Authors, Artworks, and Their Ill-Defined Borders

Intuitively, my reaction to the question “what role does the artist take in shaping an artwork” is: an essential one. This I say, considering that without the artist, the work and all subsequent interpretations of it would not exist. However, we have seen that various arguments of anti-intentionalist critics and thinkers complicate our initial concept of who is involved in the creation of an artwork. Carroll does an excellent job of fleshing those arguments out and offering counter-arguments of his own, however, I felt that he took the easy way out in part by positing that we can discount the artist’s explicit intentions by assuming that they don’t apply if they don’t immediately seem reasonable. Though Carroll’s intention with this position is to provide a moderate alternative to rejecting undue authorial input without resorting to anti-intentionalism, he doesn’t leave room for the influence of post-modernism and contemporary performance art, which I find surprising considering the paper of his that we read was originally published in 1992.

If anti-intentionalism raises the question of where the work of art ends (in the experience of the viewer/reader/listener rather than the hands of the artist), than contemporary performance art ups the ante considerably. Pieces such as Warhol’s “Eating a Hamburger” (itself only a piece of the full art object consisting of much of his life) illustrate the fact that our notion of what constitutes an artwork has always been, and continues to be flimsy. Some insight indirectly offered by Wollheim by way of his specific definition of artworks (in this case, pieces of music or theater which exist not as any particular instance of performance or in the score or the script, but as an ideal performance never realized) is the fact that “the artwork” may never be what it appears to be, giving us reason to wonder not only whether, as the anti-intentionalist would wish us to, an artwork is merely the work as related to its creator or a conjunction of the work with its many diverse and potential interpretations, but also whether an artwork’s “borders” are defined by traditional means or whether those means are being transgressed against in the construction of an even more complex artwork (regardless of who is responsible for its construction).

If, understanding that our criteria for artworks are inherently loose, we allow contemporary performance art to be a concern, we must always be aware of the artist as a sort of architect who directs the builders (experiencers/participators) in the construction of the artwork. The artwork cannot be evaluated as only the blueprints, nor only as the material without form, but must be as inclusive of the input of the creator as possible with respect to the input of the experiencer. Nehamas’ “postulated author” presents a valuable tool for retaining the influence of authorship while acknowledging the reality and power of readership. By positing an author who is in a sense communicable via interpretation, the postulated author becomes even more than the “writer” (to use Nehamas’ terminology), serving as a nexus of possible authorial intentions. The utility for this usage where the author’s intention cannot be known is readily apparent, but it also has usage for situations in which the author’s input and intention are explicit. For example, in the case of the sculptor who insists that her sculpture is pink instead of blue (although the sculpture is measurably blue), the actual sculptor’s intent can serve as a tool which expands or contracts the scope of the “postulated sculptor’s” possible intentions, but understanding that the true sculptor cannot know the full depths of their subconscious by which they could express a definitive intent for a piece, the “postulated sculptor” serves as a much better gauge than the actual sculptor (alternatively, we could conceive of the artwork not as merely the physical sculpture, but the sculpture in relation to contradictory remarks made by the artist).

As a result of these lines of criticism, a new artistic mentality is arising in artists themselves, although strains of it have been present for centuries, that they, the artists, are not responsible for imparting meaning to their work. This doesn’t just apply to interpretive meaning though, it also applies to original meaning, the meaning which would presumably exist as a teleological map which the artist would follow in the process of creation. Dr. Butler’s sculptures exhibit strains of this thought, not to mention he himself expressed such concepts. He speaks of pieces “finishing themselves,” of “working out their own conclusions” (paraphrasing here, of course). The carving of the plaster molds was not explicitly directed. The artist, at the end of the process, is in the same position as the viewer encountering the artwork for the first time, employing the tool of a “postulated artist” in order to interpret the unknown workings of the subconscious in interplay with matters of chance. In short, the artist plays an instrumental role in the existence of an artwork but hardly more than the experiencer, both attempting to touch upon a perceived wellspring of creative possibilities.

For Your Consideration:

Power of Photographs

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/

This is really relevant to the philosophy club meeting about why photos tend to / tend not to change the way we think...

5.0 (SL) Reflection paper.docx

Nancun Yu

PR. Kyle Grady

PHIL 330: Aesthetics

13^th, Nov, 2014

5.0 (SL) Reflection paper.docx

As I was describing in previous reflections, I was originally thinking that (1). Every existed subject must have a reason declared before it's been created. Otherwise the thing should not and will not be created. (2). Follow by 1, the artist is the essential “cause” of artwork, that artist generate the idea into an artwork. However, that believe was moderately changed throughout the semester. During the early semester when I first read the concept of beauty as a “taste”, the concept that process, identify artistic merit is subjective had weaken the role of the artist. As if the sense of beauty can only be generated by subjective judgment, the role of the artist becomes less important, because all the person receives from the artwork is from their own subjective interpretation.

Accordingly, I start the process to distinguish the role artist from (1). The artist is the cause of artist and they declare the essential meaning carried by their own work. To (2). Artist is still the cause of artwork, however, even though they have the preferential right to define the meaning of their own work, each individual also have the right to self-interpret.

             In different than Carroll’s claim we read this chapter. Carroll has claimed that all artwork has a determined meaning. It also means the role of artist contains the process that generates meaning into artwork. However, I could not find out Carroll’s example about literature is a sound argument towards artworks as a whole. Granted Carroll’s claim on the determinate meaning of language. But I would rather admit the determinate meaning of language only as if it is the language. On the other hand, even though the nature of language meant to be determinate, to be clear in meaning, it is still the fact that everybody learned the language differently and carries their own interpretation of the words.

            Furthermore, even if we assume each word of language have a determinate meaning. The language combined with words might not be determinate on meaning. As it involve with the sentence structure and work order. The example about myself, what happens when I am reading a novel (if it is not that abstract) is I end up imaging the theme presented by the artist (writer) in words. To be honest, I’m certain that my imagination must be slightly different than the theme in the author's mind. The point here I tried to say is that even if we assume words and sentence is very determinate, the work done by words usually does not contain all the information to paint the theme accurately. And we called “wordy” if the artist (writer in this particular example) tried to fulfil all the information by words.

            Moreover, I also disagree with considering the technique used in produce painting/ film work works similarly like language. (What I meant the technique in the previous sentence in example are color selection, lighting, and space placing, etc.) From my perspective, in spite of the fact different technique carries different information, clearly it has more ambiguity than language. And since even the language (in aim for determinate meaning) have issues with specific meaning in considering subjective interpretation. The use of techniques to produce of artwork certainly does not have a determinate meaning rather than have a suggest direction onto the individual’s subjective interpret the process.

            With previous intension, we must accept the fact that artist as the producer of artworks certainly has a power to define his own work, but it is very limited since the viewer of the work also has its own freedom to freely interpret (misunderstand) the meaning of the work.

            In Kant’s perspective of artistic genius, what I found out most efficient to answer the question what role does the artist play in shaping the meaning of the artwork. The role of “genius” is to find out a way, turning an existed rule in nature into freedom of art. The genius does not have the duty to explain how his painting, on the other hand, the reasons itself at that certain moment should be unexplainable. Thus, I reached my conclusion that the role of the artist should purely done in himself. They might construct certain suggested direction for individual interpretation. But they do not necessarily take the role of accurate (classify) the meaning of the work. Since the nature of art itself is unexplainable and contain the freedom by allowing subjective interpretation.

Nehamas, Kant, and what, exactly, we are interpreting

Nehamas’ concept of a ‘postulated author’ clearly articulates a methodological necessity that I have always instinctively believed to be true of reading. It is also applicable to any field. Authors create works of art because they find there to be something fulfilling or meaningful about doing it, but literary texts in particular cannot escape from meaning-laden-ness simply by virtue of their use of language. Poststructuralists argue that each reader ‘produces’ or creates their own reading of a text as a subject, bringing to bear their own knowledge on each text that they read. A good reading, however, does not simply ignore the author’s intent, and in this I find Nehamas’ position slightly more optimistic than the more realistic approach a theorist like Derrida takes, which buries notions of ‘good reading’ deep inside of an explanation of how reading works whether done well or poorly. Nehamas, however, advocates for a kind of reading more aligned with understanding a text than merely processing it and ‘producing’ it. He suggests that we should interpret texts not simply as they could be interpreted through the variety of connotations attached to a word, but as we have reason to believe the author could reasonably have meant them to be interpreted. For that reason, he proposes a postulated author, differentiating between the author as the one who gives the work meaning in the reader’s mind, and the writer as the actual historical figure. While information about the writer may contribute to our understanding of the author, we are necessarily limited by not being that person—there is only so much about them and their intentions that we can know.

However, an ideal interpretation would encompass all the possible facets of a text—and so, while Nehamas does not advocate making interpretations that are devoid of context (not that I believe Derrida does, either), he does recognize that meaning may arise based on historical developments subsequent to the writer’s initial creation. Personal significance may be added into the reader’s experience, so that different parts are salient because they remind the reader of some personal event. But a work may gain meaning in other ways; some texts, for example, may demonstrate something about feminism precisely for the ways in which they leave it out; ancient texts may reflect conceptions of the ‘other’ that we have now problematized, and may thus teach us how we have moved on from a certain point. Or, Sophocles, an example Nehamas uses, may have been anticipated Freudian preoccupations in Oedipus. But we would not say that Sophocles was a Freudian; we would say that both Sophocles and Freud picked up on the same sorts of interests, and that Freud elaborated on them in a different way than Sophocles, and has since become more emblematic, in part thanks to his co-opting of Oedipus and Sophocles’ genius.

Kant introduces genius to explain how art arises. The genius is a conduit for meaning and for beautiful things to come into being. I think this makes a certain amount of sense when we consider an issue like the focus both Sophocles and Freud lavished on ‘illicit’ sexual desire. Both are considered with natural human desires, but Sophocles manifested his concern in an artistic way that is often considered a paragon of Greek tragedy. It is precisely because he is able to evoke feeling and thought, because he is able to create something with some aspect of beauty, that he is a ‘genius’; he and Freud share a similar interest, but Freud analyzes his in a (somewhat) rational essay format. Sophocles captures something of nature in his tragedy, as Freud does in his essay, but Sophocles’ is a kind of art. We would be hard pressed, I think, to call Freud’s work ‘art,’ though we might call it clever, or thought-provoking, or weird. It is fully in the realm of ideas; Sophocles blurs the boundary and reaches that special space between thought and feeling, the natural and the created, with which Kant seems (if I have begun to understand him) to associate real art. The difficulty of putting that quality into words is apparent; yet this is an important difference, for while Nehamas’ theory explains our attribution of meaning to different works and offers sound advice for grounding our interpretations of any works, Kant requires us to think about what distinguishes art from any work of thought—a very real distinction that I think might escape our notice in our preoccupation with Nehamas’—not genius, but intelligence. 

The Role of Artist in Meaning

The artist’s importance in regard to meaning within a work is found in the fact that it is through the artist that the work is brought about. Though a seemingly obvious point following that the art object is, and that it is the artist that makes it so, it must be explicitly stated that the nature of the artist’s influence on the work has implications for the interpretation of the work. This relationship (the artist’s responsibility for the work’s interpretation) is derived from the simple fact that is the artist who chose the material. Whether knowingly and intentionally, or intuitively and in a state of flow, the artist provides a particular form to some matter or substance – the work is instantiated by the artist. This provides the base level for interpretation (it provides a thing to interpret the meaning of), and respecting the object can be considered a sort of lower-bound of the range of potential meanings for a work, as to disregard the actual character of the object would to be to not talk about the object at all. Therefore, on a base level, interpretations of the meaning of the work are grounded within the work’s observable properties which qualify it.[1] One cannot legitimately interpret a work if they disregard its details which would otherwise defy the given interpretation or, in other words, do not take in the whole thing. However, the artist’s delimiting of the work is not merely in being a cause of it coming into being but additionally operates by placing a work into a historical-cultural context. This does not mean that legitimate interpretation cannot be derived from a subject which is foreign to that culture – one does not need to be a part of the culture of 20^th century France to appreciate and derive meaning from the works of the composer Erik Satie. Alexander Nehamas gives an account of the delimiting effect of the artist on the work but at the same time sympathizes with the deconstructionist belief that works are better understood as time goes on and more can be used in the interpretative process. These not being in contradiction, then, one recognizes that the culture of the artist does not provide special privilege to other members of the same or similar culture. Instead, what is meant by this affixing of a historical cultural context, provided by Nehamas, is that works cannot be infused with meanings which are clearly foreign to the culture they were created in. This accounts neatly for the perceived ability to evaluate different interpretations and be able to dismiss some on the grounds of being irrelevant. Nehamas uses the example of using connotations of words in a particular text (Kafka’s Metamorphosis specifically) which those words did not possess either during or prior to the publishing of the work. The retrospective application of connotations which were only later developed, while allowing for a seemingly satisfactory interpretation to be produced, proves specious in light of the statement “those words did not have the same meaning at the time the text was written.” Another illustrative example is the mistake of some untrained listeners to refer to the “furniture music” of Erik Satie as ambient music. This misstep is easy to understand as both styles have similar aesthetic qualities and motivating principles but Satie’s works are actually precursors to the genre later known as ambient, and cannot be justifiably assimilated into the latter category for both notable historical differences/motivations and a clear difference in the sonorities  utilized. Therefore a work is diachronic up to its own historical-cultural context and with an upper-bound demarcated – most easily measured by time – by its moment of actually coming to existence; inversely it may be considered that the work exists with a limitless potential of meaning until it is put into the world.

            Turning to the meaning itself then, as it exists once a work is actually in the word, we can see that one may legitimately draw a wealth of meanings, not entirely compatible, from a single work with respect to the aforementioned upper-bound of the work’s context. The artist then does affix a singular meaning to a work (even the artist’s interpretation of their own work is an interpretive effort which places the artist in the same category as any other observer with no privilege above any other), but delimits the potential meanings a work may have. Therefore, while a work may possess multiple, equally legitimate, and incommensurable meanings; it cannot mean simply anything – it must respect the bounds set to it by the artist.

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[1] The concept of grounding here is related to the same concept written discussed by Martin Heidegger but is not intentionally isomorphic with it. For more on the concept of grounded and the compelling related concept of “world” see Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”

Nehmas and the genius

When thinking about the meaning of a text and the authoritative creator of that meaning, some people, like Alexander Nehmas, believe that the meaning of the text cannot come solely from the author. He argues that the reader makes the meaning, while considering the author as a being. I think that his analysis makes important claims about the author and the meaning of the text that cannot be overcome. However, I think his examination strips the author of her agency. With the addition of Kant’s concept of the genius that gives the author creative power, I think that Nehmas’s argument restores some of that agency to the author.

Nehmas argues that the meaning of a text is made or equivocal, that the reader makes the meaning with reference to who the author is and the context, and that there is only one correct interpretation of the meaning of a text but that we can never totally discover it.  While the author sets the bounds or the scope of the meaning, she can never totally control it. The process of writing the story is so different from reading the story that the meaning cannot totally be translated exactly from writing to meaning. In his essay “The Postulated Author,” Nehmas claims that, “just as the author is not identical with a text’s fictional narrator, so he is also distinct from its historical writer. The author is postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text’s features,” and he goes on to add that, “the author, unlike the writer, is not a text’s efficient cause, but so to speak, its formal cause, manifested in thought not identical with it” (562). Here Nehmas discusses the difference between the author as a historical figure and the creative being that wrote the text. He believes that we need to look at the writer of the text as an author and not the historical figure in total. Limiting the study of the writer as a historical figure would limit the understanding of the author as an agent. For instance, the historical writer may believe that her text is about one thing, but may not realize what cultural forces are working upon her and therefore not fully realize the meaning of her text.

While I agree with the idea that the author may not understand all of the influences upon her work, I personally believe that Nehmas’s position strips away too much of the author’s agency in creating the meaning of a text. Certainly there are things that we do not have complete knowledge of that impact our thinking on a regular basis, but that does not mean that we have no understanding of it. Nehmas addresses this by claiming that, “what a text means is what it could mean to its writer” (564). I know that Nehmas allows for the author’s meaning to play a role, but it still seems as though he does not give the author enough credit when it comes to the author’s intention, skill, and understanding of the meaning. If cultural forces act upon the author that she may have no awareness of and writes a text full of meaning, it feels like from Nehmas’s argument that the author played no role in the creation of the text. They were simply some robotic function of culture’s control. I certainly believe that this can and is the case all the time. As a historian, I know that cultural studies examine texts that are written about some event or musings that say much about the culture of the time period, but these are not texts that we necessarily read every day. The literature that we are talking about is generally something extraordinary and the author plays an essential role in creating that.

In reconciliation with Kant’s ideas on the genius, I believe that Nehmas may have a better argument. I do not think that he would disagree with Kant’s description of the genius and he may in fact welcome the combination of the two arguments. Kant argues that the genius is a being through which something happens that creates the beautiful. I believe that the beautiful in this case may also be the meaning of the text. The good author is a genius who is able to create a great work with meaning. They may not be able to fully explain what they did and how they were able to do it, but they were the one who wrote it. Perhaps, like Nehmas warns, even if they think that they know how they created the meaning, they may not truly understand all of the processes that took place and therefore not actually know the meaning. While it does not necessarily change Nehmas’s argument, I think the addition of Kant’s notion of the genius can restore some agency to the author of a text.

Dual responsibility of an artist

Karissa Bowley

What role does the artist play in shaping the meaning of the work?

            The artist, as an agent, is an important link in the chain between inspiration—everything that came together to make that artist make that work at that particular moment—and effect on the viewer or reader—the thoughts and emotions that are evoked in a complex subject by the work itself. In one way, I think the artist channels something like a charge or pulse through him or her, making the artist a kind of path through which a message or meaning flows from one social positioning to another. In another way, the artist is a link in a chain with the power to redirect and control the meaning flowing through him or her to an extent. Being an artist, then, involves being inspired and then making decisions about how to channel certain feelings and ideas into a work. But more than this, being an artist involves being recognized as an artist to an extent, and so depends on effectiveness. I think that artists are most effective when they balance the element of surprise and the element of familiarity, slightly modifying the path of the electrical charge being sent through them, but not so much that the current can’t reach its primed receiver.

            The process, though, is an openended one, in which the message being transferred may not be one succinct idea, the artist may consciously convey some messages and subconsciously convey some messages, and the interpreters may decipher similar ideas to those the artist felt or may read completely different ideas into the work. Nehamas says that the openendedness of interpreting the meaning of an artwork mimics the “openendedness of all knowledge” (564). I think this is true because knowledge, even the factual kind of knowledge, is merely a stepping stone to more knowledge in the sense that one rarely declares oneself to be “done” with the process of acquiring it, or, if one does, that does not mean that the knowledge is actually complete but just that one is satisfied with it for the time being. Meaning in a work of art works the same way: even when thought to be complete, it very well might not be, and new interpretations can burst forth from older more routine ones. All this is to say that an artist is responsible for directing, and in some ways creating, the meaning of a work, but this process of creating does not lead to a particular destination, an ultimate meaning. Rather, the creative process is what directs the multiplicity of interpretations and is crucial to consider when searching for a viable possible meaning or the “best” possible meaning (which can probably never actually be reached). This makes sense with Nehamas’s assertion that “What a text means is what it could mean to its writer” (564). So we can never know all the circumstances and inspirations and feelings that an artist puts into his or her work, but nevertheless we assess the work partially based on the process of its creation because in trying to discover its possible destination/conclusion, we know that it is important to identify where it is coming from and how exactly it got there. The ongoing meanings we give works are bound both by the reader’s personal experience and the reader’s knowledge surrounding the art and artist.

            Kant’s concept of genius also reflects the idea of the artist as a skilled vehicle through which some concept(s) is transmitted by being somewhat transformed/redirected.  Art’s “finality in its form must appear just as free from the constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature” (150). But at the same time, we must know deep down that the work is humanmade and not a product of nature. By copying the process of nature, the genius creates beautiful work because we are drawn in by the shocking and mysterious method of production it seems to indicate, while also feeling that some universal idea or theme is being portrayed. The artist, then, takes a process from nature—a seemingly incomprehensible way of ordering—and uses new methods to convey that process through uniquely human means. I think this is a good account of that unteachable, incomprehensible sense that the artists have that inspires them to combine certain materials in certain ways to make the point they wish to make. That skill that an artist seems to already possess is a skill in conveying the universal idea in a way that is inexplicable both surprising and pleasing. In Existential terms, the genius navigates his or her freedom in a field in such a way that both their liberty and their self-imposed constraints are obvious and communicative of some deeper idea and feeling.

The Artist's Role in Shaping Meaning

The artist plays many roles in relation to his/her work. The artist brings the artwork to life and gives it to the world; however I do not think that artists designate one sole meaning to their works. Rather, I think that the role of the artist is to express to her audience that she needed to bring this “thing” whether it be a piece of music, a painting or a bird’s nest into being, and that the pure need to create the thing itself, that can’t be explained, is the significance of the work. Her role in shaping the work is finding the rule that she used to create it, and the actual wonderful act of creating it, but the artist’s job isn’t to tell you what the meaning is but rather to say “this is/was important to me, is it important to you? How or why? While our discussion on Kant was what really motivated this mode of thinking, Carroll’s idea of communication solidified my interpretation.  Carroll argues that a piece of work or an artwork itself is like an ordinary conversation. An artist is trying to tell the world something and she does so through art. Looking at an artwork, interpreting an artwork is like having a  conversation with the artist and trying to understand the message that he or she is trying to communicate. Because language has a definite meaning and it is meant to communicate, he argues that we should have some one concrete meaning within the work to appeal to. In addition to being able to appeal to her artistic intention, he seems to argue that our own reaction is of importance to us as well. He argues that as long as we’re considering the artistic context as a kind of conversation, we can be concerned with on one hand that the artist’s message comes through but that on the other hand, we hold up our end of the conversation as well.  He points out that for some audiences, it is important not to be tricked or fooled by the actual meaning of the piece or personally tricked by one’s own interpretation. As viewers, we want to find the one true meaning or the intention of the author, and thus we have a tendency to disregard interpretations that can’t be directly linked back to the author or what one thinks the creator’s message may be. However, what is problematic with this argument is that you can’t ever pinpoint the exact meaning of a piece. If an artwork is purely conversational then how can we ever be sure we’re translating it correctly or fully grasping the conversation? Even further, I find an issue with arguing that art is just an ordinary conversation with a distinct intention. If it is as simple as that, why not just have a conversation? Artists create works because it’s not that simple. I think that challenge is what Carroll doesn’t fully grasp, and his arguments against anti-intensionalism don’t convince me.  Rather, I find the artist’s role more as in expressing the need to communicate. Their role in shaping the meaning of a work is to express that they needed to create this, but the why  isn’t important in relation to one singular why or in relation to what it actually meant to them in reality.  I could stand in front of a piece of art, or listen to a piece of music over and over again and search and search for the one true meaning, but I have no frame of reference but my own experiences to base meaning off of. Yes, we can reference historical contexts and research the artist, but that doesn’t provide the source of true intention, unless of course you have a purely authentic interview or for instance Van Gogh’s account of why he painted the pair of shoes. Then, yes, I think one can argue that there was direct intention, and we can now say with certainty what it was.  But would the artists themselves argue that their meaning was the only meaning that the artwork could ever hold? I don’t think so. I think artists seem to portray more often than not, that there work dictates them, not the other way around.  For example, look at Ben Butler’s cloud pieces. He said himself that he didn’t have a distinct meaning or vision for each piece, but rather he let the process guide him to his conclusion. He had the idea of the shifting rocks in the blueberry fields and then began a process of creating. I found this directly applicable to Kant. I think this point is reified through Kant’s interpretation of the genius. Kant writes that even the genius can’t explain the process she uses to create a piece of fine art. It’s something that you apprehend through the senses but can’t find completely intelligible. Perhaps the artist’s role is to ensure that no adequate, definite concept can ever be given? She finds a rule in nature and turns it into a rule for freedom that can be used as a mechanism to communicate, but the subject of the communication or its intentional meaning isn’t important. The rule is important though, as Ben pointed out (his process was very important) and also taste is very important. Somebody can’t blindly paint or start randomly hitting cords on a piano. If I started carving with a hot knife, I’d probably end up with more stitches. There is a controlled process that exists that Kant describes as “laborious” and a “slow and even painful process of improvement,” but it doesn’t have to reach to a distinct concept.   What if, as I think Kant is trying to suggest, the artist’s role is simply to communicate through art that artworks can’t ever be completely understood? Kant writes that the genius’s role is nothing else than “the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas.” But by an aesthetic idea, he means “that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.” What if Kant is saying here that the artist’s role in creating is to appeal to a concept and to provoke thought that can never be fully understood or if it can be in one’s mind, can never be intelligibly explained? And if the genius himself can’t ever fully explain it, then in my interpretation it stands to reason, that there can be more than one direct meaning, and that perhaps the meaning, just in itself, misses something about the purpose of the creation and the creation process.  Because I think the meaning of a work is up to interpretation and can’t be directed to one pure intention, but that also maybe the end meaning isn’t what’s important in the first place, I found  a hard time agreeing with Nehamas. However, I did find some interest/ reconciliation in his idea of the author “guiding interpretation” For Nehamas, the meaning of a work comes from the “postulated author” referring to the meaning that the text manifests. However the author is not, as one may assume, the writer of the text. Rather he is “in” the text not “of” the text. Nehamas writes that the author is “also distinct from its historical writer. The author is postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text’s features; he is a character, a hypothesis which is accepted provisionally, guides interpretation and is in turn modified in its’ light.”  “Guiding interpretation” seems to be the key here because the meaning of the text is based in what it could have meant to the writer not what it actually meant to the writer in reality. However, Nehamas points out that the meaning can’t just stem from anything either. It has to be relevant or possible historically. For example, he writes “the principle is that a text does not mean what its writer could not, historically, have meant by it... we cannot attribute to particular words meanings which they came to have only after the writers death.” While I don’t think that you can find one implied meaning, I do think there can be certain aspects of a work that the artist has “guided” the viewer through and that those little tidbits can be helpful in creating a frame of reference and for ruling out absurd, historically incorrect interpretations. However, I still hold true to my argument that what’s truly special about a work is it’s need to be born in the first place, and that that need and the artist’s need to communicate that to other people through their art is their role. 

Reflection 5

What role does the artist play in shaping the meaning of the work?

Before delving into the readings in this section, I examined what exactly I thought about this question. My first inclination was towards the idea that the artist is a key figure in the meaning of an art work. In terms of a song’s lyrics, the plot of a play, or a the characters in a novel, there seems to be no one with a fuller understanding of the meaning of a line, the intricacies of a story device, or the nature of a character. The artist, playwright, or novelist knows better than anyone what was meant in each case. A fiction writing professor once told my class that we knew our characters better than anyone else. He said this in an effort to make the point that we understood motives of our characters better than our readers did and it was our job to give the readers that understanding. In terms of the plastic arts, I also found upon initial reflection that I rely on the artist’s interpretation of the work before thinking about my own. For example, a painting’s title will heavily influence what I see in it. I feel this hesitance and dependence is due to my concern that I am not the most artsy or art-educated person in the world. Therefore, I first depend on any hint the artist gives in the title or placards, and then from there do the typical “I know it’s supposed to be a cloud but to me it looks like a-” fill in the blank. On the other hand, my next thought was the idea of high school literary analysis. As an English major, I’m all for literary analysis were literary analysis is due. However, just as any English professor will tell you, not every story by every author - and not even every story by every good author begs analysis. In the high school classroom, in the world overrun with curriculum requirements, a student finds themself often questioning why exactly we must analysis every little “symbol”. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And in that case, and many more valid ones, there is more emphasis on how a group of people read a certain text then there is on what the author/artist actually meant. The same is true of common and important art criticism when it comes to the plastic arts.

Nehamas turns out to use examples that are very much so in line with my initial thoughts on the subject. He writes about the relationship between the author, the reader, and the text. He offers up three ways of considering the meaning maker of a text. First, pluralism is the idea that each reader makes their own meaning and has their own reading of each text, all of which are correct. Limited pluralism is the idea that the reader, based on rules of language and the language used in the text, determines the meaning of the text. And last monism is the idea the author is the only person who can make the meaning of text, and as such the meaning of the text is always unattainable. I personally come down on neither of these sides, but rather I agree more with the idea that the meaning is made by the reader in reference to an abstracted author who is not necessarily the specific author of the text but rather the author whose presence is clear in the text itself.  

In Kant’s writings, I was able to see a different perspective via the focus on beauty and the physical arts. His demand that art be intentional in order to be fine art was intriguing and problematic for me. I realize that there is the distinction between art and beauty and that natural beauty is highly regarded, however I took issue with the idea, because an “artist” can pick up anything in the natural or manmade world, put it on a pedestal and suddenly that’s both intentionality and art. I found this all hard to reconcile, though I’m not sure it’s really too problematic to the overall claim. Nevertheless, I found Nehemas’s viewpoint most accessible and applicable to my initial concerns as they were namely considering literature. I feel that the question of meaning in the plastic arts is far less pressing, as they are either entirely straight forward or completely beyond any interpretation that would make sense.

What role does the artist play in shaping the meaning of the work?

Be they painter, composer, or writer, the artist is without a doubt the source of the work of art, at least in so much as it is a physical thing or has a physical manifestation. However, the artist does not give the meaning of the work of art, because this is not the nature of meaning. Meaning, whether in a linguistic or other semiological environment, is determined as a relation of the symbols to one another in a broader social context, and these symbols are not rigidly defined within their social context. As such, the person attending to the symbols determines the limits or overlapping of the symbols based on their own personal experience. The meaning is created through its reception in a viewer, not in its construction by the artist.

            Carroll makes an appeal to H.P. Grice’s theory of language in order to show that the artwork, particularly a literary work, has a determinate meaning. Grice says that a statement means p when A says something to B in order to make B believe that p by saying that something. What is important here is that the nature of everyday communication is not one-sided. The communicator A tries to express p, but this does not automatically mean that B will understand A’s utterance by how it is presented. When this is applied to a work of art, this becomes more problematic in that A, taking the form of the artwork, cannot provide feedback to B if B does not take away the ‘proper’ meaning. Carroll seeks to make literary works into conversational pieces, but he does not recognize that their status as works of art makes them different. In purely conversational speech, language is used as a piece of equipment; in poetry or prose, language is used for some effect beyond that of normal speech, hence its recognition as artwork. Thus, the artwork’s communication, by its ambiguous and opaque nature beyond mere equipmentality, opens up a wide range of possible meanings to be taken away from a single string of symbols, and the artwork cannot provide the feedback to ‘correct’ any interpretation.

            The author then might be able to come in and save the artwork from a seemingly anarchic multiplicity of meanings. The author is after all the one who made the thing to be interpreted. However, the author did not make the symbolic system into which the artwork is thrust, nor does she condition any particular viewer’s history of interaction with the words/images/colors/etc. Nehamas tries to thwart this by appeal to a postulated author, one who is not the author of the work but is the author in the work. This author, as an idealized entity, determines the meaning of the work by what he or she could have meant or what it could have meant to its particular audience at the time, and thus there is a sort of asymptotic ideal of what the work could mean. But this seems problematic as well. Given that nature of meaning in the Gricean terms requires the interpretation by a reader/viewer, the only people who could adequately meet the requirements of Nehamas’ ideal interpretation would be the hypothetical audience or author. Otherwise, all readers and viewers, even those who are very attentive to the historical context of the work, cannot help but bring to bear the own understandings or their own viewing of the work. As Devereaux noted in her work on the male gaze in art, there is no passive seeing, but only ways of seeing.

            Furthermore, Kant’s notion of artistic genius makes any authorial claim to meaning problematic. The Kantian genius is not a person, but more like a state of consciousness that some certain individuals have had that has allowed for the creation of works of art. This state, which produces artwork, is not explicable by the artists as to how and why they made it. So, if the method they have of producing what is artful about their creation is uncertain, and the meaning of the artwork is what makes it artful, then it follows that the artist is not in a position to explain what the meaning of the artwork is. Using the notion of genius, the artist makes the work, but then has to countersign that this work is in fact her production. In this countersigning, then, the artist comes to the same level of interpretive credibility as a well-informed critic.

The nature of art also is not one of a factical truth, as both Heidegger and Aristotle point out. What is there to be seen is not some one truth about a state of the world or one subjective opinion about that world, but rather an unveiling of Being as such. I think that Nehamas’ and Carroll’s insistence on some sort of authorial standard of meaning is a confusion brought about by the nature of language. Because the literary work makes use of tools used to communicate meaning for a different sort of purpose, there is a conflation of conversation usage with artistic truth which does not adequately account for the nature of the artwork. Art is semantically opaque and inexhaustible by its nature, and this comes out because it is made possible through the prescriptions of the artist, but rather through its perception by individual audience members.