Evocation, part 1, or, Back to Work

There follows the first part of a paper written just this past month, and which has to do with the mediation of the qualia in experience, the strength of emotion in memory, and art (works and, a bit, per se). We recognize the lack of some thirty footnotes and any number of italicized passages where they appear in the original. At some point we may add them back in, but for now the limits of the medium take precedence. A note on interpretation: there is a misreading of Goodman contained herein, which does not detract from the overall point but which may be entertaining for interested readers to try to spot.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the significance of and propose a (hopefully) novel account of certain phenomena connected to experiencing works of art. Whether my positive proposal is correct I shall not try to defend in detail (there is not space for such an argument here), though I will offer reasons why we may find it compelling. The phenomena I mean to focus upon are the emotional reactions people have to their encounters with or experiences of works of art. These are not merely, and are often not mainly, cognitive states in the usual sense—though there may be a cognitive component so that emotions may be said to be in one sense cognitive—but are best understood as full-blooded emotional responses in the quotidian sense. The thought I want to propose is that such emotional responses are, following and expanding upon some thoughts of Nelson Goodman's, a function of some sorts of artworks, which result not from mere symbols, but from their arrangements and the significance of such arrangements to us. That art may be a function is, I think, a good place to begin.
1. The cognitive account of art.
Goodman's Languages of Art lays out a theory of art as communicative. By this I mean that the symbolization of features of artwork, which are understood by those encountering the work (the audience), allows a figurative "reading" of the work. In so far as an artwork expresses, denotes, or represents properties, the work carries content which can be significant to the audience. Such content in manmade objects inheres in both dry accounting records and in abstract expressionist paintings and in tragic operas. That is the sense in which we should understand artworks as communicative, or as being vehicles for communication.
An artwork may represent something by being or containing a feature that is a symbol referring (denotatively) to that object, relation, or predicate. A picture might represent a mythical ideal of purity, with the symbol doing the main work of such representation being a unicorn; another might represent a well-known politician as a bird of prey. The politician is denoted by the symbol of the bird, but the picture is, to use Goodman's terminology, a bird-picture. To separate the sort of symbol (its usual representation) from what it represents-as is to say that "an object k is represented as a soandso by a picture p if and only if p is or contains a picture that as a whole both represents k and is a soandso-picture." The picture describes as it represents in representing-as.
Just in talking about artworks in such a way, as representing but not necessarily literally, we are also understanding special significance that is to be found in features of the works. Their representations, if they are analogous to descriptions, may be fixed by how we understand their symbols, which allows us to ascribe novel "descriptions" to what the works are about. In this way we are creating (some part of) the content of the artwork. To represent to politician as a bird of prey is to ascribe to him properties we may or may not have understood him to have in looking at a standard photographic portrait. We are applying a label to the object of reference, and in the example labeling the politician with the property of being predatory (as well as other properties, such as self-interestedness, which we might take to be implied by association). Applying the label in this novel way enables an artist to "elicit novel objects and connections" through her work. Any label may thereby be applied to any object, in an artwork.
In the second part of Languages of Art, Goodman concerns himself with the aesthetic properties of artworks and such works' expression of properties. A work will express a predicate when it both possesses metaphorically the property mentioned by the predicate and refers to that property (via denotation by its symbol(s)). Metaphorical possession of a property by a work consists in the artwork's being a sample of something with that property, which is ascribed to it literally per impossible. As a tailor's swatch is a sample of a weave, material, color, and so forth (but not of squareness), an artwork may be a sample of balance, contrast, motion, mystery, or happiness. The metaphorical as opposed to literal possession of a property consists in the property's being ascribed to the artwork in a novel application of the predicate "label" to the object, and where the label does not have literal application (barring ambiguity); on this account a painting of a guitar player, hunched seemingly disconsolately over his instrument, in blue tones, metaphorically possesses sadness—though of course this paint-encrusted object cannot be literally sad.
Goodman's account of metaphor, though difficult, can be sufficiently summarized for our purposes by saying that it is the novel application of a label to an object. A linguistic predicate is a label, and denotes some property; a label applied literally is such that the thing to which the label is applied actually possesses the property under some standard (or conventional, or traditional) definition of the predicate. The idea is that the extension of the set of things referenced by the label is dependent on a schema, a set of related labels grouped for classificatory purposes. An example with a color label would be 'red', where depending on whether red contrasts with 'non-red' or with 'yellow', 'green', etc.—the extension of 'red' is the objects which count as red in either case—but where the schema classifies objects into two sets in the former case, and more in the latter. A realm is the set of those things to which the schemata apply; in the example the realm is of colored things. Metaphorical application of a label consists in transferring a schema (and its associated labels) to a new realm—this has been done in jazz music, for instance—and instances of it, especially in novel metaphors are transfers of single labels to objects in a new realm—thus Buddy Bolden's jazz trumpet might be characterized as "red-hot." A metaphorical application of a label is still an actual application, and so—if the metaphor is successful—the object does indeed possess the property whose predicate denotes it: both literal and metaphorical possession of sadness, sublimity, turgidity, and contemptuousness are actual possession of these properties.
Needless to say, much of what art does symbolically is metaphorical rather than literal. Thus a book may possess vigor, its story ponderousness, and so forth, though the volume is slim and inert. But, if we take Goodman to be correct, metaphor is also not different in kind as a method of labeling from literal labeling, rather these are poles on a continuum. A novel application of a label, or even the invention of a new one, eventually (if it becomes common currency in a language) becomes less and less a classification of a fresh realm of objects than of a familiar one. Thus the metaphor eventually becomes frozen into literal application. Expression, perhaps the most prominent feature of artworks, is generally just of what properties a work possesses (exemplifies) metaphorically.
Our classifications of things divide the world up so that we can talk about the things in it, and metaphor provides an ever-evolving method of discovering new ways to understand what is all around us. An artwork communicates to us through the symbols we find in it, and though our understanding of the work by our application of labels both literally and metaphorically to it. A novel may tell a story, but it may also communicate to us a way of understanding a situation, person, action, or a kind of one of these or other things. A cubist painting may communicate a novel way of looking at the world, as well as the possibility of endless new ways of seeing, and it does so by its initially jarring use of shape and perspective. Tragic arias can communicate not just the suffering of the characters but the aesthetic qualities of archetypal familial relations and the seeming inevitability of loss in a world overshadowed by uncaring fate. Encountering a bust of one's ancestor may bring about a new appreciation of history in a descendant by being a symbol of the importance of memory. Art, whatever else it does in addition to this or in exclusion of it, functions as a medium for communication between the artist and audience, and between an audience member and herself. One might even go so far as to suggest that art functions as non-literal communication, but that is territory we have only time to visit.

[Update. See the rest at parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7.]