What Art Does: Using Philosophy of Technology to Talk about Art (Global Aesthetic Research) 9781538167328, 9781538167335, 1538167328

Citation preview

What Art Does

GLOBAL AESTHETIC RESEARCH Series editor: Joseph J. Tanke, associate professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii The Global Aesthetic Research series publishes cutting-edge research in the field of aesthetics. It contains books that explore the principles at work in our encounters with art and nature, that interrogate the foundations of artistic, literary, and cultural criticism, and that articulate the theory of the discipline’s central concepts. Titles in the Series Early Modern Aesthetics, J. Colin McQuillan Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, Catherine M. Soussloff Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, Edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali Living Off Landscape: or the Unthought-of in Reason, Francois Jullien, Translated by Pedro Rodriguez Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, Emily Brady, Isis Brook, and Jonathan Prior Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins, Zoltán Somhegyi François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction, Arne De Boever Figural Space: Semiotics and the Aesthetic Imaginary, William D. Melaney Eroticizing Aesthetics: In the Real with Bataille and Lacan, Tim Themi Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, Edited by J. Colin McQuillan Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us, Edited by Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa, and Antonio Cardiello What Art Does: Using Philosophy of Technology to Talk About Art, Ryan Wittingslow

What Art Does Using Philosophy of Technology to Talk about Art Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wittingslow, Ryan Mitchell, author. Title: What art does : using philosophy of technology to talk about art / Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2023] | Series: Global aesthetic research | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023035756 (print) | LCCN 2023035757 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538167328 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538167335 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art and technology. | Technology–Philosophy. Classification: LCC N72.T4 W58 2023 (print) | LCC N72.T4 (ebook) | DDC 700.1/05–dc23/eng/20230825 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035756 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035757 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

I’r un harddaf.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Chapter 1: Conditions



Chapter 2: Functions



Chapter 3: Affordances

35



Chapter 5: Artworks

Index

21

Chapter 4: Artworlds

References

1

57



75

97

103

About the Author



111

vii

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help and inspiration of all those wonderful people who have patiently put up with my half-baked thoughts on art, philosophy, and technology over the last fifteen years. There are too many to list with any completeness, but particular thanks go to (in alphabetical order): Melis Baş, Jeremy Burman, Byron Clugston, Caroline Dijkema, Daan Evers, Laura Kotevska, Sanna Lehtinen, Ferdinand Lewis, Christopher May, Michael Nagenborg, Alfred Nordmann, Marcel Siegler, and Richard Smith. My deepest thanks, however, go to my wife, Rhiannon Bruce. Not only is she a spectacularly wonderful person and my most careful reader, but she is also blessed with both excellent grammar and an unerring eye for (my) bullshit. While the lion’s share of this manuscript was produced while at the University of Groningen, the concluding sections were written at TU Darmstadt and with the support of a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

ix

Introduction

In the Art Gallery of New South Wales hangs a mirror, framed in white, about sixty centimeters to each side. I first noticed it in late 2004, during the weird no-man’s-land between the end of high school and the start of university. Unemployed and adrift, I was spending most of my time reading pretentious novels and experimenting with mail-order psychedelics. I can’t remember exactly what brought me to the gallery that day. I think, perhaps, that I’d been shopping. In any case, the day in question was fine and hot, and the Moreton Bay fig trees heaved with the sharp migraine trill of cicadas. Hoping to escape the humidity, I ducked inside to take advantage of the cool blond marble. Enjoying the air-conditioning, I began to walk the halls with no object or goal to my loafing. Not there to look at anything in particular, I was still there for the looking: there, at least, until the forecasted cool change decided to blow through. I guess I’d been roaming for about half an hour when I entered the contemporary art wing, a couple floors below the entrance, and saw the mirror for the first time. Still very much in possession of both the beauty and the narcissism of youth, I went over to get a glimpse of my reflection. It was only when I got closer that I realized there were words written in white paint upon the glass: “No object implies the existence of any other.” I stopped short and frowned. What could it possibly mean? I was bamboozled; the statement is straightforwardly untrue. There are, after all, lots of objects that imply the existence of other objects. Needles, for instance, imply thread. Space stations imply rockets. Microwave dinners imply microwaves. What a ridiculous claim! Making things even more confusing was that the work actively seemed to undercut its own thesis. Doesn’t being able to look at yourself in the mirror imply the existence of both objects: both you and the mirror? I didn’t know it at the time, but the text is lifted from Book I, Part III, Section VI of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature—specifically, the section xi

xii

Introduction

of the book wherein Hume outlines the problem of induction. “There is no object,” he writes, “which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves, and never look beyond the ideas which we form of them” (Hume 1896, 86–87). Yet to enroll in a first-year philosophy course, the intellectual background was lost on me: I was unaware of Hume’s argument that it is only on the grounds of experience that we can say that one object might imply the existence of another. Mere reason, he thought, is inadequate to the task. Had I known then what I know now, perhaps I would have thought that the artwork—No object implies the existence of any other by Ian Burn, from 1967—was making some clever point about the problem of induction. Maybe he wanted visitors to realize that there is nothing in the universe that guarantees that the future will look like the past: that the assumption is only a ‘relation of ideas,’ as Hume wrote, rather than a ‘matter of fact.’ A little over a decade after my first encounter with Ian Burn, I took my then-girlfriend (and now-wife, for her sins) to the gallery on our second date. There, I saw it again: that same white frame, that same mirror, that same ironic and inscrutable white text: “No object implies the existence of any other.” We stopped in front of it, pulling faces. As she took a selfie with her phone, I asked her what she thought No object meant. “I think it’s about the contingency of selfhood,” she said, after thinking for a moment. “When we think about ourselves, we think about how we appear to other people: how we are mirrored in them, and how they in turn are mirrored in us. It’s trying to problematize the assumption that we’re socially constituted in that way.”1 A reasonable interpretation, I thought. Reasonable, because it captures all the salient facts of the piece—a mirror at the appropriate height; that particular white text printed on glass; an aura of gnomic inscrutability. And yet, fundamentally at odds with the equally plausible interpretation I had in my possession. A quandary! How to resolve this most civilized of dilemmas? And so, seeking an arbiter, we looked to the wall text next to the mirror. Unfortunately, that didn’t prove helpful, either—instead, it provided a third possible interpretation: The viewer is asked to consider this specific work of art without considering his or her accumulated knowledge and assumptions about either ‘mirrors’ or ‘works of art’ (or the person ‘in’ the mirror). The impossibility of isolating any one thing from all others is emphasised in this conceptual artwork by our reflection in the mirror and that of the space in which it hangs and other art nearby.2

Impossible! Already we have at least three distinct interpretations of a work. Frustratingly, each interpretation is equally plausible, in that each seems to accurately account for the facts of the matter. Consequently, we are without any principled means by which to discriminate between them. As a

Introduction

xiii

further consequence, and lacking a means of easily resolving this issue, my initial question—that is, what does the artwork mean?—remains unanswered. This kind of conversation is probably familiar to you. Human beings as a species (and I, personally) expend enormous amounts of cognitive energy analyzing and discussing these kinds of cultural artefacts: not just the paintings, sculptures, and installations one might encounter in mainstream galleries, but also novels, films, music, video games, poems, graffiti, comic books, theater shows, dance performances, and whatever else. What are the political commitments implicit in this painting? Why does that poet write the way she does? Why did that dancer move his body just so? And indeed, trying to make sense of what a given artwork might ‘mean’ is one of the cognitive pleasures offered by the arts: a kind of participatory and creative problem-solving or sense-making. Philosophers are also interested in these questions. However, philosophers are not only interested in ‘what’ a given artwork means; not only interested in poetic forms, political commentaries, and exquisitely balanced grand jetés. Philosophers are also interested in higher-order questions about artistic meaning, such as ‘if’ and ‘how’ artworks mean in general. The first issue concerns the question of whether artistic meaning exists in the first place. For many philosophers, ‘meaning’ is conventionally conceptualized as some virtuous interrelationship between a given set of propositions and the world. Consequently, philosophers of this ilk—whether they endorse a semantic, foundational, or some other theory of meaning—could well struggle with the idea that abstract painting or instrumental music means anything. After all, neither abstract painting nor instrumental music expresses anything like a proposition (or at least, not in a straightforward way). So, too, might those philosophers struggle with the idea that a novel means anything qua artwork: while most novels are chock-full of propositions, very few novels contain propositions about what that novel means in the aggregate. There is also the question of how artworks mean things. For whatever set of reasons—though I could hazard some guesses—this question has inspired the lion’s share of philosophical responses to the question of artistic meaning. Where does artistic meaning reside? How is it constituted? By what means is that meaning communicated? To what extent is artistic meaning a matter of artistic intention? To what extent is the meaning of an artwork contingent upon its status as an artwork? And so on. Within this field of questions, a plethora of answers have emerged—claims that artistic meaning is representational, or expressive of the internal states of the artist, or a property of the propositional descriptions of art objects, or whatever else—all tied up (whether directly or indirectly) in whatever theory of art the philosopher in question happens to endorse.

xiv

Introduction

Regardless of the theory of art or meaning endorsed, most of the approaches to these sorts of questions can be sorted into a taxonomy of four non-overlapping positions: what we can call ‘uncritical monism,’ ‘uncritical pluralism,’ ‘critical monism,’ and ‘critical pluralism.’ While these categories denote general attitudes rather than explicit traditions, it’s nonetheless worth offering a brief description of these terms. Uncritical monists are ‘monists’ because they endorse the claim that there is only one correct interpretation of a given text, and they are ‘uncritical’ because that interpretation can be gleaned in an uncomplicated way: usually, by conflating the meaning of a work with what the author intended to mean by the work. This approach is underpinned by two assumptions: first, there is one best or most accurate interpretation of an artwork, and second, that these interpretations can be straightforwardly gleaned from the stated intentions of the artist. Or ‘the artwork means exhaustively means x because the artist says that it means x.’ Thus, most forms of uncritical monism are premised upon the assumption that an artist cannot be wrong about their own work. As might be expected, this assumption is straightforwardly incorrect. Artists can be—and are—wrong about their own work all the time. That is, artworks can fail to furnish some specific meaning stipulated within the intention under which the concept of the artwork is subordinated. This occurs when the artwork cannot satisfy some type-description included in the intentional content that guides the artist’s production of that artwork, whether because of the artist’s lack of technical skill, conceptual clarity, or whatever else. Given that, it should be clear that uncritical monism is a bit of a non-starter, and I imagine it is for this reason that no philosopher (to my knowledge, anyway) would willingly identify as an uncritical monist. Nonetheless, these attitudes are common in folk theories of meaning attribution when it comes to the arts. The second position, uncritical pluralism, is also common in folk theories of meaning attribution and is equally unfashionable with philosophers. Uncritical pluralists are ‘pluralist’ because they endorse the claim that there are a great many correct interpretations of a given text, and they are ‘uncritical’ because that interpretation can be gleaned in an uncomplicated way. Usually this means that uncritical monism is premised upon two assumptions: first, there is no single best or most accurate interpretation of an artwork; and second, there is no principled way to preference one given interpretation over another. It is a sentiment that flattens all evaluations of quality or worth into mere opinion. Any given interpretation is as good as any other: ‘the artwork means x to me and y to you, and both interpretations are equally valid regardless of the evidence we bring to bear in favour of those interpretations.’ While uncritical pluralism is less vulnerable to criticism than uncritical monism (uncritical pluralism having the same puerile strengths as other radically sceptical philosophical positions), uncritical pluralism requires one

Introduction

xv

to bite a number of deeply unpalatable bullets about the nature of artistic meaning. After all, one of the reasons we take pleasure in works of art is, as mentioned above, that we like to discuss and analyze these cultural artefacts. What makes these conversations productive and pleasurable is that we take these questions to be worth asking. While I am by no means a Kantian about art, I think Kant is correct when he states that a judgment of value constitutes a claim that all other people should find the artwork similarly valuable (Kant 2007, sec. 6). However, for that to be the case, we simply can’t afford to be uncritical in our pluralism; without the possibility that there can be, in principle, better and worse interpretations of artworks, there can be no teeth in the Kantian demand for agreement. Indeed, if meaning were a strictly private matter, there would be no point in talking about artworks at all. There are two versions of the critical approach: critical monism and critical pluralism. Like the uncritical variety, critical monists argue that there is one best or most accurate interpretation of an artwork. However, unlike the uncritical variety, critical monists do not take the meaning of a work to be reducible to that which the artist intended to mean by the work. Instead, the critical monist endorses the idea, per Alexander Nehamas, that the meaning of an artwork “is specified by that text’s ideal interpretation,” an interpretation capable of accounting “for all of the text’s features” (1981, 144). These features include the intentions of the author, but also aspects of the work including the grounds under which the object is considered an artwork, the conditions under which we engage with the artwork, the implicit and explicit claims that are instantiated in the artwork, and the material, cultural, economic, and other conditions under which the artwork was produced. An ideal interpretation would be able to offer a complete account of the given work considering those facts. However, critical monists are not overly bullish about achieving this ideal interpretation. Instead, for critical monists, the ideal interpretation serves as a regulative ideal—an abstract, Platonic yardstick—against which other (non-ideal) interpretations can be measured and found wanting. The better the interpretation, the more features of the artwork are captured and explained by the interpretation. The virtue of the critical monist position lies in the fact that posing this regulative ideal gives us a clear means by which to make the judgment that one interpretation is better than another. The appeal of critical monism is that it presents a compelling way to preserve the notion that there are better and worse interpretations of a text without reducing that evaluation to mere authorial intention. However, critical monism is not without problems. Consider Joseph Margolis’s observation that “the problem of interpretation is precisely what it is because there is no formal demarcation line between what is describably present in a work and what may be interpretively imputed to it” (1980, 127). That is, there exists

xvi

Introduction

“no stable framework in which the truth or falsity of an interpretation can be decided” because the notion of ‘art’ itself is so subject to the vagaries of history and culture (Vandevelde 2005, 2; see also Margolis 1980, 163). This absence of a stable framework means it is very difficult to motivate the critical monist assumption that there exists a Platonic yardstick against which to judge the given interpretations of a work of art. Finally, we have critical pluralism. Like uncritical pluralists, critical pluralists argue that there is no single best or most accurate interpretation of an artwork. However, unlike uncritical pluralists, critical pluralists don’t think we can simply impute whatever meaning we like about artworks. To the contrary, the critical pluralist very much endorses the idea that there are better and worse interpretations of a work—with ‘better’ and ‘worse’ again cashed out in terms of the degree to which an artwork’s features are captured by its interpretation. However, unlike the critical monist, the critical pluralist does not think that an artwork is exegetically exhausted by a good interpretation. Instead, the pluralist argues, it is possible for there to be multiple equally good, yet irreconcilable, descriptions of the same artwork. In so doing, a critical pluralist accepts Nelson Goodman’s insight that descriptions can disagree with one another yet “both be true of the same world” (Goodman 1975, 58). Consequently, critical pluralism is resistant to criticisms of the sort that Margolis offers. No longer bound to a single best possible interpretation, the demarcation line between that which is “describably present” in a work and what may be “interpretively imputed” to that work is far less important. In this manner, critical pluralism is also resistant to criticisms like the one I offer against critical monism: it’s simply not a problem that art has a social ontology if multiple apt descriptions of an artwork are possible. If it’s not already clear, I take critical pluralism to be the most plausible general account of artistic meaning. This probably shouldn’t be a surprise. While I am loath to jump on a bandwagon, critical pluralism of one kind or another probably constitutes the ‘standard’ position among philosophers, literary scholars, art historians, and other scholars who employ hermeneutic methods (cf. Vandevelde 2005, 1–2). That being said, the account I develop for the rest of this book could, I think, work for either critical position. Both uncritical monism and uncritical pluralism are premised upon the notion that it is human agents who are wholly responsible for what artworks mean: in the first case, the meaning of the artwork can be fully identified with the intentions of the artist; in the latter, the meaning can be fully identified with some member of the artworld public’s interpretation of the work. However, the critical versions of the monist and pluralist positions shift the site of artistic meaning. Possessing neither the radical dullness of uncritical monism nor the damp solipsism of uncritical pluralism, those who endorse either ‘critical’ position believe that meaning cannot be straightforwardly

Introduction

xvii

extracted from the stated intentions of the artist, nor should we conflate the contents of an artwork with what we believe to be true about that artwork. Instead, we can preference between one given interpretation and another by appealing to the identifiable features that an artwork possesses—features that are a consequence of artistic intention (cf. Carroll 2000), but are not themselves totally reducible to that intention. For a person who subscribes to either one of the critical positions, semantic content is something that you glean via your encounter with the work of art, rather than something that is imposed upon the work of art via some external party. The aim of this book is to provide one possible account of how this interaction works in practice and, consequently, provide one explanation for how artworks mean things. Artworks, in my view, not only mean things (obviously, straightforwardly); they also mean things in a robust way. While this may not sound too exciting, what’s novel about this thesis is that I make this argument not by building upon a bedrock of scholarship in aesthetics or any of the other usual suspects you might expect to find lurking around an argument of this sort. Instead, most of the moving parts of this argument are drawn from different corners of philosophy of technology. Given that goal, I have two intentions with this book. My primary, narrow intention is to present a proof-of-concept for an alternative means of making sense of artistic meaning: a means, moreover, that emerges from an extremely rich tradition that is otherwise unrelated to other scholarship in aesthetics. This primary, narrow intention is itself motivated by a secondary aspiration: to bring philosophy of technology and aesthetics into closer and more intimate conversation.3 Even though philosophy of technology and aesthetics are both materially oriented disciplines, they don’t have all that much to do with one another. This is quite weird! After all, artworks and technical objects even share a lot of the same qualities. Artworks have technical features; technical objects have aesthetic features. Moreover, it’s very difficult to properly make sense of these sets of features in isolation. Analyses of art objects, for example, that fail to consider the technical aspects of those objects are obviously incomplete; so, too, are analyses of technical objects that fail to consider how those objects appear to experience. It would be ridiculous to analyze the aesthetic features of a Frank Gehry building without taking stock of the set of technical tools, methods, and materials that make that structure possible; it would be equally ridiculous to present an analysis of a technical consumer item like an iPhone without trying to make sense of the aesthetic qualities of that gadget. There is, in short, no obvious reason why we could not (or should not) talk about technology using the aesthetics or talk about art using the philosophy of technology. Of course, simply because there’s nothing stopping us from talking about technology via the aesthetics and vice versa doesn’t mean we necessarily

xviii

Introduction

should. But there are also convincing positive justifications for talking across the aisle. Both philosophy of technology and philosophy of aesthetics offer powerful analytical methods and conceptual schemas to help use make sense of the questions posed by different kinds of material objects: questions about intention, and meaning, and form, and whatever else. Unfortunately, many of these methods and schemas remain thoroughly siloed; they are very rarely found roaming outside the narrow subdisciplinary ecosystem of conferences, journals, and publishers in which they first appeared. This is where the problem lies. Given the wealth of foundational problems and concerns shared by the philosophies of technology and aesthetics, I take there to be obvious virtues in sharing the approaches and methods that have been developed to address those problems and concerns. Unfortunately, this kind of intra-disciplinary cross-pollination is very rare in practice. Given that general concern, the thesis I develop in this book rests upon the intuition that the concepts used by philosophers of technology to make sense of technical objects—to establish the intentions they instantiate, the ways in which they are used, how they feed into and influence our decision-making processes—are just as applicable to artworks. That is, it is my claim in this book that artworks are ‘tools.’ Tools are things that humans make that are for something. Tools are artefacts with ‘functions.’ This is also true for artworks. Indeed, I argue that artworks are very much functional objects, and that—despite whatever intuitions we might hold to the contrary—they enshrine their functions in the same way as non-artworks enshrine their function. Moreover, I think that the case in favor of this claim is reasonably straightforward, in that artworks fulfill all the same sufficiency and necessity criteria as tools. I understand the claim that artworks are tools for enshrining meaning may give you pause. While I think that most readers will happily concede that hammers, nails, and screwdrivers are tools—as are cars, coffee machines, and personal computers—you may be less happy with the idea that artworks are tools. This is a common and understandable concern. After all, the ways in which we speak about artworks and tools are conventionally very different. We ask them different sorts of questions. Compare, as an example, Burn’s No object implies the existence of any other with a technological non-artwork: say, an optical telescope. No object invites the asking of a certain class of questions, questions like my entreaty, “But what does it mean?” However, it’s rather less normal to ask the same of other kinds of artefacts: not only telescopes, but also cars, dining tables, space stations, or whatever. The reasons for this are manifold, but the intuitive distinction is readily identifiable. We take artworks like No object to assume a position about a particular state of affairs: a position that probably has some relationship with

Introduction

xix

both the intentions of the author and the circumstances under which that work is produced and received. Put simply, No object is an example of a class of objects with things to say. A telescope, on the other hand, is not taken to have a position in the same way. Instead, we talk about the telescope in terms of its function: the job or set of jobs that it has within the broader context of human activities and intentions. The telescope has the function of affording human beings the ability to better see certain states of affairs without necessarily saying something about those states of affairs. Despite this intuitive distinction, my strong suspicion—and the claim I defend in this book—is that there’s not actually much of a difference between the meanings of artworks and the functions of tools. While we talk about artworks and non-artworks in different ways, this does not constitute evidence of a real difference in the ways that artworks and technological tools mean and do. To be clear, my intention in making this claim is not to dismiss or deflate the privileged status of art objects. They are not simply tools like any other. To the contrary, I think artworks are a special kind of tool—a kind of tool, moreover, that possesses particular and special functions that are tied to artworks’ status as art objects. More precisely, my claim is that artworks are tools that are for meaning things, and that they enshrine meaning via what philosophers of technology call ‘affordances.’ Coined by psychologist James J. Gibson in his 1966 book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Gibson used the word affordance to describe the set of possibilities made available to an organism by its environment. Under Gibson’s articulation, ‘affordances’ are used to make sense of the ways in which environments encourage, constrain, or determine the behaviors of organisms within that environment. When an organism engages in certain goal-seeking behaviors—growing toward the sun, or hunting for prey, or whatever—affordances are those features of the environment that facilitate, stymie, or outright prevent the achievement of that goal. As he wrote in his 1979 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (Gibson 2014, 119)

Philosophers of technology use the term in a similar but not identical fashion. Whereas psychologists tend to conceptualize affordances as features of an environment, philosophers of technology use affordances to capture the ways in which bits of the world increase our capacities in some way or

xx

Introduction

make a desired outcome possible or easier to realize. Swimming goggles, for instance, afford us the ability to see better underwater. Paintbrushes afford us the ability to precisely apply paint. Telescopes afford us the ability to see very far away. Affordances, glossed in this manner, are not passive parts of the environment. Instead, they are sites of interaction and exposure: places where our intentions, our background knowledge, and the world around us enter fruitful confluence. Within that dense skein of factors, our behavior is not simply determined by our environmental affordances but is instead informed by a rich constellation of our preferences, our physical capacities, what we take to be the case, what is actually the case, and the material amenities with which we’re surrounded. In turn, those behaviors feed back into the world around us, changing not only the array of possibilities with which we are surrounded, but also our understanding of that array of possibilities. This starts the cycle anew. Affordances, in short, provide a means of conceptualizing not only what different tools do for us but also how our experiences of the world and its contents are mediated by those technologies. It is via affordances that artworks mean things. So, how do affordances contribute to the meaning of an artwork? I think that when we talk about artistic meaning, we’re talking about a virtuous confluence of three distinct factors: first, that artworks provide affordances of a general kind; second, that artworks provide specific affordances qua artworks; and third, that those specific affordances qua artworks constitute, in toto, the sum of what a given artwork means. Let’s unpack this a little. In the first instance, I think it is trivially true that artworks provide affordances. After all, artworks possess physical and other properties just like any other object, and we can take advantage of these properties in similarly intentional ways. A smithing hammer and a small bronze bust of Socrates by some Renaissance master, for instance, share many formal features (weight, mass, density, hardness), and thus furnish us with similar sets of affordances. So, in much the same way that we could use said bust of Socrates to crack open a stubborn macadamia nut, so, too, could the Mona Lisa be used as kindling for a fire, or the Sydney Opera House be used to shelter the unhoused, and so on. The affordances in this case are straightforwardly accessible, much like those affordances furnished by any other tool. My second claim is that artworks offer affordances qua artwork. That is, artworks offer certain special affordances because they are artworks and, more importantly, because they are acknowledged and understood as artworks. When I first encountered No object at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I was inclined to treat it as a normal mirror. However, once I realized it was an artwork, I was moved to think of it differently: not as an object in the business of reflecting its surroundings, but instead as an object engaged in the question of what it means to reflect. Burn’s artwork, in being recognized and

Introduction

xxi

treated as an artwork, afforded me the opportunity to structure my attention in such a way as to think about what these questions mean. This is the artwork affordance the work provides. Naturally, there are several conditions that needed to be met for me to encounter No object qua artwork. In the first instance, I needed to possess some concept of ‘artworks’ as a privileged class of objects with its own history and norms. I also needed to recognize the object as an example of that class: in this particular case, helped along by the fact that I encountered it in an art gallery, rather than (say) in a filthy nightclub bathroom at three in the morning. I also needed to be in the relevant position to be able to encounter that object as a member of that privileged class: I needed the right amount of time, cognitive space, physical comfort, and whatever else to approach No object in the appropriate way. This alignment of factors put me in the position to access and take advantage of the artwork affordances on offer. Finally—and most contentiously—it is precisely this set of artwork affordances to which we refer when we talk about artistic meaning. When we talk about artistic meaning, we’re really talking about the fact that exposure to artworks can make certain insights possible. This is not because artworks enshrine meaning in the way that languages enshrine meaning, or because artworks are somehow imbued with the intentions of their author, or whatever else. An artwork like Burn’s No object does not make claims. Instead, what No object has something to say about objects and the inferential and implicative relationships that may or may not bind them is the consequence of a structured encounter between a work and its audience: a virtuous confluence of form and circumstance that contains within the encounter an invitation for us to consider (and reconsider) what we take to be the case about what we take to be the subject at hand. In short, an artwork like No object instantiates its meaning by affording us the opportunity to structure our attention. That artwork, in common with all artworks, affords us the opportunity to reflect upon the world and its features in a scaffolded and orderly way. In furnishing us with this opportunity for structured attention, artworks can, under the right circumstances, afford experiences, reflections, and realizations that we would not otherwise have. Artworks, in short, can teach us. It is for this reason that structured attention is what we are talking about when we discuss what artworks mean. This book is divided into five chapters, not including this introduction. Chapter 1 provides the initial groundwork for our conversation about tools: what they are, how we should make sense of them, and the extent to which they overlap and intersect. I outline the basic conditions—the ‘technical codes’—that govern tool creation and use, including an account of the supervenience relations that underwrite these conditions. I also use this chapter to make clear that tools and their use are an integral part of what it means to

xxii

Introduction

be human: both in an evolutionary sense and in the deeper sense that tools and technology are a constitutive aspect of the human condition. Then, in chapter 2, I first survey several influential attempts to make sense of tool ‘function’—that is, not only the affordances that a given tool provides but also a description of what a tool should do. There I argue that tool function is not the consequence of some abstract relational structure (as its function is often conceptualized by philosophers of biology) but instead can and should be attributed on the basis of concordance with the intentions of the person who made the tool. This move allows us to make normative assessments of sufficiency or insufficiency when it comes to tool function in a way that affordances on their own would not. In chapter 3, I continue this line of argument by making clear the different ways that users relate with the intentions of makers and the ascribed functions of tools. This furnishes a picture that accounts for the plasticity of tool function: that is, how users use tools in contravention of the intentions of makers. Integral to this picture is an account of the affordances that tools furnish human users. I argue that, unlike biological affordances, tool affordances only function as if they are part of our bodies. This as if–ness is both deeply contingent and fundamentally scaffolded: a consequence of the intentions of designers, material factors, user knowledge, prevailing social customs, immediate needs, habituated forms of embodiment, and whatever else. Finally, and via the work of Don Ihde, I conclude chapter 3 by outlining a partial typology of the ways in which affordances present themselves to us. In this section, it is my intention to highlight and argue for the deep contingency of affordances, at least as conceptualized in the philosophy of technology. The appreciation, acknowledgment, and utilization of any given affordance can only take place if certain conditions (material, cultural, intellectual, historical, and otherwise) are met. We need to have the right amenities in place for us to even begin to take advantage of the affordances with which we are furnished. In chapter 4, I move on to artworks and provide an account of the artworld conditions that make artworks possible: that is, the technical codes that govern the production and recognition of art objects. Drawing from Helen Longino’s Science as Social Knowledge and The Fate of Knowledge (wherein she argues that science qua privileged practice has both institutional and empirical features), I develop a picture of art that has both historical-institutional and aesthetic features. I argue for the case that an object’s status as an artwork in no way reflects its quality as an artwork; instead, something being an artwork is a straightforward consequence of standing in an appropriate relationship with artistic practices, institutions, persons, materials, and cultural facts. However, this is not to say that aesthetic functions are unimportant to the creation of artworks. To the contrary, the aesthetic norms to which artworks are subject are implemented and enforced within institutional and historical structures

Introduction

xxiii

and procedures. This confluence of aesthetic norms and institutional procedures are the technical codes that govern the production and legitimation of artworks as artworks. Consequently, artworks have both institutional features and aesthetic functions. Aesthetic functions are developed, ratified, and enforced within institutional practices rather than being attached to the artistic outcomes of those institutional practices. Finally, in chapter 5, I discuss the functions and affordances furnished by artworks. This will ground my full-blown account of what artworks mean and do. There, I argue that while artwork functions are fixed by the intentions of the artist, artwork affordances are furnished by a virtuous confluence between the features of the artwork, the codes that constitute the artworld, and the various capacities of the members of the artworld public. These artwork affordances, moreover, are unlike the affordances furnished by other tools. Instead, by virtue of our privileged relationship with artworks—partially constituted by our shared assumption that artworks have something to say— artworks invite us to reflect upon the artwork and its circumstances in an orderly way: to think about the artwork as an object underwritten by certain intentions, expressing a certain point of view, that exists within a certain state of affairs. It is this orderly and attentive encounter that artworks, as a class, afford. Within this encounter, artworks invite us to bear our attention upon, and try to make sense of, aspects or parts of the world that otherwise might have escaped our notice. In providing this account, I do not mean to imply that artistic meaning is somehow thin or specious. To the contrary, I argue that conceptualizing artistic meaning in this way furnishes (or affords!) us with a richly nuanced way of making sense of artworks and what they mean in a way that is neither trivial, wrongheaded, nor spooky: a means of talking about artistic meaning that is not only sensitive to the intentions of artists, but also sensitive to the conditions under which artworks are received, the hermeneutic freedoms available to artworld publics, and the historicist nature of art itself. All of that, however, is for the rest of this book. NOTES 1. Upon reading this, my wife informed me she was quite certain she had never sounded quite so clever (nor quite so exactly like me), but as she couldn’t remember the piercingly intelligent thing that she did say, this would have to suffice. 2. Explanatory text for Ian Burn’s No object implies the existence of any other, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

xxiv

Introduction

3. While I’ve been mulling over this problem for a long time, you can find my earliest attempts to articulate some of these thoughts in a public forum in Wittingslow 2021 and 2022. Those papers constitute proofs-of-concept for the thesis I present in this book.

Chapter 1

Conditions

If asked to provide examples of objects that constitute ‘tools,’ I doubt too many people would have any trouble identifying material examples: hammers, nails, screwdrivers. Given a small push, most people would also concede that more complicated devices, such as rocket ships, coffee machines, and personal computers, are also examples of tools. As a collection of things, ‘tools’ are rather shaggy and shambolic. And yet they share something. We did not just find screwdrivers and coffee machines and so on. They are not the outcomes of natural processes: they certainly don’t grow on trees. What makes tools special is that they are a kind of artefact that induces change. When we say something is a tool, we’re stating that it possesses the purpose of affording a change from one state of affairs to some new state of affairs. The transformation is not something the tool just happens to do; to the contrary, this is what the tool is for. Tools are designed to facilitate a ‘transformation’ between an input state and its concomitant output state (Maier and Fadel 2009). Ovens, for example, aren’t simply things that make bread by accident. To the contrary, ovens are for baking bread (along with lots of other things). Fulfilling that function is the job for which they have been designed and built. This comment about ovens is generalizable to all tools: we design and use tools to make it easier to engage in particular performances to achieve certain outcomes. We can gloss ‘performances’ to mean any activity governed by some intention φ. By ‘intention,’ I do not mean what phenomenologists call ‘intentionality,’ but rather how it is employed in much contemporary psychology and philosophy of action. That is, intentions—along with beliefs and desires— contribute to actions (Malle and Knobe 1997, 105). More specifically, I am gesturing toward a theory of action like that endorsed by philosopher Michael Bratman. In Bratman, any intention φ is, as Kieran Setiya writes, “a distinctive practical attitude marked by its pivotal role in planning for the future” (Setiya 2014). This means that having an intention is not simply being in possession of some desire. Instead, possessing an intention to do 1

2

Chapter 1

something is a commitment to a certain course of action. Per Bratman, intentions are “conduct-controlling pro-attitudes, ones which we are disposed to retain without reconsideration, and which play a significant role as inputs to [means-end] reasoning” (Bratman 1987, 20). Most of the actions human beings voluntarily do constitute performances of one kind or another. Writing a poem, catching a train, designing a bridge, or eating a hamburger are all kinds of performances, as all are kinds of intentional action that have given outcomes in mind. Consequently, performance itself is an unremarkable phenomenon. To call something a performance is simply to situate it within the broader context of intelligible human action. Performances can succeed or fail. I may, for instance, have failed to go to the gym despite my commitment to doing so, or the bridge I designed may have fallen down. The first is a failure to engage in the intentioned activity to which I was committed: perhaps I did not go because I was lazy, or hung over, or whatever. The latter is a failure to achieve my intended outcome: although I designed the bridge and it was built, it may have collapsed because of my chronic mismanagement, because of the dodgy contractors I hired, or because I forgot to carry the one. Tool use is an example of a performance, in that it is an end-oriented activity whereby some making agent—hereafter a maker m—possesses an intention φm to achieve a particular state of affairs. It is an activity rather than an object; a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being.’ Using a tool is a performance by which some maker makes something with something else. This means that baking a cake is a process of tool use; so, too, is constructing a flat-packed bookcase, or building a rocket, or doing long division. Given that tools are designed and used to facilitate certain performances or classes of performances, it is conventional to think of tools as being for certain tasks. This is an old faith. Indeed, ‘for-ness’ has been thought integral to properly understanding tools since the Greeks. In Physics, for example, Aristotle makes the claim that, “Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes” (1941 Physics, 192b8). Animals, plants, and the “simple bodies” of the classical elements exist by “nature”; that is, the ordinary rhythms and motions of the natural world. Things that exist by nature have within themselves “a principle of motion and of stationariness” and are subject to certain natural rhythms because of possessing that telos, or purpose. Meanwhile, he argues that the relics of human culture—“a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort”—are not the consequence of some natural thing achieving its telos. Instead, they are made (1941 Physics, 192b18). Not being natural, made things, like screwdrivers and coffee machines, have no telos of their own. While a mighty oak tree contains within itself the telos to reach toward the sun, the same cannot be said of a hammer made from that same tree. The hammer is without the animating principles of “motion and stationariness” the oak tree possesses. However, this is not to say that

Conditions

3

the hammer is without a telos. To the contrary, instead of being furnished by nature, the telos—the ‘function’—of the hammer is somehow furnished by the people responsible for the tool’s manufacture and use. The conditions under which tool function can be ascribed will be addressed at length in chapter 2. In this chapter, however, we’re going to take a more macro view of tools and technology, one that addresses the basic conditions under which tools in general—and artworks in particular—are made. Why, for instance, are some tools made and not others? It is obviously the case that, out of all the innovations that human ingenuity produces, there is an unimaginably enormous set of possible innovations that we did not produce. It’s also obviously the case that these tools and activities simply don’t emerge from whole cloth; inventors and designers are not islands, adrift in time and history. To the contrary, the problems individual makers take to be important are profoundly contingent upon the culture and circumstances of those doing the making: a series of decisions scaffolded not only by the material conditions and physical and intellectual capacities of those involved, but also the massively heterogeneous set of epistemic, social, and cultural facts that influence these kinds of decisions. Considering those observations, in this chapter I’ll seek to provide an account of how functions are circumscribed by these facts. DESIGN SPACES When I introduce first-year university students to philosophy of technology, one of the first things I ask them is to take one of the objects on their person— a mobile phone, an analog watch, a bacon sandwich, a ballpoint pen, whatever—and have them generate a list of all the other artefacts that need to exist for that object to exist. One thing becomes obvious to them very quickly: even relatively simple devices, such as the sandwich or the pen, only make sense when embedded within a recursive ecosystem or economy of artefacts. This is more obvious again when we look at more complicated devices. Consider a mobile phone. For mobile phones to make sense qua mobile phones, a huge number of factors need to obtain: historical, technological, infrastructural, and demographic. My 2020 iPhone SE would not be possible without Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 patent for an electric telephone, or Motorola’s 1973 demonstration of the DynaTAC, or reliable systems of power generation and dissemination, or the Cold War space race, or global telecommunications network infrastructure, or industrial manufacturing technologies, or questionable work and labor practices in the People’s Republic of China. Underneath that ostensibly simple object is an enormous causal and technical apparatus that a) has made that object possible, and b) makes clear

4

Chapter 1

the conventional ways in which that object is used: an apparatus composed of a nested series of persons and devices and institutions. So, how to make sense of that apparatus? We’ll start with a general description of the conditions under which tools are designed and developed, the context that needs to be in place before we can even start attributing functions and affordances to technological objects.1 I begin by referring to the work of Patrick Feng and Andrew Feenberg, who, in their chapter, “Thinking about Design: Critical Theory of Technology and the Design Process” (2008), furnish some concepts I find useful. Feng and Feenberg’s argument in that paper rests upon the distinction they pose between ‘design spaces’ and ‘technical codes.’ A design space, they argue, is the “set of technically feasible possibilities” (2008, 115) available to the makers and users within a given community. That is, the design space describes literally every technological or tool outcome a given community could do given the resources at their disposal, being constrained only by the invariant features of their circumstance, Δ. While design spaces are constrained by their invariant features, this does not mean that all design spaces are homogeneous. Because the circumstances that circumscribe design spaces can differ wildly, these changes can cause concomitant changes in the design spaces of each circumstance. While some of the features of these circumstances will be shared between design spaces (for instance, the physical constraints of the universe), others are not. Differences in resources, climate, and the ‘technical heritage’ of a given community—that is, the material and technical basis in which that community is embedded—are as much concrete matters of fact as are the laws of gravity, while still being very different between circumstances. As they write, “what is ‘technically feasible’ depends on both the technology in question and on past history. Every design community inherits from its predecessors certain practices, assumptions, and ways of viewing the design space. This ‘technical heritage’ is at least as influential on design as any vested interest or lobby group” (2008, 115). The design space available to a Neolithic hunter-gatherer, for instance, is radically different from the design space available to an uppermiddle-class white man in the twenty-first century, because of this technical heritage: “A design space sΔ describes the abstract space that contains a description of every technically feasible tool t as circumscribed by some circumstance Δ.” Individual tools ‘supervene’ upon design spaces. ‘Supervenience’ describes a phenomenon wherein, in a given system, low-level properties necessarily influence the structures of high-level properties. Or, more broadly: supervenience is the observation that ‘there cannot be a difference in A-facts without a difference in B-facts.’ For example, Brandon Carter’s weak anthropic principle—“we must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location

Conditions

5

in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers”—is a supervenience thesis, for it supposes that human life (what is called the ‘B-fact’) is supervenient upon the structural arrangement of the universe (the ‘A-fact’) (1974). Were the universe structured in a different way, it would necessarily impinge upon either the quality, quantity, or overall existence of observers. Our tools (the B-facts, in this case) are the same, in that they supervene upon the A-facts of the design space. That is, tools are a certain way because the design space mediates the forms our tools take. Consider, for example, the airplane. The reason that airplane wings possess an aerofoil shape in cross-section is that, when an aerofoil moves through a fluid because of thrust, it produces aerodynamic force in the forms of drag and lift. Were the design space otherwise—were, for example, the current fruitful interaction between thrust, drag, and lift somehow changed or removed—the aerofoil would no longer function as intended. In this way, the design space serves to impose limits upon what is possible: the B-facts of our tools supervene upon a universe capable of supporting them. More precisely, tools supervene upon the design space ‘naturally’ rather than ‘logically.’ David Chalmers explains the distinction thus: The distinction between logical and natural supervenience is vital for our purposes. We can intuitively understand the distinction as follows. If B-properties supervene logically on A-properties, then once God (hypothetically) creates a world with certain A-facts, the B-facts come along for free as an automatic consequence. If B-properties merely supervene naturally on A-properties, then after making sure of the A-facts, God had to do more work in order to make sure of the B-facts: he had to make sure there was a law relating the A-facts and the B-facts. [. . .] Once the law is in place, the relevant A-facts will automatically bring along the B-facts; but one could, in principle, have had a situation where they did not. (1996, 38)

Logical supervenience demands that, if I assume certain A-facts about a given system, then those logically supervenient B-facts are implied products of the A-facts: A → B. In this manner, logically supervenient phenomena possess ‘upward causation’: the A-facts cause the B-facts. For instance, we might say that the motions of interplanetary bodies are logically supervenient upon Newtonian laws of gravity and motion, in that they are the causal outcomes of those laws. Although we obviously need to posit certain material conditions being met, there is no need on our part to posit the existence of an additional law or rule tying the two halves of either claim together. This is because, if two given phenomena are logically supervenient, the laws that connect those phenomena are both unidirectional and causally efficacious.

6

Chapter 1

Let’s use an example. Cellular automata are discrete models used in several academic disciplines. Each automaton is composed of a regular grid of cells, with each cell in one of a few finite states. Each discrete cell has a neighborhood, defined in relation to that specific cell. The initial state of the automata (t = 0) serves to define the starting state of each discrete cell. All subsequent states (t = n, t = n + 1, t = n + 2, etcetera, where n is greater than or equal to 0), will change the states of each discrete cell according to some function that determines the new state of each cell in terms of the current state of the cell and the states of the cells in its neighborhood. The resulting dynamic patterns that form can be quite complex and unexpected. However, though they are unexpected, they remain explicable: while the functions governing the behavior of the discrete cells may not be immediately apparent, they are nonetheless “straightforwardly deducible” from the set of available data (Chalmers 2006, 245). Similarly, bird flocks, termite cathedrals, the formation of snowflakes, and other logically supervenient phenomena in the natural world are subject to similarly simple functions. These structures are deducible from the algorithmically determined actions of those actors participating in the system—birds, termites, and water molecules, respectively. The B-facts are straightforwardly deducible from lower-level phenomena. In all of these, the B-facts ‘come along for free.’ This, however, is not the case for our tools. Although the B-facts of our tools are contingent upon the A-facts, those tools are not implied products of the A-facts. In this case, the A-facts are not causally efficacious in the same way. Consider the game of chess. Chess is a game with very simple rules—a couple dozen or so—and yet, with the limited means available, it is “doubtful,” per John Holland, that any two games “would have identical move sequences” (2000, 38). What does this tell us about the rules of chess? Although the rules of chess certainly regulate what constitutes legal versus illegal moves during a game, you cannot use the rules of the game to predict the course of any given game. This is because the system itself is more than simply the rules. The game also includes the players, and the iterative ways in which the board is transformed thanks to the moment-bymoment choices of those players. While the rules are important, the mere having of rules is simply not enough. This is because “the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, ‘purposeful’ activity” (cf. Corning 2012, 308). This observation is generalizable. Although architecture, for example, is constrained by the demands of the design space and of our embodied existence, this has not resulted in determined homogeneity. To the contrary, for a domain that is so resolutely practical, architecture offers a rich panoply of use, material, and form, even among structures that share the same functional,

Conditions

7

material, cost, and size restrictions. This expressive richness is true for all our tools. Even the most functional tool is subject to more than just the A-facts, thanks to the aesthetic preferences and iterative decisions of its designer(s). In both cases, rather than the B-facts being straightforwardly determined by the A-facts or vice versa, the natural laws tying the A- and B-facts together are not causally efficacious. Instead, the laws serve only a regulatory function, in that the B-facts are contingent upon, but not deducible from, the A-facts. All this gestures toward the fact that our tools do not supervene with logical necessity upon the A-facts of the design space. Instead, our tools supervene naturally upon the design space. TECHNICAL CODES Given that the A-facts are insufficiently causally efficacious to determine the B-facts, we find ourselves in the position where we need to work out the rules or norms that determine those B-facts. This is where what Feng and Feenberg call ‘technical codes’ enter the mix. Within the amorphousness of design space, technical codes describe the subset of technically feasible possibilities that is regulated by that community and the given technological trajectory in play. Technical codes are “standard ways of understanding [how] individual devices and classes of devices emerge,” Feng and Feenberg write. “Many of these standards reflect specific social demands that have succeeded in shaping design” (2008, 115). It is this regulation that furnishes technical codes with the appropriate causal efficacy. Feng and Feenberg write: [. . .] technical codes may be conceived as the rule under which “black boxing” occurs. At the end of the development process of a technology, when it finally assumes its standard configuration, we know “what” it is, it acquires an essence. This essence is of course revisable but only with difficulty as compared to the original very fluid situation of the first innovative attempts to make the device. The technical code prescribes some important aspects of the standard configuration, specifically, those which translate between social demands and technical requirements. (2008, 116)

Technical codes can be explicit. Until the mid- to late-twentieth century, it was conventional to use chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) in several industrial and manufacturing domains. Not only do CFCs and HCFCs have useful applications, particularly as refrigerants and accelerants, they are also low in toxicity, reactivity, and flammability. However, by the late 1970s, people realized that using CFCs and HCFCs came at a significant cost to the integrity of the ozone layer. This discovery

8

Chapter 1

led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol: an international treaty designed, in part, to phase out the use of CFCs and HCFCs. It is a consequence of this accord that you can no longer buy refrigerators containing CFC or HCFC refrigerants. This protocol is an example of an explicit technical code determining the features of some class of object: in this case, refrigerators. However, codes can also be implicit, in that they are generated because of material or cultural factors rather than being the direct and explicit consequence of some intention. Consider again the fridge. It is possible, at this point in the twenty-first century, to design refrigeration devices of many conceivable shapes and sizes. This constitutes the ‘design space’ of refrigeration. However, when one buys a fridge, they tend to come in certain standardized sizes, intended for use by different cohorts: “a function of the social principles governing family size,” as Feng and Feenberg write (2008, 115). Other factors can implicitly influence technical codes as well. For example, fridges in the Netherlands (where I live) are, on average, significantly smaller than fridges in Australia (where I did most of my growing up). This is a consequence of the fact that the average Dutch person lives within walking distance from a supermarket. Urban planning in Australia, meanwhile, is far more car oriented. This means that people in Australia are more likely to need to drive to the supermarket to go to the shop: a trip that most families only make once a week. These planning decisions indirectly encode norms about fridge size in each of those countries. Fridges in the Netherlands are smaller because they only need to hold a couple day’s worth of food; fridges in Australia are larger because they potentially need to hold enough food for an entire week. This is an example of an implicit technical code determining the class features of the fridge. Given that, we should think of technical codes as the set of selection pressures exerted upon the ways in which different tools, and different classes of tools, are designed and used within the broader design space. These selection pressures are manifold, and thus defy easy summary, but include all variant features of some circumstance Δ: rules, laws, beliefs, shared concepts, tool categories, conventions, norms, traditions, methods, epistemic standard ways of life, and so on. One useful way of determining whether something is a technical code, as opposed to a boundary condition imposed by the design space, is assessing whether some given state of affairs δ is responsible for some feature of t being the case. If so, the feature is imposed by the design space. If not—that is, if things could be otherwise (if the fridge could be bigger or smaller, for example)—it is probably a technical code. In short, technical code c describes some set of selection pressures exerted upon the design and use of some tool t within sΔ. It’s also worth making explicit that, for any given design space, there is not simply one technical code or set of technical codes. To the contrary, we can

Conditions

9

and should expect a given design space to be home to a plethora of technical codes, some of which will have enshrined wildly different norms and methods for organizing and approaching the tools possible within a given design space. In this respect, codes are paradigmatic: they describe different inventions and use traditions that exist within a given design space. Feng and Feenberg are not enormously forthcoming on details about how these paradigmatic codes are generated and sustained. Thankfully economist Giovanni Dosi, in his “Technological Paradigms and Technological Trajectories” (1982), has attempted to formalize similar ideas, although his nomenclature differs from the one employed here in several important respects. Borrowing heavily from the model of scientific development outlined by Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Dosi argues that a technology ‘paradigm’ (his version of the Kuhnian ‘scientific paradigm’) should be properly understood as a kind of problem-solving activity, bounded by the social, epistemic, and material conditions in which the practice is embedded. He writes: “We shall define a ‘technological paradigm’ as [a] ‘model’ and a ‘pattern’ of solution of selected technological problems, based on selected principles derived from natural sciences and on selected material technologies.” Within this paradigm, a technological trajectory is how things are done: the “pattern of ‘normal’ problem solving activity (i.e. of ‘progress’) on the ground of the technological paradigm” (Dosi 1982, 152). These trajectories, Dosi argues, embody and enforce powerful norms about the direction of technological process, norms that are based upon the total set of needs that a given group or community might have. This means that technological paradigms have what he calls an ‘exclusion effect’—“the efforts and the technological imagination of engineers and of the organizations they are in are focussed in rather precise directions while they are, so to speak, ‘blind’ with respect to other technological possibilities” (1982, 152)—while at the same time determining what does and does not count as ‘progress’ within that trajectory. Dosi’s posed paradigmatic process captures most kinds of tool development: not only the everyday, incremental improvements in how things work, but also the kind of tool development that takes place when users resourcefully use existing tools to, eventually, make new tools for new purposes (assuming, of course, that this resourceful use is governed by the appropriate technological trajectory). And, indeed, this kind of tool development happens all the time. Consider what is called the ‘peasant’s flail.’ The peasant’s flail is a weapon, popular in peasant militias in Germany from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, which consists of a long, wooden staff topped with a short strap or rope, to which a short, thick, and sometimes spiked cylindrical wooden head was attached. Cheap to make and easy to use, the makers of these flails intended them to afford users a means of getting around a

10

Chapter 1

defender’s shields or parries while in battle. This ‘function’ (see chapter 2) was embedded within a particular set of technical codes: codes that governed the design and use of armor and melee weapons in Renaissance warfare. These weapons, however, did not simply emerge from whole cloth. They are, in fact, based upon a very physically similar agricultural object—a threshing flail—that nonetheless possessed a very different function: separating grain from straw. Although peasant’s flails were eventually made to specification, it is almost certainly a fact that the very first peasant’s flails were nothing other than threshing flails put to a novel purpose. Like scientific paradigms in Kuhnian philosophy of science, there are limits to Dosi’s trajectories. Kuhnian paradigms shift when they are confronted with sufficient epistemic anomalies: phenomena that cannot be adequately explained from within the concepts, methods, and norms of the ruling paradigm. Faced with these anomalies, the operating procedures of ‘normal science’ are thrown into crisis. This catalyzes a period of ‘extraordinary research’ that eventually settles into a new paradigm once the problematic anomalies have been contextualized or resolved. The same is true of Dosi’s research trajectories. Just like a scientific paradigm going into crisis, a research trajectory can fall into disarray for all kinds of reasons: from “difficulties and unsolved technological puzzles” (1982, 156), to social and institutional reorganization, to changes in economic and material factors, to whatever else. This disarray catalyzes the technological version of ‘extraordinary science’ and a second kind of technical code: the rapid-pace exploratory development of new technological paradigms and trajectories, in line with the limits and requirements of both the new problem space and the broader design space. This new problem space thereafter leads to the making and use of ‘discontinuous’ and novel tools within those paradigms. [This process explains] the role of continuity versus discontinuity in technical change. “Incremental” innovations versus “radical” innovations can be reinterpreted in terms of “normal” technical progress as opposed to new emerging technological paradigms. The distinction might still be in practice difficult to draw, but nonetheless can account for the conditions which allow either “normal” progress or “extraordinary” innovative effort to take place. (1982, 158)

The microprocessor offers a nice example of this phenomenon in action. Gordon E. Moore claimed in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years: “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly, over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase” (1965). This prediction was, and remains, broadly accurate. In 1971, the Intel 4004 had about 2,300 transistors. By comparison, the 2019

Conditions

11

AMD Epyc Rome has approximately 50 billion transistors: almost precisely in line with Moore’s prediction. Though the microprocessor is a good example of a successful research trajectory, it is unlikely that we will be able to continue maintaining this rate of progress, at least with contemporary technology. As Moore himself predicted in 2005, the size of individual atoms poses an absolute bottom limit to how small transistors can become: “In terms of size you can see that we’re approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier [. . .]. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit” (quoted in Dubash 2005). That second prediction also seems likely to come to pass, albeit with a delay of a few years. The very smallest transistors currently in active development are equal to or smaller than two nanometers in length, with the first two-nanometer chips slated to enter mass production in 2025. By comparison, a single gold atom is approximately 0.3 nanometers in width, a mere sixth of the size of one of these next-generation transistors. We are rapidly approaching the hard physical limits of contemporary digital computation. Considering that physical problem, technology companies, research labs, and engineering firms are working very hard to address these “difficulties and unsolved technological puzzles,” spurring recent and discontinuous breakthroughs in analog, quantum, and biological computing. These breakthroughs do nothing to surpass the physical limits of the atom, but instead are the consequence of researchers and engineers needing to develop new technological paradigms with new technological trajectories to dramatically amplify computing power within the bounds of those physical limits. What I like about Dosi’s account of technological paradigms and trajectories is that it gives us a basic account of the conditions under which technical codes emerge, are sustained, and (eventually) cease to be causally efficacious. While my view of technical codes is more generous than Dosi’s picture of technological paradigms—given my broad understanding of tools and technology more generally, I am unmoved by his claim that technological paradigms can only be “derived from natural sciences and on selected material technologies”—I nonetheless take his description to have real explanatory value in making sense of how codes are formed, are sustained, and can change. These codes are a multi-factorial consequence of several factors: the particular and contingent needs of the community; the histories of those codes; the historical motivations for those codes; the beliefs, standards, and attitudes of the community responsible for those codes; and the various technological capacities of that community. Enriched with Dosi’s account of technical paradigms and trajectories, technical codes help to ground the norms that structure the decisions we make in design spaces. For instance, both the make plan accounts offered in chapter 2

12

Chapter 1

and the account of scaffolding in chapter 3 should be understood as rational reconstructions of activities that take place within design spaces. In this manner, the ways in which we use tools are governed (at least in part) by what Feng and Feenberg call technical codes. EMERGENT FEATURES One of the more interesting (in my view, anyway) features of this description of tool development is that it also furnishes us, albeit implicitly, with an account of how our tools change their environments. This is because tools are not only naturally supervenient, but they are naturally supervenient with ‘strongly emergent’ features. When we say that some given B-facts supervene naturally upon other given A-facts, we mean that the B-facts ‘emerge’ strongly from the A-facts without being deducible from those facts (Chalmers 2006, 247). This is distinct from weakly emergent phenomena, which are logically deducible from those facts. Or, in the words of B. P. McLaughlin: “If P is a property of w, then P is emergent if and only if (1) P supervenes with nomological necessity, but not with logical necessity, on properties the parts of w have taken separately or in other combinations; and (2) some of the supervenience principles linking properties of the parts of w with w’s having P are fundamental laws” (1997). Characterizing tools as an emergent property has some interesting effects. In his seminal paper, Jeffrey Goldstein glosses emergence as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems” (1999, 49). In that paper, he identifies emergent phenomena as sharing the following six features: radical novelty; coherence or correlation; effects that manifest at a macro level; dynamism; ostensiveness; and downward causation. First, by ‘radical novelty,’ Goldstein claims that emergents have “features that are not previously observed in the complex system under investigation.” This means two things: a) that emergent B-features are not deducible from A-facts per the above; and b) that emergents cannot be anticipated in their “full richness” before they make themselves manifest (1999, 49). Second, by ‘coherence or correlation,’ Goldstein claims that lower-level A-components cohere into a B-gestalt higher-level unity capable of preserving its identity across time. Third, by ‘global or macro level,’ Goldstein claims the locus of a given emergent B-phenomenon does not manifest at the micro-level of the lower-level A-components. This means we cannot observe emergent phenomena only by looking at the A-components; we must cast a wider net to see how the effects of those A-components manifest elsewhere. Fourth, by ‘dynamism,’ Goldstein claims that emergents arise from the evolution of a

Conditions

13

given complex system rather than existing as “pre-given wholes.” Fifth, by ‘ostensiveness,’ Goldstein claims that a) emergent phenomena are recognizable as such, and b) that each new manifestation of emergence “will be different to some degree from previous ones” (1999, 50). Finally, by ‘downward causation,’ Goldstein claims that B-entities and structures can causally affect lower-level A-components, in addition to A-components causally affecting higher-level B-entities and structures. This is obviously contra logical supervenience, which permits only A to B upward causation (1999, 62). Tools possess all six of these features. First, tools are radically novel because they cannot be predicted based upon the A-facts alone; if they could, they would be logically supervenient. Second, our tools cohere, in that they work together in all kinds of interesting ways. Our tools work with one another in a mutually complementary fashion, forming a higher-level unity from modular parts. Third, with respect to the third ‘global or macro’ criterion, this socio-cultural economy of tools is the higher-level locus at which emergence occurs, as distinct from the individual artefactual components. Fourth, with respect to dynamism, our socio-cultural economy of tools is constantly changing. Moreover, it is not only the ‘radically novel’ knowledge tools that catalyze these changes. This economy also shifts in response to changing material or cultural conditions (a bad winter, peak oil, the rise of the Catholic Church, climate change), the presence or absence of other tools, and our own intentional structures (beliefs, desires, intentions). Consequently, our artefactual landscape ceaselessly evolves in response to these kinds of social, cultural, and organizational tectonics. Fifth, this economy is also ostensive, and necessarily so. Indeed, our tools are the objects of our perceptions in a very literal sense; they must be, because they are world-constituting. Finally—and most importantly—tools have downward causation. They do not have a merely epiphenomenal relationship with the design space; instead, they can cause material changes in the dynamics and properties of the design space itself: dams change the course of rivers; built circumstances provide new ecologies for urbanized animal and plant species; anthropogenic climate change has reduced glaciation and increased mean global temperature. While this emergent property of our tools might feel very contemporary, it is by no means new. “Humans, more than any other species,” as Don Ihde and Lambros Malafouris write, “have been altering their paths of development by creating new material forms and by opening up to new possibilities of material engagement. That is, we become constituted through making and using technologies that shape our minds and extend our bodies. We make things which in turn make us” (Ihde and Malafouris 2019, 195). Or, as Don Ihde writes elsewhere, “human activity from immemorial time and across the diversity of cultures has always been technologically embedded” (Ihde 1990, 20; italics in original).

14

Chapter 1

This phenomenon is clear from the fossil record. According to recent estimates, the first evidence of iterative stone tool manufacture and use among hominins dates from 3.3 million years ago. Found at the Lomekwi 3 (LOM3) site in modern Kenya and likely produced by populations of Australopithecus spp. or Kenyanthropus platyops, these tools predate the evolution of genus Homo by five-hundred-thousand-odd years (Harmand et al. 2015). Lomekwian tools are unlike the artefacts of earlier hominins and hominids. They are not simply rocks or sticks that have been used once and then discarded. To the contrary, these tools have been worked to amplify and improve their mechanical and ergonomic properties. Furthermore, different rocks appear to have been designed with different ‘functions’ in mind (see chapter 2), as hammers, axes, anvils, or otherwise. They have been very obviously designed to furnish very precise ‘affordances’ (see chapter 3). Other primates do not design and use tools in this way. A chimpanzee will use stones to crack open stubborn nuts. They will, with intention and the judicious application of force, use the mechanical and ergonomic advantages offered by a rock to achieve a desired outcome. However, the affordances end there. At no point will it occur to the chimpanzee to work the rock to amplify those mechanical advantages. It will not smash that rock against other rocks to make that rock sharper, or to improve its ergonomics. It will not work iteratively to produce different and better tools. Lomekwian tools are also different because they seem to indicate not only that the tools were improved iteratively by individual users, but that the tools in the aggregate became more sophisticated across time. The iterative improvements made by individual users are themselves taken up by later users, allowing for generational improvements in tool function. This process is particularly obvious when we compare the Lomekwian tools to the tools in Oldowan sites from about a million years later. Per Harmand et al.: The simplest defining characteristics of the Oldowan are that its knappers show the earliest evidence of a basic understanding of the conchoidal fracture mechanics of stone and were able to effectively strike flakes from cores, more often than not knapping using ‘grammars of action’ and predominantly using the free-hand knapping technique. The LOM3 knappers’ understanding of stone fracture mechanics and grammars of action is clearly less developed than that reflected in early Oldowan assemblages and neither were they predominantly using free-hand technique. The LOM3 assemblage could represent a technological stage between a hypothetical pounding-oriented stone tool use by an earlier hominin and the flaking-oriented knapping behaviour of later, Oldowan toolmakers. (2015, 314)

These tools highlight some of the radical differences between the behaviors, attitudes, and cognitive capacities of early and later hominins. It marks a

Conditions

15

moment, thanks to our opposable thumbs and sophisticated brains, when our ancestors started not only making tools, but also improved upon the tools of those who had come before to afford more and better things. This, in turn, encouraged the development of other tools—tools that only work with those prior tools in place. As I noted in the introduction, a needle cannot be used as a needle without a thread, for example; so, too, will a microwave dinner taste even more like cardboard without a microwave. These connections constitute a kind of ecosystem. This iterative and recursive process of affordance creation—a process we can first identify in the Lomekwian tools—is radically unlike the ways that earlier hominins and other animals take advantage of affordances. This is because, among animal species, we are uniquely proficient at changing our environments. While other living things, of course, change their environments on a relatively small scale, we are a special case in that we and other postLomekwian hominins use the affordances furnished by tools to design and build our own environmental niches. This makes post-Lomekwian hominins radically adaptive in a way that earlier hominins were not; they were (and we are) sensitive to the fact that the new niches for which we are responsible furnish us with new affordances. These new affordances themselves lead to the creation of new niches, which then lead to new affordances, and so on. When the first anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand years ago (Hublin et al. 2017), Homo sapiens inherited a post-Lomekwian material culture that was, even then, approximately three million years old. While “it might be possible for humans to live non-technologically as a kind of abstract possibility,” in the words of Don Ihde, “there is no such empirical-historical human form of life because, long before our remembering, humans moved from all gardens to inherit the Earth” (1990, 13). Now, all those millions of years later, we are no longer forced to adapt to our surroundings via the dumbly mechanistic processes that govern the modern synthesis. We have entirely reshaped the world considering our activities and preferences. The communities in which we live, the industrial farms that feed us, the technologies we use, the media we consume, and whatever else are constantly changing as a direct consequence of this process. Or, as Barry Allen writes in Knowledge and Civilization: If today we are profoundly, vitally, irrevocably technological beings, it is not because evolution made us that way. Natural selection did not discover our capacity for the knowledge of artifacts. We did that ourselves when, well after the evolutionary emergence of our species, the cultivation of knowledge came into view as an option. At that moment biological forces like adaptation or natural selection were well and truly done with us, and the rest, which is everything, we made for ourselves. (2005, 188–89)

16

Chapter 1

All of this is to say that what we do with tools—what we achieve via the affordances they furnish, the functions with which they’re endowed, and how we do new and innovative things with them—is scaffolded by a dense skein of material, socio-cultural, and technical factors. Using a mobile phone, or making a sandwich, or driving a car, or whatever else can only happen because this dense skein is in place. These basically human activities are premised upon possessing, and living within, a technological ecosystem constituted by design spaces and technical codes. They are part of the human condition. HUMAN CONDITIONS When I refer to the ‘human condition,’ I am using a concept borrowed from the twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt.2 Arendt—influenced, at least in part, by the phenomenological inheritance of her early mentor, Martin Heidegger—writes in The Human Condition and elsewhere about the foundational role our artefacts play in constituting the world we share. While her thesis is fundamentally about politics and the conditions under which political life emerges, Arendt’s picture of the necessarily artefactual conditions of human life are both convincing and a useful place to begin. In her work, Arendt is not trying to make some claim about the natural relationship between human beings and our tools. To the contrary, Arendt is both pessimistic and deflationary about the possibility that we have anything like an inalienable ‘nature.’ Her scholarship is part of a corpus of theory that grapples with the concept of a non-essentialist human figure: a figure whom we recognize as being like us and who, despite an absence of nature, still possesses the potential for meaningful political action. As she writes in the introduction to The Human Condition: “nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what’” (1998, 10). It is for this reason that The Human Condition, rather than talking about some common nature or ontology, is far more interested in the shared conditions under which human life, and the human subject, takes place. Instead of pitching a prescriptive thesis on what constitutes the human, Arendt’s argument is descriptive. Using the ancient Greek city-states as a framing device, she attempts to describe the qualities and circumstances of the human condition by transcribing the intersection of the public and private realms, and how those realms are constituted by artefacts. She begins

Conditions

17

by echoing Aristotle’s claim that man is a ‘political animal’ because he has been granted the powers of reason and speech—reason and speech being part of the inherent telos, or purpose, of the human’s being. The object of this purpose is eudaimonia: often translated as ‘welfare’ or ‘happiness,’ but better translated to ‘flourishing,’ this represents the best sort of life for human beings. Given our capacity for reason, Aristotle thinks the best way for us to achieve eudaimonia is by engaging in the right kind of intellectual activity. Regardless of the contingent differences between individual people, all human beings have similar requirements in that they desire to engage in activities that are virtuous and intellectually engaging, and for which they earn due success (cf. Aristotle 1941 Nicomachean Ethics 1095a). This intellectual activity cannot be adequately realized without the aid and cooperation of other similarly rational beings. This insight provides the germ of both Aristotle’s Politics and Arendt’s politics: that human beings need to be organized into some sort of society to achieve eudaimonia. Thanks to a virtuous confluence of collectivized effort, division of labor, and simple economy of scale, organized polities are much better at meeting individual needs than individuals working alone. It is only from within a society that we can escape the brutal cycles of subsistence living and instead become free to develop our rational capacities in the right kinds of ways. It is only with this freedom to develop—or, if you prefer, to flourish—that we become able to participate in the public realm as intelligent and intelligible agents. It is this active ‘political’ life that is the telos of Aristotle’s political philosophy, the complete apotheosis of our ergon, or function. He writes: It is clear therefore that the state is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. (1941 Politics I.1253a)

Building upon this Aristotelian scaffolding, Arendt argues that the idealized vita active, or ‘active life,’ to which Aristotle refers in the Politics is composed of three constitutive conditions. The first condition, ‘labour,’ “is an activity which corresponds to the biological processes of the body; [. . .] the metabolism between man and nature or the human mode of this metabolism which we share with all living organisms” (Arendt 2000, 170). Being a ‘metabolism between man and nature,’ labor is governed by the private and cyclical activities that are integral to oikia, the household. These activities are important in that they guarantee

18

Chapter 1

the future well-being and existence of the organism. However, they are also limited in scope. Eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, and so on are subsistence activities. They are concerned only with sustaining the mere life of the organism: the creaturely life of zoe rather than biographical and political bios. Because of the nature of these activities, the laboring animal (or animal laborans) does not have the opportunity nor ability to apply her labor in such a way as to generate a meaningful surplus; the person who applies their labor to hunt deer has no means by which they can store it for later use. This means that, despite the cycle of consumption that allows for the subsistence of animal laborans, animal laborans leaves no lasting impression upon the world. The effort invested into sustaining creaturely life does not change the domain in which the creature labors. Instead, “labouring always moves in the same circle prescribed by the living organism, and the end of its toil and trouble comes only with [. . .] the death of the organism” (2000, 171). The laboring animal is bound essentially to both its own body and to the environment in which its body labors. The second condition, ‘work,’ concerns tools. Work produces permanent objects that survive the cycles of labor. “To have a definite beginning and a definite predictable end is the mark of fabrication,” Arendt writes (2000, 175). A stone axe or anvil or arrowhead is not the sort of thing that is used once and then discarded; instead, it furnishes an ongoing set of functions (see chapter 2) that shape the ways in which those early tool users lived their lives. Even when broken, the stone axe or arrowhead shapes possibilities for future iterations of work, affording opportunities to infer improvements in either method or design. Work also organizes creaturely labor. Consider refuse sites like middens. While animals’ bones and other waste products “return into the natural process that yielded them either through absorption into the life process of the human animal or through decay” (2000, 171), middens—along with houses and wells and whatever else—help to structure the lifeworld of animal laborans into something richer and more permanent. In short, we qua homo faber use our objects—chairs, tables, houses, space stations—to moor us to nature. These artefacts allow us to find purchase in a world that is both indifferent and eternally moving. Without these objects, we would have no means of navigating the world, and we cannot know the world without them. They provide us with both epistemic and ontological orientation. Consequently, artefacts are both world-constituting and inherent to the human condition. Arendt writes: [. . .] the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their identity by being related to the enduring sameness of objects,

Conditions

19

the same chair today and tomorrow, the same house formerly from birth to death. Against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the man-made artifice, not the indifference of nature. Only because we have erected a world of objects from what nature gives us and have built this artificial environment into nature, thus protecting us from her, can we look upon nature as being ‘objective.’ Without a world between men and nature, there would be eternal movement, but no durability. (2000, 173–74)

Both labor and work are private activities. Labor is private in that it is the condition of natural cycles. Eating, sleeping, and defecating are not socially determined experiences (though they may be socially conditioned), nor do they result in meaningful surplus. Meanwhile, work is private because our collective capacity to render the world navigable and durable is not contingent upon forms of interpersonal engagement. However, while they are private, work and labor provide the material conditions for public politics— what Arendt calls ‘action’—to occur. Ideally, action is the radically equal realm of the agora, a place where citizens operate “free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed” (Arendt 1998, 33). There are many things to like about Arendt’s analysis of the human condition; here, as ever, she remains thoughtful and generous about both the power of what we share and the richness of our differences. In particular, what’s valuable about this account is her sensitivity to the foundational importance of tools in providing the relevant structure for recognizable human social life. It is the products of work that help constitute the shared social world that we inhabit: not only stone axes and arrowheads and whatever else, but also the physical, epistemic, aesthetic, and other infrastructures that make communities and cities and corporations and artworlds possible (spoiler alert). Arendt’s analysis also makes clear not only that our tools precede anything that we might call human social life, but also that they are influenced and constituted by the ways in which that life is lived. NOTES 1. Parts of this section first appeared in Wittingslow 2016. 2. An earlier version of this section appeared in Wittingslow 2020.

Chapter 2

Functions

Thus far I’ve furnished a general picture of the systemic conditions in which tools of different kinds appear. I hope I’ve made clear that tool design is not something that happens in a vacuum, separate from the contingencies of culture and circumstance. To the contrary, design spaces are heavily codified by the material, social, and cultural circumstances of the culture existing within that space. It is this set of circumstances that helps determine the kinds of jobs a given culture takes to be interesting, useful, or otherwise fruitful. It is this set of circumstances that (partially) circumscribe the ways in which the functions of different tools are selected for and pursued. But what exactly is a function, and where does it reside? Despite the ease with which we invoke and productively employ ‘function’ when it comes to talking about tools, making sense of what functions are and how and where they are instantiated is not as easy as it may appear at first blush. Making things more complicated again is that most philosophical work on function emerges from philosophy of biology: a tradition that, while being very rich and useful within its own domain, is only imperfectly applicable for tools and other artefacts. There is a good reason most contemporary philosophical work on function has its origins in philosophy of biology. Among what we could call the ‘big’ sciences—physics, chemistry, mathematics, and so on—biology is unusual in that it not only indulges ends-oriented descriptions of its objects of analysis, but indeed it relies upon ends-oriented descriptions to make sense of those objects of analysis. While it would be a rare physicist indeed who would claim that a planet is for rotating around a star, ends-oriented descriptions of biological organs feel quite natural. Indeed, the ascription of function is fundamental to the ways in which we talk about biological organs. We assume, quite reasonably I think, that it is only when in possession of the function of the object of analysis that we’re able to offer an apt description of said object. That is why we can say, ‘a bird wing is an organ for flying,’ or ‘a heart is for pumping blood.’ A description of wings or a heart that fails to capture their 21

22

Chapter 2

for-ness would be quite poor. While it wouldn’t be wrong, strictly speaking, to describe the heart as a large, dense piece of meat, we might think the person offering that description has missed the point about hearts, in that they have failed to understand the context in which the object operates. The point of a heart is that it moves blood around the body. What we are doing in these cases is ascribing a function to the object. The function is part and parcel with the sort of thing the object is. Larry Wright, in his foundational paper on function, argues that the sentence “the function of X is Z” means that: 1.  X is there because it does Z, and 2.  Z is a consequence (or result) of X’s being there (1973, 161). Wright’s account is a twofold definition of function. With the (1) criterion he is providing a selection account of why X came to be in the first place—the (1) criterion displays what Wright calls “the etiological form of functional ascription-explanations” (1973, 161). Bird wings, for example, evolved because they facilitate flight. Meanwhile the (2) criterion—the description of “the convolution which distinguishes functional etiologies from the rest” (1973, 161)—isolates the systemic effects of the X. Unaided flight is a consequence of the fact that wings flap, effects that, in this case, motivate bird wings being there in the first place. There’s a bicameral elegance to Wright’s formulation, a satisfyingly complementary knottiness. Unfortunately, however, Wright’s formulation is also wrong. In tying an object’s selection history to its systemic effects, Wright’s account permits no room for the possibility that objects possess functions other than those that are the consequence of selection pressures. Bird wings, for example, do lots of things other than facilitate flight. Ostriches use their wings for balance while running; birds of paradise parade them about in mating rituals; the black heron uses its wings as a sunshade to attract prey. How are we to tease out this distinction? It would be strange to make the claim that ‘a bird wing is an organ selected for shading the sun to attract prey’; the heron’s wings were not selected for that function, even if that is indeed one of the things the heron’s wings do. The (1) and (2) criteria are not in ready alignment. This poses a serious, perhaps insurmountable, challenge to Wright’s claim. It is extremely difficult to make the selection and systemic effects cohere in a satisfying way. Given that criticism, the conventional response is to disentangle the (1) and (2) criteria. Thus disentangled, the definition of function can then be moored to one—but not both—of these criteria.

Functions

23

PROPER FUNCTIONS What are called ‘proper’ function accounts offer a picture of function that follows from Wright’s (1) criterion: that is, by cashing out function as a real property that emerges as the consequence of a particular selection history. In these accounts, proper function is more than identifying and making sense of the causal-historical pressures that lead to the selection of a given function within a given object (this, after all, also happens in system function accounts). Instead, to ascribe proper functions in the first place, proper function theorists like philosopher of biology Ruth Millikan need a way of building them into the kind of thing an object fundamentally is. Armed with this ontological commitment, Millikan and others argue that we now have adequate grounds to make normative judgments about things like dysfunction or defectiveness. To build these properties into objects, Millikan conceives of functions as expressions of abstract ‘relational structures’ that are the consequence of ‘characteristic systems’ (1999, 198). These systems work, via different mechanisms, to establish a particular set of relations between an organism and its environment. These mechanisms are working ‘properly’ when serving to establish or maintain that set of relations and ‘improperly’ when not. She writes: Biological categories are carved out not by looking at the actual structure, actual dispositions, or actual functions of the organ or system that falls within the category, but by looking at (or speculating about) its history. [. . .] Every body organ or system falls in the biological or physiological categories it does due to its historical connections with prior examples of kinds that have served certain functions or, typically, sets of functions. So whether or not it is itself capable of serving any of these functions, every organ or system is associated with a set of functions that are biologically ‘proper’ to it, functions that have helped account for the survival and proliferation of its ancestors. I call these functions ‘proper functions’ of the organ or system, (1986, 51–52)

While a wing may have functions beyond those mechanisms that are the expressions of whatever abstract relational structures that are in play (maintaining balance; attracting viable mates; aiding in the hunting of prey), these additional functions are ‘accidental’ rather than proper because they don’t participate in the selection account of how and why the object developed in the first place. Those accidental functions are evolutionary spandrels, distinct from the processes of natural selection that governed the development of the organ. On these grounds, it is claimed that understanding proper rather than accidental functions is integral to properly understanding the biological

24

Chapter 2

object itself (cf. Allen, Bekoff, and Lauder 1998). In making explicit these relational structures—and in making explicit the success and failure conditions that apply to the various parts of those relational structures—the proper function account offers some real explanatory virtues. Its strength lies in the fact that proper functions give us grounds to make normative judgments about whether an object succeeds or fails in its functions—grounds on which to correctly identify ‘defective’ instances of an object. Millikan writes: “That members of function categories can be defective is coordinate with purposes being things that may not get fulfilled. Function categories are essentially categories of things that need not fulfill their functions in order to have them” (1995, 23). As far as intuitions go, it is both powerful and useful. The influence and breadth of this scholarship means that philosophers interested in technology tend to work with a similar set of assumptions about function. A hammer shares some features with hearts and bird wings. It is an object (in this case, an artefact, rather than a biological object) that we conventionally describe in terms of what we take to be its proper function. Asked to explain the purpose of a hammer to a child, we would probably say something like, ‘It is a thing for hammering nails.’ The hammer, like the wings and the heart, possesses a for-ness that other things do not. However, there is at least one good reason not to full-throatedly endorse a proper account of function, at least as philosophers of biology conceptualize it. As Pieter Vermaas and Wybo Houkes observe, the explanatory virtues of proper function accounts only imperfectly apply for tools and other artefacts (2003). While hammers, nails, screwdrivers, cars, coffee machines, and personal computers are a consequence of different selection histories, one of the facts about tools this picture fails to capture is the sheer contingency of human tool use. As we’ve already established, artefacts are not inert. They and their uses change over time; they can be re-apprised, reappropriated, and reused in all kinds of different ways as they move between different technological paradigms. Per Beth Preston: [Artifacts] are as individuals subject to all sorts of idiosyncratic uses that are not then established as proper functions for other artifacts in the same lineage. For example, I have used table knives for all of the following: peeling garlic cloves (you hit the clove with the handle of the knife to loosen the skin, an operation which is perhaps even more commonly performed with the flat of a heavier cooking knife); opening cocoa tins; transplanting seedlings; removing potbound houseplants from their pots; removing crumbs from the tablecloth; and tightening or loosening screws. (1998, 237)

And yet, to use Preston’s example, these uses are not within the selection history for knives. To the contrary, the selection history of table knives is

Functions

25

quite simple: as an instrument to help with cutting and spreading things at the dinner table. Nonetheless, using knives contrary to the relational structures that are the consequence of their characteristic systems does not (and should not) strike us as particularly problematic. The table knife is not an isolated case. In the words of Auke Pols, “biological organs tend to develop through slow evolutionary processes and thus have clear histories, while technical artifacts may be radically innovative and not have a clear ‘evolutionary’ history” (2015, 240). For this reason, endorsing a proper function view of tools entails some unintuitive consequences. Under a proper function account of tool function, alternate uses of tools are straightforwardly a violation of the proper functions of those tools because those uses contravene the intended use prescribed by the various type-descriptions that are a consequence of their selection histories. This claim is at odds with our commonsense understanding of the mutability of function, proper or not. SYSTEM FUNCTIONS The second way to cash out function is to offer an account that follows from Wright’s (2) criterion, that is, “Z is a consequence (or result) of X’s being there” (1973, 161). Under this formulation, function is understood within the context of systems. System function accounts are broadly uninterested in making sense of function via the lens of the various selection conditions that are (or were) in play as the artefact developed over time. Instead, they’re far more concerned with what the given artefact is doing right now. They take there to be little merit, for instance, in saying there is a motivated justification for saying a thing has a function beyond that for which it is used. Let us return momentarily to the wings of the black heron. Were we to endorse Wright’s (1) criterion, we would say a heron’s wings are there because they furnish flight. However, we could not say the same for the use of those self-same wings as a sunshade to attract prey. While a heron might use the wings as a sunshade, they do not exist because they can be used in this fashion. System function accounts, however, make do without these distinctions. While the aetiology of the heron’s wings might lie in the evolutionary history of flight, the functions of the wing are merely what the wings do within a given systemic arrangement: facilitate flight, in one case, and facilitate the catching of prey in another. This is not to say that system function accounts commit us to ignoring the way selection conditions participate in artefact creation and evolution. To the contrary, selection conditions are important insofar as they give us the causal-historical account of why something exists in the first place. It is, for instance, explanatorily helpful to talk about the conditions that led to

26

Chapter 2

the evolution of biological objects that started as one thing and have since become another. As an example, take the wings of a penguin. It is likely that all penguins are descended from a common ancestor that could fly. Penguins are thereby embedded within an evolutionary tradition that can be used to make sense of why they possess the properties they do—why, for instance, their flippers look an awful lot like the wings of other birds, although they no longer serve that function. Keeping this in mind helps account for why penguins look and act like penguins. What’s important to take away from this account is that causal-historical accounts are valuable for explaining why certain things might look and act the way they do; however, this value is merely explanatory. That is because, under system function accounts, the explanatory value of causal-historical accounts is divorced from any conception of how an object functions in its current capacities. Regardless of the conditions that led to an object being where it is, the function of a thing is merely what the thing does within a given context (cf. Maier and Fadel 2009). While this account has the benefit of elegance, we should also hesitate before endorsing a system function account. That is, system function accounts grant us with a descriptively rich way of making sense of the possibilities furnished by a tool to a specific user within a given environment. However, while system function accounts are descriptively useful, they are not normatively useful. This is because, in dissolving this difference between proper and accidental function, system function accounts also dissolve the grounds under which we can make normative judgments about whether a given mechanism is doing its job. Although they give us a very nice way of cashing out the variety of ways that tools can influence the suite of actions available to us at any given time, they are no good at helping us render judgments of how a given tool should and does work. Therefore, it’s very difficult to make the kinds of normative comments that occur so readily in common language about these kinds of objects: comments that something is sufficient, or non-optimal, or defective, or dysfunctional. In the words of Beth Preston: The notion of system function is [. . .] resolutely nonjudgmental. Things either have a capacity/disposition or they do not; but on this view, there is no particular sense to be made of the claim that there are particular capacities/dispositions they ought to have, but are temporarily or permanently unable to exercise even under conditions that seem completely appropriate or normal. The main difference between system function and proper function is therefore that the latter is normative whereas the former is not. Moreover, the normativity that defines proper function is not reducible to statistical regularity. It might happen that even the vast majority of a certain type of thing are unable to fulfill their proper function. (1998, 224)

Functions

27

This presents something of a problem for the system function theorist. While the ‘nonjudgmental-ness’ of system function accounts is appealing, the lack of normative traction means we’re no longer able to say when a given artefact simply doesn’t work, as Ruth Millikan (1984) and Karen Neander (1991) have argued. If we’re to have a picture of function that is fit for purpose, so they claim (and I support), we obviously need a way to ground judgments of defectiveness. This is also why talking about proper functions can be helpful. The functions of an object are part of the type-description of that object. So, the type-description of a hammer includes within it the function of hammering. A hammer that failed to fulfill that function—that is no good at hammering, for whatever reason—is a failed or defective hammer. Indeed, it may not even be a hammer at all. In this way, my commonsense assessment of whether or not that tool is working properly qua tool is tied indelibly to whether or not it successfully facilitates the relevant transformation. FIXING FUNCTION Part of the problem when we try to piggyback tool function on biological function (particularly when talking about function of the proper rather than systemic kind) is that these accounts struggle with the role that makers or designers play in determining the function of tools. After all, tools have makers and designers in a way that biological objects simply do not. This issue only becomes more complicated when we try to make sense of how different ‘idiosyncratic uses’ (to use Preston’s terminology) can lead to the ‘makership’ of new kinds of tools with new kinds of functions. Given that, we’re faced with a quandary. On the one hand, we need an account of function that can make sense of the rich contingencies and vagaries of human artefact use. On the other hand, we also need an account of function that can accommodate ‘proper’ judgments of defectiveness. Thankfully, this quandary is not unresolvable, but it does require us to shift the focus of our attention. One contemporary response to this challenge is via what are called ‘plans.’ Coming from philosophy of engineering—a subfield of analytic philosophy of technology—and first outlined by Houkes et al. (2002), the literature on plans should be understood as an attempt to rationally reconstruct (as opposed to realistically model) what people do when they make and use tools. Key to the explanatory success of plans is that tools and other processes and objects of design are analyzed according to the same conceptual frameworks employed in analytic philosophy of action: frameworks that study the various decision-making structures that underwrite human action. Within action theory, action is governed by what is called ‘practical reasoning,’ that is, the

28

Chapter 2

process “by which an agent forms intentions and plans, based upon desires and beliefs” (Houkes et al. 2002, 304). The bulk of plan literature addresses the roles of designers and engineers at different points in the design cycle: how tools are employed by users; how designs are planned in collaboration between the engineer and their client; and how specific tools are produced considering those collaborative plans. Consequently, most of the literature on plans is an enterprise fundamentally embedded in the social, technical, and economic processes that constrain contemporary product design. This finely grained approach, while useful and explanatorily rich, exceeds the limits of my intentions given my rather painterly approach thus far. Nonetheless, what I like about the literature around plans is that they offer us a way to describe how makers or designers dictate the proper uses of tools without committing to any ontological claims about what ‘properness’ means and where it resides. Plans are united in having the following three features: 1) a goal state to be realized, 2) an ordering of considered actions (whether partial or complete), and 3) a set of objects used. However, plans are not intended to document the process and procedures of making completely and perfectly. Indeed, one should expect instances of actual using and making to deviate in various ways from this idealised plan. As Houkes et al. write: “these steps are not—as in a phase model—separated by actual, explicit decisions, but they are reconstructed changes in intention” (2002, 312). Rather, plans should serve as a general template by which to make sense of these processes. Plans can take several different forms, in that they can be recursive, linear, ad hoc, partial, or whatever else. David Pye makes this clear in his tragically underutilized work The Nature and Art of Workmanship, in which he distinguishes between what he calls the ‘workmanship of certainty’ and the ‘workmanship of risk.’ Pye argues that the workmanship of certainty is the kind of workmanship wedded to an explicit and precise propositional attitude. Or, cast in the notation we've used so far: “Working within some technical code c I intend φm to create a specific tool t.” In the workmanship of certainty, the craftsman has in his or her possession the full knowledge of the make plan for artefact: exactly what needs to be done and when. The workmanship of certainty is thus the workmanship present in quantity production, with its “pure state in full automation.” As Pye writes, “In workmanship of this sort the quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single saleable thing is made” (1968, 4–5). Examples of the workmanship of certainty constitute most of the consumer objects that a person encounters in the twenty-first century. The computer on which I am writing—a 2020 MacBook Air—is fundamentally like any other 2020 MacBook Air, for it is a product of a highly automated process that has

Functions

29

explicit and precise ends. So, too, is the flat-packed furniture we use, the cars we buy, and much of the food and drink we consume. The workmanship of risk is different. Unlike the ‘exactly predetermined’ results of the workmanship of certainty, the workmanship of risk describes the process of craftsmanship, wherein “the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works” (Pye 1968, 4). If one is making a chair by hand, or assembling a sculpture out of refuse, or writing a poem, one is engaging in the dynamic, uncertain, risky practice described by the workmanship of risk: an ends-oriented but undetermined practice wherein both success and failure are courted. Given this, the intentional apparatus at play in the case of the workmanship of risk is a little different to the intentional apparatus for the workmanship of certainty. Whereas in the latter case the maker has precise knowledge of the particular outcome being sought, in the case of the former the maker might be in possession of some more general category description of what they seek. While this category description remains circumscribed by the technical code(s) governing the intentions and activities leading to the tool outcome, the tool outcome itself remains partially undetermined. In any case, while plans may differ wildly from one another (whether because they’re underwritten by type-descriptions, category-descriptions, or otherwise), they are united in being 1) “orderings of considered actions, undertaken for achieving a goal,” and 2) “means-end coherent”—that is, “the means chosen must be considered appropriate (i.e. necessary, sufficient, or optimal) to the goals” (Houkes et al. 2002, 304). So, returning to our hypothetical chair: in order to achieve that particular chair t you take stock of the constituent steps you must take: marking, sawing, nailing, sanding, oiling, and so on. As part of that process, you also take stock of what you need to have on hand to fulfill those steps: not only the ingredients required (timber, nails, screws, varnish, sandpaper, whatever), but also those tools that possess the functions necessary for appropriately manipulating those ingredients: saws, workbenches, screwdrivers, hammers, and so on. These constituent parts and processes, put together in the appropriate way and in the appropriate order, constitute the steps intended to achieve the desired outcome. There are two kinds of plans described in the literature: ‘use plans’ and ‘make plans,’ a distinction first made by Wybo Houkes in his “Rules, Plans, and the Normativity of Technological Knowledge.” He explains the difference thus: “Within the broad class of plans, we distinguish [between] use plans and make plans. If some of the considered actions are manipulations of artefacts, we call the plan a use plan; if the goal of the plan is to produce an object, we call the plan a make plan” (Houkes 2013, 42). We’ll begin with make plans, because it is via make plans that proper functions are ascribed to objects. (We will deal with use plans in chapter 3.)

30

Chapter 2

When we make tools, what we are doing is that we are following a make plan to produce a tool intended for a particular use. That is, we intend to make a tool with a particular function. We achieve these intentions when our tools are the intentional (or intended) products of an agent’s actions: the target tool t coheres with the maker’s intentions in that it can be used to a change from state of affairs δ to maker-determined target state δm, assuming that it is used in the appropriate manner. But how do we attach this ‘function’ ft to the tool? To possess a relevant intention φm, a maker m needs to possess a concept under which all relevant features of the desired state of affairs are subordinated. So, to bring about some tool and, in so doing, realize some intention, a maker needs to know the specific type-description for the tool and the properties that tool needs to possess in order to meet that type-description. Being in possession of those facts, the maker is then able to guarantee that the tool instantiates the appropriate properties. Per Risto Hilpinen: When a person intends to make an object, the content of the intention is not the object itself, but some description of an object or some ‘concept’ under which the intended object is conceived; the agent intends to make an object of a certain kind or type. Thus I want to suggest that proper or ‘strict’ authorship can be distinguished from other forms of agent-causation [. . .]; I take a person A to be an author of an object o only if it is intentionally produced by A under some description of the object. The intention ‘ties’ to the object a number of descriptions (concepts or predicates); such descriptions define its intended properties. The object’s existence, as well as some of its properties, are causally dependent on the author’s intention. (1993, 157)

PROPER USE When we possess the goal to make a tool, an aspect of that goal is to make something that does the right kind of job: the functions that are to be fulfilled by the made object are among its intended properties. A tool t has a proper function ft if it was the intention φm of the maker m of t that t, when used properly, can be used to afford a change from δ to target state δm with those intentions and target states moderated by the governing technical code c (per chapter 1). The function of a tool thus causally depends upon the intentions of the maker. It is the maker’s intention φm that fixes the proper function ft of t: makers fix the ‘function’ of their tools ‘Intentions’ furnish us with the framework in which artefact for-ness is embedded. It is via the process outlined here that tool-intentions are causally welded to tool-outcomes in an explicit way. We can re-create this process as follows. First, while working within some technical code c, some maker m

Functions

31

has an intention φm of affording a change from state of affairs δ to makerdetermined target state δm. This afforded change could be large or small, incidental or systemic. The important thing is that the maker wants to bring about some state of affairs they do not believe it obtains. Second, m believes that an appropriate means by which to realise φm within c is to design a tool t with the proper function ft of affording a change from δ to δm. Part of the maker m’s description of the proper function of t is a description of how to use t to realise δm. This is what fixes the proper function ft of t. Third, m then attempts to make t in accordance with its description; the outcome of this making is some tool outcome t′. Fourth, the made t′ meets the maker’s intentions φm if t′, when used properly, can be used to fulfill its function ft of affording a change from δ to δm. Meanwhile, t′ does not meet the φm if either t′, when used properly, cannot be used to fulfill the ft of affording a change from δ to δm, or t′ cannot be used properly to to fulfill the ft of affording a change from δ to δm. Finally, if t′ does not meet the maker’s intentions φm, the maker m may decide to change the underwriting intention φm, design a different t, reassess function ft, or some combination of those options. This process, in a nutshell, is a rational reconstruction of what happens when we fix a proper function to a made object—though, as noted, we should not expect all make plans are constituted by a set of explicit and already-established steps before use properly commences. Indeed, many instances of making are implicit rather than explicit, and it is common for the plan itself to change in response to local conditions. In any case, when we’re talking about the ‘properness’ of tool function, we mean that proper function is part of the intentional apparatus that leads to the creation of a tool. It is the degree to which a tool fulfills the purpose fixed by the intention that is being assessed when we talk about whether a tool is or is not fulfilling that proper function. Consider what it means to use a tool ‘properly,’ as implied by the make plan above. When a given user uses a tool ‘properly,’ we mean that they use the tool in a way that coheres with the intentions of the maker—not only in terms of using the tool to achieve some desired state of affairs in line with its fixed function, but also in terms of the fact that the user employs the tool in the appropriate way. First, working within some technical code c, some user u has an intention φu of affording a change from state of affairs δ to userdetermined target state δu, where δu is equal to maker-determined target state δm. Second, user u believes that an appropriate means by which to realise φu within c is to properly use a tool t with the proper function ft of affording a change from δ to δm. Third, the tool t meets the φu if t, when used properly, can be used to fulfill the ft of affording a change from δ to δu. Fourth and finally,

32

Chapter 2

t does not meet the φu if t, when used properly, cannot be used to fulfill the ft of affording a change from δ to δu. Thinking about the properness of function in this way is useful for two reasons. First, it gives us enough breathing room to account for the plasticity and contingency of tool use. By tying properness of function to intention, make plans allow us to make sense of the intuition that tools have something like proper functions without appealing to the abstract relational structures upon which Millikan’s argument is premised. The second benefit to this approach is that make plans give us the normative traction from which to make those judgments of deficiency that are integral to our everyday language about tools. Simply because a tool has a proper function does not guarantee the tool functions properly. This is because, for a tool to function properly, it must satisfy the type-description included in the intentional content that guides the designer’s production of that artefact. When the tool functions properly, the intentions of the maker and the target state cohere in a satisfying way: some given t is not defective if t possesses an ft and t meets the success criteria for ft in that t can be used to afford a change from δ to δm when used properly. However, it is not always the case that maker intentions cohere with the target state. Indeed, it is entirely possible for a tool to be designed in accordance with an underwriting intention φm and yet be inappropriate for affording the target state δm. Tools of this sort have a proper function, but then fail to fulfill that function. These tools are defective. When we say a tool is defective, we’re not saying it is failing to fulfill its function because of some real property of the tool itself. Instead, contra Millikan, we are saying it is failing to fulfill some specific function stipulated within the function-fixing intention φm under which the concept of that tool is subordinated: some given t is defective if t possesses an ft and t fails to meets the success criteria for ft in that t cannot be used to afford a change from δ to δm when used properly. A defective tool, in short, does not actually do the job for which it was designed. As this chapter demonstrates, trying to square our everyday use of the word function with some more precise picture of the conditions under which we ascribe properness of function in tools is a little more complicated than it might appear at first pass. Nonetheless, I hope this chapter has made a few things clear: first, that conventional accounts of function (from philosophy of biology and related corners of the philosophy of science, and accounts of proper versus improper function in particular) struggle to square biological function with the kinds of function we ascribe to tools; and second, that it’s possible to cash out proper function in tools by appealing to concepts drawn from action theory. The real takeaway from this chapter, however—a takeaway, more to the point, that will prove integral to our conversation about

Functions

33

artworks later in this book—is that preserving the notion of proper function in tools allows us to make normative judgments about whether tools are doing what they supposed to do (thus the crucial distinction between ‘proper function’ and ‘functioning properly’), while at the same time leaving room for users to flexibly, if ‘improperly,’ interpret those tools. We will discuss this further in chapter 3.

Chapter 3

Affordances

So far, we’ve covered the conditions under which tool functions appear, as well as the mechanism by which proper functions are affixed to tools. We also possess an account of the conditions under which tools can be described as ‘defective’: that is, by virtue of those tools failing to fulfill some specific function stipulated within the function-fixing maker intention φm under which the concept of that tool was subordinated. What, then, about tool use? That is, what are we doing with our tools, given all these conditions and functions and whatever else? We begin with what Houkes et al. describe as ‘use plans.’ Minimally, a use plan denotes the intended, ‘proper’ use of a designed artefact. However, intended use does not capture all possible ways in which tools can be used. After all, it’s obviously the case that we use our tools in all kinds of ways that are entirely contrary to their assigned function. Although a technology might be designed for a given purpose, how a technology is actually used depends on a collection of factors, including the intentions of designers, user knowledge, prevailing social customs, immediate needs, and habituated forms of embodiment. A screwdriver, for instance, is designed to drive screws. However, a screwdriver can also be used for lots of other things as well. In my house, for instance, I have an old screwdriver that is only used to open stubborn tins of paint. Similarly, a copy of Infinite Jest may find a second life as a doorstop; an old carafe can be used as a vase; a car can be used as a weapon; a sardine can may be used as a fetching headdress (cf. Ihde 1990, 126). Within the philosophy of technology (and, in particular, postphenomenology), this phenomenon is called ‘multistability,’ a concept that derives ultimately from the work of Don Ihde. As early as 1977’s Experimental Phenomenology, Ihde uses a Necker cube to argue that the same image can offer conflicting, yet stable perceptions. Invented by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker in 1832, the Necker cube is a wireframe image of a cube that offers no clues about its proper orientation; the square facing the viewer 35

36

Chapter 3

could be either the upper-right or the lower-left. Moreover, when this fact is pointed out, most people can experience this ‘bistable event’ with relative ease and under different circumstances: first perceiving the upper-right square as facing the viewer, and then perceiving the lower-left square as facing the viewer (cf. Ward and Scholl 2015). Ihde, however, extends this observation and argues that the Necker cube can be interpreted in other ways as well. We could, for instance, interpret the wireframe as a six-sided insect sitting in a six-sided hole, or (if we take the central parallelogram to be the facing side) a top-down view of a trapezoidal pyramid. In this way, Ihde demonstrates that the Necker cube affords not only bistable perceptual events, but a multiplicity of stable perceptual events. The cube is thus perceptually multistable. Armed with this insight, Ihde argues, phenomenologists find themselves with the tools to examine perceptual variations and to demonstrate “structural or invariant features” of the object of that perception (Ihde 1990, 145). Ihde applies this insight to tools and technology in Technology and the Lifeworld. Technology, he argues, is also multistable in that technologies function in practices. While the various things a tool helps us to do are obviously constrained by a bunch of different factors, there is never a case when a tool is only useful in a single way. Per Ihde, “no technology is ‘one thing,’ nor is it incapable of belonging to multiple contexts” (Ihde 2002, 106). Or, as Robert Rosenberger writes, “A technology can always be put to multiple purposes, can always fit in to multiple contexts, can always be meaningful in different ways to different people, can always evolve differently within different cultures” (Rosenberger 2020). Tools, in short, don’t just have singular assigned functions. Instead, they offer a stable of what philosophers of technology call ‘affordances,’ only some of which are assigned to functions. DEFINING AFFORDANCES The concept of affordances makes its first appearance in James J. Gibson’s The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1978). In those works, Gibson conceptualized what he considers affordances—and what I, in this book, call ‘biological affordances’—as a particular kind of opportunity. They constitute an invitation or solicitation for an organism to act in a certain way, based upon the specific features of both the organism and its environment. Whether that invitation to act exists is jointly determined by the properties of the environment and the capacities of the agent within that environment. Gibson writes: The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary,

Affordances

37

the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. [. . .] They have to be measured relative to the animal. They are unique for that animal. They are not just abstract physical properties. They have unity relative to the posture and behavior of the animal being considered. So an affordance cannot be measured as we measure in physics. [. . .] An affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective–objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. (Gibson 2014, 119–21)

The affordance is a fabulously useful concept. Both empirically rich and metaphysically prudent, the affordance offers ecologists and animal behaviorists a descriptively rich way of cashing out the different capacities that organisms have, and how those capacities interact and intersect with the environments in which organisms live. With this approach, it is much easier to offer thick descriptions of the contingent conditions (the bodies, environments, cultures, intentions, and whatever else) within which animal behavior is embedded. When a bird flies, for example, it does so because both the physical features of the bird and the external environment are working in fruitful confluence. Were things otherwise—were the bird lacking flight feathers, for example—flight would prove impossible. The affordance of flight is only possible with the relevant biological and environmental facts in place. It is this relationship—this stable disposition toward and capacity for a certain course of action—that Gibson identifies as an affordance. Affordances as Gibson conceives of them do not dictate organism behavior. After all, the mere fact that a bird can fly does not mean that the bird must fly. Instead, flight is one affordance available to the bird among many, with other affordances also available thanks to other fruitful confluences between the organism and its environment. In this way, biological affordances do not make demands. While biological affordances are stable dispositions toward and capacities for certain behaviors or actions, they are non-binding dispositions and capacities. Flight feathers and atmosphere invite birds to fly, but they do not force birds to fly. Instead, flight is one of a set of possible activities available to the organism. While biological affordances determine what an organism can do within a given environment, they underdetermine what an organism actually does. We can thus define a Gibsonian affordance as a stable but non-binding disposition for action constituted by a relationship between the capacities of some organism and its particular state of affairs. All the aggregated affordances of which a given organism can take advantage constitute an organism’s ‘niche.’ A niche, Gibson writes, “refers more to

38

Chapter 3

how an animal lives than to where it lives” (Gibson 2014, 120). A niche is the way in which an organism occupies a given environment, with this mode of occupation specific to the form and capacities of the organism. This means two different organisms can occupy vastly different niches within the same environment. The relationship that an African grey parrot has with a tall tree, for instance, is different from the relationship an elephant has with that same tree. All the physical facts are the same: a large plant of a certain height and geometry, in a certain environmental context. And yet, while the large tree might afford the elephant a scratching post or a spot of shade, for the parrot it affords a source of food, a site of social interaction, and a means of protection against various ground predators. These non-overlapping niches are a consequence of the fact that each organism can take advantage of the same environment in different ways. An environmental niche, in short, should be conceptualized as the set of biological affordances available to the specific organism that occupies that niche. Given their sensitivity to the necessarily contingent intersection of organisms and their environments, affordances have also been used in several fields outside of ecology. Psychologists employ affordances; fitting, given that Gibson was himself a psychologist. So, too, do educators, designers, semioticians, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, animal behaviorists, architects, and a great many other scholars and professionals interested in the relationships between organisms and their environments. This plurality of use presents something of a problem for those interested in employing affordances in a conceptually precise way. Gibson’s coining, wonderfully influential and useful, has been absorbed into so many different scholarly and intellectual traditions that semantic drift was inevitable. Philosophers of technology are also among those who use affordances. The term entered philosophy of technology with Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things—originally published in 1988 as The Psychology of Everyday Things—where he defines affordances thus: The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person (or for that matter any interacting agent, whether animal or human, or even machines and robots). An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine how the object could possibly be used. [. . .] This relational definition of affordance gives considerable difficulty to many people. We are used to thinking that properties are associated with objects. But affordance is not a property. An affordance is a relationship. Whether an affordance exists depends upon the properties of both the object and the agent. (Norman 2013, 11)

Affordances

39

Norman’s motivation here is clear. Our tools furnish us with affordances that look a lot like what Gibson proposed in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Affordances of the biological kind are stable but non-binding dispositions toward certain actions. The same is also true for tool affordances: they, too, are stable but non-binding dispositions toward certain actions. Wings, for example, furnish a stable but non-binding disposition for flight; hammers furnish a stable but non-binding disposition for hammering. We design and use our tools to amplify our attributes, and then we use those newly amplified attributes to negotiate and change our environments in certain ways. In the case of technology, affordances are an orderly set of relationships between a tool, the various capacities of its users, and the relevant features of the environment in which the user employs the tool—in the case of tool affordances, features that are governed by the technical codes that prevail within that environment. They are a means by which a given user can use the features of the object to induce a change from one state to another. A tool affordance at thus denotes any stable but non-binding possibility for action furnished by a relationship between the capacities (physical, cognitive, phenomenological, or other) of some user u, the tool t available to u, and the prevailing technical codes c. However, the comparison between tool affordances and biological affordances is also imperfect. Due to our unparalleled ability to design and implement our own tools and environments, a complete picture of the affordances furnished by our tools is a much more complicated affair than the account originally offered by Gibson. Affordances, as Gibson conceptualizes them, are built around a reasonably stable set of relationships between the body of an organism and the environment of that body. Tool affordances, however, are far less stable. As argued by early phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we clearly use tools in all kinds of different ways. They can be—but need not be—embodied like biological affordances, and the degree to which and the ways in which a tool is embodied can change from moment to moment. A hammer could be used as a hammer, for example, but it could also be used as a doorstop, or a paperweight, or a weapon, or whatever else, all within a very short span of time. The affordances tools make available to our bodies can change based upon the ways in which we interface with that tool. This means that tool affordances are radically more plastic than biological dispositions for action; they are contingent in a way that biological features are not.

40

Chapter 3

TECHNICAL RELATIONS Postphenomenology offers us a way by which to take stock of this plasticity. Beginning properly with the publication of Don Ihde’s Technology and the Lifeworld in 1990 (although an earlier iteration, called ‘experimental phenomenology,’ appeared with the 1977 publication of a book of the same name), postphenomenology offers a means by which conceptual and empirical approaches to technology can be fruitfully welded into a single theory of ‘technological mediation.’ Ihde’s intuition begins with Heideggerian phenomenology. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that our experience of objects is either present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) or ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). A hammer, Heidegger writes, is ready-to-hand when it is used in perfect concert with our intentions: when we use it to drive nails into wood, or crack open macadamia nuts, or what have you. Heidegger writes, “the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly it is encountered as that which it is—as equipment” (Heidegger 1962, 98). Readiness-to-hand thus denotes a kind of ‘being-with’ technology: the user and the ‘equipmentality’ of the hammer working together in the right kind of way. Meanwhile, that self-same hammer is present-at-hand when it is being observed but not used. When it is present-at-hand, we can appreciate the physical qualities of the hammer: the heft of the object, the mass of the tempered steel head, the wooden haft shiny with age and slick with sweat. The hammer makes itself known to us as a collection of physical qualities that we are then able to isolate and analyze. This is a fundamentally different relationship than the relationship we have with the hammer in the moment of perfectly synchronous use. It is this realization that constitutes the germ at the heart of Ihdean postphenomenology. However, while indebted to the Heideggerian distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, postphenomenology is also informed by the broadly epistemic and methodological assumptions that underpin Deweyan pragmatism. This has several effects. First, postphenomenological approaches do not share the dystopian attitude that characterizes earlier scholarship in the philosophy of technology. As a consequence, postphenomenology is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Second, postphenomenology eschews the Romanticism implicit in Heidegger’s ontology; there is also a broad rejection of Heideggerian nostalgia for nature and the past. Both factors render phenomenology reconcilable with more empirical approaches, such as one those employed by sociologists and historians of science. Third, and perhaps most significantly, Ihde develops a rich tool set for helping us to describe the plurality of ways in which we experience and use

Affordances

41

tools. He extends Heidegger’s distinction between ‘readiness-to-hand’ and ‘presence-at-hand’ by drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work in The Phenomenology of Perception. In that work, one of Merleau-Ponty’s most famous examples is that of a blind man using a stick or cane to move around. In using the stick to navigate the world, Merleau-Ponty argues, for the blind man, the stick is not just a stick. Instead, the stick is used to extend the blind man’s sense of touch beyond the perceptual limits imposed by his body. Unable to see with his eyes, the man casts the stick out in front of him, searching for any obstacles or impediments in his way. This allows the man to construct a mental map of his surrounds: one that is sufficiently isomorphic to the real world to be predictively useful. When the blind man is armed with a cane, the world suddenly becomes phenomenologically richer, more navigable, less dangerous. Although not a perfect replacement for sight, the stick furnishes the man with certain affordances he would not otherwise possess. As Merleau-Ponty writes: The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than of the position of objects through it. The position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach which carries him to it, which comprises besides the arm’s own reach the stick’s range of action. (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 165–66)

This, in Ihde’s eyes, constitutes a relationship with technology that is neither Zuhandenheit nor Vorhandenheit. It is not a case where the stick is being used, like the hammer, to extend and amplify the physical power and durability of the human form (as in the case of Zuhandenheit), nor is it a case where the stick itself becomes the object of attention (as in the case of Vorhandenheit). Instead, the stick is being used to extend the man’s senses: that is, as a low-fidelity replacement for human sight. Armed with this intuition, Ihde proposes a taxonomy of ‘technical relations’ that attempts to capture the multiplicity of ways in which tools are used. Technical relations refer to the classes of possible interactions we can have with our objects. These interactions should not only be understood in terms of the material and cognitive affordances they provide, but also in terms of how technical objects, by virtue of offering these affordances, help mediate the behaviors, capabilities, and attitudes of human users: what we can describe more generally as ‘human-technology relations’ (cf. Ihde 1990, 73–96). This relational approach combines philosophical analysis with empirical investigation. In so doing, postphenomenology dramatically expands and amplifies

42

Chapter 3

the Heideggerian theoretical apparatus, ideally allowing philosophers to better talk about technology, our relations with that technology, and the effects of technological mediation. It is thanks to this philosophical union that postphenomenology gives us the conceptual tools for differentiating biological affordances from tool affordances. The relationship posed between human and tool in postphenomenology is inherently contingent, motivated by the understanding that tools intersect with our bodies in all kinds of interesting ways. Understanding multistability is integral to understanding the taxonomy at the heart of Ihdean postphenomenology. If multistability makes clear the degree to which tool practices are plastic because of the intentions of designers, user knowledge prevailing social customs, immediate needs, habituated forms of embodiment, and whatever else, Ihdean technical relations provide both a typology for describing the different ways in which a given tool can be put to use within these practices and a way of building affordances into our picture of multistability. Although later philosophers have since added to Ihde’s taxonomy (the most notable of whom is Peter-Paul Verbeek, given his attempts to integrate Ihdean postphenomenology and Latourian actor-network theory into a single ‘theory of technological mediation’; cf. Verbeek 2016), Ihde’s original articulation identifies four different ways in which we can encounter tools and other technical artefacts, all of which can and do contribute to the plastic multistability of tools. These relations are as follows: ‘embodied relations,’ ‘hermeneutic relations,’ ‘alterity relations,’ and ‘background relations.’ I will offer a brief summary of each. Heideggerian Zuhandenheit provides the germ for Ihde’s ‘embodiment relations.’ These relations are the class of relations that we have with objects when those objects become integrated into our experience of our own bodies. This kind of relation is very common. For example, my relationship with my glasses is an embodiment relation. That relationship is so close that I’m not consciously aware of them unless they are somehow brought to my attention. Assuming they are fitted with the correct prescription and have a form that is amenable to sitting on the bridge of my nose, I don’t perceive the glasses themselves, but rather I perceive through them. A blind man’s stick is also an example of an embodiment relation. The blind man perceives through the stick without perceiving the stick itself; it is his means of attention without being the object of attention. Embodiment relations do not only capture our relationship with objects like spectacles and canes. We do this kind of work constantly. When you drive an automobile you know very well, or when you wear a fancy dress costume that distorts your size and shape, or whatever, you automatically compensate for the freshly redrawn boundaries of your phenomenology. You no longer think of your physical limits as those of your body, strictly speaking. Instead, your sense of ‘you’ and the physical limits of that you are subject

Affordances

43

to constant change and revision. As Merleau-Ponty writes, a person wearing a large hat knows “without any calculation” to “keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 165). Embodiment relations capture the fluid edges of proprioception: not only how our bodies move through space, but also our awareness of the blurry and contingent limits of that body as we move through space. The tools in all these cases withdraw into the user’s phenomenological sense of their own body. Ihde calls this integration of a tool into a phenomenological ‘I’ the ‘enigma position,’ denoted here by the hyphen between ‘I’ and ‘technology’: Embodiment Relations: (I-technology) → world

While Ihde does not describe them in this way, embodiment relations describe a particular class of tool affordances. Namely, an embodiment relation takes place when there is a particularly seamless integration between the tool affordances on offer, the intentions of the user, and the physical capacities of that user. This seamlessness is what permits the tool to integrate into the bodily schema of the user. What’s nice about this conceptualization is that it’s sensitive to the fact that different users will have different capacities and intentions, and therefore will not necessarily be in a position to take advantage of the tool affordances furnished by an object. My glasses can only disappear into my bodily schema because my eyesight is bad in the right kind of way. Were my eyes even slightly better or slightly worse, or were I long-sighted rather than short-sighted, I would not be able to take full advantage of the tool affordances on offer. Meanwhile, were I blind rather than sighted, I would find the glasses of no use at all. Instead, I would avail myself of a different tool, one that offers different affordances and a different embodiment relation, such as the blind man’s stick in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The next class of technical relation is what Ihde calls ‘hermeneutic relations.’ If ‘embodiment relations’ denotes the class of relations that come into play when we integrate tools into our experience of our own bodies, then hermeneutic relations do the opposite. The tool in this case does not withdraw from our attention. Instead, in hermeneutic relations the tool is the object of our attention because it ‘reads’ and then ‘translates’ the world for us; we experience the world through a tool that is itself the object of our experience. This might sound a bit complicated, so an example may be helpful. A thermographic camera is a kind of camera embedded with sensors that detect infra-red light. Because infra-red light is basically radiated heat, thermographic cameras are used to detect bodies that radiate heat, particularly in environments where normal methods of sight are compromised (such as

44

Chapter 3

extreme darkness, or heavy fog, or similar). Importantly, while human beings can also detect radiated heat due to the electrochemical network of nerves embedded in our skin, thermographic cameras can detect heat over much longer distances and much larger ranges—across light-years and hundreds of thousands of degrees kelvin, in the case of radio telescopes. In this manner, thermographic cameras ‘read’ heat in a way that humans cannot. This is why we use them. Of course, reading heat is not enough. For that reading to be useful to us, the camera must also provide a translation for that data, whether by providing a thermal image, or by rendering that temperature data into degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius. This is what Ihde means by ‘hermeneutic’: the tool reads and translates the world for us, often bringing into focus an aspect of the world that would have been otherwise inaccessible. In this case, the thermographic camera is a device with which we can have hermeneutic relations in reading and translating heat. This is the tool affordance the thermographic camera provides. What’s interesting about hermeneutic relations—at least, beyond the observation that some tools translate the world for us—is how they change the tenor and contents of our experiences. Consider an optical telescope. Looking through an optical telescope affords you the opportunity to project the range of your sight to see a much greater distance than would be possible with the naked eye. However, taking advantage of this tool affordance comes with certain opportunity costs. When you use an optical telescope to look at the stars, it is customary to place one eye against the eyepiece and close the other eye. If you do not, it is impossible for your brain to reconcile the two signals: one of the world close by; the other of a world far away. So, you need to make a choice one way or the other, each with its own opportunity cost. In one case, you close your non-telescope eye, and your present conditions fall away as you project your sight skyward; in the other, you close your telescope eye and remain grounded. It is impossible to preserve both perceptions simultaneously. While hermeneutic relations read the world for us, they also monopolize our perceptions if we remain within that relation. Hermeneutic Relations: I → (technology-world)

All this means that, per Ihde’s notation here, in a hermeneutic relation, the enigma position has changed place. Instead of the embodied union between the ‘I’ and ‘technology,’ it now lurks between ‘technology’ and ‘world.’ Because the object of the user’s attention is the translated data, the user’s experience of the world is necessarily mediated, in both positive and negative ways, by the hermeneutic function of the translation. We experience this translation as if it were the world, and we encounter the world indirectly via

Affordances

45

that translation. Furthermore, technology and the world are non-differentiable until we suspend the hermeneutic relation. Both embodiment and hermeneutic relations are what Ihde calls ‘mediated relations,’ in that both embodiment and hermeneutic relations mediate our experience of the world, albeit in different ways. However, there also exist ‘unmediated relations’: that is, technical relations that do not mediate our experience of the world. The first of these Ihde calls ‘alterity relations.’ Alterity relations describe the relationships that take place when there is an ‘I’ and ‘technology,’ but where the ‘world’ does not intervene. Instead of encountering the world via technology, you encounter the tool as an object in its own right. Or, using his schematic: Alterity Relations: I → technology-(-world)

Alterity relations describe what we do when we encounter a technical object qua object: when the object is itself the object of our attention. We engage in alterity relations when we read a book, or use an ATM, or play computer games, or eat a very fine meal. The alterity relation describes tools when they are in the capacity as something to be interacted with. Being interactable, Ihde claims these kinds of tools appear to consciousness as an ‘other.’ We take these objects—these ‘quasi-others’—seriously because they seem to have a life of their own; a sense of motion and purpose and interiority that informs and governs our interactions with, and use of, those tools. Although this sense of motion and purpose and interiority may be superficial, and the appearance of automation but a semblance, they nonetheless demand our attention because they appear to be, in some important phenomenological respect, like us: they possess “the radical difference posed to any human by another human” (Ihde 1990, 98). Or, to use an example provided by architect, designer, and Memphis Group founder, Ettore Sottsass: To drink water from a waxed paper cup on the highway and to drink it from a crystal goblet are different gestures. In the first case, you almost forget that you exist as you drink. In the second . . . you realize that you have in your hands an instrument that makes you reflect upon how you are living at that moment. (Ettore Sottsass, quoted in Grudin 2010, 10)

In this case, it is the crystal goblet that furnishes the alterity relation. Drinking from the goblet is not a thoughtless, evanescent gesture. Instead, the heft of the crystal, the quality of the workmanship, and the conditions under which the drinking takes place all work together in such a way as to prompt you to reflect upon the object in your hand. The goblet makes demands of you; in

46

Chapter 3

interacting with the goblet as an object in its own right, the goblet invites you to reflect upon what it is like to drink. The ‘interact-able-ness’ of alterity relations is what sets alterity objects apart from other tools, and is also what constrains the tool affordances furnished by alterity relations. While we would struggle to generate a general apt description of the kinds of affordances that alterity relations offer, we can say that alterity relations—at least within Ihde’s taxonomy—describe all technical relations that do not mediate the world. Rather than simply affording different forms of world access, as in mediation relations, within alterity relations the device itself becomes the object of our attention. Given that, the kinds of tool affordances offered are rich and multifarious. Reading a book affords learning new things; using an ATM affords obtaining units of exchange; playing a computer game affords the having of fun. While these tools afford very different things, they are interact-able in similar ways. The fourth and final technical relation that Ihde outlines—and the second form of unmediated relation—are ‘background relations.’ If embodiment, hermeneutic, and alterity relations describe different ways in which a given ‘I’ and a given ‘technology’ can interact—with embodiment relations occurring when ‘technology’ collapses into the ‘I,’ hermeneutic relations existing when ‘technology’ reads the world for the ‘I,’ and alterity relations occurring when the ‘I’ treats ‘technology’ as if it were an other—background relations do not describe a relationship between an ‘I’ and ‘technology’ at all. Instead, tools in background relations provide phenomenological grounding without themselves being the object of interaction. In this way, background relations provide the “context of our experience in a way that is not consciously experienced” (Verbeek 2001, 132). The multiplicity of ways in which we can use tools are unlike what occurs with biological affordances. A biological object, like wings or scales or sharp teeth, might furnish a narrow set of affordances depending on the niche of the animal, but the ways in which they can be used are necessarily bounded by the fact that these objects are part of the organism’s body. Not so with tool or technological affordances. Unlike biological objects, tools can be removed from and reintegrated into a user’s body in an effectively limitless number of constellations. Tools thus offer all kinds of affordances, depending on the properties of the tool and the individual needs, behaviors, and capacities of the user. Consequently, there is an enormous amount of functional plasticity—or, again, ‘multistability’—built into all of our tools. There are also other differences between biological and technological affordances. For one thing, we have to explicitly acquire the knowledge of how to take advantage of them. We are not born armed with the knowledge of how to drive, or build a birdhouse, or read a book, or use a mobile phone. While environments are far more information-rich than conventional

Affordances

47

psychological pictures of action would suggest, it’s simplistic to think that affordances appear to human perception without some kind of interpretative or hermeneutic act, particularly given the densely recursive skein of affordances that constitutes the world in which we live (see chapter 1). The affordances an organism perceives to be available are contingent upon a number of personal, cultural, and environmental factors. We must acquire, one way or another, a sense of not only what can be done, but also how to do it. That is why the knowledge of how to properly take advantage of certain affordances is ‘scaffolded’ or ‘acculturated,’ per Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014). We can describe scaffolding as the process by which, in order for a user u to afford a change from state of affairs δ to user-determined state of affairs δu with tool t, u’s use of t is governed by u understanding the affordances at, at′, etc., furnished by t, and how to use at, at′, etc., to afford δu. Scaffolding is a confluence of two factors. The first factor involves obtaining a sense of the affordances that are available. An organism can obtain this understanding via what Norman, in the second edition of The Design of Everyday Things, calls ‘signifiers.’ For Norman, affordances are the actions possible to an organism in each space. Signifiers, however, are the devices by which possible affordances are communicated to the organism. Signifiers can be communicated in several different ways. They can, most obviously, be communicated via explicit instruction: perhaps because someone has told you what the object can do, or because printed instructions were included in the box, or whatever else. Signifiers can also be habituated, in the sense that you might know what a given tool t can do because you know it belongs to a certain class of tool, subject to certain technical codes. Knowing that a given tool sits within a certain class affords its user clues about how that tool could be used without determining how that tool must be used: whether it is a scientific instrument, or a toy, or a vehicle, or an artwork. As Norman writes: “Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional, such as the sign PUSH on a door, but they may also be accidental and unintentional, such as our use of [. . .] the presence or absence of people waiting at a train station to determine whether we have missed the train” (Norman 2013, 12). We need to know a) how to read, and b) what a door does to properly interpret the injunction to PUSH or PULL; so, too, do we need to understand how other people use trains to make sense of an empty platform during peak hour. Organisms have to acquire this knowledge somehow, whether via inference, instruction, or otherwise. Knowing how to make sense of a signifier to appreciate the underlying affordance is a matter of scaffolding. The second factor is knowing how to take advantage of the affordance that is being signified. After all, knowing that something should be done is not the same thing as the knowledge of what one should actually do. What is known

48

Chapter 3

about what is being signified is organized into what Norman calls ‘conceptual models.’ A conceptual model, put simply, “is an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works. It doesn’t have to be complete or even accurate as long as it is useful” (Norman 2013, 25). Consider a telephone. To take advantage of the affordances furnished by the telephone, we need to know (at least in practical terms) what a telephone can do and how to use it to call people. We need to be taught that pressing certain numbers in a certain order will allow you to call another telephone: that speech and other sounds can be transmitted through seemingly empty space and into the ears of someone potentially thousands of kilometers away. This basic conceptual model of the way to use a telephone is also obviously not a naturally acquired capacity, like walking or speech. Instead, it is scaffolded, in that a) we need to acquire the ability and understanding to use it, and b) acquisition can only occur when other material and cultural facts are already in place. Different people can and will possess different conceptual models of the same tool, and consequently will respond to the same signifier in different ways. This is also an example of scaffolding. Let me offer an example. Until recently, I was the owner of a modest Volkswagen hatchback. It was, I have to say, a very fine little runabout: cheap to run and insure, reliable, easy to park, and entirely unappealing to car thieves. However, good though it was, even the best car requires maintenance. Sometimes a warning light would activate on the dashboard. I, being the responsible car owner that I am, would take that to signify that I needed to take the car to the mechanic. My conceptual model lacks the appropriate sophistication to enable me to address the problem myself, in large part due to the differences between the kind and quality of instruction about cars given to mechanics and the relative paucity of that instruction given to philosophers. I’ve received neither the relevant instruction nor the relevant practice to resolve the problem that underlies the signifier. However, the mechanic to whom I took the car does not relate to that signifier in the same way. Instead, the mechanic understands that the light signifies some specific problem within the guts of the car. She can then appeal to her conceptual model of the car to fix that problem in a way I cannot. This is an example of scaffolding in action. USING AFFORDANCES Given all the above, we’re now able to offer an account of how tool use can deviate from tool function. That is, while function is a consequence of certain intention-fixing behaviors on the part of tool makers, tool use is a consequence of some user opting to take advantage of some scaffolded affordance furnished by the tool. Let’s start with our tool t. While t was made by some

Affordances

49

maker m in order to meet the intention φm of affording a change from state of affairs δ to maker-determined target state δm, this underwriting intention does not determine everything that tool can afford: “I have used table knives for all of the following: peeling garlic cloves [. . .]; opening cocoa tins; transplanting seedlings; removing potbound houseplants from their pots; removing crumbs from the tablecloth; and tightening or loosening screws” (Preston 1998, 237). This is because tools have all kinds of features of which we can take advantage—not just those features designed and implemented in service of the proper functioning of the tool. The first step to taking advantage of some affordance, then, is a matter of judgment. This judgment can be explicit or implicit: either an “Aha!” of realization or a tacit and unvoiced understanding. Either way, the potential user u takes stock of the affordances at, at′, at′′ available given the physical, cognitive, conceptual, phenomenological, and other capacities of the user, the tool t available, and the technical codes c that prevail within that particular design space. The second step involves the user u realizing that the tool affordances at, at′, at′′ can be used to afford some outcome. Again, this process can be explicit or implicit. It could be the case that the user possesses some explicit intention φu to affording a change from δ to user-determined target state δu, and then realizes they can use one of the affordances on offer to achieve that outcome. Or it could be the case that the user does not explicitly realize the tool can be used to realize that target state, but simply employs the tool passively and without conscious thought. Third, the user u then attempts to bring about δu with t. This activity thereby achieves state δu′. Fourth, the achieved state δu′ meets the success criteria for φu if δu′ is equal to δu, or does not meet the success criteria for φu if δu′ is not equal to δu. Finally, if u does not achieve φu, u may decide to change the intention φu, use a different t, make use of different tool features at, at′, at′′, and so on, and so on, or some combination of those options. As with the make plan outlined in chapter 2, this process is more of an idealized rational reconstruction of what users do than an attempt to precisely describe processes of use. Given that, we should keep in mind Houkes et al.’s comments quoted in the previous chapter: “these steps are not—as in a phase model—separated by actual, explicit decisions, but they are reconstructed changes in intention” (Houkes et al. 2002, 312). You will notice some interesting deviations between this account and the use plan account offered in chapter 2. For example, nothing within this generalized use plan makes mention of either the intentions φm of the makers of t, nor of the degree to which the user’s u use of those tools coheres with the assigned function ft of those tools. Instead, the intended use of the tool is a consequence of the affordances at, at′, at′′ that are on offer: a choice by the user to employ the tool in one way or another, without consideration for the

50

Chapter 3

proper function of the object. This means that while some given use of a tool may cohere with the ft of that tool, these uses—and the intentions underwriting those uses—may also wildly deviate from those intentions in all kinds of interesting ways. This is because the intentions of the designer underdetermine potential uses of a given tool; to think otherwise would be to run afoul of what Ihde calls the ‘designer fallacy’ (cf. Ihde 2008). We’ve already identified one way in which use might deviate from intentions: in the instance that a tool is defective. As argued, tools with proper functions are not defective when they can be used to achieve the target state they were made to afford and are defective when they cannot. However, there are other possibilities as well. Let’s return to our make plan from chapter 2. First, while working within some technical code c, some maker m has an intention φm of affording a change from state of affairs δ to maker-determined target state δm. This afforded change could be large or small; incidental or systemic. The important thing is that the maker wants to bring about some state of affairs they do not believe obtains. Second, m believes that an appropriate means by which to realize φm within c is to design a tool t with the proper function ft of affording a change from δ to δm. Part of the maker m’s description of the proper function of t is a description of how to use t to realize δm. This is what fixes the proper function ft of t. Third, m then attempts to make t in accordance with its description; the outcome of this making is some tool outcome t′. Fourth, the made t′ meets the maker’s intentions φm if t′, when used properly, can be used to fulfill its function ft of affording a change from δ to δm. Meanwhile, t′ does not meet the φm if either t′, when used properly, cannot be used to fulfill the ft of affording a change from δ to δm, or t′ cannot be used properly to to fulfill the ft of affording a change from δ to δm. Finally, if t′ does not meet the maker’s intentions φm, the maker m may decide to change the underwriting intention φm, design a different t, reassess function ft, or some combination of those options. Now that we’ve got affordances in our arsenal, it’s pretty clear the notion that both proper function and ‘proper’ use are premised upon the tool furnishing the right kinds of affordances: that is, m believes that an appropriate means by which to realize φm is to design a tool t with the proper function ft of affording a change from δ to δm with affordance at when used properly. However, it might also be the case, for instance, that a user wants to act contrary to the function ft of the tool in question. This could happen one of two ways. First, the user might want to take advantage of the affordance at furnished by the maker of the tool while simultaneously seeking to afford a user-determined target state δu that is different from the target state δm intended by the maker. An example of this phenomenon might involve using a butter knife to smooth polymer putty into a crack in your wall instead of using that knife to smooth

Affordances

51

butter over bread. It could also be the case that a user wants to take advantage of some other affordance at′ furnished by the tool to achieve some other user-determined target state δu, like using the strong blade of that butter knife to pry the lid off a jar of jam. Both uses run afoul of the intentions of the maker, albeit in different ways. These phenomena are both examples of tool multistability in action. They are also improper uses of the artefact, in that the user-determined target states are not equal to the maker-determined target state afforded by the tool. However, this is not to say that, being improper, they are irrational uses of the tool. To the contrary these uses are entirely rational, at least in the sense that “the means chosen [are] appropriate (i.e. necessary, sufficient, or optimal) to the goals” (Houkes et al. 2002, 304)—goals that are informed by both the design space and the technical codes governing that design space, as described in chapter 1. The tool affords the target state desired by the user: in the first instance thanks to the specific affordance for which the tool was designed, and in the second instance thanks to some other affordance furnished by the object. There is nothing mad or deficient in the behavior; it’s doing the job the user wants, even if that’s not the job the maker intended. Given that, we’re now able to complicate our simple defective versus not-defective distinction made in chapter 2. If a tool has a proper function, then it can be used properly or improperly: that is, in accordance with its function as fixed by the intentions of the maker of the tool. In addition, the tool can be used either rationally or irrationally: rationally in the case that the intentions of the user are means-end coherent (that is, the tool is not defective given the intended task), and irrationally in the case that the tool is defective given the intended task. As summarized by Auke Pols: [. . .] the use plan approach elaborates two normative aspects of plans: whether they are rational or not and whether they are proper or not. A use plan is rational if its designer justifiably believes that executing the series of actions constituting the plan will lead to the realization of the plan’s goal. A use plan is proper if it is the plan the artifact was originally designed for. Similarly, artifact use is rational if the user justifiably expects that the artifact can be used in that way, and proper if that is the kind of use for which the artifact has been designed. (Pols 2015, 242)

This observation gives us two distinct axes upon which to assess tool use— properness versus improperness, and rationality versus irrationality—and four categories of use plan in total: proper and rational, proper and irrational, improper and rational, and improper and irrational. Or, more formally:

52

Chapter 3

1.  Proper and rational use captures what happens when u uses t if t possesses the function ft of affording a change from state of affairs δ to maker-determined target state δm via affordance at, user-determined target state δu is equal to δm, and t is used to afford δm via at. 2.  Proper and irrational use captures what happens when u uses t if t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, and δu is equal to δm, but t does not meet the success criteria for ft in that t cannot be used to afford a change from δ to δm via at. 3.  Improper and rational use captures what happens when u uses t if either t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, δu is not equal to δm, and t is used to afford δu via any available affordance at, at′, etc., or t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, δu is equal to δm, but t is used to afford δu via some non-standard affordance at′, at′′, etc. 4.  Improper and irrational use captures what happens when u uses t if t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, δu is not equal to δm, and t cannot be used to afford δu via at, at′, at′′ etc. There is, I think, much to recommend this four-way distinction Houkes proposes. Not only does it do an excellent job of preserving the normative framework that allows us to make judgments of defectiveness via proper function, it also gives us a way of making sense of what happens when people successfully use tools in a manner contrary to their assigned proper function. Also implicit in this story is an account of how new tools come to pass. Per the above, there is a great deal of tool use that we would describe as both improper yet rational: opening tins of paint with a screwdriver; using Infinite Jest as a doorstop; and so on. Indeed, I think it’s highly likely this kind of tool use constitutes a large percentage (perhaps even a majority, though I’ve no clear idea how you would quantify that claim) of the tool-using behaviors in which we engage. We can also surmise what takes place when improper but rational use becomes proper and rational use: because function is fixed by the intentions of a maker via some kind of make plan, the functional ascription of the tool changes if it passes through that make plan. These make plans can be serious or trivial, simple or complex; they could be as involved as designing and crafting a new kind of semiconductor for use in quantum computing, or as easy as saying, “That screwdriver is now for opening tins of paint.” More complicated, though—and the subject upon which I would like to touch as we close this chapter—is how to make sense of the notion of ‘rationality.’ Already we have a sense that rationality is a matter of being means-end coherent in some way: “the means chosen [are] appropriate (i.e. necessary, sufficient, or optimal) to the goals,” to again quote Houkes. As far as

Affordances

53

conditions go, this strikes me as trivially true. However, what I find interesting is the degree to which ‘coherence’ or ‘appropriateness’ is itself circumscribed by both design spaces and the technical codes that govern that design space. It’s obviously the case that for a technical solution to be coherent or appropriate it must be assessed in light of the material conditions available to the space. Importantly though, means-end coherence is also scaffolded by social, cultural, economic, epistemic, and other factors: in other words, by technical codes. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, for instance, was as much constrained by the codified requirements of reproducing the Latin alphabet in bound books as it was by the design space limits of smelters and dye-casters. What this highlights is that, while conditions, functions, and affordances all take stock of tools at different levels of description, these levels of description are by no means siloed. Design spaces circumscribe technical codes, which, in turn, influence both intended functions and perceived use. UPWARD CAUSATION In short, the picture I’ve developed over the preceding pages is one that (I hope) furnishes the foundation of a general theory of tools, one that is not only capable of making sense of how we use tools, but one that is also capable of both making sense of how we make normative judgments about the degree to which our tools work as intended, and the conditions under which tool invention and use take place. However, before we move into our discussion about art, it’s worth making clear that it’s not only design spaces and technical codes that influence tools. To the contrary, tools also influence their design spaces. As I noted in the chapter on conditions (chapter 1), our artefacts and their affordances together constitute much of our world. We have made the world anew considering our activities and preferences. Our lives and decisions are deeply, profoundly influenced by the tools we have inherited—and, similarly, our inherited tools influence both the functions that we deem to be worthy of pursuit and the uses of affordances that we deem to be rational. Some tools—what Barry Allen calls ‘superlative’ tools—are also capable of upwardly causing changes in the technical codes within those design spaces. Saying that a tool is ‘superlative’ is not to imply that it merely has a proper function and that it functions properly. While a bicycle used to travel to work, shoelaces used to attach your shoes to your feet, or a hamburger used to sate your hunger might all be tools that have a proper function and function properly, there is nothing remarkable about these tools or their use—assuming their user possesses the normal, everyday capacities that most people possess, at any rate. Instead, superlative tools are those tools that radically exceed the success criteria for their given function and, in doing so, change the

54

Chapter 3

system in which they operate. To use an example, photographic film is a kind of superlative tool, in that it has exerted an enormous influence on the cultural development of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “not just in broader epistemic and existential senses,” but also “in the sense that photographic and cinematic technologies have meaningfully impacted social policy, crime and punishment, information technology, news and current affairs, entertainment and the lived circumstance more broadly” (Wittingslow 2016, 133). Allen doesn’t really furnish us with a means of predicting when a tool is superlative or not, beyond the claim that superlative performances contravene existing categories. Given that, it’s a bit difficult to develop a principled way by which we can tell whether a category has been meaningfully challenged. Allen, for his part, claims that “it cannot be done.” It simply cannot be known whether or not the superlative performance will satisfy its success conditions. He continues, “There is no analytically recoverable unit, no common denominator” (Allen 2005, 69). However, this does not mean superlative performances are unable to be recognized. To this end, Allen helpfully gives us a sense of what to look out for, enumerating four qualities: appropriateness, design quality, fecundity, and symbiosis. First, ‘appropriateness’ refers to appropriateness regarding both use and users. Both criteria are important. A tool could be very good at achieving a certain task, but it might be inappropriate for a given user, as any left-handed person forced to use a right-handed can opener can attest. Or, conversely, a tool might be comfortable and easy to use, but also completely inappropriate for the task at hand. So, when Allen says that a tool is ‘appropriate’ for the task for which it is designed, he is saying that it not only possesses a function, but that the function can be realized by virtue of the affordances furnished by that tool. Second, ‘design quality’ is the measure by which the novelty of a given tool can be assessed: that is, the extent to which it either participates within an extant technical paradigm or serves to underwrite the formation of new technical paradigms. Third, ‘fecundity’ describes the richness of the affordances provided by the tool: the degree to which that tool is a “source of fruitful, inventive extrapolation or inspired innovation in adjacent fields of theory and practice” (2005, 70). Fecund tools—such as microchips, photographic film, the internal combustion engine, and the alphabet—have an outsized influence not only on the domain in which they were introduced, but also on other domains. Finally, ‘symbiosis’ indicates an artefact’s “contribution to the expansive coherence of a built circumstance” (Allen 2005, 73). By this, Allen highlights that superlative tools not only provide outsized affordances, but they also have an outsized influence on the way we live. Out of these four qualities common to superlative tools, it is ‘fecundity’ and ‘symbiosis’ that really typify tools that influence technical codes. It is via fecundity and symbiosis that superlative tools “change the design space where they

Affordances

55

work, remaking it to fit them, and not passively fitting an antecedently given nature of things. They are unpredictable because they change our idea of what is possible” (2005, 69; also cf. Wittingslow 2016). Understanding this network of relationships between affordances, functions, and conditions is of the utmost importance when trying to make sense of what tools do and how we relate to them. In addition, it’s also something to keep in mind as we begin to talk about art in the next chapter. Indeed, it’s integral to making sense of artworks qua privileged objects—that is, as objects capable of furnishing special kinds of affordances because they are artworks—as well as how artworks themselves can influence the codes that circumscribe the conditions under which we encounter them.

Chapter 4

Artworlds

The picture I’ve outlined so far is general rather than particular: a painterly description of the worldly conditions that circumscribe and underwrite— though do not determine!—the ways in which we design and use tools. While this picture is perhaps rather too light on details to be useful as is, we can use this general picture to begin to describe the conditions under which works of art become possible.1 However, before we get into the guts of my argument, it’s worth making clear that it is extremely difficult to develop a rule or principle by which to differentiate artworks from non-artworks in some orderly or predictable way. This is because artworks, unlike other classes of object, don’t possess a shared family resemblance or obvious necessity and sufficiency criteria. Whatever privilege that artworks possess cannot be a function of the formal features of the artwork in question: that is, what the object is. Something simply being a painting or a sculpture is not enough for it to be an artwork, as modern and contemporary artists know all too well. Per Gerrold Levinson: The concept of art work is unlike that of other sorts of things that surround us, e.g., cars, chairs, persons. Art work seems to lack antecedently defined limits in terms of intrinsic features, even flexible ones—as opposed to car, chair, person. There is no question of determining in all cases that something is art by weighing it against some archetype or other. The only clue one has is the particular, concrete, and multifarious population which art has acquired at any point. (1979, 234)

Artists have been playing with the conceptual slipperiness of art since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. It is the understanding that art lacks necessary formal features that lends power and wit and playfulness to artworks that toy with how we discern artworks from non-artworks. This non-formal quality—some abstract sense of ‘art-ness,’ if you like—is why we can tell Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) from an everyday urinal, or Warhol’s 57

58

Chapter 4

Brillo Box (1964) from other Brillo boxes, or Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) from her actual bed (cf. Danto 1983). All these works are premised upon the sense that art-ness is a particular quality that artworks possess, quite separate from the formal features of the object in question. To have this intuition is more than just believing that paintings are artworks because they are paintings. Instead, this intuition differentiates artworks from otherwise-identical non-artworks—from religious or cultural artefacts, or mere decoration, or craft objects, or whatever else. To properly appreciate artworks, a given viewer must possess the intuition (whether theoretic or pre-theoretic) that art objects are somehow special, and that specialness is a consequence of the fact that art objects are art. We talk and think about artworks as though they constitute a privileged class of artefact; we interrogate them, analyze them, and are moved by them in part because we expect to interrogate, analyze, and be moved by artefacts of this privileged class. We treat them as if they possess a kind of ‘devolved otherness’ that is “stronger than mere objectness but weaker than the otherness found within the animal kingdom or the human one” (Ihde 1990, 100). As a consequence of this devolved otherness, they seem to us autonomous and self-legislating, perhaps even a bit spooky. Moreover, because of this devolved otherness, we afford artworks dignities that other objects do not receive. We are horrified when overzealous governments deface cultural sites, or when paintings are wilfully stolen or destroyed by gangsters or madmen. We react with palpable moral outrage when artworks are silenced. We also take artworks to assume a position about a particular state of affairs, almost as if they, like us, have something to say: “like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets,” in the words of Roland Barthes (1977, 146). DEFINITIONS OF ART So, how to begin making sense of this intuition? Per Adajian (2018), most contemporary definitions of art can be sorted into one of three different silos: ‘functional’ definitions that claim that aesthetic properties are explanatorily fundamental when it comes to deciding whether something is or is not an artwork; ‘institutionalist’ definitions that claim that aesthetic properties are not explanatorily fundamental when it comes to deciding whether something is or is not an artwork; and ‘hybrid’ theories that attempt to reconcile aesthetic and institutional components. While the most influential hybrid positions, such as those expressed in Longworth and Scarantino (2010) and Iseminger (2004), do not bear relevantly upon the case I am making here, it is worth providing a summary of functionalism and institutionalism.

Artworlds

59

‘Functionalist’ and ‘institutionalist’ definitions of art are prima facie incompatible. Functionalists claim it is the function of artworks to have aesthetic properties: aesthetic properties are explanatorily fundamental when it comes to deciding whether something is or is not an artwork. This means that artworks are only artworks if a) they have the function of possessing aesthetic properties (such as beauty, sublimity, elegance, or whatever) as that is the thing for which they are intended, and b) they are, in fact, in possession of those aesthetic properties. Or, in the words of Nick Zangwill, “having an aesthetic purpose makes a thing art” (2007, 2). Meanwhile, institutionalist definitions of art are united by the claim that aesthetic properties are not explanatorily fundamental when it comes to deciding whether something is or is not an artwork. This means that artworks, rather than being necessarily beautiful, or elegant, or sublime, or whatever, are only artworks because they possess certain contingent cultural features. Under institutionalist definitions, these contingent cultural features are cashed out via the claim that what makes something art is the appropriate reception by relevant persons and bodies. Both views have been the object of intense criticism. Functionalism has been criticized as both being too broad and too narrow: too broad because it includes within the category of artworks things we would not institutionally consider artworks; and too narrow because it seems to exclude the possibility of the existence of bad art. Institutionalism, meanwhile, has a different set of problems, particularly with regard to defining the proper limits of what constitutes an artworld public. And yet, both stories offer something to the definition of art. The former attempts to make sense of the intuition that artworks are a special class of thing, categorically unlike non-artwork things, to which aesthetic properties are integral. The latter, meanwhile, concedes and attempts to parse the fundamentally social character of artmaking, artworks, and the artworld. Within this more general disagreement, there are three points of dispute between functionalists and institutionalists when it comes to talking about art. The first concerns the processes by which artworks are made, and the extent to which those processes are necessary and/or sufficient to correctly deem something an artwork. An example of this kind of position is what Nick Zangwill dubs the ‘aesthetic creation theory.’ In The Metaphysics of Beauty (2001), Zangwill argues that it is the function of artworks to have aesthetic properties, and that these aesthetic properties supervene upon the non-aesthetic properties of those artworks. By ‘aesthetic properties,’ Zangwill refers both to ‘verdictive’ aesthetic judgments, such as beauty and ugliness, and ‘substantive’ aesthetic judgments, such as delicacy, passion, awkwardness, and so on (2001, 9–23). Meanwhile, the non-aesthetic properties about which Zangwill cares include both formal and non-formal aesthetic properties: not

60

Chapter 4

only the various sensory properties of the work in question, but also the history of production of the work, among other things (cf. 2000, 2001). Building on this thesis in Aesthetic Creation (2007), Zangwill then proposes a normative theory of art grounded in a process governed by meeting explicit success criteria. This process of art creation involves three distinct and separable stages. First, the artist must possess the insight that it is possible to elicit certain desired aesthetic properties via the creation of non-aesthetic properties (whether formal or informal). Second, the artist must then have the intention to realize those desired aesthetic properties via the identified non-aesthetic properties. Third and finally is the success condition: the artist must, one way or another, succeed in achieving her intention to realize the desired aesthetic properties via the identified non-aesthetic properties. Although I don’t want to make the error of assuming that all functionalists share Zangwill’s precise views about the conditions under which art is made, I take his view to be representative. If we agree with Zangwill’s summary of functionalism—viz.: that having an aesthetic purpose makes a thing art—then we should assume that functionalists think objects need to be made with the intention to successfully express aesthetic properties in order to have aesthetic purpose. Institutionalist pictures of artwork creation look rather different. For institutionalists, art-making practices are those practices that provide an account of the processes by which objects are accepted as artworks by a given public. This means that normative criteria regarding art-making—such as those Zangwill identifies—do not necessarily play a role in whether something is sanctioned as being art. These matters are instead up to the public in question. Institutionalists conventionally account for artwork creation by embedding that process in what is called the ‘artworld.’ The term ‘artworld’ comes, ultimately, from Arthur Danto’s 1964 essay of the same name. Danto invokes the ‘artworld’ to make clear how we discern art objects and otherwise identical non-art objects. How else does it make sense to say that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box is art, for instance, despite being visually indiscernible from a real, non-art Brillo box? We need, he thinks, some story that prevents Warhol’s Brillo Box from collapsing into the real Brillo box; something that accounts for the special is-ness of artistic identification. This ‘something,’ Danto says, is the artworld (1964). However, it is in George Dickie’s Art and the Aesthetic (1974) and The Art Circle (1984) that institutional theories achieved their current, and most influential, articulation. Stripping out Danto’s broadly Hegelian story of the ways in which different theories of art arise, Dickie argues that art status is bestowed entirely by virtue of being embedded within the artworld. As expressed in The Art Circle: 1) an artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art; 2) a work of art is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public; 3) a public is a set of

Artworlds

61

persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them; 4) the artworld is the totality of all artworld systems; 5) an artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public (1997, 80–82). For the post-Dickie institutionalist, art-making practices have nothing to do with the successful expression of aesthetic properties at all. Instead, the process of artmaking is grounded in a fruitful relationship between an artist’s intention to produce an object of a particular class, the object itself, and an artworld public’s willingness to accept said object as belonging to that class. Within that fruitful relationship, art-making is uncomplicated by the processes and normative criteria that functionalists like Zangwill demand. Instead, artworks are simply artefacts of a kind created to be presented to, and subsequently legitimated by, the right kinds of people; there are no additional requirements about meeting verdictive or substantive aesthetic functions. The second point of disagreement concerns the ‘identification’ of artworks: that is, how a subject can discern art objects from non-art objects. I take identification to be a three-term relation between a subject or subjects, a theory by which artworks can be properly identified, and an art object (or art objects). Via this relation we highlight some virtuous interaction between a subject p’s beliefs about an object’s art status, the artwork w itself, and the art theory by which the subject can justify possessing those beliefs. Meeting these three conditions means that ‘p identifies that w is art.’ While this general characterization applies equally to functionalists and institutionalists, functionalists and institutionalists each deal with the matter of justification differently. Functionalists argue that it is the correct identification of aesthetic properties that justifies the attribution that something is an artwork. We see this clearly in Zangwill, but also in the work of other functionalists about art (cf. Beardsley 1982): if the function of artworks is to have aesthetic properties, and if the presence of those aesthetic properties is what makes something an artwork, then the correct identification of aesthetic properties is a necessary condition for the correct identification of an artwork qua artwork. Institutionalists, meanwhile, adopt a position on art identification that is neutral when it comes to the proper identification of aesthetic properties. Instead, justification is indexed to an artwork’s relationship with a given artworld public. First, the artwork must be the sort of thing intended to be presented to an artworld public; second, the artworld public in question must be “prepared in some degree” to understand the thing intended for presentation per Dickie’s third premise (1997, 81). Absent shared aesthetic criteria against which artwork status can be attributed, this means the public in question is entirely responsible for generating and enforcing the definitional and evaluative criteria against which potential art objects are assessed and ratified. An effect of this claim is that, if artworld publics are fundamentally responsible

62

Chapter 4

for the standards under which artworks are acknowledged as artworks, and these standards are not tied to normative aesthetic criteria, then there is no obligation for theories of art to cohere between communities. Consequently, institutionalists tend to be pluralists about justifiability in a way that functionalists are not. Finally, the third final point of disagreement concerns the composition of the artistic canon, that is, the total corpus of artworks at our disposal, whether paintings, sculpture, dance, literature, poetry, theater, or whatever. This canon cannot be attributed to any one person, nor is it the kind of thing that is indexed to a specific time or place. Instead, it is straightforwardly the aggregate of all things contained in the category of artworks: everything in every museum or private collection; every winner of every award; every work marked down in auction records or possessing copyright protections or whatever else. For the functionalist, this corpus is the sum of all things identified via the normative art-producing and identification processes identified above. Meanwhile, for the institutionalist that art corpus is entirely made up of whatever a given artworld public believes to be true. In summary, functionalists about art tend to be united in the claim that art is a) individualist, in that something being or not being art is not a fact that needs to be sanctioned by a community in order for art-ness to obtain; b) monist, in that there is assumed to be a single correct, complete, and consistent account of whether or not something is art; and c) non-relative, in that the justification for something being art is not arbitrary, but is instead the consequence of the artwork possessing certain aesthetic features. Institutionalists, meanwhile, make the opposite claim: that art is a) non-individual, in that something being or not being art is ratified by a given artworld public; b) non-monist, in that we can and should expect different artworld publics (whether separated by space or time) to disagree about the things—and the kinds of things—that should and should not be considered artworks; and c) relative, in that justifications for whether or not something is an artwork is basically arbitrary if mediated by the whims and preferences of the artworld public making the relevant decisions. While both accounts have their virtues, I must admit I’m not convinced that either functionalism or institutionalism is entirely fit for purpose. The former is seemingly blind to the idea that art is made up as much by histories, institutions, and egos as it is by aesthetic functions; the latter fails to capture that normative aesthetic criteria are deeply intertwined with our commonsense understanding of art objects and their functions. However, both functionalism and institutionalism get different parts of the story right. Functionalists are sensitive to the idea that, for us to possess a definition of art that captures the way we talk about art in ordinary language, we need some meaty and non-relative conception of talking about the role of

Artworlds

63

normative aesthetic criteria in art. The reason for this is that aesthetic experience is a constituent part of what we use to describe and evaluate artworks. It is, after all, what makes art interesting. As I noted in the introduction of this volume, human beings expend enormous amounts of cognitive energy analyzing and discussing artworks and the normative aesthetic criteria that they meet: not just the paintings, sculptures, and installations one might encounter in mainstream galleries but also novels, films, music, video games, poems, graffiti, comic books, theater shows, dance performances, and whatever else. How does Wallace Stevens’s “Description Without Place” manage to be both precise and periphrastic? What does the inhuman yet sublime feeling of The Triumph of the Will have to do with the political theology of fascism? And so on. Moreover, we ask these aesthetic questions of those artefacts because they are artworks as opposed to some other kind of artefact. The very ‘art-ness’ of art invites us to reflect on its aesthetic character. However, there is a real power to the institutionalist story. In characterizing art as a thing with a social ontology—a thing produced and ratified by the snarl of persons, galleries, universities and schools, governmental organizations, private institutions, and many other things that comprise the artistic enterprise in toto—institutionalists are afforded the chance to become sensitive to social facts about artists and artworks that are either invisible or irrelevant to functionalists: facts about race, or gender, or social inequality, or education, or technique, or capital (whether institutional, political, or economic), or whatever else. These contingent yet non-trivial social facts can and should be taken into consideration in any good analysis of an artwork qua artwork, if only because they can and do influence the aesthetic properties of the work in question. Institutionalists are also much better equipped to deal with questions associated with artistic quality. It would certainly be in violation of the ordinary language use of the word art to claim that artefacts must meet certain normative aesthetic criteria for them to be properly considered artworks; commonsensically, an object need not be intentionally beautiful, or elegant, or grotesque, or whatever else, to be deserving of the attribution, and objects deemed ‘bad’ art are still nonetheless considered to be artworks. Indeed, when we talk about ‘bad’ art we’re not talking about objects that have failed to meet the relevant aesthetic success criteria and thus fail to be art. Instead, we mean that, while the object in question is very much an artwork, it’s just not a very good example of an artwork. Failure to meet normative aesthetic criteria compromises an object’s quality as an artwork without compromising its character as an artwork. Considering these issues, it’s clear I have conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, I have a distinctly functionalist view of the importance of aesthetic experience. Put frankly, I think any definition of art that treats exegetical labor as an incidental thing—an uninteresting, formal consequence of a

64

Chapter 4

process of institutional ratification—misses the trees for the forest. On the other hand, however, I think institutionalism is basically correct about the social ontology of art, not only because it is obviously the case that different communities possess different standards for what does and does not constitute art, but also because institutionalism is much better placed to take stock of the contingent facts that underwrite the production and reception of artworks. So, how to resolve this dilemma? The answer is not obvious, given the story so far. After all, if the outputs of art-making processes are sanctioned by communities, then what purpose do normative aesthetic criteria serve? If something is an artwork just because a given community said it is, then it’s irrelevant whether that same something meets those aesthetic criteria. And yet we need some way of non-trivially integrating aesthetic experience into our definition of art. Given those comments, I propose a hybrid definition of art that preserves what I take to be valuable about both the functionalist and institutionalist pictures. CRITICAL CONTEXTS I As already noted, there exist several attempts to reconcile functionalist and institutionalist positions, as in the work of Longworth and Scarantino (2010) and Iseminger (2004). While these hybrid positions are undeniably of philosophical interest, here I’m going to take a different tack: one that, as we’ll soon see, owes much more to contemporary philosophy of science than it does philosophy of art. Taking my cues from Helen Longino’s ‘critical contextual empiricism’ in philosophy of science, I propose what I call—with apologies to Longino—‘critical contextual aestheticism.’ But first, a brief précis of Longino’s position. In her monographs Science as Social Knowledge (1990) and The Fate of Knowledge (2002), Helen Longino defends a particular articulation of the ways in which scientific knowledge is generated and legitimated—that is, the technical codes (my words, not hers) that govern and circumscribe scientific practice. Scientific knowledge, she says, is not simply normal knowledge “except better.” Instead, there is something special about scientific knowledge. She writes: “the purpose of scientific inquiry is not only to describe and catalog, or even explain, that which is present to everyday experience, but to facilitate prediction, intervention, control, or other forms of action on and among the objects in nature” (2002, 124). Longino argues there exist two primary camps when it comes to talking about scientific knowledge: ‘rationalizers’ and ‘sociologizers.’ Rationalizers are those interested in the normative epistemic criteria by which we should assess whether a given observation or prediction should be

Artworlds

65

considered scientific knowledge. Sociologisers meanwhile claim that scientific knowledge is strictly a social fact: a socially mediated product of certain knowledge-making institutions (2002, 77–89). This confluence of factors means that rationalizers and sociologizers have radically different conceptions of knowledge, in addition to radically different conceptions of the ways in which those senses of knowledge fruitfully interact (2002, 89–96). Rationalizers, she argues, generally endorse a conception of knowledge that is individualist (in that knowledge does not need to be sanctioned by communities), monist (in that there is assumed to be a single correct, complete, and consistent account of the facts of the matter), and non-relative (in that justification is not arbitrary). Sociologizers—again, speaking broadly—believe the opposite: that knowledge is non-individual (in that it is ratified by groups), non-monist (in that there is no assumption that there can exist a single correct, complete, and consistent account of the facts of the matter), and relative (in that justifications are basically arbitrary, if socially mediated). Both the rationalizing and sociologizing pictures of science are incomplete, Longino thinks. The former is blind to the idea that science is fundamentally a human enterprise, made up as much by histories, institutions, and egos as it is by facts, observations, and measurements; the latter fails to capture that science is as much about normative standards as it is about social facts. To be more precise, Longino doesn’t think sociologizers are wrong when they characterize scientific knowledge as being sanctioned by the persons, research bodies, funding agencies, public and private institutions, histories, and many other things that comprise the scientific enterprise in toto. Nor does she think the sociologizers are wrong when they say that knowledge is non-monist; she believes it possible that different communities have different equally apt yet irreconcilable descriptions of a given state of affairs. However, there is a part of the story that the rationalizers get right: the scientific enterprise, properly understood, needs some meaty and non-relative conception of what makes science special. The answer to this dilemma, Longino claims, lies in the procedures that govern scientific communities. While science is very much a social practice, it is also a social practice in which epistemic norms are baked in. This means that normative epistemic criteria are not applied to scientific outputs. That is, contrary to the rationalist picture, there are no procedure-independent criteria by which the justifiability of a given claim is assessed; we don’t get to the end of the process of peer review (for example), and then see if the normative epistemic criteria have been applied. Instead, the critical discursive interactions that we think of as typifying science—procedures like peer review—build the desired normative epistemic criteria into the very fabric of the social processes by which scientific knowledge is produced and sanctioned. In this way, Longino’s philosophy of science is a fruitful blend of the rationalizer and sociologizer

66

Chapter 4

positions: science is a non-individual, non-monist, and non-relative enterprise conducted by a knowledge-productive community. Longino identifies four conditions that must be met for the right kinds of critical discursive interactions to take place. First, for a community to produce knowledge, there must exist appropriate venues in which research can be disseminated, discussed, and criticized. There are two aspects to being ‘appropriate.’ First, mere ‘publicness’ is not enough. Instead, these venues (journals, conferences, book series, whatever) need to have the right kind of reputation among the community in question. Second, these venues should a) publish criticisms of the research they publish, and b) afford those critical activities a similar level of epistemic import as primary research. Second, via critical discursive interactions, there must be uptake of the criticisms leveled against extant research. The community should not just “tolerate dissent,” she writes, but “beliefs and theories must change over time in response to the critical discourse taking place within it” (2002, 129–30). Third, there must exist public standards against which scientific claims and practices are evaluated. This can be cashed out in several ways, including but not limited to shared concepts, shared principles of experimentation and inference, shared literature, and so on. This, Longino thinks, means that individuals and communities can establish the common “criteria of adequacy” necessary for making non-relative and non-arbitrary evaluations of those claims and practices (2002, 130). Finally, the “social position or economic power of an individual or group in a community ought not determine who or what perspectives are taken seriously in that community” (2002, 130). This guarantees that, when consensus occurs, it is a reasoned and fairly evaluated consequence of the various critical discursive interactions that have taken place within the community. Although by no means either perfect or complete, the venues, uptake, public standards, and tempered equality of the scientific enterprise are sufficient to explain not only what is special about science—the epistemic norms by which it is governed—but also the extent to which that enterprise is fundamentally a social thing. She writes: [We locate] justification, or the production of knowledge, not just in the testing of hypotheses against data, but also in subjecting hypotheses, data, reasoning, and background assumptions to criticism from a variety of perspectives. Establishing what the data are, what the descriptive categories and their boundaries are, what counts as acceptable reasoning, which assumptions are legitimate and which not becomes a matter of social interactions as much as a matter of interaction with the material world. Because the assumptions that constitute the intellectual context of observation and reasoning are, by their nature, usually not explicit but tacit patterns of thought, the function of critical interaction is

Artworlds

67

to make them visible as well as to examine their metaphysical, empirical, and normative implications. These discursive interactions are both constructive and justificatory. Sociality does not come into play at the limit of or instead of the cognitive. Instead, these social practices are cognitive. (2002, 205)

In short: science, for Longino, is a socially mediated activity that enforces epistemic norms by virtue of the procedures that govern that activity. It is via these procedures that the scientific process implements non-relative epistemic justifications of the various ways in which someone knows that q. So, what can Longino’s critical contextual empiricism tell us about the qualities, procedures, and institutions of art? Quite a lot, I think. Although I do not want to deflate the real differences between science and art, I think this story has something to offer us when it comes to developing a definition of art. Not only does Longino’s account provide a valuable insight into the ways in which the scientific enterprise is both normative and social, it can also be used to unpack the ways in which the artworld, and the codes that govern that world, are both aesthetic and institutional. Inspired by this ‘critical contextual empiricism,’ I argue that art is the outcome of social epistemic procedures that involve both aesthetic functions and institutional practices. Within these procedures, aesthetic functions are developed, ratified, and enforced within institutional practices, rather than being attached to the artistic outcomes of those institutional practices. I make this claim because, although science and art are obviously subject to different normative criteria (viz. epistemic versus aesthetic criteria), in addition to possessing distinct institutions, histories, and methods, there are some meaningful isomorphisms between Longino’s philosophy of science and the conventions and norms that govern our successful production and identification of art objects. Despite their obvious differences, art and science are procedurally similar. That is, they are similar to the extent that the aesthetic criteria to which artworks are subject are built into the institutional and social processes that govern the production of artworks in very much the same way as epistemic criteria are built into the processes that govern the production of scientific knowledge. These procedures are the technical codes that tie the A-facts of an art object’s physical features with the B-fact of that object being an artwork. But how exactly does this work in practice? CRITICAL CONTEXTS II Let’s start with the institutional features of artworks. Contrary to whatever intuitions we might have about the category of art, the idea of art meaning the same thing to all people, across the globe, at all points in history, is an

68

Chapter 4

anachronism of a particularly crude sort. Indeed, our intuitions about art are deeply historicist: an aggregation of facts and attitudes that we can identify as being the consequence of a precise moment in history. While we might think of artworks as somehow special—as quasi-others, or as things that take positions, or as objects deserving of particular moral treatment—there is nothing necessary about those assumptions. For most of the history of Western art, it was explicitly not the case that art constituted a special class of object; it was not until the Enlightenment that the ancient Greek conception of art as an unremarkable species of techne or ‘skill’ was seriously challenged. Indeed, as several different commentators have argued (including, but by no means limited to Kristeller 1951, 1952; Bourdieu 1984; Eagleton 1990; Shiner 2001; Mattick 2003), the idea that art is special—and that artists do something fundamentally different to other artisans—is basically an artefact of the eighteenth century. It is a category with a very explicit social ontology subject to a clearly demarcated technological paradigm. As Larry Shiner argues, before the eighteenth century, there were almost no public galleries, concerts, or museums: there was, in short, no ‘artworld.’ However, in the early 1700s, three things changed. The first change was intellectual, prompted by the realization that ideas of (fine) art, artists, and aesthetic norms could solve a bunch of rather unwieldy conceptual problems. The second change was sociological. Medieval society, so Shiner argues, was characterized by a deep integration of the political, the economic, the scientific, the religious, and the artistic. However, with the slow-motion collapse of institutions like feudalism and the rise of the modern nation-state, these formerly integrated practices dissolved into discrete spheres of activity. Under these conditions, the birth of ‘art’ as a discrete and privileged practice was basically accidental: “a contingent response to the general forces of modernization and secularization” (2001, 76). Finally, and most practically, the eighteenth century saw the development of the modern art market, kicked into gear not only by the introduction of new aesthetic categories and a new artistic sphere, but by the expanded (and expanding) economic and intellectual interests of the middle class. Rather than being produced within traditional systems of patronage as was the case in centuries prior, eighteenth-century art entered the market as a discrete class of consumer good: a good that was bought and sold within a newly forged ecosystem of dealers, agents, galleries, and (largely) anonymous buyers wanting to impress others with their wealth and taste (2001, 99–129). David Clowney summarizes this phenomenon concisely: [. . .] the modern system of the arts came together in the eighteenth century partly in connection with the development of a market for art among the growing middle class. In the new system, Fine Art (art with a capital “A”) was

Artworlds

69

divided from the crafts as the appropriate object of refined taste, and usefulness became rather a negative than a positive feature for a work of art. Art for Art’s sake, the Artist as Visionary Genius, and the unique Aesthetic Attitude/ Experience emerged as the distinguishing features of Fine Art. New institutions devoted to the arts, such as galleries, museums, concert halls and libraries, were a central part of the new system. The public had to learn that these were places where one must be quiet and devote one’s sole attention to the work. Within the new system, Art was exalted, acquiring almost a religious significance by the nineteenth century, while craftwork was devalued and minimized, leaving room for the eventual emergence in the twentieth century of artists in whose work craft skills play no important role. Alexander Baumgarten gave the new category of “the aesthetic” its name in 1738. Kant and Schiller firmed up the philosophical definition of the aesthetic at the end of the eighteenth century, Kant famously isolating aesthetic judgment from other sorts of appreciation of a work or a landscape, and likewise providing an enduring analysis of the eighteenth century categories of the Beautiful and the Sublime. (2008)

I take this moment as the origin of the ‘artworld’ for which Danto and Dickie argue in their work: an artworld that furnishes the process by which different kinds of artworks—paintings and sculptures and sonnets and opera performances and whatever else—are legitimated as artworks. It was from within this mélange of social, economic, and political shifts—a century wherein a burgeoning middle class, a collapse in traditional systems of patronage, a decoupling of perceived value from utility, and a greater interest in aesthetic experience and the aesthetic more generally—that ‘art’ emerged as a category, distinct from craft, or artisanship, or other kinds of skilled labor that produce aesthetically pleasing objects. Eventually, this category would metastasize into what would become our contemporary attitudes about the privilege of art and the specialness of artists, but even by the end of the 1700s, much of the groundwork for the artworld was already in place. Furthermore—and as Kristeller, Bourdieu, Eagleton, Shiner, Mattick, and so on rightly observe—it is this newly developed set of Feng and Feenberg’s technical codes (codes that organize a system of artists, patrons, museums, universities, critics, art theories, and so on) that defined and legitimated—and continues to define and legitimate—our shared conception of what art is. All of this is to say that the processes by which artworks are legitimated are fundamentally socially and institutionally mediated. However, the fact that these processes are socially and institutionally mediated does not mean there are no aesthetic criteria involved in the making and subsequent recognition of artworks. (Indeed, were that the case, this would be little more than a conventional institutionalist account.) Aesthetic purpose is not independent of the procedures by which artworks are ratified qua artworks. Instead, for an artefact to be understood as an artwork by an artwork public, that artefact

70

Chapter 4

must on some level cohere with what that artworld public takes to be aesthetically purposive about works of art, per the third criterion outlined by Dickie, above. It is my view that the aesthetic criteria to which artworks are subject are built into the institutional, historical, and social processes that govern the production of artworks in very much the same way as epistemic criteria are built into the processes that govern the production of scientific knowledge. Consequently, I propose a fruitful blend of the functionalist and institutionalist positions: while art has a social ontology, this social ontology is grounded in commonly shared notions of aesthetic purpose. I call this position ‘critical contextual aestheticism.’ So, what does this look like in practice? As noted above, Longino identifies four conditions that need to be in place before the kinds of critical discursive interactions that characterize knowledge-productive communities—and thus what we call ‘science’—can take place. Although the conditions for artworks are obviously different for the very good reason that art and science are distinct sorts of enterprises, our post-eighteenth-century artworld furnishes three similar conditions for the making of artworks. These conditions are as follows. First, for a community to produce artworks, there must exist appropriate venues in which artworks can be disseminated, discussed, and criticized. By ‘appropriate,’ it is not sufficient for an artwork to be ‘public.’ Something does not become art because it is handed out for free on a street corner, or spray-painted on the side of a building, or dumped into people’s mailboxes (though that is not to say that things handed out on street corners, spray-painted on buildings, or dumped into mailboxes cannot be art). Instead, these venues (museums, commercial art galleries, public art galleries, academic journals, trade magazines, whatever) need to have the right kind of reputation among the community in question; the venue must be recognized as a place where artworld publics can encounter and talk about art via critical discursive interactions. In addition, these venues should a) facilitate discussion about the relative virtues of the artworks within those venues, and b) facilitate discussion about the kinds of objects that should be represented in those venues. Second, there must exist public standards against which the ontology and relative value of artworks can be assessed. This can be assessed in a number of ways, including but not limited to the following: whether or not a work appears to participate in one or other artistic traditions; the degree to which a work reflects aesthetic functions such as beauty, the grotesque, the erotic, and so on; the degree to which the work bears some family resemblance, one way or another, to extant works of art; the degree to which people within the artworld take the artist to have had the appropriate intentions in producing the work; the apparent political and social norms enshrined in the work; the degree to which the work is in line with present fashions; and so on. As

Artworlds

71

in the case of Longino’s account of science summarized above, individuals and communities can establish some common criteria of adequacy necessary for making non-relative and non-arbitrary evaluations of those claims and practices. It is via these public standards that the artworld enforces aesthetics norms by virtue of the procedures that govern that activity. With these procedures, the artworld implements non-relative aesthetics justifications of the various ways in which someone knows that w is an artwork. However, we should not make the mistake of assuming that simply because public standards furnish common assessment criteria that they are immutable. To the contrary, the public standards governing what are and are not artworks are quite volatile and very much subject to change. Herein lies the third condition: that is, public standards can change assuming that the right critical discursive interactions take place within artworld venues. This means that the artworld, its public standards, and its contents (that is, the kinds of things the artworld legitimates as art) are not static, but are instead in a process of constant negotiation. Invoking the public standards described above, these negotiations concern both the perceived value of those things considered to be art objects, and whether certain things should or should not be considered art. It is because of these discursive interactions that the perceived ontology—that is, whether something is art—and the relative value of artworks— whether a given artwork is good, bad, or indifferent—is subject to change. A work like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain becomes an artwork not just because it is exhibited in the right kind of venue, but also because being in that venue facilitated the right kinds of discussions about whether it deserved to be there. The same is true for objects that were non-artworks at the time of their creation, but that we now consider artworks: objects like Laocoön and His Sons, or medieval paintings of the Madonna, or Papuan ritual masks, or whatever else. These formerly-non-art-and-now-art objects have been legitimated by the critical discursive interactions about public standards that take place within artworld venues. By virtue of these three features being in place, and like Longino’s portrait of the scientific enterprise, critical contextual aestheticism is premised upon the claim that art is a non-individual, non-monist, and non-relative enterprise conducted by an art-productive community. Art is non-individual because something being or not being art is ratified by a given artworld public. This process of ratification occurs via the critical discursive interactions about public standards that take place within artworld venues: the assessments, conversations, and interrogations about the kinds of things that properly should and should not be considered art. Art is also non-monist in that we can and should expect different artworld publics to disagree about the things—and the kinds of things—that should or should not be considered artworks. This is particularly important to make clear because we need to preserve the

72

Chapter 4

possibility that different groups can have different conceptions of artworks, whether those groups are spread across space or through time, based upon the different public standards expressed in the critical discursive interactions that take place in their specific artworld venues. Finally, and crucially, this picture means that the fact of something being or not being art is non-relative: because what we take to be art is determined by artwork processes, the ontology of ‘art-ness’ is grounded in social facts. Finally, within this procedural jumble of artworld venues, public standards, and critical discursive interactions, norms like beauty—norms that functionalists take to be integral to artworks—are baked indelibly into the process of art production, without aesthetic function being explicitly necessary for us to correctly attribute art-ness. In this way, critical contextual aestheticism argues that the aesthetic norms to which artworks are subject are implemented and enforced within institutional and historical structures and procedures. This confluence of aesthetic norms and institutional procedures are the technical codes that govern the production and legitimation of artworks as artworks: the set of selection pressures that govern the design and use of w within its particular design space sΔ. ARTWORK CONDITIONS To conclude this chapter and move on to our concluding analysis of the functions and affordances of art objects, let’s return to the artwork with which I began this book: Ian Burn’s No object implies the existence of any other. Physically, No object is a rather unassuming piece of work: a plain white-framed mirror, about sixty centimeters to each side. With the exception of the plain white text on the glass—‘No object implies the existence of any other,’ printed (or painted?) in an equally unassuming white sans-serif—No object could easily be the kind of thoughtless, mass-produced, non-artistic thing you might put up in your guest bathroom. And yet, No object is very much an artwork—and an important one, no less! How can this be the case? My claim, fundamentally, is that No object can only be an artwork if certain facts are in place. This is because there is nothing in the A-facts of the physical object that determine that that object is, in fact, an artwork; the A-facts are insufficiently causally efficacious for art-ness to be a consequence of those facts. This means that the B-facts of No object’s art-ness must supervene naturally upon the A-facts: some additional factor or set of factors possesses sufficient causal efficaciousness to make No object an artwork. These factors are the technical codes (to reiterate from chapter 1: the set of selection pressures exerted upon both the design and use of some tool t within design space sΔ) that circumscribe and govern the processes by which we collectively

Artworlds

73

legitimate artworks. Moreover, with respect to the nature and constitution of these codes, I take them to be a confluence of both institutional and aesthetic factors. They are institutional because the notion of ‘art’ itself—at least as we understand and use the term in contemporary parlance—is fundamentally a consequence of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was a century wherein a combination of economic, social, and philosophical factors led to the formation of the skein of roles, concepts, and institutions that are integral to the contemporary artworld. However, these technical codes also possess an aesthetic dimension. This is because artworld institutions also impose standards of adequacy regarding what should and should not be appropriately considered an artwork: judgments that, at least in part, take into consideration aesthetic values such as beauty. What’s important to note about this process is the degree to which the codes that govern the legitimation of art objects are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated. While art is a non-individual, non-monist, and non-relative enterprise conducted by an art-productive community, the kinds of things that are considered art by that community are constantly being revised as new methods and forms enter the critical discursive interactions that are integral to the artworld. Consequently, the kinds of aesthetic functions we take to be important when considering what is and is not art are very much subject to change. In the case of No object implies the existence of any other, completed in 1967, it reflects a then-recent set of changes in the norms that governed what artworks were supposed to look like. The first change was motivated by a critique of formalism that reflected similar developments in abstract expressionism (cf. Greenberg 1965); the second, by the development of a ‘language-based art’ that tasked itself with addressing the fallout of the linguistic turn in neopragmatism, (post)structuralism, and certain kinds of continental philosophy (cf. Osborne 2011; Osborne 2013). Both changes to the public standards determining what art should or shouldn’t look like took place within, and were legitimated by, the venues and critical discursive interactions that constitute the artworld. These changes are also what in turn legitimated No object as an artwork. Had the work been completed even ten years prior, it would not have been recognized as an artwork because it would not have met what were the then-prevailing public standards against which artworks were assessed. Furthermore, it is because of these changes that the aesthetic functions at play in No object are not what we might think of as the conventional standards of beauty, or the sublime, or whatever else. Instead, the aesthetic function that No object evinces is a species of arid conceptual wit, intended to stimulate a pleasure of the cognitive faculties rather than a pleasure of the senses. This story, I think, is generalizable into a wireframe model of how we should think about the artworld technical codes k that govern the conditions under

74

Chapter 4

which artworks are made possible. While I appreciate that there is much more that could be said about these codes, I trust that the story I’ve shared here is sufficient to demonstrate that artworks have both institutional features and aesthetic functions, and that aesthetic functions are developed, ratified, and enforced within institutional practices, rather than being attached to the artistic outcomes of those institutional practices. NOTE 1. This chapter is an extended version of Wittingslow (2023).

Chapter 5

Artworks

In chapters 1, 2, and 3, we moved from affordances, to functions, to technical codes. With these three chapters, it has been my intention to provide a single coherent picture of the factors governing our use of tools: first, the kinds of actions that they make possible; second, how we build normativity and purpose into our description of tools while still being sensitive to the fact that tools can be used contrary to their function; and third, the more general technical codes that help to govern the design and use of tools within a given design space. In chapter 4, I then used this picture of codes to furnish a description of the technical codes that govern the design and use of artworks within their technical space: the particular social and historical conditions that are integral to people properly understanding when something is or is not an artwork. There, I defended the notion that artworks can only exist with the right technical codes in place. This set of codes is the ‘artworld,’ as described by scholars like Arthur Danto and George Dickie: the institutional, economic, and historical matrix in which our concepts about art (‘artwork,’ ‘artist,’ and so on) need to be embedded for ‘art’ to make sense as a category. However, unlike a strictly institutionalist account of the kind that someone like Dickie might endorse, my description of the technical codes to which artworks are subject argues that aesthetic functions are an integral aspect of the public standards against which artworks are assessed. It is this set of technical codes that makes something art. We know an object like Ken Burn’s No object implies the existence of any other is an artwork because it exists within a non-individual, non-monist, and non-relative set of technical codes. Without these codes being in place, it is not possible to interact with an object as an artwork. The kinds of privileged interactions that we have with artworks— which is to say, the interactions we talk about when we’re trying to make sense of what artworks mean qua artworks—are scaffolded by the appropriate technical paradigms being in place. 75

76

Chapter 5

In this chapter, we move to the functions and affordances furnished by artworks: functions and affordances that exist because artworks are tools. To make that claim work, it behooves us to think carefully about how we can map artworks onto the general picture of tools—along with the affordances, functions, and conditions they possess and/or to which they are subject. After all, we don’t want to find ourselves in a position where we’ve done damage to the concept of ‘art’ along the way. As I stated in the introduction of this volume, it’s certainly not my intention to provide a trivial or deflationary account of art qua privileged category, nor to defend a picture of art that is hostile to, or otherwise at odds with, our shared intuitions about what artworks mean and do. Given all that, it is my goal in this chapter to begin developing the account that artworks offer particular affordances and possess particular functions because they are artworks. To begin, take some artwork w (say, Aristide Maillol’s Woman Arranging Her Hair, 1936). It’s obviously the case that we can do things with w—w furnishes affordances by virtue of its physical properties, and we can use those affordances to afford a change from one state of affairs to another. We could, for instance, use the sculpture to tenderize a cut of meat, or to prop open a door, or as a weapon; these are among the affordances the object furnishes an able-bodied adult human because of the physical properties it possesses. Considering all that, w is a tool. However, it’s also obvious that answering the question in this way misses the point a little. While describing Woman Arranging Her Hair in terms of its general capacity to afford a change from some state of affairs to some other possible states of affairs certainly establishes that it’s a tool of some kind, it doesn’t tell us anything at all about what Woman Arranging Her Hair affords as an artwork, nor about the extent to which something being an artwork has to do with it also being a tool. All this has to do with the technical codes that govern artworks as a category: the technical codes that constitute the ‘artworld’ that was the object of analysis in chapter 4. It is thanks to the philosophical and economic inheritance of the eighteenth century—thanks to “Art for Art’s sake, the Artist as Visionary Genius, and the unique Aesthetic Attitude/Experience emerged as the distinguishing features of Fine Art” to again quote Clowney (2008)—that we possess this assumption that artworks are editorializing objects, impregnated with semantic importance. Artists, of course, self-consciously contribute to the propagation of these technical codes: they do not think of themselves as mere craftspeople or designers, but as members of a privileged profession who produce uniquely expressive objects. Artworld audiences also contribute to the propagation of these codes. We, as members of that audience, engage with artworld objects armed with the assumption that artists and artworks have something important to say. Brillo Box may be indiscernible from a Brillo box, but the technical codes surrounding Brillo Box prepare us

Artworks

77

for the idea the artwork expresses something different from (or at least in addition to) the commercial object on which it is based. Of course, none of this is about meaning, exactly; at least, not yet. The artworld codes that govern the production and consumption of artworks qua artworks furnish us with the conditions for artistic meaning in that they demarcate artworks as a particular class of meaningful objects, but these codes do not furnish individual artworks with particular meanings in the same way that other technical codes do not furnish tools with particular functions. They’re a necessary—but not sufficient!—part of what makes art meaningful. Given that, how best to make sense of artistic meaning within artworld codes? And how does this meaning relate to the functions that artworks have and the affordances they furnish? For the moment, let us refer back to the definition of tool function. That is, a tool t possesses a proper function ft if it was the intention φm of the maker m of t that t affords a change from δ to target state δm. It is not obvious that artworks easily fit into this definition. We are unaccustomed to thinking of artworks as tools because we are inclined to think of works of art, unlike the other artefacts that human beings produce, as uniquely unmoored from function or purpose. While hammers and coffee machines and rocket ships are for something—the hammer hammers; the coffee machine makes coffee; the rocket ship sends people to space—many people (at least, many people in the West) are convinced that artworks are not for anything. Instead—and thanks, in part, to the ongoing influence of Romanticism on the ways in which we talk about art—artworks are thought of as being for their own sake. L’art pour l’art, in the words of Théophile Gautier: What does it [art] do? It serves to be beautiful. Isn’t that enough? Like flowers, like perfumes, like birds, like everything that man has not been able to divert and deprave for his own use. In general, as soon as a thing becomes useful, it ceases to be beautiful. [. . .] All art is there. Art is freedom, luxury, efflorescence, it is the blossoming of the soul in idleness. Painting, sculpture, music are absolutely useless. [. . .] The objects one needs least are those which charm most. (1890, 4–5)

However, even were we not saddled with this Romantic inheritance, it’s difficult to see how my picture of tool function aligns with artworks. While an artwork may be just like a hammer, or a coffee machine, or a rocket ship on one level of description—at least in the sense that it’s the product of some intention held by some maker—it’s also not obvious if or how artworks afford changes from one state of affairs to another, at least qua artworks. So, while it might be the case that a beautiful artwork instrumentally makes the room in which it sits more beautiful, I strongly suspect that most people who talk and

78

Chapter 5

think about art would recoil from the notion that artworks are merely decorative. Artworks are not throw pillows; they are not objects that we value and use only because they are (or can be) beautiful. ART AND SPEECH I’ve already made much of the idea that artworks are things that seem like they have something to say. So, let’s push that metaphor a little and begin our final analysis with what J. L. Austin, in his How to Do Things with Words (1962), calls a ‘speech act.’ Austin uses speech acts to denote the kind of act in which we intend to achieve something in performing some given utterance: promising, or asking, or explaining, or asserting, or whatever else. In this way, ‘speech act’ describes “a whole group of senses of ‘doing something’” (1962, 94). He argues that speech acts can be analyzed on three levels: that of ‘locution,’ ‘illocution,’ and ‘perlocution.’ Locution, Austin argues, denotes the utterances (or those parts of utterances) that concern the literal meaning of that utterance. He writes: “to say something in the full normal sense is to do something—which includes the utterance of certain noises, the utterance of certain words in a certain grammatical construction, and the utterance of them with a certain ‘meaning’ in the favourite philosophical sense of that word, i.e., with a certain sense and with a certain reference. The act of ‘saying something’ in this full normal sense I call [. . .] the performance of a locutionary act” (1962, 94). Locution can also be analyzed on three levels: ‘phonetically,’ or in terms of the noises that constitute a given utterance; ‘phatically,’ or in terms of individual vocables and the grammar in which they’re embedded; and ‘rhetically,’ or in terms of the sense and reference of the locution. Locution fixes the content—the literal meaning—of a sentence. However, communication does not simply start and end with locution. While locutions possess literal meaning, it’s often the case that their effect differs from that meaning. Austin writes: [. . .] it might be perfectly possible, with regard to an utterance, say ‘It is going to charge,’ to make entirely plain ‘what we were saying’ in issuing the utterance, in all the sense so far distinguished, and yet not at all to have cleared up whether or not in issuing the utterance I was performing an act of warning or not. It may be perfectly clear what I mean by ‘It is going to charge’ or ‘Shut the door,’ but not clear whether it is meant as a statement or warning, &c. (1962, 98)

Imagine that you are at dinner with a companion. You ask them, “Are you finished with the salt?” The locutionary aspect of the utterance suggests only

Artworks

79

that you would like an answer to your question: either “yes” or “no”: that is, they are either finished with the salt or they are not. This is the literal meaning of the locution. Of course, we know that when someone asks that particular question, it implies more than a mere affirmation or negation. When you literally ask, “Are you finished with the salt?” the force of your utterance is that you are asking your companion if you can then use the salt yourself (and, perhaps, also implicitly asking your companion to pass the salt your way). This conventional outcome is the part of the speech act that Austin calls ‘illocution.’ He writes, “To perform a locutionary act is in general, we may say, also and eo ipso to perform an illocutionary act, as I propose to call it” (1962, 98). He goes on: “[The] performance of an ‘illocutionary’ act [is] the performance of an act in saying something as opposed to the performance of an act of saying something” (1962, 99). That is, the illocutionary act does not fix the meaning or content of an utterance. Instead, illocution is the part of speech acts that bring about new states of affairs via its illocutionary force. For Austin, the force of an illocution is ‘conventional.’ Illocution derives its power from certain social facts being in place. While Austin does not—and maybe cannot (per Strawson 1964)—fully define what he intends by ‘convention,’ he suggests that illocutionary acts are a kind of performance that takes place in accordance with a variety of socially contingent ‘felicity conditions’: that is, the set of conventional conditions that determine whether a given illocution succeeds or fails (Austin 1962, 14–15). So, for example, a phrase like, “I pronounce you husband and wife,” only possesses illocutionary force if the speaker meets the felicity conditions for that phrase: namely, they are a minister; they are attending a wedding; they have been tasked by the bride and groom to perform the marriage ceremony; and so on. The final part of the Austinian speech act is ‘perlocution.’ The perlocutionary act describes that which is brought about by the performances of the illocutionary act: that is, the consequences of the illocutionary act on the feelings, thoughts, or actions of other people. Put simply, perlocutionary acts describe the effects for which the speaker can be taken to be responsible by virtue of their illocution (regardless of whether those effects are intended or not). If locution is the act of saying something and illocution is the act performed in saying something, then perlocution is the act performed by saying something (cf. Black 1963, 224). Austin writes: There is yet a further sense in which to perform a locutionary act, and therein an illocutionary act, may also be to perform an act of another kind. Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them; and we may then say, thinking of this, that the speaker has performed an

80

Chapter 5

act in the nomenclature of which reference is made either [. . .] only obliquely, or even [. . .] not at all, to the performance of the locutionary or illocutionary act. We shall call the performance of an act of this kind the performance of a perlocutionary act or perlocution. (1962, 101)

Austin differentiates between two different kinds of perlocution. First, perlocutionary objects are those consequences with a conventional connection to the force of the illocution—in this case, the bride and groom get married. Second, perlocutionary sequels are those consequences that do not have a conventional connection to the force of the illocution—say, the bacchanalian reverie of the celebration that follows. So, what does this account of speech acts have to do with works of art? We don’t want to be too bullish, I think. I certainly don’t want to be seen to be blandly endorsing the idea that meaning is enshrined in artworks in the same orderly way that meaning is enshrined in language. This claim is obviously incorrect (cf. Mothersill 1965; Margolis 1980). Unlike meaning in natural languages, artistic meaning is not premised upon some abstract set of grammatical relationships between component parts. Art simply does not possess the relevant lexical, morphological, syntactic, or referential features to mean things in a linguistic manner. The semiotic relationships are far too muddy and multifarious for that claim to obtain. If artistic meaning exists, it manifests via some other process. Nonetheless, I think that speech act theory of some kind or another has something to offer our account. Although it would obviously be specious to argue that speech acts of the kinds described above and ‘artistic acts’ (that is, what we do when we make art) are the same kind of activity, they share a number of relevant features. As already noted, one of the features particular to artworks qua privileged class of object is that we take it for granted that artworks have something to say. They make demands of us in a similar way that other people make demands of us, and we respond in ways that we would normally reserve for other human beings: with sympathy, anger, amusement, disinterest, or whatever else. Moreover, I’m by no means the first person to apply speech act theory to artefacts like artworks. While this kind of work is currently rather unfashionable for several uninteresting reasons, there have nonetheless been a number of recent interesting and fruitful attempts—particularly emerging from feminist and political philosophy—to apply Austin’s framework to works of art (cf. Goldblatt 2011; Dixon 2019; Scarre 2019; Shahvisi 2021; Friedell and Liao 2022). Consequently, I think there’s a good argument for applying some version of speech act theory to artworks: one that both captures the ways in which artworks are like other human beings but is also capable of preserving the real and non-trivial differences between those two things. Some of this material is extremely useful when making sense of how artworks mean

Artworks

81

things—and, as we shall see, for cashing out both the functions artworks possess and the affordances they furnish. ARTWORK FUNCTIONS Let’s start with locution. As noted above, when we’re talking about the locutionary content of an utterance, what we’re really doing is identifying what the sentence means. We can say the same for artworks: the locutionary content of an artwork is the meaning of that artwork. So, what is the meaning of an artwork? Much later work on speech acts attempts to cash out locutions in terms of the intentions that underwrite them. This scholarship is motivated by the intuition that speech acts mean things, and this meaning is—at least according to people like H. P. Grice (cf. 1957, 1968, 1969) and his various inheritors—a consequence of the pragmatic intentions of the person doing the speaking. Tying locution to intention is also helpful for making sense of the differences between what locutions literally mean and what they’re intended to do. As we’ve already established, there can be a significant difference between what a given speech act means on a conventional, semantic level (“Are you finished with the salt?”) and what it means on a pragmatic level (“May I use the salt?” “Can you pass the salt”). For this reason, intentionalists argue that there are two distinct forms of meaning tangled up in the broader category of locution. The first is what is called ‘sentence-meaning’; that is, what the sentence literally means. The sentence-meaning of the question “Are you finished with the salt?” is that you’d like to know if your dining companion is literally finished with the salt. The second form of meaning is called ‘speaker-meaning.’ Speaker-meaning describes what the speaker pragmatically means in making the utterance, and it is speaker-meaning that captures the intentions of the speaker: in our case, license to use the salt. Consequently it is speaker-meaning, rather than Austinian convention, that contributes to the illocutionary force of utterances in intentionalist accounts of speech acts. More formally, an intentionalist employing the notation I use in this book would say that an utterance possesses speaker-meaning when some speaker s possesses the intention φs of motivating an interlocutor i to afford a change from state of affairs δ to speaker-determined target state δs, and utters utterance l in an attempt to motivate i to achieve δs. In this case, it is some fruitful confluence between the sentence-meaning of l and the underwriting intention φs that contributes speaker-meaning to the utterance l, while at the same time acknowledging that l need not mean φs. For the intentionalist, it is the speaker-meaning rather than the sentence-meaning of an utterance that is the

82

Chapter 5

‘function’ of that utterance. It is via the speaker-meaning bits of locution that speech acts possess functions because it is via speaker-meaning that speech acts do something. The proper function of an utterance is the speaker-meaning of that utterance: the speaker’s pragmatic intention in saying that utterance with that particular sentence-meaning. This pragmatic intention φs—that is, what they want to do with the utterance—is to induce a change from δ to speaker-determined target state δs via the utterance l. Then on the perlocution side of things, an interlocutor i tries to reconstruct φs based on utterance l, with this interpretation resulting in some interlocutordetermined target state δi. In being the act that takes place by the uttering of l, δi is a perlocutionary consequence of φs. This account is also capable of cashing out Austin’s posed difference between perlocutionary objects and perlocutionary sequels. When we are assessing whether something is a perlocutionary object or a perlocutionary sequel, we are assessing the extent to which the interlocutor-determined target state δi of the utterance is equal to the intended-for speaker-determined target state δs. Perlocutionary objects are those outcomes δi that are equal to or otherwise meaningfully correspond with a speaker-determined target state δs, while perlocutionary sequels are those outcomes δi that deviate from speaker-determined target state δs or are otherwise not circumscribed or captured by the underwriting speaker intention φs. The intentional picture of speech acts rests on the assumption that speech is an activity premised upon being in possession of higher-order thoughts: explicit intentions to achieve explicit outcomes. However, while the production of some artworks is doubtless circumscribed by the intention to achieve a particular explicit outcome (as is the case, for example, for artworks of a particularly didactic character), it does not apply to all artworks. The second difference is that the intentional picture of speech acts rests on the assumption that speech is addressed to an explicit interlocutor, some agent responsible for affording the change from the present state of affairs to a desired state of affairs. This is not the case for all speech acts. Indeed, as Wayne Davis writes, it may even be the case that speech acts do not require an audience at all: Many speech acts do require an audience, such as communicating, telling, and informing. We cannot tell, for example, unless we tell someone, and cannot communicate unless we communicate with someone. But meaning, implying, and expressing are different, as are saying, signalling, and indicating. “S meant something” does not require, or even allow, completion by “to . . . ” (1992, 239)

It is also not the case for artworks. Indeed, while artworks are public in the sense that they are intended to be encountered by an audience, they are not (or, at least, do not need to be) created with an explicit addressee in mind. Indeed, it is wrongheaded to characterize artworks in this way. While the

Artworks

83

making of artworks is undeniably underwritten by intentional processes, and while I definitely think that artworks qua tools are for something, I am nonetheless extremely suspicious of the notion that artworks—like, for example, No object implies the existence of any other—must be made in order to achieve explicit outcomes via explicit agents of the kind captured by a Gricean intentional picture. ‘Expressivism’ presents a better opportunity for making sense of artworks. Expressivism shares certain important features with intentionalism—because illocutionary force is predicated upon certain facts that concern the mental states of the speaker—but it differs in that it’s not grounded in the assumption that there must exist an audience to make sense of those intentions. Consider the work of Mitchell Green (2011). Green’s picture, although possessing several commonalities with Grice’s intentional account of speaker meaning, deviates from Grice in thinking that communicative intentions—that is, motivating an interlocutor i to afford a change from state of affairs δ to speaker-determined target state δs—are unnecessary in order to attribute speaker-meaning. While expressions need to be what Green describes as ‘overt’—that is, underwritten by an intention to place everything of relevance “out in the open,” or “publicly discernible,” even if the expression is not then discerned (2011, 66)—it is not necessarily the case that the expression is intended to stimulate a change in the given state of affairs. He writes: Reflexive communicative intentions are not necessary for speaker meaning. In fact, speaker meaning can occur without a speaker intending to produce any beliefs in an audience. A framed suspect might mean that she is innocent in saying, “I am innocent!,” yet be fully aware that no one will believe her and perhaps, being realistic, not intending to convince anyone. She might not even intend her interrogators to believe that she believes she is innocent, since she might know that they are certain she is lying. (2011, 60)

Green describes three kinds of speaker-meaning: factual speaker-meaning, objectual speaker-meaning, and illocutionary speaker-meaning. Factual speaker-meaning denotes the kind of speaker-meaning expressed when the speaker is sharing some fact about a state of affairs: feeling annoyed and then scowling because of annoyance, for example. Objectual speaker-meaning denotes the kind of speaker-meaning expressed when the speaker is making clear their intentions in making that expression: for example, as in the case when you feel annoyed and then scowl to communicate that annoyance to someone else. Finally, illocutionary speaker-meaning denotes the kind of speaker-meaning expressed when the speaker asserts something. In making an assertion (as opposed to making a conjecture, or a suggestion, or whatever else), speakers show they are committed to and can justify their expression

84

Chapter 5

(2011, 71–74). In all these cases, Green argues that speech acts are less about the achieving of explicit outcomes and more about articulating the speaker’s state of mind. This approach is shared by other expressivists. As Harris et al. make clear in their excellent survey paper, “intentionalists categorize speech acts in terms of the psychological responses they are intended to produce in addressees, however, expressionists categorize speech acts in terms of the different kinds of states in the speaker’s mind that they express” (2018, 9). In short, speaker-meaning in the expressivist case is not about inducing some change in an interlocutor. Instead, the induced change takes place in expressing something that the speaker takes to be important, true, interesting, or whatever else. The function of the act of expressing is the expression. That is, when we say that some utterance induces a change from δ to speaker-determined target state δs via the utterance l, the change from δ to δs is really a change from some state of affairs without any expressive elements (an expressively empty state of affairs xØ) to a state of affairs with an expressive element meant by the speaker (an expressively non-empty state of affairs xs that may or may not be in service of inducing a change from some state of affairs δ to some speaker-determined target state δs). In engaging in the activity of expressing, the speaker thus fixes the speaker-meaning of the expression. While I’m not willing to weigh in on the degree to which expressivism is sufficient for making sense of speech acts, I do think it’s an apt description of what happens when people engage in artistic acts. Indeed, this is the account that Green develops and defends in the conclusion of his book (2011, 192–211). Rather than cashing out artwork-meaning in terms of intended outcomes, we’re far more inclined to talk about art as a statement by the artist regarding some belief, concept, or idea—albeit one without a particular perlocutionary outcome in mind. After all, and as noted above, while artworks may have an explicit intended outcome, it is not necessarily the case that they do. Instead, it is entirely sufficient that they constitute a kind of expression that is “out in the open,” or “publicly discernible,” per Green, without necessarily working to bring about anything other than the expression itself. This expression is the function of the artwork. The artist-meaning of a given artwork constitutes the function of the locution. Given all that, consider this rational reconstruction of an artwork make plan, based upon the rational reconstruction of a general make plan furnished earlier in this book. First, working within some artworld code k, some artist r has an intention φr of affording a change from some non-expression xØ to some artist-meaning xr. This artist-determined expression might be in service of inducing a change from some state of affairs δ to some speaker-determined target state δs, but there is no guarantee or need that that is the case; per Green, communicative intentions are not necessary for artworld-meaning. Second,

Artworks

85

artist r believes that an appropriate means by which to realize φr within k is to make an artwork w with the proper function fw of affording a change from xØ to xr when the expression is experienced and interpreted properly. By ‘experienced and interpreted properly,’ I mean those conditions under which the artwork is intended to be experienced: that is, the way that w should be experienced to express xr. This, as in the make plan account for tools, is what fixes the proper function of the artwork. Third, r attempts to make w with function fw, thereby making some artwork w′. Fourth, the made w′ meets the φr if, when used properly, w′ can be used to fulfil the fw of affording a change from xØ to xr. Meanwhile w′ does not meet the φr if, when used properly, w′ cannot be used to fulfil the fw of affording a change from xØ to xr. Finally, if w′ does not meet the φr, r may decide to change the intention φr, design a different w, reassess function ft, or some combination of those options. I take the claim with which I began this book—that artworks constitute a kind of functional tool—to be a straightforward outcome of this argument. Artworks, just like any other functional objects, do things. In the case of artworks, the proper function fw of some artwork w is that the artwork expresses some particular locutionary artist-meaning: they afford a change from some non-expressive state of affairs xØ to some artist-determined expression xr. As in the case of non-artwork tools, this proper function fw is fixed by the intentions φr of the artist r responsible for w. ARTWORLD CONVENTIONS Obviously, though, this is not everything there is to say about what artworks mean and do. Consider the difference between speaker-meaning versus sentence-meaning. It’s certainly possible to make a similar distinction when it comes to the locutionary content of artworks: that is, between what I call the ‘artworld-meaning’ of a given work of art and the ‘artist-meaning’ of that same work. The artist-meaning of a given artwork does not constitute the entire locutionary content of a work of art even if it does constitute the function that is fixed to work of art via the intentions of the artist. Rather, to capture the full locutionary content of a work of art, we need to take stock of the artworld-meaning: that is, what people in general and by convention actually take the artwork to mean, rather than what the artist intended the artwork to mean (cf. Friedell and Liao 2022, 446). The distinction between artist- and artworld-meaning is a common-enough idea in the philosophical literature on artistic meaning. Out of the four broad hermeneutic approaches outlined in the introduction—uncritical monism, uncritical pluralism, critical monism, and critical pluralism—it is only the

86

Chapter 5

first that actively denies the possibility that there can exist legitimate interpretations of a work of art that deviate from the intentions of the artist. This position is trivially false. Artists can be (and are!) wrong about their own work all the time. That is, artworks can fail to furnish some specific meaning stipulated within the intention under which the concept of the artwork is subordinated. This occurs when the artwork cannot satisfy some type-description included in the intentional content that guides the artist’s production of that artwork, whether because of the artist’s lack of technical skill or conceptual clarity, or whatever else. “Suppose you intend to write a novel with a charismatic protagonist but mistakenly make them behave obnoxiously,” per Friedell and Liao. “Your novel’s artist-meaning involves charisma, but its artworld-meaning involves obnoxiousness” (2022, 446). Artworld-meaning is not something that just exists in a vacuum. Instead, the conventional meaning of a work of art is a consequence of the reputation and shared understanding of that work of art from within the artworld: what artists, scholars, and other tastemakers say about a work of art; what is taught in schools and universities and printed on gallery walls; what the artworld public in general believes to be the case. However, this is not to suggest that the artworld-meaning of a piece of work is static. Although the formal properties of a given work of art are available to perception in a reasonably straightforward way—things like color, shape, size, figurative contents, etcetera—differences in cultural, political, ethical, and aesthetic attitudes can and will make for serious differences in what different people take to be the artworld-meaning of a work. Consider, for example, the hypothetical experiences of two people encountering one of Mark Rothko’s enormous color field paintings for the first time (say, one of his Seagram murals). These two people are identical in every way bar one: the first belongs to an artworld that has some prior experience with the history and theory of abstract expressionism, and the second does not. Because of this one difference, each person will have radically different views of the artworld-meaning of the work. Whereas the latter might take the painting to be purposively incomplete—a large canvas primed but unfinished, if unusually colored—the first might successfully re-create Rothko’s own intentions in producing works of that scale: I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however—I think it applies to other painters I know—is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view with a reducing glass. However you paint the large pictures, you are in it. It isn’t something you command. (Rothko 2012, 28)

Artworks

87

Possessing a shared artworld-meaning requires that all relevant interlocutors understand and agree that the object under discussion is an artwork. The experiences of the audience must be scaffolded so as to prepare them for the idea that artworks are the kinds of objects that have something to say, rather than being merely decorative or craft objects. Because we accept these ideas, whether explicitly or implicitly, we are prepared to take the time to try and make sense of some artwork as if it has something to say. The primary factor that contributes to these circumstances are the artworld codes k outlined in chapter 4: codes that are non-individual, non-monist, and non-relative. Artworld codes furnish the foundational scaffolding for approaching an artwork like a Rothko painting or No object implies the existence of any other as a position-taking object, thanks to the artworld public’s acceptances of eighteenth-century ideas like “Art for Art’s sake, the Artist as Visionary Genius, and the unique Aesthetic Attitude/Experience emerged as the distinguishing features of Fine Art” (Clowney 2008). Artworld codes also furnish artworks with illocutionary force. We know from Austin’s account that illocutionary force denotes “the performance of an act in saying something as opposed to the performance of an act of saying something” (1962, 99). However, this doesn’t tell us very much about how we might fruitfully apply illocution to artworks. After all, artworks and utterances (at least as Austin talks about them) are quite different. In the case of speech, the illocutionary force of a speech act is tied to the moment of locution itself: the act in saying something and the act of saying something are deployed simultaneously. This is not the case for artworks. Instead, the locutionary content of an artwork (both locutionary content of the functional artist-meaning kind and the non-functional artworld-meaning kind) and the illocutionary force can be quite distinct. A painting might mean whatever a person likes in a locutionary sense, but unless that painting is somehow able to be encountered as an artwork it has no illocutionary force at all. The fact that I encountered No object implies the existence of any other at the Art Gallery of New South Wales cued me to the fact that it is, in fact, an artwork and not just a vanity mirror printed with white text. Consequently, it cued me to start asking the questions with which I opened this book: questions about reference, and meaning, and the relationship between art and the world. Meanwhile, the illocutionary force of this encounter would have been blunted had I encountered the object in some non-artworld venue (say, the guest bathroom in the home of an unfashionable relative); I certainly doubt it would have inspired me to write this book, nearly twenty years after the fact. Given all that, it’s clear to me that when we talk about the illocutionary force of the artwork, we’re talking about something that is a direct consequence of the circumstances under which the artwork is shared. Artworks need to be presented in the right venues for their act of saying something—in this case,

88

Chapter 5

the locutionary artworld-meaning—to be accompanied by an act in saying something (the illocutionary force of that artworld-meaning). Artworld codes are an example of what Austin calls ‘conventions.’ It is ‘convention’ that ties artistic locution to artistic illocution. Of course, Austin’s original account only strictly applies to the narrow class of linguistic utterances that are bound by conventions in the way that he describes. Per Harris et al., while Austin’s conventional account is very good at explaining the conventional connection between locutionary content, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary outcomes in ritualized and/or institutionalized speech acts with clearly demarcated roles for speakers and listeners (wedding vows, legal oaths, that sort of thing), conventions are less convincing when it comes to making sense of the normal speech acts that are integral to most of our day-to-day communication: acts that do not have explicit felicity conditions to which they can be held to account: “unlike marriage, asserting, asking, and requesting needn’t be performed relative to the ‘jurisdiction’ of any particular set of institutions or conventions: it is possible to assert and ask questions across international borders, but not to marry or testify in court, for example” (Harris 2018, 2). Nonetheless, and as Friedell and Liao argue in “How Statues Speak,” artworks are covered by similar conventions. While Friedell and Liao’s concerns are narrower than mine (they’re primarily interested in the relationships between locution, illocution, and perlocution insofar as they apply to street art and public statuary), they argue that the relationship between the locutionary artworld-meaning of a work of art (what they call the ‘artwork-meaning’) and the illocutionary force of that locutionary artworld-meaning is governed by the “broad social conventions and norms” that govern different kinds of artworks. It is important when a Modernist painting is encountered in a gallery rather than a nightclub bathroom, or a piece of public statuary is on display in a public park rather than moldering in an industrial canal, or a film is shown in a boutique cinema rather than in a massive multiplex, because the illocutionary forces of these environments moderate our response to the perceived artworld-meaning of these individual works of art. The way in which a depiction is shared, Friedell and Liao argue, is what constitutes the illocutionary force of the artistic locution. Thus, the illocutionary force of an artwork is tied up in not just what the artwork means in a locutionary sense, but in how and why that meaning is communicated to some artworld public. In defense of this view, they speak at length about the locutionary content and illocutionary force of statues of Confederate soldiers. These statues, they write, have a clear artworld-meaning: namely, to celebrate and honor the people depicted in those statues. However, whether those statues actually celebrate and honor the figures they depict is a matter of illocutionary force.

Artworks

89

In the case of Confederate statues, the artworld conventions governing how those statues are exhibited are what furnish the illocutionary force of the artworld-meaning: “There is a difference between depicting a person as honorable and honoring that person. [. . .] By changing the context, we change what statues do but not what they say. For example, Elizabeth Scarbrough’s proposal to leave politically controversial statues to ruin does not change their locutionary content but does change their illocutionary force: a statue that is allowed to ruin can still depict a dishonorable person as honorable, but it will no longer honor that person” (2022, 448). There is a vast illocutionary difference between, for example, exhibiting a Confederate statue in a well-tended public park sans contextual cues and exhibiting that same statue in a public museum as part of an exhibition about the legacy of slavery in the postbellum American South, even if the artist-meaning remains the same. To summarize, when we talk about the function of a work of art, we’re really talking about the artist-meaning of the work: a meaning that is fixed by the intention of the artist to express something or other. However, the artist-meaning is not the same thing as either the artworld-meaning of an artwork or the illocutionary force of that artworld-meaning. While an artwork is obviously a causal outcome of a certain set of intentions and actions by an artist, the ways in which we respond to a work of art are a confluence of a) what we take the artwork to actually mean by virtue of its various features and whatever facts and insights a member of the artworld public might have in their possession (rather than what the artist merely intended for the work to mean), and b) the illocutionary force imparted by the circumstances under which we encounter that work of art. ARTWORK AFFORDANCES So, how does all this relate to affordances, and the use of artworks? Per our definition of affordances in chapter 3: “A tool affordance at denotes a stable but non-binding possibility for action furnished by a relationship between the capacities (physical, cognitive, phenomenological, or other) of some user u, the tool t available to u, and the prevailing technical codes c.” We already know that artworks furnish affordances like any other object—as in the hypothetical case that we decide to use Aristide Maillol’s Woman Arranging Her Hair to tenderize a cut of meat, or to prop open a door, or as a weapon. But what about if we want to think about the affordances furnished by Woman Arranging Her Hair qua artwork? Let’s begin with an example. Sometime in December 1938, W. H. Auden wrote the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” inspired by a visit to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts while visiting Christopher Isherwood in Brussels. In

90

Chapter 5

the poem, he describes his reaction upon seeing several paintings attributed to the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. From the text of the poem, we can surmise the identity of the paintings to which Auden refers: The Census at Bethlehem (1566), Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1565–1567), and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560). All paintings were at that time attributed to Bruegel, though the latter two are now considered copies. The assumed identity of these paintings is motivated by two factors: first, at the time that Auden would have seen the paintings, all three were hung in a dedicated Breugel alcove in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts (cf. Kinney 1963; Gabbert 2022); and second, via the various scenes described in the poem are present in those paintings. Lines 3–8, for instance, clearly refer to The Census at Bethlehem: “Joseph and Mary have come to Bethlehem (in the left foreground of the canvas) to be counted for taxation,” as Kinney writes (1963, 529) while they are “passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth” (Auden 1979). The next line in the poem—“there always must be / Children who did not specially want it to happen” links Census to Massacre of the Innocents (lines 9–13). This second painting depicts an event described in the gospel of Matthew, wherein King Herod ordered the deaths of all infant children in Bethlehem after having been informed of the birth of Jesus: “the dreadful martyrdom” running its course as the children are killed by soldiers. This, of course, is bad news for the ice-skating children in Census; no wonder they dread the birth of Christ. Finally, lines 14–21 refers by name to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Referencing Ovid’s Metamorphoses—“a dazed farmer leaning on his plough” (Ovid 1958, 212)—the painting depicts a ploughman turning away “quite leisurely” from the final moments of doomed and foolish Icarus. Nor is the “expensive delicate ship” moved to investigate the cries; it had somewhere else to be. The poem is terrible and lovely. It seems to be an indictment of the ways in which, through inaction and disinterest, we allow other people to suffer. It is also—and much more relevantly for our purposes—an excellent case study via which we can try to make sense of the affordances that artworks furnish. Consider the conditions under which the paintings were made and the functions that we can fix to those paintings. Only one of the three artworks was painted by the master Breugel himself; the other two by others in his employ (the copy of Massacres in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts was probably painted by his son Pieter Bruegel the Younger; meanwhile, Icarus is most likely a copy of a now-lost Breughel original by an unknown artist). All three were, in different ways and by different people, each fixed with the function of affording a change from some non-expressive state of affairs xØ to some artist-meaning xr. Even though all three paintings are set in the Flemish countryside, the scenes depicted are drawn from the Bible and Greco-Roman

Artworks

91

mythology. We can surmise that these three paintings were probably intended to function as allegorical expressions of social life in sixteenth-century Flanders: these are the individual artist-meanings xr, xr′, and xr′′. Then we move to the artworld-meaning part of locutionary content and the illocutionary force of those artworks. This artworld-meaning is moderated by two factors. The first is that Auden believed that Bruegel the Elder was responsible for all three paintings because that was taken to be the case of the Belgian artworld of that period, a belief that is integral to his poetic analysis. The second is that Auden understands that the paintings are not mere decoration. Instead, he approaches them in the spirit of what Don Ihde in Technology and the Lifeworld, called an ‘alterity relation.’ As noted in chapter 3, alterity relations are marked by the fact that, rather than encountering the world through the tool, the tool itself becomes the object of our attention. This is also the case here: he approached the three paintings in such a way that they are treated as objects of analysis. In this way, the artworld-meanings of The Census at Bethlehem, Massacre of the Innocents, and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus are underwritten by the artworld codes outlined in chapter 4. These artwork codes k furnish the modern systems of provenance and authorship that typify our attitudes toward art in the Western canon, as well as the set of assumptions that circumscribe our shared attitudes about artworks as position-assuming objects. Furthermore, these codes also furnish the venue in which Auden’s encounter with those artworks took place: the Breugel alcove in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. Auden was only able to see those paintings because they’d been appropriately absorbed into the artworld, deemed suitable for exhibition in a public gallery, and then placed in proximity by a curator. In so doing, these codes furnish the paintings with illocutionary force: not only as objects with something to say, but as objects that are saying something together: something about suffering, its human position, and how it takes place “while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (Auden 1979). Per our definition of affordances—“a tool affordance at denotes a stable but non-binding possibility for action furnished by a relationship between the capacities (physical, cognitive, phenomenological, or other) of some user u, the tool t available to u, and the prevailing technical codes c”—this state of affairs captures both the tool t and the technical codes c. This state of affairs—this concatenation of functions and meanings and paintings and conventions—are part of what furnished the affordances available to Auden in December 1938. Moreover, in addition to those felicity conditions already mentioned, for Auden or any other member of the artwork public—hereafter p—to take advantage of an affordance furnished by an artwork qua artwork, they also need to want to interact with the artwork in the right way. Not only must they be open to the possibility that the artwork has something to say,

92

Chapter 5

but they also need to be prepared to listen. The final part, of course, is Auden himself: our user u who is a man of great intellect, in possession of both a fine education and a theory of art, and (although only thirty-one) already one of the greatest poets of his generation. This relationship—between the paintings themselves, the artworld in which the paintings are embedded, and Auden’s own capacities—furnishes a stable but non-binding possibility for action that we can call an ‘artwork affordance’ aw. Artwork affordances are only possible with all these factors in place: the artworks, the artworld, and a member of the artworld public in possession of the relevant concepts, capacities, and attitudes. These affordances constitute a special subclass of affordances, albeit one only furnished by artworks. So, what do these affordances actually do? As already noted, I endorse the view that artworks constitute a class of expression. Operating within artworld codes, artworks are a kind of artefact that says something about some belief, concept, or idea held by the artist. Of course, though, neither the artist-meaning nor the artworld-meaning of a work can fully determine how an artwork is received by an individual. They are only two factors among many, all of which are filtered through the concepts and venues and processes of the artworld. At the end of that, though, members of the artworld public p are invited to pay attention to and think about the artwork and its circumstances in an orderly way: to consider the artwork as an object underwritten by certain intentions, having certain formal features, meaning certain things by convention, making certain references, expressing a certain point of view, existing within a certain state of affairs. It is this orderly and attentive encounter that artworks as a class afford. In short, artwork affordances aw, aw′, aw′′ constitute a kind of ‘structured attention’: they invite us to bear our attention upon, try to make sense of, and perhaps learn from, the artwork. In the case of Auden, seeing The Census at Bethlehem, Massacre of the Innocents, and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus that December in 1938 constituted an invitation to think upon what those paintings seem to share. Afforded that experience by a virtuous confluence of the paintings, the artworld, and his own qualities, Auden seems to have reflected on their hard and unsentimental sorrow—they were never wrong about suffering, the old Masters—and then turned that into a poem about one of the many moral failings of our species. It is this realization, this individual ‘artwork-meaning’ xp, that those artworks afforded. Whether or not everyone who goes to a gallery or visits a theater show or whatever will write one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century is not up for debate. However, Auden’s individual process can be generalized to describe what happens when any member of the artwork public engages with a work of art as a work of art. As in the case of the more general use account, the first step to taking advantage of an artwork affordance is a matter of

Artworks

93

judgment. This judgment can be explicit or implicit: either an explicit engagement with a work of art as an artwork or a tacit receptivity to the possibility. Either way, the member of the artworld public p takes stock of the artwork affordances aw, aw′, aw′′ available, given the physical, cognitive, conceptual, phenomenological, and other capacities of p, the artwork w, and the prevailing artworld codes k. The second step involves the member of the artworld public p realizing that the artwork affordances aw, aw′, aw′′ draw attention to something or other: some fact, some position, some color or sound or form. Again, this process can be explicit or implicit. It could be the case that p possesses some explicit intention φp to use the artwork w to afford some individual artwork-meaning xp about some feature or aspect of the world, and then realizes they can use one of the affordances on offer to achieve that outcome. Or it could be the case that p does not have an explicit intention to generate some specific realization xp but is nonetheless receptive to doing so because they possess the appropriate attitude toward the artwork in question. Third, the member of the artworld public p then attempts to generate some artwork-meaning xp using the aw, aw′, aw′′ furnished by w, thereby achieving some realization xp′. Finally, achieved state xp′ meets the success criteria for φp if xp′ is equal to desired artwork-meaning xp, or does not meet the success criteria for φu if xp′ is not equal to desired artwork-meaning xp. To return to Austin, the kind of artistic meaning I’m describing here is really a matter of perlocution rather than locution or illocution. Per above, perlocution describes the consequences of the illocutionary act on the feelings, thoughts, or actions of other people. While perlocution describes the consequences of a given speech act, it is underdetermined by the locutionary intentions of the speaker or the illocutionary conditions governing the production of the encounter between speaker and interlocutor. That is, there is nothing in either the locutionary content or illocutionary force of a speech act that guarantees a certain perlocutionary outcome. This is the same for artworks. Artistic meaning for an individual is not simply a matter of locutionary artist-meaning or artworld-meaning, nor is it a matter of the illocutionary force with which the artwork is communicated. Instead, individual artwork-meaning is also constituted in part by what we do with an artwork: how we make use of the various affordances they offer us to come to certain realizations or draw certain conclusions that might otherwise not have been possible. We use artworks just like any other tool: to help us do things that might otherwise be difficult or impossible. This picture also works with our previously articulated distinction between proper/improper and rational/irrational use. To reiterate from chapter 3: 1.  Proper and rational use captures what happens when u uses t if t possesses the function ft of affording a change from state of affairs δ to

94

Chapter 5

maker-determined target state δm via affordance at, user-determined target state δu is equal to δm, and t is used to afford δm via at. 2.  Proper and irrational use captures what happens when u uses t if t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, and δu is equal to δm, but t does not meet the success criteria for ft in that t cannot be used to afford a change from δ to δm via at. 3.  Improper and rational use captures what happens when u uses t if either t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, δu is not equal to δm, and t is used to afford δu via any available affordance at, at′, etc., or t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, δu is equal to δm, but t is used to afford δu via some non-standard affordance at′, at′′, etc. 4.  Improper and irrational use captures what happens when u uses t if t possesses an ft of affording a change from δ to δm via at, δu is not equal to δm, and t cannot be used to afford δu via at, at′, at′′ etc. In the case of artworks, we can already attribute properness or improperness of use depending on whether a given artwork-meaning xp equals or otherwise corresponds with artist-meaning xr. We can also attribute rationality or irrationality of use on the grounds of whether some set of artwork affordances aw, aw′, aw′′ are appropriate for generating the artworld public realization xp. Let's return, finally, to Burn’s No object implies the existence of any other. When I first encountered the mirror and sought to make sense of it, I tried to do so in a way that took stock of what it afforded me: a chance to admire my reflection; an early opportunity to read a bit of Hume. It was an experience scaffolded by both my environment and the theoretic and pre-theoretic assumptions I had about how one should appropriately interact with artworks. It was also (not to blow my own horn too much) a broadly rational exercise: the artwork affordances available were a fruitful consequence of both my features and the properties of the work. However, one could very easily imagine a person seeing No object for the first time and acting irrationally: that is, by trying to use the available affordances aw, aw′, aw′′ to produce some entirely unrelated xp (say, using Burn’s mirror to try to argue that Barack Obama is a lizard person), or by misidentifying the affordances on offer (perhaps by mistaking the mirror for a very fine and unusually dynamic oil painting). This, in summary, is how artworks mean things. That is, artworks possess meanings fixed by the artists responsible for their creation: this is their function, as described in chapter 2. They also constitute a special class of expressive tool, circumscribed by the artworld codes identified in chapter 4. They also possess artworld-meaning and illocutionary force fixed by the artworld in which they reside. Finally, working within these codes, members

Artworks

95

of the artworld public are invited to pay attention to and reflect upon artworks in a structured and orderly way. This ‘structured attention’ is an example of an affordance, per chapter 3: they invite us to bear our attention upon, try to make sense of, and perhaps learn from, the artwork. This is the third and final kind of meaning: what I call ‘artwork-meaning.’ By means of a conclusion: with this book I have attempted to demonstrate, at least as a proof of concept, that artworks and artistic meaning can be adequately described using methods and concepts drawn from philosophy of technology. In addition to hoping that I have succeeded in this goal, I also hope that in making this argument I have not inadvertently implied that artistic meaning is somehow thin or specious. To the contrary, I very much hope I’ve demonstrated that conceptualizing artistic meaning in this way furnishes us with a richly nuanced way of making sense of artworks and what they mean in a way that is neither trivial, wrongheaded, nor spooky: a means of talking about artistic meaning that is not only sensitive to the intentions of artists, but also the sensitive to the conditions under which artworks are received, the hermeneutic freedoms available to artworld publics, and the historicist nature of art itself.

References

Adajian, Thomas. 2018. “The Definition of Art.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Allen, Barry. 2005. Knowledge and Civilization. Westview Press. Allen, Colin, Marc Bekoff, and George Lauder, eds.  1998. Nature’s Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. MIT Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. “Labor, Work, Action.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr, 167–81. Penguin. Aristotle. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon, R. P. Hardie, and R. K. Gaye. Oxford University Press. Auden, W. H. 1979. “Musée Des Beaux Arts.” In W. H. Auden: Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, 79–80. Vintage Books. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Image-Music-Text, edited by Stephen Heath, 142–48. FontanaPress. Beardsley, Monroe. 1982. The Aesthetic Point of View. Cornell University Press. Black, Max. 1963. “Austin on Performatives.” Philosophy 38 (145): 217–26. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Harvard University Press. Bratman, Michael. 1987. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press. Carroll, Noël. 2000. “Interpretation and Intention: The Debate Between Hypothetical and Actual Intentionalism.” Metaphilosophy 31 (1/2): 75–95. Carter, Brandon. 1974. “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology.” In IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, 291–98. Reidel. Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. “Strong and Weak Emergence.” In The Re-emergence of Emergence, 244–54. Oxford University Press.

97

98

References

Clowney, David. 2008. “A Third System of the Arts? An Exploration of Some Ideas from Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art: A Cultural History.” Contemporary Aesthetics 6 (1). Corning, Peter A. 2012. “The Re-Emergence of Emergence, and the Causal Role of Synergy in Emergent Evolution.” Synthese 185 (2): 295–317. Danto, Arthur. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61 (19): 571–84. ———. 1974. “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (2): 139–48. ———. 1983. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Harvard University Press. Davis, Wayne. 1992. “Speaker Meaning.” Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (3): 223–53. DeClerq, Rafael. 2002. “The Concept of an Aesthetic Property.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60: 167–72. Dickie, George. 1997. Art Circle: A Theory of Art. Chicago Spectrum Press. Dixon, Daisy. 2019. “Alterpieces: Artworks as Shifting Speech Acts.” Thesis, University of Cambridge. Dosi, Giovanni. 1982. “Technological Paradigms and Technological Trajectories: A Suggested Interpretation of the Determinants and Directions of Technical Change.” Research Policy 11 (3): 147–62. Dubash, Manek. 2005. “Moore’s Law Is Dead, Says Gordon Moore.” Techworld, April. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell. Eldridge, Richard. 1985. “Form and Content: An Aesthetic Theory of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 25 (4): 303–16. Feng, Patrick, and Andrew Feenberg. 2008. “Thinking about Design: Critical Theory of Technology and the Design Process.” In Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture, edited by Peter Kroes, Pieter E. Vermaas, Andrew Light, and Steven A. Moore, 105–18. Springer Netherlands. Friedell, David, and Shen-yi Liao. 2022. “How Statues Speak.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Gabbert, Elisa. 2022. “A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight.” New York Times, March. Gautier, Théophile. 1890. “Préface.” In Œuvres de Théophile Gautier Poésies, edited by Alphonse Lemerre. Vol. 1. Gibson, James J. 2014. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press. Goldblatt, David. 2011. “Taking Art Personally: Austin, Performatives and Art.” Contemporary Aesthetics 9. Goldstein, Jeffrey. 1999. “Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues.” Emergence 1 (1): 49–72. Goodman, Nelson. 1975. “Words, Works, Worlds.” Erkenntnis 9 (1): 57–73. Green, Mitchell S. 2011. Self-Expression. Oxford University Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1965. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Beacon Press. Grice, H. P. 1957. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66 (3): 377–88.

References

99

———. 1968. “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning.” Foundations of Language 4 (3): 225–42. ———. 1969. “Utterer’s Meaning and Intention.” Philosophical Review 78 (2): 147–77. Grudin, Robert. 2010. Design and Truth. Yale University Press. Harmand, Sonia, Jason E. Lewis, Craig S. Feibel, Christopher J. Lepre, Sandrine Prat, Arnaud Lenoble, Xavier Boës et al. 2015. “3.3-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya.” Nature 521 (7552): 310–15. Harris, Daniel W., Daniel Fogal, and Matt Moss. 2018. “Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape.” In New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss. Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Edited by J Macquarrie and E Robinson. Harper & Row. Hilpinen, Risto. 1993. “Authors and Artifacts.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93: 155–78. Holland, John H. 2000. Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Oxford University Press. Houkes, Wybo. 2013. “Rules, Plans and the Normativity of Technological Knowledge.” In Norms in Technology, edited by Marc J. de Vries, Sven Ove Hansson, and Anthonie W. M. Meijers, 35–54. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology. Springer Netherlands. Houkes, Wybo, Pieter E Vermaas, Kees Dorst, and Marc J de Vries. 2002. “Design and Use as Plans: An Action-theoretical Account.” Design Studies, Philosophy of Design, 23 (3): 303–20. Hublin, Jean-Jacques, Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer, Shara E. Bailey, Sarah E. Freidline, Simon Neubauer, Matthew M. Skinner, Inga Bergmann, et al. 2017. “New Fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the Pan-African Origin of Homo Sapiens.” Nature 546 (7657): 289–92. Hume, David. 1896. A Treatise of Human Nature. Clarendon Press. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Indiana University Press. ———. 2002. Bodies in Technology. University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2008. “The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination.” In Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture, edited by Peter Kroes, Pieter E. Vermaas, Andrew Light, and Steven A. Moore, 51–59. Springer Netherlands. Ihde, Don, and Lambros Malafouris. 2019. “Homo Faber Revisited: Postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory.” Philosophy & Technology 32 (2): 195–214. Iseminger, Gary. 2004. The Aesthetic Function of Art. Cornell University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. The Critique of Judgement. Edited by Nicholas Walker. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford University Press. Kinney, Arthur F. 1963. “Auden, Bruegel, and ‘Musée Des Beaux Arts.’” College English 24 (7): 529–31. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. 1951. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I).” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (4): 496–527. ———. 1952. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (II).” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1): 17–46.

100

References

Levinson, Jerrold. 1979. “Defining Art Historically.” British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (3): 232–50. Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton University Press. Longworth, Francis, and Andrea Scarantino. 2010. “The Disjunctive Theory of Art: The Cluster Account Reformulated.” British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (March): 1–17. Maier, Jonathan R. A., and Georges M. Fadel. 2009. “Affordance Based Design: A Relational Theory for Design.” Research in Engineering Design 20 (1): 13–27. Malle, Bertram F., and Joshua Knobe. 1997. “The Folk Concept of Intentionality.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 33: 101–21. Margolis, Joseph. 1980. Art and Philosophy. Harvester Wheatsheaf. Mattick, Paul. 2003. Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics. Routledge. McLaughlin, B. P. 1997. “Emergence and Supervenience.” Intellectica 2: 25–34. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. MIT Press. ———. 1986. “Thoughts Without Laws; Cognitive Science with Content.” Philosophical Review 95 (1): 47–80. ———. 1995. “In Defence of Proper Functions.” In White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. MIT Press. ———. 1999. “Wings, Spoons, Pills, and Quills: A Pluralist Theory of Function.” Journal of Philosophy 96 (4): 191–206. Moore, Gordon E. 1965. “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” Electronics 38 (8). Mothersill, Mary. 1965. “Is Art a Language?” Journal of Philosophy 62 (20): 559–72. Neander, Karen. 1991. “Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst’s Defense.” Philosophy of Science 58 (2): 168–84. Nehamas, Alexander. 1981. “The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1): 133–49. Norman, Don. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. Basic Books. Osborne, Peter, ed. 2011. Conceptual Art: Themes & Movements. Phaidon Press. ———. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. Verso. Ovid. 1958. The Metamorphoses. Translated by Horace Gregory. Viking Press. Pols, Auke. 2015. “Affordances and Use Plans: An Analysis of Two Alternatives to Function-based Design.” AI EDAM 29 (3): 239–47. ———. 2020. “Use Plans.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering. Routledge. Preston, Beth. 1998. “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon? A Pluralist Theory of Function.” Journal of Philosophy 95 (5): 215–254. Pye, David. 1968. The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Cambridge University Press.

References

101

Rietveld, Erik, and Julian Kiverstein. 2014. “A Rich Landscape of Affordances.” Ecological Psychology 26 (4): 325–52. Rosenberger, Robert. 2020. “On Variational Cross-Examination: A Method for Postphenomenological Multistability.” AI & Society. Rothko, Mark. 2012. “I Paint Very Large Pictures.” In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. University of California Press. Scarre, Geoffrey. 2019. “How Memorials Speak to Us.” In Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials, 21–33. Routledge. Setiya, Kieran. 2014. “Intention, Plans, and Ethical Rationalism.” In Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman, 56–84. Oxford University Press. Shahvisi, Arianne. 2021. “Colonial Monuments as Slurring Speech Acts.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 55 (3): 453–68. Shiner, Larry. 2001. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. University of Chicago Press. Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: Extended or Scaffolded?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4): 465–81. Strawson, P. F. 1964. “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts.” Philosophical Review 73 (4): 439–60. Vandevelde, Pol. 2005. The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation. University of Pittsburgh Press. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2001. “Don Ihde: The Technological Lifeworld.” In American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn, edited by Hans Achterhuis, 119– 46. Indiana University Press. ———. 2016. “Toward a Theory of Technological Mediation: A Program for Postphenomenological Research.” In Technoscience and Postphenomenology: The Manhattan Papers, 189–204. Lexington Books. Vermaas, Pieter E., and Wybo Houkes. 2003. “Ascribing Functions to Technical Artefacts: A Challenge to Etiological Accounts of Functions.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2): 261–89. Ward, Emily J., and Brian J. Scholl. 2015. “Stochastic or Systematic? Seemingly Random Perceptual Switching in Bistable Events Triggered by Transient Unconscious Cues.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41 (4): 929–39. Wittingslow, Ryan. 2016. “Bloody-Minded Metaphysics: Barry Allen vs. the World.” Contemporary Pragmatism 13 (2): 129–42. ———. 2020. ‘Visions of Political Form: Kantian Free Play and Urban Space.’ Contemporary Aesthetics special issue 8. ———. 2021. ‘Using Philosophy of Technology to Talk about Art.’ Proceedings of the European Society of Aesthetics 13. ———. 2022. ‘Philosophy of Technology and Aesthetic Cognitivism.’ In Kunst und Werk, edited by Alexander Friedrich, Petra Gehring, Christoph Hubig, Andreas Kaminski, and Alfred Nordmann. Vol. 8. Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie. Nomos Verlag.

102

References

———. 2023. “Critical Contextual Aestheticism: A Proposal,” Debates in Aesthetics, 19 (1). Wright, Larry. 1973. “Functions.” Philosophical Review 82 (2): 139–68. Zangwill, Nick. 2000. “In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism.” Philosophical Quarterly (1950–) 50 (201): 476–93. ———. 2001. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. Aesthetic Creation. Oxford University Press.

Index

accidental function, 23–24, 26 action, 18–19; artistic, 84; intention and, 1–2; speech and, 78–81; tool affordances and, 39, 49 action theory, proper use and, 28, 32–33 Adajian, Thomas, 58 Aesthetic Creation (Zangwill), 60 aesthetic functions, institutional practices and, xxii–xxiii, 72–75 aestheticism, critical contextual, 64, 70–72 aesthetic judgments, of artworks, 59–60, 73 aesthetics, 61; of artworks, 69–70; creation and, 59–60; criteria and, 62–63; functionalism and, 59–60, 72; philosophy of, xvii–xviii; utility and, 69 A-facts, B-facts and, 4–7, 12–13, 67, 72 affordances, xix–xx, xxii, 15, 41; artworks and, xxi, xxiii, 89–95; behavior and, 37, 51–52; biological, 36–38; change and, 1–2, 77–78; embodiment of, 39; function and, 36, 75–76; make plans and, 50–51; in philosophy of technology, 38–39; scaffolding and, 47; structured attention as, 95; upward causation and, 53–55; use of, 48–53, 93–94;

use plans and, 49–50. See also tool affordances Allen, Barry, 53–55; Knowledge and Civilization, 15 alterity relations, 45–46, 91 appropriateness, 29–31, 54, 66, 70 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 16–19 Aristotle: Physics, 2–3; Politics, 16–17 Art and the Aesthetic (Dickie), 60–61 The Art Circle (Dickie), 60–61 Art Gallery of New South Wales, xi–xii, xx–xxi, 87–88 artistic action, 84 artistic canon, 62, 91 artist-meaning, 84–87, 89, 91–94 artists: creation and, 60; intentions of, xiv–xv, xxiii, 86 art market, 68–69 art-ness, 58, 72–73; artworld and, 60–61; criteria for, 57, 62–64; of non-artworks, 71 artwork creation, 59; functionalism and, 60; institutionalism and, 60–61 artwork-meaning, 84, 88, 92–95 artworks: aesthetics of, 69–70; affordances and, xxi, xxiii, 89–95; artist-meaning of, 84–87, 89, 91–94; artworld-meaning of, 85–89, 103

104

Index

91–93, 95; conditions for, 70–74; critical contextual aestheticism and, 70–72; discussions on, xiii–xv, 70–71, 87; expression and, 84–85, 92, 95; functionalism and, 58, 63–64; function of, 91–93; hybrid definitions of, 58, 64; identification of, 61–62; illocutionary force and, 87–89; institutionalism and, 58, 63–64; interpretation of, xii–xiii, xiv–xvii, 85–86; justification and, 61–62, 65–67; meaning of, xi–xiii, xvi–xvii, xx–xxi, 75–77, 80–81, 95; physical properties of, xx, 67, 72, 76; quality of, xiv, xxii, 63; speech acts and, 80–85; technical codes of, xxii, 75–77; as tools, xviii–xix, 76 artworld: art-ness and, 60–61; communities and, 18–19, 62–66; conventions of, 85–89; historicity of, 68–69, 76–77, 87; technical codes of, 67, 75–77, 87–88, 91–93, 95 artworld-meaning, 85–89, 91–93, 95 assumptions, xii–xiv, 40, 66–68 attention, structured, xxi, 92–93, 95 Auden, W. H., 90–93 audience, xxi, 76–77, 82–83, 87 Austin, J. L., 82, 87–88, 93; How to Do Things with Words, 78–81 background relations, 46 Barthes, Roland, 58 behavior, affordances and, 37, 51–52 Being and Time (Heidigger), 40–42 B-facts, A-facts and, 4–7, 12–13, 67, 72 biological affordances, 36–38; tool affordances compared to, 39, 42 biology, philosophy of, 21–22 Bratman, Michael, 1–2 Brillo Box (Warhol), 57–58, 60, 76–77 Bruegel, Pieter, 90–91 Burn, Ian, No object implies the existence of any other, xi–xiii, xviii– xxi, 72–73, 75, 87–88, 94

canon, artistic, 62, 91 Carter, Brandon, 4–5 causal efficacy, 5–7, 11, 72 certainty, workmanship of, 28–29 Chalmers, David, 5 change, xx, 44, 71; affordances and, 1–2, 77–78; in environments, 15, 39; expressivism and, 85; intentionalism and, 81–83; in society, 68; speech acts and, 79; tools and, 12–14, 52–54 Clowney, David, 68–69, 76 codes, artworld, 67, 75–77, 87–88, 91–93, 95 coherence, 12–13; meansend, 29, 52–53 common criteria of adequacy, public standards and, 70–71 communities, 70–71, 73; artworld and, 18–19, 62–66 conceptual models, 47–48 conditions, 2–4, 32, 52–53; for artworks, 70–74; felicity, 80, 88, 92; human, 16–19; for knowledge production, 66; selection, 25–26; technical codes and, 11 constraints, design spaces and, 4, 6 contingency, 27–28, 32 conventions: of artworld, 85–89; meaning and, 91–92; speech acts and, 79–80 conversations. See discussions creation: of affordances, 15; artists and, 60; artwork, 59; of tools, 3, 9–10, 31 criteria: art-ness and, 57, 62–64; artwork creation and, 60–61; common, 70–71; for function, 22–23 critical contextual aestheticism, 64, 70–72 critical contextual empiricism, 64, 67 critical monism, xv–xvi critical pluralism, xvi–xvii, 86 culture, 13, 15–16, 21 Danto, Arthur, 60, 69, 75 Davis, Wayne, 82–83

Index

decisions, 27–28; scaffolding of, 3, 15–16 defective tools, 32, 50–51 description, ends-oriented, 21–22, 27, 29–30 designers. See makers The Design of Everyday Things (Norman), 38–39, 47–48 design spaces, 3–7, 21; coherence and, 52–53; technical codes in, 8–9, 11–12 Dickie, George, 69–70, 75; Art and the Aesthetic, 60–61; The Art Circle, 60–61 discussions, on artworks, xiii– xv, 70–71, 87 Dosi, Giovanni, 9–11 Duchamp, Marcel, Fountain, 57–58, 71 dynamism, 12–13, 29 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Gibson), xix, 36–37, 39 ecosystem: of affordances, 47; of objects, 3–4, 15–16 efficacy, causal, 5–7, 11, 72 embodiment, of affordances, 39 embodiment relations, 42–43 emergent features, 12–16 Emin, Tracey, My Bed, 57–58 empiricism, critical contextual, 64, 67 encoded norms, 7–9 ends-orientation, 1–2; in description, 21–22, 29 engineering, philosophy of, 27–29 environments, xix–xx, 36–38, 46–47; change in, 15, 39 epistemic norms, 65–67 equality, tempered, 66 eudaimonia, 16–17 Experimental Phenomenology (Ihde), 35–36 expression, artworks and, 84–85, 92, 95 expressivism, 83–85

105

failure: function and, 24–25; of performances, 2; risk and, 29 The Fate of Knowledge (Longino), xxii, 64 fecundity, of tools, 54 Feenberg, Andrew, 4, 7–9 felicity conditions, 80, 88, 92 Feng, Patrick, 4, 7–9 folk theories, of meaning, xiv Fountain (Duchamp), 57–58, 71 framework, 27–28; artworld as, 60–61; for interpretation, xv–xvi; for normative judgments, 51–53 Friedell, David, 86, 88 function, 21, 32–33, 82; accidental, 23–24, 26; affordances and, 36, 75–76; of artworks, 91–93; in expressivism, 84; failure and, 24–25; intention and, 30–31; make plans and, 52; objects and, xviii– xix, 22–23; tools and, xxii, 27–30, 77. See also proper function functionalism, 58, 63–64; aesthetics and, 59–60, 72; artistic canon and, 62; artwork creation and, 59–60; identification in, 61 Gautier, Théophile, 77 Gibson, James J., 38; The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, xix, 36–37, 39; The Senses Considered as Perpetual Systems, xix, 36–37, 39 Goldstein, Jeffrey, 12–13 Goodman, Nelson, xvi Green, Mitchell, 83–85 Grice, H. P., 81, 83 Harmand, Sonia, 14 Harris, Daniel W., 84, 88 Heidigger, Martin, 16, 39; Being and Time, 40–42 hermeneutic relations, 43–45 Hilpinen, Risto, 30 historicity, of artworld, 68–69, 76–77, 87

106

Houkes, Wybo, 24, 27–30, 35, 49, 52–53 How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 78–81 human condition, 16–19 The Human Condition (Arendt), 16–19 Hume, David, 94; A Treatise of Human Nature, xi–xii hybrid definitions: of artworks, 58, 64; of science, 65–66 ideal interpretation, xv identification, of artworks, 61–62 Ihde, Don, xxii, 13, 15, 41–46; Experimental Phenomenology, 35–36; Technology and the Lifeworld, 36, 40, 91 illocution, 79–80, 83, 93 illocutionary force, artworks and, 87–89, 95 improper and irrational use, 51–52, 94 improper and rational use, 51–52, 94 institutionalism, 58, 63–64; artwork creation and, 60; identification in, 61–62; social character and, 59 institutional practices, 67–69; aesthetic functions and, xxii–xxiii, 72–75 intellectual changes, in society, 68 intention, xxii; action and, 1–2; affordances and, 49; of artists, xiv–xv, xxiii, 86; function, 30–31; locution and, 81; of makers, 2, 29–30, 49–50; perlocution and, 82; proper function and, 32–33; tool outcome and, 30–31; of users, 43 intentionalism, speech acts and, 81–83 interactions: with artworks, 92; with objects, 41–42; with tools, 45–46 interpretation, 46–47; of artworks, xii– xiii, xiv–xvii, 85–86 Iseminger, Gary, 58, 64 iteration, tool creation and, 13–15 judgments, of artworks, 93; aesthetic, 59–60, 73

Index

judgments, of tools, xv–xvi; affordances and, 49; normative, 24–25, 32–33, 51–53; of proper function, 51–53 justification, artworks and, 61–62, 65–67 Kiverstein, Julian, 47 knowledge, 48; production of, 66–67, 70; scientific, 64–67; tool use and, 46–47 Knowledge and Civilization (Allen), 15 Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 9–10 legitimation, technical codes and, 69–70, 72–74 Levinson, Gerrold, 57 Liao, Shen-yi, 86, 88 locution, 78–79, 81 Longino, Helen, xxiii, 65–67, 70–71; The Fate of Knowledge, xxii, 64; Science as Social Knowledge, xxii, 64 Longworth, Francis, 58, 64 make plans, 28, 31; affordances and, 50–51; expressivism and, 84–85; function and, 52; proper function and, 29–30 makers, 6–7; function and, 27–30; intention of, 2, 29–30, 49–50; users compared to, xxii, 31–32 Malafouris, Lambros, 13 Margolis, Joseph, xv–xvi McLaughlin, B. P., 12 meaning, xiv, 93; of artworks, xi–xiii, xvi–xvii, xx–xxi, 75–77, 80–81, 95; conventions and, 91–92; No object implies the existence of any other and, xi–xiii, xviii–xxi; speech acts and, 78–81. See also artwork-meaning; artworld-meaning; speaker-meaning means-end coherence, 29, 52–53 mediated relations, 45

Index

mediation, technological, 40–42 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39; The Phenomenology of Perception, 41, 43 The Metaphysics of Beauty (Zangwill), 59–61 middle class, art and, 68–69 Millikan, Ruth, 23–24, 27, 32 models, conceptual, 47–48 monism, 62, 65–66, 71–73; critical and uncritical, xiv–xvi, 86 Moore, Gordon E., 10–11 multistability, 35–36, 39; tools and, 40–42, 46, 50–51 My Bed (Emin), 57–58 The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Pye), 28–29 Neander, Karen, 27 Necker cube, 35–36 Nehamas, Alexander, xv New South Wales, Art Gallery of, xi– xii, xx–xxi, 87–88 niches, 15, 38, 46 non-artworks, art-ness of, 71 No object implies the existence of any other (Burn), xi–xiii, xviii–xxi, 72–73, 75, 87–88, 94 Norman, Don, The Design of Everyday Things, 38–39, 47–48 normative judgments, 24–25, 32–33, 51–53, 60; system function and, 26–27 norms: encoded, 7–9; epistemic, 65–67 objects: art-ness of, 57–58; ecosystem of, 3–4, 15–16; function and, xviii– xix, 22–23; human condition and, 18–19; interactions with, 41–42 opportunity cost, 44 outcomes: affordances and, xix–xx, 49; tools and, 1–2, 29 paradigms, technology and, 9–11

107

performances: of speech acts, 79–80; success or failure of, 2; superlative, 54 perlocution, 79–80, 82, 93 The Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 41, 43 philosophy, of aesthetics, xvii–xviii philosophy, of biology, 21–22; proper function and, 23–25; system function and, 25–27 philosophy, of engineering, 27–29 philosophy, of technology, xvii–xviii, 95; affordances of, xix–xx, 38–39; design spaces in, 3–7; emergent features in, 12–16; technical codes in, 7–12 physical properties, 11; of artworks, xx, 67, 72, 76; of tools, 10, 37–38, 40, 42–43 Physics (Aristotle), 2–3 plans, use and make, 27–30 plasticity. See multistability pluralism, 38, 40–41, 62; critical and uncritical, xiv–xvii, 86 Politics (Aristotle), 16–17 Pols, Auke, 25, 27, 51 postphenomenology, 39–42 prehistoric tools, 13–15, 18 Preston, Beth, 24, 26–27 production, 11, 28, 32; of artworks, 64, 67, 70–72, 82, 86; of knowledge, 66–67, 70 proper and irrational use, 51–52, 94 proper and rational use, 51–52, 94 proper function, 23–25, 31; affordances and, 50; intention and, 32–33; judgment of, 51–53; make plans and, 29–30; use plan and, 49–50; users and, 32–33 properties, physical, 11 proper use, of tools, 30–31, 35; action theory and, 28, 32–33; affordances and, 50 proper use plans, 31–32, 35

108

Index

public standards, 66; aesthetics and, 69–70; common criteria of adequacy and, 70–71 Pye, David, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, 28–29 quality: of artworks, xiv, xxii, 63; of tools, 54 quasi-others, 45, 68 rationalizers, 64–66 realization, 49–50; of artworkmeaning, 92–94 relational structures, xxii, 23–25, 32 relations, technical, 41 research trajectories, 10–11 Rietveld, Erik, 47 risk: success and failure and, 29; workmanship of, 28–29 Rosenberger, Robert, 36 Rothko, Mark, 86–87 scaffolding, 47–48, 94; of decisions, 3, 15–16; technical codes and, 87 Scarantino, Andrea, 58, 64 Science as Social Knowledge (Longino), xxii, 64 scientific knowledge, 64–67 selection conditions, 25–26 selection pressures, 8, 22, 72 The Senses Considered as Perpetual Systems (Gibson), xix, 36–37, 39 sentence-meaning, speaker-meaning and, 81–82, 85 Setiya, Kieran, 1 Shiner, Larry, 68 signifiers, 47–48 social character, 65; criteria and, 63; institutionalism and, 59; of knowledge production, 66–67 society, changes in, 68 sociological changes, in society, 68 sociologizers, 64–66 Sottsass, Ettore, 45

speaker-meaning, 83–84; sentencemeaning and, 81–82, 85 speech acts, 78–79; artworks and, 80–85; expressivism and, 83–85; intentionalism and, 81–83 structured attention, xxi, 92–93, 95 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 9–10 structures, relational, xxii, 23–25, 32 success, 24–25; of performances, 2; risk and, 29 superlative tools, 53–55 supervenience, of tools, 4–5, 12–13 symbiosis, of tools, 54 system function: philosophy of biology and, 25–27; use and, 25–26 technical codes, 7, 10; of artworks, xxii, 75–77; of artworld, 67, 75–77, 87–88, 91–93, 95; coherence and, 52–53; legitimation and, 69–70, 72–74; scaffolding and, 87; tools and, 8–9, 11–12 technical relations, 41; alterity, 45–46, 91; background, 46; embodiment, 42–43; hermeneutic, 43–45; mediated and unmediated, 45 technological mediation, 40–42 technology: paradigms and, 9–11; philosophy of, xvii–xviii, 95; users and, 41–42 Technology and the Lifeworld (Ihde), 36, 40, 91 telos, 2–3, 16–17 tempered equality, 66 tool affordances, 14, 46, 48, 52, 54–55; action and, 39, 49; biological affordances compared to, 39, 42; embodiment relations and, 43 tool creation, 3, 9–10, 31; iteration and, 13–15 tool function, 77; tool use and, 48–49 tool outcome, 1–2, 29; intentions and, 30–31

Index

tools, xxi, 1–3, 19, 23; artworks as, xviii–xix, 76; change and, 12–14, 52–54; defective, 32, 50–51; design spaces and, 5–7; emergence of, 12–16; function and, xxii, 27–30, 77; hermeneutic relations and, 43–44; interactions with, 45–46; judgments of, xv–xvi; multistability and, 40–42, 46, 50–51; physical properties of, 10, 37–38, 40, 42–43; prehistoric, 13–15, 18; proper use of, 30–31, 35; superlative, 53–55; supervenience of, 4–5, 12–13; technical codes and, 8–9, 11–12; users and, 26, 28 tool use, 24–25; function and, 48–49; knowledge and, 46–47; multistability and, 35–36; proper, 30–31, 35 trajectories, research, 10–11 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), xi–xii uncritical monism, xiv uncritical pluralism, xiv–xv, 86 unmediated relations, 45

109

upward causation, 5, 13; affordances and, 53–55 use: of affordances, 48–53, 93–94; system function and, 25–26; of tools, 24–25 use plans, 27–30; affordances and, 49–50; proper, 31–32, 35 users: intention of, 43; makers compared to, xxii, 31–32; proper function and, 32–33; technology and, 41–42; tools and, 26, 28 utility, aesthetics and, 69 venues, 66, 70, 88, 91 Verbeek, Peter-Paul, 42 Vermaas, Pieter, 24 Warhol, Andy, Brillo Box, 57–58, 60, 76–77 workmanship of certainty, 28–29 workmanship of risk, 28–29 Wright, Larry, 22–23, 25 Zangwill, Nick, 59–61

About the Author

Ryan Wittingslow is an associate professor at the University of Groningen, a Humboldt research fellow at TU Darmstadt, and a research affiliate of the University of Sydney. Most of his research sits at the meeting ground between aesthetics, philosophy of design, philosophy of technology, and political philosophy. He also, as this book suggests, has devastating opinions about art.

111