Practice Exercises — Aesthetic Essentialism
I’m going to attempt to begin a series of attacks on unsolved problems in philosophy. For this exercise, I’ve very carefully pored over the resources available and developed what I believe to be the most refined list of important individual problems. My methodology has been thus:
- Check the List of Unsolved Problems in Philosophy on Wikipedia
- Go down the damn list
My attack on this is crude and unrefined, because it spawns as a reflection of the problem which demands it. Essentialism in any form is a boldly ignorant position. Russell showed the problem with essentialism as it manifested itself in naive Set Theory; Wittgenstein annihiliated essentialism in linguistic categorization; modern empirical psychological results deny cognitive categorical essentialism. The notion of an essential, be it in the definitions of sets, the construction of the universe, or the nature of language and thought is the product of a childishly unorganized thought process.
Back in the philosophical day, according an essential nature to a thing or category was a fine way to organize our thoughts. It was a fantastic tool for slicing our world up into manageable, discussable bits. But we as philosophers need to engage our flow, we need to keep the challenge of understanding the world at a place where it meets our skill, and our skill has surpassed this. We know today that the word-symbol “table” does not refer to some prototypical, ideal table; nor does it refer to some list of features common to all tables; it refers to a nebulous cloud of tables, tables which enter the category of “table” by some subtler mechanism–probably familial resemblance to other members of the category “table.” At the edges, “table” is ill-defined (the line between a “table” and a “desk” is not always clear, is it?), but we should no longer allow that to bother us. We should, instead, remember that the space of words, of nameable categories, is countable, whereas the space of reality is not so simply bound.
This same ill-defining same holds for artistic ventures. The medium of an artistic enterprise can not be accurately or completely expressed with the naming of a category. An aesthetic essentialist would agree that sonnets and haikus are both poems, both with strengths and weaknesses in communicating different ideas, and would thus be categories of media with their own essential expressive natures. But a particular endeavour which is either a sonnet or a haiku would also be a poem. Now, a poem has communicative strengths and weaknesses, certainly, but knowing the strengths and weaknesses of a poem does not give you all the same information as knowing the strengths and weaknesses of a more refined categorization.
I think most essentialist art critics would agree that it is not sufficient to know merely the fundamental physical media of a particular artistic endeavour (because that would simply be a list of fundamental physical particles: so many electrons, so many neutrinos, a smattering of quarks, etc) to develop reasonable judgment criteria. I think they would agree that it is necessary to have more information, to have a more refined sense of the medium. But the medium of a particular work of art is that material which is used to convey the artistic meaning or message, whatever that may be. The most refined possible notion of the medium of a particular work is precisely the work itself. That is, the work of art is precisely those materials which convey the work’s meaning.
To return full-circle: once upon a time, it may have been fair (because our sense was not so sensitively refined and our critical skill not so well honed) to judge a piece by lumping it in with other pieces that use physically or expressively similar material. And it is still intelligent today to contextualize a piece stylistically and materially. But we cannot allow our aesthetic judgment to rise forth from some notion of commonality among certain categories of art, because that leads to paradox and unrefined judgment–a sonnet and a haiku should not be judged by the same standards, but to judge a sonnet as a poem judges by the same standards with which one would judge a haiku. A piece’s aesthetic quality can only be judged by standards arising from itself: from its intent, from its expression, from its form. In some sense, we could consider the essentialist thesis true: individual media do have certain strengths and weaknesses, and a piece can be judged by criteria rising from its medium. But the medium is the piece itself, so this becomes an entirely useless statement: it’s trivial that individual pieces have strengths and weaknesses, and it’s trivial that a piece gives rise to its judgment.
I think that concludes my daily pontification. As I warned you: my attack was crude, but so was the problem. Essentialism in all its forms is naive and immature, and so my attacks against it shall be correspondingly simple and immature: a philosophical “nu-uh that’s dumb.”
The problem with aesthetic essentialism as I see it is that it is more double-barreled than it makes itself out to be, and only one of those barrels is loaded. In its simplest form, I think it contains two central statements: that (1) each medium possesses its own advantages and disadvantages, and that (2) because of this, certain media are inherently better suited for conveying certain ideas.
Statement (1) is obvious. Oil paint is beautiful but it runs. Words can be very expressive but are dependent upon knowing the language. Music is very emotionally deep but cannot be experienced by the deaf.
While (2) is baldly false, if only because the burden of proof is upon it and there can be no proof for such a statement. For (2) to be true, we would have to find a line of reasoning that would
a: establish objective criteria for quality of work
b: establish objective criteria for effectiveness of conveyance of message
c: every piece of any art ever made to statistically analyze them according to the criteria established above.
Even then, all we would demonstrate is that, given all produced works of art, and controlling for quality, ones in certain media are statistically more likely to convey certain messages than others. It is downright impossible to effectively speculate about the efficacy of certain media in certain contexts, because the skill of an individual unknown future artist is completely unpredictable.
Fortunately for us, the subjectivity of aesthetic quality makes this entire line of reasoning completely moot, and anyone attempting to establish objective standards for aesthetics has obviously not listened to a psychology lecture in a good few decades.
I agree with you in major principle (clearly), but I do have to nitpick here:
“It is downright impossible to effectively speculate about the efficacy of certain media in certain contexts, because the skill of an individual unknown future artist is completely unpredictable.”
The impossibility is only in declaring absolute communicative efficacies. If we’re considering the limiting factor in this speculation to be the skill of an individual unknown future artist, there’s nothing stopping us from stating relative communicative efficacies. To analogize in a slightly more tangible domain, we can say that it is, in general, relatively hard to chuck a baseball a hundred miles an hour, while it is relatively easy to send off a golf ball at that speed. This relative efficacy is not hampered, at all, by the fact that Randy Johnson tends to sling baseballs about with three-digit velocities on a regular basis.
In general, I think even this point holds, but I do not find the skill of an individual artist to be determining factor. Significantly more important is the way in which skill can propagate from one artist to the rest. Once upon a time, paintings in the West were flat and without depth, and one would have said that it is very hard to convey three-dimensionality in painting. But then one clever bastard figured out how to use linear perspective, and others learned from him. It was the LEARNING FROM which changed the scope of the medium’s communicative efficacy, not just the skill of the individual.
This is really interesting, partly, I guess, because I both agree and disagree strongly with different aspects of what you both say.
It seems to me to be self evident that some media, as well as some sub divisions of those media, are ‘more appropriate’ to explore/express certain ideas or feelings. In language if I want to express the idea of ‘blue’ I could use the most appropriate word (“blue”) or I could try to define it by skirting around the concept and homing in on it. However, the direct form would seem to be the most appropriate but this doesn’t mean to suggest that we couldn’t find a more powerful, beautiful or original linguistic form for expressing the idea of blue.
Each time we wish to express something we are constantly making choices about the most appropriate words to convey our thinking and what to emphasise and what to schematise. Why should it be any different with media? The fact that it’s hard to express things in some media is a positive attraction for some artists – it makes the achievement all the more gratifying. However sometimes when you’re giving someone directions it simply makes more sense to draw a map.
What you say is certainly intuitively true: in the broadest gestalt received from a rapid overview of artistic process. This is why aesthetic essentialism has remained such a strong and robust viewpoint. It creates problems, though, at its boundary conditions: where are the lines between prose, poetry, and prose-poetry? My thesis here is that these problems are not resolved with clearer or more accurate definitions of each medium; my thesis is that the only way to be absolutely correct is to identify a work’s medium with itself, at which point aesthetic essentialism becomes a useless viewpoint.
If we identify a work’s medium with itself how does that allow artists to be more discriminating in their choices?
It allows an art object to stand for itself, to be judged in relation to itself. It means instead of some laundry list of concepts associated with certain macromedia that an artist uses as a reference point to build some sort of “structurally sound” artistic representation, the medium of a particular piece can evolve, during the creative process, such that it best captures the idea the artist wishes to convey. That is, instead of the message and artistry coming structurally from the medium, or even flowing organically, the message and the medium can organically grow out together, providing the artist with infinite flexibility. The task becomes, admittedly, more difficult for the artist, because they become solely responsible for every moment of the piece’s communicative and methodological evolution, but it also frees the medium and the message both from the bounds of some otherwise-ordained structuralization.