Languages of Art at the Turn of the Century

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Languages of Art at the Turn of the Century Jenefer Robinson The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 58, No. 3. (Summer, 2000), pp. 213-218. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28200022%2958%3A3%3C213%3ALOAATT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is currently published by The American Society for Aesthetics.

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Symposium: The Legacy of Nelson Goodman Jenefer Robinson Languages of Art at the Turn of the Century I. INTRODUCTION

It is hard to overemphasize the impact of Nelson Goodman's 1968 classic, Languages ofArt.' The book offered a powerful new vision of aesthetics grounded in analytic philosophy of language, which reframed many of the questions being asked in aesthetics and gave original, ingenious, often eccentric answers to them. Goodman reconceived works of art as symbols in symbol systems, and treated representation and expression in the arts in terms of semantic concepts such as reference and denotation. The book was unrelentingly systematic, highly polemical, and written in a trenchant, witty style. The reader is constantly aware of the author's formidable intelligence as well as his unwillingness to suffer foolish theories gladly. As soon as it was published, Languages of Art was both admired and attacked, and remarkably, it has continued to be admired and attacked until the present day. For more than thirty years no one who has defended an aesthetic theory with any claim to generality has been able to ignore Languages of Art. What is the status of this book at the turn of the millennium? At the time it was written, aesthetics was not a very lively field. Arguably, the only enduring masterpiece of analytic aesthetics from this era is Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism2 from 1958. Languages of Art, like its near contemporary, Wollheim's Art and Its Objects,3 was concerned to debunk both Beardsley's Dewey-flavored empiricism and the still influential idealism of Croce and Collingwood. For Goodman artworks are symbols, which refer to the world by virtue of what symbol they are in what symbol system. Like the Saussurean structuralists, he claims that artworks are signifiers in systems or structures of signs. Also like the structuralists, he argues that language and art do not merely reflect an an-

tecedently existing world but help to create new ones: Any notion of a reality consisting of objects and events and kinds established independently of discourse and unaffected by how they are described or otherwise presented must give way to the recognition that these, too, are parts of the story.4

On the other hand, the post-structuralist notion that meanings are constantly in flux, in accordance with the principles of diffe'rance and deferral of meaning, is inconsistent with Goodman's nominalism, which holds that terms genuinely refer to objects, events, and kinds. Goodman is not a skeptic about meaning. As I once heard him say, "Derrida deconstructs worlds, whereas I construct them!" Broadly construed, Goodman's view has prevailed. Works of art are now commonly understood as meanin&l entities, with cognitive value, which require interpretation rather than passive appreciation. But Goodman tried to defend his view in terms of a narrow semantic theory, which abstracts from the psychology of artists and audiences, and from the historical context of artworks, and which is consistent with his nominalism. Given the constraints that Goodman sets for himself, it is extraordinary how much the theory manages to accomplish. Nor is it surprising that it has been the butt of so much criticism. 11. REPRESENTATION

Perhaps the favorite target has been his theory of pictorial representation, or depiction. On Goodman's view, if a picturep represents an object o, then, providing that o exists,p denotes o. If o does not exist, then to say thatp represents o means that

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58:3 Summer 2000

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism p is a picture of a certain kind, an o-representingpicture. In this case p does not denote o, but the phrase "0-denoting-picture" denotes p. Similarly, a linguistic description of an object o either denotes o (if o exists) or is an o-denoting-description. The difference between pictorial representation and linguistic description resides only in the different kinds of symbol systems that they are in: whereas a language is a syntactically disjoint and differentiated system (we can always distinguish one character from another), a pictorial symbol system is syntactically dense and undifferentiated (between every two characters there can be a third), and relatively replete (every aspect of the pictorial symbol-its colors, lines, brushwork, etc.-is constitutive of it as a symbol). Goodman's theory has been salutary in showing how simple-minded it is to think of picturing as mirroring or copying or imitating. Understanding what a picture or a description refers to is always a function of the system of symbolizing within which it functions. Just as the noun "Boot" is a boat-description in German and a boot-description in English, so a portrait might be an ordinary-woman-picture in a Cubist symbol system and a grotesque-woman-with-a-seriouseye-deformity-picture in the symbol system of late-nineteenth-century academicism. Goodman's view is also salutary in that it emphasizes the need to understand pictures, just as we have to understand language, and that understanding pictures requires mastery of their pictorial "language." Finally, Goodman is also right to point out that a realistic picture cannot be defined as one that imitates the world particularly closely or accurately. After all, there are no fixed criteria for realism; a wide variety of pictorial styles from van Eyck to Courbet count as "realistic." But there are many problems. One of the main complaints has been that Goodman ignores what artists and spectators have to do psychologically or perceptually in order to grasp what a picture depicts. Spectators are not merely classifying pictures as two-little-girl-pictures or unicornpictures, or figuring out what a picture refers to (Gainsborough's daughters or nothing); they are seeing two little girls or a unicorn in the picture (Wollheim), or they are imagining of their seeing a picture that it is a seeing of two little girls or a unicorn (Walton).s We understand pictures by (imagining) seeing things in them, not by decoding them.

Now it is certainly true that Goodman does not speak explicitly about the perceptual abilities that understanding pictures requires; yet it is also true that he points out how the task of deciphering pictures is a task of discriminating characters in a system that is syntactically and semantically dense and relatively replete. Pictures cannot be " r e a d since reading is necessarily in a language; pictures require acts of perceptual discrimination. Goodman's theory here, as elsewhere, is abstract and schematic. He gets us to rethink such basic aesthetic concepts as representation without spelling out all the implications of his view. After all, there is no inherent contradiction in believing both that representation should be analyzed in terms of reference and that representation requires seeing-in (or some such perceptual ability). Gainsborough's picture of his daughters refers to his daughters. How it does this is by getting us to see the daughters in the picture. Likewise a picture of a unicorn is a unicorn-picture, but how we classify it is by seeing a unicorn in the picture. Perceptual theories of representation can be construed as filling in the gaps of Goodman's very schematic account. On the other hand, because of his nominalist preconceptions, a picture that "represents a soand-so" is always ambiguous for Goodman between being a so-and-so-picture and denoting a so-and-so. The "perceptual" theorists of representation have the advantage in that they treat representation as a univocal concept: if a picture represents a so-and-so, we (in imagination) see a so-and-so in the picture, whether or not the picture refers to any actual so-and-so's. This seems right. It is true that Gainsborough's portrait of his daughters picks them out or refers to them, whereas another picture of two little girls does not refer to anybody, but it does not follow that "representing" and "describing" are ambiguous terms. It is just that sometimes a representation or a description is satisfied and sometimes it is not. The word "represents" means the same thing when we say that a picture represents Gainsborough's daughters and when we say that a picture representstwo little girls, although in the first case the daughters are denoted and in the second case the little girls are not. Here is one of many instances where Goodman's nominalist semantics leads him to counterintuitive conclusions. Goodman has also been criticized for ignoring the important perceptual constraints on real-

Symposium: The Legacy of Nelson Goodman ism. For Goodman, realism in painting is a matter of the familiarity of the symbol system within which the picture is made. Yet, however familiar some symbol systems become (such as the system of Analytical Cubism), they still do not become realistic for us unless they permit us to see readily in a picture what it represents. On this issue, too, the "perceptual" theorists seem to come out ahead. Finally, Goodman's concept of representation ignores the historical and cultural context in which a picture originates. Goodman argues that the characteristics and functions of symbols ... can be studied quite apart from the acts or beliefs or motives of any agent that may have brought about the ... referential ... relationships involved.6

In saying this, Goodman is a child of his times. In 1968,when a formal theory was used to model parts of natural language, it would normally abstract from speakers' intentions and study syntactic and semantic regularities that are independent of contextual factors. However, there are aspects of linguistic meaning and reference that cannot be determined independently of context. Similarly, in determining the meaning of artworks, genetic and other contextual factors are often crucial. The very same picture in the same pictorial symbol system may be a quite different kind of picture depending upon how and why it came into being. For example, Wollheim cites a Terborch painting commonly known as The Parental Admonition, which, he says, in fact depicts an aspirant whore and her potential client.' The picture can be interpreted in either way; a correct interpretation depends upon knowing about the context in which the painting originated, including the painter's intentions. 111. EXEMPLIFICATION AND EXPRESSION

By contrast with the reams of pages devoted to Goodman on representation, the concept of exemplification has been relatively neglected, yet Goodman regarded this concept as one of the main important innovations in Languages of Art. An exemplified property is one that is both possessed and referred to by an artwork. Since Goodman's nominalism requires that only "labels," such as predicates, are exemplified, rather than properties, he defines exemplification as fol-

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lows: a work of art a exemplifies a predicatep if and only i f p denotes a and a refers top. Expression is analyzed as metaphorical exemplification, i.e., the predicate in question denotes the work metaphorically rather than literally. As in the case of representation, the concept of exemplification, though much vilified, has important virtues. First, it elegantly captures the way in which many artworks reveal, show forth, or "embody" the very themes and qualities that they are about. Munch's well-known painting, The Scream, for example, exemplifies its swirling shapes, lurid colors, dramatic contrasts, and powerful brushwork. It also (metaphorically) exemplifies feelings of anguish and alienation. The picture portrays the chief character as anguished and alienated; at the same time the picture itself incorporates qualities of anguish and alienation. Thus the composition of the picture-with the chief character squashed into the lower right corner, pushed up against the picture plane, turned away from the figures at the other end of the bridge, and separated by the lines of the bridge from the life of the town below+xemplifies the very qualities of anguish and alienation that this character is depicted as suffering. Moreover, the swirling brushwork echoes the character's screaming mouth, so that the whole picture seems to scream: it exemplifies screaming. Similarly, Shakespeare's lines Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end;R

exemplify the advance and retreat of the waves in line one, and the headlong rush of time in line two. The lines exemplify the very qualities to which they refer. Goodman claims that exemplificationality is one of four "symptoms of the aesthetic," along with syntactic and semantic density, and repleteness. Certainly, it has often been claimed that one of the marks of art is that it "shows" what is "says," as in the Munch and Shakespeare examples. The concept of exemplification is particularly useful in explaining how abstract arts like nonobjective painting and so-called "pure" instrumental music can be meaningful, despite the fact that they do not normally represent anything and cannot describe anything because they are not in a linguistic symbol system. We might say, for example, that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony ex-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism emplifies a "struggle to victory." A heroic theme meets obstacles in the form of other themes, key changes, etc., that try to alter it and prevent its return, yet the theme manages to survive unscathed, thereby exemplifying a triumph over the obstacles. Many theorists deny that music can have "extra-musical" meanings, while others claim that some "pure" music is indeed able to tell psychological stories of this sort. The concept of exemplification helps to bridge the gap between these views. It shows how music can refer to qualities "outside" the music that are at the same time qualities that the music itself possesses. The struggles and the triumph over obstacles are both musical and psychological. Goodman's concept of exemplification gives us an elegant way of talking about how "pure" musical structure can have "extra-musical" significance. Goodman analyzes expression as metaphorical exemplification. Strictly speaking, The Scream exemplifies its swirling brushwork, but expresses its feelings of alienation and anguish. Presumably, it also expresses its screaming quality, since the picture refers to a scream, but only metaphorically screams. One of the advantages of Goodman's view is that it allows for the expression of nonemotional properties. Some theorists of music, in particular, have criticized philosophers for confining attention to the expression of emotional qualities. On Goodman's view, however, poems, paintings, and music can all exemplify such nonemotional properties as fluidity, freshness, storminess, and weight; they can scream and snarl and droop. Goodman gives us a way of talking about the expression of qualities that are metaphorically possessed by artworks but that are not specifically emotional. Another advantage of Goodman's view is that it emphasizes that what a work of art expresses is (partly, at least) a function of the symbol system in which it is a character. To borrow an example from Ernst Gombrich, Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie expresses gay abandon partly because of the role it plays within the symbol system of Mondrian's oeuvre. If it were, per impossibile, in the pictorial symbol system of Severini's mature style, it might rather express cool a l o o f n e s ~ . ~ Not all artistic expression can be explained in semantic terms, however. If we think of an artwork or part of an artwork as a gesture expressive of some feeling (or other psychological state)

in a character or the (implied) author, then the feeling may belong literally, not metaphorically, to both the gesture and the person making it. In Purcell's celebrated lament from Dido and Aeneas, for example, Dido is represented as literally experiencing grief and despair at being abandoned by Aeneas, and her lament is literally grief-stricken and despairing. In a similar way, Tolstoy's treatment of Anna Karenina is literally sympathetic and compassionate, and the novel Anna Karenina literally exhibits this sympathy and compassion. More importantly, an account of such examples would require a psychological analysis of the emotions in question and how they can be expressed in life as well as in literature. The sympathy and compassion that Tolstoy exhibits is the same kind of "life" emotion that we may feel in real life for those whom we perceive to be suffering misfortune. To understand this kind of expression we need a psychological account of expressive gestures and how they are related to the states of mind that they express. Other examples of this sort are even harder for Goodman to deal with. Constable's landscapes and George Butterworth's music often express a love for the English countryside, but these examples are not explained by saying that the artworks themselves metaphorically love the countryside. This difficulty is related to another. The reason why we can confidently assert that Constable's landscapes express love for the English countryside is that we know the context in which they were brought into being. We know that Constable loved the landscapes he painted, and we can see this love in, for example, the vibrant freshness of his windswept skies and the loving attention to details of texture and color in the mundane rural objects he depicts. In short, as in the case of representation, knowing the symbol system an artwork is in may not be enough to determine what it expresses. We may also need to know something about its genesis in the artist's intentions.1° IV. ONTOLOGY

Goodman's views on the ontology of art have also been roundly criticized and widely condemned. According to Goodman, a musical work is identified as the referent of a sequence of characters in a notational system (a score). A notational system is syntactically and semantically disjoint

Symposium: The Legacy of Nelson Goodman and differentiated. In a score every mark or inscription is identifiable as belonging to one and only one character, such as the character for middle C or C#,and has one and only one referent: the sounding tones C or C#. Each sounding tone in turn is unambiguously denoted by one and only one character." Any sequence of sounding tones that complies with the score is an instance of the musical work determined by the score: sameness of spelling is all that counts. A literary work is a character in a notational scheme (a script), so that any inscription or utterance of the script is thereby an instance of the work. Two inscriptions of a novel are instances of the same work because they are spelled in exactly the same way. Both music and literature are therefore what Goodman calls allographic arts: the identity of both is defined broadly speaking by "sameness of spelling." An exact copy of King Lear is just another copy of King Lear. Any performance of The Rite of Spring is just another performance of The Rite of Spring. By contrast, paintings, sculptures, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs are all autographic arts. Because they are in syntactically dense and undifferentiated symbol systems, they have no distinct characters that can be spelled and read. Consequently, they are identifiable solely by means of their history of production. An autographic form like painting is such that "even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine."l2 Goodman notoriously argues that there is an aesthetic difference between a painting and a forged copy of it even if I cannot presently tell them apart just by looking at them. It is probably theorists of music who have found most to grumble about in Goodman's discussion: critics argue that the musical work cannot be identified with whatever complies with a score. First of all, the score leaves unspecified important aspects of music that help to define particular works. A musical work is not just a sequence of tones in a particular order, organized by a particular meter; it is a sequence of tones with dynamic qualities and phrasing, played on particular instruments with particular timbres, and none of these musical dimensions can be adequately captured by a notation. In shaping a phrase, musicians will make certain notes last fractionally longer than others; they will emphasize some more than others; they will play more quickly or more slowly, louder or more quietly. If phrasing and dynamics are essential features of a musical work. then the work

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cannot be fully identified via a notation. Secondly, a performance with one wrong note is no longer a performance of that work, while a performance of a Chopin Prelude that blatantly ignores tempo and expressive markings such as andantino or vivace but has no wrong notes, counts as a correct p e r f ~ r m a n c e . ~ ~ Goodman answers these objections by pointing out that we can identify a piece of music with whatever complies with the score, without thereby committing ourselves to the view that everything aesthetically important about the music is captured in the way it is identified. The idea that a performance of a work with one wrong note is no longer a performance of that work is strictly true without having any important aesthetic consequences: we may still treat the performance as a (slightly wrong) performance of the work and discuss its aesthetic virtues and vices independently of its ontological status. Here, as elsewhere, we have to remember that Goodman's account is highly schematic. At the same time, it has the corresponding virtues of systematicity and elegance. The distinction between autographic and allographic art forms has been profoundly influential. No one before Goodman had much of philosophical interest to say about forgery. Since Goodman there has been a flurry of work on this topic. Goodman focused attention on the vital role of history of production in the identification of paintings and sculptures. In doing so, however, he inadvertently opened the door to a serious objection to the distinction between autographic and allographic arts. It turns out that what Goodman thinks of as allographic art forms may, like paintings, need to be identified, at least partly, in terms of their history of production. A musical work, for example, may be identifiable not just as a sequence of sounds determined by a score, but as that particular sequence of sounds that was put together by a particular composer at a particular time. Moreover, Borges's tale of Pierre Menard's writing part of Don Quixote (in the twentieth century under the influence of pragmatism!) shows how sameness of spelling does not completely determine the identity of a literary work.14 We cannot tell the difference between Cervantes's work and Menard's just by following the words on the page.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism V. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Languages of Art is both rich and dense. In it Goodman discusses every significant topic in aesthetics from representation to expression, from forgery to metaphor, from the ontology of art to aesthetic value, and in every case he has something lucid, original, and provocative to say. His approach has influenced everyone who writes on aesthetics in the Anglo-American tradition, whether they like it or not. As I see it, while the approach has been remarkably illuminating in all sorts of ways, it suffers from three major drawbacks that recur in different guises in many different places in the book. The first drawback is Goodman's apparent denial of the psychological aspects of art, especially in his accounts of representation and expression. The second is his pervasive neglect of the historical and cultural context in which a work of art originates. Of course, we could give a broad sketch of the history of a symbol system as we could of a language, and what an artwork expresses or represents will be partly determined by the general history of the symbol system itself. But knowing about the origin of the symbol system is often not enough; we may need to know how individual works within the system originated in order to determine what they mean. This drawback is linked to the first: one of the many kinds of information that we may need to gather about the origin of a work is information about the psychology of its maker. The third drawback is Goodman's adherence to nominalism, rather than a philosophy of language that could include a richer semantics, not to mention a pragmatic dimension. Goodman's nominalism leads him to announce that "denotation is the core of representation" and then retreat to a position where most representations fail to denote. It also leads him to say that only labels can be exemplified or expressed, a view that perhaps explains his neglect of the psychological aspects of expression. Finally, it leads him to take as his paradigm of a symbol system a notation, a symbol system that is quite unlike any language in actual use. What is perhaps most remarkable about Lunguages of Art is that despite these mostly selfimposed drawbacks, it manages to say so much

that is interesting and true. At the end of the day, or, rather, at the end of the century, Languages of Art has done perhaps more than any other book to transform aesthetics into a vigorous and rigorous discipline. It is a landmark work of twentiethcentury aesthetics that has helped to define the field as we enter the next millennium.15 JENEFER ROBINSON

Department of Philosophy University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0374 internet: [email protected] 1. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to A Theor11 of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976). 2. Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981). 3. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York: Harper & Row, 1971; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 4. Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 67. In this book Goodman defends Languages ofArt from various critics. 5. See Richard Wollheim, "Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation," supplementary essay to Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed.; and Kendall Walton, Mimesis as MakeBelieve (Harvard University Press, 1990). 6. Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, p. 88. 7. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 92. 8. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60. 9. See Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York: Pantheon, 1960), chap. 11. 10. We also know that Constable flourished in the art historical period known as romanticism, in which artworks were often conceived of as expressions of the artist's feelings about nature. However, this particular fact about history may, in Goodman's view, simply serve to identify the symbol system in which Constable was working. 11.This is not quite accurate. Stephen Davies reminds me that Goodman allows for notational redundancies in a score. Thus, for even-tempered instruments, CX and DL are everywhere intersubstitutable. 12. Goodman, Languages ofArt, p. 113. 13. There are complications. Some tempo and dynamic markings may fit a notation if their ranges are disjoint. For example, mf and f may have ranges that never overlap. I owe this point to Stephen Davies. 14. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; Selected Stones and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 3 6 4 4 . 15. I thank Stephen Davies, John Martin, and Stephanie Ross for their useful comments.