AestheticJudgment,Criticism,& Conversation

"I know the difference between a slap and a slug!" So says Amanda Bonner (Katherine Hepburn) to her husband Adam (Spencer Tracy) in George Cukor's The Awful Truth, after he delivers a blow to her backside during a heated conversation. This scene is a key feature of Stanley Cavell's analysis of the film in Pursuits of Happiness, where he argues that Adam is redeemed from what he calls "the taint of male villainy" by his ability to converse with Amanda as equals, their relationship characterised by the sound of "bickering" signals commitment to their community of two. And yet Amanda knows that she was slugged, not slapped; that the smack had the "stink of masculine brutality". It seems that Adam has failed to acknowledge the physical distinctions that "expressions of friendly antagonism", according to Cavell, should not violate. In this talk, I will place Cavell into conversation with Jacqueline Rose, drawing in particular on her book On Violence and Violence Against Women and Cavell's essay 'A Matter of Meaning It' to ask two questions. Firstly: How do questions of interpretation shape cinematic depictions and receptions of domestic violence? And secondly, if — as Rose argues — violence in our times thrives on a form of blindness, how can cinema return it to the realm of the visible?

I will present some work in progress from a project taking individual works of contemporary art as spurs to philosophical reflection. I call the associated method 'philosophical criticism:' after briefly clarifying how I understand this, and where I take it to depart from more common ways of doing the philosophy of art, I focus on several works by the controversial Spanish artist Santiago Sierra: 160cm line tattooed on four people (Salamanca, 2000); 133 People Paid to have their hair dyed blond (Venice, 2001); Workers who cannot be paid remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes (Berlin, 2002). These 'remunerated actions' involve paying minimal wages to people to do things about which we may feel considerable moral disquiet: paying heroin addicted prostitutes the price of their next shot to have their backs permanently tattooed; paying asylum seekers who cannot be paid legally to sit under cardboard boxes for the duration of an exhibition; paying the immigrant street vendors selling fake merchandise on the streets of Venice to have their hair dyed an incongruous peroxide blond. If paying freely consenting participants subsistence wages to do such things is indeed wrong, why is that? One oft-heard charge is that such practices are exploitative, understood in a morally thick sense: that is, wrongly exploitative. But if they are, what makes them wrong? I consider three possibilities here: that they take unfair advantage of a vulnerability in circumstances in which one should rescind from doing so (Bob Goodin); that they extract excessive benefits from those whose desperation prevents them refusing an indecent proposal (Mikhail Valdman); that their failure to respect or even recognize the dignity of those exploited is degrading (Ruth Sample). Do any of these views capture what is going on here? I will suggest some reasons for thinking the third comes closest. One difficulty for applying such approaches to Sierra's practice, however, is their apparent assumption that exploitation is a two term relation, between a putative exploiter and their prey, when works of art involving such activities seem to implicate (at least) a three way relation: between the parties to the transaction itself and those for whose edification that transaction is apparently staged, namely us. I shall close by considering what, if any, difference this should make to whether we take the practices in question to be wrong and — if we do so take them — what implications, if any, this has for our judgement of their value as art.

Many people were troubled when it emerged that new editions of children's books by Roald Dahl had been edited to remove objectionable language. The case was only one in a long historical tradition of 'bowdlerising' texts to make them more acceptable to the tastes and values of contemporary readers. Is there something wrong with such expurgation? If so, on what grounds, and under what conditions? In this paper, I argue that the expurgation of texts is presumptively wrong, and that the wrong in question is best understood in terms of the interests not of the author but those of an ideal reader. Moreover, we argue that the interests underlying these rights can best, and most vividly, be captured by adopting the fiction of a text itself possessing rights — among other things, a right against expurgation. A text's claims may be outweighed by sufficiently important countervailing ethical considerations. However, as with other rights claims, the rights of a text may generate residual obligations, of which we shall explore in particular the residual obligation not to falsify the historical record and not to conceal the history of editorial interventions into a text.

Suppose that we not only do, but in some sense should, disagree about art. That is, suppose that disagreement in interpretation and evaluation of art is appropriate. For this to be an interesting supposition, these disagreements would have to be genuine disagreements. We would be contesting the same meaningful claim about an artwork, rather than, say, projecting meaning and value onto the work in different ways or expressing our differential reactions to a work. So, it would not be a matter of 'this is how I experienced it' or 'this is what I make of it', or 'it pleases me but not you'. In those situations there could be an appearance of conflict, and there could be tension between people who do and do not take pleasure in a work, but the interesting substance of conflict would probably be missing. But how could it make sense to think of art as a domain in which we appropriately and genuinely disagree? This talk will present one approach to this issue, arguing that artworks can put us in the position of needing to develop reasons for judgement. That we do not share reasons (and conclusions) in that situation is appropriate, in part because of the fine-grained considerations that can be relevant, and in part because of the complexity and delicacy of the questions posed.

Interpretations of artworks seem governed by two requirements: on the one hand, we want our interpretations to be correct; on the other hand, we want to arrive at our interpretations ourselves. These requirements can seem to be in tension: if we really aim at correct interpretations, why avoid relying on others? After all, in other domains, we regularly rely upon others as a way of arriving at knowledge. C. Thi Nguyen proposes to resolve this apparent tension by arguing that art interpretation has a similar structure to games. In games, we impose artificial restrictions on the pursuit of goals in order to make the pursuit of those goals enjoyable for its own sake. Analogously, Nguyen proposes, when we interpret art, we aim at correct interpretations (just as we sometimes aim to knock down a set of ten pins with a heavy ball), but we also impose an artificial restriction of not relying on others, which makes achieving our goal more difficult (just as in trying to knock down the pins we restrict ourselves from coming closer than 60 feet from them in the game of bowling). The imposition of the artificial restriction creates an autotelic activity that we enjoy participating in for its own sake, whether that is interpreting art or bowling (Nguyen 2020). In this talk, we criticize Nguyen's proposed resolution of the apparent tension between these two requirements and offer our own alternative account. Our account draws upon John Haugeland's work on representational genera and Liz Camp's work on perspectives. We argue that artworks express non-propositional perspectival content that cannot be losslessly translated into propositional form. This content loss explains Nguyen's observations about art interpretation without appeal to the imposition of artificial restrictions: on our account, the "requirement" that we should arrive at our interpretations ourselves, when properly understood, turns out to be internal to the very nature of art and aesthetic judgment. The interpretation of art is, for this very reason, not a game.