‘Art and Objecthood’,Philosophy

Michael Fried’s relation to philosophy has been a salient feature of his criticism pretty much from the beginning. In ‘Art and Objecthood’, the most relevant figure, as it is in much of the early writing, is, of course Stanley Cavell, who continues to matter throughout Fried’s career, although Fried’s net of references also broadens considerably. In conversation, Fried will refer to himself as a ‘philosophical groupie’ and this presumably means (I will decline its more playful possibilities) that he likes hanging out with the band but does not consider himself a member of it. None of this is terribly surprising for a critic; we tend to assume that critics do have implicit or explicit philosophical positions that underwrite both the kinds of attention they think proper to give to a work of art and the standards by which they judge it. This would, for example, be true for Arthur Danto in his dual role as philosopher and critic – albeit with the somewhat peculiar proviso that what his philosophical theory of art told him was that there were no particular features that demand attending to nor any overriding standards of judgment apart from what interested or pleased him. From a certain angle this can look somewhat like Fried: we often present him, following on Greenberg and with a certain push from Cavell, as a ‘Kantian’, and a part of what we recognize with that description is a bundle of Kantian notions about the essential absence of criteria for, and peculiar subjectivity of, aesthetic judgment. But unlike Danto, Kant has no theory of art at all, just an argument about why no such theory is possible that goes hand in hand with a claim for a species of universal judgment that has no counterpart in Danto.

These differences suggest that it may be useful from the outset to distinguish between something called ‘philosophy’ and something else called ‘a theory’. Some philosophers interested in art have a ‘theory of art’ (Danto, for one) and some do not. Some people have perfectly serious ‘theories of art’ that are not philosophical – Roger de Piles, for example, or Clive Bell. Our own age is characterized in one of its dimensions by an interesting new emergence of the term ‘theory’ in the humanities – one that, on the one hand, makes it relatively natural to take philosophy as essentially a matter of having theories and, on the other hand, actually pushes the word away from any kind of having theories in favor of an activity called ‘theorizing’. The exact weight of this term is hard to make out: conceived as a sort of broadly political intervention in or transformation of its object, it at once invites a certain assimilation to ‘theory’ in the more traditional sense and appears to be ultimately at odds with it – as if it wants to claim a certain rigor or unassailability while exempting itself from the usual demands of adequacy. Although Fried regularly cites figures associated with what we have come to call ‘theory’, particularly both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, he does not seem to have any particular use for the term ‘theory’ either in itself or in its verbal extension: it is not just that he is unlikely to call himself a ‘theory groupie’ – it is at best unclear that he even thinks there is a band there.

In thinking about ‘Fried and philosophy’, I am not going to consider directly Fried and Cavell on art; there is more than enough good work out there on that. Mostly, I just want to move around a bit on the terrain I have roughly outlined – that is, the various ways in which things we call ‘philosophy’ and ‘criticism’ and ‘theory’ might relate to one another, the kinds of interest that might bind them into one configuration or another – so I will, for example, be much more interested in what Cavell thinks philosophy is than in what he thinks art is.

I will start by just poking around a bit in some ideas we may already have about what philosophy is.

One impulse here I have already touched on: we tend pretty easily to think of philosophy as the construction of theories about deeply unresolved and perhaps unresolvable questions of human being; art would be one of those things and so we have a range of philosophies of art that propose theories of art. But whether we focus on philosophical aesthetics or raise our eyes to look at philosophy more broadly we find that theory-construction captures only one smallish part of what philosophy does and is hardly unique to it. It is at once far too narrow and too little peculiar to philosophy.

Taking a very different tack, we might be tempted to think of ‘philosophy’ as a purely professional term: to be a philosopher is to have undergone a certain training or certification, although it is a little hard to say what that training is beyond some mandatory grounding in logic; to be a philosopher is to have a degree in philosophy or to hold a position in a department of philosophy. But of course this does not come to very much; it does not, for example, apply to a very large number of pivotal figures in the history of philosophy. It just rehearses current institutional arrangements, and so is particularly useless if one is interested in cases – and Fried’s may be one – that exert some pressure on just those arrangements.

A more serious, less purely professional, claim might be that philosophy is distinguished from other more or less adjacent disciplines by its adherence to a certain canon of argument. This, after all, is why logic is probably the one universally agreed upon element of any philosophical education. It is certainly true that the field puts a distinct premium on argument in ways that can seem sometimes ludicrous to outsiders – ‘examples’ come and go with no concern for detailed exploration or even simple accuracy – and philosophic argument sometimes seem just plain rude: ‘But that’s just nonsense’, is a perfectly acceptable response to a philosophy paper in ways it is not in the more genteel stretches of the humanities where we tend to be considerably more responsive to a speaker’s intended point than to the route that has led there.

Against this, one can say that the forms, limits, and work of argument in philosophy seem themselves a function of one or another object claimed for philosophy and so always open to reinvention on that ground: Kant invents transcendental argument in laying claim to experience, Hegel radically reimagines dialectic as the effective shape of Spirit, Heidegger gets to ontology through phenomenology, and so on. What counts as philosophic argument is itself a matter of philosophic argument, and that argument is not primarily conducted by an appeal to rules but by claims of an altogether different order. Cavell says very early on that ‘I would regard this fact – that philosophy is one of its own normal topics – as in turn defining for the subject, for what I wish philosophy to do’ (Cavell, 1969: xxxii).

A related view would be to say that philosophy answers to a canon of more or less perennial problems – either substantive, like say ‘free will’ or ‘the definition of art’, or more nearly methodological: Danto, for example, holds that all substantive philosophical problems boil down to versions of the one and the many and so are best worked through by considering various instances of indiscernibility. In this view, the work of philosophy tends strongly toward theory-construction as the solving of problems. A major, and interesting, exception here would be Ludwig Wittgenstein, who locates the work of philosophy much more nearly in the dissolution of its problems, and Cavell follows him very strongly in this.

A significantly different view would be that philosophy is defined by its adherence to a canon neither of argument nor of problems but simply of texts, made out of its continuing responsiveness to a certain – and perhaps far from settled – history. This is at the heart of Stanley Cavell’s view and is, among other things, the ground for his complex claims for Emerson’s interest. The claim is complex because it is both, and indissolubly, a more or less historical claim about Emerson’s relation to, above all, Kant, and a claim about Emerson’s inheritability by, for example, Nietzsche, or Cavell himself.

This way of taking philosophy as radically historically exposed is not unique to Cavell; it is broadly interpretive or hermeneutic in ways that have also been particularly explicit in European philosophy since Hegel, and it assumes a pivotal distinction between the modern present and a traditional past (assumes, then, a certain modernity as a central problem and condition for philosophy altogether). As Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989: 306) puts it:

Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical consciousness involves the experience of a tension between the [past] text and the present. The hermeneutic task consists not in covering up this tension … but in consciously bringing it out … Historical consciousness is aware of its own otherness and hence foregrounds the horizon of the past from its own.

Gadamer goes on to argue that the apparent discontinuity between past and present is finally ‘only something imposed upon continuing tradition’ and so is overcome through the successful work of interpretive understanding. Cavell, along with a number of recent European philosophers, does not follow him on this last point; their shared insistence on the genuine radicality of the modern unfolds on particularly difficult terrain that I will not try to explore here, except to note that in Cavell’s writing the view of philosophy – of what philosophy is – is intimately bound to his view of its situation as specifically and consequentially ‘modernist’. With this word we arrive at a specific crossing between philosophy and criticism, between Cavell and Fried, for example, that is notably closed to Danto in his dual aspect as philosopher and critic.

Danto’s appearance in this article has not been merely incidental, so this is perhaps a good point to push the shaping contrast further and note that for Danto neither ‘modern’ nor ‘modernist’ are deep terms. If he is willing enough to use them early on as terms for style – which is for Danto, although not for Fried, a fairly serious and central notion – he increasingly abandons them in favor of calling the period of their emergence ‘the age of manifestoes’, in part because that discursive side of modernism connects well with his sense of the underlying philosophical and theoretical truth of that era. By contrast, Cavell’s first real foray into philosophical aesthetics explores the complexities – the temptations, evasions, and possibilities – of specifically modernist art precisely by reading a particular efflorescence and coalescing of mixed theoretical/critical/manifesto writings in the world of advanced postwar musical composition. These writings do not define the period. But they do betray it:

My impression is that serious composers have … all but lost their audience, and that the essential reason for this … has to do with crises in the internal and apparently irreversible changes, developments within their own artistic procedures. This is what I mean by ‘the burden of modernism’: the procedures and problems it now seems necessary to composers to employ and confront to make a work of art at all themselves insure that their will not be comprehensible to an audience.

[The writings I’ve been examining] are prompted by efforts to communicate with an audience lost, and to compose an artistic community in disarray – efforts which only the art itself can accomplish. So the very existence of such journals suggest they cannot succeed. (Cavell, 1969: 187)

Where Danto boils the complexities of modernist self-criticism down to the taking of positions, Cavell reads such position-taking as continuous with and symptomatic of – that is, as sensible only in relation to – the deepest stakes of modernism. Cavell does not take postwar musical theory and polemic as a substitute for the difficulties of modernist art but as further expression of just those difficulties – thus offering a way into them rather than a way past them. ‘Art and Objecthood’ follows a closely related strategy, strongly signaled by the early remarks that literalism, as Fried calls minimalism, ‘seeks to declare and occupy a position’ and that ‘its seriousness is vouched for by the fact that it is in relation both to modernist painting and modernist sculpture that literalist art defines or locates the position that it aspires to occupy’ (Fried, 1998: 148, 149).

The contrast I have begun exploring has one further dimension very much worth noting. Where Cavell in effect takes modernism as the fully explicit shape of art’s essential historicity, Danto’s arguments about art are, from their beginning in what his 1964 essay ‘The Artworld’ proposes as ‘the style matrix’, essentially anti-historical: art only appears to have a history, and once we are clear about what art actually is, art history ends, no longer makes sense as a way of talking about art. By the time of After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997), Danto is fully willing to embrace a claim he essentially (and I think rightly) attributes to Panofsky – that the essential elements of what has been taken to be art’s history are not in fact historical moments but cultural wholes, distinguished from one another in the ways one culture is distinct from another (that this may be a notably weak view of what a culture is goes beyond my concerns here) (pp. 64-65).

I want two things out of this contrast. The most immediate is just that the relation between philosophy and criticism that we find at work in the exchanges between Cavell and Fried depends on understanding both activities as themselves profoundly historical, whereas the very different relation Danto sets up between philosophical theory and criticism depends precisely on the refusal of history. I will try to draw some further morals from this shortly.

The other thing I want is just the clear recognition that what we have in Danto is a strong account of the foundations of something that would be properly called – and is called by Danto – the study of visual culture. Most proponents of what has in fact emerged as that study in its dominant form will not be terribly happy with this thought, largely because Danto is himself clearly hostile to much of the thought and writing they take to be fundamental to their field. Danto’s rejection of ‘theory’ and ‘theorizing’ in this sense is part of his broader argument against what he calls in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986), ‘deep interpretation’. Cavell and Fried seem able to draw at times quite strongly on materials shared with the proponents of visual culture, but evidently do not feel it as necessarily tending toward that formation.

Most of us most of the time, whether we have read or attended to Danto or not, take the broad lines of his position for granted. We are deeply at home with a certain primacy of theory, comfortable with criticism we can understand as following directly from it – and comfortable too with the essential contemporary irrelevance of criticism except in terms of its passing interest or theoretical justification. When we encounter Fried’s criticism we are likely to be both unhappy and confused, even before we get to his actual judgments, by his clear sense that criticism matters, addressing us in ways we cannot simply walk away from and raising questions that are not reducible to a theoretical position we can accept or reject as we choose.

At this level we are responding (and now I am returning to my first moral) to how we get, with Fried and Cavell, a particular knotting of philosophy, criticism, and history that is deeply at odds with how these same things are managed in Danto’s work. And this is to say that a part of what appears in asking about Fried’s relation to philosophy is a rather more general question about how we are to imagine the logic of what used to be called, with some sense of relative security, ‘the arts and humanities’. That we are not secure in this usage now hardly needs saying, and in terms of our immediate context ‘visual culture’ is just one of numerous indications of some fundamental shift in the relation between these things as they once hung together or seemed to hang together and as they now seem to hang together or fall apart as the social sciences and their various administrative extensions actively redraw both our particular fields and our institutions.

Those of us who are unhappy with these developments have little trouble saying why we are unhappy. What we have tremendous trouble producing, however, is any compelling account of what we actually take to be the good of the arts and humanities: the traditional justifications have, for the most part, no more force for us than they do for those actively undoing our institutions, so there is no point in appealing to them. If there is some plausible excuse for persisting with the arts and humanities, we are going to have to find it within the terms of our actual work, and that is why what has mostly interested me in taking up Fried and Cavell the way I have here is not some theory of art they might be held to share, but rather winkling out elements of a disciplinary relation worth attending to.

I will try putting the sense of it this way. In 1807, introducing his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel suggested that it was a problem of his post-Kantian age that in its pushing theories of knowledge to the forefront of philosophy, it risked losing the world (or, maybe better, was already a symptom of a world lost). And this leads him to say that in Kant’s impetus to secure the foundations of our knowledge ‘what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth’ (Hegel, 1977[1807]: 47). This seems to me an acute diagnosis of a problem that has only deepened and sharpened since, to the point that what Hegel called ‘fear of truth’ might now well be called ‘fear of objects’. In saying this, I mean, more or less, that we would rather know objects – would rather be ‘objective’ about them – than ask about what it is to have an object at all. And I would then want to say that the arts and humanities are above all the places where that question insists on being asked – that is why our practices are as apparently simple as reading and looking at and making things; that is how we think, how we insist on the fact of the world. It is through this kind of objectivity – the insistence on having an object – that Fried’s criticism and Cavell’s philosophy communicate as they do: how, for example, the arguments of ‘Art and Objecthood’ do not simply or even very much, draw on something one might be tempted to call ‘Cavell’s aesthetics’, still less ‘Cavell’s theory of art’, but in fact are much more deeply attuned to Cavell’s explorations of skepticism, the weight of knowing and acknowledging in our encounters with one another, the grammar of objects and actions – that is, to the way Cavell makes out the shape of our metaphysical finitude and so also our obligations to expressivity under conditions inevitably marked by the problematic burden of the past.

It was a bit of a jump up to that large view, so let me end by dropping back down to the more familiar terrain of ‘Art and Objecthood’. It is certainly a notable feature of that essay that so many of its key terms – ‘literalism’, ‘theatricality’, and so on – are introduced without distinct definition, leaving the reader to make them out on the ground of their use in the essay and in the face of the works on which the essay turns (obliging the reader to read, then). Paramount among these key undefined terms is, of course, ‘objecthood’. Danto, along with a great many others, would have most naturally taken it as simply meaning ‘object’, as if the difference that mattered to Fried were between a work, somehow endowed with special aesthetic features, and a mere, real thing – the kind of difference that mattered centrally to Danto. A good bit of art has been made since ‘Art and Objecthood’ first came out as if that were indeed the lesson of minimalism – that the artist now need only be an object-maker. ¹

But this is, I think, fundamentally wrong. ‘Objecthood’ is neither a fancy way of saying ‘object’ nor some sort of abstraction, gratuitous or honorific, from it. What ‘objecthood’ names is precisely what stands in for the object one does not have and so can only ‘know’ – a word I place in quotation marks because there is, in fact, nothing there to be known, except the simulacral shape of a presumed ‘objectivity’ –always convertible into an equally presumptive ‘subjectivity’ on which it depends. We might call it the shape of an object standing within its own absence, loss, or foreclosure. Most of the work of ‘Art and Objecthood’ is simply the tracing out of this shape.

These thoughts have not been aimed at renewing the argument about minimalism. What strikes me now, 50 years after the fact, is how thoroughly we have now cast ourselves – our intellectual institutions and artistic practices – into this shape. We move though hallways and meet in rooms in which ‘Art and Objecthood’ becomes only ever more unreadable.