Depiction and the Intimation of Experience (notes) - Rob van Gerwen
[*] The investigations were supported by the Foundation for Philosophy and Theology (SFT), which is subsidized by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). For providing the provocations that I needed to formulate this paper my thanks are due for Paul Crowther, Malgosia Askanas, Louis Schwartz, Anthony Savile, Jan Bransen, Marc Slors, Maureen Sie, Bert van den Brink, and Willem van Reijen.
[1] Typically, Nelson Goodman (in Languages of Art. 19852 Indianapolis: Hackett) characterizes representation as a denoting reference relation between a symbol and a matter of fact, and expression as a reverse reference of a symbol to emotion labels, i.e., not from a symbol to something denoted, but from a symbol to something denoting. (Both are supposed to be merely conventional.)
[2] Goodman explicitly denies the non-cognitive nature of the emotional, but how and why then do emotions differ from thoughts? (The answer, I think, must involve experiential awareness, but this is an answer unavailable to an extensionalist like Goodman.)
3 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.1212. Cf. also Tilghman's discussion of the matter in his "Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics" (1991) London, etc.: The MacMillan Press.
[4] Robert Bresson's `cinematographic' films are interesting for different reasons also, but space precludes their discussion.
[5] Cf. for a comparable analysis: Kendall Walton, Are Representations Symbols? Monist, 1974, 253-54.
[6] Due to his rigid extensionalist nominalism Goodman misperceived the exact scale of this notion's importance, upon which I shall comment in the following. Clearly, I cannot (here) elaborate on all flaws in his nominalism to the full.
[7] I do not intend to introduce a discussion about the usefulness of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, but merely refer to the notion of secondary qualities because it is illustrative here of the fact that the use of a sample lies in perceiving its qualities. And these qualities are of such a nature that they cannot be described without reference to a person seeing them.
[8] For an extensionalist nominalist like Goodman such a reference relation should be inconceivable in the first place.
[9] Douglas Arrell proposed an emendation of Goodman's theory along these lines: 1987, What Goodman should Have Said About Representation. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, 41-49.
[10] Cf. Roger Scruton, (1983) Photography and Representation, in Scruton: The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture. London, New York: Methuen, p 112. (Scruton would deny my account as an account of representation due to my seeming failure to imply intentionality.) According to Walton pictures are not denotative of themselves. "[denoting] representing is not matching and hence ... something other than what a work matches helps to determine what, if anything, it [denotingly] represents." (Walton, id., 241).
[11] Goodman does not present any arguments for what seems little more than a suggestion that works of art are linguistic entities. The naturalistical part of my account, in terms of recurrence, does not sustain such suggestions.
[12] Bar atypical medieval-like reductions of depictive powers to conventionally fixed meanings.
[13] Now one might want to object that proper names have this potency as well. However, these do not show the named, but arbitrarily denote them. They do not have the power to verify or falsify statements of fact; pictures do.
[14] In photography such recurrence is even causal, whereas in painting it merely is intentional. Cf. Scruton (id.) for this distinction.
[15] Two other answer seem possible, in terms of supervenience and of secondary use of terms, but I am not sure as to how these answers ought to be worded, nor am I confident that their success in accounting for representational efficacy regarding the experiential will outweigh the advantages of the concept of `intimation'.
[16] Cf. Stephen Mulhall on psychological terms in On Being in the World. Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects. London, 1990: Routledge.
[17] Someone who admits that representation of the full moral depth of experience is impossible, without recognizing this as a defect, neglects what we all take to be an important goal of representation.
[18] I don't mean `experience' in the sense of knowledge, or skills.
[19] Possibly because of the individuality of the experience to be intimated, that the revivification by the spectator hooks up with the creative act of the artist. Thus the empathy involved may entangle three levels: the experience of the spectator, the experience of the represented, and the experience of the artist. I thank Paul Crowther for suggesting this thought, which, clearly, is still in need of elaboration.
[20] Cf. Scruton (id.), p. 107.
[21] Cf. Flint Schier in: Deeper into Pictures. An Essay on Pictorial Representation. Cambridge University Press (1986).
[22] Intimated experience apparently exists of tertiary qualities, i.e. their experience is far less dependent upon the object's properties than is the case with the secondary ones of depiction. This comparison I cannot develop here any further.
[23] One must have a deeper understanding of the conventions involved to experience an intimation of the experiential aspect of a picture of a dying person, as opposed to merely recognize it as a picture of someone dying.
Also, representations of the most simple and best known mental events is much less transparent than they may appear on television. For example, the conventions at work with a seemingly straightforward event as `being in love' are aptly illustrated in the moving picture `Betrayal', directed by David Jones, from a script by Harold Pinter. In this movie the story of the rise and collapse of the love of a man and a woman is being told in reversed chronological order. Even though the images used in the film normally provoke instant understanding, now we have a hard time trying to imagine their falling in love, because of our hindsight. Intimation, then, is a function of convention, much more so than depicting a man kissing a woman is.
[24] Cf. David Goldblatt, `Self-Plagiarism'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, (1984) p. 71-77, and Paul Crowther: `Creativity and Originality in Art'. In: British Journal of Aesthetics 31, p. 301-309, (1991).
© Rob van Gerwen
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