Table of Contents
THE LIMITS OF DEPICTION: THE FLAG PROBLEM
Alberto Voltolini
A HARD DISTINCTION: APPLYING THE SCIENCE OF SEX TO ART HISTORY’S PORNOGRAPHY PROBLEM
Emily Horn
FUNCTION AND EXPERIENCE: TOWARDS AN EXPERIENTIAL EVALUATIVE FUNCTIONALISM
Tyler Olds
THE LIMITATIONS OF DEPICTION: THE FLAG PROBLEM
Alberto Voltolini
University of Turin
In this paper, I want to show that at least two of the three reasons Wollheim provides in order to show that Jasper Johns’ Flag is not the object of a proper seeing-in experience are correct. By means of the very same reasons, one may also show that some other paintings by Johns that are in the vicinity of Flag are instead the objects of a proper seeing-in experience. Since that experience is for Wollheim the mark of pictoriality, this exploration once more shows what the limits of depiction.
Introduction
A Jasper Johns’ flag painting like Flag (Fig.1) is “a conscious challenge that functions as both paradox and puzzle […, for] Flag serves to question what a painting is, and how it is to be differentiated from the object(s) it represents” (Loring Wallace 2014, 9-10). In (1980, 150-1), Wollheim claimed that such paintings are borderline cases of pictures.
Fig.1 Flag, Jasper Johns 1954-55 (Jstor from Artstor)
Paintings like Flag merely seemingly satisfy what for him is the both necessary and sufficient condition in order for something to have a figurative value, hence the necessary condition for something to be a depiction, i.e., a pictorial representation, a bona fide picture—namely, to be grasped (by a suitable spectator) by means of a sui generis perceptual experience of seeing-in. Granted, in order for something to really be a depiction for Wollheim, a seeing-in experience of something must also be its correct seeing-in experience—namely, the experience conforming to the author’s pictorial intentions in painting that something. Pareidolias—e.g., rocks in which one spontaneously sees faces, clouds in which one spontaneously sees animals—are typical examples of something in which something else is seen. Pareidolias have figurative value, yet are not depictions for Wollheim, for no correct seeing-in experience is associated with them. Yet Johns’ flag paintings like Flag also differ from pareidolias. Independently of the correctness issue, in such paintings nothing can be properly seen. Instead, for Wollheim (1980, 150), the perceptual experience of ultimately grasping a Johns’ flag painting like Flag is closer to a standard perceptual experience of seeing-as— namely, seeing such a painting as an (American) flag.
Granted, one might think that the case of Johns’ flag paintings like Flag is too marginal in order to be interesting for a general reflection on depiction. But this conclusion would be too hasty. Wollheim discusses this case in order to fix the boundaries of the figurative, hence the boundaries of what makes a representation a depiction. Indeed, if one legitimately assumed that Wollheim’s assessment of the case of Johns’ flag paintings like Flag rules them out of the realm of depictions, that case would be another example showing that his theory of depiction is revisionary, since it would not rank as depictions paintings that are pretheoretically taken to be bona fide pictures just as any other depiction. As is well-known, for him (1987) genuine trompe l’oeils are not depictions since they do not elicit a seeing-in experience of them.[1]
In this paper, I assume that Wollheim’s criteria of figurativity and depiction are correct. Instead, I focus on whether Wollheim is right in claiming that Johns’ flag paintings like Flag are not grasped via a proper seeing-in experience by assessing the three reasons he provides (1980, 150-1) to this purpose:
a Johns’ flag painting like Flag is a painting of a particular rather than of a state of affairs;
it is cropped to the contours of its subject’s representation—in it one can only see an (American) flag as a whole;
it shares with that subject (at least most of) its essential properties: “both are two dimensional, both are made of textile, both are coloured and to the same design instructions” (1980, 150)—it is actually a sort of (American) flag.[2]
First, I claim that Wollheim is generally right as regards Flag in particular. Indeed, given what a seeing-in experience amounts to in Wollheim’s terms, no such experience really grasps Flag. Hence, since for Wollheim seeing-in is a necessary condition for depiction, Flag is not a depiction. However, pace Wollheim, who seemingly considers (iii) as more relevant than (i) and (ii), I take these two reasons as decisive, when properly assessed.
Second, however, I claim that there are other flag paintings by Johns similar to Flag that are grasped via a proper experience of seeing-in (e.g. Three Flags), since, unlike Flag, they are not featured by (i) and (ii). Hence, they are depictions according to Wollheim’s criterion (being correctly seen-in).
One might observe that, undoubtedly, unlike Flag, paintings like Three Flags are depictions for Wollheim. Yet, it is important to understand why they are so, since some people (e.g., Walton 2008) have assimilated the two cases. The point is: by distinguishing Johns’ flag paintings into those, like Flag, which fail to be depictions—since according to (i) and (ii) they are not properly seen-in—and those, like Three Flags, which are genuine depictions—since they are properly seen-in—Wollheim’s seeing-in criterion for something to be a depiction actually draws another demarcation line between depictive and non-depictive paintings.
The architecture of this paper is as follows. In Section 1, I focus on the first point, by addressing some objections to my assessment in Section 2. In Section 3, I focus on the second point.
- Some Johns’ Paintings (e.g., Flag) Are Not Depictions
For Wollheim (1980, 1987, 1998, 2003a, 2003b), a seeing-in experience is a sui generis twofold perceptual experience. It is made out of two different folds—namely, the configurational fold (CF), in which one perceptually grasps the picture’s vehicle, the physical basis of a picture, and the recognitional fold (RF), in which one perceptually grasps the scene that a picture presents, which for Wollheim also coincides with the picture’s subject.[3] Enjoying this experience means enjoying a proper fusion experience, in which the two folds are interpenetrated (Voltolini 2020a). Indeed, neither fold coincides with the corresponding perceptual experience of the picture’s vehicle or of the picture’s subject, taken in isolation.
Given this Wollheimian characterization of seeing-in, I address Wollheim’s reasons why Flag is not grasped by a proper seeing-in experience and, thus, is not a depiction.
To start with, I take that Wollheim’s reason (iii)—to repeat, that Flag shares with its subject most of its essential properties, hence it is a sort of flag as well—basically does not work regarding Flag itself. Granted, both Flag’s vehicle and its alleged subject can be truthfully attributed some, perhaps many, identical properties. First, both can be truthfully attributed what Lopes (2005) calls the vehicle’s mere surface properties, such as being made of a certain stuff. Flag’s vehicle can be indeed made by the same stuff constituting an American flag (as Wollheim says, both are made of textile). Second, certainly both are truthfully attributed what Lopes (ib.) calls the vehicle’s design properties, i.e., those of the vehicle’s surface properties enabling a subject to be seen in that vehicle: namely, the same colors, as Wollheim again stresses, the same shapes, and even the same arrangement of such colors and shapes. Yet, Flag—in particular, its vehicle—and its alleged subject differ in some at least of their essential properties, i.e., what makes them items of a different kind.
First of all, pace Wollheim (1980, 150), unlike the former, the latter is ascribed three-dimensionality: unlike the painting, which is flat, a flag is an admittedly thin yet 3D item.
On behalf of Wollheim, one might reply that Flag is a 3D object, although very thin as well, hence it shares three-dimensionality with its alleged subject. But this reply would be wrong. As regards ordinary pictures, one abstracts from the fact that their vehicle is a 3D object, albeit very thin. For otherwise it would be meaningless to talk, as many people do (see Wiesing 2010), of the ‘miracle’ of pictures, i.e., the astonishing fact that one can see a 3D subject as emerging from what is basically a 2D object. In this respect, Flag is no exception. Flag is nothing like a bas-relief; it is flat just as any ordinary picture.
Moreover, Flag and its alleged subject differ regarding flagness itself. Unlike the latter, the former is not a flag; at most, it shares with the latter its flag-like design, as Wollheim (1980, 150) stresses: “both are […] to the same design instructions”.
On behalf of Wollheim, one might reply that Flag’s vehicle indeed is an (American) flag, since it is utterly indistinguishable from that flag. Hence again, how can one see an (American) flag in an (American) flag? This is what Lopes (2005, 42) stresses as regards the similar case of Jasper Johns’ paintings of targets.
Yet, it is very clear from Wollheim’s original quotation that he is making a (wrong) claim not about phenomenology, but about metaphysics. To repeat, among the properties that he claims Flag and an American flag basically share, there are not only phenomenologically relevant properties (colors), but also material properties (being made of the same textile) and architectural properties (being made in accordance with the same design instructions). Moreover, if Wollheim’s point were merely phenomenological, it would make the same point he makes in the case of genuine trompe l’oeils. For him, such trompe l’oeils are not depictions, since their experience is phenomenologically indistinguishable from that of their alleged subjects. More generally, the above reply is implausible. As is well-known since Austin (1962) and Putnam (1975), indistinguishability is not a good guide to metaphysics, whether one conceives it epistemologically—for all we know, we cannot distinguish one item from another one— or phenomenologically—the experience of two lookalike items have the same phenomenal character. Likewise, the epistemological or phenomenological indistinguishability of Flag and its alleged vehicle does not make them metaphysically the same kind of thing. So, the fact that Flag’s vehicle looks like an (American) flag does not mean that it is such a flag. Flag’s vehicle is not a flag; at most it is a painted flag (Morris 2020): it is an artefact corresponding to a suitable modification of a flag. In other words, as Morris (ib.) stresses, it is modified by some painting activity in a flagwise way, in the very same sense in which a fake duck is not a duck, but at most is a toy duck, i.e., it is molded by some sculptorial activity in a duckwise way for some ludic purposes. Granted, given its indistinguishability from an (American) flag, Flag might be used as such a flag. But to be used as a flag is not the same as being a flag, just as for a screwdriver to be used as an ear cleaner does not make it an ear cleaner, as Umberto Eco once witfully said. Hence, this use would not lead to that overall coincidence between Flag’s vehicle and its alleged subject that would prevent Flag from being grasped by a proper seeing-in experience.[4]
Granted, Wollheim’s reason (iii) to take Flag’s experience as not being a proper seeing-in experience might work if Flag’s vehicle and its alleged subject were truthfully attributed (at least almost) all the same properties, whether essential or accidental. This would be the case with a 2D item allegedly supposed to be a picture of another 2D item with the very same properties: both the 2D vehicle and its alleged 2D subject would share their two-dimensionality as well as their colors and shapes, as with Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome (Fig.2), which is both 2D and utterly blue. If one supposed that it is a picture of a 2D blue item, one would be wrong. For one does not see a 2D blue item in a 2D blue item, one merely sees a 2D blue item.
Fig. 2 Blue Monochrome, Yves Klein 1961 (Jstor from Artstor)
But this is not the case with Flag, in which the vehicle’s and the alleged subject’s respective essential properties overall differ in important respects. Indeed, since Flag’s alleged vehicle and its alleged subject merely partially share the same essential properties, this mere partial coincidence would not prevent the alleged subject we face when we see Flag from being grasped by a seeing-in experience.
All in all, therefore, Wollheim’s reason (iii) to take Flag not to be grasped by a proper seeing-in experience, hence not to be a depiction, does not work (although it might work for other paintings). However, this fact does not undermine Wollheim’s conviction that the experience of Flag is not a proper seeing-in experience. For the other two reasons he provides—to repeat: (i) Johns’ Flag is a painting of a particular rather than of a state of affairs; (ii) it is cropped to the contours of its subject’s representation (in it, one can only see an (American) flag as a whole)—are perfectly acceptable. On behalf of Wollheim, let me explain why I take this to be the case.
First of all, as regards (ii), consider that in the RF of a seeing-in experience, for Wollheim one sees parts of the picture’s subject as standing behind other parts: “my perception is twofold in that I simultaneously am visually aware of the marked surface and experience something in front of, or behind, something else—in this case, a woman in a hat standing in front of a clump of trees” (2003a, 3). If this is the case, then what one sees in a picture must mobilize some occlusion relation. In the above case, by standing in front of a clump of trees, the hatted woman covers not only some of the background elements of what is seen in the picture Wollheim mentions—possibly, it covers some of the trees themselves, at least partially—but also her back, since the woman is given frontally to the spectator. For Wollheim, this precisely happens with Michelangelo’s Sistine Deluge, in which “what I see is, say, a crowd of people of which all but the leading members are obscured from view by a fold in the ground” (1980, 141).[5] Yet no occlusion relations are captured while attending to Flag. For in Flag’s vehicle, all its alleged design properties are visibly manifest. Hence, there is no chance for that vehicle to present any occlusion relation. Thus, saying à la Wollheim that in its case, since Flag is cropped to the contours of its subject’s representation, one only sees an (American) flag in the painting as a whole is just a (clumsy) way of saying that Flag is affected by no proper seeing-in experience. Consider again Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome. Following Wollheim, I said before that no proper seeing-in experience affects that painting, since its vehicle and its alleged subject coincide in their essential properties. Now, could it regain a figurative value if one supposed that in that painting as a whole one sees not a 2D, but a 3D item? Obviously not. For it presents no occlusion relation (all its alleged design properties are visibly manifest). Hence, supposing that one sees a 3D item in it would be a mere wishful thinking. Ditto for Flag.
Moreover, reflecting on Wollheim’s (2003a) example shows that also his reason (i) to dismiss the idea that Flag is affected by a seeing-in experience is cogent. If for Wollheim one must grasp occlusion relations in order to see a subject in the RF of a seeing-in experience, then pace Lopes (1996) (and what Wollheim himself actually seems to concede, 1980, 140), one cannot see only a single particular in a picture. Rather, as Nanay (2022) maintains, in it one can only see a state of affairs viz a complex scene, i.e., a state of affairs whose particular constituents stand between them at least in certain figure/ground relations that determine certain occlusion relation. Thus, one cannot have a proper seeing-in experience of Flag. Flag would indeed only allow to grasp a particular as its alleged subject.
All in all, although reason (iii) hardly seems a good reason for Flag’s experience not to be a proper seeing-in experience, reasons (i) and (ii), when properly assessed, are instead good reasons for denying that such an experience is a proper seeing-in experience. Hence, given Wollheim’s further correctness criterion for depiction, Flag is not a depiction.
- Objections and Replies
In (2005, 42-3), Lopes has raised an important objection to Wollheim on this concern. A Johns’ painting, says Lopes, is indeed grasped by a seeing-in experience, only of a special case. For, says Lopes, it is a case in which an illusionistic seeing-in, such as the one occurring with genuine trompe-l’oeils, doubles with design-seeing, the perceptual grasping (in the CF of the relevant seeing-in experience) of the design properties of the vehicle. As I said before, for Lopes design properties are the vehicle properties that are responsible for the fact that (in the RF of that experience) the picture’s subject is seen in that picture; primarily, its colors and shapes.
Yet there are two reasons to stress that Flag’s experience is not a seeing-in experience. First, pace Lopes, so-called illusionistic seeing-in is not seeing-in at all. For it is the kind of experience that instead applies to genuine trompe l’oeils, which, as Wollheim himself stressed (1987, 62), are not depictions, since they are just experientially mistaken for something else, i.e., for their alleged subject. Second, also appealing to design-seeing is not sufficient for having a seeing-in experience. For experiencing the vehicle’s design properties does not yield seeing-in yet; instead, experiencing such properties amounts to a seeing-in experience only in a more complex experiential scenario that involves a grouping operation on the vehicle’s elements. This scenario precisely constitutes a proper seeing-in experience, since its CF enables the picture’s subject to emerge in the vehicle, hence to be seen in the picture, in the RF of that very experience.
Regarding the second point, consider the following example. In the case of the ‘aspect dawning’ picture of some horses (Fig.3), in an earlier phase one perceives only the black and white colors of the patches that are scattered across the picture’s vehicle. Granted, such colors are design properties. They are responsible for the fact that, in a later ‘recognitional’ phase, one sees in that picture a group of spotted black-and-white animals; namely, a group of horses (on a background). Yet perceiving such colors by themselves prompts no seeing-in experience. In that later phase, one needs to perceptually perform on that vehicle the grouping operation of subjectively contouring certain of such patches while assembling some others as standing behind that contour in order to get a CF allowing the visual emergence of the horses, as seen in the corresponding RF.
Fig.3 Horses (by courtesy of Paola Tosti)
So, even assuming with Lopes that perceiving Flag involves coupling an illusion of a ‘trompe-l’oeil’-kind with mere design-seeing, that coupling would not be enough to have a proper seeing-in experience of Flag.
Granted, Lopes would disagree with my assessment of the second point. For him, Fig.3 shows a case of pseudo-twofoldness, hence of an improper form of seeing-in. For unlike standard cases of seeing-in, in that case the design properties are not seen independently of what one sees in the picture (2005, 40-2). So, for him, the subject’s emergence, as illustrated by that case, is unnecessary for a proper seeing-in experience. Hence, Flag may be affected by that experience.
Yet Lopes confuses the fact I just showed that, as the case of Fig.3 shows, the vehicle’s design properties really play their seeing-in role only by virtue of the grouping operation on that vehicle’s elements that is responsible for the emergence of a subject in the picture, with the generally wrong idea that seeing the vehicle’s design properties qua design properties is not independent of seeing the subject in the picture. For in actual fact, also in this case a grouping operation concerning the vehicle’s elements is preliminarily needed in order for the design properties to play their seeing-in role. Certainly such properties are responsible for what is seen in the picture. Yet only once that operation is performed, one can see a subject in the picture.[6] Granted, knowing what one may see in a picture (“don’t you see the horses?”) may enable one to see something in that picture (“yes, I now see them”). But this merely depends on the fact that such a knowledge may enable one to perform a certain grouping operation on the picture’s vehicle that further allows one to see a subject in the picture.[7]
All in all, perceiving in Flag’s vehicle the colors that are also the colors of an (American) flag which one would see in Flag, provided that one might see it in that way, does not make it the case that in it one sees that flag. Hence again, Flag is not a depiction.
- Some Other Johns’ Paintings (e.g. Three Flags) Are Depictions
However, the two afore-mentioned reasons why one cannot have a proper seeing-in experience, thereby failing to have a depiction, with John’s paintings like Flag are precisely the very reasons as to why one can have this sort of experience, hence a depiction, with similar paintings by Jasper Johns.
Consider Three Flags (Fig.4).
Fig.4 Three Flags, Jasper Johns 1958 (Jstor from Arstor)
As Wollheim himself would have probably acknowledged, one can certainly have a proper seeing-in experience with Three Flags. Yet this precisely depends on the fact that unlike Flag, the reasons (i) and (ii) for something not to be a proper seeing-in experience, as I have assessed them in the previous Section, do not apply to the experience of Three Flags. First, in it one perceives an (American) flag that partially occludes a different such flag which in its turn partially occludes another such flag. Thus, in that experience there is no cropping of the picture to the contours of its subject’s representation. Hence, second, as regards Three Flags, one does not perceive a single particular stretching across so to speak the whole of the pictorial space, as in the case of Flag. Indeed, in the experience of Three Flags one instead perceives a state of affairs, or more precisely a complex scene, whose different particular constituents—the three flags—stand in a spatial figure/ground relation holding between each other, as standing in certain occlusion relations. Thus, Wollheim’s reasons i) and ii) against the existence of a proper seeing-in experience do not apply to the experience of Three Flags. Hence, that experience is a proper seeing-in experience, whose RF is such that the above three-dimensional scene is perceived in it. Therefore, since Three Flags is also taken to be an item in which one correctly sees three American flags one upon the other (this was indeed Johns’ intention for something to be seen in it), this painting is a depiction; notably, a picture of such flags. So finally, Johns’ flag paintings like Flag on the one hand and Three Flags on the other hand can be exploited to show the limits of depiction in Wollheim’s terms.
Conclusions
First, one can rule Flag out of the realm of depictions. For, when one properly sees things, Flag’s experience conforms with Wollheim’s reasons (i) and (ii) in order for an experience of a painting not to be a proper seeing-in experience of it. Thus, given Wollheim’s seeing-in theory of depiction, Flag is not even a genuine depiction. Yet second, the experience of Three Flags is a proper seeing-in experience, since (i) and (ii) do not apply to it. Since that experience is also a correct seeing-in experience in Wollheim’s terms, Three Flags is a genuine depiction. So, the case of Johns’ paintings nicely illustrates another dividing line, hitherto scarcely assessed, holding for Wollheim between depictions and non-depictions.[8]
References
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Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 205-226.
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[1] In these two cases, Wollheim’s theory of depiction is restrictive. Yet in other cases, it is permissive; it allows abstract paintings in which one (correctly) sees something to count as depictions since one is able to perform a figure/ground segmentation in what one sees (cf. Gaiger (2008, 54)).
[2] Such reasons are remindful of the three general reasons Wollheim (1980, 140-9) provides in order to distinguish a seeing-as experience from a seeing-in one: a) it may merely have a particular item as its content, instead of possibly also having a state of affairs constituted by some particulars as that content; b) while when one sees an x as a certain item there is always a part of that x that is seen as that item (the so-called localization requirement), there may be no parts of an x in which an y is seen in it: a painting may present occlusions, as well as items for which there are no corresponding figurative areas within its vehicle (the second case is what Nanay (2023, 160) calls boundary extension in pictures—Wollheim’s (1980, 141) own example of this case is Cosimo Rosselli’s Way to Calvary, presenting a Christ-like figure holding a cross whose depicted borders escape the picture’s frame); c) it is an alternating experience now of an x now of the item that x is seen as, while the seeing-in experience is a twofold experience in which one is simultaneously aware both of an x and of the y one sees in it.
[3] This coincidence must not be taken for granted. For various people (Husserl 2006, Nanay 2018, Voltolini 2018), what one sees in the picture, the scene it presents, must be distinguished from the picture’s subject, taken as what that picture is about. Indeed, in one and the same picture one may go on seeing the same scene, although the picture may be about different things (cf. Wiesing (2010), Voltolini (2015)).
[4] One might wonder why I have considered Flag in terms of its vehicle and not as an interpreted picture. Since being an interpreted picture is the same as being a depiction, this is for Wollheim precisely what is in question as regards Flag. Incidentally, however, even if by argument’s sake one considered Flag as an interpreted picture, it would be a picture of a flag, but again, not a flag.
[5] On depicted occlusions, see also Pettersson (2011, 283, 293). For Petterson, both depicted occlusions and boundary extension in pictures show that the perception of the picture’s subject, Wollheim’s RF, is substantively cognitively penetrated, as Wollheim (2003a) claimed. On this see Voltolini (2015, 2020b, 2024).
[6] For Voltolini (2015), the case of ‘aspect dawning’ pictures such as that exhibited by Fig.3 is instead the paradigmatic case of seeing-in. For it allows one to realize in temporally separate steps what in a picture’s experience normally happens at one and the same time; namely, the ascription of a figurative value to a vehicle via the rise of a certain seeing-in experience.
[7] In this respect, the perception of the CF is weakly cognitively penetrated (concepts only affect the phenomenal character of the CF whose content remains non-conceptual), along the model of cognitive penetration lite (cognitive penetration only contingently affects that phenomenal character). On weak cognitive penetration and cognitive penetration lite, see Macpherson (2012, 2015).
[8] This paper has been presented in various workshops: 14th Conference of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy, University of Messina, Sep. 22-24 2021, Noto; Reality, Presence, Vision, Eikones, University of Basel, Oct 26-27 2021, Basel; Formerly Anglo-German Now Global Picture Group Workshop, Department of Psychology, Feb 16-17 2022, Turin. I thank all the participants for their insightful and stimulating comments.
A HARD DISTINCTION: APPLYING THE SCIENCE OF SEX TO ART HISTORY’S PORNOGRAPHY PROBLEM
Emily Horn
University of Liverpool
A number of scholars have argued that pornography and art are fundamentally incompatible. Of these, one of the most influential arguments has been put forth by Jerrold Levinson, who argues that pornography can never be art, and that in-between categories such as ‘pornographic art’ cannot exist, on the grounds of the intended response they create in a viewer. However, incompatibility theories such as this often rely on conceptions of sexuality that do not align with scientific findings on how sex works in the body, thereby weakening the assertion that a hard line can be drawn between the two categories. This article unpicks scientific findings on sexual arousal to complicate Levinson’s argument.
*
This paper is primarily concerned with incompatibility theory on the divide between art and pornography, particularly that of Jerrold Levinson, the central premise of which is that a work cannot belong to both categories, owing to the different states created in a viewer by each medium. I will focus on his claims about these supposedly separate states and question his decision to conceptualize them based on their psychological and physiological effects. Though I am not the first to criticize Levinson’s theory, this particular angle of criticism is one that has not been explored before. I will bring in scientific findings on sexual arousal, using a range of data to see what they can add to this debate.
In Come As You Are, Emily Nagoski (2015) presents scientific findings on the physiological and psychological phenomena around sexual response. Over the course of the book, she debunks many myths surrounding the functioning of sex, some of which have great bearings on this discussion. Though many findings are recent, some date back as far as the 1960s. Nevertheless, there remains a delay between the findings of the scientific community and the entry of these studies into popular thought. For example, the term ‘sex drive’ is still widely used today, but is a construct which Nagoski rejects (2015, 226-227). A quick Google search of the term will yield results in the millions, with the top ones all claiming to help an individual increase or lower their drive, despite the concept having been largely discredited by scientists, on which I will go into more detail shortly. Not only is the concept still widely adhered to, it is positioned as a constant source of perceived inadequacy; a prevalent belief from individuals, regardless of their sex or gender, that their supposedly hard-wired ‘sex drive’ is either too strong or too weak. Thus, it is not only inaccurate but can have harmful effects when consistently used with a lack of proper understanding. Its use in philosophical discussions of pornography and art are no exception; the concept shows up in many areas of literature, either in a direct reference or as an underlying, implicit basis of a scholar’s knowledge about sex.
There is a counterargument to be made here that it is not beneficial to bring biological phenomena into philosophical debate, that the two are simply methodologically and functionally different. One could argue that using scientific studies to refute arguments about philosophical concepts is a slippery slope; one could attempt to thwart many theoretical discussions in this way, to no real benefit. I am conscious of this, but my response is that this disciplinary leap has already been made by Levinson. His insistence on rooting his theory in physical bodily response, not only without fully researching said response, but operating on a false conception of it, constitutes a methodological blind spot, which weakens his argument. Therefore, I intend to explore the intersection of these fields more fully to discover what results bridging this gap can yield.
Levinson’s overall thesis is that both erotic art and pornography aim at a certain type of reception in a viewer, but these modes of reception are fundamentally incompatible, and, hence, no material can be both art and pornography (2005, 239). He emphasizes the relationship between a creator’s intended response to their work and a receiver’s actual experience, which seems logical in many ways. It places no importance on the content of either erotic or pornographic pictures, which should, in theory, allow for a diverse range of material to belong to each category. Many have praised Levinson for not being as reductive as other incompatibility theorists, many of whom base their arguments too heavily on content, inevitably leading to narrow categorizations of what gets to count as either art or pornography (Van Brabandt and Prinz 2012 169; Kania 2012, 255). Levinson’s argument becomes difficult to follow when it comes to his definitions of the different experiences which creators aim to bring about in their audience.
Levinson places a great deal of importance on the somewhat elusive state of ‘sexual stimulation’. This is defined as being distinct and separate from ‘sexual arousal’, and while the latter is a term we are surely more familiar with, the former lacks clarity. Hans Maes has criticized this terminology on the grounds that these two states are too interlinked to be clearly separated (2011, 392). Even if one could accept their mutual exclusivity, it seems a stretch to say that they are what all art or pornography knowingly aims to provoke in a viewer. David Davies has developed a thorough criticism of Levinson’s argument on the grounds of his disavowal of the potential category of pornographic art, and on the grounds of the examples he chooses to support his argument (Davies 2012, 74-76). Kania also gives a thorough criticism of Levinson, questioning his assertion that a work cannot aim at an aesthetic and arousing response at the same time (Kania 2012, 257). But Davies and Kania are not much concerned with these ‘arousal-versus-stimulation’ terms, which warrant more criticism.
Levinson defines ‘sexual stimulation’ as “the inducing of sexual thoughts, feelings, imaginings, or desires that would generally be regarded as pleasant in themselves” (2005, 229). This is arguably already an oversimplification; not all sexual thoughts and feelings could be described as pleasant, and not being pleasant would not necessarily invalidate their erotic nature. It is possible to feel aroused whilst simultaneously disgusted, or similarly negatively affected. Levinson then goes on to define ‘arousal’ as the state “that is prelude and prerequisite to sexual release, involving, in the male, at least, some degree of erection” (2005, 229). This approach is problematic in and of itself, as it excludes the female body entirely from its measurement of arousal. But even more crucially, it plays into an ultimately harmful cultural myth that arousal is measurable based on bodily response, which is demonstrably untrue due to the phenomenon of arousal non-concordance.
Arousal non-concordance
Arousal concordance and non-concordance are terms which refer to the correlation of bodily arousal, such as the response of the genitals to a particular stimulus, and subjective arousal, meaning a person’s subjective experience of feeling aroused. In 2010, Chivers et al. published a meta-analysis of 132 studies that measured genital concordance, published between 1969 and 2007, with sample sizes totalling 2505 women and 1918 men across all the studies (2010, 5).[1] Though the methodology and results vary from study to study, there is overall a significant difference between the sexes, with women typically demonstrating lower concordance than men (Chivers et al. 2010, 16).[2]
To give an example, one of the studies, conducted in 2007, measured genital response and subjective arousal in a group of both male and female participants, who were shown a range of clips that included people exercising, masturbating and having sex. While they were watching these, vaginal pulse amplitude (VPA)[3] was measured in female participants and penis circumference fluctuations measured in male participants (Chivers et al. 2007, 1111). At the same time, participants also self-reported their subjective level of arousal on a scale throughout the presentation of the films, measured as a percentage with 0 being no arousal at all and 100 being “most sexual arousal ever felt” (Chivers et al. 2007, 1111). When measuring the correlations between their reported subjective and genital arousal, a significant difference was found between the sexes. (Chivers et al. 2007, 1116).[4]
Another study conducted in 2009, which was not included in the meta-analysis, measured the same data and had participants watch a variety of film clips with both sexual and non-sexual content (2015, 191-193). For the male participants, there was roughly a 50% overlap between their subjective and genital arousal, which is considered statistically significant, while for female participants, it was roughly 10%, which is considered statistically insignificant (Suschinsky et al. 2009, 568; Nagoski 2015, 177-179). These are, of course, only a couple of examples and the samples used are not perfectly representative, being limited in size, age range, and geographical location. The methodologies of studies measuring non-concordance, and therefore the results, vary widely, and interpreting them in one fell swoop to draw neat conclusions is tricky. I have used the above examples because they highlight some important trends within this research, and the 2007 study used one of the largest sample sizes in the meta-analysis, so its results are significant. There are many methodological difficulties when measuring these kinds of responses, and any experiment involving subjective self-reporting is, of course, fallible. Despite the fallibility of these data, however, they are still the best data currently available to us with which to understand genital non-concordance.
What these data demonstrate for this argument is twofold. Firstly, these data show how misguided it is to posit male bodies as the default example, as Levinson does, when the experience of arousal is not universal across the sexes or within them. Even if it could be neatly separated from mental arousal, genital arousal alone is not even a reliable measurement of male sexual response—a statistically significant 50% overlap is still only a 50% overlap—and is wholly unreliable as a measurement of female sexual response.
Secondly, the mental factor of arousal, what a person perceives themselves to be feeling, is incredibly significant; a stimulus’ effect on the body alone cannot be used as a measure of whether or not a person finds that stimulus arousing. This presents some intriguing challenges to Levinson’s proposed categories of experience when viewing erotic art or pornography. At first glance, there appear to be some similarities between the states of ‘subjective’ versus ‘genital’ arousal, which the studies measure, and Levinson’s theorized states of ‘stimulation’ and ‘arousal’. Both he and the studies define the former as changes in thought and feeling, and the latter as physical genital changes. This might initially seem to add credence to Levinson’s theory. However, if one pursues this line of thinking whilst taking the studies’ findings into account, it quickly becomes impossible to maintain that these two states are distinct and mutually exclusive from one another, as Levinson suggests. The two kinds of arousal are surely different facets of the same mechanism. One could argue that they represent different points along a spectrum of arousal, but it still does not seem plausible to experience the genital without the emotional.
Levinson’s suggested categories, therefore, cannot be conflated with those of the studies, but moreover, in light of the studies’ findings, they also do not hold up to scrutiny on their own terms. Levinson refers to his conception of ‘arousal’ as “full-blown” and “prelude and prerequisite to sexual release” (2005, 239; 227), which suggests that he views it, as proposed earlier, as a particularly intense point on a spectrum of sensation. This, however, does not seem in keeping with his assertion that it is a totally separate experience from ‘sexual stimulation’ (2005, 239). Even if it were possible to physically experience intense sexual arousal without psychologically feeling sexual stimulation, the sensation would surely not be more intense, but less; it would certainly be lacking something. If thoughts and feelings are the truer indicator of one’s level of arousal, as the scientific findings seem to suggest they are, then bodily arousal alone, without the presence of those feelings, would surely not be a more pleasurable, or more sexually enticing, experience.
What is arousal?
Added to this, some researchers have suggested that having a bodily response to a sexual stimulus at all is a learned reflex, not a reflection of whether a person enjoys or is emotionally engaged with it (Bancroft and Graham 2011, 719). This, coupled with the findings on non-concordance, would explain why it is possible to have a bodily response to material that one finds morally objectionable. If genital arousal is to be taken as a measure of ‘real’ arousal, as Levinson suggests, this leaves room for a person’s reaction to, for example, violent sexual material, to be taken as evidence that they secretly enjoy watching sexual violence. This would be misguided, and no doubt cause many to worry about their moral compass. If we view genital arousal as the reflex it is, we can then begin to question anew the different ways in which both pornography and art appeal to us.
To adequately interpret the implications of this, it is necessary to also understand some other relevant discoveries and models of sexuality. Firstly, that sex is not a drive, secondly, what it is instead and thirdly, the dual control model. Let’s begin with the first: that sex is not a drive. The term ‘drive’, in biological contexts, refers to a mechanism in the body that sustains an organism’s life. Drives in the human body include hunger, thirst, sleep and thermoregulation. Without maintaining a comfortable stasis of all these factors, a person cannot survive. To suggest that sex is on a par with any of these things is to place far too much importance on it, and ultimately justify a range of unacceptable behaviour in the name of satisfying sexual desire. This perpetuates rape culture and has been used countless times throughout history to justify predatory sexual behaviour, particularly in men. In Nagoski’s words, “if sex is a drive, like hunger, then potential partners are like food” (2015, 212).
I am not suggesting that Levinson consciously holds this belief, but this cultural attitude implicitly underpins his understandings of desire, a factor which goes unacknowledged in the text. He is by no means the only pornography scholar for whom this is the case; Michael Rea even uses appetite as an analogy to demonstrate his arguments (2001, 137). This seemingly innocent linking of sexual desire and hunger positions sex as a quota that must be met. Rea’s and Levinson’s arguments play into a masculinized conception of desire, one rooted in a heteronormative and patriarchal sexual culture, which is positioned as the default experience instead of one subjective standpoint out of many. Within this ideology, sexual desire is a pursuit or chase with one goal, that of sexual ‘release’, as Levinson calls it (2005, 229). The use of this word constructs an idea of an end-point that needs to be attained (orgasm, presumably) in order to experience sexual satisfaction. This is a view of orgasm which already is not consistent for everyone, particularly those of queer identities or possessing female bodies, for whom sexual experience may not be wholly contingent on having an orgasm at all, or having just one, or on viewing orgasm as the only and ultimate goal. This view condenses sexual experience to a quest with a definite beginning-middle-end structure, when many people’s lived experience may be far less easy to define. This notion of having to achieve sexual ‘release’ is intrinsically tied to the sex-as-drive myth.
Instead of a drive, sex can be more accurately described as an incentive motivation system, meaning that desire for sex is motivated by a potential pleasant reward, rather than by a need which must be fulfilled. Thus, what we might call a person’s ‘sex drive’ is more accurately represented by the Dual Control Model proposed by Bancroft and Graham (2011, 725), wherein each person has sexual exciters and inhibitors. Nagoski terms these the ‘accelerator’ and the ‘brake’ (2015, 51), and for ease I will adopt the same language. A state of heightened sexual arousal will be achieved by both appealing to a person’s accelerator and eliminating factors that might activate their brake, and exactly what may influence these two mechanisms is specific to each person and varies day-to-day depending on their social and environmental context.
This model leaves far more room for individual variations between people than previous conceptions of sexuality, as it considers more factors at play in the process of achieving and sustaining arousal. What it demonstrates for this argument is that a sexual stimulus will only influence a person proportionately to their capacity to be influenced. The most alluring piece of pornography in the world would be much less appealing if viewed in an incongruent or unpleasant context. ‘Context’ could here refer to a physical location, or to a person’s mental state on a particular day, including their mood, stress levels, beliefs about sex, cultural background, and so on. In other words, a work’s content and intention, while they are crucial for their capacity to enable a viewer’s accelerator, cannot be taken as the sole determining factor of whether they could be considered pornographic, when we take into consideration the existence of the brake.
Figure 1. Courbet’s L’origine du monde, 1866, in context at the Musée d’Orsay. [Image by Michele M.F. CC. 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/]
By Levinson’s assessment, appreciating a work of erotic art, as opposed to pornography, would effectively activate a person’s brake, thereby preventing a state of ‘full-blown’ arousal. I am not wholly convinced that this is what is at play when we encounter erotic art. Given the crucial role of context, added to the different factors that may activate a person’s brake, part of what may prevent arousal when viewing erotic art is the physical location in which we view it. It would be unlikely to experience heightened sexual arousal when viewing erotic art in a museum or gallery. Even though the brain may recognise a sexual stimulus, which may in turn lead to a genital response, a person’s inhibitor would prevent the cycle of arousal from progressing because they have learned that a public space, such as a gallery, is not a sex-appropriate context. Whilst we do not only encounter erotic art in these spaces, they are the main context for our interactions with it in contemporary times. It is hard to say with certainty that a person viewing Courbet’s Origin of the World in a vacuum would feel the same way about it as they do in the Musée d’Orsay (Fig. 1), because one can never view it in a vacuum. By contrast, the relationship of pornography to a viewer is usually an isolated and private one, where a person is free to create a safe context for themselves in which to experience more intense desire. It is impossible to entirely remove the role of context from the discussion of a recipient’s response, and I would argue that this has just as much, if not more, bearing on a person’s response to art or pornography than the intent behind its creation.
Concluding thoughts
The research that Nagoski details demonstrates that an isolation of the states of ‘stimulation’ and ‘arousal’ is not as clear-cut as Levinson wishes to believe. If we define stimulation as having sexual thoughts or feelings, it becomes impossible to separate it from arousal when considering the many studies which show that those thoughts and feelings are the all-important factors in a person’s embodied experience. If a person’s subjective psychological experience of feeling aroused is a clearer indicator of what they are feeling than their genital response, as the research suggests, then one could even argue for a reversal of Levinson’s categories. This would mean that erotic art could be considered more sexually arousing, and therefore pornographic, than pornography itself.
What this research shows, at the very least, is that drawing a hard line between pornography and erotic art on the grounds that Levinson suggests is difficult. Though he has been praised for providing a more expansive incompatibility theory than other scholars, he still bases his arguments on a demonstrably narrow and uninformed view of sexuality and desire. One can only assume that much of his argument is unconsciously based on personal experience, with little self-reflection or acknowledgement of his own subjectivity. The clearest example of this is when he allows for the possibility that some pornography performs its function through the very act of engaging the viewer artistically, thereby constituting a “complex mode of pornography” (2005, 236). He concedes that this constitutes the chief counterargument to his view that something cannot engage a viewer both artistically and sexually. However, he ultimately dismisses this point by claiming that this type of material is aimed at a “cognitively atypical viewer” (ibid.). He then briefly mentions in a footnote that this would only amount to a cognitively atypical male viewer, and that it has been suggested to him by a colleague that it may actually be the norm for females. Though this greatly threatens the validity of his argument, he does not elaborate on it (2005, 236).
His unwillingness to examine this idea further, and the fact that he neglects to even explain why he will not, is telling. He simply does not seem to think it relevant, which clearly demonstrates his willingness to position subjective male experience as default, and female experience not only as ‘other’ but as effectively abnormal. Perhaps this is motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by a belief that women do not engage with pornography, though this is, of course, untrue. This lack of acknowledgement weakens many of the points he is attempting to make; how can one attempt to create an all-encompassing definition of an area of sexual behaviour that does not consider how subjective sexual behaviour is? These misconceptions ultimately overshadow and discredit Levinson’s wider argument.
Sex is still contentious and conflicting, and it is difficult to enter any discussion about it, or pornography for that matter, without unwittingly bringing along our own biases and beliefs. This is perhaps unavoidable, but it must at the very least be acknowledged. To make any ultimately meaningful headway in how we talk about porn in scholarship, an attempt must be made to create scholarship that is informed, truly sex-neutral, and that does not play into long-held, ultimately harmful attitudes that have no basis in reality. As Mari Mikkola has neatly argued, “Pornography cannot be analyzed from the philosopher’s armchair a priori, and speaking authoritatively about issues relevant to pornography requires knowing something about those issues” (2019, 259). Though it might not be necessary for all scholars discussing pornography to have a thorough understanding of the science of sex, a lack of seeming interest or research into sex and sexuality is a curious phenomenon in a functionalist argument about pornography. To seek, for whatever reason, to provide a linear distinction between art and pornography by way of the effects of each on the body without conceptualizing them accurately is, at best, an unproductive venture and, at worst, spreads misinformation about a crucial aspect of human experience.
References
Bancroft, John and Graham, Cynthia A., ‘The varied nature of women’s sexuality: Unresolved issues and a theoretical approach’, Hormones and Behavior (2011) 59:1, 717-729.
Chivers, Meredith L., Seto, Michael C. and Blanchard, Ray, ‘Gender and Sexual Orientation Differences in Sexual Response to Sexual Activities Versus Gender of Actor in Sexual Films’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2007) 93:6, 1108-1121.
Chivers, Meredith L., Seto, Michael C., Lalumière, Martin L., Laan, Ellen and Grimbos, Teresa, ‘Agreement of Self-Reported and Genital Measures of Sexual Arousal in Men and Women: A Meta-Analysis’, Archives of Sexual Behavior (2010) 39:1, 5-56.
Davies, David, ‘Pornography, Art, and the Intended Response of the Receiver’ in Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61-82.
Kania, Andrew, ‘Concepts of Pornography: Aesthetics, Feminism, and Methodology’, in Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds.) Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 254-276.
Levinson, Jerrold, (2005). Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures. Philosophy and Literature, 29(1), 228-240.
Maes, Hans, ‘Drawing the Line: Art versus Pornography’, Philosophy Compass (2011) 6:6, 385-397.
Mikkola, Mari, Pornography: A Philosophical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Nagoski, Emily, Come As You Are: The surprising new science that will transform your sex life (London: Scribe Publications, 2015).
Rea, Michael C., ‘What Is Pornography?’ Noûs (2001) 35:1, 118-145.
Suschinsky, Kelly D., Lalumière, Michael L. and Chivers. Meredith L., ‘Sex Differences in Patterns of Genital Sexual Arousal: Measurement Artifacts or True Phenomena?’, Archives of Sexual Behavior (2009) 38:1, 559-573.
Van Brabandt, Petra and Prinz, Jesse, ‘Why do porn films suck?’, in Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 160-190.
[1] I use ‘women’ and ‘men’ here only to be consistent with the studies’ own terms; participants’ self-described gender identities were not measured and to my knowledge no studies of this kind have yet been conducted on trans, gender non-conforming or intersex people.
[2] The average correlations between subjective and genital arousal observed across all the studies can be defined as r=0.56 (male) and r=0.25 (female), which is noted as a significant statistical difference overall (Chivers et al. 2010: 16).
[3] Vaginal pulse amplitude measurement, or vaginal plethysmography, involves using a small probe to measure pulse and blood flow changes to the vagina, as these are what enable vaginal lubrication.
[4] The recorded correlations for male subjects were 0.82 for heterosexual and 0.85 for gay men, where for heterosexual and lesbian women they were 0.56 and 0.58, respectively (Chivers et al. 2007, 1116).
Function and Experience: Towards an Experiential Evaluative Functionalism
Tyler Olds
CUNY Graduate Center
In this paper I offer both a critique and revision of the functional theory of artistic evaluation as forwarded by Noël Carroll and Jonathan Gilmore. In summary, this theory has it that works of art ought to be evaluated based upon their ability to fulfill some function specified by the artist responsible for their production. A potential consequence of this thesis is that the evaluation of a work of art could theoretically be performed without the evaluator having had any genuine experience of the work in question. Taking a cue from the work of both Richard Wollheim and Paisley Livingston, I try to show that this consequence breeds disaster for our commonsense conception of good art criticism: for our everyday concept of art criticism, a good art critic is one who adequately appreciates works of art, where such appreciation involves experiential contact with the works in question. Once this problem is sketched out, I provide a revised version of the functionalist framework that I believe avoids the problem of inexperienced criticism by centering the production of a unique artwork-relative experience as the primary function of a given work of art.
I. Wollheim on Artistic Understanding
I want to begin with an idea that can be found in Richard Wollheim’s (1984, 252) article “Art, Interpretation, and the Creative Process,” namely, the idea that “understanding a work of art is a perceptual activity”. This thought has two central components: the first is that the viewer utilizes a relevant “cognitive stock” of information to enrich their viewing of a work; the second is that the relevant information allows the meaning of a work to become manifest in the viewer’s experience of said work. According to Wollheim, genuine recovery of an artwork’s meaning involves coming to experience the work and its qualities as the artist ultimately intended for it to be experienced. Contrary to any strict form of aesthetic cognitivism, for Wollheim the meaning of a work is not an object of pure cognition but that of cognitively-informed experience.
It is this quasi-cognitivist thesis that will guide what I have to say in the balance of this paper. For I believe that this reformulation of Wollheim’s thought can be used to subtend a prominent theory of artistic evaluation: the functional theory of art criticism. In my eyes, this theory runs into trouble at exactly the point in which Wollheim’s thesis seems most correct; a potential consequence of the functional theory as it has so far been articulated is that the evaluation of a work of art could theoretically be performed without the evaluator having had any genuine experience of the work in question. In section II below, I’ll do my best to make explicit both the tenets of evaluative functionalism and the mentioned issue with it. Section III will comprise my proffered amendment to the standard functional theory aimed at addressing this issue. In short, this will take the form of a revised evaluative functionalism that centers the production of a unique artwork-relative experience as the primary function of a work of art. Section IV will serve as a brief conclusion.
II. Evaluative Functionalism and the Concept of Criticism
The Functional Theory in Outline
Broadly construed, the functional theory of evaluation as proffered by Jonathan Gilmore (2011) and Noël Carroll (2022), amongst others, is nothing more than a reminder that artworks—like all other man-made objects—are artefacts.[1] In being produced as artefacts, all works of art are produced to serve a certain (intentionally defined) purpose, and therefore may be evaluated in terms of their ability to serve the purpose for which they were originally produced. This broad construal may be clarified a bit through comparison with the functional evaluation of a more commonplace artefact.
When one begins the task of critically evaluating a knife, the primary consideration is neither the length of the blade nor the thickness of its handle, but the knife’s ability to easily cut through objects. The length of the blade and the thickness of the handle may ultimately come to be of some importance insofar as they aid in the knife’s ability to cut through things with ease, but it’s clear that the importance of these features is only arrived at derivatively through prior consideration of the knife’s cutting abilities. In short, a knife, qua knife, is made with a specific function in mind, so any evaluation of a knife must first and foremost privilege its ability to perform this function. The same goes for any other man-made item. In evaluating them, we first look to see the function(s) for which they were produced, and then go on to judge how well they can fulfill this function.
Whereas normal artefacts tend to have a single function that’s definitive of their nature, there’s a clear discrepancy between such commonplace items, such as a knife, and works of art. That is, there does not seem to be any one function which both Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons seek to fulfill. Functional theorists however are not blind to this disanalogy. In his “A Functional View of Artistic Evaluation,” Gilmore (2011, 295-6) addresses this by introducing the thought that the generic functions of artworks are able to do the work that general definitional functions do for all other artefacts.[2] Although all artworks do not share a unified function, each artwork does belong to specific genres, and these genres themselves can be functionally defined. For example, In a Year of 13 Moons can be categorized as a work of both New German Cinema and early Queer Cinema, and we can determine how good or bad the work is at fulfilling the functions definitive of each of these genres. As a work of New German Cinema, we can look to see how well the film was able to accomplish the goal of helping to carve a new cinematic identity for a fragmented, economically fraught and culturally disillusioned post-war Germany. And as a work of Queer Cinema, we can consider how well the film showcases the vicissitudes of queer life through its focus on the suffering of a transgender woman dealing with the personal and public consequences of her transition. In any case, the deferral to generic functions provides a genre-based standard from which we can base our functional evaluations of the film or any other work of art.
This focus on generic evaluation should not however be taken to preclude the fact that for the artist the use of generic conventions only figures in the creative process as a means to the achievement of some greater end envisioned for the piece. This greater end is what functional theorists call the work’s constitutive function(s) or purpose(s). In Carroll’s (2022, 8) words, these functions “provide the unifying ideas that endow the artwork’s parts and elements with relevance and significance,” and, as such, it is to this function that all criticism must finally appeal, for their identification allows us to determine whether a work and its component parts succeed in the role envisioned for them by the artist. Thus, according to the functional theory, when we evaluate a work of art, we determine which function(s) the artist had in mind for it, and in determining this, we can come to know what genre(s) the artist intended the work to fall under (or to subvert).[3] Once we know these functions, we then move to settle the question of whether or not they have been satisfied by the work. On this picture, then, artistic evaluation is just a matter of seeing whether an artwork is able to do all that it was, artistically speaking, intended to do.
Harking back to In a Year of 13 Moons, a candidate constitutive function for the film might then be: to expose the unacknowledged indecency of the post-war German social structure through a graphic exhibition of the physical and psychological toll paid by a transgender woman living in such a social sphere. This constitutive function makes subtle reference to both of the generic functions mentioned earlier, and due to the nesting of these functions within the work’s larger constitutive function, satisfaction of the latter relies upon satisfaction of the former. So, for the evaluative functionalist, the extent to which one deems In a Year of 13 Moons a good film—a film satisfying its constitutive function—is the extent to which one deems it a good work of both New German and Queer Cinema.
Inexperienced Criticism and Critical Testimony
Though I believe that evaluative functionalism is largely correct, there is one problem with the view as it has been described: on certain readings, it appears as though the whole of the functional evaluative process could be performed without any actual experience of the work in question. All that is required for evaluation of a work and its constituents is an understanding of its functions and a determination of the degree to which they are satisfied. And in theory, this determination can be made with nothing more than the functional understanding listed above, a thorough description of the perceptible qualities of the work, and a limited range of background contextual information. The issue with this existing as even a theoretical possibility is that it fails to mesh with our general model of art criticism: a typical patron of the arts would not be willing to accept the critical testimony of a critic who lacks any real experience of the work itself.[4]
To those that do not share this intuition, I’d like to submit the following thought. Incredible as it may be, we might suppose that there is some individual out there who is gifted with the inexplicable ability to descriptively know all of a work’s properties, functions, and relevant contextual background immediately after hearing about said work. What I’m hypothesizing is that this individual, upon learning of the existence of the work, clairvoyantly gains access to all the information needed for a functional evaluation of the work without having any experience of the work itself. We can also imagine that this individual’s critical acumen matches that of our highest critical authorities. I’d now like to pose, in the form of a question, the intuition introduced earlier in this section: without appeal to the judgements of any other critical authority, can an audience member confidently defer to the opinions of this inexperienced critic?
My intuition is that the average connoisseur of the arts would regard the miraculous powers of this as little more than a party trick. The problem does not have so much to do with the metaphysics of critical evaluation as it does with the norms of critical testimony. It’s not as though there is anything wrong with the critic’s opinions themselves; for all intents and purposes they will be veridical functional evaluations. So epistemically speaking our inexperienced critic does seem to be an apt source of critical knowledge, and by taking part in testimonial exchanges with such a critic, we should be able to ourselves gain evaluative knowledge about artworks. The difficulty here is that the arbiter of these opinions does not measure up to our normal assumptions about good sources of critical knowledge. The inexperienced critic may possess the correct opinions on all matters having to do with artistic evaluation, but since this opinion lacks any experiential support, as audience members, we are incapable of seeing this critic as a real source of knowledge about the work even if they in fact are. The point is not that all critical evaluation of artworks requires firsthand experience of said work—this is clearly the case with conceptual art and some works of performance art, though an appropriate experience of these works might be best conceived along contemplative rather than sensory lines—but that our everyday concept of the place of critical testimony to in our artworld practices has it that somewhere along the line the source of an evaluative opinion had some experience produced by the work in question. This has little to do with the epistemology of testimonial exchanges and everything to do with the norms surrounding our concept of art criticism.
My reasoning here comes close to that of Richard Wollheim’s (1980, 233) famous acquaintance principle according to which “judgements of aesthetic value, unlike judgements of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissible from one person to another”. However, unlike Wollheim, I not only believe in the possibility of commonplace art-critical testimony but think that such testimonial practices are partially definitive of the role carved out for art critics in the artworld as a whole. While I don’t want to say that artistic evaluation requires first-hand experience in all cases, there is something to the idea that experience is central to what we think of as the role of a critic and their reliability as sources of testimony regarding the inherent value of a work of art.
My thought then is the following: the issue with the inexperienced critic is that we cannot deem them reliable according to our standard conception of the reliability of an artistic pundit. For our everyday concept of a reliable art critic is someone who has, if nothing else, adequately appreciated the artistic value of whatever work they are criticizing, and in virtue of having thus appreciated the work’s value can tell the rest of us how to do so. And following Paisley Livingston (2003, 277), I’d like to say that a subject S “aesthetically gauges or appreciates the inherent aesthetic value of some item only if S has an aesthetic experience of that item, where such experience requires S’s direct contemplation of either the item or some adequate surrogate for it”.[5] In contrast to this, the inexperienced critic certainly cannot be said to have adequately appreciated the value of the work, as they’ve had no experiences produced by the work in question. The criticism received from this critic is much like that which might be received from a “criticism machine” into which one inserts details about the functions of a work, its surface level perceptible qualities, and a limited range of background contextual information, and from which one receives a functional evaluation. Even though their evaluations may be correct all things considered, and even though they might continuously give us such correct evaluations, without having genuinely appreciated whatever artistic value the work has to offer, they just don’t fit the bill of what we take a certified art critic to be. And thus, we can’t allow ourselves to treat them as sources of testimonial knowledge.
So, then, the function theory must either deny that our common understanding of an art criticism has it that critics are avid appreciators of the value of artworks or it must place some experiential requirement on the structure of good critical evaluation so as to ensure that critical testimony does ultimately come from only such appreciators. Because I find it beneficial to any theory of artistic evaluation that it be able to preserve our ordinary understanding of art critical practices, I’ll be addressing the second horn of this dilemma. As one might imagine, this will involve incorporating the Wollheimian thesis described above into the theory of evaluative functionalism.
III. A Revised Functionalism
Recall that Wollheim’s thought was that understanding the meaning of a work of art is equivalent to experiencing the work of art as the artist themself intended the work to be experienced. This quasi-cognitivist denial of purely propositional artistic contents may be seen to clash with the strict cognitivism of the functional theory, as functionalism makes evaluation a matter of determining whether or not a work of art meets the functional standards which it sets itself. In each case, these standards are defined by the constitutive and generic functions, both of which are putatively propositional in character. There is, thus, no apparent space in the functionally defined evaluative exercise into which the experiential focus of the Wollheimian thesis can fit.
Against this, I hold that the experiential focus of Wollheim’s thesis not only can fit into the functional theory, but must if the theory is to ward off the issues broached in section III above. In the previous paragraph, I noted that the nature of a work’s constitutive and generic functions is only putatively propositional in character, but I did not say that a propositional format was necessitated by any aspect of the theory: one could conceive of a functional theory that takes its functions to be specified non-propositionally, and this reinterpretation of functional content would immediately bridge the gap between the quasi-cognitivism of Wollheim’s thesis and the strict cognitivism of the simple functional theory. On this reinterpretation, the content of a given work’s constitutive function would be the production of whatever particular experience the artist intended the work to produce in a viewer with an appropriate cognitive stock, where such an experience falls on a continuum between being more strictly aesthetic (as in the case of the decorative arts) or largely contemplative (as one would expect of conceptual art). The work therefore succeeds insofar as it is able to produce, in the appropriately informed viewer, the intended experience.
One might wonder how the artist could form an intention about an experience, as the content of intentions are usually taken to be wholly propositional, but this worry can be overcome if we imagine the experience to be identified demonstrably by the artist in the process of intention formation. A representative constitutive function will then be something like: “I want the work to produce this experience in the viewer,” where this is used to demonstratively refer to an experience had by the artist themself. What my account then holds is that critical evaluation of an artwork involves utilizing contextual knowledge one possesses about an artist, their life, and their oeuvre to try to determine the contours of the experience which the work functions to produce. This comprises a recreative effort in which the one’s understanding of the artist’s experience-productive purposes with a work are constrained by what is imagined to be the artist’s actual experience at the culmination of the creative process. Once this is determined one moves on to consider whether one’s felt experience actually corresponds to that which one imagined was originally intended.[6] Thus, a work succeeds if it is able to produce in us the experience that we believe the artist intended it to produce, otherwise, it fails. This reinterpretation of functional content allows the theory to skirt by the potential threats posed to our concept of good criticism by the traditional functional theory, as critics would now only be able to evaluate an artwork if they’ve had an experience of it or a suitable surrogate. So, on this theory, good criticism can only ever come from one who has been in a position to adequately appreciate the work being criticized.[7]
Applying this account to In a Year of 13 Moons, we can suppose that its constitutive function is the production of a unique empathetic experience of a transgender woman’s suffering that helps reveal the unacknowledged indecency of the post-war German social structure. We must equally suppose that Fassbinder himself had this experience upon viewing the final cut of the film, and that it was this experience which signaled to Fassbinder that the film had reached completion. From the evaluative perspective, we as audience members use what we know about Fassbinder and his body of work to conceive of the potential experience he could have intended for the film to induce. If we think In a Year of 13 Moons succeeds at producing this experience, then we evaluate the film as good; if the film does not live up to the experiential standard, we think of it as failing to satisfy its purpose—and, therefore, as being a bad film.
IV. Conclusion
Throughout this paper, I’ve attempted to remedy a perceived failure of the functional theory of artistic evaluation that surrounded the theory’s tolerance for instances of inexperienced criticism. I’ve tried to address these issues by reinterpreting the constitutive functions at the heart of the theory in broadly experiential terms. The resulting quasi-cognitivist functionalism has it that artistic evaluation is a matter of determining whether an artwork is able to produce whatever experience the artist intended it to produce. I believe that this experiential functionalism does better than the original in avoiding the problematic case of inexperienced criticism, while retaining much of its initial appeal. The intuition that has guided me throughout this paper was the Wollhemian thought that artistic understanding is a matter of correct experience of a work of art. Under its influence, I found myself unable to ignore the unsettling consequences of evaluative functionalism’s insensitivity to the importance of experience for our critical relationship to artworks. Art criticism is an activity that relies for its very nature on experiential engagement with art, and if the arguments in this paper have shown anything, it’s that this truth is one which philosophers of art cannot afford to forget.
References
Abell, Catherine, ‘Genre, Interpretation and Evaluation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2015) 115:1, 25–40.
Carroll, Noël, ‘Interpretation and Intention: The Debate Between Hypothetical and Actual Intentionalism’, Metaphilosophy (2000) 31:1/2, 75–95.
Carroll, Noël, ‘Art Appreciation’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education (2016) 50:4, 1–14.
Carroll, Noël, ‘Forget Taste’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education (2022) 56:1, 1–27.
Gilmore, Jonathan, ‘A Functional View of Artistic Evaluation’, Philosophical Studies (2011) 155:2, 289–305.
Gorodeisky, Keren, ‘A New Look at Kant’s View of Aesthetic Testimony’, The British Journal of Aesthetics (2010) 50:1, 53–70.
Kaufman, Daniel, ‘Normative Criticism and the Objective Value of Artworks’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2002) 60:2, 151–66.
Hopkins, Robert, ‘How to Be a Pessimist about Aesthetic Testimony’, The Journal of Philosophy (2011) 108:3, 138–157.
Iseminger, Gary, ‘Actual Intentionalism vs. Hypothetical Intentionalism”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1996) 54:4, 319-2.
Livingston, Paisley, ‘On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics’, The British Journal of Aesthetics (2003) 43:3, 260–278.
Parsons, Glenn and Allen Carlson, Functional Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Wollheim, Richard, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Wollheim, Richard, ‘Art, Interpretation, and the Creative Process’, New Literary History (1984) 15:2, 241–53.
[1] I’ve chosen to focus on Gilmore and Carroll’s work as both put forward intentionalist theories of evaluative functionalism, and I believe the intentionalist version of this theory to be the most fruitful variety of functionalism on offer. For functional theories that do not explicitly adhere to an intentionalist thesis, see Kaufman (2002) and Parsons and Carlson (2008). Parsons and Carlson (2008, 215) specifically veer far from intentionalism in that they attempt to identify a works “proper function” with whatever mechanisms “explain the continued existence, maintenance, or preservation” of said work. The criticisms developed in this paper will only focus on intentionalist versions of the functional theory.
[2] For a similar intentionalist theory of the genre-based or “categorical” functions that an artwork may possess, see Abell (2015). Abell (2015, 32) goes further than Gilmore in that she attempts to not only associate certain functions with certain genres, but also to define each genre by the function(s) they assign to works falling under them.
[3] This description of the identification process is not quite right. More commonly, this process will involve one reflectively coming to identify both the constitutive and generic function(s) in tandem, balancing out one’s thoughts about one with those about the other(s). See Carroll (2016, 5-8) for more on the complex and often piecemeal nature of function identification. Additionally, works may have functions beyond just their constitutive and generic functions—e.g., the work might possess decidedly political or moral functions. For a view that gives functions focusing on the moral, political, and more broadly “cultural interests of a civilization” a more foundational role in the functional profile of an artwork, see Kaufman (2002, 157-8).
[4] In what follows, I’ll be taking an optimistic approach to the question of aesthetic testimony. My reason for optimism has to do with the commonplace treatment of critical testimony as a source of knowledge within the artworld: we generally find it acceptable to defer to the opinions of our informed friends or of working critics on aesthetic matters. For similar thoughts, see Gorodeisky (2010, 60) and Hopkins (2011, 153). That being said, there is nothing in the functionalist position itself that mandates an optimistic stance towards aesthetic testimony. Just as I stated that my comments in this paper will only be addressed to intentionalist varieties of functionalism, they equally shall only apply to such a position in conjunction with generalized testimonial optimism. There is ample room in conceptual space for a functionalist view in which one is a pessimist about aesthetic testimony while remaining staunchly intentionalist. Alternatively, one might be an evaluative functionalist, an aesthetic optimist, and an intentionalist. And finally, one could hold a functionalist position while rejecting both intentionalism and aesthetic testimony. The issue voiced in the main text and the experiential solution I offer in response will only be an issue for the first of these four positions.
[5] Livingston includes the clause concerning “an adequate surrogate” for the work to allow for cases in which photographs, recordings, or models of works serve as the basis for our appreciation of the works’ values. I am largely in agreement with Livingston that such surrogates could serve as the basis for a subject’s experiential appreciation of the value of a work. For spatial reasons, I will not here discuss what I take to be an adequate surrogate for a work.
[6] Thus, the variety of intentionalism that undergirds the experiential functionalist thesis on offer here will be a moderate rather than an extreme form of actual intentionalism. For more on the difference between the various strands of actual intentionalism, see Iseminger (1996) and Carroll (2000).
[7] Because my experience may ultimately differ from that of the critic, I can only say that I’ve learned from the critic that the work satisfied its function for them. We can avoid the charge of evaluative relativism on this point by supposing that the critic—rather than the average audience member—is the cognitively prepared viewer that the artist had in mind when crafting the work.