the philosophical disenfranchisment of art

7/28/2019 The Philosophical Disenfranchisment of Art

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Ben Sonnenberg

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THE PHILOSOPHICALDISENFRANCHISEMENT OF ART

Arthur C. DantoI am learning that it's inspiriting to bewhere writers can be dangerous.Hortense Calisher

n his great poem on the death ofW. B. Yeats, Audenwrote: "Now Irelandhas hermadness and herweatherstill, / For poetry makes nothing happen .. ."No one, Isuppose, not even a poetic visionary,would have expectedlyrics to dispel the humidities of the Emerald Isle, andthis gives Auden his paradigm of artistic impotency. Theequation with Ireland's political madness is then meantto discourage the comparably futile but more often heldhope that the right bit of verse might make somethinghappen-though it is not to the especial discredit of artthat it is ineffective in Irish politics where it is not plainthat anything else could be effective. "I think it betterthat in times like these / A poet'smouth be silent, for intruth /We have no gift to set a statesman right,"Yeatswrote as a poetic refusal towrite aWar Poem. And, inanother poem, Yeats seems to have endorsed the thoughtAuden expressed to the extent of dignifying as art failedpolitical actions, if fervently enough motivated: "Weknow their dream; enough / To know they dreamed andare dead; /And what if excess of love / Bewildered themtill they died? ... A terriblebeauty isborn."That politicsbecomes poetry when ennobled by failure is a sentimental transfer I doubt would be consoling to the gunmen of the Easter Rising, since to be seriously enoughbent on political change to spill real blood is exactly nottowant one's actions appreciatedmerely as a kind of deflectedwriting in themedium of violence. To have slippedout of the order of effectiveness into the order of art, tohave inadvertently achieved something of a piece withthe golden bird in theByzantine throne room or the unconnecting figure on the Grecian urn must then be adoubled failure for the already defeated warrior.

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"I know," Auden wrote, with characteristic honesty,"that all the verse Iwrote, all the positions I took in thethirties, did not save a single Jew. Those attitudes, thosewritings, only help oneself." And in a manuscript heworked on in the summer of 1939,we read:Artists and politicians would get along better at a time ofcrisis like the present, if the latter would only realize thatthe political history of theworld would have been thesame if not a poem had been written, nor a picturepainted,norabarofmusic composed.

This of course is an empirical claim, and it is difficult,simply because of difficulties in the topic of historicalexplanation, to know how true it is.Did jazz in any sensecause or only emblemize themoral transformationsof theJazz Age? Did the Beatles cause or only prefigure thepolitical perturbations of the Sixties-or had politicssimply become a form of art in that period, at least thepolitics responsive tomusic, the real political history ofthe world taking place on a different level of causation?In any case, as we know, even works intended to prickconsciousness to political concern have tended by andlarge toprovoke at best an admiration for themselves andamoral self-admiration for thosewho admired them.Thecynical bombing of the Basque village of Guernica onApril 26, 1937, made Guernica happen-so it was not

merely wit when Picasso responded to theGerman officer'squestion, having handed him a postcard of the painting,"Did you do that?"with "No, you did." Everyone knewwho did what and why: itwas an atrocity meant to beperceived as an atrocity by perpetratorswho meant tobeperceived as prepared to stop at nothing. The paintingwas used as a fund-raiser for Spanish war relief, butthosewho paid money for the privilege of filing past itused itonly as amirror to reflectattitudes already inplace,and in later years it required art-historical knowledge toknow what was going on: it stood as a handsome backdrop forpickups at theMuseum ofModer Art, or aplacetomeet a date, like the clock at the Biltmore Hotel, and itwas sufficientlyhandsome in its grey and black harmonies

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to have ornamented the kitchen cupboard in a sophisticated apartment I once sawwritten up, where souffleswere concocted for bright and brittle guests who, nomore than the hostess, realized that gutted animals andscreamingmothers agonized above the formica: itwaspainted at about the same time asNight Fishing at Antibes, after all, asAnita Silvers has observed, and uses thesame sorts of forms as that lyricalwork. So in the end itdid about asmuch for the ravaged villagers as Auden'spoem did for dead Yeats or as Yeats's poem did for hisslaughtered patriots, making nothing relevant happen,simply memorializing, enshrining, spiritualizing, constituting a kind of cenotaph to house the fadingmemories,about at the level of a religious ceremony whose functionis to confess the extreme limitation of our powers tomakeanything happen. Hegel places religion just next to artin the final stages of the itineraryof the spirit,where history is done with and there is nothing left but to becomeconscious ofwhat inany case cannot be changed.Fine. But if the sole political role of poetry is thisdeflected, consolatory, ceremonial not to say reliquaryoffice,why is it sowidely subscribed a political attitudethat art is dangerous? The history of art is the history ofthe suppression of art, itself a kind of futility if thatwhichone seeks to cast in chains has no effectivenesswhatever,and one confers upon art the illusion of competence bytreating as dangerous what would make nothing happenif itwere allowed tobe free.Where, ifAuden is right,doesthe belief in the dangerousness of art come from?Myown view, which Imean to develop here, is that it doesnot come from historical knowledge, but rather from aphilosophical belief. It is based upon certain theories ofart that philosophers have advanced, whatever itmay bethat caused them in the first place so to have sensed adanger in art that the history of philosophy itselfmightalmost be regarded as a massive collaborative effort toneutralize an activity. Indeed, construing art, as Audendoes, as a causally or politically neutered activity is itselfan act of neutralization. Representing art as somethingthat in its nature can make nothing happen is not somuch a view opposed to the view that art is dangerous:

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it is away of responding to the sensed danger of art bytreating itmetaphysically as though therewere nothingtobe afraid of.Now it ismy thought thatwe cannot arrive at an assessment of what art is nor what art can and cannot do, norwhere in the political plane its natural locus is, until wehave archeologized these disenfranchising theories. Therelationship of art to philosophy is ancient and intricate,and though I shall paint it in very lurid terms, I amobliged to acknowledge that its subtlety may transcendour powers of analytical depiction, much as the relationship ofmind to body does, since it is far fromplain thatwecan separate art from philosophy inasmuch as its substance is inpart constituted by what it is philosophicallybelieved to be. And its insubstantiation by its oppressor

may be one of the great victories of political metaphysics.n the first serious philosophical writings on art-perhaps the first writings inwhich art is so much asrecognized as such-a kind of warfare between philosophy and art is declared. Because philosophy itself is awarring discipline, inwhich philosophy isdivided against

philosophy with nearly the degree of antagonismwe findexpressed between philosophy and art in the fatefulinitiating pages of Platonic aesthetics, itought tobe causefor suspicion that there is a near unanimity on the part ofphilosophers of art that artmakes nothing happen: for onwhat else do we agree?Even soengaged awriter as Sartrethought of art, hence thought of his own practice as anovelist in the fiction inwhich he sets forth this view, aslying outside the order of existential contingencies: ashelter againstmutability. Plato notoriously identified thepractice of artwith the creation of appearances of appearances, twice removed from the realityphilosophy addresses. It is striking that Sartre, like Keats, likeYeats, putsartistic reality exactly where Plato put philosophicalreality, but this interchange leaves the topology unaltered, and we may remarkanticipatorily at thispoint thatthe charge that philosophy makes nothing happen is notunfamiliar. In any case, both philosophy and art, on thePlatonic scheme, contrastwith thekind of practical knowl

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edge possessed by craftspeople, whose products artistsmerely imitate.And Plato seized upon the inference thatone can imitate without possessing the slightest knowledge ofwhat one imitates save how it appears, so that ifwhat one imitates is knowledge, it is consistent that onecan appear to have itwhile lacking it altogether. It isimportant for Plato to quarantine art against the practicopolitical sphere into which the philosopher may deignto descend (himself imitating the relationship inwhichForms stand to appearances), and the thought that artis arrested in the realm of second-order appearances assures that it canmake nothing happen in even the slightlyless degenerate realm of first-order appearances, beingradically epiphenomenal, like a dream or a shadow or amere reflection. It is as though Platonic metaphysics wasgenerated in order to define a place for art fromwhich itis then amatter of cosmic guarantee that nothing can bemade by it to happen.It ismore or less for these reasons that Ihave diagnosedPlato's theory of art as largely political, a move in somestruggle for domination over the minds of men inwhichart is conceived of as the enemy. So the portrait of theartistwe get inBook Ten ofThe Republic has to be placedalongside the portrait of the philosopher-the portrait infact of Socrates-we get inAristophanes' cruel comedy,The Clouds, where the philosopher is stigmatized forbeing out of touchwith the same realityPlato stigmatizesthe artist as capable only of imitating. The Clouds is anattack on intellect in the name of feeling,much in theway,millennia later, Lawrence is going to celebrate feelingagainst Russell, whom he fictionalizes in St. Mawr withAristophanic malice. So it isonly taking art at its own selfestimatewhen Socrates explains to Ion that he (characteristic of his discipline) lacksknowledge, his powers beingnot those of reason but of darker andmore confused forceswhich overcome Ion and ultimately swamp an audienceitself addressed at a level lower than intellect so far as itsuccumbs.And Ion isdepicted as stupid by Plato inorderto dramatize a confirmation of the psychology of TheRepublic, art being used against art in sly duplicity. AndPlato, asmetaphysical politician, extrudes the artist both

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from republic and from reality, towhich he is so looselytethered that imitation gives us less a theory than apowerfully disabling metaphor for impotency. The combination of danger and ineffectiveness sounds contradictory until we recognize that the latter is a philosophicalresponse to the former, for if art can be transferred ontologically to the sphere of secondary and derivative entities-shadows, illusions, delusions, dreams,mere appearances and sheer reflections-well, this is a brilliantway toput art out of harm'sway ifwe can get people to accept apicture of theworld inwhich the place of art isoutside it.And sincePlato's theoryof art is his philosophy, and sincephilosophy down the ages has consisted inplacing codicilsto the Platonic testament, philosophy itselfmay just bethe disenfranchisement of art-so the problem of separating art fromphilosophy may bematched by the problemof askingwhat philosophy would be without art.There are two stages to the Platonic attack. The first,just sketched, is toput across an ontology inwhich realityis logically immunized against art. The second stage consists so far as possible in rationalizing art, so that reasonbit by bit colonizes the domain of feelings, the Socraticdialogue being a form of dramatic representation inwhich the substance is reason exhibited as taming realityby absorbing it into concepts. Nietzsche refers to this as"aesthetic Socratism," thephilosopher having so identifiedreasonwith beauty thatnothing could be beautiful that isnot rational.This, Nietzsche proposes, marks the death oftragedy, which finds a terrible beauty in irrationality:but it also marks the death of comedy, which Socratesassures us comes to the same thing. And ever since thiscomplex aggression, as profound a victory as philosophyhas ever known or ever will know, the history of philosophy has alternated between the analytical effort toephemeralize and hence defuse art, or to allow a degreeof validity to art in treating it as doing what philosophyitself does, only uncouthly.This latter,Hegelian strategy then raises the questionof what it is that philosophy does-after all, philosophystands just next to religion and art in his scheme-andthere is a comic justice in the fact that the two-stage attack

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consisting of ephemeralization and takeover has characterized the sorryhistory of philosophy in recent times-asthough itafter all had but consisted in theweapons itwasdestined to die from. In the period of high positivism, forexample, philosophy was cast in a role relative to scienceparallel to that inwhich artwas placed relative to philosophical knowledge in the Platonic scheme-so distantfrom the cognizable not to saymeaningful order of thingsthat "philosophy makes nothing happen" follows as amatter of course. "Philosophy begins when language goeson holiday" is aWittgensteinian echo of the invidiouscontrast between art-making and the real skillsof carpentry and navigation, with philosophy now the uselessshadow of serious endeavor. And it became a metaphilosophical consensus that since there is no body of factfor philosophy to deal with alongside the body of factThe World-which science addresses, the problems ofphilosophy only appear tobe realproblems but are actually nonsense, or Scheinsprobleme. Professor Rorty's deconstruction carries this sour assessment into the immediate moment. But now comes the consoling thought thatto the degree that it had any validity at all, philosophytried to do what science really does, justasPlato had saidin effect that art did poorly what philosophy does well:philosophy just is impatient science. Caught in the dilemma of being either pseudo science or proto-science, philosophy thus reenacts the dilemma Plato set for art. Andperhaps ifwe could liberate philosophy from these toilswe might find no better place to begin than liberatingart from them, and by emanicipating art from its philosophywe might emancipate philosophy from its own parallel philosophy: the liberation of the oppressed being, by afamiliar liberationist formula, the liberation of the oppressor aswell. In any case theremust be something deeplycommon to two enterpriseswhich seem subject to a common dissolution, especially when this form of dissolutionhas no obvious application elsewhere, unless (of course)to religion. Before addressing myself to these last optimisms, letme somewhat confirmmy brash historical claimson the philosophy of art by considering the two forms ofrepression-what I refer to as ephemeralization and take

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over-as exhibited in the unsuspecting thought of KantandHegel. The texts of course are familiar-but thepolitical subtexts are perhaps not.or Kant, to begin with, our attitude towardworks ofart is characterized in terms of what he calls disin

terest, itself an attitude with which an immediate contrastexists with having an interest, hence some personal orsocial reason for caringwhether or not something exists,since itsnot existing, or even its changing in certainways,would make some individual or social difference.Withworks of artwe have nothing of this sort to gain or lose. Itis not difficult to see how Kant should take this view,given the systematic constraints of his philosophy, forwhat he was concerned to show was that aesthetic judgments are universal,with which having an interestwouldsomehow be incompatible: ifmy judgment is contaminated with my interests, it hardly could claim an acquiescence of those whose interests differ. One of the reasonsPlato thought philosophers should be kingswas that they,concerned only and ultimately with pure forms, could notcoherently have any interests in theworld of appearances,hence not be motivated by what normallymove men andwomen-money, power, sex, love-and so could achievedisinterested decisions. Plato cleverly situates works ofart outside the range of interests aswell, sincewho couldfeel exultant at possessing what merely appeared to begold? Since to be human is very largely to have interests,art stands outside the human order prettymuch as realitystands outside the primary apparent order in Plato'ssystem-so though they approach the issue from oppositedirections, the implication inboth is that art is a kind ofontological vacation place from our defining concerns ashuman, and with respect to which accordingly "makesnothing happen." This is reenforced in Kant when hespeaks of art in terms of "purposivenesswithout any specific purpose."The work of art looks as though it ought tobe useful for something, but in philosophical truth it isnot, and its logical purposelessness connectswith the disinterests of its audience, since any use itmight be put towould be amisuse, or a perversion. So art is systematicallyneutered, removed from the domain of use on one side (a

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good thing if artists lackpractical intelligence theymerelycan give the appearance of having) and, on theother side,from theworld of needs and interests. Itsworth consists initsworthlessness, which you may recall is also Plato's caricature of the thought that justice is a skill.Schopenhauer had a considerably higher regard for artthan any Plato shows inhis philosophy, but in an important sense he agrees with his great predecessors that art

makes nothing happen in the causal order of theworld.Its importance rather consists in its power to lift us outof that order and toput us in a state of contemplation ofeternal things.There is a characteristically bad inferencethat contemplation of the timeless is itself timeless,whichthen provides a lever for hoisting us, in fulfillment of aYeatsian wish, outside the order of time and suffering.Wemust appreciate that simply toexist in the causal stream is,on Schopenhauer's view, to suffer, since suffering is thedefining trait of worldly existence. But then, one mightparenthetically observe, one must distinguish betweenthe sort of suffering of which the standard human condition simply consists, and that sort of sufferingwhich occurs, say, to persecuted Jews, which Auden laments theincapacity of his poetry tomitigate. It certainly wouldhave been a bitter counsel to suggest to the skeletal sufferers of Dachau that life is suffering, though the contemplation of art helps. As Auden oncewrote on theparticular issue of Third World hunger: "It's heartless toforget about / The underdeveloped countries, / But astarving ear is as deaf as a suburbanoptimist's."But I amless concerned to deal with the after all cheerful pessimism old Schopenhauer stood for than in stressing that hiscontinuity with Kant is locating art at right angles to theworld as will.Kant did suppose art should give pleasure, but itwillhave to be a disinterested pleasure, hence a tepid gratification since unconnected with the satisfaction of realneeds or the achievement of real goals. So it is a kind ofnarcoleptic pleasure, the pleasure which consists in theabsence of pain, which is just Schopenhauer's thoughtthat the value of art must lie in the freedom it promisesfrom topical urgencies in real life. Nevertheless, disinterestedpleasure, with its implied contrast with the prac

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GRAND STREETticaldimensions of lived existence, largely summarizes themanner inwhich philosophers of art have thought aboutart in the intervening years. Santayana thinks of art interms of beauty and beauty in terms of objectified pleasure,which is to say pleasure contemplated rather thanfelt. Ballough keeps art at an aesthetic distance, drawingan explicit contrast between aesthetic and practical attitudes, our relationship to art beginning when practicegoes on holiday.What Ballough calls aesthetic distance,other philosophers have spoken of as disinterested attention (Stolnitz) or intransitive perception (Vivas) whichconsists in looking at an object forno reason.And, tobringus to the threshold of present discussion, Professor Dickiebuilds into his definition of art the condition that somethingmust be in candidacy for appreciation-where he

must clearly mean aesthetic appreciation, whatever hisdisclaimers, since he speaks of the chaste pleasure theeye might take in the curvatures and colors of an objecta urinal-which is not commonly appreciated for suchreasons by thosewho primarily appreciate them.This thumbnail run-through of the table of contents ofthe standardundergraduate anthology of aesthetics yieldsan answer to the question anyone, a philistine, say,mightwish to raise about art (testimony philosophers mightoffer when the National Endowment of the Arts comesunder fire), namelywhat good art is,what use art has: itsgoodness consists in itsnot being good for anything, andits use consists in having none, so the question is misapplied. So thatpoetrymakes nothing happen flows fromthe philosophical status assigned by philosophy to art: andthis is a matter of such overwhelming philosophical consensus that itought to give us pause. It leadsus towonderwhether, rather than art being something the philosopherfinally deals with in the name of and for the sake ofsystematic completeness-a finishing touch to an edificeart is the reasonphilosophy was invented, and philosophical systems are finallypenitentiary architectures it is difficult not to see as labyrinths for keeping monsters in andso protecting us against some deep metaphysical danger.And perhapswe ought to askwhether thiswar with whichthe discussion begins is not, millennia afterward, stillbeing fought by philosophers who compete in ingenuity

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to the common end of putting out of play what they havenot paused towonder may not be an enemy at all? If eachphilosophical period requires a kind of booster, ought wenot to ask ourselves at last what power it finally is thatphilosophy is afraid of? Perhaps the fear is that if theenemy is illusory, philosophy is illusory, since its primeobjective has been to slaywhat only seems a dragon!Indeed, ithas at times struckme that the conventionaldivision between the fine and thepractical arts-betweenles beaux arts and les arts pratiques-serves, in the nameof a kind of exaltation, to segregate les beaux arts from lifein amanner curiously parallel to theway inwhich callingwomen the fair sex is an institutional way of puttingwomen at an aesthetic distance-on a kind ofmoral pedestalwhich extrudes awoman from aworld it ishoped shehas no longer any business in.The power to classify is thepower to dominate, and these parallel aestheticizationsmust be regarded as essentially political responses towhatwere sensed as dark dangers in both (see GermaineGreer). Aesthetics is an eighteenth-century invention,butit is exactly as political, and for the same causes, asPlato's was of setting artists at a distance which aestheticdistance is a refinedmetaphor for. Itwas a bold and finallysuccessful strategy, leaving serious artists to suppose ittheir task tomake beauty. So themetaphysical pedestalupon which art gets put-consider themuseum as labyrinth-is political translocation as savage as thatwhichturned women into ladies, placing them in parlors doingthings that seemed like purposive laborwithout specificpurpose: embroidery,watercolor, knitting; essentially frivolous beings, there for an oppressor's pleasure disguisedas disinterested. Small wonder that Barnett Newmanshould have written (1948): "The impulse of modem artwas this desire todestroy beauty ... by completely denying that art has any concernwith the problem of beauty."Smallwonder thatDuchamp should have said, regardinghis most famouswork, "The danger to be avoided lies inaesthetic delectation!"I owe toDuchamp the thought that, from the perspective of art, aesthetics is a danger, since from the perspective of philosophy art is a danger and aesthetics the agencyfordealingwith it.But thenwhat should artbe if it throws

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off the bondage to prettiness? It is not enough to be selfassertively ugly, though this is a tactic a good bit of recentart has sought to employ. Uglification is too negative astance, and finally futile since being ugly remains awayof being an aesthetic object and hence underscores bondage instead of overthrowing it. It is like the self-defeminization of women, casting frills to the flames.The way tostop being a sexual object isnot to become an anti-sexualobject, since one remains an object through that transformationwhen the problem is how to slip objecthood altogether. Imean, of course, aesthetic objecthood, and tochange one way of appearing for another remains anacquiescence in the view that one's essence is one'sappearance. So some deeper transformation is required,one towhich surfaces, lovely or awful, are irrelevant or

merely a fact. The canvases of Arakawa are irrelevantlybeautiful since not really aesthetic objects at all-asthoughArakawa were subtly emphasizing the ontologicalinsight that it is not after all necessary to be ugly inorderto escape the servitudes of aesthetics.But escape towhat?This bringsme to theHegelian version of the alternativeproposed by Plato to the ephemeralization of art.

uchamp's Fountain is, as everyone knows, to all outward appearances a urinal-it was a urinal until itbecame awork of art and acquired such further properties asworks of artpossess in excess of those possessed bymere real things like urinals (the work is dated 1917,though itwould take research into thehistory of plumbingto determine the date of the urinal,which made it possible forDuchamp to use urinals dated later thanFountainwhen the originalwas lost: thework remains dated 1917).In his own view he chose this particular object forwhathe hoped was its aesthetic neutrality. Or pretended thatthat iswhat he hoped. For urinals have too strong acultural, not to say amoral identity, quite to allow themselves to be without affect. They are objects, to beginwith, highly sexualized through the fact thatwomen areanatomically barred from employing them in their primary function, at leastwithout awkwardness. So they showtheir arrogant exclusivity through their form. (The fear

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ARTHUR C. DANTOof equal access to all johnswas amajor factor, it will beremembered, in the defeat of theERA.) They are,moreover, given the cultural realities, objects associated withprivacy (though less so than stools) and with dirt. Butany object that lies at the intersection of sex and secretionis too obviously charged by the moral boundaries it presupposes simply to stand as a culturally neutral objectpicked out just for its aesthetic neutrality. Duchamp wasbeing disingenuous when he asked: "A urinal-whowould be interested in that?" Itwould be like taking thefilthiest verb in the language as one's paradigm for teaching conjugation: possibly theword's moral energywill gosubmerged as one ponders it from the perspective ofgerunds and pluperfects, but why struggle when thereare plenty of innocent words? It is,meanwhile, ingenuous to treat the urinalmerely as an aesthetic object, ratherlike the Taj Mahal in its elegant gradients and dazzlingwhiteness. But thenwhat is the conceptual fulcrum of thisstill controversial work? My view is that it lies in thequestion itposes, namelywhy-referring to itself-shouldthis be an artworkwhen something else exactly like this,namely that-referring now to the class of unredeemedurinals-are just pieces of industrial plumbing? It tookgenius to raise the question in this form, since nothing likeit had been raised before, though from Plato (sharply)downward the question of what is art had been raisedand unimaginatively answered on the basis of the acceptedartworld of the time.Duchamp did not merely raise thequestion,What isArt? but ratherwhy is something aworkof art when something exactly like it is not? CompareFreud's great question regarding parapraxes,which isnotsimply why do we forget but why, when we do forget,dowe remember something else instead?This form of thequestion opened space for a radically new theory of themind. And inDuchamp's case the question he raises as anartwork has a genuinely philosophical form, and thoughit could have been raisedwith any object you chose (andwas raised by means of quite nondescript objects)-incontrast with having been capable of being raised atany timeyou chose-for thequestionwas only historicallypossible when in fact itwas raised-it perhaps required

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something so antecedently resistant to absorption into theartworld as a urinal so as to call attention to the fact thatit after allwas already in the art world.There is a deep question of what internal evolution inthe history of artmade Duchamp's question-object historically possible if not historically necessary. My view isthat it could only come at a timewhen itno longer couldbe clear to anyone what artwas while perfectly clear thatnone of the old answerswould serve.To paraphraseKant,it seemed to have an essence without having any particular essence. It ishere thatHegel's views come in.For Hegel, the world in its historical dimension is thedialectical revelation of consciousness to itself. Inhis curious idiom, the end of history comes when spirit achievesawareness of its identity as spirit, not, that is to say,alienated from itself by ignorance of its proper nature,but united to itself through itself: by recognizing that it isin this one instance of the same substance as its object,since consciousness of consciousness is consciousness. Inthe portentous jargonof theContinent, the subject/objectdualism is overcome. Quite apart from such reservationsas one must justifiably hold regarding this overcoming,let alone the celebration of it as the end of history, it isworth observing that certain stages in this history arespecially marked, art being one stage and philosophyanother, and it is the historical mission of art tomakephilosophy possible, afterwhich artwill have no historicalmission in the great cosmo-historical sweep. Hegels stupendous philosophical vision of history gets, or almostgets,. an astounding confirmation in Duchamp's work,which raises the question of thephilosophical nature of artfromwithin art, implying that art already isphilosophy ina vivid form, and has now discharged its spiritualmissionby revealing the philosophical essence at its heart. Thetaskmay now be handed over tophilosophy proper,whichis equipped to cope with its own nature directly and definitively. So what art finally will have achieved as itsfulfillment and fruition is the philosophy of art.But this isa cosmicway of achieving the second stage ofthe Platonic program,which has always been to substitutephilosophy for art. And to dignify art, patronizingly, asphilosophy in one of its self-alienated forms, thirsting for

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clarity as to itsown nature as all of us thirst for clarity as toour own. Perhaps there is something to this.When art internalizes its own history,when it becomes self-consciousof itshistory as it has come to be in our time, so that itsconsciousness of its history forms part of its nature, it isperhaps unavoidable that it should turn into philosophyat last.And when it does so,well, in an important sense,art comes to an end.

I cannot trace in thispaper the structureof such a possible history (but seemy essay 'The End ofArt"). My mainconcern has been to put into perspective the somewhatshabby history of thephilosophy of art as amassive political effort either to emasculate or to supersede art.And tosketch certain of the strategies in this long unedifyingcareer. It is always a question in psychotherapy whetherthe knowledge of thehistory of a symptomwill constitutea cure ormerely a kind of acquiescence. Our pathologiesmay after all, as Freud perhaps realistically affirmed,betheKern unserWesens, and in the present case artmayby now have been sopenetrated by itsphilosophy thatwecannot sunder the two inorder to rescue art from the conflicts aesthetics has trapped it in.

But in revenge, philosophy has itself become entrappedin its own strategems. If art makes nothing happen andart is but a disguised form of philosophy, philosophymakes nothing happen either. Of course this was Hegel'sview. "Whenphilosophy paints itsgrey ingrey,"he wrotein one of the most melancholy phrases a philosophermight read, "then has a form of life grown old." Philosophy makes its appearance justwhen it is too late foranything but understanding. So if, according to a ringingslogan, since hardened into a radical cliche of Marxism,we want to change rather than understand the world,philosophy cannot be of use.When, then, self-consciousness comes to history, it isby definition too late for something tobe made in consequence tohappen. So thephilosophy of historical being which holds art tobe a transformof philosophy shows philosophy to be a transformof art,and this is the great ironyof Hegel's theory: the secondpart of the Platonic attack reduces to the firstpart of thePlatonic attack, and philosophy, having set itself againstart, sets itself finally against itself. This would give us a

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kind of explanation of the fact that the same structure ofargument philosophy mounted at the beginning againstart should have returned to call the enterprise of philosophy intoquestion inour own time. So there isan incentiveinphilosophically curing art of philosophy: we by justthatprocedure cure philosophy of a paralysis that itbegan itslong history by infecting its great enemywith.Perhaps, for the moment, this is enough by way ofspeculative philosophy of history. Still, itwould be unseemly not to press a bit further, for if neither of thephilosophical reasons for pretending that art can makenothing happen are compelling, the fact remains that thehistory of art is the history of censorship, and itwould beinteresting to inquirewhat sort of thing it is that art canmake happen,which isof a kind to be regardeddangerousenough tomerit, if not suppression, then political control.So Iwill try to end on a somewhat positive note regardingthe powers of art.

he firstobservation tomake, admittedly a quite unexciting one, is that oncewe have separated art fromthe philosophical theories that have given it its character,the question ofwhether artmakes anything happen is notany longer a philosophically very interesting question. Itis, rather, a fairly empirical question, a matter forhistoryor psychology or some social science or other to determine.There are theories of history,Marxism being a good example, in which art is excluded from the deep determinants of historical change, since itmerely reflects orexpresses such changes: it belongs in the superstructurerather than the base of a historical process which moveson two levels, only one of which is effective. Philosophytoo has at timesbeen placed in thepassive superstructuralposition by Marxism, a self-neutralizing transposition ifMarxism itself is philosophy and means to change theworld: a dilemma neatly sidestepped byMarxists treatingMarxism as a science, and as in the famous linguistics controversy in theSovietUnion, placing science in thedynamic base. A deeper incoherence, it seems tome, is to befound in the repression of certain forms of art,which isafter all a benchmark of communist governments whichhappen also to subscribe to the tenets of historical mate

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rialism: for if the latterwere true, artwould be impotentto do anything but express the deep structureof historicalrealitywhatever its form: so repression should be eitherunnecessary or impossible. It is, to be sure, open to ideologists to say that what does not conform to theory is notart-but this saves theory by trivialization, and leaves uswith the anomoly of something evidently effective enoughifnot suppressed,which would be artwere it not ruled outas suchby politboro fiat.A less trivializing responsewouldbe to say that the offending art reflects a contaminant substructure, and repression will not be needed when thebasis ispurified of all contradictions. But that leaves thequestion of why mere reflections of the contaminantsshould be attacked and repressed, since theywill vanishwhen theirmaterial conditions do, and it is thematerialconditions that ought then to be attacked, rather thantheir superstructuralepiphenomena. This isnot the placeto analyze Marxist theories of history, but even if theyare true,what follows from them is only that art is impotent tomake anything happen at the base: soAuden'sthought would have to be modified to say that poetrymakes nothing deep happen. But neither does anything inthe superstructure: sowhy single art out?Much the same argumentation applies to all those deeptheories of history, fortunately or not no longermuch inintellectual fashion. Even politics, on these theories, isineffective but expressive, and Burkhardt's famous chapter, "TheState asWork ofArt," takeson a specialmeaningagainst those views of history and historical style thatconstituted the atmosphere in which he thought. Thisview of historical style asks, for example, thatwe appreciate Abstract Expressionism as expressing the same deeprealities politically expressed by Eisenhower foreignpolicy,McCarthy domestic policy, and the femininemystique-or Pop Art as expressing the same reality as thepolitics of Nixon, the counter-culture, and theWomen'sLiberation Movement-and tends to dissolve all horizontal relationships between surface phenomena in favor ofvertical relationships between surface and depth-withagain the consequence that art is not especially more ineffective than anything else in the surfaces of historicalchange. It requires a very deep view indeed of history to

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say that politics makes nothing happen. But once wesanely cede power topolitics, itbecomes difficult to knowwhere the line is to be drawn, andwhy art should in theend be uniquely ineffectual andmerely reflective.Once we return to surface history-or once we returnsurfacehistory tohistorical effectiveness-it seems simplyamatter of fact whether poetry makes anything happen.Itwould be futile to suppose that poetry readings shouldhave saved the Jews. There are times when the swordismightier than the pen. But it would only have beenagainst some current of extravagant and immoderate expectations that one could have believed that poetryshould have saved the Jews or that folksongs should havesaved thewhales. Hamlet, for example, believed art couldbe effective in his own war with Claudius, and he wasright, in away. He was right, however, not because theplay within the play was art,but that as art, itwas able tocommunicate as Hamlet perhaps lacked the courage tocommunicate directly, that Claudius's crimewas knownto a consciousness other than Claudius's: for how wasClaudius otherwise to explain the choice of a drama inany terms other than that Hamlet knew, andmeant forClaudius toknow that he knew the bloody truth,and thathe had chosen TheMurder ofGonzago with the intentionof conveying this fact? So the play was, metaphorically,amirror forClaudius, but not for anyone else in the audience, save irrelevantly: and yet itwas asmuch art to themforwhom itwas not amirror as to him forwhom itwas.They were shockedorbored or even amused, and as a general theory of art and its efficacyHamlet's theory is a badone. It is bad as would be a theory that poetry is codewhen in fact someone writes an anagrammatic poem bymeans of which the instructed reader can get the formulaof the atomic bomb: the little melody in The LadyVanishes encodes some important secret, but its being afolksong has nothing to do with the special uses itmighthave been put to.Perhapswhat it isunexciting toobserve is all there is toobserve, though the example justcanvassed has thedangerof suggesting that art makes something happen onlyadventitiously, when it isput to an extra-artistic use: andthat leaves the familiar thought that intrinsically itmakes

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nothing happen as art.And we are back in the first formofthe Platonic attack.There must be somethingwrong withthis if I have been at all right inmy arguments of TheTransfiguration of theCommonplace that the structure ofartworks is of a piece with the structure of rhetoric, andthat it is the office of rhetoric tomodify theminds andthen the actions of men and women by co-opting theirfeelings. There are feelings and feelings, on the otherhand, some issuing in one kind of action and some inanother, and poetry may make something happen if it issuccessful in promoting action of a sort thatmay makesomething happen. And it cannot be extrinsic to the artwork that it should do this if indeed the structure of thework of art and the structure of rhetoric are of a piece. Sothere is reason after all to be afraid of art.

I am not sure that the structure of rhetoric and thestructure of philosophy are of a piece, since it is the aimof philosophy to prove rather thanmerely persuade: butthe common structures of rhetoric and art go some distance toward explaining why Plato might have taken acommon posture of hostility towards themboth, andwhyaesthetic Socratism should have seemed so congenial anoption.And who knows but that the analogy between artworks and females is due to a reduction of the latter tofeeling in contrastwith reason,presumed to bemasculine?So thatPlato's program ofmaking women the same asmenis another aspect of his program ofmaking art the same asphilosophy? In any case it has been a long and fatefuldisenfranchisement, and itwill be a task to disassembleportions of the philosophy of art from art: all themoretimely since there has been a recent effort to deconstructphilosophy by treating it as though itwere art!

the philosophical disenfranchisment of art

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