A discussion of moral art

John Gardener begins his essay, “On Moral Fiction”, with the metaphor of Thor and his weapon (hammer, axe, or whatever it might be) Mjollnir, warding off the forces of chaos and entropy. Gardner compares art and criticism to Thor’s hammer. Thor is the artist and art is the force that the artist wields to affirm life, to establish virtue, and to discover, generation by generation, what it means to be human. The rest of the essay is Gardner’s ruminations on this subject, on the purpose behind art.

On page 18, he defines moral art, saying, “television—or any other more or less artistic medium—is good (as opposed to pernicious or vacuous) only when it has a clear positive moral effect, presenting valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue, toward life affirmation as opposed to destruction or indifference” (pg. 18). This notion, as indicated by the title of his work, consistently appears throughout his book. While such a view could easily lead to the purpose of art being to teach, Gardener makes a firm distinction between didacticism and true art. True art doesn’t “teach” morality. It is by its nature moral. It doesn’t force upon the reader, but instead explores, with much concern, such morality, acting as a mode of thought. By creating a fictional imitation we better understand that which we imitate (116). By creating situations in which characters choose between acting morally and immorally, we are forced to consider such choices and are encouraged to make them ourselves.

Gardener goes on to comment on Plato and Aristotle’s treatment of the poet (the creator of fiction), saying, “To Plato it seemed that if a poet showed a good man performing a bad act, the poet’s effect was corruption of the audience’s morals. Aristotle agreed with Plato’s notion that some things are moral and others not; agreed, too, that art should be moral; and went on to correct Plato’s error. It’s the total effect of an action that’s moral or immoral, Aristotle pointed out. In other words, it’s the energeia—the actualization of the potential which exists in character and situation—that gives us the poet’s fix on good and evil; that is, dramatically demonstrates the moral laws, and the possibility of tragic waste, in the universe” (pg. 23). Rather than asserting, as Plato does, that a fictionalized account of wrong action leads to imitation, Gardener agrees with Aristotle in thinking that the poet’s actualization of character imparts to the audience his moral stance. This in turn leads to our moral education—we are forced to consider whether his characters are models for imitation or not.

However, he speaks about this idealist view of art as unfashionable in contemporary intellectual culture. Words like “Truth”, “Beauty”, and “Goodness” are no longer spoken of. They are seen as embarrassing. He bemoans the fact that ideas like “morality” have gone out of fashion in favor of “The Other” of philosophers like Sartre, the ubermensche of Nieztsche, or the Stranger of Camus. Such philosophers would deny that the verities that Gardener speaks of exist, especially in the immutable fashion that Gardener believes. Gardener discusses Sartre in more detail, exploring the French philosopher’s rejection of a number of sources of morality (values as implications of our conscious nature, values as implications of God, and values as implications of rationality), instead opting for nausea and angst.

He quotes Tolstoy in asserting that ideals expressed in art can affect the way people act, at least some of the times, in some people. Once again, Gardener makes a distinction between the morality rising from religious ideals and morality from a different source. He explains Tolstoy’s conception of art as given by a divine source. Morality, as prescribed by God, is enacted by the “hero”, Jesus. The artists (the recorders of Biblical events) record the events of the hero, which leads to a changing of the way people act. Similarly, Gardener uses the example of Achilles in the Illiad to demonstrate the progression of morality. Achilles, the demigod, demonstrates to normal humans what values the gods see as admirable and worthy.

However, Gardener critiques the current state of art, which he claims has increasingly replaced the affirmation of life with destruction. Instead of art being the force working against chaos, immoral art affirms Ragnarok, encouraging the exchange of humanity for the inhumane, encouraging the exchanging of death for life. It is this disconnecting from “the real”, from there being a concrete signified behind the signifier that is today’s prevailing intellectual fashion. Without such a “real” the artist is forced to ponder endlessly the questions of relativism into a sort of paralysis (51).

From here, Gardner moves to the critics. Once again, he bemoans the critics who have bought into the cultural fad of distinguishing between the modern and the postmodern, the structuralist and the post-structuralist, the conventional and the innovative. Instead of creating such categories, Gardener prescribes judging art for its morality. In true art, devotion to exploring morality is the standard by which critics should judge.

One of the most convincing examples Gardener uses to illustrate this immoral art is the music of John Cage. A number of musicians, each given a card with a number of musical motifs, play their parts at the tempo or dynamic level of their choosing, whenever they want. Or maybe the conductor signals to a section to play at a certain time. To Gardener, this is immoral art despite the fact that it supposedly “expresses the relativity and chance of a post-Newtonian understanding of the universe” or something like that. The musicians hate playing such pieces and audiences hate listening to them. Such music is immoral because chance has nothing to do with right action. If a person started randomly throwing pieces of bread out an airplane, would you credit him for feeding the hungry when a homeless person happens to find bread lying on the ground? It is the exchange of texture for “the real” that Gardener rejects in fiction, music, television, and all forms of art.

For Gardener, “True art, by specific technical means now commonly forgotten, clarifies life, establishes models of human action, casts nets towards the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns” (100). Rather than ranting or giggling at the absurdity of our predicament, true art prays or creates weapons for us to use. It is the lightning strike, illuminating our surrounds for a split second, giving us a moment of clarity in the darkness (100). Art explores what it means to be human, which is inextricably tied with being moral.

In discussing this moral art, Gardener covers a number of the authors we have during the semester. He cites Plato and Aristotle as establishing the purpose and usefulness of art. Like Kant, he espouses a disinterested view of art. However, it seems that he decides art has the definite purpose of affirming life. This seems to contradict the Kantian view of purposiveness without purpose. Like Kant, it seems Gardener sees art has having the power to give the feeling necessary to act morally despite the urgings of our instinct. Like Thor’s hammer, true art is directed towards the destruction of that which is immoral. It condemns Norman Mailer, who speaks of Charles Manson as “intellectually courageous” (77), instead depicting him as evil and destructive. It is constantly fighting for the good, passing down the wisdom of our predecessors to a new audience. It re-examines and makes relevant the archetypal stories, repackaging them for future generations.

C.S. Lewis and a Theodicy of Beauty

In his article “Evil and the Cosmic Dance” for the compilation C.S. Lewis as Philosopher (edited by Baggett, Habermas, and Walls), Philip Tallon largely critiques a previous work by John Hick in which aesthetic considerations are deliberately ignored in favor of moral and ethical ones as Hick attempts to construct a theodicy of soul-making. Hick argues that we must emphasize the relational aspect of God and that His chief aim in creating humans was to have fellowship with them. As such, questions of beauty (a type of non-moral goodness), which largely fall into the God-as-Creator category of emphasis, must needs be deemphasized in favor of explicit moral goodness in order to properly engage with the God-as-Lover-of-Humans category.

Tallon, however, sees a synthesis of the two in the work of C.S. Lewis. While many theodicists, Tallon argues, use religiously neutral values and purely moral considerations in formulating their work, this can lead to an overly distant and austere God, as well as one whose goodness is too alien to understand. By considering the beautiful in nature and in the world, a more robust picture of God’s goodness can be painted.

There is a section in Tallon’s article that articulated Augustine’s theodicy, namely, that the universe is like a painting “which, though it has some black patches, is still beautiful because of the purpose these dark spots serve, to heighten the brightness of the light patches by contrast. In the Augustinian picture, then, punishment and plenitude keep the universe beautifully balanced and wonderfully diverse” (Tallon 197). However, this serves more to critique and engage with Hick’s work than to set forth anything based on Lewis, and I will not spend any more time on it here.

Tallon begins by quoting a passage from Lewis’ essay “De Futilitate,” which I encourage everyone to read. In it, Lewis writes about human interaction with reality:

We must, then, grant logic to the reality; we must, if we are to have any moral standards, grant to it moral standards too. And there is really no reason why we should not do the same about standards of beauty. There is no reason why our reaction to a beautiful landscape should not be the response, however humanly blurred and partial, to something that is really there.

Lewis, then, sees beauty as an objective property. If we are correct in assuming that we can parallel his argument from Miracles that morality is grounded in God, then we can also say that beauty has its source in the Divine. And if beauty is from God, it is worthwhile to study it. As Tallon writes, “Following Lewis here, even if we cannot precisely see where beauty fits into theodicy, we can pursue its study in the confidence that we are advancing our knowledge of God’s goodness. For any philosopher to restrict theodicy’s scope to the purely moral may be marked by a sort of distrust in the deep connections between beauty and goodness” (Tallon 200).

Tallon focuses on two main areas of Lewis’ thought in order to make his argument: eschatology and soul-making. For those not familiar with the terms, eschatology means the study of last things, such as the end of the world or the final situation of humanity. Soul-making is a process by which God develops humans into beings more like Himself. This process sometimes can involve pain and suffering, in order to bring about a higher good.

Lewis argues that “any theodicy ignoring Heaven cannot even be called Christian” (Tallon 200). The pleasures and goods of this eternity infinitely outweigh any finite suffering endured on earth. Therefore, in a cost-benefit analysis of pains and pleasures, the good always outweighs the bad for the Christian.

Tallon analyzes the tendency which we have as fallen humans to insufficiently imagine Heaven as a fitting reward for present pains. If we do not see Heaven as desirable, our theodicy suffers. Lewis, says Tallon, does an admirable job of describing Heaven in such a way that one can make a feeble guess as to what the Christian will encounter there.

The soul-making aspect of this theodicy of course states that God uses pains and struggles to shape people into more perfect beings, beings more like Himself. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” says Lewis. We cannot ignore pains, so God sometimes uses them to teach essential lessons.

Tallon points out that while Hick’s emphasis on moral development through pain is right and biblical, his somewhat exclusive emphasis upon it is not as good. Tallon writes:

Defending God’s goodness solely in moral terms can lead to a picture of God that is cold, harsh, and generally not worth defending. What Lewis does so successfully, in including beauty and pain as formative parts of God’s creation . . . is not only to balance the joys and pains of God’s world but also to suggest that pain itself, in its ability to break through our self-centeredness, is thereby helping us to enjoy divine and created beauty (Tallon 205).

Lewis upholds Augustine’s view that virtue is the ordinate condition of affections. We can love things appropriately and inappropriately. Thus a proper instruction in valuing things, including beautiful things, is an aspect of the soul-making process. “If appreciation of creation is part of our development in virtue itself, then, contra Hick, upholding the aesthetic qualities of creation is fully compatible with a person-focused theodicy” (Tallon 206).

I will end with another quote from Lewis, his most famous regarding beauty and the human relationship to it.

We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it . . . When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch (Lewis, “Weight of Glory” pg. 17)

Works Cited
Tallon, Philip. "Evil and the Cosmic Dance." C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Ed. David Bagget, Gary R. Habermas, Jerry L. Walls. Illinois: IVP Academic, 2008. Print.

In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” he examines the effect that new technologies, especially those of photography and filmography, have affected the way that we relate to visual arts, such as painting, as well as examine the new forms of art created with these film technologies. While he mentions music occasionally, he is most definitely preoccupied with the visual arts. While photography and film were exploding in popularity, the technology for recording audio and distributing music were also making great strides and permeating society at the same time. While the audio technology really took hold a bit later than the case with photography, the things he brings up in relation to the visual arts have interesting parallels in the world of music.

First, Benjamin brings up the fact that the work of art has always been reproducible by more rudimentary means. Music is a peculiar form of art in that by its very nature it must be reproduced every single time that one experiences it. Before recording technology came about, music needed musicians to perform the music, and because it had to be recreated in each instance, it simultaneously could never be reproduced exactly the same, while each reproduction was, in a way, an authoritative instance of the music with no “original” to be compared to. With the introduction of recording technology, the live performance is imperfectly reproduced no matter how good the technology is. This recording however can be reproduced perfectly any number of times and can then be transported anywhere.

As music recordings spread, this causes a shift in the way people think about music in that the reproduction of the live performance becomes the primary production in music. People begin to focus on recording music and listening to recorded music than performing or listening to performances. This is evidenced by the fact that nearly all music we encounter today is recorded and electronically reproduced. The recording of the music then becomes the authoritative artifact of the music. At this point, it is important to define exactly what music is. Is it in the creation of sound waves traveling about in space at a particular time? Is it in the score (when available)? Is it in your perception of the sound? If you think of a piece, but no sound is made at all, is it music? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, is it music? While I am being slightly facetious with the last question, I bring this up only to demonstrate the difficulty of defining exactly what music is, other than a blanket term for aural art, and is complicated further with the introduction of recording technology. Is the music in the grooves of the record, or the magnetic tape, in the code of the CD, or computer audio file?

Benjamin points out an extremely important effect of recording, “technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain.” One can listen to any work, no matter what it was originally intended for, basically anywhere, anytime. This has a peculiar effect on music that was written before this technology. Whether a piece was written for a religious ceremony or a performance in a concert hall, one can listen to it in the privacy of their home, or basically anywhere with portable music players. A somewhat funny manifestation of this is a line of CDs put out by the Naxos Record Label, “Chill with ______” where one can put on a CD and chill their choice of Satie, Bach, Chopin, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Mozart, Beethoven, or Vivaldi.

The more important repercussion of this technology is the music that results from this technology. Benjamin brings up is that in the advent of photography and reproducibility, art reacted with the doctrine of “l’art pour l’art…which rejects not only any social function but any definition in terms of a representational content.” As Benjamin points out, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its “parasitic subservience to ritual.” Music begins to be composed with no intention of it being performed live at any point.

A group of composers emerged that utilized the more widespread availability of the magnetic tape to create their musical compositions working with the tape itself. An early example of this is Pierre Schaeffer, who coined the term Musique concrete for his compositions written around 1950 arranging recordings of machines, running water, thunder, footsteps, breathing, and other environmental sources, and recording it onto a single tape, creating a permanent musical artifact. (Pierre Schaeffer – Etude Aux Chemins De Fer: http://www.mediafire.com/?ld5j1mmmtzm). People like John Cage created compositions splicing together pieces of tape of all kinds of sounds (John Cage - Williams Mix: http://www.mediafire.com/?2u3ndjnnyjj), and Steve Reich created his earliest phase pieces by playing two tapes of the same content simultaneously at slightly different speeds, then recording that to a tape (Steve Reich - It's Gonna Rain Part 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?nok1mizkt1h). The effect of these early pieces is seen in music all the time today, including any music that uses sampling or sound clips. A recent example that comes to mind is the music of the books, which mixes “found sound” in the same vein as Schaeffer, with acoustic music, with a lot of other studio manipulation. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wVhWcpZpac)

The effect of technological reproduction on music composition is much more fundamental. Benjamin seemingly prophetically says, “to an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.” Nearly all music today is designed to be reproduced, best exemplified by the mere existence of Pop music. In many cases in popular music today is written in the studio, and the performance of the music is most often an attempt to recreate what was created on the recording. The recording becomes the “original” from which the performance attempts to reproduce.

New forms of art, like the elevation of photography and filmography to art, were also created within music (music being the blanket term for aural art). The studio engineer as artist emerges from this technology. The famous producer, Brian Eno likened his work with music to painting, saying: “You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound- you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter- he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.” The immense transformation of music by its ability to be technologically reproduced parallels that of the transformation of visual arts by photography as described by Walter Benjamin. Many of the things that he predicted in his essay, which came true for the visual arts, also manifest themselves in the aural arts.

Santayana's take on Aesthetics

George Santayana is a pragmatist from the 20th century, he offers a very different explanation for our conception of aesthetics, and taste than our previous authors. He argues that aesthetic value is subjective and created through experience. The different social structures and cultures a person lives with affect their judgment of artwork. When contrasting Santayana’s philosophy with Kant’s, there is a clear distinction between the two aesthetic philosophies.
He explains that we recognize and learn things based on “how they look and what they do to us” (Santayana Animal Faith 104). This would mean that as animals our experiences shape our attitude about the way certain objects appear to us. For example one person that had a dog growing up might see a painting of a dog to be cute and pretty; however, another person who was attacked by a dog at an earlier time might find the same painting of a dog to be terrifying. Santayana claims that every time we experience something our brain stores everything we sensed and learns from it. Like in the example, the person who was attacked by the dog at a young age is afraid of the dog because of his past experience with one. His animal self tells him that he needs to beware of dogs. His judgment about that artwork in the present stems from lessons in the past about what is good or bad for his well being. Another example would be food poisoning. If you ever get food poisoning from a restaurant like Chipotle, even after you recover, the thought of that food makes you sick. Your body associates the food at Chipotle with all the sick feelings you experienced. Your body forms a taste to help with its betterment. Likewise the things that we find beautiful are things that our animal selves find to be beneficial almost according to the lessons it learned. These experiences form our later judgments. Life experiences are not shared by everyone. Because of this, there are no universal standards of beauty. “No two men have exactly the same faculties, nor can things have for any two exactly the same value” (Santayana 42). Therefore the aesthetic values of art works are subjective, and can change over time with experience.
This idea of subjectivity with art seems very similar to Hume’s idea of “taste”. That different people can hold different values for the same work of art. Hume says that there is no point in arguing taste no one will win the argument. Santayana is able to give an account of why people have different tastes, and why it is futile to argue about the value an artwork. People may have different experiences, some may be similar, like they all had to go to school as a child, however there are many experiences that are unique to individual people. These experiences cause people to form judgments on the things they see according to those experiences. The only way to cause someone to agree completely with your assessment of a painting is to somehow change their life so they had all the same experiences you had. Some people might agree about the value of certain artworks; however that might stem from the fact that they might have had similar experiences in the past.
The idea that experience molds our value of objects around us also helps to explain why our ideas of what qualifies as good art has changed over the years. The social structures and the way society functions as a whole have changed over the years as well. It seems every time society has changed art has changed as well. Benjamin had noted how technology has drastically changed the world of art. Santayana believes artworks in general are symbolizations of the environment and social structures, meaning works of art are merely a reflection of society. This depicts the reason why art has changed throughout the years, and is different throughout cultures. People in a society have many similar tastes in works of art because they have many of the same experiences living the same society.
The greatest contrast to Santayana beliefs on making aesthetic judgments would be the Immanuel Kant. Kant claims that a person has to be disinterested in the object in order to make a value judgment. One has to be disinterested in their contemplation of the thing. He says that a judgment of beauty comes from disinterestedness, while things like the agreeable come from bodily desires or interest. For example Kant would say that when you look at a glass of water when you are thirsty, the sensation you feel is the agreeable. Your desire for water has caused this sensation to feel good when you see water. Your self interest caused those feelings. The utility the glass of water would serve caused those feelings, not your disinterested contemplation of it. You were not disinterested enough to make a judgment of aesthetic value. If you were not thirsty and disinterested with the existence of the water than you would be qualified to form an unbiased opinion of it’s aesthetic value, you would probably discover the glass of water does not have aesthetic value. Kant demands that people abandon every preconceived bias and experience when viewing art.
Santayana offers a very different view of how we should value aesthetics. He claims that “beauty is a pleasure regarded as the quality of the thing” or pleasure that comes from the quality and value of an object (Santayana 49). He explicitly disagrees with Kant’s concept of disinterestedness. Santayana claims that it is impossible to perceive a new object without applying past experiences. Kant believes that a person can, and should, abandon everything they learned from their society and culture when they view an object. Santayana claims that we do not do this. He says that our admiration of art comes from our past experiences and the effect perceiving those objects has on us. To give art any kind of value, we have to apply our personal judgment which comes from our experience in life. Back to the example of the portrait of the dog people make different values because of the experiences they had in their lives. Santayana says that the standards of art are subjective and cannot be conceived without bias, nor can it be conceived merely through the intuition.
Some people might argue that Santayana’s definition of the beautiful is the same as Kant’s concept of the agreeable. That Santayana’s idea of beauty is merely something that creates pleasure. Santayana makes a clear distinction between the pleasures resulting from the perception of the object and the idea of the agreeable that Kant mentions. “Most of the pleasure which objects cause are easily distinguished and separated from the perception of the object: the object has to be applied to a particular organ, like the palate, or swallowed like wine or used or operated on in some way before the pleasure arises” (Santayana 48). With normal pleasures the feelings of pleasure we receive come from the effects those things have on our body. Not from merely perceiving the quality of the object we see. Santayana says that the value of beauty is an intellectual pleasure that comes from perceiving something that is good according to the judgment formed by past experiences. He says that “beauty is a value… it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature” (Santayana 49). He says that the pleasure gained from beauty “must not be in the consequence of the utility of the object” (Santayana 49). Santayana says that the pleasure gained from beauty does not satisfy some pleasure of our body; however it satisfies some fundamental desire or need from our minds. Therefore a person cannot make the claim that Kant’s idea of agreeableness and Santayana’s idea of beauty are the same thing. Kant’s idea of the agreeable is that of an object that has a utility or purpose that it fulfills for our body; which differs from Santayana’s conception of beauty, which is that beauty is something that fulfills the desires of our mind.
Santayana argued for evolving standards of art. He argued that the value of an artwork a person has stems from their past experiences. When contrasting this idea with Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics, there is a clear distinction between the two philosophies.
Works Cited
1. Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty. 2. Chicago: Charles Schribners Sons, 1896 . Print.
2. Santayana, George. Skepticism and Animal Faith. 3. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Print.

"this is water! this is water!"

For no real rhyme or reason, I’ve always enjoyed reading commencement addresses.[1] In a timely fashion for all of us graduating in December, David Foster Wallace[2] offered a gem of a speech whose life advice parallels the hermeneutical foundations developed by Heidegger and Gadamer.

For those unfamiliar, reading DWF can be a marathon task. Case in point, his novel Infinite Jest clocks in at a hefty 1079 pages – and 388 endnotes (with some individual entries as long as eight pages, complete with its own set of sub-footnotes). It’s safe to say that DWF expects the reader to be fully engaged in his artwork. As he describes the blurring of the writer/reader relationship in an interview, “this process is a relationship between the writer’s consciousness and her own, and that in order for it to be anything like a real full human relationship, she’s going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work” (McCaffery 137-8). No “passive spectation”[3] allowed!

DWF’s address to the Class of 2005 from Kenyon College[4] seems to diverge from his traditional manner. His pithy, simplistic advice was not reductionist as one would be left to assume from his lack of verbal footnotes, but rather a genuine and warm address from a guy whose been there himself. Structurally, he leads off with a “standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories” (Wallace 1).

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

DWF wants to convey to the Class of 2005 that such a parable, such Aristotelian mimesis, is less insulting than the traditional liberal arts cliché would lead on, “because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about” (Wallace 1).

DWF rightly describes the difficulty of the defaulted human condition (“Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of”) and stresses the importance of individuals who can adjust such a natural default (“often described as being “well-adjusted, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term”). Without such radical adjustment, the banal days of the impending adult life will be lonely, as we would then stay as “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation” (Wallace 5).

This speech, this work of art, saved through the magic of a mass-emailed transcript-turned book published in 2009, invites the same engaging work from the listener as of the reader of DWF’s other works. His postmodern challenge for the individual to de-center their subjective self is “unimaginably hard to do” (Wallace 5), but certainly possible. To hermeneutically think outside the “excellent servant but terrible master” (Wallace 2) frees the individual, so that it will “actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down” (Wallace 3).

The capital-T Truth for DWF is simple: about life before death. About freedom involving “attention, awareness and discipline, and being able to truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day” (Wallace 5). About the real value of education, “which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight around us, all the time that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water. This is water’” (Wallace 5).

Works Cited

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (1993).

David Foster Wallace, Transcription of 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, May 21, 2005.

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[1] In the summer months, C-SPAN helps one indulge such an interest on their program American Perspectives.

[2] the “King of Footnotes”

[3] See David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction

[4] “Not near Uganda”

Benjamin and the Third Reich

July 18, 1937 marked the opening day of the “House of German Art,” a neo-classical styled grandiose stone temple, and the “Great German Art Exhibition” that boasted 16,000 works (Adam 94). On the following day, the Nazi party began an annual tradition of exhibiting more than 5,000 pieces of “degenerate” art, which was attended by more than 2 million German citizens (Petropoulos 57).

When I first learned about this obsession with art in the Nazi regime, my first thought was, “That’s so weird, why would the Nazis care so much about determining “good” and “bad” art? Does it really matter that much how someone paints or sculpts something?” Why did the Nazi Regime value artwork so highly? I believe that part of the answer lies with Benjamin. The author warned that without the politicization of aesthetics in an era of the technological reproduction of art, that society would unknowingly leave itself vulnerable to the devastating forces of fascism. Unfortunately, Germany did not heed this warning, and was awesomely manipulated by the fascism of the Third Reich. With the help of Germany’s ignorance of the separation of art from its unique existence and tradition, the Nazis were able to create their own tradition of art. The Nazis were able to "reorganize" the people's perception of what constituted "real German art," and what did not.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin claims that, when art is technologically reproduced many times over, the unique existence of the artwork – “the here and now of the original [image]” (21) – turns into a mass existence. When this happens, the work of art no longer belongs to a specific time and place, and is severed from its unique existence (and also from its tradition, which is founded upon the work’s unique existence). This detachment of the tradition from an artwork is particularly problematic given that human perception is "organized" by tradition and history - the tradition of the work of art conditions an individual how to interpret the respective piece. Therefore, when the tradition is utterly disconnected from the work of art (which is an unavoidable consequence of mass technological reproduction), an individual's perception of an artwork is unfounded, and thus easily manipulated if left unchecked and unnoticed.

In order to combat this ignorance of the detachment of art from its unique tradition, the society must politicize its aesthetics. This is exactly what Expressionism sought to do. After the end of the World War I, Germany lay in economic and social ruin: the great expectations that Germany had for the war (as the solution to their economic and political problems) proved disastrously false. Many Expressionist artists came back from the front lines forever changed: the darkness of war had changed the artists’ perceptions of art, humanity, German society, and themselves. The artists expressed onto the canvas their disillusionment of war, self-doubt, existential ponderings and insecurities, and distrust of absolutes. The art that was produced at this time shows the politicization that infused these artists’ works.

(For the following images, I've tried to limit my comments, so that you can interpret the paintings as independently as possible)



"The War" Otto Dix, 1920
(Shows the mechanization of war and the fragmentation that is created. Also, note the hostile and violent images)



"After the War" Will Küpper, 1919
(The figure's eyes are disproportionately large, and his long fingers seem to mesh into his skeletal figure)




Left: “Self-portrait in Florence” Max Beckman, 1907
(Well-lit, more “realistic-looking” portrayal of him as a confident, complacent young man)

Right: “Self-portrait in Tuxedo” Max Beckman, 1927
(The figure is positioned beside total darkness, which literally cuts him in half. The figure seems more closed-off and dark)

Benjamin also argues that with technological reproduction, the cult value of an artwork (namely, the expression of the artwork in the context of its tradition) decreases, while its exhibition value increases. In this way, technological reproduction frees art from its "subservience to ritual". In photography and film (arguably the best examples of technological reproduction of art in the modern era), exhibition value drives back the cult value of the artwork in almost every respect. Nevertheless, the cult value of the artwork is not easily erased in the minds of human beings (27). This "resistance" from the cult value of an artwork is seen in the way that we still believe that an image in a photo or film shows us something REAL, although this image should only have exhibitionary value attached to it.


Because of this misplaced cult value projected onto the artwork, the German masses could be manipulated into thinking that Hitler’s "reality" was more real than actual reality. In the year 1937 in Munich, the Nazis presented “Entartete Kunst” – a “degenerate art” exhibition where thousands of Expressionist works of art were chaotically presented, unframed, clustered, and badly lit, next to captions that emphasized the “perverse Jewish spirit” supposedly captured in the paintings. On average, 20,000 people a day came to see the “Degenerate Art” exhibit (Petropoulos 57).




“You see about you the products of insanity, of impudence, of ineptitude, and of decadence.” (Grosshans 105)

--Adolf Ziegler (chief organizer of the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition), in his opening address of the “Degenerate Art” exhibit.

According to Walter Benjamin, the apparatus of film and photograph is so intimately embedded in reality, that it seems to portray a "pure view of reality". However, this presentation of reality as equipment-free is possible only through editing, lights, camera positions, etc. In other words, this "equipment-free" reality is only possible through the "intensive interpenetration" of equipment (30). The “reality” of Hitler’s Germany was presented via deeply penetrating veils and manipulations. The lies that they identified as truth – such as their romanticism of war and the Grecian-styled and Impressionistic art that they claimed as “truly German” – did not have any unique existence within the historical and traditional context of the German nation, and thus were not rooted in reality. Nevertheless, the Nazis gained the authority to determine what was “reality” because although it only retained exhibitionary value, their aesthetic still retained cult value in the minds of the people.

Works Cited:

Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1992. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version”. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Benjamin Walter Et Al. Cambridge, Massachusets: Harvard: 2008. 19-55. Print.

Grosshan, Henry. Hitler and the Artists. New York: Homes & Meier, 1983. Print.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. Art as Politics in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Print.

Revisting Benjamin and Cinema: an interpretive update moving away from marxist conceptions of History & Tradition

Because of our privileged historical vantage point almost 75 years after he published Benjamin published his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in 1935, I believe we can offer some important interpretive corrections to Benjamin's arguments and characterizations of the significance of the introduction of mass cinema. Additionally, the resulting revisions of Benjamin's analysis encourage us to abandon Benjamin's Marxist conception of history and tradition, and instead adopt a characterization strikingly similar to Gadamer: where revolutionary artistic challenges to present understandings of the tradition are best explained through the re-conceiving and expanding pre-existing ideas and strands within the tradition itself.

In his essay, Benjamin argues that the introduction of sound in the movies was not an especially revolutionary development, saying sounds were more or less implied by the images on the screen. That might arguably be true for films like run-of-the-mill early actions, where it would be natural to associate the sound of an explosion with the action screen, or to subconsciously imagine the playing of a somber musical score when one of the good guys dies in a really old war movie. But, this kind of a characterization of images and sound seems a lot less accurate for things like opening scene of the Normandy beach invasion in Saving Private Ryan. In that scene the shaky camera work, quick cuts, desaturated images, visual effects, and the disorienting, deafening sound of the explosions all seamlessly blend in such a way so as to depict to the audience an unromanticized horrific vision of what it was like for American soldiers on those beaches during D-Day. Similarly, Benjamin's claim that moving pictures necessarily implied particular sounds feels forced when grappling with inventive uses of music. Examples that immediately come to mind are the director Quinton Tarantino's use of the song "Stuck in the Middle with You" during the infamous ear cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs, or director Stanley Kubrick's use of a classical music score throughout 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick's use of sound works to simultaneously deepen our understanding of the movie's space visuals and also detach us from them in such a way that we constantly contemplate the significance and meaning of what we are seeing on screen, instead of dealing merely with the visuals in an instrumental sort of way by simply saying "oh look, a bunch of stuff moving around in space going from here to" or even “so and so is piloting the ship in order to land on the moon."

Since I imagine a lot more people in the class haven’t seen 2001 than the other films I mentioned, here are some clips from the movie. Watch them at your leisure; they aren’t really a part of the presentation. I posted it mostly to encourage people the people who haven’t seen 2001 to give it a shot and also provide a tangible companion to the above paragraph.





Consequently, it seems that Benjamin underestimates the way movies utilize sound, rather than the mere facticity or superficial content of a particular sound usage so as to imbue the work of art, or at least our experience of it, with a kind of intentionality. After all, with a huge Hollywood budget, what movie maker couldn't buy the rights to a Leo Strauss song or put first-rate sound effects or special effects into a war movie? Significantly, to a large degree, we can account for the strikingly different ways films have employed sound over the years with the ideas of earlier thinkers, such as Kant's notion of purposiveness or Hegel's sensible presentation of a concept. Those traditional ideas may need some expanding and revision, but their basic explanatory foundation still seems up to the task of making sense of modern examples of sound in motion pictures as well as older ones.

Naturally, this makes me fairly skeptical of Benjamin's characterization of the introduction of mass cinema and photography as a kind of complete Marxist artistic revolution: a revolution where the quantitative proliferation of mass-reproduced copies of images altered those images qualitative content for the people viewing them in such a way so as to decay the aura of authenticity surrounding the image. While many of those points may remain valid, others seem dubious, like Benjamin's assertion that old concepts like "genius and creativity" have been totally "neutralized" and completely emptied out by the development of cinema so that they are unavoidably dangerous and in need of being discarded.1 To the contrary, with the benefit of historical hindsight, it does seem like the earlier examples I mentioned of sound in cinema, particularly some Tarantino and Kubrick films’ use of music, indicate that such concepts are still relevant. Thus, it seems more fitting to characterize the response to the unique challenges to existing historical conception of the artistic tradition put forward by photography and film, not as a dramatic sort of Marxian Revolution where the conditions capitalism unavoidably creates, namely the creation of the working class and thereby the proletariat, are the same ones that end up necessitating a complete revolution in the economic structure that brought them into being, but as one where historical variation can be accounted for through the expansion and preservation of existing strands within the historical artistic tradition. Still, Benjamin's fundamental analysis is sound. Our understanding and attitudes toward old concepts has to be different now from what it was back in the 1930s in order to avoid exploitation. Today we are much more cognizant than people in the 1930s likely were of how movies, such as the Triumph of the Will, can use aesthetics for political propaganda.

At this point, I'm going to backtrack a bit and mention one of the more immediate consequences of introducing talking and sound to movies that was enormously significant to the trajectory of movie production, namely the beginning of the musical film genre (think Westside Story, My Fair Lady, Singin' in the Rain, and even movies like The Wizard of Oz.) While the heyday of that genre definitely seems to have passed, recently we've experienced a resurgence in Hollywood making this kinds of films, as evidenced by movies like Chicago, Dreamgirls, and Moulin Rouge. I mention this, not only because it re-enforces some earlier points, but it also challenges Benjamin's characterization of the relationship between the stage and celluloid. While Benjamin is certainly correct to maintain that theater and film are two separate art forms, he seems to think that the gap between them, particularly for actors, is wholly unbridgeable. In fact, stage and film, while definitely separate art forms, have historically influenced one another a great deal. Most of the musicals on film were basically imported Broadway stage musicals, such as Oklahoma!, or Yankee Doodle Dandy (both of which were released well after Benjamin published his essay.)

Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that Benjamin was writing in an era where, in most films, actors functioned like automatons that were subservient to the producer and director's vision of the film and often acted out one dimensional roles. (To a lesser degree, we still can see this approach operating in more modern movies. Take, for example, Platoon, where director Oliver Stone forced his entire cast to go through 2 months of boot camp prior to filming in order to guarantee the movie performances that had an exhausted, weary quality, instead of an affective, polished quality that actors may unintentionally give off.2) One of the clearest examples of directorial approach to acting around the time Benjamin was writing is the 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation. In this clip, the actors hardly do any acting at all and the limited bit that is there is either laughable--such as, overstated gestures and movements--or painfully one dimensional, the heroic Klansmen riding in to save the day or the ravenous, rapist African-American male character played in black face. Watching a couple minutes at the start and then the last minute or so, ought to give one a pretty solid idea of what little even some of the better regarded silent films (AFI ranked Birth of a Nation #44 on its Greatest Movies List) have to offer in the way of non-caricatured characters that seem remotely authentic.



Still, I don't think he gives film sound acting is proper due, even at the time he is writing, mostly because of the emergence of more credible acting portrayals by rising acting stars like James Cagney. Look at this scene from the very influential 1931 mobster movie The Public Enemy.



Cagney, who was a stage actor himself, has palpably more naturalistic style compared to the two other actors in the scene--whose work really seems dated, wooden, and insincere/inauthentic by comparison. No more tilted gestures, long stares, over-enunciated diction, and the melodramatic stage mannerisms that were the hallmark most other early talking pictures and silent films. To audiences at the time, Cagney was himself, the real thing, or at least appeared that way. Since Public Enemy was a box office smash released in 1931, 4 years before Benjamin published his essay, it seems much more appropriate (and less presentist) to hold Benjamin’s feet to the fire for his frequently overstated, almost absolutist, claims about the nature of film acting than his views on sound and the movies or even the relationship between films and theater (since Hollywood did not really start cranking out tons of musicals until the late 30s-early 40s). Cagney, however, was the exception at the time and not the rule. He definitely helped raise the bar, so that god-awful acting (like the acting by the other people in that scene) was no longer acceptable in Hollywood, but one would be hard pressed to say that most of the performances, particularly those by some of era's top stars, such as Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, or Gary Cooper, would seem just as fresh, human, and fitting if the movie was made today.

Most critics would agree, historically, that is owed to the next revolution in screen acting, which occurred in the early 1950s due to emergence young stars, such as Marlon Brando and later James Dean, who famously practiced a style of acting referred to as "method" acting. Again, demonstrating the influential relationship between stage and film, "method acting", based on the writings of Russian theater director Stanley Stanislavsky, had its roots in the theater. Its greatest early film practitioner, Marlon Brando, similarly began his career in the theater and achieved Hollywood superstardom playing the role of Stanley Kowalski, which he had earlier played on the stage. Dean studied acting under Lee Strasberg, who also taught such famous actors as Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and Ellen Burstyn. Strasberg described his approach, particularly the technique of emotive memory, as follows, "the idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life and you learn to use it in creating the character you're working on. You learn to dig into your unconscious and make use of every experience you ever had."3 However, one shouldn't overestimate the importance of this technique to all "method" acting schools. Other "method" teachers, such as Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro’s teacher Stella Adler typically downplayed this technique either as a starting point or a crutch. Adler once quipped to a student in one of her acting classes "your life isn't big enough to play King Lear" in order to show its limitations and underscore the need for other routes toward empathetically acting out a role.4Consequently, other method schools, such as Adler's and Stanford Meisner's, put a stronger emphasis on studying the text, researching the role, instant and inner justifications for actions, "being in the moment", and using one's imaginative capabilities to help create the character.5Because of these important historical developments in film acting since 1935, I think we can safely soften Benjamin's overly bold proclamation that "[because the camera is substituted for the audience in film] the aura surrounding the actor is dispelled—and with it, the aura of the figure he portrays," so that we understand these claims in a much less absolutist way.6

Works Cited
1. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," [class handout], 20.

2 Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, “Siskel & Ebert – Platoon (1986)” [video], Retrieved 29 November 2009, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFPj1Rd0rYE

3 Mel Gussow, "Lee Strasberg of Actors Studio Is Dead," New York Times, February 18, 1982, D20.

4 Stella Adler, The Art of Acting, edited by Howard Kissel,(New York, NY: Applause Books, 2000), 83.

5 Adler, 162-163, 125-127, 64

6. Benjamin, 31.

On the Soul's Favoring the Painting above the Photograph: A Nod to Aristotle

****The questions of philosophy are not approached by most. Look to your average person walking along the street to explain a single of the great question posed by philosophers and you will most likely be left wanting. Fewer still have a strong desire to look backward far enough to meditate on the work of one of philosophy’s founders, Aristotle. Why are beautiful things appreciated? Clearly our innermost humanity, or soul for the purposes of this discussion, is responsible for our imaginations and interpretations of images. Aristotle sums up this idea by stating in his treatise On Memory and Recollection; “We have already dealt with imagination in the treatise On the Soul. It is impossible even to think without a mental picture. The same affection is involved in thinking as in drawing a diagram”. In this way Aristotle ties all creative ability to some mental creation dependent upon imagination which he in turn connects to our ability to think. This leads to a discussion relating to how we create these images. Over the course of modern human history there is only one means of preserving images that has remained relatively constant. The ability of a human to see an object, a person, or a place and then recall that image in their minds is common to most. As technology has advanced the ability of humans to recreate pieces of time has increased as well. Whether we have used pottery, paintings, or photos we have sought the ability to capture the images our eyes receive and then transfer them to some physical reality. Clearly both photos and man-made art are appreciated today, but the hand drawn representation and the painting are able to compete against the perfect photo. Something within us assigns a value to the hand-made creation despite the fact that more accurate representations of reality can be found among photos.

*****I submit that the photograph takes all of the fun and excitement out of the creation of a permanent image of reality. That mysterious process whereby the soul transforms a perception into a memory or a recollection and then the body strives to reproduce that image is reduced to a few mechanical parts put together to form a seemingly magical box that is capable of instant replication of any scene. This is a very efficient solution, but it destroys the magic inherent in human creation. Now let us turn from the abstract to a concrete example of the current topic of discussion. Consider the following portraits side by side for a moment.

****The image to the upper left is a portrait by Van Gogh titled Old Peasant. The second is a photo of an actual elderly Peasant man. Notice that the image on the left ignores the negative aspects of reality. The man has a walking stick, but it does not appear to effect him. He appears dressed in good looking clothes and any negative hygiene issues are hidden by a closed mouth. In contrast the image on the right, a photograph, embraces the edginess of reality evidenced by the teeth missing and the unkempt appearance. Despite his carefree smile, the viewer is able to see that reality has not been kind to the man. His life is displayed in clear unadulterated truth, while the painted peasant is able to hide his truth behind fluid brush strokes and the deception of imagination.

****The reason that the existence of two images with such strong similarities and stark contrasts is possible is because humans are forced to use memory in creating physical images of reality that they have previously perceived. Aristotle proposes in his third book from On the Soul provides a context in which we can come to grips with the differences present in these two images: “Sensation is either potential or actual, eg., either sight or seeing, but imagination occurs when neither of these is present, as when objects are seen in dreams”. When Van Gogh stopped looking at this peasant man, if there was in fact a single person that gave rise to this portrait, he could only rely on imagination to recreate the image on the canvas. In mixing both reality and imaginary the artist creates something that the camera can never capture because the camera cannot ignore reality and insert its hopes, dreams and desires into the image. On the other hand the camera for this reason stands above prejudice. Recall to your minds for a moment the occurrence of viewing a picture that was taken to close to its subject. Can anyone truly say that such a picture accurately reflects the world around it? Clearly such a photo does represent what was before the camera when the button was pushed, but it does not represent what you or I would imagine the object to look like if we were asked to ponder the idea for a moment. In contrast the use of paint or pen to recreate an image is a fulfillment of the soul’s natural inclination to fully remember something that it has seen at some moment in the past.

****Take a moment to imagine for a moment some place or person from your past. Consider their clothing, eye color, hair color, height and size. Ready? Likely what you have created is not a truly representative image. Instead you have produced a mental composition of all your previous perceptions of that person or place. In addition you have likely included your own personal sentiments about the object you attempted to recall. We simply cannot separate our souls from the process of memory and recollection. It is the same for you and me as it has been for every great artist, and every terrible artist for that matter, throughout history. As we examine images we desire to understand the motivation of the soul in creating them and what, if any, this effect has on the paintings and photographs.

The man at right is supposed to be Vincent Van Gogh painting. Notice that the room appears to be bare behind him, and that the colors do not perfectly represent reality as our eyes perceive reality. His style included swirls of paint that our eyes do not observe. How are Van Gogh, and others like him, able to create images that do not accurately portray reality? Aristotle concluded many years ago that “perception of proper objects is always true, and is a characteristic all living creatures, but it is possible to think falsely, and thought belongs to no animal which has not reasoning power”. In On the Soul, Aristotle claims that Imagination is something that is common only to humans, the animals with the ability to reason. It is our ability to see reality and then make thoughts about it that gives imagination power and feeds our ability to create images that are not perfect and yet send a message to the audience. Having considered Van Gogh's self-portrait consider the photgraph to the left. The man is seen in clear straight lines with a simple background behind him. He holds his brush very realistically and appears to have only recently completed his painting. Further the face lacks the humanity that I can sense coming from the face of Van Gogh’s portrait. Somehow his painted eyes cry out with humanity more so than do those of the man painting above. The very nature of instant replication jeopardizes its status as a proper representation to begin with because it lacks the prejudices present in the minds of all those who have ever witnessed a person or a landscape. This is both the best and the worst aspect of the camera. In capturing an image without taking into account context the camera loses the depth that paintings and other handcrafted works of art possess. The artisan does not simply recreate the image of a man or a mountain. The image becomes a representation of both the object’s soul as understood by the artist and the artist’s soul as well. All the experiences of the artist combine to provide us with more than a simple retelling of something that any person could perceive. Instead what we find is a retelling that is filled with judgments and memories and imperfections that lead to a new level of understanding for all involved.

****The above painting, by Van Gogh, and this photo mark the final comparison that I will draw here in this presentation. Between these two images I found distinct similarities in that both depict trees in the foreground, mountains further back, and wisps of cloud in the sky above. As I’m sure anyone can tell the differences are clear the painting is green and verdant while the photo is of a desert landscape. These two artists have also gone different routes to create similar images. The camera captured the image perfectly, while the painter’s hand sought to convey the image in sweeping strokes and whirls of color. The landscape appears more foreign than does the landscape of Mal Brey. I genuinely pose the question which work do you prefer and why? I find myself drawn into the dreamlike quality of the painting above because it almost seems to dare me to claim that the image isn’t real. It seems to call to life the swirling madness of the world. The way in which the wind pulls and tugs in various directions represents all the different directions we are being called to move toward in life. Maybe it’s a weakness of mine as a lover of literary interpretation, but I favor any creation that offers me the chance to peer within it and question its purpose. With a photo I too readily assume that it’s sole purpose it to perfectly represent some image out there in reality. The questioning of a work is what grants it its true value.

*****In discussing the differences between the photo and the portrait/landscape in light of Aristotle’s discussion on the soul and memory I hope that we have all grown in our understandings of things philosophical and things artistic. The idea that the camera can replace the brush is absurd because the brush holds infinite possibility. The brush has the enables humans to acknowledge the original perception and then to deviate from it. The camera must show whatever it perceives in its lens, and for this reason it will never truly surpass the art of handmade images, or at least that is my claim. The idea of creativity and imagination are too central to the identity of humanity to be cast aside by some technological revolution that claims it does things better. I have had opportunity in my own life to compare the pros and cons of the portrayal of reality by camera and the portrayal achieved by hand drawing an image. I conclude with an example in my own life where I have found the ability of a person to recreate an image by hand to be just as valuable, truthfully more so, than the ability of a piece of plastic to recreate the same scene.