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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Anxiety of Lack of Influence
I’m reading Derrida, bits from Truth In Painting, anthologized in Basic Writings (ed. Barry Stocker), trans. Bennington/McLeod. I’m not sure who wrote the section notes to go with this bit - Stocker, I assume. But maybe Bennington and McLeod. Here is a very odd bit, about Henry Allison and Paul Guyer, prominent Kant exegetes and commentators:
Neither Allison nor Guyer have much knowledge of recent French philosophy, including Derrida, but it is clear their work on Kant’s aesthetics derives great impetus from Derrida’s focus on this aspect of Kant, along with work by other French philosophers, particularly Jean-Francois Lyotard. Although Kant’s aesthetics is evidently a major source for aesthetic theory, Kant scholars have not previously given it a great deal of attention; and clearly the realization that French commentators were ahead of them made a difference to how much work they did on Kant’s aesthetic. (p. 401)
What an odd thing to assume.
Someone needs to rewrite Harold Bloom accordingly. Or not.
Moving right along, there are some comparative comments on Goodman-Derrida on art. Our author does not have much knowledge of Goodman (draw what anxious conclusions you will); but I would like your opinion of the accuracy of his glosses on Derrida.
In his work on induction [Goodman] questioned the possibility of attaching properties to objects with certainty into the future. In his nominalism, he denied the existence of all abstract objects. The discussion of properties connects with nominalism since nominalism denies that properties have any abstract reality. This work is at least compatible with Derrida’s adherence to ‘radical empiricism’ and denial of ideal reality for concepts. (p. 402)
Goodman most certainly did not question ‘the possibility of attaching properties to objects with certainty into the future’. That isn’t it at all. But where does Derrida speak of ‘radical empiricism’? And what does he mean by that, if he does use this rather commitment-fraught self-description? Do you think it is fair to say that Derrida is an empiricist who denies the existence of abstracta? (I seem to recall him being rather abusive of empiricism, although now I can’t remember where. Seems like I remember it being something he does in passing, quite a lot.)
An artwork is never mimetic (imitative) for Derrida. Mimesis itself rests on a metaphysical notion of an object ontologically prior to its representation. Part of Derrida’s point is that objects which are different in any way cannot be said to be identical because that would be to deny difference. He has an underlying commitment to nominalism. (p. 402)
Where does Derrida say so, if indeed he does? (Not in the section that follows, in this book, so far as I can see.) If he does say it, it certainly does sound like a bad argument: why should mimesis need to be a metaphysical notion at all, after all? The denial that artwork is ever mimetic seems trivially false, due to the possibility of ordinary, non-philosophical uses of ‘imitate’ or ‘copy’. And the fact that no two things are strictly (qualitatively) identical clearly has no bearing whatsoever; because a copy need not be qualitatively perfect in order to be a copy (imitation, mimicry). No one has ever argued that a condition of mimesis is perfect mimesis.
Goodman certainly gets into Derrida’s territory when he suggests that there is no clear distinction between style and content in art; and there is no clear distinction between representation and what is represented. For Goodman a world is no more than a series of representations, so we can make no distinction between aesthetic representations and the world to which they refer.
Goodman specifically warns against the fallacious inference, from his sort of world-making view, to the conclusion that worlds are ‘just representations’, or ‘just words’. (Whether Goodman can avoid implying this unwanted thing is another matter.) What would Derrida say about this?
Here’s a bit from Derrida himself:
By asking what art means (to say), one submits the mark “art” to a very determined regime of interpretation which has supervened in history: it consists, in its tautology without reserve, in interrogating the vouloir-dire of every work of so-called art, even if its form is not that of saying. in this way one wonders what a plastic or musical work means (to say), submitting all productions to the authority of speech and the “discursive” arts. (p. 408)
Derrida writes of a progress through questions - what is art? what is the origin of art or of works of art? What is the meaning of art? A bit further on, he suggests that by “accelerating the rhythm a little” the philosopher has “already subjected the whole of space to the discursive arts, to voice and the logos.” (p. 409).
That is, you get caught up in all sorts of ‘meaning’ questions that may not be appropriate. Art does not always work by ‘meaning’, perhaps.
I think this is more or less right. But how is it consistent with Derrida’s own rather relentlessly pan-textualist modes of handling matters? Where does Derrida discuss how, given that certain works of art are not linguistic, it is wrong ‘to subject them to the voice - to logos’; but equally wrong to subject them to writing. Not all art is intelligible as a form of writing. To be a bit more specific about it: Derrida talks about art as ‘abyssal’ - which is supposed to be, in a way, the opposite of talking about it as ‘wanting to say something’. It is paradoxical, divided. But the focus on the ‘abyss’ seems just as caught in the snares of discursivity as the focus on ‘meaning’. It’s just a subversive variation on a semantic theme. Why should the theme be semantic at all?
You probably think this is some sort of trap I’m setting. I’m hoping someone will propose a Derridean answer I can pounce on as transparently idiotic. Well, you might be right. So let me hereby promise not to do so, in the hopes that someone will actually give me a cite. I was hoping that The Truth in Painting would do it for me. But, frankly, it turned out to be about Hegel instead. At least the bit I’ve got.
I was hopeful, reading the intro notes, because Goodman is full of answers to these questions - whether they are right or not, he’s got ‘em. (I think he’s mostly wrong.) The title to Languages of Art
Rather, we may suppose, the way the object looks to the normal eye, at proper range, from a favorable angle, in good light, without instrumentation, unprejudiced by thought or interpretation. In short, the object is to be copied as seen under aseptic conditions by the free and innocent eye.
The catch here, as Ernst Gombrich insists, is that there is no innocent eye. (p. 7)
The catch here, it seems to me, is that it clearly follows that the normal eye is not innocent.
So Goodman has given a wrong account of ‘normal’. Ergo, he has said nothing against the notion that ‘imitation’ is a perfectly serviceable notion, relative to ‘normal’ conditions. Things can perhaps count as mimetic - as resembling - relative to what a ‘normal’ eye would see.
Goodman, it seems to me, is suffering from needless anxiety of influence. (Who is his strong poet? The world, my boy. The world.) All this ‘unprejudiced by thought or interpretation’ stuff is front-loading the argument with sheer presumption on behalf of a broadly linguistic constructivism.
The error is, in a sense, that Goodman is coming in too deep. An analogy: Eddington once made the point that, really, desks are not ‘solid’ - because physics teaches us they are mostly empty space. Willfred Sellars accordingly distinguishes the ‘manifest’ image of the world, which contains solid desks; from the ‘scientific’ image, which contains no solid desks. But obviously if someone says, ‘I want a big, solid desk for my office,’ she is not talking nonsense. So what we want is, in some sense, the ‘manifest’ image, when we shop for a desk. Now, regarding painting and representational art generally, we might say: in a deep, metaphysical sense, nothing really ‘resembles’ anything else. The notion simply has no application. (I actually doubt this is right, but let it be so.) But, obviously, there is also a ‘manifest’ image of art - the possibility of looking at art and noticing that it is, in some sense, mimetic. (I do not say what makes this possible. I take as a premise that it is actual, ergo somehow possible.) And please note: it need not be unarguable. You can argue whether this resembles that. You can argue about whether a desk is really solid. The fact that these disputes may not be settled does not mean that they were, after all, deep and metaphysical. (’Manifest’ has the wrong connotations. My keys are part of my ‘manifest image’ of the world. But they’ve fallen behind my solid desk, where they are is hardly manifest. Still, it does not follow that the reason I cannot find them is that they are mostly empty space, i.e. not part of the manifest image, after all, but the other thing. Likewise, if we argue about whether a painting ‘resembles’ its subject, it doesn’t follow that the explanation of the character of our dispute is some deep metaphysical thing - about abysses, or constructivism, or whatever. To dispute is just as normal as to nod together.)
Goodman actually almost gets it. He walks right up the problem with his own view. Then he misses it again.
All the same, an artist may often do well to strive for innocence of eye. The effort sometimes rescues him from the tired patterns of everyday seeing, and results in fresh insight. The opposite effort, to give fullest rein to a personal reading, can be equally tonic - and for the same reason. But the most neutral eye and the most biased are merely sophisticated in different ways. The most ascetic vision and the most prodigal, like the sober portrait and the vitriolic caricature, differ not in how much but only in how they interpret.
The copy theory of representation, then, is stopped at the start by the inability to specify what is to be copied. (p. 9)
But surely the proper conclusion from these reflections is, rather, that the copy theory is quite possibly correct. What is copied may be something along the ‘normal’ spectrum - i.e. something between the tired patterns of everyday seeing, and the results of fresh insight. Something between sober portraiture and vitriolic caricature, if you please.
I do not say this is terribly deep. Indeed, it is shallow by design. But is it obviously wrong?
Goodman concludes that all art - painting as much as language - must be denotative. “The relation between a picture and what it represents is thus assimilated to the relation between a predicate and what it applies to” (p. 5). So painting is like language. But, again, why not say instead that, under ‘normal’ circumstances, ‘resemblance’ is the relation that allows this sort of art to do what it does (whatever we may decide that is). Representational art, quite unlike predicates - which don’t resemble what they are about at all (modulo normality) - represents as a function of resemblance. (But what if things aren’t normal? Well, then maybe the art won’t succeed in representing, to a non-normal audience. If Martians show up, whose eyes see as a drunk sees through a raindrop, they won’t recognize Wellington. Maybe they will think that the word ‘Wellington’ is itself utterly resembling of the famous gentlemen. Whereas the portrait of him is some sort of arbitrary token. It doesn’t follow that the painting does not function, normally, via a relation of resemblance.)
This is, in case you are curious, a Wittgensteinian objection to Goodman. At least I think I’m inspired by Wittgenstein.
I suspect that Derrida’s views are indeed broadly similar to Goodman’s, and therefore open to broadly similar objections. Per that bit above, where he is said to be hostile to notions of mimesis. But, then again, I can’t be sure until I figure out what his views are.
Comments
Mr. Goodman’s book The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight has enjoyed very good press. It has been lengthily reviewed in the leading dailies and weeklies. It has been called “impressive and convincing.” The author has been credited with “deep insight” into an “essentially modern” character. Passages have been quoted to demonstrate his efficient handling of nutshells. One critic went so far as to take his hat off to Mr. Goodman-—who, let it be added, had used his own merely to talk through it. In a word, Mr. Goodman has been patted on the back when he ought to have been rapped on the knuckles.
I always wondered what hats were for. It turns out they have multiple functions.
There’s a lot here and I haven’t read the specific Derrida here or this Goodman person. Having said that, I’m intrigued by the notion that Kant scholars haven’t actually bothered to study his aesthetic theories. If this is true, then they are quite silly. (And obviously, if not, I wouldn’t trust those other scholars further than I could throw them.)
Anyway, the one point I can dredge out of my Derrida memory would be the vastly expanded notion of “writing” --- if we see a landscape with a road crossing it, the road is “writing” across the text of the landscape. Thus the statement that the world is a text. I think all this is in _Of Grammatology_ (or my prof used these explanations when teaching G) but I don’t remember art coming up in it so much as Rousseau and Levi-Strauss and whatnot.
Not having read the discussed Goodman (only Ways of Worldmaking) or Derrida, I can’t provide what you’re looking for—but I would like to opine that reading Goodman can be incredibly frustrating sometimes. (Sort of similar to the way reading Walton can be, actually.)
Sisyphus: The text quoted only claims that Kant’s aesthetics were under-studied before Guyer & Allison’s works. Guyer’s “Kant and the Claims of Taste” is from 1980. Allison’s “Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense” is from 1986, but it barely mentions aesthetics, being largely a commentary on the first Critique; I can’t find Allison’s CV online, but his first book-length treatment of Kant’s aesthetics is from 2001. Which is much later than a great deal of (Guyer-inspired) discussion of Kant’s aesthetics; Guyer edited a very nice collection of “Essays on Kant’s Aesthetics” in 1982. So, I have no idea what the comment Holbo quoted is on about. It seems like the guy heard that “Guyer” and “Allison” were the big names in Anglophone Kant-studies (which is true enough), and threw them in to make it sound like he was familiar with the English-language Kant literature.
The idea that Guyer was self-consciously “catching up to the Frenchies” strikes me as utterly bizarre. Nor does it seem plausible that most of the more recent work on Kant’s aesthetics has been due to Francophone envy; it seems to me that it’s mostly come about as a reaction to Guyer’s book. And there is definitely not a shortage of discussion of Kant’s aesthetics in English nowadays.
Also: I laughed at the suggestion that Holbo couldn’t find his keys because they were mostly made of empty space. Nice one, Holbo!
Sisyphus, you are right about the vastly expanded sense of ‘writing’. But there is, likewise, a vastly expanded sense of ‘speech’ and ‘voice’. Derrida is (rather typically, I think) switching between the broad and narrow senses, to suit his immediate needs. He is obviously using ‘speech’ in the more narrow, ordinary sense in the passage. So, in fairness, I ought to be able to help myself to the more narrow, ordinary sense, in responding. If he retreats to the metaphysics sense, it seems a fair reply would be: then your original argument doesn’t obviously go through. (It only seemed to be obviously right because, obviously, the plastic arts and music are not ‘discursive’, in the ordinary sense.)
The point about Anglo-American work on Kant’s aesthetics: it is true that a big difference between analytic and continental treatments of Kant, broadly speaking (VERY broadly speaking), is that the latter focuses - sometimes even first and foremost - on aesthetics. Analytic types really did neglect that leg of the three critique stool for a long time, relatively speaking. This is still true, though in absolute terms there is so much written about the 3rd critique that you can hardly call it ‘neglect’. (More than you could possibly read is usually enough, for practical purposes.) Anyway, Daniel’s point about Guyer and Allison seems exactly right.
Also, if Guyer were inspired by continental treatments of Kant’s aesthetics, then there’s no way he would write like that.
John, why do you say your objection to Goodman is Wittgensteinian? Not that I can’t imagine; I just want to hear you explain it. Also, for extra credit: what’s the difference between “the new problem of induction” (Goodman) and the rule-following problem (Kripkenstein)?
I must say: our comment counter really is broke. It used to be it was often off by 1. At the moment, there are 7 comments in this thread and the count read 3. That seems like an unacceptable margin of error.
In response to your query, Dave, I’m teaching Goodman vs. Kripke at the moment and am trying to articulate my Wittgensteinian thoughts on the subject. I’ll try to muster the strength to post something.
An artwork is never mimetic (imitative) for Derrida. Mimesis itself rests on a metaphysical notion of an object ontologically prior to its representation. Part of Derrida’s point is that objects which are different in any way cannot be said to be identical because that would be to deny difference. He has an underlying commitment to nominalism.
Looking at this again, I think the commentator is trying to make some link between D.’s argument about “iterability” (basically, a condition in which every repetition entails alteration, such that there is no such thing as the “pure copy") and a critique of a metaphysical concept of mimesis. IMO, you’re right, John, to see the point about iterability as incidental to the aesthetic concept of mimesis. D.’s critique of mimesis has more to do with the two points I outlined above.
At any rate, if you’re interested in reading more of Derrida on many of the questions you’ve raised here, try his “Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars”. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a collection of interviews/seminars JD gave while in Sydney in ‘99. But the relevant detail is that the first half of the book deals very much with what you’re working through here. E.g. “In Blind Sight: Writing, Seeing, Touching”, “The Artist, the Projectile” and (maybe not so relevant) “Specters of Media”.
It does strike me as more likely that someone just noticed that there was this whole aspect of Kant’s work that was being neglected and realized he had hit the jackpot, as opposed to “French envy.” Whatever else one may say about Anglo-American philosophy departments, they do seem to be fairly free of “French envy.”
Hey, why did you delete our boy ( = “obloH nhoJ”, this time)? Just because he said the same damn thing he always says? Now he’s going to come over to my place and bitch kvetch about it.
Is there any reason why my long detailed attempt to provide John with some answers to his questions was not approved?
In case it was a glitch, I’ll reproduce it below:
Hi John
I’ll do my best in providing some responses to your Qs about D., with the caveat that I’ve no time today for extended debates. Should you decide that you want to debate any of the points, please keep in mind that my responses should be treated neither as a substitute for D’s own words nor as formulations that I think are perfect, utterly defensible, etc.
where does Derrida speak of ‘radical empiricism’? And what does he mean by that, if he does use this rather commitment-fraught self-description? Do you think it is fair to say that Derrida is an empiricist who denies the existence of abstracta? (I seem to recall him being rather abusive of empiricism, although now I can’t remember where. Seems like I remember it being something he does in passing, quite a lot.)
I had always thought this term was associated with Deleuze rather than Derrida, but I’m very happy to use it to describe the latter too. By “radical empiricism” is meant a form of analysis that refuses the absoluteness of the distinction between concepts and objects (or between theoretics and empirics) or that refuses to oppose the two. It’s a form of analysis that can therefore seek to analyse the empirical nature of concepts — e.g. analysing not concepts as such, but rather particular events in which concepts are deployed in specific ways, according to particular regimes of thinking, via specific techniques of praxis, in relation to particular social institutions, all of which have emerged out of specific histories, etc. — as well as the extent to which empirical observation is always underpinned by such concepts, which is to say such concept-events. (To use the crass formulation, which is absolutely no substitute for the more qualified and detailed formulation: observation as interpretation).
As to whether it’s fair to say that “Derrida is an empiricist who denies the existence of abstracta”, you’d have to provide me with a precise concept of “abstracta” for me to say, but my guess is that the answer is not really, it’s just that abstracta always emerge in relation to particular contexts of abstraction. Certainly, D. critiques the notion of a pure ideality, if that helps.
An artwork is never mimetic (imitative) for Derrida.
That seems way too direct for Derrida. A better formulation would be: “for Derrida, An artwork is never simply mimetic (imitative)”. It’s never simply mimetic because 1) it might always have some other function, whether in addition to mimesis or in place of mimesis; and 2) because for the mimetic function of art to be realised (in the sense of being recognised, say, or of being effective) it has to be “framed” by a particular mode of “reception”, i.e. one that conceives of art as mimesis (Cf. Heidegger on The Origin of the Work of Art). The mimetic “function” of Art, therefore, is not purely a “property” of the artwork. For more on this, see D.’s critique of Lacan in “the Purveyor of Truth” in The Post Card.
Goodman specifically warns against the fallacious inference, from his sort of world-making view, to the conclusion that worlds are ‘just representations’, or ‘just words’. (Whether Goodman can avoid implying this unwanted thing is another matter.) What would Derrida say about this?
I’ll cite Niall Lucy (from A Derrida Dictionary) on this, since it seems to say what needs to be said:
In the broadest sense a text is something that has been made or constructed (a novel, a movie, a legal document, a book of philosophy, [a work of art], etc.), implying that there are things in the world (being, justice, truth, [human nature] and so on) which haven’t been made but just are. According to this standard (metaphysical) view, we might say that everything in the world belongs either on the side of representation (text) or presence (the real).
Now when Derrida speaks of the text he does so in the standard sense, but with a twist. Derrida’s “text” [or “textuality”] carries the sense of something that has been made — and that’s all. In other words it doesn’t carry the inference that, “outside” the text, things just are. This has two consequences: first, that everything is text and so “there is no outside-text”. Secondly, because everything is text, because there is nothing prior to textuality, then really there is no such thing as representation. A text is not, for Derrida, an imitation of presence; instead presence is an effect of textuality. (Lucy, pp.142-3)
In other words, if everything “is” representation, then nothing is representation, because the notion of representation carries with it the idea of something outside representation that is being represented, which there can’t be if everything is representation. (Note in that last sentence from Lucy that there no denial that a text (or artwork) may function as an imitation of presence, only the denial that it is an imitation of presence.) Effectively, then, Derrida’s concept of textuality has built into it a warning “against the fallacious inference ... that worlds are ‘just representations’, or ‘just words’”
That is, you get caught up in all sorts of ‘meaning’ questions that may not be appropriate. Art does not always work by ‘meaning’, perhaps.
I think this is more or less right. But how is it consistent with Derrida’s own rather relentlessly pan-textualist modes of handling matters? Where does Derrida discuss how, given that certain works of art are not linguistic, it is wrong ‘to subject them to the voice - to logos’; but equally wrong to subject them to writing. Not all art is intelligible as a form of writing.
The claim only looks inconsistent with Derrida’s “rather relentlessly pan-textualist modes of handling matters” if one rather relentlessly imagines “text” and “writing”, even in an expanded form, in linguistic terms. See our very long discussion previously for my argument as to why “writing” doesn’t mean “writing imagined as covering everything”. Derrida’s writing-in-general is not a simple Signifier/Signified relation expanded to cover everything. (The Sr/Sd structure is the representational structure par excellence) Derrida’s writing is something more like the opposite (almost) of language.
The point about Anglo-American work on Kant’s aesthetics: it is true that a big difference between analytic and continental treatments of Kant, broadly speaking (VERY broadly speaking), is that the latter focuses - sometimes even first and foremost - on aesthetics.
I think the big difference has to do not so much with the respective focus or lack of focus on aesthetics, but more to do with:
1) the relative focus on reflective as against determining judgement. Please keep in mind that Kant is actually not all that interested in aesthetic judgement in the third critique. He is more interested in the experiment-based empirical sciences. It just happens that both aesthetics and experimental science both proceed by means largely of reflective judgement (albeit in different ways one towards subjective finality, the other towards objective finality).
2) the fact that for analytic philosophy (VERY broadly speaking) determining judgement comes first, as it were. Determining judgement is privileged as the proper mode of (philosophical) argumentation, and the first critique serves as the basis for (in the sense of providing a ground for) the two subsequent critiques. In continental philosophy (again VERY broadly speaking) — from Hegel onwards, but certainly for Romanticism — it’s kind of the other way around. Lyotard is the obvious example here.
Derrida is different again, I would argue, in that it is precisely the question not only of the relations between and but also of the separability of the three critiques. To put it way too crudely, for D. there is never any determining judgement that doesn’t also depend on some form of reflective judgement (and vice versa). The problem is that for any philosophy that is premised on the subordination of reflective judgement to determining judgement, D.’s performative affirmation of reflective judgement is going to look like the rejection of the “principles” and “proper methods” of philosophy.
Hope that helps.
Cheers
rob
Hey rob, thanks the for comment. I don’t know what happened. Obviously it got accidentally deleted somehw. Thanks for the references. (Glad you save back-ups of your comments.)
No problem, John. Hope you find the comments instructive/useful.
As for back-ups, I’m a seasoned heckler: I’m sure always to carry a text-editor in my pocket wherever I go.
Guyer on Derrida on Kant’s aesthetics (*Kant and the Experience of Freedom*):
“On the linguistic account, the sublime reveals beyond any attempt to say what experience is like there lurks the abyss of the unsayable; the perceptual form shows not only how the attempt to describe the world but even that to have a determinate perception of it is dissolved in a larger sea of the ungraspable. The linguistic interpretation has been popularized by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man and the many writers influenced by them.”
Allison on Derrida on Kant’s aesthetics (*Kant’s Theory of Taste*):
“Finally, as already noted, the fourth part of this book (Chapters 12 and 13) deals with topics that are of considerable intrinsic interest but stand apart from the systematic structure of Kant’s theory of taste: his conceptions of fine art and genius, and his account of the sublime. Appealing to Kant’s term highlighted by Derrida, I refer to these topics as ‘parerga’ to the theory of taste because of their extra-systematic status.”