of human sexuality in ways both graphically pornographic and artistically subtle.

Whereas the work of pornography (WOP) appeals directly to desire, erotic art stimulates both our desire and our intellect. The promise of pleasure, therefore, that pornography offers is that of instant gratification. The fantasy arrives pre-constructed, completely manufactured and the ways in which the imagination can engage with the material are rather limited. On the other hand, when one contemplates a work of erotic art (WOEA), the burden on the imagination to fill in is so much the greater. The fragmentary and distancing style of Jelinek’s prose requires great input on the reader’s behalf. Thus, we become conspirators in an anguished vision that makes our blood run cold.

Nor is it essential to maintain critical distance when engaging with a WOEA. I am convinced that WOEA can and should engage with the reader corporally, breathlessly. And while the promise of pleasure may be latent in the WOEA, it is concerned with more than pre-manufactured orgasms. Jelinek’s work takes this notion several steps further. She offers us an erotic vision with no promise of pleasure: rather with an inherent promise of pain.

The act of reading a WOEA can be akin to living out an author’s sexual fantasies. The less in control the spectator is, the more uncomfortable he is made and the greater the achievement of the writer. Control can either mean that the reader is being guided too much or not enough at all. As we journey through Jelinek’s sexual nightmares, we frequently grow frustrated with our guide.

Sade placed enormous demands on the imagination and asked the reader to surrender to the extremity of his vision. Sade created his lurid tomes as stages on which to enact his darkest and most tortured desires. Jelinek resembles Sade in her grotesquerie and the encyclopedic cataloging of cruelty. But rather than titillate, the explicitness of a Jelinek text is meant to provoke reasoned analysis by eliciting disgust.

Whereas the WOP services the client, the WOEA seduces him. Thus a communion between author and reader is created. The fantasy is created midway between the book and the reader. The motives are different by way of Jelinek through the techniques are similar. Jelinek seduces us to her vision of non-redemptive, pleasureless sex, which springs up midway between the page and our eyes.

We fear of engaging with the WOEA as normal, healthy art. By stirring our erotic fantasies and at the same time giving us an aesthetic sensation, the WOEA threatens to break down the barrier between the public and private sector. Jelinek’s savage and relentless view of sexuality promises to tear down this barrier.

There is something potentially embarrassing in the act of reading a WOEA. This embarrassment stems from the fact that the author asks us to exercise these private desires and feelings in the public sphere of literature. Jelinek’s brutality is meant to humiliate the reader. Hers is a cruel, sadistic literature.

Whereas the pornographer will vulgarly flash the audience, the skilled eroticist will engage the spellbound crowd in a suave seduction. Jelinek, the consummate anti-eroticist, often co-opts strategies and techniques from pornography to fuel her anguished and powerful writing.

There is sometimes the impulse to defend a WOEA by focusing on the non-erotic content. This is both defensive and dishonest. Furthermore, it threatens the possibility of adequately exploring the role of the erotic in art. I consider these ruminations as a standing invitation to to such a discussion.