Collective Formations

In an article ostensibly about art forgery, Denis Dutton (philosophy professor and Editor of Arts & Letters Daily) concludes with these words:

Establishing nominal authenticity serves purposes more important than maintaining the market value of an art object: it enables us to understand the practice and history of art as an intelligible history of the expression of values, beliefs, and ideas, both for artists and their audiences — and herein lies its link to expressive authenticity. Works of art, besides often being formally attractive to us, are manifestations of both individual and collective values, in virtually every conceivable relative weighting and combination. Clifford Geertz remarks that “to study an art-form is to explore a sensibility,” and that “such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation” whose foundations “are as wide as social existence and as deep” (Geertz 1983). Geertz is only partially right to claim that the sensibility expressed in an art object is in every case essentially social: even close-knit tribal cultures produce idiosyncratic artists who pursue unexpectedly personal visions within a socially determined aesthetic language. Still, his broader description of works of art, tribal or European, is generally apt, along with its corollary is that the study of art is largely a matter of marking and tracing relationships and influences.

This explains why aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects — to be enjoyed without regard to any notion of their origins — are unsatisfactory. If works of art appealed only to our formal or decorative aesthetic sense, there would indeed be little point in establishing their human contexts by tracing their development, or even in distinguishing them from similarly appealing natural objects — flowers or seashells. But works of art of all societies express and embody both cultural beliefs general to a people and personal character and feeling specific to an individual. Moreover, this fact accounts for a large part, though not all, of our interest in works of art. . . .

Despite his mild caveats about "idiosyncratic artists" and "personal character and feeling," Dutton is expressing a view of art held these days by a number of philosophers, scientists, and social scientists, especially those who consider themselves "Darwinians", that art is mostly the product of biological impulses hard-wired into the brain, impulses that prompt us to create works of art for primarily ritualistic and "collective" reasons. (Some of these scientists simply stop at asserting that art is the byproduct of certain biological operations that appeal to our preferences for "symmetry" or that allow us to feel satisfaction at task-fulfillment, etc., leaving it to the evolutionary psychologists or the anthropologists like Geertz to speculate about how art evolved as a social adaptation.) It is a view that is astonishingly hostile to "aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects" (the "just" is oh so telling), and is, in many of its manifestations, especially hostile to artists or critics who deviate from the biological/cultural dicta announced by those such as Dutton and presume to create or champion works of art that don't follow the time and gene-honored customs they've explicated for us.

And, in my opinion, it's all poppycock. The initial move is to proclaim, in some formulation similar to Dutton's, that art proceeds from "both individual and collective values," but to both slight the importance of mere "individual" values (they're all traceable to the genes, anyway) and to skirt around the problem of defining "values" at all. Art is determinedly influenced by society and culture and that's that. To give more attention to "just" aesthetic concerns would be to "endorse precisely the concept of the eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet, in which Assyrian shards, tropical seashells, a piece of Olmec jade, geodes, netsuke, an Attic oil lamp, bird of paradise feathers, and a Maori patu might lay side by side in indifferent splendour." In other words, all of these pretty things are trivial in comparison to what art can tell us about culture, and aesthetic analysis is irrelevant to the more important task of "marking and tracing relationships and influences."

Besides being an overwhelmingly tedious conception of what art and the study of art can be, this approach is, as far as I can tell, simply wrong in terms of what artists and writers, at least in the "Western" tradition, have actually done. Perhaps ur-artists in their "ancestral environments" performed the function assigned to them by Dutton and Geertz, but could someone name for me any great artists in the modern world who did not "pursue unexpectedly personal visions," who instead regarded their art as a wonderful opportunity to embody various cultural beliefs? Who thinks Milton wanted merely to be part of a great "collective formation," no matter how devout his religious or political beliefs, or that Paradise Lost, one of the greatest "embodiments" of "values, beliefs, and ideas" in all of literature, is not first and foremost, is not primarily, a great "personal vision"? Who reads or views Shakespeare to experience his plays' "socially determined aesthetic language"? How absurd.

To say that an artist or writer works in a context that has been established by his/her experience of his/her society's practices or assumptions is at best trivial, at worst simply tautological. What other experience is he/she going to have? Her work expresses salient social or cultural presuppositions or "refects" her society's various realities and their ideological foundations. So what ? Is this all it does? Is this the most important thing it does? It was to do these things that she became an artist? A writer who comes to his work, inevitably, with all of the "individual values" he has acquired over time produces a poem or a novel behind which can be seen his. . . individual values? This is very silly.

Beware all "thinkers" who come bearing news they've discovered how to explain art (or most human activities, for that matter) by appealing to our "human contexts." It's the first clue that these thinkers likely don't know very much about art, probably don't even much like it. This is a corollary to my suggestion in an earlier post to avoid those who presume to direct us to what is beyond the "merely literary" in works of literature. In this case, we are informed by those of whom we are assured they know all about those "human contexts" that of course art is not worth the attention of serious people if all we are doing is noticing that which is "merely art."

Comments

[simen]

No doubt art springs from a personal vision. But the art we covet and remember as a society is the art that also taps into something shared. We don't know exactly what this "shared" thing at any given moment is – but the history of art is the history of the personal visions that struck chords with the reigning powers of their times – be it royal courts or global markets. That is why the history of art is also a history of the sensibilities of power.

[Leonard Bast]

I can't think of any great artists who really did think they were embodying or reflecting "collective formations," but I can think of plenty of mediocre and downright bad artists who did (and do) think this. Usually, such art has explicit political goals. These days, these goals are often about racial or ethnic identity. There's a huge number of novels, for instance, that are about defining, justifying, and speaking for something called the "African American experience." Such novels can be interesting as reflections about politics, but that's it. If people are still reading them in a hundred years, they'll be read as historical documents, not as art.

We're not going to persuade the "Darwinians," though, because one of their biggest underlying assumptions is that everything we do must have some evolutionary advantage, because if it didn't, it wouldn't have lasted as a behavior. They'd say the mere fact that art has existed for millennia is proof that it must serve some biological function. Johan Huizinga and Nancy Easterlin have more interesting theories about why art exists, and I have no problem believing that at a merely biological level, there may be something to their theories. But you're absolutely right that most thinkers in this vein know little about art and probably don't enjoy it much. They may tut-tut about the "merely literary"; I respond by dismissing the merely biological. To go back to something I said in an earlier post, the Darwinians may not be asking idle questions, but from my point of view, they are often profoundly irrelevant questions.

Finally, I'm a little uncomfortable with your phrase "personal vision," although I think this is just a matter of semantics. I agree that Milton, Shakespeare, and all great artists present distinctive (even "idiosyncratic") visions, but it wasn't their "personal" quality per se that made them great. Everybody has a "personal vision," but some personal visions become great art and others don't. Oscar Wilde's dictum that bad poetry usually springs from sincere feeling comes to mind. I don't know that I can come up with a better word than "personal" right now, but I'd say it has something to do with craft and discipline and an almost "impersonal" commitment to the thing being made, no matter how personal the materials used to make it may be.

(Sorry about the long comment. Your posts are always stimulating.)

[Corinna Hasofferett]

For me writing is listening respectfully to an inner voice or force, After it has made itself heard.

[Stuart Greenhouse]

Well, actually, Milton planned on writing an epic for many of the reasons you argue he didn't: he wanted to bring into order his England in a harmonious and Protestant vision. He was concerned with his own fame and idiosyncratic art in one sense, but in another and equally important sense with his social and moral role. In his reference to the unrhymed classics in his introduction to Paradise Lost, for example, the two (aesthetic and social) are one. He didn't think the two could be disentangled. Joyce, obviously, as well, very consciously, dealt with the two as one. I mean, he did with his society what who else could have imagined, but how can you argue what he wrote was only dependent on 'inner vision'? He was obsessed with human context.

I in no way mean that aesthetics are 'window dressing' or anything other than the form and vitals of literature, by the way, which is a good thing.

I mean, if this were a soccer game, I'd be on your side, the aesthetic side, in a minute, and so would almost any artist, and even moreso nearly every reader. But it's not a soccer game, and someone pretending it is (i.e. Denise Dutton, under some two-dimensional reduction of Darwin) doesn't have to be a red flag to an aesthetician.

Just how I see it.

[Dan Green]

Stuart: If Milton "planned on writing an epic. . .to bring into order his England in a harmonious and Protestant vision," then of course he failed pretty miserably. No one would read Milton anymore if this was what could be gotten from it. We read him because, whatever his plans, his poem is inescapably a great "personal vision."

I didn't say that what a writer such as Joyce wrote was "only dependent on 'inner vision'" (emphasis on only.) His inner vision was unavoidably provoked into existence by his context, but again I would say this is ultimately trivial. In what other way could it be provoked?

[Stuart Greenhouse]

Dan,

You're right about Milton being unsuccessful in 'writing' England whole, materially. But we read him exactly as you say, for his great personal vision. And his vision was of a society, ^his^ society, made whole. What more beautiful dream is there? His inner vision is one with his outer vision, what his society was. You may move to an extreme Platonic position, like Jack Spicer, and call all that "furniture," but even he admits that what one knows and lives in is necessary to give poetry form, and is, once it is made, inseparable from it. My mouth could speak many languages, but it only speaks English, and that is part of how I speak.

For example: maybe it's just a matter of perspective, but I don't see how you can say, regarding Joyce, "His inner vision was unavoidably provoked into existence by his context, but again I would say this is ultimately trivial. In what other way could it be provoked?" Because there is no other way, it is anything but trivial. People need people, and history is not something you can awake from, it moves through you, not around you. To take what is society, and 'forge' it into humane being, is the dream--the inner vision--of Ulysses, I think, right? To show where boundaries are false is an aesthetic project, and a social project too. I don't mean Joyce actually thought anyone would adopt his books as a form of a Constitution, a letter-law (though Whitman did, in his more extravagant moments, think Americans could read "Leaves of Grass" as a daily liturgy on an annual schedule); and he ironizes the idea of "forging the uncreated conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul" pretty ferociously; but still, there was among his other complexities in the book the desire to map out the human humane.

I know there are ready-drawn lines of perspective here, and that people who argue things like the editor was who you took down pretty well in your post are not interested in the kinds of complexities which aesthetics necessitate. And I do not want to validate such a viewpoint. But, Geertz for example, can have some pretty interesting things to say. I'd not want to have to give him up.

But like I said that's just me. I have a lot of respect for your position, and think it is a live (i.e. vital) & worthwhile one to take. I hope this makes some sense.

[Leonard Bast]

It's true that Milton and Joyce (and Whitman) did have "social" goals and preoccupations that shaped their art. But all of them also had a commitment to an aesthetic, a commitment to craft (even when, as in Whitman's case, he tries to make it look like he doesn't), and a desire to excel. It may be true that we can't easily separate the social from the aesthetic commitments in a given case. (Why bother doing something as grandiose as "justifying God's ways to man" if you're going to do it badly?) But this commitment to the aesthetic is, nevertheless, what distinguishes these three writers from any number of bad, overtly "political" writers of more recent vintage. This is why I think Dan is essentially right when he says that Milton wasn't primarily about "collective formations." Cromwell did far more to "achieve" Milton's vision of society--to embody a collective formation--than Milton did. And Milton knew this. Works of art may be imbued with context, ideology, politics, etc., but they are no substitute for political action. As Auden said, they make nothing happen. In the rare cases when they have an observable political effect, as opposed to being merely about politics (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle might be a good example), they are nearly always bad art. None of this means that context, politics, or ideology are off limits in a discussion of art (it's hard to see how you could discuss Milton without at least some reference to these things). But it does mean--as Dan says--that political intentions are not the main point of interest.

[Stuart Greenhouse]

Leonard,

Well, yes, I wouldn't argue with that.