Explanation and Value in the Arts (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts)

Explanation and value in the arts offers penetrating studies by art historians, literary theorists, and philosophers, of issues central to explaining works of literature and painting. The first chapters look at the sources of interest in the fine arts and point to the intimate relation between aesthetic and other values. The next contributions develop the interaction between value and explanation by examining the construction of value in the study of the arts, including considerations of the nature of creativity and the principles for the explanations of works. A final section takes up issues of the role of ideology and the determining role of power.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE ARTS Series editors

SALIM KEMALand IVAN GASKELL

Explanation and value in the arts

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE ARTS Series editors SALIM KEMALand IVAN GASKELL Advisory board Stanley Cavell, R. K. Elliott, Stanley E. Fish, David Freedberg, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Gage, Carl Hausman, Ronald Hepburn, Mary Hesse, HansRobert Jauss, Martin Kemp, Jean Michel Massing, Michael Podro, Edward S. Said, Michael Tanner Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts is a forum for examining issues common to philosophy and critical disciplines that deal with the history of art, literature, film, music, and drama. In order to inform and advance both critical practice and philosophical approaches, the series analyzes the aims, procedures, language, and results of inquiry in the critical fields, and examines philosophical theories by reference to the needs of arts disciplines. This interaction of ideas and findings, and the ensuing discussion, brings into focus new perspectives and expands the terms in which the debate is conducted. Already published The language of art history Landscape, natural beauty, and the arts Forthcoming titles include Authenticity and the performing arts Politics, aesthetics, and the arts

Explanation and value in the arts

Edited by SALIM KEMAL Pennsylvania State University and IVAN GASKELL Harvard University Art Museums

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521419260 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN-13 978-0-521-41926-0 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41926-3 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2006

Contents

List of contributors Editors' acknowledgments 1

page viii ix

Interests, values, and explanations

1

SALIM KEMALand IVAN GASKELL

2

Fiction and reality in painting

MICHAELPODRO

Franz Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation of his work WALTER BIEMEL 4 On relocating ethical criticism WAYNEC. BOOTH

43

3

5

Explanation and value: what makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? MARK ROSKILL

6 Is art history? SVETLANAALPERS 7 Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history GREGG HOROWITZ 8 9

55 71 94 109 127

Fullness and parsimony: notes on creativity in the arts JON ELSTER

146

Principles of a sociology of cultural works

173

PIERRE BOURDIEU

10

Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts

190

RICHARD ELDRIDGE

11 Film, rhetoric, and ideology

215

NOEL CARROLL

Index

238

vn

Contributors

SVETLANA ALPERS University of California, Berkeley WALTER BIEMEL LehrstuhJ fiir Philosophie, Diisseldorf

WAYNE C. BOOTH University of Chicago PIERRE BOURDIEU College de France, Paris

NOEL CARROLL University of Wisconsin

RICHARD ELDRIDGE Swarthmore College JONELSTER University of Chicago and the University of Oslo

GREGG HOROWITZ Sarah Lawrence College MICHAEL PODRO University of Essex

MARKROSKILL University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Vlll

Editors' acknowledgments

Several members of the series' Advisory Board have given us a great deal of help and advice. We should also like to thank Richard Eldridge and Joseph Kockelmans for their help. Michael Podro's chapter first appeared in Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. X: Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (eds.), Funktionen des Fiktiven (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1983), and is reprinted here with the author's permission. Svetlana Alpers's chapter, "Is art history?" is reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled "Discoveries and Interpretations: Studies in Contemporary Scholarship, Volume I," Summer 1977, Volume 106 Number 3. At Cambridge University Press Terence Moore (New York), Judith Ayling, and Catherine Max (Cambridge) have once more been very patient and very helpful, and we should like to thank them for their support. We continue to owe a great deal to Jane Baston and Jane Whitehead. This book is for Leo and Sara.

IX

Interests, values, and explanations SALIM KEMAL and IVAN GASKELL

Paintings, novels, and poems represent objects or describe events by giving order to material that is itself of visual or literary interest: the objects and events become available through the medium in which they are formulated. The visual interest of Matisse's La fenetre ouverte lies in part in its combination of lines and colours that eschew the natural spectrum to represent a sunlit window, or the literary interest of Auden's "In Praise of Limestone" depends on its language fusing private sensibility to natural formations.1 The aesthetic valuation of fine arts does not occlude these interests since visual and literary interests can serve other purposes.2 Botanical illustrations and engineering drawings use visually interesting material to make clear the important features of plants or clarify the dynamical relations between parts of constructions. Moreover, the conception of aesthetic value is itself at issue. Even in the eighteenth century, when it was grasped by exercising taste, this faculty appears to have so varied with changes in arrangements for displaying and distributing works3 that aesthetic evaluation was difficult to distinguish from evaluation of other kinds. Consonantly, contemporary art historians may examine aesthetically valuable works, but art history also gives stature to works for their iconography, context, their psychological depth, what they reveal of the history of production, the psychology of artists, and the pathology of societies - where the latter can go to explain the visual interests of works. The salience of visual or literary interests points in two directions, one internal to a work and the other external, though not necessarily as an irresolvable bifurcation. Interests are significant as values ascribed by subjects, who learn to discriminate what is important in a work. Such discernment depends on a complex system of

Salim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJJ distinctions and economies of preference in which visual or literary interest is not capital, and which affect both the artist and the critic or historian. Artist and critic attend to works only mediately. Among other things, the very practice of discerning interest, of giving significance or value to these qualities, depends on constitutive conventions that make it meaningful to put marks on canvas or to give words a non-pragmatic order. It depends on stories told about works that locate the importance of visual and literary interests. And these practices are social in the further sense that the discernment, location, and construction of interesting objects has value within a social scheme. It carries a social charge, blessing some discriminations with gravity and pillorying others. These issues of the nature of interests, aesthetic value, and the mode of explanation appropriate for works of art structure this volume. The first three chapters introduce the themes of explanation and value. Michael Podro examines the density, a presence of the medium of representation, to which explanations of works must give significance. This weight is the value the medium bears for us. Failure to attend to it results in incomplete explanations of paintings, and therefore in inadequate aesthetic evaluations. Walter Biemel and Wayne C. Booth disrupt the purity of aesthetic evaluation in other ways. Biemel proposes that philosophy and its study of value is vital to constructing and understanding works while Booth shows why we must practice an ethical criticism. To explain these positions in more detail, we can begin with Michael Podro's chapter. In "Fiction and reality in painting," he examines what he calls the density painting. This is the sense that it can do things that other media cannot, which is its visual interest. Painting reconstitutes its subject matter in ways particular to itself. For example, as part of the process of making the subject matter its own, the orgy scene of Hogarth's Rake's Progress gives release and relation to the dancer and the rake's clothing. Painting is representational in these cases not because it imitates reality but because it construes its subject matter in particular ways. It is a fiction because of its mode of construal rather than for its difference from any moment of reality. At one level, then, Podro's chapter identifies what the visual interest of paintings consists in by explaining how the medium constitutes or formulates its subject matter. To explain this sense of fiction Podro raises issues of the relation of subject to medium that makes for the density of painting, and of

Interests, values, and explanations representation to design, and considers the resources that painting draws upon just as literature draws on language in general. To explain how representation in paintings is a matter of construction in a medium rather than simple recognition of subject matter he first examines three arguments that a regard for the medium is distinct from one for subject matter. One maintains that the medium only serves as a means for bringing viewers to the represented subject. The more fully viewers attend to what is represented, the less they attend to the marks by means of which the depiction succeeds, and vice versa. Podro argues that this claim ignores a distinction between material and medium. Chalk or paint marks are not simply material with given properties but also serve as a medium — a controlled use of material, just as sounds are material that in controlled uses convey meanings in a language. The viewer attends to material, to be sure, but sees it as a medium, and attending to the material as medium does not exclude grasping the represented object. A second argument for the distinction of material from recognition contends that attending to the material effaces perception of the depiction and vice versa. The duck-rabbit figure that can be seen as either but never both exemplifies this distinction. Podro denies that it adequately explains the sense of transformation that occurs in seeing material as depiction: citing the case of Musique aux Tuileries he argues that transformations in painting do not always efface recognition of the material, and they are not paradigmatic of representation in general. A third contrast is between material and subject. Chardin uses a rough paint texture to give a very vivid sense of polished silver, while Rubens uses crumbling chalk to convey shimmering silk. But these contrasts do not argue against the material being a medium; they only remind us that the material may have a role other than and in addition to its role as a medium. Recognition does not exhaust the way we see the medium, 4 and a recognition that crumbly chalk can give us a sense of silk is further cause for marvel or irony. If the sense of the medium is necessary for depiction, Podro needs to explain its distinctiveness - how paints occasion and determine representations. He does this in terms of continuities between object and representation that run through paintings. This subject matter and the consistency of rhythm or texture of marks on canvas are mutually determining. The flow of line and the demands of form mutually affect each other: the subject matter takes on fresh characteristics from being reconstituted in its medium.

SaJim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJJ This representation through reconstitution of subject matter in its medium calls for a distinctive sense of design. Gombrich proposed that depiction was, on the one hand, a matter of representation (ultimately a "fidelity to nature") and, on the other, a design (composition). The two elements seem to push in opposite directions with the more natural being the less ordered and vice versa.5 Podro identifies two conditions that Gombrich proposes for order: symmetry and a regularity that is identifiable in or parallel to the surface of the painting. Yet the distinction and alleged opposition does not adequately explain representation. Symmetry is not always incompatible with natural appearances — for example, Monet's Poppy Field uses symmetry to define space, while surface patterns on some Greek vases use the regularity of lines with decreasing intervals to suggest form. Thus symmetry and representation facilitate each other and are distinguishable rather than conflicting objectives - a facilitation that resolves the apparent contrasts by discovering continuities between, say, Monet's painting of the fagade of Rouen Cathedral and drawings by van Eyck. This interrelation between subject matter and medium promises other conclusions. The consistencies within the picture will make for its coherence, showing what is its point. The use of patterns of paint is appropriate to the subject matter in that Hogarth's placing of figures in The Rake's Progress, together with the textures and solidities provided by the distribution of materials, signify a moral point. But these conclusions need more than talk of consistency, design, representation, and medium. They need a larger sense of paintings generally and their purpose. For this, Podro proposes, an analogy with language becomes pertinent, and that raises issues of what relates to painting as ordinary language does to literature. Podro initially suggests that literature in some way represents ordinary uses "as a quotation represents an utterance but does not make it."6 This explains two characteristics of literature: the freshness of the meanings constituted by literature when it reconstructs ordinary language, and the salience of language in literature. However, this cannot be the whole story since some literature does not merely represent the use of language; it is a case of language in histories, philosophy, and other narratives. The concerns of these narratives overlap. History and philosophy may include literary language, and novels may rely on descriptions of real situations. The two are not completely separable in terms of engagement or disengagement with real events or of the use of literary devices.

Interests, values, and explanations One feature of literature seems unavoidable. By contrast with other uses of language, literature calls attention to its use of language. The "distinctive feature of literature is to hold something in the mind with particular sensitivity, with uncommon exactness, and to hold it there in the mind by attention to the language in which it is formulated."7 It succeeds by disrupting our habits and leading us to attend to the "verbal texture" of the language. This model suggests that distinguished painting, like literature, may demand a similar complex and sensitive attention, while painting that failed to draw this attention to its formulations would be like non-literary language. And just as literature presupposes other uses of language, so undistinguished representation and depiction may form a background for grasping the significance of distinguished painting. By this account, the notion of painting is doubly evaluative. It is evaluative in distinguishing activity that is interesting because it is complex, sensitive, and self-reflective from its undistinguished counterpart, and also in attending to particular features rather than others when it "takes the world into itself" - when it makes its material its own. In this sense, painting is a fiction, but it is a very distinctive kind of fiction because it does not so much contrast with reality as incorporate it, structure and reconstitute it, in ways permitted by its medium. It is not like a map or scientific description (in at least one understanding of science) of reality in which two logically independent entities must correspond in signal and consistent respects. Painting, like literature, does not seek to provide such an exact correspondence but instead extracts and reintegrates the features of the world into its own structures.8 The evaluation involved in this reintegration, the visual interest these features of a painting have because they reconstitute our experience, is the object of art historical description and explanation. Art historical analysis then already supposes some kind of hierarchy of preferences, of what is significant and what is merely peripheral. The evaluation implicit in this ordering is not the result of aesthetic evaluation even if it can be the basis for it. It is, rather, implicated in the meaningfulness of representations and in the interest works have for viewers. What makes them striking, telling, and worth pursuing, even when they are not successful as aesthetic objects, or when the criteria for the aesthetic evaluation no longer seem as compelling as they were previously, what gives them a stature because they hold our attention to the elements and their composition, is their visual interest.

Salim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJJ In explaining our interest in works by reference to the complex nature of the medium, Podro's chapter moves beyond the distinction between inert material and meaningful subject matter that has raised and plagued questions about the psychological or epistemological foundation of art historical analysis and, in terms of the ontological status of works of art, structured some recent debate in aesthetics. By arguing that our concern is with the medium - with a pictorial material already in use - he locates the issue on this side of meaningfulness rather than seeks a source for aesthetic qualities out of inert material. He can address questions of the ways in which the medium itself is of interest because of the meanings it generates for its subject matter.9 Podro's chapter develops the concern with visual interest by explaining how this value is constituted. Representations are fictions, we might say, in being more than imitations of reality. If they were important as images of reality, they would be significant only for their correspondence to reality, and their nature as images would become redundant. They would not then possess any of the visual interest that makes painting an art, for the mode of their construction would be less interesting than the objects existing independently of all images. By contrast, visual interest addresses the mode of representation itself, the meaningfulness of the practices by which we give significance, value and order to our experience. Representations are fictions because they interpellate order in material that becomes visually interesting to our capacities and concerns. We may continue this interaction between explanation and value by considering another discipline - literature - to show how the entry of values into explanations is also a step across disciplinary boundaries - in this case that between aesthetic and other values. Recently the rejection of orthodox disciplinary boundaries has been less prevalent in the study of painting than in literature. Perhaps this results from developments in literary theory and critical analysis, which rest on the academic respectability literary criticism has enjoyed. When its needs "overtook" the possibilities of analysis made available in, say, orthodox New Criticism or formalist analysis, it could turn to philosophy with some assurance about its own importance, whereas art appreciation and criticism until recently had to explain themselves. In any case, having considered the role of visual interest in explanations of works, suggesting the importance of analogies with language and of historicity, we may turn to works of literature, to consider their explanation and evaluation, before

Interests, values, and explanations returning to the external aspects of visual, literary, and other interests. In their chapters Walter Biemel and Wayne C. Booth examine the conditions for the interpretation or explanation of works. Biemel's chapter relies on a conception of philosophy that takes historicity seriously and argues that literary understanding requires philosophical interpretation: that literary works invite philosophical questions. If art history too turns to language to explain its practices, and especially to the literary use of language, then this association of literature with philosophy will have implications for art history. In a comparable vein, Booth's work has explored the interaction between literature, subjects, and moral philosophy. In his chapter, "Franz Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation of his works," Walter Biemel presents a case study of two of Kafka's stories to show how philosophical conceptions structure works of literature. To be sure, given his long relation to Martin Heidegger, Biemel is relying on particular philosophical conceptions to argue about a particular kind of text, but the implication is that comparable interrelations between elements will structure other kinds of texts. Biemel seeks a relation between literature and philosophy that does not reduce either to its opposite. A literary work of art relies on an enlivening use of language to generate a world created by its author to be experienced by the reader.10 Philosophy too concerns itself with the human world "and the problematic of how the constituting function in the relationship between [humanity] and world bears out." 11 Both, then, interpret the world, one attending to human relations and the other to the meaning of "all human relationality." Their concerns are not simply continuous with each other but must interpenetrate in so far as they illustrate and explain the same features. In particular, without a philosophical interpretation the meaningfulness of literary works would escape the reader. The claim seems unorthodox only if readers have become immured to the presence of philosophy of a particular kind in texts and therefore fail to recognize its role in determining what is significant to literary works. To explain that contribution, Biemel examines two stories by Kafka: "In the Penal Colony" and "The Burrow." He sets aside a usual tendency to see these apparently confusing stories as nothing more than excursions of an author's psychology, preferring to proceed in two steps, first of exegesis, which clarifies the process and the structure of narration, and second of interpretation, which

Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell "deals with the inherent sense of the story."12 The first story represents a series of contradictions: the unsuitable uniforms, which mean "home" to the guards, and are an unmistakable sign of homelessness; the message to be imprinted in the victim's body is indecipherable; and so on. Every function of the mechanical parts of the story runs counter to making sense. This run of contradictions raises issues about meaningfulness. "As a rule we take it for granted that man is a rational animal, but overlook that he is exposed to non-sense and can even be overshadowed by it." 13 In this instance Kafka signals the manner in which justice turns into injustice and legality breaks free of its anchor in public and due processes, until the "perverted conceptualization of legality must, in the end, annul itself."14 By this account, the story becomes a study of fanaticism, presaging "the awesome, negative fact of our age." The apparently opaque perceptions that it consists of appear through their exegesis as a set of relationships between the characters, depicting choices and behaviors that, in turn, make sense when, through interpretation, they signify human reality. A relationship between individuals premised on the considerations that drive the prison officer depends on a particular conception of humanity; the result of pursuing that mode of behavior is self-annihilation. These relationships between literature and philosophy become clearer, Biemel proposes, through the second short story, "The Burrow." A schematic overview of this story "reveals three parts: (1) the animal's idea of the burrow, (2) the animal's leaving the burrow, and (3) the animal's coming back to the burrow." 15 These stages articulate "a high degree of sensitivity" toward and need for security, which constantly nullifies the security that the burrow provides. "Along with a striving for security, the enemies, which the burrow is supposed to protect it from, begin to enter its imagination."16 Even the stillness that the burrow provides is disrupted by a fear of what could threaten it. Similarly, when it leaves the burrow, its denizen restricts itself to watching over it. And once the animal has returned to its seclusion, a crisis occurs when an almost inaudible whistling wakes it from sleep. Unable to comprehend the sound, the animal loses its peace of mind and is led to destroy the burrow it had produced, in order to control the noise. Biemel sees a process of self-justification as the theme of this story. The animal is like a human being in that self-justification depends on the agents' bringing themselves "to realization." This realization of 8

Interests, values, and explanations the human being is a matter of constantly making choices that determine "the direction of their existence."17 Heidegger investigated this procedure through the concept of authenticity: "the fact that individuals must find their very own proper individuality for themselves, or, for that matter, that individuals may also lose it whenever a central choice ill serves their own possibilities - their latent abilities, talents and interests - or when it is overshadowed by ideas prevailing in the social group or human milieu with which individuals very often have come to identify themselves."18 This authenticity is most acute at the zenith of life, Biemel argues. Then an agent can no longer excuse its choice by hoping to realize itself at some future time. In the story, the construction of its burrow "is the major act of self-realization," but it remains unsatisfactory because the animal is tentative about its achievement. There is "an abyss between what has been accomplished ... and what is being experienced," suggesting that lacking certain criteria the animal cannot judge the adequacy of its work, and so is pushed into a limitless uncertainty. In the story, which now appears as a problem to be solved by referring the achievement to its experience, the animal is the enemy of its own security and the destroyer of its own construction. This interpretation calls for a second phase, Biemel proposes, that will penetrate the narrative order, showing its basis in the "Dimension of Contemporary Metaphysics." He turns to Heidegger for an analysis of this dimension, especially the essay "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," where he "came closest to determining the nature of our present time." 19 In this essay Heidegger uses the phrase "preview in representation," (vorsteJJender VorbJick) which suggests a relation of the material of experience by which subjects emplace themselves, giving objects and events a status that, rather than trying to correlate them into some overarching order or under some single explanatory principle derived from a method of analysis of objects, considers them in their particularity. In this context, the "subject" also takes on a distinctive connotation. It is no longer simply a substance underlying experience but an agency: "man struggles for a place allowing him to be that entity which draws a measure on the whole of what is.

'20

Biemel argues that Kafka's narration confronts us with this act of emplacing: the animal's desire to establish an absolutely secure domicile emplaces what exists in the story. This search for security "is not an accidental concept introduced by Kafka, but belongs to our very own times." The principal issue becomes one of a calculative

SaJim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJJ use of reason, of a technological thought that focuses primarily on identifying the best means, the determining causes and their manipulation, according to some single principle and method that seeks to be comprehensive but only reduces differences to quantification — to the detriment of other modes of thinking. Among the latter Heidegger includes a creative attention to things that is not simply determined by the security attendant upon following a known procedure. "Man's hope of finding lasting security by his endeavors to keep almost total control over entities has turned out to be a futile hope not only in the burrow, but also in our times." 21 The result of giving over to this search for control is that "our terminal sojourn on earth is no longer concerned with true dwelling, but has come to be determined by our incessant search for security, a security which will finish in total insecurity."22 Relying on an inappropriate sense of order, any satisfaction we gain will prove illusory and self-destructive. Without this philosophical understanding of the need for security and its implications, interpretations of Kafka's story will miscarry, being unable ultimately to make a full and deep sense of its parts. Without implying that Heidegger alone is right or that no other interpretation of Kafka's story is possible, Biemel reminds us that "the uniqueness of art consists in the fact that it always invites interpretation — as long as we do not find satisfaction merely in forcing entities to be under our control, but keep on looking for what, in art, reveals itself."23 Heidegger articulates issues that seem particularly germane to Kafka. Other approaches may find other meanings in the stories, some more authentic than others, Biemel suggests, but in every case some deep sense of what it means to strive for sense, and the kinds of order it is important to find, will structure our grasp of works. In the complete absence of all meaning the performance of responding to or constructing art becomes vacuous; the presence of meaning invites philosophy of some kind. While Biemel finds Heidegger an epochal thinker and therefore uses his work to explain Kafka's stories, Wayne C. Booth emphasizes a somewhat different remit for philosophy. Most recently in his book The Company We Keep, he turns to the ethical and philosophical issues present in any reading of novels. In "On relocating ethical criticism" he identifies two "dogmas" that would be hostile to his approach. These claim that artistic worth is independent of ideological, ethical, or political issues, and that where factual analysis reveals such commitments, critics' appraisal of works cannot depend 10

Interests, values, and explanations on an appraisal of those values. By contrast, analyses from deconstruction to cultural critique have conversed about practical values in responding to works of art. The latter provide the arena in which Booth's proposals engage: how should we deal with "the inescapable fact that even the purest, most 'literary,' works produce actual, tangible, ethical and political changes in the lives of those who engage with them? And how must our appraisals of literary value be affected by our judgments about the value of these changes?"24 As part of this concern for ethics in reading, Booth suggests that ethical critics must "relocate" themselves to avoid "traditional distortions." He emphasizes four such relocations: to move "(1) from blanket attacks or defenses of large lumpings like 'poetry' or 'literature' ... to detailed formal inquiry into the precise nature of our experience with particular works"; (2) from positivist or "scientistic" notions of proof that leave "rhetoric ... [as] a corrupt or decadent attempt to seduce or exploit or overpower; (3) from a worry about moral obligations or codes or lessons about them ... to appraisals of the ethical quality of human relations, especially the quality of relation between authors and readers; and (4) from a search for a single hierarchy of goods to a radical pluralism of hierarchies."25 The variety and scope of particular works that "may prove either beneficial or harmful" militates against relying too heavily on the large-scale categories such as poetry, literature, etc. The engagement Booth seeks is much more likely to be fruitful over particular works. Such particularity is ill served by the deductive model of proof usual in science. Instead, our interaction with other judges continuously modifies our engagement with these works, and is a matter of "coduction." It cannot aim for an absolute certainty promised by scientistic laws. Its intention is to develop "the best character possible, under the circumstances,"26 through conversation with particular books, rather than to impose an external and universal standard. Art works then do not so much teach us "the right moral code" as lead us to reflect on the ethical quality of lives lived in company with them. This relation between subject, sensibility, and works, resulting in what we might call a texture of living, can lead us to recognize the close symbiotic relation between self and other as part of the "coduction" around works. It precludes any reductive identification of some single most basic element of a work that generates some specific morally coded behaviour in some most fundamental element of the given self. Such a move is infected by the 11

SaJim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJJ limitations of a scientistic need. In turn, the non-reductive development of a texture of living will renounce monism for pluralism, allowing a variety of sources for and styles in which to promote ethical quality. Booth's commitment to pluralism generated a critique that deserves summary. Martha Nussbaum argues that it occurs in five versions that do not obviously sit well together. Booth identifies these varieties of pluralism as "(1) a multiplicity of component goods; (la) a multiplicity with conflicts; (2) as contextualism; (3) as multiple specification of the good; (4) as plural world-versions without contradiction, and (5) as plural versions with contradictions."27 Nussbaum suggests that the last two are problematic because they seem "dangerously like relativism."28 But Booth maintains that they follow from the earlier three definitions, and do not have the dangerous consequences that Nussbaum fears. To make his case, he shows how, for example, a need for hierarchies is usual to both Christianity and Aristotle's ethics, even though at one level this seems unlikely enough to suggest that a pluralism accepting of both would be incoherent. This claim that two conceptions "that seem to conflict can each be not just coherent but in some radical sense true, while they are still not reducible to any one of them or to any synthesis," Booth proposes, has "two consequences, the first of which may sound perhaps like the relativism Nussbaum fears."29 The first is that agents in a particular historical period, say of ancient Greece, will not easily, if at all, enter into another, say, Christian, ethic or a fully democratic or egalitarian society, or vice versa. But the second consequence, he maintains, ameliorates those fears. Serious students can discover enough about alien value systems to determine whether they "register genuine notions of better or worse." 30 And this can lead to greater sensitivity about the students' own moral and intellectual lives, expanding the terms of their own understanding and behavior. More important than agreeing on the one supreme theory is consensus about "the importance of addressing, as clearly and honestly as possible, the full quality, including the emotional effect, of our engagements with the works we choose to discuss." 31 Booth's concern is with the way books engage with practical life, their literary quality subtending an ethical texture. In this he seems in full agreement with Biemel, for whom the meaning of works depends on philosophy.32 The next chapters continue this interaction between value and explanation. Roskill examines the extra-aesthetic 12

Interests, values, and explanations considerations that make visually interesting material valuable, thus adding to the taxonomy of values in the arts, but also arguing that these considerations apply to visual works and not to literature. His contribution occurs through a citation of Richard Hamilton's work. In "Explanation and value: what makes the visual arts so different, so appealing?", he argues that works embody an attention-gaining choice and commitment on the artist's part that the audience is supposed to share when it understands the work. This sharing gives value to these "artifactual entities." Roskill proposes initially that such valuation in painting and literature usually depends on three kinds of explanations. First, a work becomes significant because it encapsulates its period and style; second, it may be the first of its kind, embodying the "occasion and force" of a set of emergent interests; third, it may "sum[ ] up and show[ ] forth certain social and political values, or ideals of the past" which, presumably, are seminal to the present and future character of a form of life.33 The interaction between these three kinds of explanation, and the way rarity, desirability, and value all jostle with each other in actual considerations, obviously complicate this picture. The preeminence of particular authors or painters can lend a value to all objects associated with them, including "the proverbial laundry list," because these effects are supposedly informed by their genius. "In that sort of treatment, the work of art appears as a unique, associatively charged material item of revelatory order which we can share in, on the basis of a response guiding explanation to match." 34 To explain the occurrence of this valuation and explanation in terms of the quality of works themselves, rather than the economics of the market or a fetish for artists, Roskill provides three examples. The vagaries of a small painting, related in subject matter to John Constable's The Cornfield, serves to show how similarities in technique, concern, and visual character led to valuing the small painting as a "mid-stage preparatory sketch" for the final painting. The earlier work serves as a "specific evidential focus" for explaining the later version because of the artist's construction of its visually interesting features. Second, the history of a work by Theodore Gericault also turns on visual interest in so far as it "involves the conceptual and material nature of the artistic project."35 The concern here is with "how far [the] scheme of creation" of a painting "may be extended to incorporate extant works which can be taken as representative in their leading features of the scheme as a whole." 36 The case concerns a portrait Gericault executed as part of a set of ten portraits of the 13

SaJim KemaJ and Ivan GaskeJJ insane. The visually interesting features of a particular canvas, housed in an American museum, seem to argue for its membership of the Gericault series; but other technical evidence decisively refutes this claim. The technical, non-visual evidence, however, does not play a clearly defined role in these considerations. 'There is no scale of assessment that can give equal weight" to all the technical, visual, and historical factors, "yet there is the sense of its being possible, through this painting, to fill out what can be said about Gericault's scheme as a whole. Value attributed to the work on these grounds of interpretative possibility remains constant, even as explanation pays its dues to the features that make such an attribution problematic."37 The third example relocates a work in time to justify ascribing it the status of a masterpiece. He cites the case of Andre Derain's The Dance. Previously dated to 1909, it was later assigned to 1905-6, square in the Fauvist period and therefore in a more senior relation than before its redating to Henri Matisse's dominant position among the Fauvists during the years 1905 to 1907. The Dance's new location in time makes possible a new role, allowing Derain's works to "play[ ] off against Matisse's ... setting their own distinctive trajectories alongside his, rather than merely following his lead." 38 Derain's own pictorial ideas, the visual interest his works possessed, is promoted by their seminal role in the group's work. Although Roskill does not use the term, all three examples serve to illustrate that visually interesting materials have value because they have an explanatory power that makes them seminal to particular developments, groups, or schools, and basic to art historical explanation. The pictorial ideas of Derain's picture, the development of painterly resources in Constable's sketch, and the relation of the techniques, concerns, and visual character of the portraits in Gericault's series, all attend to the use of the medium itself to explore the nature of representation, the play of light, or the weight and solidity of colors. Their success turns on these factors, and whatever else they may be, the works are interesting and seminal also because they exemplify problems raised and resolved in painting. They are examples of how particular artists faced problems of representation, of the relation between two dimensions and three, of the reconstitution of objects in media, of the forcefulness of colors in comparison with each other and in comparison with lines, of the molding of shapes by light, and so on. Accordingly, if Podro identifies visual interest in the medium of painting, its analogy with language, and its determination by the consistencies of the plane surface, Roskill's 14

Interests, values, and explanations discussion identifies the ascription of an explanatory power to visual interest in that conception. These make up the value that is visual interest. The analogy with language just mentioned returns attention to Roskill's chapter. Having described the valuation and explanation of pictures, he wonders if there are comparable claims about literature, and maintains that there are not unless unusual features of literary production come to the fore. The visual art of painting is distinctive in that commentary "valu[es] the activity of creation as much or more than its product." 39 Even photography gains value "according to how, or when, the activity is explained in a light that gives a specific, directed character and importance to the product." 40 This distinctiveness suggests also "that explanations are of their time," depending on the value given to visually interesting material. Stylistic and iconographic terms have declined in discussion of the arts, whereas references to "social factors affecting the imagery, and psychological factors bearing on the creative process" have become paramount because they value activity over the result. Comparable claims about the literary arts are difficult to maintain, Roskill suggests. The last claim raises a host of issues that could stand discussion. But this is not the occasion for it. For the present, it is enough to note that none of these factors detracts from the visual interest of paintings, even if they call on us to clarify the location of their explanatory power. Another account of this explanatory power of paintings occurs in "Narrate or describe?" by Svetlana Alpers.41 In explaining the appearance of a realistic mode in some of the greatest works of Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, she shows how each artist worked out for himself a set of painterly moves that made a descriptive mode possible within the narrative conventions of the Renaissance aesthetic. Alpers first examines Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul, arguing that the realistic mode supports Caravaggio's belief that "the road to salvation is through immersing oneself in the world." 42 His work plays with breaking the barrier between "the fictive world and the actual world of the beholder," that suggests that he had a "radical commitment to engagement with the viewer." A similar concern with the relation between the surfaces of the world and the painting structures Velazquez's Water-Seller. In this work "we see reality become paint before our eyes" in the way its surface moves back "through ever-flattening forms." But this work raises other questions too, about what kind of work it is and how it could manage in the 15

SaJim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJJ seventeenth century to give stature to "an image of common people." In a comparable realistic mode, Rembrandt's work promotes a distance between people represented in works, not so much to signify the "fragmentation of human experience" as to "giv[e] room to each person to be fully himself or herself. Time and experience, not distance, separate these people from one another."43 Similarly, Vermeer's Woman with Scales disengages the depicted events from narrative action in order to provide for realistic description. In all these cases, Alpers maintains, the presence of a realistic mode in the seventeenth century reflects "a displacement in the subtle balance, the assumed partnership, between imitation and narration and the attendant notions of artistic address that was the basis of the great Renaissance rebirth of ancient pictorial art."44 It is wrong to see these changes as the result of a challenge to the elevated vocabulary and themes usual to art at that time. Yet they mark a difference: "these artists have simply moved ahead to encompass new aspects of human experience out of the fullness of the representational possibilities inherent in art." 45 Moreover, the last factor distinguishes the realistic mode in its seventeenth- and nineteenth century appearances. This summary of Alpers's article is inadequate to its richness, but it serves to introduce the issue of her chapter, "Is art history?" The distinct kinds of realism in the two sets of works raise questions about the objectivity of art historical explanations: of the possibility of understanding the works of other periods from the standpoint of the present. Alpers's analysis of the works is sensitive to differences in the two sets of works; but it depends on art historical practice that may differ from the presumptions of earlier artists. The chapter was originally published in 1977, when art historical writing was itself in a particular moment of its historical development. Alpers's intervention addresses that moment in a manner particular to that period, and she may not now hold to all the claims she made then. Yet the chapter has been part of the public domain: it has influenced writing on the history of art and it raises matters that are still at issue. Chief among these are questions about the relation between art historical explanation and the values it subtends. Alpers pursues this theme of the relation of aesthetic value to explanation in art history by suggesting that some explanations generate value because they make assumptions about the transhistorical nature of aesthetic value. She makes this clear in discussing a then recent trend in art history embodied in the work of Michael Baxandall and T. J. Clark, among others, that concentrates "on the 16

Interests, values, and explanations circumstances of the making of an individual work." This emphasis has "almost unawares" come to demystify the notion of artistic invention and the problem of "looking, of how to see." The basic thrust of this art history is a kind of leveling in which vernacular pieces no longer seem eccentric to the concerns of art historians. This also allows them to decentralize the notion of art, "what art is, where and by whom it has been and is produced." 46 Yet, "in the name of clarity, rationality, and historical objectivity the new art history embraces a potentially radical view of art without accepting its implications." 47 For these art historians offer an alternative "to a dominant mode of the first great generations of modern art historians." The latter developed their techniques in studying Renaissance paintings. "Panofsky in effect posits and confirms a particular notion of man and of art." But "the very notion of the viewer's relationship to meanings which are verbally construed and which lie beneath the surface of his meaningful images, is bound up with Renaissance notions of art and the primacy of language."48 And when critics apply his technique to other arts, treating it "as a normative standard for art and its study," it becomes problematic. It brings inappropriate presumptions to bear and fails to give sufficiently serious weight to the works and their actual history. A more recent reliance on "common sense" makes similar questionable commitments, and it too "is being challenged by experience and by research."49 In the following chapter, "Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history," Gregg Horowitz examines Alpers's account of objectivity and what this might be in a history that is serious about historicity. While art history seemed significant initially for its concern for the sources of value in art, really its practices generate value. Alpers's "Is art history?" examined a particular version of this practice when she identified how "description, explanation, and interpretation.. .have unintentionally generated artistic value which is thereby discoverable in the field of inquiry." 50 For Panofsky and Gombrich the "primacy of analysis over creation marks the space which is history as a problem, the space bridged by art history." 51 The claim that analysis itself generates value thus becomes damaging to their enterprise of apparently clarifying what has been done in a work before passing judgment on its artistic value. Panofsky construes this analysis as a matter of verstehen. The historian reenters the context of a work's creation, the problem it was trying to solve, the resources available, and all the other items that 17

SaJim KemaJ and Ivan GaskeJJ make an object an intentional artifact. And to identify the particular intentionality of art history, "Panofsky restricts the intentionality of art works to their being made as objects of aesthetic experience." Yet in doing so he "ahistorically mandates the kind of intentionality exhibited in art works and recovered in art history."52 More specifically, according to Horowitz, Alpers charges that by privileging aesthetic experience as a demand art works make on the viewer, Panofsky brings the art work into consideration as the bearer of a formal meaning rather than as a "mode of making." For various reasons Alpers sees this as analogous to the model of picture making that was dominant in Italian Renaissance art theory; and in so far as it determines the method of art historical analysis, it becomes normative by over-extending its historical scope. Panofsky's focus on meaning, Horowitz explains, "systematically privileges meaningfulness as a value inherent in art works by making art as such an art of meaning."53 Having explained Alpers's criticism of Panofsky, Horowitz analyzes the diagnosis she put forward in "Is art history?" and some other papers to test its viability. Is there a set of historicized concepts that would provide a valid (objective) explanation in art history? For Alpers's rejection of Panofsky's foundations for a universal art history still seems to leave room for some other version of such an art history. But Horowitz contends that the force of the criticisms of Panofsky that Alpers made in her paper deprives her of all means of identifying artistry for any alternative art history. If critics reject Panofsky's attempt to distinguish art history from all other cultural activities by arguing that the concepts he uses implicate a normative standard because they are extended beyond their native location, Horowitz suggests, they must give up art history or have some other mode of approach that will respect particular qualities yet without deriving them from some historically specific practice. The modal question Alpers prefers - "What would it (reality, the world) be like if the relationship between us and the world were to be this one?" does not by itself single out features of artistry as it must do to be in any sense determinative of art history. Horowitz argues that an appeal to Alois Riegl's methods does not work. He holds that Alpers construes art as "making relationships between persons and their worlds," rather than "as a specifically propertied object," allowing for a reconstruction of the activity of making art before any question about evaluation. But, citing the case of Rembrandt's Enterprise, Horowitz suggests that this historicity 18

Interests, values, and explanations remains inadequate to its principal task because, while it allows a large number of factors to be brought into play, it does not clearly provide access to past works in their own terms. The detail she can bring in leaves her unable "to defend the claim that what she has recovered.. .is artistically significant at all - or perhaps significant in the ways we have come to care about."54 Art historians now seem to lack any demarcating concepts and must remain at the level of terms whose currency is much wider than fine art and which do not grasp the specific mode of producing the objects of art historical analysis. Alpers's resolution of this issue, Horowitz suggests, is inadequate. When she argues, in "Style is what you make it," that historical texts can be seen as literature, or water jugs as art, without thereby reducing historical accounts to literature or art to jugs, she relies on "a self-consciousness on the part of the maker, the viewer or their communities which makes the difference" to whether it is art or jug or history or literature.55 Yet this leaves open the questions which she needs to answer: what kind of self-consciousness? governed by what rules or procedures? Were she to answer these questions, she would fall back into a normative domain, Horowitz suggests; yet without an answer her account remains incomplete. "Art is surely a mode of making, but unless one can say what kind of mode it is, art history suffers from the epistemological deficit of never knowing if it has hit its mark. Art history thus seems trapped between a loss of objectivity due to the unintentional operation of value and the systematic inability to specify an objective relationship between its analytic concepts and its domain of objects. This is, needless to say, a bad place to be stuck."56 One lesson Horowitz draws from this "operation of value" is that the discipline of art history does not so much recover value as generate it through its nominating objects for analysis.57 This preanalytic move, inherent in the very practice of art historical analysis, is evaluative in that it seems to be normative to analyzands, and consequently undermines claims to objectivity. Horowitz sees the occurrence of this problem as symptomatic of something else. The need to provide some means of demarcating art history from, say, anthropology results from the conception of historicity deployed: it "is a kind of retrieval of difference, albeit one pursued in the context of a founding promise that the differences will be preserved.. .this premise just is.. .the promise of objectivity, entwined in the premise that the space between the present and the past is an echo of the opaque nature of the older object."58 Yet this retrieval seems to posit 19

SaJim KemaJ and Ivan GaskeJJ "a kind of paradoxical timelessness" — a "present field in which are displayed the differences which constitute the pastness of the past." The problem of objectivity arises only if the object resists incorporation into the present, and so makes a space for art history which, however, intends to overcome just that gap between the present and the past. Panofsky thought such overcoming was possible because he relied on a transhistorical conception of aesthetic value. Alpers found that commitment normative because it extrapolated from values native to one period. But Alpers's stress on historicity raises the problem of whether any access to the past can become available without some evaluative moves. Horowitz maintains that objectivity, understood as "the utter repudiation of all evaluative principles derived from the art historian's own age and practice in the name of the retrieval of past principles," is not possible. But rather than lead to a kind of solipsism, this opens us to a "productive reflection on how we cooperatively construct our experiences of past art in terms of contemporary commitments." 59 Art history, then, is not so much a theoretical enterprise of trying to grasp the nature of objects from the past. "As we let go of the dream of an experience constructed for us entirely by the past, we may be able to imagine and analyze the exchanges between past and present which constitute the stream of time in which we swim." 60 Of course, all this is in essence compatible with Alpers's own claims, and goes some way towards making explicit some of the commitments underlying, say, Rembrandt's Enterprise. The need for objectivity seems to preclude evaluative commitments. They invite relativism: since claims about works depend on and are "true" for a particular evaluative perspective, they introduce a relativism that seems to be a strong reason for rejecting this approach. Yet it is far from clear what kind of threat relativism poses to understanding generally. There may be real and particular problems of relativism, as when a critic, trained with Renaissance works, faces a Chinese watercolor from the eleventh century, and has to learn to distinguish brush strokes resulting from wrist or hand movements. But these do not necessarily raise the spectre of a general threat to comprehension altogether. Some comprehension seems available even in recognizing the objects as works constructed according to rules of art. Given that critics attend to objects constituted by their meaningfulness, to identify such an object is to find it meaningful in some respect. The problem then is to excavate the meaning further by learning the other 20

Interests, values, and explanations conventions and conditions that make a work meaningful in particular ways. The threat of any real relativism seems to be very remote here, in that it must occur as the impossibility of critics recognizing objects as meaningful artifacts at all because of their own location within certain conventions and conditions. But that seems to be a problem with critics and is not a matter of the impossibility of having procedures for understanding other cultures, etc., at all. There is also the ever-present logical possibility that we will fail to recognize an object as the artifact it is in its own culture. But this logical possibility does not entail relativism or a denial of objectivity. The ever-present logical possibility of misunderstanding does not imply that every putative recognition of a cultural artifact is mistaken in some part. If there are errors, these must be identified in their particular occurrences for the sceptic to raise the issue of relativism in any serious sense; but that presupposes that the sceptic has access to the meaning of that artifact; and this dissolves the possibility of relativism even before it gets off the ground. Nor are single historical periods so coherent and unified in themselves that objective claims clearly become possible within them. We may expect traces of diverse histories, classes, psychologies, pathologies, needs, conventions, and conditions, and so on, to make up a period. If any understanding is possible within that period itself, it shows the possibility of the very interchange between histories that the charge of relativism is supposed to show is impossible. Consonantly, if such understanding were impossible, the search for objectivity would be futile. To press the point: the charge of relativism only makes sense if we can have successful absolutely objective claims, yet the latter seems impossible in any serious sense, in so far as it depends on making sense in a heterogeneous totality of meanings yet also denies that this heterogeneity is meaningful to all its parts. Similarly, the claimed impossibility of a complete understanding of others' art may simply depend on an unwarranted psychologism. A critic may argue that the suggested defense against relativism still leaves art history only the status of a cultural anthropology. The experience of art is a subjective, interior appreciation of the complex but contingent concatenation of elements that is difficult to articulate at the best of times and impossible over a distance. An anthropologist may grasp all the rules that go into making the object a cultural artifact, but the need to learn these rules and to overcome the distance that they threaten also means that anthropologists always remain 21

Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell "outside" the subjective domain of cultural objects. Their experience can never reproduce how art feels to the subjects being studied or understood. These subjects possess an immediate grasp, dependent on an ineluctability of experience, that outsiders cannot gain. However, unless this is a reference to some inexorably private and interior experience, it is not clear why it cannot be grasped by understanding the rules by which it operates. What is left when these rules are made clear? After all, subjects must find their own experience rule-governed and meaningful. Since that rule-governed meaningfulness makes up that experience, grasping the former is a matter of grasping the latter. Pressed further, this implies that experience need not make the same sense to all subjects in the community being studied. Perhaps some have an educated sensitivity for relevant kinds of visual or literary interest, while others possess a naive grasp, and both these differ from other strata who remain unconvinced about the importance of these factors. Either these differences are not a problem, in which case the anthropologist will gain one of the many possible levels of understanding available in the community, and can participate as well as its members do, and so can also be an art historian; or it is a problem, in which case a coherent account of the experience is absent even within the community, and no clear sense of what it is to be a critic or artist becomes available in the first place. But this is not a problem of historical relativism. On the other hand, if the reference to an immediacy of experience is to some private and interior experience that lies outside rules and formulation, then its very ineffability also leaves it unclear what it consists in. Such inexponible experience remains a mystery to the experiencing subjects themselves and can play no part in any discussion arguing for or against cross-cultural understanding. If such private experiences are possible at all, they are as inaccessible to other subjects in that historical period as they are to the historian, and raise a different kind of problem than historical relativity. Even if these paragraphs suggest how to blunt the charge of relativism, a critic may contend that they do not dispense with the problem of evaluation. Art historians must identify some criteria for art in order to be art historians, and these criteria surely are evaluative, infecting their identification of what counts as art in other periods. However, blunting the charge of relativism should also deflect this kind of objection. There may be particular problems of relativism - what meaning does a kimono knotted in front have in 22

Interests, values, and explanations Utamaro's work? what does the flatness of the worked surface signify? - but a grasp of the significance of objects and their features will be a grasp of the value of others' works. Once it becomes clear that the Japanese tradition of flute-playing tries to reproduce the sound of wind in trees, this can become the object of others' aural interest, and lead them to place it in relation to the other practices governing the playing of musical instruments. This need not culminate in some single texture of experience, transcending all historical locutions, that stands as the aesthetic experience with particular phenomenal properties, and what is visual and aural interest may then vary in diverse historical periods. Perhaps such interest is not an issue at all in some practices, a critic may charge; the art historian then has neither tools nor authority to legislate over these practices in the past. If that is the case, the practice is still accessible to us; if it has no connection with art in that period, some other discipline than art history may examine the practice; if it does have some significant homology with art history, then that will be served by art history and may expand our notion of art. Certainly old disciplinary boundaries no longer seem so acute or necessary - and there is considerable relief to be found in that. The issue of the proper approach to works, and the need to escape the disciplinary boundaries that have bedeviled study of the arts, turns in part on the fact that we produce them. The conceptions of art, art historical practice, and explanation explored in the chapters so far have agreed at least in striving for a pattern of explanation that is not simply a scientistic one because they recognize that visual and literary explanations and values are constituted, are not simply a matter of finding and reporting on what is already there, and therefore need an appropriately distinctive model of understanding and explanation. When Podro proposes that painting is doubly evaluative, distinguishing complex, sensitive, self-reflective activity from its undistinguished counterpart, he seems to think of this as a matter of attending to particular features of a work when it is creative - when it "takes the world into itself." This issue of evaluation on the basis of visual interest takes on another layer in Roskill's chapter, when he argues that it is a basis of choices we make between objects for their exemplarity of style, influence, and ideals. Each of these concerns an object that he seems to think of as a creative product, even though by his analysis our grasp and appreciation of that creativity is mediated by the reasons for giving importance to them. Alpers's and Horowitz's clarifications of how normative claims enter into descriptions 23

SaJim KemaJ and Ivan GaskeJJ similarly underline the historicity of works. The latter take on a particular character since they are created at particular junctures in a history that is itself constructed. In their distinctive but overlapping explanations of the meanings of works, Biemel and Booth imply conclusions about the nature of literary and art historical explanations. In both cases creativity and the construction of meanings are central: emplacement and Heidegger's rejection of a calculative reasoning or the move from scientistic thought to reflection upon particular responses signal versions of the insight that these works make material their own. They do not simply reproduce what is given in reality but order and select in particular ways. They do not reflect culture, they are the practices of culture. The matter of producing works has another feature that we have mentioned but not emphasized recently: the "external" features of visual and literary interest. Podro suggests this character by pointing to the analogy with language in understanding and explaining the medium of painting since language is a public or social convention. Roskill's chapter also, while it turns on the role of visual interests, attends to the historical conditions and social context in which works become important. Similarly, Alpers's argument seeks to enter the meanings of works through those conditions and contexts, and references to coduction and non-scientistic approaches to criticism invoke analogous relations for appreciation and aesthetic evaluation. These social and historical features of works of art are not obviously compatible with one conception of creativity and subjectivity. Although the authors do not do so explicitly, and though what they say is compatible with other conceptions of the matter, most of them seem to focus on the individuals who produce the work. Hogarth's construction in painting or Monet's, van Eyck's and Rubens's are at issue in Podro's chapter. Roskill considers how we may contextualize Constable's or Derain's paintings, so that even if he attends to the extra-object conditions that make a work interesting, he still attends to a history of painters. Biemel and Booth similarly attend to the individuals who construct meanings and whose sensibilities works develop - the suggestion being that they are important as the source of actions and thoughts that make up the substance and texture of living in the company of good books. This texture makes room for creativity as an individual possession, it seems, whose end is a community, though the relation between individual and community involved remains unexamined. Talk of a non-scientistic model for understanding works, of explanation as clarifying their medium, and 24

Interests, values, and explanations of the meanings we give to works that make them interesting, all trade on this ability to generate and grasp meaningful activity and also suppose this grasp and generation are an individual matter. Perhaps Alpers is not alone in pointing out that the newer art history questions the feasibility of thinking of creativity as the spontaneous generation of new and valuable products. In his chapter, "Fullness and parsimony: notes on creativity in the arts," Jon Elster reflects on this issue directly. Focusing on the arts, he sees a parallel with technological change,61 and approaches creativity through discussions of value, achievement, and originality. His conception of creativity questions whether individual subjects are the sole and unadulterated source of meanings, order, texture, or conditions. Elster distinguishes our diverse expectations of the arts: some are durable, others ephemeral, although modern technology has made the distinction between performing and non-performing arts more difficult to maintain since a finished instance of the former can be constructed out of recordings of a number of performances. This possibility affects the intensity of performance and therefore its quality. Arts are distinguishable also through their different techniques of apprenticeship: copying old masters is important in some but not in others. Arts also vary in texture: the stroke of a brush, and the three-dimensionality of the touch of paint, can be vital, while timbre can be "all important" in jazz.62 Arts also differ in the choices they allow their audience - readers can skip pages and read back, whereas musical performance does not allow this license, even if recordings do. All these features of art forms may influence creators' activity in constructing a work, imposing a meaning that will determine the realization of their intentions. Elster proposes that "ultimately the main value of all art is emotional," and that it "acquires whatever value it has by concentrating and isolating patterns of experience that, although diffusely present in our life, require the maieutic functions of art to come to our full attention." 63 The latter depends on internal coherence and external adequacy. The first is the sense that all the work's parts are necessary to the whole. Although this is not to be read in the strong sense of denying the removal of any single note in a symphony, Elster insists there must be internal fullness and parsimony. The second requires that the work be general enough to be publicly recognizable and its order of sufficient interest to justify the effort the work demands of the audience. 64 The satisfaction of these formal characteristics makes a work a Jocal maximum, 65 resulting from a series of 25

SaJim KemaJ and Ivan GaskeJJ small variations and selections until the object cannot be changed in its parts without detracting from the value of the whole. From these variations in the arts and the concept of a local maximum Elster moves to a discussion of achievement. He defines achievement as self-realization which, in turn, he explains as "selfactualization and self-externalization."66 The first is to develop and deploy the talents that people possess, the second to bring these into a public domain, with all the attendant rules and defeasible criteria of success and accomplishment. Without being exercised in this public domain, and the self-esteem it makes possible, the possession of talents remains undifferentiated from a fantasy. The activities that promote self-realization require skills, have a goal that can be gained more or less well, may begin painfully, and provide an appropriate level of satisfaction as a by-product of achieving the goal. By Elster's explanation, it is important to note, self-realization has a social character. As a source of self-esteem it requires the esteem of other people. Others validate what counts as successful achievement, doing so as its audience, and it may also be carried out as a cooperative enterprise. These features of the concept of achievement relate to the variety of arts and the construction of a local maximum. They provide a vocabulary for articulating the achievement of the local maximum appropriate to a particular act. They relate also to the concept of originality, whose development may bring us closer to a sense of creativity that is both an individual possession and, thereby, a social factor. The latter becomes clearer when Elster defines originality in two ways: as authenticity - "when a work is what it is said to be" and as innovation - when it introduces "new contents ... new forms or materials." 67 The first raises questions of the value given to the arts that makes forgery an issue. The second invites a contrast with some earlier period. It may turn on issues of the rules used or abused but, importantly, compares works with other works rather than with artists to justify their value. The rules for judging innovation are thus public conventions, and if we value artists it is by extension from valuing works. With this background Elster turns to creativity in the arts, understood now as the process by which change occurs. He uses models from evolution, boat making, technical change in capitalism, and the Marxist analysis of capitalism, to generate hypotheses. The Marxist analysis acts as a counterweight to the "exhaustion" argument, which claims that forms of art change when they cease to promote 26

Interests, values, and explanations creativity much as relations to production change when they cease to promote technical change. But whereas the Marxist theory compares relations of production and technical change with what can be, so that suboptimality generates change, when analysts recognize the untapped potential of relations of production, the rejected "exhaustion" argument invokes the stagnation of art forms to explain change. However, a comparison between the two suggests that new forms come into being when they promote creativity better than earlier forms. This comparison also suggests other theses: in the arts the great innovators usually are also the great creators; by contrast, those who usher in new relations of production do not necessarily also develop the productive forces. Given that innovation is "substitution of new formal constraints for old ones" while creation is "the exercise of artistic choice within constraints," the distinction may apply to the arts too. In part that possibility depends on the role of constraints in artistic work. Relying on Henri Poincare's approach, Elster formulates this issue in terms of the writers' basis for choosing a sequence of letters and words from an infinitely large set as their work. The mathematician determines choices by relying on unconscious and deliberate processes of thought, where the first are principally aesthetic, but certain combinations "are more likely to be used as building blocks than others." 68 Artists' choices become more manageable because they work "within constraints which reduce the initial myriad of combinations to some radically smaller subset."69 Many constraints are externally imposed by media and technology, others are conventional - sonnets have determinate forms, voice only has a determinate range, strings can only be plucked so fast. Conventions can produce creativity in leading artists to focus their choices or to fine-tune variations. A constraintless work is difficult to distinguish from an arbitrary and meaningless grouping. Constraints can also be freely chosen. Artists thus make two successive choices - of constraints and within constraints - matching the two-step process mooted in Poincare. An unconscious process seems to determine the artists' selection or rejection of appropriate conventions. Perhaps that depends, in turn, on the artists' experience. "Experience is what enables the unconscious to see patterns and connections that would otherwise have been overlooked. On the one hand, constraints limit the input to the unconscious. On the other hand, experience enables the unconscious to organize a larger part of the input in a meaningful way 27

SaJim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell and then present it to the scrutiny of the conscious. Once again, we find the twin ideals of parsimony and fullness, but now with very different meanings. Richness of experience and tightness of expression are among the preconditions of good art."70 Elster develops these claims by analyzing Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen. The novel remains unfinished, he argues, because the initial choices of personalities, relations, and narrative needs cannot ultimately hold together. Their development could not lead to a resolution, he suggests, for example because of Stendhal's inability to give his heroines particular kinds of development. His two choices of and within constraints do not support each other. And that possibility of making choices between constraints and within constraints opens another possibility: that innovation and creation suit different people. This distinction invites a reconsideration of the history of writing, composing, and painting that will focus on the different reasons we have for ascribing stature to works of art and their producers. The existence and development of conventions, the manner in which they enable or constrain individual choices, the public and social character they must have in order to be meaningful and successful, the distinction between innovation and creativity that depends on a background of social practices, all make clear how creativity is inherently part of a social matrix with a given distribution of values, possibilities, and requirements. And as part of social life, creativity and its objects occur within the compass of cultural explanations. Elster's proposals for creativity and its products thus raise again the question raised by Alpers and Horowitz of the kind of objective explanations available to us that will recognize how works have particular historical and social locations, as we observers do, yet are open to our grasp. The threat of relativism portended in this claim, we have suggested, can be blunted, but we still need some positive characterization of the explanation appropriate to the social nature of cultural artifacts. In his chapter, ''Principles of the sociology of cultural works," Pierre Bourdieu outlines a set of concepts for grasping the sociality of works of art. He begins by identifying a "space of possibilities" that defines "the universe of problems, of references, of intellectual landmarks.. .and of 'isms,' in short a whole system of coordinates that must be kept in mind ... in order to play the game."71 This space situates the producers of cultural artifacts, dating them and also 28

Interests, values, and explanations making them relatively autonomous of "the direct determination of the economic and social environments." It is constitutive of artifacts, in so far as their producers have to take up positions on the points in that space, and function as a "common system of reference."72 To establish this social space, he refers to a usual opposition between "external explanations" and "internal interpretations." The second occurs in the work of, say, professors of literature, and found expression in the new critical theories of T. S. Eliot and the NRF in France. It understands works of art as atemporal formations that call for "purely internal readings," and grounds them either in universal anthropological structures,73 expecting thereby to capture the universal forms of poetic or literary reason, or in the structuralist theory which, while recognizing that structures are historical realizations, tries to decode them without reference to any external ordering such as "the economic or social conditions of the work's production or that of the work's producers (such as the educational system)."74 Even while this decoding eschews "all forms of formalist universalization," it avoids issues of the social conditions in which works become possible because it makes evaluative assumptions about, for example, which object is properly studied as the corpus: a poem, the set of the author's works, the ensemble of works produced at that time, etc. - all of which are matters of history and society. Perhaps the most "rigorous formulation of the structuralist project" is Michel Foucault's, Bourdieu contends, but it too suffers the constraints of giving absolute autonomy to "the 'field of strategic possibilities,' which [Foucault] calls episteme" 75 and removes meanings from the arena of "the relations between the producers and the utilizers of the works considered, into the heaven of ideas." 76 Bourdieu's criticism here is that a totally autonomous system cannot easily account for its own changes except by ascribing itelf some "immanent propensity for change" that, of course, explains nothing. What it does not explore is that the relevant ideas are the historical products of a particular kind of historical work in given social conditions where this activity becomes meaningful at all. Literature is not simply determined only by "the anterior conditions of the literary system."77 Whether this successfully addresses Foucault's genealogical method and later histories is another matter. Bourdieu goes on to argue that the useful "external explanations" are not much more successful than the internal interpretations he has just rejected. Some rely on a logic in which the work reflects the social characteristic of 29

SaJim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJJ the author, his or her origin, or its audience. This method only succeeds if it brings in the social practice of literary or other creation. Statistical analysis also fails to explain because it depends upon but cannot allow for, as a part of its methodological rigor, the history of choices by which we gain the list of authors to be studied, the procedure of their canonization, the system of classification, epochs, schools, genres, etc., that are "in actuality, the instruments and stakes of struggles."78 Marxist-inspired researchers make similar reductive claims in so far as they point to the origin of works in social struggles but fail to advance thereby the understanding of the works' structure. By contrast with this reductionism, Bordieu emphasizes the "field,"79 pointing to "the internal logic of cultural objects, their structures, considered as languages." 80 A field is a system of social relations giving rise to a particular logic of action because it sustains an orientation toward certain goals and a corresponding sense of what behavior is appropriate or necessary. At issue in these relations is the ability to dominate the field by amassing a "symbolic capital," an appropriate authority to judge the value of objects and events, and grant legitimacy to other participants in the field and their products. Such authority is implicit; it is achieved when its decisions are accepted as legitimate and its unfounded origin is unquestioned; and the unspoken rules establish what perceptions and claims are valid. Bourdieu in effect brings a mode of thought to the literary field that situates agents and institutions in their relations of space, force, and struggle as they conserve or transform the established order. The logic of cultural objects thus turns on the principles of actors' strategies, the form of art they defend, the alliances they make, the schools they found, and so on. External determinants such as economic crises or political disruptions exert themselves in this field by transforming its structures in ways congruent with the logic of the field. The structure of this field "refracts" such transformations. Nor does talk of fields, symbolic capital, and implicit legitimation overshadow the subtleties of the internal readings of the works themselves. Instead, reference to the field takes protagonists out of their own positions. The logic of the field makes positions about works seem logically incompatible because they are struggling for dominance; by contrast, a reference to the field, the reminder that in its own space each work bears a relation to others in the same field, will lead to recognition of homologies between "the space of works, the field of positions-taken, and the space of positions in the field of 30

Interests, values, and explanations production" (for example, literature).81 Even the most formalist approach to particular works, such as the Russian formalist analysis, which we may expect to attend most fully and concretely to the subtleties of particular novels, poems, and phrases, fits into Bourdieu's account. Their reliance on the driving force of banalization and debanalization, by which items gain or lose literary interest, appears now merely to reproduce an "opposition between orthodoxy and heresy, which is constitutive of all the fields of cultural production." 82 By this "correspondence between two homologous structures" - particular works and the literary field - we can explain the strategies adopted by writers as depending on "the position they occupy in the structure of the field" and as denoting the space of possible perspective. "Each agent, artist, writer, savant, constructs his very own creative project as a function of the available possibilities which assure him [sic] of the categories of perception and appreciation inscribed in his habitus by a certain trajectory, and also as a propensity to seize or reject the various possibilities, which inspires in him the interest associated with his position in the game." 83 Bourdieu develops this methodology further by limning an explanation of the literary field in France "during the 1880s, at the moment when the structure of the literary field as we now know it was established." 84 He points to the opposition between art and money which, structuring the field of power, appears at the heart of the literary field as the opposition between "pure" and "commercial" art, and, orthogonal to this chiasmus, as an opposition between "the social quality of the works and the social quality of the corresponding publics," which contrasts poetry with theatre and distributes novels somewhere along the space in between. These oppositions lend themselves to "two forms of struggle and of history": those between artists engaged in producing pure and commercial art, who strive to define the writer, art, and their status, and those between "the consecrated avant garde and the new avant garde." A history of art that considers only the "sub-fields" of changes within the arts misrepresents their history because it ignores that "the changes that continuously occur, for the producers in the midst of the field of production, have issued from the very structure of the field, from the synchronic oppositions between the antagonistic positions which are based on the degree of acceptance or, if we prefer, the position in the structure of the distribution of the specific capital of recognition."85 Without implying a reductive determination of art by those other oppositions or 31

SaJim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell granting art some complete autonomy, Bordieu can argue that the "autonomy of art" or "art for art's sake" are themselves strategies adopted within a framework in which the need to exercise such distinctions becomes significant. Indeed, "the relative autonomy of the field is always more fully realized in works which owe their formal properties and their value only to structure, and therefore to the history of the field, further disqualifying interpretations which.. .authorize themselves to pass over what happens in the world and go directly to what happens in the field."86 Bourdieu's subtle and complex position invites more reflection than a summary introduction can provide. It aims to display "the historical conditions of the emergence of transhistorical logics such as those of art or science." Its "first effect" is "to clear critical discourse of the platonic temptation to produce essences, of literature, of poetry," etc. It gains us the "always slightly sad pleasure" of knowing what our experience is about. In the case of this volume, in addition to providing an answer to questions raised by Alpers's, Horowitz's, and Elster's chapters, about the manner of explanation appropriate to works located in history and a society of agents who make themselves severally and altogether, Bourdieu's contribution also announces a theme that has underlain the earlier contributions. In different ways these chapters have thought through the absence of the authority of a transhistorical and "objective" reality and of a disinterested beauty in our dealings with the arts. Podro sets out the values inherent in visual interests, showing that a "pure aesthetic evaluation," as the assessment of the use of items of visual interest, is not the only evaluation relevant to the arts. Roskill's contribution clarifies another set of extra-aesthetic choices that determine which aesthetically valuable works become significant in the history of the arts. In addition to expanding the consideration of value in relation to the arts, Podro's and Alpers's chapters suggest that a return to the primacy of the object is avoidable: they find the model of art as an illusion, as a reproduction of reality, an inadequate account of the construction that art is. Thereby, in addition to ignoring the standard of a simple universalist aesthetic value, they may also find art's relation to reality too complex to construe as a naive correspondence. Horowitz's chapter, similarly, finds that a neo-Kantian commitment to universal aesthetic value intrudes upon rather than helps maintain the historicity of art. He too questions the possibility of a structured correspondence with reality as the aim of art, criticism, or art history. Elster's concern for the social and public construction of creativity 32

Interests, values, and explanations engages the same issues of the lack of any objectivist, transhistorical subjectivity and corresponding reality. In the absence of such founding standards, we have only competing commitments that seek to be realized.87 In the absence of rational and transhistorical standards, we have only a deployment of power, as some proponents and commitments prove more effective or are more thoroughly realized than others. Though Bourdieu considers only a conception of power as the domination of one agent over another, of one's product over others in an economy of preferences, in the shape of "cultural capital" and the authority it bestows, his work portends a more neutral sense of power as efficacity within structures that can also be enabling rather than simply oppressive. To achieve dominance within a field by gaining cultural capital may be for a set of otherwise unfounded commitments to gain legitimacy by others' tacit acknowledgment of this power, but Bourdieu is neither seeking some extra-historical and extra-social foundation to justify this power nor necessarily committed to thinking of power only as domination and exclusion of others. In this his work may be more compatible with Foucault's later work on a non-juridical conception of power.88 For other reasons it may also be incompatible with the proposals made by Elster.89 Be that as it may, this account of the chapters explores the kinds of evaluation and representation in the arts that become available in addition to pure aesthetic evaluation and the signal presence of reality; and giving up those standard raises the question of power because this is what operates when rationally legitimated standards no longer claim allegiance for their rationality. Power is the concept that grasps the situation of the play of forces that exists when rational standards become problematic or otiose. Bourdieu's chapter points in this direction of power because that is the "other" of the rational legitimacy of standards. This reference to power in cultural artifacts received a particular shape in recent work influenced by Louis Althusser's essay "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses." The essay is too well known and widely available to need inclusion here,90 but its influence invites diagnosis. In "Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts," Richard Eldridge argues that "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" contains "little that can be recognized as an argument," yet carries conviction and "somewhat expresses a view of human life that contemporary academic critics of literature and the arts find to be compelling on its own." 91 Teasing out the theses of the essay, he 33

SaJim Kemal and Ivan GaskeJI suggests, will explain conceptions "dominant within critical studies in our time." Eldridge argues that the theory underlying Althusser's claims in this essay shows the dual influence of Marx and Lacan. These influences are not easily made congruent, however. Consequently, Althusser shifts from a "forces of production Marxism to a relations of production Marxism" that is a "shift away from a genuinely explanatory theory of history" to an ahistorical set of immutable relations and structures that individuals can never entirely avoid.92 Ideology thus becomes a "kind of always false consciousness about how equal human freedom may be secured through the operations of various religious, artistic, trade union, sporting, familial, etc. organizations and institutions." 93 Agents evaluate existing inequalities in power, authority, and efficacity in satisfying interests in terms of some condition of full freedom and equality. But they are mistaken to suppose there can be anything other than arbitrary and unequal rights and powers. Eldridge asks why individuals cannot escape this false consciousness about the possibility "of a society of full and equal freedom under some relations of production or other, existing or alternative." In part Althusser's answer to this question draws on Lacan's account of individual subjects' preconscious sense of a primordial lack that, in later life, is buried in their unconscious, but continues to structure their needs. Similarly, the experience of the unfreedom of relations of production persists and determines subjects when they "come to speak the language of culture, to^develop (always inadequate) evaluative responses to social life as they assume socio-cultural identities." 94 In another part, when Althusser wants to relate the selfformation of subjects to issues of class and politics, Eldridge proposes, he adds another element to his argument. Althusser points to historical precedent to show that human beings just do form conceptions of the possibility of human freedom in relations of production. That seems enough to warrant the practice a seriousness and weight. A deep sense "about the conditions of their lives in complex societies" reinforces this historical evidence, however, as people become "realistic" about the possibility of their actions generating fundamental change and escaping the need for work, economy, and institutions. "A sense of powerlessness in the face of present modes of domination and social complexities ... when coupled with the apparent historical facts about ideologies, then leads to a sense that ideologies, hopeless reactions against social unfreedoms, are inevitable."95 34

Interests, values, and explanations Eldridge then draws out six "habits of thought" in contemporary criticism that, he says, manifest this conception of human agency. First, rather than turn to individual genius to explain works, critics are more likely to show how works and authors share with particular groups the positions from which they engage with relations of production. Second, critics show a disdain for works that speak for a "universalist human condition" and show a preference for "immediately local production of texts and artifacts." Third, the aim of criticism is not so much to evaluate a works' "envisionings" as to provide knowledge of its "contextual conditions of determination." Fourth, critics see a failure to elucidate the conditions of that production as a result of repression. Fifth, critics tend to favour "resistance to, refusal of, being any one thing in social life," preferring "diffuse attitudes of directionless resistance" over "accommodationist or reformist or revolutionist attitudes in art towards existing relations of production." Finally, the critics prefer to " 'intervene' in cultural life from a particular point of view" rather than try for some "disinterested" and "rational" evaluation. Eldridge takes these habits to refuse all evaluations, and he proposes as an alternative an evaluative practice in which critics, having become aware of how ideological formations distort conceptions of value and order, may still have a role. "Equivalent one-sidedness in envisionings of human freedom does not entail equivalent worthlessness" he argues. "Appreciation and evaluation of ... socially inflected exercises of grace and power and craft are ... standing possibilities of criticism."96 How far this hope is ever a real possibility, if it does not first engage with the difficulties raised by Althusser about the very possibility of envisioning a universalist standpoint, remains uncertain, and the Althusserian claims may prove more resilient than at first appears. Moreover, the six habits of thought do not follow only from the mix of Marx and Lacan that Eldridge identifies with Althusser. Bourdieu and Foucault provide other, more developed accounts of an historicist and engaged mode of thought and imagination that Althusser sought, whose self-reflective nature allows them to explain the nature of the hope for universalist and human evaluation and its source. In effect, Bourdieu's chapter and theory seem to avoid most of the difficulties accruing to Althusser's theory yet come up with answers that seem continuous with the latter.97 In the last chapter in this collection, 'Film , rhetoric, and ideology,' Noel Carroll pursues some of the issues and practices Eldridge identifies as offshoots of the Althusserian conception of ideology. He 35

Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell explores the tendency of theorists recently to construe film as an "instrument of ideological manipulation." This tendency, he says, "is a reflection of the conviction of the academic generations of the sixties and seventies that everything is political."98 Its methodology is "Althusserian"; and Carroll wants to propose that rhetoric provides an alternative account of the ideological formation that film often has. Carroll identifies the Althusserian notion of ideology through two tenets: first that the "formal" structures of cinema - perspective, projection, narrative, the usual figures of film editing - are inherently ideological in being socially constructed, and second that these structures rely on viewers' having, and instill in them, a false sense that their decisions and ordering of the narrative are freely made when, in fact, they are mandated by the dominant social elements. Both these claims seem to Carroll inadequate to the history of film. They lead ultimately to "reducing] metaphysics to politics."99 Not that Carroll rejects the possibility of criticizing films for being ideological; rather, he seeks a "trimmer conception of ideology" in order to do so. He first defines ideology as a belief or set of beliefs or a categorical framework that is "in some sense epistemically defective. It is either false, or it is ambiguous, or it is connected to other beliefs in a way that is misleading or unwarranted. The unemployed are just lazy' is a straightforward example of such a belief."100 Second, the belief "has to be used as a tenet ... in some system of social domination." More than merely social constructs, the ideas, etc., must be used to support a system of social domination. Moreover, Carroll wants to argue, the ideological slant of a film is located at, and is a function of, its organization of narrative and pictoral elements its rhetoric. This "idea that the locus of ideology in film resides in the way in which specific films articulate their stories and images is fairly commonsensical,"101 he accepts, but it becomes necessary to reaffirm the thesis since recent work seems to obscure its acceptability for the sake of more clumsy analytic techniques. Carroll proposes to understand the ideological operation of film through an Aristotelian notion of rhetoric. Usually ideological strategies are implemented in narrative, perhaps by the choices and personality of a character, whether his (as is more usual in Hollywood films) virtues be Greek (as is usual in Hollywood films) or Christian, or through examples, as in Citizen Kane. These narratives use some equivalent of enthymemes which rely on viewers to make the material their own by providing the missing premises and 36

Interests, values, and explanations construct a narrative out of the represented incidents. The "best" narratives turn on generally accepted propositions, whose ideological bent remains unexamined because acceptance of the premise promotes the subject's participation in the persuasive community and its intelligibility. Similarly with commonplaces, which reassure the audience about the truthfulness of a narrative's claims. In any case, the rhetorical structure of films uses non-ideological premises and commonplaces as well as ideological ones, Carroll holds, so films can be ideological, though not in the manner intended by some Althusserians. Nor need the audience share or accept the ideological slant of a film. What does happen, though, the suggestion is, is that viewers construct the work for themselves even as it is constructed for them. This construction need not always be "political," in a sense congruent with Carroll's conception of ideology, but it is never a simple representation corresponding with reality. Yet the notion of politics remains deeply ambiguous in this kind of argument. Rhetoric is not rational argument by this Aristotelian model, but a process that elicits conviction without demonstration. It is an exercise of power in that the propositions at issue address the incompletely rational or emotional parts of human living, cultivating some, suppressing others, and promoting a sense of participation in an order or community that need not itself be justified. Films are not arguments: they become demonstrations only by losing their "aesthetic" character. Therefore they are bound to their rhetorical structures, with no clear criteria, appropriate to cinema, for judging the truth or falsity of the propositions their narratives embody. They lack a rational force, then, and rely only on techniques of persuasion; therefore there is no clear way of saying that a particular slant is ideological, in the sense proposed by Carroll, nor therefore that it is non-ideological. There is, though, a clear enough way of saying the rhetorical structure of the narrative seeks to generate conviction without reason. Given the sense of power we proposed earlier, of the competition that arises between claims in the absence of rational universalistic standards that legitimate choices and choosers, the rhetorical, non-rational, and merely persuasive structure of narrative seems most appropriately grasped as a deployment of power. And the play of power in this form, we may say, is politics. Be that as it may, Carroll's chapter returns the book in part to its beginnings, of the recognition of the density of media in the construction of representations and images, and shows also the issues of meanings and politics that arise from considerations of the forms of 37

Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell explanation in the arts. Aesthetic issues seem rightly impure, their explanation and value rightly imbricate the other concerns of culture, politics, and our practical lives.

Notes 1 And when representation itself becomes an issue, as when paintings become self-reflective about the process of their own production, then critics, artists, and art historians examine the part of visually interesting material in the construction of the work. 2 The notion of visual interest developed in this introduction depends on but is not identical with that proposed by Michael Baxandall. For an account of the status accorded visual depiction, see Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), especially the chapter entitled "Intentional visual interest." See also Andrew Harrison, "A Minimal syntax for the pictoral: the pictoral and the linguistic - analogies and disanalogies", in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds.), The Language of Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Harrison disagrees with Baxandall's contention that visual interest is a goal of depictive painting and argues that "[distinctions regarding the type of depictively successful visual depicting in 'art' on the one hand and varieties of visual depictions can direct us to the differences between varieties of successful visual depictions that do not make an essential claim on our aesthetic response on the other" (p. 232). Another account of visual interest occurs in History of Bourgeois Perception, by Donald M. Lowe, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 3 See Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1976), 1980. 4 See below, Michael Podro, "Fiction and reality in painting," p. 47. 5 E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, Phaidon Press, 1966), pp.94ff, cited by Podro, "Fiction and reality," p. 48. 6 Podro, "Fiction and reality," p. 50. 7 Ibid., p. 50. 8 Ibid., pp. 43, 51. 9 Michael Podro's chapter was originally given as a paper in 1979 at a Poetik und Hermeneutik colloquium and published in Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. X: Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (eds.), Funktionen des Fiktiven (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1983) pp. 235-237. It was accompanied by a paper titled "Chalk and silk" ("Kreide und Seide; zur Vorlag 'Fiction and reality in painting,' "pp. 359-363 of the same volume) by the late Professor Max Imdahl. The present chapter 2 is a slightly revised version of the paper, with a new postscript in response to Imdahl's argument. 38

Interests, values, and explanations 10 See below, Walter Biemel, "Franz Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical

interpretation of his works," p. 56. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid..., p.57.

Ibid.,,p.58. Ibid.,,p.6O. Ibid.,., p. 61. Ibid.,., p.61. Ibid.,., p. 62. Ibid.,.,p.64. Ibid.,.,p.65. Ibid.,.,p.66. Martin Heidegger, (65 vols., Frankfurt: V. Klosterman, 1976-88), vol. V, p. 94; cited in Biemel, "Franz Kafka," p. 66. Biemel, "Franz Kafka," p. 68. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 69. See below, Wayne Booth, "On relocating ethical criticism," p. 73. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 90. Even though Biemel has a particular regard for the efficacity of Heidegger's work, he allows for the possibility of other interpretations reliant upon other philosophers and philosophies. It is also worth noting here that the kind of argument by example that both Booth and Biemel rely on to clarify the role of philosophy raises issues of its own. Both the formalist account that Booth rejects at the beginning of his paper and his own proposals seem to follow a pattern established by Kant. This pattern arises in part from the practical writing, including the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Metaphysics of Morals, but especially from the Critique of Judgment. In the Critique of Judgment Kant sets out the texture of our dealing with exemplary works of art. However, he is clear (in the Doctrine of Virtue) that examples do not make moral arguments, so that if works of art serve to develop our morally reflective sensibilities, they do so indirectly, even if under the guidance of moral thought. Yet works of art are not especially or uniquely qualified to take on this guidance. Other practices and cultural artifacts, associations, or possibilities may do this much better. Unless aesthetic values are to serve as exemplary of all these practices, a point of view which requires a much longer defense than has usually been forthcoming, the claims made for the aesthetic development of sensibility has a much narrower focus than arguments like Biemel's and Booth's apparently assume. They seem to take for granted that exemplary works of art are of central concern, are among important 39

Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

practices and modes of interaction for promoting the right kind of self-reflection. For that is what vouchsafes the energy they put into this ethical philosophical criticism; its promotion of community makes it important. But if the moral interest is better served by other practices, we may ask why fine art, and novels or poetry especially, should be so central. Their proof does not lie in the eating, here, as if we must read the novel to see how the works develop sensibility, because that depends on another claim: that coduction by example is the only way to proceed. Perhaps underlying this reliance on examples there is a particular conception of creativity as the activity of individuals producing new rules, embodied in particular works, whose novelty and distinctiveness precludes any kind of generalization from established procedures or objects. Therefore, the proposal might be, only a study of examples, embodying this creativity, that is in fact itself a development of sensibility in the company of particular texts, is adequate to this practice. To avoid it, by contrast, is to refuse much more than literature because it prevents the kind of development of sensibility that is important to our humanity. In this self-conception we treat ourselves and others as subjects, generating meanings and order, therefore as beings who must be understood as subjects, rather than as objects constrained to behave in determinate ways and understood scientistically. See below, Mark Roskill, "Explanation and value: what makes the visual arts so different, so appealing?", p. 97. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., pp. 99-100. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 103. Svetlana Alpers, "Narrate or describe?", New Literary History 8/1 (1976), 16-42. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 37. See below, Svetlana Alpers, "Is art history?", pp. 109-110. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., pp.H7ff. See below, Gregg Horowitz, "Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history," p. 128. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 138. 40

Interests, values, and explanations 55 Svetlana Alpers, "Style is what you make it: the visual arts once again," in Berel Lang (ed.), The Concept of Style (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 56 Horowitz, "Objectivity and valuation," p. 139. 57 Ibid., pp. 139-40. 58 Ibid., p. 140. 59 Ibid., p. 142. 60 Ibid., p. 143. 61 See Jon Elster, Explaining TechnoJogicaJ Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 62 See below, Jon Elster, "Fullness and parsimony: notes on creativity in the arts," p. 149. 63 Ibid., pp. 150-151. 64 Ibid., p. 151. 65 See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 81-83. 66 Elster, "Fullness and parsimony," p. 153. 67 Ibid., p. 157. 68 Ibid., p. 163. 69 Ibid., p. 164. 70 Ibid., pp. 166-167. 71 See below, Pierre Bourdieu, "Principles of a sociology of cultural works," p. 173. 72 Ibid., pp. 173-174. 73 These are sometimes based on a neo-Kantian theory of symbolic forms see Alpers and Horowitz on Panofsky (pp. 109-126 and 127-145 below). 74 Bourdieu "Principles," p. 175. 75 Ibid., p. 176. 76 Ibid., p. 176. 77 Ibid., p.177. 78 Ibid., p. 178. 79 For other accounts of habitus see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Distinctions, A social critique of the judgment of taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); The Logic of Practice (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1990). 80 Bourdieu, "Principles," p. 179. 81 Ibid., p. 180. 82 Ibid., p. 180. 83 Ibid., p. 182. 84 Ibid., pp. 182-183. 85 Ibid., p. 184. 86 Ibid., p. 186. 87 The ethical and philosophical criticism that Biemel and Booth advocate presupposes standards of authenticity and community that are answers to the same issues. They propose an (egalitarian) distribution of justifications based on the common possession of the conditions and capacities that make us appreciating subjects. 41

SaJim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell 88 See for example, the 'Two lectures" reprinted in the Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) and The History of Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley (2 vols., New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), vol. I, pp. 50-85. 89 See for example, Elster's note 41, p. 172 below. 90 Michael Sprinkler, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 1987), pp. 267—297, provides an interesting account of its nature and continuing relevance, showing that the theory is more resilient than many commentators and critics have thought. 91 See below, Richard Eldridge, "Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts," p. 191. 92 Ibid., pp. 201-202. 93 Ibid., p. 203. 94 Ibid., p. 205. 95 Ibid., p. 206. 96 Ibid., p. 211. 97 Foucault too seems to avoid many of these criticisms. His continuity with Althusser's work may result from having been his student. See Sprinkler, Imaginary Relations., pp. 267-297, for a defense of Althusser. 98 See below, Noel Carroll, "Film, rhetoric, and ideology," p. 216. 99 Ibid., p. 220. 100 Ibid., p. 221. 101 Ibid., p. 222.

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Fiction and reality in painting* MICHAELPODRO

Painting has a density which is obscured if we isolate the recognition of the subject from the sense of the medium. If we look at the orgy scene of Hogarth's Rake's Progress, the disheveled shirt of the Rake flows with the liquidity of paint: only painted shirts can flow like that, and the dancer on the right has an exuberance which is simultaneously that of the painting and of the figure. And only in a painting could the figures be related as they are. One way of generalizing this is to say that we see the subject matter - the things that lie in the world outside the painting and upon which the painting draws - as dissolved, reconstituted, and recombined. It seems natural to say that we see the subject formulated in the medium. But to talk of formulation is at least to invite an analogy with language which could be taken in rather different ways: for example, we might try to make the analogy with literature or with language in general. In this situation three questions seem naturally to present themselves: (1) how do we understand the relation of subject to medium? (2) of representation to the order or design in painting? and (3) if we pursue the analogy between painting and literature, what stands to representational painting as language in general stands to the literature in that language?

In the last thirty years Sir Ernst Gombrich's focus on the psychology of recognition and its application to depiction has brought to a new level of explicitness the question of how the recognition of the subject * This is a revised version of a paper originally published in Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. X (1983). A response was made by the late Max Imdahl published in the same volume and I have included a discussion of this as a postscript (see note 2 below).

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Michael Podro is related to the material surface and to the ordering of the painting. The following arguments are an adaption and a response to Gombrich's position.1 How far does seeing the subject of the painting differ from recognizing someone you have not seen for some time, or recognizing some familiar object under unusual viewing conditions? And the point of asking this question is to keep hold of the sense of recognition and reintegrate it within a wider account of painting. There are three arguments which might lead us to dissociate the sense of medium from the sense of subject matter. (1) First of all, it might be argued that we regard the material lines and marks on the paper or canvas of a drawing or painting only in so far as they provide us with cues by which to recognize the subject; that in so far as we are interested in the subject, we simply scan the marks on the canvas for cues of recognition, discarding all else as background noise. If, for instance, we take a drawing in chalk by Rubens of a woman walking in a voluminous skirt of gathered silk, we can distinguish three kinds of quality: first, qualities of the drawing material, chalk marks or pen strokes on paper; second, qualities of the depicted subject, those of the figure and her clothes; third, the qualities shared by material and subject by virtue of which the material can represent the subject, common qualities like characteristic shapes, the interruption of one shape by another, relative difference of light and shade suggesting modeling and texture, and colors. Having made this commonsense division, it is then argued that a woman moving along in voluminous skirts is very different from pen or chalk marks on paper: lines on paper cannot gather up their skirts. So the more we decide to look exclusively for the figure, the more we will withdraw attention from the marks and patches, except in so far as they provide cues for recognition; correspondingly, the more we direct our attention to the marks and patches as such, the more we will leave out of attention what those patches suggest - the figure. But should we accept this account of the matter, with its implication of oscillating attention between the marked surface and the subject? If attention to the lines or marks of the drawing means attention to the marks as such on the paper, this oscillation seems inescapable (even though in fact we have psychological difficulty in breaking past the sense of the subject), but if attention to the lines or marks of the drawing is thought of as attention to the lines drawn with the purpose of representation - that is, as medium and not as mere material, then attention to the lines and marks of the drawing does not 44

Fiction and reality in painting involve eluding our sense of the depicted subject. That is, we must distinguish between the lines and marks as material and as medium. But is this a mere trick with words? What is the medium beyond being material? One way of putting it is to say that we look at the medium as material in use, we look at it with a sense of the purpose with which the lines and patches are controlled. Perhaps we could say that the medium is more than the material in the way an utterance in language is more than a sound. Although the parallel cannot be pushed too far, it may help us to keep hold of two crucial distinctions: the distinction between mere marks on the one hand and those marks in use for the purpose of representation on the other, then the distinction between accidental patches or cast shadows or mirror images which just happen, and images that are made by the controlled use of the medium. (2) There is a second argument which would detach our awareness of the depicted subject from one sense of the medium: according to this our perception of the depicted subject and of the painted surface efface each other. This is the duck-rabbit argument: in the duckrabbit, the perception of the duck effaces the perception of the rabbit, just as in the reversible Necker cube, the sense of seeing it from below effaces the sense of seeing it from above. The duck-rabbit, reversible cube and related examples are taken by Gombrich in Art and IJJusion to illuminate the relation of the painted surface to the subject depicted, for they share two characteristics with depiction: they both elicit recognition and disrupt delusion. But such examples would hardly be used to illuminate paintings if we did not look at particular passages of paint and marvel at the way they jump into convincing depiction. So the duck-rabbit argument really has two stages: the first stage of the argument is that the reciprocal effacement of the duck-rabbit (an effacement which occurs between two representations and not between the representation and marks used) may be seen as parallel to the effect in certain passages of painting, and the second stage of the argument is that these passages of painting are thought to be paradigmatic of depiction in general. But even in passages of painting in which we experience a sense of transformation, how good an analogy is the duck-rabbit? Let me take an example. Just to the left of the centre of Manet's Musique aux TuiJeries, a top-hatted man stands in profile turned toward our left and stooping slightly. To the immediate left of him is an area of gray paint which frequently puzzles people looking at the painting. We may well find ourselves scanning the paint marks in different ways 45

Michael Podro until the image of a seated woman with a bonnet and veil, billowing skirts, and a child resting its head on her lap, emerges for us at the centre of the painting. But we do not find ourselves oscillating between the recognition of the woman and the recognition of the paint marks; the image of the woman, which resolves itself out of the gray area of paint, integrates with the painting as a whole and, in the painting as a whole, we never lose our sense of Manet's brusque, dry, incisive procedure permeating the subject. (3) There is a further line of argument which might be used to show that we separate recognition of subject matter from our sense of material. Our experience of much painting and sculpture is characterized by the coexistence, even ironic coexistence, between qualities of medium and subject: Chardin gives an extraordinarily vivid sense of polished silver with a rough paint texture, Bernini conveys the fleshiness and mobility of the face in hard polished marble, and Rubens the shimmering silk in scumbled charcoal. In these cases, we realize the coexistence of these qualities with constant surprise, surprise that the sense of rough crumbling paint can coexist or present us with the equivalence of burnished metal, and so on. Does this not show that we do, in these cases, look at the material and the subject with discrete psychological "sets," for otherwise how could we experience the sense of surprise? When we recognize something in a depiction, this could not be analyzed as perceiving an analogy between paint and subject - and so could not be analysed as perceiving a surprising analogy - because we should already have to have recognized the relevant aspect of the paint surface before we would know what to compare it to. So, it might be argued, we cannot sensibly talk about our sense of ironic equivalence between the subject and the marble, charcoal or rough paint surface, unless we meant an alternation of views, one which saw the medium and saw the subject and then found the fact that one could be represented by the other surprising. Clearly, we cannot analyze or explain how recognition of the subject occurred by reference to the perception of an analogy. But if we assume that recognition of the subject has occurred, we do not have to assume that recognition saturates or exhausts the way we see the medium. So a sense of the material charcoal, marble or paint - over and above our recognition of the subject may lead us to marvel at the way in which such crumbly charcoal gives us a sense of silk, such hard marble a sense of flesh, and such rough paint a sense of polished silver. 46

Fiction and reality in painting We should therefore reject each of these arguments which split entertaining the subject from attention to the medium: the arguments that as a matter of logic they exclude each other, that as a matter of psychology they efface each other, and that in ironic relations of medium and subject we experience a disjunction between two perceptions. The recognition theory of depiction needs amending, first of all for what it leaves out: the sense of medium. But the sense of medium has so far been given little distinctive interest. Our account has given little insight into what I have called the formulation or density of painting. Examples which direct our attention to the equivalence of paint and what it represents suggest too simple a view of the art of painting. The painter can represent the world only if there is some consistency in the relations he sets up between the material he uses and the world he sets out to depict; only then does the material become a medium. But he needs to sustain not only a minimum consistency, but to elaborate upon the opportunities his procedure provides. The procedure itself will have distinguishable characteristics. These we might call the continuities which run through the painting. Thus, we not only scan the marks on the paper or canvas for the scene or subject they depict, but we see the marks themselves as having a consistency of rhythm or texture, and we see the represented subject and the continuities of the medium as reciprocally adjusting to each other; for instance, we see the impulse of the drawing checked and pulled this way and that to define and penetrate the subject, and in this way restraining any mere routine repetition or facile spiraling of shapes. Correspondingly we see the way in which the drawing procedure neglects, slides over and omits features, only selecting and connecting what is relevant to its own order within the subject matter, thus curtailing mere literalness. II How does the reciprocity of medium and subject bear upon the relation of representation and design? In his paper "Norm and form," Gombrich proposed that we look at depiction as involving two factors, representation on the one hand, and design on the other. The polarities, says Gombrich, reduce to "composition" for all principles of order, and "fidelity to nature" for the means of representation in contour and depth. 47

Michael Podro Clearly, the more a painting or statue mirrors natural appearances, the fewer principles of order and symmetry will it automatically exhibit. Conversely, the more ordered the configuration, the less will it be likely to reproduce nature. It seems to me important to stress at this point, that, in my view, both order and fidelity to nature are reasonably objective descriptive terms.. .An increase in naturalism means a decrease in order, (p. 94)

Gombrich sees these two objectives as capable of a certain reciprocal give and take; either one or the other may gain precedence. The precise force of Gombrich's "automatically" in the first sentence, and "likely" in the second, is, I take it, that a mirror image may by chance represent a symmetrical disposition of forms, and that symmetry may be maintained between realistically represented (or really present) features, but that such occurrences would be matters of chance. We must distinguish order from natural appearances as objectives. It is as objectives that they are in conflict. Gombrich has made it a matter of definition that the pursuit of one conflicts with the pursuit of the other: "An increase of naturalism means a decrease of order." Gombrich's conception of order appears to have two conditions: the first is symmetry and analogies and regularities more widely conceived and the second is that the regularity can be detected or appreciated in the surface configurations or in a fictive plane parallel to the surface. Thus in his contrast of Raphael's Madonna with the Fish and Caravaggio's Madonna di Loretto (p. 90), the latter's symmetry seems just as marked as that of Raphael: the oblique axis running through the group serving like the frontal axis of the Raphael. The distinction which this contrast brings into focus is that between dominant planes running parallel to the picture surface and those running obliquely to it. How far do these principles of order conflict with the representation of natural appearances? It does not seem difficult to find examples in which not only is symmetry not in conflict with our sense of natural appearances, but it actually facilitates the representation of appearances. In Monet's Poppy Field, the analogy set up between the figures nearer the foreground and those on the brow of the hill serves to order and to define space, and the sense of repetition becomes stronger as we register the spatial significance of their scale more clearly. Similarly we take an example which combines symmetry with surface pattern: a series of lines used to represent the folds of a cloak on a piece of Greek pottery. While the lines form a surface pattern, the slightly decreasing intervals suggest the recession of a turning form, an effect like that of Aphrodite's robe in the Apollo 48

Fiction and reality in painting frieze of the Parthenon. Here Gombrich might reply that this is the case where the conflict is kept to a minimum, where the balance between spatial suggestion and surface order is at its most perfect. But the notion of conflicting demands is clearly not the notion we want if the fulfillment of one demand actually facilitates the achievement of the other in a substantial group of cases. The thesis, therefore, that the representation of natural appearances conflicts with symmetry or order on the surface needs some adjustment. It looks as if the factors which we recognize as aspects of order are distinguishable factors rather than conflicting objectives. Gombrich gave focus to the problem by the contrast of Monet's painting of Rouen Cathedral and a drawing by van Eyck of St. Barbara with a church in the background (p. 93). Regarding Impressionism, Gombrich says that it ''appears almost to disregard the principles of order altogether." How, if not as a contrast between order and representation, are we to give an account of this difference? In Monet's painting of the fagade of Rouen Cathedral, the great construction of masonry, which might be seen as baffling and complicated, with grand spaces between its stone masses, has taken on the homogeneity of a colored reflection thrown on a rough surface. The view of the cathedral is absorbed into and sustained within the painterly microstructure. When we compare this painting to a painting or drawing containing architecture by van Eyck, we must ask: what has been sacrificed in each? Realism to ordering or ordering to realism? For has Monet not sacrificed a great deal of a certain kind of realism to achieve a unity such that the various features of the masonry seem to have been absorbed in the broad effect of the painting? And has van Eyck not excluded a great deal of reality by the way he has ordered the forms in tightly delineated, rhythmically regular and spatially compressed overlapping shapes? We might say that Monet's ordering is sustained through the absorption of detail in an overall homogeneity, where van Eyck's is more a matter of the disposition of discrete planes and objects. But each is a way of selecting and connecting features of the subject matter, registering them within its own consistent morphologies and procedures. This expresses the difference between them by reference to different relations of medium and subject, each of which provides its own kind of consistency and coherence. This said, there is still something crucial about the contrast which has been left unsaid. The frontal, symmetrical disposition of the subject in van Eyck's drawing contrasts with the oblique view of Rouen Cathedral, 49

Michael Podro the forms set parallel to the picture surface by van Eyck with the way the Cathedral is unaligned with the plane of the surface. But this too is a matter of the subject-medium relation (for the plane of the surface is an aspect of the medium) and what this does is to dissociate our orientation to the surface from that to the subject. Ill

Turning now to the third question - what stands to painting as ordinary language stands to literature? — we need to assume some answer to the question: in what relation does literature stand to the language it presupposes? How do we make the demarcation? There is a temptation to regard the way in which literature stands to nonliterary uses of language as if literature represented ordinary uses of language, as a quotation represents an utterance but does not make it, and a rhetorical question takes the form of a question but does not ask one. In this way, literature might be thought to represent language as paintings represent figures and landscapes. This would largely explain two distinctive features of literature: first, it would explain how literature could dissolve ordinary language structures and reconstitute them, generating fresh senses, continuities, and tensions beyond the range of other uses of language; second, it would help to explain why and how it was that in literature we attended so closely to the language. The view is immensely tempting. But it cannot be sustained; so much literature is not the representation of the use of language, it is a use of language for ordinary purposes: it presents histories, it expresses philosophical theories, it formulates instructions and questions. Such histories, etc., are uses of language which are not, as it were, in quotation marks; they are not representations of language, but language being used with its normal force. But not only are history and philosophy naturally included in "literature" but even literary forms like the novel may have as part of their interest their description of a real situation, or a particular type of situation. Buddenbrooks would have a quite different and diminished interest if we did not believe that there were such societies in north Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. Little Dorrit would have a very different and diminished interest if we did not believe that the Marshalsea prison existed much as Dickens described it. Concern with actuality respect for some facts - is something without which no imagining is conceivable. What changes as we move from history to poetry is how 50

Fiction and reality in painting dissectible we regard the interest of the text, how far the components or aspects of the text are of interest beyond our grasp of its argument or factual content but not excluding them. To the extent that we extract truths of detail from the overall vision, and the vision from the exercise of the language, we are not treating the text as literature. But if we make this the demarcation between poetry and history, or more generally - literature and other uses of language, how do we establish an analogy with painting? Literature presupposes the ordinary uses of language, but what does the art of painting presuppose which is not yet art? If the demarcation between literature and non-literary uses of language is made by reference to the way literature uses language to illuminate its subject, or to illuminate the force of its own performance, and if we regard the art of painting in the same way, then we must regard painting which does not do this, which just depicts subjects or juxtaposes forms in ways which do not illuminate them, as lower-level procedures which are presupposed by the art in which we are really interested. Mere depiction and the art of depiction share the same resources, and the same basic relations of representation, but use them differently. This analogy between literature and painting has a residual awkwardness: bad sonnets and bad novels are still sonnets and novels, and they could not be returned to a status outside literature. So, in the case of literature we have a tripartite division: (1) non-literary uses of language; (2) weak literary uses of language; and (3) distinguished uses of language. And if this is so our correspondence between, on the one hand, commonplace versus distinguished painting, and on the other hand between non-literary and literary uses of language may seem to break down, for we still have weak or commonplace literature to account for. However the argument was not that undistinguished painting was like language which we did not regard as literature. The argument was that there was a relation between undistinguished painting and distinguished painting which was like the relation between literature and other uses of language. The art in both cases is demarcated not by some code, prosody, or semiotics but by sustaining a certain kind of concentration and scope. POSTSCRIPT (1992) In his paper "Seide und Kreide" Max Imdahl made the following reply to these arguments:2 that it attended to the transformation of the 51

Michael Podro material by reference to the subject it depicted, but it failed to give an account of the transformation of the subject by the way it was represented in the medium; it "deals with material in use and not the subject matter in use" (p. 360) - in use, that is, as the subject for painting. He argued that the interest of the subject, no less than the interest of the material, took on a new character within the painting. Imdahl's argument was not that the character of the medium had been left out of the above account, making the medium transparent to the subject, but that the subject had been treated as if it were still the same as the pre-pictorial subject, while only the material had been transformed into something new. While it examined the fact that "the presupposed knowledge of the subject brings about a new understanding of the material. [It] does not expressly discuss the reverse case, where there is.. .a new understanding of the subject matter, which leads beyond previous knowledge of the subject." The account was thus seen by Imdahl as one-sided, for not only was the chalk (Kreide) seen differently because of the way it was used to represent silk (Seide), but silk was seen differently because of the way the chalk represented it, because of the way the chalk transformed it. In Imdahl's account of the matter we see the chalk against the horizon of the look of silk and the silk against the horizon of - in the light of or in the service of - the look of chalk. Or, in another formulation, we see the silk being transformed in the direction of chalk and vice versa, and each has equal status. The character of each is modified by its representing or being represented by the other. Both become aspects of the image and as such are irreducible to the elements which were prior to it. Although we talk of the silk which is represented or the chalk which does the representing, these prepictorial terms are not strictly and properly descriptive of the picture. What is in the picture does not break down into these pre-pictorial components. This I take to be Imdahl's first and central point. But there is a problem here which comes into focus when Imdahl writes: "the question arises of the nature of figurative expression for which the reciprocity of material and subject cannot supply the evidence.. .to put it broadly - there is an essential 'figurative object' (BiJdgegenstand) of a representational picture which is immediately convincing, unique, not founded in an iconic visual equivalence of the image, and this cannot be discussed under the category of a necessary fusion of material and subject.. .Measured by such an understanding, which maintains the self-expression of the picture, the meaning of the medium, emphasized by Podro, as a mediation of 52

Fiction and reality in painting material and subject matter, refers to an extra-artistic, or at least a pre-artistic level of meaning.. .However important it is that the chalk and silk merge into each other, it is more important that they merge into the same rhythm" (pp. 360f). But the use of the medium and sense of the subject, however transformed within the work, remain substantial elements within its interest, together with a sense of their heterogeneity. The prepictorial chalk and silk, like the actual painted surface and intimated fictive space, the brush-stroke and the plane it delineates and so on, are each constituents of the ordered depiction, not factors which its order leaves behind as contingent or extrinsic to it, extra-pictorial or pre-artistic. But Imdahl is right that we need some account of the way they are connected which is more than equivalence. So the question is: how are we to point to the immanent unity of the work? As a solution Imdahl adopts the notion of an order which is ontologically distinct from subject matter and medium; this order would be seen as endowing them with their pictorial or artistic significance. The cost of this solution is that we have to add a new entity and one which is only contingently related to the subject and medium. Another solution would be to regard each factor that we intuitively discriminate (such as but not only subject and medium) as providing a context in which the others were seen. Cohesion might then be thought to arise out of their reciprocal relevance, their capacity to modify and give focus to each other. This alternative would capture Imdahl's first thesis about the silk and the chalk each modified in the light of the other, but it would not treat it as posing a problem. It would not lead us to seek out some further factor, some ultimate underlying configuration. It would have the advantage, furthermore, of showing how the reciprocity of medium and subject could serve as a model for a wider sense of pictorial coherence: symbolic and allegorical usages, allusions to other works and other activities and the functions of images may be thought of as calling into play - and being modified by - the pictorial skills. We might then take Imdahl to be pointing not so much to a transcendent configuration but implicit relations (worked through by the mind) by which the painting's coherence was sustained.

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Michael Podro Notes 1 The major work is Art and Illusion (1960; 2nd edn. London: Phaidon Press, 1962). The theses of this are developed in numerous subsequent papers, collected in The Image and the Eye, (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1982). On the polarity of verisimilitude and order, the central exposition is "Norm and form: the stylistic categories of art history and their origins in Renaissance ideals," republished in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), pp. 81-98, to which I refer below. For his further discussions of order and symmetry, see E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979). For further discussion on Gombrich's position, see particularly Richard Wollheim, "Reflections on Art and Illusion": On Art and the Mind (London: Allen Lane 1973) and Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 2 Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. X: Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (eds.), Funktionen des Fiktiven, (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1983), pp. 359-363.

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Franz Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation of his works WALTER BIEMEL There is no doubt that Franz Kafka is one of the most exhilarating writers of our century. While he was known only to a few during his lifetime, his worldwide literary influence did not begin until after World War II, when a second edition of his works was published by Schocken. The same publisher had already made available an edition in Berlin in 1935. But at that time of the Nazi regime, his works had no chance of becoming popular. I do not know whether his books were among those burned in public by order of the Nazi government, but I would imagine that they were not even known to its barbaric representatives. Immediately after World War II, his works began to be translated into all the major languages, and their contents began to stimulate discussions everywhere. Even today, the discussion about Kafka continues, although he no longer happens to be the center of the general literary discourse. In this chapter I wish to use Kafka as an example in order to investigate the question of whether there is a necessity for a philosophical interpretation of a literary work of art. The question itself can by no means be taken for granted. On the contrary, one could immediately argue that such a philosophical interpretation would necessarily leave the domain of literature for a mode of thought that calls for such a necessity. And this new domain of philosophy, one could also argue, must be identified with abstractions because concepts are (supposedly) basically abstractions. One tends to be apprehensive of abstractions because, it is said, they make one lose contact with the real world. But art gives us pleasure precisely because of its proximity to real life. Yet one also hears the argument that art can delude us into a reality more beautiful than the one we are living in and have to put up with. And in this, art is sometimes said to have a 55

Walter Biemel more consolatory function which we tend to escape into whenever we are unable to face de facto reality. Such opinions concerning the relationship between art and philosophy are sometimes said to be common sense. But whether common sense can be an authority on the relationship at hand is itself a moot question. It could well be the case that common sense lacks interest in the deeper questions raised by art and philosophy, making it a platform suitable only for gullible argumentations based in the merely everyday world. Consequently, one should not assign too much credibility to common sense when questions such as the relationship between art and philosophy are addressed. This point alone invites us to take a closer look into that relationship, one which does not exclude either of its terms. Our question is then how can such a relationship between art and philosophy be explored without taking away any of the constituent elements inherent in art and philosophy themselves? Let us briefly look into this matter. What actually happens during the creation of a work of art - in our particular case a literary work of art? Its author creates persons and situations and describes sequences of actions. This transposes us, as it were, into a new and specific type of created world that we may or may not accept. That world is presented in language. One of the many traits of language is to enliven the world: through language we see the persons involved in their surroundings; we see the relations among persons themselves as well as those they have with nature and, perhaps, with the supernatural, be the latter the Divine or the Holy. We cannot go into the details of these and other multiple possibilities contained in language, nor show how the rhythm of a sentence, the sound of words, or of their surrounding meanings contribute to the tones of language - something we hardly think about in everyday life. In short, in a literary work of art we are confronted with a world created by its author and to be experienced by his readers. What, on the other hand, happens in philosophy? First, and in general terms, philosophy looks into the question of "what is," i.e., into the essence of Being. Within this question there is the human being as one particular entity, with the power of choice, with his own understanding of and dealings with entities, with her relations to others and nature and the supernatural. Philosophy can also be restricted to particular domains of its own, such as logic, philosophy of nature, and ethics, but this does not concern us here. One point should be made clear: philosophy, too, concerns itself with man's 56

Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation world and the problematic of how the relationship between man and world is constituted. This may suffice to catch a glimpse that art and philosophy are by no means distant from each other. True, they are not identical, but what unifies them is their concern with interpreting the world. And the latter is done on the one hand in terms of understanding the make-up of human relations, and on the other in terms of regressing into the meaning expressed in all human relationality. If so, we cannot exclude the possibility of a philosophical interpretation of art. On the contrary, on the basis of these introductory considerations a philosophical interpretation of art seems to be required in principle, in the sense that by such an interpretation what comes-to-pass in the art work becomes accessible. Now, however, the question is why in Kafka this demand has a completely different meaning, so that we can speak of the necessity of philosophical interpretation. What does this mean? What claim is made thereby? How can it be justified? To answer this question forthrightly one could say that without such an interpretation the meaning of what Kafka tells us would remain hidden, and his story would appear even to be simply meaning-less. The following two examples taken from Kafka's works should help us demonstrate the necessity for a philosophical interpretation. The stories we have chosen are "In the Penal Colony" and 'The Burrow." Let us first briefly recall the contents of "In the Penal Colony." An explorer enters a penal colony located in the tropics. The Commandant of the colony asks him to partake in the execution of a soldier. The officer in charge of the execution is also a judge. The death sentence is to be performed with the aid of an "Apparatus" invented by a former Commandant. It is the purpose of this machine to kill a person under sentence without human intervention within twelve hours. The officer explains the death machine to the explorer, and asks him to convince the present Commandant to use the machine, or at least to refrain from criticizing it. After the explorer realizes the horrifying nature of the apparatus it is designed to fatally pierce the wording of a paragraph of the law supposedly violated by the accused right into his body - he declines the request. Thereupon the officer puts himself on the machine that he had earlier been praising so much for its efficiency. But at his own execution, the machine does not function properly. And it takes not twelve hours but only a short while for him to be killed. The 57

Walter Biemel explorer, shaken by the gruesome scene and event, leaves the colony right away. At first, the story simply appears to be nothing but the creation of an excessive seizure of imagination. Why bother attempting a philosophical interpretation of it? Would it not be more appropriate to attempt a psychological analysis of the author's mind? Let us not make rash judgments of this kind but rather take a closer look at what happened. Our summary may have been correct but it may also have failed to grasp fully the core of the events concerned. I suggest that we proceed in two steps for which I use the terms exegesis and interpretation. The former is to clarify the process and structure of the narration, while the latter will deal with the inherent sense of the story. "'It's a remarkable piece of apparatus,' the officer says to the explorer."1 Over the whole story hovers an air of remarkable peculiarity. The story is one of Kafka's most bizarre ones, and we must pay attention to this. For the officer the apparatus is a singular and strange device. At the beginning of the story, he describes it with a "certain air of admiration." Normally, one admires what is unusual or unknown. The machine, however, is something well known and familiar to him. As one will learn by reading on, he even identifies himself with it. Kafka shows us two different attitudes, (1) that of the explorer, who politely looks at the machine, and (2) that of the officer, who keeps being fascinated by it although he has known it for a long time. At the beginning of the story another such contrast occurs. On the one hand, there is the breaking of a law on the part of the accused, his alleged "disobedience"; on the other, there is his actual dog-like servility. This contrast is not without reason. It belongs to the structure of the story, and we will look into this in our exegesis. Let us point to other contraries in the story. The death machine is supposed to facilitate the execution; in fact, however, the officer is exhausted when showing the machine off. Another example is the officer's response to the remark that his uniform is unfit for the prevailing climate: "These uniforms" he says "are unfit for the tropics, surely.. .but they mean home to us; we don't want to forget our home." 2 One can only say to this that if there is nothing left of one's ties with home but a uniform unsuitable for the environment it is worn in, such a home has been lost completely. The concerted use of the external symbol of home is an unmistakable sign of homelessness, i.e., of the very loss of one's home. 58

Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation The story develops through a number of other contradictions, some of which I shall mention. For instance, the accused is to feel in his own body the sentence that will be pierced into it by the machine: he is to decipher the sentence by reading his own wounds. However, the contiguity between a piercing machine and perforated body turns into its opposite: deciphering the machine's imprints turns out to be impossible. The plates that regulate the piercing of the body are so misshapen that they are barely decipherable even when carefully looked at directly, and are very unlikely to be read at all from the imprint made by piercing the body. All the parts of the machine are contradictory to each other. Its biting needles, for instance, eject water to clean the perforated body and facilitate reading the sentence. The machine's middle part, the "Harrow" doing the perforations, is made of glass so that spectators can see the inscription being pierced through the skin. Everything about this machine is designed for the inscription of the sentence; yet the inscription remains indecipherable. The part of the apparatus called the "Bed" does not offer the comfort of a break during the torture; rather, it is the very place of the literally harrowing experience itself. The contradiction of the legal proceedings becomes apparent when the officer is asked about the wording of the sentence. He responds that the sentence is not a harsh one. It simply runs, "Honor Thy Superiors!" Yet this simple sentence is a death sentence. And the explorer also learns that the accused does not even know the sentence because there were neither criminal proceedings nor a defense. The officer continues to describe the functions of the parts of the apparatus, convinced that the explorer will become a partisan of its use. But he believes that "The injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution were undeniable." 3 And the more the officer puts his trust into the explorer the more the explorer comes to loathe the device. In his analysis of the story, Walter H. Sokel appears to have missed this point when he asserts that the explorer is emotionally on the officer's side, though rationally denouncing the penal system: he admires the officer and the apparatus and relates to the accused as if to a worthless animal.4 But there is no such admiration of the senseless machine. Sokel appears also to be mistaken when he contends that the Penal Colony is not a precursor of concentration camps because it is designed to transfigure an individual, whereas concentration camps were designed to suppress and annihilate them.5 I would say, rather, that the officer's assertion that all is 59

Walter Biemel designed toward transfiguration is just as much a lie as the inscription above the entrances of concentration camps, which read ''Work Sets Free." One has the impression that Sokel has fallen into the officer's own trap and become persuaded by him. But this would not and does not pertain to the explorer at all. He clearly refuses to recommend the apparatus to the Commandant. And this is why the officer puts himself on it, his self-chosen paragraph reading: "Be Just."6 However, the machine will not function according to its design: the officer is transfixed immediately, and the machine dissolves. How can such a peculiar story be interpreted? Is it at all possible, we must ask, to look for an inherent sense behind a senseless story? As a rule, we take it for granted that man is a rational animal, but overlook that he is also exposed to non-sense and can even be overshadowed by it. Our own century is perhaps an indisputable example of the non-sense of wars and the senseless extermination of millions of human beings. My reading of the text has shown that the presence of contradictions militates against making sense of the function of the machine's parts. At this point we must ask whether the story turns on a specific move from sense into non-sense. This, it appears to me, is definitely the case: it is the turning of justice into injustice. When the officer maintains that the machine's purpose is to deliver justice, we, for our part, are led to the conclusion that its functions do the very opposite. It delivers injustice. The old Commandant's conception of legality - he was its designer - was not aimed at finding absolute justice. Rather, the inversion of justice into injustice was all that he had in mind. Whereas the ideas that laws have to be recognized by a community, that illegal actions will be prosecuted, that a defendant has the right to legal defense, that a sentence is carefully checked prior to the conclusion of prosecutions, that there is a chance to appeal, that the institution of judgment is separated from executions of penalties, etc. belong to an objective conception of legality, in the Penal Colony no such things exist: the interconnection between rights-law-verdict or guilt-sentencing-execution are perverted beyond recognition in that the execution alone matters. The execution has no proper relationship with the violation of laws since only the death penalty is available. Unmistakably, the officer himself says: "My guiding principle is this: 'Guilt is never to be doubted.' " 7 A more perverted sense of laws and rights is hardly imaginable. The apparatus, so much exalted by the officer, does not serve an objective 60

Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation dispatching of the law. It is an unequivocal, absolute incorporation of non-justice. How is the end of the story to be interpreted? Both the officer's self-execution and the dissolution of the machine would indicate that a perverted conceptualization of legality must, in the end, annul itself. True, injustice can for a while terrorize and intimidate human beings. Yet history tells us that some time there will be an end to it, be it by furtive or overt rebellion. The fact that our own times are marked by such rebellious actions throughout various totalitarian systems truly reflects the inner dialectics of a perverted inversion of justice into injustice in such systems. The officer's sense of the law is imbued with fanaticism. His mind is blocked to the realities of communal life. Unfortunately, our century has more cases of totalitarian perversions than would have been imaginable in time past. Kafka saw something coming which, unfortunately, turned out to be the awesome, negative fact of our age. In a letter dated October 11, 1916, Kafka wrote to Kurt Wolff, his publisher: I wish just to add to this latest of my stories that it is not only it that is painful. Rather, our own general as well as my own particular times have been and are very painful, with the qualification however that my own particular times are so for even longer than our times in general.

Let us now turn to the other story, 'The Burrow." As I indicated elsewhere,8 " T h e Burrow' is Kafka's most exciting story although, strictly speaking, nothing really 'happens' in it. Equally, it is the most human of them, although its main character is an animal." It is this story that will unmistakably reveal to us that a philosophical interpretation cannot be avoided. Trying to dodge a philosophical interpretation is tantamount to relinquishing the very sense of the story. Let us start again with a brief summary. The main character, the animal, is telling us the story of its life. While, as a rule, we tell our life story to others, there is no one else that the animal is talking to. This is important for the story's whole make-up, which we will examine below. The animal talks to itself about its accomplishment: the burrow. "I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful."9 A schematic overview reveals three parts: (1) the animal's idea of the burrow, (2) the animal's leaving the burrow, and (3) the animal's coming back to the burrow. The burrow is the center of the animal's existence: "You belong to me, and I to you, we are united; what can harm us?" 10 61

Walter BiemeJ The story begins with a description of the burrow's entrance: "All that can be seen from the outside is a big hole; that, however, really leads nowhere; if you take a few steps you strike against natural firm rock." The big hole, then, is not the entrance at all. It fakes one, and who ever uses it as an entrance will not get into the burrow at all. And further, we learn, "At a distance of some thousand paces from this hole lies, covered by a movable layer of moss, the real entrance to the burrow; it is secured as safely as anything in this world can be secured..." But already here, at the beginning of the story, the high degree of sensitivity to security is nullified when the animal says, "yet someone could step on the moss or break through it, and then my burrow would lie open, and anybody who liked.. .could make his way in and destroy everything for good." The consequence of this is also stated: "I know that very well, and even now, at the zenith of my life, I can scarcely pass an hour in complete tranquillity; at that one point in the dark moss I am vulnerable, and in my dreams I often see a greedy muzzle sniffing around persistently." The successful construction of the burrow of which the animal is so proud is now not praised; it is even questioned. This is no fortuitous inversion of what has been said before; rather, such inversions occur throughout the entire story. First there is the praise of the work accomplished, then there is the realization that the actual purpose of the work done, security, has not been achieved. Along with a striving for security, the enemies, which the burrow is supposed to protect it from, begin to enter its imagination. And there are not only enemies threatening the burrow from the outside but also those "in the bowels of the earth. I have never seen them, but legend tells of them and I firmly believe in them." And the animal adds, "Not even my exit could save me from them; indeed in all probability it would not save me in any case, but rather betray me." 11 In this hopeless situation there occurs again a sudden turn, namely one from despair to hope. The burrow has just been presented as not providing security, but now the animal says of it, "yet it is a hope, and I cannot live without it." One quality is crucial: "the most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness." But a reversal follows immediately: "Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over." The animal's life appears to be determined by its listening to silence: so much so that it constantly awakens fearfully from its "sweet sleep of tranquillity," listening to the surrounding stillness and that fear, of course, jeopardizes and diminishes the beauty of the burrow — its peaceful tranquillity. 62

Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation At the center of the burrow lies a chief cell or the Castle Keep, "carefully chosen to serve as a refuge in case of extreme danger from siege..." It has taken special effort to build it: "So I had to run with my forehead thousands and thousands of times, for whole days and nights, against the ground, and I was glad when the blood came, for that was a proof that the walls were beginning to harden; and in that way.. .1 richly paid for my Castle Keep."12 The Castle Keep also serves for storage. The new projects that the animal devises always make provision for an optimal allotment of storage space. Additional places are being designed for the same purpose. Actually, there should have been more than one Castle Keep. Let us not go into other details of the structure, such as the labyrinth. Suffice it to say that here too we find sudden turns ranging from praise of the burrow to criticism of its imperfections. Next, the animal leaves the burrow. It decides to walk into the open. Since it completely identifies with the burrow, leaving it is described as a most critical event. What does the animal do in the open? It cannot reach the open at all. This conflict is expressed when Kafka lets the animal say, "And so I can pass my time here quite without care and in complete enjoyment, or rather I could, and yet I cannot." 13 Once in the open, all the animal does is watch over its burrow. Typical of this is the passage saying, "This fancy used to have such a hold over me that sometimes I have been seized by the childish desire never to return, but to settle down somewhere close to the entrance, to pass my life watching the entrance, and gloat perpetually upon the reflection - and in that find my happiness - how steadfast a protection which I am looking at here from the outside would be if I were inside it." This amounts to an hypothesis nullifying its hypothetical character. The calm at hand is only of short duration. "Well, one is soon roughly awakened from childish dreams. What does this protection which I am looking at here from the outside amount to after all? Dare I estimate the danger which I run inside the burrow from observations which I make when outside?" 14 Let us bypass the dialectics of the animal's fatiguing reflections on the burrow and its principal distrust, so that we can now come to the story's decisive moment. It is awakened from deep sleep by an "almost inaudible whistling" 15 and begins to search for its cause. It comes up with ever new ideas, and digs into the ground at various places, trying to identify the intruder who is causing the noise. Yet the more it digs the more it destroys the burrow. The "comparatively innocent" noise turns out to be beyond comprehension. True, the 63

Walter BiemeJ animal tries repeatedly to comfort itself with the thought that there is "no intention of doing me harm." 16 But these comforting delusions are short-lived: the heart of the burrow, the "murmurous silence of the Castle Keep," is gone.17 We can now address our initial question of why the story requires philosophical interpretation. Is it not plain? But who, we must ask, is the animal? This question must be answered in order to grasp fully the meaning of the story, and this necessitates philosophical interpretation. Such an interpretation does not move us away from the story into another discipline; on the contrary, it helps us to penetrate into the story. The animal is peculiar. It lives by ratiocinations. What happens in these, and who has the faculty of such rational deliberations? It is the "animal rationale," an old determination of the nature of man. The animal living his life in the burrow stands for no one else but the human being. As a first step, the interpretation must therefore clarify the theme of the nature of reasoning involved. And arguably "The Burrow" represents a process of self-justification. To what extent does selfjustification belong to human existence proper? Every human being is characterized by the fact that he has to bring himself to realization. This is in marked contrast to animals, which are fixed in specific environments and guided by a system of instinctive behavior. Heidegger implies this when he states in Being and Time that human existence is not simply a given fact, but that it has to be ("The essence of this entity lies in its having-to-be"). The human being has to realize himself. Throughout existentialism, this point is stressed by the function of making choices. Continuous choices must be made: for instance, in our relations with others, with our general environment, and even with regard to our own selves. In this context, it was important for Sartre to find out when there is an ultimate choice: for instance, Flaubert's decision to become a writer. This kind of ultimate choice also occurs in one of Sartre's own few selfpresentations, "Les Mots," when he tells us of his own decision to become a writer, which was motivated by his grandfather. Of course, it is not only artists and writers who have to make choices determining the direction of their existence. All of us must make them: to become, say, a bus driver, a car mechanic, a politician, or a teacher. And such ultimate choices are woven together with numerous other ones belonging to everyday life: whether we decide to go to a concert, 64

Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation or an exhibition, or to buy a book - and all their ramifications are woven into the fabric of our environment. All this need not be discussed here. Heidegger investigated this in his analyses of "inauthenticity" and "authenticity" - so often misinterpreted as something like "heroic existence." We are concerned here with the fact that the individuals must find their very own proper individuality for themselves, or, for that matter, that individuals may also lose it whenever a central choice ill serves their own possibilities — their latent abilities, talents and interests — or when it is overshadowed by ideas prevailing in a social group or a human milieu with which individuals have often come to identify themselves. Frequently, this leads to the well-known phenomenon of failure-experiences, which often result in personal neuroses through which people concretely live their failure. Human existence is neither predetermined nor fixated. It has to be acted out and thus realized. Therefore, justification is a necessary part of it. And the crucial moment for self-justification occurs at the zenith of one's lifetime. Prior to this, there is always the possibility of recourse to excuses implying that the major accomplishment can still be realized at a future time. But it is at the very zenith of a lifetime that existence is fully realized. A certain pride accompanies this, and this we learn right at the beginning of the story: "I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful." The animal justifies its existence in the light of what it achieves. Of course there are also many ways to delude oneself into self-justifications: saying, for example, that things did not go as they should have in order to achieve one's intended goals.18 The animal's idea of the burrow is an act of self-justification ranging from the beginning to the end of the story. But the story tells us even more: a theoretical self-justification clashes with a de facto experienced situation. This is also hinted at right at the beginning, "it seems to be successful." The animal does not say, "it has been a success." Only practice will show whether life in the burrow will be fulfilled. And the story does show us distinctly what life in it really means. As a result, we see an abyss between what has been accomplished on the one hand and what is being experienced on the other. At the end of the story the tranquillity and stillness, which the animal was so proud of, have been lost. At best, they return in moments of hope. But these are only scattered within the underlying state of hopelessness; they are presented as delusions just to allow the animal a break. 65

Walter Biemel The story leaves the source of the mysteriously threatening noise open. The editor of the story did not solve the riddle either. In his postscript to Volume 5, he writes: 'The story was completed. Nothing much was missing among the preserved papers up to the end of the description of the tense martial attitude in the animal's immediate expectations, and of the decisive battle that will make the hero succumb." 19 I propose that the whistling noise does not come from another animal. It is its own breathing. Therein lies the uncanniness of its self-alienation. The animal seeks security and is at the same time its own enemy. All its diggings in search for the noise must therefore remain futile: the noise's pitch remains unchanged wherever the animal goes and destroys the burrow by digging. This first phase of interpretation requires a second one. What happens in this? What remains is to find out whether Kafka is narrating on the basis of personal experiences, whether he wishes to tell us about it, or whether this story betrays a dimension that I wish to call, and perhaps must call, 'The Dimension of Contemporary Metaphysics." The following paragraphs explain this dimension, allowing us to penetrate into the story itself. It was probably Heidegger who came closest to determining the nature of our present time. In his essay "Die Zeit des Weltbildes"20 he uses the expression "preview in representation" (vorsteJJender VorbJick), which means that human beings want to "place" or order the sum of entities or things. This whole or sum is thus placed as that which determines its relation to man. Entities turn therefore into objects, but objects are not simply opposed to us. An object is rather that which relates back onto us. In this relatedness-back-onto-man, the object is "emplaced." This continued emplacement (Stdndigkeit) of both the object and the sum of entities thus becomes contingent upon the subject. The word subject, too, obtains a novel meaning here. While its original Greek meaning is of "underlying" (hypokeimenonj something else, today it is man alone who has this underlying function. Heidegger writes: The basic process of modern times consists in conquering the world taken as a picture. "Picture" means: structuration of production in representation. In this, man struggles for a place allowing him to be that entity which draws a measure on the whole of what is.. .The world turning into a picture, the whole of what is turns into something by which man sets himself up and, accordingly, can have and bring before himself so that he can, in a decisive meaning of the term, place it before him. In essence, "World-picture" does not mean a picture of the world, but refers to the world taken as a picture. All 66

Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation what is is now taken as if it is first only existing in so far as it has been placed through man's representation and producing. It is precisely the act of emplacing that we are confronted with in Kafka's narration. All that exists in the story is emplaced in regard to establishing a domicile, a burrow. Everything is seen in regard to an absolutely secure shelter. Indeed, the animal's whole life is nothing but work to this end. Kafka furnishes us with a consistent as well as telling description of this. For instance, neither impressions of colors nor a particular predilection for one are mentioned; nor is there any mention of a preferred shape in this construction. Why? Because such references would detract from attention to the burrow and from the protection it provides from intruders and enemies. The animal's entire attitude of emplacing itself squarely fits the fact that all other animals appear only as possible threats, and we have already mentioned that its unceasing perspective of seeking security can only allow distrust. I wish to show now that this particular perspective of seeking security is not an incidental concept introduced by Kafka, but belongs to our very own times. And with this, I wish to show that our time has brought about a change in the essence of truth. In his 1942-3 "Parmenides" lecture Heidegger describes this change as follows: Whereas in ancient Greek the meaning of "to hold something as to be something" remained within the essential domain of un-concealing and the unconcealed, in its later Roman connotation this domain was lost. In Latin, the term "reor" was used. Its respective noun is "ratio.".. .The essence of truth as "veritas" and "rectitudo" shifted into man's "ratio," reason. Greek "aleteuein," meaning "unconcealing of what is in unconcealment," and which still suffuses Aristotle's notion of "techne," turns into reasons' activity of setting up in a calculating manner.21 It is this setting itself up in terms of the animal's calculative mind-set that prevails throughout 'The Burrow." And the search for absolute security, also prevailing throughout the story, is characteristic of modern man. And Heidegger's interpretation of "ratio" as man's basic faculty shows this to be the case: Whatever man is able to accomplish by way of his faculty of reason will decide on what "verum" is, or "falsum." In order for man to reach truth as what is right or correct, he must be sure and certain of the right use of his basic faculty. The essence of truth has come to be determined by security and certainty. What is true has turned into what has been secured and certified. "Verum" became "certum." The question of truth turned into asking the 67

Walter Biemel question of whether, and how, man can be certain22and assured about the entity he himself is and about entities that he is not. Man's hope of rinding lasting security by his endeavors to keep almost total control over entities has turned out to be a futile hope not only in the burrow but also in our own times. The phenomenon of alienation Kafka so impressively describes is by no means restricted to literature alone but determines our present history in general. Just think of war and the widespread idea that more defense would secure peace, which is an idea that will eventually lead us to worldwide financial ruin, not only in the so-called Third World but also in all industrialized countries. Our own times are indeed characterized by the trend of dwindling trust and the impossibility of friendship. It is for this reason that hopes are being engendered that seem to be able to lessen the fears of hostility. At least we have become aware of the catastrophic effects in which environmental exploitation will eventually result. We still have to wait and see to what extent there may be devastating consequences for us. The animal's concentration on piling up stores, i.e., its being absorbed by the importance of its possessions, has many counterparts in our own world today. Just as the animal basically knows only work, so also modern man is nothing but a workhorse. And just as the animal knows no freedom and must, when in the open, constantly watch over its burrow, so also man is constantly watching over his possessions to avoid losses in his speculations with them. There are more parallels between 'The Burrow" and modern times than the ones just mentioned, but these suffice to make it clear that a correspondence exists between modern man and the animal in the burrow or, for that matter, that the animal stands for us. The few examples given also show us how our own Angst is one we have of ourselves, but without realizing it. They show us how our terminal sojourn on earth is no longer concerned with true dwelling, but has come to be determined by our incessant search for security, a security which will finish in total insecurity. Kafka did not ask why this development had occurred. This, however, is a question asked in philosophy. Heidegger contributed immensely to its answer. It is remarkable that Kafka was able to furnish such a lucid demonstration of modern man - long before Heidegger's interpretation of history as the history of metaphysics. The preceding paragraphs also indicate that art is not the domain of sheer invention but sheds unmistakable light on man's earthly sojourn.23 68

Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation This chapter has attempted to show that (1) without the dimension of philosophy an interpretation of Kafka will miscarry, and (2) that such an interpretation will serve, rather than put constraints on, his work. But I do not claim to have been exhaustive in any sense in my attempts. The uniqueness of art consists in the fact that it always invites interpretation - as long as we do not find satisfaction merely in forcing entities to be under our control, but keep on looking for what, in art, reveals itself. It is only then that we begin to comprehend fully the significance of art, and it is why we cannot do without art in trying to know what our own existence is all about. Works of art have a distinctive dimension. There are works of art in which the character of an historical epoch manifests itself. Such works of art can truly be called "epochal." For these works a philosophical interpretation is indispensable: philosophy is of great help, as its very theme is the articulation of the epochal character of history. In view of the fact that this is the case in the thought of Heidegger, but not of Husserl or Wittgenstein, I have turned to Heidegger. In the future another philosophy that makes the history of man's existence accessible to us could be of help in trying to understand what comes-to-pass in great art. For with Kafka one is concerned with such an art.

Notes 1 "In the Penal Colony," tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kafka, The Complete Stones (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 140. 2 Ibid., p. 140-141. 3 Ibid., p. 151. 4 Walter H. Sokel, Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie: zur Struktur seiner Kunst (Munich: A. Langen, 1964), p. 133. 5 Ibid., p. 113. 6 "In the Penal Colony," p. 161. 7 Ibid., p. 145. 8 Walter Biemel, Philosophische Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 66. 9 'The Burrow," tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 325. 10 11 12 13 14

Ibid., p. P. PPP-

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

342.

346. 328. 334. 335. 69

Walter Biemel 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

Ibid., p. 343. Ibid., p. 345. Ibid., p. 347. In my book Zeitigung und Romanstruktur (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1985) I tried to show that Emma Bovary's failure consists in the incompatibility between her anticipation and factual accomplishment, because her anticipation stems from her excessive reading of trashy literature while she was cloistered. See the chapter "Die Zeitigung als 'fatalite' in Flaubert's Madame Bovary," and cf. especially the chapter "Die Zeitingung der Zukunft im Konflikt mit der Gegenwart," pp. 80ff. 1 thank Dora Dymant, the lifelong companion of the deceased, for her kind gesture of communicating this to me. See Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (65 vols., Frankfurt: V. Klosterman, 1976-88), vol. V: Holzwege. Ibid., pp. 73f. Ibid., pp. 74f. I elaborated on this latter point in a speech presented at the Heidegger Colloquium in Munich: Thomas Buchheim (ed.), Destruktion und L/bersetzung: Zu den Aufgaben von Philosopohiegeschichte nach Martin Heidegger (Weinheim: VCH, 1989), pp. 213ff.

70

On relocating ethical criticism WAYNE C. BOOTH

Invited to "discuss ethical criticism in the light of responses to my book The Company We Keep," I was naturally tempted by the glorious opportunity to give the more careless among my readers a public lashing. Like most authors, I've been puzzled, and sometimes angered, by a fair number of grotesque misconstruals.1 But it will be more profitable here to ignore the blind and the halt and turn, instead, to explore what it might mean that the great majority of reviewers have chosen to embrace the project, if not the details, of my effort to rehabilitate ethical criticism. I had thought, as I began writing the book in the mid-seventies, that the critical world, busy with its attacks on authors, intentions, referentiality, and any form of closure, would be generally hostile to my project. Friends confirmed my expectation: "It's really courageous of you to take up such an unfashionable cause. You'll be crucified." Our predictions of hostile responses were based, at least in part, on two dogmas inherited from mid-century and seemingly still dominant then. On the one hand most practicing critics had been graduate-schooled to believe that all practical questions - ideological, ethical, political - are irrelevant to our appraisals of artistic worth: the surest sign that a critic had been badly educated was any hint that judgments about "life" could intrude on aesthetic judgment. Though critics were everywhere beginning, once again, to ferret out the political origins and intents of literary works, everybody but Kenneth Burke and a few Marxists and feminists seemed still convinced that the domain of the "aesthetic" was immune to all practical questions. On the other hand, most critics seemed to share with philosophers and social scientists an even more basic dogma of 71

Wayne C. Booth modern thought, one that in a sense undergirded the first: it is the very mark of philosophical naivete to think that you can derive an "ought" from an "is," a "value" from a "fact." In literary criticism this dogma reinforced the first: you cannot base an appraisal of ultimate literary value on a description and analysis of the literary "facts," especially if those facts are simply personal "value preferences" or commitments. Even when factual analysis reveals, as of course it always will, that the work is embedded in commitments, overt and covert, the critic's job is never to say, "This poem is good (or bad) because its ethical, moral, or political center is sound (or faulty), or because it is likely to produce good or bad effects in its readers."2 So I felt, as I began, that my enterprise was quite probably doomed to be attacked as just one final, forlorn, "post-Arnoldian" bleat of alarm: let's get moral again and save the world from the relativists.3 What happened was quite different. During the decade of composition I began to discover that our critical climate is far different from what it was not so very long ago. Beneath or alongside or perhaps even subsuming more visible transformations traveling under labels like deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, and cultural critique was a transformation from "neutralist," or "formalist," or "aestheticist" stances to open conversation about "values," "virtues," "character," and "morality." The same critical hunger that led me to write the book had long been shared, more or less silently, by an astonishing number of readers in a wide variety of positions — professional critics, popular reviewers, and "common readers." (Of course many of the latter had always just taken for granted, often in quite indefensible ways, the close connection between art and "life.") To read through the reviews now, in a batch, is to hear a vast collective sigh of release: "Your book means that at long last we can talk about what we have always cared about, without being accused of naivete." The expressions of gratitude are usually followed, of course, with objections. For some I am too much inclined to say "good ethical criticism depends heavily on the ethics of the reader," too careful about not pasting labels of "good" and "bad": earlier, gruffer moralists like Leavis did it all better.4 For others I have the wrong ethical code - I'm either too pluralistic or not pluralistic enough, or too much or too little Aristotelian, or too much or too little infected by post-modern "fashions," or too little aware that though what I call ethical criticism is required, it should really be subordinate to political criticism: every critical dispute boils down to a power 72

On relocating ethical criticism struggle.5 For several I am not systematic enough: they leave the book, they say, not knowing in advance what standards they should apply when judging the next novel: "After reading this book I am no closer to an ethics of fiction that is independent of taste, subjectivism, and political exigency than I was before."6 But even such complainers have usually asserted that novels do educate, morally, and are thus subject to questions about whether they bless us or curse us. 7 In short, if the book's half-hundred or so reviewers and the many who have written private responses are in any way representative, large numbers of readers are eager for serious engagement, once again, with the sort of question Plato asked aggressively at the beginning of our tradition. How, first, should we deal with - how can we even talk about - the inescapable fact that even the purest, most "literary," works produce actual, tangible, ethical and political changes in the lives of those who engage with them? And how must our appraisals of literary value be affected by our judgments about the value of those changes? Further evidence of a major change of climate comes from sources entirely unconnected with my work. One sees everywhere new declarations of ethical criticism, new efforts to show just how we might talk responsibly about the ways in which art works work upon us, for good and ill. Some of these were being written, without my knowing about them, as I wrote mine, and some appeared before or along with it.8 Many others, at what seems to me an increasing rate, have appeared since.9 Joining this new wave, no one needs to feel caught any longer in the intolerable conflict I had described almost two decades ago, in Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, between our objectivist theories that ruled out rational demonstration of value judgments and our inescapable need to assert and defend those judgments. Instead of feeling caught in that dilemma, as sensitive intellectuals like Bertrand Russell had felt through the century, we are now unapologetically embedding our literary appraisals in our moral, ethical, or political positions, often enough, unfortunately, with the kind of irresponsible passion that seemed to justify the objectivist purgings in the first place. But as we do so we are increasingly aware that "everyone else" - everyone, that is, outside the circle of frontline philosophy and criticism - has been doing this all the while, even those who have most vehemently declared ethical and political judgments out of bounds. We have discovered that our choice, as I insist in the book, is not whether to practice ethical criticism. It is 73

Wayne C. Booth rather whether to do it well or badly - whether to acknowledge it in our theories, and thus to lay the groundwork for a more effective and responsible ethical conversation. Our plea, then, the plea of a mounting number of critics, is addressed to two camps. To those who profess "objectivity" or "neutrality" or adherence to the pure aesthetic object, we say, "Come clean: bring your true commitments into the light of day, so that they can be tested in reasonable discussion." To those who have too casually asserted their moral and ethical judgments - for example the strident New Criterion crowd and other over-confident canonists and anti-canonists who talk as if any strongly felt assertion made good ethical criticism — we say "Come off your high horse: this kind of criticism is more difficult and complex than you have implied. Let's get our reasons out on the table, so that we can find ways of improving the ethics of our own behavior in appraising the company we keep in these fictions." The problem faced by those who embrace ethical criticism is surprisingly similar to what it was for responsible critics like Samuel Johnson or Coleridge, before theorizing ruled evaluations out of the domain of rational discourse: to find ways of talking about our values that will escape the blinkers of the merely private preference, without moving to baseless assertions about the one right way of thinking and responding. Like many a professional philosopher since the challenges of Hume and Kant, we critics are driven to search for a path between a dogmatic monism, on the one hand, and a subjectivism or solipsism or what Stephen Pepper calls "utter relativism" on the other.10 II No rehabilitation of ethical criticism is likely to last for long, unless we can relocate ourselves in ways that will avoid traditional distortions. I see four essential, and inescapably difficult, relocations: (1) from blanket attacks on or defenses of large lumpings like "poetry" or "literature" or "the novel" or "the canon" or "popular culture" to detailed formal inquiry into the precise nature of our experience with particular works; (2) from positivist or "scientistic" notions of proof that leave "rhetoric," and especially rhetoric about values, as inherently no more than a corrupt or decadent attempt to seduce or exploit or overpower; (3) from a worry about moral obligations or codes or lessons about them, and the resulting danger of immoral behavior, to 74

On relocating ethical criticism appraisals of the ethical quality of human relations, especially the quality of relations between authors and readers; and (4) from the search for a single hierarchy of goods to a radical pluralism of hierarchies.

Relocation from amorphous lumps to the powers of particulars An astonishingly large proportion of current criticism, whether committed to ethical matters or neutralist, attempts to cover domains so vast that no critic, however learned, can know much about the individuals that dwell there. Of course every individual literary form resembles, in unlimited ways, other forms, literary and unliterary (whatever those lumping terms might mean). Though ethical critics from Plato through Sidney, Johnson, Shelley, and Arnold to F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling have offered important and challenging judgments about huge heaps of works (some as large as '"poetry" or ''literature," some reduced in size slightly with adjectives like "pure" or "genuine"), in my view they were usually most useful when they settled down, as Johnson for example often does, to talk about the blessings and blights offered by particular works. What Johnson has to say about the novel in general is to me much less interesting, and considerably more difficult to defend, than what he has to say about Tom Jones and scores of other works. What Arnold has to say about the religious mission of poetry in general seems to me much less valuable than his penetratingly negative critique of his own "Empedocles on Etna." What Plato has to say about poetry in general is to me of less permanent value, and far more dangerous, than what he has to say when he settles down to the specifics of Homer's epics. The reason is of course that every large artistic grouping- "poetry," "the novel," "literature," "the lyric," "satire," "tragedy," and so o n potentially includes particular works that for a given reader or culture may prove either beneficial or harmful. Though it may be true that "the rise of the novel," or in our own time "the rise of the visual media," will have large-scale ethical effects on the hordes who suddenly join that "rise," and though one would certainly not want to ban from criticism all speculation about such effects, there is a much greater chance of a meeting of minds, through a conversation that presents not just opinion but argument, when critics deal with their experience with this novel, this epic, this poem, this rock lyric.11 75

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Relocation of standards of argument: "coduction" as shared rhetoric If our judgments are to include our sense of the human worth of our encounters with individual works, and not just our sense of the craftsman's skill,12 we cannot hope to demonstrate the validity of those judgments according to any standard scientific or strictly logical paradigm. Nothing that has been written by logicians about deduction or induction will be adequate to the subtle, complex process through which we come to know artistic worth.13 To put the point another way, every moral judgment derived from standard models of proof can be undermined by an appeal to experience: "Yes, I know that anti-semitic literary works are by definition bad, but in this work, The Merchant of Venice, which is admittedly anti-semitic in many of its scenes, I find so much of this, that, or the other valued quality that I can't simply condemn it out of hand." "Yes, of course this classical work is sexist, even more so than its contemporaries. That fact reflects a genuine limitation in the imaginative power of the author. But just look at these other powers..." The redeeming qualities can be of many different kinds, because - and this is the point we come to under the third relocation literary goods themselves are of many different kinds. Since no simple logical demonstration, conducted by a private investigator and then laid out in full cogency to the world, can do the job, the ethical critic is thrust into a community of inquirers - the community of all those who care enough about the work in hand and about engaging with it to enter into serious conversation about it. Most of us find that most of our appraisals of individual works, and even of entire genres, change over time, not only because we change with the years but because discussion with other judges modifies our views. We discover our plain misreadings: a passage that we deplored turns out to have been intended ironically. We see features in the work that our blinders had obscured. We reconsider the standards we've employed. Or we discover why some private association has temporarily deflected our full attention. This week my wife and I saw a play performed splendidly by the Steppenwolf repertory company in Chicago: Wrong Turn at Lungfish, by Garry Marshall and Lowell Ganz. We were considerably moved by the moral and intellectual changes acted persuasively by the two leads, and we came away praising the play. Then we each happened to read, independently, a perceptive negative review of the play, by 76

On relocating ethical criticism Anthony Adler,14 and we found on comparing notes that we had both revised our appraisal downward - not as far downward as Adler claimed we should, but downward nevertheless. My wife said, "Well, we'll have to get hold of that play and read it, but I think Adler has a point." Such malleability is sometimes mocked as a weakness; it can indeed be that, when one is swayed by whatever opinion happens to hit one last. But to me it is the very heart of defensible artistic appraisal: "I" don't do it, alone; "we" do it, together, arguing back and forth in a process that never comes to a permanent stop. Such coduction — the coinage I've fallen back on to distinguish the process from induction and deduction - can never yield an absolute judgment of absolute ranking. It is always comparative, and it is thus always dependent on the range of our previous experience. As Samuel Johnson puts the point, As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep, or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains, and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind.. .Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square; but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time.15

Even a Shakespeare or Homer must be subject to the shifts of coduction over time, as succeeding judgments are extended from culture to culture and age to age. Such fluidity, which is rightly stressed by subjectivists, gives absolutely no support, however, to those who think that literary values are in no sense "in" the work, or that "everything is relative to the viewer." Some reviewers have been annoyed that I should spend so much of their time (most of chapter 4 of The Company We Keep) uncovering the absurdities in the arguments of utter subjectivists; to them it should go without proof that literary works have powers of their own, and that some of these powers are more valuable to the human spirit than others. Other reviewers, deeply committed to the freedoms of subjectivism, naturally find my "proofs" of the potential commands of the work's intentions unconvincing. It is in the nature of the case that this debate will continue. What need not survive, I hope, are the twin notions that make ethical criticism pointless: that individual, private, isolated inquirers (if any such ever existed: see "Relocation from monism to pluralism," p. 82 below) could ever make meaningful judgments about literary worth; and that our mutual endeavors in refining and 77

Wayne C. Booth deepening our judgments never really get anywhere - that no ethical judgments, of literature or of anything else, are in fact superior to some other ethical judgments. Some reviewers have lamented that the process I call coduction is what most readers will ''discover they have been practicing all along."16 But that is just the point. It is indeed what most critics practice, more or less well. My argument is that the rhetoric employed in their exchanges, written and oral, is inherently superior, for the purpose of appraising value, to any paradigms of more rigorous calculation or measurement. But of course that claim presupposes that practitioners work to increase their skill in coduction. The reviewer who caught this point most acutely was Thomas M. Conley, in "Booth's company and the rhetoric we keep," in Rhetorica.17 Conley shows how the book both advocates and practices a rhetoric that the stoics would have contrasted, as "ethical," to two other kinds of rhetoric, the one springing from a "physical" view of the world in which language strives for a reflection of things as they are, the other springing from a "logical" or linguistic view of the world in which authors are wordsmiths who, consciously or not, manipulate syntactic or semantic permutations inherent in linguistic codes to reproduce old messages in new forms or produce potential new meanings. These "meanings" may or may not claim to bear on things [as in the physical orientation] and actions [as in the ethical]. In the extreme, even someone who simply provides as the text a box full of pages qualifies as an "author"; but since words have [in this "logical" orientation] absolutely no objective correlative referents, the number of "messages" that can be construed is in principle infinite - the "meaning" of the "text" is radically indeterminate, as some of them put it. The text, as an organized collection of words, is an embodiment of those codes; and so it is up to the reader to decode the message(s) and up to the critic to explore the limitations and possible extensions of the code embodied in a given text. (p. 172)

Conley sees, more clearly than most reviewers and in a historical context deeper than I will ever command, just how sharply contrasted my theory and practice are from each of these alternative rhetorics. In an ethical orientation, that is, one featuring human action, "rhetoric" is rather more comprehensive than it is in the two other orientations.. .Instead of accuracy [the aim of the "physicalists," who are the main targets of contemporary "linguistic" attacks], probability is the goal, for the issues in action are not verifiable in the way issues in knowledge are, in part because they involve "facts" that haven't yet happened.. .Instead of arbitrary pleasure taken in the permutations of words [the professed goal of some "linguistic" 78

On relocating ethical criticism programs - e.g. Barthes's], the construction of communicative patterns of desire is the goal. Probability and emotion in such a rhetoric must be combined to establish the grounds for action or the avoidance of it.. .The best texts are those which achieve.. .more than mere utility, more than mere pleasure: occasions for the coduction of value, episodes in our continuing efforts to become "the best character possible, under the circumstances." (p. 173)

Conley's grasp of this radical attempt at a "new" rhetoric, a rhetoric actually as old as the hills, enables him to understand a part of the book that hardly anyone else has even mentioned: my advocacy of a kind of "hypocrisy upward" that we are led to by the way in which our "patterns of desire" are in fact improved by association with implied authors who (because their flesh-and-blood authors have purged their quotidian vices and weaknesses) are better than we are. The relocation of rhetoric from "proof" to ethical conversation requires rethinking about what a self, or character, is, how a character gets formed (in part by playing roles "assigned" by stories and talk about them), and how the moral or ethical quality of a character is to be judged (see chapters 6 and 7). This unfashionable claim requires a third relocation for its support.

Relocation from moral obligation to ethical quality The notion that art works ought to teach us the right moral code, and that when they don't they should be condemned or banned, no doubt long predates Plato's Republic, and it is still inevitably active in our world today. I say inevitably, because art works do in fact "teach" that is, either implant or reinforce notions of moral obligation. "This hero wins my passionate sympathy by choosing public duty over private inclination - obviously an admirable choice - and I feel myself encouraged to act in the same way, suppressing my personal inclinations and struggling for public honor." "This heroine wins my passionate sympathy by expressing her contempt for conventional standards and pursuing instead her quest for personal liberation; she thus confirms me in my sense that I ought now to support this or that 'cause' by defying my parents, leaving home, and joining the rebels." Those who deny such effects have simply not looked honestly at their own behavior and at the world around them - most dramatically but not exclusively the world of the impressionable young.18 It would be absurd to reject all criticism that leads to judgments based on such effects: much of what we call progress in the arts stems 79

Wayne C. Booth from strong feelings that this or that code has been overplayed or undervalued, and that art that does such-and-such moral or political job must be honored. Nevertheless, criticism can never be reduced to the syllogistic form X notion of moral obligation is bad (or good) Artistic work Y touts X (and thus may change behavior) Therefore work Y is bad (or good)

Such arguments usually suffer from our inability to test them empirically, though they make an empirical claim. But they suffer even more from a deficiency that is embedded in the still widespread modern way of thinking about our "selves" and how we should live. By its very structure, this way usually leads to an opposition between the "individual," or self, and the others to whom some sort of obligation is owed: some duty that requires the sacrifice of something that "I" would like to have. Moral behavior is what counters my selfish ends; selfish behavior is what immorally serves my ends. This notion - that morality is found in pursuing altruism at the expense of "self'-ishness - produces serious limitations when it enters critical discourse about literary value. Not only does it oversimplify the effects of any given literary work, since they depend more on the total pattern of desires stimulated than on any particular code mentioned or preached; it deflects us into irresolvable disputes about hard scientific evidence - "Prove that watching TV or listening to this or that rock record led to this crime" - and thus bypasses the most important questions. The best critique I know of the "moral obligations" theory of ethics appeared a year after Company, though I made some use of its author's earlier manuscripts and articles: Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (the book might have had a longer subtitle, adding: "with some illustrations of ethical criticism"). 19 Even though it does not mention Company, I think of it as one of my best confirmations, because it undertakes, in a more fully developed philosophical form, precisely the same relocation from moral obligation to ethical quality that undergirds my enterprise. Taylor's chief target is those modern notions of the individual that see "self-development" as something that occurs in opposition or indifference to the "webs of interlocution" that we all in fact are constituted by and live in (p. 36). Taylor argues that all theories about the world, including those that deny the objective reality of "the good," are implicated in qualitative judgments about what makes a good human life. Modern theories that try to bypass this inescapable 80

On relocating ethical criticism implication have left us on the one hand fumbling with utilitarian calculations, and on the other spluttering passionate, unargued assertions of our privatized moral obligations. It is this effort to shift from moral obligation to ethical relations that led me to a revival of the metaphor of books as friends. Though it has the disadvantage of leading at times to a kind of sentimentalized criticism that was badly overworked in the nineteenth century, it has the great advantage of reminding us that the main motive for practicing ethical criticism in the first place is to share with others our inescapable sense that some literary "company" is worth keeping, some simply a waste of life's precious hours, and some positively debasing. Though you and I will never come to full and final agreement about just which literary company is ennobling or degrading, usefully shocking or harmfully destabilizing, we should be able to say to each other, about a novel, poem, movie, or video, not just, "It's a 'good' (or poor) read," or "You'll like it (or detest it)" but something like, "you really ought (or ought not) to have this experience: it will be pood (or bad) for you." The full implication of opening ourselves again to such shared judgments — judgments of a kind that would have been taken for granted by almost all critics from Plato to about 1900 - can't be explored here. Company claims only to open up these lamentably closed doors, and to give some illustrations of what happens to my own readings when those doors are opened. It is true that one result of the opening is likely to be a great deal of undeveloped assertion that will appear to be deplorably ungrounded; one main reason for closing the doors in the first place was to protect the world from unsupported and unsupportable "nonsense" - often meaning the evaluations of those we disagree with. A critical world in which people express and defend their sense of the human worth of this or that art work, irrespective of whether it is well-crafted, will not run smoothly. It will be even less visibly "progressive," in the sense of accumulating shared knowledge, than a critical world in which the chief issue is whether a given work is unified (and thus by definition good, in the New Critical mode) or challengingly disunified (and thus by definition worth at least an article, in the post-structuralist mode). Consequently the scientifically minded - those who have the "physical orientation" that Conley and the Stoics talked about - will almost certainly be even less respectful of criticism of the ethical kind than they have been of various formalisms. Tenure decisions will be more difficult; just as tenure committees now have to dispute about 81

Wayne C. Booth how to weigh ideology as they discuss the young woman whose criticism is radically feminist, or the young man whose criticism is radically Marxist or Christian or gay, so they will have to complicate their deliberations by taking other value-orientations into account. But can anyone really argue that such "losses" of cleanliness and clarity are as serious as losing our right to address one another about the "life and death" matters we face here? Is it really more important to chalk up undisputed progress in the cause of indubitable knowledge among experts than to develop the kind of talk that educates the talkers ethically?

Relocation from monism to pluralism A further productive muddying of the critical waters results from the fourth essential relocation: from the search for the one right critical path, the one right ethical or moral code, the one right method for conducting our ethical lives, to an embrace of plurality on all fronts. This century has produced a flood of philosophical critiques of the "quest for certainty" or the search for the one single, universal view of things. 20 Many who have become aware of the age-old problem of "reciprocal refutation" - that is, every major philosopher's claims to refute every other philosopher - have tended to turn to the one most plausible explanation: "none of them is true." Others have turned to an eclecticism that allows for a bit of truth in each of many philosophies, the whole salmagundi of odds and ends somehow constituting a stew of truth. Only in this century - perhaps as a result of increased semantic sophistication, perhaps as a result of our unprecedented anthropological awareness of the need for cultural pluralism - have we developed systematic critical pluralisms that go beneath the seeming reciprocal refutation among major philosophies to seek a reciprocal inter-translatability that would allow us to say: "Though many philosophical views may be in error, partially or in their entirety, it is in the nature of our effort at comprehensive knowledge, and in the nature of the universe itself, that we will both have and need a plurality of comprehensive visions." Our choice, facing the imposing totalizing visions of Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and so on through Marx, Freud, and Derrida and the new feminists into the indefinite future, is not to make a flat choice from among them. Nor is it to struggle for some new and all-encompassing synthesis or some way to prove them all wrong. Rather it is to select, as I have just done in my listing, those 82

On relocating ethical criticism few that seem irreducibly and persuasively comprehensive: given their assumptions about fundamental subject matters, questions, and proper philosophical method, we find them able to "account," at least in principle, for everything. We can't know in advance how many alternative views will survive such a pluralistic critique, but we can look for those total perspectives that in their comprehensiveness take into account, though always in forms that will look reductive from alternative perspectives, the data and principles of the other views. 21

The charge of relativism This is not the place to attempt even a truncated argument for such a systematic philosophical (and hence critical) pluralism. But I must deal briefly with the way in which my commitment to pluralism undergirds the whole of Company and with a few of the problems that such undergirding raises for the closest readers. Among these the most helpful so far is raised by Martha Nussbaum.22 Toward the end of an account that reveals at every point an extraordinary care in reconstructing my enterprise, Nussbaum arrives at some fundamental questions about my pluralism. She begins her critique by finding five different versions of pluralism which she claims that I blend in confusing form: 1. Pluralism as multiplicity of component goods .. .there are many distinct and non-homogeneous valuable things, and, therefore, many good roles for literature to play in life. la. Pluralism as multiplicity with conflict .. .we do get some true statements of the form "X is both good and bad" - but without logical problems, since the good and bad features of the object are distinct, though contingently impossible to separate. 2. Pluralism as contextualism .. .what is good for you in your circumstances is not necessarily good for me in mine.. .[For Booth] it would be good for a moral subjectivist to read and reflect about The Old Curiosity Shop, though the same experience might not be so good for someone excessively inclined to [moral] dogmatism. 3. Pluralism as multiple specification of the good .. .ethical principles frequently operate at a rather high level of generality, and are susceptible of many concrete specifications, not all of them simultaneously instantiable and each adequate for realizing the principle in practice. Suppose, for example, that one decides that a good human life should make room for friendship, and that what is essential in good 83

Wayne C. Booth friendship is reciprocity and the effort to treat and benefit the other for the other's own sake.. .One may then notice that a variety of relationships, concretely very different in kind (in different social traditions, for example), all exhibit those morally valuable characteristics. One cannot have all those forms of friendship together, and perhaps not even in a single society. But they are all similar in their morally relevant characteristics. Pluralism here would consist in saying that all of them are [or at least could prove to be: WCB] good, though they are in many ways non-compatible. 4. Plural world-versions without contradiction This view claims that there are many alternative versions of the world that have value and validity.. .There are standards of Tightness by which we can narrow the group of acceptable versions, but we cannot rationally opt for any of the acceptable ones over any other. 5. Plural versions with contradiction Finally, there are several places where Booth simply asserts, as an example of his open-minded pluralism, contradictions that I see no way of resolving. Early in the book, he appears to say that he holds both Aristotle's view of friendship and the Christian account (p. 173) - although in many essential respects the two are in direct contradiction... This clear sorting - the very model of what a helpful reviewer can do for an author- leads Nussbaum to express her fears that while she can accept the first three, numbers four and five sound to her dangerously like relativism. I do indeed embrace all of these versions, and she is surely justified in requiring me to explain why what she discovers under numbers four and five are in fact simply other versions of what she discovers under numbers two and three, and hence quite distinct from the kind of full relativism or subjectivism or skepticism that she and I both would deplore.23 First let us look at Nussbaum's precise charge. To say that both the Aristotelian and the Christian view of friendship can be embraced, she says leads to ethical confusion. On page 348 Booth explicitly urges the reader to take in, and to believe, a collection of cosmic myths that is "to some degree incoherent and self-contradictory." On page 351, he appears to sympathize with skeptical attacks on logic; and frequently in the last part of the book he refers to his ethical convictions (for example, his anti-racism) as "my ideology." Wanting to accept and believe all candidates for truth, he reaches the verge of giving up on reason-based ethical judgment, (pp. 179-80) She then goes on to admit that eliminating this final pluralism from the book will not be easy, but it should be done. And she speculates that I embrace this one as a kind of sop to current relativists, "to reassure them that he is no dogmatist, no stuffy defender of logic." 84

On relocating ethical criticism This view "sells out his position. Anti-racism.. .is not just his 'ideology.' It is an ethical position both defensible and defended by rational argument." However shaky my ultimate pluralism may be, it is not embraced as a sop to relativists: it is the considered (thou 0 n perhaps philosophically a bit amateurish) result of decades of living with Richard McKeon, Stephen Pepper, and others, and with the pulls upon me of various human goods that seem both real and (sometimes) incompatible. I tremble for fear any further effort to clarify will simply confirm Nussbaum's fears that I have sold out. Still, I must try, because the issues here could not be more important, not just for ethical criticism of the arts but for our ethical lives in general. First a small point about the word "ideology." Obviously for Nussbaum it has connotations that I did not intend. To refer to my "ideology" does not, for me - though apparently it does for her - give away the store to relativists, any more than referring to the "myths" that I live by would be, for me, to dismiss my beliefs as in some basic sense untrue. We need some term for the totality of our beliefsystems-cum-value-systems, some term that does not prejudge their validity or shortcomings. By the 1990s, all the terms seem, like "ideology" and "myth," to be corrupted; the traditional term would have been "religion." If, as Nussbaum seems to believe, to call my commitments "ideology" places them as far outside the possibility for reasonable argument as the term "religion" still does for many people, then she is right to object to it. (In Company I use the words "myth" and "world.") I think that similar semantic probing would remove much of her anxiety about terms like "incoherent" and "self-contradictory." (A more technical way to put my point here is that in nothing I say do I wish to repudiate the law of noncontradiction, when it is stated with the same precision about definitions that Aristotle uses in his defense of that law.) Nothing would disturb me more than to discover that my book is finally a repudiation of "logic" in the Greek sense of "reason" - a sense that usually included a weighing of conflicting commitments. But I do find that my commitment to reason is often violated by what other people call "logic." Moving beyond semantic differences, how can anyone say, as indeed I do say, that both the Christian view of friendship (taken in its extreme form, as an indiscriminate love for humankind, including especially the lowly, the undeveloped, the ignorant, the "poor in spirit") and the Aristotelian view, which is hierarchical and quite 85

Wayne C. Booth clearly "elitist," at least in the sense of ruling out from one's "love" those who are intellectually or morally "unworthy" - how can I say that both can be embraced by a fully competent reason? How can I see both views as sound, without admitting to the kind of relativism that Nussbaum deplores? Nussbaum's case is obviously challenging: nothing could have shocked Aristotle more, I assume, than the suggestion that he should devote his life to acts of "Christian charity," freezing the development of his own soul in order to "save" that soul by working to rescue as many lost sheep as possible.24 The very notion of debasing himself by seeking to dwell among ignoble publicans and sinners would be as abhorrent to him as Jesus's friends were to the Pharisees. It would be to risk what he thought of as the health of the soul. Those base ones not only corrupt the time one spends with them but also threaten to pull one down to their level. And similarly, any convinced Christian will surely find grounds for offense in Aristotle's hierarchies of human value. To suggest briefly how one might fit this conflict under the three kinds of pluralism that Nussbaum accepts, it is useful to consider how we think about the "goods" that inescapably conflict in nature. Nature operates, one could say, precisely by a conflict of goods: it is a good thing - at least from "nature's" point of view (or God's, or the ecologist's) when a certain species of red squirrel (beautiful, interesting, even lovable to some human beings, and obviously to other red squirrels) flourishes; to kill off the red squirrels (as many people think the development of the new telescope will do) is a bad thing. But of course "nature," or God, or even the ecologists, as they drive their CO2-emitting cars to their rallies, are providing, day by day, multiple threats to the squirrels (conflicts of goods with the goods of other natural species). Indeed - as current population biologists like to insist in their argument that evolution took place by blind chance — untold numbers of species have been simply developed and then dropped flat, annihilated without any contribution to the further progress of life.25 Let us imagine a species of predator, an eagle, say, that lives off red squirrels. Surely it is a good thing for eagles to thrive; some ecologists are as worked up about eagles as others are about red squirrels. It is thus both a good thing for the eagle to eat the squirrel and a bad thing for the squirrel to be eaten. So far I think the anology fits easily under Nussbaum's second pluralism. We see a conflict of goods that cannot both be served simultaneously by any one creature; only the perspective of a "nature" that embraces a plurality of good, a nature (or God) both 86

On relocating ethical criticism benign and raw in tooth and claw, can in any way harmonize the goods. The utter relativist would of course say that the ''good" of both squirrels and eagles exists only as a point of view, either of the squirrels, or the eagles, or perhaps of some ecologists: such values are "invented" by those who hold them. My position, like that of some theologians, is that such goods are not, finally, relative simply to the human perspective, and they are not invented, not in any ordinary sense of that term. Rather they are realizations of the nature of good itself: the universe consists of a multiplicity of such "goods," only a tiny fraction of which you and I ever become aware of and only a fraction of which are realized in any one time and place. It was "good" that dinosaurs flourished as and when they did, munching on each other and killing off, whenever needed, a multiplicity of other genuine goods that were in turn dining off (and thus often threatening to destroy) a multiplicity of other goods: weaker species which, as Swift's quatrain has it, have "other fleas to bite 'em" - and on down in a seemingly infinite series. Such a view necessarily entails that the "fulfillment" of even the least "significant" creature, even the least impressive molecule, is in itself a kind of "good." It also entails the notion of hierarchy - the notion shared by both Christianity and Aristotle: some of these goods are "gooder" than others. Aristotle and Christianity would both say that the development of certain human potentialities (by no means the same "list" for each, of course) is more important than the development of the gifts, say, of a dinosaur or a horse or a mosquito or a carrot.26 At moments of inevitable conflict, moments that have occurred at every instant since the beginning of things and that are at this moment occurring by the trillions,27 as when the good of a given virus leads to human death, people are justified in imposing hierarchical judgments, even while they should recognize the immense danger that they will be quite misguided as they interpret the hierarchy in their own favor. I need not take on here the question that always arises whenever philosophers or theologians defend a multiplicity of potentially conflicting goods: does this mean that "whatever is is right," that though goods are arranged hierarchically, there is no such thing as an existent that is bad? Nussbaum and I both agree that to claim irrefutability for the major philosophies does not imply that there are no false, misleading, or harmful philosophies (see the conclusion of her fourth point). What troubles her is my claim that of the 87

Wayne C. Booth philosophies that survive after our closest critique, we have no basis for choosing one over all the others. She seems to want what a majority of philosophers through western history have wanted: at least the hope that all rivals but one will finally disappear. As Jean-Paul Sartre says, introducing his Critique of Dialectical Reason, it's no use having shown, as he believes he has already adequately done, how his system works, unless he can show that it's the supreme system: "But as long as we present.. .[my position, historical materialism] as one option among others we shall have achieved nothing, and our conclusions will remain conjectural."28 Turning back, then, to the crucial question about the conflict between Christian and Aristotelian views of friendship, I see the goods that seem to conflict here as roughly analogous to the conflicts we see in nature. On the one hand, it really is the case that full happiness, in Aristotle's sense of the full exercise of the distinctively human virtues, in their proper ordering, will depend on the cultivation of a kind of friendship that will necessarily be rare, "elitist," undemocratic and non-egalitarian: you cannot be a true friend either to very many people or to people of the "wrong kind." What's more, if you try to be a full Christian you will destroy your chances for that kind of eudaimonia. On the other hand, it really is the case that to pursue the Aristotelian virtues and achieve Aristotelian friendship in an Aristotelian way is to shut off your chances not just for some imagined salvation in a future state - the least challenging, most commercial version of the Christian vision - but your chances of achieving that wonderfully blissful state of soul that a sense of universal brotherhood (or siblinghood) can inspire. Each condition will appear as at last partly illusory to those who embrace the other. Perhaps only someone who, like myself, has lived long enough to experience the full appeal of each of them, though at different times of life, can conceive of their both being genuine, legitimate, irreducible goods. This claim that two or more "ideologies," "religions," "philosophies" that seem to conflict can each be not just coherent but in some radical sense true, while they are still not reducible to any one of them or to any synthesis - this claim obviously entails two consequences, the first of which may sound perhaps like the relativism Nussbaum fears. This is the recognition that for those living within any one historical moment and embracing any one ideology, the best thought about the highest good will be to some degree relative to the full range of conditions, both intellectual and material, 88

On relocating ethical criticism in that moment: Aristotle and Plato simply could not, even in their most imaginative moments, climb out of their time and cook up a Christian ethic, or even a full image of democratic or egalitarian possibilities. Similarly, nobody who has become thoroughly Christianized (in any one of the many versions that Christianity has offered of itself) can scramble out of the Christian ''world" and succumb totally to Aristotle's.29 This fact, if it is a fact, means that my speculation here about pluralistic possibilities can never be fully tested by any one thinker at any one moment. How would one ever know that one had managed to embrace any alien ideology fully? But the second consequence is quite unrelativistic and may take care of worries about the first: any serious student can discover, with a little effort and time, enough about an alien value system to determine whether that system's hierarchies register genuine notions of better and worse. Consider Aristotle's hierarchy of kinds of friendship: those based on shared pleasure, on shared utility, and on a sharing of and mutual support in the pursuit of the virtues [Ethics, Books VIII and IX). Consider then a person who had never known any friendships except of the first two kinds. Then move that person to a discovery of the value of that higher kind of friendship that is pursued because of the quality of moral and intellectual life lived in the presence of the friend. Is it not true that from the perspective provided by any of the major philosophies or religions, including the Christian, that person will have moved from something lesser to something better? Or imagine a convinced Aristotelian, feeling the kind of proper pride in his friendships that only the great-souled person can feel, and let her encounter two people, one living her life according to a purely mercantilist, self-isolating and anxiously competitive orientation and the other embracing the sermon on the mount and managing, however partially, to escape the bonds of self-calculation and selfaggrandizement and obsession with future reward. Would not the Aristotelian have to say: "Yes, indeed. Though Christian altruism offers dangerous temptations to self-maiming and self-freezing pieties, it is surely superior to the code of those whom Jesus reviles." This mutual (though of course partial) validation by no means suggests that these two imagined acknowledgments would be fully embraced by a convinced and systematic utilitarian, say, or that the two would see themselves as in full harmony with utilitarianism. Both will think, for example, that the utilitarian is radically wrong in theory. But if you presented them with a choice between a radical 89

Wayne C. Booth hedonist and that same hedonist after he or she has been converted to utilitarianism and believes that one should work to maximize the happiness of the greatest number, would they not have to agree that some progress has been made, since the later human being is essentially closer to both of their ideals than he or she was before the conversion? In short, some standards can be translated though always with what will seem, to "native speakers," like significant loss. As ethical critics we thus need not agree about just which ethical theory is supreme. On the contrary we ought to give up, at once, all hope of ever agreeing on any one supreme theory. All we need to agree on is the importance of addressing, as clearly and honestly as possible, the full quality, including the emotional effect, of our engagements with the works or lives we choose to discuss. My claim, then, is that Aristotelians, Platonists, Kantians, utilitarians, pragmatists, existentialists - add your choice - will not and need not come to final agreement in their appraisals or their notions of how to conduct controversy. Disagreement will itself be ethically useful, provided that the critics have derived their disagreements not from imposing their systems crudely on individual literary works or large lumpings of literary kinds but have challenged their chosen systems with honest reports of their direct encounters and of their always shifting thought about those encounters. The company we keep with philosophers and theologians, like the company we keep with literary works, is inherently interminable: not resolvable with either inductive or deductive reasoning but profitably continuable in the kind of conversation I have dubbed "coduction." Notes 1 The responses varied from the most perceptive and sympathetic by Thomas M. Conley in''Booth's Company and the rhetoric we keep," Rhetohca 8/2 (Spring, 1990), 161-174, to one of the least sympathetic by Joseph Epstein, "Educated by novels." Commentary (August, 1989), 36-38. 2 See The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 28, n. 3, for a brief summary of some attempt to question a dogma that, as Hilary Putnam says, prefacing his own refutation, has become a "cultural institution," a "received answer" that will continue to live despite cogent underminings (Reason, Truth and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], p. 127). See also, for a more recent further disproof of the dogma, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge and Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press and Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 53-62. 90

On relocating ethical criticism 3 And indeed it was: 'This [book] is a bloated monument to the bankrupt tradition of critical humanism," wrote one "DTO" in the Journal of Modern Literature 16 (1990), after making clear that the whole book was invalidated by one major fault: I failed to "engage in any systematic substantial debate" with Paul de Man. 4 Martin Green, "Recantations and equivocations," Commonweal, February 10, 1989. 5 The best of these by far is Barbara Foley's "Wayne Booth and the politics of ethics," forthcoming in Keeping Company: Rhetoric, Pluralism and Wayne Booth, ed. Frederick }. Antczak. 6 Mark A. R. Facknitz, The Ethics of Fiction, University of Hartford Studies in Literature 21 (Hartford, CT: University of Hartford Press, 1989). 7 One or two reviewers expressed a full-fledged, self-confident, uncompromising aestheticist denunciation: "Both for literature's and morality's sake, it is probably better to separate the two the way Wallace Stevens supposedly did in his, possibly apocryphal, remark: 'Ezra Pound deserves a Nobel prize for his poems, and to be hanged for his politics,'" (Carl Rudbeck, in Svenska Dagbladet, May 7, 1989; tr. Blaine H. Boogert). 8 For example, Hazard Adams, "The dizziness of freedom: or, why I read William Blake," College English 48 (Sept. 1986), 431-443; George Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker: From Shakespeare to Joyce (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1983); Max Apple et al., "A writers' forum on moral fiction," Fiction International 12 (1980), 5-25; Warner Berthoff, Literature and the Continuances of Virtue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Christopher Clausen, The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986); and skipping down through the alphabet - Literature and/as Moral Philosophy, special issue of New Literary History 15 (Autumn, 1983); J. Hillis Miller, Jr., The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Irving Massey, Find You the Virtue: Ethics, Image, and Desire in Literature (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1987) - I resist the impulse to go on. 9 E.g. Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 10 Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942). 11 The dangers of dealing in great lumps can be seen in Allan Bloom's effort, in The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), to describe the ethical disasters caused by rock music (pp. 68-81). He is entirely justified in reviving Plato's claim that different musical modes have different potential powers to move the soul. But when he lumps all rock together, he simply denies what is obvious to all 91

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aficionados: some rock poisons the soul; some rock elevates it. It is a pity that Bloom's lumping will drive most devotees of music away from a kind of improved "Platonic" musical criticism that we need. Though that sense can also be considered under ethical categories: conscientiousness, free creativity, and so on. See Company, chapter 4 and my ''Poetics for the practical critic," in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1992). In fact many philosophers of science are now acknowledging that the old dichotomies between self and other, subjective and objective, valuebased and fact-based, always did great injustice to the actual ways in which even the "hardest" scientists think. And specialists in given "scientific" fields are recognizing that the ways in which scientists in fact convince one another of new scientific truth simply do not fit these old dichotomies. See, as a representative attack, The Rhetoric of Economics by Don McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). "Vanity, vulgarity, and vapidity at Steppenwolf Theatre," Chicago (September 1990), 91-93. Samuel Johnson, "Preface" to The Plays of Shakespeare (1765). In Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, vol. VII of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 59-113. Stuart M. Sperry, in Modern Fiction Studies 35 (Winter, 1989), 846. Rhetorica 8/2 (Spring, 1990), 161-174. See also Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (London: Longman, 1990), the most penetrating one-volume history we have of major rhetorical theorists. This claim is empirically verifiable by anyone who will ask friends to think of "some book that has changed my life." See The Company We Keep, pp. 278-279. Taylor, Sources of the Self. See, for one of the best of these, John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. (New York: Minton, Balch, 1929). The two philosophers who have most fully articulated such a possibility are Stephen Pepper, in World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942), and later works, and Richard McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon, ed. Zahava K. McKeon, with an introduction by Howard Ruttenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For a systematic exposition and development of McKeon's views, see Walter Watson, The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985). Martha C. Nussbaum, "Reading for life: A review article" of The Company We Keep, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 1 (1988), 164-180. I undertake a somewhat simpler and perhaps clearer classification of 92

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pluralisms in the article "Pluralism" in the The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 3rd edn., forthcoming. These two versions of Christianity and Aristotle are of course extremes. History offers many examples, most notably Aquinas, of reconciliations between less extreme versions. But they would not answer Nussbaum's worry, just because they are in effect fusions effected by reinterpretation, rather than encounters with genuine conflict. E.g. Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1991). Of course some extremes of Christianity, like some extremes of Hinduism, have attempted an egalitarianism of all creatures: birds, flowers, even stones. Such views may, for a given enthusiast at a given moment, have some value, but they are easily bypassed as soon as we try to live by them. That "refutation" comes easiest to pragmatists, but other forms can be found in every major Western philosophy. The East I'm not at all sure about. If we can talk of beginnings: some "things" did not begin but always were; or at least one "Thing" always Is: the totality of how the whole business works, with all of its conflicts. Preface to Theory of Practical Ensembles, tr. Alan Sheridan Smith (London: NLB, Humanities Press, 1976), p. 16. Those of us who have experienced, or think we have experienced, major conversions from one world-view to another can at least guess at what such a transformation would require. My own movement from a version of theism to what I called atheism took perhaps ten years; the subsequent movement from "atheism" to a new version of "theism" took only one year of intensive reading in the major philosophers and theologians, but I suspect that the changes in both cases were less drastic than would be a full transformation from an embrace of what Aristotle meant by full friendship as a supreme goal of life and what Christians, of any stripe, have meant by "charity."

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Explanation and value: what makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? MARKROSKILL In Joyce Cary's novel of 1944, The Horse's Mouth, the down-and-out London painter Gulley Jimson seizes the opportunity to paint a huge and wildly imaginative mural, on the twenty-five-by-forty-foot wall of an old chapel that is scheduled for imminent demolition. Rich aristocratic patrons who have acquired his work in the past and a knowledgeable professor who has written about it come to visit while he is at work and ask questions about what the mural ''means," or how exactly it represents its supposed theme of the Creation. Jimson keeps them at bay with jokes - "it means.. .getting up at seven o'clock every morning.. .to use all the light available," and the subject in question is "very likely.. .a good idea"; but what really engages all of his thoughts and feelings is, as he describes it, simply being in a position to get on with the job: I wanted to shout [loud] for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head.. .what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley.. .with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand.. .cleared for action.1 In Kurt Vonnegut's novel of 1987 Bluebeard an American painter of Turkish-Armenian descent tells - also in autobiographical form how, trained as an illustrator, he became a close friend of the painters of the Abstract Expressionist generation - particularly Jackson Pollock and an imaginary artist, Terry Kitchen - formed in this way a large collection of their work, and himself painted compositions in colored tape which would subsequently disintegrate on the wall, because of the material used. He is now creating, in a vast barn on a Long Island estate which he keeps locked for secrecy, a project which will become his true memorial when he dies a year later. When he lets it be seen for the first time at the close of the novel, it turns out to be an immense 94

What makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? eight-by-sixty-foot panorama representing, in minute realistic detail, what he had before his eyes "when the sun came up on the day the Second World War ended in Europe." Asked "what sort of painting [he] would call it," the reply that he gives to lay persons and promises equally to the "first critic to show up" is that "It isn't a painting at all. It's a tourist attraction.. .a Disneyland." And whilst there is in fact a particular and personal reason for every one of the 5,219 tiny figures included in it and the way they are shown, he soon gives up in exhaustion on the very idea of offering enlightenment to visitors: ''Make up your own war stories as you look at the whatchamacallit," I tell them. I stay in the house.. .and simply point the way out to the potato barn.2 Whilst the personalities of the artists in these two novels and the styles of their work are as different as they could be, the relationship and disrelationship of comment on their work to what goes into the making of it form a motif in common. The novelist's satire gains its thrust in both cases from the way in which the narrator grants that an essential inexplicability may accrue to the work, as an entity which gains responsive reactions from the viewer, and even welcomes this end result; but no such concession is made with respect to the mental and emotional energy, the drive and concentration invested in the making of it. One kind of analogy for such an engagement of the self and the way it registers would be the painting of graffiti on subway cars, in the knowledge that they will soon be cleaned off or superseded; another, the making of a cathedral out of matchsticks. In those cases, an attention-gaining choice and commitment on the maker's part is read back into the product, to give it worth. It has been characteristic of the artistic avant-garde, ever since Courbet, to make gestures of certain highly visible kinds, which are subversive of cultural norms and accepted paradigms of behavior: like the paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and his fellow artists of Die Brlicke reflecting and making known the lifestyle of nude bathing and free sex that they practiced on summer vacation with their models.3 Devotion to a chosen project, which comes to express the motivations of long and solitary endeavor in some representative fashion, has also been characteristic: as in Kurt Schwitters's construction of his Merzbauen as a kind of private cathedral, made from otherwise useless or discarded materials which he accumulated and fitted together in the space which formed his environment, wherever he was.4 Cary and Vonnegut correspondingly chose as their subjects figures who could emerge with some of the qualifications of a hero 95

Mark RoskiJJ from all of the sharp-edged fun surrounding what they did and how they did it. Of course there are also novels about artistic inheritance and the fate of lost reputations, and ones which entail the manipulative presentation to the world of supposed masterpieces from the past. These have their own sorts of attention to questions of value and the whys and wherefores of accompanying explanation, dealing with what is saved from destruction over time, or is not so saved, but rather allowed to disappear or simply lost.5 When more specific justifying circumstances surrounding the preservation of an art object are at issue - as happens in the Cary and Vonnegut novels, by virtue of their unfolding plot structures - what sorts of explanation give value in themselves, names and reputations apart, to the artifactual entity that is in question? The relations of explanation and value to one another can be taken as following here three basic "rules," or operative principles of a pragmatic sort.6 First, there is the kind of case that is represented by the need or opportunity to choose, from a bevy of old pieces of furniture, a single item which can be held to sum up, or encapsulate, the nature of the period in question and its style of furnishings. The piece selected will not necessarily be ostentatiously beautiful, or especially handsome in terms of pure craftsmanship, and it may not even be considered valuable in that sort of light; but conceived of as a display piece, or in its capability of becoming one, it is seen as embodying a certain quality (such as Victorian plushness) or effect (such as decorative overkill). Second, there are cases based on claims to firstness. The "first garden privy," if such a thing verifiably existed, would ensure that we knew where and when the idea of this was happened upon, together with the processes of its realization. The "first ready-made" is to be found in and only in the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp, so long as the term is being deployed in accordance with his own proprietary usage of it, but the "first abstract painting" is not self-defining in that fashion, who might have done it and when being subject to rival accreditative claims (including little-known and otherwise none-tooimportant figures in advance of Kandinsky). In contrast, the 1956 collage by Richard Hamilton Just What Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing, from which the title of my essay is adapted, stands as a first in Pop Art and a point of entry into its history;7 it secures evidentially, for an artist and group who were at the time little known, the occasion and force of a set of interests, of which the 96

What makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? imagery brought together here constitutes the "trace" - as the design of a knife handle may serve as the physical trace and existential index of a new interest in tableware. Finally, there are cases where the art object is taken as summing up and showing forth certain social and political values, or ideals of the past. This is essentially what the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl was referring to when, in an essay on the preservation of monuments which takes in practical and material considerations, he made a distinction for the purposes of his argument between "use value" and "artistic value". 8 Siting and physical condition may be appealed to for explanatory purposes, when it is a matter of justifying the adaptation or reconstruction of a public monument such as a gateway, statue, or fresco. But it is also the case that the power of tradition and the fabric of memory may serve as incentives for an equalizing view of what survives from the past. Quality of achievement is then not exactly irrelevant (the issue of relative importance being always there, if only tacitly, and itself subject to ideological construction); but historical distancing has the effect of making cultural associations diffuse and malleable, as they cluster around and feed upon the fact of survival itself. Explanation is then cast in the role of bringing out the grounds for those associations, and reempowering them by the cogency of the case that is made for maintenance and refurbishing: as with the Haus der Kunst representing architecture of the Third Reich in Munich, or the Statue of Liberty in New York. In the field of literature, the preservation of a work depends on its being known about through an available textual version or edition, and correspondingly circumstances and date of publication become factors which bear almost inevitably on the nature of response in this field and the way it is causally conceptualized. Examples comparable to the preceding ones bear this out. The task of choosing poems by largely unknown or uncelebrated figures for a period anthology brings to the fore how far the poems selected are representative of the total published output of those poets, so that, as W. H. Auden indicated in his anthology of British "minor poets" of the nineteenth century, one may be led thereby to find this or that poet "quite a different figure from what [one] had previously imagined."9 In the example of the stream-of-consciousness novel and its creation, the question of firstness hinges on a device of narration and presentation which is to be defined not in terms of what is thereby excluded (as with the first "non-objective" painting), but rather in terms of a 97

Mark Roskill succession of publications which come to constitute a genre of writing to which this label is applied, and the interwoven bringing into being of an acknowledged readership. The issue of "period interest" attaching to a piece of writing which puts an evocative complexion onto the lifestyles and values of an earlier time comes up in the case of a romantic fiction with a strong historical grounding to it, such as Michael Sadleir's Fanny by Gaslight,10 or Stephen Spender's The Temple, which was composed in 1929-31 as an account in novel form of a visit to Weimar Germany and then rewritten substantially sixty years later:11 here, as with a historic landscape garden, revivification authorizes itself from a later vantage-point in time, which is that of retrospect. The preeminence of certain literary figures, to the point where anything associated or associable with them takes on interest - down to the proverbial laundry list - means that a fragment of handwritten manuscript or a first edition with a personal dedication is taken as having more than just curiosity value (such as a forgotten book or an arcane publication by a lesser figure would have), inasmuch as it informs about its author in some personally revealing and appealing fashion. The factors of rarity and desirability jostle one another here, in arguments - often expressed in crudely monetary terms - as to where the item in question should belong or to whom it should be accessible. The prizing and display of such materials, in turn, tends to equate their worth with that of notations by artists, architects, and designers of a more personal or transactional nature - as distinct from their drawings, which, however humble, are taken as visual evidence of their talents and propensities, to be admired and studied as such. But treating them in that manner and inviting others to do so is explanatory in the same prescriptive fashion, with respect to how one looks and responds, as attaching to van Gogh's Crows over the Wheatfield the conspicuous label 'This is the last picture before [he] killed himself."12 In that sort of treatment, the work of art appears as a unique, associatively charged material item of a revelatory order which we can share in, on the basis of a response-guiding explanation to match. In van Gogh's case, indeed, it is as if the painting were able to bring before us directly the torment and struggle of his last weeks of life as an artist, and stood replete from brushmark to brushmark and from one image to another with the assignment of doing this. But the work of art may also be viewed and designated for explanatory purposes as part of a larger pattern of activity on its maker's part. In the case of the 98

What makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? visual arts - more so, or at least more notably so in terms of response than with literary works - its being seen and explained in this light increases its value, or gives it special value in the context of museum, gallery, or auction house. To explain how this comes to be in pragmatic terms, which again entails more than just the economics of the market at a particular point in time, here are three examples from the field of study in the fine arts with which I am most familiar, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European painting, and from exposures of mine over the last ten years that involve specific sub-areas of that field. I have chosen these examples because though they could be brought under the rubric of other branches of art historical study (connoisseurship, style analysis, iconography, reconstruction of the framework of a particular artist's development) for the purposes of explaining what is at issue, it seems to me that all three are best understood in terms of a posited pattern of activity on the artist's part which, once extended to include the work in question, then - on the presumption of a fit - serves to amplify or elaborate the picture that one has to give of the activity, and in so doing endows the work with an enhanced historical status. The first example involves the identification of a sketch in oils as preparatory study for a well-known final painting, so that the applied mode of explanation is causal in character. It did not involve discovery in the sense of finding something that was not previously known, but rather seeing the work in question in a particular way that was new, and finding that documentary evidence provided, and indeed constituted for explanatory purposes, a fit with that way of seeing. The John Herron Museum of Art in Indianapolis houses a small oil painting on canvas (about 13 by 8 inches), related in subject to John Constable's famous Royal Academy picture of 1826, now in the National Gallery, London, The Cornfield. This work forms part of the Clowes Fund Collection, which came to the museum in the 1970s. It was catalogued at that time, as it had been by Dr. Clowes when it was in his hands, as a Constable. Though doubts about its status had already been expressed in the 1960s, it was not until 1979 that it came under consideration in the Constable literature, and when it did receive mention there, it was with the implication of its being a copy (of which there are many after the finished picture in question) or a work in the manner of Constable, matching The Cornjield in essential features. Then in 1988 the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York exhibited a whole group of works in oil as Constable "discoveries," identified and catalogued by Charles Rhyne. There, the Clowes 99

Mark Roskill painting is claimed to differ from the National Gallery painting in significant respects, and to be in fact closer to the large oil study for The Cornfield from the Bacon collection, which is identified accordingly as a "mid-stage preparatory sketch," giving the sequence Clowes sketch (from nature), mid-stage sketch, finished picture. This in turn provides ground for identification of the Clowes sketch with a lost "study from nature" for The Cornfield listed in the sale of the artist's estate in May 1838, and for taking it to evince a process of preparation on Constable's part for which there are parallels in other cases, a comparable technique being used in an extant oil sketch of this type which is for a painting completed nine years earlier.13 All in all, the force of the argument (if accepted) is to give what Constable did by way of preliminary sketching in oils in the first half of his career a more specific evidential focus, and thereby widen the sense that one has of his preparatory activity as a landscapist. The second example involves the conceptual and material nature of an artistic project, and how far its scheme of creation may be extended to incorporate extant works which can be taken as representative in their leading features of the scheme as a whole. The mode of explanation adopted is correspondingly contextualistic in character, and the case made is akin to the reconstruction of a damaged and partially removed fresco scheme, in so far as the parts in question may not have been executed exactly contemporaneously with one another and may exhibit internal variations up to a certain point (as for instance when different wall surfaces were being covered). In the last part of his short artistic life and most probably close to the end of it, in 1822-23, Theodore Gericault executed a set of ten portraits of the insane for a doctor friend of his, Etienne-Jean Georget, who specialized in mental disorders and pressed for a more humane and psychiatrically oriented treatment of those who suffered from them. According to the artist's earliest biographer, Charles Clement, whose Life and accompanying catalogue of known works came out in 1879 and was based on information gleaned earlier, the paintings in question (he gives their number) were divided by sale after Georget's death between two other doctors; five of them were taken to Brittany and subsequently lost without trace, while the remaining five survived as a group, to enter the hands of a Barbizon painter named Charles Jacque. Details of their subsequent history down into this century show four of them passing into major European collections, and those paintings in turn can be identified individually with titles provided by Clement naming disorders on the verge of the criminal, 100

What makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? which may accordingly have been a feature of the whole series. The fifth canvas would then be of a compulsive kidnapper, and the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in Massachusetts acquired in 1947 a painting taken as being this one. There have been other claimants for attachment to the series, but this is the only one to win the status of appearing in exhibitions and catalogues with an unqualified identification to this effect. On the other hand, technical factors - such as the presence, detectable by X-ray, of an underpainting of a woman in a headdress which may be of later date and the claimed presence of a red pigment first manufactured in 1842 - have been held to militate decisively against such a conclusion.14 In explaining therefore the importance of what the painting represents - either as a bona fide Gericault (acquired for a very modest sum, when the artist's reputation was not nearly as high as it is now), or as a passable record of a lost picture in the series of the insane - one runs into an issue of value which is further compounded by the generally poor condition of the work. There is no scale of assessment that can give equal weight to all three of these factors; and yet there is the sense of its being possible, through this painting, to fill out what can be said about Gericault's scheme as a whole. Value attributed to the work on those grounds of interpretative possibility remains constant, even as explanation pays its dues to the features that make such an attribution problematic. The third example has to do with production within a group and the way in which a contribution associable with a particular point in time is taken as evincing, in relation to the prior and subsequent unfolding of the art of the group, a particular burden of undertaking, which presses forward to fulfill aims and develop concretely concerns held in common with other group members. The mode of explanation brought to bear here is reconstructive in tenor, and frequently it is with this kind of supporting argument that a work of art is claimed as constituting a masterpiece. Amongst the Fauves, Henri Matisse's occupation and retention of a dominant position, over the key years 1905 to 1907, is not essentially in doubt; but Andre Derain's contributions are now recognized as playing off against Matisse's, and setting their own distinctive trajectories alongside his, rather than merely following his lead. Before that recognition took effect, Derain's very large painting (73 by 90 inches) entitled The Dance had been dated, in the painter's memorial exhibition of 1954-55 in Paris, to 1909; by the end of that decade, however, this work was reassigned to 1905-06, so that its time of origin was placed squarely in the Fauve period, preceded there by another large 101

Mark Roskill painting, The Golden Age. Those two paintings then assumed in that light a parallelism to, and concatenation of interest with, Matisse's large canvases of the same years, which were also of female nudes outdoors. Even if an exact sequence could not be established that attached those works, and others of Matisse's and of Derain's, to specific stages of experiment and realization, it became apparent in this fashion that Derain staked his occupation of central Fauve territory on pictorial ideas of his own: ones that embraced by 1906 Gaugin's relief-like Tahitian compositions and their sources in Javanese sculptures, Romanesque stone carvings, and southern French frescoes as well as the legacy of fin-de-siecle Symbolism.15 Here, then, the significance of Derain's role in the development of Fauvism becomes keyed to terms of understanding in which two or more works of his from 1905-07 take on "master" status, and any evaluation thereafter of what he engaged in doing has to test its terms of assessment against that explanatory focus. Analogous cases in the field of literature are here not so easily come by. On all three fronts they lead into unusual aspects of literary production or its byways. The activity of drafting corresponds to that of sketching, in the sense of its being preliminary and subject to revision (as opposed to mere doodling, or the jotting down of thoughts unformed by a sense of what will come next). But an autograph draft, like that of The Waste Land, is treated as an earlier version of the poem that it turns into, not as a product of independent prior activity, as an oil sketch tends to be. To find an equivalent to that kind of separability, one would have to turn to T. S. Eliot's version in French of the "Phlebas the Phoenician" section of The Waste Land, or Vladimir Nabokov's earlier version of Lolita, in a different language and with a non-American plot.16 Literary works such as sonnets and the texts of songs may signpost themselves as being composed in series, like a cohesive group of paintings as mounted in an exhibition. But what is shown as a series in the case of paintings may well, as with Monet's Nympheas, be only a fraction of the work conceived and carried out with the idea of a series in mind. The regulation of what is included differs as an organizing principle here from the taking of a purchase on what is to be eliminated and what put in for a collection of poems or stories, in so far as it explains itself differently in relation to authorial valuation at the time of choice: Monet's feeling of cohesion is spoken for even if, and perhaps more particularly if, the selection and arrangement should be made by someone else. Writers forming a group do in some cases aggregate 102

What makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? their activities around a core of shared purpose, but so long as there is a range of interests at work without clear leadership, it is hard for a "masterpiece" of the group to be generated as such. To take an extreme case, the group formed by Raymond Queneau in 1960 that is dedicated to producing writings without the letter e, OuLiPo, could only judge success at a "master's" level in terms of length and pure capricious inventiveness.17 But more commonly writers collaborate for the benefit of mutual assistance, as painters did in earlier times, and in so doing lose, for that particular production of theirs, the sense of concentrated and autonomous effort that is crucial to the purely artisanal meaning of the term masterpiece. My argument is, then, that it is characteristic of the visual arts that explanatory comment should be marked by a valuing of the activity of creation as much as or more than its product. Architecture and design represent fields in which the activities of on-site planning and the passing of instructions to an executant are treated as coterminous, when it comes to evaluating how the materials are used and the effect they have on the viewer. In so far as success in making a portrait or painting an overmantel decoration for a house involves consultation with the person who wants the work done and assaying ways of bringing about the effect that is wanted, explanation for the success based on the two corresponding kinds of activity that are in question is likely to come quite naturally. With literature, by comparison, it will generally be more natural to emotionalize or spiritualize known or hypothetical details of the context of creation, as they can be taken to fit for explanatory purposes with the nature and structuring of the product.18 What about the case of photography? Doubts have been raised from the beginnings of its history as to how far - except by fiat on the photographer's part, or the manipulative transformation of what the medium has to offer - it qualifies as an art form. Everyone is potentially capable of using a camera, and the practice requires no special experience (at least latterly); the activity and its products are relatively inexpensive, or have become so; and while photographs achieve publication in many different varieties of place and context, the published photo may be anonymous or by an amateur who happened to be there. This is to put the case against its being an art at its strongest, but such terms of discussion are unanchored to the pragmatics of response. The interesting thing here is that value is bestowed on photography according to how, or when, the activity is explained in a light that gives a specific, directed character and importance to the product. 103

Mark Roskill Two cases of disputed valuation, one involving a nineteenthcentury photographer and the other a more recent "star" of the medium, bring this out. Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs of the West and Southwest of America, made on explanatory survey expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, were not published or exhibited in the later nineteenth century in the way that they are today. Instead, they formed part of a praxis of information gathering and recording, in which capacity they would serve as a basis for stereographic reproduction - their sole form of public distribution - and, where the material was relevant, for reproduction in the form of lithographs illustrating Clarence King's Systematic Geology of 1878. But it has been suggested in explanation of their character as images that they are marked by a philosophical and aesthetic sense of "grand design," in the rock formations and desert outcroppings chosen for subjects, which was shared by other team members of King's expeditions into Western territory, and that this puts a frame, so to speak, around the photographs as they are known today, allowing the whole project of making them to be evaluated retrospectively in more intellectually weighty terms. 19 Adaptability of the images to practical uses and a governing authorial concept need not in principle be incompatible with one another; but here they underwrite opposed, competing positions as to how the use of the medium was directed and the terms of response that are appropriate. Robert Frank's The Americans, which the photographer designated a "personal view" showing "a cross-section of the American population," was generally rejected at first because of the way it presented its subject matter. When it came out in a French version in 1958, followed by American publication a year later - with an improvisatory foreword by the novelist Jack Kerouac - it was treated as the expression of a grudge against the country, and as one man's skewed way of seeing it. Later the contents and organization of the book became paradigmatic, both as a cultural statement and as an example for younger photographers. Frank's way of doing things here - the practice of "shooting from the hip" to produce off-beat, oddly cropped images, the identification with the Beat generation implicit in taking to the road for this purpose, the sequenced form of publication without explanatory captions (only places being given) - became socially and semantically validated. As a result everything that was encompassed in this validation the purpose of the itinerary, the prominent inclusion of blacks and other minority groups, the page layout, the grainy texturing - now 104

What makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? took on importance for the book's being thought of in groundbreaking terms. 20 The feeling that a work of art expresses a knowing and zestful awareness of the act of its making is common in all the arts, but the attachment of this awareness to what was done for the purposes of the making is harder to claim for literature than for painting and sculpture or an improvised art form such as jazz. Where such an explanatory claim is justified, within the field of writing as a whole, it will depend on registering the activity as being of a special order for the person in question: like the travel writing from the 1920s and 1930s of novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, or the obscene verses that T. S. Eliot composed about an invented character, King Bolo, from his correspondent Conrad Aiken.21 Photographic projects, because of their intensity of focus, generally within a limited duration, tend to be of that order.22 Here, then, for the evaluative implications that can be drawn from it, photography stands between literature and painting. The wide range of examples that has been introduced here, to illustrate comparative aspects of response to visual and literary works shows, if it shows anything, that explanations are of their time. Because we do not value today the activity of illustrating texts (other than for children and schoolrooms), or the achievement of a realistic portrait (unless it be with a camera), discussion of art in stylistic and iconographic terms has declined in importance - at least for the modern period - as compared to discussion of social factors affecting the imagery, and psychological factors bearing on the creative process. For the past we do not generally have evidence enabling those sorts of explanation to give the work that is being talked about value, in a manner definitive enough to gain general agreement as to the pertinence and role here of the explanation. In the strongest growth areas of the study of visual imagery today - those having to do with women artists, representations of sexuality, and issues of class thought and energy are invested as if to compensate. To do this successfully is also - since explanations will continue to mutate in the order and terms of their convincingness - to value an activity over the end result deriving from it.

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Mark Roskill Notes 1 Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth (London: Michael Joseph, 1944), chapters 40-41; New York, 1951 edn., p. 312. 2 Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard (New York: Delacorte Press, 1987), chapters 34-35; see pp. 281, 283 for the lines quoted. 3 See Donald E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 64, 68. 4 See John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), chapter 7. 5 A recent and amusing example is Alison Lurie's The Truth about Lorin Jones (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988). Its central theme is whether the worth that a dead person's art has in one's eyes really is enhanced by finding out more about the relations of art and life. 6 These correspond to the considerations adduced in my book Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images, written jointly with David Carrier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), chapter 1 and summary, p. 117, as to why a visual image should be regarded as true, or come to seem that way: it may be taken as embodying a certain quality or effect; as evidentially securing that a happening or process took place; or as summing up and showing forth certain social and political values. 7 It served as the poster for the Independent Group exhibition "What is tomorrow?" held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London that year. 8 Alois Riegl, "Der moderne Denkmalkultur," written in 1903 as the preface to a legislative proposal for the protection of historic monuments in the Austro-Hungarian empire, published in his Gesammelte Aufsatze (Augsburg and Vienna: Filzer, 1928); tr. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo as "The modern cult of monuments: its character and origin," in Oppositions 25 (Fall, 1982), 21-51, prefaced by Forster's introduction, "Monument/meaning and the mortality of architecture," 2-19. 9 Nineteenth-Century British Minor Poets, ed. and introduced by W. H. Auden (New York: Laurel Poetry Series, 1965), Introduction, p. 18. 10 Michael Sadleir, Fanny by Gaslight (London: Appleton-Century, 1940). 11 Stephen Spender, The Temple (New York: Grove Press, 1988). 12 See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 27ff. on this subject. 13 See exhibition catalogue "John Constable R.A. (1776-1837), paintings, drawings, watercolors, mezzotints," Salander—O'Reilly Galleries, New York, 1988, pp. 18-19, catalogue entry by Charles Rhyne, with earlier references, and color plate 25; also the review of the exhibition, by Ian Fleming-Williams, Burlington Magazine 130 (August 1988), 654. I am indebted to Prof. Rhyne for sending me these materials and for his accompanying comments (correspondence of September 1988). 14 I draw for these remarks on two catalogues of exhibitions in which the work was included: "Gericault," compiled by Lorenz Eitner (Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Detroit Institute of Arts - Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 1971 - May 1972, catalogue no. 122), and "Gericault" 106

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20

(Musee d'Art Moderne, Kamakura - Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne, Kyoto - Musee des Beaux Arts de la Ville de Fukuoka, October 1987 April 1988, catalogue p. 27), pp. 111-112, and on the file of the Springfield Museum for the painting, kindly made available to me by Ann Schroder, Curator of European Paintings there. Most recently the painting was included, without question or comment on condition in the accompanying catalogue, in the exhibition devoted to the artist held at the Grand Palais, Paris, October 1991 - January 1992 ("Gericault," catalogue by Regis Michel and others [Paris: Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux, 1991]). The Dance is currently on long-term loan to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. See especially in this connection Denys Sutton, Andre Derain (London: Phaidon Press, 1959), plates 14-15 with commentary; Ellen Oppler, Fauvism Revisited (New York: Garland Press, 1976), p. 144; and John Elderfleld, catalogue for exhibition " The Wild Beasts': Fauvism and Its Affinities" (Museum of Modern Art, New York — San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, MarchOctober 1976; published New York and Toronto: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), pp. 102-106, 115. See Vladimir Nabokov, "A book entitled Lolita,'' afterword to Lolita (New York: Putman, 1955), pp. 313f. The novel in question, titled in Russian VoJshebnik, has been published in an English translation by Dimitri Nabokov, as The Enchanter (New York: Putnam, 1986). 1 draw for my knowledge of these group activities on an article by John Lee dealing with the task of translating into English the novel La Disparition by the leading group member Georges Perec (who died in 1982): Times Literary Supplement, September 2-8, 1988, p. 958. One could say that with Joyce Cary's and Kurt Vonnegut's artists (see above), who (claim to) work for themselves and (purport to) write about it too, the two kinds of explanation are left to compete with one another for evaluative purposes. See in this connection Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's discursive spaces," Art Journal 42 (Winter, 1982), repr. in her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA. and London: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 131-150 and the opposing view of Joel Snyder in the exhibition catalogue "American frontiers: the photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan" (Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 1981 January 1982; published Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1981). See also for the most recent discussion the essay by Martha A. Sandweiss, "Undecisive moments: the narrative tradition in Western photography," in the exhibition catalogue "Photography in nineteenth-century America," ed. Sandweiss, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1991), pp. 119-123, where the argument that "different texts can ascribe divergent meanings to the same image" is documented for this particular case. I have benefited here from reading Pamela Allara's unpublished ms. "From destiny to awareness: a critical study of the work of Robert Frank." 107

Mark Roskill 21 See Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially p. 203, and Letters of T. S. Eliot: vol. I, 1898-1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 42, 86,125. The term ''occasional writing" does not do justice to such productions. 22 To pick up on a term used earlier, the resultant images index the activity, existentially as well as physically.

108

Is art history? SVETLANA ALPERS

It comes as no surprise to a student of art and its history these days to open a book on Italian painting and find an extensive discussion of barrel-gauging, or to turn to a study of Courbet and find many pages devoted to a detailed account of radicalism among French peasants in 1849 and 1850. The books by Michael Baxandall and T. J. Clark to which I am referring are not eccentric texts but among the most inventive and interesting studies of art written in recent years.1 Distinctive though their emphases are, these writers share a commitment to consider the work of art as a "piece of history." Baxandall argues that we should consider Piero della Francesca's pictorial engagement with solid geometric forms in terms of the accepted fifteenth-century training in commercial mathematics. Similarly, Clark argues that an attention to the situation of French rural society enables us to understand the presence (in style, but also inseparably in content) of Courbet's great works of 1849-50. I have chosen these two books as among the most rigorously argued of what is indeed a great number of such studies. It is a fashion by now, and almost established as one of the acceptable tools of the art historical trade. The new art history was announced in the title of a series of book-length studies of individual works initiated in the 1960s — Art in Context. The traditional mode of art history is represented by Pevsner's multivolumed History of Art, which began appearing in the 1950s and considers the history of art period by period, and country by country.2 What is worth remarking about the new look in the study of art is not its emphasis on art and society — for that has a long and somewhat checkered history - but rather the terms in which it is proposed. While previously it was the history of art, conceived in terms of the development and achievement of period styles, which was studied in 109

Svetlana AJpers the historical context (resulting in books like Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenre/ormation3), today it is individual works or groups of works, individual phenomena located at a particular time and place. Thus to amplify what I have just said: it is the work of art itself, not a history or sequence of works, which is seen as a piece of history. A corollary to this change within the discipline is the phenomenon of historians turning to art not for confirmation of the notion of period style (one thinks for example of the use made of art in Friedrich's The Age of the Baroque4), but rather for the fact of individual works. It is a historian, Peter Gay, not an art historian, who most recently employed the phrase "piece of history" to describe the works discussed in his book on Manet, Gropius, and Mondrian.5 The intellectual atmosphere is one in which historians frequently turn to works of art, and joint projects between historians and art historians flourish. Velazquez is being studied by such a team, as is the patronage of Julius II in Rome. (The nature of patronage is fast becoming a separate topic of study in the field of art history.) The sense of a common enterprise demonstrated in such projects is based on the assumption that the work of art, like any other event, is a piece of history. The new social history of art as it is carried on by art historians concentrates on the circumstances of the making of an individual work. Who commissioned it, and where was it to be placed? What function (a central term here) did it serve and for what audience was it intended? Seen in this way documents establishing the commission and the later history or provenance of a work of art no longer testify to its pedigree but indeed to its very nature as an object. Specific methods of calculating the cost of paintings - so much per full-length figure in the case of seventeenth-century Italian commissions, for example - could determine, it is argued, the way a work looks. If, because of such considerations, a patron had been willing to pay for only seven full-length figures in a picture of the Massacre of the Innocents, then Guido Reni, the artist in question, would have been forced to come up with his innovative reduced version of this traditionally many-figured scene. A particular compositional organization could be due to the position of the work, the actual site for which it was intended, and the angle from which it was to be viewed. Titian's removal of the Virgin from her traditional central position to the right side of the worshipers in his Pesaro Madonna - once considered a proto-Baroque stylistic invention - is now explained by the fact that the worshipers approached the work from the aisle to the 110

Is art history? left of the altarpiece. A revisionist interpretation of Michelangelo's Medici Chapel argues that it is less neoplatonic beliefs or stylistic concerns as such than the funerary function of the chapel and the specific liturgy for the dead composed for this place which were determining factors in the artist's inventions.6 Almost unawares, such studies have come to a demystification of the notion of artistic invention. What was previously puzzled over as a mystery has now come to be understood as the task of fitting a work to a particular task, to a particular set of describable historical conditions. If a work of art is inevitably to be understood in terms of its particular historical circumstances, it is arguable that great art will result from a conscious working out of this recognition. Great art is, in short, in this essential way political in nature. However, those studies of Reni, Titian, and Michelangelo to which I have referred do not admit to this view. One of the things which I want to pursue later is the gap as I see it between the implications of this new social history and its acknowledged sense of itself and of art. In the name of clarity, rationality, and historical objectivity the new art history embraces a potentially radical view of art without accepting its implications. Analogous to the demystification of artistic creation is Baxandall's bold attempt to demystify the problem of looking, of how we see. His study of quattrocento art addresses itself to how works of art were seen at a particular time by identifying habits of vision, modes of cognitive perception he calls them, as the social practices most relevant to the perception of paintings. Making what is a kind of social application of Gombrich's perceptual notion of the ''beholder's share," Baxandall argues that eyes trained to gauge the volume of containers, to read the body language of sermons, or to respond in certain ways to color or its absence were catered to in just these terms by their artists. To quote him, "It is the highest common factor of skill in his public that the painter consistently catered for."7 The delight in the complexity of volumetric forms in a Piero or Uccello, or the careful distinction made among various gestures in paintings of the Annunciation, is to be understood in this context. The appeal being made is to common experience, ordinary schooling one might say. Compare Baxandall's instance of barrel-gauging in discussing Piero della Francesca to the claimed artistic relevance of higher, more philosophical mathematics, invoked by Rudolf Wittkower in his landmark discoveries about Palladio, in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 8 Instead of the mathematics of the humanist we have that of the merchant. Piero himself is here not seen in 111

Svetlana AJpers conjunction with the Golden Section (frequently cited in analyses of the composition of his Flagellation), but with high-school mathematics, for which, as Baxandall points out, the artist himself wrote a text. Despite a continuing concern to deal with major works, the view of art put forth in these studies is basically a leveling one. And in fact if we look at the broad spectrum of phenomena that are being studied today a leveling tendency is very much in evidence. Wolfflin, in a famous and oft-repeated passage, once argued the stylistic equivalence between Gothic shoes and Gothic architecture.9 It was in the smallest shapes, he said, that the purest manifestation of a style can be felt. It is thus in the grand order of styles that shoes are the equal of cathedrals. While Wolfflin treated shoes on a par with art, today shoes and cathedrals, but more to our point barns and cathedrals, carpets and frescoes are all treated as products of society. The studies of so-called vernacular architecture (like barns) no longer seem eccentric in an atmosphere in which architecture can be defined not in terms of monuments but as any changes at all that man makes in his environment. Apartment houses and tenements take their place beside town houses and public buildings in this enterprise. In a curious meeting of the old and the newest, Oleg Grabar's article "An art of the object" (occasioned by the Metropolitan Museum's opening of its Islamic installation) brought oriental carpets and designs into the pages of Art/orum.10 This publication testifies to the modern blurring of the line between art and craft, seen also in the acceptance of pottery and weaving among the media of art and institutionally in the interest in the historical artifacts being exhibited by newly invigorated historical museums all over the country. But it also testifies to the extension of serious study to the "decorative" (the term is no longer prejorative) traditions of non-Western art. We should be reminded of Riegl's arguments of seventy-five years ago which used the traditional motifs in textiles as a model for the history of style.11 However, as we saw in the comparison with Wolfflin, there is today no appeal to a higher and more extensive historical reality such as style. It is rather their common functions as social products that bind these various artifacts together. There is further a healthy decentralization in the view of art, what art is, where and by whom it has been and is produced. More kinds of objects, but also more kinds of makers are being admitted into the circle of artists. Women, traditionally makers in the household, are a significant group. From studies of art in China and India to Europe 112

Is art history? there is a similar scholarly attention to the status and working conditions of artist-craftsmen and their influence on the nature and reception of works.12 When and where were artists born into professional families? When and where were they treated as craftsmen or honored as members of wealthy households? Consider the double or triple professions of many Dutch artists in the seventeenth century: Steen was a brewer as well as a painter; Vermeer was probably both art dealer and innkeeper. This now seems less a case of an underdeveloped country, by comparison with Italy, than an example of a different social and thus artistic situation. The net in which we catch art and artists is spread widely and much more is caught for our consideration. The question "What is art?" and the old answer that denned it as having aesthetic rather than utilitarian appeal has never seemed further from anyone's mind. One way in which to understand the directions being taken today in the study of art is to see them as offering alternatives to a dominant mode of the first great generations of modern art historians. The most influential figures among these, Wolfflin for example, and Panofsky, largely concentrated their attention and developed their modes of analysis with reference to the art of the Italian Renaissance. Both because of Panofsky's influence inside and outside the field, and because of the explicit way in which his writings lay out his assumptions, I have chosen to let him serve as the example of a general phenomenon. Panofsky's method of iconographic analysis originated in a series of primarily theoretical papers. His iconographic method, loosely construed, has been adopted by students of the pictorial (and verbal) arts of all ages. But Panofsky's interpretive strategy was bound up with Renaissance phenomena and with the study of Renaissance art. In his early papers (which remain untranslated) Panofsky argued against trying to decipher meanings using the notion of style, which was then defined psychologically by Wolfflin as "forms of beholding" (Seh/ormen) or by Riegl as the socio-psychological KunstwoJJen (variously translated "will to form," "artistic volition," or more literally "that which wills art"). 13 Arguing instead for the way in which pictorial images are bound to ideas, Panofsky defined their essential meaning in terms of Sinn, later rendered as "intrinsic meaning" in his English publications. Adopting Cassirer's notion of symbolic forms, the greater achievement of Panofsky's approach was that it drew attention to the links between pictures and ideas, between art and thought. But whether he is defining the Renaissance as the reintegration of classical motif with 113

Svetlana AJpers classical theme, or pointing to the symbolic force of the use of perspective construction in Renaissance painting, Panofsky in effect posits and confirms a particular notion of man and of art.14 Man here is a figure located historically in time (acknowledging his historical relationship to antiquity) and in space (employing the device of linear perspective to posit his picture as a window onto a second, substitute world). Man is at the center, viewing the world beyond of which his art is the imagined imitation. The very notion of the viewer's relationship to meanings which are verbally construed and which lie beneath the surface of his meaningful images is bound up with Renaissance notions of art and the primacy of language. While validating and expounding a certain view of man, and the kind of art he produced, Panofsky was clear, at least at first, that this was distinguished from what came before (Middle Ages) and what came after (the modern age): But no mediaeval man could see the civilization of antiquity as a phenomenon complete in itself, yet belonging to the past and historically detached from the contemporary world — as a cultural cosmos to be investigated and, if possible, to be reintegrated, instead of being a world of living wonders or a mine of information.. Just as it was impossible for the Middle Ages to elaborate the modern system of perspective, which is based on the realization of a fixed distance between the eye and the object and thus enables the artist to build up comprehensive and consistent images of visible things; just as impossible was it for them to evolve the modern idea of history, which is based on the realization of an intellectual distance between the present and the past, and thus enables the scholar to build up comprehensive and consistent concepts of bygone periods.15

It is when Panofsky's method was expanded, by him and by the field in general, to other arts and then treated as a normative standard for art and its study that problems developed. Compelling though his study of early Netherlandish painting is, it more and more seems to me that it compels partly by making northern art follow the art of the South.16 Northern artists, far longer and more persistently than those in the South, trusted to the flatness of the working surface. Although it is true that the illuminated pages of books became more and more picture-like in the Italian Renaissance sense, the flatness of the surface of northern art in general was not killed off by perspective as Panofsky suggests. Neither the flat surface nor the repetition involved in printing techniques disturbed northern European artists, who, unlike the Italians, did not accept the authority of the individual work, created by an individual artist for a located viewer. As an image of the world, northern art is often more like a mirror than like a 114

Is art history? window. This is true of van Eyck, as it is of Vermeer. The common denominator between both aspects (flatness of working surface and mirror) is the absence of the maker or viewer, clearly posited in space and located in time, that is central to the creation of Italian art. Northern art, it might be argued, moved from the eye of God (van Eyck's mirror in the Arnolfini Wedding) to the optical lens like a reflecting eye (the world cast onto the surface of the canvas as in Vermeer). But all the time a human center, in Panofsky's Italian Renaissance sense, is strangely absent. Finally, Panofsky's definition of disguised symbolism - his inventive way of analyzing the combination of new pictorial realism and old medieval symbolism in the art of the North - in effect follows Italian fashions by subordinating surface imitation to meaning. He does not allow for the fact that the appearance of the first seems so often to outrun the verbal presence of the second, even in van Eyck. If we turn to Panofsky's masterful study of Diirer, it is characteristic that he sees Diirer as a kind of captive of the alien northern darkness struggling toward the southern light.17 This of course is how Diirer often saw himself and it is thus in keeping with much of his art. But it is less clear that there is a right and a wrong, a light (the South) and a darkness (the North) here. In view of the accomplishments of Diirer's art one might say that he was far better at a characteristically northern task, print-making, than at a southern one, painting. Or to pursue the contrast further, that his landscapes (northern) are far superior to his nudes (southern). As heirs to this southern emphasis students of the northern tradition have until recently been inordinately interested in those artists and works which are bound in some way to the south of Europe. Motifs and meanings have been tracked down with great energy. Despite the evidence of the pictures themselves, an entire moralistic school of interpretation of Dutch seventeenth-century realism has developed on the assumption that hidden meaning, not the surface, is the key to pictorial significance. Despite their pictorial balance and presence, Vermeer's women, for example, are seen as emblems of sin. Although moralizing emblem books were popular in the Netherlands and some paintings follow suit, the impetus for this kind of interpretation can be explained at least in part as an attempt to lend the right kind of significance to an otherwise - by Italian standards - insignificant art. This attitude is widespread. Lord Clark introduces his book Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance18 by asking how such an artist could rise from the mediocrity of Dutch art. 115

Svetlana AJpers And he goes on to expound Rembrandt's greatness in terms of Italian models. He thus speaks from a specifically Italian notion of greatness and incidentally leaves precious little room for the more obviously native achievements of a Saenredam, a Ruisdael, or a Vermeer. Although he is suspicious of subjectivity, Panofsky's view of art and its history is clearly on the side of certain values, certain notions of man, art, and history for which he claims objective validity. Thus although his methods for studying art and its history were historically located as appropriate ways of dealing with Renaissance art, he came to treat them as normative and so they came to be seen by the discipline itself. In the course of his well-known 'The history of art as a humanistic discipline," Panofsky makes the statement that man is ''fundamentally an historian" and that "to grasp reality we have to detach ourselves from the present." 19 He speaks as a Renaissance viewer, located in time and space, detached from what he observes as he is from the process of observing. The very title of this essay, which long has been given to our students as a standard definition of and defense of the study of art history, can now be seen as grounded in Renaissance assumptions about man and art. What happens, one wonders, if the art one wants to study is itself not based on such humanistic principles? Is it not art? Can it not be studied by art historians? These questions lead us back to the concerns occupying students of art today. My argument is that much of what was previously considered marginal - in terms of kinds of objects, whole civilizations, but also in terms of the questions one would ask about them - is presently holding our attention. In effect, then, questions about our assumptions are raised by what is being done in the study of art as a piece of history. I say "in effect," however, because they are hardly being voiced as questions except by Marxist critics.20 To them, nothing that I have said will seem new, and much of what I have said will seem mild or too superficial in ideological terms. To ask why such questions are not being addressed is to speak not only to the inertia inherent in any academic discipline, but also to strike to the heart of the discipline's sense of itself as a discipline. For as scholars, art historians all too often see themselves as being in pursuit of knowledge without recognizing how they themselves are the makers of that knowledge. It is often in recognizing the assumptions underlying one's research, one's habit of mind in a sense, that new problems are clarified and new issues are made clear. If we recognize our current 116

Is art history? intellectual stance as a challenge to the previous hegemony of the Renaissance, we should go on to reconsider some things that we have made basic to the study of art. Three issues, basic operating procedures actually, built right into our study of Western art come to mind: (1) the notion of the role or the authority of the individual maker; (2) the notion of the uniqueness of the individual work; and (3) the notion of the centrality of the institution of painting. It is common procedure to begin any study by attributing and dating the works to be considered and separating them out from any possible imitations. On what basis (other than market value) must we consider the authority of an individual maker as the central feature of every work? Entire modes of art which we are now beginning to include in our studies do not depend on such identification. The assertion of the identity of the maker is properly studied against the background of a much larger production of anonymous objects which were made apart from such a recognition of self. Perhaps there was a conscious attempt at self-effacement, an attempt to blend into an admired style or mode of image-making. In studying a tradition such as Chinese painting, where imitation of an admired style is the rule and attribution a chancy and demanding procedure at best, would it not be useful to ask how appropriate the task of attribution is? How is the individual maker related as an individual to such a powerful and absorbing tradition? How should we deal with the collaborative effort of workshop products, such as medieval illuminated manuscripts or Renaissance frescoed rooms? Should our aim always be first to sort out, to identify the hands? What is the status or nature of collaborative efforts at different times, in different societies? What were the conditions of working together? When we turn to the works themselves, our assumption about the absolute uniqueness of the original work is a counterpart to this notion of individual creators. There are first of all types of objects prints, but also tapestries or photographs - which are designed to be replicated. Not only does our current method of print connoisseurship lead us, against this very fact, to continue to sort out when and in which order each individual pull of a print was made, but further the very notion of the value of repetition is hardly faced at all. If, as William Irvins has argued in his feisty but powerful Prints and Visual Communication, one function of a pictorial image is the communication of information (as in a map, or the illustrations to a study of botany, both of which were worked on by Dutch artists in the seventeenth century), then the possibility of repetition is a prime 117

Svetlana AJpers virtue, not a vice.21 That Rembrandt fought this possibility, often creating essentially unrepeatable etchings, is a different but not necessarily on this account (though it may be on others) superior artistic achievement. There are entire schools of art, such as the Dutch, or artistic enterprises, such as Monet's series of haystacks or poplars, which might be better understood in the light of a more general appreciation of repetition. The strength of the hold which the original (in the sense of the originating or first in a sequence of inventions) has on us is made clear even in such an independent study as George Kubler's The Shape of Time. Kubler begins by proposing that ''the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things." 22 He proceeds to search for an order in which to put all these things and insists on establishing distinctions between what he calls "prime objects" and "replicas." In arguing, for example, that "with European objects we often come closer to the hot moment of invention than in non-European ones where our knowledge is so often based only upon replicas of uniform or debased quality," he seems to me to reveal a European cultural bias (but of course also an appropriate cultural responsiveness) which we are just starting to reflect on as we expand the bounds of art and its history.23 As a final example of new directions in which to turn, consider the notion of painting as an institution - 1 mean the sense in which in our study of Western art a new subject, like landscape, is considered to have truly arrived only when it is rendered in the most permanent and expensive medium, paint. One notes the ease with which students of Western painting commonly speak of sources in a minor medium, such as prints, as if they were there just to serve painting. It is as if the transition from one medium to another was not in itself problematic and worthy of assessment. Gombrich, for example, has demonstrated most eloquently that it is not a new look at the actual landscape on the part of painters in the north of Europe, but rather a theory making landscape a suitable subject for art contributed by southern writers, that led to the establishment of the new genre of landscape painting. "Here then," he writes, "was a frame into which the admired products of northern skill and patience could be fitted." 24 And he goes on to discuss their classification in terms of heroic and pastoral types. Yet as Gombrich himself admits a few pages earlier, citing the example of Durer, northern skill and patience had already flowered. For Durer was indeed "one of the world's greatest landscape painters," though in his topographical watercolors done for his own pleasure, not in paintings for purchase.25 Is the 118

Is art history? topographic watercolor not art? And when we look at the great northern landscape painters - Bruegel, and then van Goyen and Ruisdael - is it true that topography could not be the motif or function for paintings (as contrasted with a watercolor)? Is the birth of landscape painting in the North so at variance with the function of the lesser media? What if the entire tradition of northern art is indeed rather like painted prints? Is the human measure - what Gombrich means by the institution of landscape as a type of painting - essential before pictorial renderings can be considered in the realm of art? We have here indeed the recipe for the makings of Renaissance art, but surely not for all picturing. Far from being limited to a revisionist study of art, the questions we are touching on here, the very mode of thinking that leads me to pose them, is shared by many thinkers today. The status or nature of the individual creator is, for example, a central concern in all of the works of Michel Foucault.26 His account of what he terms the archeology of knowledge emphasizes, like Braudel's study of the Mediterranean, what Braudel calls "that other submerged history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants." 27 This view of the human situation, the slow process of continuing transformation enacted between us and our environment(s) is also confirmed in much contemporary art. We might take as a prime example the writing and the earth-works of the late Robert Smithson - be it his evocation of Olmsted's Central Park as an "ongoing development" of slow geological changes interacting with an environment for man, or his Spiral Jetty made out of, and subsumed once again into, the Great Salt Lake.28 To ask these questions is then to acknowledge a common enterprise with historians, critics, artists, and writers of our time and, one would think, to gain strength and insight from such a common intellectual cause. From this vantage point we can now return to our earlier remarks on Panof sky and to his generation of art historians in a slightly different light. For in marked contrast to the generation of Panofsky, art historians today, far from acknowledging that they live and work at a certain time and place, in the company of others (all of which would be considered subjective factors), deny this in favor of a notion of objective historical research. Baxandall, a most sophisticated spokesman, argues that "quattrocento intentions happened in quattrocento terms, not in ours." 29 It is characteristic of art history that we teach our graduate students the methods, the "how to do it" of the discipline (how to date, attribute, track down a commission, 119

Svetlana AJpers analyze style and iconography), rather than the nature of our thinking. In terms of the intellectual history of the discipline our students are woefully uneducated. How many have been asked to read Panofsky's early untranslated writings, or Riegl, or Wolfflin? Supporting this is that prejudice for the original object and against the desk-bound scholar. To think, to write is itself somehow to forsake the works. At issue is not the method one uses but rather the notion of art and its history, the notion of man and the form that his knowledge of the world takes. For all of Panofsky's claims to employing an objective method (his three levels of meaning, for example), he accepted the responsibility for his own thought and his commitment to certain values. In studying Renaissance art he was aware of having made certain choices; he was aware of the phenomena that he excluded by making them. He celebrated the accomplishment of a humanistic art and despaired at the loss of it. A certain latitude was possible within this set of mind. Panofsky celebrates what he saw as a kind of cultural wholeness testified to in the symbolic content of Renaissance images. Aby Warburg, more psychological in his sensibility, studied that precarious balance among competing human impulses that is achieved by a society in the ordering of its rituals (the Navajos served him as an example) or by an individual in his patronage of art. In the midst of the current rush of alternatives to an earlier mode of studying art, it is only the radical critics of the field who engage those issues of society and history, those questions of moral values that were, by earlier scholars, accepted as an essential part of their scholarship. To what view of human and societal values, and to what understanding of the sequence of objects that we call history do we tend in our current mode of equating all works as separate but equal pieces of history? One of the few people to see and address this as an issue has been E. H. Gombrich. Best known for his studies of representation and artistic illusion and the perceptual processes at work in receiving and forming images of the world, Gombrich has devoted himself on a number of recent occasions to the problem of maintaining the values of tradition.30 His long-standing critique of the notion of Zeitgeist is extended here in an argument directed against the social historicization of the study and perception of art and the relativistic view of all values that results. On the one hand Gombrich is firm in his belief that a disciplined study of what he calls "the psychological and technical resources of the visual media" is necessary. But he also speaks to the value of personal response, which, with a characteristic 120

Is art history? confidence in right-mindedness, he feels will inevitably support traditional canons of taste, support in short the value of tradition itself.31 Gombrich's concern with the perceptual processes of vision can be easily accommodated to artistic notions of modernism, even as his analytic rigor can be accommodated to current structural modes of analyses. In contrast to modernist art and thought, however, he insists that our visual perception, like our judgment, is validated by external phenomena. For Gombrich the "beholder's share," that happy phrase by which he evokes the part we play in perceiving any representative illusion (or by extension one might say make a judgment), depends on a notion of constancy, constant objects in the world, constant values posited outside ourselves. This is, as Gombrich has often argued, simply a matter of common sense. But it is common sense - taking this to refer to a community able to agree on certain realities and certain values - that is today being challenged by experience and by research. Many do not share Gombrich's confidence in tradition. Those who do, do not share Gombrich's urgent sense that it needs reiteration. Some of the most interesting work is being produced out of a sense of this situation. The studies by Leo Steinberg, Michael Fried, and T. J. Clark that I particularly have in mind are perhaps more accurately called writings. For they are all acts of writing as much as they are reports of research accomplished.32 These three scholars differ from one another greatly in subject, attitude, and manner of address. But they share a meditative stance which testifies in each case, I think, to work which is not only reflective in nature but which might also properly be called reflexive. Each one clearly establishes where he stands. It is useful to recall that several years ago Leo Steinberg argued eloquently against what he called the rule of objectivity and the shrinking self.33 For Steinberg the self is a psychological presence, for Michael Fried it is rather a beholder, in a more philosophical sense, of pictorial fictions or images, whereas for T. J. Clark the self is a member of a particular society and class.34 To the sensible question of whether it is appropriate to deal with Michelangelo, say, or Greuze or Courbet in terms of viewers so conceived, the answer these scholars seem to give is some mixture of evidence from the lifetime of the artist and from continuing human necessity. Surely Baxandall's disembodied desire - one shared by many art historians today - to see quattrocento art in quattrocento terms is as much an intellectual structuring of our time as are the others. This too is knowledge we make. 121

Svetlana Alpers Of these three writers, T. J. Clark comes closest to providing a response to the present problematic of our field as I have described it here. To repeat something said earlier, if art is most powerfully understood in its particular historical circumstances, then it is arguable that great art would result from consciously working out of this recognition. It is this claim that Clark makes for the art of Courbet in the years 1849-50. Clark's Image of the People leads us with care through the social and political upheavals in France during these years. He traces Courbet's roots in the fractured and radicalized world of rural Besangon, his experimentation with popular imagery and popular forms taken from the example of simple popular engravings until Courbet finally comes to a pictorial definition of his audience. In Clark's analysis, the Burial at Ornans subverts the expectations of the normal public for high art by filling a work of monumental proportions and presumptions with the disorderly actualities of village society. In contrast to the traditional treatment of Courbet as a realist, his art is here not only seen as a piece of history but is shown to have been made as such. One of the virtues of this study is that it understands its assumptions. Clark argues for the ideological determinants of art and he attempts to locate these in the complex surface, the figures, but also the very colors and brush-strokes of a work. Let us extract some sentences from Clark's description of the Burial at Ornans: He has painted more than forty-five figures life-size in a great frieze over eight yards long, arranging the figures in a long row which curves back slightly round the grave itself; and in places, following the conventions of popular art, he has piled the figures one on top of the other as if they stood on steeply sloping ground. And towards the right of the picture he has let the mass of mourners congeal into a solid wall of black pigment, against which the face of the mayor's daughter and the handkerchief which covers his sister Zoe's face register as tenuous, almost tragic interruptions. He has used colour deliberately and dramatically, in a way which has little to do with the careful materialism of the Stonebreakers, to symbolize matter; almost, as our eyes move right, to threaten the faces put upon the solid ground.. .Beyond this point, when we start to ask about the picture's meaning, the real difficulties begin. What, to put it briefly, is the Burial's affective atmosphere? What are the mourners' attitudes and emotions, and what is Courbet's attitude to the event portrayed?.. .We have to answer such questions in the face of an image which deliberately avoids emotional organization: by that I mean the orchestration of forms to mimic and underline the emotional connotations of the subject.. .Is the Burial a sacrament or merely a social occasion?.. .It was precisely its lack of open, declared significance which offended most of all; it was the way the Burial seemed to hide its attitudes, seemed to contain within itself too many contraries - religious and secular, comic and tragic, senti122

Is art history? mental and grotesque. It was this inclusiveness, this exact and cruel deadpan, that made the Burial the focus of such different meanings. It was an image that took on the colours of its context; and perhaps it was designed to do so.35 But despite all this there are things that are left out. Clark does not intend a traditional assessment of the oeuvre of a master. The exclusions that he makes - many other works, but also other aspects of those he chooses to discuss - are made consciously. One can understand why they do not appear here. Clark can tell us of the social function of the Burial at Ornans, but what about Courbet's extraordinary self-portraits? Surely a discovery of self went along with Courbet's discovery of the state of his society when he returned to his village birthplace to paint in 1849-50. And what if the issues are not self and society? How are we to understand that he painted landscapes and still-lifes as he did? The importance of Clark's work, like Steinberg's and Fried's, is not to demonstrate the strengths or the limits of a particular approach. It is rather that these writings set a standard, offer a level of thinking, of looking, of pictorial analysis that we in art history sorely need. In distinguishing the preeminent problems in our field today, the criticisms that I offered about how they are being dealt with are less criticisms of the particular assumptions made than criticism of assumptions not perceived, not acknowledged. The pressing need in other words is to recognize just what it is that we are about. It is curious to note that each of these three very different scholars has been at pains to give an account of the nature and attentiveness of past viewers of the works that they are studying. Steinberg characteristically sets his studies in this very frame, summarizing for us how a work - Michelangelo's Last Judgment, for example - has been seen through the ages. Fried in studying the critiques of the eighteenth-century French salons and Clark in studying the reactions to the exhibitions of Courbet's works of 1849-50 have made the reactions the basic material of their research and analysis. More important than the distinctiveness of their approaches (Steinberg might be called a psychoanalytic, Fried a formalist, and Clark a Marxist critic) is the common claim made by these scholars, against the evidence of most art historical writing today, that not only research about, but looking at a work, takes time. They all show that it took time to look in the past and they offer us ways in which it can take time today. In the greater expanse of art history this fact has frequently been lost sight of, though indeed in reading Riegl, Wolfflin, Focillon, or 123

Svetlana Alpers Lawrence Gowing, for example, we find writers who did not. But it is a particularly pressing issue today in the atmosphere and with the kind of intellectual engagements outlined in the opening part of this essay. With such a profusion of objects and cultures, with old hierarchies crumbling, how does one justify such an occupation as looking? It is a daunting question.

Notes 1 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Florence: A Primer in the Social History of Style (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) and T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courhet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Two remarks should be appended by way of introduction to this essay. First, although the examples of both present and past work in art history will come largely from those areas I know best, the Renaissance and after, I think that the points I shall make are not limited to these areas. Second, in choosing to emphasize the directions being taken by innovative work I do not mean to deny that much excellent scholarship of a more traditional kind continues to be done. 2 John Fleming and Hugh Honour (eds.), Art in Context (New York: Viking Press, 1972); Nikolaus Pevsner, The Pelican History of Art (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1953- ). 3 Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, 1921). 4 Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque (New York: Harper, 1952). 5 Peter Gay, Art and Act: On Causes in History - Manet, Gropius, Mondrian (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 3. 6 I am referring here to the following studies: Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), p. lOn. (Reni); David Rosand, "Titian in the Frari," Art Bulletin 53 (1970), 206 (Titian). 7 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, p. 40. 8 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles of the Age of Humanism, Warburg Institute Studies, vol. XIX (London: Warburg Institute, 1949). 9 Heinrich Wolfflin, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architecktur (1886), reprinted in Kleine Schri/ten (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1946); see p. 44. 10 Oleg Grabar, "An art of the object," Artforum 14 (March, 1976), 36-43. 11 Alois Riegl, Stilfragen (Berlin: R. C. Schmidt, 1893). 12 To give but two examples in the work of colleagues at Berkeley: James Cahill's recent study, "Life patterns and stylistic directions in Ming painting," and Joanne Williams, "Caste and the role of the painter in Mughal India." 13 Erwin Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens," Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Algemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920), 321-339. 124

Is art history? 14 See Erwin Panofsky,''Iconography and iconology: an introduction to the study of Renaissance art," in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 26-54. 15 Erwin Panofsky, "Introductory," in Studies in Iconography: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 27-28. First published in 1939. 16 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). 17 Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955). First published in 1943. 18 Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (New York: New York University Press, 1966). 19 Erwin Panofsky, 'The history of art as a humanistic discipline," printed as the Introduction to Meaning in the Visual Arts; see pp. 5 and 24 for the quotations cited. 20 There are of course some exceptions. Early on James Ackerman voiced concerns about the direction being taken by art history in "Western art history," in Art and Archaeology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), where he pointed to the non-interventionist stance of American art historians. He has not been alone among art historians since then in turning to film (Ackerman has even made one) by way of being more in touch with the realities of modern society. In this connection we should remember that Panofsky himself wrote a piece welcoming and, in certain respects at least definitively defining, this newest of artistic media. As always, Panofsky located just where he stood in relationship to it: "It is the movies, and only the movies that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization." "Style and medium in the motion pictures," Critique 1/3 (January-February 1947), reprinted in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 151-169. 21 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). First published in 1953. 22 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 1. 23 Ibid., pp. 39ff. and p. 44. 24 E. H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance theory of art and the rise of landscape painting," in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), p. 114. 25 Ibid., p. 108. 26 See particularly Michel Foucault, "What is an author?" Partisan Review 42 (1975), 603-614. 27 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean, tr. Sian Reynolds (2 vols., New York: Harper & Row, 1973), vol. 1, p. 16. 28 Robert Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmsted and the dialectical landscape," Art/orum 11 (February, 1973), 62-68. 29 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, p. 151. 125

Svetlana Alpers 30 For example, see E. H. Gombrich, "Art history and the social sciences," The Romanes Lecture for 1973 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 31 These comments are based on Gombrich's Erasmus Prize acceptance speech as published in Simiolus 8 (1975-76), 47-48. 32 Leo Steinberg has published books, articles, and reviews on many different areas of art. See his Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), or more recently Michelangelo's Last Paintings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Michael Fried, first known for his studies of contemporary artists, has also written on nineteenth-century French art and is now studying its antecedents in Century Studies 9 (1975-76), 139-177; and 'Towards a supreme fiction: genre and beholder in the art criticism of Diderot and his contemporaries," New Literary History 6 (Spring, 1975), 534-584. Besides his study of Courbet mentioned earlier, T. J. Clark has also written a book on Daumier, The Absolute Bourgeois (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), and has now turned to Impressionism and after. 33 Leo Steinberg, "Objectivity and the shrinking self," Daedalus 98 (Summer, 1969), 824-836. 34 A specific woman's sense of self is also being articulated in art studies today. The ground for such writing was laid (was in effect cleared) by Linda Nochlin in an article first published in 1971, "Why have there been no great woman artists?", reprinted in Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth B. Baker (eds.), Art and Sexual Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973). It has been part of the groundswell of revisionist views of art history. If I have not selected out any single woman writer here, it is because it seems to me to be more a chorus than distinct individual voices. A major virtue of the woman's movement in art is that the chorus joins art historians with critics and artists in an easy relationship not usual in these tight professional worlds. This promises much. 35 T. J. Clark, Image of the People, pp. 82-83.

126

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history GREGG M. HOROWITZ

Contemporary art history is rife with anxiety. As in so many of the humanistic disciplines entrusted with the understanding, care, and transmission of culture, this anxiety is really a manifold of concerns masquerading as unitary under the rubric of "the crisis." However, all genuine crises have multiple structural determinants and the crisis in art history is no different. The disciplinary integrity and productivity of the field is being challenged on epistemological,1 metaphysical,2 historical,3 political,4 and feminist5 grounds. In this essay I will be concerned not directly with any of these problems, but with yet another vector of the crisis, the relation between art historical practice and the value of art works. In my investigation of this particular dilemma, I am claiming neither that it is primary nor that it is isolated, but I will treat it as discrete and hope that I do not thereby drastically distort its nature. Analogically, the crisis of value in art history has the same structure as the parable of the emperor's invisible clothes. Much of the legitimacy and prestige of the art historical enterprise is derived, in an Arnoldian fashion, from the inherent value of the object domain of the discipline. But, again as in so many of the humanistic disciplines, there is a creeping concern that rather than the custodial work uncovering the sources of value in art, the custodial work itself is instead precisely where value is generated. What Mark Roskill used to call the science of art history6 is in danger of losing its objectivity, that is, the distance from its object of study through which it produces knowledge, in the face of the possibility that rather than our caring for art because it is valuable, it is valuable because it is cared for. There are, I think, interesting and uninteresting expressions of this 127

Gregg Horowitz anxiety. On the one hand, there is the faintly sophomoric worry that art historians are trendy taste-makers, mere rhetoricians in the service of some market or patron, engaged in a project of valuation as deception. This position is surely a common enough proposal among undergraduate students of aesthetics, and it has received a fair defense from David Carrier.7 But this conception of the value of art works as the product of a conspiratorial web of persuasion spun by a coterie of initiates is, I think, a bit of paranoia which serves to obscure a crucial feature of artistic value, a feature it shares perhaps most clearly with the desirability of the beloved: value is something felt as it is discovered. It seems to me phenomenologically and praxically incontrovertible that the value of art works is something experienced by art historians and art amateurs alike, so any account of it as a function of a deception is sure to miss one of its most identifying marks. The more philosophically interesting version of the problem of value suggests not that the value of art works is a deception practiced by art historians but rather that it is an unintentional by-product of some other intentional activity. An exemplary expression of this position can be found in the work of Svetlana Alpers. In her studies of northern art and in her theoretical examinations of the methodological foundations of art history, Alpers attempts to identify the ways in which the interconnected projects of description, explanation, and interpretation (which I will henceforth refer to collectively as "analysis") have unintentionally generated artistic value which is thereby discoverable in the field of inquiry.8 Specifically, Alpers argues that art historians like E. H. Gombrich and, especially, Erwin Panofsky, in attempting to develop the tools for a universal art history, have privileged those conceptual tools adequate for the analysis of the art of the Italian Renaissance. In treating these tools as universally applicable, indeed at times in arguing that they are necessarily universally applicable,9 Panofsky and Gombrich treat Italian art as normative for art history and hence treat other types of art as more or less defective. The normative hierarchy is thus not explicitly posited but is rather discovered through the concrete activity of writing art history. The philosophically interesting point made by Alpers is that the foundations of contemporary art history are themselves the source of artistic value in such a way that that value can be experienced as if it were an objective property of the works analyzed. The distinction drawn above between the intentional and derivative production of value can be clarified by contrasting two different 128

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history relations between art historical analysis and evaluation. Against Vasari, Baldinucci, even perhaps Winckelmann, the charge that analytic techniques license normative judgments would not be surprising. This would be so, however, precisely because the normative project was the primary motivation for the development of the analytic techniques in question, and not in any subtle way either. To recover the special value of the art of antiquity or to grant special value to the artists favored by one's patron is the telos around which is organized the work of these proto-historians. It is, for instance, on the basis of the explicitly normative distinction between the vecchio and the antico that Vasari constructed his tale of Renaissance recovery as a driving force in Tuscan art. Against Panofsky and Gombrich, however, the charge has a different force because for them, as, I would imagine, for nearly all contemporary art historians, analysis is primary, evaluation secondary. This is not a mere inversion of earlier methodologies but an ordering of priorities derived from the historical nature of the object domain of the discipline. The job of the art historian, the activity through which she is distinguished from the "mere" connoisseur and the art critic, is the explication of what the art is in itself, of what the artist has done in the making of the art. Not until we know what it is and what has been done in making it can we pass judgment on a work's artistic value. The primacy of analysis over evaluation marks the space between our observation and the art work's creation, the space which is history as a problem, the space bridged by art history. Vasari may in some sense be the father of art history, but in his explicitly normative claims about Renaissance recovery he too quickly closed the gap which grants to the art of the past its historical specificity; in foregrounding analysis, Panofsky and Gombrich open that gap and thus renew the specificity of past art as the art historian's problem. Michael Ann Holly makes this point, albeit for different purposes, when she writes, "Historians are interested in facts; critics in impressions and judgments. Historians coolly analyze; critics are passionately engaged. Historians are exempt from ideological commitments; critics revel in their presence. And perhaps most important, historians deal with the art of the past and critics with the art of the present." 10 To argue against contemporary art history that the foundations of its mappings of its object domain are compromised by an unintentional principle of evaluation is thus a powerful challenge to the possibility of objective art historical knowledge. This point may be put another way. The scope of contemporary art 129

Gregg Horowitz history is geographically and temporally universal. A quick scan of a college catalogue, a university press booklist, or the table of illustrations in Gombrich's Art and Illusion demonstrates the point. In order to warrant this scope, the art historian must provide and deploy a set of conceptual tools such that the objects in the domain of the discipline can be appropriately explained. The set of tools in art history is familiar: kunstwoJJen, form, style, and so on. These concepts are used to pick out properties of objects such that their inclusion in the domain of art is justified; that an object exhibits form or style is a prerequisite for its susceptibility to art historical analysis at all. Thus, these concepts are supposed to have objective reference which in turn justifies their analytic deployment. Put simply, the fundamental concepts of art historical analysis should reveal to us properties of the objects themselves.11 Panofsky writes: We must be able to characterize artistic volition or artistic intention.. .as a concept which can be derived immediately from every artistic phenomenon, no matter how limited, whether it be the total creation of a period, a people, or a particular region, the oeuvre of a particular artist, or, finally, any work of art at all. Such a concept defines the phenomenal characteristics of the work in question not generically, as discovered by abstraction, but fundamentally, revealing the work's immanent meaning and laying bare the actual root of its being.12

When looked at in this light, the tools of analysis function as correctives to what we might call premature familiarity. David Rosand writes that: By concentrating on the formal, art historians have been able to isolate an aesthetic sine qua non, the essential quality shared by all works of art. The concept of style has allowed us to construct a model that transcends the constraining specificity of historical setting and to assign to works of art their own particular parameters of sequential development. We have been able thereby to break the parochial bonds of inherited cultural prejudices and conceive of a world history of art, moving easily, synchronically, among the cultures and epochs of museum exhibits.13

A concept like style allows the art historian to see objects which may look at first glance odd, defective, or otherworldly as instead problematic, as riddles to be answered. The art historian must resolve the riddle by reconstructing the style in which the unfamiliar object was created, thus rendering it comprehensible by preserving its difference, its independent nature. 14 Art history should actively block quick and ready evaluation, and so, again, the primacy of analysis over evaluation appears as a goal of the discipline. From this 130

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history point of view, the charge that art historical analysis enables the discovery of value and disvalue that are themselves unintentional by-products of the tools developed to guarantee objectivity is a serious one indeed, for it suggests that the tools do not prevent premature familiarity at all. Rather, they guarantee it. II Alpers's charge against Panofsky can be explicated with reference to Panofsky's famous essay 'The history of art as a humanistic discipline." In that text, the paradoxical relation of analysis and evaluations manifests itself most clearly: In defining a work of art as "a man-made object demanding to be experienced aesthetically" we encounter for the first time a basic difference between the humanities and natural science. The scientist, dealing as he does with natural phenomena, can at once proceed to analyze them. The humanist, dealing as he does with human actions and creations, has to engage in a mental process of a synthetic and subjective character: he has mentally to re-enact the actions and to re-create the creations. It is in fact by this process that the real objects of the humanities come into being. For it is obvious that historians of philosophy or sculpture are concerned with books and statues not insofar as these books and statues exist materially, but in so far as they have a meaning. And it is equally obvious that this meaning can only be apprehended by re-producing, and thereby, quite literally, "realizing," the thoughts that are expressed in the books and the artistic conceptions that manifest themselves in the statues.15

Panofsky here presents a familiar defense of the primacy of verstehen in the cultural sciences. It is just because an art work is an artifact, a humanly made object, that the historian must recreate the "subjective" component of it. This re-creation requires a reanimation of the object, an imaginative reinsertion of it into the context of creation in which its identity was established. Reanimating the object hence entails establishing its identity as an intentional artifact, an artifact made thoughtfully, made as something. This is the point on which the cultural sciences differ from the natural ones: the intentional objects of the cultural sciences demand historical analysis because their identities are through-and-through historical. 'The humanities endeavor to capture the processes in the course of which those records were produced and became what they are." 16 However, Panofsky's recognition of the intentional status of art history's object does not on its own allow him to pick out art history's object. Since a historical foundation for the cultural sciences is, if 131

Gregg Horowitz sound, sound for all artifactual practices, it does not help to pick out the mode of intentionality characteristic of objects in art history's particular domain. In an attempt to render the particularity of art history, Panofsky restricts the intentionality of art works to their being made as objects of aesthetic experience. It is startling that in the passage cited above, the argument proper is focused on intentionality in general while the specific art intention is forced to stand unclothed, for it is here that the problem emerges. In attempting to construct a unique domain, Panofsky ahistorically mandates the kind of intentionality exhibited in art works and recovered in art history. Alpers's quarrel with Panofsky is, in essence, that he is insufficiently historicist in his historicist approach to art. Because his arguments for verstehen as the founding methodological principle of all cultural disciplines do not enable him to mark the limits of the domain of art history in particular, Panofsky must provide an additional principle which will so enable him. Ex hypothesi, this principle grounds, rather than emerges from, historical analysis, although, to be sure, its concrete historical elaborations need to be historically confirmed. "Assuming the concept of artistic volition to be methodologically justified, the necessity which it, too, determines in a particular historical process consists not in determining a causally dependent relationship between individual phenomena which succeed each other in time but in discovering in them (just as in an artistic phenomenon) a unified sense." 17 But in selecting the specific mode of intentionality called "demanding to be experienced aesthetically," Panofsky invokes a historically particular goal of picture making as the sine qua non of art and thus, methodologically speaking, arbitrarily forecloses the possibility that other kinds of pictorial intention may inform the art-ness of art history's objects. In the name of the apparently expansive notion of aesthetic experience, the expansiveness of which allows art history to have a universal scope, Panofsky in fact renders a particular norm an a priori analytic precept. But Alpers's charge is also more finely grained, going directly to the core of what she sees as the deleterious analytic and evaluative inevitabilities of Panofsky's elevation of the iconographic method to disciplinary pride of place. In figuring aesthetic experience as a kind of demand that art works as such make on the beholder, Panofsky privileges a mode of intentionality which posits a viewer at a distance from the work who receives the meaning already embodied in it. Whatever "aesthetic experience" might mean, and it is plausible in 132

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history light of Panofsky's overall commitments that we understand it as entailing a Kantian contemplative detachment,18 that all art works demand it suggests that Panofsky is envisioning a distanced confrontation between creator and spectator mediated by the semantically active object as the space of art. The art work is the bearer of meaning already made rather than, as Alpers will later propose, a mode of making. The view of the art work as a bearer of meaning demanding of the spectator that she behold it in a manner the instructions for which are encoded in the work itself is, Alpers argues, particular to the Albertian model of picture making dominant in Italian Renaissance art and theory. The assumption of the physical and psychological distance between artist or viewer and image is, historically, part and parcel of the invention of the perspective system which is basic to much, though not all, Italian Renaissance picture-making. A maker or viewer is posited whose location and size are the module or measure for the figures and space around them in the painting. The objecthood of the image, if I can put it that way, is in other words part and parcel of the status of the image or the relationship set up between viewer and image in the Renaissance.19 It is on the basis of this model, in which understanding an art work requires understanding the meanings it bears and how it does so, that the primacy of iconography is constructed. Alpers therefore suggests that the iconographic method may be appropriate in grasping the intentionality of Albertian art, but, in transforming the principles of Albertian painting into the kunstwoJJen as such, Panofsky ahistorically, hence illegitimately, makes iconography into the central method for all art historical analysis. The true import of Alpers's critique of Panofsky can now be recovered. Panofsky foregrounds iconography as the primary art historical activity, as enabling the discipline to take hold of that unique property of its objects which constitutes its disciplinary specificity. But the problem of meaning is central only if the art work as such is made to stand as a bearer of meaning for a spectator who must decode it. Positing embedded meaning as pivotal thus depends on a prior privileging of a particular kind and purpose of picture making. Revealing the particularity of the focus gives the lie to the putative universality of any art history constructed on Panofsky's foundations, but, further, it is just this focus which systematically privileges meaningfulness as a value inherent in art works by making art as such an art of meaning. The Italian Renaissance, in its concern 133

Gregg Horowitz with clarity of meaning, with the istoria, design, and invention, is taken as the moment at which art comes into its own intentionality. Panofsky thereby formulates his analyses and evaluations of the achievements of some artists and periods and the relative failures of others according to their degree of proximity to the Italianate will to art. On these grounds, Alpers criticizes both Panofsky's analysis of Diirer as struggling toward a southern style and his attempt to recuperate the stasis of Dutch art as a hiding of meaning as evaluatively improper because historically so. Panofsky reanimates van Eyck as a painter of static, non-narrativized images rather than as a different kind of painter because he views him only relative to the Italian norm.20 In other words, the analyses generate evaluations which, while apparently derived from the works as experienced, are in fact artifacts of the analytic practice. Ill

Alpers's critique of Panofsky is, I think, important and compelling. Rather than accusing him of expressing mere prejudices in favor of one period over another, her conclusion is that Panofsky's "prejudices" are written into his approach. The evaluations he defends are rooted firmly in his experiences of the value of the works and are not tacked on in an arbitrary and impressionistic manner; the success or failure of art works is indeed revealed and grounded intersubjectively by concrete historical analyses. However, the experience is itself constructed at least in part by the tools used in procuring it, and thus the intersubjective validation of it no more validates its objective reference than a kaleidoscope passed from spectator to spectator would validate the claim that all Vermeers are composed of luminous color chips. Rather than Panofsky's methods enabling a preservation of art historical distance from its objects, they unintentionally render them prematurely familiar. The experience of value as if objective enabled by these methods obscures the real nature of the valuebearing objects. A question is raised by Alpers's critique, however, and it is a sticky one. Again, Alpers's point is not that Panofsky has made up his analytic tools out of nothing, but that he has made up their necessity by fallaciously generalizing from a historically particular practice. "It is when Panofsky's method was expanded, by him and by the field in general, to other arts and then treated as a normative standard for art and its study that problems developed."21 This argument suggests 134

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history that perhaps there is another, different set of analytic tools, sufficiently historicized, which would both adequately demarcate the boundaries of art history as a discipline and yet prevent the premature familiarity with - the improper obliteration of the differences of - the works analyzed which otherwise would undermine objectivity. Put simply, Alpers's critique seems to endorse Panofsky's general project of providing foundations for a universal art history at the same time that it rejects his version of it. Indeed, to the extent to which her criticism is that Panofsky is insufficiently historicist, not conceptually misguided, Alpers must be continuing to embrace the goal of a clearly demarcated universal scope. The structure of Alpers's position is revealing of a more general problem regarding the relation of analysis and valuation in art history. Since Alpers's criticism has its force just where Panofsky attempts to differentiate art history from the other cultural sciences, there are perhaps two quite different conclusions that might be drawn from it. The first and most obvious is that it is just the attempt to demarcate the scope and domain of the discipline that generates the paradoxical non-objectivity of the judgments it licenses; for this reason, one might infer that the only way to prevent the projection of misplaced values is to allow the discipline to merge back into a generalized cultural anthropology. In this way, all attempts to recover the inherent value of art works would lapse in so far as the very notion of inherent value itself lapses. But if this were the conclusion Alpers wished to draw, she would not need to criticize Panofsky as insufficiently historicist; she might, instead, criticize the project of demarcation as necessarily distorting. How, exactly, such an argument might develop is not of concern just yet, since the criticism in fact developed suggests, as I have argued, that the project of demarcation is still on the table; I will deal with it in my conclusion. Alpers thus draws the other conclusion: she wants a historicized criterion whereby she can gauge the objective reference of the fundamental art historical concepts, for only in this way can the disciplinary integrity of art history be maintained. At one moment, Alpers is explicit about this commitment. She writes: Questions about style and iconography are appropriate for Renaissance art, but we want questions that are appropriate for all art. The main question, it seems to me, should be modal. And it goes something like this: "What would it (reality, the world) be like if the relationship between us and the world were to be this one?" This formulation has the virtue of not distinguishing 135

Gregg Horowitz form and content, of not excluding function, of not choosing in advance between the parts played by the individual maker, his community, certain established modes of perceiving the world, or the viewer.22 The point of this argument appears to be that if we ask the right question we will get correct answers. That is, Alpers is embracing the Panofskian goal of catching the specifically art-making properties of art works in our conceptual nets. However, to build our nets properly, to avoid premature and, hence, prejudicial, familiarity, we must construct them using the resources made available by the artists and art communities whose works we want to analyze. The nets, thus, will have to differ from case to case, for only in this way can value be represented rather than unintentionally generated. But this proposal, I suggest, is deeply confusing since, in so far as Alpers wants to catch the art-making properties and not just any property whatsoever, the nets must, at some level, be at least transhistorically, if not ahistorically, validated. She must have in mind some criterion for evaluating whether she has caught what she has angled for. Let me put this point non-metaphorically. Wanting to ask questions that are appropriate for all art is not the same as wanting to ask all questions that are appropriate for art. While there are many things an artist does when making art - applying paint (and not), making a living (or not), deriving satisfaction (why not?) - not all of them are necessarily the making of art. Not just any analysis of, say, Rembrandt's painting will provide us access to his making of art simply because he is a painter. The claim that we can understand his artistry in some specified way does not follow from the claim that we can understand his activity, nor even that we can understand his painting, in that way. What is needed to ground the analytic technique as appropriate for all art is an argument to the effect that what is explained by the technique is the artistry. This is what Panofsky tried to provide, even if he fell into the trap of hasty generalization. On what grounds could Alpers provide the additional argument to defend the propriety of her main, modal, question? This is really just another way of asking how Alpers can differentiate art history from the other cultural sciences, but now with the added difficulty that whatever differentia is proposed cannot itself be derived from a historically specific practice, for in that direction, we now know, lies the danger of faultily generated valuations and the undermining of objectivity. But nor can Alpers derive a differentia from all art practices collected into an empirical archive, since the structure and content of that archive would itself require justification as a cdllec136

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history tion of specifically artistic practices. A rejection of the historically specific concept of style as a ground leaves her in need of replacement concepts which will, from the disciplinary point of view at least, do the same work. So, what historicized justification of the derivation of such concepts might be available? Alpers constructs her answer through an appeal to Alois Riegl's methods in studying the Dutch group portrait. Riegl developed what, following Northrop Frye, Alpers calls a "modal nature of understanding" wherein the central themes of art historical analysis are regarded as "psychological issues setting forth the measure of man through his relationship to others and the world. " 23 Alpers's proposed differentia, so far as it is clear, is, indeed, broader than Panofsky's; it regards art essentially as a way of making relationships between persons and their worlds rather than as a specifically propertied object. The benefit of such an approach is obvious, for, contrary to Panofsky's apparent restrictions of the subjective nature of the art work to its semantic properties, the modal approach permits a theoretically limitless number of subjective elements to enter into an analysis of an artist's activity in making art. The lack of limitations is the key here, for it is what allows Alpers to remain sensitive to the possibility that the "normative standard for art" is internally differentiated. It would at least enable the art historian to defer evaluation until the nature of the activity is itself reconstructed, and thus she would not need to bring the object into focus by deploying a set of alien norms masquerading as universally applicable analytic concepts. However, Alpers's attempt to save the universality of art history by historicizing its basic concepts does not work; the reasons are rooted in the putative benefit of historicization, the theoretically limitless number of subjective elements available for and in reconstruction. I would like to illustrate this point in an unusual way: through hearsay. Rembrandt's Enterprise, Alpers's stunningly creative analysis of that artist's work and working as both a complex function of his relationship to studio and market relations and a way of making and remaking them, is frequently disliked by readers who feel it deprives them of their "spiritual" Rembrandt. Liking the book very much, I often find myself defending it, often fruitlessly. The reason for so much testiness is, I think, Alpers's failure to articulate clearly her belief that Rembrandt's relations to studio, court, and market, rather than being factors external to his artistic practice, excessive attention to which turns him into a conniving moneygrubber, are instead factors internal to his mode of making art. 137

Gregg Horowitz When Alpers writes of the conclusion of her study that "it describes Rembrandt as pictor economicus and returns to points made about his career and his production that were previously couched in studio terms - relation to patrons, handling of paint, relationship to tradition, and depiction of self - to frame them, as he did himself, in terms of the marketplace,"24 she surely means that Rembrandt's relation to the market accounts, in part, for the esteem in which so many viewers hold him today. But later Alpers writes: His works are commodities distinguished from others by being identified as his; and in making them, he in turn commodifies himself. He loved only his freedom, art, and money, to recall the words of Descamps. Or, put differently, so as to bring out connections between the terms, Rembrandt was an entrepreneur of the self.25

Now, it is not so clear that, with this description, what Alpers has illuminated about Rembrandt is his mode of making art rather than his mode of making money out of paint. Granted that the norms of the practice being analyzed are not alien to Rembrandt's activity, it nonetheless remains indeterminate whether those same norms are the ones relevant to Rembrandt's activity as an artist. What I am suggesting here is that Alpers's concept of modes of making is not fine-grained enough to guarantee, or even to promise in good faith, that it can be useful in accomplishing what Panofsky failed to do, viz. provide access to artworks of the past in their own terms, thus reanimating them for us so as to provide access to what in them is of artistic value. Every human artifact carries the impress of its mode of making, so the observation that art is so stamped provides no reason to believe that modal analysis tells us what we want to know. The consequence of Alpers's adoption of such a historicized methodology does, perhaps, prevent her from misevaluating, and thus misrepresenting, the works she studies, but the cost seems to be an inability to defend the claim that what she has recovered in her analysis is artistically significant at all - or, perhaps, significant in the ways we have come to care about. The tension created by this impasse is felt in an acute theoretical form at the conclusion of Alpers's essay "Style is what you make it." Recognizing that once we jettison Panofsky's notion of style as a category with transhistorical objective reference we are perhaps cast adrift with no demarcating concepts at all, Alpers writes: Historical texts can be read as literature even as a waterjug can be seen as a work of art. This does not mean that there are no such things as historical accounts (as distinct from literature) or waterjugs (as distinct from art). It is 138

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history self-consciousness on the part of the maker, the viewer, or their communities which makes the difference.26 The pressing question, of course, is what kind of selfconsciousness? That Alpers does not say is, I believe, testimony to the fact that she cannot say for fear of lapsing back into a version of the threat to art historical objectivity to which Panofsky succumbed. But that she makes the proposal to differentiate at all is even more vivid testimony to the unavoidability of the question. Art is surely a mode of making, but unless one can say what kind of mode it is, art history suffers from the epistemological deficit of never knowing if it has hit its mark. Art history thus seems trapped between a loss of objectivity due to the unintentional generation of value and the systematic inability to specify an objective relationship between its analytic concepts and its domain of objects. This is, needless to say, a bad place to be stuck. IV Alpers's theoretical criticisms of Panofsky and her subsequent art historical writings are both powerful statements and compelling symptoms of a perhaps irreducible dilemma in art history understood as a humanistic discipline. There is a suspicion afoot, and not just in art history, that the value of art works recovered through art historical analysis is not in fact recovered but is instead generated by the discipline itself. If value is produced rather than discovered, then the specific objectivity pursued by and constituting the field would itself stand exposed as a sham; if value is a disciplinary artifact, the founding insights regarding the historical distance of the art work in and through which its real nature is revealed in analysis are shown up as unsustainable. Alpers both raises this specter and seeks to dispel it by criticizing Panofsky on historical grounds. In this way, she tries to renew art historical objectivity by reconstructing the principles of proper distance. The consequences of her arguments, however, threaten the possibility of any disciplinary integrity whatsoever; Alpers historicizes the ground away from art history by denying the possibility of any characterization of art making prior to historical investigation. She has paid the price for this, I have suggested, both in a theoretical impasse and in the frequent misinterpretation of her book on Rembrandt. The moral of my story so far is this: there is a moment of or prior to art history, indeed a disciplinary constitutive moment, that resists 139

Gregg Horowitz historicization, that resists, in fact, history itself. It is the moment in which we nominate, or have nominated, the relevant objects and properties for analysis. Whether this resistance will be redeemed through a transcendental argument - Panofsky's deep strategy when, as Alpers observes, he changes Riegl's basic issues by treating the art work as an autonomously meaningful object27 - or will remain as an irredeemable moment of evaluative relativity and an open threat to objectivity, has not, to be sure, been decided here. I do believe, however, that an important conclusion can be drawn from my sketch. The impasse of claims to art historical objectivity being grounded by historicist presuppositions that in turn render that objectivity impossible arises at a revealing moment. Both Panofsky and Alpers, having accepted the challenge of the essential historicity of art history's object, also seek to provide some principle of demarcation whereby the integrity of the field itself can escape historical drift. I have suggested that this effort is in part rooted in the refusal, articulated in Alpers's comment about water jugs, to allow art history to collapse into anthropology, the refusal, that is, to lose sight of the art in art works. But the pressure to demarcate is rooted in something deeper than defense of academic turf even if such territoriality is a characteristic expression of it. I propose that the need to demarcate emerges from the ways in which the idea of historicity is deployed, ways which guarantee that the paradox of demarcation will arise inevitably. Consider, once again, the problem to which the founding art historical concepts respond: the differences between the art of the present and the art of the past render the latter opaque to contemporary norms of interpretation. The concepts of style and form, capable of maintaining an identity of intention across an array of different concrete intentions, promise to both preserve the distinction between past and present and simultaneously drag the work of the past forward in time as the art historian * 'reproduces... the thoughts" or reimagines the mode of making in the present. The writing of history, on this model of it, is a kind of retrieval of difference, albeit one pursued in the context of a founding promise that the differences will be preserved as such in the retrieval. This promise is precisely, of course, the promise of objectivity, entwined in the premise that the space between the present and the past is an echo of the opaque nature of the older object. The preservation of difference in retrieval is, we might say, the founding goal of art history as a science since it is that difference which constitutes the problematized identity of the older object. 140

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history If we take this goal seriously, however, then the project of objective art history can be seen to be the construction of a kind of paradoxical timelessness, a present field of pure simultaneity in which are displayed the differences which constitute the pastness of the past. As Michael Podro has observed, a central concern of critical art history is "to show how the art of alien or past cultures could become part of the mental life of the present". 28 But if the goal is to reanimate past art so that it is part of contemporary mental life in the same way present art is part of contemporary mental life — and what other model could there be? - then its pastness becomes a merely contingent feature of past art. Pastness would pose no more of an interpretative dilemma than the one posed by the physical distance between a viewer and a contemporary art work. With the retrieval and display of historical difference as a goal, the historicity of the art work is transformed into a positive, present feature of it, a mark of the difference obliterated in its very presentation. To put this point a bit differently: the pastness of past art poses a critical problem only if its pastness is an essential feature of it. That is, only if the identity of the art work resists incorporation into the mental life of the present by virtue of just that feature which opens up the space between it and us does the problem of objectivity arise. Thus, the essential feature of the art work which both enables and demands art history as a science cannot be displayed but is at the same time that in the name of which promises of objectivity can be made good - the essential feature is precisely the distance from representability. The dream of retrieval, the construction of a field of simultaneous historical differences, is hence both true and false to the recognition of the essential historicity of the work of art. It is the falsity of the dream that the founding art historical concepts seek to disavow. It is in the context of this dilemma, I suggest, that the need for a principle of demarcation emerges. Panofsky posits his proposed principle in the same breath in which he avows the essential historicity of the art work; Alpers's critique of Panofsky's insufficiently historicist approach breeds a need for a principle although, as I have argued, she never develops one. The principle of demarcation, the displacement to the methodological register of the problem of the historical nature of the art work, embraces the difference of the past by positing it as art history's problem while attempting to provide a transhistorical ground which would cancel the resistance of history. A methodological principle which would justify the representation 141

Gregg Horowitz of past art works as really embodying a specific intentionality or modality promises to overcome the historical drift which creates the problem of the identity of past art works, but it can only do so by disavowing the deep critical problem which historicity provokes. It is thus inevitable that the effort to demarcate the boundaries of art history would succumb to paradox, for such effort accepts at one moment a lesson which it feels the need to be rid of. This last point notwithstanding, the central topic of this chapter has not been the paradox of historicity as such but rather the way in which that paradox gives rise to evaluative commitments which undermine objectivity by producing, rather than deterring, premature familiarity. But my digression highlights, I believe, why such unintended evaluative commitments are inevitable. The pressure experienced by both Panofsky and Alpers as the need to demarcate is a product of the need to curtail the negativity introduced into the art historical object by the recognition of its historicity. A deep and perhaps as yet inadequately understood consequence of the dynamic of historicism is that the distance between contemporary commentators and the object of their commentary is recuperated for the present by being attributed to the object; in this way, a hole in representation is both embodied and disguised in and by means of the construction of disciplinary domains. The consequence of historicism, that we, too, are cast adrift in history, is held in abeyance by projecting that drift backwards onto the object. Thus, if I am right that the problem of how past objects can be prepared, so to speak, for analysis in terms of founding art historical concepts is already a problem of how to close a gap improperly objectified as an objective distance from us, then such preparation, whether it is accomplished transcendentally or sociohistorically, will inevitably yield premature familiarity. The historicist art historian29 is motivated from the start by the goal of a retrieval of meaning or modality intended to cancel the distance which opens the very possibility of objectivity. Put simply, the problem of demarcation arises at a moment in art history the structure of which guarantees both that there will be principles of valuation and that they will be unintentionally generated. The question that remains for me to answer is whether it is possible, in the wake of the criticisms here developed, to recover any ground for objectivity in art historical analysis which is consistent with an historicist conception of historical distance. If by objectivity is meant the utter repudiation of all evaluative principles derived from the art historian's own age and practice in the name of the 142

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history retrieval of past principles, my answer is no. This answer need not lead, however, to a counsel of despair. The irredeemable moment of evaluative relativity that opens for us as we recognize the deep impact of historicism on art history can, in fact, motivate us to productive reflection on how we cooperatively construct our experiences of past art in terms of contemporary commitments. The lapse of objectivity understood as the negation of all subjective commitments is, perhaps, a conclusion to be embraced; indeed, we embrace it already when we use, say, Winckelmann's Reflections to understand the concerns of mid-eighteenth-century German social and aesthetic theory. As we let go of the dream of an experience constructed for us entirely by the past, we may be able to imagine and analyze the exchanges between past and present which constitute the stream of time in which we swim. We need not give up the various projects of constructing a method with which to analyze and evaluate past art when we become self-conscious about the goal of firmly demarcating art from water jugs, but we can also then recognize our own principles of evaluation at work in those projects. Art history would then be both a project of retrieval and a mode of self-reflection. What more could a committed historicist desire?30

Notes 1 Mark Roskill, The Interpretation of Pictures (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989) and Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). 2 Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 3 Jonathan Crary, "Techniques of the observer," October 45 (Summer, 1988), 3-35 and "Modernizing vision," in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 29-49. 4 A. L. Rees and F. Borzello (eds.), The New Art History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988). 5 Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 6 Mark Roskill, What is Art History? (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 9. 7 David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). 8 In this essay, I will be drawing on the following works by Alpers: "Style is what you make it: the visual arts once again," in Berel Lang (ed.), The Concept of Style (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 137162 (hereafter referred to as "Style"); "Is art history?" this volume, pp. 106-126 (hereafter "History"); The Art of Describing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) (hereafter Describing); and 143

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9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

Rembrandt's Enterprise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) (hereafter Rembrandt). E. H. Gombrich, "Norm and form: the stylistic categories of art history and their origins in Renaissance ideals," in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), pp. 81-98. Michael Ann Holly, "Past looking," Critical Inquiry 16/2 (Winter, 1990), 373. Cases in which objects are treated as having style but are later discovered not to be art works at all (the famous DeKooning three-seater, for instance) make the point about objective reference quite clearly; an object must have style to be subjected to stylistic analysis, it must have form to be subjected to formal analysis, and so on. Erwin Panofsky, 'The concept of artistic volition," tr. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8/1 (Autumn, 1981), 25-26. David Rosand, "Art history and criticism: the past as present," New Literary History 5 (Spring, 1974), 435. There are, it should here be noted, a range of possible explications of the concepts of style and form the differences between which I am eliding here. These differences are crucial to art historical practice since they determine what will count as a legitimate explanation of an art work. Richard Wollheim, for example, takes the style of an art work to be explicable only in the strictest intentional manner, whereas Theodor Adorno takes it to be explicable in the strictest anti-intentionalist manner; between these two extremes can be arranged the spectrum of historiographical techniques. However, what the disputants in the philosophical style wars have in common is a commitment to establishing some fundamental concept or set of concepts which will serve to foreground the artistically significant features of art works, those features which make claims on interpreters by virtue of their art historical specificity. In short, the range of art historical positions rests on a common presumption that art works are not self-interpreting objects, a presumption which testifies to the need to preserve historical difference. It is in terms of this commonality that my elision is, I hope, justified. Erwin Panofsky, "The History of art as a humanistic discipline," in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 14. Ibid., p. 24. Panofsky, "The concept of artistic volition," p. 30. For a relevant discussion of Panofsky's relationship to the Kantian tradition in aesthetic theory, see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1984), especially pp. 141-157. Alpers, "Style," pp. 148-149. Alpers, Describing, pp. xxi, xxiii-xxiv, and "History," pp. 112-114 above. Alpers, "History," p. 113 above. Alpers, "Style," p. 158. Ibid., p. 147. 144

Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history 24 25 26 27 28

Alpers, Rembrandt, p. 8. Ibid., p. 118. Alpers, "Style," p. 161. Ibid., p. 148. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p.xxii. Podro also suggests that the concerns characteristic of the German art historical tradition became outmoded after Panofsky. Needless to say, I disagree. 29 This designation is not redundant; a commitment to historical distance is not a sine qua non of historical imagination and intuition. 30 An essay by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, "Semiotics and art history," Art Bulletin 73/2 (June, 1991), dealing, especially in its concluding section, with some of the same issues I have canvassed here, was published just as I was concluding this essay. I regret not being able to take account of their arguments.

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Fullness and parsimony: notes on creativity in the arts JONELSTER

I INTRODUCTION Creativity - the ability to fashion objects that are valuable for their beauty, truth or usefulness - is an elusive phenomenon. Like time or power, it is easier to recognize than to characterize. This essay offers some notes on creativity that are, I hope, more than random yet certainly less than systematic. The main topic is creativity in the arts. Here, I draw not on expertise or even a modicum of knowledge in aesthetics, but on my experience as a lay reader, spectator or listener. Some art forms I know better than others, notably the earlynineteenth-century novel (Stendhal and Jane Austen) and American jazz and films between 1935 and 1940, but even of those I am only an amateur, in both senses of the word. My interests and loves may give what I have to say a bias towards classical art forms that put a premium on order and well-roundedness. There is not much I can do about that, except to warn the reader. Whatever specialized knowledge I bring to the topic derives from other sources. Some years ago I wrote a book on technical change,1 a phenomenon that turns out to bear some similarity to that of artistic innovation. In particular, the idea that good works of art can be seen as local maxima derives from this earlier work. Later, work on Marx led me to consider the notion of self-realization, a notion that is multiply central in the analysis offered here.2 Finally, as a writer myself, I have reflected on the processes that go into the writing of a chapter such as this one. Like artists, although in a different way, philosophers and scientists are in the business of putting old elements together in new ways. What counts as "new," and what gives value to the new combination, are questions that arise in all cases. 146

FuJJness and parsimony I shall proceed as follows. Section II offers a brief typology of the main forms of art, and a discussion of the aesthetic value we derive from them. Section III defines the notion of an achievement, as a prelude to the discussion of originality in section IV and of creativity in Section V. II ART AND ITS VALUE The arts are related to the senses, at least to some of them. There are no olfactory or gustatory arts. Wine and food satisfy material needs only, not the emotional or cognitive ones that underlie the aesthetic experience as I define it (see below). There is no art form that is exclusively and essentially tactile, but some that are partially or incidentally so. Sculpture is essentially tactile as well as visual, because the three-dimensional aspects of a sculpture may be better grasped by the hand curving around it than by the eye. Literature is incidentally tactile, since it can be mediated by the fingers (in Braille) as well as by the eye or the ears.3 Paintings and drawings are essentially visual, and music essentially auditory. Although people who can read music derive aesthetic pleasure from doing so, it is only because they associate sounds with the notes they read. This may not be a necessary truth (perhaps those born deaf could be trained to appreciate musical scores), but as far as I know it is an empirical one. We may also distinguish the arts by their durable or ephemeral character. Writing, painting, and composing usually result in durable products. Dancing, play-acting, music performances, or verse reading usually do not: they are services consumed on the spot, not goods that can be stored. The performing arts usually but not invariably involve other artists than the performer: the choreographer, playwright, or composer. Even then, the performers can be artists in their own right, if they add something to the essentially underdetermined score to which they are harnessed. Conductors are artists in this sense; the musicians they conduct only intermittently so. The score may lend itself more or less well to independent enjoyment. Everybody can benefit from reading Shakespeare; some people can enjoy reading musical scores; but essentially no one can benefit from a choreographic score. To enable us nevertheless to ''tell the dancer from the dance," the choreographer can have several dancers perform the same, identical movements in time with each other. That device also performs an essential function for the dancers, by providing a clear goal for their achievements (see below). 147

Jon Elster Modern technology has partly undone the classical distinction between the performing and the non-performing arts. Performances can be taped and filmed, thus leaving a durable trace that may be inferior or superior to an unrecorded event, depending on which of two opposing tendencies is the stronger. On the one hand, there is less interaction with the audience. Lester Young, for instance, preferred to play to a dancing audience (just as he preferred to play tunes to which he knew the words). On the other hand, the recording or movie studio allows for the possibility of several takes, of which the best can then be selected for release. Fred Astaire, for instance, sometimes shot his dancing scenes as many as fifty times. Moreover, technology allows one to take bits and parts from several takes and piece them together into one coherent whole, whereas a live performance must be seamless. Astaire had a strong aversion to this practice. He insisted on his dance scenes being shot in one continuous sequence or, at least, in a small number of uninterrupted chunks. Why? Partly, I suspect, because the flow itself is artistically valuable; partly out of professional pride; and partly perhaps to impose a constraint on himself that, by making his art more difficult, would force him to concentrate harder. Otherwise, of course, splicing is essential to film - not a sign of laziness, but an indispensable artistic tool. It is harder to know what to say about spliced jazz performances. Jazz is supposed to be an improvised art form, not the product of clever studio engineering. To seJect one among several improvised takes is acceptable; to construct one out of several takes seems more dubious. The reason, once again, has to do with the need for constraints. If jazz musicians know that any hitch or bad passage can be edited out, there is less incentive to play well. Does it really matter that Armstrong misses a note in "Wild Man's Blues"? When there is an emotional concentration which he might not have achieved had he gone into the studio knowing that any problems could always be fixed later? On the other hand, it would be excessively puristic to insist that only one take be allowed. Another way of distinguishing between the arts stems from different techniques of apprenticeship. In painting, copying old masters has traditionally been part of the process of becoming a master. (As far as I know, sculptors don't do this: why?) Jazz musicians, too, have always assimilated new styles by learning standard solos by heart. Charlie Parker could play Lester Young's solo on "Shoe Shine Boy" note perfect. All trumpet players in the nineteen-thirties could play Armstrong's great solos. There is nothing like this in fiction and in 148

Fullness and parsimony composing. A composer might, as part of his training, be asked to compose a sonata "in the style of X," but it would not make sense to ask him to recreate a given sonata: for that purpose, he would just use a Xerox machine. The same remark applies to fiction, Borges's amusing story of the man who rewrote Don Quixote word for word notwithstanding. A further, somewhat related difference concerns the varying importance of texture in the different arts. In painting, the stroke of the brush, with the slight three-dimensionality it imposes on the flat surface, can be extremely important. Each painter invents his own colors, rather than having to choose from a predetermined finite palette. In classical music, timbre is sometimes impossible (as in the piano) and, where possible, not always a desideratum. In jazz, timbre can be all-important. The sweetness of Johnny Hodges's alto saxophone between 1936 and 1938 (in small groups with Lionel Hampton and Billie Holiday rather than with the Ellington band of which he was a member) is unsurpassable, probably inimitable, a work of art in itself. By contrast, the finiteness of the alphabet allows for no timbre or texture. Being digital rather than analogue, at a further remove from reality than painting or music, writing has no texture. Illuminated manuscripts, onomatopoeia and other special effects ('Tour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur mon cceur?") are marginal phenomena in literary aesthetics. A final differentiation between the arts can be made in terms of the constraints imposed on their audiences. Readers have a choice. They can skip passages, or reread them, even turn to the last page if they are eager to see the denouement. Listeners or spectators have no choice. Sometimes their attention slackens, but not from choice. One cannot decide not to listen, any more than one can decide to forget. Nor can listeners replay a moving passage to engrave it in their mind. (At least, these statements held true before the invention of recordings and movies.) These features of the art form may influence the creator. If he knows that he has the audience in his grip, he can impose a higher degree of gratification deferral on them (see below) than if he knows that they can skip (or play at high speed) the parts they find boring. On the other hand, music or movies are more open-ended than fiction, having no analogue to the "tell-tale compression of the pages" that signals to the reader that the story is coming to an end. Hence the strategem of false endings, although not unknown in fiction, has a much more central place in music. Art, as I understand it, can have perceptive, cognitive or emotional 149

Jon Elster value. Ultimately, I believe, the main value of all art is emotional. In the following I shall distinguish between two sources of emotional satisfaction through the arts. On the one hand, works of art can sharpen and condense emotions that we experience outside the work, in the world — love, grief, envy, and the like. On the other hand, they provide autonomous sources of specifically aesthetic pleasures — created by echoes, symmetries, contrasts, surprises, the resolution of tension and similar devices. In the best works of art, these two effects go together and reinforce each other. As if by magic, the pleasure of a rhyme that falls into place adds to the poignancy of the episode which the poem encapsulates. A work of art can help us see or understand the world differently, react to it differently, and understand our own reactions to it differently. A different perception or understanding of the world is valued because it allows us to have emotions that otherwise might have lain dormant or unfocused. Emotions attach to objects; emotional objects exist only qua perceived or conceived; hence new perceptions open up the possibility of new emotional attachments.4 More directly, art can enhance our emotional life by offering a condensed version of emotions we do have, allowing us to recognize them, cultivate them, or get rid of them. One way in which art acquires value is by concentrating and isolating patterns of emotional experience that, although diffusely present in our life, require the maieutic functions of art to come to our full attention. The central aesthetic requirement is that of internal coherence. In a good work of art nothing can be subtracted and nothing needs to be added. Consider, for instance, the art of the novel. In a good narrative, the inessential routines and the distracting noises that make up most of everyday life are left out. (Here, the work itself defines what counts as inessential and distracting, viz. whatever makes no contribution to the coherence of its universe.) Every incident and description serves to build up tension or to resolve it. Each new event is a natural development of what has gone before, a ''downhill" rather than "uphill" move.5 Craftsmanship is incompatible with coincidences, like the one at the center of MiddJemarch, or with interventions ex machina, like the separation between Lucien Leuwen and Madame de Chasteller (see below). When tension is resolved, the author does not dwell needlessly on the happiness or misery of the parties. Nothing can be removed without loss of impact or understanding. In addition, the narrative should not have gaps that leave the reader frustrated. It is a crucial demand that every tension set up by the work 150

Fullness and parsimony or performance eventually be resolved. I argue below that Lucien Leuwen remained unfinished because Stendhal made the mistake of building up a tension that he could not resolve. Although a wonderful work of art, it is, to that extent, flawed. Conversely, the multiple ending of The French Lieutenant's Woman does, to my mind, detract from rather than add to its value.6 The aesthetic emotion experienced by the reader is in some respects similar to the satisfaction obtained by its creator, further described below. It is a question, in both cases, of self-actualization and of deferred gratification. It must not be confused with the emotion that the work allows us to have or to understand. That emotion, although caused by the work, is directed to the world. By contrast, the aesthetic emotion of reading a tale well told is both caused by the work and directed toward it. Music allows for a largely similar analysis. In a good musical composition or improvisation, repetitions are allowed only when they serve a purpose. Cliches are not forbidden, but they, too, must be dominated by the artist. Here, again, the deferred gratification from tension set up and then resolved is a valuable aesthetic component.7 This statement does not imply that a complex construction, which includes the building up of expectations, surprises (false endings), and a final resolution, is necessary for a musical work to have aesthetic value. There are alternative sources of value, such as the emotional impact of a poignant theme or a beautiful sound. What it does imply is that the artist must choose between building up tensions and then resolving them, and not building them up in the first place. Painting differs from both writing and composing in that the end product has no temporal parts. To be sure, a picture cannot be taken in in a single glance, but there is no predetermined or canonical order in which its different parts are to be inspected. The aesthetic emotions, in this case, attach themselves to the overall composition: harmony of color, balance of shape, and synergistic effects. Once again, these aspects are not the only source of value. A self-portrait by an artist may be devoid of compositional effects, yet move us by its insights. Needless to say, these characterizations are largely formal and empty, yet sufficient for my purpose here, which is to describe the successful work of art as a JocaJ maximum. 8 Any work of art is intended to satisfy the criteria of internal coherence and external adequacy. It must make us perceive or feel in new or more focused 151

Jon EJster ways, and it must do so in a manner that sustains our attention and satisfies our aesthetic emotions by providing deferred gratification. This is a complex task, involving several objectives. In particular, the artist must at one and the same time keep in mind the need to satisfy the specifically aesthetic emotions and the task of exploring the (usually) non-aesthetic emotions that the work helps us to have or to understand. 9 It is not simply a question of the relative weight assigned to these two objectives. More importantly, it is a question of harnessing the aesthetic emotions to the service of the non-aesthetic ones, so that the internal rhythm of the work resonates with its perceptual or emotional impact. Conversely, the non-aesthetic emotions may lend poignancy to the aesthetic ones. In achieving this complex aim, many choices must be made. Artists typically experiment with small variations, as can be seen from their sketchbooks and notebooks, adding, subtracting and substituting elements until they decide that they have got it right, in the sense that any further small change would detract from the value of the whole. I argue later that the basic elements in artistic creation, as in the evolution of species, are variation and selection. In Darwin's theory both elements operate blindly, by blind chance and blind necessity. Eilert Sundt, a nineteenth-century Norwegian sociologist, applied to boat construction some of the principles underlying Darwin's theory of evolution: A boat constructor may be very skilled, and yet he will never get two boats exactly alike, even if he exerts himself to this end. The variations arising in this way may be called accidental. But even a very small variation usually is noticeable during the navigation, and it is then not accidental that the sailors come to notice that boat which has become improved or more convenient for their purpose, and that they should recommend this to be chosen as the one to imitate.. .One may believe that each of these boats is perfect in its way, since it has reached perfection by one-sided development in one particular direction. Each kind of improvement has progressed to the point where further development would entail defects that would more than offset the advantage.. .And I conceive of the process in the following way: when the idea of new and improved forms had first been aroused, then a long series of prudent experiments, each involving extremely small changes, could lead to the happy result that from that boat constructor's shed there emerged a boat whose like all would desire.10

The idea to be retained from this passage is that of a local maximum being created by small variations and intentional selection. Later, I examine the nature of variation and selection in artistic work. Here, I only want to focus on the idea that the goal of the artists is that the end 152

Fullness and parsimony product be a local maximum with respect to the values mentioned above. Given the way in which aesthetic and non-aesthetic emotions are incorporated into one overall objective, the successful work of art is one that gets it right with respect to that objective. In that sense the successful work of art, like a well-constructed boat, represents a solution to a maximization problem. Clearly, the notion must not be taken too literally. It would be impossible to verify that in a symphony not a single note, in a painting not a single stroke, in a novel not a single word, could be changed without loss of value. Even assuming that the concept of value defended here is accepted, it could never be made that precise, and besides there are too many cases to be considered, even when possible changes are constrained by conventions and medium (see below). The central idea conveyed by the phrase "local maximum" is that good art embodies the twin ideals of fullness and parsimony III ACHIEVEMENT I define achievement as any activity that achieves self-realization. Self-realization, in turn, I define through the ideas of selfactualization and self-externalization. Self-actualization is the development and deployment of talents and capabilities. It can be seen as a process in two stages, although often the two proceed pari passu. The abilities and powers of the individual are two steps removed from reality: they must first be developed and then deployed. Being able to learn to speak French is a condition for knowing how to speak French, and this, in turn, is a condition for speaking French The individual has many powers and abilities which may be deployed in ways that cannot be observed by others. One may train one's ability to enjoy poetry or wine, but the use of this power is not part of the public domain. It is self-actualization, but not selfexternalization. It is consumption, not self-realization. One may, of course, externalize the power by interpreting poetry for others or taking up the occupation of a wine-taster. To enjoy wine is not an activity that can be performed more or less well, although one may enjoy the wine more or less. By contrast, professional wine-tasting lends itself to evaluation by external criteria. It is self-realization the powers of the self actualized as well as externalized. To explain why self-realization ranks above self-actualizing consumption, I shall invoke three Hegelian arguments. The most 153

Jon Elster important value for human beings is self-esteem. Self-esteem derives largely from the esteem accorded one by other people whom one esteems. Esteem requires something to be esteemed, an externalization of one's inner self. It is of no avail to be a beautiful soul, if the soul remains ineffable and mute: the self must be made part of the public domain. Another, related argument stems from the need for external criteria of evaluation. Other people perform the indispensable function of assessing, criticizing, and praising one's performance. They provide the reality control without which self-actualization would be like a private language, a morass of subjectivity. Finally, self-realization through creative activities is an inherently more complex and interesting task than self-actualization through consumption of the result of those activities. A skilled novelist must also be a skilled reader, but not vice versa. 'Tour qui a goute de la profonde occupation d'ecrire, lire n'est plus qu'un plaisir secondaire." 11 Here are some activities that lend themselves to self-realization and, hence, to be vehicles of achievement: playing tennis, playing chess, playing the piano, composing for the piano, making a table, cooking a meal, juggling with a chain saw, acting as a human mannequin (i.e., being in absolute, willed immobility), proving a mathematical theorem, making an argument, writing a poem, painting a picture, making wine, tasting wine, painting The Supper at Emmaus as a work of Vermeer, detecting the alleged Vermeer as a forgery, counterfeiting a new coin, forging or imitating an old coin, embezzling money, having a secret affair, doing a pastiche of Balzac, imitating someone imitating oneself, telling jokes. These activities have a number of features in common. (1) They require skills - of coordination, reasoning, dissembling, discernment. (2) They have a goal - getting it right, finding the truth, beating the opposition, detecting fakes, avoiding detection, inducing mirth, moving the audience. (3) They can be done more or less well. (4) When successful, they can provide satisfaction, perhaps the deepest form of satisfaction there is. (5) Yet the initial stages of the activity, whether in developing the skill or in deploying it, are usually painful to some extent. Self-realization has the pattern "one step backwards, two steps forwards" - meeting a challenge and then overcoming it. It involves both pain and pleasure - with, moreover, the pain being an essential condition for the pleasure.12 (6) In all the activities the satisfaction derived from a successful performance is essentially a by-product, in the sense that the performer who engages in the 154

Fullness and parsimony activity for the sake of self-realization rather than for the sake of the primary goal (getting it right, etc.) is unlikely to achieve either.13 There are, to be sure, other forms of satisfaction. Consumption is an important source of satisfaction. Indeed, many forms of selfrealization are parasitic on consumption, in that the goal of the activity is to please a listener, spectator, reader, or consumer. If everybody were concerned exclusively with self-realization, many would have to fail for want of audience or customers. Consuming works of art has some of the features of creating works of art. In particular, the pattern of deferred gratification - one step backwards, two steps forwards - is common to both. It is hard to start writing a novel. The characters are inchoate, the plot hazy, the blank page terrifying in its potentialities. Gradually, as the characters are built and the plot constructed, episodes and dialogue flow more freely. (An example from Stendhal's writing is provided below.) For similar reasons, it is often hard to start reading a novel. The reader must invest attention and energy in understanding the characters and their background, and the payoff comes later, sometimes much later. The first time I picked up Madame Bovary, for instance, I lacked the motivation to go through (what I then thought to be) the tedious opening chapters. Standard forms of consumption are instantaneously gratifying. After a while, however, satiation and boredom set in. In substance addiction (an extreme end of the standard case) the consumption may nevertheless be sustained by fear of withdrawal symptoms, but usually it ceases after a while. In all standard cases, consumption is subject to a law of decreasing marginal satisfaction, whereas the satisfaction derived from self-actualization becomes stronger the more one engages in the activity. Conversely, the dissatisfaction from not engaging in substance abuse increases the longer one has engaged in it. Both self-actualization (e.g. writing and reading) and substance use can, therefore, be addictive, although for very different reasons. Interpersonal relations - being with friends, lovers, family, colleagues, fellow amateurs, neighbors - are a third source of satisfaction. These are not vehicles for self-realization: one does not achieve anything by friendship or love. Nor can companionship be assimilated to consumption: there is no scarce good involved, nor is there decreasing marginal satisfaction. Yet a community can be organized around shared activities of self-realization or consumption. Let me distinguish here between common self-realization and joint selfrealization. The former refers to a community of achievers, who are 155

Jon Elster essentially engaged in independent acts of self-realization. They may or may not learn from each other, but they do not need each other. A club of stamp-collectors would be an example. In the latter, by contrast, "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." 14 The members of a symphony orchestra or the crew on a small fishing vessel produce essentially one output, which is the joint result of the activities of all. In the above I have noted four or five senses in which achievement can have a social character. Let me summarize them here. First, selfrealization as a source of self-esteem requires the esteem of other people. Secondly, self-realization must be validated by other people, as arbiters of what counts as a successful achievement. These arbiters may be anonymous referees of an anonymously submitted article, and hence cannot always serve the first function. They esteem the product, not its creator. Thirdly, self-realization is parasitic on other people as consumers or audience. And lastly, self-realization may be carried out with other people, in either of the two ways just distinguished. Almost everybody could succeed in self-realization of some kind or other, yet many don't. External obstacles to achievement include lack of resources and lack of demand. If the public shows little interest in epic battle movies, which are my chosen vehicle of self-realization, and I cannot afford to produce them on my own, my desire for achievement may remain frustrated. Internal obstacles include myopia and risk aversion. As I have defined self-realization, it presupposes an ability to defer gratification that may exceed that of many people. Also, people usually do not know ahead of time what power and abilities they have in them. If they choose a task that is too easy, they may get bored; if it is too difficult, they are frustrated. If frustration is worse than boredom, as I think it is, risk-averse individuals may err on the side of caution. Let me end with some additional comment on the role of deferred gratification in the arts. As I have described it, this pattern involves a pattern of tension and release, one step backwards, two steps forwards. Literature can embody this pattern at three different levels. To write a good novel is a feat of self-realization. To read a good novel is an experience of self-actualization. The characters in the novel may, as is often the case in Balzac, themselves be engaged in activities that require deferred gratification, and the tension in the novel derives from uncertainty about their success.15 In music, composer and listener are both subject to deferred gratification. In the visual arts, only the artist exemplifies the pattern. 156

Fullness and parsimony IV ORIGINALITY The notion of originality in art can be understood in many ways. I shall consider two of them. First, an original work can be defined as a genuine, unfaked, authentic one - a work that is what it is alleged to be. Secondly, a work of art can be called original if it is qualitatively innovative in some sense, introducing new contents or new forms or materials. Both authenticity and innovation bear complex relations to value, achievement, and creativity. In this section and in the following I try to sort out some of them. Forgeries, i.e., works falsely presented to be by a specific artist or school, can without any doubt be achievements. Van Meegeren succeeded splendidly in his goal of forging paintings by Vermeer, and derived a great deal of satisfaction from it.16 At least he succeeded in the sense of being accepted by the best experts at the time. Indeed, when he finally confessed, he had difficulties making the experts believe his confession. It is not clear whether he could have succeeded indefinitely or whether he would have eventually been discovered. It has been argued that forgeries are always discovered in the end, because the forger is too much of his time. On the one hand, he perceives the original from a modern perspective ''forgeries are generally discovered in the end because they were designed, and could only have been designed, to have just those properties that the forger and those in his circle were aware of in the target of the forgery."17 On the other hand, the forger has modern conceptions of his own that betray him: "the better forgers, against their intentions, share with their fellow artists the compulsion to impose their own conceptions upon the sight they try to reproduce." 18 The forger fails either by doing too little, i.e., by missing some of the qualities in the original, or by doing too much, i.e., by adding something of his own. We need not presuppose that experts will eventually be able to distinguish, by visual inspection alone, the forgery from the original. Detection might spring from technical analysis of paint and canvas, and then be verified by visual means, through newly enlightened eyes. An expert "will not see that the paintings have.. .quite different qualities.. .unless he already knows which painting is which. Nothing in our argument, however, requires that this knowledge be based on visual grounds." 19 Or consider the jazz lover who "was shocked when he heard that Jack Teagarden was not a Negro, he stopped collecting Teagarden records right away."20 Assuming that the reaction wasn't just snobbery, knowledge of Teagarden's color 157

Jon EJster might have enabled him to hear nuances that escaped him before. There are analogues in other, less subjective realms. Once someone has proved a long-standing mathematical conjecture, others may be able to prove it soon thereafter using wholly different techniques of proof.21 The knowledge that the conjecture is true induces confidence and persistence that would otherwise be lacking. Similarly, once we know that The Supper at Emmaus is by van Meegeren and not by Vermeer we can perceive differences that eluded us. 22 The analogy would break down of course, if an expert, falsely told that what is actually an original is a forgery, was similarly able to perceive why this had to be the case Be this as it may, these comforting arguments cannot be verified empirically, since we have no knowledge of the forgeries that have successfully escaped detection. In any case I do not find them plausible, except in the following, somewhat trivial sense. Usually, forgeries are undertaken for profit.23 Forgeries of great artists bring more money than forgeries of second-rate artists. One who successfully forges a great artist has to be a great artist himself, even greater, perhaps, than the artist whom he is forging, because the forger is working under a tighter set of constraints. The composer who would forge a hitherto unknown symphony of Mozart has to conform not only to all the conventions within which Mozart himself was working, but also to Mozart's pattern of choices as embodied in the known Kochel numbers. Even a genius has habits, deviations from which can be recognized by experts or computers.24 Within this double set of constraints the forger must also produce a work of art of sufficient aesthetic value to be plausibly composed by Mozart. The chances are that anyone sufficiently good to do this would not waste his time forging others. He might, perhaps, try to earn an income by forging lesser artists, whose habits are less exhaustively documented and whose level of achievement places fewer demands on his talent. I am not sure, however, that this is likely to happen. I have heard of serious authors who have tried to earn money writing for the best-seller market, but not of anyone who succeeded. The result tends to be either too good or too bad. It is hard to hit the exact note of mediocrity and shallowness, to distinguish the cliches that will please a mass audience from those that will insult them. I do not know if serious composers even try for the Top Ten. In writing and musical composition, it is not true that "Qui peut le plus, peut le moins." In painting, I suspect it might be easier to forge one's inferiors, but I might be wrong. 158

Fullness and parsimony Consider next originality in the sense of innovation. This concept presupposes a contrast with some earlier period. I shall consider innovation as a break in form, technique, medium, or genre with the immediately preceding period. Thus understood, originality in the arts consists in substituting new types of constraints for the conventional ones. The new forms need not be historically unprecedented. The return to an earlier period can amount to innovation, a selfconscious break with the tradition by which one has been shaped. But I'll limit myself to innovation in the more radical sense, the invention of new and unprecedented forms. The emergence of unrhymed verse, non-figurative art and atonal music are well-known, dramatic examples, but innumerable smaller innovations could be cited, from Lester Young's startlingly vibrato-free tone on the tenor saxophone to David's use of classical models in his pre-revolutionary paintings. Innovation is neither sufficient nor necessary for aesthetic value or for creativity. The non-sufficiency is shown by bizarre achievements such as those embodied in much of conceptual art.25 Shock and astonishment are not in themselves aesthetic emotions, although they may be produced by aesthetic experiences. The non-necessity is shown by the examples of great artists who worked wholly within the medium handed down to them by the past. It does not detract from Mozart's achievement that it is possible to mistake him for Haydn. Jane Austen could not have cared less about experimenting with form. Further discussion of the relation between innovation and creativity is postponed to the next section. What explains artistic innovation - the emergence of new art forms? Why cannot artists remain content with the medium within which they have been trained? One answer is that "if artists were concerned only with making beautiful pictures, poems, symphonies, etc., the possibilities for the creation of aesthetically pleasing works of art would soon be exhausted. We would (perhaps) have a number of lovely paintings, but we should soon grow tired of them, for they would all be more or less alike." 26 As illustrated by this passage, the "exhaustion argument" can take the form that after a while there are no more beautiful works of a certain kind to be made, or that after a while beautiful works of a certain kind lose their power to please. In my opinion, the argument is implausible in either form. It is absurd to argue that the realistic novel went out of fashion when and because all good plots, characters, and dialogues had been invented, and equally implausible to assert that at some time in the second half of the nineteenth century readers got tired of realism. Nor do I think that 159

Jon Elster realism went out of business because novelists got tired of it.27 I discuss an alternative account below. V CREATIVITY The basic pattern of much change is trial and error, search and subsequent selection. Later I shall use the process of artistic creation to illustrate this proposition. First, however, I would like to adduce some examples from other domains. Biological evolution rests, as I said, on blind variation and equally blind selection. The basic source of genetic variation is random mutation, whereas selection proceeds by differential reproductive capacity. The stream of mutations is quite independent of the needs of the organism. Mutations do not occur more frequently when there is a need for them, nor is there any mechanism that makes useful mutations more probable than deleterious ones. The process of selection is utterly myopic. It is incapable of waiting, and of using indirect strategies of the form "One step backwards, two steps forwards." Mutations are selected if and only if they increase shortterm reproductive fitness, even though they might block promising long-term developments.28 Consider next Eilert Sundt's analysis of boat construction. Initially, the source of variation is largely random. Each new boat differs from its model because a man-made imitation necessarily is imperfect. Had the imitators been perfect, there would have been no variation and no progress. The selection process, by contrast, is deliberate and intentional. The more seaworthy boats are retained, not because the others sink, but because their superiority is noticed and deliberately incorporated in the next model. After a while, the constructors begin to perceive this pattern of change, and are led to introduce deliberate variation, by cautious experimentation. The process of improvement is accelerated, compared to what it would have been with purely random sources of variation. Consider further the analysis of technical change offered by Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter.29 On their view, it is false that capitalist firms always and everywhere try to maximize profits. The very notion of maximization can be shown to border on incoherence, and in any case we do not observe managers systematically scanning all opportunities and combinations and then selecting the one that promises to maximize profits. Rather, they stick to their established routine, as long as it offers them a targeted level of profits. If, however, 160

Fullness and parsimony profits fall below that critical threshold, managers start searching for new opportunities, products, markets, and techniques. In their search for new techniques they do two things. One part of their time, attention, and money is spent looking at what other firms do, and another part at sampling hitherto unexplored methods. If and when they find a technique that restores profits to the critical level, they stop searching and adopt this technique as their new routine. Unlike natural selection, the stream of variations in this conception is a function of the need for variation. Consider finally the Marxist critique of capitalist relations of production. 30 Among the many things Marx found wrong with capitalism was its alleged inefficiency of suboptimality in developing the productive forces or, in non-Marxist language, technology. In this conception, technical change is a function both of the intensity of the search for new techniques and of the efficiency of selecting among the techniques generated by the search. Capitalism, Marx argued, is inherently inferior to communism with respect to the selection of new techniques, being motivated by profit rather than by the desire to reduce human drudgery. At a low level of development of the productive forces, however, capitalism is superior to communism in the intensity of the search for new techniques. Communism, to be viable, presupposes a high level of material welfare, at which people can spontaneously engage in creative activities, such as artistic, scientific, and technical innovation. By providing the profit motive as a spur to search, capitalism enables mankind to reach that level; but once it is reached, capitalism becomes the ladder it can kick away. The general idea underlying this analysis is that a mode of production remains in existence as long as it is historically progressive, i.e., as long as it generates new techniques at a higher rate than any other mode could do. It disappears when and because another mode becomes superior. None of these theories can be used as a blueprint for understanding creativity and innovation in the arts. They can, however, serve as generators of ideas to be explored - and perhaps rejected. Hypotheses suggested by an analogy may turn out to be genuinely useful - not because of their ancestors, but because of their progeny. Also, thinking about why an analogy is not valid can provide ideas that otherwise might not have occurred to one. I shall provide some examples of these uses of analogies. The " exhaustion argument" discussed earlier has a certain resemblance to the Marxist theory of the relations between relations of 161

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production and productive forces. That theory asserts: relations of production change when and because they cease to promote technical change. The exhaustion argument says: forms of art change when and because they cease to promote creativity. The value of the comparison is that it suggests an alternative to the exhaustion argument. To see this, note that the Marxist theory compares the actual rate of development of the productive forces with the hypothetical development under another regime, not with their earlier development under the same regime. What forces change is suboptimality, compared to what could be, not stagnation, compared to what has been. The exhaustion argument, as stated and rejected, invokes stagnation as the explanation of new forms of art. The comparison with the Marxist theory suggests that new forms of art come into being when they promote creativity better than the earlier form did. Whatever the value of this idea, it is less obviously implausible than the exhaustion argument. The analogy may also be put to a different use. In the arts, we tend to assume that great innovators are also great creators. By contrast, the revolutionaries that usher in new relations of production do not themselves engage in the task of developing the productive forces. On reflection, it is not clear why the analogous statement about the arts could not have an element of truth in it. Innovation, I argued earlier, is the substitution of new formal constraints for the old ones. Creation, I argue below, is the exercise of artistic choice within constraints. There is no a priori reason why these two functions have to be exercised by the same individuals. I return to this issue in the final section. I have made a number of casual references to the importance of constraints in artistic work. It is now time to discuss this idea in a more systematic manner. Consider first written literature. The two facts about writing that are relevant for the present discussion are first, that the letters in the alphabet can be combined and put together in infinitely many sequences,31 and secondly, that the decisive choice facing the artist is to select one of these sequences and declare it as his work. These two facts generate a puzzle: how to choose from an infinitely large set? The first to formulate the problem of creativity in this way was Henri Poincare, in his essay "L'Invention mathematique." In a key passage he writes that Inventer, je l'ai dit, c'est choisir; mais le mot n'est peut-etre pas tout a fait juste, il fait penser a un acheteur a qui on presente un grand nombre 162

Fullness and parsimony d'echantillons et qui les examine 1'un apres l'autre de fagon a faire son choix. Ici les echantillons seraient tellement nombreux qu'une vie entiere ne suffirait pas pour les examiner. Ce n'est pas ainsi que les choses se passent. Les combinaisons steriles ne se presenteront meme pas a l'esprit de l'inventeur. Dans le champ de sa conscience n'apparaitront jamais que les combinaisons reellement utiles, et quelques-unes qu'il rejetera, mais qui participent un peu des caracteres des combinaisons utiles. Tout se passe comme si l'inventeur etait un examinateur du deuxieme degre qui n'aurait plus a interroger que les candidats declares admissibles apres une premiere epreuve.32

He then goes on to argue that the first, preliminary selection is made at an unconscious level, while the final selection is made by the conscious, deliberating self. The criteria of selection used by the unconscious or subliminal self are essentially aesthetic. "On peut s'etonner de voir invoquer la sensibilite a propos de demonstrations mathematiques qui, semble-t-il, ne peuvent interesser que l'intelligence. Ce serait oublier le sentiment de la beaute mathematique, de l'harmonie des nombres et des formes, de l'elegance geometrique. C'est un vrai sentiment esthetique que tous les vrais mathematiciens connaissent." 33 He recognizes, however, that this leaves a difficulty: "est-il vraisemblable que [le moi subliminal] puisse former toutes les combinaisons possibles dont le nombre effrayerait l'imagination? Cela semblerait necessaire neanmoins, car s'il ne se produit qu'une petite partie de ces combinaisons, et s'il le fait au hasard, il y aura bien peu de chances pour que la bonne, celle qu'on doit choisir, se trouve parmi elles." 34 To solve the problem, he suggests that not all possible combinations are generated and presented to the sieve of the unconscious. Certain elements are more likely to be used as building blocks than others: "ce sont ceux dont on peut raisonnablement attendre la solution cherchee." 35 Jacques Hadamard, expanding on Poincare's idea, suggests that the trick is to generate and combine elements that are optimally dissimilar from each other. "It is well known that good hunting cartridges are those which have a proper scattering. If this scattering is too wide, it is useless to aim; but if it is too narrow, you have too many chances to miss your game by a line." 36 Artistic creation differs in many ways from mathematical invention. In mathematics, beauty is a good but imperfect indication that the goal - truth - is in sight. In art, beauty is the goal. This and other differences notwithstanding, the two processes are similar in that both require a delicate balancing of variation and selection. The 163

Jon EJster artist, however, solves the problem (or the problem is solved for him) in a way that has no analogue in mathematics. His problem of selection is made more manageable and more focused by the fact that he works within constraints which reduce the initial myriad of combinations to some radically smaller subset. In science or technology, creativity is never enhanced by the creator pulling his punches or tying one hand behind his back. In art, less can be more. In other contexts, the reason for restricting one's opportunities can be weakness of will 37 or the desire to gain a strategic advantage.38 In art, the reason for imposing constraints or welcoming them is the need to economize on costs of decision. To seek out local maxima in an unconstrained opportunity set would take up too much time. The artist would be searching forever, without ever reaching the point when he can make a decision. Many constraints are externally imposed by medium or technology. Before the advent of the long-playing record, jazz recordings were limited to about three minutes' duration. A solo rarely lasted more than a minute, which may be about the maximal time a continuously inventive flow in improvisation in this idiom can be sustained. I mentioned earlier that the technical possibility of splicing tapes can reduce the incentive to perform well. For a long time films had to be shot without sound, and for even longer in black and white only. There are those who think the quality of movies deteriorated steadily as sound and then color became available. If less can be more, more can be less: technical change can be a bridle rather than a spur on artistic creativity. Other constraints are purely conventional, like the rules defining a sonnet or the color schemes to be used in paintings of traditional religious topics. These are the constraints that are violated in innovative works of art. Although in this sense convention is an obstacle to originality, it can be a vehicle for creativity by, as I said, helping the artist in focusing his choice and fine-tuning his variations. The innovative artist is also, of course, working within constraints. The idea of unconstrained art - free verse, free jazz, free painting - is nonsense if taken literally. There are only two possibilities: either the innovator chooses and dominates the constraints within which he is working, or he submits to them without recognizing them. The latter case obtains, for instance, when innovators define themselves by their revolt against the old forms, rather than by their espousal of the new. If what matters to an artist is epater J'academie, the academy retains the upper hand. A constraint can, as it were, be read both from 164

FuJJness and parsimony the inside and from the outside: if a would-be innovator is afraid to use a conventional combination even when it might otherwise be appropriate, he is effectively constrained by the old conventions. Finally, there are freely chosen constraints, allowed but not required by convention. Even today movies are still made in black and white, and not always for financial reasons (Woody Allen's Manhattan). The only person to utter a word in "Silent Movie'" is Marcel Marceau, the mime. Georges Perec is famous for having written a novel [La Disparition) in which the letter e was never used. Even before the invention of the word processor, I heard of writers who typed their manuscripts with justified right-hand margins. Perhaps this behavior was compulsive rather than freely chosen, but the benefits from being constrained may still have been forthcoming. The artist, then, makes two successive choices: choices of constraints and choices within constraints. Some constraints are given with the choice of a particular medium. The range of the human voice can be extended, but not indefinitely. The movement of the fingers across the keyboard can be speeded up, but not indefinitely. Others are given with the choice of a particular conventional form. Nobody has to write sonnets, but if they do the rules have to be respected. Still others are freely chosen to supplement the constraints of medium or convention. And some, finally, are chosen so as to replace the conventional constraints. In all cases, the effect of the constraints is to reduce the amount of variation that goes into the next stage, that of selection. Here, the two-stage selection process posited by Poincare seems plausible. Some unconscious selection takes place before the conscious refinement and fine-tuning can begin. I know this from introspection, and it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. Even though the constraints have the effect of limiting the number of possible combinations of the basic elements, the number that remains is still more than can be consciously surveyed. First, an unconscious or intuitive process somehow puts together combinations of elements that promise to have aesthetic value, rejecting other combinations (virtually all, in fact) as worthless. Next, the conscious part of the mind takes a hard look at the products of the intuitive part, discarding or accepting according to deliberate, intentional criteria. The picture bears a strong resemblance to the views of Carl Sagan, put forward in The Dragons of Eden and summarized as follows: "Sagan describes the right hemisphere as a pattern recognizer that finds patterns, sometimes real and sometimes imagined, in the 165

Jon EJster behavior of people as well as in natural events. The right hemisphere has a suspicious emotional tone, for it sees conspiracies where they don't exist as well as where they do. It needs the left hemisphere to analyze critically the patterns it generates in order to test their reality." 39 This description matches that of Poincare, in suggesting that the criteria of beauty and harmony can be misleading. "Quand une illumination subite envahit l'esprit du mathematicien, il arrive le plus souvent qu'elle ne le trompe pas; mais il arrive aussi quelquefois, je l'ai dit, qu'elle ne supporte pas Pepreuve d'une verification; eh bien! on remarque presque toujours que cette idee fausse, si elle avait ete juste, aurait flatte notre instinct naturel de l'elegance mathematique." 40 Yet there is a difference between the processes described by Sagan and Poincare and those that are at work in artistic creation. It would be strange to say that an artist can be misled by beauty or patterns. Sagan hits the nail on the head when he suggests that scientists can be misled by patterns into finding conspiracies where none exists. Social scientists may be particularly prone to this fallacy,41 but in earlier centuries natural scientists also fell victim to the fallacious search for meaning in all things.42 Obsessional works of art, however, like Alexander Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, Joseph Heller's Catch 22 or the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Francis Bacon, are not in any way vitiated by their one-sidedness. On the contrary, we appreciate these works (perhaps reluctantly) because they isolate and purify strands of experience that we usually fail (or do not want) to acknowledge. I have emphasized the need to limit the amount of variation in the process of creation. This may seem to go against another artistic necessity - the need to have a varied experience before one starts writing, composing, or painting. To write about love, one must know what it is. To convey melancholy in music, one must have felt the emotion. The only way to know emotions is to have been in situations that generate them, the more and the more diverse the better. On reflection, however, we see that this is a very different kind of variation. Experience is what enables the unconscious to see patterns and connections that would otherwise have been overlooked. On the one hand, constraints limit the input to the unconscious. On the other hand, experience enables the unconscious to organize a larger part of the input in a meaningful way and then present it to the scrutiny of the conscious. Once again, we find the twin ideals of parsimony and fullness, but now with very different meanings. Richness of experi166

Fullness and parsimony ence and tightness of expression are among the preconditions for good art. I shall use Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen to illustrate some of the ideas developed above. Stendhal's first novel, Le Rouge et le Noir, was constructed around a fait divers he had come across in a newspaper. Lucien, by contrast, is invented out of whole cloth. From his marginal comments in the manuscript, we know that Stendhal initially felt constrained by this lack of constraints or, in George Ainslie's wonderful phrase, by a "shortage of scarcity."43 "Je ne puis mettre de haute portee ou d'esprit dans le dialogue tant que je songe au fond. De la l'avantage de travailler sur un conte tout fait, comme Julien Sorel."44 A few hundred pages later, he came to feel this freedom as an exhilarating experience. "On ne va jamais si loin que quand on ne sait ou Ton va. Ceci ne ressemble pas a Julien, tant mieux." 45 In between, there is the extraordinary, moving, and amusing interplay between Lucien and Madame de Chasteller. Clearly, Stendhal was intoxicated by the freedom of improvisation. Yet in the end it led him into a blind alley, as I shall now attempt to argue. Lucien, when he falls in love with Madame de Chasteller, is essentially a blank page. He has virtues, but no character. What makes Madame de Chasteller fall in love with him is his tact, delicacy, sensibility, romanticism, and utter lack of vulgarity, including his lack of courage to speak his love. He has no worldly insight or experience, unlike his witty and cynical father, who is Stendhal's second alter ego in the novel. To have him marry Madame de Chasteller at this stage would be a case of premature satiation. Lucien had to acquire more substance before the final union with Madame de Chasteller could take place. To achieve this end, Stendhal separates them from each other by a clumsy and implausible device, and then sends Lucien off to develop his character. In this, both Stendhal and Lucien succeed admirably. In the bureaucracy of the July Monarchy Lucien finally sees action, quite a lot of it in fact, some of which would have been dishonorable had it not been for his fundamental integrity. An unforeseen side effect, however, is that he becomes more and more like his father. There is no reason to believe that Madame de Chasteller would have recognized in this lucid cynic the awkward young man whom she had loved. The third act, therefore, never takes place: the novel remained unfinished. In his great work La Creation chez Stendhal, Jean Prevost offers a different explanation of the novel's unfinished state: "II aurait fallu [a Stendhal], pour eviter le fade et l'arrivee lente du bonheur, un dernier 167

Jon EJster obstacle reel a mettre entre madame de Chasteller et Lucien; il fallait remplacer les obstacles dont il ne voulait plus. II avait deja le reve, la fin de ce dernier chapitre. II lui restait a trouver la resistance qui aurait donne la lutte et la substance. C'est faute d'avoir trouve un obstacle reel a poser entre les amants qu'il a laisse inacheve un livre si pres de sa fin."46 I agree with him that a temporary separation between the lovers was necessary, to avoid premature satiation; and that, moreover, it should flow from the characters themselves, as in Pride and Prejudice, and not be posited ex machina. But I don't think a plausible separation story would have helped Stendhal out of his real dilemma, as I have tried to describe it. A way out could have been to have Madame de Chasteller undergo a similar BiJdung, so that when she and Lucien met again they could laugh affectionately at their earlier selves, as do Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy when the scales fall from their eyes. Stendhal was not capable, however, of giving his heroines that kind of development. According to Poincare, mathematical invention involves three kinds of acts: the generation of variation, the preliminary selection, and the final choice. In the arts, I have argued, the deliberate choice of constraints must also count as a separate part of the creative process. There is no reason to expect one and the same person to be proficient in all of these tasks. A division of labor might, here as elsewhere, be in order. If Sagan is right, the brain already embodies a division of labor between the intuitive right and the analytical left hemisphere. But we may go further, and divide the labor between different people. 'The final drafts of Thomas Wolfe's novels owe so much to his editor that the question of joint authorship may not unreasonably be raised. " 47 A similar relation is supposed to have obtained between the Beatles and their producer George Martin. And there must be many other examples of the same kind. Yet we all feel that these are uneven partnerships. Imagination is much rarer than intelligence; many could have edited Wolfe's amorphous manuscripts, but no one else could have written them. Truly joint creation is very rare in the arts. Musicians in a symphony orchestra, for instance, do not achieve it. Being tools for the composer's and the conductor's creative gifts, they have to suppress their own. Their goal is to do whatever the conductor tells them to do as well as possible. If they succeed, it is an achievement, in the sense denned above, but not a creative one. They are engaged in joint self-realization, but not in joint creation. Collective improvisation, in jazz or commedia dell'arte, is a vehicle for joint creation, but I do not 168

Fullness and parsimony know of any other important cases. There are many instances of joint mathematical creation,48 but I do not know a single example of a great literary, musical, or visual work of art that is the joint product of several individuals. With the minor exceptions just mentioned, artistic creation seems to be an inherently individual act, corresponding to Hegel's description of the creative realm as a "geistige Tierreich" in which each cares about his work only if done by him and not by others.49 Another possibility is this. Some people might be better at innovation than at creation. They can set up new constraints, but lack the gift of working within them. Perhaps, in fact, the gift of innovation is much more widespread than that of creativity. It is obvious to the most superficial observer that the rate of change of conventions is much higher today than in any earlier epoch. At the same time, I do not believe that the rate of production of works that will be seen as having durable value is any higher than before. It seems to me that much of contemporary art and art criticism is laboring under a fundamental misconception - the overvaluation of originality at the expense of creativity. Some further questions along these lines are the following. Does one have to be a great artist to make a radical break with the past? How much time does it take for the artistic community to adjust to a new set of conventions? Could the very effort of innovating distract and thus detract from the power to create? Could there be an analogy in this realm to the tales of inventors who go bankrupt only to see their inventions successfully exploited by others? Does the "penalty for taking the lead" exist in the arts? How could one identify premature innovations and premature decays of conventions?

Notes 1 Explaining Technical Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I am indebted to G. A. Cohen, H. F. Dahl and S. H. Olsen for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 ''Self-realization in work and politics," Social Philosophy and Policy 3 (1986), 97-126. 3 As far as I know, there is no art in deaf language, although there could be. 4 This is not to say that the new perceptions may not be valued for themselves, on purely intellectual grounds, only that this value is an extra-artistic one that can be found in other mental creations as well. 169

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Tocqueville's Souvenirs no less than Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen helps us understand the July monarchy, but only the latter is a work of art. For the notion of uphill and downhill moves in thought experiments, see Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, "The simulation heuristic," in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky (eds.), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 201-208. "There are rules that mustn't be violated. An important one is no feedback from the audience. You cannot show two episodes and let each viewer choose." (T. C. Schelling, "The mind as a consuming organ," in J. Elster (ed.), The Multiple Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 177-195, at p. 177. For a discussion of this idea, see M. Budd, Music and the Emotions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 169-171. I discuss this idea at greater length in my Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 81-83. A novel might be constructed around the aesthetic emotions experienced through art and, if well done, will then provide an instance of the very emotion it is exploring. Yet novels or poems more frequently deal with the experience of creating works of art than with that of reading, watching or listening. Proust's analyses of Elstir, Vinteuil and Bergotte are probably the major exception to this statement. E. Sundt, "Nordlandsbaden," in E. Sundt, Verker i UtvaJg, vol. VII (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1976), pp. 211-212. Stendhal, Oeuvres Intimes (2 vols., Paris: Gallimard [Bibliotheque de la Pleiade], 1982), vol. II, p. 512. 1 take my cue here from Leibniz and Marx. "L'inquietude est essentielle a la felicite des creatures." (Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais sur TEntendement Humain, in G. W. Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften, ed. Gerhardt [Hildesheim: Olms, 1966 reprint] p. 175.) "It seems quite far from [Adam] Smith's mind that the individual, 'in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility,' also needs a normal portion of work and of the suspension of tranquillity. Certainly, labor obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling that this overcoming of obstacles is itself a liberating activity. [Labor] becomes attractive work, the individual's self-realization, which in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier, with grisette-like naivete, conceives it. Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion." (Marx, Grundrisse [Harmondsworth, Middx.: Pelican Books, 1983], p. 611. Italics added.) For the notion of states that are essentially by-products, see chapter II of Sour Grapes. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. VI (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 506. This pattern differs from the BiJdungsroman, in which there is no goal to 170

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25 26 27 28 29

be achieved by intentional means, only a character to be developed as the unintended by-product of actions undertaken for other ends. The essays collected in D. Dutton (ed.), The Forger's Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), contain a good deal of discussion of the van Meegeren case and its implications for aesthetic theory. The opening essay by H. B. Werness has valuable biographical information about his career. F. Sparshott, "The disappointed art lover," in Dutton (ed.), The Forger's Art, pp. 246-263, at p. 248. R. Arnheim, "On duplication," in Dutton (ed.), The Forger's Art, pp. 232-245, at p. 242. M. Sagoff, "The aesthetic status of forgeries," in Dutton (ed.), The Forger's Art, pp. 131-152, at p. 150. M. Zwerin, La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Jazz under the Nazis (New York: William Morrow 1985), p. 46. An example is the following. In the 1920s the Danish mathematician J. Nilsen proved that all subgroups of free groups are themselves free groups. His proof makes use of complex algebraic methods. A few years later the Norwegian I. Johansson obtained the same result by direct geometrical means. I have been told by Jens-Erik Fenstad (to whom I owe this example) that Johansson would probably not have obtained his result had he not known the theorem to be true. Problems concerning the authenticity of pictures are assimilated to problems of scientific discovery in J. Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (New York: Dover Books, 1954), p. 34. An exception is forgeries of inscriptions, where the motive usually is to lend prestige and glory to a temple or city (or to justify expensive excavations). See M.-Ch. Hellmann, "Les Fausses Inscriptions," in Vrai ou Faux? Copier, Imiter, Falsifier (catalogue for an exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Cabinet des Medailles et Antiques, May 6 October 29, 1988). Anyone interested in the problem of forgery should consult this catalogue. Literary forgeries can be recognized by computer analysis of vocabulary and syntax. Presumably musical forgeries could be detected in the same way. Painting, however, does not have the digital structure that allows for computerized detection. For more about conceptual art, see Sour Grapes, pp. 82-84. A. Lessing, "What is wrong with a forgery?", in Dutton (ed.), The Forger's Art, pp. 58-76, at p. 75. As suggested by J. Levenson: "an art-form is 'exhausted' when its practitioners think it is" (Confucian China and its Modern Fate [3 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968], vol. I, p. 41). See also chapter 1 of my Ulysses and the Sirens, rev. edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1982). 171

Jon Elster 30 This theory is more fully set out in chapter 5 of my Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 31 The possibilities are not literally innumerable; they can be enumerated, or counted. In painting, with no finite alphabet to generate the combinations, the possibilities are literally innumerable. 32 "L'Invention mathematique," in H. Poincare, Science et Methode (Paris: Flammarion, 1920), pp. 43-63, at pp. 49-50. 33 Ibid., p. 57. 34 Ibid., p. 59. 35 Ibid., p. 61. 36 Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention, p. 48. 37 For explorations of this idea, see chapter 4 of Ulysses and the Sirens; also chapters 3 and 4 in T. C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 38 For explorations of this idea, see chapter 5 of T. C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 39 S. Springer and G. Deutsch, Left Brain, Right Brain (San Francisco: Freeman, 1981). 40 Poincare, "L'Invention mathematique," p. 59. 41 In chapter 11.10 of Sour Grapes I cite Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu as examples of this tendency. More generally, functional explanation and psychoanalytic theory embody the tendency to find meaning everywhere. 42 Many examples occur in K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1973). 43 G. Ainslie, "Beyond microeconomics," in Elster (ed.), The Multiple Self, pp. 133-176, at p. 156. 44 Stendhal, Romans et Nouvelles (2 vols., Paris: Gallimard [Bibliotheque de ola Pleiade], 1952), vol. I, p. 1492. 45 Ibid., p. 1539. 46 J. Prevost, La Creation chez Stendhal (Paris: Mercure de France, 1971), p. 313. 47 J. Margolis, "Art, forgery and authenticity," in Dutton (ed.), The Forger's art, pp. 153-171, at p. 165. 48 The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos, for instance, has been engaged in so much collaborative work that mathematicians have been assigned "Erdos numbers" specifying the length of the shortest chain of coauthorship that links them to Erdos (S. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician [New York: Scribner, 1976], p. 135). 49 Hegel, Phdnomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), pp. 298-300. Originally published in 1807.

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Principles of a sociology of cultural works PIERRE BOURDIEU Translated by Jenifer Wakelyn and Cameron Majidi The fields of cultural production offer those who are engaged with them a space of possibilities [possibles) which tends to orient their research by defining the universe of problems, of references, of intellectual landmarks (often constituted by the names of guiding figures), and of "isms", in short a whole system of coordinates which must be kept in mind - which is not to say in consciousness - in order to play the game. This is what marks the difference between, for example, professionals and amateurs, or, to speak the language of painting, "naifs," such as the customs officer Rousseau, and a "painter object" who is constituted as a painter by the field. This space of possibilities is what makes the producers of a given epoch at once situated, dated (the problematic is the historical outcome of the field's specific history), and relatively autonomous with respect to the direct determinations of the economic and social environments. Thus, for example, in order to understand the choices made by contemporary directors, one cannot be content to relate them to the economic and social conditions affecting the theater, or to the availability of grants or conditions at the box-office, or even to the expectations of the public; one must refer to the entire history of stage direction since the 1880s, in the course of which there arose the universe of points under discussion, of those constitutive elements of the theater on which any director worthy of the name must take a position. This space of possibilities, which transcends individual agents, functions as a sort of common system of reference which ensures that even when they do not consciously refer to one another, contemporary creators are objectively situated in a relation to one another in so far as they refer to the same system of intellectual coordinates or intellectual landmarks. 173

Pierre Bourdieu The analysts of literature are not immune to this logic, and I should like to try to define the range of possible ways in which cultural works can be analyzed and to explain the theoretical presuppositions of each case. Taken to its logical conclusion, this method, which establishes the existence of an intelligible relation between positionstaken (choices from among possibilities) and positions in the social field, would require that I list, in each case, the sociological elements necessary to understanding the distribution of different specialities among the different approaches and the reasons for making certain choices rather than others. But I shall not do this, although it would not be overly difficult (for example, I have outlined such a set of relations in my analysis of the Barthes-Picard debate in my Homo Academicus). A familiar initial division opposes external explanations to internal interpretations. The latter is meant in the sense of Saussure's "internal linguistics;" it can also be called formal or, to use the language of Schelling and Cassirer, "tautegorical," as opposed to allegorical. The internal reading in its most ordinary form is performed by Jectores, professors of literature the world over. To the extent that it is sustained by all the logic of the university institution the situation is even clearer in philosophy - it does not need to constitute itself as a body of doctrines, and can remain a doxa. The "New Criticism," which had the merit of giving explicit expression to this view, merely put together a theory from the presuppositions of "pure" reading, based on an absolutization of the text, and of "pure" literature. The historically constituted presuppositions which are inherent in "pure" production, notably in the case of poetry, also found expression in the field of literature, both in England, with the T. S. Eliot of The Sacred Wood, and in France, with the NRF and especially Paul Valery. Cultural works are thought of as atemporal significations and as pure forms which call for purely internal readings, excluding, and condemning as "reductive" and crude, all references to social determinations and functions. In fact, if one wishes at all costs to give a theoretical basis for this formalist tradition which, as such, dispenses with foundations since it is rooted in institutional doxa, we can, it seems to me, turn in two directions. We can invoke the neo-Kantian theory of symbolic forms or, more generally, all the traditions which aim to discover universal anthropological structures, such as the comparative mythology of Mircea Eliade and Jungian or Bachelardian psychoanalysis, traditions which are blithely drawn upon and juxtaposed by academic hermeneutics. We expect a tautegorical reading, one that relates 174

Principles of a sociology of cultural works works only with one another, to grasp the universal forms of poetic or literary reason, the ahistorical structures which are the basis of the poetical construction of the world. This position, perhaps because it is untenable, is rarely given explicit expression, although, in my opinion, it haunts all researchers into the "essence" of the poetic, of the symbol, of metaphor, etc. The second possible foundation, the structuralist theory, is much more powerful, both intellectually and socially. Socially it has taken over the internalist doxa and conferred an aura of scientificity on the internal reading as the formal dismantling of atemporal texts. Breaking with neo-Kantian universalism, structuralist hermeneutics treats cultural works (language, myth, and, by extension, works of art) as structures structured without a structuring subject: structures which, like the Saussurian langue, are particular historical realizations and must therefore be decoded as such. But this decoding must be without any recourse to an external hermeneutic, in other words, without any reference to the economic or social conditions of the work's production or that of the work's producers (such as the educational system). Rejecting all forms of universalization (LeviStrauss clearly stated his opposition to Eliade and comparative mythology), structuralism seeks to isolate the specific code particular to a myth, which is to say to a historical tradition, or, in the case of literature, to a single work, treated as a little private mythology. But in fact structuralism does not only dodge the question of the social conditions of possibility of the works considered (forgetting, for example, that the formalism that frees the work from the most visible determinations of history is itself a historical invention); it also dodges, by applying the analysis to an isolated work, for example, in the case of Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, to one of Baudelaire's sonnets (even though the set of Baudelaire's poems that mention cats may furnish many clues), the absolutely fundamental question of the delimitation of the corpus: one of Baudelaire's sonnets, Baudelaire's works as a whole, the selection of poetical works from Baudelaire's time, etc. In fact, notwithstanding a number of quarrels between ancients and moderns, such as the Barthes-Picard debate, which have obscured a profound agreement on the main issue, structuralism only "caught on" in academia because it furnished the opportunity to update the old internal reading so dear to the lector academicus. However, the structuralist tradition does have more to offer, provided one poses the problem of the corpus that I just suggested. And Michel Foucault's merit lies in having given what seems to me to be the only rigorous 175

Pierre Bourdieu formulation of the structuralist project (other than that of the Russian formalists) as regards the analysis of cultural works. Symbolic structuralism as elucidated by Foucault retains the essence of Saussure's thought, namely the primacy of relations: "la Jangue," says Saussure, in language very similar to Cassirer's in Substanzbegri// und Funktionsbegrrff, "is form and not substance." Aware that no work exists by itself, that is to say, outside the relations of interdependence that link it with other works, Foucault proposes to call the "ordered system of differences and dispersions," within which each individual work is given definition, the "field of strategic possibilities." 1 But much like the semiologists, with the uses they, Trier for example, were able to make of a notion like that of "semantic field," Foucault refuses to search anywhere outside the field of discourse to elucidate each of the discourses that is thereby invoked: "If the analysis of the physiocrats belongs to the same discourses as that of the utilitarians, it is not because they lived during the same epoch, nor is it because they were confronted with the same society, nor is it because their interests were tangled up in the same economy, it is because both options derived from one and the same distribution of points of choice, on one and the same strategic field." (p. 29) Therefore, what cultural producers share is a system of common references, of common landmarks, in short, something akin to my earlier suggestion of a space of possibilities. But Foucault, faithful in this to the Saussurean tradition and to the clear-cut rupture that it anticipates between internal linguistics and external linguistics, affirms the absolute autonomy of the "field of strategic possibilities," which he calls episteme; and he quite logically challenges as "doxological illusion" the claim that the explicative principle of what occurs in the "field of strategic possibility" is to be found in what he calls the "field of polemic" and in "the divergence of interests or mental habits among individuals" (I cannot but feel that I am the one referred to here...). In other words (and this is where the border between orthodox structuralism and the genetic structuralism that I propose lies), Michel Foucault transfers the oppositions and the antagonisms, which have their roots in the relations between the producers and the users of the works under consideration, into the heaven of ideas, if I may call it that. There is, of course, no question of denying the specific determination exerted by the space of possibilities, given that it is one of the functions of the concept of a relatively autonomous field, which has its own history, to explicate this determination. However, it is not 176

Principles of a sociology of cultural works possible to treat the cultural order, the episteme, as a totally autonomous system, if only because in so doing one would be prohibited from giving an account of the changes that occur in this separate universe except by according it an immanent propensity for change, as in Hegel, by a mysterious form of SeJbstbewegung. (Foucault, like so many others, succumbs to this form of essentialism, or, if you like, of fetishism, which has appeared in other domains, particularly in mathematics: here it is necessary to follow Wittgenstein, who notes that mathematical truths are not eternal essences, springing fully armed from the human brain, but historical products of a certain type of historical work accomplished in the particular social world that is the scientific field.) The same criticism applies to the Russian formalists. Like Foucault, who drew on the same source, they consider only the system of works, the network of relations between texts: intertextuality. Again, like Foucault, they are obliged to locate the dynamic principle of the system of texts in the system itself. Tynianov, for example, explicitly affirms that everything which is literary can be determined only by the anterior conditions of the literary system. (Foucault says the same of the sciences.) They make the process of ''automatization," or of "disautomatization," into a sort of natural law of poetical change, analogous to the effect of mechanical wear and tear. I shall return to this point. Now I proceed to the external analysis, which, viewing the relationship between the social world and cultural works according to the logic of "reflection" [reflet), links works directly to the social characteristics of their authors (to their social origin) or to the groups to which they are actually or supposedly addressed, and whose expectations they are supposed to fulfill. The biographical method, looking now at its most favorable case, which in my opinion is the analysis Sartre devoted to Flaubert, exhaustively investigates the particular condition of the author's existence in the search of the explicative principles that can be discovered only if one takes account of the literary microcosm in which that existence took shape. Statistical analysis is no better. In effect it most often applies predefined principles of classification to populations that are themselves predefined. To give this method a minimum of rigor it would be necessary, first of all, to study, as Francis Haskell has done for painting, the history of the process of drawing up lists of authors which are the objects of the statistician's work; in other words, the history of the procedure of canonization and of hierarchization that 177

Pierre Bourdieu leads to the demarcation of the population of consecrated writers. But it would also be necessary to study the genesis of systems of classification, names of epochs, schools, genres, etc., which are, in actuality, the instruments and the stakes of struggles. In the absence of such a critical genealogy, one runs a risk of cutting off from the field of research that which is at issue in reality, for example, the limits of the population of writers - in other words, those who are recognized, by the best-known writers, as having the right to call themselves writers (the same thing applies if we are studying historians or sociologists). Moreover, without going on to an analysis of the real divisions of the field, one risks, as a result of the regroupings that the logic of statistical analysis imposes, destroying the real cohesions, and thereby the genuinely established statistical relations which only a statistical analysis armed with a knowledge of the specific structure of the field could apprehend. However, the studies that are most typical of the external mode of analysis are Marxist-inspired researchers, represented by such diverse authors as Lukacs, Goldman, Borkenau (on the genesis of mechanistic thought), Antal (on Florentine painting), and Adorno (on Heidegger), who try to relate works to a world-view or to the social interests of a social class. The presupposition in these cases is that to understand a work is to understand the world-view of a social group as expressed through the artist, who acts like a sort of medium. Ideally, one would have to examine all the extremely naive presuppositions of these imputations of spiritual paternity which led all these researchers to suppose that a group can act directly, as the final cause (function) of a work's production (for example, is a work's avowed commissioner, where one exists, really the person to whom the work is addressed?). But, at a deeper level, supposing that one succeeds in determining a work's social functions, the groups and the "interests" which it "serves," has one then advanced even slightly the understanding of the work's structure? To say that religion is the "opiate of the people" is not to say a great deal about the structure of the religious message; and, if I may anticipate the logical sequence of my exposition, the structure is the condition for the accomplishment of the function, if there is a function. It is in opposition to this sort of reductive "short-circuit" that I have developed the theory of the field. In fact, exclusive attention to functions (which the internalist tradition, and notably the structuralist tradition, were certainly wrong to neglect) leads us to ignore the question of the internal logic of cultural objects, their structures, 178

Principles of a sociology of cultural works considered as languages; but, at a deeper level, it results in a failure to consider the groups which produce these objects (priests, jurists, intellectuals, writers, poets, artists, mathematicians, etc.) and for whom the objects also fulfill functions. It is here that Max Weber, with his theory of religious agents, is a great help. But, in fact, though he has the merit of reintroducing specialists and their particular interests - that is, the functions that their activity and their products (religious doctrines, juridical corpuses, etc.) fulfill for them - he fails to see that the circles of clerics are social microcosms with their own proper structures and laws. It is these microcosms that I have called fields and whose general laws of functioning I have attempted to describe. In fact what is needed is to apply the relational, or, if you like, structuralist, mode of thought to the social space of the producers. The social microcosm that I call the literary field is a space of objective relations between positions (for example those of the consecrated artist and the artist who is beyond the pale), and one can understand what happens there only if one situates each agent or each institution in its relations with all the others. It is in this particular universe, this "republic of letters," and in the relations of force and the struggles which aim to conserve or to transform the established order, that the principle of the producers' strategies, of the form of art that they defend, the alliances that they make, the schools that they found, resides; and this through the specific interests that are determined there. External determinants, for example the effects of economic crises, technical advances, or political revolutions, which the Marxists used to invoke, cannot exert themselves except through the intermediary of transformations in the structure of the field which results from them. The field exerts an effect of refraction (in the manner of a prism) and it is only on the condition of knowing the laws specific to its function (its "coefficient or refraction," that is, its "degree of autonomy") that one can understand what it is that occurs, for example, in the disputes between poets, between those who champion social art and the defenders of art for art's sake, or, more generally, in the struggle between the practitioners of different genres (e.g., novel and theater) as one passes from a conservative monarchy to a progressive republic. But what becomes of the works themselves in all this? And have we not lost along the way the gains made by the more subtle supporters of the internal reading? The logic of the fields' functioning creates a situation where the different possibilities constituting the space of 179

Pierre Bourdieu possibilities at a given moment in time can appear, to the agents as well as to the analysts, as incompatible from the logical point of view (this is the case, for example, with the various methods that I have examined - and also with the positions in the literary field that they propose to analyze). The logic of struggle, and the division into antagonistic camps according to objectively offered possibilities — to the point that no one sees more than a tiny fraction of the space — can make certain options which, in some cases, are not logically separate appear irreconcilable. Because each camp places itself by opposing another, it cannot see the limits that it imposes on itself by the very act whereby it constitutes itself. This is particularly clear in the case of Foucault, who, in order to constitute the space of possibilities, feels himself obliged to exclude the social space of which this space is the expression. Very often, as here, the social antagonisms which subtend the theoretical oppositions and the interests attached to these antagonisms form the sole obstacle to the transcendence and synthesis of these oppositions. Retaining what we get though the idea of intertextuality - the fact that at each moment the space of works presents itself as a field of positions-taken which can only be understood relationally, in the manner of a system of phonemes, that is, as a system of differentials one can pose the hypothesis (a heuristic instrument confirmed by analysis) of a homology between the space of works, the field of positions-taken, and the space of positions in the field of production. Thus many fundamental problems are resolved at a stroke: first of all the problem of change. For example, the driving force of the process of "banalization" and "debanalization," which the Russian formalists describe, is not inscribed in the works themselves but in the opposition between orthodoxy and heresy, which is constitutive of all the fields of cultural production, and which takes its paradigmatic form in the religious field. It is significant that Weber, discussing religion, specifically the problem of the respective functions of the priesthood and the prophets, also speaks of "banalization" or "routinization," and of "debanalization" or "deroutinization." The process that results in works is the product of the struggle between agents who, as a function of their position in the field, linked to their specific capital, are interested either in conservation, in other words in routine and routinization, or in subversion, in other words in the return to sources, to the purity of origins and to heretical critique. It is certain that the orientation of change depends on the state of the system of possibilities (stylistics, for example) which history 180

Principles of a sociology of cultural works offers, and which determines what is possible or impossible to do at a given moment in time and in a given field. But it is no less certain that this orientation also depends on interests (often entirely "disinterested") which orient the agents - as a function of their position at the dominant pole or at the dominated pole of the field — toward the more open, the more innovative possibilities, or toward the more sure, the more established possibilities, or toward the possibilities which are newest among those that have already been socially constituted, or even toward those that must be created wholesale. The science of cultural works has as its object the correspondence between two homologous structures: the structure of the works (genres, forms, themes, etc.) and the structure of the literary field, a field of forces which is inseparable from the field of disputes. The driving force of change in cultural works (language, art, literature, science, etc.) resides in the struggles that take place in the corresponding fields of production. These struggles, which aim to conserve or to transform the relations of forces instituted in the field of production, obviously have the effect of conserving or transforming the structure of the field of works which are themselves both the instruments and stakes of the struggles. The strategies adopted by the agents and institutions engaged in literary struggles, that is, their positions-taken (specific positions, e.g., stylistic, political, ethical, etc.), depend on the position they occupy in the structure of the field, that is, in the distribution of symbolic capital, whether institutionalized or not ("celebrity," internal recognition). This position, mediated by the constitutive dispositions of their habitus - which are relatively autonomous relative to position - inclines them either to the conservation or to the transformation of this distribution, and therefore to the perpetuation of the rules of the game in force or to their subversion. But these strategies, by virtue of the stakes of the struggle between the rulers and the pretenders, that is, the issues over which they oppose one another, also depend on the state of the legitimate problematic, that is, the space of possibilities inherited from previous struggles, which tends to define the space 01 possible positions-taken and accordingly to orient research into solutions and, consequently, the evolution of production. The relationship that develops between the positions and the positions-taken is not, as we see, a mechanistic determination. Each agent, artist, writer, scholar, constructs his very own creative project as a function of the perception of the possibilities available which assure him of the categories of perception and 181

Pierre Bourdieu appreciation inscribed in his habitus by a certain trajectory, and also as a function of the propensity to seize or reject the various possibilities, which inspires in him the interests associated with his position in the game. To sum up this complex theory in a few words, I would say that each author, in so far as he or she occupies a position in a space, in a field of forces (irreducible to a simple aggregation of material points) which is also a field of struggles for either the conservation or the transformation of the field of forces, exists and subsists only under the structured constraints of the field (for example, the objective relations that become established between genres). But I would add that each author also affirms the differential that is constitutive of his position, his point of view (understood as a view taken from a point), taking one of the aesthetic positions actually or virtually possible in the field (and thus taking a position on the other positions). Being situated, he cannot but locate himself, distinguish himelf, and this irrespective of any attempt to gain distinction. By entering the game he tacitly accepts the constraints and the possibilities inherent in the game (which present themselves not in the form of rules, but as possible winning strategies). Difference, the differential, is the principle of the field's structure, and also of its changes; these occur through the struggles which arise regarding the stakes, which are themselves produced by the disputes. However complete the autonomy of the field may be, the outcome of these struggles is never completely independent of external factors. Thus the relations of force between the "conservatives" and the "innovators," the orthodox and the heretics, the ancient and the "new" (or the "modern"), closely depend on the state of external struggles and the reinforcement that one or another group can get from outside - for example, the heretics might receive assistance through the emergence of a new clientele, whose appearance is often linked to changes in the educational system. Thus, for example, the success of the impressionist revolution would, no doubt, not have been possible without the appearance of a public made up of young artists and young writers, which was determined by an "overproduction" of diplomas. In order to give concrete illustration to this program of research it would be necessary to present a thorough description of a state of the literary field. I should like, at the risk of seeming simplistic or dogmatic, to mention only a few of the major characteristics of the literary field such as it appeared in France during the 1880s, at the 182

Principles of a sociology of cultural works time when the structure of the literary field as we now know it was established. The opposition between art and money, which structures the field of power, is reproduced at the heart of the literary field under the form of the opposition between "pure" art, symbolically dominant but economically dominated (poetry, the exemplary incarnation of "pure" art, does not sell), and the two forms of commercial art: variety theater (Je theatre de boulevard), which procures major revenues and the consecration of the bourgeoisie (the Academy), and industrial art, vaudeville, the popular novel (the/euiJJeton), journalism, cabaret. Thus we have a chiasmatic structure, homologous to the structure of the field of power, which opposes, as we know, the intellectuals (rich in cultural capital and relatively poor in economic capital) and the captains of industry and commerce (rich in economic capital and relatively poor in cultural capital): on one hand maximum independence with regard to the demands of the market, and exaltation of the value of disinterestedness, on the other hand direct dependence, recompensed by immediate success, with regard to the demands of the bourgeoisie and even of the working class (in the case of theater) and of the petite bourgeoisie (in the case of vaudeville and the serialized romance). Thus we have all the recognized characteristics of the opposition between two sub-fields which are virtually closed in on each other: the sub-field of restricted production, which is a market unto itself, and the sub-field of large-scale production. This primary opposition is crossed by a secondary opposition, orthogonal to it, that of the social quality of the works and the social quality of the corresponding publics. At the most autonomous pole this opposition occurs between the established avant-garde (for example, in the 1880s, the Parnassians and, to a lesser extent, the Symbolists) and the nascent avant-garde or the failed avant-gardes (who become outmoded without ever having been established). At the most heteronomous pole the opposition is less clear and is established primarily according to the social quality of the publics opposing, for example, variety theater to vaudeville and all other forms of industrial art. As we can see, since around 1880 the principal opposition is partially superimposed on the opposition between genres, that is, between poetry and theater, with the novel occupying a highly dispersed middle ground. The theater, which is globally situated in the sub-field of large-scale production (we recall the theatrical failures of all the supporters of art for art's sake), is itself divided, with 183

Pierre Bourdieu the appearance of the new figures of the directors, notably Antoine and Lugne-Poe, who, by their opposition, give rise to the whole space of possibilities which the subsequent history of the theatrical subfield has merely to act out.

N.B. the + and — signs measure specific capital.

Thus we have a two-dimensional space and two forms of struggle and of history. On the one hand (in the horizontal dimension of the ''cross") there are the struggles, between the artists engaged in the pure and commercial sub-fields, over the very definition of a writer, and over the status of art and of the artist - through which there occurs the struggle to impose the principle of domination which opposes the intellectuals of the restricted field to the "bourgeois," those who act through the intermediary of the bourgeois intellectuals. On the other hand (in the vertical dimension of the cross), at the most autonomous pole, in the midst of the restricted sub-field, the struggles are between the established avant-garde and the new avant-garde. In fact the history of art knows and recognizes only the restricted sub-field, and all representations of the field and of its history are thereby falsified. The changes that continuously occur, for the producers in the midst of the field of production, originate from the very structure of the field, from synchronic oppositions between antagonistic positions based on the degree of acceptance or, if we prefer, the position in the structure of the distribution of the specific capital of recognition. This position is strongly correlated with age; the opposition between (symbolically) dominant and dominated, between orthodox and heretic, tends to take the form of a permanent revolution between the young and the old, the new against the ancient. Issuing from the very structure of the field, the changes that occur in the restricted field are largely independent of the chronologically contemporaneous external changes which can seem to determine them - this would be the case even though the subsequent establishment of the changes may owe something to this conjuncture of 184

Principles of a sociology of cultural works "independent causal series" (according to the formula Cournot used to define chance). It is the struggle between the champions and the pretenders, between the title-holders ("writer," "philosopher," "scholar," etc.) and their challengers, as they say in boxing, which gives rise to the history of the field. The aging and becoming outmoded of writers, of schools, and of works is the result of the struggle between those who made history (by creating a new position in the field) and who struggle to endure (become classic) and those who cannot make history in their turn without returning to the past, those who are interested in eternalizing the present state and arresting history. In the struggles that, within each genre, oppose them to the established avant-garde, the new avant-garde is inclined to call into question, by a return to sources and to the purity of origins, the very foundations of the genre. It follows that the history of poetry, of the novel, and of theater tends to present itself as a process of purification whereby each of these genres, by means of an incessant critical return upon itelf, upon its principles and presuppositions, reduces itself more and more completely to its most purified quintessence. Thus the series of revolutions, against established poetry, which have marked the history of French poetry since Romanticism, have tended to exclude everything that is most "poetical" from poetry: the most clear-cut forms, the alexandrine, the sonnet, the poem itself, in short, what one poet called poetical "humming," including the figures of rhetoric, comparison, metaphor, conventional sentiments, lyricism, effusion, psychology. Likewise the history of the French novel since Balzac tends to exclude the "novelistic." Flaubert, with his dream of the "book about nothing," and the Goncourts, with the ambition of a "novel without peripeties, without intrigue and without base amusements," have certainly contributed to the program, announced by the Goncourts themselves, "to kill the novelistic." This program continued, from Joyce, through William Faulkner, to Claude Simon, with the invention of a "pure" novel, from which all linear narrative, and thus all pretension to realism, has disappeared, a novel that denounces itself as fictional. And finally the history of the stage always tends towards the exclusion of the "theatrical" and reaches completion in a deliberately illusionistic, and therefore illusory, representation of theatrical illusion. Paradoxically, in this field which is the site of a permanent revolution, the avant-garde producers are determined by the past in so far as their innovations, which are intended to transcend it, are 185

Pierre Bourdieu inscribed, as though in an original matrix, in the space of possibilities immanent to the field itself. That which is produced in the field is increasingly dependent on the specific history of the field, and increasingly difficult to deduce or to foresee from a knowledge of the social world (the economic situation, political situation, etc.) at the moment under consideration. Another consequence: the relative autonomy of the field is always more fully realized in works which owe their formal properties and their value only to structure, and therefore to the history of the field, further disqualifying interpretations which, by means of a ''shortcircuit," authorize themselves to pass over what happens in the world and go directly to what happens in the field. Just as there is no longer a place, in the realm of production, for "naifs," except as artist-objects (it would be necessary, here, to contrast the customs officer Rousseau with Duchamp), so there is no longer a place for a naive reception. Work produced according to the logic of a strongly autonomous field calls for a differential, distinctive, perception, attentive to divergences in relation to other, past or contemporary, works. It follows, paradoxically, that adequate consumption of this art, which is a product of a permanent rupture with history, with tradition, tends to become completely historical. The enjoyment of a work has as its condition the consciousness and knowledge of the space of possibilities of which the work is the product, of the "contribution" which the work represents, and which cannot be grasped except by historical comparison. Thus the epistemological problem posed for science by the existence of "pure" arts, and of "formalist" theories which explain their principles, is resolved: it is in history that the principle of liberty with regard to history resides, and the social history of the process of automatization (of which I have just given a sketch) can account for the freedom with regard to the "social context" which the direct relationship with the social conditions of the moment annuls in the very movement of its explanation. The challenge laid down to sociology by formalist aesthetics, which deliberately excludes everything except form, both in production as in reception, has been surmounted. The formalist's refusal of any kind of historicization rests on a refusal to take account of its own social conditions of possibility, or, more precisely, on neglecting the historical processes in the course of which the social conditions of liberty with regard to external determinations, that is, the field of relatively autonomous production and the pure aesthetics that it makes possible, have been 186

Principles of a sociology of cultural works instituted. The basis of an independence from historical conditions, which is affirmed in works originating from a pure concern for form, lies in the historical process which has led to the emergence of an autonomous field (univers). Having thus rapidly sketched the structure of the field, the logic of its functioning and its changing (ideally, one would have to discuss the relationship to the public), I shall conclude by describing the relationship between singular agents, which is given expression in a trajectory and a work, and therefore their habitus, and the forces of the field. By contrast with ordinary biographies, the trajectory describes the series of positions successively occupied by the same writer in the successive states of the literary field, given that it is only in the structure of the field that the sense of these successive positions - directorships of magazines, publication by such and such an editor, participation in such and such a group - are defined. It is within each state of the field, defined by a certain state of the space of possibilities, that - as a function of the position occupied and of sentiments of success or failure, recognized to a greater or lesser degree, with which that position is associated - the predispositions linked to a certain social origin orient practice toward such and such an available possibility. Most often this occurs in an entirely unconscious manner (habitus, as instinct for the game, excludes and spares calculation). Since I am unable to enter into the details of the dialectic between positions and dispositions, I shall say only that we can observe an extraordinary correspondence between the hierarchy of positions (those of genre, and, within it, that of styles) and the hierarchy of social origins, and therefore the associated dispositions. Thus, to take but one example, it is notable that within the domain of the popular novel, which is the category of novel most often relegated to writers issuing from the lower classes and the female sex, it is in the works of the authors who are the most favored, relatively, that we encounter the most distanced, semi-parodic treatments - the best example being Fantomas, celebrated by Apollinaire. However, I do not want to conclude without explicitly posing a question that I have been implicitly posing all along: what does this particular way of understanding the art work show? Is it worth the bother to give an apology for works, to know what they are about, to reduce and destroy them, to unmask and dismantle them, in short, to strip them of charm? The resolutely historicist vision which leads one to a rigorous knowledge of the historical conditions of the emergence of 187

Pierre Bourdieu transhistorical logics such as those of art or science has the initial effect of clearing critical discourse of the platonic temptation to produce essences, of literature, of poetry, or, in another domain, of mathematics, etc. Many "theorists" were guilty of this analysis of essence, notably, concerning "literariness," the Russian formalists and Jakobson, who was familiar with phenomenology and eidetic analysis, but many others as well, from Bremond and Artaud on, concerning "pure poetry" or "theatricality." But these analyses only unconsciously recapitulate the long, slow work of purification which I described earlier, and which, in each genre (poetry, the novel, theater), has accompanied the autonomization of the field of production. From purification to purification, the struggles that take place in the field of production lead gradually to the isolation of the specific principle of the poetic (or theatrical, or novelistic) effect. Only a sort of highly concentrated extract, such as we find in the work of Ponge, of the properties best suited for the production of the effect specific to each genre - in the case of poetry the effect of debanalization, the ostranenie of the Russian formalists - is allowed to remain in existence, and this without recourse to the techniques socially designated as poetical. The field of restricted production, or, rather, the historical process that establishes it, is the true abstraction of quintessence. But what have we gained from this historical reduction of something which ought to be lived as an absolute experience, alien to the contingencies of a historical genesis, other than the always slightly sad pleasure of knowing what it is about? "The action of works on works," which Brunetiere spoke about, occurs only through the intermediary of authors, whose strategies owe their form and their content to interests linked to the positions that they occupy in the structure of a highly particularized game. History can produce transhistorical universality only by instituting social fields (univers) which, as an effect of the social alchemy of the specific laws by which these fields function, tend to draw the sublime essence of the universal out of the often ruthless confrontations of particular interests. This realist perspective, which makes the production of the universal a collective enterprise, seems to me, after all, to be more reassuring, more humane, than the belief in the miraculous virtues of a pure interest in pure form.

188

Principles of a sociology of cultural works Note I am referring here to a text which is without doubt the clearest expression of the theoretical presuppositions of Foucault's work: ''Repose au cercle d'epistemologie," Cahiers pour L'Analyse 8 (Summer, 1968), pp.8—40, especially p. 40.

189

Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts RICHARD ELDRIDGE

Louis Althusser's 1970 essay "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" 1 is arguably the most influential and important document in contemporary critical practice and its theory. In one way this is puzzling, for the essay contains almost nothing that can be recognized as an argument. It does not put forward a causal theory of the rise and fall of forms of social life. It offers no deductions, and it contains only a few sketchily described examples of ideologies. The essay is instead filled with oracular pronouncements, couched in a terminology partly invented and partly cobbled together from the Marxist tradition and from Lacan. Yet there it is. Althusser's work receives more extended discussion — thirty-five consecutive pages, plus numerous occasional references — in Fredric Jameson's 1981 The Political Unconscious,2 perhaps the most important American text in so-called New Historicist criticism, than any of the literary works Jameson considers except Conrad's Lord Jim. Althusser is the principal subject of the longest chapter in Rosalind Coward and John Ellis's 1977 Language and MateriaJism,3 itself one of the principal theoretical works of so-called cultural materialist criticism in England, and the discussion of "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" is the centerpiece of that chapter. Terry Eagleton observes that in this essay "Althusser has taught us to regard.. .[the] misperceptions [of] the infantile narcissist of the Lacanian mirror stage.. .as an indispensable structure of all ideology,"4 where ideology is omnipresent. By allusion the essay appears in hundreds of titles such as The Ideology of the Aesthetic, The Romantic Ideology, Aesthetics and the Ideology of Form, Ideology and Imagination in the Victorian Novel, and so on. Teachers and students of literature will readily recognize the game of "hunt the ideology" - ferreting out an author's necessary but unconscious 190

AJthusser and ideoJogical criticism of the arts reinforcements ("reinscriptions" they are often called) of various forms of class domination - that is typically played in advanced literary classrooms. In the criticism of the visual arts, critics such as John Barrell are now busy unmasking the traditional seductions of artistic form and its connoisseurship, instead focusing on, for example, Constable's implicit simultaneous acknowledgment and devaluing of the existence and importance of displaced agricultural laborers, often represented in miniature in the foreground or background of his landscape paintings. "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" is the essay of Althusser's that is included in Adams and Searle's anthology Critical Theory Since 1965, where Althusser's work is said to be "much used by literary theorists" and where we are told that this is "one of Althusser's most influential essays."5 A recent critical obituary of Althusser calls "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" Althusser's "single most influential text."6 Together with the work of Raymond Williams, Althusser's writings are the most decisive theoretical influence in the development of British cultural materialism. Together with the work of Foucault, they are the most decisive theoretical influence in American New Historicism. Insofar as cultural materialism, New Historicism, and politicized Lacanism have themselves affected feminism, Althusser's work forms much of the theoretical basis of advanced feminist criticism as well. "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" is the most general articulation of a critical sensibility for which ideology is allimportant and economic theory largely irrelevant. The essay has both helped to form that sensibility, directly and indirectly, and given it powerful expression where it exists on its own. Yet, to repeat: "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" offers very little that can be recognized as an argument. Such premises and assumptions as it relies on and urges are far from being readily acceptable starting points that then lead us to more interesting conclusions. They are not always even readily intelligible. What are we to make of this situation? The most plausible initial guess to understand the influence and importance for criticism of "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" is that the essay, despite its turgidity and lack of argumentation, somehow expresses a view of human life that contemporary academic critics of literature and the arts find to be compelling on its own. Hence investigating Althusser's essay to tease out this view promises not only to elucidate Althusser, but also to help us to bring to consciousness a conception of human life that is dominant 191

Richard Eldridge within critical studies in our time. Having such a view before us explicitly, we can then begin to think all at once about topics that will emerge as deeply interconnected: how Althusser's view might be criticized, what the shape of critical studies might be other than ideology criticism, and what general views about human life and its prospects of social expression or development are plausible for us. ALTHUSSER AND HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" elaborates four interrelated theses. "Ideology has no history" (239B); "Ideology represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (241A); "Ideology has a material existence" (242B); and "my central thesis: Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects" (244A). Each of these theses helps to establish the meanings and uses of "ideology" in Althusser's analysis of culture, cultural production, and cultural reproduction, where, as he notes, ideology is "a reality which needs a little discussion" (239A). Two of these theses - the first and third, on the lack of history and the material existence of ideology - draw on and are best explicated in terms of a Marxist theory of history. The other two - the second and fourth, on the relations between individuals and ideology - also draw on terms and ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Of all these theses, the second is the most fully summary statement of Althusser's view of human life. "Ideology represents the imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence." Here we are told just how ideology always mediates between individuals and reality. Understanding how and why this mediation always takes place, according to Althusser, is necessary for understanding what it means to say that art is ideological or that artistic and literary works always reinscribe ideologies. But this thesis - "Ideology represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence" - drawing together the Marxist and Lacanian strands of the essay, uses terms ("imaginary," "real," "ideology") that themselves stand in need of explication. What are the imaginary and the real for Althusser? What is ideology that it has no history and yet has a material existence? Just what does the summary thesis say? It is best to begin by thinking about Marx. To say that ideology has no history and has a material existence, or elsewhere, as Althusser puts it, that ideology "has no history of its 192

AJthusser and ideological criticism of the arts own" (240B) and that "its history is outside it" (240A), is in the first instance to say that philosophical idealism is false. Or, as Marx himself puts it in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."7 In history agents conceive of things in various ways and form various plans of life that lead to action. Culture seems to result from the accummulated actions of individual, intentional agents. But in fact this appearance is deeply misleading, for agents form their ideas and plans of life only by taking up conceptions and possibilities of life that their cultures have made available to them, and cultures in turn are shaped by economic forces and relations. How we produce and reproduce the conditions of human life, both what forces or powers of production are available to us and the social relations through which these forces are deployed, largely determine what we will think and do. "Ideology, then, is for Marx an imaginary assemblage (bricolage), a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by the 'day's residues' from the only full and positive reality, that of the concrete history of concrete material individuals materially producing their existence. It is on this basis that ideology has no history" (240A). The most systematic development of a Marxist conception of history is in G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. Where Althusser is, at best, difficult, Cohen is startlingly clear. It is instructive therefore to compare Althusser's conception of the determination of culture with Cohen's account of Marx's views. Using the 1859 Preface as the centerpiece of his interpretation, Cohen ascribes two central theses to Marx: "(a) The productive forces tend to develop throughout history (the Development Thesis); and (b) The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the Primacy Thesis proper)."8 Productive forces are human capacities and powers to shape or work natural materials so as to satisfy human needs, both biologically given and created. They grow principally through the growth of "productively useful science,"9 which is then put to use in technological innovation, though this is not the only means of growth of productive power: growth in population, for example, will produce increased labor power. The level of development of the productive forces may be gauged by measuring their capacity to produce a surplus of humanly useful goods, over and above the holdings of goods (including machines and machine tools themselves) that 193

Richard EJdridge existed prior to their deployment. The development thesis states not simply that the productive forces have grown throughout history, but rather that they have a universal tendency to grow. That tendency may be inhibited on occasion, but not too often (for it would then be implausible to see it at work in history), and when the productive forces do grow, they must grow not "for a miscellany of uncoordinated reasons," 10 but rather because it is, as it were, in their nature, or their nature in relation to human nature, to grow. Cohen argues in favor of the Development Thesis by making two further claims, one historical and one a set of premises about human nature. The historical claim is that by and large productive forces have grown. "Societies rarely replace a given set of productive forces by an inferior one." 11 So far this might be true, but the result merely of accident or of political decisions autonomously taken by agents or groups, not the result of an autonomous tendency toward growth on the part of the productive forces. The premises about human nature then take us from the historical facts to the existence of a tendency. Those premises are that human beings exist in situations of relative scarcity (not all their wants are readily satisfied), that they are capable of recognizing their wants, and that they are intelligent enough to develop new means to satisfy the wants they have recognized.12 It might be that these facts about human nature obtained, but did not regularly result in the growth of the productive forces, for the ability of human beings to develop means of satisfying their wants might be regularly inhibited by their pursuit of other interests. But the historical claim shows that this has not in fact happened. The productive forces have generally grown, and they have grown autonomously, in the face of whatever other interests human beings have had, so that we are entitled to conclude that there is an autonomous tendency for them to grow. The Development Thesis, now established, is then used as part of the argument for the Primacy Thesis. Relations of production are social relations through which productive powers are deployed. People work, deploying productive forces, as serfs giving up part of their product to the lord, or as slaves, or as laborers selling their labor-power in return for a wage. People receive goods produced through the use of the productive powers variously as serfs, slaves, or workers, lords, masters, or owners. The Primacy Thesis then states that the existence of a given set of productive relations - master-slave; lord-serf; owner-worker - is explained by the level of development of the productive forces. A given set of productive relations will come to inhibit the autonomous tendency of the productive forces to 194

AJthusser and ideological criticism of the arts grow. For example, the continual use of slave labor to extract luxury products will inhibit the investment of the social surplus in new technology. When that happens, then, given that the productive forces are tending to grow, that set of relations of production will disappear in favor of a new set of relations under which maximum growth of productive power can take place. There are, as Marx puts it, correspondences between social forms and productive ones. And these correspondences must result from the selection constraint exercised on relations of production by the productive forces, for the tendency of the productive forces to grow is autonomous. 13 A similar sort of selection is then exercised by the relations of production on ideas. Classes, or groups of people producing or receiving goods under definite social roles, through which they struggle for goods with members of other classes, ''are receptive to whatever ideas are likely to benefit them." 14 Hence classes will either develop or select from independently available candidates the sets of ideas about appropriate life plans, political arrangements, religious duties, gender roles, and so on that will increase the share of the social product that their members will receive. These ideas will be their ideology. The ruling class, the class which owns or controls the deployment of the forces of production, will have the ability to propagate its ideas most effectively and will be able to develop religious, political, educational, and cultural institutions that will both reflect and inculcate them. While it may be possible for political, religious, educational, or artistic ideas to arise spontaneously, such ideas will not be effective in shaping either social relations of production or social institutions unless they suit the material interests of the current ruling classes or perhaps their nascent successors. In the long run, Cohen argues, human productive powers will have increased under capitalism to such an extent, giving us such an ability to satisfy human needs, that it will then be manifestly unreasonable for workers any longer to accept the curse of toil in exchange for relatively meager wages. Capitalism "cannot realize the possibilities of liberation it creates. It excludes liberation by febrile product innovation, huge investment in sales and advertising, contrived obsolescence. It brings society to the threshold of abundance and locks the door. For the promise of abundance is not an endless flow of goods but a sufficiency produced with a minimum of unpleasant exertion."15 Once this contradiction between promise and its inhibition is manifest, the expropriators will be expropriated and capitalist relations of production will be done away with. In comparison with Cohen's classical, teleological Marxism, 195

Richard Eldridge Althusser's Marxism is distinctively structural and anti-teleological. Where Cohen sees productive forces autonomously tending to develop and through their development tending further to lead toward a society of human freedom, Althusser sees continuing class struggle, without end, and continuing frustrations of human freedoms, in various ways. "Superstructures," or educational, religious, juridical, and cultural institutions that reproduce class relations by propagating class identities, Althusser writes, "are never seen to step aside respectfully [in favor of a non-class society of equal freedom] when their work is done.. .From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes." 16 In place of Cohen's optimism and claim that the forces of production tend autonomously (and beneficently) to grow, we find Althusser's pessimism and sense of the continuing force of political, superstructural relations and institutions. Indeed, in the context of France in the 1960s, when bureaucratic communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe was still apparently strong and expansionist, the sort of optimistic, beneficent forces of production Marxism that Cohen later elaborated from Marx's texts in the 1970s might well have seemed both historically inaccurate and dangerous. In such a context, economic determinism may well have seemed to point toward forced development under five-year plans. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely given Althusser's affiliation with the French Communist Party, it may have seemed important to explain why the communists had not come to power, why republican political institutions had not altered, in industrialized France. It may well have seemed important then to emphasize that political arrangements resist full determination by the forces of production, even while remaining in some sense "in the last instance" subordinated to them. Althusser's effort was hence to find a way between philosophical idealism, humanism, and voluntarism, on the one hand, and forces of production determinism, on the other. "Central to Althusser's work is his concern to provide an account of the social totality which avoids a crude economic determinism and allows for the effectivity of the superstructures whilst at the same time retaining a notion of determination by the base in the 'last instance.'" 17 Althusser's central move in navigating between idealist voluntarism and economic determinism is to introduce the notion of the overdetermination of superstructural ideas and institutions. Not only are these ideas and institutions conditioned by economic life, they also display a kind of structural or internal causality. Certain ideas 196

AJthusser and ideological criticism of the arts and institutions logically require further ideas and institutions for their existence and intelligibility. Just as, for example, the concepts "adult" and "child" are internally related, in that each is essentially defined and explained in terms of the other, so the concepts "property owner" and "plaintiff in a civil suit," together with all their surrounding institutions, are internally related. What it is to sue for damages must be explained in terms of what it is to own property, and what it is to own property must be explained, among other things, in terms of what it is to be able legitimately to defeat such suits, to be able to claim protection from theft, and so forth. A structural causality obtains among these concepts. There is a clear sense in which property owners and plaintiffs, and the institutions under which they exist, are what they are by virtue of their internal relations, and not only by virtue of the development of the productive forces. According to Althusser, this overdetermination - internal, structural causality in addition to conditioning by economic life gives to superstructural ideas and institutions a kind of partial autonomy or effectivity.18 The cost, however, of introducing this notion of overdetermination, avoiding both idealist voluntarism and economic determinism, is that there seems to be no room left for any source or agency of change. If not from accumulated acts of individual will, and if not from the autonomous tendency of the forces of production to grow, then from what are transformations in social structures to come? Althusser "seems better placed to account for the persistence of a structure than for transition and change."19 A certain pessimism, favoring the sublimities of detached understanding of social life as it stands over solidarity and substantive transformation, results, it seems, from the move between idealist voluntarism and economic determinism. Human beings thus live under the necessity of producing and reproducing their material conditions of existence. This necessity is lived out under a further necessity of having some structured social arrangements or other, within which there is always relative domination, as those with the responsibility of enforcing a social order must always have rights and powers that are denied to others. And it is at this social level, where distinct social classes with distinct but internally related rights and powers face off against one another, that the formation of human ideals is materially conditioned. "Material," in Althusser's writing, thus means not "pertaining to the forces of production or to physical nature and our powers to rearrange it," but rather "pertaining to the way in which within a structured system of 197

Richard Eldridge opposed classes people produce and reproduce their conditions of existence." All this is taken for granted in "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses," not argued for. Althusser insistently emphasizes the importance in human history not of forces of production, but of relations of production, class relations. These insistences amount to a kind of litany about reality. The ways in which individuals think of their lives "in the last analysis arise from the relations of production, and from relations arising from the relations of production" (242A). "The reality in question [out of which ideology is constituted].. .is indeed, in the last resort, the reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them" (249A). "Ideologies are 'born'.. .from the social classes at grips in the class struggle: from their conditions of existence, their practices, their experience of the struggle" (250B). Opposition to forces of production Marxism, coupled with Marxist opposition to idealism, has here led to relations of production Marxism. Althusser's skepticism about the possibility of a society of full and equal human freedom, let alone as the appointed destiny of humanity through the growth of its productive powers, is further partly expressed in considerations drawn from Lacan's accounts of the formation of conscious and self-conscious human subjects. Lacan describes not the dismissal or disappearance of the human subject, but rather a decentered, emergent, and internally self-opposed human subject, yet for all that a subject nonetheless. For Althusser, the human subject as Lacan describes it will be the subject of ideology, that is, the person who necessarily has some ideology or other, some form of false consciousness. Lacan's principal interest as a psychoanalyst is in the material of the analytic situation, in what patients say in recounting their dreams, fantasies, wishes, obsessions, and so forth. On the basis of his encounters with this material from various patients in analysis, and developing from his reading of Freud, Lacan is led to posit the existence of an order or register or mode of human experience, prior to the entry of the human subject into language, discursive consciousness, and self-consciousness.20 This initial order of experience, the imaginary, is characterized above all by immediacy. There is no subject-object differentiation, no awareness of one's own body as one's own, as a home for a subject, and no subject-subject differentiation. Here there is no desire for specific objects, for there is no awareness of objects as objects, but only a generalized Jack of 198

AJthusser and ideoJogicaJ criticism of the arts completeness of being, a generalized, uncomprehended, and unconceptualized dependence on a world one knows not. Specific and self-conscious subjectivity then emerges through two stages of development: first through the formation of an imago or image of a brighter, better, wholer self whom one wishes to be, formed at the age of six to eight months, as one experiences one's mirror image as this wholer, more complete imago, and secondly through entry, continuously effected from the ages of about one year to two-and-a-half, into the symbolic order of language, wherein one becomes able to conceptualize and name objects, and hence able as a now self-conscious subject to desire specific things. Lacan emphasizes two features of this course of development, two related modes of loss of contact with reality that occur within it. Within this course of development, the selfconscious subject who is coming into existence loses contact with and represses both the pre-linguistic subject of the Jack and the world as it is (a world not of discrete objects, but an undifferentiated world that mysteriously induces and remedies lacks - this might be called ''Mother" some day). These two separations - from preconscious subjectivity and from a material world that is preobjectual - are necessary for the development of explicitly human propositional or judgmental consciousness or subjectivity. To be able to say or judge that here is an F, and so to experience the world as objectual, one must be able to deploy a structured system of internally related signifiers. What one then says or judges within the symbolic order of signification will then be overdetermined, just as in Althusser superstructural ideas and institutions are overdetermined. For Lacan, all human utterances within the symbolic order are both pressured or conditioned by prelinguistic material needs on the part of subjects and structured or internally determined by the internal relations among concepts and expressions that are present in a particular language. (These are valuable points against computational linguistics and scientific semantics.) The conscious subject thus comes to be in separation from what there really is: from both its own preconscious, deep subjectivity, and from reality as it is preconsciously experienced and genuinely is. What the now conscious subject or ego then explicitly desires will hence always be an inadequate, too specific substitute for the fulfillment of a more primordial and still deeply persistent lack. The object of desire will now be specifically conceived of and named (constructed) in the terms set by a culture, more or less arbitrarily, given the fluid nature of reality in itself. The real, according to Lacan, 199

Richard Eldridge is a set of linguistically constructed objects of desire, and "the real" that is thus constructed is not what there really is. What one then desires is never fully one's own, never the primordial, sometime lack-filling reality that was once sought and is still sought, at least by the being whom one most deeply is. The unconscious, the locus of this primordial lack, is what is left over and repressed in this course of development. It is material from this part of the subject, the unconscious, that then surfaces in the material of the analytic situation, the patient's dream reports, wishes, fantasies, and obsessions, as well as always covertly pressuring even more routine and conventionalized utterances. What Lacan calls the Spaltung (splitting) of the subject or the division of the subject.. .results from the fact that he speaks and from the fact of his insertion into the symbolic order. By mediating himself in his discourse, the subject in effect destroys the immediate relation of self to self, and constructs himself in language.. .as he wishes to see himself, as he wishes to be seen, and thereby alienates himself in language. This is the best way of conceiving the establishing of an unconscious. If the image the subject makes of himself for himself is a lure, then his desire will be lost in its real implication to his consciousness and will be conveyed in a demand (that is, in spoken discourse and in accordance with the exigencies of Culture) in which it will be only a metonymy of itself.21

Lacan's views about subject development are of considerable use in illuminating all at once the fragility of our life with language, our buried creative potentials for transforming routinized expressive systems, and analogies between the resistances of artists to routinized systems of expression and the utterances and behaviors of neurotics. As a general theory of human subjectivity, however, these views also have distinct weaknesses. They tend first toward an odd mix of Cartesian individualism about a deep prelinguistic self and Heraclitean materialism about reality, encouraging peculiar and implausible conceptions of a deep self and of a fluid reality as non-emergent, primordial, and subject to repression through the processes of subject construction. It is as though Lacan were arguing that a person who is lost in the dark and then acquires a flashlight becomes thereby less fully herself and less fully in contact with reality than prior to acquiring the flashlight. Since such a person can now with the flashlight identify discrete objects through the darkness, such a person has now lost contact with a pre-flashlight, groping subjectivity and with the "reality" of obscure things in darkness. Second, Lacan's views about subject development are not in the first instance distinctly political. For Lacan, it is language in general, any language, 200

Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts accession to which involves repression of preconscious subjectivity. Repression is not in the first instance a matter of living under a specifically unjust political system or set of social arrangements, and its undoing, in so far as it is at least partly possible, is more immediately a matter for private psychoanalytic therapy than for public political action. Third, Lacan's normative views about human subjectivity, in his orientations toward the private and the preconscious, are thin and implausible. It is for him a necessary truth that in entering into any language or system of expression, one is forced "to misconstrue the particular meaning of [one's] life in false communication," 22 that is, to distort and betray one's prelinguistic subjectivity. "We get used to the real. The truth we repress." 23 As a result, since we do this, the way forward is an always impossible way back toward prelinguistic subjectivity rather than toward articulate expressiveness. Althusser's views are nowadays often presented as merely derivative from the deeper views of Lacan. It is Lacan, not Althusser, Coward and Ellis write, who "demonstrates the construction of the subject in language.. .Lacan's concept of 'the imaginary' is a more subtle instrument for understanding this process" 24 of subject formation than Althusser's theory of ideology. "It is only with [Lacan's] theory of the subject [- not Althusser's -] that Marxism can move towards a destruction of the division between subject and object, which underlies its [deplorable] return to idealist thought." 25 In fact, however, it is current critical, politicized Lacanism that derives much of its appeal from Althusser and the Marxist tradition, not the other way around. It is Althusser's account of the partial autonomy of superstructural ideas and institutions, themselves structured like a language by internal relations, that enables Lacan's views about subject development to be connected up with a specifically political account of class domination. Without this connection, Lacan's views imply nothing about either the omnipresence of class relations in society or the repressions involved in the existence of superstructural social institutions. Lacanism may in a way enable relations of production Marxism to go forward, to articulate further views about the subject in society, but it cannot found or establish relations of production Marxism on its own. What then is the source of the appeal of Althusser's conception of subjects of class-related ideology? Althusser is not producing a theory of history. The shift on his part from forces of production Marxism to relations of production Marxism where relations may 201

Richard Eldridge themselves be formed autonomously, as people pursue their various religious, scientific, or political interests, is in fact a shift away from a genuinely explanatory theory of history, according to which class relations and ideologies are explained by the requirements of growing productivity. Althusser is not interested in tracing the ultimate causal antececents of social formations. While he acknowledges that "ideologies have a history of their own (although it is determined in the last instance by the class struggle)" (240B), Althusser is not in "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" interested in that (vague) causal determination, insisting instead that "ideology in general has no history, not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely positive sense" (240B). Nor, though he avails himself of their idioms, is he deriving his views about subjects and ideology from the views of Lacan or Saussure. Just what is he doing? In explicating the slogan that ideology in general has no history, that ideology is "a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which [its] structure and functioning are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we can call history" (240B), Althusser appeals to "a theoretical reference point:" Freud's account of the role of the unconscious in the dream-work. In what sense is Freud's theory of dreaming in any way structural or non-historical? Freud distinguishes, as Althusser notes, between the manifest content of a dream, or the dream as reported, and its latent content. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud sketches explanations of the formations and significances (latent contents) of various dream reports by describing what he calls the dream-work. The general theory of the dream-work involves the specification of three kinds of influences that are always present in the formation of any dream report or manifest content: (1) the thoughts of the day (what one has heard, read, seen, thought, and so on in the course of the day's experiences), (2) various thoughts that are naturally present at various stages of psychogenesis (infantile envies, wishes, resentments, transferences, etc. and their repressed remainders in the lives of adults), and (3) the mechanisms of the dream-work: condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary revision.26 Influences (1) and (2) together form the latent content of the dream; (3), the mechanisms of the dream-work, then translate that latent content into the dream as reported or manifest content, as, for example, visual images to express wishes are sought, narrative 202

AJthusser and ideoJogicaJ criticism of the arts coherence is introduced, thoughts are combined or condensed with one another, and substitutes for the objects of deep wishes and revenges are found. In any dream, however, some material from the day, some material from the life of the unconscious since infancy, and the mechanisms of the dream-work always combine to generate the dream as remembered and reported. In a clear sense, that (1), (2), and (3) always figure in the formation of the manifest content is an eternal (human) fact, not a human historical one. And it seems equally likely that it is an eternal (human) fact that there are dreams. It is like this, according to Althusser, with ideology. His structural Marxism consists in his effort to describe the perennially present sources and mechanisms of formation of very general views people hold about how human flourishing and freedom may be secured under certain sets of social institutions. Ideology is here "the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of man or a social group" (239A), a kind of always false consciousness about how equal human freedom may be secured through the operations of various religious, artistic, trade union, sporting, familial, etc. organizations and institutions (the ideological state apparatuses). It is the manifest content of culture, formed by a sort of always present ideology-work, that it is the business of the structural Marxist to specify. How does that ideology-work take place? The latent content of ideology is the existing set of relations of production, class relations, under which human beings work and under which the goods that they produce are distributed. Under these class relations, there are various modes of unfreedom and domination. Certain people or groups of people will have rights and powers that others will lack. In that sense, there will not be equal freedom. The ideology-work consists in reacting evaJuatively to existing relations of production. Perhaps these relations are simply accepted as productive of full equal freedom, so that the proper job of educational, artistic, religious, etc. organizations (the ideological state apparatuses) is then seen as that of forming subjects to enter into and accept these existing relations. Perhaps alternatively, existing relations are seen (correctly) as embodying unequal freedom, and alternative relations genuinely productive of full equal freedom are then imagined (dreams of a new society), together with the educational, religious, artistic, etc. infrastructures of reproduction that they would require. But in any case, whether accepting, reformist, or revolutionist, these evaluations are one and all false in their envisioning of some condition of full equal freedom under some relations 203

Richard Eldridge of production or other. Individuals imagine that there might be such a condition, and thus generate ideology, but in this imagining are victims of false consciousness. Society requires some social organization, some relations of production. Any such organizations and relations will involve some unfreedom, some arbitrarily unequal rights and powers attaching to dominant and subordinate classes. In reaction people imagine that this is not so. But in this imagining they are mistaken. We can no more cease living within existing relations of production nor cease imagining either them or some alternatives to embody full equal freedom than we can cease having unconscious thoughts, wishes, fantasies or cease dreaming. "Ideology," we may say, "represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (241A). Or, more fully, All ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live. (242A)

But why can't we stop doing this? Why is the relation of individuals to existing relations of production "necessarily an imaginary relation" (242A), one marked by false consciousness or belief about the possibility of a society of full equal freedom under some relations of production or other, existing or alternative? Why can't we either get it right, and successfully envision and fashion a society of fully equal freedom, or just give up such envisionings and accept the relatively tragic character of human life (perhaps still recognizing that some social organizations embody more freedom than others)? Here is where Althusser appears to draw substantively on Lacan. Echoing Lacan's account of the formation of the unconscious according to Freud, Althusser writes that "It is clear that this ideological constraint and preappointment, and all the rituals of rearing and then education in the family, have some relationship with what Freud ... registered by its effects [a Lacanism] as being the unconscious" (246B). Roughly, just as the experience on the part of preconscious subjects of a primordial lack, now buried in the unconscious and productive of fantasies, obsessions, and neuroses, persists in the lives of conscious subjects (whose desires are always inadequate metonymies or substitute-successors to that lack), so the experience of relations of production and their unfreedom likewise persists, as 204

AJthusser and ideological criticism of the arts human beings come to speak the language of culture, to develop (always inadequate) evaluative responses to social life as they assume socio-cultural identities. Althusser's name for the process through which subjects are ideologically constituted as having specific evaluative responses to existing relations of production is interpellation. Human subjects coming to be under existing relations of production are called to respond to them one way or another by existing evaluative languages and stances. Even refusal to accept an existing invitation to evaluate is itself a language of evaluation, the language of outsiderliness, which is to say that "ideology has no outside" (246A). But this appearance of dependence on Lacan is in part misleading, or, where genuine, unhelpful, in so far as Lacan's account of subject formation is not itself related to class. And in fact Althusser does present another, historical argument, for the claim that ideology (mistakenly) imagining relations of production of equal freedom - is for us inevitable, like dreaming. This argument is somewhat buried in the text; it is not even marked as itself a line of argument. But it is the source, perhaps, of whatever appeal Althusser's text and ideologycriticism that makes use of Lacan now have for critics of the arts. "Why," Althusser asks, "do men 'need' this imaginary transposition of their real conditions of existence in order to 'represent to themselves' their real conditions of existence?" (241B). Althusser begins to treat this question by surveying solutions to it that have been proposed in the past but are not the answer to it. It is not the case that "Priests or Despots" (241B) forced people to imagine a condition of full equal human freedom, as the Enlightenment perhaps urged us to think. Nor is it the case, as Feuerbach and the early Marx urged, that "material alienation" forced human subjects into ideological imaginings (241B). Nor is it the case that God, through his Scriptures or his papal servants, has himself in fact commanded us to take up a certain evaluative stance toward existing relations of production. This too is an ideology, a piece of false consciousness about the possibility of equal freedom that is like any other in its structure and significance (247A-248A). People believe variously "that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt 'love thy neighbor as thyself, etc." (248B). The cumulative force of these examples of "Enlightenment ideology," "Feuerbachian-early Marxist ideology," and "Christian ideology," and so on, is that, altogether apart from commitment to Lacanism, ideologizing - forming conceptions of possibilities of 205

Richard EJdridge equal human freedom in reaction to existing relations of productionis something people do. After all, it is here, and here, and here. This historical evidence is then reinforced by — perhaps is even itself developed out of — a deep sense people now have about the conditions of their lives in complex societies. People are aware of the existence under various forms of present social life of various forms of unfreedom. The complexities of social life being what they are, and the surveyable social alternatives all remaining marked by some modes of domination, people feel powerless to do anything in social life to increase human freedom significantly. Is it possible that human beings may some day no longer have to work to satisfy their needs? No. Is it possible that they may come to do their work without having a structured social organization, within which some groups of people (parents, judges, teachers, etc.) have powers that others lack? No. A sense of powerlessness in the face of present modes of domination and social complexities - perhaps the deepest legacy, in Paris, of May 1968 - when coupled with the apparent historical facts about ideologies, then leads to a sense that ideologies, hopeless reactions against social unfreedom, are inevitable. Can we stop having them - either by solving the problem of human freedom or by tragically accepting its unsolvability - any more than we can stop dreaming? The thought that we cannot has its plausibility. Human subjects, it seems, are subjects of ideology. HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND THE FUNCTIONS OF THE ARTS The consequences for art of such a view of human subjects are immediate and powerful. Six habits of thought about art that are motivated by the Althusserian view of subjects are powerfully manifest in contemporary criticism (even if not always fully consistent with one another). (1) Where traditional Kantian critics, formalist critics, or humanist Marxist critics (such as Marcuse)27 all see works of art and literature as exemplary envisionings, born of genius in its engagement with a tradition of such envisionings, of human freedom (variously conceived in contexts), ideology critics under the influence of Althusser and structural Marxism are now inclined to dwell less on the contents of such envisionings and more on their internal structures and (often disguised) histories of formation. Instead of elucidating an author's or a painter's self-consciousness, genius, or understanding of freedom, an ideological critic is more likely now to point to how 206

AJthusser and ideological criticism of the arts the author or painter has been interpellated, that is, how the author or painter has come to a vision of human freedom by interacting with (perhaps refusing or negating) a sectarian piece of false consciousness about how to accept, reform, or overthrow existing relations of production so as to produce human freedom. Authors or painters will be seen to have taken their sectarian and false reactions to existing relations of production less from their genius in relation to tradition than from the church, from the artistic elite, from a rising bourgeois class, from the working class, from the consciousness of men, or whatever, in all their one-sidedness. It will then further be pointed out that the ideology thus inscribed in the work involves the repression or domination of some other social group - atheists or workers or women or whatever - whose interests and (likewise, of course, sectarian) conceptions of freedom are opposed to the interests and conceptions of the social group from whom the artist's conception was developed, the social group, that is, that "interpellated" the artist as the subject or creator of his artistic production. (2) To the extent that critics acknowledge any preferences for particular works of art and literature, it will typically be not for universalist works that pretend to speak from and to a universalist human condition (works, as Wordsworth put it, of "a man speaking to men"), but for explicitly localist works. Not Wordsworth but John Clare, not Pollock or Rothko or Louis but local weavers and watercolorists, not John Updike but Raymond Carver, are the heroines and heroes of art. Not high and universal works of art, but immediately local productions of texts and artifacts are what is of interest: what is naive, not what is sentimental, in Schiller's terms.28 As one recent, prominent, feminist, post-Althusserian critic has claimed, the "two-page autobiography," written in "the first decades of the century" by an "anonymous 'Seamer on Men's Underwear,'" despite its "somewhat hackneyed style" and artistically simple, "circumstantial," accumulations of "events from the melancholy to the melodramatic," despite its cliches and "sentimentality," is at least as interesting as other texts in that its writer "had a unique sense of herself both as an individual and as member of the working class" that she did not repress.29 (3) In keeping with the relative devaluing of high and universal art, the aim of critical study is recast as knowledge of a work's contextual conditions of determination, rather than appreciation or evaluation of its envisionings. Critical study of the arts is now to tell us not how we might best imagine our futures, how we might by following 207

Richard EJdridge artistic envisionings of genius ourselves avoid sentimentality and cliche, but rather how class and gender antagonisms in society are "spoken" - both noticed and repressed - by the texts of art. Works of art are now to be interrogated as showing us the social antagonisms and illusions about their resolutions that were typical of members of a certain class (author or painter and their audiences) in a given society at a given time. The aim of criticism is not the elucidation of the powers of high art, but positive historico-social knowledge. (4) When artistic works do not explicitly comment upon or notice their social conditions of production, this failure of notice will typically be taken to have proceeded from unconscious notice overlain by repression. Works are read as palimpsests of such unconscious awarenesses and their refusal. Thus, for example, we are told that Wordsworth in writing "Tintern Abbey" must have been aware of such things as the fact that the actual abbey was a site where vagrant beggars from the armies of the Napoleonic wars sought alms, but must further have repressed that awareness (while nonetheless manifesting it to the canny reader) in titling his poem in full "Lines Composed A Few MiJes Above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13,1798" (italics added). And so on for other bits of detail throughout the poem. In "Tintern Abbey," "the primary poetic action is the suppression of the social."30 As one trenchant critic of this way of reading has observed, it is not obviously true that everything that is not present in a poem is repressed or canceled. "Tintern Abbey" may be titled as it is largely because it is a loco-descriptive poem, composed in a certain spot a few miles above the abbey. If we are to say that "Tintern Abbey" suppresses the social, then we might as well "say that a drawing 'cancels' the oil painting it might have been, or that a solo partita 'suppresses' the symphonic mode it might have been written in." 31 Yet, against this criticism, the Althusserian critic has an extraordinarily plausible general conception of the human subject as a subject of ideology to deploy, and, armed with this conception, the critic has very little trouble reading "Tintern Abbey" in detail, in subtle and interesting ways, as arguing, just as the bourgeosie has always argued, that significance and freedom are achieved in a human life by individual minds in interaction with nature - surely, it will be argued, a piece of false consciousness, an ideology. Once one has a conception of the subject that encourages one to look for expressions of ideology, they are not hard to find. Once found, they do not appear to be accidental to the poem's argument and intentions. 208

AJthusser and ideological criticism of the arts The aim of the canny critic is then to ferret out such unconscious awarenesses and repressions in even those works that may seem most innocent of them. (5) To the extent that any attitudes toward existing relations of production and evaluative, ideological reactions to them are held to be more worth having than others, there is a pronounced tendency within ideological criticism to favor diffuse attitudes of directionless resistance. Rather than appreciating accommodationist or reformist or revolutionist attitudes in art toward existing relations of production, and rather than developing such attitudes on their own, ideological critics of the arts will typically tend both to praise and to maintain a certain sort of detachment and disengagement from the political. This will often take the form of praising artistic and literary works that, while acknowledging their social conditions of formation, fail to achieve closure in a formed understanding of human possibilities — fragmentary works, say, that simply break off, or that reveal the authors' disunity of subjectivity in her or his multiple, inconsistent interpellations. (There are obvious affinities with poststructuralist and deconstructionist stances here.) Here the preferences will be against Anne Tyler and for Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme, against Helen Frankenthaler and for Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, against Jennifer Bartlett and for Cindy Sherman. The sublimities of resistance to, refusal of, being any one thing in social life, intermingled with awareness that social life solicits or interpellates us in various ways, is the hallmark of advanced artistic and critical consciousness. (6) The interest in sectarian interpellations rather than in contents of artistic envisionings, the preference for localism against (always inauthentic) universalism, the seeking of socio-historical knowledge rather than the developing of elucidatory appreciations, the attention to unconscious awarenesses and repressions in all works, and the development and appreciation of rhetorics of resistances without closures, all tend to encourage a considerable shyness or hesitancy about evaluation in the arts. From what standpoint, in whose name, could standards or even looser principles of evaluation be developed? Do not conceptions of artistic success and value themselves proceed from the very same class affiliations and interpellations as artistic works themselves? At best, it seems, the critic might "intervene" in cultural life from a particular point of view, writing as a partisan of the working class, as a woman, as an elite modernist, or whatever. "Disinterested" "rational" evaluation seems to disappear 209

Richard Eldridge along with disinterested, universal artistic production. (And it is hard to see how dogmatic invocations of taste in the manner of Hilton Kramer or of Clement Greenberg in places will be of much help in resisting the conception of the human subject as ideological that underlies this evaluative hesitancy.) These six features permeate the artistic and literary criticism of our cultural moment. They are fed by historical considerations about persistent unfreedom in human societies displaying various class relations coupled with a kind of despair or hopelessness about bringing human freedom into the world in social life. These historical considerations and this sense of despair are powerfully expressed in Althusser's "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses." Against the vision of the human subject as ideological that it puts forward, it will not do to point to the fact that that essay itself has an ideological stance. "Of course," an Althusserian will reply, "it does: the essay is itself an intervention, not a master discourse. See if you can do better, can write from the point of view of humanity as such; you can't." Nor will it do to attack the six habits of thought that permeate contemporary criticism piecemeal or on their own, without engaging with the general Althusserian conception of the human subject that supports them. Nor will it do simply to deny the historical considerations about domination and the present sense of despair that Althusser expresses and that people feel. The historical considerations are well founded; unfreedom and varieties of evaluative response to it have existed under manifold forms of social life, under wide varieties of relations of production. And how would one criticize a sense of despair? There is perhaps not even any question of whether Althusserian conceptions of the human subject and Althusserian critical stances are true or false apart from whether we do or do not manage to recover a kind of self-confidence as human subjects. Althusserianism may reasonably seem less attractive if, but only if, we manage to recast our social lives and class relations as expressions of a universal human interest. And how would we do that? But perhaps - this must be tentative - there is a way of accepting Althusserian, relations-of-production-Marxist historical insights and of acknowledging the naturalness of present social despair while shifting slightly the tone in which these insights and this despair are given voice. Perhaps it is true that the history of successive forms of relations of production is a history of successive forms of human domination. Perhaps it is true that human beings naturally react evaluatively to such domination and fantasize or envision its amelior210

AJthusser and ideological criticism of the arts ation or removal. Perhaps it is true that their envisionings proceed always in part from a class position, from interpellations, and are not fully attractive to those outside that class position. Perhaps their art must always reflect such sectarian envisionings, rooted in the historical experiences of classes. Aaron Copland is not Charlie Parker; Raymond Carver is not John Updike. Explaining and elucidating artistic and literary production as reflecting in part the experiences and outlooks of a social class is a standing possibility for criticism. Yet there may also be distinctions to be drawn. Althusserian criticism tends to regard all sectarian envisionings of human freedom as equivalent in value. Roughly, from the facts that all such envisionings are in part sectarian and in part unattractive to some members of some classes at some historical time, it is concluded that all such envisionings, and all artistic productions that express them, are equally worthless: hence the structuralism, the localism, the interest in knowledge not appreciation, the attention to repressed awarenesses of complicities, the rhetorics of diffuse resistances, and the shyness about evaluation that dominate contemporary criticism. But equivalent one-sidedness in envisionings of human freedom does not entail equivalent worthlessness. To develop, albeit against a sectarian background, new forms of shared aspiration, individuality, and intelligibility, and to do that with grace and power and craft, is not mechanically to reproduce socialized humanity as it stands, but to call us in some specific ways to something better. James Michener is not Salman Rushdie; Jerry Lewis is not Jean Renoir; Tony Roche is not Rod Laver. Appreciation and elucidation of such socially inflected exercises of grace and power and craft are likewise standing possibilities of criticism. Human subjects have common multiple interests. They are not prisoners of the interests of their classes. Workers and owners, men and women, serfs and lords, peasants and bureaucrats, may all have interests among other things in their autonomy and in human solidarity, in health, in discovering and cultivating their talents whatever they may be, or in their friends and families. It may well be that there can be no society, no set of relations of productions, that enables the universal and full satisfaction of all these divergent interests. Under some sets of relations of production, certain of these genuine and universal human interests may be more fully repressed than under others, and more fully repressed for certain classes than for others. When it happens that under an existing set of relations of production certain genuine human interests are repressed, then in 211

Richard Eldridge reaction certain utterances, images, musical themes, plastic forms, and so on can remind us — all of us — of the importance of these interests. Such reminders to us all then stand as culturally specific and personal expressions of common aspirations to a collective freedom. A society of whatever political structure in which wide ranges of such reminders are encouraged and attended to is at least in that respect better than one in which they are not. Art may serve, as one critic has it, in a vision that is not so far, perhaps, from what is common to humanist Marxism, New Criticism, post-Aristotelian historicist humanism, and Kantianism, as the perennial "cultural psychic monitoring"32 of what we have done and continue to do to ourselves under various relations of production and as the exemplary envisioning of something better. Such artistic envisionings, inflected by the sectarian though they may be, offer us various "models of what we can make of ourselves" that "elicit fundamental forms of desire and admiration," call to us not to repeat or imitate them but to follow after them in liberating our common humanity against a background of culture.33

Notes 1 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses," first published in La Pensee, 1970; English translation in Lenin and Philosophy, tr. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 123-173; excerpted in Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (eds.), Critical Theory Since 1965 (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1989), pp. 238-250. Subsequent references to this essay will be to the excerpted version in Adams and Searle, likely to be the most readily available and influential version of the essay, and will be given in the text in page and column numbers, in parentheses. 2 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 3 Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). 4 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 87. 5 Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, "Louis Althusser" (editors' introduction to "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses"), in Adams and Searle (eds.), Critical Theory Since 1965, pp. 238, 239. 6 Gregory Elliott, "The lonely hour of the last instance: Louis Pierre Althusser, 1918-1990," Radical Philosophy 57 (Spring, 1991), 30. 7 Karl Marx, "Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy/' in Early Writings, tr. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 425. 212

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8 G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 134. 9 Ibid., p. 45. 10 Ibid., p. 135. 11 Ibid., p. 153. 12 See ibid., p. 152. 13 Ibid., p. 158. 14 Ibid., p. 291. 15 Ibid., pp. 306-307. 16 Louis Althusser, For Marx, (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 113. It is useful to compare Althusser's stance here with a recent criticism of G. A. Cohen's optimism. Joshua Cohen, "Review of G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History," The Journal of Philosophy 79/5 (May, 1982), 253-273, has argued that Cohen is over-optimistic and is wrong to hold that the forces of production grow autonomously; rather they grow only under political arrangements that may be willed for a variety of reasons even in the long run: for example, perhaps because tyrants enjoy despotism. Consequently the development thesis and the premises about human nature do not entail the primacy thesis. G. A. Cohen and Will Kymlicka, "Human nature and social change in the Marxist conception of history," The Journal of Philosophy 85/4 (April, 1988), 171-191, have replied that of course the forces of production grow only under relations of production, not autonomously or by themselves, but they nonetheless autonomously tend to grow, in the long run more or less no matter what relations of production obtain. This reply perhaps misses the point, however, that a so far persistent tendency toward growth may not now be decisive enough to be beneficent for a society of full equal freedom. 17 Sheelagh Strawbridge, "From 'overdetermination' to 'structural causality': some unresolved problems in Althusser's treatment of causality," Radical Philosophy 38 (Summer, 1984), 12A. 18 See ibid, for a very clear and useful treatment of overdetermination and structural causality in Althusser. 19 Ibid. p. 12A. See also Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 134. 20 Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, tr. David Macey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), esp. pp. 1-187, is the best general survey of Lacan's work. 21 Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, p. 64. 22 Jacques Lacan, "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage," Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), p. 282. 23 Lacan, "L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient," Ecrits, p. 521. 24 Coward and Ellis, Language and Materialism, p. 75. Italics added. 25 Ibid., p. 92. 26 Richard Wollheim, Freud (London: Fontana, 1971), pp. 65-106, esp. pp. 65-79, provides a useful summary of the mechanisms of the dreamwork. 213

Richard Eldridge 27 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, tr. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). 28 Juliet Sychrava, Derrida to SchiJIer: Idealism in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) argues impressively for the interest of naive, non-sentimental, localist, "material," works in general and the poetry of John Clare, in comparison with that of Wordsworth, in particular. 29 Lillian S. Robinson, 'Treason our text: feminist challenges to the literary canon," in Adams and Searle (eds.), Critical Theory Since 1965, p. 581A. 30 Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 37. 31 Helen Vendler, " Tintern Abbey': two assaults," typescript of an address delivered to the conference "Romanticism and Revolution," Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA. April, 1989, p. 6. 32 Ibid., p. 12. See also Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood: PhiJosphy, Literature, Criticism and Self-Under standing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) for an extended account of how poets and novelists attend to modes of the repression of multiple and genuine human interests and describe partial overcomings of these repressions. 33 Charles Altieri, "An idea and an ideal of a literary canon," Critical Inquiry 10/1 (September, 1983), 47, 51. The distinction between imitation and following after or succession [Nachfolge] appears in Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement tr. J.C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 171. It is nicely associated in Timothy Gould, "The audience of originality: Kant and Wordsworth on the reception of genius," in Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (eds.), Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). I am grateful to Anthony J. Cascardi, Ivan Gaskell, and Salim Kemal for detailed and useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and to Jay M. Bernstein for conversations across this terrain.

214

Film, rhetoric, and ideology NOEL CARROLL

INTRODUCTION Until recently, the major recurring question of value that confronted film theorists was whether film could be an art, and, thus, a source of artistic value. In the earliest stages of film theory, this worry was made urgent by the existence of certain anti-mimetic prejudices with respect to photography. For photography was regarded to be a purely mechanical process of recording, and, hence, essentially inartistic. Consequently, film, whose central constituent is photographic, likewise found its artistic credentials under fire. As a result, the self-appointed task of members of the first generation of film theorists, like Rudolph Arnheim,1 was to demonstrate, often at length, the ways in which film could diverge expressively from what was thought of as the mere reproduction of reality. And, in the course of these demonstrations, film aesthetics was born. For in showing the ways in which cinematic devices creatively reconstructed pro-filmic events,2 an inventory of artistic structures was enumerated. Moreover, the task of establishing the artistic potentials of film proceeded under certain constraints. For it was thought that if film had genuinely artistic potentials, they would have to be of a uniquely cinematic variety. That is, film would not be shown to be an art were it simply mimicking theater. Rather, it had to be established that film had some range of essentially cinematic effects, possessed by no other art forms, which, at the same time, performed some demonstrably artistic function (such as, for example, expression). Thus, for much of its history, film theory operated within an essentialist framework. Theorists, of course, disagreed over what they took to constitute the essential features and powers of cinema: 215

Noel Carroll for Arnheim it involved the expressive reconstruction of reality, while for Andre Bazin it was a matter of the objective re-presentation of reality.3 However, until the late sixties and early seventies, most of the conversation of what might be called classical film theory gravitated toward securing the artistic value of film by means of identifying its essentially cinematic capacities.4 But, as the sixties turned into the seventies, the essentialist project in film theory found itself embattled from two directions: a neoWittgensteinian suspicion of essences, on the one hand,5 and semiotics, of an implicitly anti-essentialist sort, on the other. These pressures, along with a rising sense that film theory should leave off its primary preoccupation with aesthetics, and examine the role of cinema in society, spelled the demise of at least one sort of film theory. From the early seventies onward, film theory became less concerned with the aesthetic value of cinema and more obsessed with its social value. Moreover, the primary social role that film theorists came to attribute to film was negative. Film, particularly but not exclusively the mass entertainment cinema, was regarded as predominantly - and for many (ironically enough) essentially6 - an agency of ideological manipulation, a means by which ostensibly oppressive systems, notably capitalism, sustain dominion. Thus, the leading hypothesis amongst contemporary film theorists is that film is an instrument of ideology, and their research program is a matter of identifying the relevant levers of ideological manipulation that cinema affords. As a result, the central preoccupation of film studies in the United States today concerns the ideological effect of cinema on its audiences. Film studies in the United States became a widespread and established academic discipline in the seventies. Its preoccupation with ideology is a reflection of the conviction of the academic generation of the sixties and seventies that everything is political. Within contemporary film studies, it is typical to invoke a contrast between research into the ideological dimensions of film and a concern with aesthetics - of the sort one finds in earlier generations of film theorists - where, furthermore, a concern with aesthetics is often regarded as not merely old-fashioned, but potentially reactionary. Moreover, not only are contemporary film scholars generally agreed that ideology is their central topic; they are also convinced that they have at their disposal a theoretical framework for analyzing the ideological effect of the cinema. For the sake of convenience, I will call this framework Althusserian.7 My purpose in this paper is to 216

Film, rhetoric, and ideology suggest a rival approach to the analysis of ideology in cinema, to that of the dominant Althusserianism of contemporary film theorists. Unlike contemporary film theorists, I do not think that aesthetics is either beside the point or pernicious. But I do agree with them that film is (often) a vehicle for conveying ideology and that it is worthwhile to attempt to get some general (theoretical) understanding of the ways in which cinema performs this function. That is, I do not want to suggest that we abandon questions of aesthetic value with respect to film. But we may, at the same time, accommodate the concerns of contemporary theorists with the ideological operations of film. Indeed, I hope to introduce ways of thinking about the ideological operation of film - in terms of the notion of rhetoric - that are superior, theoretically, to what the reigning Althusserian model proposes. THE ALTHUSSERIAN MODEL In order to set the stage for the rival approach that I wish to advocate, something needs to be said about the presuppositions of the Althusserian film theory. There are two fundamental tenets of this theory. The first is that ideology in film is not simply a matter of the content of films. Rather, ideology is, so to speak, built into the very instruments of cinema: the camera, especially in terms of perspective,8 and the projection apparatus. 9 Moreover, narrative structure as well as the customary figures of film editing - such as point-of-view editing10 are also taken to be inherently ideological.11 Thus, the first tenet of Althusserian theory maintains that what others might tend to call the formal conditions and formal structures of cinema are themselves ideological. In this sense, of course, using the word "formal" itself is a misnomer, since these structures are, ex hypothesi, primary disseminators of ideology. This tenet of Althusserian film theory can be summed up by saying that cinema is essentially or inherently ideological. The second tenet of Althusserian film theory concerns the ideological effect of what I call, perhaps tendentiously, the formal elements of film. This effect is a matter of instilling in the film viewer the impression or illusion that he or she is a unified and autonomous subject. That is, film theorists believe that certain structures of cinematic representation, such as perspectival representation, impart or reinforce the viewer's faith in his/her identity as what contemporary film theorists label (dubiously, I think) a Cartesian subject or ego. 217

Noel Carroll What does regarding oneself as what contemporary film theorists call a Cartesian ego have to do with ideology? Presumably, such a subject considers itself to be free. But contemporary film theorists think that this is false. Individuals are shaped by the cultures in which they are raised and their choices - including those which appear to them as free choices - are socially mandated. Given this, imparting the impression of freedom, it is thought, has a function for the status quo. It encourages the impression that the choices dictated by the culture at large are free choices, thereby encouraging the subject in the illusion that the roles, choices, and beliefs that are imposed upon her by the culture are really her own. The dominant social system functions smoothly, that is, by instilling the conviction in its subjects that their decisions are freely made, whereas, under the Althusserian dispensation, they are, in reality, completely constructed by the social system in the interests of the dominant order. All cultural life turns out to be ideological in this framework. If something is cultural, it is ideological or, what amounts to the same thing, it is socially constructed. A primary function of ideology is to obscure the operation of social construction. Of central importance, in this regard, is inspiring the belief or, in the jargon of film studies, the misrecognition on the part of the subject that she is a unified, free agent rather than a consummate social construction. Cinema participates in this central function of ideology by deploying structures — such as the perspectival image, narrative closure, point-of-view editing, a certain type of projection arrangement — all of which are claimed to enhance the spectator's conviction that she is a unified, free subject. Space does not allow the rehearsal of how this misrecognition is supposedly counterfeited in each case. But for illustrative purposes, let me say that it is widely believed that perspective putatively enjoins the viewer to embrace the illusion that she is at the center of an optical array - i.e., at the monocular station point of the perspectival image. This central position, moreover, is a single point in space, and it is supposed that the attending impression of singularity promotes the conviction of unity in the subject, thereby securing the principal ideological effect of the Althusserian theory. There are a great many problems with the characterization of the operation of ideology endorsed by contemporary film theorists. I will briefly discuss a few of them in order to motivate the proposal of a rival conception of the way in which we might think of the ideological operation of film. 218

Film, rhetoric, and ideology The first tenet of the Althusserian theory - that film is inherently ideological - seems to me suspect. Undeniably, many films may function ideologically to celebrate the values and assumptions of the status quo. For example, many cavalry films of the forties and fifties valorized the conquest of the American West while dehumanizing the claims of the indigenous, native populations. However, it seems equally possible to make a film from an oppositional position that mobilizes the resources of conventional cinema and that at the same time contests the ideology of the status quo. However, if the film employs cameras and projection in standard ways; if it tells a story with a beginning, a middle and an end; and if it advances that story by means of continuity editing, it will, according to contemporary film theorists, be ideological. Thus, John Sayles's film Matewan could not avoid being ideological once certain decisions were made about designing it to be accessible for general audiences. It would appear that any film that is not an exercise in modernist reflexivity is unavoidably ideological (though, of course, many contemporary film theorists are also suspicious of the prospects of modernism for different reasons). I believe that this is an extremely counterintuitive conclusion. Any approach to the analysis of ideology in film ought to resist the conclusion that film as such, or film of a certain form - say conventional narrative cinema - is inherently or essentially ideological. The claim that film is ideological by virtue of its formal structures is putatively supported by the analyses that film theorists offer of the various structures in question. Without going through these analyses one at a time here, I shall merely say that I find them consistently ill-advised. For example, in my brief summary of the case against perspective, one immediately notes that the reasoning proceeds by means of a number of hasty inferences. Even if we suppose that a perspectival image imparts to the viewer a sense of being posited at a single monocular station point, we immediately wonder why thinking that one is occupying a single point in space would give one the impression that one was unified in the requisite sense - what does occupying a single point in space have to do with, for example, the impression of being an autonomous agent?12 Indeed, the accounts that one finds by contemporary film theorists of the dynamics according to which interactions with formal film structures result in the film viewer misrecognizing herself as a Cartesian ego seem uniformly strained. Of course, there is an even deeper problem here. The contemporary 219

Noel Carroll film theorist assumes that it is a necessary element of capitalist ideology that we all conceive of ourselves - via misrecognition - to be what they call Cartesian subjects, subjects who believe that they are unified in the sense of not being socially constructed and who, it is said, therefore, mistakenly take themselves to be autonomous agents. However, on the one hand, it is doubtful that a culture like capitalism requires that its citizens endorse any single conception of the subject of the generality of the film theorists' so-called Cartesian subject. Couldn't capitalism flourish if we were all behaviorists or if we thought of ourselves in terms of Hume's bundles? Couldn't a population of Zen Buddhists supply a coterie of happy workers? And, alternatively, couldn't the putative delusion that we are Cartesian egos underwrite a culture quite different than that of capitalism? The contemporary film theorist wants to reduce metaphysics to politics. This is not only a problem because of the way in which these theorists attempt to "read" a metaphysics of the subject into the formal structures of cinema. But, in addition, the metaphysical commitments they supposedly discern are underdetermined with respect to the political purposes that they may serve. Along with their assimilation of metaphysics to ideology, contemporary film theorists also, often expressly, conflate the notion of ideology with that of culture. To show that something is cultural, to show that it is a social construction, in their view, warrants the inference that it is ideological. Perhaps this presumption is underwritten by the notion that whenever society comes into the picture, the powers that be enter in such a way as to ensure that whatever conventions or conceptions we arrive at will be to the advantage of the status quo. This does not seem to be empirically plausible; surely there are practices and beliefs that arise outside the dominant culture - e.g., break-dancing and other subcultural expressions. Indeed, even within mainstream culture, it seems possible for ideas and practices to emerge that do not serve the status quo, such as the anti-war movement of the sixties. And, more importantly, the view of contemporary theorists presupposes that any culture, virtually by definition, is politically complicit, which, of course, makes the point of criticizing ideology from the perspective of a vision of emancipatory social relations pointless.13 However, there does seem to be a point in criticizing certain films as ideological. But in order to do this we need a trimmer conception of ideology than one that identifies the ideological with the cultural. Thus, the first step in constructing an approach that is rival to the 220

Film, rhetoric, and ideology Althusserian view is to specify what we mean by "ideology," and to assure that our conception of ideology does not conflate it with culture in general. IDEOLOGY AND RHETORIC Originally "ideology" pertained to the study of ideas; Lockean epistemologists were ideologues in this sense.14 However, the notion gradually narrowed so that it applied to political ideas or ideas that were politically significant, especially in terms of those ideas that were politically useful for supporting oppression. Following this heritage, I want to restrict the domain of what is ideological to ideas, primarily: to beliefs understood as propositions held assertively - where the propositions may be vague, especially in terms of quantification (e.g., "People are funny") - and to categorical frameworks.15 Taking beliefs first, I hypothesize that in order to be ideological, a belief or the way it is held must be in some sense epistemically defective. It is either false, or it is ambiguous, or it is connected to other beliefs in a way that is misleading or unwarranted.16 "The unemployed are just lazy" is a straightforward example of such a belief. Of course, it is not enough for a belief to be false or otherwise defective epistemically for it to be ideological: "2 + 2 = 1492" is false, but to my knowledge it has not, as yet, ever been employed ideologically. To be ideological an epistemically defective proposition has to be used in a certain way. Specifically, it has to be used as a tenet - as a slogan, a premise, a principle, etc. - in some system of social domination. To show that a proposition with its corresponding belief is ideological, one must show that it is epistemically defective and that its continued invocation plays a role in practices of social domination. Stated roughly, x is an ideological belief if and only if (1) x is false (or otherwise epistemically defective) and (2) x is employed as a tenet in some system of social domination. Of course, as noted above, ideological ideas may not merely take the form of propositions, but may be of the order of categorical frameworks, i.e., ways of carving up phenomena. 17 For example, if a society like ours tends to portray African-Americans as either drug-crazy criminals or saints, then that grid distorts the way in which someone who employs this optic forms expectations and assessments about the behavior of AfricanAmericans. This framework, moreover, may readily perform a service 221

Noel Carroll in continuing social oppression since persons failing to evince sainthood are likely to be consigned to the criminal class and treated with suspicion. So a categorical framework is ideological if it is distorting, where that distortion performs some role in a system or practice of social domination. In contrast to the Althusserian approach, then, showing that a film or a segment of a film is ideological is not a matter of indicating that it is a social construction, but of demonstrating that it promotes ideological ideas - either false beliefs or distorting categorical schemes that function to support some system of social domination. The Althusserian approach locates central levers of ideology in the formal structures of film. I have at least suggested some reasons why this is a problematic way to go. In contrast, I want to hypothesize that whether a film is ideological is a function of its internal organization or, more specifically, what I call its rhetorical organization, i.e., the particular organization of its narrative and pictorial elements in such a way that it promotes or encourages ideological beliefs or frameworks in viewers. The idea that the locus of ideology in film resides in the way in which specific films articulate their stories and images is fairly commonsensical. It would not seem to be worth dignifying by the title of ''an approach" were it not the case that, at present, most contemporary film theorists think that they have isolated a deeper level of ideological manipulation in film, viz., that of generic film structures, like perspective. This has the liability of being overly general in two ways: it makes all films - or at least all films that employ certain generic structures - ideological and it makes them all ideological in the same way, always encouraging spectators to misrecognize themselves as Cartesian subjects. Alternatively, the view that ideological beliefs are propagated by films through their specific rhetorical organization allows both that some films may not be ideological — if they promote no ideological beliefs — and that there can be quite a range of ideological beliefs, including ones that may not pertain to issues of personal identity.18 To say that ideological beliefs are propagated by films by means of their rhetorical organization is pretty uninformative, unless we have some idea of what the notion of "rhetorical organization" signifies. So, how do I understand rhetoric and how is that relevant to analyzing the ideological operation of film? Rhetoric is a matter of influencing thought - a matter of persuasion, as a consequence of presenting material in a way that is structured to 222

Film, rhetoric, and ideology secure an audience's belief in certain conclusions, or, at least, their favorable disposition toward those conclusions. Those conclusions may be stated outright by the orator, or the listener may come to embrace them in so far as they are strongly implied by, insinuated by, or presupposed by the rhetoric in question. Moreover, many of the techniques of oratory can be adapted to narrative film-making so as to promote beliefs or openness to beliefs in audiences. From my perspective, where those beliefs are epistemically defective and where instilling them contributes to a system of social domination, they are ideological. That rhetorical strategies may be implemented in narrative film should be fairly obvious. Aristotle, for example, points out that establishing one's good character is influential in securing a speaker's point of view.19 Similarly, in narrative films, an ideological perspective may be advanced by a character, and the persuasiveness of the view may hinge, in part, on portraying the said fictional character as virtuous. In Hollywood films, these virtues - strength, fortitude, ingenuity, bravery - are more often Greek than Christian. However, quite frequently in Hollywood films, a character is designated virtuous in terms of his courteous, respectful, and thoughtful treatment of supporting characters, especially ones who are poor, weak, old, lame, wrongfully oppressed, children, etc. - that is, characters who are in some sense the protagonist's "inferiors," but whom the protagonist treats with consideration (notably in contrast to the villain, who is apt to handle his social inferiors quite brutishly - kicking dogs, etc.). Democratic courtesy to one's "inferiors," as well as protectiveness toward the weak, and an overall aura of "niceness" (toward other "nice" characters) can function as a means of representing protagonists in such a way as to make the positions - which may be ideological - that they uphold attractive. Likewise, Aristotle points out that a crucial form of rhetorical argument is the example, of which the fable or invented story is a major variation.20 And clearly whole film narratives can serve as rhetorical examples. Andre Bazin took Orson Welles's Citizen Kane as an example supporting the contention that "there is no profit in gaining the whole world if one has lost one's own childhood." 21 Of course, this rhetorical function is not unique to film narrative; a narrative in any art form can operate this way. For instance, Arthur Miller's drama Death of a Salesman functions as an argumentative example, advancing the viewpoint that the American Dream and its corresponding cult of appearances are ultimately destructive. 223

Noel Carroll Nevertheless, where film narratives serve as argumentative examples for views that are epistemically defective and tenets in some practice of social domination, their rhetorical effect will be ideological. Among Aristotle's insights into the rhetorical strategies of persuasion is the importance of the enthymeme - the syllogism that leaves something out and that requires the audience to fill in the missing premise.22 Indeed, Aristotle thought that this form of rhetorical argument was the most effective one available. The advantage of this device for the rhetorician is that it engages the audience as participants in the process of argument in such a way that listeners, by what Arthur Danto calls "an almost inevitable movement of mind," supply what is needed for the argument to go through.23 This enhances the credibility of the argument for the listener; in so far as she has the impression of reaching the missing segment on her own, she may regard it as her own idea. For example, rhetorical questions function as a means of bringing the listener to certain conclusions before the orator states them outright. And, when the orator does, subsequently, state them outright, the listener then greets them favourably as conclusions that she probably already formed on her own. That is, "when an arguer suppresses one or more parts of a rhetorical syllogism, the arguer invites an audience to complete it, thereby contributing to its own persuasion and exhibiting its rationality in the process." 24 Narrative films are not arguments. But they often do presuppose ideas which the audience fills in in order for the narrative to be intelligible. Narrative films may be thought of as rhetorical, then, in so far as they are structured to lead the audience to fill in certain ideas about human conduct in the process of rendering the story intelligible to themselves. For example, in James Whale's film The Bride of Frankenstein, there is a scene in which the monster is alone, raging through the forest. At one point, he begins to hear offscreen music, issuing from an unseen fiddle. His demeanor changes from that of a rampaging monster to one marked by childlike yearning. In order for the scene to make sense to the viewer, one must realize and fill in what is being presupposed, namely a commonplace principle of behavior that goes something like "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast." That is, the narrative is structured in such a way as to elicit this presupposition - which is of the order of a cultural commonplace from the audience in its own process of making sense of the action. We may call this operation the narrative enthymeme. Though it is not 224

Film, rhetoric, and ideology the only rhetorical structure available in film, it is a crucial one - one whose significance has not been extensively discussed. In the remainder of this essay, I want to explore this device further as a way of expanding our understanding of one very important way in which film, especially narrative film, disseminates ideology. Narratives presuppose all sorts of vague generalizations as conditions of intelligibility. The audience must supply them as it supplies the missing premise in oratorical enthymemes. Moreover, where the unstated generalizations are made explicit, they have resonance because we have already been prompted in their direction by the structure of the story. Typical episodes of the eternally rerun TV series Star Trek exemplify this nicely. Very often, these programs will conclude with a vaguely liberal observation by Captain Kirk, which takes the form of a generalization that comprehends the action in terms of an organizing moral that is virtually on the audience's lips already - precisely because the story has been structured in such a way as to elicit it from the viewer. For example, in the installment entitled "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," race hatred is explored through the conflict between two aliens from the planet Charon. One, called Loki, is a revolutionist; the left side of his body, from head to foot, is black and the right side is white. His pursuer, Beal, represents the master race on Charon; he is black on the right and white on the left. Loki and Beal loathe each other and they are prone to denounce each other by means of racially loaded epithets. Of course, the difference between them seems insignificant to the viewer and we feel that Spock has merely verbalized our own conclusions when he remarks that they look as if they belong to the same race. The underlying theme of this episode which the action illustrates - is that the kind of irrational, racial hatred that these two Charonites bear toward each other can only lead to their own destruction and the destruction of their respective races. This is borne out by the plot - indeed it is the presupposition that makes the plot intelligible — and when Capt. Kirk intones lines like "There's nobody alive on Charon because of hate" and "You both must end up dead if you don't stop hating," the audience hears its own surmises stated, thereby disposing it favorably toward Kirk's conclusions.25 Of course, this sort of structure is not only found in what might be thought of as the simplistic narratives of mass culture. When Oedipus Rex ends with the Chorus singing that we should count no mortal as fortunate until he/she is dead (and safely out of harm's way), we hear 225

NoeJ CarroJJ the articulation of the presupposition of the vivid example (the story of Oedipus) that we have just witnessed and which was predicated on bringing us to just this sobering viewpoint. Also crucial to the rhetorician for securing conviction from audiences - as may already be evident from my examples - is the manipulation of commonplaces, cliches and what Aristotle called maxims. The rhetorician exploits what is common or familiar in order to gain the assent of the audience. That is, the rhetorician uses what the audience is already likely to believe or have cognitively available in order to encourage acceptance of the rhetorician's viewpoint. The use of commonplaces is also thought to encourage conviction because it leaves the audience with the impression that what it's heard is what it already believes and that the conclusions the rhetorician reaches are, again, its own conclusions. For the rhetorician has elicited these conclusions from the audience by way of generally accepted commonplaces and, indeed, the conclusion which the rhetorician ideally tries to inspire in the mind of the audience even before it is uttered - is itself often couched in commonplaces. Of course, where the rhetorician has already inspired the commonplace in the mind of the audience before it is uttered, the effect of uttering it will be that the audience may recognize the utterance as its own concurrent thinking on the matter. The relevance of the role of commonplaces in oratory to what we can call narrative enthymemes is, of course, that the presuppositions that the narrative prompts the audience to fill in are generally of the nature of commonplaces or cliches or nostrums or platitudes of a general sort about the nature of human conduct and behavior. The narrative functions to dispose the audience toward mobilizing these commonplace generalizations in the process of rendering the narrative intelligible to itself, thereby reinforcing the audience's faith in them by virtue of the impression that the audience has reached these conclusions "on its own." And, of course, where these commonplaces themselves are ideological, the rhetorical operation of the film - here understood as importantly but not exclusively as prompting the filling in of commonplace presuppositions - is ideological.26 In order to clarify the application of these points about rhetoric to film, an illustration will be useful. Consider the original version of Back to the Future. The point of the film seems to be that anything can be altered by acts of individual will. This is the general principle or premise that the film dramatizes, and, in order for the film to make sense to audiences, they must embrace, or, at least, entertain it.27 That 226

Film, rhetoric, and ideology is, if the film is to appear as a coherent whole to them, they will have seen it in the light of this generalization. In addition, this generalization is a commonplace of our individualist culture - a tenet of what is called positive thinking - and it is serviceable in a number of ways for upholding practices of social domination. For example, if someone finds himself in dire straits, such as homelessness, this is sometimes said to be ultimately his own fault — and not a product of social conditions — because he has failed to think himself positively out of his circumstances. In Back to the Future, this commonplace is sowed early on in the film. Walking down the street with his girlfriend Jennifer, Marty says that Doc says "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything." 28 At this point in the film it is cited tentatively; it is quoted by Marty, but it is not yet a matter of conviction for him. But it is repeated on two subsequent occasions. Marty offers it as a piece of advice to George, his father. And then at the end of the film, George who had promised never to forget Marty's advice - repeats it when advance copies of his first novel arrive in the mail. By this time, the commonplace clearly expresses the viewpoint of the film. Moreover, the audience has been encouraged to see the events of the film under the aegis of this commonplace throughout, and it has been rewarded in adopting this generalization as a relevant presupposition about human behavior in so far as this generalization offers the most comprehensive explanation of the action in the film. Obviously, the generalization applies to the exploits of the major character, Marty, who, among other things, is able to change the conditions of his own existence by putting his mind to it. This is achieved in large measure by changing his father, George, whose transformation, in turn, is achieved by virtue of his acceptance of the principle that willing enables you to accomplish anything, whether it be decking Biff or publishing a novel. Likewise, that Goldie Wilson becomes the first African-American mayor of Hill Valley is due, the film implies, to his go-getter attitude - to his commitment to making something of himself and to standing tall, while Doc, himself, is moved from the despondency over his history of failed experiments to enthusiasm by the challenge of putting his mind to sending Marty "back to the future." Rhetorically speaking, Back to the Future plants the idea in the audience's mind that "if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything" - an idea, moreover, that is already a cultural commonplace. The viability of this idea, furthermore, is enhanced at least in 227

Noel Carroll so far as that idea, as a presupposition of the plot, underwrites the narrative development of much of the action of the film. That is, this idea supplies a general principle that applies to a great deal of the action in the film, most notably to virtually all the successful activity in the film. The audience, in turn, comes to adopt it as its own hypothesis for the sake of comprehending the events of the film. And, finally, when the commonplace is uttered for the last time - when George receives his copies of his novel - the film iterates the commonplace to an audience which is likely to endorse it as its own thought in so far as it has already reached this view, if only as a generalization that best explains the events in the film. Of course, this is not the only commonplace in the film. Another, made explicit by Goldie Wilson, is that you need to stand up to bullies and not let them walk all over you. This is connected to the notion that you can do anything to which you put your mind not only because it occurs in the context of Goldie's speech about making something of himself, but also because the road to George McFly's "accomplishing anything" is bound up with confronting a bully, namely, Biff. Bullies, that is, are defeatable by acts of will and this commonplace is, in turn, a particular instance of "If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything," which includes defeating bullies. A further particularization of the nostrum of positive thinking, which is crucial to the film, concerns the importance of taking risks or trying. This arises in several contexts, including Marty's paralyzing fear of rejection with respect to his music, and his father George's parallel fear about showing his science fiction stories to anyone; and, of course, the importance of trying is also related to George's asking Marty's mother, Lorraine, for a date and, later, to his exercising his will in confronting bullies such as Biff and, later still, the redhead at the dance. When characters complain of their fears of rejection, the audience is apt to think that the character will never know whether he can succeed unless he puts himself on the line. We almost subvocalize: "You'll never know unless you take a chance." The conversations in which these anxieties are expressed function in a way that is analogous to rhetorical questions - given the culture that we inhabit, they elicit a predictable answer to the character's plight. In addition, this answer underwrites the narrative action as a general principle - i.e., the characters do succeed when they try - and, furthermore, it is connected to the overarching commonplace that structures the film. For resolving to try, to take a risk, 228

Film, rhetoric, and ideology or to take a stand is part of what is required by "putting your mind to it." 29 If this analysis of the rhetoric of Back to the Future appears convincing, then central to the film is the manipulation of commonplaces. Either these commonplaces are presented overtly to the audience or they are elicited by contriving situations to which the audience is apt to respond associatively with a well-worn truism (like "in order to succeed, you have to take risks"). Moreover, the audience uses these commonplaces to track the action; in so far as they have, in fact, structured the action, they account for it quite expeditiously. So by the time the leading commonplace is delivered as a conclusion, the spectator is apt to greet it as what she already thinks, for she has already come to it herself, albeit as the result of rhetorical promptings. So one crucial element in the rhetorical operation of the film is that it instills its conclusion in its spectators in such a way that the spectator's conviction is reinforced by her sense that the conclusion is a matter of something that she is already disposed to embrace. The key to installing this conviction is that the view in question be rather of the order of a commonplace and that this commonplace - as a generalization about behavior or a principle of conduct - fit the events in the plot as the best way to make sense of them. That is, the plot is rather like an example of the commonplace. The audience's acceptance of the commonplace is encouraged as it comes to recognize the story of an instance of the commonplace. This, in turn, has the net effect of reinforcing the commonplace - in so far as it appears successful in accounting for some behavior, even if fictional - while also concretizing the commonplace in the audience's mind in terms of a paradigm case which may guide application of the commonplace to actual situations.30 How generalizable are these observations about what I have called the rhetorical organization of Back to the Future? My hunch is that they can be extended to quite a lot of films, and that adopting the notions of rhetoric, presupposition and the use of commonplaces will provide a useful framework for isolating the ideological operation of a great deal of cinema. To support my hunch about commonplaces, two considerations come to mind. First, one notices that frequently the titles of conventional films are themselves commonplaces — You Can't Take It With You, The Best Years of Our Lives, Cheaper By The Dozen, It's A Wonderful Life - and, in these cases at least, the role cliches play in organizing the narrative seems to accord with our 229

Noel Carroll hypothesis about films like Back to the Future, where the commonplace is not featured in the title. Secondly, one would predict, on what might be called "design grounds," that the presuppositions that are favored in popular narratives would be something of the order of commonplaces and cliches since they would have to be familiar enough for mass audiences to have access to them. That narratives involve presuppositions that the audience fills in, I conjecture, is something that most theorists accept. However, several qualifications about the relevance of filling in presuppositions with respect to the ideological operation of film need to be made. First, I am not claiming that narrative presuppositions are always ideological; they are only ideological where they meet the criteria stated earlier in this paper. Moreover, eliciting presuppositions from audiences is not the sole means of conveying ideology; films may have long speeches that state their ideological position quite bluntly. Rather, my claim is that the use of presuppositions, in terms of the way in which it involves the audience "finding the conclusion for itself," is a powerful rhetorical device for conveying ideology and a frequent one. Moreover, though sometimes the presupposition may be found stated somewhere in the dialogue or title of the film,31 in other cases the commonplace remains tacit.32 Though the rhetorical organization of a film in terms of presuppositions and commonplaces may proffer ideological tenets to audiences, they do not, of course, guarantee their acceptance. For viewers who do not already accept the ideological presuppositions and commonplaces advanced by the film are unlikely to accept them. For such viewers, the film is apt to seem unintelligible or ridiculous, and, perhaps, worthy of indignation.33 On the other hand, where viewers readily accept the rhetoric of the film, they probably already accept the ideological commonplaces, and the ideological operation of the film in such cases is probably best described as reinforcing existing ideology. My suspicion is that this is the most common operation of ideology in film. One other case, however, is worth brief comment. There may be some viewers who, antecedently, neither accept nor reject the ideological commonplaces that the film elicits. What is the film's ideological effect on them? Here, I conjecture that the rhetorical operation of the film may at least tilt them toward the ideological premise in question by enhancing the viability of the commonplace in their cognitive stock of heuristics.34 That is, human beings are optimizers.35 When confronted with situations, we will often grasp for 230

Film, rhetoric, and ideology whatever heuristics - such as commonplace generalizations - are available to us for the purpose of rendering the situation intelligible. That a film reinforces one of these heuristics with respect to some fictional behavior may then have some spill-over effect in the sense that when searching for a heuristic to apply to real circumstances, the heuristic in question is one whose availability is attractive because it has succeeded in the past in rendering some stretch of phenomena, albeit fictional, intelligible. Moreover, recent research in cognitive and social psychology indicates that vivid information is more likely to be stored, remembered, and mobilized than is pallid information. Factors that contribute to vividness include the extent to which the information is, for example, emotionally interesting, concrete, and imageryprovoking.36 Thus, heuristics wedded to films, in so far as they are characteristically conveyed vividly, will have a high degree of availability in the minds of viewers who are not ill-disposed toward the heuristic to begin with. And the availability of the said heuristics may incline viewers to access and apply them to actual cases.37 And, of course, where the heuristic in question is ideological, a film's reinforcement of its availability amounts to an ideological effect.38 In conclusion, where contemporary film theorists attempt to locate the most important ideological effects of film in its formal structures, I propose that we think in terms of rhetorical structures, such as the ideological deployment of presupposition in the service of eliciting ideological tenets (which will often be of the nature of commonplaces). Commonplace and presupposition are not the only relevant rhetorical levers in film; further research in this area is required. However, thinking of the dissemination of film ideology in this way has the advantages of: (1) satisfying our intuition that not all films are necessarily ideological and (2) facilitating the recognition that ideology in film can be more than a matter of causing people to conceive of themselves as Cartesian egos.39 Furthermore, the Althusserian approach suggests that the ideological effect of cinema is virtually unavoidable - that through its formal structures, cinema uniformly causes us to misrecognize ourselves as Cartesian egos. A final advantage, then, of a rhetorical approach is that, as indicated in the preceding paragraphs, it allows that the uptake of a film's ideology is variable, depending in large measure on the audience's predispositions.

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Noel Carroll Notes 1 Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). 2 A term of art, in film studies, for events staged or otherwise transpiring before the camera. 3 Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? (2 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 4 For a sketch of this conversation, see Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 5 A primary representative of this sort of skepticism in film theory is Victor Perkins. See his Film as Film (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972). It should be noted that the case of Perkins here is somewhat complicated. For though he mounts anti-essentialist arguments against classical film theory, it is also possible to read his constructive proposals for the film theory of the future as a species of closet essentialism. See Carroll, Philosophical Problems, chapter 3. 6 I say "ironically" above because, though many contemporary film theorists are avowedly anti-essentialist, they believe that certain cinematic devices — like the perspectival image — are essentially ideological. 7 The label "Althusserian" has been chosen in order to signal the degree to which contemporary film theorists have been influenced by the framework for analyzing ideology that was introduced by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in his "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses," in his Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). By employing this appellation I am not implying either that Louis Althusser endorses all the findings of contemporary film theorists or that contemporary film theorists have not essayed critical departures from the views of Althusser. However, I do believe that it is indisputable that the previously cited article supplies the fundamental framework within which contemporary film theory has developed and continues to develop. This much is admitted even by contemporary film theorists - for example, see Colin MacCabe, "Class of '68," in his Tracking the Signifier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13. Moreover, I doubt that any contemporary film theorist would deny that there is a historical link between Althusser's speculation on ideology and the emergence of contemporary film theory. For a further defense of this way of labeling contemporary film theory see Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). For a collection of many of the central documents of this variety of film theory see the anthology edited by Philip Rosen and entitled Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 8 See, for example, Jean-Louis Comolli, "Technique and ideology: camera, perspective and depth of field," Film Reader 2 (January 1977). 232

Film, rhetoric, and ideology 9 See, for example, Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus," in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (ed.), Apparatus (New York: Tanam Press, 1980). 10 See, for example, Daniel Dayan, 'The tutor-code of classical cinema," in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 11 For a sympathetic overview of this position, see James Spellerberg, "Technology and ideology in the cinema," reprinted in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 12 A similar argument can be found in David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 25-26. 13 For a more thorough account of contemporary film theory, along with more detailed criticisms thereof, see Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. As its title indicates, that book is a brief against Althusserian film theory. The present chapter is a continuation of that debate. Specifically, in order to challenge contemporary film theory, I believe that one must not only show its logical flaws and empirical shortcomings. One must also indicate that there are more fruitful lines of research than those developed by the Althusserians for answering the very questions that perplex them. That is, in order to defeat contemporary film theory decisively, one needs to engage it dialectically and to demonstrate that competing theories superior to the Althusserian model are available, i.e., theories that avoid the liabilities their theories incur while also explaining the data. One question that contemporary film theorists ask is how films disseminate ideology. This essay is an attempt to begin to develop an alternative answer to that question. Thus, this essay is an extension of the argument in Mystifying Movies to the terrain of the ideological effect of cinema. 14 For information on the history of the concept of ideology, see David McLellan, Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); H. Barth, Truth and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Allen Wood, "Ideology, false consciousness and social illusion," in Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 15 1 am also willing to entertain the extension of what counts as ideological to other cognitive phenomena, including what cognitive scientists have labeled scripts (Shank and Abelson), paradigm scenarios (de Soussa), schemas (Kelley), and personae (Nisbet and Ross), and perhaps even to prepropositional patterns of salience (Rorty). However, if such structures are to play a role in ideology, we must be able to specify the conditions under which each, in turn, is epistemically defective. See R. Shank and R. P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977); Ronald de Soussa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); H. H. Kelley, "Causal schematas and the attribution process," in E.E. Jones (ed.), Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of 233

Noel Carroll

16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28

Behavior (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1972); Amelie Rorty, "Explaining emotions," The Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978); Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1980), p. 35.1 have attempted to apply the notion of a paradigm scenario to films in Noel Carroll, "The image of women in film: a defense of a paradigm," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4 (1990). This last disjunct is introduced in order to allow for the role that true propositions may play in ideology. That is, a true proposition may be embedded in an otherwise ideological discourse in such a way that its import is, overall, misleading owing to its discursive contextualization. Other candidates for the cognitive component of ideoJogicaJ ideas are mentioned in note 15 above. Of course, the Althusserian does not deny this. Rather, for the contemporary film theorist the conviction of Cartesian egohood is the primary ideological effect of the cinema and, perhaps, a condition for the effectiveness of further ideological machinations. On our contrasting account, films may be ideological with no implications about the nature of the subject, and therefore, need not require the misrecognition of Cartesian subjecthood as a condition for other ideological effects. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book I, sections 8 and 9. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, section 20. Andre Bazin, Orson WelJes, (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 66. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, sections 22-25. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 170. Walter R. Fisher, Human Communication As Narration (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), p. 28. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle regards the example and the enthymeme as distinct forms of argument; where they are both deployed in the same discourse, he advises that the enthymeme precede the example so that the force of the former not be diluted. However, with what we are calling narrative enthymemes, it is generally the case that example and ellipsis work in tandem. Needless to say, films may be rhetorical without being ideological. Films may propose genuinely moral (in the sense of upright) arguments by means of rhetoric. And, of course, the use of rhetoric in and of itself is not a sign of disvalue. The rhetorical operation of a film will only count as ideological if it meets the criteria laid down earlier. At the same time, we are also claiming that ideology in film is primarily disseminated through rhetorical operations of which the narrative enthymeme is one of the most important. Or know that others in the given culture believe it. There is a similar commonplace in Back to the Future III to the effect that your future is what you make it. This cliche is woven through the narrative in a way that is analogous to the example discussed above and, 234

Film, rhetoric, and ideology in addition, it is literalized by the special features of time-travel, as is the maxim that we are considering. 29 Interestingly, the characterization of the ideological operation of Back to the Future that I am advancing may appear to correlate with the kind of ideological effect that I claimed Althusserians find pervasive in film. That is, I have maintained that Back to the Future celebrates an exorbitant belief in personal agency and freedom. The question then arises as to how really distinct my analysis is from an Althusserian view of the same film. Here, I think that three differences are noteworthy. First, the beliefs that I find proposed in Back to the Future are more in the nature of folk platitudes which, contra the Althusserians, need not be thought necessarily to hook up to an entire ontology of the subject, nor can they be worked into a theory of the subject that you could label Cartesian, Husserlian, or even Idealist. Second, if these beliefs can be derived from Back to the Future, this is not - again, contra Althusserianism - a function of the fact that the film is projected by an apparatus, that it employs pictorial verisimilitude, perspective, narrative or continuity editing (including point-of-view editing). It is, rather, a matter of rhetoric - indeed, of the rhetorical/narrative organization of this specific film. And finally, though Back to the Future appears to traffic in ideology in terms of its notion of personal freedom, the method used to isolate this commitment does not privilege themes of agency as the sine qua non of ideology, and it allows that in other films there may be other sorts of ideological commitments, ones that may have nothing to do with personal efficacy, but that are conveyed by narrative enthymemes. On the other hand, I take it that the Althusserians are committed to the view that any film, of the classically constructed variety, is not only always ideological but, at the very least, involved in propagating an ideology of exorbitant personal agency. 30 Though further research on the matter is necessary, it would also appear that one way in which a film may function ideologically that differs somewhat from my examples so far is by concretizing a cultural commonplace - which in isolation may not be ideologically charged - by means of a misleading or tendentious example that, in turn, may come to influence the way in which the audience applies that commonplace in actual situations. For example, John Ford's She Wore A Yellow Ribbon is underwritten by the presupposition that the army is always the same. This refers, first and foremost, to its routinized activity and to the induction of successive generations of soldiers (primarily officers) into its routines and folk-ways. But there is also the suggestion that the army is always the same in the sense that the high moral purpose exemplified by the cavalry in the film is an enduring, eternally benevolent feature of the military. Thus, the example in question puts an ideological "spin" on the otherwise innocent and perhaps accurate maxim about military life. Further study of this "spin factor" with respect to tendentious and misleading narrative examples will, I believe, reveal a major source of the ideological operation of films. 235

Noel Carroll 31 For example, when Marty quotes Doc as saying "If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything." 32 For example, in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part of the horror of collectivist invaders is that they lack individuality. As vegetables, the pod people are alike - as alike as two peas in a pod. That is, a commonplace about vegetables is exploited for horrific as well as ideological effect, though it is never explicitly stated in the film. 33 One advantage of what I am calling the rhetorical approach to film ideology versus the Althusserian approach is that whereas the Althusserian approach seems to present the ideological effect of afilmas inevitable, the rhetorical approach allows that spectators may reject and resist the ideology proffered by a film. That is, on the Althusserian model, if a film has a certain generic structure, like perspective, this will inexorably cause the spectator to misrecognize himself as a Cartesian ego. However, in my account of the rhetoric of Back to the Future, there is no problem in acknowledging that a viewer may recognize the ideology of positive thinking that the film presupposes and reject it. That viewers are quite often aware of and ill disposed toward the ideological address of a film seems to me to be an indisputable fact. That the viewer is always duped, as the Althusserian model suggests, is just wrong. One strength then, comparatively speaking, of the rhetorical approach to film ideology is that it can explain how films dispose audiences toward various ideological stances, while also admitting that viewers do not always succumb to them. 34 For discussions of heuristics in human reasoning, see Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases," Science 185 (1974), 1124-1131; Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability," Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973); Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (ed.), Judgments Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Nisbett and Ross, Human Inference. 35 Shelley E. Tylor, "The availability bias in social perception and interaction," in Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (eds.), Judgments Under Uncertainty, pp. 190-191. 36 See Nisbett and Ross, Human Inference, chapter 3. 37 My use of terminology above differs somewhat from that of cognitive psychologists. They call vividness itself an example of the availability heuristic, i.e., a heuristic that privileges a biased inference or interpretation because it is available. Nevertheless, despite our slightly different uses of terminology I believe that our points of view amount to roughly the same thing. 38 Another case, which is at least worth noting, is that of the viewer who is unaware that the heuristic or commonplace conveyed by the film is ideological. Such a viewer might even be opposed to the ideological message of the film, if the ideological applications of the message were to be made apparent. The range of potential and logical effects on such 236

Film, rhetoric, and ideology viewers is too varied to discuss here, but will be developed in a future paper. 39 Since the ideological presuppositions and commonplaces that a film mobilizes may involve issues that don't involve questions of personal identity.

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Index

Abelson, R. P., 223 achievement, 25, 26, 97, 153-156 Ackerman, J., 125 Adams, H., 91, 191, 212 Adler, A., 76-77 Adorno, T., 144, 178 Aiken, C, 105 Ainslie, G., 167, 172 Allara, P., 107 Allen, W., 165 Alpers, S., 15-20, 23, 25, 28, 32, 40, 41, 109-126, 128, 131-142 Althusser, L., 33-36, 42, 190-214, 232 Altieri, C, 214 analysis primacy of, 17, 129-131 statistical, 30, 177-178 Anastaplo, G., 91 Antal, F., 178 Antczak, F. J., 91 anthropology, 21-22, 29, 135, 140 Antione, A., 184 Apollinaire, G., 187 Apple, M, 91 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 93 architecture, 103 Gothic, 112 Aristotelianism, 72, 84, 85-89, 90 Aristotle, 12, 82, 85-89, 93, 223-224, 226, 234 Armstrong, L., 148 Arnheim, R., 171, 215,232 Arnold, B., 75 Arnoldism, 72, 127 art(s), 19, 68-69, 112-13, 116 Albertian, 133 and craft, 112-113 and delusion, 55-56 Chinese, 20, 112-113, 117 collaborative, 117

conceptual, 159 distinctions between, 25 Dutch, 113, 115-116, 117-118, 134, 137 emergence of new forms, 162 epochal, 69 film as, 215 for art's sake, 32, 179, 183 great, 69, 111, 122 Greek, 4, 48-49 group, 14, 101-102, 117 Indian, 112-113 industrial, 183 Italian, 114-116, 128, 134 non-Western, 112 northern and southern Europe, 114-116 performing, 25, 147, 148 Pop,96-97 preservation of, 96-98 "pure," 186 relation to senses, 147 social aspects, 24, 28f, 109, 110, 111,120 texts of, 208 Tuscan, 129 value of, 25, 26, 127-145, 147-153 visual, 13, 75, 94-108, 156, 169 works of, 96f, 110, 206, 207 Artaud, A., 188 Astaire, F., 148 Auden, W. H., 1,97, 106 Augustine, St., 82 Austen, J., 146, 159, 168 authenticity, 41 and originality, 26, 157-158 Heidegger's notion of, 9, 65 avant-garde, 95, 183, 184, 185-186 Bachelard, G., 174 238

Index Bacon, F., 166 Baker, E. B., 126 Bal, M., 145 Baldinucci, F., 129 Balzac, H., 154, 156, 185 Barrell, J., 191 Barth, H., 233 Barthelme, D., 209 Barthes, R., 79 debate with Picard, 174, 175 Bartlett, J., 209 Baudelaire, C, 175 Baudry, J.-L., 233 Baxandall, M., 16, 38, 109, 111, 119, 121, 123, 126 Bazin, A., 216, 223, 232, 234 Beat, 104 Beatles, the, 168 Being, 56 Benton, G., 212 Berger, J., 106 Bernini, G. L., 46 Bernstein, J. M., 214 Berthoff, W., 91 Biemel, W., 2, 7-10, 12, 24, 39, 41, 55-70 Bloom, A., 91-92 Boogert, B. H., 91 Booth, W. C., 2, 7, 10-12, 24, 39, 41, 71-93 Bordwell, D., 233 Borges, J. L., 149 Borkenau, F., 178 Borzello, F., 143 Bosch, H., 166 Bourdieu, P., 28-33, 35, 41, 172, 173-189 Bremond, H., 188 Braudel, F., 119, 125 Brewster, B., 212 Brooks, M., 165 Bruegel, P., 119 Bruntiere, F., 188 Bryson, N., 143, 145 Buchheim, T., 70 Budd, M., 170 Burke, K., 71 Cahill, J., 124 capitalism, capitalists, 26, 160-161, 195, 216,220 Caravaggio, M. M., 15, 48 Carrier, D., 106, 128, 143 Carroll, N., 35-38, 42, 215-237 Carver, R., 207, 211 Cary, J., 94-96, 106, 107 Cascardi, A. J., 214

Cassirer, E., 113, 174, 176 causality, structural, 197 Cervantes Saavedra, M. de, 149 Cha, T. H. K., 233 change, technical, 25, 26, 146, 160-162 Chardin, J., 3, 46 choreography, 147 Christianity, Christians, 12, 82, 84, 85-89, 93 cinema, see film Clare, J., 207, 214 Clark, Lord, 115-116, 125 Clark, T. J., 16, 109, 121-123, 124, 126 class(es), 195, 196, 197-198, 201, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211 relations, 201, 202, 203 ruling, 195 social, 197, 198 struggle, 195, 196, 198, 202 Clausen, C, 91 Clement, C, 100-101 Clowes, W., 99-100 coduction, 11, 24, 76-79, 90 Cohen, G. A., 169, 193-196, 213 Cohen, J., 213 Cohen, M., 124, 233 Cohen, T., 214 Coleridge, S. T. 74 Coles, R., 91 communication, 117-118 communism, 161, 196 community, 24, 40, 41, 61, 76, 121, 155-156 Comolli, J.-L., 232 composition, 47-50 musical, 149, 151, 158 Conley, T. M., 78-79, 81, 90, 92 consciousness, 193 false, 34, 198, 203-204, 205, 207, 208 Constable, J., 13-14, 24, 99-100, 106, 191 constraint(s), 27-28, 148, 159, 162, 164-165, 168, 169 Copland, A., 211 Courbet, G., 95, 109, 121-123 Cournot, A. A., 185 Coward, R., 190, 201, 212, 213 Crary, J., 143 creativity, 15, 23, 24, 25, 26-28, 32, 40, 103-105, 111, 146, 159, 160-169 criticism, 32, 34, 35, 41, 129, 191, 211 Althusserian, 206-211 contemporary, 35, 72, 75, 129, 169, 190, 205, 206-211, 232 critical studies, 34, 191-192 critical theory, 190, 191 cultural, 72

239

Index criticism cont. ethical, 2, 10-12, 39-40, 41, 71-93 literary, 6, 33, 191 New, 6, 81, 174, 212 political, 72-73 see also film, Althusserian theory cultural artifacts/objects, 21, 28-29, 30, 33, 177, 178, 181 cultural sciences, 131-132, 136, 181 culture(s), 21, 24, 38, 97, 118, 124, 141, 192, 193, 199-200, 203, 212 as ideological, 218, 220-221 Dahl, H. F., 169 dance, 147, 148 Danto, A., 224, 234 Darwin, C, 152 David, J.-L., 159 Dayan, D., 233 de Man, P., 91 de Soussa, R., 233 deconstruction, 11, 72, 209 della Francesca, P., 109, 111-112 density, 2, 37, 43, 47 Derain, A., 24, 101-102, 106 Derrida, J., 82 Descamps, J. B., 138 design, 4, 47-50, 103 Deutsch, G., 172 Dewey, J., 92 Dickens, C, 50, 83 Die Briicke, 95 distance, 16, 21, 27, 34, 97, 132-133, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145 Duchamp, M., 96, 186 duck-rabbit, 3, 45 Durer, A., 115, 118, 134 Dutton, D., 171, 172 Dymant, D., 70 Eagleton, T., 190 egalitarianism, 88, 89, 93 Eitner, L., 106 Elderfield, J., 106, 107 Eldridge, R., 33-35, 42, 190-214 Eliade, M., 174, 175 Eliot, G., 150 Eliot, T. S., 29, 102, 105, 174 Eliot, V., 108 elitism, 85-86, 88 Ellington, D., 149 Elliott, G., 212 Ellis, J., 190, 201, 212, 213 Elster, J., 25-28, 32, 33, 41, 146-172 emotion, aesthetic, 150-153, 159 Engels, F., 170 Enlightenment, the, 205

episteme, 29, 176-177 epistemology, 127 Epstein, J., 90 Erdos, P., 172 ethical quality, 11, 79-82 ethics, 56, 71-93 evaluation, 5, 22, 23, 32, 33, 35, 129-131, 207-210 as product of analysis, 17, 19, 127-143 existentialism, existentialists, 64, 90 Expressionism, Abstract, 94 Eyck, J. van, 4, 24, 49-50, 115, 134 Facknitz, M. A. R., 91 familiarity, premature 130-131, 134, 135, 136, 142 Faulkner, W., 185 Fauvism, 14, 101-102, 106 feminism, feminists, 71, 72, 82, 127, 191, 207 Fenstad, J.-E., 171 Feuerbach, L., 205 field, 30-32, 173, 178-188 Fielding, H., 75 film, 35-37, 125, 147, 148, 149, 164, 165, 215-237 aesthetic value of, 215-217 Althusserian theory of, 35-36, 216-221, 222, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236 essentialism in theory, 215-216, 232 formal elements/structures, 36, 217, 219, 222, 231 Hollywood, 36, 223 narrative structure of, 36-37, 217, 218, 222, 223-230, 235 perspective, 36, 218, 219, 222, 236 rhetorical organization of, 36-37, 222-231, 235 Fisher, W. R., 234 Flaubert, G., 64, 70, 155, 177, 185 Fleming, J., 124 Fleming-Williams, I., 106 Focillon, H., 123-124 Foley, B., 91 Ford, J., 235 forgery, 154, 157-158, 171 form, 130, 140, 144, 151, 159, 174, 176 formalism, formalists, 6, 18, 25-26, 29, 31, 39, 81, 123, 174, 175, 186, 206 Russian, 31, 176, 177, 180, 188 see also film, formal structures of Forster, K. W., 106 Foster, H., 143 Foucault, M., 29-30, 33, 35, 119, 125, 172, 175-177, 180, 189, 191 240

Index Fourier, C, 170 Fowles, J., 151 Frank, R., 104 Frankenhalter, H., 209 freedom, human, 34-35, 68, 196, 198, 203-207, 210, 211 Freud, S., 82, 198, 202-204 Fried, M., 121, 123, 126 Friedrich, C. J., 110, 124 Frye, N., 137 fullness, 25, 28, 153, 166-167 Fussell, P., 108 Ganz, L. and Marshall, G., 76-77 Gaskell, I., 1-42, 214 Gauguin, P., 102 Gay, P., 110 genealogy, 29, 178 Georget, E.-J., 100 Gericault, T., 13-14, 100-101, 106-107 Ghirardo, D., 106 Goldman, E., 178 Gombrich, E. H., 4, 38, 43-45, 47-50, 54, 111, 118-119, 120-121, 125, 126, 128, 129, 144 Goncourts, the, 185 Gordon, D. E., 106 Gould, S. J., 93 Gould, T., 214 Gowing, L., 123-124 Goyen, J. van, 119 Grabar, O., 112, 124 Green, M., 91 Greenberg, C, 210 Greene, G., 105 Greuze, J.-B., 121 Gropius, W., 110 Guyer, P., 214 habitus, 31, 181-182, 187 Hadamard, J., 163, 171, 172 Hamilton, R., 13, 96-97 Hampton, L., 149 Harrison, A., 38 Haskell, F., 38, 124, 177 Haydn, J ., 159 Hegel, G. W. F., 169, 172, 177 Hegelianism, 153f Heidegger, M., 7, 9-10, 24, 39, 64, 65, 66-68, 70, 178 Heller, J., 166 Hellman, M.-C, 171 Henrich, D., 38, 54 Hess, T. B., 126 hierarchy, hierarchies, 11, 75, 84-86, 87, 89, 124, 128, 177-178 Hindness, B., 213

Hinduism, 93 Hirst, P. Q., 213 historicism, historicity, 18-20, 23, 24, 28, 29, 32, 35, 72, 111, 114, 129, 131, 132, 135, 137, 139-143, 174, 175, 177, 186-188, 190, 191, 192-195, 210 history, 4, 17, 19, 24, 29, 32, 50-51, 61, 109f, 114, 120, 129, 140-141, 177, 180-181, 184-185, 186, 201-202 see also ideology, no history of; Marxist theory of history; objectivity, historical history, art, 1, 5, 16-25, 32, 99, 109-126, 127-145 crisis of, 127 distinction from other cultural sciences, 23, 135, 136, 140-142 Hodges, J., 149 Hogarth, W., 2, 4, 24, 43 Holiday, B., 149 Holly, M. A., 129, 144 Homer, 75, 77 Honour, H., 124 Horowitz, G., 17-20, 23-24, 28, 32, 40, 41,127-145 humanism, 111, 116, 120, 127, 131, 196 Hume, D., 74, 82, 220 Hurley, R., 42 Husserl, E., 69 iconography, 1, 99, 105, 113, 119, 132-133, 135 ideology, 34-37, 82, 84, 85, 88-89, 97, 116,122,129,190-212, 215-231 and culture, 218, 220-221 and dream-work, 203-204 belief(s) and, 221 epistemic defectiveness of, 36, 221, 224 no history of, 192-195, 202 social domination and, 36, 218, 221-222, 224, 227 Imdahl, M., 38, 51-53 Impressionism, 49, 182 interest literary, 1-2, 22, 24, 31 moral, 39-40 visual, 1-2, 5-6, 13-15, 22, 23, 24, 32, 38 interpellation, 205 Irvins, W., 117-118, 125 Iser, W., 38, 54 Jacque, C., 100 Jakobson, R., 175, 188

241

Index Jameson, F., 190, 212 jazz, 25, 105, 147, 148, 149, 157-158, 164, 168 Jesus, 86, 89 Jimson, G., 94 Johansson, I., 171 Johns, J., 209 Johnson, S., 74, 75, 77, 92 Jones, E. E., 233 Joyce, J., 185 Jung, C, 174 justice, 8, 59-61 Kafka, F., 7-10, 55-70 Kahneman, D., 170, 236 Kandinsky, W., 96 Kant, I., 39-40, 74, 82, 214 aesthetics of, 132-133, 144 Kantianism, 206, 212 neo-, 32, 41, 174, 175 Kelley, H. H., 233 Kemal, S. , 1-42, 214 Kerouac, J., 104 King, C, 104 Kirchner, E. L., 95 Kramer, H., 210 Krauss, R., 107 Kubler, G., 118, 125 Kunstwolien, 113, 130, 133 Kymlicka, W., 213 Lacan, J., 34, 35, 190, 198-201, 202, 204-205 Lacanism, 191, 192, 201, 205 landscape, 50, 118-119 Lang, B., 143 language, 45, 50-51, 56, 78, 178-179, 198,199-201 as social, 24 subject and, 199-201 see also painting Laver, R., 211 Leavis, F. R., 72, 75 Lee, J., 107 Leibniz, G. W., 82, 170 Lemaire, A., 213 Lessing, A., 171 Levenson, J., 171 Levi-Strauss, C., 175 Levinson, M., 214 Lewis, J., 211 literature, 4-5, 6-7, 13, 50-51, 55-56, 75, 103, 147, 149, 156, 162, 169, 174,177, 190-191, 206 and history, 4, 19, 29, 50 and painting, 5, 15, 43, 50-51, 102-105

and philosophy, 4, 7-8, 10, 12, 50, 55-70 preservation of, 97-98 Livingstone, R., 212 local maximum, 25-26, 146, 151-153, 164 localism, 207-208, 209, 211 logic, 76, 78, 84, 85 Louis, M., 207 Lowe, D. M, 38 Lugne-Poe, A. F., 184 Lukacs, G., 178 Lurie, A., 106 MacCabe, C., 232 Macey, D., 213 Manet, E., 3, 45-46, 110 Mann, T., 50 Marceau, M., 165 Marcuse, H., 206, 214 Margolis, J., 172 market, the, 99, 137-138, 158, 183 Marshall, G. and Ganz, L., 76-77 Martin, G., 168 Marx, K., 34, 35, 82, 146, 161, 170, 192-195, 205, 212 Marxism, Marxists, 26-27, 30, 34, 42, 71, 82, 116, 123, 161-162, 178, 179, 190, 192-195, 196-198, 212 see also Althusser, L.; production Massey, I., 91 Mast, G., 125, 253 mathematics, 27, 111-112, 158, 162-164, 166, 168, 169, 177 Matisse, H., 1, 14, 101-102 McCloskey, D., 92 McKeon, R., 85, 92 McKeon, Z. K., 92 McLaughlin, B. P., 233 McLellen, D., 233 medium, 1, 6, 27, 47, 104, 159, 164, 165 and material, 3, 6, 44-45 and subject matter, 2-3, 43, 44-47, 49-50, 51-53 metaphysics, 9, 66, 68, 220 Michelangelo, 111, 121, 123 Michener, J., 211 Miller, A., 223 Miller, J. H., 91 modernism, 121, 219 post-, 72 Monarchy, July, 167, 170 Mondrian, P., 110 Monet, C., 4, 24, 48, 102, 118 Rouen Cathedral, painting of, 4, 49-50 monism, 74, 75, 77, 82-83 242

Index morality, 11, 39, 71-72, 74, 76, 78, 79-82

Mozart, W. A., 158, 159 music, 147, 151, 156, 166, 168-169 classical, 149 myth, mythology, 85, 174, 175 NRF, 29, 174 Nabokov, D., 107 Nabokov, V., 102, 107 nature, 86-87, 88 fidelity to, 47-50 Necker cube, 45 Nelson, R., 160-161 Nichols, B., 233 Nilson, J., 171 Nisbett, R., 234, 236 Nochlin, L., 126, 143 novel, the, 51, 75, 183, 185, 187 Nussbaum, M., 12, 83-88 O'Sullivan, T., 104 object, 32, 52, 66, 127, 134 objectivism, 73, 74, 92 objectivity, 16, 17, 18, 19-20, 21, 28, 111, 116, 118, 121, 127-145 historical, 111, 116, 135, 139, 140-143, 206 Olsen, S. H., 169 Oppler, E., 107 OuLiPo, 103 overdetermination, 196-197, 199 painting, 2-3, 5, 14, 23, 43, 45, 47, 97, 103, 147, 148, 149, 151, 158 and language, 4, 14, 24, 50-51 institution of, 117, 118-119 see also literature Palladio, A., I l l Panofsky, E., 17-18, 41, 113-116, 119-120, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131-136, 138-140, 141-142, 144 Parker, C, 148, 211 Parnassians, 183 parsimony, 25, 28, 153, 166-167 Parthenon, 48-49 patronage, 110 Pepper, S., 74, 85, 91, 92 Perec, G., 107, 165 Perkins, V., 232 Pevsner, N., 109, 124 philosophy, philosophers, 2, 6, 7, 39-40, 56-57, 71-72, 82-83, 87-88, 90, 93, 146,174 see also literature photography, 15, 103-105, 117, 215 Plato, 73, 75, 81, 82, 89, 90, 91-92 pluralism, 12, 72, 75, 77, 82-90, 92

Podro, M., 2-6, 14, 23, 24, 32, 38, 43-54, 141,144 poetry, 50-51, 75, 174-175, 183, 185, 208 Poincare, H., 27, 162-163, 165-166, 168, 172 politics and the political, 36, 37-38, 73, 127, 179, 195, 196, 201, 209, 212, 216 and criticism, 71-72 and metaphysics, 220 everything as, 36, 216, 220 Pollock, J., 94, 207 Ponge, F., 188 Pound, E., 91 power, 33, 37, 72-73, 183, 203, 204, 211 Prevost, J., 167-168, 172 pragmatism, pragmatists, 90, 93 Preziosi, D., 143 production forces of, 193-194, 195, 196, 198, 213 relations of, 35, 193, 194-195, 198, 203-206, 207, 209, 210, 211-212, 213 Proust, M., 170 Putnam, H., 90 Pynchon, T., 209 Queneau, R., 103 Rabinow, P., 42 race, 225 racism, 84, 85, 221-222 Raphael, 48 rationality, reason, 9-10, 33, 35, 37, 60, 64, 67, 73, 84, 85, 111 Rauschenberg, R., 209 realism, 15-16, 34, 49, 115, 159-160, 185, 188 Rees, A. L., 143 Regis, M., 107 relativism, 12, 20-23, 28, 72, 74, 77, 83-90, 120, 140, 143 Rembrandt, 15, 16, 115-116, 118, 136, 137-138 Renaissance, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 113-118, 129,135 Italian, 18, 114-116, 128, 133 Reni, G., 110-111 Renoir, J., 211 representation, 4, 6, 14, 37, 38, 43, 44-45, 47-50 Reynolds, S., 125 rhetoric, 11, 36-37, 74, 76-79, 222-226 Rhyne, C., 99, 106 Riegl, A., 18, 97, 106, 112, 113, 120, 123-124, 137, 140

243

Index Robinson, L. S., 214 Roche, T., 211 Romanticism, 167, 185 Rorty, A. O., 92, 233, 234 Rosand, D., 124, 130 Rosen, P., 232 Roskill, M., 12-15, 23, 24, 32, 40, 94-108, 127, 143 Ross, L., 234, 236 Rothko, M., 207 Rubens, P. P., 3, 24, 44, 46, 52-53 Rudbeck, C, 91 Ruisdael, J. van, 116, 119 Rushdie, S., 211 Russell, B., 73 Ruttenberg, H., 92 Sadleir, M., 98, 106 Sagan, C, 165-166, 168 Sagoff, M., 171 Sandweiss, M., 107 Sartre, J.-P., 64, 88, 177 Saussure, F., 174, 176, 202 Sayles, J., 219 Schelling, T. C, 170, 172, 174 Schiller, F., 207 Schroder, A., 107 Schwitters, K., 95 science, scientists, 11, 32, 92, 164, 166, 193, 233 and the humanities, 131 scientism, 11-12, 23, 24, 40, 74 sculpture, 147, 148 Searle, L., 191, 212 selection, 152, 160, 162-163, 165, 168 self, the, 80, 92, 121, 126, 154 self-actualization, 151, 153-156 self-consciousness, 19, 138-139, 198f, 206 self-externalization, 26, 153f self-realization, 8-9, 26, 64-65, 146, 153-156, 168 semiology, 176 semiotics, 216 Shakespeare, W., 76, 77, 147 Shank, R., 233 Shelley, P., 75 Sherman, C, 209 Sherover, E., 214 Sidney, P., 75 Siebers, T., 91 Siegel, D., 236 Simon, C, 185 Slovic, P., 170, 236 Smith, A., 170 Smith, A. S., 93 Smithson, R., 119, 125

Snyder, J., 107 social science, scientists, 71, 152, 166, 173, 188 social structures, 197, 204 society, 30, 32, 84, 112, 120, 122, 179, 185, 195, 206, 208 and the individual, 9, 121, 123, 218 possibility of free, 34, 204-206, 210, 211, 213 sociology, 153, 173-188 Sokel, W. H., 59-60, 69 sonnet(s), 164, 165 Sophocles, 225-226 Sorel, J., 167 Sparshott, F., 171 Spellerberg, J., 233 Spender, S., 98, 106 Sperry, S. M., 92 Spinoza, B. de, 82 Springer, S., 172 Sprinkler, M., 42 Star Trek, 225 Statue of Liberty, 97 Steen, J., 113 Steinberg, L., 121, 123, 126 Stendhal, 146, 150-151, 155, 167-168, 170,172 Stevens, W., 91 Stoics, the, 81 Strawbridge, S., 213 structuralism, 29, 30, 121, 175-176, 202f post-, 81, 209 struggle, 31, 180-185 style, 112, 113, 130, 135, 137, 138, 140, 144 subject matter, 43, 44, 104 subject(s), 9, 25, 40, 41, 66, 198f, 205, 210 Cartesian, 217-218, 219, 220, 222, 231, 234, 235,236 unified, 217-218, 219-220 subjectivism, subjectivity, 33, 73, 74, 77, 83, 84, 92, 116, 192-212 Sundt, E., 152, 160 Sutton, D., 107 Swift, J., 87 Sychrava, J., 214 syllogism, 80 Symbolists, 183 taste, 1 Taylor, C, 80-81, 90, 92 Teagarden, J., 157-158 technology, 148, 161, 164 theater, 173, 183-184, 185, 215 Thomas, K., 172 244

Index Titian, 110, 111 topography, 118-119 Trier, J., 176 Trilling, L., 75 Tversky, A., 170, 236 Tyler, A., 209 Tyler, S., 236 Tynianov, I., 177 Uccello, P., I l l unconscious, the, 27-28, 34, 163, 165, 166, 200,204, 208-209 universalism, 32, 35, 37, 82-83, 129-130, 133, 135, 137, 174-175, 188, 207, 209, 210, 211-212 Updike, J., 207, 211 Utamaro, K., 22-23 utilitarianism, utilitarians, 81, 89-90 Valery, P., 174 valuation and art history, 127-143 as deception, 128 value, 2, 32, 38, 120, 135, 146 aesthetic, 1, 16, 20, 32, 71, 76, 97, 128, 149-150, 151, 158, 159, 215 emotional, 150-152 fact and, 72, 92 literary, 11, 72, 73, 77, 80 of art works, 127-131, 139f social, 13, 120, 216 sources of, 151 use, 97 van Gogh, V., 98 van Meegeren, H., 157-158 Vasari, G., 129 vaudeville, 183 Velazquez, D., 15, 110

Vendler, H., 214 Vermeer, }., 15, 16, 113, 115, 116, 134, 154, 157-158 verstehen, 17-18, 131-132 virtue, 223 volition, artistic, 130, 132 Vonnegut, K., 94-96, 106, 107 Warburg, A., 120 watercolor, 118-119 Watson, W., 92 Waugh, E., 105 Weber, M, 179, 180 Weisbach, W., 110, 124 Welles, O., 36, 223 Werness, H. B., 171 Whale, J., 224 Williams, J., 124 Williams, R., 191 Winkelmann, J. J., 129, 143 Winter, S., 160-161 Wittgenstein, L., 69, 177 Wittgensteinianism, neo-, 216 Wittkower, R., I l l , 124 Wolfe, T., 168 Wolff, K., 61 Wolfflin, H., 112, 113, 120, 123-124 Wollheim, R., 144, 213 Wood, A., 233 Wordsworth, W., 207, 208, 214 writing, 31, 158, 162, 165, 166 see also literature Young, L., 148, 159 Zemiks, R., 226-230, 235, 236 Zinoviev, A., 166 Zwerin, M., 171

245