Aporia

Simen and I disagree about whether there can be anything “objective” about art. As a Popperian, I believe that the distinction between the objective and the subjective (or the relative) has been misunderstood and hyperbolized. Perhaps nothing is objective, but that does not mean that all is subjective. Newton’s proposed laws of motion were, for centuries, “objectively” true; confirmed by all experimental tests, they formed the basis of thousands of discoveries in physics and other fields. These discoveries were themselves experimentally tested, and themselves led to thousands of discoveries in the exponential fashion to which we’ve become accustomed.

But Newton was wrong; his laws were inaccurate. In David Deutsch’s terms, they were very, very good misconceptions, just as Einstein’s better ideas are very, very good misconceptions that will eventually be replaced by even better, more accurate, deeper ideas that explain more with less. This process is progressive: science gets better and better, even though it is purely the creation of “subjective” human conjecture —imagination— tested against reality for utility. We might say that the history of human knowledge is one of conjectures which are never complete or objective but which are ever-improving. To be ever-improving, they must be moving towards something; if they cannot reach it, they approach it as an asymptote does a line. Science asymptotically approaches objective, complete truth, never arriving but getting closer and closer (¹) . It is not objective —as the work of humans, how could it be?— but neither is it aimless or subjective.

But what about art? We do not tend to think that art is progressive. Indeed, the attitude of the age treats art as a private utterance, as pure subjectivity, or at best as a personal religion of some entertaining use to others. One epistemological consequence of the democratic ethos, unmoored from axiomatic values, is that we struggle with the idea of objectivity in anything, although we incoherently exempt the sciences from our anxious doubt. But this is a temporary phase, a confusion. It is not the case that art is purely subjective, aimless, without teleology or purpose; it is rather the case that art, like science, improves over time because it asymptotically approaches something. It happens to be the same “something” that science hews to: reality.

Consider the following work of art from tens of thousands of years ago:

From Chauvet, this depiction is among the earliest instances of art; it features a range of animals including, most prominently, cave lions. From tens of thousands of years later, in the 19th century, here is the head of a lion painted by Théodore Géricault:

It’s obvious that this is a better depiction, in part because we can reasonably assume that the intent of these two artists, across so much time, was similar: to capture and convey something essential about the lion. This intent was almost certainly inexplicit for the ancient artist, and may have expressed itself in other ways which recur throughout the history of art. For example, artists have occasionally conceived of their mission in ceremonial, religious, or supernatural terms, imagining that by performing acts in concert with images they might control reality (²). In later centuries, they might consider their art in more subtle religious, political, pedagogical, ideological, or emotional terms. But a sufficiently abstract definition might cover most cases:

Art seeks to virtualize phenomena for human benefit.

By “virtualize,” I mean only that what art offers us it offers on our terms. One can experience tragedy when a loved-one dies; one can know the awe and power of the lion when one sees it enter a cave in which one’s family is camped. Art seeks to make these phenomena, and the meanings they provide, available to you apart from the uncontrollable and contingent world, for a variety of reasons. Through art, we are enriched by experiences with less risk of suffering or injury; experiences are made more portable and reproducible, and are freed from temporality; we can begin at least to portray what we imagine, even if we cannot yet build it; and so on. Art, then, supports the same accelerated development of knowledge that consciousness, metaphor and language, and reason support, and all are related. Whereas we once built knowledge accidentally and slowly, when the inexplicit knowledge of environment and utility embodied by genes would lead to those genes’ replication and spread, we now have a range of means for building knowledge rapidly and at little cost. We can, at our discretion, experience alternative modes of being, the lives of others, worlds we’ve never seen; we can be taken deep within ourselves or so far away that we can no longer remember our names.

And from this, we learn. From art, from the virtualization of phenomena far removed from our practical realities, we derive values, politics, and purposes, in addition to whatever assortment of facts and information the art carries with it. Some essential values we seem incapable of arriving at any other way, especially in the absence of axioms or authority: compassion and empathy, for example, depend on the recognition of the humanness of others but are hardly logically compulsory propositions; art is unparalleled at conveying, in experiential and therefore broadly-intelligible terms, the bases of such moral notions, even to the ignorant and resistant. (³) Art is where we find meanings we cannot reason and experiences that we cannot otherwise have; that we recognize the value and utility of these experiences and meanings but cannot yet rationally justify them doesn’t mean that they’re purely subjective. The fact that our ancestors didn’t understand the stars by which they navigated didn’t make those stars subjective either. They were simply little-understood, but their utility was evident to all. The same is true of art and culture, emergent phenomena we dismiss because of weaknesses in our contemporary philosophies. What we cannot reduce we pretend doesn’t exist.

The consequences of purpose

If we say that “art seeks to virtualize phenomena for human benefit,” we can begin to critique art apart from distracting historicisms. This liberates us from, among other traps, referentiality and academic preoccupations. We can attempt to discuss art concretely in terms of its aims:

• Does the work virtualize phenomena well? Does it use the best forms for the phenomena it pursues? Does it use effective available techniques for their virtualization? Are the relevant parts of the phenomena captured and expressed? Does the work have a purpose, and are its aesthetic choices suitable for that purpose?
• Is the work novel? If it isn’t, it won’t “work,” for just as sound science that discovers what science already knows is redundant and contributes nothing, repetitive art with cliched expressions, moribund forms, or a derivative purpose is redundant and contributes nothing. Novelty is what permits consciousness to attend to phenomena, and is therefore a foundational value in art.
• Do humans benefit? The benefit may be to the artist alone, which is perfectly fine but should be understood as an extremely narrow sort of aim, like a scientific discovery that extends the life of a single human. The tension between an artist’s desire to express himself purely and without calculations about reception and the fact that art must benefit humans or be pointless is irreducible and beneficial, itself a metaphor for the paradox of selfhood.
• Art that is about art is as science about science: useful for practitioners but insufficiently universal in scope. Art that is about artists is as science about scientists: likely to be worthless where it cannot be generalized, and where it can it is hardly about individuals anyway.

An important note: art makes virtualized reality possible both for external sense experiences like seeing a lion or a landscape and internal, phenomenological experiences like emotional states or even qualia. The virtualization of meaningful human phenomena might involve nothing representational —music often does not— or taken from the world outside of us. A work of art which captures, provokes, or explores something like sorrow, hope, love, or fear might be highly abstract, impressionistic, unusual, just as our internal life is.

Artists are technologists

I’ve mentioned qualia twice, once implicitly noting that some do not believe they exist and once by noting that art captures them well. Qualia were first described by C.I. Lewis in 1929:

There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these “qualia.” But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects.

Another way of putting it: when you look at a red sign, the “redness” you see doesn’t exist anywhere. The sign is an almost entirely-empty latticework of vibrating particles. Photons bounce off of some of these and enter your eye at a wavelength, but that wavelength is a mathematical description: it has no color in it, and photons themselves are colorless. Your mind experiences “redness,” but you might also say that it “creates” or “invents” redness when prompted by certain light phenomena which themselves have nothing to do, now or ever, with “redness,” which doesn’t exist. Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel-prize winning quantum physicist, put it thus:

The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.

That one of the founders of modern physics didn’t believe a physical or physiological explanation for qualia would be forthcoming is arresting. But more to the point, while scientists and philosophers try to determine what “redness” or “sorrow” really is, as a quale, artists are virtualizing qualia and catalyzing them in audiences. Indeed, much of the personal quality that art has consists in its relationship to deep, individuated qualia we ourselves hardly comprehend.

For millennia art outstripped the sciences in its ability to understand and recreate qualia, virtualize reality, and provide ennobling, edifying, educational, and entertaining simulations for humans. Indeed, art pushed science, demanding better technologies which required deeper understanding in dozens of fields. The demands of art pushed architecture, and therefore engineering and chemistry and materials sciences; art required new resources for colors and sculptures, shaping societies economically; the musical arts were constrained awfully until technology turned music from vanishing performances into enduring, widely-distributed works.

All of which is to say: artists are natural technologists. Historically, they’ve pursued the newest and best techniques, materials, and forms. When the methodology for achieving perspective became clear, few resisted it on the basis of a calcified iconographic style considered to be “high art,” or if some did they’ve been suitably forgotten. And had new inks, better canvases, or some unimaginable invention given superior means to the impressionists to capture washes of light and mood —like, say, film— they’d have used whatever was available. The purpose of painting isn’t paint, after all; nor is the purpose of writing a book. (⁴)

The purpose is instead to virtualize phenomena for the benefit of humans. The best techniques for doing so do indeed change; the schools of thought that shape artists wax, wane, wear out; intellectual movements, critical and popular reaction, and technology are all part of the contingency in which we work. But the orientation of art should not be towards the ephemeral (except in exploring ephemerality itself, permanent and vexing) but towards deeper, universal, clarifying aims.

In elementary school, we were taught about Europe’s cathedrals. Centuries of fatality- and error-filled construction and engineering innovation on the edge of recklessness produced spaces intended to virtualize the experience of heavenly light, spiritual elevation, credence in the sacred. A peasant from the fields could enter one and immediately understand; he’d not know Suger’s theories or the tradeoffs involved in the buttresses, but the purpose and effect of the art were somehow not lost on him. The same would likely have been true had he seen Michelangelo’s David or been permitted to hear Mozart or Hildegard of Bingen. With exceptions, of course, art has aspired to universality.

The extraordinary present circumstance in which art is not expected to be intelligible, to have any “benefit” beyond the meaninglessly subjective “enjoyment” of the “consumer” is an aberration. That art is denied its progressive success at virtualizing greater and greater parts of reality, conveying ever-more phenomena with ever-greater fidelity to ever-more people, is the result of a philosophical disruption and a subsequent error. We found God dead; we asked what had god-like authority and reeled to realize that nothing can. But we’ve accepted that somehow, science exceeds merely moody paradigms. It works. It gives us control over the universe and ourselves, reduces contingency and accident, allows us to be what we think we should be.

Art is part of the same process, and can be evaluated similarly. In allowing us to virtualize and experiment with realities and phenomena, and, gradually, to live in those realities, it is part of the same epistemological and creative process as science. We are simply at an earlier stage, and just as someone might have surveyed the globe in 500 CE and concluded, “There is nothing objective about the so-called sciences; it appears that every culture and every society simply invents its own ideas and none is really any better than the rest,” so we now struggle to understand how aesthetics and morality might someday be understood teleologically, nor as expressions of “taste” but as forms of knowledge-generation, experimentation, and even reality-building.

Perhaps we are transitioning from artists-as-depictors and artists-as-catalyzers (⁵) to artists-as-world-makers. To create something, you must first understand it; to create a world for humans to experience, you must first understand how humans experience the world. Once you can reliably replicate any sense-perception, you must think of how such sense-perceptions are experienced in the mind: as qualia. Then you must think of how to generalize or objectify qualia, or how to catalyze them. This is not a task for science alone, though whether it is not yet or not at all I cannot say. It will involve art, however, particularly in the form it takes when it wants to extend itself into life: design.

Design is art which cannot ignore the outcome it pursues, which uses every technology or tool it can conjure to succeed, and which accepts the judgement of audiences. In this way, one can understand why so much of the vitality of art now resides in the commercial space: there, the artists still care about audiences, still have aims apart from themselves, still seek resonance, utility, universality. My anxieties about art stem mostly from this concern: if purposive, deliberate, universal art becomes the province of commercial design, art’s values will gravitate towards market values. The hope: those values will evolve intelligently through self-correction. But it seems safer to me to have a cultural space which accords art precisely the same sort of respect we pay science so that the arts can pursue their ends purely —ends far deeper than markets, capitalism, any historicism, incidentally— just as science exists apart from technology and its commercialization. But I doubt whether such a space is possible so long as we insist that all art is subjective, no teleology is imaginable, and there is no such thing as progress. Such an insistence is, in my view, both materially incorrect and snobbish, arising more from nostalgia for older forms or aristocratic art-culture than any real analysis of the present. We live in a world in which more people read, listen to music, and experience works of art than ever before. This is both art’s triumph and a prelude to its expanding role. From its earliest efforts to virtualize reality through its portrayal and later attempts to produce specific experiences in audiences, art aspires to the creation of worlds. As it converges with technology —in video games, for example— these worlds will grow to support the range of experiences and meanings humans desire, as art always has.

“In the morning, a cultured man leafs through an intellectual review at breakfast and reads an important discussion between a structuralist and an existentialist. It is so intelligent that it is impossible to conclude that it is simply stupid —stupid because our two thinkers pretend to be more knowledgeable than they are. In fact they know very little and what they know they only know partially (indeed, how can one know anything in any other way?).

So, after reading with tedious interest this stupid knowledgeable discussion, our homo sapien goes to town to see an exhibition of Picasso or (if you’d rather) Titian. And there he participates fervently, but distractedly: he is enchanted, but as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him. He falls to his knees, but it is as if he didn’t fall. Then he tears himself away from Beauty with regret, but with relief. Once he is back at home, he seizes the latest novel, but it’s as though he weren’t reading. He gets up, goes out for lunch, and, in cultured company, engages in intelligent conversation, not snobbishly, frankly, modestly, but…

That’s enough. You see, don’t you? It’s all a matter of this but which seeps through the rules of the game. [I do not] propose to delve into our culture, to enrich it, but to see whether it fits us, whether it remains down here, on earth, with us or whether it has broken away, soared into the sky, and is making us dizzy. It isn’t culture that interests me so much as our relationship with it…each of us plays at being cleverer and more mature than he is.

This may look like a mere denunciation of snobbery. Snobbery? Yes, that too. But something infinitely more important is at stake. An almost greater alienation than that brought about by machines. The accumulative and ascendant mechanisms of culture are very complicated and they operate outside ourselves…”

A Kind of Testament, 1968, trans. by Alastair Hamilton.

I. Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction famously details the consequences of our capacity to reproduce works of art, or, more broadly, sense experiences, with ever-increasing fidelity. Technology allows the transmission and re-creation of more and more, and Benjamin was one of the first to note a cost, in 1936:

In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus —namely, its authenticity— is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object… One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

The aura of the work of art withers in the age of mechanical reproduction, and the self is a kind of work of art, too. As with a work of art, a person’s “most sensitive nucleus,” his or her “authenticity,” is interfered with by the reproduction of the self, its transmission and portrayal and multiplication. While “no natural object is [similarly] vulnerable,” selves and works of art, and all that self-aware humans intentionally create, are not natural in the sense meant here: unselfconscious, automatic, invulnerable to attentive or perceptual interference. Selves are negotiated, photonic: affected by detection, observation, relay.

Shortly before World War II, Benjamin saw the coming crisis of authenticity, the diminishing of auras and meanings. He was sensitive to an anxiety that would soon register with artists and philosophers everywhere, and within a decade or so would inform an enormous amount of discourse from the academy to the arcade. In its second half, the twentieth century concerned itself with authenticity.

II. A crucial moment: in 1951, J.D. Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye, whose protagonist Holden Caulfield despises, with the timeless fury of youth, everything he considers “phony.” Fools like Polonius have always advised us to be true to our own selves —without explaining which parts of them are “our own,” if any— but it is Caulfield who announces the promotion of authenticity to a moral virtue and the classification of phoniness as a capital crime. At the halfway point of the century, the moral law was established. Salinger is sometimes credited with the popularization of this fetish, this preoccupation with phoniness; sometimes, it is attributed to the existentialist philosophers and their ideas about “bad faith” and so on. But neither philosophers nor novelists much affect the attitudes of the public, and the Tolstoyan view of history is, in this instance, accurate: men like Jean Paul Sartre and Salinger sensed and obeyed the mysterious, unwilled moral injunctions that arose in the 20th century from “History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind…”

III. The herd’s obsession with authenticity is an anxious response to the technological reproduction of perceptual experiences, which has improved such that we fear that essences too might be fungible. Just as the primacy of the original artwork is reduced by ten million posters, so the primacy of the original self is reduced by ten million portrayals: by the flickering face on seas of screens, the exhortatory voice filling fleets of commuting cars, the flesh of bodies on billboards along crowded interstates. The multiplexed multiplicity of personality and identity drives us deeper into the self to search for what cannot be reproduced, devalued, commodified, into the world of intentions, subjective states, secrets. We flock to the aura of the artwork and to the Platonic self: an unmediated self of inimitable, irreducible, meaningful purity. We vigilantly test for forgeries and phonies.

We want what the camera cannot show: a person’s fidelity to his innate truth. We want the soul we doubt, the core we have learned isn’t there. We want the antidote to personality, the desperate and neurotic fictions of the performative self. We want the inner, abiding fact: may it abide beyond death.

IV. As the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s pass, authenticity is increasingly a criterion of intense importance; its absence provokes devastating judgements. The zeitgeist, particularly in the counterculture, demands a pure transformation of artless, unconstrained, uncontemplated intent into action. Indeed, the best action is purely thoughtless; spontaneity —which can as easily be considered a liberating delight or an abrogation of contemplative ability— is sanctified, consecrated; improvisation is the technique of the day, especially in music. Criticisms of moral systems like religions, of social mores, of individuals concentrate their fury on the great accusation of the 20th century: hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy emerges as our leading sin as nearly all other sins are being recategorized, legalized, made ordinary. The forces of change —science, technology, urbanization, globalization— chase away our souls, commodify our selves, give us a new crime to fear, and provoke us to persecution. We become a police state of Holden Caulfields, rooting out whatever is contrived or inauthentic, and like any pogrom there are innocent victims: we turn, too, against the deliberate, the thoughtful, the mediated. With phonies must go manners, self-possession, self-creation. For decades, no one will admit that they attend to their appearance; for much of the century, we claimed to none’s credulity that we “just roll out of bed and throw whatever on.” We speak our minds; we do what we feel; our revolution is against self-control. A constellation of judgments attends such words as “artificial”; schools of analysis argue that intentions in art scarcely matter, as though to recover the act of the art from the problematized will of the artist.

From splashed paints on a canvas to junkie saxophonists screaming their rage into the horn to the real awkwardness, real stupidity of reality television, we are finished with trained performances and the demands of propriety; we demand the real, the pure and true, the ejaculations of Freud’s atavistic psychic entities straight out into the world, uncorrupted. (But uncorrupted by what? The rational mind against which we’ve turned, the sober and dispassionate author of civilization, with its rules, schemes and structures, machines and automations? The rational mind whose technologies are now reproducing our selves with such facility that we cannot believe that we’re special? Reason: the factory foreman; the self: sausage being made).

If hypocrisy is a sin, however, it is original and universal. No self-aware creature can escape the first consequence of self-awareness: the ability to consciously influence what were once instinctual processes. As soon as one becomes of oneself and begins to control how one acts, one is calculating, disguising, living twice or more within one identity. One is a hypocrite: one says one thing and does another. One contains multitudes. That the contemporary world criminalizes what all humans share, of course, means only that it is precisely like the ancient world; the moral values of a culture don’t reflect the culture as it is but as it wishes to be, and the sins it prosecutes are those it perceives as threatening infections.

V. But while this fetishized and extended notion of authenticity is an anxiety-induced obsession, it is nevertheless the case that we all know and detest ordinary conversational falsity. Nothing is more unpleasant than interacting with someone who is not truly themselves, someone whose performative identity necessitates unfelt reactions from you. Their act makes demands of an audience; their laughter at their own jokes is really an “Applause” sign. When someone’s personality is a lie, they oblige you to lie back to them, to feign credulity, to simulate the responses they seem to expect.

The excruciating deformation of selves by other selves, the pressures selves put on one another without the awareness of their owners, so to speak, is the focus of much of Witold Gombrowicz’s hilarious and brilliant fiction. In his novels, selves are bloated, hypertrophied things which push against one another, jockey for space in small rooms, wear from friction or expand when flush with trivial successes. The dynamics of these collisions are unintelligible to the characters, as they are to us: some people seem to draw us out, others to push us in; around some we are funny, around others hopelessly awkward; who we are and how we act is constrained, deformed, molded by the accidental and degraded selves of others, themselves thusly shaped, and so on.

…if I am always an artefact, always defined by others and by culture as well as by my own formal necessities, where should I look for my ‘self’? … I have found one answer: I don’t know who I really am, but I suffer when I am deformed. So at least I know what I am not. My ‘self’ is nothing but the will to be myself.

The self is nothing but the resistance to deformation. It is a kind of relation or process, not an inner truth to which one is faithful or not. The principle demand of authenticity, then, is not that we scrupulously compare our behavior or personality to some inner ideal; to be authentic should mean, above all, that we never deform the selves of others. It means permitting others to be who they are, not insisting that we are a certain kind of unedited immediacy which others must accept.

If reproductive technology has eliminated the aura of the work of art, it has also problematized our belief in the inimitable, unmediated self. As film, television, and computers proliferate, culture develops an obsession with authenticity in a silly sense, prosecuting a pointless search for bad faith, phoniness, and eventually even self-composure and self-control. But this is no different from interrogating works of art to find their real aura: the point is that there is no aura anymore. And there is no soul-like self underneath expressions of personality, only our laudable, instinctive discomfort when we’re forced to be something we’re not.