Let Me Explain
Right, where are we. How much ground have we conceded and how much can we keep. We’ve admitted what we’ve always known and would admit when pressed: that aesthetic opinions are opinions, not facts. Very well. That’s the sum total of our concession, and I’m sure we can all remember conceding the same thing when we were fifteen and judging the contest between Austen and Bronte or the Beatles and the Stones or folky Dylan and rock Dylan (yes, thank you, I am a dinosaur, I told you that, I said on my birthday I was 175) or NWA and Eminem or whatever it may be. De gustibus non est disputandum. Fine. Granted. But we go on disputing just the same, and a good thing too.
It’s all an illusion, but what of that? So many things are illusions, aren’t they. As a matter of fact I wrote an essay about that for TPM Online recently. We live in a great sea of illusions, that we know are illusions if we think about it, but we need to live as if they weren’t. We need to think, or half-think, or think in an ‘as if’ sort of way, that what we do matters, that our lives mean something, that there’s some point to long-range planning. It’s the same with aesthetic opinions and judgments. We need to pretend they are meaningful, or at least sort of meaningful, semi-groundable, quasi-real, or else why bother? And since not bothering is boring and depressing whereas bothering is interesting and engaging, we keep the illusion.
And then, what if they were groundable? What if aesthetic judgments were in fact factual, like judgments about evidence or documents? What if someone could prove mathematically that ‘Hamlet’ was better than Bridget Jones’ Diary or vice versa? Would we even want that? Hardly! In fact the idea is revolting. So perhaps the very ungroundedness, the subjectivity and dependence on personal experience, association, resonance – on the individual mind and self – is what we like about art? I don’t want to prove that Austen is better than King, I want to explain why she is, so if you have interesting reasons why the reverse is the case, I’m interested to hear them.
It all has to do with exploration, I think. As well as with what Schiller (and wmr in comments) said about play. Art is gratuitous, and it needs to be gratuitous to do its work, and to work. If it’s not (at least somewhat) gratuitous it stops being art – what we think of as art – and becomes something else. Vitamins, or education, or discipline, or some such. Good things, but different from art, and answering different needs and desires.
“I don’t want to prove that Austen is better than King, I want to explain why she is,”
But you’ve just conceded there is no such thing as “better” or “worse”, so how can you explain how she is better?
Why I think she’s better, then. Why she is (I think) better. What it is about her that, in my opinion, makes her better.
If it were certain that she is better, then I wouldn’t be interested in explaining why she is, would I. Humans love this kind of indeterminate argument! It may be utterly pointless (though I don’t think it is) but hey, so is squash.
“If it were certain that she is better, then I wouldn’t be interested in explaining why she is, would I.”
Sure, but that isn’t the only alternative here.
Someone might think that there is a fact of the matter about these kinds of things, but that it is hard to get at the fact of the matter, therefore, it is worth explaining why something is better than something else.
That, I suspect, is what most people working in aesthetics would think.
What about what people working in squash would think?
And of course most people working in aesthetics would tell me what an ignorant fool I am to have conceded so much ground.
[What if there is a fact of the matter within the terms of whatever discipline is in question? Not sub specie aeternitatis, but given the definitions and rules of the game that’s being played. There might be some hope there…]
Jerry S:
But there is a fact of the matter, a “Sache”- (German word, broader and more indeterminate than the English, “subject matter”, “stuff”, “topic”, “topos”). (The English “fact”, by the way, originally meant “deed”, something done or made, from the French “faite”, derived from the verb “faire”.) The fact that in literature and art, the “Sache” requires interpretation to be at all apparent, (though I don’t think this is only the case in literature and art), does not mean that there is no “Sache” there, that it does not “really” exist. Nor does the requirement for interpretation mean that there are no constraints on interpretations and that there is no difference between better and worse interpretations; but this is priorly an indeterminate matter, which precisely requires discussion. (Is there some residue of metaphysics in your thinking? Are you still hung up on the notion that “true” being or reality is what remains the same in the midst of all change, and that therefore reality must be identified with pre-givenness? But reality is precisely what changes, though it changes of itself and not often in the ways or directions one would wish for.) However, some interpretations will simply fall off the map and no longer be able to locate the “Sache”. (This is the subject of furious debates.)
Now it may well be true that all convictions of rightness in such matters are wrong. But that would simply indicate the non-cognitive status of such matters and shift the question to what the “reality” of such matters is aiming at, what the point and value of art and literature are. Art and literature clearly are trafficking in illusion; no one is deceived about that, (though the German “Schein” is better, “radiating appearance”.) Specifically, the reception of works of art involves, paradoxically or ironically, at once the suspension and acknowledgement of disbelief. (You look at the art work until it moves, and then you find that you yourself have been moved.) Surely modern art and literature are just as much species of formal-rational discourse as is modern science. The effort to reduce them to the level of arbitrary and illusory and indistiguishable, therefore functionally equivalent, subjective preferences in the name of the primacy and priority of science can only be a category mistake. What would be needed is an account of the functionality of art and literature within human social reality. Perhaps it’s not just “handwaving”, after all, and perhaps handwaving is not so readily dispensable. It would be less a matter of some people having “superior” experiences than one of enlarging the circle of potential experience. And perhaps, in the hustle and bustle of modern life, at the behest of formal institutional rationalizations, that mode of understanding bound up in the telling of stories tends to become lost. Perhaps works of literature and art, in forcing us back on our own memories and resources, serve to remind us of our need to tell stories to one another and about ourselves to be at all of account to ourselves, of the extent to which we simply are the stories that we live to tell.
(OT, Terry Gross once interviewed some singer-songwriter with an accoustic guitar and she asked him if there were any shlock-pop songs whose merits had been overlooked. He choose “Dancing Queen” and promptly gave an accoustic rendition.)
Sorry John, but you’re just going to have to write less if you want me to read.
All this has got me wondering why so many people feel a need to say “this piece is objectively better than that piece” or even “that piece really isn’t art”. I mean, I have my preferences–and I like to think I have good reasons for them–, but I’m not about to make someone feel guilty or ignorant because they don’t share them. And I don’t see much point in worrying about the level public recognition of my good taste has achieved.
Is it the psychology of the home town team? As if they were saying “What I read must be good or I wdn’t be reading it, wd I?”
Or cd it be that they believe that whether something is art is a question of simple observation: “If what I see is a work of art, then anyone with eyes to see will also see a work of art, and vice versa.”
Is it nothing more than political or psychological one-up-manship?
Boundaries – hours of fun here! One of the more frustrating areas of aesthetic debate is around ‘That’s crap, ergo it isn’t art’ versus ‘Yes it’s crap but it’s still art – just bad art’. The latter position allows debate within a context, the former just closes it off.
I want to share a little epiphany I had once. I was listening to an R.E.M. song on the radio. It occurred to me that R.E.M.’s “message” is highly contextual. The music is “about” the rock’n’roll tradition, and what can be done within those stylistic constraints. That’s where the “signal” is. It’s as if they’re saying, “Okay, GIVEN this medium of guitar-bass-drums-lead singer, we would make music like the following.” For a listener not intimately familiar with this musical language, the “message” of R.E.M.’s music would be inaudible, in the same way that if you tell me a joke in Polish, I won’t get it. Then came the epiphany. This contextuality, this dependence on a shared language, doesn’t mean that R.E.M. isn’t saying something interesting. For those “who have ears to hear”, they ARE saying something interesting. Subjectivity is not the same thing as meaninglessness. On the contrary, it’s only through subjectivity that there can be any meaning at all. There aren’t any meanings in the objective world, and we don’t need there to be.
Yeah I think that’s what I mean by resonance. What’s inaudible and what isn’t, the shared language, etc.
“Is it nothing more than political or psychological one-up-manship?”
Well that’s certainly one answer. Veblen and Bourdieu would say so – and quite convincingly. There is a great deal in what they say. I do try to slap myself at regular intervals just in case I am in fact merely playing status games by preferring ‘Hamlet’ to other things.
But I would omit the ‘nothing more’ part. I would agree that there is an element of that, but disagree that that’s all of it.
It’s a huge subject…
I agree with Chris that the notion of ‘that’s crap, ergo it’s not art’ is a non-starter (though I don’t think many aestheticians or philosophers of art would argue that point these days).
But although aesthetics and interpretation are subjective, that doesn’t mean that they are unbounded or that some views can’t be better than others (in the sense that they are better argued, better supported, more convincing, etc.). Not everyone is going to agree and different camps will have varying criteria, which is why discussions take place. But it’s not a complete free-for-all.
In order for even a disagreement to occur there has to be some foundation on which the disagreement takes place–there is some common language. If you like Stephen King because his stories build suspense in you, or you like his characterizations, and I think that his books are not suspenseful and his characters are one-dimensional–then we are disagreeing, but there is a common language that we are speaking. There is the possibility that we could persuade each other on the merits or non-merits.
So, yes, we will never have “necessary and sufficient conditions” for what makes a work of art aesthetically good or bad, but that doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it and attempt distinctions.
If someone wants to argue that “Hamlet” is really about Martians having a tea party, that’ll be tough to support. If someone wants to insist that the main criterion for a good work of literature is that the book contains chickens, he can hold that belief, but it isn’t very convincing.
Subjectivity is not unbounded.
I think part of the confusion is that people (academics as well) think that aesthetics means “one” aesthetics. That’s obviously not the case. I have aesthetic and interpretative reasons why I believe, say, The Clash is a better rock band than Hootie and the Blowfish. Others may strongly disagree (though they’d be wrong, haha), but there are intelligent things to be argued on both sides that go beyond, “I just like it better.” That’s precisely what aesthetics and interpretation are about. That’s the whole point.
Aesthetics may be subjective, but it is also empirical. It can be discussed and argued. If you don’t want to participate in that type of discussion, then by all means don’t. But it just doesn’t follow that subjective means “anything goes so why bother”….
” good work of literature is that the book contains chickens, he can hold that belief, but it isn’t very convincing.”
But that’s exactly what I think makes literature great.
It has to do with the relationship between chickens and the Godhead. In the little known “Chooknic gospels”, G_d states that literature containing chickens is an embodiment, in a kind of written way, of his G_dliness. Anyone aware of this essential truth, will look at literature in an entirely different way, and understand that chickens + literature equal aesthetic perfection.
You made me laugh, but alas that is not the same as putting forth a convincing argument.
“but alas that is not the same as putting forth a convincing argument.”
But saying “alas that is not the same as putting forth a convincing argument” is not a convincing counter-argument to demonstrate that mine wasn’t a convincing argument.
And yours didn’t even have the advantage that it was funny! :-)
Ha!
That’s an encouraging sign for the Dictionary, too. There are a good few chickens in there. Aesthetic perfection is on the way.
True! All too true.
Though my unfunny statement wasn’t intended as a counter-argument, since you never presented a serious argument in the first place.
My discussion of aesthetics was not to argue that there are any nonsubjective evaluative criteria, but rather a common language that can be used to discuss it–for literature: things such as language use (metaphor, poetics, etc), character, narrative, representation, engagement with the human condition, elicitation of emotion, etc.
Why those things? Because those things are the materials of the novel. So discussion is not foreclosed nor is it a free-for-all even if it is ultimately subjective–there is some basis for argument to exist. Now within that realm, there is no consensus and if you still want to argue for chickens as aesthetic perfection, so be it. Again, it’s just not very convincing as your reasoning is “because God says so.”
Of course, when all is said and done, anyone can claim anything, but you should be able to provide some sort of compelling evidence as to why you are making a certain claim.
I certainly understand the points you are making, but at the end of the day it’s a game you are either willing to play or not willing to play. It seems you don’t want to play which is cool, or are a raving postmodernist which is less cool, but hey, who am I to judge? But don’t burn down the baseball field just because you don’t like the game–others still want to play. :)