Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters

Perception, Interpretation, and the Signs of Art

Robert E. Innis

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781438488240
  9781438488257
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438488264
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

A novel fusing of multiple approaches and range of examples exploring the dimensions, objects, and import of aesthetic encounters.

We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of "method of rotation" Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art.

CHAPTER 1

Dimensions of an Aesthetic Encounter

Encountering Giorgione’s Sunset

In Iris Murdoch’s 1974 novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Harriet Gavender, the wife of Blaise Gavender, the psychological and narrative pivot (and even butt) of the novel, is visiting the National Gallery in London and has been viewing a famous Giorgione painting, fictionally called St. Anthony and St. George, which is actually The Sunset / Il Tramonto (see figure 1.1). Murdoch writes:

Fig. 1.1. Giorgione, The Sunset, 1508. Source: National Gallery, London.

She had felt very strange that afternoon. … An intense physical feeling of anxiety had taken possession of her as she was looking at Giorgione’s picture. … There was a tree in the middle background which she had never properly attended to before. Of course she had seen it, since she had often looked at the picture, but she had never before felt its significance, though what that significance was she could not say. There it was in the middle of clarity, in the middle of bright darkness, in the middle of limpid sultry yellow air, in the middle of nowhere at all with distant clouds creeping by behind it, linking the two saints yet also separating them and also being itself and nothing to do with them at all, a ridiculously frail poetical vibrating motionless tree which was also a special particular tree on a special particular evening. …

Hypnotized by the tree, Harriet found that she could not take herself away. … Harriet recalled having suffered when young in the Louvre and the Uffizi and the Accademia. The last visit on the last day, as closing time approached, indeed the last minutes of any day, had had this quality of heart-breaking severance, combined with an anxious thrilling sense of a garbled unintelligible urgent message. (1974, 52–53)

This is a remarkable description—of a full and deep encounter with a remarkable painting. For Harriet, the body-mediated encounter with this painting—what John Dewey called the art product on the way to becoming the work of art—is first and foremost a work of embodied perception, just as the actual production of the painting was. Its enigmatic significance, however, elicits a work of interpretation, just as the painting itself is an interpretation of a complex spiritual relationship conveying a vital message. But in spite of its explicitness, indeed its absurd precision, what it means seems to slip away beyond the bounds of discourse, even though the configuration of marks on the canvas was as articulate as possible and consummately beautiful. Harriet finds a deep affective affinity (although not necessarily a harmonious one) between herself and the world projected in the painting. The affective quality or tone that structures the painting offers her a source both of self-recognition and of a kind of shattered, even undefined and undefinable, self-completion. The painting speaks to her even though she is not able to say or fully comprehend what it is saying. At the analytical level, Murdoch pinpoints the distinctive features of the existential meeting between Harriet and the painting. Both the literary description and the painting that is described are clearly correlative and mutually defining; they are perceptually “thick” and hermeneutically engaging and nuanced, and they exemplify the diversity and complexity of signifying powers of the various material elements that carry the perceptual qualities, objects, and significances embodied in, represented by, and expressed in the painting.

Murdoch’s schematization highlights the essential moments in our encounter with works of art quite generally, and not just visual works. These inseparable and internally related dimensions are the perceptual, the hermeneutical, and the semiotic. In Murdoch’s novel, the work itself is not presented or reproduced, but rather accessed through a linguistic presentation of an encounter with it. But it is immediately clear that the text itself has certain features that distinguish it from an art historical analysis, which, indeed, make it an instance of literary discourse. One could see the interplay of moments in Murdoch’s text itself as giving rise to such an experience and exemplifying the dimensions of an aesthetic encounter. A rich schematization of these features on the basis of a plethora of literary examples is given a masterful discussion in Johansen’s Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (2002; see also Innis 2007b).

Murdoch focuses on the embodied perceiving, meaning-making, and sign-reading interpreter, that is, on the receptive side of the encounter. These dimensions within which Harriet’s meeting with the artwork takes place are parallel with the productive dimensions within which the artist works. As Nigel Wentworth, in his The Phenomenology of Painting (2004), has illustrated in a particularly rewarding way, there is a fusion and mutual reinforcing of the dimensions from both the productive and receptive sides. The whole logic of his book, which is a kind of extended meditation on and application of the insights of Merleau-Ponty, is aimed at uncovering “the pre-reflective realm of painting,” which is a matter of “lived-experience” (19; see also G. Johnson 1993). The viewer of any painting, as well as the reader of his book, Wentworth claims, needs to gain an understanding of this prereflective activity. To do so, they must “live the experience involved in it, and this can be achieved through learning to look at paintings in certain ways, ways that reveal something of how paintings come into being” (19). His discussion of the material, the plastic, and the figurative elements is shot through with echoes of the dimensions alluded to previously: the perceptual, the hermeneutic, and the semiotic. Think also of Harriet’s experience of the Giorgione painting in light of Wentworth’s two following remarks: (1) “A painting does not merely express a certain feeling, but also embodies a world” (242) and (2) “When a viewer looks at a painting, and has the experience of entering the world expressed within it, this world also enters him” (243).

Differently pitched theories of interpretation intersect in the interweaving and weighting (or valorizing) of perceptual, hermeneutic, and semiotic strands in their approaches to art. Perception-based models, which are rooted in our bodily-being; hermeneutical approaches, which are rooted in, but clearly not restricted to, the primordiality and universality of our relation to language; and theoretical semiotic frameworks, which are rooted in the “spiral” of unlimited semiosis carried out in the production and interpretation of signs quite generally, are not really alternatives or in irresolvable conflict. They are rather different ways of foregrounding and scaling permanent features of our encounter with texts or sign-configurations of all sorts, whether explicitly or thematically aesthetic or not. Artworks are configurations of perceptible qualities and hence must be perceived in some modality. As having a content, as world-opening or bearing on a world, these configurations must be interpreted; that is, they set us a hermeneutic task of self-understanding, of orienting ourselves to and within a world (cf. Ricoeur 1976, esp. 36–37; Johansen 2002, 113–174; Innis 1998b, 2007b). Furthermore, the perceptual configurations and contentful meaning-structures have a distinctive makeup as artifacts: they are combinations of sign-functions with distinctive logics or grammars, the investigation of which is the task of a philosophical semiotics, something that can take, and has taken, different forms (see Innis 1985, 1994, 2002, 2009, 2013; Nöth 1990).

The aesthetic domain—or in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s anti-Kantian way of putting it, which was confirmed by John Dewey, the domain of the experience of the work of art (see Gadamer [1960] 1991, 1977b, 1986e)—can function as a kind of laboratory wherein the adequacy as well as the complementarity of differently oriented interpretative strategies and theories of interpretation can be fruitfully assessed. Keeping constantly in mind the concrete instance of Harriet’s fictional experience in the National Gallery, I would like to indicate, briefly and schematically, how conceptual tools taken from representative or paradigmatic philosophical, or philosophically relevant, positions (to be developed in other chapters) can illuminate, in specific and powerful ways, essential dimensions of aesthetic experience and aesthetic reflection.

While these conceptual tools are derived from sources that have a deep affinity with one another, they were in some cases (though not all) developed without explicit connections. Their choice, of course, reveals a broad set of value judgments and theoretical commitments on my part, which are grounded in the work of Peirce, Langer, Cassirer, and Dewey, as well as many others. I will try to show that a sufficiently sober semiotics can thematize the perceptual sphere, but it also intersects with the more florid phenomenological tradition in aesthetics, culminating in the types of investigations undertaken by Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne. In this chapter the hermeneutical dimension is represented first by the valuable work of Gadamer, but it will become clear from the discussion that semiotics and hermeneutics are not competitors, but rather collaborators, in a properly configured account of the dimensions of an aesthetic encounter. At any rate, my programmatic intention is both to initiate a discussion about the dialectic of methods and to exemplify the heuristic fertility of doing so with these conceptual resources.

Perception and the Qualitative Matrix

Any interpretation theory adequate to the experience of art must find some way of thematizing the perceptual dimension. Gadamerian hermeneutics, which stems from and extends Heidegger’s project while clearly opposing the “principle of the empty head” and insisting on the tradition-laden and prejudice-informed nature of our understanding quite generally, starts high for the most part. The body-subject, in whom, in Dewey’s words, “action, feeling, and meaning are one” ([1934a] 1989, 22), plays little role in Gadamer’s thought, although it is foregrounded in another context in his rich essays in The Enigma of Health (1993), with its development of the core notion of a body-based existential balance. Perhaps we could say that his language-based hermeneutical theory, rich as it is, suffers from a certain blind spot, which we could call the “principle of the empty body.” Because, as Dewey says, the self is a “force, not a transparency” (251), its transactional relation to the experiential field itself is intrinsically problematic. The enigmatic nature of texts of all sorts, which for hermeneutically oriented theories of interpretation elicits the labor of interpretation, in fact prolongs the original (and originary) labor of perception, a point developed by Louise Rosenblatt’s extension of Dewey’s pragmatist positions into a theory of reading (Rosenblatt 1994, 1995; Innis 1998b), as well as by Thomas Alexander (1987), who foregrounds the actional nature of an organism’s transactions with its “situation.” Shusterman (1997, 2000, 2002) engages Dewey’s positions by focusing in novel fashion on what lies “beneath interpretation,” namely, the lived body, the autoaesthetic implications of which are to be studied, practiced, and promoted by a new discipline, termed somaesthetics (Shusterman 2008, 2012, 2018). The “opening” that Gadamer rightly ascribes to texts, following Heidegger’s analytical lead, marks the field of perception itself, which has, if we follow Dewey ([1934a] 1989), no greatest upper bound.

We unconsciously carry over [a] belief in the bounded character of all objects of experience (a belief founded ultimately in the practical exigencies of our dealings with things) into our conception of experience itself. We suppose that experience has the same definite limits as the things with which it is concerned. But any experience, the most ordinary, has an indefinite total setting. Things, objects, are only focal points of a here and now in a whole which stretches out indefinitely. This is the qualitative “background” which is defined and made definitely conscious in particular objects and specified properties and qualities. (196)

Art explores or makes manifest in a distinctive way the forms in which this qualitative background comes to appearance. This background, Dewey asserts, is a “bounding horizon,” which moves as we move ([1934a] 1989, 197). It is a field that can never be expanded out to definite margins, which themselves “shade into that indefinite expanse beyond which imagination calls the universe.” Thus, Dewey writes, “About every explicit and focal object there is a recession into the implicit which is not intellectually grasped” (198) but rather functions as a frame that is qualitatively defined and revealed. This is the field that Harriet finds herself embodied in, willy-nilly, as she is grasped by the painting’s “aura.” There is an allusion here to William James’s distinction between the focus and the fringe of the field of consciousness. The fringe makes up a vast web of interconnected links and nodes, in multiple sensory modalities, which are not the thematic object of consciousness, but which surround, emerge out of, flow into, expand, and modify it. The richer the fringe, the richer is the matrix of the given focal object. The fringe, however, is not stable. It is constantly “in motion,” although it is clearly not “going any place.” The dynamism and time-conditioned character of aesthetic apprehension is deeply conditioned by this fringe, as the embodied interpreter is caught up in the to and fro of the relational field, which cannot be surveyed all at once. James’s great image of conscious experience being structured like the alternations of the flights and perchings of a bird, with the periods of transitions composed of transitive parts and the period of rest composed of substantive parts, is of great aesthetic importance.

Donald Dryden (2001) has explored this theme, connecting, not James and Dewey, but rather James and Langer. He points out, with startling clarity, that for James, naming—language and discursive forms—that is oriented toward the substantive parts of consciousness can capture only, in James’s words, “the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live” ([1890] 1983, 255). It is the role of art—what Langer calls the realm of presentational forms—to capture and express the “innumerable relations and forms of connection between facts of the world.” So numberless are these relations, James writes, that “no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades” (244–245). Thinking about the stream of thought, James speaks, in a powerful metaphor, of the “free water of consciousness” that is resolutely overlooked by psychologists. However, in his view, which is confirmed by art, “every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water of consciousness that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it” (255). It is the artistic image that valorizes and makes present to awareness this vague, yet rich, domain. Dryden shows in detail how Langer’s aesthetic theory speaks to these issues.

This penumbral field is defined by a distinctive quality or affective tone, by what Mikel Dufrenne calls “dim evidences” ([1953], 1973, 67). Dewey would say that Harriet interacts with the painting as a “whole organism” ([1934a] 1989, 127). The “total response” charted in Murdoch’s description is mediated by the senses in their diverse ways, as Dewey is at pains to affirm:

It is not just the visual apparatus, he writes, but the whole organism that interacts with the … environment in all but routine action. The eye, ear, or whatever, is only the channel through which the total response takes place. A color as seen is always qualified by implicit reactions of many organs, those of the sympathetic system as well as of touch. It is a funnel for the total energy put forth, not its well-spring. Colors are rich and sumptuous just because a total organic resonance is deeply implicated in them. (127)

The “limpid sultry yellow air” and the “ridiculously frail poetical vibrating motionless tree” illustrate the intersensory—indeed, total-sensory—nature of Harriet’s reading of the configuration of signs inscribed on the canvas. As I have written elsewhere, “This organic resonance makes up the body of semiosis, objectified in systems of perceptual signs which have their own intersensory ‘feels’” (Innis 1994, 62).

Russell Epstein (2004) has pointed out many instances of this phenomenon in Marcel Proust and its connection with the work of James. Taking the simple example of how wiping one’s mouth with a starched napkin can bring a whole past situation back to consciousness, Epstein notes how Proust speaks of reexperiencing “not only … the sight of the sea as it had been that morning but … the smell of my room, the speed of the wind, the sensation of looking forward to lunch, of wondering which of the different walks I should take” (Proust 1982, 3:909). Involuntary memory is, in fact, a kind of paradigm of what happens to us when we encounter or are interrupted by a work of art, although the contingency of such an episode of memory in real life is replaced by the necessity or “felt rightness” of the artistic form. A work of art can condense and make manifest a “tissue of dimly-felt associations” with a force and power beyond normal experiencing (Epstein 2004, 9). But what Proust (1982) says about involuntary memory in life also applies to the complex artistic image that combines, in dialectical fashion, the voluntary and the involuntary.

An image presented to us by life brings with it, in the single moment, sensations which are in … fact multiple and heterogeneous. The sight, for instance, of the binding of a book once read may weave into the characters of its title the moonlight of a distant summer night. The taste of our breakfast coffee brings with it that vague hope of fine weather which so often long ago, as with the day still intact and full before us we were drinking it out of a bowl of white porcelain, creamy and fluted and itself looking almost like vitrified milk, suddenly smiled upon us in the pale uncertainty of the dawn. An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sound and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelope us simultaneously with them. (3:924)

It is the skilled artist who knows how to capture these felt significances—and the skilled critical perceiver who is sensitive to them; indeed, who is captured by them.

Aesthetic perception, as Dewey works it out, is characterized by a kind of “unbalancing” preanalytic apprehension of meaning or significance that defines a kind of dialectic of “original seizure and subsequent critical discrimination” ([1934a] 1989, 150). Rosenblatt (1994, 1995) makes much of this dialectic, considering it a cornerstone of her practice-oriented theory of literary interpretation. The unbalancing nature of Harriet’s encounter with the painting is exemplified in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Dimensions of an Aesthetic Encounter: Encountering Giorgione’s Sunset
• 2. Energies of Objects: Between Dewey and Langer
• 3. Quality and the Theory of Signs: Dewey’s Peircean Aesthetics
• 4. Aesthetic Naturalism and the “Ways of Art”: Linking Dewey and Samuel Alexander
• 5. Between Nature and Art: Analytical Exemplifications of Dewey’s Aesthetics
• 6. Pragmatism and the Challenge of a Cosmopolitan Aesthetics: On Theory beyond Borders
• 7. Filling the Hole in Sense: Between Art and Philosophy
• References
• Index
• Back Cover