Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era

L. Conner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137023919
• eBook ISBN: 9781137023926
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book offers readers an understanding of the theoretical framework for the concept of Arts Talk, provides historical background and a review of current thinking about the interpretive process, and, most importantly, provides ideas and insights into building audience-centered and audience-powered conversations about the arts.

P A R T I

DEFINING ARTS TALK

MESSENGERS OF THE GODS

When Hermes, the messenger god, discovered language and writing and gave it to humans, he invited us to engage in the process of translating our experience and perception into words; in short, he gave us the gift of interpretation. In homage to Hermes, the Greek word for interpret (hermeneu) focuses on the role of language: how we use it to organize our sense of the world by linking words into structures of thought; how those structures express, intend, and signify other structures of thought until, at last, we have meaning—meaning that can be communicated to others. But do we interpret in order to understand, or is understanding a function of a reflexive, elemental need to make sense of our worlds? Is this desire to make meaning for ourselves and then to share our thoughts with others what makes us human? As cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom notes in How Pleasure Works, developmental psychologists have “long marveled at how children naturally point, wave, and grunt to draw attention to interesting things in their environment. This might seem like the simplest skill until you realize that no other species does this. By some accounts, this desire to share our thoughts is responsible for much of what makes us human, including language and our sophisticated culture.”¹

When it comes to the interpretive process, we are all messengers of the gods. We find real pleasure in making meaning and, importantly, in sharing our understandings with others. By pleasure I do not mean comfort or ease, but rather the deep satisfaction that comes from working something through. It is satisfying to work at processing an opinion about the interesting things that surround us. Especially art. What can be more pleasurable for me as an audience member than experiencing a work of art not as a product with a fixed meaning but rather as a process of meaning making dependent on my participation? And what can be more satisfying than sharing that process with other audience members? The psychological reality and subsequent emotional value of this basic human desire to make meaning and then to share one’s findings with others is the underlying tenet of this book.

But what, precisely, is meaning making? Analyzing and articulating the nature of meaning—the message that is intended or expressed or signified—is fundamental to the history of thinking, of course; in the Western tradition, this work extends back to Plato’s Dialogues and Aristotle’s On Interpretation and continues to this day in a range of disciplines that includes semiotics, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, phenomenology, media studies, performance theory, reception theory, cognitive science, and learning science. For Plato, thinking (and its attendant meaning making) is a dialogue of the soul with itself. For Aristotle, meaning making arises from the relationship between two kinds of things: signs and the things they intend, express, or signify. When words are spoken, they become symbols or signs of the affections of the soul.² In Aristotle’s view, the logical structure of language is the way in which the “facts” of the world are worked through and conveyed to oneself and to others. Language, then, becomes the representation of meaning—the machine that allows the soul’s dialogue to emerge and to transmit “what is meant.” Once that communication is launched, meaning making begins its journey into the realm of interpretation. The Latin word translatio, meaning “to carry over on the other side,” conveys the essential idea of this journey, the “translation, or ‘interpretation’, of thought into language.”³ It’s worth noting here the interchangeability of the nouns “translator” and “interpreter” in contemporary usage. Implicit in this definition of translation is the key idea that interpretation is both a practice (transforming something into another idiom for the purpose of understanding) and, more generally, a way of knowing, or understanding, a phenomenon. The human mind is always busy “translating” symbols (whether language-based, corporeal, or natural) in the external world. The human mind is also always looking for opportunities to integrate those symbols into a higher-order unity, in the same way that letters integrate into words, words into sentences, sentences into poems and novels and essays and plays, etc. Indeed, it is in these examples of higher-order unity that meaning not only takes concrete shape but also takes on its deep, satisfying, life-determining quality.

In Western thought, theories on how the interpretative function operates both culturally and cognitively were first systematized under the label “hermeneutics,” a term traceable to early nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher.⁴ Critical to Schleiermacher’s thinking (and others of that era) is the idea of hermeneutics as a science organized around the project of systematizing human knowledge: Can we locate a set of rules, a group of interpretive techniques, that will help us to understand texts and thus to make meaningful any set of data regardless of its disciplinary focus or cultural situation? “Prior to Schleiermacher, the task of textual interpretation was thought to require different methods as determined by the type of text to be interpreted. Thus, legal texts gave rise to a juridical hermeneutic, sacred scripture to a biblical hermeneutic, literary texts to a philological hermeneutic, and so on.”⁵ Wilhelm Dilthey, a transitional figure writing in the mid-nineteenth century, extended the discourse by arguing for hermeneutics to be categorized along with the fields of epistemology and logic so as to become an “essential connecting link between philosophy and the historical disciplines, an essential component in the foundation of the human studies themselves.”⁶ Both Schleiermacher and Dilthey wanted to find a theory for their concept of “‘understanding’, an intellectual activity seen as different both in object and in form from explaining.”⁷

The field of modern philosophical hermeneutics, influenced by Martin Heidegger, repositions hermeneutics as “structures of Being,” that is, activities of understanding and interpretation.⁸ From Heidegger, German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer articulates the idea of the hermeneutic circle, or the acknowledgment that our approach to understanding a historical phenomenon (a text, a work of art) is necessarily conditioned by the series of interpreters (and interpretations) that precede us. In Truth and Method, Gadamer proposes that the job of interpreting can be understood as the fusing of two horizons: that of the interpreter and that of the object being interpreted. (A horizon is the context of interpretation.) “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting,” argues Gadamer. “He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there.”⁹

Of particular resonance here is Gadamer’s acknowledgment that our personal horizons, which include our biases and limited/situated historical understandings, are an essential component of any interpretive act. And even more resonant is his understanding, from Heidegger, of the implications of what he calls the hermeneutic circle:

Just as we cannot continually misunderstand the use of a word without its affecting the meaning of the whole, so we cannot stick blindly to our own fore-meaning about the thing if we want to understand the meaning of another. Of course this does not mean that when we listen to someone or read a book we must forget all our fore-meanings concerning the content and all our own ideas. All that is asked is that we remain open to the meaning of the other person or text. But this openness always includes our situating the other meaning in relation to the whole of our own meanings or ourselves in relation to it . . . This places hermeneutical work on a firm basis. A person trying to understand something will not resign himself from the start to relying on his own accidental fore-meanings, ignoring as consistently and stubbornly as possible the actual meaning of the text through what the interpreter imagines it to be. Rather, a person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something.”¹⁰

For Gadamer, this fusion of horizons, the ideal state wherein the tensions between the lineage of the interpreter’s historical horizon or range of vision (the fore-meanings referred to in the above quotation) and another interpreter or interpretation’s horizon, is resolved through meaningful conversation, a belief we will return to in Part II in the discussion about how to launch an Arts Talk ethos.

Another well-known use of the horizon metaphor comes from Hans Robert Jauss, whose “horizon of expectations” refers to the shared set of criteria that a reader (or an audience member) uses to judge a text (or arts event/object) in any given period. For Jauss, these criteria are situated, which is to say that the values used to interpret (and judge) a work are formed through social structures, like education, and, as such, are not stable from one generation to another. Jauss’s work is part of the reader-response critical tradition, which posits that in order to understand the meaning of a text it is necessary to acknowledge the historical horizons by which a reader creates meaning. As he famously said in his 1965 essay, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” “A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue.”¹¹ The important idea here, for our purposes, is his insistence that in order to make meaning we must understand the difference between an art event’s interpretive position in the past and its potential meaning in the present. This, as performance theorist Susan Bennett puts it, “dispels the notion of objective and timeless meaning contained independently within a text.”¹² A particularly resonant explication of this phenomenon is contained in literary critic Terence Hawkes’s essay, “A Sea Shell,” in which he likens the process of reading Hamlet to picking up a conch shell at the shore. What we say we are doing is listening to the ocean (reading Shakespeare’s intentions). But what we are actually doing is listening to our heart muscle pump blood through our own vascular system (rereading our own fore-meanings).¹³ In other words, we are conditioned to understand what we already understand and to find new “truths” in the rediscovery of our already established “truths.” We are limited by our cultural and social horizons.

More recent work on the problem of meaning construction encompasses not only verbal and nonverbal communication, but also other aspects of understanding and cultural learning that happen before formal language takes over. Contemporary theorists, working from disciplinary points of view as disparate as cognitive psychology, anthropology and reception theory, routinely acknowledge interpretation as both a function of social constructions and an embodied process arising out of the mind/brain, term employed by cognitive scientists to underscore the fact that soft phenomena such as emotions, which are often ascribed to “the mind” (as a metaphorical container), are, in fact, hardwired physiological realities locatable as neural activity in the brain. For cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, meaning and meaning making are intertwined with our conceptions of “the real.” As he argues in Culture in Mind, people “live out the details of their daily lives in terms of what they conceive to be real: not just rocks and mountains and storms at sea, but friendship, love, respect are known as false or real . . . This is the domain of meaning making, without which human beings in every culture fall into terror.”¹⁴ Cognitive anthropologist Bradd Shore stresses that meaning making “involves the perpetual encounter of a meaning-seeking subject and a historically and culturally orchestrated world of artifacts.”¹⁵ Cultural models, he argues, “render certain kinds of experience perpetually significant and readily communicable within a community.”¹⁶ For Shore, as with other cognitive-based theorists, the first point of meaning making, the perceptual encounter, is an aspect of the mind/brain—again, an embodied process of the physical mind/brain rather than of the metaphorical mind. The field of neuroaesthetics takes the mind/brain concept a step further by testing the relationship between the physical brain and the contemplation and creation of a work of art.¹⁷ By looking for the neural correlates of artistic judgment, these researchers are in the process of identifying the physiology of aesthetics: what areas of the brain produce what types of artistic activity (both creative and interpretive acts).

This is interesting in juxtaposition to a number of emerging concepts about the evolution of human cognition and its relationship to meaning making in an arts context. In evolutionary anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake’s recent study of the relationship between art making and the “infancy of the human species,” she notes that meaning was first located in “what ‘felt right’—a full stomach, a safe environment, nearness of familiar others, or ways to acquire these” and that, over a millennia of human evolution,

the mind increasingly became a “making-sense organ”: interrelated powers of memory, foresight, and imagination gradually developed and allowed humans to stabilize and confine the stream of life by making connections between past, present, and future, or among experiences and observations. Rather than taking the world on its own terms of significance and value (the basic survival needs, sought and recognized by instinct), people came more and more to systemize or order it and act upon it. Eventually this powerful and deep-rooted desire to make sense of the world became part of what it meant to be human—to impose sense or order and thereby give the world additional (what we now call “cultural”) meaning.¹⁸

In Engaging...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Preamble: We the Audience
• Part I    Defining Arts Talk
• Part II    Facilitating Arts Talk
• Conclusion: The Pleasures of Interpretation in the Live | Digital Era
• Notes
• Index