Strange Tools (2 and final)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club Reading of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noë.
My topic is art, the fuzziest of fuzzy subjects fit to be taken seriously. I’m prepared to endure some dubious propositions to let someone writing about it have his say. But I have limits, and the second quarter of Strange Tools by Alva Noë blew past them.
Noë spent the book up to this point arguing, as a philosopher, that art is a subcategory of philosophy: art is a “strange tool” for investigating the nature of our perceptual being. This is a philosophical activity; ergo, said activity distinguishes art from other kinds of objects. He differentiates mere pictures from artistic paintings, and refers to “artist-painters” as opposed to picture painters whose works do not engage in that kind of investigation. This is overstated and flimsy, but I can accept a limited form of the argument that ambitious art inherently makes both artistic claims about itself and normative claims about art in general—both is and ought.
After asking for the reader’s indulgence for much of the first quarter of the book, he withdraws it when dealing with other philosophers who claimed that art has an evolutionary basis, particularly Ellen Dissanayake, or a natural or biological one, including anyone associated with neuroaesthetics. Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent much of the first part of Phenomenology of Perception dismantling empiricist claims about the experience of seeing. I suppose Noë feels similarly obliged to deal with the contemporary empircists. But Noë’s argument hinges on art ultimately belonging in the domain of the mental or at least the social, something for which Merlau-Ponty would have had no patience. Phenomenology of Perception contends that you can’t make easy distinctions between cognitive, bodily, cultural, and environmental processes, something to which Noë alludes but seems to forget when it suits him.
This, in vaunted refutation of the naturalists, is just irritating:
[Dissanayake] illustrates her point with lines from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself that give expression to the sexual, physical character of the pleasures we may take in art.
Substack won’t let me put poetry blocks in block quotes, but here’s the germane Whitman.
I hear the trained soprano ... she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip; The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast, It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror, It sails me ... I dab with bare feet ... they are licked by the indolent waves, I am exposed ... cut by bitter and poisoned hail, Steeped amid honeyed morphine ... my windpipe squeezed in the fakes of death, Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, And that we call Being.
Back to Noë:
It is the fact of this sort of extreme, bodily, passionate response to art that requires explanation, she says, and only an evolutionary, only a truly species perspective, one that takes into account reaches of time on evolutionary scales, can provide the needed explanation.
If the argument of this book is right, then Dissanayake gets things exactly backward. Art’s effects are not immediate. And they are never simple or unproblematic or direct in the way that the pleasures of food and sex are (or can be) simple and unproblematic and direct. Art’s responses are always perturbable by criticism, by questioning, by context, and by reflection. They are magnificently and necessarily cultural.
Never immediate, simple, unproblematic, or direct? This is quite a claim to make on behalf of the rest of humanity for all time. And what’s worse:
I find that there’s something startlingly self-defeating in Dissanayake’s appeal to Whitman’s poem to document the bodily, visceral, sensual character of our art responses. For one thing, Whitman’s poem is, well, it’s just that, a work of nineteenth-century literary art. And while its artistic merit is not in question, it does not produce in readers the riot of bodily, erotic excitement that the poem itself describes. So its very existence gives the lie to the idea that physical-sensual response is, if you like, required for art, or what art most truly aims at.
Yet the effectiveness of Whitman’s poem demonstrates that cultural know-how and background understanding—literacy, familiarity with and interest in reading—serve as the vehicle of artistic creation and aesthetic experience and are not, as it were, some kind of “high cultural” overlay. The poem exhibits the fact that thought and feeling cleave to each other.
Thought and feeling don’t just cleave to each other—thought and experience inhere in perception and sensation. That you don’t literally heave along with Whitman doesn’t disprove the idea that a sensual basis is required for art. It’s hard to know how these lines of Whitman would be intelligible to someone with no experience of lovemaking, or hailstorms, or painkillers. Whitman is metal, and Noë seems not to grasp why the rest of us bang our heads.
Whitman’s poem investigates the encounter not with a woman, or her voice, but precisely with a trained soprano, that is, with art. The poem affords us the opportunity to consider the ways that, through such an encounter, we come up against what he, in the penultimate line, calls “the puzzle of puzzles,” namely, the inexplicable fact of our being. Whitman’s example brings out that physical feeling and emotional response are art’s preconditions, its raw materials, rather than something at which art aims. Art aims at much more. For Whitman, as for us, art is a kind of philosophy.
The lines again, emphasis added: “Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, / And that we call Being.” Feel, not “consider.” Philosophy, pace Noë, is not this large. It won’t do to presume that philosophy includes any variety of contemplation or wonderment. Strange Tools doesn’t illuminate art, it makes the category of philosophy incoherent.
More problems with the book ensue, but there’s no need to go into them. I’m discontinuing this book from further consideration. We will return to Art in America 1945-1970 for a couple of weeks and then launch into Joyce. I’m currently in Miami attending to an urgent family matter, but the Asynchronous Studio Book Club calendar will reflect the new schedule when I’m able to revise it.
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism edited by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.