Twentieth Century Theories of Art 9780773596054

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JAMES M. THOMPSON Carleton University Press Ottawa"" Canada 1~90

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Contents Preface

ix

Introduction

xi

Acknowledgements

xiii

Section One: The Expression Theory: Art and Feeling Introduction Tolstoy: Art as Expression Collingwood: Art as Expression Notes Suggestions for further reading

1 3 18 54 56

Section Two: Formalism Introduction Fry: An Essay in Aesthetics Pure and Impure Art Bell: The Aesthetic Hypothesis Greenberg: Modernist Painting State of Art Criticism Notes Suggestions for further reading

57 60 73 79 94 102 118 119

Section Three: The Psychological Approach Introduction Freud: The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming Phantasy-making and Art Symbolism in Dreams Jung: On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry Arnheim: Balance Notes Suggestions for further reading

121 124 132 134 151 168 201 202

Section Four: The Sociological Approach Introduction Marx: The Materialist Interpretation of History Material Production and Artistic Production Alienated Labour Hauser: The Sociological Method in Art History Hadjinicolaou: Art History and Class Struggle Sanchez Vazquez: Art and Society Clark: On the Social History of Art Notes Suggestions for further reading

205 209 210 212 214 239 256 266 279 281

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Section Five: Semiotics and Structuralism Introduction Cassirer: The Symbolic Function J.M. Thompson: Panofsky's Iconography and Iconology Saussure: General Principles of Linguistics Levi-Strauss: Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology Structural Analysis of Painting and Music The Logic of Myth and Bricolage Barthes: Elements of Semiology Myth Today Notes Suggestions for further reading Section Six: Existentialism and Phenomenology Introduction Heidegger: Origin of the Work of Art Merleau-Ponty: Eye and Mind Notes Suggestions for further reading

285 289 297

300 310

323 334

336 357 366 369

371 374 415 425 427

Section Seven: Poststructuralism Introduction Kristeva: Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini Derrida: Differance Writing and Differance Dissemination Notes Suggestions for further reading

429 441 467 470 475 490 499

Section Eight The Analytical/Linguistic Approach Introduction Weitz: The Role of Theory in Aesthetics Holloway: The Role of Canons in Criticism Beardsley: Propositions in Paintings Danto: The Artworld Notes Suggestions for further reading

503 505 517 522 531 545 546

viii

Preface

The aim of this book is to provide a general introduction to the major approaches in this century to art theory and criticism. It is designed both as a book of readings for university courses and for the general reader with little or no background in the subject. The introductions to the different sorts of approach make the book self-contained. They vary in length and character depending on the difficulty of the readings. The introduction to Section Seven is very much longer since poststructuralist texts are typically obscure, employing esoteric terms and strategies. Since the introductions are relatively brief, I am aware they run the risk of over-generalization and caricature; they are intended for readers with no background in art theory and criticism. My suggestions for further reading are relatively brief but should enable the interested reader to explore the major literature in each area. I have suggested more extensive readings in connection with writers and theories where interest and controversy are currently intense. In the introductions and in the lists of suggested readings, original dates of publication have been given to place the books and essays in the stream of the development of ideas. In the notes some format variations will be observed: notes are printed as in the original source for each selection. The selections are chosen to give a general introduction and therefore are confined to expository material. My suggestions for further reading include critical assessments. The basic principle of selection was to present those ideas and theories which have been most influential. Secondly, while much of the most helpful material deals with art in general I have emphasized the visual arts, which tend to be somewhat neglected in anthologies, not to mention in art theoretical discussion.

ix

Introduction

Although it is not always recognized, art is produced and enjoyed and even defined against a background of theories and ideas. Oversimplifying greatly, up to the 18th century theories of art were largely developments of and reactions to elements in Greek thought. The 18th and 19th centuries saw a tremendous development of new thinking about art. The 20th century has been even more prolific in production of new approaches. Some are developments of earlier themes but on the whole they can be studied independently. At the same time one can discern a good deal of interrelation between those 20th century theories which are not mutually exclusive. The Expression Theory, stressing the relation between art and emotion, first attained relatively clear articulation towards the end of the 19th century, reaching its peak of sophistication in the writings of Croce in the teens and Collingwood in the thirties of this century. Its influence began to wane in the fifties, at least at the academic level, though it seems destined to remain one of the permanent possibilities. Formalism, focussing on the work of art itself, is rooted in the 18th century, particularly in Kant's writings on art, though it can be argued that its 20th century forms are responses to modern art. It received influential statements in the teens and twenties, and again between the forties and sixties. Until recently it has dominated writing on art and theory especially at the academic level. Psychoanalysis, partly because of the persuasive writings of Freud and Jung, has captured the popular imagination during most of this century. Since the teens and twenties it has strongly influenced art and art criticism. Gestalt theories of perception, first presented towards the end of the 19th century, have remained steadily if not spectacularly influential. Emphasizing close analysis of the perceptual field, focussing on structure and the part-whole relation, they have also been more or less closely linked with some varieties of formalism and some forms of semiotics and structuralism. Sociological approaches, focussing on the place of art in society, typically owe their inspiration to the ideas of Karl Marx. Much divergence of doctrine is observable, from the doctrinaire Socialist Realism of the thirties in Soviet Russia to the deviationist theories of recent years in the Western World. Recent theorizing has been increasingly sophisticated and is exemplified in many books and journal articles. xi

Semiotics, though founded in the 19th century by Peirce, only achieved its most popular development and its application to art in the forties and fifties. Stressing the work of art as sign, utilizing the background of structural linguistics and to some extent structural anthropology, it continues to develop dynamically, often closely linked with other approaches. What future developments and applications will be and what place the future will reserve for it are not yet clear. Contemporary existentialism also has its roots in the 19th century, adding to the insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche the emphasis of phenomenology on close non-reductive analysis of experience. Popular in Europe since the Second World War, its appeal in the English-speaking world has declined since the fifties though it remains one of the perennial options. In continental Europe, though semiotics, structuralism and poststructuralism have made a tremendous impact, the influence of phenomenology and existentialism has remained strong and can be clearly seen in the development of poststructuralism. Poststructuralism emerged in the sixties out of structuralism and semiotics; indeed it could be considered as part of that line of dynamic development which traces its roots to Saussure. At the same time its background lies partly in phenomenology and existentialism though individual theorists differ considerably. During the seventies and eighties it has been widely discussed in Europe and North America and its views have been much debated in books and journals. The analytic/linguistic approach dominated academic discussion of art and art theory in the English-speaking world from the early fifties to the seventies and its influence remains strong. It originates in the work of English philosophers, notably Ludwig Wittgenstein. Emphasis is on very rigorous analysis of specific problems, deliberately avoiding technical terms and studying carefully what critics actually say and what actually happens in the artworld. The prevalence of such a variety of theories may seem puzzling and disturbing. On the other hand it can be argued that this situation enriches and enlivens our enjoyment of art. In any case, if we are to appreciate and evaluate contemporary talk about art we must become acquainted with these theories.

xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following who have kindly granted permission to quote from copyrighted works or reproduce paintings: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, R.T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1943 for permission to reproduce Saint Michael Weighing Souls. The Aristotelian Society for permission to reprint from 'What Are the Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts?' by John Holloway in Supplementary Volume 23 of the Proceedings of the Society, 1949. Reprinted by courtesy of the Editor of the Aristotelian Society4.' 1949. The Art Institute of Chicago for permission to reproduce Mme Cezanne in a Yellow Chair, 1888-90, by Paul Cezanne. The Athlone Press for rights for the United Kingdom and Commonwealth to reprint from Dissemination by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson. English translation copyright e 1981 by the Athlone Press. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers for rights for the United States, its dependencies, Canada, the Philippines, and Mexico to reprint from Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strauss. Translated from the French by Oaire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Copyright C 1963 by Basic Books, Inc. And for rights for the United States and its dependencies to reprint from Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, Volume 4. Translated and edited by James Strachey. Published by Basic Books, Inc., by arrangement with the Hogarth Press Ltd., and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. Basil Blackwell for rights for the United Kingdom and Commonwealth to reprint 'Motherhood according to Bellini' from Desire in Language by Julia Kristeva translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. CopyrightC Basil Blackwell 1980. . And to Basil Blackwell and David McLellan for permission to reprint from Karl Marx: The Early Texts edited by David McLellan copyrightc Basil Blackwell 1971.

xiii

Columbia University Press for rights for the United States to reprint 'Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini' from Desire in Language by • Julia Kristeva translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Copyrightc 1980 Columbia University Press. J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., for permission to reprint from What Is Art?' in Miscellaneous Letters and Essays, volume XXII of The Complete Works of Count Leo N. Tolstoy translated and edited by Leo Weiner. Copyright C J.M. Dent and Sons 1902. Minor changes have been made to the translation. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Inc., for rights for the United States to reprint excerpts from Elements of Semiology by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Copyright" 1967 by Jonathan Cape. Clement Greenberg for permission to reprint 'Modernist Painting' from Art and Literature, no. 4, Spring 1965. And 1'he State of Criticism' from The Partisan Review, vol. 47, no. 11981. Hill and Wang for rights for the United States, its dependencies, the Philippines, and open market outside the British Commonwealth to reprint selections from 'Myth Today' from Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers. TranslationC 1972 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc. International General for permission to reprint from Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, Lee BaxandaII and Stefan Morawski, editors. New York: International General, 1977. Jonathan Cape Limited and the author and translators for rights for the British Commonwealth and Empire, including Canada to reprint from The Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi-Strauss, translated by John and Doreen Weightman. This book was first published in France in 1964 by Librairie Pion. English translation copyright"by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1969. And for rights for the British Commonwealth and Empire, including Canada to reprint from 'Myth Today' from Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Roland Barthes, the translator and the publisher. Mythologies was first published in French by Editions du Seuil in 1957. The translation copyright" by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1972. And for rights for the British Commonwealth and Empire, including Canada to reprint from Elements of Semiology by Roland Barthes, translated

xiv

by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Elements of Semiology was first published in French in 1964 by Editions du Seuil. Translation copyright" 1967 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. Reprinted by pennission of the Estate of Roland Barthes, the translator and the publisher. The American Society for Aesthetics for permission to reprint 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics' by Morris Weitz, from The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 15, 1956.

The Journal of Philosophy and Arthur Danto for permission to reprint Pfhe Artworld' by Arthur Danto, from The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61, no. 19 (October 15, 1964) pp. 571-84. Donald Kuspit for permission to reprint his commentary on Oement Greenberg's paper 'The State of Criticism', printed in The Partisan Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 1981. Liveright Publishing Corporation for permission for the United States to reprint from Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, translated by Joan Riviere. Copyright" 1920, 1935 by Edward L. Bernays. The Merlin Press Ltd. for permission to reprint from Art and Society by Adolfo Sanchez-Vazquez, translated by Maro Riofrancos. Art and Society was first published in 1965 in Mexico by Ediciones Era. English translation copyrightC by Monthly Review Press 1973. First published in the United Kingdom by the Merlin Press. Oxford University Press for permission to reprint from Principles of Art by R.C. Collingwood 1938. And for permission for the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth to reprint 'The Aesthetic Hypothesis' from Art by Clive Bell. CopyrightC 1949 by Quentin Bell.

The Partisan Review for permission to reprint the discussion following papers by Clement Greenberg and Donald Kuspit on 'The State of Criticism', published in The Partisan Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 1981. Penguin Books Ltd. for rights for the British Commonwealth to reprint excerpts from pp. 31-34,37,40,41,42,46,208-16 of Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strauss, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Penguin Books 1968), copyrightC Basic Books, Inc. 1963. Reproduced by pennission of Penguin Books Ltd.

xv

Philosophical Library Inc. for permission to reprint from Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, translated by Wade Baskin. English translation copyrightC by The Philosophical Library 1959. Pluto Press for permission to reprint from Art History and Class Struggle by Nicos Hadjinicolaou, translated from the French by Louise Asmal. Art History and Class Struggle was first published in France by Librairie Fran~ois Maspero in 1973. English translation copyrightC by Pluto Press 1978. G.P. Putnam's Sons for permission for the United States and Canada to reprint 'The Aesthetics Hypothesis' from Art by Clive Bell. Copyrightc 1949 by Quentin Bell. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. for rights for the British Commonwealth to reprint from The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, translated by R.F.C. Hull, vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. And for permiSSion to reprint from The Philosophy of Art History by Arnold Hauser, copyrightc 1958 by Arnold Hauser. Sigmund Freud Copyrights Ltd., The Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Hogarth Press for world rights excluding the United States, its dependencies, and the Philippines to reprint from ~he Relation of the Poet to DayDreaming' by Sigmund Freud, translated by Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud Collected Papers, vol. 4. Thames and Hudson International Ltd. for permission to reprint from Image of the People by T.J. Clark. Copyright" 1973 by Thames and Hudson Ltd., London. The University of California Press for permission to reprint from the second edition of Art and Visual Perception by Rudolph Arnheim. CopyrightC 1974 by the Regents of the University of California. University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint from Positions by Jacques Derrida, translated and annotated by Alan Bass. English translation copyrightc 1981 by the University of Chicago. And for permission for the United States to reprint from Dissemination by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson. English translation copyrightC 1981 by the University of Chicago Press. And for rights for the United States to reprint from The Savage Mind by Claude Levi-Strauss. This book was first published in France in 1962 by Librairie PIon. English translation copyrightc 1966 by the University of Chicago Press and Weidenfeld and Nicolson. xvi

Unwin Hyman Ltd. for permission for the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth to reprint from Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, translated by Joan Riviere, revised second edition 1929. George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. for rights for the British Commonwealth to reprint from The Savage Mind by Claude Levi-Strauss. The Savage Mind was first published in France in 1962 by Librairie PIon. English translation copyright«=> 1966 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. and the University of Chicago Press. Yale University Press for permission to reprint from An Essay on Man by Ernst Cassirer. Copyright«=> 1944 by Yale University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. I am grateful to all who have helped me in preparing this book. Michael Gnarowski as General Editor of Carleton University Press unwaveringly supported the project and very helpfully advised me at every stage during the four years of preparation. Naomi Griffiths as Dean of Arts initially encouraged the project and as acting General Editor of Carleton University Press brought it finally to culmination. Janice Yalden as Dean of Arts generously supported me in meeting costs of preparation of the manuscript. Pauline Adams of Carleton University Press patiently guided me through the final stages of preparation of the text. Mary Browne typed the first draught of my material. Christine Wirta patiently typed and retyped an enormous manuscript. I benefited from the help of the library staff at the University of London (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College and the Senate House Library) and at the British Library. Andrew Jeffrey and Thanos Fotiou helped with Greek words in the text. My wife Anne by her comments and encouragement made it possible.

xvii

1 The Expression Theory Art and Feeling Introduction The Expression Theory is one of the distinctively modern approaches to art. 1/Art is the expression of emotion." Of course earlier writers said a good deal about art and emotion. Plato described art as the feeding and watering of the passions. In the third century the Peri-Hypsous stressed the importance of vehement emotions in the literary work. Renaissance artists were much concerned with the faithful rendering of feeling states in the portrayal of their subjects. Eighteenth century artists and theorists had much to say about the sublime, the feeling of delicious terror. Hegel emphasized the insight art gives into the inner life. The Romantics provide the immediate basis of the theory in their emphasis on emotion and on the artistic genius. It was only towards the end of the 19th century, however, that these emphases were articulated in a distinctive theory. And it was only in the thirties that it received its most sophisticated exposition by Collingwood. Its first articulation was in Eugene Veron's L'Esthetique, published in 1878 and translated into English the following year as Aesthetics. It contains most of the major themes developed in later writings though not in well worked out form. Here is his general definition: "[A]rt is the manifestation of emotion, obtaining external interpretation, now by expressive arrangements of line, form or colour, now by a series of gestures, sounds, or words governed by particular rhythmical cadence." The first reading is taken from the definitive statement of one version of the theory in Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? published 18 years later, in 1896. By this time Tolstoy (1828-1910) had securely established his reputation as one of the great novelists. What is Art? offers a new version of the Expression Theory and, closely connected with this, a profoundly challenging account of the role of art in society. More comprehensive and more sophisticated versions of the theory were presented later in the century by Benedetto Croce (1886-1952) and by 1

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943). Croce's theory is stated in several books, notably Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902) and The Br(!{)iary of Aesthetic (1913). For him expression and intuition are closely connected. Indeed he is often categorized as an intuitionist. An elaborate metaphysical theory provides the background. The second reading is taken from R.G. Collingwood's Principles of Art. Collingwood was one of the most learned and brilliant men of his generation. He was a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University but this only hints at his interests. He was an expert in the history of Roman Britain and wrote influentially also on the philosophy of history and the philosophy of science. He kept well abreast of developments in art and thinking about art. Principles of Art was published in 1938 and almost at once attracted wide attention. The approach of the book is dialectical and polemical. For instance, he notes the common statement that art is expression but goes on to bring out more precisely what this means: expressing is distinguished from arousing, betraying and describing emotion. Nor is it catharsis. He states more positively what it means in terms of a carefully developed distinction between three levels or aspects of experience: psychical, imaginative and intellectual. Artistic expression takes place at the level of imagination. It turns out that the intellectual level also is intimately connected with art. In the end it turns out also that the initially individualistic emphasis of the early sections develops into a strong emphasis on the audience and on the community for whom the artist writes or paints or composes music. During the thirties and forties the Expression Theory largely dominated the art theoretical scene, at least in the English-speaking world. In the fifties it encountered a spate of slashing criticism and at the academic level passed into disfavour though it has continued to be studied as an object lesson of a type of theory which is seductive though untenable. At the popular level, however, it is still widely held, though often in an unsophisticated or unarticulated form. In recent theoretical writing it has been defended at a sophisticated level though in a restricted form emphasizing that the work of art is expressive, largely omitting the characteristic though not universal view that expression involves reference to artist and audience.

2

Leo Tolstoy Art as Expression The Definition of Art There is no objective definition of art; but the existing definitions ... reduce themselves to a subjective definition and, however strange it may seem to say so, to this, that that is considered to be art which manifests beauty; but beauty is what pleases (without evoking desire). Many aestheticians have felt the insufficiency and weakness of such a definition, and, in order to find a basis for it, have asked themselves why this or that pleases, and have transferred the question of beauty to that of taste, as was done by Hutcheson, Voltaire, Diderot, and others. But all the attempts at defining what taste is, as the reader may see from the history of aesthetics and from experience, cannot bring us to anything, and there is no explanation, and there can be none, as to why such and such a thing pleases one and does not please another, and vice versa. Thus the whole existing aesthetics does not consist in what one could expect from the mental activity which calls itself science, namely, in defining the properties and laws of art or of the beautiful, if this is the contents of art, or the property of taste, if taste decides the question of art and its value, and then in recognizing as art, on the basis of these laws, those productions which fit in with these laws, and in rejecting those which do not fit in with them; it consists in this, that, having come to recognize a certain kind of production as good, because it pleases us, we form a theory of art, according to which all the productions which please a certain circle of men should be included in this theory. There exists an artistic canon, according to which favourite productions are in our circle recognized as art (Phidias, Sophocles, Homer, Titian, Raphael, Bach, Beethoven, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and others), and the aesthetic judgments must be such as to take in all these productions. Opinions as to the value and Significance of art, which are not based on certain laws, according to which we consider this or that good or bad, but on this, whether it coincides with the canon of art, as established by us, are constantly met with in aesthetic literature.... Thus the theory of art, based on beauty and expounded in aesthetics and in dim outlines professed by the public, is nothing but the acknowledgment that that is good which pleased and still pleases us, that is, a certain circle of men. 3

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

In order to define any human activity, we must understand its meaning and significance. But in order to understand the meaning and significance of any human activity, we must necessarily first of all view this activity in itself, in dependence on its causes and consequences, and not merely in relation to the pleasure which we derive from it. But if we acknowledge that the aim of any activity is nothing but our enjoyment, and define it only in reference to this enjoyment, this definition will obviously be false. The same took place in the definition of art. ... What, then, is art, if we reject the ·concept of beauty, which brings confusion into the whole matter? The latest and most comprehensible definitions of art, which are independent of the concept of beauty, are as follows: art is an activity, which arose in the animal kingdom from the sexual feeling and the proneness to play (Schiller, Darwin, Spencer), which is accompanied by a pleasurable excitation of the nervous energy (Grant Allen). This is a definition in terms of physiological evolution. Or: art is the external manifestation, by means of lines, colours, gestures, sounds, words, of emotions experienced by man (Veron). This is an experimental definition. According to the very latest definition by Sully, art is: lithe production of some permanent object or passing action, which is fitted not only to supply an active enjoyment to the producer, but to convey a pleasurable impression to a number of spectators or listeners quite apart from any personal advantage to be derived from it." . In spite of the superiority of these definitions over the metaphysical definitions, which are based on the concept of beauty, these definitions are none the less far from being exact. The first, the definition in terms of physiological evolution, is inexact, because it does not speak of the activity itself which forms the essence of art, but of the origin of art. The definition according to the physiological effect on man's organism is inexact, because many other human activities may be brought under this definition, as is the case in the new aesthetics, in which the preparation of pretty garments and pleasant perfumes and even food is counted in as art. The experimental definition, which assumes art to lie in the manifestation of emotions, is inexact, because a man may by means of lines, colours, sounds, and words manifest his emotions, without acting through this manifestation upon others, and then this manifestation will not be art. The third definition, Sully'S, is inexact, because with the production of objects supplying enjoyment to the producer and a pleasurable impression to the spectators and listeners without any advantage to them, may be classed the performance of sleight of hand and of gymnastic exercises, and

4

Leo Tolstoy: Art as Expression

other activities, which do not form art, and, on the contrary, many objects, from which we derive a disagreeable impression, as, for example, a gloomy and cruel scene in a poetical description or in the theatre forms an unquestionable production of art. The inexactness of all these definitions is due to this, that in all these definitions, just as in the metaphysical definitions, the aim of art is found in the enjoyment derived from it, and not in its purpose in the life of man and of humanity. In order exactly to define art, it is necessary first of all to cease looking upon it as a means for enjoyment, but to view art as one of the conditions of human life. In viewing life thus, we cannot help but see that art is one of the means of intercourse among men. Every work of art has this effect, that the receiver enters into a certain kind of intercourse with the producer of art and with all those who contemporaneously with him, or after him, have received or will receive the same artistic impr~ssion. As the word which conveys the thoughts and experiences of men serves as a means for the union of men, so also does art act. The peculiari ty of this means of intercourse, which distinguishes it from intercourse by means of the word, consists in this, that by means of the word men communicate their thoughts to one another, while by means of art they communicate their feelings. The activity of art is based on this, that man, by receiving through hearing or seeing the expressions of another man's feelings, is capable of experiencing the same feeling which was experienced by the man who expresses his feeling. Here is the simplest kind of an example: a man laughs, and another man feels happy; he weeps, and the man who hears this weeping feels sad; he gets excited and irritated, and another, looking at him, comes to the same state. A man with his motions, with the sounds of his voice, expresses vivacity, determination, or, on the contrary, gloom, calm, and this mood is communicated to others. A man suffers, expressing his suffering by means of groans and writhing, and this suffering is communicated to others; a man expresses his feeling of delight, awe, fear, respect for certain objections, persons, phenomena, and other men are infected and experience the same feelings of delight, awe, fear, respect, for the same objects, persons, and phenomena. It is on this property of men to be infected by the feelings of other men that the activity of art is based. 5

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

If a man infects another or others directly, immediately, by his look or by sounds produced by him at the moment that he experiences the feeling; or causes another man to yawn, when he himself is yawning, or to laugh or weep, when he himself is laughing or weeping over something, or to suffer, when he himself is suffering, that is not yet art. Art begins when a man, with the purpose of conveying to others the feeling which he has experienced, evokes it in himself and expresses it by means of well-known external signs. Here is the simplest kind of a case: a boy, who, let us say, has experienced fear from having met a wolf, tells of this encounter and, in order to evoke in others the feeling which he has experienced, pictures himself, his condition before this encounter, the surroundings, the forest, his carelessness, and then the looks of the wolf, his motions, the distance between him and the wolf, and so forth. All this, if during the recital the boy again lives through the feeling experienced by him, infects his hearers, and causes them to go through everything through which the narrator has passed, is art. Even if the boy did not see the wolf, but frequently was afraid of him, and, wishing to evoke in others the feeling of fear experienced by him, invented the encounter with the wolf and told of it in such a way that by his recital the same feeling was evoked in his hearers which he experienced in picturing the wolf to himself, this is also art. Similarly it will be art, when a man, having in reality or in his imagination experienced the terror of suffering or the charm of enjoyment, has represented these feelings on canvas or in marble, so that others are infected by it. And similarly it will be art if a man has experienced or imagined to himself the feelings of mirth, joy, sadness, despair, vivacity, gloom, or the transitions of these feelings from one to another, and has represented these feelings in words in such a way that the hearers are infected by them and pass through them just as he passed through them. The most varied feelings, the strongest and the weakest, the most important and the most insignificant, the worst and the best, so long as they infect the reader, spectator, hearer, form the subject of art. The feeling of self-renunciation and submission to fate or to God, as conveyed in the drama; or of the ecstasy of lovers, as described in the novel; or the feeling of lust, as represented in a picture; or of vivacity, as communicated in a solemn march in music; or of merriment, as evoked by a dance; or of humour, as evoked by a funny anecdote; or the feeling of quiet, as conveyed by yesterday'S landscape or cradle-song-all this is art.

6

Leo Tolstoy: Art as Expression

The moment the spectators, the hearers, are infected by the same feeling which the composer experienced, we have art. To evoke in oneself a feeling which one has experienced before, and, having evoked it in oneself by means of motions, lines, colours, sounds, images expressed in words, to communicate this feeling in such a way that others may experience the same feeling-in this does the activity of art consist. Art is a human activity which consists in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, communicates to others the feelings experienced by him, so that other men are infected by these feelings and pass through them. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of any mysterious idea, beauty, God; it is not, as the physiological aestheticians say, play, in which a man lets out the surplus of his accumulated energy; it is not the manifestation of emotions by means of external signs; it is not the production of agreeable objects, above all else, not an enjoyment, but a means for the intercourse of men, necessary for man's life and for progress toward the good of the individual and of humanity, uniting men in the same feelings. Just as, thanks to the ability of man to understand ideas which are expressed in words, every man is able to find out everything which in the sphere of thought all humanity has done for him, is able in the present, thanks to the ability of understanding other men's thoughts, to become a participant in the activity of other men, and himself, thanks to this ability, is able to communicate to his contemporaries and to posterity those ideas which he has acquired from others and his own, which have arisen in him; even so, and thanks to man's ability to be infected by other people's feelings through art, there is made accessible to him, in the field of sentiments, everything which humanity passed through before him, the sentiments which are experienced by his contemporaries, the sentiments experienced by men thousands of years ago, and there is made possible the communication of his own sentiments to other people. If men did not have the ability of receiving all the thoughts which are communicated in words and which have been thought out by men who lived before them, and to communicate their ideas to others, they would be like animals and like Kaspar Hauser. If there did not exist man's other ability, to be infected by art, men would be almost more savage still, and, above all else, disunited and hostile.

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Twentieth Century Theories of Art

And so the activity of art is a very important activity, as important as the activity of speech, and just as universal. As the word acts upon us, not only in sermons, orations, and books, but also in every speech in which we communicate our thoughts and experiences to one another, so art, in the broad sense of the word, penetrates all our life, but only a few manifestations of this art do we call art, in the narrower sense of this word. We are accustomed to understand under art only what we read, hear, and see in theatres, at concerts, and at exhibitions-buildings, statues, poems, novels. But all this is only a very small part of that art by means of which we commune with one another in life. The whole of human life is filled with works of art of every kind, from a cradle-song, a jest, mocking, ornamentation of houses, garments, utensils, to church services and solemn processions. All this is the activity of art. Thus, we call art in the narrower sense of the word not all human activity which communicates feelings, but only such as we for some reason select from this whole activity and which we invest with a special significance.... The sign which distinguishes true art from its counterfeit is this indubitable one-the infectiousness of art. If a man without any activity on his part and without any change of his position, in reading, hearing, seeing the work of another man, experiences a state of mind which unites him with that man and with others who, like him, are affected by the object, then the object which evokes such a state is a work of art. No matter how poetical, how seemingly real, how effective or entertaining a work may be, it is not a work of art, if it does not evoke in man that feeling of joy which is distinct from all other feelings, that union of one's soul with another (the author) and with others (the hearers or spectators) who perceive [it] .... It is true, this sign is internal, and men who have forgotten the effect produced by true art and expect from art something different---and there is an immense majority of such in our society-may think that that feeling of diversion and of some excitement, which they experience from the counterfeits of art, is the aesthetical feeling, and although it is impossible to change the minds of these men, just as it is impossible to convince a colourblind person that green is not red, this sign none the less remains fully defined for people with an uncorrupted and unatrophied feeling in matters of art, and clearly distinguishes the feeling produced by art from any other. The chief peculiarity of this feeling is this, that the receiver to such an extent blends with the artist that it seems to him that the object perceived by him was not made by anyone else, but by him, and that every-

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thing expressed by it is the same which he had been wanting to express for a long time. A true work of art has this effect, that in the consciousness of the perceiver, there is destroyed the division between him and the artist, and not only between him and the artist, but also between him and all men who are perceiving the same work of art. In this liberation of the personality, from its separation from other men, from its seclusion, in this blending of the personality with others does the chief attractive force and property of art consist. If a man experiences this feeling, is infected by the mental condition in which the author is, and feels his blending with other men, the object which evokes this state is art; if this infection is lacking, and there is no blending with the author and with those who perceive the production, there is no art. More than this: not only is the infectiousness a certain sign of art, but the degree of the infection is the only standard of the value of art. The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art, not to speak of its contents, that is, independently of the value of those feelings which it conveys. Art becomes more or less infectious in consequence of three conditions: (1) in consequence of a greater or lesser individuality of the feeling conveyed; (2) in consequence of a greater or lesser clearness of the transmission of this feeling; and (3) in consequence of the sincerity of the artist, that is, of the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself experiences the feeling which he is conveying. The more the feeling to be conveyed is individual, the more strongly does it act upon the perceiver. The perceiver experiences a greater enjoyment, the more individual the condition of the mind is, to which he is transferred, and so he more willingly and more powerfully blends with it. But the lucidity of the expression of the feeling contributes to the infectiousness, because, blending in his consciousness with the author, the one who receives the impression is the more satisfied, the more clearly the feeling is expressed which, it seems to him, he has known and experienced for a long time, and for which he has just found an expression. Still more is the degree of the infectiousness of art increased with the degree of the artist's sincerity. The moment the hearer, spectator, reader, feels that the artist is himself infected by his production and writes, sings, plays for himself, and not for the purpose of acting upon others, this mental condition of the artist infects the person receiving the impression, and, on the other hand, as soon as the spectator, reader, hearer, feels that the au9

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

thor writes, sings, plays, not for his own satisfaction, but for him, the person receiving the impression, and does not himself feel what he wants to express, opposition makes its appearance, and the most special and the newest feelings and the most intricate technique not only fail to make an impression, but are even repulsive. I am speaking of three conditions of the infectiousness of art; in reality there is but the last, which is, that the artist should experience an inner need of expressing the feeling which is communicated by him. This condition includes the first, for, if the artist is sincere, he will express the feeling as he has received it. And since no man resembles another, this feeling will be different for anyone else, and the more individual and the deeper the source from which the artist draws, the more intimate and sincere will it be. This sincerity will cause the artist to find a clear expression for the feeling which he wishes to convey. Therefore this third condition, sincerity, is the most important of the three. This condition is always present in peasant art, for which reason it acts so powerfully, and is nearly always absent in our art of the higher classes which is continuously manufactured by the artists for their personal, selfish, or vain purposes. Such are the three conditions, the presence of which separates art from its counterfeits, and at the same time determines the value of each work of art independently of its contents. The absence of one of these conditions has this effect, that the work no longer belongs to art, but to its counterfeits. If a work does not render the individual peculiarity of the artist's feeling, especially, if it is not clearly expressed, or if it did not rise from the author's inner need to express, it is not a work of art. But if all three conditions are present, even in the smallest degree, the work, however weak it may be, is a work of art.

The Evaluation of Art The presence of all three conditions, of individuality, clearness, and sincerity, in varying degrees, determines the worth of the object of art as art, independently of its contents. All works of art are as to their worth classified in accordance with the presence of one of these three conditions. In one it is the individuality of feeling which predominates; in another it is the clearness of expression; in a third-sincerity; in a fourth-sincerity and individuality, but the absence of clearness; in a fifth-peculiarity and clearness, but less sincerity, and so forth, in all possible degrees and combinations. 10

Leo Tolstoy: Art as Expression

Thus is art separated from what is not art, and the worth of art as art determined, independently of its contents, that is, independently of whether it conveys good or bad feelings .... By what is good or bad art, as regards its contents, determined? Art is, together with speech, one of the instruments of intercourse, and so also of progress, that is, of humanity's forward movement toward perfection. Speech makes it possible for the men of the latest generation to know what the preceding generations and the best leading contemporary men have found out by means of experience and by reasoning; art makes it possible for the men of the latest generation to experience all those feelings which men experienced before them and which the best and leading men are still experiencing. And as there takes place an evolution of knowledge, that is, as the truer and necessary knowledge crowds out and takes the place of faulty and unnecessary knowledge, so also does the evolution of feelings take place by means of art, crowding out the lower, less good feelings, which are less necessary for the good of men, to make place for better feelings, which are more necessary for this good. In this does the mission of art consist; and so art is according to its contents better, the more it fulfils this mission, and worse, the less it fulfils it. But the valuation of feelings, that is, the acknowledgment of these or those feelings as better or less good, that is, as necessary for the good of men, is achieved by the religious consciousness of a certain time. In any given historic time and in every society of men there exists a higher comprehension of the meaning of life, attained by the men of this society, which determines the highest good after which this society is striving. This comprehension is the religious consciousness of a certain time and society. This religious consciousness is always clearly expressed by some leading men of the society, and is more or less vividly felt by all. Such a religious consciousness, corresponding with its expression, has always existed in every society. If it seems to us that the religious consciousness is absent in a society, it seems so to us, not because it is really lacking, but because we do not wish to see it. And the reason we do not wish to see it is because it judges our life, which is not in accord with it. The religious consciousness in a society is the same as the direction of flowing water. If the water runs, there is a direction in which it flows. If a society lives, there is a religious consciousness, which indicates the direction along which all the men of that society are tending more or less consciously. 11

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For this reason the religious consciousness has always existed in every society. In correspondence with this religious consciousness the feelings which are conveyed by art have always been valued. Only on the basis of this religious consciousness of its time was there selected from the whole endlessly varied sphere of art that which conveys the feelings that realize in life the religious consciousness of a given time. And such art has always been highly esteemed and encouraged; but the art which conveys feelings which result from the religious consciousness of a former time, which is obsolete and outlived, has always been condemned and despised. All other art, which conveys the most varied feelings, by means of which men commune with one another, has not been condemned and has been admitted, so long as it has not conveyed any feelings which are contrary to the religious consciousness. Thus, for example, the Greeks evolved, approved, and encouraged the art which conveyed the feelings of beauty, strength, valour (Hesiod, Homer, Phidias), and condemned and despised the art which conveyed the feelings of gross sensuality, dejection, effeminacy. The Jews evolved and encouraged the art which conveyed the feelings of loyalty and obedience to the God of the Jews, to His commandments (some parts of the book of Genesis, the prophets, the psalms), and condemned and despised the art which conveyed the feelings of idolatry (the golden calf); all other art-stories, songs, dances, the decoration of the houses, of the utensils, of the wearing apparel-which was not contrary to the religious consciousness, was not considered or condemned at all. Thus has art always and everywhere been esteemed according to its contents, and so it ought to be esteemed, because such a relation to art results from the properties of human nature, and these properties do not change. I know that, according to the opinion which is current in our time, religion is a superstition which humanity has outlived, and that, therefore, it is assumed that in our time there is no religious consciousness common to all men, by which art may be valued. I know that such is the opinion which is diffused among the so-called cultured classes of our time. Men who db not recognize Christianity in its true sense and so invent for themselves all kinds of philosophical and aesthetical theories, which conceal from them the meaninglessness and sinfulness of their lives, cannot help but think thus. These men intentionally, and at times unintentionally, by confusing the concept of the religious cult with the concept of the religious consciousness, think that, by denying the cult, they thereby deny the religious consciousness. But all these attacks on religion and the attempts at establishing a world conception which is contrary to the religious conscious12

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ness of our time, prove more obviously than anything else the presence of this religious consciousness, which judges the lives of men who do not conform to it. If in humanity there is such a thing as progress, that is, a forward movement, there must inevitably exist an indicator of the direction of this movement. Religion has always been such an indicator. The whole of history proves that the progress of humanity has taken place only under the guidance of religion, not the religion of the cult, the Catholic, the Protestant, and so forth, but the religious consciousness. And if the progress of humanity cannot take place without the guidance of religion-the progress is taking place all the time, consequently also at present-there must also exist a religion of our time. Thus, whether the so-called cultured people of our time like it or not, they must recognize the existence of religion as a necessary guide to progress even in our time. But if there is among us a religious consciousness, our art must be valued on the basis of this religious consciousness; and just as always and at all times, there was selected from all indifferent art, cognized, highly esteemed, and encouraged that art which conveys feelings that arise from the religious consciousness of our time, and the art which is contrary to this consciousness was condemned and despised, and all other indifferent art was not selected and not encouraged. The religious consciousness of our time, in its most general, practical application, is the consciousness of the fact that our good, the material and the spiritual, the individual and the general, the temporal and the eternal, is contained in the brotherhood of all men, in our love-union with one another. This consciousness was not only expressed by Christ and all the best men of the past, and is not only repeated in the most varied forms and from the most varied sides by the best men of our time, but has also served as a guiding thread in the whole complex work of humanity, which, on the one hand, consists in the destruction of the physical and moral barriers, which interfere with the union of men, and, on the other, in the establishment of those principles, common to all men, which can and must unite all men into one universal brotherhood. On the basis of this consciousness we must estimate the value of all the phenomena of our life, among them also our art, selecting from its whole sphere that which conveys feelings arising from this religious consciousness, esteeming highly and encouraging this art, rejecting what is contrary to this consciousness, and refraining from ascribing to other art that meaning which is not proper to it.... Christian art either evokes in men those feelings which through love 13

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

of God and our neighbour draw them to a greater and ever greater union and make them ready and capable of such a union; or it evokes in them those feelings which show them that they are already united in the unity of the joys and sorrows of life. And so the Christian art of our time can be, and actually is, of two sorts: (1) the art which conveys sentiments which arise from the religious consciousness of man's position in the world, in relation to God and to our neighbour-religious art, and (2) the art which conveys the simplest feelings of life, such as are accessible to all men of the whole world-vital, national, universal art. It is only these two kinds of art that in our time may be regarded as good art. The first kind of religious art, which conveys both the positive sentiments of love of God and of our neighbour as also the negative indignations, the terrors in violating love, is manifested chiefly in the form of literature and partIy in painting and sculpture; the second, that of universal art, which conveys feelings that are accessible to all, is manifested in literature, and in painting, and in sculpture, and in dances, and in architecture, and chiefly in music. If I were required to point out in modern art the models of each of these kinds of art, I should point, as to models of a higher art, which arises from the love of God and of our neighbour, in the sphere of literature, to Schiller's Robbers; from the moderns, to Hugo's Les Pauvres Gens and to his Les Miserables; to Dickens's stories and novels, Tale of Two Cities, Chimes, and others, to Uncle Tom's Cabin, to Dostoevski, especially his Dead House, to George Eliot's Adam Bede. In the painting of modern times there are, however strange this may seem, hardly any works of the kind which directly convey the Christian sentiments of love of God and of our neighbour; this is especially true among famous painters. There are gospel pictures, and of these there is a great quantity; they all illustrate historical events with a great wealth of details, but do not convey, and cannot convey, that religious sentiment which the authors do not possess. There are many pictures which represent the personal sentiments of various people, but there are very few pictures which reproduce acts of self-renunciation and Christian love, and these are only among little known painters and in unfinished pictures, but mainly in drawings. Such is Kramski's painting, which is worth many of his pictures, and which represents a drawing-room with a balcony, past which solemnly march the regiments returning home. On the balcony is standing a nurse with a babe, and a boy. They are taking in the procession of the soldiers; but the mother, covering her face with a handkerchief, falls sobbing

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with her face against the back of the sofa.... such is also the picture which represents a rescue boat hurrying in a heavy storm to save a drowning ship, by the French painter Morlon. There are also some other pictures which approach this kind, and which express the labourer with love and respect. Such are Millet's pictures, especially his drawing, "The Digger Resting"; of the same character the pictures by Jules Breton, L'Hermite, Defregger, and others. Samples of works evoking indignation and terror at the violation of love of God and of our neighbour are Gay's picture, "The Judgment," and Liezen Mayer's picture, "The Signing of the Sentence of Death." There are few pictures even of this category.... It is even more difficult in the new art of the higher classes to point out models of the second kind, of good, universal, vital art, especially in literature and in music. Even if there are works which by their inner contents, like Don Quixote, Moliere's comedies, Dickens's Copperfield and Pickwick Club, Gogol's and Pushkin's stories, and a few things by Maupassant, may be referred to this kind, these on account of the exclusiveness of the feelings conveyed and on account of the special details of time and place, and, chiefly, on account of their poverty of contents, as compared with the models of ancient universal art, as, for example, the history of Joseph the Fair, are for the most part accessible only to people of their own nation and even of their own circle.... In music the same happens as in literary art, and from the same reasons. On account of the poverty of their contents, the tunes of the modern musicians are strikingly barren. And so, to strengthen the impression produced by a barren tune, the modem musicians burden every most insignificant melody with the most complex modulations of their own national tunes, or only of such as are proper to a certain circle, a certain musical school. Melody-every melody-is free, and may be understood by all; but the moment it is tied to a certain harmony and is obstructed by it, it becomes comprehensible only to men who are familiar with that harmony, and becomes completely foreign, not only to other nationalities, but also to all men who do not belong to the circle in which men have trained themselves in certain forms of harmony.. . In music, outside of the marches and dances of composers, which approach the demands of universal art, there may be pointed out the popular songs of the various nations, from the Russian to the Chinese; but in the learned music there are but a very few productions, the famous violin aria by Bach, Chopin's Es dur nocturne, and, perhaps, a dozen things, not entire pieces, but passages selected from the productions of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin... 2

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In painting, as such works of bad art must be similarly regarded all pictures, false, religious, patriotic, and exclusive, in short, all pictures which represent amusements and delights of a wealthy and idle life, all socalled symbolical pictures, in which the meaning of the symbol itself is accessible only to people of a certain circle, and, above all else, all pictures with lascivious subjects, all that horrible feminine nakedness, which fills all the exhibitions and galleries. To the same category belongs all chamber and opera music of our time, beginning in particular with BeethovenSchumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner-which by its contents is devoted to the expression of feelings which are accessible only to men who have nurtured in themselves a morbid nervous irritability, excited by this exclusive and complicated music. 'What, the ninth symphony belongs to the bad kind of art?" do I hear voices of indignation. "Unquestionably," do I answer. Everything I have written, I have written for the purpose of finding a clear, rational criterion, by which to judge the values of works of art. This criterion, coinciding with simple common sense, shows to me indubitably that Beethoven's symphony is not a good work of art. ... To verify this assertion, I first of all put the question to myself: If this work does not belong to the highest order of religious art, has it any other property of good art of ()ur time-the property of uniting all men in one feeling? Does it not belong to the Christian universal art? I cannot answer affirmatively, because I not only fail to see that the feelings conveyed in this production are able to unite people who are not specially educated to submit to this complex hypnotization, but I cannot even imagine a crowd of normal men that could make anything out of this long and confused artificial work, but some short passages drowned in a sea of the incomprehensible. And so I am involuntarily obliged to conclude that this work belongs to bad art. What is remarkable is that to the end of the symphony there is attached Schiller'S poem which expresses the idea, though not clearly, that feeling (Schiller speaks only of the feeling of joy> unites people and evokes love in them. Although this song is sung at the end of the symphony, the music does not correspond to the thought of the poem, since this music is exclusive and does not unite all men, but only a few, separating them from the rest of men. In precisely the same malUler one would have to judge many, very many works of art of every description, which among the higher classes of

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our society are considered to be great. By the same, the only firm criterion one would have to judge the famous Divine Comedy and Jerusalem Delivered, and the greater part of the productions of Shakespeare and Goethe, and in painting all the representations of miracles and Raphael's IITransfiguration," and so forth.

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R.G. Collingwood Art as Expression The Meaning of Craft The first sense of the word 'art' to be distinguished from art proper is the obsolete sense in which it means what in this book I shall call craft. This is what ars means in ancient Latin, and what texV1l means in Greek: the power to produce a preconceived result by means of consciously controlled and directed action. In order to take the first step towards a sound aesthetic, it is necessary to disentangle the notion of craft from that of art proper. In order to do this, again, we must first enumerate the chief characteristics of craft. (1) Craft always involves a distinction between means and end, each clearly conceived as something distinct from the other but related to it. The term 'means' is loosely applied to things that are used in order to reach the end, such as tools, machines, or fuel. Strictly, it applies not to the things but to the actions concerned with them: manipulating the tools, tending the machines, or burning the fuel. These actions (as implied by the literal sense of the word means) are passed through or traversed in order to reach the end, and are left behind when the end is reached. This may serve to distinguish the idea of means from two other ideas with which it is sometimes confused: that of part, and that of material. The relation of part to whole is like that of means to end, in that the part is indispensable to the whole, is what it is because of its relation to the whole, and may exist by itself before the whole comes into existence; but when the whole exists the part exists too, whereas, when the end exists, the means have ceased to exist. As for the idea of material, we shall return to that in (4) below. (2) It involves a distinction between planning and execution. The result to be obtained is preconceived or thought out before being arrived at. The craftsman knows what he wants to make before he makes it. This foreknowledge is absolutely indispensable to craft: if something, for example stainless steel, is made without such foreknowledge, the making of it is not a case of craft but an accident. Moreover, this foreknowledge is not vague but precise. If a person sets out to make a table, but conceives the table only vaguely, as somewhere between two by four feet and three by six, and between two and three feet high, and so forth, he is no craftsman. 18

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(3) Means and end are related in one way in the process of planning; in the opposite way in the process of execution. In planning the end is prior to the means. The end is thought out first, and afterwards the means are thought out. In execution the means come first, and the end is reached through them. (4) There is a distinction between raw material and finished product or artifact. A craft is always exercised upon something, and aims at the transformation of this into something different. That upon which it works begins as raw material and ends as finished product. The raw material is found ready made before the special work of the craft begins. (5) There is a distinction between form and matter. The matter is what is identical in the raw material and the finished product; the form is what is different, what the exercise of the craft changes. To describe the raw material as raw is not to imply that it is formless, but only that it has not yet the form which it is to acquire through 'transformation' into finished product. (6) There is a hierarchical relation between various crafts, one supplying what another needs, one using what another provides. There are three kinds of hierarchy: of materials, of means, and of parts. (a) The raw material of one craft is the finished product of another. Thus the silviculturist propagates trees and looks after them as they grow, in order to provide raw material for the felling-men who transform them into logs; these are raw material for the saw-mill which transforms them into planks; and these, after a further process of selection and seasoning, become raw material for a joiner. (b) In the hierarchy of means, one craft supplies another with tools. Thus the timber-merchant supplies pit-props to the miner; the miner supplies coal to the blacksmith; the blacksmith supplies horseshoes to the farmer; and so on. (c) In the hierarchy of parts, a complex operation like the manufacture of a motor-car is parcelled out among a number of trades: one firm makes the engine, another the gears, another the chassis, another the tyres, another the electrical equipment, and so on; the final assembling is not strictly the manufacture of the car but only the bringing together of these parts. In one or more of these ways every craft has a hierarchical character; either as hierarchically related to other crafts, or as itself consisting of various heterogeneous operations hierarchically related among themsel ves. Without claiming that these features together exhaust the notion of craft, or that each of them separately is peculiar to it, we may claim with tolerable confidence that where most of them are absent from a certain ac19

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

tivity that activity is not a craft, and, if it is called by that name, is so called either by mistake or in a vague and inaccurate way.

The Technical Theory of Art It was the Greek philosophers who worked out the idea of craft, and it is in

their writings that the above distinctions have been expounded once for all. The philosophy of craft, in fact, was one of the greatest and most solid achievements of the Greek mind, or at any rate of that school, from Socrates to Aristotle, whose work happens to have been most completely preserved. Great discoveries seem to their makers even greater than they are. A person who has solved one problem is inevitably led to apply that solution to others. Once the Socratic school had laid down the main lines of a theory of craft, they were bound to look for instances of craft in all sorts of likely and unlikely places. To show how they met this temptation, here yielding to it and there resisting it, or first yielding to it and then laboriously correcting their error, would need a long essay. Two brilliant cases of successful resistance may, however, be mentioned: Plato's demonstration (Republic, 330D-336A) that justice is not a craft, with the pendant (336E-3S4A) that injustice is not one either; and Aristotle's rejection (MetaphysicsA) of the view stated in Plato's Timaeus, that the relation between God and the world is a case of the relation between craftsman and artifact. When they came to deal with aesthetic problems, however, both Plato and Aristotle yielded to the temptation. They took it for granted that· poetry, the only art which they discussed in detail, was a kind of craft, and spoke of this craft as 1t01.ll'ttXll texVTl, poet-craft. What kind of craft was this? There are some crafts, like cobbling, carpentering, or weaving, whose end is to produce a certain type of artifact; others, like agriculture or stock-breeding or horse-breaking, whose end is to produce or improve certain non-human types of organism; others again, like medicine or education or warfare, whose end is to bring certain human beings into certain states of body or mind. But we need not ask which of these is the genus of which poet-craft is a species, because they are not mutually exclusive. The cobbler or carpenter or weaver is not simply trying to produce shoes or carts or cloth. He produces these because there is a demand for them; that

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is, they are not ends to him, but means to the end of satisfying a specific demand. What he is really aiming at is the production of a certain state of mind in his customers, the state of having these demands satisfied. The same analysis applies to the second group. Thus in the end these three kinds of craft reduce to one. They are all ways of bringing human beings into certain desired conditions. The same description is true of poet-craft. The poet is a kind of skilled producer; he produces for consumers; and the effect of his skill is to bring about in them certain states of mind, which are conceived in advance as desirable states. The poet, like any other kind of craftsman, must know what effect he is aiming at, and must learn by experience and precept, which is only the imparted experience of others, how to produce it. This is poet-craft, as conceived by Plato and Aristotle and, following them, such writers as Horace in his Ars Poetica. There will be analogous crafts of painting, sculpture, and so forth; music, at least for Plato, is not a separate art but is a constituent part of poetry. I have gone back to the ancients, because their thought, in this matter as in so many others, has left permanent traces on our own, both for good and for ill. There are suggestions in some of them, especially in Plato, of a quite different view; but this is the one which they have made familiar, and upon which both the theory and the practice of the arts has for the most part rested down to the present time. Present-day fashions of thought have in some ways even tended to reinforce it. We are apt nowadays to think about most problems, including those of art, in terms either of economics or of psychology; and both ways of thinking tend to subsume the philosophy of art under the philosophy of craft. To the economist, art presents the appearance of a specialized group of industries; the artist is a producer, his audience consumers who pay him for benefits ultimately definable in terms of the states of mind which his productivity enables them to enjoy. To the psychologist, the audience consists of persons reacting in certain ways to stimuli provided by the artist; and the artist's business is to know what reactions are desired or desirable, and to provide the stimuli which will elicit them. The technical theory of art is thus by no means a matter of merely antiquarian interest. It is actually the way in which most people nowadays think of art; and especially economists and psychologists, the people to whom we look (sometimes in vain) for special guidance in the problems of modem life.

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But this theory is simply a vulgar error, as anybody can see who looks at it with a critical eye.... [Collingwood goes on to argue that art is not any kind of craft. The six criteria of craft do not apply to works of art. He grants that there is a grain of truth in the modern theory which emphasizes artistic truth.] The same cannot be said about another attempt to rehabilitate the technical theory of art, namely, that of a very large school of modem psychologists, and of critics who adopt their way of speaking. Here the entire work of art is conceived as an artifact, designed (when a sufficient degree of skill is present to justify the word) as means to the realization of an end beyond it, namely, a state of mind in the artist's audience. In order to affect his audience in a certain way, the artist addresses them in a certain manner, by placing before them a certain work of art. In so far as he is a competent artist, one condition at least is fulfilled: the work of art does affect them as he intends it should. There is a second condition which may be fulfilled: the state of mind thus aroused in them may be in one way or another a valuable state of mind; one that enriches their lives, and thus gives him a claim not only on their admiration but also on their gratitude. The first thing to notice about this stimulus-and-reaction theory of art is that it is not new. It is the theory of the tenth book of Plato's Republic, of Aristotle's Poetics, and of Horace's Ars Poetica. The psychologists who make use of it have, knowingly or unknowingly, taken over the poet-craft doctrine bodily, with no suspicion of the devastating criticism it has received at the hands of aestheticians in the last few centuries. This is not because their views have been based on a study of Plato and Aristotle, to the neglect of more modern authors. It is because, like good inductive scientists, they have kept their eye on the facts, but (a disaster against which inductive methods afford no protection) the Wrong facts. Their theory of art is based on a study of art falsely so called. There are numerous cases in which somebody claiming the title of artist deliberately sets himself to arouse certain states of mind in his audience. The funny man who lays himself out to get a laugh has at his command a number of well-tried methods for getting it; the purveyor of sobstuff is in a similar case; the political or religious orator has a definite end before him and adopts definite means for achieving it, and so on. We might even attempt a rough classification of these ends. 3 First, the 'artist's' purpose may be to arouse a certain kind of emotion. The emotion may be of almost any kind; a more important distinction emerges according as it is aroused simply for its own sake, as an enjoyable experience, or for the sake 22

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of its value in the affairs of practical life. The funny man and the sob-stuff monger fall on one side in this division, the political and religious orator on the other. Secondly, the purpose may be to stimulate certain intellectual activities. These again may be of very various kinds, but they may be stimulated with either of two motives: either because the objects upon which they are directed are thought of as worth understanding, or because the activities themselves are thought of as worth pursuing, even though they lead to nothing in the way of knowledge that is of importance. Thirdly, the purpose may be to stimulate a certain kind of action; here again with two kinds of motive: either because the action is conceived as expedient, or because it is conceived as right. Here are six kinds of art falsely so called; called by that name because they are kinds of craft in which the practitioner can by the use of his skill evoke a desired psychological reaction in his audience, and hence they come under the obsolete, but not yet dead and buried, conception of poetcraft, painter-craft, and so forth; falsely so called, because the distinction of means and end, upon which every one of them rests, does not belong to art proper. Let us give the six their right names. Where an emotion is aroused for its own sake, as an enjoyable experience, the craft of arousing it is amusement; where for the sake of its practical value, magic (the meaning of that word will be explained in chapter IV). Where intellectual faculties are stimulated for the mere sake of their exercise, the work designed to stimulate them is a puzzle; where for the sake of knowing this or that thing, it is instruction. Where a certain practical activity is stimulated as expedient, that which stimulates it is advertisement or (in the current modem sense, not the old sense) propaganda; where it is stimulated as right, exhorta tion. These six between them, singly or in combination, pretty well exhaust the function of whatever in the modem world wrongfully usurps the name of art. None of them has anything to do with art proper. This is not because (as Oscar Wilde said, with his curious talent for just missing a truth and then giving himself a prize for hitting it) 'all art is quite useless', for it is not; a work of art may very well amuse, instruct, puzzle, exhort, and so forth, without ceasing to be art, and in these ways it may be very useful indeed. It is because, as Oscar Wilde perhaps meant to say, what makes it art is not the same as what makes it useful. Deciding what psychological reaction a so-called work of art produces (for example, asking yourself how a certain poem Imakes you feel') has nothing whatever to do

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with deciding whether it is a real work of art or not. Equally irrelevant is the question what psychological reaction it is meant to produce. The classification of psychological reactions produced by poems, pictures, music, or the like is thus not a classification of kinds of art. It is a classification of kinds of pseudo-art. But the term 'pseudo-art' means something that is not art but is mistaken for art; and something that is not art can be mistaken for it only if there is some ground for the mistake: if the thing mistaken for art is akin to art in such a way that the mistake easily arises. What must this kinship be? . .. [T]here may be a combination of, for example, art with religion, of such a kind that the artistic motive, though genuinely present, is subordinated to the religious. To call the result of such a combination art, tout court, would be to invite the reply, 'it is not art but religion'; that is, the accusation that what is simply religion is being mistaken for art. But such a mistake could never in fact be made. What happens is that a combination of art and religion is elliptically called art, and then characteristics which it possesses not as art but as religion are mistakenly supposed to belong to it as art. So here. These various kinds of pseudo-art are in reality various kinds of use to which art may be put. In order that any of these purposes may be realized, there must first be art, and then a subordination of art to some utilitarian end....

Expressing Emotion and Arousing Emotion Our first question is this. Since the artist proper has something to do with emotion, and what he does with it is not to arouse it, what is it that he does? It will be remembered that the kind of answer we expect to this question is an answer derived from what we all know and all habitually say; nothing original or recondite, but something entirely commonplace. Nothing could be more entirely commonplace than to say he expresses them. The idea is familiar to every artist, and to every one else who has any acquaintance with the arts. To state it is not to state a philosophical theory or definition of art; it is to state a fact or supposed fact about which, when we have sufficiently identified it, we shall have later to theorize philosophically. For the present it does not matter whether the fact that is alleged, when it is said that the artist expresses emotion, is really a fact or only supposed to be one. Whichever it is, we have to identify it, that is, to decide what it is that people are saying when they use the

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phrase. Later on, we shall have to see whether it will fit into a coherent theory. They are referring to a situation, real or supposed, of a definite kind. When a man is said to express emotion, what is being said about him comes to this. At first, he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: 'I feel ... I don't know what I feel.' From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It has also something to do with consciousness: the emotion expressed is an emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious. It has also something to do with the way in which he feels the emotion. As unexpressed, he feels it in what we have called a helpless and oppressed way; as expressed, he feels it in a way from which this sense of oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightened and eased. This lightening of emotions which is somehow connected with the expression of them has a certain resemblance to the 'catharsis' by which emotions are earthed through being discharged into a make-believe situation; but the two things are not the same. Suppose the emotion is one of anger. If it is effectively earthed, for example by fancying oneself kicking some one down stairs, it is thereafter no longer present in the mind as anger at all: we have worked it off and are rid of it. If it is expressed, for example by putting it into hot and bitter words, it does not disappear from the mind; we remain angry; but instead of the sense of oppression which accompanies an emotion of anger not yet recognized as such, we have that sense of alleviation which comes when we are conscious of our own emotion as anger, instead of being conscious of it only as an unidentified perturbation. This is what we refer to when we say that it 'does us good' to express our emotions. The expression of an emotion by speech may be addressed to some one; but if so it is not done with the intention of arousing a like emotion in him. If there is any effect which we wish to produce in the hearer, it is only the effect which we call making him understand how we feel. But, as we have already seen, this is just the effect which expressing our emotions has on ourselves. It makes us, as well as the people to whom we talk, understand how we feel. A person arousing emotion sets out to affect his 25

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audience in a way in which he himself is not necessarily affected. He and his audience stand in quite different relations to the act, very much as physician and patient stand in quite different relations towards a drug administered by the one and taken by the other. A person expressing emotion, on the contrary, is treating himself and his audience in the same kind of way; he is making his emotions clear to his audience, and that is what he is doing to himself. It follows from this that the expression of emotion, simply as expression, is not addressed to any particular audience. It is addressed primarily to the speaker himself, and secondarily to anyone who can understand. Here again, the speaker's attitude towards his audience is quite unlike that of a person desiring to arouse in his audience a certain emotion. If that is what he wishes to do, he must know the audience he is addressing. He must know what type of stimulus will produce the desired kind of reaction in people of that particular sort; and he must adapt his language to his audience in the sense of making sure that it contains stimuli appropriate to their peculiarities. If what he wishes to do is to express his emotions intelligibly, he has to express them in such a way as to be intelligible to himself; his audience is then in the position of persons who overhear him doing this.4 Thus the stimulus-and-reaction terminology has no applicability to the situation. The means-and-end, or technique, terminology too is inapplicable. Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing it is therefore an exploration of his own emotions. He is trying to find out what these emotions are. There is certainly here a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which appropriate means· can be thought out in the light of our knowledge of its special character. Expression is an activity of which there can be no technique.

Expression and Individualization Expressing an emotion is not the same thing as describing it. To say 'I am angry' is to describe one's emotion, not to express it. The words in which it is expressed need not contain any reference to anger as such at all. Indeed, so far as they simply and solely express it, they cannot contain any such reference. The curse of Emulphus, as invoked by Dr. Slop on the unknown

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person who tied certain knots, is a classical and supreme expression of anger; but it does not contain a single word descriptive of the emotion it expresses. This is why, as literary critics well know, the use of epithets in poetry, or even in prose where expressiveness is aimed at, is a danger. If you want to express the terror which something causes, you must not give it an epithet like 'dreadful'. For that describes the emotion instead of expressing it, and your language becomes frigid, that is inexpressive, at once. A genuine poet, in his moments of genuine poetry, never mentions by name the emotions he is expressing. Some people have thought that a poet who wishes to express a great variety of subtly differentiated emotions might be hampered by the lack of a vocabulary rich in words referring to the distinctions between them; and that psychology, by working out such a vocabulary, might render a valuable service to poetry. This is the opposite of the truth. The poet needs no such words at all; the existence or non-existence of a scientific terminology describing the emotions he wishes to express is to him a matter of perfect indifference. If such a terminology, where it exists, is allowed to affect his own use of language, it affects it for the worse. The reason why description, so far from helping expression, actually damages it, is that description generalizes. To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualizes. The anger which I feel here and now, with a certain person, for a certain cause, is no doubt an instance of anger, and in describing it as anger one is telling truth about it; but it is much more than mere anger: it is a peculiar anger, not quite like any anger that I ever felt before, and probably not quite like any anger I shall ever feel again. To become fully conscious of it means becoming conscious of it not merely as an instance of anger, but as this quite peculiar anger. Expressing it, we saw, has something to do with becoming conscious of it; therefore, if being fully conscious of it means being conscious of all its peculiarities, fully expressing it mea~s expressing all its peculiarities. The poet, therefore, in proportion as he understands his business, gets as far away as possible from merely labelling his emotions as instances of this or that general kind, and takes enormous pains to individualize them by expressing them in terms which reveal their difference from any other emotion of the same sort. This is a point in which art proper, as the expression of emotion, differs sharply and obviously from any craft whose aim it is to arouse emo-

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tion. The end which a craft sets out to realize is always conceived in general tenns, never individualized. However accurately defined it may be, it is always defined as the production of a thing having characteristics that could be shared by other things. A joiner, making a table out of these pieces of wood and no others, makes it to measurements and specifications which, even if actually shared by no other table, might in principle be shared by other tables. A physician treating a patient for a certain complaint is trying to produce in him a condition which might be, and probably has been, often produced in others, namely, the condition of recovering from that complaint. So an 'artist' setting out to produce a certain emotion in his audience is setting out to produce not an individual emotion, but an emotion of a certain kind. It follows that the means appropriate to its production will be not individual means but means of a certain kind: that is to say, means which are always in principle replaceable by other similar means. As every good craftsman insists, there is always a 'right way' of performing any operation. A 'way' of acting is a general pattern to which various individual actions may conform. In order that the 'work of art' should produce its intended psychological effect, therefore, whether this effect be magical or merely amusing, what is necessary is that it should satisfy certain conditions, possess certain characteristics: in other words be, not this work and no other, but a work of this kind and of no other. This explains the meaning of the generalization which Aristotle and others have ascribed to art. We have already seen that Aristotle's Poetics is concerned not with art proper but with representative art, and representative art of one definite kind. He is not analysing the religious drama of a hundred years before, he is analysing the amusement literature of the fourth century, and giving rules for its composition. The end being not individual but general (the production of an emotion of a certain kind) the means too are general (the portrayal, not of this individual act, but of an act of this sort; not, as he himself puts it, what Alcibiades did, but what anybody of a certain kind would do). Sir Joshua Reynolds's idea of generalization is in principle the same; he expounds it in connexion with what he calls 'the grand style', which means a style intended to produce emotions of a certain type. He is quite right; if you want to produce a typical case of a certain emotion, the way to do it is to put before your audience a representation of the typical features belonging to the kind of thing that produces it: make your kings very royal, your soldiers very soldierly, your women very feminine, your cottages very cottagesque, your oak-trees very oakish, and so on. 28

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Art proper, as expression of emotion, has nothing to do with all this. The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, 'I want to get this clear." It is no use to him to get something else clear, however like it this other thing may be. Nothing will serve as a substitute. He does not want a thing of a certain kind, he wants a certain thing. This is why the kind of person who takes his literature as psychology, saying 'How admirably this writer depicts the feelings of women, or bus-drivers, or homosexuals ...', necessarily misunderstands every real work of art with which he comes into contact, and takes for good art, with infallible precision, what is not art at all.

Selection and Aesthetic Emotion It has sometimes been asked whether emotions can be divided into those suitable for expression by artists and those unsuitable. If by art one means art proper, and identifies this with expression, the only possible answer is that there can be no such distinction. Whatever is expressible is expressible. There may be ulterior motives in special cases which make it desirable to express some emotions and not others; but only if by 'express' one means express publicly, that is, allow people to overhear one expressing oneself. This is because one cannot possibly decide that a certain emotion is one which for some reason it would be undesirable to express thus publicly, unless one first becomes conscious of it; and doing this, as we saw, is somehow bound up with expressing it. If art means the expression of emotion, the artist as such must be absolutely candid; his speech must be absolutely free. This is not a precept, it is a statement. It does not mean that the artist ought to be candid, it means that he is an artist only in so far as he is candid. Any kind of selection, any decision to express this emotion and not that, is inartistic not in the sense that it damages the perfect sincerity which distinguishes good art from bad, but in the sense that it represents a further process of a non-artistic kind, carried out when the work of expression proper is already complete. For until that work is complete one does not know what emotions one feels; and is therefore not in a position to pick and choose, and give one of them preferential treatment. From these considerations a certain corollary follows about the division of art into distinct arts. Two such divisions are current: one according to the medium in which the artist works, into painting, poetry, music, and the like; the other according to the kind of emotion he expresses, into tragic, comic, and so forth. We are concerned with the second. If the dif29

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ference between tragedy and comedy is a difference between the emotions they express, it is not a difference that can be present to the artist's mind when he is beginning his work; if it were, he would know what emotion he was going to express before he had expressed it. No artist, therefore, so far as he is an artist proper, can set out to write a comedy, a tragedy, an elegy, or the like. So far as he is an artist proper, he is just as likely to write any one of these as any other; which is the truth that Socrates was heard expounding towards the dawn, among the sleeping figures in Agathon's dining-room. 5 These distinctions, therefore, have only a very limited value. They can be properly used in two ways. (1) When a work of art is complete, it can be labelled ex post facto as tragic, comic, or the like, according to the character of the emotions chiefly expressed in it. But understood in that sense the distinction is of no real importance. (2) If we are talking about representational art, the case is very different. Here the so-called artist knows in advance what kind of emotion he wishes to excite, and will construct works of different kinds according to the different kinds of effect they are to produce. In the case of representational art, therefore, distinctions of this kind are not only admissible as an ex post facto classification of things to which in their origin it is alien; they are present from the beginning as a determining factor in the so-called artist's plan of work. The same considerations provide an answer to the question whether there is such a thing as a specific 'aesthetic emotion'. If it is said that there is such an emotion independently of its expression in art, and that the business of artists is to express it, we must answer that such a view is nonsense. It implies, first, that artists have emotions of various kinds, among which is this peculiar aesthetic emotion; secondly, that they select this aesthetic emotion for expression. If the first proposition were true, the second would have to be false. If artists only find out what their emotions are in the course of finding out how to express them, they cannot begin the work of expression by deciding what emotion to express. In a different sense, however, it is true that there is a specific aesthetic emotion. As we have seen, an unexpressed emotion is accompanied by a feeling of oppression; when it is expressed and thus comes into consciousness the same emotion is accompanied by a new feeling of alleviation or easement, the sense that this oppression is removed. It resembles the feeling of relief that comes when a burdensome intellectual or moral problem has been solved. We may call it, if we like, the specific feeling of having successfully expressed ourselves; and there is no reason why it should not be called a specific aesthetic emotion. But it is not a specific

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kind of emotion pre-existing to the expression of it, and having the peculiarity that when it comes to be expressed it is expressed artistically. It is an emotional colouring which attends the expression of any emotion whatever.

The Artist and the Ordinary Man I have been speaking of 'the artist', in the present chapter, as if artists were persons of a special kind, differing somehow either in mental endowment or at least in the way they use their endowment from the ordinary persons who make up their audience. But this segregation of artists from ordinary human beings belongs to the conception of art as craft; it cannot be reconciled with the conception of art as expression. If art were a kind of craft, it would follow as a matter of course. Any craft is a specialized form of skiII, and those who possess it are thereby marked out from the rest of mankind. If art is the skill to amuse people, or in general to arouse emotions in them, the amusers and the amused form two different classes, differing in their respectively active and passive relation to the craft of exciting determinate emotions; and this difference will be due, according to whether the artist is 'born' or 'made', either to a specific mental endowment in the artist, which in theories of this type has gone by the name of 'genius', or to a specific training. If art is not a kind of craft, but the expression of emotion, this distinction of kind between artist and audience disappears. For the artist has an audience only in so far as people hear him expressing himself, and understand what they hear him saying. Now, if one person says something by way of expressing what is in his mind, and another hears and understands him, the hearer who understands him has that same thing in his mind. The question whether he would have had it if the first had not spoken need not here be raised; however it is answered, what has just been said is equally true. If some one says 'Twice two is four' in the hearing of some one incapable of carrying out the simplest arithmetical operation, he will be understood by himself, but not by his hearer. The hearer can understand only if he can add two and two in his own mind. Whether he could do it before he heard the speaker say those words makes no difference. What is here said of expressing thoughts is equally true of expressing emotions. If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can understand him are those who are capable of experiencing that kind of fear themselves. Hence, when some one reads and un31

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derstands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet's expression of his, the poet's, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet's words, which have thus become his own words. As Coleridge put it, we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets. We know that he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours. Thus, if art is the activity of expressing emotions, the reader is an artist as well as the writer. There is no distinction of kind between artist and audience. This does not mean that there is no distinction at all. When Pope wrote that the poet's business was to say 'what all have felt but none so well express'd', we may interpret his words as meaning (whether or no Pope himself consciously meant this when he wrote them) that the poet's difference from his audience lies in the fact that, though both do exactly the same thing, namely express this particular emotion in these particular words, the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the audience can express it only when the poet has shown them how. The poet is not singular either in his having that emotion or in his power of expressing it; he is singular in his ability to take the initiative in expressing what all feel, and all can express.

The Curse of the Ivory Tower I have already had occasion to criticize the view that artists can or should form a special order or caste, marked off by special genius or special training from the rest of the community. That view, we have seen, was a byproduct of the technical theory of art. This criticism can now be reinforced by pointing out that a segregation of this kind is not only unnecessary but fatal to the artist's real function. If artists are really to express 'what all have felt', they must share the emotions of all. Their experiences, the general attitude they express towards life, must be of the same kind as that of the persons among whom they hope to find an audience. If they form themselves into a special clique, the emotions they express will be the emotions of that clique; and the consequence will be that their work becomes intelligible only to their fellow artists. This is in fact what happened to a great extent during the nineteenth century, when the segregation of artists from the rest of mankind reached its culmination. If art had really been a craft, like medicine or warfare, the effect of this segregation would have been all to the good, for a craft only becomes more efficient if it organizes itself into the shape of a community devoted 32

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to serving the interests of the public in a specialized way, and planning its whole life with an eye to the conditions of this service. Because it is not a craft, but the expression of emotions, the effect was the opposite of this. A situation arose in which novelists, for example, found themselves hardly at their ease except in writing novels about novelists, which appealed to nobody except other novelists. This vicious circle was most conspicuous in certain continental writers like Anatole France or 0' Annunzio, whose subject-matter often seemed to be limited by the limits of the segregated clique of 'intellectuals'. The corporate life of the artistic community became a kind of ivory tower whose prisoners could think and talk of nothing except themselves, and had only one another for audience. Transplanted into the more individualistic atmosphere of England, the result was different. Instead of a single (though no doubt subdivided) clique of artists, all inhabiting the same ivory tower, the tendency was for each artist to construct an ivory tower of his own: to live, that is to say, in a world of his own devising, cut off not only from the ordinary world of common people but even from the corresponding worlds of other artists. Thus Burne-Jones lived in a world whose contents were ungraciously defined by a journalist as 'green light and gawky girls'; Leighton in a world of sham Hellenism; and it was the call of practical life that rescued Yeats from the sham world of his youthful Celtic twilight, forced him into the clear air of real Cel tic life, and made him a great poet. In these ivory towers art languished. The reason is not hard to understand. A man might easily have been born and bred within the confines of a society as narrow and specialized as any nineteenth-century artistic coterie, thinking its thoughts and feeling its emotions because his experience contained no others. Such a man, in so far as he expressed these emotions, would be genuinely expressing his own experience. The narrowness or wideness of the experience which an artist expresses has nothing to do with the merits of his art. A Jane Austen, born and bred in an atmosphere of village gossip, can make great art out of the emotions that atmosphere generates. But a person who shuts himself up in the limits of a narrow coterie has an experience which includes the emotions of the larger world in which he was born and bred, as well as those of the little society he has chosen to join. If he decides to express only the emotions that pass current within the limits of that little society, he is selecting certain of his emotions for expression. The reason why this inevitably produces bad art is that, as we have already seen, it can only be done when the person selecting already knows what his emotions are; that is, has al33

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ready expressed them. His real work as an artist is a work which, as a member of his artistic coterie, he repudiates. Thus the literature of the ivory tower is a literature whose only possible value is an amusement value by which persons imprisoned within that tower, whether by their misfortune or their fault, help themselves and each other to pass their time without dying of boredom or of home-sickness for the world they have left behind; together with a magical value by which they persuade themselves and each other that imprisonment in such a place and in such company is a high privilege. Artistic value it has none.

Expressing Emotion and Betraying Emotion Finally, the expressing of emotion must not be confused with what may be called the betraying of it, that is, exhibiting symptoms of it. When it is said that the artist in the proper sense of that word is a person who expresses his emotions, this does not mean that if he is afraid he turns pale and stammers; if he is angry he turns red and bellows; and so forth. These things are no doubt called expressions; but just as we distinguish proper and improper senses of the word 'art', so we must distinguish proper and improper senses of the word 'expression', and in the context of a discussion about art this sense of expression is an improper sense. The characteristic mark of expression proper is lucidity or intelligibility; a person who expresses something thereby becomes conscious of what it is that he is expressing, and enables others to become conscious of it in himself and in them. Turning pale and stammering is a natural accompaniment of fear, but a person who in addition to being afraid also turns pale and stammers does not thereby become conscious of the precise quality of his emotion. About that he is as much in the dark as he would be if (were that possible) he could feel fear without also exhibiting these symptoms of it. Confusion between these two senses of the word 'expression' may easily lead to false critical estimates, and so to false aesthetic theory. It is sometimes thought a merit in an actress that when she is acting a pathetic scene she can work herself up to such an extent as to weep real tears. There may be some ground for that opinion if acting is not an art but a craft, and if the actress's object in that scene is to produce grief in her audience; and even then the conclusion would follow only if it were true that grief cannot be produced in the audience unless symptoms of grief are exhibited by the performer. And no doubt this is how most people think of the actor's work. But if his business is not amusement but art, the object at 34

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which he is aiming is not to produce a preconceived emotional effect on his audience but by means of a system of expressions, or language, composed partly of speech and partly of gesture, to explore his own emotions: to discover emotions in himself of which he was unaware, and, by permitting the audience to witness the discovery, enable them to make a similar discovery about themselves. In that case it is not her ability to weep real tears that would mark out a good actress; it is her ability to make it clear to herself and her audience what the tears are about. This applies to every kind of art. The artist never rants. A person who writes or paints or the like in order to blow off steam, using the traditional materials of art as means for exhibiting the symptoms of emotion, may deserve praise as an exhibitionist, but loses for the moment all claim to the title of artist. Exhibitionists have their uses; they may serve as an amusement, or they may be doing magic. The second category will contain, for example, those young men who, learning in the torment of their own bodies and minds what war is like, have stammered their indignation in verses, and published them in the hope of infecting others and causing them to abolish it. But these verses have nothing to do with poetry. Thomas Hardy, at the end of a fine and tragic novel in which he has magnificently expressed his sorrow and indignation for the suffering inflicted by callous sentimentalism on trusting innocence, spoils everything by a last paragraph fastening his accusation upon 'the president of the immortals'. The note rings false, not because it is blasphemous (it offends no piety worthy of the name), but because it is rant. The case against God, so far as it exists, is complete already. The concluding paragraph adds nothing to it. All it does is to spoil the effect of the indictment by betraying a symptom of the emotion which the whole book has already expressed; as if a prosecuting counsel, at the end of his speech, spat in the prisoner's face. The same fault is especially common in Beethoven. He was confirmed in it, no doubt, by his deafness; but the cause of it was not his deafness but a temperamental inclination to rant. It shows itself in the way his music screams and mutters instead of speaking, as in the soprano part of the Mass in D, or the layout of the opening page in the Hammerklavier Sonata. He must have known his failing and tried to overcome it, or he would never have spent so many of his ripest years among string quartets, where screaming and muttering are almost, one might say, physically impossible. Yet even there, the old Adam struts out in certain passages of the Grosse Fuge. 35

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It does not, of course, follow that a dramatic writer may not rant in character. The tremendous rant at the end of The Ascent of F6, like the Shakespearian 6 ranting on which it is modelled, is done with tongue in cheek. It is not the author who is ranting, but the unbalanced character he depicts; the emotion the author is expressing is the emotion with which he contemplates that character; or rather, the emotion he has towards that secret and disowned part of himself for which the character stands....

The Work of Art as Imaginary Object If the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative creation, a tune is an imaginary thing. And the same applies to a poem or a painting or any other work of art. This seems paradoxical; we are apt to think that a tune is not an imaginary thing but a real thing, a real collection of noises; that a painting is a real piece of canvas covered with real colours; and so on. I hope to show, if the reader will have patience, that there is no paradox here; that both these propositions express what we do as a matter of fact say about works of art; and that they do not contradict one another, because they are concerned with different things. When, speaking of a work of art (tune, picture, &c.), we mean by art a specific craft, intended as a stimulus for producing specific emotional effects in an audience, we certainly mean to designate by the term 'work of art' something that we should calI real. The artist as magician or purveyor of amusement is necessarily a craftsman making real things, and making them out of some material according to some plan. His works are as real as the works of an engineer, and for the same reason. But it does not at all folIow that the same is true of an artist proper. His business is not to produce an emotional effect in an audience, but, for example, to make a tune. This tune is already complete and perfect when it exists merely as a tune in his head, that is, an imaginary tune. Next, he may arrange for the tune to be played before an audience. Now there comes into existence a real tune, a collection of noises. But which of these two things is the work of art? Which of them is the music? The answer is implied in what we have already said: the music, the work of art, is not the collection of noises, it is the tune in the composer's head. The noises made by the performers, and heard by the audience, are not the music at all; they are only means by which the audience, if they listen intelligently (not otherwise), can reconstruct for themselves the imaginary tune that existed in the composer's head. 36

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This is not a paradox. It is not something napa oo~av, contrary to what we ordinarily believe and express in our ordinary speech. We all know perfectly well, and remind each other often enough, that a person who hears the noises the instruments make is not thereby possessing himself of the music. Perhaps no one can do that unless he does hear the noises; but there is something else which he must do as well. Our ordinary word for this other thing is listening; and the listening which we have to do when we hear the noises made by musicians is in a way rather like the thinking we have to do when we hear the noises made, for example, by a person lecturing on a scientific subject. We hear the sound of his voice; but what he is doing is not simply to make noises, but to develop a scientific thesis. The noises are meant to assist us in achieving what he assumes to be our purpose in coming to hear him lecture, that is, thinking this same scientific thesis for ourselves. The lecture, therefore, is not a collection of noises made by the lecturer with his organs of speech; it is a collection of scientific thoughts related to those noises in such a way that a person who not only hears but thinks as well becomes able to think these thoughts for himself. We may call this the communication of thought by means of speech, if we like; but if we do, we must think of communication not as an 'imparting' of thought by the speaker to the hearer, the speaker somehow planting his thought in the hearer's receptive mind, but as a 'reproduction' of the speaker's thought by the hearer, in virtue of his own active thinking. The parallel with listening to music is not complete. The two cases are similar at one point, dissimilar at another. They are dissimilar in that a concert and a scientific lect.ure are different things, and what we are trying to 'get out of' the concert is a thing of a different kind from the scientific thoughts we are trying to 'get out of' the lecture. But they are similar in this: that just as what we get out of the lecture is something other than the noises we hear proceeding from the lecturer's mouth, so what we get out of the concert is something other than the noises made by the performers. In each case, what we get out of it is something which we have to reconstruct in our own minds, and by our own efforts; something which remains for ever inaccessible to a person who cannot or will not make efforts of the right kind, however completely he hears the sounds that fill the room in which he is sitting. This, I repeat, is something we all know perfectly well. And because we all know it, we need not trouble to examine or criticize the ideas of aestheticians (if there are any left to-day-they were common enough at one time) who say that what we get out of listening to music, or looking at 37

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paintings, or the like, is some peculiar kind of sensual pleasure. When we do these things, we certainly may, in so far as we are using our senses, enjoy sensual pleasures. It would be odd if we did not. A colour, or a shape, or an instrumental timbre may give us an exquisite pleasure of a purely sensual kind. It may even be true (though this is not so certain) that no one would become a lover of music unless he were more susceptible than other people to the sensual pleasure of sound. But even if a special susceptibility to this pleasure may at first lead some people towards music, they must, in proportion as they are more susceptible, take the more pains to prevent that susceptibility from interfering with their power of listening. For any concentration on the pleasantness of the noises themselves concentrates the mind on hearing, and makes it hard or impossible to listen. There is a kind of person who goes to concerts mainly for the sensual pleasure he gets from the sheer sounds; his presence may be good for the box-office, but it is as bad for music as the presence of a person who went to a scientific lecture for the sensual pleasure he got out of the tones of the lecturer's voice would be for science. And this, again, everybody knows. It is unnecessary to go through the form of applying what has been said about music to the other arts. We must try instead to make in a positive shape the point that has been put negatively. Music does not consist of heard noises, paintings do not consist of seen colours, and so forth. Of what, then, do these things consist? Not, clearly, of a 'form', understood as a pattern or a system of relations between the various noises we hear or the various colours we see. Such 'forms' are nothing but the perceived structures of bodily 'works of art', that is to say, 'works of art' falsely so called; and these formalistic theories of art, popular though they have been and are, have no relevance to art proper and will not be further considered in this book. The distinction between form and matter, on which they are based, is a distinction belonging to the philosophy of craft, and not applicable to the philosophy of art. The work of art proper is something not seen or heard, but something imagined. But what is it that we imagine? We have suggested that in music the work of art proper is an imagined tune. Let us begin by developing this idea. Everybody must have noticed a certain discrepancy between what we actually see when looking at a picture or statue or play and what we see imaginatively; what we actually see when listening to music or speech and what we imaginatively hear. To take an obvious example: in watching a puppet-play we could (as we say) swear that we have seen the ex38

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pression on the puppets' faces change with their changing gestures and the puppet-man's changing words and tones of voice. Knowing that they are only puppets, we know that their facial expression cannot change; but that makes no difference; we continue to see imaginatively the expressions which we know that we do not see actually. The same thing happens in the case of masked actors like those of the Greek stage. In listening to the pianoforte, again, we know from evidence of the same kind that we must be hearing every note begin with a sforzando, and fade away for the whole length of time that it continues to sound. But our imagination enables us to read into this experience something quite different. As we seem to see the puppets' features move, so we seem to hear a pianist producing a sostenuto tone, almost like that of a hom; and in fact notes of the hom and the pianoforte are easily mistaken one for the other. Still stranger, when we hear a violin and pianoforte playing together in the key, say, of G, the violin's F sharp is actually played a great deal sharper than the pianoforte's. Such a discrepancy would sound intolerably out of tune except to a person whose imagination was trained to focus itself on the key of G, and silently corrected every note of the equally tempered pianoforte to suit it. The corrections which imagination must thus carry out, in order that we should be able to listen to an entire orchestra, beggar description. When we listen to a speaker or singer, imagination is constantly supplying articulate sounds which actually our ears do not catch. In looking at a drawing in pen or pencil, we take a series of roughly parallel lines for the tint of a shadow. And so on. Conversely, in all these cases imagination works negatively. We disimagine, if I may use the word, a great deal which actually we see and hear. The street noises at a concert, the noises made by our breathing and shuffling neighbours, and even some of the noises made by the performers, are thus shut out of the picture unless by their loudness or in some other way they are too obtrusive to be ignored. At the theatre, we are strangely able to ignore the silhouettes of the people sitting in front of us, and a good many things that happen on the stage. Looking at a picture, we do not notice the shadows that fall on it or, unless it is excessive, the light reflected from its varnish. All this is commonplace. And the conclusion has already been stated by Shakespeare's Theseus: 'the best in this kind ['works of art', as things actually perceived by the senses] are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.' The music to which we listen is not the heard sound, but that sound as amended in various ways by the listener's imagination, and so with the other arts. 39

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But this does not go nearly far enough. Reflection will show that the imagination with which we listen to music is something more, and more complex, than any inward ear; the imagination with which we look at paintings is something more than 'the mind's eye'. Let us consider this in the case of painting.

The Total Imaginative Experience The change which came over painting at the close of the nineteenth century was nothing short of revolutionary. Every one in the course of that century had supposed that painting was 'a visual art'; that the painter was primarily a person who used his eyes, and used his hands only to record what the use of his eyes had revealed to him. Then came Cezanne, and began to paint like a blind man. His still-life studies, which enshrine the essence of his genius, are like groups of things that have been groped over with the hands; he uses colour not to reproduce what he sees in looking at them but to express almost in a kind of algebraic notation what in this groping he has felt. So with his interiors; the spectator finds himself bumping about those rooms, circumnavigating with caution those menacinglyangular tables, coming up to the persons that so massively occupy those chairs and fending himself off them with his hands. It is the same when Cezanne takes us into the open air. His landscapes have lost almost every trace of visuality. Trees never looked like that; that is how they feel to a man who encounters them with his eyes shut, blundering against them blindly. A bridge is no longer a pattern of colour, as it is for Cotman; or a patch of colour so distorted as to arouse in the spectator the combined emotions of antiquarianism and vertigo, as it is for Mr. Frank Brangwyn; it is a perplexing mixture of projections and recessions, over and round which we find ourselves feeling our way as one can imagine an infant feeling its way, when it has barely begun to crawl, among the nursery furniture. And over the landscape broods the obsession of Mont Saint-Victoire, never looked at, but always felt, as a child feels the table over the back of its head. Of course Cezanne was right. Painting can never be a visual art. A man paints with his hands, not with his eyes. The Impressionist doctrine that what one paints is light 7 was a pedantry which failed to destroy the painters it enslaved only because they remained painters in defiance of the doctrine: men of their hands, men who did their work with fingers and wrist and arm, and even (as they walked about the studio) with their legs and toes. What one paints is what can be painted; no one can do more; and

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what can be painted must stand in some relation to the muscular activity of painting it. Cezanne's practice reminds one of Kant's theory that the painter's only use for his colours is to make shapes visible. But it is really quite different. Kant thought of the painter's shapes as two-dimensional shapes visibly traced on the canvass; Cezanne's shapes are never two-dimensional, and they are never traced on the canvass; they are solids, and we get at them through the canvass. In this new kind of painting the 'plane of the picture' disappears; it melts into nothing, and we go through it. 8 Vernon Blake, who understood all this very well from the angle of the practising artist, and could explain himself in words like the Irishman he was, told draughtsmen that the plane of the picture was a mere superstition. Hold your pencil vertical to the paper, said he; don't stroke the paper, dig into it; think of it as if it were the surface of a slab of clay in which you were going to cut a relief, and of your pencil as a knife. Then you will find that you can draw something which is not a mere pattern on paper, but a solid thing lying inside or behind the paper....

Psychical Expression [W]e must begin by observing that linguistic expression is not the only kind of expression, and not the most primitive kind. There is another kind, which unlike linguistic expression occurs independently of consciousness and is a feature of experience at its purely psychical level. This I shall call psychical expression. It consists in the doing of involuntary and perhaps even wholly unconscious bodily acts, related in a peculiar way to the emotions they are said to express. Thus, certain distortions of the face express pain; a slackening of muscles and a cold pallor of the skin express fear; and so forth. In these cases, we feel the emotion expressed and also feel the bodily act, or complex of acts, expressing it. The rel~tion between these, to which we refer when we say that the act expresses the emotion, is of course a relation of necessary connexion, and asymmetrical: we grimace 'because' we feel pain, not vice versa. But the word 'because' is used to indicate any kind of dependence, and does not distinguish one kind from another. The connexion is in one way like that between a sensum and its emotional charge, namely, in the fact of its immediacy; the two things connected are not two distinct experiences, but are elements in one indivisible experience. The sensum of muscular tension, when one's face is screwed 41

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up with pain, is as intimately connected with the pain as the sensum of scarlet which terrified a child, in our earlier example, with the terror it produced. [In Chapter VIII Collingwood described an infant terrified at the sight of a blazing scarlet curtain and argued that though one can analyze the experience into a sensuous experience of seeing red and an emotional experience of fear there is really only one experience, a "terrifying red".] But though the two cases are alike in the intimacy of the union between their elements, the structural order of the elements is different, and indeed opposite. The terror is the emotional charge of the colour, and the colour sensum is logically (though not temporally) prior to it. The pain is not the emotional charge of the tension in the facial muscles; the sensum is here not prior but posterior to the emotion. The two cases have, in fact, been incompletely described. In the first, we have omitted the original sensum (for example, an intestinal gripe); in the second, we have omitted the expression of the child's terror, a complex reaction which may be described as cringing. These omissions once made good, the two cases are parallel; and we get an analysis which, by recognizing the element of psychical expression, supplements the account of the frightened child given in Chapter VIII. We have now (1) a sensum of scarlet (or rather, a visual field containing that colour), (2) terror as the emotional charge on that field, (3) the cringing which expresses that terror. In the other case we have (1) the abdominal gripe as a sensum (or rather, a field of organic sensation containing the visceral sensum), (2) the pain which is the emotional charge upon it, (3) the grimace expressing that pain. Each case is one single experience, in which analysis reveals three elements in a definite structural order. Every kind and shade of emotion which occurs at the purely psychical level of experience has its counterpart in some change of the muscular or circulatory or glandular 9 system which, in the sense of the word now under discussion, expresses it. Whether these changes are observed and correctly interpreted depends on the skill of the observer. So far as we can see, nothing but lack of this skill prevents us from reading like an open book the psychical emotions of every one with whom we have to do. But observing and interpreting is an intellectual process; and this is not the only way in which psychical expression conveys a meaning. There is a kind of emotional contagion which takes effect without any intellectual activity; without the presence even of consciousness. This is a familiar fact, alanning because it seems so inexplicable, in man. The spread of panic through a crowd is not due to each person's being independently fright42

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ened, nor to any communication by speech; it happens in the complete absence of these things, each person becoming terrified simply because his neighbour is terrified. The psychical expression of fear in one person appears to another as a complex of sensa immediately charged with terror. Fear is not the only emotion that is thus contagious; the same thing happens with any emotion belonging to the level of psychical experience. Thus the mere sight of some one in pain, or the sound of his groans, produces in us an echo of his pain, whose expression in our own body we can feel in the tingling or shrinking of skin areas, certain visceral sensa, and so forth. This 'sympathy' (the simplest and best name for the contagion I have described) exists visibly among animals other than man, and between animals of different species; notably, for example, between man and his domestic animals. A dog will snap at a man because it is afraid of him; and the best way to make a dog bite you is to feel frightened of it. However successfully you think you are concealing your nervousness, the dog feels it; or rather he feels the nervousness in himself which he has thus caught from you. The same relation exists between men and wild animals. How this contagion 'takes' will depend, of course, on the psychical structure of the mind that takes it. Terror in a rabbit will communicate itself to a pursuing dog not as terror but as a desire to kill, for a dog has the psychical 'nature' of a hunting animal. Every one knows that dogs chase cats because cats run away; the cat's exhibition of fear produces in the dog, not an argument running thus: 'this cat is afraid of me; it evidently thinks I can kill it, so I suppose I can; here goes', but an immediate response in the shape of aggressive emotion. Psychical expression is the only expression of which psychical emotions are capable (they can only be expressed otherwise by being themselves transformed through the activity of consciousness from impressions into ideas, as we shall see in the next section); but psychical emotions are not the only ones that can be psychically expressed. There is a certain group of emotions which arise only through the consciousness of self. Hatred, love, anger, and shame may be taken as examples. Hatred is a feeling of antagonism; it is an attitude towards something which we regard as thwarting our own desires, or inflicting pain upon us, 10 and this presupposes awareness of ourselves. Love is a feeling towards something with which we feel our own existence to be bound up, so that a benefit or injury to it is a benefit or injury to ourselves. Anger, though unlike hate it does not involve the idea of any particular thing or person that angers us, 43

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is like it in being a consciousness of ourselves as baulked or opposed. Shame is the consciousness of our own weakness or ineffectiveness. These 'emotions of consciousness', unlike the purely psychical emotions, admit of expression in language: in a phrase, a controlled gesture, or the like. But they also have their own special psychical expressions, for example, the blush of shame, accompanied by muscular relaxation; or the flush of anger with muscular tension and rigidity. Now, a psychical emotion is the emotional charge on a sensum; but an emotion of consciousness is the emotional charge not on a sensum but on a certain mode of consciousness. Hence, if we ask What is the sensum upon which shame is the emotional charge?' and find (quite correctly) that no sensum is present except those of hot skin and relaxed muscles, we may reject the commonsense view that we blush because we are ashamed, and propound the startling discovery that we are ashamed because we blush. But all we have done is to beget a paradox on a misunderstanding. To the series (1) scarlet colour, (2) fear, (3) cringing, in the case of psychical emotions, the corresponding series in an emotion of consciousness is (1) consciousness of our own inferiority (which is not a sensum but a mode of consciousness), (2) shame, (3) blushing. The common-sense view is right, and the JamesLange theory wrong. Why should emotions of consciousness be thus expressible in two quite different ways? The answer lies in the relation between anyone level of experience and the next above it. The higher level differs from the lower in having a new principle of organization; this does not supersede the old, it is superimposed on it. The lower type of experience is perpetuated in the higher type in a way somewhat like (though not identical with) the way in which a pre-existing matter is perpetuated when a new form is imposed on it. We shall avail ourselves of this resemblance and use it metaphorically as a description. In this metaphOrical sense of the words, any new and higher level of experience can be described in either of two ways. Formally, it is something quite new and unique, capable of being described only in terms of itself. Materially, it is only a peculiar combination of elements already existing at the lower level, and susceptible of description in terms of these lower elements. Consciousness (to apply this distinction) is formally unique, altogether unlike anything that can be found in merely psychical experience. Materially, it is only a certain new arrangement of psychical experiences. A mode of consciousness like shame is thus, formally, a mode of consciousness and nothing else; materially, it is a constellation or synthesis of psychical experiences.... 44

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One other aspect of this dual expressiveness may be mentioned. If experience is really organized into different levels so that each provides for the next a matter upon which new form is to be imposed, each level must organize itself according to its own principles before a transition can be made to the next; for until that has been done, the raw material needed for the creation of the next is not forthcoming. Emotions of consciousness can be expressed, we have seen, in two ways: formally, as modes of consciousness; materially, as constellations of psychic elements. If the level of consciousness is a level beyond which there lies another, namely the level of intellect, as we have been supposing, it follows that the emotions of consciousness must be formally or linguistically expressed, not only materially or psychically expressed, before a transition can be made from the level of consciousness to that of intellect: for their formal or linguistic expression is a necessary element in the consolidation of experience at the level of consciousness. The merely material expression of such emotions, on the contrary, is a retrograde step, which by reducing the conscious level to terms of the psychical impedes the development of experience towards its higher levels. Not that this material expression is in itself retrograde; on the contrary, it is the way in which consciousness asserts its domination over psychical experience as such, by creating a new combination of its elements; but if it could go unsupplemented by formal expression, it would indicate a mind unwilling to test its fate in further adventures.

Imaginative Expression The peculiarity of psychical expression lies in its being completely uncontrollable. Physiologically considered, a grimace of pain or a start of fear is an action; but as it occurs in us, it is something that simply comes to us and overwhelms us. It has the same character of brute givennes 11 which belongs to the emotions it expresses, and the sensa of which these are the emotional charge. This is merely the general character of experience at its purely psychical level. At the level of awareness a certain change occurs. For brute givenness is substituted the consciousness of experience as our own experience, something belonging to us and dominated by our power of thought. This change affects all the three elements distinguished in the foregoing section. . .. We saw that the work of consciousness converts impressions of brute sense and brute emotion into ideas, something which we no longer simply feel but feel in that new way which we call imagining. We have now to

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consider how the same change affects the bodily act of expression, raising it from the crudely psychical level to the imaginative. The general nature of this change can be expressed by saying that just as our emotions no longer arise in us as brute facts, but are now dominated in such a way that we can summon them up, suppress them, or alter them by an act of which we are conscious as our own act and therefore as free, even though it cannot be called purposive or selective; so the bodily acts which express these emotions, instead of being simply automatisms of our psycho-physical organism, are experienced in our new self-consciousness as activities belonging to ourselves, and controlled in the same sense as the emotions they express. Bodily actions expressing certain emotions, in so far as they come under our control and are conceived by us, in our awareness of controlling them, as our way of expressing these emotions, are language. The word 'language' is here used not in its narrow and etymologically proper sense to denote activities of our vocal organs, but in a wider sense in which it includes any activity of any organ which is expressive in the same way in which speech is expressive. In this wide sense, language is simply bodily expression of emotion, dominated by thought in its primitive form as consciousness....

Good Art and Bad Art The definition of any given kind of thing is also the definition of a good thing of that kind: for a thing that is good in its kind is only a thing which possesses the attributes of that kind. To call things good and bad is to imply success and failure. When we call things good or bad not in themselves but relatively to us, as when we speak of a good harvest or a bad thunderstorm, the success or failure implied is our own; we mean that these things enable us to realize our purposes, or prevent us from doing so. When we call things good or bad in themselves, the success or failure implied is theirs. We are implying that they acquire the attributes of their kind by an effort on their own part, and that this effort may be either more or less successful. I am not raising the question whether it is true, as the Greeks thought, that there are natural kinds, and that what we call a dog is something that is trying to be a dog. For all my present argument is concerned, either that view may be true (in which case dogs can be good or bad in themselves), or the alternative view may be true, that the idea of a dog is 46

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only a way in which we choose to classify the things we come across, in which case dogs can be good or bad only in relation to us. I am only concerned with good and bad works of art. Now, a work of art is an activity of a certain kind; the agent is trying to do something definite, and in that attempt he may succeed or he may fail. It is, moreover, a conscious activity; the agent is not only trying to do something definite, he also knows what it is that he is trying to do; though knowing here does not necessarily imply being able to describe, since to describe is to generalize, and generalizing is the function of the intellect, and consciousness does not, as such, involve intellect. A work of art, therefore, may be either a good one or a bad one. And because the agent is necessarily a conscious agent, he necessarily knows which it is. Or rather, he necessarily knows this so far as his consciousness in respect of this work of art is uncorrupted; for ... there is such a thing as untruthful or corrupt consciousness. Any theory of art should be required to show, if it wishes to be taken seriously, how an artist, in pursuing his artistic labour, is able to tell whether he is pursuing it successfully or unsuccessfully: how, for example, it is possible for him to say, 'I am not satisfied with that line; let us try it this way ... and this way ... and this way ... there! that will do.' A theory which pushes the artistic experience too far down the scale, to a point below the region where experience has the character of knowledge, is unable to meet this demand. It can only evade it by pretending that the artist in such cases is acting not as an artist, but as a critic and even (if criticism of art is identified with philosophy of art) as a philosopher. But this pretence should deceive nobody. The watching of his own work with a vigilant and discriminating eye, which decides at every moment of the process whether it is being successful or not, is not a critical activity subsequent to, and reflective upon, the artistic work, it is an integral part of that work itself. A person who can doubt this, if he has any grounds at all for his doubt, is presumably confusing the wayan artist works with the way an incompetent student in an art-school works; painting blindly, and waiting for the master to show him what it is that he has been doing. In point of fact, what a student learns in an art-school is not so much to paint as to watch himself painting: to raise the psycho-physical activity of painting to the level of art by becoming conscious of it, and so converting it from a psychical experience into an imaginative one. What the artist is trying to do is to express a given emotion. To express it, and to express it well, are the same thing. To express it badly is 47

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not one way of expressing it (not, for example, expressing it, but not selon les regles), it is failing to express it. A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails. This is the difference between bad art and art falsely so called .... In art falsely so called there is no failure to express, because there is no attempt at expression; there is only an attempt (whether successful or not) to do something else. But expressing an emotion is the same thing as becoming conscious of it. A bad work of art is the unsuccessful attempt to become conscious of a given emotion: it is what Spinoza calls an inadequate idea of an affection. Now, a consciousness which thus fails to grasp its own emotions is a corrupt or untruthful consciousness. For its failure (like any other failure) is not a mere blankness; it is not a doing nothing; it is a misdoing something; it is activity, but blundering or frustrated activity. A person who tries to become conscious of a given emotion, and fails, is no longer in a state of sheer unconsciousness or innocence about that emotion; he has done something about it, but that something is not to express it. What he has done is either to shirk it or dodge it: to disguise it from himself by pretending either that the emotion he feels is not that one but a different one, or that the person who feels it is not himself, but some one else: two alternatives which are so far from being mutually exclusive that in fact they are always concurrent and correlative. If we ask whether this pretence is conscious or unconscious, the answer is, neither. It is a process which occurs not in the region below consciousness (where it could not, of course, take place, since consciousness is involved in the process itself), nor yet in the region of consciousness (where equally it could not take place, because a man cannot literally tell himself a lie; in so far as he is conscious of the truth he cannot literally deceive himself about it); it occurs on the threshold that divides the psychical level of experience from the conscious level. It is the malperformance of the act which converts what is merely psychic (impression) into what is conscious (idea). The corruption of consciousness in virtue of which a man fails to express a given emotion makes him at the same time unable to know whether he has expressed it or not. He is, therefore, for one and the same reason, a bad artist and a bad judge of his own art. A person who is capable of producing bad art cannot, so far as he is capable of producing it, recognize it for what it is. He cannot, on the other hand, really think it good art; he cannot think that he has expressed himself when he has not. To mistake bad art for good art would imply having in one's mind an idea 48

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of what good art is, and one has such an idea only so far as one knows what it is to have an uncorrupt consciousness; but no one can know this except a person who possesses one. An insincere mind, so far as it is insincere, has no conception of sincerity. But nobody's consciousness can be wholly corrupt. If it were, he would be in a condition as much worse than the most complete insanity we can discover or imagine, as that is worse than the most complete sanity we can conceive. He would suffer simultaneously every possible kind of mental derangement, and every bodily disease that such derangements can bring in their train. Corruptions of consciousness are always partial and temporary lapses in an activity which, on the whole, is successful in doing what it tries to do. A person who on one occasion fails to express himself is a person quite accustomed to express himself successfully on other occasions, and to know that he is doing it. Through comparison of this occasion with his memory of these others, therefore, he ought to be able to see that he has failed, this time, to express himself. And this is precisely what every artist is doing when he says, This line won't do'. He remembers what the experience of expressing himself is like, and in the light of that memory he realizes that the attempt embodied in this particular line has been a failure. Corruption of consciousness is not a recondite sin or a remote calamity which overcomes only an unfortunate or accursed few; it is a constant experience in the life of every artist, and his life is a constant and, on the whole, a successful warfare against it. But this warfare always involves a very present possibility of defeat; and then a certain corruption becomes inveterate. What we recognize as definite kinds of bad art are such inveterate corruptions of consciousness. Bad art is never the result of expressing what is in itself evil, or what is innocent perhaps in itself, but in a given society a thing inexpedient to be publicly said. Every one of us feels emotions which, if his neighbours became aware of them, would make them shrink from him with horror: emotions which, if he became aware of them, would make him horrified at himself. It is not the expression of these emotions that is bad art. Nor is it the expression of the horror they excite. On the contrary, bad art arises when instead of expressing these emotions we disown them, wishing to think ourselves innocent of the emotions that horrify us, or wishing to think ourselves too broad-minded to be horrified by them. Art is not a luxury, and bad art not a thing we can afford to tolerate. To know ourselves is the foundation of all life that develops beyond the 49

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merely psychical level of experience. Unless consciousness does its work successfully, the facts which it offers to intellect, the only things upon which intellect can build its fabric of thought, are false from the beginning. A truthful consciousness gives intellect a firm foundation upon which to build; a corrupt consciousness forces intellect to build on a quicksand. The falsehoods which an untruthful consciousness imposes on the intellect are falsehoods which intellect can never correct for itself. In so far as consciousness is corrupted, the very wells of truth are poisoned. Intellect can build nothing firm. Moral ideals are castles in the air. Political and economic systems are mere cobwebs. Even common sanity and bodily health are no longer secure. But corruption of consciousness is the same thing as bad art. I do not speak of these grave issues in order to magnify the office of any small section in our communities which arrogates to itself the name of artists. That would be absurd. Just as the life of a community depends for its very existence on honest dealing between man and man, the guardianship of this honesty being vested not in anyone class or section, but in all and sundry, so the effort towards expression of emotions, the effort to overcome corruption of consciousness, is an effort that has to be made not by specialists only but by every one who uses language, whenever he uses it. Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art. It is important to each one of us that in making them, however much he deceives others, he should not deceive himself. If he deceives himself in this matter, he has sown in himself a seed which, unless he roots it up again, may grow into any kind of wickedness, any kind of mental disease, any kind of stupidity and folly and insanity. Bad art, the corrupt consciousness, is the true radix malorum.

Art as Theory and Art as Practice The aesthetic experience, as we look back at it from a point of view where we distinguish theoretical from practical activity, ... presents characteristics of both kinds. It is a knowing of oneself and of one's world, these two knowns and knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the language which is the world. It is also a making of oneself and of one's world, the self which was psyche being remade in the shape of consciousness, and the world, 50

R. G. Collingwood: Art as Expression

which was crude sensa, being remade in the shape of language, or sensa converted into imagery and charged with emotional significance. The step forward in the development of experience which leads from the psychic level to the level of consciousness (and that step is the specific achievement of art) is thus a step forward both in theory and in practice, although it is one step only and not two; as a 'progress along a railway-line towards a certain junction is a progress towards both the regions served by the two lines which divide at that junction. For that matter, it is also a progress towards the region in which, later, those two lines reunite.

Art and Intellect Art as such contains nothing that is due to intellect. Its essence is that of an activity by which we become conscious of our own emotions. Now, there are emotions which exist in us, but of which we are not yet conscious, at the level of psychical experience. Therefore art finds in purely psychical experience a situation of the type with which it essentially deals, and a problem of the kind which its essential business is to solve. This might seem to be not only a problem such as art exists to solve, but the only problem which it can solve. It might seem, in other words, that psychical emotions are the only emotions which art can express. For all other emotions are generated at levels of experience subsequent to the emergence of consciousness, and therefore (it might be thought> under the eyes of consciousness. They are born, it might seem, in the light of consciousness, with expressions ready-made for them at birth. There can, therefore, be no need to express them through works of art. The logical consequence of this argument would be that no work of art, if it is a genuine work of art, can contain in its subject-matter anything that is due to the work of intellect. That is not what I said in the first sentence of this section. Art as such might contain nothing that is due to intellect, and yet certain works of art might contain much that is due to intellect, not because they are works of art, but because they are works of a certain kind; that is, because they express emotions of a certain kind, namely, emotions that can arise only as the emotional charges upon intellectual activities. Here, then, we have two alternatives. Either the subject-matter of a work of art (that is, the emotion it expresses) is drawn exclusively from the psychical level of experience, because that is the only level at which there exists any experience of which we are not conscious; or it may also include 51

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elements drawn from other levels, in which case these levels, too, will contain elements of which, until we find expression for them, we are not conscious. If these two alternatives are considered in the light of the question: what emotions do this and that work of art actually express? it will hardly be doubted, I think, that the second alternative is right. If we examine almost any work of art we like to choose, and consider what emotions it expresses, we shall find that they include some, and those not the least important, which are intellectual emotions: emotions which can only be felt by an intellectual being, and are in fact felt because such a being uses his intellect in certain ways. They are the emotional charges not upon a merely psychical experience, nor upon experience at the level of mere consciousness, but upon intellectual experience or thought in the narrower sense of the word. And this, if we come to think of it, is inevitable. For even if a certain emotion is, as I put it, endowed at birth with its own proper expression, this is only a way of saying that the work of expression has already been done in its case; and if done, done by the artistic consciousness. And every emotion is, if not born with the silver spoon of expression in its mouth, at least reborn in that state on the occasion of its second birth as idea, as distinct from impression. Since the emotional life of the conscious and intellectuallevels of experience is far richer than that of the merely psychical level, therefore, it is only natural that the emotional subject-matter of works of art should be drawn mostly from emotions belonging to these higher levels. For example, Romeo and Juliet form the subject of a play not because they are two organisms sexually attracted, however powerfully, to each other; nor because they are two human beings experiencing this attraction and conscious of the experience, that is, two human beings in love; but because their love is woven into the fabric of a complicated social and political situation, and is broken by the strains to which that situation subjects it. The emotion experienced by Shakespeare and expressed by him in the play is not an emotion arising simply out of sexual passion or his sympathy with it, but an emotion arising out of his (intellectual) apprehension of the way in which passion may thus cut across social and political conditions. Similarly, Lear is envisaged, by Shakespeare and by ourselves, not simply as an old man suffering cold and hunger, but as a father suffering these things at the hands of his daughters. Apart from the idea of the family, intellectually conceived as a principle of social morality, the tragedy of 52

R. G. Collingwood: Art as Expression

Lear would not exist. The emotions expressed in these plays are thus emotions arising out of a situation which could not generate them unless it were intellectually apprehended. The poet converts human experience into poetry not by first expurgating it, cutting out the intellectual elements and preserving the emotional, and then expressing this residue; but by fusing thought itself into emotion: thinking in a certain way and then expressing how it feels to think in that way. Thus Dante has fused the Thomistic philosophy into a poem expressing what it feels like to be a Thomist. 12 Shelley, when he made the earth say, 'I spin beneath my pyramid of night', expressed what it feels like to be a Copernican. Donne (and this is why he has become so congenial to ourselves in the last twenty or thirty years) has expressed how it feels to live in a world full of shattered ideas, disjecta membra of old systems of life and thought, where intellectual activity is itself correspondingly shattered into momentary fulgurations of thinking, related to each other only by an absence of all logical connexion, and where the prevailing emotional tone of thought is simply the sense of this shatteredness: a tone expressed over and over again in his poems, for example in 1'he Glasse', and in the shape of a moral idea by his many verses in praise of inconstancy. And Mr. Eliot, in the one great English poem of this century, has expressed his idea (not his alone) of the decay of our civilization, manifested outwardly as a break-down of social structures and inwardly as a drying-up of the emotional springs of life....

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Notes 1

Eugene Veron, Aesthetics, trans. W.H. Armstrong (London: Chapman, 1879) 89.

2

In presenting models of art which I regard as the best, I do not ascribe any special weight to my selection, because I, besides being little versed in all the kinds of art, belong to the class of men with a taste which is corrupted by a false eduction. And so I may, from an old inherent habit, be mistaken when I ascribe an absolute worth to the impression produced on me by a thing in my youth. I call them models of this or that kind only for the purpose of more clearly elucidating my idea and showing how, I with my present view, understand the value of art from its contents. I must remark with this thatI count my artistic productions as belonging to the sphere of bad art, with the exception of the story, God Sees the Truth, which belongs to the first kind, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the second.

3

The reason why I call it a rough classification is because you cannot really 'stimulate intellectual activities', or 'stimulate certain kinds of action', in a man. Anybody who says you can, has not thought about the conditions under which alone these things can arise. Foremost among these conditions is this: that they must be absolutely spontaneous. Consequently they cannot be responses to stimulus.

4

Further development of the ideas expressed in this paragraph will make it necessary to qualify this word and assert a much more intimate relation between artist and audience; see pp. 311-36 of Principles of Art.

5

Plato, Symposium, 223 D. But if Aristodemus heard him correctly, Socrates was saying the right thing for the wrong reason. He is reported as arguing, not that a tragic writer as such is also a comic one, that (, teXV1J tpaYcpAo7totOS is also a comic writer. Emphasis on the word teXVU is obviously implied; and this, with a reference to the doctrine (Republic, 333E-334A) that craft is what Aristotle was to call a potentiality of opposites, i.e. enables its possessor to do not one kind of thing only, but that kind and the opposite kind too, shows that what Socrates was doing was to assume the technical theory of art and draw from it the above conclusion. 54

Notes

6

Shakespeare's characters rant (1) when they are characters in which he takes no interest at all, but which he uses simply as pegs on which to hang what the public wants, like Henry V; (2) when they are meant to be despicable, like Pistol; or (3) when they have lost their heads, like Hamlet in the graveyard.

7

Anticipated by Uvedale Price as long ago as 1801: 'I can imagine a man of the future, who may be born without the sense of feeling, being able to see nothing but light variously modified' (Dialogue on the distinct

characters of the Picturesque and Beautiful). 8

The 'disappearance' of the picture-plane is the reason why, in modem artists who have learnt to accept Cezanne's principles and to carry their consequences a stage further than he carried them himself, perspective (to the great scandal of the man in the street, who clings to the pictureplane as unconsciously and as convulsively as a drowning man to a spar) has disappeared too. The man in the street thinks that this has happened because these modern fellows can't draw; which is like thinking that young men of the Royal Air Force career about in the sky because they can't walk. See p. 153 of Principles of Art.

9

Not the endocrine system only. Even men, whose sense of smell is so feeble, can discover that certain emotions in their fellow men occasion peculiar scents by causing glandular discharges. To an animal whose sense of smell is so acute as a dog's, I suppose there is a 'language' of scent as expressive as the 'language' of involuntary facial gesture is to use.

10

'Odium est tristitia (sc. transitus a maiore ad minorem pefectionem) concomitante idea causae externae.' Spinoza, Ethics, III, Affectuum definitiones, vii.

11

12

For the meaning of this, see pp. 206-14 of Principles of Art: e.g. 'brute violence', p. 214. Or however else one labels his (not wholly Thomistic) philosophy.

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Suggestions for further reading Primary sources Collingwood writes brilliantly and persuasively. For full appreciation of the strength of his position the whole book should be read, especially the last chapters to supplement these selections. Croce's Aesthetics and Breviary of Aesthetic have been widely influential. The theory has been held in a number of versions by many writers. John Dewey presented a highly individualistic version in Art and Experience (1934). Also much read have been George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1907) and L.H. Reid's A Study in Aesthetics (1931). Though he has since abandoned the Expression Theory, John Hospers offered a version of it in Meaning and Truth in the Arts (1946). Alan Tormey's The Concept of Expression (1971) rejects the traditional theory but analyses the conditions of expressing. In Mind and Art (1972) Guy Sircello defends an original version of the theory.

Secondary sources The theory is examined critically in chapter 7 of Harold Osborne's Aesthetics and Criticism (1955). Slashing criticism, some of it taken from Osborne, is to be found in John Hospers' article 'The Concept of Artistic Expression', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1954-55. More subtle, more difficult, though also entertaining is O.K. Bouwsma's IThe Expression Theory of Art', in Philosophical Analysis (1950) edited by Max Black. A somewhat earlier critical analysis is contained in Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (1942). See also Monroe Beardsley's brief exposition and assessment of the theory in his Aesthetics, chapter 7. Osborne's critique is written from the standpoint of formalism, Bouwsma's, and to some extent Beardsley's, from the standpoint presented in the final section of this anthology, PhiIo. sophical/Linguistic Analysis. Tolstoy'S views, usually regarded as noble but untenable, are examined sympathetically in T.J. Diffey's Tolstoy'S 'What

is Art?' (1985).

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2 Formalism

Introduction Though formalism reached its full flowering in the 20th century, there are vigorous statements of formalist themes in the 19th century and its roots go back to the 18th century. To trace the origins of 20th century versions is by no means an easy task. In part formalist theories emerge as protests against other theories, partic:ularly those emphasizing emotion and biographical criticism on the one hand and those which emphasize general rules and classical traditions on the other. Partly also they emerge in response to the challenge of developing critical methods adequate to late 19th and 20th century art forms. The impetus to other strands comes from developments in linguistics and from philosophical movements, particularly philosophical/linguistic analysis. Insofar as there is an attempt at theoretical articulation and justification of formalist approaches there is a strong tendency to look to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Up to the 18th century art, on the whole, was valued for the functions it performed, as a powerful moral or religious influence, as a means to the acquisition of knowledge or as a beneficial relaxation. Kant held that art is to be valued for its own sake. When we say something is beautiful this is a distinctively artistic or aesthetic judgement. It is not a cognitive, nor a moral, nor a practical judgement, nor is it simply recording that something evokes a pleasant sensation. Taking up a revolutionary notion derived from earlier 18th century writers, particularly Shaftesbury, he contended that there is a distinct aesthetic attitude, that of disinterested attention. In aesthetic experience we are not, however, simply passive; the mind is active. We are not actually knowing but the cognitive faculties, especially imagination and understanding, are active. What we admire in a work is what he calls its purposiveness without purpose, its air of being intelligibly designed though not for any specific purpose. Kant emphasized the structural aspect of artworks though arguing that it is impossible to give general rules for composition or judgement. One of the interests in looking at 20th century formalist theories is in assessing the extent to which they follow or deviate from the Kantian position.

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One of the most influential versions in the area of visual art was presented in the teens and twenties by Clive Bell (1881-1964) and Roger Fry (1866-1934). Their theory appears to have developed partIy out of intense enthusiasm for a certain kind of art. The art was that of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and more particularly that of Cezanne. In 1910 and 1912 Fry arranged exhibitions of the work of Post-Impressionist artists in London where their work up to this time had not been accepted or even well known. At the same time, particularly in Fry's case one can see, if not the influence of Kant, remarkable similarities to basic Kantian themes. Bell's views are explained most succinctly in his essay The Aesthetic Hypothesis', the first chapter of his influential little book Art, published in 1913. Fry's views are stated in a number of books. The first selection is his 'An Essay in Aesthetics' taken from his best known book Vision and Design (1920); it originally appeared in 1909 in the New Quarterly. The second selection is from 'The Artist and Psychoanalysis' in The Hogarth Essays (1924). Clement Greenberg (1909-) as a working critic in New York has had enormous influence since the forties over the sort of art which has been shown, purchased and admired. Like Bell and Fry, he has focussed much of his theorizing on a particular art movement, really two movements. Abstract Expressionism was in its heyday from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties; he coined the term Post-Painterly Abstraction to refer to painters like Louis and Noland who followed Abstract Expressionism and whose work perfectly exemplified his ideas. Greenberg, however, is more self-consciously aware of his theoretical roots and makes no secret of his Kantian affiliation. This comes out particularly clearly in the second selection The State of Art Criticism' (1981), though in the first, 'Modernist Painting' (1965) he describes Kant as "the first modernist." 'Modernist Painting' brings out another aspect of Greenberg's theorizing, his emphasis on the history of art and on the dialectical development of modernist painting in France and America. 'Modernist Painting' was first published in the journal Art and Literature. The second paper was delivered to a session on art criticism at a conference on the state of criticism and published in Partisan Review. The selection includes Donald B. Kuspit's commentary and the discussion which followed. Formalism in the 20th century is by no means a phenomenon confined to the English-speaking world. Nor is it a movement confined to the visual arts.

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Introduction

The vigorous highly experimental avant-garde art and its associated theories in Russia during the period from around 1900 to the late twenties is often referred to as Russian Formalism. The theoretical writings from this period which have been most influential were by linguists and others interested in problems of literary criticism. The best known names are Eichenbaum, Shklovsky, Jakobson and Tomashevsky. They emphasized the autonomy of the literary work of art: it uses language in a distinctive way marking it off from the everyday use of language. By the time formalist theories were banned in Russia around the end of the twenties a vigorous Czech formalist movement had been established. Jakobson moved to Prague about 1920. Another very productive and influential writer was Jan Mukarovsky (1891-1975). Rene Wellek (1903-), another member of the group, moved to the United States where his writing on literary theory and criticism became influential. In the United States the New American criticism has been very influential, especially since the forties, for example the writings of Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt and Austin Warren. The autonomy of the literary work of art was the theme of two very widely read articles by Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1947) and 'The Affective Fallacy' (1949). Beardsley in 1958 published an extensively used college text, Aesthetics, which embodies the same emphasis. Though Beardsley does not like the term formalism and in the end adopts a nonformalist position, much of this work can be taken as formalist. Interestingly, near the beginning of the important section on 'The Instrumentalist Theory', he acknowledges his debt not only to John Dewey and I.A. Richards but also to Edward Bullough and Immanuel Kant. Though there are Kantian themes Beardsley shows how liberal a formalist theory can be in admitting the importance of non-structural aspects of the work of art and in allowing a role to canons in evaluation.

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Roger Fry An Essay in Aesthetics A certain painter, not without some reputation at the present day, once wrote a little book on the art he practises, in which he gave a definition of that art so succinct that I take it as a point of departure for this essay. "The art of painting," says that eminent authority, "is the art of imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments." It is delightfully simple, but prompts the question-Is that all? And, if so, what a deal of unnecessary fuss has been made about it. Now, it is useless to deny that our modern writer has some very respectable authorities behind him. Plato, indeed, gave a very similar account of the affair, and himself put the question-is it then worth while? And, being scrupulously and relentlessly logical, he decided that it was not worth while, and proceeded to tum the artists out of his ideal republic. For all that, the world has continued obstinately to consider that painting was worth while, and though, indeed, it has never quite made up its mind as to what, exactly, the graphic arts did for it, it has persisted in honouring and admiring its painters. Can we arrive at any conclusions as to the nature of the graphic arts, which will at all explain our feelings about them, which will at least put them into some kind of relation with the other arts, and not leave us in the extreme perplexity, engendered by any theory of mere imitation? For, I suppose, it must be admitted that if imitation is the sole purpose of the graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon as more than curiosities, or ingenious toys, are ever taken seriously by grown-up people. Moreover, it will be surprising that they have no recognisable affinity with other arts, such as music or architecture, in which the imitation of actual objects is a negligible quantity. To form such conclusions is the aim I have put before myself in this essay. Even if the results are not decisive, the inquiry may lead us to a view of the graphic arts that will not be altogether unfruitful. I must begin with some elementary psychology, with a consideration of the nature of instincts. A great many objects in the world, when presented to our senses, put in motion a complex nervous machinery, which ends in some instinctive appropriate action. We see a wild bull in a field; quite without our conscious interference a nervous process goes on, which, unless we interfere forcibly, ends in the appropriate reaction of flight. The nervous mechanism which results in flight causes a certain

60

Roger Fry: An Essay in Aesthetics

state of consciousness, which we call the emotion of fear. The whole of animal life, and a great part of human life, is made up of these instinctive reactions to sensible objects, and their accompanying emotions. But man has the peculiar faculty of calling up again in his mind the echo of past experiences of this kind, of going over it again, "in imagination" as we say. He has, therefore, the possibility of a double life; one the actual life, the other the imaginative life. Between these two lives there is this great distinction, that in the actual life the processes of natural selection have brought it about that the instinctive reaction, such, for instance, as flight from danger, shall be the important part of the whole process, and it is towards this that the man bends his whole conscious endeavour. But in the imaginative life no such action is necessary, and, therefore, the whole consciousness may be focussed upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience. In this way we get, in the imaginative life, a different set of values, and a different kind of perception. We can get a curious side glimpse of the nature of this imaginative life from the cinematograph. This resembles actual life in almost every respect, except that what the psychologists call the conative part of our reaction to sensations, that is to say, the appropriate resultant action is cut off. If, in a cinematograph, we see a runaway horse and cart, we do not have to think either of getting out of the way or heroically interposing ourselves. The result is that in the first place we see the event much more clearly; see a number of quite interesting but irrelevant things, which in real1ife could not struggle into our consciousness, bent, as it would be, entirely upon the problem of our appropriate reaction. I remember seeing in a cinematograph the arrival of a train at a foreign station and the people descending from the carriages; there was no platform, and to my intense surprise I saw several people turn right round after reaching the ground, as though to orientate themselves; an almost ridiculous performance, which I had never noticed in all the many hundred occasions on which such a scene had passed before my eyes in real1ife. The fact being that at a station one is never really a spectator of events, but an actor engaged in the drama of luggage or prospective seats, and one actually sees only so much as may help to the appropriate action. In the second place, with regard to the visions of the cinematograph, one notices that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the consciousness. If the scene presented be one of an accident, our pity and horror, though weak, since we know that no one is really hurt, are felt 61

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quite purely, since they cannot, as they would in life, pass at once into actions of assistance. A somewhat similar effect to that of the cinematograph can be obtained by watching a mirror in which a street scene is reflected. If we look at the street itself we are almost sure to adjust ourselves in some way to its actual existence. We recognise an acquaintance, and wonder why he looks so dejected this morning, or become interested in a new fashion in hatsthe moment we do that the spell is broken, we are reacting to life itself in however slight a degree, but, in the mirror, it is easier to abstract ourselves completely, and look upon the changing scene as a whole. It then, at once, takes on the visionary quality, and we become true spectators, not selecting what we will see, but seeing everything equally, and thereby we come to notice a number of appearances and relations of appearances, which would have escaped our notice before, owing to that perpetual economising by selection of what impressions we will assimilate, which in life we perform by unconscious processes. The frame of the mirror, then, does to some extent tum the reflected scene from one that belongs to our actual life into one that belongs rather to the imaginative life. The frame of the mirror makes its surface into a very rudimentary work of art, since it helps us to attain to the artistic vision. For that is what, as you will already have guessed, I have been coming to all this time, namely that the work of art is intimately connected with the secondary imaginative life, which all men live to a greater or less extent. That the graphic arts are the expression of the imaginative life rather than a copy of actual life might be guessed from observing children. Children, if left to themselves, never, I believe, copy what they see, never, as we say, "draw from nature," but express, with a delightful freedom and sincerity, the mental images which make up their own imaginative lives. Art, then, is an expression and a stimulus of this imaginative life, which is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action. Now this responsive action implies in actual life moral responsibility. In art we have no such moral responsibility-it presents a life freed from the binding necessities of our actual existence. What then is the justification for this life of the imagination which all human beings live more or less fully? To the pure moralist, who accepts nothing but ethical values, in order to be justified, it must be shown not only not to hinder but actually to forward right action, otherwise it is not only useless but, since it absorbs our energies, positively harmful. To such a one two views are possible, one the Puritanical view at its narrowest, which regards the life of the imagination as no better or worse than a life of

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sensual pleasure, and therefore entirely reprehensible. The other view is to argue that the imaginative life does subserve morality. And this is inevitably the view taken by moralists like Ruskin, to whom the imaginative life is yet an absolute necessity. It is a view which leads to some very hard . special pleading, even to a self-deception which is in itself morally undesirable. But here comes in the question of religion, for religion is also an affair of the imaginative life, and, though it claims to have a direct effect upon conduct, I do not suppose that the religious person if he were wise would justify religion entirely by its effect on morality, since that, historically speaking, has not been by any means uniformly advantageous. He would probably say that the religious experience was one which corresponded to certain spiritual capacities of human nature, the exercise of which is in itself good and desirable apart from their effect upon actual life. And so, too, I think the artist might if he chose take a mystical attitude, and declare that the fullness and completeness of the imaginative life he leads may correspond to an existence more real and more important than any that we know of in mortal life. And in saying that, his appeal would find a sympathetic echo in most minds, for most people would, I think, say that the pleasures derived from art were of an altogether different character and more fundamental than merely sensual pleasures, that they did exercise some faculties which are felt to belong to whatever part of us there may be which is not entirely ephemeral and material. It might even be that from this point of view we should rather justify actual life by its relation to the imaginative, justify nature by its likeness to art. I mean this, that since the imaginative life comes in the course of time to represent more or less what mankind feels to be the completest expression of its own nature, the freest use of its innate capacities, the actual life may be explained and justified by its approximation here and there, however partially and inadequately, to that freer and fuller life. Before leaving this question of the justification of art, let me put it in another way. The imaginative life of a people has very different levels at different times, and these levels do not always correspond with the general level of the morality of actual1ife. Thus in the thirteenth century we read of barbarity and cruelty which would shock even us; we may, I think, admit that our moral level, our general humanity is decidedly high to-day, but the level of our imaginative life is incomparably lower; we are satisfied there with a grossness, a sheer barbarity and squalor which would have shocked the thirteenth century profoundly. Let us admit the moral gain 63

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gladly, but do we not also feel a loss; do we not feel that the average business man would be in every way a more admirable, more respectable being if his imaginative life were not so squalid and incoherent? And, if we admit any loss then, there is some function in human nature other than a purely ethical one, which is worthy of exercise. Now the imaginative life has its own history both in the race and in the individual. In the individual life one of the first effects of freeing experience from the necessities of appropriate responsive action is to indulge recklessly the emotion of self-aggrandisement. The day-dreams of a child are filled with extravagant romances in which he is always the invincible hero. Music-which of all the arts supplies the strongest stimulus to the imaginative life, and at the same time has the least power of controlling its direction-music, at certain stages of people's lives, has the effect merely of arousing in an almost absurd degree this egoistic elation, and Tolstoy appears to believe that this is its only possible effect. But with the teaching of experience and the growth of character the imaginative life comes to respond to other instincts and to satisfy other desires, until, indeed, it reflects the highest aspirations and the deepest aversions of which human nature is capable. In dreams and when under the influence of drugs the imaginative life passes out of our own control, and in such cases its experiences may be highly undesirable, but whenever it remains under our own control it must always be on the whole a desirable life. That is not to say that is always pleasant, for it is pretty clear that mankind is so constituted as to desire much besides pleasure, and we shall meet among the great artists, the great exponents, that is, of the imaginative life, many to whom the merely pleasant is very rarely a part of what is desirable. But this desirability of the imaginative life does distinguish it very sharply from actual life, and is the direct result of that first fundamental difference, its freedom from necessary external conditions. Art, then, is, if I am right, the chief organ of the imaginative life; it is by art that it is stimulated and controlled within us, and, as we have seen, the imaginative life is distinguished by the greater clearness of its perception, and the greater purity and freedom of its emotion. First with regard to the greater clearness of perception. The needs of our actual life are so imperative, that the sense of vision becomes highly specialised in their service. With an admirable economy we learn to see only so much as is needful for our purposes; but this is in fact very little, just enough to recognise and identify each object or person; that done, they go into an entry in our mental catalogue and are no more really seen. In 64

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actual life the normal person really only reads the labels as it were on the objects around him and troubles no further. Almost all the things which are useful in any way put on more or less this cap of invisibility. It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it, as for instance at a China ornament or a precious stone, and towards such even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity. Now this specialisation of vision goes so far that ordinary people have almost no idea of what things really look like, so that oddly enough the one standard that popular criticism applies to painting, namely, whether it is like nature or not, is one which most people are, by the whole tenour of their lives, prevented from applying properly. The only things they have ever really looked at being other pictures; the moment an artist who has looked at nature brings to them a clear report of something definitely seen by him, they are wildly indignant at its untruth to nature. This has happened so constantly in our own time that there is no need to prove it. One instance will suffice. Monet is an artist whose chief claim to recognition lies in the fact of his astonishing power of faithfully reproducing certain aspects of nature, but his really naIve innocence and sincerity were taken by the public to be the most audacious humbug, and it required the teaching of men like Bastien-Lepage, who cleverly compromised between the truth and an accepted convention of what things looked like, to bring the world gradually round to admitting truths which a single walk in the country with purely unbiassed vision would have established beyond doubt. But though this clarified sense perception which we discover in the imaginative life is of great interest, and although it plays a larger part in the graphic arts than in any other, it might perhaps be doubted whether, interesting, curious, fascinating as it is, this aspect of the imaginative life would ever by itself make art of profound importance to mankind. But it is different, I think, with the emotional aspect. We have admitted that the emotions of the imaginative are generally weaker than those of actual life. The picture of a saint being slowly flayed alive, revolting as it is, will not produce the same physical sensations of sickening disgust that a modern man would feel if he could assist at the actual event; but they have a compensating clearness of presentment to the consciousness. The more poignant emotions of actual life have, I think, a kind of numbing effect analogous to the paralysing influence of fear in some animals; but even if this experience be not generally admitted, all will admit that the need for responsive action hurries us along and prevents us from ever realising fully 65

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what the emotion is that we feel, from co-ordinating it perfectly with other states. In short, the motives we actually experience are too close to us to enable us to feel them clearly. They are in a sense unintelligible. In the imaginative life, on the contrary, we can both feel the emotion and watch it. When we are really moved at the theatre we are always both on the stage and in the auditorium. Yet another point about the emotions of the imaginative life-since they require no responsive action we can give them a new valuation. In real life we must to some extent cultivate those emotions which lead to useful action, and we are bound to appraise emotions according to the resultant action. So that, for instance, the feelings of rivalry and emulation do get an encouragement which perhaps they scarcely deserve, whereas certain feelings which appear to have a high intrinsic value get almost no stimulus in actual life. For instance, those feelings to which the name of the cosmic emotion has been somewhat unhappily given find almost no place in life, but, since they seem to belong to certain very deep springs of our nature, do become of great importance in the arts. Morality, then, appreciates emotion by the standard of resultant action. Art appreciates emotion in and for itself. This view of the essential importance in art of the expression of the emotions is the basis of Tolstoy'S marvellously original and yet perverse and even exasperating book, "What is Art?" and I willingly confess, while disagreeing with almost all his results, how much I owe to him. He gives an example of what he means by calling art the means of communicating emotions. He says, let us suppose a boy to have been pursued in the forest by a bear. If he returns to the village and merely states that he was pursued by a bear and escaped, that is ordinary language, the means of communicating facts or ideas; but if he describes his state first of heedlessness, then of sudden alarm and terror as the bear appears, and finally of relief when he gets away, and describes this so that his hearers share his emotions, then his description is a work of art. Now in so far as the boy does this in order to urge the villagers to go out and kill the bear, though he may be using artistic methods, his speech is not a pure work of art; but if of a winter evening the boy relates his experience for the sake of the enjoyment of his ad venture in retrospect, or better still, if he makes up the whole story for the sake of the imagined emotions, then his speech becomes a pure work of art. But Tolstoy takes the other view, and values the emotions aroused by art entirely for their reaction upon actual life, a view which he courageously maintains even when it leads him to condemn the whole of Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, and 66

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most of Beethoven, not to mention nearly everything he himself has written, as bad or false art. Such a view would, I think, give pause to any less heroic spirit. He would wonder whether mankind could have always been so radically wrong about a function that, whatever its value be, is almost universal. And in point of fact he will have to find some other word to denote what we now call art. Nor does Tolstoy's theory even carry him safely through his own book, since, in his examples of morally desirable and therefore good art, he has to admit that these are to be found, for the most part, among works of inferior quality. Here, then, is at once the tacit admission that another standard than morality is applicable. We must therefore give up the attempt to judge the work of art by its reaction on life, and consider it as an expression of emotions regarded as ends in themselves. And this brings us back to the idea we had already arrived at, of art as the expression of the imaginative life. If, then, an object of any kind is created by man not for use, for its fitness to actual life, but as an object of art, an object subserving the imaginative life, what will its qualities be? It must in the first place be adapted to that disinterested intensity of contemplation, which we have found to be the effect of cutting off the responsive action. It must be suited to that heightened power of perception which we found to result therefrom. And the first quality that we demand in our sensations will be order, without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed, and the other quality will be variety, without which they will not be fully stimulated. It may be objected that many things in nature, such as flowers, possess these two qualities of order and variety in a high degree, and these objects do undoubtedly stimulate and satisfy that clear disinterested contemplation which is characteristic of the aesthetic attitude. But in our reaction to a work of art there is something more-there is the consciousness of purpose, the consciousness of a peculiar relation of sympathy with the . man who made this thing in order to rouse precisely the sensations we experience. And when we come to the higher works of art, where sensations are so arranged that they arouse in us deep emotions, this feeling of a special tie with the man who expressed them becomes very strong. We feel that he has expressed something which was latent in us all the time, but which we never realised, that he has revealed us to ourselves in revealing himself. And this recognition of purpose is, I believe, an essential part of the aesthetic judgment proper.

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The perception of purposeful order and variety in an object gives us the feeling which we express by saying that it is beautiful, but when by means of sensations our emotions are roused we demand purposeful order and variety in them also, and if this can only be brought about by the sacrifice of sensual beauty we willingly overlook its absence. Thus, there is no excuse for a china pot being ugly, there is every reason why Rembrandt's and Degas' pictures should be, from the purely sensual point of view, supremely and magnificently ugly. This, I think, will explain the apparent contradiction between two distinct uses of the word beauty, one for that which has sensuous charm, and one for the aesthetic approval of works of imaginative art where the objects presented to us are often of extreme ugliness. Beauty in the former sense belongs to works of art where only the perceptual aspect of the imaginative life is exercised, beauty in the second sense becomes as it were supersensual, and is concerned with the appropriateness and intensity of the emotions aroused. When these emotions are aroused in a way that satisfies fully the needs of the imaginative life we approve and delight in the sensations through which we enjoy that heightened experience because they possess purposeful order and variety in relation to those emotions. One chief aspect of order in a work of art is unity; unity of some kind is necessary for our restful contemplation of the work of art as a whole, since if it lacks unity we cannot contemplate it in its entirety, but we shall pass outside it to other things necessary to complete its unity. In a picture this unity is due to a balancing of the attractions of the eye about the central line of the picture. The result of this balance of attractions is that the eye rests willingly within the bounds of the picture. Dr. Denman Ross of Harvard University has made a most valuable study of the elementary considerations upon which this balance is based in his "Theory of Pure Design." He sums up his results in the formula that a composition is of value in proportion to the number of orderly connections which it displays. Dr. Ross wisely restricts himself to the study of abstract and meaningless forms. The moment representation is introduced forms have an entirely new set of values. Thus a line which indicated the sudden bend of a head in a certain direction would have far more than its mere value as line in the composition because of the attraction which a marked gesture has for the eye. In almost all paintings this disturbance of the purely decorative values by reason of the representative effect takes place, and the problem becomes too complex for geometrical proof.

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This merely decorative unity is, moreover, of very different degrees of intensity in different artists and in different periods. The necessity for a closely woven geometrical texture in the composition is much greater in heroic and monumental design than in genre pieces on a small scale. It seems also probable that our appreciation of unity in pictorial design is of two kinds. We are so accustomed to consider only the unity which results from the balance of a number of attractions presented to the eye simultaneously in a framed picture that we forget the possibility of other pictOrial forms. In certain Chinese paintings the length is so great that we cannot take in the whole picture at once, nor are we intended to do so. Sometimes a landscape is painted upon a roll of silk so long that we can only look at it in successive segments. As we unroll it at one end and roll it up at the other we traverse wide stretches of country, tracing, perhaps, all the vicissitudes of a river from its source to the sea, and yet, when this is well done, we have received a very keen impression of pictorial unity. Such a successive unity is of course familiar to us in literature and music, and it plays its part in the graphic arts. It depends upon the forms being presented to us in such a sequence that each successive element is felt to have a fundamental and harmonious relation with that which preceded it. I suggest that in looking at drawings our sense of pictorial unity is largely of this nature; we feel, if the drawing be a good one, that each modulation of the line as our eye passes along it gives order and variety to our sensations. Such a drawing may be almost entirely lacking in the geometrical balance which we are accustomed to demand in paintings, and yet have, in a remarkable degree, unity. Let us now see how the artist passes from the stage of merely gratifying our demand for sensuous order and variety to that where he arouses our emotions. I will call the various methods by which this is affected the emotional elements of design. The first element is that of the rhythm of the line with which the forms are delineated. The drawn line is the record of a gesture, and that gesture is modified by the artist's feeling which is thus communicated to us directly. The second element is mass. When an object is so represented that we recognise it as having inertia we feel its power of resisting movement, or communicating its own movement to other bodies, and our imaginative reaction to such an image is governed by our experience of mass in actual life.

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The third element is space. The same-sized square on two pieces of paper can be made by very simple means to appear to represent either a cube two or three inches high, or a cube of hundreds of feet, and our reaction to it is proportionately changed. The fourth element is that of light and shade. Our feelings towards the same object become totally different according as we see it strongly illuminated against a black background or dark against light. A fifth element is that of colour. That this has a direct emotional effect is evident from such words as gay, dull, melancholy in relation to colour. I would suggest the possibility of another element, though perhaps it is only a compound of mass and space: it is that of the inclination to the eye of a plane, whether it is impending over or leaning away from us. Now it will be noticed that nearly all these emotional elements of design are connected with essential conditions of our physical existence: rhythm appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular activity; mass to all the infinite adaptations to the force of gravity which we are forced to make; the spatial judgment is equally profound and universal in its application to life; our feeling about inclined planes is connected with our necessary judgments about the conformation of the earth itself; light again, is so necessary a condition of our existence that we become intensely sensitive to changes in its intensity. Colour is the only one of our elements which is not of critical or universal importance to life, and its emotional effect is neither so deep nor so clearly determined as the others. It will be seen, then, that the graphic arts arouse emotions in us by playing upon what one may call the overtones of some of our primary physical needs. They have, indeed, this great advantage over poetry, that they can appeal more directly and immediately to the emotional accompaniments of our bare physical existence. If we represent these various elements in simple diagrammatic terms, this effect upon the emotions is, it must be confessed, very weak. Rhythm of line, for instance, is incomparably weaker in its stimulus of the muscular sense than is rhythm addressed to the ear in music, and such diagrams can at best arouse only faint ghost-like echoes of emotions of differing qualities; but when these emotional elements are combined with the presentation of natural appearances, above all with the appearance of the human body, we find that this effect is indefinitely heightened. When, for instance, we look at Michelangelo's "Jeremiah," and realise the irresistible momentum his movements would have, we experience

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powerful sentiments of reverence and awe. Or when we look at Michelangelo's uTondo" in the Uffizi, and find a group of figures so arranged that the planes have a sequence comparable in breadth and dignity to the mouldings of the earth mounting by clearly-felt gradations to an overtopping summit, innumerable instinctive reactions are brought into play. At this point the adversary (as Leonardo da Vinci calls him) is likely enough to retort, uYou have abstracted from natural forms a number of socalled emotional elements which you yourself admit are very weak when stated with diagrammatic purity; you then put them back, with the help of Michelangelo, into the natural forms whence they were derived, and at once they have value, so that after all it appears that the natural forms contain these emotional elements ready made up for us, and all that art need do is to imitate Nature." But, alas! Nature is heartlessly indifferent to the needs of the imaginative life; God causes His rain to fall upon the just and upon the unjust. The sun neglects to provide the appropriate limelight effect even upon a triumphant Napoleon or a dying Caesar. Assuredly we have no guarantee that in nature the emotional elements will be combined appropriately with the demands of the imaginative life, and it is, I think, the great occupation of the graphic arts to give us first of all order and variety in the sensuous plane, and then so to arrange the sensuous presentment of objects that the emotional elements are elicited with an order and appropriateness altogether beyond what Nature herself provides. Let me sum up for a moment what I have said about the relation of art to Nature, which is, perhaps, the greatest stumbling-block to the understanding of the graphic arts. I have admitted that there is beauty in Nature, that is to say, that certain objects constantly do, and perhaps any object may, compel us to regard it with that intense disinterested contemplation that belongs to the imaginative life, and which is impossible to the actual life of necessity and action; but that in objects created to arouse the aesthetic feeling we have an added consciousness of purpose on the part of the creator, that he made it on purpose not to be used but to be regarded and enjoyed; and that this feeling is characteristic of the aesthetic judgment proper. When the artist passes from pure sensations to emotions aroused by means of sensations, he uses natural forms which, in themselves, are calculated to move our emotions, and he presents these in such a manner that the forms themselves generate in us emotional states, based upon the fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological nature. The artist's 71

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attitude to natural form is, therefore, infinitely various according to the emotions he wishes to arouse. He may require for his purpose the most complete representation of a figure, he may be intensely realistic, provided that his presentment, in spite of its closeness to natural appearance, disengages clearly for us the appropriate emotional elements. Or he may give us the merest suggestion of natural forms, and rely almost entirely upon the force and intensity of the emotional elements involved in his presentment. We may, then, dispense once for all with the idea of likeness to Nature, of correctness or incorrectness as a test, and consider only whether the emotional elements inherent in natural form are adequately discovered, unless, indeed, the emotional idea depends at any point upon likeness, or completeness of representation.

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Roger Fry Pure and Impure Art There is such a thing as impure or useful science, and, if you were to analyze that activity, you would find all sorts of biological motives at work, although the fundamental truth-seeking passion of pure science is distinguished precisely by its independence of, and its indifference to, biological necessity. Similarly there is an impure and, perhaps, useful art (though the use of impure art is not so easily demonstrated as that of impure science); here too, analysis would reveal a number of elements which really form no part of the essential esthetic activity, and you will make a serious mistake if, after such an analysis, you declare these to be constituent parts of that phenomenon. If you have a substance which you know to be chemically pure it is clear that you have a right to say that every element which you discover in that substance by analysis is a constituent part of it, but, if you have any reason to suspect an impure mixture, you know that any particular element which the analysis reveals may be due to the impurity and form no part of the substance which you are investigating. Now that the esthetic activity does mix in various degrees with a number of other activities is surely evident. Take for instance advertisements: many of these show no esthetic effort and do not even try to afford esthetic pleasure; they merely convey more or less inaccurate information about a particular object. You can think of advertisements where not only are the merits of the objects enumerated but the object, let us say a bottle of Somebody's Beer, is depicted. Every detail of the bottle and its label is given so that we may recognize it when we see it in the bar, but there is no sign that in the manner of representation any thought has been expended for our esthetic pleasure. On the other hand I take certain advertisements in American journals, where advertisements are taken seriously and romantically, and I find a very genuine effort, in the proportion and spacing of the letters, in the harmonious consistence of the forms, and in the exact presentation of the object, towards esthetic pleasure. None the less this esthetic appeal is mixed with all sorts of appeals to other feelings than the love of beauty-appeals to our sense of social prestige, to our avarice, to our desire for personal display, and so forth.

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Or take again the case of dress-here no doubt there is often a considerable care for pure beauty of line and harmony of color, but such considerations have continually to give place to far more pressing concerns connected with social rivalry, in fact to all the complicated mass of instincts which go to make up what we call snobbishness. These, then, are cases of obvious mixtures, in which the esthetic impulse has a part-but you will say these belong to applied art; if we take pictures which subserve no ultimate use we shall surely be safe. But alas the vast majority of pictures are not really works of art at all. No doubt in most a careful analysis would reveal some trace of esthetic preoccupations, but for the most part the appeal they make is to quite other feelings. For the moment I must be dogmatic and declare that the esthetic emotion is an emotion about form. In certain people, purely formal relations of certain kinds arouse peculiarly profound emotions, or rather I ought to say the recognition by them of particular kinds of formal relations arouse these emotions. Now these emotions about forms may be accompanied by other emotions which have to do more or less with what I call the instinctive life. The simplest examples of this can be taken from music. If, as frequently happens, an unmusical child strikes six notes in succession on the piano, the chances are that no one would be able to perceive any necessary relation between these notes-they have been struck by accident, as we say. But if I strike the first six notes of "God Save the King," every one who is not quite music-deaf recognizes that they have, as one would say, a meaning, a purpose. They occur in such a sequence that after each note has been struck we feel that only certain notes can follow and, as the notes follow one another, they more or less adequately fulfill our expectation, that is, from the beginning the idea of a formal design or scheme is impressed on our minds, and anything which departed violently from that would be not merely meaningless, but an outrage to our sense of order and proportion. We have then an immediate recognition of formal design, of a trend in every part towards a single unity or complete thing which we call the tune. Now let us suppose that you hear "God Save the King" for the first time; it is possible that you would get an emotion from the mere recognition of that formal system. I do not say it would be a very profound or important emotion, but it might be an emotion, and it would probably stir up no image whatever in your mind, would be associated with no particu-

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lar person or thing or idea. But those particular notes have become associated with many other things in our minds, so that when they are played we no longer can fix our minds on the form, we are instantly invaded by the associated feelings of loyalty, devotion to country, boredom from the memory of tiresome functions, or relief that we can now at last leave the theater. We shall say that that particular formal design of notes has become symbolical of numerous other things with which it has become associated. Now this simple case presents in easy form some of the problems which confront us in works of art of all kinds. The form of a work of art has a meaning of its own and the contemplation of the form in and for itself gives rise in some people to a special emotion which does not depend upon the association of the form with anything else whatever. But that form may by various means either by casual opposition or by some resemblance to things or people or ideas in the outside world, become intimately associated in our minds with those other things, and if these things are objects of emotional feeling, we shall get from the contemplation of the form the echo of all the feelings belonging to the associated objects. Now since very few people are so constituted by nature or training as to have developed the special feeling about formal design, and since every one has in the course of his life accumulated a vast mass of feeling about all sorts of objects, persons, and ideas, for the greater part of mankind the associated emotions of a work of art are far stronger than the purely esthetic ones. So far does this go that they hardly notice the form, but pass at once into the world of associated emotions which that form calls up in them. Thus, to go back to our example, the vast majority of people have no notion whether the form of "God Save the King" is finely constructed and capable of arousing esthetic emotion or not. They have never, properly speaking, heard the form because they have always passed at once into that richly varied world of racial and social emotion which has gathered round it. And what is true of certain pieces of music is even more true of the graphic arts. Here we have forms which quite visibly resemble certain objects in nature, and not un frequently these objects, such for instance as a beautiful woman, are charged for us with a great deal of emotion. When to this we add that people are far less sensitive to the meaning of visible formal design than they are to audible deSign, we need not be surprised that

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pictures are almost always estimated for qualities which have nothin~ or almost nothin~ to do with their formal design or their esthetic quality in the strict sense. To satisfy this emotional pleasure in the associated ideas of images which the mass of mankind feel so strongly there has arisen a vast production of pictures, writings, music, etc., in which formal design is entirely subordinated to the excitation of the emotions associated with objects. And this is what we may call popular, commercial, or impure ~rt, and to this category belongs nowadays the vast majority of so-called artistic productions. On the other hand in each generation there are likely to be a certain number of people who have a sensitiveness to purely formal relations. To such people these relations have meaning and arouse keen emotions of pleasure. And these people create such systems of formal relations and do not sacrifice willingly or consciously anything of those formal relations to the arousing of emotions connected with objects in the outside world. Their whole attention is directed towards establishing the completest relationship of all parts within the system of the work of art. lt so happens that these systems of formal relations the meaning of which is apprehended by a comparatively few people in each generation, have a curious vitality and longevity, whereas those works in which appeal is made chiefly to the associated ideas of images rarely survive the generation for whose pleasure they were made. This may be because the emotions about objects change more rapidly than the emotions about form. But whatever the reason, the result is that the accumulated and inherited artistic treasure of mankind is made up almost entirely of those works in which formal design is the predominant consideration. This contrast between the nature of inherited art and the mass of contemporary art has become so marked that the word IIclassic" is often used (loosely and incorrectly, no doubt) to denote work which has this peculiar character. People speak of classical music, for instance, when they mean the works of any of the great composers. It is significant of the rarity of comprehension of such formal design that to many people classical music is almost synonymous with IIdull" music.... Since most people are unable to perceive the meaning of purely formal relations, are unable to derive from them the profound satisfactions that the creator and those that understand him feel, they always look for some meaning that can be attached to the values of actual life, they always hope to translate a work of art into terms of ideas with which they are familiar. . .. 76

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Now I venture to say that no one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture-what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form all depends on how it is presented, nothing on what. Rembrandt expressed his profoundest feelings just as well when he painted a carcass hanging up in a butcher's shop as when he painted the Crucifixion or his mistress. Cezanne whom most of us believe to be the greatest artist of modem times expressed some of his grandest conceptions in pictures of fruit and crockery on a common kitchen table. I remember when this fact became clear to me, and the instance may help to show what I mean. In a loan exhibition I came upon a picture of Chardin. It was a signboard painted to hang outside a druggist's shop. It represented a number of glass retorts, a still, and various glass bottles, the furniture of a chemist's laboratory of that time. You will admit that there was not much material for wishfulfillment (unless the still suggested remote possibilities of alcohol). Well, it gave me a very intense and vivid sensation. Just the shapes of those bottles and their mutual relations gave me the feeling of something immensely grand and impressive and the phrase that came into my mind was, "This is just how I felt when I first saw Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel." Those represented the whole history of creation with the tremendous images of Sybils and Prophets, but esthetically it meant something very similar to Chardin's glass bottles. And here let me allude to a curious phenomenon which I have frequently noticed, namely, that even though at the first shock of a great political design the subject appears to have a great deal to do with one's emotional reaction, that part of one's feeling evaporates very quickly; one soon exhausts the feelings connected by associated ideas with the figures, and what remains, what never grows less nor evaporates, are the feelings dependent on the purely formal relations. This indeed may be the explanation of that curious fact that I alluded to, the persistence throughout the ages of works in which formal perfection is attained, and the rapid disappearance and neglect which is the fate of works that make their chief appeal through the associated ideas of the images.... . . . The question occurs, ''What is the source of the affective quality of certain systems of formal design for those who are sensitive to pure form? Why are we moved deeply by certain sequences of notes which arouse no suggestion of any experience in actual life? Why are we moved

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deeply by certain dispositions of space in architecture which refer so far as we can tell to no other experience?" One thing I think we may clearly say, namely, that there is a pleasure in the recognition of order, of inevitability in relations, and that the more complex the relations of which we are able to recognize the inevitable interdependence and correspondence, the greater is the pleasure; this of course will come very near to the pleasure derived from the contemplation of intellectual constructions united by logical inevitability. What the source of that satisfaction is would clearly be a problem for psychology. But in art there is, I think, an affective quality which lies outside that. It is not a mere recognition of order and interrelation; every part, as well as the whole, become suffused with an emotional tone. Now, from our definition of this pure beauty, the emotional tone is not due to any recognizable reminiscence or suggestion of the emotional experiences of life; but I sometimes wonder if it nevertheless does not get its force from arousing some very deep, very vague, and immensely generalized reminiscences. It looks as though art had got access to the substratum of all the emotional colors of life, to something which underlies all the particular and specialized emotions of actual life. It seems to derive an emotional energy from the very conditions of our existence by its relation of an emotional significance in time and space. Or it may be that art really calls up, as it were, the residual traces left on the spirit by the different emotions of life, without however recalling the actual experiences, so that we get an echo of the emotion without the limitation and particular direction which it had in experience.

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Clive Bell The Aesthetic Hypothesis It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that. It is certain, however, that about no subject with which I am acquainted has so little been said that is at all to the purpose. The explanation is discoverable. He who would elaborate a plausible theory of aesthetics must possess two qualities-artistic sensibility and a turn for clear thinking. Without sensibility a man can have no aesthetic experience, and, obviously, theories not based on broad and deep aesthetic experience are worthless. Only those for whom art is a constant source of passionate emotion can possess the data from which profitable theories may be deduced; but to deduce profitable theories even from accurate data involves a certain amount of brain-work, and, unfortunately, robust intellects and delicate sensibilities are not inseparable. As often as not, the hardest thinkers have had no aesthetic experience whatever. I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously false. Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though unlucky in that it makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his argument, mercifully blinds him to the absurdity of his conclusions while leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic. People who set out from the hypothesis that Sir Edwin Landseer was the finest painter that ever lived will find no uneasiness about an aesthetic which proves that Giotto was the worst. So, my friend, when he arrives very logically at the conclusion that a work of art should be small or round or smooth, or that to appreciate fully a picture you should pace smartly before it or set it spinning like a top, cannot guess why I ask him whether he has lately been to Cambridge, a place he sometimes visits. On the other hand, people who respond immediately and surely to works of art, though, in my judgment, more enviable than men of massive 79

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intellect but slight sensibility, are often quite as incapable of talking sense about aesthetics. Their heads are not always very clear. They possess the data on which any system must be based, but, generally, they want the power that draws correct inferences from true data. Having received aesthetic emotions from works of art, they are in a position to seek out the quality common to all that have moved them, but, in fact, they do nothing of the sort. I do not blame them. Why should they bother to examine their feelings when for them to feel is enough? Why should they stop to think when they are not very good at thinking? Why should they hunt for a common quality in all objects that move them in a particular way when they can linger over the many delicious and peculiar charms of each as it comes? So, if they write criticism and call it aesthetics, if they imagine they are talking about Art when they are talking about particular works of art or even about the technique of painting, if loving particular works they find tedious the consideration of art in general, perhaps they have chosen the better part. If they are not curious about the nature of their emotion, nor about the quality common to all objects that provoke it, they have my sympathy, and, as what they say is often charming and suggestive, my admiration too. Only let no one suppose that what they write and talk is aesthetics: it is criticism, or just "shop." The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion. But all these emotions are recognisably the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side. That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc., etc., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shaH have discovered the ~ssential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects. For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of works of art" we gibber. Everyone speaks of "art," making a mental classification by which he distinguishes the class "works of art" from all other classes. What is the justification of this classification? II

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What is the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class? Whatever it be, no doubt it is often found in company with other qualities; but they are adventitious-it is essential. There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to St. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible--significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I shall call "Significant Form"; and I'Significant Form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art. At this point it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective business, since my only data are personal experiences of a particular emotion. It will be said that the objects that provoke this emotion vary with each individual, and that therefore a system of aesthetics can have no objective validity. It must be replied that any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing. We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual. Aesthetic judgments are, as the saying goes, matters of taste; and about tastes, as everyone is proud to admit, there is no disputing. A good critic may be able to make me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till at last, receiving the aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art. To be continually pointing out those parts, the sum, or rather the combination, of which unite to produce Significant form, is the function of criticism. But it is useless for a critic to tell me that something is a work of art; he must make me feel it for myself. This he can do only by making me see; he must get at my emotions through my eyes. Unless he can make me see something that moves me, he cannot force my emotions. I have no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally, and I have no right to look for the essential quality in anything that I have not felt to be a work of art. The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience-that is to say, they must be subjective. Yet, though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judg81

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ments, and ultimately all aesthetic judgments must be matters of personal taste, it would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity. For, though A, B, C, 0 are the works that move me, and A, 0, E, F the works that move you, it may well be that x is the only quality believed by either of us to be common to all the works in this list. We may all agree about aesthetics, and yet differ about particular works of art. We may differ as to the presence or absence of the quality x. My immediate object will be to show that significant form is the only quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art that move me; and I will ask those whose aesthetic experience does not tally with mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment, common to all works that move them, and whether they can discover any other quality of which the same can be said. Also at this point a query arises, irrelevant indeed, but hardly to be suppressed: "Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a particular way?" The question is extremely interesting, but irrelevant to aesthetics. In pure esthetics we have only to consider our emotion and its object: for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it. Later, I shall attempt to answer the question; for by so doing I may be able to develop my theory of the relation of art to life. I shall not, however, be under the delusion that I am rounding off my theory of aesthetics. For a discussion of aesthetics, it need be agreed only that forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way, and that it is the business of an artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall move us. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called, for the sake of convenience and for a reason that will appear later, "Significant Form." A third interruption has to be met. "Are you forgetting about colour?" someone inquires. Certainly not; my term "significant form" included combinations of lines and colours. The distinction between form and colour is an unreal one; you cannot conceive a colourless line or a colourless space; neither can you conceive a formless relation of colours. In a black and white drawing the spaces are all white and all are bounded by black lines; in most oil paintings the spaces are multi-coloured and so are the boundaries; you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line. Therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of lines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves me aesthetically.

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Some people may be surprised at my not having called this Of course, to those who define beauty as IIcombinations of lines and colours that provoke aesthetic emotion," I willingly concede the right of substituting their word for mine. But most of us, however strict we may be, are apt to apply the epithet ~'beautiful" to objects that do not provoke that peculiar emotion produced by works of art. Everyone, I suspect, has called a butterfly or a flower beautiful. Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture? Surely, it is not what I call an aesthetic emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty. I shall suggest, later, that some people may, occasionally, see in nature what we see in art, and feel for her an aesthetic emotion; but I am satisfied that, as a rule, most people feel a very different kind of emotion for birds and flowers and the wings of butterflies from that which they feel for pictures, pots, temples and statues. Why these beautiful things do not move us as works of art move is another, and not an aesthetic question. For our immediate purpose we have to discover only what quality is common to objects that do move us as works of art. In the last part of this chapter, when I try to answer the question-" Why are we so profoundly moved by some combinations of lines and colours?" I shall hope to offer an acceptable explanation of why we are less profoundly moved by others. Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic emotion IIBeauty," it would be misleading to call by the same name the quality that does. To make ''beauty'' the object of the aesthetic emotion, we must give to the word an over-strict and unfamiliar definition. Everyone sometimes uses ''beauty'' in an unaesthetic sense; most people habitually do. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic. Of its grosser abuse, patent in our chatter about ''beautiful hun tin'" and ''beautiful shootin'," I need not take account; it would be open to the precious to reply that they never do so abuse it. Besides, here there is no danger of confusion between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic use; but when we speak of a beautiful woman there is. When an ordinary man speaks of a beautiful woman he certainly does not mean only that she moves him aesthetically; but when an artist calls a withered old hag beautiful he may sometimes mean what he means when he calls a battered torso beautiful. The ordinary man, if he be also a man of taste, will call the battered torso beautiful, but he will not call a withered hag beautiful because, in the matter of women, it is not to the aesthetic quality that the hag may possess, but to ~'beauty."

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some other quality that he assigns the epithet. Indeed, most of us never dream of going for aesthetic emotions to human beings, from whom we ask something very different. This "something," when we find it in a young woman, we are apt to call "beauty." We live in a nice age. With the man-in-the-street "beautiful" is more often than not synonymous with "desirable"; the word does not necessarily connote any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I am tempted to believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word is stronger than the aesthetic. I have noticed a consistency in those to whom the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful woman, and the next most beautiful thing a picture of one. The confusion between aesthetic and sensual beauty is not in their case so great as might be supposed. Perhaps there is none; for perhaps they have never had an aesthetic emotion to confuse with their other emotions. The art that they call "beautiful" is generally closely related to the women. A beautiful picture is a photograph of a pretty girl; beautiful music, the music that provokes emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls the same emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector's daughter. Clearly the word "beauty" is used to connote the objects of quite distinguishable emotions, and that is a reason for not employing a term which would land me inevitably in confusions and misunderstandings with my readers. On the other hand, with those who judge it more exact to call these combinations and arrangements of form that provoke our aesthetic emotions, not "significant form," but "significant relations of form," and then try to make the best of two worlds, the aesthetic and the metaphysical, by calling these relations "rhythm," I have no quarrel whatever. Having made it clear that by "significant form" I mean arrangements and combinations that move us in a particular way, I willingly join hands wi th those who prefer to give a different name to the same thing. The hypothesis that significant form is the essential quality in a work of art has at least one merit denied to many more famous and more striking-it does help to explain things. We are all familiar with pictures that interest us and excite our admiration, but do not move us as works of art. To this class belongs what I call ''Descriptive Painting"-that is, painting in which forms are used not as objects of emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information. Portraits of psychological and historical value, topographical works, pictures that tell stories and suggest situations, illustrations of all sorts, belong to this class. That we all recognize the distinction is clear, for who has not said that such and such a 84

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drawing was excellent as illustration, but as a work of art worthless? Of course many descriptive pictures possess, amongst other qualities, formal significance, and are therefore works of art: but many more do not. They interest us; they may move us too in a hundred different ways, but they do not move us aesthetically. According to my hypothesis they are not works of art. They leave untouched our aesthetic emotions because it is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by their forms that affect us. Few pictures are better known or liked than Frith's ''Paddington Station"; certainly I should be the last to grudge it its popularity. Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its fascinating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain though it is that Frith's masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture-and this although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is by no means badly painted. "Paddington Station" is not a work of art; it is an interesting and amusing document. In it line and colour are used to recount anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age: they are not used to provoke aesthetic emotion. Forms and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotion, but means of suggesting emotion and conveying ideas. The ideas and information conveyed by "Paddington Station" are so amusing and so well presented that the picture has considerable value and is well worth preserving. But, with the perfection of photographic processes and of the cinematograph, pictures of this sort are becoming otiose. Who doubts that one of those Daily Mirror photographers in collaboration with a Daily Mail reporter can tell us far more about "London day by day" than any Royal Academician? For an account of manners and fashions we shall go, in future, to photographs, supported by a little bright journalism, rather than to descriptive painting. Had the imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufacturing incredibly loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths instead of being Alma Tademas! But photography has made impossible any such transmutation of modem rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they are 85

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not unpleasant, which is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which liThe Doctor" is the most flagrant example. Of course "The Doctor" is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to make it nugatory; it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What it suggests is not pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity. It is sentimental. Art is above morals, or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate means to good. Once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically of the first importance and put it beyond the reach of the moralist. But descriptive pictures which are not works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means to good states of mind, are proper subjects of the ethical philosopher's attention. Not being a work of art, "The Doctor" has none of the immense ethical value possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state of mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to me undesirable. The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian Futurists, are notable examples of descriptive painting. Like the Royal Academicians, they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey information and ideas. Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art. Their social and political theories are respectable, but I would suggest to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in thought and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be born one. To associate art with politics is always a mistake. Futurist pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment; their forms are not intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These forms, by the way, whatever may be the nature of the ideas they suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary. In such Futurist pictures as I have seen-perhaps I should except some by Severini-the drawing, whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is found to be in that soft and common convention brought into fashion by Besnard some thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux-Art students ever since. As works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible; but they are not to be judged as works of art. A good Futurist picture would succeed as a good piece of psychology succeeds; it would reveal, through line and colour, the complexities of an interesting state of mind. If Futurist pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in

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a lack of artistic qualities that they were never intended to possess, but rather in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal. Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves them most the greater part is what scholars call "Primitive." Of course there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers (Notre-Dame-La-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as any better class building by one of those highly civilised architects who flourished a thousand years earlier or eight hundred later. But such exceptions are rare. As a rule primitive art is good-and here again my hypothesis is helpful-for, as a rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities. In primitive art you will find no accurate representation; you will find only significant form. Yet no other art moves us so profoundly. Whether we consider Sumerian sculpture or pre-dynastic Egyptian art, or archaic Greek, or the Wei and T'ang masterpieces, or those early Japanese works of which I had the luck to see a few superb examples (especially two wooden Bodhisattvas) at the Shepherd's Bush Exhibition in 1910, or whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the Western barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished in Central and South America before the coming of the white men, in every case we observe three common characteristics-absence of representation, absence of technical swagger, sublimely impressive form. Nor is it hard to discover the connection between these three. Formal significance loses itself in preoccupation with exact representation and ostentatious cunning. Naturally, it is said that if there is little representation and less saltimbancery in primitive art, that is because the primitives were unable to catch a likeness or cut intellectual capers. The contention is beside the point. There is truth in it, no doubt, though, were I a critic whose reputation depended on a power of impressing the public with a semblance of knowledge, I should be more cautious about urging it than such people generally are. For to suppose that the Byzantine masters wanted skill, or could not have created an illusion had they wished to do so, seems to imply ignorance of the amazingly dexterous realism of the notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the misrepresentation of the primitives must be attributed to what the critics call, wilful distortion." Be that as it may, the point is that, either from want of skill or want of will, primitives neither create illusions, nor make display of extravagant accomplishII

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ment, but concentrate their energies on the one thing needful-the creation of form. Thus they have created the finest works of art that we possess. Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic form may be as significant, in its place as part of the design, as an abstract. But if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art mayor may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exultation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognized intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying to fix our attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance. If this were so, it would be permissible to inquire whether it was the forms themselves or our perception of their rightness and necessity that caused aesthetic emotion. But I do not think I need linger to discuss the matter here. I have been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us; I should not have travelled by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain combinations are perceived to be right and necessary, and why our perception of their rightness and necessity is moving. What I have to say is this: the rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance of life. In this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with emotions of its own. To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space. That bit of knowledge, I admit, is essential to the appreciation of many great works, since many of the most moving forms ever created are in

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three dimensions. To see a cube or a rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its significance, and a sense of three-dimensional space is essential to the full appreciation of most architectural forms. Pictures which would be insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly moving because, in fact, we see them as related planes. If the representation of three-dimensional space is to be called "representation," then I agree that there is one kind of representation which is not irrelevant. Also, I agree that along with our feeling for line and colour we must bring with us our knowledge of space if we are to make the most of every kind of form. Nevertheless, there are Significant designs to an appreciation of which this knowledge is not necessary; so, though it is not irrelevant to the appreciation of some works of art it is not essential to the appreciation of all. What we must say is that the representation of three-dimensional space is neither irrelevant nor essential to all art, and that every other sort of representation is irrelevant. That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in many great works of art is not in the least surprising. Why it is not surprising I shall try to show elsewhere. Representation is not of necessity baneful, and highly realistic forms may be extremely significant. Very often, however, representation is a sign of weakness in an artist. A painter too feeble to create forms that provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out by suggesting the emotions of life. To evoke the emotions of life he must use representation. Thus a man will paint an execution, and, fearing to miss with his first barrel of significant form, will try to hit with his second by raising an emotion of fear or pity. But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always. It means that his aesthetic emotions are weak or, at any rate, imperfect. Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They know that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power of apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the work those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel for them the emotions that they can feel-the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture, instinctively they refer back its forms to the world from which they came. They treat created form as though it were imitated

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form, a picture as though it were a photograph. Instead of going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experience, they turn a sharp corner and come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance of a work of art depends on what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred. A good work of visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy; to use art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope for reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or not a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas. This last sentence has a very confident ring-over-confident, some may think. Perhaps I shall be able to justify it, and make my meaning clearer too, if I give an account of my own feelings about music. I am not really musical. I do not understand music well. I find musical form exceedingly difficult to apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder subtleties of harmony and rhythm more often than not escape me. The form of a musical composition must be simple indeed if I am to grasp it honestly. My opinion about music is not worth having. Yet, sometimes, at a concert, though my appreciation of the music is limited and humble, it is pure. Sometimes, though I have a poor understanding, I have a clean palate. Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent, at the beginning of a concert, for instance, when something that I can grasp is being played, I get from music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent; I understand music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concert. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into

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the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of life. Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation-the song of a bird, the gaIloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons-to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased; they would afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very weIl what has happened. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with a razor. I have tumbled from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a joIIy country. No one need be ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfaIIen in the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because he had made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thriIIing raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art. About music most people are as wiIling to be humble as I am. If they cannot grasp musical form and win from it a pure aesthetic emotion, they confess that they understand music imperfectly or not at all. They recognise quite clearly that there is a difference between the feeling of the musician for pure music and that of the cheerful concert-goer for what music suggests. The latter enjoys his own emotions, as he has every right to do, and recognises their inferiority. Unfortunately, people are apt to be less modest about their powers of appreciating visual art. Everyone is inclined to believe that out of pictures, at any rate, he can get all that there is to be got; everyone is ready to cry IIhumbug" and lIimposter" at those who say that more can be had. The good faith of people who feel pure aesthetic emotions is caIled in question by those who have never felt anything of the sort. It is the prevalence of the representative element, I suppose, tha t makes the man in the street so sure that he knows a good picture when he sees one. For I have noticed that in matters of architecture, pottery, textiles, etc., ignorance and ineptitude are more wiIling to defer to the opinions of those who have been blest with peculiar sensibility. It is a pity that cultivated and inteIIigent men and women cannot be induced to believe that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation is at least as rare in visual as in musical art. A comparison of my own experience in both has enabled me to discriminate very clearly between pure and impure appreciation. Is it too 91

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much to ask that others should be as honest about their feelings for pictures as I have been about mine for music? For I am certain that most of those who visit galleries do feel very much what I feel at concerts. They have their moments of pure ecstasy; but the moments are short and unsure. Soon they fall back into the world of human interests and feel emotions, good no doubt, but inferior. I do not dream of saying that what they get from art is bad or nugatory; I say that they do not get the best that art can give. I do not say that they cannot understand art; rather I say that they cannot understand the state of mind of those who understand it best. I do not say that art means nothing or little to them; I say they miss its full significance. I do not suggest for one moment that their appreciation of art is a thing to be ashamed of; the majority of the charming and intelligent people with whom I am acquainted appreciate visual art impurely; and, by the way, the appreciation of almost all great writers has been impure. But provided that there be some fraction of pure aesthetic emotion, even a mixed and minor appreciation of art is, I am sure, one of the most valuable things in the world-so valuable, indeed, that in my giddier moments I have been tempted to believe that art might prove the world's salvation. Yet, though the echoes and shadows of art enrich the life of the plains, her spirit dwells on the mountains. To him who woos, but woos impurely, she returns enriched what is brought. Like the sun, she warms the good seed in good soil and causes it to bring forth good fruit. But only to the perfect lover does she give a new strange gift-a gift beyond all price. Imperfect lovers bring to art and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisation. In twelfth-century Europe a man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T'ang picture. To a man of a later age, Greek sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions. But the perfect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of time and place. To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent. If the forms of a work are significant its provenance is irrelevant. Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures in the Louvre he is carried on the same flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more than four thousand years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried. It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal. Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change their institutions and their customs as they change their 92

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coats; only great art remains stable and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of fonn what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The fonns of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

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Clement Greenberg Modernist Painting Modernism includes more than just art and literature. By now it includes almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture. It happens, also, to be very much of a historical novelty. Western civilization is not the first to tum around and question its own foundations, but it is the civilization that has gone furthest in doing so. I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist. The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself-not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left in all the more secure possession of what remained to it. The self-criticism of Modernism grows out of but is not the same thing as the criticism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its more accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized. It seems natural that this new kind of criticism should have appeared first in philosophy, which is critical by defini~ tion; but as the nineteenth century wore on, it made itself felt in many other fields. A more rational justification had begun to be demanded of every formal social activity, and ''Kantian'' self-criticism was called on eventually to meet and interpret this demand in areas that lay far from philosophy. We know what has happened to an activity like religion that has not been able to avail itself of "Kantian" immanent criticism in order to justify itself. At first glance the arts might seem to have been in a situation like religion's. Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated, like religion, to therapy. The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.

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Each art, it turned out, had to effect this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. By doing this, each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered "pure," and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. "Purity" meant self-definition, and the enterprise of selfcriticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance. Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting-the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment-were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly. Manet's paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet's wake, abjured underpainting and glazing, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors used were made of real paint that came from pots or tubes. Cezanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas. It was the stressing, however, of the ineluctable flatness of the support that remained most fundamental in the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. Flatness alone was unique and exclusive to that art. The enclosing shape of the support was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater; color was a norm or means shared with sculpture as well as with the theater. Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.

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The Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness under the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space. The apparent contradiction involved-the dialectical tension, to use a fashionable but apt phrase-was essential to the success of their art, as it is indeed to the success of all pictorial art. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather, they have reversed its terms. One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first. This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it as the only and necessary way, and Modernism's success in doing so is a success of self-criticism. It is not in principle that Modernist painting in its latest phase has abandoned the representation of recognizable objects. What it has abandoned in principle is the representation of the kind of space that recognizable, three-dimensional objects can inhabit. Abstractness, or the nonfigurative, has in itself still not proved to be an altogether necessary moment in the self-criticism of pictorial art, even though artists as eminent as Kandinsky and Mondrian have thought so. Representation, or illustration, as such does not abate the uniqueness of pictorial art; what does do so are the associations of the things represented. All recognizable entities (including pictures themselves) exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kind of space. The fragmentary silhouette of a human figure, or of a teacup, will do so, and by doing so alie~ate pictorial space from the twodimensionality which is the guarantee of painting's independence as an art. Three-dimensionality is the province of sculpture, and for the sake of its own autonomy painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture. And it is in the course of its effort to do this, and not so much-I repeat-to exclude the representational or the '1iterary," that painting has made itself abstract. At the same time Modernist painting demonstrates, precisely in its resistance to the sculptural, that it continues tradition and the themes of tradition, despite all appearances to the contrary. For the resistance to the sculptural begins long before the advent of Modernism. Western painting, insofar as it strives for realistic illusion, owes an enormous debt to sculpture, which taught it in the beginning how to shade and model toward an

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illusion of relief, and even how to dispose that illusion in a complementary illusion of deep space. Yet some of the greatest feats of Western painting came as part of the effort it has made in the last four centuries to suppress and dispel the sculptural. Starting in Venice in the sixteenth century and continuing in Spain, Belgium, and Holland in the seventeenth, that effort was carried on at first in the name of color. When David, in the eighteenth century, sought to revive sculptural painting, it was in part to save pictorial art from the decorative flattening out that the emphasis on color seemed to induce. Nevertheless, the strength of David's own best pictures (which are predominantly portraits) often lies as much in their color as in anything else. And Ingres, his pupil, though subordinating color far more consistently, executed pictures that were among the flattest, least sculptural, done in the West by a sophisticated artist since the fourteenth century. Thus by the middle of the nineteenth century all ambitious tendencies in painting were converging (beneath their differences) in an antisculptural direction. Modernism, in continuing this direction, made it more conscious of itself. With Manet and the Impressionists, the question ceased to be defined as one of color versus drawing, and became instead a question of purely optical experience as against optical experience modified or revised by tactile associations. It was in the name of the purely and literally optical, not in that of color, that the Impressionists set themselves to undermining shading and modeling and everything else that seemed to connote the sculptural. And in a way like that in which David had reacted against Fragonard in the name of the sculptural, Cezanne, and the Cubists after him, reacted against Impressionism. But once again, just as David's and Ingres's reaction had culminated in a kind of painting even less sculptural than before, so the Cubist counter-revolution eventuated in a kind of painting flatter than anything Western art had seen since before Cimabue-so flat, indeed, that it could hardly contain reCOgnizable images. In the meantime the other cardinal norms of the art of painting were undergoing an equally searching inquiry, though the results may not have been equally conspicuous. It would take me more space than is at my disposal to tell how the norm of the picture's enclosing shape or frame was loosened, then tightened, then loosened once again, and then isolated and tightened once more by successive generations of Modernist painters; or how the norms of finish, of paint texture, and of value and color contrast were tested and retested. Risks have been taken with all these not only for the sake of new expression but also in order to exhibit them more clearly as 97

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norms. By being exhibited and made explicit they are tested for their indispensability. This testing is by no means finished, and the fact that it becomes more searching as it proceeds accounts for the radical simplifications, as well as radical complications, in which the very latest abstract art abounds. Neither the simplifications nor the complications are matters of license. On the contrary, the more closely and essentially the norms of a discipline become defined the less apt they are to permit liberties. ("Liberation" has become a much abused word in connection with avant-garde and Modernist art.) The essential norms or conventions of painting are also the limiting conditions with which a marked-up surface must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limiting conditions can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed. The intersecting black lines and colored rectangles of a Mondrian may seem hardly enough to make a picture out of, yet by echoing the picture's enclosing shape so self-evidently they impose that shape as a regulating norm with a new force and a new completeness. Far from incurring the danger of arbitrariness in the absence of a model in nature, Mondrian's art proves, with the passing of time, almost too disciplined, too convention-bound in certain respects; once we have got used to its utter abstractness we realize that it is more traditional in its color, as well as in its subservience to the frame, than the last paintings of Monet are. It is understood, I hope, that in plotting the rationale of Modernist art I have had to simplify and exaggerate. The flatness toward which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an utter flatness. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe-l'oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness, and the configurations of a Mondrian still suggest a kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension. Only now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension. Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye. One begins to realize that the Neo-Impressionists were not altogether misguided when they flirted with science. Kantian self-criticism finds its perfect expression in science rather than in philosophy, and when this kind of self-criticism was applied in art the latter was brought closer in

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spirit to scientific method than ever before-closer than in the early Renaissance. That visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to anything given in other orders of experience, is a notion whose only justification lies, notionally, in scientific consistency. Scientific method alone asks that a situation be resolved in exactly the same kind of terms as that in which it is presented-a problem in physiology is solved in terms of physiology, not in those of psychology; to be solved in terms of psychology it has to be presented in, or translated into, these terms first. Analogously, Modernist painting asks that a literary theme be translated into s~rict1y optical, two-dimensional terms before becoming the subject of pictorial art-which means its being translated in such a way that it entirely loses its literary character. Actually, such consistency promises nothing in the way of aesthetic quality or aesthetic results, and the fact that the best art of the past seventy or eighty years increasingly approaches such consistency does not change this; now as before, the only consistency which counts in art is aesthetic consistency, which shows itself only in results and never in methods or means. From the point of view of art itself, its convergence of spirit with science happens to be mere accident, and neither art nor science gives or assures the other of anything more than it ever did. What their convergence does show, however, is the degree to which Modernist art belongs to the same historical and cuI tural tendency as modem science. It should also be understood that the self-criticism of Modernist art has never been carried on in any but a spontaneous and subliminal way. It has been altogether a question of practice, imm.anent to practice and never a topic of theory. Much has been heard about programs in connection with Modernist art, but there has really been far less of the programmatic in Modernist art than in Renaissance or Academic art. With a few un typical exceptions, the masters of Modernism have betrayed no more of an appetite for fixed ideas about art than Corot did. Certain inclinations and emphases, certain refusals and abstinences seem to become necessary simply because the way to stronger, more expressive art seems to lie through them. The immediate aims of Modernist artists remain individual before anything else, and the truth or success of their work is individual before it is anything else. To the extent that it succeeds as art, Modernist art partakes in no way of the character of a demonstration. It has needed the accumulation over decades of a good deal of individual achievement to reveal the self-critical tendency of Modernist painting. No one artist was, or is yet, consciously aware of this tendency, nor could any artist work suc-

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cessfully in conscious awareness of it. To this extent-which is by far the largest-art gets carried on under Modernism in the same way as before. And I cannot insist enough that Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling of anterior tradition, but it also means its continuation. Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art. The making of pictures has been governed, since pictures first began to be made, by all the norms I have mentioned. The Paleolithic painter or engraver could disregard the norm of the frame and treat the surface in both a literally and a virtually sculptural way because he made images rather than pictures, and worked on a support whose limits could be disregarded because (except in the case of small objects like a bone or horn) nature gave them to the artist in an unmanageable way. But the making of pictures, as against images in the flat, means the deliberate choice and creation of limits. This deliberateness is what Modernism harps on: that is, it spells out the fact that the limiting conditions of art have to be made altogether human limits. I repeat that Modernist art does not offer theoretical demonstrations. It could be said, rather, that it converts all theoretical possibilities into empirical ones, and in doing so tests, inadvertently, all theories about art for their relevance to the actual practice and experience of art. Modernism is subversive in this respect alone. Ever so many factors thought to be essential to the making and experiencing of art have been shown not to be so by the fact that Modernist art has been able to dispense with them and yet continue to provide the experience of art in all its essentials. That this "demonstration" has left most of our old value judgments intact makes it only the more conclusive. Modernism may have had something to do with the revival of the reputations of Uccello, Piero, EI Greco, Georges de la Tour, and even Vermeer, and it certainly confirmed if it did not start other revivals like that of Giotto; but Modernism has not lowered thereby the standing of Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, or Watteau. What Modernism has made clear is that, though the past did appreciate masters like these justly, it often gave wrong or irrelevant reasons for doing so. Still, in some ways this situation has hardly changed. Art criticism lags behind Modernist as it lagged behind pre-Modernist art. Most of the things that get written about contemporary art belong to journalism rather than criticism properly speaking. It belongs to journalism-and to the millennial complex from which so many journalists suffer in our daythat each new phase of Modernism should be hailed as the start of a whole 100

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new epoch of art making a decisive break with all the customs and conventions of the past. Each time, a kind of art is expected that will be so unlike previous kinds of art, and so '1iberated" from norms of practice or taste, that everybody, regardless of how informed or uninformed, will be able to have his say about it. And each time, this expectation is disappointed, as the phase of Modernism in question takes it place, finally, in the intelligible continuity of taste and tradition, and as it becomes clear that the same demands as before are made on artist and spectator. Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is, among many other things, continuity. Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as Modernist art would be impossible.

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Clement Greenberg The state of Art Criticism Value judgments constitute the substance of aesthetic experience. I don't want to argue this assertion. I point to it as a fact, the fact that identifies the presence, the reality in experience of the aesthetic. I don't want to argue, either, about the nature of aesthetic value judgments. They are acts of intuition, and intuition remains unanalyzable. The fact of aesthetic intuition, as distinguished from other kinds of intuition, has, for lack of a better word, to be called Taste. This word has acquired unfortunate connotations since the nineteenth century, for what are really irrelevant reasons. That great literary critic F.R. Leavis, while insisting on the primacy of value judgment, avoided the word for-as it seems to me--fear of these connotations. Instead, he resorted to "sensibility" or circumlocutions like Ufeeling for value" or usense of value." (I may not be quoting with exactness, but I'm not misrepresenting.) I want to try to rehabilitate the word; Taste is the handiest term for what's meant, and somehow the bluntest-in part precisely because of the disrepute into which it has fallen. The word drives home the fact that art is first of all, and most of all, a question of liking and of not liking-just so. Liking and not liking have to do with value, and nothing else. It's as though the shying away from the use of the word, Taste, had been a portent of the present general tendency to shy away from what it, or its synonyms, means. There is a reluctance nowadays to express value judgments in criticism-at least in criticism of painting and sculpture, and maybe of some of the other arts too. 1 I mean outspoken value judgments, judgments that can be discussed. Implied judgments abound, and have to: they decide usually (though by no means always) what items, or occasions, of art critics give their attention to. But implied judgments don't get discussed enough, they don't get put on the table. Art will get explained, analyzed, interpreted, historically situated, sociologically or politically accounted for, but the responses that bring art into experience as art, and not something else--these will go unmentioned. Need they be mentioned? Only in so far as it's art, and not anything else, that's to be talked about. Sure, art can be talked about as something else: as document, as symptom, as sheer phenomenon. And it does get talked about that way more and more, and by critics no less than by art historians and by philosophers and psychologists. There's nothing neces-

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sarily wrong in this. Only it's not criticism. Criticism proper means dealing in the first place with art as art, which means dealing with value judgments. Otherwise criticism becomes something else. Not that it is to be so narrowly defined as to have to exclude interpretation, description, analysis, etc.; only that it must, if H's to be criticism, include evaluation, and evaluation in the first place-for the sake of art, for the sake of everything art is that isn't information or exhortation, for the sake of what's in art's gift alone. To experience art as art is-again-to evaluate, to make, or rather receive, value judgments, consciously and unconsciously. (A value judgment doesn't mean a formulation or statement, a putting of something into thoughts and words; a value judgment takes place; the thoughts and words come afterwards.) The critic happens to be under the obligation to report his value judgments. These will be the truth, for him, of the art he discusses. It will also, most often, make for the greatest relevance, and greatest interest, of what he says or writes. Though I grant that the issue of what's interesting here may be a moot point for a lot of people. I realize that I'm simplifying. But I'm not oversimplifying. I'm stating flatly what hasn't been stated flatly enough, or often enough with emphasis. But then the primacy of value judgment in art criticism used to be taken so much as a matter of course that it didn't have to be stated, much less stated emphatically. The last great art critics I'm aware of-Julius Meier-Graefe and Roger Fry-simply assumed it, just as E.D. Hirsch's literary critics did. And it is still assumed, as far as I can see, in music and architectural criticism, and in literary reviewing as distinct from "serious" literary criticism, as it isn't in art criticism or even art reviewing. Which is why I don't feel I'm laboring the obvious when I harp on the primacy of value judgment in the present context. Didn't the late Harold Rosenberg say that Taste was an "obsolete concept"? Didn't another reputable art critic refer recently to the weighing of the quality of specific works of art as "art mysticism"? To be sure, value judgments of a certain kind-more than enough of them-are to be met with in the current art press. But they are not aesthetic value judgments. The values invoked are those of sheerly phenomenal newness, or of "objectness," or "information," or "process," or of purported demonstrations of the hows of perceiving and knowing, or of acts and things by which our notion of what's possible as art is expanded. The critics who take these values or claims to value seriously ipso facto exclude any appeal to aesthetic value, whether they realize it or not. To judge from 103

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their rhetoric, more often they don't. I said earlier that implied value judgments abound, and I meant value judgments that were properly aesthetic, for better or for worse. I want to correct myself somewhat. Being for the new simply because it's new, or being for a certain kind of art simply because it's in vogue, doesn't entail an aesthetic value judgment. Nor does rejecting what seems old-fashioned simply because it seems that. (Categorical judgments are in any case never truly aesthetic ones.) What's involved here is something I'd call aesthetic incapacity: the incapacity lies in letting irrelevant factors like newness and oldness shut off aesthetic experience, inhibit the operations of Taste. This amounts to, has amounted to, a kind of judgment on aesthetic experience itself. And it's this judgment, this disparaging judgment, that seems to control too much of what's offered as criticism of contemporary fine art. Of course, there's more, and should be more, to art criticism than the expressing of value judgments. Description, analysis, and interpretation, even interpretation, have their place. But without value judgment these can become arid, or rather they stop being criticism. (A bad work of art can offer as much for description, analysis, and interpretation-yes, interpretation-as a good work of art. It's possible to go on as long about a failed Goya as about a successful one.) As Meier-Graefe and Fry show us, description and analysis can carry value judgments with them, implicitly and otherwise. The literary criticism of F.R. Leavis shows that too, eminently. Donald Francis Tovey, in writing about music, shows it comparably. (It takes nothing away from Tovey to suggest that music, of all arts, seems most to compel the critic to evaluate a~ he describes or analyzes.) But what about the extraaesthetic contexts of art: social, political, economic, philosophical, biographical, etc., etc.? The historical moment? Don't they have to be brought in? And how can aesthetic value be kept enough in sight in such contexts? It doesn't have to be. For when such contexts are brought to the fore it's no longer criticism that's being practiced. It's something else, something that can be valuable, something that can be necessary. But it's not criticism. And let those who occupy themselves with such contexts not think they're doing criticism; or that they're rendering criticism proper unnecessary. I want now to enter a plea for the diSCipline of aesthetics. It's become routine lately to refer disparagingly to aesthetics, and there may be some justification. When you see the aesthetical lucubrations of a philosopher like Nelson Goodman treated with respect by others in the field you want to throw up your hands and conclude that anything can be gotten away

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with here, just as in art criticism. But that's not the whole story. Certainly artists don't need to be acquainted with aesthetics. However, it might be of help to those who teach art-acquaintance, that is, with the right kind of aesthetics, the kind that shows you what it's possible to say relevantly about art or aesthetic experience and what it's not possible to say relevantly. Acquaintance with this kind of aesthetics would most certainly be of help to a critic. It might lead him to keep more firmly in mind that aesthetic value judgments can't be demonstrated in a way that would compel agreement; consequently, that in the last resort it's his reader's or listener's taste that he has to appeal to, not his reason or understanding. The critic might also be brought, with the help of aesthetics, to see more clearly what his own experience only too often doesn't bring him to see at all: namely, that content and form can never be adequately differentiated, since the term [onn is always somewhat indefinite in application, while the term content is of no definiteness at all. An awareness of this might head off a lot of vain controversy. (It might also keep someone like Joshua Taylor, in his recent The Fine Arts in America, from referring to the "intense concern for content, not method, that characterized" the "procedures" of the Abstract Expressionists. This is also what comes of taking artists at their word.) Some critics would also do well to consult a dictionary oftener. They might look up the word gestural, for example, and discover what a solecism they commit when they talk of gestural painting. Is it conceivable for a painting to be made by means of gestures? Can a material object-or for that matter, a poem or a song-be created, fashioned, or altered by gestures? It "signifies" that the appelation art critic has been narrowed down now to one who criticizes contemporary and recent art alone. When you deal with art further back in time you get to be called an art historian rather than an art critic. It was not always that way; it wasn't that way for Julius Meier-Graefe, or Roger Fry, or Andre Lhote, all three of whom wrote about past and present indiscriminately, and it was only ignorance that called anyone of them art historian. Now it's also become assumed that an art historian proper is not to engage in criticism, not to express value judgments, but keep to scholarship and interpretation. As a consequence, painting and sculpture of the more than recent past get less and less evaluated or reevaluated, less and less criticized as art. There are exceptions, but that's just what they are: exceptions. The case doesn't appear to be the same with music. There the productions of the past continue day in and day out to be evaluated and 105

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reevaluated along with those of the present, and to a great extent by the same people, whether musicologists or just plain music critics. Nor is the situation that much the same in literature either, despite all the truth there is in what E.D. Hirsch says. Literature of the past still does get discussed often enough in terms of aesthetic value. And while most literary scholars proper may not come near contemporary or very recent literature, literary critics still range between past and present with their value judgments, and do so as a matter of course, taking it for granted that without keeping an eye on the past it would be impossible to keep Taste sharp enough for the present. Of course there are exceptions here, but those are mainly reviewers, not literary critics proper, and not taken seriously-as, alas, their counterparts in the field of art are. The difference for current art writing stems, I feel, from what's become the entrenched assumption that modern, modernist painting and sculpture have broken with the past more radically and abruptly than any other modernism has. The assumption is wrong, just as the notion of a radical break as defining modernism itself is wrong. This doesn't make the assumption any the less prevalent, as it has been for a long time. I remember Paolo Milano-an Italian man of letters and as cultivated a person as I've ever known-telling me back in the 1940s how surprised he was to gather from a review of mine in The Nation that I saw modernist art as not fundamentally or even phenomenally different in kind from art of the past; that was new to him. (His remark made me realize that originally I myself had made the same assumption to the contrary and had come to abandon it only unconSciously. In that Nation review I'd not at all made a point of indicating this change of view, I hadn't even known I was indicating it.) Anyhow a large consequence of this assumption of a radical, epochal break between the visual art of modernism and that of the past is, finally, the further assumption that the former has made value judgment, made Taste, irrelevant in dealing with painting and sculpture. As I said in the beginning, even when it comes to current and recent art, criticism is ceasing to be criticism proper, ceasing to judge and assess. Look at the magazines devoted to contemporary visual art and see how more and more of the articles that fill them are scholarly or would-be scholarly, would-be high-brow in the academic way: explicative and descriptive, or historical, or interpretative, but hardly at all judicial, evaluative. Notice the proliferation of foot and tail notes, and how they attest to recondite reading, most of which has nothing to do with art as art. Meanwhile the value judging is pocketed off in the spot reviews (where even so,

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there's always a certain coyness enforced by the art magazines' large dependence on art dealers' advertising-for which, things being as they are, the magazines can't be censured). On the other hand there's now and then the laudatory or apologetic article about.a given artist or artists which has to contain value judgments. Yet these are couched less and less in aesthetic terms. Aesthetic quality as such is no longer enough to warrant praise; other, extraaesthetic values have to be invoked: historical, political, social, ideological, moral of course, and what not. But what's new about that? What's new is something else. That the value in itself, the autonomous value, of the aesthetic wasn't asserted so often in the past, at least in the Western past, doesn't mean that we're permitted to keep on doing the same. We've eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. The more ruthless examination and cross-examination of inner experience, the more searching introspection, that have gone with the advance (if it can be called that) of rationality have shown well enough that the aesthetic is an intrinsic, ultimate, and autonomous value. 2 Art for Art's Sake has helped, and so have 200odd years of aesthetics, both of them giving much and taking away enough. There's no excuse now for not realizing that when the absolute value of the aesthetic is doubted, the reality itself of the aesthetic is doubted, the absoluteness being inseparable from the reality. Just as this reality is there and can't be thought away, so the status of that value is there and can't be thought away. Bearing this in mind can make the doing of art criticism-of any kind of aesthetic criticism-difficult. It means writing about art as art before anything else. And it does seem easier to write and talk about art as something else. I know it's easier for me. But it doesn't catch my interest much when I read or hear that kind of writing or talk. Almost, if not quite, I can do without it.

Donald B. Kuspit There are two assumption~nd they are that because they are dogmatically urged more than they are logically argued-at the core of Clement Greenberg's paper, assumptions which twine around one another like the snakes of a caduceus. The first is that criticism must be outspokenly evaluative if it is to be worth the name. The second is that its value judgments articulate aesthetic intuitions. The first implies a Herculean effort on Greenberg's part to clean the Augean stables of current criticism, glutted by various kinds of descriptive, analytic, and above all interpretative ap107

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proaches to art, which all tend to view it contextually and culturallyevery which way but aesthetically. The second assumption is meant to buttress and qualify the first one by acknowledging the irreducible operative in aesthetic value judgment, namely intuition, which alone is able to be aware of quality in art. I will try to demonstrate the inadequacy of Greenberg's conception of aesthetic intuition, partly in the spirit in which Gadamer says "we need to overcome the concept of aesthetics itself," and partly to show that Greenberg does not offer us the aesthetics we do need, even if that need is more an afterthought of our consciousness of art than inherent in it. I will then circle back to the original intention of Greenberg's paper, namely the attempt to define "true" criticism-or rather, what amounts to the same thing, to reinstate what he regards as the traditional function of criticism-and show that, despite its usefulness in reminding us that art criticism in practice has gotten wildly out of hand, the idea of criticism as qualitative evaluation of art is not only a half-truth but one which mocks the whole truth. Greenberg importunately totalizes evaluation in the hope of de totalizing interpretation, but in so doing he falsifies the roles of both, and thereby the complex nature and spirit of the 'critical enterprise as such. Everything that Greenberg tells us about aesthetic intuition has already been told us by Kant, and more clearly and systematically. Greenberg's characterization of aesthetic intuition as "unanalyzable," "prearticulate," "transhistorical," and "intrinsic, ultimate, and autonomous" paraphrases Kant's conception of taste or aesthetic judgment. This can be demonstrated even more pointedly. Greenberg argues that the contemporary critic would be helped by an acquaintance with "the right kind of aesthetics," which "might lead him to keep more firmly in mind that aesthetic value judgments can't be demonstrated in a way that would compel agreement; consequently that in the last resort it's his reader's or listener's taste that he has to appeal to, not his reason or understanding." Compare this with Gadamer's summary of Kant's achievement in the third Critique: In the subjective universality of the aesthetic judgment of taste, he [Kant] discovered the powerful and legitimate claim to independence that aesthetic judgment can make over against the claims of the understanding and morality. The taste of the observer can no more be comprehended as the application of concepts, norms, or rules than the genius of the artist can. Presumably the genius of the critic resides in the intuitions of his taste. 108

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The key point is the subjective absoluteness-the subjective universalityof genius and taste, an absoluteness not only self-justifying (this is the full weight of Greenberg's characterization of aesthetic intuition as lIintrinsic, ultimate, and autonomous") but in no need of explication (its unanalyzability). Such absoluteness guarantees the existence of "art as art": the "absolute value of the aesthetic," coincidental with the "autonomous value of the aesthetic," argues for art-aesthetic value-as an end in itself. But the question is the extent to which the assumption of the independence of the aesthetic can be sustained: the nature of the ground on which the conception of the hermetic absoluteness of art rests. The moment that ground is suspect, cognitive and moral considerations enter into the judgment of taste. They seem more relevant to art than they did when the subjective universality of the aesthetic judgment of taste was guaranteed. The ground-"the metaphysical horizon," as Gadamer calls it-on which the subjective universality of aesthetic intuition rests, and therefore the independence of art, is "a teleological order of being." Without the assumption of a teleological ordering of art, its absoluteness-the autonomy of the aesthetic--cannot be assumed. The teleological assumption disintegrates the moment we recognize it as what Kant himself saw it to be, a "transcendental illusion" satisfying the human need for completeness, reaching beyond experience to an absolute ordering of being. Greenberg's whole treatment of art-not particularly in his current paper, but in his practical criticism-is permeated by a teleological approach to art, giving it an order which guarantees the absoluteness of his aesthetic intuitions. He has never comprehended that this order, seemingly "a universal ontological horizon" for art, is a pragmatic guideline rather than a logical necessity. In Jamesian terms, it is an expression of an intense "will to believe" in art even when there is seemingly no existential reason to believe in it, and when it itself seems to have no necessary reason for being. Greenberg in effect mutes the Pascali an wager which underlies-one might even say motivates-his whole "intuition" of art by a sense of it as a determinate order, credible because of its universality. But that determinate universality is itself credible only by reason of the purposiveness of art that it presupposes. In any case, acknowledgment of the transcendental illusion on which the assumption of the subjective universality of taste rests destroys the concept of the autonomy of art, as well as the concept of aesthetic intuition. The moment the absoluteness of art and aesthetic judgment can be logically denied, the particularity of works of art reveal themselves anew, not under the auspices of a teleological assumption, but through relative 109

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contexts and interpretations, relative descriptions and analyses. Thus, Greenberg's conception of aesthetic intuition turns out, in practice, to be countercritical, for it stifles awareness of artistic particularities, and, worse yet, shows itself to be anti-intellectual, for it gives short shrift to every method, however relative, of generating consciousness of art. Taste is antiintellectual because it refers to the relativity that consciousness of the particularity of art gives us, but this does not excuse it. Ultimately, the approach to art through aesthetic intuition, yearning as it does for the metaphysical absoluteness or ontological independence of art, is more uncritical of art than the most naive description of it. Or perhaps the results of aesthetic intuition are the most naive description of it. What is the alternative-what is true criticism? Is there any reconciliation between taste and interpretation, between the evaluative and the descriptive? Greenberg has given us a half-truth, bifurcating criticism into true and false parts. But in the current paper he seems to do more than make a distinction: the wisdom of Solomon decides to cut supposedly infantile art criticism in half, assuming that the better half will live. But there is another solution, which Greenberg himself would have recognized, had his take on Kant not been so limited, as we have already shown. What Greenberg does not recognize is that taste is a numinous concept, that is, a heuristic, regulatory device, a revelation of the "ideal" limits of art. The judgment of taste no longer has to stand on its absoluteness or universality to make itself good. Its value is that it clears a field of art-without presupposing its teleological necessity, its existence as a completely determinate, completely purposive order. Taste is that "clearing of being" Heidegger spoke of, which first represents the realm in which beings are known as disclosed in their unhiddenness. This coming forth of beings into the "there" of their Dasein obviously presupposes a realm of openness in which such a 'there' can occur. And yet it is just as obvious that this realm does not exist without beings manifesting themselves in it, that is, without there being a place of openness that openness occupies. Taste is that clearing of being in which artistic beings appear, are disclosed in their unhiddenness. The reciprocity between taste and artistic beings is crucial: there is no clearing in which the artistic beings are disclosed (however hidden they remain). I see this view of taste as the redemption of aesthetic intuition, and a way of reconciling it-as Greenberg refuses to do110

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with the varieties of interpretative analysis of art. For, as Heidegger asserts, the work of art, like every other being, is a "conflict between revealment and concealment": its truth is always their "opposition." As Heidegger says, "Being contains something like hostility to its own presentations," and it is crucial to the task of criticism not only to make a clearing in consciousness for the kind of beings works of art are by means of aesthetically intuitive taste, but also to attempt, through so-called interpretation-a word as inadequate as "taste"-to present and re-present works of art, attempting to overcome their hostility to their existing presentations in consciousness. Criticism overcomes the concealment of art by exploiting its compulsion for revealment. It grasps the work of art by playing its concealment against its revealment. Aesthetic intuition sets the stage for this hermeneutic game. The folly of Greenberg's position in his current paper is that an obsolete conception of taste used as a source for the autonomy of art has led him to falsify the total critical enterprise. The moment that he begins to see that taste is necessary to art, not as a sign of its autonomy, but as the first step in its revelation, he will once again become truly critical, and will comprehend the fullness that criticism can attain. Using the idea of intuitive taste to buttress the idea of art for art's sake he cannot begin to be a critic, for he cannot begin to see the world that, as Heidegger says, arises in the work of art, like an event-and with a thrust that mocks the entire question of the independence or dependence, absoluteness or contingency, of art. WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Clem, you have a chance to answer these weighty assertions. CLEMENT GREENBERG: Thanks, Mr. Kuspit. I didn't mean that ironically, either.You know aesthetic intuition shares its impenetrability of analysis with ordinary intuition, with intuition in the first place. We can't analyze what takes place in us when we see blue as blue, what takes place in consciousness. We may be able to decide what takes place in our irises and retinas. But we can't analyze what takes place in consciousness when we touch something and that goes for the rest of the senses. And so aesthetic intuition doesn't enjoy a privileged place by reason of its impermeability to discursive or conceptual analysis. So much for that. The absoluteness I talk of is not

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a metaphysical absoluteness, it's the absoluteness of experience. Aesthetic experience is not privileged in this respect either. It just happens. Aesthetic experience is not confined to made art. It is not confined to what the Greeks called techne. Anything that enters experience except aesthetic experience itself can be experienced aesthetically. Aesthetic experience is not privileged. Aesthetic intuition, taste (and Mr. Kuspit quite properly called me on this informally yesterday) is formed, it's developed. Maybe sharpness of hearing can be developed, I don't know. Aesthetic experience is developed. We may be born with a capacity for it, but we don't all necessarily develop it. I don't believe any human being in possession of his or her full senses is without aesthetic experience. There's nothing metaphysical here. To say that something is absolute is not to give it metaphysical status. As far as Heidegger is concerned, I have to confess that I don't have the competence to say that Heidegger is largely full of hot air. I'm not competent to say that and I know that dismissing Heidegger as hot air is vulgar and ignorant, but I have to confess further that I didn't understand in terms that were useful to me, or could be useful to me, or, were I hypothetically to accept them, that I would make sense of, what Mr. Kuspit meant or what Heidegger meant as quoted by Mr. Kuspit. That's all. WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I'd like to start off by asking you a question, Clem. I was wondering how you would conceive of the relation between the taste or intuition of individuals and collective taste. CLEMENT GREENBERG: That question is one that Croce dodged, and Croce was one of the greatest aestheticians. Susanne Langer is serious and good and it's a question she dodges too. Santayana, too. The question is whether taste, or judgments, or aesthetic value judgments are subjective or objective. Kant, and it shows his mettle, faced it head on and he had to posit something called sensus communis, a common sense that all human beings shared. I don't think he solved it. He let it go. I retreat to experience like a good American. I've noticed that such a thing has emerged, a long time ago, as a consensus of taste. It's very pragmatic. When it comes to, let's say, Western

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painting, you may not like this or that about Raphael, but if you can see painting, by God you know Raphael was a very great painter and you know Michelangelo was too and Titian and Pierot and Giotto and Rubens and so forth. This consensus of taste recreates itself constantly. New generations arise and we more or less think the old masters aren't that good or we want to change, radically change, the hierarchy, and we do to some extent. We may put Pierot up much higher than we used to; since the nineteenth century we've put Masaccio and Giotto up higher than they were at the beginning. That goes on all the time and it's part of the necessary process of reevaluation, but we don't overturn the overall consensus. WILLIAM PHILLIPS: If there is no other question immediately, I'll ask another one. It seems to me that you derive a great deal of weight and emphasis from experience as well as from original capacity and intuition. CLEMENT GREENBERG: The consensus over the ages is formed by those who care most, spend most time, try hardest, get closest. It's an elitist consensus. Alas, alas, alas. I mean that word to come up. Of course it's an elitist consensus. And didn't Marx himself say it required comfortable, dignified leisure in order to cultivate the arts properly? It's a sad fact of human existence up to now, or let's say urban existence. DONALD KUSPIT: Clem, does this consensus issue in a necessary and singular hierarchy of value of works of art? CLEMENT GREENBERG: There are differences in evaluation among different artists, and ups and downs, but within the consensus, there's a certain floor below which the great old masters don't fall. You might say that some of Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican aren't that good, but even so Raphael doesn't fall too far. DONALD KUSPIT: Weren't there at least two centuries in which Raphael was put down? There were about three centuries in which Diirer was put down as a mere technician. What do you do with those centuries?

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CLEMENT GREENBERG: Has there been progress in the arts? There has been progress in taste because taste has become more catholic. Taste is supposed to be catholic. Good taste is catholic taste. Good taste likes anything that's good and dislikes anything that's bad, regardless of where it comes from, and it doesn't proscribe verisimilitude and it doesn't proscribe abstraction. It's ready-taste at its best, in its fullest sense, likes whatever is good, regardless of where it comes from. Taste is involuntary. MORRIS DICKSTEIN: My question is on the same subject, about historical shifting of value judgments. I think perhaps you passed too lightly over your statement that Giotto and Masacdo had gone up since the nineteenth century. I would pursue the question of whether there aren't changes in the faculty of seeing art or the facuIty of hearing music, and how these come about. I think that kind of change, that kind of historical shift in consensus, whether it's elitist or not, is something we have also experienced in our own lives. Can taste or can the eye be educated? One thing I would want to connect with that is the question of the relation between the changing patterns of the historical consensus and contemporary work. When you have the beginning of abstraction in painting or the beginnings of experimental work in literature, you begin not only to see things in earlier works that you couldn't see before, but in a sense you also create a different tradition. Suddenly you have a new vocabulary with which to reevaluate past works. CLEMENT GREENBERG: Let me say first that aesthetic experience is never dependent on the tools of discourse. We may not have a concept for something, but you still experience it. What is curious here is whether ways of seeing or hearing change radically. I doubt it, but all these rediscoveries-the rediscovery of Giotto in the nineteenth century, the rediscovery of Masacdo, Vermeer, and la Tour-were rediscoveries of people who were hailed in their own lifetimes. MORRIS DICKSTEIN: • But think of the many people who were famous in their own lifetimes who haven't been rediscovered or whom we still can't see. 114

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CLEMENT GREENBERG: On the whole, the consensus comes out confirmed in each new generation. Old gaps are filled in, certain protuberances become depressions. But by and large the landscape isn't revolutionized. RODOLFO CARDONA: How does the recognition that this or that painter belongs to the canon of the people that we should respect and like ultimately help, whom does it help? CLEMENT GREENBERG: Well, I have to be elementary here, Mr. Cardona. All that helps is looking at a lot of art since you can't learn to see. You can't learn to get poetry unless you read it, you can't learn to hear music unless you listen to it, and so forth. You look, and that's how you learn. KEITH BOTSFORD: Just to change the subject very briefly: in the last hour we heard the most extraordinary scission of language between two people talking about art. Mr. Greenberg spoke in language that we all understood and then Mr. Kuspit came out with a very highly charged philosophical language. Mr. Greenberg said-he was talking about Heidegger, but he must also have been referring to Mr. Kuspit-that he didn't feel this was of great use to him personally as an art critic. I have a question that puzzles me. Do you, Mr. Kuspit, feel that what Mr. Greenberg says does not speak to you as an art critic, or is simply too rudimentary? DONALD KUSPIT: Yes, I feel it is too rudimentary. I feel that Oem is too concerned with the room at the top and the room always turns out to be claustrophobic regardless of how much room there is. I feel the issues are more complicated. There are certain philosophical issues about the status of the concept of intuition which I feel are at stake. Excepting a very elementary political idea, there's no being that escapes discourse or language. Clem seems to imply that there's an intuitive experience that does. KEITH BOTSFORD: I was asking something about language. Is there any sense in which those of us who are not professional art critics could in any possible way reconcile the two languages that were used? 115

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CLEMENT GREENBERG: I won't exclude language, Donald, I don't exclude it. DONALD KUSPIT: I did in the latter part of my paper try to introduce the idea of some reconciliation of taste and interpretation. If we look at Baudelaire, we find that many people said Baudelaire was wrong about the artists he acknowledged, but so what? Even if he was right it didn't matter. What he had to say was certainly extraordinarily interesting and valuable. CLEMENT GREENBERG: I'll say the same for Ruskin, one of the greatest handlers of language I'm aware of. I'll disagree with Ruskin around the clock, and yet I find he's a delight to read and not just because of his language. WILLIAM PHILLIPS: It seems to me that what Donald Kuspit is saying is that other factors enter into a judgment besides what Clement Greenberg is calling intuition and taste. I think it might be interesting if you could try to specify what other factors get in and how they relate to judgment. CLEMENT GREENBERG: Your whole being is involved in aesthetic intuition. You don't look with your eye alone, you don't read with your understanding. DONALD KUSPIT: Codes enter in. What we call cultural logic enters in. Now how you specify that cultural logic, whether you use a language of codes and linguistic terminology or use dialectical methodology is not an issue. CLEMENT GREENBERG: I happen to agree. It's developed intuition, but there it is. Intuition is there. UNIDENTIFIED P ARTICIPANT: I would like to ask Mr. Greenberg how we might reasonably expect to get frank and lusty criticism of modem art when those of us who have been in art history class and read art history and music history are constantly being bombarded with information about the mistakes of the past: how the critics in the 1860s and 1870s misunderstood Manet and so forth.

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CLEMENT GREENBERG:

The history of these mistakes began only in the 186Os. Before that most artists of merit were recognized fairly soon. It was only in the 1860s-it started with Baudelaire, Flaubert, and especiaIly Manet-that the better you were, in a sense, the longer you had to wait for recognition. That's a modernist phenomenon and it stiIl holds true today. The rule hasn't been broken and I hope to see it broken any moment. It's recent. Now the fact that so many mistakes were made within the past 150 years or so is not supposed to frighten us. We stiIl look at art for ourselves, we stiIl hear music for ourselves, we read for ourselves maybe. It's a nice chaIlenge, being aware that you're liable to make a fool of yourself or your taste, certainly an incentive to an art critic to bet his eye against the future. AIl too many art critics are afraid to do that.

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Notes 1

E.D. Hirsh, Jr. in The New York Review of Books (14 June 1979): "Ever since Plato, literary theory has concerned itself almost exclusively with the problem of value, e.g., Are the ancients better than the moderns?' You can read through virtually all the major works of the important literary critics before the twentieth century without finding an extended discussion of the problem of interpretation. In Britain, writers like Sidney, Pope, Hume, Johnson, Coleridge, and Arnold ... asked of a pice of writing, 1s it good?' or 'Why is it good?' rather than What does it mean?' "By contrast, ever since the revolution begun by the New Critics during the 1940s, and the enormous increase in the numbers of academic interpreters over the past forty years, the question of value has fallen into the background ... ." I

2

This doesn't mean the same thing as supreme value. To claim this was the Art for Art's Sakers' unnecessary mistake. The great Charles Peirce did, however, argue that whatever is valued for its own sole sake, even when it's a supreme sake -like human life - has in the showdown to be understood as being valued aesthetically: in other words, anything valued as an end in itself, as something other than a means or instrument, is experienced in the aesthetic mode. Which isn't to say that absolu te values have equal status. All the art that's ever been made isn't worth the life of a single human being.

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Notes

Suggestions for further reading Primary sources The application of Roger Fry's theory to actual criticism is well exemplified in his book on Cezanne (1927). A selection of Greenberg's criticism was published in 1961 under the title Art and Culture. In 1986 the first two volumes of a new collection were published: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, edited with an introduction by John O'Brian. Together these volumes cover the years 1939 to 1949. See particularly the article ~owards a Newer Laocoon' (1940). The article 'After Abstract Expressionism' (1962), in Aesthetics edited by George Dickie and Richard Sclafani, expresses his views in the context of an account of the origins and development of the movement. Harold Osborne (1905-1987) is another highly sophisticated expositor of Formalism. Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1955) expounds his own "organicist" version of formalism along with exposition and critique of other major types of theory of art. Aesthetics and Art Theory (1968) is a somewhat idiosyncratic but very helpful history of art theory from Greek times to the present. It is idiosyncratic only in using the format of history to expound his own views. Also very helpful are The Art of Appreciation (1970) and Ab-

straction and Artifice in the Twentieth Century (1979).

Secondary sources Dean W. Curtin's article 'Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39 (1981), deals with Fry, Bell and Greenberg. David Carrier's 'Greenberg, Fried, and Philosophy', in Dickie and Sclafani's Aesthetics, examines the relationship between Greenberg and Kant. In a very valuable article in Vanguard 10 (1981) entitled 'Modernism and After', Paul Richter considers Greenberg's relation to Kant and the contrast between his views and those of Timothy Clark. Ingrid Stadler in chapter 7 of Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (1982), edited by Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, also examines very helpfully the relation between Greenberg and Kant. Donald B. Kuspit's book Clement Greenberg (1979) should also be consulted.

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T.}. Clark, writing from a sociological standpoint, attacked Greenberg's theory in two much-quoted symposium papers. 'Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art' was published in Critical Inquiry 9 (1982). This issue includes Michael Fried's response: 'How Modernism Works: A Response to T.}. Oark'. Oark's counter, 'Arguments About Modernism: A Reply to Michael Fried', was published in The Politics of Modernism (1983) edited by W.}.T. Mitchell. Clark's other paper, 'More on the Difference between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves', was printed in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers (1983) edited by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin. Though it no longer represents his views, a much earlier paper by Fried is well worth reading as a vintage piece. In the introduction to an exhibition catalogue, Three American Painters: Jules Dlitski, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella (1965), he brilliantly and enthusiastically expounded and defended Greenberg's theory. Fried emphasized what he saw as a fundamentally Hegelian conception of art history in Wolfflin and Greenberg and welcomed Greenberg's conception of the task of the critic as involving active involvement with artists in solving and even proposing formal problems. Controversy continues to swirl around Greenberg and this brief list gives only an indication of the material available. Publication of the new collection of essays has evoked further discussion. As samples of different attitudes see the review essays by Sidney Tillim, Art in America 75 (1987), Kay Larson Art Forum 25 (1987) and Francis Frascina Art Monthly 111 (November,1987). On visual art developments in Russia during the early part of the century see The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922 (1962) by Camilla Gray. For brief expositions of Suprematism in Russia see Harold Osborne, Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth Century Art (1979) and Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art (1974, revised 1981).

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3 The Psychological Approach Introduction In the case of the psychological approach it becomes even more immedi-

ately obvious that in fact the title refers not to a single theory but a number of approaches emerging from different psychological theories. Our selections introduce psycho-analytical and gestalt theories. It has been said that with the possible exception of Einstein no one has had more influence than Freud on the 20th century. It is not surprising, therefore, that Freudian approaches to art have been popular. Since a general acquaintance with Freudian theory can be assumed only a very brief introduction will be given. According to Freud much that seems unmotivated and inexplicable turns out to be motivated and explicable. Much of our behaviour, in fact, is unconsciously motivated. The mind is divided into three provinces. The id contains the inherited fixed drives, primarily sexual. It is governed by the pleasure principle. The task of the ego is self-preservation and in so doing it attempts to govern the id. The super-ego contains the internalized norms of the culture. What is unacceptable to the super-ego is repressed and goes to the unconscious. Particularly in childhood what is too painful for consciousness is dealt with by repression and sublimation. In all of this the child's phantasies playa key role. In psychological treatment of psychoses and neuroses forgotten incidents and phantasies must be brought to light. Freud never claimed to offer a comprehensive theory of art. Nevertheless he had a passionate interest in art and his writings are strewn with references to it. In a few articles, including the first two selections here, he deals expressly with problems in interpreting art and in understanding genius. Though he explicitly denies that he is concerned with evaluation in fact he offers suggestions as to why some works are considered great. According to Freud the artist is, with some qualifications, engaged in much the same sort of activity as the child who plays and the adult who phantasizes or dreams. The third selection is a summary by Freud, from an introductory series of lectures, of his account of symbolism in dreams. A certain ambivalence may be noted. On the one hand he gives the im-

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pression he is providing the key to interpreting a universal symbolic code. On the other, he carefully cautions that accurate interpretation of dream symbols requires a knowledge of the immediate and larger context of the dreamer's unique situation. 1 The Relation of the Poet to Day Dreaming' was first published in New Revue (1908). The other two selections are taken from Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis first delivered in 19151916 and published in 1916-1917. C.G. Jung (1875-1961) was at one time a colleague of Freud but broke with his views for a number of reasons, some of which come out in the selection 'On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry' (1922). He rejects the Freudian approach to art as reductive, treating the artwork as a neurosis, and inappropriate because it distracts attention from the artwork itself. Further, what Freud calls symbols, Jung describes as mere signs or symptoms of the background process. His own view of symbol he describes as positive: the contents of the unconscious have a forward-looking, healing power. On this basis the artwork is a means by which we can enhance our grasp of reality. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) he writes: "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him ... as an artist ... he is 'collective man' ..." 2 Gestalt psychology is very different from psychoanalysis. The movement is said to have really begun with a paper presented in 1912 by Wertheimer. Further developments of his method were made by Wolfgang Kohler (1887-1967) and Kurt Koffka (1896-1941). Gestalt psychology is, in the main, a theory about perception and if Amheim is right in claiming that liThe arts are based on perception" 3 then an analysis of perception is an analysis of the basis of art. In perceiving we have an innate tendency to organize the data of perception into wholes (Gestalten). The organization is such that the resulting structure is as simple as the given conditions permit. This is a formulation of the basic law (of Pragnanz). The whole we perceive has its own unique character, not simply those of its constituent parts. At the same time the quali ties of the whole depend on the parts and their relations. This last-the relations-is fundamental. Rudolf Arnheim has made the greatest contribution to the gestalt analysis of visual fields. The selection is from chapter one of his most influential book, Art and Visual Perception, published first in 1954, revised in 1974. The ten chapter headings are: balance, shape, form, growth, space, light, colour, movement, dynamic expression. This sample is valuable in 122

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itself and also suggests the wealth of detailed analyses in the rest of the book. It should be noted that Arnheim is engaged in three different projects, often inter-twined: (1) giving an account of what we perceive in a visual field; (2) explaining why we perceive the visual field as we do; (3) laying down criteria for judgement and explaining why they must be accepted. The influence of gestalt theories on art theory is clearest in the writings of Harold Osborne. His version of formalism takes its distinctive character largely from gestalt emphases. See Aesthetics and Criticism, referred to above, particularly the account of organic unity. Suzanne Langer in Philosophy in a New Key (1941) makes no secret of her debt to gestalt theory. She quotes Koffka, Kohler and Wertheimer and describes perception in gestalt tenns. The theory of Jacques Lacan, described in the section on poststructuralism, could also have been placed in this section.

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Sigmund Freud The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming We laymen have always wondered greatly-like the cardinal who put the question to Ariosto-how that strange being, the poet, comes by his material. What makes him able to carry us with him in such a way and to arouse emotions in us of which we thought ourselves perhaps not even capable? Our interest in the problem is only stimulated by the circumstance that if we ask poets themselves they give us no explanation of the matter, or at least no satisfactory explanation. The knowledge that not even the clearest insight into the factors conditioning the choice of imaginative material, or into the nature of the ability to fashion that material, will ever make writers of us does not in any way detract from our interest. If we could only find some activity in ourselves, or in people like ourselves, which was in any way akin to the writing of imaginative works! If we could do so, then examination of it would give us a hope of obtaining some insight into the creative powers of imaginative writers. And indeed, there is some prospect of achieving this-writers themselves always try to lessen the distance between their kind and ordinary human beings; they so often assure us that every man is at heart a poet, and that the last poet will not die until the last human being does. We ought surely to look in the child for the first traces of imaginative activity. The child's best-loved and most absorbing occupation is play. Perhaps we may say that every child at play behaves like an imaginative writer, in that he creates a world of his own or, more truly, he rearranges the things of his world and orders it in a new way that pleases him better. It would be incorrect to think that he does not take this world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and expends a great deal of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not serious occupation but-reality. Notwithstanding the large affective cathexis of his play-world, the child distinguishes it perfectly from reality; only he likes to borrow the objects and circumstances that he imagines from the tangible and visible things of the real world. It is only this linking of it to reality that still distinguishes a child's "play" from "daydreaming." Now the writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously; that is, he invests it with a great deal of affect, while separating it sharply from reality. Language has pre-

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served this relationship between children's play and poetic creation. It designates certain kinds of imaginative creation, concerned with tangible objects and capable of representation, as "plays"; the people who present them are called "players." The unreality of this poetical world of imagination, however, has very important consequences for literary technique; for many things which if they happened in real life could produce no pleasure can nevertheless give enjoyment in a play-many emotions which are essentially painful may become a source of enjoyment to the spectators and hearers of a poet's work. There is another consideration relating to the contrast between reality and play on which we will dwell for a moment. Long after a child has grown up and stopped playing, after he has for decades attempted to grasp the reali ties of life with all seriousness, he may one day come to a state of mind in which the contrast between play and reality is again abrogated. The adult can remember with what intense seriousness he carried on his childish play; then by comparing his would-be serious occupations with his childhood's play, he manages to throw off the heavy burden of life and obtain the great pleasure of humor. As they grow up, people cease to play, and appear to give up the pleasure they derived from play. But anyone who knows anything of the mental life of human beings is aware that hardly anything is more difficult to them than to give up a pleasure they have once tasted. Really we never can relinquish anything; we only exchange one thing for something else. When we appear to give something up, all we really do is to adopt a substitute. So when the human being grows up and ceases to play he only gives up the connection with real objects; instead of playing he then begins to create phantasy. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams. I believe that the greater number of human beings create phantasies at times as long as they live. This is a fact which has been overlooked for a long time, and its importance has therefore not been properly apprecia ted. The phantasies of human beings are less easy to observe than the play of children. Children do, it is true, play alone, or form with other children a closed world in their minds for the purposes of play; but a child does not conceal his play from adults, even though his playing is quite unconcerned with them. The adult, on the other hand, is ashamed of his daydreams and conceals them from other people; he cherishes them as his most intimate possessions and as a rule he would rather confess all his misdeeds than tell his daydreams. For this reason he may believe that he is 125

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the only person who makes up such phantasies, without having any idea that everybody else tells themselves stories of the same kind. Daydreaming is a continuation of play, nevertheless, and the motives which lie behind these two activities contain a very good reason for this different behavior in the child at play and in the daydreaming adult. The play of children is detennined by their wishes-really by the child's one wish, which is to be grown-up, the wish that helps to "bring him up." He always plays at being grown-up; in play he imitates what is known to him of the lives of adults. Now he has no reason to conceal this wish. With the adult it is otherwise; on the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to play any longer or to daydream, but to be making his way in a real world. On the other hand, some of the wishes from which his phantasies spring are such as to have to be entirely hidden; therefore he is ashamed of his phantasies as being childish and as something prohibited. If they are concealed with so much secretiveness, you will ask, how do we know so much about the human propensity to create phantasies? Now there is a certain class of human beings upon whom not a god, indeed, but a stem goddess-Necessity-has laid the task of giving an account of what they suffer and what they enjoy. These people are the neurotics; among other things they have to confess their phantasies to the physician to whom they go in the hope of recovering through mental treatment. This is our best source of knowledge, and we have later found good reason to suppose that our patients tell us about themselves nothing that we could not also hear from healthy people. Let us try to learn some of the characteristics of daydreaming. We can begin by saying that happy people never make phantasies, only unsatisfied ones. Unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind phantasies; every separate phantasy contains the fulfillment of a wish, and improves on unsatisfactory reality. The impelling wishes vary according to the sex, character, and circumstances of the creator; they may be easily divided, however, into two principal groups. Either they are ambitious wishes, serving to exalt the person creating them, or they are erotic. In young women erotic wishes dominate the phantasies almost exclusively, for their ambition is generally comprised in their erotic longings; in young men egoistic and ambitious wishes assert themselves plainly enough alongside their erotic desires. But we will not lay stress on the distinction between these two trends; we prefer to emphasize the fact that they are often united. In many altarpieces the portrait of the donor is to be found in one corner of the picture; and in the greater number of ambitious daydreams, 126

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too, we can discover a woman in some comer, for whom the dreamer performs all his heroic deeds and at whose feet all his triumphs are to be laid. Here you see we have strong enough motives for concealment; a wellbrought-up woman is, indeed, credited with only a minimum of erotic desire, while a young man has to learn to suppress the overweening self-regard he acquires in the indulgent atmosphere surrounding his childhood, so that he may find his proper place in a society that is full of other persons making similar claims. We must not imagine that the various products of this impulse towards phantasy, castles in the air or daydreams, are stereotyped or unchangeable. On the contrary, they fit themselves into the changing impressions of life, alter with the vicissitudes of life; every deep new impression gives them what might be called a "date stamp." The relation of phantasies to time is altogether of great importance. One may say that a phantasy at one and the same moment hovers between three periods of time-the three periods of our ideation. The activity of phantasy in the mind is linked up with some current impression, occasioned by some event in the present, which had the power to rouse an intense desire. From there it wanders back to the memory of an early experience, generally belonging to infancy, in which this wish was fulfilled. Then it creates for itself a situation which is to emerge in the future, representing the fulfillment of the wish-this is the daydream or phantasy, which now carries in it traces both of the occasion which engendered it and of some past memory. So past, present, and future are threaded, as it were, on the string of the wish that runs through them all. A very ordinary example may serve to make my statement clear. Take the case of a poor orphan lad, to whom you have given the address of some employer where he may perhaps get work. On the way there he falls into a daydream suitable to the situation from which it springs. The content of the phantasy will be somewhat as follows: He is taken on and pleases his new employer, makes himself indispensable in the business, is taken into the family of the employer, and marries the charming daughter of the house. Then he comes to conduct the business, first as a partner, and then as successor to his father-in-law. In this way the dreamer regains what he had in his happy childhood, the protecting house, his loving parents and the first objects of his affection. You will see from such an example how the wish employs some event in the present to plan a future on the pattern of the past.

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Much more could be said about phantasies, but I will only allude as briefly as possible to certain points. If phantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the necessary conditions for an outbreak of neurosis or psychosis are constituted; phantasies are also the first preliminary stage in the mind of the symptoms of illness of which our patients complain. A broad bypath here branches off into pathology. I cannot pass over the relation of phantasies to dreams. Our nocturnal dreams are nothing but such phantasies, as we can make clear by interpreting them. Language, in its unrivaled wisdom, long ago decided the question of the essential nature of dreams by giving the name of "daydreams" to the airy creations of fantasy. If the meaning of our dreams usually remains obscure in spite of this clue, it is because of the circumstance that at night wishes of which we are ashamed also become active in us, wishes which we have to hide from ourselves, which were consequently repressed and pushed back into the unconscious. Such repressed wishes and their derivatives can therefore achieve expression only when almost completely disguised. When scientific work had succeeded in elucidating the distortion in dreams, it was no longer difficult to recognize that nocturnal dreams are fulfillments of desires in exactly the same way as daydreams are-those phantasies with which we are all so familiar. So much for daydreaming; now for the poet! Shall we dare really to compare an imaginative writer with "one who dreams in broad daylight," and his creations with daydreams? Here, surely, a first distinction is forced upon us; we must distinguish between poets who, like the bygone creators of epics and tragedies, take over their material ready-made, and those who seem to create their material spontaneously. Let us keep to the latter, and let us also not choose for our comparison those writers who are most highly esteemed by critics. We will choose the less pretentious writers of romances, novels, and stories, who are read all the same by the widest circles of men and women. There is one very marked characteristic in the productions of these writers which must strike us all: they all have a hero who is the center of interest, for whom the author tries to win our sympathy by every possible means, and whom he places under the protection of a special providence. If at the end of one chapter the hero is left unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds, I am sure to find him at the beginning of the next being carefully tended and on the way to recovery; if the first volume ends in the hero being shipwrecked in a storm at sea, I am certain to hear at the beginning of the next of his hair-breadth escape-otherwise, indeed, the story could not continue. The feeling of security with 128

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which I follow the hero through his dangerous adventures is the same as that with which a real hero throws himself into the water to save a drowning man, or exposes himself to the fire of the enemy while storming a battery. It is this very feeling of being a hero which one of our best authors has well expressed in the famous phrase, liEs kann mir nix g'schehen!" It seems to me, however, that this significant mark of invulnerability very clearly betrays-His Majesty the Ego, the hero of all daydreams and all novels. The same relationship is hinted at in yet other characteristics of these egocentric stories. When all the women in a novel invariably fall in love with the hero, this can hardly be looked upon as a description of reality, but it is easily understood as an essential constituent of a daydream. The same thing holds good when the other people in the story are sharply divided into good and bad, with complete disregard of the manifold variety in the traits of real human beings; the "good" ones are those who help the ego in its character of hero, while the "bad" are his enemies and rivals. We do not in any way fail to recognize that many imaginative productions have traveled [sic] far from the original naive daydream, but I cannot suppress the surmise that even the most extreme variations could be brought into relationship with this model by an uninterrupted series of transitions. It has struck me in many so-called psychological novels, too, that only one person-once again the hero-is described from within; the author dwells in his soul and looks upon the other people from outside. The psychological novel in general probably owes its peculiarities to the tendency of modem writers to split up their ego by self-observation into many component-egos, and in this way to personify the conflicting trends in their own mental life in many heroes. There are certain novels, which might be called "eccentric," that seem to stand in marked contradiction to the typical daydream; in these the person introduced as the hero plays the least active part of anyone, and seems instead to let the actions and sufferings of other people pass him by like a spectator. Many of the later novels of Zola belong to this class. But I must say that the psychological analysis of people who are not writers, and who deviate in many things from the so-called norm, has shown us analogous variations in their daydreams in which the ego contents itself with the role of spectator. If our comparison of the imaginative writer with the daydreamer, and of poetic production with the daydream, is to be of any value, it must show itself fruitful in some way or other. Let us try, for instance, to examine the works of writers in reference to the idea propounded above, the re129

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lation of the phantasy to the wish that runs through it and to the three periods of time; and with its help let us study the connection between the life of the writer and his productions. Hitherto it has not been known what preliminary ideas would constitute an approach to this problem; very often this relation has been regarded as much simpler than it is; but the insight gained from phantasies leads us to expect the following state of things. Some actual experience which made a strong impression on the writer had stirred up a memory of an earlier experience, generally belonging to childhood, which then arouses a wish that finds a fulfillment in the work in question, and in which elements of the recent event and the old memory should be discernible. Do not be alarmed at the complexity of this formula; I myself expect that in reality it will prove itself to be too schematic, but that possibly it may contain a first means of approach to the true state of affairs. From some attempts I have made I think that this way of approaching works of the imagination might not be unfruitful. You will not forget that the stress laid on the writer's memories of his childhood, which perhaps seems so strange, is ultimately derived from the hypothesis that imaginative creation, like daydreaming, is a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood. We will not neglect to refer also to that class of imaginative work which must be recognized not as spontaneous production, but as a refashioning of ready-made material. Here, too, the writer retains a certain amount of independence, which can express itself in the choice of material and in changes in the material chosen, which are often considerable. As far as it goes, this material is derived from the racial treasure-house of myths, legends, and fairy tales. The study of these creations of racial psychology is in no way complete, but it seems extremely probable that myths, for example, are distorted vestiges of the wish-phantasies of whole nations-the age-long dreams of young humanity. You will say that, although writers came first in the title of this paper, I have told you far less about them than about phantasy. I am aware of that, and will try to excuse myself by pointing to the present state of our knowledge. I could only throw out suggestions and bring up interesting points which arise from the study of phantasies, and which pass beyond them to the problem of the choice of literary material. We have not touched on the other problem at all, that is, what are the means which writers use to achieve those emotional reactions in us that are roused by their productions. But I would at least point out to you the path which 130

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leads from our discussion of daydreams to the problems of the effect produced on us by imaginative works. You will remember that we said the daydreamer hid his phantasies carefully from other people because he had reason to be ashamed of them. I may now add that even if he were to communicate them to us, he would give us no pleasure by his disclosures. When we hear such phantasies they repel us, or at least leave us cold. But when a man of literary talent presents his plays, or relates what we take to be his personal daydreams, we experience great pleasure arising probably from many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique by which our feeling of repulsion is overcome, and this has certainly to do with those barriers erected between every individual being and all others. We can guess at two methods used in this technique. The writer softens the egotistical character of the daydream by changes and disguises, and he bribes us by the offer of a purely formal, that is esthetic, pleasure in the presentation of his phantasies. The increment of pleasure which is offered us in order to release yet greater pleasure arising from deeper sources in the mind is called an "incitement premium" or technically, "fore-pleasure." I am of the opinion that all the esthetic pleasure we gain from the works of imaginative writers is of the same type as this "fore-pleasure," and that the true enjoyment of literature proceeds from the release of tensions in our minds. Perhaps much that brings about this result consists in the writer's putting us into a position in which we can enjoy our own daydreams without reproach or shame. Here we reach a path leading into novel, interesting, and complicated researches, but we also, at least for the present, arrive at the end of the present discussion.

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Sigmund Freud Phantasy-making and Art [C]onsider ... the origin and meaning of that mental activity called "phantasy-making." In general, as you know, it enjoys high esteem, although its place in mental life has not been clearly understood. I can tell you as much as this about it. You know that the ego in man is gradually trained by the influence of external necessity to appreciate reality and to pursue the reality-principle, and that in so doing it must renounce temporarily or permanently various of the objects and aims-not only sexual-of its desire for pleasure. But renunciation of pleasure has always been very hard for man; he cannot accomplish it without some kind of compensation. Accordingly he has evolved for himself a mental activity in which all these relinquished sources of pleasure and abandoned paths of gratification are permitted to continue their existence, a form of existence in which they are free from the demands of reality and from what we call the exercise of IItesting reality." Every longing is soon transformed into the idea of its fulfillment; there is no doubt that dwelling upon a wish-fulfillment in phantasy brings satisfaction, although the knowledge that it is not reality remains thereby unobscured. In phantasy, therefore, man can continue to enjoy a freedom from the grip of the external world, one which he has long relinquished in actuality. He has contrived to be alternately a pleasure-seeking animal and a reasonable being; for the meager satisfaction that he can extract from reality leaves him starving. "There is no doing without accessory constructions," said Fontane. The creation of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete counterpart in the establishment of IIreservations" and "natureparks" in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic, or industry threaten to change the original face of the earth rapidly into something unrecognizable. The "reservation" is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else; there everything may grow and spread as it pleases, including what is useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroachments of the reality-principle. The best-known productions of phantasy have already been met by us; they are called daydreams, and are imaginary gratifications of ambitious, grandiose, erotic wishes, dilating the more extravagantly the more reality admonishes humility and patience. In them is shown unmistakably the essence of imaginary happiness, the return of gratification to a condition in which it is independent of reality's sanction. We know that these 132

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daydreams are the kernels and models of night dreams; fundamentally the night dream is nothing but a daydream distorted by the nocturnal form of mental activity and made possible by the nocturnal freedom of instinctual excitations. We are already familiar with the idea that a daydream is not necessarily conscious, that unconscious daydreams also exist, such unconscious daydreams are therefore just as much the source of night dreams as of neurotic symptoms.... The return of the libido ... to phantasy is an intermediate step on the way to symptom-formation which well deserves a special designation. C.G. Jung has coined for it the very appropriate name of Introversion, but inappropriately he uses it also to describe other things. We will adhere to the position that introversion describes the deflection of the libido away from the possibilities of real satisfaction and its excessive accumulation upon phantasies previously tolerated as harmless. An introverted person is not yet neurotic, but he is in an unstable condition; the next disturbance of the shifting forces will cause symptoms to develop, unless he can yet find other outlets for his pent-up libido. The unreal character of neurotic satisfaction and the disregard of the difference between phantasy and reality are already determined by the arrest at this stage of introversion.... Before you leave today I should like to direct your attention for a moment to a side of phantasy-life of very general interest. There is, in fact, a path from phantasy back again to reality, and that is-art. The artist has also an introverted disposition and has not far to go to become neurotic. He is one who is urged on by instinctual needs which are too clamorous; he longs to attain to honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications. So, like any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and all his libido too, on to the creation of his wishes in the life of phantasy, from which the way might readily lead to neurosis. There must be many factors in combination to prevent this becoming the whole outcome of his development; it is well known how often artists in particular suffer from partial inhibition of their capacities through neurosis. Probably their. constitution is endowed with a powerful capacity for sublimation and with a certain flexibility in the repressions determining the conflict. But the way back to reality is found by the artist thus: He is not the only one who has a life of phantasy; the intermediate world of phantasy is sanctioned by general human consent, and every hungry soul looks to it for comfort and consolation. But to those who are not artists the gratification that can be drawn from the springs of phantasy. 133

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Sigmund Freud Symbolism in Dreams We have found out that the distortion in dreams which hinders our understanding of them is due to the activities of a censorship, directed against the unacceptable, unconscious wish-impulses. But of course we have not asserted that the censorship is the only factor responsible for the distortion, and as a matter of fact a further study of dreams leads to the discovery that there are yet other causes contributing to this effect; that is as much as to say, if the censorship were eliminated we should nevertheless be unable to understand dreams, nor would the manifest dream be identical with the latent dream-thoughts. This other cause of the obscurity of dreams, this additional contribution to distortion, is revealed by our becoming aware of a gap in our technique. I have already admitted to you that there are occasions when persons being analysed really have no associations to single elements in their dreams. To be sure, this does not happen as often as they declare that it does; in very many instances the association may yet be elicited by perseverance; but still there remains a certain number of cases where association fails altogether or, if something is finally extorted, it is not what we need. If this happens during psychoanalytic treatment it has a certain significance which does not concern us here; but it also occurs in the course of interpretation of dreams in normal people, or when we are interpreting our own. When we are convinced in such circumstances that no amount of pressing is of any use, we finally discover that this unwelcome contingency regularly presents itself where special dream-elements are in question; and we begin to recognize the operation of some new principle, whereas at first we thought we had only come across an exceptional case in which our technique had failed. In this way it comes about that we try to interpret these "silent" elements, and attempt to translate them by drawing upon our own resources. It cannot fail to strike us that we arrive at a satisfactory meaning in every instance in which we venture on this substitution, whereas the dream remains meaningless and disconnected as long as we do not resolve to use this method. The accumulation of many exactly similar instances then affords us the required certainty, our experiment having been tried at first with considerable diffidence. I am presenting all this somewhat in outline, but that is surely allow-

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able for purposes of instruction, nor is it falsified by so doing, but merely made simpler. We arrive in this way at constant translations for a series of dreamelements, just as in popular books on dreams we find such translations for everything that occurs in dreams. You will not have forgotten that when we employ the method of free association such constant substitutions for dream-elements never made their appearance. Now you will at once say that this mode of interpretation seems to you far more uncertain and open to cri ticism than even the former method of free association. But there is still something more to be said: when we have collected from actual experience a sufficient number of such constant translations, we eventually realize that we could actually have filled in these portions of the interpretation from our own knowledge, and that they really could have been understood without using the dreamer's associations. How it is that we are bound to know their meaning is a matter which will be dealt with in the second half of our discussion. We call a constant relation of this kind between a dream-element and its translation a symbolic one, and the dream-element itself a symbol of the unconscious dream-thought. You will remember that some time ago, when we were examining the different relations which may exist between dream-elements and the thoughts proper underlying them, I distinguished three relations: substitution of the part for the whole, allusion, and imagery. I told you then that there was a fourth possible relation, but I did not tell you what it was. This fourth relation is the symbolic, which I am now introducing; there are connected with it certain very interesting points for discussion, to which we will turn attention before setting forth our special observations on this subject. Symbolism is perhaps the most remarkable part of our theory of dreams. First of all: since the relation between a symbol and the idea symbolized is an invariable one, the latter being as it were a translation of the former, symbolism does in some measure realize the ideal of both ancient and popular dream-interpretation, one from which we have moved very far in our technique. Symbols make it possible for us in certain circumstances to interpret a dream without questioning the dreamer, who indeed in any case can tell us nothing about the symbols. If the symbols commonly appearing in dreams are known, and also the personality of the dreamer, the conditions under which he lives, and the impressions in his mind after which his dream occurred, we are often in a position to interpret it straightaway; to translate it at sight, as it were. Such a feat flatters 135

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the vanity of the interpreter and impresses the dreamer; it is in pleasing contrast to the laborious method of questioning the latter. But do not let this lead you away: it is no part of our task to perform tricks nor is that method of interpretation which is based on a knowledge of symbolism one which can replace, or even compare with, that of free association. It is complementary to this latter, and the results it yields are only useful when applied in connection with the latter. As regards our knowledge of the dreamer's mental situation, moreover, you must reflect that you have not only to interpret dreams of people whom you know well; that, as a rule, you know nothing of the events of the previous day which stimulated the dream; and that the associations of the person analysed are the very source from which we obtain our knowledge of what we call the mental situation. Further, it is especially remarkable, particularly with reference to certain considerations upon which we shall touch later, that the most strenuous opposition has manifested itself again here, over this question of the existence of a symbolic relation between the dream and the unconscious. Even persons of judgement and standing, who in other respects have gone a long way with psychoanalysis, have renounced their adherence at this point. This behaviour is the more remarkable when we remember two things: first, that symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, nor exclusively characteristic of them; and, in the second place, that the use of symbolism in dreams was not one of the discoveries of psycho-analysis, although this science has certainly not been wanting in surprising discoveries. If we must ascribe priority in this field to anyone in modern times, the discoverer must be recognized in the philosopher K.A. Schemer (1861); psychoanalysis has confirmed his discovery, although modifying it in certain important respects. Now you will wish to hear something about the nature of dreamsymbolism and will want some examples. I will gladly tell you what I know, but I confess that our knowledge is less full than we could wish. The symbolic relation is essentially that of a comparison, but not any kind of comparison. We must suspect that this comparison is subject to particular conditions, although we cannot say what these conditions are. Not everything with which an object or an occurrence can be compared appears in dreams as symbolic of it, and, on the other hand, dreams do not employ symbolism for anything and everything, but only for particular elements of latent dream-thoughts; there are thus limitations in both directions. We must admit also that we cannot at present assign quite definite limits to our conception of a symbol; for it tends to merge into substitution, 136

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representation, etc., and even approaches closely to aIlusion. In one set of symbols the underlying comparison may be easily apparent, but there are others in which we have to look about for the common factor, the tertium comparationis contained in the supposed comparison. Further reflection may then reveal it to us, or on the other hand it may remain definitely hidden from us. Again, if the symbol is really a comparison, it is remarkable that this comparison is not exposed by the process of free association, and also that the dreamer knows nothing about it, but makes use of it unawares; nay, more, that he is actually unwilling to recognize it when it is brought to his notice. So you see that the symbolic relation is a comparison of a quite peculiar kind, the nature of which is as yet not fuIly clear to us. Perhaps some indication wiIl be found later which wiIl throw some light upon this unknown quantity. The number of things which are represented symbolically in dreams is not great. The human body as a whole, parents, children, brothers and sisters, birth, death, nakedness-and one thing more. The only typical, that is to say, regularly occurring, representation of the human form as a whole is that of a house, as was recognized by Schemer, who even wanted to attribute to this symbol an overwhelming significance which is not reaIly due to it. People have dreams of climbing down the front of a house, with feelings sometimes of pleasure and sometimes of dread. When the waIls are quite smooth, the house means a man; when there are ledges and balconies which can be caught hold of, a woman. Parents appear in dreams as emperor and empress, king and queen or other exalted personages; in this respect the dream attitude is highly dutiful. Children and brothers and sisters are less tenderly treated, being symbolized by little animals or vermin. Birth is almost invariably represented by some reference to water: either we are falling into water or clambering out of it, saving someone from it or being saved by them, i.e. the relation between mother and child is symbolized. For dying we have setting out upon a journey or travelling by train, while the state of death is indicated by various obscure and, as it were, timid aIlusions; clothes and uniforms stand for nakedness. You see that here the dividing line between the symbolic and the aIlusive kinds of representation tends to disappear. In comparison with the poverty of this enumeration, it cannot fail to strike us that objects and matters belonging to another range of ideas are represented by a remarkably rich symbolism. I am speaking of what pertains to the sexual life-the genitals, sexual processes and intercourse. An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. A curi137

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ous disproportion arises thus, for the matters dealt with are few in number, whereas the symbols for them are extraordinarily numerous, so that each of these few things can be expressed by many symbols practically equivalent. When they are interpreted, therefore, the result of this peculiarity gives universal offense, for, in contrast to the multifarious forms of its representation in dreams, the interpretation of the symbols is very monotonous. This is displeasing to everyone who comes to know of it: but how can we help it? As this is the first time in the course of these lectures that I have touched upon the sexual life, lowe you some explanation of the manner in which I propose to treat this subject. Psychoanalysis sees no occasion for concealments or indirect allusions, and does not think it necessary to be ashamed of concerning itself with material so important; it is of opinion that it is right and proper to call everything by its true name, hoping in this way the more easily to avoid disturbing suggestions. The fact that I am speaking to a mixed audience can make no difference in this. No science can be treated in usum delphini, or in a manner adapted to school-girls; the women present, by appearing in this lecture-room, have tacitly expressed their desire to be regarded on the same footing as the men. The male genital organ is symbolically represented in dreams in many different ways, with most of which the common idea underlying the comparison is easily apparent. In the first place, the sacred number three is symbolic of the whole male genitalia. Its more conspicuous and, to both sexes, more interesting part, the penis, is symbolized primarily by objects which resemble it in form, being long and upstanding, such as sticks, umbrellas, poles, trees and the like; also by objects which, like the thing symbolized, have the property of penetrating, and consequently of injuring, the body,-that is to say, pointed weapons of all sorts: knives, daggers, lances, sabres; fire-arms are similarly used: guns, pistols and revolvers, these last being a very appropriate symbol on account of their shape. In the anxietydreams of young girls, pursuit by a man armed with a knife or rifle plays a great part. This is perhaps the most frequently occurring dream-symbol: you ('an now easily translate it for yourselves. The substitution of the male organ by objects from which water flows is again easily comprehensible: taps, water-cans, or springs; and by other objects which are capable of elongation, such as pulley lamps, pencils which slide in and out of a sheath, and so on. Pencils, penholders, nail-files, hammers and other implements are undoubtedly male sexual symbols, based on an idea of the male organ which is equally easily perceived. 138

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The peculiar property of this member of being able to raise itself upright in defiance of the law of gravity, part of the phenomenon of erection, leads to symbolic representation by means of balloons, aeroplanes, and, just recently, Zeppelins. But dreams have another, much more impressive, way of symbolizing erection; they make the organ of sex into the essential part of the whole person, so that the dreamer himself flies. Do not be upset by hearing that dreams of flying, which we all know and which are often so beautiful, must be interpreted as dreams of general sexual excitement, dreams of erection. One psychoanalytic investigator, P. Fedem, has established the truth of this interpretation beyond doubt; but, besides this, Mourly Void, a man highly praised for his sober judgement, who carried out the experiments with artificial postures of the arms and legs, and whose theories were really widely removed from those of psychoanalysis (indeed he may have known nothing about it), was led by his own investigations to the same conclusion. Nor must you think to object to this on the ground that women can also have dreams of flying; you should rather remind yourselves that the purpose of dreams is wish-fulfilment, and that the wish to be a man is frequently met with in women, whether they are conscious of it or not. Further, no one familiar with anatomy will be misled by supposing that it is impossible for a woman to realize this wish by sensations similar to those of a man, for the woman's sexual organs include a small one which resembles the penis, and this little organ, the clitoris, does actually play during childhood and in the years before sexual intercourse the same part as the large male organ. Male sexual symbols less easy to understand are certain reptiles and fishes: above all, the famous symbol of the serpent. Why hats and cloaks are used in the same way is certainly difficult to divine, but their symbolic meaning is quite unquestionable. Finally, it may be asked whether the representation of the male organ by some other member, such as the hand or the foot, may be termed symbolic. I think the context in which this is wont to occur, and the female counterparts with which we meet, force this conclusion upon us. The female genitalia are symbolically represented by all such objects as share with them the property of enclosing a space or are capable of acting as receptacles: such as pits, hollows and caves, and also jars and bottles, and boxes of all sorts and sizes, chests, coffers, pockets, and so forth. Ships too come into this category. Many symbols refer rather to the uterus than to the other genital organs: thus cupboards, stoves and, above all, rooms. Room symbolism here links up with that of houses, whilst doors and gates repre139

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sent the genital opening. Moreover, material of different kinds is a symbol of woman,-wood, paper, and objects made of these, such as tables and books. From the animal world, snails and mussels at any rate must be cited as unmistakable female symbols; of the parts of the body, the mouth_as a representation of the genital opening, and, amongst buildings, churches and chapels are symbols of a woman. You see that all these symbols are not equally easy to understand. The breasts must be included amongst the organs of sex; these, as well as the larger hemispheres of the female body, are represented by apples, peaches and fruit in general. The pubic hair in both sexes is indicated in dreams by woods and thickets. The complicated topography of the female sexual organs accounts for their often being represented by a landscape with rocks, woods and water, whilst the imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends it to symbolization by all kinds of complicated and indescribable machinery. Yet another noteworthy symbol of the female genital organ is a jewel case, whilst "jewel" and "treasure" are used also in dreams to represent the beloved person and sweetmeats frequently stand for sexual pleasures. Gratification derived from a person's own genitals is indicated by any kind of play, including playing the piano. The symbolic representation of onanism by sliding or gliding and also by pulling off a branch is very typical. A particularly remarkable dream-symbol is the falling out or extraction of teeth; the primary significance of this is certainly castration as a punishment for onanism. Special representations of sexual intercourse are less frequent in dreams than we should expect after all this, but we may mention in this connection rhythmical activities such as dancing, riding and climbing, and also experiencing some violence, e.g. being run over. To these may be added certain manual occupations, and of course being threatened with weapons. You must not imagine that these symbols are either employed or translated quite simply: on all sides we meet with what we do not expect. For instance, it seems hardly credible that there is often no sharp discrimination of the different sexes in these symbolic representations. Many symbols stand for sexual organs in general, whether male or female: for instance, a little child, or a little son or daughter. At another time a symbol which is generally a male one may be used to denote the female sexual organ, or vice versa. This is incomprehensible until we have acquired some knowledge of the development of conceptions about sexuality amongst human beings. In many cases this ambiguity of the symbols may be apparent rather than real; and moreover, the most striking amongst them, such

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as weapons, pockets and chests, are never used bisexually in this way. I will now give a brief account, beginning with the symbols themselves instead of with the objects symbolized, to show you from what spheres the sexual symbols have for the most part been derived, and I will add a few remarks relating particularly to those in which the attribute in common with the thing symbolized is hard to detect. An instance of an obscure symbol of this kind is the hat, or perhaps head-coverings in general; this usually has a masculine significance, though occasionally a feminine one. In the same way a cloak betokens a man, though perhaps sometimes without special reference to the organs of sex. It is open to you to ask why this should be so. A tie, being an object which hangs down and is not worn by women is clearly a male symbol, whilst underlinen and linen in general stands for the female. Clothes and unifonns, as we have heard, represent nakedness or the human form; shoes and slippers symbolize the female genital organs. Tables and wood we have mentioned as being puzzling, but nevertheless certain, female symbols; the act of mounting ladders, steep places or stairs is indubi tably symbolic of sexual intercourse. On closer reflection we shall notice that the rhythmic character of this climbing is the point in common between the two, and perhaps also the accompanying increase in excitation-the shortening of the breath as the climber ascends. We have already recognized that landscapes represent the female sexual organs; mountains and rocks are symbols of the male organ; gardens, a frequently occurring symbol of the female genitalia. Fruit stands for the breasts, not for a child. Wild animals denote human beings whose senses are excited, and, hence, evil impulses or passions. Blossoms and flowers represent the female sexual organs, more particularly, in virginity. In this connection you will recollect that the blossoms are really the sexual organs of plants. We already know how rooms are used symbolically. This representation may be extended, so that windows and doors (entrances and exits from rooms) come to mean the openings of the body; the fact of rooms being open or closed also accords with this symbolism: the key, which opens them, is certainly a male symbol. This is some material for a study of dream-symbolism. It is not complete, and could be both extended and made deeper. However, I think it will seem to you more than enough; perhaps you may dislike it. You will ask: "Do I then really live in the midst of sexual symbols? Are all the objects round me, all the clothes I wear, all the things I handle, always sexual 141

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symbols and nothing else?" There really is good reason for surprised questions, and the first of these would be: How do we profess to arrive at the meaning of these dream-symbols, about which the dreamer himself can give us little or no information. My answer is that we derive our knowledge from widely different sources: from fairy tales and myths, jokes and witticisms, from folklore, i.e. from what we know of the manners and customs, sayings and songs, of different peoples, and from poetic and colloquial usage of language. Everywhere in these various fields the same symbolism occurs, and in many of them we can understand it without being taught anything about it. If we consider these various sources individually, we shall find so many parallels to dream-symbolism that we are bound to be convinced of the correctness of our interpretations. The human body is, we said, according to Scherner frequently symbolized in dreams by a house; by an extension of this symbolism, windows, doors and gates stand for the entrances to cavities in the body, and the fa~ades may either be smooth or may have balconies and ledges to hold on to. The same symbolism is met with in colloquialisms; for instance, we speak of "a thatch of hair," or a "tile hat," or say of someone that he is not right "in the upper storey." In anatomy, too, we speak of the openings of the body as its "portals." We may at first find it surprising that parents appear in our dreams as kings and emperors and their consorts, but we have a parallel to this in fairy tales. Does it not begin to dawn upon us that the many fairy tales which begin with the words "Once upon a time there were a king and queen" simply mean: "Once upon a time there were a father and mother"? In family life the children are sometimes spoken of jestingly as princes, and the eldest son as the crown prince. The king himself is called the father of his people. Again, in some parts, little children are often playfully spoken of as little animals, e.g. in Cornwall, as "little toad," or in Germany as "little worm," and, in sympathizing with a child, Germans say "poor little worm." Now let us return to the house symbolism. When in our dreams we make use of the projections of houses as supports, does that not suggest a well-known, popular German saying, with reference to a woman with a markedly developed bust: "She has something for one to hold on to" (Die hat etwas zum Anhalten), whilst another colloquialism in the same connection is: "She has plenty of wood in front of her house" (Die hat viel Holz vor dem Hause), as though our interpretation were to be borne out by this when we say that wood is a female maternal symbol. 142

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There is still something to be said on the subject of wood. It is not easy to see why wood should have come to represent a woman or mother, but here a comparison of different languages may be useful to us. The German word Holz (wood) is said to be derived from the same root as the Greek UAn, which means stuff, raw material. This would be an instance of a process which is by no means rare, in that a general name for material has come finally to be applied to a particular material only. Now, in the Atlantic Ocean, there is an island named Madeira, and this name was given to it by the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at that time it was covered with dense forests; for in Portuguese the word for wood is madeira. But you cannot fail to notice that this madeira is merely a modified form of the Latin materia, which again signifies material in general. Now materia is derived from mater = mother, and the material out of which anything is made may be conceived of as giving birth to it. So, in the symbolic use of wood to represent woman or mother, we have a survival of this old idea. Birth is regularly expressed by some connection with water; we are plunging into or emerging from water, that is to say, we give birth or are being born. Now let us not forget that this symbol has a twofold reference to the actual facts of evolution. Not only are all land mammals, from which the human race itself has sprung, descended from creatures inhabiting the water-this is the more remote of the two considerations-but also every single mammal, every human being, has passed the first phase of existence in water-that is to say, as an embryo in the amniotic fluid of the mother's womb-and thus, at birth, emerged from water. I do not maintain that the dreamer knows this; on the other hand, I contend that there is no need for him to know it. He probably knows something else from having been told it as a child, but even this, I will maintain, has contributed nothing to symbol-formation. The child is told in the nursery that the stork brings the babies, but then where does it get them? Out of a pond or a well-again, out of the water. One of my patients who had been told this as a child (a little count, as he was then) afterwards disappeared for a whole afternoon, and was at last found lying at the edge of the castle lake, with his little face bent over the clear water, eagerly gazing to see whether he could catch sight of the babies at the bottom of the water. In the myths of the births of heroes, a comparative study of which has been made by O. Rank-the earliest is that of King Sargon of Akkad, about 2800 B.C.-exposure in water and rescue from it playa major part. Rank perceived that this symbolizes birth in a manner analogous to that 143

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employed in dreams. When anyone in his dream rescues somebody from the water, he makes that person into his mother, or at any rate a mother; and in mythology, whoever rescues a child from water confesses herself to be its real mother. There is a well-known joke in which an intelligent Jewish boy, when asked who was the mother of Moses, answers immediately: liThe Princess." He is told: ''No, she only took him out of the water." "That's what she said," he replies, showing that he had hit upon the right interpretation of the myth. Going away on a journey stands in dreams for dying; similarly, it is the custom in the nursery, when a child asks questions as to the whereabouts of someone who has died and whom he misses, to tell him that that person has "gone away." Here again, I deprecate the idea that the dreamsymbol has its origin in this evasive reply to the child. The poet uses the same symbol when he speaks of the other side as "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns." Again, in everyday speech it is quite usual to speak of the "last journey," and everyone who is acquainted with ancient rites knows how seriously the idea of a journey into the land of the dead was taken, for instance, in ancient Egyptian belief. In many cases the "Book of the Dead" survives, which was given to the mummy, like a Baedeker, to take with him on the last journey. Since burial-grounds have been placed at a distance from the houses of the living, the last journey of the dead has indeed become a reality. Nor does sexual symbolism belong only to dreams. You will all know the expression "a baggage" as applied contemptuously to a woman, but perhaps people do not know that they are using a genital symbol. In the New Testament we read: "The woman is the weaker vessel." The sacred writings of the Jews, the style of which so closely approaches that of poetry, are full of expressions symbolic of sex, which have not always been correctly interpreted and the exegesis of which, e.g. in the Song of Solomon, has led to many misunderstandings. In later Hebrew literature the woman is very frequently represented by a house, the door standing for the genital opening; thus a man complains, when he finds a woman no longer a virgin, that "he has found the door open." The symbol "table" for a woman also occurs in this literature; the woman says of her husband III spread the table for him, but he overturned it." Lame children are said to owe their infirmity to the fact that the man "overturned the table." I quote here from a treatise by L. Levy in Briinn: Sexual Symbolism in the Bible and the Talmud. That ships in dreams signify women is a belief in which we are sup-

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ported by the etymologists, who assert that "ship" (Schiff> was originally the name of an earthen vessel and is the same word as Schaff (a tub or wooden vessel). That an oven stands for a woman or the mother's womb is an interpretation confirmed by the Greek story of Periander of Corinth and his wife Melissa. According to the version of Herodotus, the tyrant adjured the shade of his wife, whom he had loved passionately but had murdered out of jealousy, to tell him something about herself, whereupon the dead woman identified herself by reminding him that he, Periander, "had put his bread into a cold oven," thus expressing in a disguised form a circumstance of which everyone else was ignorant. In the Anthropophyteia, edited by F. S. Kraus, a work which is an indispensable textbook on everything concerning the sexual life of different peoples, we read that in a certain part of Germany people say of a woman who is delivered of a child that ''her oven has fallen to pieces." The kindling of fire and everything connected with this is permeated through and through with sexual symbolism, the flame always standing for the male organ, and the fireplace or the hearth for the womb of the woman. If you have chanced to wonder at the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to symbolize the female sexual organs, you may learn from mythologists how large a part has been played in the ideas and cults of ancient times by "Mother Earth" and how the whole conception of agriculture was determined by this symbolism. The fact that in dreams a room represents a woman you may be inclined to trace to the German colloquialism by which Frauenzimmer (lit. "woman's room") is used for Frau, that is to say, the human person is represented by the place assigned for her occupation. Similarly we speak of the Porte, meaning thereby the Sultan and his government, and the name of the ancient Egyptian ruler, Pharaoh, merely means "great court." (In the ancient Orient the courts between the double gates of the city were places of assembly, like the market-place in classical times.) But I think this derivation is too superficial, and it strikes me as more probable that the room came to symbolize woman on account of its property of enclosing within it the human being. We have already met with the house in this sense; from mythology and poetry we may take towns, citadels, castles and fortresses to be further symbols for women. It would be easy to decide the point by reference to the dreams of people who neither speak nor understand German. Of late years I have mainly treated foreign patients, and I think I recollect that in their dreams rooms stand in the same way for women, even though there is no word analogous to our Frauenzimmer in their language. There are other indica145

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tions that symbolism may transcend the boundaries of language, a fact already maintained by the old dream-investigator, Schubert, in 1862. Nevertheless, none of my patients were wholly ignorant of German, so that I must leave this question to be decided by those analysts who can collect instances in other countries from persons who speak only one language. Amongst the symbols for the male sexual organ, there is scarcely one which does not appear in jests, or in vulgar or poetic phrases, especially in the old classical poets. Here, however, we meet not only with such symbols as occur in dreams but also with new ones, e.g. the implements employed in various kinds of work, first and foremost, the plough. Moreover, when we come to male symbols, we trench on very extensive and much-contested ground, which, in order not to waste time, we will avoid. I should just like to devote a few remarks to the one symbol which stands, as it were, by itself; I refer to the number three. Whether this number does not in all probability owe its sacred character to its symbolic significance is a question which we must leave undecided, but it seems certain that many tripartite natural objects, e.g. the clover leaf, are used in coats-of-anns and as emblems on account of their symbolism. The socalled "French" lily with its three parts and, again, the "trisceles," that curious coat-of-arms of two such widely separated islands as Sicily and the Isle of Man (a figure consisting of three bent legs projecting from a central point), are supposed to be merely disguised forms of the male sexual organ, images of which were believed in ancient times to be the most powerful means of warding off evil influences (apotropaea); connected with this is the fact that the lucky "charms" of our own time may all be easily recognized as genital or sexual symbols. Let us consider a collection of such charms in the form of tiny silver pendants: .a four-leaved clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horseshoe, a ladder and a chimney-sweep. The four-leaved clover has taken the place of that with three leaves, which was really more appropriate for the purposes of symbolism; the pig is an ancient symbol of fruitfulness; the mushroom undoubtedly symbolizes the penis, there are mushrooms which derive their name from their unmistakable resemblance to that organ (Plulllus impudicus); the horseshoe reproduces the contour of the female genital opening; while the chimney-sweep wi th his ladder belongs to this company because his occupation is one which is vulgarly compared with sexual intercourse. (Cf. Anthropophyteia.) We have learnt to recognize his ladder in dreams as a sexual symbol: expressions in language show what a completely sexual significance the word steigen, to mount, has, as in the phrases: Den Frauen nachsteigen (to run after women) 146

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and ein alter Steiger (an old roue). So, in French, where the word for "step" is la marche, we find the quite analogous expression for an old rake: un vieux marcheur. Probably the fact that with many of the larger animals sexual intercourse necessitates a mounting or "climbing upon" the female has something to do with this association of ideas. Pulling off a branch to symbolize onanism is not only in agreement with vulgar descriptions of that act, but also has far-reaching parallels in mythology. But especially remarkable is the representation of onanism, or rather of castration as the punishment for onanism, by the faIIing-out or extraction of teeth; for we find in folk-lore a counterpart to this which could only be known to very few dreamers. I think that there can be no doubt that circumcision, a practice common to so many peoples, is an equivalent and replacement of castration. And recently we have learnt that certain aboriginal tribes in Australia practice circumcision as a rite to mark the attaining of puberty (at the celebration of the boy's coming of age), whilst other tribes living quite near have substituted for this practice that of knocking out a tooth. I wiII end my account with these examples. They are only examples; we know more about this subjeCt and you can imagine how much richer and more interesting a coIIection of this sort might be made, not by dilettanti like ourselves, but by real experts in mythology, anthropology, philology, and folk-lore. We are forced to certain conclusions, which cannot be exhaustive, but nevertheless will give us plenty to think about. In the first place, we are confronted with the fact that the dreamer has at his command a symbolic mode of expression of which he knows nothing, and does not even recognize, in his waking life. This is as amazing as if you made the discovery that your housemaid understood 5anscrit, though you know that she was born in a Bohemian village and had never learnt that language. It is not easy to bring this fact into line with our views on psychology. We can only say that the dreamer's knowledge of symbolism is unconscious and belongs to his unconscious mental life, but even this assumption does not help us much. Up till now we have only had to assume the existence of unconscious tendencies which are temporarily or permanently unknown to us; but now the question is a bigger one and we have actually to believe in unconscious knowledge, thought-relations, and comparisons between different objects, in virtue of which one idea can constantly be substituted for another. These comparisons are not instituted afresh every time, but are ready to hand, perfect for all time; this we infer from their identity in different persons, even probably in spite of linguistic differences. 147

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Whence is our knowledge of this symbolism derived? The usages of speech cover only a small part of it, whilst the manifold parallels in other fields are for the most part unknown to the dreamer; we ourselves had to collate them laboriously in the first instance. In the second place, these symbolic relations are not peculiar to the dreamer or to the dream-work by which they are expressed; for we have discovered that the same symbolism is employed in myths and fairy tales, in popular sayings and songs, in colloquial speech and poetic phantasy. The province of symbolism is extraordinarily wide: dream-symbolism is only a small part of it; it would not even be expedient to attack the whole problem from the side of dreams. Many of the symbols commonly occurring elsewhere either do not appear in dreams at all or appear very seldom; on the other hand, many of the dream-symbols are not met wi~ in every other department, but, as you have seen, only here and there. We get the impression that here we have to do with an ancient but obsolete mode of expression, of which different fragments have survived in different fields, one here only, another there only, a third in various spheres perhaps in slightly different forms. At this point I am reminded of the phantasy of a very interesting insane patient, who had imagined a "primordial language" (Grundsprache) of which all these symbols were survivals. In the third place, it must strike you that the symbolism occurring in the other fields I have named is by no means confined to sexual themes, whereas in dreams the symbols are almost exclusively used to represent sexual objects and relations. This again is hard to account for. Are we to suppose that symbols originally of sexual significance were later employed differently and that perhaps the decline from symbolic to other modes of representation is connected with this? It is obviously impossible to answer these questions by dealing only with dream-symbolism; all we can do is to hold fast to the supposition that there is a specially close relation between true symbols and sexuality. An important clue in this connection has recently been given to us in the view expressed by a philologist (H. Sperber, of Upsala, who works independently of psycho-analysis), that sexual needs have had the largest share in the origin and development of language. He says that the first sounds uttered were a means of communication, and of summoning the sexual partner, and that in the later development the elements of speech were used as an accompaniment to the different kinds of work carried on by primitive man. This work was performed by associated efforts, to the sound of rhythmically repeated utterances, the effect of which was to 148

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transfer a sexual interest to the work. Primitive man thus made his work agreeable, so to speak, by treating it as the equivalent of and substitute for sexual activities. The word uttered during the communal work had therefore two meanings, the one referring to the sexual act, the other to the labour which had come to be equivalent to it. In time the word was dissociated from its sexual significance and its application confined to the work. Generations later the same thing happened to a new word with a sexual Signification, which was then applied to a new form of work. In this way a number of root-words arose which were all of sexual origin but had all lost their sexual meaning. If the statement here outlined be correct, a possibility at least of understanding dream-symbolism opens out before us. We should comprehend why it is that in dreams, which retain something of these primitive conditions, there is such an extraordinarily large number of sexual symbols; and why weapons and tools in general stand for the male, and materials and things worked on for the female. The symbolic relations would then be the survival of the old identity in words; things which once had the same name as the genitalia could now appear in dreams as symbolizing them. Further, our parallels to dream-symbolism may assist you to appreciate what it is in psychoanalysis which makes it a subject of general interest, in a way that was not possible to either psychology or psychiatry; psychoanalytic work is so closely intertwined with so many other branches of science, the investigation of which gives promise of the most valuable conclusions: with mythology, philology, folk-lore, folk psychology and the study of religion. You will not be surprised to hear that a publication has sprung from psychoanalytic soil, of which the exclusive object is to foster these relations. I refer to Imago, first published in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank. In its relation to all these other subjects, psychoanalysis has in the first instance given rather than received. True, analysis reaps the advantage of receiving confirmation of its own results, seemingly so strange, again in other fields; but on the whole it is psychoanalysis which supplies the technical methods and the pOints of view, the application of which is to prove fruitful in these other prOvinces. The mental life of the human individual yields, under psychoanalytic investigation, explanations which solve many a riddle in the life of the masses of mankind or at any rate can show these problems in their true light. I have still given you no idea of the circumstances in which we may arrive at the deepest insight into that hypothetical "p rimordiallanguage," or of the province in which it is for the most part retained. As long as you

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do not know this you cannot appreciate the true significance of the whole subject. I refer to the province of neurosis; the material is found in the symptoms and other modes of expression of nervous patients, for the explanation and treatment of which psychoanalysis was indeed devised. My fourth point of view takes us back to the place from which we started and leads into the track we have already marked out. We said that even if there were no dream-censorship we should still find it difficult to interpret dreams, for we should then be confronted with the task of translating the symbolic language of dreams into the language of waking life. SYMBOLISM, then, is a second and independent factor in dream-distortion, existing side by side with the censorship. But the conclusion is obvious that it suits the censorship to make use of symbolism, in that both serve the same purpose: that of making the dream strange and incomprehensible. Whether a further study of the dream will not introduce us to yet another contributing factor in the distortion, we shall soon see. But I must not leave the subject of dream-symbolism without once more touching on the puzzling fact that it has succeeded in rousing such strenuous opposition amongst educated persons, although the prevalence of symbolism in myth, religion, art and language is beyond all doubt. Is it not probable that, here again, the reason is to be found in its relation to sexuality?

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C. G. Jung On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry In spite of its difficulty, the task of discussing the relation of analytical psychology to poetry affords me a welcome opportunity to define my views on the much debated question of the relations between psychology and art in general. Although the two things cannot be compared, the close connections which undoubtedly exist between them can for investigation. These connections arise from the fact that the practice of art is a psychological activity and, as such, can be approached from a psychological angle. Considered in this light, art, like any other human activity deriving from psychic motives, is a proper subject for psychology. This statement, however, involves a very definite limitation of the psychological viewpoint when we come to apply it in practice. Only that aspect of art which consists in the process of artistic creation can be a subject for psychological study, but not that which constitutes its essential nature. The question of what art is in itself can never be answered by the psychologist, but must be approached from the side of aesthetics. A similar distinction must be made in the realm of religion. A psychological approach is permissible only in regard to the emotions and symbols which constitute the phenomenology of religion, but which do not touch upon its essential nature. If the essenc:e of religion and art could be explained, then both of them would become mere subdivisions of psychology. This is not to say that such violations of their nature have not been attempted. But those who are guilty of them obviously forget that a similar fate might easily befall psychology, since its intrinsic value and specific quality would be destroyed if it were regarded as a mere activity of the brain, and were relegated along with the endocrine functions to a subdivision of physiology. This too, as we know, has been attempted.

Acknowledgement: The collected works of C.G. lung, trans R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, copyrightC 1966 by Princeton University Press. Excerpts pp. 65-83 reproduced by permission Princeton University Press. Rights granted for the United States, Canada and Open Market in English.

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Art by its very nature is not science, and science by its very nature is not art; both these spheres of the mind have something in reserve that is peculiar to them and can be explained only in its own terms. Hence when we speak of the relation of psychology to art, we shall treat only of that aspect of art which can be submitted to psychological scrutiny without violating its nature. Whatever the psychologist has to say about art will be confined to the process of artistic creation and has nothing to do with its innermost essence. He can no more explain this than the intellect can describe or even understand the nature of feeling. Indeed, art and science would not exist as separate entities at all if the fundamental difference between them had not long since forced itself on the mind. The fact that artistic, scientific, and religious propensities still slumber peacefully together in the small child, or that with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality, or that no trace of "mind" can be found in the natural instincts of animals-all this does nothing to prove the existence of a unifying principle which alone would justify a reduction of the one to the other. For if we go so far back into the history of the mind that the distinctions between its various fields of activity become altogether invisible, we do not reach an underlying principle of their unity, but merely an earlier, undifferentiated state in which no separate activities yet exist. But the elementary state is not an explanatory principle that would allow us to draw conclusions as to the nature of later, more highly developed states, even though they must necessarily derive from it. A scientific attitude will always tend to overlook the peculiar nature of these more differentiated states in favour of their causal derivation, and will endeavour to subordinate them to a general but more elementary principle. These theoretical reflections seem to me very much in place today, when we so often find that works of art, and particularly poetry, are interpreted precisely in this manner, by reducing them to more elementary states. Though the material he works with and its individual treatment can easily be traced back to the poet's personal relations with his parents, this does not enable us to understand his poetry. The same reduction can be made in all sorts of other fields, and not least in the case of pathological disturbances. Neuroses and psychoses are likewise reducible to infantile relations with the parents, and so are a man's good and bad habits, his beliefs, peculiarities, paSSions, interests, and so forth. It can hardly be supposed that all these very different things must have exactly the same explanation, for otherwise we would be driven to the conclusion that theyactu152

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ally are the same thing. If a work of art is explained in the same way as a neurosis, then either the work of art is a neurosis or a neurosis is a work of art. This explanation is all very well as a play on words, but sound common sense rebels against putting a work of art on the same level as a neurosis. An analyst might, in an extreme case, view a neurosis as a work of art through the lens of his professional bias, but it would never occur to an intelligent layman to mistake a pathological phenomenon for art, in spite of the undeniable fact that a work of art arises from much the same psychological conditions as a neurosis. This is only natural, because certain of these conditions are present in every individual and, owing to the relative constancy of the human environment, are constantly the same, whether in the case of a nervous intellectual, a poet, or a normal human being. All have had parents, all have a father- or a mother-complex, all know about sex and therefore have certain common and typical human difficulties. One poet may be influenced more by his relation to his father, another by the tie to his mother, while a third shows unmistakable traces of sexual repression in his poetry. Since all this can be said equally well not only of every neurotic but of every normal human being, nothing specific is gained for the judgment of a work of art. At most our knowledge of its psychological antecedents will have been broadened and deepened. The school of medical psychology inaugurated by Freud has undoubtedly encouraged the literary historian to bring certain peculiarities of a work of art into relation with the intimate, personal life of the poet. But this is nothing new in principle, for it has long been known that the scientific treatment of art will reveal the personal threads that the artist, intentionally or unintentionally, has woven into his work. The Freudian approach may, however, make possible a more exhaustive demonstration of the influences that reach back into earliest childhood and play their part in artistic creation. To this extent the psychoanalysis of art differs in no essential from the subtle psychological nuances of a penetrating literary analysis. The difference is at most a question of degree, though we may occaSionally be surprised by indiscreet references to things which a rather more delicate touch might have passed over if only for reasons of tact. This lack of delicacy seems to be a professional peculiarity of the medical psychologist, and the temptation to draw daring conclusions easily leads to flagrant abuses. A slight whiff of scandal often leads [sic] spice to a biography, but a little more becomes a nasty inquisitiveness-bad taste masquerading as science. Our interest is insidiously deflected from the work of art and gets lost in the labyrinth of psychic determinants, the poet be153

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comes a clinical case and, very likely, yet another addition to the curiosa of psychopathia sexualis. But this means that the psychoanalysis of art has turned aside from its proper objective and strayed into a province that is as broad as mankind, that is not in the least specific of the artist and has even less relevance to his art. This kind of analysis brings the work of art into the sphere of general human psychology, where many other things besides art have their origin. To explain art in these terms is just as great a platitude as the statement that "every artist is a narcissist." Every man who pursues his own goal is a "narcissist" -though one wonders how permissible it is to give such wide currency to a term specifically coined for the pathology of neurosis. The statement therefore amounts to nothing; it merely elicits the faint surprise of a bon mot. Since this kind of analysis is in no way concerned with the work of art itself, but strives like a mole to bury itself in the dirt as speedily as possible, it always ends up in the common earth that unites all mankind. Hence its explanations have the same tedious monotony as the recitals which one daily hears in the consulting-room. The reductive method of Freud is a purely medical one, and the treatment is directed at a pathological or otherwise unsuitable formation which has taken the place of the normal functioning. It must therefore be broken down, and the way cleared for healthy adaptation. In this case, reduction to the common human foundation is altogether appropriate. But when applied to a work of art it leads to the results I have described. It strips the work of art of its shimmering robes and exposes the nakedness and drabness of Homo sapiens, to which species the poet and artist also belong. The golden gleam of artistic creation-the original object of discussion-is extinguished as soon as we apply to it the same corrosive method which we use in analysing the fantasies of hysteria. The results are no doubt very interesting and may perhaps have the same kind of scientific value as, for instance, a post-mortem examination of the brain of Nietzsche, which might conceivably show us the particular atypical form of paralysis from which he died. But what would this have to do with Zarathustra? Whatever its subterranean background may have been, is it not a whole world in itself, beyond the human, all-too-human imperfections, beyond the world of migraine and cerebral atrophy? I have spoken of Freud's reductive method but have not stated in what that method consists. It is essentially a medical technique for investigating morbid psychic phenomena, and it is solely concerned with the ways and means of getting round or peering through the foreground of 154

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consciousness in order to reach the psychic background, or the unconscious. It is based on the assumption that the neurotic patient represses certain psychic contents because they are morally incompatible with his conscious values. It follows that the repressed contents must have correspondingly negative traits-infantile-sexual, obscene, or even criminalwhich make them unacceptable to consciousness. Since no man is perfect, everyone must possess such a background whether he admits it or not. Hence it can always be exposed if only one uses the technique of interpretation worked out by Freud. In the short space of a lecture I cannot, of course, enter into the details of the technique. A few hints must suffice. The unconscious background does not remain inactive, but betrays itself by its characteristic effects on the contents of consciousness. For example, it produces fantasies of a peculiar nature, which can easily be interpreted as sexual images. Or it produces characteristic disturbances of the conscious processes, which again can be reduced to repressed contents. A very important source for knowledge of the unconscious contents is provided by dreams, since these are direct products of the activity of the unconscious. The essential thing in Freud's reductive method is to collect all the clues pointing to the unconscious background, and then, through the analysis and interpretation of this material, to reconstruct the elementary instinctual processes. Those conscious contents which give us a clue to the unconscious background are incorrectly called symbols by Freud. They are not true symbols, however, since according to his theory they have merely the role of signs or symptoms of the subliminal processes. The true symbol differs essentially from this, and should be understood as an expression of an intuitive idea that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. When Plato, for instance, puts the whole problem of the theory of knowledge in his parable of the cave, or when Christ expresses the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven in parables, these are genuine and true symbols, that is, attempts to express something for which no verbal concept yet exists. If we were to interpret Plato's metaphor in Freudian terms we would naturally arrive at the uterus, and would have proved that even a mind like Plato's was still struck on a primitive level of infantile sexuality. But we would have completely overlooked what Plato actually created out of the primitive determinants of his philosophical ideas; we would have missed the essential point and merely discovered that he had infantile-sexual fantasies like any other mortal. Such a discovery could be of value only for a man who regarded Plato as superhuman, and who can now state with satisfaction that 155

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Plato too was an ordinary human being. But who would want to regard Plato as a god? Surely only one who is dominated by infantile fantasies and therefore possesses a neurotic mentality. For him the reduction to common human truths is salutary on medical grounds, but this would have nothing whatever to do with the meaning of Plato's parable. I have purposely dwelt on the application of medical psychoanalysis to works of art because I want to emphasize that the psychoanalytic method is at the same time an essential part of the Freudian doctrine. Freud himself by his rigid dogmatism has ensured that the method and the doctrine-in themselves two very different things-are regarded by the public as identical. Yet the method may be employed with beneficial results in medical cases without at the same time exalting it into a doctrine. And against this doctrine we are bound to raise vigorous objections. The assumptions it rests on are quite arbitrary. For example, neuroses are by no means exclusively caused by sexual repression, and the same holds true for psychoses. There is no foundation for saying that dreams merely contain repressed wishes whose moral incompatibility requires them to be disguised by a hypothetical dream-censor. The Freudian technique of interpretation, so far as it remains under the influence of its own one-sided and therefore erroneous hypotheses, displays a quite obvious bias. In order to do justice to a work of art, analytical psychology must rid itself entirely of medical prejudice; for a work of art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one. A doctor naturally has to seek out the causes of a disease in order to pull it up by the roots, but just as naturally the psychologist must adopt exactly the opposite attitude towards a work of art. Instead of investigating its typically human determinants, he will inquire first of all into its meaning, and will concern himself with its determinants only in so far as they enable him to understand it more fully. Personal causes have as much or as little to do with a work of art as the soil with the plant that springs from it. We can certainly learn to understand some of the plant's peculiarities by getting to know its habitat, and for the botanist this is an important part of his equipment. But nobody will maintain that everything essential has then been discovered about the plant itself. The personal orientation which the doctor needs when confronted with the question of aetiology in medicine is quite out of place in dealing with a work of art, just because a work of art is not a human being, but is something supra-personal. It is a thing and not a personality; hence it cannot be judged by personal criteria. Indeed, the special significance of a true work of art resides in the fact that it has 156

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escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator. I must confess from my own experience that it is not at all easy for a doctor to lay aside his professional bias when considering a work of art and look at it with a mind cleared of the current biological causality. But I have come to learn that although a psychology with a purely biological orientation can explain a good deal about man in general, it cannot be applied to a work of art and still less to man as creator. A purely causalistic psychology is only able to reduce every human individual to a member of the species Homo sapiens, since its range is limited to what is transmitted by heredity or derived from other sources. But a work of art is not transmitted or derived-it is a creative reorganization of those very conditions to which a causalistic psychology must always reduce it. The plant is not a mere product of the soil; it is a living, self-contained process which in essence has nothing to do with the character of the soil. In the same way, the meaning and individual quality of a work of art inhere within it and not in its extrinsic determinants. One might almost describe it as a living being that uses man only as a nutrient medium, employing his capacities according to its own laws and shaping itself to the fulfilment of its own qeative purpose. But here I am anticipating somewhat, for I have in mind a particular type of art which I still have to introduce. Not every work of art originates in the way I have just described. There are literary works, prose as well as poetry, that spring wholly from the author's intention to produce a particular result. He submits his material to a definite treatment with a definite aim in view; he adds to it and subtracts from it, emphasizing one effect, toning down another, laying on a touch of colour here, another there, all the time carefully considering the over-all result and paying strict attention to the laws of form and style. He exercises the keenest judgment and chooses his words with complete freedom. His material is entirely subordinated to his artistic purpose; he wants to express this and nothing else. He is wholly at one with the creative process, no matter whether he has deliberately made himself its spearhead, as it were, or whether it has made him its instrument so completely that he has lost all consciousness of this fact. In either case, the artist is so identified with his work that his intentions and his faculties are indistinguishable from the act of creation itself. There is no need, I think, to give examples of this from the history of literature or from the testimony of the artists themselves.

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Nor need I cite examples of the other class of works which flow more or less complete and perfect from the author's pen. They come as it were fully arrayed into the world, as Pallas Athene sprang from the head of Zeus. These works positively force themselves upon the author; his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. The work brings with it its own form; anything he wants to add is rejected, and what he himself would like to reject is thrust back at him. While his conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being. Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own self speaking, his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he would never have entrusted to his tongue. He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though he were a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will. So when we discuss the psychology of art, we must bear in mind these two entirely different modes of creation, for much that is of the greatest importance in judging a work of art depends on this distinction. It is one that has been sensed earlier by Schiller, who as we know attempted to classify it in his concept of the sentimental and the naive. The psychologist would call "sentimental" art introverted and the "naIve" kind extraverted. The introverted attitude is characterized by the subject's assertion of his conscious intentions and aims against the demands of the object, whereas the extraverted attitude is characterized by the subject's subordination to the demands which the object makes upon him. In my view, Schiller's plays and most of his poems give one a good idea of the introverted attitude; the material is mastered by the conscious intentions of the poet. The extraverted attitude is illustrated by the second part of Faust: here the material is distinguished by its refractoriness. A still more striking example is Nietzsche's Zarathustra, where the author himself observed how "one became two." From what I have said, it will be apparent that a shift of psychological standpoint has taken place as soon as one speaks not of the poet as a person but of the creative process that moves him. When the focus of interest shifts to the latter, the poet comes into the picture only as a reacting subject. This is immediately evident in our second category of works, 158

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where the consciousness of the poet is not identical with the creative process. But in works of the first category the opposite appears to hold true. Here the poet appears to be the creative process itself, and to create of his own free will without the slightest feeling of compulsion. He may even be fully convinced of his freedom of action and refuse to admit that his work could be anything else than the expression of his will and ability. Here we are faced with a question which we cannot answer from the testimony of the poets themselves. It is really a scientific problem that psychology alone can solve. As I hinted earlier, it might well be that the poet, while apparently creating out of himself and producing what he consciously intends, is nevertheless so carried away by the creative impulse that he is no longer aware of an "alien" will, just as the other type of poet is no longer aware of his own will speaking to him in the apparently "alien" inspiration, although this is manifestly the voice of his own self. The poet's conviction that he is creating in absolute freedom would then be an illusion: he fancies he is swimming, but in reality an unseen current sweeps him along. This is not by any means an academic question, but is supported by the evidence of analytical psychology. Researches have shown that there are all sorts of ways in which the conscious mind is not only influenced by the unconscious but actually guided by it. Yet is there any evidence for the supposition that a poet, despite his self-awareness, may be taken captive by his work? The proof may be of two kinds, direct or indirect. Direct proof would be afforded by a poet who thinks he knows what he is saying but actually says more than he is aware of. Such cases are not uncommon. Indirect proof would be found in cases where behind the apparent free will of the poet there stands a higher imperative that renews its peremptory demands as soon as the poet voluntarily gives up his creative activity, or that produces psychic complications whenever his work has to be broken off against his will. Analysis of artists consistently shows not only the strength of the creative impulse arising from the unconscious, but also its capricious and wilful character. The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and 159

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grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment. We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the language of analytical psychology this living thing is an autonomous complex. It is a split-off portion of the psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness. Depending on its energy charge, it may appear either as a mere disturbance of conscious activities or as a supraordinate authority which can harness the ego to its purpose. Accordingly, the poet who identifies with the creative process would be one who acquiesces from the start when the unconscious imperative begins to function. But the other poet, who feels the creative force as something alien, is one who for various reasons cannot acquiesce and is thus caught unawares. It might be expected that this difference in its origins would be perceptible in a work of art. For in the one case it is a conscious product shaped and designed to have the effect intended. But in the other we are dealing with an event originating in unconscious nature; with something that achieves its aim without the assistance of human consciousness, and often defies it by wilfully insisting on its own form and effect. We would therefore expect that works belonging to the first class would nowhere overstep the limits of comprehension, that their effect would be bounded by the author's intention and would not extend beyond it. But with works of the other class we would have to be prepared for something supra personal that transcends our understanding to the same degree that the author's consciousness was in abeyance during the process of creation. We would expect a strangeness of form and content, thoughts that can only be apprehended intuitively, a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are the best possible expressions for something unknown-bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore. These criteria are, by and large, corroborated in practice. Whenever we are confronted with a work that was consciously planned and with material that was consciously selected, we find that it agrees with the first class of qualities, and in the other case with the second. The example we gave of Schiller's plays, on the one hand, and Faust II on the other, or better still Zarathustra, is an illustration of this. But I would not undertake to place the work of an unknown poet in either of these categories without first having examined rather closely his personal relations with his work. It is not enough to know whether the poet belongs to the introverted or to the extraverted type, since it is possible for either type to work with an introverted attitude at one time, and an extraverted attitude at another. This 160

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is particularly noticeable in the difference between Schiller's plays and his philosophical writings, between Goethe's perfectly formed poems and the obvious struggle with his material in Faust II, and between Nietzsche's well-turned aphorisms and the rushing torrent of Zarathustra. The same poet can adopt different attitudes to his work at different times, and on this depends the standard we have to apply. The question, as we now see, is exceedingly complicated, and the complication grows even worse when we consider the case of the poet who identifies with the creative process. For should it tum out that the apparently conscious and purposeful manner of composition is a subjective illusion of the poet, then his work would possess symbolic qualities that are outside the range of his consciousness. They would only be more difficult to detect, because the reader as well would be unable to get beyond the bounds of the poet's consciousness which are fixed by the spirit of the time. There is no Archimedean point outside his world by which he could lift his time-bound consciousness off its hinges and recognize the symbols hidden in the poet's work. For a symbol is the intimation of a meaning beyond the level of our present powers of comprehension. I raise this question only because I do not want my typological classification to limit the possible significance of works of art which apparently mean no more than what they say. But we have often found that a poet who has gone out of fashion is suddenly rediscovered. This happens when our conscious development has reached a higher level from which the poet can tell us something new. It was always present in his work but was hidden in a symbol, and only a renewal of the spirit of the time permits us to read its meaning. It needed to be looked at with fresher eyes, for the old ones could see in it only what they were accustomed to see. Experiences of this kind should make us cau tious, as they bear ou t my earlier argument. But works that are openly symbolic do not require this subtle approach; their pregnant language cries out at us that they mean more than they say. We can put our finger on the symbol at once, even though we may not be able to unriddle its meaning to our entire satisfaction. A symbol remains a perpetual challenge to our thoughts and feelings. That probably explains why a symbolic work is so stimulating, why it grips us so intensely, but also why it seldom affords us a purely aesthetic enjoyment. A work that is manifestly not symbolic appeals much more to our aesthetic sensibility be'cause it is complete in itself and fulfils its purpose. What then, you may ask, can analytical psychology contribute to our fundamental problem, which is the mystery of artistic creation? All that 1.61

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we have said so far has to do only with the psychological phenomenology of art. Since nobody can penetrate to the heart of nature, you will not expect psychology to do the impossible and offer a valid explanation of the secret of creativity. Like every other science, psychology has only a modest contribution to make towards a deeper understanding of the phenomena of life, and is no nearer than its sister sciences to absolute knowledge. We have talked so much about the meaning of works of art that one can hardly suppress a doubt as to whether art really "means" anything at all. Perhaps art has no "meaning," at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and "means" nothing beyond that. Is "meaning" necessarily more than mere interpretation-an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been said, is beauty, and "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever." It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art. Within the sphere of art, I must accept the truth of this statement. But when I speak of the relation of psychology to art we are outside its sphere, and it is impossible for us not to speculate. We must interpret, we must find meanings in things, otherwise we would be quite unable to think about them. We have to break down life and events, which are self-contained processes, into meanings, images, concepts, well knowing that in doing so we are getting further away from the living mystery. As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition. But for the purpose of cognitive understanding we must detach ourselves from the creative process and look at it from the outside; only then does it become an image that expresses what we are bound to call "meaning." What was a mere phenomenon before becomes something that in association with other phenomena has meaning, that has a definite role to play, serves certain ends, and exerts meaningful effects. And when we have seen all this we get the feeling of having understood and explained something. In this way we meet the demands of science. When, a little earlier, we spoke of a work of art as a tree growing out of the nourishing soil, we might equally well have compared it to a child growing in the womb. But as all comparisons are lame, let us stick to the more precise terminology of science. You will remember that I described the nascent work in the psyche of the artist as an autonomous complex. By this we mean a psychiC formation that remains subliminal until its energycharge is sufficient to carry it over the threshold into consciousness. Its association with consciousness does not mean that it is assimilated, only that

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it is perceived; but it is not subject to conscious control, and can be neither inhibited nor voluntarily reproduced. Therein lies the autonomy of the complex: it appears and disappears in accordance with its own inherent tendencies, independently of the conscious will. The creative complex shares this peculiarity with every other autonomous complex. In this respect it offers an analogy with pathological processes, since these too are characterized by the presence of autonomous complexes, particularly in the case of mental disturbances. The divine frenzy of the artist comes perilously close to a pathological state, though the two things are not identical. The tertium comparationis is the autonomous complex. But the presence of autonomous complexes is not in itself pathological, since normal people, too, fall temporarily or permanently under their domination. This fact is simply one of the normal peculiarities of the psyche, and for a man to be unaware of the existence of an autonomous complex merely betrays a high degree of unconsciousness. Every typical attitude that is to some extent differentiated shows a tendency to become an autonomous complex, and in most cases it actually does. Again, every instinct has more or less the character of an autonomous complex. In itself, therefore, an autonomous complex has nothing morbid about it; only when its manifestations are frequent and disturbing is it a symptom of illness. How does an autonomous complex arise? For reasons which we cannot go into here, a hitherto unconscious portion of the psyche is thrown into activity, and gains ground by activating the adjacent areas of association. The energy needed for this is naturally drawn from consciousnessunless the latter happens to identify with the complex. But where this does not occur, the drain of energy produces what Janet calls an abaissement du niveau mental. The intensity of conscious interests and activities gradually diminishes, leading either to apathy-a condition very common with artists-or to a regressive development of the conscious functions, that is, they revert to an infantile and archaic level and undergo something like a degeneration. The "inferior parts of the functions," as Janet calls them, push to the fore; the instinctual side of the personality prevails over the ethical, the infantile over the mature, and the unadapted over the adapted. This too is something we see in the lives of many artists. The autonomous complex thus develops by using the energy that has been withdrawn from the conscious control of the personality. But in what does an autonomous creative complex consist? Of this we can know next to nothing so long as the artist's work affords us no insight into its foundations. The work presents us with a finished picture,

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and this picture is amenable to analysis only to the extent that we can recognize it as a symbol. But if we are unable to discover any symbolic value in it, we have merely established that, so far as we are concerned, it means no more than what it says, or to put it another way, that it is no more than what it seems to be. I use the word "seems" because our own bias may prevent a deeper appreciation of it. At any rate we can find no incentive and no starting-point for an analysis. But in the case of a symbolic work we should remember the dictum of Gerhard Hauptmann: "Poetry evokes out of words the resonance of the primordial word." The question we should ask, therefore, is: "What primordial image lies behind the imagery of art?" This question needs a little elucidation. I am assuming that the work of art we propose to analyse, as well as being symbolic, has its source not in the personal unconscious of the poet, but in a sphere of unconscious mythology whose primordial images are the common heritage of mankind. I have called this sphere the collective unconscious, to distinguish it from the personal unconscious. The latter I regard as the sum total of all those psychic processes and contents which are capable of becoming conscious and often do, but are then suppressed because of their incompatibility and kept subliminal. Art receives tributaries from this sphere too, but muddy ones; and their predominance, far from making a work of art a symbol, merely turns it into a symptom. We can leave this kind of art without injury and without regret to the purgative methods employed by Freud. In contrast to the personal unconscious, which is a relatively thin layer immediately below the threshold of consciousness, the collective unconscious shows no tendency to become conscious under normal conditions, nor can it be brought back to recollection by any analytical technique, since it was never repressed or forgotten. The collective unconscious is not to be thought of as a self-subsistent entity; it is no more than a potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in the specific form of mnemonic images or inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain. There are no inborn ideas, but there are inborn possibilities of ideas that set bounds to even the boldest fantasy and keep our fantasy activity within certain categories: a priori ideas, as it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except from their effects. They appear only in the shaped material of art as the regulative principles that shape it; that is to say, only by inferences drawn from the finished work can we reconstruct the age-old original of the primordial image. The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure-be it a daemon, a human being, or a process-that constantly recurs in the course of history 164

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and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. When we examine these images more closely, we find that they give form to countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, so to speak, the psychic residua of innumerable experiences of the same type. They present a picture of psychic life in the average, divided up and projected into the manifold figures of the mythological pantheon. But the mythological figures are themselves products of creative fantasy and still have to be translated into conceptual language. Only the beginnings of such a language exist, but once the necessary concepts are created they could give us an abstract, scientific understanding of the unconscious processes that lie at the roots of the primordial images. In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history, and on the average follow ever the same course. It is like a deeply graven river-bed in the psyche, in which the waters of life, instead of flowing along as before in a broad but shallow stream, suddenly swell into a mighty river. This happens whenever that particular set of circumstances is encountered which over long periods of time has helped to lay down the primordial image. The moment when this mythological situation reappears is always characterized by a peculiar emotional intenSity; it is as though chords in us were struck that had never resounded before, or as though forces whose existence we never suspected were unloosed. What makes the struggle for adaptation so laborious is the fact that we have constantly to be dealing with individual and atypical situations. So it is not surprising that when an archetypal situation occurs we suddenly feel an extraordinary sense of release, as though transported, or caught up by an overwhelming power. At such moments we are no longer individuals, but the race; the voice of all mankind resounds in us. The individual man cannot use his powers to the full unless he is aided by one of those collective representations we call ideals, which releases all the hidden forces of instinct that are inaccessible to his conscious will. The most effective ideals are always fairly obvious variants of an archetype, as is evident from the fact that they lend themselves to allegory. The ideal of the "mother country," for instance, is an obvious allegory of the mother, as is the IIfatherland" of the father. Its power to stir us does not derive from the allegory, but from the symbolical value of our native land. The archetype here is the participation mystique of primitive man with the soil on which he dwells, and which contains the spirits of his ancestors. 165

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The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beJ.leficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of great art, and of its effect upon us. The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers. Peoples and times, like individuals, have their own characteristic tendencies and attitudes. The very word "attitude" betrays the necessary bias that every marked tendency entails. Direction implies exclusion, and exclusion means that very many psychic elements that could play their part in life are denied the right to exist because they are incompatible with the general attitude. The normal man can follow the general trend without injury to himself; but the man who takes to the back streets and alleys because he cannot endure the broad highway will be the first to discover the psychic elements that are waiting to play their part in the life of the collective. Here the artist's relative lack of adaptation turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path, and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age. Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual's conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs.

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I am aware that in this lecture I have only been able to sketch out my views in the barest outline. But I hope that what I have been obliged to omit, that is to say their practical application to poetic works of art, has been furnished by your own thoughts, thus giving flesh and blood to my abstract intellectual frame.

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Rudolf Arnheim Balance The Hidden Structure of a Square Cut a disk out of dark cardboard and place it on a white square in the position indicated by Figure 1. The location of the disk could be determined and described by measurement. A yardstick would tell in inches the distances from the disk to the edges of the square. Thus it could be inferred that the disk lies off-center.

Figure 1 This result would come as no surprise. We do not have to measure-we saw at a glance that the disk lies off-center. How is such "seeing" done? Did we behave like a yardstick by first looking at the space between the disk and the left edge and then carrying our image of that distance across to the other side to compare the two distances? Probably not. It would not be the most efficient procedure. Looking at Figure 1 as a whole, we probably noticed the asymmetrical position of the disk as a visual property of the pattern. We did not see disk and square separately. Their spatial relation within the whole is part of what we see. Such relational observations are an indispensable aspect of common experience in many sensory areas. liMy right hand is larger than the left." "This flagpole is not straight." "That piano is out of tune." "This cocoa is sweeter than the kind we had before."

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Objects are perceived immediately as having a certain size, that is, as lying somewhere between a grain of salt and a mountain. On the scale of brightness values, our white square lies high, our black disk low. Similarly, every object is seen as having a location. The book you are reading appears at a particular spot, which is defined by the room about you and the objects in it-among them notably you yourself. The square of Figure 1 appears somewhere on the book page, and the disk is off-center in the square. No object is perceived as unique or isolated. Seeing something involves assigning it a place in the whole: a location in space, a score on the scale of size or brightness or distance. One difference between measurement with a yardstick and our visual judgments has already been mentioned. We do not establish sizes, distances, directions, singly and then compare them piece by piece. Typically we see these characteristics as properties of the total visual field. There is, however, another, equally important difference. The various qualities of the images produced by the sense of sight are not static. The disk in Figure 1 is not simply displaced with regard to the center of the square. There is something restless about it. It looks as though it had been at the center and wished to return, or as though it wants to move away even farther. And the disk's relations to the edges of the square are a similar play of attraction and repulsion. Visual experience is dynamic. This theme will recur throughout the present book. What a person or animal perceives is not only an arrangement of objects, of colors and shapes, of movements and sizes. It is, perhaps first of all, an interplay of directed tensions. These tensions are not something the observer adds, for reasons of his own, to static images. Rather, these tensions are as inherent in any percept as size, shape, location, or color. Because they have magnitude and direction, these tensions can be described as psychological "forces." Notice further that if the disk is seen as striving toward the center of the square, it is being attracted by something not physically present in the picture. The center point is not identified by any marking in Figure 1: as invisible as the North Pole or the Equator, it is nonetheless a part of the perceived pattern, an invisible focus of power, established at a considerable distance by the outline of the square. It is "induced," as one electric current can be induced by another. There are, then, more things in the field of vision than those that strike the retina of the eye. Examples of lIinduced structure" abound. An incompletely drawn circle looks like a complete circle with a gap. In a picture done in central perspective the vanishing 169

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point may be established by the convergent lines even though no actual point of meeting can be seen. In a melody one may "hear" by induction the regular beat from which a syncopated tone deviates, as our disk deviates from the center. Such perceptual inductions differ from logical inferences. Inferences are thought operations that add something to the given visual facts by interpreting them. Perceptual inductions are sometimes interpolations based on previously acquired knowledge. More typicaIIy, however, they are completions deriving spontaneously during perception from the given configuration of the pattern. A visual figure such as the square in Figure 1 is empty and not empty at the same time. Its center is part of a complex hidden structure, which we can explore by means of the disk, much as we can use iron filings to explore the lines of force in a magnetic field. If the disk is placed at various locations within the square, it looks solidly at rest at some points; at others it exhibits a puII in a definite direction; and in others its situation seems unclear and wavering. The disk is most stably settled when its center coincides with the center of the square. In Figure 2 the disk may be seen as drawn toward the contour to the right. If we alter the distance, this effect is weakened or even reversed.

Figure 2

We can find a distance at which the disk looks "too close," possessed by the urge to withdraw from the boundary. In that case the empty interval between the boundary and the disk wiII appear compressed, as though more breathing room were needed. For any spatial relation between ob170

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jects there is a "correct" distance, established by the eye intuitively. Artists are sensitive to this requirement when they arrange the pictorial objects in a painting or the elements in a piece of sculpture. Designers and architects constantly seek the proper distance between buildings, windows, and pieces of furniture. It would be most desirable to examine the conditions for these visual judgments more systematically. Informal explorations show that the disk is influenced not only by the boundaries and the center of the square, but also by the cross-shaped framework of the central vertical and horizontal axes and by the diagonals (Fig. 3). The center, the principal locus of attraction and repulsion, establishes itself through the crossing of these four main structural lines. Other points on the lines are less powerful than the center, but the effect of attraction can be established for them as well. The pattelTI sketched in Figure 3 will be referred

Figure 3 171

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to as the structural skeleton of the square. It will be shown later that these skeletons vary from figure to figure. Wherever the disk is located, it will be affected by the forces of all the hidden structural factors. The relative strength and distance of these factors will determine their effect in the total configuration. At the center all the forces balance one another, and therefore the central position makes for rest. Another comparatively restful position can be found, for example, by moving the disk along a diagonal. The point of balance seems to lie somewhat closer to the comer of the square than to the center, which may mean that the center is stronger than the comer and that this preponderance has to be offset by greater distance, as though comer and center were two magnets of unequal power. In general, any location that coincides with a feature of the structural skeleton introduces an element of stability, which of course may be counteracted by other factors. If influence from a particular direction predominates, there results a pull in that direction. When the disk is put at the exact midpoint between center and comer, it tends to strive toward the center. An unpleasant effect is produced by locations at which pulls are so equivocal and ambiguous that the eye cannot decide whether the disk is pressing in any particular direction. Such wavering makes the visual statement unclear and interferes with the observer's perceptual judgment. In ambiguous situations the visual pattern ceases to determine what is seen, and subjective factors in the observer, such as his focus of attention or his preference for a particular direction, come into play. Unless an artist welcomes ambiguities of this sort, they will induce him to search for more stable arrangements.... When conditions are such that the eyes cannot clearly establish the actual location of the disk, the visual forces discussed here may possibly produce genuine displacement in the direction of the dynamic pull. If Figure 1 is seen for only a split second, is the disk seen as closer to the center than it is on leisurely inspection? We shall have many occasions to observe that physical and psychological systems exhibit a very general tendency to change in the direction of the lowest attainable tension level. Such a reduction of tension is obtained when elements of visual patterns can give in to the directed perceptual forces inherent in them. Max Wertheimer has pointed out that an angle of ninety-three degrees is seen not as what it is, but as a somehow inadequate right angle. When the angle is presented tachistoscopically, i.e., at short exposure, observers frequently report seeing a right angle, afflicted perhaps with some undefinable imperfection. 172

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The roving disk, then, reveals that a visual pattern consists of more than the shapes recorded by the retina. As far as retinal input is concerned, the black lines and the disk are all there is to our figure. In perceptual experience, this stimulus pattern creates a structural skeleton, a skeleton that helps determine the role of each pictorial element within the balance system of the whole; it serves as a frame of reference, just as a musical scale defines the pi tch value of each tone in a composition. In still another way we must go beyond the black-and-white picture drawn on paper. The picture plus the hidden structure induced by it is more than a lattice of lines. As indicated in Figure 3, the percept is really a continuous field of forces. It is a dynamic landscape, in which lines are actually ridges sloping off in both directions. These ridges are centers of attractive and repulsive forces, whose influence extends through their surroundings, inside and outside the boundaries of the figure. No point in the figure is free from this influence. Granted there are "restful" spots, but their restfulness does not signify the absence of active forces. "Dead center" is not dead. No pull in anyone direction is felt when pulls from all directions balance one another. To the sensitive eye, the balance of such a point is alive with tension. Think of a rope that is motionless while two men of equal strength are pulling it in opposite directions. It is still, but loaded with energy....

What Are Perceptual Forces? The reader may have noted with apprehension the use of the term "forces." Are these forces merely figures of speech, or are they real? And if they are real, where do they exist? They are assumed to be real in both realms of existence-that is, as both psychological and physical forces. PsycholOgically, the pulls in the disk exist in the experience of any person who looks at it. Since these pulls have a pOint of attack, a direction, and an intensity, they meet the conditions established by physicists for physical forces. For this reason, psychologists speak of psychological forces, even though to date not many of them have applied the term, as I do here, to perception. In what sense can it be said that these forces exist not only in experience, but also in the physical world? Surely they are not contained in the objects we are looking at, such as the white paper on which the square is drawn or the dark cardboard disk. Of course, molecular and gravitational forces are active in these objects, holding their micropartic1es together and 173

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preventing them from flying away. But there are no known physical forces that would tend to push an eccentrically placed patch of printer's ink in the direction of the center of a square. Nor will lines drawn in ink exert any magnetic power on the surrounding paper surface. Where, then, are these forces? In order to answer this question we must recall how an observer obtains his knowledge of the square and the disk. Light rays, emanating from the sun or some other source, hit the object and are partly absorbed and partly reflected by it. Some of the reflected rays reach the lenses of the eye and are projected on its sensitive background, the retina. Many of the small receptor organs situated in the retina combine in groups by means of ganglion cells. Through these groupings a first, elementary organization of visual shape is obtained very close to the level of retinal stimulation. As the electrochemical messages travel toward their final destination in the brain, they are subjected to further shaping at other way stations until the pattern is completed at the various levels of the visual cortex. At which stages of this complex process the physiological counterpart of our perceptual forces originates, and by what particular mechanisms it comes about, is beyond our present knowledge. If, however, we make the reasonable assumption that every aspect of a visual experience has its physiological counterpart in the nervous system, we can anticipate, in a general way, the nature of these brain processes. We can assert, for instance, that they must be field processes. This means that whatever happens at anyone place is determined by the interaction between the parts and the whole. If it were otherwise, the various inductions, attractions, and repulsions could not occur in the field of visual experience. An observer sees the pushes and pulls in visual patterns as genuine properties of the perceived objects themselves. By mere inspection he can no more distinguish the restlessness of the eccentric disk from what occurs physically on the page of the book than he can tell the reality of a dream or hallucination from the reality of physically existing things. Whether or not we choose to call these perceptual forces "illusions" matters little so long as we acknowledge them as genuine components of everything seen. The artist, for example, need not worry about the fact that these forces are not contained in the pigments on the canvas. What he creates with physical materials are experiences. The perceived image, not the paint, is the work of art. If a wall looks vertical in a picture, it is vertical; and If walkable space is seen in a mirror, there is no reason why images of men should not walk right into it, as happens in some movies. The 174

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forces that pull our disk are "illusory" only to the man who decides to use their energy to run an engine. Perceptually and artistically, they are quite real.

Two Disks in a Square To move a bit closer to the complexity of the work of art, we now introduce a second disk into the square (Figure 4). What is the result? First of all, some

• • a

• • b Figure 4 of the previously observed relations between disk and square recur. When the two disks lie close together, they attract each other and may look almost like one indivisible thing. At a certain distance they repel each other because they are too close together. The distance at which these effects occur depends on the size of the disks and the square, as well as on the location of the disks within the square. The locations of the disks may balance each other. Either of the two locations in Figure 4a might look unbalanced by itself. Together they create a symmetrically located pair at rest. The same pair, however, may look badly unbalanced when moved to another location (Figure 4b). Our earlier analysis of the structural map helps explain why. The two disks form a pair because of their closeness and their similarity in size and shape, and also because they are the only "content" of the square. As members of a 175

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pair they tend to be seen as symmetrical; that is, they are given equal value and function in the whole. This perceptual judgment, however, conflicts with another, deriving from the location of the pair. The lower disk lies in the prominent and stable position of the center. The upper one is at a less stable location. Thus location creates a distinction between the two that conflicts with their symmetrical pairness. This dilemma is insoluble. The spectator finds himself shifting between two incompatible conceptions. The example shows that even a very simple visual pattern is fundamentally affected by the structure of its spatial surroundings, and that balance can be disturbingly ambiguous when shape and spatial location contradict each other.

Psychological and Physical Balance It is time to state more explicitly what we mean by balance or equilibrium. If we demand that in a work of art all elements be distributed in such a

way that a state of balance results, we need to know how balance can be attained. Moreover, some readers may believe the call for balance to be nothing but a particular stylistic, psychological, or social preference. Some people like equilibrium, some don't. Why, then, should balance be a necessary quality of visual patterns? To the physicist, balance is the state in which the forces acting upon a body compensate one another. In its simplest form, balance is achieved by two forces of equal strength that pull in opposite directions. The definition is applicable to visual balance. Like a physical body, every finite visual pattern has a fulcrum or center of gravity. And just as the physical fulcrum of even the most irregularly shaped flat object can be determined by locating the point at which it will balance on the tip of a finger, so the center of a visual pattern can be determined by trial and error. According to Denman W. Ross, the simplest way to do this is to move a frame around the pattern until the frame and pattern balance; then the center of the frame coincides with the weight center of the pattern. Except for the most regular shapes, no known method of rational calculation can replace the eye's intuitive sense of balance. From our previous assumption it follows that the sense of sight experiences balance when the corresponding physiological forces in the nervous system are distributed in such a way that they compensate one another. If, however, one hangs an empty canvas on a wall, the pattern's visual center of gravity coincides only roughly with the physical center ascer176

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tained by balancing the canvas on a finger. As we shall see, the canvas's vertical position on the wall influences the distribu tion of visual weight, and so do colors, shapes, and pictorial space when the canvas has a picture painted on it. Similarly, the visual center of a piece of sculpture cannot be determined simply by suspending it on a string. Here again, vertical orientation will matter. It also makes a difference whether the sculpture hangs in midair or rests on a base, stands in empty space or reposes in a niche. There are other differences between physical and perceptual equilibrium. On the one hand, the photograph of a dancer may look unbalanced even though his body was in a comfortable position when the photograph was taken. On the other, a model may find it impossible to hold a pose that appears perfectly poised in a drawing. A sculpture may need an internal armature to hold it upright despite its being well balanced visually. A duck can sleep peacefully standing on one oblique leg. These discrepancies occur because factors such as size, color, or direction contribute to visual balance in ways not necessarily paralleled physically. A clown's costume-red on the left side, blue on the right-may be asymmetrical to the eye as a color scheme, even though the two halves of the costume, and indeed of the clown, are equal in physical weight. In a painting, a physically unrelated object, such as a curtain in the background, may counterbalance the asymmetrical poSition of a human figure. An amusing example is found in a fifteenth-century painting that represents St. Michael weighing souls (Figure 5). By the mere strength of prayer, one frail little nude outweighs four big devils plus two millstones. Unfortunately prayer carries only spiritual weight and provides no visual pull. As a remedy, the painter has used a large dark patch on the angel's robe just below the scale holding the saintly soul. By visual attraction, nonexistent in the physical object, the patch creates the weight that adapts the appearance of the scene to its meaning.

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Figure 5

St. Michael Weighing Souls. Austrian, c. 1470. Allen Memorial Museum, Oberlin College.

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Why Balance? Why is pictorial balance indispensable? It must be remembered that visually as well as physically, balance is the state of distribution in which all action has come to a standstill. Potential energy in the system, says the physicist, has reached the minimum. In a balanced composition all such factors as shape, direction, and location are mutually determined in such a way that no change seems possible, and the whole assumes the character of IInecessity" in all its parts. An unbalanced composition looks accidental, transitory, and therefore invalid. Its elements show a tendency to change place or shape in order to reach a state that better accords with the total structure. Under conditions of imbalance, the artistic statement becomes incomprehensible. The ambiguous pattern allows no decision on which of the possible configurations is meant. We have the sense that the process of creation has been accidentally frozen somewhere along the way. Since the configuration calls for change, the stillness of the work becomes a handicap. Timelessness gives way to the frustrating sensation of arrested time. Except for the rare instances in which this is precisely the effect the artist intends, he will strive for balance in order to avoid such instability. Of course balance does not require symmetry. Symmetry in which, for example, the two wings of a composition are equal is a most elementary manner of creating equilibrium. More often the artist works with some kind of inequality. In one of EI Greco's paintings of the Annunciation, the angel is much larger than the Virgin. But this symbolic disproportion is compelling only because it is fixated by counterbalancing factors; otherwise, the unequal size of the two figures would lack finality and, therefore, meaning. It is only seemingly paradoxical to assert that disequilibrium can be expressed only by equilibrium, just as disorder can be shown only by order or separateness by connection. The following examples are adapted from a test designed by Maitland Graves to determine the artistic sensitivity of students. Compare a and b in Figure 6. The left figure is well balanced. There is enough life in this combination of squares and rectangles of various sizes, proportions, and directions, but they hold one another in such a way that every element stays in its place, everything is necessary, nothing is seeking to change.

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Compare the clearly established internal vertical of a with its pathetically wavering counterpart in b. In b, proportions are based on differences so small that they leave the eye uncertain whether it is contemplating equality or inequality, symmetry or asymmetry, square or rectangle. We cannot tell what the paHern is trying to say. Somewhat more complex, but no less irritatingly ambiguous is Figure 7a. Relations are neither clearly rightangular nor clearly oblique. The four lines are not sufficiently different in length to assure the eye that they are unequal. The paHern, adrift in space, approaches on the one hand the symmetry of a crosslike figure of vertical-horizontal orientation, and on the other the shape of a kind of kite with a diagonal symmetry axis. Neither interpretation, however, is conclusive; neither admits of the reassuring clarity conveyed by Figure 7b. Disequilibrium does not always make the whole configuration fluid. In Figure 8 the symmetry of the Latin cross is so firmly established that the deviating curve may be perceived as a flaw.

b

a

a

Figure 6

Figure 7

Here, then, a balanced paHern is so strongly established that it attempts to preserve its integrity by segregating any departure as an intruder. Under such conditions, disequilibrium causes a local interference with the unity of the whole. It would be worth studying in this respect the small deviations from symmetry in frontally oriented portraits or in traditional representations of the crucifixion, in which the inclination of Christ's head is often balanced by slight modulations of the otherwise frontal body.

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Figure 8

Weight Two properties of visual objects have a particular influence on equilibrium: weight and direction. In the world of our bodies we call weight the strength of the gravitational force pulling objects downward. A similar downward pull can be observed in pictorial and sculptural objects, but visual weight exerts itself in other directions as well. For example, as we look at objects within a painting their weight seems to produce tension along the axis connecting them with the eye of the observer, and it is not easy to tell whether they pull away from or push toward the person looking at them. All we can say is that weight is always a dynamic effect, but the tension is not necessarily oriented along a direction within the picture plane. Weight is influenced by location. A "strong" position on the structural framework (Figure 3) can support more weight than one lying offcenter or away from the central vertical or horizontal. This means, e.g., that a pictorial object in the center can be counterbalanced by small ones placed off-center. The central group in paintings is often quite heavy, with weights petering out toward the borders, and yet the whole picture looks balanced. Furthermore, according to the lever principle, which can be applied to visual composition, the weight of an element increases in relation to its distance from the center. In any particular example, of course, all the factors determining weight must be considered together. Another factor influencing weight is spatial depth. Ethel Puffer has observed that "vistas," leading the glance to distant space, have greatcounterbalancing power. This rule can probably be generalized as follows: the greater the depth an area of the visual field reaches, the greater the 181

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weight it carries. We can only speculate why this should be so. In perception, distance and size correlate so that a more distant object is seen as larger and perhaps as more substantial than it would be if located near the picture's frontal plane. In Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, the figure of a girl picking flowers at a distance has considerable weight in relation to the group of three large figures in the foreground. How much of the girl's weight derives from the increased size that the distant perspective gives her? It is also possible that the volume of empty space in front of a distant part of the scene carries weight. The phenomenon might be observable even in three-dimensional objects. Which factors, for example, balance the weight of the protruding wings in some Renaissance buildings, such as the Palazzo Barberini or the Casino Borghese in Rome, against the weight of the recessed central part and the cubic volume of the enclosed court space created by such a plan? Weight depends also on size. Other factors being equal, the larger object will be the heavier. As to color, red is heavier than blue, and bright colors are heavier than dark ones. The patch of a bright red bedcover in Van Gogh's painting of his bedroom creates a strong off-center weight. A black area must be larger than a white one to counterbalance it; this is due in part to irradiation, which makes a bright surface look relatively larger. Puffer has also found that compositional weight is affected by intrinsic interest. An area of a painting may hold the observer's attention either because of the subject maUer-for example, the spot round the Christ child in an Adoration-or because of its formal complexity, intricacy, or other peculiarity. (Note in this connection the multicolored bouquet of flowers in Manet's Olympia.> The very tininess of an object may exert a fascination that compensates the slight weight it would otherwise have. Recent experiments have suggested that perception may also be influenced by the observer's wishes and fears. One could try to ascertain whether pictorial balance is changed by the introduction of a highly desirable object or a frightening one. Isolation makes for weight. The sun or moon in an empty sky is heavier than an object of similar appearance surrounded by other things. On the stage, isolation for emphasis is an established technique. For this reason the star often insists that others in the cast keep their distance during the important scenes. Shape seems to influence weight. The regular shape of simple geometrical figures makes them look heavier. This effect can be observed in abstract paintings, notably some of Kandinsky's works, in which circles or squares provide remarkably strong accents within compositions of less definable shapes. Compactness-that is, the degree to which mass is concen182

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trated around its center-also seems to produce weight. Figure 9, taken from the Graves test, shows a relatively small circle counterweighing a larger rectangle and triangle. Vertically oriented forms seem to be heavier than oblique ones. Most of these rules, however, await verification by exact experiment.

o Figure 9 What about the influence of knowledge? In a picture, no knowledge on the part of the observer will make a bundle of cotton look lighter than a lump of lead of similar appearance. The problem has come up in architecture. According to Mock and Richards: "We know from repeated experiences how strong wood or stone is, for we frequently handled them in other contexts, and when we look at a piece of wood or masonry construction we are immediately satisfied that it is able to do the job it has to do. But reinforced concrete construction is different; so is a building of steel and glass. We cannot see the steel bars inside the concrete and reassure ourselves that it can safely span several times the distance of the stone lintel it so much resembles, nor can we see the steel columns behind a cantilevered store window, so that a building may appear to stand unsafely on a base of glass. It should be realized, however, that the expectation that we shall be able to understand at a glance why a building stands up is a survival of the handicraft age that had disappeared even in the days of William Morris." This kind of reasoning is common nowadays, but seems open to doubt. Two things must be distinguished. On the one hand there is the technical understanding of the craftsman, who deals wi th such factors as methods of construction and strength of materials. Such information cannot ordinarily be obtained by looking at the finished building, and there is no artistic reason why it should be. Quite another matter is the visual rela183

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tion between, say, the perceived strength of columns and the weight of the roof they appear to support. Technical information or misinfonnation has little influence on visual evaluation. What perhaps does count is certain stylistic conventions-relating, for example, to the width of the span. Such conventions oppose change everywhere in the arts, and may help explain the resistance to the visual statics of modem architecture. But the main point is that the visual discrepancy between a large mass and a thin supporting pole is in no way alleviated by the architect's assurance that the structure will not collapse. In some early buildings of Le Corbusier, solid cubes or walls, whose appearance is a carry-over from abandoned construction methods, appear to rest precariously on slender pilotis. Frank Lloyd Wright called such buildings ''big boxes on sticks." When later the architects revealed the skeleton of girders and thus drastically reduced. the building's visual weight, style caught up with technology and the eye ceased to be troubled.

Direction Equilibrium, we noted, is attained when the forces constituting a system compensate one another. Such compensation depends on all three properties of forces: the location of their point of attack, their strength, and their direction. The direction of visual forces is determined by several factors, among them the attraction exerted by the weight of neighboring elements. In Figure 10 the horse is drawn backward because of the attraction exerted by the figure of the rider, whereas in Figure 11 it is pulled forward by the other horse. In the composition of Toulouse-Lautrec from which this sketch was made, the two factors balance each other. Weight by attraction was demonstrated earlier, in Figure 5. The shape of objects also generates direction along the axes of their structural skeletons. The triangular group of El Greco's Pieta (Figure 12) is perceived dynamically as an arrow or wedge, rooted at its broad base and pointing upward. This vector counterbalances the gravitational downward pull. In European art, the traditional standing figure of classical Greek sculpture or Botticelli's Venus owes its compositional variety to an asymmetrical distribution of body weight. This allows a variety of directions at the various levels of the body, thus producing a complex equilibrium of visual forces.

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Figure 10

Figure 11 185

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Figure 12

Subject matter also creates direction. It can define a human figure as advancing or retreating. In Rembrandt's Portrait of a Young Girl, at the Chicago Art Institute, the eyes of the girl are turned to the left, thus providing the almost symmetrical shape of the front-face figure with a strong lateral force. Spatial directions created by the actor's glance are known on the stage as "visuallines." In any particular work of art, the factors just enumerated may act with and against one another to create the balance of the whole. Weight through color may be counteracted by weight through location. The direction of shape may be balanced by movement toward a center of attraction. The complexity of these relations contributes greatly to the liveliness of a work. When actual motion is used, as in the dance, the theater, and the film, direction is indicated by movement. Balance may be obtained between events that occur Simultaneously-as when two dancers walk symmetrically toward each other-or in succession. Film cutters often have a movement toward the right followed, or preceded, by one toward the left. The elementary need for such balancing compensation was shown clearly by experiments in which observers, after fixating a line bent at the middle into an obtuse angle, saw an objectively straight line as bent in the opposite 186

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direction. In another experiment when observers inspected a straight line that was moderately tilted away from the vertical or the horizontal, the objective vertical or horizontal later appeared bent in the opposite direction. Speech creates visual weight at the place from which it issues. For example, in a duet between a dancer who speaks poetry and another who is silent the asymmetry may be compensated for by the more active movement of the silent dancer.

Patterns of Balance Visual balance can be obtained in infinitely different ways. The mere number of elements may vary from a single figure-say, a black square holding the center of an otherwise empty surface-to a screen of innumerable particles covering the entire field. The distribution of weights may be dominated by one strong accent to which everything else is subservient, or by a duet of figures, such as Adam and Eve, the angel of the Annunciation and the Virgin, or the combination of red ball and feathery black mass that appears in a series of paintings by Adolph Gottlieb. In works consisting of only one or two units on a plain ground, the "hierarchic gradient" can be said to be very steep. More often, an assembly of many units leads in steps from the strongest to the weakest. A single human figure may be organized around secondary balance centers in the face, the lap, the hands. The same may hold for the total composition. The hierarchic gradient approaches zero when a pattern is composed of many units of equal weight. The repetitive patterns of wallpaper or the windows of high-rise buildings obtain balance by homogeneity. In some works by Pieter Brueghel, the rectangular space of the picture is filled with small episodic groups, fairly equal in weight, which represent children's games or Flemish proverbs. This approach is better suited to interpreting the overall character of a mood or mode of existence than to describing life as controlled by central powers. Extreme examples of homogeneity can be found in Louise Nevelson's sculptural reliefs, which are shelves of coordinated compartments, or in Jackson Pollock's late paintings, evenly filled with a homogeneous texture. Such works present a world in which one finds oneself in the same place wherever one goes. They may also be termed atonal, in that any relation to an underlying structural key is abandoned and replaced by a network of connections among the elements of the composition.

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Top and Bottom The force of gravity dominating our world makes us live in anisotropic space, that is, space in which dynamics varies with direction. To rise upward means to overcome resistance-it is always a victory. To descend or fall is to surrender to the pull from below, and therefore is experienced as passive compliance. It follows from this unevenness of space that different locations are dynamically unequal. Here again, physics can help us, by pointing out that because moving away from the center of gravity requires work, the potential energy in a mass high up is greater than that in one low down. Visually an object of a certain size, shape, or color will carry more weight when placed higher up. Therefore, balance in the vertical direction cannot be obtained by placing equal objects at different heights. The higher one must be lighter. An experimental demonstration with regard to size is mentioned by Langfeld: '1f one is asked to bisect a perpendicular line without measuring it, one almost invariably places the mark too high. If a line is actually bisected, it is with difficulty that one can convince oneself that the upper half is not longer than the lower half." This means that if one wants the two halves to look alike, one must make the upper half shorter. If we conclude that weight counts more in the upper part of perceived space than in the lower, we must remember, however, that in the physical world uprightness is defined unambiguously while in perceptual space it is not. When we deal with a totem pole as a physical object we know what is meant by top and bottom; but applied to what we see when we look at an object, the meaning of the term is not obvious. To the sense of sight, uprightness means more than one thing. When we stand upright or lie in bed or tilt our heads we are at least approximately aware of the objective, physical vertical '. direction. This is "environmental orientation." However, we also speak of the top and bottom of a bookpage or picture lying flat on the table. As our head bends over the table, the "top" of the page is in fact at the top of our visual field. This is "retinal orientation." It is not yet known whether the distribution of visual weight differs depending on whether we see a picture on the wall or on the table. Although weight counts more in the upper part of visual space, we observe in the world around us that many more things are generally assembled near the ground than high up. Therefore we are accustomed to experiencing the normal visual situation as bottom-heavy. Modem paint-

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ing, sculpture, and even some architecture have tried to emancipate themselves from earthly gravity by distributing visual weight evenly throughout the pattern. To this end, the weight at the top must be slightly increased. Seen in the intended upright position, a late Mondrian painting displays no more weight at the bottom than at the top. But tum it upside down, and the picture will look top-heavy. The stylistic preference for overcoming the downward pull is in keeping with the artist's desire to liberate himself from the imitation of reality. Certain particularly modern experiences may have contributed to this attitude, e.g., the experience of flying through the air and the upsetting of visual conventions in photographs taken from above. The motion picture camera does not keep its sight line invariably parallel to the ground, and thus presents views in which the gravitational axis is freely displaced and the lower part of the picture is not necessarily more crowded than the upper. Modem dance has run into an interesting inner conflict by stressing the weight of the human body, which classical ballet tried to deny, and at the same time following the general trend in moving from realistic pantomime to abstraction. A powerful tradition, however, still tends to make the bottom part of a visual object look heavier. Horatio Greenough observed: "That buildings, in rising from the earth, be broad and simple at their bases, that they grow lighter not only in fact but in expression as they ascend, is a principle established. The laws of gravitation are at the root of this axiom. The spire obeys it. The obelisk is its simplest expression." Here the architect confirms for his viewers what they know from the muscle sensations in their bodies, namely, that things on our planet are pulled downward. Enough weight at the bottom makes the object look solidly rooted, reliable, and stable. In realistic landscapes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the bottom part tends to be clearly heavier. The center of gravity is placed below the geometrical center. But the role is observed even by typographers and layout designers. The number 3 in Figure 13 looks comfortably poised. Tum it upside down, and it becomes macrocephalic. The same holds for letters like S or B; and book designers and picture framers leave customarily more space at the bottom than at the top.

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Figure 13

The strictly spherical building at the New York World's Fair in 1939 created the unpleasant impression of wanting to rise from the ground but being tied to it. Whereas a securely balanced building points freely upward, the contradiction between the symmetrical sphere and asymmetrical space made for frustrated locomotion in this particular structure. The use of a completely symmetrical form in an asymmetrical context is a delicate undertaking. One successful solution is the positioning of the rose window in the fa~ade of Notre Dame in Paris (Figure 14). Relatively small enough to avoid the danger of drifting, it "personifies" the balance of vertical and horizontal elements obtained around it. The window finds its place of rest somewhat above the center of the square-shaped surface that represents the main mass of the fa~ade.

Figure 14

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As I mentioned earlier, there can be a discrepancy between orientation in physical space and in the visual field, i.e., between environmental and retinal orientation. A Roman floor mosaic may depict a realistic scene, the top and bottom of which both lie in the horizontal plane, but which is surrounded by a square or circular ornamental border devoid of such asymmetry. Jackson Pollock felt most at ease working on the floor: ''I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting." This, he said, was akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the western United States. A similar tradition prevailed among Chinese and Japanese artists. Pollock's paintings were intended to be viewed on the wall, but the difference in orientation seems not to have disturbed his sense of balance....

Right and Left The anisotropy of physical space makes us distinguish between top and bottom but less so between left and right. A violin standing upright looks more symmetrical than one lying on its side. Man and animal are sufficiently bilateral creatures to have trouble in telling left from right, b from d. Corballis and Beale have argued that such a symmetrical response is biologically advantageous so long as nervous systems are focused on movement and orientation in a world in which attack or reward are equally likely from either side. However, as soon as man learned to use tools that are better operated by one hand than by two, asymmetrical-handedness became an asset; and when sequential thought began to be recorded in linear writing, one lateral direction came to dominate the other. In the words of Goethe: liThe more perfect the creature, the more dissimilar its parts get to be." Visually, lateral asymmetry manifests itself in an uneven distribution of weight and in a dynamic vector leading from the left to the right of the visual field. The phenomenon is unlikely to be noticeable in strictly symmetrical patterns, e.g., the fa~ade of a building, but it is quite effective in paintings. The art historian Heinrich WOlfflin has pointed out that pictures change appearance and lose meaning when turned into their mirror images. He realized that this happens because pictures are IIread" from left to right, and naturally the sequence changes when the picture is inverted. Wolfflin noted that the diagonal that runs from bottom left to top right is seen as ascending, the other as descending. Any pictorial object looks heavier at the right side of the picture. For example, when the figure 191

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of Sixtus in Raphael's Sistine Madonna is moved to the right by inverting the painting, he becomes so heavy that the whole composition seems to topple (Figure 15). This agrees with the experimental observation that when two equal objects are shown in the left and right halves of the visual field, the one on the right looks larger. For them to appear equal, the one on the left has to be increased in size.

Figure 15 The investigation was carried further by Mercedes Gaffron, notably in a book which attempted to demonstrate that Rembrandt's etchings reveal their true meaning only when we see them as the artist drew them on the plate, and not in the inverted prints, to which we are accustomed. According to Gaffron, the observer experiences a picture as though he were facing its left side. He subjectively identifies with the left, and whatever appears there assumes greatest importance. When one compares photographs with their mirror images, a foreground object in an asymmetrical scene looks closer on the left side than it does on the right. And when the curtain rises in the theater, the audience is inclined to look to its left first and to identify with the characters appearing on that side. Therefore, according to Alexander Dean, among the so-called stage areas the left side (from the audience's viewpoint) is considered the stronger. In a group of

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actors, the one farthest left dominates the scene. The audience identifies with him and sees the others, from his position, as opponents. Gaffron relates the phenomenon to the dominance of the left cerebral cortex, which contains the higher brain centers for speech, writing, and reading. If this dominance applies equally to the left visual center, then "there exists a difference in our awareness of visual data in favor of those which are perceived within the right visual field." Vision to the right would be more articulate, which would explain why objects appearing there are more conspicuous. Heightened attentiveness to what goes on at the left would compensate for that asymmetry, and the eye would move spontaneously from the place of first attention to the area of most articulate vision. If this analysis is correct, the right side is distinguished for being the more conspicuous and for increasing an object's visual weight-perhaps because when the center of attention is on the left side of the visual field, the "lever effect" adds to the weight of objects on the right. The left side, in turn, is distinguished for being the more central, the more important, and the more emphasized by the viewer's identification with it. In Grunewald's Crucifixion of the Isenheim altar, the group of Mary and the Evangelist to the left assumes greatest importance next to Christ, who holds the center, whereas John the Baptist to the right is the conspicuous herald, pointing to the scene. If an actor comes on stage from the viewers' right, he is noticed immediately, but the focus of the action remains at the left if it does not lie at the center. In traditional English pantomime the Fairy Queen, with whom the audience is supposed to identify, always appears from the left, whereas the Demon King enters on the prompt side, on the audience's right. Since a picture is "read" from left to right, pictorial movement toward the right is perceived as being easier, requiring less effort. If, on the contrary, we see a rider traverse the picture from right to left, he seems to be overcoming more resistance, to be investing more effort, and therefore to be going more slowly. Artists prefer sometimes the one effect, sometimes the other. The phenomenon, readily observed when one compares pictures to their mirror images, may be related to findings by the psychologist H.C. van der Meer that "spontaneous movements of the head are executed more quickly from left to right than in the opposite direction," and that when subjects are asked to compare the speeds of two locomotions, one going from left to right, the other from right to left, the movement to the left is seen as faster. One may speculate that the movement to the left is seen as overcoming stronger resistance; it pushes against the current instead of drifting with it. 193

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It should be noted that the directional vector, which makes compositions asymmetrical, has little to do with eye movements. From tracings of eye movements we know that viewers explore a visual scene by roaming about irregularly and concentrating on the centers of major interest. The left-right vector results from this exploration, but it does not derive from the direction of eye movements themselves. Nor is there any hard evidence that lateral bias is related to handedness or eye dominance. Van der Meer claims that scholastic training may have some influence: she found that persons of limited education are less inclined than university students to perceive directed tension toward the right in pictorial objects. She also reports, however, that sensitivity to the left-right vectors appears rather suddenly at the age of fifteen-strangely late if training in reading and writing is decisive.

Balance and the Human Mind We have noted that weight is distributed unevenly in visual patterns and that these patterns are pervaded by an arrow pointing to "movement" from left to right. This introduces an element of imbalance, which must be compensated if balance is to prevail. Why should artists strive for balance? Our answer thus far has been that by stabilizing the interrelations between the various forces in a visual system, the artist makes his statement unambiguous. Going a step further, we realize that man strives for equilibrium in all phases of his physical and mental existence, and that this same tendency can be observed not only in all organic life, but also in physical systems. In physics the principle of entropy, also known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, asserts that in any isolated system, each successive state represents an irreversible decrease of active energy. The universe tends toward a state of equilibrium in which all existing asymmetries of distribution will be eliminated, and the same holds true for narrower systems if they are sufficiently independent of external influences. According to the phYSicist L.L. Whyte's "unitary principle," which he believes to underlie all natural activity, "asymmetry decreases in isolable systems." Along the same lines, psychologists have defined motivation as lithe disequilibrium of the organism which leads to action for the restoration of stability." Freud, in particular, interpreted his "pleasure principle" to mean that mental events are activated by unpleasant tension, and follow a course that leads to reduction of tension. Artistic activity can be said to be a compo194

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nent of the motivational process in both artist and consumer, and as such participates in the striving for equilibrium. Equilibrium achieved in the visual appearance not only of paintings and sculpture, but also of buildings, furniture, and pottery is enjoyed by man as an image of his broader aspirations. The quest for balance, however, is not sufficient to describe the controlling tendencies in human motivation generally or in art particularly. We end up with a one-sided, intolerably static conception of the human organism if we picture it as resembling a stagnant pool, stimulated to activity only when a pebble disturbs the balanced peace of its surface and limiting its activity to the reestablishment of that peace. Freud came closest to accepting the radical consequences of this view. He described man's basic instincts as an expression of the conservatism of all living matter, as an inherent tendency to return to a former state. He assigned a fundamental role to the "death instinct," the striving for a return to inorganic existence. According to Freud's economy principle, man constantly tries to expend as little energy as possible. Man is lazy by nature. But is he? A human being in good physical and mental health finds himself fulfilled not in inactivity, but in doing, moving, changing, growing, forging ahead, producing, creating, exploring. There is no justification for the strange notion that life consists of attempts to put an end to itself as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the live organism may well be that it represents an anomaly of nature in waging an uphill fight against the universal law of entropy by constantly drawing new energy from its environment. This is not to deny the importance of balance. Balance remains the final goal of any wish to be fulfilled, any task to be accomplished, any problem to be solved. . .. Only by looking at the interaction between the energetic life force and the tendency toward balance can we reach a fuller conception of the dynamics activating the human mind and reflected in the mind's products.

Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair It follows from the foregoing discussion that an artist would interpret hu-

man experience quite one-sidedly if he allowed balance and harmony to monopolize his work. He can only enlist their help in his effort to give form to a Significant theme. The meaning of the work emerges from the interplay of activating and balancing forces. 195

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Cezanne's portrait of his wife in a yellow chair (Figure 16) was painted in 1888-1890. What soon strikes the observer is the combination of external tranquillity and strong potential activity. The reposing figure is charged with energy, which presses in the direction of her glance. The figure is stable and rooted, but at the same time as light as though it were suspended in space. It rises, yet it rests in itself. This subtle blend of serenity and vigor, of finnness and disembodied freedom, may be described as the particular configuration of forces representing the theme of the work. How is the effect achieved? The picture has an upright format, the proportion being approximately 5:4. This stretches the whole portrait in the direction of the vertical and reinforces the upright character of the figure, the chair, the head. The chair is somewhat slimmer than the frame, and the figure slimmer than the chair. This creates a scale of increasing slimness, which leads forward from the background over the chair to the foreground figure. Correspondingly, a scale of increasing brightness leads from the dark band on the wall by way of chair and figure to the light face and hands, the two focal points of the composition. At the same time the shoulders and arms form an oval around the middle section of the picture, a centric core of stability that counteracts the pattern of rectangles and is repeated on a smaller scale by the head (Figure 17).

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Figure 16 Paul Cezanne. Mme. Cezanne in a Yellow Chair, 1888-90. Art Institute, Chicago. The dark band on the wall divides the background into two horizontal rectangles. Both are more elongated than the whole frame, the lower rectangle being 3:2 and the upper 2:1. This means that these rectangles are stressing the horizontal more vigorously than the frame stresses the vertical. Although the rectangles furnish a counterpoint to the vertical, they also enhance the upward movement of the whole by the fact that vertically the lower rectangle is taller than the upper. According to Denman Ross, the eye moves in the direction of diminishing intervals-that is, in this picture, upward.

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Rudolph Arnheim: Balance

The three main planes of the picture-wall, chair, figure--overlap in a movement going from far left to near right. This lateral movement toward the right is counteracted by the location of the chair, which lies mainly in the left half of the picture and thus establishes a retarding countermovement. On the other hand, the dominant rightward movement is enhanced by the asymmetrical placement of the figure in relation to the chair: the figure presses forward by occupying mainly the right half of the chair. Moreover, the figure itself is not quite symmetrical, the left side being slightly larger and thus again emphasizing the sweep toward the right. Figure and chair are tilted at about the same angle relative to the frame. The chair, however, has its pivot at the bottom of the picture and therefore tilts to the left, whereas the pivot of the figure is its head, which tilts it to the right. The head is firmly anchored on the central vertical. The other focus of the composition, the pair of hands, is thrust slightly forward in an attitude of potential activity. An additional secondary counterpoint further enriches the theme: the head, although at rest, contains clearly directed activity in the watchful eyes and the dynamic asymmetry of the quarter profile. The hands, although moved forward, neutralize each other's action by interlocking. The free rising of the head is checked not only by its central location but also by its nearness to the upper border of the frame. It rises so much that it is caught by a new base. Just as the musical scale rises from the base of the key tone only to return to a new base at the octave, so the figure rises from the bottom base of the frame to find new repose at the upper edge. (There is, then, a similarity between the structure of the musical scale and the framed composition. They both combine two structural principles: a gradual heightening of intensity with the ascension from bottom to top; and the symmetry of bottom and top that finally transforms ascension from the base into an upward fall toward a new base. Withdrawal from a state of rest turns out to be the mirror image of the return to a state of rest.) If the foregoing analysis of Cezanne's painting is correct, it will not only hint at the wealth of dynamic relations in the work, it will also suggest how these relations establish the particular balance of rest and activity that impressed us as the theme or content of the picture. To realize how this pattern of visual forces reflects the content is helpful in trying to appraise the artistic excellence of the painting. Two general remarks should be added. First, the subject matter of

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the picture is an integral part of the structural conception. Only because shapes are recognized as head, body, hands, chair, do they play their particular compositional role. The fact that the head harbors the 1l1ind is at least as important as its shape, color, or location. As an abstract pattern, the formal elements of the picture would have to be quite different to convey similar meaning. The observer's knowledge of what is signified by a seated, middle-aged woman contributes strongly to the deeper sense of the work. Second, it will have been noticed that the composition rests on point and counterpoint-that is, on many counterbalancing elements. But these antagonistic forces are not contradictory or conflicting. They do not create ambiguity. Ambiguity confuses the artistic statement because it leaves the observer hovering between two or more assertions that do not add up to a whole. As a rule, pictorial counterpoint is hierarchic-that is, it sets a dominant force against a subservient one. Each relation is unbalanced in itself; together they all balance one another in the structure of the whole work.

200

Notes

Notes 1

2

3

In his New Introductory Lectures (1932) he complains about several misunderstandings of his views including failure to be aware of lithe impossibility of interpreting a dream unless one has the dreamer's associations to it at one's disposal ..." The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1964) 22:8. C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London: Routledge, 1933) 195. Rudolf Amheim, Visual Thinking (London: Faber, 1969) 3.

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Suggestions for further reading Primary sources In addition to the discussion of Hamlet, Freud offers elucidations of other artworks. 'The Moses of Michelangelo' (1914) is a lengthy example. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is valuable in regard to interpretation of artworks as is also Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905): it has been suggested that for "jokes" we can substitute "artworks". The most extended and most famous analysis of an artist, and also some of his works, is his essay on Leonardo (1910). The edition by Brian Farrell contains a helpful introduction by the editor. Jung's writings contain many references to art. The discussion in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) covers much the same ground as our selection but is usefully complementary. The definitions of some basic terms in Psychological Types (1921) are worth looking at: see "image", pp. 554-559; "symbol", pp. 601-610; "thinking" pp. 611-613; "unconscious" pp. 613-617. Man and His Symbols (1964) is a popular book prepared, with others, near the end of Jung's life: it contains many examples and interpretations of mandalas and other symbols. The long section on 'Symbolism in the Visual Arts' by Aniela Jaffe includes brief discussions of a number of modem artists and art works. Other books by Amheim include Visual Thinking (1969), Towards a Psychology of Art (1966), and Dynamics of Architectural Fonn (1977).

Secondary sources Jack Spector's The Aesthetics of Freud is an exposition of Freud's views together with a lengthy account of his influence on art and art theory. Along with Freud's little work on Leonardo, Meyer Schapiro's fine essay 'Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study' Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956) should be read. For general accounts of lung's views the books by Anthony Storr, Jung (1973), and Iolande Jacobi, Jung (1942) are helpful, the first being more analytical and critical, the second mainly sympathetic exposition. The influence of psychoanalytic theories on visual art is discussed briefly in American Art Since 1910 (revised edition 1975) by Barbara Rose and in Concepts of Modern Art (revised edition 1981) edited by Nikos Stangos. 202

Notes

The influence of Freud on art criticism can be seen in many places: for example Daniel Schneider's essay 'Three Modern Painters' in The Psychoanalyst and the Artist (1950). Freudian influence is particularly clearly observable in Surrealist art and art theory. For specific references see Spector's The Aesthetics of Freud. The influence of Jung is similarly broadly observable, for instance in different ways in the writings of Maud Bodkin and an article by James Baird 'Jungian Psychology in Criticism' in Literary Criticism and Psychology (1976) edited by Joseph P. Strelka. For discussion of specific Jungian influence see the literature dealing with the interpretation of Abstract Expressionism, particularly psychoanalytic interpretations of the work of Jackson Pollock. For critical evaluation of gestalt theories see the writings of E.H. Gombrich, for instance Art and Illusion. Gombrich's approach in turn has been criticized by Arnheim: see, for example, his review of The Image and the Eye (1982) by Gombrich in the Times Literary Supplement (1982).

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4 The Sociological Approach Introduction Any approach to art is sociological which solves the familiar problems of description, interpretation and evaluation by setting the artwork in the context of the society in which it was produced. Nowadays sociological approaches tend either to be committed to or influenced by Marxist views. I use the plural deliberately since there is not a single commonly accepted Marxist approach to a theory of art and art criticism. One reason for the variety of approaches in this case is the fact that Marx himself did not develop a theory of art, nor did Engels. Marx obviously was well acquainted with the aesthetic views of his day, particularly those of Schiller, Kant and Hegel, as well with the interpreters of Hegel and the work of Winckelman in the history of art. It is also obvious from the many comments scattered throughout his writings that he valued art highly. Though Marx did not develop a theory of art himself there are obviously bases in his writings for a distinctive theory. Probably the best known is his materialist interpretation of history, summarized succinctly in the first selection, taken from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). All social change from the most primitive to the present is explicable in terms of what is produced and how it is produced and exchanged. The economic structure of a society is the substructure which determines the whole cultural superstructure, including the social institutions, the law, philosophy, religion and of course the art and the thinking about art. It would seem to follow that artistic changes are to be explained in terms of contradictions and changes in the material basis. A particular work cannot be explained until it has been related to the peculiar conditions of its social/economic background. In fact, however, the implications for theory of art and art criticism are far from clear. In the twenties in Russia a tremendous debate raged over such questions as these: is the work of art completely determined by the conditions of the society in which it is produced and ultimately by the economic substructure? does the artist necessarily represent a particular class interest? should the artist be responsible to SOCiety and how? are aesthetic standards essentially bound to particular classes and periods? The 205

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second selection, from his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (1857), brings out that Marx himself seems not to have held a doctrinaire position; he pOints out that "certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of society ..."1 Before carrying further this very brief sketch of developments, attention should be drawn to the third selection. The account of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 has been the source of much fascinating discussion of art, particularly in the last thirty years. Back of this account are Hegel's accounts of historical development, alienation and art. In Hegel, the goal of history, broadly speaking, is freedom. Man becomes free as he comes to understand himself and his world in all its aspects. He sees himself as alienated until this is achieved. His alienation is overcome when he recognizes himself in all his experience. Art has a vital role in the development since it is one of the ways in which man creates himself and recognizes himself as he is-in his products. 2 In his work, including his art, man exercises his freedom and realizes his potentialities. Marx's account focuses on man as political and economic creature. Further, the problem is not just to understand the world but to change it. Man's alienation is with respect to his labour and its products and it has come about through capitalism. Marx distinguishes three aspects. First, what the worker produces becomes an alien thing, sold by the capitalist for his profit. Second, the labourer becomes alienated from himself since his labour under capitalism becomes a burden, rather than a means to personal development. Third, the labourer is estranged from his fellows. Men become competitors rather than producing for the species. This is tragic since it is only as a species being, a member of the human species, that man comes to know himself. All these points have obvious applications to thinking about the role of art and the artist in society. The selection from Sanchez Vazquez contains some typical reflections on this set of themes. Returning to the brief summary of developments begun above, under Stalin debate in Russia was brought to a close and the view known as Socialist Realism was authoritatively proclaimed. This version of a Marxist theory of art has been generally rejected by western Marxists. Hadjinicolaou calls it "vulgar Marxism". He and Sanchez Vazquez explicitly, Hauser and Clark less directly, take criticism of this model as a basic part of their task. Selections from four theoreticians are presented to illustrate the variety of approaches. Many regard Arnold Hauser (1893-1978) as the most outstanding exponent of the sociological approach to visual art. Born in Hungary, he 206

Introduction

studied philosophy, literature and art history in Budapest and economics and sociology in Berlin. He taught on the Continent, and in England, then in 1957 became Professor of Art History at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. His Philosophy of Art History (1958) expounds an obviously Marxist position though he also rejects what are regarded by orthodox Marxists as fundamental tenets. The selection from it includes his defence against familiar criticism of the sociological approach but also his emphasis on the autonomy of the work of art and his perception of the limitations of the sociological approach. Nicos Hadjinicolaou was born in Greece in 1938. In Art History and Class Struggle (1973) he writes in the context of contemporary developments in France. Unlike Hauser he is not plagued by doubts about the possibility of developing a purely Marxist and purely sociological approach to art history. For him art historians have failed heretofore by failing to recognize that every picture is an ideological work. Art history is the history, not of styles, but of visual ideologies. Art production has a certain autonomy but it is not really independent. Analysis of art and art movements is complex because each class is complex with many layers and sections. The approach to individual works, however, is simple: each is either a positive or negative visual ideology. Description, not evaluation, is the art historian's task. Evaluation is always relative to the aesthetic ideologies of the social group. Aesthetics as a discipline disappears. A valuable feature of the work is the long section devoted to detailed analysis of particular works along the lines proposed. Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez was born in Spain in 1915. At the end of the Spanish Civil War he moved to Mexico. He took his doctorate at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico where he is Professor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Philosophy. The selection is from his best known work Art and Society (1965); he claims that Marxist aestheticians and critics have erred in overemphasizing the role of the ideological factor and minimizing the formal aspects of art. Art is not an imitation of reality but a new reality which manifests the creative power of man. T.]. Clark belongs to a slightly different generation. The same concerns are evident but the points are made in the style of an art historian trained in England in the sixties with the flavour of awareness of other contemporary theoretical approaches. Clark made his reputation with two books published in 1973: The Absolute Bourgeois and The Image of the People. Since 1980 he has been a professor of Art History at Harvard and has been a lively debater at conferences and in journals in North America. A 1974

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article in The Times Literary Supplement, The Conditions of Artistic Creation', has been read as a manifesto for a new art history. An art history ready to fall apart at the seams must be rescued. New art historians should ask two kinds of question: one, about the relation of the work of art and its ideology; the other about the precise conditions and relations of artistic production in specific cases. The selection printed here, from the introduction to The Image of the People, elaborates the second. Clark rejects vague talk about reflection and influence in terms of intuitions and speculative generalizations. Though he emphasizes as strongly as Hauser the difficulty of carrying out the sociological programme this is not taken as grounds for despair. On the contrary the social historian of art, armed with great patience and immense erudition, should take up his task confidently, bringing out in concrete detail what, for example, influence means in a specific case or what the public is for a particular artist at a particular point in his career.

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Karl Marx The Materialist Interpretation of History In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite state of the development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or-what is but a legal expression for the same thing-with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.

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Karl Marx Material Production and Artistic Production The unequal relation between the development of material production and e.g., artistic production. On the whole, the conception of progress should not be accepted in the usual abstraction. Modem art, etc. It is not as important and difficult to grasp this disproportion as that within practical social relations, e.g., the relation between education in the United States and Europe. The really difficult point to be discussed here, however, concerns how the productive relations come forward as legal relations in an unequal development. Thus, e.g., the relation between Roman civil law (this is less true of criminal and public law) and modem production. This conception of development appears to imply necessity. On the other hand, justification of accident. Varia. (Freedom and other points.) (The effect of means of communication. World history did not always exist; history as a consequence of world history.) The starting point is of course in certain facts of nature: subjective and objective. Clans, races, etc. It is well known that certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of SOciety, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its organization. Witness the example of the Greeks as compared with modem art or even Shakespeare. As concerns certain forms of art, e.g., the epos, it is even acknowledged that as soon as the production of art as such appears they can never be produced in their epoch-making, classical aspect; and accordingly, that in the domain of art certain of its important forms are possible only at an undeveloped stage of art development. If that is true of the mutual relations of different modes of art within the domain of art itself, it is far less surprising that the same is true of the relations of art as a whole to the general development of society. The difficulty lies only in the general formulation of these contradictions. No sooner are they made specific than they are clarified. Let us take for instance the relationship of Greek art and then Shakespeare's to the present. It is a well known fact that Greek mythology was not only the arsenal of Greek art but also the very ground from which it had sprung. Is the view of nature and of social relations which shaped Greek imagination and thus Greek [mythology] possible in the age of automatic machinery and railways and locomotives and electric telegraphs?

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Where does Vulcan come in as against Roberts & Co., Jupiter as against the lightning rod, and Hermes as against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature. What becomes of the Goddess Fame side by side with Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes the existence of Greek mythology, i.e., that nature and even the forms of society itself are worked up in the popular imagination in an unconsciously artistic fashion. That is its material. Not, however, any mythology taken at random, nor any accidental unconsciously artistic elaboration of nature (including with the latter everything objective, hence society too). Egyptian mythology could never be the soil or the womb which would give birth to Greek art. But in any event [there had to be] a mythology. There could be no social development which excludes all mythological relation to nature, all mythologizing relation to it, and which accordingly claims from the artist an imagination free of mythology. Looking at it from another side: is Achilles possible where there are powder and lead? Or is the Iliad at all possible in a time of the hand-operated or the later steam press? Are not singing and reciting and the muse necessarily put out of existence by the printer's bar; and do not necessary prerequisites of epic poetry accordingly vanish? But the difficulty does not lie in understanding that the Greek art and epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It rather lies in understanding why they still afford us aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment. A man cannot become a child again unless he becomes childish. But doesn't he enjoy the naive ways of the child, and mustn't he himself strive to reproduce its truth again at a higher stage? Isn't the character of every epoch revived perfectly true to nature in child nature? Why should the historical childhood of humanity, where it had obtained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return? There are ill-bred children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples belong to these categories. But the Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not stand in contradiction with the undeveloped stage of the social order from which it had sprung. It is much more the result of the latter, and inseparately connected with the circumstance that the unripe social conditions under which the art arose and under which alone it could appear can never return.

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Karl Marx Alienated Labour While alienated labour alienates (1) nature from man, and (2) man from himself, his own active function, his vital activity, it also alienates the species from man; it turns his species-life into a means towards his individual life. Firstly it alienates species-life and individual life, and secondly in its abstraction it makes the latter into the aim of the fonner which is also conceived of in its abstract and alien form. For firstly, work, vital activity and productive life itself appear to man only as a means to the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve his physical existence. But productive life is species-life. It is life producing life. The whole character of a species, its generic character, is contained in its manner of vital activity and free conscious activity is the species-characteristic of man. Life itself appears merely as a means to life. The animal is immediately one with its vital activity. It is not distinct from it. They are identical. Man makes his vital activity itself into an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious vital activity. He is not immediately identical to any of his characterizations. Conscious vital activity differentiates man immediately from animal vital activity. It is this and this alone that makes man a species-being. He is only a conscious being, that is his own life is an object to him, precisely because he is a species-being. This is the only reason for his activity being free activity. Alienated labour reverses the relationship so that, just because he is a conscious being, man makes his vital activity and essence a mere means to his existence. The practical creation of an objective world, the working-over of inorganic nature is the confirmation of man as a conscious species-being, that is as a being that relates to the species as to himself and to himself as to the species. It is true that the animal, too, produces. It builds itself a nest, a dwelling, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But it only produces what it needs immediately for itself or its offspring; it produces one-sidedly whereas man produces universally; it produces only under the pressure of immediate physical need, whereas man produces free from physical need and only truly produces when he is thus free; it produces only itself whereas man reproduces the whole of nature. Its product belongs immediately to its physical body whereas man can freely separate himself from his product. The animal only fashions things according to the standards 212

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and needs of the species it belongs to, whereas man knows how to produce according to the measure of every species and knows everywhere how to apply its inherent standard to the object; thus man also fashions things according to the laws of beauty. Thus it is in the working over of the objective world that man first really affirms himself as species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of work is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man; for he duplicates himself not only intellectually, in his mind, but also actively in reality and thus can look at his image in a world he has created. Therefore when alienated labour tears from man the object of his production, it also tears from him his species-life, the real objectivity of his species and turns the advantage he has over animals into a disadvantage in that his inorganic body, nature, is torn from him.

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Arnold Hauser The Sociological Method in Art History Ideology in the History of Art The concept of ideology, derived from the notion of IIfalse consciousness," shows striking analogies with the concept of "rationalization" in psychoanalysis. The individual "rationalizes" his attitudes, his thoughts, his feelings, his actions; that is, he is concerned to give them an acceptable interpretation, unobjectionable from the standpoint of social conventions. In a similar way, social groups, speaking through representative individuals, interpret natural and historical events, and above all their own opinions and valuations, in accord with their material interests, desire for power, considerations of prestige, and other social aims. And just as the individual in his motives and aims remains unconscious that he is rationalizing, for the most part the members of a social group also are unaware of the fact that their thought is conditioned by material conditions of life. Otherwise, as Engels says, lithe whole ideology would collapse." The analogy with psychoanalysis takes us a step farther. Just as the individual does not need to rationalize the whole of his behavior, a large part of his thoughts, feelings and acts being socially unobjectionable or negligible, so also the cultural products of groups include representations and interpretations of reality which are ''harmless'' and 1I0bjective" because they have no direct connection with the interests of the groups concerned and do not collide with the interests of any other groups. Thus, mathematical propositions and theories of natural science are, on the whole, objective, and obey principles that may be considered to be timeless and invariable criteria of truth. But the scope of such objective propositions is relatively narrow, and though one feels a certain reluctance to make the history of mathematics or mechanics an appendage of economic history, there can be no doubt that even a natural science such as medicine shows traces of dependence upon economic and social conditions, so that not merely the emergence of problems, but often also the direction in which the solution of the problems is sought, can be seen to be socially conditioned. On the other hand, the humanistic disciplines too, especially the different branches of historical research, are confronted with a vast number of problems that have nothing, or scarcely anything, to do with an ideological interpretation of the material, problems of which the solution can in the main be judged by objective criteria. 214

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Leaving questions of detail aside, it is obvious that each of the various cultural structures, such as religion, philosophy, science, and art, has its own proper IIdistance" from its social origin; they form a series with many steps, manifesting progressive "ideological saturation." This series reaches from mathematics, which is almost neutral from the sociological point of view, its particular propositions scarcely allowing one to draw any conclusions as to their date, place, or circumstances of origin, to art, in which hardly a single feature could be considered indifferent from the historical and social point of view. In this series, art stands in the very closest connection with social reality and farthest from the region of what are commonly regarded as timelessly valid ideas. At least it is directed in a far more unreserved and straightforward way to social aims, serves far more manifestly and unmistakably as ideological weapon, as panegyric or propaganda, than objective sciences. That the social tendencies art serves can scarcely ever be seen unconcealed and un sublimated-that is of the essence of the ideological mode of expression, which, if it is to achieve its aims, cannot afford to call a child by its proper name. In the series that runs from art to the exact science and mathematics, the autonomy of cultural structures grows in inverse proportion to the distance from the immediate experience of the actual living individual, in whose psychic life thought and feeling, contemplation and action, theory and practice are undifferentiated-the individual whom Wilhelm Dilthey, as we know, termed the IIwhole man." The more nearly the IIsubject" of the various fields of cultural creation coincides with the concrete real man, the less this subject is regarded as something impersonal and unhistorical, and the more is his thought seen to be socially dependent and ideologically conditioned. Undoubtedly both IIconsciousness in general" as the correlative of the natural sciences and Dilthey's "whole man" are simply limiting concepts and useful only as lIideal types". Abstract, timeless "consciousness in general" is not found in its purity even in a mathematical operation; and the "whole man" free from all trace of specialization is not manifest even in those works of art which have the most universal and immediate appeal-for any work of art requires for its realization a certain degree of one-sidedness and mediation, a restriction upon the role of the whole living individual. Even in Marx and Engels there is talk of the varying distance between the different cultural structures and their economic substratum; and Engels remarks in a well-known passage of his work on Feuerbach that in the higher ideologies "the interconnection between the ideas and their ma215

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

terial condition of existence becomes more and more complicated, more and more obscured by intermediate links." This view of the matter is essentially correct. The content of art, religion, and philosophy is much richer, and their structure far more opaque, than that of the natural sciences and mathematics; it is so even when compared with that of Law and the State, in which economic conditions are expressed more directly, that is, in a less sublimated fashion. But the fact that the property conditions of a certain economic system are expressed more directly in current legal provisions and political institutions than in the contemporaneous trends of philosophy or art does not imply that art and philosophy are more independent than juristic or political thought of the actual conditions of life. In fact, they keep drawing upon immediate, socio-historical reality to a much greater extent than Law with it~ codified rules or the State with its stereotyped institutions. In the case of art and philosophy, the workings of social causation may be veiled, but they are no less decisive and no less farreaching than in the other cultural fields. The problem of ideology, however, takes on a different form in the field of art from that in the sciences, the concept of truth in art being so strikingly different from that of theoretical truth. A work of art is not "correct" or "incorrect" in the way a scientific theory is; it cannot properly speaking be termed either true or false. The concept of changeless, superhistorical validity can be applied to art only with very special reservations, and here all talk of "false consciousness," as of correct consciousness, is out of place. In other words: when truth is not what is aimed at, it is idle to speak of conformity to it or evasion of it. Art is partisan through and through, and because a view of reality which did not reflect any particular standpoint would be devoid of all artistic quality, the problem of relativity simply does not arise in art. Every aspect of art is a perspective; only one that involves an inner contradiction can rightly be termed "false." And yet it would be wrong to deny to art all claim of achieving truth, to deny that it can make a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the world and of man. That works of literature are an abundant source of knowledge requires perhaps no further proof; the most penetrating achievements of psychological insight which we have at our disposal derive from the masters of novel and drama. But there can be no doubt that the visual arts also contribute a good deal toward giving us our bearings in the world. It is, of course, important to point out the difference between scientific knowledge and artistic representation, to emphasize, for instance, that to speak of "stylistic" trends is perfectly legitimate in art, but very 216

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questionable in science. The sociologist, however, can only feel uneasy about any too radical separation of art and science. For after all, the worldview of a generation-or, more exactly, of a group that is historically and socially self-contained-is an indivisible whole. Attempts to demarcate the different fields in which this world-view manifests itself may be very promising from the epistemological point of view, but to the sociologist they appear as violent dissections of the reality he studies. To him, philosophy, science, law, custom, and art are different aspects of one unitary attitude to reality: in all these forms men are searching for an answer to the same question, for a solution to one and the same problem of how to live. They are not ultimately concerned with formulating scientific truths, producing works of art, or even laying down moral precepts, but with achieving a workable world-view, a reliable guiding principle for life. Always and everywhere they are bent upon one and the same task, that of subjugating the bewildering strangeness and ambiguity of things. To point to the share of art in the formation of world-views is not to say that it is continuously tied to practical needs or to deny that a special feature of art is precisely its emancipation from current reality. If anyone is inclined to over-stress the real conditions of artistic production, it may be rightly pointed out that the development of stylistic forms has an inner logic of its own. Art displays a rigorous conSistency in its pursuit of the solution of certain formal problems, and within each stylistic period a fairly steady and continuous progress toward that goal can be discerned. It has, however, been asserted that an immanent development of this kind occurs not only in the phases of history which are stylistically unitary and coherent-periods, for instance, in which there is steady progress in naturalistic representation or in abstract formalization-but also in the succession of the various styles. From this point of view, the successive styles seem to be related as question and answer, or as thesis and antithesis. For example, the baroque is said to be, not the expression of new socio-historical conditions of life, but the "logical" continuation of the Renaissance-that is, in part the solution of the formal problems set by the works of the Renaissance masters, in part the result of a contradiction, which also arises out of a relationship to those masters. Such a '10gic of history," which asserts the inner necessity of each successive step in the development, always has a certain appeal; however, it justifies itself only when applied within the limits of a certain unitary stylistic trend. When one comes to a change of style, it breaks down.

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For even supposing that one could admit such an antithetic relation between successive trends to be a general principle of stylistic development, one could never explain by purely formal and intrinsic characteristics why at a certain point of time one trend gives way to a different one. The stimulus to a change of style always comes from without, and is logically contingent. Nor are feeling of satiety and desire for change at all adequate as an explanation of the disappearance of a style. Certainly, desire for change often plays as important a role in the history of art as in the history of fashions; but this requirement can be satisfied, when talent is available, without going outside the potentialities of the current style. In any case, with the ageing of a well-established social culture, there comes both a growing desire for a renewal of the accepted forms, and, often, an increased resistance to every attempt to change them. In general, the emergence of a new public is needed to shake a deeply and firmly rooted tradition of art and bring about a radical change of taste. The dissolution of the rococo is to be accounted for not at all on intrinsic grounds, slick and unexciting as its products had become, but primarily by the new patronage of art in the revolutionary period. Wolfflin held that the external stimulus is more marked and more clearly discernible in a reversal of style, than in the ups and downs of an uninterrupted line of development. In reality, there is no difference of principle between these two phases or kinds of the one process. External influences are not more decisive, they are merely more obvious in the case of the interrupted development. A closer look reveals extrinsic factors always at work whether there is a change of style or not. Social realities-what Wolfflin called "external conditions"--always play the same role in influencing the choice of form; for any formulation involves a choice of form. At every moment of the development the question of what one should do, what attitude one should take to the current possibilities, is an open question that has to be answered afresh. One says "yes" or "no" to the direction in which the others are moving and which one has followed oneself up to now; and acceptance is neither more mechanical nor less voluntary than rejection. To uphold an established tradition is often just as much a decision, just as much the result of a dialectical process full of conflicts and having its internal and external preconditions, as the decision to change it. The attempt, for instance, to stem a tide flowing in the direction of ever-greater naturalism does not involve different principles of motivation from those which govern the contrary desire, to promote and accelerate this naturalism. One is always faced by the same questions: is the received style still serviceable as a guide to life in a changed world? 218

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Can it still impress, convince, and spur to action? Is it still a suitable weapon in the struggle for life? Does it reveal what should be revealed and veil what should be veiled? The artist never puts these questions to himself in so many words. Seldom does he answer them consciously or directly; nor are they put to him by any particular agents of society. Wolfflin's mistake, his lack of sociological sense and his abstract logical conception of history, are mainly due to his too radical differentiation between external influence and inner logic. The error in his way of thinking is typical; a similar failure to understand social causation underlies the common incomprehension of sociological methods and, in particular, the misinterpretation of historical materialism. The essence of the materialistic philosophy of history, with its doctrine of the ideological character of thought, consists in the thesis that spiritual attitudes are from the outset anchored in conditions of production, and move within the range of interests, aims, and prospects characteristic of these; not that they are subsequently, externally, and deliberately adjusted to economic and social conditions. "Primum vivere, deinde philosDphari" is a truth one does not need any theory of historical materialism or of ideology to recognize. The remarkable thing is that even well-tried thinkers in this field represent the economic dependence of art in terms of a purely external tie. Even such a writer as Max Scheler falls into this way of thinking, when he speaks of the material conditions of artistic creation. "Raphael requires a paintbrush," we read. "His ideas and his visions cannot provide that. He needs politically powerful patrons who commission him to glorify their own ideals; without them he could not give expression to his genius." It is extraordinary that a sociologist of the rank of Scheler should have failed to note that the artist glorifies the "ideals" of potential as well as of actual patrons; that the ineluctable character of ideology-in so far as it really is ineluctable-leads the painter to represent the ideas and aims of the predominant, cultured classes even when he has no patrons-or better, in spite of his not having the right patrons or representing social groups with whom he would feel really in harmony. Failure to recognize this is the more remarkable because Engels in his thesis on the "triumph of realism" and the nature of Balzac's method left no room for doubt as to what is meant by ideology in art. One would naturally think that it would have been realized that the artist does not need to be aware of the social ideas he expresses, that he may, so far as his consciousness goes, feel himself in opposition to the ideas and ideals he portrays, justifies, or even glorifies in his works. Balzac, as is well known, was an enthu219

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siast for absolute monarchy, the Catholic Church, and the French aristocracy; but that did not prevent him from writing the most impressive of apologies for the bourgeoisie. Art can express social aims in two different ways. Its social content can be clothed in the form of explicit avowal-confessions of belief, express doctrines, direct propaganda-or in that of mere implication, that is, in terms of the outlook tacitly presupposed in works which seem devoid of social reference. It can be frankly tendentious or a vehicle of an unconscious and unacknowledged ideology. The social content of a definite creed or an explicit message is consciously realized by the speaker and consciously accepted or rejected by the hearer; on the other hand, the social motive behind a personal manifesto can be unconscious, and can operate without men being aware of it; it will be the more effective the less it is consciously expressed and the less it is or appears to be consciously aiming to gain approbation. Nakedly tendentious art often repels where veiled ideology encounters no resistance. The plays of Diderot, Lessing, Ibsen, and Shaw are undisguisedly tendentious; the message for which they seek to gain approval does not have to be read between the lines, as must the meaning of Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Comeille; it is not wrapped up in an ideology; but it is convincing only to him who is already half convinced. And in art, the indirect, ideological mode of expression is not only the more effective, it is also the more illuminating from a historical point of view, for in truth a social outlook creates a style only when it cannot find expression directly. The open expression of a social outlook is compatible with the most various stylistic forms, as in that case the content of ideas is simply superimposed upon a given formal structure; no transformation of this content into novel forms of expression is required. With Diderot, LeSSing, and Shaw, versions of liberalism are expressed in three different styles, whereas the styles of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and ComeiIle are the expressions of different social and political situations. In the one case the social attitude maintains a certain abstract independence of the artistic form; in the other it is embodied in a stylistic form appropriate to it. The translation of a social outlook into a style evidently requires quite a different mechanism from that which suffices for its straightforward expression in a political program or a manifesto. The artist as exponent of style is not merely the mouthpiece of society, and his function as representing a social group cannot be explained in psychological terms alone; it becomes intelligible only through research into the nature of connections that are the theme of historical materialism. 220

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Historical materialism is not a psychological theory; it derives ideologies not from the motives of persons, but from objective conditions that work themselves out often without the consciousness, and not infrequently contrary to the intentions, of the participants. Even to speak of "interests" in this connection is not altogether appropriate, for the thoughts, feelings, and actions of men are by no means always in accord with what, from a psychological point of view, one might designate as their interests. They generally think and act in accord with a class-consciousness for which the maintenance of a certain class is the cardinal, though not always the acknowledged, aim. Men's thinking depends on this consciousness, although the collective unity with which they are at one is not always the social class from which they sprang, and although they are not always aware of their class-situation. The motives, for example, which lead someone to volunteer for a certain war may from a subjective point of view be wholly idealistic; nevertheless, not only can the war be economically conditioned, but also there may be operative, behind the idealistic motives of the volunteer, unconscious factors of a materialistic, interested, and classdetermined character. Class-consciousness is not a psychological reality; it materializes only to the extent to which individuals do in fact behave in accord with their class-situation. In so far as class-consciousness does find expression, one may, in the language of the romantics, speak of the higher intentions of the group-or, in the Hegelian jargon, of a sort of "cunning," in this case the cunning of the class-war. Put in less romantic and speculative terms, this is equivalent to saying that men's thought is much more decisively influenced by their social situation than by their illusions or by their conscious reflections on their situation-although current social conditions presumably work only through psychological motivation, or as Engels has it, lie very thing that sets men in motion must go through their minds." The most effective argument, at first sight, against the admission of ideological factors in the history of art derives from the observation that the same stylistic traits often do not appear simultaneously in the different arts, that a style may last longer in one branch of art than in another, that one may appear to lag behind the rest instead of keeping in line. Thus in music, until the middle of the eighteenth century, that is, up to Bach's death, we find the baroque style still flourishing, whereas in the visual arts the rococo has already reached its climax. If, however, the argument runs, like social conditions do not produce like results in all prOvinces of art and culture, then there is evidently no justification for talk of ideological condi221

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tioning or of sociological laws of any sort, and movements in art are free from the influence of social causation. The solution of this apparent difficulty is obvious. In any fairly advanced state of civilization, social conditions are never quite uniform; they do not present us with the same situation in the various fields of art and of culture. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the middle ranks of the bourgeoisie exerted a much greater influence upon painting and literature than upon music. They were a very influential section of the consumers in the fields of literature and painting, whereas in music the taste of Court and Church authorities was still predominant. The institution that in the case of music was to do the work of book publishers and art exhibitions, the commercial organization of concerts for a middle-class public, was still in its infancy. Indeed, a similar tension, caused by the differences of the publics concerned, between the visual arts and literary forms persists throughout the history of Western culture. The circle of customers for painting and sculpture, and of course for architecture, is for obvious reasons a much more restricted one than for literature. That does not imply that stylistic change always starts with literature; literature takes the lead only when the bourgeoisie takes over the leadership in society, and that only comes about with the enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the democratization of the reading public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is clear that this preponderant place of literature in the evolution of style, as also that of music at a later date, is brought about by a shift in the art market. The concept of ideology can be sensibly employed only in relation to a certain social group; to speak of the ideology of a historical epoch, without an attempt to differentiate classes or groups, is sociologically meaningless. Only when we assign ideological phenomena to particular social units do we get beyond a mere registering of historical sequence; only then are we able to work out a concrete, sociologically useful concept of ideology. In a histOrically advanced period there is no one ideology, but only ideologies-in the same way as there is not just Art, but the various arts, or as there are several relevant artistic trends to be distinguished, corresponding with the various influential social strata. This does not alter the fact that in any historical period one class predominates, but it reminds us that this predominance does not go unchallenged by competitors in the spiritual realm any more than in economics or politics. As a rule, the new forces of production begin to manifest themselves in the form of "new ideas," giving rise to dialectical tensions in the field of thought which often 222

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work themselves out in economic organization only at a later date; but this does not invalidate the contention of Marx and Engels that the new ideas are only a sign "that within the old SOciety, the elements of a new one have been created." In fact, we frequently get a situation in which the spiritual tendencies are much more tangled, more pervaded by deep-seated oppositions than the economic; in which, as for example in the age of the enlightenment, the ruling class was already spiritually divided into two hostile camps while economically it still maintained an appearance of unity. The differing composition of the publics is undoubtedly not the sole explanation of the differing speeds of change found in the different arts. In the various branches of art, the traditional formal rules that prescribe modes of representation and set limits to what may be represented can be more rigorous or less, and so can offer more resistance or less to the influence of contemporary social conditions. In an art-form such as church music, in which production is governed by rather strict traditions and serves precisely defined functions, in which the executants generally belong to a closed professional group, and the demand for novelty is naturally slighter than elsewhere, the speed of change will be relatively slow and the stYlistic forms less obviously ideological-unless one treats the very rule of tradition itself as an ideological symptom, as in a sense it is. But for the formation of new ideologies all tradition is a factor of inertia, as both Marx and Engels observe. 'The tradition of all the dead generations weighs down the brains of the living," says Marx, and Engels, somewhat more favorably, but still with a certain horror, speaks of tradition as a "great conservative force in all ideological fields." Tradition owes its existence to the fact that cultural structures outlast the socio-historical conditions of their origin, and can live on, although, as it were, without roots. There exists a remarkable linkage of transitory and enduring factors, whose problematic character Marx seems to have noticed first when he came to deal with artistic experience. The passage in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy in which he speaks of the difficulty of accounting for the effect of the Greek epic upon generations living in a world utterly different from that of Homer is wellknown. Here Marx stumbled upon the discrepancy between genesis and validity; without, however, being able to formulate the problem accurately. He was scarcely aware that he was concerned with a peculiarity of all forms of spiritual activity, and thus with the central and most difficult problem of the whole doctrine of ideology: the circumstance that the socalled superstructure has a vitality of its own, that spiritual structures have

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both the capacity and the tendency to cast loose from their origins and go their own way. In other words, they become the origin of new structures that develop according to inner laws of their own, and also come to have a value of their own which enjoys more than ephemeral validity. This phenomenon by which the cultural structures that were once vital tools and weapons, means for mastering nature and organizing society, gradually become formalized and neutralized, and finally ends in themselves, is no doubt closely akin to the process of "reification" (Verdinglichung) discovered and so vividly described by Marx. The spiritual structures, with their independence, auton0n:ty, and immanence, their formal, superhistorical values, confront us as so many "alien natural forces"-as Marx terms the institutions of capitalist society. Even in art, the most human of all human forms of expression, this alien character is felt whenever art is treated as pure form. A work of art, taken as a purely formal product, a mere play of lines or tones, an embodiment of timeless values without relevance to anything historical or social, loses its vital relationship to the artist and its human significance for the person contemplating it. In art, especially in art, the setting up or postulating of supertemporal and superpersonal values has about it something of "fetishism," which Marx held was the essence of "reification." By the setting up of such abstract values and the marking off of distinct mental faculties which goes with it, that unity of the spiritual world which the romantic philosophy of history discerned in the so-called "organic" cultures, with their total world-view· and their natural growth, is finally destroyed. Marx himself describes in somewhat romantic terms the dissolution of this natural state, which he makes coincide with the beginning of modern capitalism, as "the end of human innocence." His messianic gospel, with its dominant theme of the "absolute sinfulness" of the capitalist era and its promise of classless society, is certainly a romantic legacy. In reality, the formalization of spiritual powers and achievements, the invention of "pure science" and lIart for art's sake," is no more a creation of modem capitalism than is the commodity character of industrial products. The process begins in the seventh century B.C. in Ionia, and evidently is a concomitant of the Greek colonization. Here we meet not only with a completely novel, unpragmatic conception of science, but equally with a completely new idea of art, which is no longer exclusively magic, incantation, votive offering, or propaganda, but an attempt to realize beauty for its own sake. As out of knowledge directed to purely practical ends there arises "enquiry" that is in some degree purposeless, so out of 224

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art as means of winning the favor of gods, spirits, or potentates, there gradually emerges pure, untendentious, disinterested form. This development is undoubtedly an accompaniment of the Greeks' contact with foreign peoples, of their discovery of the variety and relativity of values, which entails the dissolution of their ancient wisdom, that more or less undifferentiated unity in which religion, science, and art are scarcely distinct. The process of formalization and separation of the branches of culture goes along with the contemporary beginnings of monetary economy, and may to some extent be explained by the notion that use of abstract means of exchange promotes intellectual adaptability and power of abstraction; but all that has not much in common with the rise of modem capitalism. In spite of the process, almost uninterrupted from that time on, of increasing separation of the cultural fields, with the autonomy of art growing more and more assured, still in no phase of art history, not even in times of the most extreme aestheticism and formalism, do we find the development of art completely independent of the current economic and social conditions. Artistic creations are far more intimately linked with their own time than they are with the idea of art in general or the history of art as a unitary process. The works of different artists do not have any common aim or common standard; one does not continue another or supplement another; each begins at the beginning and attains its goal as best it can. There is not really any progress in art; later works are not necessarily more valuable than earlier; works of art are in fact incomparable. That is what makes truth in art so very different from truth in science; it also explains why the value of the knowledge gained and propagated by art is not at all impaired by its ideological character. The fact that the insights gained by art often so quickly go out of currency and never really secure universal acceptance does not trouble us in the least. We regard them as uncommonly, often indeed uniquely, valuable interpretations of life, not as objectively compulsive, demonstrable, or even, properly speaking, arguable propositions. The artist's communications about reality intend to be and ought to be relevant; they do not have to be true or indisputable. We can be completely overwhelmed by a work of art, and yet quite reconciled to the fact that it leaves other men, who are our spiritual neighbours, unmoved. That there is nothing compulsive about judgments of taste is one of the earliest aesthetic insights, de gustibus non disputandum being almost a piece of popular proverbial wisdom. The remarkable thing is that judgments of taste do none the less make a claim, and though not claiming uni-

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versa! validity, do have a normative aspect: the person judging believes himself to be recognizing an objective value that is in a way binding, at least for him. This complication deserves to be noted, but does not alter the fact that validity in art is utterly different from validity in science, and that there is no contradiction in art's being ideological and at the same time having objective value. But the problem of relativity of values, which we thus avoid in considering the actual production and enjoyment of art, confronts us when we tum to art history as a science with difficulties almost as great as are encountered in any other field of study. The development of art history does not even manifest that rather small element of continuous progress which can be detected in other branches of historical writing. In the case of art, the historical interpretations and evaluations of one generation not only are not felt to be binding upon the next, but often have to be positively ignored, even fought against, in order that the new generation may gain its own direct access to the works of the past. We enjoy all this variety and many-sidedness of historical interpretation, feel infinitely enriched and enlivened by such constant shifts in the point of view from which sensitive and ingenious art historians investigate and reflect upon the works of the masters; in the end, the question of the validity of all these different interpretations which successive generations put upon the artistic creations of the past obtrudes itself and demands further investigation. It is somewhat disquieting to observe that the ranking of the artists considered important is being continually changed, that for example Raphael or Rubens is being constantly re-appraised, that artists such as EI Greco, Breughel, and Tintoretto have had to be rescued from complete oblivion or neglect, that types of art that yesterday were decried as the most frightful aberrations are today acclaimed as the most interesting and stimulating of all, that a Burckhardt wrote with contempt of the baroque and a Wolfflin with contempt of mannerism. Are such interpretations correct or incorrect? Is one more correct than another? Is a later interpretation always more correct than an earlier? Or has the temporal sequence of judgments in this case nothing whatever to do with progress, with any progressive discovery of truth? Is relativism in art history inevitable and unobjectionable? Or have we in the last resort to do with assertions that are not to be distinguished as true or false, but according to some quite different criteria, such as the degree of relevance of the connections pointed out, or the extent of the deepening and enrichment of our aesthetic experience which may result? It certainly seems clear that the course not merely of art, but of art history 226

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also-that is, not only of the practice but also of the interpretation of artis subject to the laws of something like Alfred Weber's "cultural development," which is not a strictly progressive movement, unlike the continuous process of cumulative achievement which he terms "civilization." The judgments of art history can be neither completely objective nor absolutely compelling; for interpretations and evaluations are not so much knowledge, but are ideological desiderata, wishes and ideals that one would like to see realized. Works or schools of art of the past are interpreted, discovered, appraised, neglected in accord with the point of view and current standards of the present. Each generation judges the artistic endeavors of former ages more or less in the light of its own artistic aims; it regards them with renewed interest and a fresh eye only when they are in line with its own objectives. In this way, around the middle of last century, a generation of middle-class liberals headed by Michelet and Burckhardt discovered or revalued the art of the Renaissance; the generation of the impressionists led on by Wolfflin and Riegl did the same for the baroque; our own generation, with its expressionism and surrealism, cinematography and psychoanalysis, is undertaking the same task for the intellectualistic, problem-ridden, and inwardly disrupted art of mannerism. The evaluations and revaluations of art history, it is plain, are governed by ideology, not by logic. They relate to the same living conditions, are based upon the same social foundations as are the contemporary artistic tendencies and, like these, express and reveal a definite world-view. The sociology of art history has still to be written; it could make a valuable contribution to the social history of art. It would have to treat such problems as that of the changing Significance of classical antiquity over the centuries: its naturalistic-progressivist interpretation by the cultured patricians of the Italian Renaissance, its formalistic-conservative interpretation by the courtly aristocracy of seventeenth-century France, and its rigorously academic interpretation by the bourgeois intelligentsia of the revolutionary period. No doubt art history, as well as interpreting and evaluating, has a number of other tasks not essentially different from those of factual historical research in general. In this field, the objective truth of its findings is a problem that cannot be ignored. Such tasks are those concerned with the dating and attribution of works, their grouping in a way that correctly reflects the development of schools or of individual personalities, the determination of what can be inferred from them as "documents," regarding 227

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social groups and individuals, the discovery of the patron's identity and of the extent of his influence upon the fonn of the work, the examination of changes in the art market and in the modes of organizing artistic production. All these are questions of which the putting and solution are but little affected by any particular ideology, though even here those aspects and modes of explanation will naturally tend to be preferred which are appropriate to conditions of life at the time. For example, appraisal of current market conditions and of the relationship between artist and patron is never altogether unaffected by the social position and economic prospects of those who carry on the business of art history. Nevertheless, in this sort of question we certainly need not give up hope of finding out "how it actually was." But the central problem of art history is the interpretation and evaluation of styles, and here it must be questioned whether one should even aim at objectivity and immutability of judgment. Can one, should one, experience and appreciate works of art in a sort of vacuum without any presuppositions? Does not their meaning and value consist in a satisfaction of particular, concrete, ideologically conditioned requirements? Is a work of art not a Utopia, the gratification of a need that finds expression in an ideology? Is it not, in Stendhal's phrase, "a promise of happiness"? What can art signify to one who does not judge it from a poSition in real life, who is not entangled in life as deeply, as passionately, as dangerously as the artist himself! Art helps only those who seek her help, coming to her with their qualms of conscience, their doubts, and their prejudices. Dumb to the dumb, she can speak only to those who question her. Analysis of the sociological presuppositions of art history enables us to get a truer view of the problem of ideology, its place in our spiritual life, its importance for the vitality and enlivening power of our thought. Such analysis reminds us that the ideological entanglement of our consciousness also has its good side. It confirms the suspicion that desire to be free of all ideology is just a variant of the old idea of philosophical salvation, which promised the human spirit access to a meta-historical, supernatural, secure world of absolute, eternal values. In a word, it helps us to realize that ideology is not just error, delusion, falsification, but an expression of some requirement, some need, willing, or striving that has wrapped itself in a cloak of seemingly objective, passionless propositions. Man is a creature full of contradictions: not merely existing, but aware of his existence; not merely aware of his existence, but also willing to change it. History is a dialectical controversy between ideology and the 228

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ideal of truth, between willing and knowing, the desire to alter things and the awareness of the inertia of things. We move back and forth endlessly within the space set by the material conditions of our life and by our aims. All talk of an end to the movement, that is, an end of history, whether on Hegelian or on Marxian lines, is pure speculation. For rational thinking, the limits of history coincide with the limitations of man....

Scope and Limitations of Sociology of Art Culture serves to protect society. Spiritual creations, traditions, conventions, and institutions are but ways and means of social organization. Religion, philosophy, science, and art all have their place in the struggle to preserve society. To confine oneself to art, it is first of all a tool of magic, a means of ensuring the livelihood of the primitive horde of hunters. Then it becomes an instrument of animistic religion, u'sed to influence good and bad spirits in the interest of the community. Gradually this is transformed into a magnification of the almighty gods and their earthly representatives, by hymn and panegyric, through statues of gods and kings. Finally, in the form of more or less open propaganda, it is employed in the interests of a close group, a clique, a political party, a social class. Only here and there, in times of relative security or of social estrangement of the artists, it withdraws from the world and makes a show of indifference to practical aims, professing to exist for its own sake and for the sake of beauty. But even then it performs an important social function by providing men with a means of expressing their power and their "conspicuous leisure." Indeed, it achieves much more than that, promoting the interests of a certain social stratum by the mere portrayal and implicit acknowledgment of its moral and aesthetic standards of value. The artist, whose whole livelihood, with all his hopes and prospects, depends upon such a social group, becomes quite unintentionally and unconsciously the mouth piece of his customers and patrons. The discovery of the propaganda value of cultural creations, and of art in particular, was made early in human history and exploited to the full, whereas thousands of years passed before man was ready to acknowledge the ideological character of art in terms of an explicit theory, to express the idea that art pursues practical aims either consciously or unconsciously, is either open or veiled propaganda. The philosophers of the French, and even of the Greek enlightenment, discovered the relativity of cultural standards, and doubts regarding the objectivity and ideality of 229

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human valuations were expressed again and again in the course of the centuries; Marx, however, was the first to formulate explicitly the conception that spiritual values are political weapons. He taught that every spiritual creation, every scientific notion, every portrayal of reality derives from a certain particular aspect of truth, viewed from a perspective of social interest, and is accordingly restricted and distorted. But Marx neglected to note that we wage a continual war against such distorting tendencies in our thought, that in spite of the inevitable partialities of our mental outlook, we do possess the power of examining our own thought critically, and so correcting to a certain extent the one-sidedness and error of our views. Every honest attempt to discover the truth and depict things faithfully is a struggle against one's own subjectivity and partiality, one's individual and class interests; one can seek to become aware of these as a source of error, while realizing that they can never be finally excluded. Engels understood this process of pulling oneself out of the mud by one's own bootstraps when he spoke of the "triumph of realism" in Balzac. But no doubt such correcting of our ideological falsification of the truth operates within the limits of what is thinkable and imaginable from our place in the world, not in a vacuum of abstract freedom. And the fact that there are such limits of objectivity is the ultimate and decisive justification for a sociology of culture; they stop up the last loophole by which we might hope to escape from the influence of social causation. Apart from its external limitations, the sociology of art also has internal limitations. All art is socially conditioned, but not everything in art is definable in sociological terms. Above all, artistic excellence is not so definable; it has no sociological equivalent. The same social conditions can give rise to valuable or to utterly valueless works, and such works have nothing in common but tendencies more or less irrelevant from the artistic point of view. All that sociology can do is to account in terms of its actual origin for the outlook on life manifested in a work of art, whereas for an appreciation of its quality everything depends upon the creative handling and the mutual relations of the elements expressing that outlook. Such elements may assume the most diverse aesthetic quality, and again the qualitative criteria may be the same in spite of great diversity of outlook. It is no more than an idle dream, a residue of the ideal of kalokagathia, to suppose that social justice and artistic worth in any way coincide, that one can draw any conclusions with regard to the aesthetic success or failure of a work from the social conditions under which it has been produced. The great alliance envisaged by nineteenth-century liberalism between political 230

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progress and genuine art, between democratic and artistic feeling, between the interests of humanity in general and universally valid rules of art was a fantasy without any basis in fact. Even the alleged connection between truth of art and truth in politics, the identification of naturalism with socialism, which was from the beginning a basic thesis of socialistic art theory and still is part of its creed, is very dubious. It might be very satisfying to know that social injustice and political oppression were punished with spiritual sterility, but this is not always the case. There have indeed been periods such as that of the Second Empire, in which the predominance of a not very sympathetic social type was characterized by bad taste and lack of originality in art; but along with that inferior art much valuable work was being produced as well. Along with Octave Feuillet there was Gustave Flaubert, along with the Bouguereaus and Baudrys, artists of the rank of Delacroix and Courbet. It may, however, be significant that from the social and political point of view Delacroix was no closer to Courbet than to Bouguereau, that the common artistic aims of these two artists did not rest upon any sort of political solidarity. Still, on the whole one may say that in the Second Empire the arriviste bourgeoisie got the artists it deserved. But what is one to say about epochs such as those of the Ancient Orient or the Middle Ages, in which a most severe despotism or a most intolerant spiritual dictatorship, far from preventing the production of the greatest art, created conditions of life under which the artist did not seem to suffer in the least, certainly no more than he now fancies himself to suffer under the compulsions of even a very liberal form of government? Does not this sho\y that the preconditions of quality in art lie beyond the alternatives of political freedom or unfreedom, and that such quality is not to be compassed by sociological methods? And what of examples that seem to suggest a contrary view: Greek classical art, which had scarcely any connection with the common people and only the very slightest connection with democracy? Or the IIdemocracy" of the Italian Renaissance, which was anything but a democracy in reality? Or cases from our own day which show the attitude of the masses to art? ... Objections to social history of art as a method of interpretation result mostly from attributing to it aims that it neither can nor wiIl carry out. Only the very crudest type of social history would seek to represent a particular type of art as the homogeneous, conclusive, and direct expression of a particular form of society. The art of a historicaIIy complex age can never be homogeneous, if only because the society of such an epoch is not homo231

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geneous; it can never be more than the expression of a social stratum, of a group of persons with some common interests; it will exhibit simultaneously just as many different stylistic tendencies as there are different culturallevels within the relevant society. "Inner contradictions" need not, as has been assumed, occur within the same class; they are none the less among the most potent impulses making for change. Art can express the structure of a given society either positively or negatively, can assent to it or reject it, promote some features and oppose others, serve as propaganda weapon, defence mechanism, or safety-valve. It is essential to realize that art's dependence upon society can take the most varied forms, and that apparent opposition is often no more than "negative imitation." There never is complete accord between art and society, or between the different arts within the same society, if only because no historical point can start afresh with its own art; it always starts with a burden, so to speak, of inherited forms, each of which has its own history and tradition, which fit it or unfit it, in various degrees, to take part in the social struggle. No sociology that goes beyond the most naive form of materialism will view art simply as a direct reflection of economic and social conditions. Any critic of the social interpretation of spiritual developments is perfectly right to object to the simple equation of feudalism with formalism, of absolutism with classicism, or of capitalism with individualism. The earliest formulations of historical materialism of any consequence were ready to concede that conditions of production did not manifest themselves in culture directly and literally, that only through a long chain of intermediaries did they find expression in scientific doctrines, moral principles, and creations of art; on the way from "being" to "conscious being" these gradually become more spiritual and more remote from their material origin. Thus the degeneration of the manorial economy and the beginnings of the new town-based monetary economy do not straightway bring about Gothic naturalism; what they do is to loosen ancestral obligations, alter outmoded legal concepts, weaken traditional principles of morality and custom, make hitherto unquestioned dogma seem empty, favor a nominalistic view of the individual, and promote 5t. Thomas's idea that God has joy in all things-because even the least of them has its own unique value---so that in the end they cease to be mere symbols and begin to be interesting in themselves and worthy of representation in art as true and substantial. And however much one might prolong this series, it would still be an arbitrarily shortened, enormously simplified account of the real process, which leads through numberless intermediate steps from 232

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the serf's leaving the soil for the town to the naturalism of a late Gothic altar-piece. Plekhanov once remarked that social conditions could never explain the form of the minuet. Henri Focillon, following the same line of thought, said that the most intensive study of social conditions of the period would never enable us to infer the lines of the Laon Cathedral towers. Such attempts at explanation are foreign to the socio-historical interpretation of art. To explain the form of the minuet or of the towers of Laon in Plekhanov's and Focillon's sense would be a sort of conjuring trick that no scholarly historian would undertake. Social history of art merely asserts-and this is the only sort of assertion which it can seek to substantiate-that artforms are not only forms of individual consciousness, optically or orally conditioned, but also expressions of a socially conditioned world-view. The musical form of the minuet is not "entailed" by the social conditions of the eighteenth century, but the pre-revolutionary world with its refinement, elegance and etiquette, its inclination toward the charming and the playful, was one of the pre-suppositions for the emergence of this kind of art. Eighteenth-century society is in a way implied in the minuet, but the minuet is not implied in the social forms of that society. Each art-form is original and creative, not to be deduced from either the material or the intellectual conditions of the time. If we knew nothing but the social structure of a public, we could neither "picture" nor reconstruct its art, for socially conditioned though it be, the essential unpredictability of the artist's creative gifts renders futile all prediction in the field of art. In this field there can be only correlations, empirically observable links between what goes before and what follows, and such formulations can always be modified or upset; and can never guarantee the recurrence of like effects. But while not allowing of the formulation of laws, such observed links prove very suggestive, somewhat in the way that certain brain operations prove successful in the treatment of some mental disorders without anybody's understanding why; problematic as are the limits of indication and effectiveness of such operations, their success rests upon a definite correlation of surgical and psychiatric data. There is nothing that could be called a universal law of the social history of art. This is not only because there are no rules of artistic creation; besides the irreducibility of art to rules, there is the additional fact that art as a social agency is implicated in a process that never repeats itself and constantly throws up new combinations. In consequence, it is always possible for the social significance of a style to change, even to take on a

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function the very opposite of the function that it fulfilled previously. One need only mention the metamorphoses to be observed if one traces the social role of classicism or romanticism through the centuries. Just as there is no social criterion of artistic quality, so there is no social function that a style fulfils unequivocally; it can be employed in the service of various political and social aims. Yet it is not a completely neutral instrument; but the concept of a style is vaguer than the systematic concepts of sociology and takes its particular social significance on each occasion from the totality of historical forces at work. Thus, a certain social stratum may be inclined to adopt a style simply to be different from its opponents, or to give up a style as compromised through employment by an antagonistic group; but equally, it may employ certain means of expression and influence because its opponents have employed them successfully or because they have become common property and the most effective means of communication. Classicism, which in seventeenth-century France was the representative style of absolute monarchy and the court aristocracy, became, if in a modified form, the official style of the Revolution, primarily because it could be regarded as negation of the standards of taste, protest against the frivolity, of the rococo. As in the course of the eighteenth century the aristocracy, partly in consequence of its social contacts with the bourgeoisie, had come to take more and more pleasure in the intimate effects of the painterly style, so now the opposition in its struggle against the rococo culture of the nobility and the higher bourgeoisie went back to the stylistic ideals of the former ruling class, which, courtly and aristocratic though it was, seemed to be cast in a more heroic mould. Yet, in spite of this changed significance and revaluation of a style, it would be wrong to assert that the artistic aims of the absolute monarchy, the courtly aristocracy, or the revolutionary middle class were independent of and uninfluenced by social and poli tical considerations. Numerous as are the instances of change in social significance of a style, they certainly do not prove that artistic styles are socially unimportant and without effect. Flaubert, Maupassant, and the brothers Goncourt employ naturalism in their guerrilla warfare against bourgeois democracy, although this naturalism was the idiom of the hated bourgeoisie and came into existence partly through bourgeois opposition to the reactionary tendencies of romanticism. Romanticism in its tum is even more ambivalent and kaleidoscopic than naturalism. There is a romanticism of socially progressive and a romanticism of conservative strata: consider the romanticism of the Hellenistic bourgeOiSie, of medieval chivalry, of the late Gothic, of the hispanophile 234

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French nobility, the romanticism of the reaction against revolutionary France and of those classes which were determined to maintain at any cost the spiritual heritage of the Revolution, especially its emancipation of the individual. The romantic movement that gripped all Europe in the age of the Restoration had in one country a predominantly revolutionary character, but in another was rather counter-revolutionary; even within the same country, it sometimes played a liberating role, inspiring the individual with a sense of self-reliance, sometimes an obscurantist role, clouding and confusing the minds of men. We recognize that there were hints of modem romanticism long before the outbreak of the Revolution, but this fact is seen in its proper light only when we realize that the romantic movement would never have had its profound and widespread effect without the achievements of the Revolution, and that it was from the very beginning a symptom of the social crisis that led to the Revolution. The socio-historical treatment of art can claim to be scientific in spite of the fact that no hard and fast laws governing the relation between social form and art-form can be established. For although the social function of the attitudes typical of a style changes, so that these become linked with various class-interests and ways of life, they are still not socially indifferent attitudes, not compatible with any and every social position. There is one romanticism of the medieval knight and another of the modem bourgeoiS, but there is no peasant romanticism. And though one can speak of the artistic rationalism of the fifteenth-century bourgeois and that of the seventeenth-century aristocracy, a rationalism associated with the knightly ideal of life seems inconceivable. A more concrete example: the dramatic unities were introduced into French tragedy for the most part with a view to making more lifelike what went on on the stage; later, however, they lost this realistic significance and became the vehicle of the most extreme stylization; but all the time they represent an essentially rationalistic view of life which would be quite incompatible with the genius of the medieval, as with that of the romantic, drama. To return to the case of naturalism, it is not a monopoly of politically progressive and liberal circles, as socialist art theory will have it; yet a type of society whose interests are bound up with the conservation of socially backward conditions will wherever possible support those tendencies in art which are inclined to idealize existing conditions. None the less, the leaders of this kind of society may on occasion find it advisable to employ naturalistic methods in art, as Gros, for example, who began to paint naturalistic battle-pieces when the misery of the Napoleonic campaigns could no longer be covered up. It was no 235

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doubt a romantic kind of naturalism that was there expressed, the language of the post-revolutionary middle and upper bourgeoisie, whose favor he had to court. This is not a case of inner contradictions within a class, in the Marxist sense, but of the adaptability of a social stratum that possesses its own preferred weapons and tactics, but often has to adopt those of opponents or future allies in order to maintain itself-as, for example, the knightly armies adopted infantry tactics when the age of gunpowder came, the knights giving up, for the sake of survival and the common victory, the chance of winning individual fame. Certainly, the weapons employed may change from time to time and pass from the hands of one group to those of another, but in the face of the spectacle of the dramatic social struggles in which we see art continually implicated, to deny that its tasks and methods are practically conditioned is obstinate blindness. One thing more needs to be said. To recognize that economic conditions often have a decisive influence in shaping spiritual structures is not equivalent to the denial of the bright immaculate supermundane ideals and the willing acceptance of all dark material forces, nor does it mean ascribing to these latter a higher value than to all ideal principles. It does not even necessarily imply that the material factor in history is more real than the ideal factor. It is simply to assert that we never find any human spiritual endeavor unless there is some tension with the material conditions of living. If we give proper weight to this fact, we should concede Marx's thesis about the relation of being and conscious being. This thesis by no means excludes the possibility that ideal factors may react upon material conditions. The objection that the human spirit often runs counter to all economic incentives, and can emancipate itself from them by an act of will is not fatal to historical materialism. For the kernel of that doctrine is the assertion that spiritual achievements originate in a dialectical relationship to economic conditions of production; it does not suppose that they are mere copies of the economic conditions. In some cases the dialectical contest may actually end with the outward triumph of the ideal, giving rise to idealistic constructions that seem for the time being able to override the material limitations upon man's spirit. But the important question is to what extent a certain idealistic point of view is tied to particular external circumstances, to what extent it presupposes particular external, material conditions in SOciety. As a king is no less of a social figure than a beggar, so idealism has its roots in social conditions no less than materialism has. The individual's subjective feeling of independence cannot be taken too seri236

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ously in comparison with the objective facts that have been established by historical materialism. The real objection to this doctrine is that it has not been content to note the dialectical development arising from the opposition of material and ideal factors, but has replaced the untenable doctrine of the absoluteness of spirit by the equally untenable absoluteness of matter, one metaphysic by another. The employment of the sociological method in the history of art does not necessarily presuppose this extreme form of historical materialism. It need not imply a claim to give a strictly sociological explanation of the talent of the individual artist, with all his particular impulses and inclinations. It is merely that we are guided by the principle that one individual's opposition to some collective tendency of the time, no less than another individual's acceptance of it, is partly a product of social forces. The artist no doubt produces what he will and as he will, but the question of what elements go to make up his "will" always remains. The artist, to be sure, has the last word, but the role of those who have the last but one is not to be underrated, especially as their word can normally be detected in the utterance of the artist. The weakest of the objections raised against the sociological point of view is that the creators of the great works of art were extraordinary persons in that they were "great solitaries." We are unduly narrowing the concept of "the social" if we take it to exclude solitariness. Even W.B. Yeats inappropriately restricts the field of social efficacy with his dictum: "A work of art is the social act of a solitary man," for he sets up an opposition between the social product and its lonely creator, ignoring the fact that loneliness is a social category, and that as an individual experience it can exist only in a society. One can certainly be alone in all sorts of circumstances, but one can only feel lonely in a world in which others somehow or other partake. For reasons that psychoanalysis is able to explain in part, the artist is more estranged from his society than most other men, but it is not obvious that in consequence of this estrangement artistic activity must be more intractable to the SOciologist than any other occupation or obsession. If one allows that some social preconditions of criminality can be found, it seems incomprehensible that one should not admit similar social conditions of artistic production. The spiritual world of the artist may be incomparably more complex than that of the criminal, but as far as the relation between individual freedom and social causation goes, there seems to be no difference of principle between the creation of a work of art and the commission of a crime.

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The work of art is indeed something incommensurable on account of the good fortune its creator enjoys and the happiness it bestows on others. That is why those who have had most experience of that happiness have wanted to base the interpretation of art upon principles that should be unique and peculiar to it; no method that has proved useful for anything else seems good enough. This is the only explanation for such assertions as: "Social history of art is as senseless as an art history of society would be." But the cleverness of the formulation should not blind us to the unsatisfactory substance of the thought. The fact that sociological concepts do not enable us to comprehend the essence of art is not to say that art cannot be elucidated by sociological concepts any more than can society by aesthetic concepts. The relationship between art and society cannot be thus simply reversed. Society is anything but an aesthetic phenomenon, whereas art is an eminently social achievement; whatever else it may be, it is among other things a product of social forces and a source of social effects. About the forces operative in art and the effects that proceed from it much that is noteworthy can be said without presuming to fathom its intrinsic being or fearing to dispel its magic.

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Nicos Hadjinicolaou Art History and Class Struggle Any scientific treatment of the history of art must encompass not only the concepts of 'social class' and 'class struggle', but also all the terms which describe particular social groups such as social category, autonomous fraction of a class, fraction of a class, and social stratum. It is not proposed to define these here, but it must be stressed that any concrete analysis of a picture from a historically determined period requires a knowledge of them so that the art historian can recognise them in their historical reality. It is, however, necessary to pay close attention to one concept, ideology, which is of vital importance for the discipline of art history.

Ideology Just as people take part in economic and political activity, so they take part in religious, moral, aesthetic and philosophical activities, and their ideology is the relatively coherent system of ideas, values and beliefs that they develop. Ideology is concerned with the world in which they live, their links with nature, society, other people, and their own activi ties, including their political and economic activities. In fact people express in their ideology not their actual relation to their situation in life, but the way in which they see this relation-which implies a dual relation to reality, one real and one imagined. Thus ideology signifies their relation to 'their world'. It expresses the inevitable coalescence of their actual and their imagined relation to the true conditions of their existence. In ideology, the actual relationship is determined by the imagined relationship, which expresse a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describes a reality. On the one hand it follows that ideology must be an illusion, because it is so interwoven with an imaginary view of life. Its social function is not to provide people with a real understanding of the structure of society, but to give them a motive for continuing the practical activities which support that structure. In a class-ridden society, the structure ensures that class exploitation is not conducted nakedly. Its operations are veiled so that society can function in an acceptable way, and this of necessity impedes human vision of it. Thus even when ideology contains elements of knowledge, it is still inherently flawed and of necessity only partially equates to reality. 239

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On the other hand it follows that the internal workings of ideology are not apparent. This brings us to the question of the inner coherence of the ideological level, that is to say of its structure and its relation to the ruling class. The very function of ideology, as opposed to science, is to hide the contradictions in life by fabricating an illusory system of ideas which shapes people's views and gives them a perspective on their experience of life. Since this system has a relationship with human experience in society, ideology does not cover just the rudiments of knowledge, ideas, and so on, but also extends to myths, symbols, taste, style, fashion, and the whole 'way of life' of a particular society. However, each ideology can only function within the limits of a particular society and the predominant mode of economic production. The contradictions which are contained within that society and which, taken together, form its unity, are the raw materials which ideology shapes into an imaginary coherence. The structure of the ideological level derives therefore from the system of society, and its specific role is to reflect unity in the imaginary system it builds. It should now be clear that ideology-the ideological level-is an organic part of every society. Human societies need these systems of ideas and beliefs in order to survive, and they secrete ideology as if it were an essential nourishment for their being and for their historical continuance.

Ideology and the Ruling Class If the relation of the ideological level of society to social classes and the ruling class is considered more closely, it is clear that in societies divided into classes the fundamental function of ideology is determined by class relations. Dominant ideology corresponds to the politically ruling class because the ideological level is constituted within the overall structure of a SOCiety which has as an effect the domination of a particular class in the field of class struggle. The dominant ideology, while it ensures that people keep their place within the social structure, at the same time aims at the preservation and cohesion of this structure, principally through class exploitation and dominance. It is in this precise sense that in the ideological level of a society the prevailing ideas, values, opinions, beliefs and so on are those that perpetuate class domination; thus this level is dominated by what may be called the ideology of the ruling class. It follows that if the function of ideology in general is to conceal contradictions, then the function of the dominant ideology, the ideology of the 240

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ruling classes, is a fortiori the same. This is bound to have serious consequences for all historical disciplines which are concerned with the various forms of ideology, including art history. This is a crucial point for understanding ideology and the ideological class struggle. Ideology's positive or affirmative character is shown in the very way in which it works, making the struggle appear as a struggle without opponents, or a combat without combatants. It is paradoxical that, in spite of what the word 'struggle' seems to suggest, participation in the class struggle does not only involve the propagation, defence, condemnation or glorification of the political or social ideas of a class (this is only one aspect of the struggle and necessitates a certain degree of class consciousness), but requires the affirmation of class values which apparently have nothing to do with politics or the division of society into classes. These values are concerned with the unity of society, with the successes and misfortunes of mankind as a whole, and with the provision of a positive world view. Their affirmative character is a fundamental aspect of ideology. This explains why I have thought it necessary to introduce the term 'positive ideology' for all those ideologies which manifest this affirmative character, and 'critical ideology' for those ideologies which are more or less openly opposed to particular class practices or class ideologies (usually ruling-class ideologies). The distinction between 'positive visual ideology' and 'critical visual ideology' that I make later in order to clarify the concept of 'style' is based on this fundamental aspect of ideology. The way in which the ruling ideology is expressed often borrows features from ways of life which differ radically from that of the ruling class, and which may even belong to the explOited classes. In any society one may also find whole sub-systems, functioning by themselves with relative autonomy in regard to the ruling ideology (for example, in a capitalist society one can find feudal and petit-bourgeois sub-systems, and so on). We have just considered the role of the ruling ideology as the decisive element in ideological social relations. The second important element which is characteristic of the ideological level is its division into spheres, of which one always dominates the others.

Ideology and its Spheres or Forms There are different spheres or forms of the ideological level: for example, the moral, legal, political, religious, economic, philosophical and aesthetic spheres. The process by which one sphere dominates the others is ex241

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tremely complex. This is apparent even in the fact that the other spheres function by borrowing the ideas and ways of working of the dominant sphere. It is no accident that within the limits of the dominant ideology one sphere influences all the rest. This sphere provides as it were a distorting mirror through which is reflected the whole structure from which the dominant ideology derives its determining position, and by means of which the structure appears as a coherent whole. Thus it could be said that the role of ideology consists not just in concealing the economic level, which in the last analysis is always the determining factor, but also in obscuring the dominant role which might be played by another level, and the actual fact of its dominance. The dominant sphere or form of the ideological level is the one which, for different reasons in different historical periods, can best carry out the task of providing this disguise. Before going further, it must be emphasised that ideological spheres or forms have real differences and very varied ways of working internally, even though they all belong to the ideological level. This means that in a concrete historical analysis the art historian has to undertake a great deal of work before he can show that they all belong to the same class ideology. It is a long and difficult road that leads from ascertainment of the existence of a historically determined 'pictorial' ideological form and a historically determined religiOUS ideological form, to proof that they both belong to the ideology of the same social class. This study concentrates its interest on the sphere or, ultimately, the spheres, which are related to the production of pictures. In order to discover these spheres, and leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the production of pictures is itself a form of ideological activity, one should consider whether there are some spheres which by definition form an integral part of the ideological level and are fundamentally bound up with the production of pictures. If one substitutes the concept of 'aesthetic ideologies' for 'writings on art', one can affirm that the sphere of the ideological level which corresponds to the production of pictures is the sphere of aesthetic ideology. Here one is approaching a very heterogeneous field, covering many categories: in every society the sphere of aesthetic ideology is determined by the ideology of the ruling class, though as we have seen the process is effected through the influence of a different sphere, and in addition it is divided into sub-spheres according to the system of 'the arts' current in each period (for example, there are sub-spheres of aesthetic ideology concerning painting, music, and so forth). 242

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The different sub-spheres can be seen in the various practices of aesthetic ideology, for example, art criticism in daily newspapers or periodicals, and art history, philosophy of art, aesthetics and sociology of art in the appropriate publications, as well as the artists' own memoirs, letters or private diaries, and their fictionalised biographies. To sum up, it is the sphere of aesthetic ideology which is important in this context, because it is directly concerned with the production of pictures. The relevant sub-sphere may be called 'the aesthetic ideology of the picture', and this includes all writings on the subject which have appeared in the course of history. In accordance with the thesis that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles', it can be stated that 'the history of the aesthetic ideologies of pictures forms one part of the general history of class struggles'....

The Ideology of a Picture Without anticipating propositions which have yet to be put forward, it can be said that every picture is an ideological work, independently of its quality. In this sense the world that it reveals is the world of an ideology, regardless of how realistic the painting may be, for realism is only one of numerous visual ideologies. For the moment, it is enough to stress the fact that the ideology of a picture is literally a visual ideology, and not a political or literary ideology; it can only be found within the limits of a picture'S two dimensions, even though at the same time it has specific links with other kinds of ideology which may be literary, political, philosophical, and so on. It remains to be seen what exactly is a visual ideology, how it can be localised, what its particular features are, and what is its relation to the ideological class struggle. These questions go to the heart of the problem and are in my view of decisive importance for the future of art history as a science, for on their solution depends the definition of the subject-matter of art history. Three major difficulties have to be resolved, which must be viewed as obstacles barring access to the desired definition and thus to a scientific knowledge of the production of pictures and its history. The obstacles take the form of three ideological conceptions of art history. All three, in spite of appearances, are variants of middle-class art ideology. In one way they illustrate the evolution of the middle class itself, but they also represent no more nor less than the fortunes of art history. This comes to the same thing, for no one can deny that from the beginning art history as a scientific discipline has been dominated by middle-class ideology. 243

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The first obstacle is the conception of art history as a history of artists. This is the oldest and still today the most widespread conception, certainly in writings which aim to popularise art, except in the universities, although even here the monograph on an artist continues to predominate as a thesis subject. This conception presupposes an identity between an artist and his work which is assumed to be self-evident, and which disguises the relationship between painting and the ideology of a social group to such an extent that all understanding of it is lost. The second obstacle is the conception of art history as forming part of the general history of civilisation. This conception, which relies on the supposed link between 'art' and the 'general spirit' of a society, a civilisation or an epoch, ignores the existence of a link between artistic production and class ideologies. The third obstacle is the conception of art history as a history of works of art. This conception views art in complete isolation from all social classes and their ideologies, and again denies the existence of a link between art and ideology and the ideological class struggle. There are common elements to all these variants, which will help to reveal the structure of bourgeois art ideology. It should be pointed out, as Marx did in his letter to Weydemeyer, that although 10ng before me bourgeois historians have described the historical development of this class struggle', they had largely done so when the bourgeoisie was in the ascendant. Even then, some areas were avoided. For instance, in the field of art, bourgeois theoreticians have always been silent on the very factor to which they had first given prominence: social classes and class struggle. Schematically, bourgeois art ideology is composed of the following elements: a.Only works considered masterpieces are grouped under the heading of art. Works considered as minor are largely ignored. b.Works of art are considered to have been executed by creative geniuses and to show the homogenous spirit of an epoch, thus forming the heritage of the whole of humanity. Oass ideologies are ignored. c.The twin notions of form and content predominate, form being the one to which 'aesthetic value' is attributed. The relationship of style to overall class ideology is ignored ....

Vulgar Marxism If all these variants of bourgeois ideology have flourished in art history,

perhaps it should be recognised that they have done so largely because of 244

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an almost total absence of marxist research in this field, and also because of the predominance of vulgar marxism over marxism. In the first place it must be admitted that marxist research in this area lags behind. This can be easily explained by the fact that in capitalist countries other research work (in economics, politics or even literature because it is much more widely diffused among the people) has been given priority and for decades has used up nearly all the energy available for marxist endeavours. It is, however, also due to a particular idea of marxism itself. This idea necessarily has an impact on art history which claims to be marxist in origin. There are two significant misconceptions which should be pointed out. Firstly, there is a confusion between the demands for militant art, which is indispensible to contemporary political and ideological struggle (but which, far from being imposed, can only flourish as the result of a need to intervene freely experienced by the artist), and the requirements relating to the interpretation of pictures from earlier times. Secondly, there is a false assimilation of Irealism' to a specific artistic school. These two misconceptions, which correspond to an aesthetic ideology determined by a political ideology, are closely linked to each other, not to say inseparable. It is convenient, however, to consider them one by one. The confusion between the demands for militant art and the requirements for the interpretation of pictures from the past is not confined to currents of marxist thought in capitalist countries. It is even and above all in countries where the revolution has triumphed that art history is practised either in accordance with the conventions of the liberal middle class eart history as the history of culture' or even las the history of form'), or just as a propaganda weapon to promote the doctrine of realism. Both bourgeois and vulgar marxist tendencies have existed side by side in the Soviet Union since the 1920s, but it is the former that has gained ground. An art historian like Mikhail Alpatov, who does not have the remotest connection with marxism, and who is considered in the Soviet Union today as the major art historian in the country (with La sa rev, who specialises in Russian and Byzantine art) personifies the path trodden in his country for the last forty years. Other Isocialist' countries have taken a similar path, except Albania and China where vulgar marxism tends to predominate. Given that the conception of the discipline of art history as an instrument of propaganda for realism has very little to offer, it follows that the different variants of bourgeois ideology exert their influence unchallenged. This theoretical inadequacy is revealed in the fact that every analysis con245

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cerned with the art of the past has as its point of reference the Communist Party's current views on contemporary art. Vulgar marxist ideology does not see any difference between the political level and the ideological level-in other words it does not see the specificity of the ideological level-and, therefore, this school of thought is chiefly interested in works of the past with political subjects, that is to say with a more or less overt political character. In this sense, art history becomes the history of visual images with political subjects considered 'progressive'. However, if it is acceptable to expect of present-day committed artists and party members not of course to work according to some given aesthetic rules but to utilise their talents ideologically on the side of the proletariat and the people, then it is not acceptable to interpret pictures of the past without taking their specificity into consideration. They belong to a different historical period, and so cannot be hastily forced into a present-day mould. On the question of attitudes to living artists and contemporary art, it is interesting to compare two diametrically opposite points of view. Andrei Zhdanov, in his introductory speech to a conference of Soviet musicians in January 1948, expatiated: Painting is your sister-muse. As you know, at one time there were strong bourgeois influences at work in painting which came to the surface now and again under extremely 1eft' flags and attached to themselves names like futurism, cubism, and modernism. Under the slogan of 'Overthrow rotten academism' they called for innovation, and this innovation reached its most insane point when a girl, for instance, would be portrayed with one head and forty legs, one eye looking at you and the other at the North Pole. How did all that end? With a complete fiasco of the new trend. The Party fully reestablished the significance of the classical heritage of Repin, Bryullov, Vereshchagin, Vasnetsov and Surikov. Did we act correctly when we defended the treasure-house of classical painting and destroyed the liquidators of painting? Or did the Central Committee, in saving the classical heritage in painting, act in a conservative manner and under the influence of 'traditionalism' and 'epigonism' and so on? Utter nonsense, of course! 3 Ten years later the same point of view was defended by Nikita Khruschev, though he based it on different reasoning. In an interview given to two journalists, H. Shapiro and M.H. Hearst, in answer to a ques246

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tion from Shapiro as to whether Ian expansion of different schools in literature and art is possible in the Soviet Union', Khruschev replied: First of all we must clarify what you mean by the tenn Ischool'. Clearly in your sense Ischool' is a particular current in literature and art.... In our literature and art, there is not and cannot be any other current but the Soviet current. By this word current, we understand the reflection of the interests of particular classes and layers of society. Such a current has its own material base, which it could be said gives it the right to exist. There are no hostile classes or layers of society in the Soviet Union. There is a monolithic socialist society in our country; there are only workers in our homeland. Consequently Soviet citizens, our writers and artists, have no need to create different hostile currents; our literature and art are inseparable from the life of the people, and they share their life and interests. 4 There are many marxists who have taken up a position diametrically opposed to Zhdanov and Khruschev, both on art and realism and on the relationship between the Party and living artists. The most important is undoubtedly Bertolt Brecht. Unfortunately the wealth contained in his writings on these questions has not yet received the attention it deserves. In any case, it would appear that the best definition of general principles on this issue has been formulated by the political leader and marxist theoretician Mao Tse-tung, as far back as 1942 in a period when stalinism held sway everywhere else, and again in 1957. Therefore the position he espoused in his speech entitled IOn the Correct Handling of the Contradictions among the People' cannot be explained by the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, and besides it is completely alien to Khruschev's position, which remained essentially stalinist. Analysing the slogans ILet a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend', Mao Tse-tung had this to say: These slogans were put forward in the light of China's specific conditions, on the basis of the recognition that various kinds of contradictions still exist in socialist society, and in response to the country's urgent need to speed up its economic and cultural development. Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress 247

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of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of

art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular school of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled through free discussion in artistic circles and through practical work in these fields. They should not be settled in summary fashion. . .. It will take a fairly long period of time to decide the issue in the ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism in our country. The reason is that the influence of the bourgeoisie and of the intellectuals who come from the old society will remain in our country for a long time to come, and so will their class ideology. If this is not understood, or is not sufficiently understood, the gravest mistakes will be made and the necessity of waging the struggle in the ideological field will be ignored. Ideological struggle is not like other forms of struggle. The only method to be used in this struggle is that of painstaking reasoning and not crude coercion. . .. At the first glance, the two slogans-let a hundred flowers blossom and let a hundred schools of thought contend-have no class character; the proletariat can tum them to account, and so can the bourgeOisie or other people. But different classes, strata and social groups each have their own views on what are fragrant flowers and what are poisonous weeds. What then, from the point of view of the broad masses of the people, should be the criteria today for distinguishing fragrant flowers from poisonous weeds? In the political life of our people, how should right be distinguished from wrong in one's words and actions? . .. The criteria should be as follows: (1) Words and actions should help to unite, and not divide, the people of our various nationalities. (2) They should be beneficial, and not harmful, to socialist transformation and socialist construction. (3) They should help to consolidate, and not undermine or weaken, the people's democratic dictatorship. (4) They 248

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should help to consolidate, and not to undermine or weaken, democratic centralism. (5) They should help to strengthen, and not discard or weaken, the leadership of the Communist Party. (6) They should be beneficial, and not harmful, to international socialist unity and the unity of the peace-loving people of the world. . .. These are po-

litical criteria. Naturally, in judging the validity of scientific theories or assessing the aesthetic value of works of art, additional pertinent criteria are needed. But these six political criteria are applicable to all activities in the arts and sciences. In a socialist country like ours, can there possibly be any useful scientific or artistic activity which runs counter to these political criteria? 5 A comparison between the two positions held by Zhdanov and Khruschev on the one hand and Mao Tse-tung on the other is illuminating. It shows up the disastrous consequences of Zhdanov's and Khruschev's ideas: first, the illusion that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production is enough to put an end to the class struggle (which Khruschev holds strongly); second, the identification of the Central Committee's point of view with the 'Soviet current' and the consideration of every other point of view as anti-Soviet or counter-revolutionary (Zhdanov and Khruschev); and thirdly, the failure to recognise the specificities of ideology and the ideological struggle among the people, and the illusion that administrative measures can be used in ideological matters to resolve the existing contradictions (especially in Zhdanov). On the other hand, Mao Tse-tung justly appreciates the specificities and relative autonomy of the ideological level as well as of the ideological struggle among the people. He recognises that there are specific criteria for analYSing and criticising 'artistic' and scientific productions, and that the last word about them must be given to 'artists' and scholars, although it is indispensible that the people take part in criticism. He understands too the necessity for a framework or limits within which all productions and criticism are permissible; this must be a political framework defined by general criteria which determine the artist's and the scholar'S freedom-'can there possibly be any useful scientific or artistic activity which runs counter to these political criteria?'. In my opinion, this point of view is valid not only for the concrete conditions pertaining in China, as Mao Tse-tung has claimed, but for every country, although the general political criteria established must in each case reflect the specific conditions of that country. 6 249

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Let us go back to the application of vulgar marxism to the art of the past, and take the conception of art history based on themes in pictures. The kind of art history which is exclusively interested in themes describing the life of the people or political events, and which is based on a monolithic conception of 'realism' enriched with insights into political history or the development of the productive forces, is found for example in the General History of Art written by a group of members of the Institute of Theory and History of the Fine Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts of the USSR. Another version of vulgar marxist art history corresponds to the idea of art history as a history of 'progressive' artists. This conception, although it claims to be marxist, neglects historical and dialectical analysis, and up to the present has only succeeded in setting up a kind of pantheon of 'realist' artists: Caravaggio, the Dutch school, Velasquez, Goya, Hogarth, Delacroix, Gericault, Daumier, Millet, Courbet, Veneziano v and the nineteenth-century Russian school, the impressionists, Kollwitz, and their contemporary imitators. All the rest are forgotten, or at best a few of their best-known works, their 'masterpieces' are allowed a half-hearted conventional description. It may be said without too much exaggeration that artists are divided into two categories: 'reactionary artists of every age' (Botticelli, Rubens, Boucher, Ingres, Gustave Moreau) and 'democratic artists of every age' (Breughel, Delacroix, Manet, Repin, Otto Dix)! It is for this reason that the works of an artist of the calibre of Raphael still await an analysis which will do them justice, while in the meantime the bourgeoisie has been doing its best to appropriate them. It is not that Raphael's works are 'essentially democratic'. The pOint is, they should be analysed and explained by reference to their time, as should every artist's work ....

Visual Ideology When I speak of visual ideology, I intend the term to be understood in a literal sense: 'a specific combination of the formal and thematic elements of a picture through which people express the way they relate their lives to the conditions of their existence, a combination which constitutes a particular form of the overall ideology of a social class' .... So visual ideology, like style, is not an objective fact, nor can it be identified with a 'fact' such as a visual image, but it is a theoretical concept which allows us a better grasp of the particularities of the production of pictures and its history. This history is none other than the history of visual ideologies. In this sense, we can substitute for the old bourgeois

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watchword of the 1920s, 'art history is the history of styles', the following: 'the history of the production of pictures is the history of visual ideologies'. It follows that the subject-matter of the discipline of art history is the visual ideologies that have occurred in the course of time. The sense of visual ideology can be further elucidated by linking it with the concept of ideology in general. It will be recalled that 'in ideology the real relation of men to their real conditions of existence is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality.... The place that a social class occupies in society enforces a specific view of social reality that no other class possesses. Dominant classes and dominated classes (even though the latter may, as has been pointed out earlier, be impregnated with the ideology of the dominant classes) cannot have the same ideology. Even within each class, there are sections or layers which have their own individual features at the ideological level. It would seem therefore that this two-way allusion-illusion feature which characterises ideology in general is also a feature of visual ideology. Each style makes allusion to reality, to one particular reality which is the combination of the consciousness a class has of itself and its view of the world. This allusion to reality goes together with an illusion about the objective place the class occupies within class relations in a society. Historical analysis of each visual ideology is needed to reveal this two-way allusiveillusory process which characterises the production of pictures in general. One may therefore conclude that the production of pictures constitutes a sphere of the ideological level, since every picture belongs to a visual ideology even when it can in some way be considered as inaugurating a new one. However one must not forget that this sphere has specific features and some autonomy even though it is not independent. Its autonomy is shown by the fact that the elements of which it is composed do not exist as such, or certainly not all of them, in other types of ideology. Its dependence is shown by the fact that it is always determined by other types or spheres of the ideological level, according to the mode of production and the social formation. Thus, to give an example, between the fourth and fourteenth centuries within the ideological level the sphere of visual ideology was determined by the sphere of religious ideology....

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Positive and Critical Visual Ideologies The concept of visual ideology must now be expanded, bearing in mind the distinction in the definition of ideology that was made at the beginning of this book between positive or affirmative ideology and critical ideology. In fact, if it is true that the essence of every picture lies in its visual ideology, it is also true that in the course of history one can discern two different kinds of visual ideology manifesting themselves in individual paintings: one which I shall subsequently call 'positive visual ideology' and one which I shall call 'critical visual ideology'. Positive visual ideology implies that there is no apparent contradiction in the relationship between a work's visual ideology and other types of ideology to which some elements of the picture refer. This positive, non-antagonistic relationship can go so far as to glorify other types of ideology through visual ideologies (this is the case with political and religiOUS allegories, for instance). On the other hand, critical visual ideology implies that a work's visual ideology exerts a critical function in regard to other non-visual kinds of ideologies, some elements of which are to be found in the work. Criticism is carried out through the treatment of the work's subject. So, from the point of view of the relationship between art and knowledge, both positive and critical ideology (in their problematical relationship with other types of ideology) reveal and help us to 'know' their relationship with the overall ideology of a social class, and eventually their relationship with some contemporary non-visual ideologies. However, this kind of knowledge is not scientific but rather is felt or experienced, and requires the art historian's intervention in order to be transformed into scientific knowledge....

Rembrandt: Rape of Ganymede This is a painting which belongs to baroque visual ideology and more particularly to one of its regional manifestations, 'Dutch baroque visual ideology'. The role played here by mythology has already been cited in regard to Rubens' Drunken Silenus. Rembrandt also took his subject from mythology, from Ovid's Metamorphoses. 7 This time however the subject, the abduction of the young man Ganymede by an amorous Jupiter who transformed himself into an eagle in order to bear Ganymede away to Olympus, does not fulfil the same function, and even offers a radical critique.

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This critique, which has been given the misleading designation of 'de-heroisation' is expressed through the manner in which the mythological subject is treated: instead of a handsome youth who submits ecstatically to his abductor, we see a weeping child urinating because he is so frightened of the huge bird which has carried him off just when he was happily eating cherries ..... Rembrandt's Rape of Ganymede criticised in the most ferocious way ruling ideas at the court and in contemporary humanist circles. In the name of what and whom was this criticism made? If one was still a prisoner of the psychological explanation of art, one would have either to invent for Rembrandt this notorious religious revulsion which he felt for the sexual practices of Antiquity, or concoct a sort of private vengeance (as far as is known Rembrandt was not commissioned to paint the Rape of Ganymede) which he intended to wreak on the humanists of whom he might be supposed to be jealous because they were culturally or socially above him, and so on ad infinitum. All these paths lead nowhere. One cannot explain Rembrandt's paintings through Rembrandt himself. The criticism exercised by the Rape of Ganymede relies on the principle of 'disenchantment with the world' (Max Weber) which is to be found at the very foundation of the ideology of the Calvinist or Mennonite Dutch bourgeoisie. Rembrandt's picture is unique in that it criticises a subject typical of baroque visual ideology while at the same time it belongs to this very visual ideology. Nevertheless the criticism is fierce and ruthless: it is aimed at, and reaches, the highest 'values' of a class, the nervous centre of its ideology, revealing to us the intensity of the ideological struggle in Holland when it was being produced....

Ideology and Aesthetic Effect Art does not exist. To speak of Art is, as has already been pointed out, a feature of bourgeois aesthetic ideology. Art as a single unit does not exist; what does exist are various arts, various types of production such as the production of pictures, music, and so on. From this pOint of view, it is clear that all paintings produced in history-and not only those considered masterpieces-belong as of right to the history of the production of pictures. The recognition of this fact necessarily entails a change of orientation and method of working in art history. 253

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However, the problem remains: what are the considerations which make a painting a masterpiece at a particular period in history? Visual ideology may be value-free, but are there not some values which must be taken into account? Might not these values be 'aesthetic values'? The question then arises as to whether one can take them into account while utilising the concept of visual ideology, when this concept is indifferent to aesthetic values. I must admit at once that there are some paintings which I personally find 'more beautiful' or 'better done' than others. There are some which I consider masterpieces and others which I consider minor. Is it their aesthetic aspect which gives me this impression? To answer this question, it is necessary to go a step further along the road which may seem to lead to the complete levelling of Art. I deny the existence of an aesthetic effect which can be dissociated from the visual ideology of a work. And I refuse to use even the idea of aesthetic value in art history. Every object, every product of man's endeavour (independently of its importance), provokes a reaction when one looks at it, hears or touches it. The reaction varies from pleasure to displeasure and in the case of pictures changes according to the relationship between the spectator's aesthetic ideology and the visual ideology of the work. Therefore the very notion of aesthetic value and 'aesthetic objects' should be rejected, and the old question must be reformulated in the following manner: why do some paintings arouse more pleasure than others when we look at them? What is the link between this pleasure, visual ideology, and the 'quality' of the paint. ? mg .... On the question of 'aesthetic value', I shall therefore adopt for my own George Boas' thesis, according to which 'works of art are not the locus of one value, known as ''beauty'' or something similar, but are rather multivalent, that certain of their values are experienced by some persons, others by others, and that there is no a priori method ... of determining which of the many values are properly "aesthetic"'. Of course, when Boas writes that 'certain of their values are experienced by some persons, others by others', it is a very vague statement. On the other hand, if one can discover the social status and ideology of all these persons, and if it is understood that the 'values' of a work are nothing but its visual ideology (understood as a specific form of the overall ideology of a social class), then Boas' position becomes clear and concrete and shows us the path to research which we must follow in order to explain the different ways in which a work is appreciated. On the other hand, Boas rightly affirms that every 254

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work of art 'was identical with itself throughout history in name only', and after having justified this affirmation by studying the history of the appreciation of the Mona Lisa he concludes: 'works of art which "withstand the test of time" change their natures as the times change. The work of art becomes thus the locus of a new set of values determined by the preconceptions or the predominant interest of the new critic or observer.' This thesis about the 'change in the nature' of paintings in the course of time is of capital importance. Moreover arguments in its favour can be found in practically every important study on a particular work or on an artist's whole output.... To sum up: aesthetic effect is none other than the pleasure felt by the observer when he recognises himself in a picture's visual ideology. It is incumbent on the art historian to tackle the tasks arising out·of the existence of this recognition, and to found his analysis of a painting's visual ideology on the history of its appreciation. This line of reasoning leads logically to the abandonment of all reflections on 'beauty', 'aesthetic values', 'mimesis', and even what Lukacs calls 'the specificity of the aesthetic effect'. Any such speculation must be incorporated into a concrete historical analysis of the work or style in question. This fusion implies an 'immanent' analysis of the particular work or style which must take two important factors into account: firstly the conditions under which it was produced, and secondly the history of its appreciation stemming from the aesthetic ideologies of various social classes. The recognition that there is no aesthetic effect to be isolated results in certain consequences for aesthetics as a discipline. Just as the field of application of the philosophy of history has been proved not to exist (which has resulted in its disappearance as a discipline), so it may be asserted today that aesthetics will follow philosophy of history into oblivion, because it also is a 'discipline' without subject-matter. It will be replaced by the theory and history of the different arts .... In practice this means that from now on the idealist question 'What is beauty?' or 'Why is this work beautiful?' must be replaced by the materialist question, 'By whom, when and for what reasons was this work thought beautiful?' ...

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Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez Art and Society Aesthetic problems are of increasing interest to Marxist thinkers. There is a general need to go beyond, in this field as well as others, the dogmatic and sectarian conceptions which were prevalent during the years of the Stalinist deformations-theoretical and practical-of Marxism. We must not forget that those deformations were particularly grave in the realm of artistic theory and practice. Furthermore, as aesthetic problems have become increasingly important, the content of Marxism has been enriched, and its humanist character-which includes the essential aesthetic relationshiphas increasingly been emphasized. There is also the need to overcome old, one-sided views of the artistic phenomena of our time. Modern art, apart from the place we assign it socio-historically as part of an ideological superstructure-and regardless of the value we attribute to it on an aesthetic plane, is a rich, complex, and contradictory phenomenon which cannot be approached with the schematic and simplistic criteria that dominated Marxist art criticism until recently....

Art as Ideology Let us look first at the concept of art that reduces it to a form of ideology. Of course, this view of art carries good credentials as Marxist thought; in fact, Marxism has all along emphatically insisted on the ideological nature of artistic creation. According to its cardinal thesis of the relationship between the economic base and the superstructure, art belongs to the superstructure and, in a society divided into classes, is linked to definite interests of particular social classes. But the expression of these interests takes on form: the artist's political, moral, or religious ideas are integrated in an artistic structure or totality that has its own set of laws. As a result of this process of integration or formation, the artistic work appears to be endowed with a certain internal coherence and relative autonomy which thwarts its reduction to a mere ideological phenomenon. The writings of Marx and Engels on the complex web in which artistic phenomena exist, on the endurability of Greek art across changing historical conditions, on the autonomy and dependence of spiritual creations, including art, and on the uneven development of art and society, proscribe the placement of an equal sign between art and ideology in the name of the ideological charac-

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ter of an artistic work. Nevertheless, until only a few years ago one of the most frequent temptations for Marxist aestheticians-and, above all, for literary and artistic critics confronted with specific works of art-has been to over-estimate the role of the ideological factor and consequently to minimize the form, the internal coherence, and the specific laws of the work of art. The Marxist thesis that the artist is socially and historically conditioned, and that his ideological positions playa particular role, in some cases bearing on the artistic fate of his work, does not in any way imply a need to reduce a work of art to its ideological components. And there is even less justification for equating the aesthetic value of a work with the value of its ideas. Even when a particular work clearly shows its class roots, it will continue to live, although those roots-already dry-may not bear new fruits. The work of art thus outgrows the socio-historical ground which gave it birth. Because of its class origin, its ideological character, art is an expression of the social division or gash in humanity; but because of its ability to extend a bridge between people across time and social divisions, art manifests a vocation for universality, and in a certain way prefigures that universal human destiny which will only be effectively realized in a new society, with the abolition of the material and ideological particularisms of social classes. Just as Greek art survived the ideology of slavery, the art of our times will outlive its ideology. To characterize art according to its ideological content ignores a key historical fact: class ideologies come and go, but true art persists. If the specific nature of art lies in its transcendence, because of its durability, of the ideological1imits which made it possible; if it lives or survives by its vocation for universality, thanks to which people living in actual socialist societies can coexist with Greek, medieval, or Renaissance art, then its reduction to ideology-and to its particular elements, its here and now-is a betrayal of its very essence. But at the same time we should not forget that art is made by men who are historically conditioned, and that the universality that art achieves is not the abstract and timeless universality that idealist aestheticians speak of after creating an abyss between art and ideology, or between art and society, but the human universality that is manifested in and through the particular. Thus we see that the relationship between art and ideology is extremely complex and contradictory, and in dealing with this relationship we must avoid-as two equally noxious extremes-either an identification or a radical opposition between art and ideology. The first is characteristic 257

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of ideologizing, subjectivist, or crudely sociological posi tions; and the second is found at times among those who carry their distinction between art and ideology to the point of denying the ideological character of art, thus placing themselves outside Marxism.

Artistic Decadence and Social Decadence In the last few years Marxist aestheticians have taken important steps to overcome these false positions, particularly the crudely sociological position, which as we have seen is the most prevalent and has the oldest roots. However, this process has encountered grave difficulties when it has attempted to go beyond a formulation of general theoretical theses to an analysis of concrete artistic phenomena. This is what happens, for example, in dealing with the phenomenon of modem painting, or contemporary novels with roots in Proust, Joyce, and Kafka. As we know, these artistic manifestations formerly were rejected en bloc, in the name of MarxistLeninist aesthetics, because they were considered decadent. This attitude does not find the support it did a few years ago among Marxist aestheticians. The essence of this position-which inspired the famous Lukacsian dilemma, IIFranz Kafka or Thomas Mann," decadent vanguard ism or realism-is substantially the following: art is decadent when it expresses or portrays a decadent SOciety, when its view of such a society leaves its socio-economic pillars intact, or when its ideological content is decadent or contains elements of decadence. Now then, even given this debatable characterization of artistic decadence, the concept is inapplicable to Kafka's novel The Trial, for example, since the author here gives us a key to an understanding of the abstract, alienated, and absurd nature of human relationships in capitalist society. With regard to the requirement that the artist consciously shake the foundations of society by offering not only a critique but also a set of solutions, Engels has already given a full and convincing retort. And in any case, after we have read Kafka, the pillars on which bureaucratized human relationships rest can no longer appear to us as firm as before. What concerns us here is not whether the concept of decadence is applicable to Kafka-who clearly will not let himself be confined within the narrow framework of Lukacs' dilemma-but whether the very concept of decadence is valid in its application to art. From our point of view, this application shows the same simplistic conception of the relation between 258

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art and ideology we criticized above. This simplification results from a hasty move from the social and ideological to the artistic, thus in a way burning bridges, ignoring the intermediate links and peculiarities that must be taken into account. The concept of decadence is not immutable, to be applied indiscriminately to all ideological forms or to specific artistic phenomena or social periods. Decadent art is not the same as the art of a decadent society; decadence in artistic terms is not the same as decadence in social terms. An artistic movement can be called decadent when, after reaching its apogee, it begins to descend for lack of further creative possibilities. It can also be said that a decadent ideology, or elements of it, may inspire the artistic creations of a society in which the dominant social class, at one time progressive, has. entered its period of decline. But none of this leads to the conclusion that a society in decadence necessarily engenders a decadent art in the sense we give to that term-art in decline due to a weakening or exhaustion of its power to innovate or create. That is as false as the contention-made by A.A. Zhdanov in 1948-that socialism engenders a vanguard art, superior by the mere fact of its being an expression of a superior stage of social development. Likewise, we cannot apply the category of progress-and indeed, Marx never did-to two related but distinct fields. In short, what is false with regard to the ascendant phase of a social movement or dominant class is also false in dealing with its decadent phase. In our opinion, no true art can be decadent. Artistic decadence appears only with the falsifications, constriction, or exhaustion of the creative forces which are objectified in the work of art. The elements of decadence a work may contain-pessimism, loss of energy, attractio~ for the abnormal and morbid, etc.-express a decadent attitude toward life. But from an artistic point of view those elements can take only one of two roads: either they are so powerful that they wear out the creative impulse, or they are integrated and transcended in the work of art, thus contributing, through the curious dialectic of the negation of the negation, to an affirmation of man's creative power, which is precisely the negation of a decadent outlook on life....

Art as Creation So let realism extend its boundaries without excluding or absorbing other artistic phenomena, and let us look for a more profound and primary stra259

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tum of art, one that does not identify art with a particular tendency-realist, symbolist, abstract, etc.-or rigidly restrict its development, and one that enables us to understand art in its totality as an essential human activity. Only in this way can we avoid, from a Marxist point of view, the limitations of a merely ideological, sociological, or cognitive conception of art. Certainly, art has an ideological content, but only in the proportion that ideology loses its substantiveness by being integrated into the new reality of the work of art. That is, the ideological problems that the artist chooses to deal with have to be solved artistically. Art can have a cognitive function also, that of reflecting the essence of the real; but this function can only be fulfilled by creating a new reality, not by copying or imitating existing reality. In other words, the cognitive problems that the artist chooses to deal with have to be solved artistically. To forget this-that is, to reduce art to ideology or to a mere form of knowledge-is to forget that the work of art is, above all, creation, a manifestation of the creative power of man. In the failure to recognize this lie the limitations of the concept of art we examined previously. From a truly aesthetic point of view, the work of art does not depend for its life on either the ideology that inspires it or its function of reflecting reality. It exists by itself with its own reality, into which that which it expresses or reflects is integrated. A work of art is primarily a human creation, and it exists through the creative power it incarnates. This point of view allows us to see the historical development of art as an infinite process that cannot be enclosed within the limits of a determinate movement. Ideological or sociological criteria ignore the law of the uneven development of art and society. They talk of superior and inferior art, or progressive and decadent art, ignoring the specific nature of artistic activity as a manifestation of the creative power of man. Realist criteria underline the cognitive function of art, making it the sole function, overlooking the other functions art can fulfill and has fulfilled historically; realist criteria ignore the fact that art, as a human product, not only represents or reflects man, but also makes him present, objectified. Certainly, human presence is not the exclusive property of works of art, and even less of a particular tendency in art. If, as Marx said, technology is an opening to the essential forces of man, then we have even more reason to say that so is art, whether it be ornamental, symbolist, realist, or abstract. Precisely because it is a superior form of creation, an exceptional testimony to creative existence, humanity is present in every work of art. In this sense, man is as present in the pre-Colombian Coatlicue as in the shoes of Van Gogh's 260

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peasant, or in a Christ by Rouault, or in an apple by Cezanne. The organization of colors and forms does not cease to be a manifestation of man's creative capacity whether it depicts a human face, a stone, or a tree, or even if its reference to external reality is minimal. Man is not lost in the transition from representational to nonrepresentational art; what happens is that the process of humanization, characteristic of art, follows a different road. That is why there is no point in speaking rigidly of the dehumanization of art where there is real creativity. The dehumanization of art-its alienation-would be its own negation, the exclusion of all objectification or presence of human reality. By emphasizing the human presence in artwhether realist or not-we point to its most profound and basic level: its quality of being a particular form of creative work. The roots of this idea can be found in one of Marx's youthful works, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In order to arrive at this conclusion we must overcome, as Marx did, the idea that art and work are antagonistic activities, an idea which resulted either from a failure to see the creative character of human work (a forced, mercenary activity, according to KanO, therefore excluding it from the sphere of freedom, or from reducing work to a merely economic category, without understanding its relationship to man, to the human essence (work, according to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was to produce material goods, and was the basis of all material wealth). Hegel had perceived the commonality of art and work, although in an idealist manner (see The Phenomenology of the Spirit on the role of work in the development of man, or man as a product of his own work), but it was Marx who first saw clearly that the relationship between art and work lay in their common creative character. Consequently, Marx conceived of this creative character not only as an economic category (source of material wealth) but as an ambivalent philosophical category (source of human wealth and misery). The idea that art is an activity that, by prolonging the positive aspect of work, manifests the creative capacity of man permits an infinite extension of the boundaries of art, without confining it to any particular ism. Although the work of art can fulfill the most diverse functions-ideological, educational, social, expressive, cognitive, decorative, etc.-as it has throughout the history of art, it can only fulfill these functions as an object created by man. Whatever internal or external reality it may refer to, a work of art is, above all, a creation of man, a new reality. The essential function of art is to broaden and enrich, with its creations, a reality already humanized by human work. 261

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The idea of art as creation precludes the establishment of formal criteria that can be applied to any future artistic work. Rooting ourselves finnly on this basic level, we can avoid falling into a closed, dogmatic idea of art. If creation is the substance of all true art, then we cannot exclude any particular artistic tendency; realism, therefore, has no monopoly on creation. But we would be creating a new dogmatism if we saw the break with visible reality as the only creative impulse. The theory that the growing infidelity of painting to external reality, which began with impressionism, is an advance toward the conquest of the true creative nature of art forgets that a truly realistic painting is always creation. Realist art deserves its name not because it has recourse to external reality, but above all because it can order real forms and figures in such a way as to place them in a relationship to man. Real creation is just as opposed to direct, fonnless expression as to an imitation or copy; on the other hand, it does not exclude a formed or structured expression-of an ideological nature, for example-any more than it rules out the use of real figures. The representation does not in itself constitute creation, but neither is its abolition a necessary guarantee of, or condition for, creative activity. Those who think this way will find themselves in a situation similar to that of Kant's famous dove, who thought that if it were not for the resistance of air it would be able to fly in total freedom ....

Alienation and Artistic Work In capitalist society, a work of art is "productive" when it is market-oriented, when it submits itself to the exigencies of the market, the fluctuations of supply and demand. And since there is no objective measure by which to determine the value of his particular merchandise, the artist is subject to the tastes, preferences, ideas, and aesthetic notions of those who influence the market. Inasmuch as he produces works of art destined for a market that absorbs them, the artist cannot fail to heed the exigencies of this market: they often affect the content as well as the form of a work of art, thus placing limitations on the artist, stifling his creative potential, his individuality. A form of alienation is thus produced, denaturalizing the essence of artistic work. The artist does not fully recognize himself in his product, because anything produced in response to external necessity is alien to him. This alienation becomes total when the sense of artistic creation is inverted, and artistic activity becomes not an end but a means of subsistence.

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The material utility required of the products of human labor is a necessary condition, for these products are intended for satisfaction of material needs; and it is only within the framework of these needs that man can affirm, objectify, and recognize himself. But the predominance of material utility in the work of art contradicts the very essence of art; for unlike common merchandise its primary aim is not the satisfaction of determinate needs but the satisfaction of man's general need to express and affirm himself in the objective world. In this manner, capitalist society deprives the artist of creative freedom. In a society where a work of art can sink to the level of merchandise, art becomes alienated or impoverished; it loses its essence. When Marx pointed out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts that art under capitalism "falls under the general law of production," he was clearly alluding to this degradation of artistic creation; these early remarks formed the basis of his later theories on the contradiction between art and capitalism, between production for profit and creative freedom. But even under capitalism the artist tries to escape alienation, for alienated art is the very negation of art. The artist does not resign himself to becoming a salaried worker. By seeking to satisfy his inner need as a social being, the artist tends to transcend the alienation that inverts the sense of artistic creation, and thus he tends to overcome the alienation of his own existence. He searches for ways of escaping alienation, refusing to submit his work to the fate of all merchandise, winning his freedom at the price of terrible privations. But the source of this alienation lies outside of art; it is fundamentally a socioeconomic alienation. Therefore, according to Marx, only a change in social relations can enable labor to reclaim its true human sense and art to be a means of satisfying profound spiritual needs. That is why the salvation of art is not in art itself, but in the revolutionary transformation of the socioeconomic relations which permit the degradation of artistic work by placing it under the general law of capitalist commodity production ....

The Task of Aesthetic Theory Starting from an analysis of the place in human existence of man's aesthetic relationship to reality and of the role of art as part of the ideological superstructure in a society divided into antagonistic classes, Marxist aesthetics must at the same time deal with certain problems which are ignored by sociological aesthetics, such as the structure of a work of art, the dialec263

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tic of its universality and particularity, its durability, the specific character of artistic objectification, expression, and communication, the relationship between art and reality, the nature of artistic reality, etc. These problems must be resolved on the basis of a recognition of the social conditioning of art, taking into account the thesis that a work of art is a unique totality which can be divided into what we call content and form only by means of abstractions. But when it is a matter of explaining an act-art-we have no other recourse except to abstract from it its essential aspects. The task of aesthetic theory cannot be identified with that of art criticism. The critic evaluates a particular work and tries to base his evaluation on specific aesthetic principles, although he may not always be fully conscious of doing this. Aesthetic theory is concerned not with accounting for a unique work of art, but with an explanation of the specifically human phenomenon we call art, which occurs in a historical context and is concretized in a store of particular creations.... We must avoid subjectivism or empty generalizations which dissolve the specificity of art. Our conception of religion, for example, does not imply that we should ignore the significance of religion for medieval art. The subject-object relationship in the process of cognition cannot be mechanically equated with the relationship between the artist and reality. A critique of bourgeois social relations should not lead to a rejection of the great art that has been created within the framework of those relations, namely, art that transcends the class interests to which it responded.

Against Artistic Normativism and Academicism Marxist aesthetic theory attempts to give an account of what is, not of what should be. It does not outline norms or rules of creation: it is thus incompatible with normativism.... As soon as a theory stops changing, or a particular abstraction is regarded as definitive, or a limited set of determining factors is deemed sufficient to express reality, then theory ceases to have any value; if in spite of this we impose a value on that theory as a guide to action, or praxis-including artistic praxis-we should distinguish between a theory which springs from the movement of reality as an expression of its essential determinations and can therefore help guide praxis, and what is nothing more than a normative doctrine or strait-jacket for the creative impulse.... No objective conditions exist under socialism which could bring about such artistic normativism; no specific class interests could serve as 264

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its basis. However, bureaucracy and dogmatism in the socialist countries can create (and indeed did create, in the period of the personality cult) conditions which allow the emergence of artistic normativism, manifested in the application of administrative and coercive methods to the field of art. A Marxist theory of aesthetics must try to avoid this Scylla and Charybdis choice which threatens every theory. It must strive to maintain a close, vital contact with the artistic experience which celebrates the past as well as with modern artistic practice....

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T. J. Clark On The Social History of Art When one writes the social history of art, it is easier to define what methods to avoid than propose a set of methods for systematic use, like a carpenter presenting his bag of tools, or a philosopher his premises. So I begin by naming some taboos. I am not interested in the notion of works of art 'reflecting' ideologies, social relations, or history. Equally, I do not want to talk about history as 'background' to the work of art-as something which is essentially absent from the work of art and its production, but which occasionally puts in an appearance. (The intrusion of history discovered, it seems, by 'common sense': there is a special category of historical references which can be identified in this way.) I want also to reject the idea that the artist's point of reference as a social being is, a priori, the artistic community. On this view, history is transmitted to the artist by some fixed route, through some invariable system of mediations: the artist responds to the values and ideas of the artistic community (in our period that means, for the best artists, the ideology of the avant-garde), which in tum are altered by changes in the general values and ideas of society, which in tum are determined by historical conditions. For example, Courbet is influenced by Realism which is influenced by Positivism which is the product of Capitalist Materialism. One can sprinkle as much detail on the nouns in that sentence as one likes; it is the verbs which are the matter. Lastly, I do not want the social history of art to depend on intuitive analogies between form and ideological content-on saying, for example, that the lack of firm compositional focus in Courbet's Burial at Ornans is an expression of the painter's egalitarianism, or that Manet's fragmented composition in the extraordinary View of the Paris World's Fair (1867) is a visual equivalent of human alienation in industrial society. Of course analogies between form and content cannot be avoided altogether-for a start, the language of formal analYSis itself is full of them. The very word 'composition', let alone formal 'organization', is a concept which includes aspects of form and content, and suggests in itself certain kinds of relation between them-all the more persuasively because it never states them out loud. For that reason it is actually a strength of social art history that it makes its analogies specific and overt: however crude the equations I mentioned, they represent some kind of advance on the lan-

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guage of formal analysis, just because they make their prejudices clear. Flirting with hidden analogies is worse than working openly with inelegant ones, precisely because the latter can be criticized directly. In any discourse analogies are useful and treacherous at the same time; they open up the field of study, but may simply have deformed it; they are a kind of hypothesis that must be tested against other evidence. This is as true of art history as any other discipline. Faced with the strange and disturbing construction of the Burial at Omans, it would be sheer cowardice not to give some account of the meaning of that construction; but I shall try to keep that account in contact and conflict with other kinds of historical explanation. The question is: what in this subject can be studied, once these various comforting structures are set aside? Must we retreat at once to a radically restricted, empirical notion of the social history of art, and focus our attention on the immediate conditions of artistic production and reception: patronage, sales, criticism, public opinion? Oearly these are the important fields of study: they are the concrete means of access to the subject; time and again they are what we start from. But, to put it briefly, the study of anyone 'factor' in artistic production leads us very swiftly back to the general problems we hoped to avoid. The study of patronage and sales in the nineteenth century cannot even be conducted without some general theory-admitted or repressed-of the structure of a capitalist economy. Imagine a study of the critical reaction to Courbet which had no notion of the function of art criticism in nineteenth-century Paris, no theory of the critics' own social situation, their commitments, their equivocal relationhalf contemptuous, half servile-to the mass public of the Salons. Perhaps I should have said remember, not imagine: the kind of haphazard collage which results, the dreary mixture of 'absurd' and lsensitive' remarks, is all too familiar to art historians. Not that I want to ignore the critics and the texture of what they wrote: on the contrary. No less than forty-five writers had their say about Courbet in the Salon of 1851, and that mass of words is crucial evidence for us. It makes up a complex dialogue-between artist and critic, between critic and critic, between critic and public (sometimes that public makes an appearance, in imaginary form, within the criticism itself; for the most part it is an implied presence, a shadow, an occlusion; it is what critic and artist, in their civilized and hypocritical discourse, agree to leave out-but without success). In that weird, monotonous chorus, what matters is the structure of the whole, and the whole as a structure hiding and revealing

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the relation of the artist to his public. For our purposes, the public is different from the audience: the latter can be examined empirically, and should be. The more we know about the audience-about the social classes of Paris, the consumption habits of the bourgeoisie, how many people went to exhibitions-the more we shall understand that curious transformation in which it is given form, imagined, by the critic and by the artist himself. As for the public, we could make an analogy with Freudian theory. The unconscious is nothing but its conscious representations, its closure in the faults, silences and caesuras of normal discourse. In the same way, the public is nothing but the private representations that are made of it, in this case in the discourse of the critic. Like the analyst listening to his patient, what interests us, if we want to discover the meaning of this mass of criticism, are the points at which the rational monotone of the critic breaks, fails, falters; we are interested in the phenomena of obsessive repetition, repeated irrelevance, anger suddenly discharged-the points where the criticism is incomprehensible are the keys to its comprehension. The public, like the unconscious, is present only where it ceases; yet it determines the structure of private discourse; it is the key to what cannot be said, and no subject is more important. These are, I think the only adequate attitudes to patronage and criticism in this period. And they lead us back to the terrain of those earlier theories I rejected-that is, the complex relation of the artist to the total historical situation, and in particular to the traditions of representation available to him. Even if one distrusts the notions of reflection, of historical background, of analogy between artistic form and social ideology, one cannot avoid the problems they suggest. What I want to explain are the connecting links between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the current theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and processes. What the discarded theories share is the notion that all artists experience, answer and give form to their environment in roughly the same way-via the usual channels, one might say. That may be a convenient assumption, but it is certainly wrong. If the social history of art has a specific field of study, it is exactly this-the processes of conversion and relation, which so much art history takes for granted. I want to discover what concrete transactions are hidden behind the mechanical image of 'reflection', to know how 'background' becomes 'foreground'; instead of analogy between form and content, to discover the network of real, com-

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plex relations between the two. These mediations are themselves historically formed and historically. altered; in the case of each artist, each work of art, they are historically specific. What is barren about the methods that I am criticizing is their picture of history as a definite absence from the act of artistic creation: a support, a determination, a background, something never actually there when the painter stands in front of the canvas, the sculptor asks his model to stand still. There is a mixture of truth and absurdity here. It is true and important that there is a gap between the artist's social experience and his activity of formal representation. Art is autonomous in relation to other historical events and processes, though the grounds of that autonomy alter. It is true that experience of any kind is given form and acquires meaning-in thought, language, line, colour-through structures which we do not choose freely, which are to an extent imposed upon us. Like it or not, for the artist those structures are specifically aesthetic-as Courbet put it in his 1855 Manifesto, the artistic tradition is the very material of individual expression. 'To know in order to be able to do, that was my idea'; '5avoir pour pouvoir, telle Jut rna pensee.' Nevertheless, there is a difference between the artist's contact with aesthetic tradition and his contact with the artistic world and its aesthetic ideologies. Without the first contact there is no art; but when the second contact is deliberately attenuated or bypassed, there is often art at its greatest. The point is this: the encounter with history and its specific determinations is made by the artist himself. The social history of art sets out to discover the general nature of the structures that he encounters willy-nilly; but it also wants to locate the specific conditions of one such meeting. How, in a particular case, a content of experience becomes a form, an event becomes an image, boredom becomes its representation, despair becomes spleen: these are the problems. And they lead us back to the idea that art is sometimes historically effective. The making of a work of art is one historical process among other acts, events and structures-it is a series of actions in but also on history. It may become intelligible only within the context of given and imposed structures of meaning; but in its tum it can alter and at times disrupt these structures. A work of art may have ideology (in other words, those ideas, images and values which are generally accepted, dominant) as its material, but it works that material; it gives it a new form and at certain moments that new form is in itself a subversion of ideology. Something like that happened in the Salon of 1851. I have been arguing for a history of mediations, for an account of 269

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their change and ambiguity. What this means in practice may become clearer if I tie it down to some familiar problems of art history. Take, for example, the artist's relation to the artistic world and its shared ideologies. In its usual form this is a question of the artist's membership of one particular 'school'-in particular whether or not he was one of the avant-garde. Clearly we want to know how the avant-garde was fonned, but we equally want to know what it was for; in both cases what we need is a sense that the category itself is fundamentally unstable, illusory. To write a history of the avant-garde simply in terms of personnel, recruitment, fashion: nothing could be more misguided. It ignores the essential-that the concept of avant-garde is itself profoundly ideological; that the aim of the avant-garde was to snatch a transitory and essentially false identity from the unity of the Parisian artistic world. It is the unity that is fundamental, not the factions. The more we look at the artistic world in Paris, the more its schools and dogmas seem an artifice; what really mattered was the ease of transition from attitude to attitude, style to style, posture to imposture. Balzac was the great exponent of such transformations; below him (below his real, hard-won inclusiveness) lesser men traded allegiances, played at metamorphosis for a living. Gautier, the refined Pamassian poet and the agile, time-serving critic, could write a poem to the mummified hand of the poetmurderer Lacenaire (which Maxime du Camp kept in a jar), or could dash off a set of pornographic letters to Madame Saba tier. The same Madame Saba tier, queen of the literary salons in the early 1850s, was portrayed at one time or another by Flaubert, Gautier (in his official role), Clesinger, Baudelaire, even Meissonier. A minor figure like the novelist Duranty could combine aggressive Realism with a projected biography of Baudelaire; Baudelaire himself was reconciled with his Catholic critic Veuillot. These are random examples; the list could go on indefinitely. In such a world, being avant-garde was just an institutionalized variant of everyone's gambit. It was a kind of initiation rite-a trek out into the bush for a while, then a return to privileged status within the world you had left. It was a finishing-school, an unabashed form of social climbing. When we look at Champfleury, Courbet's mentor and parasite, we see that process to perfection. In this light the real history of the avant-garde is the history of those who bypassed, ignored and rejected it; a history of secrecy and isolation; a history of escape from the avant-garde and even from Paris itself. The hero of that history is Rimbaud, but it makes sense of many others in the nine-

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teenth century: Stendhal, Gericault, Lautreamont, Van Gogh, Cezanne. It applies precisely, I think, to four of the greatest artists of the mid-nineteenth century: Millet, Daumier, Courbet and Baudelaire. . .. Each of them had truck with the avant-garde and its ideas; each of them was part of it at certain moments or in certain moods; but in each case the relationship is shifting and ambiguous, a problem rather than a 'given'. We shall not solve the problem by counting heads known, ideas shared, salons visited. Count these by all means, but also measure the distance these men established from Paris and its coteries. We need to search for the conditions of this distance: the reasons for rejection and escape as much as the continuing dependence on the world of art and its values. We need also to distinguish avant-garde from Bohemia: they fought, for a start, on different sides of the barricades in June: the Bohemians with the insurrection, and the avant-garde, of course, with the forces of order. We need to unearth the real Bohemia from the avant-garde's fantasy of it; to rescue Bohemia from Murger's Scenes de la Vie de Boheme. These are distinctions with some relevance to the present. This brings us back to the problem of artist and public. I want to put back ambiguity into that relation: to stop thinking in terms of the public as an identifiable 'thing' whose needs the artist notes, satisfies or rejects. The public is a prescience or a phantasy within the work and within the process of its production. It is something the artist himself invents, in his solitude-though often in spite of himself, and never quite as he would wish.... For the artist, inventing, affronting, satisfying, defying his public is an integral part of the act of creation. We can go further-we need to, if we are to understand the strength of mid nineteenth-century art and the desperation of what followed. It is when one of those stances towards the public becomes an autonomous or over-riding consideration (on the one hand, €pater Ie bourgeois, on the other, producing specifically for the market), or when the public becomes either too fixed and concrete a presence or too abstract and unreal a concept, that a radical sickness of art begins. All this is vital because Courbet was an artist for whom the public was very much present, richly, ambiguously defined: subject-matter and spectator, the mainspring of his art. I am talking here of Courbet in his thirties, from 1848 to 1856, the great period of his painting. His decline after 1856 had a lot to do with the disappearance of that public. Finally, there is the old familiar question of art history. What use did the artist make of pictorial tradition; what forms, what schemata, enabled 271

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the painter to see and to depict? It is often seen as the only question. It is certainly a crucial one, but when one writes the social history of art one is bound to see it in a different light; one is concerned with what prevents representation as much as what allows it; one studies blindness as much as vision.... When the blindness is breached by extreme circumstances the result is pathos. Listen to Tocqueville, suddenly confronted, when the National Assembly was invaded by the clubs on 15 May 1848, with the arch-revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui: It was then I saw appear, in his tum at the rostrum, a man whom I never saw save on that day, but whose memory has always filled me with disgust and horror. His cheeks were pale and faded, his lips white; he looked ill, evil, foul, with a dirty pallor and the appearance of a mouldering corpse; no linen as far as one could see, an old black frock-coat thrown about spindly and emaciated limbs; he might have lived in a sewer and have just emerged from it. I was told that this was Blanqui. It is not merely that this description of Blanqui is untrue-though we have only to put Tocqueville's paragraph against the drawing by David d' Angers (done eight years earlier) to show that. It is more that we are confronted with prejudice which clearly believes itself to be description: before our eyes depiction changes into ideology.... So the problem of schema and pictorial tradition is rather altered. The question becomes: in order to see certain things, what should we believe about them? What enables an artist to make effective use of a certain schema or the formal language of a certain artist of the past? There is nothing unchanging or automatic about this. To take one example, it became quite fashionable in certain circles after 1848 to admire the art of the seventeenth-century brothers Le Nain. Several critics praised them; several artists attempted to imitate them. But your Le Nains and my Le Nains? Courbet's Le Nains and Champfleury's? Worlds apart, we shall discoverindeed, what Champfleury half-laughingly called their weaknesses, Courbet went ahead and used. What we want to know are the reasons for that difference; and we shan't find them by adding up 'influences'. The same thing applies to popular imagery. When Courbet said, in his 1850 letter to Francis Wey, that he wanted to draw his science from the people, he meant, among other things, pictorial science. All his circle of friends and admirers were interested in popular art; but how many put it

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to use instead of collecting it? How many realized that they needed its fonns and structures if, 'below a certain social plane', they were to see at all? Courbet did; his friend Buchon knew it but could not act upon it; I doubt if Champfleury, the great propagandist for popular imagery, really understood the point. So here too one must integrate the separate arthistorical problem into a wider account; one must ask, ultimately, what kind of 'visibility' a certain symbolic system made possible; and in what specific circumstances one artist could take advantage of this, and another fail to. To answer merely in terms of artistic competence is just begging the question. There is thus a general question which cannot be avoided, though the means of access to it must be particular: whether we can discover in the complex and specific material of a single artist's historical situation and experience the foundation of his unique subject-matter and 'style'. Let us take the case of Courbet. It is fairly easy to list the various factors to be taken into account when we talk about his art: his situation in rural society and his experience of changes within it; the various representations-verbal and visual-of rural society available to him; the social structure of Paris in the 1840s; the iconography of Bohemia and his use of it; the nature and function of his notorious life-style in the city; the artistic ideas of the period; the aspects of artistic tradition which interested him. We shall have to give flesh to these bare categories of experience; but the list itself, however elaborate, stays this side of explanation. The real problem is to describe the specific constellation of these factors in 1849-1851, and what determined that constellation. In other words, what made Courbet's art distinctive, effective, at a certain moment? To answer that, we shall have to go far afield, from painting to politics, from a judgment of colour to more general concerns-concerns which touch the State, which move anger and delight because they are the concerns of many. But we shall discover these politics in the particular, in the event, in the work of art. Our starting point is a certain moment of historical coalescence--a gesture, or a painting, which is supercharged with historical meaning, round which significance clusters. The Burial at Ornans, the Stonebreakers and the Peasants of Flagey are paintings like this-the more we look and enquire, the more facets of social reality they seem to touch and animate. Take one small but significant gesture to illustrate the point. In May 1850, in Salins in the Jura, a religious procession took place. The Procureur

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general, the political prosecutor of the regime, reported on the matter to the Minister in Paris: The situation in the town of Salins, the most degenerate of all the Jura towns, shows signs of improving. The processions for Corpus Christi day were very colourful and went off in a very orderly way; a special procession, ordered in this town by the Bishop of Saint-Claude, to atone for Proudhon'5 blasphemies, did not give rise to any disturbances, even minor ones. We were extremely surprised to see citizen Max Buchon taking part in this procession, candle in hand, and in a state of perfect composure; he is one of the leaders of the Socialist party, a professed advocate of the doctrine of Proudhon, and apparently his intimate friend. Did his presence at this ceremony indicate, as many have supposed, sincere contrition? I see it rather as one of those eccentricities which we have long since been led to expect from this man, who loves above all to strike a pose and make himself a talking-point. Max Buchon cracks a joke: one which typifies the time. Jokes resemble art, certain Freudians have suggested, in their treatment of unconscious material; perhaps in their treatment of historical material too. Buchon's joke plays on his audience's doubts about history; he puts the unexpected in contact, confuses codes; instead of an argument he uses an act and its ambiguity. In this particular case, the tactic was advisable-it was difficult, even in 1850, to send a man to jail for a joke you did not quite understand, and Buchon wanted to avoid jail (he had been acquitted of revolutionary conspiracy four months earlier at the Jura assizes). As with the pictures, I shall later have to explain the point of the joke and its material, spoiling it in the process. We shall have to know more about Buchon himself, Courbet's oldest friend, poet and translator, dedicated revolutionary. More also about Salins and the strange politiCS of 1850; about the radical confusion of religion and politics after 1848; about the nature of this kind of public irony, the whiff of the dandy and Baudelaire in the whole performance (if Proudhon was no dandy, some of his followers were). Knowing about Buchon and Salins (a twenty-five-mile walk from Omans, and Courbet's point of political reference) will eventually lead us back to the Burial at Omans, the beadles' red noses and Buchon's place in that particular religious procession (he lurks in the background, sixth from the left). 274

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From a wisecrack to a masterpiece; but in both cases it is what is done to the historical material that counts. Joke and picture play with different contexts of meaning in order to constitute an individuality. Discover the codes by all means. Investigate burials, religion, Salins and Omans; describe the political temper of the Jura, the social significance of a frock-coat and spats. But remember also that Buchon and Courbet juggle with meanings, switch codes, lay false trails and make one thing, not many. (A quick pun, not an immense shaggy dog story.) Look at the process of transformation-call it work, call it play-as well as what the work is done to. Striking that balance is sometimes difficult, especially in the social history of art. Just because it invites us to more contexts than usual-to a material denser than the great tradition-it may lead us far from the 'work itself'. But the work itself may appear in curious, unexpected places; and, once disclosed in a new location, the work may never look the same again. I have been saying that there can be no art history apart from other kinds of history. But let us restrict ourselves in a rough and ready way to art history 'proper'. Even within the discipline-perhaps especially here, just because its limits are so artificial-there is a problem of choice of perspectives. So far, nineteenth-century art history has usually been studied under two headings: the history of an heroic avant-garde, and the movement away from literary and historical subject-matter towards an art of pure sensation. But what a bore these two histories have become! It is not that they are false in any simple sense-just that they are no more than fragments of the story. And one cannot help feeling that what they miss is precisely the essential. Try to understand, for example, the careers of Cezanne and Van Gogh with their aid! We shall retrieve the meaning of these concepts only if we demote them, uncover the avant-garde only if we criticize it, see the point of an art of pure sensation only if we put back the terror into the whole project. In other words, explain Mallarme's words to Villiers de I'Isle-Adam: 'You will be terrified to learn that I have arrived at the idea of the Universe by sensation alone (and that, for example, to keep firm hold of the notion of pure Nothingness I had to impose on my brain the sensation of the absolute void).' Which leads us straight to Hegel and other disagreeable topics. What we need, and what a study of anyone period or problem in detail suggests, is a multiplicity of perspectives. Let me name a few, more or less in note form. 275

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First, the dominance of classicism in nineteenth-century art-not just the continuing power of academic classicism in the Salon, but the bias of French art towards an introspective, fantastic, deeply literary painting and sculpture which drew on antique form and subject-matter. An art history which sees Chasseriau, Moreau, Gerome, Rodin, Puvis and Maurice Denis as marginal episodes, rather than the most vivid representatives of a vigorous, enduring tradition-that art history will not do. Precisely because it fails to account for the ambivalence of artists whom we call avant-garde: the classicism of Corot, of Daumier, of Millet, Degas, Seurat. Realism is an episode against the grain of French art; and therefore its forms have to be extreme, explosive. Hence Courbet's Realism; hence Cubist realism which looked back to Courbet as its extremist founding father; hence, finally, Dada. And hence also the neo-classical reaction against all three. Second, the progress of individualism in French art-which is something different from the movement towards an art of absolute sensation. It was a doctrine with confusing implications for the arts. Moreau and Rodin thought it meant the reworking of classical form and content. Courbet thought it meant immersion in the physical world, a rediscovery of the self the other side of matter (in this he was the carrier of his friends' Hegelianism). Gautier and the classicists thought it an unworthy ideal. Individualism was the platitude of the age, contradictory, inflated, often absurd; yet somehow or other the idea that art was nothing if not the expression of an individuality, and that its disciplines were all means to this ambiguous end, survived. The Realist movement was shot through with this dogma; why it persisted, and what in practical terms it prescribed, is a central nineteenth-century problem. Third, whether to sanctify the newly dominant classes or to look for a means to subvert their power. Whether to address your respectful, ironic preface Aux Bourgeois; or to climb the barricades, hands black with powder, to dispute their rule. Baudelaire tried both solutions in the space of two years, and then gradually retreated into an icy disdain: 'What does it matter whether the bourgeoisie keeps or loses an illusion?', as he commented in 1859. But it continued to matter for artists; they continued to wonder whether bourgeois existence was heroic, or degraded, or somehow conveniently both. They did so because it was a doubt that touched their own identity. Was one to be, as in Renoir's Portrait of Alfred Sisley and his Wife, the artist as bourgeois; or was one to be, in fact or dream, in a thousand evasive self-portraits, the artist as outcast? Or, perhaps, the artist as opponent-Courbet's intention, which also persisted. (In the 1880s and 1890s art and anarchism renewed their contact.)

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Fourth, the problem of popular art, which is part of this wider crisis of confidence. In its most acute form-in Courbet, in Manet, in Seuratthe problem was whether to exploi t popular forms and iconography to reanimate the culture of the dominant classes, or attempt some kind of provocative fusion of the two, and in so doing destroy the dominance of the latter. On its own, a Utopian project. But one which haunted French art, from Gericault's London lithographs to Van Gogh's Arlesian portraits. Hence, once again, the connection of art with political action. Fifth and last, the withering-away of art. In a century which 'liberated the forms of creation from art'-the century of the photograph, the Eiffel Tower, the Commune-iconoclasm is not incidental. No theme is more insistent; it is, necessarily, part of the century's Realism: Iconoclasm and I'Art pour l'Art are different responses to the same unease. When Proudhon wrote in Philosophie du progres in November 1851, 'For our own most rapid regeneration, I should like to see the museums, cathedrals, palaces, salons, boudoirs, with all their furniture, ancient and modem, thrown to the flames-and artists forbidden to practise their art for fifty years. Once the past was forgotten, we would do something', he was, surprisingly, addressing himself to the same problem that exercised Gautier. His bluster is only the other side of Gautier's irony ('You think me cold and do not see that I am imposing on myself an artificial calm,' as Baudelaire put it later) . . Somewhere between irony and bluster lie Courbet's attitudes, or Baudelaire's conviction in 1851 that 'art had to be inseparable from ... utility'. In Baudelaire's case that belief lasted three or four years at the most; afterwards came blackness, despair, the first poetry to celebrate 'the theatrical and joyless futility of everything' (Jacques Vache). If art was useless, so was life; and that was not an idiosyncratic conclusion. It leads us to Mallarme's 'horrible vision of a work that is pure' ('vision horrible d'une oeuvre pure'), to Tzara's 'Rhymes ring with the assonance of the currencies, and the inflexion slips along the line of the belly in profile', and to Miro's 'murder of painting'. The inheritor of Baudelaire's short-lived belief is Surrealism: in Breton's words, We have nothing to do with literature, but we are quite capable, when the need arises, of making use of it like everyone else'. Though by then the implications of that belief were clearer: to quote the Surrealist Declaration of 1925, We are not utopians: we conceive of this Revolution only in its social form.'

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When Proudhon talked in Du principe de i'art of creative activity entering the world and taking it as its material, to be altered directly and not just on canvas, he echoed Hegel but presaged the modems. Malevich said, 'Let us seize the world from the hands of nature and build a new world belonging to man himself.' And Mondrian: 'One day the time will come when we shall be able to-do without all the arts, as we know them now; beauty will have ripened into palpable reality. Humanity will not lose much by missing art.'

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Notes 1

2

3

4

Quoted from the second selection in this section, p. 210 See G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.W. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) 1: 30-32. Andrei Zhdanov, On Literature, Music and Philosophy, London: Lawrence and Wishart 1950, p. 65

Etudes sovietiques, supplement to no. 118, January 1958, p. 5.

5

Mao Tse-tung, 'On the correct handling of the contradictions among the people' Four Essays on Philosophy, Peking 1966, pp. 113-20.

6

The text from Mao Tse-tung quoted is addressed to the artists in a given society, and concerns artistic production in the present, and indeed the future; it does not therefore necessarily apply to past production. However, it is possible to find elsewhere a few precious remarks from him concerning the analysis of the artistic production of the past. Thus at the 1942 forum on literature and art he made a closing speech on 23 May in which he affirmed the existence of two criteria for literary and artistic criticism, one political and one artistic, and postulated the existence of scientific criteria for analysing art; he then made the following axiomatic remark which seems to me fundamental: 'We deny not only that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable political criterion, but also that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable artistic criterion; each class in every class society has its own political and artistic criteria ..' (Mao Tse-tung in 'On literature and art', Selected Works, vol. III, Peking: Foreign Languages Press 1967, p. 89) Of course, as I shall try to show, Mao Tse-tung's distinction between political and artistic criteria ('Politics cannot be equated with art') cannot solve the problem of the class character of artistic production. The central concepts necessary for analysing 'artistic' production will be found in ideology.

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7

IThe King of the gods once burned with love for Phrygian Ganymede, and something was found which Jove would rather be than what he was. Still he did not deign to take the form of any bird save only that which could bear his thunderbolts. Wi thou t delay he cleft the air on his lying wings and stole away the Trojan boy, who even now, though against the will ofJuno,mingles the nectar and attends the cups of]ove.' (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann Ltd. 1971, vol. II, p. 75.)

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Suggestions for further reading Primary sources Brief excerpts from the sections of Marx's writings relevant to theory of art can be found in a number of anthologies: Marxism and Art (1972) edited by Berel Lang and Forrest Williams; Marxism and Art (1973) edited by Maynard Solomon, and Karl Marx/Frederick Engels on Literature and Art (1974) edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. Literature and Art (1947) by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels provides a selection of their writings specifically on art and literature. Mikhail Lipschitz, on whose work Literature and Art is based, produced in the 1930s a proposed model of the theory of art implied by these writings: see The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1938) edited by Angel Flores, translated by Ralph Winne Many writers have developed theories of art based on Marx's writings. Selections are contained in the ~nthologies already mentioned. Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) is perhaps the best known and most influential though other modem Marxists have attacked his views. See History and Class Consciousness (1918, English translation 1971). The great dramatist Bertolt Brecht, though a Marxist, was one of Lukacs critics. Walter Benjamin has been much read recently, particularly his article 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936 reprinted in Illuminations 1970). Ernst Fischer's The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (1959) remains valuable. Lucien Goldmann's Cultural Creation in Modern Society (1971) has been influential. Stefan Morawski's Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics (1974) takes a moderate Marxist line, demonstrating acquaintance with the full range of debate in the Western World on questions of the theory of art. With regard to the application of a sociological approach to visual art, Hauser's The Philosophy of Art History (1959), from which our selection is taken, should be read as well as Mannerism (1965) which studies developments in 16th century art from a sociological point of view. Also see his four-volume The Social History of Art (1958) and the more recent Sociology of Art (1982). T.]. Clark has provided ample illustration of how his version of the sociological approach works in writing art history. Besides Image of the People, from which the selection here is taken, he published in the same year The Absolute Bourgeois and in 1985 The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of

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Olympia in 1865' (Screen, 1980) has been much referred to. In section two attention was drawn to other essays by Clark which deal polemically with Greenberg's theory and with the more general question of the nature of modernism. Also valuable are the writings of the French art historian Frederic Antal, for example, Classicism and Romanticism (1966) and Florentine Painting and Its Social Background (1948). John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) is a popular work, the product of a series of BBC television lectures. Janet Wolff's Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (1982) is a fresh, analytic and readable discussion by a sociologist of the relevance of sociological considerations to aesthetic theories and questions.

Secondary sources On Marx's general theories see Robert C. Tucker's Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (1961), and two helpful works by David McLellan: The Thought of Karl Marx (1971) and Karl Marx: Early Texts (1971). On his theory of art see Marx's Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts (1984) by Margaret Rose. Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present contains a useful short account of the ferment in Russia during the twenties and the development of Socialist Realism. In this connection the authoritative primary documents are writings by Andrei Zhdanov; see Essays on Literature, Philosophy and Music (1950) and his contribution to the First AlIUnion Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. In 'The Impossibility of a Uniquely Authentic Marxist Aesthetics' British Journal of Aesthetics 16 (1976) James P. Scanlon argues that the controversies of the twenties are rooted in conflicting emphases in the writings of Marx and Engels, and that Socialist Realism is contradicted by the early and other incidental writings of Marx and Engels. A short account of Lukacs' views is given in Rene Wellek's Four Critics (1981) and a longer, though still relatively brief account, in Georg Lukacs (1970) by George Lichteim. Monroe Beardsley offers a brief characterization and criticism of the Marxist approach to evaluation of art in his Aesthetics (1958). Roger Scruton in The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) presents general criticism of Marxist art theory. In 'The New Art History and Art Criticism', in The New Art History (1986) edited by A.L. Rees and F.B. Borzello, Paul Avery assesses critically Clark's achievement as art historian in applying the

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sociological approach. Michael Fried criticizes Clark in the essay referred to in the readings for section two: 'How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark'. Given his own intellectual history, Herbert Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1976) is interesting reading.

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5 Semiotics and Structuralism Introduction Even more than in the case of the other sections it must be stressed that the selections presented constitute nothing more than an introduction. The double-barrelled title already suggests an embarrassment: are we dealing with one movement or two? In fact semiotics (or semiology, the term often preferred in Europe), let alone structuralism, is used to cover a considerable variety of positions. In the case of movements such as the expression theory and formalism the approaches in their alternative versions have already been pretty thoroughly worked out. Here we are dealing with a dynamic movement (or movements?) which has not only developed already in different ways but also continues to develop. The fluidity of the situation is brought out by reflecting that some thinkers prominent in this line of development display equally clearly other lines of influence such as Marxism or psychoanalysis or formalism. If one is forced to draw a conclusion it appears to be something very vague: that we have here a number of exciting and influential writers and ideas displaying at most family resemblance. If one insists on a general characterization, semiotics at least tends to be concerned with the resemblances between various sorts of human activities and artifacts which we would ordinarily speak of as signs or symbols. Beyond that it is claimed that many things we would not ordinarily describe as instances of sign-using should be so viewed, for example, fashions in clothes. For the sake of terminology I shall refer briefly to a writer and line of development not represented in the anthology. C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) was the founder of semiotics, conceived as the general science of signs. Though there is not a clear line of development from Peirce one can see Charles Morris Signs, Language and Behaviour (1946) and Nelson Goodman Languages of Art (second edition 1976) as heirs in different respects. Peirce distinguished the sign itself, the thing signified (the referent> and the interpretant, which has three important aspects (i) the emotional interpretant, the feelings produced in the interpreter, (ij) the dynamical interpretant, the actual muscular response, (iii) the logical interpretant, the effect in the establishment of an habitual response.

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One part of the classification of signs continues to be used by other semioticians. It is with respect to the sign/object relation. 1. An icon is a sign which refers to its objects because of a resemblance. 2. An index has a dynamic or existential relation to the referent. 3. A symbol is a conventional sign. Another semiotic tradition stems from Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945). Cassirer was a philosopher, originally a Neo-Kantian, though in his later work his views often seem Hegelian. His thought was developed in a huge three-volumed Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923, 1925, 1929). After a forced emigration from Germany to the United States in the thirties he wrote An Essay on Man (1944), a beautifully clear introduction to his thought. The selection begins with the key chapter-on the symbol. Cassirer's influence has been considerable, in the U.S.A. notably on Wilbur Urban (Language and Reality, 1939) and Suzanne Langer (Philosophy in a New Key, 1942). In another and very strong way his influence was felt by a fellow member of the Warburg Institute, Erwin Panofsky: he was concerned, not with the exploration of the symbolic function on a grand scale, but with the exploration of meaning in the visual arts. This is almost exactly the title of the book which contains his very influential 'Iconography and Iconology: an Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art', first published as an article in 1939. No collection of writings on theory with particular emphasis on visual art could be complete without this essay. Unfortunately it is not available for anthologization. In its place is a brief summary of the major ideas including the key terminology. In Europe a great deal of semiology can be seen as developing from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist. This selection is taken from his Course in General Linguistics. It was compiled after his death from notes taken by his students and published in 1915. The lectures were given between 1906 and 1911 at the University of Geneva. Claude Levi-Strauss (1908- ) is Professor of Social Anthropology at the College de France. He is usually described as a structuralist for reasons that will become clear. Back of both structuralism and semiotics is structural linguistics. Saussure's influence is in the background as is that of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), a colleague at the New School for Social Research in New York at the end of the Second World War. A little more introduction than usual is necessary to enable the reader to cope with the first Levi-Strauss selection which is from Structural Anthropology, published in 1958 but embodying basic material going back at least to a 1945 publication. Levi-Strauss' writings contain an initially 286

Introduction

overwhelming amount of factual detail. Analysis distinguishes a few basic ideas from a mass of anthropological data. At the beginning of the selection's second part, 'The Structural Study of Myth', we find two basic assumptions: (i) structural linguistics is a success in explaining the character of language; (ii) all aspects of social activity constitute language and consequently the methods employed by structural linguistics are applicable to them. Recall Saussure's langue/parole distinction. The puzzling confusion of observed kinship relations (compare parole) turns out to be governed by a relatively simple system of basic conventions (compare langue). Another distinction not as obvious in Saussure is extremely important: binary opposition. Probably Jakobson's influence is strong at this point: he claimed that all the values of phonemes are learned as members of an organized system of oppositions. One is the organization of consonants between voiced and voiceless, for example, /d/is to/t/as/b/is to /p/. Our selection gives two basic examples of how this works out, in kinship systems and myths. In the analysis of myth note the even clearer emphasis on the importance of distinguishing the right basic units in laying bare the basic structure. This emphasis on units is pervasive in structuralism and semiotics. The application of the method here is to what Levi-Strauss calls the Oedipus myth: actually he considers the whole cycle of Theban myths. Levi-Strauss' general conclusion with respect to method implies that the human mind has an innate structuring capacity and binary opposition is its basic mechanism. The general aim of thought, including the primitive but logical thought exemplified in myth, is man's understanding of himself. The basic problem and the fundamental dichotomy is expressed in myth: nature and culture. The culture of a society is expressed in a variety of systems, including kinship, myth and art. Consequently art should be amenable to analysis along similar lines. The last two selections, from the Raw and the Cooked (1964) and The Savage Mind (1962), suggest briefly such an analysis of art which sees its primary function as practical and cognitive. Its logic is comparable to the logical mode of myth; it is exemplified in totemism, displaying the brilliant improvisation of the bricoleur, the handyman. Like the bricoleur, the painter takes elements which already have significance and out of them creates something with novel significance. Roland Barthes (1915-1980) became Professor of Literary Semiology 287

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at the College de France in 1976. His position continued to change throughout his career. The first set of selections is taken from Elements of Semiology (1964). Though Barthes' thought developed and changed, the distinctions drawn and the terminology employed there have remained influential. Saussure had said there should exist a general science of signs of which linguistics would be a part. Barthes takes up this project with a reversed emphasis: semiology is a part of linguistics. The first three sections of the book take up and develop distinctions drawn from Saussure. Note the influence of Jakobson in the revisions in section III. The selections from Mythologies (1957) flesh out the very compressed discussion in section IV of the Elements though some difference in the use of terms should be noted. Mythologies also brings out the sociological and political orientation of much of Barthes' writing.

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Ernst Cassirer The Symbolic Function A Clue to the Nature of Man: the Symbol The biologist Johannes von Uexkiill has written a book in which he undertakes a critical revision of the principles of biology. Biology, according to Uexkiill, is a natural science which has to be developed by the usual empirical methods-the methods of observation and experimentation. Biological thought, on the other hand, does not belong to the same type as physical or chemical thought. Uexkiill is a resolute champion of vitalism; he is a defender of the principle of the autonomy of life. Life is an ultimate and self-dependent reality. It cannot be described or explained in terms of physics or chemistry. From this point of view Uexkiill evolves a new general scheme of biological research. As a philosopher he is an idealist or phenomenalist. But his phenomenalism is not based upon metaphysical or epistemological considerations; it is founded rather on empirical principles. As he points out, it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences-and therefore the realities-of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkiill, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things." From this general presupposition Uexkiill develops a very ingenious and original scheme of the biological world. Wishing to avoid all psychological interpretations, he follows an entirely objective or behavioristic method. The only clue to animal life, he maintains, is given us in the facts of comparative anatomy. If we know the anatomical structure of an animal species, we possess all the necessary data for reconstructing its special mode of experience. A careful study of the structure of the animal body, of the number, the quality, and the distribution of the various sense organs, and the conditions of the nervous system, gives us a perfect image of the inner and outer world of the organism. Uexkiill began his investigations 289

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with a study of the lowest organisms; he extended them gradually to all the forms of organic life. In a certain sense he refuses to speak of lower or higher forms of life. Ufe is perfect everywhere; it is the same in the smallest as in the largest circle. Every organism, even the lowest, is not only in a vague sense adapted to (angepasst) but entirely fitted into (eingepasst) its environment. According to its anatomical structure it possesses a certain Merknetz and a certain Wirknetz-a receptor system and an effector system. Without the cooperation and equilibrium of these two systems the organism could not survive. The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven. They are links in one and the same chain which is described by Uexkiill as the functional circle (Funktionskreis) of the animal. I cannot enter here upon a discussion of Uexkiill's biological principles. I have merely referred to his concepts and terminology in order to pose a general question. Is it possible to make use of the scheme proposed by Uexkiill for a description and characterization of the human world? Obviously this world forms no exception to those biological rules which govern the life of all the other organisms. Yet in the human world we find a new characteristic which appears to be the distinctive mark of human life. The functional circle of man is not only quantitively enlarged; it has also undergone a qualitative change. Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality. There is an unmistakable difference between organic reactions and human responses. In the first case a direct and immediate answer is given to an outward stimulus; in the second case the answer is delayed. It is interrupted and retarded by a slow and complicated process of thought. At first sight such a delay may appear to be a very questionable gain. Many philosophers have warned man against this pretended progress. "L'homme qui medite," says ~ousseau, "est un animal deprave": it is not an improvement but a deterioration of human nature to exceed the boundaries of organic life. Yet there is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man 290

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lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines upon and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. "What disturbs and alarms man," said Epictetus, "are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about the things." From the point of view at which we have just arrived we may correct and enlarge the classical definition of man. In spite of all the efforts of modem irrationalism this definition of man as an animal rationale has not lost its force. Rationality is indeed an inherent feature of all human activities. Mythology itself is not simply a crude mass of superstitions or gross delusions. It is not merely chaotic, for it possesses a systematic or conceptual form. But, on the other hand, it would be impossible to characterize the structure of myth as rational. Language has often been identified with reason, or with the very source of reason. But it is easy to see that this definition fails to cover the whole field. It is a pars pro toto; it offers us a part for the whole. For side by side with conceptual language there is an emotionallanguage; side by side with logical or scientific language there is a language of poetic imagination. Primarily language does not express thoughts or ideas, but feelings and affections. And even a religion "within the limits of pure reason" as conceived and worked out by Kant is no more than a mere abstraction. It conveys only the ideal shape, only the shadow, of what a genuine and concrete religious life is. The great thinkers who have defined man as an animal rationale were not empiricists, nor did they ever intend to give an empirical account of human nature. By this definition they were expressing rather a fundamental moral imperative. Reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man's cultural life in all their richness and variety. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we 291

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should define him as an animal symbolicum. By so doing we can designate his specific difference, and we can understand the new way open to manthe way to civilization....

The Definition of Man We cannot define man by any inherent principle which constitutes his metaphysical essence-nor can we define him by any inborn faculty or instinct that may be ascertained by empirical observation. Man's outstanding characteristic, his distinguishing mark, is not his metaphysical or physical nature-but his work. It is this work, it is the system of human activities, which defines and determines the circle of "humanity./I Language, myth, religion, art, science, history are the constituents, the various sectors of this circle. A "philosophy of man" would therefore be a philosophy which would give us insight into the fundamental structure of each of these human activities, and which at the same time would enable us to understand them as an organic whole. Language, art, myth, religion are no isolated, random creations. They are held together by a common bond. But this bond is not a vinculum substantiale, as it was conceived and described in scholastic thought; it is rather a vinculum functionale. It is the basic function of speech, of myth, of art, of religion that we must seek far behind their innumerable shapes and utterances, and that in the last analysis we must attempt to trace back to a common origin. It is obvious that in the performance of this task we cannot neglect any possible source of information. We must examine all the available empirical evidence, and utilize all the methods of introspection, biological observation, and historical inquiry. These older methods are not to be eliminated but referred to a new intellectual center, and hence seen from a new angle. In describing the structure of language, myth, religion, art, and science, we feel the constant need of a psychological terminology. We speak of religious IIfeeling," of artistic or mythical lIimagination," of logical or rational thought. And we cannot enter into all these worlds without a sound scientific psychological method. Child psychology gives us valuable clues for the study of the general development of human speech. Even more valuable seems to be the help we get from the study of general sociology. We cannot understand the form of primitive mythical thought without taking into consideration the forms of primitive society. And more urgent still is the use of historical methods. The question as to what language, myth, and religion "are" cannot be answered without a penetrating study of their historical development. 292

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But even if it were possible to answer all these psychological, sociological, and historical questions, we should still be in the precincts of the properly "human" world; we should not have passed its threshold. All human works arise under particular historical and sociological conditions. But we could never understand these special conditions unless we were able to grasp the general structural principles underlying these works. In our study of language, art, and myth the problem of meaning takes precedence over the problem of historical development. And here too we can ascertain a slow and continuous change in the methodological concepts and ideals of empirical science. In linguistics, for instance, the conception that the history of language covers the whole field of linguistic studies was for a long time an accepted dogma. This dogma left its mark upon the whole development of linguistics during the nineteenth century. Nowadays, however, this one-sidedness appears to have been definitely overcome. The necessity of independent methods of descriptive analysis is generally recognized. We cannot hope to measure the depth of a special branch of human culture unless such measurement is preceded by a descriptive analysis. This structural view of culture must precede the merely historical view. History itself would be lost in the boundless mass of disconnected facts if it did not have a general structural scheme by means of which it can classify, order, and organize these facts. In the field of the history of art such a scheme was developed, for instance, by Heinrich Wolfflin. As Wolfflin insists, the historian of art would be unable to characterize the art of different epochs or of different individual artists if he were not in possession of some fundamental categories of artistic description. He finds these categories by studying and analyzing the different modes and possibilities of artistic expression. These possibilities are not unlimited; as a matter of fact they may be reduced to a small number. It was from this point of view that Wolfflin gave his famous description of classic and baroque. Here the terms "classic" and ''baroque'' were not used as names for definite historical phases. They were intended to designate some general structural patterns not restricted to a particular age....

Art as Symbolic Fonn All aesthetic theories which attempt to account for art in terms of analogies taken from disordered and diSintegrated spheres of human experience-from hypnosis, dream, or intoxication-miss the main point. A great lyri293

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cal poet has the power to give definite shape to our most obscure feelings. This is possible only because his work, though dealing with a subject which is apparently irrational and ineffable, possesses a clear organization and articulation. Not even in the most extravagant creations of art do we ever find the "ravishing confusions of fantasy," the "original chaos of human nature." This definition of art, given by the romantic writers, is a contradiction in terms. Every work of art has an intuitive structure, and that means a character of rationality. Every single element must be feIt as part of a comprehensive whole. If in a lyrical poem we change one of the words, an accent or a rhythm, we are in danger of destroying the specific tone and charm of the poem. Art is not fettered to the rationality of things or events. It may infringe all those laws of probability which classical aestheticians declared to be the constitutional laws of art. It may give us the most bizarre and grotesque vision, and yet retain a rationality of its ownthe rationality of form. We may in this way interpret a saying of Goethe's which at first sight looks paradoxical, "Art: a second nature; mysterious too, but more understandable, for it originates in the understanding." Science gives us order in thoughts; morality gives us order in actions; art gives us order in the apprehension of visible, tangible, and audible appearances. Aesthetic theory was very slow indeed to recognize and fully realize these fundamental differences. But if instead of seeking a metaphysical theory of beauty we simply analyze our immediate experience of the work of art we can hardly miss the mark. Art may be defined as a symbolic language. But this leaves us only with the common genus, not the specific difference. In modern aesthetics the interest in the common genus seems to prevail to such a degree as almost to eclipse and obliterate the specific difference. Croce insists that there is not only a close relation but a complete identi ty between language and art. To his way of thinking it is quite arbitrary to distinguish between the two activities. Whoever studies general linguistics, according to Croce, studies aesthetic problems-and vice versa. There is, however, an unmistakable difference between the symbols of art and the linguistic terms of ordinary speech or writing. These two activities agree neither in character nor purpose; they do not employ the same means, nor do they tend toward the same ends. Neither language nor art gives us mere imitation of things or actions; both are representations. But a representation in the medium of sensuous forms differs widely from a verbal or conceptual representation. The description of a landscape by a painter or poet and that by a geographer or geologist have scarcely anything in common. Both the mode of description and the 294

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motive are different in the work of a scientist and in the work of an artist. A geographer may depict a landscape in a plastic manner, and he may even paint it in rich and vivid colors. But what he wishes to convey is not the vision of the landscape but its empirical concept. To this end he has to compare its form with other forms; he has to find out, by observation and induction, its characteristic features. The geologist goes a step farther in this empirical delineation. He does not content himself with a record of physical facts, for he wishes to divulge the origin of these facts. He distinguishes the strata by which the soil has been built up, noting chronological differences; and he goes back to the general causal laws according to which the earth has reached its present shape. For the artist all these empirical relations, all these comparisons with other facts, and all this research into causal relations do not exist. Our ordinary empirical concepts may be, roughly speaking, divided into two classes according as they have to do with practical or theoretical interests. The one class is concerned with the use of things and with the question "What is that for?" The other is concerned with the causes of things and with the question "Whence?" But upon entering the realm of art we have to forget all such questions. Behind the existence, the nature, the empirical properties of things, we suddenly discover their forms. These forms are no static elements. What they show is a mobile order, which reveals to us a new horizon of nature. Even the greatest admirers of art have often spoken of it as if it were a mere accessory, an embellishment or ornament, of life. But this is to underrate its real significance and its real role in human culture. A mere duplicate of reality would always be of a very questionable value. Only by conceiving art as a special direction, a new orientation, of our thoughts, our imagination, and our feelings, can we comprehend its true meaning and function. The plastic arts make us see the sensible world in all its richness and multifariousness. What would we know of the innumerable nuances in the aspect of things were it not for the works of the great painters and sculptors? Poetry is, similarly, the revelation of our personal life. The infinite potentialities of which we had but a dim and obscure presentiment are brought to light by the lyric poet, by the novelist, and by the dramatist. Such art is in no sense mere counterfeit or facsimile, but a genuine manifestation of our inner life. So long as we live in the world of sense impressions alone we merely touch the surface of reality. Awareness of the depth of things always requires an effort on the part of our active and constructive energies. Bu t since these energies do not move in the same direction, and do not

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tend toward the same end, they cannot give us the same aspect of reality. There is a conceptual depth as well as a purely visual depth. The first is discovered by science; the second is revealed in art. The first aids us in understanding the reasons of things; the second in seeing their forms. In science we try to trace phenomena back to their first causes, and to general laws and principles. In art we are absorbed in their immediate appearance, and we enjoy this appearance to the fullest extent in all its richness and variety. Here we are not concerned with the uniformity of laws but with the multiformity and diversity of intuitions. Even art may be described as knowledge, but art is knowledge of a peculiar and specific kind. We may well subscribe to the observation of Shaftesbury that "all beauty is truth." But the truth of beauty does not consist in a theoretical description or explanation of things; it consists rather in the "sympathetic vision" of things. The two views of truth are in contrast with one another, but not in conflict or contradiction. Since art and science move in entirely different planes they cannot contradict or thwart one another. The conceptual interpretation of science does not preclude the intuitive interpretation of art. Each has its own perspective and, so to speak, its own angle of refraction. The psychology of sense perception has taught us that without the use of both eyes, without a binocular vision, there would be no awareness of the third dimension of space. The depth of human experience in the same sense depends on the fact that we are able to vary our modes of seeing, that we can alternate our views of reality. Rerum videre formas is a no less important and indispensable task than rerum cognoscere caUSQS. In ordinary experience we connect phenomena according to the category of causality or finality. According as we are interested in the theoretical reasons or the practical effects of things, we think of them as causes or as means. Thus we habitually lose sight of their immediate appearance until we can no longer see them face to face. Art, on the other hand, teaches us to visualize, not merely to conceptualize or utilize, things. Art gives us a richer, more vivid and colorful image of reality, and a more profound insight into its formal structure. It is characteristic of the nature of man that he is not limited to one specific and single approach to reality but can choose his point of view and so pass from one aspect of things to another.

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J.M. Thompson Panofsky's Iconography and Iconology Since Panofsky's essay 'Iconography and Iconology: an Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art' is not available for this anthology, I shall present as briefly as possible its main ideas and terminology. Panofsky reminds us-and here he goes back to Cassirer and beyond him to Kant-that experiencing is always interpreting. We never encounter bare reality: it is always interpreted reality and this involves even at the most elementary, commonsense level a complex of conventions. He distinguishes three interconnected aspects of "meaning". When we recognize an object or an acquaintance we are interpreting a certain set of configurations, colours, lines and volumes as a stone or a man. This is "factual meaning". We recognize the man before us as hostile or friendly: this is "expressional meaning". Together these constitute the level of "primary" or "natural meaning". Further, we interpret a certain wave of the hand as a greeting. Our interpretation is conditioned by the conventions of a certain society in a certain period. This is "secondary" or "conventional meaning". Thirdly, even a glance is enough for us to interpret someone we see in the street as belonging to a certain class and having a certain attitude to life. What Sherlock Holmes consciously perfected we all perform more or less well and usually quite unconsciously. This is "intrinsic" or "essential meaning", that is, we recognize the essential character of a person as manifested in this single action. Interpretation of a work of art is similarly complex and similarly involves familiarity with appropriate conventions. In what is really a single act of interpretation three aspects or strata may be distinguished analogous to those outlined above. First, a work has primary or natural meaning or subject-matter, factual or expressive. A certain configuration of lines or colours is interpreted as a cow or a house. An interior is described as peaceful. This basic level of interpretation is "pre-iconographical description". The pure forms (the lines, colours, etc.) are "motifs". Second, a work has secondary or conventional meaning or subjectmatter. We interpret objects or events taken as motifs as also embodying specific themes or concepts. "A female figure with a peach in her hand is a personification of veracity". 1 As carriers of conventional meaning the mo297

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tifs are "images"; collections of images are "stories" or "allegories". Their identification at this level is the domain of "iconography." Third, a work has intrinsic meaning, or perhaps we can say symbolic meaning for it is in this context that Panofsky refers to Cassirer. As a single action of a person reveals to an experienced observer his personality and outlook on life so a work of art reveals to a trained art historian lithe basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion".2 The task of discovering and interpreting the symbolic "values" Panofsky calls "iconology". As iconography builds on pre-iconographic description, iconology depends for its interpretive conclusions on these two. The three are, to repeat, only distinguishable aspects of the single task of interpretation. At each level the interpreter must bring to his task specific knowledge if he is to avoid arbitrariness and sheer error. In the case of the first two, acquaintance is required with certain conventions which only long training can give. For pre-iconographic description knowledge of the history of styles is essential, that is, one has to know how certain objects and events are commonly represented in the period and area under study. In an Ottonian gospel miniature a town (the city of Nain) is represented as apparently suspended in mid-air. Is this to be interpreted in magical terms? Reference to conventions of the period does not support this interpretation: apparently empty space is not to be taken realistically but serves as an abstract background. Iconographical interpretation must be based on acquaintance with the cultural and period conventions for the representation of themes and concepts. It requires acquaintance with literary sources as well as other works in the relevant period. If we take a painting by a 17th century Venetian artist, Francesco Mappei, "representing a handsome young woman with a sword in her left hand, and in her right a charger on which rests the head of a beheaded man ..." 3 is this Salome with the head of John the Baptist? Or is it Judith with the head of Holofernes? The literary sources do not provide an answer. It turns out, however, that in Germany and North Italy in the 16th century there was a type of painting which depicted Judith with a charger but there were no Salomes with swords. The conclusion: Judith, not Salome, is represented in the painting. Iconology is described as requiring "synthetic intuition" which, Panofsky recognizes, sounds like a subjective and irrational basis, conditioned by the interpreter's personal psychology and Weltanschauung. If this is the basis it is an intuition educated by an acquaintance as profound as possible 298

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with every aspect of the culture and period involved. He describes this as correcting intuition by familiarity with "a history of cultural symptomsor 'symbols' in Ernst Cassirer's sense-in general". 4 The background of this requirement derives from Hegel who held that in a particular period in the history of culture the Spirit of that culture is exemplified or revealed in all its aspects: its philosophy, its religion, its ethics, its law, its political institutions, etc. and of course its art. For the iconologist it is a matter of setting the puzzling painting against the cultural context. He has to check his interpretation of its meaning against "what he thinks is the intrinsic meaning of as many documents of civilization historically related to that work or group of works, as he can master: of documents bearing witness to the political, poetical, religious, philosophical, and social tendencies of the personality, period or country under investigation". 5 Obviously, Panofsky points out, the process also works the other way: other disciplines can make use of art works. ''It is in the search for intrinsic meanings or content that the various humanistic disciplines meet on a common plane ..." 6 Here we recall Cassirer's emphasis on the problem of meaning in studying the works which make up "the circle of humanitY'. Language, myth, art, religion, science and history are the constituents of this symbolic universe. ''They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience." 7 While Panofsky's immediate concern is the iconological interpretation of paintings, he sets it in the larger context of humanistic studies. The subtitle of the essay, An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art", makes it clear that Panofsky saw his approach as primarily applicable to representational art with a strongly "literary" character. He mentions briefly, however, that it can be applied to works of art which do not have a conventional subject-matter in which case "a direct transition from motifs to content is effected, as is the case with European landscape painting, still life and genre, not to mention 'non-objective' art". 8 1/

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Ferdinand de Saussure General Principles of Linguistics Sign, Signified, Signifier Some people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a namingprocess only-a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names. For example:

ARBOR

EQUOS

etc.

etc.

This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words ... it does not tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological in nature (arbor, for instance, can be considered from either viewpoint); finally, it lets us assume that the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation-an assumption that is anything but true. But this rather naive approach can bring us near the truth by showing us that the linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the associating of two terms. We have seen in considering the speaking-circuit ... that both terms involved in the linguistic sign are psychological and are united in the brain by an associative bond. This point must be emphasized. The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it

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makes on our senses. The sound-image is sensory, and if I happen to call it "material," it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract. The psychological character of our sound-images becomes apparent when we observe our own speech. Without moving our lips or tongue, we can talk to ourselves or recite mentally a selection of verse. Because we regard the words of our language as sound-images, we must avoid speaking of the "phonemes" that make up the words. This term, which suggests vocal activity, is applicable to the spoken word only, to the realization of the inner image in discourse. We can avoid that misunderstanding by speaking of the sounds and syllables of a word provided we remember that the names refer to the sound-image. The linguistic sign is then a two-sided psychological entity that can be represented by the drawing:

The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other. Whether we try to find the meaning of the Latin word arbor or the word that Latin uses to designate the concept "tree," it is clear that only the associations sanctioned by the language appear to us to conform to reality, and we disregard whatever others might be imagined. Our definition of the linguistic sign poses an important question of terminology. I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current usage the term generally designates only a sound-image, a word, for example (arbor, etc.). One tends to forget that arbor is called a sign only because it carries the concept "tree," with the result that the idea of the sensory part implies the idea of the whole.

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Ambiguity would disappear if the three notions involved here were designated by three names, each suggesting and opposing the others. I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifie.J and signifier [signifiant]; the last two terms have the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and from the whole of which they are parts. As regards sign, if I am satisfied with it, this is simply because I do not know of any word to replace it, the ordinary language suggesting no other. The linguistic sign, as defined, has two primordial characteristics. In enunciating them I am also positing the basic principles of any study of this type.

Principle I: The Arbitrary Nature of the Sign The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. The idea of "sister" is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-li-r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be represented equally by just any other sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the very existence of different languages: the signified "ox" has as its signifier b-o-f on one side of the border and o-k-s (Ochs) on the other. No one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, but it is often easier to discover a truth than to assign to it its proper place. Principle I dominates all the linguistics of language; its consequences are numberless. It is true that not all of them are equally obvious at first glance; only after many detours does one discover them, and with them the primordial importance of the principle. One remark in passing: when semiology becomes organized as a science, the question will arise whether or not it properly includes modes of expression based on completely natural signs, such as pantomime. Supposing that the new science welcomes them, its main concern will still be the whole group of systems grounded on the arbitrariness of the Sign. In fact, every means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on collective behavior or-what amounts to the same thing-on convention. Polite formulas, for instance, though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness (as in the case of a Chinese who greets his emperor by bow302

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ing down to the ground nine times), are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them. Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiological process; that is why language, the most complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense linguistics can become the master-pattern for all branches of semiology although language is only one particular semiological system. The word symbol has been used to designate the linguistic sign, or more specifically, what is here called the signifier. Principle I in particular weighs against the use of this term. One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot. The word arbitrary also calls for comment. The term should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker (we shall see below that the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community); I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified. In concluding let us consider two objections that might be raised to the establishment of Principle I: 1) Onomatopoeia might be used to prove that the choice of the signifier is not always arbitrary. But onomatopoeic formations are never organic elements of a linguistic system. Besides, their number is much smaller than is generally supposed. Words like French fouet 'whip' or glas 'knell' may strike certain ears with suggestive sonority, but to see that they have not always had this property we need only examine their Latin forms