(Consciousness, Literature and The Arts) Tone Roald, Johannes Lang-Art and Identity - Essays On The Aesthetic Creation of Mind-Rodopi (2013)

Art and Identity
Consciousness
Liter ture
the Arts
&
32
General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,

William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Jade Rosina McCutcheon
Art and Identity

Essays on the Aesthetic Creation
of Mind
Edited by
Tone Roald and Johannes Lang
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Cover illustration: Gerhard Richter, 1025 Farben, 1974. 120 x 123,50 cm,
oil on canvas. Catalogue Raisonn: 357-3. Gerhard Richter.
Cover design by Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3634-5
ISSN: 1573-2193
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0904-5
E-book ISSN: 1879-6044
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
7
Introduction
15
Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art
Mark Johnson
39
Acts not Tracts! Why a Complete Psychology of Art and Identity
Must Be Neuro-cultural
Ciarn Benson
67
I Am, Therefore I Think, Act, and Express both in Life and in Art
Gerald C. Cupchik
93
Sense, Modality, and Aesthetic Experience
Simo Kppe
113
Reading Proust: The Little Shock Effects of Art
Judy Gammelgaard
133
Becoming Worthy of What Happens to Us: Art and Subjectivity in
the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
Kasper Levin
167
Art and Personal Integrity
Bjarne Sode Funch
199
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present:
On Our New Relationship to Classics
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
213
List of Contributors
217
Index
225
Acknowledgements
I. Introduction
University of Copenhagen and
the Danish Institute for International Studies
Art has the capacity to shape and alter our minds. Those who have had
aesthetic experiences know this intimately; politicians also have an
awareness of arts powerful effects as revealed through their efforts to
support or censor certain kinds of artistic expression. But what are
aesthetic experiences and how do they influence us? These are the
questions that the authors of this book, philosophers and psychologists, seek to answer.
The Danish artist Per Kirkeby has described one of his own aesthetic experiences:
Earlier today I went to see an exhibit at the Museum of Prints and Drawings
showing Bottichellis drawings for Dantes Divine Comedy. Then you dont
have to think too much about it. I just put on my glasses. When something
really important touches me, I can get quite emotional and well up. My tears
flow freely [].The way he sat very meticulously and drew with a fine
penit is as if the line touches me. Twenty seconds pass where I feel I know
why I am alive. At this point in time everything flows together into one and
becomes a harmonious moment of experience which justifies an entire life.
(Quoted in Pilgard Johnsen, 2000)
For Kirkeby, the aesthetic provides him with a sense of intense significancea harmonious mind, a reason for being, a reason for being
like he is. It creates an emotional experience of meaning-density.
Reading his narrative we feel the power of the work of art and, although the description leaves out philosophical and psychological ex-
planations, we know intuitively why the experience is important to

him as an artist.
Aesthetic experiences are obviously not limited to artists. Here is
another potent description of an intense experience with art by Theresa, a museum visitor we interviewed who does not have a formal education within the arts. For her, seeing Francis Bacons pictures is
completely fantastic. She says that the pictures touch many things
in ones attitude to life, and that they rise above the mundane and
become something. It somehow gives birth to something which
changes one, right? But the experience and its consequences for her
cannot be fully captured in language: I dont know whether I can
formulate it, she claims. The furthest she gets in this difficult task of
making her experience explicit is to say that the paintings are fascinating because they contain a whole lot of human nature, and they
contain a whole lot of messages that I cannot explain. Do they move
me? I cannot say whether they make me more tolerant, but I believe
that the more people you get to meet and experience, the more you
know about diversity.
Without a doubt, Theresas experiences with these pictures are
significant to her. This significance indicates that Pierre Bourdieu and
Alain Darbel, in The Love of Art (1991), diminished and ignored aesthetic experiences in their claim that museum goers visit museums to
become distinct and distinguished. What they forgot was to ask
whether the visitors also had distinct experiences. In their attempt to
understand why we love art, they forgot the essential dimension of
aesthetic experiences and their effects upon the human mind.
The consequences of aesthetic experiences are the topic of this anthology. The chapters focus on the creation of subjectivity, identity,
and self-development through aesthetic experience, inviting a dialogue between philosophical and psychological approaches. A dialogue between psychology and philosophy was precisely what Alexander Baumgarten (1734) imagined when he inaugurated the field of
aesthetics. Seeking to establish aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, he regarded psychology as particularly useful. Psychology was
indeed that field which Baumgarten believed had the tools to complement philosophy in moving the study of art into the domain of the
rational. However, such a juxtaposition of philosophy and psychology
has not always been embraced.
Introduction
Modern philosophy frequently ignores psychology in its quest for

understanding the consequences of art. The philosopher, Hans Robert
Jauss, for instance, said that he wanted to avoid the threatening pitfalls of psychology (1982: 22), and Martin Seel claimed that neither
the reality accessible to aesthetic consciousness nor the presence attainable in this consciousness can be treated properly within the
framework of other disciplines than philosophy (2005: 17).
To these philosophers, individual psychological descriptions of
experience are too transitory and too singular, not able sufficiently to
support general statements for the creation of a philosophical system.
Psychology, in this view, does not offer rigorous proofs, but only
vague answers and possibilities. Such a dismissal of psychology might
involve a desire for the (sometimes flattening) generality of philosophy present in the metaphysical search for universal categories, systems, and arguments. Yet, when philosophers reject psychology as a
useful dialogue partner on questions of aesthetics, it is not always
clear what it is that they reject. For aesthetics has hardly been a psychological field of inquiry. Instead art has been treated as a marginal
topic at the fringes of the various psychological schools of thought.
But if it is correct that we get to understand experience and identity in
general through understanding experiences with art, then why has
psychology, to which experience is so central, still not investigated
this epistemological potentialin fact largely ignored it? Perhaps
aesthetics was lost as an acceptable area of research in psychologys
quest for scientific legitimacy. Experiences with art were seen as too
subjective for the scientific psychological community, which admits
truth only in the form of facts.
As psychologists, we find it regrettable that psychology, in the
study of art, has remained too closed-off from the insights of philosophy. We hope this is beginning to change with an increased focus on
philosophical aesthetics in a theoretical psychology which, nevertheless, also takes the empirical seriously. Philosophy has a long and rich
history on the topic, and although many philosophers reject the reduction of art to its subjective potential for experience, philosophical aesthetics contains several assumptions about the psyche, both in relation
to psychic structures as well as to psychic functions. Philosophy has
often searched for the functions of art in rational and general systems,
while psychology, with its more empirical nature and much shorter
10
history, offers the possibility of creating an explanation of arts consequences based on actual, lived experience.
The present volume brings together philosophical and psychological perspectives on aesthetics in order to explore how art is linked
to identity, self-development, and subjectivity. How can philosophy
and psychology inform each other in this mutual quest for understanding these functions of art? For art engages our complex personal and
social identities in many ways. With regard to personal identity, for
instance, the work of art can challenge our common ways of being
through provocations or variations of everyday experience. Personal
and cultural habits in terms of perception and emotions are questionedthe work of art puts consciousness and identities to the test,
so to speak. With regard to the more social aspects of identity, it has
been suggested that the work of art calls for a new social order. Art
reflects political situations and solutions, and reveals aspects of the
social order that can lead to emancipatory reflection and action upon
ones own and societys practices (cf. for example Horkheimer and
Adorno 1947; Marcuse 1955; Rancire 2004).
As impenetrable as experiences with art and its consequences are,
many of the obstacles we have mentioned can and should be overcome, and the authors of the following chapters will show us ways in
which we can come closer to arts psychological meanings in truly
interdisciplinary ways. The chapters are written with the combination
of philosophy and psychology in mind and the anthology is the result
of a symposium held in Copenhagen in 2010, where the participants
discussed these issues.
True to the spirit of the symposium, Mark Johnson begins by
showing us why art lies at the heart of what and who we are. To see
this, we must grasp the extent to which mind and thought are embodiedthe degree to which our capacities to experience meaning, to
think, and to create are tied to our distinctive bodily engagement with
our world. Because the arts are primary consummations of this embodied meaning-making process, aesthetics, which concerns the qualities, patterns, feelings, and emotions that make meaning possible for
us, provides the key to understanding how we can experience anything
as meaningful in our lives. As a result, the aesthetic dimensions of
experience are absolutely central to a general account of human meaning, self-identity, and values.
Introduction
11
In order to arrive at an adequate understanding of embodied aesthetic experience and its impact on identity, Ciarn Benson argues, we
must combine the tools of cognitive neuroscience and social psychology; we must grapple with both the how and the why, the physically and the normatively possible. Benson explores how the longstanding, but largely neglected, concept of an act can serve as a bridging
concept between these domains. When explaining the interrelations
between art and identity, this emphasis on the act leads him to defend
a dynamic view: identity is not something you have, it is something
you do and have done to youby acting in and through art, your
sense of identity changes.
But what is identity? Gerald C. Cupchik proposes that a persons
identity has two complementary facets, the Thinking-I and the Being-I. The former embodies the processes of perception, cognition,
and reflection that help us adapt to challenges faced in everyday life;
the latter is involved in both the conscious representation of shared
meanings as well as in the unconscious projection of personal meanings onto particular situations. These dynamics are relevant to how we
create and perceive art. On the one hand, the creative act can go beyond established experience to the extent that it gives expression to
previously unarticulated meanings and feelings; on the other hand,
reflecting on acts of representation or projection provides an opportunity for encountering the self and transforming ones personal identity. Cupchik discusses his conceptualizations in light of the findings
of a diverse set of psychological studies of artworks dealing with the
embodiment of identity.
The work of art is a special kind of object, insists Simo Kppe,
because it can present itself as a mono-modal quality. In other words,
it can appeal to mainly one sense at the time. This idea leads Kppe to
discuss the aesthetic transitions from one sense modality to the next,
as well as the relations between reflection and modalities. The modern
form of reflection on the viewers processes of sensing began with
Impressionism, he argues. For with Impressionism the artists began to
decompose the human subjects perception of the world, and by doing
this they made the work of art an object through which the viewing
subject could engage in a reflection on its own perception. In narrative
art, which comprises more than one modality, this reflection on the
subjects own perception also often involves reflection upon the sub-
12
jects own narrativesthat is, on the life history as part of the subjects identity.
This reflection on ones life history is not necessarily under subjective control. In her analysis of Marcel Prousts Remembrance of
Things Past, Judy Gammelgaard shows how Prousts involuntary
memory is simultaneously the coherent thread that runs through a life
and the vital inspiration for artistic creation. The narrators involuntary memories first appear as seemingly harmless moments of happiness, but then they suddenly open up existential dimensions beyond
the comprehensible. Taking some vivid examples of these eruptions of
involuntary memory as her starting point, Gammelgaard focuses on
how to think about such experience. For this purpose, she makes a
distinction between what in German is termed Erlebnis and
Erfahrung, and proposes to let the latter concept define the area
where experiences of events have transformative potentials in a persons life. Gammelgaard relates the aesthetic experience of reading
Proust to psychoanalytical theories of sense, time, and memory, with
the aim of elucidating the transient moments of aesthetic experiences.
Kasper Levin also draws on Prousts work, albeit from the very
different perspective that comes from reading the philosopher Gilles
Deleuze. He explores Deleuzes attempt to present a unified aesthetics
that accounts for the relationship between art and subjectivity. By
invoking the thinking of Deleuze, Levin suggests that art primarily
should be considered as a process of production, which cannot be
subjugated to general categories of thought or reduced to representational or referential functions of subjectivity. In Deleuze, Levin finds
a perspective that places art at the center of thought. Art is not simply
a supplement to our subjective thought; it relates to the very creation
of our subjective being. From Deleuzes writings on aesthetics, the
painter Francis Bacon, and the writer Marcel Proust, Levin not only
brings out an often overlooked existential perspective in Deleuzes
approach to art, but also extracts a normative demand: we must be
worthy of our own experience.
One way to think about such existential worthiness is in terms of
personal openness toward existence. Existence, art, and identity are
meticulously discussed through an existential-phenomenological perspective in the chapter by Bjarne Sode Funch. He argues that works of
art can show distinct forms that reflect specific life experiences. If the
work of art affects us on an existential level, these thematic forms give
Introduction
13
shape to corresponding emotions in the viewer. These are emotions

which until then have been diffuse. As our emotions are revealed by
the work of art and organized around an existential theme, we can
relate to them without the previous diffusion, and our self-identity is
strengthened. This, argues Funch, is how art can change our lives.
But the existential impact of great art is far from certain. Our responses to art, writes Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, are dependent on larger
historical processesand on our very conception of temporality. According to Gumbrecht, the extent to which we imbue for example
classic literary texts with the ability to say something meaningful
about our condition, and thereby affect us existentially, depends on
our assumptions about time itself. If the past is seen as something
distant, buried in the sequence of historical events, that pasts masterworks might easily be viewed as remote, unlikely to yield valuable
insight into our own experience. This is the historicist view, and
Gumbrecht argues that its sequential understanding of time, as something moving from the future, through a brief present, into the past, is
being supplanted by another understanding of temporality. The alternative view of time looks to the past and incorporates it in an everexpanding present. In this view, the past comes to be seen as a cultural
heritage in which we are continuously immersed through memories
and objects. As a result, the classics become potential sources of
profound insight. Gumbrecht claims that such a shift in our perception
of time has come about already, however unrecognized, and that this
makes possible an existential reading of classic literature. It follows
that literature, like all art, is not only created by aesthetic minds; it is
also, in its effects, deeply involved in the aesthetic creation of minds.
Bibliography
Baumgarten, Alexander G. 1734/1954. Reflections on Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Alain Darbel. 1991. The Love of Art: European Art Museums
and their Public. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno (1947/2007). Dialectics of Enlightenment.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jauss, Hans R. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
14
Marcuse, Herbert. 1955/1974. Eros and Civilization. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Pilgard Johnsen, Poul. 2000. Udvalgt selskab in Weekendavisen (May 5, 2000).
Rancire, Jaques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.
London and New York: Continuum.
Seel, Martin. 2005. Aesthetics of Appearing. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press.
II. Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

Mark Johnson
University of Oregon
One of the more important themes emerging from the last century of
philosophy and the past three decades of cognitive neuroscience is
that the self that defines our personal identity is not a thing, but rather
an ongoing experiential process. In American philosophy, William
James and John Dewey were among the first to realize that the self is
a cluster of habits of experiencing, thinking, and acting, so that what
we call a persons character is nothing but what Dewey called an interpenetration of habits of a particular embodied creature acting within some physical and cultural environment. In this essay I will explore
Deweys contention that because the self is intrinsically embodied and
connected to its environment, it can be dramatically influenced by art,
which is a culmination of intensified, unified, and harmonized experience. I begin by observing that we have inherited a roughly Kantian
view of experience as divided into distinct types. This assumption
relegates aesthetic experience to one particular non-cognitive type of
feeling experience. Such a view provides no adequate way to explain
how a persons identity might be tied to their experience of art, since
it regards art as affecting only one dimension of a persons being. My
claim is that Dewey rejected any partitioning of experience into discrete types, emphasizing that the self develops in and through its organic biological and cultural engagement with its environment. Dewey placed art at the center of the development of the self, insofar as art
is an exemplary form of experience that optimizes our sense of meaning.
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Mark Johnson
1. Kant's Problematic View of Art and the Self

The greatest obstacle to a full appreciation of the power of art to shape
a persons identity is any metaphysical partitioning of the self into
different, and discrete, mental faculties. Within such a faculty psychology, if you think of the identity of the self as based principally on
its rational capacities, and if you think of art as primarily affecting our
perceptual and emotional systems, then you will never be able to explain how art can be meaningful to us and how it can influence our
self-understanding.
To see why this is the case, let us consider Immanuel Kants
treatment of art in relation to self-identity. I mention Kant because we
today are inheritors of some of his most influential views about the
nature of aesthetic judgment. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
Kant worked out his insight that the unity of the self exists in and
through that selfs synthesis of objects of experience. As Kant expressed it,
the original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at
the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis
of all appearances according to concepts, that is, according to rules, which ...
determine an object for their intuition, that is, the concept of something
wherein they are necessarily interconnected (1781/1968: A108)
To put it a bit more concisely and less abstrusely, the unity of the self
is constituted in and through our experience of objects. Subjectivity
and objectivity are thus two aspects of one and the same experiential
process.
The self that Kant saw as emerging in the combining of perceptions into objects of experience was what he called empirical consciousness: our awareness of ourselves as we experience ourselves.
Kant called this our phenomenal self. Unfortunately, Kants epistemological quest for pure (i.e., non-empirical) foundations for selfhood
and knowledge led him to a more disembodied view of the self, for
two basic reasons. First, Kant mistakenly assumed that perception was
merely a passive receiving of sense impressions that were supposedly
given in intuition and then had to be organized into a perceived
object by some alleged pure unifying activity that Kant unhelpfully
called the transcendental unity of apperception. Setting this obscure
terminology aside, Kant said that for some set of perceptions to become part of my particular consciousness, they must previously have
17
been organized into a coherent whole by a non-empirical source of

unifying activity that is our pure (or noumenal, to use Kants language) self, as opposed to our own empirical experience of ourselves.
The pure unifying activity of the self is posited, not as an experience
of a self, but rather on epistemic grounds as the pure unifying agency
for all mental representations that I can call mine. Though, as noted
above, Kant recognized an empirical consciousness of our inner
states (i.e., our phenomenal self), nevertheless he ultimately argued
that our true self must be the active unifying subject behind the scenes
of our experience (i.e., our noumenal self). This view of the self as
pure agency meshed nicely with Kants mostly Christian conception
of the self as a free, autonomous generator of action. Consequently,
Kant was led to downplay the material, bodily, and emotional aspects
he attributed only to the empirical self in favor of claims about our
true noumenal self as the inexplicable originator of action in the
world.
Under the pressure of this epistemic conception of the self, by the
time Kant got around to the self in relation to art, in his Critique of
Judgment (1790), his over-intellectualized system left him more or
less unable to account for the power of natural and artistic beauty and
sublimity to affect the entire identity of a perceiver. For if ones identity is tied to an alleged transcendental unity of apperception (i.e.,
the pure synthesizing activity of a noumenal [non-empirical] self)
having no direct connection to perception, feeling, or emotion, then
we are at a loss to explain how a sensuous, emotionally-charged artwork can shape that pure or noumenal self.
The inability of Kants great system to do justice to art and aesthetic experience can be tied to his erroneous psychology of distinct
faculties (powers of judgment) and to his obsession with the epistemological project of explaining the nature of, conditions for, and limits to
various kinds of mental judgments. The chief problem that so much
twentieth and twenty-first century aesthetic theory inherited from
Kant is his assumption that the key question of aesthetics is fundamentally epistemic (i.e., a question about knowledge claims), concerning the nature and validity of aesthetic judgments. More specifically,
Kant wanted to explain how judgments of taste (of the form This X
is beautiful) could be both subjective, that is, based on feeling, and
yet still lay claim to universal validity. Aesthetic judgments of taste
are supposedly subjective and based on feelings, whereas cognitive
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Mark Johnson
judgments are objective and based on concepts. Notice that Kant

merely assumed a classic cognition/feeling split. Based on this assumption, Kants notorious solution to the problem of the alleged
universal validity of pure judgments of taste was to insist (in section 9
of his Critique of Judgment) that the feeling involved in a judgment of
taste is not the ground or cause of the judgment of taste, but instead
merely an effect of a prior cognitive statea state in which a representation of some object or event puts imagination and understanding
into a mutually enlivening, harmonious free play. Kant said that the
feeling is merely our way of being aware of the harmony of our cognitive faculties in experiencing some scene or object. In short, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is not the basis (cause) of the judgment
of taste, but only the mere effect of the pure judgmenta judgment
which he will later tell us must be based on the indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of nature, since it cannot be based
on any determinate concept.
My concern here is not so much with the intricate and often obscure details of Kants ingenious system, but rather with the consequences of Kants turning of aesthetics into an exclusively epistemic
project, coupled with his neglect of the body as a source of meaning
and value. Kants system has no resources to explain how the noumenal self (i.e., the self as non-empirical source of unity for our experience) that is supposedly the ground for theoretical and practical judgments alike is constituted or affected by our experience of art. Once
you make knowledge entirely a matter of conceptual judgment and
you then regard art as non-cognitive, you can never get the two (i.e.,
knowledge and art) back together again. Moreover, in spite of the
high-sounding claim in the infamous section 59 of the Third Critique,
that beauty is the symbol of morality, Kant does not bring us any
closer to an explanation of the power of art in anything he says in this
passage. I do not mean to assert that there is not any view of the self
implicit in that account, but only that there is no view of the self that
can adequately explain the power of good art to transform a persons
self-identity.
I am suggesting that Kants metaphysical system gives us a self
that exists as a unifying process prior to any experience of art, and that
a transcendental unity of this sort could not derive its identity in any
way from art, whether that art be beautiful or sublime. My claim is
that to find a view of the self capable of explaining the trans-formative
19
power of art, we need to turn to someone like John Dewey, who, nearly a century and a half after the Critique of Judgment, published Experience and Nature (1925), in which he provided a view of selfformation, growth of meaning, and the processes of art that were up to
the task of making sense of the role of art experience in ones identity.
What Dewey saw that Kant could not see was how important art is in
the construction of human meaning by means of the basic aesthetic
dimensions of ordinary experience.
2. Deweys Naturalistic Alternative to Kant
One of the things that most sets Dewey apart from Kant is Deweys
focus on a non-dualistic, multi-dimensional view of experience, mind,
and language.1 As Richard Rorty showed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Kant's
principal error was to define Philosophy-as-Epistemologyto define
philosophy as the examination of the nature, possibility, and limits of
various types of judgments that come to play a role in our knowledge
of our world. This conception of his project then drastically narrowed
experience into an intellectualized series of types of judgment based
on the alleged workings of a set of discrete faculties.
For Dewey, by contrast, experience is what happens when an active, complex organism engages its multidimensional environments.
As such, experience is neither exclusively subjective nor objective,
cognitive nor emotive, theoretical nor practical, mental nor physical.
Instead, in Deweys non-reductionist, process-oriented view, experience is all of those dimensions interwoven, not as ontological or epistemological dichotomies, but as inseparable yet distinguishable
threads of an ongoing process of organism-environment interactions
or transactions.
According to Deweys naturalistic orientation, the chief challenge
for an adequate theory of mind is to account for emerging levels of
function and qualities of experience as the result of increasing complexity of organism-environment interactions. The main challenge
Kant was not, of course, a substance dualist, but his metaphysical system is founded
on an extensive set of grounding dichotomies such as phenomena/noumena, cognition/feeling, concept/intuition, and so forth. The ultimate result of this is a self (as
transcendent ego) that is fundamentally separate from any bodily perceptions or feelings, even though it actively organizes them on some occasions.
20
Mark Johnson
was to provide such an explanation without bringing in forces, causes,

or metaphysical entities alleged to stand outside experience itself (as
Kant had done). In other words, as a philosophical naturalist, Dewey
insisted on continuity among all levels and dimensions of experience.
Naturalism, he claimed,
means, on one side, that there is no breach of continuity between operations
of inquiry and biological operations and physical operations. Continuity, on
the other side, means that rational operations grow out of organic activities,
without being identical with that from which they emerge. (1938/1991: 26)
It could almost be said that Deweys entire reconstruction of philosophy is predicated on the retention of continuity among all aspects of
any experience. This means, among other things, that meaning, conceptualization, reasoning, and valuing are all embodied processes of
experience. In other words, you have to explain human conceptualization, reasoning, and valuing as growing out of, and being rooted in,
organic bodily activities. Dewey explained that a full appreciation of
the importance of continuity in all experience would solve many or
most of our philosophical conundrums:
The isolation of nature and experience from each other has rendered the undeniable connection of thought and effectiveness of knowledge and purposive action, with the body, an insoluble mystery. Restoration of continuity is
shown to do away with the mind-body problem. It leaves us with an organism in which events have those qualities, usually called feelings, not realized
in events that form inanimate things, and which, when living creatures communicate with one another so as to share in common, and hence universalized objects, take on distinctively mental properties. The continuity of nature
and experience is shown to resolve many problems that become only the
more taxing when continuity is ignored. (1925/1981: 7-8)
Among the many philosophical problems that Dewey thought would

be either solved, or more properly, dissolved by continuity were the
nature of the self and the power of art to transform the self. The key to
solving all of these problems is remembering that there are no fundamental, primary dualities in our experience. Rather, dualisms and other distinctions are selections and discriminations we mark in our experience for various purposes of grasping meaning, planning, thinking,
and acting. In such a view, meaning is embodied, the self is an embodied process of meaning-making, and art is often the most eminent
realization of the possibilities of embodied meaning.
21
3. Embodied Meaning
Dewey saw that if you were going to articulate an adequate theory of
art and aesthetics, it had to be founded on a view of how embodied
humans discover and make meaning. Obstacles to a theory of embodied meaning are as numerous and as deeply rooted in our day as they
were in Deweys. Chief among those obstacles is a view of mind and
language that treats meaning almost exclusively as conceptual and
propositional.
3.1. The Conceptual/Propositional View of Meaning
The key tenets of this orientation can be summarized as follows:
1. Meaning is regarded solely as a property of language.
2. Concepts and propositions, along with the words we use to
symbolize them, are what have meaning.
3. Therefore, if the arts have any meaning, it can only be via
structures analogous to words, phrases, and sentences in a language.2
If you assume something like this conceptual/propositional notion of
meaning, you will not be able to explain most of the meaning that
operates in our experience of an artwork in virtually any medium,
including even poetry and prose fiction. Your conception of aesthetics
will be significantly impoverished, for two reasons:
1. If you assume that meaning is essentially linguistic and tied to
concepts and propositions, then anything in art that is not expressible
propositionally is ignored or dismissed as meaningless and cognitively
insignificant.
2. This dismissal of art is reinforced by the mistaken idea that
most art is only about the evocation of feelings and emotions, which
are regarded as merely subjective, non-cognitive, and private.
3.2. The Embodied View of Meaning
The proper critical response to such a drastically limited conception of
meaning and art is an embodied view of meaninga theory of how
meaning emerges from qualities and patterns of bodily interaction
with various aspects of our environment. My main hypotheses in this
essay are the Deweyan views that meaning is embodied and that art
2
This objectivist theory of meaning is described in more detail and extensively critiqued in Johnson (1987) and Johnson (2007).
22
Mark Johnson
employs the very same meaning-making materials and processes as

are found in our ordinary day-to-day experiences of the meaning of
objects, events, and persons.3 Meaning reaches down into the depths
of our ongoing bodily engagement with our environments, which are
at once physical, interpersonal, social, and cultural. This meaningmaking goes beyond the operations of language in important ways. If
we want to understand how humans make and experience meaning,
we should therefore pay special attention to the processes by which
our arts enact basic ways for us to inhabit our world.
I should begin by saying what I mean by meaning. According to
my pragmatist view, the meaning of any event, object, or symbol is
relationalthat is, its meaning is what it points to by way of past,
present, or future (possible) experience. The meaning of any thing is
what it affords by way of experience. Take, for example, a bottle. The
meaning of a bottle might involve any number of experiences it has
provided or might provide us. The bottle means the possibility of containing liquids, some of which I might drink to quench my thirst. It
means that if I reach out to take hold of the bottle, I can pick it up with
a certain specific grasping movement of my hand, and I can then manipulate it in certain ways, such as raising it to my lips for a drink. It
means that, when half full of water, it will provide a certain anticipated weight in my hand. Perhaps there is a wine label on the bottle, and
this provides a meaningful recollection of the evening I spent over that
particular wine with someone I care about. Meaning emerges from the
structures, qualities, and felt directions of our embodied experience.
Meaning is first tied directly to sensory-motor processes, which have
both structure and emotional valence. What we call abstract concepts
are typically metaphorical extensions of these sensory-motor meanings. Whenever I hear or read the word bottle, or even when I imagine a bottle, these and many more experiences are available to me as a
horizon of meaning, out of which some specific meanings will be
selected by the context of my hearing or reading the word, or imagining a bottle.4
Deweys pragmatist claim is that art employs all of the structures
and processes of human meaning-making, and it does this often with-
I owe this reading of Dewey to Thomas Alexander (1987).

I am assuming some form of what has come to be called a simulation view of
meaning, as set forth, for example, by Lawrence Barsalou (1999).
23
out abstract conceptual and propositional content. Moreover, art is the

exemplary, consummatory presentation (enactment) of the possibilities of human meaning. Aesthetics, in Deweys view, concerns the
structures, processes, qualities, and feelings that make any meaningful
experience possible. Aesthetics is not just about art, but is rather about
all of our processes of meaning-making and is therefore the best starting point for any adequate account of human experience and understanding.
In what follows, I propose a cursory survey of certain selected aspects of embodied meaning that are crucial to our capacity to make
sense of virtually any experience. A partial list of these embodied
dimensions includes the following:
x The felt sense of a word, phrase, or passage;
x Qualities and the pervasive qualitative unity of a situation;
x Emotions;
x Images and image schemas.
3.2.1. Felt Sense
To give some preliminary idea of what it means to say that meaning is
embodied and that meaning goes deeper than our conceptual and
propositional structures, I want to consider briefly some of Eugene
Gendlins work on what he calls the felt sense that is intimately
connected to the structural, conceptual, representational patterns of
meaning that are typically thought to constitute the entirety of linguistic meaning. Gendlin asks us to reflect on how it is that a poet who is
searching for the next word or the next line in his burgeoning poem
knows that one candidate is better than others that offer themselves to
our thought. Imagine that you were the anonymous late 15th century
poet who was trying to find the final line to finish his now-famous
quatrain. The poem begins:
O Western wind, when wilt though blow,
that the small rain down can rain.
O Christ, that my love were in my arms,
. . . .?
What comes next? How do you know which of the possible endings
that might suggest themselves to your thought is the one you actually
want, or, rather, the one that works best in your poem-in-process?
How about, O Christ, that my love were in my arms/and all of my
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Mark Johnson
fortunes gain. Terrible! And you know its terrible because you feel
that tension and rejection in your diaphragm, even as the words of the
line are forming in your mind. Maybe O Christ, that my love were in
my arms/and I should not die in vain. Better. Not bad, but not great,
either. The tension is still there. Gendlin observes:
The poet reads the written lines over and over, listens, and senses what these
lines need (want, demand, imply, ....). Now the poet's hand rotates in the air.
The gesture says that. Many good lines offer themselves; they try to say, but
do not saythat. The blank is more precise. Although some are good lines,
the poet rejects them.
That .... seems to lack words, but no. It knows the language, since it understandsand rejectsthese lines that came. So it is not pre-verbal; rather, it
knows what must be said, and knows that these lines don't precisely say that.
It knows like a gnawing knows what was forgotten, but it is new in the poet,
and perhaps new in the history of the world. (1991: no pagination)
You keep on trying out alternatives until something changesuntil

you feel that release in your gut and your lungs. You keep going until
the meaning seems to flow forward to a culmination. O Christ, that
my love were in my arms/and I in my bed again. Thats it! Thats
what the lines called for. Thats how the meaning can best be carried
forward in this context. Once again, you know what is better by the
felt sense of the emerging line. The blank (the . . .) is satisfied. Gendlin explains:
This .... must be directly referred to (felt, experienced, sensed, had, . . . .).
Therefore, whatever term we use for such a blank, that term also needs our
direct reference.
The blank brings something new. That function is not performed by the linguistic forms alone. Rather, it functions between two sets of linguistic
forms. The blank is not just the already written lines, but rather the felt sense
from re-reading them, and that performs a function needed to lead to the next
lines. (1991: no pagination)
What Gendlin is bringing to our attention is how the meaning of the

words is never accomplished only through the structural/conceptual/
linguistic patterns we use. There is what William James called a
fringe or halo of meaning surrounding and supporting any word,
phrase, or sentence. The felt sense testifies to the more-thanlinguistic, more-than-conceptual dimensions of meaning-making.
Gendlins project has been to help us recover the neglected deep
25
meanings that go beyond language and other symbol systems. He

suggests that:
we can develop a new mode of language and thinking which enters, and
speaks from, what is more than conceptual patterns (distinctions, differences,
comparisons, similarities, generalities, schemes, figures, categories, cognitions, cultural and social forms . . .), although these are always inseparably at
work as well. For example, more than is a pattern, but here it says more
than the pattern (1997: 3)
3.2.2. Qualities and the Pervasive Qualitative Unity of a Situation

Gendlins notion of the felt dimensions of meaning calls to mind the
crucial role of qualities in our meaningful experience of our world.
Dewey regarded one of his greatest missions to be the recovery of the
central role of the qualitative in all aspects of human meaning,
thought, and symbolic interaction. In his important, but underappreciated essay Qualitative Thought (1930), Dewey began by
observing that what matters to us in life are qualities that we seek to
realize or to avoid: The world in which we immediately live, that in
which we strive, succeed, and are defeated is preeminently a qualitative world (1930/1988: 242). We humans live for the qualities that
form our experiential realities. We learn, for instance, to discriminate
and care about a vast array of reds that have special meaning for us:
the red of a ripe tomato sitting on a small white plate, the red of your
lovers luscious lips, the red of the sun setting on the Oregon coast, or
the red of the blood that gushes from a wounded comrade. Our English word red, even with all of the qualifying adjectives we can attach to it, is never fully adequate to the meaning of the reds we encounter in our lives. In the following short poem we are called to a
very special meaningful experience of felt qualities embedded in and
carried forward by the words, but certainly not fully comprehended by
those words:
Mark Johnson
26
Level Light
Sometimes the light when evening fails
stains all haystacked country and hills,
runs the cornrows and clasps the barn
with that kind of color escaped from corn
that brings to autumn the winter word
a level shaft that tells the world:
It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find themfail.
In one stride night then takes the hill.
William Stafford (1998)
The opening lines call up, and, we might even say, enact that experience of a very specific quality of color. Have you experienced that
golden-corn twilight of late autumn that stains the haystacks and
clasps the barn? It is a dying light that suggests the end of one season
and the coming on of winter. Perhaps insight comes to us in the fading
of some unique quality of the corn-colored light with the felt approach
of night moving toward you through the crisp chill of autumnal air
cold, dry, rich with the scent of decaying life. Through this light we
come to understand how other things can come only upon the death
and passage of what has been. It is a frightening, anxious world that
requires death before the emergence of new possibilities: now there
are only some other ways/and only one way to find themfail.
One of Deweys most important, yet least appreciated and most
dismissed, claims is that all meaning and thought emerges first from
what he called the unifying qualitative whole of a situation. Here is
how he formulated this insight:
An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that
rupture of a friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of
its constituent parts. This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it.
(1934/1988: 37)
To grasp Deweys seminal idea of the qualitative whole let us reflect

on the way a good work of art grabs you and pulls you into its
world. As Paul Ricoeur (1984) was fond of saying, an artwork draws
the perceiver into the world of the work where the perceiver can
experience the possible ways of inhabiting that world. What grabs
you is the pervasive unifying quality of the whole work, prior to most
27
of the conceptual discrimination you might subsequently lavish on the

work. Dewey described this experience of being caught up by an artwork or a scene:
The total overwhelming impression comes first, perhaps in a seizure by a
sudden glory of the landscape, or by the effect upon us of entrance into a cathedral when dim light, incense, stained glass and majestic proportions fuse
in one indistinguishable whole. We say with truth that a painting strikes us.
There is an impact that precedes all definite recognition of what it is about.
(1934/1988: 150)
Dewey certainly acknowledged that when you encounter an artwork,

you are not simply or only enraptured by its overall qualitative unity.
Of course, you also quickly see lines, shapes, colors, objects, spaces,
animals, people, and even events that might be depicted or referenced.
However, these perceived patterns and objects are selections and discriminations within the total unifying background quality of the world
you are engaging in the artwork. Yes, you see objects, but those
objects stand forth from, and within, the felt qualitative unity of the
whole scene.
Based on studies of the various neural architectures of the brain
(e.g., right/left, front/back, core/shell), neuroscientist and psychologist Don Tucker has traced the path of a developing experience that
begins with a feeling-rich synthetic whole that is subsequently differentiated in areas of the sensory cortices, which in turn feed back into
our developing holistic grasp of the scene or situation we are encountering.
In early attempts to understand a novel situation, therefore, the first patterns to
be formed may be holistic, visceral representations at the limbic network level. Reflecting the residuals of personal history, these representations take the
form of . . . inherent expectancies for what should happen. Such visceral
concepts are formed at the core of each hemisphere . . . The result is a fast and
abstractif syncreticcomprehension of the novel situation that is organized
within the linked network architecture of the right hemisphere. (Tucker 2006:
236)
It is just such a holistic, affect-laden take on a situation that leads us to

feel that we have an intuition about that given situation: it is threatening, joyful, welcoming, promising, intriguing, disruptive, calming,
and so forth. The joyful situation is not just a subjective feeling in us;
rather, it is the qualitative unity of the entire scene that defines its
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Mark Johnson
character and direction. Consequently, any distinctions or patterns or

qualities we mark within the scene have their meaning only in relation
to the defining qualitative unity from which they emerge.
3.2.3. Emotions
Attention to the felt qualities of a situation leads us to the role of emotions in the meaning of an artwork. The field of emotion studies is a
vast and rapidly growing venue of psychological, biological, anthropological, and neural research that has become immense. I have selected Antonio Damasios celebrated theory of emotions for the briefest possible treatment as it bears on the nature of meaning. The basic
idea, I shall argue, is that emotions arise within the flow of our ongoing experience with our environment, and they are a primary way by
which we assess the quality and development of our experience.
Therefore, emotions are a key part of how we gauge the meaning of
what is happening to us. In a series of three important books (1994,
1999, 2003) Damasio presents the following evolutionarily grounded
account:
1. In order to survive and grow, an animal must continually take
stock of its current body-state, which is the result of its ongoing interaction with its environment, and it must make bodily changes to maintain (or sometimes restore) an internal homeostasis and some measure
of harmonious engagement with its surroundings.
2. Most of this regulatory activity takes place automatically and
without conscious awareness. Emotional responses are thus automatic,
non-conscious patterns of adjustment of the organism to its situation,
based upon the organisms assessment of its body-state. Emotional
response patterns are sometimes accompanied by our conscious feeling of our emotional body-state, which is mostly an after-the-fact way
of being aware of how things are going for us; however, the feeling of
an emotional state is not typically requisite for the emotional response
pattern to engage.
3. Emotions are thus a key part of the process by which our bodies monitor and assess their state and make adjustments to maintain a
homeostasis within our internal milieu, the loss of which could be
debilitating or even fatal.
4. The range of human emotions includes background emotions
(e.g., energy or malaise, edginess or calmness), primary emotions
29
(e.g., fear, sadness, anger, joy), and social emotions (e.g., shame, honor, pride, jealousy).
5. Consequently, what Daniel Stern (1985) calls feeling contours are one of the primary non-conceptual ways we become aware
of the meaning and significance of our experience, as we evaluate
how things are going.
6. In this way, emotions lie at the heart of our ability to make
sense of our world and to act intelligently within it.
7. Finally, in addition to emotions evoked by direct experiences,
Damasio describes what he calls an as-if body loop by which we
can experience emotional responses and have emotional feelings in
relation to imagined scenes or events like dramatic plays or musical
works or paintings. The key idea here is that emotions dont necessarily require actual bodily experiences with an environment, since they
can also be elicited by merely imagining some situation or scenario. In
cases where you can become utterly terrified, erotically charged, or
calmly invigorated in a movie theater, or while reading a novel or
exploring a painting, it is this as-if loop that gives rise to the appropriate emotions. According to Damasios theory of emotional experience, emotions are central to our ability to experience the meaning of
any situation, whether it be a real world encounter with an enemy or
an as-if encounter with an enemy in some artwork, whether it be the
felt anxiety of a tense situation at work or the tense anxiety of one of
Picassos cubist paintings, whether it be the joyful exuberance of
ones wedding day or the joyful exuberance of a Kandinsky painting.
The great psychologist of art Rudolf Arnheim has given us brilliant analyses of many of the bodily patterns and processes by which
art can be meaningful to us. Arnheim argued, like Dewey, that there is
no grand metaphysical gap between the processes of perception and
feeling and those we think of as matters of conceptual and propositional reasoning. Over forty years ago Arnheim used his gestalt psychology studies of perception to argue that thinking and perceiving are
not radically distinct functions, but rather utilize the same types of
cognitive operations:
[T]he cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental
processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. I am referring to such operations as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, as well as combin-
30
Mark Johnson
ing, separating, putting in context. These operations are not the prerogative
of any one mental function; they are the manner in which the minds of both
man and animal treat cognitive material at any level. There is no basic difference in this respect between what happens when a person looks at the world
directly and when he sits with his eyes closed and thinks. (1969: 13)
In Art and Visual Perception (1954), Arnheim took pains to describe a

large number of patterns and types of psychological processes by
which human beings, with the brains and bodies they have evolved,
are able to make some sense of what they perceive, interact with, and
imagine. An adequate empirical aesthetics would seek a more or less
comprehensive taxonomy of these patterns and processes of human
meaning-making. That would be a daunting task, but a number of
people in different disciplines are contributing to this ongoing project.
3.2.4. Images and Image Schemas
As I understand such an empirical aesthetics of human meaning, it
would include the role of images, image schemas, conceptual metaphors and metonymies, semantic frames, qualities, feelings, and emotions all woven together. So far, I have only discussed three of these
dimensions. I would like to end by saying a few words about image
schematic structures of meaning and some of the feeling contours that
play a role in our engagement with the arts.
In 1987 George Lakoff and I (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987) coined
the term image schemas to describe recurrent patterns of organism/environment interactions that are automatically, nonconsciously,
and directly meaningful to creatures with bodies and brains like ours,
in interaction with our shared environments. For example, given our
upright stance within a gravitational field and our proprioceptive and
kinaesthetic senses, we humans have developed a sense of bodily balance as key to successful transactions with our world. We know what
it feels like to be balanced and to lose our balance. We know the possible consequences of losing our balance and falling. As Arnheim
(1954) has observed, we see objects in our surroundings as balanced,
unbalanced, or teetering precariously between the two states. We thus
acquire a felt sense of the meaning of balance. Were we to have radically different bodies, or were we to have radically different environments, such as existing outside a gravitational field, we might have
either no sense of balance or a quite different sense than we currently
possess. The BALANCE schema is thus a basic image-schematic mean-
31
ing structure for beings embodied in the same ways we are and in the
same general types of environments we routinely inhabit.
Another basic image schema is that of a RUSH, which consists of a
rapid build up of intensity in the quality of some situation. Everyone
knows the common feeling contour of a rush of fear, a rush of joy, a
rapid growth of brightness of light or sound, or some drug-induced
bodily rush. Rushes are the result of increases in the firing rates of
certain neuronal functional clusters and felt responses to hormones
released into our bloodstream that affect our bodily response patterns.
Developmental psychologist Daniel Stern (1985) has named feeling patterns, such as rushes, vitality affect contours. He notes that
infants must experience their world through an extensive range of just
such affect contours, which are felt rather than conceptualized. When
we grow up we dont leave these basic meaning patterns behind;
instead, we incorporate them into our more abstractive systems of
meaning. What Stern calls vitality affects are the patterns of flow
and change of our felt experience: These elusive qualities are better
captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as surging, fading away,
fleeting, explosive, crescendo, decrescendo, bursting, drawn
out, and so on (54).
Vitality affect contours are most evident in temporal arts, such as
music and dance, in which there is some kind of actual or virtual
movement. In dance, for instance, bodies actually move through space
with leaps, twists, crouches, sweeps, loss and restoration of balance,
and various explosions and curtailing of expressed energy. However,
image-schematic affect contours are also present in events and art
experiences where there is no literal movement in space, but only
temporal motion. Steve Larson and I (Johnson and Larson 2003),
for example, have analyzed some of the chief metaphors by which we
understand musical motion through musical space.
Susanne Langer argued that music was the quintessential art of
virtual motion. She described music as the tonal analogue of emotive
life (Langer 1953: 27) in which patterns of feeling are what are experienced most directly in music, and in art generally. Art is an expressive form, by which Langer meant:
any perceptible or imaginable whole that exhibits its relationships of parts, or
points, or even qualities or aspects within the whole, so that it may be taken
to represent some other whole whose elements have analogous relations.
(1957: 20)
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Mark Johnson
Although Langer sometimes, as in the previous quotation, used the

word represents, she saw that art does not primarily re-present or
re-create some experience; on the contrary, art is a presentation or
enactment or creation of meaning through what she called living
form:
Living form is the most indubitable product of all good art, be it painting,
architecture, or pottery. Such a form is living in the same way that a border
or a spiral is intrinsically growing: that is, it expresses lifefeeling,
growth, movement, emotion, and everything that characterizes vital existence. This expression, moreover, is not symbolization in the usual sense of
conventional or assigned meaning, but a presentation of a highly articulated
form wherein the beholder recognizes, without conscious comparison and
judgment but rather by direct recognition, the forms of human feeling: emotions, moods, even sensations in their characteristic passage. (1953: 82)
It is not too difficult to begin exploring the ways that a dance movement or a musical movement become meaningfulthat is, enact
meaningvia some of the qualities, feelings, affect contours, emotions, images, and image schemas that are the flesh, bone, and blood
of embodied meaning. In my book The Meaning of the Body I have
tried to do a bit of this type of analysis for a simple musical work like
Over the Rainbow, but there are much more profound and sophisticated treatments of embodied musical meaning by music theorists like
Steve Larson (2012), Lawrence Zbikowski (2002), Hallgjerd Aksnes
(1997), Janna Saslaw (1996), Michael Spitzer (2004), Juha Ojala
(2009), Arnie Cox (1999), and many others. Once you appreciate the
cognitive sources of our experience of musical motion and space,
every structure or pattern or quality of bodily movement and expression can be appropriated for our experience of musical meaning. Music can move by pitch changes, key changes, meter, rhythmic modulations, tone qualities, and temporal dynamics of all sorts.
It is more difficult to recognize some of these affect contours and
movement patterns in supposedly non-temporal arts like painting and
architecture, but Arnheim (1954) has famously shown how paintings
can invite the experience of perceptual forces and movement of the
eye through the work. Consider, for example, Henri Matisses beautiful cutout, The Acanthi.
33
Henri Matisse. The Acanthi (1951)
Even if you were unaware of the title Matisse gave to this work, you
would experience an eruption of organic forms emanating upward
from the bottom, or perhaps from the bottom right corner. You feel an
upsurge of life. You feel growth, expansion, and the coming-tofruition of things in one consummatory moment. The colors sing and
give you a joyful feeling of vitality and exuberance. Matisse invites
you to inhabit his world of light, color, and life. Your identity in such
a world would be quite different from your sense of self in the dark,
somber, foreboding, desolate, tortured, memorializing landscape of an
Anselm Kiefer painting.
4. Bodily Meaning and Self Identity in Art
I have been suggesting that works of art can provide the perceiver
with possible ways of being in and inhabiting a world (of the work).
Works of art are no less, nor no more, real than the events of our
everyday practical reality. As Dewey argued in his early essay, The
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Mark Johnson
Postulate of Immediate Empiricism (1905), things are what they are

experienced as. There is a real experience of an artwork, just as there
is a real experience of a computer keyboard, a loaf of bread, or a rainy
day. These experiences are all equally real, insofar as they each afford
us with different opportunities of meaningful engagement. There is
meaning (and nutrition!) that you can get from a loaf of bread that is
unavailable from an abstract painting, but likewise there is meaning
available in that painting which none of these other experiences can
enact. Given that each of these is equally real, the only question is,
at this present moment, which of these opportunities for engagement
best satisfy our needs, open up possibilities for growth, and deepen
and enrich meaning for us. Deweys claim is that good works of art
provide exemplary instances of just such a development of meaning,
and they provide depths of meaning that are not routinely available in
our ordinary day-to-day affairs.
Deweys metaphysics gives us a way to get over the mistaken
view that an artwork derives its significance and validity from fixed
and complete experience that it allegedly re-presents. Overly simplistic imitative theories of art are a prime example of our tendency to
think that a work of art gets whatever value it has by pointing to some
independent, already complete, experience. If that were the case, then
artworks would have only derivative, second-rate value for their representational function. To the contrary, Dewey argued that art is a
unique experience, not a static thing. As experience, it is neither merely objective (as nothing more than a re-presentation), nor merely subjective (as nothing more than an inner experience), but rather an occasion for a meaningful encounter with aspects of our world, in which
both self and world are transformed. As experience, it reaches beyond
the present, back into parts of what has come before to define a context, and forward into future possible experiences (and meanings) that
are opened up by the artwork. Consequently, there is no eternal essence of any given artwork. Our experience of the artwork is different at different moments and in different developing situations. The
artwork exists in its enactment through a perceiver engaging a set of
affordances for possible meaningsaffordances presented via some
organization of marks, colors, tones, words, thoughts, feelings, etc. It
makes no sense to speak of the artwork in itself, as though it were a
completed object or event. Susanne Langer made this point well when
35
she observed that artworks do not re-present feelings; rather, they

present or enact felt situations:
But a work of art does not point us to a meaning beyond its own presence.
What is expressed cannot be grasped apart from the sensuous or poetic form
that expresses it. In a work of art we have the direct presentation of a feeling,
not a sign that points to it. (1953: 133-34)
I would want to expand this claim beyond the presentation of feeling

to embrace all of the ways we make and discover meaning, but the
basic ideathat the artwork is an enactmentis sound. The work of
art is a working of arta process of engagement between a human
being and some aspects of her environment. However, the artworking
occurs not just in some objective environment, nor exclusively in
some inner experiential space, but in the developing organismenvironment interaction, where the environments are at once physical,
interpersonal, and cultural. The enactment of the artwork has meaning
in the very same ways, and by the same neural and embodied means,
as our ordinary experience is meaningful, but Dewey suggests that
what makes artworks more significant than ordinary life affairs is their
capacity to enact meanings with a harmony, wholeness, intensity, or
scope that is not routinely possible in our day-to-day affairs. The coffee cup on my desk can have plenty of meaning for me, but Matisses
rendering of a cup in a still life can reveal, through its imaginative
exploration, aspects of significance that are not typically afforded me
by the cup that sits before me.
So, where does the issue of personal identity reside in this account
of enacted meaning? My answer is that you are who you are in and
through the meanings that are afforded you by your experience. You
are the relatively stable habits of experiencing, thinking, valuing, feeling, and acting that interpenetrate in your life. You gain selfunderstanding, not by allegedly pure acts of reason turning reflectively inward on itself. Rather, you learn who you are by seeing the patterns and content of what you have experiencedwhat matters to you,
what you find appealing, what you find repulsive, and what you have
undergone and done. Therefore, although a work of art doesnt directly tell you who you are, what it can do is open a world of possible
experiencean encounter with ways of being in the world. Matisse
cut-outs are just as much affordances of possible experience as are
pork cutlets. Do you find your identity in pork cutlets? Well, you find
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Mark Johnson
that either you are a carnivore and a great lover of the pig, or else,
perhaps as an orthodox Jew, you find pork cutlets repulsive (or at
least, something off limits to your gustatory experience). Do you find
yourself in Matisse cut-outs? Well, perhaps you find that you are attracted to certain shapes and organic contours, and that you feel at
home in the dynamic play of his lovely shapes with their luscious
colors. Or maybe you learn that your aversion or lack of interest in the
cutouts reminds you that you are more comfortable with the controlled, yet dynamic, rectilinearities and precision of a Mondrian
world.
In either of these cases, it is crucial to remember that your identity
is not locked up within you; it is not something wholly subjective. It
is the identity of you-in-your-world. The things you experience are the
matter and form of your self-understanding. The part of this that Kant
got right was that you are what and who you are only in your world,
that is, only in ongoing interaction with your situation in a shared
world. What Kant got wrong was his postulating of a transcendent ego
working behind the scenes. There is no you beyond this embodied
world-in-process. There is no fully fixed self, but only a self-inprocess that is shaped by what it experiences and enacts.
I would end by observing, as Dewey did, that there is nothing
merely subjective about this process of experience in which your
self-identity is carried forward. The qualitative unities of an artwork
as experienced, which are correlative with the qualitative unity of our
selves, are really there. They are not just idiosyncratic feelings in
you. They are in and of your world, whether it is the world of soccer
balls and automobiles, or the world of Mondrian geometries and Matissian organic harmonies.
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Barsalou, Lawrence. 1999. Perceptual Symbol Systems in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 22: 577-660.
Cox, Arnie. 1999. The Metaphoric Logic of Musical Motion and Space. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Music, University of Oregon.
Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
New York, NY: G. P. Putnams Sons.
. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.
. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL:
Harcourt.
Dewey, John. 1905. The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism, in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method 2, No. 15: 393-399.
. 1925/1981. Experience and Nature in Vol. 1 of The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed.
Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
. 1930/1988. Qualitative Thought in Vol. 5 of The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
. 1938/1991. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry in Vol. 12 of The Later Works, 19251953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Gendlin, Eugene. 1991. Crossing and Dipping: Some Terms for Approaching the
Interface between Natural Understanding and Logical Formulation. Unpublished
manuscript. University of Chicago.
. 1997. How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can in Levin,
Michael David (ed.) Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in
Gendlins Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 3-41.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
. 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
and Steve Larson. 2003. Something in the Way She Moves: Metaphors of Musical
Motion in Metaphor and Symbol 18(2): 63-84.
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Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1968. Critique of Pure Reason (tr. N.K. Smith). London:
Macmillan (St. Martins) Press.
. 1790/1987. Critique of Judgment (tr. W. Pluhar). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
about the Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Langer, Susanne. 1953. Feeling and Form. New York, NY: Charles Scribners Sons.
. 1957. Problems of Art. New York, NY: Charles Scribners Sons.
Larson, Steve (2012). Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Ojala, Juha. 2009. Space in Musical Semiosis: An Abductive Theory of the Musical
Composition Process. Helsinki: Hakapaino.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, Vol. 1 (tr. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer).
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Saslaw, Janna. 1996. Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-derived Image
Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music in Journal of Music Theory 40(2):
217-242.
Spitzer, Michael. 2004. Metaphor and Musical Thought. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Stafford, William. 1998. Level Light in The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems by
William Stafford. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.
Stern, Daniel. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Tucker, Don. 2007. Mind from Body: Experience from Neural Structure. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Zbikowski, Lawrence. 2002. Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory,
and Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
III. Acts Not Tracts! Why a Complete

Psychology of Art and Identity Must Be
Neuro-cultural
Ciarn Benson
University College Dublin
The act and not the [association] tract is the fundamental datum in both social and
individual psychology, and it has both an inner and an outer phase, an internal and
an external aspect. (George Herbert Mead 1934: 8)
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger contexta chair in a room, a
room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
(Eliel Saarinen, Time Magazine, July 2, 1950)
Nature provides the can, but culture and language provide the may and must.
(Rom Harr 1993: 5)
The great British literary critic Frank Kermode once asked why we
represent a clock as going tick-tock when it is actually going ticktick. On this observation he built an argument about human beings
compulsion to organize experience into beginnings and, even more
strongly, into endings. The tick of the clock was for Kermode a
humble genesis; the tock, on the other hand, was a feeble apocalypse! From the days of the Gestalt Psychologists there has been a
fascination with the variety of ways in which the forward movement
of subjective experience is organized, whether spontaneously due to
the ways in which brains have evolved, or under the active control of
a culturally constituted person.1 The imaging techniques of neurosci-
For an analysis of the ways in which metaphors permeate our thinking cf. George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999).
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Ciarn Benson
ence are helping to deepen our understanding of how subjectivity is

managed by the brain. The problem of how intersubjectivity is organized, however, is currently less amenable to these technologies. This
is especially so in the case of the psychology of art. Because experiences with art are, as John Dewey (1934) argued, the most complete
kind of experiencerecruiting, as it does, sensation, perception, conception, judgment, emotion, memory, imagination, personal idiosyncrasy, cultural tradition, etc.the making and the reception of Art is
therefore likely to be the most testing ground for the adequacy of any
psychologys ontology. But what is the nature of the phenomena to be
studied, and what particular categories best assist the inquiry?
A strikingly obvious feature of subjectivity, and of intersubjectivity, is the apparent seamlessness or unity of the ways in
which many different neural capacities are bound together into ongoing, interwoven, subject-centered fields of consciousness. Since William James, words like stream are routinely used to indicate the forward movement of such fields of consciousness, particularly when
considered from the point of view of their subjects (James, 1890). The
degree to which a person is not engaging in centering reflection for
passages of that stream has, on the other hand, been described using
words like absorption (Dewey 1934; Benson 1993, 2001) or flow
(Csikszentmihalyi 2008). When the experience is aesthetic, in John
Deweys sense of that term, then absorption is one of its symptoms.
We should remember that experience for Dewey is not the same
as is currently understood by that word. Contemporary usage tends to
emphasize the subjective or private aspect whereas, for Dewey, experience is both subjective and objective and is to be understood as relational. Experience is always temporally extended. Subject and object together produce experience. In this sense, it is a suitably
equipped subject aesthetically engaging with an art object that together generate the work of art. The work of art is an outcome in
time of the dynamic give-and-take between a subject and an art object/event. Late in his life Dewey wondered whether, instead of trying to recover and defend this understanding of experience, he
would have been better off using and developing the concept of culture. The course of experience/culture has both public and private
phases.
In this view, experience streams, sometimes as a subjective phase,
sometimes as an objective phase, which can in time achieve its own
Acts Not Tracts!
41
kind of form. This form is one that unfolds over time with a beginning and a conclusion or, as the Pragmatists would say, a consummation. Dewey himself tried to describe this idea of form using
the everyday idiom of English-speaking communities where people
speak of an exceptional passage of experience as An experience, as
when, after hearing a great jazz trio, we might say Now that was an
experience! A challenge for art theory, art criticism and for the psychology of art is to describe the elements and form of such experience
well. As the title of Deweys great work on art alerts us, we should
think of art as experience, not in our contemporary subjectivistic
sense, but in the more complex relational sense that Dewey, vainly as
it turns out, argued for (Dewey 1934). If the phenomena of Deweyan
experience are to be studied over time, then the question of ontology
has to be addressed. What aspects of these experiential phenomena are
to be abstracted out for attention, or thematized, and what concepts
can be usefully deployed by the psychology of art to study them?
The three epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter summarize
the three particular elements I want to review and connect in this
chapter. First, a psychology which is fit for purpose when describing
and explaining the delightful, or confrontational, complexities of Art
must, to paraphrase the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, take account
of the nested hierarchies of action, act and obligation which form
human psychological lives. Two kinds of hierarchy need to be distinguished here. A non-nested hierarchy is, like an army command,
vertical, or top-down, with control descending from the higher to the
lower reaches. It has a top and a bottom. A nested hierarchy, on the
other hand, is one in which all higher levels of the hierarchy are physically composed of elements at the lower levels, but with the higher
levels having emergent properties not present in lower levels. Elements fit inside other elements, with no top or bottom. Living organisms are such nested hierarchies, and I suggest it is helpful to think of
acts as being too, in the sense of the term used by Rom Harr (1993).
Second, a key concept in the project of constructing a neuro-cultural
psychology of art must be this currently neglected idea of an act.
Third, that project must also incorporate a normative account of human psychological life.
I believe that a neuro-cultural synthesis is the primary challenge
facing psychological theory. As Harr (1993: 1) has long argued,
human psychology is best understood as coming into existence in the
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Ciarn Benson
enormously variable discursive or symbolic interactions of persons,

grounded in a common biological inheritance. The psychology of art,
of all psychologies, must be cultural-historical as well as biological
and neural. A neuro-cultural account would be a synthesis of both
these strands of inquiry. This is a vast project for which we will need
an appropriate conceptual armory. The appeal of the concept of an
act, much neglected by contemporary psychology, lies in its potential to contribute significantly to unifying the conceptual domains of
the neural and the cultural.
Before proceeding further, let me offer some further clarifications about my position on the idea of art. As to what we should
understand the word Art to mean I follow Ernst Gombrich who, in
his classic The Story of Art (1950) wrote that, There really is no such
thing as art, there are only artists. By this he meant to revive and
defend earlier usages when the word signified any skill or mastery
as it still does when we speak of the Art of War, or the Art of
Love. Decades later he clarified this further by pointing out that skill
never exists in the abstract. On the contrary, skill is always for something.
For Gombrich that something was, in the case of Art, imagemaking. As it happens, this is an idea that contemporary art practices
have overtaken. Artists are today doing and making things that
would seem bizarre by the standards of traditional Art, even in 1950.
Some kinds of contemporary artsuch as conceptual art, installation art, performance art, etc.have turned away from imagemaking per se. The implication of this is that psychologies of art will,
of necessity, always trail behind contemporary art practices. In this
context it is worth remembering Nelson Goodmans (1978) argument
for replacing the question What is Art? with the more productive
formulation When is Art?
There is one final distinction to be made before proceeding. This
is between what I want to call psychologies of can as distinct from
psychologies of may (Harr 1993). This will become clearer in what
follows but, in essence, it concerns the difference between accounts of
the neural, physical, or cognitive capacities necessary for psychological functions, as distinct from the culturally and historically shaped
reasons given for, and governing, the exercise of those particular functions by the persons performing them. The study of capacities, of how
it is that human beings can do some things but not others, has been a
Acts Not Tracts!
43
major concern of modern psychology. Differential psychology has

focused on measuring differences in capacity (aptitudes, abilities, and
attainments), developmental psychology has looked at the origination
of capabilites, and so on. Contemporary psychologies of art tend to be
preoccupied with neuroscientific and cognitive viewpoints which seek
to describe and explain the necessary conditions for seeing color, for
instance, or for finding illusion compelling. In essence, they explore
how our seeing is shaped by neural infrastructure in dialogue with
what is constructed for our attention by artists. These are orthodoxies,
of great value but necessarily limited when facing the complexities of
actual art practices in situ. This is what I mean by a psychology of
can. A psychology of may, in contrast, would be one whose phenomena are fundamentally social in construction, normative in practice, and concerned with the personal making of meaning as opposed
to the impersonal processing of information, in the sense outlined by
Jerome Bruner (1990).
To summarize so far: I will argue, using concrete examples from
different eras of art, that cognitive and neuroscientific psychologies of
art are psychologies of can, that social act psychologies are psychologies of may, and that a neuro-cultural psychology of art would
be a synthesis of both.
1. Acts, Art, and Why Questions: Peter Rubens and Anselm
Kiefer as Examples
To clarify this distinction between may and can I will use some
examples. The contribution of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to understanding art is not in question. My concentration is on
what, from the perspective of a more complete psychology of art, they
necessarily miss. To facilitate this argument for what would further
need to be taken into account, let me briefly elaborate a few examples.
In these cases I will draw upon art-historical and art-critical perspectives in order to fill out what seems to me to be a key question: What
is it that Artist A is doing when s/he is making Work X? My examples
reflect interests of my own, and the reader could substitute any others.
Between 1611 and 1615, Rubens painted The Death of Seneca.
The scene is the final moments of the great Roman Stoics life as he
struggles ineffectually to commit suicide under the orders of his former pupil, the emperor Nero. Applying our question to this work
what was Rubens doing when he was painting The Death of Sene-
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Ciarn Benson
ca?it is obvious that he was working simultaneously on many levels. He was manipulating pigments, brushes, canvas etc. in a constant,
focused, and critical transaction over time with emerging marks on
canvas. He was deploying all his knowledge of composition, color,
perspective, line, form, and so on, to achieve a thematically chosen
outcome. In doing these sorts of things he was utilizing his brain in all
the ways necessary to successfully achieve the final look of the work.
Cognitive psychology and neuroscience greatly enrich our understanding of how a human being can do things like this by, for instance,
mapping the modular structure of the visual cortex and the temporal
sequences and patterns by which visual stimuli are processed by the
brain. The work of cognitive psychologists like Robert Solso and neuroscientists like Semir Zeki, both of whose ideas I use below, helps us
understand the visual capacities of artists and spectators. But are these
analyses of capacity sufficient to explain why an artist does what s/he
does, and why they do it in this particular way rather than in some
other way? Is the making and receiving of art not also a normative
engagement involving the complex processes of selfhood and identity,
of meaning and culture?
As a simple matter of fact this latter question tends not to be treated in contemporary cognitive or neuroscientific accounts of art and
experience, beyond the rather superficial repetitions of evolutionarypsychological accounts to do with mate selection, status, and so on.
To answer why questions more convincingly one has to turn to cultural-historical perspectives of a kind that struggle to be heard in competition with current psychological orthodoxies. In the case of Rubens The Death of Seneca, how do art historians answer the question
of what he was doing when he painted that work? Rubens had seen a
restored black marble Roman statue while he lived in Italy between
1600 and 1608. It is now thought to have represented an African fisherman. The genitals are clearly depicted on the statue. Back in Antwerp, Rubens began transforming this image, of which he had made a
number of drawings, into the flesh and blood depiction of the dying
Seneca. But in doing so he made a number of changes which, tellingly, indicate another level of answer to the why question. Here is
what Rose-Marie Hagen and Rainer Hagen write:
Rubens was a Catholic and was familiar with Lipsiuss (Senecas Dutch
translator) view of Seneca, so he painted the philosopher in the attitude of a
Christlike martyr. [...] Rubens lowered the angle of the head a little, but also
Acts Not Tracts!
45
emphasized the heavenward gaze and gave the thinker a larger forehead, a
forehead that gleams as if with enlightenment in the last minutes of his life.
(2005: 314-19)
The Hagens go on to say that Rubens assimilated the depicted figure

of Seneca to his contemporary code of decency by lengthening the
original wrap around the fishermans waist into a loincloth that covered Senecas genitals. More significantly, since suicide was not an
option for a Christian martyr, and therefore unlikely to commend the
figure of Seneca to potential Christian admirers, Rubens solved the
problem by having an attendant cut Senecas veins rather than Seneca
doing it himself, as had been recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus.
To return once again to the question, What was Rubens doing
when he was painting this picture? we can now answer in more abstract social act terms, informed by cultural-historical studies, and say
that he was in fact inducting the exemplary Roman Stoic Seneca into
the Christian pantheon of heroes. Is this the best answer to the why
question? If it is, then what further psychological perspectives would
we need to add in order to achieve a more complete account if not
social-psychological ones which utilize the concept of an act?
Here is one further recent example to reinforce this point. Kiefer
showed his powerful, dark, suffocating painting Sulamith in 1982.
From the postwar generation, Kiefers work grapples with the legacy
of the post-Nazi era in a transformed Germany. Just as Rubens drew
on the work of a Roman artist, so Kiefer built on a poem by Paul Celan, while also recruiting the work of the Nazi-era architect Wilhelm
Kreis.
Celan wrote:
Death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
He strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
A man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
He sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
He plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
Your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamith
Excerpt from Celans Todesfuge/Death Fugue [1952], tr. M. Hamburger 2007)
The densely painted vault that is Sulamithin oppressive blacks,

browns, blues, and lines of whiteis borrowed from the funerary
crypt of the Soldiers Hall built in Berlin in 1939 by Wilhelm Kreis.
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Ciarn Benson
Using traditional linear perspective, Kiefer relentlessly draws the eye

toward the vanishing point which now has the flames of the Jewish
menorah burning quietly away, as in a Holocaust crematorium. In the
top left hand corner is inscribed the name of the emblematic Jewess
from Celan, Sulamith. Once again, we can point to the neural and
cognitive-psychological conditions which must be fulfilled for a painting such as this to be made and perceived and, in answering the question What was Kiefer doing when he was making Sulamith? we can
answer in terms of how he was fulfilling these conditions neurally and
cognitively. But clearly there is much more to answering this question, and that again requires the concept of a social act.
Daniel Arasse (2001), for example, argues that Kiefers quoting
of Kreiss 1939 Soldiers Hall in Berlin is an act which furthers a
therapy of memory. It enables him to transmute the Nazi cult of the
dead into a powerful memorial for their Holocaust victims. This is
intelligible only within a cultural-historical perspective.
In the case of the Rubens above we have an instance of an artist
suturing one tradition into another whereas in Kiefers case we have
something similar but for quite opposite purposes. These, surely, must
be aspects of art-making which a more complete psychology of art
needs to claim as legitimate parts of its territory.
To further emphasize why we need to recover the concept of a social act for a more rounded psychology of art I now want to briefly
consider the work of Zeki, specifically his account of what he understands the great Russian Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich to be
doing when he moved to abstraction in mid-career. Let me stress at
the outset that I find work like Zekis illuminating, and have learnt
much from it. Part of Zekis contribution to the argument for a more
complete psychology of art is, paradoxically, what his neuro-aesthetic
account is compelled to leave out. Zeki clarifies why it is that what
certain artists, such as the Fauves, want to accomplish cannot be
achieved because of the limiting nature of visual cortical functioning.
Work like his helps us to understand the significance of the constraints imposed by neural capacities. Equally, it indicates what more
is needed conceptually if a fuller, neuro-cultural psychology of art is
to be achieved.
Acts Not Tracts!
47
2. Neuro-aesthetic and Cultural-historical Approaches to

Malevich: A Contrast
In his book Inner Vision Zeki argues that no theory of aesthetics
which does not have strong biological foundations is likely to be complete, let alone profound (1999: 217). He is, however, rightly cautious
about the explanatory reach of his neurological perspective and is
clear that it is almost impossible to say anything beyond the most
general about the relationship between brain physiology and the perception of some of the more complex, narrative and representational
works, which is why I say less about them (2), and that We have
little knowledge of what brain areas are involved in the powerful subjective feelings that the painting arouses, or how these brain areas
interact to give us the overall impression of the painting (181). Yet it
is in precisely these areas of narrative, emotion, and action, and in the
cultural-historical circumstances that shape them, that Art does its
work, and for which we must find ways of incorporating, and nesting,
neural perspectives into cultural-historical ones.
Malevich is a key artist for Zekis argument for the biology of abstract art. At first sight the abstract art of Malevich might seem like a
perfect choice for a neurology concerned with identifying and investigating those parts of the visual cortex that specialize in processing
lines, angles, colors, forms, faces, or movement. Apparently shorn of
all narrative and representation, Malevichs abstractions appear to be
tailored to the capacities of specific visual cortical regions. Yet, considered as productions nesting within wider cultural-historical acts,
Malevichs abstractions are intimately connected to specific narratives
and values which are, in turn, served by those pared-down geometrical
forms, but which are in no way free of them.
Zeki argues that the function of art is the search for constancies,
and that this is also the function of the brain: The function of art is
thus an extension of the function of the brainthe seeking of
knowledge in an ever-changing world (1999: 12). But there is more
to art than this. It also involves the creation of knowledge and of novel
experiences which move from person to person and from group to
group, via the expressive power of such creations and the networks
into which they are embedded. No account of solitary brain function
can account for this dimension of art. Because of this a psychology of
art will only be intelligible, and profound, once it is based not simply
on the workings of the brain, but on the workings of enculturated
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Ciarn Benson
brains working collectively, and dialogically engaged with, and

shaped by, their objectifications.
For Zeki, and for many neuroscientists, the concept of a person
and that of a brain tend to be conflated. He writes: That painters
experiment is common knowledge. That they do so by working and
re-working a painting until it achieves a desirable effect, until it pleases them, which is the same thing as saying until it pleases their brains
(1999: 30). This is a less than obvious proposition, but not one to be
pursued here. The heart of his argument concerning artists is that they
have inadvertently tailored their work to characteristics of specific
brain physiology whose functioning is being revealed by neuroscientists. Kinetic artists, for example, have in their work discovered and
used characteristics of the physiology of area V5. Fauvists, in discovering that color cannot be liberated from formour brains wont allow thatsolved this problem artistically by investing forms with
colors not usually associated with them (e.g., Andr Derains green
Houses of Parliament, red Thames, and so on).
In the case of Malevich, it is Zekis contention that his new
formslines, squares, rectangles
are admirably suited to stimulate cells in the visual cortex, and the properties
of these cells are, to an extent, the pre-existing idea within us. While one
cannot draw an exact causal relationship between the two, one can state with
certainty that when we look at the paintings of Malevich, many cells in our
brains will be responding vigorously. One can also state the converse, that
if cells in the brain did not respond to this kind of stimulus, then this kind of
art would not exist. (1999: 124-125)
In essence, Zeki argues that artists like Malevich tailor their work to
the capacities of specialized areas of the brain without knowing it. But
still the question arises: is such tailoring an act, or is it a precondition for an act whose ontology transcends individual brain functioning? Without cells specializing in orientation, and cells specializing in
rectangular colored receptive fields, Malevich could not make the art
he did, nor could we visually appreciate it without the same kinds of
cell. To understand that it is cells in the V2, V3, and V4 complexes
that are recruited here does advance our understanding of the neural
underpinnings of what is happening when we make and experience
elements of art like these. But this raises more questions. Did Malevich make that art simply because he had the neural capacity to do so,
because he could? Was that all that he was doing? If not, how are we
Acts Not Tracts!
49
to think about what else he was doing when he was engaging these
highly specialized modules in the visual cortex?
Malevichs period of abstraction was necessarily short-lived, and
was sandwiched between figurative phases that began and ended his
working life. His revolutionary Black Square (1915), and other Suprematist works, helped change the course of art history, and this revolutionary turn became bound up with the political upheaval of the
Russian revolution. Cultural-historical accounts of Malevich, however, of the kind one finds in John Golding (2000) or in T. J. Clark
(1999) tell quite a different story of what it was that Malevich was
doing during his revolutionary mid-career turn to abstraction. The
narrative sequence of events that leads to understanding Malevichs
radical turn to the non-representational in art is inextricably woven
into the cultural-historical fabric of the early decades of the twentieth
century in Russia. This can best be understood in psychological terms
by the use of terms like act.
Readers can pursue this intriguing story more fully in the references, but here are a few points that should make us cautious in interpreting Malevichs work as just pure abstraction designed to stimulate specific receptive fields in the visual cortex.
In an insightful chapter titled Malevich and the Ascent into
Ether, John Golding reflects on Malevichs entry into abstraction
through a preoccupation with the human body, his belief in ideal proportion, and his obsession with the mystic properties of geometry.
Golding stresses the significance of Malevich painting in a square
format and the fact that he spoke of his Black Square of 1915 using
facial imagery. The revolutions in art that were taking place in Paris
notably Pablo Picassos cubismwere filtering back to artists in Russia and, although often misunderstood, greatly influenced artists like
Malevich. Malevich was formed by Russian culture and when he exhibited his radical new work in Petrograd on December 30, 1915, of
central significance was his placing of the painting of the black
square. He hung it where an icon would normally hang, high across
the corner of the room. Malevichs revolution in art was to be understood as a spiritual revolution.
That painting was accompanied by text, and that text showed influences as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, Henri
Bergson, M.V. Lodyzhenski, and the American architect Claude
Bragdon, whose book, Man the Square (1912), greatly influenced
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Ciarn Benson
theosophy. The writings of P. D. Uspensky on the idea of a fourth

dimension beyond the space of sensory perception, further influenced
Malevich and led him to think about the scientific and the mystical
aspects of geometry. There is much more to be said here but the main
point is this: the clean geometrical lines of mid-career Malevich were
deeply embedded in a welter of ideas and aspirations of the time. The
purity of his abstraction cannot be understood apart from them. Whatever Malevich was doing, he was doing much more than inadvertently
finding ways to stimulate his visual cortex.
Golding locates the precise origin of The Black Square in stage
sets that Malevich designed for a futurist opera in 1913 called Victory
Over the Sun. The set for the coffin into which the dead sun is laid is a
black square, and its pallbearers have black squares on their chests
and hats, not unlike the art students with Malevich in the photograph
in Vitebsk after the 1917 revolution. His abstraction was further interlocked with ideas of flight (planes were now a visible part of warfare)
and, to the mystically-inclined Malevich, flight was associated with
the idea of release from weight. There is clearly more to his abstraction than mere geometry; his focus, as Golding remarks, was on infinity, on ideas of unbounded space beyond the knowledge of man.
In the years after 1917 Malevich tried to harness his ideas to the
movement of the Russian Revolution. His later Suprematist paintings
are signs, messages, pictorial planets, emanating from the artists
skull directed out through infinite space toward some ultimate,
unknowable Godhead (Golding 2000: 76).
Needless to say, this mystical dimension to his work failed the test
of the newly emerging orthodoxy of Social Realism. Malevichs return to figuration after 1923, with his peasants and sportsmen, ostensibly seems to move toward this new thematic political imperative but,
to an eye familiar with his Suprematist work, the operative word is
seems. In later portraits, such as of his wife, his signature has become a black square!
Malevichs Black Square is an act of iconic rupture from a Russian-Orthodox Christian tradition, just as Rubens The Death of Seneca, or Kiefers Sulamith, can be understood as acts of iconic suture.
None of these works could possibly be explained or described adequately in neuro-scientific psychological terms alone, but all could be
well described and explained in neuro-cultural psychological terms of
Acts Not Tracts!
51
which a central term would be that of an act, and more specifically a

social act.
To recap, the claims so far are that psychologies of can are nested in psychologies of may; that each has a different ontology; and
that an adequate psychology of art requires both. It is time now to
review the concept of an act in the recent history of psychology, and
of its philosophical cognates.
3. Some Background for the Concept of the Act in the Recent
History of Psychology
Of necessity, contemporary neuroscience is thus far utterly individualistic. It focuses, as it must given the current state of imaging technologies, on individual brains. But the rest of psychology tells us how
fully embedded human beings are in social groups and networks, and
how their identities are constituted by their positioning, and interactions, within those social networks. The future of a fuller psychology must lie in giving accounts of the creativity of networked, interacting people. In other psychological traditions this is known as intersubjectivity.
The indices of textbooks are often very instructive in being records of significant absences. Psychology textbooks are no exception.
What has fallen into, and out of, the indices of psychology textbooks
tells us a huge amount about the state of the field at key points over
the last century and a half. The fate of words like mind, consciousness, feeling, and emotion, to take just four, make that point forcefully.
You will search a long time for a contemporary psychology textbook that contains an extended entry on the word act. Histories of
psychology tend not to thematize the act (an exception is McNeill,
1968). Yet the importance of concepts (they are quite diverse) of an
act can be seen across the board in different European, Russian, and
Anglo-American philosophical traditions in the twentieth century.
Here, for example, is a selected list of theorists for whom some
version of an act is central to their accounts of experience, selfhood,
or art: Franz Brentano (1838-1917), Edmund Husserl (1859-1938),
Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), Mikhail
Bakhtin (1895-1975), George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1889-1951), J. L. Austin (1911-1960), John Searle
(1932-), Kenneth Burke (1897-1993), Susanne Langer (1895-1985),
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Jerome Bruner (1915-), Rom Harr (1927-), Jurgen Habermas (1929)

and Charles Altieri (1942-).
All of these thinkers were grappling with ontological questions
concerning what an adequate human psychology should be. More
specifically, they were interested in questions concerning the temporality of consciousness, whether from a first or from a third person
perspective, and more particularly still with formulating basic units of
analysis for an adequate psychology, namely ones that could encapsulate both neural/brain and social/cultural-historical dynamics, units
that could deal with both private and public psychological processes
as they are constituted over time and as they engage other people.
There are deliberate, humanly created design features to our
shared social lives, as well as attributes which emerge more casually
from processes of bricolage. Any study of social-psychological transactions immediately faces questions about which level of complexity
to abstract for attentionthe chair in the room, the room in the house,
and so onand whether the available conceptual languages are fit for
that task.
Acts transcend separate, individual agents while at the same time
integrating them into working social units. This is an achievement of
the concept. At a time when the potential dominance of, for want of a
better phrase, neural individualism, threatens to curtail the scope of
academic psychology, the concept of act offers an opportunity to
think productively in terms of networked brains, networked consciousnesses, and the cultures which are their creation. If we think of
the power of social networks to shape individual conduct and subjectivity then, to use a metaphor, acts might be understood as the nodal
synapses of these networks.
The idea of an act developed in parallel in America, Europe, and
Russia. In America, pragmatists like Dewey and Mead made the act
central to their philosophical-psychological theories of self and society. More recently in the US, literary critics like Burke and Altieri have
productively deployed ideas of the act, as has the psychologist Bruner
(cf. Bruner 1990; Burke 1969; Altieri 1981). Meads prescient call,
now more than 80 years old, for acts not (brain) tracts to be the basic
units for a unified social and individual psychology of self and others,
is still valid and necessary.
In continental Europe an idea of the act was central to the work of
Brentano, to the phenomenology of his student Husserl, and to the
Acts Not Tracts!
53
social phenomenology of Schutz. Schutz considered mapping acts

onto verbs. Austin also had this idea and conjectured that the number
of verbs might be as many as 10 to the power of 3.2 Schutz understood action as behavior to which a subjective meaning is attached.
The task of the social sciences was to be interpretive, to understand
the subjective meanings of social action. Following Husserl and Bergsons idea of the stream of consciousness/lived experience (Erlebnisse), Schutz argued that experience acquired meaning by virtue of
acts that turned inwards, via acts, that is, of reflection, recognition,
identification, and so on. The temporal dimensions of experience were
for Schutz, just as they were for Mead, crucial for the human sciences.
More recently, the concept of an act, particularly communicative
acts, plays a pivotal role in the philosophy of Habermas. In Russia,
Vygotsky and the young Bakhtin also gave prominence to ideas of the
act.
A more idiosyncratic conception of the act is to be found playing
a pivotal role in the late work of the American philosopher of art, and
follower of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer. The concept of an act is
central to Langers three-volume magnum opus, Mind: An Essay on
Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982). Langer judged artists to be experts in pre-scientific knowing and she set herself to explore the biological roots of artistic thinking. The direction of her inquiry was substantially downwards, so to speak, into the biological roots that, in
evolution, ultimately led to consciousness, which she understood as
feeling. I will not be arguing for Langers concept of an act as such
except in one respect. In volume 3 we find that, for her, the act of
assertion is a primary act of mind, an affirmation of self. To jump
ahead to the final section of this chapter, this idea ties in well with the
notion that the deployment of the first person pronoun (I in English)
is always part of acts that tie actions to self as a responsibility-taking,
self-locating author.
While all of the above thinkers have insights to offer on how concepts of an act can advance our understanding of the psychology of
art, I want to draw attention for present purposes to the work of Harr
(1993) and his formulation of a social act. Harrs version of the act is
Why, asks Austin (1975: 150), use this expression instead of 1000? First, it looks
impressive and scientific; second, because it goes from 1000 to 9.999a good marginwhereas the other might be taken to mean about 1000too narrow a margin.
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indebted to Wittgenstein, and to the English philosopher Austin whose

work on speech acts was subsequently developed by philosophers
like Searle.
Where is a social act? In Meads thinking a social act is one which
begins within an organism, and which then requires its completion in
the actions of others. For him the basic act is a social act. This is one
that involves the co-operation of more than one individual (Mead
1938/1972: viii). The individual act is an abstracted part of such a
social act. In Harrs terms we might say that acts belong to particular
irreducible relational systems (1993: 61-62). He writes that, The
interactions of everyday life are orderly sequences of meaningful
actions (56) and that Rules and narrative conventions are
amongst the tools or means that people use to create and maintain
order in their joint productions (56).
The distinctiveness of movements, actions, and acts derives from
the embedding of the same neutral core existent in three distinct and
irreducible relational systems (Harr 1993: 61-62). Harr summarized his idea of what constitutes the elements of a social act in the
form of a nested hierarchy where Actions are the meanings of
movements and utterances, Acts are the meanings of actions, and
Commitments and expectations are the meanings of acts (74; for an
early study of the nested structure of acts in scripts cf. Schank and
Abelson 1977). For example, a person may move their head in a nodding way; that movement takes on a specific meaning when it is nested in the action of bidding; that action becomes a bid when it is
nested into the act of bidding at an auction where it finds its completion as a social act when it is taken by the auctioneer; that social act
finds its meaning as part of the commitment and expectations that
make up the cultural script which tells each player how to behave at
this event called an auction. This is normative and is an example of
what Harr means when he writes: Nature provides the can, but
culture and language provide the may and must (Harr 1993: 5).
A social psychology of art, shaped by this normative notion of an
act, would be a psychology of may. Harr argues that all human
social activity can be understood as consisting of two main kinds of
performance. The first kind is where people perform actions that find
their meaning by being nested into acts performed in socially recognized episodes. The second kind is where people then speak about
what they do. They give accounts of their actions in order to ensure
Acts Not Tracts!
55
that the act/action performances are given a particular meaning, one

that signifies a rational person. His argument is that both kinds of
performance stem from a single system of social knowledge, a system
from which our rules of action are derived in the first place, and the
principles by which they are to be interpreted (Harr 1993: 98).
Let us apply these ideas to one final example. Earlier I mentioned
that the ways in which art practices have changed over the last sixty
years since Gombrich insisted that there is no Art, only artists and
that image-making is the work of Art, would puzzle and perhaps
enrage many a traditional art historian. These new practices might also
bewilder a psychologist of art whose perspective was exclusively a
psychology of can. My suggestion is that a psychology of can,
nested in a psychology of may, is more open to these innovations in
art while losing none of its applicability to the persisting streams of
more traditional art making. This is because it accepts questions of
meaning in art as legitimate and necessary for psychology. There is no
good reason why the psychology of art should cede normative questions of meaning to other disciplines.
In the examples of Rubens and Kiefer above I looked at artists
borrowing from other artists while grappling with the traditions and
cultural-historical periods from which they emerged. But what of an
artist thieving from another artist, and making that very act of theft the
centre of her work? How can a psychology for which the concept of
an act is centralin Harrs senseaddress a work of conceptual
art?
4. How a Social Act Psychology Can Keep Pace with Contemporary Art Practices: Roisin Byrnes Look What You Made Me
Do
Conceptual Art presents the psychology of art with interesting challenges. Toward the end of the 2000 German tax year the artist Jochem
Hendrick finalized his calculation for his annual income tax, and noted what he owed when all exemptions were deducted. He subsequently took that sum and had it converted into its value in a gold bar. He
then called this bar a sculpture and titled it Tax. Doing this allowed
him to claim back the cost of the material, gold, as working material
for art! This allowed him to keep his outstanding tax. What, then, was
Hendrick doing when he did that? Keeping what belonged to the
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56
German revenue authorities? Challenging current conceptions of

Art?
In 2009, Byrne exhibited her postgraduate work for Goldsmiths
College in London. She called it Look What You Made Me Do. This
consisted of a 24 carat 10 gram Degussa gold bar, a pay form belonging to the artist Mr Jochem Hendrick, a book, a postcard, and email
correspondence, all presented for inspection in a room. This work had
a history. Late in 2008 Byrne contacted Hendrick by email, expressed
her admiration for his work, offered her services as an assistant in
London should he need one, and gave him some information about
herself. There followed further email correspondence and a trip to
London by Hendrick to give an invited lecture at Goldsmiths. On returning to Germany after the lecture, he wrote requesting that Byrne
arrange a signature so that he could claim his expenses for the trip.
Byrne then wrote an email which contained the following:
I should tell you though that when I received your payment form back in
February I was caught between a rock and a hard place. At the time I felt I
had to use it as a piece of work. On the form I substituted your bank details
for mine (sic) and acquired a 24 carat Degussa Feingold 10 Gram Gold Bar
with your earnings, the beginnings of what would eventually be a copy of
one of my favourite works of yours. The question that keeps nagging me
though seems to be whether now this work is yours or mine.3
How do you make a conceptual artist angry? Well, you could try stealing his concept! Roisin Byrne has emerged as the star of the BBC4
series Goldsmiths: But Is It Art? Her work is calculated to make artists
themselves rage, like many puzzled citizens who find contemporary
art baffling. She herself says that her primary interest is in ownership. In an interview with the Chief Arts Correspondent of the London Evening Standard, Byrne was reported as saying that I would
hope that people would think about ideas of authorship and authenticity and desiring luxury goods that were all obsessing over. Its robbery, its consumption. In a statement responding to this publicity,
Goldsmiths College added: An ethical review process is in place to
ensure students and tutors are protected from engaging in actions that
might bring harm upon them, the public or the college. It is, however,
Byrnes website is http://www.roisinbyrne.co.uk.
Acts Not Tracts!
57
unusual for a tutor to subject a student to an ethical review prior to the

execution of a work. This discourages innovation (quoted in Dury,
2010).
A psychology of this kind of Art must be aware of the normative
practices of contemporary Western culture and of Arts often challenging relationship to them. In asking what Byrne is doing when she
does a work like Look What You Made Me Do, we are inevitably led
to ask further questions to do with the relationship between art and
ethics, for example. Is Byrnes work asking whether artists are free
from Immanuel Kants categorical imperative (Act only according to
that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it become a
universal law)? Is Byrne universalizing Hendricks actions and
thereby hoisting him with his own petard? And why is it that what she
does make us laugh? Surely work like this shows the limitations of
traditional, individualistic psychologies of can and moves us emphatically toward a more inclusive psychology of may?
5. Art, Acts, and Selfhood: A Summary
What has all this to do with art and self or identity, given the general theme of this book? I have used the examples from Rubens and
Kiefer, from Malevich and Byrne to make the case that a psychology
adequate to the highly complex, ever-changing world of art would
need to be an integration of psychologies that explain the neuropsychological bases for the capacities we use to make and receive art,
and psychologies adept in explaining normative social conduct where
some actions are permitted and celebrated while others are constrained
and prohibited. For the ideal of that synthesis I used the term neurocultural. Secondary to that main argument, but central to a wider
focus on art, as considered in this book, are the problems that arise
from recognizing that self, identity, and art comprise a rich nexus of
connections. Here are some brief reflections on the connectedness of
these ideas using the same examples I have relied upon throughout the
chapter.
Concepts of self and concepts of art are inextricable if the psychology of art we aim for is to be a synthesis of psychologies of can
and may. There is now a vast literature on concepts of self, and it is
beyond our scope to review it here. I will simply present some relevant conclusions about self which should be useful for a neurocultural psychology of art.
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Self is best thought of as a process rather than as a product, as a

verb rather than as a noun. The term identity comes into play as a
part of the process of self when questions are asked like Who are
you? or What are you? or Are you the same person now as you
were ten years ago? Identity is best understood, not as something you
have or something you are, but as something you do and have done to
you, as something that unfolds as you act in various ways. As the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (in a novel called A House in Paris) put it: Who would the Irish be without somebody to be Irish at!
Different world languages have developed different pronoun systems to satisfy the organizational needs of selfhood and the management of social relations (Muhlhausler and Harr 1993). Pronouns are
key constitutive elements in the linguistic construction of self. Linguistically constructed selfhood is founded on a more primal perceptual-motor selfhood which developmentally predates language acquisition, and which comes into play from the very beginning in organizing the infants burgeoning field of consciousness.
In the English language, the first person pronoun I plays a central role in both personal identity (who I am to myself) and social
identity (who I am to and for others). Harr has long argued, as have
others, that the first person pronoun I is deployed most prominently
in acts of self-location (I am over here), acts of authorship (I wrote
that), and related acts of responsibility-taking (I stole it) or of responsibility-denying (I did not do that). The words self and identity are shorthand we use to nominate our complex capacities and
tendencies to act more or less coherently and reflexively, and it is
these differently organized tendencies to act that distinguish persons
and groups from each other.
To be succinct, and necessarily Anglo-centric, acts deploying I
tend to be nested in acts of assertion, and such acts play an intimate
and vital role in peoples sense of themselves and of who they are.
(This formulation applies to English. The pronominal systems of other
languages, as Harr reminds us, require their own adjustments.) Selfhood and identity are constituted in and by acts of assertion (something Langer recognized), and specifically in and by acts of authorship
and ownership, acts of responsibility-taking or responsibility-denying
(argued by Harr and by Bakhtin 1993), as well as in acts of selflocation generally (Benson 2001).
Acts Not Tracts!
59
A normal human psychological life is a long, but always finite,

series of constantly changing subjective states, substantially shaped by
successive intentional objects, that is, by objects which are the focus
of a subjects sequenced attention. It is the particular choreography of
subjectivity and intentionality that characterizes the forward-moving
stream of consciousness of each and every persons life, with the balance of influence on what comes next constantly shifting between
subject and object. Over time, the interconnections between the vast
sequence of subjective states and intentional objects stabilize into both
typical and idiosyncratic patterns filtered, edited and reconstructed by
memory. Subject and object mutually constitute each other momentby-moment.
Describing the passage of each subjective moment into its successor is less well served by the idea of a transition, I believe, than it is
by the notion of a transformation. This leads us to think not of transitions of subject and object, but of successions of transforming subject-object relations. Selfof which a key organizing constituent is
the subjectis the term used to indicate the centering tendencies
(they are plural, being a coordination of both perceptual and linguistic
systems) at play in organizing the fields of consciousness which subjectivity and intentionality ephemerally coalesce to form.
These fields of consciousness are the dance produced by the
moment-by-moment responses to each other of subjective state and
intentional object. For philosophers like Richard Wollheim (1986) it is
the constant dialogue of subjectivity and intentionality that yields
phenomenal states. These fields of consciousness are not reducible
to their constituting parts, but require a descriptive language appropriate to themselves.
In temporal terms, subjectivity is Janus-faced: it gathers up into
the present moment elements of its remembered past and, in tandem, it
becomes what the current intentional object invites and allows it to
become. Intentional objects, in addition to shaping subjectivity, carry
with them an entire network of other potential objectsworldsin
which they are themselves enmeshed. Our evolutionary history prepares our readiness to receiveor notmany potential objects whose
primary place is in the natural world. Our cultural biography prepares
our readiness to assimilate or reject what the collectives we belong to
have constructed as significant, or as unworthy of our notice.
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It is the constant transaction of a persons subjective readiness

and objective affordanceto add James. J. Gibsons concept into
the storythat are the potential grounds for all creative action. Gibsons concept of affordance, now part of psychologys vernacular
language, identifies the ways in which information from environments suggest and shape behavior in those environments. It does this
by favoring some options for action while simultaneously curtailing
others. One kind of rock, for example, might have afforded cutting
for our hominid ancestors, while another with different properties
could have afforded hammering or battering. Taken together, these
ideas are important for questions of art, selfhood, and significance.
What glues them together is the concept of an act.
This might all seem very abstract and remote but when applied to
the artists whose work we have used to make the case for a neurocultural psychology of art, their relevance is immediate. In the flow of
interconnected consciousnesses that is culturethe great conversation, as it has been called by Harrit is only as part of particular
acts that the word I comes into and out of play. These are, to reiterate, acts in which responsibility is taken or repudiated, where authorship of some action is claimed or disowned, or where the location of
the person speaking or writing is requested. Outside the demands of
such acts, the occurrence of I-thoughts is quite rare. Every time that
a person uses I, that use is nested in an act. So how do these ideas
help us understand Malevich or Rubens, Kiefer or Byrne as we have
discussed them above?
Either in the subject matter of their work, or in the specifics of
their relationship to their own work, we can see a concern with one or
other of the acts that constitute selfhood and identity. In each case we
can ask which kind of self-entailing act is prominent in what they
are doing. In The Death of Seneca Rubens was making a definite
statement which, in terms of the moral basis of his own identity, advanced the worldview that he endorsed and asserted his own sense of
himself, presumably, as a Christian. By taking a revered figure from
early Roman life and culture and visually transforming his famous
death into a language that could be easily assimilated to Christian
iconography, Rubens turns the identity of Seneca-the-Stoic into that of
Seneca-the-almost-Christian-martyr. Now the question of who, or
what, Seneca actually was can take a different route. The historical
Senecas identityat best a proto-Christian, at worst a paganhas
Acts Not Tracts!
61
been challenged by Rubens, and by those whose ideas he has built into
this painting.
Kiefer has created a powerful body of work that is clearly expressive of the man, and of his concerns with issues of modern German
history. That body of work is identifiably Kiefer and each additional
element develops that identity. In Sulamith Kiefer is painfully preoccupied with questions of German responsibility and identity, and he
deliberately bases the painting on a deep understanding of the world
of the Nazi Other, Judaism. A Nazi memorial has its identity held up
for scrutiny at the point of its being transformed into a Holocaust memorial. Nothing empirical is denied here, but is used instead to a
greater end. This work, amongst the many other things it is doing, is
an exercise in taking responsibility, but also in allocating responsibility. These are key acts of selfhood and of identity, as we have described above. Only by taking responsibility for ones actions, whether personally or collectively, can certain emotions follow. In this case,
the collective challenge is to work through the dynamics of shame,
shock, guilt, uncertainty, and so on, but to do so en route to building a
more viable national identity which warrants other emotions like affection, pride, tolerance, and commitment to humane ideals. This has
been the challenge for postwar Germany, and artists like Kiefer have
contributed greatly to the reconstructions of identity, personal and
national, which these challenges have required.
What then of Malevichs black square? How much of him was in
it? How much of him was lost when Soviet Social Realism banished
his square from the place he wanted it to have in the construction of
the brave new Soviet world? Malevich was one of those artists in history who was caught in the vortex of epoch-making events that sought
to revolutionize the very idea of personal and social identity. That is
why Malevich is so interesting. In a transforming historical world,
here is an artist who, along with others, sought to transform art as part
of that revolutionary surge and in failing on one count he succeeded
on another. It would take the best part of the twentieth century to vindicate that other significance in his homeland. We see in Malevichs
story and work the connections between acts, identities, and art. How
intimate is our own name to our sense of ourselves? Name-changing is
obviously a notable aspect of any identity and sense of self. What
happens when the act of change is not simply within a language but is
instead to yet another symbol system? Malevich ended his working
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life by signing his final works not with his name but with a little black
square, defiantly asserting his own and his arts identity. That is a
notable act of assertion.
I chose the work of the newly-emerging artist Byrne primarily to
show how any adequate psychology of art would have to deal with art
that was conceptual, and not solely concerned with the more traditional identification of art with image-making. I also wanted an example that was of the moment to make the point that the psychology of
art, in its impulse to look for essences, might be better served by
being attuned to the inexorably onward movements and processes of
creative cultures. But Byrnes work is also an example of how key
acts of selfhood, such as claims to authorshipclaims that inquire into
what is yours and what is mine, what is ours and what is
theirscan be part of art. All such claims are normative and moral,
and the Byrne example shows this with a welcome sense of humor.
Byrne herself affirms that her work has to do with issues of authorship and authenticity.
6. A Last Thought: Do Particular Kinds and Patterns of Act
Identify Historical Periods of Art?
I conclude with a final question designed to suggest the utility of the
act as a concept for the analysis of artistic development: can we explore the Art of different cultural-historical periods in terms of predominant kinds and patterns of act? Using the idea (from Schutz
and Austin) that acts can map onto verbs, I have abstracted below the
verbs used in the exposition of a major show on modern art called the
BIG BANG which was held in the Muse National DArt Moderne in
Paris from June 2005 to March 2006. Seeing this show, and reflecting
on it through its catalogue, it struck me that the distinctive list of
acts, understood as active verb forms, which constituted the creative
acts of twentieth-century modern art identified by the shows curators, might have its counterpart for each distinctive art-historical period.
Here are the acts which the curators of that show judged to be
those operative in the creation of modern art: to destroy, to redefine,
to abandon, to distort, to recombine, to devalue, to reform, to deconstruct, to experiment with, to investigate qualities, to speculate, to
cross-fertilize, to find again, to produce/simulate regressive acts, to
refer to buried areas of thought, to explore other types of hybrid, ar-
Acts Not Tracts!
63
chaic language, to affirm the right to sexual pleasure, to liberate

women, to explore sex in terms of shapes, etc., to bear witness, to
entail commitment, to mobilize, to remember, to parody, to provoke, to defy, to deride, to subvert, and to re-enchant.
Art historians might replicate this exercise for other periods.
What, for instance, might be the pattern of predominant acts of the
Italian Renaissance? Or of Byzantine art? Late in the staging of the
Big Bang show came the work of the American artist Bill Viola. His
summary of arts role in society seems a fitting end to this chapter:
Our culture has taken away room for contemplation. There is nowhere in our culture which is officially devoted to subjective experience. Art fills the gap.
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IV. I Am, Therefore I Think, Act, and Express

both in Life and in Art
Gerald C. Cupchik
University of Toronto
The overall purpose of this chapter is to present a psychological perspective on the themes of art and identity. I will explore complementary relations between the Thinking-I and the Being-I. The Thinking-I, related to the ego, is fundamentally pragmatic and helps the
person fulfill needs and goals through a pragmatic analysis of the
world and this extends to the application of technique in art. The Being-I is related to a sense of self and an ability to critically reflect
upon the ego and its thinking or purposive activities. A complementary relationship links the Thinking-I and the Being-I in that a
sense of identity emerges when the self approves of the egos
achievements. In their attempt to deal with cultural and media offerings, people can shift between a more superficial examination based
on a pragmatic desire to change moods and a more profound effort to
find personal or collective emotional meaning in the work. Research
in experimental aesthetics has provided a concrete framework within
which to test these ideas.
1. The Thinking-I and the Being-I
In earlier work (Cupchik and Leonard 1997; Cupchik 1999), I have
described a complementary relationship between the Thinking-I and
the Being-I in psychology and the arts. The Thinking-I is similar to
Freuds concept of the ego and facilitates strategic adaptation to challenges posed by the physical or social environments. The Being-I is
more closely tied to the self and reflects a persons situation with
reference to the social world. Meaningful actions can be observed in
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Gerald C. Cupchik
both contexts. At a microscopic level of analysis, action serves a biological function by helping to preserve the organism in an adaptive
context. At a macroscopic level, action is associated with decisions
whereby a person affirms himself or herself in relation to a social
world. While expression can be tied to purposive or intentional planning, it is more closely related to spontaneous acts that reveal feelings
and emotions associated with the self. Together, these concepts cover
the interpretation of events in the social world and action or emotional
expression with reference to them.
The Thinking-I (or Thinking-Eye) was essentially described by
Rudolf Arnheim in his book Visual Thinking (1969), where he argued
that artistic creation shares perceptual and cognitive actions in common with everyday mental activity. He wrote:
My contention is that the cognitive operations called thinking are not the
privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential
ingredients of perception itself. I am referring to such operations as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis
and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, as well as
combining, separating, putting in context.... By cognitive I mean all mental
operations involved in the receiving, storing and processing of information:
sensory perception, memory, thinking, learning. (1969: 13)
In Art and Visual Perception (1954), Arnheim argued that thinking

and feeling are complementary processes involved in the creation and
reception of art. He emphasized the ability of painters to holistically
grasp the integrated structure of artworks. But the artists work is not
just about structure since it is also dynamic and expressive. The expressive quality is embodied in a configuration of forces which are
embedded in the structure. Viewers can discern these perceptual patterns and feel the expressive qualities without being explicitly aware
of the specific underlying structural features. The meaning attributed
to a painting thus reflects a figure/ground relationship in which its
subject matter resonates with the expressive qualities embedded in its
style. This description of an interaction between sensory and cognitive
qualities that creates multileveled meaning (Kreitler and Kreitler
1972) is distinctive to Gestalt psychology. In the ontogenesis of a
meaningful aesthetic experience, the products and feelings associated
with early global processing provide a context which shapes the unfolding event (Cupchik and Winston 1996).
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The notion of a Being-I was derived from Rollo Mays existential transformation of Ren Descartess famous dictum I think, therefore I am to I Am, therefore I think, I act (1958: 44). This idea was
prompted by the self discovery experiences of a highly articulate female patient who was illegitimate by birth. In her fourth month of
therapy, she arrived at the conclusion that Since I Am, I have a right
to be and, further, it is my saying to Descartes, I Am, therefore I
think, I feel, I do (43). This account of the priority of the self enabled her to get past the social stigma of illegitimate birth and affirm
herself as a person. This validation of her state of being led May to
extrapolate that being is in the future tense and inseparable from
becoming (45n8). Thus, people find themselves in worlds, and their
efforts, in life episodes, to establish relationships with the self, others,
and the environment pose a challenge that goes to the core of their
beings. These challenges can be momentary and specific to art, or
long-term and related to unresolved, emotionally loaded issues and
conflicts. I propose that both creating and viewing art can provide a
framework for working out these challenges in a way that evokes
meaningful and pleasurable experiences. While the artist works to
resolve problems related to composition, color, texture, and so forth,
the treatment of the subject matter provides an opportunity for these
issues to be expressed or addressed symbolically even without the
artists conscious intention.
A unified artistic version of these ideas about the Thinking-I and
the Being-I would be I Am, therefore I think, act, and express (in
art, literature, and so on). On the Thinking side, we have perception, cognition, and reflection which are skills of adaptation from everyday life. But the expressive qualities which are embedded in a paintings structure can spontaneously evoke feelings and emotions in a
process mediated by metaphors. On the Being side, we have the
representation of self and others, unconscious responses involving the
spillage of emotion, and sensitivity to symbolically rich materials that
echo events from earlier life. In addition, there is always the potential
for transcendence, a reawakening to the meaning of life through expression and interpretation. In this sense, artistic creation and appreciation provide an opportunity for being to turn into becoming so
that, through encounters with art, we are changed. The Thinking-I
and the Being-I are complementary in that Thinking is linked to
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emotion through metaphor, while Being is predicated on a search for

meaning in ones life (Arnheim 1971).
2. Aesthetic Perception
The Thinking-I provides some sense of continuity from the pragmatics of everyday life to aesthetic experience. Consistent with Arnheim,
we can argue that aesthetic perception involves a particular kind of
thinking that is focused on cultural artifacts. My own approach is
based on a contrast between pragmatic perception in everyday life and
the disinterested apprehension of artworks that takes place during
aesthetic episodes. It is here that psychologists and philosophers share
a common intellectual ancestry. David Fenner (1996) has traced the
notion of an aesthetic attitude to philosophers associated with British
Empiricism. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, introduced the notion of disinterestedness whereby the aesthetic object is approached in and of itself and without regard for any practical
purpose that it might serve (Cupchik and Winston 1996). He adopted
a neo-Platonic position to the effect that there were absolute properties
that defined aesthetic beauty (Unity in Multiplicity) and introduced
the disinterested posture as a necessary precondition for accessing
them. The Moral Sense, a taste faculty (i.e., a quality), would then
enable viewers to discern beauty in much the same way that elementary physical properties like color could be directly perceived. Francis
Hutcheson extended Shaftsburys ideas from a neo-Platonic to a relational realist viewpoint. While acknowledging that beauty was a real
property of objects that could be perceived either correctly or incorrectly, he emphasized relations between the object and the perceiver.
The locus of judgment was therefore grounded in the observer, whose
internal sense faculty could discriminate uniformity amidst variety. In addition to a disinterested attitude, the sense of taste was a
function of a practiced eye and therefore experience facilitated aesthetic judgment.
The idea about disinterest was elaborated in the concept of psychical distance introduced by Edward Bullough (1912). He argued
that psychological Distance is obtained by separating the object and
its appeal from ones own self, by putting it out of gear with practical
needs and ends (89). Psychological distance has two aspects: an inhibitory process that suppresses everyday cognition and a facilitative
one that fosters elaboration of the experience in which subtle, hitherto
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unnoticed features produce a special emotional experience. Bullough

addressed the context in which psychical or aesthetic distance is
achieved in accordance with the needs and emotional history of the
person. As may be evident, his approach was consistent with Gestalt
psychology of that era.
Bulloughs theorizing was very much in tune with other ideas expressed in the early twentieth century. He was writing during a rich
period of multidisciplinary scholarship when Theodor Lipps (19031906) formalized the process of Einfhlung, or empathy (which
contrasted with Wilhelm Worringers [1908] more detached account
of Abstraktion) and when Heinrich Wlfflin (1915) described psychological processes underlying the linear (e.g., Neoclassical) versus
painterly (e.g., Baroque) dimension of artistic style. The Russian Formalists understood that everyday perceptual activity leads to automaticity of response and habituation to frequently observed stimuli
which would lose their evocative effects. According to Victor Shklovsky, The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known ... Art is a way of experiencing
the artfulness of an object. The object is not important (1917/1988:
20). The goal of aesthetic devices is therefore to deautomatize or defamiliarize perception and to reawaken fresh experiences through
novelty. The German Aktualgenese (perceptual microgenesis) school
believed in the intrinsic structuredness of perception and demonstrated
that a coherent (i.e., meaningful) Gestalt image emerges over time as
perception progresses to conception (cf. Flavell and Draguns 1957).
Edward Bulloughs (1912) phenomenological approach to experience treated psychical distance as an outlook, a metaphor, a
space that lies between our own self and such objects as are the
sources or vehicles (89) shaping our affections. These affections
comprise bodily or spiritual reactions involving sensations, perceptions, emotional states, or ideas. In the intellectual lineage of the British Empiricists, though more Continental in sensibilities, he saw distance as transforming the experience, say of fog, in the first instance
by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical,
actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal
needs and ends (89); then,
by looking at it objectively, as it has often been called, by permitting only
such reactions on our part as emphasise the objective features of the experi-
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ence, and by interpreting even our subjective affections not as modes of our
being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon. (1912: 89)
This projection of subjective experience and meaning onto the evocative stimulus is precisely what Lipps meant by Einfhlung. It is also
consistent with the complementary relations between the Thinking-I
and the Being-I which is central to my analysis.
In essence, Bulloughs model of psychical distanceor aesthetic distance as we say nowadaysoffers a contrast between aesthetic engagement, based on the intensity of a personal emotional
response, and aesthetic detachment which reflects a more intellectual
treatment of an artwork. Distance provides the much needed criterion
of the beautiful as distinct from the merely agreeable (1912: 90) and
offers a unique synthesis of traditional opposites; subjectivityobjectivity, idealistic-realistic, sensual-spiritual, personal-impersonal,
and individualistic-typical. Distance is therefore one of the essential
characteristics of the aesthetic consciousness (90) and of the contemplation of the object (91). His central principle is the same for
both viewers and artists: the goal is maximal involvement without
excessive self-absorption; utmost decrease of Distance without its
disappearance (94). Two extreme conditions can be observed in
relation to Distance: under-distancing and over-distancing. Underdistancing occurs when the subject matter is crudely naturalistic,
harrowing, repulsive in its realism and over-distancing takes place
when the style produces the impression of improbability, artificiality,
emptiness or absurdity (94). Distance is therefore decreased when
subject matter reminds us of our personal lives with the attendant
emotional experiences. When style is salient, it can attenuate this possible digression away from the work. But if we concentrate only on
style in a detached way, the emotional meaning of the work might be
lost. This is why Bullough emphasized the need for balancing engaged
receptivity with reflective detachment.
3. Aesthetic Attitude
I have conducted a number of studies in experimental aesthetics related to the Thinking-I. This research was guided by the premise that
social psychology must always examine people in situations. In this
case, the contexts encompass episodes of creation and reception in
which the artist or viewer interact with an aesthetic work. I want to
underscore the point that artists and their audiences alike are aware
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that they are entering into aesthetic situations and accordingly bring
appropriate codes of interpretation and engagement to bear. We take
this for granted until encountering a new form of artistic expression
which lacks a literal frame, such as an installation, and feel uncertain
as to how to approach it. The same goes when it comes to being a
member of an audience. Imagine my sense of discomfort when a nicely dressed man suddenly shouted down at the stage during a performance of Kabuki theatre that I attended in Tokyo. He was joined by
another man sitting elsewhere and wearing the same dark suit no less.
My apprehensive feelings about being surrounded by lunatics subsided when I read in the brochure that this kind of audience response is
part of the tradition.
The studies I performed in order to explore the Thinking-I determined facts that are of interest to psychologists and philosophers
alike. In essence, they concern how a shift from pragmatic to aesthetic
processing is revealed at different levels of analysis ranging from the
neural to the behavioral. The data have demonstrated:
1. That neural activity underlies the aesthetic attitude;
2. How this neural activity interacts with the perceptual challenge
posed by soft-edge (e.g., Impressionist) paintings (Cupchik, Vartanian, Crawley, and Mikulis 2009);
3. How untrained viewers generalize the pragmatic cognitive bias
of everyday life to aesthetic reception (Cupchik and Gebotys 1988;
Winston and Cupchik 1992);
4. How this cognitive bias interferes with the discerning of artistic
style (Cupchik, Winston, and Herz 1992);
5. That reception moves from global to local effects and is always
accompanied by feelings (Cupchik and Berlyne 1979).
It is a basic premise of aesthetic attitude theory that viewers must
shift from the pragmatic identification of useful objects to an awareness of stylistic properties. This transition is difficult because physical-sensory qualities that are incorporated into style are discarded en
route to object identification (Craik and Lockhart 1972). In other
words, subjects, untrained in the visual arts, generalize the objectidentification habit from everyday life to the viewing of artworks
(Cupchik and Gebotys 1988; Cupchik, Winston, and Herz 1992; Winston and Cupchik 1992), favoring realism over abstraction and warm
associations over interpretive challenge. Untrained viewers focus on
familiar features of subject matter and have difficulty attending to the
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Gerald C. Cupchik
physical-sensory qualities that constitute style. This suggests that

some kind of cognitive control must be effected to attenuate the object
recognition habit in order for a person to attend to stylistic structure.
We have experimentally demonstrated that a shift from the pragmatic orientation of everyday life to an aesthetic attitude is mediated
by a specific area in the cortex of the brain (Cupchik, Vartanian,
Crawley, and Mikulis 2009). In essence, we manipulated aesthetic
distance by instructing subjects to shift between detached and engaged
attitudes. They viewed eight paintings from each of four genres
(nudes, group portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes) and were asked to
shift between pragmatic and aesthetic attitudes while in a MRI apparatus. For the pragmatic condition, they were instructed to search for
information about the subject matter of the paintings in an objective
and detached manner. In contrast, for the aesthetic condition, they
were instructed to approach the paintings in a subjective and engaged
manner, focusing on colors, tones, composition, and shapes, and to
experience the mood of each work and the feelings it evoked.
Our data showed activation in left lateral prefrontal cortex (BA10)
associated with executive functioning when subjects were instructed
to adopt an aesthetic attitude. This reflects top-down control in directing perception toward an aesthetic orientation. The results also revealed that the left superior parietal lobule (BA7) was activated when
subjects viewed soft-edge (e.g., Impressionist) paintings in the aesthetic orientation compared with hard-edge (e.g., Neoclassical) paintings in the pragmatic orientation. This was associated with viewers
attempts to resolve the indeterminate forms in soft-edge paintings
while constructing a coherent aesthetic image. These results provide
support for the idea that the shift from a pragmatic to an aesthetic
attitude is intentionally mediated by instructions in the prefrontal cortex and that subjects who are untrained in art can shift between the
two attitudes. It bears noting that BA13, which is associated with
emotional response, was also activated in the aesthetic viewing condition.
Visual images differ in the ease with which viewers can attend to
subject matter and style. Stephen Palmer (1999) has pointed out that
boundaries between objects are discriminated in the brain through the
application of hard-wired mechanisms that focus on luminance edges
to locate closed contours. In contrast, a Gestalt-based approach assumes a more global approach to grouping discrete elements based
75
on common properties and mutual attraction. A comparable distinction was made in the early twentieth century by Wlfflins (1915)
contrast between linear (e.g., hard-edge Neoclassical) and painterly (e.g., soft-edge Baroque) artistic stylesa contrast in perception
between outline and surfaces versus mere visual appearance
(Wlfflin 1915/1950: 14).
Experimental studies in which pairs of paintings were compared
in terms of how they look (same versus different judgments) have
shown that the hard-edge and soft-edge distinction is fundamental and
prior to representational-abstract discriminations (Berlyne and Ogilvie
1974; Cupchik 1974, 1976-1977). Whereas hard-edge paintings use
contours to clearly define boundaries and isolate objects, soft-edge
paintings have porous boundaries that engage viewers in an attempt to
resolve forms. The underlying idea is that hard-edge images (as in the
Florentine tradition of desegno with its focus on structure and composition) are easier to discern, whereas soft-edge images (as in the Venetian tradition of colore with its emphasis on an expressive use of color) more readily absorb viewers in interpretive activity. Only after
viewers discern the boundaries of images in an artwork do they turn
their attention to the relative presence of realism or abstraction.
Artists de-automatize the process of perception, arresting the bias
of everyday life to identify objects pragmatically and attend instead to
the structure of physical-sensory qualities that constitute style (Cupchik 1992). This enables them to observe and learn the structure or
pattern underlying tonal, color, and textural variations in natural
scenes. Through rehearsal with the manipulation of a medium, artists
learn to recreate and manipulate the visual effects they observe,
matching the emerging artistic product with the percept (Gombrich
1960). They also project an image onto the emerging artwork, just as
we perceive images in cloud formations, and ensure that it remains
coherent as the work unfolds. In essence, artists are able to shift between three-dimensional perception, which creates the illusion of
depth, and two-dimensional perception, which affirms the surface of
an artwork, thereby creating abstract and expressive effects (cf. Cupchik 2007).
In aesthetic reception, the figure, or subject matter, is always related to the ground or style. Representational art simulates the structure of space to foster the identification of subject matter. These structural affordances (Gibson 1971; Hochberg 1978) provide a transpar-
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Gerald C. Cupchik
ent scaffolding within which to locate the scene. The more obtrusive
the style, the harder it is to apply the cognitive bias of everyday life
and identify subject matter. Abstract art transforms an image by isolating representational features, thereby challenging the viewers effort
after meaning (Bartlett 1932). Expressionist art makes the background salient, thereby providing a context within which the subject
appearsone that is loaded with metaphorical or connotative implication.
One appeal of art is that viewers welcome this opportunity at reconciliation that encompasses both the proximal decoding of the work
and the distal placing of it in a more meaningful (i.e., deeper) context.
I would go so far as to propose that the simultaneous engagement of
sensory and symbolic processes is a hallmark of aesthetic experience.
Art therefore challenges viewers to reconcile physical/sensory and
symbolic cues which are co-present in perceptual and cognitive experience. In this process of reception, the thematic and structural properties of the work are engaged by the interpretive knowledge and emotionally tinged life experiences of the viewer. The search for unity in
diversity which characterizes aesthetic activity must take place within
a frame where codes of discernment can be applied and related feelings experienced.
Aesthetic creation and reception episodes should be understood as
complementary with the artwork serving as a multilayered and openended context linking artist and viewer. This notion of complementarity is implicit in John Deweys (1934) book Art and Experience.
Dewey pointed out that the artist must give some thought to the audience if communication is to occur. Of course this point must be
hedged to incorporate innovative aspects of an artists project in
which established codes of creation are transformed by an original
style. In a reciprocal manner, viewers have a more profound aesthetic
experience to the extent that they appreciate the artists perspective
both with reference to stylistic intentions and choices regarding iconography and subject matter. The work of art therefore provides an
occasion for an almost infinite regress into an open-ended effort after
meaning which can never be fully resolved either in terms of the artists intentions or the viewers interpretations.
Aesthetic reception is an emergent process, according to the Aktualgenese school of Gestalt psychology of the 1920s (Flavell and
Draguns 1957), such that meanings and feelings occur from the first
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moment and unfold over time from a global sense for the whole to
specific attention to particulars (Cupchik and Berlyne 1979). We
demonstrated this in a study in which subjects viewed selected paintings and patterns for 50, 500, and 5,000 msec. Fifty msecs. only permit a single glance at the stimulus which restricts subjects to a sense
for the whole. But even in this limited viewing opportunity, subjects
they were able to discern the relative complexity and orderliness of
the stimuli and feelings accompanied these preliminary global analyses. Subjects who viewed complex artworks with conflicting stylistic
codes had an aversive reaction to them after a single glance and did
not want to see them again. This shows that feelings accompany aesthetic experiences from the first moments of perception as viewers try
to find order in the artwork.
The cognitive bias of everyday perception has a profound effect
on the way that untrained viewers approach art. In one experiment,
students were shown randomized sets of three paintings and sculptures
that varied from abstract to representational and were instructed to
place them in a meaningful order (Cupchik and Gebotys 1988). Untrained viewers used object clarity as their criterion for meaningfulness and placed the artworks in an ascending order from abstract (i.e.,
unclear) to representational. Students who were trained in a studio or
in art-history classes chose transformations involving increasing levels
of abstraction that reflected a more creative interpretive response to
the task. In a separate but related study, untrained students expressed a
preference for Popular art images that evoked warm feelings,
whereas trained students preferred more complex works that presented
an interpretive challenge (Winston and Cupchik 1992).
Regardless of training, the salience of subject matter can interfere
with the discrimination of artistic style. The reason for this is that the
cognitive bias of everyday life makes it harder to discriminate purely
perceptual (i.e., stylistic) relationships. In another experiment, students without training in a studio or in art-history were presented with
pairs of paintings (Cupchik, Winston, and Herz 1992). On half the
trials, they were instructed to discriminate between same or different
subject matter. On the other half of the trials, they had to distinguish
between same or different style. Two findings are relevant here. First,
it was harder to make judgments about style when relations based on
subject matter were salient. Thus, it was harder to perceive different
style (Impressionism versus Cubism) when both paintings involved
Gerald C. Cupchik
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the same kind of subject matter (e.g., still-life). Similarly, it was harder to discern the same style when the subject matter was different.
Second, it was easier to make judgments about style when subjects
were instructed to approach the task in a subjective, emotional manner
(i.e., to adopt a global orientation). This study showed that, while a
holistic attitude facilitates judgments of stylistic similarity or difference, salient subject matter invokes the pragmatic attitude of everyday
life, thereby interfering with attention to the physical-sensory qualities
that define artistic style.
In summary, the aesthetic attitude involves a shift in processing
from the mere identification of useful symbols, objects or people, to
an appreciation of the structure underlying the material elements that
make up the work. Scholars in both the Gestalt (Arnheim 1982) and
Information Theory traditions (Moles 1958; Berlyne 1971, 1974) distinguished hierarchically structured levels of order, from fundamental
material elements to stylistic codes, and symbolic representations.
Artistic works uniquely integrate all levels at once, and the simultaneous apprehension of sensation and symbol is unique to aesthetic processing. However, when the cognitive habits of everyday reception
dispose a viewer to focus on identifiable subject matter, it interferes
with the discerning of stylistic structure. For this reason, untrained
viewers prefer representational art and avoid works that pose an interpretive challenge with the attendant uncomfortable feelings.
4. Ego, Self, and Identity
As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, I
learned a simple set of ideas expressed in a kind of psychological poem. I apologize for not knowing the exact provenance.
Ego is a collection of skills.
Self is the ego of which I am aware.
And Identity is the ego that my Self approves of.
Here we can imagine ourselves to be like onions (or is it a millefeuille?), multilayered in a life that evolves over time but with different realities and themes at the various stages. Within the scaffolding
of our bodies, we deal with challenges imposed on us by our diverse
worlds and by needs that motivate us from within. In the Darwinian
manner, we build a set of skills that accrue over time. We also have
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the ability to think about things, taking them as objects of attention

and reflection. Of prime importance, we can also take ourselves as an
object of attention and reflect upon the state of the skills which constitute our ego. Sometimes it is difficult to reflect on ourselves, and
some people are less disposed to look within. We achieve a sense of
coherence, a sense of identity, if the result of this reflection is positive
because the development of skills and the realization of our goals is a
basis for self-approval. Of course these goals are diverse and may
vary across cultures and people.
The ego, the self, and a sense of identity are all potentially
related to our experiences of art. The ego is where the Thinking-I
proves itself because it encompasses our skills for analyzing the subject matter and stylistic codes that underlie an artwork. Feelings accompany the application of our skills because we can feel the effects
of our creative or interpretive acts in terms of pleasure and excitement. In this way feelings are the shadow of cognition. The self has
one foot assessing the state of our knowledge and feels the results of
this examination. But it has another foot in the realm of expression
together with the elaboration of powerful emotions that are attendant
to reflecting upon the state of ones life and how it is livednot just
about ideas but also about meanings. Identity is very important here
because it has to do, not only with relations to ourselves, but with the
bond that we feel toward art in its various forms along with the artists
that create them. Identity in relation to ones self and life has a lot
to do with a feeling of coherence, of feeling together. But identity also implies a sense of equivalence, as when we identify with
something in an artwork. We might identify with a character because
we have found ourselves in a similar situation. We can feel equivalent
to, or identify with, a character with whom we experience a strong
emotional bond. Artists identify with particular works of their own
which were closely bound to personal themes and meanings. Identity
therefore implies the greatest possible depth, so that the boundary
between the person (either the artist or a viewer) and the work is
weakened and the experience of personal meaning is immediate and
powerful. Absorption and attachment are the hallmarks of an intimate
bond between the person and the work.
It is important to place a sense of self in a historical context.
Given that the ability to take oneself as an object of consciousness is
unique to humankind, the potential for self-awareness and the devel-
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Gerald C. Cupchik
opment of a sense of identity has always been there. A modern

sense of self can be seen in European cultures as part of the emerging
industrial society of the nineteenth century, when authors and artists
were expressing a personal vision of the surrounding world. This affirmation of self was evident in the realist novels of the Goncourt
brothers written in the early nineteenth century and the emerging realist style in paintings by French artists like Gustav Courbet and Honor
Daumier. Thus, the existential self appeared at the same time as the
weakening of traditional institutions such as Feudalism and vestiges of
the royal court, emperors, and so forth. This continuing search for
legitimacy of self was also evident in the later nineteenth century in
an emerging feminist movement, for instance.
In the context of art appreciation, it is valuable to distinguish between two aspects of self and identity: the personal and the collective. The personal self is related to the Eigenwelt, which presupposes self-awareness, self-relatedness, and is uniquely present in human
beings (May 1958: 63). The collective self is associated with the
Mitwelt, the world of interrelationships with human beings founded
on the structure of meanings which is designed by the interrelationship of the persons in it (62). The essence of relationship is that in
the encounter both persons are changed (63). The personal self is
related to art which provides an occasion for self-expression and selfdiscovery in the contexts of creation and reception. These two aspects
of self were observed in a recent study on responses by Muslim students to Islamic art (Cupchik, El-Haj, and Hilscher 2009). We asked
Muslim participants to complete a questionnaire dealing with religious
values, beliefs, attitudes, and activities. Two factors emerged from this
questionnaire, representing questions that were interrelated around a
common theme. One was a personal sense of self regarding Islam
related to sexual practices, prayers, dress, sin, and the belief that the
religion cannot be modernized. The other was a collective sense of
identity related to the importance to their families of being Muslim,
the need to teach their children Arabic so they can pray, seeking spiritual counsel for problems in their lives, and the liking of Islamic religious art and music. This second factor, relating to a collective sense
of self and identity, was the best predictor of responses to the three
categories of Islamic art depicting humans, animals, or abstract designs. This research showed how an awareness of the self and a col-
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lective sense of identity shape reactions to art embodying religious

themes.
Albert Rothenberg (1979, 1986, 1990) has shown some of the impact which creativity in art or literature has on the development of the
self, for example, the expression of personal life themes. This activity
is stimulated by what he called a homospatial process which involves engagement with multilayered images. Together with another
researcher, I explored this idea in a study involving multi-layered
visual images which were embedded in fabric-based artworks by the
Toronto artist Rochelle Rubinstein (Cupchik and Gignac 2007). Subjects were presented with images of these artworks and instructed to
evaluate them on a variety of scales and also to select a few for additional written commentary. Separately, they filled out a scale which
assessed their disposition toward becoming absorbed, or losing themselves, in literature, music, film, and so forth. The data showed that
these artworks stimulated thoughts related to family, unresolved issues, and personal growth particularly for participants who were highly disposed toward getting absorbed in creative works.
Another research project studied the experiences of visitors to a
museum in downtown Toronto who were invited to comment on four
scenes, created by another Toronto artist, Lanny Shereck, which involved 40 cm. high painted plaster figures that appeared in groups of
two, three, or four (Cupchik and Shereck 1998). While some viewers
described the scenes in a superficial manner, others offered personalized accounts that were stimulated by the images. These narratives
showed how artworks can touch the personal self and concretely situate a work in the life-history of the viewer. Still other participants
proposed more abstract metaphorical or ideologically driven interpretations that elevated the work to a general maxim about life.
Our research on reading processes also showed how personal
meaning is important when it comes to literary absorption. Subjects
read more slowly when they encountered passages that were found to
be rich in meaning about life (Cupchik and Laszlo 1994). Similarly,
when instructed to identify with the characters in a literary passage,
subjects were stimulated to reflect on their own lives (Cupchik, Oatley, and Vorderer 1998). This under-distancing can also be problematic because excessive engagement of the self can lead viewers or readers away from aesthetic engagement, making the work a pretext for
self-absorption.
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Art or literary works which are closely tied to a persons core

sense of either personal or collective self clearly have an impact on
identity. The boundary disappears between a person and works which
are closely related to his or her sense of personal identity. These
works have a symbolic value, eliciting deeper thought and emotional
elaboration. In this regard it is important to understand that the issue
of art and identity is highly individualistic and quite separate from
discussions of artistic merit or quality. The issue is also more profound than feelings of pleasure or excitement arethat is, the feelings
evoked by the artworks. When a work has a profound meaning for a
person or groups sense of identity, there is the potential for a close
bond to form between them and the artist because they are all embedded in the same world of symbolic meaning. It is also in this context
that the deepest emotions are experienced and elaborated. In a study
of emotional memory for art (Medved, Cupchik, and Oatley 2004),
artworks which had a profound emotional effect on museum visitors
were recollected in a more structured and coherent manner after six
weeks than works which did not elicit such a response.
It can also be helpful to distinguish between the private and the
public self. The private self is what I have been discussing thus far
in this chapter. It is closely tied to a persons history and relations
with others to whom they feel a close attachment. This private self is
something that is kept close to the breast and encompasses things
which are cherished and about which the person would be aware. The
public self is a kind of persona which shapes how he or she appears to the world. This persona serves an important role in what psychologists call impression management and embodies intentional
decisions made by the individual to create a certain image, illusion, or
cache in a social context. This would be more closely related to the
treatment of art as a commodity, a sign that the person has arrived at a
particular niche in life. Any kind of identification with the work of art
would be completely superficial and external of the person.
5. Action and Expression
The title of this essay, I Am, Therefore I Think, Act, and Express
both in Life and Art, implies that a sense of self and the attendant
identity shape both action and expression. This leads to a question
about the nature of the relationship between action and expression.
My answer involves a distinction between Instrumental and Expres-
83
sive Embodiment. Given the central role played by embodiment in

the work of Mark Johnson (2007), I want to be very precise. From my
perspective, instrumental and expressive embodiment map onto the
Thinking-I and the Being-I, respectively. Instrumental activity is
adaptive and enables a person to address challenges and realize goals.
The ego-related skills of the Thinking-I are crucial for adaptive activity to occur.
An instrumental approach to art is incorporated into all aspects of
planning and application of technique to realize a project. From the
perspective of the artist, the unfolding work is matched against expectations and modified to adhere to them (Cupchik 1992). This strategic
process is rule-guided and results in a scaffold within which spaces
are created that are filled with people and objects. This kind of physical-sensory infrastructure is what mathematicians of the Renaissance,
such as Piero Della Francesca, injected into their artworks. It is the
essence of desegno, or design, in the Florentine tradition. Psychologists such as James Gibson (1971) spoke of affordances as qualities
which prompt a viewer to spontaneously perceive structured space.
The result of this instrumental embodiment of meaning and structure
is a space replete with symbols which can be readily identified. Ideas
about space relationships, such as inside or outside would be epiphenomenal or indirect byproducts of instrumental activity.
Expressive embodiment is quite different. It involves the spontaneous and sometimes inadvertent embodiment of emotional meanings
in the artwork and need not be explicit or intentional. It is imageguided rather than rule-guided (Cupchik 1992). In other words, the
artist or viewer perceives a coherent image which shapes the unfolding work. In this case, coherence is not determined by a match with
some kind of external criterion. Rather, it is predicated on a holistic
experience of the image combining denotations and connotations,
subject matter and style. The work is meaningful for one person and
may have less of an impact on someone else. Expressive embodiment
spontaneously stimulates the experience of emotion because of the
symbolic potency of the situation that is depicted. This situation resonates with memories of events long past and which may reside in the
persons unconscious, a repository of historical meanings and feelings.
Instrumental and expressive embodiment stand in a complementary relationship to each other that is associated with an interesting
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Gerald C. Cupchik
tradeoff related to the inadvertent leakage of emotion. If an artist is

concentrating on mimesis and the precise or accurate rendering of
subject matter through control over technique, then emotion might be
unintentionally leaked through the connotations of subject matter or
iconographic elements. Thus, a flower might be very precisely rendered, but it might also be very dead. The question then arises as to
what the meaning of a dead flower might be. The artist could respond
that the selection of subject matter was arbitrary and simply provided
an occasion for the artistic exercise. But the subject matter might also
be related to events in the life of the artist who did not realize that the
painting provided an occasion to embody this theme in a work. Art
historians speculate about the inadvertent selection of symbolically
meaningful subject matter. On the other hand, the artist might be very
clear about the choice of subject matter and simply try to render it in a
precise manner. However, the rendering might have expressive qualities of which the artist was unaware. The choice of color, the application or brush stroke or texture might in fact depart from the norm and
this more extreme quality has a strong connotative effect. In short, the
artist attends to one channel and the other unattended channel becomes the vehicle for the inadvertent and spontaneous expression of
emotion. This is comparable to what happens in nonverbal leakage
(Ekman and Friesen 1969) when a person controls one channel, such
as the expression of facial emotion, but their nervousness spills out
through the tapping of a foot on the floor during a job interview.
We contrasted the reactions of participants who were assessed as
high or low on a measure of loneliness to paintings of solitary figures
by Edgar Degas, Edward Hopper, and other artists (Cupchik and
Wroblewski-Raya 1998). Participants were instructed, on half the
trails, to identify with the character in the painting and imagine how
he or she feels. Of particular relevance here was the finding that, when
instructed to identify with the solitary figures, lonely subjects preferred stylistic qualities, such as color or composition, over the subject
matter as it appeared to them. The point is that personal feelings of
isolation were presumably evoked when lonely subjects were asked to
identify with the solitary figures. Thus, these subjects turned away
from subject matter that stimulated negative feelings and attended
instead to the safer stylistic qualities. This study showed that subjects
will unconsciously choose a safe haven of aesthetic exploration when
negative features of the self are made salient in an experimental con-
85
text. From the perspective of aesthetic distance theory, lonely subjects experienced the aversive feelings in the identification condition
that produced under-distancing and moved further away in order to
achieve a proper affective balance. Attending to aesthetic or stylistic
features becomes the vehicle for achieving this.
6. Identity and Aesthetic Experience
When identity governs a persons response to art, either as artist or
viewer, the boundary between the person and the work dissolves. This
bond between the person and an artwork that is closely related to his
or her identity can be related to the dynamics underlying Samuel Taylor Coleridges description of a willing suspension of disbelief for
the moment, which constitutes poetic faith (Coleridge, Biographia
Literaria [1817], cited in Burwick 1991: 221) as a basis for aesthetic
illusion. Coleridge emphasized the logic of the imagination, rather
than the reception of sensation, because imagination provides a basis
for the fluid continuity of conscious experience. I am arguing that,
when a work expressively embodies a persons sense of identity, it
provides the occasion for the experience of what Henri Bergson
(1889) called a state of pure duration in consciousness: Pure duration is what the succession of our states of consciousness becomes
when our ego drifts through life and refrains from drawing a distinction between the present state and previous states (75; tr. in Fraisse
1963: 70). Paul Fraisse (1963) inferred that, in the experience of internal duration, our thoughts and even more our emotions fuse together
in perfect harmony (70). Thus, the state of pure duration and the
willing suspension of disbelief go hand in hand with a bond that
emerges between a person and a work of art. This bond reflects the
depth to which the person responds to the work. Works of art that
touch upon a persons sense of identity lead to a suspension in the
experience of timea frozen moment in which the person and the
work become one.
7. Feeling and Emotion
I have as yet to discuss the relations of feeling and emotion to the
assorted themes examined here, including the Thinking-I and the
Being-I, or Instrumental and Expressive Embodiment. I have
distinguished elsewhere (Cupchik, 2011) between two principles
termed affective covariation and emotional elaboration. Affective
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Gerald C. Cupchik
covariation fits with the Thinking-I and instrumental embodiment.

According to this principle, feelings of pleasure and excitement are
associated with the byproducts of instrumental activity which have to
do with the resolution of challenges. The idea that feelings are the
shadow of cognition implies that feelings serve as markers for the
products of instrumental activities. This principle can be traced back
to the Enlightenment. Together with a colleague, I have shown that
subjects who arrive at the laboratory in a state of negative feeling are
moved by artworks that depict emotional scenes in a directly expressive manner (Cupchik and Gignac 2007). They project their thoughts
and feelings onto the work in a manner that is akin to Lippss (19031906) account of Einfhlung. In other words, in this study people
preferred artworks and other cultural products that modulated their
feeling states. If a person is bored and in need of stimulation, then
action films might do the trick; if, on the other hand, the person has a
need for warm feelings, then a romantic comedy might resolve the
need. Affect covariation therefore describes a process whereby aesthetic works are favored because isolated features can modulate feeling states related to arousal or pleasure. The relationship between
viewer and work is superficial and, consequently, no greater depth of
involvement is required.
When a sense of identity is fully formed, the person looks at the
ego of which the self is aware and approves of it. Thus, a work of art
can embody a persons sense of being and this applies both to artist
and viewer alike. But a work can also be part of a persons becoming,
because in the act of executing the work, he or she tries to find himself
or herself. This is a goal of art therapy, which is a means of discovering and expressing the self and thereby resolving a sense of identity.
Emotional elaboration is involved when a work of art, or other cultural artefact, is related to a persons sense of identity both in terms of
being and becoming. Deep seated emotions which are tied to a persons history are awakened and embodied in the aesthetic act of creation or reception. The experience of the sublime (Spartshott 1963)
would reflect this kind of profound encounter with a work that touches
upon the core of a persons being.
87
8. Conclusion
In summary, the goal of this chapter has been to present a psychological perspective on the themes of art and identity. The central framework of my argument involved an account of complementary relations
between the Thinking-I and the Being-I. The Thinking-I is focused on an instrumental analysis of the world, both everyday and
aesthetic, which enables a person to address needs and realize goals.
This can just as easily involve walking down a street to a caf or depicting the scene in a painting in accordance with specific stylistic
codes. It involves the domain of the ego, and the instrumental application of a set a pragmatically oriented skills. The Being-I, or the Becoming-I for that matter, is more closely tied to the self and is predicated on an ability to take the ego as an object of reflection. When
this act of reflection expresses confidence in the achievements of the
ego, a sense of identity is achieved. Artworks, literary works, and
other cultural artifacts can be associated with a persons sense of identity both in episodes of creation and of reception. An artwork expressively embodies a persons sense of identity when its subject matter is
meaningful to the person, either as an individual or as a member of a
group. The style of the work, as a spontaneous mode of expression,
gives form to the subject matter and achieves a level of coherence that
is immediately meaningful to the artist or viewer. During these rare
moments, a bond is achieved with the work in which the flow of time
is arrested and absorption is complete.
From a psychological perspective, an aesthetic attitude involves
the self-conscious shift from the pragmatic viewpoint of everyday life
to one which attends to the physical-sensory qualities that underlie
style. This shift is mediated by the neocortex which sends a message
to adopt an aesthetic attitude in an executive top-down manner. Aesthetic episodes also involve the complementary relations between
engaged experience and detached reflection to achieve a proper aesthetic distance from the work which applies to both artist and viewer
alike. However, I want to underscore the point that one cannot be both
inside experience and reflectively outside at the same time. A
person lost inside the experience might be overwhelmed and forced to
exit the episode, as when a play reawakens bad feelings from childhood. But someone who is disposed to evaluate critically works or
performances in a logical and detached manner might lose the ability
to experience spontaneously aesthetic pleasure. A proper balance of
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Gerald C. Cupchik
engaged and detached perspectives is fundamental to the aesthetic

attitude and related experiences. Art and identity become one when
a work of artthat is symbolically related to profound meanings in a
persons lifeoffers the hope and opportunity for personal growth
and becoming.
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V. Sense, Modality, and Aesthetic Experience

Simo Kppe
University of Copenhagen
Aesthetic experiences are peculiar. On the one hand, artworks often

engage mainly one single sense modality and are in this way rather
primitive compared to ordinary conscious life. On the other hand, art
can be very complicated and might eventually provide the basis for a
highly complex experience. In the following chapter I seek to resolve
this apparent contradiction. I will do this by analyzing the concept of
modality, the relations between modalities and reflection, and finally
the connections between narrativity and identity. As part of my argument, I will claim that modern art comprises a psychological experiment with perception.
1. Modality and Complexity
Classical textbooks in psychology from ca. 1900-1950 were often
structured in a way that started with descriptions of simple psychological functions and then proceeded to the more complex ones. The simple functions were sensations (described as different sense modalities)
and motor functions (if described at all), the intermediate functions
comprised perception and remembering, while the most complex
functions always involved consciousness and self-reflection. Descriptive concepts such as personality, character, or identity were placed at
the end of this continuum of increasing complexity.
It is no doubt legitimate to arrange many of these functions into a
hierarchy of complexity. Mono-modality, such as tactile sensation, is
in many ways simpler than self-reflection. Tactile sensation represents
only one qualitative sense, while self-reflection involves several modalities. If it were possible to isolate the specific brain tissue involved
in tactile sensation and self-reflection, especially the associative rela-
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Simo Kppe
tions manifested by the associative neural paths, then self-reflection

would certainly involve more activity and brain tissue.
The differentiation between single sense modalities such as vision
and hearing is clear, but it is just as obvious that you never encounter
any single modalities in your daily life. Mono-modal experience is as
fictive as the planetary model in particle physics. You are never psychologically engaged through only one modalityit is simply impossible, at least as an adult (the early psyche is an exception from this
generalization). A simple reason for this is that no sensation can exist
without a movement of the body (as researchers like Alexander Bain
[1855] knew), and this movement involves either proprioception or
the kinesthetic sense. Mono-modality is never manifest in experience.
The early psyche has not developed self-reflection, intersubjectivity, or higher consciousness. It is likely that during this early
phase the psyche mainly senses (Goldstein 1980). This state is gradually replaced by different sorts of complexities such as intersubjectivity, role-play, and identifications, which prevent a regression or return
to mono-modality. In this context it is interesting to note that art is one
of those very few media through which it is possible to recreate and
assimilate the mono-modal experience of infancy. Painting and music
are obvious examples. Through the lack of narratives the artwork
comes to resemble the primeval mono-modality. But figurative art and
some vocal music often involve a narrative component because they
present some more or less symbolic statement, frequently with affective content. Therefore, both painting and music can be loaded with
narratives.
In relation to art and art forms, it is obvious that complexity can
involve narratives. Indeed, narrative art forms, such as theater and
film, are those which engage the greatest number of modalities. Modern psychological theories of identity (e.g., McAdams 1997) have
pointed to the narrative as a means for identity-production. By constructing and telling stories about our own selves, we use these narratives to create our identitiesthe narratives are our identities.
2. Art as Psychological Experiment
Artists necessarily presuppose that the perceiver of the work of art is a
subject who roughly has the same psychological characteristics as
themselves. No artist can live as a solipsist; the artistic expression is
always related to another subject more or less similar to the artist. In
95
the last twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century, painters began
to revise the narrative component of artistic creationa development
that ended in a total suspension of narrative within certain art traditions such as in abstract art. This revision included a new way of
thinking about the psychological subject. Apparently the artists became psychological experimentalists in parallel with a burgeoning
psychological science.
It is possible to understand the new orders in modern art (from the
end of the nineteenth century) in terms of an artistic shift in focus
from the objective reproduction of reality to the viewers experiences.
This is not to say that earlier artists failed to reflect upon the subjects
viewingbut this reflection is not about the subjects processes of
perception and has its own history and development (cf., for example,
Foucaults [1966] description of Velasquez work). I would argue that
the viewing subject, i.e., the psychological subject which the artist
presupposes as the one who looks at art, becomes an object of artistic
investigation that coincides with and resembles the beginnings of scientific psychologyespecially the dissection, the reduction, and the
isolation of specific psychological functions.
The artistic deconstruction of the subjects viewing begins with
Impressionism. One of Impressionisms basic tasks is to reduce the
visual recognition of external reality to points or dots. These points
resemble the physiological basis for the visual sense in rods and
cones. As a good positivist, the impressionist seeks to reduce the visual complexity to its primary elements. The impressionist analyzes and
then deconstructs the visual field and the visual function. It is not the
motif, as such, that is of primary interest to the artistit is rather the
subject studying the motif. What, then, is the nature of the intentionality and interest that the modern subject directs toward impressionistic
paintings? Ideally, the subject reflects not only on the painting as
such, but also on the subjects own perception of the object upon
which the painting seems to elaborate. The viewing subject reflects
upon its own reflection. As sociologists and social psychologists from
Norbert Elias to Anthony Giddens have argued, this self-reflection is
one of the most important elements in the creation of identity in modernity.
Expressionism and Cubism continued to dismantle the subjects
viewing position. These traditions were mainly concerned with the
decomposition of colors (e.g., Vincent van Gogh) and three-
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Simo Kppe
dimensional space (e.g., Paul Czanne, Fernand Lger, Georges

Bracque, and Pablo Picasso). While Impressionism focused on the
immediate perception of the world, Expressionism and Cubism went
further. Now the primary architecture of painting was under attack:
colors were deliberately wrong, in the sense that the artist could
exchange an objects given or natural colors with colors that emphasized the objects atmosphere (cf. Henry Matisses Portrait of Madam
Matisse). Some painters tried to catch the dynamics of movement
through bold uses of color, and the objects three-dimensionality was
reduced to the paintings own two-dimensionality. The world was
presented by the surfaces of the objects yet in a two-dimensional way.
Cubism, in particular, was very precise in its emphasis on the viewing
subjects reflection on dimensionality. In a peculiar way, it illustrates
Maurice Merleau-Pontys (1945) description of the bodys knowledge
of the concealed aspects or sides of the sensed object. According to
Merleau-Ponty, perception of the world always presupposes the perception of the hidden sides of the objects.
With Futurism and Dadaismand, to a lesser degree, with Surrealismarts relations to society and political ideology were directly
drawn into the art. Futurism (e.g., Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni) expressed an ambivalent conception of the modern industrial
world and all its potentialspossibilities that both attracted and repulsed the artist. These artists hereby also reintroduced a more complex narrative content, although not in the former naturalistic fashion,
with its almost objective reproduction of reality. Surrealism also used
a narrative component in its depiction not of reality but of the sur-real.
As a school, Surrealism acquired different expressions: Salvador Dali
and the unconscious, Ren Magritte and the surprising oddness, Giorgio De Chirico and the morbid fearfulness. These various expressions
of the surreal share one particular element: a sort of morphogenetic
experiment with the substance of the world, involving liquid watches,
flying persons, non-existing organic forms, and twisted threedimensionality.
Even if Surrealisms expression reintroduced a certain narrative
dimension, Surrealists saw perceptual experimentation as their primary tool (Gombrich 1950). They dissolved the objectivist intention of a
realistic reproduction of the world, relegated the worlds complexity
and its narratives to the background, and continued to experiment with
the subjects viewing. Focus was placed on elements of perception,
97
primary physical qualities of reality, and the subjects ability to isolate

the different psychological functions of these features. This implied a
reduction of the narrative component and an experiment with both the
perceptual elements of the viewing subject and of reality. It also implied a hitherto unseen reflection of the constitutive aspects of perception and the production of meaning. It was therefore no longer sufficient to look at a painting and thereby (at best) understand its narrative
and feel its emotion. The message had to be actively decoded, including the implied comment on, as well as description and examination
of, primary perceptual elements (which are often part of the message).
The subject should reflect on its own viewing and its own relation to
reality in this viewing. In other words, with Surrealism the aesthetic
reflection became self-reflection. The aesthetic relation to the painting
became something you had to achieve, something you had to work
toward. In this way, aesthetic praxis produced subjectivity and was
able to contribute to the production of identity in the subject.
As indicated earlier, a peculiar aspect of this combined reflection
and reduction is the reflection of primary perceptual elements which
one would never be able to achieve in daily life. One is never in just a
visual or in only an auditory relation to something; the modalities are
always mixed and never realized separately. When looking at a painting, it takes place in a social setting, inside a specific institution,
where there are noises and other interferences from the surroundings.
In principle, however, the communicative object can be presented in
one modality and through a single quality of this modalitya color,
for instance, as in Yves Kleins blue paintings. Incidentally, this is not
only the case with modern paintings. When one looks at certain paintings by Joseph Turner, it seems obvious that he, in his depiction of
explosions and fires, came close to idealizing the crystal clear white
and, if he had dared, would have liked to paint a picture which was
mono-chromatic white. But he did not venture this far, and it would
take another one hundred and twenty years before someone did.
3. The Cradle of the Aesthetic
Why are humans, alone among the known species, able to respond
aesthetically to the expression of an isolated modality which is not a
perception of the real world? How is it possible to produce a complex mixture of feeling, cognitive processing, and reflection in relation
to something which is extremely reductive? Maybe the answer is that
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we at some point in our ontogenetic development lacked a sensorium

commune, that is, a center for coordination of sense modalities. In
the long run, this center is a primary prerequisite for all experience,
including the human self and identity.
My argument rests on the idea that, biologically, humans are born
too early" (cf. theories of neoteni and paedomorphosis, e.g., Gould
1977). One of the consequences of our species being born too early is
that we, from the very beginning, lack a centeran origo, in the
phenomenological sense, which has also been called the sensorium
communefrom which to experience the world. Instead we have a
variety of qualities, each with its own relatively separate consciousness. These qualities, with their separate consciousnesses, are sense
modalities. The center is something that has to be established, created
in the development of the psyche (cf. Kppe 2008).
We are born-too-early in the sense that the human species developed a brain so big in relation to the rest of the body that an important part of individual development has to take place outside the
womb. All mammalian brains grow very fast in the fetal state. After a
relatively short period, the weight of the brain in relation to the whole
body increasesuntil birth, after which this ratio decreases. Only the
human infants fetal ratio continues after birth and throughout the first
year of life. So while human brains develop in a way similar to other
mammalian brains inside the womb, they continue to grow postnatally in what might be termed a social womb (cf. Kppe 2008).
Consensus is lacking with regard to the psychological consequences of this asymmetrical development of humans compared to
other species. From a psychoanalytical point of view, the biological
asymmetry is a precondition for both the sexual drive and the unconsciousanimals only have instincts and no other mammal seems to
have an unconscious (cf. Laplanche 1976). This combination of biology and psychoanalysis is in opposition to the view of a constitutive
primary intersubjectivity present from the beginningin opposition
because this sort of psychological complexity is something which has
to be developed outside the womb and because any form of intersubjectivity presupposes an origo or center (cf. Trevarthen 1993; Beebe
2005).
It is most likely the case that the process which establishes the
center is intimately connected with the development of the relations
between the sense modalities. The process which establishes the cen-
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ter for attention is, as far as I can see, the same process that involves a
fusion, or linking together, of all the existing modalities. This linking
together is necessary because modalities are not developed at the same
time. Sense modalities become active at different points in time; they
have not reached the same developmental level at birth. (It is often
supposed by most people that the visual sense is the most important,
but the visual sense is developed last of all the senses.) If the experiential center is built upon the integration of sense modalities, then we
have to assume that the center does not exist prior to the linking of
modalities. And if we cannot assume that there is an experiential center present at birth, then it is very plausible to think that the sense modalities initially function relatively autonomously. Each sense modality, then, has its own part-attention and part-consciousness, and the
sense modalities do not function serially but in parallel. Different modalities operate simultaneously but without a unifying consciousness
or center. (The infant, it turns out, is the true multitasking subject.)
In these relations between the sense modalities, no causality is involved. It is not an issue of what came first, not a question of
whether it is the center/attention/sensorium commune that combines
the sense modalities into a union, or whether it is the combination of
the sense modalities that boosts the center for common consciousness
and attention. It is probably neither one nor the otherthey were very
likely constituted in relation to each other.
Various theories (e.g., Lacan 1949; Merleau-Ponty 1948-1951)
have described the foundation of the center as connected with the
ability to move around, emphasizing the process by which the infant
stands up, rising from its relative immobility. This process ultimately
establishes the ego which is built around a united consciousness and
attention. Lets trace this process in a few steps.
First of all, there is a close connection between motor function
and sensing. The senses function by virtue of the fact that the sensory
receptors move in relation to that which generates sensory impressions. We would not see much if our eyes did not move; tactile
ability occurs only by movement in relation to an object. The auditory
sense is likewise honed by a movement of the head.
Secondly, it seems useful to distinguish between a motoric agency
and a sensory agency in the infant as two different centers of consciousness: one for motor function and another for the sensorium. But
before that rudimentary consciousness is tied either to activities within
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single modalities and shifts, so to speak, between the individual modalities, or it simply exists in parallel in such a way that it is possible,
in principle, to activate different modality-specific consciousnesses
simultaneously. In any case, it is highly likely that it is the motor function that enables sensory unification of the different modalities, so that
a unified motoric and sensory agency is established, connected to a
unified intentional consciousness.
It is the motor function that makes it possible for the body to carry
forth its sensory organs in the world. In this regard it does not matter
whether one is able to move rapidly, toddle, or just crawl about. What
matters is merely whether one pre-reflectively grasps the idea of bodily movement: that ones body can be moved in concert and that
movement will bring the sensory organs along. This assembling of a
motoric agency creates a template for the establishment of a sensory
agency. Understood in this way, an agency exists that early on moves
between the individual modalities. This agency can shift from one
modality to another, but is not able to unify different modalities into
one agency. Later, a motoric agency is established which assembles
the body and, thereby, the modalities tied to the body and its surface.
Finally, the motoric agency becomes the basis for a united sensory
agency.
Thus far one of my central concerns has been to establish theoretically the existence of a center for motor ability and perception. The
topics addressed have been the structuring of the psyches formation
and the permanent and irreversible establishment of a fundamental
aspect of the psychenamely, the establishment of the self as, among
other qualities, a knowing, perceiving, and recognizing subject. It is
this period that Lacan (1949) called the mirror stage, which is tied to
the childs upright position and established through the recognition of
oneself as standing in a relation to the other. In the next section I will
argue for the existence of a center for the personalitys formation. My
argument will be that it is no longer possible to exist in one single
modality or to live in different parallel consciousnesses after the center has been established and the modalities combined. When the modalities have been integrated, the relation between the single modalities can only be discerned through reflection. This kind of reflection is
a central part of aesthetic experience.
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4. Language and Sense Modalities

Many prominent theories more or less explicitly presuppose that the
acquisition of language is a necessary condition for any real production of meaning (e.g., the developmental theories of Jean Piaget
[1954] and Lev Vygotsky [1934]). This is a great mistake and would
imply, if it were true, that non- or extra-linguistic aesthetic experiences are meaningless. Language has, of course, a primary function in the
adults conscious world. But besides rendering aesthetic experience
meaningless, theories that require the presence of language in meaning-making also reduce non-language users to non-subjects. It is
therefore necessary to distinguish between language narrowly defined
as opposed to language broadly conceived. Language, in a narrow
sense of the term, comprises written and oral language. In a broader
semiotic sense, language is a system that also includes sense modalities. In this essay I employ the term language in the narrow sense.
However, the problem at hand demands a more thorough discussion of
the relation between language and sense modalities.
The subjects individual senses are tied to specific sense organs.
Ever since Johannes Mllers (1834) theory about specific nerve
energies, a controversial problem has been how to explain the experiential differences between the senses that arise when the medium that
transports them is identical. For example, how is the difference between a visual and a tactile sensation preserved when the neural impulse moves along pathways that are anatomically and physiologically
identical, and when the very frequencies carried are the same? We
have an anatomical difference at one end (i.e., the receptors) and a
consciousness-based and qualitative difference on the other end, without otherwise knowing much about how the connection is actually
made.
This difference is the first distinction in experience and is, as
such, the first example of the infants meaning formations. Meaning is
therefore tied to the defining qualities of each sense modality. The
sense modalities are modalities of meaningbut so is language, and,
as will be discussed below, emotions and feelings as well. In this regard an important question is to what extent meaning can be translated
from one sense modality into another, or, rather, to what extent the
modalities possess a non-reductive meaning-tone. One of the fields
concerned with this is aesthetics, where two of the dominant move-
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ments, namely semiotics and hermeneutics, have different, but nevertheless compatible suggestions for an answer.
The relation between modalities and meaning is, as far as I can
see, a central question for aesthetics, because, as argued above, it is a
significant part of works of art and thereby of aesthetic experiences.
Furthermore, the human subject is the only known creature able to
deal with modality in this way. With a point of departure in the fact
that the individual art form cultivates and widens delimited sensory
and representational modalities (the painting as a type of visuality; the
sculpture as another form of visuality combined with the spatial,
which implies the motoric; music as the auditory; several modern installations as incorporating the tactile and the proprioceptive; literature as language; theater and film as cross-modal combinations), both
semiotics and hermeneutics claim that it is in the experiencing psyche
that the creation of meaning takes place.
Various structural (semiological) analyses assume that the single
entitywhether it is a visual advertisement, a myth, or a novelcan
be meaningfully traced back to a basic inventory of set meaningmatrices, semes, or the like (cf., for example, Algirdas Greimas
[1983] butterfly-model or Roland Barthes [1957] work). This is also
the case in hermeneutics (cf. Heideggers [1926] existentials), although the subject that the artworks refer back to is an altogether different one. In hermeneutics, analyses of art often end in views of art as
a manifestation of a fixed set of existential problems concerning the
subjects existencefor example, life, death, and love (as exemplified
by Funchs [1997] analyses). Both structuralism and hermeneutics
can, therefore, arrive at a fixed starting point for any creative activitywhether it is semantic matrices or fear of death is, in principle,
less important here.
The most interesting point in all of this is that the analysis of the
artwork often reaches existentials or general semantic elements, and
that it is possible, through this reduction, to reach a transformation
of meaning in the shift from one modality to the next. Because the
fixed set of existential problems or the basic semantic inventory in
both cases are universals underlying the single work of art, it is possible to achieve a transformation from one modality to another. What is
expressed in a painting can be transformed directly into a piece of
music. Directly here means that it is a one-to-one transformation
where the aesthetic content expressed in one modality can be repeated
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identically in another. In principle, an equal sign could be placed between the various modalities. The modalities are reducible to each
other and, therefore, will not possess an irreducible modality trait.
Now we may begin to see how language is a modality. It is a modality to the extent that all modalities are media of meaning, that is to
say, as specifically irreducible qualities that can contain and express
specific meanings. It will be necessary to assume that language can
express meanings that no other modality can, which certainly stands to
reason. Some (e.g., Greimas 1983; Hjelmslev 1943) say that language
is in itself a meta-modality because it can refer to all the other modalities in a different way than the modalities themselves. But one must be
careful not to exaggerate this meta-position, since it easily construes
language as trans-modal, which in turn dissolves conceptually what is
irreducible in the various modalities.
There is another modality that is liable to be overlooked, in part
because it apparently does not have any anatomically demarcated
receptors. This modality comprises the affects, a general term which
includes feelings and emotions. At first look, the affects appear to
share some characteristics with language. For instance, they are just as
trans-modal as language, able to arise in connection with phenomena
from each sense. But the affects are hardly meta-modal, since they do
not represent the contents of the other modalities. They are more like a
commentary on them, a constantly flowing parallel current.
Notice that this theoretical position in no way denies that universal themes get expressed in all modalities, such as death, for instance.
This does not automatically mean, however, that the horizontal transformation between modalities is possible without a residuea fact
that leads us to a very important principle, namely, that the individual
sense modalities are irreducible, both in regard to the aesthetic and to
consciousness. They will always include a sensory quality that also
becomes an aesthetically irreducible quality. In the model being outlined here, a capital S may stand for the subject, or psyche, and a capital B for the body:
Subject
spoken/written language, affects
visual, auditory, kinaesthetic/proprioceptive, tactile, olfactory
Body
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Simo Kppe
For the time being, let it remain an open question whether or not B is
a cross-modal or modal-specific entity. In any case, it is evident that
we are dealing with an activity or a practice-relation, and not with a
statistical index or with set elements of meaning.
Apparently, certain semantic, narrative, and bodily universals exist (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Johnson 2007). A question is whether
these universals are sufficient to capture meaningful dimensions such
as aesthetic dimensions in general and cross-modal entities in particular. In the semiotic approach it is always the goal of any analysis to
reach a level of abstraction which is indifferent to the material that
carries the meaning. For this reason, the semiotic analysis is not only a
reduction of meaning-modalities to a shared subordination under S, it
is not just a question of vertical reduction and/or horizontal transformation; semiotic analysis is also a reduction of experimental complexity to some sort of universals which transcend the modality (e.g.,
Greimas 1983). The very application of such an analysis implies that
the artwork cannot be said to have a special status in relation to other
meaning-producing media. An artwork is a nugget of meaning like
any othera shopping list, a road sign, or a sporting event. There are
institutional differences and a lot of other distinctions to be made between an artwork and, to take the one example, a shopping listbut
these are secondary differences in relation to the reducibility of experience to S, the reducibility to universals.
After these considerations, it is necessary to insist on the irreducibility of sense modalities (and oppose both the semiotic and the hermeneutic analyses), precisely because it is this irreducible element
that is one of the key parts of aesthetic functioning. Artworks can
present meaning in a way that is subject to an alternation between
modalities, a reflection of the relation between modalities, and a reflection of the conceptual elements in the modalities. The modalityspecific qualities are conditions for meaning. While it is uncontroversial to emphasize the historical import of language and emotions, it is
unusual to emphasize that the senses also have a historical context.
Our senses are socialized just as language, affects, and the rest of our
bodies. Through this socialization the modalities of meaning are created, together with the conditions under which their contents can be
expressed.
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5. Vitality Contours
It is a key point in the above discussion that the sense modalities are
irreducible. This means that it is not possible to transfer the complete
meaning present in any of the modalities to any other modality. Language and emotions, however, are meta-modalities and they function
in two different ways: language can be used to comment upon, describe, and indicate diacritical elements in the primary sense modalities, while emotions are able to connect to and transform elements of
the modalities into specific emotions.
As previously argued, the irreducibility of the modalities does not
exclude the possibility of transformations, generalizations, and abstractions between modalities. One of the frequently used concepts
which capture this aspect is Daniel Sterns (1998) vitality affect or
vitality contours. He makes numerous references to philosopher Susanne Langer, who uses art as a key element in her discussion of affects. Sterns analysis of vitality affect or vitality contours is very
important in relation to specifying the level of meaning-producing
universals. When you look closer at Sterns discussions, it is possible
to differentiate between different versions of vitality affects or vitality
contours (cf. Kppe, Harder, and Vver 2008). There are two main
versions worth mentioning here:
1. In the most stringent definition of vitality affects they are defined as changes in intensity over time. They are defined as an aspect
of form and as an abstract figure which can be recognized in different
modalities. This use of the concept prioritizes dynamic progression
and implies the idea of crystallizing a contour into a temporal progression, a contour which is stylized and abstract. In the development of
Sterns texts there is a growing recognition of the contour as not necessarily needing to describe only variations in intensity, but that it can
also express changes in the level of activity, or just changes in time.
Time could not exist if there were no differences between a given
state and an immediately subsequent version of that same
state/condition. While initially the concept is closely connected to
intensity, it is later supplemented with a connection to the temporal
aspect.
The contours are abstract form-concepts, and Stern compares
them, all the way back from the early formulations, with some other
concepts recently investigated in developmental psychology, namely,
cross-modality and amodality (cf. Lewkowitz 2000). The essential
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Simo Kppe
questions in this context are connected to the existence of elements

across the individual sense modalities where perception is filled with
properties that exist in several modalities. Some properties will be
established via experiences (e.g., that substances can be hard, wet, and
gritty), and these can be called cross-modal because they are manifested in different modalities (e.g., wetness is both tactile and visual).
Other properties, such as number, rhythm, and frequency appear as the
most abstract ones and are supposedly inborn. These can be termed amodal. There can hardly be any doubt that part of the inspiration for
Sterns use of vitality contours derives from the cross- and a-modal
qualities, forms, and figures.
Stern exemplifies vitality contours and vitality affects with terms
like surging, fading-away, fleeting, exploding, effortful,
accelerating, decelerating, climaxing, bursting, and drawn
out. They can be used immediately on both visual and auditory perceptions, but also on movements and, with some imagination, also on
taste and tactility, and are therefore a-modal. The contour does not
represent a certain quality which can be extended across a continuum,
but consists instead of several unique elements that only have their
level of abstraction in common. At hand is a kind of semantic primeval theme which gives rise to several abstract demarcations of progression and movement. In this version, the vitality affects closely
resemble cognitive semantics picture schema, though with the limitation that vitality affects primarily concern dynamic movement. They
have, in principle, the same status since they are constituted at a level
of abstraction that is cross-modal.
2. A second approach to vitality affects places the greatest emphasis upon the childs relation to its primary caregivers. Vitality affects
are described as arising in the relation to the other, they are constituted
by virtue of this relation. Stern describes this most precisely in connection with what he calls affect attunement. Affect attunement is a
specific relation between the child and its primary caregiver. It presupposes a rudimentary kind of intersubjectivity. The phenomenon
partly covers what others have called interaffectivity and mirroring,
but for Stern it is important to leave out imitations, as affect attunement is not imitation, and imitation takes place before affect attunement exists as a possibility. Imitation appears to Stern as primarily
concordance of form. When the child imitates the adult, or vice versa,
it does not follow that the one can embrace the mental state of the
107
other. Imitation is really just a pure repetition of form, like parroting.

While imitation causes repetition of the surface properties, most frequently within the same modality, affect attunement is significantly
more complex than imitation, visible in the fact that almost all affect
attunement is cross-modal. The child can, for instance, express an
affective state through sound which the primary caregiver then mimics
as a bodily action. The idea, as far as it goes, with affect attunement,
is to describe one of the interactions wherein it is completely obvious
that the infant and the primary caregiver share mental states. They
share and communicate affects as well as a form of reflection in regards to affects.
Stern contends, moreover, that most of the affective states/ conditions that participate in affect attunement are vitality affects. When
one observes the qualities that are isolated in connection with an empirical investigation of affect attunement, a greater consistency between affect attunement and vitality affects follows. Thus, there is a
differentiation between absolute intensity, intensity contours, temporal meter, rhythm, duration, and form (where form is not a direct
mirroring of form as in imitation, but rather is a derived form which is
repeated in another substance). All these properties are discussed in
Sterns various texts in connection with the vitality affects.
Vitality affects and vitality contours are probably the best examples of meaning universals established very early in the psyches development, primarily by the body-movement modality (cf. the model presented in the section titled Language and Sense Modalities)
kinaesthetic/proprioceptive, tactile sense modalities. These meaning
universals are general experiential structures that the artwork can assimilate. They are also general experiential structures that are a part of
the psyches early centering and, thereby, a pre-condition for the development of reflectivity and identity.
6. Reflectivity and Identity
As I stated above, reflectivity also has a relation to identity. Identity
can be defined in many ways. For now, identity can be seen as part of,
or identical with, personhood, personality, or character, and primarily
as the set of characteristics which distinguish a person from other
people. Reflectivity is a function which the person can employ when
convenient; it is used in many ways and in relation to many different
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objects and phenomena. But in this context it is necessary to explicate

what reflection is in relation to works of art.
One way reflection in art takes place, and especially with works of
art which can be defined as good art, is through the artists attempts
to display and explicitly set out the rules for the work of art. In this
regard the arts seek to transcend the rules which govern a modality (or
modalities). Many of these rules are not directly known or not conscious in the viewing moment, but the process of viewing can in itself
be a reflection which does not necessarily find the rules and orders.
Reflection is a more complicated function, and in relation to works of
art, reflection can directly produce meaning through reflecting on
itself in the viewing process (self-reflection) or on the rules that govern the object. In other words, the individual artwork can involve a
reflection that simultaneously transcends the work, and by the power
of this transcending makes possible a reflection on the rules for its
own representation. (This is, if not the exact same theme, then of the
same thematic order as Adornos negative dialectics [1966]). Bad
art is conventional in its observance of these very rulesit does not
create new meanings, but is a more or less crude repetition. New
meanings can be created in good art by attempting to challenge the
limits within which the modality is definedlimits that cannot be
removed, as the modalities always have an irreducible remnant that
substantiates the modality.
There are several types of rules which are made explicit through
reflection. There is, for one thing, a whole series of material rules for
each individual modalitysome are bound to our receptors organization, others to the material worlds substance. To a certain extent,
these rules cannot be broken (we know that the lines in the MllerLyer illusion are exactly the same length, yet we cannot see it). They
can, however, be displayed, and an attempt made to exceed their limits. Other rules are more tightly connected to the modalitys quality,
still others to style. A large part of the rules are historically given,
making the inherent reflection historical as well. The work of art offers the possibility for reflection at one moment, but at later points, as
our experiential structures change, the work surrenders its potential
for generating reflexivity. For this reason, it seems important to investigate more closely how far these rules extend historically.
More complicated art involves a number of modalities. Such
work is often narrative and will therefore relate to the subjects own
109
life history. It reflects the subjects identity-producing narratives, not

only by identification or generalization, but by creating a distance that
is open to interpretation and to mirroring the persons own history.
The same cannot be said when the artwork is not narrative, but restricted to a single modality. In the single-modality view (e.g., of visual art), much of the reflective experience is related to surprise, astonishment, contrast, contradiction, illusions, etc., and presupposes a sort
of regression to the primary forms of the sense modalities in the infant. But it is certainly not a regression in the ordinary sense, because
the way consciousness reflects mono-modality is influenced by the
experiential center, movement, and every single art-produced experience. It is therefore not the case that experiences with art are regressions to a former primitive state. While they are indeed regressions to
a more simple state, it is a state which is constructed, and as a construction it does not repeat the former experience in totality. As a
construction some traits are rearranged and combined differently and,
as such, they are not objective or real, but have a psychological
reality. It is not a precondition for the regression that the experience is
a repetition of a former stateit seldom is. The work of art is a certain
type of object, and by devoting its time to the object, the subject can
become engaged in a relation which in a certain way recapitulates
qualities that only exist before the acquisition of language.
7. Conclusion
Many experiences with art do not rely on existentials or semiotic
structures. Experiences with art of the non-complicated form do not
necessarily relate to life, death, or love. These experiences are very
different from our actual lives and closer to a perceptual experiment,
which tells us something about how we experience the world or relate
to universals particularly of the vital kind, namely the vitality affects
or vitality contours. One of the very interesting paradoxes in this is
that the primitive mono-modal perception can be related to a reflection on the subjects relation to the world and the subjects relation to
its own life historyin other words, to the subjects identity. The
processes which are involved in art, from perception to self-reflection,
are directly related to the individuals biography and, thereby, to its
self-understanding.
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VI. Reading Proust:

The Little Shock Effects of Art
Judy Gammelgaard
University of Copenhagen
My contribution to the theme of this book is based on my reading of

Marcel Prousts Remembrance of Things Past, more specifically on
the aesthetic experience it is possible to extract from this reading. My
main argument will be that in our attempts to grasp this experience,
which has the character of small shocks (Benjamin 1999a), we
might profit by drawing on an experiential distinction in German between Erlebnis and Erfahrung. This distinction is lost in English,
where we have only one word: experience. As the distinction between
Erlebnis and Erfahrung is crucial to my argument, I follow John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinsons (2000) translation of Martin
Heideggers Sein und Zeit, using Experiencewith an uppercase E
for Erlebnis, and experiencewith a lowercase efor Erfahrung.
The distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung points, I think, to
a significant tension in Proust, which he deliberately used to render
visible the life thread weaving not only the life of the narrator, but
also our own lives, made recognizable in the plot as it unfolds when
we read it.
Proust criticism has concerned itself mainly with the themes of
time and memory (Beckett 1999; Bowie 1998; Lagercrantz 1992;
Kristeva 1993, 1996), with the notable exception of Gilles Deleuze
(1964), who proposed a reading that did not focus on the Madeleine
cake and other involuntary memories but on signification as the key to
an alternative reading of Proust. Rather than reading the novel as a
search backwards in time, Deleuze suggested reading it in a direction
pointing toward the future and seeing how the narrator interprets the
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world around him as embedded in signifiers determines his fate. Notwithstanding the importance of Deleuzes interpretation I focus on the
way memory and time are organized in Prousts writing, linking this
to experiences we have from our own lives, which endow the work
with its unique aesthetic quality.
Out of the complexity of Proustian temporality emerges memory,
securing the entirety of intertwined time in a complex pattern which
the narrator variously compares to a vast musical composition and to a
cathedral. We are not, however, dealing with the narrators memories
of certain significant childhood events: they are not pivotal for the
authorno matter how significant the reader experiences them to be.
The objective is to convey these events just as they sink into the narrators life, in order to transmit them to the reader as experience.
Proust is convinced that in life coincidences determine whether or
not we are able to use the events that befall us to create links to other,
similar events, and to draw from these an experience of their essence.
However, when it is coincidental whether or not we find our way back
to ourselves, and when the poetic task is to render this project present,
Proust inevitably faces a difficult challenge. Indeed, he has allowed
his main character to struggle at length with this vocation. The narrator has evaded the task whose solution he senses early on in the novel,
but which he hesitates to pursue. Proust called this solution involuntary memories. While voluntary memory is the brains ordinary
memory, which can inform us about the past in the same way as photographs in an album, we have no power over involuntary memory. It
just happens to us, choosing its own time and place for the emergence
of its miracles. Prousts novel is a monument to involuntary memory,
an epic of its effects (Beckett 1999).
The involuntary memories in the novel are staged as small shocks:
sudden and entirely harmless events that awaken the narrator and,
with him, the reader. We are caught off-guard during our reading,
despite the everyday character of these utterly familiar experiences.
We must not misunderstand, however, the reappearance of memory in
Proust as the result of a happily arisen experience of a sensual naturewhich, precisely due to this sensuality, is suited to evoke a similar event in the past. Nor must we be led astray by the childlike innocence which is nonetheless an essential feature of the authors epic.
His vocation has a far more serious experiential vista, as the patient
reader will gradually realize.
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Proust has endeavored to examine an experience which only the

novel can pass on to the reader. Using the little shocks linked to the
immediate experience of imagery, Proust strikes up a series of profoundly existential themes, which the reader gradually becomes aware
of and touched by.
In short, the aesthetic experience that can be deduced from the encounter with Prousts text must take its point of departure in the
memory process which unlocks the narrative structure of the novel
and in that feeling of joy which the narrator seeks so eagerly, and
which to the reader appears to be the distinctive quality associated
with reading Proust. Indeed, my reading of Proust will use the concept
of memory to focus on the tension between Experience and experience which in particular characterizes Prousts aesthetic.
1. In Search of Happiness
Every artists goal is to create a world. Prousts world consists of
memories: he does not describe a life as it was actually lived, but as it
is remembered by the one who experienced it. But even this statement
is too nebulous. It is not the memories themselves but their intertwining with each other that constitutes the essence of this work. Recovered time is a unique reconstruction of monumental proportions, often
based, however, on banal everyday experiences of the sort we all
have. The episode with the Madeleine has become the most famous of
a series of Experiences surrounded by an aura of mystique, which
Proust referred to as involuntary memories and which he construed as
the essence not only of art but of life. These Experiences are all distinguished by coming in pairs. The combined impression of taste and
smell is suited to evoking a similar impression back in time, and
thanks to this similarity Proust can conjure up an image that erodes
the distance between the I of the present and the past, thereby seizing the happiness that results from a connection between the sensed
ability of the body to appropriate a piece of the past, on the one hand,
and the ability of the spirit to reproduce it on the other. Time allows
the two sensory impressions to meld into a weighty and fruitful experience which Proust transforms into an image whose expressiveness is
a consequence of this transformation. It strikes the reader with an immediacy that makes the sensory registration of the body and the imagination of the spirit seem as if they had never been distinct.
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The story of the Madeleine which we encounter in the first volume serves as a prelude to the experience upon which the author
builds his opus. Not until the beginning of the last volume, Time Regained, do we as readerstogether with the authorfully comprehend the significance of involuntary memories for the act of artistic
creation. In other words, we have been absorbed in the life events of
the narrator, forgetting all about the Madeleine until in the last volume
he presents us with some kind of solution to the miracle of this first
example of involuntary memory.
The narrator is on his way to an afternoon party at the home of the
Princesse de Guermantes and along the way he has a series of these
re-experienced sensory impressions. He trips on a cobblestone and is
transported fleetingly back to Venice, where he stepped on two uneven paving stones in the Baptistry of Saint Marks. Later a servant
brings him a starched napkin whose texture evokes a new vision of
azurepure and saline (Vol. III: 901) and he is back at the beach
hotel in Balbec, where he had a hard time wiping his mouth the first
evening after his arrival. The sensory impressions do not return alone,
but are accompanied by the feeling of joy that seized him the first time
he tasted the cookie soaked in tea. It is not until the last volume, however, that the narrator and the reader can extract the essence of the joy
that is associated with the involuntary memory:
The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was
common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they
were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through
one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find
itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. (Vol. III: 904)
The entirely everyday character of involuntary memories endows

them with an aura of trustworthiness. Just as we must not, however,
misunderstand the return of memory in Proust as the result of a fortuitous event of a sensory nature that via its similarity simply brings together present and past, we must also not be deceived by the childlike
innocence with which Proust spellbinds us, using his metamorphoses
of sensory impressions. Indeed Proust has positioned these sensory
memories around events of far more brutal or traumatic character,
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whose existential thematic evokes an experiential vista of a quite different nature than the immediate joy of Experiencing pure time.
Events that influence our lives decisively long after they take
place are presented by Proust with the same shocking character as
memories of cakes, napkins, and paving stones. We do not understand
the causes of these events until we happen to re-experience them at a
later point in time, whereas unbeknownst to us they have been influencing our lives all the while. This is the essence of Prousts understanding of what binds together our lives and which distinguishes life
as it is lived from life as we appropriate it, an understanding which
exposes the affinity of his thinking to that of both Sigmund Freud and
Sren Kierkegaard.
The experiential vista that opens up to the reader behind the poetic
play created by embodied imagination is about lossloss of love objectsand about sexuality that enters our life as a trauma.
2. Involuntary Memories
When the scent of tea mixed with cake arouses the memory of his
childhood at Combray, embodied in the figure of his bedridden Aunt
Lonie, we may, as Julia Kristeva (1993, 1996) suggests, read this
image as a displacement from the mother to the aunt, in order to mitigate the memory of the childs relationship to his mother and the painful experience of love that was given and taken away.
Before the story of the Madeleine we have heard about the little
boy the narrator was, who could not fall asleep without the mothers
goodnight kiss, and the entire novel is framed by the narrative of the
fateful night when the little boys desire to have his mother to himself
was satisfied. That night the father for unknown reasons sanctioned
the mothers stay with the boy and during their intimate being together
his mother read to him from George Sands Franois le Champi,
which sketches the fundamental Oedipal myth that runsotherwise
uncommented onthrough the love scenes of the novel and does not
reappear until the narrator finds himself in the library at the Guermantes palace and pulls this particular novel off the shelfas if by lucky
coincidence.
In the love theme of the novel (which I have discussed elsewhere
[Gammelgaard 2011]) two currents seem to intersect and to a certain
extent cancel each other out. In one current jealousy predominates,
along with the desire to possess and control the object in order to re-
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pair the loss and repeat the jouissance promised by that fateful night.
The other current consists of an attempt to render this fate harmless by
insisting on the pure aesthetic joy of embodied imagination, where all
traces of pain are eliminated. The aesthetic experience gained through
reading would, however, lose depth if the narrator had not succeeded
in representing both of these currents with equal intensity. The loss of
the first love object casts its shadow on all of the love relationships the
narrator encounters, and in which he seeks his reflection.
The author has conveyed the experience of loss with all its painful
consequences in a beautiful parallel scene which he refers to as the
intermittencies of the heart. This is the story of the death of his beloved grandmother, located like a displaced object between the narrators Experience of the loss of the primary love object and the later
repetitions of this loss in the narrators encounters with love. Once
again Proust uses the characteristic form of experience, where two
Experiences are linked, to tell us about the loss of his grandmother.
The narrator arrives at the seaside resort of Balbec with his
grandmother and steps into his room, hot and tired from the journey,
but sleep proves impossible in this hell of strange and unknown objects. All his senses are in a heightened state of alert. There is no room
for his body in this horrible room because his attentionthis function
which rushes out to meet reality to avoid being overwhelmedhas
peopled the room with huge furniture, a hurricane of sounds, and tormenting colors. Alone and defenseless in this room he wishes to die.
His grandmother comes in to help him, sees his terror and insists on
helping him to bed and bends down to unbutton his boots. That night
he suffers in the same way as in his early childhood when his mother
did not come to give him the goodnight kiss without which sleep
would not come.
The next time the narrator visits Balbec his grandmother is dead
and he is accompanied by his mother. He is ill and tired when they
arrive, but this time the room is not a monster. Habit has transformed
it. He bends down to unbutton his boots and at that very moment he is
seized by the reality of his grandmothers death. It is this particular
gesture which brutally brings back the earlier, similar Experience, and
because he is caught off-guard, he and the reader are confronted with
the shock that results when memories impose themselves on awareness without the mediation of attention.
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From this repeated gesture of unbuttoning the boots the narrator

derives not only the lost reality of the grandmother, but also discovers
his own lost reality, the lost reality of the I. The reappearance of his
beloved grandmother is traumatic: it takes him by surprise and makes
it impossible for him to fend off the reality of her death. For the first
time since her death he knows that she is dead. He knows who is dead.
In other words, he had to re-experience her as alive and devoted before he can admit that she is dead and forever unable to devote herself
to him. This juxtaposition of something present with its relentless
destruction is unbearable and will therefore soon be rendered harmless, as the numbing effect of habit sets in. But the narrator has
learned a lesson:
I knew that if I ever did extract some truth from life, it could only be from
such an expression at once so particular and so spontaneous, which had neither been traced by my intelligence nor attenuated by my pusillanimity, but
which death itself, the sudden revelation of death, striking like a thunderbolt,
had carved within me, along a supernatural and inhuman graph, in a double
and mysterious furrow. (Vol. II: 787)
I shall return to this experience when I discuss how the author sets it
up so that the reader can also learn from it. First, however, I shall give
another example of this kind of experience which links together two
Experiences in such a manner that the firstin its repetition in the
secondlends the latter special significance.
We are still in Combray. The narrator is a young boy, losing himself in sensory impressions and curiously pursuing the eroticism that
has been aroused in him, the full magnitude of which exceeds the
reach of awareness. One day he finds himself in Montjouvain, where
the composer Vinteuil lives.
It was during a spell of very hot weather, my parents, who had been obliged
to go away for the whole day, had told me that I might stay out as late as I
pleased, and having gone as far as the Montjouvain pond, where I enjoyed
seeing again the reflection of the tiled roof on the hut, I had lain down in the
shade and fallen asleep among the bushes on the steep slope overlooking the
house (Vol. I: 173-174)
This is the harmless and apparently quite innocent introduction to the

erotic scene, which is then played out before his very eyes, as he witnesses the erotic play of Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her girlfriend
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through a window, during which the latter suggests that they spit on a
portrait of the composerthe formers father.
Like the novel itself this scene contains several interwoven
themes and various intermingling voices. There is the voice of the
narrator, the innocent and nave child he is talking about, and, finally,
the author who arranges the material for the reader, to whom this entire scene seems abstruse and confusing. The text finds us just as unprepared as the child who is driven by curiosity to try to penetrate the
adults secret, but who at that very moment is met by prohibition and
an attendant sense of guilt.
In brief, what Proust offers us as readers in this passage about the
appearance of sin in the world of the child has many layers of meaning. On the one hand we are caught unawareslike the childby
what we hear and by our own curiosity, which is piqued without being
satisfied. We are titillated but have to condemn what we experience as
a perverted act. We are also shocked on another level, but here it is
our reason which is attacked. The profanation of the love object inevitably arouses conflicting impulses: we are both outraged and excited.
Above and beyond these impulses, however, the voice of the author is
raised, exhorting us not to condemn the young woman, and we are
invited into a profound and sophisticated contemplation on the difference between sin and evil. More layers of meaning are brought into
play and added to the unresolved suspense and to the feeling of having
been left dangling, when the narrator abruptly interrupts his story to
resume his tale of the legendary Saturday excursions the family used
to make in the Combray area. We are suddenly returned to the child
who falls in love with the hawthorn and the sun reflecting off the tiles
of the roofs. Like the child we retain the impression in a time warp, a
pocket in time, and it does not come back to life till we are reminded
of the episode in volume four.
The narrator, who is now a young man, is riding the local train in
the Balbec area together with Albertine, whom he has just decided not
to marry. They start talking about a certain composer and she asks his
name. My dear child, replies the narrator in a rather condescending
and arrogant tone of voice, when Ive told you that his name is Vinteuil, will you be any the wiser? (Vol. II: 1151). He has superciliously miscalculated, however, and is immediately punished for his narcissistic arrogance. Not only does Albertine know Vinteuil quite well,
she is even close friends with the composers daughter and the latters
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girlfriend, whom she refers to as my two big sisters. This revelation

strikes him because it evokes momentarily the memory of the episode
at Montjouvain. All of a sudden it resurfaces from the depth of his
being, where it would apparently have lain buried forever, waiting to
strike out in vengeance. Like Orestes, fantasizes the narrator, whose
death the gods had prevented in order that, on the appointed day, he
might return to his native land to avenge the murder of Agamemnon (1152). This vengeance, he imagines, can be a punishment,
for my having allowed my grandmother to die or for the evil deeds
he merely witnessed, as for example his voyeuristic observation of the
sinful game of Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her friend.
Offhand, this episode is about the narrators jealousy at the
thought of his beloveds desire being directed at anyone other than
himself. Although we as readers can follow the logic of the torment of
jealousy that immediately leads him to change his mind about marrying Albertine, this account aims at an entirely different reality. Why
should the narrator be punished for letting his grandmother die, and
how ought we interpret the reference to Orestes and the assertion that
the narratorthat day long ago at Montjouvainhad perilously
allowed himself to open up within him the fatal and inevitably painful road of knowledge (Vol. II, 1152).
On the narrative level, the author has allowed his hero to learn
that in love we both profane and elevate the object of our desire, and
that in art we do the same. The same friend who suggested spitting on
the composers portrait singlehandedly assumed responsibility for
completing the septet, the musical composition which for the narrator
functions as a mental image of the opus he himself was to have created.
On the personal level, Proust feels thatlike Oresteshis pursuit
of what he saw as his holy duty and vocation killed his mother: dedicating himself to his art, even when it forced him to learn that profanation and idealization are two sides of love as well as of creation. He
was not able to write the deeply provoking volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, quoted above, till after his own mothers death.
What is decisive here is not so much the authors own personal
life experiencesalthough naturally they motivate his artistic creationbut the reality toward which he aims this opus. We get a
glimpse of this reality in the narrators concluding reflections on the
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pain he experiences when Albertine confides in himreflections

whose depth exceeds the personal level.
And at the same time, from my bitterest grief I derived a feeling almost of
pride, almost of joy, that of a man whom the shock he has just received has
carried at a bound to a point to which no voluntary effort could have brought
him. (Vol. II: 1152-53)
The artist draws on this allegory to express a kind of experience,

whichthough naturally grounded in a process which he has personally lived throughhe has subjected to an artistic process, thus forcing it to a level of reality that transcends the personal. Proust uses an
image of the circus artiste who plunges through a paper stretched over
a hoop and lands in another reality. This is the kind of plunge that
takes place in these pages of Prousts text, pointing toward a reality
which to the author is the only place for the experience of art. Theodor
Adorno has underlined this experience when commenting on the way
Proust let his narrator reflect on the death of Bergotte, the authors
literary alter ego: The idea, that Bergotte was not permanently dead
is by no means improbable (Vol. lll: 186). This reflection, says
Adorno, holds the essence of the experience of great works of art in
the sense that their substance could not possibly be not true, that their
success and their authenticity themselves point to a reality of what
they vouch for (Adorno 1991: 183). Taking Prousts involuntary
memories as our point of departure, I shall discuss the aesthetic experience I extract from our encounter with the universe of the novel.
3. Memory and Consciousness
According to Walter Benjamin (1999b), Prousts involuntary memories should be discussed in light of an assumption made by Freud when
he sought to create a model of the psychic apparatus. In brief, Freud
assumed that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive, an
assumption that seems to undergird Prousts conviction that memories
do not come to us through the mediation of consciousness, but in spite
of it.
Freud first presented this view of memory and consciousness in
The Interpretation of Dreams from 1900. He expounded on it twenty
years later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in the short 1925
article, A Note about the Mystic Writing Pad. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud asserted that, Becoming conscious and leaving
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behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible with each other

within one and the same system (1920: 25). He argued that consciousnessunlike other psychical systemsdoes not preserve impressions; on the contrary, impressions expire, so to speak, in the process of becoming conscious.
In this sense, memory traces are often stronger and more durable
when the process that has laid them down never reaches consciousness. If we transfer Freuds assumption to Prousts turn of phrase, we
can say that only that which has not expressly and consciously been
Experiencedthat which has not befallen the subject as Experience
can constitute an involuntary memory. According to Freud, gathering
lasting traces as the basis of memories is reserved for other systems,
which must be considered distinct from consciousness. Consciousness
has another functionserving as a protective shieldwhich is more
important, even, than receiving excitations. For this purpose consciousness is equipped with its own energy stores. It must above all
seek to protect the special kinds of energy turnover that take place in it
when it wards off and smoothes over the deleterious influence of excessive amounts of external energy. The threat of these energies is
detected by consciousness as the threat of a shock. The more consciousness accustoms itself to registering them, the smaller the traumatic effect of these shocks. Based on these assumptions the traumatic
shock can be described as a penetration of the protective shield and
the significance of fear lies in the absence of what Freud calls the
signal of anxiety.
Human impressions and sensory experiences belong to the category of surprises. Shock reception is facilitated through practice in mastering excitation; here both memory and not least dreams can be called
upon in an emergency. Normally, however, it falls to the waking consciousness to avert the reception of external energies, and thus consciousness has developed the attentive function which scans reality
prior to conscious registration. In the description above of the narrators arrival at Balbec together with his grandmother, Proust delivers a
vivid picture of the attentive function of a sensitive temperament,
languishing under the weight of the external bombardment of sensory
impressions. According to Proust, habit, memory, and boredom function to protect us from impressions by blunting our susceptibility.
Hereby, however, they incapacitate creation. In a way, shock seems to
have the opposite effect, as long as it does not overwhelm us and
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leave a trauma. The shock takes attention by surprise and thereby

opens our senses and makes our Experience significant.
Freuds model of the psychic apparatus locates Prousts involuntary memories in a theoretical system and simultaneously helps
us deduce something about the experience the reader encounters in
Prousts opus.
For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and
unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those
which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning
which it is possible for us to extract. (Vol. III: 912)
Only the impressions which, so to speak, sneak past consciousness,

and which are therefore saved in the memory system, can be retrieved
by being coupled with an Experience in the present, which through
this coupling in turn increases the quality of the Experience. The
stronger the conscious impression, the weaker the trace left in the
memory system. The greater its character as significant Experience,
the less it will attach itself as the kind of memory material which in
Prousts world is the stuff of creation.
Like the conscious registration of an impression, our conscious
memory would never in itself be able to evoke anything other than a
weak imitation of an earlier Experience because it is subject to the
logic of thought. Not even the most random processing can completely reconstruct impressions which the will, as Samuel Beckett (1999)
put it, has crumpled up. If a general diminishing of consciousness
has taken place, however, through inattention, or if cogitation has
occupied the system of consciousness and by an analogical miracle it
so happens that an earlier Experience is repeated as a direct stimulation, then this earlier Experience bursts forthnot as a copy or an
echo, but as the Experience itself being repeated.
The questions remain, meanwhile, whether and how a poet gains
access to this inner landscape which is banished by reason but lives its
secret life imprisoned in vessels of certain scents, colors and temperatures, and how he may convey this landscape to the reader.
4. A Psychoanalytic Perspective Aesthetic Experience on
In my reading of Proust I have emphasized the tension between Experience and experience and underlined that one characteristic of
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Prousts concept of Experience is that such Experiences come in pairs.

When an Experience in the presenttypically of a sensory nature
commingles with the memory of a corresponding Experience in the
past, the Experience appears especially strong and thereby gives access to a world of memories that is normally closed. In insisting on the
priority of the senses for access to that reality which he considered the
only one of artistic value, Proust followed the classical meaning of the
concept of aesthetic.
In Ancient Greek, aesthesis is that perception of reality which
relies on the senses. However, not only does Prousts concept of experience encourage an opening of the sensory approach to the world,
mediated by memory; Proust also leads and seduces his reader into the
erotic desire associated with the senses. On this level, an interplay
takes place between metaphorical expressions of the bodys erotic
appropriation of the sensory world, as when Albertine seductively
teases the narrator with her description of the desire with which she
imagines she will consume the ice cream they pick up from the Ritz.
The scent of hawthorn, which can be understood as emblematic of
the spellbinding garden of childhood, has become so dense in the multiplicity of that which is only hinted at and that which is actually
sensed, that it leaves the reader in that particular state of confusion
which characterizes the encounter with Prousts sensory world. The
boy is not merely charmed by the hawthorn; he is in love with it.
Within this enchanted world of sensory Experiences another world is
hidden, a world of great joys and bitter privation, a world of conquered experiences. Proust has not only given us access to the world
of the senses through his embodied imagination. With its aesthetic
yield of pleasure (Freud 1905a) this world has absorbed the other
world, the one in which we see the narrator experience desire, loss,
and sorrow. It is as if Proust has used the creative gamenot least
with metaphorsto shroud a more disturbing layer of experiences,
although these layers should not be understood as separate. On the
contrary, they coexist and determine one another.
Proust leads his reader astray, not merely on the semantic level,
where long interposed sentences contribute to the dissolution of rational thinking and progressive reading, disturbing our sense of direction. Through deliberate inversion of cause and effect Proust creates
these sudden surprises that stun the reader in the form of little shocks.
With his Borgian perspective on the complex simultaneity of time and
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space he succeeds in sustaining the readers examination of the immediate layers of significance of the text, while at the same time opening
up the layers of meaning which can only be revealed step by step.
Like a sort of aleph (Borges 1949) the reader is left in a position
where the usual permanence of localization and temporal succession is
suspended, while at the same time all the world is seen simultaneously
from every single angle.
In the scattered contributions to the discussion of the problem of
aesthetics we find in Freuds authorship, there are some that can aid in
a conceptual visualization of this contradiction between surface and
depth, and between that which is immediately Experienced and its
transformation into experience. One observation concerns that element of aesthetics which consists in deflecting attention in order to
open up to desire on a deeper level. It is to Richard Wollheim (1974)
that I owe this elaboration of one of Freuds discreetly articulated
thoughts which is significant to my discussion of aesthetics.
Freuds first attempt to approach aesthetics is found in Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious (1905a), where he introduced the
concept of incentive bonus or fore-pleasure (137), a concept he used
first and foremost to examine infantile sexuality (1905b). In Jokes the
concept of fore-pleasure refers to the ability of the joke to generate a
desire, which would not have been possible without the assistance of
the joke. The result is a much greater desire than that which can simply be ascribed to the joke. The joke achieves this release of desire by
disguising itself in the harmless apparel of thought, thus diverting
attention from the suppressed sources of desire. A good joke catches
us by surprise and we often dont know why we laugh, nor do we
usually comprehend what this special desire consists of. The uncertainty of our assessment probably constitutes an important intention
behind the joke. The thought dresses in the joke in order to catch our
attention and legitimate our surrender to laughter.
In a short article, Psychopathic Characters on the Stage, written at
about the same time, but published posthumously, Freud expressed
similar thoughts concerning the goalbuilt into aestheticsof deflecting our attention. In his discussion of modern drama, exemplified
by Shakespeares Hamlet, Freud asked how explicit the audiences
understanding of what is revealed ought to be in order to achieve the
desired effect. He answered that it need not be explicit. Indeed, if the
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artist is too explicit, he risks provoking the audiences resistance rather than the anticipated effect.
It appears as a necessary precondition of this form of art that the impulse that
is struggling into consciousness, however clearly it is recognizable, is never
given a definite name; so that in the spectator too this process is carried
through with his attention averted and he is in the grip of his emotions instead of taking stock of what is happening. (Freud 1905c: 309)
In the technical treatment of his material the artist must orchestrate the
dismantling of the audiences or listeners normal, conscious registration and judgment. Attention is diverted so that a deeper and not immediately accessible part of our psychic life opens up.
Freuds contributions to the question of aesthetics were all made
prior to the transformation of his theories that took place around 1920.
In these early writingswhich also include Creative Writers and
Day-Dreaming (Freud 1908), A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da
Vinci (Freud 1910), The Theme of the Three Caskets (Freud 1913),
and The Moses of Michelangelo (Freud 1914)he based his analysis
on a dynamic and particularly economic perspective. In the question
of aesthetic effect this meansas we have seenthat he considered it
from an economic perspective and limited it to the release of that desire, to which the artist has gained access by the means of technique,
circumventing repression and censure.
After Freud introduced the structural model and the theory of the
death drive he abandoned his examination of aesthetics, so it has been
up to subsequent generations to supplement the economical perspective with a theory that incorporates the concepts of the structural model, adding an experiential dimension to the aesthetic effect. Two
trends in contemporary psychoanalysis have contributed explicitly to
this project. One is Hannah Segals epochal work A Psychoanalytic
Approach to Aesthetics (1985), the other is represented by Christopher
Bollas (1993), who belongs to the so-called independent group,
going back primarily to the work of Donald Winnicott. Segals work
is based on Melanie Kleins theory, which directly concerns aesthetics, in her opinion a topic neglected by previous psychoanalytic discussions of art. What constitutes good art, she asks, and in which ways
is it distinct from other human production, in particular what we refer
to as bad art? She believes that Melanie Kleins concept of the depressive position allows us to further our understanding of the aesthetic
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experience of the audience (Segal 1985: 385). The depressive position refers to the phase in the development of the child when it
acknowledges the significant persons around it as real and whole objects. These whole, beloved objects are introjected and integrated in
the childs I, resulting, however, in a new fear, i.e., the fear of losing
or hurting the object, which in turn gives rise to a desire to make reparation and do good. The wish to restore and re-create is the basis of
later sublimation and creativity (386).
Segal referred to Proust as one of the artists who have given us the
most comprehensive descriptions of the creative process. Our focal
point here, however, is the aesthetic Experience. In her discussion of
this topic Segal refers to Wilhelm Diltheys concept of Nacherleben,
i.e., an unconscious identification. This identification, she goes on to
say, is directed toward the artist as well as to his work of art, and using the example of the classical tragedy she explains that the spectator
identifies with the artist who lives through and expresses his experiences of the depressive position. Simply put, the following takes
place:
The author has, in his hatred, destroyed all his loved objects just as I have
done and like me he felt death and desolation inside him. Yet he can face it
and despite the ruin and devastation we and the world around us survive
Out of all this chaos and destruction he has created a world which is whole,
complete and unified. (1985: 399-400)
The part of Segals rich analysis I wish to emphasize here is the idea
that the depressive way of processing a destroyed and chaotic inner
world contributes to the fact that the concept of the beautiful also includes that which is ugly: Ugly and beautiful are two categories of
aesthetic experience (401). This idea captures a significant moment
of the acquisitionon a personal and pertinent levelof the experience the artist has put in his work.
In Segals own words we can conclude about this psychoanalytic
perspective on aesthetics that, In order to move us deeply the artist
must have embodied in his work some deep experience of his own
and that the stimulus to create must have lain in the drive to overcome an unusually strong depression (1985: 403).
I shall conclude my discussion of Proust and aesthetics by adding
a critical remark concerning Segals conception of Nacherleben, or
Reading Proust
129
as she preferred, the unconscious identification with the artists work

of mourning.
The Kleinian school, represented here by Hannah Segal, interprets
aesthetic experiences as a purely subjective phenomenon. Via identification the subject experiences the grief work which the artist has lived
through in creating the work of art. The group around Donald Winnicott, however, and the literary Bloomsbury circle, argued that cultural and aesthetic experiences take place in a space in between, which
Winnicott termed the intermediate area or potential space. Christopher
Bollas (1993) has articulated this way of thinking through the idea of
the aesthetic moment. According to Bollas, this moment precedes
representational cognition and provides the person with a generative
illusion of fitting with an object (40). The origin of this form of experience must be sought in the childs experience of being one with the
primary love object, which is repeated in a kind of experience beyond
cognition. This is not because cognition does not exist, but because it
is experienced as something that takes place somewhere else, outside
the subjective Experience. In other words, the aesthetic experience
must be sought in the original experience of being a part of the transformational other, an experience that implies that we have internalized
not only an object but the process itself whereby we allow the object
to serve a transformative function beyond language and cognition.
It is the uncanny pleasure, says Bollas, of being held by a poem, a painting or some other aesthetic object that gives the aesthetic
experience its transformative character (1993: 41). Inspired by Winnicott, Bollas has substantiated the idea that the aesthetic experience
takes place in an intermediate area with an existential form of recognition, where the meeting with the aesthetic object is transformative in
nature.
Returning to Proust and his oeuvre we can use Bollas concept of
the transformational object to indicate that this transformation has
two aspects. One consists in tracing the experiences which can only be
rendered accessible through shocking sensory impressions and which
dissolve time and abolish the distinction between body and world. The
Danish poet Inger Christensen has referred to this state as amorphous and said that it implies an apparent lack of distinction between skin and air, body and world and that although it is paradisically pleasurable it is also, in its extreme consequence, deadly
(Christensen 2000: 27, my translation).
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Judy Gammelgaard
The other aspect of the transformationthat is, the one which

Christensen identifies as deadlyhas been experienced by Proust
personally in his pursuit of images that would satisfy his longing and
honor his artistic ambitions. Ill, bedridden, and finally dying, Proust
has transformed himself into his work of art, whose undying fame he
has imagined in one of his charactersBergottethe authors literary
alter ego.
Marcel Proust, one of the nineteenth centurys most distinguished
poets and the creator of modern aesthetics, leaves us with the question
Julia Kristeva has asked in a provocative tone of voice: Are we still
able to read Proust? Can we, in other words, overcome our impatience
and let ourselves be absorbed in a kind of reading which aims toward
indeterminable time? And will we be fascinated by art which has this
kind of tension between Erlebnis and Erfahrung that I have described as Proustian? Looking at contemporary art the answer seems
to be negative. With its, at times, overwhelming stimulation of the
senses burdening our sensory apparatus with what might be called
traumatic scenarios, contemporary art does not evoke those small
shocks of Proustian aesthetics. We live in a sensation-seeking society,
as the German philosopher Christoph Trcke (2002) has pointed out,
and I end with Trckes unsettling question: Are we able to make the
shocks of much contemporary art productive, when in fact the same
shocks have made this impossible?
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. Short Commentaries on Proust in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.)
Notes to Literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press: 174-185.
Beckett, Samuel. 1999. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London:
John Calder.
Benjamin, Walter. 1955/1999a. The Image of Proust in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations. London. Pimlico: 197-211.
. 1955/1999b. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations. London: Pimlico: 152-197.
Bollas, Christopher. 1993. The Aesthetic Moment and the Search for Transformation in Peter Rudnytsky (ed.) Transformational Objects and Potential
Spaces. New York, NY: Columbia University Press: 40-50.
Reading Proust
131
Borges, Jorge L. 1949. Aleffen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.

Bowie, Malcolm. 1998. Proust among the Stars. London: Harper Collins.
Christensen, Inger. 2000. Hemmelighedstilstanden. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1964. Proust et les signe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [SE], IV and V.
. 1905a. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in SE, VIII.
. 1905b. Three Essays on Sexuality in SE, VII.
. 1905c. Psychopathic Characters on the Stage in SE, VII.
. 1910. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood in SE, XI.
. 1913. The Theme of the Three Caskets in SE, XII.
. 1914. The Moses of Michelangelo in SE, XIII.
. 1925. A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad in SE, XIX.
Gammelgaard, Judy. 2011. Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust in
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92(4): 963-983.
Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Sein und Zeit. Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Kristeva, Julia. 1993. Proust and the Sense of Time. London: Faber and Faber.
. 1996. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press.
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1992. At lse Proust. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Proust, Marcel. 1982. Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. I-III. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Segal, Hannah. 1952. A Psycho-analytical Approach to Aesthetics in International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 33: 196-207.
Trcke, Christoph. 2002. Erregte Gesellschaft. Mnchen: Verlag C.H. Beck.
Wollheim, Richard. 1974. On Art and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
VII. Becoming Worthy of What Happens to Us:

Art and Subjectivity in the Philosophy of
Gilles Deleuze
Kasper Levin
Roskilde University
Aesthetics traditionally lends itself to a double meaning. On the one

hand, it is often referred to as a theory of art by which we can reflect
on our experiences with different material forms of expression; on the
other hand, aesthetics also refers to a more general theory of sensibility, as the fundamental ground for subjective experience. In the context of this books themes of art and identity, aesthetic dualism is central, because it immediately forces us to presuppose, in the analysis of
the role of art, a separation of the subjective level of experience and
the objective conditions for experience, as such.
Philosophically, aesthetic dualism goes back to Immanuel Kants
distinction between the analysis of a transcendental aesthetic (Kant
1781) and aesthetic judgment (Kant 1790). However, due to the pervasiveness of Kantian thought aesthetic dualism does not restrict itself
to the realm of philosophical aesthetics. This dualism leads to a common claim inherent in many approaches to art: that works of art must
be considered as representations, expressing or signifying an identity
underlying human subjectivity.
To name a few generalized examples, in psychoanalysis aesthetic
dualism is inherent in the understanding of artworks as representations of unconscious objects or desires (e.g., Freud 1910; Segal 1952;
Wollheim 1987). In neuropsychology the aesthetic dualism is inherent
in the claim that art represents neural laws of the brain (Zeki 2004),
and in phenomenology it is inherent in the conception of art as a rep-
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Kasper Levin
resentation of the intentionality of subjective experience (e.g.,

Ingarden 1965). In other words, subjectivity is presupposed in the
understanding of art. Though many exponents of various disciplines in
philosophy and psychology emphasize the significance of art to subjectivity, most often the model of art as a representation or reflection
of the world reduces art to an appendix to subjective thought.
From my point of view, the presupposition of a subjective identity
as a primary condition in art is problematic because it reduces the
genuinely creative or productive relationship between art and subjectivity to an instance of representation, reference, or reproduction. By
presupposing subjectivity in the understanding of art, the productions
in art are subjugated to general categories of subjective thought, reducing art to a reflection of thought rather than a production of it. In
my view, this perspective remains blind to the role of art as a genetic
or productive force in subjectivity.
The intensive engagement with art and aesthetics in the works of
the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is often portrayed as a means
of dissolution or a fundamental break with the discourse on subjectivity in both its psychological and philosophical expositions. According
to Deleuze, what is central to art is not an exploration of emotions or
representations of a world of perceptions, but rather the production of
sensations as the genetic principle immanent to subjectivity. The
claim that art does not represent, but rather creates or expands the
world we experience through sensations, means that the question of
art and identity is not an apprehension of a harmonious accord
between the subjective being and art, but rather an expression of a
fundamental dissension or rift. Thus, through the function of art we
are constantly reminded that the subjective acts of thinking, feeling,
seeing, or hearing cannot be presupposed. As Deleuze argued, we do
not experience art but we become subjectivities through it. Often this
radical aesthetic element of Deleuzes philosophy is reduced to a destructive dismantling of personal identity, exposing the contradictory
elements and internal oppositions of subjectivity.
Indeed, a genuinely non-human element of thought, beyond the
established notions of subjectivity and identity, does constitute a central force in Deleuzes approach to art. However, as I suggest, his
radical dismantling of subjectivity through art should not be considered as the end of subjectivity, but rather as an opening up of a crea-
Art and Subjectivity in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
135
tive domain in our constant involvement with the production of subjectivity as a way of organizing thought.
Deleuzes famous notion of the Body without Organs (taken
from the French poet Antonin Artaud) as the means of escaping the
subjective organization of thought, is perhaps the most renowned example of a radical non-human element in his thinking related to a specific work of art. However, this notion must not be misunderstood as a
rejection of the subjective element in art. On the contrary, the dissolution of subjectivity in Deleuzes philosophy is always immanent to a
productive endeavor, a launching of new organizations of thought. It
is in this context that Deleuze calls for a will to listen to and learn
from art. As I shall argue, what is produced in Deleuzes writings is
not a negative rejection of subjectivity, but an affirmation of life
through art. It is this affirmative openness or will to learn from works
of art that makes Deleuzes approach to the relation between art and
subjectivity a unique attempt to place art at the center of thought.
Nevertheless, this rather existential perspective in Deleuzes work is
often ignored.
By following a trajectory from Deleuzes critique of Kantian aesthetics and his own aesthetic notion of a transcendental empiricism to
his influential engagement with the works of the painter Francis Bacon and the writer Marcel Proust, I will analyze Deleuzes work as an
exemplary case of placing art at center of thought and consequently at
the core of subjectivity.
1. The Reversal of Kantian Aesthetics
Philosophically, the question of subjectivity and art in Deleuzes work
is closely related to a rigorous rethinking of the relationship between
sensation and thought, which makes aesthetics a central topic of his
writings. As seen in his reading of Kant, what Deleuze is pushing for
is the possibility of uniting the duality between the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience (i.e., the transcendental aesthetics) and the theory of art as reflection of real experience (i.e., aesthetic
judgment) (Smith 1996). On the one hand, the a priori forms of space
and time constitute the conditions for the possibility of our experience
and cognition, as such (the transcendental aesthetic in Kritik der
Reinen Vernunft [1781]); on the other hand, aesthetic judgments based
on the feelings of pleasure and pain are subjective and hold no immediate universal validity. Thus, in Kants transcendental philosophy, the
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Kasper Levin
relationship between sensation and thought is approached dualistically. In Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), one of the challenges for Kant is
how to account for the possibility of universal principles for aesthetic
experiences. Kants answer is based on a presupposition of a universal
relationship between the faculties of cognition.
While the transcendental aesthetic forms the necessary condition
for the given object and the universal possibility of objective experience, the universal principle of aesthetic judgment, as the subjective
reflection on real experience, is what Kant calls a sensus communis
aestheticus, or aesthetic common sense. In Deleuzes reading of
Kants aesthetics, the presupposition of common sense represents
what he calls a dogmatic image of thought that must be overcome to
reveal the real relationship between sensation and thought.
2. Critique of the Aesthetics of Common Sense
According to Kant, the external senses of the subject are passive receivers of intuitions of a given object, and the recognition of a sensed
object presupposes an active synthesis or accordance of the internal
faculties: understanding, reason, and imagination. Each faculty has its
own way of acting toward a given object, but in order to recognize an
object a faculty must find its given object identical to that of another:
the object that can be sensed must be identical to what can be imagined, remembered, conceived, etc. The synthesis of an intuited object
of sensation and the cognitive faculties is possible due to the imaginations creation of a transcendental schema combining the formless
manifold of sensuous intuitions according to the a priori concepts or
categories. The result of the different faculties total relation to the
transcendental form of a given object is what Kant refers to as sensus
communis, which is not to be understood as a common understanding
or a psychological disposition but as the universal condition for our
judgments.
In logical scientific judgment and practical moral judgment, the
schematization of the imagination is legislated respectively by the
concepts of understanding and reason as the pure form of desire. Aesthetic judgment, however, is described by Kant as a result of the effect
of the subjective common sense, which does not mean a psychological
or empirical outer sense, but [...] the effect arising from the free play
of our powers of cognition (Kant 1790/1987: 87). Because the aesthetic common sense is a free accord of the cognitive faculties
137
meaning that neither understanding nor reason has legislative power

aesthetic judgment cannot be determined by a concept, but remains
the subjective feeling of pleasure or pain. This is also why Kant described aesthetic pleasure as disinterested, since it is neither guided by
a speculative or practical interest. However, this does not imply that
the imagination is independent from understanding in aesthetic judgments of the beautiful:
Only where the imagination is free when it arouses the understanding, and
the understanding, without using concepts, puts the imagination into a play
that is regular [i.e., manifests regularity], does the presentation communicate
itself not as thought but as the inner feeling of a purposive state of mind.
(Kant 1790/1987: 162)
In other words, the feeling of pleasure related to an aesthetic judgment

of beauty is not produced by the empirical or sensuous encounter with
an object, but is the effect of the pure representation of a universal
subjective state of mind. In this way, the common sense also designates the result of an a priori unity of the cognitive faculties, without
which knowledge would not be communicable and universal. When
we feel pleasure from experiencing a beautiful piece of music or a
painting, we assume, in principle, that our pleasure is communicable
to everyone through the universal identity of subjectivity. Similarly,
when we say that a work of art is beautiful, the objectivity we claim is
not related to the conditions to which an object must be subject, but to
the mere reflection of an inner harmony or free accord between the
faculties as the condition for subjectivity, as such. As a universal principle for the subjective judgment and synthesis of knowledge, common sense is also what relates the transcendental conditions for the
true, the good, and the beautiful in Kants philosophy.
In this way, aesthetic experiences and works of art are described
as acts of recognition and representation in the subjective relation
between sensation and thought. This relationship not only presupposes
an objective identity given to the faculties as recognition (i.e., transcendental aesthetic), but also an identity of the subject that unites the
faculties in a harmonious accord in the effect of common sense (i.e.,
aesthetic judgment). In different terms, the a priori common sense in
Kant presupposes an accord between the unity of the consciousness
and the wholeness of the object. Deleuze questioned this assumption
and asked:
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Kasper Levin
[Is] it sufficient to assume this free accord, to suppose it a priori? Must it not
be, on the contrary, produced in us? That is to say: should aesthetic common
sense not be the object of a genesis, of a properly transcendental genesis?
(1963/1984: 50)
As Deleuze pointed out, Kants aesthetics of beauty does not leave

room for a genetic or creative element in the relations between sensation and thought. The presumption of recognition as a ground for the
external relations of thought reduces the act of thinking to a question
of representation of the already given. Kant described the spatiotemporal relations in the schema of the imagination, which connects
passive sensuous intuitions to the active faculties, as a mystery, or an
art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of
activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover (Kant
1781/1929: 183). In Kantian aesthetics of beauty, encounters with
works of art remain cognitive representations of an already given
harmony which is never explained but must be assumed.
According to Deleuze, however, the presupposition of a common
sense as ground for the aesthetic experience presents a problem in
terms of explaining the reproduction of sensuous intuitions by the
imagination, because the common sense necessarily presupposes an
inaccessible or hidden external harmony in sensible nature which
makes possible the identification or recognition of concepts. As a
result, intuition and conceptand, consequently, sensation and
thoughtconstitute a problematic duality in the Kantian system,
which does not account for aesthetics or sensation as genetic or creative elements of thought.
In his early main work, Diffrence et Rptition, Deleuze wrote:
Such a duality refers us back to the extrinsic criterion of constructability and
leaves us with an external relation between the determinable (Kantian space
as pure given) and the determination (the concept in so far as it is thought).
(1968/2004: 220)
Kants internalization of the subject-object relation in the presupposed common sense is based on an assumption of an already given identity of the subject, and remains blind to this external difference
between what is determinable in thought and the act of thinking in
determinant concepts. For Kant, difference remains empirical and, as
such, suspended outside the transcendental relations of the faculties
and unobtainable by the ideas of reason. The schematism of the imag-
139
ination therefore neither legislates nor creates the harmony between

intuition and concept, but merely adapts and reproduces it under the
given accord between concepts of understanding and ideas of pure
reason. On this account, Deleuze accused Kant of reducing the transcendentalthat is, the conditions of possibilityto a question of
adapting to or reproducing an already given aesthetic common sense.
In so far as the practical finality of recognition lies in the established values, then on this model the whole image of thought as Cogitatio natura bears witness to a disturbing complacency (171).
Deleuze objected to an image of thought based on the idea of a good
nature of the faculties (Deleuze 1963/1984: 21) and to the act of
thinking as a natural or voluntary exercise that formally leads to truth.
Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Deleuze criticized Kant for leaving out the
question of values in his critical project, and pointed to the model of
recognition in the common sense as a dogmatic image of thought,
blind to its own origin in the already established. This becomes particularly apparent in the judgment of beauty, because the harmony
cannot be ascribed to a legislating faculty, but must be assumed instead as a disinterested reflection of a universally well-proportioned
subjectivity a priori. Kants aesthetics remains dualistic, separating
the objective conditions of possibility exposed in the transcendental
aesthetic from the subjective feeling involved in aesthetic judgment.
In Kants theory of the sublime, however, Deleuze found an opening toward another basis for aesthetics that goes beyond the presupposition of subjective identity, representation, and recognition.
3. The Sublime: Toward a Genetic Principle of Aesthetics
Kant simply described the sublime as large in its absolute sense or
large beyond all comparison (1790/1987: 103). The sublime denotes
the wholeness that through its magnitude is not available to the reconstruction of the faculties. Contrary to the experience of beauty
grounded in the higher pleasure of the free and indeterminate harmony, the experience of the sublime is grounded in an unpleasurable
inadequacy of the faculties due to the limited powers of the imagination. The precondition for the experience of aesthetic magnitude is, on
the one hand, the apprehension (apprehensio) of the imagination
the inner partial presentations from the manifold or formless sensuous
intuitionand, on the other hand, the simultaneous comprehension
(comprehensio aesthetica) of the successively apprehended parts,
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Kasper Levin
the mental grasping of the manifold over time in a representation of a

unity of intuition. But the encounter with the whole of an absolute
magnitude creates problems in this progressive synthesis.
Apprehension involves no problem, for it may progress to infinity. But comprehension becomes more and more difficult the farther apprehension progresses, and it soon reaches its maximum, namely, the aesthetically largest
basic measure for an estimation of magnitude. (Kant 1790/1987: 108)
Our comprehension, Kant argued, has a limited range beyond which

representation of the progression of parts apprehended becomes impossible to imagine. The foundation for aesthetic experience of the
sublime is a feeling of unpleasure due to this inadequacy of the power
of the imagination. Only the experience of crude nature in its incomprehensible magnitude serves as an appropriate example of the
sublime. Faced with the immensity of natures formless, absolute
magnitude the imagination reaches its own limit. The comprehension
of any appearance in the absolute whole of intuition is imposed on us
from the law of reason, which knows no other determinate measure
that is valid for everyone and unchanging than the absolute whole
(114).
So, while the feeling of the beautiful represents a harmony between the faculties of understanding and imagination, the feeling of
the sublime expresses a dissension between the demands of reason
and the power of imagination. In other words, the sublime denotes the
impossibility of an accord between imagination and reason in the
comprehension of the rational idea of sensible nature as an infinite or
absolute whole. Thus, the unpleasurable inadequacy in the sublime
reflects the inaccessibility of the absolute rational ideas to the sensuously dependent imagination. It is not a psychological discrepancy,
but an inadequacy in sensible nature, as such, or what Kant described
as an encounter with a supersensible substrate (Kant 1790/1987:
112). Nevertheless, the feeling of the sublime is associated with a
certain transcendental genesis or creation.
In order for the mind to be attuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be
receptive to ideas. For it is precisely natures inadequacy to the ideasand
this presupposes both that the mind is receptive to ideas and that the imagination strains to treat nature as a schema for themthat constitutes what both
repels our sensibility and yet attracts us at the same time, because it is a dominance [Gewalt] that reason exerts over sensibility only for the sake of ex-
141
panding it commensurately with reasons own domain (the practical one) and
letting it look outward toward the infinite, which for sensibility is an abyss.
(Kant 1790/1987: 124)
Like common sense in the judgment of beauty, the sublime is founded

on subjective principles. But the feeling of the sublime more urgently
requires a genetic principle that is associated with the creation or development of a culture. This does not mean that the sublime is something produced by culture or imposed by society; it is, rather, the natural capacity for a feeling for (practical) ideas, a moral sense that marks
the fundamental relationship between nature, man, and the creation of
a culture. The subjective feeling of the sublime is not connected to
truth as an abstract idea, but rather to the practical destination of our
faculties as moral beings. In this way, the discord or dissension between imagination and reasonthe precondition for the sublimeis
also the genesis of a new harmony.
For though the imagination finds nothing beyond the sensible that could support it, this very removal of its barriers also makes it feel unbounded, so that
its separation [from the sensible] is an exhibition of the infinite; and though
an exhibition of the infinite can as such never be more than merely negative,
it still expands the soul (Kant 1790/1987: 135).
Confronted with its own limit by the demands of reason, the imagination goes beyond this limit in the sense that it presents to itself the fact
that there is something in sensible nature that cannot be represented in
imagination. Empirically the sublime is inaccessible to the faculties,
but expresses itself as a transcendental engendering of the genuinely
new, or, rather, that which can only be imagined. In this way, [t]he
sense of the sublime is engendered within us in such a way that it prepares us for the advent of the moral law (Deleuze 1963/1984: 52). In
other words, the analysis of the sublime introduces a final discordant
harmony between the faculties that is not presupposed, but is the result of a transcendental and creative exercise of the faculties. By introducing this element of creativity into his system, Deleuze argued,
Kant managed to go beyond the dogmatic image of thought toward a
genetic principle of aesthetics.
However, since the essence of Kants philosophical system, running through his three major critiques, is still founded predominantly
on the dogmatic model of recognition and common sense as a given
identity in the relation between the transcendental and the empirical,
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Kasper Levin
it can be said that Kants critical revolution changes nothing essential (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/1983: 48). But as Deleuze pointed
out, the analysis of the sublime presents a form of thinking fundamentally different from the dogmatic image of thought. The analysis of the
sublime in Kritik der Urteilskraft is an opening toward a genetic relation between sensation and thought. On this basis, Deleuze interpreted
Kants third critique as the genetic foundation for the previous two,
since it uncovers a deeper free and indeterminate accord of the faculties as the condition of the possibility of every determinate relationship (Deleuze 1963/1984: 68). Through this reversal of Kant,
Deleuze suggested that the element of sensation is not preconditioned
by a priori common sense or cognitive recognition, but is rather the
genesis from a fundamental encounter of differential relations between the faculties. From this perspective, Deleuzes critique of Kant
also overcomes aesthetic dualism between the aesthetics of possible
experience and that of real experience, between the transcendental and
the empirical. It is from this perspective that Deleuze called his position transcendental empiricisman image of thought in which art is
considered a necessary productive element.
4. Transcendental Empiricism and Art
In several texts, Deleuze (1962, 1968, 1972) illustrated the difference
that separates the dogmatic and the genetic relation between sensation
and thought by referring to a passage in Platos The Republic (c. 380
B.C) that lays out two different accounts of perception.
Take our perceptions, then. I can point to some of these which do not provoke thought to reflect upon them, because we are satisfied with the judgment of the senses. But in other cases perception seems to yield no trustworthy result, and reflection is instantly demanded. (Plato c. 380 B.C./1945: 238239)
Platos description of unprovoked judgments is an example of what

Deleuze, in relation to Kants general analysis of cognition, described
as a disturbing complacency of thought and that he found to be
dogmatic. But those cases where reflection is instantly demanded
mark the genetic principle of thought, to be found in Kants analysis
of the sublime. On this background, Deleuze described the sublime as
a fundamental encounter that calls for thinking:
143
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of

recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be
Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective
tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition.
In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but
that which bears directly upon the senses in an object which can be recalled,
imagined or conceived. (1968/2004: 176)
The conditions for subjective thought are not to be found in what is

possible to represent in general, but rather in the real encounters with
the differential or contradictory elements of sensationto quote Plato,
those encounters when perception yields a contradictory impression,
presenting two opposite qualities with equal clearness (239).
Contrary to the Kantian image of thought, presupposing the identity of truth and the good as pre-established recognizable subjective
givens in aesthetic experience, Deleuze pointed to a fundamental difference in aesthetic experience as the precondition for every phenomenon and production of subjectivity:
Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which
the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse... Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. Every diversity
and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders
of difference: difference of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential,
difference of intensity. (1994/1998: 280)
In this way, no general transcendental conditions of possibilities can

be given a priori, but must always be the result of a genesis or transcendental production in sensible nature. It is from this perspective
that Deleuze related his own philosophy to empiricism, not in the traditional sense as a way of explaining all knowledge as induced by
experience, but rather empiricism as a question of the production of
subjectivity. In his book, Empirisme et subjectivit (1953), on the
philosophy of David Hume, Deleuze criticized the traditional textbook
definition of empiricism as defined by the Kantian tradition, because it
mistakenly interprets knowledge as the most important element for
empiricism. Knowledge, argued Deleuze,
is not the most important thing for empiricism, but only the means to some
practical experience... because experience for the empiricist, and for Hume in
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particular, does not have this univocal and constitutive aspect that we give it.
(1953/1991: 107-108)
According to Deleuzes reading of Humes empiricism, human nature

and subjectivity are not given as such, but are always constituted in
the given, i.e., in a collection of ideas or in the imagination. As
Deleuze pointed out, the important questions for empiricism are: how
does the mind become a subject? How does the imagination become a
faculty? (23). To the empiricist, ideas are not representations of a
universally given system, but are the result of differential external
relations in the production of subjectivity. In Hume, Deleuze found
this in the relationship between atomism of distinct differential ideas
(nature) and the transcending principles of associationism (human
nature, subjectivity). Rather than presupposing a privileged harmony
as a precondition for meaningful and rational representations, Hume
claimed an atomic structure for our ideas by showing how the idea in
itself is a complete whole with no reference to other ideas. The relationship between singular and differential ideas occurs as a result of a
psychological habit in human nature, not as a result of the way the
ideas are given in themselves. Humes primary example is causality,
which, according to him, does not refer to the nature of how an idea is
given in itself, but is rather the result of a habit. In other words, habit
determines the imagination to make a transition from the idea of one
object to that of its usual attendant, and from the impression of one to
a more lively idea of the other (Hume 1888/1978: 170). The concept
idea should here be understood equivocally as both the sense impression of an object and the linguistic understanding of it. This
equivocality of the idea makes it possible for the empiricist to insert
habit and the laws of association as mediating principles between the
meaningless nature of distinct differential relations and the structure
of the subjective world of intentionality and meaning (Diderichsen
2001). Rather than presupposing a given identity represented in ideas,
empiricism takes its point of departure in the differential relations
between a nature of meaningless causal associations, on the one side,
and a meaningful human culture of habits or structure, on the other.
Between the immediate lifeworld of the thinking subject and the physical world, empiricism inserts the equivocal nature of human sensation
as a mediating principle (Diderichsen 2001).
Consequently, in Deleuzes interpretation, the primary question
for empiricism concerns the genesis of subjectivity, or how the consti-
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tution of a world of meaning and culture is possible on the basis of

immanent principles in nature. As opposed to Kants transcendental
idealism of common sense, empiricism does not presuppose subjectivity and the rational structure of the world as a given, but rather seeks
the conditions of possibility of thought in the chaotic multiplicity of
relations external to subjective meaning and ideas. The depth of the
human mind is indeed delirium, orsame thing from another point of
viewchance1 and indifference (Deleuze 1953/1991: 23). In this
perspective, human subjectivity is constituted as the practical structuring and affecting of the chaotic multiplicity of singular and differential ideas. On this account, Deleuze considered empiricism to be a
pluralistic theory of understanding and a critique of representationin
essence a thinking that does not suspend or reduce differential relations to an impure element outside the act of thinking:
Hume shows that representation cannot be a criterion for the relations. Relations are not the object of a representation, but the means of an activity. The
same critique, which takes the relation away from representation, gives it
back to practice. (1953/1991: 120)
This is also why the primary object for Hume is not knowledge or
truth, but rather subjectivity as the unfolding of practical ideas for
moral, historical, and political questionsHume is above all a moralist, a political thinker, and a historian (Deleuze 1953/1991: 33). It
is through this interpretation of Hume and empiricism that Deleuzes
introduction of the notion of a transcendental empiricism should be
understood as a pluralistic thinking that does not presuppose general
ideas of already established external relations as a condition for possible experience. In this image of thought, aesthetics is not a question of
identifying the conditions of possibility for a harmonious or sensible
thought, or the feeling of pleasure related to the reflection of subjectivity; it is, rather, a question of seeking the conditions for thought and
ideas in the multiplicity of differential relations directly in the sensible.
It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded
on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not
I have corrected a typographical error in the English text, in which the French word
"hasard" erroneously is translated as change.
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much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from
representation and to determine it as that which remains once representation
is removed... Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that
which only can be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential
difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. (Deleuze 1968/2004: 68)
Deleuzes notion of aesthetics is transcendental insofar as its origin is

not given in a transcendent relation between subject and object, and
empirical to the extent that it seeks the explanation of ideas in immanent principles given in the multiplicity of differential relations of
sensation. By not subjugating sensation to a model of representation in
the sensible, it reveals itself as a necessary quantitative force behind
the production of subjectivity and in this way aesthetics becomes an
apodictic or necessary discipline for thought. There are no general
conditions of possibility for the object of sensation, but only a mutual
determination of the object in the encounter between contradictory
forces of sensation.
We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even
a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the
thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.
(Deleuze 1962/1983: 3)
Sensation is in itself a symptom of an encounter that gets its meaning

from the existing dominant forces. The act of thinking is neither reflection, nor contemplation, nor representation, but a production of
forces. Deleuzes account of the relation between sensation and
thought resonates heavily with the ontology of Nietzsche and his notion of the will to power as a principle for the synthesis of forces (cf.
Deleuze 1962). Force is the result of a differential relation or encounter between opposing forces (i.e., intensities), which are the fundamental genetic condition for thought. Like Nietzsche, what Deleuze
suggested is that objects are expressions of quantitative difference
conditioned by immanent relations of force. Subjective qualities of
perception and affection originate and are conditioned by intensities of
differential relations of sensation. He claimed that The privilege of
sensibility as origin appears in the fact that, in an encounter, what
forces sensation and that which only can be sensed are one and the
same thing (Deleuze 1968/2004: 182), and that [T]he two senses of
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the aesthetic become one, to the point where the being of the sensible
reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art
appears as experimentation (82). In uniting the transcendental aesthetics of objectivity and the empirical pluralism in the production of
subjectivity, the understanding of sensibility must take its point of
departure in a genealogy of sensation that is not limited to what is
possible in general. Instead it must seek to expand the limits of subjective thought. It is in this perspective that artas the exploration of
differential forces of intensitybecomes central to the production of
sensibility and a necessary condition for the act of thinking.
In my view, Deleuzes philosophical unification of aesthetics is
remarkable because it gives us theoretical grounds for considering art
as a force of production at the center of thought. In this way, the question concerning the relationship between art and other disciplines of
thought also becomes relevant. From this perspective, Deleuze considered art to be one of the three great forms of thought, along with
science and philosophy. Art is not defined as more creative or productive than other forms of thought but differs in terms of what it produces. While philosophy is the production of concepts and science the
production of referential functions, art is the production of percepts
and affects and, as such, the exploration of the fundamental encounter
of differential sensations. In this way, art is considered as experimentation with the chaotic multiplicity of sensation, creating or exposing
new possibilities for structure, intentionality, and meaning. It does not
reflect subjectivity but rather produces sensations independent of the
perception of objects or the perceiving subject. According to Deleuze,
art is what forces sensation, and is in itself that which only can be
sensed (1968/2004: 182). And if art is what can only be sensed, it
follows that art, as a production of thought, is independent of philosophical concepts or the referential functions of science. At the same
time, however, what can only be sensed in art is also a presentation of
an external condition immanent to something still to be thought as a
philosophical concept or a scientific function.
Consequently, while philosophy captures sensation through the
creation of a language of concepts, science is deeply involved in creating referential systems that can account for the functions of human
perception and affection. Conversely, concepts and functions can
serve as the necessary external conditions immanent to what is produced or thought as a sensation in art. In this way, Deleuze argued that
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art, philosophy, and science serve as each others external conditions

immanent to the production of each. As an example, the artist may
have great interest in, and utilize, the scientific functions of materials
used in a work of art, but what he creates is only art insofar as it produces a sensation independent of the scientific functions of its materials. Likewise, the artist may be interested in exploring a philosophical
concept, but if the exploration does not produce a sensation independent of the concept, it fails to leave the philosophical plane.
So the work of art is not an imaginary representation, reflection, or
reproduction of any concept or function of subjective sensibility. It
does not express qualities of already felt or perceived affections and
perceptions, but is instead a preservation of a more primitive level of
sensation itself.
Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved in itself (quid juris?), although actually it lasts no
longer than its support and materialsstone, canvas, chemical color, and so
on (quid facti?). The young girl maintains the pose that she has had for five
thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it. The air
still has the turbulence, the gust of wind, and the light that it had that day last
year, and it no longer depends on whoever was breathing it that morning...
What is preservedthe thing or the work of artis a bloc of sensation, that
is to say, a compound of percepts and affects. Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects
are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who
undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity
lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the
absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by
words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a
being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself. (Deleuze 1991/1994:
163-164)
The aesthetic composition wrests free, or isolates, a bloc of sensation independent from the subjective lifeworld, because it can be
referred back only to a material structure in paint, canvas, or stone,
etc. At the same time, however, the material structure of the work of
art does not represent or refer to anything else than what is expressed
through it, namely, the forces of sensation. This is why Deleuze argued that the work of art exposes sensation as a relation of external
forces immanent to its own production.
We paint, sculpt, compose, and write with sensations. As percepts, sensations
are not perceptions referring to an object (reference): if they resemble some-
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thing it is with a resemblance produced with their own methods; and the
smile on the canvas is made solely with colors, lines, shadows, and light.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991/1994: 166)
It is in this sense that art can be considered a return to a more primitive level of sensation and, as such, the creation of the sensible or
what can be sensed. From this point of view, art can be considered a
non-human expression beyond lived experience immanent to the production of subjectivity. As a being of sensation that exists in itself, art
exposes us to relations of force outside our subjective being which at
the same time become immanent as a genetic force of our subjective
lifeworld. Contrary to psychological and phenomenological descriptions of the function of art as a reflection or re-presentation of a deeper meaning, emotion, identity, or essence of human nature, art is a
composition of pure sensations. We are not in the world, we become
with the world (Deleuze and Guattari 1991/1994: 169).
Because the production of sensations goes beyond any representation or organization of already given conditions, there is no
such thing as a theory or system of art in Deleuze. As Deleuze and
Felix Guattari expressed in Milles Plateaux (1980), In no way do we
believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems
whose solutions are found in heterogeneous arts (1980/1987: 300).
The work of art faces problems immanent to its own materials and
techniques in producing and presenting sensations. In other words, art
cannot be subjugated to a philosophical concept or a scientific function.
For this reason, Deleuze considered artworks to be singular and
his philosophy does not present a thinking about art, but is rather an
effort to think with art. This is not to say that Deleuze believed that art
solves philosophical problems (i.e., that it creates concepts), but since
the principles for the composition of the work of art are the same as
the genetic principles for the sensation it presents, works of art become that which call for the creation of concepts that correspond to
the sensations presented. What interested Deleuze was not the concept
of art, which is a solely nominal concept (Deleuze and Guattari
1980/1987: 301), but instead art as a practical thought which exposes
us to the question of the origin of the being of the sensible or the conditions for what can be sensed. Just as the genesis of the sublime in
Kant goes beyond the limits of what can be represented in thought, the
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encounter of intensive or differential forces in art is what expands the

limits of what can be sensed.
What is most interesting in Deleuzes perspective on art as a productive force is that it expands the possibilities of subjectivity. In this
way, art comprises a process of fundamental learninga pedagogy
of the sensesimmanent to the relation between sensation and
thought. It is from this perspective that the relations between art and
subjectivity become an intensely constructive endeavor in Deleuzes
engagement with works of art and why he insisted that art is an integral part of the constitution of a thinking subject, which should encourage us to pay attention to art practices.
5. Art and the Pedagogy of the Senses
In his book on Bacon, Deleuze wrote:
We do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say. They say that
the painter is already in the canvas, where he or she encounters all the figurative and probabilistic givens that occupy and preoccupy the canvas. An entire
battle takes place on the canvas between the painter and these givens.
(1981/2003: 70)
If Deleuze wanted to listen to Bacon and his work, it is not because he

was interested in his personal history or psychological profile as a
means of unraveling an intentionality, meaning, or existential narrative in his paintings. According to Deleuze, the primary battle in the
practice of painting is not a personal inquiry into emotional states or
an effort toward representing an already felt or perceived state in the
materials of line and color. Instead, what he found in exemplary form
in Bacons work is an exploration of a practical problem common to
all art practice, which is not a matter of reproducing or inventing
forms, but of capturing forces (40).
[F]or a sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body, on a point of the
wave. But if force is the condition of sensation, it is nonetheless not the force
that is sensed, since the sensation gives something completely different
from the forces that condition it. How will sensation be able to sufficiently
turn in on itself, relax or contract itself, so as to capture these forces, and
raise itself to its own conditions? It is in this way that music must render
nonsonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible. (1981/2003: 40)
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From this perspective, the question immanent to painting is expressed

in Paul Klees famous formula [n]ot to render the visible, but to render visible (40). This does not mean that the painter uses his imagination to invent new forms, colors, or structures. Quite the opposite:
since the imagined represents the already given subjective ideas of
what can be painted, these givens must be fought or cleared off in
order to expose ones self to new sensations. Like the painter Paul
Cezanne has suggested, not a minute of the world passes that we
will preserve if we do not become that minute (Deleuze and Guattari 1991/1994: 169). This is why the identity of a subject crea-ting or
experiencing works of art cannot serve as a point of departure or be
presupposed in an explanation of the composition of sensation in Bacons paintings. On the contrary: the subjective level of the encounter
with Bacons work is the result of the production or collection of sensations isolated in the material structure.
Consequently, the primary condition for the production of a sensation in the work of art is an escape from, or dissolution of, any given
subjective identity or organization. For Deleuze, listening to artists or
engaging with art is an exploration of what forces us to become human, or subject, to something. What makes us subjects is not a
sensible being, but the being of the sensible (Deleuze 1968/2004:
176). The necessarily destructive or dissolving element in the encounter with works of art is only effective insofar as it gives rise to a reorganization or production of sensation. To Deleuze, the good or effective work of art is something that forces us to think in terms of
new sensationsto become sensible beings. Is this not the definition
of the percept itselfto make perceptible the imperceptible forces that
populate the world, affect us, and make us become? (Deleuze and
Guattari 1991/1994: 182). In other words, by going beyond recognition and representation art becomes an experimental apprenticeship in
the forces of sensation.
6. Bacon and the Body of Sensation
In the effort to go beyond representation and wrest sensation from any
given objective or subjective organization, one of the main obstacles
the painter has to fight is the clich of the figurative, which subjugates
the eye to recognition or representation by relating painting to a given
object as an illustration or subjective narrative.
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According to Deleuze, modern painting has avoided figurative representations in two ways, by going toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation
(Deleuze 1981/2003: 2). While Jackson Pollocks work can be considered an exemplary expression of radical abstraction, Deleuze found
Bacons work to be an exemplary expression of isolating what the
philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard has termed the figural (Lyotard
1971). The figural is what goes beyond the rational representation of
discourse. In Lyotards writings, the figural resembles Freuds notion
of the unconscious as a primary process appealing to emotional or
sensuous experiences beyond the discursive domain of representation.
However, in contrast to Lyotard, Deleuze did not relate the figural to a
psychological domain, but rather to the production of percepts and
affects as a precondition for any emotional or perceptive organization
of sensations.
Taking the figural to mean the domain of pure figure, Deleuze
went on to describe the battle that unfolds in Bacons canvases as a
neutralization of the primary figuration, which means going beyond
the identifying relation between a given object or subjective identity
and the Figure.2 Bacons insistence on the Figure isolated from any
figurative or narrative association with already given objects or phenomena was what fascinates Deleuze. As Bacon argued, The story
that is already being told between one figure and another begins to
cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with paint alone
(Deleuze 1981/2003: 3). By canceling out the structures of already
established relations or associated narratives and meanings between
figures, Bacon wanted to explore the pure differential relations of
force immanent to the composition.
Contrary to the traditional interpretations of Bacons work, which
generally highlight narrative and existential themes of violence, torture, and pain, Deleuze found the most important endeavor to be what
Bacon himself described as record[ing] the fact (Deleuze
1981/2003: 26)which in Deleuzes terms becomes an effort to paint
the pure sensation. Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent
X is an exemplary case of this. Deleuze extrapolated:
To emphasize the contrast to the figurative Deleuze writes Figure with a capital F.
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When he [Bacon] paints the screaming Pope, there is nothing that might
cause horror, and the curtain in front of the Pope is not only a way of isolating him, of shielding him from view; it is rather the way in which the Pope
himself sees nothing, and screams before the invisible. Thus neutralized, the
horror is multiplied because it is inferred from the scream, and not the reverse. (1981/2003: 27-28)
What we experience as terrifying in Bacons painting of the Pope is

not a phenomenon or narrative illustration of horror that makes the
Pope scream, but the isolation of the intensive forcethe violence of
sensationthat produces the scream. As Bacon has suggested, he
wanted to paint the scream more than the horror (27). The isolation
of the Figure counteracts the re-presentation of violence as figurative
illustration or narrative scene to make visible the violence of sensation
in the scream itself. As a result, the portrait renders visible the invisible forces of the bodys becoming-screamThe entire body escapes
through the screaming mouth (20). Put differently, the body of the
Pope escapes its representational or illustrative figuration to become
an intensive Figure of the production of a scream.
[T]he forces that produce the scream, that convulse the body until they
emerge at the mouth as a scrubbed zone, must not be confused with the visible spectacle before which one screams, nor even with the perceptible and
sensible objects whose action decomposes and recomposes our pain. If we
scream, it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling. (1981/2003:
42-43)
It is not the visible or extensional bodily movement of a scream that is

explored in Bacons work, but the invisible or intensive forces of sensation directly in the material. According to Deleuze, the technique of
figural isolation in Bacons work exposes a direct encounter between
the material and the conditioning forces of sensation. The job of the
painter is to make the material pass into sensation. In Bacons paintings the Figures are not embedded in landscapes or backgrounds from
which the form emerges; instead, they are surrounded by uniform and
motionless fields of color. As non-figurative zones, these fields do not
relate to the Figures as optical depth or distance, but appear on the
same plane in an encounter that expresses static or potential violence.
It is the confrontation of the Figure and the field, their solitary wrestling in a shallow depth, that rips the painting away from all narrative
but also from all symbolization (xiv). Isolation is in itself an invisible
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force that neutralizes or cancels out the visible movements of the figures, making it possible for Bacon to wrest free, or produce, intensive
forces of sensationnot as moving bodies, but as movements in the
bodies, that is, as the intensive condition of movement itself.
Bacons studies of deformed and twisted bodies do not illustrate
constrained or forced bodies; instead, they are the most natural postures of a body that has been reorganized by the simple force being
exerted upon it: the desire to sleep, to vomit, to turn over, to remain
seated as long as possible (Deleuze 1981/2003: 42). The same applies to Bacons paintings of distorted or agitated faces which do not
derive their expressions from movement, but rather from the forces
of pressure, dilation, contraction, flattening, and elongation that are
exerted on the immobile head (41-42).
According to Deleuze, Bacon was centrally occupied with the
problem of expressing the elementary forces directly in the material,
to make the paint come across directly on the nervous system
(Deleuze 1981/2003: 26). This is not a new problem in the history of
painting, nor an effort limited to Bacons work.
This is a problem of which painters are very conscious. When pious critics
criticized Millet [Jean-Franois Millet, 1814-1875] for painting peasants who
where carrying an offertory like a sack of potatoes, Millet responded by saying that the weight common to the two objects was more profound than their
figurative distinction. As a painter, he was striving to paint the force of that
weight, and not the offertory or the sack of potatoes. And was it not Czannes genius to have subordinated all the techniques of painting to this
task: rendering visible the folding force of mountains, the germinative force
of a seed, the thermic force of a landscape, and so on? (1981/2003: 41)
In Bacons work the problem of capturing forces becomes a radical

exploration of the intensive and invisible forces of the body. What
science might explore as functions of referential relations in a system
of thermodynamics, Bacon explored through intensive relations of line
and color as the primary conditions for the pure sensation. In his
paintings, what is important is not the referential functions of material
structures or the figures representational relations to narratives, but
rather the expression as a fundamental encounter of differential forcesa static violence of sensationas the invisible conditions beneath
the visible organization of the body. This is also why Deleuze insisted
that what Bacon painted in his portraits were not faces but heads: For
the face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head,
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whereas the head is dependent upon the body, even if it is the point of
the body, its culmination (15).
What is exposed beneath the spatial organization of the body in
Bacons paintings is a formless matter of expression or an incorporeal
event of the body. It is in this sense that Bacons work forms a transcendental empiricism revealing sensations that do not represent an
emotional state or objective reference. As a spectator, I experience
the sensation only by entering the painting, by reaching the unity of
the sensing and the sensed (Deleuze 1981/2003: 25). By sustaining or
saving a sensation in the material, the painting comes to express an
event as an incorporeal effect that forces the body to become. The
body happens through sensation.
It is from this perspective that I consider Deleuzes approach to be
a remarkable opening toward a new understanding of the relationship
between subjectivity and art. Rather than representing subjective
sense-experiences or a pre-existing essence of sensibility, art expands
our capacity for sensibility through experimentation with intensive
still-to-be-actualized forces of the body.
Much like Maurice Merleau-Ponty compared the body to a work
of art (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002: 174), Deleuze suggested in his
analysis of Bacons work that art is a bodily expressiveness, a Beingin-the-World. But contrary to Merleau-Pontys phenomenological
claim that a bodily, pre-reflective intentionality serves as the organizational function in sense experience, Deleuze considered the body to be
an assemblage of differential forces with no primary intentional structure or natural identity. The subjective or objective organization of a
body is always the result of an immanent production of differential
relations. A body of sensation is a body insofar as it encounters other
bodies as its differential, intensive elements, or relations, of becoming.
Between two actual bodies or different points of the body something
undetermined is happening which creates a relation. It is this purely
relational image of the body that is captured in Deleuzes immediately
strange idea of a Body without Organs, inspired by a poem by the
French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud: The body is the body /
it is all by itself / and has no need of organs / the body is never an
organism / organisms are the enemies of the body (quoted in Deleuze
and Guattari 1972/1983: 9).
While Merleau-Ponty described art as an expression of the concrete man (Merleau-Ponty 1946/1964: 36), capturing the perceived or
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actual body of intentionality in sense experience, Deleuze saw art as

the production of a Body without Organsas a virtual domain freeing
sensation from the actual or already established organization. Somewhat schematically, the virtual here refers to the transcendental production, or creative field, that conditions the domain of the actual
recognition or identification of what currently is. Virtual does not
mean unreal or imaginary, but rather relational, in the sense that an
actual state or organization always presupposes the production of a
relational possibility. What we call virtual is not something that lacks
reality but something that is engaged in the process of actualization
(Deleuze 1995/2001: 31). The production of a Body without Organs in
art is at once a dissolution of the actual understanding of the body, but
also the virtual engagement of opening or producing new bodily relations, new ways of becoming, or new varieties to the world
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991/1994: 175). In this way, the Body without
Organs in art is an aesthetic effort to free the concept of the body from
its own idea, which resembles what his French colleague Michel Foucault has attempted to do from a historical perspective by arguing that
the soul is the prison of the body (Foucault 1975/1977: 30). The
Body without Organs is at once the dismantling of the self through
experimentation, and that which forces a production of new possibilities of subjective sensibility; It is not at all a notion or a concept but a
practice, a set of practices (Deleuze and Guattari 1980/1987: 149150). To create or find an opening toward forces of sensations still to
be sensed, the artist must neutralize or overcome the already given
subjective ideas of sensibility and the bodily habits in the act of painting. Deleuze described this as a preparatory work that belongs to
painting fully, and yet precedes the act of painting (1981/2003: 70).
Every painter has his own way of facing this invisible battle, but in
Bacon it is captured in a practice of making random or involuntary
marks, scrubbing or wiping the canvas or simply throwing paint. It is
as if, in the midst of the figurative and probabilistic givens, a catastrophe overcame the canvas (71). This catastrophe overcoming the canvas is not only a dissolution or destruction of the given subjective
ideas of the painter, it is also the emergence of another world in the
materiala body of sensation escaping the constraints of objective or
subjective representation. It is through experimentation with these
non-representative or non-illustrative traits that the painter composes
sensations beyond what is given in subjective experience. In this way,
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according to Deleuze, Bacons compositions expose a sensibility of

the eye beyond the visual domain: It is a violent chaos in relation to
figurative givens, but it is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new
order in painting (72). Rhythm is more profound than vision, hearing,
etc., because it is a transcendent force immanent to the exercise of the
faculties. Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual (30). By relating the
Figures to a rhythm, Bacons paintings go beyond the visual domain
of painting and are no longer just a question of seeing, but also of
tasting, hearing, or feeling with the eye.
To subjective sensibility, then, what is encountered in Bacons
paintings, according to Deleuze, are not qualities or recognizable objects remembered, felt, or imagined, but that which can only be sensed
as a limit of the organized body, forcing the emergence of a new domain. At the limit, the body is both subject and object and it is the
same body that gives and receives sensation, forcing an immanent
production of sensation. [I]t is inside the body that something is happening: the body is the source of movement. This is no longer a problem of place, but rather of the event (Deleuze 1994/1998: 11).
In line with Nietzsches notion of the eternal return, the problem that
artists like Bacon grapple with is one of how to sustain the intensity of
becoming as an immanent force in being.
That the present moment is not a moment of being or of present in the strict
sense, that it is the passing moment, forces us to think of becoming, but to
think of it precisely as what could not have started, and cannot finish, becoming. (Deleuze 1962/1983: 48)
This is why Deleuze determined the body of sensation as a problem of

understanding an event. The body of sensation is an event of that
which can only be sensed; an event that forces the body beyond what
can be remembered or imagined (i.e., beyond common sense). The
Body without Organs does not mean or signify anything, but is created or laid out as an assemblage of points of immanent difference, a
something happening or a sign that perplexes the soul and forces
us to think. Many have interpreted this element of Deleuzes thought
as a call for radical dissolution of our organized self and subjectivity.
However, as Deleuze pointed out, Dismantling the organism has
never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage (1980/1987: 160). What
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Deleuzes engagement with art calls for is not a rejection or denial of

subjective thought, but rather an experimentation with the relational
forces external to the actualization of subjective thought.
In this perspective, the relationship between subjectivity and art in
Deleuzes writings is closely related to what Nietzsche once described
as an endeavor to stop dragging the past through the future in order
to become who we are (Nietzsche 1887/2001: 189). From this existential point of view, I find that Deleuzes description of the constructive relationship between subjectivity and art comes across most vividly in his idea of art as a fundamental process of learning.
7. Proust and the Apprenticeship of Signs
From the aesthetic perspective of Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, learning is not defined in terms of knowledge or the possession
of truth, but rather as the encounter with a problem that raises a faculty to the level of its transcendent exercise, i.e., going beyond recognition and representation. Learning takes place not in the relation between a representation and an action (reproduction of the Same) but in
the relation between a sign and a response (encounter with the Other)
(Deleuze 1968/2004: 25).
A sign should here be understood in terms of Deleuzes theory of
sensation, as a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force,
rather than as an appearance or apparition of a given phenomenon.
The subjective meaning of a sign is never given, but always the result
of an encounter between forces external to the idea of subjectivity. A
sign is a sign because we do not know the meaning of it. For this reason, Deleuzes question is not what a sign is, but rather how it is used,
discovered, or interpreted. Consequently, Deleuze rejected the idea of
a method for learning, but found the source of learning in a violent
training through fundamental encounters with differential forces
immanent to thought. With regards to sensibility, the apprentice attempts to give birth to that second power which grasps that which
only can be sensed (Deleuze 1968/2004: 205).
It is particularly in relation to the work of Proust that Deleuze unfolds the idea of a learning relationship in the engagement with art. In
his book Proust et les Signes, Deleuze wrote:
A work of art is worth more than a philosophical work; for what is enveloped
in the sign is more profound than all the explicit significations. What does
violence to us is richer than all the fruits of our goodwill or of our conscious
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work, and more important than thought is what is food for thought.
(1964/2000: 30)
According to Deleuze, the central theme in Prousts monumental

work, la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), is the narrators
exploration of signs as a fundamental apprenticeship involved in becoming an artist. Contrary to traditional interpretations, Deleuze did
not find the unity of la recherche du temps perdu to be an examination of memory, but rather a search for truth. This search does include explorations of memories, but only as part of the narrator Marcels apprenticeship of deciphering involuntary pluralistic signs.
Learning is essentially concerned with signs. Signs are the object of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge. To learn is first of all to
consider a substance, an object, a being as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted. There is no apprentice who is not the Egyptologist of
something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs
of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease.
(1964/2000: 4)
In la recherche du temps perdu the narrator is affected by signs that

compel him to seek their meaning beyond their immediate appearance. On the one hand, the signs are only there because the narrator
attends to them; on the other hand, the reason why he attends to them
is that they overwhelm him with feelings that compel him to explore
what they mean. In Deleuzes analysis, the narrator explores four different worlds of signs, which correspond to different structures of
time. What unifies the different worlds or structures is their formation
of systems or collections of signs with intersecting persons, objects,
and substances. However, even though the sign systems are unified by
these signs, a man can be skillful at deciphering the signs of one
realm but remain a fool in every other case... we discover no truth, we
learn nothing except by deciphering and interpreting (5). Since the
plurality of worlds is such that the signs do not appear in the same
manner and do not have the same relation to their meaning, Deleuze
asserted that signs are both unifying and pluralistic in the production
of truth and meaning. Thus, the truth of the sign is beyond significance. The sign is the external force immanent to the production of
meaning and truth. It does not signify an already established or stable
truth in the world, but it is rather the essence that calls for the production of different worlds. The essential aspect of the search for truth
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does not reside in the involuntary memories, but rather in the learning
process that they give rise to: What is important is that the hero does
not know certain things at the start, gradually learns them, and finally
receives an ultimate revelation (3-4).
What the narrator comes to learn in la recherche du temps perdu
is that sensuous signs already refer to an ideal essence of sensation
incarnated in the material meaning, which is only revealed in the dematerialized or virtual world of art. In this way, Deleuze argued, la
recherche du temps perdu explores or produces different structures of
time, corresponding to the different world of signs. In opposition to
the dogmatic image of thought represented by common sense, what
forces the narrator to think or search for the truth are not natural or
voluntary acts, but the events of involuntary sensuous signs that compel him to decipher or unfold their meaning.
The involuntary memories in Prousts work should not, according
to Deleuze, be understood as an exposition of reminiscence or of actual events of the past, but rather as a composition of virtual events that
force on us a sensibility for that which happensevents that force us
to become sensitive or open to different worlds of signs. The event is
always and at the same time something which has just happened and
something about to happen; never something which is happening
(Deleuze 1969/2004: 73). The event should not be understood as the
active synthesis of present moments exercised by our faculties, but as
the passive synthesis of time which is the primary condition for a contemplative mind; our expectation that it will continue, that one or
two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case (Deleuze 1968/2004: 94-95).
Consequently, the ideal essence of sensuous signs in la recherche du temps perdu expresses a creative composition of events, which
folds differential forces of time into being and gives rise to a sensibility for a world of signs.
To be sensitive to signs, to consider the world as an object to be deciphered,
is doubtless a gift. But this gift risks remaining buried in us if we do not
make the necessary encounters, and these encounters would remain ineffective if we failed to overcome certain stock notions. (Deleuze 1964/2000: 27)
In my view, the understanding of art as an apprenticeship of signs

uncovers an existential side to Deleuzes writings that is often overlooked. The description of the relationship between subjectivity and
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art as being sensitive to signs might even reveal a normative prescription or ethical imperative to be drawn from art.
8. Becoming Worthy of the Event
The normative force of being sensitive to signs is transcendental insofar as sensuous signs do not depend on a subjective or objective being,
and empirical insofar as signs or sensations are pluralistic.
To be sensitive to signs or open to new varieties of the world is
what Deleuze considered an affirmation of the infinite pluralism of a
lifenot the individual, or lived, life dependent on a being, but life
as the absolute immanent power carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects (Deleuze
1995/2001: 28). In his essay, Limmanence: Une Vie (1995), Deleuze
illustrated his image of a life with reference to a scene in Charles
Dickens Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), in which a disreputable
man is brought back to life. Those who eagerly try to save him turn
cold once he is brought back to his mean and crude self. What they
respond to and want to save is not the individual life of a man held in
contempt, nor life in general, but the pre-individual power of a life.
Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life
playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and
yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal
and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. (Deleuze 1995/2001: 28)
It is this impersonal, infinite force of a life within the event that the
artist responds to or saves in the act of creation, and which is actualized in the spectator as perceptions and affections. As Deleuze argued,
Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite (Deleuze and
Guattari 1991/1994: 197). Though empirically no general rules can be
given for these acts of affirmation, the will to free the forces of life
imprisoned within its actual organization reveals a normative element,
or willing, in art practice.
Although Deleuze never dedicated much of his writing specifically to the question of ethics, in his book, Logique du Sens (1969), he
related his ideas of the event to an element of Stoic ethics expressed
in the work of the French poet Joe Bousquet, exploring the bodily
wounds he incurred as a soldier in the First World War.
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Kasper Levin
He apprehends the wound that he bears deep within his body in its eternal
truth as a pure event. To the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait
for us and invite us in. They signal us: My wound existed before me, I was
born to embody it. (Deleuze 1969/2004: 169)
To Deleuze, Bousquets work expresses an exemplary case of willing

the event, as such. To will the event is not to resign and accept what
occurs (e.g., war or wounds), but rather to will something yet-to-come
inside the event: the purely expressed (170). Instead of grasping the
external wound inflicted on him by the war as an unjust or unwarranted incident, Bousquet apprehended it as a necessary event making it
possible for him to become what he already was through his writing. It
is in this sense that there is an ethics of the event or the purely expressed in the genetic relationship between art and subjectivity. Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us (169). To
become worthy of what happens to us is to affirm the impersonal
force of a life that does not refer to or represent any given subjective
or objective moral principles. The ethical principle of the relationship
of fundamental learning between art and subjectivity can be described
as an affirmation of the existential grip that sensations or signs can
have on us. To become sensitive to the chaotic multiplicity of sensuous signs through art imposes on us an ethical call for a creation or
production of meaning and signification that is immanent to what
happens. The work of art does not represent something outside its
material structure, but is rather a production immanent to its own being as a sensation. In this perspective, becoming worthy of the event
primarily implies not to do violence to the forces of sensation that
happen to us. Instead, art must appropriate the external forces that are
immanent to what happens to us. As described in Deleuzes analysis
of Bacons work, this is a challenging task that requires a battle
against the presupposed figurative or narrative structures of our world.
In my view, Deleuzes critique of the traditional aesthetic dualism
originating with Kant not only paves the way for a non-representational understanding of art as a production at the center of thought; it
also provides valuable insight into the existential grip that art and the
world of sensations have on us. Rather than becoming imprisoned,
victimized, or categorized by what happens to us, we can operate with
the event and make it something else by releasing the pure expressive
force within it. This is what painters like Bacon do by exploring the
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expressive force of bodily movements beyond figurative representation, and what writers like Proust do by exploring the forces of time
beyond the signs of memory. What Deleuzes reference to Bousquets
work illustrates is that art is a means of attaining the will that events
create in us. It is not a question of creating or representing events that
have happened or are happening in our lives, but rather an issue of
becoming the quasi-cause or operator of the impersonal pre-individual
effects of life as it happens to us.
Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles. 1953/1991. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature (tr. C.V. Boundas). New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
. 1962/1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy (tr. H. Tomlinson). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
. 1963/1984. Kants Critical Philosophy (tr. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam).
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
. 1964/2000. Proust and Signs (tr. R. Howard) in Theory Out of Bounds, vol. 17.
. 1968/2004. Diffrence and Repetition (tr. P. Patton). London: Continuum.
. 1969/2004. The Logic of Sense (tr. M. Lester and C. Stivale). London: Continuum.
. 1981/2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (tr. D.W. Smith). London:
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. 1995/2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (tr. A. Boyman). New York, NY:
Urzone.
and Felix Guattari. 1972/1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (tr. R.
Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
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and Felix Guattari. 1980/1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (tr. B. Massumi). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
and Felix Guattari. 1991/1994. What is Philosophy? (tr. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
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Diderichsen, Adam. 2001. Fra empirisme til subjektivitet: Deleuze og Hume in

Carlsen, Misha S., Karsten G. Nielsen, and Kim S. Rasmussen (eds) Flugtlinier.
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Freud, Sigmund. 1910/1964. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood in
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XI: 59-137.
Foucault, Michel. 1975/1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (tr. A.
Sheridan). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Hume, David. 1739/1978. A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd. ed. Oxford: Claredon
and Oxford University Press.
Ingarden, Roman. 1965/1973. The Literary Work of Art (tr. G.G. Grabowicz). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1929. Critique of Pure Reason (tr. N.K. Smith). London:
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. 1790/1987. Critique of Judgment (tr. W.S. Pluhar). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1946/1964. The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences (tr. J.M. Edie) in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1887/2001. The Gay Science (tr. J. Nauckhoff). Cambridge:
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VIII. Art and Personal Integrity

Bjarne Sode Funch
Roskilde University
After experiencing the beauty of the archaic torso of Apollo, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1907/1980: 61) declared that he must
change his life. Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions (c. 400/
1961: 177) that a childs song led him onto a renewed path of life.
Phenomenological studies of the aesthetic experience indicate that
people on rare occasions are overwhelmed by a state of clarity that
encourages radical changes in their lives (Chasman and Chiang 2000;
Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson 1990; Dorsky 2005; Elkins 2001;
Panzarella 1980; Roald 2007). Inspired by such descriptions, Monroe
C. Beardsley defined a set of criteria of the aesthetic experience that
includes a sense of integration as a person, of being restored to
wholenessand a corresponding contentmentthat involves selfacceptance and self-expansion (1982: 289). But how does art make
such a significant impact on human existence, and what is this effect
in psychological terms? With a point of departure in selected accounts
on human identity, a phenomenological approach is used in an attempt
to reveal how works of art may contribute to a new identity. I argue
that a work of art experienced as fiction provides the necessary options for constituting emotional qualities that have never been constituted before, thereby contributing to personal integrity. Toward the
end of the essay I propose that art enables an exceptional type of identity called the spiritual self.
1. Perspectives on Human Identity
During the history of self-reflection there have been countless attempts to define human identity. The following approaches are not
representative of the various accounts, but they bring forward some of
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Bjarne Sode Funch
the most crucial facets of the discussion. My inquiry is carried out

from a phenomenological point of view, investigating how identity
appears in experience. The phenomenological claim is, as such, that
the formation of identity theories need first and foremost to be based
on nuanced descriptions of the way identity is experientially present.
1.1. Who am I?
I am who I am. This is how we are told God answered when Moses
asked his name. Created in Gods image, everybody could say: I am
who I am, thereby defining very precisely their own identity. From a
phenomenological perspective I am the one I am in this very moment.
Being conscious in the present moment is ones actual registration of
ones own identity and this state of consciousness is continuously
changing. However, memory links one moment with the next in a
lifelong chain of self-identities, so I am never the same, and yet I am
always the same.
Gods definition of self demonstrates very well the contradiction
between the phenomenon of the self and its conceptualization. On the
one hand, God (and, for our purposes here, leave aside the matter of
whether he is fictitious or not) does not doubt who he is. He is the one
he is, just as you are the one you are and I am the one I am. Opening
our eyes after a long night of sleep we may wonder on rare occasions
where we are, but hardly who we are. Being conscious is unconditionally associated with an impression of our own identity. God is explicitly referring to the I, which indicates that he is not in doubt about
who he is. Our problem with God is that he has no image, and although we know of his accomplishments from the Christian scriptures
we still have a need for an image to consolidate these accomplishments similar to something in terms of our reality. But God remains
true to his own existence by keeping to the one he is, and in this way
he reveals that what exists in the present moment is truly the most
precise definition of his identity. However, we know from own experience that there is more to say. Being the one I am is very much the
same as being the one I was yesterday, or last week, or even last year,
even the same as I was when I was a child. The notion of identity indicates this sameness. When Moses asked for Gods name he was
surely refer-ring to this kind of identity. Gods answer, although it
does not comply with Moses inquisitiveness, establishes the fact of
being as fundamental to his existence and prior to any names. The
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difference between being and naming will be further clarified later in

this chapter.
1.2. What am I?
Asking himself about the phenomenon of personal identity, the British
philosopher David Hume came to a conclusion similar to the answer
God gave Moses. Hume wrote that,
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time
without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
When my perceptions are removd for any time, as by sound sleep; so long
am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. (1739/1969:
300)
In an attempt to identify himself, Hume did not find anything except

a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each
other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perceptual flux and
movement (300). He did not find any single power of the soul,
which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment (301).
Humes inability to attribute personal identity, which he knew well
from his own experience, is like Gods use of the pronoun I in reference to his own identity. Hume concluded that the experience of
identity is fictitious and actually unrelated to the continuous flow of
perceptions that makes up the mind. Instead the experience of identity
is merely a quality we attribute because of the union of ideas in
the imagination, when we reflect upon them. So he turned his attention from a phenomenological description to an explanation of personal identity. Hume stated that our notions of personal identity proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the
thought along a train of connected ideas, according to the principles
of resemblance and causality (1739/1969: 308). Resemblance as
well as causality, he argued, are based on memory by producing the
relationship among the perceptions. Hume concluded that, Identity
depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity,
by means of that easy transition they occasion (310).
Humes consideration of personal identity provided logical foundations for human nature rather than reveal its existential importance.
His leap from introspective observations to logical considerations
leaves the question Who am I? in a peculiar intellectual trap. On the
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Bjarne Sode Funch
one hand, identity is recognized as being fictitious since no feature is

reserved for identity alone; on the other hand, minds nature, in the
form of the uninterrupted succession of perceptions and thoughts in
light of memory, is recognized as the proper basis for identity. Hume
might have been right when he concluded that there is no feature to
characterize personal identity, but yet he referred to his own I as an
inevitable ground for his statement, reducing this I to the result of
some specific faculties of human nature.
1.3. The Me and the I
The American psychologist William James seems to contradict
Humes observations when he claimed that, Whatever I may be
thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence (1892/1904: 176). While Hume maintained that he could not find himself when searching his mind, James
declared that he found himself everywhere in his thinking. The difference in their observations is apparent. Hume observed that he could
not find any specific feature of the self among the many perceptions
passing through the mind; James found that his experience of this or
that was always associated with an awareness of himself, not saying
anything about the self as an independent feature of mind. In James
observations, he himself is present in any perception or thought, but
he is also at the same time the one who experiences himself. Consequently, James discriminated between the Me, or the self as
known, which is the part that is perceived and the I, who is the one
who perceives, also called the pure ego and the knower.
James described in detail the Me as everything associated with
oneself. In the widest possible sense, however, a mans Me is the
sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic
powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and
yacht and bank-account (1892/1904: 177). All these things are not
only ours, they are also so closely associated with our self that they
are our self, to such a degree that ones emotions are dependent on
their fluctuations. James suggested dividing the constituents of the Me
into three categories: The material Me, the social Me, and the
spiritual Me. The body is the most essential part of the material Me,
but also ones clothes, family, and home belong to it. The social Me is
the recognition one gets from other people. James pointed to the fact
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that if no one turned round when we entered, answered when we

spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met cut us
dead, and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and
impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruelest
bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that,
however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as
to be unworthy of attention at all (179). A person has in this sense as
many social selves as there are individuals that relate to him or her
and, as James said, carry an image of him in their mind (179). Finally, the spiritual Me is according to James conception the entire collection of my states of consciousness, my psychic faculties and dispositions taken concretely (181). At any moment these mental capacities can be the object of attention and elicit an awareness of Me. As in
any category, some things appear to be more external than others. Our
capacities for sensation, for example, are, according to James, less
intimate possessions than our emotions and desires; our intellectual
processes are less intimate than our volitional decisions. James maintained that the more active-feeling states of consciousness are thus
the more central portions of the spiritual Me (181).
The constituents of the Me arouse feelings and emotions in the category of self-appreciation, such as pride, conceit, and vanity on the
one hand, and modesty, humility, shame, and personal despair on the
other. Furthermore, they give occasion for acts of self-seeking and self
preservation. James description of the Me is a meticulous review of
how some of our perceptions are loaded with emotions and intentions
that relate directly to our self and form our personal identity.
James became humble and less eloquent when he reached the point
of describing the I, the knower. He wrote that, The I, or pure ego is
a very much more difficult subject of inquiry than the Me. It is that
which at any given moment is conscious, whereas the Me is only one
of the things which it is conscious of (1892/1904: 195). After this
short definition James asked what the thinker is and he took straight
away the same path as Hume by suggesting the passing state of consciousness itself as the constituent of I (196). He rejected the idea of
a permanent entity behind the passing states of consciousness, sometimes called the soul, the transcendental ego, or the spirit, and
concluded that psychology as a natural science only needed the states
of consciousness to define the I. In line with Hume, James pointed to
the continuity of thoughts as constituents of the I. He concluded that,
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Bjarne Sode Funch

The I which knows them [i.e., the things that are known] cannot itself be an
aggregate; neither for psychological purposes need it be an unchanging
metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the transcendental Ego,
viewed as out of time. It is a thought, at each moment different from that
of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the
latter called its own. The thoughts themselves are the thinkers.
(1892/1904: 215-216)
Whereas Hume trimmed down his experience until he found no independent self, James conceptualized his experience and described what
he called the empirical Me. His description takes its point of departure
in phenomenological observations, but they are conceptualized from a
third-person perspective rather than a first-person perspective. This
makes it impossible to distinguish between what is actually in consciousness in the present moment and what are intelligible descriptions of that content. According to the view that there is a personal
identity behind the many conceptions of the Me, James ended up with
a functional identity, an I that is nothing but the stream of thoughts
itself. Hume referred to resemblance and causality as principles behind the sameness that constitutes personal identity. James was less
specific about the ruling principles, but maintained that each thought,
out of a multitude of other thoughts of which it may think, is able to
distinguish those which belong to it from those which do not. The
former have a warmth and intimacy about them of which the latter are
completely devoid, and the result is a Me of yesterday, judged to be in
some peculiarly subtle sense the same with the I who now makes the
judgment (1892/1904: 201). Are the Me and the I in James conception actually one and the same? James was ready to think so. On the
other hand, his inquiry prepares the way for two approaches. One
focuses on the theoretical conception of self, the other on the phenomenological presence of self. The former prevails in contemporary psychology in terms of the narrative self, the saturated self, and the relational self, which I expand on in the following.
1.4. The Relational Self
James approach to the Me is eloquently put into a social context of
understanding in contemporary psychology. Kenneth Gergen (2000) is
one among a number of psychologists who points to the fact that human identity is determined by social circumstances. He even goes so
far as to claim that the very assumption of a bounded identity with
palpable attitudes (15-16) is an idea taken from Romanticism, which
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still prevails in contemporary language and understanding, even

though it is an understanding which is out of touch with human identity in the era of Postmodernism. New technologies have resulted in an
enormous barrage of social stimulation, which has major implications
for change in human life and identity today. This barrage of stimulation has resulted in a state of saturation, and Gergen points to four
major tendencies in response to this situation. Although new technologies have expanded human connections, Gergen recognizes a tendency among people to drift toward isolation. The abundant opportunities to expand social networks can be so overwhelming that people
tend to cement relationships with those who already share their way of
life, and this new situation contributes often to self-righteousness and
antagonism. Gergen also recognizes an increased state of technobewilderment, which means that people are no longer able to catch
up with the new and find order in chaos. Without having the means to
control the situation people lose their autonomy. Gergen believed at
first that giving up the familiar conception of ourselves as autonomous
and separated beings would intensify relationships and improve mutual understanding, but he later realized a tendency among people to
merge more closely with technology rather than with other human
beings. Finally, Gergen points to a continuous battle between an ever-expanding domain of social organization on the one hand and the
simultaneous subversion of organization on the other (xx). People
become reluctant to commit themselves in a world with everexpanding opportunities, where every new ordering is a threat to a
previous organization.
Gergens thesis is that the process of social saturation is producing a profound change in our ways of understanding the self (2000:
6). He maintains that the understanding of human identity during the
twentieth century has been dominated by a Romantic view inherited
from the nineteenth century as well as by a Modernist view. These
views attributed to the individual characteristics of personal depth
such as passion, soul, creativity, and a moral fiber. The ability to reason in our beliefs, opinions, and conscious intentions become a primary characteristic in the Modernist view. Modernists, Gergen writes,
believe in educational systems, a stable family life, moral training,
and relational choice of marriage partners (6). The social saturation
in contemporary life, also called Postmodernism, has shown itself to
be a radical threat to a previous understanding of the self. Not by
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providing a new vocabulary, but by casting suspicion on the concept

of personal essence itself. Thus, Gergen maintains, Selves as possessors of real and identifiable characteristicssuch as rationality, emotion, inspiration, and willare dismantled, (7) and his objective becomes to explore the impact of social saturation on our ways of conceptualizing the human self and related patterns of social life (3). He
points to the fact that our vocabulary of self-understanding has
changed markedly over the past century, and with it the character of
social interchange (3).
In his attempt to describe a general tendency in the understanding
of human identity in our time, Gergen (2000) states that new technology has not only provided new possibilities, but it has changed our
way of life to such an extent that peoples self-consciousness has
changed. New technology, in particular, has increased peoples social
relationships. These relationships have not only increased in number,
but also in variety and intensity. Gergen refers to a state of social
saturation, where people are getting increasingly emerged in social
relationships and exposed to the opinions, values, and lifestyles of
others to such a degree that peoples selves have become increasingly populated with the character of others (71), and the individual self
has gradually been erased. The process of social saturation, argues
Gergen, has led to multiphrenia: a new constellation of feelings or
sensibilities originating in the splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments (73-74). The everyday has become a chaos
of compelling opportunities and necessities. Gergen vividly describes
how even a day off from work easily turns from optimism to defeatism when thinking about the opportunities to get something done, to
do some repairs, get a haircut, bring shirts to the drycleaner, buy
birthday cards, get some exercise, go to an important championship
game, and have lunch with ones ex-partner. Multiphrenia is not a new
kind of illness; it is suffused with expansion, new opportunities, and
adventures, but as a prelude to postmodern self-consciousness, it is
characterized by a vertigo of values, expansion of inadequacy, and
rationality in recession. When values, measures, and the language of
others are incorporated, they not only provide an enormous increase in
possibilities, but also obligations to maintain the relationships. As the
population of the self increases, the range of its proprieties expands
because the range of what is good and proper expands. This expansion of self and its obligations easily leads to a feeling of inade-
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quacy, inactivity, and a feeling of emptiness because the obligations

are endless and sometimes even contradictory. Finally, as complexity
increases, rationality becomes meaningless. Varying relationships
with varying value make it impossible to make a rational choice because what constitutes rationality in one relationship is questionable or
absurd in another.
This prelude to a postmodern self may seem bleak at first, but
Gergen is optimistic and believes it is only a transition toward a relational self. He anticipates that we are entering a new era of selfconception; an era where the self is redefined as no longer an essence
in itself, but relational (2000: 146). I and you are transformed into
we, and the individual participates in its context as an integrated part
of social life rather than as an individual with his or her own responsibilities. Gergen writes,
As the emphasis shifts from self to relationship, multiphrenia loses much of
its lacerating potentiality. If it is not individual Is who create relationships,
but relationships that create the sense of I, then I ceases to be the center
of success or failure, the one who is evaluated well or poorly, and so on. Rather, I am just an I by virtue of playing a particular part in a relationship.
Achievements and failures, expansions of potential, responsibilities, and so
on are simply attributes assigned to any being who occupies a particular
place in certain forms of relationships. If one does not participate fully and
effectively, it makes little difference, since there is no fundamental I on
whose character this reflects. (2000: 157)
Although Gergens epistemological approach is very different from

James, his observations are a prolific addition to James description
of the Me. Whereas James mainly focused on what the Me is, Gergen
focuses how people relate to the constituents of the Me. Where James
pointed to the fact that the Me is associated with a number of things
and relationships, Gergen points to fact that those circumstances
change throughout history and that, to the degree they do stay the
same, people relate to them in new ways. Human identity has at any
time in history and in any culture been determined by relationships.
The difference between postmodern identity and identity in former
times is that people relate to objects as products of perspective rather
than as permanent objects. Thus, processes such as emotion and reason cease to be real and significant essences of persons; rather, in the
light of pluralism we perceive them to be imposters, the outcome of
our ways of conceptualizing them (2000: 7). This means that what
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was previously perceived as a relatively permanent and stable identity

is now subject to sudden and frequent changes, turning identity into a
state of relatedness.1
1.5 Perspectives on Human Identity
Hume and James philosophical arguments, as well as Gergens ideas
about the socially constructed self, provide a rich background for differentiating three dimensions of human identity. First, a state of beingI am who I amtheoretically reinforced by Humes observations. Second, the presence of an I, which is constituted by relationships; an I that is claimed to be fictitious and nothing by itself precisely because of its being constituted by relationshipsIdentity depends
on the relations of ideas (Hume, 1739/1969: 310), and the thoughts
themselves are the thinkers (James 1892/1904: 216). Finally, the Me
is not only the constituent of the I, but everything that in some way
characterizes the identity of a person. James and Gergen agree that
social relationships are fundamental to the conception of our selves,
but James pointed directly to the importance of the material world,
including the body, whereas Gergen recognizes new technology and
other material conditions as implements for certain kinds of social
relationships. He does not seem to attach any importance to the body
as a constituent for human identity, and what James called the spiritual Me is hardly taken into consideration.
2. A Phenomenological Approach to Human Identity
Any description of human identity is marked by the authors ideological and epistemological perspectives, but they all draw on phenomenological observations. This means that research questions in general
are based on conceptualizations with an origin in experience, whether
the author is aware of it or not. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated:
All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained
from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the
In his extensive inquiry into human identity Gergen does not mention the I which in
Humes and James studies is subject to careful consideration.
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world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless.

(1945/1962: viii)
2.1. Mental Vitality

Human consciousness is basically made up of a continuous stream of
sense impressions, emotions, fantasies, memories, and thoughts. They
are so plentiful and rich that it is impossible to become aware of every
single aspect. This makes phenomenological studies difficult. On the
one hand, human consciousness consists of all the aspects appearing
in consciousness; on the other, only a few aspects appear in such a
way that they are acknowledged. Most features of human identity
belong to the spontaneous stream of consciousness and only in exceptional situations are they the focus of reflective functions that make
them objects of awareness. Therefore, describing human identity from
a phenomenological point of view usually means identifying and conceptualizing features of consciousness that are infrequently the focus
of awareness. Mental vitality is one such feature that not only describes human identity but also consciousness and existence in general. Mental vitality is the psychological core of life.
Mental vitality is a permanent aspect of human identity and at the
same time it is almost impossible to grasp and conceptualize. Daniel
Stern (2010), who reintroduced the concept of vitality to contemporary psychology, refers to the physiological arousal system, but, from
a phenomenological point of view, vitality must be life as it appears in
consciousness. It may vary in intensity, but it is always present to
some degree in any act of consciousness. Mental vitality is the most
fundamental characteristic of consciousness. It is always present even
in cases where there are no reflective functions to make one aware of
it. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning the first sense impressions enter consciousness. Opening our eyes and acting on the
situation means that new aspects arise in the mind and take over consciousness. Soon these impressions will be taken over by others. This
continuous stream of consciousness provides a feeling of being alive
and this feeling is a general feature of human identity. It is permanent
in our sense of vitality, but at the same time, constantly changes in
terms of what arises in the mind. The dimension of always being the
same and at the same time never being the same is well constituted by
the sense of mental vitality. Mental vitality is, as such, an integrated
part of consciousness, and, therefore, always presentbut we are
never aware of it whenever it appears as the only aspect of conscious-
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ness. There is nobody of whom to be aware. We might get a

glimpse of our mental vitality as the first thing in the morning, but
reflective functions instantaneously arise and they are the preconditions for being aware of anything at all. This subtle differentiation
between pure vitality and awareness is fundamental for understanding
human identity because vitality, which is an essential aspect of identity, is never acknowledged when it unfolds without reflective functions. During contemplation, which is one of the most passive reflective functions, it is possible to glimpse how human vitality unfolds
when it is not observed. Sense impressions ebb and flow without any
order, memories and ideas arise, and so forth. But actually we dont
know if this contemplative awareness has an influence on the spontaneous stream of consciousness. One gets the impression of being the
sly watcher of ones own consciousness, like observing an animal who
is not aware of being watched.
What is most remarkable about mental vitality in its pure form is
that it takes up a major part of daily life although we are hardly aware
of it. There is a continuous switch between unreflected and reflected
vitality and there is good reason to believe that the former plays a
leading part in the same way that it takes over during sleep in the form
of dreams.
It is no wonder that it is difficult to grasp something present in
consciousness but not present in awareness. When James had difficulties defining the I this is possibly because he was bewildered by the
fact that mental vitality is fundamental to our feeling of identity, yet
when he looked for a representative of this identity he, like Hume, did
not find any. And when he finally found something representative of
identity, it belonged to the reflective functions and not to the core of
the spontaneous stream of consciousness.
2.2. Point of Experience
Ever since Franz Brentano in 1874 introduced the concept of intentionality it has been widely acknowledged that consciousness is characterized by being directed toward something. Any act of consciousness, whether its focus is on the surrounding world, inner ideas, or
feelings, it is always directed toward something specific. In other
words, consciousness is consciousness of something. The nature of
mental vitality, the phenomenological basis of consciousness including human identity, however, is not as simple as that.
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The spontaneous stream of consciousness is at any moment constituted by an experience appearing in consciousness as an undifferentiated whole. Here there is no differentiation between the experienced
and the one experiencing; there is not a someone directed toward
something. The experience is what the experience is. Even using
stream as a metaphor for a specific phenomenological characteristic
of consciousness in its most pure form may be misleading because a
stream of consciousness is a state of being that does not encompass
the awareness of a stream. Being a stream does not involve being
aware of the stream. When I use the term in this context it is simply
because I am in need of a concept to describe the nature of human
vitality and because James used it. Although the metaphor stream of
consciousness describes very well the continuous flow of sense impressions, feelings, imagination, thoughts, and so forth, it may unfortunately give the impression of something that takes place in consciousness in the form of a mental universe. This is not the case. Sense
impressions are phenomenologically located in the surrounding world,
feelings and emotions mainly in the body, and imagination in a virtual
reality that we usually call the mind. They are all mixed in experience
without any previous differentiation between an inner and outer
world.
The reflective functions of consciousness make it possible to contemplate, to focus and identify, to differentiate, analyze, and conceptualize what is taking place in the spontaneous stream of consciousness. Without these reflective functions human beings would always
and only be in the present moment without memory, without selfawareness, and without the ability to reflect on their own lives. The
concept of intentionality takes on a completely different meaning in
light of reflective functions. Originating in a mystical essence of being, depicted by the motion and direction of a stream, it has become a
concept referring to any kind of reflective consciousness that is directed toward something.
Intentionality is a general characteristic of reflective consciousness and it generates a permanent aspect of human identity, which I
call the point of experience. The point of experience is an integrated
part of intentionality and it is what makes it possible to talk about the
something that an experience is directed toward. This is what James
(1892/1904: 176) called the I and which is also called the pure ego
or simply ego. It would be tempting to introduce a kind of homuncu-
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lus and then try to identify its nature, but the point of experience has
no nature of its own.
The construction of a reverse perspective, used in Byzantine and
Russian Orthodox icons and sometimes in Cubism and other movements of modern art, may serve as an illustration of reflective consciousness. Reversed perspective is constructed with a view point that
is opposite the vanishing point in linear perspective with the viewer as
the point of departure for a three-dimensional visual scenery that
opens out like a Japanese fan and goes toward the infinite. An experience of the visual environment has from a phenomenological point of
view a similar construction. Any kind of reflective experience, whether it is directed toward the environment or the inner space of the imagination and thought, has a similar a point of departure from which the
experience is put into perspective. This point of experience is the very
point from which any experience is experienced, and it therefore constitutes a general aspect of human identity. The point of experience is
like the view point in reversed perspective with nothing but a point. It
exists only by virtue of the perspective and is nothing by itself. When
Hume realized that his own self disappeared when he removed all of
his perceptions he was describing precisely the fact that his ego was
manifested by virtue of the experience and was nothing by itself. He
furthermore claimed that without perceptions he would not exist. As
we have seen, this is not true. The spontaneous stream of consciousness continues uninterrupted even after perceptual awareness has
ceased. In other words, Hume overlooked life itself. It was not to be
grasped without a point of view.
2.3. Self-reflection
The phenomenological location of the I or the point of experience is
usually right behind the eyes. Experimental studies show that even
young children give the impression of being mentally present behind
the eyes. When they cover their eyes and say, You cant see me!
they usually refer to their conception of the I (cf. Flavell, Shipstead,
and Croft 1980).
With regard to identity, self-reflection is a special feature of human consciousness. People are able to focus on their own perceptions,
thoughts, and emotions in such a way that the original point of experience is included in the experience. In other words, they are able to
include their own I or rather the I in relation to the Me in an experi-
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ence. It is as if the I is able to be in two locations at the same time, but

this is probably an illusion because only one I is active at the time. I
am either watching the sunset or I am watching myself watching the
sunset. I am able to switch back and forth, but I am not able to be actively present in both points of experience at the same time. It is very
difficult to determine the location of the point of experience during
self-reflection, because I am not able to reflect on my own selfreflection in the present moment, a precondition for determining the
location of the I. The point of experience seems to be more flexible
than the ordinary I by taking up a position that in some way also includes part of ones own body or part of ones own mind. On rare
occasions, it may even be located in the eyes of another person or
even a fictitious audience, as when I watch myself from a distance.
Self-reflection is crucial to our knowledge of human identity.
Without self-reflection there would be no self-awareness or conception of identity at all. Without self-reflection there would probably
only be a kind of feeling of something, but not of what. Self-reflection
makes it possible to focus on the point of experience as it is actively
involved in life and this makes it possible to identify what it relates to
and how it relates to different aspects of the life-world. This leads to
the third dimension of human identity: the Me or the self.
2.4. Constituents of the Self
The point of experience is to determine the character of what is experienced and this determining factor is crucial to the feeling of an identity. When James (1892/1904: 176-216) described the constituents of
the Me and the emotions they arouse he was identifying precisely this
aspect of human identity. His description was obviously based on his
own phenomenological observations, but his ambition to present his
observations in general terms prevented a convincing description. For
example, James (179) described the social Me as the recognition a
person gets from his fellow human beings and he emphasized that a
person has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him or her. His approach is peculiar in that it affords recognition
to fellow beings rather than to the person himself, although by pointing to the recognition of others, he highlights an important implement
for self-confidence. James also limited the social Me to individuals
who recognize the person and carry an image of him in their
mind. This last point is a more accurate description of the social Me,
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or at least an aspect of the social Me. For describing the self from a
phenomenological point of view means describing it from the persons
own point of view. Therefore, it is the person who carries the images
of others in his or her mind. Those images are often of individuals to
whom the person relates in everyday life, but they may also refer to
photos, films and videos, or to contrived ideas. They may even have
the character of generalizations, such as specific groups of people; for
example, those who make the decisions in a company, the noisy people on the second floor, or the Chinese, the Italians, and so forth.
Those images are always linked to a specific emotional quality distinct for the existing social relationship. Thus, a person has as many
social selves as he or she has images of individuals and other human
entities, and these images are always emotionally loaded.
Love at first sight is an extraordinary experience and an illustrative example of how a social self is constituted. Such an experience is
first of all characterized by an emotional state of being. We often talk
about being fascinated by or attracted to another person, but these
descriptions are not specific enough to fully describe what is going on
emotionally. Our vocabulary to describe specific emotional states of
being is extremely insufficient, but, to describe it in a basic way, the
emotions of falling in love are elicited by the view or image of a specific person. This person is unique. She or he stands out from a crowd
of people and cannot be exchanged with any other person. There is
something so exceptional about this person that she or he gives rise to
emotional qualities that other people do not.
The constitution of the social self is based on complex psychological processes. Not only is the social self established through direct
emotional attachments, such as falling in love, it is also established by
a mirroring in the mind of fellow beings, as well as through social
interactions in which a person tests his or her own self-conceptions
and builds up new ones. Children who spontaneously catch sight of
other children within a big crowd of adults show the importance of
peers in identity making and that this emotional attachment operates
beyond recognition.
The self is one of the topics that have received the most attention
within psychology and it is impossible to encapsulate the nature of
these discussions in a brief overview. It is crucial for this study, however, to point out that the self is constituted within all areas of human
activity, including the physical space surrounding the individual, the
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body, the inner space of imagination, memories, thoughts, attitudes,

values, and so forth. In the following I want to sketch some parts of
this aspect of human identity in an attempt to describe how the self is
constituted through emotional attachments and to pave the way for an
examination of arts psychological function in the question of human
identity.
It has always fascinated me that the line of the horizon between
ocean and sky at all times remains exactly at my own eye level. When
I am standing high above the seashore the horizon is high up and right
at the level of my eyes; when I am standing at the beach it is as low as
I am. Inspired by the work of James Gibson, Ulric Neisser (1988;
1994) demonstrates how our eye level is an integrated part of our perception. We may rarely be aware of it, but we measure the height of
things in our surroundings by, so to speak, our own eye level. We
immediately know if a door is high enough to pass through, if a chair
is high enough to be comfortable, and we know the height of a tree
from how far it reaches above eye level. Neisser demonstrates how
perceptionas well as actions in the physical world in generalis
highly dependent on the relationship between the surrounding environment and the I. He claims that we all perceive ourselves continuously, easily, and vertically without having a mirror to look in. More
precisely, self-perception is manifested in any act of perception and in
how it is perceived. It is as if life experiences and knowledge of our
own capabilities are integrative parts of an experience. During everyday activities we are usually not consciously aware of ourselves as a
part of perception, but as soon as the surroundings do not match up
with self-knowledge people get in trouble. They become unsure of
themselves and even simple acts like walking can become difficult.
Neisser concentrates on self-perception and self-knowledge, but
relationships to the surrounding world are not only based on perception and knowledge; they are also emotionally established. When
traveling in a foreign country the architecture and cityscapes are not
only difficult to relate to, they are also experienced with an atmosphere unique to a particular place. In other words, we are attached to
places with our emotions and a specific atmosphere of a place can stay
in the mind forever. Neisser (1994: 397) mentions the peculiar phenomenon of returning to the house one grew up in only to find the
house and interior much smaller than one remembered. This is no
illusion, Niesser claims. Ones perception of size is always scaled
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Bjarne Sode Funch
with respect to the height of your gaze as a child or as a grown-up,

and, therefore, in memory it is bigger than in current perception. The
same phenomenon is characterized by an immediately felt atmosphere, which might be covered by a feeling of nostalgia, but the original atmosphere is closely linked to the place.
Neisser makes the claim that perception is the oldest source of
self-knowledge, pointing to the fact that even infants are aware of
themselves in the environments, and of the environments in terms of
their own bodies and possibilities for action (1994: 399). The fact
that most people live in the same place for years accounts for the longterm stability in self-perception that the surrounding environments
provide. This contrasts with the social self, as Gergen (2000) conceives it.
A feeling of the body appears in experience with an aspect of familiarity, just like social relationships and things in the physical environment do. An awareness of the body presents itself as one of the
first sense impressions when waking up in the morning. This is usually an undifferentiated feeling of a body being present at the very moment. It is a state of vitality, although there is a feeling of waking
from sleep to a gradual regaining of full vitality. This feeling of ones
bodya living texture of muscular tissues, trunk, head, and limbs,
with a certain temperature and moistureis one of the most permanent aspects of human identity. When Gergen (2000) talks about a
radical change of the self in contemporary western culture he refers
exclusively to the changes in social relationships caused by new technologies, and he completely overlooks the body as a constituting entity. The self constituted through the body undergoes, like any other
part of the self, culturally determined changes, but still the body constitutes some aspects of the self that are so universal and independent
of time that they are fundamental to a feeling of being the same person
throughout the course of life.
The body is so familiar and so much a part of experience that only
when something is wrong or different from the usual body-feeling
does it come into focus. A headache, hunger, or a sore back may detract attention away from the otherwise general feeling of the body.
The body-feeling is so fundamental that growing older, for example
often progresses so slowly that it hardly affects the body-feeling. Even
mental images of our body may stay the same over the years and be
out of touch with reality. I remember, for example, having an image of
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myself with a space between my front teeth that I actually had as a

teenager. One day many years later I suddenly realized that my teeth
had grown together and there was no space anymore. This is an example of how things are changing without having an effect on the general
body-feeling or body-image.
The inner space of consciousness is contiguous with the outer
world of social relationships, and so the physical conditions of life and
the body are an important area of constituents for human identity.
Neisser (1988) talks about the extended self, which refers to the fact
that we remember ourselves in the past and are able to anticipate ourselves in the future. But the inner space is not just based on memory
and anticipation; it is a living world of phenomena taking action in the
present moment without necessarily referring directly to the past or
future. Most people have had erotic fantasies, for example, and they
take form momentarily just as any perception of the physical environment does. Appearances of the inner world are similar to those of
the outer world by taking form in the same sense modalities, although
they are often much more transient and nebulous.
The inner space of appearances interacts to a great extent with the
conceptual world and it is difficult to tell to what degree emotional
attachments in the form of attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and ideologies
are based on forms or concepts. Both aspects constitute features of
human values, and, thereby, of human identitybut the basic link
between the forms of appearances and their emotional qualities are
prior to conceptual determinations of human identity. When people
are asked to describe themselves they usually point to general facts
such as gender, age, education, profession, and so forth. In other
words, they identify themselves with conceptions of general social
significance rather than with private circumstances, even when such
circumstances are ascribed more importance to the feeling of self
(Deurzen-Smith 1996: 59). This is not the place to discuss the difference between appearance and concept, but I will simply point out that
self-conception derives from self-awareness and self-feeling, while
self-feeling is constituted in the direct encounter with phenomena in
the outer or inner space of consciousness. Any aspect of the personal
Me or self can principally be referred to as an original encounter during which an emotional quality was linked to features of the appearing
form of an existential encounter for the first time. Therefore, any aspect of the self originally has a personal reference that is unique, and
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the appearance of this original occasion even in memory is emotionally the most intense and most valued aspect of the self in comparison to
later self-reflections.
New technologies have made it possible to experiment with ones
own identity in new ways. In cyberspace it is possible to take on new
identities, to play out characters you want to be or do not dare enact in
reality. This point is illustrated with a sense of humor in Sherry
Turkles reference to a cartoon from The New Yorker of a dog, paw on
keyboard, explaining to another dog that, On the Internet, nobody
knows that youre a dog (1996: 156). Playing with identities is nothing new. Children throughout history have been engaged in role play
and people in general have been creating imaginative identities different from those constituted within other life spaces. What is new is the
fact that cyberspace provides a virtual reality located outside individual imaginations, gradually becoming so elaborate and providing so
many options that peoples cyberspace identities can seem more real
than identities available in physical space. The many constituents of
the self have possibly never been in accordance with each other to
form an integrated harmonious identity. There have always been conflicting identities or at least opposites that could not be united in a
singular self. The formation of cyberspace has increased the options
for multiple selves. My classification of different spaces for identity
formation is only presented for analytical purposes. The social space
is not fully separate from the physical space, the body, the inner space,
or cyberspace; they interact in complex psychological patterns. The
Me, or the self, is nothing but the actualization of some of those patterns in the eye of the I.
2.5. Existential Attachment
In spite of the fact that the psychology of the self is extensive and
complex, the fundamental principles are relatively simple. In encounters with other people, conditions of life, bodily impressions, and the
inner space of the imagination, the individual responds with emotional
attachment. Selected sense impressionsor imagination with the
character of sense impressionsare linked to specific emotional qualities. In other words, forms of different modalities are linked to emotional qualities in order to structure the emotional basis for a meaningful relationship to the life world.
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The phenomenon of emotional attachment is well known from the

early bond between mother and child (Bowlby 1980) when the mother
or primary caregivers responses to the infant constitute the character
of the infants emotional relationship to the person in question and this
relationship leads in turn to a specific awareness, to thoughts, expectations, and behavior. This early attachment may well be influential for
social relationships later in life.
Emotional attachment is the basis of any physical or mental interactions with phenomena in the surrounding environment, other people, imagination, and so forth. Any appearances independent of modality and with some kind of importance to the existence of the person
are linked with specific emotional qualities. The formation of such
emotional attachments is the fundamental principle for the constitution of the self. When an appearance has an emotional attachment, it
also belongs to the person as part of ones identity. The emotion or
pattern of emotions that constitute a phenomenon is established right
away and stays the same, or it expands and develops over time. The
emotions linked to a specific phenomenon may not, however, be the
focus of attention. Thus, a great number of the most everyday attachments are so well established that it can even be hard to identify their
presence. Our attachments to our residence, belongings, and close
family members, for example, may, according to the emotional aspect,
be so far removed from awareness in everyday life that they may be
difficult to identify at all. But still the emotional bonding to phenomena in the world is fundamental to the feeling of self and, consequently,
fundamental to self-awareness and self-conception.
Emotional attachment is a fundamental principle of existential attachment. Any phenomenon that represents emotional value has existential importance; people do not just relate emotionally to their
world, they are emotionally engaged with it because the phenomenon
in question has some kind of importance to their lives. This is obvious
in the mother-child relationship and in a love relationship, but it is
also a ruling principle in the enjoyment of a hot bath, the annoyance
of a pimple, and the disinclination to take a walk. For any aspect of
life is bound up with specific emotional qualities and the world is
structured by sense impressions or imagination linked to these emotional qualities. Some of those linkages may be permanent after they
are established, staying for the course of life, whereas others may
undergo changes and differentiation. The emotional quality of an exis-
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Bjarne Sode Funch
tential attachment may in some cases be in focus, but more often they
are lingering at the fringes of consciousness. Emotional attachments
are in any case fundamental to the existence of the individual: they
determine the significance of each phenomenon in the world and at
the same time determine personal identity in the form of a self.
3. Art and Personal Integrity
A phenomenological description of the self reveals that human identity is an integral part of consciousness. People not only perceive and
act in their world, they are also attached to it through their emotions.
Whenever someone encounters his or her surrounding environment or
inner world the intentional subject acquires its importance by virtue of
the emotion it elicits and becomes linked to. This is also the case with
works of art, although art as fiction has an exceptional influence on
the human psyche by constituting emotional qualities that have never
been constituted before (cf. Funch 1997).
3.1. The Work of Art as Object
Art is fiction, but what does it mean that a work of art is fictitious?
Obviously, to be fictitious means to be not real in the sense that its
content does not refer to the physical world, but instead to the realm
of imagination. Henri Matisses painting of a red studio is not a studio
in reality, and artists are continuously challenging this distinction between fiction and reality. Tromp loeil is such an attempt to create an
optical illusion that may be confused with reality. Marcel Duchamps
ready-mades provide another example. While many installations, as
for example Christine Hills used clothing store Volksboutigue (1997),
challenge the distinction between art and reality, an aspect of nonreality remains to assure the works artistic status.
Instead of being something real, a work of art refers to reality. It
may picture reality, reuse real objects, or reproduce something from
reality. Without such references a work of art is not art. This delineation of art has also been challenged by artists throughout the history of
art. Abstract art by Vasilij Kandinskij and Kazimir Malevich exemplify attempts to create works without references. Minimal art, such as
the monochromes by Robert Ryman, is another attempt. Music is a
prime example of art that does not refer back to reality. Notes of music have the same origin as sounds in reality but music seems to be
abstracted from that reality, except in rare instances like Catalogue
189
doiseaux (1958), in which Olivier Messiaen transcribes birdsongs

into music, or Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra
(1972) by Einojuhani Rautavaara, who incorporates tape recordings of
birdsongs into his composition. In most cases, music and abstract art
make use of a different strategy: instead of referring back to something in reality, these works of art refer ahead to reality in the way
that they elicit emotions in people listening to or looking at the work
in question, and those emotions then refer back to the memory of
something in reality.
Although art appreciation is about appreciating art as fiction, it is
common to deal with art in other ways. A work of art can be recognized as an object like any other in reality. But in some cases people
are deceived into believing that a work is real, for example, by responding to a film as if the actors were people they could speak to
this response, however, is considered nave. People who reject works
of contemporary art usually make arguments that assume art to reflect
reality rather than fiction. Damien Hirst, for example, is blamed for
his treatment of animals and Jeff Koons for his attitude toward sexuality.
Art curators and art collectors may also in some cases recognize
works of art as objects in the sense that they are part of a collection or
that they represent something of economic or academic value. A
common approach to art as an object is connected to an appreciation
of formal beauty. Works of art are often valued for their compositional and color harmony. As soon as beauty is separated from the existential theme it refers to it takes on a quality of something real, in the
same sense that material, social, and economic realities are real. In
this way, beauty is something that makes our reality beautiful.
A work of art as an object is linked to emotions like any other object in reality. One could claim that fiction is also linked to emotions,
but this link, as I will soon describe in more detail, is of another nature.
3.2. The Work of Art as Concept
Conceptual art has had a prime position within the art world during
the last fifty years. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most
important aspect of the work, Sol LeWitt stated in his programmatic
article from 1967. This approach to art has found resonance within
academic circles where a treatise such as Language of Art: An Ap-
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Bjarne Sode Funch
proach to a Theory of Symbols (1976) by Nelson Goodman has had

groundbreaking importance for our understanding of art today. A
great number of contemporary scholars have expanded on the idea of
art as concept, symbol, or sign, and it is widely argued that arts psychological function is based on cognition by providing people with
insight, knowledge, and meaning.
Conceiving of art as concept, symbol, or sign recognizes a work of
art as a representation of something real. This approach to art differs
from one that sees the work of art as an object. The concept of love,
for example, refers to a specific set of emotions and behaviors; a yinyang symbol stands for complementary opposites that interact within a
common whole; and thunder signifies a storm. All of these cognitive
entities are representations of something beyond themselves. Whereas
objects represent themselves, concepts, symbols, and signs represent
something other than what they themselves are. The relations between
a work of art as concept, symbol, or sign may vary, just as the different concepts indicate, but the work in question represents something
that is not present at the same time. These relationships between
presentation and what is represented are based on certain conventions
that are more or less agreed upon, and without knowledge of those
conventions it will be impossible to understand the meaning of the
work of art in question.
Whereas the presence of a work of art as an object may provide
options for formal beauty as well as for economic and scholarly selfsatisfaction, the subject matter represented by a work of art provide
options for new insights and knowledge. Such meaning as a state of
consciousness belongs to the spiritual Me in James conception of
human identity. Meanings, conceived through works of art, contribute
to our understanding of life, our own and others existence, society in
general, and many other things. They contribute to values, attitudes,
opinions, and so forth as a result of new insights that are linked to
emotional qualities. The mental field of life experience, knowledge,
values, beliefs, and so forth has an incredible importance for the constitution of the self and, in spite of these features mental and sometimes fleeting character, they represent major capabilities that a person
can identify him- or herself with.
A returning question is if works of art bring new insight. LeWitt
maintained that conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.
They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach (1969: 11). Whether
191
this is true or not is difficult to say. In contemporary society there is a

strong conviction that creativity is crucial for progress within most
areas of knowledge, yet art is not on an equal footing with the sciences. Rather than providing new insight for progress in society, art may
offer exceptional conditions for the individual to gain new insight.
People commonly acquire new knowledge through their own experiences or through knowledge brought forward in texts and verbal
teaching. The arts have the advantage of presenting meaning as it is
intimately linked to sensation, and it is well known that sensation provides favorable conditions for thinking. Rudolf Arnheim (1969)
claimed that perception is one of the most important sources of information and that it provides the necessary grounds for understanding
the present condition of life. Broadening ones horizon extends the
mental self, and new insights pave the way for existential values that
may in fact become part of the self of the individual.
3.3. The Work of Art as Fiction
Fiction is created; it is an imaginary reality with the potential to elicit
emotions similar to those brought forth by encounters in existential
reality. Fiction may be a representation of reality and it may also refer
to a meaning beyond that reality, but, first of all, fiction has a domain
all its own within human consciousness.
Fiction is contradictory in the sense that people respond to it emotionally as if it were real, despite the fact that people know very well
that fiction does not have any direct influence on their existence the
way reality does. Guernica (1937) by Pablo Picasso does not pose any
threat to the spectator, and the sorrows of young Werther in Goethes
novel from 1774 are not the readers, although the spectator as well as
the reader might be deeply affected. Elsewhere (Funch 1997, 2007), I
have argued that their emotional responses are based in life experiences that are recalled and reflected in the work of art. Only the emotional aspects of those life experiences are recalled without further memories, which mean that they are spontaneously linked to the work of art
rather than to the circumstances that originally caused the recalled
emotions.
Art as fiction has an incredible capacity to evoke emotional states
of being and it would be a mistake to talk about an art experience
without an emotional aspect. Art in the form of visual art, music, and
literature plays with mono-modality in the sense that a work of art
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Bjarne Sode Funch
within the different fields addresses mainly the eye, the ear, or the
imagination, respectively. This is a unique feature of art. Everyday
encounters are almost always made up by a mixture of different kinds
of stimuli addressing various sense modalities at the same time. Addressing primarily one sense means that the appearance of the form of
the work of art in question is distinct, and therefore it is more easily
linked to an emotion.
Works of art have an advantage over existential reality not only by
addressing one modality, but also by employing artistic media that can
be varied to a degree that they surpass existential reality. The variations of artistic forms make it possible to provide distinct forms for
even the subtlest emotional qualities and to expand the repertoire according to new emotions occurring in new existential encounters.
Art as fiction confirms human identity rather than providing new
options. The exceptional capacity to elicit emotions makes art a source
for exercising and consolidating personal identity. When a work of art
reawakes an emotional state of being it provides a distinct form that is
adequate to the existential theme in question. Because this form is
distinct it reinforces the emotion and the existential theme in an experience that is often clearer and more intense than real-life experiences.
Clarity and intensity of experience are also boosted by the fact that
fiction does not lead to any action.
4. Personal and Existential Integrity
Art-as-fiction has a capacity to constitute emotions that have never
before been constituted through existential encounters. My theory, in
short, is that emotions are elicited by existential encounters and usually those emotions are linked to the sense impressions that are adequate
to the emotions in question. The first encounter constitutes a continuous linkage between the form of the intentional subject and the adequate emotional quality. Such emotional attachments may stay unchanged for years, or for an entire life, but they may also undergo
substantiation and differentiation. Experiences in which sense impressions or fantasies are linked to emotions are saved in memory and
may usually be recalled voluntarily. Once in a while the appearance of
a form of an existential encounter is not linked to the emotion it provokes, and, consequently, the experience cannot be recalled from
memory because pure emotions cannot be recalled. They are saved in
a concealed memory and can only be provoked by new encounters.
193
Concealed emotions are dynamic forces with an influence on the psyche that goes beyond volition. They may pop into mind unexpectedly
and exert their influence by disturbing basic awareness, or they may
even exercise their emotional force without being recognized. Therefore, it is sometimes of crucial importance that concealed emotions are
constituted in order to prevent their free movement in consciousness.
Constituted emotions are linked to specific existential encounters, they
can be reflected on, they may in some cases be intense and predominant in experience, but they do not drift around and disturb awareness
in everyday life. Works of art have a capacity to constitute such concealed emotions and in this way they contribute to personal and existential integrity. The personal mind regains its ability for mindfulness
and obtains a capability to act appropriately in future existential encounters.
5. Art and the Spiritual Self
Experiencing a work of art during emotional constitution is an exceptional state of consciousness that I call the aesthetic experience
(Funch 1997: 214-241). Erin Hogan (2008), a public affairs director at
the Art Institute of Chicago, describes such an experience from a visit
to The Lightning Field (1977) in New Mexico, a land art project by
Walter De Maria. Hogan had been travelling around by car to visit
major works of art such as Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson,
Sun Tunnels (1976) by Nancy Holt, Double Negative (1969) by Michael Heizer, and Roden Crater (n.d.) by James Turrell. Hitherto her
description of the works of art had been matter of fact, but at The
Lightning Field she felt awe. She writes,
When the sun was almost gone, the last remaining light slid up the poles,
and for a moment only their tips were visible. They all lined up, slightly
pulsing against the darkening sky. They were an army of hope reaching upward; they were bearers of flame against the encroaching darkness; they
signaled the meek attempts of humans to take part in the cycles of nature;
they were desperate and lovely and organized and chaotic. They were plaintive and proud; they were powerful. They made me write sentences like these, think grand thoughts in an inarticulate whir, be grateful and humble.
(2008: 125)
She continues,
they filled me with a cacophony of strong, vague feelings that never fell
into any form I could define as coherent experience. A warm, internal tor-
Bjarne Sode Funch
194
nado? A heady rush? Quiet exhilaration? Dare I suggest joy? It was all of
this and more. It was simply and inexpressibly beautiful. The sum of the
facts does not constitute the work or determine its aesthetics. (125-126)
Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977
An aesthetic experience transcends the ordinary consciousness of

everyday life. It is emotionally intense and characterized by an exhilarating feeling of pleasure and, at the same time, it is emotionally loaded with a quality that is hard to describe. The work of art appears as
an integrated whole with an exceptional distinctiveness and luminosity. On the one hand, the work appears as concrete and unique in the
present moment; on the other, it holds something that is general or
maybe even universal and sublime. The work gives an impression of
familiarity and at the same time it seems totally new and original. The
usual distinction between subject and object, inner and outer space of
consciousness, and the distinction between past, present, and future is
suspended and the experience is loaded with existential density.
An aesthetic experience is not only an exceptional experience that
transcends ordinary consciousness. It also reveals a type of identity
195
that is different from a state of vitality, an ego as a point of experience, and a self that is constituted by a wide selection of existential
attachments. The aesthetic experience reveals a state of consciousness
that reminds one of a spontaneous stream of consciousness, but in this
case the stream is vested with personal presence. There is no distinction between I and self, but rather a quality of being transparently
present in the entire experience. I suggest calling this feature of human identity the spiritual self because it is signified by the mystery
of life. In other words, the experience seems to reach out beyond the
limits of human understanding and at the same time touches on
themes that are fundamental to human existence. The experience is
imbued with existential density as if ones own personal uniqueness
forms a united whole with existence itself. It is private and universal
at the same time.
The spiritual self can be understood as a relationship reflected in a
relationship. The first relation is the encounter with a work of art and
this encounter reflects the life experience that originally elicited the
existential theme in question. Since the original encounter did not give
grounds for constituting the existential theme in question, the emotion
was saved in a concealed memory. This emotion is reawakened by the
encounter with the work of art which provides a distinct form for the
original experience to be constituted. The more fundamental to existence those life experiences are, the more existentially dense the aesthetic experience becomes.
The presence of the spiritual self during an aesthetic experience is
the optimal experience of ones own identity. It surpasses in complexity the feeling of vitality during the spontaneous stream of consciousness by personal presence; it surpasses the I by drawing on life
experiences, and it surpasses the emotional attachments of the self by
being united with existence itself. The presence of the spiritual self
during an aesthetic experience only lasts for a moment, but the experience is usually so significant that it is recognized as one of the most
valuable experiences in life, often remaining in memory forever and
regarded as an ideal for human existence.
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Bjarne Sode Funch
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Augustine. 1961. Confessions (tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin). London: Penguin Books. Originally published in Latin c. 400.
Beardsley, Monroe C. 1982. The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays (ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bowlby, John. 1980. Attachment and Loss. New York, NY: Basic Books.
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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Rick E. Robinson. 1990. The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum and
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IX. Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present:

On Our New Relationship to Classics
1

Stanford University
While our relationship to classics has so far become neither a typical

subject for exam questions nor for literary supplements, many observations, some seemingly trivial, suggest that this relationship has altered; altered in the way it is experienced by educated readers, not as
it is reflected in institutions, which are slower to respond to change.
As of yet we have no vocabulary to describe the shift; it has no name,
no agendabut it is certainly not restricted to the culture of any one
particular nation. It is, indeed, the very diffuseness of this new relationship to classics that both reveals and obscures this novel dynamic.
Wherever developments of this nature have been perceived in the
last three hundred years, two contrasting reactions have ensued with
reflexive predictability. There have always been voices that celebrated
a return to the classics as the inevitable triumph of absolute quality
in a literal sensesomething to be welcomed, as if the present were
correcting itself, albeit too late. Yet others, with a slight sense of insecurity, have asked if the retreat to classics is a symptom of the diminished vitality, even decadence, of the age.
We professional students of literature and the arts should have relegated such trite responses to the arena of dinner party repartee long
ago, since they are no more than arbitrary postures, adopted uncritically. Indeed, we have an obligation to do so to those who finance us.
Tr. M.J.R. Barley and W.G.F. Kelley.
200
The point is not to celebrate the latest development regarding the classics or to react with a frown. My alternative, in many respects more
challenging, is to argue first and foremost that our new relationship to
classics, still operating diffusely, has grown out of a change in our
construction of time (I shall employ the word chronotope as a synonym here, though I am well aware that this usage does not convey all
the nuances that students of Mikhail Bakhtin, the originator of this
term, would insist upon). Time-forms, as we know from Edmund
Husserl, shape the stage upon which we enact experience, including
the context in which we read texts we have inherited on the pretext of
their inherent merit.
My thesis requires attention because the transformation of our
chronotopewhich explains why our altered relationship to classics is
so all-pervadinghas escaped the notice of the humanities. Those
admirably complex terms historical time and history stillas, most
prominently, Michel Foucault (1966, 1969) and Reinhart Koselleck
(1959, 2002) have shown from such various points of departure
carry a range of reference that crystallized in the early nineteenth century. I argue that this range of reference no longer accurately characterizes the manner in which our experience is shaped in the present
day. The transformation has caught us unawares, caught, indeed, everyone in the humanities unawares. So our new relationship to classics
is in fact an important symptom of this new chronotope. Indeed, it is
becoming clear that our relationship to authority, and not solely to
cultural authority, has undergone a transformation in tandem with our
prevailing construction of time. For our new relationship to classics
seems more productive than it ever was in the era of historicism.
I will lay out my argument in five stages. First, I shall give some,
as already stated, diffuse examples that tell of a new relationship to
classics in our present. A brief reflection on the change in the meanings of the terms classic and canon from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries will follow. This leads on to the third part of my argument, in which I compare the emergence of historicism after 1800
(and its implications for the terms classic and canon) with some of
the reasons for its obsolescence in the third-quarter of the twentieth
century. Against this background it is possible to illuminate a new
relationship with classics, not justas I am arguingin diffuse instances, but, first and foremost, in a new way of reading. Perhaps surprisingly, in the fifth part of my argument I look at how the situation
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present
201
differs from country to country. If a nations relationship to words

such as classic and canon have changed over the course of history,
then we might expect differences to have developed also between
nations.
1. A New Relationship to Classics
It is often remarked that no brilliant thinkers have emerged among the
intellectuals of recent decades. This is more obvious in Paris than
anywhere else. Less than three decades ago, an educated person who
visited the city might have hoped to meet some of his contemporary
intellectual heroes at a seminar or in a caf (though the latter aspiration always accompanied a fairly predictable, romanticized notion of
Paris). For at that time truly world-famous thinkers lived, taught, and
wrote in Paris: the philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and
Jean-Franois Lyotard; the historians Franois Furet, Michel Foucault,
and Jacques Le Goff; the semiotician who became a literary figurehead for a new movement, Roland Barthes; and Claude LviStrausseven then a kind of father-figurewho was to outlive most
of the others. There is certainly no lack of highly competent and productive humanities scholars in Paris today, but only a few figures remain from that great period who give off any kind of auraMichel
Serres is one of them. This is surely symptomatic of our changed relationship to intellectual authority.
Simultaneously, we are more enthusiastic than ever before about
new (or recently augmented) editions of classic texts with extensive
commentaries. The letters of Louis-Ferdinand Cline, which do not
come close to matching the power of his literary prose, were a sensation in the French book market at the beginning of 2010. In Germany,
above all, the apparently endless flood of anniversary celebrations has
attained prodigious proportions, blazoning Johann-Peter Hebels verse
and blank face upon the pages of literary supplements and within the
shelves of surviving bookshops. Whenever institutions offering funding dare to refuse applications for new editions of classics, they find
themselves exposed to a storm of national indignation. Greater and
lesser classics have appeared, not only as carefully-edited texts, but
recently via widely-researched and well-written biographies, too,
which is all the more remarkable since, until recently, academics
anathematized this genre. It may have been Stephen Greenblatts biography of Shakespeare, as bold as it is lucidly speculative, which
202
after initial resistanceachieved the international breakthrough for

this genre. Since then, certainly, no one in Germany has been surprised by a series of weighty accounts of Stephan George, followed by
a history of reception which augments the biographical coverage; no
one has been surprised by abundant accounts of Schillers life, celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth; indeed, they are not even
surprised by a study of the life of the social historian Werner Conze, a
scholar who was as unoriginal as he was opportunistic in his dealings
with the Nazi rulers.
And all these books are read, discussed, and esteemed by a generation of amicable young scholars between the ages of twenty-five
and fifty who are profoundly competent in narrow fields and thus
avoid the Oedipal conflicts that ensue from advancing provocative
theses. What can the eminent ex-revolutionaries of my generation do
but renounce both the well-maintained practice of critical revision
and the ambitions of arcane seminars (e.g., Cultural Difference in
Alaska and the Problem of Frozen Traces) so that we may pay homage to classics, saving as much face as possible. Instead of being stubborn, and finding myself ignored, I have acquired the habit of advertising some of my lectures to studentsin an economical program
under the bare names of classic Western writers: Jean Racine, Voltaire, Denis Diderot and Gustave Flaubert; Friedrich Hlderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Musil, and Gottfried Benn; Lope de Vega,
Pedro Caldern de la Barca, Garca Lorca, and Luis Martn Santos.
Success in teaching Kleist to undergraduates convinced me that this
alteration to the degree course was more meritorious than one that
conformed to academic convention. The listeners at Stanford enjoyed
what they called Kleists linguistic mannerism: for instance, his
description of the protracted cry of a robber who jumped into a stagecoach and was hit by the coachmans whip, which lets us interpret
Kleists lapidary conclusion to a letter of March 1792: We happened
upon this charming concert in Eisenach at 12 oclock at night. The
students also returned again and again to the mismatched footprints
left behind by the village judge Adams apprehensive trudging
through the snow. Positively surprised by their fascination, when a
little-known university in central Brazil invited me to give three lectures on Kleist I could not resist the temptation. More young people
attended these lectures than any I had hitherto delivered, and they
came to hear both the German original and an improvised Portuguese
203
translation of Kleist quotes with which they were familiar. The suicide
of Kleist and his lover Henrietta Vogel by the Wannsee, and his final
letters written there, surprisingly (to me, at least) became a favorite
subject of theirs; in particular, the passage where Kleist likens the
ascent of his and Henriettas souls to that of two serene airships.
There, in Vitoria da Conquista, a middle-sized town in the Brazilian
state Bahia, if not before, it became clear to me that something fundamental had happened to our presents relationship to literary classics. At the time, though, this was not a change I could explain.
2. Classics and Canons: The Shifting Meanings of the Words
What exactly was and is the background against which we can identify and describe a change in our relationship to the classics? In Germany, no definition of the classic is more popular than Hans-Georg
Gadamers. By this definition, the eminence of these exceptional
texts is founded on their enduring immediate power to speak to us.
Implicitly, then, classic texts strike us as possessing a paradoxical
character, for Gadamers historicist assumption is that as texts grow
older their accessibility diminishes. Three issues become clear here:
First, the term classic, used commonly up until today, is a paradox.
Second, its paradoxical form derives from the historicist assumption
that the meaning of a text is dependent on its specific historical context. Third, the term classic flourishes, above all in Germany, despite
the relative unpopularity of the notion of a canon. For a canon is supposed to be timeless, and is therefore difficult to reconcile with a corpus of classics which are paradoxical anomalies.
If the relationship to classic texts (embodied in Gadamers definition) was a cultural signature of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, its contradistinction to another definition of classic,
popular until the eighteenth century, should be obvious. The article
Classique in Diderot and dAlemberts (1751-1772) Encyclopdie,
elaborated from the middle of the century of Enlightenment, lists a
canon of texts from Greek and more especially Latin antiquities that
for no specified reasonare considered paradigmatic by virtue of
their form and manifest wisdom. I shall not merely reiterate that the
notion of a canon is necessarily weakened by the recognition that phenomena are susceptible to change over time, and consequently to the
progressive erosion of their claims to admiration. For the contrast
between Gadamers twentieth-century definition and that of the Ency-
204
clopdie also reveals that circa 1800 a change must have taken place,
which in two respects rendered the traditional synchronic definition of
classic null and void. Since Reinhart Koselleck, scholars in Germany
have tended to associate important changes in the decades before and
after 1800 with the metaphor of the saddle period. For Koselleck
himself, the emergence of historicism resembled the apparatus of
thought of the saddle perioda period when many phenomena of
change that he observed accumulated and converged.
3. The Emergence and Critique of Historicism
Since I have argued that the institutionally dominant relationship to
classics that predominated until recently was an outcome of historicism, I will briefly examine the latters emergence at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, so that we may establish whetherand, if so,
whythe historicist chronotope entered a state of crisis in the twentieth century, thus precipitating a change in our relationship with classics. The very emergence of a historically specific chronotope, which
was to become so compelling and undisputed that for more than a
century it was taken for time and history itself, can be seen as contingent upon the emergence of a historically specific mental attitude,
namely, second-order observation. By the second-order observer I
am referring to Niklas Luhmanns (1997) observeran observer
who in the act of observing, observes himself. Since human consciousness is always capable of second-order observation, which we
would call self-reflection, we must specify that by circa 1800 second-order observation had become prevalent in a particular social
group. This is to say, from that date intellectuals (they were more frequently known by the French term philosophe) could not avoid observing themselves while observing the world. The perspectivist mode
of delineating our experience was one direct consequence of this innovation. For a second-order observer discovers that the perspective
of observation determines each of his experiences; and since he recognizes the infinity of possible perspectives, the second-order observer soon apprehends that for every object of experience there is a potential infinity of conceivable forms. A dizzying epistemological horror vacui ensuesabundantly apparent, for example, in Friedrich
Schlegels air of reflection. In the face of potentially infinite forms of
experience and representation for every object of observation, how
205
can one believe in the existence of an ultimate object of experience,

identical with itself?
This problem would find a solution early in the nineteenth century
which became the basis for the emergence of historicism. The solution
was found in substituting a narrative manner of representing the world
and ordering our experience for the mirror-like structure. Since the
early nineteenth century, if you ask someone what Switzerland is, he
will relate the history of Switzerland; those who seek to understand
natural phenomena are urged to study evolutionary history. And when
the young Hegel came to describe the nature of the spirit, he conceived his Phenomenology of the spirit as a history. How could
adopting a narrative mode for ordering our experience and representing the world fill the epistemological horror vacui unleashed by
perspectivism? Precisely because narratives can absorb a plurality of
representations of experience and link them to each other.
The historicist chronotope, wherein no phenomenon was immune
to temporal change, soon unfolded upon this foundation, and made the
permanent value of the classics, hitherto casually asserted, seem a
paradox. One of the central endeavors of Reinhart Kosellecks work
was to describe and historicize this chronotope, within which the past
seems to be left behind by the passage of historical time, shedding its
ability to give us our bearings. In historicist time the future appears as
an open horizon of available possibilities. Between the pastwhich
faded away forever behind its successor, the presentand the future,
whose threshold lay before the next step, the present narrows to an
imperceptibly brief moment of transition (as Charles Baudelaire put
it in his Peintre de la vie moderne in 1857). The present as a mere
moment of transitionas the place where the subject chooses from
the possibilities of the future based on past experience, adapted to the
presentbecame an assumption for those who still had an intellectual
investment in the Cartesian subject. This act of choosing is the central
component of action. The particular nature of the present in the historicist chronotope therefore became a foundation and precondition for
action.
Here I will put forward the claim that the historicist chronotope no
longer constitutes the matrix of assumptions that shape how we experience reality, even though its discourse persists unaltered unto the
present day. There is reason to regard the invective exchanged in the
late seventies and early eighties between intellectuals who suddenly
206
sought to be postmodern and their opponents who remained committed to the modernist project as symptomatic of the rapidly shifting
chronotope. This is not to say that the new chronotope should be
named a postmodern one, or that the postmodern faction should
claim victory. What is significant, rather, is that in the course of this
debatewhich seems to us, in retrospect, excessively acrimonious
and, more precisely, in Jean-Franois Lyotards (1979) pamphlet La
condition postmoderne, a central premise of the historicist mentality
was rendered problematic. This would have lasting consequences.
Above all, Lyotard sought to criticize the great totalizing historical
metanarratives claim to represent absolute truth. Might not, Lyotard
asked, a potentially infinite number of competing historical narratives
supersede dominant institutionalized narratives? Thus, the narrative
mode of representation was challenged as a solution to the problem of
perspectivism and as the basis of the historicist mentality, and was
soon abandoned. In the decades leading up to our present a newstill
namelesschronotope was established as a premise for our experience of reality in the place of the historicist mentality. Instead of constantly leaving our pasts behind us, in the new chronotope we are inundated by memories and objects from the past. Time no longer
erodes the classics direct power to speak to us. Instead of transporting us onto a wide horizon of possibilities, today the future appears
intimidating in many respects. And so, between the threatening future
and the past in which we are immersed, an ever-expanding present has
replaced that imperceptibly brief moment of transition. It is at least
possible that recourse to the notion of a canon might easily reintegrate
the classics as a component within this pluralistic sphere of simultaneity. If it is indeed true that the Cartesian subject was situated epistemologically within the narrow present of the historicist mentality, then
it is unsurprising that, in this new ever-expanding present, we are
searching for more nuanced alternatives of human self-reference to the
Cartesian subject.
In our new chronotope, the relentless dynamic of historical
movement has weakened, and, in any case, the momentum of temporal procession has stalled in the meantime. This makes our encounters with classics more relaxed, because their power to speak to us
directly is no longer threatenednor is this power peculiarly theirs. In
the new chronotope, the documents of the past are present with a truly
confusing variety, and require not so much preservation from amnesia
207
as integration into a larger cultural framework. And yet we hesitate to

follow John of Salisbury of the twelfth century, for whom contemporary thinkers, though they be mere dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, could inevitably see further than their more eminent predecessorsperhaps because classics are now so immediately accessible to
us. A more relaxed relationship does not necessarily become a more
intellectually and aesthetically productive one.
In the new chronotope we seek to replace the traditional Cartesian
subject, and we are therefore more alive to the greater complexity of
human existence than that suggested by the cogito. In the new chronotope the authority and hierarchical power of the state (and perhaps not
only the power of the state) have diminishedquite in contrast to the
nightmares of boundless state power so powerfully articulated in novels of the mid-twentieth century, such as 1984 and Brave New World.
In our quotidian existence we live in laterally linked webs, not hierarchical relations of dependence. The English language has responded
with a tendency to replace the term government with governance.
All this may issue from a new chronotope, in which an inhibited future has made the possibility of practically molding the futurethe
possibility of a politics of practicemore challenging. And at the
same time the weakness of the practical paradigm is more openly evident in a longing for charisma and direction that must also have effects in the world of culture.
4. New Attitudes and Approaches to Reading Classics
These still somewhat tentative observations of our new chronotopes
consequences, manifesting themselves today, make the suggestion that
our relationship to classics has changed plausible and historically
founded. Against this background, I would like to pose the narrower
(and in its narrowness essentially empirical) question of whether a
change in our attitude toward classics is expressed in new approaches
and attitudes to the reading of texts. I shall offer some observations,
the first of which is concerned with ways of reading the classics. My
generation grew up with an intellectual commitment to mistrust classics in all their forms. It was widely suspected that admiration for
classics was, in all respects, merely proof of conformity to the ideologies of their, or our, world. We aspired to become specialists in subverting the classics. This prejudice and the ambition it engendered
have long been absent, both among the generation of nicely-
208
competent young scholars today and in the youngest generation of

students, who accept the basic premise that reading classics pays dividends, particularly with relation to the present. One then attempts selfexamination with a new steadiness to understand where such dividends might arise in particular cases. That growing interest among so
many who heard my Kleist lectures in Vitoria da Conquista was in
this respect as typical an experience as it was eccentric; it changed my
view on the status of classics today irreversibly. Those listeners had to
penetrate Kleist for the first time to discover how much his death wish
fascinated them. Following Heidegger, they came to practice a piety
of reading and were, I hope, rewarded.
But above all I believe that today we read classics less politically
than even a quarter of a century agoand experience the texts instead, to bring in a conflicting term, from an existential perspective.
We no longer relate words, images, and scenes from classical texts to
the problems of contemporary society or even to the problems of
humanity itself. Instead, we relate the classics to the manifold eventualities and challenges encountered in individual livesnot in relation to our own lives, but rather in relation to challenges typical of
life, close to the hearts of many readers. That the traditional Cartesian
subject has been challenged as a central model for human selfreference renders the new existential imperative still more acute. Such
a change in readers perspectives can partially explain the allure and
even the academic rehabilitation of the biographical genre. For the
biographies of literary figures do not simply attempt to locate the origins of the themes and forms of their texts. An inquiry into the genesis
of themes and forms can be turned on its head, becoming another tool
for applying texts (following Gadamers usage). A reader who understands how Kleists longing to die arose will be able to discover
more relationships between this dimension of Kleists texts and specific questions, which may change his own viewsand, beyond that,
perhaps suggest the beginnings of protracted paths of argument and
reflection. Incidentally, the most important justification for collecting
and reappraising forewords and afterwords, as the Marbacher Archive
does so energetically, is that it makes them available for such existential applications.
It is possible that the level on which we apply the classicsone is
tempted to say the ontological levelis currently shifting to an existential domain, revealed and informed by biography. One can certain-
209
ly ascribe no ability to enrich life, as my German teacher used to

promise in my last year at grammar school, to Kleists Farewell Letters, or the traces left behind by the village judge Adam in the snow.
Or, less paradoxically, perhaps the occasionally praised hermeneutic
logic of question and answer acquires fresh purchase over our new
way of reading classics. Resurrecting intense experiences is what fascinates us today, even in philology, which has suddenly become fascinating again. Rather than posing and answering concrete questions,
our semiotics of aesthetic philosophy concerns itself with the emotions of the reader; we concentrate immediately on dimensions such as
elegy, melancholy, tragedy, or fate; we want to get to the bottom of the dialects of emotionand the temporal signs of precipitancy or irreversible departure familiarized by Karl Heinz Bohrer.
Even the striking contrast (to play on Kleist one last time) between a
failed life and the overwhelmingly lovely artifacts it leaves behind,
can become a source of existential provocation and literary consolation today.
5. National Canons? A Comparison of Different Countries Approaches to Classic Texts
Setting aside our altered way of reading classic texts, we would expect
canonical bodies of texts to be more readily established and more
apparent in the new chronotope than they were under the reign of the
historicist mentality. Should we actualize this potential and build
under very specific circumstancesa national canon? My view is
probably not. Probably not, because the texts that we call classic
today certainly cannot provide the foundations we think of if we
talkwisely or unwiselyof demanding from all members of society
a familiarity with their national culture. It is unrealistic to seek in
Faust some means to access the German identity of todayand, sadly,
knowledge of such texts is not especially helpful in attaining social
recognition or advancement (unlike in England, France and perhaps
even the United States). I am also inclined to oppose the project of
elaborating a national canon because such an exclusively national
focus has for a long time ceased to correspond with the habits of a
more internationally oriented population. Looking at the German book
market, we see an emphasis on ambitious translations of classic texts
from other national literatures with extensive commentariesonly
recently, new editions of Miguel de Cervantes (1605-1615) Don
210
Quixote and Stendhals (1830) Le rouge et le noir appeared. A few

years ago, a new English edition of the Man without Qualities finally
won Robert Musil recognition among American readers as one of the
great authors of the twentieth century. Of course, such examples and
tendencies mean neither that we can exclude texts valued as classic
in certain national cultures today nor that, with the exception of certain wistful academic imaginings, a developing global canon is really
discernible.
These points notwithstanding, there are distinct national differences in the literary canon which have evidently persisted almost unchallenged, though literary theorists have never dwelt on them
perhaps they have in fact escaped their attention. It was not particularly surprisingbut still profoundly striking, at least for me as a student
of Romance languages educated in Germanyto discover, that to
establish a panel discussion with French Germanists on the subject of
Classic and Canon requires almost infinite explicit clarifications.
Such hitherto neglected national differences, with which I am concerned, are therefore differences in the assumptions and emphases
with which one reads in different national cultures.
Until the present day, the prescriptive authority of the classics has
been less challenged in France than anywhere elsethe Acadmie
franaise and Comdie franaise spring to mindwhere the legitimate existence of a canon has never been questioned in principle,
unlike in Germany. No single individual has been as comprehensively
canonized in any national literature as William Shakespeare and his
oeuvre in the Anglosphere have been. Shakespeares unmatched position also explains why drama occupies so prominent a position in the
teaching of literature and literary scholarship. It is difficult to imagine
that a person might complete secondary education without at some
point having played a Shakespeare role and recited his lines. On the
other hand, no national canon of classics has been so narrowly defined, so undisputed, and so chronologically removed as Dante
Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francesco Petrarch, the three
jewels of Italian literature. This might be because, until now, in no
other culture has the literary canon and the language shaped by its
authors become so manifest a part of the national identity as in Italy.
If we may speak of a national literary canon in Japan, two main theatrical genres are central: No and Kabuki, which originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet it is not the authors of drama that
211
exemplify this canon, so much as the great thespian dynasties, whose

members the state has awarded the status of national treasure. A
notable peculiarity of the Spanish literary canon is apparent in the
status that the protagonists of its texts have attained, rivaling that of
classic authors, to the extent that protagonists have superseded their
creatorsand sometimes even stand in their place. In the middle of
the Plaza de Espana in Madrid there is a sculpture of Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza, not one of Miguel de Cervantes.
And what is the distinctive tone of the German literary canon? It
betrays itself in intensive reflection on the assumptions and values that
have informed the reading of classic texts in German culture for 250
years, possibly owing to the vicissitudes of history. For German purposes it has almost always been difficult to locate and claim a direct
route to the classics. Precisely this unusual quality has generated the
sometimes rather exaggerated impartiality so popular among nonprofessional readers, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1999) deploys
when he writes about his favorite texts as classics. Yet the German
inclination to intense reflection seems to survive him, as it does the
even more complex alterations in our relationship to classic texts that
the new chronotope has set in motion.
Bibliography
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Sandre.
Cervantes, Miguel. 1605-1615/2002. Don Quixote. London: Penguin Classics.
Diderot, Denis and Jean Le Rond dAlembert (eds.). 1751-1772/1993. Encyclopdie
ou dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers. Paris: Editions
Flammarion.
Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: ditions Gallimard.
. 1969. Larchologie du savoir. Paris: ditions Gallimard.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960. Warheit und Methode. Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr.
Koselleck, Reinhard. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing, History,
Spacing Concepts. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 1959. Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der brgerlichen Welt. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber.
212
Luhmann, Niklas. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 2 vols. Frankfurt-amMain: Suhrkamp.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 1979. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris:
Les Editions de Minuit.
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel. 1999. Mein Leben. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
Stendhal. 1830. Le rouge et le noir. Paris: Levasseur.
Ciarn Benson
Benson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at University College
Dublin. His research interests include the cultural psychology of self,
philosophical psychology, and the psychology and philosophy of the
visual arts. Amongst his publications are The Cultural Psychology of
Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds and The Absorbed
Self: Pragmatism, Psychology and Aesthetic Experience. He has long
been practically active in the arts in Ireland as a policymaker, an occasional curator and as a critic. He was founding chairman of the Irish
Film Institute and, from 1993-1998, was the government-appointed
Chair of The Arts Council of Ireland with responsibility for developing and funding all the contemporary arts in Ireland.
Gerald Cupchik
Cupchik is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. He
explores the meaning and experiences of feelings and emotions in
everyday and aesthetic episodes. Topics of special interest include
nonverbal communication of emotion and the creation and reception
of art and poetry. His list of publications includes Finding meaning
and expressing emotion in response to artworks (co-author A. Gignac, Visual Arts Research, 2007), The scent of literature (co-author
K. Phillips, Cognition and Emotion, 2005), and The evolution of
psychical distance as an aesthetic concept (Culture and Psychology,
2002).
Bjarne Sode Funch
Funch is Associate Professor of Psychology at Roskilde University.
His research areas are the psychology of art, existential phenomenology, and personality psychology. He has written The Psychology of Art
Appreciation (1997) as well as numerous articles and book chapters
on the topic. His most recent contributions are A Psychological Theo-
214
ry of the Aesthetic Experience (in Aesthetics and Innovation, 2007)

and Long-term effects of aesthetic education (in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2012).
Judy Gammelgaard
Gammelgaard is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University
of Copenhagen. She is a psychoanalyst whose research interests include aesthetics and literature. In Katarsis: Sjlens Renselse i Psykoanalyse og Tragedie (1993) [Catharsis: The Purification of the Soul in
Psychoanalysis and Tragedy], she has provided a reinterpretation of
the concept of catharsis based on a reading of Aristotle and Freud,
wherein catharsis becomes a way of obtaining self-knowledge, not
emotional release. Experiences with art provide a foundation for understanding empathy in her book Mellem Mennesker: Trk af
Indflningens Psykologi (2000) [Between People: Aspects of the Psychology of Empathy]. She has written on Sren Kierkegaard, Albert
Camus, Marcel Proust, and the Danish authors Henrik Pontoppidan
and Peter Hegh.
Gumbrecht is the Albert Gurard Professor in Literature at Stanford
University, with appointments in French and Comparative Literature.
His extensive research areas include the field of aesthetics, and in one
of his most recent books, Production of Presence: What Meaning
Cannot Convey (2004), he shows that interpretation alone cannot do
justice to presence. In the dimension of presence, he argues, cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an
immediate impact on our senses and bodies.
Kasper Levin
Levin holds advanced degrees in philosophy and psychology and he is
currently a PhD Fellow at the Department of Psychology at Roskilde
University. His primary research area is the role of art and aesthetics
in relation to subjectivity. In his masters thesis he explored the function of art in the work of Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze. In his
current PhD project he investigates the role of expressive movement
in children diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity
Disorder) and explores the embodied mind thesis from an aesthetic
perspective.
215
Mark Johnson
Johnson is the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at
the Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon. The main focus in Johnsons work is on areas such as cognitive science, cognitive
linguistics, and embodied philosophy. Most importantly he has shown
how our thinking, our concepts, and our language are tied to bodily
experience. His research has been published in a variety of articles
and books, including Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in
the Flesh (1999), co-authored with George Lakoff. This research has
opened up an investigation of the aesthetic dimensions of experience,
which he develops in his most recent book, The Meaning of the Body:
Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007).
Simo Kppe
Kppe is Professor of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen.
He works within the fields of theory of science, theoretical psychology, psychoanalysis, the psycho-physical problem, and the emergence
of the psyche as it relates to the biological and societal. The aesthetic plays a particular role in this mix as it is one of the most clear-cut
manifestations of sense modalities. His most recent publication in this
field is the article The emergence of the psyche. The Constitution of
the Psyche in the First Year of Life, Nordic Psychology (2008).
Johannes Lang
Lang holds degrees in psychology from the University of Exeter and
the University of Copenhagen, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2009.
Since then he has been a lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, and
a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and at the Danish Institute for International Studies, where he is currently based, researching aspects of the
social psychology of genocide. Among his publications is Questioning Dehumanization: Intersubjective Dimensions of Violence in the
Nazi Concentration and Death Camps, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2010).
Tone Roald
Roald has a PhD in psychology from University of Copenhagen on the
topic of aesthetics and subjectivity. She is currently a postdoctoral
researcher there, working on issues of art, identity, and subjectivity
particularly from the point of view of the phenomenological tradition.
216
Her most recent publications within the field of aesthetics and subjectivity are Toward a Phenomenological Psychology of Art Appreciation, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology (2008) and Cognition
in Emotion: An Investigation through Experiences with Art (2007).
Index
act; 11; 29; 35; 39; 41; 45-46; 48;

50-55; 58; 60-63; 68; 79; 8687; 116; 137-139; 145-147;
156; 161; 171; 177-178; 183;
188; 193; 204-205
Adorno, Theodor; 10; 108; 122
aesthesis; 125
aesthetics; 4-6; 8; 13-14; 17; 19;
26; 47; 101-102; 126-128;
130; 133-136; 138-139; 141142; 145-147; 194; 214-216;
experimental; 67; 72; transcendental; 133; 135-137;
139; 147
aesthetic activity; 76; aesthetic
attitude; 70; 72-74; 78; 85;
aesthetic common sense; 136;
138-139; aesthetic consciousness; 9; 72; aesthetic creation;
13; 76; aesthetic distance; 7172; 74; 85; 87; aesthetic dualism; 133;142; 162; aesthetic
experience; 7-8; 10; 12; 15;
17; 68; 70; 76-77; 85; 93;
100-102; 114-115; 118; 122;
124; 127-129; 136-137; 139140; 143; 167; 193-195; aesthetic judgment; 16-17; 70;
133; 135-137; 139; aesthetic
reception; 73; 75-76; aesthetic
reflection; 47
affect; 27; 31-32; 86; 103-107;

109; 147-148; 152
affordance; 34-35; 60; 75; 83
Aksnes, Hallgjerd; 32
aktualgenese; 71; 76
Alexander, Thomas; 22
Altieri, Charles; 52
Arasse, Daniel; 46
architecture; 33; 183
Arnheim, Rudolf; 29-30; 32; 68;
70; 78; 141
art; abstract; 47; 76; contemporary; 42; 56, 130; 189; minimal; 188; performance; 42
attachment; 79; 82; 182-183;
185-188; 192; 195
Austin, J. L.; 51; 53-54; 62
Bacon, Francis; 8; 12; 135; 150157; 162
Bain, Alexander; 94
Bakhtin, Mikhail; 51; 53; 58; 200
Barthes, Roland; 103; 201
Baumgarten, Alexander; 8
Beardsley, Monroe C.; 167
beauty; 17-18; 70; 137-139; 141;
167; 189-190
Beckett, Samuel; 113-114; 24
being-I; 11; 67; 69; 72; 83; 85;
87
Benjamin, Walter; 113; 122
Benn, Gottfried; 202
218
Bergson, Henri; 49; 53; 85

Berlyne, D. E.; 73; 75; 77-78
Boccaccio, Giovanni; 210
body without organs; 135; 155157; of sensation; 151; 155157
Bohrer, Karl Heinz; 204
Bollas, Christopher; 127; 129
Bourdieu, Pierre; 8
Bousquet, Joe; 161-163
Bowen, Elizabeth; 58
Bragdon, Claude; 44
Brentano, Franz; 51-52; 178
British empiricism; 70
Bruner, Jerome; 43; 52
Bullough, Edward; 70-72
Burke, Kenneth; 51-52
Byrne, Roisin; 55-57; 60; 62
Caldern de la Barca, Pedro; 202
cannon; 200-201; 203; 206; 209211
Cassirer, Ernst; 53
categorical imperative; 57
Cline, Louis-Ferdinand; 101
Cervantes, Miguel; 209; 211
Cezanne, Paul; 151
chronotrope; 200; 204-207; 210211
Clark, T. J.; 49
cogito; 207
cognitive faculties; 18; 136; 138
cognitive neuroscience; 10; 15
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; 85
consciousness; 9-10; 16-17; 40;
51-53; 58-60; 72; 79; 85; 9394; 98-101; 103; 109; 122124; 127; 137; 168; 171-172;
174; 177-180; 185; 188; 190191; 193-195; 204;stream of;
53; 59; 177-180; 195
Conze, Werner; 202
Index
cortex; 44; 47; 49-50; 74; prefrontal; 74

Courbet, Gustav; 80
cubism; 49; 77; 95-96; 180
dadaism; 96
dAlembert, Jean Le Rond; 203
Damasio, Antonio; 22; 29
dance; 31-32; 59
Dante, Alighieri; 7; 210
Daumier, Honor; 80
Degas, Edgar; 84
Deleuze, Gilles; 12; 114; 132;
134-139; 141-163; 201; 214
De Maria, Walter; 193-194
Derrida, Jacques; 201
Descartes, Rn; 69
desire; 9; 67; 117; 121; 125-128;
133; 136; 154; 171
de Vega, Lope; 202
Dewey, John ; 15 ; 19 ; 20-23 ;
25-27 ; 29 ; 33-36 ; 40-41 ;
52 ; 76
Diderot, Denis; 202-203
Dilthey, Wilhelm; 128
disinterestedness; 70
displeasure; 18
Duchamp, Marcel; 188
ego; 36; 67; 78; 85-87; 99; 180;
195
einfhlung; 71-72; 86
Elias, Norbert; 95
emotion; 17; 28; 32; 40; 47; 51;
69-70; 83-85; 97; 149; 174175; 185; 188; 192; 194-195;
209; 213; 216
emotional elaboration; 82; 85-86
enactment; 23; 32; 34-35
erfahrung; 12; 113; 130
erlebnis; 12; 53; 113; 130
expressionism; 95-96
Index
faculty psychology; 16
feeling; 10-11; 15; 17-21; 23; 2736; 47; 51; 53; 68-69; 73-74;
76-79; 82-87; 97; 101; 103;
115-116; 120; 122; 134; 135;
137-138; 140-141; 145; 148;
153; 157; 159; 171; 174-175;
177-179; 181; 184-185; 187;
193-195; 213; feeling contour; 29-30
Fenner, David; 70
Flaubert, Gustav; 202
Foucault, Michel; 95; 156; 200201
Fraisse, Paul; 85
Francesca, Piero Della; 83
Freud, Sigmund; 67; 117; 122127; 133; 152; 214
Furet, Franois; 201
futurism; 96
Gadamer, Hans-Georg; 203; 208
Gendlin, Eugene; 23-25
genetic principle; 134; 139; 141142
George, Stephan; 202
Gergen, Kenneth; 172-176; 184
Gibson, James; 60; 75; 83; 183
Giddens, Anthony; 95
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang; 191
Golding, John; 49-50
Gombrich, Ernst H; 42; 55; 75;
96
Goncourt brothers; 80
Goodman, Nelson; 42; 190
Greenblatt, Stephen; 201
Guattari, Felix; 142; 149; 151;
155-156; 161
Habermas, Jurgen; 52-53
Hagen, Rose-Marie & Rainer;
44-45
219
Harr, Rom; 39; 41-42; 52-55;

58; 60
Heidegger, Martin; 102: 113; 208
Heizer, Michael; 193
Hendrick, Jochem; 55-57
Hebel, Johann-Peter; 201
hermeneutics; 102
Hill, Christine; 188
Hirst, Damien; 189
historicism; 200; 204-205
Hogan, Erin; 193
Hlderlin, Friedrich; 202
Holt, Nancy; 193
Hopper, Edward; 84
Hume, David; 143-145; 169-170;
172; 176; 178; 180
Husserl, Edmund; 51-53; 200
Hutcheson, Francis; 70
Idealism; 145
identification; 53; 62; 73; 75; 78;
82; 85; 109; 128-129; 138;
156
image; 23; 30-32; 38; 44; 55; 62;
71; 74-76; 82-83; 115; 117;
121-122; 130; 136; 139; 141143; 145; 155; 160-161; 168;
171; 181-182; 184-185
impressionism; 11; 77; 95-96
integrity; 67; 193
intentionality; 59; 95; 134; 144;
147; 150; 155; 178-179
intuition; 16; 19; 27; 138-140
James, William; 15; 24; 40; 60;
170-172; 175-176; 178-179;
181; 190
Jauss, Hans Robert; 8
Johnson, Mark; 10; 21; 30-31;
39; 83; 104; 215
Kandinskij, Vasilij; 188
220
Kant, Immanuel; 16-20; 36; 57;

133; 135-142; 145; 149; 162
Kermode, Frank; 39
Kiefer, Anselm; 33; 43; 45-46;
50; 55; 57; 60-61
Kierkegaard, Sren; 17; 214
Kirkeby, Per; 7
Klee, Paul; 150
Klein, Melanie; 127
Klein, Yves; 97
Koons, Jeff; 89
Koselleck, Reinhard; 200; 204205
Kristeva, Julia; 113; 117; 130
Lacan, Jacques; 99-100
Lakoff, George; 30; 39; 15; 104
Langer, Susanne; 31-32; 34; 51;
53; 58 ; 105
language; 8; 17; 19; 21-22; 2425; 37; 39; 54; 58-61; 63;
101-105; 107; 109; 129; 147;
173-174; 189; 207; 210; 215
Larson, Steve; 31-32
Le Goff, Jacques; 201
Lvi-Strauss, Claude; 201
LeWitt, Sol; 189-190
Lipps, Theodor; 71-72 ; 86
Lodyzhenski, M.V.; 49
Lorca, Garca; 202
Luhmann, Niklas; 204
Lyotard, Jean-Franois; 152; 201;
206
Macquarrie, John; 113
Malevich, Kazimir; 46-50; 57;
60-61; 188
May, Rollo; 69; 80
Matisse, Henri; 32-34; 36; 96;
188
Mead, George Herbert; 39; 51-54
Index
me; material; 170; social; 170;

181-182; spiritual; 170-171;
176; 190
meaning; 10-11; 15; 18-26; 2832; 34-35; 43-44; 53-55; 6770; 72; 76; 79-84; 87; 97;
101-105; 107-108; 120; 124126; 133; 136; 144-147; 149150; 152; 158-160; 162; 179;
190-191; 200; 203; 213-215;
embodied; 10; 20-21; 23; 32;
meaning-density; 7; meaningmaking; 10; 20; 22-24; 30;
101; meaning-matrices; 102;
meaning-modality; 104;
meaning-tone; 101
memory; 11-12; 40; 44; 46; 59;
68; 82; 113-117; 121-125;
127; 159; 163; 168-170; 179;
184-186; 189; 192-193; involuntary; 11-12; 114; 116;
123; voluntary; 114
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; 96; 99;
155; 176
Messiaen, Olivier; 189
mimesis; 84
mind; 7-8; 10; 19-21; 24-25; 51;
53; 121; 137; 140; 144-145;
160; 169-171; 177; 179; 181183; 193; 210; 214
modality; a-; 97; mono-; 93-94;
109; 191; sense-; 99
modernism; 63
movement; 47; 50; 54; 80; 94;
96; 99-100; 106-107; 109;
153-154
Mller, Johannes; 101; 108
multiphrenia; 174-175
music; 31-32; 36; 80-81; 94;
102; 137; 150; 157; 188-189;
191
Musil, Robert; 202; 210
Index
narrative; 7; 11; 47; 49; 54; 9497; 104; 108-109; 115;

117;121; 150-153; 162; 172;
205-206
naturalism; 20
Neisser, Ulric; 183-185
network; 27; 59
nested hierarchies; 41
nesting; 47
neuroscience; 10; 15; 43-44; 51
Nietzsche, Friedrich; 49; 139;
146; 157-158
objectivity; 16; 137; 147; 161
Ojala, Juha; 32
ontology; 40-41; 48; 51;146
organism; 19-20; 28; 30; 3; 54;
68; 155; 157
origo; 98
Palmer, Stephen; 74
parietal lobule; 74
perception; 10-11; 13; 16-17; 2930; 40; 47; 50; 68-71; 74-75;
77; 93; 95-97; 100; 106; 109;
125; 142-143; 146-147; 169170; 183-185; 191
personality; 93; 107; 213
Petrarch, Francesco; 210
phenomenology; 52-53; 133;
205; 213
Picasso, Pablo; 29; 49; 96; 191
Plato; 142-143
pleasure; 18; 63; 79; 82; 86-87;
122; 125-126; 129; 135; 138139; 145; 169; 194
philosophy; 8-10; 15;19-20; 53;
134-135; 137; 139; 141; 143;
145; 148-149; 209; 213-215
point of experience;179-181; 195
Pollock, Jackson; 151
postmodernism; 173
pragmatism; 19; 213
221
primary process; 152;

proprioception; 94
Proust; Marcel; 11-12; 113-118 ;
120-125 ; 128-130; 135; 158 160 ; 163 ; 214
psychical distance; 70-72 ; 213
psychoanalysis; 98; 127; 133;
214-215
psychology ; 8-10; 16-17; 29; 3944; 46-47; 51-55; 57; 60; 62;
67-68; 71-72; 76; 93; 95; 105;
134; 171-172; 177; 182; 186;
213-216 ; contemporary; 42;
51; 172; 177 ; developmental;
43; 105; differential; 43; gestalt; 29; 68; 71; 76; social; 10;
54; 72; 215
pure duration; 85
Racine, Jean; 202
Rautavaara, Einojuhani; 189
reception; 40; 68; 72-73; 75-76;
78; 80; 85-87; 123; 202; 213
reflection; 10-11; 26; 40; 53; 69;
79; 87; 93-97; 100; 104; 107109; 118-119; 122; 134-137;
139; 142; 145-146; 148-149;
167; 181; 200; 204; 208; 211
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel; 211
renaissance; 63; 83
representation; 11; 18; 47; 69;
108; 134;137-140; 145-146;
148; 151-152; 156; 158; 163;
190-191; 204; 206
Ricoeur, Paul ; 26
Rilke, Rainer Maria ; 167
Robinson, Edward; 113; 167
romanticism; 172
Rothenberg, Albert; 81
Rubens, Peter Paul ; 43-46; 50;
55; 57; 60-61
Rubinstein, Rochelle; 81
Ryman, Robert; 188
222
Saint Augustine;167
Sand, George; 117
Santos, Luis Martn; 202
Saslaw, Janna; 32
saturation; 173-174
schema; 30-31; 106; 136; 138;
140
Schutz, Alfred; 51; 53; 62
Searle, John; 51; 54
Seel, Martin; 9
Segal, Hannah; 127; 128-129;
133
self; collective; 80; 82; empirical;
17; extended; 185; narrative;
172; noumenal; 17-18; personal; 80-81; phenomenal;
16-17; relational; 172; 175;
saturated; 172; spiritual; 167;
195; self-development; 8; 10;
selfhood; 16; 44; 51; 58; 6062; self-identity; 10; 12; 16;
18; 36; self-reflection; 93-95;
97; 108-109; 167; 180-181;
204
semiotics; 102; 209
sensation; 40; 71; 78; 85; 93-94;
101; 130; 135-138; 142-144;
146-158; 160; 162; 171; 191
sense; felt; 23-24; 30;
sense impression; 144
sense modality; 11; 93; 99; 101
sensorium commune; 98-99
Serres, Michel; 201
Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony
Ashley Cooper); 70
Shakespeare, William; 126; 201;
210
Shereck, Lanny; 81
Shklovsky, Victor; 71
shock; 61; 118; 122-124
sign; 35; 82; 103-104; 157-159;
190
Smithson, Robert; 193
Index
Solso, Robert L; 44
space; potential; 129
Spitzer, Michael; 32
Stendhal; 210
Stern, Daniel; 29; 31; 105-107;
177
structuralism; 102
subjectivity; 8; 10; 12; 16; 40;
52; 59; 97; 133-135; 138-139;
143-147; 149-150; 155; 158;
160-162; 214-216
sublimation; 128
sublime; 18; 86; 139-142; 149;
194
suprematist paintings; 50
surrealism; 96-97
taste; 7; 18; 70; 106; 115
temporality; 13; 52; 114
thinking-I; 11; 67-70; 72-73; 79;
83; 85-87
time; historical; 200; 205
Tucker, Don; 27
Trcke, Christoph; 130
Turkle, Sherry; 186
Turner, Joseph; 97
Turrell, James; 193
unconscious; 11; 69; 83; 96; 98;
126; 128-29; 133; 152
Uspensky, Peter. D; 50
Viola, Bill; 63
visual cortex; 44; 47-50
vitality; 33; 177-179; 184; 195;
199; mental; 177-178; vitality
affects; 31; 105-107; 109; vitality contour; 105-107; 109
Vogel by the Wannsee, Henrietta;
203
Voltaire; 202
von Kleist, Heinrich; 202-203;
208-209
Index
223
Vygotsky, Lev; 51; 53; 101
qualities; expressive; 68-69; 84
Whitman, Walt; 49
Winnicott, Donald; 127; 129
Wittgenstein, Ludwig; 51; 54
Wlfflin, Heinrich; 71; 75
Wollheim, Richard; 59; 126; 133
Worringer, Wilhelm; 71
Zbikowski, Lawrence; 32
Zeki, Semir; 44; 46-48; 133
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Thomas Collier, Marie Duchne, Bjarne Sode Funch,
Kasper Levin, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe, Sofie Nielsen, Andreas
Roald, and Aud Judith Roald. This work is supported by grants from
the Danish Council for Independent Research (Humanities).

(Consciousness, Literature and The Arts) Tone Roald, Johannes Lang-Art and Identity - Essays On The Aesthetic Creation of Mind-Rodopi (2013)

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Art and Identity

Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,

Art and Identity

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang

planations, we know intuitively why the experience is important to

Modern philosophy frequently ignores psychology in its quest for

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang

shape to corresponding emotions in the viewer. These are emotions

Tone Roald and Johannes Lang

II. Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

1. Kant's Problematic View of Art and the Self

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

been organized into a coherent whole by a non-empirical source of

judgments are objective and based on concepts. Notice that Kant

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

was to provide such an explanation without bringing in forces, causes,

Among the many philosophical problems that Dewey thought would

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

employs the very same meaning-making materials and processes as

I owe this reading of Dewey to Thomas Alexander (1987).

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

out abstract conceptual and propositional content. Moreover, art is the

You keep on trying out alternatives until something changesuntil

What Gendlin is bringing to our attention is how the meaning of the

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

meanings that go beyond language and other symbol systems. He

3.2.2. Qualities and the Pervasive Qualitative Unity of a Situation

William Stafford (1998)

To grasp Deweys seminal idea of the qualitative whole let us reflect

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

of the conceptual discrimination you might subsequently lavish on the

Dewey certainly acknowledged that when you encounter an artwork,

It is just such a holistic, affect-laden take on a situation that leads us to

character and direction. Consequently, any distinctions or patterns or

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

In Art and Visual Perception (1954), Arnheim took pains to describe a

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

Although Langer sometimes, as in the previous quotation, used the

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

Henri Matisse. The Acanthi (1951)

Postulate of Immediate Empiricism (1905), things are what they are

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

she observed that artworks do not re-present feelings; rather, they

I would want to expand this claim beyond the presentation of feeling

Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art

III. Acts Not Tracts! Why a Complete

ence are helping to deepen our understanding of how subjectivity is

Acts Not Tracts!

enormously variable discursive or symbolic interactions of persons,

Acts Not Tracts!

major concern of modern psychology. Differential psychology has

Acts Not Tracts!

The Hagens go on to say that Rubens assimilated the depicted figure

The densely painted vault that is Sulamithin oppressive blacks,

Using traditional linear perspective, Kiefer relentlessly draws the eye

Acts Not Tracts!

2. Neuro-aesthetic and Cultural-historical Approaches to

brains working collectively, and dialogically engaged with, and

Acts Not Tracts!

theosophy. The writings of P. D. Uspensky on the idea of a fourth