Book Reviews
kivy, peter. Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Phi-
losophy of Music. Oxford University Press, 2012,
296 pp., 12 b&w illus., $55.00 cloth.
Sounding Off is the perfect title for Peter Kivy’s
most recent collection of essays on music. Although
the thirteen essays are arranged into loose thematic
sections, there is no underlying thesis or grounding
project. And Kivy does not pretend there is. What
we have instead is a great pioneer of music’s philos-
ophy weighing in on a variety of focused and often
dialectically driven topics against the backdrop of the
more general views he has developed over decades.
We also have a collection that is a pleasure to read,
for, as always, Kivy masterfully brings the reader up
to speed and lasers in on the central questions and
arguments in a style that is nevertheless breezy and
accessible.
The collection is probably not best read cover to
cover (as this reviewer did) but rather selectively, as
one’s interest is piqued by particular topics. For any-
one working in the philosophy of music, the volume
is worth owning, especially since most of the essays
are not in print elsewhere. But the collection will also
appeal to those working in musicology or aesthetics
more generally or to anyone who is simply interested
in appreciating some of the puzzles raised by spe-
cific aspects and specific pieces of music. As might
be expected in reviewing such a diverse collection
of essays, I can offer only a brief summary of the
collection’s four main sections and some scattered
observations.
The two essays in the first section, titled “Genius,”
are narrowly focused but engaging nevertheless. Kivy
has explored the concept of musical genius in a pre-
vious book. So it is no objection that beyond point-
ing to the usual paradigms—Bach, Handel, Mozart,
Beethoven—genius is never defined. (Presumably it
is not a categorical distinction but rather an end to
a scale much further down which the rest of us re-
side.) Perhaps this is part and parcel of Kivy’s view
that the mechanical workings of musical genius are
deeply mysterious and that our enjoyment of music
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72:4 Fall 2014

C 2014 The American Society for Aesthetics
will be better off if these mysteries are not plumbed
fruitlessly. From this vantage point, Kivy dispenses
with some scientific and “political deconstruction-
ist” explanations of Mozart’s genius in the first essay
while, in the second, he shows how an apocryphal
story about the adolescent J.S. Bach playing prohib-
ited music by moonlight has persisted because of a
“thwarted prodigy” myth that is bound up in our con-
cept of genius.
The second section, “Authenticity,” bundles to-
gether three essays on musical authenticity, a topic
Kivy has extensively explored in previous work. Two
of the essays are interesting applications—the first
to the question of whether we can authentically ac-
cess ancient music (“yes,” in a significant sense) and
the second to the puzzle of why the authentic per-
formance movement has not touched opera. Some
philosophical punch is taken out of this second puz-
zle by the pedestrian, though plausible explanation
Kivy offers near the end—that it would be a logistical
and financial nightmare for an opera company to de-
ploy different instruments and performers for each
of the historically varied operas it stages in a typical
season.
The final and most philosophically interesting es-
say in this second group establishes a tension between
authenticity in performance and what Kivy calls “au-
thenticity in appreciation and understanding.” Kivy’s
main target here is a brand of anti-formalist, “new
musicology,” exemplified by Susan McClary, which
purports to uncover in a piece of music a hidden
narrative—a deeper meaning that is not obviously
supported by the composer’s intentions. The tension
is that if, in an anti-intentionalist spirit, we reject a
need to moor such explanations in any historical evi-
dence about the composer, we also demotivate the at-
tention these same musicologists have recently given
to music’s “reception history” as well, it seems, as the
authentic performance movement to which they are
also allied. If the mind-set of a composer is irrele-
vant to our understanding of a work, why should it
be relevant to how it is performed? This seems an
important challenge to contemporary musicology.
452
The heading of the third section, “Meaning and
Representation,” is broad enough to capture four
quite disparate essays. One challenges recent sci-
entific attempts to establish musical meaning while
three have to do, in one way or another, with the com-
plexities of the listening experience. Kivy’s target in
the first essay is the attempt to establish the meaning
of a piece of music by statistically assembling from a
group of listeners a typical associative response. He
starts by pointing out that the notion of “meaning”
here must be looser than the “semantic” or “proposi-
tional” notion we deploy in connection with linguis-
tic representation. Indeed, as used by his main target,
Aniruddh Patel, it can arise merely from “perception
of an object or event that brings something to mind
other than the object or event itself” (p. 170). We
can no doubt establish a piece’s “musical meaning”
in this sense by asking for group associations. But
Kivy rightly complains that this construct is no more
significant than the “riparian meaning” we might as-
semble by asking tourists what adjectives are brought
to mind as they watch the Niagara River plummet
powerfully and violently over the falls. Not only do
we know the answer before we ask the tourists, but
the result does not explain very much. The argument
here seems so convincing that one wonders, at first,
whether the target view has been mischaracterized or
whether responding to it was really worth the effort.
But at moments like this, it is important to appreciate
Kivy’s interdisciplinary reach—he speaks to musical
scholarship in many fields, not just the arguments of
analytic philosophers.
Of the three essays on the listening experience, the
first argues that while the Passion section of Handel’s
Messiah is undeniably blemished by its false textual
representation of Jews as “mean, vicious, vindictive
and corrupt” (p. 129), the work can still be appreci-
ated as a musical masterpiece. Kivy counters recent
claims that the work is strongly anti-Semitic on the
grounds that Handel reliably believed the events in
this text to be grounded in historical fact and that
these textual attitudes are not, in any case, central
to the piece’s musical transcendence. But Kivy’s line
here should be evaluated in the context of the en-
tire essay, not my summary. I will say that I find it
compelling even if no general account is given of the
extent to which epistemic and moral blemishes mar
aesthetic merit.
The second essay argues that our experience and
appreciation of a sacred piece of music is not sig-
nificantly altered or diminished if we do not live by
the associated ideology. We can still appreciate great
sacred music for what it is as long as we are not
dogmatically closed to the religious possibilities it
endorses. This seems right, although Kivy does not
give an entirely compelling reason for withholding
full appreciation from the “dogmatic atheist.” And
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
this is because he does not give us a measure of ex-
periential authenticity. This matters to those of us
who probably fall into the impoverished group. I rel-
ish and seem fully to appreciate the carols I belt out
during the holidays—especially the holy ones—even
though I do not open up much to their religious con-
tent. But maybe I am missing something.
To my mind, “Sound in Sound” is the most in-
teresting essay of this third group. Here Kivy de-
fends the possibility that a bit of music, even a bit
of absolute music, can be used to represent another
piece of music. Against the worry that the music
putatively represented is merely reproduced, Kivy
explores examples from Handel and Mozart which
seem to satisfy a Wollheimian notion of “hearing-
in”—cases, that is, in which the listener’s experience
maintains the “twofolded” awareness both of the mu-
sic represented and the musical medium that rep-
resents it. The discussion is interesting not merely
for its defense of a philosophical thesis but also for
the light it sheds on the different manners of mu-
sical representation one finds in the baroque and
classical eras.
Kivy further explores the listening experience in
the first essay of the final section, “Music Alone.”
Continuing a debate with Christopher Peacocke,
Kivy argues that a composer’s intentions are relevant
to properly hearing not only a piece’s extra-musical
features (for example, the emotive dispersal of sad-
ness over the course of Beethoven’s String Quartet in
C-sharp minor, Op. 131) but also its purely musical
parameters (for example, the contrapuntal relation
between two of the quartet’s main themes). The fact
that one theme might invert another is, as it were, an
entirely “syntactic” fact—not one that depends upon
anyone’s intentions. But Kivy maintains that this fact
is only musically relevant—that is, something upon
which our listening should properly focus—because
Beethoven intentionally chose it as part of his compo-
sition. The argument here is subtle and interesting,
turning as it does upon a scrutiny of the intuitions
elicited by certain thought experiments.
For my money, Kivy leaves the best for last. (The
book actually ends with fifty-five pages of “appen-
dices” in which Kivy continues some heated historical
debate with James Young over the way our concept
of musical genius developed and over the existence
of a “great divide” in which Western art music moved
into the concert hall during the eighteenth century.
I suppose it is useful to have these essays included,
since it is unclear where else they might appear. Still,
the entirely dialectical focus and tone of the pieces
clashes a bit with the collection’s main essays.) The
collection’s final essay, “Leonard Meyer’s Sonata,” is
an artful, affectionate, and intriguing exploration of
two themes from Leonard Meyer’s life work. The
first is Meyer’s pioneering, information-theoretic
Book Reviews
explanations of musical function. This theme is for-
malist and dovetails, of course, with views Kivy has
himself developed and defended over the years. The
second is Meyer’s later attempt to explain change
in musical style as arising from shifts in cultural
ideology. Rethinking an earlier assessment, Kivy is
now inclined to reject Meyer’s second project on
the grounds that such explanations tend to be ten-
uous and unverifiable and, more importantly, that
style changes can, in any case, be better explained
in ways Meyer had not considered. Kivy suggests,
first, that a style can change internally through the
gradual working out of its “musical logic” and, sec-
ond, that any external influences on musical style are
almost always mediated through texts that the mu-
sic is asked to set. It is not entirely clear why this
second possibility supplants the type of ideological
explanation Meyer sought instead of simply being
part of one. But in any case, Kivy’s discussion here is
rich and “open” in just the way in which he admires
Meyer’s work. For Kivy’s proposals in this essay and
throughout the collection open up fruitful new chan-
nels of empirical and conceptual investigation. They
point the way to better and deeper understandings
of this thing, music, which we find so puzzling and
wondrous.
joseph moore
Department of Philosophy
Amherst College
grant, james. The Critical Imagination. Oxford
University Press, 2013, 192 pp., $55.00 cloth.
James Grant’s slim but dense book takes on three
tasks. The opening two chapters set out and defend
a view of the aims of criticism. A substantial third
chapter arrives at an analysis of imaginativeness and
indicates its importance for critics. The remaining
three chapters address metaphor, offering a positive
account of its function, countering indispensability
claims, and canvasing its uses in criticism.
Grant begins his book by explaining the ways in
which five illustrious predecessors—Monroe Beard-
sley, Arnold Isenberg, Noël Carroll, Arthur Danto,
and Frank Sibley—were mistaken in their attempts
to characterize the aim of criticism. One main take-
away from this discussion is the idea that no univocal,
essentialist account can adequately characterize the
critical enterprise, though Grant does note that each
of the views he takes up reveals something instructive
about the critic’s task (p. 5).
Distinguishing journalistic from academic
criticism—the first helps users make practical
choices about how to budget their scarce art-related
453
time while the second enlightens appreciators who
have already experienced the works in question
(p. 6)—Grant places Beardsley in the first camp. He
then reminds us of a set of counterexamples that
challenge the view that criticism’s primary function
is to offer practical advice. The set comprises all
those works that can no longer be experienced—
performances whose run has expired, lost works,
works that have become physically degraded. Since
such works are no longer available, it follows that
critics cannot be recommending that appreciators
seek them out.
Grant counters Noël Carroll’s claim that critics are
in the business of providing reasoned evaluations by
noting that these strands are separable. Critics some-
times offer a summary evaluation without supporting
reasons (p. 18), and they sometimes offer plausible
elucidations without appending an evaluation toward
which they point (p. 19). He suggests this leaves Car-
roll in a quandary regarding how to distinguish crit-
icism from other discourses about art. Finally, even
when reasons and evaluations travel together, Grant
maintains that the overall purpose of a piece of criti-
cism need not be showing how those evaluations are
supported. For example, when the work is already
acclaimed and assured of a place in the canon, such
a goal is otiose. Grant groups Danto and Sibley as
theorists who link criticism with explanation. While
he concedes that critics often provide several sorts
of explanations—of a work’s value, of its aesthetic
properties, of the world of the work (all p. 23), and of
responses elicited (p. 24)—he once again denies that
such an aim is essential to criticism.
Grant’s treatment of Isenberg—presented as task-
ing criticism with the facilitation of perception—is
rather different from his treatment of the other fig-
ures covered in this chapter. For a start, the discussion
of Isenberg’s paper “Critical Communication” takes
up a full ten pages, while each of the other views is
handled much more summarily. Grant’s overarching
objection to Isenberg’s view seems to be that while
critics do sometimes “call our attention to or get us
to perceive various properties of a work” (p. 11),
critics do not always do this. So, once again, Grant
blocks any univocal account of critical practice. But
Grant’s analysis of the shortcomings of Isenberg’s
view becomes much more arcane. Discussing an ex-
ample that figures centrally in Isenberg’s argument,
a passage in which critic Ludwig Goldsheider de-
scribes a rising and falling contour that outlines the
foreground figures in El Greco’s painting The Burial
of Count Orgaz, Grant invites us to distinguish desig-
nating versus characterizing the property in question.
This discussion may well foreshadow Grant’s later
treatment of likeness in his analysis of metaphor,
as he admits that Goldsheider calls our attention
to a likeness—“being like the contour of a violently
454
rising and falling wave” (p. 12)—yet agrees with other
commentators that this property is too ordinary and
banal to be value conferring in any and all works
and thus cannot function as a critical norm. More-
over, while Grant agrees with Isenberg that R-type
statements do not support critics’ value judgments,
he leaves it open that support may flow from oth-
ers among their statements, in particular, from eval-
uative claims (“it is possible to support one value
judgement with another” [p. 14]).
In Chapter 2, Grant identifies both constitutive
and nonconstitutive aims of criticism. The former are
threefold. They involve supporting appreciation by
indicating “(a) what parts, features, or represented
elements [of an artwork] appreciation can involve
responding to; or (b) what responses appreciation of
it can involve; or (c) what appropriate reasons for
these responses there are” (p. 39). The nonconsti-
tutive aims of criticism include all those objectives
whose universality Grant rejected in his traversal of
prior accounts of criticism, namely, “helping readers
choose what works to experience, aiding apprecia-
tion, and guiding perception” (p. 41). Grant further
explains that “an aim is [a nonconstitutive] aim of
criticism if achieving, or being such as to achieve,
that aim makes criticism that has it good as criticism”
(p. 42).
Return to the constitutive aims of criticism. Grant
puts a prior requirement in place for the first of
these: critics must have become aware of a work’s
features via appropriate means. This necessary con-
dition, which Grant dubs the acquaintance require-
ment (p. 9), mandates perceptual acquaintance for
all works where this is the standard mode of ac-
cess as opposed to, say, basing one’s critical ver-
dict entirely on others’ testimony. Various reason-
able qualifications come into play with regard to the
acquaintance requirement. For example, Grant ex-
plicitly allows critical responses to drawings based
on high-quality reproductions (p. 30), and, as al-
ready noted, many of the counterexamples raised in
the opening chapter address the problem posed by
works that are no longer accessible for one reason or
another.
In glossing the set of appropriate responses, Grant
acknowledges five types—perceptual, cognitive, cog-
itative (responses owed to belief, thought, or imag-
ination rather than to knowledge [p. 32]), affective,
and conative (pp. 31–32). He also allows that critics
might know that particular responses to a work are
appropriate without in fact having those responses,
if, say, a foul mood temporarily blocked the flow-
ering of that response or if the work and appropri-
ate response(s) to it originated in a distant culture
(p. 33). On the other hand, appropriate response can
also take place after the fact, “when reflecting on the
work after experiencing it” (p. 35).
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Grant’s third constitutive aim has to do with rea-
sons. Critics offer appropriate reasons for the re-
sponses a work properly elicits. Grant notes that our
awareness of such reasons can be a matter of degree
(p. 6). Yet his definition of this notion both posits
some minimal degree of awareness and links reasons
to responses: “ . . . one might think of a reason as
a fact about the work your awareness of which ex-
plains, or partially explains, your response. This is
the kind of reason I’m talking about when I say ap-
preciation can involve responding appropriately for
appropriate reasons” (p. 36).
While Grant supports his account of criticism by
citing varied and erudite examples (instances in the
first two chapters include Thomas De Quincy on
Macbeth, John Summerson on Roman architecture,
Stephen Jay Gould on Mickey Mouse, Samuel John-
son on Milton, Walter Pater on Leonardo, and Frank
Kermode on King Lear), I find his proposal regard-
ing the criticism’s constitutive aims generic and un-
satisfying. He does little to sort the types of fea-
tures works of art might possess and their varying
relevance to appreciation. In particular, the volumi-
nous literature concerning aesthetic versus nonaes-
thetic qualities and the possible logical relations be-
tween them is not addressed in his treatment. The
range of responses Grant recognizes is so broad that
any and all ways of acknowledging a work of art,
its parts, its meaning, and its features count among
responses calling out for critical guidance. Whether
appreciators must marshal reasons for this range of
reactions seems an open question, one that Grant
peremptorily closes through the structuring of his
taxonomy.
In his third chapter, Grant develops a self-standing
account of imaginativeness in order to defend its ap-
plicability not in the expected arena, the creation
of art, but rather in its reception—in particular, in
the activity of criticism. His analysis is in one sense
a bravura performance. He reveals unexpected as-
pects of our exercise of imaginativeness and emerges
with a fresh and persuasive account of this concept.
However, Grant’s taxonomizing cast of mind and
style, on display throughout this book, are clearly
present in this chapter. His rigorous exposition pro-
ceeds through iteration of sometimes nested num-
bered sequences; traversing this material can feel like
a forced march.
After briefly recapping the views of Addi-
son, Hume, and Kant on imagination’s contribu-
tion to aesthetic response and documenting some
nineteenth-century claims assimilating critics to
artists, Grant develops his account. He begins by
declaring that imaginativeness, and not imagination,
is the notion he is tracking, as there can be unimag-
inative instances of imagining (p. 60). He also pro-
poses that “the imaginativeness of persons is to be
Book Reviews
understood in terms of the imaginativeness that acts,
omissions, and products can have” (p. 68). He then
launches into a complex analysis of these factors, first
specifying various ways in which they can be relative
(for example, an act, an omission, or a product that is
both f and g may be an imaginative f but not an imag-
inative g [p. 68]; something can be an imaginative f to
φ but not to ψ[p. 69]), then considering the relation
of the imaginative to the original, the nonderivative,
the unobvious (pp. 70–73). These moves leave Grant
with the interim suggestion that “imaginativeness is
to be explained using the notion of being an unobvi-
ous f to think of” (p. 73). Various counterexamples
and challenges are summoned, and eventually Grant
arrives at this resting place: “Something is an imag-
inative f to think of only if (1) it is an unobvious f
to think of, and (2) it is plausible to believe that it is
reasonably likely to be an achievement” (p. 76).
Grant closes this chapter by explaining how imagi-
nativeness so understood comes into play in criticism.
Grant earlier amended and enlarged Hume’s list of
the traits of ideal critics, resulting in a nine-point list
(pp. 49–50) that requires critics to possess good judg-
ment regarding what their readership needs to be told
and how to best communicate that knowledge (points
[ii] and [iii]) as well as a disposition to have appropri-
ate responses likely to be lacking in their readers (vii)
and the supporting trait of being good at thinking of
such responses (viii). On Grant’s view, imaginative-
ness facilitates these reader-directed goals since it
ensures that critics are good at thinking of things.
In particular, it ensures that “good critics are good
at thinking of ways of communicating effectively”
and “good at thinking of ways of appreciating the
work better than the readership would be likely to
appreciate it if they were aware of the work with-
out her criticism” (p. 84). I found many of the ex-
amples, counterexamples, and competing lines of
thought that Grant explored in arriving at his ac-
count of imaginativeness to be edifying. But I worry
that his view skews too much of a critic’s attention,
not to mention our understanding of critical virtues,
away from features of works and focuses instead
on deficits in the critic’s audience and strategies for
remedying them.
The second half of Grant’s book (Chapters 4–
6) is devoted to metaphor. I do not know enough
to say whether he makes an original contribution
to debates in this area; certainly he engages many
major players, including Elisabeth Camp, Donald
Davidson, Robert Fogelin, William Lycan, Richard
Moran, John Searle, and Stephen Yablo. I will sim-
ply indicate in passing some of the topics he takes
up. In Chapter 4, “Metaphor and Likeness,” Grant
proposes that “likeness always plays a role in deter-
mining what is communicated with metaphor and in
enabling readers to grasp it” (p. 87). Distinguishing
455
likenesses (being like N), likeness-makers (proper-
ties that make things alike), and determinants of like-
ness (V’ing like N, where “V’ing” is something other
than “being”) (p. 92), Grant arrives at the following
Minimal Thesis: “Each property a metaphor’s sub-
ject is characterized with the metaphorical element
as having is either (a) A likeness indicated by the
metaphorical element, or (b) A determinant of such
a likeness, or (3) A likeness-maker for such a like-
ness, or (4) A way of possessing a likeness-maker for
such a likeness” (p. 93). The second part of the thesis
is a spelling out of what is involved in understand-
ing metaphors, given that they posit commonalities
possessed in any of these four ways.
Grant insists that his is not a version of the
Comparison Theory, as that is an account of what
metaphors mean, while Grant eschews from the get-
go any interest in claiming that metaphors communi-
cate “the speaker’s meaning, semantic content, what
is said, what is conversationally implicated, what she
is caused to notice, etc.” (p. 88). Succeeding sections
of the chapter canvas and resist eight inapplicable
and then four applicable objections to the Minimal
Thesis (where the final objection is Searle’s claim
that it is subject to many counterexamples, several of
which Grant explores!).
Grant devotes Chapter 5 to the Indispensabil-
ity Thesis, the claim that “we use at least some
metaphors to think, to express, to communicate, or to
discover what cannot be thought, expressed, commu-
nicated, or discovered without metaphor” (p. 126).
He suggests that support for this thesis is based on
several confusions—for example, regarding multiply
realizable properties (p. 128) and regarding para-
phrasability (pp. 138ff)—and concludes we should
be skeptical overall about indispensability. Grant’s
closing chapter attempts to show what critics achieve
through the use of metaphor. Rejecting antirealist
views of both metaphor and of aesthetic descrip-
tion in general and thus insisting that metaphors do
indeed attribute properties to things in the world
(and that art-critical metaphors attribute properties
to works of art), Grant concludes that their use is
“a particularly effective way” of achieving both the
constitutive and the nonconstitutive aims of criticism.
That is, appreciation can involve “confirming by ap-
propriate means that certain properties give some-
thing a certain likeness” (p. 159). In addition, critics
“often want to cause readers to have, or to accurately
imagine or recall having, other kinds of response that
appreciation involves having” (p. 171), and metaphor
can effectively achieve this goal. Grant concludes by
reiterating the aims of criticism as he set them out,
declaring that critics “affect what we respond to, how
we respond, and why we respond,” and he insists
that the Minimal Thesis shows us how the metaphors
critics wield guide us in these respects (pp. 174–175).
456
Grant suggests that his account represents an im-
provement over the “vague claim that metaphors
make us think of one thing ‘in terms of’ another”
(p. 175); readers will have to decide whether talk
of likeness and likeness makers is clearer and more
helpful.
stephanie ross
Department of Philosophy
University of Missouri, St. Louis
rockmore, tom. Art and Truth after Plato. University
of Chicago Press, 2013, 344 pp., $55.00 cloth.
Tom Rockmore has undertaken a monumental task.
His book is a meticulously researched and finely writ-
ten work which seeks to trace back and consolidate
the various art-theoretical tributaries that originate
with Plato, the Platonic critique of the imitative arts,
and Plato’s “theory” of Forms. Rockmore initiates
the task by examining the meanings of “mimesis”
and the key concept of imitation or representation as
it occurs in Plato’s dialogues in the first chapter. The
reader should know, however, that Rockmore con-
tinues to expand upon and refurbish Plato’s views
on art, truth, beauty, and goodness until the end of
the book. Plato’s critique of the imitative arts and
its epistemological foundations are summoned again
and again in every chapter. This may well be as it
should be, given the title of the work, Art and Truth
after Plato (henceforth ATP). To whatever extent the
book is successful in the minds of its readers, in my
view, the success is achieved only at the great cost
of taking the life and the literary artfulness out of
Plato’s dialogues.
Rockmore states his “central thesis” in simple
terms as a perennially “old question” about the re-
lation of art to truth. He speaks of the art–truth re-
lationship as a theme that deserves more attention
than it receives due to the mistaken belief that “the
question was resolved long ago” (p. 1). In effect,
since Plato was the first to challenge the connec-
tion between art and truth, it is reasonable to say
that Plato has not yet been answered. Rockmore’s
thesis involves the far-reaching claim that the West-
ern tradition of aesthetics can be construed as a se-
ries of attempts to respond to Plato and provide a
successful “anti-Platonic analysis of art and art ob-
jects of the most varied kinds” (p. 1). While art the-
orists over the ages have been heavily influenced
by and responded to Plato’s views about art and
representation, not much concern has been devoted
to Plato’s radical idea that philosophers are those
“who alone know reality” and are thereby rightfully
deemed to be the “true artists.” It seems then that
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
one of the purposes of the book is to remedy the
situation.
Rockmore declares his interpretive standpoint on
how he plans to discuss Plato’s views at the same time
that he presents the position he will maintain about
Plato’s basic motivation for rejecting the imitative
arts. The motivation is tied directly to Plato’s politi-
cal commitments to create a “just or good state, based
on the intuitive grasp of reality beyond mere appear-
ance” (p. 3). Plato’s program is not to be understood
only in a negative way as an attack on the poets; he
is preparing a positive way for those future men who
would achieve knowledge of the forms through intu-
ition. According to Rockmore, there have been two
main responses to Plato’s critique, which are reflected
in the art–truth debate in the history of philosophical
aesthetics. Those who have responded to the negative
sides of Plato’s critique argue against the connection
between art and knowledge, and those who respond
positively accept the cognitive connection but reserve
it for a “special kind of art only” (p. 3).
This substantive part of Rockmore’s thesis is but-
tressed by his strong disclaimers regarding what any
of us can know about Plato’s thought: “We cannot
recover Plato’s position, if there was one. I will be
attributing to Plato the view that ordinary art is so-
cially pernicious, and that the philosophical effort to
bring about the ideal state is not only socially just,
but further, the only correct way of joining together
art and truth” (p. 3). This is the standpoint Rockmore
adopts. He finds this approach to Plato to be “richer,
less arbitrary, arguably more interesting than when it
is understood as simply condemning art on cognitive
grounds” (p. 3).
About half a page later, Rockmore makes a similar
point that despite Plato’s reputation as the originator
of the Western philosophical tradition, he is someone
“whose position we do not know and cannot now
identify and who is mainly known to us in what has
come down as Platonism” (p. 4). He admits at the out-
set that what will not be clear (nor made clear by him)
is whether it is Platonism or Plato, as we may under-
stand Plato through his writings, which prevails over
the Western philosophical tradition. Rockmore adds
that “this is particularly true for aesthetics, which he
does not create, but which he powerfully shapes, and
which has struggled ever since to escape from its Pla-
tonic shadow” (p. 4).
In the introduction, then, Rockmore explains the
book’s aim to a large extent but says nothing about
which he takes to be his audience. He says that ATP
is not “intended as a history of aesthetics, even in
outline. It is rather a systematic inquiry focusing on
several key interventions in the ongoing debate about
art and truth concerning finally the social role of art”
(p. 6). This “overall theme,” as he refers to it in the
next sentence, is treated in its various aspects. An
Book Reviews
enormous edifice will be built on an interpretive plat-
form, which holds that Plato’s critique of the imitative
arts arises from his “theory of knowledge,” which in
turn “presupposes the theory of forms” (p. 6). As
part of the platform, Rockmore takes the suggestion
seriously that the major focus of Plato’s critical atten-
tion is directed against the imitative arts of his own
time rather than “art in general” (p. 6). While this
approach is plausible, he does little to substantiate it.
It becomes an unnoticeable part of his argument and
resurfaces occasionally (pp. 239–240).
Rockmore capitalizes on the uncertainties that
surround Plato’s works. Nothing, it seems, will de-
ter him from his plan to connect the critique of the
imitative arts present primarily in Republic, Books
2–3 and 10, with what he calls Plato’s “conviction.”
The conviction is that certain types of people, namely
philosophers, can grasp the truths about reality suf-
ficiently to create the kallipolis or ideal city as an
“imaginary art object” in which justice, beauty, truth,
and goodness can be found (p. 6). For purposes of
the review, I choose not to contest Rockmore’s in-
terpretive assumptions about Plato or challenge his
arguments in Chapter 1. I find these arguments to be
the least convincing and the most controversial part
of his thesis, given the role they have in ATP. Rock-
more relies on an overly optimistic reading of Plato’s
Republic, he omits details and excludes features of
the Republic and other dialogues that do not fit his
thesis, and he takes Socrates to speak for Plato at all
times. When Socrates does not appear in a dialogue,
such as the Sophist, Plato must be speaking through
the Stranger (p. 37).
The book has seven chapters and is organized
chronologically, with each chapter focusing on one
philosopher or group of philosophers in a given time
period. Rockmore provides a chapter-by-chapter
synopsis of the arguments in the book (pp. 6–10).
There are section headings in each chapter that are
somewhat helpful and function as signposts, but these
are not always good indicators of the topic about to
be discussed. The book has endnotes and an index
but no bibliography, unfortunately. The endnotes are
sometimes helpful, though a peculiarity of ATP is
the author’s apparent suppression of references to
his earlier books. Rockmore has published more than
eight books since 2002. Two of his most recent works
(In Kant’s Wake, 2006, and Kant and Idealism, 2007)
cover more or less the same conceptual ground and
present similar arguments within related historical
contexts. In the endnotes, there are only two refer-
ences to his works: one on Heidegger (p. 284, n. 84)
and another on Hegel (p. 308, n. 99).
In Chapter 2, Rockmore gives an interesting ac-
count of Aristotle on mimesis that contrasts strongly
with Plato’s narrower approach. Much of what Rock-
more says about Aristotle’s contributions will be fa-
457
miliar to his audience; what is distinctive about his
approach are the anticipatory asides and leaps of in-
terpretation from ancient to modern aesthetics and
back again. Rockmore speaks of Aristotle’s response
to Plato as “a sea change in aesthetics” (p. 67). Aris-
totle has broken the link in Plato’s argument that the
imitative arts cannot meet a standard of knowledge.
Rockmore writes: “For Aristotle, imitation is not cog-
nitive in the Platonic sense. In giving up the principle
of imitating the mind-independent real, he abandons
the Platonic insistence on knowledge of the forms”
(p. 67).
In Chapter 3, Rockmore takes up medieval and
Christian aesthetics in an informative discussion that
interrelates the views of Plato and Aristotle to Plot-
inus, the Neo-Platonists, Augustine, and Aquinas.
Plotinus’s aesthetic and moral philosophy was highly
influential in upgrading the status of the artist and
art’s relation to beauty, truth, and goodness. In this
respect, Neo-Platonism, which is sometimes gener-
ally referred to as “Platonism,” is incongruent with
the negative Platonic view of the arts. Rockmore cov-
ers a wide range of complex themes, which some-
times results in a confusing mix of ideas. He speaks
too loosely, at one point, when he claims “Plotinus
is a religious Christian mystic” (p. 87). With regard
to medieval aesthetics, Rockmore argues that due
to Christian religious belief and fervor, there is no
need for an epistemological justification that art and
truth are connected since it occurs through the con-
cept of the divine. He writes: “Medieval aesthetics
is more anti-Platonic than Platonic, and specifically
anti-Platonic on the key point of the cognitive func-
tion of aesthetic representation” (p. 92).
Chapter 4 concerns the aesthetic theories of Kant
and the German idealists. It is in the eighteenth cen-
tury that the aesthetic theory moves away from the
strict mimetic relations between the art object and
the subject and recognizes the role of human imagi-
nation. Rockmore writes: “This view transforms the
aesthetic problem from an anti-Platonic justification
of a relation between beauty and truth to consider-
ation of beauty in terms of pleasure (and pain) in
raising questions of taste” (p. 122). In the section
called “Kant and Truth” (pp. 143–145), Rockmore
says: “Kant suggests he is a deep Platonist while tak-
ing an anti-Platonic approach to art and art objects”
(p. 142). He discusses the difference between inter-
preting Kant’s view of knowledge as given in the First
Critique whereby he would agree with breaking the
link between art and truth and Kant’s view of knowl-
edge in the Third Critique. As Kant understands
knowledge in the later work, there is a connection
between art and knowledge but not as Plato would
accept it since the only knowledge we can access, ac-
cording to Kant’s constructivism, does not qualify as
knowledge for Plato.
458
The fifth chapter is entitled “Hegel on Art and
Spiritual Truth,” and in it Rockmore does a splendid
job of presenting certain facets of Hegel’s aesthet-
ics, the idea of spirit and its relevance to religion
and the art–truth relation. He explains why, given
Hegel’s historical approach to knowledge, Hegel
rejects Plato’s standards. He also offers an insight-
ful comparison of Hegel and Plato on the distinc-
tion between the idea and ideal. Finally, he consid-
ers the end of art thesis and talks about Hegel and
Danto.
Marx and the Marxist aesthetic tradition, pre-
sented in Chapter 6, provide lots of historical and
fertile ground for the continued discussion of art and
truth on the anti-Platonic side of things, given the so-
cial realist point of view. Rockmore makes a parallel
between medieval religious belief as a justification
for accepting the art–truth relation and a “post reli-
gious political faith” which serves as a rational basis
for Marxist arguments, which connect certain types
of art and truth (p. 194).
In Chapter 7, Rockmore considers what aspects of
Plato’s view are still live questions in modern or con-
temporary times. These aspects are epistemological
representationalism and the art–truth relation. No
longer is there a concern with philosophy as the true
art. Both aspects reach down into the practice of the
arts and the attitude of artists such as Cezanne and
Picasso about the art–truth relation or as Rockmore
dubs it here the “Platonic link” (p. 233). He notes a
paradox that while artists now reject representation-
alism and by implication disregard the Platonic link,
there is a “qualified return to the Platonic view” by
philosophers and recognition of a “constitutive link
between art and truth” (p. 233).
Some artists have shown their disregard for rep-
resentational art through their cubistic fragmentary
approach to ordinary objects, and some defiantly
challenge the aesthetic nature of the art object itself.
Rockmore takes up the issue of whether cubism is an
“attack on representationalism” and argues against
those who consider it a type of realism. He consid-
ers the question of the status of the artwork to be
“an unrelated concern” (p. 234). Again, Plato has set
the standard. Rockmore takes on the nonrepresenta-
tionalist views, and one should note the crucial point
being made that we are in a different phase of history
now and currently engage in a “non-Platonic” mode
of philosophizing about art. As it turns out, however,
Plato’s standard will not go unacknowledged insofar
as it is either “set aside” or “honored in the breech.”
In this context, Rockmore discusses the views of
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The chapter
ends with a section on the social utility of art and
a discussion of Plato, Kant, and Hegel on the possi-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
bilities that remain viable once Plato’s demands for
knowledge have been overturned.
In ATP, Rockmore is doing more than provid-
ing readers with a “systematic inquiry” into the “on-
going debate about art and truth”; he is engaged
in a highly speculative mode of interpretation and
has written a quasi-historical philosophical analy-
sis of aesthetic theory. There is a surprising amount
of exposition and less critical discussion than one
might expect given his controversial claims and the
scope as well as the volume of material he covers.
Rockmore frequently intervenes in his own narra-
tive and distracts the reader’s attention away from
the immediate topic. He prompts the reader to an-
ticipate what’s ahead and comments on the views of
one philosopher in terms of how it will relate to an-
other philosopher’s position. After pointing ahead
to what is to come once he arrives at this junc-
ture, he sometimes looks back to the previous dis-
cussion he had finished and is compelled to repeat
himself.
While I have grown a bit weary of the semantic
strains put upon the different meanings and uses of
the concepts of Platonic and Platonist in ATP and
had almost given up the attempt to keep track of
which side of the Platonist/anti-Platonist divide var-
ious philosophers are placed, I am quite apprecia-
tive of the book as a whole. Given the nature of the
project, it is necessary for Rockmore to stake out and
clearly identify numerous positions and occasionally
reformulate the positions as he works from chapter to
chapter. This strategy is especially evident in Chapter
7, where he divides a set of responses to the Platonic
link “into anti-Platonic representationalist and Pla-
tonic or quasi-Platonic intuitive theories” (p. 243).
As the result of this strategic practice, there is a pro-
liferation of “isms” in ATP.
On a final note, as I studied ATP and pursued re-
search, I came across A.E. Taylor’s book, Platonism
and Its Influence (New York: Cooper Square Publish-
ers, 1963). Taylor suggests that one should grant to
Plotinus his belief that he was reviving the “genuine
thought of Plato.” We can allow this, Taylor says,
“if we add that the Plato of Plotinus is inevitably
Plato seen through a temperament” (p. 12). Taylor’s
account helps one to recall the complex routes by
which Platonism “found its way into the main cur-
rent of Western orthodoxy” (p. 18). Understanding
these routes is not only relevant but also indispens-
able for an adequate interpretation of philosophical
history and aesthetics. Rockmore has made a gen-
erous contribution to this sort of understanding. To
change slightly the metaphor with which I began the
review: all roads really do lead back to Platonic phi-
losophy in one way or another.
Book Reviews
rebecca bensen cain
Department of Philosophy
Oklahoma State University
nowell smith, david. Sounding/Silence. Martin
Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics. Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2013, xiv + 237 pp., $55.00 cloth.
A characteristic feature of an artwork is that it brings
attention to “that it is.” Unlike a tool, it is not merely
something through which we can manipulate or un-
derstand our environment; instead, the work can
open up a whole new configuration of intelligibility
that changes the way we understand our environ-
ment. All of this it does through material, stroke,
color, sound, marks, body, and words. In this sense,
the work of art is exemplary for Heidegger’s ongoing
investigation into how meaning comes to be, since
here we are so concretely confronted with the as-
tounding fact that a particular material can fix a fig-
ure which then opens up a wider realm of signification
around itself, and that realm can shape the outlook
of its audience for years to come.
This is what Heidegger calls the truth of art, and
it is the underlying theme that interests Heidegger in
all of his writing on art. It is also the underlying issue
of David Nowell Smith’s book, which takes on the
challenge of thinking carefully through how meaning
comes to be in a work of art, using poetry as its ex-
emplar, and why and how the “that it is” is so central
to the work of art. Unlike some of the recent publica-
tions on Heidegger and art, the book is not an intro-
duction, a commentary, or a more associative reading
or interpretation of art “with Heidegger.” Rather,
it is a broad-ranging argument for a fairly cohesive
Heideggerian view of art, and of poetry in particular,
that is anchored in careful close reading of Heideg-
ger’s text, constantly related to debates in philosophy
and literary theory, and further challenged by ana-
lyzing some of Heidegger’s own reading practices,
in particular of Hölderlin’s, George’s, and Trakl’s
poetry. The book presents its position in four long
chapters.
Chapter 1, “For the First Time,” is a general en-
gagement with Heidegger’s understanding of art,
working through some of the motifs from Heideg-
ger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Es-
pecially useful and interesting here is the discus-
sion of Heidegger in relation to formalism. Nowell
Smith argues convincingly that even though Heideg-
ger thinks a dualist understanding of artworks as
consisting of formal features and content obfuscates
what the work is, this does not mean that Heidegger
rules out the importance of what might be called the
work’s formal features, for example, color, rhythm,
and intonation. The work is a Gestalt or figure (which
459
must not be confused with image or trope) that holds
in place “the strife between earth and world” or,
if you wish, the opposing movements of disclosure
and concealment, openness and opacity. The “formal
features” are not merely embellishment or qualities
of a vehicle communicating content: they are rather
constitutive of the figure that holds “the movement
that characterizes all entry into appearance” in place
(p. 59).
Chapter 2, “The Naming Power of the Word,” is an
argument for what the right conception of language
is, according to Heidegger. This is a fairly ambitious
chapter (and could have been a project in its own
right), which argues that central to Heidegger’s un-
derstanding of language is the originary act of nam-
ing. This means that language can pick out a being
in such a way that it “transforms the way [this being]
comes to presence” and that the system of intelligi-
bility that is language as a whole is opened up and
reconfigured around it. Nowell Smith is here making
his most original contribution by emphasizing that
this first naming is an event that does not just occur
within language, nor is it some mysterious event we
passively receive from outside of human intelligibil-
ity, but that it is importantly bodily and hence is a
case of the body coming to language (I will return to
this in a moment).
This account of language makes possible Chap-
ter 3, “Heidegger’s Figures,” which then is able to
explain why Heidegger dismisses metaphor despite
the fact that his own writing and the poetry he holds
in so high regard employ such tropes. As Heidegger
avoids dualism in the ontology of art, his understand-
ing of language is one in which the prosodic elements
of language are integral to meaning, and hence the
distinction between linguistic token and sense that
is traditionally used to account for metaphor is dis-
missed as misunderstanding the nature of language.
Chapter 4, “Reading Heidegger Reading,” then
tries to suggest what kind of poetics could be con-
structed on the basis of Heidegger’s philosophy.
This can just be suggested through example, and
hence Nowell Smith turns to some concrete read-
ings of some of Heidegger’s favorite poems, read-
ing both with and against Heidegger’s own particular
readings.
The book is of such a scope that it cannot be
engaged as a whole here; hence I will devote the
rest of the review to the central issues of the middle
chapters, that is, Heidegger’s conception of language
and his critique of metaphor. Central to Heidegger’s
description of an artwork is that it is the fixing of
two opposing forces, what he calls earth and world.
Both are needed to come together for the artwork
to be an event of meaning, and they do so in the
work’s figure (Gestalt). World is the open realm of
meaningfulness, whereas earth is in the artwork as its
460
material—it is “the heaviness of stone,” “the firm-
ness and flexibility of the wood,” “the lightening and
darkening of color” (Heidegger’s “The Origin of the
Work of Art,” as quoted on p. 61). However, it is
not obvious that poetry has such an “earthy” mate-
rial. Instead, poetry seems to be working within a
language of signification already part of the world of
the poet. Heidegger claims the word’s material is its
“naming power,” and Nowell Smith goes on to show
how this naming power has a similar kind of material
thickness and opacity as colors, sounds, and stone by
anchoring the word in the human body—naming is
an “articulation both bodily and linguistic” (p. 91).
This account is both complex and convoluted, draw-
ing on analysis of mood, intonation, voice, gesture,
and movement, so it is hard to trace the argument
from beginning to end, but the central claim is that
in the naming of poetry, we encounter meaning to-
gether with the bodily opacity out of which it comes,
and poetry does so in a manner that changes the stan-
dards and limits of language and linguistic practice.
Language sounds, rings, vibrates, hovers, and trem-
bles, Heidegger writes, and those elements are partly
paralinguistic and literally tied to body and mate-
rial. These paralinguistic elements are also how the
word comes to mean something. The poetic word an-
nounces “that it is” by making us alert to how its
sound is a “broken silence.” Nowell Smith’s example
of an open E-string played on a violin might be a
helpful comparison here: the noise of a bow scrap-
ing across the string is the condition that must with-
draw for the reverberation to soar and erupt into tone
(p. 38). The figure that means something to us is an-
nouncing both its own movement out of the sensuous
and its belonging in the sensuous.
Next, Nowell Smith asks: what would such use
of language as naming look like? A clear candidate
is what we would usually refer to as metaphor. It
is thus immediately puzzling that Martin Heidegger,
the philosopher who claimed, “language is the house
of being,” dismissed metaphor as only existing within
metaphysics (coming from Heidegger, this is a clear
devaluation). Heidegger insists that when Hölderlin
describes words as being “like flowers,” which bloom,
which are “the flower of the mouth” (in “Bread and
Wine” and “Germania,” respectively), we are led
astray if we understand these as metaphors. Instead,
these words of Hölderlin’s are better understood as
naming, an original articulation of language in which
beings—in this case, words—show themselves as if
for the first time and then introduce change into the
lexico-syntactic structure that ordinary language is.
Drawing on his account of language, Nowell Smith
can make sense of Heidegger’s negative claims and
explain how metaphor, like Hölderlin’s flower of the
mouth, is better understood as a figure (Gestalt) that
occurs as a new measure within language than as an
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
image (Bild), which would just work within the al-
ready established language. Of course, on one level
a reader will read Hölderlin’s lines and recognize a
trope there. Hölderlin is using the established rhetor-
ical tool made available to him through the history
of the genre, and the reader recognizes that. Hei-
degger’s point is rather that the figure is not just
an interpretational puzzle. The sensory experience
of the figure is also part of it, and what Hölderlin’s
“flower of the mouth” makes heard is its unfamil-
iarity. By contrast, if we understand the metaphor
as an interpretational puzzle, it can be “solved” and
hence domesticated. Making poetry familiar in this
way would be to make the naming into regular lan-
guage use. In Nowell Smith’s words, “Heidegger’s
denunciation of metaphor leads to a defense of po-
etics against hermeneutics” (p. 133).
As mentioned, Chapter 2’s theory of language
could have been a project in its own right. However,
Nowell Smith’s choice not to limit his project thus is
revealing of philosophically important reasons: If it
is to be more than mere insistence that new thoughts
come about through the kind of naming that happens
in poetry, Heidegger’s own philosophical claim needs
to be anchored in some particular use of language out
of which such new ways of configuring standards and
limits are offered. To put it more straightforwardly, it
is important that Heidegger’s thinking is not merely
spinning in a void, but that it has some material or
body to engage in order to show us how poetic nam-
ing happens. Engagement with poetry is supposed
to offer just such a suggestive friction for Heideg-
ger’s own thought. This is where Nowell Smith’s ar-
gument for Heidegger’s view of language seems to
be challenged by Heidegger’s own reading practice,
since Heidegger rarely pays attention to the “body”
of poetry, its prosodic elements, when he reads po-
etry. Through careful analysis, Nowell Smith there-
fore tries to show ways the poetry Heidegger reads—
oftentimes against Heidegger’s own readings—plays
the role of such exemplary use of language for the
reader. Here Nowell Smith attempts to enact a Hei-
deggerian poetics on his own. A second challenge sur-
faces here, in the author’s readings of Trakl’s “Winter-
abend,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key
West,” and Celan’s “Schieferäugige,” where at times
the reader might question whether the word is really
sounding as described or if the lack of reverberation
is just due to her own inability to listen properly. That
kind of skeptical question is not voiced, or settled, in
this book.
Sounding/Silence is dense and demanding at times
but ultimately rewarding, and the key insights seem
both important and right. The book is presumably
addressed to readers who are quite familiar with
more contemporary literary theory and/or Heideg-
ger’s thinking on art and poetry, since it is fast paced
Book Reviews
and frequent in its references to different texts of
Heidegger’s (spanning over half a century) as well as
theories of language and literature spanning from
classical structuralism to more recent discussions
of metaphor. Where the references to theoretical
discussion of linguistic meaning and trope are of-
ten helpful (the discussion of Derrida’s and de Man’s
criticism of Heidegger are especially illuminating),
the use of some of Heidegger’s lectures, for example
on Aristotle and Anaximander, are potentially hin-
dering the flow of the argument rather than helping
it along, since we get yet another level of voice to
interpret and keep track of. A clearer outline of the
chapter structure would have been helpful, and the
book is unfortunately also marked by frequent typo-
graphical errors as well as by some inconsistencies in
use of abbreviations for referenced texts, issues that
hopefully will be addressed in a future second edition
of the book.
ingvild torsen
Philosophy Department
Marquette University
swirski, peter. From Literature to Biterature: Lem,
Turing, Darwin, and Explorations in Computer Lit-
erature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolu-
tion. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013, 235
pp., 43 b&w illus., $26.96 cloth.
In his latest masterpiece, Peter Swirski explores
three core issues: computer-written literature, ma-
chine thinking, and cultural evolution. Inspired by
the writings of Stanislaw Lem, Alan Turing, and
Charles Darwin—which roughly corresponds to the
tripartite division of the book—and taking into con-
sideration the latest developments in computer sci-
ences and robotics, his main claim is that “at a certain
point in the already foreseeable future, computers
will be able to create works of literature in and of
themselves” (pp. 5–6). Always mindful of the im-
portance of narrative for human cognition, Swirski’s
book forges no less than a marriage of the computer
sciences and the humanities by drawing “a synop-
tic map of the future in which the gulf . . . between
mere syntax-driven processing and semantically rich
understanding has been bridged” (p. 7).
The idea of computer-written literature—
biterature—comes from Lem’s 1973 metafiction “A
History of Bitic Literature.” However, where Lem
gave his imagination free rein, and not always with
satisfactory results, Swirski remains critical and care-
ful in analyzing his core ideas, particularly regard-
ing the underlying conditions that need to obtain
for computers to become authors, or in his neolo-
461
gism “computhors.” For computhorship to become
possible—that is, for machines to be seen as genuine
authors—he argues contra Lem, “there must be a
direct and not underlying causal link between a com-
puthor and the work in its given shape” (p. 45). Given
the extent to which computers are already capable
of originating new things—like the famous Mozart’s
42nd symphony—Swirski is convinced they will even-
tually evolve to the point at which they will sponta-
neously begin to write literature without any input or
commands issued by humans.
There are at least two ways to challenge this line
of thought. One can claim that computers can only
do what programmers tell them to do, that is, those
things for which they were programmed. This does
not seem convincing to Swirski, who spares no effort
to argue and document with real-life examples that
already today we cannot explain some of the things
that computer programs do. Our inability to explain
what went wrong in cases like the Knight Capital in-
cident from 2012, in which an investment firm’s com-
puters went haywire, might stem from our inability
to discover the error in the algorithms designed by
human programmers rather than from computers’
ability to upgrade and spontaneously evolve.
The second way to challenge biterature is to claim
that it will lack some of the aesthetic qualities we nat-
urally associate with literature, primarily originality.
Biterary texts might exhibit a degree of coherence
and plausibility and might even be competently writ-
ten, but are they in fact literary works? Without hu-
man agency as its underlying cause, the composition
might not count as original. However, Swirski points
out that not everything we consider literature today
has the quality of being original. Computers today
may not originate anything, where this means acting
on their own volition (possessing agency), but their
outputs may still be original in the sense of being
unanticipated by us. Case in point, computer-written
music today exhibits qualities that make it in practice
indistinguishable from music originally composed by
the greatest of human greats.
The prospects of biterature challenge all of the
fundamental concepts in literary aesthetics, not least
because they eliminate human authorship and the
value we place on authors. Art lovers who oppose
Rorty-like textualism might frown at this point, ex-
pecting Swirski to offer some kind of criteria that
should govern evaluation of biterature. Instead, he
astonishes by reinforcing the argument in favor of
computhorship. Again inspired by Lem’s vision, he
describes evolutionary process that will turn com-
puters of today into creative individuals of tomor-
row. These will act spontaneously, out of their own
volition and agency, and will not depend on the al-
gorithms provided by their creators. Crucial here
is a move from producing pieces that are textually
462
indistinguishable from human literature to originat-
ing biterary works.
It is highly speculative what will inspire com-
puthor’s art, but given all the unsurpassable differ-
ences between people and computhors and their abil-
ity to rapidly upgrade themselves, computhors will
most likely not be creating art for people. Even if
at the first stage identified by Swirski, cis-humana,
we may still manage to recognize their creations
as art, as the process continues and they evolve to
transhumana stage, we will not be able to keep track
of them. Multiplying scenarios in which machines
turn not against but away from humans, Swirski
sees them as rapidly progressing toward “exploring
worlds to which only they will have access” (p. 73).
To them, we will be irrelevant. To us, they will be
incomprehensible.
Obviously, for this to happen, computers will have
to develop the ability to learn and adjust their behav-
ior to meet the challenges of their environment. In
fact, explains Swirski, their evolution will, to a great
extent, be enhanced by people’s desire to make the
experience of using computers for various activities
faster, more enjoyable, and more efficient. By rely-
ing more and more on their performances, we will be
increasing our demands to the point at which com-
puters will have to develop intelligence in order to
cope with our quests. Once this happens there is no
way of telling how they will behave, but surely their
constant development will lead them to develop per-
sonality, so much so, actually, that we might need to
recognize them as nonhuman persons.
This progress will be gradual, predicts Swirski,
without a turning point at which they will for sure
become sentient. Therefore, runs his bold argument,
a decision as to whether or not machines think will
not be exclusively a matter of their performances, but
“a consensual decision rooted in the web of socio-
cultural practices current in the world at that time”
(pp. 88–89). Swirski follows here the lead of thinkers
such as Douglas Hofstadter, who tend to downplay
the “intelligence” of Artificial Intelligence and focus
on adaptive behavior instead. Therefore, for many
who read Swirski’s book, plausibility of his arguments
will depend not on what one takes literature or biter-
ature to be but on how one understands intelligence.
This is, of course, the mother of all questions.
One of the crucial issues is Swirski’s assumption that
during the first stage, computhors will really write
literature. The worry is, even if computers sponta-
neously create texts, that is, semantically and syn-
tactically well-formed strings of sentences, can these
really count as literature? The step from text to liter-
ary work endowed with literary value is not one that
can easily be taken in literary aesthetics, as Swirski,
author of Literature, Analytically Speaking, knows
all too well. But, he maintains, the real criterion for
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
recognizing creativity may not be quality but causal
independence of the act of creation. Assuming this is
so, the true problem that Swirski explores becomes
obvious: what does it mean to be creative, to have
consciousness, and to act intentionally? All of these
are necessary in order to ascribe authorship to some-
one, and if computhors will in fact write literature,
we will have to presuppose that they exhibit analo-
gous kinds of intentional behavior. This is the core
problem that makes the backbone of the book, and
the four chapters of the second part are exclusively
devoted to analyzing it.
What does it mean to think and to recognize that
others—including computers—are thinking? What
role does Theory of Mind—which enables us to rec-
ognize others as intentional creatures—play in this?
Is this something that only people are capable of, or
are we going to live to see the day when machines, al-
ready better at a staggering array of activities, will be
enjoying poetry and diagnosing depression? Swirski
analyzes these issues by turning the concept of think-
ing upside down. Adopting hard-core skepticism re-
garding our own abilities to prove we can think, he
issues a challenge: “Try as hard as you like, you will
not be able to prove that I have not been artificially
created” (p. 93). His follow-up claim is: we can no
more prove that machines cannot think than we can
prove that we can.
Crucial in this discussion is Alan Turing, who to
this day remains famous for designing a simple (or
not so simple) test of whether machines are capa-
ble of thinking. Lots of polemics have been raised
regarding the Turing test, and Swirski does a mar-
velous job in summarizing sixty years of discussions
regarding its efficiency and purpose. His almost revo-
lutionary claim is that the test should be understood
in “inductive rather than logical-categorical terms”
(p. 124), where this means that it does not deliver
analytical conditions for machine thinking but pro-
vides a “source of controlled inductive evidence for
or against computer intelligence” (p. 124). The prob-
lem is that computers are just as capable of passing
the test as humans are of failing it. Therefore, if the
test is to be used to determine whether or not a ma-
chine “can be acknowledged as a sentient being and
perhaps even a citizen” (p. 107), we need to devise
“the toughest and most foolproof version of the test”
(p. 107).
If Turing is the hero of the second part, then John
Searle is the villain. Considered one of the most pas-
sionate denouncers of the view that machines can
think, his famous Chinese-room argument was meant
to show that computers cannot understand semantic
content and therefore “no program in and of itself can
be equivalent (give rise) to a mind” (p. 112). Swirski
raises several objections to Searle, all of which are
based on the premise that Searle in fact begs the
Book Reviews
question by supposing that Searle himself—and by
extension, other people—is capable of thinking. Un-
fortunately, there is no way to prove this; Swirski
demonstrates and offers a different account of how
thinking and consciousness developed, inspired by
biologist Stuart Kauffman. Relying on his theory of
autocatalytic systems, Swirski argues that the ability
to think, consciousness, and self-awareness emerge at
a “certain level of system complexity without being
detectable in any way prior” (p. 121). Swirski’s point
is, given that we do not entirely understand how we
got to develop mentality, it cannot be claimed that
some other complex systems—like computers—are
incapable of developing it.
Having marched thus far into the future, Swirski
pauses to drop “the big question: what will drive com-
puters?” (p. 144). Unlike people, who exhibit bio-
logically primed goal-oriented behavior and deter-
mination to have their wishes and desires fulfilled,
computers have no such drive to act or even to
survive. Whether this is claimed for cis-humana or
transhuma, it seems surprising: why not assume that
a desire to survive and to have circumstances in the
world changed in accordance with one’s volitions will
evolve simultaneously with the ability to learn and
create? Given Swirski’s preference for physicalism
and rejection of Cartesian dualism, it seems that once
we allow for the possibility of computers having any
kind of consciousness at all, we have to allow this
process to develop “all the way” rather than to stop
it artificially at the point at which they can create
literature but lack a desire to survive.
If the second part of the book makes us feel
uneasy about the fact that we cannot prove our
cognitive agency, the third part might throw us in
utter despair—or excitement, depending on one’s
preferences—when Swirski starts unveiling a gallery
of ultrasmart futuristic gadgets. Whether used for
killing the bad ones, diagnosing the ill ones, or mak-
ing life easier for everybody else, the underlying as-
sumption is that various kinds of smart robots will
be around to help us fight wars, write homework,
choose restaurants, and maybe even choose spouses.
And here Swirski’s speculations (predictions?) stop,
with the question of how well—or badly—computers
will manage to master the challenges of physical envi-
ronment, once they infiltrate into our natural world.
Given that intelligence is ultimately a matter of the
interaction between a system and its environment,
Swirski is certain they will be rather good at it.
There is a lot to recommend in this book, even
if sometimes it seems Swirski is balancing on the
verge of futurology, if not science fiction. Still, one
has to admire the amount and variety of informa-
tion he delivers. Sharp and relentless in analyzing
the arguments of philosophers, biologists, psycholo-
gists, AI designers, and various other experts in these
463
topics, Swirski formulates his theses with analytical
precision after carefully reflecting on pro and contra
arguments. His masterful narrative technique chal-
lenges us to reexamine what we take for granted in
life, literature, and philosophy. The book is bound to
inspire debates over the nature of art and intelligence
in days to come, even if some of Swirski’s arguments
may be seen as far-fetched, particularly by those who
put their faith into programmers’ skills rather than
in uncontrollable, self-evolving programs. There is
no doubt, however, that the vision he leaves us with
is powerful and the questions he raises fundamental
to our sense of who we are as thinkers, artists, and,
perhaps most of all, human beings.
iris vidmar
Department of Philosophy
University of Rijeka
vaughan, hunter. Where Film Meets Philosophy:
Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic
Thinking. Columbia University Press, 2013, 264
pp., $89.50 cloth, $29.50 paper.
Where Film Meets Philosophy is a compelling attempt
to answer the question: how is the medium of film
philosophical?
To answer this question, Vaughan takes a seem-
ingly disparate pair of methodologies and weaves
them into an insightful and useful whole. The phe-
nomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the semiotics of
Deleuze are, separately, ideally suited to an analy-
sis of film, but historically have been considered in-
commensurable. In a similar spirit, Vaughan’s choice
to engage in a comparative analysis of the films of
Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais demonstrate an
innovative approach, open to new ways of seeing yet
mindful of the tradition.
In Where Film Meets Philosophy, Vaughan seeks
to provide a theoretical foundation, a tailor-made vo-
cabulary, for interrogating film. He explicitly rejects
any attempt to reduce film to language or narrative
or image but instead argues that we should appreci-
ate the full range of meaningful elements involved in
cinema. Image, sound, space, and time all contribute
to our experience of film and are therefore of equal
phenomenological significance.
In order to construct this foundation, Vaughan be-
gins by considering the most fundamental way to
frame his theory, as a matter of subject–object re-
lations.
For Vaughan, the distinction between subject and
object is never wholly exclusive; these categories
permeate, influence, and transform into each other.
Rather than a duality, Vaughan regards them as more
464
of a polarity, a spectrum of possible relationships that
includes the movement between viewed and viewer,
fictive and real, representation and represented.
Vaughan’s framing of the issue as a matter of re-
lations, rather than distinct items with properties,
allows him to fully appreciate the fluidity and mal-
leability of film. The formal elements—editing, light-
ing, and sound—can be arranged to convey a charac-
ter as subject or object. For Vaughan, though, what
is of most interest is the potential for film to express
and embody the idea that, rather than properties that
are tacked on to the things, it is the relation between
them that gives rise to whether they are subject or
object.
To develop a vocabulary for how film can do this,
Vaughan proposes a new concept for bracketing off
his phenomenon of interest. The immanent field is
a concept that captures the visual and audio dimen-
sions of the film, how they are organized and how
they relate to each other.
Importantly, Vaughan is not necessarily concerned
with just our experience of the film; the immanent
field lies outside of our minds; it is the sound-image
that we interact with when we engage with the film.
He further specifies his particular interest by dif-
ferentiating between denotation and connotation.
Denotation is the dictionary definition type mean-
ing of the representation. Connotation is how the de-
notation is constructed, the various filmic elements
(color, sound, location within the frame) that orga-
nize our experience of the thing.
For Vaughan, then, the matter of inquiry lies in
how the immanent field, how the visual and audio
elements of a film, interact and relate to connote
meaning. Vaughan believes that this question lies at
the intersection between phenomenology and semi-
otics.
Vaughan structures his exploration of this ques-
tion by first considering the phenomenology of film,
the relationship between the subject doing the view-
ing and the immanent field being viewed. In Chapter
1, Vaughan argues that it would be misleading to use
a human metaphor to describe the camera, to say
that the camera perceives or literally possesses sub-
jectivity does not tell us anything about the resultant
immanent field. Instead we should consider how the
camera as a viewing point can at times offer a po-
sition of viewing while also containing the potential
to deconstruct this position. This position of view-
ing involves the frame of the shot, a limiting form,
within which the elements interact and form object–
subject relations. Using Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa
vie (1962) and Two or Three Things I Know About
Her (1969), Vaughan demonstrates alternative tech-
niques that film can employ in exploring subjectivity.
Vivre sa vie is shot in a more traditional style, with
the main character, Nana, being the object of percep-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
tion. Two or Three Things I Know About Her is much
more experimental. The formal elements, not just the
content of the shot but the sequence of shots, at turns
reinforce and break down the barrier between sub-
ject and object.
These movies serve as perfect initial examples of
Vaughan’s method in action. An alternative analytic
method might have focused on the narrative similar-
ities between the films, but Vaughan focuses on the
filmic aspects and so has a full vocabulary to discuss
the different ways the films represent, not just talk
about, subjectivity.
In Chapter 2, Vaughan delves into the semiotics
of subject–object relations, how the filmic elements
are organized to give rise to meaning. Of particu-
lar interest to Vaughan is film’s capacity, in a sense
analogous to philosophy, to reflect and perpetuate
orders of meaning yet also subvert and reconfigure
them.
Building on the phenomenological principles laid
out in Chapter 1, Vaughan goes to great lengths to
contextualize his method in relation to other theo-
rists. This chapter is quite technical; Vaughan does
not analyze any films to demonstrate his ideas, and it
may prove troublesome for a reader without a firm
background in semiotics. But for those with experi-
ence in this style of technical discourse, this chap-
ter is extremely enlightening as to the genealogy
of Vaughan’s ideas. Here Vaughan places Deleuzian
semiotics in relation to the work of Umberto Eco,
the Italian critic and novelist; Roland Barthes, the
French literary theorist and philosopher; and Pier
Paolo Pasolini, the Italian film director and public
intellectual.
In Chapter 3, Vaughan returns to using films to
demonstrate his method. Alain Resnais’s Last Year
at Marienbad (1961) and Hiroshima, mon amour
(1959) are analyzed with an ear for how sound is
used to configure subject–object relations. By stress-
ing the importance of the audio in the structure of
the immanent field, Vaughan shows cinema’s unique
capacity for multidimensional explorations of inter-
subjectivity. Where Vaughan gets really interesting
is in his consideration of the range of implications of
diegetic sound, sound that originates within the world
represented on-screen, and nondiegetic sound, such
as an orchestral score. This uniquely filmic consider-
ation is a perfect example of how film semiotics must
look beyond the visual signs if it is to capture all of
the possibilities of the cinematic medium.
In Chapter 4, Vaughan develops his film semi-
otics to consider the codification of subjectivity, or
how subjectivity is connoted by the filmic elements
at play in Alain Resnais’s The War Is Over (1966).
For Vaughan, the genius of Resnais lies in his adop-
tion of the traditional signs that connote subjectivity,
such as the point of view shot, but ultimately in order
Book Reviews
to subvert the proposition of a separate, Cartesian,
wholly independent subject, instead demonstrating
a web of relations between agents. This chapter is
impressive; as Vaughan is finished with introducing
and clarifying his conceptual framework, he is free to
fully explore Resnais’s masterful techniques.
In Chapter 5, Vaughan turns to what he terms the
code of objectivity, how the formal elements of a film
can be organized in such a way that they remove
subjectivity. Mirroring the structure of Chapter 4,
Vaughan examines how Godard’s Contempt (1963)
at once exemplifies and deconstructs the code of ob-
jectivity. This chapter brings Vaughan back to the
questions he posed in the first chapter. For Vaughan,
any film’s claim to objectivity is suspect, as the ar-
rangement of the immanent field is always connoting
meaning.
Where Film Meets Philosophy is an insightful, well-
structured, and enjoyable book. At times the techni-
cal language necessitates a very slow reading, but the
ultimate rewards make the effort more than worth-
while.
cian whelan
Department of Philosophy
University College Cork
hösle, vittorio. Zur Geschichte der Ästhetik und
Poetik. Basle: Schwabe, 2013, 102 pp., €16.50
paper.
Hösle’s brief volume is an attempt at understand-
ing how Western aesthetics and poetics got to where
we are now, in the hope that a look back will help
us move forward. However, as signaled by the title’s
prepositional “Zur” (“On”), the author is not aim-
ing at a comprehensive survey but at a condensed
philosophy of the history of aesthetics. Even within
this project, Hösle develops additional focus by con-
centrating on just one characteristic philosophical
structure: he sees a special opportunity in thinking
through those aesthetics that are self-reflexive and
put their own rules into practice. This leads him to
set a further emphasis on poetics, where the medium
of consideration is at the same time the medium con-
sidered, allowing the critic of language art to imi-
tate and even rival the objects he examines. Eventu-
ally, Hösle points to what he considers the pearls
on the string of the history of aesthetics: the dis-
tinguished moments when authors of poetics were
able to make critical ideas and their linguistic rep-
resentation coincide. He locates the most stunning
and delightful examples of this phenomenon in an-
cient as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
poetics.
465
Hösle has made a name for himself through his
contributions on Plato and Hegel as well as through
his work in ethics and social philosophy. One char-
acteristic feature of his approach is a focus on
self-reflexive argumentative structures—a focus with
which the present volume is consistent. While early
on in his career he wrote on Greek tragedy (Die
Vollendung der Tragödie im Spätwerk des Sopho-
cles, Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1984), Hösle’s
fascination with the arts and aesthetics seems to
have been increasing over the past decade and a
half: besides an examination of the Golden Ratio
in Greek art and a brief study of Dante’s Comme-
dia, most of his publications concern post-eighteenth-
century authors (Holberg, Goldoni, Schiller, Goethe,
Dickens, Büchner, Grillparzer, Thomas Mann), but
there are also articles on philosophy and its literary
forms—again consistent with the present volume—
and even on John Ford and Clint Eastwood. Hösle
has four books on literature, film, and aesthet-
ics: Woody Allen (Munich: Beck, 2001/University
of Notre Dame Press, 2007), The Philosophical Di-
alogue (Munich: Beck, 2006/University of Notre
Dame Press, 2013; trans. Steven Rendall), Die Ran-
gordnung der drei griechischen Tragiker (Basle:
Schwabe, 2009), and The Many Faces of Beauty (Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press, 2013; as editor). Hösle
himself presents Zur Geschichte der Ästhetik und
Poetik as the continuation of his Die Rangordnung
der drei griechischen Tragiker, which attempted to
elucidate the history of Western poetics by way of
a material problem, the concept of the tragic. The
present volume contributes to the same project but
now through the focus on a formal issue, the self-
instantiation of poetic norms.
Chapter 1, an English-language version of which is
also available in The Many Faces of Beauty, provides
a brief philosophy of the history of aesthetics, anal-
ogous to how Hösle’s Philosophie der ökologischen
Krise (Munich: Beck, 1991) offers a philosophy of
the history of philosophy of nature and his Morals
and Politics (Munich: Beck, 1997/University of Notre
Dame Press, 2004; trans. Steven Rendall) sketches a
history of the philosophy of ethics. Hösle realizes
that a philosophical history of aesthetics must know
the various reigning paradigms in its own past and
should also account for the shifts that have occurred
between these paradigms. Hösle’s demands go even
further: only by analyzing which causes of paradigm
shifts were necessary and irreversible and which were
not can a philosophical historian of aesthetics distin-
guish between true progress and random change, and
only this distinction will enable him to grasp if, for ex-
ample, the currently dominating paradigm should be
considered definitive.
Hösle delineates a history of aesthetics that
progresses through seven main stages, becoming
466
increasingly general. An early, oral Stage 1 of aes-
thetics must have accompanied the art production
of prehistoric civilizations. Especially stimulating for
a Western audience may be what Hösle, a trained
Indologist, has to say about the aesthetics of Stage
2, as exhibited in the ancient Chinese and Indian in-
struction manuals that describe in technical detail the
crafts and skills required for the production of indi-
vidual works in specific art forms. Hösle mentions the
Bhat..tikāvya, “which . . . integrates the teaching of
grammar and poetics into its own narration” (p. 19),
as well as Chapter 6 of the Nāt.yaśāstra, which deals
with the emotional qualities, the rasas, of the vari-
ous art forms involved in drama and theater and thus
approaches the status of a general aesthetic theory.
Hösle locates Stage 3 within Greek philosophy
of art and discusses Xenokrates of Sicyon, Plato, and
Aristotle. While Plato has no name for the philosophy
of art or for the philosophy of the beautiful (which
he comes closest to formulating in the, perhaps in-
authentic, Greater Hippias), he of course offers nu-
merous detailed insights into art and aesthetics; but
because to him aesthetics are not an autonomous dis-
cipline of philosophy, Plato places many of these in-
sights within his works on political philosophy. Hösle
argues that the theory of mimesis, which compre-
hends the arts and literature, provides the arts with
an ontological foundation and connects them both
with nature and the realm of ideas. He also restates
his belief that Plato has grasped the Golden Ratio as
a universal aesthetic principle which applies even to
his own dialogues. Medieval aesthetics, Stage 4, does
not reserve one single general concept for the arts but
mixes them with the crafts and sciences. Based on the
Neo-Platonic teaching of an intelligible, true beauty
which is mirrored by visible beauty, medieval theol-
ogy develops—for example, within Aquinas’ thinking
about the Trinity—a metaphysical theory of beauty,
where sensuous art imitates the extrasensory and
transcendent, through perfect integrity, proportion,
and clarity.
At Stage 5, the aesthetics of the Renaissance and
of Humanism, the arts emancipate themselves from
crafts, technology, and science, and a general concept
of art—encompassing architecture, sculpture, paint-
ing, music, and literature—is developed. Winckel-
mann tells an intrinsically meaningful story of Greek
art, and his elevation of this pre-Christian accom-
plishment contributes to a loosening of the ties be-
tween art and religion. Stage 6, at around 1800, sees
a dramatic intensification in the field of aesthet-
ics. Ever since Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)
and Schiller’s theoretical treatises of the early 1790s,
philosophical systems with a claim to completeness
have been held together by a capstone of aesthetics.
Through the pivotal concept of the sublime, the ethics
of autonomy are seen as underlying aesthetic judg-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ments, and the playful experience of autonomous art
is interpreted as furthering human morality and free-
dom. Hösle describes this as the most important mo-
ment in the history of aesthetics: art now begins to
replace religion as the central means of accessing an
absolute and providing meaning.
Stage 7 brings the collapse of these Idealist aes-
thetics. Production and reception aesthetics gain im-
portance at the end of the nineteenth century, but
they cannot support the aesthetic norms which alone
allow for the distinction between good and bad art.
Art is no longer seen as able to convey ultimate mean-
ing. Hösle praises Adorno as the last classic philoso-
pher of art who maintains the link between art and
truth as well as the focus on the artwork. But, asks
Hösle, is Adorno’s privileging of the concept of dis-
sonance, which fits beautifully with Schönberg and
Beckett, also adequate to Bach or to Dante? Hösle
suggests that Adorno’s criteria cannot replace those
aesthetic values that have held true throughout mul-
tiple paradigm shifts over the previous course of the
history of aesthetics: the ability to inspire through the
synergy of several human faculties; moral meaning;
organic unity; indirectness of communication; viola-
tion of rules which have only limited validity; and
clever continuation of an artistic tradition.
Chapters 2 and 3 consider the performative char-
acter of a special kind of aesthetics, namely, poetics.
Hösle examines six “poetic poetics” (p. 10) in ancient
and modern history which strive to put into prac-
tice what they prescribe, with the crucial twist that
prescription and demonstration take place simulta-
neously, one through the other. Hösle thus provides
“an aesthetics of aesthetics” that seeks to understand
the traditionally recurring “methods which enable
an aesthetic theory to itself follow aesthetic norms”
(p. 10). Surprisingly, this concept of self-instantiation
of aesthetic norms has been neglected or even ig-
nored by the critics of aesthetics. True, such poet-
ological reflexivity cannot ultimately prove poetics’
validity, but it can at least help avoid a performative
contradiction and thus prevent poetics’ most obvi-
ous point of weakness. For the discipline of aesthet-
ics, self-reference is not as urgent a desideratum as
for, say, the field of epistemology; because aesthetic
norms are not categorical, there is no absolute re-
quirement for a philosopher of art to herself be artis-
tic. Still, argues Hösle, self-instantiations of aesthetic
theories are helpful (for the author, who, through
this appropriation, grasps a rule more deeply, and for
the reader, who simultaneously comprehends and ex-
periences a rule), economical, efficient, and elegant;
they prove that a posited rule is not only an abstract
demand, thereby increasing its believability and per-
suasiveness, and inviting imitation, and they make
the ideal sensuous, merging abstract meaning with
concrete being or doing—just as all art does.
Book Reviews
Chapter 2 proceeds to show how Horace’s Ars
poetica achieves coherence by continuously insisting
on and performing variations of precisely the princi-
ple of coherence. Longinus, in On the Sublime, not
only extols but also strives to demonstrate the sub-
lime, though he never makes this self-instantiation
explicit—in accordance with his recommendation
that a great writer should conceal his art. Chapter
3 turns to four poetic poetics of the seventeenth to
twentieth centuries. Hösle claims that the highest
achievement of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s L’Art
poétique is not substantive originality but exactly the
kind of creative self-instantiation that is the topic
of his analysis. In his Essay on Criticism, Alexan-
der Pope is the first literary critic to discuss poe-
tological self-instantiation—on the occasion of cri-
tiquing Longinus. When a poetics actualizes its own
central rules and becomes poetry, this can happen
in acutely pinpointed fashion within the very same
individual verses that formulate the prescription or
indirectly through the text as a whole. Friedrich
Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie exercises a self-
instantiation mostly, though not only, of the second
kind. Schlegel’s text offers a new solution, in that
it integrates essay, lecture, letter, and dialogue into
one artwork which thus demonstrates an aesthetics of
plural norms from various historical epochs. Accord-
ing to Hösle, even Theodor W. Adorno’s Ästhetische
Theorie, with its prescriptive elevation of dissonance,
is self-instantiating theory: its style of intentional
fragmentation, associative and full of hyperbata and
foreign words, halting, somewhat stilted, and always
difficult, performs what it means.
Few today would dare a 100-page treatment of
such a broad and at the same time logically com-
plex subject matter. This attempt satisfies because it
is not merely a static encyclopedic article but does
difficult conceptual work and offers a strong argu-
mentative thrust. At times, however, the presenta-
tion is so brief that one wishes for further elaboration.
Most centrally, the concept of self-instantiation could
bear more explanation: how does self-instantiation
relate to the ideas of reflexivity, self-reference, self-
application, and the autological? What exactly is the
difference between an aesthetic norm instantiating
itself and an aesthetic norm being instantiated by
or through language? How can we distinguish more
systematically between the variants of artistic self-
reflexiveness? Hösle also briefly develops the notion
of “modal promiscuity” (p. 73), a to-and-fro between
fictional and actual worlds; this would be worthy of
elaboration. At the same time, the volume shows
a few instances of repetition—evidence that these
chapters were originally composed as independent
articles.
Hösle argues for the priority of artwork aesthet-
ics, which then leads him to give relatively sparse
467
consideration to the performative art and aesthet-
ics of the past fifty years—Beckett and Adorno are
the most recent artist and philosopher he seriously
considers, and Stage 7 of his history of aesthetics is
viewed as degenerative. Hösle has almost nothing
to say about self-instantiation in analytic aesthetics.
We need to hear more about the art and aesthetics
of our time, even if much of it would not be very
edifying.
For many readers, Hösle’s unusually high degree
of normativity will take some getting used to, but
it frees him up and allows him to critique even his
heroes in the history of aesthetics. More importantly,
it enables him to cut through the wealth of material
and create long-range vistas. His insistence that aes-
thetics need to be normative, but nevertheless histor-
ical, his arguments for an aesthetics of the artwork,
and his focus on poetics that not only formulate but
also follow rules are refreshing; his combination of
clear structure and historical and textual detail is im-
pressive. When Hösle praises the lecture on “Epochs
of Poetry” in Schlegel’s Gespräch as “a brief history
of Western literature, with a breadth of vision, a fo-
cus on the essential, and a certitude of judgment as
has never been seen before and will hardly be ever
achieved again” (p. 89), he might be setting a critical
standard to apply to himself, definitely with at least
partial success.
jan l. hagens
Department of Comparative Literature
Yale University
rebentisch, juliane. Aesthetics of Installation Art.
Trans. Daniel Dendrickson and Gerrit Jack-
son. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, 296 pp.,
$24.95 paper.
Ever since Walter Benjamin’s fulminations against
an “aestheticization of politics” (Ästhetisierung der
Politik), two specters have consistently haunted polit-
ically oriented critical thought in the areas of art and
aesthetics: “theatricality” (Theatralität) and “aes-
theticization” (Ästhetisierung). In her formidable
work Aesthetics of Installation Art, translated in 2012
from the 2003 German original, Juliane Rebentisch
takes on both concepts with an ambitiously talented
theory of aesthetic autonomy based on an interpre-
tation of aesthetic experience that utilizes current
controversies over the character and nature of instal-
lation art.
The English reader will be grateful for this
particular translation, which renders many of the
complexities of German philosophical and dialec-
tical thought into an engrossing, if demanding,
468
narrative, although the book’s value might have
gained from an index and possibly an updated bib-
liography as well as an overview by the author on
subsequent developments since its original publica-
tion. The reader will also want to consult Reben-
tisch’s more recently published companion volume
The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectic of Demo-
cratic Existence (Die Kunst der Freiheit: Zur Di-
alektik demokratischer Existenz), which appeared in
German in the same year (Suhrkamp, 2012) and
which deserves its own immediate translation into
English.
Rebentisch organizes her project under three sec-
tions reflecting, she claims, common agreement over
the main features of installation art: theatricality,
intermediality (Intermedialität), and site specificity
(Ortspezifik). It might be noted at the outset that
such consensus is not as transparent as she intimates,
particularly where it comes to site specificity. Still, let
it be conceded that her work aims at a broader task:
“to rehabilitate philosophical aesthetics as a critical
project” (p. 16, emphasis in original), rather than sim-
ply as a contribution to empirical studies in periodi-
cally controversial art movements such as installation
art.
In the course of the amplification of these head-
ings, Rebentisch weaves in her overall aesthetic
theory. The gist of her argument is that while mod-
ernists have been right to defend aesthetic auton-
omy from the postmodernists’ campaigns to dissolve
boundaries, that defense needs to shift from protect-
ing the “purity” of conventional genre boundaries, as
even that most enlightened of aesthetic modernists
Theodor W. Adorno continued to insist, to one strate-
gically rewriting the meaning of aesthetic experience.
Drawing on the ample contributions to the notion of
aesthetic experience made by such prominent Ger-
man philosophers as Rüdiger Bubner, Josef Früchtl,
Martin Seel, and Ruth Sonderegger since the 1980s,
Rebentisch’s version argues a notion of aesthetic au-
tonomy derived from aesthetic experience as defined
in terms of a specific relation between a subject and
its object. That relation brackets the aesthetic ob-
ject as truly an object only through the nature of
the experience as “processual,” “event,” “happen-
ing” (Prozessualität, Ereignis, Geschehen). The sub-
ject, then, according to this reading of aesthetic ex-
perience, always engages in a performative relation
to its object yet without control over that same ob-
ject, since the resulting subject–object relationship
can only be one of tension, uncertainty, and inex-
haustibility. Moreover, precisely because distancing,
or “becoming-unfamiliar,” is inseparable from such
an (aesthetic) object, aesthetic experience needs ar-
ticulation into public, intersubjective discursivities in
order to give meaning to, and therefore to complete,
that experience.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Rebentisch sums up the target against which she
directs her theory as “objectivism” (hence her own
theory as an “anti-objectivism”). The enemies she
singles out under this label include such prominent
critics as Stanley Cavell, Michael Fried, and Clement
Greenberg. What she objects to in their assaults on
“theatricality” is their mutual endeavors to under-
mine the possibility of a controlling subject through
the exclusivity they accord the “object” of aesthetic
experience, a move that then leads to their problem-
atic embrace of aesthetic autonomy as requiring un-
yielding defense of genre boundaries. In contrast, far
from seeking to bring back that same detested all-
consuming subject, Rebentisch’s alternative means
to highlight the performative role of the subject in
its ongoing relation to an object that in principle
is inseparable from the unsettled and open-ended
dynamics between subject and object in genuine
experience.
For this project, installation art furnishes not the
only example of the kind of art that Rebentisch thinks
best exemplifies her approach to aesthetic experi-
ence, but it does set up an invaluable testing ground
for that approach given the degree to which installa-
tion art exploits the performative perspectives of the
subject at play and highlights the intrinsic “indefinite-
ness” of aesthetic experience in general. Indeed, she
sees the very idea of installation as applicable to all
art, but the evolution of installation art proper since
the 1960s all the more strongly brings into critical fo-
cus a host of issues related to participating in concrete
artworks with all the tensions, such as those between
the subject’s and the artwork’s separate temporali-
ties, that necessarily result.
Rebentisch begins her campaign against “objec-
tivists” by robustly undermining their critique of
“theatricality” (which she both in this work and in
her more recent book considers inseparable from
broader critiques of “aestheticization”). For Reben-
tisch “there is no art that is not theatrical” (p. 72,
emphasis in original), all the more reason why both
1960s minimalism (a mode of installation art avant
la lettre according to her) and installation art proper
should be congratulated for forcing a more sophisti-
cated performative understanding of the very mean-
ing of aesthetic experience.
Once the “theatricality” onus is removed, the
way is cleared for appreciating the aesthetic nuances
of the hybridity or intermediality that installations
champion. Distinguishing between the “multimedia”
merging of arts into one and the hybridity set up
by “intermediality,” Rebentisch introduces the con-
cept of “fraying” (her translator’s qualified choice
for the German Verfransung) to clarify the plurali-
ties and oscillatory qualities of hybrid art that both
unravels and interweaves “what has been unraveled”
(p. 99, n. 26) while liberating art from “genre-specific
Book Reviews
limitations” (p. 140). In the most pointed analysis of
her book, she then takes up three major hybrid art
forms: theatrical installation, cinematographic instal-
lation, and sound installation, an analysis backed by
drawing on Adorno, Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, the
systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, and the art theorist
Boris Groys.
For each such case, Rebentisch exploits the rene-
gotiating of assumed relationships between space-
and time-based arts. Thus, for theater, Rebentisch
invokes not only Gertrude Stein’s theatrical ex-
periments in replacing stories with “landscapes”
which nonetheless bear their own movement and
create space that is “taking place” (p. 153), but
also Ilya Kabakov’s installations, which play out
the time of a theatrical stage resembling conven-
tional intermissions. For cinematography, Reben-
tisch points out the refusal to tell a story and
spatialize the time-based art of film as demon-
strated in the use of loops, hyper slow motion,
and duration. Finally, in opposition particularly to
Adorno’s score-based reading of music, Rebentisch
elaborates the modernist tendency toward spatial-
ization in music in the experience of sounds in
space and apparent lack of dramaturgy of devel-
opment, a hybrid, as she puts it, between visual art
and music.
These considerations highlight, in turn, the key
role of spaces and places or “situatedness” in all in-
stallation art, the original usage of which, after all,
stemmed from the setting up of exhibitions in given
spaces. In this last part on “site specificity,” Reben-
tisch has to face the challenge of many supporters of
installation art to transform “art into life” or “abol-
ish” art as such, with installations presumably in-
creasingly taking on explicitly social-political goals.
Rebentisch resists such postmodernist calls by em-
phasizing that the political worth of all art, not just
installations, resides in the distancing its aesthetic au-
tonomy allows rather than the dissolution of art into
a directly political act. Her own theory in fact allows
the social dimension to enter the experience of art
precisely through her insistence on the public discur-
sivity that necessarily completes aesthetic experience
as she has defined it.
To buttress her argument, Rebentisch calls first on
phenomenology and an unlikely ally, Martin Heideg-
ger. Recognizing that since the 1970s site specificity
has been less about a phenomenological “subjective-
physical experience of space” than the “critical
or even political quality of installations” (p. 249),
Rebentisch works through Heidegger’s problematic
commitment to a “history of being” in order to
draw out the “deconstructivist” author of his rather
sparse essay Art and Space. This is the least success-
ful move in the book—particularly as it includes a
somewhat convoluted interpretation of the Heideg-
469
gerian neologism Ge-stell (“enframing”)—but it does
help convey Rebentisch’s approach to true site speci-
ficity as having to be also “site-less” if it is to get
past purely bodily-phenomenological conceptions of
space without at the same time succumbing to post-
modernism’s political expectations. Ultimately, for
her, installation art can only indirectly favor “politi-
cal utopias” through reclaiming the aesthetic auton-
omy constituting art, in this manner confirming that
real utopias “would take more than art”: they would
require the direct intervention of “moral-practical
and theoretical-scientific reason” (p. 275). In im-
portant ways, Rebentisch’s sequel The Art of Free-
dom seeks to make good on this recommendation,
for it undertakes the impressive task of justifying
“aestheticization of the life-world,” suitably rede-
fined, against a multiple of opponents from Plato to
Benjamin.
For all that, how successful is this theory of aes-
thetic experience for a comprehensive account of
art? Attractive as Rebentisch’s consistent resort to
the language of nonidentity—along with such com-
plicit attributes as tension, openness, polarization,
and strife—may be for postmodern sensibilities, it
remains unclear why such experience merits exclu-
sive claims on the “aesthetic.” For Rebentisch it
seems almost self-understood that “what is specif-
ically aesthetic” must be a relation of “unresolved
conflict” between subject and object: “a concept of
aesthetic autonomy grounded in a theory of experi-
ence that makes the insolubility of the enigma of art
the decisive part of its definition” (pp. 91, 130, em-
phasis added). But even if one gives precedence to
such features of art as shock, suddenness, and sur-
prise that have certainly driven critique since the
onset of modernism, for her theory to extend be-
yond one admittedly important yet still discrete pe-
riod of art, it would need to evolve into a more inclu-
sive art theory that included such familiar landmarks
of past critique as concepts of beauty sustaining
harmony, symmetry, and proportionality—concepts
that actually confirm tensions at their maximum
by underscoring the minimal holding-together with-
out which all tension necessarily disintegrates into
nontension.
Throughout her narrative, Rebentisch seems ev-
idently repulsed by the slightest outbreak of uni-
ficatory or “totalizing” temptations to art. Trum-
peting Adorno’s mockery of the Wagnerian vision
of a Gesamtkunstwerk, she fails to consider the
degree to which that project did indeed produce
real and lasting theatrical art (namely, the analy-
ses by composer-conductor Pierre Boulez), and in
a manner not entirely accounted for by her vo-
cabulary of polarization. Indeed, Wagner’s example
may have more to do than her theory with experi-
mentations eventually producing the “happenings,”
470
“environments,” and “performances” that preceded
and accompanied the explicit emergence of installa-
tions in the 1970s.
Some of Rebentisch’s recoil may be attributed to,
as she puts it, sotto voce, “the bitter experience with
the German past” (p. 128), but in her eagerness to
avoid the Scylla of Adorno’s proletarian utopianism
and the Charbydis of Heidegger’s “historical exis-
tence of a people,” she may have fallen short of a
fully efficacious philosophical aesthetics. If the task
of such aesthetics is, as she quotes Martin Seel, “to
be an apology of aesthetic practice based on an un-
derstanding of its best possibilities” (p. 135), then
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Rebentisch may wish in the future to work toward
greater inclusivity in order to turn her promising the-
ory into a genuine standard for all art and aesthetics.
Then perhaps the German poet Friedrich
Hőlderlin’s insight might regain aesthetic currency:
“Reconciliation is there even in the midst of strife
[Streit], and all things that are sundered find one an-
other again.”
josef chytry
Department of Critical Studies
University of California, Berkeley, and California
College of the Arts