Art: Theory of Functions and the Function of Theory

Art: Theory of Functions and the Function of Theory A.N. Akwanya Department of English & Literary Studies University of Nigeria, Nsukka [email protected] Abstract The word theory so frequently collocates with the scientific disciplines that some take it to be a scientific term. Conceived as a different order of intellectual productivity than the sciences, use of theory with respect to art therefore strikes some as inappropriate. But if organized knowledge about art is possible, and genuine knowledge about it distinguishable from non-genuine, it must be because theory is at work in this study. Theory as a general statement about something is in fact implicated in the production, consumption, and study of art. The rather insignificant role some critics associate with it in the study may be owing to use of habitual knowledge to the extent of forgetfulness of the need to re-examine and re-assess the founding principles. An academic discipline must be wary if the founding principles have become part of everyday discourse and are transmitted as traditional and socially and culturally useful knowledge – if, in other words, the student of this discipline receives his/her basic notions from the social space. This paper examines the theory function in art studies from concern over the undue influence of everyday utilitarian notions of art on the academic study of art in Nigeria. Keywords: art, functionalism, knowledge object, made things, theory, work. Introduction Of the different ways of regarding art, one appears to be most peripheral. This is the one that regards it as embellishment or a way of doing something – anything at all. In The Republic of Plato, some of these things are mentioned: the art of making money, the art of the vine-dresser, the art of medicine, the art of theft, the art of horsemanship, and so on. But it is understood that in all these, the focus is on the activity itself, which may be performed in one way or another – with finesse, indifferently, passably, poorly, and so on. So art in this sense is not what is meant by that word in the title of this paper. Yet it is taken seriously in one academic activity called ‘stylistics’. Wimsatt and Beardsley, therefore, comment about this academic activity that ‘it is the least theoretical in detail, has the least content, and makes the least demand on critical intelligence, so it is in the most concrete instances not a theory but a fiction or a fact – of no critical significance’ (1972: 351). Stylistics may indeed celebrate the beauties of a Hopkins sonnet, a well-written newspaper column, or a well-rendered sermon, but there can be no coherent and consistent procedure for discovering these beauties, because the ‘art’ of doing something is obviously peripheral to that thing itself and peripheral to art also. The problem of the nature of art does not arise with stylistics or the art of doing anything. Art is also seen in terms of fulfilling a function, but whether it is a function and what does function mean with respect to art, or whether it is an object for itself and is self-justifying for this, these are not peripheral issues. The aim of this paper is to investigate art as an area of study in which theory must play a necessary part. Function, an Ambiguous Sign in Art Studies Theory as a general statement about a class of phenomena is strictly neutral as to the field of application as long as knowledge is in question. There are approaches to art in which knowledge is not directly in question. One such current runs in ‘the Great Tradition’ of British literary history, and is articulated as follows by Wordsworth writing about the literary artist: that ‘He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love’ (‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ 658). The Great Tradition is concerned with the question, what we can do with art, or what art can do for us, which is the question that Plato is concerned with in the dialogue between Socrates and Adeimantus: And what shall be [the heroes’] education? Can we find a better than the traditional sort?— and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul. 1 True. Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards? … And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not? (The Republic 64.) Plato is using the name of one art or another as paradigm for art itself. He will quickly move to the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ in art, a distinction which arises because of the task assigned art here, which is the intellectual formation of the young who shall grow up to become defenders of the city and upholders of its institutions and values. It would seem therefore that only what will contribute positively to the formation of the right attitudes – only what is truly worth knowing – should be inculcated. Following this initial premise, he enacts a process of censorship, which leads ultimately to the rejection of art and the artist in his ideal republic, although he would permit employing just ‘for our souls’ health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers’ (84). In Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Study of Poetry’, art is destined to replace both religion and philosophy, and having done that would give ‘our spirits what they can rest upon’ (line 558). But it must do so on the basis of truth; hence there is need to distinguish in it ‘between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true’ (lines 64-66). Censorship of some sort is unavoidable in handling art in the Great Tradition. In Dryden, there is strong aversion for art which does not clearly punish misbehaviour and approve and reward virtue; in Matthew Arnold, artworks are estimated, using ‘truth and seriousness’ as a filter; while Leavis, even if the work’s integrity is outwardly respected, the reader must know how to distinguish what is sincerely meant, which is to be taken seriously since for him, ‘sincerity can only mean identity with truth’ (Cullen 155). Poetic justice, high seriousness, and sincerity are thought to be discoverable qualities; and there are rules to guide in the discovery. But no one investigating the work for any of these things can be said any longer to be studying literature or art. We see an example of the practice of the Great Tradition in D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Why the Novel Matters’, starting with a gesture of interest in the artwork and moving away to something else which is the real object of interest: And only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living. For out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive, and live woman (Nos. 231-236). The contrast here between ‘life itself’ and ‘inert safety’ is most striking in classical tragedies where a dangerous course is often followed over against the one that could conceivably lead to safety; for this would have been ‘inert safety’. The ability to choose the higher value over ‘inert safety’ is that heroic quality whereby the tragic character is said by Aristotle to be ‘better than we are’ (On the Art of Poetry, chapter 2). For Lawrence, however, it is not the giving full play of things that is of interest in the work, but rather the outcome, seen from a specific viewpoint: ‘the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive, and live woman’. This sliding away from art began with the question of the function – in terms of the uses – of art. Traditionally, the answers have been varied, but without there being a way to check them and establish their truth value. The most that could be said about these answers is that they are not absurd. But ‘the wholeness of a man’ is not what one thinks about in a work like Arrow of God, where the character is ravaged by his experience and left an effigy of himself, unlike the Bildungsroman, with which D.H. Lawrence’s own works are associated (Jeffers 2005). In these, the character’s career is often attended by moral, spiritual, and intellectual progress and may yield as an outcome ‘the wholeness of a man’. Plato’s question was as regards existing literature and what it could be used for, whereas Bildungsroman was a deliberately constructed historical image in which the individual is in a process of ‘creative evolution’. According to Jeffers, By yoking a Lutheran, at times even pietistic concern for the soul with an intelligent interest in its “material base,” broadly conceived, Goethe creates a hybrid realism that Mr. Boyle suggestively compares to the “magic” variety recently offered by Umberto Eco, Gabriel García Márquez, or 2 Günter Grass—or, to put it in eighteenth-century terms, he has blended Voltairean conte, Johnsonian fable, and Smollettian travelogue (15). A very significant change occurred in the seventeenth century as part of the new secularism in Europe. Under the influence of the Scholastics up till the late Renaissance period, religious art and literature, mainly the Bible, were treated as exclusively important and rules of interpretation were developed and applied to them. As an outcrop of the rebirth of learning, interest was shifting in the seventeenth century to secular literature and art, marking a new man-centred universe, or at least a this-worldly approach to things. The seventeenth century humanists now associated art with improving man, or in Philip Sidney’s terms delighting and instructing mankind (An Apology for Poetry 224). Aristotle’s old idea that the aim/end of tragedy is the incidents and action of the sequence (hôste ta pragmata kai ho muthos telos tês tragôidias), and that this ‘end is the chief thing of all’ (to de telos megiston hapantôn) (see Aristotle, Peri Poiêtikês, 1450a, 23; On the Art of Poetry chapter 6), essentially that the work is self-referential, was lost sight of and was picked up again only recently by the twentieth century Aristotelians. Whereas Plato had tied the use to something measurable: civic education, the humanists extending to Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’ make claims about the social efficacy and beneficent influence of art at the individual level with no better support than passionate belief. The use of the word function in terms of utility is quite infrequent in the literature. Yet in African literary criticism, function tends to be used with literature in the sense of what literature enables one to do; what it leads to, or normally gives effect to. This may have been influenced by the Marxists of whom we read: In an article called The Crisis in Criticism in the New Masses of February 1933, Granville Hicks drew up a list of requirements which the ideal Marxist work of literature must meet. The primary function of such a work, he asserted, must be to ‘lead the proletarian reader to recognize his role in the class struggle (Wilson 2000: 1250). Art understood as having social utility brings into play not only censorship, but also prescriptions. Hicks’s functionalism above may be contrasted to another kind of functionalism reflected in Northrop Frye’s ‘Archetypes of Literature’: Hence art, which Plato called a dream for awakened minds, seems to have as its final cause the resolution of the antithesis, the mingling of the sun and the hero, the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide. This is the same goal, of course, that the attempt to combine human and natural power in ritual has. The social function of the arts, therefore, seems to be closely connected with visualizing the goal of work in human life. So in terms of significance, the central myth of art must be the vision of the end of social effort, the innocent world of fulfilled desires, the free human society (1972: 431). In Hicks, art selects its audience for the purpose of working certain changes in them, a specific form having previously been selected by the artist and fitted out with the specific tool to achieve the end intended. He is speaking of course of ‘a Marxist work of literature’, not of literature or art. Literature or art unqualified is what Plato, the Humanists, and the Marxists are really opposed to. The tacit understanding among all these schools is that art always carries a label, whether articulated or not, announcing its ‘function’ – to document a history, which may be personal or socio-political; to explain individual behaviour or socio-political practice by aligning it to an intellectual model; to correct misguided human actions in the public and private domains and assign their cause and remedy; or to advance a way of seeing and being or of responding to life situations. Thus once upon a time, the Christian Church showed disquiet over art, longing rather for Christian art. The case is not different for Islam, except that those on the right remain opposed, and those who are willing to consider Islamic art would probably own to being left-leaning or moderate. All systems in which thought can be correct or incorrect, where there are positions, for and against, have this same problem with art. Indeed some modes of accounting for art trace it to primitive ideation, where meanings that could be returned to in thought and refigured in symbolic representations were often things connected to survival and threats to survival. This is echoed in Frye’s ‘mingling of the sun and the hero, the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide’ and ‘the innocent world of 3 fulfilled desires’. Accordingly, his account of the social function is apparently unaware of the present of humanity with its fragmentation by conflicting ideologies, interests, cultures, politics, and histories. Art may be associated with one effect or another, but only if we are speaking of ‘the characteristic function of representations of this kind’ (touto gar idion tês toiautês mimêseôs estin) (Peri Poietikes 1452b, 34). Frye is speaking of art’s ‘final cause’ at the social level. ‘Final cause’ is of course an Aristotelian concept to which we have already referred, namely the end, which is ‘the chief thing of all’. Lukács has distinguished in literature what he calls the ‘immanent function’ (1971: 101), presumably as opposed to an extrinsic one. The immanent function is the one Aristotle explicitly refers to, where the assemblage of incidents becomes a muthos, a poetic image, or as the case may be, an artistic image. Frye’s social function is obviously extrinsic to the individual work or group of works, but he thereby suggests that an adequate account of art may only be achieved by referring it to sociological phenomena – and functional analysis in the strict sense. According to Durkheim, We use the word ‘function’ in preference to ‘end’ or ‘goal’ precisely because social phenomena generally do not exist for the usefulness of the results they produce. We must determine whether there is a correspondence between the fact being considered and the general needs of the social organism, and in what this correspondence consists, without seeking to know whether it was intentional or not. All such questions of intention are, moreover; too subjective to be dealt with scientifically (1982: 123). Art as a sociological phenomenon is one way of answering the question, what is art? In this case, we are concerned with how it exists within the social organism, its distinctive function within this organism, and how it interconnects in a relationship of organic solidarity with other components of that body. At the personal level, art has an efficient cause who may exercise an intention on one side, and on the other the individual subject capable of exercising the ‘aesthetic attitude’ (Jauss, 1974: 289). Discussions of art at this level are always subjective and speculative, even defensive, as is often seen in the Great Tradition. Robert Vischer’s account of art from the efficient-cause perspective, however, has the work itself as the end: it issues as ‘the epitome of our general experience of the world [and if] looking at external objects amounts in fact to the attempt to assimilate them to human nature, this leaning is perfectly realized in the work of art’. But Barasch notes that this account is offered ‘in principle (though not in detailed description or analysis)’ (1998: 105). The Knowledge Object There is still another way of answering the question as regards the object itself: what it consists of, its properties, how it may be known in opposition to other things, how it works or holds together as an organised structure. Inevitably we are once again provoking the question of functionalism, since Durkheim’s fundamental position is that functionality works at different levels: the organism itself consists of functions – organs having functional roles; and at the same time the functions themselves are organic and have constituents with distinctive functions. Art is the centrepiece of the human sciences and interconnects a host of human cultural and academic interests. As a result, Works of art can be stimulating starting points for interdisciplinary investigations leading … to explorations of history, social studies, geography, and culture. Less commonly, but no less intriguing, art may be a stimulus for exploring concepts in math and geometry [and provides the means of] learning about the variety of geometric patterns employed by artists to embellish a wide range of works of art, including textiles, ceramics, metalwork, architectural elements, and manuscripts (Islamic Art and Geometric Design, 2004: 8) For this reason, some see art and artworks as a way of studying something: history, culture, or things that exist in the world: locale, society, religious phenomena, human beings, philosophical ideas and values, or the artist himself and the workings of his mind. The commonplace way of approaching art is in fact that it is a way of seeing; that is, knowing the world, human society, culture, moral values, human relationships and the interests that govern these, types of humans, their individualities, and their 4 histories. Therefore a preliminary question for the arts is precisely where the question of knowledge is raised. Is art itself the knowable, or is art a way of knowing something which is not itself art? But contrary to Hogan (2000), who provides a place in literary theory for each and every linkage and perspective that art might give rise to, the contention in this paper is that literary theory and art theory aim to identify the art object, and distinguish it by opposition to other things which are not art. It is postulated that theory should work with art the same way that it works with the sciences: it should lead to the identification and exploration of the properties of its object, its behaviour patterns, or what it consists of. Just as in the sciences, theory is what enables the building up of a body of knowledge about this phenomenon known as art. The study of literature and art in themselves, without going into the deep philosophical dilemma of knowledge of things in themselves, may certainly be pursued using general statements. Aristotle appears to be the first to offer a coherent account of art as an object of knowledge. In his Ethics, he writes: Art … is “a certain state of mind, apt to Make, conjoined with true Reason;” its absence, on the contrary, is the same state conjoined with false Reason, and both are employed upon Contingent matter (Book VI, chapter IV). It is first of all ‘a state of mind which is apt to make’; secondly, this state of mind is ‘employed upon contingent matter’. Thus there is a product. We tend to see art simply as the product, a work, and the state of mind as a genius or an artist. The artist is a productive human being making artworks. The artwork is his product. This product is human in that it is ‘conjoined with true reason’. It does not happen by chance. It is intentional, in this sense that the artist directly intends to produce it. We already saw elsewhere in Aristotle that to bring about this product is the end directly aimed at by the artist – and since this ‘end is the chief thing of all’, the success or failure of the artist depends on the identity of his product, whether it is art or not. Aristotle returns to the question in his Poetics to bring it as it were to completeness by specifying the formal properties of the production. Martin Heidegger, however, highlights that human productivity conjoined with true reason and employed upon contingent matter does not always result in artworks; and such works are not always the end of the making process. He distinguishes two different kinds of ‘made things’: A piece of equipment, a pair of shoes for instance, when finished, is also self-contained like the mere thing, but it does not have the character of having taken shape by itself like the granite boulder. On the other hand, equipment displays an affinity with the art work insofar as it is something produced by the human hand. However, by its self-sufficient presence the work of art is similar rather to the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is self-contained. Nevertheless we do not count such works among mere things. As a rule it is the use-objects around us that are the nearest and authentic things. Thus the piece of equipment is half thing, because characterized by thingliness, and yet it is something more; at the same time it is half art work and yet something less, because lacking the self-sufficiency of the art work. Equipment has a peculiar position intermediate between thing and work, assuming that such a calculated ordering of them is permissible (1971: 23). Heidegger’s main concern here is with the ontological status of things, among which are a class known as art. He distinguishes things into two broad classes: ‘mere things’, like the granite boulder, and made things, like the pair of shoes and the art work. The law of production of made things is mimesis, but it would appear that mimesis embodies two distinct possibilities, one of which is poiesis (Ricoeur, 1981: 180). Design, ingenuity, innovativeness could all be involved in the making of equipment; in art, we are dealing with something other: ‘All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 70). The art work is a made thing of a specific kind, and differs from other made things in having ‘self-sufficient presence’, a feature it shares with the ‘mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is self-contained’. It differs further from everything in its relation to truth. 5 Heidegger is careful to distinguish two kinds of truth: correspondence (homoios) and patency (aletheia). ‘The letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is’ precludes the truth of correspondence, since in correspondence, the truth is the stable referent contrasted to a specific production of thought or language, which may fall short in one way or another. In aletheia, the contrast is to everything else that is not itself. One of the legacies of Plato is the analysis of art by opposition to real, ideal, or cultural objects on the presupposition that the work’s truth was one of correspondence. Plato discusses this extensively in The Republic (82-85), and damns the artists who copy indiscriminately the ‘mere things’. But the French classicists of the mid-seventeenth century were to associate art, with notions of ‘verisimilitude (vraisemblance) and decorum (bienseance)’ (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 363). The suggestion is that objects of experience comprise the model (paradeigma) which art copies, which must mean that the categories ‘matter’ and ‘form’ are meaningless with respect to art. For Heidegger, in fact, those categories belong much more properly to equipment, for ‘the origin of equipment lies in a mere fabricating that impresses a form upon some matter’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 34), and ‘the production of equipment is finished when a material has been so formed as to be ready for use’ (62). The work of art, by contrast, comes into being as aletheia, truth, patency. It comes about as ‘the setting-into-work of truth … a self-establishing truth’; quite simply, art ‘is the becoming and happening of truth’ (69); for example, Sekoni’s carving in Soyinka’s The Interpreters, called ‘a frenzied act of wood’, with the accent clearly on the being of the carving as a pure productivity (99). It is for this very reason that art is preserved, that it is truth: Preserving the work means: standing within the openness of beings that happens in the work. This “standing-within” of preservation, however, is a knowing. Yet knowing does not consist in mere information and notions about something. He who truly knows what is, knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is (Poetry, Language, Thought 65). Form is undoubtedly involved in ‘the becoming and happening of truth’, but not in the same way as for equipment where form is paradeigma (model). For art it is morphe – however truth attains patency; however it historically attains it. Equipment exists and realises itself as a ‘use-object’, this usefulness being already what the model designates. Heidegger identifies other properties that pertain to use-objects which are not shared by art; for instance, the matter of equipment is used up in the production, whereas that of the art remains; and there is even something more: equipment takes into its service that of which it consists: the matter. In fabricating equipment— e.g., an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work’s world (44-45). Mere things are part of the world of nature, equipment the world of human civilization. The artwork sets up its own world which, according to Heidegger is thrown towards the work’s preservers. The need for theory goes together with thinking art as an object of a specific kind. The twentieth century witnessed what was probably the decisive struggle in the history of criticism between the view of art as an object of a specific kind and as a tool that could be put to work by morality or ethics, religion, politics, or culture to achieve specific ends. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger’s paper which we have been discussing, according to Timothy Clark, ‘Heidegger’s great lecture’ (2002: 6), argues the case for art, against morality, ethics, politics, and so on in a way it had never been done before. He brings out the overwhelming advantage of focusing on art as something to be known, rather than an impetus to the knowledge of something else: In such knowledge, which can only grow slowly, the question is decided whether art can be an origin and then must be a head start, or whether it is to remain a mere appendix and then can only be carried along as a routine cultural phenomenon (Poetry, Language, Thought 75). The question of ‘origin’ is a complex thing in that paper whose title is ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. In the above, however, the question considered is ‘whether art can be an origin’. No perplexity arises 6 for Heidegger over what amounts to the question of the origin of an origin. Rather it leads to the ‘unconcealment’ of the rootedness of human culture and history in art: The origin of the work of art—that is, the origin of both the creators and the preservers, which is to say of a people’s historical existence, is art. This is so because art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical (75). One of the outcomes of Heidegger’s investigation is a statement of the nature of art: the theory of art, by means of which this form of human production may be studied as a phenomenon, in its history, and in its individual moments: ‘Art then is the becoming and happening of truth’. Conclusion Human culture and history, human religious, political, economic, social and interpersonal behaviours, issues of human freedom and unfreedom, identity and ideological control are distinct problems which may be studied using appropriate tools. Art criticism does not have the appropriate tools in question. Among the ancients, philosophy attempted to cover the entire field of knowledge. The results were very mixed. But it willingly yielded the field when a discipline with the appropriate tools evolved. Thus bodies of knowledge areas hived off one after another from philosophy. Today, some art critics, especially literary critics, appear to be so interested in neighbouring intellectual practices which arose, undoubtedly from art, as Heidegger has shown, that they give little attention to the object itself which is their proper domain. This is why the core question of literary and art theory, what is literature? what is art? is little considered in the very institutions and professional practices of the critics. In most Nigerian programmes of literary studies, there is only one course on the subject, ‘Modern Literary Theory’, which however is crammed full with political, cultural, and ideological theories, moral, ethical, linguistic, and rhetorical perspectives on the literary, and sociological, Marxist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, feminist, and behavioural approaches to art phenomena. In the course description sometimes, there is no space whatever for the question, what is literature, an issue that such state of the question studies and course books as Eagleton (1982), Dean (2001), Klarer (2004), do not forget, but one which an anthologist of theory like Habib (2005), curiously does forget or perhaps fails to give due prominence. Many students therefore come away with the notion that literature is any story out of which a lesson of some sort could be distilled, or one that could be analysed sociologically, historically, politically, and so on; and art is whatever is ‘enfranchised’ by one theory or another (Carroll, 2000: 3). Typically the literally engaging work of art, functioning ‘in an independent form, difficult of access, folded back upon the enigma of its own origin’ (Foucault, 2001: 327), and which declines to minister to the human need for ‘authority for our actions, our beliefs, even our perception’ (Josipovici, 1987: 110), are looked upon with fear and discomfort. Further consequences are seen in the artistic output, in which the implied belief is that whatever an artist produces is art and that an artist is whoever produces something with the outward form that recalls what was presented in the classroom, which boils down to Donato’s relativism of art. For Donato, ‘there are no artworks or works of art at all: speaking of art is … a purely rhetorical flourish regarding things that are real (“mere real things”) but that are never, qua real, artworks’ (see Margolis, 2000: 109). Donato’s view might apply for art as seen in terms of opinion and belief, where the artist is seen as a social worker trying one device or another to achieve his purposes. But if determination of art is to be detached from opinion and something ‘carried along as a routine cultural phenomenon’, as Heidegger says, it falls to theory to set forth the criteria. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1964. Print. Aristotle. On the Art of Poetry. Trans. Ingram Bywater. www.gutenberg.org. 2009. ___. Peri Poiêtikês. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Aristot.+Poet.+1462b ___. The Ethics. Trans. J. A. Smith. The Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, 2004. http://www.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/aristotl.htm. PDF. Arnold, Matthew. ‘The Study of Poetry’. English Critical Texts. 260-285. Print. 7 Barasch, Moshe. Modern Theories of Art, 2: From Impressionism to Kandinsky. New York: New York University Press, 1998. PDF. 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