“I always
had a soft spot for artists and writers labeled symbolists,” Andrei Pop tells
us, “if only because they were often picked on.” Indeed, he explains, they were
unjustly labeled incomprehensible neurotics or egoists, anarchists or decadents
— the latter even becoming a popular name for the movement. For Pop, an
associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago and a member of
its Committee on Social Thought, symbolist practices are crucial to
understanding the genesis of modern art. Now an intellectual assumption across
many disciplines, symbolism, Pop affirms in his new book “A Forest of Symbols,”
was a consequence of the radical rethinking of the nature of the symbol in the
late 19th century. His book provides a rich and unprecedented examination of
this historical period, and a unique framework for rethinking the emergence of
non-referential models of perception and for understanding the modernization of
how various forms of knowledge can be represented.
Like
many of the titles we at Zone Books are proud to have published in recent years
— Christopher Heuer’s “Into the White,” Mitchell Merback’s “Perfection’s
Therapy,” and Amy Powell’s “Depositions,” among them — Pop’s vibrant book is
driven by crucial questions internal to art history but which, in their
realization, are fundamentally transdisciplinary in extraordinarily creative
ways. This creativity is well-reflected in the far-reaching interview featured
below, in which Pop discusses, among other topics, what drew him to symbolism,
the potential symbols have to communicate a common visual language, and the
outsized influence of Edgar Allan Poe.
Zone
Books: “A forest” seems a fittingly symbolic choice for the title. How did you
decide upon it?
Andrei
Pop: Credit goes to the great French poet Baudelaire, who wrote that “Man
passes through forests of symbols which watch him with familiar gazes.” This
reminds me of a jungle with stone idols glaring through the foliage, mysterious
but also a bit silly — like a Tintin comic. But a forest is so much more: not
just a thing or place but a world for plants and animals and people, who use it
for food, shelter, resources — in other words, they coexist uneasily within it.
And everything the humans do, practical or theoretical, they represent in
pictures or words or other symbols: so symbols are our forest, and we even
overlay nonhuman nature, whether forest or outer space, with symbols to bring
it closer to us (the Moon, the Sun, the Milky Way). A Forest of Symbols then is
a symbol full of symbols: the very theme of the book. But the title didn’t come
easy! I only picked it after being struck by all the forest symbolism I used in
the book, like the common phrase of ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’.
Finally, there is a small but significant difference between Baudelaire’s
phrase and mine: his forests are many, mine just one, “a forest” linking art
and science as symbol-making activities.
ZB: What
drew you to questions of symbolism?
AP: I
always had a soft spot for artists and writers labeled symbolists, if only
because they were often picked on. They were supposedly overblown or
overwrought or incomprehensible, they ignored nature, dabbled in the dark arts
or art for art’s sake, were neurotics or egoists or anarchists or decadents —
the last was even a popular name for the whole movement. Yet what these
criticisms missed is the humor and the intelligence of this art, which often
turned its razor wit against itself and its makers: the artist’s futile
attempts to represent the world for other human beings. Then I was struck by
what seemed a pure linguistic coincidence: the fact that mathematicians of the
era spoke of “symbolism” too, e.g., the mathematician-philosopher Whitehead
even wrote a book with this title. They did not mean art, but just the
technical notations they used to express logical proofs. It turned out, on
closer investigations, that these two apparently opposite practices both
involved getting unreliable, subjective, self-centered human minds to pay
attention to subtle nuances of drawn or printed or otherwise inscribed figures,
for the purposes of coming to understand each other and recognize objective
truths they could share. I was hooked.
ZB:
Several artists, writers, philosophers, and mathematicians appear throughout
your discussion: including Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein. How did you choose which figures to discuss?
AP: I
wish I could say it took great originality to collect these people, but the
artists, whether poets or painters, just couldn’t shut up about Poe. And they
were right! Just like Bart Simpson and a lot of general readers, I’ve always
loved Poe, but did not realize what a systematic thinker he is. He explained
with great philosophical clarity just how he intended to get the personal,
incalculable effects his stories and poems like “The Raven” have on us. This
theoretical bottom to Poe, but also to his translator Mallarmé and his friend
the painter Manet, made them akin to my mind to the great turn-of-the-century
philosophers Frege and Wittgenstein, who wrestled with how limited animal minds
with a rough and ready language can know eternal truths of logic and
mathematics. These thinkers in turn were friends in real life and connected in
the history of philosophy. My one originality, which I think justified, has
been to bring them together: Poe and Frege, Wittgenstein and Mallarmé. It is
their shared ideas and the common difficulties they wrestled with, such as the
possibility (or impossibility) of a private language, that to my mind justifies
the combination. It might also allow us, having the benefit of their insights,
to see farther than these geniuses.
ZB: How
did you find and curate the illustrations for the book?
AP: Some
of them have been with me since student days — especially the Manet lithographs
of Poe’s Raven, which I stumbled across in the Fogg Museum print study room
while studying for grad exams at Harvard: a scary rite of passage where you
could be shown any object in the enormous collection without being told what it
is. The Manets didn’t come up, but a seed of curiosity was planted. Another
work, Van Gogh’s otherworldly green portrait of his mother, painted from a
black and white photograph by the homesick son, is one of the first artworks I
discovered on starting high school in Southern California in the 1990s. Others,
like Seurat’s Grande Jatte and the chest, painted and carved by Gauguin, I’ve
seen repeatedly over the last few years at the Art Institute of Chicago. Many I
found in books, and are only to be found there, being book illustrations. One
particular drawing was known to scholars over the last quarter-century only in
reproduction. I finally tracked down the original just as the book was being
printed this summer 2019. So it is quite a cast of characters, from familiar
friends to chance acquaintances. They belonged in the book if I could explain
what drew me to them, and what made them speak to each other. I have also given
each a little commentary on the page where they are reproduced, in addition to
the main text. They deserve the second look!
ZB: At
one point, you outline that there are aesthetic, scientific, political, and
other signs. What are the other kinds of signs might one encounter?
AP:
There may not be “countless uses of language” as Wittgenstein thought, but
indefinitely many sign systems: as many as activities requiring coordination.
Every sport has its gestures and slogans, there are lovers’ hearts carved into
trees, rituals and regalia for every priesthood and profession. A whaler and a
thief have their own patois, and possibly worldview: modern stories like Moby
Dick show us that. Music is fascinating because its signs are often implicit.
Key signatures can convey mood, like the bleak D minor heralding Mozart’s stone
guest, who drags Don Giovanni to hell. I have always wondered: are keys really
signs to “be read” correctly, or just sound patterns to which people respond
freely? One may ask the same about animal calls: stomping tails to indicate
danger may be a sign, but what about pheromones that animals and even plants
release unwittingly? The American logician Peirce, who makes a cameo in my
book, was fascinated by natural signs, like smoke for fire. (He was doubtless
acquainted with Native American communication systems). In the book I focus on
symbols, which are signs intended to be recognized as intentionally made to be
such. I’ll end with an odd one: martial arts. I practiced judo a lifetime ago,
and knew the names for the grabbing at each other’s kimonos and trying to trip
each other up that we did. These were ordinary Japanese words, but our fumbling
moves were themselves signs of the elegant modes of flooring the opponent to
whose ideal beauty we aspired in vain.
ZB: It
seems that symbols have the potential to communicate a common visual language,
but also to be overlooked, or misunderstood. How do you see the artists of the
19th century grappling with that issue?
AP:
Enlightenment thinkers, confronted with classical Chinese and ancient Egyptian
writing, thought pictures could be a new universal language, imparting wisdom
impossible to misinterpret. Alas, two centuries of false starts with
hieroglyphs taught them, by the end of the 19th century, that pictorial
language, being immediate and intuitive, can give rise to the wildest
misunderstanding. That has its bright side too: one doesn’t misunderstand
prosaic interactions like paying for groceries. It is with singular, puzzling,
dark or dazzling things or happenings that we have a hard time saying what they
are. In my book I quote some classic vitriol, such as the painter-poet Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, a visionary artist in his own right, exclaiming that Manet’s
Raven illustrations are only fit for insane asylums. The old art critics were
interested in such outbursts because they showed what prejudices modern
innovators had to overcome. The Marxist critics on the other hand think they
stem from class tensions. Both might be right: but there are more immediate
causes of misunderstanding, from the state of one’s own body to the education
one brings to the artwork. The artists in my book were used to being called
incomprehensible: they did not despair, but patiently asked that viewers look
closer, and think longer. It’s good advice for us too, as distractions and the
demands on our time have multiplied.
ZB:
Going further, you discuss the slippage between private and public meaning. Is
there something that viewers of art can do to recognize public meaning more
often?
AP: The
20th century, from Wittgenstein to various technocratic states, was haunted by
the idea that all meaning is public and so all our thinking ought to be as
well. In art, this amounts to going into the gallery and doing long division
out loud: the only reason we’d speak is to show off our facility doing
something trivial. This has been the ideal of some old academic art
institutions, but fortunately art is too unpredictable to achieve it. The
opposite extreme, a purely interior world of unutterable feelings, is
unfortunately closer to the cliché of museum as temple: silent people looking
pained, furrowing their brow at artworks, grunting now and then. Much better,
both for personal enjoyment and for any kind of political, moral, or scientific
insight, is a balance between the experiences we have as individuals and shared
content — the plot of a story, the sitter of a portrait, the mode of
representation or the use of material, which points to historical context. The
private too can be given its due, without being remorselessly made public: a
parent’s pain for a deceased child, or the artist’s commitment to a cause,
which thankfully we need not share to appreciate. One might say with Freud that
“I (the ego) will be where It (the unconscious) was”, that is, become
self-aware. But I prefer to think we can make articulate in dialogue what we
both see as well as the marvelous fact that we do not both see everything one
of us sees.
There
may not be “countless uses of language” as Ludwig Wittgenstein thought, but
indefinitely many sign systems: as many as activities requiring coordination.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
ZB: You
write that “the logical content of pictures is richer than generally supposed.”
How can one learn to identify the logical content?
AP:
“Logical” here doesn’t mean syllogisms or standard notation out of a first-year
college course. By those standards, pictures are judged logically boneless,
flabby, formless; but so is much language. Take the simple utterance “See Spot
run”. Nothing follows from it syllogistically. Yet there is logical content:
the scaffolding on which its meaning is built. The request or command to the
hearer to perceive something, the claim that what will be seen is an action of
the subject Spot, perhaps even the suggestion, built on Anglophone traditions,
that Spot is a dog. Here we see how the logical blends into the factual, but
there are facts about the world that are not logical: whether there is a Spot,
who or what that is, and so on. Likewise, in pictures, such matters as the
causal means of their making (mechanical, optical, by hand?), whether they belong
to the past or to timeless imagination, whether they represent sentient beings,
and those beings are meant to be doing or thinking something, or showing
awareness of the presence of spectators: all this belongs to the scaffolding of
meaning, which historical detail fills out. There is no algorithm for figuring
out what is logically implied in an image and what we need to know about the
world to grasp it; it is a mutually informing process. The payoff to perceiving
what is there logically is that we are more likely to look in the right place
for the facts that bring the picture to momentary life.
ZB: Do
symbols help people to see an artwork in the way that the artist intended it?
AP:
Writing this book, I grew fascinated and finally impatient with all the catchy
terms for what is really the same thing: sign, emblem, allegory, Leitmotiv,
Ur-form, Gestalt, schema, and of course symbol and all its variations. What is
important about symbolist art — and science, which is not usually called
symbolist, but should be — is that it regards symbols as purposely devised to
function as such. An artificial, that is a human-made object, be it paint or
sound or ink on paper, stands for some reality, abstract and conceptual like
Number or Truth or concrete and dusty like a bone or a tree. The point of the
symbol is to not confuse it with the thing symbolized. Even if you take a tree
to symbolize another, say a bonsai for a mighty oak, you do not conflate the
two. The artwork describes reality at a distance, and it is good to know the
distance. This is already a step along the road to understanding art rightly,
that is self-reflectively and intelligently. Whether it is also what the artist
intended depends on the artist — was the artist careful and reflective? It is
possible to notice something in an artwork that the artist totally missed. But
the greatest artists invest their work richly with meaning, whether they are
aware of it or not. So knowing the art helps up enormously to know the people.
It is the closest we will ever get to reading the minds of those long gone.
ZB: You
write that “Color is, as much as pain, a paradigm case of the private.” Yet,
today, marketing and psychological studies try to find common, if not
objective, effects of color. Is color still private? Would one’s experience of
color and its symbolism have been more private in the 19th century?
AP:
Advertising wouldn’t earn its keep if it didn’t explore our hopes and fears —
as do doctors for nobler purposes. I would say pain is analogous: it is
colonized today by states seeking ways to torture without hurting the body
(waterboarding?) and pharmaceutical companies peddling opiates, but also to
cure, and if not, to understand the experience of those living in pain. These
developments start in the symbolist 19th century, prior to which little was
known about how the eye processes light, not to mention the
liquor-and-a-board-to-bite-on approach to anesthesia. So it certainly seems as
if the lonely part of our minds is shrinking. But: to this we must always add,
“approximately.” An adman or dietician might know that this or that hue will
make you hungry or kill your appetite: they still don’t see what you see when
you have that measurable public reaction. In science fiction, authors imagine
telepathy or ‘feely’-machines. The hero of William Gibson’s Neuromancer feels
the excruciating pain of the heroine when she breaks her leg. Frege foresaw
this scenario a century ago and replied: is it the same pain, or a different
one beamed now into a second person? He thought there could be no right answer,
unless we were both people at once. So there will always be metaphysically
private experiences, no matter how intrusive Big Brother becomes. The challenge
is how to make them count: like aesthetes circa 1900, many of us want
transformative experiences that also matter to the world we inhabit.
ZB: Can
you say what you’re working on next?
AP: I
think it might already be obvious from the last answer: science fiction! Like
symbolism, it explores the farthest imaginable reaches of human — and not just
human — experience, but it does so often in a naïve, breakneck fashion that is
a lot of fun after the subtleties of Manet or Frege. And if symbolism is inseparable
from my experience of growing up intellectually, science fiction has been with
me even longer: as long as I could read or write, and certainly before I spoke
the American English that even the most exotic Hollywood aliens favor. It
stayed with me too. Today literary scholars look to this genre for answers, or
at least questions about our uncertain future: climate change, human migration
to the stars, a world of radical genetic and computer science. That is
important, but for me it is also exciting to attend to earthy and disposable
materials like pulp paperbacks and magazines, lurid space films from the dawn
of cinema and today’s slick video games, so different from the fastidious
elegance of symbolism. Although there is symbolist science fiction too: not for
nothing was Poe a pioneer of the genre. His revived Mummy observes that they
had Progress in its time too, but it never progressed. I find what is absurd
and funny as important as what is sad and portentous, and only together do they
capture our experience of that part of reality that does not yet exist — the
Future.
Zone
Books is an independent nonprofit publishing house founded in 1985. Zone Books
are edited by Jonathan Crary, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Ramona Naddaff, and
designed by Bruce Mau and Julie Fry. They are distributed by the MIT Press.
A Forest
of Symbols: In Conversation With Andrei Pop.
By: Zone Books/The Editors. The MIT Press Reader , December 9, 2019.
On the
face of it, art historian Andrei Pop, in his latest book, A Forest of Symbols:
Art, Science and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (Zone Books, 2019), sets
out to achieve something rather concrete—a reevaluation of the French symbolist
movement in art—and yet the reader soon becomes aware that much more is at
stake, as Pop weaves together art history with an account of early analytic
philosophy to raise questions about the very nature of truth and human ways of
meaning-making in artistic and scientific practice, which are further explored
in this interview with David Kretz.
DK : A
Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century
begins by characterizing a type of mid-19th-century reductionism about the self
and the mental that finds expression, for example, in Ernst Mach’s
psychologistic philosophy and impressionist painting, which, roughly speaking,
presents the viewer with sensations of color pigments rather than with objects.
You then establish a surprising parallel between two counter-reactions to this
Zeitgeist: symbolist art and early analytic philosophy, especially Frege and
the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Can you sketch the parallel in their
responses for us?
AP : The
predominance of positivism and various forms of mechanistic philosophy and
science, including physiological psychology, was no ideological conspiracy but
a result of real progress: the invention of analytic chemistry, the refinement
of celestial mechanics, and the rapid strides in comparative anatomy,
microbiology, and the rest, crowned as we still think by Darwinian evolutionary
theory. To say nothing of practical gains from pasteurization to electricity.
This materialist front faltered a little when confronting the mind and
subjectivity, but here too advances were legion: from the study of the eye and
physiologic color to the psychology of counting and their manifold
applications, from calculators to color printing, early motion pictures, and,
yes, realist and impressionist painting. These art practices, of course, were
not always understood as reductive, but insofar as they were—as they answered
to the decree of “paint only what you see”—they fit the positivist lockstep.
Only
they also produced weirdness: what an impressionist ‘saw’, made up as it was of
blocky saturated brushstrokes, differed markedly from what anyone else saw,
live or through a camera. So the act of translating vision to canvas produced
an effect different in kind. At the same time, positivism was of little help in
the foundations of arithmetic, or physics, where explaining natural law
mechanistically and psychologically (a tendency called “psychologism” on the
model of scientism—taking psychology beyond its field of application) led to
theories of numbers as consensual hallucinations, or meaningless counters in a
game. This self-undermining nature of positivism—its search for verification
leading always to unstable mental states that could deceive the
verifier—naturally led to revolt among ambitious scientists from Boltzmann to
Cantor. The revolts tended to assert the reality of things unseen and strictly
unseeable: whether infinite sets (Bolzano) or irrational numbers (Weierstrass)
or both of these (Dedekind, Cantor, Frege). This is a reformed Platonism,
because it doesn’t point us to the perfect Bed in the sky, but to what is
necessary for there to be anything at all—the laws of arithmetic describe any
possible universe. They certainly underlie the mathematical natural science on
which positivism relied while undermining it.
It is
perhaps surprising then that the scientific revolt against equating truth with
the perceptible or verifiable, which issued in mathematical logic and
philosophy of language that you call “early analytic philosophy”, also made
room for domains inaccessible to it, what it called the subjective realm, which
stretched from color perception and proprioception to poetic nuance to
aesthetic judgment. If we identify the later tradition with the elimination of
subjectivity and a nearly algorithmic commitment to the application of logic to
philosophical problems, we may, ironically, regard Frege and the young Russell
and Wittgenstein as backward Romantics, because they sought to delimit
objective sense and laws from realms of radical subjectivity that separate each
mind from each other: the very notion of private language, which the older Wittgenstein
violently rejected. The philosophical point of this book is to show that the
objective requires the subjective as a foil if it is to play the scientific
role late nineteenth-century philosophers assigned to it, not to mention to
become accessible through our perceptual apparatus in new kinds of mathematical
and logical symbolism. As for the symbolist artists, they frankly acknowledged
that the mind contributes as much as the hand in reproducing reality, so that
continuous color and contour, which impressionism and the opticians had
rejected as found nowhere in nature, reappear as signs of our subjective
activity as perceivers as much as our logical activity organizing percepts into
objects. The category of the image serves as a useful beacon, joining
theoretical speculation to plastic art: it is structured sense itself, distinct
from and mediating between the concrete things embodying it and whatever else,
concrete or abstract, they stand for or refer to. But once one has noticed the
affinity between the artistic and philosophical project, there is no reason to
leave out photographers, realist painters, or romantic poets like Poe, when one
finds them engaged in a project of exploring the interface between the
logically objective, or public world, and the private, subjective worlds which
Heraclitus already said we each possess.
DK : You
agree with historians of science like Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison that
there is an artistic aspect to scientific practices of observation and
documentation, for example, but want to also claim the inverse: that artworks
are, in a sense, truth-apt and logical. Truth in art, moreover, on your view
lies not so much in its power to disclose a world (Heidegger, Gadamer). Rather
your concept of truth in art seems to follow along representationalist lines:
Frege and the early Wittgenstein. Could you tell us more about your
understanding of truth—in art, in science? Are they the same? Is truth in art
the same as meaningfulness?
AP : The
opposition between disclosive and representationalist accounts of truth
requires some scrutiny. I take it by the latter you have in mind the view that
sentences or images build up models of reality, which we compare with their
referent and judge to be true in case the representation corresponds to
reality. Frege in fact denied that such a view is generally applicable to
pictures—as he pointed out, we would only call a picture of Cologne Cathedral “true”
in this sense if we appended the sentence “the cathedral looks like this”, so
that what we are really judging true is the sentence. But then he went further
and pointed out that the correspondence theory doesn’t explain truth in
language either! For if you ask just what makes this sentence correspond to
reality, and I provide an answer, you can still ask whether the answer is true,
which on the correspondence theory would lead to asking for another object of
correspondence (not of the sentence, but of the sentence asserting the truth of
the sentence), and thus a vicious regress. So correspondence will not explain
truth in general: but it certainly plays a role in much everyday language and
imagery, from ID cards to IOUs.
So it
won’t do to dismiss representation altogether and insist on elevated uses of
“world-disclosing” language and images: it matters whether I owe you or you owe
me a sum of money, just as it should matter to the disclosing of a peasant
world whether, say, a pair of boots painted by Van Gogh belonged (are painted
as belonging) to a peasant woman or not. What matters still has to do with the
language or the image: these are logically articulated, which needn’t mean
reducible to language. What it does mean is: properly interpreted, it is
responsive to true or false propositions about it. This is how a picture
differs from the object which is its bearer, as it differs from a stone or a
leaf, which are neither meaningful nor potentially true or false, though we can
say meaningful, true or false things about them. As for the worry that pictures
allow for multiple plausible interpretations, that doesn’t differentiate them
from language qualitatively, only quantitatively. A picture might seem awfully
ambiguous about, say, the intentions of the person it portrays, but it is
merely compatible with several different ones. In turn, a sentence describing a
face, as Lessing noticed, is endlessly more ambiguous than even a crude visual
image of that face. Logically articulated, then, in every domain, means
something like this: the object would mean different things if it were
structured otherwise.
Likewise,
context matters: language abounds in indexical expressions whose full
significance (as opposed to linguistic meaning) depends on who is speaking and
listening, and the sense of images may depend on assumptions about who is
looking, what goes on beyond the frame of the picture, and so on. This is why I
like to say that a historian may not be a Platonist, but a Platonist must be a
historian: you never reach mind-independent meaning from a historical artifact
unless you account for specific human conventions and acts. As for truth, that
is once again a further step: it is not objects as such, but the thoughts they
provoke, which are true or false. The only guaranteed truths are the
tautologies held in such suspicion by Wittgenstein—which are perfectly
respectable logical truths, true solely due to their structure (the same goes
for contradictions, which are necessarily false). As for other thoughts, their
truth and falsity depends not so much on correspondence to fact (which,
inconveniently, tends to ape the representational content of the thought), but
on what they really mean. Again artifact and world, structure and context
interlock, while remaining very much distinct.
And that
is why images, and not just texts or scientific sentences, may be logically
articulate: it’s because they are interesting, eventful. The Nelson Goodman
line, according to which pictures are just analog color gradients with no
structure, is as implausible as Heidegger’s speculations on peasant shoes,
which he claims are accessible only in looking at a Van Gogh painting, but
which in fact can only be had by reading Heidegger. In order for this kind of
art theory to reestablish contact with ordinary acts of looking, and with
communication between lookers, and their other intellectual activities
(including science), logical structure has to be recognized wherever it is
found. It is naturally rather unevenly distributed among meaningful artifacts
(perspectival pictures may be dreadful at tense, but they are far better than
sentences at describing spaces, and both are terrible at clarifying
inferences). We also have to recognize and respect the incommunicable aspect of
each subject’s experience, which we can sense rather than verify and which I
suspect is what drives the world-disclosing philosophers to their premature
attempts at disclosure.
DK : Is
there anything that would make an artwork logically inarticulate? Would you
rule out the possibility of interesting, eventful nonsense?
AP : I
rule out “nonsense” understood as “no sense”, a degree zero of sense: the
nonsense poems of Lear, Carroll, dada, medieval monks, etc. are in fact full of
tidbits of sense, arranged less than sentence-wise (or even word-wise at times).
So the “may be” above applies to the degree of coherence a particular artwork
aspires to. A monochrome may well occupy a monistic logical space akin to David
Chalmers’ fantastic “consciousness of a thermostat”. If so it is quite dull,
perhaps inarticulate by our usual standards, but never unintelligible or
senseless in a pure way. Poésie concrète, doodles, automatic writing are telic
activities too, with a minimal sense that is requisite to being an interesting
representation. Of course, a fossil or a blank wall may be interesting, but not
as representation: only as a natural object about which questions may be asked.
DK : How
does your understanding of these larger metaphysical and epistemological issues
inflect your own methodology as a historian? What do you think art historians
should learn from philosophy—and philosophers from (art) historians?
AP : I
more than once heard a celebrated philosopher say that his only method is to
never say anything that is obviously false. One could do worse! The use of
external “theory” in art history once had a dogmatic cast—the writer “knows”
that Marxism or Lacanian psychoanalysis or structural linguistics is right, and
rearranges art, or rather the extant writings on it, in accordance with this
certainty. The old (“classical”) Germanophone art historians by contrast had
some philosophical training (generally neo-Kantian), which they did not flaunt,
instead inventing terms like Kunstwollen (‘art-willing’), Pathosformel (‘pathos
formula’) or symbolische Form (this one due to a philosopher, Ernst Cassirer)
to do their philosophizing, still in a broad generalizing vein, but generally
asserting a continuity or change over time in how concrete objects embodied
these more abstract patterns or schemata. I hope I have learned some lessons
from both traditions: to think on our feet when the form of artifacts is
meaningful and to look outside them when artifacts reach into the world. Still,
art historians must learn not just philosophical theories, but some habits of
mind philosophers take for granted (notably analytic philosophers, whom too few
of us read, but above all the great philosophical minds, wherever those occur):
not to adopt any position because they think it’s right or will elicit
admiration without understanding it, but to think for themselves, accepting
only what on their best efforts they regard as the truth. This, of course, need
not involve certainty, but includes possibilities and hypotheses and the most
plausible conclusions.
Can
philosophers in turn learn anything from art historians? Well, besides learning
what not to do (in the bad case), most art history, and certainly art history
at its best, abounds in careful and explicit observation of meaningful
artifacts, from all known human cultures and epochs: I think it does so in a
way that if properly taken up could challenge the philosophy of mind, of
language (which really should be a branch of a larger philosophy of meaning),
and of logic and science. Art history isn’t just interesting to aestheticians.
Questions ranging from the compositionality of semantics to the nature of
things can be elucidated, if not definitively answered, by closer attention to
art and artifacts. Not that this will involve taking anything art historians
say at face value, but most of what philosophers think about the limits of
thought, discursive language and the expressible, would benefit from an
acquaintance with a wider range of meaning-making tools. Knowing symbolic logic
helps, but so do comics or sculpture or opera! I am just as bad, I have no clue
what to make of key signatures and chord changes in music, which can be
instruments of thought, as much as any syllogism or perspectival projection.
The key to wisdom, I’d agree with Socrates, is knowing that we don’t know. That
is something art historians and philosophers have in common with each other—and
with everyone else.
Andrei
Pop is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art
History at the University of Chicago. Previously, he has taught eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century art history and aesthetics at the Universities of Basel and
Vienna
David
Kretz is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Germanic Studies and the
Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His current project
contrasts poets and translators as complementary paradigms of historical agency
in times of crisis
French
Symbolism and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy. By David Kretz. Journal of the History of Ideas Blog,
December 16, 2019.
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