The Vanishing Frame began as an attempt to understand the origins and consequences of a postdictatorial reality that was emerging in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, one that centered on the commitment to human rights as the primary position through which the Left articulated the concept of injustice and how to confront it.1 This political reality was as much a consequence of the state that inflicted abuses on its citizens as it was the upshot of international solidarity movements that sought to address and bear witness to these abuses. Before the dictatorships of the 1970s, human rights held little, if any, political prominence in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and had almost no relevance for the political movements that fought against the state. After the return to democracy, however, human rights, with the emphasis on the integrity of the body, past abuses, and truth and justice, became the primary conceptual framework through which to view the past and to think progressive politics in the present. Or at least this was the case for the Left that aimed at creating a more stable and just democracy through a discourse of memory, which elevated questions of remembering or forgetting past violence (torture, disappearances) to a principal concern. What was less important to this nascent worldview (and seems almost beside the point now) was the ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism that preceded the dictatorships, which unlike human rights, precipitated the years of state-sponsored terror. As such, we can begin to see that the call to remember past violence also tends to forget, even push aside, the anti-capitalist project that was at the heart of Leftist politics before and during the dictatorships. In other words, the fundamental disagreement between two political ideologies (and two distinct ways of imagining how society might best be organized) was now redescribed as a conflict between remembering and forgetting human rights violations, a conflict that is, as I argue in the book, deeply compatible with neoliberalism. Consequently, in the postdictatorial period, while the Left strongly (and justifiably) quarreled with the Right regarding issues about past abuses, the same could not always be said about economic policies, as the Left—at first apprehensively and then later devotedly—embraced the free market. Human rights provided the Left a position of difference while sharing with the Right the economic ideology that they once fought against. To be sure, the Left’s electoral victories in the early 2000s—what is often described as the Pink Tide—were attempts to address a legacy of human rights violations as well as to correct some of neoliberalism’s most pernicious consequences. Further, it is equally true that today, with the resurgence of the Right across Latin America, this Leftist project is under threat. Nevertheless, to grasp clearly this moment, it is essential to understand the foundational role that human rights have played in solidifying neoliberal hegemony in Latin America. From this vantage point, the rise of the Left in the 2000s becomes the moment when the postdictatorial era comes into full view as the consolidation of the neoliberal world order via human rights.

Latin Americanist cultural criticism has, for the most part, been no less enthusiastic in its celebration of this new world. To be sure, much of the scholarship on the legacy of the dictatorships, with its focus on trauma, memory, affect, and disability, understands itself as working for human rights activism and against neoliberalism. More specifically, the emphasis on trauma, memory, affect, and disability sees a blurring of the lines between art and politics as a means to advocate for human rights and to resist neoliberalism. Consider the discourse of memory, which, as I just noted,promotes a political message that remembers the pain of the victim while forgetting the anti-capitalist project to which the victim was committed. For postdictatorial scholarship, this largely becomes a question of how a text, a film, or a painting must function as an object of transmission rather than as an object of interpretation in order to guarantee this political purpose. If a work functions less as an object of interpretation and more like an object that transmits pain—that is, less like a representation of torture, and more like the very act of torture itself—then the pain of the victim could be shared with the reader. Or more strategically, the viewer could be transformed into a sort of witness to these events. Like memory, theoretical positions committed to the relevance of trauma, affect, and disability have served as mechanisms to sidestep and even disavow questions of interpretation, with an eye to creating a kind of immediacy between that event and the reader or viewer. Of course, unlike the events we witness, questions of interpretation require disagreements—or even agreements—over what the text means; and thus by turning art into an object of transmission those interpretations are now understood as effects that render disagreements about what the text means impossible. In this way, we can begin to see a politics developing in the postdictatorial period where treating art as a series of effects becomes aligned with a Leftist project, while questions about art are envisioned as a way of ignoring that project. Or worse still, questions about intention, interpretation, disagreements, and representation—which is to say questions raised by the work of art—come to be regarded as actively working against any kind of solidarity with the victims of Latin America’s dictatorships.

But once we begin to treat artwork as, above all, an occasion for an experience, we also can immediately see the value that this approach has to neoliberalism, which is fundamentally committed to thinking about aesthetic and political disagreements as differences between perspectives (or “the group that binds”). And the point of treating these issues as differences rather than as disagreements, as Walter Benn Michaels argues, is that it allows us not to think of neoliberalism as a problem but rather as a kind of solution.3 In the case of the Southern Cone, it becomes a solution because the military regimes of the 1970s believed that socialism was a threat to capitalism. As we recall, in the period that precipitated the dictatorships, the fundamental ideological conflict centered on a disagreement between socialism and capitalism, and more specifically, at least for those on the Left, around the question of economic equality. For revolutionary groups like MLN-Tupamaros in Uruguay or the Montoneros in Argentina, what was wrong with capitalism, among other things, was that it was a system of exploitation that produced poverty, and what was right about socialism was that it sought to eradicate that system. But today poverty in Latin America has become a question of treatment, respect, and dignity, which of course is also framed within a colonial legacy of racism against indigenous peoples, mestizos, and blacks. The whole point here is that once you treat the poor as another group that is discriminated against for who they are, you no longer have to think about poverty as a system of exploitation. In fact, you don’t have to think about poverty as something that is right or wrong, but rather as a difference to be valued and even celebrated, if we could only stop discriminating. For the Tupamaros or Montoneros, however, the problem was not that we discriminated against the poor but rather that the poor existed; that is, the problem was with the capitalist system of exploitation the produced poverty. The idea is not that you have to be a revolutionary to want to get rid of economic inequality, but you do have to at least think that economic inequality is wrong. And if you believe it’s wrong, you believe it’s wrong not just for some but for everybody. But once poverty is treated as a difference of perspective, then resolving the problem of poverty involves not getting rid of it, but rather shifting our perspectives so that the poor can continue to be poor but with dignity and respect. The perception of the poor changes, but capitalism remains untouched. The redescription of disagreements as differences thus becomes a means not to challenge this system of exploitation, but to keep it firmly in place. But my argument is not that a commitment to aesthetics can eliminate poverty. Aesthetic questions (e.g., what does the text mean?) are of a different order, even though I might disagree with your interpretation of a text in much the same way as I might disagree with your beliefs about capitalism. The point here, instead, is that the desire to treat art as nonart ends up eliminating any possibility of disagreement (or even agreement) and, in doing so, any possibility of thinking beyond neoliberalism. Thus, if part of my argument is meant to show that art and nonart are not the same, the other part is to insist that thinking they are marks a further entrenchment of neoliberalism. Which is just to say that the attempt to blur the lines between art and nonart—the attempt to redescribe disagreements into differences between perspectives or subject positions—ultimately confirms a vision—at least for the Left—where problems are viewed primarily through the lens of human rights, and possible solutions to those problems are resolved within neoliberalism’s marketplace of ideas.

This summary serves as a point of entry to address some of González’s criticisms of my book. In his review, González argues that to apply the term “postdictatorial period” to the entire Latin American region runs the risk of “flattening” complex national histories of countries like Colombia and Guatemala, which are different from Southern Cone countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. As suggested above, I present the term “postdictatorial” in two ways in the book. First, postdictatorial characterizes the historical events (and specific chronology) and the cultural production of the Southern Cone, from the end of the dictatorships to the rise of the Pink Tide. Second, postdictatorial describes how Latin Americanism (including in the Southern Cone) has been bound up conceptually and ideologically in the idea of human rights and neoliberalism, roughly during that same time period. My readings of Botero’s Abu Ghraib and Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio are largely positioned within and against this broader discourse. Thus, while it is certainly true that the histories of Colombia and Guatemala are different from those of the Southern Cone (and from each other), the discourses of human rights in relation to the question of how we perceive and approach Latin America are not. Surely, another term could be used to name this broader discourse, but the term “postdictatorship” does have the advantage of offering something like a regional genealogy of human rights and neoliberalism, one that begins in the Southern Cone in the 1970s, and that almost immediately extends to the rest of the region. But this only means that a change in terminology would not have made a fundamental difference in my reading of Botero’s Abu Ghraib as a work that rejects the moral universe of neoliberalism.

Admittedly, for González, my terminology is a minor criticism. Nevertheless, I hope that my explanation above helps to better frame some of the other questions and concerns that are raised in his review, particularly with regard to what he describes as the “crucial second part of the book.” González begins his review with a reading of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which gets to the heart of this second part where I consider the work of more contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists including Roberto Bolaño, Pablo Larraín, and Alejandro Zambra, whose interests in aesthetic autonomy emerge in a period where neoliberalism is fully consolidated, and whose individual works understand that the real aim of the dictatorship was to organize every aspect of society according to the dictates of the free market. These are the main reasons why the interest in aesthetic autonomy (as well as in intention, interpretation, disagreements, and representation) for these artists becomes less a response to the moral universe of neoliberalism than a direct criticism of the market. As González reminds us, Borges’s story concludes with the fictional narrator noting that Tlön will soon subsume everything, but that he “pay[s] no attention” as he works on a literary translation which he has no intention of publishing. The anachronistic 1947 postscript of the short story (part of the original short story published in 1940) includes a comment about “dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, and Nazism;”4 and thus, for González, the narrator’s claim to autonomy is read as a critique of those artists who, like the narrator, turn a blind eye to totalitarianism. This allows González to draw a parallel between the worldview of Borges’s narrator and my reading of Zambra’s Bonsái, which is more concerned with aesthetic matters than with political (the dictatorship) or economic ones (appeasing the desires of the consumer). And yet, according to González, unlike Borges’s 1930s critique of Nazism in “Tlön” or his later praise for Francisco Franco’s or Jorge Rafael Videla’s Fascism, I argue that the claim to autonomy in Zambra’s text serves as a rejection of neoliberal orthodoxy. Citing the ways in which autonomy has been used for different political ends, González writes, “The problem perhaps lies in that the concept of autonomy can be used to defend diametrically opposed political ideologies.” This gives rise to a crucial question: What is the relationship between an artwork’s claim to autonomy and politics? It also raises two other questions, which are not explicitly González’s, but are nonetheless related: Why should we defend autonomy when it isn’t exactly a politics? And why should we defend autonomy today if it can’t defend our politics?

Although Borges does not factor significantly in my book, González is correct to suggest that the Argentine writer does offer us a productive way of thinking through these questions. As is well known, Borges’s politics changed over time, but his conception of fiction as an autonomous space mostly did not. This conception of autonomy clashed with that of many scholars, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, who believed that Latin American literature needed to be politically engaged. In a more recent moment, marked by the consolidation of neoliberalism (which authoritarian rule forcefully ushered in) and the commodification of art, for many on the cultural Left the suspicion about aesthetic autonomy has only intensified. But if autonomy has been increasingly viewed with suspicion, the emphasis on readerly experience is understood as a form of resistance to neoliberalism. This emphasis is valued because it highlights a form of agency that could be read as directed against the supremacy of the market. Yet, what looks like a resistance to the market turns out, under closer investigation, to be a kind of endorsement of it. As Nicholas Brown correctly points out, for capitalism, the crucial thing about the commodity is not whether it is being used for any purpose the seller may have intended for it. If the seller intends to make a chair to be sat on and the consumer instead decides to hang it on the wall or put it in the shed, this is not necessarily a problem for the market, which is concerned more with the commodity being bought and sold. The consumer’s desires and interests trump whatever the seller’s intentions are. To imagine that the consumer is wrong for hanging the chair on the wall is to fail to understand that there is no right or wrong for the market. Whatever the consumer thinks or does with the object, from the perspective of the market, is his business.5 But put in these terms it’s not difficult to see how this commitment to readerly experience, while not exactly following the activist logic outlined above—insofar as the reader is no longer understood as a kind of witness—ends up in almost exactly the same place by redescribing disagreement (right or wrong interpretations) about what the text means into difference. It is only slightly different insofar as it presents a clearer vision of where the commitment to difference without disagreements gets you, which is right back to the consumer and the supremacy of the market. On this account, the primacy of the reader looks less like a critique of the market than the market’s version of how to do literary theory, where the multiplicity of meanings and indeterminacy of interpretations gives rise to endless opportunities for the reader/activist/consumer to determine what the object is. From this position, Zambra’s metafictional narrative, which insists on an autonomous aesthetic space by remaining indifferent to the reader/activist/consumer’s desires, seems less like an escape from politics than a direct confrontation with politics, or at least an attempt to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy. In other words, the assertion of aesthetic form in Zambra’s text—which requires disagreements about what the text’s means—begins to look less like Borges’s critique of Nazism than an opportunity to think beyond neoliberalism.

This last point hinges on a central claim of my book, that autonomy is never a turn away from politics but rather marks the very substance of politics within art. It is interesting to note that the ending of Borges’s “Tlön” affirms precisely this point. As suggested, Tlön could be read as a metaphor for the Nazis. But what about the narrator when he declares, “I pay no attention to all this?” It would be right to say that this too can be read, as González does, as a critique of those who turn a blind eye to totalitarian systems of rule. But much more striking, I think, about the statement “I pay no attention to all this” is that it serves ultimately to thematize what we might call a politics of autonomy. But how does this work? One must first consider that it is not as if the narrator is not paying attention at all; instead he is paying attention to the work of art. The narrator is treating the object at hand as something that demands a form of attention that we would describe as aesthetic. Here, Borges’s text offers what appears to be a contradiction about paying attention to the work of art. On one hand, that the fictional narrator pays attention to the work of art is understood as a criticism of those who turn away from political concerns. On the other hand, for us as readers, paying attention to the work of art is how we interpret its political meaning (e.g., “Tlön” is a cautionary tale about those who turn a blind eye to totalitarianism). Aesthetic judgement, in the first instance, is considered problematic, in the second, it is understood as a necessity. Yet, this contradiction vanishes once we recognize that Borges’s text is most interested in demonstrating not only that art and politics work at different levels, but also and more importantly, that the meaning of “Tlön” (again, González’s reading, but not just his) can only be obtained by insisting on its status as a work of art. This insistence, however, does not mean a prohibition against a political reading of “Tlön” as a critique of Nazism would be utterly unrecognizable if we didn’t consider events that were happening in Europe in the 1930s. The point is instead that it is under close scrutiny of the work of art that this interpretation becomes available. Which is just to say that for us as readers, paying attention to the work of art is not a turn away from the political, but rather that which makes a political interpretation of the text possible in the first place. Thus in “Tlön” the fictional narrator, by paying attention to the work of art, also points to its very requirement for aesthetic judgement, which, in turn, does not deny but rather allows for us as readers to produce this political reading. “Tlön,” in other words, thematizes a claim to autonomy, revealing that aesthetic judgment is not the negation of the political but rather one way of making the political legible within the work of art.

This does not mean that the work of art is interchangeable with politics, much less with political organization and mobilization. As we also recall, “Tlön” ends precisely with the elimination of the barrier between the fictional and the real, so that the two become indistinguishable. It would be wrong, however, to think from this narrative reduction that we, as readers and critics, can physically enter into the text to stop Tlön’s invasion; it would also be wrong to think that we could enter “Tlön” to stop a Nazi takeover. It is wrong not because our interpretation of the text does not make us worry or feel concerned about an impending Nazi invasion. Nor is it because the text cannot teach, inspire, or even persuade us to mobilize against this invasion. It is wrong because the work of art, as a mediated object, requires that these feelings and ideas be understood as an upshot of our interpretations of the text’s meaning. Put in this way, we can also understand why aesthetic judgment could be understood as a barrier to political organization and mobilization. Aesthetic judgment requires that we turn toward a text in order to interpret it, while political organization and mobilization do not. For this reason, it is quite understandable (even necessary) to think—especially as we witness mass uprisings in the United States and across the globe—of aesthetic judgment as distinct from political organization and mobilization. Nevertheless, it should be noted that critical approaches to art that aim at blurring the lines between art and politics do not bring us any closer to political organization and mobilization, either. In many ways, insofar as these approaches insist on the dedifferentiation between art and politics, they offer a built-in defense against organizing and mobilizing, since reading now becomes political in the same way. The claim to autonomy, instead, makes evident the limitations of theory and criticism. But if autonomy (and heteronomy) can never replace real political organization and mobilization, there is nothing about the politics of autonomy that stops us from getting out and mobilizing.

I do not want to suggest here that autonomy is intrinsically on the left or the right of the political spectrum. Nor do I mean to imply that Borges’s “Tlön” is actually critiquing neoliberalism. In fact, the claim to autonomy as a critique of neoliberalism in Zambra’s Bonsái or Bolaño’s Estrella distante would be somewhat unrecognizable to Borges. This brings us to the question of why the claim to autonomy now counts as a critique of neoliberalism. Perhaps the answer begins to emerge if we ask another question: Does my account of autonomy not simply reaffirm the rather banal notion that it is through art that we come to understand the world and perhaps imagine alternatives to it? There are only a few truths about art that seem more commonplace than this; unless, of course, one is committed to the idea that the statement is not at all true, but false or at least misplaced. Indeed, the dominant political discourse in Latin Americanism is the notion that the work of art is reducible to a politics, to a commodity, or it is compromised or impure. But this dominant discourse, as I have suggested, ends up endorsing rather than critiquing neoliberal orthodoxy. But it is precisely because neoliberal orthodoxy demands this worldview that claims to autonomy become especially important to defend in Latin Americanism today. To this point, I would like to return to the statement that González presents in his review that “The problem perhaps lies in the fact that the concept of autonomy can be used to defend diametrically opposed political ideologies.” If I understand his use of the word “problem” correctly, it is not necessarily that González subscribes to the dominant discourse within Latin Americanism, but rather that the “problem” is akin to that of the agnostic: I have not fully persuaded him that autonomy has any relevance for Leftist criticism in the contemporary moment. This, I believe, is also connected to another limitation that González raises about how the book leaves out a rich history of Marxist criticism. I agree with González that including more criticism might have strengthened the historical case for autonomy, making it more persuasive. I also recognize that dialoguing more with figures such as Lukács, Brecht, or Adorno would have helped better contextualize the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Adorno, in particular, would help elucidate how my claim to autonomy offers a political reading that was unavailable in the modernist period. Here it would be important to emphasize—and Brown’s recent book Autonomy makes this point quite convincingly—that Adorno’s defense of modernism (or even Borges’s commitment to autonomy and Puig’s critique of it) emerge in a period in which capitalism’s reach still had not become entirely universal. Today, however, capitalism has no other. Perhaps from this assumption, the very desire for the reduction between art and politics is understandable. Nonetheless, understanding literature as only political or as only a commodity like any other is not a rupture with the status quo, it is the status quo. Or to turn this around, the assertion of the aesthetic frame does not offer a possible challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy unless this orthodoxy already assumes that art is nothing other than the commodity. What this means is that we find ourselves in a period where claims to autonomy offer political possibilities that were unavailable to Adorno, Borges, and Puig.

It may seem that we are far from the human rights framework laid out above. But not really. If in the first moment the work is understood as an instrument that tortures you, in the second it is an instrument that is sold to you. While the first instance is certainly more violent and coercive than the second, the violence and coercion is no different in the desire for the work of art to be transformed into a series of effects directed at the subject. But if you are treating a text as if it were nothing more than a series of effects, then what are the ways that the text can challenge neoliberalism? There are none. Where does this leave Latin Americanism? If art is no longer understood as a space of disagreement, then criticism is no longer a space for alternatives. Instead, we are forced to accept the neoliberal world as it is given. And yet, there is still compelling art in spite of our desires, our politics, ourselves. And this truth is the first step to moving beyond the unfreedom of neoliberalism that generally holds sway over Latin American criticism today.

I would note, first, that Adams is not claiming that Piketty’s analysis is incorrect on its own terms.  Adams does not revise numbers or criticize the methodology behind Piketty’s description of inequality.  Rather, Adams feels that, like many who complain about growing inequality, Piketty offers inequality as “something to be chastised or exposed, not fought.”  This is why Adams describes Piketty’s work as (yet another) “theater of inequality”—because it offers an occasion for chastising and exposing, not for inciting action.  Not that Piketty considers policy improvements impossible.  He supports a global wealth tax, for instance.  But he does not say how the institutions that have fostered inequality (the “global governing class” of Adams’ analysis) will be made to reverse their apparent preferences and begin to take steps to decrease inequality, rather than continue to increase it.  This failure to specify how policies favoring the redistribution or wealth or income should reverse themselves is where Adams sees the absence of class politics in Piketty.

Somewhat surprisingly, though, Adams’ diagnosis does not yield a prescription for a more robust and class-conscious action.  Not precisely.  Rather, for a patient who suffers from a lack of class politics, the prescription is a dose of history.  According to Adams, mobilizing class politics depends on history:

Politics and policy tools are not synonymous, and the assertion of the latter without the former is effectually demobilizing.  The approach is both cause and condition of our political atrophy in the contemporary neoliberal moment.  It is also a condition, not unrelated to neoliberalism, of a debilitating antihistoricism in social and political thought.

What never quite gets explained, however, is how the antihistoricism and the political atrophy go together—how antihistoricism brings about and absolutely guarantees political atrophy.  Of course, in the passage I’ve cited, Adams doesn’t say that antihistoricism causes political atrophy.  But he implies it there and elsewhere.  Thus: “positing solutions and imagining that a global governing class will somehow institute them sans contentious and institutional class politics is politically debilitating and symptomatic of our cultural antihistoricism.”  And so on.

I have no desire to be taken to argue that we should embrace antihistoricism.  (Maybe we should, for all I know.  But I’m not in a position to argue that thesis.  That is why I insist that what I am doing here is asking a question, not refuting Adams.)  What I would like to ask is, how do past history and present action go together?

This is where E.P. Thompson enters the argument:

Let politics attempt to abstract the concepts from the practices, and build for them a home independently of these, and far removed from any dialogue with their object, and then we will have—the theatre of inequality.1

I will not attempt to summarize or even represent Thompson’s careful response to Louis Althusser (and Karl Popper, and a host of others).  And I’ll keep the italics, so as to underscore, as it were, that it is Adams’ use of Thompson with which I concern myself.  But I’ll permit myself to cite Thompson once or twice, too, to help set my question in relation to Adams’ argument and what I can understand of its background.  Anyway, I take this opening salvo to be a declaration of Adams’ principle: that experiences (in the form of practices, in this passage, but more generally, too) inform one’s politics and that one’s politics emerge from one’s interpretation of experience.  To attempt to isolate—or theorize—politics in isolation from experience is to enter a kind of idealist echo chamber within which theoretical assumptions merely underwrite theoretical conclusions.  (I take it that Thompson would agree, at least to this point.)

Writing, as he did, around the end of the interregnum of which Adams speaks, Thompson acknowledged the exceptional character of recent history and experience:

“Experience”—the experience of Fascism, Stalinism, racism, and of the contradictory phenomenon of working-class “affluence” within sectors of capitalist economies—is breaking in and demanding that we reconstruct our categories.  Once again we are witnessing “social being” determining “social consciousness,” as experience impinges and presses upon thought: but this time it is not bourgeois ideology but the “scientific” consciousness of Marxism which is breaking under the strain.

This is a time for reason to grit its teeth.  As the world changes, we must learn to change our language and our terms.  But we should never change these without reason. (“Poverty,” 25)

Experience—even, or especially, experience that challenges our deepest beliefs, our surest ideas—has to modify our arguments and our social consciousness.  “Fascism, Stalinism, racism, and […] the contradictory phenomenon of working-class ‘affluence’” all present challenges to the kind of social consciousness Thompson found himself inhabiting; his arguments would need to accommodate them.

But Adams, while acknowledging racism, the passing period of working-class affluence (the interregnum), and other embarrassing features of the history of good class politics (such as its coincidence with sexism, etc.), considers the basic rightness of class politics superior to those accidental features.  I’m completely sure he’s right about that.  However racist or sexist American society was during the interregnum, the success of organized labor during that period was a success.  And it should be a lesson to us now—and we can surely do things differently this time, without the racism and sexism, for instance.

With this totally salutary and right thought come some other issues, though.  Early on, Adams expresses some concern about the “replicability” of the United States’ mid-century triumphs (always understood as qualified along the lines Adams suggests with regard to racism, sexism, etc.).  Replicability notwithstanding, “understanding the historical logics and contingencies on which these successes were built is a task central to rebuilding a redistributive politics, one that can plausibly pull us out of the current morass.”  That is, we cannot repeat (the parts we like best of) the mid-century triumph, but we can learn from them.  And we can learn from them because we can separate certain contingencies (Fascism, Stalinism, racism, etc.) from principles (effectively organized labor counters inequality) that transcend the circumstances of a given historical example.  We might say that the principles are different from the contingencies because we can see causal mechanisms that unite them to desired outcomes, but that would be to permit “theory” to dictate to “experience,” to validate itself in the absence of historical experience.

Of course we think that way all the time.  Any imputation of causality does as much as that.  One does not need to replicate in every detail the last circumstance in which one drove a nail with a hammer in order to imagine how to drive a nail with a hammer.  But the trick is to figure out which elements of the situation need to be the same in order for the historical hammering to offer a useful model for the latest hammering project.  To say that theory must emerge from practice is to say that a sufficient history of hammering will tell you how to approach a given nail.

“Contingency” is, to simplify things considerably but not wrongly, a name for the limitations of that principle:

“history” affords no laboratory for experimental verification, it affords evidence of necessary causes but never (in my view) of sufficient causes, the “laws” (or, as I prefer it, logic or pressures) of social and economic process are continually being broken into by contingencies in ways which would invalidate any rule in the experimental sciences, and so on. (“Poverty,” 38)

Thompson does not leave the matter there, but I think we may.  If we take the notion of historical contingency seriously—as a way of limiting talk of the replicability of historical events or of naming the sufficient conditions of historical or projected outcomes—then we raise a serious question about the relevance of historical examples to present predicaments.  In short, when we look to the past (New Deal America, for instance) for an example, we bracket certain differences between our situation and that past situation (globalization, the information economy) and declare the separability of certain factors (racism, sexism) from our calculations, so that we can take other factors (an explicit politics of class, organized labor) in something close to isolation, as necessary (if never sufficient) causes of processes that are continually disrupted by historical contingency.

How do we decide what factors are wheat and what are circumstantial chaff?  Once we have, can we say that we are attending to history, or should we rather say that we are producing a carefully counterfactual story of our past history with the right features to motivate action in the present that suits our present sensibilities?  Or, to put the matter in terms of the question I want to ask, does history provide evidence of historical consciousness (as opposed to antihistoricism) as a necessary condition of class-driven politics?  This is the matter Adams assumes, and which I want to make explicit.  Is it not at least hypothetically possible that a fiction of history could motivate an effective class politics?  How correct does our historical interpretation (of, say, mid-century America) need to be to motivate a class politics?  If it needs to be true and accurate—which is to say, if it needs to be historical at all—then according to what principle are we permitted to carve out those features of that history (Fascism, Stalinism, racism, etc.) that we need to isolate from it in order to render it acceptable to our sensibilities now?

This is not to argue that the mid-century interregnum is not a useful model for future action.  I fully support the agenda Adams evidently proposes (organized labor and political action from within a class consciousness), but I want to ask, above all, where the authority—that principle of mobilization that turns calls to action into action—resides?  Steven Knapp has argued, in a different context, that historical accounts get mobilized, and selectively distorted, in order to provide an explanation for our situation, on one hand, and an analogy to mobilize us in the present—two purposes or functions that live in an obscure and shifting relation to one another.2 Is it in history itself, understood as the object of our inquiry, or is it in the present, in an interpretation of history that is made possible by and limited by our present ideas and ideals.  If it is the latter, then what is it about history, in its obdurate, factual mixture of the exemplary and the execrable, that is fit to guide us?  Would a finer fiction—or a set of internally coherent ideas—not do just as well?  How do history and action in the present go together?  How does history gain authority over us?

Notes

Dear Prof. Michaels and Prof. Olin,

I have read with interest your essays on Owen Kydd’s recent work, including the video Marina and the Yucca in which I appear. I’ve thought a great deal about your interpretations, about the work’s formal components, its framing devices, and most importantly, as Prof. Michaels states, its disinterest in my personality or interior life. Upon reflection I feel I may have some small contribution to make to the discussion. I have the benefit of having been part of the work’s creation, along with the gift of distance and time for consideration between that moment and now.

Owen asked me to pose for the video one day towards the end of our graduate program at UCLA. I was very hesitant – I’ve always been uncomfortable having my photo taken, so I’ve preferred to be behind the camera. During those last few months of school, I was taking portraits of male friends of mine. I showed them as comic relief from my thesis show and jokingly called the series “Beautiful Young Men,” but of course my friends really were all beautiful. I thought it would only be fair to assume the role of the model myself after having subjected my social circle to similar treatment—although my and Owen’s working processes are very different.

So that afternoon I took a break from what I was doing in the studio and told Owen I’d sit for him. He set up his tripod and camera, and I sat on the steps just outside my open door. It took a few takes to get the right shot. There were some technical issues with the lens—I think my sweater was too sharp in capture. And even though I thought I was sitting still I really wasn’t. When my eyes were closed my mind seemed to move even faster than when they are open. It took a while before I could force my mind to still my body. Nobody will ever know exactly what I was thinking in those minutes, I suppose that is what so much portraiture is really a container for. But I can tell you that in the time that Owen was recording me, in my head I gave forms to the abstractions that give order to the world. I thought very hard about the shapes of numbers. I drew their contours and filled them in and turned them over. I popped them up out of nowhere and added them up and kept recombining them. And this is what I sometimes think about before I fall asleep. So maybe I relaxed too much playing games with numbers. But to tell the truth, I’ve always been a bit of a slouch and I think it’s a cool look.

I am clearly not a professional model and have never been one, but I have friends who did it for a living when they were younger. I also worked alongside a fashion photographer when I had a job for a while as a black-and-white printer. He was a brilliant man, and in our long days in the dark he told me in detail about the workings of that world. Fashion models work very hard. They have to know their bodies on a deep technical level in relationship to a machine. They have to possess awareness of the full potentiality of their movements in relationship to every angle of sight of a lens, a range of technicians with differing abilities, a range of products with varying qualities, an endless complex of machinery. An actress has an even more difficult job, on top of all of this: to channel a fictional character, culled from a text, to draw up whatever empathy she is capable of and enact a situation she’s never experienced in her own life. And she must do this repeatedly until the camera captures the perfection of her emotional state. Photographing my friends I came to understand how different it must be to work with someone whose profession it is to be looked at. Though I’ve learned from living in LA that it’s really about the right casting.

I have heard Owen mention Warhol as an influence. To speak specifically about Warhol’s durational films, he left the camera running on his subjects for lengths of time far exceeding a regular film with little to no direction. In his screen tests he let his subjects act out their selves. Or take Warhol’s first film Sleep – that film was interesting because sleeping was such a rarity in those days – everyone was on amphetamines. Warhol writes that he thought sleep was becoming obsolete and hurried to film it. In the present day, I get more than a full night’s sleep, and most of the people I know do too. But I did read a recent psychological study stating that most people would rather inflict pain on themselves than be alone with their thoughts – so maybe being able to sit and think is now a rarity. However, Owen didn’t ask to record me in my natural state (I generally think with my eyes open), he gave me some specific directions.

What does it really mean now for there to be a picture out in the world of me with my eyes closed? Nobody will really know what I was thinking about that day. Does anyone really want to know what women in pictures are thinking about? Could the theoretical question of a work that shows someone thinking, an image of the outside of an alive person’s head, be “(Why) is there something in there instead of nothing?” What form does thought take since it cannot be deduced from staring at a brain?

I don’t expect a picture to reveal anything about my interior life. But here, since I’m not playing a character, I do wish it could reveal something of my outward engagement with the world, as proof that my thinking is not merely tautological. To use the force of a frame to extract a person from their world, symbolic or physical, is a violent act. If I act out my response lightly, it’s only because I’ve grown inured. I wish on screen I could look as alive as I usually am. But my eyes are closed, my body is out of focus and squeezed into a narrow frame, too narrow and with too little depth of field to be able to see into my studio. Instead of being pictured with the surrounding outward signs of what I do with my mind and how I make a living, I just look like a girl nodding off next to an exotic plant.

I keep trying to think about Owen’s video in the third person, but that kind of dissociation is impossible here. Prof. Michaels states that the work’s autonomy reminds us that we indeed live in a society based on class. But the work’s particular framing devices do not separate it from the outside world, they reinforce those workings in how the viewer is made to behave when facing the artwork. If we as spectators assume the behavior I am modeling, if we sit politely, inactive, if we do as we’re told, play the part we’re asked to play and close our eyes to the world, how would this ever produce any form of justice, inside or outside the arena of art? The way that a person addresses an artwork is so deeply conditioned that people think the work is addressing them as though it were alive itself! The way that people act in society is so deeply conditioned that they don’t even know they are acting. The complexity of social struggles in the US cannot be subsumed under the umbrella of class struggle without belittling their particularities.

Photography and cinema have been intimately connected to unrest in the United States since they were brought here (or at least since Muybridge immigrated to the country and did everything that made him notorious, including shooting a man and being acquitted in his era’s “Stand Your Ground” law). The complex of inventions making up the spectrum of photography and cinema have always been used in the service of both authority and protest. The issues being fought for aren’t just out in the street, or in the storefront, they’re also behind closed doors and behind the camera. To look from another vantage point and think outside terms of scale, it’s possible to see that the poorest place in America aside from Detroit is Blackwater, AZ—of which the overwhelming majority of the population is Native American. Consider the race disparities in the American prison system. Compare mandated maternity leave in the US to the policies in other nations. Observe the continued income disparity between men and women at every level of education and in nearly every profession. I’d prefer to read theories that could help make many more of these issues visible—that show how artworks open up all the possibilities of activity out in the world. Doesn’t the image’s power lie in its proliferation of meanings? So what is the point of arguing for such autonomy? Is it possible to separate ourselves from all the forces that teach us how to act in a room with an artwork?

In my reading, the violence of the frame in Marina and the Yucca not only makes what Pinsky calls the particularities of its subject’s life unknowable, it also, more crucially, makes them irrelevant. What I mean is, it’s not just that the photo doesn’t show what Marina is thinking or imagine her life but that it isn’t even interested in them. And because it’s not interested in what she thinks, it’s also not interested in what we might think about her. That’s the point of its insistence on its own internal structure. Thus, for example, it’s not Marina’s barely visible (but, I completely agree, cool) slouch that matters; it’s the loop that straightens her up, that doesn’t belong in any way to her (it’s not an element in her body language) and that has nothing to do with how we feel about her. It’s created and contained by the work itself. Hence its power lies not in any “proliferation of meanings” (what it might mean to you, to me, to men, to women, to black people, to white people, to rich, to poor) but in the fact that it means what it means regardless of who we are.

Another way of putting this is to say that the violence of the frame consists above all in making our lives as irrelevant as hers, and it’s in this indifference to our particularity (this allegorizing of its irrelevance) that I locate the politics of Kydd’s work. The fundamental categories of both conservative and liberal politics in the U.S. today are deployed in debates over how we should understand our own and each other’s particularity, over (to use Pinsky’s examples) questions like whether racism is responsible for the disproportionate number of black people in prison or Native Americans in poverty and whether sexism is responsible for the state’s indifference to providing adequate child care. But these debates are empty, and for two reasons. The first is that it obviously is racism and sexism that’s responsible for these disparities. (Which means the liberals win.) The second is that success in eliminating these disparities – in creating a world where as many white people as black people are in prison, as many Asian Americans as Native Americans are poor, and women are just as free to enter the job market and compete for the best jobs as men – would not create a more equal society. (Which means the conservatives win.)

Why do the conservatives win? Because economic inequality is left materially undiminished and ideologically enhanced by a critique that identifies justice not with the effort to minimize it but with the effort to minimize the role played by racism or sexism in causing it. This is what Adolph Reed and Merlin Chowkwanyun mean when they say that the “disparitarian perspective” is “reflective of a class position tied programmatically to the articulation of a metric of social justice compatible with neoliberalism.” And it’s what Karen and Barbara Fields are talking about when they worry that what they call “racecraft” (the ability of conservatives and liberals to racialize both their defense of inequality and their opposition to it) leaves us “no legitimate language for talking about class.” Indeed, one could put the point in even stronger terms; it leaves us, even when we are talking about class, treating it as if it were a kind of identity, like race or sex, as if opposing “classism” were a way of opposing capitalism.

But works like Marina and the Yucca do have a way of talking about class, and without turning it into just another identity. Indeed, the way they do it is precisely by refusing identity (that’s what it means for Marina, as Marina Pinsky says, to reveal neither its subject’s “interior life” nor her “outward engagement with the world”) and by insisting on distinctions that are instead structural (that’s what it means for Marina to establish the frame itself and hence thematize the irrelevance of the beholder’s interior life and his or her engagement with the world too). The politics of the work thus consist not in its subject matter but in its relation to that subject matter and not in making itself open to the responses of its audience but in asserting its autonomy from them.

So when Marina Pinsky ends her letter by asking, “what is the point of arguing for such autonomy,” one answer is political. It’s a way of imagining our society as fundamentally structured by differences that are produced by the relations between capital and labor and not by how we see or feel about each other. But I don’t imagine that this political answer is entirely adequate. That is, I don’t imagine that the goal of (what seems to me) a good politics is primary here. Naturally, different artists will have different motives but it’s probably pretty safe to say that the desire to make good art takes an almost tautological precedence over any other. The interesting question then is not about the artist’s politics but about his or her understanding of what good art is, about the work’s theory of itself. And Marina and the Yucca’s answer to that question is precisely the assertion of its autonomy. Its good politics, in other words, are less its point than an entailment of its point.

I was asked to comment on essays by Bartlett, Ashton, and Gibson. I found it refreshing to see such ambitious and lively efforts to use philosophical concerns as a means of entry into the quite close reading of literary texts. Such a framework helps reduce the danger that close readings will be arbitrary or absorbed by intricate patterns whose significance is at best marginal. These three powerful and intense essays are nothing if not focused on important and timely claims, with orientations that demand careful attention to the steps of the argument.  Moreover, their power is such that, in the first two essays at least, I came to doubt my own abilities as a thinker because I could not always keep up with the swift moves on which the essays turned.   So in what follows I have to recognize that I may simply misunderstand some of the arguments, for which I apologize in advance, as I apologize for the aggressive defensiveness that tends to accompany my being forced into humility.

I will claim that Bartlett and Ashton seem mirror reversals of one another. Bartlett proposes that vagueness is a determining problematic for Stendhal’s style, but she fails to provide any clear index of what counts as vagueness in a literary text. Ashton, by contrast, invokes definitional rigor in domains where she probably should admit a great deal more indeterminacy— or, at least, gradations in our vocabulary for relations between meaning and experience in works of literature. These polarities then seem to me to set off Gibson’s terrific essay, since he has a powerful grasp of how philosophy might begin to talk about poetry while recognizing where language can only serve as an inadequate or partial index of what is available for experience in certain kinds of writing.

For two thirds of the way I felt Bartlett’s lively and keen prose was presenting the most attractive and incisive account of Stendhal’s fiction that I have encountered. She has a lively sense of how self-consciousness is idealized in his fiction. And she is stunningly precise on how his treatments of his fictional agents move “from character to soul and back again, oscillating between but also packing into each the ground that belongs to the other.” Through her eyes, we see that control as inseparable from what might called an oxymoronic absolute, in which “unfinishable precisification could pin its openness on the promise of closure.” As is evident simply in these quotations, Bartlett’s prose is itself apt tribute to Stendhal’s. Each sentence seems to provide something approaching an overdetermining precision. Yet these sentences produce a cumulative effect of an ideal of intensity gone slightly mad in its willingness to cultivate abstraction as a means of establishing significance for the details that fascinate her.

Since I can’t be confident that I am following Bartlett’s argument, I will have to make up my own case for what she sees as the role of vagueness in Stendhal, then hope that argument captures at least the bare outlines of what she is claiming. Because desire is so powerful a force in Stendhal’s fictive worlds, the novels rely more than most novels on the technique of “circumscription” that enables fiction to play the desire for control against the various dynamic forces that resist control and make self-consciousness a domain for adventure. Circumscription is focused on mapping the constantly shifting border between the soul and its others. One location for these others is the capacity of the psyche to become absorbed by the energies in situations and conflicts that the agent cannot control; another is the presence of other persons who constantly threaten to violate any border self-consciousness tries to establish. By recognizing the force of such otherness, circumscription holds out two promises: that one can produce the maximum focus for self-consciousness in a given moment, and that characters can establish continuity among burning moments in their lives. Ultimately circumscription allows us to see character as a kind of geological structure from which we can separate the alien matter that accumulates around it. (I think Bartlett could use as an analogue for Stendhal’s geology of character the classical idea of character as virtu in tension with what allows it a place in social life.)

Vagueness matters because it provides the literal operation of what refuses to succumb to circumscription, and hence to any sense of character as that approximates mastery. The desire for stability of self-consciousness is challenged by a constant need to be as precise as possible about its situations. But “precisification” seems both necessary and doomed because the very effort to be precise creates further arenas of a vagueness consisting in the constant emergence of relations that in both their nature and their treatment turn out to provide only “indeterminate extension.” That indeterminacy is ultimately the space of those others that the characters struggle to delimit. The desire to establish mastery continually encounters what is “peculiarly and positively deficient in semantic meaning.” This deficiency is not all negative because it continually thrusts characters like Julien into situations that they cannot quite comprehend. Then they get to manifest what in character seems a force in nature as it struggles to grapple with cultural factors that may be only a mere screen for their passions.

Bartlett’s engagement with vagueness comes to a climax in an appropriately very long paragraph. I cite first most of the first part of that paragraph:

The Geology of Morals” describes approaching as a prediction of the circumstances under which the granite of a young man’s character is made manifest. …Stendhal is in fact developing a theory of vagueness itself, of the nature and treatment of relations of predicates with indeterminate extensions. His diary is littered with them. After some under-specific descriptions of his brilliant achievement of perception he writes, “I was wearing a waistcoat, silk breeches and black stockings, with a cinnamon-bronze coat, a very well arranged cravat, a superb frill.” The cinnamon-bronze coat pulls focus because it is strikingly overdeveloped and vague at the same time, and also because it marks a shift in Stendhal’s descriptive process in the passage. The facts of his waistcoat are objective and declarative—the breeches are silk and the stockings are black—but neither description allows for nuance. By contrast, the “well arranged cravat” and “superb frill” contain highly subjective judgments, but judgments that are stabilized and communicated by convention. In-between, the cinnamon-bronze coat points to a kind of painstaking specificity, and at the same time the impossibility of combining terms in a coherent, repeatable or otherwise communicable way.

The paragraph goes on to specify why the description fails in its effort to precisify what tends toward vagueness, even if we can imagine a red coat washed so many times that it becomes “cinnamon-bronze”:

Theories of vagueness seem not merely to allow for, but to depend upon the kind of precisification that Stendhal seems to be encouraging us to perform. In this case, it is not quite the logic that is fuzzy, but the object. Insofar as Stendhal throws the cinnamon-bronze coat into a heap of clothes that are more or less sufficiently described, he seems to be trying to define something that is itself unclear, not being deliberately cagey about its description. Thanks to Stendhal’s description, we can imagine a continuous gradation of colors, such that, on either side of a particular color lies a color that is distinct but not discriminably different from it, and thus, for any acceptable precisification of or a word like “cinnamon-bronze,” there would be shades of cinnamon-bronze that were not discriminably different from shades that were not cinnamon-bronze.

One can always produce a standard by which any practical observation seems insufficiently precise. But because it is always possible, the attribution of vagueness does not seem to have much use as a concept for literary criticism, apart from dramatic situations where the vagueness is strategic and influences the plot or dominant emotion in a scene. Vagueness is devastating in practices where standards of precision have been developed so that one can resist ambiguity and establish extensional or logical relevance. But when we are concerned primarily not with empirical description but with dramatic conditions of enunciation, determinations of vagueness can only be based on practical judgments about what characters or readers might be doing or intending. And in such judgment situations, we learn to make do with vagueness so long as there is some sense of fit or mutual understanding that allows us to go on as if we and the text understood each other. There is no authority to determine what is vague beyond how the agents judge their mutual encounter. So we have to admit that in these practical cases vagueness is almost entirely a matter of pragmatics and not semantics per se. And as such there is no theory of vagueness possible in ordinary language; there is possible only pragmatic observations that something is lacking which some speaking or responding agent “should” have provided.

This pragmatic flexibility is evident in the way I think most of us would mark differences between Bartlett’s first and third examples. And, more important, as we focus on these differences we also see the possible literary significance of emphasizing pragmatics rather than semantics in relation to vagueness. In the case of the “cinnamon-bronze” coat, I think the issue may be of interest to theorists of vagueness but not to readers and critics. Bartlett notes that the characterization fixing the coat appears more precise than the rest of the passage if we let ourselves be governed by considerations of descriptive adequacy. The only way the instance could be significant in a novel, or even in Stendhal’s own life, is if some character made a point of wanting further “precisification.” Otherwise readers are likely to rest content with the level of description an author provides. They will try to see imaginatively into the world they are given. But the situation is quite different in her example of Julien’s efforts in the seminar to embrace a “pure nothingness” that is simultaneously detachment and despair. This is Bartlett’s description of the passage where Julien laments his retaining “the air of thinking” and so is worsted “by the coarsest peasants” in his group:

Not-yet, nearness, and readiness are all vague, absent-center relations—they generate a passage as long as this one, not by negotiating between two bivalent polarities, but by describing the asymptotic haze of approach that seduces Julien ever toward indeterminacy. … This is a clear case of the generative powers of vagueness, and not simply as a characterological tool. Because Stendhal overgenerates conflicting representations of events and characters, he elicits different parts of a vague relation from his readers, a much more dynamic and intuitively “right” understanding of the role vagueness plays in language—from denoting and ostension to borderline relations—than Greenough’s minimal theory. The ignorance that so clearly motivates Stendhal’s descriptions stems from a series of investigations into the nature of perception as a kind of circumscription.

I just can’t see Julien’s problem as stemming from general ignorance or specific vagueness or, for that matter, from anything involving the perceptive order. Why not just accept Julien’s own rationale—that the air of thinking makes it impossible to choose only one absolute form of life? Then we can see that Julien’s “failure” is not because he cannot perceive precisely but because he cannot will the object of that precision. Julien’s refusal to commit stems not from what Julien can’t see but from what he does see—that there are alternatives to “pure nothingness” and that his fantasies require pursuing them. It is true that the way of pure nothingness fails to engage Julien’s attention—not because it is vague but because it is not compelling. (Can you imagine a more precise version of Christian ascetism that would be compelling to Julien?) Julien is a great character in part because he exemplifies a condition of will increasingly aware that it cannot produce the heroism it imagines yet cannot return to the definite forms of life of the past because they seem so utterly limiting. For Stendhal the novel seems to play out of what happens to the romantic spirit within a realist sensibility. The world of semantics plays at best a very minor role in this historical drama.

Ashton offers a cultural critique of another kind of vagueness—that produced by the lines of thinking that culminate in post-modernist contrasts between meaning and experience. For once one seeks experience as one’s goal in encounters with art, one is condemned to the privacy of what happens to one’s own sensibility. There is no content to be shared; only effects to be fleshed out:

As I have argued elsewhere, language poetry and postmodernism more generally have been marked by a tendency to conflate the meanings of poems with their effects, the post-language-poetry tendency we see in Armantrout transforms a poetics of indeterminacy into a Stevens-like poetics of uncertainty, although, as we’ll see, it involves a more radical (and I would argue, a more implausible) skepticism than anything Stevens could have imagined.

She is witheringly right about how Steve McCaffrey’s ideas about homolinguistic translation completely exemplify the desire to collapse meaning into experience.  (Perhaps one could say that McCaffery seeks a version of meaning that is indistinguishable from experience–hence the desire for b to return to a).  One might even say that the villain is the effort in the experimental tradition to correlate meaning with aesthetic force, so that Ashton can be seen as offering an important statement of why poetics has to return to the domain of rhetoric, which studies meanings and not experiences.  But I don’t think separating experience from meaning is a useful model even for much contemporary writing.  And it does not help the return to rhetoric because rhetoric depends on the possibility of imagining that experience is partially a matter of meaning. Or, to put the case  the other way around, certain kinds of meanings are as much aspects of what we experience as they are independent forces fixed by determinate intentions. Obviously there are significant differences between Armantrout’s poetry of hesitant refusal of mastery and, say, Pound’s utter faith in the capacity of language to produce significant extensions of the world of fact. But I think the difference lies in contrasting ways the poets envision the ways meanings might enable kinds of experience.  Ashton’s way of opposing experience and meaning seems to me way too sharp, too eager to impose versions of meaning derived from arguments about discrete intentionality that gives shape to a discreet utterance. She could profit from more tolerance for vagueness or at least blurred edges between concepts. One probably cannot limit “meaning” to determinate intentions because one also has to recognize conditions of meaningfulness that create questions about intentionality in the first place.

I am not sure why Ashton seems so insistent on meaning and experience being so sharply opposed. There is certainly a historical moment, some aspects of postmodernism, where experience is explicitly opposed to determinate meaning. But not all postmodernists make this separation, and the reasoning that sustains the separation seems challenged in the dimension of its power to persuade.  And Gibson shows how there can be general talk about poetry that breaks down those oppositions. Meaning and experience need not occupy the same plane because there can be experiences of meaning that brings force and pointedness to what one understands. One can also resist Ashton’s binaries by simply looking at the practical consequences of her using them. Notice the contrast here between Armantrout’s cautious and qualified statements and the conceptual assertiveness Ashton forces upon her. More important, Ashton seems bound to grant a certain kind of epistemic demand authority over poetry, since it seems that only empiricist philosophy and science would be so systematically suspicious of “experience.” Experience becomes something that is opposed to “meaning” because meaning can be independently described while experience is a matter of how subjectivity is deployed. Experience in that sense is the undoing of meaning: it forces what might be objective entirely into the domain of subjective intensities.  But I am by no means sure that experience is a matter only of subjectively appropriating meaning, except in the tautological sense that there must be a subject for there to be experience.  This need not entail that experience is only subjective.  And even in those cases where experience does not link one mind to another, there is no reason why states with different orientations need be seen as in opposition to each other.  The two conditions do not occupy the same plane and so both can be present.  Similarly, feeling and thinking are clearly distinct, but the distinction does not entail our having only one of these states.

Ashton’s eagerness to make meaning objective and experience subjective ultimately invokes an epistemic framework for our uses of language: either they tend toward some form of objective verification or they just elicit subjective associations.  This is probably what drives her essay toward Stevens, the poet whom many critics think obsessed with a divide between the fictive and the real.  But I think this perspective imposes a uniformity on Stevens’ career that is not sufficiently attentive to the changes in attitude it dramatizes during WW II, when Stevens devotes himself largely to exploring alternatives to the domination of epistemic inquiry in his society. The main alternatives involve the weaving of notions of experience into notions of meaning, hence the importance of separating Stevens from what were to become distinctive postmodern attitudes.  Stevens’ essays in particular try to show how there can be critiques of “truth” that do not result in idealizing subjectivity but in recasting what kinds of reality effects are possible as aspects of our shared imaginative lives.

I risk matching Ashton’s assertiveness, so I will turn to what seems concretely problematic in her specific claims. The following paragraph summarizes her efforts to make McCaffery’s ideal of homolinguistic translation stand for the Postmodernist sensibility (and in the process also absorbing all of Modernism into the critical shibboleth of the heresy of paraphrase):

We can see more clearly now what might be at stake in raising the question of paraphrase in this context. If the heresy of paraphrase is that by losing the form of the text you lose experiences that are crucial to the meaning of the text, then a paraphrase that could somehow keep all that experience of the text would look like a kind of solution. In the case of found poetry, you certainly have a way of keeping all the experience of the text because you keep all of the form of the text. The fantasy of the link between found poetry and translation seems to be the same fantasy as Higgins has for the allusive referential—that you can somehow keep the experience of a even when the movement to b involves a lot of “activity upon the source text.” If I can always feel a when I’m reading b, withb I haven’t lost, much less violated, the experience of the source text. If the heresy in the heresy of paraphrase was that the paraphrase gave you the meaning of the text without the experience of it, the triumph of the homolinguistic translation—basically also the triumph of found poetry—is that it gives you the experience of the text without the meaning of it.

First, I do not see how found poetry is in any way a paraphrase—it just is a piece of language that one asks to take as poetry. There is no effort to state something in a different way. In fact what claims to be found poetry does not alter the language of the object text, so I don’t see where paraphrase could enter. Found poetry has an exact commitment to meaning, but then it absorbs the target meaning into another framework, a framework in which we experience that meaning as if we had to identify with the framing rather than the original assertion.  Second, if one understands found poetry as I do, there can be no parallel between it and translation—inter-language or homolinguistic. Translation does not foreground an attitude toward found material but presents an effort to clarify what is going on in one text by providing another that claims the first as it target, or guide, or—for McCaffery—its inspiration.

Perhaps the source of my problem, if not of Ashton’s, is the use of abstractions like “meaning” or “experience” as if they were isolated Platonic entities with only one cogent meaning.1 I think it is much more reasonable and workable to imagine that there is little reward to isolating one kind of state as experience and another as meaning when we are talking about literature. The distinction may hold with some kinds of meaning that have to ward off all affects in order to preserve sheer unequivocal description. But in other domains meaning conditions experience: how Achilles is described as standing on the ramparts influences how we experience his status as hero. And experience conditions meaning whenever we allow affective states and expectations to quicken the pulse as we process semantic information; especially when one wants to preserve the sense of a while rendering the subject’s engagement with b. Indeed, one might say that it is because these two attributes so diversely condition one another that is dangerous to talk of each in isolation. Baroque experiences of how meanings take on force are very different from those in modernist ascetic art, so why isolate terms without being concerned for how they provide aspects under which one another appear?

Years of teaching Wallace Stevens in conjunction with Wittgenstein have taught me to try to posit an “as” in conjunction with abstract terms like “meaning” and “experience.” “Experience” becomes “experience as” a certain kind of reader or as a certain kind of agent with specific orientations of consciousness. And meaning becomes “meaning as” a certain kind of statement in a certain kind of discourse. We just use different senses of meaning when we talk about propositions on the one hand and gestures and poems and suggestions or hints on the other. After all we submit certain kinds of meanings to empirical tests while with others we are concerned less with accuracy than with suggestiveness or sharpness of articulation. In some conditions—call them avowals like “I am in pain”—we recognize a sharp asymmetry between first person agency that we need to register to make sense of an expression and third person modes of inquiry that have to deal with what everyone can observe but only at a distance. In the first case, we typically process avowals by trying to sympathize so that we can approximate sharing the experience. In the case of third person meanings, we are likely to try to come to an agreement about what everyone in principle can observe.

I get most upset when Ashton’s argument leads her to invoke Wallace Stevens as a skeptic suspicious of all meaning.  Although she so cleverly contextualizes this view that I am not sure what she would assert on her own, she seems to align herself with the Stevens of supreme fictions:

And although this new interest in Stevens has functioned not exactly to recruit him for metonymy, the critique of his commitment to metaphor (which can be found in the work of poets from Frank Bidart to Rae Armantrout to Jennifer Moxley) has, I’ll argue in the second half of this paper, functioned to produce a skepticism that goes beyond the Language poets’ enthusiasm for the explosion of meaning into an “unlimited freeplay of dissemination” and for systemic indeterminacy. It has been instead through something like a radicalization of metaphor rather than metonymy that meaning as such has come to be understood not as inherently indeterminate but inherently false, and that truth has come to inhere in the refusal of holding any beliefs at all.

Against this statement I invoke perhaps Stevens’ keenest statement on the relation between experience and meaning.  It occurs in a review of Paul Valery’s Eupaulinos.  There Stevens imagines Valery hearing “the voices of the speakers and” watching “the movements of the dancers at one and the same time.” Notice now the use of “as” to bring together the experience of voice and movement with the work of understanding:

… As his interest in what is being said grows greater as the discussion approaches its resolution, and as the absorption in the spectacle grows
greater with his increased understanding of it and because of the momentum toward the ultimate climax, he realizes, for the first time, the excitement of a meaning as it is revealed at once in thought and in act.2

The work done by “as” here also suggests the importance to late Stevens not of metaphor, but of simile–because simile makes possible poetry’s keeping the actual world open for imagination. Metaphor for Stevens after 1940 seemed too bound to image and so incapable of dramatizing the powers of mind not just to seek new names but to alter our understanding of names. Metaphor promised a stability of reference that threatened the desires of imagination to maintain the freedom to experience changes as it looked at things first one way then another. But this is not a general skepticism about meaning. Rather it is a specific sense that meaning in poetry can be open to shades of experience that cultivate mobility rather than stability. Stevens term was “resemblance” or what I call the aspectual dimension of our encounters with the world that honor the force of imagination as a continual possibility for modifying the shadings of phenomena—not because nothing is true but because so much is possible within experiences of meaningfulness.

It is not surprising that Stevens would appreciate how meanings work in poetic prose. It is surprising to me how thoroughly he brings that awareness to bear in his writing about the ways truth functions in philosophy and in poetry. One could cite several passages in Stevens’ lecture “A Collect of Philosophy”3 but this remark may be the most apposite for our discussion (as well as the best evidence for Stevens’ skill in dealing precisely with how philosophers formulate concepts):

It may be said that the philosopher probes the spheres or sphere of perception and that he moves about therein like someone intent on making sure of every foot of the way. If the poet moves about in the same sphere or spheres, and occasionally he may, he is light-footed. He is intent on what he sees and hears and the sense of the certainties about him is as nothing to the presences themselves.4

No trace of skepticism here.5 Yet Ashton might say, “But that is only prose.” We have to turn to the poetry where Stevens might put a little more distance between the work of imagination and the ideological needs for the poet to be a responsible inquirer into truth. And through Parts of a World, Stevens poetry flirts with disappointment if not skepticism with the ways his culture poses the role of Truth. But even by 1938 he uses this skepticism toward received models of truth not to claim that all is illusion, but that there are other aspects of meaningful experience that promise a different positive model for how meaningfulness can be experienced. These are some lines Ashton does not cite from “The Latest Freed Man,” the concluding poem in her sequence:

…Yet having just
Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist,
Which is enough: the moment’s rain and sea,
The moment’s sun (the strong man vaguely seen),
Overtaking the doctrine of this landscape. Of him
And his works, I am sure. He bathes in the mist
Like a man without a doctrine. The light he gives—
It is how he gives this light. It is how he shines, …

It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
It was being without description, being an ox.
It was the importance of the trees outdoors, …
It was everything being more real, himself
At the centre of reality, seeing it.6

I love the fact that vagueness itself becomes an aspect of celebrating what can be present. Stevens is not without irony here—in the title and in the concluding line of the poem—but this is an irony that qualifies the situation rather than dismissing it as illusion: others have also thought they were free, so one has to tread cautiously in celebrating this new focus on manner. Wariness cannot prevent the text from suggesting that it is wise to celebrate even how the actual world can seem continuous with the passions of the self.

I hate the fact that I so much prefer the tone and patience and modesty of Gibson to the work of two of our brightest literary critics. But I persist in my idealization because I want to provoke discussion of what I see as the problem that many of the best younger literary critics seem driven to prefer the display of intelligence to the testing of the validity of the ideas used for that display. Our critics move very quickly through vast ranges of material. This takes a great deal of intelligence. But it also risks wasting that intelligence because the work tends to override the texts’ capacities to make themselves heard on what might be considered something close to their own terms. Such work visibly claims more than it can establish, as if one aspect of the process were to make risk itself a mark of distinction for criticism, like Lowell’s poet-skier. This judgment binds me rhetorically to treat Gibson’s essay with considerable abjection. So I am very pleased that it seems to me to deserve that stance. The best I can do is isolate aspects of it for praise and then at the end suggest minor modifications.

I love most about Gibson’s essay its clear sense that most lyric poetry involves a mode of meaningfulness that requires us to talk about the suggestiveness of situations rather than the pointedness of discreet assertion. By treating meaning as destination rather than beginning point, Gibson offers the most concise and elegant role for criticism that I have encountered: criticism is not an academic exercise but the full commitment to a mode of responsiveness that is aware of how to reconcile “the communicative force of poetry… with the unconventionality and sheer inventiveness of its language.”Gibson proposes to honor what critics call the materiality of poetry, but as means and not end, as invitation to experience but not yet the judgment of how it attaches to meaningfulness.

Gibson bases his sense of meaning as destination on two basic principles which I think are brilliantly developed. First he makes a telling contrast between “sentence meaning” and “work meaning.” This allows him to separate the “meaning-space” of poetry from the entire domain of decoding sentences and specifying how metaphors do their concrete work. (He does not address the ways in which poets project their works as extensions of the logic of metaphor in order to preserve the concreteness of lyric discourse.) There is the interpretation of sentence meaning, and there is the separate task of construing the meaning of what gives force and point to the relations between sentences. One could say that this model affords a rationale for the heresy of paraphrase that does not depend on any special condition of poetic language. It depends only on an established practice of seeking something beyond the capacity of sentences to convey descriptions or respond to practical situations. Gibson shows how critical imagination can elicit a world for these sentences to inhabit by interpreting their relation to each other as based on work meaning. The opposite of paraphrase is not quite sheer “experience” but attention to how this other level of meaning can take hold. Critics need not content themselves with decoding messages or characterizing intricate experiments in elaborating plays with textural features of language. They characterize possible worlds by expanding the space of an imagined situation.7

Gibson’s second way of characterizing meaning space is distinctive to verbal art. He characterizes “semantic descent” as a series of steps in which each provides a little more of the world that language implicates, and a little less of language about language. I see the concept as kin to Richard Wollheim’s idea of critical activity as “seeing in” to what paintings come to represent. Thus “Juliet is the sun” becomes not just an example of the logic of metaphor but a statement asking us to imagine what Juliet and the sun might have in common: we ask how the sun can bear “a kind of meaning for us” that is other than simply “linguistic in nature.” This level of meaning consists in the set of associations, connotations, resonances, values, and so on that any object that matters in our form of life will have. The metaphors of semantic ascent and descent capture nicely the structures of embedding characteristic of our language use, and it recognizes the range of experiences that this use can convey or make present. And this figure of descent beautifully explains how our expectations for coherence and clarity change at each level. When we turn to the worldliness of the metaphor, our “experience” need not be described by resolving it “into a coherent image of, or claim about” the tenor: “It is enough to place [Juliet] in the imaginative space created by the image of the sun and allow her to linger there for a moment, framing our thought of her in productive and, ultimately, meaningful ways.” Because of this space of significance developed by semantic descent, criticism becomes largely a matter of tact in fleshing out how work-meaning frames the relations between these resonances and values. So the critic can embrace aesthetic attention to the specifics of “how” the work unfolds and still avoid any trace of formalism: art is a means of combining and re-orienting imaginative spaces that attach us to features of the world.

Perhaps Gibson’s case could be even stronger if he were to modify his claims in two ways that I suggest would better meet the theoretical needs critics encounter in their practical work. First  Gibson may occasionally celebrate too much the possible resonance of the worldliness of poetry without sufficiently attending to its demands not only for critical tact but also for critical precision. His critique of master-meanings by which we decode figures may make him too open to the sheer indefiniteness of possible imaginative elaboration of the space the poem establishes:

We frequently experience poetic meaning as a far-off destination not because the meaning of a poem is so deeply hidden in its language but because the kind of communicative act in which a poem engages is extraordinarily complex, beginning with language and words but then soon passing from this into a richly, and at times bizarrely, textured imaginative space, the exploration of which is potentially interminable.

Gibson sees poems as acts of composing imaginative space. But often the fleshing out of imaginative space for poetry requires not just indicating modes of relation but clarifying the specific terms of the performance by which this space takes on a concrete atmosphere or particular urgency to the passion of making. We have to avoid losing sight of the energies of the making in order to elicit the possible significance of the object created. For the best poets typically want their audience to appreciate how the sheer act of articulation itself provides an imaginative order for that space. On one hand, I think of Keats elaborating why Psyche deserves to be a modern goddess; on the other I think of Eliot’s Four Quartets laboring to show how Christian sentences can be meaningful in a world that thinks itself secular.

I suspect my modification simply comes down to a matter of emphasis rather than a theoretical dispute. But I worry because philosophers tend to prefer the sheer worldliness of texts, where they can make judgments, to the diverse and difficult to determine intentional states that govern interpretive hierarchies within that world. In one sense Gibson addresses my worry with his brilliant trope of using two paintings as possible characterizations of an agent’s feeling for his or her own life. Here he enters fully into the expressive aspect of making poetry. But now I think he needs a modification of the theory at the opposite pole from my first suggestion. It is true that much lyric poetry offers “a very precise environment of thought and feeling into which we can place an otherwise formless, indeterminate conception of a life.” Such work charges “aesthetic features with a kind of moral significance: they now come to represent ‘ways of being in the world’; that is, they represent a life as tethered to very different kinds of value and forms of possible experience.” But when I stop applauding this lovely precise generalization, I start worrying that in this aspect of his account lyric poetry becomes too much the affair of giving one’s own life meaning rather than trying out ways to bring certain qualities of the world into an intense visibility that warrants various modes of desire. I think accounts of poetry have to keep making at the center—as the condition of the artifact and as the affirmation of second order states that offer plausible desires to change one’s life:

It was everything being more real, himself
At the centre of reality, seeing it.

In “Confiance au Monde: or, The Poetry of Ease,” Oren Izenberg brings to bear on a selection of poems several considerations raised by John McDowell in his book Mind and World that suggest a way of understanding what one could call the therapeutic effect of the poems, and this in ways of relevance for both philosophy and literature. In “On Going On: Rules Inferences and Literary Conditions, Paul Grimstad brings to bear on certain philosophical claims, especially on the “analytic pragmatism” of Robert Brandom, as explored in his book, Making It Explicit, considerations derived ultimately from Stanley Cavell’s reflections on the “literary conditions” of philosophy, themselves indebted to Wittgenstein’s famous rule-following discussions, and thereby suggests something about the philosophical availability of literature, and this again of relevance to both philosophy and to literature.1

Both Izenberg and Grimstad raise fundamental issues about the nature and import of reflexivity itself in philosophical and critical practice that are very difficult to get into focus in any economical way. I will try only to say what I take each to be saying, and to raise some questions for further discussion.

1.

By a “poetry of ease” Izenberg says he means not “just a relief from anxiety” but a “release into life,” an “expression” of something like Horatian otium, or what he calls, in using Whitman as a foil (Whitman’s self-affirmation is not what is meant by “ease”), a “confident consubstantiality.” And Izenberg wants to delineate how concern with such an issue (perhaps most familiar in the pastoral tradition) gets a special grip on the “modern subject” and so “modern poetry,” indeed imposes an unavoidable constraint or task on it, a necessary confrontation with the lack of a confident consubstantiality.

As I see it, the ontological conception of ‘discursive consciousness’ as exterior to nature places upon poetry a limit of expressive variation. That limit is the poet’s knowledge of the apparent requirement of subjective unease, borne into speech.

In the modern German literary and philosophical tradition since Hölderlin first started to characterize modernization as a loss of any confident place in both the natural and social world, this “condition” is best summarized in Nietzsche’s brief characterization of the modern German temper: “homesickness.” It is prominent in Hegel on modern “torn apartness” (Zerissenheit), Weber on disenchantment (Entzauberung), and Heidegger on the forgetting of being, (Seinsvergessenheit). In other words, it’s everywhere, and not just among the Germans.

But Izenberg wants some “alternative to the infinite nuances of negativity,” some answer to “the person whose occasions for speaking are instances of the world’s failure either to accommodate her existence or to provide a justification for his desire to exist.” To explain what he is looking for, and what he considers uniquely available in poetry, he turns to John McDowell’s Mind and World. This appropriation involves three steps, the third of which is the most controversial. First, Izenberg summarizes McDowell on the unique “anxieties of modern philosophy”: basically the problem of skepticism or the more general problem of understanding the possibility of perceptual knowledge of the world. This problem is understood as a putative gap between subjective representation and reality, and this issue is taken to be how to bridge that gap. Second, Izenberg follows McDowell in trying to show that there is no problem to be solved, there is no such gap to be bridged. Or there seems to be, but only on unnecessary assumptions about subjectivity and interiority, and on the assumption of an even broader gap between the unique discourse of human intelligibility (a normative discourse, the “space of reasons”) and the causal regularities of the disenchanted natural world. We can show how both assumptions are avoidable if we are simply “reminded” that “nature is also second nature,” that one of the natural capacities possessed by human beings, once suitably socialized in a community (once formed by Bildung), is a responsiveness to reasons. At the perceptual level, this reminder (ultimately, but it takes an enormous amount of philosophical work to show how) bears on an extremely delicate philosophical claim that even McDowell has had to constantly explain, tinker with, reformulate, defend to critics and even revise to some degree2: that the deliverances of sensibility are always already conceptual, not the mere “matter” for the imposition of human conceptual form.

But, to come to the third and most controversial step, Izenberg is taken with the idea that this “exorcism” of such blinding and avoidable assumptions is to be achieved not by an argument but by a “reminder.” And so he wants to turn to his issues with a disclaimer: “If this thin obviousness has contestable merits as a philosophical strategy, it [the reminder] has considerable promise as a poetic one.” Or: “the idea of a reminder is the idea of a poetry of ease.” So he imports McDowell exorcising reminders on the limited if crucial issues of perceptual mind-world relations into the context most famously expressed in the German tradition cited above, at once the ontological question of the status of human subjects in the natural world, and the modern historical experience of having ourselves, collectively over time, created a social world which is as much ours as it is alien. He then launches into a consideration of what he calls “Wordsworth’s famous McDowllian argument” of the fittedness of world and mind, George Peele’s lyric “A Summer Song,” and Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You.” He denies that a sensibility like O’Hara’s is a mere “form of exquisite sensibility,” “but rather a way of judging and sorting the world,” a claim that allows him to refer to “the philosophy of O’Hara’s fun” and to claim that it contributes “rationally to a judgment of the world.”

The question raised by this importation is whether the issues raised by McDowell about perceptual knowledge in Mind and World bear on the questions of existential alienation or the “world’s failure” to provide someone with a “justification for his desire to exist.” By asking such a question, I don’t mean to start rebuilding fences between disciplines. What McDowell is saying has to do very generally with how material objects or the sensory interchanges with the physical world could so much as possibly bear meaning, and so his perspective is capacious enough to invite some of Izenberg’s questions about, one could say, finding meaningful “ease.”3 And in some general sense, McDowell does want to find a way of claiming that “experience” can serve as a “tribunal” for perceptual knowledge claims without having to answer to skeptic’s questions about bridging a gap. This could certainly suggest similar strategies elsewhere. But is this picture about perceptual knowledge importable in the way Izenberg proposes? If our erotic investment in “the world” begins to fail, if what I (or we) have to endure and suffer begins to seem pointless, if we begin to suffer what Izenberg wants to say is “metaphysical unease,” is the response offered by the poems he cites rightly thought of as a form of justification, a move in the space of reasons? It could only be if there is there some way equivalent or analogous to McDowell’s to show the sufferer that he has misunderstood himself and his relation to the world, that the source of his experience, this failure of meaning, is an “illusion.” Izenberg is rightly sensitive to the need not merely to dismiss the experience as some kind of pathology or mistake, and he is well aware of the need to grapple seriously with the powerful grip of the illusion and the reasons for such a grip, but the question is deeper: whether an illusion, on the order of some post-Cartesian misdirected agenda in epistemology, is a proper matrix for understanding the sort of suffering chronicled in the modern literature of loss, absurdity, alienation, meaninglessness and simple heartlessness. (For that matter, the larger question here: could McDowell be right that the Cartesian agenda is simply an illusion, to be recovered from, to be exorcised? Is not that image itself telling, as if it is something like possession, witchcraft? Could that be right?) And what about the “weight” of the poetic “evidence” adduced by Izenberg, that manifestation of possible ease. What are we to do with such a moment of “release” in the light of, say, what is so powerfully expressed by Beckett, much of Stevens, Philip Larkin? And I don’t mean to point to other anxieties, but to poets on about just what Izenberg is, the “metaphysics of unease.” If O’Hara’s philosophy is a kind of “rational judgment,” a move in the space of reasons that, having been understood, justifies, how is it to be weighed against, what should one call it? The “counter-evidence”? (And again, could the problem itself be one of “justification”? Would that not be like our ever so commercially successful “cognitive therapists” asking: “But do you have any real reason to be depressed?” Could there be a more irrelevant question?) Is there an appropriate set of scales on which such “disagreements” could be weighed? Again, it may be that something like being at home in a natural or social world is not the kind of relation that needs “justification,” that the assumption that it does partly creates the problem, but this realization could leave us worse off, enduring a fate, not victims of a mistake or illusion.

The largest question (and I mean these not as rhetorical but as genuine questions provoked by Izenberg’s thoughtful essay): could the possibly therapeutic effect of any modern literature be understood without, first, placing it in the context of modern and modernist aesthetics, especially the epochal turn from aesthetics to the philosophy of art begun by Kant, extended by Schiller and completed by Schelling and Hegel? (How much is left of an “aesthetic” dimension, in other words, in late modernity? If anything, what is it? What could allow us to consider that therapeutic?) And second, could that turn be understood without an ambitious account of the basic dynamic of modernization itself and the status of art within it, its new autonomy and not coincidentally its new doubts about itself, where that dynamic has to include (impossibly) everything from the new role of religion, industrialization, the rise of science to supreme cognitive authority, and so on? What makes a modern literature of ease a response to a modern understanding or even a modern “metaphysics” of unease, especially if we bring these poems to bear on the Master of Massive Unease, Heidegger, who has given us a phenomenology of “unease” as necessary, unavoidable, “fundamental,” hardly an “illusion”?4

2.

In “On Going On: Rules, Inferences and Literary Conditions,” Paul Grimstad wants to sign on to the most important point about linguistic meaning in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (PI)5 – that meaning is use – but to distinguish the interpretation given the famous phrase by “analytic pragmatism,” especially in the work of Robert Brandom,6 from another that he derives from Stanley Cavell. This leads him to very interesting and very speculative reflections about the relation between philosophy and literature.

Grimstad explores Wittgenstein’s idea by commenting on §293 of PI, the “beetle box” example, part of Wittgenstein’s multi-front attempt to loosen the hold of the idea that what someone means by a word can be determined by being able to “check” what mental experience she is having when thinking the word. He is out to disabuse us of all such fantasies of peering inside the mind of another, as in “other minds skepticism” about whether others are human (or automata), or whether they feel what I feel when they feel and express pain, or even the more natural notion of peering into our own mind. Another good illustration occurs at PI, p.217, when someone is imagined wondering what another might mean by “At that word we both thought of him.” Not even God, Wittgenstein points out, assuming his capacity to look inside what another is thinking, would thereby be able to determine the answer to such a question. (“If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.”) And so, accordingly, learning the meaning of a word or coming to understand a concept is not to grasp some “thought” or a “meaning,” but to acquire a kind of know-how, an ability to use the word in a variety of contexts, and this in a way acknowledged by others.7 Brandom glosses this as understanding its inferential possibilities, understanding how saying p, being committed to the truth of p, also requires that one must be committed to q and to ~r, and to much else, none of which is entertained in what one is at some punctuated moment aware of, and all of which (what one is actually committed to de re, not just de dicto), requires an understanding of the way normative attitudes work in a community, how we are held to account by such deontic score-keeping. Or, understanding an assertion is being able to understand how it could function as a premise or conclusion of an inference in what Brandom famously calls the “game of giving and asking for reasons.”

This issue becomes much more complicated though when we try to explain these kinds of normative proprieties. Language use is constrained by norms; that is, rules. If people can’t “check” their use against an internal standard or criterion of some sort, how do we know, how does the speaker know, that she is “going on the same way”? In Brandom’s inferentialist position (and many others that follow Wittgenstein), the situation (whether a rule is being followed properly) is not helped by someone citing some further rule, defining correct application for this rule. That would obviously generate a regress. And so we come to a problem that was first posed as a dilemma or paradox by Kant (who was one of the first to understand concepts as rules, “predicates of possible judgments”).8

Here is where Grimstad wants to raise an objection to Brandom, contrasting his “inferentialism” with what he finds in Cavell. His basic question is, “But is Wittgenstein’s idea of the criteria by which we take our talk to be meaningful a matter of ‘inference?” He finds in Cavell’s notion of “literary conditions” of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical aims” a less restrictive and so more adequate of what he calls an “alternate form of justification.”

Could a tactful or artful (or beguiling or captivating or worrisome) ordering of words – what we might simply call a style – itself generate a criterion for claiming? How exactly can, as Cavell puts it, “an ordering of words [be] its own bottom line [and] to see its own ground.”

This is a hard thought, not only that a “style” could be an alternate form of justification, but of a sort that could respond to some sort of anxiety about correctly going on in the right way.

A lot will depend on how one understands the “inference” in inferentialism and what one takes to be a “justification.” As Grimstad notes, Brandom, following Wittgenstein, wants to explain the normative proprieties of rule-following (“going on in the right way”) without either reducing such a notion to mere regularities in speech and behavior, and without any appeal to another rule which stipulates how some rule is supposed to be applied, which would generate the regress. But it is important to note, first, that Brandom does not confuse the theorist of such norms, and the theorist’s “making it explicit” activity, with what goes on in the social negotiation that ensues among participants when there is a challenge to some claim of commitment or some disavowal of a commitment. (No participant, claiming that a belief that p does not at all commit him to the truth of r will appeal to the game of inferential articulation as such.) Moreover, second, it is even more important to note that Brandom does not at all want to restrict “inference” to anything like “formally valid” inference. In fact he wants vigorously to deny that inferential articulation should be understood simply as “logical articulation.” That would disallow something crucial to Brandom’s (and Sellars’) theory: material implication.9 (“Today is Wednesday” materially implies “Tomorrow will be Thursday.”)

But if inference is not restricted to formally valid inference, and if it includes material implication (of a wide variety of sorts) then the “game of giving and asking for reasons” could not look like disputants setting out premises and conclusions in logical form, and certainly not appealing to “explicit” rules or to any theory. So what is so restrictive about it? Someone claiming to be a “citizen” claims, say, not to mean this or that that another or others do claim it to mean, and the dispute begins, appealing to the nation’s history, famous examples, other similar cases, and so forth. A friend says, “this is what a friend does,” and reveals a confidence, and another says that that is not friendship but “betrayal.” Inferentialism and the reliance on normative attitudes, double-book score-keeping, and all of Brandom’s apparatus is not meant to counter or replace or reduce in any way what is required by such a phenomenology.

But Grimstad appears not to be worried so much about the right presentation of Brandom’s theory, but about the fact that he offers a theory at all— that he thinks we need a theory of “how norms are implicit in practice.” This always, Grimstad thinks, diverges from Wittgenstein, and is an illusion captured well in many of Cavell’s formulations, especially in the “Introductory Note” added to “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself.”10 Norms are implicit in practice is this contrasting sense, in a way evident or “shown” by the “ordering of words” itself. Here is a crucial passage in Grimstad.

A kind of literary tact – the sound of these words in this order – would then serve as the condition under which we are entitled to mean in our own and find meaning in another’s words. The sort of perspicacity striven for here is not a matter of lining up reasons (it would not be formal in the way that a proof is formal), but of attunement to arrangements of words in specific contexts.

But who believes that the “perspicacity” in question is a “matter of lining up reasons” or that it must be “formal in the way a proof is formal”? Certainly not Brandom.

So what is the issue? If we are going to use terms like “alternate forms of justification” and terms like “entitlement,” then it is also the case that we have to concede that any such claim to authority can be challenged (if in fact it is a claim to entitlement), and when challenged must be responded to in some way. The nature of the response depends on the nature and form of the claim. But claims are claims and they don’t come for free. It can be difficult; reasons of all kinds can seem to give out, but nothing in Brandom’s theory forecloses such difficulties. (He has no “theory” about substantive claims, no views on how negotiations and disputes and challenges should go on. That depends on a community’s practices at a time. And it is a pragmatic theory, not a formal one; ultimately a matter of what participants allow each other to say. Not for nothing is the book dedicated to Rorty.) Justly famous passages like this one from Cavell do not bypass such dialectical entanglements:

We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of significance and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor, and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation – all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (because it is) terrifying.11

I see nothing here that conflicts with any non-formalist inferentialism, and much that requires it, once we realize that in particular cases any such expectation of commonality can fail, what one takes to be an expression of forgiveness could be taken by others to be false, not credible. Leaping, at every such instance, to “well, this is just how I go on” is the wrong, because always potentially smug, response, especially since I have to realize I may be wrong; they may be right.

Sometimes the right response to such a breakdown is an attempt, perhaps a collective attempt, at what Grimstad calls a proper “attunement” to some propriety, assuming it has been somehow lost. We might have to help each other regain some common attunement to forgiveness or justice or fairness or vengeance or even to “male” and “female.” And there is every reason to think that some intense attention to literature can be of great, indispensable, unique help in such an enterprise.12 But to distinguish “literature” from “philosophy” in the way Grimstad does at the end of his piece, as if the former moves us away from any “giving of reasons” and towards some mute, you-either-see-it-or-you-don’t “showing,” at bottom seems to me to re-inscribe a very traditional division (“you guys take care of the reasons; I’ll take care of the deep insights”) that we would be better advised to reject. If we are rather being asked to think of “reasons” in some new way, then we must be shown how that new way can fulfill the minimal condition for their being reasons: being offered in a way that can be challenged and defended.13

Talk about interdisciplinarity has been so concerned lately with the relation between the humanities and the natural sciences that one sometimes forgets that the term has any other meaning. So it is refreshing to see this crop of papers about the much older “quarrel” between literature and philosophy. Although the three papers I was asked to comment upon share little in the way of common ground—Camp discusses the self; Harold is concerned with genre; and Chodat takes up pragmatism—they do have a common structure. The philosophers spend some time with literary texts; the literary scholar reaches over into philosophical debate. And in doing so, each reveals something about the art of the other: how philosophy or literary study poses questions, treat texts, and make arguments.

Elizabeth Camp for example pursues a theory of the “rich, substantive selves” she thinks we need “to evaluate our past actions and to guide future ones” by first looking back at Wordsworth's The Prelude. The paper quotes liberally from the poem to establish what she takes to be Wordsworth's model of a teleological selfhood grounded in the natural order of things. On this view, nature provides Wordsworth with an already formed self. He need only discover that he is a “Poet of Nature” through the various incidents he chooses to recount in his great autobiographical poem. Crossing the Alps, stealing a boat, mourning the boy of Winander, and the like reveal his “'true self', 'Nature's self,' waiting to be actualized.” Wordsworth describes a “robust” selfhood, but his terms are untenably ontological and teleological. He is committed to the discovery of real, actually existing selves and believes that every self has a pre-set task. So even though Wordsworth's self may be “robust,” it fails to provide a model for us, loathe as we are to commit ourselves either to ontology or teleology: “It is most certainly not the case that Nature designates individual people for particular tasks, like being a Poet, and then manipulates their surrounding circumstances—conjuring an advancing storm, say, or orchestrating their discovery of a little boat on a lake—to mold those individuals into agents capable of performing their allotted tasks.” It is most certainly not the case, in other words, that Wordsworth is right, so we had better look elsewhere to “generate robust, substantive selves.” Thus ends Camp's use of a work of literature, but not her use of literary terminology. Passing quickly over the “analytic debunking” that would dispense with the need for robust selves in the first place (a tradition here represented by Hume and Strawson), Camp spends the rest of the essay engaging critically with ideas of “narrative” selfhood and outlining at the end a solution to the problem of the self founded on “character.”

I don't have much to say about the discussion that follows the section on Wordsworth. My own inclinations lead toward the analytic debunking for which Camp has no patience. I'm with Hume. Every time I try to catch my “self” all I apprehend are some perceptions. I also don't see why we need to have a theory of the self in order to talk about actions, or why the self need be “robust” (whatever precisely that means) in order for agents to deliberate on their behavior. No matter. I'm sure Camp has good answers to these questions. And for what it's worth, I like the turn to character at the end. Where narrative selves are supposed to be the coherent subjects of their own stories, characters show simply a unified comportment over a given slice of time. We should “drop the insistence on life-long autobiographies in favor of many short overlapping stories.” Hear hear.

My concerns are instead with the handling of Wordsworth. Camp cites the poem copiously in the early going and seems genuinely interested in setting up her theory of selfhood in contradistinction to what she imagines to be his. Wordsworth thus provides both an historical foil and literary background. Even so, I found the discussion of The Prelude quite unsatisfying. Camp doesn't misrepresent the poem. Her quotations are in context and accurate. (Or they're accurate at least for the nonstandard 1850 edition she uses.1) Camp doesn't exactly misread the poem either. Rather, she doesn't read the poem at all. She treats the speaker's romantic autobiography as if it were Wordsworth's. This collapse of any distinction between the speaker of the poem and the poem's author produces a certain naiveté, as if all utterances in the poetic first person are actually Wordsworth's account of himself rather than lines of a poem he was writing. Camp jumps out of the gate with Wordsworth as the “lucky guy” who is endowed by nature with a “vital soul,” and from thence all bets are off: “Wordsworth's growing awareness of Man's place within an animate and spiritual Nature culminates in his choice to become a Poet, creating works of art that reveal the beauty and power of Nature to his fellow man.” Again, this sort of thing rings naïve for a reason: it fails to recognize the distinction between speaker and author, which, like the distinction between narrator and author in works of fiction, founds the critical sensibility. To recognize the distinction and distance between the speaker of a poem and the poem's author after all is to recognize that a poem is a made artifact, with a certain form. And to recognize that is to begin to get to work.

I'm pretty sure Camp knows this. In a revealing series of sentences midway through the discussion of the poem, she says that Wordsworth might be saved from   accusations of philosophical simplemindedness by an invocation of the poem's “'literary' status”: “A natural way to respond to the accusation that The Prelude manifests nothing so much as self-serving delusion is to point out the accusation depends on treating The Prelude in a flat-footedly literal manner, one which ignores the various ways in which Wordsworth the author signals that he is creating a character.” Yet, she thinks we can only take this so far. While the response is “fair enough as a matter of literary analysis,” it “renders The Prelude problematic as a model for a narrative conception of self-identity.” Why is this rendering a bad thing? Why shouldn't Wordsworth's creation of his speaker as a character in the poem feed into the sort of character-centered model of the self she advocates at the essay's end? Camp doesn't say. So these hints at a “literary” part of the puzzle are something of a missed opportunity. And that is too bad. We can fit Wordsworth precisely to the project Camp designs but that would require us to move past bare content and engage the poem as a formed artifact.

On the face of it, James Harold's thoughts about popular and serious writing are at some distance from Camp's discussion of the self. She uses Wordsworth to do some philosophy. Harold talks philosophically about a literary topic. Yet, here too I felt a certain grating against my own practices and expectations. Harold wants to “defend the view that there are real differences between the pleasures of genre fiction and literature” and in doing so he also wants to defend “critical evaluation, criticism that attempts to show how and why some works are better than others.” Harold's point is not to say that one shouldn't read genre fiction or that discerning what works are better than others makes any sort of statement about value. He defends a “highly context-sensitive sense of 'better'” and is motivated throughout to discover a rationale for reading and valuing mysteries, thrillers, horror fiction, and the like. I would agree with all this, were I asked, but I'm usually not. I think that is by itself interesting. For some time now, audible talk of judgment has rarely been heard in academic literary study. While many of us would surely say that the works we write about and teach are worth studying for a reason, overt acts of ranking and evaluating—this work is better than that; this facet of a work is why it's great—receded from the literary disciplines years ago as something like the mark of professionalism: the putting of the object of one's study at a distance of analysis. We buried judgment into the practical acts of veneration that go into making a living in English: this work repays one's interest, we say without saying, in different registers over the lifespan of the business. Likewise, spending much time on evaluative statements of one or another kind is typically a sign that one has left disciplinary pursuits for something else, like selling books. Witness the career of Harold Bloom. So I think a conversation with philosophy in which the terms involve judgment is likely to be one-way and brief.

And yet I also welcome Harold's provocation to lessen the analytic distance on occasion and ask whether detached critical reading should be the only kind we take seriously. Harold speaks of pleasure, which is certainly one part of the reading experience, but doubtless there are others: curiosity, shock, delight, fear, and so on and on through the many-faceted domain of the imagination. We've seen as of late some renewed interest in taking literary experience seriously as experience, in for example the work of Rita Felski. Much of that work would profit, or has already profited, by contact with philosophy, especially of the phenomenological bent that is not represented in these essays (the tradition of Merleau-Ponty, for example). We needn't consider the turn to experience as one away from rigor, however, so much as a bringing of our techniques of formal analysis to the qualities of literary experience itself.

I think there is reason to consider this kind of conversation as a quarrel-free point of contact between philosophy and literature. Both have something to say about the contours and character of phenomenal experience. Harold's comments on the importance of theme in the constitution of great works however ultimately get us on the wrong track. Talk of universal themes produces a certain eye-glaze, or worse an eye-roll, and I think ought to do so. The sort of argument Harold takes from Lamarque and Olsen—that the “characteristic purpose” of literary works is to develop in depth some allegedly universal theme (“family, mortality, inevitability, and freedom,” and so on)—advances little over Samuel Johnson, for whom identifying the universal was an important way to distinguish literature from other forms of writing at a moment when such distinction could provide energy to critical prose rather than run it into banality. In any case, talk of universal themes glazes the eyes because such themes always disappear when looked at closely. And they do so because they have neither formal nor phenomenal properties. But we needn't be detained by themes in order to soften the habitual detachment of critical reading. Neither critical reading nor philosophical argument has to forswear literary experience; indeed it is likely such experience has a form illuminated by each.

Robert Chodat's paper takes a different approach from either Camp or Harold. He doesn't use philosophy to demarcate kinds of literature or literature to establish an account of the self. He remains instead within the historical bounds of most work in his discipline and asks instead how one tradition of twentieth-century thinking (pragmatism) might or might not have influenced the work of one of its major authors (Walker Percy). Chodat weaves in an out of Percy's novels and works of non-fiction alike in order to reveal the author's attraction to a philosophical tradition with which he was also in considerable tension. The stakes are high: nothing less than the revolution in the mind-body problem brought about by combined developments in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. On Chodat's account, Percy finds in Pierce a resistance to the possibility of physical reduction elsewhere countenanced by the pragmatists themselves. According to Percy, humans “represent a break in the universe,” a “cleft in the order of being” which accommodates a set of terms different in kind from our talk about mere matter: selves and egos and, “upgraded into the theological register,” even “souls” and “spirits.” In contrast, contemporary pragmatists like Rorty and Dennett brush off such ontology-talk by answering “our most urgent questions—are we fundamentally material creatures or something more? — with a casual 'It all depends'.” So we are left with a choice between the commitment to “potent ideals of spiritual perfection” and “meliorist ideals of intellectual growth and progress.”

Chodat leaves this as an open question and yet, for all the delicate working in and out of Percy's texts, I felt myself missing some of the declarative brio of Camp and Harold, if only to make Percy feel a little less of a museum piece. The questions haunting this elegant and moving essay are indeed “urgent,” and yet the intellectual and literary terrain seem unnecessarily narrow. Pragmatism nudges out other areas of philosophy where the mind-body problem was at center stage, the tradition from Nagel through Chalmers and well beyond for example. And I couldn't quite see what in Percy's work itself spoke to the dilemmas of reduction with which he seemed evidently to be concerned, or how he attempted any sort of resolution other than by means of plot.

One famously urgent problem is how, in Chodat's words, the “view of the brain scientist, focusing on neural and other physical processes” could account for the felt experience these processes yield. With their presentation of first-person experience in third-person form, literary works do their part in addressing this problem. They don't solve it, but they do provide some ground for conversation.

Rhie sees the strength and the power of a number of such theories – but he also sees that that strength and power is dependent upon first having implicitly subscribed to the dualistic sub-structure lying beneath the question. His project then, appropriately, is not one of criticizing the various available theories and then adding his own, but rather it is one of working to achieve insight into the presuppositions that motivate the problem to which the available theories are answers. It is a Wittgensteinian undertaking, and his conception of philosophical progress is internal to this methodology. Rhie shows, in short, that in writing about the human face, Wittgenstein is doing very much more than only writing about the human face. Indeed, Wittgenstein, as Rhie compellingly shows, is thinking with facial expressivity as a tool for more deeply understanding the physiognomy of embodied expression.

But the problem of artistic expressivity, the now-conventional one that is built upon a metaphysical substructure that takes as granted the inferential gap separating expressive content from that content’s manifest form, as Rhie indicates, calls for more than a brief description. It is a virtue of Rhie’s discussion that he sees the importance of differences on this score: Some works of art involve performances by living human beings where their persons constitute the materials of the artform, e.g. dance; some works are performed by persons but where the person is present but using an instrument, e.g. music; and some involve works that leave their personal creators behind (but keep their expressive traces), e.g. painting or drawing. The degree of presence of physiognomic expressivity is a result of the location of the artwork along this continuum from embodied to (what we might then call) disembodied work. Rhie helpfully shows that the problem of artistic expressivity will then be regarded as easiest on the one extreme, and hardest on the other, i.e. where the body is fully present, the expressivity is explained as natural human expression (although conceptually framed by artwork status); where the body is fully absent, and yet expressive content is unquestionably present, we face what, on these conceptual foundations, is then taken to be the hardest problem.

Stephen Davies’ neat term for one approach to this problem, “appearance emotionalism,” holds, as Rhie reminds us, that it is a relation of resemblance that lies at the heart of art’s expressive content. That resemblance, on this view, is discernible between the expressive comportment of a human body (I’ll return to the implicit danger of using the term “body” in this context in a moment) and the contours of, e.g., melody and rhythm. A close relative of this view, advanced by Peter Kivy, is similar in emphasizing contour, but differs in that, in this case, the viewer is thought to project animate qualities onto the otherwise inert surface of the work. We give (in the case of music) sound patterns expressive life by projecting onto them expressive traits that we would perceive in the naturally expressive comportment of truly animate creatures, i.e. human beings. The important distinction here, as Rhie captures it, is between (1) perception on the one hand – where we see the resemblance that is already there between animate comportment and the contours of expressive work, and (2) projection on the other hand – where we take what we know from our perception of natural human expressivity and then, turning it around, project it onto what we then perceive as the expressive content of the work. There is significant insight in Rhie’s observation that one needs to see some of the problems of the classical expression theories (e.g., Tolstoy, Croce, and Collingwood) in order to understand how we arrived at the strong emphasis on appearances or on the surfaces of works of art in recent theories of expression. The assumption beneath those classical theories, i.e. that any emotional content of a work must record or refer back to an initial emotional experience of the artist, led straight to insuperable difficulties: how do we identify the originating emotion with any specificity; how do we distinguish between right and wrong determinations of expressive content; why should originating emotional experience circumscribe all future work-meaning; how do we get past the fundamental other-minds problem of knowing another’s emotional state in the first place; why should we reduce the function of the work singly to that of an inner-content delivery system; etc. All those philosophical troubles were left behind by changing the focus to the surface – on the first view, we just see resemblances between the appearances of two kinds of things as a fact of perception; on the second view, we see expressive content through a natural or hard-wired perceptual habit of animating by projecting onto the otherwise inanimate art object. Neither requires the placement of an originating emotion on the part of the artist at the center of the theory; neither requires a revivification of the Romantic myth of the deep and profound emotional experience of the creative genius fueling the external manifestation of that inner content in outward form; neither requires that the correct interpretation of a work is, and only is, the receiving of that emotional message as packaged and sent. But the two types of view – the classical expressionist and the more recent appearance-emotionalist – have something in common that Rhie intimates but perhaps does not state as forcefully as his lucid discussion has earned the right to do.

In saying that it is the body that exhibits naturally expressive contours – gait, stance, posture, position, speed of movement, grace or its absence, and so forth – one is already insinuating, consciously or not, at the deepest level of our thinking on these matters a dualistic conception of selfhood. (Rhie does, very much to his credit, point this out, but given its profound importance for thinking our way clear of misleading conceptual pictures that have shaped aesthetic thought for generations, I rather want him to shout it from the rooftops in direct and forceful language and then articulate the implications fully). To say that it is the body – rather than a person – that exhibits expressively behavior is to think in accordance with dualistic dictates (precisely the ones from which Wittgenstein’s philosophical observations on naturally expressive action will deliver us); the body has its expressive contours, which themselves are taken to be the external packaging, the outward manifestation in material form of prior immaterial content. In short, this is the Romantic myth’s true, if submerged, origin. And it is the true origin of both much theorizing about artistic expression and of the very structuring of the problem that motivates and (from beneath) shapes that theorizing. It is this – precisely, a dualistic conception of the self, where (1) expressive content is believed to be wholly contained internally, and (2) expressive action is believed to be posterior to and separable from that prior internal emotive content – that the classical and the more recent problem-formulations have in common. Schematically stated, the situation is this: the Cartesian points to the source in the inner world; the behaviorist points to the embodied movements of the outer world; the classical expressionist points with the Cartesian to the inner determinants of content; the appearance emotionalist points with the behaviorist to the outward determinants of content. Simply put, both pairs of theorists have buried in their conceptual substrates a picture that they share in common beneath their more visible differences.

That picture is subtly and exactingly taken apart by Wittgenstein. It is not repudiated with a large-scale counter-proposal, nor is it refuted in a manner internal to its own terms (which would end, as much philosophy has in fact done, with arguing ultimately for the priority of one side or the other, thus staying within the dualistic categories that framed the problem in the first place). And once the overarching picture is taken apart, the pieces are shown not to fit together into a whole as we initially thought, so the progress is very unlike that of reductive analysis. This progress, by contrast, is measured by a deep change in vision, a change in the way of seeing what is now exposed as the shaping influences, influences considerably more powerful than we might have realized, the entire problem-field. It is precisely here that Rhie’s contribution is of such value: it brings into sharp focus the widely dispersed remarks Wittgenstein made on the recognition of facial expressivity, and he shows why these remarks are of the first importance in understanding not only the character of, but indeed the very possibility of, artistic expressivity over and against the problems generated by a misleading conceptual model of selfhood. (It is a mark of Rhie’s intellectual generosity that he also considers the position claiming that the person has been eradicated in some recent theory, where this concept is shown to have been illusory all along. I will not pause to consider this view’s interesting and instructive lack of plausibility here, other than to say that it refutes itself in its first articulation, since to speak with intelligible content of the “we” in the sentence “We have come to see the person as an illusory mirage-construct” one has to refer to a set of selves who allegedly discovered the fact. It would take another full discussion and some time to explain this properly. Rhie rightly says that this view, in any case, would leave us with more difficulty about artistic expression than we started with.)

So what does Rhie see in Wittgenstein in connection with artistic expression, exactly? Rhie is not only reminding us that Wittgenstein returned to the topic of facial recognition hundreds of times throughout his writings; any close reader of Wittgenstein knows that. What Rhie is doing is assembling a number of Wittgenstein’s observations in order to loosen the grip of a picture that holds us captive (to use Wittgenstein’s famous phrase). A familiar word can strike us as having a face; meaning itself is a kind of physiognomy; the lack of a musical ear stands parallel to an inability to recognize facial expressions; observations that are instructive run crisscross over distinctions that (given a prior subscription to the underlying picture) we would expect to be hard and fast, i.e. the distinction between the nuanced recognition of facial expressivity in an animate human being and the nuanced recognition of expressive content in an inanimate artwork; blindness to one aspect of a work can be akin to the kind of moral insensitivity that would turn a blind eye to subtle expressions of human suffering or difficulty. What this cluster of interrelated themes sounds like, so far, is a set of analogies between abilities to recognize expressive content in faces and parallel abilities to recognize expressive content in art. What the traditional (from the present point of view, picture-bound) expression theorists will say at this point is that all analogies break down, and that our philosophical task is to provide a convincing explanation of how the perception of expressive content is possible on the inanimate side. But Rhie’s point is deeper, and that point cannot be captured in these terms or properly acknowledged within any such response. His point is that, if we are sufficiently mindful of and attentive to our actual human practices, we will see that these are not analogies, and they do not naturally divide, on the level of practice, into animate and inanimate sides. It is the underlying picture that leads us to see the matter in that polarized way. The truth, Rhie is suggesting, following Wittgenstein, is far more interesting.

The explanations offered by the expression theorists (both classical and more recent) involve the perception of pre-existent contour-resemblances on the one side, and the projection of animate content onto those contours on the other. It is at this juncture easy to say that what the Wittgensteinian observations show is that the perception of expressive content on the animate side is unproblematic. That is, the perception of expressive content on the inanimate side is, again, the problem (and what Wittgenstein is doing is simply trying to attach what is philosophically problematic to what is philosophically unproblematic and so remove, or at least significantly dilute, the problem – a kind of innocence by association). This way of taking the Wittgensteinian contribution, Rhie is suggesting, is easy to grasp, and it is – instructively and deeply – wrong. To focus on the inanimate side (which in truth, on the level of actual recognitional phenomenology, is a side that, as a pre-demarcated area, does not exist) as a methodological desideratum is to blind ourselves to aspects of the phenomena in question that will help us see the entire problem-field anew. The issue – here Rhie’s initial distinction comes into play forcefully – is that we need to think with the experience of facial recognition when thinking about artistic expressive content. And to do that requires our meticulously thinking through the nature of, the character of, animate faces. (It can be instructive to note that, at just this juncture, we might be tempted to classify all such cases under the heading “animated faces.” This itself would be an initial wrong step: we use the expression “animated face” to describe one kind or category of facial expressivity, often, but not always, in contrast to flat, dull, immobile, motionless, inexpressive, poker-faced, or other kinds of faces. To run them all together under a generic term is to prejudice the investigation against subtlety from the outset.)

One thing of central importance that we can learn from the part of our natural history concerning expressive content recognition in faces is that the process, as Wittgenstein observes, is not like – in truth not anything like – the model of facial recognition that a dualistic conception of selfhood would encourage. That is to say, it is not like a medical doctor framing a diagnosis from symptoms as an inferential process. Now, it is true that mediation between evidence and emotive-content attribution can take place, but in the vast range of ordinary cases it does not. “Joy” and “grief” are not words waiting at the end of an inferential chain. Nor do we deduce the presence of emotional states: All persons exhibiting facial contours C have emotion E; this person is exhibiting facial contour C; etc. The face, Wittgenstein is showing, does not in the ordinary case mediate its own expressive content.

How might one capture this point further to amplify Rhie’s clarifying use of these passages for gaining a clearer view of the character of artistic expression? For one thing, a musical arranger might take the original piece as composed at the piano, and then, through an extended creative process involving trial and error, thought about timbres, thought about registers, thought about harmonizations, and so forth, begin to piece together an arrangement of that original piece. That is an intelligible example of mediation between content and its later expression. Or one might transcribe a cello suite for the guitar, involving similar mediating cognition along the way from original score to completed transcription. In another domain, a forensic accountant might look for, then see part of, a pattern of misreported accounts, and then, on that basis, predict the appearance of the next one, look for it, and find it, further confirming the inferential chain. The kind of recognition that Rhie is putting to work here is not at all of this kind – it is, in the ordinary case, not mediated. And if we do have occasion for mediated reflection of facial expressivity, it will likely be a case in which the person in question is attempting to hide an emotion under, as we say in such cases (but not always), the surface. (“Oh yes; now that I think of it, I saw him turn away for a moment and touch the corner of his eye when she was mentioned – and that fits with what you are saying about how upset he must actually be”). The emotion, to put it one way (and Wittgenstein is suggesting this as one way of speaking among others) is personified in the face. What these contrasts bring into focus is that the idea of immediacy need not just be a truncated version of the hidden facts of inferential or mediated perception where everything outward is in truth evidence for the inner. What they bring into focus – and this is Rhie’s extraordinarily helpful contribution here – is that we will cling to such pictures only so long as we leave undisturbed a Cartesian or dualistic conception of selfhood as the foundational architecture upon which everything else concerning expressive content must be built. If the human self is thought to be composed of (in the first instance) metaphysically inaccessible emotive content, content that is then (in the second instance) contingently signaled through facial movements, then we will forever be saddled with a problem concerning how those intangible inner contents cross the ontological divide into the inanimate realm. And where the surfaces, the external appearances, are conceived in the first instance to be always expressively inert or in their primary state without expressive content of any kind, then the question will invariably concern the relation between two kinds of things. The modern problem of expression in the arts has been formulated in precisely these terms.

An attitude towards a soul, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, is not reducible into component parts: it is not an amalgam of a perceived body and an inferentially justified claim concerning its soul-habitation. If, as Rhie correctly says, we speak of a person’s body or a person’s mind, we are not speaking about two ontologically distinct elements contingently brought together in this amalgam before us. And I want to add to this: if we speak of evidence for a person still having a soul, still being alive, still being animate (we think we might have seen a finger very slightly twitch), the person of whom we are speaking is in very serious medical condition. That language game, against the dictates of the picture, is not the one actually hidden beneath our ordinary discourse that would only misleadingly appear non-dualistic. And if that is true, then the model that generates the problem of the relation between the two kinds of things is (1) falsely applied to other (i.e. artistic) cases, and worse (2) false to the nature of human beings in the first place. We see human mental states, emotions, nuanced expression (of a kind and with variations far more subtle than philosophy often acknowledges) in persons, not in bodies that provide evidence for hidden ghostly mental entities. And if we get clear on that, we then have at least a chance of clarifying, in a way true to the wondrously complex and intricate phenomenology of facial recognition, just what it is we see in works of art and how it is that we see it. What has been said here, following Rhie following Wittgenstein, by no means offers a full account (nor does Rhie intend his discussion as one), but it opens a door to a new way of seeing the entire issue, a way free of the conceptual picture that generates a problem-template that, once established, has proven very difficult to dislodge.

Metaphysical dualism leads us to assume that the content of an expression is both prior to and separable from what we then construe as its embodiment. And Wittgenstein, as Rhie reminds us, called attention to the often-concealed power of the verb “to have” in such contents: to say that a drawing of a face has this particular expression suggests that what it has is taken on by it, that what it has was separate from and prior to it. And here again, then, the question of the relation arises: how exactly are the face and its expression related? But if we look to the close details of our actual language, we see that it does not conform whatsoever to what a misplaced scientism might dictate, i.e. that extended matter is the only kind of thing unproblematically real, and that matter is in the first instance value-neutral and expressively inert. How, we then ask, could we arrive at a perception of extended matter that includes those metaphysically less stable, indeed metaphysically less real, things? Rhie does not go into this here – one cannot do everything at once – but the dualistic view, conjoined to a misplaced scientism, also generates a conception of language. That conception parallels the view of persons as body-plus-soul amalgams; it is the picture of inert signs-plus-meanings. And that in turn quickly gives rise to a question concerning the relation of signs to meanings, and we are embarked before we know it – that is, before the underlying picture has been identified and subjected to independent scrutiny — on the project of relation-specifying theory formulation. Expressive content, so we think under the influence of this picture, is not really out there in the way the materials that carry that content are, and meanings are not really out there in the way that the physical signs and sounds that carry them are. Thus, as Rhie succinctly capture it, seeing expressive content either as animating fiction or as interpretive projection removes what is actually central to human physiognomic perception and recognition to the ontological periphery, just as (taking the discussion into the linguistic field) what we say, what we intimate, what we imply, what we enact in speech, how we remake the world with metaphor — in short, what we do with our words – is removed to the periphery of any investigation into the reality within which we live.

Magdalena Ostas, in her fine and linguistically nuanced contribution, shows on the other hand that the closest scrutiny of our language is anything but secondary to, or merely prefatory for, philosophical progress. The incorporation of what we say, of real language, into poetry is, as she shows, one way of integrating philosophy into poetry. Here the sides clearly are those of the ancient quarrel, poetry and philosophy; what philosophy might learn, or learn better, from poetry is just how to pay the closest attention to language, to linguistic practice and to linguistic nuance and complexity. Ostas begins with the excavation of a deep affinity: Wordsworth saying in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry should be written in “language really used by men,” and Wittgenstein’s wide ranging efforts to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” As Ostas shows, what they both want to avoid, in Wordsworth’s wonderful phrase (anything but self-exemplification), is “inane phraseology.” Phraseology, as we already have reason to believe given Rhie’s project above, is I truth hardly a small matter in philosophy (I take it as evident that phraseology is of the essence in poetry): if we can overcome the dualism that would separate soul from body, expressive content from its expression, animate significance from brute materiality, and – now here – meaning from saying, then we will arrive at a vantage point from which, in philosophy too, how we say what we say is of the essence. We have seen that how we say it – our phraseology – can unwittingly shape expectations concerning how an answer to a problem will be developed, what will and will not be accepted as an answer to that problem, what is and is not regarded as relevant to the settling of that problem, and, perhaps most importantly, what is in the first place so much as taken as a problem. In poetic expression, as Ostas beautifully shows, the content of the expression is instructively not separable from the expression; saying and meaning are not two things metaphysically rent asunder in a manner that requires theoretical explanations of verbal reunions.

Ostas discusses the way of seeing exemplified in Michael Fried’s recent reading of the photographer Jeff Wall’s work. Fried finds there the remaking of the everyday, the commonplace, the ordinary; he finds objects portrayed anew, revitalized, and – as Fried brings in Wittgenstein – revivifying of “life itself.” One aspect of this photography-induced reawakening of what we might call real-setting vitality comes through grasping, against the embedded conceptual pictures and their corresponding expectations, that those objects, persons, places, and settings of our quotidian world, newly arranged, newly juxtaposed, newly positioned, and seen (in Wittgenstein’s sense) in a new light (in photography’s case this phrase functions both metaphorically and literally simultaneously) are anything but inert. They are not like the brute materiality of extended substance that comes in the first instance without a sense of animated expressivity – at least they need not do so. Words – the real words of women and men – like the things and places in Wall’s photographs as Fried sees them (a critical vision that is itself re-enlivening), are not in the first instance mere dead signs awaiting the embodiment of the linguistic analogue of prior and separable spirit-content. Ostas is directing our attention to the creative processes of the reassembly, the re-composition, the re-sounding of our ordinary language in a way directly parallel to Fried viewing Wall; that is, in such a way that our language becomes, through poetic transformation, philosophical.

Ostas reminds us of Wittgenstein’s remark, one of fundamental importance to grasping what is original and conceptually reorienting about his philosophical methodology (and what sets that methodology in striking contrast to the scientific model prevalent in the methodological mainstream): “It is … essential to our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.” That is the contrast between a contribution to knowledge and a contribution to human understanding, and it is of deep importance for Ostas’ project precisely because the question concerning poetic truth can hereby be helpfully reformulated. Rather than asking what knowledge, or what kind of knowledge, poetry delivers, and, once that is settled, whether that knowledge is new or a kind of knowledge not available elsewhere, one can instead ask what contribution poetry makes to human understanding, and whether that kind of contribution is unique to this art-form. And with the preceding two thoughts (the special life ordinary language shows when reassembled and recomposed within poetry, and the methodological point concerning human understanding) behind her, Ostas is well positioned to shed a good deal of light in succinct form on the kind of poetry she is examining.

It has been said that, if you are a politician trying to hide something, you should hide it in plain sight. Nobody will look for it there – they will be looking in, and closely attending to, concealed, dark, underground places. And thus they will not see what is right in front of them for what it is. Ostas identifies this aspect of Lyrical Ballads (and one could add here a much longer list of poetry that has this special quality since that stylistically foundational work), this sense of the plainness of word-presentation that carries in its undercurrent a sense of something else, a sense of not-yet-fathomed content. That under-content, hidden in plain sight, we come to understand through what Ostas rightly sees as the dialogic structure of many of the passages in Lyrical Ballads (as is also true, she rightly observes, of Philosophical Investigations.) The way we satisfy the need for fuller understanding aroused by that sense of hiddenness-in-plain-view is to gain a full grasp of the way the words and phrases interact, the larger interconnections between words, phrases, and passages, the resonances these words sound with and against each other. (Philosophical Investigations demands precisely this kind of reading as well.) To read for the interactive work of words is what it takes to see how, when juxtaposed in ever-new ways, when re-enlivened, when recomposed, when re-sounded, our words have life.

Ostas observes that, in Wordsworth, “poems are investigations into the act of speaking or telling itself – something that importantly distinguishes the “lyrical” ballad from the traditional ballad grounded in the rehearsal of plot or event.” To the extent that we truly understand the act of speaking or telling therein represented, I want to say, we must first understand the dialogic-interactive functions of those words down to an extremely minute level (a degree of attentiveness to meaning-constitutive minutiae that philosophy could well learn from poetry). And this is a way of saying that words, when taken only by themselves (actually it is, I think, impossible to take them in isolation and genuinely understand them for what they are), hide content in plain sight. On any such atomistic or scientifically modeled approach to words, we take them as if they were inert signs that had isolated meaning-units attached; or (to connect back to the underlying picture, the half-buried architectural foundation discussed above) as though they were merely the linguistic analogues of mind-soul amalgams. Ostas’s sensitive approach functions as a corrective to this conceptual misdirection: “both Wordsworth and Wittgenstein also resist uses of language unanchored to or ungrounded in the specificity, tangibility, and one might say wholeness or completeness of a total speech situation. Both in Philosophical Investigations and Lyrical Ballads, language is emphatically placed.” But in following out these remarkably helpful thoughts, there is one place where I think Ostas should go farther – significantly farther – than she does. It looks initially like a rather small matter.

In writing of the distinctively lyrical ballad, Ostas observes that it is the feeling that gives importance, and she adds that, “the action alone or in itself is frequently unimportant.” Given all that she has said to cast light both on the relations between Wordsworth’s poetic language and Wittgenstein’s conception of language in Philosophical Investigations, as well as what she has said about the distinctive philosophical character and function of Wordsworth’s language, Ostas is perfectly positioned to say that, in truth (i.e. against dominant underlying conceptual pictures), there is no such thing as action alone, no such thing as action in itself. It is, to use a well-worn philosophical phrase, always already placed, and this shows – because linguistic usage is always already “placed” in just the sense she has so lucidly described – the full extent to which words and deeds, action and language, are in reality proximate and complexly interwoven. And so, actions as actually performed (i.e., real action like Wordsworth’s real language) by human beings, and events as experienced by human beings, are always already intertwined within the fabric of a life-narrative with previous actions and events, within trajectories throughout a life of such engagements, with actions considered but not performed, with events anticipated or imagined but not had, and countless other variations on this theme. And the language that captures the nuances of these complexly interacting actions and events in a human life, i.e. poetry, mimetically has its words within its structure interacting in complex and unpredictable ways as well. Once we see this issue in its larger frame, it becomes clear that this is not a small matter: just as Rhie said of the understanding of the very possibility of expressive content in the arts (and its connections to conceptions of selfhood), this issue goes to the heart of human self-understanding, of how we make sense of experience. But then here as well, one cannot do everything at once (and my fundamental purpose here is to help articulate some of the implications stemming from two pieces with which I happily find myself in very considerable agreement).

The contrast Ostas draws between Wordsworth and Keats is a profound one, and it casts into high relief one distinctive mode of aesthetic experience. One approaches, she says, Wordsworth (at least in his early work) as a listener; Keats, by contrast, leads one in as a reader “of written language that is unmoored to a human voice.” Listening to Wordsworth in one’s mind’s ear brings to prominence the connection between this kind of poetic language and the place we normally listen to words-in-action, i.e. human dialogue. And as we have seen, it is within those dialogues (and I want here to say only within) such dialogues that we are able to discern the sense-making, meaning-constitutive interrelations that make those linguistic actions what they are. Thus what is to my mind of central importance in what Ostas is saying at this point is that it is decidedly not the case that words-as-signs are stationed in a holding repository with fixed meanings attached and ready to be deployed as individual operatives of a collective team (a sentence) when called for. On the contrary, poetic usage, as I intimated above, is also itself an instance, and exemplification, of what poetic language represents: it involves the creative and context-specific interaction of words, phrases, sentences – the makings of language games – that, through the linguistic analogue of chemical reactions, circumscribe their own limits and give rise to possibilities of expression which a highly sensitive ear – the ear of the poet – will “hear.” (There is a direct parallel in philosophy to work in the Austinian tradition.) And what poets can hear, in this sense, gives rise to what they can say; the content of the one is dependent upon the other. All of this is what lies beneath Ostas’s radiant sentence: “Wordsworth, like Wittgenstein, anchors his voice in the world.”

That world is one in which we live and which we cannot reduce: words are far too complex a set of instruments to assign to each a fixed and single employment. To learn a word is thus dependent upon a form of life, a way of living, an irreducible set of complex interrelations between elements – persons, hopes, fears, aspirations, affections, past experience, developmental narratives and their teleologies, things, categories of things, layered and embedded practices, modes of attention and of responsive attentiveness, patterns of avoidance, aesthetic sensibilities, interactive preferences — in short, life. Ostas offers a brilliant reading of Wordsworth’s 1798 “We Are Seven” in precisely these terms, and she shows how much more than the isolated meaning of a word (the word “are” in the sentence “We are seven”) one would have to teach the girl who insists on counting two of the dead among her seven tallied persons. In the lines, “You run about, my little maid,/Your limbs they are alive;/If two are in the church-yard laid,/Then ye are only five,” the meaning of what we might initially assume to be among the most unproblematic of all words – a word right before us in plain sight – quickly becomes overwhelmingly complex, when we think about it in terms of what the girl needs to understand in order to come into alignment with the “are” in “ye are only five.” And this connects directly back to the issues we considered above in connection with Rhie’s deeply engaging contribution: the simple, schematic dualistic conception of the word, when drawn from a dualistic conception of selfhood that also generated the dualistic conception of the problem of artistic expression, is hopeless when brought up against the difference of vision between the two worlds invoked by the two employments of “are” (again, as employed in the sentences “We are seven” and “Ye are only five.”) The two “are” usages, as Ostas rightly puts it, “don’t share a world.”

The way of seeing awakened by the girl’s insistence, that special way in which we show our allegiance to an expanded, indeed poetic, ontology within which the deceased are countable with us, or loyally remain here, in an extended sense, among us, is a function of the re-enlivening of a word — the re-assembly, the re-composition, the re-sounding. One misreads Wittgenstein if one insufficiently attends to what is herein discussed as the poetic interaction, the meaning-constitutive dialogical interweave, of the words he puts to work. Just as one misses what is hidden in plain sight if one insufficiently attends to the philosophical dimension of the ever-new poetic re-employments of our language. The ancient quarrel can safely be left behind.