Book Reviews

kivy, peter. The Performance of Reading: An Essay in

the Philosophy of Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, xiii + 155 pp., $59.95 cloth.
Peter Kivys bold thesis in this very engaging and
stimulating monograph is that literature in general
not just drama or even poetry but also the novel
should be viewed as a performance art, analogous to
music, where the instances of works through which
they are appreciated are performances enacted by
readers. Reading itself, then, is a performing art. Kivy
argues for a number of analogies between fictional
narratives and musical scores. The literary text, he
maintains, is not a token of the literary work but, like
the musical score, a character in a notation for generating instances of the work. Tokens of the musical
work are performances, and tokens of the novel are
readings, construed as datable events. Furthermore,
Kivy argues, silent readings of novels are analogous
to performances of musical works in the head by
score readers. Performances of literary works in the
head can be seen as expressive soundings that,
as in the case of soundings of musical works by
score readers, embody an interpretation of the overall sense of the work. Given that the silent reading of
a novel can be viewed as a performance, Kivy further
maintains, this is how it should be viewed: literature
in general, including the novel, is properly viewed as
a performance art.
Kivy adduces a number of different considerations
in support of these striking claims. He draws our attention to the history of reception of literary works,
offering informed speculations as to the overtly performative nature of such reception until relatively recently. The novel, he argues, initiated a widely shared
practice of silent reading, but early theorists of the
novel viewed silent reading as a kind of disguised
performance. Joseph Addison, for example, held that
readers imaginatively realize a dramatic presentation
of the narrated events. Kivy, citing approvingly Edmund Burkes criticisms of this view, claims, instead,
that readers enact, in the head, something very like

the performance that Plato ascribed to Ion. Ion, Kivy

argues, did two things. First, in reciting the texts of
Homer, he impersonated Homer, the teller of the
stories. This involved an expressive presentation of
the narrative proper, and also of imitative parts of
the story, such as direct speech rendered in the voices
of the characters. Second, Ions performance embellished Homer, which, Kivy speculates, involved
not only commenting on the significance of the narrative but also assessing the plausibility and truth of its
explicit or implicit propositional content. The silent
reader, Kivy maintains, enacts her own inner Ion,
expressively impersonating the storyteller, and critically commenting and reflecting on the content of the
narrative. Such reflection takes place in the gaps
that punctuate, and the afterlife that follows, the
reading performance in the narrow sense. The gaps
and afterlife are, he maintains, essential elements in
literary experience and their critical dimension provides the literary cognitivist with an answer to the
charge that the propositional contents of fictions are
banal. However, Kivy stresses, the case for viewing
silent reading as a performance of the literary work
does not depend crucially upon the accuracy of his
historical speculations. It depends, rather, upon the
sense it makes of his reading experience, the phenomenology of which is described in often fascinating
detail, and will, he believes, resonate with the literary
experience of other readers.
As should be clear, this book is a mine of intriguing speculations, ingenious argument, and stimulating suggestions, made even more attractive by Kivys
engaging style. There are, however, some questions
that must be addressed if we are to be convinced by
the overall thesis of the book. Consider first the claim
that, in silently reading a novel, the reader can be seen
as enacting an Ion-like performance in her head. Ion,
in reciting Homer, impersonated the storyteller, and
we do the same in our heads when we silently read a
novel, Kivy maintains (p. 59): We hear stories in the
head, the way Beethoven, when he read the scores
of Handel, heard musical performances in the head

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66:1 Winter 2008

c 2008 The American Society for Aesthetics

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(p. 63). The storyteller we impersonate is the person held responsible for constructing the story
either the real author of the tale (Kivys own preference) or a fictional or an implied author of some
kind. Where novels have impersonal third-person
narratorsas, for example, in Graham Greenes The
Heart of the Matterthe silent reader impersonates
the authorhere Greenetelling the story. What,
however, of a novel with a first-person narrator, such
as David Copperfield? Given the Ion model, it seems
that the reader impersonates Charles Dickens who is
himself impersonating David Copperfield, since that
is what the model takes a storyteller to do in telling
a first-person fictional narrative. In the case of direct
quotation in such a fiction, the reader must presumably impersonate the author impersonating the narrator impersonating one of the characters (see, for
example, the remarks [p. 60] on the epistolary novel,
and [pp. 4445] on Ions imitation of both the narrative and imitative aspects of Homers telling). But
this strikes me, at least, as a somewhat baroque description of the phenomenology of reading. If silent
readers do indeed expressively sound direct quotations in a fictional narrative in distinctive ways, it
seems more intuitive to say that they impersonate the
character himself, rather than enact the complex set
of nested impersonations just sketched. The (real or
assumed) author enters the picture only insofar as
the reader takes account of how the former intends
the character to be understood. Or, again, what of a
novel with a deceived or deceiving first-person narrator, such as Vladimir Nabokovs Pale Fire? Here,
it seems, Kivys claim must be that the reader impersonates Nabokov impersonating the deceived Dr.
Kinbote. But, once the reader grasps that Kinbote is
a deceived narrator, how would such a nested impersonation differ, as a sounding, from the readers
impersonating Kinbote himself in light of her understanding of Nabokovs narrative intentions? These
matters need to be made clearer, I think.
A more serious worry concerns Kivys principal
argument for taking the reading of literary fiction to
be a performing art, namely, that it makes best sense
of his reading experience, of which, as noted, he provides a rich account. But can this account bear the
weight placed upon it in his overall argument? Indeed, this raises a more general question about the
relationship between the descriptive and the normative elements in Kivys book. At the very beginning
of the book, he affirms that his thesis is not a normative claim, about how we should read fictional works,
but a descriptive claim, about how we, at least some
of us, do read them (pp. 12). But, in the final sections of the book, the question asked is a normative
onewhether, given that we can view reading as a
performing art, we should do so (p. 126). And this is
surely the question that Kivy must address if he is to

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

defend the claim that the novel is a performance art.
For what makes music and drama performance arts is
not merely that aficionados attend performances of
plays and musical works, but that it is only through
engagement with such performances that theatrical
and musical works can be properly appreciated and
evaluated. It is the role that performances by practitioners of the performing arts play in the appreciation
and evaluation of works that makes theater and music
performance arts.
But if this is true, then descriptive facts about the
phenomenology of our reading experiences, however
insightful, cannot serve as the principal argument for
viewing the reading of fictional literature as a performing art analogous to musical performance. Nor,
I think, can the principle of parsimony, which is the
other reason offered for viewing silent reading as a
performing art. For parsimony comes into play only
if, as Kivy claims, the reading of literary fiction can
be viewed as a performing art bearing upon the appreciation and evaluation of literary works, and this,
again, depends not upon the phenomenology of anyones reading experience, but on the ways in which
that phenomenology bears upon such appreciation
and evaluation. Only if the sort of performance
that Kivy characterizes bears upon the appreciation
of a work of literary fiction in a manner analogous
to the way in which a performance (public or in the
head) of a musical work bears upon its appreciation
can our ability to perform a literary work in the
head support the conclusion that literature is properly viewed as a performance art and reading as the
related performing art.
Can Kivy meet this challenge? Recall, first, the distinction between the narrative and imitative elements
in the Homeric storytelling that Ion impersonates.
The imitative element includes the representation,
by the storyteller, of the utterances of the characters.
There may indeed be a role, in the proper appreciation of at least some literary fictions, for the readers
expressive sounding in the head of such utterances,
for this may bear upon what is true of the characters in
the story. But, to be accorded such a role, the sounding must contribute to understanding and appreciation of the fiction over and above the contribution
made thereto by the interpretation of the characters
upon which the expressive sounding is based. It must
be in virtue of how the utterances sound when voiced
in the head that some appreciation-relevant fact
about the literary work is made manifest to the receiver. Clearly there are cases where this is sofor
example, the humorous dimensions of certain comic
characters depend in this way upon how their utterances would sound. But in general it is unclear that
this condition on artistic relevance will be satisfied.
And, if we turn to the narrative elements in the storytelling, it is much more difficult to see how expressive

Book Reviews
sounding plays a part in the appreciation of the
work, save where the sound of the words itself contributes to the works appreciable propertieswhere
literature performs certain more standardly poetic
functions in virtue of the sounds of the text.
Second, and related, it is not clear that expressive
soundings of the narrative of a literary work mediate between interpretations of how the work goes
and the appreciation of the work in a manner analogous to the musical cases to which Kivy draws our
attention. The interpretation of a musical work, so
Kivy argues, both lies behind and is manifested in
its performance, and this applies as much to performances in the head by score readers as to public
performances. Kivy maintains, surely correctly, that
the reasonably sophisticated reader of literary fiction also constructs, as she reads, an interpretation
that provides a way of making sense of the narrative
as a whole. Furthermore, we can speak of better or
worse readings depending upon the readers interpretation. What is less clear is how the interpretation
of the literary work, so conceived, is somehow manifest in the reading viewed as a sounding in the
head. Crucially, it is through its implications for how
the musical work sounds to the listenerincluding
the score readerthat the performers interpretation
bears upon appreciation. But is a particular kind of
sounding in the head of the narrative of a literary
fiction equally a requirement for a proper appreciation of that fiction? If so, Kivy owes us an account of
how this is so.
Of course, all of these things are arguably crucial
to our appreciation of poetry and of drama, which
is why we do routinely perform such works, even
to ourselves, when we seek to appreciate them, and
why the ability to sound such works is one that is
fostered in literary education. But these considerations seem much more peripheral to appreciation of
the novel. This concern is augmented given that, as
noted earlier, the reader is supposedly impersonating the sounding of the narrative by the storyteller.
This must, I think, be taken in terms of the contentful
intentions of the storyteller (author) rather than in
terms of her actual or hypothetical soundings. For,
as readers of literary fictions, we rarely have a clear
sense of how the author would have sounded the narrative of the story, nor does this ignorance present an
obstacle to appreciation of the novel. And it is surely
likely that some great novelists were very bad readers
of their own fictions. Rather, what matters for appreciation is that we grasp such things as the tone of the
narrativeis it playful, ironic, earnest, and so forth?
But this seems to bear directly on how we understand the fiction, rather than bearing only indirectly
through the properties of a soundinginformed
by such an interpretative graspof that narrative in
the head of the silent reader.

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Finally, consider again the ontological status of the
literary fiction. If, as Kivy assumes, literary texts are,
like scores, notational characters for producing instances of works, and if the instances of literary works
are soundings, usually in the head of readers,
what are the works themselves? For Kivy, it seems, literary fictions like novels must be types of expressive
sound sequences. But, as noted, whereas the sounding of a musical work is crucial to its appreciation, the
sounding of a literary work seems to contribute to its
appreciation in much more limited ways. What seems
crucial to appreciation in the literary case is grasping a structure of meanings embodied in a linguistic
medium, including both story meanings and thematic
meanings. But, in order to grasp the work as a structure of meanings, the reader has to extract the relevant structure from the text before her, and this may
require a complex range of activities, at least some of
whichrelating to direct quotation, for example
may be thought of as soundings of elements in the
work. Related activities might include exercises of
Gregory Curries secondary imagination in order
to grasp certain psychological truths in the story. So
it may be important to think of silent readers as playing a role in realizing the work through their activity, which suggests that silent reading is in this respect more like score reading than like looking at a
painting. Kivys compelling presentation of the case
for a performative element in literature may serve to
awaken us to the significance of such aspects of literary experience, even if, as I have suggested, the case
for viewing literature as a performance art requires
further argument and elucidation.
DAVID DAVIES

Department of Philosophy
McGill University
levitin, daniel j. This Is Your Brain on Music: The
Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton,
2006, 320 pp., $24.95 cloth, $15.00 paper.
This book is fun to read, regardless of whether you
have a philosophical interest in music. Daniel Levitin
is a neuroscientist who studies music in the laboratory, but he has also been a performer, a record producer, and a sound engineer, and he is knowledgeable
about a wide range of music, from rock and roll and
bluegrass to classical and jazz. Although the book title suggests well learn a lot about the neuroscience of
music, in fact the actual results are relatively sparse.
Levitin wisely insists that the neuroscience is only
interesting insofar as it explains the how and the
why of mental functioning, and he devotes a lot
of space to the cognitive psychology of music. The
book is written in a chatty style with many anecdotes

92
about his life and the famous people hes met who
have helped form his theoretical outlook. He also
gives mini-lectures on acoustics, the anatomy of the
brain, and evolutionary theory. Experts in these fields
will no doubt quibble with some of his formulations.
But overall this is a learned book, which wears its
learning lightly.
The book has nine chapters. The first two deal with
the basic elements of music. Levitin briefly defines
tone, pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, spatial location, and reverberation, as well as
the higher-order concepts meter, key, melody, and
harmony. Chapter 1 focuses on pitch, scales, and intervals, as well as timbre. Chapter 2 is mainly about
rhythm, meter, tempo, and loudness. Levitin emphasizes that music does not consist of its elements but
of relations among them: Chapter 2 ends with a discussion of grouping principles. Among other things,
I learned that we distinguish two instruments (such
as oboe and trumpet) that are playing the same note
(so with roughly the same overtones) by the fact that
the two overtone series begin milliseconds apart, and
that our brains pick this up; and that Bach partitas
give the impression of two lines of music even when
there is only one instrument playing by virtue of large
frequency differences that segregate sounds into
an upper and a lower stream. Throughout the
book there are innumerable fascinating insights like
these.
The third chapter is about music perception. Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain
that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem (pp. 8384). The brain uses functional segregation for music processing and employs feature
detectors much as vision does. Levitin is particularly
interested in the way that the brain fills in information that is not actually provided, for example when
it hears a melody as continuous even though it is obscured by another musical stream, or when a melody
emerges from a stream of rapidly played notes. He
claims that music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure
and order on a sequence of sounds (p. 107). Whether
this is the most perspicuous way to put the point is
debatable; the properties detected in music may be
mind dependent without being genuine illusions.
The most interesting aspect of Chapter 4 concerns
the connections between speech and music. Levitin
tells us that structural processingmusical syntax
has been localized to the frontal lobes of both hemispheres in areas adjacent to and overlapping with
those regions that process speech syntax, such as
Brocas area, and that regions associated with musical semanticsassociating a tonal sequence with
meaningappear to be in the back portions of the
temporal lobe, near Wernickes area (p. 124). (Unfortunately he doesnt say what he understands by

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

musical meaning.) But whereas speech is primarily found in the left hemisphere (although intonation
and expressivity often reside on the right), music processing is found on both sides of the brain: processing
of melodic shape is on the right, whereas the naming aspects of music such as naming a song, a performer, an instrument, or a musical interval happen
on the left. Interestingly, Levitin says that [m]usical
training appears to have the effect of shifting some
musical processing from the right (imagistic) hemisphere to the left (logical) hemisphere, as musicians
learn to talk aboutand perhaps think aboutmusic
using linguistic terms (p. 123). I am reminded of Peter Kivys idea that musical understanding requires
linguistic description, even if it is of a rudimentary
sort. If Levitin is right, a whole lot of music processing
and understanding goes on independently of naming.
The music system in the brain is functionally independent of the language system, but Levitin thinks
it likely that music and language share some common neural resources while also having independent
pathways as well. The most interesting result he cites,
I think, is from fMRI studies showing some overlap in
areas for musical syntax and for syntax in language.
Interestingly, the same left hemisphere regions are
involved in both musical structure and in sign language used by the deaf. Levitin speculates that there
is perhaps a brain region that processes structure in
general, when that structure is conveyed over time
(p. 127).
Chapter 5 is about memory and category formation, and much of what it says is not specific to music. Any theory of memory has to be able to explain
why we often seem to remember an abstract prototype rather than fine details: for example, people are
very good at recognizing a melody thats been transformed in multiple ways. But on the other hand, Levitin has found that people remember fine details of
a particular performance of a song, including tempo
and idiosyncratic stylistic features. Levitin cites Zatorres neuroimaging studies showing that what he
calls melodic calculation centers in the dorsal (upper) temporal lobes seem to be attending to interval size and distances between pitches as we listen
to music, creating a pitch-free template of the very
melodic values we will need in order to recognize
songs in transposition (p. 160). His own studies have
shown that familiar music activates these regions as
well as the hippocampus, the seat of memory encoding and retrieval. He concludes that we are storing both the abstract and the specific information contained in melodies (p. 161). On the multiple-trace
memory model he endorses, every experience leaves
a memory trace, and if we come across the right contextual cue, like Prousts madeleine, the memory will
be retrieved. How the theory explains the ability to
remember prototypes is unclear to me.

Book Reviews
Perhaps the most interesting chapter is Chapter 6,
subtitled Music, Emotion, and the Reptilian Brain.
Levitin points out that we wouldnt notice and enjoy
the subtle ways good musicians play with timing in
a piece unless a computational system in the brain
has extracted information about when the beats are
supposed to occur (p. 168). The key to understanding this phenomenon is the cerebellum in the reptilian brain, which is involved with timing and coordinating body movements, but is also massively connected to emotional centers in the brain, notably the
amygdala and the frontal lobes. Stimulation of different regions of the cerebellum can produce rage
(or sham rage) and calm. Interestingly, there are
projections from the inner ear not only to the auditory cortex but also directly to the cerebellum. This
suggests that rhythm and meter can be emotionally
arousing in a direct way, which bypasses the cortex.
Other interesting data have come from A. J. Blood
and R. J. Zatorre, who have studied the neural accompaniments to thrills and chills in response to
music and have found activation in areas associated
with the brains reward system, the ventral striatum
(including the nucleus accumbens), the amygdala,
the midbrain, and regions of the frontal cortex (see
p. 185).
Through a mathematical technique that Levitin
does not explainfunctional and effective connectivity analysis (p. 186)he infers that the following
sequence of activations occur in music listening: first
the auditory cortex processes the various components
of sound, then the frontal regions process musical
structure and expectations, and then the mesolimbic system, which is involved in arousal, pleasure,
and the transmission of opioids and the production
of dopamine, is activated, culminating in activation
in the nucleus accumbens (p. 187). Throughout there
is activity in the cerebellum and basal ganglia, presumably supporting the processing of rhythm and meter (p. 187). Levitin comments that this process goes
far toward explaining how music can improve peoples moods. The brain, he says, takes satisfaction
in matching a mental beat with the real one, and it
enjoys violations of expectation.
Levitin confines his attention to the pleasure we
get from music and especially the pleasure we get
from purely musical aspects of music. He says nothing about expression and expressiveness, and even
in the discussion of rhythm he doesnt clearly distinguish between being emotionally aroused by rhythm
or meter and taking pleasure in departures from expected rhythms and meters. Moreover, it is not clear
why we take pleasure in the unexpected rather than
fear it. Levitin also notes that there is an auditory
subsystem that responds very fast to changes in the
environment, such as a sudden loud sound, since such
changes are potentially dangerous. He says that we

93
know that music isnt threatening and thats why our
cognitive system interprets the violations of expectation in music as a source of pleasure and amusement (p. 188). But at most, one might think, this
explains why such violations bring relief; it doesnt
explain why they should give us positive pleasure.
Chapter 7 discusses what makes an expert musician. Its conclusions are somewhat banal, and many
of the conclusions it draws are not peculiar to music:
for example, apparently ten thousand hours of practice are required to become an expert in any field.
Chapter 8 on why we like the music we like also comes
to unsurprising conclusions: schemata for genres and
styles of music heard in childhood tend to dictate what
we listen to in later life, and musical preferences are
heavily influenced by social factors such as what our
group listens to.
The final chapter, The Music Instinct, however,
has perhaps the most interesting sustained argument
in the book. It is an attempt to rebut Stephen Pinkers
hypothesis that music is a spandrel of language, that
is, that language is a genuine adaptation but that music is just a by-product of language. It may also be
a by-product of other genuine adaptations, such as
responding to emotional signals in the human voice
(alert calls, cooing to a baby, and so forth) and having
a motor control system that uses rhythm to coordinate bodily movements. Levitin emphasizes Pinkers
remark that music is auditory cheesecake, in the
sense that we evolved to like fats and sugars, and our
liking for cheesecake is just a consequence of this
more general liking. Its inappropriate for Levitin to
stress this analogy in the way he does, however, since
music is supposed to be a spandrel of language and
language is not primarily a source of pleasure.
Levitin wants to argue that music is more important than a mere spandrel. He suggests three ways of
defending the idea that music evolved as a system in
its own right. First there is Darwins suggestion that
music evolved to play a role in sexual selection. In
Darwins words, music was acquired for the sake of
charming the opposite sex, like the peacocks tail
(p. 245). Levitin suggests that it may indicate biological and sexual fitness: the ability to sing and dance
signifies good health and fitness, and it also shows that
one has plenty of spare time, thus indicating that one
has already taken care of basic needs. To illustrate
these somewhat dubious points, Levitin anachronistically cites contemporary practices like the love life
of rock stars and the wearing of bling!
A second possibility is that music evolved as a
device for social bonding and cohesion (p. 252).
Collective music making may encourage social cohesion and promote group togetherness. Here as
elsewhere, he draws on the evidence from Williams
syndrome, a syndrome in which sociability and emotionality are linked with musicality, but also with

94
severe intellectual deficits. Interestingly, he contrasts
Williams syndrome patients with those with autism
spectrum disorders (ASD), who have difficulty empathizing with others and understanding others emotions, and who also seem to be unable to be moved by
music. Apparently the neocerebellum is larger than
normal in Williams syndrome and smaller than normal in ASD.
Third, music might have evolved because it
promoted cognitive development, and it could be
the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors
for speech communication, and for the . . . cognitive . . . flexibility necessary to become humans (p.
254). Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are cited as
supporters of this view.
Against Pinker, Levitin argues that music has been
around for a very long time. Musical instruments
are among the oldest artifacts on record. There is
no tangible evidence that language preceded music, according to Levitin, and the physical evidence
suggests the contrary. . . . The archaeological record
shows an uninterrupted record of music making everywhere we find humans, and in every era (p. 250).
But this is a poor argument: if music is a spandrel
of language, then presumably it evolved at the same
time. Moreover, its unfair to demand evidence of
speech in the early archaeological record: that flutes
antedate writing does not mean that music antedates
speech.
Second, Levitin points out that if music was nonadaptive, then music lovers should be at some evolutionary or survival disadvantage (p. 249). But Pinker
apparently does not say that music is positively nonadaptive; its just a spandrel. Some spandrels have
turned out to be useful for other purposes.
Third, Levitin repeatedly emphasizes that almost
everyone listens to and enjoys music; the modern
Western concept of the musical expert has led us to
lose sight of this fact. But if music is a spandrel of language, then it would not be surprising that musical
ability is a general human competence.
So far none of these arguments seems to me compelling. The best argument against Pinker may be
the fact that, as Levitin has shown in earlier chapters, there are dedicated brain systems for music and
for language, and although there are connections between them, they are very different. This suggests that
music evolved separately from language. Of course it
leaves the question of priority open. As for the rival
theories Levitin canvasses, they are all speculative,
and there is no knock-down argument in favor of any
one of them.
If I have any general complaint about the book,
it is that it is sometimes hard to follow the argument
and to figure out what the main point of a chapter
is. Levitin is clearly more concerned to maintain the
average readers interest than to present a carefully

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

honed argument. This is sometimes frustrating to a
philosopher. But the book is great fun and full of
interesting information, including some about neuroscience. It also nicely conveys the excitement of a
field that is just beginning to make important discoveries.
JENEFER ROBINSON

Department of Philosophy
University of Cincinnati
goldman, alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy,
Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford University Press, 2006, 364 pp., $35.00 cloth.
Over the past several decades, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have paid increasing attention to questions about mindreading, the process
through which we come to understand and predict
others thoughts, emotions, and desires. The dominant explanation for mindreading in philosophy and
psychology has been theory theory, which states that
people make mental state attributions on the basis of
a nave theory or a theory-like body of information.
In the 1980s simulation theory emerged as an alternative explanation, according to which we understand
a target individuals mental states by attempting to
undergo a similar mental process ourselves. In spite
of the intuitive plausibility and explanatory power
of simulation theory, theory theory has remained the
dominant view. Alvin Goldmans new book should
change that.
Goldman employs an interdisciplinary approach
that draws extensively on empirical research in
developmental psychology, social psychology, and
cognitive neuroscience. In addition to providing the
clearest and most compelling account of simulation
theory to date, the book demonstrates why philosophers have a great deal to contribute to the science of
the mind. This is because Goldman does more than
cite various studies that support his view; he critically
analyzes and systematizes the empirical findings from
multiple disciplines, thereby providing an organizing
framework that reveals the relevance of individual
studies to broader philosophical and psychological
issues.
This is all fine and good, but what does it have
to do with aesthetics? Soon after simulation theory
was introduced, aestheticians (Gregory Currie, Susan Feagin, and Kendall Walton to name just a few)
began using and refining the concept of simulation to
understand how we engage with works of art. Currie and Shaun Nichols are two of the major players
in the mindreading debate. Both also work in aesthetics. And simulation is relevant to a broad range
of topics in aesthetics, including those that involve
the imagination, pretense, character identification,

Book Reviews
narrative, and emotional reactions to art. Goldman
himself briefly considers the relevance of simulation
to aesthetics at the end of the book, but even if he
did not, the book would still be required reading for
aestheticians interested in questions regarding the relationship between art and the mind.
The first few chapters of the book set the stage
by providing a conceptual overview of the mindreading debate and establishing the relevant theoretical
construct of simulation. Goldman elaborates on his
earlier view of mental simulation, expanding the category in light of recent empirical findings. Several
features of this updated account are worth mentioning. First, both successful and attempted simulations
now qualify as simulation. Second, this is a hybrid
theory of simulation, which means that it allows for
theorizing to play a role in mindreading tasks. It is
still labeled simulation theory because of the essential
role it assigns simulation and its emphasis on simulation routines. Goldman has been a hybrid theorist for
some time, yet many of his critics seem to forget this.
Third, this is a duplex theory of simulation that characterizes two different types of simulation-based processes. There are low-level simulations, which involve
a type of direct mirroring or resonance and do not require pretense, and high-level simulations, which necessarily involve pretense or enactment imagination
and target more complex mental states. Although
these two processes rely on different mechanisms and
operate in very different ways, Goldman shows that
they are significantly similar and should both fall under the category of simulation, which is natural and
theoretically interesting.
In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Goldman develops persuasive arguments against some of the leading alternative theories of mindreading. Chapter 3 focuses
on rationality theory, Chapter 4 on the child as scientist theory, and Chapter 5 on modularity theory.
These chapters will probably be of the least interest to aestheticians. They primarily function to clear
the way for the elaboration and defense of simulation theory that is developed in the rest of the book.
This is not the only place, however, where Goldman addresses the opponents of simulation theory.
Almost every chapter in the book has some discussion of the rival accounts. The majority of Goldmans
arguments against these accounts are successful, especially those he puts forth in Chapters 3, 4, and 5,
but he occasionally seems to overemphasize the differences between his view and the views of theory
theory hybrid theorists such as Nichols and Stephen
Stich, whose book Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding
Other Minds (Oxford University Press, 2003) develops a convincing hybrid account. Nichols and Stich
grant that simulation plays a role in mindreading,
albeit a far less significant one than Goldman pro-

95
poses, yet Goldman sometimes seems to suggest that
any empirical support in favor of simulation makes
such accounts untenable. This cannot be right, given
that those who hold a hybrid version of theory theory do not deny that simulation is part of the mindreading story. I am not suggesting that there is as
strong a case to be made for a hybrid theory theory as
there is for a hybrid simulation theory. The evidence
Goldman marshals throughout this book shows that
there is not. Nevertheless, some of Goldmans critiques seem to gloss over the extent to which some
of the rival accounts make room for simulational
processes.
In Chapters 6 through 8, Goldman continues to expand and refine his earlier formulation of simulation
theory on the basis of a broad range of empirical studies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Goldmans treatment of the empirical evidence in these
chapters is exemplary. He is spectacularly well informed about the relevant science. He takes nothing for granted and scrutinizes numerous individual
studies and the conclusions drawn by the empirical
scientists. He acknowledges when the findings are inconclusive and points out when they create problems
for his view. A less conscientious philosopher would
make much bolder claims on the basis of far less. It is
no wonder that leading neuroscientists and psychologists have sought Goldmans collaboration in the
study of mirroring processes.
Chapter 6 focuses on low-level mindreading, a
type of mirroring process that is relatively primitive,
automatic, and largely outside of consciousness, and
that is used to mindread emotions, pain, and simple
intentions. This is one of the most important chapters
in the book. It details extensive empirical support for
simulation theory, including recent empirical findings
on mirror neurons, which are changing the way we understand human sociality. It also breaks new ground
in the mindreading debate, which has focused almost
exclusively on high-level mindreading, by reconceptualizing the notions of mindreading and simulation
to include automatic mirroring processes that play
a fundamental role in our social engagements and
understanding yet have gone virtually ignored in the
philosophical literature. Goldman shows how the significant body of empirical research on mirror systems
can and should be brought to bear on questions about
the nature of mentalizing.
Interestingly, although philosophers of mind have
for the most part neglected the type of mirroring processes Goldman discusses, several aestheticians have
addressed their role in eliciting emotional responses
to art, including Noel
Carroll, Stephen Davies, Carl
Plantinga, Jenefer Robinson, Murray Smith, and me.
There is a history of aestheticians making significant contributions to the study of processes related to simulation, and of philosophers of mind and

96
emotion who take such processes seriously using our
engagement with art to help understand how these
processes operate. For example, the German psychologist Theodor Lipps, best known for his work in aesthetics, was one of the first to utilize the concept of
empathy, which he used to refer to a process of projecting oneself into an object of perception.
Returning to Goldmans book, the strongest
evidence for simulation-based mindreading comes
from findings on face-based emotion recognition
(FaBER). Deficits in the experience of particular
emotions (so far, there is strong evidence on fear, disgust, and anger) have been shown to co-occur with
deficits in the face-based recognition of the same
emotions. Goldman convincingly argues that these
paired deficits appear to reveal a systematic, functional relationship between emotion experience and
emotion attribution (p. 119). This is precisely what
simulation theory predicts. A hybrid version of theory theory might be able to account for this, but the
data leave little room for accounts of mindreading
that do not give simulation a central role to play.
Chapter 7 turns to high-level mindreading, the
type typically discussed in the literature. High-level
mindreading is a process involving pretense or Enactment imagination (E imagination), which differs
from mere supposition and has one or more of the
following features: it targets mental states such as
propositional attitudes, which are relatively complex;
it includes components that are subject to voluntary control; and it is accessible to consciousness. As
Goldman acknowledges, the evidence for simulationbased high-level mindreading is not as substantial as
the evidence for low-level mindreading, but it is still
highly significant.
Especially persuasive is Goldmans discussion of
egocentrism and projection. It is well established that
people are frequently subject to egocentric biases
when they attempt to mindread others, which leads to
inaccurate attributions. Simulation theory can easily
explain this phenomenon as a kind of quarantine violation. When an attributor fails to bracket (or quarantine) his or her own genuine nonpretend states, those
states become inappropriate inputs to the simulation
routine, contaminating the process. Goldman examines evidence for egocentric biases in attributions of
knowledge, valuations, and feelings, showing that all
three types are easily handled by a simulation theory
of mindreading. It is difficult to imagine how alternative theories would account for these errors.
Chapter 8 reviews empirical research on an even
broader range of topics, including developmental
findings, work on autism and control theory, a dual
process theory of empathy, and the possible evolutionary roots of simulation. Many of the studies analyzed in this chapter are less conclusive than those
discussed in the preceding chapters. Goldman makes

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

a convincing case that however tentative it may be,
this evidence is instructive when considered in conjunction with the evidence offered in the earlier chapters.
Chapters 9 and 10 concern introspection and its relationship to self-attribution and mental concepts. In
Chapter 9, Goldman defends a special method view
of first-person mindreading, according to which the
self-ascription of mental states occurs via a process
of introspection, inner sense or self-monitoring,
that is modeled on perceptual processes. This view explains how attributors classify their own mental states
as belonging to certain categories. Although most discussions of mindreading concentrate on third-person
attribution, a comprehensive simulation theory must
say something about self-attribution since attributors
classify the mental states of others based on their classifications of their own states. The view on offer here
is controversial, which is why Goldman carefully considers and addresses potential objections and distinguishes his version of the special method view from
other recent variants.
Chapter 10 takes off from Chapter 9 to answer
questions about the nature of mental concepts. Goldman claims that mental concepts are constituted
in part by introspection-derived mental representations, proposing that an introspective code is employed in the representation of mental categories and
the classification of mental state tokens. Although
Chapters 9 and 10 address key issues in philosophy of
mind and are important for distinguishing Goldmans
account of mindreading, they may have minimal interest for aestheticians who are not also interested in
philosophy of mind or epistemology.
In the final chapter of the book, Goldman considers various applications of simulation theory. It is
here that issues in aesthetics are dealt with explicitly,
though the chapter also includes discussions of the
relevance of simulation and our simulational propensities to questions regarding the nature of human sociality and moral theory. The sections on aesthetics in
this chapter cover some of the same ground as Goldmans essay Imagination and Simulation in Audience Responses to Fiction, which appears along with
several other essays on or directly related to issues
in aesthetics in The Architecture of the Imagination:
New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (ed.
Shaun Nichols, Oxford University Press, 2006). The
discussion in this chapter, however, is broader.
Goldman considers two important topics in aesthetics: fiction and enactment imagination, and simulation and fiction. Regarding the former, he challenges Shaun Nicholss approach to understanding
our engagement with fiction, arguing that it supports
suppositional imagination and not enactment imagination, and raising doubts about whether a singlecode theory of pretense and belief representations

Book Reviews
can explain our emotional reactions to fiction. Goldman agrees with Nichols that pretense representations elicit mental states that are very similar to the
genuine states they mimic but claims that these are
better explained by enactment imagination, which
has as its aim the production of states that replicate
genuine states.
He then moves on to consider some of the issues
that have been raised about the role of simulation
in our involvement with fiction. Beginning with the
paradox of fiction, Goldman disputes the claim that
we do not have genuine emotional responses to fiction. Taking an approach similar to that of Jenefer
Robinson, he rejects the judgmentalist (or cognitive)
theory of emotion, which makes belief an essential
component of all emotions. The basis of this rejection
is empirical, namely, the findings discussed in Chapter 6 on emotional contagion and FaBER. Although
work has already begun on the relevance to aesthetics of this research on mirroring, including work by
Goldman, there is still much more to do. As we learn
more about the mechanisms involved in transmitting
emotions, our understanding of why and how we react to fictions will increase.
After concluding that our emotional responses to
fiction are genuine, Goldman considers simulation
(or empathy) as explanations for them. He first examines Noel
Carrolls arguments for rejecting the
view that our emotional responses to characters are
based on perspective taking or simulation. Although
he says that Carroll has good reasons for his position,
he claims that there are other reasons for thinking
simulation plays a role in our involvement with fiction. Drawing on Curries account, he explains that
we can simulate a hypothetical observer (or reader)
of fact who experiences the narrative events as facts.
This does not mean we cannot also simulate characters perspectives. We can, and there is a growing body
of empirical research suggesting that we do. If both
types of simulation occur, then Carrolls concerns can
be addressed.
The final section of the chapter on aesthetics comprises Goldmans responses to Matthew Kierans objections to the simulation theory of fictional engagement. He characterizes Kierans construal of simulation theory as unnecessarily strong, since few if any
simulation theorists claim that simulation is needed
for understanding characters or that simulation is the
only mode of engagement with fictions. Goldman
then challenges Kierans grounds for claiming that
readers acquire deep and sophisticated understanding of narratives without simulation and argues that
the question of whether a process of simulation or
one involving inference is at work is not one that can
be answered through armchair theorizing.
Goldmans treatment of topics in aesthetics
demonstrates why aestheticians should read this

97
book. Issues and research in philosophy of mind have
important implications for the philosophy of art, and
aestheticians, particularly those who are empirically
minded, cannot afford to ignore this literature. Goldman has already performed the enormous task of refining and systematizing a huge amount of data and
revealing its relevance to various problems and debates in philosophy and psychology. He has also begun to draw connections between this research and
problems in philosophy of art.
AMY COPLAN

Department of Philosophy
California State UniversityFullerton
joselit, david. Feedback: Television against Democracy. MIT Press, 2007, xvi + 214 pp., 53 b&w illus.,
$19.95 cloth.
Histories of video art often begin with studies of Nam
June Paiks disruptions of the conventions of television viewing in order to establish that video is not
television, and then go on to address video art in art
historical categories, as if the disciplinary complications entailed by videobetween art, pop culture,
technology, and mass communicationhad been effectively neutralized. In Feedback: Television against
Democracy, David Joselit adopts a contrary tack. He
seizes upon the complicated nature of video, as both
a fine art and a commercial mass media, to examine
the politics of aesthetics. And he takes the work of
early video artists, including Paik, Andy Warhol, Joan
Jonas, and others, as the point of departure for critically engaging television and rethinking art history
as a resource for activism.
What interests me most about Joselits study is
the formulation of his problem and the methodology he develops to address it. Joselit brings together
the art historical dilemmas presented by the amorphous pluralism of contemporary art and the confused state of politics since 1989, in which there seems
to be no remaining vantage point from which to critique the institutions of capitalism and liberal democracy. Art historians, he contends, too often still rely
on Marxist categories inherited from the Frankfurt
School to explain the significance of artworks in
quasi-revolutionary terms. Instead he take(s) it as
axiomatic that there is no longer a position outside
capitalism in the United States, and that under such
conditions, facile revolutionary claims for art (not to
mention television) are little more than posing (p.
30). Whether one entirely concedes the exhaustion
of Marxist critical theory or not, Joselits argument
finds further support in contemporary art. In its heterogeneity, the work of artists no longer stands strictly
opposed to products of the culture industry. By

98
bringing televisions into the gallery, Paik not only elevated video to an art form, but he also corrupted the
field of art with the paradigmatic consumer technology. And Warhol not only painted soup can labels but
also lent his talents to produce television commercials
and his name to endorse consumer goods. Not only
is there no longer a clearly defined social horizon for
resistance to capitalism, but also it may be no longer
possible even to imagine a world altogether beyond
the demands of commodity exchange.
Joselit contends that this calls for a novel critical
theory that would be both more true to the place
of art in contemporary society and, in this honesty,
reinvigorate the political possibilities articulated by
artworks. Against the Frankfurt Schools concept of
reification, which, he contends, reduces the commodity form to an absolute stasis, he draws upon the
works of Paul Virillo, Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, and others to argue that the politics of contemporary culture would be better understood in terms
of the tension between commodities and networks. He
offers a synopsis of the structure of broadcast television in which he outlines the mutual implication
of the two and argues that, while commodities coalesce networks (of information and social relationships) in apparently fixed objects, their coimplication
also presents the contrary possibility, that is, to dissolve commodities into the networks they otherwise
stabilize. In the process, the commodity form would
be not altogether overcome, but objects might be set
in motion along new trajectories and infused with
novel social significances.
At the same time, Joselit works to surmount contemporary disciplinary disputes between art history
and the emerging field of visual culture, in which conventional, formal analyses of artistic productions are
suspended in favor of considerations of commercial
artifacts, new technologies, and modes of aesthetic
consumption. He contends the terms in these debates
are too fixed and proposes to move beyond the opposition, central to them, between fine and commercial
art, by reconceiving the distinction between medium
and media. Rather than the material substrate of artwork, Joselit follows Rosalind Krauss in thinking of
medium in terms of the recursive, self-limiting conditions of cultural practices. And to define media,
he appeals to Marshall McLuhans concept of ratio, as the dialectical effect that distinct technologies have on one another. Rather than simply distinguished, for Joselit, medium and media address
the dynamics of inner and outer direction, which play
complimentary roles in constituting the practices, audiences, and institutional frameworks of diverse phenomena. And he brings them together in his central
concept, feedback, which he explains as the figure
that arises from the interaction between medium and
media.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Joselit conceives history on the model of television technology as a scanned image whose apparent stasis is in constant motiona fabric that
at every moment is being undone and replenished
(p. 63). Accordingly, historical changes take place
not through revolutions along a teleological path, but
through interferences in the play of presence and absence that constitutes experience. And diverse fields
do not stand simply segregated from one another,
but help define one another through the dynamics of
their interactions. He explains his art historical approach as an eco-formalism, in which the study
of discrete images gives way to considerations of
whole ecologies as the fundamental units of analysis; and yet the formal concerns of art history are
not abandoned in favor of what would ultimately
amount to sociology. Instead, he studies artworks
alongside other cultural productions as disruptions,
which resonate throughout these broader ecologies,
by (re)defining the fundamental dynamics of figure and ground that structure them as fields. Art,
he contends, stands against television as figure
stands against ground, and television, in its privatization of public speech . . . stands against democracy
(p. xi). Completing the hermeneutical circle, he then
concludes: in this era of politics conducted largely
through media icons, democracy stands against the
background provided by art.
Joselits interdisciplinary approach fills his book
with analyses of richly diverse phenomena, which
provide provocative compliments to one another and
together articulate aesthetic strategies for social and
political change in ontological terms. Feedback is, for
Joselit, a figure not only for aesthetic form but furthermore for politically sovereign subjectivity itself .
His interest in television as an impediment to democracy concerns not the limited distortions it produces
in the already established, empirical field of politics,
as one might find in a piece of more conventional
political science, but its role in constituting identities and communities as such. And he explores the
work of artists not merely as potentially applicable to
activism, but as the articulation of subject positions
fundamental to social and political life.
By transforming standard broadcast images into
swirling colored lines, and constructing raging, oversaturated montages on walls of televisions, Joselit
contends Paik reversed the dynamics of figure and
ground in the structure of television viewing and not
only revealed new dimensions of the visual field, but
also disrupted the nature of objectivity at its very
roots (p. 50). In this way, Joselit explains Paiks
video-works as inheritors of the ontologically destabilizing project inaugurated by Duchamps readymades. But he also connects Paiks work to 1960s
counterculture and invests it with explicit social significance. He compares Paiks videos to the ecstasies

Book Reviews
of psychedelic drugs, ties his techniques to the existential, political, street theater of Haight-Ashburys
The Diggers, and traces a broader map of experiments in transforming social consciousness with expanded media, through work by Ken Kesey, Stan
Brakhage, and others.
Similarly, Joselit argues that pieces by Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, and Peter Campus
tear figure and ground out of alignment and render
the video image conspicuous as a construct. The effect, he argues, is not a self-conscious opening onto
reality, but rather the liberation of the image as a vehicle for forming identitiesas a process, not a televisual presence (p. 163). And he takes issue with Rosalind Krausss now classical argument that video is
fundamentally narcissistic. Instead, Joselit contends,
videos medium is community, insofar as it constitutes the collective identities that provide the foundation for social formations (p. 105). On this basis, he provocatively explores Abby Hoffmans and
Andy Warhols respective engagements with media
celebrity and follows Huey Newtons lead in tracing
the figures of political agency in a film by Melvin Van
Peebles. By engaging and articulating media identities, Joselit contends these three, in their distinct ways,
were engaged in community building.
Joselits writing is lucid, and he works out a remarkably cohesive theory of art history and the politics of aesthetics. The only significant problems I
find with his book concern the substance of the matter and my ultimate disagreement with the idealism
of his position. If Frankfurt School Marxists recognized the importance of culture in constituting social formations, rather than dismissing it merely as
an epiphenomenal superstructure determined by a
material base, Joselit does away with considerations
of material bases altogether. To speak in this way of
ideal and material phenomena is perhaps to maintain the kind of theoretical distinction that Joselit
generally works to dissolve, but, in his appeal to
image and information networks, he decidedly collapses the opposition in favor of one of its terms.
To his credit, Joselit acknowledges the need to consider the investments that inform distinct artworks
and cultural practices; but this is the one promise of
his methodology on which he does not make good.
He examines the structures of images, without reference to the social, psychological, and economic forces
that produce them and sustain their enjoyment. So,
while I found his analyses generally compelling, he
did an injustice to political groups like the Black
Panthers by treating them almost exclusively as media activists (p. 144), and he claimed too much for
the authority of images by arguing that they themselves constitute subject positions and communities,
rather than merely playing an essential role in the
process.

99
Joselits study also verges on abandoning critical
praxis in favor of speculative synthesis. He employs
his interdisciplinary strategies almost exclusively for
the sake of comparison, without working out the disjunctions necessary to define the objects in question.
For example, when he relates Paiks video to 1960s
counterculture, he never questions whether counterculture is a politically potent force, whether it is in fact
progressive, or whether it is an instrument and effect
of dominant institutions. What about the contrary example provided by the merging of artists video and
counterculture with the development of MTV in the
1980s? Did this not instead mark a further refinement
in the commodity form, as popular songs were reduced to soundtracks for their own advertisements?
And what about contrary examples from the history
of video art? In the end, Joselit offers fairly conventional readings of canonical, early, artists video,
which indeed maintained a dissonant opposition to
mass culture. But has it continued to maintain this dissonance, as it has emerged as a predominant art form?
To the contrary, does not much video artincluding
work by Pipilotti Rist and Mathew Barneyfurther
extend the spectacles of consumer culture into the
museum? The tendency to relinquish critique in favor
of speculative synthesis may be a danger in interdisciplinary studies, insofar as they might seem to allow
one to shift focus before establishing the intradisciplinary contrasts that would give an object concrete
determinacy. But, in the context of Joselits study, it
seems more like a further effect of his idealism. When
one supposes that artists and activists can cause a
public to flash into being with feedback (p. 131), the
success, failure, and actual character of those publics
cease to be concerns. And the critic is free to map an
open-ended field of possible analogues.
In the end, I wonder how one might take into
consideration the role of material conflict in social
formations and avoid these speculative tendencies
without thereby compromising the significant accomplishments of Joselits excellent book.
CLARK BUCKNER

School for Interdisciplinary Studies

San Francisco Art Institute
benson, stephen. Literary Music: Writing Music in
Contemporary Fiction. Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2006, vii + 175 pp., $89.95 cloth.
Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction joins the sizable population of studies of the
relationships between music and literature. It studies representations of music within fictional literature, taking off from certain assumptions about the
structural and ontological elements shared in the

100
interaction between two cultural forms (p. 4). Its
prime purpose is to extrapolate from its various case
studies a sense of the ways in which literature can be
said to be musical.
In the introduction, Music for Reading, Stephen
Benson defines his titular term as follows: literary
music refers in the first instance to the self-evident
fact that such music [as written about in literature]
is by definition literary, a music made by the narrative in which it occurs (p. 4). The interest is in
treating representations of music within fictional literature as primary evidence rather than historical
detritus (p. 4), and to progress beyond unhelpful notions of music as cipher, supplement (p. 13), adjectival icing, corroborating sound, cap (p. 14), as
merely a realization of a non-musical narrative underpinning (p. 70). The point is to argue, or at least
provide evidence for the case, against the notion that
language in literature frequently speaks about music . . . but music is not felt to speak about literature
(p. 13).
The key to literary music, then, is not the success or otherwise of the evocation, but the nature of
the performance: the question of how and why music
is staged [in the fiction], and to what desired end
(p. 4). The question is less about what music means
on its own and more about what it does in certain
literary contexts. This, the Janus-headed dynamic of
literary musicthe work of music within literature
and the work of literature in staging musicis the
core of Bensons thesis. The writing of such music
in contemporary fiction is not only a matter of reception history; it serves also as one arena in which we
can witness the cultural work to which music is put
(p. 7). Benson places some emphasis on the work involved in joining, or at least juxtaposing, musical and
literary acts, and to this extent the title could also
be through (p. 38 n. 45) or into fiction, since
the focus is on the active passage from the one to
the other, on their dynamic interaction (this is particularly evident in the chapter on Maurice Blanchot,
whose thematics are particularly suited to these purposes). Hence Benson argues, like Lawrence Kramer
(a frequent methodological presence in Literary Music), that all writing about music seeks to make music known and so becomes part of that musics means
and mode of existence (p. 5). Within this critical
context, fictional representations serve as one more
performance, one more instance of music making (in
both senses of the term) (p. 5).
In Chapter 1 Benson considers how the novelist
James Hamilton-Paterson engages in Gerontius with
the cultural phenomenon of the English composer
Edward Elgar. The focus of Bensons engagement
is the musical figure of melody, the intention being
to confront the subject with a real presence (Benson mentions George Steiner in a later chapter), as

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

opposed to the fictional music conventionally considered by the literary camp within music-literature
studies.
Focusing in particular on the opening motto theme
from Elgars First Symphony, which is famous for appearing pretty much fully formed on its first occurrence, Bensons analysis leads him from music to culture, and to the remark, quoting Kramer, that [t]he
melody arises where whatever subject enunciates it
has departed, or may depart, or will have departed,
and arises, moreover, imbued with both the pathos of
this departure and its mitigation (p. 39; the quoted
passage is from Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History). Indeed, Bensons broader cultural argument is that the symphony is too confident in its
own presence (p. 39), and not ironic and ambiguous
enough, since a sense of its own authenticity is always on hand. This idea would bear comparison with
themes in the Elgar anniversary celebrations, during
which, on the one hand, the relation of the composeras-English-icon to the subjects of the realm and, on
the other hand, the tangled relationship Elgar had
with modernism, are being rethought in new political
and demographic contexts. Benson notes, correctly,
that in the symphony the melodic voice [is] the master sound of authenticity itself, yet it is a voice at once
over-emphatically near and, in its yearning, naggingly
distanced. Its affective intimacy is not entirely comforting (p. 39).
Chapter 2 considers the musical engagement with
Rudyard Kipling in Michael Berkeley and David
Maloufs opera Baa Baa Black Sheep (1993). The focus is the libretto, and the chapters work begins with
the familiar observation that libretto texts tend to be
predicated on a prior understanding of the condition
of music to which they are destined and to be conceived as the below-stairs facilitator of the real musical life of the multimedia work of opera propera
text to be heard but not noticed.
Methodologically and aesthetically, Benson makes
the interesting suggestion that the work going on in
operatic setups like this takes place at the border
between the libretto as literature and the libretto as
musical fodder (pp. 59, 76); between prose and verse
(p. 60); between text as central and as supplemental; between, one might add, Wagner and Stravinsky, paradigm cases of these ideological positions.
This ideas application is broader than opera. Benson draws on Gerard

Genette and Peter Kivy for

support, following Genette (Paratexts: Thresholds of
Interpretation [Cambridge University Press, 1997]) in
the idea that [m]ore than a boundary or a sealed
border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold . . . an undefined zone between the inside and the outside (p.
66 n. 54), and Kivys belief (Introduction to a Philosophy of Music [Oxford University Press, 2002]) that
listening to absolute music is, among other things,

Book Reviews
the experience of going from our world, with all of its
trials, tribulations, and ambiguities, to another world,
a world of pure sonic structure, that, because it need
not be interpreted as a representation or description
of our world, but can be appreciated on its own terms
alone, gives us the sense of liberation that I have
found appropriate to analogize with the pleasurable
experience we get in the process of going from a state
of intense pain to its cessation (quoted twice, pp. 123,
156). For Benson these two otherwise quite different
texts come together at the threshold over which
music becomes literature becomes music in a continual process of going from one place to another.
These movements are indicators of the important role
played by links, bridges, and passages (p. 6, see also
pp. 25, 33, 71, 77, 87, 141, 148) between music and
literature in literary musiceven when passages
are thwarted (p. 96) or become a Sisyphian labor.
Elsewhere, too, Benson notes the importance of this
movement between music and text: We pass thereby
from the felt immediacy of the musical experience to
the seeming inadequacy of our ability to put that experience into words (p. 1). This otherwise tangential
remark on an aspect of Bensons methodology suggests one reason why Blanchototherwise a slightly
odd bedfellow in this bookhas a vital role in the
argument: his work, drawn alongside that of Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett, presents a limiting case
of the passage-as-waiting where music in literature
literary musicnever arrives but is constantly on the
verge of doing so.
Chapters 3 and 4 turn to narrative theory, beginning with the idea that, although voice in literary
narrative is a metaphor we live by (p. 103), little
attention [has] been paid to the work of polyphony
as metaphor, to the non-literary discursive sphere
it implicates, as opposed to the concept that it passively enables (p. 70). Bensons argument turns on
a frequent problem with narrative readings of musical works, namely that they ignore the question of
whether music is already implicated within the narrative theory: whether narrative theory has already
needed to perform its own idea of musicto have already read music (p. 70)as a means of setting out its
methodology. This is an argument about bootstraps.
Chapter 3 considers Bakhtins concept of
polyphony and compares it with Milan Kunderas theory of the novel. Kundera, it transpires, is more willing
than Bakhtin to allow the idea of a musical influence
on the form and content of novelistic narrative, while
for Bakhtin and Blanchot music enters through the
figure of the voice, which in turn brings with it notions of sound. Sound, of course, even though it is
never transparent but always mediated and, strictly
speaking, is lacking from the text and in this sense
uncanny (p. 51 n. 23), is nevertheless a sign of selfhood and thus a necessary key to theories of nar-

101
rative. Benson concludes that [m]usical polyphony
thus defined can only ever be a virtual property of
narrative literature, but it is precisely the discursive
gap bridged by the metaphor that is of interest, the
aspiration to polyphony conceived as a paradigm of
musicality itself (pp. 8687).
In Chapter 4 Benson tackles Blanchots complex
analogizing of narrative voice as a form of absent
song. In Blanchots attempt to work through the idea
of a voiceless, musicless text, the musical trace returns
(was always there) as a shadow, a keenly felt absence.
In order to unpack this paradoxical dynamic, Benson
explores Blanchots reading of the myth of Odysseus
and the sirens (The Song of the Sirens), in particular the twist that Odysseus does not resist heroically
but is a coward, risking nothing in his passage by the
sirens. Problematizing the conventional reading of
the myth whereby the sirens simply delay, distract,
disrupt, and divert Odysseus from his journey (pp.
92, 93, 139 n. 47) and tempt him to spend time with
them instead, the key concept here (if not in Literary
Music as a whole) is this: The Sirens song, like the
song of Claudia, is insufficient and imperfect. Its
power as event lies in its being preludial, the before
of music; an overture of the infinite movement which
is the encounter itself, always at a distance (p. 103).
This position allows Benson to take a stand against a
certain brand of musicology: The problem with the
notion of subject formation in music as suggested by
[Lawrence] Kramer, at least when considered as a
means of reading literary music, is that it relies upon
the anthropomorphic presence of the narrative voice
in the act of listening: the written voice in narrative as
signifying a speaking voice in the world, which voice
is perceived in turn as the sound of a subject present
to itself (pp. 9697).
Chapter 5 considers novels in which music is
valued for its abstracting separatenessfrom the
world, from the everyday and above all, from language (p. 10). (One might ask why abstracting and
separateness are always juxtaposed, given that the
one does not necessarily imply the other.) Wittgensteinian ideas about what language is capable of (pp.
44, 138139) are juxtaposed alongside case studies of
the performance of musical canon in Vikram Seths
An Equal Music, the role of the notated score in
Jeanette Wintersons Art & Lies, and the conception of compositional practice in Ian McEwans Amsterdam, J. M. Coetzees Disgrace, and Bernard Mac
Lavertys Grace Notes. Benson shows that their very
condition as novels compromises their attempts to
place music out of reach, for in the novel the worldliness of music is laid bare. The necessary failureand
hence successof these novels, Disgrace and Amsterdam in particular, harks forward to the matter of the
next chapter. Indeed, echoing the Bakhtin discussion
in the previous chapter, Benson theorizes that [t]he

102
novel need not defer to music as that which it can
only verbally name, and so gesture towards; rather,
the novel might be granted a particular privilege as
that form in which the sociability of music can be
represented, accorded a thick description of a piece
with the interwoven strands of the musical act (pp.
139140).
Chapter 6 concerns fiction in which the representational act of literary music is itself problematized, even withheld (p. 10). (Here we will pass over
the difference between withheld and without, the
word used in the title of the chapter.) The case study is
Kazuo Ishiguros The Unconsoled, in which, although
musicand, unusually, contemporary music at that
plays a massive thematic role (its central protagonist is a professional pianist), the narrative revolves
around the endless deferral of a projected musical
event. Music, Benson argues, resists the enticements
of its narrative description and expectation. To enrich
his analysis Benson invokes Kafkas poetics, in which
music was doubly problematic, on the one hand because of its ravishing sensuousness and on the other
hand because of its resistance to language. Bensons
point, following on neatly from his earlier analysis
of Blanchot, is that the more successful we feel the
evocation of music to be, the more oxymoronic is the
novel, in that the proximity to music only serves to
draw attention to what is missing (p. 142).
In this respect, The Unconsoled is quite different from the novels discussed in the previous chapter. In Art & Lies and An Equal Music there is a
moment of exchange in which music and literature
meet as equals in full view of each other. The narrative proves its worth in this moment of exchange,
with the predicted enigma resolved in plenitude
paradigmatic plenitude, in that the reader is lifted
out of words and towards the apparent semantic immediacy of music (pp. 148149). However, as Benson notes, Kafka and Ishiguro stubbornly, but with
great artifice, refuse to let music arrive in any major sense, and the silence of the novelboth literal
and musicalbecomes part of the point (p. 155).
It is only fair to point out that, unlike Ryder, the
(anti-?) hero of The Unconsoled, Brodsky, one of the
secondary characters, does in fact eventually get to
conduct his orchestra, albeit in somewhat unconventional circumstances; although Benson does not read
the novel this way, it could be said that this secondary
narrative strand, which has after all coursed all the
way through the novel toward the climactic public
showdown, does provide the reader with some kind
of musical arrival, and perhaps even catharsis, given
the degree to which Brodskys plight inspires sympathy from the reader and given the detailed description
of the performance provided by Ishiguro. Even if this
is the case, though, Benson is right to argue that just
as the other displacements serve to defamiliarize and

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

thereby heighten basic human predicaments, so the
burden placed on music is resolutely conventional.
Music is valued for its singular powers of affect, and
by these means, its powers of consolation (p. 146,
see also pp. 69, 149, 156, 159). In this, Ishiguro is less
radical than Blanchot.
Literary Music is an interesting book and repays
repeated reading. It should probably be read alongside other similar studies rather than on its own. Although it starts from a now familiar Kramerian position with respect to its musicological contexts, which
might be said to limit its scope a little and age it prematurely, it is more usefully disciplined by its grounding in literary theory and fiction studies. Some of Bensons arguments have a use beyond the case studies
from which they emerge, particularly in the case of the
Bakhtin and Blanchot chapters, and many of his observations provide useful insights into the workings,
intentional or otherwise, of contemporary novelists
and the cultural discourses that they work through
and (usually) uphold.
ANTHONY GRITTEN

Royal Northern College of Music

Manchester, UK
hein, hilde. Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently. Lanham, MD: Mira Press, 2006, xxix + 167
pp., 18 b&w illus., $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.
In Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently, Hilde
Hein ambitiously attempts to give a conceptual, historical, and normative account of recent steps made
by museums toward ephemerality and interactivity.
Museums are relinquishing their claims to the immutable and universal. Instead of transmitting eternal values to the public, they seek to resonate with
transient ideas and to stimulate sympathetic vibration (p. xxiii). Rather than being storehouses of
precious objects, guardians of objects deemed fixed
in significance (p. 3), museums in the late twentieth century began to emphasize dematerialization,
process over stasis, variability, impermanence, social
reintegration, and political commitment. Hein argues
that all of these characteristics, and more, are to be
found in new public art that can come to serve as
a paradigm for the museum. Its normative program
seems to be aimed primarily at museologists and museum administrators, while the conceptual and historical underpinnings will be of interest to art historians
and philosophers already well versed in recent debates over the nature of museums.
The book, then, sets for itself a rather daunting
task. First, it needs to tell and substantiate two histories: that of recent public art as well as that of recent
museums. Second, since the history of museums will

Book Reviews
be told in terms of the history of public art, Hein needs
to pick out salient characteristics, not to say defining
characteristics, of public art that will be applied to
museums. Chapter 1, The Experiential Museum,
analyzes the changing attitude toward the role of
museum-goers experience. Chapter 2, The Private,
the Non-private, and the Public, briefly traces the
history of the terms public and private and then distinguishes private from non-private art in order
to clear the way for a direct consideration of public
art. The following two chapters, Public Art: History
and Meaning and Innovation in Public Art, collect characteristics of public art through a selectively
detailed account of its history since the 1930s. Hein
draws on these characteristics as she sets out her account of recent developments in museum practice in
Chapter 5, Old Museums and a New Paradigm, and
Chapter 6, Why a New Paradigm.
Hein begins by analyzing the first step toward the
museums dematerialization: an emerging interest in
producing a certain experience in the members of the
audience. This picks up a thread of argument from her
previous book, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Smithsonian, 2000). The traditional role of the museum was to collect objects
as illustrations of established ideas or devices to
demonstrate truths (p. 5). On this model the museum played an authoritative role in the determination of the meaning of the objects collected, as well
as the traditions and histories embodied in the objects. The truths embodied in the objects and presented by museum experts were to be passively, even
reverently, received by the viewing audience. The
experiential museum treats its audience more sensitively. Now they were viewed as variegated, textured beings marked by their own history and experience and by the constructive proclivities they brought
with them into the museum (p. 7). The experiential
museum, rather than simply imposing its view onto
the audience, aims to connect with the wants,
history, and interests of the individual viewer in order to catalyze inquiry, communication, and even disputation and dissent (p. 9).
Hein presents the Exploratorium, San Franciscos
Museum of Science and Art, and the Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as two examples of successful experimental museums. Each
museum demands collaboration from its visitors,
and each museum makes experience an essential,
though not the sole or final, aim of the museum.
Each of them is dedicated to the pedagogic principle that true learning, both cognitive and affective,
begins with the learners own effortful experience
(p. 15). Hein is careful to acknowledge that museums production of experience is not newall museums produce some experience in their audiences.
Rather, the role of experience has changed in the ex-

103
periential museum. More importantly for her overarching project of illuminating the nature of public art,
Hein reminds us that the museums attention to production of experience is not sufficient either to grant
the audience authority in the production of meaning or to produce a rich exploration of the context
and cause of experience. As a result, [m]useums
would do well to apply their history of persuasive
authority to cross-examining experience, rather than
merely fashioning it and celebrating it (p. 11). This
call for the cross-examination of experience is a call
to bring aesthetic experiences into a critical public
sphere.
Hein argues that this is precisely the role that public art has come to play in recent history. After a brief
and somewhat freewheeling account of the confused
history of the terms public and private, Hein distinguishes between private art (or museum art) and
non-private art not by defining either term, but by
picking out some general characteristics of each and
by considering some varieties of non-private, but not
yet public, art. So, private art is associated with individual artistry, is concerned with a pure aesthetic
product, and does not in general countenance attention to its social function or worldly sources (pp. 35
36). These characteristics do not apply to non-private
varieties of art such as folk art, popular art, mass art,
or outsider art.
Even though each of these varieties of art is nonprivate, none qualifies as public because the creation of a public is [public arts] point of departure.
Public art presupposes the public sphere and produces a public in relation to that concept (p. 49).
This circular-sounding statement allows Hein to claim
both that public art constructs a public and that the
public constructs public art. That the public constructs public art is an extension of the argument
from the first chapter on experience concerning the
transfer of authority from curators to audience members. Though attention to experience does not entail
a relinquishing of authority, making an artwork public does. A public, unlike a mass, for example, is not
merely affected by the presentation of a work. Instead, it ultimately legislates the public identity of
art. Publicsnot one, but manywhile not directly
responsible for the production of art, have a sense of
entitlement toward what is done in their name. No
longer content to be merely spoken to or for, they
are emboldened by art and wish to be heard (p. 62,
emphasis added).
Rather than presenting an argument for the radical contextualism presupposed here, Hein provides
examples from twentieth-century history of public art, each of which illustrates a different aspect
of contextual influence. She is aware of, and unconcerned with, the question-begging nature of this
method. She is unconcerned because her aim is not

104
lexical certainty but a workable demarcation between
public art and private art in the absence of a clear
definition (p. xxiv). While there is a great deal to
recommend the sort of attention to historical and
practical detail that this method should involve, I
longed for at least a passing acknowledgment of
the possibility of different explanations of the same
historical phenomena. For example, Hein relates
Martha Kendall Winnackers account of the radical
change that the My Lai memorial statue and museum
underwent between 1977 and 1992 largely as a result
of its changing audience. Few people [in 1992 and
now] remember what happened there; for them the
statue and museum are only a memorial (p. 58). It
seems as though we could equally account for the
changes in the site, the differences in the audience,
the changes in the perceptions of the work, and so
forth without arguing that the identity of the work
had thereby changed. The normative thrust of Heins
account could even be maintained by favoring one
kind of public experience and participation over another without entering into questions of ontology.
Hein argues that public art began to take its
audience-emboldening role seriously with the murals
of Diego Rivera. This art-to-public relationship was
encouraged by the paternalistic, though democratically inspired, New Deal. The 1960s saw a resurgence
of attention to public art, but without the paternalism
of the New Dealthis new public art was of the public, and not just for it. This trend has continued and
todays public artists incline to replace answers with
questions. They seek to advance debate and discussion. Their art is left open-ended and invites participation. Its orientation is toward process and change
rather than material stability. Since its borders are
indefinite, so is its authorship (p. 77). While it is
frustrating that none of these stark, categorical assertions are accompanied by explicit argument, it is
clear that, for Hein, the essential participation, if not
authorship, of the public is what identifies public art
as such.
While this public-art interaction can take many political and social shapespolitical advocacy of fascism or any form of demagoguery is as possible as
liberal or left radicalism (p. 56)Hein draws a line
when the work reflects a banal pallid sameness or
simply serves to reinforce the status quo. Without
some political bite (p. 86), I would say without truly
critical reflection, would-be public art collapses into
a form of non-public, non-private art like mass art.
This is a demand placed both on the public and the
artist or, as we will see below, the museum. Again,
to build this into the identity conditions of public art
seems to go too far, but Heins insistence that not just
any audienceartwork interaction counts as a public
interaction, no matter how widespread, is well taken.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

The essential role of public participation, in its endlessly varied and indeterminate shapes, is what finally
ties public art to the new paradigm of museums. The
paradigm of the new museum allows it to focus on
people rather than things (p. xxv). While Hein highlights the flux and plasticity of meaning and identity that she takes her emphasis on the newly constitutive role of the public to entail, her aim is not
simply to relativize meaning and identity to context.
Rather, her aim is to normalize the variability, impermanence, and limited scope that have become acceptable in public art and to urge their adaptation
to the museum (p. 145). The shift to normative language here need not be troubling if we take the museums historical movement, described by Hein, to be
incomplete.
While Heins overall aim is relatively clear, and her
rich use of examples from the Bamiyan Buddha to
Korie Seagulls It Takes a Village (presented in rather
shabby black-and-white photographs) can be illuminating, the specifics of her argument are less so. She
claims that a museum is a work of public art, a
performance in which both objects and people participate, a work of art, a complexly crafted artifact
with the power to transform its constituent materials (p. 110), as though each of these descriptions
were either equivalent or at least compatible and mutually illuminating. Are artifacts, performances, and
works simply to be collapsed into the one kind of
entity? Making matters even more obscure, Hein argues that the museum is also a Popperian locus of
thought, quite apart from the actual thinking of individuals (p. 136), a site of controversy as well as
a participant in controversies that should be able to
have defensible grounds for the positions it takes
(p. 113). These calls for a stable ground of judgment,
relatively independent from individual subjects, are
an attempt to counterbalance the currently modish
celebration of subjectivity (p. 137). Why Hein chose
Poppers third world containing the autonomous
and objective contents of thought is puzzling. After
the books relentless emphasis on contextualization,
fluidity, and plasticity of meaning and its frequent
references to John Dewey and Jurgen

Habermas, it
seems that any number of pragmatic or contextualist
accounts of objectivity would have served the argument better.
Public Art is an ambitious effort to weave together
concerns from museology, aesthetics, art history, and,
to a lesser extent, political philosophy and epistemology. Heins dazzling ability to think across disciplines
by thinking through a wide array of concrete examples makes this a rewarding book to read. If only
Hein had been better able to avoid the philosophical
fragmentation that is the ever-present danger of this
method of inquiry.

Book Reviews
JONATHAN NEUFELD

Department of Philosophy
Vanderbilt University
de botton, alain. The Architecture of Happiness.
New York: Pantheon Books, 2006, 280 pp., numerous b&w illus., $25.00 cloth.
Although he holds an advanced degree in philosophy
and is the author of The Consolations of Philosophy
(Vintage, 2000), Alain de Botton prefers to think of
himself as an essayist in the tradition of Montaigne
rather than as a professional philosopher. His book
on the consolations of philosophy sets out to show
how one could learn from philosophers about dealing
with lifes problemsSocrates on unpopularity, Epicurus on lack of money, Nietzsche on the necessity of
overcoming difficulties. Although The Architecture of
Happiness lacks the often witty self-help approach of
The Consolations of Philosophy or of his even more
popular How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage,
1997), it is still concerned with our practical experience of architecture, specifically its role in achieving happiness, a term which for de Botton seems to
mean satisfying our psychological and spiritual needs
or more generally enabling our flourishing. Such a
book might not seem to promise much for academic
aesthetics in general or the philosophy of architecture
in particular. Yet embedded in its charming prose and
its useful reflections on the psychological and moral
meanings of architecture is a progression of ideas that
amounts to an argument. Although it is not a formal
philosophical argument, I found de Bottons perspective suggestive and worth the time to readit is a
short book and over a third of it consists of judiciously
chosen illustrations.
De Botton sets off from two premises. First, our
livesand our happinessare deeply affected by our
physical surroundings, especially by the design of our
homes and workplaces and by the atmosphere of the
cities in which we live. Second, that when buildings
contribute to our happiness or well-being, we are
likely to call them beautiful. The Architecture of Happiness could be seen as an extended meditation on
Henri Stendhals phrase Beauty is the promise of
happiness, quoted by de Botton, a great admirer of
Stendhal, in a central passage of his book. De Botton
is fully aware that despite recent attempts to revive
beauty as a theme for aesthetics, beauty is hardly a
central feature of most discussions of architecture.
He notes, however, that despite the modernists rejection of historical styles and their eschewing talk
of beauty in favor of function, modernist architects and theorists actually recognized two kinds of
function, the one utilitarian, the other expressive. It
is this expressive aspect of architecture that most interests de Botton.

105
He likes John Ruskins formulation that buildings
should not only shelter us, but should also speak to
us. And what they speak of is the kind of life that
would most appropriately unfold within and around
them (p. 72). We consider those buildings beautiful
that celebrate values we consider worthwhile, values
that refer . . . through their materials, shapes or colors, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence
(p. 98). At this point, the philosophical reader of de
Bottons book will immediately think of the longstanding debates on the nature of expression in art
and architecture and in particular of Nelson Goodmans essay How Buildings Mean. Of course, de
Botton is writing for a general audience and so offers
a more informal perspective on the question of how
buildings talk. His suggestions are a little disappointing, since they amount to an appeal to the everyday
experience of discovering expressive meaning in all
sorts of objects. He offers many examples from art
and architecture, such as the contrast between the
narrow Gothic arches of Bayeux Cathedral, which
convey ardour and intensity, and the Roman arches
of the Ducal Palace of Urbino, which embody serenity and poise (p. 90). But the lack of discussion of
the cognitive status of these ascriptions and of how
we are to justify them might leave even the general
reader skeptical. To his credit de Botton does recognize that we may pass judgment on a building based
more on personal associations than on its specific architectural features and that a great deal of what we
hear a building say is simply our projection. He
even suggests that we might define genuinely beautiful objects as those endowed with sufficient innate
assets to withstand our positive or negative projections. They embody good qualities instead of simply
remind us of them (pp. 9697). Again, just how we
are to discern genuine embodiment from mere projection is not ventured. Instead de Botton leaves us
with another saying of Stendhals: There are as many
styles of beauty as there are varieties of happiness
(p. 100).
Yet these problems should not blind us to a crucial
move de Botton has made here. He has shifted our attention from the purely visual aspects of architecture
to the values promoted by buildings. The issue of
beauty in architecture, he says, is a matter of the values we want to live byrather than merely of how we
want things to look (p. 73). Although it remains unclear just how buildings promote values, the shift
from appearance to the embodiment of values has the
advantage of moving disputes about the evaluation of
architecture to a more serious level than that of visual preferences for one style or another. Here, he
joins a distinguished tradition not only in the history
of architectural theory but one that has also received
a thorough and illuminating philosophical exposition

106
in Karsten Harriess The Ethical Function of Architecture (MIT Press, 1997), where Harries argues that
the essence of architecture is the interpretation of a
way of life for our time. (Harriess book, by the way,
also contains a significant discussion of what it means
to say that architecture speaks.) Unfortunately, one
of the side effects of de Bottons preoccupation with
psychological responses is that his train of thought
keeps lapsing into the very speculative and relativistic vein that his shift of focus from vision to value is
meant to avoid. (Another effect of his psychological
focus is the relative absence of a concern for the social
class and political aspects of architecture.)
The philosophical perils of an overly psychological approach become apparent when de Botton begins to explain why it is that buildings speak to us of
values. He speculates that buildings are, in idealized
form, tokens of a goodness to which we aspire, a
goodness which in fact we lack. We call something
beautiful whenever . . . it contains in a concentrated
form those qualities in which we personally, or our
societies more generally, are deficient (p. 157). He
believes this criterion of beauty can help us escape
the two great dogmas of aesthetics, namely that
there is only one right style or that all styles are
equal. But this brings him back to Stendhals idea
that there are as many styles as visions of happiness
(p. 167). No doubt this approach does allow de Botton to embrace any style or look in architecture, and
one of the pleasures of his book is the wide span of
building styles past and present that he can appreciatively discuss. But one might question whether a
relativity based on varying psychological needs is really better in the end than one based on visual preferences. De Botton sounds a bit Humean when he
opines that we can generally agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like so long as we
are not expecting an exact or conclusive agreement;
for example, most people would agree that Paris is
architecturally more beautiful than Frankfurt or San
Francisco than Detroit. Moreover, if there are no
rules of beauty, de Botton thinks there are several
identifiable virtues of architecture, which together
define a beautiful building. His list of architectural
virtues is hardly surprisingorder, balance, elegance,
coherenceand, unlike Roger Scruton, who put forward a similar list in The Aesthetics of Architecture
(Princeton University Press, 1980), de Botton is as
seriously prepared to find these virtues in modernist,
postmodernist, or deconstructive architecture as in
classicism.
In an informal interview in May 2007, de Botton was asked if the characterization of his work
as a philosophy of everyday life was appropriate
to his own intentions. His answer showed that, although he believes that many questions of everyday lifehe mentioned friendship, desire, shyness

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

ought to be treated philosophically, he is not prepared to call himself a philosopher since that title is
owned by the academy and implies a more technical
approach. He sees himself as purely an essayist and
specifically denied that his book on architecture is a
book in philosophy. (For the interview with de Botton see Another think comingAlain de Botton
at www.markvernon.info/friendshiponline/dotclear/
index.php?2007/05/16/602.) Although one cannot
fault him for failing to discuss the academic literature
on the problem of expression in architecture, I cannot help but think his book would have been stronger
had he probed the nature of expression more closely
rather than slipping by the difficulties so quickly
in his move toward more edifying subjects. In any
case, The Architecture of Happiness, despite its flaws
from a philosophical perspective, is an invitation to
philosophers to take up anew the question of the
place of the experience of architecture in everyday
life.
LARRY SHINER

Department of Philosophy
University of Illinois at Springfield
jones, peter. Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 2006, 352 pp.,
14 color + 108 b&w illus., $40.00 cloth.
Peter Jones has done much more than make Ove
Arup available and interesting to us as a great
engineer, as an unsung hero of many icons of
twentieth-century architecture and engineering
Coventry Cathedral, the Sydney Opera House, the
Olympic Village in Beijing, the Beaubourg Center
(Centre Pompidou) in Paris, the Hong Kong and
Shanghai Bank, the Channel Tunnel, among many
others for which his firm is also responsible. Jones
has written a compelling narrative, one that does justice to Arups full range of commitments: as a farsighted thinker about the organizational, social, and
ecological contexts in which engineers work; about
the relationships among new technology, computation and computing, and innovations of form; about
the necessary integration of science, aesthetics, and
moral conviction; about the ultimate integration of
engineering and architecture. In effect, Jones has provided a superbly written case for why a philosopher
should have written Arups biography: not simply to
reveal the collaborative importance of engineering
to architecture, although he does that; not simply to
serve as an accountant to a long and rich life, as any
good biographerand Jones is a good onewould;
not only to describe the importance of Arups legacy
within architectural or engineering or corporate history, although this, too, is successfully achieved. It

Book Reviews
is Joness own philosophical, historical, and literary
range, his breadth of sensibility, that serve to complete what Arups own struggles and published reflections could not complete on their own. Jones draws
out the philosophical ideas that permeated and
underpinned everything [Arup] proposed (p. 2), and
he does so with a keen eye and the literary verve of a
storyteller who knows how to keep our attention and
why it is worth paying attention to Arups ideas.
The book is itself an excellent example of the
kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration Arup encouraged. Jones is able to connect the technical details,
the cigar waving, the subtle and shifting play of cultural context, the eccentricities, and the aesthetic
vision into a whole. Witold Rybczynski, in his review Genius in Concrete (New York Review of
Books, May 10, 2007), writes, uncharitably if not dismissively, that, [w]hile [Joness] philosophical background helps him describe Arups early life, Arup was
not a philosopher but an engineer. The author writes
that his book is not a history of engineering or of
architecture, or of a firm and its evolution. It should
have been (p. 36). Such pithy question begging is
unfortunate and misses something central both to
Arups ambitions and Joness gift for engaging them.
Neither accepts the presumed line of demarcation between philosophy and engineering, between problem
solving of one sort or another, when it comes to contributing to ones cultural context. On the contrary,
Jones writes, This is a story about relationships to be
built and barriers to be breached (p. 3). He makes
his case.
In this sense, Jones has done a service also to philosophy. Perhaps some of his own most valuable contributions to philosophyhis aesthetic, historical and
contextual, and morally acute contributionscan be
found connecting and commenting upon the worlds
of thought and action that concerned Arup. Jones
has made philosophy not the abstract beacon on the
hill but a socially engaged force for clarity and understanding of the sort that one associates with the
eighteenth centuryone of Joness many areas of
philosophical scholarship: a period before philosophy became a professionalized and overspecialized
department in the academy, concerned more for the
formal entailments of its own opaque jargon than for
the larger social consequences and communicative
responsibilities that ought to concern the person of
ideas.
Arup was born in England, of a Danish father
and a Norwegian mother, and educated in both Germany and Denmark before returning to England in
1923. Having first studied philosophy and mathematics, he took his second degree in engineering.
His lifelong ambitionof Total Designwas to
unite, through engineering and engineering consultancy, the aesthetic imagination of the architect with

107
the moral imagination of a civically engaged philosopher. In preparation for the mature builder-thinker,
Jones captures the qualities and details of character in
Arups early childhood that would continue to define
his relationships to friends and family throughout
particularly a combination of ironic detachment and
a clear intention to enjoy himself (p. 8). He explores
the relevance of his early pursuits of philosophy and
music; he details Arups lifelong dislike of overspecialization and hostility to abstract ideologies, as well
as the complex conditions that led him to concrete
to be a masterbuilder. While Jones explores the
direct influence of Le Corbusier and Gropius against
the relevant historical backdrop of the likes of Vitruvius and Alberti, the primary impetus for Arup
was not only Bauhauss celebration of engineering,
but especially Gropiuss view of the unity of human
goals and aspirations and the interrelatedness of
diverse forms of inquirytechnological, social, and
aestheticin service of doing over theorizing.
One might also expect a contemporary biography,
situated as it is within todays popular culture, to indulge its conventions of explicitness and libidinous
intrigue. Jones shows, in equal measure, a warmth and
intimacy with the details of Arups personal life and
a sense of ease and tact that comes precisely from
caring about the persons involved. He has used his
unique access to the personal correspondences to illuminate the issues and details that matter, and it
is written in a way that captures the wide range of
registers involvedpart memoir, diary, history, and
philosophical discourse, connecting thoughts about
wine and car and book purchases to the philosophical hobbyhorses, technical innovations, and aesthetic
reflections that constituted the man in his context.
For Jones, like Arup, taste is not an indication of
the superficialalthough it can be; it goes all the way
down; it is an indication of what one values and it suggests the social forms through which one chooses to
act in a given community; it shapes, therefore, the
kinds of commitments one has to the built environment in which human life is transacted. In 1936, as an
expression of these commitments, Arup wrote: It is
for the Architect and the Engineer to join the widest
resources of the industrial system to the fullest needs
of society (p. 94).
But what were the prospects for civil society in
1939? During WWI the death toll in London was
670: by May 1941 it had already exceeded 40,000
(p. 69). Whether the issue was bomb shelters or housing or bridges or structures of any kind, Arup understood and contributed significantly to the role that
reinforced concrete and prefabrication would play
in the future of buildingsomething that could be
molded, stretched, and sculpted to make new forms
both possible and affordable, with the help of iron
and steel (and later with epoxy resins). But how to

108
fight an absolute war, sustain a firm, build to the
requirements of both urgency and future civility, innovate on the levels of both technology and architecture; how to create an organizational structure
that would successfully synthesize all of these requirements? How to respond to the key problems of
modernity through engineering? Jones is at his best
at combining his own skills as historian and philosopher here, at exploring the contextual details and
philosophical underpinnings that permitted Arup to
work out responses to both the technical and intellectual challenges he and we faced.
Arups proposal was to suggest the development of
a kind of composite mind. In a 1941 address he proposed that even the best-educated architect could
not possibly, by himself, know about all the intricacies of modern technical developments which go into
building. . . . [A] wealth of new knowledge, new materials, new processes have so widened the fields of
possibilities, that it cannot be adequately surveyed by
a single mind. . . . This produces the specialist or expert, and the usual problem arises how to create the
organization, the composite mind so to speak, which
can achieve a well-balanced synthesis from the wealth
of available detail. This is, I suppose, one of the essential problems of our time (p. 94 ff.). Although Arups
context at the time is primarily British, one can easily hear a philosophical resonance with the pragmatists, especially William James and John Dewey:
the importance of connectingrather than dividing
and segregatingscientific, technological, aesthetic,
and humanistic concerns; and the effort, especially in
Deweys case, to imagine collaborative educational
structures and practices that responded to this cognitive and moral need. It was Arups lifelong effort
to develop a conception of engineering and an appropriate organizational culture that would together
work in this direction.
In the sphere of engineering, Arup recognized
and contributed significantly to both resolving the
problems that were raised by reinforced concrete
and to figuring out possible solutions of form, without which contemporary architecture itself could
not have moved forward as it didsuch architectural luminaries as Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas,
Penzo Piano, I. M. Pei, Basil Spence, Jrn Utzon,
and Robert Venturi, among many others, have all
made use of the Arup firm. The challenges at the
time, however, had to do with the increasing complexity of the calculationsthe design calculations for
the Copenhagen Broadcasting House by Lauritzen
took four engineers six months (p. 125); the challenges had also to do with the costs related to temporary formwork, the increased possibilities, and, therefore, computational complexity of moving toward
more sophisticated geometries, over larger spans of
space and with increased scalessignificant consid-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

erations in light of the future problems raised by
the Sydney Opera House; and they had to do with
the challengesinterpersonal and intellectualof
developing and sustaining financially a firm at the
cutting edge of these trends and committed to an
unusual organizational philosophyteamwork and
conviction mattered more than profit.
Jones is more than informative; he is a delight
to read when it comes to teasing out the role that
manners and social conventions of all sortstheir
assumptions, their lack of cultural intertranslatability, their unintended ironiesplayed in the personal
and professional interactions of Arup. Joness skill
here is not simply the skill of the psychologically astute observer-commentator (much of the biography
reads like a Bildungroman); it is also a philosophical
commitment to explore the role that social and cultural contingencies, along with communicative successes or failuresthat is, rhetoric in the classical
senseplayed in the social realization of ideas and
buildings. Whether illuminating a dinner party or a
philosophical argument, a marriage or a tragedy, or
something else left conventionally unspoken, Jones
is a sure-footed guide to their interconnectedness.
The early Partners were socialists of various kinds,
and this connected well with how the firm viewed collective responsibility, with the teamwork associated
with engineering, and with Arups view that ideas are
not, contra the self-image of the artist-architect, the
property of any one person. The force of Joness analysis of Arups organizational philosophyas his detailed analysis of the soap opera of the Sydney project
successfully revealsis that Arups goal of bringing
disciplines together was achieved by establishing a
single catch-all practice, outside which architects and
engineers remain as separate from each other as they
were when he started his campaigns, eighty years ago
(p. 145).
One hopes that a biography will illuminate the
relationship between qualities and forces of character and the ideas and practices associated with
and inspired by that character. Jones moves sympathetically and critically between these two: At the
end of January 1955 Ove made his first trip to the
USA. . . . Some of his relatives and friends had been
living there for thirty years, but unhampered by experience and forearmed by prejudice, Ove knew he
would hate it. He was wrong: and graciously admitted it. He had never been embarrassed about admitting ignorance or mistakes. Indeed, he insisted on
immediately accepting responsibility if he believed
the firm to have been in error; this discomfited his
colleaguesand bequeathed a legacy of integrity
which came to be universally admired (p. 159).
The most sustained analysis of Arups work and
ideas in the book is in relation to the Sydney Opera
House. The saga is, in many respects, well known; the

Book Reviews
details and insights that Jones brings to the analysis are not. His account serves not merely as a thorough reckoning of the technical challengesthey
were enormousor of the political difficulties that
dogged the projectthese, too, were enormous
but as a philosophical allegory, or a morality play,
for distilling and evaluating the concerns that animated Arups entire career and life: to connect engineering, architecture, philosophy, social morality,
and the firms practices seamlessly and successfully
together. Jones has both some axes to grind in this
regardagainst, for example, the romantic rhetoric
to which Utzon, the architect, appealed to hide his
flights from the realities and needs of the project
and some well-considered judgments to render, in
service of some philosophical lessons of his own. They
are well worth attending to and have not lost any of
their force since the opera house opened officially in
1973.
Ultimately, the force of Arups life and Joness account of it are in service of a message: reform of the
whole construction industry, and of the participating
professions (p. 242) as guided by a sustained philosophical vision. This vision concerns the relationship between architecture and engineering and the
need for a shared and collaborative sense of inquiry
and knowledge for supporting this relationship
technological, environmental (Arup was impressed
by the work of Rachel Carson, for example), and political knowledge. In seeking the best possible design
one cannot omit politics: design must take account
of purposeand purpose is politics, if you like
(p. 254).
It is, however, Joness analysis that rescues Arups
thoughts from their own incompleteness and from
Arups impatience and more limited intellectual resources for working his thoughts out. It is a valiant
service, done with humility, prodigious learning, conviction, and good humorthere are too many finely
tuned crystallizations and one-liners to recount. What
Arup attempted and Jones has continued is a kind
of critique of architectural philosophy (p. 257), but
it is also a critique of a certain kind of philosophy itself. Through Arup, Jones also provides a
sustained polemic against jargonarchitectural and
philosophicalnot because he does not understand
it, but because he understands some its unsavory
functions: to avoid a responsibility to communicate
effectively to a wider public, to obscure, to induce an
isolated clubbiness, to indulge a tendency for overspecialization where collaboration and teamwork are
most needed. These are more than quibbling philo-

109
sophical asides. Jones is at his historicist best when
explicating a philosophical context for Arups work
one that Arup himself did not provide. With the assured clarity (and occasional irony) reminiscent of
his beloved Cicero and Hume, Jones identifies how
ideas matter. It is not because they are True in some
timeless sense, but because they are historically situated, effectively communicated, and contingent artifacts, whose success depends upon their capacity to
address the present but changing needs of a given
community.
Arups legacy, however, has not been considered in
philosophical terms, understandably. From the original twenty members of the firm, it exceeded, by 2005,
some seven thousand, working on projects for about
four thousand clients in over a hundred countries,
from seventy established offices (p. 303)! The five
knighthoods and numerous CBEs were not awarded
for achievements in the realm of letters or philosophy,
and Arups ideas have had no commensurable impact on philosophy. Nevertheless, in his old age Arup
became happy to assume the mantle of a philosopher . . . because he now considered his fundamental
goal to be a moral one, concerned with fellow human beings. . . . The French would have known him
at once: un morliste, perhaps even un philosophe.
Indeed, all of his more philosophical observations
could have been written by any one of a dozen writers of the eighteenth century (p. 303 ff.), but in a
necessarily different and contextually more relevant
vocabulary: in pursuit of holism and sustainability, Jones suggests. Joness accolades and arguments
are no less relevant for feeling somewhat stretched,
not because Arup was not a philosopher, but because Jones is a better one. It is their teamwork that
matters.

TIMOTHY H. ENGSTROM

Department of Philosophy
Rochester Institute of Technology

Erratum
In volume 65, no. 4, David Osipovich was mistakenly
affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Iowa at the end of his review of Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance
and Philosophy, edited by David Krasner and David
Z. Saltz. He is in fact a student at the University of
Iowa College of Law. We regret the error.