Book Reviews
goehr, lydia. Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on
the History of Aesthetic Theory. Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2008, xviii + 386 pp., $35.00 cloth.
A decade ago, Lydia Goehr shared her thoughts on
Wagner and German Romanticism in The Quest for
Voice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). In the present
volume she resumes her exploration of the history
of aesthetic theory by interrogating modernism in
its German incarnation. With a title borrowed from
Goethe, the book consists of eight long, idiosyncratic
essays on the aesthetics of music, all of which are
ultimately reflections on Theodor Adorno’s reflec-
tions on music. Sympathetic readers will appreciate
her patient exploration of a cluster of reoccurring
themes. Detractors are likely to respond that the un-
dertaking would be improved by aggressive editing
and tightening. A Hegelian might suggest that this
standoff exemplifies an inevitable dialectical tension
that will be resolved in her future explorations of
German postmodernism.
Goehr explains that she “do[es] not engage in the-
ory production,” but rather that she offers “a criti-
cal history of concepts,” mapping “a history of their
reception and thereby of the complex adaptations,
appropriations, and retrievals of some of the most
dominant philosophical and aesthetic theses of mod-
ern times” (p. x). Dominant, that is, if you agree with
her assessment that “it is to Adorno to whom even
those most irritated [by Adorno’s difficulty and ob-
scurity] turn when in search of something new or
interesting to say” (p. xi). To further complicate the
proceedings, Goehr intentionally reads Adorno and
other theorists “against the grain of their usual re-
ceptions” (p. xiii), and pursues concepts “at a certain
level of perpetuated and mythified abstraction, ex-
plicitly to expose assumptions that . . . remain preva-
lent” (p. 259).
In order of appearance, the eight essays range over
the topics of affinities between music and philosophy,
the concept of musicality as it applies to Beethoven
and Wagner, John Cage and birdsong, experimen-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68:2 Spring 2010

c 2010 The American Society for Aesthetics
talism (and, again, Cage), connections between the
philosophies of history and of art, the tendency of
commemorative art to mirror the violence done to
the victims we commemorate, the musicality of film
movement, and the problem of American opera. In
the spirit of the book’s own methodology, my gen-
eral response is best summarized by the observation
that my reading was constantly accompanied by the
thought, “These fragments she has shored against our
ruins,” a variation on T. S. Eliot’s line in The Waste
Land (1922).
Why did this line of poetry keep coming to me as
I read? It might be because the topic of ruins domi-
nates chapter five, as does fragmentation elsewhere.
However, that is not really why. It is because, in the
end, I felt that I’d been touring the ruins of Ger-
man intellectual history. Not that the tour guide isn’t
amazingly well informed! Yet the guide is overly di-
gressive; at the end of the tour there is no sense of the
whole. Different chapters will resonate to different
degrees with each reader, but there’s no overarching
thesis, no core idea to applaud or dispute. (This might
very well be Goehr’s intended effect, if we take seri-
ously her early remarks that her aim is to display the
“movement of [her] thought” [p. xvii], sacrificing in-
ternal consistency in the process [p. xii].) On another
level, the whole book seems to me a working out of
the last chapter’s theme concerning the problem of
American opera, to wit, that it is symptomatic of a
(German) nostalgia for a historical moment and cul-
tural configuration that did not, because it could not,
exist.
Before tackling these eight essays, readers who
are not presold on the book’s appeal might prepare
themselves by self-assessing their familiarity with a
wide range of cultural landmarks. (And that means
knowing them well, for Goehr is not one to pro-
vide details, much less background exposition. Any
reader who needs to consult the notes or bibliogra-
phy in order to understand that “Benjamin” is Wal-
ter Benjamin is not a reader addressed by this au-
thor. In that spirit, the following list is restricted to
176
surnames.) Minimally, and in rough order of impor-
tance, Goehr assumes that the reader knows Adorno,
Danto, Hegel, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Kant, Marx,
Hanslick, Merleau-Ponty, Dewey, Schiller, Wittgen-
stein, Proust, Twain, Yeats, and Beckett as well as
the music of Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg, Cage,
Mozart, Stockhausen, Strauss, Stravinsky, Brahms,
Adams, Rossini, Puccini, Weill, and Tippett. With re-
spect to chapter seven, it’s imperative that one knows
the major film theorists of the early twentieth century
and Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944).
I admit to puzzlement in response to some of
Goehr’s references. And I do not mean her refer-
ences to Schiller and Mann. As in Adorno, references
to examples are frequently vague or obscure: her ref-
erence to Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007) seems quite
gratuitous (p. 252), and despite having seen it at least
four times, I did not initially recall the eighty sec-
onds of the Marx Brothers’ The Cocoanuts (Robert
Florey and Joseph Santley, 1929) that matters to her
argument (pp. 293 and 301). (Incidentally, shouldn’t
some credit go to Irving Berlin, who wrote this par-
ticular bit?) After locating and watching the scene, a
Carmen spoof, I worry that she expects it to bear too
much weight. There is no particular reason to read it
as a critique of European opera, as Goehr would have
it. One might as well say that Groucho’s reference to
Winnie the Pooh in the film’s auction sequence is a
critique of British children’s literature. Consider an-
other example: Goehr discusses Mark Twain’s obser-
vations, in A Tramp Abroad (1880), about applause
at a Munich concert, and then her next paragraph
begins, “Twain’s story recalls the king of Bavaria”
and his preference to attend opera sans audience (p.
303). Initially, there is no mention that the story about
the king is likewise from Twain’s A Tramp Abroad.
(Precisely how many readers will “recall,” with her,
that the Wagner chapter ends with this story?) She
then extracts a major conclusion from Twain’s punch
line, which compares German and American “mod-
eration.” Yet how much weight should a punch line
in Twain be asked to bear? Is a (fictional?) anecdote
from 1880 really the place to look for evidence of
an American predisposition to welcome the end of
art, as Goehr supposes (p. 304)? Moving from an (al-
leged) sadistic disregard for performers to an Ameri-
can desire for the end of art is certainly an “elective”
affinity on her part. I might just as well ground this
review in my own happenstance associations, such as
that her frequent references to nightingales reminded
me of battlefield hospitals in the Crimean War and
the Derek and the Dominos song that contains the
phrase “There sings no bird.” But free association is
neither analysis nor argument.
Granted, some of her examples yield interesting
affinities, most notably when her examination of Al-
bert Speer’s remarks on Nazi architecture and in-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
tentional ruins, including the question of which par-
ticulars fall within the scope of those remarks, in-
spires a comparison of Adorno and Danto on both
history and art. Another illuminating discussion ex-
plains how their shared commitments to art’s unique-
ness and to its “posthistoricist condition” (p. 85)
inform the thinking of both Adorno and Danto con-
cerning the continuation of art relative to the ends or
endings of art.
I wonder if other readers will experience the odd
reversal that these sections inspired in me. Situat-
ing Adorno in a larger conversation makes his views
more understandable and thus a bit more plausible.
Situating Danto in the same conversation has the op-
posite effect, making it more difficult to appreciate
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard
University Press, 1981) as a series of independent ar-
guments. Transfiguration contains only one passing
reference to Hegel, so the book’s arguments formerly
seemed to rest on Danto’s well-chosen examples. By
reminding us that Danto’s methodology is a critical
response to his framing Hegelianism, Goehr brings
out his underlying affinities with Adorno and thus
asks us to reevaluate Danto’s position as a thread
in a larger intellectual history. In the end, however,
Goehr’s decision to compare Adorno and Danto is
buried in its surroundings. One cannot avoid the sus-
picion that a shorter book, concentrating primarily on
those two philosophers for a hundred pages, would
have been a greater accomplishment.
THEODORE GRACYK
Department of Philosophy
Minnesota State University Moorhead
fowler, sherry d. Muroji: Rearranging Art and His-
tory at a Japanese Buddhist Temple. University of
Hawaii Press, 2005, xiv + 293 pp., 13 color + 79
b&w plates, $57.00 cloth.
levine, gregory p. a. Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures
of a Zen Monastery. University of Washington
Press, 2005, lii + 444 pp., 136 color and b&w plates,
$60.00 cloth.
It is one thing to write philosophy of art and quite an-
other to write philosophy of art that is not solely a re-
flection of one’s own familiar experience and biases.
But while many aestheticians want to incorporate
non-Western material, and even points of view and
methods, into their teaching, writing, and research,
and even their own thinking, this is not always as easy
as it may seem before one begins. Even reading the
literature (in translation) may be more complex than
it first appears. Longtime foundational texts are be-
ing reevaluated. Works such as D. T. Suzuki’s Zen and
Japanese Culture (Princeton University Press, 1970)
Book Reviews
have come under criticism for oversimplifying sectar-
ian differences or ignoring social and historical con-
texts (that is, for being of their time rather than ade-
quately theoretically informed, as we are today); the
work of Okakura Kazuo (aka Tenshin, 1862–1913),
such as The Ideals of the East, with Special Atten-
tion to the Art of Japan (London: John Murray, 1903)
and his well-known classic The Book of Tea (New
York: Putnam’s, 1906), is now recognized as disingen-
uously disavowing political agendas as well as foster-
ing illusions that Japanese art, indeed all of Asia, is
transcendent, unchanging, and timeless while also in
some cases exacerbating ideological breaches among
Japanese artists themselves.
Rushing into the breach, at least in terms of
Japanese culture, is a series of substantial interdis-
ciplinary books about temples and shrines, by schol-
ars of religion and art historians. (Within Japanese
studies, the term ‘temple’ is restricted to Buddhist
institutions or buildings, while, with the exception of
a few very small tabernacle-like constructions some-
times found within Buddhist temples that are also
referred to as shrines, ‘shrine’ is reserved for Shinto
institutions or buildings.) Among the more helpful
to aestheticians are two recent books, Sherry D.
Fowler’s Muroji: Rearranging Art and History at a
Japanese Buddhist Temple and Gregory P. A. Levine’s
Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery.
The pioneers in this informal “series” are John K.
Nelson’s A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 1996), which focuses
on Suwa Jinja, Nagasaki’s major Shinto shrine, and
Donald McCallum’s Zenkoji and Its Icon (Princeton
University Press, 1994). The other major pieces on
Shinto shrines are Dominic McIver Lopes’s “Shiki-
nen Sengu: The Ontology of Architecture in Japan”
(The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 [2007]:
77–84) and Jonathan Reynolds’s article “Ise Shrine
and a Modernist Construction of Japanese Tradi-
tion” (The Art Bulletin 83 [2001]: 316–341). Re-
cent works on Buddhist temples include Andrew
Watsky’s Chikubushima (aka Tsukubusuma), De-
ploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan (Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 2004) and Mimi Yieng-
prukusawan’s Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional
Politics in Twelfth-Century Japan, on Chusonji (Har-
vard University Asia Center, 1998).
Both Daitokuji and Muroji are well-illustrated
cross-disciplinary studies by art historians specializ-
ing in Japanese art who bring considerable historical,
cultural, photographic, and linguistic or literary ex-
pertise to bear on issues that turn out to be of philo-
sophical interest, although the authors do not tackle
them philosophically themselves.
Having completed dissertations on these temples
within more traditional art-historical paradigms (dat-
ing and stylistic analysis and so on), both authors turn
177
away from that paradigm. They begin their books
by examining issues that were long invisible to art
historians, namely, the movements or repositioning
of sculpture (and less commonly painting) from one
place to another and the renaming of statues and
their temples. How and why (under what circum-
stances and auspices and with what motivations) do
works that have been known by one name and have
been located in one place come to have their identi-
ties reassigned? And what do these reassignments tell
us about art-historical and religious practices, beliefs,
and motivations? What roles are played by religious
ritual and by politics, national or sectarian?
In the process of exploring these case studies,
both authors undertake the debunking of century-
old myths of the timelessness and transcendence of
Japanese (and by extension other Asian) art, such as
are perpetuated not only by writers like those men-
tioned in paragraph one above but also by the temple
photography, often commissioned by the Japanese
government, that has made these buildings so mes-
merizing. (Levine is by far the more overtly the-
oretical, not to say jargon-riddled and straight-out
verbose, of the two; he is also mean-spirited in his
condemnations of scholars whose work predated our
contemporary enlightened theorizing.)
Both books raise a number of issues related to phi-
losophy of art, including interrelations among paint-
ing, sculpture, and architecture; the ways in which the
identity of works of art is understood and assigned;
the ways in which a work’s identity may change over
time (and under what circumstances, and for what the
reasons are); resemblance in portraiture; purposes of
portraiture; relations between religious architecture
and its surrounding landscape, the natural environ-
ment, and their aesthetics; gender and art; and more.
Those working in philosophy of religion and envi-
ronmental philosophy will also find much of interest,
especially related to sacred space (indexed by Fowler
under ‘landscape’ and ‘esoteric cosmology’). Written
by art historians of specific buildings and the reli-
gious institutions that built and care for them, not
all their questions are those of philosophers of art;
you may encounter far more than you want to know
about contesting the temples’ affiliations and the in-
tricacies of dating works of art. Yet the information
they provide and the questions and perspectives they
offer challenge many prevailing Western paradigms.
Both books situate their subjects historically
and are diachronic, rather than synchronic, look-
ing at changing beliefs and practices within the sites
and communities they study, as well as across dif-
ferent communities at certain historical junctures.
Thus they are able to examine the varying senses
(within the temples’ own communities) of differ-
ences in understanding of identity, both personal
identity (for example, of abbots, the subjects of
178
portraiture) and identity of artworks and institutions.
(And while acknowledging that the very notion of
sectarian identity is largely a modern construct, these
studies are able also to help clarify the specificity of
Zen and other “sects” or schools within Buddhism
that nonspecialists are liable to confuse or ignore.)
The two books also share some faults. Regret-
tably, despite their focus on Buddhist temples (Zen
at Daitokuji and Hosso school, Tendai and Shin-
gon [both esoteric] at Muroji), neither author spends
much time on gardens, on the aesthetics of the tem-
ples’ natural sites, or on the relations of built site
to natural environment, concentrating instead on is-
sues raised by architecture (primarily) and sculpture.
(Painting enters in a supportive role in both, and cal-
ligraphy in Daitokuji.) This is too bad, as Daitokuji’s
gardens, especially those at the abbot’s quarters in
the subtemple Daisen’in, are, outside, and probably
within Japan, among the three most published, along
with Ryoanji and Kinkakuji, aka the Temple of the
Golden Pavilion, outside, and probably within, Japan.
Of the two, Sherry D. Fowler’s Muroji: Rearrang-
ing Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple
is the more manageable stylistically: the reader may
bog down from time to time in lineages, sectarian
conflicts, or comparative dating of sculpture, but the
range of information is very helpful. The narratives
remain clear and her periodic summaries and the con-
clusions of the chapters are excellent. (Hint: feel free
to skip the genealogies in chapter 2, most of the dis-
cussion of institutional conflicts, and minute details of
dating. You may want to begin with the conclusion;
chapters 1 and 2 are not to be missed.) She draws
connections among the temple and its artworks, reli-
gious beliefs and practices, the environment, and the
politics of the state (for Muroji this latter is primar-
ily during its early centuries). Fowler makes all her
reasoning explicit and explains exactly where and on
what grounds she faults others’ theories. While her
focus is largely on the rearrangements and renamings
of statues and the temple’s buildings, the issues raised
go far beyond the particulars of one rather isolated
temple.
Fowler’s supporting materials are superb: infor-
mative photographs conveniently placed; a transla-
tion of the main historical document, a list of illustra-
tions, an excellent bibliography of English as well as
Japanese sources and a glossary with Japanese char-
acters (not found in Levine’s book). With a few im-
portant exceptions, the index is useful, though per-
haps organized more for specialists in temple archi-
tecture than the general reader. (Why are there no
entries for ‘painting,’ ‘portrait,’ and ‘iconography’ in
a book on art that discusses these topics at length,
nor on sacred space and geography when the mo-
tivation for the placement of Muroji was based on
space that was conceived as already sacred and when
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
the task of the temple was to guarantee continued ef-
fectiveness of the space? The ‘landscape’ entry omits
several of her discussions. Why are the female pa-
trons discussed not indexed by name or title? Why
are there no entries for thatch or roof repair when
her discussions of these topics are so interesting and
informative, even enlightening, and it is a book on
architecture?)
Unlike the temples of the other studies men-
tioned above, which are known (among Western-
ers) primarily to Japanese art and religion special-
ists, Daitokuji, a Zen temple in northeast Kyoto,
is widely known through its enormous impact on
American arts and letters. In the 1950s and 1960s,
Daitokuji opened itself to foreign students of Zen
and of Japanese literature and culture. Among the
most influential were poets and writers, including
Beat poet Gary Snyder and poet-filmmaker Ruth
Stephan, who lived at Daitokuji for many years; art
historians like Jon Carter Covell, who published Zen
at Daitokuji with abbot Yamada Sobin (1974); art
historian-cum-mystery writer Janwillem van de We-
tering; and Rand and Sondra Castile, the first direc-
tor of the Japan Society Gallery in New York City
and the founder of the East Asian conservation stu-
dio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, respectively.
(The latter were among a number of American stu-
dents who were affiliated with the Sen schools of
tea ceremony.) Scholars of religion and translators
Philip Yampolsky and Burton Watson also studied
and visited there. In 1958 Ruth Fuller Sasaki reno-
vated its subtemple Ryosen’an so it could house the
First Zen Institute of America in Japan, while ab-
bot Kobori Nanrei Sohaku mentored Americans and
held zazen (sitting meditation) sessions in the sub-
temple Ryokoin until the 1980s. (This informative
discussion is not indexed; it is on pp. xliii–xliv of the
Prologue.)
Levine begins his study of arts at Daitokuji with
abbot portraiture: specifically, a case he uncovers
where the accepted attribution turns out upon care-
ful examination (of a written inscription in the in-
terior of the wooden sculpture) to be a seemingly
deliberate misidentification of the personage it pur-
ports to be. Zen abbot portraits (originally painted
but increasingly, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, wooden sculptures) have long been puz-
zling, because in spite of the doctrine of “emptiness”
derived from the Heart Sutra (among others), in-
cluding the emptiness of the self, they are treated
with enormous respect and show startling degrees of
resemblance; indeed they are regarded as being the
person himself after death.
Just how the portrait can be so full in the face
of theoretical emptiness has bearing not only for
philosophers of art and religion but also for those
interested in personal identity and philosophy of the
Book Reviews
person and of the body. (Relics play a role here,
among other things.) Luckily the question has been
the subject of a number of fascinating studies re-
cently. (Bernard Faure’s work is particularly helpful;
see “The Buddhist Icon and the Modern Gaze” [Criti-
cal Inquiry 24 (1998): 768–813] and Visions of Power:
Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism [Princeton
University Press, 1996]. Richard Vinograd’s Bound-
aries of the Self: Chinese Portraits 1600–1900 [Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992] and Richard H. Davis’s
Lives of Indian Images [Princeton University Press,
1997] investigate issues of selfhood, social and per-
sonal identity, resemblance and portraiture in other
Asian contexts.) Vinograd’s theory is also applica-
ble to Japanese portraiture; see Mara Miller’s “Iden-
tity, Identification, and Temperament in Emblematic
Portraits of in Edo Japanese Literati Artists Taiga &
Gyokuran: A Philosophical and Theoretical Anal-
ysis of the Ming-Qing Legacy” [MingQing Yanjiu
(MingQing Studies)] (2007): 65–116.)
Levine concludes that site setting (enshrinement)
and ritual (including a variety of texts) may be as im-
portant as resemblance and naming in the attribution
of identity to a religious sculpture. At the same time,
there are important repercussions of the practices
for the understanding of the personage represented,
both by the original and subsequent audiences of be-
lievers, and for us today who strive to understand art
and human identity in a scholarly context; the rites, he
argues, “presented, it seems two senses (two faces) of
the patriarch: as a physical presence of institutional
and spiritual authority and charismatic sayings and
doings and as a transcendent absence, his enlightened
nature beyond form and representation” (p. 80).
The result is a case study with important impli-
cations for our understanding not only of the is-
sues mentioned but also of the range of possibil-
ity of intertextuality, of contextualized viewing and
experience, and of the roles of personal subjective
experience.
Levine’s subsequent case study in the book ex-
plores the famous Sanmon Gate and the portrait-
statue of the founder of the modern tea ceremony,
Sen no Rikyu (1522–1591), erected at Daitokuji after
Rikyu refurbished its gate, together with its infamous
crucifixion by the newly unified nation’s warlord-
ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He follows this with anal-
yses of calligraphy, personal identity, and cases of
forgery, and of the institution of mushiboshi, or an-
nual airings and exhibitions of artworks. Again the
material is inherently fascinating and also useful to
those who wish to understand the arts outside of our
familiar Western paradigms. Regrettably, Daitokuji
has neither a list of illustrations nor a list of Japanese
characters.
Although their intended audiences are primar-
ily art historians interested in Japanese architecture,
painting, and sculpture, philosophers of art and other
179
aestheticians will find the information, arguments,
and photographs in both Muroji and Daitokuji deeply
informative and philosophically provocative.
MARA MILLER
Independent Scholar
Honolulu, Hawaii
dadlez, e. m. Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and
Value in Jane Austen and David Hume. Chichester,
UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, xv + 234 pp., $89.95
cloth.
As Eva Dadlez makes clear at the outset of her
new book, any brave soul who attempts to deci-
pher some systematic philosophical content in Jane
Austen’s writing faces two considerable obstacles.
Not only does Austen explicitly deny that she had
any knowledge of philosophy, but many of the fea-
tures of the complex and precisely rendered moral
world readers confront in her novels fall neither
exclusively nor unambiguously under the purview
of any particular philosopher. If one rejects, more-
over (as Dadlez emphatically does) seeing Austen
as egoist or deontologist, claiming her instead for
the tradition of virtue ethics, the themes that charac-
terize the moral vision that approach involves can
be heard plausibly as echoes not only of Aristo-
tle, but of a host of eighteenth-century philosophers
from Shaftesbury to Dugald Stewart. Refusing to
yield to such impediments, however, blessed with
a careful eye to detail and armed with an impres-
sive command of her subject matter, Dadlez pro-
poses to defend a strikingly bold thesis: not only
are we indeed able to decipher the “philosophical
position to which [Austen’s] writing commits her”
(p. viii), but it is also possible to show that this
commitment finds its best expression in the work of
David Hume.
Dadlez clearly recognizes the potential briars and
brambles by which the traveler on this road might be
snagged, and she is careful both to distance her posi-
tion from the hardly tenable one that Austen’s preoc-
cupations can be tied exclusively to Hume and to dis-
tinguish it from a mere Humean “reading” of Austen:
while the latter might be undertaken with a variety
of authors without any particular philosophical con-
tent, Dadlez contends that Austen and Hume actu-
ally share “common concerns and perspectives” and
have the same “insights” about moral life (p. 207).
Dadlez risks watering down her proposal with four
secondary theses, including largely undeveloped ones
about Austen’s “affinity for Enlightenment thought”
(p. ix) and Hume’s “immediacy and relevance”
(p. xiii), both of which appear in the preface but
resurface only en passant in the final chapter. As
the book proceeds, however, all of the others effec-
tively devolve into the primary one around which the
180
narrative is structured and from which the metaphor
that provides the title of the book is derived. Hume
and Austen are “mirrors to one another,” Dadlez
urges, because in the novels of the latter we discover a
series of thought experiments that represent norma-
tive positions that reflect, illustrate, and embody the
insights of the former, including the method of moral
reasoning through which they are reached; similarly,
in Hume’s Treatise and second Enquiry we find a
space where Austen’s insights “survive intact” within
a systematic philosophy that enables us to “better
understand” her (p. xi).
Given the difficulty of pinning the details of
Austen’s work with any specificity onto the body of
Hume’s philosophy, Dadlez opts for an approach in-
tended to amass such a quantity of evidence that its
“cumulative” effect will overwhelm readers and lead
them to accept the cogency of the proposed thesis.
The upside of this gambit is that Dadlez can work
at a comfortable level of generality with the famil-
iar elements of Hume’s philosophy (inter alia plea-
sure, sympathy, the general point of view, beauty,
views of marital relations, and an array of virtues
and vices) paraded in consecutive chapters along-
side judicially chosen episodes and passages from
Austen’s novels, designed to demonstrate the connec-
tion in question. Some of these juxtapositions elicit
insights that are original, informative, and a joy to
read, especially the latter chapters of the book where
Dadlez tackles chastity, fidelity, pride, jealousy, mal-
ice, indolence, and industry. On the way, the reader is
also treated to spirited appropriations of Austen for
Hume against Kantian (pp. 37ff.) and Aristotelian
(pp. 46ff.) interlopers, a subtle rejection of preferring
Smith’s account of sympathy as adequate to appreci-
ating Austen (pp. 76ff.), some nicely developed criti-
cal appreciation of Austen’s literary style and narra-
tive skill (pp. 20ff.), and an impassioned disdain for
film and Masterpiece Theater adaptations of Austen’s
ouvre to which only the Austen aficionado could rise
(pp. 210ff.).
On the other hand, the downside of Dadlez’s at-
tempt to convince the readers by sheer volume of
evidence has the effect of blurring the outlines of
the narrative and elicits the unsettling feeling that
one cannot, as reader, pin down exactly what has
been established. Dadlez is forced to frame her dis-
cussion in necessarily vague terms of ‘fit,’ ‘corre-
spondence,’ ‘commonalities,’ ‘complimentarity,’ ‘cor-
relation,’ and the like, sufficiently ambiguous that
it is hard actually to deny that the thesis has, in
some sense, been proved. Dadlez clearly demon-
strates that one can plausibly describe Austen’s nov-
els in a Humean idiom by finding in them characters,
passages, plots, and dialogue illustrative of Hume’s
moral philosophy. One can, pari passu, find in Hume
intimations of views fictionalized by Austen. Yet this
succeeds only if one casts the comparison, as Dadlez
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
does, at a sufficiently high level of generality when
comparing, say, the “fit” in their aesthetic views
(pp. 114ff.) or the role they assign utility in moral
judgment (pp. 100ff.). When one descends to the par-
ticular, however, cracks begin to show. For at bot-
tom, the philosopher Hume and novelist Austen are
engaged in fundamentally different tasks. As Hume
himself emphasizes, philosopher and novelist view
the same landscape from radically divergent points
of view originating in the different tasks in which
they are engaged: the former casts the eye of rea-
son over the geography of common life to reflect its
shapes and disparate forms in a cold, unimpassioned
way; the latter, by contrast, rises on flights of fancy
to fashion an artificial world populated by creations
that deliberately distort the original, warm the imag-
ination of readers, and invite them into a world that
is a representation: enticing, seductive, but ultimately
unreal.
This observation goes to the heart of Dadlez’s
thesis and while the wound is not mortal, when it
strikes home, the force is sufficient to upset the steady
rhythm with which the “cumulative” evidence is sup-
posed to mount. While Austen’s novels and plots
leave one in no doubt as to the moral lessons the
reader should take away (think, most obviously, of
the transformation of Emma Woodhouse or Eliza-
beth Bennet), it is not easy to find much moraliz-
ing in Hume, who, as Dadlez herself comments in
a rather feeble plea for her case, is on “normative
territory, surely” (p. 101). The main problem is that
even if Hume does venture into recommending cer-
tain courses of action over others, it emerges as a mild
reflection and affirmation of the accurate description
and explanation of moral life he has provided: appro-
bation and disapprobation of action and character
based on features of our nature (our affective capac-
ity, ability to sympathize, tendency to self-interest,
and the like) that he captures in the explanatory prin-
ciple of utility and agreeableness to self and others.
Beyond this rather safe bet of living in the house
he has himself confidently and carefully constructed,
Hume is largely silent on venturing into the “oughts”
of moral life, but often vocal in expressing his suspi-
cion that the heated brains of philosophers (let alone
the enthusiastic visions of fiction writers!) can emit
much of anything useful when it comes to directing
our conduct.
One cannot fail to appreciate the labor of love
that is Dadlez’s book, but, in the end, it tends to
confirm Hume’s own express view about the limits
of the philosopher-cum-moralizer and the contrasts
between philosophy and fiction: there is less a “corre-
spondence” between the worlds of Hume and Austen
than an incommensurability that emerges, ironically,
in the very body of evidence marshaled by Dadlez
with the intention of showing the very opposite. If
there is a mirror, to return to and conclude with her
Book Reviews
metaphor, it resembles more a specimen from a fun-
fair hall of mirrors than one into which the heroines
of Austen’s novels might peer to find, in their faithful
reflection, some truth about themselves: what we see
instead is more blurry and indistinct.
TIMOTHY M. COSTELLOE
Department of Philosophy
The College of William and Mary
azoulay, ariella. The Civil Contract of Photogra-
phy. Zone Books and MIT Press, 2008, 585 pp.,
$36.95 cloth.
Photography is public. Indeed, photography is a
model of publicity, in all sorts of ways. Photographs
publicize: they reveal; they make photographed
things publicly available (and to an ever-widening
public); they create a public record of events. Every-
one knows this, from the producers of celebrity gossip
television shows to analytic philosophers. For exam-
ple, when Michael Tye, in Consciousness, Color, and
Content (MIT Press, 2000), needs a quick argument
to show that we see external objects and not private
sense data, he simply notes that the visual things he
is discussing can be photographed. Whether the pho-
tographable quality of certain visual things proves
Tye’s point is a question for another day, but Ariella
Azoulay would follow Tye here, if nowhere else. In
The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay too in-
sists that photography, no matter how baffling or her-
metic any particular photographic image may seem,
is necessarily public.
Necessarily public, but also, for Azoulay, necessar-
ily incomplete: every photographic image is “always,
of necessity, the product of an encounter, even if a vi-
olent one, between a photographer, a photographed
subject, and a camera” (p. 13), an encounter that
moreover is always mute: “This is what photogra-
phy is like by nature—lacking a mouth, speechless,
dumb at birth” (p. 448) and always limited. “In its
very essence, the image is partial, obscured, fissured,
and questionable” (p. 191). A photograph “attests to
what ‘was there’ ” (p. 126), but “what was there is
never only what is visible in a photograph” (p. 127).
Every photograph tells parts of various stories, but at
the same time every photograph refuses to tell only
one story or to tell any story completely: a photo-
graph “always includes more than one wants it to
contain” (p. 355). It is impossible to say what a pho-
tograph finally means or represents, and yet, it is
something, and the world somehow is there, how-
ever partially, in the photograph: “The photograph is
out there, an object in the world, and anyone, always
(at least in principle), can . . . trace it in such a way as
to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows”
(p. 13). For Azoulay, a photograph is like a kind of
urgent ruin: an “opaque, dumb, distant” (p. 375) im-
181
age of a disaster (perhaps an ongoing disaster, or one
still pending) that “comes to life out of the picture,
makes demands, activates, tries to pull strings, hovers
in the air, commands, seduces, repels, troubles, and
irritates” (p. 375), that looks forward to some future
“rebuilding” (p. 36).
If all this sounds a bit overdramatic, consider that,
for Azoulay, every photographic image “always and
inescapably involves a measure of violence” (p. 99),
due to the necessary “instrumentalization” (p. 99)
of what is photographed. In a way it is as if ev-
ery photograph exists “on the verge of catastrophe”
(p. 289), but seeing this requires “collaboration”
(p. 411) with the photograph: “Watching as a spec-
tator means thoroughly investigating the visual phe-
nomenon . . . the spectator . . . seeks to reconstruct
the situation . . . from the surface of the photograph”
(p. 342). After “prolonged observation” (p. 168), af-
ter “hours of looking, possibly days, weeks, or years”
(p. 411), the photograph becomes something more
than “a picture on a wall” (p. 448): “Watching some-
thing as a spectator . . . allow[s] the visible to unfold,
like a picture in motion. . . . This motion does not be-
long to what is seen, as in a movie, but to the specta-
tor” (p. 342). The photograph itself does not project
a world (as movies do, on Stanley Cavell’s view, for
example), but rather “the gap between world and
picture” (p. 329) calls on the spectator “to take part
. . . to take responsibility” (p. 169), to speak for the
photograph in some way or other: “Handicapped, the
image is not sufficient in itself and requires visual and
verbal support, a spokesperson to bring it forth and
have it speak” (p. 191).
Azoulay criticizes both Roland Barthes and Su-
san Sontag for reducing the role of the spectator to
the mere making of an “aesthetic judgment” (p. 130)
about the photograph. According to Azoulay, this
aesthetic judgment model depends upon “the notion
of a stable meaning of what is visible in the pho-
tograph” (p. 130), “as though it were a given, easily
accessible piece of visual data that can be determined
without any negotiation” (p. 311). Sontag, for exam-
ple, ridicules “any attempt to start speaking for the
photo” (p. 130) as akin to some magical “attempt
to revive the dead” (p. 130), but for Azoulay that is
precisely the spectator’s duty: to “speak on behalf
of the photograph” (p. 117). A photograph requires
support; it seeks “collaboration” (p. 411): “the pho-
tograph wants something from me” (p. 375). And
any spectator has standing, “as a plaintiff, rather than
an owner” (p. 117), to assist in the presentation of the
photograph’s “grievance” (p. 143).
Azoulay’s account of photography here resem-
bles the general theory of interpretation Miguel
Tamen develops in his dazzling Friends of Inter-
pretable Objects (Harvard University Press, 2004).
On Tamen’s view, an interpreter speaks for an other-
wise mute interpretable entity almost in the way an
182
attorney speaks for, represents, a client unable to
speak directly for itself (a corporation, say). Inter-
pretable objects, for Tamen, require representation
in order to speak, but such objects are hardly static:
they often surprise their representatives, much as
clients often surprise their lawyers. Azoulay’s view
is similar: a viewer has a duty to try to speak for
the photograph, but the photograph may surprise the
viewer. A photograph may resist or evade a viewer’s
attempts to represent it, just as a client may resist
or evade a lawyer’s representative efforts. This un-
ending possibility of resistance and surprise makes
speaking for photographs a slippery and uneasy sort
of collaboration. It is far less demanding to assume
that a photograph is simply a straightforward record
of “what ‘was there’ ” (p. 160), and that the character
of a photograph is thus graspable “at a glance” (p.
251) (“Oh, that’s a photograph from Abu Ghraib”
[p. 272]), but for Azoulay, such casual looking re-
mains aesthetically dim and ethically costless. Such
an approach refuses to enter what Azoulay calls, a
bit hazily, the civil contract of photography.
What does Azoulay’s title mean, exactly? Some-
thing like this: photographs address everyone. Any
photograph (even a photograph taken for a very par-
ticular purpose, a crime scene photo, for example)
may be examined by anyone who sees it. Traces of
the past (of a real event, a real encounter) are present
in the photograph: “a photograph is evidence of the
social relations that made it possible” (p. 127). The
meaning of the crime scene photo remains to be ne-
gotiated, and indeed, the purpose for which the pho-
tograph was taken (police record keeping) does not
and cannot exhaust the photograph’s message. On
Azoulay’s view, the crime scene photo calls out in
its mute, peculiar way to all sorts of viewers, in all
sorts of voices: one thinks, for example, of Weegee’s
brutally evocative crime scene photos, but also of
the strange mesmeric power sometimes found in the
most ordinary mug shot. This “heterogeneity” (p.
199) of address “turns the photographic sign into an
active statement that can never be completely and
ultimately sealed” (p. 199).
Out of this photographic “instability” (p. 199), and
drawing on a hodgepodge of philosophical sources
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walter Benjamin, Hannah
Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, and Giorgio Agam-
ben, among others), Azoulay cobbles together a
utopian notion of universal citizenship ostensibly me-
diated and made possible by photography: “photog-
raphy created a new community, in part actual and
in part virtual . . . a new political community . . . not
mediated by a sovereign ruling power” (pp. 22–23).
Thus, for Azoulay, “a viewing of the photograph . . .
becomes a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic ap-
preciation” (p. 14). And since “[t]he world cannot
be wiped clean of photography” (p. 345), since pho-
tography “is present everywhere” (p. 146), photog-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
raphy not only ripens the world for surveillance but
also makes possible a reconstruction of a “hypothet-
ical, imagined” (p. 23) public: “an international com-
munity of the governed” (p. 45). This accounts for
Azoulay’s focus on photographic engagements with
what she calls the “impaired citizenship” (p. 15) of
both Palestinians and women. Azoulay’s hope is that
such photographic engagements make possible a hy-
pothetical reconstruction of universal citizenship, a
reconstruction that rehabilitates sorts of citizenship
that are currently impaired: “Photography . . . deter-
ritorializes citizenship, reaching beyond its conven-
tional boundaries and plotting out a political space
in which the plurality of speech and action . . . is actu-
alized permanently by the eventual participation of
all of the governed” (p. 25).
The overall project is thus Rousseauian and post-
structuralist, and like many a Rousseauian post-
structuralist before her, Azoulay overplays her hand.
The utopian and vaguely anarchistic desire for an inti-
mate community from which power and humiliation
have been banished is likely unsatisfiable, even in fan-
tasy. Certainly it appears to be well beyond what any-
one could reasonably expect either photography or
contractarianism to deliver. At times, Azoulay drifts
toward acknowledging this, as when she notes that
her “turn to the rhetoric of the contractarian tradition
. . . may seem curious” (p. 86). Indeed, it is curious,
and in a number of ways. To mention only two: first,
the rhetoric of contract seems oddly suited to the stri-
dent urgency Azoulay brings to her encounters with
photography and, second, the use of social contract
terminology raises the reader’s hopes that Azoulay
has in mind some concrete political program, a pro-
gram that moreover will be built out of an ethical,
civic, and aesthetic engagement with photography.
These wild hopes (for some kind of Benjaminian re-
construction of Friedrich von Schiller’s Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man [1795] perhaps filtered
through the work of T. M. Scanlon, say) are of course
soon dashed. But to say that Azoulay fails because
she presents no workable political program is to miss
the crucial point: photographs disclose traces of the
past, and thus the past may sort of speak (ambigu-
ously and equivocally to be sure) through us and
to us. But this “us” is potentially universal, and ex-
tends far into the future. Azoulay sketches a way in
which unending interpretive work may serve as a ve-
hicle for political continuity, albeit of a virtual and
utopian sort, rather than as a barrier to such con-
tinuity. Azoulay has thus somehow managed to use
photography to reconstruct a tentative notion of po-
litical agency, however elusive and unstable it may be,
in the wake of post-structuralism. This, surely, counts
as some sort of success.
The Civil Contract of Photography is a frus-
trating book, no question. It is prolix, repetitive,
high-handed, and cryptic. At times riddled with
Book Reviews
jargon, at times question begging, at times self-
congratulatory, the book has a grandiose flowery es-
chatological tone that exhausts and exasperates the
reader over the long course of more than five hun-
dred pages. And yet, something important is going
on here. The project of entering into never-ending
negotiations with photographs does serve to estab-
lish a way to connect the sufferings of the past and
present to some future, forever imaginary, horizon
of justice. That this collaborative project is fraught
with bizarre risks and ironies—Azoulay, for instance,
writes compellingly about ways in which photographs
themselves may be used “as a mode of torture”
(p. 422) through the branding of photographed per-
sons as “collaborators” (p. 423), in turn implicating
the spectator’s collaboration with the photograph in
a kind of collaboration with the torture—comes as no
surprise. What is surprising, however, is that Azoulay
partially succeeds at the seemingly impossible task
she sets herself: using photography to allow the dead
to speak, and in surprising ways.
CHAD MCCRACKEN
Department of Philosophy
Lake Forest College
lopate, phillip. Notes on Sontag. Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2009, vi + 247 pp., $19.95 cloth.
sontag, susan. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks
1947–1963. Edited by David Rieff. New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, xiv + 318 pp., $25.00
cloth.
We live in a time in which intellectual labor is
treated as almost synonymous with academic labor
and in which fastidious scholarship ranging over very
circumscribed areas of concern defines intellectual
worth. Judged in terms of its ultimate coherence
or technical accuracy, Susan Sontag’s achievement
will always come up short in the academy. But that
doesn’t really matter. Her main importance (and
surely she knew and even calculated this) rests in
how she presented herself in her work as a perform-
ing intellect: a passionate thinker pursuing complex,
interesting, and, in some cases, novel ideas, all the
while surrounded by the atmosphere of herself.
From childhood on she considered herself spe-
cial. Sontag was precocious, entering college when
she was fifteen, transferring to Chicago because she
found Berkeley too mundane, and graduating at the
top of her class. At seventeen she married the soci-
ologist Philip Rieff and gave birth to a son two years
later. Then it was off to Harvard where she began in
the English department, but transferred over to phi-
losophy within the year. Such transfers at that time
183
were a matter of word of mouth; she simply met with
Morton White, then the director of graduate studies
in the department, and convinced him through con-
versation that she could do the work. And she could
do the work. Her literary sympathies were already
firmly entrenched in the European avant-garde, en-
tailing certain philosophical interests that were, by
and large, outside the mainstream of the Harvard
philosophy department, but quality will out, and she
developed avidity for issues of conceptual and epis-
temological holism and fell in with Quine’s version
of it. White has written that, should she have contin-
ued in her philosophical studies, she would have as-
cended in philosophy to the same intellectual promi-
nence she enjoyed in cultural and artistic criticism
(A Philosopher’s Story [Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1999], pp. 148–149). As it is, she went to
Oxford on a Fulbright the next year, and although
she was impressed by Hart and Austin (but not by
Berlin), she decamped to Paris at the end of fall
and never looked back. She came into her own in
France, meeting public intellectuals, reading cutting-
edge philosophy and literature, obsessively attending
the cinema, and discovering her sexuality. After the
year, she returned to the States, to a divorce and cus-
tody battle for her son, and plunged into the perilous
waters of the New York intellectual scene, waters she
later would come to dominate.
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963 is a
selection from Sontag’s journals from the age of four-
teen to the year of the publication of her first mature
work, the novel The Benefactor (1963). The journal
(she is very careful not to conceive of these note-
books as “diaries” [Reborn, pp. 164–165]) is divis-
ible into three main biographical periods: Sontag’s
teenage years up through her time in college and
marriage to Rieff, the period she spent in Oxford
and Paris, and her entry into New York literary life.
One gets three main impressions from the entries
that cover the initial period. First, she is quite gifted.
“Self-possessed” does not exactly do justice to this,
written by a fifteen-year-old girl: “What seemed once
to be a crushing weight has sharply shifted position,
in a surprising tactic, swung beneath my fleeing feet,
become a sucking force that drags and tires me. How
I long to surrender! How easy it would be to convince
myself of the plausibility of my parents’ life! . . . Does
my ‘intelligence’ need frequent rejuvenation at the
springs of other’s [sic] dissatisfaction and die without
it?” (Reborn, p. 5). Second, she feels hemmed in by
her home life. Her family is deeply bourgeois and
her suburban high school is a bore. As it turns out,
they weren’t so bourgeois, and she was not quite free
from that constraint. These adolescent sentiments are
hardly new, but her expression of them (as imping-
ing upon a developmental path she feels already her
life’s task to tread, that is, to be “intellectual”) is
184
less common. The way she conceives of this path and
its relation to art, literature, music, and philosophy
is, nevertheless, oddly consumerist. She treats such
things as objects to “possess” or “own,” an attitude
quite consistent from beginning to end of these jour-
nals (Reborn, pp. 19, 306). List follows upon list of
films to see, books to read, music to hear, as if having
the experience of any one of them might amount to
merely ticking a box next to its entry in the list. The
young make such lists of course. I recall one having
to do with learning all the languages and sources for
the allusions in Pound’s Cantos. This autobiographi-
cal aside on my part points to an interesting feature of
these notebooks. If one, in retrospect at least, views
one’s youth as tending toward becoming intellectu-
ally able, one will be prompted to such thoughts (and
asides) in reading Reborn. The sixteen-year-old Su-
san will endear with her admonition to herself to use
the word ‘enormous’ correctly (and she does [Re-
born, p. 30]). Her chutzpah in showing up on Thomas
Mann’s southern California doorstep to “interview”
him will delight.
She is agog with Mann, although comes later to
regard this as a youthful indiscretion, demoting him
(quite properly) below her favorite, Kafka. Another
early soul mate is Gide, but it is, tellingly, Djuna
Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) that keeps popping up
in the journal again and again. This leads to the third
point to make about the early journals: Sontag comes
to the knowledge that she is lesbian. It is sometimes
said that she was bisexual (she even said so at times),
and, to be sure, she had sexual relationships with
men. But these relationships were few, far between,
short (often ending up in a kind of domestic monasti-
cism), and quite unsatisfying (for her at least). She an-
nounces early on and “reluctantly” in the notebooks
that she is lesbian; but the reluctance has nothing to
do with possible mistake on the topic. It rather has
to do with coming to state what she knows to be a
fact. The overwhelming impression one gets here is
of someone who embraces her sexuality realistically.
Her loves were not easy, and this comes clear in
the second period covered by Reborn. Sontag writes
of her fraught passion for “H”: Harriet Sommers, a
habituée of James Baldwin’s circle in Paris, some-
time artistic model, and translator into English of
Sade. This last vocation is highly relevant; for all of
her self-awareness, it seems to have never dawned
on Sontag that she was involved in a sadomasochistic
relationship. The other great love of her youth was
the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, another relation-
ship in which Sontag played second fiddle, this time
as too cerebral and withdrawn. Nonetheless, Paris is
a revelation. There is a seriousness of mind there that
makes philosophy at Harvard and Oxford seem te-
dious and desiccated. Despite her desire to immerse
herself in the scene there, her French lags, a deficit
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
which she never covers, if several basic grammati-
cal errors in the journals are any indication. There is
a rather strained relation between Sontag’s wish to
experience European culture at its deepest and her
lack of the discipline that would put her in the best
position to do so, for instance, learning languages
well. This tension imposed itself on Sontag’s intellec-
tual dealings throughout her career. She was taken
to task at times for superficiality and pretension, and
the championing of her European favorites is apt to
seem less compelling when one suspects that either
she is not reading them in the original or, if she is, that
she does not have sufficient linguistic knowledge to
fully appreciate their literary merit. One simply can-
not read Lautréamont, Mallarmé, or Proust with any
real comprehension unless one speaks the language
quite well. It seems that she was so intent on pos-
sessing these works, on incorporating them into her
sense of all-things-Sontag, that she could not bear
to be slowed down by the drudgery of acquiring lin-
guistic competence. Still, her advocacy could work in
the face of such suspicions. I remember quite well
reading her endorsement of Péter Nádas’s A Book
of Memories (1986) and picking it up on that basis
alone, never mind what I supposed was her lack of
Hungarian (and what I knew to be mine).
The third biographical period finds Sontag in New
York in the midst of the Partisan Review crowd, her
transformation from academic to intellectual com-
plete. She writes in 1956 that “college instruction is a
brand of popular culture; the universities are poorly
run mass media” (Reborn, p. 81). True, true, yet we
find her in academics too, first at Sarah Lawrence
College and, then, at Columbia. The essayist Phillip
Lopate, a student at Columbia at that time, knew
her then and since and has written a comprehensive
and judicious assessment of her achievement in his
Notes on Sontag. Lopate deems Sontag’s first three
collections of essays (Against Interpretation [1966],
Styles of Radical Will [1969], and Under the Sign of
Saturn [1980]) preeminent both in her corpus and in
the genre of the modern intellectual essay (Notes on
Sontag, p. 8). He is surely right in both assessments.
He is also right, it seems to me, to rate her fiction in
the main to be “poor” and “derivative” (Notes, p. 9),
although I would not make the exception that he does
for the late novel The Volcano Lover (1992), which,
indeed, is not derivative but lacks artistry nonethe-
less. How much does Sontag’s lack of accomplish-
ment in art color her overall achievement? I would
say: not much. The brilliance of her criticism more
than makes up for her schematic and unconvincing
novels and films. After all, how many great critics are
also great fiction writers, playwrights, or poets? How
many great fiction writers, playwrights, or poets are
great critics, for that matter? But failing to make the
grade artistically would have mattered to her a great
Book Reviews
deal (for example, Reborn, p. 166). And this is part of
the story that Lopate wants to tell. That is, Sontag’s
writerly self-creation consists in passionate relation-
ships to the art of others in which she measures her
competencies against theirs. This is the essence of the
sense of judgment operative in her essays. Sontag’s
work, at least the best of it, demands that she per-
form this high-wire act of putting herself on the line
by putting others on it as well.
Notes is full of perceptive criticism of Sontag, nega-
tive and positive. Perhaps most impressive is Lopate’s
assessment of the way the early essays express the
general scheme of Sontag writing herself into exis-
tence. As he puts it, the issue is “how she came to put
forth the complicated identity of ‘Susan Sontag’ over
the course of her books, how she created this part-
intentional, part-inadvertent persona, and to some
extent become a prisoner of it, while at other times
she was able to slip the knot of our expectations and
augment her worldliness” (Notes, p. 6). Lopate quite
correctly locates the literary precursor of those es-
says in a specific form of aphoristic writing that one
finds in the early Frankfurt School. German letters
borrow much in this vein from the French tradition
of La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and Chamfort,
but put a twist on this, producing a distinctive line
running from Lichtenberg and the Schlegels down to
Benjamin and Adorno that is important to Sontag.
The use of “fragments” and the short pungent essay
that Nietzsche perfected are extensions of this apho-
ristic impulse. These literary forms allow thoughts
expressed by their means a potent indeterminacy.
Lopate holds that such writing involves “a statement
that moves in two directions at once. It raises and
resolves a paradox; it leaves behind an after-image,
like an op art painting the clash of whose two colors
produce a third on the retina. . . . Kafka’s plausible-
gnomic style . . . fascinated Benjamin and Adorno,
and their sentences at times seemed modeled on
his ability to achieve uncannily disillusioned effects”
(Notes, p. 92).
This compact and extraordinarily apt statement of
the power of the aphorism in its modernist form limns
an aspect of Sontag’s early essayistic practice. Disil-
lusion and demystification are important for Sontag,
as they were for her predecessors; both are reactions
to an alleged pervasive falseness that systematically
dominates the standard and basic means by which
one might reveal such falseness. In view of this pos-
sibility, critical intelligence must exercise constant
vigilance lest it, too, unwittingly succumb to the ef-
fects of illusion. In fact, one can never know that one
has not fallen prey. This requires a radical readjust-
ment of rationality away from explanation toward
interpretation and away from conceptual security to-
ward a form of skepticism. Instead of confronting
uncertainty against a general background of more or
185
less accepted fact by adopting a pragmatic attitude
of intellectual “wait and see,” one is gripped by the
thought that every form of assertion is fraught with
unseen problems and that what freedom amounts to
is the capacity to think one’s way out of any asser-
tion. It is a form of irony, although it is not a very
enjoyable one, and its classic text is Adorno’s Min-
ima Moralia (1974) (Notes, p. 91). Any essay with
a claim to be truly critical must set up an internal
tension; it arrests the reader with an insight that is
enough separated from the dross of ideology to pro-
vide some measure of relief without, however, taking
itself to be so unproblematic as to hold out hope of
deliverance.
Does Sontag intend her essays to be of this kind,
and are they? I agree with Lopate that the answer
to the first question is affirmative. I am less sanguine
about such a response to the second. That is, I am less
accepting than is Lopate that she pulls it off even in
some of her most formidable early essays. It is unar-
guable that Sontag remained a tourist in the land
of Kafka, Benjamin, and Adorno. This is a land she
cherished deeply, but her essays do not disassemble
themselves at the brink of assertion as do the best of
this genre. Hers are more assertive, in essence more
American, and the tensions that are constitutive of
even her very best essays are often more a matter of
irresolution than resolve. In the early work, the com-
ponents in tension are typically fealty to some type
of aesthetic formalism, on the one hand, and to the
quasi-moral requirements of the cultural critic, on
the other. Lopate is right to emphasize the neglected
essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” and perhaps her
greatest achievement, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” as center-
pieces of her critical practice in this vein. But I remain
more skeptical than Lopate that even these essays re-
alize what he takes to be their core intentions. I would
attribute the ambivalence present in this work more
to the subject matter of the essays (the interrelation
of the triads: high culture–low culture–gay sensibility;
silence–irony–popular culture) than to any formal di-
mension of the pieces.
Lopate’s discussion of Sontag’s modernist creden-
tials also engages. Artistic modernism is sometimes
considered a progressive doctrine according to which
the arts, subject perhaps to restrictions native to their
various genres, advance stepwise toward ideal ends.
But this progressive thesis does not sit well with Son-
tag’s aestheticism or with her reliance on “negative
dialectics.” So, she replaces the concept “progres-
sive” with the concept “radical” (Notes, pp. 86–88).
One can be enjoined to “go to one’s root” without in-
volving progression in any standard sense. And here
we see the other, less overtly modernist side of Son-
tag once more. She abjures realism as an aesthetic
doctrine; nevertheless, she is a kind of ethical realist
for whom the imperative “get radical” is the exact
186
opposite of “keep turning on the spit of critical intel-
ligence.” When she asks for an “erotics of art” in the
famous ultimate line of “On Interpretation,” she is
neither asking for simple rapture (erotics is a branch
of knowledge after all) nor for a constant juggling of
concepts. She wants a connection of the seriousness
of art with the seriousness of the project of becoming
a person.
Sontag was a great one for pronouncements or,
one might say, renouncements. She was “against in-
terpretation,” “against metaphor,” “against photog-
raphy,” and so forth. What she was truly against, and
what unites these cases, was psychologism. She was
schooled in this temperament in both her studies of
analytic and European philosophy; she understood
Freud non-psychologistically as a “moralist” (Notes,
pp. 73–74), and her tastes in literature, film, and mu-
sic (in short, her love of aesthetic surfaces) bear this
out. She was, in a way, classical in her outlook. But
she leavened this with the nascent literature in erotic
power and its political place. (Sontag was an early
reader of Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse
was her houseguest for a year in Cambridge.) A judg-
ment for her is precisely not a psychological report
of an opinion; it is rather a form of self-care and
discipline. Beyond this of course she could play the
role of the disciplinarian of others and of their tastes,
and many were taken aback, and taken aback of-
ten, by her rigidity. It is undeniable that she could be
doctrinaire, but she was able to reconsider her judg-
ments, for example, her somewhat positive appraisal
of Riefenstahl’s films (“On Style” vs. “Fascinating
Fascism”). And she did modulate some of the more
apocalyptic utterances of On Photography (1977),
where every photographer was saddled with being
“Diane Arbus” (even Diane Arbus) and in which
the constant barrage of visual media was criticized as
sapping any real response to the images, the latter a
view straight out of Adorno. It is fair to say that she
held views firmly but not with fixation. This is con-
sistent with her conception of critical judgment as a
species of caring for oneself. One would not be caring
for the self very well if one were not willing to recon-
sider prior attempts to exercise that care. Self-care is
not self-certifying; it admits of error.
Similarly, in her personal dealings Sontag could be
curt, dismissive, and even rude. Lopate recounts sev-
eral incidents in which Sontag’s intellectualism and
lack of social skill combine to poor effect. I suspect
she rationalized some of this behavior as a kind of
“tough love,” but it was measured out usually with
at least a pinch of self-regard. In Ars Amatoria Ovid
dispenses wise counsel on the subject of the proper
solicitude of lover to beloved: “neve cibo prohibe nec
amari pocula suci/porrige; rivalis misceat illa tuus”
(II.335–336) (“Never restrict her diet, never make
her drink unpleasant/Medicines: leave your rival to
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
deal with such things” [tr. P. Green]). Sontag was not
so calculating. Sometimes “unpleasant medicines”
were all that she was prepared to offer, rivals be
damned.
Sontag was ubiquitous in the New York that she
dearly loved, and many have stories of her. What was
my Sontag moment? It came in 1990 at a party after
a preopening screening of Pedro Almodóvar’s film
¡Átame! at the old Limelight in New York. This was
Almodóvar prior to his turn to melodrama, and the
party was camp on stilts. The stars were abundant
(Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio Banderas, Penélope
Cruz, and Liza Minelli were there), the music loud,
and strobe lights pumped in time, making it all seem
like an outtake from 8 1/2. I believe there were peo-
ple in animal masks. I recall Liza sliding down a fire
pole trailing a feather boa. Absolutely distinctively,
with her signature hair, white shock amid black, Son-
tag made her way through the heaving throng. It did
not part for her as would a crowd of her admirers
at a proper New York cocktail party. This tribe was
oblivious to who she was. Yet, that didn’t seem to
matter to her. She was taking it all in: the Queen of
Camp, incognito in her own realm. Right by me she
went. I didn’t dare speak.
FRED RUSH
Department of Philosophy
University of Notre Dame
krausz, michael, denis dutton and karen bards-
ley, eds. The Idea of Creativity. Leiden, The
Netherlands: Brill Academic, 2009, 350 pp.,
$147.00 cloth.
The Idea of Creativity invites the reader to reflect on
questions of creativity by presenting seventeen es-
says on various aspects of scholarly research on the
subject. All seventeen are solid and fascinating inves-
tigations into this vexing area, and each one leaves
the reader, if not completely satisfied, at least bet-
ter equipped to think about creativity. Like the blind
men and the proverbial elephant, each writer offers
his or her perspective on the subject while at the same
time leaving the impression that no one has com-
pletely accounted for it. Nevertheless, one’s thinking
about creativity will be enhanced by reading this vol-
ume. Though most of the chapters were written at dif-
ferent times and do not directly address each other,
nine were written specifically for this volume and do
often seem complementary. Interestingly, eight of the
essays are reprinted from an earlier ten-essay book,
The Concept of Creativity (Martinus Nijhoff, 1981),
edited by Dutton and Krausz. A perfectionist might
wonder why eight-tenths of a twenty-eight-year-old
book was reprinted without comment, especially in
light of the fact that two of the three previous editors
Book Reviews
are the same and the book has a similar title. This is
no objection, however; all of the exquisitely written
chapters here have something deep and interesting to
say about the topic, and the added chapters of more
recent origin give the book even more breadth than
the original.
The book has three parts, though the delineation
is rough and sometimes appears downright arbitrary.
The aim of Part One, “Explaining Creativity: Persons,
Processes, and Products,” is to draw attention to one
or another site of creativity and attempts to sepa-
rate what has been said of value on the topic from
what has been simplistic and misleading in previous
theorizing. Carl Hausman, employing a phenomeno-
logical approach, reasons that creativity only makes
sense in light of some result, so that the product is
primary over both the person and the process. He
further argues that the idea of “newness” is intrin-
sically important to any idea of a creative outcome.
(This idea crops up again and again throughout the
book.) Certainly “newness” simpliciter won’t suffice
for an understanding of creativity, for simply saying
that something is “new” would include too much, for
instance, a boy learning math tables, which is new but
arguably not “creative.” Nevertheless, starting with
the concept “newness” allows Hausman to derive cri-
teria from it: creative outcomes are those composed
of irreducibly intelligible structures that are unpre-
dictable, inherently instrumentally valuable, and with
a component of spontaneity. Larry Briskman too
maintains that the search for an explanation for cre-
ativity must be found in creative products, not pro-
cesses or persons. For Briskman, the creative product
is a transcendent one, by which he means a novel so-
lution to a problem that nevertheless conflicts with
the background constraints of a tradition but at the
same time is seen as an appropriate solution, one
that has internal connections to what came before.
As opposed to a mechanistic, random, or teleological
approach, Briskman argues that a Darwinian model
can most powerfully explain how such creative prod-
ucts can arise. The Darwinian model gives rise to
plasticity on the one hand, in that the producer of
creative products must be willing to go against tra-
dition in searching for solutions to problems, and to
control on the other, insofar as the producer must
work within the constraints of the job specification
for the discipline.
Taking a different tack, the next two chapters em-
phasize processes over products or persons. I. C.
Jarvie proposes that only a rational process can result
in creative products. In fact, Jarvie suggests that we
might dispense with the word ‘creativity’ for words
like ‘simple,’ ‘unifying,’ or ‘trail-blazing,’ since what
the word finally means is something like a successful
solution to “an artistic or cognitive problem” (p. 55).
For Jarvie, then, the focus is on a rational process
rather than a mysterious product, since the actions
187
so-called creative people produce were arrived at
through trial and error mediated by self-critical stan-
dards. This point dovetails nicely into Dean Keith
Simonton’s chapter, where the author argues that
Darwin’s theory is in fact a theory of creativity in-
sofar as it explains how new forms arise from old.
Like Jarvie, Simonton emphasizes the creative pro-
cess, one that is guided by both chance and constraint.
Here we may find something of a formula for creativ-
ity. One should work on several problems concur-
rently in order to take advantage of insights in one
domain arising and thus being available to be em-
ployed in another. Interestingly, this setup operates
on another higher level insofar as creative persons
tend to be those who are easily distracted and thus are
constantly “blindly” scanning the environment for
interesting associations to fit together. In addition,
creative development appears to be enhanced when
individuals are exposed to multicultural and multilin-
guistic influences. Moreover, Simonton argues that
successfully creative works tend to be produced by
those people who produce the highest number of
unsuccessful works. So if you want to increase your
percentage of hits, increase your output, thus also
increasing the number of misses. Berys Gaut takes
up the theme of randomness within constraints by
focusing on the creative process, which, he argues,
involves skill. Against the traditional view that holds
that a creative process is one that gives rise to a prod-
uct that is innovative and valuable, Gaut maintains
that a creative act is a kind of skill that is performed
by one who has the courage to revise and redirect
routine paths in new ways.
Peter Lamarque’s chapter appears to depart some-
what from the process–product–person debate, as he
deals with the issue of how artworks arise in the
world, arguing that an artwork is not just a rearrange-
ment or revision of something already in the world;
rather, artworks can only come into existence against
a background of cultural practices. And this can only
occur when the artist finishes (that is, knows when to
stop) fashioning a work rather than abandoning it.
In the second section of the book, “Creativity,
Imagination, and Self,” processes are once again
taken up, along with questions surrounding their ef-
fects. Paisley Livingston, employing some ideas from
Henri Poincaré, observes that creative persons are
those who take time to let their ideas “incubate,” but
that this is not to be confused with being completely
idle. Creative persons are those who let their psy-
chological processes work on preselected elements.
Michael Polanyi uses scientific advancements as ex-
amples to argue that creativity in science stems from
imagination guided by intuition. The kind of intu-
ition Polanyi has in mind apparently involves the be-
lief that the scientist is one whose understanding of
the universe is guided by a “gradient of deepening
coherence.”
188
Francis Sparshott’s chapter, one that seems a bit
out of place in the otherwise theoretical content of
the rest of the articles, is nevertheless a welcome re-
lief from so much theorizing. Reflecting on his prac-
tice as a poet, he observes that creativity involves a
special kind of attending, one whose purpose is to
produce something original and unpredictable. Only
an inexperienced writer has themes “come to him.”
The experienced poet is one who knows how to find
themes to work with; he seeks them out. Here again,
routine is coupled with selection. Sparshott says that
the experienced poet has a kind of preset schema,
“his own way of working,” though he does not know
how he does it. Like Sparshott, Michael Krausz be-
gins from personal experience. Painting, says Krausz,
is something he does because the process fosters a
“self-transformation.” In this way, art is not some-
thing he does to produce artworks; rather it is a
“personal program.” Krausz interestingly compares
his own transformational experiences to “religious,”
“oceanic,” or “flow” experiences where the gap be-
tween subject and object is dissolved.
Citing Hegel and Heidegger as his point of de-
parture, Albert Hofstadter invites us to think about
creativity from the perspective of “dialectical phe-
nomenology,” where the artist is one who tries to
find a unity between form and content in order to de-
velop a new totality. Hofstadter uses the master–slave
idea from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to
show how the struggle between master and slave is
analogous to the struggle between the artist and his
medium. Moreover, the relation is also analogous
with the struggle between a child and his world and,
in fact, with every creative person and the world.
It seems to me that the chapter by David Davies
only indirectly concerns creativity, in that his main
focus is to maintain that some facts about the history
of an artwork’s making are relevant to understanding
it. Although Davies is against aesthetic realism (the
view that only properties experientially apparent are
relevant to interpretation), he does hold that the rele-
vant historical properties are those that bear on one’s
experience of a work. In addition, many times the
relevant historical properties are those that reveal
originality and a creative process at work, which can,
in turn, only be seen against a background of cultural
conventions.
In section three, “Forms and Domains of Creativ-
ity,” Margaret Boden, a cognitive scientist, argues
that there are three different kinds of creativity: com-
binatorial, exploratory, and transformational. One
interesting result of Boden’s research is the insight
that if we want our children to become more creative
we need to encourage novel experiences in their edu-
cation, and work hard to foster their self-confidence
by not always punishing them for breaking the rules
and engaging in surprising and unusual behaviors.
Another surprising result comes from the theoriz-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ing in Arthur Koestler’s chapter. Koestler envisions
artistic originality, scientific discovery, and comic in-
spiration as constituting a continuum of creativity. He
coins the term ‘bisociation’ to make the point that
creative ideas come from associations made from
different contexts. The comic, for instance, is one
who tells a story whose climax involves information
from a different context. Similarly, where the comic
shows different contexts colliding, the creative sci-
entist shows different contexts fusing together into a
new whole and the artist juxtaposes two contexts in
an artwork.
Rom Harrè argues that the creative scientist is
one who finds an icon or a model with which to make
sense of the world, and that the supporting evidence
never justifies it but rather serves as metaphor and
illustration in the understanding of the icon (one may
be reminded of Kuhn here). Thomas Leddy argues
that a reader helps to create a literary work by way
of her interpretation of that work, not as a replace-
ment for the writer’s creativity, but as an augmen-
tation of it. Moreover, one’s interpretation is always
made from a worldview, the interpretation also serv-
ing to partially constitute that worldview. John Car-
valho employs the thought of Gilles Deleuze to argue
that creativity in philosophy occurs when the philoso-
pher retrieves a concept contained in the flow of
thought that is already present in the world. Creativ-
ity, then, is not so much an adding, but rather a kind of
subtracting.
The Idea of Creativity is certainly not a how-to
book on how to be creative, but one can learn a great
deal about how to be creative if one reads closely.
Though treating the subject for the most part the-
oretically, embedded in the many conceptual twists
and turns are hints at how one might go about in-
creasing one’s creativity, or at least increasing the
likelihood of producing something new, surprising,
and valuable. A reviewer writing about the 1981 ver-
sion of this book implied that there was little of value
in it. I disagree. While certainly not for the casual
reader looking for light summer reading, The Idea of
Creativity will deeply enhance one’s thinking on the
subject and should serve to stimulate debate about
the essential ingredients of creative processes, prod-
ucts, and persons for many years to come.
PHIL JENKINS
Philosophy Department
Marywood University
stock, kathleen and katherine thomson-jones, eds.
New Waves in Aesthetics. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008, xix + 269 pp., $95.00 cloth, $38.00
paper.
Analytic philosophy of art is alive and doing well at
the start of the twenty-first century. New Waves in
Book Reviews
Aesthetics charts the range of topics and practices
that define a healthy, growing field of research that
is integrated into the mainstream of analytic philoso-
phy. This contrasts starkly with the mid-twentieth-
century conception of aesthetics as a myopic and
derivative field dedicated to discussions of the na-
ture of judgments about beauty, discussions whose
resolution would ultimately depend upon the out-
come of discussions of moral value. It also contrasts
with a late twentieth-century view of aesthetics as
a second-order pursuit dedicated to the clarification
of concepts and distinctions borrowed from produc-
tive and critical artistic practices. These perspectives
identified aestheticians as second-class citizens, out-
siders in between and alienated from the artistic
and philosophical practices that defined their sub-
ject matter and discipline. The papers in this volume
speak against this view. First, clarifications of con-
cepts like ‘art,’ ‘music,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘expression,’ and
‘imagination’ involve questions about the particular
objects and practices that fall within their extensions.
Therefore, conceptual clarification in the philosophy
of art is in part a first-order empirical project that
includes a direct examination of particular artworks.
Second, this artistic turn has enabled aestheticians
to have a direct impact on the productive and criti-
cal practices of art, for example, the critical writing of
Arthur Danto. Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
the analytic turn in aesthetics has demonstrated that
the range of issues germane to our understanding
of art do not lie outside the mainstream of analytic
philosophy.
The thirteen original papers collected in this vol-
ume are arranged in a loosely topical order. They
include discussions of the ontology of art, the nature
of metaphor, the nature of creativity, definitions of
art, aesthetic judgments, the nature of aesthetic prop-
erties, imagination, the relationship between history
of aesthetics and contemporary philosophy of art,
and questions about the way artifacts can be used to
express emotions. The diversity of topics presented
reflects a central unifying goal of analytic aesthet-
ics. Questions about beauty and the aesthetic do not
exhaust the range of substantive questions that one
can ask about art. Artworks are a diverse lot loosely
divided into categories by a range of distinct media
and practices. Once upon a time these differences
were thought to be subordinated to a set of common
goals, the presentation of beauty and the production
of aesthetic experience. However, twentieth-century
art was indefatigably focused on driving a wedge be-
tween art and the concepts of beauty and the aes-
thetic (for example, Mario Mertz’s arte povera instal-
lations, John Cage’s As SLow aS Possible [1985], and
Vito Acconci’s Following Piece [1969] and Seedbed
[1972]). Ontological and epistemic questions about
the individuation of art forms rise to the forefront
189
once questions of beauty and the aesthetic drop out of
the demarcation equation as merely contingent fea-
tures of only some artworks. These types of questions
can only be answered by an examination of the prac-
tices associated with particular works. Therefore, the
artistic turn in analytic aesthetics leads naturally out
of the armchair and into the field. Furthermore, ana-
lytic philosophers of art borrow a range of tools from
metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy
of mind. In this regard philosophers of art treat art-
works as instances of the ordinary categories of ob-
jects and mental events particular to those branches
of philosophy. Investigations of artworks and associ-
ated mental events can, as a result, contribute to re-
lated discussions within those philosophical domains
(for example, discussions of the nature of metaphor
or investigations of the role imagination plays in in-
terpretation). These discussions, in turn, clarify our
understanding of the differences between different
art forms and the nature of our engagement with art.
Therefore the reciprocity between analytic aesthet-
ics and other domains of philosophy generalizes to
the first-order critical practices associated with our
understanding of art. The papers in this book reflect
this framework for analytic aesthetics.
The contemporary focus within analytic aesthet-
ics on particular artworks and artistic practices is
a distinct virtue. A willingness to struggle through
methodological challenges raised by difficult con-
temporary works guarantees that philosophy of art
is philosophy of art and not simply philosophy for
philosophy’s sake. This focus is most strongly illus-
trated in the papers by Sherri Irvin, Dustin Stokes,
Aaron Meskin, Stacie Friend, and Jonathan Wein-
berg. A recurrent theme among these papers is that
standard difficulties for a definition of “art” general-
ize to definitions of particular artforms. Consider,
for instance, Irvin’s discussion of Felix Gonzalez-
Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1985),
a pile of hard candies to be eaten and replenished
throughout the duration of its installation. The strate-
gic promise of a definition of particular arts strategy
lies in the hope that, perhaps because they were tradi-
tionally defined by static media and single perceptual
modalities (for example, vision, color, and light for
painting or hearing, sound, and tonal structure for
music), particular art forms will yield homogenous
categories of objects. However, this hope is compli-
cated by the fact that our critical and appreciative
practices are constrained by the range of parame-
ters an artist sanctions for the presentation of his or
her work. Irvin argues that this fact renders even the
canonical category of “visual artworks” problematic.
Gonzalez-Torres’s piece illustrates the trouble. The
nature of this work is not transparent in its publicly
accessible physical form, but rather emerges from the
set of instructions provided for its presentation. The
190
intentions of the artist are the sole source of con-
straints on the presentation of the work in this case.
Why is this a difficulty? Because, generally, there
are no natural medium-specific constraints on the in-
tentions of an artist. Therefore, the probability that
there are a common set of defining features for any
category of artwork grounded in publicly accessible
shared aspects of a medium is negligible.
I am sympathetic to Irvin’s point. However, I have
one small quibble with her arguments that illustrates
the importance of engaging with particular artworks
and associated critical practices. Irvin argues that her
case study demonstrates that the category “visual art-
work” lacks clear defining parameters. This is likely
true. Contemporary artists (as contrasted with, say,
Maine Plein Air painters) simply do not make ob-
jects, let alone objects whose identity is constrained
by discrete media. And this is the rub. Untitled (Por-
trait of Ross in L.A.) is not a visual artwork. It is
a conceptual artwork. Consider Sol LeWitt’s location
drawings. LeWitt would fax galleries sets of scribbled
instructions that loosely defined the relative sizes and
positions of the elements of the drawings. But the ex-
ecution and final form of these works was left to the
installation staff who drew them on the gallery walls.
Lewitt argued that the work itself was the idea in the
artist’s head, and that its execution was perfunctory.
Of course, LeWitt’s drawings are rather beautiful and
his assistants get paid quite well to carefully supervise
their execution to this day. But his point can still be
taken. The differences between particular instances
of these works do not matter ontologically. What mat-
ters is the idea they exhibit, an idea that includes
within it the variability of its particular instantiation
at any time. In this regard Gonzalez-Torres’s piece is
not a difficult visual artwork. It is a traditional con-
ceptual artwork that pays homage to and, in classic
form, pokes mischievous fun at its precursors. The
candy matters. The variability of the size of the pile
matters. Even eating the candy matters. The mate-
rial embodiment of the work is therefore no more
perfunctory in this case than it is in LeWitt’s. Nor
are its aesthetic dimensions mere eye candy. They
firmly ground the work within its category (as we ca-
sually enjoy the sweets we symbolically eat the body
of Ross, enacting a range of semantic associations re-
lated to AIDS, homosexuality, and Catholicism that
are salient to the content of the work). The relation-
ship between the artist’s sanction and the ontology
of the work are therefore not problematic. They are
standard for an entrenched category of art whose his-
tory stretches back at least as far as the collaboration
between Merce Cunningham and John Cage. I take
it this point doesn’t detract from Irvin’s arguments.
Conceptual art is singularly dedicated to gumming up
the works of traditional definitions of particular art
forms. However, it does illustrate the importance of
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
genuinely engaging with art when one writes about
it.
A second central theme in this book is that the
field can make substantive contributions to philo-
sophical debates in core analytic topics. This strain
of argument comes through most clearly in Andrew
Kania’s discussion of musical ontology, Andrew Mc-
Gonigal’s discussion of Davidson’s error theory of
metaphor, and Saam Trivedi’s discussion of musical
metaphor and paraphrase. But it is also present in
Dustin Stokes’s and Jonathan Weinberg’s papers on
creativity and imagination. Kania argues that musical
works are deeply perplexing, temporally extended,
abstract objects that challenge our basic metaphysi-
cal notions. He argues, following Amie Thomasson,
that if musical ontology doesn’t fit well to off-the-rack
categories borrowed from metaphysics, the problem
may not lie with philosophy of art, but with meta-
physics itself. Grappling with these types of thorny
problems may therefore be just as good for the goose
as it is for the gander. Likewise, metaphor is a cen-
tral formal device used in both literature and music.
Works of literature and music can therefore provide
a well-articulated context in which a central aspect of
language can be studied.
The papers in this volume exemplify the diverse
range of interests of a vibrant and expanding field.
However, there is one new wave in analytic aesthetics
that is underrepresented. Jonathan Weinberg, Aaron
Meskin, and Dustin Stokes have each made signifi-
cant contributions to our understanding of the rela-
tionship between cognitive science and the philoso-
phy of art. Their papers in this volume reflect these
contributions. However, these papers also explic-
itly downplay the importance of empirical research
to philosophical questions about art. The sentiment
seems to be that, although we should be method-
ological scavengers who draw on any and all relevant
interdisciplinary information in our research, some
form of good old-fashioned conceptual analysis is the
most efficient and perhaps the only appropriate way
to get at genuine answers to the problems of analytic
aesthetics. My concern with this sentiment is, in one
sense, a matter of taste. New Waves is a collection of
papers at the metaphysicians’ end of our field. In this
regard, it makes sense to downplay issues in cogni-
tive science. But there is another sense in which it is a
substantive question. If one interprets artworks as ar-
tifacts intentionally designed to direct consumers’ at-
tention to nonaesthetic features responsible for their
artistically salient aesthetic and semantic effects, then
cognitive science will play a critical role in the ontol-
ogy of art. If not, a potential role for cognitive science
in philosophy of art is far from established. However,
the claim that questions about key concepts in the
philosophy of art are questions about the particular
objects that fall within their extension is a unifying
Book Reviews
assumption of the papers collected in this volume.
Questions about the nature of particular artworks
are, at least in part, questions about the nature of
our engagement with them, that is, questions about
the way consumers acquire, represent, and use salient
information encoded in a work’s surface in order to
recognize and evaluate its content. Therefore, un-
derstanding the nature of particular artworks would
seem to require understanding something about the
nature of our psychological engagement with them.
Good philosophical theories have been proposed in
this regard. But, there is a range of psychological re-
search in cognitive science that bears on the validity
of these theories. This research plays an increasingly
important role in analytic aesthetics. Why ignore it?
W. P. SEELEY
Department of Philosophy
Bates College
skov, martin and oshin vartanian, eds. Neuroaes-
thetics. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2009, iv + 302
pp., 8 color + 47 b&w illus., $68.50 cloth.
Neuroaesthetics, as defined by the editors in their
brief introductory chapter, “is the study of the neu-
ral processes that underlie aesthetic behavior” (p. 3).
More precisely, “there are forms of interaction with
objects that can be called ‘aesthetic,’ ” and “[t]he job
of neuroaesthetics is to identify these aesthetic func-
tions and to investigate their neurobiological causes”
(p. 3). They then make two clarifying remarks con-
cerning the scope of the field. First, the study of aes-
thetic behavior, as the term suggests, should not be
restricted to the study of aesthetic response. It should
also include the study of the processes involved in
the production of aesthetic objects. Second, we en-
gage aesthetically with objects as diverse as paintings,
faces, landscapes, and food, which means that the
study of aesthetic behavior should not be restricted
to our interactions with artworks.
These are of course the goals of neuroaesthetics, as
a field, so it shouldn’t be too surprising if the contribu-
tion of the book’s fourteen chapters toward fulfilling
these goals is rather modest. For example, despite
repeated mention by several contributors of the im-
portance of studying the production side of aesthetic
behavior, only the chapter by Chatterjee and the one
by Zaidel (which both include interesting discussions
of the effects of brain damage on artistic production)
deal directly with this topic. Similarly, even though
many of the contributors explicitly acknowledge that
empirical approaches to the study of aesthetics need
to go beyond art, discussions of our aesthetic en-
gagement with objects other than artworks are few.
Such discussions are, in fact, practically limited to the
chapter by Jacobsen, which contains a mini review of
191
the field as well as a useful framework for the psy-
chology of aesthetics, and the one by Chenier and
Winkielman, which offers a general explanation of
aesthetic pleasure. Neuroaesthetics is in its infancy,
and we should expect that progress in this field will
be made in small steps. With that in mind, let us ex-
amine how the book performs with respect to its own
more modest goal.
The editors have selected the topics covered in
the book according to what they consider to be the
“key questions of neuroaesthetics.” The key issues
are (1) to identify the main features of aesthetic pro-
cesses and to explain how they contribute to aesthetic
experience, (2) to inquire about the evolutionary sig-
nificance of aesthetic experience, (3) to elucidate the
nature and the role of representation in art and aes-
thetics in general, and (4) to explain the role of emo-
tion in aesthetic experience. The editors also wanted
to highlight the multidisciplinary nature of the field
by including contributions from (and also coauthored
by) researchers working in a wide range of disci-
plines and from various theoretical and methodolog-
ical perspectives; the book features contributions by
psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, evo-
lutionary biologists, historians, artists, and indepen-
dent scholars (there is, however, a noticeable absence
of philosophers, more on which below). These ed-
itorial decisions were made with a specific aim in
mind, namely, to allow for genuine integration to oc-
cur along the four areas of inquiry just outlined.
Researchers from different disciplinary back-
grounds propose different, and often competing, ex-
planations of aesthetic response, either at the same
level of analysis (for example, cognitive, neurobiolog-
ical) or at different levels of analysis. To be successful,
neuroaesthetics must seek integration among these
different explanations, whenever possible. Here the
book delivers on its promise. There are several cases
of this kind of integration throughout the book. One
example is Oshin Vartanian’s chapter on the experi-
ence of pleasure in art, in which he proposes a way to
integrate a recently proposed neurobiological model
of the experience of emotion with an influential cog-
nitive model of aesthetic experience. Another exam-
ple is Chenier and Winkielman’s explanation of aes-
thetic pleasure in terms of processing fluency. They
argue that processing fluency, the experience of the
ease with which the perceiver perceives a stimulus,
can account for the hedonic character of a broad
range of previously identified aesthetic phenomena
(for example, mere exposure, symmetry, prototypi-
cality). Finally, in their chapter on the evolution of
art and aesthetic appreciation, Nadal et al. elegantly
use data from comparative neurology, biological an-
thropology, and cognitive neuroscience to propose
a framework for studying the evolution of aesthetic
preference.
192
The field of neuroaesthetics presents another
integration challenge. There is a great deal of vari-
ability in (and sometimes disagreement about) what
researchers think must be explained. Indeed, differ-
ent groups of investigators differently conceptualize
aesthetic response. For example, Jacobsen notes that
one meaning of the term ‘aesthetics’ is related to
processes of sensation and that beauty is “the main
conceptualization of aesthetics in Philosophical and
Psychological Aesthetics,” and then concludes that
“aesthetic processing is sensation-based evaluation
of an entity” primarily with respect to the beauty di-
mension, along with other concepts such as elegant,
harmonious, shapely, big, small, and so forth (p. 29).
Chenier and Winkielman take aesthetic pleasure to
be “the sine qua non of aesthetic experience” (p. 275).
However, others focus their discussions on emotion
or evaluation or a combination of both. This vari-
ability in what researchers view as the focus of ex-
planation suggests that it is an open question what
features of aesthetic response need to be explained.
It also leaves open the list of features that should be
considered essential (if any) to aesthetic response,
typical to it, or simply occasional. For example, aes-
thetic response and evaluation may dissociate if some
works of art have great artistic value and yet evoke
no pleasure, and pleasure is a necessary component
of aesthetic response.
This second kind of integration, wherein re-
searchers converge on a common conception of what
they are trying to explain, is hard to find in the
book. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the
book contains virtually no discussions of classical and
contemporary philosophical theories of aesthetics. It
would seem likely that philosophical analysis could
contribute a great deal to the development of a com-
mon theoretical concept of aesthetic response. After
all, neuroaesthetics, and aesthetic science in general,
can easily be conceived as branches of cognitive sci-
ence, which is itself a multidisciplinary field that has
benefited greatly from philosophy. One of the editors
(Martin Skov) seems to be well aware of the need for
this kind of integration. In his chapter, in which he
sketches a framework for neuroaesthetic research,
he writes that “the burgeoning field of neuroaesthet-
ics, while primarily concerned with the question of
how the brain computes art behavior, must advance
with an eye to discussions of what art behavior is”
(p. 10). He then adds that “to a high degree, exper-
imental aesthetics cannot get started without using
the insights from traditional aesthetics” (p. 11). Skov
is here pointing to the need to develop a common
conception of art appreciation, but the same point
could be made with respect to aesthetic response in
general.
This is not to say, however, that we should wait
for philosophers to provide a satisfactory definition
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
of aesthetic response and then expect scientists to do
the job of explaining how its different components
are implemented in the brain. As anyone who reads
this book will realize, aesthetic science, by discover-
ing the mechanisms behind our aesthetic responses,
is telling us a great deal about the nature of this phe-
nomenon that we would have otherwise had no way
of finding out. We should therefore expect that a con-
ception of aesthetic response that is productive for
research across the different scientific, philosophi-
cal, and humanistic disciplines involved in its study
will emerge as a result of integration.
The book is written for the most part in non-
technical language (with the exception of a small
number of chapters in which part of the discussion
requires the reader to have some background in cog-
nitive neuroscience) and should therefore be acces-
sible to nonscientists. The book would also be well
suited for an advanced undergraduate course or a
graduate seminar.
VINCENT BERGERON
Department of Philosophy
University of Ottawa
chapin, keith and lawrence kramer, eds. Musical
Meaning and Human Values. Fordham University
Press, 2009, ix + 226 pp., $65.00 cloth.
The book under review (henceforth MMHV) is an
anthology of contributions to a conference held at
Fordham University in 2007 under the title “Mu-
sical Meaning and Human Values: A Symposium
with Lawrence Kramer.” In addition to an introduc-
tion by Kramer there are eight chapters, as follows:
“Due Rose, Due Volte: A Study of Early Modern
Subjectivities,” by Susan McClary; “Sublime Experi-
ence and Ironic Action: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the
Use of Music for Life,” by Keith Chapin; “The De-
voted Ear: Music as Contemplation,” by Lawrence
Kramer; “Music and Fantasy,” by Marshall Brown;
“Whose Brahms Is It Anyway? Observations on the
Recorded Legacy of the B-flat Piano Concerto,” by
Walter Frisch; “The Civilizing Process: Music and the
Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the
Golden West,” by Richard Leppert; “A Farewell, a
Femme Fatale, and a Film: Three Awkward Moments
in Twentieth-Century Music,” by Peter Franklin; and
“ ‘Pour Out . . . Forgiveness Like a Wine’: Can Music
Say ‘An Existence Is Wrong’?” by Walter Bernhart.
A perusal of the foregoing will quickly reveal that
the book is largely devoted to what has come to be
known as the “New Musicology.” In the spirit of full
disclosure I must state that I have little sympathy
for the conception either of music or of humanistic
scholarship generally which informs New Musicol-
ogy; I will nonetheless do my best to offer a reasoned
Book Reviews
critique of the contents of this volume, though with
a warning to the reader that there is some polemic
ahead. I should also make it clear that I am not a
musicologist (New or otherwise) and will therefore
limit my discussion to other matters.
The very title of the book is already problemati-
cal, or at least provocative. Whether the concept of
meaning in any commonly understood sense of the
term applies to music at all is at best unsettled, and
how music might relate to questions of value out-
side the aesthetic sphere is no less open. (Stephen
Davies [Meaning and Expression in Music (Cornell
University Press, 1994), pp. 39ff.] presents the most
detailed and careful analysis I know of ways in which
the concept of meaning might be applicable to music,
though whatever the authors represented in MMHV
mean by the term ‘meaning’ seems far removed from
what Davies is talking about.) But since the various
contributions to the volume turn out to be largely
unconcerned with its two putative subjects, either in-
dividually or in relation to each other, I cannot accuse
the editors of anything worse than false advertising.
What exactly is the book about? This is madden-
ingly hard to pin down (one of my gripes with New
Musicology and its siblings elsewhere in the humani-
ties), but certain themes and tendencies make them-
selves apparent. The contributors other than Kramer
himself are largely in intellectual orbit around him
and thus are prone to concentrate on matters that
he deems important, or at least to profess agreement
with things that he has said. (Though there is noth-
ing wrong with this in itself, it troubles me somewhat
that Kramer is seldom, if ever, cited except in the
most fulsomely positive terms. It would be refresh-
ing, not to say more instructive, if someone were oc-
casionally to say, “I agree up to this point but. . .” or
“The premise is correct but not all the conclusions
follow . . .”). Among his concerns, as expressed in his
introductory chapter, are the idea of modernity in
music and a particular response to it that Kramer
calls transformative reflection. Given the former (in
regard to the latter I confess to not knowing, even af-
ter reading what he says, what Kramer means), one
might expect the focus of the book to be on musical
figures and works associated with such historical mo-
ments as the Counter-Reformation and the period
extending from the late nineteenth century through
the years directly preceding and following World War
I. But the contributors’ attention turns in unexpected
directions: we hear more about Marenzio than about
Palestrina and more about Puccini than about Wag-
ner, Debussy, and Schoenberg.
There is nothing wrong with this a priori: ‘mod-
ern’ is a flexible term. (Descartes is considered to be-
long to the modern period of philosophy and ‘Early
Modern’ is the label given by linguists to the En-
glish of Shakespeare.) Indeed, there is a certain fresh-
193
ness in the idea that the late sixteenth century might
have been a more modern time than it is commonly
thought of as being, and that the composer who gave
us Tosca (1900) and La Bohème (1896) might be more
of a modernist than usually thought. But the book
skimps on its promises, partly because the authors
insist, to a distressing degree, on cloaking everything
in an impenetrable verbal haze. Here are a few sam-
ple quotes: “Transformative reflection . . . marks the
experience of a novel form of subjectivity. It maps
the interior space of a developing historical condi-
tion. It makes self-recognition available in a new or
evolving mode of awareness” (Kramer, p. 3); “Music
allows human beings to experience the mysteries of
animation, to allow their participation in imbricating
orders to rise above the mechanical, and ultimately
to achieve the semblance of immediacy” (Chapin,
p. 45); “In its compact intensity, [Beethoven’s Fifth]
is a triumph of form, for sure; the blending of in-
troduction and implementation brilliantly fulfills the
postulates of Kantian or Schillerian organicism. Yet
it fulfills them only to show the impossibility of form
ever disentangling itself from the spooky, mysteri-
ous energies in which it is implicated and with which
it is activated” (Brown, p. 99). Language like this
gives the entire enterprise a whiff of phoniness, ex-
acerbated by such displays of pseudo-erudition as
the misuse of the word ‘parameter’ (for example, by
Chapin on p. 42 and Leppert on p. 138). This ia all
the more dismaying given that there is some real eru-
dition on display here.
That said, I’ll do my best to identify places—there
are some—where something of value can be extracted
from the dross. In that spirit, let me first say that
there are a couple of chapters (the ones by Frisch and
McClary, especially Frisch) which have something of
genuine interest to offer.
Frisch takes up the question of the correct tempo
for the Andante from the second piano concerto
of Brahms (1881), providing a fascinating survey
of recorded performances to show how the move-
ment has, over the years, gotten progressively slower,
and he supplies textual and biographical information
about the composer in support of the contention that
it ought to go much faster than one tends to hear it
these days. The only thing I can see to object to in this
atypically lucidly written and tightly argued piece is
the unexamined presumption that one must hew ex-
actly to what the composer wanted in cases where
this is known, of which this is one: Brahms penciled
metronome markings into the manuscript prior to
the work’s premiere and carried them over without
alteration into the published score. About the afore-
mentioned presumption I have some doubts, tending
to side with those who maintain that if it works it
works, whether or not it is exactly what the com-
poser had in mind. (The pianissimo final chords in
194
Horowitz’s performance of Chopin’s Op. 10, No. 8
at his legendary 1965 Carnegie Hall concert run di-
rectly counter to the composer’s dynamic indication,
but are pure magic to which a performance faithful
to the score does not hold the proverbial candle.)
But all this prompts a larger concern and a sense
of a significant opportunity missed. Start with the
fact that our lives today, both inside the arts and out-
side, have long been in thrall to something Benjamin
Filene will calls the Cult of Authenticity (in Romanc-
ing the Folk [University of North Carolina Press,
2000]). Now, if ever there was a connection to be
made between music and human values, here is one:
surely authenticity is one of the most highly valued of
virtues in today’s world, and surely the performance
of classical music as we now routinely encounter it
has been profoundly influenced by the belief that our
renderings of it must be informed by what is known
about the composer’s wishes and the practices of the
composer’s time and place. And here, moreover, is
a paradox of some interest: authenticity in the con-
duct of one’s personal affairs requires being true to
oneself, whereas authenticity in the performance of
music, on one understanding, requires the suppres-
sion of one’s own instincts (bad, bad Horowitz for
not playing those final chords as Chopin ordered!)
and being true to someone else’s. But this vexing,
subtle, and compelling issue regarding art in rela-
tion to values goes, as far as I can determine, un-
touched by any of the contributors here. (The most
comprehensive exploration known to me is that of
Peter Kivy, Authenticities [Cornell University Press,
1995]. See also James O. Young [“The Concept of Au-
thentic Performance,” British Journal of Aesthetics
28 (1988): 228–238] for some highly perceptive com-
ments, likewise Alfred Brendel, On Music [Chicago:
A Cappella, 1991], p. 375ff.) This strikes me as espe-
cially surprising given the preoccupation of Kramer
and others with modernity and its attendant crises:
the authenticist movement in musical performance
has a modernist aspect, at least insofar as it repre-
sents a counterweight to the perceived excesses of
nineteenth-century musical practice.
As a final comment about Frisch, I should add
that he says what is perhaps the most comprehen-
sible thing to be found in the book about how his
subject relates to musical meaning, or is intended to:
“[T]he horizon of meanings of the Andante of the
[B-flat] Concerto has morphed dramatically across
almost 130 years through the mediation of per-
formance, recording and reception by generations
of listeners. . . . Musical meanings are never stable;
they are continuously being reshaped by values, as
reflected by performance styles and preferences”
(p. 114). But I think this entitles one to ask whether
the word ‘meaning’ as used above isn’t just a substi-
tute for the more familiar locution ‘interpretive con-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ception,’ and what (if anything) is gained by replacing
the usual, well-understood one with another which is
less well understood. I’m also not sure whether the
values to which Frisch alludes aren’t purely artistic
ones (for example, it’s better to do what the com-
poser wanted) rather than ones meriting the all-
encompassing label ‘human.’ Perhaps that’s all any-
one represented in MMHV means by ‘human values,’
but if so, then one is entitled to wonder whether the
title of the volume isn’t so much hype.
McClary compares two settings of a sonnet of
Petrarch, one by Gabrieli and one dating from nine-
teen years later by Marenzio. Anyone interested in
the music of the Renaissance and in the art of set-
ting texts to music should find plenty to feast on
here. As I say, I’m not a musicologist and so will
take as given that the musicology is sound, particu-
larly as regards the harmonic practices of the time.
Marenzio (so McClary tells us) departs from an ear-
lier norm in ways which produce some of the same
feelings as “the lunges for tonic conclusions in so
much nineteenth-century music after the certainties
of eighteenth-century tonality had been called into
question” (p. 29).
This is not an entirely uninteresting conclusion,
but one might wonder why it’s treated as a matter
of so much moment. From other comments which
McClary makes, there would appear to be some air-
ing of grievances and score settling involved here.
As she says: “[As a specialist in seventeenth-century
music] I quickly found that attempts at publishing my
analyses and interpretations ran up against the com-
monly held belief that early music ‘does not work.’. . .
Thirty years after I started, I find it possible at last
to address sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mu-
sic with the kind of analytical depth and the sorts of
questions that Kramer brings to Mozart or Strauss”
(p. 11). And here is her parting shot: “If what I am
doing is [imposing my own semiotics on a tempo-
rally distant and defenseless culture], I vastly pre-
fer it to accepting the notion that musicians in the
Renaissance were simple-minded and incapable of
anything we might want to acknowledge as the ar-
ticulation of subjectivity. We can learn a great deal
about how our predecessors experienced the self and
interiority, but only if we take the music itself seri-
ously as historical evidence” (p. 31). Well and good,
but I find the ha-ha-on-you-guys tone a bit unseemly
here, more appropriate to an interview or a memoir
than a scholarly communication.
In an intermediate category I would place the
chapters by Chapin, Leppert, and Bernhart. Chapin’s
contains an interesting and largely lucid discussion of
Hoffmann’s career as a jurist in a difficult time dur-
ing which his interpretation of the law led him to
some decisions that did not sit well with the Prussian
monarchy. Human values in the broadest sense are
Book Reviews
clearly pertinent to this chapter in history; but I lost
patience trying to figure out how this pertains to mu-
sic (Hoffmann’s or anyone else’s). What I found of
most interest in Leppert’s chapter had less to do with
Puccini and the music of La fanciulla del West (1910)
than with the lengthy discussion of the David Belasco
play on which the opera is based, and on Belasco’s
instructions for its staging. (Disclosure: Leppert is an
institutional colleague of mine, but we are not well
acquainted.)
Bernhart takes up the matter of the evocation of
evil in music via three case studies (all operas, all from
the modern era): Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers
(1961), Hindemith’s Cardillac (1926), and Britten’s
The Turn of the Screw (1954). In the first two, un-
ambiguously evil acts occur without any accompa-
nying music, whereas in the last, music of a specific
kind is associated with moments fraught with ambi-
guity: evil may or may not be present, and, if it is, its
true perpetrator could be either of two people. The
point appears to be that music is too beautiful, hence
too “forgiving,” to be associated with unquestionable
evil, whereas its two-sided nature (seductive as well
as forgiving) makes it appropriate for inclusion in the
portrayal of more ambiguous circumstances.
There might be something to this, but I wonder if
the matter is quite so simple. Consider, for example,
the final scene of Dialogues of the Carmelites (Francis
Poulenc, 1957), in which an unambiguously evil act
(the guillotining of a group of French nuns for defy-
ing the revolutionary government’s edict dissolving
religious orders) takes place as the nuns sing a Salve
Regina. Perhaps Poulenc’s intent is to indicate that
those responsible for this ghastly deed are being ab-
solved, as they perform it, by their victims, but I have
my doubts. Rather, it would seem that the ethereal
beauty of the music serves principally to accentuate
the horror taking place offstage. Granted, that horror
is most directly evoked not by anything musical but
by the repeated sound of the falling blade (and the
simultaneous stilling of a voice); but what gives such
great power to the opera’s portrayal of the monstrous
deed being done is the very quality of the music that
Bernhart would presumably take as rendering it in-
appropriate to such a moment. (Inappropriateness
of music to text or dramatic action is sometimes de-
liberate, but in cases I can think of it’s usually for
humorous effect, as in Tom Lehrer’s Oedipus Rex
theme song [1953].)
The chapters by Kramer, Brown, and Franklin
were, for me, the most problematical. I had the same
difficulty with Kramer’s as I did with his book Why
Classical Music Still Matters (University of California
Press, 2007), rather, two difficulties. In both cases I
found the writing frustratingly opaque, and where I
could make out what the author was trying to say, it
struck me as having to do with an art form with which
I’m not familiar, though for some mysterious reason
195
referred to by the same name as one with which I
am. (Example: Kramer’s description of Beethoven’s
Sixth Symphony as imagining “an unbroken conti-
nuity of tradition.” Maybe that’s an apt description,
but I’m powerless to see what motivates it or why,
even if I shared this judgment, it would overcome
anyone’s indifference to this or any other classical
work.) Some of this no doubt is due to my not be-
ing initiated in all the mysteries of the Kramer circle;
but it seems not unreasonable to wish that a book as
portentously titled as MMHV might have something
to say to interested readers outside this coterie. I had
a similar difficulty with Brown’s chapter (in which,
I might add, Kramer’s statement about Beethoven’s
Sixth is admiringly quoted). I question, for exam-
ple, what insight is to be gained from statements like
“Musical fantasy . . . cuts into and cuts away the com-
placencies of logic” or the one I quote earlier in this
review.
Franklin presents a different kind of difficulty. I
have no quarrel with the idea that awkward moments
can be of great interest on many scores. But I had
much trouble discerning what is supposed to be re-
vealed by the three particular works Franklin chooses
to describe (Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (1910–11),
the 1913 opera Das Spielwerk und Die Prinzessin
by Franz Schrecker, and the 1946 Hollywood film
Humoresque [Jean Negulesco]). Indeed, I had trou-
ble figuring out why they are associated with awk-
ward moments (beyond the fact that at least two of
them are bad). Here I also had a very strong sense of
an opportunity missed: surely there have been awk-
ward moments more familiar to contemporary musi-
cophiles that reveal something about the stresses and
strains to which our musical culture is subject. (Even
a cursory glance at Christopher J. Washburne and
Maiken Derno’s Bad Music: The Music We Love to
Hate [New York: Routledge, 2004] will suggest plenty
of possibilities.)
I have some gripes of a less substantive nature.
First, there is no excuse for any publisher to resort
to endnotes. The book is also inadequately indexed,
to say the least: there is an index of musical and
literary works cited, but none for authors or subjects.
There is also no list of references. These deficiencies,
while unrelated to the content of the book, are quite
serious ones, for which the publisher owes readers an
apology.
In sum, my dissatisfaction notwithstanding,
MMHV isn’t a total loss. But the ratio of sunlight to
fog is not favorable, and readers who react with fury
to the constant need to flip back and forth between
text and notes have my complete sympathy.
MICHAEL B. KAC
Department of Philosophy and Program in
Linguistics
University of Minnesota
196
argenton, alberto. Arte e Espressione. Studi e
Ricerche di Psicologia Dell’arte. Padua, Italy: Il
Poligrafo, 2009, 320 pp., 116 illus., €25.00 paper.
Expression, it can be argued, is why we are interested
in the arts in the first place. Yet there seems to be a
long-standing reticence to deal with just how it comes
about. We either leave expression to the neuroscien-
tists or the poets. This book does neither. It outlines
how one may use an experimental phenomenologi-
cal approach to visual phenomena in order to bet-
ter understand how expression arises. It is one thing
to apply perceptual principles to art, discovering the
workings of color or space perception in a painting; it
is another to face the challenge of the full complexity
of the work of art and, as a by-product, to enlighten
the psychologist’s knowledge of laboratory percep-
tion itself. This is the challenge accepted by Alberto
Argenton in this important book.
Along with Lucia Pizzo Russo, Argenton is the
most prominent psychologist of art in Italy. He has
already written an excellent introduction to the sub-
ject, Arte e cognizione [Art and Cognition], but
his works are relatively unknown in the English-
speaking world. This is unfortunate, because The
writing of American Psychologists on art, and es-
pecially on the latest biology . . . and neuroaesthetics
of art in which anthropomorphization of the brain
abounds (“the brain sees,” “the brain decides”),
is extremely shoddy from a philosophical perspec-
tive. (Pizzo Russo’s recent So quello che senti: Neu-
roni specchio, arte ed empatia [I Know What You
Are Feeling], on mirror neurons, is a masterly in-
dictment of this tendency.) Argenton’s approach af-
firms the perceptual sphere by simply ignoring these
developments. When brain models go away, even
as we are pursuing a methodological goal of neu-
rophysiological reduction, the phenomenology will
remain.
Argenton’s book proudly carries on the mantle of
Rudolf Arnheim, even more so than the related Psy-
chology of Graphic Images (Psychology Press, 2001)
by his colleague, Manfredo Massironi. These two
books stand well together for a similarity of method-
ology as well as subject matter, moving from shape
and space to expression. The book is made up of two
excellent introductory chapters on, respectively, “Ex-
pression and Expressive Qualities” and “Perceptual
Dynamics and Expressive Qualities.” The bulk of the
book is three chapters exploring different perceptual
phenomena: contour rivalry, amodal completion, and
the perception of obliquity. Finally, Argenton and a
collaborator, Tamara Prest, put the model to work by
building an iconographic analysis.
In chapter one, Argenton emphasizes that expres-
sion is central to any science of psychology and de-
plores its neglect. Utilizing a blend of Arnheim’s
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
work and the experimental phenomenology prac-
ticed in Italy, and downplaying Arnheim’s adher-
ence to the gestalt brain model believed superflu-
ous by such prominent Italian psychologists as Paolo
Bozzi and Giovanni Vicario, Argenton is able to rely
on a large body of shared phenomenological and
introspective research. Against Gombrich’s proba-
bilistic approach, Argenton affirms the “genetic and
phenomenal priority of expressive qualities” (p. 44).
While Argenton expects that perceptual forces and
tensions will have a physical basis, in line with Ital-
ian experimental phenomenology he does not find it
necessary to defend it at length. The perceptual facts
are there and have to be explained.
In the last chapter of Art and Visual Perception
(University of California Press, 1954), “Expression,”
Arnheim writes that if the previous chapters have
done their job there will be little left to say. This
is exactly the path pursued by Argenton, who uses
the second chapter to investigate how the dynamics
of perception led to expressive qualities. Like Arn-
heim, Argenton does not mean movement by the use
of dynamic, but rather “mental life and the behaviors
which constitute it as regulated by energetic factors”
(p. 64) like vectors, forces, and tensions. Briefly con-
sidering the possibility that perceptual forces are the
product of physical forces, Argenton calls dynamics
natural and authentic aspects of experience. Male-
vich’s Black Circle (1913), an off-center circle on a
square ground, is a useful example. The circle be-
comes a “protagonist” and develops a “perceptual
meaning,” as a sort of “symbolic icon” or “visual
metaphor” (p. 76). Comparing two paintings, Titian’s
Adam and Eve (c. 1550) in the Prado with Rubens’s
copy of the same in the same museum, Argenton is
able to show how minor differences have deep con-
sequences for perceptual meaning and expression.
Chapter three is a discussion of what Argen-
ton calls the “see-saw effect,” contour rivalry in
line drawings. Argenton delves into why this phe-
nomenon only occurs when there are two separated
objects perceived. When a dividing line is part of a
unified object, it is an “object line,” whereas in the
latter case it has a “bilateral function.” The “tug of
war” that results can be quite dynamic, and Argenton
devises the two conditions for the illusion to appear
and distinguishes it from other cases of perceptual
multistability. Referring to logos, symbols, geometric
decorations, and works of art by artists like Sano
di Pietro and Picasso, Argenton examines his hy-
pothesis that the see-saw effect ought to be found
in highest proportion in areas that search out ambi-
guity and the punning that results. The simplicity of
logos and symbols, where two elements often occur,
ensures the presence of the see-saw effect. In formal
painting, where clarity is sought after, it is rarer, al-
though Sano di Pietro obtains an interesting, almost
Book Reviews
theological, point by merging the contour of the
Christ child’s and Virgin Mary’s faces. Indeed, in the
final chapter, Argenton and Prest present no less than
eight works with this “cheek to cheek” (guancia a
guancia) configuration by this artist. They suppose
that the small size of the devotional format allowed
Sano to experiment with this iconography in a way
that no one else ever did.
Argenton turns to the problem of amodal com-
pletion in chapter four. Amodal completion, which
has been investigated deeply by Italian psychologists,
consists of an integral percept for which some stimuli
are incomplete. Moreover, in the case of some figures
like two horses or scooters over which a solid square
occludes half of each, the object appears to stretch,
overriding our knowledge. Once again, Argenton is
interested in how this phenomenon of surface infor-
mation and “completed” object can serve expressive
purposes. Using an example from the Giottesque mu-
ralist Giusto de’ Menabuoi, he shows how the over-
lapping of halos in a Taking of Christ (fourteenth
century) creates an intensely dynamic effect, as the
golden aureoles of the apostles are stacked one upon
another. Again, in the last chapter, Argenton and
Prest follow the iconography further and compare
twenty-two images of this “stampede” (fuggi fuggi)
effect. In general, almost all apostles are occluded by
other apostles in these works (and not objects), and
most show occlusion at the border, where they are
shown cut off, as they leave the scene.
The last phenomenon Argenton investigates is
oblique perception, using the examples of picto-
rially depicted windmills and clocks to investigate
the placement of, respectively, the blades and watch
hands. Argenton first took a sample of numerous
painted depictions of windmills and then examined
the configuration of the blades. Departing from an
observation of Arnheim that oblique forms are per-
ceived as more dynamic, Argenton hypothesized that
these would be the most numerous. In the early,
“symbolic” form common to manuscripts and early
197
Renaissance paintings, the windmill is seen at three
quarters and the blades are symmetrically oblique.
The “realistic” phase begins in the seventeenth cen-
tury, when the windmill is shown at a sharper an-
gle and the blades are now obliquely asymmetrical.
The effect is more dynamic, appropriate to the aims
of the landscape painters who used the windmill to
express activity, extreme weather, or change of sea-
sons. As for clocks, Argenton again took a number
of examples, notably from paintings but especially
advertisements. He hypothesized that the configura-
tion of ten and two o’clock would be the most popu-
lar because it shows active time measurement, which
vertical and horizontal hands would negate and a
downward dynamic (eight and four o’clock) would
counteract.
The studies described here raise many important
issues, first, regarding the usefulness of psychology
for the creation of conventional meaning and, sec-
ond, the possibility of using perceptual dynamics as a
naturalistic basis for ontologically founding expres-
sive qualities. As regards meaning, it is clear that
Argenton’s quasi-experimental method clarifies the
range of meaning established by iconography but
does not leave variation to randomness but rather
can explain the popularity of solutions based on fun-
damental perceptual facts. The method of variation
recalls Lucien Rudrauf’s found within these pages
sixty years ago (vol. 7, 1949). As regards expressive
qualities, Argenton gives good reasons to consider
the Arnheimian bridge between perceptual dynamics
and aesthetic expression a good candidate for cross-
ing the aesthetic and nonaesthetic divide. Frankly,
in Anglo-American aesthetics this possibility has not
proved too interesting of late, but perhaps Argen-
ton’s thorough and convincing book will allow us to
consider it again.
IAN VERSTEGEN
Moore College of Art & Design
Philadelphia, PA