The Reading Experience

New Critical Compilation

Preface

            The following essays do not make a sustained argument on behalf of the efficacy of an approach to literature and literary criticism I am calling “literary pragmatism.” They do attempt to show how such an approach can be grounded in the aesthetic philosophy propounded by John Dewey and can be developed in a more particular way by focusing specifically on literature than Dewey’s own synoptic focus on all the manifestations of art in Art as Experience allows. Perhaps this entails taking the pragmatic view of art in a different direction than Dewey himself might  have done, or questioning the views expressed by others influenced by Dewey, but I believe that my explication of a pragmatic form of criticism remains true to the underlying principle Dewey wanted to advance—that art is indeed a singular human activity, valuable for its own sake beyond the multifarious uses to which it might be put, but that its value is to be found not in the particularity of the art object—its tangible “beauty”—but in the existential event of expanded consciousness by which the work of art makes itself known.

            The first section, “John Dewey and Literary Criticism” explicates Dewey’s theory of art at length, more or less chapter by chapter. Here I am less interested in subsuming Dewey’s book to the selectivity and shapeliness of a critical essay and more concerned to elucidate the progression of Dewey’s thinking on a granular level. In this section I also attempt to show how a pragmatic conception of criticism might function as a corrective to some of the less tenable assumptions of New Criticism.

            “Dewey’s Disciples” focuses on perhaps the two most important exponents of Dewey’s thought, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish—in Rorty’s case, surely the most important philosopher to adopt (and extend) Dewey’s conception of pragmatism in the post-World War II era, while Fish formulated probably the most significant critical approach drawing on Dewey’s emphasis on the role of reader/audience in the acts of perception and interpretation—his famous “reader response” theory. In the Rorty essay, I take some exception to his somewhat superficial dismissal of “aestheticism” as it applies to the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

            In “Pragmatic Applications,” I attempt to pull away even more fully from a purely explicative approach to the particulars of Art as Experience in exploring some of the implications of thinking about literature from a pragmatic perspective, first as literature might provide a beneficial model for thinking about politics (“Liberalism and Literature”) and then in a critique of what I find to be seriously deficient thinking about literature by Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate. In a third essay on Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature, I discuss Attridge’s experience-based approach to teaching and reading literature in all of its “singularity” as a phenomenon of consciousness, but ultimately as well attempt to reconcile this singular raw experience as Attridge evokes it with the needs of literary criticism to describe and analyze a work of literature as an “object.”

            The final essay is a response to Mary Jane Jacob’s book, Dewey for Artists, published in 2018. I have used the essay (not quite a review) to both recapitulate the core principles of Dewey’s philosophy of art as delineated in the first section and to address the misperceptions specifically of Art as Experience that I feel a book like Jacob’s could encourage. Dewey for Artists is assuredly a well-intentioned book, but its exposition of Dewey’s concept of “aesthetic experience” falls short of capturing what he really means by “aesthetic.”

            Most of these essays originally appeared on my literary blog, The Reading Experience, or as articles/reviews in other publications. They are the product of my own integrated thinking about the application of pragmatism as manifested in Art as Experience to literature and literary criticism, but they, and the collection as a whole, do not possess the sort of structural rigor associated with academic criticism. Probably the content expressed in the essays would be similar if I were still an academic critic, but the presentation is necessarily more various.

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The Experience of Experience Itself

In her book, Dewey for Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Mary Jane Jacob admirably attempts to explicate the philosophy of John Dewey--not just Art as Experience--as a useful guide for artists (and also curators and art teachers) in considering the implications of their own practices, as well as the social and cultural role of art in a democratic society. The book effectively explicates the main ideas of Art as Experience  and also provides a generally reliable (if brief) synoptic survey of Dewey's thought as a whole. However, in correctly emphasizing Dewey's abiding commitment to democracy, both political and cultural, and his equally abiding dedication to upholding human rights and achieving social justice, Jacobs misrepresents Dewey's conception of "aesthetic experience" and leaves the misleading impression that Dewey believed art was most beneficial as an aid in effecting social and political change.

Jacobs appropriately devotes her first two chapters to "Making" and "Experiencing," Dewey's twinned activities that when bound together through an act of perception is the realization of art. Jacobs is right to emphasize the extent to which Dewey wanted to challenge then-standing distinctions between "high" and "practical" art, which he did by defining "art" not as the product of certain long-established forms but as a process. In the maker's case, the process is one of heightened care for the very act of making, a fully engaged attention to the act in and for itself--any human creation most immediately carried out not to accomplish a utilitarian purpose but to validate its own creative integrity (by, in Dewey's terms, becoming an "integrated" experience) can be regarded as art. Activities that might have been considered merely "artisinal" rather than "artistic" can be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities (as long as the artisan was him/herself preoccupied first of all by aesthetic quality) just as readily as the greatest masterpieces of traditional art history. There are still differences between these kinds of artistic practice, but one of Dewey's ambitions in Art as Experience is to establish that the making of art is not confined to the chosen few but is something that is available to all, in whatever medium they might work.

To this extent, the "democratization" of art is certainly one of Dewey's aspirations as expressed in his writing about the aesthetic, but it is a misreading of Art as Experience to maintain that "democracy" in art entails that all artistic activity is inherently equal simply because it is available to everyone. Effort and attention are required in both the making and experiencing of art, and rendering each of these in the way that Dewey prescribes is an exacting task that some people are not willing to undertake. Dewey indeed believed the satisfactions of creativity and aesthetic experience were widely attainable human aspirations, and that existing social arrangements too often impeded their fulfillment, but even if those arrangements were altered (something Dewey tried diligently to effect in both his public activism and his other writing), obstacles to the creation and the vibrant reception of art might remain.

These obstacles would arise from individual human imperfections, not from social constraints. When every citizen is finally free to cultivate whatever kind of artistic inclination he/she might possess (or perhaps acquire), some will succeed less readily than others. Some will not succeed at all, although not necessarily because of lack of the requisite "talent" as conventionally understood. "Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception," Dewey writes in Chapter 9 of Art as Experience ("The Common Substance of the Arts"), and here is the explanation of the potential for failure. By "sensitivity to a medium as a medium," Dewey does not mean some sort of exquisitely calibrated sense of "taste," but the ability to achieve something like a pure state of attention. Attention to "medium" entails not just appreciation of the particular raw material of the artist's chosen form but a kind of a radical attention in itself, a state of being rather than an artistic act per se.

There will always be failures of attention. On the artist's part, such failures could originate in cliched or rote execution, a lack of insight into the possibilities of the medium, but also in devoting disproportionate attention to the subject of the art work, the "message" or "statement" to be taken from it. Efforts to treat art as "communication" and "expression" can also misdirect the artist's interest, replacing concern for the "medium as a medium" with  the opportunity to "say" something or convey "inner feelings." Dewey would not deny that art can communicate or express, but these are done indirectly, as the secondary effects of "making," giving order to emotions and integrating message and means. In this way, the making of art, a general human capability, remains a rigorous act, or else it would not be the source of such profound value of the sort Dewey ascribes to it.

This value inheres in the experience of art as well, thus a focus on medium in and for itself is also a prerequisite for "esthetic perception." If the making of art requires diligent attention by the artist, so too does aesthetic experience if such experience is to redeem its full potential, both for aesthetic appreciation and for the consummation of experience itself. And, since for Dewey "art" takes on substance only in the meeting of a perceiving consciousness and the artist's effort as manifested in the work, art is, most immediately and unavoidably, an existentially particular phenomenon, an individual encounter not a social project. Indeed, Dewey describes it as an almost inescapably personal abandonment of inhibition: "I do not think it can be denied that an element of reverie, of approach to a state of dream, enters into the creation of art, nor that the experience of the work when it is intense often throws one into a similar state" (Art as Experience, Ch. 12).

An "intense" aesthetic experience is not something that suddenly happens but again, as in the making of art,  requires concerted concentration. Jane Jacob acknowledges the requisite effort involved in this process, noting that "Dewey was clear that perception involves hard work" and quoting his warning that "the one who is too lazy, idle, or indurated in convention to perform this work will not see or hear." Yet at times in Dewey for Artists she seems to deny Dewey's admonition in favor of a more comfortable appeal to "real life" as source of art's attraction, both for artist and perceiver. She takes Dewey's insistence that both the creation of art and the ability to appreciate are natural impulses continuous with other forms of human experience to mean that the practice of art should make explicit connections to the "everyday," as if "life experience" itself somehow needs to be made art's explicit subject, so that we don't forget that life and art are inseparable.

The work of art offered by the artist and our attentive experience of that work are continuous with "life" simply because they proceed from the activity of what Dewey calls a "living creature"--a human being. When Dewey maintains that art and life are not separate, he is trying to extricate art from the ossified carapace  of its "classic status" that has accumulated over time and to return it to "the human conditions under which it was brought into being" and "the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience" (Art as Experience, p.1). I think Dewey would have it that all art is connected to the "everyday" as long as it is an honest response by the artist to his/her experience of the world that is transformed through the "ordering" the artist provides. There is always "a direct transmission of experience at an aesthetic level" in  successful art, notwithstanding that Jacob seems to think this is some special accomplishment of what she calls "social practice art." What else would the artist be transmitting?

According to Jacob, Dewey is urging us to accept that "When we have an aesthetic experience, we experience the world in a revitalized way," but it is difficult to know whether she is saying that after an aesthetic experience we are more open to heightened experience in general (which certainly could happen), whether during the aesthetic experience we are somehow encountering "the world" as depicted in the work of art, or whether she is speaking not of art at all but of the aesthetic response we can have to elements of the "real" world. Since she makes this statement while discussing "socially engaged art" that "goes directly to the source--to life itself--drawing out the aesthetic experiences that the everyday affords and bringing life for a time into the frame of art," it is likely the second, but the assertions she is making verge on incoherence: Why go to everyday life for its sort of "aesthetic experiences" that are then reproduced in a work of art? Why is the art needed if life itself has already provided the experience? And what can it mean that the socially engaged artist "goes directly to the source--to life itself?" Where are all the other artists going for subjects or inspiration? Somewhere other than life?

One of the examples of this socially engaged art that Jacob cites is Future Library, by Katie Paterson, an installation employing "a forest of spruce trees and library of books." This work "is not an avant-garde gesture but. . .a reinvestment in the world around us through art. . .The duration required to grow a forest suggests it is worth investing in the future, expressing the hope that humanity will survive another hundred years and more. . . ." Everything about Jacob's description here suggests that this art work is making a political statement, that it exists in order to advance that statement, not to offer an aesthetic experience of the kind Dewey describes in Art as Experience.  One could very well agree with the statement, even find the installation itself inspiring, but also consider it to be something other than art, unless it does in fact invite the viewer to consider it first only as a work of art--at which point its status as "a reinvestment in the world around us" becomes irrelevant. If instead a work's primary ambition is to "express the hope" that we make such a reinvestment, it is not in that aspiration functioning as art.

Nothing in my reading of Art as Experience suggests to me that Dewey thought the goal of art is to "revitalize" or "invest" in the world, or to "express hope" (or despair). These are all gestures, pronouncements made by the artist through the art but seem to have little room for the perceiving consciousness that must complete the process by which art comes to be. It certainly might happen that an ancillary effect of the experience of a work of art would be to further think about the work's subject or theme, even to be energized by a presumed "message." But if these are the only felt effects, then the point of art has been lost. Although Jacob goes beyond "making" and "experiencing" as topics in Dewey for Artists, providing a rather wide-ranging (especially for a fairly short book) discussion of Dewey's thought as she believes it might apply to art practice and curation, these are the crucial concepts underlying his theory of art as articulated in Art as Experience, his most thorough and most essential inquiry into the subject. In my view, Jacob distorts this book's careful delineation of the nature of aesthetic experience by overemphasizing John Dewey's concern with social context and underemphasizes his recognition that art is first a phenomenon of human awareness that can become aesthetic only when the social drops away in the experience of experience itself.

Going Where There's No Intepretation

Sebastian Smee is quite right that the recent cancellation of a Philip Guston exhibition is an act of abject cowardice on the part of the four museum directors responsible for it. Apparently, a cultural institution's "responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment" (as the museum directors put it in their joint statement) is to protect people from art that might offend or disturb. Most likely, the cancellation actually represents the directors' attempt to protect themselves from even the possibility of controversy, controversy that exposes them to the pitchforks of the social media mob.

Smee is certainly correct that the directors' assertion that the Guston exhibition should wait until "his work can be more clearly interpreted” betrays an assumption that is "utterly antithetical to what art is about," but I think that such a demand is not really so much for "clear" interpretation as it is for no interpretation. If a work of art has been "clearly" interpreted, its "meaning" has been fully assimilated, presumably because it was always obvious. The work was not intended to be interpreted--it offers no resistance to understanding and communicates its purpose (usually an easily discernible "message") quite directly and transparently. The artist speaks, the audience listens.

We appear to be quite rapidly becoming a culture that wants its art delivered in this way. The act of interpretation, it would seem, is too likely to lead to messy areas of ambivalence and ambiguity. Interpretation means the work's significance requires the participation of viewers (or readers or listeners) to be deduced, and they might differ about it, both among themselves and with the artist. Better to go with "clarity." But if there is no interpretation, there is no art, only declarations, decrees, and lectures. Yet this seems to be the order of the day.

Artists are actually very poor choices to act as founts of wisdom and virtue. Historically speaking, only the most benighted or deluded have claimed to be sages (and usually they're very poor artists, anyway). Artists can be plenty self-absorbed, but that's because they're preoccupied with the materials of their art, of shaping those materials so as to realize a vision of what the form of art they practice can be made to do. This sort of preoccupation can make artists seem disconnected from ordinary concerns (which they often are), but this is the price to be paid for the attention that must be given to making art that is true to that vision. It is not a particularly expedient place from which to make pronouncements about how to live or what to believe.

I have little doubt that Philip Guston fits this profile quite readily. Certainly the intensity of focus on the structure of painting itself is reflected in the major shifts or phases in his career, from the early social realism to the abstraction of his middle phase (for which he initially became well known ) to the final return to something like figuration (though surreal and fragmented). Paradoxically, his paintings in the first and third phases frequently incorporate images that can be taken as forms of political commentary (satirical, anti-racist, and generally anti-establishment) of the sort that ought to be welcome to the progressive contingent that the directors seem most concerned about, but it is these very images that have driven the museum directors to terminate the exhibition (at least for now). Perhaps Guston's own contention that "painting is 'impure,'" that "It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity" helps account for the disquiet Guston's work has caused these directors. Guston's use of these impudent images still needs to be interpreted: their impurities provoke, but they don't explain.

In his statement of support for the museum directors' action, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker asserted that "the context in the US has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racial imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it." Apparently Walker doesn't agree with the museum directors that Guston's work is too ambiguous. He has determined that it is "incendiary and toxic," a pretty clear interpretation. Perhaps it is incendiary, since it irritated both those who thought it had become too obviously political (Robert Hughes, among others) and now those who think it isn't political in exactly the right way. But if it is "toxic," it is for reasons that have little to do with the paintings themselves. It should be the purpose of a museum exhibition to make this point clear, to help viewers to, indeed, interpret complex works of art more fruitfully. Museums should not just abandon interpretation altogether.