Embodying Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and Literary Theory [150th ed.] 9783653001075, 3653001072

Citation preview

,ITERAR Y AND #ULTURAL4HEOR Y

7OJCIECH-A‘ECKI

%MBODYING 0RAGMATISM 2ICHARD3HUSTERMAN´S 0HILOSOPHYAND,ITERARY4HEORY

0%4%2,!.' )NTERNATIONALER6ERLAGDER7ISSENSCHAFTEN

%MBODYING0RAGMATISMISTHEFIRSTMONOGRAPHIN%NGLISHDEVOTEDTO2I CHARD 3HUSTERMAN AN INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED PHILOSOPHER AND ONE OFTODAY´SMOSTINNOVATIVETHINKERSINPRAGMATISMANDAESTHETICS4HE BOOKPRESENTSACOMPREHENSIVEACCOUNTOF3HUSTERMAN´SPRINCIPALPHIL OSOPHICALIDEASCONCERNINGPRAGMATISM AESTHETICS ANDLITERARYTHEORY INCLUDINGSUCHTHEMESASINTERPRETATION AESTHETICEXPERIENCE POPULAR ART ANDHUMANEMBODIMENT¯CULMINATINGINHISPROPOSALOFANEWDIS CIPLINECALLED±SOMAESTHETICS² !S3HUSTERMAN´SPHILOSOPHICALWRITINGS INVOLVE A DIALOGUE WITH BOTH ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL TRADITIONS THIS MONOGRAPHNOTONLYOFFERSACRITICALVISIONOFCONTEMPORARYPRAGMATIST THOUGHTBUTALSOSITUATES3HUSTERMANANDPRAGMATISMWITHINTHECUR RENTSTATEOFTHEORY

7OJCIECH-A‘ECKIISASSISTANTPROFESSORATTHE)NSTITUTEOF0OLISH0HILOL OGYATTHE5NIVERSITYOF7ROC‘AW0OLAND (ISRESEARCHINTERESTSINCLUDE PRAGMATISM LITERARYTHEORY AESTHETICS POPULARCULTURE ANDCONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY(EISTHEEDITORCO EDITOROFTWOBOOKSANDHASPUBLISHED NUMEROUSBOOKCHAPTERSANDARTICLESINPEER REVIEWEDJOURNALS

WWWPETERLANGDE

Embodying Pragmatism

Literar y and Cultural Theor y General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

Vol. 34

Peter Lang

Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Wien

Wojciech Małecki

Embodying Pragmatism Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory

Peter Lang

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Wien

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover Design: Olaf Glöckler, Atelier Platen, Friedberg

ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-653-00107-5 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2010 All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. www.peterlang.de

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

7

List of Abbreviations

9

Introduction

11

Chapter 1: The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

23

1.1. Zarathustra and the Paradoxes of Contemporary Pragmatism

23

1.2. Two Deweys, Two Deweyans, and the Problem of Nondiscursivity

25

1.3. Art as (Aesthetic) Experience

37

1.4. Conclusions

55

Chapter 2: Interpretation and Beyond

63

2.1. No Gods Before Interpretation

63

2.2. Shusterman’s Critique of Hermeneutic Universalism

65

2.3. Interpretation and Literature

74

2.4. Conclusions

99

Chapter 3: On Rap and Other Dangerous Things: In Defense of Popular Art

109

3.1. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Theodor W. Adorno

109

3.2. The Theory and Practice of Meliorism

112

3.3. Conclusions

135

Chapter 4: Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

141

4.1. The Somatic Turn and Its Discontents

141

4.2. Somaesthetics

143

4.3. Conclusions

167

Afterword

173

Bibliography

179

ACKNOW LED GEM ENTS

This book is based on a dissertation written, in Polish, under the supervision of Professor Wojciech Głowala at the Institute of Polish Philology, University of Wrocław. Therefore, I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to Professor Głowala for his advice, and also to the Institute for providing me with excellent research conditions. Moreover, I feel obliged to thank the reviewers of the dissertation, Professor Adam Chmielewski and Professor Andrzej Szahaj, for their valuable remarks, which allowed me to improve the quality of the text in many ways. No less important for the shaping of the ideas contained in the book were my discussions with Professor Richard Shusterman, who has been always willing to respond to my interpretations (and criticisms) of his work, something for which I am particularly grateful. I also owe a great debt to David Wall, who generously read the entire manuscript and offered numerous insightful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Jarosław Furmaniak for helping me with the final typesetting of the text. Significant portions of this book were written during my research fellowship at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (The University of Edinburgh), in September-November 2008, and during my stay as a visiting researcher at the John F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien (Freie Universität Berlin), in April-May, 2009. I would therefore like to thank these institutions – especially Professor Susan Manning, the Director of IASH; Professor Winfried Fluck, Chair of American Studies at the Kennedy Institute; Anthea Taylor, IASH’s Administrator; and Donald Ferguson, IASH’s Secretary – for their support. Some of the material contained in the book was previously published in a slightly different form in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie; Er(r)go; Filozofia i etyka interpretacji [The Philosophy and Ethics of Interpretation], ed. Adam Kola and Andrzej Szahaj (Kraków: Universitas 2007); Utopien, Jugendkulturen und Lebens-wirklichkeiten, ed. Eva Kimminich (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009); and Wizje i re-wizje [Visions and Re-Visions], ed. Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Kraków: Universitas 2007),1 and is used here with permission. Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife Karolina for her support during the writing of this book and for her constant encouragement in all my endeavors.

1

See Bibliography for details.

LIS T O F ABBR EV IAT IONS

BC – Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). PA – Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). PL – Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). PP – Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997). SD – Richard Shusterman, Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

IN T R O D U C T IO N “Philosophy’s ultimate aim is to benefit human life, rather than serving pure truth for its own sake.”1 Richard Shusterman “When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy’s ‘mission’ or ‘task’ to be, I get tonguetied.”2 Richard Rorty

Scholars in the humanities are probably the most self-reflective of all creatures, and thus it should come as no real surprise that in their drive to reflect on everything they do, some of them have been led to begin introductions, prefaces, forewords, and prologues to their books with investigations on what introductions, prefaces, forewords, and prologues are. Thus we have Hegel’s famous reflections in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit,3 Giorgio Agamben’s bold remarks which open the “Preface” to his Infancy and History,4 or, to move closer to the philosophical context in which the present work is situated, Joseph Margolis’s prologue to his Pragmatism without Foundations, which begins with the following words: “Prologues are a form of magic, mixing bias with tact. How to begin what is already finished? How not to answer what has not yet been asked?”5

1 2 3

4

5

Richard Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13 (1995), p. 39. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” in: Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 19. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. and ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 63-198; cf., for instance, Jacques Derrida, “Outwork,” in: Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2004), especially pp. 1-65. “Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because latter works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks.” Giorgio Agamben, “Preface: Experimentum Linguae,” in: Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London-New York: Verso, 2007), p. 3. Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. xiii. Cf. another pragmatist on the list, John J. Stuhr, who begins the preface to his book by asking: “Can a book have a preface? Can it, unlike life and thought, begin before its start? And, is its start really a beginning? Isn’t it always a rebeginning, a redirection, a reconstruction?” John J. Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community (New York: SUNY University Press, 1997), p. ix.

12

Introduction

I, too, would like to join this tradition (and perhaps I have already done so) and say that introductions are a way of limiting the promise of the title. That particular feature of introductions is related to the fact that titles are very specific proper names; and they are specific because they perform not only an identificational function – indicating this and no other text – but also a descriptive one – saying something about that text’s properties.6 In fact, assuming the perspective of ethical criticism, we could say that if the title does not match the promised content of the book, then we are dealing with a certain moral fault, with impersonating somebody else, with appropriating the name of the other. The problem, however, is that the title, just as any other linguistic utterance for that matter, lends itself to multiple interpretations, and it is exactly the interpretive context that determines whether we will find a given title adequate or not. Once, as far back as the 17th18th centuries, literary decorum allowed authors to equip their texts with titles long enough (sometimes of monstrous length indeed) to narrow this context and to specify the promise one makes to the readers at least a bit. Today one needs to do that in an introduction. The title of the present work is thus Embodying Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory, and what I mean by it, among other things, is that the book is not intended to be a monograph of the entire oeuvre of that author. For Shusterman concerns me here exclusively as a representative of contemporary pragmatism – of which he is one of the most interesting voices – and this is why I leave aside the works from his earlier, analytic period. Moreover, even that scope is further narrowed by my focusing on some particular elements which, in my view,7 are key to Shusterman’s neopragmatism, at the expense of those that may be worth attention, yet which I see as not belonging to the core of it.8 Let me also clarify that even though the present book aims at discussing Shusterman’s approach to some specific issues (to be exact: aesthetic experience, interpretation, popular art, and embodiment), it shall invariably revolve around one particular aspect of his pragmatism. But before I say anything more on that topic, I would like to allow myself to make a few introductory remarks that will concern the rather vexed question of the identity of contemporary pragmatism, or neopragmatism. 6

7 8

I shall not get into the details of the investigations into the nature of titles presented by philosophers and literary theorists alike. Let me note, however, that on some accounts the title is understood as an autonomous literary genre; see, e.g., Harry Levin, “The Title as a Literary Genre,” The Modern Language Review, 72, No. 4 (1977), pp. xxii-xxxvi; cf. Jacques Derrida, “Title (to be specified),” SubStance, No. 2 (1981), pp. 5-22; and his “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston, in: Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 181-220. Slanted as it is by the disciplinary matrix of literary theory, which I belong to. Generally, I focus on Shusterman’s works that have been written after 1988, while considering the earlier texts only to the extent that they have been incorporated into the former or constitute a significant background for his subsequent development.

Introduction

13

When Stanley Fish asserts that pragmatism’s “amorphous and omnivorous” nature is something quite advantageous – namely, because it contributes to pragmatist philosophy’s being “a very bad substitute for the absolutes it tilts against”9 – one can even agree with the reasoning itself, yet at the same time must stress that this feature has the unfortunate consequence of almost entirely stripping the term “pragmatism,” along with its derivatives, of any concrete meaning. Let us take, for instance, the word “neopragmatism,” which has been mentioned above. It is often used to denote the contemporary intellectual current that draws from classical pragmatism – the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, or George Herbert Mead.10 Yet there also exists quite strong a tendency to narrow the circle of “neopragmatists” to philosophers of linguistic inclination who are distinguished from the founding fathers of the movement in that they abjure the category of experience and substitute it with that of language.11 Whatever our terminological preference would be here, the very fact of there being a possibility to choose in this regard indicates that contemporary pragmatism (or neopragmatism) is hardly monolithic, which, after all, should not be surprising given that classical pragmatism itself can be understood in a gamut of ways, some of which differ significantly in tracing its genealogy12 and in the level of homogeneity they attribute to it.13 All of this leads to a situation where some 9

10 11 12

13

Stanley Fish, “Truth and Toilets,” in: The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 424; the essay was subsequently republished, in a slightly modified version, as Chapter 16 of Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2001). And this is how I myself deploy the term in the present book. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Truth without Correspondence to Reality,” in: Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 24-7; see also footnote 15 in Chapter 1 of this book. Let us take, for instance, the controversy over whether Emerson can be considered, as Shusterman and others would like to have it, a protopragmatist (see Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” in: The Revival of Pragmatism, pp. 72-80; cf. Richard Shusterman, “Emerson’s Pragmatist Aesthetics,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No. 207 (1999), pp. 87-99). Consider also two recent hypotheses concerning the sociocultural genesis of pragmatism and the responses generated by each: see (a) The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism, ed. Paul B. Thompson and Thomas C. Hilde (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000); cf. Scott L. Pratt’s review of the book in The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 39, No. 2 (2003), pp. 334-41; or Michael Eldridge’s review in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 16, No. 4 (2002), pp. 300-3); (b) Scott L. Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); cf. the symposium on the book in The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 39, No. 4 (2003), pp. 557-616. Cf. Shusterman’s own remarks on the subject: “Far from a uniform school, pragmatism has always displayed different views and interests, while regarding plurality as an advantage more than a weakness” (PP 7). See also Michael Eldridge, “Adjectival and Generic Pragmatism: Problems and Possibilities,” Human Affairs, 19, No. 1 (2009), pp. 10-8. As is well known, in order to palpably distinguish himself from other pragmatists, C.S. Peirce

14

Introduction

philosophers are called “pragmatists” against their will, while others, who often desire to be so labeled, are denied that privilege, and no one is able to settle such disputes in a decisive way. I must also add that quite often the person responsible for the confusion in this regard is Richard Rorty (the key figure in recent pragmatist philosophy and a thinker whose name will appear very frequently in this book), who has the inclination to indulge in claims such as “we pragmatists think x, or y,” where under that “we” he subsumes the philosophers who subsequently respond to such a dictum by insisting that they have never thought x, or y, and, moreover, do not know at all what they could have in common with Rorty himself.14 To complicate the picture even further, let me draw the reader’s attention to the problem of the philosophical affiliations of the most prominent literary scholars associated with pragmatism, i.e., Stanley Fish, Steven Knapp, and Walter Benn Michaels, especially that later I will refer extensively to their works. Now, in pinpointing various ways in which the “Rortyesque neo-pragmatism” deviates from the ideas of Peirce, James, and Dewey, Susan Haack adds that “[this] style of neo-Pragmatism has been warmly received by some literary scholars; one consequence [of which] has been yet further distortion of the message of the classical

14

“changed the name of his philosophy from ‘pragmatism’ to ‘pragmaticism’,” believing the latter to be a name so ugly that nobody would want to steal it from him. Hilary Putnam, “Comment on Robert Brandom’s Paper,” in: Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. ĩegleĔ (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 64. Cf. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), p. 351. It should also be stressed that there are significant disparities to be found between James and Dewey – see, e.g., Richard M. Gale, “William James and John Dewey: The Odd Couple,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 28 (2004), pp. 149-67. On the other hand, some readings point to the basic “consistency” of the perspective of classical pragmatism. See, e.g., Sandra B. Rosenthal, “Pragmatism and the Reconstruction of Metaphysics,” in: Anti-Foundationalism Old and New, ed. Tom Rockmore and Beth J. Singer (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 165-88; and her Speculative Pragmatism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). This has happened, e.g., in the case of Donald Davidson. Others, like Nietzsche, have, of course, never had any chance to respond. A perfect example of Rorty’s alleged allies explaining that they are not so is a collection entitled Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Cf. a review thereof by Simon Blackburn, in which he emphasizes that “it is nicely ironic to see [these authors] making their excuses, like nervous guests fearing that a revel has got out of hand,” while “Rorty, a gentlemanly host, is wonderfully polite and patient with these excuses, while not concealing his conviction that they are basically worthless.” Simon Blackburn, “The Professor of Complacence,” New Republic (20 August 2001), p. 40. Cf. Stanley Fish, “Almost Pragmatism: The Jurisprudence of Richard Posner, Richard Rorty, and Ronald Dworkin,” in: There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech... and It’s a Good Thing, Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 224.

Introduction

15

pragmatist tradition.”15 Importantly, Haack refers here to Fish, Knapp, and Michaels, whom she does not even label “neopragmatists” but “neo-neoPragmatists” instead!16 Well aware of all the above problems, I want to stress that I take Shusterman to be a representative of neopragmatism in the sense that even though the sources he draws from include a dizzying array of authors (ranging from Confucius through Alexander Baumgarten, T. S. Eliot, Pierre Bourdieu, Ludwig Wittgenstein to Michel Foucault), classical pragmatism remains the most important point of reference to him – it constitutes his basic reservoir of ideas, concepts, and methods. I must immediately add, however, that as far as classical pragmatist thinkers are concerned, Shusterman is inspired mainly by the philosophy of John Dewey, particularly Dewey’s conception of art presented in Art as Experience.17 In other words, as a neopragmatist Shusterman should be deemed mainly a continuator of Dewey’s aesthetic theory – something which will become apparent as this study unfolds. The pragmatist affiliations of Shusterman’s thought are confirmed by such of its features as antiessentialism, antifoundationalism, and the tendency to dissolve dualisms, which features also connect him to most other neopragmatist authors. But given that, as I have noted above, neopragmatism is anything but monolithic, I should now try to determine Shusterman’s position within it, and one handy way of addressing that issue is to consider which tendencies expressed by contemporary pragmatism he opposes most. There are two of them, basically, and both are hinted at in the main title of the present book: i.e., Embodying Pragmatism. Firstly, then, Shusterman is bothered with what I have described above as the linguistic strain of neopragmatism, which he sees as significantly and unfortunately diverging, in its textualization of human subjects, from James’s and Dewey’s emphasis on corporeality (including somatic experience), and as particularly dangerous because of the popularity its enjoys thanks to the impact of Richard Rorty. Whether his assessment of Rorty’s thought as a radical textualism is entirely accurate remains to be seen in Chapter 1, yet even at this point one can well understand Shusterman’s contention that Rorty’s pragmatism, which indeed focuses almost exclusively on the linguistic dimension of human existence, demands to be opposed with a more embodied pragmatist approach. One that would fully recognize our rootedness in corporeality and embrace all the forms of somatic expe-

15 16

17

Susan Haack, “Pragmatism Old and New,” Contemporary Pragmatism, 1, No. 1 (June 2004), pp. 30-3. In referring to the views of Louis Menand, another author whom she includes into that current, she has expressed the fear that this is not even a “vulgar pragmatism” but rather a “vulgar Rortyism.” Haack, p. 33. See John Dewey, Art as Experience: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 10, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).

16

Introduction

rience that evade the prison-house of language, which is exactly the stance Shusterman purports to develop.18 Yet there is another sense in which Shusterman wants to “embody” pragmatism. It is strictly related to one of the metaphilosophical postulates he inherits from John Dewey, and as this aspect of Shusterman’s thought will concern me most in this book, I would like to elaborate on it here. What I mean is that, unlike some other neopragmatists, such as Fish, Shusterman believes that philosophy (and pragmatism in particular) needs to take up questions that are directly related to social life since its vocation is rather reforming the world than searching the truth for itself, and that, moreover, philosophers cannot confine themselves to concocting ideas, but must try to implement them with their own hands, too. This belief finds its explicit expression in many places in his oeuvre, but the following passage seems particularly instructive: Philosophy’s standard posture of lofty disinterestedness must be questioned. Rather than disinterested, it seems to reflect the interest of a bland conservatism which is either happy to reinforce the status quo by representing it in philosophical definition, or is simply too timid and effete to risk dirtying its hands in the messy shaping over art and culture. More dangerously, the fetishism of disinterested neutrality obscures the fact that philosophy’s ultimate aim is to benefit human life, rather than serving pure truth for its own sake.19

Obviously, even a philosophically uneducated ear will be able to spot in that rhetoric an analogy with Marx’s “Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach” (for some it may even sound ominous),20 yet it should be clear that the inspiration here comes rather from Dewey than from the sage of Trier.21 There are, however, much more important things to clarify in this citation than its intertextual ties. Let us ask, for instance, isn’t it demagogic to oppose “benefitting human life” to “truth for its own sake”? Pure theory and messy practice? Doesn’t Shusterman know about the 18

19 20

21

See, e.g., PA (Chapters 5 and 10), PP (Chapter 6), and BC (passim). This is, of course, not to say that Shusterman is alone in celebrating the role of the somatic in pragmatism, see, e.g., Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), especially Chapter 4; and Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). I would like to thank Don Morse for his comments on this issue. Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 207; cf. PA 45. Cf., e.g., one Polish philosopher’s sour remarks on the affinity between pragmatism and “The Eleventh Thesis” (or even Stalinism and Leninism) – Andrzej Grzegorczyk, “Discussion,” in: Jürgen Habermas, Leszek Kołakowski, and Richard Rorty, Debating the State of Philosopy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski, ed. Józef NiĪnik and John T. Sanders (Westport: Praeger Paperback, 1996), p. 120. Cf. PA 20 for Shusterman’s remarks on the relation between Dewey’s activistic approach and that of Marx.

Introduction

17

myriads of historical instances where the disinterested search for “the truth in itself” resulted in overwhelming practical results (for better or for worse)? Doesn’t he realize that, as Heidegger once commented on Marx, in order to change the world one must give it a philosophical interpretation first?22 Or that – as Adorno and his contemporary readers such as Žižek remind us – in the present “ungodly reality” every action must mean the perpetuation of the structure that had generated the evil we are fighting against, and henceforth there can be nothing more radical than high theory?23 To address these questions properly, it must be stressed that Shusterman is too much a gradualist and contextualist in his pragmatism to swallow the truth/practice or theory/practice dichotomy. His point is rather that in philosophy, and anywhere else for that matter, we must “start from where we are.” That is, philosophers must neither ignore the pressing problems of the reality they inhabit (while doing their job in the hope that its results may, someday, somewhere, be of use to society) nor respond to them in the usual abstracting manner, turning them into another academic topic (“Are these problems real in a deeper ontological sense?” “Are we epistemologically entitled to discern them as problems?”). Both of these options are impractical, with the second one being dangerous to boot, as it may lead to the conclusions in the vein of Heidegger’s musings on there being no “metaphysical” difference between the Stalinist Russia and contemporary America.24 This is why what philosophers should do instead is try to use, right here and right now, their theoretical tools to improve very concrete, mundane social problems in whatever way possible and however piecemeal and unspectacular the results might be. Yet exactly at this place does Shusterman expose himself to an objection that is probably best exemplified by an old remark of Nicolai Hartmann’s that those who “make it a condition of their occupation with philosophical matters that they be led on as straight a way possible to the solution of pressing problems of their own present situation” in fact turn philosophy upside down. Or, to be more exact, by refusing to address basic philosophical questions as too otherworldly and turning their attention to social realities, they start from “the end” and “[t]hus with the very first step they unwittingly divorce themselves from philosophy.”25 Interestingly, however, Shusterman’s position might be also accused of something quite

22 23

24 25

See Martin Heidegger, “Über Karl Marx und die Weltveränderung,” TV Interview conducted by Richard Wisser (1969). See Theodor W. Adorno, Vermischte Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 404; cited in: Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings (London: Verso, 2004), p. 170. See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 37. Nicolai Hartmann, New Ways of Ontology, trans. Reinhard C. Kuhn (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 3.

18

Introduction

the contrary, namely, that it is divorced not from philosophy but from reality itself. To explain that point, let me emphasize that for neopragmatists such as Fish, Hartmann and Shusterman must look very much alike in the sense that each believes that philosophy can solve practical social problems, and the only difference between them is really a cosmetic one: i.e., the former is convinced that philosophy should address fundamental questions first, while the latter thinks it can forget about such “detours” and proceed directly to saving the world. Yet irrespective of where we begin, Fish thinks, there is no way (either straight or a winding one) that leads from philosophy to solving concrete, pressing problems of humanity. And this is because – as he has succinctly put it – the “successes and failures [in philosophy] do not entail or even make more likely successes and failures in activities other than the activity of doing philosophy.”26 To be sure, Fish de facto reiterates here (albeit in a slightly different form) Aristotle’s famous question posed in The Nicomachean Ethics: “What advantage in his art will a weaver or a joiner get from knowledge of [the] good-itself? Or how will one who has had a vision of the idea itself become thereby a better doctor in general?”27 But the argument goes further: one needs to remember that as far as practical actions are concerned, the idea of the good-itself is equally useless as the idea that that latter idea is a metaphysical chimera. Therefore, Fish shares Rorty’s opinion that pragmatism, being basically a kind of antifoundationlism and antiessentialism, is suited merely for “toppling” certain metaphysical “towers” erected in the academia and should remain “a medicine which dissolves the old medicines but doesn’t in fact leave its own trace in the bloodstream.”28 But besides its efficiently performing this antifoundationalist job, pragmatism “will not take you either to heaven or hell,” “pulls us in no direction,” “does not tell you what to do,” “delivers

26

27 28

Fish, “Truth and Toilets,” p. 418. Although Richard Rorty has many times expressed a similar skepticism vis-à-vis the efficiency of philosophy in improving the world, he has also made it clear that: “Nobody can set any a priori limits to what change in philosophical opinion can do, any more than to what change in scientific or political opinion can do. To think that one can know such limits is just as bad as thinking that, now that we have learned that the ontotheological tradition has exhausted its possibilities, we must hasten to reshape everything, make all things new. Change in philosophical outlook is neither intrinsically central nor intrinsically marginal – its results are just as unpredictable as change in any other area of culture.” Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Pragmatism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy,” in: Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 6. Cf. Rorty, “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” p. 19-20. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. James Alexander Kerr Thomson (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), p. 13 [1096b]. Richard Rorty and E. P. Ragg, “Worlds or Words Apart?: The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies: An Interview with Richard Rorty,” Philosophy and Literature, 26 (2002), p. 374.

Introduction

19

no method.” And the better for it, since also for this reason it is a “bad substitute for the absolutes it tilts against.”29 So is Shusterman’s pragmatism a betrayal of philosophy or a betrayal of practice? Actually, it is none of them, and let us try to see why. As far as the former objection is concerned, Shusterman could reply that it is not him but rather Hartmann and like-minded thinkers who are in fact divorcing themselves from philosophy since, as he correctly observes, “philosophy’s major achievements were never really governed by … the wholly disinterested pursuit of truth,” as “[i]ts theories and chosen problems [e.g., “Plato’s philosophy of art”] were rather an intellectual response to the socio-cultural conditions and perplexities of the day” (PA 45). And that is not all, as they were also, at least in the ancient times, part and parcel of a way of life that philosophy then constituted for its acolytes. In fact, Shusterman’s plea for the practicality of philosophy should be seen not only as an attempt at reinvigorating the spirit that permeated the thought of his hero John Dewey, but also as an explicit return to the long forgotten ancient conception of bios philosophicos, which has been recently excavated by a host of authors, including Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, Martha Nussbaum, and Stanley Cavell. We may admit, then, that there is a sense in which Shusterman, rather than being false to philosophy, is at least more faithful to it than thinkers like Hartmann. Yet there still remains the question whether in his philosophical activism he is not divorcing himself from the reality he wants so much to ameliorate. Doing full justice to it, however, requires not only a good dose of metaphilosophical reflection but also a careful assessment of Shusterman’s own attempts at addressing various social conditions and problems, something which cannot be realized in an introduction to a book, as it needs a whole volume instead. What follows is exactly such a book, but before I proceed to its substance, let me address one possible objection to the perspective I want to assume. There is no doubt that the issues I have been talking about belong to the discourse on the end of philosophy, or to the so-called “theory wars.” Let me note, then, that there are scholars, particularly in continental philosophy, who claim that this discourse belongs in turn to the late 20th century rather than to our times, and that it has been already laid to rest on the dusty shelves of libraries in favor of the freshly rejuvenated, unswerving and progressive belief in the power of philosophy to intervene in the world.30 Yet is this certainly true? Have we really gone past the theory wars? The answer is two times “no,” and that it cannot be otherwise is suggested by the very fact that the main heroes of contemporary continental philoso-

29 30

Fish, “Truth and Toilets,” p. 420, 424-5. See, for instance, Nina Power, “Review of Alain Badiou’s Conditions,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (July 25, 2009), http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16706 (accessed August 7, 2009).

20

Introduction

phy,31 such as Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek (not to mention their acolytes), are quite ardent in their defense of the practical, militant potential of the love of wisdom and vividly aggressive vis-à-vis any form of philosophical self-pity and flagellation. Such a reaction could hardly be provoked by a non-entity, and given that, as we see, the problem still seems pressing, I believe that it is profitable to take a closer look at Shusterman’s grappling with it; especially that in the course of doing so he provides many refreshing ideas, subverts some anointed dogmas, and takes up topics that many of his fellow-philosophers reject as too insouciant, trivial, or scandalous indeed. It is my hope that all of these features of Shusterman’s work will be adequately presented in the chapters of this book, which are as follows. Chapter 1 addresses Shusterman’s account of aesthetic experience. Firstly, it provides an in-depth analysis of Shusterman’s debate with Richard Rorty over the question of non-discursive somatic experience, as it was conceived by Dewey. Subsequently, the chapter describes Shusterman’s attempts at reanimating Dewey’s conception of art as experience and it also presents the former’s original perspective on history of art. It elucidates, too, the importance of Shusterman’s contribution to the ongoing controversy over the definition of art (i.e., among other things, his critique of what he calls “wrapper definitions of art” and his definition of art as dramatization). Another crucial theme of Shusterman’s pragmatism, i.e., literature and interpretation, is dealt with in Chapter 2, which begins by analyzing his critique of “hermeneutic universalism” (as represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Fish, and Alexander Nehamas). Shusterman’s theory is then presented as a middle road between deconstruction and analytic philosophy; in particular, the chapter explores Shusterman’s Wittgenstein-inspired conception of interpretation as sense-making, as well as his pluralistic approach to literary criticism, which leads him, among other things, to a critique of the disciplinary perversions afflicting the theories of reading espoused by some of his fellow neopragmatists. The focus of Chapter 3 is Shusterman’s approach to popular culture, which, as is worth noting, has exerted strong influence in various fields, gaining him wide international recognition and popularity. Among specific topics discussed are: Shusterman’s Deweyan meliorism, his attempts at providing “aesthetic legitimation” for popular art, his criticisms of various arguments questioning the aesthetic value of such art, as well as Shusterman’s pioneering analyses of rap music. Finally, Chapter 4 probes so-called somaesthetics; a new interdisciplinary field of studies Shusterman coined a decade ago and has been concentrating on in his research ever since. The main structure of somaesthetics is presented, along with its indebtedness to various philosophical traditions. The chapter contains an 31

Which is the only relevant context here as the discussion of the end of philosophy has never significantly affected analytic thought. Note that the context in question includes all the disciplines heavily influenced by continental thought, such as cultural studies, literary theory, etc.

Introduction

21

overview of somaesthetic conception of the ontology of the body and an analysis of Shusterman’s critical engagements with other famous thinkers who have devoted their interest to the theme of human embodiment: i.e., William James, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel Foucault.32 As is clear from the above synopsis, much space will be devoted in the book to Shusterman’s polemics with other authors, and I must add that I shall often try to reconstruct and assess them in a manner that on the first look may seem unnecessarily pedantic. There are two basic reasons for this modus operandi. To begin with, Shusterman’s most important ideas very often emerge, or at least become fully articulated, in a dialectical engagement with the conceptions of other thinkers, and thus to grasp them in an appropriate way demands a knowledge of what they were meant to oppose in the first place. Secondly, analyzing Shusterman’s debates is all the more profitable given the vicissitudes of his philosophical genealogy. To cut the long story short, Shusterman had begun his career as a hardcore analytic philosopher (writing his dissertation in Oxford under the supervision of J.O. Urmson), then went through a period of flirtation with continental thought (Frankfurt School in particular) to end up only in his late thirties as a pragmatist. Now, this puts him in a very advantageous position in the sense that no matter which of these three traditions the idea he attacks comes from, he not only possesses a sufficient knowledge of that tradition, but also can maintain an appropriate critical distance to it thanks to his knowledge of the other two. This is why he does not limit himself to shallow gestures of dismissal and the charges of folly that the representatives of opposite schools usually exchange, but is able to engage the arguments of his adversaries in their complexity, scope, and historical context, exposing their inner workings and blind spots, something which has earned him a reputation of a generous, careful, and fair critic33 and is definitely worth discussing in a monograph like this. Yet it must be also admitted that he is not always successful in his criticism, just as he sometimes fails in his mission to make pragmatism, and philosophy generally, practical. And even though I am sympathetic to his overall approach, I will put considerable stress in the book on the instances where exactly this happens; e.g., when his criticism of other thinkers (however right its intentions might

32

33

See, e.g., my “ĩycie filozoficzne Richarda Shustermana” [Richard Shusterman’s Philosophical Life] Odra, No. 4 (2004), pp. 54-7, (cf. also my entry on “Richard Shusterman” in English Wikipedia; version from January 18, 2007). See, e.g., Arthur C. Danto’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s remarks on the back cover of PA (in particular, Danto stresses that the book “is clear, eloquent, fair, and urgent,” while Bourdieu calls Shusterman’s reading of Dewey “generous and inspired” – emphasis added).

22

Introduction

be) suffers seriously from misinterpretations, or where he unjustifiably attributes to philosophy the positive power to solve some specific practical questions.34 The book, then, shall contain conspicuously critical elements, which brings me to a rather significant remark by Shusterman in which he expresses his concern about the habit (“promoted by the institutional structures of academic philosophy”) that encourages scholars to refer to their colleagues’ works in a fiercely antagonistic way and often results in empty and ritualistic nit-picking.35 Now, I believe that some readers of Shusterman’s works may be baffled by such remarks on the part of an author a significant part of whose oeuvre consists in criticism indeed. Shusterman, however, would most probably rejoin by saying that the difference between him and those philosophers who indulge in the nit-picking stimulated by the internal requirements of the discipline is that his critiques have been constructive insofar as they have aimed at enhancing philosophy in such a way as to make it better serve human life. Since being a judge in one’s own case is always problematic, I should abstain here from trying to adjudicate whether the objections contained in this book are examples of pointless “fault-finding” or constructive criticism. Let me emphasize, however, that what stands behind them is the contention that if we want philosophy to serve the purpose Shusterman wants it to serve, we need to be aware of the discipline’s limitations and of the dangers of forgetting about them (something to which we might be lead to by our enthusiasm). On a slightly less general level, the book is permeated by the idea that both declaring pragmatism absolutely useless in practice (something Shusterman rightly rejects) and trying to force pragmatism to be useful where it cannot be so (something he sometimes is guilty of) are very unpragmatic approaches indeed.

34

35

I shall also be accentuating the moments when, in attempting to realize the mission of his philosophy, Shusterman succumbs to foundationalism and essentialism and thereby steers away from his basic pragmatism. “[T]he structural logic of our professional institutions … tends to force the critical commentator to magnify possible differences of opinion with the author, even if those differences are only minor ones of tone or emphasis.” Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Criticism: A Response to Three Critics of Pragmatist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 16, No.1 (2002), p. 26-7.

CHAP TER 1

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

1.1. Zarathustra and the Paradoxes of Contemporary Pragmatism As probably all of us remember quite well, before parting with his disciples Nietzsche’s Zarathustra uttered the following words: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. … Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves, and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”1 No matter how many thinkers have been modest, or megalomaniacal, enough to tell the same to their students, one could risk a hypothesis that denying a teacher to be faithful to her has been one of the most frequent patterns of intellectual succession (or continuation) in the history of philosophy.2 For it indeed happens quite often that pupils reveal to the world that their teacher had had a wonderful idea, but she nevertheless betrayed it in the end, since she either used some inadequate tools in developing it or simply forgot about it for some reason, and now the main task for her spiritual inheritors is to save what was distorted or lost. One could provide many historical examples here, but for my present purposes it suffices to mention, e.g., Fichte’s relation to his great predecessor Kant3 or, since I have begun by mentioning Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to emphasize who Nietzsche was for Heidegger and, subsequently, Heidegger for Derrida. As has already been indicated in the literature, this, so to speak, Zarathustrian model of intellectual succession might seem especially adequate with regard to Dewey, who stressed that his, as well as anyone else’s, philosophical thought is inevitably contextual, which means not only that it always emerges out of some concrete “situation,” but also that it responds to the challenges of its own and no

1 2

3

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin,1978), p. 78. Of course, by being a pupil I do not necessarily mean having some direct spatiotemporal contact with the teacher, but rather a generally conceived intellectual apprenticeship, which can transcend time and space. See, e.g., Dewey’s remark on Fichte and Kant in: John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1984), p. 50.

24

Chapter 1

other time.4 And hence, since “contexts … change,” we should not hew blindly to any idea, even when it belongs to our mentor.5 As it seems to me, this model of reception accounts also for a well-known, yet still striking, paradox of contemporary pragmatism: namely, that even though the notion of experience was doubtless crucial to Dewey (and to other classical pragmatists, too), the most famous contemporary follower of this thinker and exponent of pragmatism, the late Richard Rorty, rejected this notion completely (cf. PP 158), claiming at the same time that he did that in order to realize a task which Dewey himself had intended to complete, but had sadly failed to do so exactly because he had celebrated the notion of experience.6 I am going to discuss this more extensively in a moment; for now, let me just say that, as it usually happens in such cases, it is for this very reason that Rorty has been attacked by other adherents of Dewey (note that many of them would have certainly never become who they are now, i.e., observant Deweyans, had not Rorty freed the ideas of his mentor from a philosophical purgatory in the first place), who have fervently argued that Rorty must be a dangerous heretic (or only an ignoramus) and that without the notion of experience pragmatism does not exist. One must stress, however, that this debate has not been limited solely to “policing the proper interpretation” of Dewey’s works “for the sake of historical accuracy,”7 as it has also involved important questions concerning the direction of pragmatism and philosophy per se,8 and some of the most insightful of these have 4

5

6

7 8

See William Gavin’s introduction to: In Dewey’s Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction, ed. William J. Gavin (Albany: SUNY Press 2003), from which I borrow the example of Zarathustra. Cf. John J. Stuhr, “Old Ideals Crumble: War, Pragmatist Intellectuals, and the Limits of Philosophy,” Metaphilosophy, 35, No. 1-2 (2004), p. 85. William Gavin, “Introduction: Passing Dewey By?,” in: In Dewey’s Wake, p. 1. Shannon Sullivan has put it quite clear, indeed: “We Deweyans demonstrate that we read Dewey poorly when, in response to his work, we erect pragmatism as a statue to worship, as creed to recite by heart. The more we earnestly believe that Dewey got it right, the more we need to be wary of our devotion to him. If we are to be true to Dewey’s ideas we at time must declare him false.” Shannon Sullivan, “(Re)Construction Zone: Beware of Falling Statues,” in: In Dewey’s Wake, p. 110. See, e.g., Richard Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” in: Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 72-89. Despite his criticism of Dewey, Rorty claims: “The philosopher I most admire, and of whom I should most like to think of myself as a disciple, is John Dewey.” Richard Rorty, “Relativism – Finding and Making,” in: Debating the State of Philosopy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski, p. 32. As Richard Shusterman argues, such an approach would be simply untrue to Dewey’s own conception of philosophical criticism. See Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Criticism,” p. 26. The number of articles and books which criticize Rorty’s reading of Dewey is enormous. See, e.g.: Gary Brodsky, “Rorty’s Interpretation of Pragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 18, No. 4 (1982), pp. 311-38, and Susan Haack, “Between Scientism and Conversationalism,” Philosophy and Literature, 20, No. 2 (1996), pp. 455-74. As far as the question of experience is concerned, see: John J. Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

25

been posed by Richard Shusterman. Interestingly, however, in his case we can observe a paradox which is analogous to the one mentioned above, for in order to protect Dewey from Rorty, Shusterman provides a radical critique of the former, and he does that precisely to enable Dewey’s conception of experience to better serve the purpose that was assigned to it by none other than Dewey himself. Now, it should become clear that even though this chapter concerns a vast array of topics, such as, e.g., textualism or essentialist tendencies in defining art, it incessantly revolves around the issue of how one questions Dewey to ensure that one is faithful to him.9 1.2. Two Deweys, Two Deweyans, and the Problem of Nondiscursivity Let me begin by saying that even though he declares himself an advocate of Dewey’s theory of experience,10 it would be hopeless to search in Shusterman’s works for systematic discussions on this topic of the kind of which his philosophical hero excelled in. On the other hand, however, it would be equally problematic to say that he merely applies Dewey’s conception to some specific issues, for, as we shall see, he has many reservations with regard to it, thereby openly breaking with the Deweyan orthodoxy. Be that as it may, the only text that Shusterman devoted

9

10

(especially Chapter 6, tellingly entitled “Rorty as Elvis: Dewey’s Reconstruction of Metaphysics”); and David L. Hildebrand, “The Neopragmatist Turn,” Southwest Philosophy Review, 19, No. 1 (January 2003), pp. 79-88. For the lack of space, I shall not present here any summary of Dewey’s (or classical pragmatist in general) theory of experience, and in what follows I assume that the reader has some basic knowledge thereof. See, e.g., John Dewey, Experience and Nature: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1981). Cf. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature, and Chapter 1 of Robert J. Roth, British Empiricism and American Pragmatism: New Directions and Neglected Arguments (New York: Durham University Press, 1993), pp. 1-28. Cf. the following remark: “Experience, as I conceive it in the tradition of William James and John Dewey, is not a purely private domain of consciousness; it is a transactional nexus of interacting energies connecting the embodied self and the environing world, including the social world that constructs the biological organism into a self. So conceived experience can be a helpful notion for appreciating the varieties of energy, value, meaning, knowledge, and behavior that extend beneath and beyond the realm of intellectual thought.” Shusterman, “Intellectualism and the Field of Aesthetics: The Return of the Repressed?,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 220 (2002), p. 331. Cf. also the following metaphilosophical declaration made by Shusterman: “Pragmatism, as I practice it, is a philosophy of embodied, situated experience. Rather than relying on a priori principles or seeking necessary truths, the pragmatist works from experience, trying to clarify its meaning so that its present quality and its consequences for future experience might be improved” (PL 96).

26

Chapter 1

entirely to Dewey’s general conception of experience is basically a polemic with Rorty,11 and thus let me set the stage by characterizing the latter’s position first. It has already become common knowledge among the pragmatists that Rorty’s relation to Dewey is at least ambivalent. Of course, there are passages in Rorty’s texts where Dewey appears to be a cure for the foundationalist sickness that plagues traditional philosophy, but there are other passages according to which Dewey himself is “sick” and requires a treatment, or even, as John Stuhr has sardonically pointed out in his diatribe against Rorty, an “amputation”12 of that part of his views which cannot be saved at all. In fact, as Rorty’s critics have not failed to observe, there are simply two Deweys in Rorty’s works.13 One of them good: an “Emersonian visionary”14 and an anti-foundationalist who fights ontotheology not with transcendental argumentation, but rather through genealogical narratives (such as those presented in The Quest for Certainty or “An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms”). The other one bad: an apostle of scientism and at the same time a full-blooded metaphysician who does not want to get rid of the foundationalist philosophy as such, but rather to propose his own version thereof. Moreover, that which is the worst (i.e., the most metaphysical) for Rorty in the bad Dewey is the conception of experience the latter is famous for. Besides scientism, it is in fact the second basic element of Dewey’s thought which Rorty rejects in pursuing his own version of pragmatism – sometimes dubbed as “neo-pragmatism,” “postlinguistic-turn pragmatism” (PP 158), or “neo-analytic pragmatism.”15 Naturally, Rorty agrees with the classic pragmatists that the idle metaphysical problems need to be “dissolved,” but he nevertheless claims that this goal is better served by the notion of language than by the notion of experience (and nondiscursive expe11

12 13

14 15

See Chapter 6 of PP “Somatic Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?,” originally published as “Dewey on Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?,” Philosophical Forum, 26, No. 2 (1994), pp. 127-48. Cf. Chapter 6 of BC (entitled “Redeeming Somatic Reflection: John Dewey’s Theory of Body-Mind”). In what follows, I shall also consider Shusterman’s criticism of Rorty presented in Chapter 5 of PA (entitled “Beneath Interpretation”). Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, p. 118. See Paul C. Taylor, “The Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued: Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 16, No.1 (2002), p. 17-8. Cf. Hildebrand, “The Neopragmatist Turn,” p. 79; James Gouinlock, “What Is the Legacy of Instrumentalism?: Rorty’s Interpretation of Dewey,” in: Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), p. 74; David L. Hall, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 71. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 96. See Richard Rorty, “Truth without Correspondence to Reality,” in: Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 24-27. In his article “The Neopragmatist Turn,” David L. Hildebrand talks about “linguistic pragmatism,” while Tom Rockmore refers to “neo-analytic pragmatism,” whose different “types” can be found “in the writings of Carnap, Sellars, Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Brandom, and others.” Tom Rockmore, “On Classical and Neo-Analytic Forms of Pragmatism,” Metaphilosophy, 36, No. 3 (2005), p. 260.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

27

rience in particular), especially given that the latter, as it was conceived by Dewey and other philosophers, is far too polluted with the residues of metaphysics. Richard Shusterman, in turn, does not agree with Rorty. He thinks that Dewey “in emphasizing nondiscursive experience … was onto something valuable,” and that only if we straighten out what he “unfortunately confused” (PP 158) will we fully understand the significance the notion of experience has for pragmatism. Therefore, he attempts to defend Dewey’s conception of “immediate, nondiscursive”16 experience (taking as its paradigmatic form somatic experience) 17 in the following three steps: questioning what he calls Rorty’s global textualism;18 proving that Rorty’s critique is off the point, having been based on a mistaken reading of Dewey; and removing all sorts of obstacles (including various philosophical prejudices) against introducing this kind of experience into philosophy. “Global textualism” is conceived by Shusterman as a view which claims that language is “ubiquitous,” and that, as a consequence, all possible experience or understanding must have a linguistic character (see SD 203). He tries to undermine this stance (a) by arguing for the existence of extra-linguistic experiences, and he also attempts to (b) undermine the alleged anti-foundationalist potential of the textualist stance by indicating that the category of language can be interpreted in a foundationalist way, too. a) Shusterman argues, against textualism, that “certainly there seem to be” acts of experience of non-linguistic character, specifying further that these can be conscious, e.g., when,“[a]s dancers, we understand the sense and rightness of a movement or posture proprioceptively, by feeling it in our spine and muscles, without translating it into conceptual linguistic terms” (PA 127), or unconscious –

16

17

18

It is important to note that the essay “Somatic Experience,” which shall be my focus in the following pages, is burdened with a terminological confusion. Namely, Shusterman uses there interchangeably terms such as “immediate experience,” “nondiscursive experience,” and “immediate, nondiscursive experience,” which is misleading insofar as this might falsely suggest that he restricts immediacy to the nondiscursive. In fact, Shusterman explicitly argues for the existence of immediate linguistic “experiences” and “understandings” (more on that shall be said in the next chapter). On the other hand, for Shusterman (at least in that article) all nondiscursive experience seems to be exclusively immediate. See Taylor, “Two Dewey-Thesis, Continued,” pp. 20-3, for a discussion of Shusterman’s use of terms “immediate” and “nondiscursive.” One has to be aware, however, that in his recent texts Shusterman stipulates that “we must not conflate all somatic experience with nondiscursive immediacy, since our somatic experience is in many ways structured by the discursive environments and institutions in which our bodies perform.” Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Criticism,” p. 32. Cf. Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism Between Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Education: A Response to David Granger,” Studies in Philosophy of Education, 22, No. 5 (2003), p. 409. See SD 203. Shusterman refers to Rorty’s views also by the term “global linguisticism” (PP 128).

28

Chapter 1

“we typically experience our verticality and direction of gaze without being aware of them” (PA 127). Moreover, Shusterman tries to anticipate one important objection which may be raised by the textualist; namely, that any theoretical defense of non-liguistic experience must be a performative contradiction insofar as it necessarily demands putting into linguistic categories something which allegedly remains outside of them (PA 128). To this he rejoins that even though indeed “we can never talk (or explicitly think) about things existing without their being somehow linguistically mediated; it does not mean that we can never experience them non-linguistically or that they cannot exist for us meaningfully but not in language” (PA 128). b) As far as Shusterman’s undermining of the antifoundational potential of textualism is concerned, he seems to be wanting to turn Rorty into an easy target by imputing to him a view according to which “noncognitive experience is intrinsically a foundational notion, while language is intrinsically immune to such uses” (PP 162). Quite unsurprisingly, Shusterman finds this stance untenable, and to prove that it is exactly so, he points to the metaphysical interpretations of Wittgenstein’s language-games theory, which are professed by some analytic philosophers, and to the fact that even protocol statements, the pride of the vociferously anti-metaphysical logical positivism, have found themselves in the service of foundationalism (PP 162). Now, let us see try to assess the validity Shusterman’s arguments. First of all, let me emphasize that since he is a pragmatist with analytic training who himself claims that “the objects we refer to are always linguistically mediated” (PA 91),19 he should not be surprised if the textualist tells him that she cannot believe in a totally extra-linguistic conscious experience and that the examples given by Shusterman are not convincing (at least to her). For if I am conscious of the fact that I am “dancing,” “moving,” or “twisting,” etc., so the textualist’s argument would go, then is it not the case that the background of this thematized consciousness is structured by linguistic categories: say, these and no other verbs? The way I see it, Shusterman cannot convince his adversary that the latter is mistaken, and this is not so much because the textualist is absolutely right at this point, but rather because textualism, similar to any other philosophical view for that matter, is immune to empirical counterexamples of this kind. Not to mention the fact that textualists could bring into foray their own empirical examples: for instance those “cases of anesthesia” which demonstrate body feelings to be permeated by linguistic structures to an extent larger than most of us imagine.20 19

20

Cf. the following remark: “There is no single description of the world and no transcendental, non-linguistic God’s-eye perspective of its objects that would be available for us to appeal to, that would even be intelligible for us language-users” (PA 91). Some “cases of anesthesia – numbness or lack of all feeling in certain part of the body … were [shown to be] in no way, shape, or form regulated by the location of a particular nerve’s endings in some part of the body, but which instead clearly obeyed popular notions

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

29

Shusterman’s argument from unconscious experience is in the same (if not worse) position as his references to conscious extralinguistic experiences, and this is because the notion of unconscious experience, which it refers to in order to legitimize nondiscursive experience, remains highly controversial and would itself demand legitimization in the first place. Most probably, then, the textualist would claim that in this case the term “experience” becomes so incredibly stretched and vague that it is impossible to say what it means exactly, and hence, to use one of Rorty’s favorite sayings, “it makes more trouble than it’s worth.” But what if despite this inability to outargue the textualist, and the basic impossibility to talk about experience without using language at the same time (to which tautological point the textualist line of argumentation apparently boils down), one is still convinced, as Shusterman and I myself are, that humans are capable of nondiscursive experiences? In fact, toward the end of “Beneath Interpretation” (the principal exposition of his anti-textualism), as if aware that his arguments might fall flat on his adversaries’ ears, Shusterman suggests that a better, if radical, solution might be a recontextualization of the whole debate, the taking of a drastically different perspective on it; one that would expose the difficulties the anti-textualist encounters in making her case not as a sign that she misses something important about the reality as it is in itself, but rather as a result of a certain professional deviation contemporary philosophers in general suffer from: We philosophers fail to see this [i.e., that our inability to “talk (or explicitly think) about things existing without their being somehow linguistically mediated … does not mean that we can never experience them non-linguistically”] because, disembodied talking heads that we are, the only form of experience we recognize and legitimate is linguistic: thinking, talking, writing. But neither we nor the language which admittedly helps shape us could survive without the unarticulated background of prereflective, non-linguistic experience and understanding … language is [not] the only game in town. For there is … meaningful experience that is non-linguistic. [It resides] in those unmanageably illiterate and darkly somatic neighborhoods of town that we philosophers and literary theorists are accustomed to avoid and ignore, but on which we rely for our non-professional sustenance and satisfactions. After the conference papers are over, we go slumming in their bars (PA 128).

Seen from this perspective, the textualist argument may begin to “seem more like a sophistic paradox about talking without a language than a deep truth about human experience and the world” (PA 128). One historical analogy that might be invoked here in order to elucidate Shusterman’s point is that of the ontological argument for the existence of God, which argument could have become seen, and about where a part of the body, as defined in common speech, started and stopped.” Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 12.

30

Chapter 1

dismissed, as sophistry only after philosophers had ceased to conceive of themselves as workers in the Lord’s vineyard.21 Nevertheless, however right Shusterman’s anti-textualist arguments may be, they cannot pose a real threat to Rorty’s actual stance. For Shusterman, in painting far too demonized a picture of Rorty, apparently neglects the fact that the latter was not so much interested in putting forward the totalizing thesis that everything is language but rather in something more modest. The way I see it, he just wanted to play the role of a philosophical gadfly by asking his foundationally-inclined epistemologist-colleagues troubling questions such as: Is there a way to clearly demarcate where the language stops and reality begins? What do you actually mean when you say that language reflects, mirrors, represents, or “corresponds” to, the world? And how can you say anything about that topic given that you have problems with the aforementioned demarcation?22 Therefore, as some of his commentators underscore,23 Rorty does not deny the existence of nondiscursive experiences. In fact, he only argues that one cannot use them as a philosophical proof without expressing them in language at the same time. It is not surprising, then, that Shusterman’s declaration to the effect that body (and nondiscursive somatic experience) “remains … a promising place where discursive reason meets its limits, encounters its other” (PP 129) is treated by Rorty as a symptom of an old philosophical disease: I do not see a difference between ‘discursive reason’ and talking about things, and I cannot see that talking about things has either ‘limits’ or an ‘other’. Talking about things is one of the things we do. Experiencing moments of sensual joy is another. The two do not stand in a dialectical relationship, get in each others’ way, or need synthesis in a programme or theory. We can agree with Gadamer that ‘being that can be understood is language’ while remaining aware that there is more to life than understanding. Inventing others to reason and then purporting to provide a better discursive understanding of these non-discursive others (a project which stretches

21

22 23

I, of course, do not mean here that after the desecularization of philosophy, all philosophers adopted a dismissive approach to the ontological argument, my point being rather that the adopting of such a perspective had been made possible by the change. Moreover, I am also not trying to say that the philosophers who today take the ontological argument seriously must anachronistically embrace the ideal of philosophy as ancilla theologiae. Cf. Chapter 3 of John L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 41-63. See, e.g., Richard Rorty, “Charles Taylor on Truth,” in: Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 91. See Alan Malachowski, “Deep Epistemology without Foundations (in Language),” in: Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 145.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

31

from British empiricism through Bergson to existential phenomenology) seems to me a beautiful example of kicking up dust and then complaining that we cannot see.24

For Shusterman, however, the case is not so simple – most importantly because he thinks that philosophy does not have to be a purely linguistic affair; the point which I will return to shortly. As far as Shusterman’s argument from Rorty’s alleged belief in the inherently anti-foundational potential of language is concerned, it must be stressed that Rorty, contrary to what Shusterman seems to suggest, does not say anywhere that the notion of language is intrinsically, in and of itself, anti-foundational, for he only claims that ‘Language’ is a more suitable notion than ‘experience’ for saying the holistic and antifoundationalist things which James and Dewey had wanted to say. This not because formulating philosophical problems in terms of sentences rather than in terms of psychological processes is ‘clearer’ and ‘more precise,’ but simply because malleability of language is a less paradoxical notion than the malleability of nature or of ‘objects.’25 By taking what Bergmann called ‘the linguistic turn,’ and emphasizing that no language is more intrinsically related to nature than any other, analytic philosophers such as Goodman or Putnam have been able to make the anti-realist arguments common to Dewey and Green more plausible than either of the latter made them. For although Darwin saved Dewey from inheriting Green’s Cartesian notion of mind, he did not save him from the epistemological problematic with which Green had struggled.26

On the other hand, there is no doubt that Rorty’s views on language are not immune to the charges of foundationalism, as, e.g., Hilary Putnam has rightly demonstrated, pointing out that if, according to Rorty, it does not make sense to say that language represents reality, then it is equally nonsensical to claim the contrary (as Rorty himself does).27 Leaving this problem aside, let me now turn to Shusterman’s argument that Rorty’s critique of Dewey is based on a misreading of the latter. According to Shusterman, Rorty’s main charge against Dewey’s metaphysics of nondiscursive experience is that Dewey wanted to assign to this experience the role of “justificational evidence for our conscious cognitive claims” (PP 161). This charge, however, is said to be pointless since, as Shusterman objects, Dewey 24 25

26 27

Richard Rorty, “Response to Richard Shusterman,” in: Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 156-7. Cf. Shusterman’s remark: “Rorty is right that language works much better than experience for such epistemological purposes, since language is a clearer notion and epistemology is a distinctively linguistic enterprise” (PP 162, emphasis added). Richard Rorty, “Comments on Sleeper and Edel,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 21, No. 1 (1985), p. 40. See Hilary Putnam, Words and Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 300. See also Hildebrand, “The Neopragmatist Turn.”

32

Chapter 1

never had any such intentions. But before Shusterman will present his hypothesis as to what Dewey had in fact intended, he must fight his own bad Dewey,28 who, furthermore, differs significantly from his Rortyan counterpart, certainly not being an epistemologist who wants to justify our cognitive claims by means of nondiscursive experience.29 According to Shusterman, Dewey’s foundationalism is far more “subtle” (PP 163) than Rorty portrays it, with its main tenet being that there is some basis, or foundation – whose site is nondiscursive experience – which organizes and “directs our [discursive] thinking” yet itself can never be known by us.30 In this interpretation, even though the bad Dewey starts from “the good holist premise” that all understanding and experience takes place in, and is determined by, a “contextual whole” (or “situation” in Dewey’s nomenclature), he eventually makes a fatal mistake by introducing some mysterious, transcendental entity, the so-called “immediately experienced quality” (PP 163), whose workings, although it itself “is unknowable and ineffable” as such, “can be recognized by introspection” and deduced theoretically since without them any coherence of thought would be impossible (or so the bad Dewey thinks). This immediate quality: • •

•

28

29

30

31

32

constitutes situations as such, i.e., it synthesizes the elements of a situation into this and no other, unique whole31; “controls the distinction of objects or terms that thinking later identifies and employs as parts of the situation (e.g., whether we notice a sound sequence as one message or two, or instead disregard it as background noise)” (PP 163). is the source of standards of adequacy for all “judgments”32;

It is thanks to Paul C. Taylor’s insightful essay “The Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued” that I realized “that Shusterman subscribes to a way of reading Dewey that we might trace to Richard Rorty, an approach that posits two Deweys, one good, one less so,” p. 17, passim. As Shusterman argues, Dewey could not have been an epistemologist of that kind: “since [as Dewey claimed] not even known as ‘had,’ immediate [nondiscursive] experience is unavailable for use as evidence to support specific knowledge claims.” Henceforth, “in insisting that only language constitutes qualities as objects of knowledge, Dewey has already taken the linguistic turn which requires that the realm of cognitive justification be entirely linguistic” (PP 161). In this context, Shusterman refers primarily to Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry: The Later Works 1925-1953, Volume 12 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), as well as Dewey’s essay “Qualitative Thought,” in: Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Capricorn, 1963), pp. 93-116. A situation is “held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality.” Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” p. 97, cited in PP 163. See Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” p. 108.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience • •

33

secures the “continuity” of a situation and controls its direction, and thereby guides our thinking processes33; determines the way we associate all kinds of objects; for the “standard explanations of physical contiguity and similarity are insufficient to make the link” (PP 164).34

Needless to say, Shusterman regrets that Dewey succumbs at this point to a kind of foundationalism with a Kantian transcendental twist, thereby unnecessarily spoiling his, otherwise commendable, conception of experience (and, as we shall see, his theory of aesthetic experience in particular).35 Yet at the same time he argues that the case is not entirely lost as one can extract the idea of immediate quality from that conception without much effort and negative consequences, given that its theoretical role can be played as well by the non-foundationalist categories of need, habit, and purpose which were elaborated by Dewey himself in Human Nature and Conduct.36 As I hope to have clarified, Shusterman’s bad Dewey indeed differs from his Rortyan counterpart. Interestingly, the same can be said of their good Deweys. The good Dewey of Rorty wants primarily to get rid of the deadwood of traditional philosophy (Philosophy with a capital P) and “preach the gospel of democracy,” while Shusterman’s good Dewey, in addition to the latter motivations, would also like “to celebrate the importance of nondiscursive” immediate experience (PP 166) and improve its quality in practice, not only to theorize it. Of course, some caustic critic could point out that Shusterman’s interpretation then makes it really hard to explain why Dewey wrote hundreds of pages devoted to the metaphysical theory of experience and introduced the aforementioned category of its immediate quality. But Shusterman’s rejoinder would be quite simple and direct: Dewey’s intentions were good, but he eventually failed to realize them in a proper way; i.e., he wanted to extol the nondiscursive experience and in order to do so he turned it into a foundation, something which is after all quite understandable, since, as the history of philosophy indicates, when one wants to show that something has a crucial philosophical importance, one usually proceeds this way. As Shusterman concludes, “[t]his was a bad confusion of what was (or should have

33 34 35

36

See Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” pp. 99, 107. See Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” p. 111. For a discussion of some negative consequences which the conception of immediate quality has for Dewey’s theory of inquiry, see Richard M. Gale, “The Problem of Ineffability in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 44, No. 1 (2006), pp. 7590. Cf. a critique of this solution provided by Jon Borowicz in his “The Body of a Philosopher. Embodied Thought as Physical and Social Activity,” in: Sagesse Du Corps, ed. Gabor Csepregi (Aylmer: Éditions du Scribe, 2001), pp. 67-8.

34

Chapter 1

been) his true aim – to establish and improve the quality of [nondiscursive] experience as a practical end and useful tool” (PP 167). To support his thesis concerning the real intentions behind Dewey’s theory of experience, Shusterman points to the fact that Dewey was deeply interested in the ideas of F.M. Alexander, the inventor of one the most popular contemporary body therapies, known as Alexander Technique. What is crucial for Shusterman, this interest led Dewey not only to advocate Alexander’s ideas in his works and to write “enthusiastic introductions” (PP 31-32, 167)37 to the books authored by the latter, but also to take up the somatic practices recommended by him, thanks to which Dewey, as he himself claimed, managed to live to an impressively old age and in good physical condition to boot.38 Alexander’s main ideas can be summarized in the following way: as a result of the rapid development of contemporary civilization, our milieu has drastically changed, and thus our bodily habits and capacities (which had been shaped in, and adapted to, different circumstances)39 have simply become inadequate to the conditions in which we live now (see PP 167). This situation, in turn, is a constant cause of many diseases and physical ailments and, moreover, “subjects us unconsciously to new customs and regimes of body control (like Foucauldian disciplines of biopower)” (PP 167). Given that humanity can no longer count on the mechanisms of evolutionary adaptation in this regard, because they work too slowly to keep pace with our increasingly changing life-world, it seems understandable that we now need to modify, or even recreate, our somatic mechanisms ourselves, and a good way to do so is by engaging in diverse exercises that improve our conscious control of the body. Finally, since to achieve this goal, as F.M. Alexander suggests, we need to deploy nondiscursive somatic experience, the latter simply had to play a crucial role not only in his works but also in Dewey’s pragmatism, which aimed primarily at improving reality rather than at merely describing it. In the “Alexandrian context” – Shusterman argues, we can better understand Dewey’s deep philosophical “concern for … experiences” of this kind: “not as foundational epistemology but as a panegyric to the somatic in the face of centuries of denigrating philosophical scorn,” and as an attempt to alleviate “the

37

38 39

See John Dewey, “Introductory Word,” in: Frederick M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1918), pp. xiii-xvii; reprinted in: John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Volume 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 350-2. A detailed and insightful analysis of Alexander’s influence on Dewey can be found in Chapter 6 of BC. For a philosophical discussion of Alexander’s Technique, see Chapter 8 of PL. Not to mention the fact that due to the West’s troubled relation to the somatic they were developed to a lesser extent than our intellectual habits and capacities.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

35

painfully (though often unconsciously) experienced fragmentation of human life” (PP 170-171).40 It is worth noting that Shusterman does not confine himself to reconstructing Dewey’s project of the philosophical rehabilitation of nondiscursive experience, as he also puts considerable effort into arguing that it is worth developing further. Nevertheless, he is aware that there may be some obstacles to doing so – both explicitly articulated theoretical claims as well as some tacit prejudices that lurk behind the traditional concept of philosophy (see PP 171) – and therefore he tries to discern and criticize them. First of all, as he emphasizes, the two main arguments which Rorty directs against Dewey’s concept of nondiscursive experience – namely, that it presupposes what Wilfrid Sellars called the “myth of the given”41 and mistakenly puts that experience in the position of a reason for our beliefs, while it can merely be a cause thereof – are valid exclusively within the realm of epistemology.42 Thus, even if we agree that justifying any claim by reference to nondiscursive experience can be possible only in fantasy43 and that, in Rorty’s words, “nothing is to be gained for an understanding of human knowledge by running together the vocabularies in which we describe causal antecedents of knowledge with those in which we offer justifications of our claims to knowledge,”44 we still cannot exclude the possibility that nondiscursive experience can play a significant role in philosophy. To think otherwise would mean identifying the entire philosophical edifice with one of its subdisciplines, i.e., epistemology, a view Shusterman finds unacceptable, rejecting the idea that philosophy’s only (or main) function is to act as a cognitive tribunal that accepts or disproves the already existing convictions and practices, shying away from instilling new convictions and proposing novel practices (see PP 171-2). And if we do not agree with this reduction of philosophy to epistemology and think, moreover, that philosophy’s “pragmatist goal [is] not the grounding of knowledge, but the production of better lived experience,” then a new option will reveal itself. Namely, that philosophy does not have to be con40

41

42 43 44

And this, “as [Dewey] believed, could be achieved only by recognizing the immediate dimension of somatic experience” (PP 171). On Dewey’s relation to F. M. Alexander, see also Thomas C. Dalton, Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), for instance, pp. 97-101, 117-22. Cf. Borowicz, “The Body of a Philosopher,” p. 71. It is worth noting that, as Hilary Putnam points out, in his works Rorty “generalizes” Sellars’s original argument concerning the myth of the given. See Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism and Realism,” in: The Revival of Pragmatism, p. 43; cf. Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). See Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” and his “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin,” in: Truth and Progress, pp. 290-306. Since in reality the very act of justification necessitates mediating such an experience through discursive categories. Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” p. 81.

36

Chapter 1

cerned solely with adjudicating propositional truths and “can aim more directly at the practical end of improving experience by advocating and embodying practices which achieve this” (PP 173). Philosophy’s epistemological inclination, however, is not the only factor that could hamper Shusterman’s rehabilitation of nondiscursive experience, and as the first of the remaining ones I would like to point to the already mentioned textualism. Although he is ready to recognize the efficacy and advantages of the antifoundationalist arguments formulated by the proponents of textualism, Shusterman claims nevertheless that this stance has been infected (since the time of its birth from the spirit of German idealism) with a certain aversion toward everything that belongs to the body, somatic experiences included, which it tries to assimilate by means of textualization or, if that proves impossible, turns a blind eye to (see PP 173). Furthermore, he tries to bolster this diagnosis by invoking the parallel between “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism” which is borrowed from the essay under the same title, written by none other than Rorty himself.45 And while there is no need to go into the details of the parallel, the conclusions which Shustermans draws from it are indeed seminal: “[t]he whole project of policing the borders between ‘the logical space of reasons’ and the realm of ‘physical causes’ so as to confine philosophy to the former is just one more assertion of the old dualism of separating the concerns of the superior soul from the corruption of the material body“ (PP 174). Continuing his genealogical investigations, and going further back in time, Shusterman links the negative approach of Western philosophy to nondiscursive somatic experience with the fact that its foundations had been laid by the most logocentric of philosophers, i.e., Plato, thanks to whom the love of wisdom means basically the love of ideas and at the same time a mistrust toward everything that lies beyond the light shed by logos (PP 174).46 Quite naturally, this Platonic inheritance prevents nondiscursive bodily experience from being incorporated into the practice of Western philosophy, which in this respect differs significantly from its Indian or East-Asian counterparts that were lucky enough not to have a Plato as their originator.47 45 46

47

See Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” in: Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 139-59. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Life and Soul: The Phaedo,” “The Soul between Nature and Spirit,” and “From the Soul to the Logos: The Theatetus and the Sophist,” in: The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 41-70. Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and East-Asian Thought,” Metaphilosophy, 35 (2004), pp. 13-42. Cf. Yasuo Yuasa’s opinion that “there is a marked difference in the methodological foundations of the theoretical organization of Eastern and Western philosophy. Unless we examine this point, we cannot grasp the uniqueness of the Eastern theory of the body.” Yasuo Yuasa, The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, ed. Thomas P. Kasulis, trans. Nagatomo Shigenori and Thomas P. Kasulis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 25.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

37

And if the aforementioned factors were not enough, there is also what Shusterman dubs the disciplinary fallacy, which consists in considering as relevant for a given discipline only that which it is already concerned with and in accordingly treating that discipline’s lack of interest in something as proof that it indeed should not develop any. Therefore, when confronted with the examples of Eastern thinkers who philosophize by means of their nondiscursive experiences, professional Western philosophers can just snarl contemptuously: “That’s not philosophy!” (which should in fact be read as saying: It’s not the kind of thing we’re doing around here). And it would be all the more difficult to convince them that this judgment is wrong given that the disciplinary fallacy sponges off an altogether reasonable idea that each discipline, in order to have any identity, cannot concern all things, but must limit its scope.48 While not questioning this general principle of disciplinary limitation, Shusterman argues that observing it too rigidly is just as dangerous as dispensing of it entirely; for this must result in blocking any possibility of the discipline’s progress and ultimately in its self-annihilation. Be that as it may, taken together, the aforementioned factors make it extremely hard to imagine a way in which Western philosophy could fully recognize the value of nondiscursive experience, and almost impossible to conceive how it could be deployed in philosophical practice. Nevertheless, Shusterman is convinced that this situation can be changed by a new philosophical discipline which he invented and labeled “somaesthetics,” and which shall be the focus of the last chapter of this book. 1.3. Art as (Aesthetic) Experience The Rise and Fall of a Concept The history of philosophical reflection on aesthetic experience is certainly longer than that of the use of the term “aesthetic” in its current sense. In fact, one might say that this history is as long as the history of philosophy itself. Among the thinkers who discussed “aesthetic experience” (though without deploying this exact term) were Pythagoras, Plato, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and a host of Renaissance theorists, yet it became the dominant concept in theoretical reflection on art only in the second half of the 19th century.49 This reign, however, was not to last 48

49

See, e.g., Stanley Fish, “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do,” in: There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech... and it’s a Good Thing, Too (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 231-42; and his “Distinctiveness: Its Achievement and Its Costs,” in: Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 19-39. Cf. Wojciech Małecki, “Neopragmatism and the Problem of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Stanley Fish,” Human Affairs, No. 1 (2009), pp. 96-104. See Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics, trans. Christopher Kasparek (The Hague; Boston: Nijhoff, 1980), pp. 310-38. (cf. the original Polish

38

Chapter 1

forever, and thus in his essay “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” Richard Shusterman talks about the process of the “decline” of the concept of aesthetic experience in the philosophy of art, which had begun with the theory of Monroe Beardsley and lead, in the 1980s, to an almost complete rejection by Arthur C. Danto of such an experience as an object of theoretical reflection.50 While applying this diagnosis both to continental thought (the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu),51 as well as to Anglo-Saxon philosophy,52 Shusterman devotes his analyses mainly to the latter, emphasizing that within its confines the change has been most drastic and worrying (see PL 15). Namely, if in Dewey’s theory the concept of aesthetic experience could still be characterized as “evaluative, phenomenological, and transformational,” then along with the subsequent variants of this concept presented by Beardsley, George Dickie, Nelson Goodman, and Danto, it became “purely descriptive” and conservative, and lost its “phenomenological dimension” to a “third-person semantics” of perception of artworks, only to eventually be substituted with the notion of interpretation (PL 17, 21-22, 31). What Shusterman means here, basically, is that Dewey conceived of experience as “something [that is] vividly felt” by the perceiving subject and as something “valuable” in itself, while his successors refrained from attributing any value to it and ultimately began to construe it as an almost mechanical process of decoding the signifiers which constitute a given work (something which could well be performed by a digital processor). Moreover, and this feature of Dewey’s attitude is especially crucial for Shusterman, Dewey did not intend his notion of aesthetic experience to merely reflect how this experience functioned in the cultural milieu of his time (when it was understood as confined to the perception of beaux arts),

50 51

52

edition, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Dzieje szeĞciu pojĊü (Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1975), p. 361). Richard Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” in: PL, p. 15. For Shusterman’s views on Danto see also: “Art in a Box: Danto” (Chapter 10 of SD). Significantly, Shusterman bases his rather uncompromising thesis exclusively on the analysis of the works written by the abovementioned authors, while, as Wolfgang Welsch indicates in his critique of “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” from the 1970s onward one can talk about an upsurge of the philosophical interest in the notion of aesthetic experience, especially in German-speaking countries and among authors not even mentioned by Shusterman. See Wolfgang Welsch, “Rettung durch Halbierung?: Zu Richard Shustermans Rehabilitierung ästetischer Erfahrung,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 47, No. 1 (1999), p. 111. Let me also note that despite his deep knowledge of Gadamer’s ideas (shown by Shusterman in his book on Eliot), he seems to miss the convergence of Gadamer’s conception of Erfahrung with Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience, which has been convincingly demonstrated by Thomas M. Jeannot in “A Propaedeutic to the Philosophical Hermeneutics of John Dewey: Art as Experience and Truth and Method,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15, No. 1 (2001), pp.1-13. Cf. David E.W. Fenner, “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Analysis,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 37, No. 1 (2003), pp. 40-53.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

39

but to defy the actual state of affairs and project a way in which the situation might be changed toward a more desirable outcome. Quite understandably, given their attachment to the scientific model of representing reality, nothing could be further from how Anglo-Saxon analytic aestheticians perceived their task. Taking this into account, Shusterman admits that at least the transition from the phenomenological to the semantic aspect of the notion of aesthetic experience can be in a way justified by the transformations that actually took place in the course of the 20th century within art itself, which throughout that period increasingly gravitated toward more “conceptual” forms53 and thus began to favor “intellectualized” modes of appreciation. Yet he is deeply convinced that the notion of aesthetic experience, especially in its Deweyan variant, has critical importance for both philosophy of art and art as such, and this is why he sets out on a mission to rehabilitate it. This very project shall be the main topic of the remainder of the chapter; before I get to it, however, let me consider what exactly Shusterman understands by the term “aesthetic experience.” What Is Aesthetic Experience? Given all the similarities between their conceptions, it is surely tempting to say that Shusterman simply inherits the conception of aesthetic experience from Dewey.54 That, however, would be a gross misconception since not only are there differences between the two, but some of them are of a fundamental nature. One must remember, above all, that while Dewey pursued a systematic theory of aesthetic experience, whose culmination is the extensive work entitled Art as Experience (rich in meticulous phenomenological investigations and subtle distinctions), Shusterman does not have such ambitions to systematicity, as he is not “sure how much aesthetic experience should be analyzed in philosophical terms” (PA 11), and, besides that, is not concerned with theorizing it, but rather with using the concept of aesthetic experience to achieve certain practical goals (of which

53

54

Thereby, according to Shusterman’s interpretation of Danto, fulfilling Hegel’s prophecy of art’s dissolution in philosophy (PL 2, 32); cf., e.g., Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), e.g., p. 13; Arthur C. Danto, “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense,” History and Theory, 37, No. 4, Theme Issue 37: Danto and His Critics: Art History, Historiography and After the End of Art (1998), pp. 127-143 (see also other articles published in that issue). Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. Thomas M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 90, 103; and Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) pp. 101-3. See Dewey, Experience and Nature, Chapter 9; and Dewey, Art as Experience, passim. Cf. James S. Johnston, “Reflections on Richard Shusterman’s Dewey,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 38, No.4 (2004), p. 99.

40

Chapter 1

more shall be said later).55 Even though this does not exhaust the differences between each authors’ conceptions of aesthetic experience, I would like to begin with the points of convergence. The most fundamental of them is that for both Shusterman and Dewey aesthetic experience does not merely accompany art but, in a sense, constitutes it. This thesis, however, does not equal reducing art to a purely subjective sensation because in Dewey’s pragmatism, aesthetic experience (as any other experience for that matter) is not something which can be reduced to a purely subjective sensation: it does not take place in the subject, but between subject and object, being an interaction (or, better yet, a transaction)56 between the two.57 Therefore, even though Dewey makes it clear that the presence of an “external object” is essential to aesthetic experience, he contrasts what he calls “the art product” (i.e., “statue, painting or whatever”), which possesses aesthetic qualities only potentially, with the “work of art,” which comes into being when aesthetic attention is directed at the product and actualizes those qualities58 (cf. PA 25-6; PL 22). This interactional theory entails that aesthetic experience cannot be classified as a purely passive reception; the listener, the viewer, the reader surrenders to the product to the same degree as she constitutes the work through her involvement in aesthetic experience (cf. PA 54-5). 55

56

57

58

This, however, does not mean that Shusterman does not theorize aesthetic experience at all; he does, but simply in a less systematic manner than did Dewey. Shusterman’s discussions of aesthetic experience are in fact quite numerous, and in what follows I shall try to reconstruct a certain general picture that emerges from them, basing my analyses on the following texts of his: PA, Chapters 1 and 2; “The End of Aesthetic Experience”; “Wittgenstein on Bodily Feelings: Explanation and Melioration in Philosophy of Mind, Art, and Politics,” in: The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Cressida J. Heyes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 202-19; “The Uses of Pragmatism and Its Logic of Pluralism: A response to Altieri and Grabes,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 15 (1999), pp. 137-50; “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 45, No. 4 (2005), pp. 323-41; “Pragmatism Between Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Education: A response to David Granger”; “Pragmatism and Criticism: A Response to Three Critics of Pragmatist Aesthetics”; “Intellectualism and the Field of Aesthetics”; “Emerson’s Pragmatist Aesthetics”; “Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43, No. 3 (2003), pp. 289-307; “Interpretation, Pleasure, and Value in Aesthetic Experience,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56, No. 1 (1998), pp. 51-3; “Complexities of Aesthetic Experience: Response to Johnston,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 38, No. 4 (2004), pp. 109-12; “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2006), pp. 217-29. See Arthur F. Bentley and John Dewey, Knowing and the Known, in: John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 16, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), especially Chapters 4 and 5. This, however, does not mean that for Shusterman aesthetic experience is devoid of a “firstperson” aspect; quite the contrary, this aspect is one of the characteristics of such an experience. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 167.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

41

Another important aspect of Dewey’s conception of experience is its naturalistic orientation, which is a consequence of pragmatism’s general “indebtedness to Darwin.” Here, the transcendental, otherworldly “aura” is taken away from aesthetic experience since the latter is seen not only as intimately linked to the organism’s biological functions and needs, but also as a result of the constant exchange of energy between the organism and the surrounding milieu (see PA 7). It is thus understandable that for Dewey all artistic activity has its source in “organic rhythms,” which find their expression, among other things, in the broadly conceived formal aspects of artworks.59 The picture of this naturalistic approach must be further modulated by stressing that aesthetic experience involves the human being as a whole, each mental faculty, emotion and bodily mechanism,60 something which renders such an experience, as Dewey emphasized, “more” than merely “aesthetic” (cf. PA 12, 53; PP 95-6).61 Shusterman also approves of Dewey’s view that what distinguishes aesthetic experience from ordinary experiences is certainly not some “single fundamentum divisionis” (PA 15), i.e., one particular aspect or element that cannot be found in any other experience. But if that is indeed the case, we might ask, then what constitutes its distinctiveness? Thanks to what does it constitute a breach in the stream of everyday monotony? What makes it an experience62 in the first place? The answer lies in that aesthetic experience, while actually consisting of elements that can be found in other kinds of experiences (PA 15), integrates those elements into a certain amalgam which is “marked by a greater inclusiveness of all psychological factors than occurs in ordinary experiences, not by reduction of them to a

59

60 61 62

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 153. Cf. Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism, Art, and Violence: The Case of Rap” in: Philosophical Designs for a Socio-Cultural Transformation, ed. Tetsuji Yamamoto (Tokyo and Boulder: E. H. E. S. C. and Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 667. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 45. As it possesses cognitive, semantic, affective, and ethical aspects, too. Note that according to Dewey: “… we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency.” Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 42. It is worth noting the sometimes neglected fact that for Dewey “an experience” is not equal to “aesthetic experience,” even though the former constitutes the necessary basis for the latter, which is its intensification. For a discussion of this issue, see, e.g., Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Sztuka jako rytm Īycia: Rekonstrukcja filozofii sztuki Johna Deweya [Art as the Rhythm of Life: A Reconstruction of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art] (Kraków: Universitas, 2003), especially Chapter 3. Cf. Jack Kaminsky, “Dewey’s Concept of an Experience,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, No. 3 (1957), pp. 316-30.

42

Chapter 1

single response.”63 As Shusterman claims, it is due to this inclusiveness that aesthetic experience can absorb us so thoroughly (very often providing intense pleasures) and is generally attributed a positive value (see PA 47). Another, yet equally crucial, matter is that in being essentially a continuation, radicalization, or enhancement of ordinary experiences, aesthetic experience does not need to be confined to what we call beaux arts as it can grow, so to speak, on the ground of anything a human being engages in: from solving mathematical equations through preparing a meal to having sex (PL 22).64 Not far from pragmatism’s naturalistic approach toward aesthetic experience is also the pragmatist conception of its instrumentality. Naming Dewey as his inspiration here, Shusterman opposes what he sees as the Kantian thesis of the disinterestedness of art and aesthetic experience, indicating that even though it would be folly to ascribe to them one particular, external goal, they in fact serve many such goals, of which most important is “human flourishing” (PA 9).65 The benefit of human kind is certainly one of the noblest purposes possible, yet since it is also one of the vaguest, we need a small clarification here. Basically, Dewey and Shusterman believe that: aesthetic experience “enhances” our perceptivity; supplements, through its galvanizing force, our reserves of vitality; and that by introducing beauty and pleasure into our life, it constitutes a strong “stimulus” to its continuation, which is an evolutionary advantage no one can deny (see PA 9-11; PL 5). Equally beneficial, both thinkers tell us, is its capacity to sustain or generate communal bonds between individuals (PL 5) as can be concluded, e.g., from how important a part of the identity of a nation are its artworks. This question, in turn, allows us to reach beyond naturalism and accentuate the socio-historical traits of aesthetic experience. They are clearly visible not only in the fact that, as Shusterman tirelessly reiterates after Dewey, one can share it

63 64 65

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 259; Shusterman approvingly cites this passage in PA 15. As far as the latter example is concerned, see, e.g., Shusterman “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros.” He stipulates, however, that we do not desire aesthetic experience for any external goals, even if it contributes to their achievement, but rather for it itself. Note that, according to Herbert Grabes, Shusterman’s own position is not that different from Kant’s as Shusterman himself seems to think. This interpretation, however, seems entirely unsupported. See Herbert Grabes, “The Revival of Pragmatist Aesthetics,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature” 15 (1999), pp. 140-141. More generally, James Scott Johnston points out that Shusterman’s critiques of Kant, as well as of some other “aesthetic thinkers,” are “shopworn,” and adds that thereby “Shusterman is following a line of sloppy pragmatist thought beginning with James and continuing up to Rorty; a line of thought that seems not to bother to question its own assumptions about its conclusions with respect to other thinkers.” James Scott Johnston, “Deweyan Aesthetics for These Times,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 35, No. 3 (2001), p. 115. Although, as we have seen (and will yet see), it is true that Shusterman sometimes significantly misinterprets his opponents’ views, the sheer generality of Johnston’s thesis makes it itself into a misrepresentation.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

43

with others (something which even intensifies it (PA 28)), but also in that, apart from its universal traits, which belong to the biological order, it is always shaped by the socio-cultural milieu in which it occurs, changing along with the tectonic movements of the culturally sedimented aesthetic paradigms that govern our understanding of art (see PA 21-2). What has been said so far should not leave any doubt that Shusterman approves of Dewey’s conception in many crucial respects, yet it is now time to turn to the points of divergence and to the accusations which he levels against that theory. Some of them are quite serious (as they witness the return of the bad Dewey), while others seem significantly less important, and it is with them that I will begin. Shusterman, then, is not comfortable with the fact that Dewey had a “rather conservative aesthetic taste,”66 which apparently made him put much emphasis on the wholeness and harmony of aesthetic experience67 and believe, moreover, that it must always be pleasurable. That such an attitude is misguided can be shown by the fact that, as Shusterman rightly argues, some aesthetic experiences (especially as far as contemporary art is concerned) are characterized by fragmentariness and inconsistency and (for this but also for other reasons) can be perceived as difficult, distressing, displeasing, and disorienting. This is why Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience and art needs to be supplemented by an aesthetics of resistance which includes those artworks that are meant to annoy, shock, and provoke the audience, thereby defying all kinds of accepted aesthetic conventions.68 Related to the question of wholeness and harmony are Shusterman’s doubts about the salient role that is played in Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience by fulfillment, or consummation. In a rejoinder to James Scott Johnston’s criticism of his reading of Dewey, Shusterman admits that this aspect of aesthetic experience (as it was conceived by Dewey) reminds him of the stereotypic image of “sexual experience,” as supposed to have its finale in orgasmic discharge, and then asks: But … what about the subsequent emotions, tremors, and afterglow? Can they not be considered part of the sexual experience when it is “an” experience in Dewey’s evaluative sense. And, by analogy, cannot a lingering reflection on an aesthetic experience be part of the aesthetic experience by which it was evoked?69

66 67 68

69

Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Criticism,” p. 28; Cf. Lauri Väkevä, “Interviewing Richard Shusterman: Part I,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, No. 1 (2002), p. 9. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 278. Which is not to say that Dewey neglected the role of resistance, rupture, or tension in aesthetic experience. In fact, he deemed them necessary elements thereof but nevertheless insisted on their being finally overcome in its wholeness. Cf., e.g., Shusterman “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros,” p. 5; cf. PL 103. Shusterman, “Complexities of Aesthetic Experience,” p. 111.

44

Chapter 1

Such remarks should indeed be considered as minor corrections, yet Shusterman also provides arguments that strike at the very heart of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience, exposing some serious errors in the very method with which it was constructed. The first significant flaw (and at the same time contradiction) of Dewey’s theory lies in that he attempts to define aesthetic experience while simultaneously insisting that, due to the ineffable quality that permeates it, this experience “is essentially indefinable” (PA 56; cf. PL 221n17). To begin with, let me note that the charge is hardly new70 and, moreover, it has been argued by one critic that it misses the point by neglecting the Deweyan distinction between the level at which experience is had, and the one at which it is known; i.e., Shusterman’s position is allegedly underlain by the same mistaken presumption which he has accused Rorty of making.71 Defending Dewey from Shusterman, Paul C. Taylor – for he is the critic in question – indicates that the former claimed merely that in aesthetic experience we are always dealing with a certain quality that escapes verbalization, which is a modest thesis that certainly does not entail aesthetic experience’s indefinability. Taylor utilizes here the analogy with defining a color such as red: even though I cannot verbalize my perception of redness qua redness, nothing prevents me from conceiving as adequate a definition that explicates redness in terms of specific “physical conditions” of perceiving it; say, the required length of light waves etc.72 Since we already know Shusterman’s unaffirmative attitude toward Dewey’s conception of the immediate quality of experience, then it should not surprise us that he dismisses Taylor’s argument by saying that even though it itself might succeed in proving the formal coherence of the definition, a “consistency [of this kind] is not enough to make a definition successful.”73 Yet what could that point mean? After all, successfulness is a relative notion, and if we want to use it, we must always specify the domain in which a given thing or person is successful (or not). A definition, for instance, can succeed in being elegant, concise, precise, persuasive, explanatory, or in countless other respects. So which of them are we

70

71 72 73

As it was raised, albeit in a slightly different form and context, by Bernstein, Garret, and others. Cf. Richard J. Bernstein, “John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience,” Journal of Philosophy, 58, No. 1 (1961), pp. 5-14; Roland Garrett, “Dewey’s Struggle with the Ineffable,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 9, No. 2 (1973), pp. 95-109; these articles have come under critical scrutiny from John J. Stuhr, see his Genealogical Pragmatism, pp. 193-7. Cf. Gale, “The Problem of Ineffability in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry.” See Taylor, “The Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued,” p. 20. Cf. footnote 29 in this Chapter. Taylor, “The Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued,” pp. 20-21. Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Criticism,” p. 29. Not to mention the fact that Taylor’s accusation that Shusterman fails to recognize Dewey’s distinction between the experience that is had and the one that is known is off the spot. Shusterman’s point is rather that Dewey himself seems to violate this distinction by acting as if he knew immediate quality of aesthetic experience, which by his own account can only be had.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

45

talking about here? This issue should become less muddled as we consider Shusterman’s last accusation against Dewey’s enterprise of defining art. In his aesthetic opus magnum, Dewey proposed a definition of art not (only) to add his brick to the edifice of philosophical aesthetics, but to oppose what he dubbed “the museum conception of art” (see PL 22-3).74 He was convinced that having had been imprisoned within the walls of galleries and museums, and commodified by the machinery of capitalism, art had to such an extent alienated itself from our “everyday” experiences and existence that it lost its aesthetic relevance for most of us.75 The situation would change, Dewey thought, if we began to conceive of art not in terms of material objects, which can be separated from the world and fetishized, but as nothing other than aesthetic experience. While assuming the persistent actuality of this diagnosis of the artworld’s condition, Shusterman agrees with Dewey also in thinking that the definition of art as experience may function as a remedy here. Yet, on the other hand, he claims that Dewey failed in pursuing his enterprise. For not only did he, as we have already seen, unnecessarily burdened the notion of aesthetic experience with the metaphysicstainted ineffable quality, but also, instead of limiting the goal of his definition to emphasizing the importance of “the experiential dimension of art” against the negative tendencies present in contemporary art and its philosophy, wished the definition to have a classificatory character, too. This, however, as Shusterman suggests, was an entirely wrong move since the idea that all art must be classified as aesthetic experience is far too counterintuitive for it to gain wider recognition (PA 58), especially when the only thing it seems to be backed with is a theoretical argument most people cannot understand, let alone accept. Nevertheless, Shusterman is willing to risk the “paradox” that, despite all the aforementioned flaws, “Dewey was right to define art as experience” (PA 35); for the real problem lies not in understanding art as experience but rather in the conception of defining that dominates philosophical aesthetics.76 War Over the Definition What does it take for the definition of art to be useful? This seemingly simple question is posed by Shusterman in his essay “Art as Dramatization,”77 and even though some philosophers might reject it as too trivial, it nevertheless serves for him as a starting point for a penetrating critique of contemporary aesthetics. Let us 74 75 76

77

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 12. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 13. To be more exact: “If Dewey’s definition is valuable, its value lies not in achieving a wholesale conceptual revolution and satisfying our traditional impulse for general definition, but in its directive gesture towards remedying certain painful limitations in art’s institutional practice” (PA 58). Chapter 13 of SD.

46

Chapter 1

begin with noting the obvious fact that the concept of usefulness, similarly to the concept of being successful that was mentioned before, always demands qualification, and thus in responding to a question like Shusterman’s, one first needs to ask: useful for what? Furthermore, it is equally obvious that there are quite many purposes a definition can serve, but what may be slightly less obvious is the fact that most philosophers of art seem to be convinced that there is only one such purpose; namely, covering the extension of our current concept of art. As a corollary, they believe that the only useful definition of art78 is the one that enumerates the “essential” features possessed by all works of art and by nothing else (so that the definition is neither too narrow, nor too broad) or determines “necessary and sufficient conditions” of being art (SD 227).79 Now, Shusterman finds the very idea of such a definition “problematic,” and to justify his skeptical position, he points to the following reasons: (1) the multiple meanings and uses of the term “art”; (2) art’s open, creative nature; (3) its essentially valued, hence essentially contested, character; (4) the changing conceptions of art over history; and (5) the very different and changing ways that art is deeply connected yet also distinguished from other practices in the different societies in which it is situated (SD 271n7).

If that was not enough, such definitions, as he observes, are ex definitione purely descriptive, therefore abhorring evaluation, and since value is inextricably linked to art, they thereby “perversely eliminate what is essential to [the latter].”80 Interestingly, Shusterman’s harsh assessment of definitions of this type has even lead him to coin a special derogatory name for them, namely, “wrapper definitions,” which term, by the way, neatly inscribes itself in the pragmatist tradition of basing philosophical terminology on the realities of popular culture; the tradition which stretches from William James’s infamous use of the expression “cash value” to Stanley Fish’s baseball analogies.81 Here, Shusterman’s point is that (a) when we wrap food in transparent foil, we primarily want it to be visible (so that we can clearly see what the package contains) and to remain in the same condition for as long as possible; and that (b) we wish philosophical definitions to serve an

78

79

80 81

Cf. Stephen Davies, “Definitions of Art,” in: The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 16979. Consider, too, that besides embracing everything that is today considered as art, such a definition should also be flexible enough to absorb any work of art that the future may bring (see SD 227). Richard Shusterman, “Definition, Dramatization, and Rasa,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61, No. 3 (2003), p. 295 (citation slightly modified). Cf. also the role of an NFL analogy in Shusterman’s metatheoretical discussion of cultural politics (PP 85).

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

47

analogous function with regard to our concept of art,82 which idea is wrongheaded insofar as the true mission of philosophy, as we know, lies not in conserving, or preserving, the reality but rather in altering it. In any event, the simile to food wraps has not exhausted Shusterman’s invention: in an essay “Art in a Box,” devoted to Arthur Danto, he went even as far as to say that these definitions remind him of condoms (or “présevatifs,” as they are named in French), since they “preserve art from contamination by its exciting yet impure enveloping environment while at the same time preserving that environment from art’s potential to create new life” (SD 179). Does all this mean that we should discard defining art altogether? Of course not, argues Shusterman: what we would be better off to do is to get rid of the mistaken theories that underlie our conception of what a valid definition is.83 And to do that properly, one needs to identify their origin, which Shusterman himself finds in Plato, in effect laying on the latter’s shoulders the burden of responsibility for two thousand years of the reign of a detrimental conception of defining art (see SD 178). Thus it is to the ancient Greece that we must now turn. Shusterman’s starting point is that when philosophy began to take its shape in the times of Plato and Socrates, it was not alone in its ambition to assume the position of the Polis’ spiritual guide as it had serious competitors in the sophists and artists (most significantly, poets). If we add to this that philosophy had been in a way derivative to both sophistry – from which it borrowed some of its discursive practices, and to art – whose model of theatrical spectator, or the viewer of visual art, had had an influence on philosophy’s conception of cognition as disinterested gaze,84 then the picture becomes even more vexed. What could philosophy do in such a tough competition for such a high stake? Could it try to discredit its adversaries, for example? Shusterman’s thesis85 is that it did exactly so, and that it was significantly helped in this regard by Plato, who incessantly harried the sophists in his dialogues and – what is most crucial for us here – defined “art as mimesis” in order to slight it by “maliciously” introducing a fissure between artistic pursuits and the domain of the “praxis of life”, of which art, according to this conception, could only be an imitation (PA 52; cf. SD 178). By doing so, Plato 82 83 84

85

That is, we want our concept of art to be “clearly articulated” and “preserved” in the definition. See Shusterman, “Response to Granger,” p. 405-6. Not to mention that philosophy’s theory of “ideal forms,” as Shusterman argues, could not have emerged without the inspiration brought by the “formal properties” of “artworks.” Also, “the founding images of philosophical life – either as Socrates’ death-defying heroism or as the ascending quest toward the Form of Beauty and the engendering of beautiful creations that Plato describes in The Symposium – seem to be modeled either on the heroes already portrayed in Greek art or on the vision of the artist’s life as devoted to the quest for beauty” (SD 177). Cf. PP 24-5. Inspired partly by Arthur C. Danto’s book, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

48

Chapter 1

also established one of the fundamental criteria of the philosophical definition of art: namely, such a definition was supposed to isolate art from all other spheres of human existence. And as Shusterman does not hesitate to conclude, given that it had been propelled “by such negative and questionable motives” (PA 36), the whole enterprise of defining art could hardly have brought anything positive, something which can be clearly seen in that even if later philosophers did not intend to slight the value of art, they were unwittingly lead to do so by the idea of the definition of art they inherited from their great predecessor. Equally grave consequences resulted from the second requirement of the traditional theory of art, namely, essentialism. At least since Plato, philosophers have tried to distill the transhistorical essence of art and then capture it in the form of definition, yet every definition they would conjure up ultimately proved fallacious, either including objects that were clearly not art or excluding its most unquestionable specimens. To be more detailed: Like imitation, the features of expression, play, form, and symbol [each of which had been elevated to the status of art’s essence by this or that thinker], were clearly not features peculiar to art; nor did they singly or collectively account for all of art’s important traits. As for the narrower Bell-Fry theory of Significant Form, not only did it rely circularly on a mysterious aesthetic emotion itself identified only through significant form; it also clearly could not cover those arts where representational content was undeniably crucial (PA 37).

Whole ages of tedious and hopeless efforts must have passed before analytic philosopher Morris Weitz came to a conclusion that due to its “expansive, adventurous character” art can never be defined once and for all, and that if we can nevertheless efficiently employ the term “art” in practice, it is because the particular objects that we denote with it are linked by “family resemblances.”86 Another observation made by Weitz, and as fraught with consequences as the previous one, was that many of the problems encountered by philosophers of art had partly stemmed from the fact that the definitions they formulated were of evaluative instead of, as it would have behooved the true philosophy, purely descriptive character. As Shusterman rightly notes, the avoidance of the evaluative has since then become analytic aestheticians’ principal obsession.87 Yet despite Weitz’s lasting influence, his antiessentialism had not been the last word in the history of defining art; for it was soon realized that if objects of art “seemed to exhibit no set of common and peculiar properties, perhaps the defining essence of art is not in their exhibited properties but in their generative process” (PA 38). Thus, having adopted the notion of artworld from Arthur C.

86 87

Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 16, No.1 (1956), pp. 31, 32. Cf. PA 37. Cf. Richard Shusterman, “Evaluative Reasoning in Criticism,” Ratio, 23 (1981), pp. 141-57.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

49

Danto, George Dickie coined his institutional theory of art, according to which “a work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.”88 This definition, finally, seemed to perfectly meet the postulates of the traditional wrapper definition,89 yet it achieved that at the price of collapsing into pure formalism,90 thus exposing the “perversity” inherent in the project of defining art. No wonder, then, that Dickie’s theory also met with serious objections, one of which (“lack of historical depth” (PA 40)) inspired the inception of a definition that still dominates analytic aesthetics – i.e., art as a certain “historical practice,” where The traditional definitional function of identifying artworks from other objects no longer depends on finding art’s essence but is left to the internal reasons and standards of the complex practice of art and perhaps ultimately to its various subpractices … As [such a] practice art should be defined … in terms of a complexely coherent historical narrative which at once explains and helps sustain its historical identity. The precise form of art’s defining narrative must be open and revisable, not only to allow for future works but because the task of narration is itself an open and contested practice, the practice of art history and criticism (PA 43).

There is no need to belabor the particular differences that exist between various representatives of this stance (Danto, Noël Carroll91), since for Shusterman (and thus for us) the most important issue here is that driven by the urge to meet all the demands of the traditional, i.e., Platonic, theory, philosophy of art performed an act of self-destruction. To be more exact, by turning definition of art into a narrative on the latter’s development, it virtually dissolved itself in the history of art.92

88

89 90

91

92

George Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1971), p. 101. Cf. an earlier formulation: “a work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some society or some sub-group of society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.” George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1969), p. 254. And it at the same time appeared to be capable of absorbing the future works of art, no matter how extravagant and unpredictable they might be. “It provides no real account of the structure and the content of the artworld or of the constraints on its agents, let alone an account of the relationship of the artworld to the wider sociocultural and politico-economic world in which it is embedded” (SD 180). See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Noël Carroll, “Art, Practice, and Narrative,” Monist, 71 (1981), pp. 140-56. “In defining art as a practice defined by art-historical narrative, all substantive decisions as to what counts as or in art are left to the internal decisions of the practice as recorded by art history. Philosophy of art simply collapses into art history, and the live and momentous issue of what is art gets reduced to a backward-looking account of what art has been up to the present” (PA 44).

50

Chapter 1

Now, Shusterman suggests that the lesson we should draw from this story is that the wrapper model of the definition of art has, at least until now, worked so ineffectively that it is high time to substitute it with a different one, and that an appropriate candidate here would be what we might call a directional definition. Its principal aim is neither the faithful “coverage” of the extension of our current concept of art nor a complete reform of that concept (as is the case with Dewey), but rather enhancing “our understanding of art” by directing us to what constitutes its kernel (i.e., according to Shusterman, aesthetic experience) and, if that proves necessary, taking part in the “struggles over the shaping of art” itself (PA 45). This activist attitude is, of course, quite natural in the context of Deweyan pragmatism, yet at the source of Shusterman’s animosity toward the “quiescent” definitions that merely consolidate the present understanding of the art’s nature there also lies his not too favorable opinion on the condition of contemporary art itself, which, as he claims, has not fully recovered from the “postmodern crisis” and “seems to have so lost direction that not only its end but its death is envisaged” (PA 45). In order to fully appreciate this opinion, however, we must first examine the historical narrative with the help of which Shusterman explains the processes that lead to the present state of affairs.93 First of all, let me note that the story is a fine example of the topos of the Golden Age94 as it begins by reference to the times when, in the ancient Hellas, art had been almost perfectly integrated with the “praxis of life”. This state was regrettably disrupted by Plato’s disastrous theory of art, with its insistence on the fissure between art and the so-called real world,95 and the no less detrimental conception of Aristotle which portrayed artistic activity not as praxis but rather as poiesis (i.e., as producing “external objects”), something which significantly contributed to the emergence of the idea of identifying art with fetishized material things.96 But as far as the decline of art is concerned, the main culprit, according to Shusterman, is modernity with its project of “rationalization, secularization, and differentiation” (PA 211), which mercilessly imposed rigid divisions on the flux of culture. For it was only with the crystallization 93

94 95 96

It should be noted that this narrative has been influenced by Dewey’s portrayal of the history of art in Art as Experience (see, e.g. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 13-16). In what follows, I am presenting a reconstruction of it, based on, e.g., Chapter 2 of PA, Chapter 10 of SD; Richard Shusterman, “Come Back to Pleasure,” in: Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures, ed. Philippe Vergne (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2000), pp. 33-47; Väkevä, “Interviewing Richard Shusterman”; and Richard Shusterman, “Self-Styling After the ‘End of Art’,” [interviewed by Chantal Pontbriand and Olivier Asselin], Parachute, No. 105 (2002), pp. 57-61. See Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 82, 121. A “dogma thematized and reinforced by many works of art” (PA 52). “Preoccupation with the productive model has led to the fetishization of art’s objects with little regard to their actual use in appreciative experience” (PA 54).

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

51

of the sociocultural institutions of modernity that art became entirely reduced to fine arts and hid from the masses in the “exalted cloister of elitism.”97 Due to the sectioning off of the autonomous spheres of sciences, politics/morality, and art, as well as due to the collapse of religious traditions, art found itself in an uncomfortable situation: on the one hand, it became a substitute for religion (as a domain freed from material goals), but on the other it failed to provide any meaningful response to the needs of ordinary people (PA 198).98 This failure, in turn, was a consequence of the fact that under the influence of the ideology of artistic autonomy artists lost their interest in “the serious business of life” and focused on themselves, immersing in a solipsistic esotericism (stimulated in part by the pursuit of novelty at any price),99 while the experience provided by their fetishized products, “isolated” in “galleries and museums,” became bloodless and “ghostly” not only to the so-called wide public but to connoisseurs as well (BC 47; PA 53).100 Ultimately, with the transition of Euro-American culture from “an experiential to informational” phase, of which Walter Benjamin spoke so anxiously, the aforementioned processes led to art’s transformation into a philosophical reflection on itself and succumbing to postmodern stagnation (PL 15). What is more, at least from the 18th century on, high art has been an instrument with which the ruling classes controlled the politically and economically underprivileged, imposing on them the feeling of inferiority to the great works of art, which the proverbial man in the street cannot grasp, let alone enjoy.101 As Shusterman suggests, one cannot underestimate here the noxious influence of aesthetics and art criticism, which, having equated real art exclusively with high art,102 and thereby denying any authentic artistic merit to popular art, either ignore the latter or, if it appears in their field of vision, explicitly castigate it. Not to mention the fact that they conShusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 206. Cf. PA xv. “When theological faith was lost but religious sentiments and somber spiritualizing habits were still enormously potent, these were projected into the religion of high art, a new realm of unworldly experience and devotional seriousness with a new priestly class of intellectual artists and critics” (PA 198). Cf. BC 47. 99 Note that both the need to produce ever novel works and their subsequent “fetishizing commodification” are attributed by Shusterman, who in this regard follows Dewey, to the influence of capitalism. That thesis, as well his contention that the modern institution of art is linked to nationalism, chimes, of course, with the thought of Marx. Cf. PP 26-18. 100 In modernity, “the aesthetic was … firmly differentiated from the more sensate and appetitive gratifications of embodied human nature, aesthetic pleasure rather residing in distanced, disinterested contemplation of formal properties” (PA 212). 101 Moreover, even though this “incapacity to appreciate high art” is determined largely by economic and political factors (e.g., the fact that “the culturally underprivileged” do not have “access” to certain resources), it “is instead projected as a sign of a more intrinsic inferiority, a lack of taste or sensibility, terms which suggest natural and not socio-economic disability” (PA 145). 102 Cf. Jane Forsey, “The Disenfranchisement of Philosophical Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 64, No. 4 (2003), pp. 581-97. 97 98

52

Chapter 1

sider as valid only the refined, intellectualized, and disinterested forms of reception, available almost exclusively to those inhabiting the higher strata of socioeconomic hierarchy.103 We can already get a glimpse of why Shusterman cannot espouse the traditional project of defining art and, in particular, the historical definition which currently dominates the Anglo-Saxon aesthetics (even though he at the same time admits the latter has the advantage of precisely covering the extension of our established notion of art). Shusterman’s definition of art as experience, to be sure, does not have this advantage, yet it has a feature that is much more crucial: it indicates “the point, ground, and value of art,”104 namely, nothing else than aesthetic experience itself. This is indeed a bold statement that demands justification (it is not self-evident why aesthetic experience would be most crucial in art) and Shusterman does not shirk from providing one. As he claims, it is mainly the immense satisfaction brought about by aesthetic experience that makes us attracted to art and value it for itself – both as its creators and receivers (PA 47). To strengthen this point, Shusterman resorts to counterfactuals and argues that if art had been intrinsically unable to provide aesthetic experience, it would have never come into being, and if it “universally” discarded it, “art, as we know it, would disappear” (PL 31). Besides its indicative/directional function (or because of it, to be exact) Shusterman’s definition of art as experience has also a “transformative” one, since it allows us to improve the current bleak condition of art. How could it achieve that? First of all, by pointing to the autonomous value of art, it provides a criterion for its assessment that is not alien to the actual artistic practice, yet simultaneously does not fall entirely under the jurisdiction of the artworld. That this particular position is advantageous can be seen by comparing it to the perspective of the historical definition. If philosophers define art as a specific autonomous practice, they thereby deprive themselves of the capacity to evaluate it; for they, by principle, have to agree that what is “good” or “bad” art can only be decided by the 103 Cf. Richard Shusterman “Of the Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the Aesthetics of Hume and Kant,” in which article he scrutinizes these thinkers’ conceptions of taste, arguing that even though these theories allegedly probe into the universal human nature, they in fact promote the endemic interests of privileged classes. Shusterman sees this clearly, for instance, in the idea of disinterested contemplation, where “disinterested” means neglecting the practical aspects of the perceived object; an attitude that is affordable mainly to those who do not have to be bothered with mundane needs (see SD 104). See also Richard Shusterman, “Review of B. H. Smith, Contingencies of Value,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47 (1989), pp. 182-4. Cf. Monique Roelofs, “A Pearl’s Pleasures and Perils: The Detail at the Foundation of Taste,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14, No. 5 (2005), pp. 57-80; Timothy M. Costelloe, “Hume, Kant, and The Antinomy of Taste,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41, No. 2 (2003), pp. 165-85; and Tobin Siebers, “Kant and the Politics of Beauty,” Philosophy and Literature, 22, No. 1 (1998), pp. 31-50. 104 Shusterman, “Pragmatism Between Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Education,” p. 405.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

53

legitimate functionaries of its institution. As a result – Shusterman thinks – without being exposed to an assessment formulated from “a wider normative perspective,” art may become helpless whenever it grows “misdirected and increasingly alien to the lives and joys of most people” (PA 46); i.e., exactly when it needs an engaged proposal for reformation instead of a neutral description. The historical definition of art thus only tightens the “stranglehold of the institutionally cloistered practice of fine art” (PA 57), while Shusterman’s Deweyan definition is supposed to break that stranglehold or at least loosen it significantly. This might work in the following way: •

•

•

•

•

•

if we make aesthetic experience into the criterion of the value of art, we will be able to recognize the “artistic legitimacy” of everything that has so far remained outside the institutional boundaries of high art (e.g., various forms of popular art), yet at the same time has never failed to induce this kind of experience (PA 51, 57). By making this move not only will we contribute to undermining the distinction between high and popular art that strengthens the deleterious stratification of society, but we will also help the audience of the deprecated genres of art to undergo aesthetic experiences in a fuller and more satisfactory way as their aesthetic predilection will not be exposed to the scornful attitude of the official “institutions of art”. The definition evades the distinction “between art and life,” given that it is based on the presumption that aesthetic experience constitutes a real element of everyday existence and, pace all isolationist theories of art, possesses cognitive and ethical aspects, too (see PA 53); It liberates art from “certain traditionally privileged forms and media” and thus allows it to “become more rewardingly open to future experimentation through the vast variety of life’s experienced materials” (PA 57-8). In highlighting that art is above all experience and not a set of material objects, the definition counteracts the Aristotelian categorization of art as poiesis (which identifies art with “external making” (PA 54)), the fetishization and commodification of art, and thus also the “collector” model of dealing with it, which consists in amassing artistic specimens. Given the active-passive nature of aesthetic experience assumed by this definition, it allows us to transgress an unnecessary dualism which characterizes today’s thinking about the appreciation of art. Namely, the dualism of passive reception, where the connoisseur surrenders to the work completely and with sufficiently reverent adoration, and the “macho” paradigm, where aesthetic reception consists in violating its object by producing a “revisionary” interpretation of it (PA 54). Finally, in pointing to aesthetic experience as the kernel of art, it “direct[s] us toward more and better aesthetic experience” and “primes us to look for and cultivate” this experience, which function is far from trivial as thereby this

54

Chapter 1 definition prevents the possible extinction of art (i.e., it does not let us forget about the element without which art simply cannot exist) and aesthetic experience itself. And for those to whom the idea of aesthetic experience’s disappearing off the face of the earth seems rather improbable, Shusterman emphasizes a “growing concern, far beyond academy,” that as a result of our civilization’s transition to an “informational” phase, in which we are constantly bombarded by myriads of inassimilable data and grow increasingly dependent on digital technologies, our potential for aesthetic experience becomes threatened. This tendency, however, might be reverted exactly by the notion of aesthetic experience since it can lead us to “fuller recognition of [the] importance and richness” of this experience, something which, in turn, may encourage us to look for such an experience more eagerly and in far more numerous contexts than we used to, and henceforth may make it possible for us to undergo it more frequently; a consequence which is crucial for Shusterman, given his assumption that “aesthetic experience will be strengthened and preserved the more it is experienced” (PL 34). Briefly put, “aesthetic experience” is a “directional concept” (given “its orientation toward having the experience it names” (PL 34)), and this same directional character is transferred onto the definition of art as experience.

It must be recalled here that in Shusterman’s perspective the value of a definition lies primarily in its efficiently fulfilling a desired goal, and therefore, since it is obvious that improving the condition of contemporary art cannot be the only worthy goal we can set for a definition of art, the definition discussed above need not be presumed as the only valid one. This is why when, a few years after his reanimation of Dewey’s definition of art as experience in Pragmatist Aesthetics, Shusterman forged a definition of art as dramatization, this was not an act of renouncing or even correcting the former one but rather an attempt at achieving a new, different goal: a “reconciliation” of naturalistic and historicist conceptions of art, the debate between which he considers “futile” (SD 234). Well aware that each of these stances has various incarnations, Shusterman finds the paradigm of the former in the views of Emerson and Nietzsche, while believes the latter to be epitomized by the conceptions of Bourdieu, Danto, and Dickie. Naturalism, thus, conceives of art as “arising from natural human needs and drives,”105 as something that contributes to the survival of the species, and, above all, as a phenomenon that appears wherever and whenever Homo sapiens exists. For historicists, on the contrary, art is an invention of the modern EuroAmerican culture, and thus to talk about “art” with regard to pre-modern times or

105 Namely from: “a natural inclination toward mimesis; a natural desire for balance, form, or meaningful expression; and a thirst for a kind of enhanced, aesthetic experience that gives the live creature not only pleasure but a more vivid, heightened sense of living” (SD 229).

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

55

with regard to any culture that does not belong to the West must be a category mistake (SD 231). To put it differently, seen from this perspective, art and aesthetic experience, as we know them, simply cannot exist outside of the institutional framework (the artworld, as it is sometimes called) which emerged in a concrete phase of the development of our culture and which can function properly only within that culture’s confines. Having defined both stances in the way that has just been summarized, Shusterman then reduces the conflict between them to “the apparent tension between art’s explosively vital life-feeling and its formal frame,” which frame allegedly suppresses such feelings (SD 236), and it is this maneuver that allows Shusterman to advertize his definition of art as dramatization as “a handy formula for fullness, synthesis, reconciliation” of the two opposing camps. Shusterman begins with the remark that the English word “to dramatize” (as well as some of its equivalents in other languages, say, Polish and French) has at least two different senses, one of which is, roughly, ‘to stage something,’ the other being ‘to take, or to present, something as more significant/dramatic than it really is.’ This ambiguity sets Shusterman on the trail of art’s constitutive dialectic of framing, which makes him realize that the discord between naturalism and historicism is anything but an illusion. A frame, generally speaking, “focuses its object, action, or feeling more clearly; and thus sharpens, highlights, and enlivens” (SD 236), which, as far as art is concerned, means that its “formal frames” allow us to experience “more intensely” the content it carries, “rendering that content far more vivid and significant” (SD 236). Shusterman admits, however, that besides drawing our attention to the particular object it embraces, the frame also abstracts that object “from the rest of life.” Yet he insists that it is exactly due to this latter function that art provides the “feeling of lived intensity and heightened reality” (SD 237); for it takes away many obstacles to intensive experience by translocating us to a sphere where we can feel free from the stressful risk the ordinary existence abounds with. As he concludes, given such intimate ties between the formal frame and intense experience, aesthetic naturalism and historicism may cease to quarrel.106 1.4. Conclusions Given the activist character of Shusterman’s philosophical conceptions, I shall devote the last part of each chapter of the book to providing an answer to the 106 Ranjan K. Ghosh observes that a similar “happy amalgam” of naturalist and historicist stances “is to be found in the Indian approach to theorization about art,” namely, in the “conception” of a specific “aesthetic emotion” known as rasa. Ranjan K. Ghosh, “Art as Dramatization and the Indian Tradition,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61, No. 3 (2003), p. 293. See Shusterman’s response (“Definition, Dramatization, and Rasa”) in the same issue of JAAC, where he argues that his conception of art as dramatization differs significantly from its alleged Indian counterpart.

56

Chapter 1

question “But will all this work?” To be more exact, I shall try to treat these conceptions (in accordance with their author’s intention) as a real remedial measure for certain pressing problems, and assess what their results may be. Since his plea for the introduction of nondiscursive somatic experience into philosophy finds it full expression only in Shusterman’s somaesthetics, I will leave this topic in abeyance until the last chapter, devoted entirely to the somaesthetic project. For now let me concentrate on Shusterman’s account of aesthetic experience, contemporary art, and the history of aesthetics. To begin with the latter, I hope that I have done enough justice to the force of Shusterman’s critique of the dominant conception of the philosophical definition of art; a critique which does not merely expose the symptoms of the problem but also probes deeply into its etiology. Irrespective of whether one agrees with his claim concerning the ignoble motives that lie at the source of Plato’s conception of art, one has to admit that the history of the persistence of “separationism” (i.e., the view which “separates art” from the rest of life) and essentialism in philosophical aesthetics which Shusterman paints is convincing, just as is his claim that wrapper definitions should be abandoned. Unfortunately however, even though I support Shusterman’s criticisms and am deeply sympathetic to the pragmatist attitude that propels them, I believe that he gets himself into serious trouble exactly at the point when he wants to offer a positive alternative to the state of affairs he has so powerfully denounced. What I mean is that apparently not satisfied with mere rejection of the wrapper model of definition of art, Shusterman wants to substitute it with his own model and in order to do so he resorts to a rather questionable creation – a “directional” definition – which, I think, hampers his otherwise commendable project of promoting the significance of aesthetic experience. Let us observe that his version of Dewey’s definition of art as experience, even though it is supposed to fulfill a transformative function with regard to our established beliefs on art, is not an ordinary persuasive definition107; i.e., Shusterman, unlike Dewey, does not aim at a global redefinition of art, at persuading us into conceiving art en bloc as experience (what is more, he discards such an intention as “quixotic”),108 but rather at indicating, and directing us to, what constitutes “the point” of art, its main value, or its core.109 The upshot, however, is that on the one hand Shusterman apparently want us to believe that art is experience (after all, his is not a definition of the point of art, but of art itself), yet at the same time insists that the works that do not engender aesthetic experience (both on purpose and unintentionally) belong to art,

107 In the sense given to this term by Charles L. Stevenson. See his “Persuasive Definitions,” Mind, 47, No. 187 (1938), pp. 331-50. 108 Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 35. 109 Cf. Paul Taylor’s critique of the account of Dewey’s definition of art, presented by Shusterman. Taylor, “Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued,” p. 23.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

57

too. That is, practically speaking, he wants us to believe that art must be and may not be experience. Now, could such a definition succeed in fulfilling the goal Shusterman ascribes to it? As we remember, he rejects Dewey’s definition on the grounds that it cannot effectively perform its persuasive function since the common views on art it aims to transform are simply too well established in our culture for them to be uprooted by means of such a philosophical device. Yet even though in his correcting Dewey’s definition he manages to secure it from the charge of quixotism on one level, the charge returns with a vengeance on another. Namely, if Dewey’s idea that all art needs to be reclassified as experience is too counterintuitive to win recognition, then equally (or even more) so is Shusterman’s conception of directional definition, especially given its basic logical inconsistency. Wouldn’t it be better for Shusterman to give up on trying to present a definition of art, and try to emphasize the essential role of aesthetic experience in art in some other way? This, however, brings me to my worry that Shusterman’s definition is not only burdened with incoherence but may also be tainted with essentialism, which, ironically, belongs to the philosophical sins he considers most serious. Let us take a look at the terms which Shusterman deploys in claiming that aesthetic experience is “the point, ground, and [“intrinsic”] value of art.”110 They are, one may suspect, merely synonyms of the term “essence,” and suffice it only to examine Shusterman’s attempts at demonstrating the crucial value of aesthetic experience for art to strengthen such a suspicion. Shusterman argues, e.g., that art could not exist without aesthetic experience: if art ceased engendering it, it would disappear. I will leave aside the fact that if we wanted to treat this reasoning as a kind of proof, it would have to be dismissed as petitio principii. Why is aesthetic experience so important for art? Because without it art would become extinct. But in order for the conclusion to hold, we have to presume that aesthetic experience is a crucial element of art, while this is, after all, what we are yet to prove! The thing which interests me more than this potential logical flaw, however, is the fact that in Shusterman’s argumentation aesthetic experience functions as a conditio sine qua non of the existence of art. And since we are by the vision of the disappearance of art, it is worth exploring what Shusterman understands by the “postmodern crisis,” from which art has not yet recovered, for here, too, one can see some symptoms of the possible essentialism and exclusivism of his conception. As we can gather from his remarks made in various articles or interviews, what he means is nothing else than that art has lost its capacity to induce aesthetic experience or that the experience it provides is too “anemic.”111 This, however, should make one pause: Does that mean

110 Shusterman, “Pragmatism Between Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Education,” p. 405. 111 See, e.g., EP Chapter 2; SD Chapter 10; PL Chapter 1. My interpretation is further supported by Shusterman’s remark, made in an interview, to the effect that “contemporary artworld …

58

Chapter 1

that Shusterman’s forward-looking historicist pragmatism excludes the possibility that the contemporary artists who simply do not want their works to provoke aesthetic experiences are prophets of the art of the future and not gravediggers of art per se? If it does, then this would suggest that despite all of his declarations, aesthetic experience functions in Shusterman’s theory as a transhistorical essence of art, which is a worrying possibility indeed.112 Now, it is exactly at this place that we approach the question of adequacy of Shusterman’s assessment of the condition of contemporary art, an assessment which, after all, forms an important part of the justification of his activist enterprise. On the first look, this diagnosis seems to border on a massive exaggeration, of which a good example could be the claim that contemporary art (separated in “the exalted cloister of elitism”)113 and its institutions deprecate so-called popular culture. After all, one could point out pace Shusterman that respected acolytes of today’s high art liberally draw from popular culture and entertainment and even create works that, through a strategy of double coding, function equally well in the popular circulation as they do among a more refined public (just to evoke the inevitable example of The Name of the Rose).114 Or that thanks to the transformations provoked by postmodernism, nowadays street graffiti artists exhibit in prestigious galleries, while rock bands perform with Philharmonic orchestras. Numerous other contemporary examples of high/low art osmosis could, of course, be named here, but let us turn now to another aspect of Shusterman’s diagnosis that may be found arguable. As we know, in his seminal Pragmatist Aesthetics, Shusterman worries over the “stranglehold of the institutionally cloistered practice of fine art” (PA 57) and urges us to free art from “certain traditionally privileged forms and media” so that it becomes “more rewardingly open to future experimentation through the vast variety of life’s experienced materials” (PA 58). This again may raise some eyebrows, for it seems that the main problem of contemporary art (if this is a problem at all) consists rather in that it knows no boundaries and restrictions; that no form or technique is privileged; and that one can do almost everything and with anything. And how could anybody fail to see this fact if the awareness of such a conseems to be losing its appeal for the general public because of its failure to create powerful aesthetic experience.” Väkevä, “Interviewing Richard Shusterman: Part I,” p. 5. 112 It is worth invoking here Shusterman’s own criticism of the essentialism of Dewey’s conception of the immediate quality of experience: “Had Dewey simply claimed that immediate quality sometimes grounds or directs our thinking, his position would be more convincing. Unfortunately, however, such quality is claimed as the ‘background, the point of departure, and the regulative principle in all thinking,’ determining in every particular situation the coherence of thought, the structure of discourse, and the measure of adequacy in judgment” (PP 165). 113 Shusterman “Popular Art and Education,” p. 38. 114 See Steven Sallis, “Naming the Rose: Readers and Codes in Umberto Eco’s Novel,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 19, No. 2 (1986), pp. 3-12.

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

59

dition of contemporary art reaches far beyond the community of connoisseurs and philosophers? We might invoke here a scene from an American thriller, a blockbuster entitled Seven, in which two detectives – played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman – chase a dangerous psychopath and at some point land at a shop specializing in manufacturing S/M equipment, whose owner they interrogate as to why he accepted the commission by the said psychopath to make something as uncanny as an enormous metal penis with a blade (which became the instrument with which a prostitute was murdered). The man is authentically baffled and explains: “I thought he was a performance artist. The sort of guy that pisses in a cup on stage and then drinks it.” This very example, however, (as representative as it is of the popular perspective on contemporary art) provides us with an opportunity to understand that Shusterman’s diagnosis is paradoxically right just where it seems to be most vulnerable. First of all, the supposedly outrageous artistic act is mentioned in the movie as something quite ordinary, as nothing to be excited about, which nicely reflects the fact that virtually no one who has any knowledge of contemporary art would be shocked to see this sort of performance. Among such a public it can provoke nothing but the feeling of abyssal boredom indeed. After all, haven’t we seen, or have heard of, such acts countless times, and isn’t it the case that the bulk of contemporary art is exactly about making such gestures of transgression, about probing to what extent we can stretch the boundary of art, and what other seemingly non-artistic thing we can do and still call it “art”? It would seem, then, that the banishing of the limitations of traditional art, a process initiated by modernity and completed by the postmoderns, resulted not in a pluralistic explosion of artistic freedom but in something quite contrary: in the rigid injunction (which definitely can remind one of a “stranglehold”) that art must be occupied exclusively with dwelling on its own identity, or, as Shusterman and Danto put it, that it must “become its own philosophy.”115 This self-reflectivity points to another reason why “the sort of thing performers do” (i.e., the sort of thing artists in general do today) does not provoke a lively reaction; namely, that all these acts of transgression are of purely conceptual nature, are made to be decoded and studied, and not to be met with aesthetic experience and cherished, something which further supports Shusterman’s worry that the experiential dimension seem to be rapidly evaporating from today’s model of reception of art.116 Finally, that the performance mentioned in the movie takes place on stage should also not be overlooked, for this fact helps us to realize 115 SD 32. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), p. 110. 116 On the conceptuality of contemporary art, see Peter Osborne, “Art Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Criticism, Art History, and Contemporary Art,” Art History, 27, No. 4 (2004), pp. 651-70. Cf. Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” Leonardo, 35, No. 4 (2002), pp. 433-8.

60

Chapter 1

that the transgressions of contemporary art are always “staged” or faked in the sense that they take place within carefully demarcated, safe confines of its institution and thus are no real transgressions at all. True, one can invite a graffiti artist to exhibit in a museum, or a rapper to perform during a classic music concert, thereby allegedly violating the boundary between the official, high art and the popular one, but the very fact they are “invited” imposes on them the role of guest, which in turn implies abiding to the rules one finds already in place, in the artworld.117 If, as I hope to have clarified, Shusterman’ diagnosis is largely accurate, then this should indeed make us more understanding toward his idea that (pragmatist) aesthetics ought to assume “an activist role in rethinking and reshaping art” (PA 45) and that it ought to submit the latter to a “critique from a wider normative perspective” (PA 46).118 Understanding, however, does not have to mean an endorsement, especially that some objections can be made against Shusterman’s activism. Apart from the general one that by abandoning the role of spectator, assigned to them by Pythagoras, philosophers betray philosophy (which objection I have discussed in the introduction), someone might try to dismiss Shusterman’s ambitions by citing Barnett Newman’s remark that aesthetics is for artists “what ornithology must be like for birds.”119 But even though such a remark should be taken seriously by us since it comes from a painter, i.e., a member of the artworld, who supposedly has a reliable knowledge of its potential receptivity to philosophy, insider knowledge proves fallible in this case. That is, Shusterman would be right to respond that Barnett’s claim is historically inaccurate, as the seminal influence of Artistotle and Kant on artistic practice (see PA 45),120 or the interrelation between French postmodern theorists and American artists, clearly shows.121

117 However, some of the artists who represent popular culture, e.g., the graffiti artist Banksy, openly refuse to abide to those rules. What is significant, though, Banksy’s independent “interventions” in the artworld (galleries or museums, for instance) are then labeled as “terrorism.” See Luke Dickens, “Placing Post-Graffiti: The Journey of the Peckham Rock,” Cultural Geographies, 15, No. 4 (2008), pp. 471-96 118 Because, as we remember, otherwise art may become helpless whenever it grows “misdirected and increasingly alien to the lives and joys of most people” (PA 46). 119 Barnett Newman in Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene, 1940-1970, directed by Emile de Antonio; cited in Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert HullotKentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), p. 367n1. 120 Cf. a remark by M.H. Abrams that “Even an aesthetic philosophy so abstract and seemingly academic as that of Kant can be shown to have modified the work of poets.” Meyer Howard Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 5. 121 See, e.g., François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 230-47. Quite surprisingly and ununderstandably, Alexander Nehamas imputes to Shusterman that he actually “vindicates” Barnett’s claim. See

The Varieties of (Aesthetic) Experience

61

So there is no reason to believe that artists must be necessarily deaf to argumentation formulated within philosophical aesthetics, but whether it will succeed in realizing the purpose it has been meant to serve is a matter determined partly by philosophers’ professional deformations, which can play a rather negative role in this regard. As we have already seen, Shusterman’s attempt at employing Dewey’s definition of art to make a case for the importance of aesthetic experience seems rather an unnecessary and unfortunate tribute to the tradition of philosophical aesthetics than an efficient persuasive tool. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Let us take, for instance, Shusterman’s belief in the directional potential of the notion of aesthetic experience, i.e., that “greater attention” given to the notion of aesthetic experience will ultimately lead us to “having the experience it names” (PL 34). Now, paying attention to a given notion leads us mainly to some conclusions regarding that notion, which we can then present to people who share our opinion that dealing with concepts is something crucial (mostly academics, that is) – and even publish in a professional journal or a book. One cannot presume, however, that that activity will result in our “having the experience” denoted by a given notion: to think otherwise is to pay tribute to Socratic (in the worst sense of the word) intellectualism, which, as I believe, is untenable. Of course, I do not preclude that the consequences of the kind Shusterman hopes for may indeed occur, but this is so little probable that it would be better to look for other ways to achieve them. To demonstrate the infeasibility of Shusterman’s idea suffice it only to indicate that one can devote one’s entire life to studying the notion of humor, yet (or perhaps because of that) remain an incurable sourpuss; one can be an aesthetician and lack any taste; or, last but not least, one can be a genius in dissecting ethical concepts and at the same time an individual immoral to the core. Therefore, I think that there is not much sense in saying, as does Shusterman, that the notion of aesthetic experience allows us to have aesthetic experiences or “leads” to them. Can we suppose, e.g., that if someone has difficulties undergoing aesthetic experiences, then they could be helped by some “conceptual treatment”? Of course, I should not be understood here as saying that no one can be taught sensitivity to art and its fuller appreciation. What I do think, however, is that it is rather a matter of a certain unsystematic and hard-to-define practice (requiring contacts with concrete works, showing to the student what is beautiful in them, revealing their meanings, etc.), in which much depends on the individual psychological traits of the instructor and which surely does not always bring the desired result. But I suppose that it does so more often than it might be the case with studying the concept of aesthetic experience.

Alexander Nehamas, “Richard Shusterman on Pleasure and Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56, No. 1 (1998), p. 49.

62

Chapter 1

To sum up, while appreciating Shusterman’s plea for the rehabilitation of aesthetic experience in philosophy and art, I find some of the tools with which he wants to achieve this goal rather clumsy. As for the directional definition of art as experience in particular, I believe that it should be abandoned,122 and that Shusterman would be better off trying to find another way to promote the importance of aesthetic experience. And if he at the same time wants to avoid essentialism, Shusterman should limit this claim of importance in a historicist manner (by saying, e.g., that the art which produces aesthetic experience is crucial for us here and now and for this or that reason),123 instead of making aesthetic experience into something which suspiciously resembles a transhistorical essence of all artistic activity. It should be recalled, however, that this and other flaws which I have discussed are primarily the consequences of the fact that Shusterman does have the ambition to engage in the “messy” and risky business of putting philosophy to practice. And this seems to be the price worth paying, given how often we encounter something which, in Rorty’s words, was meant to be a “bold new positive program,” yet all it “offers … is a criticism of the [philosophical] tradition.”124

122 Note that as far as the definition of art as dramatization is concerned, it, too, cannot achieve its purpose, i.e., the reconciliation of naturalism and historicism. My point is that in order to squeeze these stances into the mold of this definition, Shusterman reduces them to the emphasis on art’s formal frame (historicism), and on the vivid feelings it induces (naturalism). And since such a reduction is unjustified (as John J. Stuhr rightly observes “there is no general reason to think that naturalists would not view nature as frame and context … or that historicists would not see cultural time and place as the site of experiential intensity and quality”), the definition of art as dramatization reconciles not historicism and naturalism, but rather their caricatures. On a positive note, I share Stuhr’s opinion that the case about art’s nature which Shusterman makes in the course of developing this definition is “original, powerful, compelling.” John J. Stuhr, “Practice, Semiotics, and the Limits of Philosophy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19, No. 1 (2005), p. 80. 123 Here I am directing at Shusterman his own argument against Dewey’s essentialism; see footnote 112 above. 124 Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” p. 78.

CHAP TER 2

Interpretation and Beyond

2.1. No Gods Before Interpretation In his preface to a recent collection of essays by Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty expresses a contention that Fish, along with Thomas Kuhn, should be seen as a prophet of a culture inhabited by people for whom Nietzsche’s famous dictum that “there are no facts only interpretation” will be as trivial and obvious as that humans have two legs or that water is wet.1 One could, of course, agree with Rorty’s thesis, but irrespective of whether such a culture will reign supreme some day, and whether we should put as much hope in it as does Rorty, it has to be recognized in the first place that this culture already exists, even if only in embryonic form. Confined as it is to university departments, it nevertheless still expands, and its luminaries, tsars indeed, include thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo2 and none other than Stanley Fish himself. What I am referring to is, of course, the philosophical current known as “paninterpretationism,” “interpretive monism,” or “hermeneutic universalism”3; a movement whose representatives are deeply convinced that Nietzsche’s aforementioned claim is by all accounts right. The growing popularity of that position, however, is not the only reason why, among the hyperinflationary influx of diverse “turns” and “revolutions” in the contemporary humanities, it is the interpretive turn that has gained particular attention in specialist literature.4 Another, and far more important, reason is that 1

2

3 4

See Richard Rorty, “WstĊp do polskiego wydania wyboru esejów Stanleya Fisha” [Introduction to Polish Edition of Stanley Fish’s Essays], in: Stanley Fish, Interpretacja, retoryka, polityka [Interpretation, Rhetoric, Politics], ed. Andrzej Szahaj, trans. Krzysztof Abriszewski et al. (Kraków: Universitas, 2002), p. 9. See, e.g., the following remark by Gianni Vattimo: “I have the impression … that hermeneutics has become a sort of general attitude. Almost everybody recognizes that we know only by interpreting, even in the theory of paradigms proposed by Thomas Kuhn, for instance. People in the experimental sciences are not scandalized by the idea that we interpret …” Gianni Vattimo and Sebastian Gurciullo, “Interpretation and Nihilism as the Depletion of Being: a Discussion with Gianni Vattimo about the Consequences of Hermeneutics,” Theory & Event, 5, No. 2 (2001), p. 3. From now on I shall be using these terms synonymously. See James Bohman, David R. Hiley, and Richard Shusterman, “Introduction,” in: The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. James Bohman et al. (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-

64

Chapter 2

“interpretation” has become one of the most fundamental categories or themes even outside of the philosophical discourse, having penetrated into numerous other fields, sometimes up to the point of changing their character in a drastic way, which fact, as usual in such cases, has been met with enjoyment by some and with horror by those others who conceive it as a clear symptom of the ultimate fall of academic standards.5 There is no place here to dwell on the possible affiliations of hermeneutic universalism6 or on the factors that contributed to its flourishing in the second half of the twentieth century and in the beginning of the new millennium, for that would be equal, in practice, to providing a historical narrative of the genealogy of socalled postmodernism or post-structuralism. A separate study would also be needed to determine where the predilection to describe human cognition per se in terms of “interpretation” comes from. One could risk hypothesizing, however, that the crucial influence in this regard was the increase of academic interest in language, which process had begun in the nineteenth century and culminated in the so-called linguistic turn that the humanities made in the twentieth century (suffice it only to mention as instances thereof analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, structuralism, or ethnolinguistics).7 In any event, the historical context which has been sketched above allows us to understand more clearly why Shusterman has devoted a large part of his oeuvre to interpretation. Firstly, he needed at some point to take a stand on hermeneutic universalism, given that it has played an important role in the anti-foundationalist current of contemporary philosophy, with which he identifies himself. Secondly, as a philosopher of art who devotes much of his attention to literature, he, willynilly, had to participate in the debate over the boundaries of interpretation which

5

6

7

versity Press, 1992), pp. 1-14. Cf. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham-London: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 485. See, e.g., Herbert Schnädelbach, “Morbus Hermeneuticus: Thesen über eine philosophische Krankheit,” in: Vernunft und Geschichte: Vorträge und Abhandlungen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 279-84. Let us note, however, that Nietzsche’s paninterpretationism may be treated as a “radicalization” of Leibniz’s monadology; see Chapter 3 of Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity, trans. M. B. Debevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). See, e.g., Simo Säätelä, “Between Intellectualism and ‘Somaesthetics’,” Filozofski Vestnik, No. 2 (1999), pp. 151-62. It is worth mentioning here those contemporary philosophical approaches which are analogous to paninterpretationism and differ from it only in that, instead of claiming that everything is interpretation, they argue that there is nothing but “text” or “description.” See, e.g., Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1978); and Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” in: Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 139-59.

Interpretation and Beyond

65

has galvanized the community of philosophers and literary theorists in recent decades. These are, also, some of the themes that this chapter will be devoted to. 2.2. Shusterman’s Critique of Hermeneutic Universalism Given that the main thesis of hermeneutic universalism constitutes one of the dogmas of contemporary humanities, and that the army of hermeneutic universalists has annihilated virtually all opposition, every attempt at blasphemy against it is worth closer attention, especially if it has not been undertaken by some epigonic knight-errant of foundationalism but by a representative of a progressive, pragmatist camp. And it is exactly this situation that we are dealing with in Shusterman’s essay “Beneath Interpretation,” which I shall analyze in this subchapter.8 Let us begin with how Shusterman understands the term “hermeneutic universalism.”9 It is supposed to be a position which, drawing on the antifoundationalist presumption (taken from the perspectivalism presented in Nietzsche’s later works) of the impossibility of “reaching a naked, rock-bottom, unmediated God’s-eye view of reality,” argues that “we see everything through an interpretive veil or angle” (PA 115).10 Therefore, as it is stated by proponents of paninterpretationism, among whom Shusterman counts Nietzscheanists (Alexander Nehamas), pragmatists (Fish, Rorty), and philosophical hermeneutists (Gadamer): “All perception and understanding must be interpretation” (PA 116). Even though Shusterman is eager to agree with their “rejection of foundationalism” and embracing of the “ubiquitous role of interpretation,” he has two major reservations vis-à-vis hermeneutic universalists: firstly, the arguments they provide do not support their main thesis, and, secondly, accepting that thesis is far more “dangerous and unprofitable” than accepting “the contrary idea”, i.e., “that 8

9

10

The essay was initially published as “Beneath Interpretation, Against Hermeneutic Holism,” in The Monist, 73 (1990), pp. 181-204. In what follows, I am referring to the version published as Chapter 4 of PA. “Beneath Intetrpretation” is especially worth examining here given its being considered one of Shusterman’s most important achievements. See, e.g., Didier Maleuvre, “Art and Criticism: Must Understanding be Interpretive? ,” SubStance, 30, No.3 (2001), pp. 120-8; Gustavo Guerra, “Practicing Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman’s Unbound Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 36, No. 4, (2002), p. 74-75. Casey Haskins underscores the “ingenuity” of the argumentation presented in this text. Casey Haskins, “Enlivened Bodies, Authenticity and Romanticism,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 36, No. 4 (2002), p. 94. Note that in “Beneath Interpretation: Against Hermeneutic Holism,” Shusterman used the term “hermeneutic holism,” which he only later substituted, in Chapter 4 of PA, with “hermeneutic universalism.” See Shusterman’s comments on this change in PA 307n1. It is worth noting that since (given their commitment to antifoundationalism) hermeneutic universalists cannot accept the view that there is some uninterpreted “reality” an sich, beyond the interpretive “veil,” they are ultimately lead to the conclusion “that we do not merely see everything through interpretation, but everything is in fact constituted by interpretation” (PA 115).

66

Chapter 2

our intelligent and meaningful intercourse with the world includes noninterpretational experience, activity, and understanding” (PA 116-7). The thesis of hermeneutic universalism is “dangerous” because one of its potential consequences seems to be that the overstretched notion of interpretation will lose its meaning entirely; something which can be avoided, as Shusterman suggests, by contrasting this notion with the notion of understanding.11 In the following pages, I am going to present an analysis of the reservations formulated by Shusterman and try to demonstrate that even though they point to an important drawback of hermeneutic universalism (and thereby, given the stance’s popularity, also to a certain worrying tendency in the contemporary humanities in general), they miss the mark in some other important respects. First of all, however, I would like to make one caveat. Namely, I am fully aware that it is indeed disputable whether the views of the aforementioned authors are convergent enough to lump them together, as does Shusterman, under one banner of “hermeneutic universalism.” For instance, the prominent Polish expert on neopragmatism Andrzej Szahaj sees Gadamer’s respective stance as incompatible with Fish’s thought, while Steven Mailloux seems to have an entirely different opinion in this regard.12 Aware of this and related controversies, and taking into account the fact that the focus of the present book is (neo)pragmatism, I shall concern myself mainly with adjudicating the adequacy of Shusterman’s charges against Stanley Fish, who is naturally a paninterpretationist often associated with the pragmatist camp.13 Generally speaking, there are six accusations leveled by Shusterman, and they can be divided into two groups. Those belonging to the first (1-3) have an analogical structure and boil down to indicating that since hermeneutic universalists derive from the claim that understanding and interpretation share some features (they both are: prejudiced, corrigible, and perspectival) the conclusion that understanding is interpretation, then they must tacitly assume the additional premise that “only interpretation could be prejudiced [corrigible, perspectival], while (preinterpretive) understanding or experience could not be” (PA 123). And this allows Shusterman to blame them with a regrettable attachment to foundationalist 11 12

13

Shusterman stipulates that the interpretation-understanding distinction he proposes does not have an “ontological,” but rather “functional,” character (PA 117). See Andrzej Szahaj, “‘Nie ma niczego poza interpretacją’ – tako rzecze Stanley Fish” [There Is Nothing Beyond Interpretation: Thus Spoke Stanley Fish], in: Zniewalająca moc kultury: Artykuły i szkice z filozofii kultury, poznania i polityki [The Fine Power of Culture: Papers in Philosophy of Culture, Cognition, and Politics] (ToruĔ: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2004), p. 160; cf. Steven J. Mailloux, Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 7-8; and Leszek Drong, Disciplining the New Pragmatism: Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 115. I shall also take into consideration Shusterman’s critique of another pragmatist on the list, Richard Rorty.

Interpretation and Beyond

67

thinking, one of whose fundamental elements is exactly the distinction between the perspectival interpretation and non-perspectival understanding. The above argumentation does not apply, however, to the Fishian paninterpretationism and can be questioned, for instance, by proving that Fish’s reasoning in fact looks different from Shusterman’s portrayal of it. But even if that portrayal were accurate, it might still be demonstrated that the charge itself is off the mark, to which end consider the following analogy. Suppose someone draws rightly from: (1) a square has four sides, and (2) a quadrangle has four sides, the conclusion: a square is a quadrangle, having assumed an additional premise that (3) nothing but a quadrangle can have four sides. Now, does that mean that they must at the same assume that a square does not have four sides? Of course not, which stems from the banal fact that the notion of a quadrangle is more general that that of a square, and thus one can say that only a quadrangle has four sides, while at the same time admitting that so does a square. The case is similar with the hermeneutic universalisms of Fish, Nehamas, and Gadamer,14 where interpretation is a notion more basic than that of understanding, or experience (understanding, experiencing, and practically all the things we do are acts of interpreting15), and this is why in advocating their paninterpretationist theses, Fish, Nehamas, and Gadamer do not need to assume the foundationalist premise that understanding cannot be perspectival, prejudiced, etc. Let us proceed now to the second set of charges (4-6). In the first of them, Shusterman argues that even though he has to agree that understanding has a selective character, he cannot consent to the reasoning that this entails that “understanding must [also] be interpretive.” For this move would demand presuming that “all purposive selection must be the product of interpretive thinking and decision” (PA 123), which presumption is a perfect case of “the intellectualist fallacy” diagnosed and condemned, by Dewey.16 In my opinion, this is the key moment in Shusterman’s argumentation, as it is here that he determines what he means by “interpretation,” which meaning then serves as the basis for his claims that hermeneutic universalists’ views are misguided (and also for his construction of the interpretation-understanding distinction). Resorting to “our ordinary linguistic usage” (PA 134), Shusterman construes “interpretation” primarily as a thoughtful activity (“Interpretation, in its standard ordinary usage, certainly implies conscious thought and deliberate reflection” (PA 124)) and opposes it to those kinds 14 15 16

See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), e.g., p. 66-72. Cf., e.g., Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 104-11. “Perhaps the deepest dogma of most philosophical thinking, intellectualism expresses itself as the tendency to assimilate all intelligent experience and action to a model of thematized thinking and discursive reasoning.” Shusterman “Intellectualism and the Field of Aesthetics,” p. 328 (Shusterman admits that in his critique of intellectualism, he was inspired, too, by Pierre Bourdieu). Cf. Dewey, Experience and Nature, pp. 28-9.

68

Chapter 2

of “intelligent behavior” which do not imply these (e.g., when one grasps the meaning of a given utterance without reflecting on it). Therefore, since not every act of understanding bears the above definitional features of interpretation, the theses espoused by hermeneutic universalists must be mistaken. Here, however, a question emerges: Are there any such hermeneutic universalists who by saying that all our intelligent behavior is interpretation, mean that, among other things, it must also be purposeful, thoughtful, etc.? Shusterman in fact never tries to demonstrate that such is the stance of the authors he designates as the mystagogues of painterpretationism (Fish, Gadamer, Nehamas), something which would not be a serious fault in itself if it weren’t for the fact that, as I think, he could not do so since their texts do not provide any decisive evidence for this reading. As far as Fish, who interests me here the most, is concerned, I would like to stress that in his discussions cited by Shusterman, he deploys the term “interpretation” mainly in order to emphasize that all understanding, cognition, and experience is always contextualized, mediated, and prejudiced,17 and not to indicate that it must inadvertently be deliberate, conscious, or purposeful,18 as Shusterman imputes to him.19 Besides the charge discussed above, Shusterman formulates two more that refer to the ordinary meaning of the term “interpretation.” The first of them, which I shall not study here,20 questions the validity of inferring the interpretive nature of understanding and perception from their “active” character, while the 17

18

19

20

In one of his recent texts, Fish himself explains that by making such “flamboyant statements” as “[i]nterpretation is the only game in town” he merely wanted to give voice to “a weak antifoundationalism that asserts the ubiquity of mediation (‘everything comes to us under a description’).” Stanley Fish, “One More Time,” in: Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish And the Critical Enterprise, ed. Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (New York: SUNY Press, 2004), p. 281. What is more, in Fish’s book Is There a Text in This Class?, from which Shusterman often quotes in “Beneath Interpretation,” one can find an essay where Fish formulates his task as follows: “I want to argue for … the normal, the ordinary, the literal, the straightforward, and so on, … [and] I want to argue for them as the products of contextual or interpretive circumstances …” Let us also consider Fish’s commentary, to be found in the very same essay, to the following fragment of St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana: “‘to the healthy eye and pure internal eye He is everywhere.’ He is everywhere – says Fish – not as the result of an interpretive act self-consciously performed on data otherwise available, but as the result of an interpretive act performed at so deep a level that it is indistinguishable from consciousness itself.” Stanley Fish, “Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases,” in: Is There a Text In This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 268, 272. As far as Shusterman’s critique of Gadamer is concerned, see, e.g., Scott R. Stroud, “Understanding and Interpretation: Defending Gadamer in Light of Shusterman’s ‘Beneath Interpretation’,” Auslegung, 22 (2002), p. 151. As it is almost identical to the charge No. 4.

Interpretation and Beyond

69

second is targeted at the linguistic version of paninterpretationist argument, put forward by Rorty, Davidson, and Gadamer. According to Shusterman, it proceeds in two stages: it presumes that (1) there can be no non-linguistic understanding and then couples that premise with the premise (2) that to grasp anything in any language always means to interpret it (after all, languages are specific codes, and the meaning they express is thus never self-evident), from which it concludes, again and again, that “all understanding is interpretation.” Since Shusterman’s criticism of (1) was already discussed in the previous chapter, let me turn now to his attempt at undermining (2). To begin with, he points out to the linguistic universalists that they profess “an overly formalistic and intellectualized picture of linguistic understanding,” for they presume that this understanding “is always the decoding, translation, or interpretation of arbitrary signs through rules of meaning and syntax” (PA 126) while according to Shusterman no such thing takes place in the case of simple and direct grasping of words. In opposition to their conception Shusterman then proposes “an alternative model … where linguistic understanding is a matter of being able to make the right responses or moves in the relevant language-game, and where such ability or language-acquisition is first gained by brute training or drill” (PA 126).21 The problem with this argument is twofold. First of all, it is hard to see why simple, intuitive understanding of words could not be conceived of as interpreting or decoding the meaning of an utterance on the basis of all sorts of semantic and syntactic rules, especially that this is in fact what practically all schools in contemporary linguistics postulate. Everything becomes clearer, however, when we realize that Shusterman, again appealing to the common meaning of “interpretation,” sees interpretation as a deliberate and purposeful activity22 – while there is nobody (including the hermeneutic universalists themselves) who would profess such radical views on the nature of all linguistic behavior.23 Secondly, as far as Rorty and Davidson are concerned, the Wittgensteinian model favored by Shusterman is really close to their views – and finally, to finish with the issue, for both there is no such thing as language.24 21 22 23

24

Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), paragraphs 5,6, 9, 86. It involves “a thoughtful decision about how to understand or respond” (PA 126). For it would imply that we always (even when understanding common phrases uttered in “our native tongue”) “explicitly think” about the grammatical structure of an utterance we hear, just as we do when we learn a foreign language. Cf. Gary Wihl, The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Deconstruction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 16. Unfortunately, the limited space does not permit me to dwell on Davidson’s and Rorty’s conceptions of language. Cf. the famous closing passage of Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”: “I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-

70

Chapter 2

Let us now turn to Shusterman’s arguments for sustaining the distinction between understanding and interpretation. Firstly, assuming that every word achieves its meaning only through its opposition toward other words, he concludes that to claim that everything is interpretation means depriving the word “interpretation” of every possible contrastive term and thereby condemning it to the dissolution in “semantic emptiness” (PA 128). In order to save this word from such a fate, one needs to supply it with an opposition, which role can be finely fulfilled by the term “understanding.” Though logically flawless, this reasoning might seem baffling to some, and since his distinction between interpretation and understanding constitutes the primary value of Shusterman’s critique of hermeneutic universalism, such potential doubts must be dissipated first. That is, someone may ask: Is the term “interpretation” really in the danger of dissolving completely in a semantic void only because it is used in such a wide way in a very specific context of the humanities? Of course not – the response would go – there are millions of language-users who have never heard of such a use of this term, and most probably never will. Yet it is crucial to understand that what Shusterman is concerned with is exactly the blurring of the meaning of this term in the domain of the humanities and philosophy in particular. To be sure, one could object that even there the word “interpretation” does have a very conspicuous contrastive term, i.e. “the view from nowhere” (a cognition that is unmediated, nonperspectival, and unprejudiced), but there is still something very important to what Shusterman claims, for it would be folly to deny that the abuse of the term “interpretation,” which is indeed taking place in the humanities, constitutes a serious problem. “Interpretation” has become, in this domain, a fashionable buzzword which possesses an absolute explanatory power, something which has rather unpleasant consequences that have been aptly portrayed by Zygmunt Bauman: “the more experiences [such buzzwords] explain clearly, the more they themselves become vague and obscure; the more dogmas they repudiate, the faster they themselves become undisputed truths.”25 In making the second argument, Shusterman invokes the Heideggerian conception of the hermeneutic circle and Wittgenstein’s remarks from Philosophical

25

users acquire and then apply to cases …” Donald Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in: Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives On the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 446. Cf. the second part of Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Martin Gustafsson, “Systematic Meaning and Linguistic Diversity: The Place of Meaning-Theories in Davidson’s Later Philosophy,” Inquiry, 41 (1998), pp. 435-53. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalizacja: I co z tego dla ludzi wynika [Globalization: The Human Consequences], trans. Ewa Klekot, (Warszawa: PIW 2000), p. 5. [cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)].

Interpretation and Beyond

71

Investigations.26 He points out that in undertaking an interpretation of a given syntagm, we have to start from a provisional understanding thereof; an understanding that is immediate, does not demand deliberation, and constitutes, so to speak, our first look at it. This primary perspective is exactly what Shusterman calls “understanding” in the proper sense and describes as always directing us when we take a second look at the syntagm: clarifying its meaning, exploring its syntactical intricacies, reflecting on its relations to other syntagms – or, in other words, “interpreting” it. Although “interpretive” process may eventually lead us to reject our “understanding” as fallacious, unsatisfying, etc., this does not change the fact that no such process can ever take place without the basis of understanding, and that not always there is a need to check our “understanding” of the text against its “interpretation.” In fact, we only take a second look at something if we think that the first glance was not enough for some reason, and, as Shusterman emphasizes, so is the case with texts. If, at a given moment, our understanding of them, however superficial and hasty it might be, satisfies us fully, then we can abstain from interpreting them since “there are always other – and usually better – things to do” (PA 130). The above arguments can serve as another proof that Shusterman consistently employs in his essay the word “interpretation” as designating an activity which – unlike understanding – is inherently purposeful and thoughtful. Yet speaking of differences between the two, one needs to stress that from Shusterman’s perspective, interpretation is definitely not distinguished from understanding by any kind of epistemological infallibility (i.e., it is alike prejudiced, dependent on perspective etc.), even though it serves a different epistemological function.27 Therefore, if what is at stake in Shusterman’s version of the hermeneutic circle is putting forward a certain theory of comprehending that assumes a sequence of thus conceived understanding and interpretation, then it can be agreed that, as Shusterman himself suggests, we are dealing here with a functional distinction. One that could in fact be accepted even by Fish and other hermeneutic universalists since when they “conflate” understanding and interpretation, they do so only on the epistemological plane, with which they are exclusively concerned. Since we already know his arguments for contrasting interpretation with understanding, it is time now to elaborate further on how Shusterman conceives 26

27

See Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1962), pp. 194-5, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, paragraphs 198, 201. Cf. Charles Guignon, “Philosophy after Wittgenstein and Heidegger,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50, No. 4 (1990), pp. 649-72. On the hermeneutic tradition running from Schleiermacher, through Droysen, Rickert, Dilthey to Heidegger, see Chapter 4 of Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831-1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). To be exact, “understanding initially grounds and guides interpretation, while the latter explores, validates, or modifies that initial ground of meaning” (PA 133).

72

Chapter 2

these two notions. To begin with, let us observe that although he intends “understanding” to function as a clear contrastive term for “interpretation,” and although he tries to define it as precisely as is possible, the term has fallen prey to some misunderstandings. Simo Säätelä, for instance, assumes that in fighting the radical intellectualism manifested by hermeneutic universalists, Shusterman himself goes from one extreme to the other (“somatic foundationalism,” that is) defining all acts of meaningful behavior that do not involve interpretation (understanding included) as forms of nondiscursive bodily experience.28 However, as should be clear from the above discussion, such an accusation is entirely pointless since by “understanding” Shusterman means any intelligent behavior (whether discursive or not) that is nonreflective and immediate,29 where “immediacy” is understood not in epistemological terms (as the lack of mediatization) but psychologically instead, i.e., that understanding occurs at an instant and demands from us neither conscious effort nor reflecting on what exactly we are doing.30 These features, as we already know, are what differentiates understanding from interpretation, so let us turn now to this latter notion and enrich its characterization by discussing a position Shusterman took in his essay “The End of Aesthetic Experience.” Just as does “Beneath Interpretation,” that text, too, constitutes an attempt at cracking down on the hegemony of the category of interpretation, but this time it specifically concerns the realm of philosophical aesthetics. What we find in this text, among other things, is an interesting “cyborg parable,” which I will allow myself to quote in extenso: Imagine two visually identical art viewers who offer identical interpretations of the very powerful paintings and poems before them. One is a human who thrills to what he sees and interprets. The other … is only a cyborg who, experiencing no qualia, feels no pleasure, indeed no emotion at all, but merely mechanically processes the perceptual and artworld data to deliver his interpretive propositions. We would surely say here that the cyborg, in an important sense, doesn’t really understand these works. He doesn’t, in a big way, get the point of such art, even if he recognizes that some feeling he cannot feel is somehow appropriate. For much of the point is precisely to feel or savor art’s qualia and meaning, not just compute an interpretive output from the work’s signs and artworld context. For this reason, even if the cyborg’s interpretive propositions were descriptively more accurate than the human being’s, we would still say that 28 29

30

See Säätelä, “Between Intellectualism and ‘Somaesthetics’,” p. 153, 155. See his remarks in Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Criticism,” p. 32; and in: “Complexities of Aesthetic Experience: Response to Johnston,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 38, No. 4 (2004), pp. 109-12. Cf. the following remark by Shusterman: “I distinguish between the immediacy of uninterpreted understandings of language (as when I immediately understand simple and pertinent utterances of a language I know well) and the mediacy of interpretations (as when I encounter an utterance or text that I do not understand in terms of word-meaning or contextual relevance and then have to figure out what is meant).” Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Criticism,” p. 32. Cf. Johnston, “Deweyan Aesthetics for These Times,” p.113.

Interpretation and Beyond

73

say that the human’s general response to art was superior and that the cyborg, since he feels absolutely nothing, does not really grasp what art is all about (PL 31).

Let me note that Shusterman’s intention behind this thought experiment was to strengthen his critique of the position of Arthur C. Danto, who renders interpretation the most basic form of aesthetic appreciation and rejects the category of aesthetic experience, assuming that given its intimate linkage to emotions and feelings, particularly pleasure, such an experience “trivializes art”(PL 30). Thus, Shusterman wants to demonstrate that any true appreciation of art must ex necessitate involve an affective element, and so it cannot be limited to mere interpretation. As much as I agree with Shusterman’s intentions, and as much as I admire his masterful rejoinder to Alexander Nehamas’s critique of the cyborg parable,31 I believe that Shusterman himself courts a detrimental dualistic thinking when he assumes, even if only for the sake of reductio ad absurdum argumentation, that interpretation of art is possible without qualia and emotions involved; an assumption he would be better off to question. As it seems to me, if we could perform the experiment Shusterman imagines, and achieved the results described above, we would have to treat it as a kind of Turing test, or at least as a strong suggestion that the cyborg indeed has emotions, rather than an indication that one can interpret an artwork and at the same time not understand it since one does not experience emotions (as it is supposedly the case with the cyborg). Of course, for my explanation of the results of the experiment to hold I have to assume: •

•

31

32

That without having emotions one cannot interpret a work in the way human beings normally do it; a claim which is strongly supported by the neurobiological research concerning the role of emotional factors in interpreting the social life.32 That emotions may occur, too, outside of the human, or more generally, organic, body, something with which Shusterman might not agree with, given that he – despite some reservations – shares William James’s physiological theory of emotions.

See Nehamas, “Richard Shusterman on Pleasure and Aesthetic Experience,” and Richard Shusterman, “Interpretation, Pleasure, and Value in Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56, No.1 (1998), pp. 51-3. See, e.g., Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999). This question is especially crucial with regard to those art forms which involve narrative, and is undertaken by aestheticians and literary researchers who adopt the perspective of evolutionary psychology. For an account of the latter approach see, e.g., John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts,” SubStance, No. 94/95 (2001), pp. 6-27; and Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Chapter 2

74

Be that as it may, I believe “the cyborg parable” provides evidence that Shusterman’s insistence on the deliberate, reflective, and mediated character of interpretation can lead him to an overly “rationalized” picture thereof (as we see, on the account presented in the parable, interpretation seems to be a matter of a calculated decoding of signifiers that could be performed by a machine), something which may eventually weaken the usefulness of his distinction between interpretation and understanding; the distinction that, after all, forms his positive response to hermeneutic universalism. Speaking of which, let me conclude my assessment of Shusterman’s grappling with that latter position. On the one hand, then, it could be said that in “Beneath Interpretation” Shusterman not only did not attack hermeneutic universalists in an effective way (as his assault rests in part on a misconception of their use of the term “interpretation”) but also revealed himself as their great ally by declaring his support for antifoundationalism, to which hermeneutic universalism practically comes down. On the other, however, Shusterman’s arguments are indeed powerful in pointing out that within hermeneutic universalism, and thus within large parts of the humanities that are under its spell, “interpretation” becomes an all-encompassing signifier and thus loses any heuristic, not to mention critical, value. Moreover, the practical, or functional, distinction between understanding and interpretation which he puts forward is a welcome attempt at counteracting hermeneutic universalism’s tendency to look at human understanding from the reductionist perspective of high theory, in which if not “all cows are black,”33 then surely all understanding is interpretation in the sense that all the differences between the varieties of understanding that are not of epistemological character tend to be downplayed. And we must remember that for Shusterman there is much more to understanding and interpretation than is dreamt of in so conceived paninterpretationism – especially as regards literature, to which we now turn. 2.3. Interpretation and Literature Between Analytic Philosophy and Deconstruction: Interpretation as SenseMaking More often than not pragmatism is advertized by its exponents as a third way, or a philosophy of the golden middle, something which constitutes quite an effective rhetorical maneuver inasmuch as middle ground is universally associated with common sense and impartiality, which features inspire mostly positive feelings. And even if they, on the other hand, may also bring to mind boring sedateness,

33

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 9.

Interpretation and Beyond

75

particularly as far as philosophy is concerned, one can make a virtue out of this, too, by saying, as Richard Rorty does, that From Aristotle to Dewey, philosophers who have been dubious about the posturing and paradox-mongering of their flashier colleagues have been dismissed as tedious trimmers, too shortsighted to glimpse the new intellectual world that gleams on the horizon. But the gleam has often faded, and middle-of the-roaders like Putnam have often enjoyed the last laugh.34

Shusterman himself employs the rhetoric of the middle road on several occasions,35 but the one which interests me here the most is when he localizes his pragmatist hermeneutics between what he conceives as the two opposite poles of the contemporary theory of literary interpretation.36 One of them is analytic philosophy, for which objective interpretation constitutes the goal of literary criticism, and which proposes a specific methodology (or a set of methodologies) that is supposed to yield it; the other being deconstruction, which claims that interpretation could not be farther from objectivity as it is always a misinterpretation.37 Irrespectively of how hostile they might be to each other, however, Shusterman claims that both these positions share a peculiar view of comprehending texts – namely, that all forms of this activity must boil down to “the recovery or reproduction of an identical semantic object, ‘a content or meaning’” (PA 89-90). In fact, the main theoretical difference between them seems to be that while analytic 34 35 36

37

Richard Rorty, “Review of Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact-Value Distinction and Other Essays,” Common Knowledge, 10, No. 1 (2004), p. 151. For Shusterman’s remarks on pragmatism as a “middle road,” see PA 62. See SD, 53-71. It is worth noting that Shusterman initially participated in debates on literary theory as a representative of analytic philosophy (analytic aesthetics, to be exact). See Richard Shusterman, “Analytic Aesthetics, Literary Theory, and Deconstruction,” The Monist, 69 (1986), pp. 22-38. Similarly as in the case of interpretation, Shusterman situates himself between analytic philosophy and deconstruction also when approaching the problem organic unity, which, however, I shall not treat in detail in this book (see PA, Chapter 3). In PA and SD, Shusterman consistently treats deconstructive reading as a rather insouciant playing with the text (it is worth noting, however, that in his book on T. S. Eliot he presented a more balanced position on this issue, see Richard Shusterman, T. S. Eliot and Philosophy of Criticism (London: Duckworth, 1988), p. 220). Most obviously, deconstructionists would treat that as an insult, insisting that deconstructive reading is nothing but the epitome of serious and detailed hermeneutic practice, something which is very often emphasized with regard to Derrida’s work. See also Derrida’s “Afterword” to Limited Inc. (ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), where he defends himself against imputing to him a belief in the absolute freedom of interpretation and, moreover, responds to the charge that his philosophy of reading necessarily rests on a foundationalist understanding of the category of meaning. On the other hand, the deconstructionist stance (if there is one) de facto presumes the possibility of the “true” reading of the text – namely, that which discloses its aporeticity; see, e.g., Barbara Johnson’s review of Barthes’ S/Z – “Review: The Critical Difference,” Diacritics, 8, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), p. 3.

76

Chapter 2

philosophy claims that access to this objective and stable meaning is possible, deconstructionists think it is not – because the object to which we might have such access simply cannot exist. In thinking so, deconstructionists lean on the presumption that meaning undergoes constant transformation because it “is not anchored in prior extralinguistic realities but is instead always the product of the systematic play between the elements of language whose differential relations change with every change in context and every use” and thus it inevitably falls prey to “the unconstrained forces of uncentered ‘free play’” (SD 67). According to Shusterman, the foundationalist reification of meaning, which characterizes the conceptions of interpretation proposed by both the adherents of Derrida and the inheritors of Frege, may be avoided by adopting a more “earthy” semantic attitude. One that is inspired by the thought of later Wittgenstein and sees the meaning of the text as “the correlate” of the conventional modes of “responding” to it (PA 90)38 that are observed in a given culture and in particular groups it consists of. Most obviously, as is the case with all cultural phenomena, these modes change constantly, so we cannot treat any of them as some eternal standard on which we could then base an objective, trans-historical theory of meaning. Furthermore, they are also quite varied on the synchronic plane, constituting unique practices which have their own specific “aims, strategies, and logics” (SD 49) and are at times incommensurable to each other. Yet despite this diversity, Shusterman proposes to subsume them all under the category of “sensemaking,”39 and by deploying that particular term he intends to emphasize both the active, reconstructive character of our comprehension of texts and the general goal of this practice, which, from his perspective, consists in generating a “meaningful response to the text” rather than penetrating to the core of it (i.e., to its objective and unchanging meaning (PA 92)). And if interpretation is a form of sense-making, then this encourages us to recognize that it may come in very diverse forms, which Shusterman calls “interpretive games,” thereby highlighting even more forcibly the indebtedness of his theory to the thought of later Wittgenstein (SD 49). As Shusterman argues, his position allows one to avoid both (a) the absolutism of analytic philosophy and (b) deconstruction’s skepticism. As far as (a) is concerned, Shusterman’s theory stresses that along with changes in our ways of responding to the text – changes which may occur both in diachronic and synchronic perspective – its meaning changes, too, and therefore no “textual meaning” is absolutely “stable.” When it comes to (b), in turn, Shusterman claims that the conventions which govern each interpretive game regulate, at least to some extent, which readings are more plaus38

39

Shusterman suggests that the aforementioned reification of the meaning of the text is a vestige of correspondence theories of truth and knowledge, which are, as he believes, untenable (PA 91-92). See Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” in: Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. xvi-xxxii; cf. PA 62.

Interpretation and Beyond

77

ible than others,40 and that, given the fact that we always play some interpretive game (not being able to escape beyond all games but only from one game to another), the inexistence of foundationally conceived meaning does not entail that every reading must be wrong, or that the reader is permitted to do whatever she wants with the text.41 Shusterman is, of course, aware that his theory may face some grave philosophical objections, and he takes considerable pains to forestall them, something which is worth summarizing here, especially that in the course of doing so he formulates theses which are crucial to his general position. One such potential criticism claims that Shusterman is wrong to think that different interpretive games can have “different logics.” This is allegedly so because the logic of every activity, interpretation included, must be determined by the ontology of its object, and since the literary work “always has the same ontological status” (for any change in this regard would mean that it ceased to be a literary work at all), then any plurality of interpretive logics is impossible. To this Shusterman rejoins that, first of all, we might simply define this constant ontology of literary works as one that “allows plural logics through the work’s indeterminate gaps or its culturally open, historically constructed character” (SD 51). Secondly, we might reverse the relation of determination between the ontological status of the work and the logic of its interpretation, and claim that it is the former which determines the latter – which is the solution Shusterman himself prefers as it chimes with his more general contention that the ontological status of any cultural entity is regulated by transitory conventions. Another objection is a specific case of an argument which must be faced by all constructivist or relativist epistemological theories. Its gist is to prove that they are helpless when it comes to explaining certain phenomena known from ordinary life which are, in contrast, accounted for quite easily by the classic correspondence theory of truth and knowledge. As far as the theory of interpretive games goes, the point is that while it can account for the occurrence of misreadings within an interpretive game – by simply saying that they diverge from the interpretation “that is established in a given community” (SD 66) – it seems not to have any response to the question whether this accepted interpretation, too, can prove false (and how we might know that). One could argue, furthermore, that Shusterman’s theory in fact forces him to render the currently accepted interpretation as incorrigible for it seems that once we get rid of the foundationalist touchstone of objective meaning, there is nothing that might disprove the rightness of the interpretation in question. In other words, while the foundationalistically inclined theoretician can tell herself: Yes, we believe that this interpretation is right, but we cannot 40 41

Shusterman agrees with Wittgenstein that conventions ultimately constitute the “rock bottom” of all human experience. Cf. Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1996), pp. 218-27.

78

Chapter 2

be sure whether this is not merely an illusion, given that one day it may occur that the objective meaning of the text is actually quite different than we believe; the interpretive-games theorist is not entitled to have any “but” because the only sense she can give to the adjective “objective” is ‘what we believe’ indeed. Shusterman, however, has a solution to this problem, and it can be summarized by rephrasing the sentence in the following way: Yes we believe this interpretation to be right, but we cannot preclude that one day we will come up with an “interpretation that is still more acceptable, more cogent and valid” – i.e., an interpretation that, in this sense (and only in this sense), is more right than the one we currently cling to (SD 67). This way the interpretive-games theorist can both have a “but” and keep his antifoundationalism intact, but (surely the right word here) let us note that thus conceived fallibilism does not solve the problem of why our beliefs change, being merely an expression of the conviction that we can always change our mind.42 The last objection consists, too, in drawing ultimate consequences from Shusterman’s stance, but this time it does not concern the rightness and wrongness of our interpretation of the text, but our very ability to refer to texts at all. It argues that if we presume, as Shusterman does, that the meaning of the text changes from one interpretive game to another, and that it can change even within one particular interpretive game (given that the latter may evolve), then this in fact implies the multiplication of the text in question and thus the impossibility of referring to “the same text” by people representing different interpretive games (or different stages in the evolution of a game). And given that literary criticism does consist of different games, then Shusterman’s position would eventually preclude any “fruitful critical dialogue concerning the work and how it should be understood” (SD 69). What we are dealing with here are in fact ages-old theoretical problems of what constitutes the identity of a given thing, and how we can be sure that we are referring to “the same object” if our descriptions of it differ significantly.43 No wonder, then, that Shusterman tries to secure his position by resorting to a similarly old philosophical strategy (after all it was Aquinas who urged us to “distinguish well”44) and splits the category of identity into two kinds – referential45 and sub42

43 44

45

Cf. Stanley Fish, “Change,” in: Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 141-160; Adam Leite, “Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 54, No. 215 (2004), pp. 232-51. Cf. Quine’s remarks on “Indentity,” in: Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 89-92. At least this is what he tells Dante in Canto XI of Divine Comedy, cf. Ronald Herzman, “From Francis to Salomon: Eschatology in the Sun,” in: Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), pp. 320-33. As Shusterman observes, Joseph Margolis denotes this kind of identity with the term “unicity,” as distinguished from “unity.” See Joseph Margolis, Interpretation: Radical but Not Unruly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 33; cf. Joseph Margolis, What, After

Interpretation and Beyond

79

stantial. The former is of “logical” (or “numerical”) character, and, unlike the latter, does not depend on the “change[s] occurring in the object,” or on how it is perceived, for the fact that we do not talk about the same kind of object (or person) does not mean that we are not talking about “the same” object (or person) (PA 94; cf. SD 70, 195). Furthermore, in Shusterman’s perspective, the stability of numerical reference is determined not by some metaphysical properties of the object that is referred to, but rather by our conventions of “individuation,” which are at work, e.g., when “we … agree that we are talking about the same thing while differing radically … whether [e.g.] it’s a bird, a plane or indeed a Superman” (PA 94).46 Since we are by this subject, let me also say that if Shusterman treats the distinction between the identity of content and reference as a superhero whom he can call to defend his position, then he employs it also to bolster his attacks on the positions of other theorists. He indicates, for instance, that if one believes, as those who fail to make the distinction often do, that the price to be paid for accepting the validity of radically different interpretations is the breakdown of the communication between the critics, then one is likely to sacrifice the pluralism of interpretations to save the stability of reference. And that this must be a serious accusation on Shusterman’s part is clear from the fact that the rejection of pluralism47 is considered by him as one of the gravest philosophical sins one can imagine. That topic, however, demands a separate treatment. The Pluralism of Interpretive Games Let us note that besides its capacity to counter what he perceives as the misguided picture of interpretation shared by analytic philosophy and deconstruction, there is yet another feature of his theory of sense-making that Shusterman emphasizes as potentially useful – namely, its pluralistic implications (SD 49). For not only does it allow us to accept the truthfulness of various incongruent readings (something

46

47

All, Is a Work of Art?: Lectures in the Philosophy of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 90-4. As he adds, “the agreement about referential identity can be secured by agreeing on a certain minimum number of identifying descriptions” (PA 94). Cf. Stanley Fish’s essay “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” in: Is there a Text in This Class?, pp. 322-37. Note that for Shusterman, pluralism constitutes one of the primary facets of pragmatist thought. See, e.g., Richard Shusterman, “Making Sense and Changing Lives: Directions in Contemporary Pragmatism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19, No. 1 (2005), p. 65; cf. Beth J. Singer, “Pragmatism and Pluralism,” The Monist, 75, No. 4 (October 1992), p. 477, passim. It is worth mentioning that there are some controversies over pragmatism’s allegedly essential pluralism; see the following exchange: Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin, “Why Pragmatists Cannot Be Pluralists”; Michael Eldrige, “Why a Pragmatist May Be a Pluralist”; Cheryl Misak, “Pragmatism and Pluralism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 41, No. 1 (2005), pp. 101-22, 129-35.

80

Chapter 2

which would be merely a “cognitivist” interpretive pluralism48) but also to recognize that apart from those interpretive games that are governed by cognitive goals, there are other legitimate interpretive games as well49; ones that may aim, for instance, not at truth but at providing pleasure or diversion (which is obviously not to say that seeking truth does not bring, or that it precludes, pleasure or diversion). This particular attitude, which Shusterman dubs “logical pluralism,”50 has quite many advantages, one of which is that it does not diverge, like most interpretive “monisms” do, from the actual reading practice of literary critics. And in order to illustrate that latter point, Shusterman provides some interesting examples which, as he argues, show how certain analytic conceptions present a distorted image of this practice. He begins with an observation that there are several analytic approaches to what is called the logic of criticism, each of which describes that logic differently even though it at the same time claims to be providing nothing but a pure description of the actual critical practice. Now, there is of course nothing strange in the fact itself, which one might explain by saying that perhaps one of these approaches is empirically right, while others are not, but it becomes rather intriguing as soon as we realize that, as Shusterman points out, all of them are backed with convincing empirical examples. How could this be so? The answer to this question, and at the same time the source of the common error of the aforementioned positions, lies in the fact that the character of contemporary literary criticism is such that it allows for the coexistence of different critical logics, no matter how conflicted or incommensurable they might be, and that this coexistence actually takes place.51 Henceforth, any philosopher who elevates a given critical logic to the status of the only valid one must be either blind to the existence of the others or, if that is not the case, she thereby abandons her task of describing the critical practice and turns into a “legislator.” Shusterman obviously does not think that it would be wrong for philosophers to assume that latter role (this is in fact what he often encourages them to do), but he thinks that in this case it becomes deleterious 48

49

50 51

“According to that narrower pluralism, there are many approaches to the many aspects of an artwork with respect to which true (or truth-like) interpretive assertions can be made. There can be true interpretation of what the work meant to its author and true interpretation of what it means to the reader … and true interpretation of its archetypal meaning. Thus, we can have differing and sometimes conflicting interpretive assertions that are true or plausible” (SD 49). Cf. Robert Stecker, “Interpretation,” in: The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 243-45. The question of the plurality of “interpretive aims” is addressed also in Shusterman’s T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, pp. 124-33. This stance found its first articulation in a book written by Shusterman already in the analytic period of his career, namely The Object of Literary Criticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984). Cf. M.H. Abrams’s remarks on the “great debt we owe” to “the variety” of literary criticism. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 4-5.

Interpretation and Beyond

81

indeed, and this is because literary criticism thrives on plurality, which makes it the exciting and flourishing enterprise that it is. Let us, then, get a glimpse of this plurality by turning to Shusterman’s discussion of the said analytic accounts, which is organized around the issues of “the logical status of interpretive statements” (whose standard form Shusterman puts schematically as ‘W is I’52); “the logical role of … reasons” in critical interpretations; and the structure of “interpretive arguments” (SD 34). As far as the first of these issues is concerned, Shusterman distinguishes the following three stances adopted by analytic philosophers: descriptivism, prescriptivism, and performativism. Generally speaking, descriptivism is defined by its conceiving all “interpretive statements as expressing propositions” (SD 36), yet it should be stressed that this approach assumes quite variegated forms. One of them is called, in Shusterman’s nomenclature, “subjectivism,” which label reflects the fact that its representatives render “‘W is I’ as ‘W is I to me,’” thus reducing the role of the critic to merely documenting the impressions that a given work generates in her (SD 36). Now, even though according to subjectivism interpretive statements can be “true or false” (depending, of course, on the “sincerity” of the critic), their being true is not so much important in this perspective. What is important is rather the aesthetic value of the interpretation presented, and thus subjectivism seems also an aestheticism of sorts, which should not surprise us given that its patrons are “Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater.” But that is not all: subjectivism is a kind of pluralism, too, (though not the one Shusterman advocates) since it allows for the existence of many diverse interpretations of a given work, rightly presuming that each critic may get quite a different impression from it. The situation is drastically different in the case of another form of descriptivism, which Shusterman determines as strong (or, to emphasize its strength, he calls it “absolutism”). For absolutists, then, interpretive statements do not concern the critic’s impressions but the work itself (or its meaning, to be exact) which meaning, if it is truly “true,” can be only one. Interestingly, however, even though strong descriptivism seems to be motivated by a repulsion toward the plurality of interpretations, it is itself haunted by plurality at its very core since there is no agreement among absolutists as to what that “true meaning” is and where it can be found. Some seek it in the autonomous linguistic structure of the work, while others find it outside of the textual boundaries, in the author’s intention.53 Besides this basic disagreement as to what constitutes the meaning of the text, strong descriptivists face another problem. For it might be said that even though their, so to speak, anxiety of plural opinions, could be understandable in the context of disci52 53

“Where ‘W’ is a variable whose values are artworks, and ‘I’ is a variable whose values are interpretive predicates about individual artworks” (SD 36). Shusterman refers here primarily to Hirsch (see Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967)), Jerrold Levinson, Steven Knapp, and Walter Benn Michaels.

82

Chapter 2

plines such as engineering or accounting, it becomes totally out of place vis-à-vis literary criticism, where vagueness and ambivalence are the daily bread and anyone who tries to argue that their interpretation is the only correct one looks like a boor at best and a madman at worst. In other words, literary criticism deserves a more fine-grained theory of interpretation than absolutism, and a suitable candidate seems to be what Shusterman labels weak descriptivism, whose representatives he finds in Joseph Margolis and Morris Weitz.54 This descriptivism is weak in the sense that instead of claiming that interpretive statements must be judged according to their truth or falsity, it chooses to place such statements on the continuum of greater or lesser “plausibility,”55 treating them as “hypotheses” rather than as propositions in the strict sense. We should be aware, however, that there is an absolutist contraband smuggled in that position, too, and it reveals itself as soon as we take a closer look at how weak descriptivism splits the critical discourse into two types. One of them is “interpretation” of objective features of the work (say, when the critic talks about a symbolic meaning of a given scene in Hamlet), and it is only with regard to it that weak descriptivism applies the criterion of plausibility, i.e., is genuinely weak; and the other is “description” of those features (take, e.g., the critic’s statement that a scene takes place in a castle and there are x persons participating in it), in which case the strict attribution of logical value is a must, and where weak descriptivism becomes the strong one, indeed. Now, such a splitting is a smart maneuver that allows for much more than being sensitive to the sophistication of the actual literary criticism while at the same time avoiding some rampant interpretive relativism (and to what that “much more” is I shall come back later), yet it is unfortunately a disputable one, too. For it can be argued that when it comes to the meaning of literary works, there are no obvious facts and thus there can be no pure descriptions which perfectly correspond to such facts, thereby differing from “mere” interpretations of the work.56 However far-fetched this point might sound, it has actually found proponents within the radical wing of the position Shusterman calls “performativism.” These theorists argue that the meaning of the work does not exist in itself and waits to be found by the critic, but needs to be constructed by the latter instead, and that

54

55 56

Shusterman refers particularly to: Joseph Margolis, “The Logic of Interpretation,” in: Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, ed. Joseph Margolis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), pp. 108-18; and Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Cf. Joseph Margolis, The Truth about Relativism (Oxford-Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), especially Chapter 2, “Bipolar Truth-Values.” To demonstrate this suffice it consult the history of literary criticism, which provides all too many examples to the effect that virtually no statement about a literary work (even such a seemingly self-evident one as that Hamlet is about a Hamlet) has remained safe from being dismissed as mere interpretation.

Interpretation and Beyond

83

hence, in fact, there is nothing in the work that would not be a result of interpretation.57 The position of more modest performativists, in turn, could be characterized as saying that though indeed there is something in it that is not such, the work always includes many, even infinitely many, gaps58 that must be filled by the critic for an interpretation to emerge (despite the fact that the work itself does not contain any decisive directions as to how this needs to be done). Without going into further details, let me stress that, in effect, for both the radical and modest performativists interpretation looks much like artistic, creative activity (“interpretive performance,” to be exact) and the literary critic struggling to provide a reading of the work seems more like an actor preparing for a role, or a film director working on an adaptation of the novel, than, for instance, a scientist writing a report on the fossils she has found (see SD 41).59 Henceforth, it comes as no surprise that according to this position the basic formula of ‘W is I,’ which schematically describes the statements contained in the interpretation presented by the critic, comes to mean “a practical demonstration of W in I-fashion,” and that interpretation cannot be assessed with the help of the categories of truth or falsity, but should rather be judged, as performances often are, in terms of its successfulness (SD 40)60 None of these standards of judgment, however, appeals to the third position which Shusterman discerns with regard to the status of interpretive statements, namely, prescriptivism. As its very name suggests, prescriptivism construes these statements as prescriptions, but to understand why it does so and what this means exactly we need to turn to its portrayal of critical practice, or the starting point thereof, to be exact. Just as philosophy begins with wonder, so each act of literary

57

58

59

60

According to Shusterman, Margaret Macdonald is one of the advocates of that view; see her “Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts,” in: Aesthetics and Language, ed. William Elton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), pp. 114-130. Another expression of performativism is found by Shusterman in: Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York: Harper and Row,1970), p. 103. This is because – as the foremost phenomenologist of literature, Roman Ingarden, has convincingly demonstrated: of an “infinite … manifold of states of affairs [that] belongs” to every “autonomous temporal object” only a finite number can be represented in the literary work. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of literature. With an Appendix on the Functions of Language in the Theater, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 198. Cf. a recent book by Peter Kivy in which he argues that not only the literary critic but every reader is a kind of “performer.” Peter Kivy, The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature (Malden: Blackwell, 2006). As for the critics who work, or worked, in a performativist manner, Shusterman names Helen Gardner, Lionel Trilling, J. Dover Wilson, and M. C. Bradbrook (see SD 42-3).

84

Chapter 2

criticism, we are told by the prescriptivist C. L. Stevenson,61 begins with the realization that the work surrenders to various possible modes of interpreting it, and that the critic must choose one of the latter. As soon as the choice is made, and it has to be made for the critical process to proceed, the critic’s job is, first, to systematically pursue this hermeneutical path and, then, to convince her readers, something which she tries to achieve by producing an interpretation that consists not of propositions concerning what the text is but rather of recommendations how it should be seen (‘W is I’ equals “W should be seen as I” (SD 38)). But why doesn’t it consist of propositions? If the critic wants to convince somebody to her interpretation of W, then doesn’t she do it because she thinks the interpretation to be true? And if this is so, then wouldn’t it be natural for the critic to simply tell that person that ‘W is I’ (i.e., to produce some appropriate propositions) instead of recommending a way of seeing W as I? The answer to these questions should become clear if we realize that, according to the prescriptivist point of view, the critic’s choice is “based on and governed by factors that are not merely logical or cognitive” (SD 39), and thus she cannot advertize her interpretive statements as true or false. These statements, let me repeat again, are merely “recommendations” as to how a work should be seen and as such can only be, or so the prescriptivists tell us, right or wrong. Quite naturally, these two latter terms cannot mean here complying or not complying with the facts (like when we say, e.g., “You’re wrong to think that John Dewey is the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System”), yet besides that we do not, unfortunately, learn from prescriptivism much more as to what their meaning could be.62 Be that as it may, apart from considering different analytic approaches to the logical status of interpretive statements, Shusterman also explores, as I have already mentioned, analytic conceptions of the functions performed by reasons in critical argumentation, and concerning the structure thereof. Interestingly, just as in the case of the first aspect of interpretive logic (i.e., interpretive statements), in the case of each of the remaining two aspects (reasons and structures), he finds three different positions, too, which gives Shusterman’s typology an elegant triadic structure. The significance of this seemingly inessential observation should become overt by the end of this chapter, but for now let me say that even though this structure might suggest some strict homology between the positions discerned in each aspect, this is actually not the case, even though there are convergences in this regard. What I mean is that some descriptivists,63 for instance, tend to see the role of reasons given by critics as that of providing 61

62 63

See Charles L. Stevenson, “Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics,” in: Philosophical Analysis: A Collection of Essays, ed. Max Black (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), pp. 319-58. According to Shusterman, some critics who practice prescriptivism are Francis Fergusson and F. R. Leavis. Such as “Weitz, Margolis, Beardsley, and Hirsch” (SD 43).

Interpretation and Beyond

85

“evidence that logically supports” a given interpretive thesis or hypothesis (say, when the critic invokes certain facts about the writer’s childhood in order to support a psychoanalytic reading of her work), and those who do so tend also to cling to the view that critical arguments have inductive structure (SD 43). Speaking of induction, there are analytic philosophers who, on the contrary, elevate deduction to the status of the primary form of critical reasoning, and a good example here is Morris Weitz, whom Shusterman describes as claiming that “all interpretations are essentially explanations in the form of deriving a specific interpretive hypothesis from a general hypothesis” (SD 47). The triad is completed by the “dialogical” type of critical argument, which is held as fundamental by still other analytic theorists and defined as a kind of staged dialogue between the critic and her reader, where the former tries to lead the latter to accepting a given interpretation by means of intricate sequences of questions, suggestions, and allusions, which might remind one of the maieutic method as it was applied by Socrates (see SD 47).64 As for the remaining two analytic accounts of critical reasons, the first, favored by the prescriptivist Stevenson, sees their role as explaining the causes that have lead the critic, and might encourage the reader, “to adopt” this and not that interpretation (SD 44). And since, as we remember, one crucial premise of prescriptivism is that the critic is prompted in her work by “factors that are not merely logical or cognitive” and rely heavily on “the critic’s personal sensibilities,”65 such a reason has nothing (or little) to do with the interpretation being true, and may, e.g., take the form of the critic’s frankly admitting that she adopted a given way of reading the text because it gives her more “enjoyment” than others; a point which, hopefully, will seem acceptable to those of the critic’s readers who value enjoyment as much as she does (see SD 44). Finally, there is a position that construes critical reasons as neither explaining or “justifying” the critic’s perspective on the text but as “creating” it in a way (SD 45). What hides behind this enigmatic and abstract formulation is a rather simple idea, and to explain it let me refer to the notion of perspective, which I have intentionally invoked in the previous sentence instead of that of interpretation, which might have seemed more suitable. Namely, according to the position in question, having made an initial decision as to the way in which she is going to see the text in her interpretation, the critic is then helped in maintaining that perspective by 64

65

Shusterman’s example of such a “dialogical or dialectical” critical argument is a fragment “of Leavis’s interpretation of Blake’s poem ‘Hear the Voice of the Bard’”: “In spite of the semi-colon at the end of the second line we find ourselves asking whether it is the Holy Word or the Bard that is calling the ‘lapsed soul.’ There is clearly a reference to the voice of God in the Garden calling Adam, but is it God who is weeping in the evening dew? And is it God that might control the starry pole? – though it could hardly be the Soul (an interpretation permitted by punctuation and syntax) that might? ...” Frank Raymond Leavis, Revaluation (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 133-4, cited in SD 48. Stevenson, “Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics,” p. 124; cited in SD 44.

Chapter 2

86

various discursive “devices” that keep some aspects of the text in her focus while obscuring others. Moreover, these same devices, when placed in a written interpretation, can perform an analogous function with regard to the reader, working as a literary-critical equivalent of the ordinary “if you cock your head to the side and squint a little, you will see what I see.”66 Now that I have summarized the main tenets of the nine analytic positions toward interpretive logic which Shusterman discusses, let me recall the point that his discussion was aimed to prove, which is as follows: all these positions are both right and wrong, and they are right and wrong in the same way. They are right insofar as each of them refers to a practice that does exist (some critics indeed follow the prescriptivist model, while still others are descriptivists etc., etc.), yet they err in treating it as the sole valid form of literary criticism per se, while it is valid only for one among the many interpretive games (each governed by its own logic, perfectly valid within its confines) that the general enterprise of literary criticism is comprised of. Therefore, Shusterman’s solution is not to dismiss these positions altogether, but to reject what is bad in them (the generalizing tendency) and to keep what is good (their reconstruction of various interpretive logics), something his pluralism surely allows for as it recognizes the legitimacy of divergent interpretive games. Of course, there are more unjustified generalizations in literary theory, analytic or otherwise, and I shall study Shusterman’s critiques of some them in the next section; the critiques of which are all the more interesting as they try to explain where such tendencies come from in the first place. Literary Theory in the Trap of Professionalism In the course of one of his numerous metaphilosophical explorations, Shusterman characterizes the brand of pragmatist thought that he pursues as “reconstructivegenealogical” (SD 194). This label is supposed to signify, among other things, that his pragmatism dismantles the theoretical ideas which it finds retrograde and detrimental to human progress by means of narratives that reveal these ideas’ rootedness in various contingencies and idiosyncrasies, which genealogy they officially discard in order to establish their authority (SD 200).67 We have already 66

67

Shusterman considers Wittgenstein as a precursor of this theory and admits that it “has been endorsed by many analytic aestheticians (e.g. Aldrich, Isenberg, and Paul Ziff)” (SD 45); see, e.g., Paul Ziff, “Reasons in Art Criticism,” in: Art and Philosophy, ed. William Kennick (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), pp. 669-86, cf. Marjorie Perloff, “The Poetics of Description: Wittgenstein on the Aesthetic,” Parallax, No. 4 (1998), p. 81. As for literary critics in whose interpretations “reasons function as [“focusing”] devices,” Shusterman mentions, again, F.R. Leavis (SD 80). See Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Culture: Margolis and Rorty,” (Chapter 11 of SD, pp. 191-207). Among the thinkers whom Shusterman, quite rightly, counts as representatives of this branch of pragmatism we find Richard Rorty. Cf., e.g., Rorty’s remarks in his “Philosophy without Principles,” in: Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmat-

Interpretation and Beyond

87

seen (in Chapter 1) Shusterman applying this method to philosophical conceptions of defining art, but he also uses it in those of his analyses of interpretive theories which focus on unmasking the latter’s entanglement in the web of professional requirements of literary studies and the humanities in general.68 That Shusterman chooses to do so should not surprise us, given that literary studies and literary theory very easily yield to a kind of critique that derives its force from “the ambivalence with which our society regards professionalism.”69 One the one hand, then, as Stanley Fish emphasizes, “professionalism” may bring to mind the knowledge or skills which, even though they are directly or indirectly useful to us, nevertheless remain far from our reach, not to mention positive features such as diligence and artistry. On the other, however, it might be associated with belonging to a hermetic community, often a gang indeed, which concentrates narrowly on its own interests and wants to draw as much profit from the rest of society as possible by using all kinds of tricks, the least indecent of which is perhaps pulling wool over people’s eyes with the help of “obfuscating jargon.”70 Interestingly, even though in most cases that bad side of a profession is, at least in theory, perceived as a mere unfortunate distortion of an otherwise useful and valuable idea, there are some professions believed not to have any good side at all, and – as one can easily guess – literary studies is among them.71 The reason for this rather disapproving assessment seems to be the fact that while most professions (neurosurgery or engineering, for instance) serve so-called useful goals, or – if that is not the case – their members at least do some things better than laypersons (take fire eaters or belly dancers), literary studies, as is often held, constitutes an entirely redundant supplement to literature, which redundancy results from the fact that literary works can be easily read without help of any mediators, such as literary scholars, for example.72 Shusterman, however, does not pick up this thread of uselessness and neither does he join the choir of the conservative critics lamenting the professionalization and specialization of English departments, which instead of propagating general cultural values have disintegrated into narrow groups studying idiosyncratic subjects related to a particular gender or ethnicity.73 Yet he surely exploits the topic of professional self-seeking in accus-

68 69 70 71 72 73

ism, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 134. See Chapter 4 of PA. Stanley Fish, “Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies,” in: Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 200. Fish, “Profession Despise Thyself”, p. 200. See Fish, “Profession Despise Thyself”, p. 200. Fish, “Profession Despise Thyself”, p. 201. According to Peter S. Jay, such subjects prove that the condition of literary studies is anything but alarming. See Jay’s Column in Baltimore Sun, September 5 (1982) [no pp. given]. See also, Walter Jackson Bate, “The Crisis in English Studies,” Harvard Magazine, 85 (Sep-

88

Chapter 2

ing various theories that despite their claiming to reveal the universal nature of interpretive processes, they in fact advocate very endemic forms of reading in order to serve the interests of the academic profession of literary studies. Let me begin discussing Shusterman’s position with a rather obvious observation that each profession, in order to preserve its existence, must take care of its legitimacy. In the case of literary studies, as Shusterman suggests, this often boils down to a specific “dialectic of truth versus productivity” (PA 95, 84-85), where the discipline tries to sustain its “scientific” or scholarly status by deploying interpretive methods that allegedly yield objective results, and simultaneously sees to it that the ultimate results will never emerge, “thereby ensuring the continued demand for interpretation” (PA 85). Shusterman discovers this dialectic at work in both analytic and deconstructionist theories of literary interpretation, yet he is quick to underscore that they differ insofar as the former put more stress on truth than on productivity, which proportion is inverted in the case of the latter. Analytic-oriented theorists, then, try to “secure” the objectivity of interpretation by, e.g., referring to the “author’s intention” (Hirsch) or to “the text’s own meaning … determined by public linguistic rules” (Beardsley (PA 85)) or to some inherent, unquestionable features of the text (Margolis). Yet the other element of the dialectic that they are entangled in forces them to compromise this objectivity. And thus Hirsch admits that however strongly we must cling in our interpretations to the author’s intention, it is so hard to determine what that intention actually is that we must allow for its different reconstructions. Beardsley, in turn, recognizes that, being an ever developing structure that it is, language can never stand still and hence neither can the interpretations that are dependent on its conventions. And according to Margolis’s theory (at least that formulated in his earlier articles), describing the “firm” features of the text, as we already know, constitutes only half of the interpretive job, the other being the actual interpretation, which is concerned with more ambiguous aspects of the text and thus can never be definite.74 As far as deconstructionist criticism is concerned, even though its proponents would surely balk at the suggestion that they aim at objectivity in any strong epistemological sense, one can see in them, too, a clear ambition for scholarly soundness and seriousness (suffice it only to recall the pride with which deconstructionists advertize each other’s analyses as “rigorous,” “scrupulous” and so on),75

74

75

tember-October 1982), pp. 41-53. Both articles cited in Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 568-9. See Margolis, “The Logic of Interpretation”; Monroe Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970); Eric Donald Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Christopher Norris, e.g., is particularly keen on emphasizing the rigorousness of deconstruction (as represented by Derrida but also Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman) see Christopher

Interpretation and Beyond

89

which is not diminished, at least in their eyes, by what Shusterman conceives as their insistence on the primacy of misreading.76 However simplifying this account may seem (and note that he refers here not so much to Derrida himself but rather to his followers), Shusterman is careful to stipulate that deconstruction is hardly a monolith, and he separates the Bloomian version thereof from its other incarnations. In Bloom’s psychoanalytico-kabbalistic theory, then, every authentic critic, just as every authentic poet and writer for that matter, is propelled in her practice by what Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence,” which forces her to read in a “strong” way and thus to produce ever newer misreadings which could distinguish her from the predecessors.77 The case is different, however, with those variants of deconstruction which, such as Jonathan Culler’s, conceive the production of misreadings not as a matter of the critic’s (conscious or unconscious) choice but as a necessity resulting from the very nature of language, or to be more precise, from the economy of différance, which governs it.78 Before I move on with the question of the dialectic of truth and productivity, allow me a general comment that will further contextualize Shusterman’s arguments and which transcends the perspective of literary theory. Namely, I would like to note that, as is widely known, the fiercest and bloodiest wars are civil ones and that they are so no matter whether we are talking about actual military conflicts or about those taking place exclusively in the domain of ideas. In that latter field, the most galvanizing debates are those carried on within individual doctrines, and as a rule the more minute the differences between the opponents are, the more exacerbated their dispute becomes. Therefore, it should come as no real surprise that as far as Shusterman’s analyses of the professionalization of literary studies is concerned, he is the most critical – not always justifiably, I must admit – of his fellow pragmatists. In fact, he charges them with anything but a betrayal of pragmatist ideals: i.e., that in succumbing in various ways to literary professional-

76

77 78

Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London-New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 19, 98, 104, 163. Cf. also footnote 37 above. The dialectic of the truth versus productivity can be seen, e.g., in Derrida’s interpretive practice, as described by Geoffrey Bennington: “One can imagine Derrida as very modest, entirely occupied by reading and re-reading his predecessors with minute attention, determined to spend the time it takes over the slightest detail, the slightest comma, guardian of the letter of the old texts, putting nothing forward that he has not already found written by an other, scarcely our contemporary – and this is true. But one can also imagine him, on the contrary, as immodesty itself, forcing these same old texts to say something quite different from what they had always seemed to say … – and this not false.” Geoffrey Bennington, “Derridabase,” in: Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 6-7. See Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Shusterman refers primarily to Jonathan Culler’s, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

90

Chapter 2

ism, Walter Benn Michaels, Steven Knapp, Stanley Fish, and Richard Rorty (for they are the pragmatist literary theorists in question), move away from egalitarianism and pluralism, which Shusterman deems the kernel of pragmatism. Let us begin with Knapp and Michaels79 and their article tellingly entitled “Against Theory,” which provoked a stir of controversy in mid-eighties and whose shockwaves have been felt in the discipline of literary studies until this day. In the text, they undertook a critique of both the epistemological aspect of literary theory80 as well as its ontological underpinnings, i.e., primarily, the distinction between the author’s intention and the meaning of the text, which they tried to undermine by arguing that “there is no such thing as intentionless language” or meaning (and thus “what a text means is what its author intends”).81 Leaving aside the details of the former critique, since it is not the primary target of Shusterman’s analyses, let me focus on the latter. In a nutshell, Knapp and Michaels’ argument is that in order to see something as having any meaning in the first place, we must always assume (and this in most cases happens without our knowing it) that there is someone’s intention behind it, which intention, or, to be more exact, our tacit or explicit assumption of its content, then determines our interpreting of that something. To illustrate this thesis, they deploy a peculiar thought experiment, which has already become wellknown in the community of literary scholars as the so-called “wave-poem.” Knapp and Michaels invite us to envision that while on a beach by the sea, we suddenly discover a text written on the sand which begins with words “A slumber did my spirit seal” (this is obviously the incipit of Wordsworth’s famous poem, but practically any other text would be suitable for the experiment to work). In reading these words, we may wonder where they come from and who actually wrote them, yet it is crucial for Knapp and Michaels’s point to realize that consciously reflecting on such matters is not necessary for us to grasp the meaning of the inscription. Everything changes, however, with the coming of a wave which overflows the text and then leaves some lines added to the ones we first saw (actually, the new words are the second stanza of Wordsworth’s poem). Knapp and Michaels claim that having faced such an awkward, surreal indeed, situation, we have but two options to choose: either to assume that there is some conscious

79

80

81

Unfortunately, there is not space here to scrutinize Knapp and Michaels’s views and the reactions they have provoked. See, e.g., Leszek Drong, Disciplining the New Pragmatism, pp. 83-94; and Danuta Szajnert, “Intencja i interpretacja” [Intention and Interpretation], PamiĊtnik Literacki, No. 1 (2000), pp. 7-42. Namely, its aspiration to “base interpretation on a direct encounter with its object, an encounter undistorted by the influence of the interpreter’s particular beliefs.” Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” in: Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, p. 26. The article was first published in Critical Inquiry, 9, No. 4 (1982), pp. 723-42. Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” pp. 17, 19.

Interpretation and Beyond

91

“agent” behind the inscription, even if that be someone as spectral as Wordsworth’s ghost, or to assume that it is an “accidental product” of some blind natural forces, such as “erosion.”82 One thing is certain, however: it is only in the former case that we can talk of any “meaning.” For if we agree that the lines in the sand came into being by chance, we will not be able to deem such a thing a syntagm at all, but something which merely resembles it.83 Besides laying out their theory (which they, by the way, claim is not a theory) Knapp and Michaels criticize the intentionalism of Hirsch for not being consistent enough (they argue that Hirsch first, and rightly, conflates the meaning of the text and the intention of its author, and then, wrongly, separates them by saying that the task of the interpreter is to assess whether the meaning of the text converges with the author’s intention) and attack the views on intention presented by Paul de Man and other scholars.84 The conclusion that they eventually reach is that if interpretive theory in practically all its guises rests on the untenable distinction between the author’s intention and the autonomous meaning of the text, then it must be discarded. To come back to Shusterman, he portrays Knapp and Michaels as being motivated in their arguments by an “anxiety that … interpretive pluralism and instability of meaning will undermine the convergence necessary for conceiving literary criticism as a cognitively respectable discipline” (PA 100). This is what supposedly drove them to the advocacy of a view that interpretation must be based exclusively on the historical author’s intention, which they thought could “ground

82

83

84

After all, given that there are plenty of cases when natural forces create things which resemble human artifacts, say sculptures or paintings, it surely remains probable that they can create something which looks like an inscription, even if that would happen very rarely. “In the … case … in which you accept the hypothesis of natural accident you’re amazed to discover that what you thought was poetry turns out not to be poetry at all. It isn’t poetry because it isn’t language; that’s what it means to call it an accident. As long as you thought the marks were poetry, you were assuming their intentional character. You had no idea who the author was, and this might have tricked you into thinking that positing an author was irrelevant to your ability to read the stanza. But in fact you had, without realizing it, already posited an author. It was only with the mysterious arrival of the second stanza that your tacit assumption (e.g., someone writing with a stick) was challenged and you realized that you had made one. Only now, when positing an author seems impossible, do you genuinely imagine the marks as authorless. But to deprive them of an author is to convert them into accidental likeness of language. They are not, after all, an example of intentionless meaning; as soon as they become intentionless, they become meaningless as well.” Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” p. 16. Cf. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,” Critical Inquiry, 14, No. 1 (1987), pp. 49-68; Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Reply to George Wilson,” Critical Inquiry, 19, No. 1 (1992), pp. 186-93; and Walter Benn Michaels, “The Shape of the Signifier,” Critical Inquiry, 27, No. 2 (2001), pp. 266-83.

92

Chapter 2

the meaning and the identity of a text in something fixed and transparent which itself neither needs interpretation nor allows divergent ones” (PA 98). Such an exclusivity always has a price and in this case it is the disenfranchisement of all existing interpretive goals and methods which, however valuable for literary criticism they might be, do not subscribe to Knapp and Michaels’ intentionalism. Shusterman’s main point of criticism, however, is that even though one can still find in their theory an attempt at securing the productivity of the critical enterprise (Knapp and Michaels emphasize that it is compatible with many different conceptions of who the historical author is and with equally diverse ways of determining her intention), it may result in blocking, or significantly constraining, the development of that field by preventing any new goals and methods of interpretation from being even taken into consideration by the critics. Besides these potential negative consequences for interpretive pluralism and the future of literary criticism, Knapp and Michaels’ position suffers from other deficiencies, too. To begin with, Shusterman emphasizes that at its very heart lies a glaring non sequitur. For even if they managed to prove that meaning is impossible without intention, then there is still a long argumentative way from that claim to the claim that the intention in question must be the historical author’s, while Knapp and Michaels act as if there was no need to justify their immediately jumping from one claim to the other. What Shusterman means here is that utterances can be given meaning, at least in principle, by the intention of all kinds of subjects: historical author, imagined author, or even the reader herself, and the thesis of the necessity of intention does not, in and of itself, determine to which of them the said intention should belong (see PA 97). In a way that is characteristic for his “down-to-earth” pragmatism, Shusterman also points out that despite their much trumpeted zeal to defend practice from parasitic theory, Knapp and Michaels are in fact so blinded by their transcendental argument from intentional necessity that they divorce themselves from the actual linguistic practice. For the distinction between meaning and intention does not function merely in abstract literary methodologies, as their article seems to suggest, but also within ordinary language, where it is used, among other things, to describe very frequent cases when we want to say one thing but our words say another (i.e., when our “speech or writing fail[s] to mean what it was intended to mean” (PA 97)) or when, upon hearing some outrageous or strange utterance (and “Meaning equates intention” would be a perfect example here), we want to ask our interlocutor simply and directly: “Do you really mean that?” Finally, Shusterman underscores that – independently of the aforementioned charges – the very idea of “grounding,” “anchoring,” or “stabilizing” the interpretation in intention, so as to avoid the divergence of readings of a given text, is doomed to failure from the very beginning. And this is so because it (a) depends on the existence of an “idiolect of intentionality” which must be absolutely “transparent” in order to perform the anchoring function (if it were not, it would

Interpretation and Beyond

93

itself generate multiple interpretations thus losing the stability which entitles it to perform that very function),85 but as such is utterly impossible. And (b) apparently ignores the fact that the multiplicity of interpretations “might … be” (and has often been) allowed, encouraged or even programmed by precisely the intention of the historical author of a given text (PA 98). To sum up, Shusterman sees Knapp and Michaels as incurable conservatives ready to sacrifice interpretive pluralism on the altar of the scholarly authority of their own discipline, and who thereby86 espouse a pragmatism that is oriented toward the past and stability and bears no resemblance to classical pragmatist thought, which celebrates change and flux and whose vectors are inadvertently directed at the “future” (PA 99-100). Yet even though the remaining theories of Rorty and Fish do not make that mistake, being apologies for constant transformation and novelty instead, Shusterman thinks they also call for correction, and I shall try to explain why this is so in what follows. In Rorty’s case, the problem is actually that he goes too far in his celebration of creativity and of ever new interpretations and discourses. Recall, first, that for Rorty texts do not have essences, i.e., do not exists in themselves, and that the identity of each of them is determined by “agreement in ways of talking of reacting which pragmatically identify it as the same work while allowing its descriptions and interpretations (but never simultaneously all of them) to change without necessarily implying that we have changed the topic of discourse” (PA 101).87 So far everything chimes with Shusterman’s theory of interpretive games, but according to the latter Rorty’s mistake is that he also believes that “the primary aim” of language consists in providing us with absolutely novel “vocabularies,” and in effect considers the task of the literary critic to be the creation of interpretations expressed in a unique “private language,” a pure idiolect which does not have anything to do with other languages (PA 101-2; cf. PP 121-3). And this, obviously, brings to Rorty’s position a threat of incoherence. For if the identity of the text 85

86 87

“For whatever use we wish to make of the artist’s original understanding of her creation, all we (or the artist) can ever have of it is an interpretive reconstruction of what it was, even if that reconstruction is based on the artist’s own testimony” (SD 62). This is one of the reasons why Shusterman rejects the distinction between the historical and hypothetical author (see SD 37). On the distinction between the factual and hypothetical intention, see also in Noël Carroll, “Interpretation and Intention: The Debate Between Hypothetical and Actual Intentionalism,” Metaphilosophy, 31, No. 1/2 (2000), pp. 76-95; cf. Gary Iseminger, “Actual Intentionalism vs. Hypothetical Intentionalism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, No. 4 (1996), pp. 319-26. Along with their attachment to “transcendental” reasoning (“necessitarianism” as he dubs it) and to the intention of the historical author. See Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 78-112, and his “The Pragmatist’s Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation,” in: Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 131-47. Cf. Leon Surette, “Richard Rorty Lays Down the Law,” Philosophy and Literature, 19, No. 2 (1995), pp. 261-75.

94

Chapter 2

emerges as a result of the consensus among those who participate in the discourse about it, and if, on the other hand, Rorty thinks that literary critics should come up with absolutely novel, idiosyncratic, and private readings (and need “no common vocabulary in terms of which” they could explain to others the merits of their interpretations),88 then that entails the exclusion of “any effective referential individuation, hence any effective discourse” (PA 102) in literary criticism.89 Having formulated these accusations, Shusterman suggests that Rorty might reply to them by referring to his trademark division between the “private and public” sphere of discourse. The public one, regulated by some common values and principles of communication, would secure the identity of the objects of the discussion between literary critics, while the private domain would function as an isolated zone in which virtually every critical judgment is allowed, even the wildest, most idiosyncratic view on a given work (see PA 103). As Shusterman thinks, however, such a solution must fail, which is mainly because one cannot draw an impermeable boundary between two such domains and henceforth what is done in one may have consequences for what takes place in the other. Consider, for instance, the fact that literary critics usually do not produce interpretations with the intention to later put them in a drawer but rather to publish them. Thus there is always at least some possibility (and to Shusterman’s mind it is a high one indeed) that these interpretations will escape the narrow circle of private critical interpretations and, having penetrated into the public discourse, will have some impact on the so-called wider “reading public,” questioning “its familiar, shared, and perhaps cherished understandings of literature” (PA 104). Admittedly, Shusterman claims that this may be so “both for better and for worse,” yet he at the same time seems to think the negative consequences will prevail. One such consequence is related to the fact that changes in the substantial identity of the text may have serious repercussions for the referential identity of works (even though, as we remember, Shusterman insists on carefully distinguish88 89

See Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 158. Pace Shusterman, one might point out that Rorty never talks about any absolutely novel critical language that is incommensurable to the common discourse. After all, as Rorty himself explains, responding to Shusterman’s own charges (albeit posed in a different context, see Richard Shusterman, “Reason and Aesthetics between Modernity and Postmodernity: Habermas and Rorty” in: Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, pp. 134-52), when he talks about the “highest function” of language, by “highest” he means, in general, “‘most beautiful, most exciting and most fun’.” And then he adds: “Orchids are higher than trees in order of phylogenesis, and they strike many of us as more beautiful and more interesting. But without the forests we should not only have no orchids, we should have no oxygen. Without the banal, routine, problem-solving uses of language, we should not only lack occasion and motive for inventing orchidaceous language, but would have no economy and no society.” Richard Rorty “Response to Richard Shusterman,” p. 154. I should admit, however, that Shusterman is justified in his indictments insofar as Rorty’s claims are often imprecise, mainly due to the latter’s predilection for hyperbole.

Interpretation and Beyond

95

ing between these two types of identity): e.g., “We may no longer find [texts] worth individuating in the same way, no longer care about distinguishing their authentic copies from drastically abridged or bowdlerized versions” (PA 104). But that is not all, for there can be even more negative consequences of such hyperinnovatory interpretations for the sphere of ordinary readership. According to Shusterman, the problem is that they together form a certain normative matrix “which structures and constrains the range of acceptable public responses to texts, valorizing some as currently informed and up to date, while deprecating others as naïve and old-fashioned” (PA 104), the regulatory ambitions of whose matrix, moreover, are not limited to the profession of literary studies and criticism and reach practically all readers. Now, exactly at this moment does Shusterman roll out the heavy artillery of anti-professionalism. He argues that Rorty’s stance implies a denigration of everyday, unprofessional readings and those who engage in them. Not only all those ordinary people who are uninitiated in the mysteries of the critical craft but professionals, too, insofar as they sometimes read works that fall beyond the scope of their specialist knowledge and read them not in the hope of then producing an interpretation that will impress their colleagues (thereby boosting their career) but for the sheer pleasure of reading. The imperialism of literary theory’s rigid emphasis on “innovation,” to which Rorty subscribes, is especially unforgivable given that it may potentially neutralize the basic function of art, that is – if one were to believe John Dewey – uniting the society.90 For when reception of artworks (literary ones included) is seized by “an institutionalized priestly class of professional appropriators” (PA 105), art inevitably becomes an instrument of exclusion.91 However objectionable Shusterman finds Rorty’s views, he nevertheless tries to reconstruct deeper presumptions that might lurk behind Rorty’s elevating of professional novelty as the principal criterion of the assessment of literary interpretations. As he claims, there could be at least two of them – namely, that innovatory readings somehow contribute to our personal “autonomy,” and that they bring us more “pleasure” than the ordinary ones do; and then he proceeds to questioning the validity of both these presumptions. Referring to his personal observations, Shusterman first makes a reasonable point that novelty does not necessarily generate pleasure, something which can be demonstrated by the fact that sometimes reading a professional interpretation that definitely is novel can nevertheless prove a painful experience, or at least seems painful when compared to the relax-

90

91

As Dewey claims: “In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity.” John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 88. More on this shall be said in the next chapter.

96

Chapter 2

ing enjoyment we feel when reading a book in our leisure time.92 Secondly, to talk about Rorty’s favored reading strategies in terms of autonomy is a bit of overstatement, if not utter nonsense, given their embeddedness in larger ideological structures. For we need to realize that the reading strategies Rorty celebrates are a product of the ideology of originality which has dominated Western culture, including its arts and sciences, at least since the 19th century,93 and as such they can hardly be thought of as a matter of autonomous choice. To turn to the last pragmatist in the set, Stanley Fish, one important advantage of the former’s approach over that of Rorty’s and Knapp and Michaels’ is, according to Shusterman, that it questions the autonomy of “both reader and author,” recognizing that it is the cultural “community” that has the decisive role in their “constitution.”94 Another, and probably more important one, is its honesty, since Fish has apparently no qualms to talk explicitly about the “political and economic” mechanisms (and machinations) that work behind, and sometimes on, the scenes of the profession of literary studies, of which he himself is a prominent member (PA 108).95 But before we get to these questions, let me outline some general theoretical reservations Shusterman expresses concerning Fish’s conception of interpretive communities. One of them refers to the consequences of Fish’s failure to make the distinction between referential and “substantive identity” of the text, which Shusterman, as we know, considers crucial for any interpretive theory. To begin with, recall that the gist of Fish’s stance is that an interpretive act can be neither objective nor subjective. It cannot be objective because instead of “construing” some independently existing meaning of the text it consists in “constructing” that meaning by the reader; and it cannot be subjective because such a construction is always governed by a set of rules that are shared in the interpretive community to which a given reader belongs (and she cannot not belong to any community). For Fish this means that whenever a new way of interpreting a text emerges within a particular 92

93

94 95

Let me note, parenthetically, that for this comparison to be symmetric, one would have to contrast reading, or “struggling through” (as Shusterman puts it), professional interpretations not with our everyday reading of books but rather with “struggling through” standard interpretations produced by nonprofessionals. Then, however, Shusterman’s comparison would probably be to the advantage of professional interpretations, something which anyone who has ever read school essays on “my favorite books” can agree on. On the importance, and the understanding, of originality in the humanities, see Joshua Guetzkow, Michèle Lamont, and Grégoire Mallard, “What Is Originality in the Humanities and the Social Sciences?,” American Sociological Review, 69, No. 2 (2004), pp. 190-212. See Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?, pp. 303-71; Stanley Fish, “Change,” in: Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 141-2. See Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 163-246; cf. Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Interpretation and Beyond

97

community, we should rather be talking about the emergence of a new text (interpreting is constructing after all), and that the “same” work read within the confines of different interpretive communities multiplies into “different” works. The conception looks coherent up to this point, but, as Shusterman suggests, Fish ultimately becomes embroiled in the same problem as Rorty did (albeit not for entirely the same reasons); i.e., that of securing the stability of reference. This becomes evident as soon as we realize that interpretations of a text can differ not only from one community to another, or from one period in the development of a given community to another period, but also within one community at the same time, and this indeed happens, as Fish himself does not hesitate to admit, in the case of the community he is concerned with most – that of professional literary criticism. If, then, the identity of the text depends on how it is interpreted (constructed), and if each text is usually interpreted in a gamut of ways in each interpretive community, then how could the stability of reference to any text be preserved in any such community (see PA 109)? In order to disentangle himself from this troublesome situation, Fish goes through considerable theoretical contortions; he argues that however much those ways of interpreting might differ, they are nevertheless permeated by one goal (in the case of the community of literary critics it is “seeking the meaning of a text”), which makes them into elements of a single community in the first place and which allegedly provides enough convergence between them for the identity of any text they are applied to to be preserved.96 Shusterman’s reaction to this solution, however, is as reasonable as it is deadly for it: “such a unifying formula is clearly not precise or concrete enough to individuate interpretive communities in such a way that will adequately sort an array of different interpretations into interpretations of the same text and the interpretations of different texts” (PA 110). But even if such a formula could be palpable enough to perform the job he assigns to it, Fish would still be left with “another problem”; a problem that is analogous to the one just mentioned and to which he gives a similar, and equally questionable, answer. We already know that communities are made into what they are by the specific goals they serve, but what must be added here is that, according to Fish, each such goal must be incommensurable to all other goals. As a consequence, it organizes the perspective and practices of a given community in such a way that the latter becomes a monadic entity in the sense that anything which takes place in other communities must be “incomprehensible,” or virtually “invisible,” for its own members. “But if – Shusterman asks – things and practices outside our interpretive community are indeed incomprehensible, how can we understand them enough to recognize them as belonging to a different interpretive community, let alone individuating them into, say, three different communities?” (PA 110). The 96

See Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 149.

98

Chapter 2

trouble, then, just as in the case of the identity of the text, is avoiding the total divergence: there of interpretations of the same text, here of particular interpretive communities. But while Fish’s solution in the former case was too vague, in the latter case it is too concrete indeed. Namely, in order to escape the absolute monadicity of interpretive communities, Fish incorporates them into a metacommunity which could allegedly constitute their common background. That, for sure, would not be a wrong move in itself, but it becomes such as soon as Fish equates this meta-community with nothing else than the “profession of literary criticism”; and he does so by means of the reasoning that is reconstructed by Shusterman as follows: The interpretation and appreciation of literature, which the literary interpretive community as a whole must engage in and which we can summarily call “literary criticism,” is a cultural practice and therefore depends on the existence of cultural conventions or institutions which constitute it as a practice. If literary criticism is essentially institutional, it should be identified with its most institutionalized form, which is professional academic criticism. If literary criticism means professional literary criticism, then the global literary interpretive community is, in essence, simply the academic critical profession (PA 111).97

For Shusterman both this reasoning itself and the conclusions to which it leads are unacceptable. He points out that literary criticism cannot be identified with “academic criticism,” if only because there are clear instances of criticism that is practiced outside of the academic context and follows different standards.98 And if we do not recognize all this – or do not wish to do so – and as a result dismiss ordinary readings which do not meet academic criteria (note that for Fish some of the most important of these criteria are originality and innovativeness), it is mainly the “elitist and constraining” ideology of professionalism that, again and again, is to blame (PA 112). Given the gravity of this charge against Fish, it behooves me here to address one potential objection with regard to it. For one might point out that in citing Fish’s remarks to the effect that literary critic’s activity is necessarily regulated by the criteria that are inherent to the profession of academic criticism, Shusterman does not say a single word on the context in which they were articulated, namely, the controversies which had arisen among members of the Modern Language Association (an organization that is obviously academic and professional) concerning the blind review process of articles submitted to specialist journals. A close reading of Fish’s essay, so the argument goes, would be enough to realize that in no way does it deprecate unprofessional readings since it addresses professional readings exclusively, and it is only to them that it applies the aforementioned cri97 98

Cf. Drong, Disciplining the New Pragmatism, p. 109-10. Take, for instance, the reviews one reads in popular press, or in various blogs, or even the “casual discussion[s]” about books that we have with our friends (see PA 110-2)

Interpretation and Beyond

99

teria.99 Yet one needs to stress here that Shusterman is not concerned with what Fish’s essay says explicitly but rather with what it implies. This is a crucial distinction insofar as, according to Shusterman, not only Fish but also Rorty, Knapp, and Michaels seem in general to be either unaware or unwilling to recognize that their points may have some negative consequences that they did not intend them to have. I am going to expand on this point further, and also provide a longer critical commentary Shusterman’s account of the professionalist perversions within pragmatist literary theories, but would like to place these in the context of more general remarks that shall be made in the final part of this chapter. 2.4. Conclusions As Shusterman carefully notes at some point in his analyses, interpretations of interpretive theories can be no less controversial than the literary interpretations that these theories concern (SD 35-6). This, of course, applies as well to my interpretation of his theory, but if this interpretation is right, then Shusterman’s own position can be summarized as a metatheoretical interpretive pluralism based on the presumption that the meaning of the text is a “correlate” of its use, while the possible ways of using the text – even though they are to some extent determined and hierarchized within a given interpretive game – may be questioned or undergo transformation. Moreover, given that, according to Shusterman “all meaningful experience” is perspectival, partial, and fallible, we can assume no understanding or interpretation of any work to be absolutely true or exhaustive, something which gives Shusterman’s theory a clear anti-foundationalist character. It is also incumbent to add that Shusterman advocates a certain version of the conception of hermeneutic circle and puts much emphasis on the distinction between understanding and interpretation, the former of which always precedes the latter, being immediate and undemanding of purposefulness and reflexivity, which are conditions sine qua non of interpretation. So much for my general overview of Shusterman’s stance, and since I have already mentioned what I consider to be the advantages and drawbacks of Shusterman’s critique of hermeneutic universalism, let me now say something about the positive and negative aspects of his interpretive pluralism, too. To begin on a positive note – besides the obvious profit that such a pluralism is truer to the actual practice of both professional literary criticism and non-professional readership – if widely accepted, it could also counteract a certain unfortunate tendency in contemporary literary theory. Namely, since some theorists are apparently convinced that literary interpretation can essentially have only one goal (such as discovering formal properties of the work), when they are told that the goal in ques99

Stanley Fish, “No Bias, No Merit: The Case Against Blind Submission,” in: Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 163-79.

100

Chapter 2

tion may not be what they thought (e.g., that, as Richard Rorty succinctly puts it, “[r]ather than detecting and expounding [literary] qualities” the goal is “facilitat[ing] moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers”100), they have but two options to choose. Either to dismiss such a claim as nonsensical and hold firmly to their actual position, or to admit that up to this point they clang to a nonsense and embrace this claim as their new stance. When the latter happens to a sufficient number of theorists, the result is an outburst of a theoretical fad, enthusiastically announced as another “turn” in the discipline, which practically boils down to the abandonment of the previous directions of research (no matter at which stage they are and how promising they seemed before) and the establishment of new directions, courses, journals, book series, institutes and so on. After some time, however, the theorists realize they have gone astray in their reformatory zeal and must humbly re-turn to what they previously dismissed, a move that is usually advertized as a “new” version of some old “-ism.” In case my narrative does not ring any bell, consider the fact that not much time passed since the announcement of so-called ethical and political turns in literary theory (and the accompanying denouncements of aesthetic approaches to literature as either incoherent, retrograde or politically reactionary) before we could hear again about “the revenge of the aesthetic” or the need for a “new aestheticism,”101 which calls should be in fact read as a simple zurück zu Ästhetik! Now, note that I do not have anything against literary theorists changing the topic of their discussions, and I also do not think that one can get rid of fads in any academic discipline nor that that would be advantageous. My point is rather that thanks to Shusterman’s logical pluralism (which, as we know, claims that interpretation comes in many flavors: some concerned with the aesthetic, some with the political, some with something still else), such changes might not be so dramatic and not necessarily consist in entirely replacing one theoretical topic with another but in partially changing the focus of theoretical attention. Thereby, we could avoid unwelcomed consequences such as the one which the editors of New Aestheticism attribute to ethical and political turns in literary studies and call “throwing out the aesthetic baby with the humanist bathwater.”102

100 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 82. Cf. Simon Stow, “The Return of Charles Kinbote: Nabokov on Rorty,” Philosophy and Literature, 23, No. 1 (1999), pp. 65-77. 101 Actually, these expressions are taken from the titles of quite recent collections of essays. See New Aestheticism, ed. John Joughin and Simon Malpas (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); and Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, ed. Michael P. Clark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Cf. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), especially pp. 19-44, 109-132. 102 John Joughin and Simon Malpas, “Introduction,” in: New Aestheticism, p. 1.

Interpretation and Beyond

101

To sum up, I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with the general thrust of Shusterman’s pluralism, but, just as was the case with his project of rehabilitation of aesthetic experience, I also think it is unfortunately spoiled by one of Shusterman’s philosophical inclinations, which apparently come from his analytic period. In the former case it was the need to coin a definition of art, and to explain what it is in this case, let me come back to his discussion of the analytic approaches to logics of criticism. My point is that while he was entirely right to curb the absolutistic ambitions of these approaches, Shusterman made a mistake in declaring each of them partially valid and simply compiling them all in one scheme. Consider, e.g., the typology of different logical statuses of interpretive statements. Isn’t it an instance of too strong an attachment on Shusterman’s part to analytic philosophy’s classification of utterances? And doesn’t it, through its entanglement in that philosophy’s categories, threaten Shusterman’s position with troubling consequences? What I mean here is not only that this distinction seems to rely, at least partially, on Hume’s guillotine – the strict delimitation between is and ought103 – for which there is place neither in classical nor in contemporary pragmatism,104 but also some other problems. For it would definitely be better to confine interpretive logical pluralism to the thesis that interpretive games can have different goals instead of squeezing it into a triadic analytic scheme, and thereby exposing it to troubling questions such as: Are all sentences in a given critical essay propositions, and if not all, then which are? Do propositions which refer to the fictional reality have different logical status than “ordinary” propositions that refer to everyday life? Can we say, e.g., that the sentence “Sherlock Holmes did not play violin” is false, and if it is, in what sense?105 Is the obligation expressed in the critic’s imperative relative (if you want to achieve this or that, you need to read the text in such and such a way) or categorical?, etc., etc. All in all, that categorization seems to result from a deductive reasoning based on a certain preformed taxonomy of utterances (propositions, prescriptions, performatives) rather than from actual empirical study of critical texts, something which can be clearly seen from the fact that Shusterman has considerable problems with finding adequate citations that would exemplify the principles of prescriptivism and performativism. A similar critique could be raised against Shusterman’s typologies of critical reasons and structures of arguments, whose consistently triadic structure (probably motivated by a triadiomania which philosophers easily fall prey to, and which was pertinently diagnosed by W.V.O. Quine106) seems rather artificial and cumbersome.107 103 See John R. Searle, “How to Derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’,” The Philosophical Review, 73 (1964), pp. 43-58. 104 Including Shusterman’ own declared stance, see PA 292n3. 105 Cf. Richard Rorty, “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?,” in: Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 110-38. 106 See Willard Van Orman Quine, “Trinity,” in: Quiddities, pp. 210-2.

102

Chapter 2

Speaking of unfortunate triadic schemas, let me turn to Shusterman’s critique of the conceptions of Rorty’s, Fish’s, and Knapp and Michaels’, whose overall value, of which more shall be said soon, is diminished by its deeming them three different theories, each of which focuses on one specific element of the literary communication (the reader, the community, and the author, respectively). The trouble with this classification is that if we take a closer look at their texts, we will realize that Stanley Fish, while certainly not discarding his conception of interpretive communities, advocates an intentionalism much in the spirit of Knapp and Michaels; moreover, we will learn that Rorty, who is allegedly a proponent of radical privatism, fully agrees with Fish that everything (and thus every text) is constituted within the confines of communities or institutions; and we will also have to admit that Fish talks about original and autonomous readings of texts, etc., etc. Should we treat these as inconsistencies that blast out the views of those pragmatists from the inside? I think not. For I believe that what is crucial in their conceptions is not what remains in the foreground (the community, the author, the reader) but rather what is absent from it, namely, the text in itself, the text without any context.108 Shusterman’s particular objections call for a commentary, too. Since Knapp and Michaels’ article dissected by Shusterman dealt mainly with intentionality, it is worth stating that their intentions, at least insofar as they were presented in their text, seem to be different from how Shusterman portrays them. The goal which Knapp and Michaels explicitly set for themselves was an attack on the very conception of grounding interpretation in theory and not the presentation of another way of doing so. Therefore, in arguing that the author’s intention is ubiquitous, they did not want to render it a supreme authority, but rather to show the untenability of the distinction between intention and meaning which lies at the core of the contemporary theory of interpretation. It seems thus that Stanley Fish was right to claim, in “Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road,” that Knapp and Michaels “have been misread as urging a methodology in order to assure the interpretation will proceed ‘objectively’.”109 Moreover, Knapp and Michaels would surely add here that not only did they not want anybody to draw methodological consequences from their conception, but that it would simply be impossible to do so. After all, they repeatedly emphasize that one cannot do anything practical with 107 For instance, the dialogical structure of critical argumentation is not discerned by Shusterman on the basis of the same criteria as the inductive and deductive one, and thus cannot be a type of argumentative structure in the same sense in which they are, as is made clear by the fact that one can present both deductive and inductive reasoning in the dialectical-dialogical form. 108 See, e.g., Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 320. Let me note that this does not mean that there are no divergences between them. There are indeed, and some of them can be clearly seen in the polemics published in Against Theory. 109 Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 7.

Interpretation and Beyond

103

their argument against intentionless meaning. It is supposed to be entirely “useless”110 because the sole fact that “the meaning of the text is identical with its author’s intention” does not settle how we are to determine “the content of any particular intention”: whether by studying the author’s life or her own comments on the text, or by immanent analysis of the text itself. As they say, even if someone were convinced “that all poetry in every language and every age was written by a universal muse and that therefore no information about any other person could be of any possible interest – … this too would not be incompatible with the necessity of intention.”111 Yet just as I would agree that Shusterman may be misinterpreting Knapp and Michaels’ intentions, I would have to admit that he has a point in arguing that despite what they claim, their theory indeed has some consequences for the practice of literary criticism. But in order for this point to become clear, let me consider first a general objection that might be leveled against Shusterman’s reading of not only Knapp and Michaels but also Rorty and Fish (to which four authors I will further refer to as “the pragmatist literary theorists”). One could say, then, that in Shusterman’s reading, their positions adopt a form of normative and positive theories of interpretation, and that this picture is incorrect. And it is allegedly so because these incriminated positions are mainly destructive, i.e., aimed at undermining all those theories (which E.D. Hirsch subsumes under the notion of “general hermeneutics”) whose ambition is to constitute a universal epistemology of interpretation that could provide standards for all particular acts of reading.112 Roughly speaking, the pragmatist literary theorists question the sense of talking about the essence of the text (and thereby the validity of all theories which derive from that essence the only correct, objective method of reading), referring, in an antifoundationalist manner, to the inevitable contextuality of all cognition, which contextuality, in turn, entails the impossibility of grounding our knowledge in things in themselves. Thus, if “strong” theories usurp the right to “guide practice” since they supposedly are free from contingency and contextuality, in which practice is always entangled, then the antifoundationalist argument’s goal is to push them from the pedestal by indicating that they are “no

110 Knapp and Michaels, “Reply to Our Critics,” in: Against Theory, p. 104. 111 Knapp and Michaels, “Reply to Our Critics,”, p. 101. 112 As Fish puts it, such hermeneutics is “an effort to govern practice in two senses: (1) it is an attempt to guide practice from a position above or beyond it … and (2) it is an attempt to reform practice by neutralizing interest, by substituting for the parochial perspective of some local or partisan point of view the perspective of a general rationality …” Stanley Fish, “Consequences,” in: Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 319. Cf. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation, p. 18; cited in Fish, “Consequences,” p. 316.

104

Chapter 2

less contingent” and contextual than practice and thereby their “project cannot succeed.”113 Obviously, this antifoundationalist argumentation is vulnerable to many objections and in this context probably the most severe of them would be that refuting theory with yet another theory is a hopelessly counterproductive activity since by attacking theory on its own ground one can only consolidate it.114 Yet I shall not belabor this,115 moving instead to another important issue, namely that in challenging foundationalist, normative theories of interpretation, the pragmatists do not want to substitute them with their own. If they present any theory at all in this respect, it is, as they claim, “descriptive” and not prescriptive. The pragmatist theorists think that their points do not have any bearing on the practice of literary studies in the sense that one cannot derive from them any “directions” concerning the interpreter’s work and its evaluation, but merely the lesson that there are no such directions in absolute sense,116 which on the other hand does not mean that there are no directions at all (in practice, we always follow some standards which are at a given moment unquestionable to us).117 To sum up, the pragmatist theory of interpretation, at least as it is advertized by its proponents, neither reveals any absolute truth nor encourages any absolute relativism, and is primarily negative (its main goal being the criticism of foundationalist approaches) and descriptive (it does not recommend any standards of action).118

113 Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 301, 319, 321, 325, 432. Cf. Gary A. Olson, Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 36-45; Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” pp. 24-30; Rorty and Ragg, “Worlds or Words Apart?,” p. 374. 114 Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 340. 115 To put it differently, one can argue that pragmatists do exactly the same thing that they protest against: as theoreticians they tell literary scholars “what they should do,” namely, give up on theory. The paradoxality of pragmatist antitheories is highlighted by Terry Eagleton, who, in his usual manner, resorts to a wicked simile: “The anti-theorist is like a doctor who gives you sophisticated medical reason for eating as much junk food as you can swallow, or a theologian who provides you with unbeatable arguments for committing adultery.” Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Basic Books, 2003), p. 54. Cf. Drong, Disciplining the New Pragmatism, p. 120, 124. 116 As Fish claims, “anti-foundationalist theory has no consequences because as a belief about how we got our beliefs, it leaves untouched (at least in principle) the beliefs whose history it is an explanation.” Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 325. Cf. Fish, „One More Time,” pp. 270-1, and Rorty and Ragg, “Worlds or Words Apart?,” p. 391. On pragmatism’s lack of consequences for interpretive practice see Brian Vescio, “Donald Davidson, Pragmatism, and Literary Theory,” Philosophy and Literature, 22, No. 1 (1988), p. 210. 117 Fish, “Consequences,” p. 322-3. 118 This lack of consequences for practice which is declared by the pragmatist literary theorists is sometimes denounced as one of their fundamental divergences from the classical pragmatism. See, e.g., David L. Hildebrand, “Pragmatism and Literary Criticism: The Practical Starting Point,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 15

Interpretation and Beyond

105

But is it really so? As far as descriptivity is concerned, consider, as a case in point, the aforementioned claim that Fish’s criterion of originality of interpretation refers specifically to academic literary studies and is, in fact, not an injunction but merely a description of existing practices. As Fish himself explains, through his theory he merely wants to underscore that the inherent rules of literary studies obligate each scholar who presents an interpretation to make it novel,119 and that this is practically the only game literary scholars can play: whether they are attending a meeting of The Milton Society or submitting an article to “PMLA,” “New Literary History,” or anywhere else. Besides, this is how any academic activity proceeds, so even if Fish’s claim that within literary studies only novel interpretations are valid indeed deprecates ordinary readings, then it does so in exactly the same way that the general academic postulate of innovativeness deprecates ordinary truths of everyday life. And thus if we wanted to reject his claim, the very idea of academic research would have to go as well. Shusterman might respond to this line of thought in at least two ways. First of all, by claiming that the main task of pragmatism is not concocting descriptive theories that sanction the status quo but rather changing reality for the better. Yet he might also argue that Fish’s description suits only a part of academic criticism, and thus in selecting as legitimate one particular mode of it and rejecting others, Fish in fact (just as was the case with the analytic philosophers mentioned earlier) turns from an observer into a legislator. But how could this be so? Doesn’t it seem entirely uncontroversial to say that if a literary critic publishes an article or gives a paper at a conference, she must include in it something which has not yet been said by any other critic because otherwise her effort would not be considered a “contribution” to the discipline at all? So far so good, but we need to remember that there are different degrees of novelty, of which Fish seems to be concerned only with the most radical, such as, e.g., when a critic puts forward a thesis that is “a reversal of what is usually said.”120 Fish’s stance, however, should not be surprising as this is the only kind of novelty that counts among the circle of the main players, or “big names,” in the discipline, to which he belongs and is most familiar with. There, one indeed “earns the right to say something” only by presenting a bold statement that seems to stand everything on its head; a rule which forces even those whose point is relatively modest121 to at least present it in a controversial way.122 But besides the

119 120 121 122

(1999), pp. 303-22. Cf. Dewey’s opinion on the practical vocation of philosophy in Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1962), p. xxxix-xli. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 164-5. Fish, “Professionalism,” p. 146. Cf. Drong, Disciplining the New Pragmatism, p. 102, 126. But who nevertheless want to be granted entry to the circle or to remain its members. A good example of this tendency, which I owe to Professor Winfried Fluck, is Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s book which is sensationalistically entitled Was Huck Black?, yet “all” it argues is that Huck Finn’s idiolect borrows from African-American English. See Shelley Fisher

106

Chapter 2

confines of this arena, the notion of novel contribution to the discipline can also embrace such interpretations that do not question, or even “draw [previously unthought-of] implications” from, any of the existing readings, but merely support one of them with further evidence or do something equally unspectacular. That Fish fails to acknowledge this is a serious mistake; one which can also be found in Rorty, and, in a different variant, in Knapp and Michaels. Another blunder which the pragmatist literary theorists make concerns the general question of the consequences of their, and any other kind of, theory. Namely, they are apparently convinced that if something does not logically (or, as they sometimes put it, “necessarily”) “follow” from a theoretical view, then that something cannot be a consequence of it, or, in a less radical formulation, that this something merely “befalls” this theory, meaning that it is a sort of unpredictable outcome which one can neither “count on” nor be responsible for.123 This is why the pragmatist theorists could say that Shusterman’s accusations are absurd insofar as he points to the consequences that cannot be derived directly from their views (such as that their theories may threaten ordinary forms of reading or may block the development of literary criticism, etc.), and thus are not consequences at all or are consequences that have so little to do with the exact content of their views that it would be folly to put any blame on them in this regard.124 Yet however convincing it might seem, this argument from logical consequences must fail since it is definitely not the case that on the one hand we have logical consequences of our views, which we should take seriously, and on the other the contingent ones, with which we do not have to bother as we cannot predict them.125 Among the “non-logical” consequences there are still those that are more or less probable and we know it quite well, e.g., when in everyday life we abstain from saying something in some circumstances because we predict that our interlocutor may derive from our words a conclusion that is unintended and unwelcomed by us, even though it is not logically supported by those words. This is why Shusterman’s points cannot be rejected by some theoretical sleight of hand and need to be assessed in terms of the likelihood of the consequences they point to. Consider, for instance, his claim that the pragmatist theories may be imposing some forms of hermeneutic practices on the ordinary reading public. It might Fishkin Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); see Winfried Fluck, “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” in: The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 227n7. 123 See Fish, “Consequences,” p. 338. See also Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time, p. 134, 66, 144. See also, Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 28. Cf. Knapp and Michaels, “A Reply to Our Critics,” pp. 95-105. 124 In this way, we could hold anybody responsible for any possible action that might result from any (mis)understanding of what that person said. 125 Cf. Leszek Drong’s criticism of Fish’s views on “the consequences of theory” – Drong, Disciplining the New Pragmatism, p. 131-2.

Interpretation and Beyond

107

be said that it is indeed hardly imaginable how theories of interpretation (whether normative or descriptive) could in any real sense threaten “ordinary private readings.” The bulk of people who devote themselves to such readings do not have the slightest idea of the existence of any such thing as theory of interpretation, let alone the particular theories of Rorty, Fish, or Knapp and Michaels. How could they then feel intimidated by them? Yet theories of interpretation can eventually reach the minds of so-called ordinary people (even if in a very vulgarized form) through educational institutions, and it is worth considering this possibility here. Again, one might reply that it is highly doubtful whether anybody could be bothered with interpretive theories taught by one’s teacher when outside of the class and reading for oneself. To think otherwise seems as reasonable as believing that kids will stop reading Harry Potter if they learn from their English teacher that the works of Ms. Rowling make Harold Bloom go into a frenzy.126 But even if literary theories, pragmatist or otherwise, may not have any impact on how one reads in one’s free time, they may have some when it comes to what one wants to say, in the classroom, about the work one has just read. They may, e.g., thwart spontaneous reflection on a literary work and force one into producing only commentaries of the kind that is legitimized by these theories. Of course, to ponder on such pedagogical questions and to try to find empirical answer to them might not seem exciting for a theorist who, like Fish, specializes in making grand and flamboyant claims on the nature of human cognition. But, as Shusterman reminds us, tackling those questions is something that surely behooves a pragmatist, especially of a Deweyan denomination.127

126 Harold Bloom, “Dumbing Down American Readers,” Boston Globe, September 24 (2003), http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/dumbing_do wn_american_readers/ (accessed October 21, 2009). 127 Cf. Arthur Efron, “Literature as Experience: Dewey’s Aesthetics in an Age of Galloping Theory,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 31 (1995), pp. 322–57.

CHAP TER 3

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things: In Defense of Popular Art

3.1. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Theodor W. Adorno One of Shusterman’s principal metaphilosophical convictions concerns the epistemological status of his own ideas, which he does not consider as pure, neutral “revelations” of absolutes but rather as rooted in a personal, idiosyncratic background.1 He openly confesses that his conceptions spring “more from vivid life experience than from” the philosophical works he has read,2 and, as if to make it easier for his readers to understand these ideas, he encrusts his text with various autobiographical narratives.3 One such narrative explains the genesis of Shusterman’s philosophical interest in popular art, and it is worth our attention not only because of the topic of this chapter but also because it sheds light on the circumstances of his “conversion” to pragmatism (PA xvii).

1

2 3

This aspect of Shusterman’s thought is underscored by Kathleen M. Higgins in “Living and Feeling at Home: Shusterman’s Performing Live,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 36, No. 4 (2002), pp. 84-6. Shusterman’s views on the interrelations between the philosopher’s life and her ideas can be found in: Richard Shusterman, “Regarding Oneself and Seeing Double: Fragments of Autobiography,” The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy, ed. George Yancey, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), pp. 1-21. See also his autobiographical/philosophical short story “Human Nature at the Schlachtensee,” in: Aesthetics in the Human Environment, ed. Pauline von Bonsdorff and Arto Haapala (Lahti, Finland: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, 1999), pp. 35-47. Cf. the remarks on the same topic made by Shusterman’s fellow-pragmatist William James in A Pluralistic Universe: The Works of William James, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 14; and in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 77. Cf. also Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 13. Shusterman, “Regarding Oneself and Seeing Double,” p. 4. I elaborate on Shusterman’s attempts at philosophical biography in my “Challenging the Taboo of the Autobiographical: Contingency, Literariness, and Philosophical Discourse,” in: Between Politics and Aesthetics: Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatism, ed. Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki, forthcoming.

110

Chapter 3

Let us, then, move back in time to a Ph.D. seminar on post-Hegelian aesthetics that Shusterman taught at Temple University in the late 1980s, the scope of which he describes as follows: “I chose to focus on Arthur Danto ... , John Dewey (who I thought would be an example of American cultural simplicity and shallowness), while the hero was going to be Adorno.”4 Faithful to the Adornian perspective, Shusterman was steadfastly critical of so-called cultural industry, a position he openly expressed in front of his students, “who came from working class backgrounds, [and] who really grew up” on popular art.5 Quite understandably, it is a radically different thing to condemn this art in scholarly articles – which usually circulate exclusively among academics, who may not be strongly attached to popular culture – and to do so in the presence of those for whom popular art is part and parcel of their daily existence; not only in the sense that it surrounds them (which might be true even for highbrow academics, provided that they do not live on a desert island), but that it positively constitutes their cultural identity. In the latter case, one has a chance to directly experience the impact of one’s condemnatory position on those who are its objects, and this is exactly what happened to Shusterman. As he explains, it was only then that he understood that instead of providing the alleged slaves of cultural industry, i.e., his students, with a sense of liberation and empowerment, the “austere, gloomy and haughtily elitist [Adornian] Marxism” which he represented in fact disempowered them insofar as it induced in them, through the force of the educational system that stood behind him, a feeling of “inferiority” – the need to be “ashamed” of what the students deeply cherished (PA xvii).6 Moreover, by exactly the same time Shusterman began to realize that

4

5 6

Richard Shusterman, “ĩycie, sztuka i filozofia” [Life, Art, and Philosophy: An interview conducted by Adam Chmielewski], in: Richard Shusterman, O sztuce i Īyciu: Od poetyki hip-hopu do filozofii somatycznej [On Art and Life: From Hip-Hop Poetics to Somatic Philosophy], trans. and ed. Wojciech Małecki (Wrocław: Atla 2, 2007), p. 19. Shusterman, “ĩycie, sztuka i filozofia,” p. 20. “And to come to them and say: ‘this is idiocy, this is corruption, this is mindlessness’ was a tremendous insult to their family and to them. It was not an enabling, empowering insult, but just a confirmation of their inferiority, as opposed to the superiority of Adorno and those who shared his culture and cultural attitude, myself included. So I began to realize the destructive, unfeeling arrogance of Adorno’s position by seeing my working class students cringe and seeing the pain and anger and defeat in their eyes from these kind of wholesale critiques of the culture that made them, and thus of what they were. I realized that this global critique of popular culture was humiliating rather than empowering the underprivileged.” Shusterman, “ĩycie, sztuka i filozofia,” p. 18; see also PA 170. Cf., e.g., the following texts by Theodor W. Adorno: “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” and “Free Time,” in: Culture Industry (Florence: Routledge, 2001), pp. 29-60, 187-97; “Analytical Study of NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” The Musical Quarterly, 78, No. 2 (1994), pp. 325-77; Aesthetic Theory, pp. 243-6. See also György Markus, “Adorno and Mass Culture: Autonomous Art against the Culture Industry,” Thesis Eleven, 86, No. 1

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

111

there is a scission between his official theoretical stance and his actual aesthetic taste as he discovered that he intensely enjoyed the pop music played in clubs to which he would go with his PhD students after classes. In fact, he confesses that he experienced this as a kind of personality split which seemed almost as unbearable as that which troubled the main character of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Unwilling to be a Dr Jekyll who at day provides sophisticated elitist criticisms of popular art only to transform, with the sunset, into a Mr. Hyde who is an enthusiastic consumer of such art, and at the same time not wanting to extract either of the two latter figures entirely from his personality, Shusterman chose to adopt a stance that would incorporate what was most valuable in each of them, something in which he was helped by the “earthy, upbeat, and democratic” aesthetics of John Dewey (PA xvii). I will get to the details of this stance shortly, but for now let me summarize what can be learned from Shusterman’s autobiographical narrative. Firstly, then, it seems that at the heart of his attitude toward popular art lies a very strong moral, or political, impulse. In other words, one very important factor which contributed to his rejection of the “leftist elitism” of the Frankfurt School7 was his recognition that this approach causes unnecessary suffering to popular audiences, and that it is also ineffective as a tool of social emancipation, because “[e]ven if you think that high art is superior, and I think a lot of it is, not in principle but in actual fact, then if you’re going to bring people up to it, you don’t bring them up to it by disdaining their popular culture but by making a bridge between the two.”8 No less important was the need to secure for himself a sense of mental equilibrium and moral consistency; a traumatic experience which made Shusterman aware that the aesthetic condemnation of popular art may induce psychological problems – a personality split indeed. These are Shusterman’s personal experiences which constitute the motivational background of his melioristic project of the legitimization of popular art, to which we now turn.

7

8

(2006), pp. 67-89; and Morton Schoolman, “The Next Enlightenment: Aesthetic Reason in Modern Art and Mass Culture,” Journal for Cultural Research, 9, No. 1 (2005), pp. 43-67. Let me note that Shusterman’s interpretation of Adorno’s approach to popular culture might be considered controversial by some authors. See, e.g., Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique, No. 56 (1992), p. 43. I elaborate on Shusterman’s treatment of Critical Theory, as well as provide a comparative analysis of the aesthetics of Critical Theory and pragmatist aesthetics, in my “Toward the Aesthetics of Emancipation?: Critical Theory and the New Pragmatism,” in: Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical Theory, ed. Stefano Giacchetti (Newark/Rome: John Cabot University Press/University of Delaware Press, 2009), pp. 267-80. Shusterman, “ĩycie, sztuka i filozofia,” p. 21.

Chapter 3

112 3.2. The Theory and Practice of Meliorism Main Tenets

To fully understand Shusterman’s enterprise, one would have to refer not only to the biographical circumstances in which it emerged but also to his more general narrative of the history of art, which I have outlined in the first chapter. Here, I would only like to recall that, according to Shusterman, as a result of the emergence of the institution of high art, the more popular artistic forms were “relegated to the status of mere entertainment” (PA 58), and that this refusal to grant aesthetic legitimation to popular art, i.e., to consider it “true” art, has serious and farreaching consequences. One of them is that the condemnatory approach to popular art exemplified by Adorno, Allan Bloom, and other prominent intellectuals amplifies some very deep social tensions troubling our civilization.9 This is because, as we can learn from Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, the hierarchical distinction between popular and high art, rather than being a reflection of some objective and politically neutral judgments of taste (as it is often portrayed to be), has been shaped by all kinds of structures of socioeconomic power (PA 21).10 Moreover, the lack of aesthetic legitimization of popular art results in its being “deprived of [any form of] artistic care and control,” which lacuna is usually filled by the influence of the entertainment industry, often to the aesthetic disadvantage of popular art (PA 167).11 This last point is especially worth emphasizing here since it clearly indicates that Shusterman cannot be accused of ignoring “popular art’s … flaws and abuses” (PA 177).12 In fact, his intention is not to prove that all its specimens are intrinsically and necessarily valuable in aesthetic terms, but rather to question those approaches which claim that no such specimen can be valuable at all. Another point which I should make here is that even though Shusterman agrees that in some respects the market has a negative impact on popular art, he would reject a claim that it does so in all possible aspects – that there is something intrinsic to it that necessarily prevents it from having any positive influence on popular art, or any other kind of art for that matter. Finally, the pedagogical experience which I have discussed above made Shusterman aware that the condescending attitude toward popular art, insofar as it is expressed by intellectuals, art critics, and educators, induces a great deal of frustration in its audience and there9 10 11 12

Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 203. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1984). As Shusterman notes, due to that influence popular art often “grows robust, technically sophisticated, but brutally crude in sensibility” (PA 168, cf. PA 177). Cf. Stefán Snaevarr’s criticisms of Shusterman presented in the former’s “Pragmatism and Popular Culture: Shusterman, Popular Art, and the Challenge of Visuality,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 41, No. 4 (2007), p. 10.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

113

fore can diminish the pleasure that they draw from its appreciation (as Shusterman argues, it is rather hard to “fully” appreciate something that we know is scorned by official institutions of art and education).13 I hope the above has sufficiently clarified why the “aesthetic legitimization of popular art” became a crucial problem for Shusterman, so now let me try to explain why in trying to solve it, he decided to resort to Dewey’s theory of art as experience. Shusterman did so primarily because he believed, and still believes (as we saw in Chapter 1), that once we begin to conceive art in terms of an experience that flows from the natural “life energies,” we will be able to grant “artistic status” to those genres which (as heavy metal or techno music do, for example), “afford such frequent and intensely gratifying aesthetic experience to so many people from so many nations, cultures, and classes” (PA 58), yet at the same time do not fit the current standards of the artworld. Secondly, because Dewey, “unlike earlier philosophers … underlined the problem of [this] art’s lack of legitimacy,”14 an opinion Shusterman supports by citing the following remarks by Dewey, taken from the latter’s seminal Art as Experience: The arts which today have the most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip ... For, when what he knows as art is relegated to the museum and gallery, the unconquerable impulse towards experiences enjoyable in themselves finds such outlet as the daily environment provides ... When because of their remoteness, the objects acknowledged by the cultivated to be works of fine art seem anemic to the mass of people, aesthetic hunger is likely to seek the cheap and vulgar. … Philosophic theory concerned itself only with those arts that had the stamp and seal of recognition by the class having the social standing and authority. Popular arts must have flourished, but they obtained no literary attention. They were not worthy of mention in theoretical discussion. Probably they were not even thought of as arts.15

Yet Dewey’s enterprise is itself in need of correction. As is noted by Shusterman, despite the above allegations about “philosophic theory” not being concerned with

13 14

15

Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 211. Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 35. I should like to note that only quite recently did Shusterman realize that he had neglected two philosophers close to the spirit of pragmatism, namely, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alain Locke, who anticipated Dewey’s aesthetics (along with its emphasis on popular art). Shusterman confesses to this mistake (and tries to rectify it) in his “Emerson’s Pragmatist Aesthetics”; and “From Natural Roots to Cultural Radicalism: Pragmatist Aesthetics in Alain Locke and John Dewey” (SD 123-38). Cf., e.g., Paul Gilmore, “Mechanical Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology,” Modern Language Quarterly, 65, No. 2 (June 2004), pp. 245–68; and Jürgen E. Grandt, “Moving on Up: Alain Locke and the Telos of African American Culture,” South Atlantic Review, 68, No. 1 (2003), pp. 4-14. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 11-12, 191.

114

Chapter 3

popular art, Dewey did not devote a single page of the aforementioned book to interpreting or analyzing any concrete forms of this art, preferring rather to focus his attention on the representatives of high culture such as Cézanne.16 Shusterman suggests that the guilt for this apparent inconsistency should be put on Dewey’s “quixotic” conviction that the wholesale “redefinition” of art as experience will automatically provide “aesthetic legitimacy” to all arts that have so far been denied this privilege, but which at the same time engender aesthetic experience – i.e., among others, popular arts.17 After all, Dewey’s reasoning would go, if we managed to convince somebody that all art is experience, then whenever they would encounter a popular work, its experience would simply force them to deem that work an example of “true art” because otherwise they would have to contradict themselves.18 Thus, the defenders of popular art should bother neither producing analyses and interpretations of its particular works nor arguing for its value in general since all this is simply unnecessary for legitimizing it. Such a belief on Dewey’s part, however, is utterly wrong, says Shusterman, pointing out that the process of aesthetic legitimation has undeniably discursive character and consists in providing diverse arguments, descriptions, and injunctions, which job cannot be performed by aesthetic experience “alone” since it is naturally “mute.”19 And it is exactly in order to make sure that this job is done that Shusterman chose to supplement Dewey’s approach with a comprehensive enterprise which he calls “meliorism.” Just as in many other cases, here, too, Shusterman presents his position as a third way, but this time it leads between the Scylla of the wholesale denigration of 16 17

18

19

See Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 100,127, 134. Let me note that the case here may be a bit more complex (or indeed simpler). Namely, it is not so certain whether Dewey had as positive an approach to popular art and culture as Shusterman suggests. Cf. the following quotation from Dewey’s Ethics: “The moving pictures, the jazz music, the comic strips, and various other forms of popular entertainment, are not an object of pride to those who have learned to know good art, good music, and good literature. A civilization, in which the average man spends his day in a factory and his evening at a movie, has still a long way to go.” John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics: Revised Edition, in: John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), p. 434. On this aspect of Dewey’s aesthetics, see also Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, p. 251. Shusterman reconstructs Dewey’s reasoning as follows: “Ultimately, then, nothing but aesthetic experience is needed for legitimation, and criticism is simply a means to bring the reader to have the relevant experience. It is, in Dewey’s words, but ‘an auxiliary ... guide’ to the work of art that serves to make the experience of that work ‘enlarged and quickened.’ It helps the reader ‘through the expansion of his own experience by the work of art to which criticism is subsidiary’. The upshot is that if we had the right experiences, we would not need criticism at all, neither for understanding nor for legitimation. The power of the experience would be enough.” Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 204 (Shusterman quotes from Dewey’s Art as Experience, p. 328). Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 204-5.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

115

popular art (in the vein of Allan Bloom, for instance) and the Charybdis of its glorification (see PA 177). To be more precise, Shusterman adopts a stance which “recognizes popular art’s flaws and abuses but also its merits,” and which holds “that popular art should be improved because it leaves so much to be desired, but that it can be improved because it can and often does achieve real aesthetic merits and serve worthy social ends.”20 That would be the general premise of Shusterman’s meliorism, whose practical side consists in exactly what Dewey’s project lacked: exposing the fallaciousness of various arguments leveled against the aesthetic value of popular art and devoting sufficient “critical attention” to its particular works by presenting their close readings, which, importantly, should include “not only formal and thematic analysis but philosophical and social critique.”21 Speaking of critique, it is incumbent to add here that just as Shusterman’s meliorism does not mean a deification of the popular, then neither does it entail being relentlessly and programmatically critical of what is usually called high art. On the contrary, faithful to the pragmatist “inclusive disjunctive stance” (SD 272),22 Shusterman openly celebrates high modernist authors such as T.S. Eliot, and even goes as far as to meticulously rebuke various condemnations of high art, as expressed, for example, by Herbert Marcuse (see PA 146-7).23 Such activities, however, still play a marginal role in Shusterman’s work – at least when compared to his efforts to bring about aesthetic legitimation of popular art. In Defense of Popular Art Alluding to St. Augustine’s Confessions, one might say that the case with the distinction between high and popular (or low) art is analogous to that with our understanding of time24: when we are not asked about what it is, we seem to know per-

20 21 22

23

24

Shusterman “Popular Art and Education,” p. 204. Shusterman “Popular Art and Education,” p. 204. “The familiar logical disjunction ‘either p or q’ is here understood pluralistically to include either one or both alternatives (as it does in standard propositional logic and in the common occasions of everyday life where one can choose more than one thing, e.g. either wine or water, or both). This is in contrast to the exclusive sense of ‘either/or’ when one alternative strictly excludes the other, as indeed it sometimes does in life as well as in logic” (SD 272). As Shusterman insists, this stance “allows one to affirm things that are often contrasted and assumed to be contradictory but are easily shown not to be, when they are examined with greater closeness and logical precision.” Richard Shusterman, “The Uses of Pragmatism and its Logic of Pluralism: A Response to Altieri and Grabes,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 15 (1999), p. 155. See Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 121,129,131. Cf. Morton Schoolman, “Marcuse’s Aesthetics and the Displacement of Critical Theory,” New German Critique, No. 8 (1976), pp. 54-79. See St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. A. Cook Outler (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2002), p. 224.

116

Chapter 3

fectly well what we are talking about, but when we are supposed to explain the nature of the phenomenon in question, everything becomes much more complicated, if not helpless indeed (cf. PA 145-6). This situation is brilliantly portrayed by John A. Fisher in his essay “High Art Versus Low Art,” where he performs a comparative analysis of various attempts to determine, or question, the difference between these two kinds of art.25 The results he eventually reaches are genuinely interesting in how they show the distinction to be overdetermined by all kinds of factors (e.g., the historical context of the emergence of beaux arts and the development of new media in the course of the 19th and 20th century), but what interests me here the most is his typology of the theoretical approaches to that distinction, as it shall help us detect a certain troubling ambiguity in Shusterman’s stance. For this purpose, however, it is sufficient to mention only two of the five types discerned by Fisher, namely, relativism and conventionalism. The former, as represented by Herbert Gans, for instance, conceives popular and high art as two distinct aesthetic forms that cannot be compared to each other, let alone put in a hierarchical relation, as each of them belongs to an entirely different (incommensurable indeed) “taste culture.”26 As is quite easy to see, that perspective has quite dramatic consequences for the distinction between popular and high art since it renders the predicate “high” completely inappropriate in this context. Yet conventionalism is even more radical because it claims not merely that we cannot compare high and popular art, but that there is in fact nothing to compare here, at least in aesthetic terms. And this is because that distinction does not have an aesthetic character (i.e., it does not divide art into two aesthetically different subsets) but an ideological one (it merely distinguishes between the kind of art that does not “threaten the interests of the dominant classes,” i.e., high art, and that which does so by representing the interest of the underprivileged).27 To come back to Shusterman, on the one hand, his views might be subsumed under the category of conventionalism as he has major doubts about there being “any essential and unbridgeable divide between its [i.e., high art’s] products and those of popular culture” (PA 167),28 and argues that the very distinction between 25 26 27 28

John A. Fisher, “High Art Versus Low Art,” in: The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, pp. 409-21. Fisher finds an articulation of this view in Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Fisher, “High Art Versus Low Art,” p. 414. Cf. PP 176. In order to substantiate his doubts, he points out that “the popular art of one culture (e.g., Greek and or even Elizabethan drama) can become the high classics of a subsequent age,” and that “even within the same cultural period, a given work can function either as popular or high art depending on how it is presented and interpreted by its public” (PA 167). Shusterman relies here on Lawrence Levine’s insights; see the latter’s Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 13-81.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

117

high and popular art, instead of reflecting any real aesthetic difference between the two, is rather a tool in a struggle over ideological hegemony (cf. PA 146). On the other hand, however, in some places he seems to suggest that popular art does have its distinct aesthetics,29 and mentions a certain “sociocultural ideal where socalled high and low art (and their audiences) together find expression and acceptance without oppressive hierarchies, where there is difference without domination and shame” (PA xvi), something which would bring him closer to relativism.30 As a consequence, when Shusterman announces that the ultimate goal which he aims at is “the dissolution of the high/popular art dichotomy,” it is hard to decide whether he means that these two “arts” do not differ substantially in aesthetic terms, or that even though there are crucial differences between the two, they do not constitute sufficient reason for elevating one above the other. Shusterman nevertheless consciously shirks from declaring himself on either side, hiding as he does behind the postulate of the primacy of action: “to speak [of popular and high art] simply and generally, as I shall be doing, involves a great deal of philosophical abstraction and simplification. But since global condemnations of popular art are made in such simplifying, binary terms, I feel justified in using them for its defense” (PA 170). Actually, one might say that the aforementioned ambiguity of Shusterman’s position is a consequence of the fact that he wants to evade a dilemma haunting every emancipatory enterprise: to “blur the differences” or to “highlight” them.31 Yet irrespective of how unclear his own position might be, there is no doubt as to which position he opposes, namely, so-called “intolerant hierarchicalism,” which is defined by Fisher as holding that “popular art is essentially flawed” and aesthetically inferior to high art. Representatives of this hierarchicalism, who curiously recruit from both the left and right wing of the political spectrum,32 have prepared an impressive arsenal of arguments against the aesthetic value of popular art, of which Shusterman attacks the following: • •

that the pleasures offered by it are not “real” (see PA 177-183); that its reception does not demand any “aesthetic effort” (see PA 183-185);

29

For instance, when he says that “our high art aesthetics instead makes radical novelty and individuality the prime requirement of an artwork, though this demand is not made by the aesthetics of popular art” (PP 26). See also PP 29-30, 50. Note, however, that at one point he criticizes a radically relativist approach to popular and high art which conceives them as two completely unrelated spheres, and where popular art in particular becomes an “autonomous” domain “with its own … rules, values, principles and aesthetic criteria.” Shusterman’s point is that what will escape us if we adopt this perspective is how the domains of popular and high art interpenetrate each other. Shusterman, “Entertainment,” p. 291. See, e.g., Andrzej Szahaj, E Pluribus Unum? (Kraków: Universitas, 2004), p. 128. See PA 169, and Shusterman, “Entertainment,” p. 289.

30

31 32

118 •

•

•

Chapter 3 that it lacks “aesthetic autonomy,” complexity, artistic self-awareness, “formal adequacy,” and does not express “resistance” toward the status quo (see PA 192-200); that it “cannot be creative” or original because (a) it has to appeal to “the barbaric taste … of the unenlightened, manipulated masses,” and (b) because its production is standardized, mechanized, and very often “collective” (see PA 170,188-192); and that it is “intellectually shallow” (see PA 185-188).33

The limited space does not permit me to do justice to the thrust of all of Shusterman’s rebuttals, and therefore I would like to concentrate on those which are important from the perspective of this chapter,34 beginning with the one whose target is the argument from “intellectual shallowness.” An influential variant of this argument underscores that popular art does not address human existence in its most salient and “serious” aspects, and that it simply cannot do so because its principal aim is providing mindless entertainment (or, to put it more drastically, “a drugged quiescent stupor” (PA 185)), and, quite naturally, any reference to these aspects would be an enormous obstacle to achieving that goal.35 Shusterman refutes this argument by pointing out that “[l]ong before Woodstock [popular art] had often been a … voice of [social] protest” and an instrument of consciousness raising, as well as by giving concrete examples of rock events (Live Aid being one of them) devoted to turning public attention to grave problems, such as hunger in Africa. The latter example, of course, comes from the 1980s, but events of this kind have frequently taken place also in the 2000s (e.g., a series of benefit concerts named Live 8). Moreover, one should mention that just as it was in the era of the hippie revolt, it has also not been uncommon in subsequent decades that popular artworks dealt with problems which can hardly serve as good topics for mind-numbing, easy-to-swallow entertainment. Let us take,

33

34 35

Note that Shusterman has also undertaken a defense of entertainment in general against the philosophical criticisms of it formulated by Hannah Arendt and other thinkers. See Shusterman “Entertainment,” passim. For a discussion of Shusterman’s position, see Wojciech Małecki, “On Pragmatist Aesthetics, the New Literacy, and Popular Culture: A Response to Stefán Snaevarr,” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics,” No. 38 (2009), pp. 56-74. That is, those whose discussion can prepare a good ground for my further points. Among the proponents of this argument we can find, e.g., Dwight Macdonald. Shusterman concentrates particularly on the latter’s “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in: Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White (Glencoe: Free Press, 1964), pp. 59-79. For a discussion of some other criticisms of Macdonald, see Barry D. Riccio, “Popular Culture and High Culture: Dwight Macdonald, His Critics and the Ideal of Cultural Hierarchy in Modern America,” Journal of American Culture, 16, No. 4 (1993), pp. 7-18.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

119

e.g.,36 Phil Collins’s number-one, Grammy awarded hit single “Another Day in Paradise” (a song on homelessness),37 Genesis’s highly successful song “Jesus He Knows Me” (exposing the hypocrisy of televangelists), Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” (on child abuse),38 Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” (about young people “lost on the streets of America”), or Nirvana’s “Polly” (dealing with rape).39 But as Shusterman underscores, faced with examples like these, critics of popular art could still dismiss homelessness or even rape as not being “true,” or “deep” elements of life. And they might do so (and in fact do so) by identifying “‘the relevant and significant’ in human experience with the new and the difficult [in the intellectual sense]” (PA 187), and at the same time treating the aforementioned themes of popular art as obviously not deserving to be referred to by the latter two predicates. Shusterman astutely rejoins that this attitude stems from the fact that the adversaries of popular culture worship “the high modernist aesthetic of originality and difficulty which are unconsciously smuggled in as a general standard of experiential relevance and significance.” Still worse – Shusterman continues – it becomes the standard of the real, so that the ordinary problems treated by popular art … can be denied as unreal, while the real problems worthy of artistic expression are only those novel and esoteric enough to escape the comprehension of the general public. This is surely a convenient strategy for the privileged and conservative to ignore and suppress the realities of those they dominate by denying the artistic legitimacy of their expression … (PA 187).

The second way to denounce popular art as “intellectually shallow” is to argue that one cannot find in it the intricate structure, semantic finesse, and intertextual relations that are characteristic of high art, and I should note here that Shusterman’s response is not limited to providing counterexamples to this argument as he also explains why such counterexamples are likely to be dismissed by the highbrows who make it. Namely, the latter are often “unable to grasp” works of popular art because they tend to be completely ignorant about the specific cultural code (including all types of artistic idioms) in accordance with which these works are created. And it is more than obvious that if, e.g., one does not know the slang 36 37

38

39

All the examples that follow come from the late 80s or 90s, which of course does not mean that appropriate examples cannot be found in more recent popular culture. I should note here, however, that Bruce Cumings, for instance, is skeptical about the possible edifying influence of Collins’s song (and other “socially engaged” works of popular culture) on its audience. See Bruce Cumings, War and Television (London: Verso, 1992), p. 29. See Suzanne Vega, “Surviving the Hits,” Measure for Measure: How to Write Songs and Other Mysteries (June 18, 2008), http: //measureformeasure.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/8/ surviving-the-hits/ (accessed July 29, 2009). For a discussion of the motif of rape in Nirvana’s lyrics, see Matthew Bannister, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 147. Cf. Michael Azerrad, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (New York: Doubleday, 1993), p. 218.

120

Chapter 3

used by members of a given group, be they European “metalheads” or AfricanAmerican hip-hoppers, one will not be able to fully understand their songs. Moreover, if one has not assimilated the musical aesthetic of, say, punk rock – which includes distorted guitars, harsh screams and fast drum patterns – one will reject this type of music as a mindless cacophony, and will remain blind to the often intellectually sophisticated political message behind it (let us take the classic punk rock band Dead Kennedys, for instance).40 A similar point can be made where recognizing the intertextual embeddedness of a given work is concerned. That is, even if one is sensitive and educated enough to be able to spot obscure and sophisticated references to various poets and philosophers in, say, 20th century Western literature, one will certainly be blind to the complex intertextuality of African-American rap lyrics without the knowledge of their field of textual reference. And rap lyrics indeed very often constitute parodies, travesties, pastiches or collages of various texts which an average intellectual might not (and most often does not) know, and are no less often incrusted with allusions to, or quotations and paraphrases of, other rap songs. For instance, how can one do justice to the rich semantic complexity of the classic song “Party for Your Right to Fight” by the black militant rap group Public Enemy if one does not know, among other things, that its title is a travesty of the title of the song “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” (itself a parody of mindless “hair metal” songs41) by the white rap group Beastie Boys? I suspect, however, that even if critics of popular art were made aware of the specific intertextual contexts of this art, as well as of its distinctive aesthetic forms, they would, most probably, not bother exploring it precisely because their deeply entrenched presumption that works of popular art are in general intellectually shallow would convince that them that this is simply not worth doing. Another widespread criticism concerning popular art is that it “cannot be creative,” original, or ideologically “nonconformist” since it has to appeal to “the entire mass audience” (PA 190), where the latter expression usually denotes a group which consists of the majority of a given society (or even a whole civilization), sharing the same weltanschauung and some standard of taste. To Shusterman’s mind, this reasoning must eventually fall under its own weight as it presupposes an entirely unreasonable requirement which an art must allegedly meet to be “popular,” namely, that it be a mass art in the aforementioned sense. And that it is unreasonable becomes clear as soon as we realize that there are many genres that do not meet that requirement, yet at the same time are widely called “popular,” even by exactly those who level the criticism we are discussing. Therefore, as 40 41

See, e.g., Jude Davies, “The Future of ‘No Future’: Punk Rock and Postmodern Theory,” Journal of Popular Culture, 29, No. 4 (1996), pp. 3-25. See, for instance, Michael Odell, “The Greatest Songs Ever! Fight for Your Right,” Blender.com (February 15, 2004); http://www.blender.com/guide/67366/greatest-songs-ever-fightfor-your-right.html (accessed November 14, 2009).

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

121

Shusterman points out, it would be more correct, at least as far as our established understanding of the predicate “popular” is concerned, to say that popular art needs not a “mass” but a “multitudinous audience,” one which, moreover, may have “social experiences” and “educational background (or “a[n] ideology or artistic tradition)” that are very different from those that characterize the majority of the society to which it belongs (PA 191). Indeed, one could not expect the bulk of population of any country to enjoy, e.g., the tales of gang wars told by the representatives of one of today’s most popular musical genres, i.e., gangsta rap, or the descriptions of the social alienation of youth which can be found on the records of many nu-metal groups, such as Slipknot or Korn. Moreover, some popular cartoons, such as “South Park” series, or forms of music, such as punk rock, are in fact meant to insult and provoke the socalled decent, normal people. Consider, e.g., Sex Pistols’ classic hit single “Anarchy in the UK,” with the following lyrics: I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist! Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it I wanna destroy the passer by ‘cause I... I wanna be anarchy! … I wanna be an anarchist! Get pissed! Destroy!42

One should add that the single was originally released in 1976, but after 30 years the spirit of punk lives on, even in its softer version, tailored to the demands of MTV.43 For instance, the title track from Green Day’s 2004 multi-platinum LP American Idiot contains the following statement: Don’t want to be an American idiot! Don’t want a nation under the new mania! And can you hear the sound of hysteria? The subliminal mind fuck America. … Well maybe I’m the faggot America. I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.

42 43

Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (Warner Bros/WEA, 1990 [1977]), track 8. For a discussion of the commercialization of alternative music, see Karen Bettez Halnon, “Alienation Incorporated: ‘F--- the Mainstream Music’” in the Mainstream,” in: The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium, ed. Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), pp. 201-26.

Chapter 3

122 Now everybody do the propaganda And sing along to the age of paranoia.44

Unsurprisingly, the song that was chosen to be the first single from their subsequent album 21st Century Breakdown (released in 2009), namely, “Know Your Enemy,” presents no less rebellious an attitude: Violence is an energy From here to eternity Violence is an energy Silence is the enemy So gimme gimme revolution … Overthrow the effigy The vast majority We’re burning down the bargain of control.45

Or let us take a look at Sum 41’s single “Fat Lip”: I don’t wanna waste my time Become another casualty of society. I’ll never fall in line Become another victim of your conformity And back down.46

Not to mention bands like Rage Against the Machine (whose very name is telling and whose most famous song, “Killing in the Name Of,” bursts with verses such as “Fuck You! I won’t do what you tell me!”47) or System of a Down, both of which sell millions of records, yet at the same time use their lyrics to accuse the Western world, to which most of their listeners belong, of economic injustice or oppression of cultural minorities. That latter issue actually brings us to Shusterman’s treatment of rap; a genre whose genesis is inextricably related to the African-American community48 and which plays a special role in his melioristic project as he does not merely use it to question this or that specific accusation against popular art, but instead invokes as a positive proof that at least some of the latter’s forms are fully legitimate in aesthetic sense. 44 45 46 47 48

Green Day, American Idiot (Reprise Records, 2004), track 1. Green Day, 21st Century Breakdown (Reprise Records, 2009), track 2. Sum 41, All Killer, No Filler (Island Records, 2001), track 4. Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine (Epic Records, 1992), track 2. See, e.g., Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 163-215. In what follows, I shall be using the terms “rap,” “rap music,” and “hip-hop music” synonymously. Note that the musical genre known as rap is part of a wider phenomenon of hip-hop culture, which consists also of graffiti and breakdance (not to mention a specific sociolect, style of dress, etc.).

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

123

Pragmatist Aesthetics and Rap “So you should decide for yourself... Is this art or dangerous propaganda?”49 These words that open Greatest Misses, a record by a legendary rap music group Public Enemy, perfectly reflect the controversies raised by rap in the early 1990s, when Shusterman wrote his most influential articles about it.50 At that time, rap arguably underwent its “golden age.” Groups such as RUN DMC and A Tribe Called Quest reached a high level of artistic mastery, while the likes of MC Hammer proved with the massive sales of their records, and with their songs reaching far beyond American conurbations (being played virtually all around the world – from clubs in Tokyo to discos in Romania), that the career of a black musician may, too, be an embodiment of the American dream. Yet what is most crucial for me here is that genuinely successful rap groups of that time, e.g., the aforementioned Public Enemy, very often chose to put a political message to the forefront of their artistic output. This is why, as Shusterman reveals in an interview, rap “seemed [to him] the ideal representative of a pragmatist art form that tries to bring together the cognitive, the practical and political, and the aesthetic..., [and] was just too great an example not to study.”51 On the other hand, Shusterman was aware that rap’s political engagement might also constitute an obstacle to what he was interested in most: using this genre as an example of the aesthetic legitimacy of popular art.52 For it is impossible to deny that rap artists of the time intensely engaged in pressing and touchy social matters, such as the socio-economic condition of African-Americans,53 often presenting a controversial attitude in this regard (for instance, N.W.A’s single “Fuck tha Police” [sic] may, of course, be seen as instigating violence against police officers54), something which provoked nervous reactions in various circles of Amer-

49 50 51 52

53 54

Public Enemy, Greatest Misses (Def Jam/Columbia/SME Records, 1992), track 1. Shusterman’s first, and pioneering, article on the aesthetics of rap was published in 1991. See “The Fine Art of Rap,” New Literary History, 22 (1991), pp. 613-32. Richard Shusterman, “ĩycie, sztuka i filozofia,” p. 21. “Rap is an art whose cultural and aesthetic importance is at once demonstrated and concealed by the smoke of media hype and political controversy that surrounds it. ... [R]ap’s clouds of controversy – not only its alleged links to ... race riots but even its proud selfidentification as ghetto music in an age of contestatory identity politics – have distracted cultural critics from coming to grips with its artistic significance.” Richard Shusterman, “Rap Remix: Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Other Issues in the House,” Critical Inquiry, 22 (1995), pp. 151-2. See, e.g., Derrick P. Alridge, “From Civil Rights to Hip Hop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas,” The Journal of African American History, 90, No. 3 (2005), pp. 226-52. As Jerry H. Bryant observes, “the track ‘Fuck tha Police’ is a not very subtle challenge to hated authority. When rapper Ice Cube says in that piece that ‘when I’m finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath/of cops dyin’ in L.A.,’ he does not muffle his message. These lines are inflections of ‘bad nigger’ sentiments.” Jerry H. Bryant, Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent

124

Chapter 3

ican society, leading in some cases to “censoring and confiscations of rap records” (PA 327). But leaving aside the question of whether such radical measures were in any way justified, it should be noted that besides the radical political message, it is exactly violence which constituted the second important factor that seemed to threaten the project of deploying rap in order to effect the aesthetic rehabilitation of popular art.55 For, as Shusterman emphasizes, hip-hop music has been universally associated with brutal crimes since its very inception, which is mainly due to the media’s focus on “sensationalist” topics such as the murders of famous gangsta rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. (see PP 141).56 Finally, let me mention yet another circumstance which, as Shusterman himself clarifies, made it hard for him to put rap in the service of meliorism, and even to write and publish about it all; a circumstance that is inseparably linked to the terror of “identity politics.” Namely, it was pointed out to Shusterman that not only was he “white” but also Jewish and “an Oxford-trained philosophy professor,” and that this apparently disqualified him from probing the phenomenon so deeply rooted in the existence, and experience, of the black underclass of American society as rap was.57 It thus comes as no real surprise that in his articles, he

55 56

57

Man in African American Folklore and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 158. See Shusterman, “Pragmatism, Art, and Violence,” pp. 668-9; and Shusterman, “Rap Remix,” p. 150. For a discussion of the media coverage of these rappers’ deaths, see Lindon Barrett, “Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Small, and Hip-Hop Eulogy,” Callaloo, 22, No. 2 (1999), pp. 306-32. “[M]y aesthetic interest in the genre was roundly condemned by colleagues from both right and left: not only for endorsing black hooliganism by supporting such music, but also for disenfranchising ghetto youth by expropriating their music for my own bourgeois entertainment and theoretical pursuits. As a white, Oxford-trained, philosophy professor (and not simply a Jew but an Israeli), I was so often told that I had no business dealing with rap, that before I dared submit my research to any journal, I sought the moral advice and symbolic permission of a leading African-American critic, Houston Baker. Nor does being black resolve all problems of legitimation in speaking academically about rap and its aesthetic meaning. In certain rap circles (for example, those of grassroots fanzines), black academics in Ivy League schools are as suspect as whites, and perhaps sometimes more. For while their links and allegiance to the black ghetto may be just as questionable, the danger of their usurping the role of rap- or ghetto cultural spokesmen is far more real.” Shusterman, “Rap Remix,” p. 150-1. Cf. the following remarks by African-American rappers, used as epigraphs to Shusterman’s essay “Ghetto Music”: “I have found that all music has originated from the Ghetto and this is why I call the album Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop. Only Ghetto consciousness will understand it and only ghetto consciousness will enjoy it.” Boogie Down Productions, Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop (Jive/RCA Records, 1989), track 12. “If you ain’t never been to the Ghetto, don’t ever come to the Ghetto. Cause you won’t understand the Ghetto. So stay the fuck out of the Ghetto.” Naughty By Nature, Naughty by

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

125

took (and still takes) pains to explain that, contrary to what such “rap purists” may think, “one’s own non-ghetto experience” of subjugation and rejection, not necessarily on racial grounds, can give one a hint on what the perspective of ghettoized African-Americans may be, thus allowing for a better understanding of their subject position.58 Despite the aforementioned difficulties Shusterman nevertheless chose to stick to rap in his aesthetic explorations, which choice has eventually proven right at least insofar as it is his essays on that topic (to be more precise, the one entitled “The Fine Art of Rap”) that have established his international position,59 even if they have at the same time raised some controversies, too.60 And given that these texts constitute also the fullest realization of his meliorism, let me now take a closer look at them.61 “Rap is crap” – sounds the categorical verdict of its highbrow adversaries, who usually do not bother providing any serious evidence to substantiate their claim, even if they at the same time happen to be men of letters who pride themselves on their capacity to pass on most probing and objective judgments.62 What

58

59

60

61

62

Nature (Tommy Boy, 1991), track 4. Ct. in Richard Shusterman, “Ghetto Music,” Journal of Rap (Winter 1992), p. 11. See Shusterman, “Ghetto Music.” See Shusterman, “Rap Remix,” p. 150-1; PA 201-2. For instance, in Pragmatist Aesthetics, he dubbed rap artists (DJs, to be exact) “the musical cannibals of the urban jungle” (PA 203), which resulted in his being accused of using racist language. See his comments on this issue in Richard Shusterman, “Two Questions on Cannibalism and Rap,” in: Catalogue of the 24th Biennial of Sao Paulo (Sao Paulo, 1998), pp. 144-7. See, for instance,. David Zerbib, “De Socrate, MC Solaar,” l’Humanité (January 28, 2002); http: //www.humanite.fr/ 2002-06-28_Cultures_-DE-SOCRATE-MC-SOLAAR (accessed September 14, 2009). As far as the criticisms of Shusterman’s work on rap are concerned, see, e.g., George Ciccariello Maher, “Brechtian Hip-Hop: Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta Political Mixtapes,” Journal of Black Studies, 36, No. 1 (2005), pp. 130-7; Gustavo D. Cardinal, “Review of Richard Shusterman, Performing Live,” Philosophy of Music Education Review, 12, No. 1 (2004), p. 90; Timothy A. Brennan “Off the Gangsta Tip: A Rap Appreciation, or Forgetting about Los Angeles,” Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), pp. 663-93. Cf. Shusterman’s response to Brennan, published as “Rap Remix.” Note that in his explorations of popular culture, Shusterman has not limited himself to studying hip-hop music, and has even turned his interest to a genre of popular music which is usually understood as the opposite of black rap, i.e. “white” country music, arguing, among other things, that it is not as white as it seems to be. To be more exact, in the essay “Affect and Authenticity in Country Musicals,” he points out that “country music is in fact deeply rooted in the black musical tradition of the United States” (PL 197), and thereby in fact defies its being portrayed, as it almost universally is, as an expression of the Caucasian American ethnicity. I shall not, however, discuss this essay in the present book, as country music does not play as important a role in Shusterman’s meliorism as does rap. Such an opinion was expressed, e.g., by the renowned Polish intellectual Ludwik Stomma, in a feature article that referenced to the Polish edition of Pragmatist Aesthetics. See Ludwik Stomma, “Nieistniejąca Filozofia” [Nonexistent Philosophy], Polityka, 16 (2001), p. 98. Cf. Adam Chmielewski, “ĩycie-sztuka-filozofia czyli czy rap jest sztuką?” [Life-Art-

126

Chapter 3

is to be done in such a situation? How should we react in case we are of a different opinion? It will certainly not help to invoke our judgment of taste as an arbiter, for it alone will scarcely make our opponent change her mind. We can, however, as it often happens in debates concerning values and opinions, refer to some basic convictions professed by the opponent and try to demonstrate that the particular judgment of hers with which we disagree remains in conflict with them, something which, assuming that the opponent will prefer to keep those convictions untouched, should force her to give up on it. Now, it is this strategy that Shusterman wants to employ in his treatment of rap as an artistic form,63 trying to present it as belonging to some wider phenomena which, as he surmises, most intellectuals are prone to consider respectful. To be more exact, he aims to prove that rap “satisfies” the criteria of postmodern art64 and “is down with” John Dewey’s and “Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman’s” aesthetic theories (PP 131).65 Let us begin with postmodernism. Proving that rap is postmodern has at least one major advantage and at least one equally major flaw, both resulting from the chronic ambiguity of the category of postmodernism, which makes that term every semantician’s worst nightmare.66 The advantage consists in the fact that it is quite easy to prove that something is postmodern, given that the abyssality of this conceptual grab-bag affords us an utterly amazing freedom to choose those features of postmodernism that are appropriate for our purpose. The disadvantage, in turn, lies in that our proof can be very easily refuted by pulling out a different set of features from the very same grab-bag.67 Yet the situation is far from hopeless since we still have in stock one of the most powerful arguments used in the hu-

63

64

65

66

67

Philosophy, or Is Rap Art?], in: Walc wiedeĔski i walec europejski [The Viennese Waltz and the European Road Roller] (Wrocław: Atla 2, 2001), pp. 115-32. His work on hip-hop music includes both a philosophical discussion of rap in general as well as a comprehensive close reading of the song “Talkin’ All That Jazz” by the group Stetsasonic. As Shusterman emphasizes, the latter interpretation (which constitutes a large part of Chapter 8 of PA) was intended to clarify “how the genre can answer the major aesthetic indictments against popular art” (PA 202). On the postmodern character of rap, see, e.g. Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 1-54, passim. Shusterman’s first remarks on the pragmatist character of rap come from the article “The Fine Art of Rap,” while his comparison of the artistic practice of rap with the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman was first published in French, and only then in English as “Art Infraction: Goodman, Rap, Pragmatism,” Australian Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1995), pp. 269-79 (it subsequently became Chapter 5 of PP). This expression is actually a travesty of the title of Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s article “Romantyzm, czyli rozpacz semantyka” [in a free translation: Romanticism, or Every Semantician’s Worst Nightmare], PamiĊtnik Literacki, No. 4 (1971), pp. 3-21. See, e.g. Ihab Hassan, “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context,” Philosophy and Literature, 25, No. 1 (2001), pp. 1-13; cf. Rorty, “Afterword: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Postmodernism,” in: Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 261-77.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

127

manities, namely ex auctoritate, and henceforth it is hardly surprising that in claiming that rap is “a postmodern art” that defies “some of our most deeply entrenched aesthetic conventions … which are common not only to modernism as an artistic style and ideology but to the philosophical doctrine of modernity and its sharp differentiation of cultural spheres” (PA 201), Shusterman supports his particular choice of the defining features of postmodern aesthetics with the authority of the renowned American critic Frederic Jameson.68 To be more detailed, these features include the following: recycling appropriation rather than unique originative creation, the eclectic mixing of styles, the enthusiastic embracing of the new technology and mass culture, the challenging of modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy and artistic purity, and an emphasis on the localized and temporal rather than the putatively universal and eternal (PA 202).

As far as rap’s “recycling appropriation” strategy is concerned, Shusterman sees it, among other things, in the techniques used by rap DJs when composing songs (see PA 202). These techniques are, of course, too complicated to be described here in detail, but for our purposes suffices it to stress that DJs usually proceed in such a way that they first use turntables, samplers, or music software to extract appropriate fragments (i.e., “samples”) from various previously recorded musical works or other sonic material, and, after transforming and amalgamating them, they create as a result entirely new aesthetic entities (see PA 202-8).69 Now, what has that to do with postmodern art? To begin with, Shusterman notes that rap, unlike jazz, which also consists in experimenting with previously existing works, does not appropriate “abstract musical patterns,” such as sequences of notes, but rather “concrete sound events” (e.g., as I have already noted, fragments of previously recorded songs). Secondly, rap ex definitione does not set for itself any limits as to the scope of the sources which it “deconstructs” in order to find new sonic material. These, as is well known, can include: musical recordings (pop, jazz, rock) but also soundtracks of TV programs and films, messages left on answering machines, and recordings of practically all kinds of sounds that are emitted by electronic equipment and the remaining inanimate things, as well as by flora and fauna of the earth (see PP 139). Thirdly, DJs have at their disposal many procedures of “aesthetic appropriation” that “seem as versatile and imaginative as those of high art – as those, say, exemplified by Duchamp’s mustache on Mona Lisa” (PA 205). And, finally, just as one of the artistic premises behind Du68

69

See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); cf. also Shusterman’s review of that book, published in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50 (1992), pp. 254-7. See, e.g., Andrew Bartlett, “Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics,” African American Review, 28, No. 4 (1994), pp. 639-52.

128

Chapter 3

champ’s L.H.O.O.Q. was that the audience should know that this work was based on another one, so rap artists, too, want each listener to recognize that the song she listens to consists of borrowings, and they sometimes help her in this regard by enlisting these borrowings in the lyrics that accompany the soundtrack. All this contributes to the fact that the aesthetic of rap “challenges the traditional idea of originality and uniqueness” which stems from the modernist dreams of a radical, solitary autarchism of the artist. To Shusterman’s mind, even if hip-hop musicians sometimes aspire to establishing a new aesthetic standard through their works, they conceive novelty in a weak sense, presuming that “absolute” originality is just another foundationalist fiction – that there are “only appropriations of appropriations and simulacra of simulacra; so creative energy can be liberated to play with familiar creations” (PA 205). Another outdated ideal that falls apart when confronted with hip-hop music is the one of “unity and integrity” (PA 206). After all, rap artists do not have any qualms about dissecting the specimens from which they take the artistic ingredients they need, and they admit, to boot, that rap songs may alike become subject to decomposition and transformation. Thereby, hip-hop music counteracts the tendency, prevalent in the contemporary culture of late capitalism, to “fetishize” art objects and carries “the Deweyan message that art is more essentially process than finished product” (PA 206)70 and that as such it cannot escape its spatiotemporal situatedness. If one were to believe Shusterman, one would think that no “Exegi monumentum” could ever leave the mouths of rap artists. It is to such an extent that they are aware of the transiency and contingency of the artistic beauty, which awareness is evidenced by the appearance in many rap songs of the indications of the year when they were recorded or exclamations such as „Fresh for ’89, you suckers” obviously implying that rap works, just as does food for instance, have a limited shelf life (see PA 207; PP 140-1). Besides emphasizing this temporal embeddedness, rappers also point to the intimate attachment of their work, particularly as far as their lyrics are concerned, to a given cultural and spatial context. Their ambition is not, as was the case with modernist artists, to address some “universal” human concerns and appeal to an abstract spectator as such; on the contrary, they content themselves with, and are often proud of, representing the perspective of a very specific, “local” community, be that a “’hood” in New York, Wrocław, or Havana.71 From this Shusterman 70 71

Thanks to this feature it also converges, or so Shusterman says, with the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman; see PP 134. For a discussion of how rap is used to express specific concerns of local communities around the globe, see Halifu Osumare, “Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 24, No. 1/2 (2001), pp. 171-81. Cf. Wojciech Małecki, “Homies from the (Post-Communist) Block: Representations of East-Central Realities in Polish Rap Lyrics,” in: Transatlantic Cultural Traffic: Beyond the Legacy of the Cold War, ed. Laetitia Guran and Anca Holden, forthcoming.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

129

does not hesitate to conclude that such manifestations of contextuality should in fact be seen as instances of “the postmodern breakdown of modernism’s international style” (PA 207). Yet however local rap might be when it comes to its message, the instruments it uses (such as samplers, for instance) are hardly endemic insofar as they are pieces of “mass-media technology” that is widely spread in the globalized world. In fact, to say with Shusterman that rap, just as does postmodernism, “enthusiastically embraces” this technology might seem an understatement, for that genre was in fact “born of” it, still absorbs its subsequent inventions, and could not exist without it (PA 202, 208). The nature of rap songs, for instance, is such that “no musical notation can render [their] crazy collage of music,” and henceforth only recording them on a CD or any other, analog or digital, medium can save them from fading away immediately after being performed.72 Rap, however, owes much more to mass media technologies than its inception and thriving; for it is thanks to them that it has also grown to be the hypertrophic, international cultural phenomenon that I have described at the beginning of this subchapter. As Shusterman emphasizes, if it hadn’t been for vinyl LPs, CDs, “radio and TV broadcasting,” and later the Internet and MP3s, hip-hop music would have certainly failed to gain the massive popularity that it still enjoys; the popularity that has helped to make millions of listeners around the globe aware of AfricanAmerican culture, not to mention the fact that it has also helped rappers to make millions of dollars on their art (PA 209). It is obviously a truism to say that media popularity can be a curse to an equal extent that it is a blessing, and we can better understand what its negative aspects are in this case if we consider the genre of hip-hop music on which Shusterman concentrates most in his writings, i.e., so-called knowledge rap. That he does so can be explained by the fact that this kind of rap, besides exhibiting all the artistic features that have been described above, has yet another characteristic that fits Shusterman’s interpretation of rap as a postmodern art. Namely, its representatives do not accept modernity’s segmentation of culture, where “art was distinguished from science as being concerned with the formulation and dissemination of knowledge … and from the practical activity of ethics and politics, which involved real interests and appetitive will” (PA 212). In fact, knowledge rappers travel freely between these domains, being occupied to an equal degree with the aesthetic quality of their creations as well as with seeking the wisdom and ethical principles that they then could convey to their listeners. As Shusterman notes, the classical knowledge rapper KRS-One (who in 72

See PA 209. Cf., e.g., John Andrew Fisher, “Rock’n’Recording: The Ontological Complexity of Rock Music,” in: Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip Alperson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), pp. 109-23; and Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

130

Chapter 3

his songs “presents himself … as a ‘teacher’” and “a philosopher” or “metaphysican” (PP 144; PA 212)) does not limit his lyrical performance, as other rappers often do, to a mere expression of “verbal virtuosity” or to bragging about his wealth and “sexual desirability” (PA 202-3, 212). Instead, he raps about the importance of family life, “monogamy,” “the evils of violence” and substance abuse (PP 147), and to give a hint of the attitude he presents in doing so, let me add that mere songs must have recently become insufficient for him to realize his ambitions as he has decided to write a hip-hop “Bible,” entitled The Gospel of HipHop.73 Now, even though (as the example of televangelists shows) one can become a media star by being a preacher, and make loads of money on this, too, the entertainment industry very soon realized that knowledge rap, however popular it might have been in its time (i.e., the early 90s), is not the most “lucrative” option, and that they can get much more profit from rappers who say exactly the opposite of what KRS-One says. Therefore, it begun to promote gangsta rap (for this is how this inversion of knowledge rap is appropriately called), something which, as Shusterman rightly notes, has largely contributed to rap’s being generally and unjustifiably associated in the media with violence and “black criminality” (PP 142-3).74 One needs to say that this detrimental tendency has only deepened since the time when Shusterman made his observations in the mid-‘90s. After the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., it has been Jay-Z who earned millions of dollars on his “criminal” tales, and now the market is dominated by an ex-drug dealer 50-Cent, not to mention the fact that there are dozens of successful rappers who feed their audience with “war stories” (to use Tupac Shakur’s own expression) which paint pictures of a pleasurable life of the gangster. It is also worth noting that the “gangsta” business has extended its territory and embraces not only 73

74

See KRS-One, The Gospel of Hip Hop: First Instrument (Brooklyn, NY: I Am Hip Hop, 2009). Cf., for instance, Dawn Danz and Phalary Long, “KRS Plans New Hip-Hop Religion With Gospel of Hip Hop,” All Hip Hop: The World’s Most Dangerous Site (August 20, 2009), http: //allhiphop.com/stories/news/archive/2009/08/20/21903171.aspx (accessed October 21, 2009). See also Shusterman, “Pragmatism, Art and Violence,” pp. 668-9. This state of affairs is described by John H. McWhorter in his article “How Hip-Hop Holds Black Back,” City Journal (Summer 2003); http: //www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html (accessed on August 23, 2009). Importantly, Ralph M. Rosen and Donald R. Marks, point out that, in academic criticism, one can discern two different approaches to gangsta rap – one of them sees in its artists “poetic journalist[s] accurately describing the racial and economic inequities of American society.” The other (under which we might subsume Shusterman) conceives of gangsta rap “as a symptom or warning sign of an aggravated moral and social malaise, a crude and unwitting herald of a social order in decline or disequilibrium.” Ralph M. Rosen and Donald R. Marks, “Comedies of Transgression in Gangsta Rap and Ancient Classical Poetry,” New Literary History, 30, No. 4 (1999), p. 923n1.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

131

records, video clips, and designer clothes. For instance, in 2003, a peculiar cardboard game was released, provoking the outrage on the part of some AfricanAmericans as it was called “Ghettopoly” with its main idea being that one should make as much money as possible in a black ghetto thanks to drug trafficking and other illegal activities.75 However important knowledge rap might be for Shusterman’s parallel rappostmodern art, its giving way to the gangsta style does not in itself weaken that parallel, which on the other hand is not to say that Shusterman’s position is safe from objections. And I do not mean here simply brushing off Shusterman’s efforts, just as it has been done by Timothy Brennan, with a remark that Shusterman “has no other conceptual peg to hang his comments on than postmodernism,”76 since I believe that the matter is worth (and rewards) a deeper insight. First of all, one might say that the persuasive force of Shusterman’s invoking postmodernism to legitimize rap is rather questionable, given that in other places (and there are not that few of them) he claims with all seriousness that “[t]oday we face the cultural problem that the high art tradition has … entered a postmodern malaise.”77 Is this, then, good or bad that rap belongs to postmodernism? How could one make the aficionados of high culture more sympathetic to rap by associating the latter with something that allegedly disintegrates and spoils what is dearest to them? Still another matter is that, as I have already said, postmodernism is a conceptual grab-bag with which we can demonstrate the postmodernity of everything and anything, depending on which elements of its content we will use and how much effort we put in this. Shusterman eagerly capitalizes on that possibility, yet since, as Didier Maleuvre quite rightly observes, “most” of the characteristics of postmodern aesthetics which Shusterman enumerates can be as well discovered in “the average beer commercial,”78 it is therefore hard to conceive something’s possessing them as a sufficient proof of that something’s being art (let alone so-called “true art”). It is for this very reason, or so Maleuvre claims, that “postmodern criticism [is] so easy to lampoon – the same theoretical cant can be used to deconstruct Céline Dion as well as Wordsworth.”79 Now, irrespective of whether we shall deem recycling appropriation rather than unique originative creation, the eclectic mixing of styles, the enthusiastic embracing of the new technology and mass culture, the challenging of modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy and artistic purity, and an empha-

75

76 77 78 79

See Sara B. Miller, “Hip-Hop Product Portrayals Divide Black Community,” The Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1027/p01s02-ussc.html (accessed August 23, 2009). Brennan, “Off the Gangsta Tip,” p. 676. Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 207. Maleuvre, “Must Understanding Be Interpretive?,” p. 126. Maleuvre, “Must Understanding Be Interpretive?,” p. 126.

132

Chapter 3 sis on the localized and temporal rather than the putatively universal and eternal (PA 202).

as sufficient and necessary conditions for being postmodern art, the main danger Shusterman courts in trying to squeeze rap into thus prepared mold is that he may thereby perpetrate the same crimes of which accuses the critics of popular art – unjustified generalization and other kinds of misreading.80 Let me begin by saying that even though rap indeed uses fragments of previously recorded songs, which it then modifies and amalgamates into a novel aesthetic product, the analogies with postmodern strategies of aesthetic appropriation seem to end here. Above all, one needs to remember that the postmodern “playing with the pieces,” to use Baudrillard’s famous expression,81 consists in that a given work is created from fragments of other works in such a way that its intertextuality constitutes the gist of the artistic effect.82 The whole fun is that the public should get the joke and know what has been taken from where; the point, after all, is not to seamlessly synthesize the fragments into something beautiful and new, but to design a rebus that suggests that nothing beautiful and new can be created. Pace Shusterman’s generalizing remarks, in the case of many rap songs, the samples which are included in the soundtrack come from recordings that are generally not recognizable by the audience (if only due to their having been significantly processed) and need not be so83 as the aimed effect is nothing but a catchy song.84 Yet even when the reference to a given work is explicit, it is hard to say that rap artists thereby make a subversive gesture characteristic of trans-avantgarde (something like painting a Mona Lisa with mustache) for more often than not they are driven by a rather trivial and mercantile urge to launch themselves off the springboard of a well known hit (just as rap musician and producer P-Diddy most probably was when he based his songs on guitar riffs taken from Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” and Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”). The case is analogous with rappers’ attitudes toward originality or artistic genius. Contrary to what Shusterman claims, they frequently present a very “modernist” approach to these matters, which is exemplified not only by the shameless self-flattery they indulge in in their songs (let us take one of Shusterman’s favorite rappers, Guru: “Above the clouds, above the crowds, where the 80 81 82 83 84

Cf. the critical remarks on “The Fine Art of Rap” presented in Cardinal, “Review of Richard Shusterman, Performing Live,” p. 90. Jean Baudrillard, “Interview: Game with Vestiges,” On the Beach, 5 (1984), p. 24. “The postmodern artwork must be knowing and learned: it must quote, name-drop, and be wise to the ways of culture.” Maleuvre, “Must Understanding Be Interpretive,” p. 126. To be sure, if the sources of particular samples are enumerated in booklets of some rap CDs, this practice is primarily dictated by the copyright laws. Similar objections with regard to Shusterman’s parallel rap-postmodernism are raised by Maleuvre in “Must Understanding Be Interpretive,” p. 125-6. Cf. also Maher’s criticism of that parallel: “Brechtian Hip-Hop,” pp. 130-7.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

133

sounds are original, infinite skills create miracles”85) but also by the fact that “imitating” somebody else’s style, or “borrowing” someone’s rhymes or samples, is condemned by rappers as one of the gravest offences against hip-hop decorum (in fact, there has even been coined a scornful metaphorical term to denote such practices, namely “biting”).86 A close scrutiny would reveal that the remaining elements of Shusterman’s parallel rap-postmodernism can be undermined with counterexamples, too, and thus the whole construction needs to be reformulated or supplied with stipulations if it is to hold. But without going into details I would like to stress that the flaws I have indicated should be considered a testimony to the dangers which result from analyzing the phenomena of so-called popular culture through the prism of philosophical aesthetics developed in, and accustomed to, the context of the history of beaux arts, something which, in the case of insufficient caution, can lead to presenting a distorted picture of the analyzed object.87 That said, I can neither accept without reservations the other parallel advocated by Shusterman, namely: rap-the pragmatist aesthetic theories of Goodman and Dewey, as it seems overly vague and far-fetched and thereby might even hamper the whole enterprise of proving rap’s (and popular art’s) aesthetic merit. Recall the position of Nelson Goodman himself, who states that all “attempts of philosophical aesthetics to justify art” can only deprecate it since “they suggest that there must be something wrong or inadequate with art if it needs such theoretical justification.”88 This, as Shusterman rightly suggests, may be too strong a statement, but it nevertheless makes one think (or it at least makes me think) about what may happen if someone presents as a proof of rap’s aesthetic value not the aesthetic perfection of its particular instances, but its rather doubtful convergence with a refined pragmatist philosophy. And that it is doubtful can be demonstrated on two examples. First of all, according to Shusterman, the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman “prefigures and reinforces rap” in its “radical pluralism,” something which Shusterman tries to show by juxtaposing Goodman’s highly abstract theory of worldmaking with “rap’s rivalries and multiple styles” (PP 133). Leaving aside the fact that that particular analogy can tell us very little about rap’s specificity

85 86 87

88

Gangstarr, Moment of Truth (Noo Trybe/Virgin/EMI, 1998), track 5. Cf. Chairman Mao [pseud.], “Taking a Bite out of Rhyme: A Look At How Hip-Hop Has Become Run by Copycat MCs and Producers,” The Source, No. 100 (1998), no pp. Cf. Maleuvre, “Must Understanding Be Interpretive?,” p. 125-6. Note that there are indeed black intellectuals, bell hooks among them, who have explicitly encouraged the use of the category of postmodernism in the discourse on African-American culture. See her “Postmodern Blackness,” in: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 421-7. Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 208; cf. Nelson Goodman, Of Minds and Other Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 154, 155.

134

Chapter 3

since “rivalries and multiple styles” are to be found in any other kind of art, let me say that it indeed demands a great intellectual effort (not to mention the power of imagination) to discover what Goodman’s thesis that “Our universe consists, so to speak, of [“the ways of describing of whatever is described”] rather than of a world or of worlds”89 has to do with the mere fact that, e.g., rappers from L.A. rap differently from those who live in New York, and that each group thinks that they do it better than the other (see PP 141). But even if that effort could be made, the result, I contend, would be either the complete extraction from Goodman’s thesis of the epistemological and ontological content that makes it the interesting philosophical point that it is, or the injection of that content into rap, and thus making the latter into what it is not, namely, a philosophy in the technical sense of the word. And there probably cannot be more conspicuous example of the materialization of this last option than Shusterman’s claim that rappers put “emphasis on the temporally changing and malleable nature of the real,” professing “a respectably tenable metaphysical position associated with American pragmatism,” something which “of course, [makes] the realities and truths which hip hop reveals … not the transcendental eternal verities of traditional philosophy, but rather the mutable facts and patterns of the material socio-historical world” (PA 212, emphasis added). These remarks have been made by Shusterman in the context of knowledge rap, whose artists, as we know, perform with regard to their listeners the role of teachers, providing existential truths and aiming at effecting social changes (thanks to which they break out, as Shusterman argues, from the modernist paradigm of the autonomy of art). Now, it is hard for me to resist the impression that by his remarks on the rapper’s ontological commitments Shusterman simply tries to manage the troubling fact that their lyrics smack too much of an outdated belief in truth and reality, which is completely at odds with the irony of the pragmatists and the authors of postmodern critical art who, even when they preach, do not cease to wink at us – thematizing and problematizing at the same time their own preaching. Without dwelling on that question, I would like to stress that rappers certainly are not “down” with Dewey’s ontology, which on the other hand does not mean that they are acolytes of Plato, Aristotle, Berkeley, Russell, Badiou, or any other philosopher. “Unfortunately” the truth is more prosaic. Rappers talk about what is going on in their neighborhood and about what they like and do not, in a way no more philosophical than that in which each one of us talks about similar subjects outside the academic context, on a bus, in a bar, or anywhere else. To think otherwise is to force them to be philosophers without their knowledge or consent,90 and Shusterman sometimes does exactly so, thereby making the same 89 90

Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p. 3. To be sure, rappers such as KRS-One or Guru do call themselves “philosophers,” but Shusterman seems to be taking these declarations too literally. More often than not these artists understand the term “philosophy” in its non-technical sense (as in the sentence “being a bi-

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

135

intellectualist mistake of which he accuses Aristotle. Namely, he tries to demonstrate the aesthetic value of rap by arguing that it is similar to philosophy and thus, despite his claims to the contrary, perpetuates one of philosophical aesthetics’ oldest sins (PA 36). 3.3. Conclusions Richard Rorty quipped once, in criticizing the negative influence of overblown philosophical theory on literary studies, that when it comes to art we should not “bother … to put a philosophical frosting on [our] elective affinities,” which remark can be right or wrong depending, of course, on what we understand by “putting philosophical frosting.”91 It is right (as I hope my previous point to have clarified) if this expression denotes arguing that our favorite poets, or painters, or singers, are in some important way similar to the philosophers we admire. But it is wrong, I think, if such a philosophical confectionery is conceived of as using points borrowed from our favorite philosophy to show the autonomous value of our favorite art, or merely to defend a kind of art we deem valuable against those who consider it “worthless.” Even though Shusterman engages in both these forms of “frosting,” his unfortunate attempts at the former surely do not invalidate his efforts at the latter. On the contrary, I believe Shusterman’s meliorism to be a much needed initiative, and share, in particular, his conviction that popular art should be submitted to aesthetic analysis; that its criticisms formulated by intellectuals such as Adorno are more often than not incomplete, uninformed, and overly hysterical; and that some of its forms, rap in particular, have undeniable aesthetic merits. This is why I have defended his project from diverse charges on some previous occasions, and shall try do the same in the remainder of this chapter. But this is also why I think it is worth making it better (that is after all the original meaning of the Latin word “melior”), and to this end I would like to correct it in one respect, which by the way brings us again to the question of how Shusterman questions Dewey to be faithful to him. As we remember, Shusterman wants to follow Dewey in using the conception of art as aesthetic experience to effect the aesthetic legitimation of popular art, yet he argues that the latter made a serious mistake in this regard. He argues that, pace Dewey, the definition of art as experience will not suffice to bring about “adequate legitimation” since aesthetic experience is “mute” and thus cannot “convince,” at least not without external help, anybody that something has aesthetic value, especially if they are skeptical about this. Moreover, as Shusterman

91

ker is my philosophy of life”), and, moreover, do not stick to that self-description in a consistent way; see the song “In Memory of …,” by the group Gangstarr, in which Guru raps: “Freud, a philosopher, but I’m a realist.” Gangstarr, Moment of Truth, track 20. Rorty, “Worlds or Words Apart?,” p. 377.

136

Chapter 3

admits, if one does not devote any “aesthetic attention” to that something in the first place, then it “will not be able to afford [them with] aesthetic experience.”92 Having made these points, he categorically rejects Dewey’s “quixotic” conviction that the legitimization can be left to aesthetic experience, and suggests that one should first “demonstrate,” through critical practice, that a given object has aesthetic status, and only if one succeeds in doing so, the skeptic can have the appropriate experience. On the surface of it, this reasoning seems to work seamlessly, but it in fact entails a circulus vitiosus: i.e., Shusterman wants to prove through aesthetic experience the aesthetic legitimacy of popular art against its detractors, but he at the same time argues that for that art to engender aesthetic experience it must be first recognized as aesthetically legitimate. Of course, he could try to save himself from this methodological predicament by saying that such an aesthetic legitimacy can be proven not in terms of aesthetic experience, but in terms of the criteria recognized by our opponent, yet he would thereby expose himself to a troubling practical question: What, then, is the utility of defining art in terms of aesthetic experience for his melioristic project? For in such a case, one could hardly resist the impression that aesthetic experience plays a purely ornamental role here.93 I should note, however, that irrespective of how serious the mistake I am pointing to might seem, it does not constitute an unavoidable and inherent flaw of Shusterman’s meliorism and can eventually be corrected. But let us now turn to such criticisms of Shusterman’s position which, if they were right, would mean that it is hopeless and should be abandoned altogether. For a pragmatist anti-theorist such as Richard Rorty, for instance, it is indeed hard to understand how a book or an article in philosophical aesthetics might contribute to the legitimation of popular art, at least how Shusterman imagines it to look like94 (and recall that what the latter is concerned with is not merely providing an argument for the aesthetic value of popular art, which would meet the standards of academic philosophy, but rather in effecting an actual change of intellectuals’ attitude). To begin with, we need to realize that the intellectualist adversaries of popular art cited by Shusterman seem to employ the term “art” not in a descriptive sense but in an evaluative one (or honorific, to be exact), and thus their indictments de facto constitute a kind of judgment of taste. Therefore, persuading them into changing their mind, at least the way Shusterman wants to achieve this, would be equal to making them like something they now dislike through a theo-

92 93

94

See Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 205. See Thomas Leddy’s critical remarks in “Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics,” p. 11. Some other problems related to the use of aesthetic experience in Shusterman’s meliorism are indicated by Robert E. Innis; see his “Meaning, Art, and Politics: Dimensions of a Philosophical Engagement,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19, No. 1 (2005), p. 61. Shusterman mentions Rorty’s reservations in “Popular Art and Education,” p. 38-9.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

137

retical argumentation; a task, however, that is doomed to failure.95 Those among intellectuals whom we could count as the most virulent critics of popular art, Adorno, Allan Bloom, and others, are simply prejudiced against it and its public. And hence the most crucial problem for Shusterman should be overcoming that attitude as such (which by the way, as he himself admits, operates “beneath the level of consciousness”)96 rather than grappling with its theoretical manifestations, such as the arguments that popular art does not address human existence in its most salient and “serious” aspects, or that “it provides only spurious pleasures” (PA 182). These manifestations, so the criticism would go, form merely the surface of the problem, and the only possible conclusion that Shusterman can lead the detractors of popular art to by demolishing their “general … arguments for popular art’s intrinsic worthlessness” (PA 177) is that they defend their conviction in too inefficient a way (or they do not articulate it lucidly enough) and therefore should try harder. Such a criticism of Shusterman’s position, however, is very easy to refute,97 if only because it wears its biggest weakness on its sleeve. Namely, if this is indeed the case that the arguments against popular art made by Adorno, Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, Ernest van der Haag, Bernard Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and others in fact constitute completely irrelevant manifestations of their deeper prejudices, then why do these authors put so much effort into presenting them in the first place? Why do they fill their books with such points instead of simply saying “That’s rubbish!,” and why other people make so much of them? The reason is not merely that these arguments ensure the highbrows that their particular taste is right, but also that they are an important discursive instrument for establishing its ideological hegemony.98 And even if Shusterman’s meliorism cannot make cultural mandarins admire rap or techno, it surely performs an im-

95

96 97

98

Cf. William Day’s analogous remarks that he made in his review of Shusterman’s Performing Live (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62, No. 3 (2004), pp. 300-2), e.g. “All of this is interesting, and much of it is genuinely helpful; yet it is an odd way to convince a human being that this rhythmic articulation of words, this music, or this activity holds aesthetic treasures – as if our age has found alternatives to expressing an aesthetic conviction too, beyond the old method of conveying an experience through poetic, suggestive, metaphoric, phenomenological, ... language” (p. 301). Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” p. 43. Here I correct my earlier views on this issue, presented in “Praktyczne aspekty estetyki Richarda Shustermana: Sztuka popularna i somatoestetyka” [Practical Aspects of Richard Shusterman’s Aesthetics: Popular Art and Somaesthetics], in: Wizje i re-wizje: Wielka ksiĊga estetyki polskiej [Visions and Re-Visions], ed. Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Kraków: Universitas 2007), pp. 813-26. Moreover, even if, assuming that such arguments can reach the “audience of popular art,” they are not able to change its taste, they may convince its members that their aesthetic predilections “are inferior” and thus, as Shusterman argues, diminish their enjoyment (cf. PA 221).

138

Chapter 3

portant job by making it harder for them to drape their aesthetic prejudices in theoretical clothes. It does so partly because it shows their arguments to be empirically or logically wrong, and partly because it exposes these arguments as manifestations of prejudices indeed, something which they naturally claim not to be.99 But is there any need for this uncovering at all? Indeed, it behooves me to admit that among various possible ways to challenge Shusterman’s position perhaps the most powerful might be, paradoxically, to argue that the highbrow critics of popular culture whom Shusterman attacks are not as black as they are painted. Or, to be more precise, that their negative influence on the reception of popular culture waned a long time ago, and they at the same time have no real continuators. Moreover, one could even argue that the real situation of popular art in academic institutions, and in highbrow publications, is the exact opposite of what Shusterman describes it to be: namely, that within those areas such an art not only enjoys unquestioned aesthetic status, but is also given very sympathetic attention. If this were so, then Shusterman’s ardent criticism would be merely another storm in an academic teacup. This argument may seem so obvious that it comes as no real surprise that it has already been made by some of Shusterman’s commentators, such as Stefán Snaevarr100 or Didier Maleuvre.101 In responding to it, we first need to agree that no one can deny that the relative abundance of cultural studies led to a change in

99

“Such dismissive prejudices are as deep as they are pervasive; they work effectively beneath the level of consciousness, even in those of us who appreciate popular art; they are also inscribed in the institutions of aesthetic education and legitimation. They are one of the greatest obstacle to the legitimation of popular art. One way to combat them is to make them explicit as I have briefly done here. A more powerful but more difficult strategy would be to transform these prejudices by institutional change, such as curriculum reform giving more serious attention to the teaching and aesthetic analysis of popular art.” Shusterman, “Popular Art and Education,” pp. 43-4. 100 “[Shusterman] seems to think that the high brows still rule. But the only place to find bona fide intellectual snobs these days is in the Frasier sitcom; nonvirtual high brows virtually disappeared in the 1960s, the decade during which hedonism triumphed. Interestingly enough, most of the high brows Shusterman criticizes wrote their books before the advent of the Beatles. So his criticism of the puritans and the high brows seems a bit dated.” Snaevarr, “Pragmatism and Popular Culture,” pp. 1-11. I try to refute this and other criticism made by Snaevarr in my “On Pragmatist Aesthetics, the New Literacy, and Popular Culture.” 101 “In his zeal to justify popular art against stuffed-shirt academia, Shusterman is guilty of setting up straw men: he has to dig out highbrow fogeys from half a century ago, or notorious curmudgeons like Adorno, to find voices still railing against popular art forms. Whereas a glance at contemporary academic publishing or college course catalogues would have informed him that the case of popular arts scarcely needs championing.” Maleuvre, “Art and Criticism,” p. 125.

On Rap and Other Dangerous Things

139

the understanding of “the concept of culture in the universities,”102 which has not only allowed various pop icons and their works to become subjects of academic publications and courses,103 but has also made it an accepted practice, as the example of Slavoj Žižek and others shows, to refer to old and respected academic topics through the prism of popular art.104 One the other hand, however, one could risk a hypothesis that, at least in this regard, the specters of Adorno, Allan Bloom, and others still haunt the academia, and their revenge from the grave is that even though today almost no one would dare to denigrate popular art as fervently and generally as they did, academics treat this art primarily as a vehicle of politics (focusing almost exclusively on its gender, racial and socioeconomic entanglements), while at the same time largely neglecting the question of its aesthetic potential.105 Just as if popular art was devoid of aesthetic value and therefore not worthy of formal analysis. In so doing, even those scholars who are interested in promoting the political value of popular art and in empowering the groups which use it as a form of expression (youth, ethnic minorities etc.) in fact unwittingly strip it of its political power exactly because they reduce this art to politics. Let me underscore that even though Shusterman does not deny “art’s contamination with politics and culture,”106 he nevertheless is apparently convinced that it does not follow that we should abandon the notion of the aesthetic altogether, along with any normative judgments in this regard. This move would in fact be more than mistaken. It would be impractical, too, for it would make it impossible to effect the positive aesthetic reform, i.e., the legitimization of popular art, which could, as he believes, contribute to an equally positive political transformation – the empowerment of the underprivileged groups who enjoy such art.

102 Richard Van Oort, “The Critic as Ethnographer,” New Literary History, 35, No. 4 (2005), p. 626. 103 See, e.g., Harold Bloom’s negative assessment of such tendencies in Bloom, “Dumbing Down American Readers.” 104 Suffice it to mention Blackwell’s Philosophy and Pop Culture series, or Open Court’s similarly entitled series Popular Culture and Philosophy (see, e.g., Supervillains and Philosophy, ed. Ben Dyer (Chicago: Open Court, 2009) and Soccer and Philosophy, ed. Ted Richards (Chicago: Open Court, 2010)). 105 Cf. John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 1-3. 106 See footnote 103 in Chapter 1 of this book.

CHAP TER 4

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

4.1. The Somatic Turn and Its Discontents Among the many virtual communities that exist in the Internet special attention has recently been directed at one that advertizes itself as providing help for women and, moreover, encourages especially men to take part in this noble enterprise. The latter can do so by donating “small contributions to the ladies … Through [which], along with the global power of the Internet, the women of [the community] are able to reach their goals.” And if one has any doubts as to whether such goals are worth supporting, the people behind the website around which the community is organized try to dissolve them with the following words: “remember ... You can take pride in knowing that you helped her improve her self esteem and self image!” Assuming that the reader has not recognized yet what website I am referring to, she is now asked to guess which group of women does it help, and, in particular, what the aforementioned goals might exactly be, given that, as it has been heard on a popular radio program, the enterprise “is a real public service, and honestly the government should be funding [it] it’s so great”? Does the website, then, help women who are victims of domestic violence, molestation, or rape to heal their trauma and regain psychological equilibrium? No, it doesn’t. Does it help women from poor communities to achieve education or to start their own businesses? It does that neither. What it does, in fact, is helping women to get free breast implants, and I do not mean here women who have been forced by a disease or accident to undergo mastectomy, but women who want to get a “boob job” in order to have bigger breasts, and to this end are ready to register at the website, set up their personal profile, and upload “their pictures” there, which are, as we are told, “one of the key components towards achieving [their] goals.” So we already know what is the main benefit of the site for the “ladies,” but do the “benefactors” (who are, by the way, automatically assumed to be “gents”) get anything from the whole enterprise besides the “pride” they can take from their good deed? Actually, the site does not mention the following as benefits, yet it makes it clear that “As a member of the MyFreeImplants website” one has “the

142

Chapter 4

unrestricted access to all of the female profiles,” and “can … [r]equest personal custom videos from the ladies” as well as “Receive custom photos of your favorite girls.”1 “[T]he best part,” however, “is seeing the newly transformed ladies after the surgery when they return to the website to post pictures of the results.”2 These revealing lines allow me stress two among the many aspects of the website that are worth our critical attention,3 particularly given the content of this chapter. Namely, the role of media transmitted images in disseminating body norms and the fact that the male benefactors of MyFreeImplants.com are actually helping to solve the problem they themselves have created, as the specific body norm which concerns the proper size of woman’s breasts is imposed by them and answers mainly their desires. We should not be surprised, then, that such modern-day Pygmalions crowd to offer their assistance, and that, from their perspective, “the best part” of the whole thing is to see “the newly transformed ladies,” i.e., to revel in the sight of girls with appropriately big breasts. Now we have suddenly found ourselves in the middle of what Shusterman calls “the somatic turn” of Western culture and which he has been studying very carefully in recent years (PL 154). That is, in the middle of a world defined by a “striking paradox” that despite the proliferation of all sorts of technologies, such as the Internet, which allow us to get rid of the constraints of corporeality, our “bodies seem to matter more” (PL 137).4 A world, where they do so in various senses but also in the sense that the bodies that do not conform to the established norms become an increasingly heavy burden.5 A world where in order to get rid of, or just lessen, this burden, we engage in diverse, often painful, practices, and are willing to spend more and more money on the products, devices, and treat1

2 3

4

5

As far as photos are concerned, benefactors are kindly informed that “you may even request specific outfits*,” where the asterisk refers us to the following annotation, which is quite telling of the image of the potential “benefactor” that the people behind the site have: “*We request that you be respectful of the ladies on this website. While you may request particular outfits for custom photos, the ultimate decision is up to the lady. We encourage you to both work together in a civil manner so that everyone is happy. Abuse of the system or harrassment [sic] of any member will not be tolerated.” All citations from MyFreeImplants.com, http://myfreeimplants.com/how_it_works.asp#GentsInfo (accessed November 10, 2009). MyFreeImplants.com (accessed November 10, 2009). Of course, I am hardly original in my directing such a critical attention to the website and in pointing to the ambiguity of its rhetoric of “helping the girls,” as this has already been done by all kinds of publicists, journalists, bloggers, and feminist activists. For a discussion of this paradox, see also Slavoj Žižek’s, The Plague of Fantasies, for instance: “on the one hand I rely less on my proper body; my bodily activity is more and more reduced to giving signals to machines which do the work for me (clicking on a computer mouse, etc.); on the other hand, my body is strengthened, ‘hyperactivated’, through bodybuilding and jogging, pharmaceutical means, and direct implants …” Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London-New York: Verso, 1997) pp. 134-5. See, e.g., Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 27-65, 107-38, 173-91.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

143

ments (from cosmetics through training equipment to plastic surgery indeed) that are eagerly offered to us by an ever expanding somatic industry. Therefore, to come back to our example, it is also a world where getting a “boob job” can be seriously described as an effort at self-realization and can function as a cause around which one may organize a community, even if merely a virtual one. Of course, it might be said, and rightly so, that this is hardly a novel diagnosis, but Shusterman’s originality lies not in his description of the phenomenon itself, but rather in the accusations he formulates in this context against contemporary philosophy. For he thinks that the latter either ignores the aforementioned somatic turn of our culture, or confines itself to “theorizing about” the body, while what it should do instead is to adopt a more practical, “embodied” stance. What would it look like, then? First of all, according to Shusterman, contemporary body theory, taken en bloc, suffers from unnecessary compartmentalization and thus needs some “structuring overview or architectonic to integrate its very different, seemingly incommensurable discourses into a more productively systematic field” (PL 141). And as far as philosophy in particular is concerned, it cares too little about the practical value of its conceptions of the body and henceforth lacks “something that the individual can directly translate into a discipline of improved somatic practice” (PL 141). Somaesthetics, Shusterman suggests, is a perfect solution to “both of these deficiencies” (PA 271). 4.2. Somaesthetics Its Structure and Affiliations Even though his disciplinary proposal has already become the subject of many analyses, and an inspiration for researches representing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, dance theory, and aesthetic education, it is still a relatively new phenomenon, and therefore before I get to those aspects thereof that are of particular importance for the present book, it behooves me to present its synthetic description.6 6

See, e.g., Guerra, “Practicing Pragmatism”; Kathleen Marie Higgins, “Living and Feeling at Home: Shusterman’s Performing Live”; Haskins, “Enlivened Bodies, Authenticity and Romanticism”; and Martin Jay, “Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art” – all four articles published in Journal of Aesthetic Education, No. 4 (2002), pp. 55-69, 84-102; Jerold J. Abrams, “Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bioethics: Shusterman, Rorty, Foucault,” Human Studies, No. 27 (2004), pp. 241-258; Peter J. Arnold, “Somaesthetics, Education, and the Art of Dance,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, No. 1 (2005), pp. 48-64; Eric C. Mullis, “Performative Somaesthetics: Principles and Scope,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, No. 4 (2006), pp. 114-7; Säätelä, “Between Intellectualism and ‘Somaesthetics’”; Ken Tupper, “Entheogens & Education: Exploring the Potential of Psychoactives as Educational Tools,” Journal of Drug Education and Awareness, No. 2 (2003), pp. 145-61; Bryan S. Turner, “Somaesthetics and the Critique of Cartesian Dual-

144

Chapter 4

According to its inventor, then, somaesthetics “is devoted to the critical, ameliorative study of one’s experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning” (PL 138). Importantly, it is a “discipline” in at least two senses of the term: a specific field of studies and a methodic body “training,” and this hybridity can be clearly seen in somaesthetic’s very structure (PA 276). For it includes: •

•

•

7 8

Analytic somaesthetics, which studies “the basic nature of our bodily perceptions and practices” (PL 141) as well as the role which they both play in human life.7 It is Shusterman’s intention that in pursuing such studies, analytic somaesthetics does not confine itself to a purely philosophical perspective with its sanctioned (and sanctified) themes and methods, but draws, too, from physiology, psychology, neurology, cultural studies, and virtually all other fields that might enrich our knowledge of human corporeality (see PA 272). Pragmatic somaesthetics, which focuses not so much on general features of the body but on particular somatic practices, such as yoga, athletics, cosmetics, or Feldenkrais Method, and does so, moreover, not (only) in order to present academic accounts of them, but (mainly) to assess their practical value in enhancing the quality of our embodied lives (see PA 272; cf. PL 142). And, finally, practical somaesthetics, which has philosophers get up from their armchairs and actually perform the somatic techniques they write about, something which is especially crucial for Shusterman, who claims that lovers of wisdom, being enslaved by “the logos of discourse,” naturally avoid “this dimension, not of saying but of doing,” while they should not limit themselves to “textualizing the body,” but engage in “concrete … body work,” too (PL 143-4).8

ism,” Body & Society, 14, No. 3 (2008), pp. 129-33; Deanne Bogdan, “Musical Spirituality: Reflections on Identity and the Ethics of Embodied Aesthetic Experience in/and the Academy,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, No. 2 (2003), pp. 80-98. Cf. also articles and chapters in languages other than English, e.g., Penser en Corps: Soma-esthétique, art et philosophie, ed. Barbara Formis (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); David Zerbib, “Richard Shusterman: les effets secondaires d’une philosophie douce,” Le Monde des Livres (20 Nov 2007), p. 12; Monika Bakke, “Wszystkie przyjemnoĞci: duĪe i małe” [All Pleasures Great and Small], Czas Kultury, No.1 (2003), pp. 27-34; Dorota Koczanowicz, “Sztuka i Īycie: Teoria estetyczna Richarda Shustermana” [Art and Life: Richard Shusterman’s Aesthetic Theory], in: DoĞwiadczenie sztuki, sztuka Īycia: Wymiary estetyki pragmatycznej [The Experience of Art and the Art of Living: Dimensions of Pragmatist Aesthetics] (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Naukowe DolnoĞląskiej Szkoły WyĪszej, 2009), pp. 159-66. For Shusterman’s own reflections on the reception of somaesthetics, see, e.g., Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Revival of Aesthetics,” Filozofski Vestnik, No. 2 (2007), pp. 135-49. Cf. PA 271-2. As Shusterman emphasizes, “[s]ince, in philosophy, what goes without saying typically goes without doing, the concrete activity of body work must be named as the crucial practical

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

145

Shusterman is, of course, perfectly aware that his idea of introducing a novel element into the well established, and already a bit hypertrophic, structure of philosophy’s subdisciplines might be deemed “arrogant” (PA 263), and that some of the themes and methods of somaesthetics can make its disciplinary identity look rather dubious to the general philosophical public. For instance, one can argue that the very fact which makes somaesthetics look original, namely, that performing actual somatic activities is its defining, indispensable element, at the same time prohibits its incorporation into philosophy since the latter is “traditionally” a domain of pure thought. Nevertheless, being himself vitally concerned with transforming the character of the contemporary philosophical scene, Shusterman wants to treat somaesthetics as a subdiscipline of philosophy exactly because this would necessitate expanding the boundaries of the latter (see PA 279-80). Of course, he does not think that such a reform would be an easy task: one of the obstacles to its realization might be, for instance, the aforementioned logocentric character of occidental philosophy, the other being the difficulty of teaching philosophy in such a radically “embodied” form.9 However, not unlike many reformers before him (just to mention Martin Luther), Shusterman tries to legitimize his endeavor by arguing that he actually does not propose anything new but only goes back ad fontes. As he claims, alluding to James’s famous dictum, somaesthetics is just “a new name” for some “old insights” (PA 263),10 since in the times of ancient Greece philosophy was far more comprehensive than it is today and involved not only the pursuit of conceptual truth and the mastery of logical reasoning but also “physical exercises” (as well as practical directions concerning clothing and diet),

9

10

branch of somaesthetics, conceived as a comprehensive philosophical discipline concerned with embodied self-care” (PL 144). “Just imagine what would happen to the philosophy professor who asked his seminar in somaesthetics to study Wilhelm Reich’s body therapy by lying down in class and practicing the Reichian orgasm reflex. Would asking students to lift weights or perform yoga postures and breathing exercises be much easier? Even asking them to dance or sing or keep a special diet would seem a shock to today’s philosophical posture of pure theory” (PA 279). Cf. Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Education: Exploring the Terrain,” in: Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds: Towards Embodied Teaching and Learning, ed. Liora Bresler (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), p. 59. See William James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” in: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 1132. Shusterman’s declarations to the effect that the value of his project lies not in its being entirely new are obviously meant to protect him from critiques like Ruben Berrios’s of Pragmatist Aesthetics: “[Nietzsche] returned the aesthetic to the body and changed the tradition for ever. Only the congenitally uninformed will be able to entertain Shusterman’s disciplinary-proposal without a stifled yawn.” Ruben Berrios, “Review: Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art,” Music and Letters, 85, No. 4 (2004), p. 678.

146

Chapter 4

something which nowadays is most probably practiced only by “religious orders” and Asian philosophies such as Confucianism and Zen (PA 279; cf. BC 16).11 But here some troubling questions might be asked: Why should such a philosophical enterprise be realized under the aegis of aesthetics, as its very name suggests? Does a project which aims at widening the territory of philosophy, yet confines itself to what is perhaps the narrowest of the latter’s subdisciplines makes any sense? And, particularly, does it behoove an antifoundationalist, antiessentialist philosopher such as Shusterman to refer to that subdiscipline if the very disciplinary systematic to which it belongs is a vestige of foundationalist thinking? As far as the latter question is concerned, let me refer to what is probably Rorty’s only essay that refers to somaesthetics, where he makes the following remark: “I am not sure whether we need ‘a somatic aesthetics’ because I am not sure that we need an aesthetic theory or an aesthetic programme, at all.” This uncertainty on Rorty’s part stems, in turn, from his “scepticism about ‘aesthetics’ as a field of inquiry”: This has always struck me as another of Kant’s bad ideas – of a piece with the bad idea (to which I think Habermas unfortunately prone) of splitting culture into three spheres, one for each of the three Critiques. Some good books have been written about painting, others about literature, others about music, others about sex, and still others about birdwatching. But I have never read a book that succeeded in saying something interesting about what all these have in common.12

Admittedly, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Shusterman declares himself to be a dedicated enemy of this threefold division of culture, but such declarations would surely not satisfy Rorty. He would stress that in pointing to phenomena (such as knowledge rap) which transgress the boundaries between what in the modern paradigm was conceived as the aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical, Shusterman does not want to undermine the validity of aesthetics as a separate discipline devoted to some distinctive subject, but instead to prove that its subject has been hitherto understood too narrowly since the qualities of being aesthetic (whatever it is) in fact refer to a far greater number of things than we have ever imagined.13 And although Shusterman fails to go as far as, e.g., Wolfgang Welsch, for whom 11

12 13

For a comparative perspective on somaesthetics and Asian thought, see, e.g., the following essays by Richard Shusterman: “Pragmatism and East-Asian Thought”; “Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67, No. 2 (2009), pp. 133-45; “Pragmatist Aesthetics and Confucianism,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43, No. 1 (2009), pp. 25-7. Cf. Satoshi Higuchi, “Eastern Mind-Body Theory and Somaesthetics,” in: Concepts of Aesthetics Education: Japanese and European Perspectives, ed. Yasuo Imai and Christopher Wulf (Münster: Waxmann, 2007), pp. 88-96. Rorty, “Response to Richard Shusterman,” p. 156. See, e.g., Shusterman’s remark that “reason reveals its own deep aesthetic dimension” (PP 113).

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

147

almost everything today is aesthetic,14 he nevertheless must apparently believe that, given the “aesthetization” of our life, aesthetics is extraordinarily important if he tries so hard to revitalize it instead of abandoning it altogether (along with the whole idea of philosophical systematic) – something what Rorty would have wished him to do. Therefore, in Rorty’s view, Shusterman must be indeed, sit venia verbo, an old-fashioned philosopher who believes that the divisions between philosophical subdisciplines, even if they have been drawn incorrectly, reflect some important general features of the world. But Rorty is dramatically off the mark in his assessment of Shusterman’s idea, something which becomes clear as soon as we realize that the genealogy of somaesthetics leads us back in time to the philosophical enterprise which Alexander Baumgarten presented in his seminal Aesthetica. It is obviously a well-known historical fact that the latter’s aesthetics does not have much in common with the discipline that is currently denoted by that term, being an inquiry into “sensory knowledge” (that is, a part of epistemology) rather than a study of “art and natural beauty” (PA 264). But what is less known – and what Shusterman puts much stress on – is that, in contrast to contemporary epistemological projects, Aesthetica does not limit itself to producing an objective description of the mechanisms of the senses and attempts, too, at developing a way by which their use in “common life” could become more efficient. Approving this general idea of Baumgarten’s edifice, Shusterman nevertheless complains that it was spoiled by the former’s failing to recognize the role of “cultivation of the body” in functioning of the senses; a mistake whose clear symptom is that while Aesthetica offers (under the label of “exercitatio aesthetica”) some concrete solutions as how to improve the sensual aspect of our cognition, none of these actually engages the body nor demands physical effort.15 This is most probably because Baumgarten seems to associate such activities with various “somatic evils like … orgies” (which attitude Shusterman explains partly with Baumgarten’s relations to Pietism),16 and also because his philosophy belongs to the paradigm of rationalism, which sees “the body … as a mere machine,” thereby introducing an unbridgeable gap between the latter and all the 14

15

16

And hence aesthetics in his texts is promoted to the rank of a “first philosophy” (even if he perceives the “firstness” of this philosophy in an unorthodox manner). See Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, trans. Andrew Inkpin (London: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 47. Shusterman refers to the following edition of Aesthetica: Alexander Baumgarten, Theoretische Ästhetik: Die grundlengenden Abschnitte aus der “Aesthetica” (1750/58), trans. H.R. Schweizer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988), cited in PA. Cf. Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, pp. 3-13; and Leonard P. Wessell, Jr., “Alexander Baumgarten’s Contribution to the Development of Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 30, No. 3 (1972), pp. 333-42. A “background” Baumagarten shared with Kant, whose views of corporeality are famously colored by a similar uneasiness.

148

Chapter 4

processes (sensual cognition included) that characterize the “mental substance” which animates it (PA 266). Yet in urging his proposal of a new philosophical discipline that might remedy the deficiencies of Baumgarten’s project, Shusterman does not rely merely on the power of historical examples (and let me mention that the thinkers whom he considers to be precursors of somaesthetics include, among others, John Dewey and Michel Foucault). For he also argues that it presents a fruitful approach to the traditional philosophical problems pertaining to ethics, political theory, epistemology, and many others,17 which fruitfulness is supposed to lie primarily in that somaesthetics rescues philosophy from the safe, but ultimately stuffy and narrow, confines of the academic discourse and re-connects it with the spheres of ordinary life. As far as ethical matters are concerned, e.g., Shusterman’s approach is animated by his conviction that the body is our primary “instrument” in ethical practice, and that therefore somatic care becomes our “duty”; for “if we value and want to achieve the end, then we must equally respect the best means to secure that end (provided, of course, that there is nothing objectionable about those means).”18 Moreover, Shusterman conceives corporeality as the site where our basic moral convictions and our self-perception as ethical subjects are shaped,19 and stresses that given the somatic rootedness of the affects that determine our “behavior toward others,” (BC 25) we may try to influence them by attending to our bodies themselves: strengthening those of these attitudes that are positive, such as empathy, and eradicating those condemnable, say, racial prejudices.20 The above issues belong, of course, to the pragmatic branch of somaesthetics, which, given the perspective of this book, shall be my main concern in this chapter. But, as we already know, somaesthetics does not reject typical academic approaches to the body, engaging in them through its analytic explorations, and some of the latter need to be addressed first as they form the theoretical underpinnings of more pragmatic somaesthetic pursuits.

17 18

19 20

See, e.g., Richard Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 40, No. 1 (2006), pp. 1-21. Shusterman, “Pragmatism and East-Asian Thought,” p. 26. Cf. PP 41. Even more generally, the body is “also the basic instrument of all human performance, our tool of tools, a necessity for all our perception, action, and even thought. Just as skilled builders need expert knowledge of their tools, so we need better somatic knowledge to improve our understanding and performance in the arts and human sciences and to advance our mastery in the highest art of all – that of perfecting our humanity and living better lives.” Shusterman, “Thinking through the Body,” p. 2 (emphasis added). Shusterman, “Thinking through the Body,” p. 5. More on this shall be said in the next section of this Chapter.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

149

Analytic somaesthetics Let me begin, therefore, with a general theory of the body that can be distilled from Shusterman’s works, and which has been inspired mainly by John Dewey’s naturalism. Being basically a marriage of Darwin with Hegel, Dewey’s conception deems the human mind, biologically, an adaptive tool that emerged in the process of evolution as a function of neurological system, yet it adds to this picture a strong ontological claim that there are actually no such entities as body and mind (if we understand them to be two separate “things”) but rather one “bodymind” (PA 280).21 Thus, for Dewey and Shusterman alike, the body ceases to be mere inert matter, or mute flesh, becoming instead a “soma,” i.e., something that is lived by, and lives, us; something which we “think through”; or – as William James has put it in his trademark metaphorical and robust style – something that constitutes “the storm centre, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in [our] experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view.”22 Such theses surely distinguish Shusterman’s naturalism from various biological reductionisms, from which it is also separated by its insistence on the cultural dimensions of human embodiment. For Shusterman stresses that just as how our bodies look and smell is determined by cultural factors,23 so is the case with our bodily experiences24 and habits, which implies that they are far from universal, politically neutral, or unchangeable, and can (sometimes indeed must) be transformed if we are unsatisfied by them.25 Another important aspect of Shusterman’s 21

22 23

24

25

See, e.g., John Dewey, Logic, p. 32; cf. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature; Thomas M. Alexander, “Dewey, Dualism, and Naturalism,” in: A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 18492; Rorty, “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin”; and Robert B. Brandom, “When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment,” boundary 2, No. 2 (2002), p. 5. William James, “The Experience of Activity,” in: Essays in Radical Empirism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 86; cited in BC 135. Suffice it to mention the simple fact that, as feminist scholars point out, today’s supposedly “natural” look of the female body (with its depilated legs, for instance) is a “construct” of modern patriarchal civilization. For more on this subject see, e.g., Women’s Bodies: Cultural Representation and Identity, ed. Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw (London: Continuum, 1999). For it is culture that “shape[s] … the ways we experience our body: whether as a holy vessel or a burden of sinful flesh, a pampered personal possession for private pleasure or a vehicle of labor to serve the social good.” Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body,” p. 3. Consider, e.g., Shusterman’s remarks about the cultural aspects of gustative habits: “Already in the womb, one’s tastes are being culturally shaped by the foods, odours, sounds, movement rhythms of one’s cultural environment, which of course includes the physical culture of the mother’s body. It is part of our human nature to have, and to require for our survival, an acquired cultural second nature. We may be evolutionarily programmed to like fatty, salty,

150

Chapter 4

naturalism is that by embodying the “subject,” it nullifies the chasm allegedly gaping between the latter and “external world,” and construes both as intimately connected in primary experience (which has the character of “interaction” or “transaction”). But even though the body, in this sense, assures us that we are never entirely separated from die Dinge an sich, it also prevents us from perceiving them as they really are, the reason being that due to the body’s necessary “spatiotemporal location” and its various cultural and biological specificities that inflect our perception, we can never achieve what Stanley Fish mockingly, and oxymoronically, calls “universal perspective.”26 This, however, is not something Shusterman would be worried about, and which would cause him to attempt to escape this condition by making gestures in Baron Münchhausen’s vein, as he is instead interested in things more mundane than such abstract epistemological matters. I have already hinted at what these mundane things are, and will say more about them soon, but for now let me stress that we need to keep in mind that the most important feature of Shusterman’s naturalism is the assumption that human nature is characterized by two basic unities: the psychosomatic and culturalbiological, and that it is on these unities that are founded his pragmatic somaesthetic conceptions.27 Yet however uncontroversial the latter unity might look to today’s philosophy, Shusterman is well aware that the former of them cannot be made into a sound foundation of any philosophical enterprise until some objections to it are dismissed. What I mean here specifically is that •

26 27 28

Shusterman’s main somaesthetic concern is how we might improve the quality of our lives by submitting our body consciousness to introspection28; and sweet foods, but these basic preferences are very differently inflected or expressed through different eating habits, and these biological predilections themselves must have also been partly shaped by the physical culture and ways of living of our evolutionary ancestors rather than by pure body mechanics.” Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime,” pp. 338-9. See Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 11. Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body,” p. 7-8. Wojciech Małecki, “Somatoestetyka i normy ciała” [Somaesthetics and Body Norms], Kultura Współczesna, No. 1 (2009), p. 13. And what he means by body consciousness here are our “explicitly conscious bodily sensations.” To be more exact, “conscious, explicit experiential perceptions of our body … include distinct feelings observations, visualizations and other mental representations of our body and its parts, surfaces and interiors … Among these … we can distinguish between those dominated by our more external or distance senses (like seeing, hearing, etc.) and those more dependent on more internal body senses such as proprioception or kinaesthetic feelings. I can consciously sense the position of my hand by looking at it and noting its orientation, but I can also close my eyes and try to sense its position by proprioceptively feeling its relation to my other body parts, to the force of gravity, to other objects in my field of experience. Such explicit proprioceptive perceptions can be regarded as somaesthetic per-

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics •

151

and that this idea might be found problematic indeed, even in philosophies as attentive to the lived body as the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is.

The latter in fact explicitly rejects what Shusterman calls “reflective somatic perception with explicit awareness” – which is fundamental for somatic introspection29 – arguing, among other things, that (a) our reflection on “somatic experience” always imposes on it all kinds of artificial “categories and conceptual distinctions,” thereby producing a distorted picture thereof (BC 65)30; and that (b) it is impossible for the body to “be at the same time the object of an observation” and “the observing subject of experience” (a claim which Merleau-Ponty tries to support by pointing to the fact that when we, e.g., touch one of our hands with the other, it is not the case that we then feel the hand touching some external “object” since the hand that is touched is a touching hand, too (cf. BC 71-2)).31 Shusterman, in a manner characteristic to himself, attacks the former argument by undermining the vision of philosophy’s tasks it presumes. He claims that even though it is true that reflective body consciousness can never fully render the

29

30 31

ceptions par excellence, because they are not only somaesthetic by invoking mindful aesthetsis or discriminating, thematized perception, but also by relying essentially on the somaesthetic sensory system rather than our teleceptors” (BC 53). As Shusterman argues, “through systematic practice of somaesthetic awareness … [our] proprioceptive consciousness can … provide a sharper and fuller picture of our body shape, volume, density, and alignment without using our external senses” (BC 53-4). Note that from now on I shall be using the terms “bodily introspection,” “somatic introspection” and “somaesthetic introspection” synonymously. This “level [of somatic consciousness] is very important in somatic disciplines of body-mind attunement. Here we are not only conscious of what we perceive as an explicit object of our awareness but we are also mindfully conscious of this focused consciousness as we monitor our awareness of the object of our awareness through its representation in our consciousness ... On this level we will be aware not simply that [for instance] our breath is short or even precisely how we are breathing (say, rapidly and shallowly from the throat or in stifled snorts from the diaphragm); we will also be aware of how our self-consciousness of breathing influences our ongoing breathing and attentive awareness and related feelings” (BC 56). See, e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 138, cf. pp. 78, 89. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , p. 93, 198; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 9, 147-8. Actually, one might argue that Merleau-Ponty’s argument is more complicated than it would appear from Shusterman’s summarization thereof which I have presented above. Moreover, Jack Reynolds observes that although “Merleau-Ponty suggests that this difference between touching and being touched reveals a fundamental divergence within the body, … it is not such that it prohibits an overall grasp of the body.” Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), p. 63. Cf. Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 187.

152

Chapter 4

nature of our somatic experience, this consciousness can well serve a different aim – for instance, that of enhancing such an experience – and, after all, there is no good reason for adequate description to be the only aim worthy of philosophy, or at least this is what the pragmatists say (see BC 66). The counterargument leveled against premise (b) is a bit more intricate. To be exact, in his counterattack, Shusterman invokes the Jamesian conception of a “specious present,” according to which our perception of each “now” is de facto heterogeneous since it must preserve in itself the trace of the moment that this “now” is directly preceded by.32 This idea, then, allows Shusterman to indicate that one “can simultaneously have experiences of touching and being touched … even if that [meant that] the prime focus of our attention … vacillate[s] rapidly between two perspectives within the very short duration of time we phenomenologically identify as the present” (BC 72). Such is Shusterman’s response to the charge that somatic introspection is impossible or inherently flawed, but he must also face arguments which claim that, however possible, bodily introspection is in fact inadvisable since rather than improving our psychosomatic condition, it constitutes a serious threat to it. He must do so all the more because they have been formulated by some of the most iconic thinkers of Western philosophy, including Immanuel Kant33 and (what is quite “surprising” for Shusterman) his fellow-pragmatist William James. And since it is to the latter’s position that Shusterman primarily devotes his critical attention, I will limit myself here to discussing James.34 When Shusterman conceives James’s negative assessment of somatic introspection as surprising, he does so not merely because the latter is known to be a philosopher and psychologist deeply interested in human corporeality, but also because he, as Shusterman notes, bequeathed us with numerous interesting and 32

33

34

Cf. James’s famous discussion of our experience of the sound of thunder: “Does not a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain? No; for even into our awareness of the thunder the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-uponsilence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of silence as just gone …” William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), p. 26. In this context, Shusterman refers specifically to: Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 17, and The Contest of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 187-9. As far as some other historical criticisms of somatic introspection are concerned, Shusterman points also to the neo-Platonic tradition. See, e.g., Richard Shusterman, “Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents,” Philosophy of Education Archive (2009), pp. 25-6, http: //ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/pes/article/view/1432/179 (accessed October 10, 2009). I feel justified in doing so particularly because James’s ideas on somatic introspection chime in many respects with the respective views of Kant.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

153

potentially useful observations concerning this form of attending to our bodily feelings, not to mention the fact that he considered bodily introspection as a valuable instrument in psychological research.35 Why, then, did he reject the idea of “develop[ing] his insights into practical ways of deploying [somatic introspection] for enhancing our performance in the wider world of action” (BC 165)? One important reason for this might be related to how James understood the nature of “our performance in the wider world of action” indeed. Namely, as he argued, when we use our bodies to perform a given action, we usually do not have to consciously think about what the body is doing, let alone to scrutinize how it feels,36 just as (allow me the following simple analogy) while riding on a bike we do not have to monitor the workings of its mechanism. Actually, the example of the bike can be helpful in stressing that according to James it is not merely that we do not have to attend to our body while performing an action, but we should not do so – because just as explicitly attending to our bike would make us unable to concentrate on reaching a desired destination, so probing our body consciousness would surely divert our attention from any goal we might want to reach through our (bodily) action.37 Therefore, when nature equipped us with all sorts of “automatisms” and unconscious habits that coordinate the movement of our bodies, it did so for a good reason, and we should rather stick to them instead of trying to correct her in this regard (BC 165-6).38 Furthermore, James seems to worry, just as Kant did before him, that indulging in somatic introspection can transform one into a “hypochondriac” and believes that it “would … destroy the energies, spontaneity, and positive attitude he considered crucial for success in practical life” (BC169).39 To such worries Shusterman replies that James’s cautious attitude toward somatic introspection is not only ungrounded, but may in fact be harmful to what it seeks to secure, i.e., effective bodily action. For it happens quite “often” that “our [unconscious bodily] habits” are in fact “inadequate” to our actions and/or have a destructive effect on our health. Thus, although they may serve us for some time, it would be more beneficial for us in the long run to correct them, something for which studying our bodily feelings seems indispensable, as Shusterman explains by referring to a very concrete body action:

35 36 37 38 39

Shusterman means here mainly William James’s, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), e.g., pp. 185, 381-2, 395, 400, 430, 475. See James, The Principles of Psychology, e.g., p. 1108. See James, The Principles of Psychology, p. 1128. See James, The Principles of Psychology, p. 126. William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” in: Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some Life’s Ideals (New York: Dover, 1962), pp. 99-100, 103-5, 107, 109. Cited in BC 168-9. Cf. Randall D. Wight, “More Than Mere Weather: James’s Talks to Students About Life,” Teaching of Psychology, 30, No. 1 (2003), p. 38-40.

154

Chapter 4 Though a batter should bat best when his attention is fixed on the ball and not on his own body, a slumping batter may discover (sometimes through an observant coach) that the way he places his feet and grips his toes, or the way he too tightly clenches the bat, puts him off balance or inhibits movement in the rib cage and spine, and thus disturbs his swing and impairs his vision of the ball. At this point, conscious attention must be directed to the batter’s own body and somatic feelings so that he can recognize the bad habits of stance and swing, inhibit them, and then consciously transform his posture, grip, and movement until a new, more effective habit of swinging the bat is established. Once it is established, then focused attention to these bodily means and sensations of swinging can be relinquished to sink back into the unattended background so that the batter can focus wholly on the ball he aims to hit. Nonetheless, since his very skill of somaesthetic awareness has itself also been reinforced by this exercise of introspection, it can be reapplied with greater ease and power in future cases where his habits prove inadequate, including a relapse into the earlier habit he has just corrected (BC 168).

Besides the allegedly necessarily negative impact of somatic introspection on the efficiency of our actions, James is also wrong40 – which is again surprising for a fine psychologist and discerning expert on the nuances of human emotions that he was – when it comes to its effects on our mental attitudes. For it is certainly not the case that delving deep into our corporeal sensations equals, as he seems to suggest, descending into the well of negativity and giving in to the sicknesses of the soul known as acedia and aboulia. To prove this, Shusterman cites “scientific research in psychology and neurophysiology” to the effect that exercises in somatic awareness may even counteract “symptoms of anxiety, depression, and panic,”41 and also refers to a lesson that he has brought from his personal practice of Zen meditation; i.e., that such forms contribute to nothing but the “strengthening 40

41

To give justice to James, however, one has to note that there is scientific “data [that] demonstrate[s] the benefits of relying on the automatic brain when playing a familiar sport. Sian Beilock [“a professor of psychology”] … found that when experienced golfers are forced to think about their putts, they hit significantly worse shots. All those conscious thoughts erase their years of practice. ‘We bring expert golfers into our lab, we tell them to pay attention to a particular part of their swing, and they just screw up,’ Beilock says. ‘When you are at a high level, your skills become somewhat automated. You don’t need to pay attention to every step in what you’re doing.’ This is what happens when people ‘choke’ [i.e., fail while “performing under pressure”]. The part of their brain that monitors their behaviour starts to interfere with actions that are normally made without thinking. Performers begin second guessing skills that they have honed through years of practice. The worst part about choking is that it tends to spiral. The failures build upon each other, so a stressful situation is made more stressful.” Jonah Lehrer, “How Science Can Save You from Choking,” The Observer, Sunday, July 26 (2009), http: //www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/jul/26/sports-psychologychoking (accessed October 20, 2009). I would like to thank David Wall for drawing my attention to this article. One of the studies referred to by Shusterman is, for instance, Jon Kabat-Zinn et al., “Effectiveness of Meditation-Based Stress Reduction Program in the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 149 (1992), pp. 936-43.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

155

of [one’s] volitional power” (BC 174).42 The latter advantage, argues Shusterman, stems from the fact that Zen’s somatic meditations allow one to acquire a better control of one’s mind,43 thanks to which one can also be able to dismiss the temptation of excessive rumination “that James and Kant feared” so much (BC 174). These, then, are Shusterman’s counterarguments against some general philosophical criticisms of somatic introspection, and through their relying on the force of examples of concrete bodily activities, they allow us to move smoothly to the pragmatic and practical branches of somaesthetics. Pragmatic and Practical Somaesthetics Although Shusterman often presents himself as an enemy of compartmentalizing and classifying, he does not hesitate to provide a classification of the bodily practices that are studied within the pragmatic branch somaesthetics, emphasizing, however, that he does so primarily for a heuristic reason and that the classes he discerns have a functional rather than “rigidly” ontological character. As to what hides behind this heuristic reason I shall yet return, but for now let me outline Shusterman’s classification by deploying to this end the phenomenon with which this chapter began, namely, breast augmentation. To what class, according to Shusterman, does this bodily practice belong, then? The answer is that mammoplasty can be subsumed under at least three somaesthetic classes as it is, firstly, an atomistic practice (i.e., a practice which concerns one specific part or dimension of the body)44; an “other-directed” one (in the sense that a “surgeon typically works on others” (PL 158)); but most importantly it belongs to what Shusterman calls “representational somaesthetics” (i.e., to the set of disciplines that seek to modify how the body presents itself to external observers, or spectators indeed).45 Moreover, each of these classes has its opposing classificatory pole and these are: holistic somatic practices (activities which, like tai chi chuan, cover the whole body, along with its various physiological processes and the psyche that inhabits it); “self-directed” practices (those that we perform on our bodies ourselves); and “experiential” somaesthetic practices, which, as Shusterman explains, prefer to focus on the aesthetic quality of its “inner” experience. Such experiential methods aim to make us “feel better” in both senses of this ambiguous phrase (which reflects the ambiguity of the very notion of aesthetics): to make the quality of our expe42 43

44 45

Cf. James H. Austin, Zen-Brain Reflections: Reviewing Recent Developments in Meditation and States of Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 29-33. After all, they teach us how to concentrate rigidly and “for … longer periods” on a single object (such as “one’s breathing”) against our “mind’s natural tendency to wander off” in an unruly way (BC 174). “Countless practices focus narrowly on particular body parts – stylizing the hair, painting the nails, shortening the nose, enlarging the breasts or biceps etc.” (PL 158). Let us take body building, for instance.

156

Chapter 4 rience more satisfyingly rich, but also to make our awareness of somatic experience more acute and perceptive (PA 272-3).

Given his concern with body consciousness, Shusterman is naturally interested most in that latter class, and he actually uses the distinction between it and its opposition in order to provide what he conceives as a more fine-grained analysis of the contemporary somatic culture than those that are usually presented in academic discourse, and also to propose an efficient antidote to that culture’s aberrations. Here, the example of MyFreeImplants.com can again be instructive as contemporary plastic surgery is often held by researchers in various fields in the humanities as an epitome of what I have called above the somatic turn.46 Significantly, it is also valued negatively and this assessment is then transferred, by means of a synecdochic association, onto the wider phenomenon to which it belongs. But why is plastic surgery valued negatively? Primarily because it is explained, and rightly so, as determined by all sorts of “oppressive” race- and gender-marked body norms that serve to sustain detrimental “social hierarchies” (such as that which defines the patriarchal society, for instance).47 Of course, besides plastic surgery, numerous other elements of the somatic turn have been considered equally complicit in this kind of ideological stratification of contemporary societies, and even the seemingly innocent activities such as using cosmetics or exercising have received their share of political criticism, too, beginning with the following sour words that date as far back as the 1940s, and come from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: the advertising posters for vitamin pills and skin creams … simply stand for the immanent aim of publicity: the new, great, beautiful, and noble type of man – the Führer and his storm troopers … Those who extolled the body above all else, the gymnasts

46

47

“Cosmetic surgery stands, for many theorists and social critics, as the ultimate invasion of the human body for the sake of physical beauty. It epitomizes the astounding lengths to which contemporary women will go to obtain bodies that meet current ideals of attractiveness.” Debra L. Gimlin, Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 75. BC 28. Cf. the following remark by Susan Bordo: “Are diverse ethnic and racial styles of beauty asserting their ‘differences’ through such surgery? Far from it. Does anyone in this culture have his or her nose reshaped to look more ‘African’ or ‘Jewish’? Cher is typical here; her various surgeries have gradually replaces a strong, decidedly (if indetereminately) ‘ethnic’ look with a much more symmetrical, delicate, Anglo-Saxon version of beauty.” Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 25. See also Bordo, Twilight Zones, pp. 42-7, and Virginia L. Blum, Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 57, 62-1.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

157

and scouts, always had the closest affinity with killing ... They see the body as a moving mechanism, with joints as its components and flesh to cushion the skeleton.48

When Shusterman refers to the above words in one of his earlier somaesthetic essays (see PL 160), he does so mainly to pinpoint what is missing from this and analogous accounts of the Western world’s obsession with corporeality. Namely, a recognition of the presence and value of experiential somaesthetic practices; an omission which is all the more unfortunate as it is in these methods that lies the germ of a positive solution to the current problems of somatic turn. For let us think for a moment how we could solve them. Could we, for instance, try to uproot the images of bodily beauty that are disseminated in advertisements, movies, music videos, etc. by monitoring and influencing the media? That seems hardly possible. So maybe instead of trying to silence the media we could compete with them by unfolding a social campaign whose aim would be to openly condemn the body norms in question, or even the whole fixation on corporeality we seem to suffer from? (see PL 151). Such measures also could not work for they would with all probability be rejected by its addressees as “retrograde” preaching in the vein of St. Paul’s “their God is their stomach” (Philippians 3:1719). Shusterman’s answer, then, is to channel our culture’s pursuit of corporeality, which he has nothing against in itself, into the direction of experiential somaesthetics since, as he thinks, thereby we could neutralize the harmful bodily stereotypes without at the same time engaging in a dubious ascetic rhetoric. And we could neutralize them, his argument goes, because by being essentially “individual” the bodily feelings and sensations which experiential somaesthetics operates on (and which would, in his project, substitute the bodily stereotypes of representational somaesthetics) do not submit to “external” normativization, or at least do so less easily than the latter (PL 152).49 Now, all this might certainly seem even more fantastical and unfeasible than the two solutions I mentioned earlier, but Shusterman points out that since experiential techniques are already quite popular, and become increasingly so, our task would basically boil down to supporting an already existing tendency. And since the term “experiential techniques” may still sound a bit vague, let me recall that Shusterman means here the well-known practices like “Zen meditation” or “Western therapies of Alexander Technique” and Feldenkrais Method (PL 152, cf. PL

48 49

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1986), p. 235; cited in PL 160. “People could be encouraged to transfer their concern for the external shape and attractiveness of the body to an improved qualitative feeling of its lived experience and functioning. Since we are speaking here of an individual’s felt improvement, there is no fixed external standard, no stereotypical representation, of what good or improved body feeling might be” (PL 152).

158

Chapter 4

158-80; BC 20, 108-9).50 It is also worth noting that Shusterman himself is a certified instructor of the latter therapy (see BC 25), which he describes as dedicated to “mak[ing] one aware of the plurality of ways certain actions can be performed.” Feldenkrais Method, he explains further, “allow[s] one to sense their qualitative differences and learn to choose the most effective [of these] ways” through activities such as Awareness Through Movement, which, in turn, “is a set of slow and gentle exercises involving different alignments and movements of trunk and limbs (some of them slightly resembling yoga) aimed at heightening somatic awareness” (PL 178).51 So now that we know something more about what model experiential techniques are, let us take a closer look at Shusterman’s idea that due to bodily experiences’ being to a considerable extent immunized against external normativization, substituting them for practices of representational somaesthetics might contribute to the eradication of oppressive somatic stereotypes. Interestingly, Shusterman himself suggests a way to undermine this idea by providing, in one of his essays on Foucault, the evidence that such a normativization is not only possible, but is in fact one of the gravest problems we face today. The road that leads Shusterman to this conclusion begins with his analysis of Foucault’s project of “desexualization of pleasure,” by which the latter meant, basically, freeing our notion of the pleasurable from its rigid associations with “genital sex” (BC 32-3).52 As Shusterman observes, even though the ultimate effect Foucault hoped for was the unleashing of a “polymorphism of pleasure,” the measure he undertook to 50

51

52

For a concise and clear account of these body practices, see, e.g., Joel Ziff, “The Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique,” in: Blackwell Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Fast Facts for Medical Practice, ed. Mary A. Herring and Molly Manning Roberts (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Science, 2002), pp. 47-54 (this entry contains also a very useful bibliography on the subject). Let me add that besides their therapeutic use, these somatic techniques are sometimes employed in actor and dance training; see, e.g., Sondra Fraleigh, “Consciousness Matters,” Dance Research Journal, 32, No. 1 (2000), pp. 54-62. As Shusterman emphasizes, the “exercises called Awareness Through Movement … are properly given by a teacher to a group of students … The teacher gives verbal instructions to guide the movement and awareness but does not manipulate the body. There is, however, a second Feldenkrais practice that does involve hands-on treatment by the teacher who, by observing and manipulating the student’s body (typically reclined on a padded table), discovers the problematic peculiarities of the student’s neuromotor functioning and then makes the student aware of them, ‘along with alternative ways of controlling the motor functions’” (PL 178-9). The fragment cited by Shusterman comes from Yochanan Rywerant’s, The Feldenkrais Method: Teaching by Handling (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. xix. According to Timothy O’Leary, “What S/M represents for Foucault, is a creative response to the space of freedom that opens up as soon as one rejects the modes of behaviour which the modern discourse of sexuality would impose.” Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 162. As we have seen, in Shusterman’s interpretation, Foucault’s sadomasochism, rather than being a response to such a space, is actually a way of opening it.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

159

achieve it (namely, sadomasochistic sex) was suspiciously mono-morphic (BC 33).53 And the point here is not merely that the popular fantasy of S/M’s creativity and diversity (perhaps best epitomized, in mass imagination, by acrobatically tangled limbs and the multitudinous devices of mysterious use portrayed in illustrations to de Sade’s works), is belied by its actual practice, which ultimately comes down to a narrow set of staged, clichéd, and bland rituals (see BC 34). Rather, it is that Foucault’s choice of sadomasochistic sex reflected, on the one hand, his fixation on a particular kind of pleasure (i.e., a very intense one that approaches limitexperience)54 and, on the other, his repudiation as not worthwhile of all the pleasures that do not match such intensity. Now, this attitude surely does not even resemble recognizing, let alone promoting, the diversity of enjoyments, especially when one considers the fact that in “everyday life” we are surrounded by myriad forms of “mild” pleasure, such as “gladness, contentment, pleasantness, amusement, merriment … diversion, entertainment, titillation, fun, and so forth” (BC 37).55 And even though the expression “everyday life” might suggest that Foucault is exceptional in his approach, this is actually not the case. For, as Shusterman concludes, the latter’s “problem,” which at the end of the day consists in the inability to feel pleasure unless it is of radical, excessive intensity, in fact constitutes a condition that is shared by most of the inhabitants of today’s western cultures and can be characterized as follows: First is the pervasive devastating dichotomy drawn between the allegedly meaningless body pleasure of everyday life (unimaginatively identified with food and drink) and those truly significant pleasures defined by their violent intensity and identified with transgressive drugs and sex … [But] The persistent demand for extreme intensities threatens not merely to reduce the range of our felt pleasures but even to dull our affective acuity, our very capacity to feel our bodies with real clarity, precision, and power ... [being] a recipe for increasing dissatisfaction and difficulty in achieving pleasure ... (BC 37-9)

What is more, and what is important for me here, such tendencies, according to Shusterman, are mere inflections of the “late capitalist … unquestioned economic imperative of ever-increasing growth [which] … promotes an unquestioned de53

54 55

“The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure [which] is the root of all our possible pleasure. I think that’s something quite wrong. These practices [i.e., S/M] are insisting that we can produce pleasures with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations and so on.” Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and Politics of Identity,” in: Foucault Live: (Interviews, 1966-84), trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 384; cited in BC 32. See, e.g., Martin Jay, “The Limits of Limit Experience,” Constellations, 2, No. 2 (1995), pp. 155–74. Cf. Shusterman, “Entertainment,” pp. 302-5; and “Come Back to Pleasure”, in: Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures, ed. Philippe Vergne (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2000), pp. 33-47.

160

Chapter 4

mand for constantly greater stimulation, ever more speed and information, ever stronger sensations and louder music” (BC 39). Admittedly, it would be hard to deny the accuracy of this account, but it would be equally difficult to miss out its implying that, contrary to what Shusterman’s earlier argument seems to presume, bodily experiences are widely normativized, are so in a harmful way, and to the benefit of the capitalist industry, which leads us to the conclusion that substituting body images with body experiences will not in itself help to alleviate the general problems of the somatic turn.56 But to give Shusterman justice I should add that he at least suggests a potentially doable solution to the specific problem of our incapacity, or unwillingness, to recognize the value of non-extreme pleasures; a solution which again hangs on the advantages of experiential somaesthetic techniques. One such advantage, as we are assured by Shusterman, is that these disciplines contribute to “sharpening” our bodily perception, thereby enabling us to discover the often neglected as insufficiently extreme, yet still valuable, joys. For instance, “the endorphinenhanced glow of high-level cardiovascular functioning, the slow savoring awareness of improved deeper breathing, the tingling thrill of feeling into new parts of one’s spine” (PL 137), and many others which can be found in the mundane sphere of our existence. Of course, it might be said that their capacity to widen our “palette of pleasures” seems insufficient a reason to devote as much attention to experiential somaesthetic methods as Shusterman does, but I must add that there are still other reasons that have driven his interest in this direction, and they are specifically related to the role of corporeality in patriarchalism and racism. As far as the latter question is concerned, I would like to begin with an observation that while academic discourse pays much attention to how racist ideologies are disseminated or strengthened by discursive stereotypes of the other’s body, it largely, and wrongly, neglects the significance of somatic feelings in this

56

Cf. Cressida J. Heyes’ following criticism of Shusterman’s argument: “… although somaesthetic [experiential] techniques are a necessary form of resistance for normalized gendered bodies, as Shusterman and I agree, it becomes increasingly difficult in a culture that sells every technology as a form of ‘creative self fashioning’ to know how to remain a step ahead of normalization, rather than desperately hanging from its coattails.” Cressida J. Heyes, Self Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 124-5. In this context, cf. also Slavoj Žižek’s general remark that “when we try to preserve the authentic intimate sphere of privacy against the onslaught of instrumental/objectivized ‘alienated’ public exchange, it is privacy itself that changes into a totally objectivized ‘commodified’ sphere. Withdrawal into privacy today means adopting formulas of private authenticity propagated by the modern culture industry—from taking lessons in spiritual enlightenment, and following the latest cultural and other fashions, to taking up jogging and bodybuilding.” Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), p. 38.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

161

regard.57 Of course, this is not to downplay the atrocious and devastating role played in, say, anti-Semitic propaganda, by descriptions of Jews as “dark, hairy, malodorous, unclean, and unhealthy” (BC 129) or, in colonial discourse, by literary portrayals of subalterns as savages whose bodies bear monstrous or animal features,58 but rather to highlight the fact that, as we can learn from Shusterman, no adequate account of, let alone antidote to, racist propaganda is possible that would not consider non-discursive corporeal sensations or experiences. Shusterman’s point is that in frequent cases our “hostility” toward the ethnic other has its roots in the “visceral feelings” of repulsion that are incited by such features of the other’s body as its characteristic smell, color of the skin, body posture, etc.,59 and that these feelings tend to go undetected by us because they work “beneath the level of explicit consciousness.”60 This obviously contributes to the fact that racism cannot be reduced to “an operation of discourse”61 or to a set of specific convictions concerning a given racial group, and thus can neither be opposed by mere discursive tactics (say, by demonstrating it to be incoherent or empirically incorrect, or by the introduction of speech codes). After all, one might be convinced into believing that there is no evidence that would prove a given race’s inferiority, yet still maintain a racist attitude toward it, driven by the somatic feelings or sensations that one is enthralled by (see BC 25). And here exactly does Shusterman see a task for experiential somaesthetics, thanks to whose techniques of enhancing body “awareness” one would be able – as he claims – to, first, discover in oneself such feelings and, then, try to monitor and curb them when necessary, so that they do not influence “our political judgment” (BC 130). Yet this is not the only option possible since we can also expel the undesired somatic affects from our bodies, given they are not an endowment of nature or God but rather something which we have acquired

57

58 59

60 61

Shusterman’s somaesthetic account of racism comes from Chapter 4 of Body Consciousness, entitled “Wittgenstein’ Somaesthetics: Explanation and Melioration in Philosophy of Mind, Art, and Politics” (see BC 112-34). An earlier version of the essay appeared in: The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Cressida J. Heyes (Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 202-19. See, e.g., John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 29-30. “The fanatical kind of hatred or fear that some people have for certain races … does display a deep visceral quality, which suggests that such enmity may reflect profound concerns about the integrity and purity of the familiar body in a given culture. Such anxieties can be unconsciously translated into hostility toward foreigners who challenge that familiar body and threaten its corruption through ethnic and cultural mixing that can alter the body in both external appearance and behavior” (BC 128). Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body,” p. 4. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, “Introduction: The Textuality of Empire,” in: De-Scribing Empire, ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3.

162

Chapter 4

through “learning” and which we can “transform” in the same way – and in this aspect, too, we can be helped by various methods of body work.62 If in the case of racism Shusterman is concerned with the oppressor’s bodily feelings, then when it comes to patriarchalism, his attention turns to the body consciousness of the oppressed or subjugated; but before I elaborate on this, let me add a word on the genesis of Shusterman’s somaesthetic explorations in feminism. Unsurprisingly, topics such as the imprinting of the patriarchic ideology in women’s bodies have appeared in his essays on somaesthetics from the very inception of the discipline,63 yet it was only after he saw his somaesthetic ideas refracted through feminist philosophy64 that he decided to devote a separate study to gender issues. The result was an essay on Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, initially published in the journal Hypatia65 and praised for its “interesting” interpretation of this cornerstone of second-wave feminism.66 Yet what Shusterman aimed for in writing the piece was not a novel reading in itself but rather employing a critique of Beauvoir’s stance to outline some concrete strategies of furthering the feminist cause. Unfortunately, the limited space does not allow me to give full justice to

62

63

64

65

66

“Disciplines of somaesthetic training can … reconstruct our attitudes and habits of feeling and also give us greater flexibility and tolerance to different kinds of somatic feeling and behavior. This is a commonplace of gastronomy, athletics, and somatic therapies” (BC 130). Nota bene, Shusterman indicates that these disciplines can be helpful in fighting not only the somatic “basis” of racism, but also of “homophobia” and even of “habitual reaction[s] of anxiety” toward all kinds of school subjects (mathematics, for instance). See BC 131 and Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Education,” p. 57. Already in one of the first somaesthetic essays published in English, Shusterman emphasized that “entire ideologies of domination can … be covertly materialized and preserved by encoding them in somatic norms that, as bodily habits, typically get taken for granted and therefore escape critical consciousness. For example, the presumptions that ‘proper’ women speak softly, stay slim, eat dainty foods, sit with their legs close together, assume the passive role or lower position in (heterosexual) copulation are embodied norms that sustain women’s social disempowerment while granting them full official liberty.” Richard Shusterman “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999), p. 303-4. See Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), especially Chapter 5, entitled “Transactional Somaesthetics: Nietzsche, Women, and the Transformation of Bodily Experience,” pp. 112-32. See Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and The Second Sex: A Pragmatist Reading of a Feminist Classic,” Hypatia, 18 (2003), pp. 106-36. A modified and expanded version of the essay later became Chapter 3 (entitled “Somatic Subjectivities and Somatic Subjugation: Simone de Beauvoir on Gender and Aging”) of Shusterman’s Body Consciousness (see BC 77-111). Peg Brand and Mary Deveraux, “Introduction: Feminism and Aesthetics,” Hypatia, 18, No. 4 (2003), p. xiv.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

163

Shusterman’s vast and intricate discussions,67 but let me stress that his main quarrel with Beauvoir is that while she rightly advocated the use of various bodily practices (from fashion to sport) for widening the scope of women’s emancipation,68 she at the same time had a negative approach, at least in this respect, toward the techniques of experiential somaesthetics, convinced that instead of “empowering” women they are in fact bound to condemn them to an even deeper sense of powerlessness (BC 80). Why would she think that? – this is the question that Shusterman asks before revealing why her views are erroneous, and let us now try to follow him in answering it. To begin with, one needs to notice that there is a certain fissure in Beauvoir’s conception of the human body since she describes it in some places as “the radiation of subjectivity,”69 while in still others she deems it, in a “Sartrian” manner, inert matter or être-en-soi (BC 80). The latter view is then coupled in The Second Sex with Beauvoir’s observations that in our culture, women’s somatic activity is directed not, as is the case with men, outside of their bodies – to the wider world, but at those bodies, which situation could be exemplified, for instance, by the fact that from their early childhood onwards women obsessively focus on their bodily feelings, studying vigilantly the physiological processes that take place inside them (see BC 93-4). This inwardness, Beauvoir contends, is far from innocent as it significantly contributes to women’s subjugated status in patriarchal societies, where they are denied certain jobs, positions, and roles on the premise they simply cannot perform or maintain them, being too “passive” and “sensitive,” something with which women often agree as this is actually how they perceive themselves.70 Indeed, how can one ever “function … successfully in the public and economic world” if one constantly concentrates on what one’s body feels instead of using that body for achieving desired purposes (BC 94)?71 And how could one change this attitude by means of the activities that Shusterman 67

68 69

70

71

It should be noted that in this essay Shusterman interrogates not only the work of Beauvoir but also of other feminist thinkers, including Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young. See, e.g., BC 90. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 53, 262, 333. Cited in BC 86-7. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 267. As Shusterman points out, this perspective is convergent with “Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology” and conceives of the body as “not a merely material thing but the positive, enabling, instrumental situation of our grasping and having a world” (BC 80). “Beauvoir seems to be arguing that by improving their awareness of bodily experience, women would be reinforcing their passivity and withdrawal from the world into immanence as well as underlining the very dimension of their being (namely, bodily experience) that most expresses their oppression. Being identified with the body and the passive interiority of its feelings, women find it more difficult to assert themselves in the public world of action and intellectual projects” (BC 97). See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 697, 702-3.

164

Chapter 4

subsumes under the notion of experiential somaesthetics if their substance is exactly what constitutes the core of the problem, i.e., being attentive to one’s bodily feelings? This brief summary of Beauvoir’s position should make it clear that, from Shusterman’s perspective, she makes an error similar to that of William James’s which has been discussed above. It is thus hardly surprising that the response which Shusterman gives to her might sound familiar. Namely, while Shusterman agrees that for the time of engaging in somatic introspection one naturally “withdraws” from “the public world” and cannot effectively perform many bodily actions, he emphasizes that this would only be a problem if such an introspection was the sole, or main, thing one spent one’s life on, something which he surely does not advocate (see BC 96). What he in fact advocates, as we know, is the idea that, when applied reasonably, exercises in experiential somaesthetics can improve our actions in the “external world” – also when it comes to those actions that women find themselves unfit to perform because of the influence of patriarchal culture. If, for instance, women are discouraged from using physical violence and do not employ it all, as a result feeling too clumsy to do so even when they need to defend themselves, then that feeling will not be eradicated but rather strengthened by a mere attempt to finally act differently. What is more, even if a woman decides to take up self-defense classes, these might prove insufficient, too, since through the years of cultural training she has developed a certain set of unconscious bodily habits that hamper her performance, remaining at the same time either undetectable to her or, even if detected, are incorrigible by standard methods. What she needs in both situations, just like the batter who has been mentioned above, is experiential techniques, thanks to which she will be able to reeducate her body in the direction she finds desirable. But making her more efficient and bold in her bodily actions is not the only way by which experiential somaesthetics can widen the scope of the woman’s freedom as it in fact also gives her a very specific advantage over the man, who, usually perceiving himself as a transcendent intelligence, tends to neglect or downplay his being anchored in the flesh. Shusterman’s point is that by engaging in experiential practices the woman cultivates her awareness of the composite nature of human ontology, which embraces both mental and bodily elements, and thus (assuming that “blindness to our ontological condition is an obstacle to realizing true freedom”) she becomes freer than the man is (BC 95). This argument is surely far from uncontroversial (and I myself shall say something about it later), but it, just like the rest of Shusterman’s arguments that have been discussed above, constitutes an adequate illustration of what pragmatic somaesthetics is about. By way of recalling and summing up, then, pragmatic somaesthetics is an attempt to couple philosophical reflection with observations, data, and methods borrowed from other disciplines (from gender studies through cultural anthropology

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

165

and neurology to somatic therapies) in order to propose some concrete bodily measures that might improve the quality of our embodied lives. In this section, I have concentrated only on those aspects which belong to the sphere of politics or ethics, yet it must be said that Shusterman’s own explorations in pragmatic somaesthetics concern other dimensions of human existence as well. For instance, when it comes to art, Shusterman emphasizes that somaesthetics might not only contribute to various theoretical debates that galvanize the field of philosophical aesthetics, such as that concerning the so-called artistic truth, but also positively influence our actual reception of artworks, and that both these possibilities are related to the role of bodily feelings in aesthetic experience. As far as the first issue is concerned, one can say this role is usually neglected in the discussions over the factors which determine “art’s special cognitive contribution,” i.e., its power to instill in us strong beliefs about the world, and that this is a serious mistake since somatic feelings constitute one of the most important of such factors. For among the truths conveyed by a poem, play, painting, or a sculpture, it is only those which succeed in arousing our bodily sensations that can possess “appeal and sticking power,” in contrast to those which, failing to do so, appear to us as strained or artificial.72 It is understandable, then, that with its interdisciplinary attitude and focus on body consciousness somaesthetics seems a perfect approach to explore this issue. But it can do more than that: namely, it is also able to make us more perceptive toward such sensations, which increased perceptivity might in turn translate into an improved aesthetic experience of art. If this sounds unconvincing, consider the fact that what we usually call aesthetic sensitivity involves not only tracing the meanders of the poet’s thought or spotting the hidden allusions the work contains, but also responding to the work with appropriate “flesh-and-blood” feelings. Now, more often than not our somatic consciousness is too “underdeveloped” for us to properly distinguish the penumbras and nuances between them. As a result, we tend to drive in the rut of aesthetic conventionalism, “identifying artistic feelings with the familiar kind of emotions (such as sadness, joy, melancholy, regret, etc.),” something which might be easily changed by somaesthetic techniques of heightening such consciousness (BC 125). Interestingly, according to Shusterman, a similar function can be performed by the very same techniques with regard to the art of thought known as philosophy, but in order for this to become clear, his general somaesthetic approach to philosophical methodology must be presented first. To this end, let me recall that at one point, in a moment of disciplinary critical self-consciousness, Shusterman complains that “we, philosophers” are “disembodied talking-heads” (PA 128), through which remark, however, he does not mean the usual self-flagellating point philosophers make, namely that “we are just talking and talking and nothing 72

Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime,” p. 325.

166

Chapter 4

comes out of it.” His intention is rather to stress that virtually all philosophers today, even those whose principal interest lies in the philosophy of the body, do not count their own bodies as their philosophical tools. That is, when they want to improve their philosophizing, they usually resort to training their logical skills, enriching their erudition through reading, or broadening their cultural horizons through travel, but fail to even think in this respect about caring for their corporeality, which approach reveals its unreasonableness as soon as we realize that, to put it bluntly, “thinking depends on the body’s health and requires its muscular contractions” (PL 140).73 As Shusterman underlines, for instance, the philosopher’s body might be troubled by “a chronic contraction of certain muscles” or other bodily ailments, which she might not even be aware of due to her insufficient body consciousness, but which at the same time can have a destructive impact on her thinking processes (PL 139).74 Such body-mind relations, of course, seem all too trivial but, from Shusterman’s perspective, we simply cannot afford to ignore their stubborn reality, given that what is at stake here is our philosophizing itself, including our most nontrivial ideas, which we might never come up with if our bodies prevent us from doing so. This, actually, is a good moment to turn, finally, to practical somaesthetics, but since dwelling on it in an abstract manner would smack of a performative contradiction (it is after all defined as working, instead of writing, on the body), let me confine myself here to some very brief remarks, following in this respect Shusterman himself (see PL 143-4). First of all, it is probably worth mentioning that the creator of somaesthetics indeed practices what he preaches, going in for Zen meditation as well as other bodily techniques. Secondly, in order to give a glimpse of what practical somaesthetics for philosophers (or generally for scholars in the humanities) looks like, I would like to cite a fragment of Shusterman’s ar-

73

74

As Jon Borowicz argues, “Philosophers typically give little attention to the activity of philosophy. Talk of ‘doing philosophy’ tends to direct attention either immediately to its products or to its logical methods. While this situation is not surprising given the academic institutionalization of inquiry, it is perhaps less justified in the case of philosophy which, because it claims no subject matter peculiarly its own, is characterized as an attitude of and toward thought.” In this context, Borowicz associates somaesthetics with “[t]wo recent philosophical developments – the philosophical practice movement and renewed attention to the concept of philosophy as a way of life” which are “noteworthy … for their enforcing attention to the body for our understanding of philosophical activity.” Borowicz, “The Body of a Philosopher,” p. 61. “Philosophy since Socrates has always recognized that physical ill health (through consequent organ malfunctioning or mental fatigue) is a major source of error. But therapies such as Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, and Reichian bioenergetics (like older Asian practices of hatha yoga and Zen meditation) go further by claiming to improve the acuity, health, and control of our mind and senses by cultivating heightened attention and mastery of their somatic functioning, while also freeing us from bodily habits and defects that tend to impair cognitive performance” (PL 139).

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

167

ticle where he recommends to his readers the following somaesthetic exercise, which consists in “scanning” one’s “somatic feelings.” This, I hope, will serve as an appropriate counterbalance to the often overly theoretical discussions of this chapter, and as good intermezzo between its main body and its conclusions. What are you aware of on the bodily level as you read these lines, and can you become more aware of your bodily position and feelings? Does your posture feel maximally comfortable for reading, or are there any tensions in your jaw, eyes, neck, chest, belly, hands or legs? If reading English is not very easy for you, you are likely to have extra tension in some place because of the special effort of concentration you are making. In making a special effort, we usually contract muscles beyond those necessary for making that effort; for instance, we often harden our jaw when we lift or push a heavy weight or when we force ourselves to do hard mental work, even if we neither lift the weight nor think with the jaw. Similarly, your effort of concentration in reading may involve unnecessary contractions and hardening of your rib cage, which constrains breathing. So are you breathing easy and comfortably, or is your breath more shallow and perhaps hurried, expressing your impatience to finish this task of reading? Are both feet resting calmly and firmly on the floor while you are reading? Does one foot (or part thereof) or one side of your body feel like it is bearing more of your weight than the other? Which part or which side? Is there any change of posture or breathing you think would make you feel more comfortable, and what deters you from making that change?75

4.3. Conclusions As I have already mentioned, in explaining the genealogy of somaesthetics, Shusterman refers to James’s idea of pragmatist philosophy being just an old wine in a new bottle, which idea was expressed in the latter’s classic lectures published as Pragmatism. But he might also use that book (although he chooses not to do so) in order to elucidate the reception of his disciplinary proposal as James presents there some famously insightful observations on how a novel theory makes its way on the intellectual market. To put it briefly, the usual pattern is that such a theory is initially met with incredulity and considered insane or absurd, and for this reason ridiculed or persecuted. “Then it is admitted true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”76 When James wrote these words, he thought that pragmatism itself was still on the first of these stages; when it comes to somaesthetics, in turn, one might say that it is now mutatis mutandis in a more fortunate position as it already approaches the third stage. For no more does one see attempts to “caricature” somaesthetics as, for instance, “something like whipping oneself while reading Kant, mountain-climbing while reading Nietzsche, and doing breathing exercises 75 76

Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Education,” p. 58. William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, p. 87.

168

Chapter 4

while reading Heidegger”77 (a charge of absurdity) or hear criticisms that it was already Nietzsche who “returned the aesthetic to the body and changed the tradition for ever”78 (a charge of obviousness). On the contrary, somaesthetics is now frequently hailed as “profoundly important” and “inspir[ing] philosophy to vital transformation,”79 and it indeed may happen that sometime soon somebody may want to hijack it. But – if I may supplement James’s account – the third, successful stage of the career of any idea always embraces something more; for it is exactly then that the idea begins to fully reveal its limitations, which need to be subsequently addressed by its sympathizers if it is to thrive. This, actually, is what I am going to do in the following pages, focusing on what seems to be one of somaesthetics’ greatest promises, but can also be its significant weakness. Namely, its interdisciplinarity and multidimensionality, or, simply put, its underlying ambition to bring together philosophy, empirical sciences, therapy, and political/social activism. To begin with, let me contrast Shusterman’s stance with a radically different approach espoused by Stanley Fish which claims that no such bringing together could ever be possible. From Fish’s perspective, then, the very idea of a discipline whose aim is to explore “the basic nature of our bodily perceptions and practices” and provide “structuring overview or architectonic to integrate … very different, seemingly incommensurable [academic] discourses [on the body] into a more productively systematic field” (PL 141) must seem anything but suspicious. For what gives Shusterman the a priori knowledge that disciplines as diverse as, e.g., physiology, cultural studies, and philosophy are only “seemingly” incommensurable? A certain answer might be suggested by those of his remarks where Shusterman talks about “the basic nature of bodily perceptions,” which Fish would most probably read as betraying that the former’s project is founded on a presumption that all these fields are connected by something nontrivial. Connected, that is, by their being occupied with the basic nature of the body and its experience, which is one and the same in all its manifestations even though this sameness may not be easily recognizable (and that due to the fact that academic knowledge has been divided by artificial disciplinary borders). Seen in this light, Shusterman’s conviction that the abolishing of these boundaries must not only be cognitively productive, but also allow us to “intervene in the larger political world” looks like a perfect example of what Fish has called the “religion” of “interdisciplinarity.”80 After 77

78 79 80

This is an actual phrase which comes from a review, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, of Shusterman’s German book Vor der Interpretation. Cited in Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the Revival of Aesthetics,” p. 136. Berrios, “Review: Pragmatist Aesthetics,” p. 678. Cynthia Gayman, “Review of Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 22, No. 3 (2008), p. 225. See Fish, Professional Correctness, p. 136, 73; Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech..., p. 223.

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

169

all, isn’t it the case that Shusterman’s conception of a “structuring overview or architectonic” is animated by “the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis, and the integration of knowledge”81 that can be found in every “interdisciplinary impulse”?82 Shusterman seems to believe that we can amalgamate the perspectives of all kinds of disciplines which concern the body (that we can simultaneously be physiologists, philosophers, body therapists, and various other specialists) and that thanks to this a fuller, more complex picture of corporeality will appear before our eyes. Yet, as Fish would have it, it is here that Shusterman goes entirely wrong, because Objects, including texts [and bodies] do not have an identity apart from some discursive practice … Objects … come into view within the vocabularies of specific enterprises (law, literature, economics, history [philosophy, physiology, physiotherapy, cultural anthropology, gender studies], etc.) and in relation to the purposes of which that discipline is the instantiation. The application of the vocabularies of different enterprises to an object will not bring out facets of the object’s ‘complexity’ or ineffable thingness, but rather will constitute different objects.

And exactly for this reason anyone who wanted to pursue several, or just two, academic disciplines at the same time [w]ould not be a single man, but two men, or one (physically defined) man who took on alternate tasks and was, as he moved from one to another, alternate persons. As one person he would see the centrality of X and the appeal of Y; as another X and Y would never come into view, or if they come into view, they would be beside his present point. … The ideals of the unified task, the unified object, the body of unified knowledge, and the unified self all fall together before the fact of irreducible difference. If one is (as everyone now says) always situated, then one’s sense of alternative courses of action and of oneself as an actor are situation-specific and can never be made larger although they will often be different.83

Now, even though I think that Fish’s point fails as an argument against the possibility of interdisciplinarity in general (to name just one thing, it ignores the homologies that often exist between different disciplines and allow for their synthesis, even it be merely a partial one),84 I at the same believe it to be an accurate account of those situations when particular disciplines, or their relevant parts, are

81 82 83 84

Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), p. 19; cited in Fish, Professional Correctness, p. 136. Fish, Professional Correctness, p. 136, Fish, Professional Correctness, pp. 137-8. See my detailed criticism of Fish’s theory of interdisciplinarity in “Neopragmatism and the Problem of Interdisciplinarity.”

170

Chapter 4

so divergent that such a synthesis proves either infeasible or extremely difficult, as is indeed the case with some of Shusterman’s somaesthetic ideas. What I mean is that Shusterman wants to simultaneously be a philosopher and, as he himself puts it, a “somatic educator” (BC 50), yet, probably because of the fact that the fusion of these two approaches is not as easy as it might seem, he sometimes talks in his works about philosophy as “somatic educator” or about “somatic education” as a philosopher,85 which does not always bring positive results. A good example of the confusion that can be caused by the application of philosophical perspective to somatic practice is supplanted by Shusterman’s essay on Simone de Beauvoir, in which, as we have already seen, Shusterman wants to provide some feasible devices for dealing with the political situation of women in patriarchal societies. Unfortunately, one might say that some of these devices are unfit to realize that purpose, and this is exactly because of their being overly “philosophical.” What I mean is that Shusterman argues, among other things, that it is liberating for women to engage in somatic introspection because thereby they will become more fully aware of their “ambiguous” ontology qua human subjects (who are somatic and mental and the same time), and without such a “recognition,” or awareness, a human being cannot be free.86 So far so good, but how could we reconcile this claim with the fact that, as Shusterman observes after Beauvoir in the very same essay, men do not possess this awareness, and yet it is they who dominate over women and are freer than them? One way to answer this question would be to say that Beauvoir is concerned more with practical, political freedom, and what Shusterman is arguing for here is a kind of philosophical liberation. But we would have to add immediately that even though it is not without importance, such a philosophical emancipation hardly matters to political practice. Now let us take a look at what happens when the somatic educator looks at philosophy, taking as an example Shusterman’s methodological argument from 85

86

The latter happens, for instance, when he attempts to provide an extensive comparative analysis of three somatic techniques, Feldenkrais Method, Alexander Technique, and bioenergetics, and aims not at measuring their therapeutic efficacy but rather at assessing their “rationality” (PL 169). Importantly, what Shusterman means here is not “rationality” in a common understanding of the term (which we deploy when we say, e.g., that it is irrational to avoid periodic medical examination out of the fear that it may reveal that we are sick) but rather a philosophical “rationalism” – “understood as the privileging of reason over all other factors” (PL 169). The results of the aforementioned analysis can be summarized as follows: “If the somaesthetics of experience should be incorporated into philosophy, conceived as a rationally disciplined quest for better living through greater knowledge, self-knowledge, and right action, then the more rational disciplines of Alexander and Feldenkrais seem much better candidates for incorporation than the Reichian varieties of bioenergetics. The former share philosophy’s stress on rational, conscious control and autonomy in contrast to bioenergetics’ strong emotionality and surrender to impulse and involuntary control, coupled with its use of shock and forceful manipulation by others” (PL 181). “[B]lindness to our ontological condition is an obstacle to realizing true freedom” (BC 95).

Body Consciousness, Body Surfaces, and Somaesthetics

171

the importance of the body for philosophizing. To begin with, one has to admit that Shusterman is exceptional in this regard (although he is not without some historical predecessors) since, as we know, he encourages his colleagues to exercise their bodies and argues that “thinking depends on the body’s health and requires its muscular contractions” (PL 140). But let us ask: can practical somaesthetics really improve philosophizing? On the one hand, it would be folly to question Shusterman’s thesis that the body determines our thinking in some way. In more drastic cases, when one suffers from a toothache or the pain of a broken leg, the somatic factor will surely make it hard or even impossible for one to think. But, on the other hand, will one think better because of the improved functioning of one’s body, as somaesthetic arguments seem to suggest? Does a healthier body – e.g., one free of unnecessary contractions and tensions – translate into better philosophy? In one of his essays, Richard Rorty asked us to imagine how Nietzsche’s thought would have looked like had he enjoyed wealth and international fame in his lifetime.87 I, in turn, would ask if Nietzsche would have written more and better philosophical works had he not been so sick and haunted by terrible pain through almost all of his adult years.88 Of course, there is no good answer to that question. Maybe yes, or maybe no. How could we know that? This consternation, however, is not without meaning, for it shows us that the maxim Mens sana in corpore sano, which somaesthetics inherits from the ancient philosophy of the body, is more problematic than it initially seems to be. Similar doubts are raised in me by some other of Shusterman’s arguments for the practicality of somaesthetics, for instance, the one which addresses the field’s potential to solve the problem of racial prejudices. Let us suppose, then, that somebody is a racist and I inform him that his hatred toward African-Americans or Asian people is a matter of the fear of the other’s body which is deeply entrenched in his “visceral feelings.” Will the racist discard his deplorable beliefs as a result of my intervention or rather strengthen them, having realized that his body, too, hates “niggers” or “gooks”? Moreover, Shusterman claims that thanks to the heightened body consciousness I can discern these negative feelings and either “control” or repress them, so that they will not distort my perception of reality anymore (BC 130). But don’t I have to cease being a racist in the first place in order to want to repress or remove them? What is to be done, then? Should we force racists to undergo a somaesthetic therapy? To sum up, I would say that Shusterman is at times overly optimistic in his attempts to yoke his interdisciplinary project to practical problems. My criticisms, however, should not be understood as a wholesale rejection of somaesthetics but rather as an instance of being

87 88

See Richard Rorty, “Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition,” in: Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 327. The same question could be asked with regard to William James, who also suffered from “recurrent bodily ailments”; see BC 136-7.

172

Chapter 4

true to an important and interesting philosophical idea in the “Zarathustrian” way that was discussed in the beginning of this book.

AFTERW ORD

One of the tasks that I explicitly set for this book in the introduction was that it should respond to the question whether Shusterman’s pragmatism, despite, or indeed because of, its activistic approach, constitutes a betrayal of praxis or not. In other words, can it be of any help in solving practical problems: social, political, ethical, aesthetic, or otherwise? Or maybe Shusterman should rather give up on his attempts to “embody pragmatism,” and capitulate to an antitheoretical stance espoused by Stanley Fish and others? It is therefore time now to adjudicate what my discussions show in this regard. And without going into their particular results (as they have been summarized in the concluding parts of each chapter), I would like to recall that, on the most basic level, they simply indicate that while in some cases Shusterman’s philosophy can indeed be useful outside of the walls of academia, “in the wider world of action,” in some other cases it fails in this task, or at least needs to be significantly corrected to perform it in the right way. Now, I have to agree that for some this may seem to be a rather weak support for the high-sounding idea of the practicality of philosophy, but I believe, on the other hand, that this support is at least strong enough to refute the categorical arguments of Fish and similar minded authors,1 and to free Shusterman from the charge that by engaging in philosophical theory, he inevitably alienates himself from the world of action he is so eager to improve. Another result of my analyses which I would like to emphasize is their bringing to light some very important features of Shusterman’s thought, such as its revaluation of the ordinary (as represented by popular art; the “middle-range pleasures” that are “rejected” by Foucault (BC 37); or by the wider public’s “familiar, shared, and perhaps cherished understandings of literature” (PA 104), which are neglected by Rorty and Fish),2 and, especially, its skeptical approach toward the professionalization of philosophy. In fact, one might say that, irrespective of his

1

2

Here I correct my earlier views on this issue, presented in “Praktyczne aspekty estetyki Richarda Shustermana: Sztuka popularna i somatoestetyka” [Practical Aspects of Richard Shusterman’s Aesthetics: Popular Art and Somaesthetics]. One might say that thereby Shusterman inscribes himself in the American philosophical tradition, whose most famous contemporary advocate is Stanley Cavell, which stems from “Emerson and Thoreau” and is characterized by the “devotion to the thing [the latter] call the common, the familiar, the near, the low.” Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 34.

174

Afterword

opinion on Rorty’s interpretive theory, Shusterman would wholeheartedly agree with the latter’s remark that In recent decades, Anglophone philosophy professors have had a harder and harder time explaining to their fellow-academics, and to society at large, what they do to earn their keep. The more specialized and professionalized the study of philosophy becomes, the less respect it is paid by the rest of the academy or by the public. By now it runs some risk being ignored altogether, regarded in the same way that classical philology is, as a quaint, albeit rather charming, survival.3

What Shusterman would add to this, however, is that, pace some historical interpretations, the constant narrowing of philosophy’s territory4 and its quietist retreat into artificial specialization is not a necessary result of the unstoppable expansion of sciences which has been taking place at least from the 18th century.5 If anything, it is rather something that philosophers have arbitrarily imposed on themselves, and now it is only up to them to change this situation. Yet it needs to be noted in this context, again and again, that when Shusterman invokes the wellknown anti-professionalist mantra of Thoreau that “[t]here are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers,”6 he is not encouraging his colleagues to discard professional structures altogether and leave their academic pursuits behind, but rather to pay more attention to how these structures and pursuits might be used for improving the world outside the academy. A good example of this attitude (and at the same time an example of yet another feature of Shusterman’s philosophy which has appeared quite frequently in the preceding pages, i.e., its “third way” strategy) is provided by Shusterman’s polemic with Richard Rorty over the issue of cultural politics, with which I would like to close this book.

3 4

5 6

Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 184. Here I am extrapolating Rorty’s judgment on Western philosophy in general, which I believe is a justified move, given that specialization significantly affects non-Anglophone Western philosophy, too. See, e.g., Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany. As Thoreau adds, “Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” Henry David Thoreau, Political Writings, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 32. See Shusterman, PP 1. As Stanley Cavell notes, however, one should be cautious in interpreting Thoreau’s words as an anti-professionalist pronouncement: “In my hearing this sentiment is invoked as a crack at academics, and of course in part it surely is that. But to suppose that is the exhaustive, or primary, target of this sentiment is to underrate Thoreau’s complexity, let alone the extent of his hopes and his disappointments; and it is to overrate the attention he is giving to what we call professors of philosophy.” Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, p. 40.

Afterword

175

To avoid unnecessary confusion, let me stipulate that I am referring here to the term “cultural politics” in the sense in which it was used by Rorty in his book Achieving Our Country,7 which differs significantly from the meaning he attributed to it in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics, where the term denotes generally all kinds of vocabularies that have been proposed by philosophers, novelists, scientists, theologians, and politicians to describe humanity’s history, values, and goals.8 Achieving Our Country, in turn, brings yet another meaning of “cultural politics,” which can only be understood against the background of Rorty’s bitter account of the history of the American leftist movement in the latter half of the 20th century.9 To cut a long story short, Rorty juxtaposes what he calls “the reformist Left,” whose focus was on basic economic-political issues such as the role of “trade unions,” and which had been active until the time of Vietnam war, and “the cultural Left” which replaced it and has been devoting its energy mostly to the matters of gender and race.10 However much Rorty agrees that the discrimination of AfricanAmericans, gays, women, and other underprivileged groups is an urgent issue that deserves real political efforts, and however much he is willing to recognize the achievements of the cultural Left in this regard, he at the same time bemoans that its inability or unwillingness to grapple with the economic problems of American society has contributed to the increasing class diversification of that society,11 in the sense that American capitalism has ceased to be monitored and mitigated by any significant political force. Furthermore, Rorty observes that most acolytes of the cultural Left recruit from academia and indulge in a mistaken and dangerous 7 8

9

10

11

See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). As Rorty explains: “The interventions in [thus conceived] cultural politics have sometimes taken the form of proposals for new roles that men and women might play: the ascetic, the prophet, the dispassionate seeker after truth, the good citizen, the aesthete, the revolutionary. Sometimes they have been sketches of an ideal community – the perfected Greek polis, the Christian Church, the republic of letters, the cooperative commonwealth. Sometimes they have been suggestions about how to reconcile seemingly incompatible outlooks – to resolve the conflict between Greek rationalism and Christian faith, or between natural science and the common moral consciousness.” Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. ix-x. For a discussion of this particular understanding of cultural politics presented by Rorty, see Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics,” forthcoming in New Literary History. I elaborate on this issue in my “Ascetic Priests and O’Briens: Sadism and Masochism in Rorty’s Writings,” Angelaki: The Journal of Theoretical Humanities, No. 3 (2009), pp. 10115. Cf. Richard Rorty, Derek Nystrom, and Kent Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2002), p. 16. For an alternative account of this history, see Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 86.

176

Afterword

belief that their professional activities, such as, e.g., subversive readings of the Western canon or providing radical conceptions of gender, etc., have direct impact on political realities. And that this belief is dangerous is indicated by the fact that some such academics may feel excused from the obligation to engage in what Rorty calls “real politics”12 and “glosses as ‘initiatives for reducing misery and overcoming injustice’,”13 something which, he thinks, would be more down-toearth and efficient, yet is certainly more messy and boring than writing yet another dazzling cultural analysis or concocting enlightening theories.14 Applied to Shusterman’s meliorism, for instance, Rorty’s critique of cultural politics would mean that if the former really wants to contribute to effecting the social empowerment of underprivileged groups, he must not confine himself either to analyzing their artistic forms of expression, even if such analyses take politics into account, or to providing theoretical arguments for the aesthetic legitimacy of those art forms. For even if the art that is a cultural expression of a given group is granted aesthetic recognition in the academy (or in the artworld), this alone will not help change that group’s socio-economical status; the reason being that the social structures and mechanisms which keep the underprivileged underprivileged, and the poor poor will still be left untouched. So what is Shusterman’s defense of cultural politics? He points out that while Rorty is on to something when he emphasizes that real politics brings more immediate and powerful results than cultural politics, he must certainly be “wrong” when he “make[s] ‘the better’ the enemy of ‘the good’” by completely rejecting the value of cultural political efforts (PP 87). Moreover, Shusterman emphasizes that since analyzing cultural artifacts is probably “the best thing we, humanist professors can currently do for democracy,” it would simply be unreasonable not to let us use that ability in order to change the status quo – first on the campuses where we teach, then maybe in the larger social context (PP 86). But let me add that Shusterman is hyperbolizing Rorty’s statements here, for the latter does not fight cultural politics as such – his only worry being that contemporary American leftists often reduce their activity to it, apparently forgetting that there are also “some other,” probably more important, “things to do.”15 And since Rorty’s stance eventually boils down to the idea that we need both cultural and real politics, he seems to be in perfect agreement with Shusterman, who declares that he is aware of the fact that no contribution to academic cultural politics can achieve its

12 13 14 15

Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 14, 36. PP 85. These initiatives could involve, e.g., “proposing new laws.” Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 15. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?,” Critical Horizons, 1, No. 1, (2000), pp. 7–20. See Rorty, “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?”

Afterword

177

desired goals all by itself since what is “also [necessarily] needed” in this regard are “concrete social and cultural reforms.”16 The same diagnosis applies to Shusterman’s general conception of embodying pragmatism, and even though, as my analyses of his works has shown, such an embodying is not always successful, this ceases to be a problem in itself when we realize that (and here I would like to let Richard Shusterman have the final word in this book): The crucial question for the responsible pragmatist [and, we might add, for any responsible philosopher] is, finally, one of long-term cost accounting: whether the gains of philosophical activism outweigh the advantages of presumed philosophical neutrality. I think they do, partly because of my skepticism toward putative philosophical neutrality, but also because the stakes of our cultural struggles are too important to remain neutral about them (SD 202).

16

Shusterman, Popular Art and Education, p. 205.

B IB LIO G R A P H Y

Abrams, Jerold J. “Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bioethics: Shusterman, Rorty, Foucault.” Human Studies, no. 27, 2004, pp. 241-58. Abrams, Meyer Howard. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Adorno, Theodor W. “Analytical Study of NBC Music Appreciation Hour.” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 2, 1994, pp. 325-77. Adorno, Theodor W. Culture Industry. Florence: Routledge, 2001. Adorno, Theodor W. Vermischte Schriften I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Agamben, Giorgio. “Preface: Experimentum Linguae” in Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London-New York: Verso, 2007, pp. 1-11. Alexander, Thomas M. “Dewey, Dualism, and Naturalism” in John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, eds., A Companion to Pragmatism. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 184-92. Alexander, Thomas M. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Alridge, Derrick P. “From Civil Rights to Hip Hop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 90, no. 3, 2005, pp. 226-52. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by James Alexander Kerr Thomson. London: Penguin Classics, 2004. Arnold, Peter J. “Somaesthetics, Education, and the Art of Dance.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, no. 1, 2005, pp. 48-64. Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw, eds. Women’s Bodies: Cultural Representation and Identity. London: Continuum, 1999. Augustine, Saint. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated by A. Cook Outler. New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2002. Austin, James H. Zen-Brain Reflections: Reviewing Recent Developments in Meditation and States of Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Azerrad, Michael. Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Bakke, Monika. “Wszystkie przyjemnoĞci: duĪe i małe” [All Pleasures Great and Small]. Czas Kultury, no.1, 2003, pp. 27-34.

180

Bibliography

Bannister, Matthew. White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Barrett, Lindon. “Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Small, and Hip-Hop Eulogy.” Callaloo, vol. 22, no. 2, 1999, pp. 306-32. Bartlett, Andrew. “Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics.” African American Review, vol. 28, no. 4, 1994, pp. 639-52. Bate, Walter Jackson. “The Crisis in English Studies.” Harvard Magazine, vol. 85, 1982, pp. 41-53. Baudrillard, Jean. “Interview: Game with Vestiges.” On the Beach, vol. 5, 1984, pp. 19-25. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalizacja: I co z tego dla ludzi wynika. Translated by Ewa Klekot. Warszawa: PIW, 2000. Baumgarten, Alexander. Theoretische Ästhetik: Die grundlengenden Abschnitte aus der “Aesthetica”. Translated by H.R. Schweizer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988. Beardsley, Monroe. The Possibility of Criticism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H.M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1989. Bennington, Geoffrey. “Derridabase” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 1-316. Bernstein, Richard J. “John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience.” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 58, no. 1, 1961, pp. 5-14. Berrios, Ruben. “Review: Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art.” Music and Letters, vol. 85, no. 4. 2004, pp. 677-9. Blackburn, Simon. “The Professor of Complacence.” New Republic, 20 August 2001, pp. 39-42. Bloom, Harold. Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Bloom, Harold. “Dumbing Down American Readers.” Boston Globe, September 24, 2003 (accessed online October 21, 2008). Blum, Virginia L. Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Bogdan, Deanne. “Musical Spirituality: Reflections on Identity and the Ethics of Embodied Aesthetic Experience in/and the Academy.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, no. 2, 2003, pp. 80-98. Bohman, James, David R. Hiley, and Richard Shusterman. “Introduction” in James Bohman et al., eds. The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 1-14.

Bibliography

181

Boogie Down Productions. Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop, Jive/RCA Records, 1989. Bordo, Susan. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Borowicz, Jon. “The Body of a Philosopher: Embodied Thought as Physical and Social Activity” in Gabor Csepregi, ed., Sagesse Du Corps. Aylmer: Éditions du Scribe, 2001, pp. 61-77. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1984. Brand, Peg and Mary Deveraux. “Introduction: Feminism and Aesthetics.” Hypatia, 18, no. 4, 2003, pp. ix-xx. Brandom, Robert B., ed. Rorty and His Critics. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Brandom, Robert B. “When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment.” boundary 2, vol. 29, no. 2, 2002, pp. 1-28. Brennan, Timothy. “Off the Gangsta Tip: A Rap Appreciation, or Forgetting about Los Angeles.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 4, 1994, pp. 663-93. Brennan, Timothy. Wars of Position: the Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Brodsky, Gary. “Rorty’s Interpretation of Pragmatism.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 18, no. 4, 1982, pp. 311-38. Bryant, Jerry H. Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. BuczyĔska-Garewicz, Hanna, James. Warszawa: PIW, 2001. Cardinal, Gustavo D. “Review of Richard Shusterman, Performing Live.” Philosophy of Music Education Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2004, pp. 89-93. Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Noël. “Art, Practice, and Narrative.” Monist, vol. 71, 1981, pp. 140-56. Carroll, Noël. “Interpretation and Intention: The Debate Between Hypothetical and Actual Intentionalism.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 31, no. 1/2, 2000, pp. 7695. Cavell, Stanley. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Edited by David Justin Hodge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Cavell, Stanley. “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 72-80. Chairman Mao [pseud.], “Taking a Bite out of Rhyme: A Look At How Hip-Hop Has Become Run by Copycat MCs and Producers.” The Source, no. 100, 1998, no pp.

182

Bibliography

Chmielewski, Adam. NiewspółmiernoĞü, nieprzekładalnoĞü, konflikt: Relatywizm we współczesnej filozofii analitycznej [Incommensurability, Untranslatability, Conflict: Relativism in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy]. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1997. Chmielewski, Adam. Walc wiedeĔski i walec europejski [The Viennese Waltz and the European Road Roller]. Wrocław: Atla 2, 2001. Clark, Michael P., ed. Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Costelloe, Timothy M. “Hume, Kant, and The Antinomy of Taste.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 41, no. 2, 2003, pp. 165-85. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Cumings, Bruce. War and Television. London: Verso, 1992. Curtius, Ernst R. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Translated by Jeff Fort. Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Dalton, Thomas C. Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Damasio, Antonio R. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Danto, Arthur C. “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense.” History and Theory, vol. 37, no. 4, Theme Issue 37: Danto and His Critics: Art History, Historiography, and After the End of Art, 1998, pp. 127-43 Danto, Arthur C. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Danz, Dawn and Phalary Long. “KRS Plans New Hip-Hop Religion With Gospel of Hip Hop.” All Hip Hop: The World’s Most Dangerous Site, August 20, 2009, http: //allhiphop.com/stories/news/archive/2009/08/20/21903171.aspx (accessed October 21, 2009). Davidson, Donald. “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” in Ernest Lepore, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives On the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 433-46. Davies, Jude. “The Future of ‘No Future’: Punk Rock and Postmodern Theory.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 29, no. 4, 1996, pp. 3-25.

Bibliography

183

Davies, Stephen. “Definitions of Art” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds., The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 169-79. Davies, Stephen. Themes in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Day, William. “Review of Shusterman, Performing Live.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 62, no. 3, 2004, pp. 300-2. Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law” in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature. Translated by Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston. London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 181-220. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Edited by Gerald Graff. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. “Outwork” in Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 1-65. Derrida, Jacques. “Title (To Be Specified).” SubStance, no. 2, 1981, pp. 5-22. Dewey, John. Experience and Nature: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 1. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. Dewey, John. “Introductory Word” in Frederick M. Alexander. Man’s Supreme Inheritance. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1918, pp. xiii-xvii. Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry: The Later Works 1925-1953, Volume 12. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Dewey, John. “Qualitative Thought” in Philosophy and Civilization. New York: Capricorn, 1963, pp. 93-116. Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 4. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1984. Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1962. Dewey, John and Arthur F. Bentley. Knowing and the Known in: John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 16. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Dewey, John and James H. Tufts. Ethics: Revised Edition in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 7. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Dickens, Luke. “Placing Post-Graffiti: The Journey of the Peckham Rock.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 15, no. 4, 2008, pp. 471-96 Dickie, George. Aesthetics: An Introduction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1971.

184

Bibliography

Dickie, George. “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 6, 1969, pp. 263-6. Drong, Leszek. Disciplining the New Pragmatism: Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007. Dyer, Ben, ed. Supervillains and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 2009. Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. London: Basic Books, 2003. Efron, Arthur. “Literature as Experience: Dewey’s Aesthetics in an Age of Galloping Theory.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 31, 1995, pp. 322–57. Eldridge, Michael. “Adjectival and Generic Pragmatism: Problems and Possibilities.” Human Affairs, vol. 19, no. 1, 2009, pp. 10-18. Eldridge, Michael. “Review of The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 4, 2002, pp. 300-3. Eldridge, Michael. “Why a Pragmatist May Be a Pluralist.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 41, no. 1, 2005, pp.119-22. Fenner, David. “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Analysis.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 37, no. 1, 2003, pp. 40-53. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham-London: Duke University Press, 1989. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text In This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Fish, Stanley. “One More Time” in Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds., Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish And the Critical Enterprise. New York: SUNY Press, 2004, pp. 265-94. Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fish, Stanley. There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech... and It’s a Good Thing, Too. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Fish, Stanley. The Trouble with Principle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2001. Fish, Stanley. “Truth and Toilets” in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 418-33. Fisher, John A. “High Art Versus Low Art” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds., The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 409-21.

Bibliography

185

Fisher, John A. “Rock’n’Recording: The Ontological Complexity of Rock Music” in Philip Alperson, ed., Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, pp. 10923 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Fluck, Winfried. “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism” in Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 21130. Formis, Barbara, ed. Penser en Corps: Soma-esthétique, art et philosophie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. Forsey, Jane. “The Disenfranchisement of Philosophical Aesthetics.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 64, no. 4, 2003, pp. 581-97. Foucault, Michel. Foucault Live: (Interviews, 1966-84). Translated by John Johnston. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. Fraleigh, Sondra. “Consciousness Matters.” Dance Research Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2000, pp. 54-62. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Beginning of Philosophy. Translated by Rod Coltman. New York: Continuum, 1998. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum, 2004. Gale, Richard M. “The Problem of Ineffability in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 44, no. 1, 2006, pp. 75-90. Gale, Richard M. “William James and John Dewey: The Odd Couple.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 28, 2004, pp. 149-67. Gangstarr. Moment of Truth. Noo Trybe/Virgin/EMI, 1998. Gans, Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Garrett, Roland. “Dewey’s Struggle with the Ineffable.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 9, no. 2, 1973, pp. 95-109. Gavin, William. “Introduction: Passing Dewey By?” in William J. Gavin, ed., In Dewey’s Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003, pp. 1-6. Gayman, Cynthia. “Review of Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 3, 2008, p. 225-7. Ghosh, Ranjan K. “Art as Dramatization and the Indian Tradition.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 61, no. 3, 2003, p. 293-5. Gilmore, Paul. “Mechanical Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2, June 2004, pp. 245–68.

186

Bibliography

Gimlin, Debra L. Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Goodman, Nelson. Of Minds and Other Matters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1978. Gouinlock, James. “What Is the Legacy of Instrumentalism?: Rorty’s Interpretation of Dewey” in Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., ed., Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995, pp. 72-91. Grabes, Herbert. “The Revival of Pragmatist Aesthetics.” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 15,1999, pp. 137-49. Grandt, Jürgen E. “Moving on Up: Alain Locke and the Telos of African American Culture.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 68, no. 1, 2003, pp. 4-14. Green Day, 21st Century Breakdown. Reprise Records, 2009. Green Day, American Idiot. Reprise Records, 2004. Grzegorczyk, Andrzej. “Discussion” in Jürgen Haberman, Leszek Kołakowski, and Richard Rorty. Debating the State of Philosopy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski. Edited by Józef NiĪnik and John T. Sanders. Westport: Praeger Paperback, 1996, p. 120-1. Guerra, Gustavo. “Practicing Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman’s Unbound Philosophy.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, p. 70-83. Guetzkow, Joshua, Michèle Lamont, and Grégoire Mallard. “What Is Originality in the Humanities and the Social Sciences?” American Sociological Review, vol. 69, no. 2, 2004, pp. 190-212. Guignon, Charles. “Philosophy after Wittgenstein and Heidegger.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 50, no. 4, 1990, pp. 649-72. Gustafsson, Martin. “Systematic Meaning and Linguistic Diversity: The Place of Meaning-Theories in Davidson’s Later Philosophy.” Inquiry, vol. 41, 1998, pp. 435-53. Haack, Susan. “Between Scientism and Conversationalism.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 20, no. 2, 1996, pp. 455-74. Haack, Susan. “Pragmatism Old and New.” Contemporary Pragmatism, vol. 1, no. 1, June 2004, pp. 3-41. Hall, David L. Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Halnon, Karen Bettez. “Alienation Incorporated: ‘F--- the Mainstream Music’ in the Mainstream” in Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, ed., The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006, pp. 201-26. Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Bibliography

187

Hansen, Miriam. “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer.” New German Critique, no. 56, 1992, pp. 43-73. Hartmann, Nicolai. New Ways of Ontology. Translated by Reinhard C. Kuhn. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975. Haskins, Casey. “Enlivened Bodies, Authenticity and Romanticism.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, p. 92-102. Hassan, Ihab. “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 25, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-13. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Translated by Thomas M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated and edited by Yirmiyahu Yovel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. Heidegger, Martin. “Über Karl Marx und die Weltveränderung.” TV Interview conducted by Richard Wisser, 1969. Herzman, Ronald “From Francis to Salomon: Eschatology in the Sun” in Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, ed., Dante for the New Millennium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003, pp. 320-33. Heyes, Cressida J. Self Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Higgins Kathleen M. “Living and Feeling at Home: Shusterman’s Performing Live.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, pp. 84-92. Higuchi, Satoshi. “Eastern Mind-Body Theory and Somaesthetics” in Yasuo Imai and Christopher Wulf, eds., Concepts of Aesthetics Education: Japanese and European Perspectives. Münster: Waxmann, 2007, pp. 88-96. Hildebrand, David L. “The Neopragmatist Turn.” Southwest Philosophy Review, 19, no. 1, January 2003, pp. 79-88. Hildebrand, David L. “Pragmatism and Literary Criticism: The Practical Starting Point.” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 15, 1999, pp. 303-22. Hirsch, Jr., Eric Donald. The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Hirsch, Jr., Eric Donald. Validity in interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.

188

Bibliography

hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 421-7. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1986. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of literature. With an Appendix on the Functions of Language in the Theater. Translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Innis, Robert E. “Meaning, Art, and Politics: Dimension of a Philosophical Engagement.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, pp. 5562. Iseminger, Gary. “Actual Intentionalism vs. Hypothetical Intentionalism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, no. 4, 1996, pp. 319-26. James, William. “The Experience of Activity” in Essays in Radical Empirism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 79-96. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe: The Works of William James. Edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. James, William. Pragmatism and Other Writings. Edited by Giles Gunn. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. James, William. Psychology: The Briefer Course. New York: Dover Publications, 2001. James, William. Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some Life’s Ideals. New York: Dover, 1962. James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Jay, Martin. “The Limits of Limit Experience.” Constellations, vol. 2, no. 2, 1995, pp. 155–74. Jay, Martin. “Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, no. 4, 2002, pp. 55-69. Jay, Peter. “Peter Jay’s Column.” Baltimore Sun, September 5, 1982, no pp. Jay-Z. Blueprint. Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam, 2001. Jeannot, Thomas M. “A Propaedeutic to the Philosophical Hermeneutics of John Dewey: Art as Experience and Truth and Method.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 1, 2001, pp.1-13. Johnson, Barbara. “Review: The Critical Difference.” Diacritics, vol. 8, no. 2, 1978, pp. 2-9.

Bibliography

189

Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Johnston, James Scott. “Deweyan Aesthetics for These Times.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 35, no. 3, 2001, pp. 109-15. Johnston, James Scott. “Reflections on Richard Shusterman’s Dewey.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 38, no.4, 2004, p. 99-108. Joughin, John and Simon Malpas, eds. New Aestheticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Kabat-Zinn, Jon et al. “Effectiveness of Meditation-Based Stress Reduction Program in the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 149, 1992, pp. 936-43. Kaminsky, Jack. “Dewey’s Concept of an Experience.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, no. 3, 1957, pp. 316-30. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Victor Dowdell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. The Contest of the Faculties. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Kivy, Peter. The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006. Klein, Julie Thompson. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Knapp, Steven and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory” in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 11-30. Knapp, Steven and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 1, 1987, pp. 49-68. Knapp, Steven and Walter Benn Michaels. “Reply to George Wilson.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 1, 1992, pp. 186-193. Koczanowicz, Dorota. DoĞwiadczenie sztuki, sztuka Īycia: Wymiary estetyki pragmatycznej [The Experience of Art and the Art of Living: Dimensions of Pragmatist Aesthetics]. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Naukowe DolnoĞląskiej Szkoły WyĪszej, 2009. KRS-One. The Gospel of Hip Hop: First Instrument. Brooklyn, NY: I Am Hip Hop, 2009. Kwiek, Marek. Rorty’s Elective Affinities: The New Pragmatism and Postmodern Thought. PoznaĔ: Wydawnictwo UAM, 1996. Leavis, Frank Raymond. Revaluation. London: Penguin, 1972. Lehrer, Jonah. “How Science Can Save You from Choking.” The Observer, Sunday, July 26, 2009, http: //www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/jul/26/sportspsychology-choking (accessed October 20, 2009). Leite, Adam. “Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming.” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 215, 2004, pp. 232-51.

190

Bibliography

Levin, Harry. “The Title as a Literary Genre.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 72, no. 4, 1977, pp. xxii-xxxvi. Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Macdonald, Dwight. “A Theory of Mass Culture” in Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. Glencoe: Free Press, 1964, pp. 59-79. Macdonald, Margaret. “Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts” in William Elton, ed., Aesthetics and Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954, pp. 114-30. Mackie, John L. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Maher, George Ciccariello. “Brechtian Hip-Hop: Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta Political Mixtapes.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2005, pp. 129-60. Mailloux, Steven J. Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Malachowski, Alan. “Deep Epistemology without Foundations (in Language)” in Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp. 139-55. Maleuvre, Didier. “Art and Criticism: Must Understanding be Interpretive?” SubStance, vol. 30, no.3, 2001, pp. 120-8. Małecki, Wojciech. “Ascetic Priests and O’Briens: Sadism and Masochism in Rorty’s Writings.” Angelaki: The Journal of Theoretical Humanities, no. 3, 2009, pp. 101-15. Małecki, Wojciech. “Bardzo zły substytut dla prawd absolutnych: Neopragmatyzm i literaturoznawstwo” [A Very Bad Substitute for Absolutes: Neopragmatism and Literary Studies] in Adam Kola and Andrzej Szahaj, eds., Filozofia i etyka interpretacji [The Philosophy and Ethics of Interpretation] Kraków: Universitas 2007, pp. 109-19. Małecki, Wojciech. “Challenging the Taboo of the Autobiographical: Contingency, Literariness, and Philosophical Discourse” in Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki, eds., Between Politics and Aesthetics: Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatism, forthcoming. Małecki, Wojciech. “Homies from the (Post-Communist Block: Representations of East-Central Realities in Polish Rap Lyrics” in Laetitia Guran and Anca Holden, eds., Transatlantic Cultural Traffic: Beyond the Legacy of the Cold War, forthcoming. Małecki, Wojciech. “Neopragmatism and the Problem of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Stanley Fish.” Human Affairs, no. 1, 2009, pp. 96-104.

Bibliography

191

Małecki, Wojciech. “On Pragmatist Aesthetics, the New Literacy, and Popular Culture: A Response to Stefán Snaevarr.” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, no. 38, 2009, pp. 56-74. Małecki, Wojciech. “Popular Art, Youth Culture, and Cultural Politics: A Pragmatist Perspective” in Eva Kimminich, ed., Utopien, Jugendkulturen und Lebens-wirklichkeiten: Ästhetische Praxis als politisches Handeln. Frakfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 1-16. Małecki, Wojciech. “Praktyczne aspekty estetyki Richarda Shustermana: Sztuka popularna i somatoestetyka” [Practical Aspects of Richard Shusterman’s Aesthetics: Popular Art and Somaesthetics] in Krystyna Wilkoszewska, ed., Wizje i re-wizje: Wielka ksiĊga estetyki w Polsce [Visions and Re-Visions]. Kraków: Universitas, 2007, pp. 813-26. Małecki, Wojciech. “Richard Shusterman vs. uniwersalizm hermeneutyczny” [Richard Shusterman’s vs. Hermeneutic Universalism]. Er(r)go, no. 12, 2007, pp. 47-58. Małecki, Wojciech. “Somatoestetyka i normy ciała” [Somaesthetics and Body Norms] Kultura Współczesna, no. 1, 2009, pp. 8-18. Małecki, Wojciech. “Toward the Aesthetics of Emancipation?: Critical Theory and the New Pragmatism” in Stefano Giacchetti, ed., Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical Theory. Newark/Rome: John Cabot University Press/University of Delaware Press, 2009, pp. 267-80. Małecki, Wojciech. “Von nicht-diskursiver Erfahrung zur Somästhetik: Shusterman über Dewey und Rorty.“ Translated into German by Urszula Kawalec, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, no. 5, 2008, pp. 677-90. Małecki, Wojciech. “ĩycie filozoficzne Richarda Shustermana” [Richard Shusterman’s Philosophical Life]. Odra, no. 4, 2004, pp. 54-7. Marcuse, Herbert. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Margolis, Joseph. Interpretation: Radical but Not Unruly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Margolis, Joseph. “The Logic of Interpretation” in Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987, pp. 108-18. Margolis, Joseph. Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Margolis, Joseph. The Truth about Relativism. Oxford-Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Margolis, Joseph. What, After All, Is a Work of Art?: Lectures in the Philosophy of Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Markus, György. “Adorno and Mass Culture: Autonomous Art against the Culture Industry.” Thesis Eleven, vol. 86, no. 1, 2006, pp. 67-89.

192

Bibliography

McWhorter, John H. “How Hip-Hop Holds Black Back.” City Journal, Summer 2003, http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html (accessed August 23, 2009). Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Shape of the Signifier.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 2, 2001, pp. 266-83. Miller, Sara B. “Hip-Hop Product Portrayals Divide Black Community.” The Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1027/p01s02ussc.html (accessed August 23, 2009). Misak, Cheryl. “Pragmatism and Pluralism.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 41, no. 1, 2005, pp. 129-35. Mullis, Eric C. “Performative Somaesthetics: Principles and Scope.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, no. 4, 2006, pp. 114-7. Naughty By Nature. Naughty by Nature. Tommy Boy, 1991. Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Nehamas, Alexander. “Richard Shusterman on Pleasure and Aesthetic Experience.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 1, 1998, pp. 4951. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. London: Penguin,1978. Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London-New York: Routledge, 2002 Odell, Michael. “The Greatest Songs Ever! Fight for Your Right.” Blender.com, February 15, 2004, http://www.blender.com/guide/67366/greatest-songsever-fight-for-your-right.html (accessed November 14, 2009). O’Leary, Timothy. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum, 2006. Olson, Gary A. Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Oort, Richard Van. “The Critic as Ethnographer.” New Literary History, vol. 35, no. 4, 2005, pp. 621-61. Osborne, Peter. “Art Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Criticism, Art History, and Contemporary Art.” Art History, vol. 27, no. 4, 2004, pp. 651-70.

Bibliography

193

Osumare, Halifu. “Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, vol. 24, no. 1/2, 2001, pp. 171-81. Perloff, Marjorie. “The Poetics of Description: Wittgenstein on the Aesthetic.” Parallax, no. 4, 1998, pp. 79-89. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Power, Nina. “Review of Alain Badiou’s Conditions.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, July 25, 2009, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16706 (accessed August 7, 2009). Pratt, Scott L. Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pratt, Scott L. “Review of The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism.” The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 39, No. 2, 2003, pp. 334-41. Public Enemy. Greatest Misses. Def Jam/Columbia/SME Records, 1992. Putnam, Hilary. “Comment on Robert Brandom’s Paper” in James Conant and Urszula M. ĩegleĔ, eds., Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 59-65. Putnam, Hilary. “Pragmatism and Realism” in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 37-53. Putnam, Hilary. Words and Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Quine, Willard Van Orman. Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. Rage Against the Machine. Rage Against the Machine. Epic Records, 1992. Ramsey, Jr., Guthrie P. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Renaut, Alain. The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity. Translated by M. B. Debevoise and Franklin Philip. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Reynolds, Jack. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Riccio, Barry D. “Popular Culture and High Culture: Dwight Macdonald, His Critics and the Ideal of Cultural Hierarchy in Modern America.” Journal of American Culture, vol. 16, no. 4, 1993, pp. 7-18. Rockmore, Tom. “On Classical and Neo-Analytic Forms of Pragmatism.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 36, no. 3, 2005, pp. 259-71.

194

Bibliography

Roelofs, Monique. “A Pearl’s Pleasures and Perils: The Detail at the Foundation of Taste.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 5, 2005, pp. 57-80. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Rorty, Richard. “Comments on Sleeper and Edel.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 21, no. 1, 1985, pp. 39-48. Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rorty, Richard. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rorty, Richard. “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?” Critical Horizons, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 7–20. Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin, 1999. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Rorty, Richard. “Philosophy without Principles” in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 132-8. Rorty, Richard. “Relativism – Finding and Making” in Jürgen Habermas, Leszek Kołakowski, and Richard Rorty. Debating the State of Philosopy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski. Edited by Józef NiĪnik and John T. Sanders. Westport: Praeger Paperback, 1996, pp. 31-47. Rorty, Richard. “Response to Richard Shusterman” in Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, eds., Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, pp. 153-7. Rorty, Richard. “Review of Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact-Value Distinction and Other Essays.” Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 1, 2004, pp. 151. Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rorty, Richard. “WstĊp do polskiego wydania wyboru esejów Stanleya Fisha” [Introduction to Polish Edition of Stanley Fish’s Essays] in Stanley Fish. Interpretacja, retoryka, polityka [Interpretation, Rhetorics, Politics]. Translated by Krzysztof Abriszewski et al., edited by Andrzej Szahaj. Kraków: Universitas, 2002, pp. 5-12.

Bibliography

195

Rorty, Richard, Derek Nystrom, and Kent Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2002. Rorty, Richard and E.P. Ragg, “Worlds or Words Apart? The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies: An Interview with Richard Rorty.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 26, 2002, pp. 369-96. Rosen, Ralph M. and Donald R. Marks. “Comedies of Transgression in Gangsta Rap and Ancient Classical Poetry.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 4, 1999, pp. 897-928. Rosenthal, Sandra B. “Pragmatism and the Reconstruction of Metaphysics” in Tom Rockmore and Beth J. Singer, eds., Anti-Foundationalism Old and New. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992, pp. 165-188. Rosenthal, Sandra B. Speculative Pragmatism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. Roth, Robert J. British Empiricism and American Pragmatism: New Directions and Neglected Arguments. New York: Durham University Press, 1993. Rywerant, Yochanan. The Feldenkrais Method: Teaching by Handling. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Säätelä, Simo. “Between Intellectualism and ‘Somaesthetics’.” Filozofski Vestnik, no. 2, 1999, pp. 151-62. Sallis, Steven. “Naming the Rose: Readers and Codes in Umberto Eco’s Novel.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 19, no. 2, 1986, pp. 3-12. Schnädelbach, Herbert. “Morbus Hermeneuticus: Thesen über eine philosophische Krankheit” in Vernunft und Geschichte: Vorträge und Abhandlungen. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987, pp. 279-84. Schnädelbach, Herbert. Philosophy in Germany, 1831-1933. Translated by Eric Matthews. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Schoolman, Morton. “Marcuse’s Aesthetics and the Displacement of Critical Theory.” New German Critique, no. 8, 1976, pp. 54-79. Schoolman, Morton. “The Next Enlightenment: Aesthetic Reason in Modern Art and Mass Culture.” Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 9, no. 1, 2005, pp. 43-67. Searle, John R. “How to Derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 73, 1964, pp. 43-58. Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Sex Pistols. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Warner Bros/WEA,1990 [1977]. Shanken, Edward A. “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art.” Leonardo, vol. 35, no. 4, 2002, pp. 433-8.

196

Bibliography

Shusterman, Richard. “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, 2006, pp. 217-29. Shusterman, Richard. “Analytic Aesthetics, Literary Theory, and Deconstruction.” The Monist, vol. 69, 1986, pp. 22-38. Shusterman, Richard. “Art Infraction: Goodman, Rap, Pragmatism.” Australian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 73, no. 2, 1995, pp. 269-79. Shusterman, Richard. “Beneath Interpretation, Against Hermeneutic Holism.” The Monist, vol. 73, 1990, pp. 181-204. Shusterman, Richard. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Shusterman, Richard. “Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 67, no. 2, 2009, pp. 133-45. Shusterman, Richard. “Come Back to Pleasure” in Philippe Vergne, ed., Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2000, pp. 33-47. Shusterman, Richard. “Complexities of Aesthetic Experience: Response to Johnston.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 38, no. 4, 2004, pp. 109-12. Shusterman, Richard. “Definition, Dramatization, and Rasa.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 61, no. 3, 2003, pp. 295-8. Shusterman, Richard. “Dewey on Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?” Philosophical Forum, vol. 26, no. 2, 1994, pp. 127-148. Shusterman, Richard. “Emerson’s Pragmatist Aesthetics.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, no. 207, 1999, pp. 87-99. Shusterman, Richard. “Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 43, no. 3, 2003, pp. 289-307. Shusterman, Richard. “Evaluative Reasoning in Criticism.” Ratio, vol. 23, 1981, pp. 141-57. Shusterman, Richard. “The Fine Art of Rap.” New Literary History, vol. 22, 1991, pp. 613-32. Shusterman, Richard. “Ghetto Music.” Journal of Rap, Winter 1992, pp. 11-8. Shusterman, Richard. “Human Nature at the Schlachtensee” in Pauline von Bonsdorff and Arto Haapala, eds., Aesthetics in the Human Environment. Lahti: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, 1999, pp. 35-47. Shusterman, Richard. “Intellectualism and the Field of Aesthetics: The Return of the Repressed?” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 220, 2002, pp. 327-42. Shusterman, Richard. “Interpretation, Pleasure, and Value in Aesthetic Experience.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 1, 1998, pp. 51-3.

Bibliography

197

Shusterman, Richard. “Making Sense and Changing Lives: Directions in Contemporary Pragmatism.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, pp. 63-72. Shusterman, Richard. The Object of Literary Criticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984. Shusterman, Richard. Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Shusterman, Richard. “Popular Art and Education.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 13, 1995, pp. 203-12. Shusterman, Richard. Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New York: Routledge, 1997. Shusterman, Richard. “Pragmatism and Criticism: A response to Three Critics of Pragmatist Aesthetics.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 16, no.1, 2002, p. 26-38. Shusterman, Richard. “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics.” New Literary History, forthcoming. Shusterman, Richard. “Pragmatism and East-Asian Thought.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 35, 2004, pp. 13-42. Shusterman, Richard. “Pragmatism, Art, and Violence: The Case of Rap” in Tetsuji Yamamoto, ed., Philosophical Designs for a Socio-Cultural Transformation. Tokyo and Boulder: E. H. E. S. C. and Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, pp. 667-74. Shusterman, Richard. “Pragmatism Between Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Education: A Response to David Granger.” Studies in Philosophy of Education, vol. 22, no.5, 2003, pp. 403-12. Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Shusterman, Richard. “Pragmatist Aesthetics and Confucianism.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 18-29. Shusterman, Richard. “Rap Remix: Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Other Issues in the House.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, 1995, pp. 150-8. Shusterman, Richard. “Reason and Aesthetics between Modernity and Postmodernity: Habermas and Rorty” in Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, eds., Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, pp. 134-52. Shusterman, Richard. “Regarding Oneself and Seeing Double: Fragments of Autobiography” in George Yancey, ed., The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, pp. 121. Shusterman, Richard. “Review of Barbara H. Smith, Contingencies of Value.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, 1989, pp. 182-4.

198

Bibliography

Shusterman, Richard. “Review of Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 50, 1992, pp. 254-7. Shusterman, Richard. “Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents.” Philosophy of Education Archive, 2009, pp. 25-37; retrieved November 7, 2009, from http://ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/pes/article/view/1432/179. Shusterman, Richard. “Self-Styling After the ‘End of Art’” [interviewed by Chantal Pontbriand and Olivier Asselin]. Parachute, no. 105, 2002, pp. 57-61. Shusterman, Richard. “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 57, 1999, pp. 299-313. Shusterman, Richard. “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime.” British Journal of Aeasthetics, no. 4, 2005, pp. 323-41. Shusterman, Richard. “Somaesthetics and Education: Exploring the Terrain” in Liora Bresler, ed., Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds: Towards Embodied Teaching and Learning. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, pp. 51-60. Shusterman, Richard. “Somaesthetics and the Revival of Aesthetics.” Filozofski Vestnik, no. 2, 2007, pp. 135-49. Shusterman, Richard. “Somaesthetics and The Second Sex: A Pragmatist Reading of a Feminist Classic.” Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 4, 2003, pp. 106-36. Shusterman, Richard. Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Shusterman, Richard. “Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 40, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-21. Shusterman, Richard. T. S. Eliot and Philosophy of Criticism. London: Duckworth, 1988. Shusterman, Richard. “Two Questions on Cannibalism and Rap” in Catalogue of the 24th Biennial of Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo, 1998, pp. 144-7. Shusterman, Richard. “The Uses of Pragmatism and Its Logic of Pluralism: A response to Altieri and Grabes.” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 15, 1999, pp. 137-50. Shusterman, Richard. “Wittgenstein on Bodily Feelings. Explanation and Melioration in Philosophy of Mind, Art, and Politics.” in Cressida J. Heyes, ed., The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 202-19. Shusterman, Richard. “ĩycie, sztuka i filozofia” [Life, Art, and Philosophy: An interview conducted by Adam Chmielewski] in O sztuce i Īyciu: Od poetyki hip-hopu do filozofii somatycznej [On Art and Life: From Hip-Hop Poetics to Somatic Philosophy]. Translated and edited by Wojciech Małecki. Wrocław: Atla 2, 2007, pp. 11-29.

Bibliography

199

Siebers, Tobin. “Kant and the Politics of Beauty.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 1998, pp. 31-50. Singer, Beth J. “Pragmatism and Pluralism.” The Monist, vol. 75, no. 4, 1992, pp. 477-91. Snaevarr, Stefán. “Pragmatism and Popular Culture: Shusterman, Popular Art, and the Challenge of Visuality.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 41, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1-11. Stecker, Robert. Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1996. Stecker, Robert. “Interpretation” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds., The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 243-45. Stevenson, Charles L. “Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics” in Max Black, ed., Philosophical Analysis: A Collection of Essays. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971, pp. 319-58. Stevenson, Charles L. “Persuasive Definitions.” Mind, vol. 47, no. 187, 1938, pp. 331-50. Stomma, Ludwik. “Nieistniejąca filozofia” [Non-Existent Philosophy], Polityka, no. 16, 2001, p. 98. Storey, John. Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Stow, Simon. “The Return of Charles Kinbote: Nabokov on Rorty.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 1999, pp. 65-77. Stroud, Scott R. “Understanding and Interpretation: Defending Gadamer in Light of Shusterman’s ‘Beneath Interpretation’.” Auslegung, vol. 22, 2002, pp. 151-60. Stuhr, John J. Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community. New York: SUNY University Press, 1997. Stuhr, John J. “Old Ideals Crumble: War, Pragmatist Intellectuals, and the Limits of Philosophy.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 35, no. 1/2, 2004, p. 82-98. Stuhr, John J. “Practice, Semiotics, and the Limits of Philosophy.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, pp. 73-80. Sullivan, Shannon. Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Sullivan, Shannon. “(Re)Construction Zone: Beware of Falling Statues” in William J. Gavin, ed., In Dewey’s Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003, pp. 109-27. Sum 41. All Killer, No Filler. Island Records, 2001. Surette, Leon. “Richard Rorty Lays Down the Law.” Philosophy and Literature, no. 2,1995, pp. 261-75. Szahaj, Andrzej. E Pluribus Unum? Kraków: Universitas, 2004.

200

Bibliography

Szahaj, Andrzej. “Granice anarchizmu interpretacyjnego” [The Boundaries of Interpretive Anarchism] in Zniewalająca moc kultury: Artykuły i szkice z filozofii kultury, poznania i polityki [The Fine Power of Culture: Papers in Philosophy of Culture, Cognition, and Politics]. ToruĔ: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2004, pp. 93-122. Szahaj, Andrzej. Ironia i miłoĞü: Neopragmatyzm Richarda Rorty’ego w kontekĞcie sporu o postmodernizm [Irony and Love: Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism in the Context of the Debate on Postmodernism]. Wrocław: Leopoldinum, 1996. Szahaj, Andrzej, “‘Nie ma niczego poza interpretacją’ – tako rzecze Stanley Fish” [There Is Nothing Beyond Interpretation: Thus Spoke Stanley Fish] in: Zniewalająca moc kultury: Artykuły i szkice z filozofii kultury, poznania i polityki [The Fine Power of Culture. Papers in Philosophy of Culture, Cognition, and Politics]. ToruĔ: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2004, pp. 158-67. Szajnert, Danuta. “Intencja i interpretacja” [Intention and Interpretation]. PamiĊtnik Literacki, no. 1, 2000, pp. 7-42. Talisse, Robert B. and Scott F. Aikin, “Why Pragmatists Cannot Be Pluralists.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 41, no. 1, 2005, pp. 10118. Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. Dzieje szeĞciu pojĊü. Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1975. Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics. Translated by Christopher Kasparek. The Hague-Boston: Nijhoff, 1980. Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. “Romantyzm czyli rozpacz semantyka” [Romanticism, or Every Semantician’s Worst Nightmare]. PamiĊtnik Literacki, no. 4, 1971, pp. 3-21. Taylor, Paul C. “The Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued: Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 16, no.1, 2002, pp. 17-25. Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London: Continuum, 2002. Thompson, Paul B. and Thomas C. Hilde, eds., The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Thoreau, Henry David. Political Writings. Edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tiffin, Chris and Alan Lawson, “Introduction: The Textuality of Empire” in Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds., De-Scribing Empire. London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 1-11. Tooby, John and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts.” SubStance, no. 94/95, 2001, pp. 6-27.

Bibliography

201

Tupper, Ken. “Entheogens & Education: Exploring the Potential of Psychoactives as Educational Tools.” Journal of Drug Education and Awareness, no. 2, 2003, pp. 145-61. Turner, Bryan S. “Somaesthetics and the Critique of Cartesian Dualism.” Body & Society, vol. 14, no. 3, 2008, pp. 129-33. Väkevä, Lauri. “Interviewing Richard Shusterman: Part I.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, no. 1, 2002, pp. 2-10. Vattimo, Gianni and Sebastian Gurciullo. “Interpretation and Nihilism as the Depletion of Being: a Discussion with Gianni Vattimo about the Consequences of Hermeneutics.” Theory & Event, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001, no pp. Vega, Suzanne. “Surviving the Hits.” Measure for Measure, June 18, 2008, http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/8/surviving-the-hits/ (accessed July 29, 2009). Vescio, Brian. “Donald Davidson, Pragmatism, and Literary Theory.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 1988, pp. 200-11. Weitz, Morris. Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Weitz, Morris. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 16, no.1, 1956, pp. 27-35. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Rettung durch Halbierung?: Zu Richard Shustermans Rehabilitierung ästetischer Erfahrung.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 47, no. 1, 1999, pp. 111-26. Welsch, Wolfgang. Undoing Aesthetics. Translated by Andrew Inkpin. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Wessell, Jr., Leonard P. “Alexander Baumgarten’s Contribution to the Development of Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 30, no. 3, 1972, pp. 333-42. Wight, Randall D. “More Than Mere Weather: James’s Talks to Students About Life.” Teaching of Psychology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2003, p. 38-40. Wihl, Gary. The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Deconstruction. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Wilkoszewska, Krystyna. Sztuka jako rytm Īycia: Rekonstrukcja filozofii sztuki Johna Deweya [Art as the Rhythm of Life: A Reconstruction of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art]. Kraków: Universitas, 2003. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1968. Wollheim, Richard. Art and Its Objects. New York: Harper and Row,1970. Yuasa, Yasuo. The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory. Edited by Thomas P. Kasulis, translated by Nagatomo Shigenori and Thomas P. Kasulis. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987. Zerbib, David. “De Socrate, MC Solaar.” l’Humanité, January 28, 2002, http://www.humanite.fr/2002-06-28_Cultures_-DE-SOCRATE-MCSOLAAR (accessed September 14, 2009).

202

Bibliography

Zerbib, David. “Richard Shusterman: les effets secondaires d’une philosophie douce.” Le Monde des Livres, November 20, 2007, p. 12. Ziff, Joel. “The Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique” in Mary A. Herring, Molly Manning Roberts, eds., Blackwell Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Fast Facts for Medical Practice. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Science, 2002, pp. 47-54. Ziff, Paul. “Reasons in Art Criticism” in William Kennick, ed., Art and Philosophy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979, pp. 669-86. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991. Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings. London: Verso, 2004.

Literary and Cultural Theory General editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga Vol.

1

Wojciech H. Kalaga: Nebulae of Discourse. Interpretation, Textuality, and the Subject. 1997.

Vol.

2

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Memory – Remembering – Forgetting. 1999.

Vol.

3

Piotr Fast: Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History. Socialist Realism and its Others. 1999.

Vol.

4

Ewa Rewers: Language and Space: The Poststructuralist Turn in the Philosophy of Culture. 1999.

Vol.

5

Floyd Merrell: Tasking Textuality. 2000.

Vol.

6

Tadeusz Rachwał / Tadeusz Slawek (eds.): Organs, Organisms, Organisations. Organic Form in 19th-Century Discourse. 2000.

Vol.

7

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał: Signs of Culture: Simulacra and the Real. 2000.

Vol.

8

Tadeusz Rachwal: Labours of the Mind. Labour in the Culture of Production. 2001.

Vol.

9

Rita Wilson / Carlotta von Maltzan (eds.): Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Literature and Culture in Africa and Beyond. 2001.

Vol.

10

Leszek Drong: Masks and Icons. Subjectivity in Post-Nietzschean Autobiography. 2001.

Vol.

11

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Exile. Displacements and Misplacements. 2001.

Vol.

12

Marta Zajac: The Feminine of Difference. Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous and Contemporary Critique of the Marquis de Sade. 2002.

Vol.

13

Zbigniew Bialas / Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski (eds.): Alchemization of the Mind. Literature and Dissociation. 2003.

Vol.

14

Tadeusz Slawek: Revelations of Gloucester. Charles Olsen, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Writing of the Place. 2003.

Vol.

15

Carlotta von Maltzan (ed.): Africa and Europe: En/Countering Myths. Essays on Literature and Cultural Politics. 2003.

Vol.

16

Marzena Kubisz: Strategies of Resistance. Body, Identity and Representation in Western Culture. 2003.

Vol.

17

Ewa Rychter: (Un)Saying the Other. Allegory and Irony in Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethical Language. 2004.

Vol.

18

Ewa Borkowska: At the Threshold of Mystery: Poetic Encounters with Other(ness). 2005.

Vol.

19

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Feeding Culture: The Pleasures and Perils of Appetite. 2005.

Vol.

20

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Spoiling the Cannibals’ Fun? Cannibalism and Cannibalisation in Culture and Elsewhere. 2005.

Vol.

21

Katarzyna Ancuta: Where Angels Fear to Hover. Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror. 2005.

Vol.

22

Piotr Wilczek: (Mis)translation and (Mis)interpretation: Polish Literature in the Context of Cross-Cultural Communication. 2005.

Vol.

23

Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski: Glebae Adscripti. Troping Place, Region and Nature in America. 2005.

Vol.

24

Zbigniew Białas: The Body Wall. Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices. 2006.

Vol.

25

Katarzyna Nowak: Melancholic Travelers. Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal. 2007.

Vol.

26

Leszek Drong: Disciplining the New Pragmatism. Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study. 2007.

Vol.

27

Katarzyna Smyczyńska: The World According to Bridget Jones. Discourses of Identity in Chicklit Fictions. 2007.

Vol.

28

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Multicultural Dilemmas. Identity, Difference, Otherness. 2008.

Vol.

29

Maria Plochocki: Body, Letter, and Voice. Construction Knowledge in Detective Fiction. 2010.

Vol.

30

Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis: Stories of the Unconscious: Sub-Versions in Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. 2009.

Vol.

31

Sonia Front: Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction. 2009.

Vol.

32

Wojciech Kalaga / Jacek Mydla / Katarzyna Ancuta (eds.): Political Correctness. Mouth Wide Shut? 2009.

Vol.

33

Paweł Marcinkiewicz: The Rhetoric of the City: Robinson Jeffers and A. R. Ammons. 2009.

Vol.

34

Wojciech Małecki: Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory. 2010.

www.peterlang.de