The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art

A Critical Realist Aesthetics

Nick Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317432173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art radically challenges our assumptions about what art is, what art does, who is doing it, and why it matters. Rejecting the modernist and market-driven misconception that art is only what artists do, Wilson instead presents a realist case for living artfully. Art is defined as the skilled practice of giving shareable form to our experiences of being-in-relation with the real; that is to say, the causally generative domain of the world that extends beyond our direct observation, comprising relations, structures, mechanisms, possibilities, powers, processes, systems, forces, values, ways of being. In communicating such aesthetic experience we behold life's betweenness – "the space that separates", so coming to know ourselves as connected.

Providing the first dedicated and comprehensive account of art and aesthetics from a critical realist perspective – Aesthetic Critical Realism (ACR), Wilson argues for a profound paradigm shift in how we understand and care for culture in terms of our system(s) of value recognition. Fortunately, we have just the right tool to help us achieve this transformation – and it's called art. Offering novel explanatory accounts of art, aesthetic experience, value, play, culture, creativity, artistic truth and beauty, this book will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of art, aesthetics, human development, philosophy and critical realism, as well as cultural practitioners and policy-makers.

Part I

Foundations

Critical realism and experience

1 Introduction

A realist theory of art

Chapter summary

In introducing this realist theory of art, I establish my interest in the philosophy of critical realism, and draw particular attention to the betweenness of our lived experience – what I refer to as The Space that Separates. The book’s developing account of Aesthetic Critical Realism surpasses a disciplinary concern for “the arts”, “artworks”, or indeed “artists”; moreover, art is not restricted to the visual arts or even the cultural sector. Instead, I have a much broader agenda in mind, one that is based on a re-conceptualisation of art as the skilled practice of giving shareable form to our experiences of being-in-relation with the natural necessity of the world, i.e., relations, structures, mechanisms, possibilities, powers, processes, systems, forces, values, ways of being. Such “aesthetic” experiences are vital for human development and flourishing.

Introduction

It is impossible to do art “in your head”, and whilst many artworks continue to have a material existence beyond the sight or hearing of anyone, equally, art does not exist “out there”, unobserved by humankind. Unlike many other philosophies of art and aesthetics, the theory developed in this book does not focus its analytical attention on artworks and their “aesthetic properties”; nor, indeed, is it primarily concerned with our “aesthetic judgments” of such properties, or even a particular type of attitude that we might somehow bring to artworks. Instead, it takes as its point of departure the much more pervasive and miraculous capacity of human beings to experience. Experiencing the world is something we do all the time. You are doing it now, as am I. It denotes our capacity (and more or less-skilled capability) for gaining thought and unthought “knowledge” through interaction with our environment. One might even say experience is being human; without it there is no meaning, no value, no life – indeed, no “we”, “you” or “I”, though still a world to be experienced. Despite experience’s significance and ubiquity (or perhaps because of it), our being “homo experientia” is readily overlooked. In fact, experience per se isn’t something we are normally aware of. We just do it. There are good reasons for this too – in our everyday encounters with the world, especially those that pose any kind of threat or danger to our survival, the immediacy and directness of our experience proves adaptively useful. However, when it comes to theorising special experiences,¹ such as those we associate with “art”, or with “the aesthetic”, this apparent transparency of experience is a problem. Indeed, as I will go on to argue, it has contributed to the relative marginalisation of philosophy of art and aesthetics in contemporary culture.² Rather than seeking to account for art in terms of what is made possible through the mechanism of human experience, explanations have defaulted to analyses of the way things actually appear through our senses, perceived properties or qualities, and/or our judgments of these things. We need to get “real” about experience and art. This is the project I have embarked on here.

Within philosophy there is ample scope for taking up widely opposing positions. For example, some “metaphysical” philosophers believe that the things of the world exist in the form of “essences” or “ideals”, which we may or may not go on to reveal through our experiences.³ A more widely held view maintains that human beings socially construct meanings and values through their experiences. One should then be wary of anything that smacks of essentialism or idealism. What unites all sides, regardless of position, is the default tendency to rely upon an intuitively “common sense” and theoretically “shallow” view of experience as comprising little more than our direct apprehension of the world. Unfortunately, this leads to irrealist theory-making. What is needed instead is a “deep” meta-theory and theory of meta- that can account for the complex betweenness of human experience and the world that is experienced.⁴ This is precisely what the philosophy of critical realism affords. Founded in the early-1970s by philosopher Roy Bhaskar, critical realism is itself distinctively positioned between positivism and postmodernism.⁵ It is serious about “being” per se, i.e., “strong” on ontology, whilst avoiding essentialism and idealism; but it is also serious about the conceptually, historically, and culturally mediated, i.e., socially constructed nature of human knowledge about this being. Thus far, critical realism has been developed as a philosophy of (social) science. In what follows, I argue for it to become the basis for a philosophy of art too. This preserves the main premises of critical realism (which I outline in “21 Steps” in Chapter 2), supplementing these with a range of new theoretical insights. I call this Aesthetic Critical Realism (ACR).

The Space that Separates can be read in a number of different ways.⁶ At its broadest it refers quite simply to human “life”. For much of this book I apply a narrower designation that focuses more directly on experience – a phenomenon uniquely positioned between internal and external, self and other, subject and object, and so forth. But, as we’ll see, I also seek to cast the spotlight on our development as human beings. Each of us has experienced, is experiencing, and will continue to experience, a journey of self-actualisation and self-development. Early in our lives we separated from our “good-enough” mothers⁷ who cared for us. We came to recognise both ourselves as autonomous individuated human beings, and those around us as “others”. In the process of doing art we continue to undertake a similar form of reality-checking. A holistic process, art is founded on our distinctive capacity for aesthetic experience, namely our emergent experience of being-in-relation with the world – and especially (though counter-intuitively) those aspects of the world which are not directly observable. Such aesthetic experience is central to those practices and things we enjoy under the label of “the arts”, but it is also muchmore than this; it transcends the arts both conceptually and in practice, and is thereby pivotal to individual human development, and ultimately to collective human flourishing. Given the widespread suspicion of the aesthetic, this will no doubt be seen as a bold claim by some.⁸ Four additional underlying readings of The Space that Separates (ontological, epistemological, material, and cultural, respectively) point towards the kinds of arguments I will be making to justify my position, all understood from the particular perspective of critical realism.⁹

At an ontological level, The Space that Separates is a statement about the way being is. Ontological realism holds that the world exists independently of us and our investigations of it.¹⁰ While it is the case that all knowledge is conceptually mediated, and therefore all our observations of the world are “theory laden”, this does not determine what reality is like – rather, reality exists independently of our knowledge of it.¹¹ This is a vitally important starting point and forms the basis for realist social ontology. The world is comprised of different things, operating at different levels. In this sense, we might think of it as a space (or spaces) full of separation(s). In the vocabulary of critical realism, the world is “stratified” and “differentiated”. As technical as this sounds, this simply confirms our common sense thinking that there exist in the world different things, operating at and across discrete levels. In fact, we have no difficulty in thinking about the world in this way, such as when discussing the chemical, biological, cultural or perhaps aesthetic make-up of an object or event. An important manifestation of this stratified reality, which critical realism casts particular light on, is the division of reality into three domains: the events that take place in the “actual” domain; our experiences of these events in the “empirical” domain; and then a third domain of the “real” which comprises the mechanisms, causal powers and potentials that cause the events we experience. This, as we shall see, has profound implications for how we understand art and aesthetic experience.

A further ontological feature to highlight arises from the necessary and contingent relations that form between different things. This is called emergence. Emergence occurs when a whole possesses a property that is “not possessed by any of the parts individually and that would not be possessed by the full set of parts in the absence of a structuring set of relations between them”,¹² or more succinctly, when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. An emergent property is one that is not possessed by any of the parts individually and that would not be possessed by the full set of parts in the absence of a structuring set of relations between them. One of the implications of this is that when we talk of being human, rather than focusing on atomistic individuals or selves, we are concerned with being-in-relation.¹³ As we’ll see, emergence of this kind is a defining characteristic of “aesthetic experience”.

At the second underlying level, The Space that Separates is a statement about what follows from the above ontological account, only now considered in terms of our fallible knowledge of our being through our experience, i.e., what is known as epistemology. Each of us must come to terms with living in this betweenness. Most centrally, this includes the life-long challenge of reconciling our (ontological) being-in-relation with our partial and fallible (epistemological) knowledge of this relationality and of the “other”. We are faced with the existenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: Foundations: Critical realism and experience
• PART II: Developments: Realising aesthetic experience
• PART III: Deepenings: Art and aesthetic critical realism
• References
• Index