Transversality as a Medium of the Depth of Being of Human and Non-Human Objects

“If, however, we observe moving figures, we see their actual movement, and film gives us a certain equivalent of this experience, whereby, thanks to the technology of representation, the need for explanation falls away […] we must always infer the feelings of others from the cues offered by their grimaces and gestures. If there were some effective equivalent of sharing the feelings of others, it would be an instance of the kind of representational progress I am discussing here.”^[1] — Danto, Konec umění

This text was written as part of the project The Transversal Navigation — Podivné bezdomovectví: sen jako skutečná praxe by Aleš Čermák

Among the influential currents of thought about the work of art is the work of the philosopher of art Arthur Danto. In his texts Svět umění and Konec umění from 1964 and 1984, Danto sets out to clarify what makes art art. In the first of these texts he delimits the field of his thinking by means of two dominant modes of creating works of art: 1) imitating what exists through the strategy of mimesis and 2) generating new ways of seeing the world. In the first mode, the telos of art lies in the imitation of nature, or mimesis. According to this mode, the quality of a visual work is judged by how well the work corresponds to reality. The dominance of mimetic representation in art persisted through the Renaissance up to the birth of modern art, after which the theory of art as mimesis ceased to be adequate. Impressionism, action painting, Malevich’s black square, Reinhardt’s ultimate paintings, but also the happenings and performances of Joseph Beuys or Marina Abramović would, in the context of the representational theory of art, be great failures, or at least a Dadaist curiosity. Although, according to Danto, art-as-representation has many advantages — we can assess the development of art towards ever more accurate representation relatively objectively —, in the end this theory of art reached its peak with the arrival of the new media of photography and film, which are representational art par excellence. But the representational theory of art has other problems too: it cannot, for example, explain borderline cases, among which we can count Duchamp’s readymades or Warhol’s Brillo boxes.

That is also why the more fitting mode of producing works of art in Danto, as Vít Neznal also notes,^[2] is not the re-presentation of existing states of the world through some conventionally artistic medium, but rather the generation (presentation) of new artistic shapes, states and, we may say, new strategies of seeing the world. These new shapes and ways of seeing the world, however, cannot by themselves be immediately dubbed art objects. Not every urinal or Brillo box has the status of a work of art, even though materially they do not differ from Duchamp’s urinal and the Brillo boxes that Andy Warhol exhibited in a gallery. On what basis, then, are we able to distinguish works of art, objects and performances from everyday objects and interactions with other people?

Danto offers a possible solution. For him, art is art only if there exists some theory of art that explains the given work and contextualises it within the history of art, that is, places it within what Danto calls the Artworld. From an ontological point of view, the work of art is therefore subordinate to art theory (philosophy), for only theory can, in the last instance, confer on things in the world the ontological status of a work of art. That is also why, in his Hegel-inspired essay Konec umění Danto believes that the philosophy of art will eventually swallow up artistic creation itself, since the historical development of art is a history of methods, theories and approaches by which art defines for itself what it is. Although after the end of art works of art will still be made, from the standpoint of art history they will be a kind of echo of the past, frozen in time, unaware that the problems they are trying to solve or raise were solved by philosophy long ago.

This theory of art of Danto’s is problematic for several reasons at once. First of all, let us notice that Danto confuses artistic creation with thinking about artistic creation, which means that all the artistic ways of creating new shapes and new ways of seeing can be reduced to verbal propositional statements about works of art. But in doing so Danto has ended up where he started: he rejected the representational theory based on the correspondence of the work of art with the real world and in its place introduces a new representational theory, in which what matters is the relation between the work and an exhaustive philosophical theory expressed in words. Danto thereby de facto claims that all artistic media remediate a single metamedium, which is human speech, and so everything we can know and express can always, with enough ingenuity and intelligence, be transformed into its primordial verbal form.

In the field of media theory, the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan arrived, towards the end of his life, at a similar grasp of the mediality of artefacts. According to McLuhan, all human artefacts, including works of art of every genre, “are in fact a word, a metaphor that translates experience from one form into another”, and it does not matter whether we analyse material artefacts such as media technologies, or more ephemeral philosophical systems or artistic movements in painting, poetry, theatre or music, for they all equally display their verbal structure.^[3] What is important for McLuhan’s media theory is that the introduction of new media is never a passive or neutral event; rather, media as extensions of man have inherently disruptive and transformative effects on our consciousness. This also gives rise to new modes of perception and new modes of Being, which delimit the range of answers to the fundamental questions of human existence, ontology and noetics: analytic geometry and linear perspective, which can be regarded as cognitive technologies, depicted a world that can be captured in an imaginary mathematised grid, which culminated in Newtonian physics and the theological vision of God the geometer. Digital technologies, the internet and instant communication, in turn, present a picture of the world as discrete units of data, in which the parameters of time and space are absent and the only thing that interests us is a suitable interface that gives us access to the data. McLuhan’s own example from 1964 points to the fundamental influence of the introduction and use of the phonetic alphabet in ancient Greece, which played an important role in habituating individualistic, analytical and deductive thinking in the mind of Western man. Thanks to the alphabet, he could grow used to separating the sound of a verbal utterance from its visual form, and thereby to the gradual separation of form and meaning, and, for McLuhan, also to the setting apart of the individual from the totalising collective consciousness of the tribe.

If we compare Danto’s vision of art being absorbed into philosophy with McLuhan’s media theory, we will see that both privilege the word. On the other hand, the fact that in McLuhan all human artefacts, including works of art, have a verbal structure does not mean that we can reduce every artefact to an intellectual, transparent, clear and thoroughly elaborated philosophy, as we read in Danto. On the contrary, for McLuhan every human artefact has two dimensions, which, following Gestalt psychology, he calls figure and ground: figure is the surface, perceptually visible part of artefacts, whereas the ground of artefacts is for McLuhan a largely phenomenally inaccessible, invisible layer, even though its subliminal effects act upon us. And it is precisely this invisible environment of artefacts that primarily transforms and conditions the bodily, psychological and social milieu of individuals and society. It is this ground of artefacts, inaccessible to humans and yet transformative, that troubles McLuhan most. The ground of media is invisible to us, which is why the ordinary person has a minimal chance of defending themselves against the effects of a medium and its logic, which imposes itself on us and thereby – to put it in McLuhan’s terms – “amputates” all alternative sensory and perceptual possibilities and approaches to seeing the world and other people. McLuhan points out that we should not understand these effects of media through the lens of technological determinism. People always have the option of acting otherwise. At the same time, however, media are not entirely passive and subordinate to sociocultural influences: they have the power to influence us and to display elements of agency, not least because their materiality cannot be reduced to discourses and to the ways we talk about them. Media, which McLuhan defines as anything that can extend our psychological and social environment, always have, thanks to the ontological layer of their ground, some surplus to which we will never have direct access, neither through direct perception nor through any form of representation.

Here McLuhan parts ways with Danto, who (see the opening quotation) holds to what is, from the point of view of phenomenology, a naive notion, let us say, that the being of objects or people can be described by a suitable medium of representation (film, hologram, performance, dynamic model) exhaustively and without surplus, thereby eliminating the need for further interpretation or reflection. Danto claims, for example, that when we perceive the movement of figures, film “gives us a certain equivalent of this experience, whereby, thanks to the technology of representation, the need for explanation falls away […]”.^[4] Although in a passage relevant to theatre and performance Danto mentions that “we must always infer the feelings of others from the cues offered by their grimaces and gestures”,^[5] he believes in a “technological fix”, in which new, as yet non-existent kinds of media will in the future be able to convey the emotional states of other people exhaustively: “If there were some effective equivalent of sharing the feelings of others, it would be an instance of the kind of representational progress I am discussing here.”^[6] We cannot rule out that some day a technology will appear that can re-present the electrical signals from the brain of one person feeling certain emotions to another person, as Danto would most likely wish. But it will tell us about as much about a person’s emotional states as glimpsing someone crying or laughing in the street from the window of a passing vehicle. All we have at our disposal is the outer “figure” of the person experiencing the given emotion or, in the near future, an electrical signal that evokes in us, without any context, the figure of a feeling of sadness or laughter. The whole complexity of emotional experience, all the relevant life events that led, in this example, to the laughter or the crying, remain in the depths of the person’s undisclosed being. The question is whether we will ever have at least theoretical access to these depths of being, or whether, as in McLuhan’s analysis of media, we are left with indirect contact.

Contemporary authors influenced by phenomenology, such as Graham Harman, Dan Zahavi or the Czech philosopher Alice Koubová, agree with McLuhan, directly or implicitly, about the inaccessibility of the depth of the being of objects; however, unlike McLuhan, who worked in the context of media theory and human artefacts, Koubová and Zahavi apply this inaccessibility to the intersubjectivity of human relationships as well, and to the question of whether the contents of other people’s minds can be known. According to Koubová and Zahavi, depth and the impossibility of direct access to minds or mental states in intersubjective relationships between people is not something that has to be fought against. On the contrary, it is a condition for establishing communication and human interaction. According to Koubová, a certain form of estrangement is a necessary condition of expression. In order to interact with others, we need a certain reduction of their being to something that the human mind and the perceptual apparatus of an ordinary person can take in. In other words, just as the telling of a life story cannot present all lived events at once, in our interactions with people we need an interface that presents the other person to us complexly enough that they do not become a caricature, and simply enough that we are not overwhelmed by perceptual data. Even though a large part of a person’s being remains hidden from us, “this difference is not a problem of our inability and inadequacy, but a constitutive aspect of the relationship to the other person: only in this way is the other truly a human being for us”.^[7] Koubová and Zahavi quote Levinas, reminding us that “a person, precisely in their unattainability, otherness, absence, becomes present as the other.”^[8] In the context of her analysis of performance, Koubová adds that the other person is, paradoxically, “visible in their expression when they are, in a certain sense, not seen, when they are, in a certain sense, unattainable, when we do not take hold of them immediately, and yet we somehow understand their expression”.^[9] 

The contemporary philosopher and member of the circle of speculative philosophers Graham Harman regards, alongside McLuhan, also Heidegger and, for instance, the American art theorist Clement Greenberg as so-called theorists of ontological depth, and partly on the basis of their thought he develops his object-oriented ontology (OOO), which declares that the ontological layers of the surface/depth of being can be applied not only to media or to the intersubjectivity of human relationships, but rather that the dialectical relation of surface/depth or visible/hidden must be applied to all objects — from atoms or black holes to human relationships and works of art. In his essay The Third Table Harman claims that historically there have been two ways in which we have dealt with the inaccessible depth of the being of objects. In the first, the natural sciences reduced objects “downwards” to the smallest possible elementary particles and to a description of their properties and interactions. In the second case Harman speaks of a reduction “upwards”, which he attributes to the humanities, which study the effects of objects on the human mind from the perspective of their everyday existence.^[a][10] This dichotomy of the natural sciences and the humanities is not new. Harman himself mentions C. P. Snow’s well-known concept of the “two cultures”, and he also draws on Eddington’s parable of the two tables: the natural sciences claim that the table consists of elementary particles and empty space, whereas for the humanities the everyday table and its effects on people and other objects are just as real as the scientific one, if not more so. Harman holds that both versions of the table are equally mistaken. Instead he introduces a third version of the table, which stands exactly midway between these two. Objects can be reduced neither to physical laws nor to the social relations and functions ascribed to them by the sociocultural context in which they occur. For Harman, and for that matter also for McLuhan, Zahavi and Koubová, objects exist in their own autonomous regime and announce themselves to us through their “faces-interfaces” in the form of facial grimaces, materiality, social functions and so on. Since the previous two versions of the table are firmly bound to their respective cultures, Harman asks which culture the third version is bound to. He concludes that it is the culture of art and philosophy. According to Harman, these fields do not try to give an unambiguous answer about objects; instead they approach objects indirectly and, by means of various metaphorical strategies, are nonetheless able to say something new and important about them. How exactly?

McLuhan once called artists “the antennae of the race”,^[11] because, thanks to a training focused on the senses, they are uniquely equipped to see better and further than a non-artist. For McLuhan, in the context of media, this means that artists are able to see through the entrenched stereotypes and clichés that dominate society in a given epoch and that most people regard as the inevitable way things are and must be. One of the main strategies artists use, according to McLuhan, is the creation of an anti-environment. By this he means the creation of situations and contexts in which even an ordinary person with untrained senses will be able to recognise the more real being of objects and the arbitrariness of established orders, systems and hierarchies, and this because in an anti-environment media are stripped of the veil they have acquired through automated and unreflected everydayness, and instead, by the method of defamiliarisation and the “transversal” crossing of contexts, even ordinary people can gain a more sincere and authentic relationship with objects and, if we agree with Koubová and Zahavi, specifically with other people too, without demanding complete knowledge of the other, for in surplus and hiddenness lies the very possibility of being seen and perceived at all by the universally limited powers of the human mind and its cognitive operations.

It is precisely the systematic generation of anti-environments that in this text I identify with Aleš Čermák’s transversal strategies. By creating unusual situations he makes possible, in a defamiliarised environment, the meeting of diverse, disparate individuals who are, for various reasons, socially unequal. The meeting of the participants, who take an active part in constructing the performance, turns away from any tendency to represent predetermined meanings or situations. Instead, Čermák works in a tradition that seems close to what Alice Koubová in her book Myslet z druhého místa calls, quoting the German phenomenologist and philosophical anthropologist Max Scheler, the expressive phenomenon: “[…] the phenomenological elaboration of the theme of the expressive phenomenon also touches on the theme of dramatic expression, the experience of the existence of visibility on stage, the experience of agency and performance. In the expressive phenomenon, a person’s visibility and their invisibility are combined in a specific way. Invisibility here is not a negation of visibility, its lack, but an aspect of visibility.”^[12] The concept of the expressive phenomenon attaches greater weight than we ourselves have so far admitted to the way people express themselves through their outward appearance. The core of the human being of individuals is not accessible to others; according to Koubová and other phenomenologically, cognitively and psychoanalytically oriented authors, we must bear in mind that our human interior is not fully accessible even to ourselves, because there is always more hidden in our (un)conscious than we are able to describe at the conscious level in explicit verbal expression. The expressive phenomenon thus says nothing less than that our ways of expressing ourselves, our grimaces and our bodiliness are constitutive elements of intersubjectivity, for they disclose parts of our interior to other people and, through the feedback mechanism of others’ reactions, in turn co-constitute the expression of who we are and what we can be. Goffman’s thesis that we are all playing a part on a stage should by no means be taken negatively, but rather as an inevitable fact: through expressivity and performance we deliver ourselves up to others so that others can help us co-define ourselves. This is the consequence of intersubjectivity in phenomenology and of subscribing to the thesis that we will never be fully transparent to others, nor to ourselves, but that there always exists in us, in other people, in media and in objects in general a surplus that cannot be fully represented, but which we must approach by an indirect route. In the case of McLuhan and Harman this role is taken by artists and their creation of anti-environments. For Koubová and other phenomenologists, the constitutive aspect of the expressive phenomenon is also powerful, and therefore dangerous. That is also why the transversality of established intersubjectivities, which can indeed disrupt the phenomenological understanding of oneself and of our relationship to others, represents an ethical challenge. And so it requires the necessary trust that it is safe to experiment with alternative modes of one’s own expressivity in the as yet invisible depths of one’s interior, and in gradually estranging oneself and finding new expressions of one’s Self. Even for experienced artists this is a challenge that requires not only enough empathy but also fertile ground where performative art and philosophy can explore, on the relevant philosophical, phenomenological, psychological and other levels, whether it is possible to achieve what Graham Harman calls “philosophy as a rigorous art”.^[13] If philosophy is never to have direct and complete access to the being of objects, it must find a suitable method for indirect contact. And artistic practice seems to be a more suitable alternative method than verbal propositions that pretend to be scientific. This would be the opposite of what Danto speculated about: in Harman’s ontology art is fully complementary to philosophy, and under certain conditions art can swallow philosophy.

---

References

Danto, Arthur Coleman. “Konec umění”. Estetika. 1998, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 1–18. ISSN 0014-1291.

Danto, Arthur Coleman. “Svět umění”. Aluze: časopis pro literaturu, filozofii a jiné. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého. 2009, no. 1, pp. 66–74. ISSN 1212-5547.

Harman, Graham. The Third Table: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 085 (Documenta (13): 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken). Hatje Cantz. ISBN 978-3775729345.

Koubová, Alice. Myslet z druhého místa: K otázce performativní filosofie. Praha: NAMU, 2019. ISBN 978-80-7331-511-5.

McLuhan, Marshall – McLuhan, Eric. Laws of media: The new science. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1988. ISBN 0802057829.

Neznal, Vít. Medialita divadla: V souvislostech české teorie divadla. [Praha]: Akademie múzických umění v Praze v Nakladatelství AMU, 2020. ISBN 978-80-7331-552-8.

---