1. “Wij wensen de moeders een onvergetelijke moederdag” (logos).
Al de rest betreft de ethos van de spreker en de manier waarop de emoties of onbewuste overwegingen van de kijker worden gemobiliseerd, de pathos.

2a. “Wij lachen de moeders uit (kijk eens hoe mooi wij mooie jonge meiden nog zijn)” / of:
2b. “Wij zijn ook moeders maar in tegenstelling tot de gemiddelde moeder zijn wij wel nog volledig ‘in vorm’ (dus toch: haha)”.
3. Moet je die linkse vrouw zien, daar is men met de Photoshop weer eens uitgeschoten: mededeling: “Zo mager moet je zijn om mooi te zijn.”

Visuele argumentatie is de gedaante die ethos en pathos aannemen in een cultuur als de onze waar de media het primair zijn geworden voor het overtuigen van een publiek.
]]> http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/2012/05/12/visuele-argumentatie/feed/ 0 http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/2012/03/15/adamitic-language/ http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/2012/03/15/adamitic-language/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:24:21 +0000 rob http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/?p=2447 There is something attractive in the thought that our language of universals was preceded by an Adamitic language which makes use only of proper names. Such a language acknowledges the importance of individuals, as they are perceived, as opposed to the categories they fall under. We are more interested in our friend Mary than in women generally.

But what would the world be like in the days of Adamitic language? How are we to understand the thought of Adamitic language?

… ill-concieved

When, in my perception, I recognise individuality before generality—the individual item before its category—how do I assure myself that I am looking at the same individual when not by realising that it is identical to the one I encountered before, and different from any of the things that are like it? Or: it makes no sense to think of individuals without a conception of categories they are instances of.

Perhaps the original thesis of precedence was not about the precedence of conceptions but of terms? Perhaps we first had terms to refer to individuals, even though in our mind we already possessed the concepts to generalise.

Proper names

There is yet another issue with proper names. Are they to be conceived of as a causal chain originating in a baptising (Kripke)? Perhaps, yes, we must say this talking about the logic of proper names. But their use is rather different: my friend’s proper name captures—for me!—a set of shared experiences, and it retains these. And amongst these shared experiences there is, most notably, the intimacy of reciprocal exchanges of gazings.

Perceptions do not produce images, or mental representations, in the mind. The images are out there. We see the things before us and the events which take place around us directly. If we remind ourselves of an event from the past somehow we re-perceive it. Even in such cases, it makes no sense to think that we are watching an image in our minds. Normally, the original events slowly but surely mix with intermediate and present perceptions and lose their hold on us. (I am thinking of Bergson’s much neglected theory).

It makes sense, therefore, to argue that events produce “images”, and that some of these will stick permanently. Someone lies awake at night and cannot stop the events from making him see them again and again. And the events pester him in such a way that they feel incomparably singular—sealing him off from post-processing them, and from integrating them to his present perceptions. They model new perceptions, rather than standing on their own, ready to be mixed in with the next.

I think the traumatic images produced by the Nazis in the heads of survivors are like that. Crimes leave us with vehement images, and the Nazi crimes are the nastiest and the most persistent. Commentators have reported how victims in the camps were forbidden as well as incapable to watch the events—their experience of the horrors was not a full-fledged normal, thick perception to begin with, not something they could interfere with. (Thick perception is perception which allows the embodied perceiver to stand towards the events, partake in them as an agent; not observe them passively, as if they are represented.)

The Unrepresentability of the Shoah

The issue with art about the Shoah is not the unrepresentability of the Shoah. It is that art always revolves around itself. An art work’s content is always just that: the subject matter of a work. The work precedes its meaning, or referent (there is no need in art for a referent that actually exists). The Shoah, however, is too real to allow for this, art’s lenient ontology.

That is different from saying that the Shoah is too big (in any way) to allow its adequate representation. This unrepresentability of the Shoah is an epistemological issue. But art trumps epistemology in this, as it helps us understand how crimes make images—and, how making images of crimes implicates the audience in those crimes.

To deal with the Shoah through representation in 2006 is both instructive with regard to the powers and incapacities of representations, and a challenge in a singularly complex manner.
The complexity stems from several determinants which are well-rehearsed but remain as hard to deal with as ever before: the sheer horror of the planned extermination of Jewry; the scientist fallacies backgrounding the Shoah (Mengele’s experiments; social darwinism—are they as alien to science as we want to believe?); the open-endedness of the events (the murder not just of individuals but of families; the appeal to long histories of anti-semitism; uncontrollable religious backgrounds); the powerlessness inherent in remnant photographic material; the visual arguments therein (who shot the footage? Was “it” really like this?), and so on.

On top of all this, any new representation must count with its predecessors and the flaws and strengths therein, as well as the debates about these. Think of the 1978 Holocaust television series, Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Roberto Benigni’s La Vita e Bella (1997), to name but the most important examples.
If you consider making a film about the Shoah, will you do it like either one of your predecessors did it or are you going to offer a new approach? And how new can it be? Hasn’t everything been done already?

The Truth about the Real

The Holocaust television series provided a soap opera version of the shoah; it showed the struggle for survival of the Jewish family Weiss—in a typical soap opera way, by showing everything an audience might crave to see. The series was critiqued for its sentimental distortion of the vastness of the shoah by presenting it as a narrative setting allowing closure.
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah presented testimonials by survivors, moral witnesses (in Avishai Margalit’s terms): no documentary footage because that would “kill the imagination”—as Lanzmann put it in his critique of Schindler’s List—and the imagination is required to connect to the vast horrors of the shoah; no stories of individuals and their individual problems but stories by individuals speaking “for the lot”.
Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was a fictional reenactment, reflecting the point of view of a good German, as if such perspectivism might not in itself already involve a distortion of “reality”.

Of course, it is not easy to establish just what that reality was, and I will not try it here—a negative approach might suffice: whenever a representation gives you flawed views, this in itself is an indication of its distortive nature. And Schindler’s List as much as the television series give one the impression that the shoah was something one might be able to convey in nice narratives with a beginning, middle and ending where certain things problematised in the beginning are resolved at the end—a typical Hollywood narrative that most people feel good with.

Reenactment

Secondly, irrespective of the truth-issue, Schindler’s List presents a reenactment by professional actors, doing their best—no doubt about that—to render their characters as plausibly and convincingly as they can. Lanzmann (in the named critique) asks whether actors can convey the horrors of the shoah, and that points to a philosophical, and hence more general question about the transparancy of acting to the enacted. And there is a critical asymmetry here: when a character is to pick up a book, his real-life “counterpart”, the actor—say, Ben Kingsley—picks up a book. So far so good. Even though one may already pose the question whether seeing Kingsley pick up a book is ever bringing to our mind a Jewish victim picking up a book.
Nevertheless, however lenient we may choose to be about the transparency of physical reenactment, a more critical asymmetry surfaces when the character is suposed to go through some or other feeling. This time the question whether the audience succeeds in empathising with the feelings of the character depends on the acting efforts of the actor, Kingsley. The actor Kingsley will always be a determining factor in the success of the expression. For fictions this is, of course, no problem at all, but we are dealing here with the Real.
Lastly, Hollywood conventions dictate that the narrative be closed at the end, so as to provide some katharsis in the audience. Truthfulness becomes a real issue.
Roberto Benigni’s La Vita e Bella, in contrast, seems not to be vulnerable to such criticism, as the film is fictional, and evidently so from the start. The film shows a certain survival strategy, the use of humor and irony without suggesting that this is how things were, generally, or even in some specific case. No truth-valuational assumptions in this film. This opens the question whether fictional renderings of parts and aspects of the shoah is a viable endeavour—but that question is answered affirmatively by this film and other works, such as Polish artist, Libera’s LEGO Concentration Camp (1996), and the puppet play of Hotel Modern, Kamp (2006).

Implicating the Audience in the Image-Making

Benigni’s La Vita e Bella makes us laugh about these horrible events, which implicates us in his manner of representing them. Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO Concentration Camp consists of a LEGO-set with building blocks and puppets allowing players to build their own concentration camp, and, as LEGO-players are used to, to play out the puppets against each other. Children playing with LEGO know that doing it means identifying with the characters. Thus, Libera presents us with our own complicitness in producing the imagery of horror.
A similar artistic strategy is encountered in Hotel Modern’s Kamp. This hybrid and complicated piece presents a life audience with a projection of a puppet play on a screen at the back of a stage where the puppeteers are devoted to bringing the scenes to life, for the sake of the audience’s experience. We see the care with which a puppeteer cicks a puppet from the little crate it was mounted on seconds earlier, to hang it. The puppeteer’s finger hangs the victim; the audience sees the devotion in the tiny movements that lead to the hanging, and no-one in the audience interferes—of course not, but that is not the point: the point is that it was the perpetrators who made the imagery, of the hanging of a Jew. And somehow, they made it for posterity to watch. We are implicated in the image-making that the horror consisted in as well.

The artists don’t make the images—they remade them—the Nazis did. It makes one think back to the often emotionally laden testimonials in Lanzmann’s Shoah. E.g. the barber Abraham Bomba is filmed in a barbershop, while Lanzmann interviews him about how they cut the hair of hundreds of women in gas-chambers, minutes before they would be gassed. At a certain point during his story, Bomba feels he can no longer proceed with his tale, and we see how he sees how images of the situation creep back into his memory. Yes, it was the Nazis who made these images, and it is the images which haunt the survivors.

Where are the Images?

Taking it from here, the next question seems to become: how do we acquaint ourselves with the images the Nazis made?
To think that they are in the documentary footage would be a mistake, but a mistake which, to expose it, requires an additional argument—against photography—that is philosophical in nature. That additional argument is this: 1. Photography, on account of its causal origins, proves what it shows. 2. People therefore think that—since we see something in the photograph which the photograph in itself proves to have been real—we see in that same photograph just how it was. 3. But a photograph may prove what it shows—I don’t debate that claim, and surely won’t do so by appealing to contemporary digitalisation (think of Roger Scruton’s objection to that)—yet it doesn’t tell us what that is. Pictures generally, and photographs are no exception, cannot assert anything—just as they are incapable of denying or questioning anything, or of pointing to their own context (Wollheim). 4. This additional argument makes me conclude that the images the Nazis caused are not captured in the documentary pictures. Then where are they?

Rex Bloomstein: KZ (2006)

This is where Rex Bloomstein’s KZ steps in. KZ shows us groups of visitors of the Mauthausen camp, as well as their guides and people living in the camp’s vicinity.

Examples of scenes in the film are groups of tourists being walked through the camp by local guides; we see them listening to guides relating stories they have obviously been recounting numerous times. The guides themselves are interviewed and they tell of their personal devotion to the guiding, and their personal suffering of having to repeat the stories over and over.

The ways in which the guides tell their stories within the historical circumstances where they took place, provides the film with a strange kind of authenticity; comparable, in a way, to how Lanzmann placed the moral witnesses in Shoah within historical contexts—only in KZ those present in these horrible surroundings are not survivors. So how do their stories acquire authenticity, one wonders.
We are also shown the surroundings of the camp, the village of Mauthausen and its present inhabitants engaging in beer-festivities. The locals are asked about the camp, and they state that the camp does not “control” their lives, and that Mauthausen is a village like any other. The spectator has different thoughts, though. Among others one realises that the mere presence of the camp retains and reactivates memories of the atrocities that took place in it.

It is the place itself which archives our memories, even those memories which cannot be said to be ours personally, for instance, because we are too young to have experienced the events. But KZ shows us how they are brought to live—by visiting the site and experiencing the camp, the rooms, the corridor as embodied perceivers. This differs from reading about the Shoah, or from watching documentaries or testimonials. KZ brings that insight home, but honesty bids me to acknowledge that some of this is also central to Lanzmann’s Shoah, which is different in all other aspects, of course.

References

- Alphen, Ernst van. 2005. “Playing the Holocaust.” In Art in Mind. How Contemporary Images Shape Thought, 180–203. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
- Benigni, Roberto: La Vita e Bella (1997). (IMDB)
- Bergson, Henri. 1990. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. Zone.
- Bloomstein, Rex: KZ (online information-sheet).
- Gerwen, Rob van. 1999. “Representaties waarnemen.” Feit & fictie IV:67–80.
- Hotel Modern: Kamp (press release, online).
- Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah. An Oral History of the Shoah. New York: Pantheon Books. (IMDB).
____________. 1994. “Holocauste, la représentation impossible.” Le Monde, March 3.
- Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.
- Scruton, Roger. 1983. “Photography and Representation.” In The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture, 102–126. London, New York: Methuen.
Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain Of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Spielberg, Stephen: Schindler’s List (1993). (IMDB)
- Wollheim, Richard. 1993. “Pictures and Language.” In The Mind and its Depths, 185–192. Cambridge (Mass.), London (England): Harvard University Press.

Dear Mr. President, I cannot imagine that you do not know what to do. You have my full support in doing it (which is easy to say, I know).

Download voor je eigen gemak de pdf met het programma en verdere specificaties.

English

Call for papers for an expertmeeting in philosophy of art, Utrecht, November 17-18 2011.
Download the pdf for program and specifications.

Wittgenstein once remarked that it would count as a bigger miracle if we had been capable of devising a pill which would make one paint the Creation of Adam, than one which made us feel something in the stomach.

“Suppose I give you a pill
(1) which makes you draw a picture—perhaps `The Creation of Adam’;
(2) which gives you feelings in the stomach
Which would you call the more peculiar effect? Certainly—that you draw just this picture. The feelings are pretty simple.”

Contemporary Cognitive Neuro-science, in contrast, seems to think that there is no big gap between the two effects, since everything someone does or feels has its counterpart in neural brain-activity.

So, just to get the burden of proof back where it belongs: I dare cognitive neuro-scientist to produce something (a pill or computer-guided neural stimulating) that causes someone who has no experience in art whatsoever to paint `The Creation of Adam’. Ah, no, not `The Creation of Adam’, because that would be cheating, a forgery.

I dare cognitive neuro-scientist to produce something that causes someone who has no experience in art whatsoever to paint something as highly valued aesthetically, i.e. with as much artistic merit as Michelangelo’s `The Creation of Adam’.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1938–1946. Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 30:3.

See, if one demolishes a television-set with an axe, say, one really destroys the thing, and what remains of this act of literal violence is a rumble, nothing new arises.
However, when a philosopher sets out to destroy the theory of his predecessors, the net result will be something new. By destroying one theory he will have brought into being (at least the seeds of) a new theory, or view, or set of considerations. Destruction in philosophy is always also construction, hence deconstruction.

It is the tragedy of doing philosophy, not a method for doing it.

The connection would be this: 1. I can listen to Albert Ayler (the man) even though he is long dead (and see Gerwen 2011 about the audibility of musicians making music). 2. People tend to loose interest in music after the demise of the musicians. (I happen not to (loose interest) with Ayler, but something like this happens regularly—we sometimes get to call the music outdated.) This might be due to the fact that we are no longer interested in imagining this (now deceased) musician making music! 3. This is compatible with a central argument in Wollheim’s thought: that the appreciation of works of art presupposes that we treat them as realising intentions of human beings (artists).

Wollheim’s argument against treating art as communication is based in the thought that for something to count as communicating this presupposes that one person knowingly addresses another actual person. I consider this a legitimate point, but it is in a different league.

So, though in many cases a work of art does not count as a communication between one person (the artist) and another (me), sometimes a work carries so much artistically relevant evidence of its maker (individual style) that it can be thought of as successfully bringing the musician to the mind of the listener, the painter to the mind of the viewer, and so on.

– Savile, Anthony. 2001. “Communication and the Art of Painting.” In Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting. Art as Representation and Expression, edited by Rob van Gerwen, 96–110. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

– van Gerwen, Rob. 2011. “Hearing Musicians Making Music. A Critique of Roger Scruton’s notion of “Acousmatic Experience”.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. (In Press).

– Wollheim, Richard. 1988. Painting as an Art. Princeton / London: Princeton University Press / Thames and Hudson.

____________. 1993. “Pictorial Style: Two Views.” In The Mind and its Depths, 171–184. Cambridge (Mass.), London (England): Harvard University Press.

____________. 2001. “A Reply to the Contributors.” In Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting. Art as Representation and Expression, edited by Rob van Gerwen, 241–263. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

The difference between the natural sciences on the one hand, and, on the other the social sciences and humanities is in their subject matter. Yet, people’s evaluations of the two groups of sciences is based in a difference in methodologies.
The critical difference then is that one group of methods—the “scientific” ones—explains events in such manner that we can predict without exception the next occurrence of one; whereas the other group of methods—the social sciences or humanities ones—does not include any such capacity. Instead it has to accept the occurrence of certain events and then to look back at what might help us understand their occurrence.
The “scientific” group of methods could be said to be pro-active; the “humanities”-group to be retro-active.

The Retrograde in Physics

If someone drops something, physics can predict how it will drop … if it has a full view of the initial conditions. So, if the thing is a feather and while it is travelling down a sudden wind gushes out to carry the feather upwards, physical theory should be held able to predict how it would proceed, and so on. In experimental situations these initial conditions are controlled and hence prediction can be decisive. In the real world, however, due to complexity and sheer number, the initial conditions can only be controlled up to a point. I would want to conclude that in real-life the predictive powers of said scientific methodologies presuppose an infinite, total insight in all the relevant conditions (and which conditions would be relevant, and for which theoretical reasons?).
Pro-active explanation depends on accessibility of data. This means that in the absence of absolute knowledge these methodologies too must allow for an element of retroactive assembling.

The Pro-active in Humanities

The insights produced by interpretation and other humanities methods help us understand our own stance in life—to co-determine how we conceive of our selves. In this reflexivity humanities methods produce states of affairs, and, understanding such effects might allow us to predict certain events. This provides, both, an explication of how to deal with the relevant initial conditions and an argument for limiting the approach of humanities or social science experiments on ethical grounds.

Leibniz and Voltaire

The explanatory claims of science appeal to Leibniz’s ideal, that our world be the best of possible worlds.
Leibniz argued in his Essais de théodicée (1710) that our world is the best of all possible worlds: God would only have created this world because it is logical—even He has to accommodate logic. Leibniz concluded that this meant that the present is the best of all possible worlds: because everything hangs together with everything and the reality of the world simply assumes that this coherence is supportive. In plain language, this argument boils down to saying that this world is good because it is. The Only One capable of actually seeing this is, of course, God with His infinite understanding. Science has the beautiful task to reach for this divine perspective.
Voltaire thought differently about the goodness of this world, in Candide, ou l’optimisme (1759): everywhere where Candide, the text’s main character, came, he confronted misery and misbehaviour.

We could think of our world as determined by laws of the universe, and in a sense this is unsurmountably true. But knowing what is going to happen next is something different altogether.

Commentaar

Ik heb betoogd (in 2011) dat Kants schoonheids-voorbeelden te eenzijdig over objecten gaan: de tulp is Kants favoriet om de doelmatigheid zonder doel van schoonheid te illustreren; maar dat er in de natuur vaker sprake is van een gebeurtenis, die in de omgeving van de natuur ervaren wordt.

Het omgevingsmodel van Carlson

Ik beroep me daarbij onder meer op Alan Carlson (1979) die betoogde dat we de verkeerde modellen hanteren om over natuurschoonheid te denken: het objectmodel beschouwt natuurschoonheid tezeer in termen van de mooie dingen die we uit het bos mee naar huis nemen en op de schoorsteenmantel zetten, mooie stenen en zo. Het probleem daarmee is dat we het mooie dan uit zijn eigenlijke context isoleren. Het landschapsmodel is gemodelleerd naar het landschapsschilderij—dat soort schoonheid vinden we als we naar een uitkijkpunt worden geloodsd vanwaar we een zogenaamd mooi overzicht over het landschap krijgen. Dit model plaatst de kijker op een afstand en buiten de mooie natuur. (Denk aan de centrale perspectief die de kijker ook buiten de afgebeelde werkelijkheid plaatst, op een vast punt). Carlson stelt daarom een omgevingsmodel voor waarbij het subject zich in de natuur bevindt en beweegt en door de natuurschoonheid omgeven wordt.
Ik geloof dat Carlson een rijker model geeft voor natuurschoonheid dan de andere twee modellen.

Een dik model van natuurschoonheid

Ik denk dat Kant vooral een objectmodel hanteert (en het landschapsmodel wellicht reserveert voor wat hij de ervaring van verhevenheid noemt—maar daar moet ik nog eens over nadenken). In het licht, nu, van het haardvuur-argument, wil ik daar het volgende over zeggen. Kants argument dat iets soms alleen maar mooi lijkt maar het niet is—omdat het onze verbeelding alleen maar door zijn onduidelijkheid bezig houdt, is volgens mij goed te verdedigen. Ik weet alleen niet of het noodzakelijk op al onze vergezichten van toepassing is waarbij we de dingen in hun concreetheid niet goed kunnen ontwaren.
Het omgevingsmodel appelleert als het ware aan een ander moment in onze waarneming: we voelen hoe de omgeving als geheel subjectief doelmatig is (om bij Kants terminologie te blijven) voor het subject als belichaamd waarnemer. Natuurschoonheid, zoals begrepen door het omgevingsmodel, impliceert de kijker in de scene als een belichaamd waarnemer, een handelende actor die door om zich heen te kijken en de dingen te horen, zien, ruiken, en betasten de omgeving als subjectief doelmatig kan ervaren. Als men, in de tuin achter, een vlucht ganzen in de verte hoort aankomen, de lucht in kijkt en ze zoekt, en vindt—die langgerekte V—dan is de esthetische bewondering daarvoor evengoed precies, ook al gaat het ons nietom de individuele schoonheid van een of andere specifieke gans die in de trek meevliegt. Beoordelen we dan niet esthetisch een gebeurtenis, eerder dan een object? En kan zoiets niet ook met haardvuur? Tja, we moeten niet het vuur in staren en er met onze verbeelding op los gaan fantaseren, maar dat is ook werkelijk iets anders.

Dik?

Ik noem deze benadering dik omdat ze de mens als handelend actor betreft.
Gilbert Ryle introduceerde dikke beschrijving als een beschrijving van lichaamsbewegingen die ook alle werkelijke betekenissen daarvan involveert. Een knipperend oog kan bij voorbeeld ook een knip-oog zijn, of een ironisch commentaar op iemand die een tik aan zijn oog heeft. Een dunne beschrijving zal het met een beschrijving voor alle drie deze varianten doen. Een dikke maakt de nodige onderscheiden.
Bernard Williams (1985) onderscheidde dikke van dunne concepten op basis van het opdoemen van een reden tot handelen: “If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason to act, though that reason need not be a decisive one and may be outweighed by other reasons [...]” (140).

uit: Allgemeine Anmerkung zum ersten Abschnitte der Analytik

[...]
Noch sind schöne Gegenstände von schönen Aussichten auf Gegenstände (die öfter der Entfernung wegen nicht mehr deutlich erkannt werden können) zu unterscheiden. In den letztern scheint der Geschmack nicht sowohl an dem, was die Einbildungskraft in diesem Felde auffaßt, als vielmehr an dem, was sie hiebei zu dichten Anlaß bekommt, d.i. an den eigentlichen Phantasien, womit sich das Gemüt unterhält, indessen daß es durch die Mannigfaltigkeit, auf die das Auge stößt, kontinuierlich erweckt wird, zu haften; so wie etwa bei dem Anblick der veränderlichen Gestalten eines Kaminfeuers, oder eines rieselnden Baches, welche beide keine Schönheiten sind, aber doch für die Einbildungskraft einen Reiz bei sich führen, weil sie ihr freies Spiel unterhalten.

– Carlson, Allen. 1979. “Appreciation and the Natural Environment.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37:267–275.

– Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (A-first edition: Berlin, Libau 1790; B-second edition: Berlin, 1793). online

van Gerwen, Rob. 2011. “Mathematical Beauty and Perceptual Presence.” Philosophical Investigations, vol. 34:3 (In Press).

Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press.

But what does it mean? What are we being told by this graphical reproduction of keyword-combinations and their quantified occurrence?

And here is some more of this. You may have wondered: how else do I find out what everybody is twittering about except by looking at the cloud? Appinions.

Within days, people’s guilt feelings about living on without “doing much of anything to help” is cashed in through national fundraising efforts. We dig deep into conscience.
At the same time and without second thought, we support an immoral system (that allows people to “remove” their cash from the disaster area the moment a certain “risk” develops).

Astronomy describes in scientific manner the state and history of the universe. We cannot but acknowledge that the state and history of the universe form the necessary conditions of everything that happens in our lives: Our lives are determined by what happens and happened in the universe, how can they not be?
Yet, we think that astrology, which predicts our daily lives on the basis of what it takes to be the state and history of the universe, is a pseudo-science. And rightly so: not only is daily life complicated and comprises the mixing of many factors; it is also co-determined by human choices, and these are, as hermeneutics tells us, overdetermined, and semantically so (we don’t mean that there are many intertwined causal mechanisms at work here, but that people have many explicatory reasons for their behaviour and we need good, i.e. coherent, theoretical points of view to sort things out).

The attractiveness of astrology is in its consoling effect: suddenly we can forget about our troubling feelings of guilt and responsibility, because it was all written in the stars.

Cognitive science

Why then is it that we we allow cognitive science to play both roles? Cognitive science describes in minute detail the state and history of brain states and neural processes. And it, too, claims, that everything people do or decide is fully determined by these brain states and neural processes. As with the state of the universe, how can we disagree with the claim that everything we think and feel has these brain states and processes as their determination?
A major bestseller in the Netherlands says that “We are our brains” and it goes as far as predicting what our lives will be like given the state of our brains.

Now you make the analogy.

After a few hours of listening to such radio stations the net result may be … boredom. Why?

Surely, each of the tunes picked may be to your taste, so that is not the problem.

What is wrong

What is wrong is something to do with the switching between tunes. With computerised radio stations the switching is not done by someone who appreciates one tune’s expression, and thinks his thoughts, and develops his associations, to find what he feels are similar feelings, which induce him to pick the next tune (as appealing to those newly acquired associations and feelings). His audience follows through these processes.
With computerised radio stations the switching is done unhumanly. And the listener has no clue how to empathise with the choosing of the music.

Conclusions

What this teaches (me at least) is that a radio broadcasting station is more than the frequency at the FM-bandwidth it broadcasts from. It forms a practice, at the heart of which is the disc jockey, who feels for the music and for his audience (and whom his audience feels for). The disc jockey appeals to associations induced by the expression of music.

Connections

1. The argument is analogous to my objection to the view that music amounts to what is in its score. Human manipulations (of discs, or of an instrument) must be audible and traceable.
2. The semantics of the in-between tunes is similar to that of the cinematic in-between shots that is used through editing to make the shots tell a story, and of the interrelation between sound and image in music-videos (more here). (Someone should look into these analogy.)

Readings

- Rob van Gerwen. 2011. “Roger Scruton on Hearing the Musician.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. (In Press).
____________. 2002. “De ontologische drogreden in de analytische esthetica.” Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 94:109–123.

It is public; the works are out there, on the streets, for all to see. They are accessible to all, and make ample use of circumstances available on the streets (empty walls, holes, sidewalks). The pictures are always carefully, and beautifully rendered and without exception well-placed: the place is integral to the picture. Banksy’s works are site-specific.
Plus, his visual arguments are art, not mere (political) statement: passers-by are confronted with the relevant thoughts and feelings in a perceptual manner, as embodied persons.

That said, I think the peculiar quality of his work lies in Banksy’s mobilizing meanings that lie dormant on the streets already. We see two male cops depicted kissing—it is something that would happen there, would it not?

The next question is: how do these meanings lie there? (To be followed.)

As soon as one believes that the monument is real, one starts mourning the death of GW (or so we assume), his falling victim to some accident or crime at that spot. One might want to write out the ensuing response.
But someone may ask: “So, what is wrong with that?”, and the answer might be hard to spell out.

For one, I think it disrupts a perfectly defensible ceremony of mourning. Secondly, the “monument” forms a case of public lying, it disrupts public interaction (one might retort: “what is there to disrupt?”, but that is a cynical remark, about which more can and should be said, but not here). I would argue that this second point merely shows the relevance of the first.

If, however, this “work” does not present itself as a work, and hence does not call upon people to take on an artistic attitude, then its maker, it seems to me, cannot in retrospect claim art status for it. (It makes one think of a rougher case, in London, a few years ago when a woman rang the local police announcing three bombs in the London metros; upon which inner city was evacuated. A few hours later the same woman called the police to say it had been a work of art … Of course, the “GWW” are far less disruptive, but I am not interested in the empirical gradation of societal effect, but in the conceptual point: when is art?).

Apparently, Geert Wilders sued the artist, complaining that he, Wilders, felt menaced by the work. That, I think, is grossly overstated (as thought the judge), as well as a misinterpretation. Of course, the case wasn’t over by then, even though Wilders’ first claim was dismissed by the judge.

He re-claimed his case at a higher court, upon which the artist included these court cases in the “Geert Wilders Werke”. I don’t have a quarrel with that latter move, as in doing so, the artist does exactly that which he forget to do in the beginning: announce art status.

The Artistic Device onderzoekt welke mogelijkheden een “extradisciplinaire” opstelling kan bieden binnen het gespannen politieke klimaat van vandaag. Hoe kunnen kunst, theorie en actie samenkomen in een progressieve kunstpraktijk? Een vraag die onder meer wordt verkend in een performance van de Grieks-Duitse video-kunstenaar Angela Melitopoulos, die in haar werk en haar praktijk als kunstenaar nieuwe samenwerkingsverbanden zoekt met theoretici. Overige deelnemers zijn Armin Medosch, Willem van Weelden en Merijn Oudenampsen. In de bijlage vindt u een digitale uitnodiging met uitgebreide informatie over het symposium.
Lees hier meer:

»  The Artistic Device (94K)

“The Transcendental Anti Christ”
© Sam van Gerwen, 2010.

]]> http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/2010/06/25/proof/feed/ 0 http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/2010/06/24/chatroulette/ http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/2010/06/24/chatroulette/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:09:06 +0000 rob http://blog.phil.uu.nl/robvangerwen/?p=1760 chatroulette.com offers people the possibility to check in with someone anonymous, exchanging live footage from the webcams of both people involved, and a switch-button allowing either of the two to stop the interaction at will and without explanation.

1. I am convinced chatroulette has an addictive aspect.

2. It also tampers with Kant’s Practical Imperative:
“Act to treat humanity, whether yourself or another, as an end-in-itself and never as a means”. Immanuel Kant, 1758. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. J. F. Hartknoch, p. BA 67.

Does that mean that chatroulette has finally delivered us from the imperatives of respect—or that, maybe, chatroulette is profoundly unethical?

If it isn’t objects that you perceive, but colours and forms, or, even, sense-data, then when will you know what to do? Which processes are required for your insight (in the nature of the whatever that is coming towards you) to surface?

The anticipation need not be all-inclusive, but will need to include all that the subject needs to keep feeling at home in his surroundings.

The advantage is that farmed out perception holistically involves the embodied organism as the subject of perception as the agent he is. It does not treat a perception as consisting of an atomistic slice of time providing (through difficult neurological physical causal processes issuing in some brain event) incommensurable data streams issuing from conceptually distinct aspects of the world which generate skeptical challenges to our intuitions of being able to perceive the real things.

Now, watch these two films on Youtube: the first, from the BBC-series The Mind’s Eye, gives you a nice impression of the illusions; the second shows the way the room apparently is built (a spoiler, so to speak). Try watching the films without sound (because the sounds will distract you from your own thoughts as they provide some explanation or other—neither one holds much promise, I think):
1. BBC
2. Ramachandran explanation (the simulation starts at 19 seconds).

Perception, Depiction, or neither?

First, is the Ames room a perceptual situation? We, the viewers, most certainly are not in the environment of the room. The simulation in the second film shows clearly how we are stood outside, and how we are supposed to look in through a small hole in one of the walls. That means that the situation is a trompe l’oeuil, requiring the viewer to be unnaturally fixed in a particular spot (because in any other spot the illusion would fail to show.) So our perception is non-egocentrical: if we move nothing changes in the thing viewed (Currie), which is very extraordinary, and hence it is fair to say that it is not at all clear what the Ames room tells us about perception. Would the twins take each other as growing and shrinking like we do, or would they, rather, be puzzled by what they see? (Has anyone cared to ask them?)

Why Fixation Inhibits Perception

It is not intuitively immediately clear that fixation inhibits perception, because, we want to think, if we see X that counts as perceiving X. My view here is that seeing merely counts as one aspect of perceiving—provided by abstracting from perception; but perception involves embodied agency (a spatio-temporal structure) and hence a veridical synchronicity of everything which enters the mind through he senses.

Holism about Perception

A holist theory of perception (which leads automatically, I argue elsewhere, to naive direct realism) involves someone who notices something visually to the effect of immediately attributing characteristics to be corroborated by many of the other so-called senses as well as by repeated and slightly altered vision (we see a chair and immediately expect it to look so-and-so from the back).

Depicted Trompe L’oeuil

The trompe l’oeuil is depicted, yes: we are watching a film of the trompe l’oeuil. The pictures clearly depict the twins as of different height: you can definitely measure the difference. Or, in different words: in Fig. 1.c. one can see how it is the camera who has made the right twin bigger than the left! We, the viewers of the picture are not fooled by the Ames room, but by its depiction. The picture clearly depicts the lines of floor and ceiling as symmetrical thereby enlarging the right girl, or diminishing the left girl.

a.	b.	c.
Figure 1. The Ames Room (BBC)

Perhaps the Ames room tells us something about depiction? I guess it does—like drawings by Maurits Escher do.

Pictures and Far-off Situations

The Ames room does seem to provide some insight in the similarity and the difference between what we see in a picture and what we see at large distances. First, egocentrical perception: if we see a table with books and a tea pot on it, we know we can grab either one of these objects or look behind them, and so on: if we move the interrelations between the objects change and thus we perceive depth, and we perceive how we might interfere in the world through our actions. Perception tells us all that; there is no need to actually do anything. Perception, however, does not provide us with that sort of information about the clouds above our heads. If we move the interrelations between the clouds do not change accordingly—they change all right, but not according to our movements. For all we know we might be watching a cloud movie.
(Cognitive science, and evolution theory might explain this by saying that we never developed perceptual means to anticipate on moving about in situations at such large distances, and why would we? We would first have to make sure to get there, and once there our perception will inform us in the right egocentrical manner. I am absolutely okay with that.)
Pictures do not present themselves as scenes where the perceivers might actually engage while all they do is put such interaction gradually out of reach on account of the distance. Instead, pictures present situations in a way which conceptually separates them from the perceiver—hence they do not fool us into some sort of illusion. Trompe l’oeuils however, do. They present us with situations which we may be fooled to believe to be able to enter into and interact in whilst demanding that we take up a place which puts us in the spot we are in when we look at the clouds: a spot disallowing us to actually move as perception dictates. Thus, the Ames room is neither a perception nor a picture (although it is presented to us now as depicted in a film).

a.	b.	c.
Figure 2. Construction of the Ames Room (Ramachandran)

Panorama Mesdag

The Panorama Mesdag (in Den Haag) provides a case where all three subjects are at stake at once: as a visitor you will be bodily aware of the railing and the sand just behind it; visually the sand can be seen to extend a certain distance, behind which the vista is taken over by pictures. The trompe l’oeuil is in this that it should be difficult to make out exactly where the real and the depicted sand meet, but little is done to fix the viewer because the situations are meant to be continuous with each other.

– Currie, Gregory. 1998. “The Aesthetics of Photography.” In Image and Mind, 72–74. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
– Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
– Johnston, Mark. 2006. “The Function of Sensory Awareness.” In Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne, 260–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
– McDowell, John. 1994. “Action, Meaning and the Self.” In Mind and World, 87–107. Cambridge, Mass and London, England: Harvard University Press.
____________. 1994. “The content of perceptual experience.” The Philosophical Quarterly 44:190–205.

Had Jack Nicholson been lip-synced in the passage from The Shining, where his character is threatening to bash his wife, Wendy’s brains in—his threats, a speech act, would not have worked, because part of the successful firing of the speech act consists in the manner in which the words are spoken. If you threaten someone surely your speech must overflow of conviction of your intent.

Children’s television

Children’s television broadcasts cartoons which are obviously spoken, not by the cartoon characters but by humans reading out the texts. Two ways to do this prevail. In cheaper programs people are hired to read out a text they have before them. The reading has a reading contest quality: you hear the readers do their utmost best to introduce some or other intonation. In cartoons this mostly works just fine. But here too the second form of synced speech works better: where actors are hired who put more effort into identifying with the characters. How do they achieve their finer results? They learn their texts by heart—as they would when play-acting on stage—and then, while watching the cartoon they move their bodies like their characters do, and all they have to pay attention to is the cartoon they see before them—they don’t have to look down at the text. They simply speak along their own movements. Hence the naturalistic effect.

Most recently, we see children’s programs with real children acting, and these shows too are lip-synced. Here, the difference between the two approaches has a thorough consequence, in that when the speakers read out their texts, we simply fail to believe the actors. Here is a forgery of a fatal kind.

Gimme Shelter

Alternatively, I show my students a clip from the Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter, where we see the members of the band worn out in the dressing room, while listening to their rendering of “Wild Horses”. They do not sing or play along with the music, so in a sense they seem further away from the music than Peter Green in his lip-synced performance, yet they are far closer to it. There is abundant proof in the footage that they are indeed listening to the song that we hear—their gestures and expressions are really, not just intentionally, synchronous to the music. And what we see them do is ponder about how they performed it; we see the members of the band listen-watch their own performances. This brings that performance home to us, thickly.
The Stones suitably prompt us to the nature of the music.

Biology prescribes that humans strive for survival. It simply makes no sense for a person sustaining a life of his own, to do things which will threaten that project—ultimately it is the support of all his other projects, and dying marks the end of all of them.
Ethics presupposes biology, and tries to develop arguments to deal with actions whose nature it makes sense to have deliberations about. Whenever ethical considerations lead to issues of killing or ending life, biology steps in.

With this distinction in mind I return to my question whether Wiener Aktionism provides cases of Immoral Art or whether it is immoral in such measure as to fall outside the moral limitations of art practice.

Summarising the argument so far

I assume that art is a moral practice and that this means that nothing happening within art practice (which means: nothing happening in the name of art) can be immoral, or: if it is immoral it cannot—for that reason—be art. I use this supposition to argue that moral assessment of art is, by definition, a non-starter and that all assessment of art should be art-critical (i.e. answering to art-historically relevant, aesthetic considerations). We may assess moral aspects of works of art, such as whether a work endorses immoral stances, or whether it portrays immoral events, but these are art-internal assessments, and they should end in establishing whether or not the work has artistic merit in doing these things (i.e. endorsing immoral stances, or portraying immoral events).

By an elaborate argument still slightly under construction, I then defended the present rise of works with a clearly immoral aspect as the rise of a new art form—hence as art, and, hence, not as immoral in the normal sense of the word: Immoral Art. To put fish in a blender and provide an art audience with the opportunity to push the blender’s button and mash the fish (Marco Evaristti’s Helena), has an immoral aspect but is not in itself more immoral than having fishing trawlers lift millions of fish out of the water and have them suffocate on deck. (There are far more considerations in my argument, but this should suffice here).

Intermediate conclusion

The question I posed was whether Aktionists eating their own vomit, or bathing in the intestines of bovine slaughter meat, which clearly involves the transgression of taboos, should count as “works” with an immoral aspect or as works transgressing the biological framework of life. I suggest now that we argue that the taboos transgressed here are indeed biological, not ethical, and that therefore, they do not even enter the realm of a moral practice, let alone that of art practice.

References

–Gerwen, Rob van. 2004. “Ethical Autonomism. The Work of Art as a Moral Agent.” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 2.
____________. 2010. “How the Present Rise of Immoral Art Helps Clarify Both the Definition and the Moral Autonomy of Art. A Post-Script to Ethical Autonomism.” ms.
____________. 2008. “Immorele kunst als paradox van haar autonomie.” In Kunst als morele vrijplaats, edited by Gert Peelen and Albert van der Schoot, 50–57. Arnhem: D’jonge hond, i.s.m. ArtEZ Press.

Their grip on psychology is brought on us by gross failure on behalf of philosophical theory with regard to the mind-body problem. The time has come—now more than ever—to clarify what (nothing) and where the mind is (not in the brain), how it works (by mobilising—recognising and projecting—meaning in objects and events in the outside world) and how it contains the person’s self (by collecting other people’s visions on us).

For those who care to know, I am presently finishing a book that argues that these samples are exactly not samples of beautiful people. That said, it IS interesting to see what this photographer, Phillip Toledano, has come up with—it most certainly fits what we see coming out of cosmetic surgery.

“There are other actions which are commonly performed under certain circumstances, independently of habit, and which seem to be due to imitation or some sort of sympathy. Thus persons cutting anything with a pair of scissors may be seen to move their jaws simultaneously with the blades of the scissors. Children learning to write often twist about their tongues as their fingers move, in a ridiculous fashion. When a public singer suddenly becomes a little hoarse, many of those present may be heard, as I have been assured by a gentleman on whom I can rely, to clear their throats; but here habit probably comes into play, as we clear our own throats under similar circumstances.” p. 1086.

Little other than the workings of mirror-neurones is needed to understand why people would mimic certain movements perceived. This should be so, because there is no psychology—or meaningful translation—to be found in the transposing of the perceived into the mimicked. That is the good news about physiological explanations: they deliver us from certain questions. However, this nice feat they do not achieve by answering questions, but by clarifying their non-psychological nature. I submit that we won’t get any decisive answers to questions about psychology, social significance, values, and so on, from reductions to causal processes.

A possible role played by mirror-neurones: some people are more prone to emotions because they have more (better?) mirror-neurones than others. This may be true; but it is not clear how it solves issues like those concerning the roles of emotions and their recognition, their intentional objects, and their psychological semantics. Emotional capacities are genetically inherited, but concrete emotions depend on input: triggers, associations, anticipation and dispositions. Mirror-neurones and proprioceptive re-enactment seem (obviously) to play a bigger role in our recognition of expression than in what seems to be a more straightforwardly receptive case of perception: seeing a colour. Remembering experientially seems to fit the former; recognising the use of a hammer; perceiving with all senses our surroundings, too. I may not be impressed by the find of the mirror-neurones, but that is due to my scepticism of mind-body dualism and of the issue of other minds consequent thereupon, or of solipsism for that matter.

The peculiar role of mirror-neurones seems to support Alan Fridlund’s co-evolution thesis, which says that expression and empathy co-evolved. What expression and empathy would then have saddled us up with, genetically, is mirror-neurones. Nevertheless, mirror-neurones do not help us understand the relevant mental processes, and these are crucial because the reciprocal addressing at work in facial expression is saturated with semantics, and psychological reality, but mirror-neurones are strictly local, ad hoc, explanations of the physical reality—perhaps—necessary for these semantics to emerge. Mirror neurones may be necessary conditions for the development of expression and empathy (the socially reciprocal process), they most certainly are not sufficient.

References

– Darwin, Charles. 2005. “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” In The Indelible Stamp. Four Essential Volumes in One, edited by James D. Watson, 1061–1258. Philadelphia and London: Running Press.
– Fridlund, Alan J. 1997. “The new ethology of human facial expressions.” In The Psychology of Facial Expression, edited by James A. Russell and José-Miguel Fernandez-Dols, 103–32. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dreams have psychological reality, but not like our behaviour has, not by intentional design. If dreams can be characterised as a neuronal storm in our brains, then what comes along during those storms will be remnant of previous events, or rather: it will cause the mind to “think” of elements and aspects of events from one’s own history of experiences. This allows philosophers to distinguish dreams from perceptions (pace Descartes) and, at the same time, to disengage from the point of view that we are consciously aware of our dreams, which, one can argue, we are not, as Wittgenstein, McFee and Malcolm argue.
So they have psychological reality, i.e. they belong to the person having the dreams. But only the person himself can make out where his own personal history of experiences comes in. Freud’s analysis of dreams corroborates this view (should be: I corroborate Freud’s views).

What we dream feels very much as if it is ours only—and I argued above: it is. And if it is an unpleasant dream, the unpleasantness has something to do with events belonging to our psychological reality (see above). So if a dream strikes us with fear this fear concerns something that belongs to our psyche. But fears are future-directed. We fear things that come towards us. Hence, frightening dreams (and not just the frightening ones—there will be other kinds, too) install a fear in us which concerns what would be fearful in the future. We get ready to experience such fearful events. And this makes us attentive to such events, where perhaps without the dreamed warning we might have missed the opportunity. Dreams can be self-fulfilling, and in that measure only can they be taken to predict one’s future.

References

– Antrobus, John S. 2000. “How Does the Dreaming Brain Explain the Dreaming Mind?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23:904–907.
– Gallagher, Neil A. 1976. “A Plea to Stop Dreaming About Dreaming.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 36:423–424.
– Malcolm, Norman. 1959. Dreaming. New York: Humanities Press.
– McFee, Graham. 1993. “The Surface Grammar of Dreaming.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 4:95–115.

I have always thought that dying is the most intimate affair of human life, and that it should be shared with one’s loved ones. This case really shatters a moral intuition of mine, a profound feeling about what it means to be human.

We must think this through thoroughly. Yet my first thought is that this is plain immoral, and cannot for that reason be art.

(Thanks to Irene Janze)

- Gerwen, Rob van. 2004. “Ethical Autonomism. The Work of Art as a Moral Agent.” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 2.
____________. 2010. “How the Present Rise of Immoral Art Helps Clarify Both the Definition and the Moral Autonomy of Art. A Post-Script to Ethical Autonomism.” ms.
- More on this on my weblog.

I was told about this case by a colleague from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, in Norway. Hornsleth’s artistic gesture has a clear immoral aspect to it: how can you demand someone to take on your name for a gift, any gift for that matter? Would I do it when they promised me a million euros?—I don’t think so.
Yet the gesture also refers to conditions wealthy Western and Asian countries put on the receivers of donations, and, surely, Hornsleth hasn’t done anything truly immoral, has he? The villagers contributed of their own free will, and they were “payed” for partaking. And the name Hornsleth was only added to their original names—which means it was merely adding more history to the person.

According to my definition, this is a case of Immoral Art: the event stirs our moral intuitions without being immoral. And there is something there to experience perceptually. It would pay off artistically to visit the village and see the new Hornsleths. Yet, a nagging question remains: should we look upon a person—the villagers—as a work of art?

(Thanks to Søren Kjørup)

Several questions surface, such as 1. ones about art: is this art? Why would it be art? Is this good art? Are these instances (avant la lettre?) of Immoral Art? 2. And, obviously (is it obvious?) ones about morality: Isn’t it immoral to behave like this? But most of all: 3. questions about taboos: What is the relevance of this breaking of taboos? What is its artistic or its moral relevance? Well, first: what is a taboo?
Q. Is breaking a taboo immoral?

Taboos

A. Well, breaking a taboo for fun seems indeed to be immoral but I think this is due to the fact that taboos precede the moral realm. We don’t need a moral rule against auto-mutilation or systematic hungering, because it is evident that either is wrong—evident, because it is endangering not life-supporting. Taboos regulate our respect for the integrity of bodies, rather than the integrity of persons, and it may be clear that the latter presupposes the former.
For instance, there is no moral incentive against eating your own vomit, so why is it taboo? Well, we don’t eat our own vomit because it is life-threatening. Similarly cannibalism is taboo because it is life-threatening; similar with incest; masturbating in the presence of babies; auto-mutilation; demanding the right to see inside your own body (Orlan); smearing people with excrements or urine.
Such behaviour is life-threatening because it makes people sick, breaks them or destroys them. If someone has a hang towards such actions he (and people surrounding him) must be protected against his behaviour. Psychopaths, I guess, have some sort of fascination for lilling flesh too, but surely there is no reason to present an art audience with that fascination, is there?

Q. So, how do taboos precede the moral realm?
A. This can be seen looking at situations where they are broken, for instance, after a place crash it has been reported that sometimes cannibalism occurred. We understand this; we don’t say “But this is immoral, bring these people before the law”. The taboo was broken for the sake of survival, and because taboos are to prevent life-threatening situations, when the situation itself is already life-threatening, breaking the taboo might be a lesser evil.
The works of Immoral Art which I discuss in my paper, in contrast, do concern our morality. Marco Evaristti, Santiago Sierra most notably. Aktionism is not Immoral Art

Not Immoral Art

Are these instances (avant la lettre?) of Immoral Art? I don’t think so, because breaking taboos is not about the moral, nor do they embody the moral. The material of these “works” (bodies >> Body Art) consists of stuff not standardly available to make art from or with (in that sense they might fit my definition of Immoral Art). But what is at stake in what these “artists” do with that material is taboos, not moral incentives.

Body Art

Body Art is a genre in Performance Art. It concerns the integrity of the body of the artist: a consenting adult. Body Art does not dirrectly concern or implicate the body of the viewer in the audience, even though the viewer may respond physically to the horrors on view. To see the Aktionists “scrutinise” the limits of their bodies integrity—or rather: transgress these—is not to scrutinise one’s own physique, or transgress its limits. Instead, the viewer imaginatively scrutinises his conception of bodily integrity.
These works of art are persons too—their personal bodies are transgressed, not just any body. This is by all social norms abnormal. That these artists would choose to do as they do may be motivated by some artistic consequence, but that does not make their behaviour—as the persons they are—any less abnormal, deviate, perverse.

Immoral Art, in contrast, does implicate the agency of the viewer.

Body Art concerns the tabooed limits of the human body. The scope of these “works” lies well below the moral, below semantics generally. These “works” are genuinely shocking. I must admit: I have no clue what else to think of them than to advise psychotherapy.
Aktionism is fascination turned into sickness.

– van Gerwen, Rob. 2010. “How the Present Rise of Immoral Art Helps Clarify Both the Definition and the Moral Autonomy of Art. A Post-Script to Ethical Autonomism.” ms.

– UBUWEB: Vienna Actionist Films (1967-1970)

Thus, the anticipated appreciative experience motivates the artist; the artist’s realised intentions (toward that anticipated experience) motivate the ones responsible for the presentation of the work (in the institutions); the audience’s experience is structured by the artist and by the conditions in the institutions. In short, all relevant considerations feed-back onto each other. Hence, art is a practice.
It is also a moral practice, and have said something about certain consequences of that fact for the moral assessment of art, and am about to publish a paper on the rise of a peculiar art form dealing with exactly this moral embedding.

- Gerwen, Rob van. 2004. “Ethical Autonomism. The Work of Art as a Moral Agent.” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 2.
- Walton, Kendall L. 1970. “Categories of Art.” The Philosophical Review 79:334–67.
Wollheim, Richard. 1993. “Pictorial Style: Two Views.” In The Mind and its Depths, 171–184. Cambridge (Mass.), London (England): Harvard University Press.

And he refers to how sometimes when a smell hits us we are transported back to a situation from the past. And that we don’t have a more direct, or a roundabout means to remember a smell: you cannot think of a smell and have it recur.

I also like the issue this brings up: is a smell something in us who perceive it or is it clearly an object in the world? I think the latter, and what it makes me argue, next, is that something similar goes for sounds (a piece of music), and, I go on, really only visual information seems to be retained in something similar to pictures in our memory, and: following Wittgenstein, I think our memories are in the objects, and we put them there, back in the old days.

“The concept of the ‘inner picture’ is misleading, for this concept uses the ‘outer picture’ as a model …” Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 196:d.

Imagine this: you are the only person in the world who moves in slow motion. You have no clue about this (of course you don’t), but everyone else can see it happening. So imagine a world where people see one person moving in slow motion, and that one person is you. So there you are.
Now ask yourself: how do you perceive the world?
For the record, it is part of the exercise that you imagine that this has always been the case, so it is not a momentary situation. You are not puzzled in that manner.

So you cross the street—slowly. And while you do it the leaves from the trees blow under you at high speeds, cyclists flash by, pedestrians make speedy gestures that you cannot understand.

Phenomenology is martial art for philosophers.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: “Behind the station”

Re-membering

Remembering could be viewed literally as putting the membered perceptions back into their embodied coherence.

Dreams

One reason why we have difficulty re-membering our dreams: their were never any membered perceptions of the scene dreamed to begin with. Other reasons for said difficulty: dreams consist of brain stimulations that have initially nothing to do with bodily stimulations: the same, or similar, brain modules are stirred during sleep as are activated in real-life, which should account for the fact that we “think” we are perceiving events, when there are none; also: dream consistency has a highly literary aspect: we are in this room and merely associating it with an event from the past transports us there. The associations are lived out in the dream, hence Freud’s interest in them.

What we see on the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin is, for instance, a corpse, beheaded, sitting on a chair, in “Man without a Head”, 1993; a head that is apparently lying on a plate, in “Head of a Dead Man”, Mexico 1990. Several questions are bound to be raised by viewers when they see these photographs.

“Did Witkin stage these scenes? If so, that means that he has been rumbling around with corpses.” The thing with the photographs seems to be this: because they are photographs they record a scene in the world (or so we standardly and centrally—and mostly rightly—assume).

“Did the photographer find this scene, or did he add to it, and, if the latter: what did he add?” (For instance, the white drapes in the background of “Man without a Head”: who put them there—it is obvious they weren’t there when the man was decapitated, as they don’t show any blood spattering? The left hand, who put it like this?)

Next, we can’t establish from looking at the photograph itself whether Witkin Photoshopped the photograph, or whether he staged the corpse.
When the first, then Witkin created disturbing images with the epistemological force of photographs; when the latter, then his actions seem to be immoral (you ought not to stage corpses for the sake of taking interesting photographs).
We can only decide after establishing the relevant facts about the making of the photographs.
But is that really decisive? (Of course, it is for certain –legal– questions; but is it for the art?)

As I see it, however this moral/legal search turns out, the photographs have this effect of making the viewer wonder about these things, and this, I submit, confirms their high artistic merit. So let us take it from there.

Now, what if he did stage the corpses? As, he assured me, he actually did:
The model for that photograph was a [...] man beaten to death by the Mexican police. The head of this man looks cut off. However, this visual effect was accomplished by propping up the dead man and cutting a plate to fit around his neck so that the dead man looked as though his head was cut off.
How immoral is it to prop up a corpse and put a plate around his neck—the man is dead after all, and certainly, in the morgue things like that happen all the time?
Put differently: how strong are our moral intuitions? Could one be tried for doing such things to a corpse? Possibly it all depends on the context, and then the next question becomes: what sort of context is art practice?

Asking these latter questions is typical of Immoral Art. I develop the notion of this new art form of Immoral Art in a different place. But I am not implying that Witkin is anything other than a photographer—but he could be, depending on answers to the above questions

Online catalogue of Witkin’s photographs.

Another view interestingly connects with and distinguishes itself from the former two: Conceptual art.
“Conceptual artists do not set out to make a painting or a sculpture and then fit their ideas to that existing form. Instead they think beyond the limits of those traditional media, and then work out their concept or idea in whatever materials and whatever form is appropriate. They were thus giving the concept priority over the traditional media.” From the Tate online Glossary (accessed September 26, 2009).
So, what is it? When is the work?

What is Conceptual art?

What exactly is conceptual art, though? Arguably its roots lie in Marcel Duchamp’s “art for the mind”:
“I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.” Duchamp, p. 125. (See the discussion in Crowther, pp. 164–186.)
Does that mean that a concept art work is the concept, not the material it was realised in? Put another way: certain paintings by René Magritte could be rephrased as pictorial puns. Think, for instance, of “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, a painting which clearly depicts a pipe. What it means is: what you are looking at is a picture of a pipe, not a pipe. Would you say that the latter paraphrase replaces the painting? I think that would be overstated. In fact, Magritte’s painting brings home a philosophical (if you want) insight into the nature of pictures, by way of a picture. He didn’t say it, he showed it.

Though the point of Magritte’s painting is conceptual, it is made visually. There is no reason to coin the phrase “conceptual art” to deal with works like these.

But conceptual artists concentrate on the concept without choosing beforehand the medium in which it will be realised. Okay. Point taken. But now: does this attitude provide a reason to coin the phrase “conceptual art” meaning something like: “the work is the concept (and its beauty, too, is of a concept)”?
I don’t think so. The good thing about this art-movement consisted in the openness to new materials. Indeed, there is no prima facie reason to paint when there is something you want to express artistically, nor is there one to adhere to any of the other traditional art forms. Without the conceptual-art movement, I guess, we would not have developed such new art forms as performance-art, and installations.

I am not at all convinced that the works made in these new art forms is by definition more conceptual (if that is intelligible to begin with) than earlier art forms, nor that they point to a predominance of mind over sensation, which they don’t.

Art is as perceptual as it was before.

Conceptual art is not an art form but an attitude artists needed to break away from old routines and mannerisms.

Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Croce, Benedetto. 1953 (orig. 1902). Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistics. Translated by D. Ainslie. London: Peter Owen.
Crowther, Paul. 1997. The Language of Twentieth-Century Art. A Conceptual History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1975. The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. London: Thames and Hudson.
Tolstoy, Leo N. 1960. What is Art? Translated by Almyer Maude. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company.
Wollheim, Richard. 1993. “Pictorial Style: Two Views.” In The Mind and its Depths, 171–184. Cambridge (Mass.), London (England): Harvard University Press.

For me, some good examples of this are:

• Blue Boy – Remember Me
• George Michael – Freedom
• a clip one could take from Gimme Shelter, where the members of the Rolling Stones are listening to their own performance of “Wild Horses”, a song they wrote for Gram Parsons.

The shock came when upon arriving at the railway platform at our local airport, an acquaintance (not exactly a friend) passed me by, and suddenly thoughts worked my mind of how to greet her, whether I wanted to talk to her, which of my selves was mobilised (in me!) by her presence (the one linked to and built in the many contexts we have shared).

It then dawned on me that this was something Sartre had overlooked when he treated every person whoever who would enter the scene in the park as a contender for his absolute freedom. I definitely think that we should make a deep distinction between persons one is not acquainted with (as they don’t activate a peculiar self in you) and persons one is.

Disclaimer: Of course, this won’t go for people travelling in groups.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003 (1956)b. “The Look.” In Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 276–325. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York and London: Routledge.

Now, when at a reunion, I see, say, Peter, again and think about things he did in those days, things he had said in a certain situation. And I talk to him about these things, and he obviously feels embarassed.
What interests me is an issue to do with responsibility. The thoughts that came up in my mind about the events I then talked about, as well as the talking should be viewed as subsumable under my responsibility. A decision on my part made me talk about them; and the things thought and expressed where things available in my mind, not, yet, in his. These caused his embarassment. Tradition would seem to satisfy itself with this assessment.
But my question is: whence the association? Why did my meeting with Peter stir exactly these thoughts in my mind? Surely, I cannot be held responsibility for the arising of these thoughts which are, one way or the other, retained in my mind. The lay dormant in my mind under no conscious control.
And my hypothesis is that it is Peter himself, or better the perceptually available expressive body he is, who kept the triggers to my thoughts. Was he then responsibile for the arising of the thoughts in me? The further question would be: what is the scope of the attributability of responsibility? I think the mechanisms that make people associate thoughts with situations are epistemologically speaking responsible for how we think, then the thoughts themselves that are “located” in our minds, and, therefore, we should reconcieve “responsibility”.

Wollheim, Richard. 1984. “Cutting the Thread: Death, Madness, and the Loss of Friendship.” Chapter IX of The Thread of Life, 257–84. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gerwen, Rob van. 2009. “De psychologische werkelijkheid van het zelf.” In Vrijheid en verlangen. Liber Amicorum prof. dr. Antoine Mooij, edited by Frans Koenraadt and Ido Weijers, 13–23. Den Haag: Boom Juridische uitgevers.

By the way, I am not bashing the distinction between real and fictional represented worlds. I am merely urging that our analysis start on the right footing.

Currie, Gregory. 1998. Image and Mind. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
van Gerwen, Rob. 2002. “De ontologische drogreden in de analytische esthetica.” Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 94:109–123.
____________. submitted. “An Ontological Fallacy in Analytic Aesthetics.”

Gerwen, Rob van. 2001. “On Exemplary Art as the Symbol of Morality. Making Sense of Kant’s Ideal of Beauty.” In Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung. Akten des IX. Kant Kongresses, Volume 3, 553–62. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Hume, David. 1985 (1757). “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Essays Moral Political and Literary, edited by Eugene F. Miller, 226–250. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Wiggins, David. 1987. “A Sensible Subjectivism?” In Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, 185–214. Oxford: Blackwell.

One would want to select images that are candidates for such iconisation under the assumption that the nature of the image has an impact on the interpretation of the situation it gets to stand for.

Lanzmann, Claude. 1994. “Schindler’s List: een onmogelijk verhaal (Schindler’s List is an impossible story—my tr.).” NRC Handelsblad 26/03/1994:11.

Does it mean that our perceptions are projections of the perceiver and the world is not real? I don’t think so. But we should ask first how it is that we know that the world is real.

Srebnik’s Hopes Shattered

Moral witnesses have no smaller task than to prove that the atrocities were real, and to show the extent to which they were real. Srebnik standing in front of the church amongst fellow villageans, doesn’t say a word, and yet his mere presence, and the historical sensation this cuases in the others, proves the ease with which in earlier days the nazi-atrocities could have taken place—under the eyes of these or other people in their everyday surroundings.
The mere effort of guessing what Srebnik is going through exactly within this scene, can be interpreted in two ways. We may speculate as to how he relives the historical events that left him as the sole surviving Jew of the whole village. But such speculations are not even called for. The scene itself demonstrates the risks Margalit ascribes to moral witnessing: the risk of not finding that moral community one hopes for. The chruch scene unmistably brings home to Srebnik the realisation that these fellow villageans are not part of that hoped for community—Srebnik can be seen to resist judging them.
The audience of the film hopes to form part of that community when they don’t, but one cannot be sure, can one? What with the villageans–simple plain people–failing so bluntly.

In Defence of Lanzmann’s approach

In all, I think Lanzmann did a good thing confronting “his” interviewees with historical, or historically relevant sites. He did not trust the studios to be capable of stirring the memories sufficiently—both quantitatively, qua force, and qualitatively, qua detail. Of course, in any other situation, such as a studio, or a shopping mall, relevant narratives might come up. But the risk of these narratives to not surpass the stories told by the moral witnesses to themselves to try and control the historical events or to simply inform others of the necessary details, would be real. These narratives too would be vulnerable to attacks from holocaust deniers objecting to any particular claim made in these narratives as being objectively correct.
Next to this, Lanzmann provided the calmth necessary for the audience on the one hand, to fully recognise the historical site, and, on the other, the moral witnesses to show their own (psychological) reality before the camera. The camera movement generally is slow, the editing sparse and as non-intruding as possible.

Lanzman might have visited the witnesses in their homes, providing them with the secureness they might really need psychologically, but he didn’t. Had he done it, this would have contaminated what normal lives these people have been capable of mustering in the years since their humiliation in the camps, for themselves, and their next of kin. That would have repeated the Nazi genocide more than the approach that was eventually chosen.

Spielberg

In response to Lanzmann’s film, Spielberg did two things. He made Schindler’s List (you may want to read Lanzmann’s critique of that film), and …

[..] established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. [..] Within several years, the Foundation’s Visual History Archive held nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages, representing 56 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world. (From: USC Shoah Foundation Institute)

Contexts for Testimonials

We discussed the legal and scientific flaws of (moral) testimonials as they showed in the trial against John Demjanjuk (read Draaisma about it). Is it safe to conclude that the courthouse is not the right context for a moral tstimonial to be induced, for one, because the questions posed there are far too restricting, “leading”—which in a court of law seems excusable as the aim is to find the truth about matters. The court needn’t be interested in how it felt–or should it be?
What then are we to think of the context the Shoah Visual History Foundation provided for the witnesses: a cold studio, utterly neutral to any historical existentials. Perhaps they chose these circumstances to interfere as little as possible with the lifes of the survivors, and to protect them from reliving the horrors.

Questions Concluding

I conclude by putting two questions before the reader:
1. What value are the latter types of testimonial if they are not based in a real reliving–for us?
2. What value do they have for the witnesses themselves? We can be sure that their testimonial will have reinduced the storm of nightmares that pesters survivors, if it has ever left them. Yet, the witnesses cannot be expected to have learned mucht for themselves of their accounts, which may have been rehearsed over the years, adn, now, are repeated in front of the cameras in a neutral place. The narrative rather than its experiential anchorage.

Perhaps someone feels confident enough to take up the challenge of charging a criticism against the Shoah Foundation Institute. The confidence is needed to ward one off of any too hesitant dismissals, as, obviously, in itself the project is important as an effort to retain the testimonials of those will die in the next few years. It is just that they might have been triggered in more fruitful conditions, such as those provided by Lanzmann.

farmed out perception

All this has to do with how people are in the world, as embodied perceivers. How their perception of the world surrounding them consists in the recognition of possible or effected actions. Memories, I think, consist in this that they are refound in the places where these anticipated actions were farmed out to.
That the reality of the memories does not necessarily require the site to be scientifically correctly real, shows from the devastating effects Auschwitz will have on its ever visitors, even though large parts of the camp were reconstructed to serve as a memorial site. It still functions thus, even though it is reconstructed. memory has little to do with the physical reality of the processes it refers to.
These latter remarks await further elaboration, though some of that can be found on my site:

on addiction; on tactile perception; on >> memory; on the self (in Dutch); >> Plato’s cave-myth

Finally a quote from Ewout van der Knaap, seemingly in support of my views, although I am not sure whether he would mean it as literal as I do. He seems to refer to cultural contexts, rather than the physical context the witness finds himself in:

“Every testimony is a choice of memories and is framed within the situation in which the testimony is put forward. We therefore need to consider the context in which the speaker remembers.” (14)
van der Knaap, Ewout. 2006. “The Construction of Memory in Nuit et Brouillard.” In Uncovering the Holocaust. The International Reception of Night and Fog, edited by Ewout van der Knaap, 7–34. London & New York: Wallflower Press.
Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah. An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon Books.
____________. 1994. “Schindler’s List: een onmogelijk verhaal (Schindler’s List is an impossible story—my tr.).” NRC Handelsblad 26/03/1994:11.
Margalit, Avishai. 2002. “A Moral Witness.” Chapter 5 of The Ethics of Memory, 147–182. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.