I want to start by introducing the idea of “inherent vice.”1  In the language of insurance, “inherent vice” is the natural tendency of an object to self-destruct for no apparent reason. The inherent vice of glass or marble objects, for instance, is that they can collapse at any moment; the material is structurally unstable. For photography, and particularly for color photography, the inherent vice of the photograph is that it inevitably tarnishes, no matter how hard we try to slow it down.2

I’d like to mention quickly the now gigantic industry in archival preservation of photographic materials. Chang’s work suggests this: no one wants their photographs to fade in their lifetime.  The term “archival” is announced on the box of the plastic page protectors I buy from Staples. The purple glue stick I buy from 3M is now acid-free, i.e. archival.  If I were to chart the rise of the interest in archival preservation from the late 1970’s on, I would start with the Wilhelm Imaging Institute’s3 groundbreaking study of the accelerated aging of color photographs. 4

In his text, Walter Benn Michaels discusses Chang’s use of the photogram. But many of the component units of Cache, Active are not photograms but photographic contact prints. So what is the difference between a photogram and a contact print? A photogram is made without a photographic positive or negative. An object shadows the sensitized surface/paper to produce an image. A contact print is created when the sensitized surface/paper is put in contact with a photographic positive or negative.5 The “contact print” is frequently opposed to prints made with a photographic enlarger because contacts are sharper than prints made by enlargement.  As we will see in a moment, sharpness is not the only reason contact printing is employed for certain photographic processes.

Some of the earliest photographs used a sensitized surface that visibly darkened when exposed to light.  Known as a printing-out process (POP), the POP emulsion was so slow that the exposure had to be made under strong ultraviolet light. After 1880, a “faster” sensitized surface was developed. Developing-out processes (DOP) were optimized for exposure using artificial light. After developing-out paper was exposed to light, an invisible, “latent image” formed and this image was made visible by a chemical developer.

Although Chang is using DOP paper for Cache, Active, he is exposing it as a POP. That is, he’s exposing the DOP paper to bright light and making a POP print on it.  So, it should be noted, that in order to create the representational parts of Cache, Active, Chang needed to carefully think through the process of making the work. Chang’s procedures in making the work are both necessary and roundabout. Necessary because in order to use DOP photographic paper as POP, Chang needed to put massive amounts of light on the paper to coax an image from the material. And, in order to make “photographic “ images, a photographic enlarger would not be bright enough to expose the paper as a POP print. The roundabout solution Chang came up with was to create a same size negative from his original negative or digital file so that he could make a POP contact print with a UV light source on DOP paper.

A quick aside here: Michaels and Chang mention that the photographic paper is “expired” in Cache, Active. When applied to photographic materials “expired” can be a bit inaccurate. Kodak puts an expiration date on its materials to tell you that they may not perform perfectly after the expiration date. Yet, as photographers, we all know that expired paper or film more often than not works exactly as it should some years after its expiration date. If expired paper were truly “expired,” as in “dead,” no image would result.  I don’t know how old Chang’s paper is, but there is still enough chemical potential stored in to produce an image. Perhaps the idea of expired paper also adds to the affect inherent in the work; expired, no longer manufactured paper etc. is used. It occurs to me that Chang’s paper may not yield any sort of developed-out image, but there’s still enough silver in the paper to print-out. Or it may still be OK to print on using an enlarger. Either way, the paper has enough compounds that react to light so that the term “expired” is somewhat misleading.

The notion of making a photograph that eventually turns a black, recalls a paper that portrait photographers used in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Kodak Studio Proof 6 was a printing out paper that was intentionally left unfixed by photographer so the client’s picture would darken after a few hours. And the client would then have to buy prints that were properly fixed. I remember watching the proofs of my high school yearbook photographs turn black in the afternoon sun.

A few years ago I thought of curating a show of “black” photographs. In addition to Chang, the show would include work by

Jose Alvaro Perdices
Black Photos, 1997

Liz Deschenes
Tilt / Swing, 2009

Walead Beshty’s
Transparencies, 2009

Allan McCollum’s
Glossies, 1980

Marco Breuer
Nature of the Pencil, 2009

Breuer uses a sheet of maximally exposed and processed photographic paper (i.e. black paper) to carefully scratch lines at different depths to reveal colored dyes below. For Breuer, Phil’s work would be a starting point, not an end point.

Finally, I’d like to mention three works made by Chang’s peers that I associate with Cache, Active:

Erika Vogt’s Action Unrestricted, 2005, a film that unspools onto the exhibition floor, thereby hastening its destruction.

Mathew Brand’s Lakes and Reservoirs, 2011, waterlogged chromogenic prints with the emulsion partially destroyed

Evan Holloway’s, Negative Value Drawing, wherein the value of the work decreases (by fiat) each time it is sold.

Holloway’s drawing focuses on value inversion in the art world. In the art market, the older the thing is, the greater its value. Holloway flips this around and forces the first collector of the work to agree to sell it at a lower price in six months. And so on for the next purchaser. This is in line with the economics of digital technology where new devices are priced higher than old ones. Because of its inherent vice, photography occupies a somewhat fraught place between these two positions, and this seems to be the crux of matter in Chang’s Cache, Active.

REFERENCES

1.  I began my talk by mentioning that I do association not theory.↑

2.  All analogue or chemical photographic processes make use of the tendency of silver compounds to darken when exposed to light.

Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Davy are often footnoted as the inventors of photography. In the first decade of the 19^th century they created photograms on salted paper. However they were unable to fix the images they made, so the work eventually turned black. I’ve often wondered what happened to these images. I’d love to see one. Couldn’t the blackening be chemically reversed or bleached back to discern an image?

In 1997 Sandra Goldbacher made “The Governess,” a film about the invention of photographic fixer. Minnie Driver plays a destitute young woman who is forced to hide her Jewish identity in order to work as a tutor for a wealthy Scottish family. Driver falls in love with the mad-scientist-inventor-head-of-the-household, Tom Wilkinson who, like Wedgewood and Davy discovered a photographic process but could not fix his images. Driver is deeply moved by a fading photograph of a bird’s wing and she embraces the quest to make the image permanent. She takes the picture back to her garret room and begins to celebrate—in secret— the Passover Seder. Driver accidentally splashes salt water on the print and this fixes it. From there the romance goes south when Wilkinson takes the credit for the all-important discovery.  Driver’s character leaves Scotland with this secret knowledge, returns to London and succeeds as a masterful portrait photographer.↑

3.  http://www.wilhelm-research.com/about_us.html↑

4.  Stephen Shore set his 8×10 color contact prints at low prices because he anticipated that they would fade. This price structuring may have been the result of Wilhelm’s research into image permanence.↑

5.  The printing plates in offset lithography are exposed by contact using a UV light source.↑

6.  Introduced in 1892, discontinued in 1987, Kodak’s Studio Proof printing-out paper was the longest continuously manufactured photographic paper.↑

       I don’t know how I found you—like
               red dots spread across lines, pages
               before I noticed I
 read them as if I read them—like when turns
       of plot arise
               in shows I watch
 while thinking how I thought them there—

       as in this passage here—now dear—
               come to where this paragraph goes
               to imagine your name
 like your signature—I found you—your style
       in these spots—red
               dots move across
 the lines with what you are saying—

       and I may have caught an error,
               but what gets fixed with “cinch” too close
               to “clinch” in article
 on Israel—as with rain, its coming
       down pattering
               on how it used
 to sound too much the exact thing,

       like same—is your fact—is your fact
               back here—it’s disappearing, dear—
               I found you still in one
 direction, and not yet gone to what we
       hear in the rain,
               still in its same
 fact—you are approaching, brother—

       that’s the rain becoming patterned
               as exactly mine patterning
               yours—is that the point to find
 you may be what I know slips close closer—
       there’s more to hear—
               or better throw
 it in reverse across the lawn

       whose house—that sound—a garbage can
               crushed by the way—you seem to know
               the route but not the turns—
 now dear, before we get this picture of
       you again—how
               you hate not to
 be perfect is less sometimes with

       someone there to see you hate it—
               it must be lovely to be like
               hair—to have precision
 so render your value apparent to
       yourself—but can
               you read with red
 ants across the page—you write of

       the self thinking of ways in which
               to appear the self able to
               determine the moment
 you traded the feeling of being watched
       for noticing
               you were watching—
 you write this like a witness to

       an accident, considering
              your account more and more closely
              until the belief that
 memory itself is time, itself is
       that kind of light
              everywhere,
 no, none here, then another like

       hair you think you finished sweeping—
              I said “brother” in the middle
              of the paragraph with
 two sweaty trash bags—one crawling with ants—
       a story you
              tell about how
 you split with thinking where it caught

       you here—years before—a park bench,
              willing to engage in chatter,
              considerate, pleasant,
 but by most accounts this conversation
       does not exist,
              not for all these
 people on the sidewalk, nor those

       possibilities of its width
              that were left to you sent forward
              by believing you went
 faster sent to the ground, broke your own tea
       bottle—no one
              helped as you came
 toward where need was confused for

       violence—like when the subway doors
              shut on a woman with a box,
              the man kicked the wall, said
 “they doing it on purpose”—dear, notice:
       first a branch moved,
              then several,
 a bird coming forward onto

       the sidewalk where it meets the walls,
              the building—uphill—the building
              continued to the store,
 which was larger than thought, extending round
       corner—voices—
              the tomatoes— 
 behind them there is space for what—

       Uruguay turning another
              you in sheets of mountain aerie—
              resting on the edge of
 I have no time for anyone who’d need
       the person next
              to them, before
 deciding they’d fit perfectly

       behind the phrase, “now close the door”—
              you were late, which made the crowds more
              difficult, the same as
 if you had nothing to do, but listen:
       the farther store,
              the street empty,
 again—I turned, you knocked into

       how far off—was it me moving
              the crowd—have you ever
              noticed it’s possible
 to forget birds for weeks, concerned with your
       own behavior—
              had nothing to
 do with everything else—but

       how bright the light, what you made that—
              the tomatoes you ate baked spoon
              inside each, warmer than
 voices you expected further into
       what you couldn’t
              see—that night you
 write of where rain is as white light

       over red dots, revealing they aren’t—
              aren’t they—simpler as splatter from
              the tomatoes on your
 apparitions—come in, that’s a coat rack,
       speak, that’s a light
              switch it loose like
 things are supposed to come apart—

       or and again—with whom begin—
              who’s there holding himself like he’s
              no better than here—like
 here’s a means by which anyone claims to
       exist—yes, yes,
              that one, who seems
 as if he hasn’t been told yet

       there’s a selection—is that what
              he traces in his pocket—no,
              only lining—ask him—
 what do we call him—brother—hey brother
       is the lining good here—listen,
 cinch means clinch, a sound that’s dear to—

       I don’t know how I found you—like
              there was a fix in on the fix—
              no, that was not hinted,
 that door at your touch was enough thesis—
       remember you
              don’t remember
 how to play—that’s preparation—

       like thawing a whole in pieces—
              like waterboarding or frozen
              elevation—like change
 long dead from lack of change or oxygen—
       are you thirsty
              now, dear—I’ve had
 you unjustly, you feel the time

       like time breaking, acting as if
              asking for just three square instants
              is to ask everything—
 you haven’t even thought that far in far
       too long—brother,
              it’s not who asks
 the questions, but that you make your

       answer easy—brother, as if
              you’re at home—no knock at the door
              could disturb you, for who
 belongs more in his place than you—a night
       like wind—into
              the rain—without
 you, could this comfort remember—

       brother, when it turns actual
              is what you mean less possible—
              the rain is it itself,
 or how exact it falls like grammar—kid,
       you never learn
              patterns partly—
 when you can say it you tell me—

       a limit always remembers—
              the next thing you know it’s hard to
              be after what you were
 here for—let’s have it—you leave them, brother—
       it’s just the wind
              leaving the hall,
 you can shut the windows later—

this is the hour
of the small ear
& the sea’s all a case
of minds.  the splotched
ginkgo leaves attest
nothing more than
dogshat sidewalks.
the ancient dreams
of mariners marooned
in new cities are now
revealed—bacalao
cake, kimchi, an
empanada all on the same
block & sailors
go looking for love
unimpeded not asking
not telling whom they’ll meet
in the alleys
& downbeat hotels.
Time arrowed
through me
pinning an obsolete
self unaligned
with my profile
on Facebook
a blazing doubloon
to the mast

OK fern

OK fern
I’m your apprentice
I can now tell you

apart from your
darker sister ferns
whose intricate ridges

overlay your more
regular triangled fans.
Tell me what to do

with my life.

A Situation

Everything bending
elsewhere, summer
longer, winter mud &
the maples escaping
for norther zones . . .

Take it up Old Adam—
everyday the world exists
to be named.

Here’s a chair,
a table, grass.
A cricket hums
my Japanese name.

Skyscrapers
are stars.  Rocks.
Those were swell,
seasons.  So strange,
that heaven, that hell.

Two special features consider writing on cubism–Kevin Chua on Christopher Green and Lisa Florman on Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and T.J. Clark.

Finally, Thierry de Duve introduces the theme of nonsite.org‘s next issue–Intention and Interpretation–by raising an unavoidable question: what court is qualified to judge what line of interpretation to adopt?

A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal enacts a movement and when that animal merely observes the same action by another (especially a con-specific). In other words, mirror neurons appear to “mirror” the behavior of another animal by a kind of motor simulation or motoric resonance. Mirror neurons were first detected in the 1990s in experiments using electrodes directly implanted in the pre-motor cortex of the macaque monkey. Although mirror neurons are often assumed to exist in humans and other species, the evidence is scant.2 In humans, for example, the only published direct evidence of mirror neuron activity exists in the form of single-neuron electrode recordings from the brains of epileptic patients and even that evidence is equivocal.3

From the start, the function of mirror neurons has been the topic of much speculation and controversy. Many researchers have claimed that mirror neurons provide a mechanism for an animal’s ability to grasp the motor-intentional actions of others without the intervention of higher cognitive or sensory processes. Dysfunction in the mirror neuron system is also thought to explain mind-reading failures associated with autism. Gallese and art historian David Freedberg have recently applied the idea of mirror neurons to the field of neuroaesthetics by claiming that our empathic responses to works of art as well as to everyday images depend on the activation of embodied, non-cognitive mirror-neuron mechanisms.4 Freedberg and Gallese thus follow the trend in the neurosciences to expand the role of mirror neurons to include the capacity for emotional empathy.5

In their 2003 article, Wicker and his group described the results of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study in which experimental subjects were asked to inhale odorants selected to produce strong feelings of disgust. The same subjects were also asked to observe video clips of other individuals exhibiting or showing the facial expression of disgust. The scientists reported that the same sites in the anterior insula (and to a lesser extent in the anterior cingulate cortex) were activated both when the experimental subjects themselves experienced disgust and when they observed the filmed expressions of disgust on the faces of others.6 The researchers therefore concluded in reference to the mirror-neuron matching system that, “just as observing hand actions activates the observer’s motor representation of that action, observing an emotion activates the neural representation of that emotion. This finding provides a unifying mechanism for understanding the behavior of others” (“BUD,” 655). The study by Wicker and his team has generated considerable interest in the neuroscientific community (a recent Google search indicates that the paper has now been cited in over 900 research articles). In subsequent publications, Rizzolatti, Gallese, Keysers and others have cited Wicker et al.’s experiment on disgust as confirming the idea that there is a common neural basis for emotional empathy.7 The experiment by Wicker and his group has also provided confirming evidence for Alvin I. Goldman’s influential approach to the “problem of other minds.” In his 2006 book, Simulating Minds, Goldman begins his review of the empirical evidence supportive of his Simulation Theory of mindreading by focusing on the “low-level” task of recognizing the emotional expressions of others because, as he observes with reference to the findings of Wicker et al. and those of others, the case for simulation here is “very substantial.”8

The Wicker Experiment In Detail

Let me begin by providing some details about the Wicker experiment. First, the experimenters recruited from a Marseille theater school six actors (male and female) who agreed to be filmed while smelling either neutral, or pleasant, or unpleasant odors. The actors were presented with a glass containing either pure water (for the neutral expression), water with an added pleasant odor (perfume designed to produce the pleased expression), or water with an added unpleasant odor (the content of “stinking balls” from a local toy store designed to induce the disgust expression). The actors were asked to display the relevant emotional reactions in a “natural but clear way.” Each emotional reaction was filmed three times for each actor, and the “most natural example” was selected by one of the experimenters. These filmed enactments served as the visual “stimuli” for the experiment that followed.

The experiment itself was conducted with fourteen males, each of whom was asked to participate in two “visual runs” and two “olfactory runs” while undergoing fMRI. In the “visual runs” the participants passively viewed the film clips that had been made of the actors smelling the contents of the glass. The participants were not informed of the aim of the study, and were not explicitly instructed to empathize with the actors. In the “olfactory runs” the participants themselves inhaled the same pleasant or disgusting or neutral odors that had been smelled by the filmed actors.

The central finding of Wicker and his team was that the anterior insula was not activated during the participants’ observation of happy expressions or during their experience of pleasant odors. But it was activated both during their observation of the actors’ disgusted facial expressions and during the feeling of disgust evoked in the participants themselves when they smelled the foul odors. The investigators suggested that two different hypotheses might explain our ability to recognize and understand emotions in other people. According to the “cold” hypothesis, we recognize the affects of others by using our perceptual and cognitive mechanisms without ourselves experiencing or sharing the same emotions and without activating the same causal mechanisms. But Wicker’s group claimed that their findings appeared to confirm the “hot hypothesis” according to which observing the emotions of others automatically generates the same emotion in ourselves because of a shared neural basis for seeing and feeling. In the case of disgust, the authors stated, “this automaticity may explain why it is so hard to refrain from sharing a visceromotor response (e.g., vomiting) of others when observing it in them” (“BUD,” 661).  The authors suggested that in evolutionary terms “hot” activation is likely to be the oldest form of emotion understanding, permitting a form of primitive empathy that may protect monkeys and young human infants from food poisoning even before sophisticated cognitive skills develop (“BUD,” 661).

Goldman considers Wicker’s disgust experiment an original contribution to his Simulation Theory because it provides evidence for an “Unmediated Resonance (Mirroring)” model of simulation, according to which the perception of the target’s facial expression “directly” triggers sub-threshold activation of the same neural substrate of the emotion in question. He states that this model does not require the cognitive “pretend” or “off-line” states on which higher-level mindreading is theorized to depend, but only a minimum automatic matching between the pair of emotion events in the target and the observer. “The observer’s emotional system ‘resonates’ with that of the target,” Goldman writes, “and this is the matching event on which the attribution is based.”9

Background Assumptions

Wicker’s et al.’s experiment and the conclusions drawn from it presupposed a set of theoretical and methodological premises that are deeply entrenched in the field of emotion research today, and it is important to be clear about them from the outset. The main assumptions informing their work can be briefly summarized as follows:

1. There exists a small set of “basic emotions” (“BUD,” 658) defined as pan-cultural categories or “natural kinds.” These basic emotions are evolved, genetically hard-wired, reflex-like responses of the organism. Disgust is one such basic emotion, as are fear, sadness, anger, joy, surprise, and perhaps contempt. The evolved status of the emotions implies some degree of emotional commonality between human and non-human animals, although the similarities and differences are rarely articulated.

2. Each basic emotion manifests itself in distinct physiological and behavioral patterns of response, especially in characteristic facial expressions. When not masked by cultural or conventional requirements of display or by deliberate deception, the face “expresses” the affects, which is to say that under the right conditions facial displays are authentic “read-outs” of the discrete internal states that constitute the basic emotions.

3. The facial expressions associated with the basic emotions can be posed or portrayed by actors in a natural way so as to convey the authentic truth of the affects.

4. Each basic emotion is linked to specific neural substrates in the brain, an assumption that implies the embrace of some degree of modularity and information-encapsulation in brain functions. Whereas (at least until very recently) the amygdala has been pinpointed as the neural seat of fear, insula activation has been especially implicated in the response to facial expressions of disgust, a finding Wicker’s experiment claims not only to confirm but extend, such that the insula is activated both during the experimental subject’s observation of the facial expressions of disgust in others and during the subject’s own experience of disgust.10

5. Emotional processes occur independently of “cognitive” or “intentional” states.11 As Paul Ekman has declared: “[E]motional expressions are special . . . because they are involuntary, not intentional . . . emotional expressions occur without choice . . . we trust them precisely because they are unintended.”12 According to this view, the basic emotions do not involve “propositional attitudes” or beliefs about the emotional objects in our world. Rather, they are rapid, phylogenetically old, automatic responses of the organism that have evolved for survival purposes and lack the cognitive characteristics of higher-order mental processes. The tendency in the recent literature on empathy to distinguish between “cognitive empathy,” our ability to identify someone else’s intentional actions, and “emotional” empathy, our ability to sympathize with or match someone else’s feelings, helps reinforce a non-cognitive (or non-intentionalist) theory of the affects by suggesting that our affects occur independently of our cognitions. Wicker et al.’s definition of disgust conforms to the non-cognitive model by pigeonholing disgust as in essence a sensory or corporeal phenomenon—a point to which I will return.13 The authors explicitly present the “hot hypothesis” as a non-cognitive theory of emotional empathy.

6. Grasping another person’s emotional state is also a non-cognitive process.  It’s just a matter of responding automatically to the triggering effect of another person’s facial displays. Goldman has criticized those whose view of empathy involves imputing purposive states to others (SM, 10-11). Goldman argues that the kind of low-level faced-based emotion recognition that occurs in emotional empathy recruits a simulation mechanism that operates automatically and sub-personally, without the necessity of propositional contents, desires, or beliefs of any kind. The comparative simplicity of faced-based emotion recognition, he writes in this regard, “consists in recognizing emotion types (e.g., fear, disgust, and anger) without identifying any propositional contents, presumably a simpler task than identifying desires or beliefs with specific contents” (SM, 113). On this view, reading someone’s emotional expressions has survival value and specialized mirroring mechanisms have evolved for this primitive kind of emotion detection.

Now to anyone knowledgeable about the history of research on the emotions, the assumptions I have just summarized will be familiar, belonging as they do to an emotion theory or paradigm that has had tremendous success over the last thirty years in the United States and, to a large extent, in Europe as well. Specifically, the presuppositions of Wicker and his team can be traced most directly to the work of the American psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins, and especially to that of his follower, Paul Ekman, both of whom have proposed an evolutionary-classificatory approach to the affects.14 Key features of their approach include the claim that there exists a small number of basic emotions, such as disgust, which can be defined in evolutionary terms as universal or pancultural, adaptive responses of the organism; that these emotions are discrete, innate, reflex-like “affect programs” located in subcortical parts of the brain; that the basic emotions manifest themselves in distinct patterns of physiological arousal and especially in characteristic facial expressions; that according to Ekman’s “neurocultural” model for explaining commonalities and variations in human facial displays, socialization and learning may determine the range of stimuli that can “trigger” the emotions and can moderate facial movements according to social norms or “display rules,” but that under the right conditions the underlying emotions can nevertheless leak out; and that the more complex or “higher” emotions are made up of blends of the basic emotions. This view of the emotions has been given a variety of names; in this paper I shall refer to it as the Basic Emotions View.15

A further claim associated with the Basic Emotions View, one that we have already seen in both Wicker et al.’s and Goldman’s work, is that although the emotions can and do combine with the cognitive systems in the brain, they are essentially separate processes. For Freud and the “appraisal theorists” such as Richard Lazarus, Robert Solomon, Martha Nussbaum, Phoebe Ellsworth and others, emotions are embodied intentional states that are directed toward objects and depend on our beliefs and desires. But the Basic Emotion View denies this by interpreting the affects as non-intentional responses. It thus posits a constitutive disjunction between our emotions on the one hand and our knowledge of what causes and maintains them on the other, because feeling and cognition are two separate systems. On this conceptualization, disgust does not concern the meaning of the objects or situations that disgust us but the inherent noxiousness or offensiveness of physical objects (such as animal and body wastes or contaminated foods) that are capable of automatically triggering an adaptive disgust response.

The Basic Emotions View has been extremely influential, especially because Ekman’s strategy of using pictures of posed facial expressions as “stimuli” to test the responses of subjects in experimental situations is so easy to use and conforms so well to the requirements of the newer imaging methods of research. Hundreds of experiments have now been performed using as emotional stimuli a standard set of photographs of posed expressions that Ekman and Friesen first made available for research purposes as far back as 1976.16 In order to give the appearance of greater “ecological validity” to their study, Wicker and his colleagues used moving rather than still pictures of actors posing expressions, but this does not alter the fact that their assumptions and research methods fundamentally adhere to the norms of the Basic Emotions View.

But are those assumptions and research methods valid? There are serious reasons to doubt it. Not only have appraisal theorists questioned the validity of the Basic Emotions View by emphasizing the role of perceptual-cognitive evaluation of the situation in emotional processing, for other reasons as well, it is doubtful whether the Basic Emotions View can withstand critical scrutiny.17 In recent years especially, investigators such as Alan J. Fridlund, James A. Russell, Jose-Miguel Fernández-Dols, Brian Parkinson, and Lisa Feldman Barrett have published cogent criticisms of the Ekman paradigm.18 The net result of those criticisms has been to directly challenge from within the emotion research field the empirical and theoretical validity of the Basic Emotions View. Nevertheless, for reasons I can’t examine here, that paradigm continues to dominate the field. Indeed, it currently represents the orthodox position.

Critique

Against this background, I now want to raise certain questions about Wicker et al.’s experiment and the uses to which it is being put to explain emotional empathy. I cannot do justice to the entire range of issues that interest me but will restrict myself to the following points:

1. My first question concerns the validity of the assumption by Wicker and his group that there exists a small set of basic emotions and that under the right conditions facial expressions can be viewed as involuntary readouts of internal emotional states. This is an assumption that Fridlund, Russell, Fernández-Dols, Feldman Barrett, and others have criticized. If we are to take their criticisms seriously, as in my view we must, then we need to reject the presuppositions underlying Wicker et al.’s analysis of emotional empathy. The idea that there exists a set of basic emotions, which manifest themselves in characteristic patterns of physiological reactions and facial movements has been shown to be erroneous, and the “readout” view of the affects mistaken. Not that the reader would learn anything about those criticisms from Wicker et al.’s paper, which simply ignores them. The authors’ failure to acknowledge the work of critics or to admit the existence of dissent exemplifies what I regard as a striking fact about the current situation of research on emotion, namely, that most scientists committed to the Basic Emotions View feel free to cite selectively and mention only the work of others that supports their views. The result is that objections are not allowed to disturb the investigators’ basic premises or their experimental approach. Simply put, the network of presuppositions and methods associated with the Basic Emotions View is too attractive and the laboratory methods too convenient to be given up.

2. The experiment on disgust by Wicker and his group was based on a belief central to the Basic Emotions View, namely, that under the right conditions the face reliably and sincerely reveals the truth about the subject’s “inner feelings.” Put slightly differently, the body does not lie. The facial displays performed by the actors as “stimuli” for the participants in the experiment were assumed to be authentic emotional expressions of this kind. It is because Ekman thinks that under the right conditions the face is bound to reveal the authentic truth of a person’s feelings that since 9/11 he has been developing methods of surveillance designed to read the telltale involuntary signs he believes will identify terrorists. His goal is to reassure us that we don’t have to be frightened by the tendency of human beings to dissimulate, because trained observers can be counted on to reliably distinguish authentic facial expressions from false ones, the genuine from the feigned. His speculations have recently led to his involvement with a fanciful television series, “Lie to Me,” in which the lead character, a jet-setting Ekman surrogate named Lightman, oversees a large firm of beautiful men and women, reads faces to solve crimes, and routinely makes the police and the FBI look foolish.

But what if his assurance that the face reliably divulges the truth of our emotions is false? What if, as critics have argued, there is no simple one-to-one relationship between a person’s facial behavior and his or her emotional state? What if facial displays can’t be considered simple readouts of underlying “basic emotions” because they are intentional communicative signals that aid in the negotiation of social encounters? As Fridlund has pointed out in this regard, “[A]ny reasonable account of signaling must recognize that signals do not evolve to provide information detrimental to the signaler. Displayers must not signal automatically, but only when it is beneficial to do so, that is, when such signaling serves its motives. Automatic readouts or spill-outs of drive states (i.e., ‘facial expressions of emotion’) would be extinguished early in phylogeny in the service of deception, economy, and privacy. Thus, an individual who momentarily shows a pursed lip on an otherwise impassive face is not showing ‘leakage’ of anger but conflicting intentions . . . for example, to show stolidity and to threaten” (HFE, 131-32). In short, what if deception is widespread in nature and can be advantageous for the displayer?19 Wouldn’t this imply that Wicker and his research team were wrong to take for granted the meaning of the posed facial expressions used in the experiment because they ignored the potential for a mismatch between facial displays and their subjects’ actual emotional experiences?

So confident were Wicker and his colleagues that faces normally and automatically express the truth of the hypothesized basic emotions that it did not occur to them to ask the actors what they themselves were feeling when they sniffed the various odorants. Of course, it’s possible that the actors really did feel the emotion of disgust they were exhibiting on their faces; the smell in question was selected because it was vile and was assumed to be intrinsically disgusting. But possibly they did not—to repeat, no one asked. Nor did the investigators make any effort to find out or discern whether the participants in the experiment felt disgust when they observed the actors posing facial expressions of disgust. This omission is all the more striking because, according to the “hot hypothesis,” individuals recognize emotions in others by actually experiencing the same emotions themselves. But how do we know that this was the case in the absence of any effort to find out? In the experiment by Wicker’s research group, any attempt to discern what the participants were feeling was ruled out from the start. All they were asked to do was to passively witness the actors’ facial displays or to smell the various odors themselves while submitting to brain imaging: emotion was equated with brain activation, with the result that the distinction between subjective experience and neuronal response was elided. In order to induce disgust in the participants, the investigators puffed the unpleasant and other odors into an anesthesia mask. Moreover, the subjects’ mouth and eyes were closed throughout the olfactory runs, and during the experiment itself they did not speak or report on their feelings. In other words, it’s as if the irrelevance of the subject’s subjective state was assumed from the outset.20 I could apply to the experiment what Jean Despret has said more generally about such methods in psychology: “The subject proves the scientist’s point so well only because the latter has managed to keep him from speaking.”21

3. My third question concerns the strategic role played in their experiment by Wicker et al.’s definition of disgust as simply and primordially a visceromotor reaction. For these authors, primitive or “core” disgust does not involve any cognitive-interpretive dimension entailing, as an intentionalist might argue, an embodied revulsion against appraised objects of various kinds, whether real or symbolic. Rather, Wicker and his team assumed that disgust is essentially a reflex response of the body to repulsive smells. The scientists treated the more familiar or ideational forms of disgust as elaborated forms of the more fundamental olfactory and gustatory reflexes that serve to protect the organism against poisoning by preventing the ingestion or inhalation of harmful substances and smells. Disgust was therefore viewed as a food-related sensation involving a reflex revulsion at the incorporation of revolting or noxious foods. On this interpretation, derived from the work of Paul Rozin, disgust just is the sensation of a bad smell or bad taste (as Rozin points out, the word dis-gust simply means “bad taste”): in human development distaste may become linked cognitively, ideationally, and symbolically to an array of non-food-related items and objects, but at its core disgust is “a type of rejection primarily motivated by sensory factors.”22 The fact that the anterior sector of the insula is an olfactory and gustatory center that appears to control visceral sensations and related autonomic responses helps support this sensory-corporeal definition of disgust (the anterior insula region is known as the “gustatory cortex”).23

One can see the point of Wicker et al.’s definition. If disgust is just a bodily sensation with visceromotor manifestations, then the subjective-experiential dimension can be collapsed into the corporeal by studying brain activation directly, without any apparent conceptual loss. If both of us are disgusted in my insula, because the activation of your insula when you experience an emotion is automatically duplicated by the activation of mine when I observe your disgust expression, then scientists don’t have to worry about what I am feeling or what you are feeling because the neural mechanism we share will tell us everything they need to know.24

But is such a reflex definition of disgust valid? Fridlund, for one, doesn’t think so. He concedes that the social disgust display resembles the protective gag reflex, but thinks it is more likely that the display is a convention or a “conversational icon,” of the kind we see when a child sticks out its tongue in a display of defiance (HFE, 120).25 Nor does he believe that the disgust face should be considered an “expression” of a basic emotion. As he puts it, the gag reflex acts “not to ‘express’ sensory disgust but to abort it. Likewise, the social display signifies not ‘you make me sick’ so much as ‘I want to do with you what I do with bad food (lest I get sick).’ It thereby denotes an intention rather than an ‘expression’ of an emotion, and is therefore better named ‘revulsion’ or even ‘rejection’ than ‘disgust’” (HFE, 121). In other words, Fridlund proposes that the disgust display should be regarded as an intentional movement subserving various social motives, which means not only that it is responsive to proximate elicitors but also that it is sensitive to those who are present, one’s aim toward them, and the nature and context of the interaction.26 He cites various experiments suggesting that facial responses to odors and tastes do not behave like simple reflexes but are influenced by the social situation in which they occur, including the presence of others.27 Research on animal signaling has also suggested that many nonhuman facial and vocal displays likewise vary with the presence of interactants and with the relationship between the interactants and the displayer (HFE, 145-152).28

Such findings are known collectively as “audience effects,” a characterization which has the virtue of drawing attention to the performative-transactional nature of facial and other displays.29 It is precisely this performative-transactional dimension that Wicker and his team ignored. In their experiment, the investigators treated both the actors and the experimental subjects or participants as if the latter were entirely alone in the room, which is to say as if they were completely liberated from the various cultural constraints that ordinarily guide people in any situation along a trajectory of social interaction with the expected and appropriate roles and expressions, with the result that they were free to exhibit their natural, innately-determined expressions. In other words, these scientists forgot that the laboratory is a social space structured by conscious and unconscious or subconscious demands and expectations, including not only those of the experimental subject but of the scientists involved as well. Fridlund has emphasized the “dramaturgical” dimension of such demands and expectations, suggesting that when subjects are asked to pose or mimic facial displays to the point of being emotionally aroused themselves, the experimenter is actually a director and the subject-actor posing the expression is a Stanislavski actor who “slips into role”: “It is the role or ‘set’ taken in the given social context that determines the emotion,” Fridlund observes in this regard, “not the facial displays themselves” (HFE, 179).

4. In the light of such considerations, which emphasize the sociality of facial displays, the decision by Wicker and his colleagues to define disgust as primordially a primitive reflex can be understood as a means of denying or suppressing the social-transactional character of the organism’s emotional reactions. It is all the more interesting, then, to note that at one moment in their paper Wicker et al. themselves naively invoked Stanislasvki’s acting theories in ways that unexpectedly redounded on themselves. The issue came up when Wicker et al. were discussing another experiment on emotional empathy, one that appeared the same year as their own and that covered somewhat similar ground. In the experiment in question, Laurie Carr and her associates asked the experimental participants—ordinary persons, not actors—to pose all six of the “basic emotions,” including disgust, in order to determine by fMRI whether the same neural substrate was activated both when the participants actually experienced emotions through posing or imitation in this way, and when they observed the same emotions in others, by observing a set of Ekman and Friesen’s photographs of facial expressions on a computer screen.30 Carr’s research group showed that both the imitation of emotions and their observation activated a largely similar network of brain regions, including the anterior insula, although activation was greater when the subjects imitated the expressions than when they merely passively observed them in others.31

In their paper Wicker and his team acknowledged the agreement between their own results and those of other researchers, including those of Carr et al. But they also drew attention to certain differences. They pointed out that no previous study of disgust, including that of Carr and her colleagues, had actually evoked the “sensation of disgust” in experimental subjects, as they themselves had done, in order to investigate whether the activated locations were common to both the experience of disgust and the perception of the same emotions in others. They stressed in this regard that merely imitating or posing an emotion, as Carr’s experimental subjects were asked to do, does not require or guarantee that the poser subjectively feels the portrayed affect, because “imitation usually does not require experiencing the imitated emotion” (“BUD,” 658-59). They thus declared that Carr’s research group had demonstrated only that the insula was involved in imitation, not that it was directly involved in the “experience of emotions” (“BUD,” 659). In other words, Wicker’s team claimed that, unlike the subjects in their own experiment who, by smelling a foul odor actually experienced the emotion or sensation of disgust, the participants in Carr’s experiment might only have represented but not personally felt the emotions they were showing on their faces (as if Carr’s subjects only experienced “cold” emotional responses).

Since Carr and her group found that the insula was nevertheless activated, their findings appeared to invalidate the claim by Wicker and his colleagues that the insula is necessary for actual emotional experience. But Wicker et al. ingeniously proposed a solution to this apparent difficulty. They suggested that, like good method actors, some of Carr et al.’s participants must have been so swept up in their role that they really must have felt the emotions they were portraying on their faces. “However,” Wicker’s group observed in this connection, “in the light of our findings, it is possible that, during imitation, some of their participants felt the imitated emotion—as actors do when using the ‘Stanislavsky’ method of emotion induction” (“BUD,” 659).32 I call the invocation by Wicker and his team of Stanislavski’s theory of acting “naïve” because the authors don’t seem to have appreciated the problem of acting in their own case. The interesting question here is: Why in their own experiment did these investigators use not ordinary persons but precisely actors to perform expressions in front of the camera for the purposes of making portraits of disgusted, neutral, or pleased facial expressions to show to the participants in the experiment? If disgusting smells are disgusting to everyone and automatically induce the experience (or “sensation”) of disgust, then ordinary volunteers could have served the investigators’ purposes just as well. The fact that professional actors were used and that they were asked to display expressions in a “natural but clear way” (“BUD,” 661) suggests that some degree of acting skill and “stage direction” was necessary to produce the required disgust display, or at any rate that Wicker and his team believed that to be the case—in other words, they believed, or proceeded as if they believed, that ordinary people are not very good at portraying such emotional expressions in the way scientists require. We might put it that in their experiment, Wicker and his colleagues functioned in part as directors of the facial displays, although it remains an open question whether the performers slipped into their role so deeply that, like good “method” actors, they really felt the emotion or “sensation” of disgust the investigators attributed to them—as I say, the actors were not asked. In any case, the notion of a “natural but clear” display begs every conceivable question, implying as it does that performers or actors are capable on demand of producing “natural” appearances (as opposed to what exactly?) and moreover that they can on demand produce emotional expressions that are “intense but natural” and not, let us say, overdone or exaggerated.33 But the entire history of modern theories of dramaturgy testifies to the fact that nothing of the sort can be taken for granted.34 All this may be summed up by saying that in their appeal to the ideas of Stanislasvki, Wicker’s team inadvertently drew attention to the contextual-social influences at work in the production of emotional expressions, influences that their Ekman-inspired reflex, corporeal, readout approach to the affects was meant to forestall.

New Findings

The disgust story does not end here. Perhaps aware that the 2003 experiment on disgust by Wicker and his group was defective in some respects, investigators returned to the fray with a follow-up experiment in 2007. In the new study, by Jabbi, Swart, and Keysers (the latter being one of the authors of the 2003 experiment), disgusting tastes rather than disgusting smells were the focus of inquiry, but the basic experimental set-up remained the same. As before, actors were filmed while posing disgusted, pleased, and neutral expressions in a “naturally vivid manner,” this time when sipping unpleasant (quinine), pleasant (sucrose) and neutral (artificial saliva) solutions from a cup, and the ten best clips for each emotional category were selected for use in the experiment. In the “Visual runs” the experimental participants (eighteen right-handed subjects, ten females and eight males) were asked to observe the movie clips of those posed expressions while they themselves underwent fMRI. In the “Gustatory runs” the participants were asked to sip the same liquids as those the actors had tasted, again while undergoing brain scanning. (The solutions were delivered by an experimenter standing beside the MRI scanner, using a tubing system consisting of a syringe connected to an infusion tube inserted into a pacifier.) Just as in the previous experiment, insula activation was reported in both the observing and the gustatory or “experiencing” condition. But this time the investigators added a new feature: they asked the participants to rate their own experiences both on tasting the solutions and on seeing the actors’ emotional expressions when the latter posed their facial reactions to the same drinks. It’s as if the researchers recognized that, without documenting the participants’ actual subjective states, the “hot” hypothesis predicting that the participants would actually experience the same emotion as those whom they were observing had remained unproven. Put less critically, it’s as if they wanted to document assumptions that in their 2003 paper Wicker et al. had apparently taken for granted but that skeptics could rightly question.35

It is worth remarking that the attempt to evaluate the participants’ subjective responses raised some theoretical difficulties for Jabbi et al. The hot hypothesis claimed that observers experience emotions in an automatic, non-cognitive way just by observing the facial expressions of others. That hypothesis cannot be supported without demonstrating that people really do experience disgust when they see disgust expressions in others—evidence of brain activation alone will not suffice. The dilemma Jabbi et al. faced was that the attempt to determine an observer’s emotional experience required asking him or her to make conscious and explicit what, on the hot hypothesis, had been theorized as an implicit, non-conscious and sub-personal process. Evaluating a participant’s subjective feelings therefore necessitated asking him or her to transform a hypothesized non-cognitive experience or event into an actual cognitive one in order to articulate and report on it. In effect the hypothesis of emotional simulation couldn’t be tested, because the moment the researchers asked their subjects to report on their subjective experience the latter were doing cognition and hence transforming what was understood to be a “hot,” non-cognitive process into a cognitive one. In short, the hot hypothesis couldn’t be confirmed without contradicting its basic, non-cognitive premise.

Moreover, in designing their experiment Jabbi and his colleagues appear to have been motivated by a further concern, namely, that although the hot hypothesis could explain the observer’s tendency to emotional “contagion” or emotional resonance, it couldn’t in itself account for the empathic “understanding” of another, as the hot hypothesis had seemed to propose. As Jabbi’s research team observed in this regard, infants contagiously cry when they witness the distress of other people but are presumably unable to distinguish their feelings from those of others. In contrast, more mature persons not only resonate contagiously to the emotions of others, but are able to interpret and attribute their subjective states to someone else while distinguishing their emotions from those of another, thereby acquiring genuine “empathic understanding” or “conscious knowledge” of the other. In short, in their paper Jabbi and his colleagues now appeared to concede that mirroring or resonance or contagion of the kind proposed by the hot hypothesis might be a prerequisite for empathic “understanding” of another but is not sufficient for it, as the hot hypothesis had at first appeared to claim.36

Against this background of issues and concerns, we can understand why in their 2007 experiment Jabbi and his team made an effort to determine the subjective responses of their experimental subjects.37 First, the researchers rated the subjective reactions to the gustatory emotions of the actors in the movies by asking the participants how willing they would be to drink the beverages the actors had just tried (using a scale from – 6 “absolutely not willing,” to 6 “very much willing”). Second, the investigators asked the participants to rate the solutions they themselves had to ingest during the experiment (on a scale ranging from “extremely disgusting” to “extremely delicious”).  These scales were taken to be measures of the participants’ evaluations of the beverages involved, in the third person (“He tastes”) and the first person perspective (“I taste”), thus allowing a direct comparison of these two perspectives. In other words, how willing the participants were to taste the drinks they witnessed the actors ingesting was taken to be a measure of the affective states the facial expressions induced in them. In addition, Jabbi et al. obtained the participants’ self-reported empathy scores as measured by an Interpersonal Reactivity Index. The investigators then correlated these scores with the insula activation that occurred during the same participants’ witnessing the clips of the actors posing the pleased, or disgusted, or neutral expressions.38

The main new result reported by Jabbi et al. was that for the first time it had been demonstrated that during the observation of other people’s “gustatory emotions” (that is, the observation of other people’s disgust expressions), the size of insula activation correlated with differences in self-reported interpersonal reactivity, or empathy. They took this finding to extend the previous demonstration by Wicker et al. that the insula was activated during the experience and observation of negative emotional states, such as disgust, and therefore to provide further support for the hypothesis that the anterior insula was involved in the transformation of emotional states into experienced ones. Their results also showed that the insula’s involvement was not restricted to negative emotions but was involved in the processing of positive emotions as well.

In the light of the criticisms I have already offered in my paper, many questions could be raised about this experiment and its purported findings, but here I will raise only two.39 First, Jabbi et al. appear to have made no attempt to ascertain whether the participants (observers) felt disgust or pleasure when they actually watched the actors’ facial expressions, so that their effort to determine their experimental subjects’ subjective experience seems to have fallen short.40 Equally interesting from my point of view is the fact that Jabbi et al. made no attempt to discover what the actors experienced when they were asked to taste various liquids and produce the relevant facial movement or expression in order to be filmed. Why did the researchers limit their inquiries in this regard? Perhaps the investigators assumed that the liquids the actors were asked to sip inevitably aroused in them the relevant experience of disgust or pleasure and, according to the readout theory, therefore also produced the relevant facial expression.41 Or maybe the researchers took it for granted that facial mimicry of the kind involved in posing expressions automatically induces in actors the relevant internal emotional states (although the evidence on the topic of facial-mimicry or facial feedback is mixed at best).42 But Jabbi and his research group didn’t address this question at all.

Why does the omission matter? I think it matters because, by failing to determine the actors’ personal or subjective experiences, the authors left open the possibility that, just as in the earlier experiment by Wicker’s research team, so in this experiment the actors might not have actually experienced disgust themselves but merely posed the facial expressions they were asked to represent on their faces. (Of course, as I’ve said, the quinine used to induce the actors’ disgust expression was taken to be inherently disgusting, but this claim was not tested by asking the actors their subjective reactions, so it remains an open question whether such a response should have been taken for granted.) Actors do this all the time, and indeed Ekman’s neo-cultural theory predicts insincerity or feigning in many social situations, of which the demand that actors pose an expression can serve as an example. But the effect of the omission is to suggest that since, according to the “hot hypothesis” of emotional empathy, we automatically empathize with, or resonate to, the emotional expressions of others, we will do so whether or not the people we observe are really feeling what they show on their faces. The hot hypothesis therefore seems to imply that we are destined to spend our days resonating madly, nonselectively, immoderately, automatically to whatever facial signals someone else, anyone else, sends us, without our knowing whether those signals are telling us the truth about the latter’s emotional state. If the mirror neuron theory of simulation is true, we can be fooled—we will be fooled—about the emotional states of others all the time. Both of us disgusted in my insula? It might be more accurate to say that I will be disgusted in my insula as long as you display or perform an expression of disgust—regardless of whether you are sincere. But what kind of theory is that?

* * *

It is often said by scientists that our understanding of the neural basis of empathy is in its infancy, the suggestion being that it is only a matter of time before problems will be solved, as if the difficulties facing the research field are merely technical. But the implication of my paper is that the issues confronting empathy theorists are as much theoretical or, say, philosophical, as they are technical or scientific. Adam Smith’s name is today routinely evoked in introductory remarks on the nature of empathy. But how many people realize that for Smith empathy (or sympathy) was not a natural phenomenon or an automatic process of resonance with the feelings of another? Rather, according to him sympathy was conditioned by an inherent theatricality that, by making persons into actors and spectators who distance themselves from each other and even from themselves, forestalls the possibility (the dream) of complete sympathetic merger or identification.43 Freud expressed the same difficulty, indeed impossibility, in his own way when he made psychical ambivalence—the constitutive impossibility of separating Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, immersion and distance—central to his understanding of the sympathetic-identificatory phenomenon. According to Freud, rivalry with the other is as inherent in human nature as is love, and indeed is inseparable from love: the taming of these emotions is the necessary but endless task of civilization.44 For such thinkers, then, our knowledge of other minds cannot be explained by an appeal to a simple mechanism of mutual resonance or mutual attunement of the sort I have analyzed here. A further implication of my paper is that the problem of emotional empathy can only be rendered the more intractable if investigators persist in adopting the theoretical assumptions and experimental methods associated with the Basic Emotions View and the mirror neuron hypothesis.

Notes

My thanks to Michael Fried, Avery Gilbert, James A. Russell, and Rainer Reisenzein for their helpful comments on my paper.

1.  Bruno Wicker, Christian Keysers, Jane Plailly, Jean-Pierre Royet, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust,” Neuron 40.3 (October 2003): 655-64; hereafter abbreviated “BUD.”↑

2.  As Dinstein has observed, in the absence of direct evidence for mirror neurons in humans many researchers interpret any fMRI response by the relevant brain areas as due to mirror neuron activity.  Ilan Dinstein, Cibu Thomas, Marlene Behrmann, and David Heeger, “A Mirror Up to Nature,” Current Biology 18.1 (January 2008): R13-R18.↑

3.  Mukamel et al. directly recorded from the brains of 21 patients who were being treated for intractable epilepsy. Electrode location was determined solely on the basis of clinical criteria for surgery. Neuronal activity from 1,177 cells was recorded in the human medial frontal and temporal cortices while patients executed or observed hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions. The authors reported that a significant proportion of neurons in the supplementary motor area, hippocampus, and environs responded to both observation and execution of those actions. However, a subset of these neurons demonstrated excitation during action-execution but inhibition during action-observation (in other words, these neurons showed contrasting patterns of excitation and inhibition for action-execution and action-observation respectively). The authors concluded that multiple systems in humans might be endowed with mirroring mechanisms for both the integration and differentiation of perceptual and motor aspects of actions performed by the self and others. They suggested that the inhibiting neurons seemed suited to provide the controls necessary to prevent the organism from making undesirable automatic imitations of others. Roy Mukamel, Arne D. Ekstrom, Jonas Kaplan, Marco Iacobini, and Itzhak Fried, “Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions, Current Biology 20.8 (April 2010): 750-56.

These findings on humans were initially hailed as providing crucial empirical support for the mirror neuron theory (see for example, Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola, “Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Recorded in Humans,” Current Biology 20.8 (April 2010): R353-R354). But the new research results have begun to complicate the picture of the function of mirror neurons, limiting their role and giving due credit to the importance of non-mirror systems. Cognitive neuroscientist Greg Hickok, a long-time critic of mirror neuron theory, sees in the theoretical revisions now being proposed by mirror neuron theorists evidence of a retreat that amounts to a confirmation of his alternative theory, according to which mirror neurons are part of the sensorimotor system involved in action selection and control, rather than action understanding.

Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia have recently acknowledged the limitations of mirror neurons by restricting their role to that of allowing us to understand “from the inside” only those actions we already know how to perform (Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, “The Functional Role of the Parieto-Frontal Mirror Circuit: Interpretations and Misinterpretations,” Nature Reviews Neurosciences 11.4 [April 2010]: 264-74). As Hickok notes, this is a highly limited domain of function, considering the range of actions we are able to understand without being able to perform them ourselves. Moreover, Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia have also moved away from the idea that mirror neurons code particular movements via motor simulation toward the notion that they code motor goals or intentions. But since goals and intentions are non-motoric, with this concession these theorists have retreated from their claim to provide a motor explanation of how intentional processes into the functioning of the mirror neuron system – cognitive processes we understand the actions of others. In doing so, they have implicitly reintroduced cognitive- whose participation in action understanding mirror neurons were supposed to render unnecessary. As Hickok remarks of Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia’s latest formulation: “This sounds like a profound insight, but in fact it pushes mirror neurons right out of the motor system and into the dreaded cognitive system that Rizzolatti and colleagues so wish to avoid.” (See Gregory Hickok, “Two New Ways the Mirror System Claim is Losing Steam,” www.talkingbrains.org, May 18, 2011). For further details see the discussions at www.talkingbrians.org; Gregory Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21.7 (July 2008): 1229-43; Gregory Hickok, “What Mirror Neurons are REALLY doing,” http://talkingbrains.org/2010/what-mirror-neurons-are-really-doing.html. September 17, 2009; Gregory Hickok and Marc Hauser, “(Mis)understanding Mirror Neurons,” Current Biology 20.14 (July 2010): R593-R594 ;and Vittorio Gallese, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Cecilia Heyes, Gregory Hickok, and Marco Iacobini, “Mirror Neuron Forum,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6.4 (July 2011): 369-407.↑

4.  David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11.5 (May 2007): 197-203.↑

5.  Gallese, Stephanie Preston, and F.B.M. de Waal are among those who proposed early on that empathy depends on a perception-action model, according to which the perception of another’s state automatically activates the observer’s representations of that state, and that activation of those representations generates the autonomic and somatic responses associated with the emotion. See Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119.2 (April 1996): 593-609; and Stephanie Preston, and Frans B.M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25.1 (February 2002): 1-20.↑

6.  The insula (or insular cortex) is a portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the brain; the cortical area overlying it toward the lateral surface of the brain is the “operculum” (meaning “lid”). The insula is divided into two parts, the larger anterior insula and the smaller posterior insula. The anterior insula appears to be involved in a variety of functions, including emotional regulation and physiological homeostasis. In its original formulation, the mirror neuron system was considered a strictly neo-cortical system, so that the assumption that mirror neurons exist regulation and physiological homeostasis. In the original formulation, the mirror neuron system was considered a strictly neo-cortical system, so the assumption that mirror neurons exist sub-cortically in the anterior insula is a theory, one that relies on indirect evidence only of the kind ostensibly provided by Wicker et al.’s experiment. For an interesting debate on the topic of mirror neurons and emotional processing see the 2008 exchange between Jan Panksepp, Ross Buck, and others at the website of the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) at http://isre.org.↑

7.  Vittorio Gallese, Christian Keysers, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8.9 (September 2004): 396-403; Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola, “Toward a Unifying Theory of Social Cognition,” Progress in Brain Research, 156 (2006): 379-401; Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).↑

8.  Alvin I. Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113; hereafter abbreviated SM.↑

9.  Goldman argues that on the minimum Unmediated Resonance (Mirroring) model of simulation, the sub-threshold tokening of the same emotion experienced in the target serves as the matching or mirroring event on which the subsequent attribution or imputation (projection) of the emotion to the other is based. It is, however, only the first stage of a two-stage routine comprising simulation and projection. In Wicker et al.’s experiment, as Goldman acknowledges, the participants were not asked to judge the actors’ emotional displays, so the second, attribution stage of the simulation routine was not tested. However, Goldman thinks that lesion studies of the kind he reviews in his book do clearly suggest the existence of an association between damage to substrates for the experience of disgust and impaired interpersonal judgments of disgust (Goldman, Simulating Minds, 137, and see also, 40).  For a critique of some of the lesion studies on which Goldman relies, see Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Entity and What Kind of Entity Is It?” Representations 110.1 (Spring 2010): 66-104. A detailed review of Gallese’s related “shared manifold” theory of empathy and social cognition lies beyond the scope of this paper.↑

10.  In fact, Wicker and his research team showed that in the gustatory runs, the amygdala was activated along with the anterior insula; they reported that in the visual runs, only the disgust expression activated the insula and there was no activation of the amygdala in response to seeing disgust.↑

11.  The term “cognitive” can mean different things to different theorists. Because the term “cognitive” is often associated with the “cognitive revolution” in psychology and with computer models of the mind, emotion theorist Paul Griffiths prefers to use the term “propositional attitude” theory to describe the position of appraisal theorists who stress the role of beliefs, appraisals, and meaning in emotion (Paul E. Griffiths, “The Degeneration of the Cognitive Theory of Emotion,” Philosophical Psychology 2.3 (September 1989): 297-313; and Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). I use the term “intentionalist” to describe these theorists as a way of signaling the importance of (conscious or unconscious) intentionality in emotion, without regard to the role of human speech. Intentionalism (or cognitivism) in affect theory is often represented by its critics as offering a peculiarly disembodied view of the emotions, but intentionalism is perfectly compatible with the claim that the emotions involve an organism’s embodied disposition to act in certain ways toward the objects in its life world.↑

12.  Paul Ekman, “Universality of Emotional Expression? A History of the Dispute,” in Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, third ed.; intro., afterword, and commentaries by Paul Ekman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 373.↑

13.  It is an interesting question whether intentional states of the kind involved in the understanding of actions can in fact be explained by the firing of mirror neurons, or whether a philosophical confusion is involved here. For challenges to mirror neuron theory along these lines see Emma Borg, “If Mirror Neurons are the Answer, What is the Question?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 14.8 (August 2007): 5-19; and Pierre Jacob, “What Do Mirror Neurons Contribute to Human Social Cognition?” Mind and Language 23.2 (April 2008): 190-223. For a thoughtful critique of simulation theory, including neural simulation theory of the kind advocated by Gallese, Keysers and others, see also Shaun Gallagher, “Simulation Trouble,” Social Neuroscience 2.3-4 (September 2007): 353-65. Gallagher proposes instead a theory of mind reading based on notions of embodied enactive perception. “Rather than simulation,” he suggests, “MN [mirror neuron] activation can easily be viewed as part of the neuronal processes that underlie enactive inter-subjective perception that functions within the interactional context” (Shaun Gallagher, “Phenomenology, Neural Simulation, and the Enactive Approach to Intersubjectivity,” www.duq.edu/phenomenology/_pdf/gall10duquesne.pdf [2010], 13). On this interpretation, mirror activation is not the initiation of simulation, but part of an enactive inter-subjective perception of what the other is doing. There are suggestive similarities between Gallagher’s enactive approach and Hickok’s idea that mirror neurons should be viewed as part of a sensori- or perceptual-motor apparatus, not as a freestanding motor system.↑

14.  Ultimately, the Basic Emotions View can be traced even further back, to the work of William James and others. But that story must be told on another occasion.↑

15.  James A. Russell and Jose-Miguel Fernández-Dols, eds., The Psychology of Facial Expression (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), use the term “The Facial Expression Program” to describe the Tomkins-Ekman position (7); Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, uses the label “the affect program theory” (77); and Alan J. Fridlund, in Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994), uses the label “The Emotions View” (124): hereafter abbreviated HFE.↑

16.  Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Pictures of Facial Affect (Paolo Alto, Calif.: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1976). In an earlier study of neural responses to disgust in which subjects were shown pictures of neutral, disgusted, frightened, and mildly happy facial expressions—pictures taken from Ekman and Friesen’s standard set of posed expressions—while they underwent fMRI. The experiment confirmed the involvement of the anterior insula in the recognition of disgust displays. M.L. Phillips, A. W. Young, S. K. Scott, A. J. Calder, C. Andrew, V. Giampietro, S. C. R. Williams, E. T. Bullmore, M. Brammer, and J. A. Gray, “Neural Responses to Facial and Vocal Expressions of Fear and Disgust,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series B 265.1408 (October 1998): 1809-1817.↑

17.  For a recent review of appraisal theories see Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research, ed. Klaus R. Scherer, Angela Schorr, and Tom Johnstone (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).↑

18.  Most current work on the emotions adopts the tenets of the Basic Emotions View. In a large literature see Paul Ekman, “An Argument for Basic Emotions.” Cognition and Emotion 6.3-4 (1992): 169-200; Paul Ekman, “Basic Emotions,” in Tim Dalgleish and Mick Power, eds., Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (Chichester, U.K. and New York: Wiley, 1999), 45-60; Paul Ekman and D. Cordaro, “What is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,” Emotion Review 3.4 (October 2011): 364-70; P. E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are; and Andrea Scarantino and Paul Griffiths, “Don’t Give Up on Basic Emotions,” Emotion Review 3.4 (October 2011): 444-54. A recent book on disgust by philosopher Daniel Kelly adopts the Ekman view of disgust as a basic emotion and fails to consider alternative approaches. See Daniel Kelly, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford, 2011).

For criticisms of the Basic Emotions View see Fridlund, Human Facial Expression; Russell and Fernández-Dols, The Psychology of Facial Expression; Brian Parkinson, “Do Facial Movements Express Emotions or Communicate Motives?” Personality and Social Psychology 9.4 (November 2005): 278-311; Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Are Emotions Natural Kinds?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1.1 (March 2006): 28-58; Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10.1 (February 2006): 20-46; Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kristen A. Lindquist, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Seth Duncan, Maria Gendron, Jennifer Mize, and Lauren Brennan, “Of Mice and Men: Natural Kinds of Emotion in the Mammalian Brain? A Response to Panksepp and Izard,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 2.3 (September 2007): 297-312; Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Natural Object and What Kind of Object Is It?”; Ruth Leys, “Navigating the Genealogies of Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview with Ruth Leys,” The University of Toronto Quarterly, Special Issue, “Models of Mind and Consciousness,” 79.2 (Spring 2010): 656-79; Ruth Leys “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (Spring 2011): 434-72; Ruth Leys, “Affect and Intention: A Reply to William E. Connolly,” Critical Inquiry 37.4 (Summer 2011): 799-805.↑

19.  In Fridlund’s view deception is omnipresent in nature, but he does not treat all signals as deceptive or manipulative because cooperation between signaler and receiver is also important. He thus agrees with animal communication experts who propose the existence in any signaling system of a dynamic equilibrium between cooperative and exploitative signals (HFE, 137-39). The question of reliability and deception in animal communication, which has played an important role in the history of debates over the nature of the emotions, is a large topic that deserves separate discussion.↑

20.  But the researchers could have asked the participants about the feelings elicited by the odors by letting them press buttons while they were inside the fMRI tube, or by asking them about their feelings before or after the fMRI session, or by presenting the odors a second time outside the imaging process, and so on. But none of this was done. My thanks to Rainer Reisenzein for these suggestions.↑

21.  Vinciane Despret, Our Emotional Makeup: Ethnopsychology and Selfhood (New York: Other Press, 2004), 92. See also Gallese et al., “A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition,” in which the authors claim on the basis of Wicker et al.’s findings that the mirror-neuron system gives us “direct experiential understanding” of the actions and emotions of others without the intervention of conceptual reasoning or reflective mediation (396). But the participants’ emotional experiences of disgust when observing the disgust faces of the actors was not measured by Wicker et al.↑

22.  Paul Rozin and April E. Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” Psychological Review 94.1 (January 1987): 23-41; Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley, “Disgust,” in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd edition, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 637-53.↑

23.  In support of their interpretation, Wicker et al. cite electrical stimulation experiments on the anterior section of the insula conducted during neurosurgery. The stimulations induced nausea and unpleasant sensations in the throat and mouth, suggesting a role for the anterior insula in transforming unpleasant sensory input into visceromotor reactions and the accompanying feeling of disgust (“BUD,” 658). For an interesting debate over the nature of disgust between researchers Royzman and Kurzban, who defend Fridlund’s strategic signaling position, and Chapman and Anderson, who defend a read-out view of disgust, see: Edward B. Royzman, Robert F. Leeman, and John Sabini, “‘You make me sick’: Moral Dyspepsia as a Reaction to Third-Party Sibling Incest.” Motivation and Emotion 32.2 (June 2008): 100-08; Edward B. Royzman and Robert Kurzban, “Minding the Metaphor: The Elusive Character of Moral Disgust,” Emotion Review 3.3 (July 2011): 269-71; Edward B. Royzman and Robert Kurzban, “Facial Movements are Not Goosebumps: A Response to Chapman and Anderson.” Emotion Review 3.3 (July 2011): 274-75; Hanah A. Chapman, David A. Kim, Joshua M. Susskind, and Adam K. Anderson, “In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust.” Science 323 (February 2009): 1222-1226; Hanah A. Chapman and Adam K. Anderson, “Response to Royzman and Kurzban.” Emotion Review 3.3 (July 2011): 272-73. Royzman and Kurzban’s “Facial Movements Are Not Goosebumps” is especially useful for its brief discussion of how problematic the evidence is for the existence of characteristic disgust facial expressions in congenitally blind people, children, and other individuals.↑

24.  It appears that for Rozin disgust is a more cognitively sophisticated emotion than Wicker et al. take it to be, even if food rejection is central to it. On this point see William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Edward B. Royzman and John Sabini, “Something It Takes to be an Emotion: The Interesting Case of Surprise,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 31.1 (March 2001): 29-59.↑

25.  Darwin described the disgust response in these terms: “The term ‘disgust,’ in its simplest sense, means something offensive to the taste. It is curious how readily this feeling is excited by anything unusual in the appearance, odour, or nature of our food. In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty” (Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, third ed., ed. Paul Ekman, 255). As Ahmed has pointed out, despite Darwin’s apparent emphasis on the self-evident nature of the disgust reaction, his own description points to the complexity of the emotion in its mediated entanglement with questions of familiarity versus unfamiliarity, purity versus impurity, proximity versus distance, white man versus native, and so on. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 82-84. Recently, Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia naively quote this passage from Darwin as if its meaning is self-evident, because for them disgust is one of the basic emotions they regard as visceromotor reflex responses with characteristic facial movements, emotions to which we empathically respond in a mirror-like simulation process. See Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 175-78.↑

26.  Wicker et al. regard the contagiousness of vomiting as further evidence of the automaticity of emotional empathy (“BUD,” 661). Fridlund, however, argues that only when odors are very strongly unpleasant or irritating to the nose and throat do expulsive facial reflexes occur (as when the trigeminal nerve is irritated by ammonia), and considers these brainstem-mediated, protective reflexes whose actions imply neither hedonics nor emotion. So for him the issue is whether, apart from such supranormal stimulation, patterned faces automatically accompany the hedonics of odor or taste. His conclusion is that they don’t. He does not regard the contagiousness of retching as a matter of the automaticity of simulation but as an aversive reaction caused not only by the sight of the face but by the sound and posture of vomiting, as well as by the sight and smell of the vomitus (HFE, 108-122, 153-54).↑

27.  For a review of the experimental literature up to 1994, not mentioned by Wicker et al., see HFE, 155-57; Russell and Fernández-Dols, The Psychology of Facial Expression; Peter Marler and Christopher Evans, “Animal Sounds and Human Faces: Do They Have Anything in Common?” in The Psychology of Facial Expression, ed. Russell and Fernández-Dols, 133-226; and James A. Russell, Jo-Anne Bachorowski, and Jose-Miguel Fernández-Dols, “Facial and Vocal Expressions of Emotions,” Annual Review of Psychology 54 (2003): 329-49.

Fridlund has called his approach to the emotions the Behavioral Ecology View in order to emphasize that facial movements function not to express the so-called basic emotions but to communicate information about social motives to implicit or explicit audiences. For a related set of experiments on the influence of audiences, this time experiments on the smile, see Robert E. Kraut and Robert E. Johnston, “Social and Emotional Messages in Smiling: An Ethological Approach,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37.9 (September 1979): 1539-1553; María-Angeles Ruiz-Belda, Jose-Miguel Fernández-Dols, Pilar Carrera, and Kim Barchard, “Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Happy Bowlers and Soccer Fans,” Cognition and Emotion 17.2 (2003): 315-26; and David Matsumoto and Bob Willingham, “The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat: Spontaneous Expressions of Medal Winners of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91.3 (September 2006): 568-81. In a recent experiment comparing Ekman’s neurocultural theory and Fridlund’s Behavioral Ecology View, Studtmann and Reisenzein tried to address various perceived limitations in these previous studies of the smile. The initial report of their findings appeared to affirm the validity of Fridlund’s theory by stating that “1: Bowlers do not smile because they feel happy about a good score. 2: They smile because they have a social motive and an audience they can communicate the motive to. 3: Having a feeling of joy but no appropriate audience is in most cases not sufficient to display happiness.” Markus Studtmann and Rainer Reisenzein, “Bowlers’ Smiles Revisited: Disentangling Influences of Feelings and of Social Contexts on Displaying Happiness,” talk at the 13th European Conference on Facial Expression, July 26-28, 2010, Duisburg, Germany.

Reisenzein now rejects the language of “social motives” on the grounds that although one can attribute the results of the study to a social-communicative motive, as the initial report of the results did, the experiment did not provide independent evidence of social motives or its contents. He therefore proposes a new statement of the findings as follows: “Studtmann and Reisenzein found that bowlers do not smile simply because they feel happy about a good strike, they also need an audience to which they can communicate their feelings” (personal communication). Thus instead of suggesting that facial actions lend themselves to a direct social-motive interpretation without reference to an internal emotion needing expression (Fridlund’s view), Reisenzein proposes a model in which Feelings + Audience produce a “Communication of Feelings.”  In short, he posits the existence of feelings independently of social motives—social motives that are presumably determined by the presence or absence of an audience and that merely serve as a gate on the expression or communication of those feelings. The risk of this formulation is that it makes it hard to see any difference between it and Ekman’s neurocultural conception according to which our basic emotions are internal states that express themselves outwardly in facial expressions, which may be modified by culturally-determined display rules. My thanks to Markus Studtmann and Rainer Reisenzein for discussing this experiment and their report with me.

In a recent study Sandra Miener also undertook a comparison between Ekman’s and Fridlund’s positions, focusing on the emotion of disgust, using as stimuli computer images of objects held to be inherently disgusting to the observer, and manipulating the conditions under which the experimental subject viewed these objects, such as being alone, or with friends, or with strangers. Sandra Miener, Die Basisemotion Ekel: Untersuchungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen Gefühl und Ausdruck [The Basic Emotion of Disgust: Studies on the Relationship between Feeling and Expression] (Ph.D. Diss., University of Bielefeld, Faculty of Psychology and Sports, 2007). Available at http://bieson.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/volltexte/2007/1128/index.html. Miener’s findings were mixed, but a detailed discussion of her experiments lies outside the scope of my essay. I thank Markus Studtmann for drawing my attention to Miener’s work.↑

28.  In an interesting investigation the facial responses of female subjects were videotaped while they smelled six odors in each of three experimental conditions (spontaneous, posing to real odors, and posing to imagined odors). Videotaping was covert in the spontaneous condition (in other words, the subjects were unaware of being filmed) but overt in the posed condition. Raters were then asked to identify the type of odor—good (cloves, roses), bad (urine, rancid sweat), and neutral (mineral oil only)—from the poses. The findings demonstrated that subjects exhibited few facial responses to the odors when smelling them in private, despite dramatic differences in their hedonic ratings of the odors. In short, patterned faces did not automatically accompany the hedonics of odor, as the reflex theory of facial expression predicted, but were influenced by the social demand character of the setting.  See Avery N. Gilbert, Alan J. Fridlund, and John Sabini, “Hedonic and Social Determinants of Facial Displays to Odors,” Chemical Senses 12.2 (June 1987): 355-63. For a more recent discussion of experimental work on the facial expression of disgust, including a critical analysis of Rosenberg and Ekman’s 1994 experimental work on disgust, see also Jose-Miguel Fernández-Dols and María-Angeles Ruiz-Belda, “Spontaneous Facial Behavior During Intense Emotional Episodes: Artistic Truth and Optical Truth,” in Russell and Fernández-Dols, The Psychology of Facial Expression, 255-74.↑

29.  For a comparison between Ekman’s Basic Emotions versus Fridlund’s Behavioral Ecology theories which finds little evidence to support Ekman’s position, see Parkinson, “Do Facial Movements Express Emotions or Communicate Motives?” Fridlund’s and Ekman’s approaches tend to make different predictions about the impact of interpersonal contexts or audiences on facial movements. Whereas Ekman’s theory tends to suggest that the presence of other people may make us moderate an otherwise “spontaneous” expression of emotion of the kind we make when we are alone, Fridlund argues that displays are always forms of address to some audience, literal or implicit. According to Ekman’s position, then, there should be less inhibition or masking of emotional expression, which is to say more expressive movements, when we are unobserved or alone than when we are in observed situations. By contrast, according to Parkinson, Fridlund’s theory predicts that there will be less facial movements in unobserved situations than in those in which an “amenable” addressee or audience is present.

However, it is important not to adopt too literal a view of Fridlund’s position, since according to his theory, how we respond depends on the context. As he points out, friends sharing a humorous experience face-to-face are likely to exhibit greater facial responses than if they are separated by a partition, but friends asked to play poker may well exhibit less. Then, too, facial behavior that is socially censored, such as crying in front of strangers or casual acquaintances, may produce less facial movement with increasing sociality. In other words, social role is an important determinant of facial behavior: thus “commuters on a subway may be within inches from each other yet pretend not to notice; if they are friends, however, their talk and facial behavior may be incessant. (There are exceptions, as when we ‘spill out our guts’ to a total stranger on a plane, and here, our faces pour out with our words)” (HFE, 70).

Fridlund has observed in this connection that it is hard to strip an experiment of the impact of such social roles. The result is that social influences are difficult to control or handle experimentally. In any situation, the number of variables potentially influencing behavior is enormous; even unconscious influences can’t be ruled out. The risk of being too literal about the “alone” (or “spontaneous”) condition is especially high, with researchers too often assuming that just because an experimental subject is alone in a laboratory setting he or she loses all cultural influences. Instead, according to Fridlund, when we are alone we often act as if real or imagined others are present. “In the implicit sociality view,” Fridlund writes, “implicit or imaginal interactants can never be excluded” [HFE, 166].) Experiments are suspect, then, which proceed on the assumption that sociality can be ruled out if the experimental subject is alone in the laboratory or viewing room. The same criticisms apply to experiments, all too frequent, that operate on the assumption that facial electromyography, the electrical recording of facial muscle activity through the use of tiny electrodes attached to the skin, is uncontaminated by social roles and contexts. Such studies often wrongly assume that electromyography reflects pure emotion because the experimental subject is “alone” while viewing or imagining, and because electromyographic activity is below or at the edge of visibility. But from a Behavioral Ecology point of view, electromyography techniques don’t offer the chance to penetrate below the social, but instead reveal the covert sociality of what can’t be seen. (See HFE, 171-72, for a cogent discussion of this issue.)

The issue of the sociality of expression is at the center of Fridlund’s important critique of Ekman’s canonical Japanese-American experiment, an experiment that is foundational for the Basic Emotions View. For an analysis of Ekman’s effort to respond to Fridlund’s criticisms, see Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 88-89. Likewise, Despret observes that leaving a subject alone in a room and thinking that he or she is not aware of being observed borders on the naïve—and thinking that the subjects are naïve (Despret, Our Emotional Makeup: Ethnopsychology and Selfhood, 85).↑

30.  Laurie Carr, Marco Iacoboni, Marie-Charlotte Dubeau, John C. Mazziotta, and Gian Luigi Lenzi, “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans: A Relay From Neural Systems for Imitation to Limbic Areas,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100.9 (April 29, 2003): 5497-5502.↑

31.  Carr et al. frame their results in terms of mirror neuron theory by suggesting that “the type of empathic resonance induced by imitation does not require explicit representational content and may be a form of ‘mirroring’ that grounds empathy via an experiential mechanism” (Carr et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans,” 5502). The main difference between the findings of Wicker’s team and those of Carr’s group was that, according to the latter, the insula’s importance was not restricted to its role in disgust but extended to the other basic emotions as well.↑

32.  It’s possible that Carr’s experimental subjects did in fact induce emotions in themselves in some “method-acting” way. Carr et al. simply report that their subjects were “asked to imitate and internally generate the target emotion on the computer screen, or to simply observe” (Carr et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans,” 5498). On the other hand, their subjects were not actors trained in method acting, so how good they were at generating internal emotions while imitating facial expressions on the computer screen is an open question. Moreover, we don’t know what Carr et al.’s subjects actually felt when imitating the emotions because, as I say, they were not asked to report on their subjective experiences.↑

33.  In a study of emotional recognition in a patient with extensive brain damage from severe Herpes simplex encephalitis, including bilateral damage to the amygdala and insula, an effort was made to test the patient with “dynamic facial expressions” by having one of the experimenters pose the expressions held to characterize the basic emotions when seated across from the subject. The researchers report that in each case, the experimenter produced an “intense but natural expression of an emotion.” The investigators also followed up on the patient’s impaired recognition of disgust by “acting out” behaviors or acting “scenarios” normally associated with intense disgust, such as eating and then regurgitating and spitting out food, accompanied by retching sounds and facial expressions of disgust. See Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Dissociable Neural Systems for Recognizing Emotions,” Brain and Cognition 52.1 (June 2003): 63, 66. But in the light of my criticisms, these methods seem naïve.↑

34.  Thus for Denis Diderot, for example, the threat of exaggeration or falseness or mannerism—in short, of “theatricality”—in acting is omnipresent. It may be that an inspired actor under exactly the right conditions can by some inner process of “identification” produce now and then the impression of authentic feeling, but the whole point of Diderot’s well-known text, Le Paradoxe sur le comédien, is that this can’t be assured. Instead, he insists that what matters is simply how an actor’s performance appears to the audience—with the further, crucial proviso that an authentic-seeming performance requires that the actor convey not the least suggestion that the audience has been taken into account. This explains his recommendation that the actor treat the audience as if it did not exist, or as if the curtain separating the actor from the audience had never risen. In other words, the actor must seek to create the illusion that he or she is entirely absorbed in the actions and situations taking place on the stage; only then will the performance have the look and ring of “authenticity”—but it is an illusion, not some ultimate truth. In other words, these are deeply complex issues that defy facile formulations. A further layer of complexity is implied by the fact that live performance is one thing, but posing for a photograph or a film is something else again (two different somethings, as a matter of fact). Yet the scientists who have used posed expressions seem oblivious to this entire nuance.↑

35.  Mbemba Jabbi, Marte Swart, and Christian Keysers, “Empathy for Positive and Negative Emotions in the Gustatory Cortex.” NeuroImage 34.4 (February 2007): 1744-1753. However, the authors no longer imply or believe that insula activation is specific to negative emotions such as disgust or pain, since they provide evidence of insula activation also in the case of positive feelings.  More recently, Keysers and colleagues have acknowledged the absence of a reliable mapping of particular emotions onto specific brain regions. Instead, the authors propose the existence of a “mosaic” of affective, motor, and somatosensory components involved in emotional processing, while continuing to stress the role of motor simulation in triggering the simulation of associated feeling states.  Jojanneke A.C. J. Bastiaansen, Marc Thioux, and Christian Keysers, “Evidence for Mirror Systems in Emotions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, series B 364.1528 (August 2009): 2391-2404. For a general critique of the locationist approach to the brain basis of emotions see Kristen A. Lindquist, Tor D. Wager, Hedy Kober, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “The Brain Basis of Emotion: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press.↑

36.  The problem Jabbi et al. were dealing with is one that has haunted simulation theory for a long time, as the philosopher Shaun Gallagher has pointed out. Simulation depends on one’s own first-person experience as the basis for what goes into the simulation. “We start with our own experience and project some tentative empathic conception of what must be going on in the other’s mind . . . The question is, when we project ourselves imaginatively into the understanding of the other, are we merely reiterating ourselves? Goldman describes simulation in the following way: ‘In all these cases, observing what other people do or feel is therefore transformed into an inner representation of what we would do or feel in a similar situation—as if we would be in the skin of the person we observe’ . . . But [Gallagher goes on] how does knowing what we would do help us know what someone else would do? Indeed, many times we are in a situation where we see what someone is doing, and know that we would do it differently, or perhaps not do it at all.” Gallagher calls this the “diversity problem” in order to stress the idea that most of the time we don’t impute our experience to others, nor do we automatically feel what others feel. He goes on in this and other publications to suggest that it is an error to call mirror neuron systems “simulations” at all, since such processes are neither “pretend” processes nor modes of instrumental actions, as the term simulation usually implies. In subpersonal mirror neuron processes of the kind proposed by Wicker et al. there is no pretense, since neurons either fire or don’t fire: they don’t pretend to fire. There is no “as if” involved at all. (See Shaun Gallagher, “Phenomenology, Neural Simulation, and the Enactive Approach to Intersubjectivity” www.duq.edu/phenomenology/_pdf/gall10duquesne.pdf [2010].)↑

37.  Of course, like facial movements themselves, self-reports of emotion may also be closely attuned to the perceived interpersonal context and hence be sensitive to audience effects or experimental demand. For a discussion see Parkinson, “Do Facial Movements Express Emotions or Communicate Motives?”↑

38.  Jabbi et al.,“Empathy for Positive and Negative Emotions in the Gustatory Cortex,” 1747-48.↑

39.  In a paper originally titled “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience” that has caused a lively controversy, Jabbi et al.’s 2007 experiment was included in a list of “non-independent” studies that were accused of exaggerating the correlations between emotional and other behaviors and measures of brain activity.  See Edward Vul, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman, and Harold Pashler, “Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4.3 (May 2009): 274-290; and Edward Vul, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman, and Harold Pasher, “Reply to Comments on ‘Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4.3 (2009): 319-24. For replies to Vul et al. see Mbemba Jabbi, Christina Keysers, Tanya Singer, and Klaas Enro Stephan, “Responses to ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’ by Vul et al., summary information for the press”; Matthew Lieberman, Elliot T. Berkman, and Tor D. Wager, “Correlations in Social Neuroscience Aren’t Voodoo: Commentary on Vul et al. (2009),” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4.3 (May 2009): 299-307.↑

40.  It is unclear to me from Jabbi et al.’s description of their experiment if they determined whether the participants (observers) felt disgust when they were actually watching the actors’ facial expressions.↑

41.  But then wouldn’t this also be true for the participants? So why bother to ask them to rate their responses?↑

42.  For a discussion of the origins of the facial feedback theory and a critique of the various attempts to prove its validity, a critique based in part on the claim that the experimental tests have been inextricably confounded with implicit suggestions to subjects about how they should act, see HFE, 173-82. For a more recent discussion see Jean Decety, “To What Extent is the Experience of Empathy Mediated by Shared Neural Circuits?” Emotion Review 2.3 (July 2010): 204-07.↑

43.  David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 167-92.↑

44.  As Menninghaus has usefully reminded us, for Freud, the emotion of disgust is the direct opposite of a natural given, since it is a result or symptom of the repression of archaic libidinal drives and hence of the passage into culture: as a transformation of eros, disgust is indissociable from pleasure or desire. Wicker et al.’s narrow definition of disgust as essentially a visceromotor reflex, like vomiting, contrasts with the long Western tradition of theorizing disgust that, since Kant, has been oriented toward questions of aesthetics and aesthetic judgment. In his discussion of this tradition, Menninghaus brings out the ways in which in earlier theorizing both attraction and revulsion—hence ambivalence or conflict—were seen to characterize the disgust experience, a dimension entirely lacking in contemporary scientific definitions of the kind adopted by Wicker et al. See Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany, N,Y,: State University of New York Press, 2003). For an account of the role of sympathetic identification or imitation in Freud’s work on trauma and the affects, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).↑

I

In a Lonely Place (1950), while often characterized as a film noir,1 also has the emotional intensity, the sense of intimacy, the tenderness in its treatment of very flawed characters, and the psychological complexity that one associates with a film by Nicholas Ray. It presents as well an intense focus on romantic love, or at least on the possibility of romantic love, that in standard noirs would be a matter of obsessive attachment to, or mostly submission to, a murderous femme fatale, and so a relationship contaminated by an underlying struggle for power. The movie is modest in scale and seems offered as material for reflection; as if it poses a question rather than just narrates and resolves a story. There is much more conversation than action, heightening its more reflective aspects.

It is reflective in another sense too, and I will come to that in a moment. There are two intertwining narrative threads in the plot. In the main plot, a bitter, apparently burned-out Hollywood script writer, Dixon Steel (Humphrey Bogart), is accidentally connected with a murder victim, one Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), a hat-check girl from his favorite restaurant, whom he had asked home after work to tell him the plot of a popular book he has been asked to adapt for the screen. Since Dix was the last person known to have seen Mildred alive, and since he has a long record of fights, attacks on others, even perhaps domestic abuse, the police figure him for a violent character and suspect him of the murder. (As in many noirs, one has to pause often in plot summaries. This last bit—that Dix has been “known for violence”—may not be what it seems. As Victor Perkins points out, the police captain in charge of the investigation, Captain Lochner (Karl Benton Reid), is shown recounting, very slowly and solemnly for dictation, almost comically so (as if his belief in what he is saying is comical), the list of Dix’s scrapes, but he is clearly reading from press clippings, not from police records.2 (Any movie audience could be expected to know all about press agents and their problematic relation to the truth.3) But Dix has an alibi. One Laurel Gray (Gloria Graham, still Ray’s wife at the time), an unemployed starlet, is a new neighbor of Dix’s and had happened to come home at the same time as Dix and Mildred (a spectacular entrance, close to the femme fatale appearances that doom so many noir heroes; it won’t take long before we learn she has suspicious past, with “gold digger” associations). She swears that she also saw Mildred leave Dix’s apartment, alone. (Another interruption: it is of some importance that this claim is not supported by what the viewer is allowed to see. All we see of what Laurel sees is that Dix has partially disrobed, is in a dressing gown, alone in his apartment after midnight with a young woman, and we surmise that she must have heard Mildred loudly yelling twice for help.4 (Mildred is enthusiastically acting out a part from the book, but Laurel does not know this, does not mention the screaming for “help” to the police, she never asks Dix about it, and we never hear this lacuna explained from her point of view.) We do not of course know that she has not seen this, but we are given no confirmation. Moreover, later, when people are trying hard to convince her that Dix did do it, she never replies resolutely, “Look, I saw her leave alone.” And by the end of the film she is clearly convinced that he could have done it, which has to mean that she did not see Mildred leave alone.5

Dix and Laurel fall in love, and immediately Dix can write again. His own life now has a “plot,” with love at the center, and he can write himself and Laurel into it. (This also suggests, at the reflective level again, that they may be trapped by Hollywood expectations, by Dix’s “script” for them too. Lauren’s main function in their relationship is as the transcriber of his words. As we shall see, the last lines of the movie, her lines, are from Dix’s script.) But from the beginning of their romance, the police put a lot of pressure on Dix, plant a lot of doubts in Laurel’s mind, and that, and what Dix (rightly) regards as several violations of his trust, and the exhibition of his own terrible temper, doom their relationship.6 At the end of the film, after their nearly violent break-up (Dix appears to be intent on strangling her until the phone rings), they learn that the real murderer has been caught and that Dix is in the clear. Laurel says that this news would have meant everything had they heard about it they day before, but now it is too late, again as if they are typical film noir victims of mere chance.7

In this, the major plot, it is obvious that the question the characters are struggling with, and so the one addressed to us, as viewers, is something like “what do we really know when we claim to understand someone, or to understand their ‘character’ or ‘true self’ or who they really are, especially to the extent necessary (whatever extent that is) to trust someone, and so expose oneself to possible betrayal?”8 Or: what is the right way to acknowledge and live out the implications of realizing that we will very likely never be in a position to resolve such issues?  Everyone—Laurel, Dix’s agent, Mel (Art Smith), Dix’s improbably named army buddy, Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), who is also the police detective working the Mildred murder case, Brub’s very conventional and suspicious, even hostile wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell), and Captain Lochner—they all want to know whether Dix is capable of murder. The usual tropes and figures come to mind: they want to know what is “inside” him, want to know the real, if hidden, Dix. The issue is naturally most important to Laurel, since she is in an intimate relation of trust with Dix; exposed to him, to his supposed instability, and to his potential violence, as it were. As we shall see though, once she allows the question of whether this trust and faith are justified to arise, the possibility of answering it immediately changes, as her relation to Dix just thereby changes; he notes the change, is wounded, he changes, and then, and only then, does he begin to evince what could be, and are taken to be, indications that he really is “capable of murder.” The movie, in other words, introduces us to a reflection on one dimension of the philosophical problem of  “skepticism about other minds,” but in a distinctly practical register (perhaps the only appropriate register, as we shall see). In the modern period (and it seems to be an exclusively modern problem) the most general form of the issue is: how do I know that other apparently human beings are actually human beings (at least are human beings like me), and not automata, and so forth, and the most common focus for the discussion is the experience of pain and its relation to pain behavior. That is: I only see, know, can be sure of, another’s expressions, presumably of pain. How do I know the other experiences what I experience when I experience pain? But our inability to enter and “have” another’s experience or in some other way know what they experience in the way I experience what I do, gives rise to many forms of doubt or skepticism, most famously in cases like Othello’s, and is certainly at issue in this film.9

There is an interconnected subplot too, and that suggests that other level of reflectiveness mentioned earlier. This concerns the “Hollywood plot.” Dix, we are told, “hasn’t written anything good since before the war,” now some time back. His own reason for this, which we are invited to share and sympathize with (up to a point), is that this is because of his integrity, his refusal to churn out the schlock that Hollywood requires.10 We are several times shown Dix befriending an alcoholic actor friend, Charlie Waterman (Robert Warrick), clearly a Shakespearean actor of the “old school,” genuinely trained as an actor, familiar with the classics, who later actually recites Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace in fortune and men’s eyes” sonnet. This seems to suggest that there was a time when movies aspired to something real and honest, whereas they are now made by what Dix calls “popcorn salesmen.” Everything we see of the movie industry, often from what seems to be Dix’s point of view, is of a soulless mass culture machine, geared to the “Mildred Atkinson tastes” of the public.11 There are many other “internal” references to the industry in the Ray film itself. I mean not in the plot but in what can be taken as references by Ray to himself in Dix (the apartment complex is the one Ray lived in when he came to Hollywood), to Bogart and Bogart’s reputation, to studio heads and so forth.12 But if the problem in the film is sincerity and trust, the problem of the film (as a film) is very similar. Dix wants everyone to know that Hollywood films are false, dishonest, pandering and in that sense “insincere.” So if the former problem concerns what it would mean, how it would be possible, to know someone well enough to trust him or her, to trust not just that they are honest but that their own (sincere) “presentation of themselves” is not itself a self-deceived fantasy, is reliable, this latter concerns what it is for a film (or a work of art) to be “genuine” too, to prove Dix’s skepticism about the movies wrong. This was partly at issue in the “interruptions” above; feeling sufficiently assured that the “formula plots” we are apparently invited to invoke are inadequate, that the film has rejected such satisfactions, would invite us to closer attention; something that is itself, at the outset, an act of faith by the viewer, based on some sort of trust.

There is a visual embodiment of both levels of reflection in the opening credits. This first thing we see are Dix’s eyes in the car’s rear-view mirror, and so the problem of both our knowing him (the eyes being windows to the soul), and his knowledge of himself, or anyone’s knowledge of themselves, is introduced. (It is probably deliberate and important that at no point in the opening shot does Dix look at himself in the mirror or even check the mirror. If though, as this avoidance might indicate, he knows himself poorly, then his remaining “true to himself” and all his clinging to fiercely held ideals of integrity will carry a different weight in what follows.) But we are also at this point not just watching Dix in the movie; the credits are rolling by, so we are also attending to the movie, not what it represents. (We are in effect seeing a movie screen (the mirror) within a movie screen.)13 And since the movie is itself, or presents itself as, a mirror to the events, “reflecting” them (not just their visibility but their meaning) realistically, the question of the film’s reflective honesty or genuineness is also at issue, perhaps problematically at issue if the same doubts about what the film (any film, implicitly) “purports to be” can be raised as about Dix’s self-knowledge.

Clip 1: Opening

II

At this point I will need to introduce some philosophical apparatus in order to develop what has been introduced. Given the framework already presented (skepticism, other minds, genuineness, fraudulence, revelation, acknowledgement), it should come as no surprise that the approach I will take up is Stanley Cavell’s discussion of the problem of skepticism in The Claim of Reason, and his own use of his approach in essays like “Knowing and Acknowledging” and “The Avoidance of Love” in Must We mean What We Say? And “Othello and the Stake of the Other,” originally the closing discussion in The Claim of Reason and reprinted in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). I am interested in Cavell because he provides a different approach to, and an often perspicuous vocabulary for, discussing a Hegelian idea that many have found either opaque or dangerously illiberal or both (in Hegel and also in Cavell’s source, Wittgenstein): that what it is to know oneself as a subject is wrongly conceived at the outset if understood as some sort of particularly intimate relation between a thinker or an agent and itself, as something essentially “inner” and directed to a particular kind of object.  (Both Hegel and Wittgenstein stage their dissatisfactions in terms of re-thinking something like the logic of “inner and outer” in philosophical psychology. And so for both, an implication of this re-thinking is that “knowing” another can be nothing like the fantasy of looking “inside” them, or telepathically gaining insight into “what they experience.” And for both, this is because it is the wrong model for the person himself, for his own self-knowledge.14) Cavell goes so far as to say the whole notion of a knowledge of others is wrongly framed. The struggle with attempting to understand others requires something other than a special sort of propositional knowledge; it requires instead a certain “acknowledgement” of them, as he puts it. The context in which doubt about what I take to know of another arises is often, in Cavell’s discussion, a particularly intimate one; a great deal is at stake in the burden of such doubt and in what is achieved if it can be alleviated. With so much at stake, one manner of self-protection—an unavoidable consideration—is to ensure that each is as exposed as the other, as much at risk, even if no stable form of reassurance about this is ever available. (This is certainly the case in the movie; there is a great deal at stake in Laurel’s knowing “what Dix is really capable of”; there is a great deal at stake for Dix in whether Laurel can be trusted, what it “means” that she had been the kept girlfriend of a real estate tycoon.) This means for Cavell that such an attempt to know something about another is inseparable from what he calls “taking up an attitude” towards that other.

I understand what he is trying to say in the following way. (And here I will stray a bit from his own formulations, will not be so concerned with global skepticism about the human/non-human distinction, and will try to put his points in my own words.) First, that any intimate involvement with others inevitably involves a struggle of some sort, ideally a mutual struggle, to understand each other. This also means that the struggle is necessarily dynamic. That is, knowing each other is not a matter of episodic, punctuated inspections or momentary revelations, but always a struggle over time to understand and be understood, where what is to understand and to be understood is itself at least somewhat unstable, itself changing over time. Secondly, in the context of one’s involvement with another, thinking one knows what, say, another would do in some situation simply amounts to a matter of whether one can trust the other to do this or that. Knowing that another will stay loyal in some crisis is, in a practical context, counting on them to stay loyal. (Counting on them is what it is to know them; the former is not based on the latter.) Wanting to know whether another loves me is determining what I can expect, count on, from the other. One makes it true (even if not in some wholly self-constituting way) that the other is loved by what one does, not by registering a feeling. Hence the link between knowing and taking up an attitude, and any such taking up of an attitude is an acknowledgement of the other in some way or another, an expression of a resolution of confidence that such and such is the case, or not. So such attempts at acknowledgement are of a sort that can also fail. Ray’s film is about such a failure, and while it is certainly not King Lear or Othello (the scale of the film is much smaller, more intimate), there is much to be learned from it as to why such a failure is a failure.

I do not mean to say that Ray’s film in some way exemplifies or supports Cavell’s analysis, but that we cannot really understand what that analysis amounts to until we see the issues “alive” in an appropriately complex dramatic or literary context. I take his own work on literature and film to be guides to how that “realization” (to use Hegel’s word) is to be understood.15 In Cavell’s terms, what we see in the film are characters trying to understand what others mean by what they say and do, all under the pressure of a great deal of uncertainty, and the pressure of unavoidable, immanent decisions, and where the stakes in getting matters right or wrong are quite high. This attempt, as Cavell explains it, involves not trying to understand what is literally said, but what is meant by a character’s saying what is said, what he or she means, not simply “what is meant,” or what she meant by doing what she did or did not do.16 (An obvious example in the film: the police must ask what it means that, when Dix learns of Mildred’s death, he remains flippant, cracking-wise, and apparently indifferent.)  This will involve quite a complex activity, though still everyday and familiar, of interpretation, assessment and, especially, evaluation (rendering ourselves intelligible to each other is inseparable from the way we render ourselves answerable, accountable, to each other),17 all of which is made even more difficult when the characters are in intimate relations of dependence, exposed emotionally to each other. In those cases, the question must also involve issues like: what did he mean by saying that to me, then (or doing that, then) and when I have a great stake in his meaning one thing and not another, in his understanding me one way, rather than the other. (The skepticism involved is what Cavell calls a “motivated” skepticism, and we will hear more about it shortly.) If all of this is so, the task of investigating what it is to understand another, another’s meaning and deeds, will need to be carried out in some context where the complexity of such factors can be constantly visible and bear on the issues in a credible way. Simple and contrived philosophical “thought experiments” are not going to do the job.18

And as viewers of filmed drama, all of these issues of what is involved in understanding others are in play for us as well, with a fundamental difference that needs to be worked out: we are not exposed in any way to those whom we are trying to understand, and the characters in the drama cannot do anything to make themselves available to us. We cannot struggle together to be understood.19 However, if what was said above about the nature of the problem of subjects who are “other to each other” and find that otherness unsatisfying and even disturbing is correct, then, in watching the film, we can be said to have come to understand something (if we have) about that in some way not reformulable in an argument or in a more familiar philosophical justification (or not all that well, as in what I am going to say discursively about the film). Something like the compellingness of the narrative will have illuminated something in a way again much closer to having understood someone, than it is to having proved something.20

II

What I need from Cavell in order to address these issues in the film are three major claims, mostly worked out in The Claim of Reason, but present almost everywhere else in his corpus. The first is directly related to what was just mentioned: the nature of the problem. For Cavell claims that skepticism about other minds is really not skepticism but “tragedy,” and, as he says, “there is no human alternative to the possibility of tragedy” (The Claim of Reason, 453).21 He establishes this somewhat indirectly, by arguing that such a putative skepticism about other minds cannot at all be made to parallel traditional skepticism about the external world, which, at one major level, can clearly be at least initially formulated as a problem about knowledge.22 For one thing, the latter cannot be lived out as a form of life; we leave it, like Hume, in the philosopher’s study, and treat the world, as we must if we are to avoid injury, as full of real, spatio-temporally located objects. But we do have to live out and live with a kind of deep, irremediable uncertainty that we will ever know what we think we need to know in order to deal with other human beings, as well as with a kind of uncertainty about just what would ease our anxiety about this situation (a fact that immediately calls into question whether our frustration at the otherness of the other can be understood as product in our finitude in trying to know). We take it as intuitively obvious that each of us occupies an absolutely superior position with regard to our own mindedness, i.e., “what it is like to be me.” So we are then tempted to think that overcoming skepticism about other minds would be knowing the other’s mindedness by occupying just that sort of a superior position with respect to her mindedness (by “having” it). It is very unclear what this could be, though.

If I imagine myself with extraordinary telepathic powers, so that I can begin to see and feel things exactly as you do, then either this is incoherent (for you don’t experience the world as me having those experiences as mine, as I would, with such powers) or, the whole difference or separateness between me and you vanishes (like Cavell’s Corsican brothers example in “Knowing and Acknowledging,” one of whom simply has every and only every experience the other has). In that case, we do not have someone knowing another’s mind, but the simple collapse of the separateness of persons altogether. We have just one mind, perhaps in this fanciful example, in two bodies; not one mind knowing another. So, Cavell says, what we have in this concern with knowing others is not frustration at the limitations of knowledge (an assumption that implies there is some limitation that can be overcome, and we have just seen what the fantasy of overcoming it would amount to), but unavoidable, constant disappointment with what we do have available from the other, disappointment with what is available (all that is available), once we have disabused ourselves of the fantasy of “breaking into” the other’s world.23 However, once we have given up that fantasy, the idea that what we are left with is “insufficient,” or a frustrating result of an in principle overcomeable finitude, can no longer get a grip.24

Second, with this established, Cavell can introduce an analysis of what is motivating our concern with the other’s knowability (once it can be established that the problem cannot be an epistemological or even philosophical problem), suggesting that our enacting our inability to break into the other’s world is motivated by (“means”) an anxiety that others will be able to break into ours (and so a defense against that) or a fantasy of inexpressiveness about ourselves which insures our unknowability to them, itself a reassuring response to an anxiety about being revealed, available to others’ gazes. So, “[t]he block to my vision of the other is not the other’s body, but my incapacity or unwillingness to interpret or judge it accurately, to draw the right connections” (The Claim of Reason, 368). And “…the alternative to my acknowledgement of the other is not my ignorance of him but my avoidance of him, call it my denial of him” (The Claim of Reason, 389).

This last point already introduces the third and most important contribution of the book, the differences between, and especially the complementarity and inseparability, of what Cavell calls active and passive skepticism about other minds. The first, active skepticism, just reiterates what we have mostly been focusing on: how can I know another, the true nature of that other’s (supposedly) inner life. The latter though is a concern, or an anxiety about whether I am ever truly known (“as I really am”) by an other. And the two modalities are interconnected.25 If we assume, as we should given Cavell’s concerns, a domestic, or intimate, or dialogic situation of self and other, where the question is not what “any self” (a human sciences researcher, say) can claim to know about anyone at all, but the everyday struggle to make ourselves intelligible to each other, then in claiming to know something about you, and in claiming this to you, I of course risk being misunderstood. I need to make sure that I am being understood, not just that my words are intelligible. This requires some effort; it does not just happen. And it comes with emotional risks. And it is often just in those cases where I am trying to convey to someone what I take it I have learned about her, I feel myself badly misunderstood. Feelings are hurt; friendships can fracture. Likewise, in hearing from others what they take themselves to have understood about me, I want to reserve some special authority to acknowledge or reject such claims; I am not just an object to be inspected and reported on.

And the connection is deeper. Insofar as I strive to understand something about another, I must be willing to make it possible for that other (or even any other) to understand me, or I will not be understood, in the sense just discussed; or, better, in Cavell’s way of seeing it, I will have not been able to say what I mean. And in so far as I want to understand myself, I cannot claim that my own understanding is inexpressible, cannot be understood by others. (If that is so, then famously, I can’t be said to have expressed what I mean either.26) But this also involves accepting that I have to struggle to make my own putative self-understanding available for others, subjecting to some extent the question of what I mean to say to another’s view of what saying that would mean.

And just by considering something like the common neighborhood these concepts inhabit, it is clear that such a claim to authority and rejection of a claim can often also be a version of defensive protectiveness against an unpleasant truth (too close to be easily or effectively distinguished), just as the putative claim about me can be motivated, directly or in a self-deceived way, by hostility and an urge to wound. It can be this and also be true, of course, but our question is what the other meant by saying what she did. Moreover, the situation is even more difficult if set out, as an intentional task, to get the other to see things as I do.

But then the responses you produce in the other are apt to be directed to the wrong thing, to the part you have enacted, not to yourself. It is as an alternative to the wish to produce the response in the other that I claimed you must let yourself matter to the other. (The Claim of Reason, 383)27

This leaves us with three complicated levels of complexity. This dynamical picture, especially this link between active and passive skepticism,28 means that the struggle to understand another must also be a struggle to be understood, and a mutual struggle against suspicions of insincerity, mere seduction, manipulation, simple misunderstanding. But there is a second level of difficulty when we realize that in many contexts sincerity resolves none of the major anxieties, and this because a sincere avowal by an other may be an expression of self-deceit. In some cases I am called on to understand the other better than she understands herself; called on to admit that another may have understood me better than I understand myself.29 And third, this struggle goes on over time, at no point in which can there be any resolution once and for all of what provoked the anxiety and uncertainty. Sometimes my very attempt to question another’s self-representation alters what one might have understood about such a person before any such interrogation or expression of skepticism. (As we shall see, this certainly happens in the film. Dix’s being Dix, one might say, changes a great deal under the pressure of everyone’s doubts about him. In returning to the film, we shall also return to the question of what it would mean to, as Cavell puts it, “let yourself matter.”)

III

Let us say that the issue of anyone’s knowledge of any other is dialectical; not a matter of a subject knowing, or confirming in some way in the face of doubts, its knowledge of an object. Moreover our understanding of such an other subject is often available to us only in terms relevant to that subject’s relation to us. It could even be that what we think we understand of another is a result of that subject’s acknowledgement of or engagement with, an “us” that was not genuinely or honestly made available for acknowledgement, and this can “distort” the “results.” In this and several other senses,  acknowledging and being acknowledged are inseparable elements of inter-subjectivity, and so subject to these dialectical gymnastics.30

In the terms presented by Nicholas Ray’s film, the major issue for the police, and for Dix’s friend Brub, Brub’s wife Sylvia, Laurel, and Dix’s agent Mel, is understanding Dix’s “temper and potential violence,” and, just as Cavell would have it, that issue cannot be isolated as a mere report or a matter even of knowledge.  There would be something bizarre about simply “recording” the fact that another “tended to violence.” Always? In any circumstance? In what circumstance and why? That is an assessment, a judgment in the normative sense, with consequences for conduct, but it is also not something “seen” or, that is, “provable.” And there is a good deal of emphasis by Ray on the extremely limited bases for any such judgment, unavoidable as it is. Lochner seems to suspect Dix because Dix is flippant and did not call a taxi for Mildred. Laurel stands up for Dix, perhaps lies for him, because she “likes his face.” Brub invokes the cliché that artistic geniuses do not and cannot behave like the rest of us. Sylvia thinks, on the basis of the vividness of Dix’s imagination, her “college education,” and Dix’s unusual behavior, that he can be classified as psychologically “abnormal.” And this is an issue for the viewers as well, complicated even more for us by the fact that this is Humphrey Bogart, and I think it is fair to say that we, or most viewers, accept the early indications of his violent tendencies as marks of Bogart’s toughness, integrity and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. As the movie goes on, however, those early explanations become less and less credible, and the questions about the meaning of Dix’s conduct become much more complicated, as if we are being called to some account for our own early “acceptance” of the incidents.

This all has something to do with the ease, one might say, of a straightforward reading of the plot. Ray is clearly aware of this and is somehow referring to rather than invoking this expectation. A man, a war veteran, with a hair-trigger temper is suspected of murder. A woman saves him with an alibi of sorts; she is probably lying, because she is immediately infatuated with him, as is he with her. Their love suffers from the continued police scrutiny and her growing doubts about Dix. These doubts prove justified. He seems eventually to snap and attacks her. But, thanks to a lucky phone call, he does not injure her, and they learn “too late” that he has been cleared.

The hold of such a reading can be very strong, and I believe it is connected with a kind of default hermeneutic in understanding other people: that when someone does something startling or dramatic or hitherto unexpected or objectionable (violently beating a motorist after an accident, say) we are justified in saying: we now know he is the type who would do such things. In one sense this is a trivial and obvious tautology; he did it. In another sense, it is profoundly misleading, and is under sustained attack in this film. (If the phone call had occurred before the beach scene, Dix would not have been such a type? Someone can be such a type without ever expressing his type?) The same doubt is being cast on the typological explanations mentioned above. That is, this appeal has something to do with the deeply misleading and just as deeply entrenched reliance on ex ante elements like fully transparent, determinate intentions, character traits, dispositions, and the like, in the explanation of actions, and, by contrast, what is actually the essentially retrospective or belated nature of self-knowledge and the knowledge of others unavoidably linked to such self-knowledge.31

Here is a montage of the first two episodes in the film of Dix’s violence. After these, the near fight in the street at the beginning, and the bar fight, the turning point of the movie occurs at a beach picnic, and the character and meaning of “the violence” change dramatically.

Clip 2. First two episodes of violence

These first scenes raise no suspicions about Dix/Bogart (they are “in character” for a Bogart character),32 but everything changes with most important scene in the movie, a friendly beach picnic the Nikolais had arranged with Dix and Laurel. Laurel had been called in to Lochner’s office for more questioning, or more pressure, since Lochner suspects she is lying about the alibi. At the interview she learns that Brub’s dinner for his friend Dix had also been part of the investigation, a confidence we hear Brub had explicitly asked Lochner not to reveal. (Again, exposure, betrayal of intimacy, as a strategy in a struggle for control of the agenda is made visible.) Laurel does not tell Dix about the added interview, nor about the minor but still significant betrayal by Brub of his friendship. She thus enters into a collusion with the Nicolais, and from here on, Dix’s violence is a reaction, each of the next three times, to his learning of such a betrayal; actions by people he trusts, trying to find out something about him without asking him, or to act in a way that is hidden from him, indicating a distrust of his honesty and a certain objectification of the object of their study.33 This attitude towards Dix arrogates a certain position of superior power to those who adopt it, and part of what Dix’s violence means, intends, is a rejection of such power, something not ever understood or even considered by Lochner or the Nicolais or Laurel. And it is hard to exaggerate the importance of Sylvia’s revelation. It is the pivot on which everything in the film turns. It leads to the car accident, the fight, a catastrophic collapse of Laurel’s trust in Dix, her panic, her attempted flight, and Dix’s paranoid reaction to all that, and eventually to the irrelevance of Dix being cleared.

Clip 3. Beach and Road Rage

We are prepared for the intensity of these reactions by a scene in which Dix’s vulnerability, his fear of “letting himself be known,” in Cavell’s words, is painfully visible. The extent of his need to be known and loved (to finally escape his “lonely place”), the extent to which he is not theatricalizing the self he presents to Laurel, and so the palpable fear of the exposure and rejection of himself as he understands himself, all amount to the extent to which he is enraged at finding himself treated in such a third- and not second-person way, let us say.34 Here is the scene, as much against the Bogart type, especially at the beginning, as one will see. You will also see a kind of anticipatory, defensive, somewhat scary reaction to his own fear, an ominous foreshadowing. (Call it the “murderousness of love.”) Watch the positions of his hands and listen to the foreboding undercurrent in the music. I think that part of what is so intense about Dix’s speech in this love scene is that the viewer senses how deep is his hope that someone will finally be able to tell him who he is, that his loneliness has not been a matter of his being always by himself but that, being alone, there was nothing for him to be, or be with, at all. (This is connected with the fact that Dix now switches to a kind of overheated movie-script language, elevating and formalizing his address.) I would guess that for most viewers it is only on a second viewing that we sense the great imbalance in the scene, how silent Laurel is, how less desperate. Compare what you hear here from Dix with what is on her side: “I’m interested.”

So what appears to be this desperate desire to be loved is dangerously close to a massive fear—great to the point of implied violence—that he will be intimately known, unguarded. His gesture of tenderness is also, at the same time, murderous. It is also oddly photographed for a love scene, with him standing and her sitting, something that may signal that Dix believes he is in charge, running the show, however vulnerable. It turns out to be an ironic pose.

Clip 4. Dix’s vulnerability

Compare this now with the scene near the end when Dix learns that Laurel had been planning to flee and begins to attack her. The position of his hands clearly couples both scenes.

Clip 5. The attack

And throughout these developments, the meta-movie issues reappear as well. At a dinner with the Nicolais, as they discuss the case, Dix stages a reenactment for them, and assumes the role of film director, setting up the set, positioning the actors, explaining their motivations, and indicating how easily we can be made to believe the “truth” of dramatic representations, how vulnerable we are to the conventions of screenwriters. (We have already seen and will see throughout, the reliance of characters on clichés, stereotypes, hasty, stock generalizations for interpretation, and this scene dramatizes how powerfully “movie logic” can fill the role once played by traditional roles, social hierarchies, natural order, and so forth.) The continuity of this scene with the opening credits is established by lighting, which highlights Dix’s eyes, just as they were in the mirror. While we may be surprised at the effectiveness of Dix’s direction, the scene ends with a nice irony. The person who most confuses image with reality (is most susceptible to the confusion) is the “average” middle-class Brub, who, it turns out, begins actually to strangle his wife. Ray seems both to be indentifying with Dix’s talent, and so identifying his movie with powerful scenes like this, and keeping some ironic distance. Dix begins to look positively insane in the scene, although there is an unmistakable pleasure on his part in theatrically terrifying Sylvia, perhaps having sensed her suspicions of him. Ray seems to be playing along with Dix, garishly highlighting his “insane” eyes.

Clip 6. Dix’s staging the scene

I have said that Sylvia’s betrayal of a confidence is the central dramatic explosion in the film’s narrative. Afterwards, everything in Dix’s relation to his friends and to Laurel changes, and because of that everything about the attempt “to understand Dix,” especially by Laurel, has to change as well. That which results from trying to know someone is a function of what one allows of oneself to be known (often based on a fragile and self-deceived sense of what there is to be known), and that this dialectic is inseparable from issues of control and fear of exposure, is prominently on view from now on in the film. When Laurel says that “we” didn’t want to upset you, so we kept the meeting with Lochner from you, we should feel a chill of betrayal. Up to this point, what has Dix done to deserve this infantilizing, disloyal treatment?  He had counted on them believing him and in him; that is, he trusted them, and they had been false. They were all reserving judgment on whether he could be guilty of murder. The “Dix” we see from here on in relation to these intimates can hardly be called “the true Dix coming out,” however genuinely dangerous he has become. (Nothing in anything we have seen or heard about suggests the nearly homicidal rages he is now subject to. Does this prove that the suspicions were correct? That he “was capable of murder”?)

But Sylvia does not initiate everything; the spark she provides finds pretty combustible material. Everyone agrees that Dix is “not normal,” that he has an aura of unpredictability and a sometimes violent refusal to compromise that attracts attention and erotic interest. (Mel, who loves him most and perhaps best, explains that you just have to take all this on if you want closeness to Dix.) Laurel’s first contact with him after all, is as a murder suspect, and she must be harboring doubts and anxieties that are easily brought to active life. Those doubts are very near the surface and after the road rage incident, are uncontrollably present. When she visits Sylvia after the fateful picnic (another act of disloyalty; Dix had insisted that people stop talking about him behind his back), she admires their cozy house and says that this is what she wants, domesticity and kids; normalcy. Laurel? With Dix? We have heard none of this before and it rings completely false. She is already trying to escape, and concocting self-deluded fantasies about herself to justify it. We have also already seen that Sylvia and Brub have “converted” sexual passion into marital or domesticated love by means of several normalizing strategies. Sylvia gets to be the smart one, for example, Brub the “average one.” Nothing about their domestic situation makes them look appealing as the “future” of Dix and Laurel. Marriage, the bedrock, foundational bourgeois institution, the contract to love and so the heart of the system that maintains that all the humans passions can be contracted into submission and control, thus assumes a kind of metonymic role for the social order, and greatly elevates the stakes in the issue of whether Dix and Laurel will, or can, marry. Take as a single example the suppressed hostility and self-deceit on view in this picture of marriage.35

Clip 7. Brub and Sylvia

And similar doubts about Laurel had been suggested throughout the film, and we learn, in the restaurant scene when Dix hits Mel, that he too has been thinking all along of what appears to have been something close to concubinage between Laurel and the real estate tycoon, “Baker.” In one of the strangest scenes in the film, the point seems to be to reveal to us Laurel’s “secret life” in the past; how little available for Dix she had really been. In the scene, the relation with her masseuse, Martha, seems “coded” for a lesbian relationship. She calls Laurel “angel,” the tone of the conversation is of a jilted lover’s and is aimed clearly at “breaking up” Laurel and Dix, and she says later, “I’m all you have.” (In fact Ray has obviously set up a clear parallel love-match in each of the two cases, two same-sex friendships, between Mel and Dix, and between Martha and Laurel, that are more stable, perhaps even deeper and more intimate than the heterosexual love affair, although both are also based on some very implausible, fatalistic conviction that the loved one, Dix or Laurel, has a fixed nature that must be wholly and uncompromisingly accepted in love.) 36

Both of them, in other words, Dix and Laurel, have created, in all sincerity, a fantasy of intimacy and love (a Hollywood fantasy, one might say) that most viewers have largely bought into, and both of them are subject to intense panic and retreat and even violence when that fragile fantasy begins to collapse. Of course, to make things even more complex, as complex as they are, it is not unheard of for human beings to formulate for themselves some ideal goal, and invest so heavily in its achievement and what they expect from it, that they insure that they cannot achieve it. Practical contradictions like this are the natural home of “real” contradictions. Some of the intensity and overwrought investment in what they expect from being in love is framed by the fact that both live “inside” the movie world and its fantasies. Some of this resonates with Cavell’s themes in another, even deeper way. If it is true that Dix and Laurel have jointly formulated a kind of goal that insures they will fail, then that failure means they have also achieved a form of self-protection, and can in that sense (Cavell’s “avoidance” sense) be said to have intended to fail. That an agent can be doomed, can doom himself, by what he does to escape doom, is the stuff of tragedy both ancient and modern.37

The film builds to a conclusion in a powerful scene, full of undercurrents and double-meaning. Dix, sensing that Laurel is drawing away (she cannot sleep, has been taking pills) suddenly proposes marriage, and this in a manic, impatient way that contrasts all the more with Laurel’s sleeping-pill haze and her own clear hesitations. Bogart gives as powerful a performance here as he ever did, suggesting by the business of his action, and his air of unease, and the pace of his speech, that he knows everything is falling apart, and that he is simply refusing to see it, wants instead to push forward before it is too late. (As you will see, he is trying to “straighten out” something already crooked.) Laurel, for her part, enacts a Cavellian theme, but in a slightly different register. She has not “let herself be known” by Dix, let herself matter to him, but this is because she doesn’t know what she should reveal or how. Her lack of self-knowledge, which we saw when she spouted her pieties about domesticity, is on view here, as she seems unable to look into one mirror, and then, as if to make the point again, she turns to another mirror, and again fails to see her reflection (all of course an echo of the opening credits). And Dix enacts the domesticity she says she wants, but, as you’ll see, clumsily. Here is the scene. The irony of Dix’s description of their own love scene, that it is like his movie script, is true but (a) that also means it is posed, that just as in a fiction film, it is staged by both of them as they both suspect things have fallen apart, and (b) ironic because there is actually no real love anymore. The irrelevance of what they simply “tell” each other is also a point made, but is has a different meaning than the one Dix intends. Bogart has never been better, as, when he sits on the couch for breakfast and Laurel comes toward him, the fleeting expressions on his face register at once what he knows, but what he also will not admit.

Clip 8. Kitchen

This all serves as prelude for Dix’s final, violent attack on Laurel, interrupted by a phone call that will announce he is cleared. Ray is willing to go very far in this scene to suggest that what has happened is not the result of mistakes, moral failures, correctable blindness. He stages the aftermath to suggest that their last nearly deadly physical encounter38 was also at the same time something like the last time they made love, suggesting too that the violence and the love are intertwined, given what we have seen of the complex demands—almost impossible demands—made on these lovers, and by these lovers.39 That intertwining is unmistakably and rather startlingly suggested by Laurel’s dishabille.

Clip 9. Finale

That closing line, “I lived a few weeks while you loved me,” brings together many of the themes of the movie and, appropriately, leaves a good deal unsettled. Laurel is quoting a line from Dix’s new movie, lines that Dix had already expressed as if a foreshadowing of the end of their own affair. (“I was born when she kissed me; I lived a few weeks while she loved me. I died when she left me.”) There is, first, genuine pathos in the line; they, Laurel especially, had missed their chance for “life.” There is, second, the fact that Laurel expresses herself in a line from a film, not her own words, and so that second level of reflectivity returns: the movie’s relation to the audience, its own genuineness or honesty, and so here the question of its quotability, or the meaning of Laurel’s use of it to express herself.40 (She sees herself in lines provided by a movie, and this could mean either that the movie script has captured something genuine, or that Laurel is as “real” as a character from a film.) Third, there is her alteration, changing the third person (she) to the first (me). Laurel seems to realize that Dix’s “leaving her” is as much a result of her distrust and that she is back where she began, a starlet with a shady past. Astonishingly, in her mind, Dix left her. (“I died when you left me,” would be the continuation); they did not break up—all an odd way to put it after what we have just seen.

Stanley Cavell has argued that skepticism about other minds, while an expression of uncertainty about another, is not properly skepticism in the philosophical sense, but tragedy, and that there is no human alternative to tragedy. I think Nicholas Ray would agree.

Notes

I have benefited a great deal from conversations and correspondence about this paper with a number of people. I am especially indebted to Lauren Berlant, Jim Conant, Michael Fried, Markus Gabriel, Gertrude Koch, Paul Kottman, Dan Morgan, Richard Neer, Thomas Pavel, Victor Perkins, Martin Seel, George Wilson, and the audiences at presentations at Bonn, Frankfurt, Chicago, and Zürich.

1.  It is included, for example, in the excellent anthology, Ian Cameron, ed., The Movie Book of Film Noir (London: Studio Vista, 1992) and is the subject there of a brilliant article by Victor Perkins, “In a Lonely Place” (222-31). And it exhibits the modest “B movie” production values associated with the genre, as well as the thematic issues of fatalism (characters who cannot seem to make their own fate, seem doomed from the start), paranoia (police spying is a central element of the plot), and moral ambiguity (we are as attracted to what seems like the integrity, honesty and forthrightness of Dix Steele, the Humphrey Bogart character, even as we begin to suspect he may be capable of murder). And it is a study, a fairly intricate study, of failure; here the failure of love. See Robert Pippin, Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012) for more on the philosophical dimensions of the noir genre.↑

2.  Lochner has a kind of super-ego role in the film, The Supreme Father, for Brub and Laurel and to some extent Dix. His distaste for Dix is obvious as he reads out the incidents, making clear that he is as much condemning Dix as reciting facts.↑

3.  Mel says early on, “It is much easier to get people’s names into the paper than to keep them out,” reminding us of the press agent’s role.↑

4.  Ray takes care later in the film to establish that sounds from Dix’s apartment can easily be heard throughout the complex. When asked if he just lets his phone ring and ring, he replies that he does and his neighbors will confirm that fact. (“Just ask my neighbors.”)↑

5.  Dana Polan notes this (Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place [London: BFI, 1993], 65). It is an extraordinarily important piece of information in the film—that all along, from the very beginning, Laurel had been lying to the police about their chief suspect, a man she does not know, and whom she decides to protect (decisively) on the spur of the moment, because she liked his face. (This already tells us a great deal about Laurel.)  Extraordinarily important, but, typical for Ray, this fact is only silently present throughout the rest of the film.↑

6.  Another interruption: this is at least what the surface narration seems to indicate, the explanation we are invited to accept: that sheer bad luck, the murder, dooms the relationship. As we shall see the psychological reality of the film is much more complicated.↑

7.  We are invited to accept this too, but that would be another mistake. It is not so much that her fears about Dix would have been assuaged if only she had known the truth earlier. As in many such cases, her needing to have them assuaged already means they cannot ever go back to where they were before she began to find such fears credible.↑

8.  This is complicated for us, the viewers too, because by 1950, we certainly think we “know” Humphrey Bogart, know what a Bogart character is. But he is very much not that character in this film. Perkins notes that Bogart’s biographer, Joe Hyams, reported that Bogart disliked the film, perhaps realizing how vulnerable and so untypical and unheroic he looked (226).↑

9.  We seem pressed to a kind of holism in such understanding. I might come to understand another’s dispositions, commitments, beliefs and anxieties and so forth; that is, understand the content of such states. But I would not thereby really understand what they mean to her, how they fit into some unique psychological economy. To understand that, I must simply have come to understand her. But that can’t be formulated in any propositional content. It is to understand how she does and would go on in all sorts of ways.↑

10.  This appears to be his stance/excuse now. It is clear from conversations with a movie director at a bar that Dix had been willing to write what the studios wanted. Not any more, though; so he claims.↑

11.  Another interruption: so much for the surface plot again. Paradoxically, even though Dix’s eventual script contemptuously ignored the book on which it was to be based—just as Ray did with Dorothy Hughes’s novel—the supposedly corrupt movie producer is actually crazy about its quality and wants to start production right away. This could mean either that Dix was wrong; quality films can still be made, like the one we are watching perhaps; or that Dix was wrong about his high-brow ambitions. Maybe he thought he had written Citizen Kane, but he ended up with another good way to sell popcorn. Perkins suggests that an association between Dix and Herman J. Mankiewicz may be deliberate (224). For more on the “Hollywood frame” for the narrative, and the suggestion that the “lonely place” referred to in the title is Hollywood itself, see Bernard Eisenschitz, Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, trans. Tom Milne (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 133-146. Polan notes the interesting noir narrational theme: “forward motion combined with the undoing of confident progress by a paranoid looking back…” (12).↑

12.  Again, many of these references are pointed out by Perkins.↑

13.  Eisenschitz calls this “the fragmentation of the screen that was to assume obsessional form in Ray’s work” (135).↑

14.  Cf. Wittgenstein: “The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), II, iv, 178. And his more general remark that since the meaning of an expression is not tied to an inner, punctated experience, even God could not learn, by such inner inspection, what someone meant by “bank” if he had said “Wait for me by the bank.” (Philosophical Investigations, 217) From Hegel: “Hence what is only something inner, is also thereby external, and what is only external is also only something inner” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991], §140). And “an individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action” (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, 401. [http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page.html]).↑

15.  See his account of how and why he was “pushed to literature” (and one assumes, film) “to discover the problem of the other,” and to finding it “undiscovered for philosophy (in English),” (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 476; originally published 1979).↑

16.  This is a common theme throughout Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, updated edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). A particularly clear formulation is at The Claim of Reason, 355. In Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love,” the theme is introduced by attention to Shakespeare criticism, and in opposition to the idea that there could be differing, distinct emphases; some on “character,” some on “words.”↑

17.  See Cavell on Wittgenstein on “attitudes” towards others. “…human expressions, the human figure, to be grasped, must be read. To know another mind is to interpret a physiognomy, and the message of this region of the Investigations is that this is not a matter of ‘mere knowing.’” (The Claim of Reason, 356) And: “In no case is such knowledge [of others, of their ‘physiognomy’] expressed by a ‘mere report’…” (The Claim of Reason, 356).↑

18.  “In general, Part II of the Philosophical Investigations moves into this region of meaning. It is a region habitually occupied by poetry” (“The Avoidance of Love,” 271).↑

19.  So one, merely preliminary version of the special competence humans have in being able to acknowledge other human beings, what Cavell calls “empathic projection,” is largely what I am limited to in aesthetic appreciation (though not in social experience; see below). The Cavellian drama of the inseparability between knowing and being-known can occur aesthetically only in the domain of the imagination. For the relevance of the notion to pictorial art, see Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002)  36-39 and 226-29; and Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravagio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 105-06.↑

20.  See Cavell in “Music Discomposed” on “why it is we treat certain objects, or how we can treat certain objects, in the way normally reserved for treating persons” (Must We Mean What We Say?, 189).↑

21.  There is a lucid summary of this point in The Claim of Reason, 432.↑

22.  “At one level,” because at another deeper level, Cavell will want to say that most intimate or proximate mode of our being in a world, oriented and familiar with it, is not “knowledge,” and skepticism is not primarily a matter of the limitations of what could be known, had we more powerful capacities of sentience and sapience.↑

23.  The Claim of Reason, 341 and 434.↑

24.  There is a clear indication of the role the fantasy of looking “inside” another is playing in the dynamics of the film in a brief bit of dialogue between Dix and Laurel once he notices an oddity in the angles at which their apartments face one another.

Dix: You know, Miss Gray, you’re one up on me—you can see into my apartment but I can’t see into yours.

Laurel: I promise you, I won’t take advantage of it.

Dix: [wryly] I would, if it were the other way around.

Thanks to Richard Moran for discussions about this issue and for pointing out this moment.↑

25.  This interconnectedness is the main reason that understanding acknowledgement as “empathic projection,” introduced in The Claim of Reason on page 421, is no longer adequate by page 442, where this other (passive) skepticism/anxiety is both introduced and linked to the active form.↑

26.  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §244-271.↑

27.  See also Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 352.↑

28.  See Richard Moran, “Cavell on Outsiders and Others,” Revue internationale de philosophie, 256.2 (September 2011), 250.↑

29.  An implication: if I want to understand the other (in the practical, attitudinal sense, want to count on the other), even direct access to “what she thinks” can be dissatisfying. What she thinks she thinks and what she really thinks may be quite different.↑

30.  Another, very important sense is one explored by Richard Moran in “Cavell on Outsiders and Others.” It is that in exploring what knowing others’ mindedness would amount to, I have to be oriented from my sense of what it is for me to be known, and this as measured by my superior position with respect to myself. Exploring this further, Moran shows, should lead us to doubt that the issue itself is correctly posed in terms of knowledge. Cf. also this very apt formulation:

With respect to other minds it may seem that the problem is rather to break into another circle of experiences. But the main point is that the objects of external world skepticism do not have a perspective on what it is to be known. The question of their knowability has to be solved on the side of the knower alone, with no ‘confirmation’ from the side of the known object. The possibility of forms of skepticism both with respect to knowing an other mind (the “‘active skeptical recital”’) and with respect to being known by an other mind (the “‘passive skeptical recital”’), will turn out to be crucial for understanding the instabilities in the idea of an Outsider in other minds skepticism, and for understanding what may be distorting in seeing the problem of others as a problem of knowledge in the first place. (246)

I discuss the implications of this distinction below.↑

31.  See my Fatalism in American Film Noir. And for a much more detailed account, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).↑

32.  They are “both linked to the Hollywood environment and stressing the rage it arouses in Dix Steele” (Eisenschitz, 136).↑

33.  Right after apparently realizing that she “should have told” Dix about the interview, and apparently willing to heed his advice to “ask him” if she wants to know something, Laurel shows up at Sylvia’s house, again discussing Dix in worried tones. She knows whose wife Sylvia is, and so reaching out to her has to count as a form of disloyalty. (Sylvia’s motives are also interesting. The Freudian slip seems intended to ruin the marriage she is ostensibly encouraging. Is she jealous of what Laurel has? Attracted to Dix? Dissatisfied with her “average” husband?) I am grateful to Michael Fried for this point about Sylvia’s possible motivations.↑

34.  Sylvia’s slip also touches another nerve. Brub and Sylvia and Laurel had all been talking about a matter of great intimacy and importance to Dix—his marriage—all without consulting him.↑

35.  Now the great subject of nineteenth century prosaic literature, the novel and drama, is marriage. This is appropriate; it is the central institution of bourgeois society: marriage represents the compromise between passion and law, or contract: the improbable unity of contracted passion. (I promise to love you forever.) I am not dealing with the issue the same way he does, but I assume that my enormous debt to Stanley Cavell’s pioneering pair of books is obvious: Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), and even more, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Drama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

There is accordingly always a great anxiety about this; whether the unity required in marriages built on romantic love between individuals is a fantasy, or ideological. (If it is, then perhaps all contractual constraints are; say, property; contractual restraints on takings.) That is why the central plot in such novels is adultery. (And why the subject of gay marriage touches such a nerve of anxiety in modern American society. Varying its contractual conditions seems to many to open a disturbing set of questions about what marriage itself is. If we are able to vary its contractual conditions, where can it stop? The people who are anxious think: those in favor of varying the contract think there is no such objective, real, “natural” thing as marriage, and they are right.) But the topic of marriage also requires some collective understanding how persons enter marriage; how we pick our partners, by means of intense romantic love. And there is the same kind of anxiety? Is there such a thing? And this depends on what we take it to be. One profoundly influential form of understanding (instructing us as to how to understand it, and assuming several conventions in projecting it back to us) is Hollywood film. Romantic love is a form of engagement with others that can be haunted by its own form of skepticism. In this film, a central element in that mythology is on view. Laurel likes Dix’s face. Dix sees her in the courtyard for a second. And we also see in both how much they expect such a romantic relationship to do for them, how religiously Dix, at least, expects to be saved, as well as the lived-out implications of such a structure of understanding.↑

36.  It is also the case that much of the film is suffused with an air of paranoia and the constant surveillance and pressure exerted by the commercial interests of Hollywood and the police. In this scene the “world of women,” pressured and dominated by the much more powerful “world of men,” is also visible. There are some remarks relevant to this issue by Polan (39-41).↑

37.  I don’t mean that each of them has cynically, or simply out of fear, withheld themselves. How could Dix “explain” his past violence and expect to be understood, rather than even more suspected? (When he does try once, saying that he will not allow the other driver or anyone to call him names like this, Laurel recalls that the grave insult was, “blind knuckle-headed squirrel.”) Extraordinarily, though, Laurel knows why he is angry but never apologizes, as if conceding that explaining herself would be impossible. And it is simplistic in the extreme to suggest that she should have “told Dix all about Martha and Baker.” As we have seen, it would take some super-human talent to find a way to break through the conventional language of “abnormal,” “unstable,” “gold-digger,” “unemployed starlet,” “kept woman” and so forth. As noted, there is something here of what Cavell finds in Lear: the characters avoid trying to do something like this, and that can be called “the avoidance of love.” But it is much more credible here, in this world, to say that they can’t “let themselves be known,” not merely that they won’t.↑

38.  This ending was improvised on the set. The original script, which they filmed, has Dix murder Laurel just as Brub arrives to tell him he is in clear for Mildred’s murder, and so has to arrest him for Laurel’s.  In an interview, Ray remarked “I just can’t do it! Romances don’t have to end that way…Let the audience make up its own mind about what’s going to happen to Bogie when he goes outside the apartment area…” (quoted from Ray’s documentary portrait I’m a Stranger Here Myself, in Eisenschitz (144) and in Polan (61), who notes that the original ending was shot, and that Ray ordered a closed set for the next day, and re-shot with the ending we have.↑

39.  Perkins notes that the “investment in love” on both sides is “excessive,” and so the relationship is “doomed” (225). The reasons for such an excessive investment amount to the great theme of nineteenth century novels, such as Madame Bovary, Anna Karinina, and Effie Briest. Bourgeois marriage often serves as a great figure for bourgeois domesticity and convention itself (that is, ordinary life), and romantic adventure, adultery, as a kind of salvation or liberation from such a fate; there as here an illusory salvation. The great cinematic treatment of such fantasies about love: Max Ophuls’s Reckless Moment and Caught.↑

40.  It is a Hollywood line, not Shakespeare, but I don’t think Ray is ironizing its use here. I assume we are meant to understand that it does express both the pathos of the moment, Laurel’s reliance on Dix’s words (the closest she’ll get to self-knowledge), and her own realization of who has done what to whom.↑

There follows a passage of par­ticular inter­est in the present con­text:

Since the world is extension in time, i.e., change, the perfection of that faculty that connects man with the world will have to consist in maximum changeability and maximum extensity [my emphasis].  Since the person is persistence within change, the perfection of that faculty that is to oppose change will have to be maximum autonomy and maximum intensity [my emphasis].  The more facets his receptivity develops, the more labile it is, and the more surface it presents to phenomena [my emphasis], so much more world does man apprehend, and all the more potentialities does he develop in himself.  The more power and depth the personality achieves, and the more freedom reason attains, so much more world does man compre­hend, and all the more form does he create outside of himself.  His education [the work of culture] will therefore consist, firstly, in procuring for the receptive faculty the most manifold contacts with the world, and, within the purview of feeling, intensi­fying passivity to the utmost [my emphasis]; secondly, in securing for the determining faculty the highest degree of independence from the receptive [my empha­sis] and, within the purview of reason, intensifying activity to the utmost [my emphasis].  Where both these aptitudes are conjoined, man will combine the greatest fullness of existence with the highest autonomy and freedom, and instead of losing himself to the world, will rather draw the latter into himself [my emphasis again] in all its infinitude of phenomena, and subject it to the unity of his reason. (122-23)

In the next “Letter,” indeed, Schiller suggests that were it possible for a human being actually to maximize both drives, to combine receptivity and autonomy at something like full strength, he (Schiller means he or she) “would have a complete intuition of his human nature, and the object that afforded him this vision would become for him a symbol of his accomplished destiny and in consequence (since that is only to be attained in the totality of time), serve him as a mani­festation of the infinite” (126).

Assuming that such cases could actually occur, Schiller says, they would awaken in the subject a new drive, a third drive, which he calls the play drive, and which he claims “would be directed toward annulling time within time [an extremely interesting claim in view of what will fol­low], reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity” (126).  Or again: “The sense drive wants to be determined, wants to receive its object; the form drive wants itself to determine, wants to bring forth its object.  The play drive, therefore, will endeavor so to receive as if it had itself brought forth, and so to bring forth as the intui­tive sense aspires to receive” (126).  In other words, following some difficult sentences on contingency, the play drive will “introduce form into matter and reality into form.  To the extent that it deprives feelings and passions of their dynamic power, it will bring them into harmony with the ideas of reason; and to the extent that it deprives the laws of reason of their moral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interests of the senses” (127).

In the following “Letter,” the fifteenth, Schiller explains that “the object of the sense drive, expressed in a general concept, we call life, in the widest sense of the term: a concept designating all material being and all that is immediately present to the senses.  The object of the form drive, expressed in a general concept, we call form, both in the figurative and in the literal sense of this word: a concept that includes all the formal qualities of things and all the relations of these to our thinking faculties.  The object of the play drive, represented in a general schema, may therefore be called living form: a concept serving to designate all the aesthetic qualities of phe­nomena and, in a word, what in the widest sense of the term we call beauty” (128).  At this point, or rather just before it, I want to leave Schiller behind: the notion of beauty will be of no use whatsoever in what follows, and indeed strikes one almost as an atavism when it sud­denly comes to the fore in the passage I have just cited.  For we are on the threshold of the decisive turning in aesthetics that will be represented by Hegel, in whose Lectures on the topic the concept of beauty, as is well known, plays a structurally minor role. (Cf. Witt­genstein: “The way whole periods are incapable of freeing themselves from certain concepts—e.g. the concept `beau­tiful’ & `beau­ty’.”2)

Nor do I wish to follow Schiller in maintaining that the opposition between the sense drive and the form drive is determining for the human psyche as such, or that ideally both drives are reconciled, brought into relation with each other, via a third or play drive also within the psyche, so to speak.  Not that it is hard to imagine, not that one is not familiar with, less convincing claims than these about the nature and structure of the human psyche.  But my aim in what immediately follows is more narrowly focused: I want to use the terms in which Schiller seeks to define the drives as a means of characterizing, perhaps I should say of framing, an exemplary work of video art by Anri Sala.

The work is called Mixed Behavior and was made by Sala in 2003. Ideally it would now be possible for the reader to leave this essay and view the actual piece, which lasts exactly eight minutes and nineteen seconds, preferably more than once.  Unfortunately, that isn’t possible.  Never­theless I shall proceed by describing the video as if the reader had just watched it.3 A few preliminaries:

First, Mixed Behavior was filmed in Sala’s native Tirana on New Year’s Eve, 2003 (and then worked on exten­sively afterward).  According to Sala, in the course of the 1990s and the first years of the new decade the New Year’s Eve celebration in Tirana became more than a little dangerous, with indivi­duals setting off their own fireworks and also firing guns the sound of which was masked by the fireworks, so that the next morning it would turn out that people had been killed and no one had real­ized it.  In important respects, Mixed Behavior repre­sents an inspired response to this situation.  Second, Mixed Behavior brilliantly exemplifies one of Sala’s chief concerns through­out his career to date: the relation of image to sound, or perhaps more accurately image track to sound track, which in many of his videos or short films are treated as essen­tially autonomous elements that never­theless—or rather, precisely by virtue of that autonomy—are made to arti­culate each other in fascin­ating and productive ways.  This is true of Long Sorrow (2005), in which the noted free jazz saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc has been filmed at extremely close range improvising on his instru­ment—which we no more than glimpse—while suspended outside a window on the eighteenth floor of a large apartment complex in Berlin.4 Mixed Behavior takes a similarly inven­tive approach to the same basic issue.  But its import goes beyond even that, as I shall try to show, or at least suggest, with the help of the preceding summary of Schiller.  Finally, if the reader were about to watch (and listen to) the actual video I would say at this point: above all keep your eyes open; don’t let yourself be lulled by an expectation that the video will simply continue as it starts—in fact about two minutes and fifty seconds into the piece dis­tinctly strange things begin to happen.  As follows:

The video opens confusingly.  It is dark, nighttime, and we hear the sound of raindrops strik­ing some sort of surface (a plastic tar­paulin, it turns out).  We then become aware of a light source—a flash­light of some sort?—the other side of a transparent plastic sheet that seems to be covering . . . what?  Some sort of equipment: we first see a dark rectilinear form with wiring coming out of its top—probably a battery, a power source of some kind.  We notice too that some­one is moving just beyond the plastic sheet, we see the sheet being lifted, we glimpse an earphone gripped in a hand, we sense the person beyond the sheet ducking to get his head under its protection, then we are given a glimpse of his head and face and realize that he—a young man with short-cropped dark hair—has put on the ear­phones, and as all this is taking place we first become aware of a few crackling noises, like fire­crackers or gunshots, and then, as the young man seems to do some­thing with his hands to the equipment in front of him, we also hear music, a disco beat . . .  All this takes less than a minute, in fact after fifty seconds our point of view shifts deci­sively to a posi­tion directly behind the young man and the plastic sheeting-covered equipment and perhaps fifteen feet away, and when this happens we also become aware of the larger situation: the young man and the equipment (on a table), indeed we too, in a manner of speaking, are on the roof of a building from which we look past the young man and the equipment toward the dark city beyond.  Most conspicuously there is a large building right of center which we feel must be several hundred feet away, part of which remains dark and part of which shows lighted windows (possibly, though, we are see­ing two different buildings at somewhat different distances from us), plus there are various smaller build­ings in the distance, but the upper half of the image is taken up by the night sky and the rocketing or exploding fire­works.  And along with the sound of the fireworks, and the back­ground sound of the rain, there is now equally prominently the sound of music with its Latin-sounding beat (actually the music started up around forty seconds into the piece, when we were still under the plastic sheeting), music we quickly gather is somehow being controlled—actually it is being “remixed”—by the young man, who in effect is playing the role of a DJ on this curious occasion.5

And that is the basis of the entire work: the camera now stays fixed, we are shown the young man always from the rear, sometimes bent considerably over so as to get his entire upper body under the plastic sheeting, sometimes only partly bent over, but always his hands and the equipment are covered by the sheet­­ing, and within a minute or two our attention shifts almost exclu­sively to the sky and the fireworks, or rather to the interplay between the re­mixed music and the fire­works—the latter as both visual and sonic phenomena—which are clearly meant to be experienced in some at least partly motivated rela­tion to each other. In the upper left corner of the image we see the scalloped bottom of an awning that presumably has been lowered to help protect the camera (and in a sense us) from the rain.

As for the overall structure of Mixed Behavior, two points should be stressed.  First, I count four more or less distinct phases or “movements” based on shifts in the music, which as I have said begins roughly forty seconds into the piece; a second phase begins around the four minute mark; then shortly after five minutes the music stops and for nearly forty seconds we hear only fireworks (and rain), until around 5:50 a new burst of music comes on, supple­mented at around 6:28 by voices chanting something we cannot quite make out (there were voices earlier, too); finally a last phase begins around 6:55 with music of a different beat, though the voices return shortly before the eight-minute mark.  Then there is silence except for a few fire­works until the piece ends at 8:19.

Second, an absolutely crucial point, about two minutes and forty seconds into the piece something alto­gether out of the ordinary happens: two fireworks go into reverse, by which I mean that instead of simply exploding into a large number of brilliant fragments that then (often) explode again and slowly fall, extinguishing themselves en route, the explosion and fanning out of fragments are followed by an exactly opposite movement as the fragments contract back to the originating explosion (and beyond).  Following the first few reversals, however, the explosions return to normal for roughly 20 seconds, then another explosion goes into reverse, and starting just after three and a half minutes the reversals return in force to great effect—they cannot now be missed.  And just over one minute later, around 4:37, we see a single explosion expand then contract and then expand and contract again twice more; this takes place in the sky right of center, where most of the more spectacular fireworks go off, and the effect of playfulness as well as of what can only be called authorial control—but this will call for qualification—is ex­tremely strong.  Something of the sort also happens just over one minute later, the fireworks this time being more than usually dramatic and the rever­sals much speedier, more palpably “in one’s face,” than any until now.  In the last minute and a half we are made particularly aware of the awning at the upper left, as well as of rockets exploding overhead, beyond the limits of the “frame,” drenching the DJ-figure and his protected equip­ment with bursts of red and green illumination.  (Something similar happens toward the beginning of the piece.)  Toward the end of the video there is music alone for maybe half a minute; then we see the DJ stand up as if to leave the scene though not quite in the flesh—rather he appears super­imposed over a shot of the equip­ment as if he were a ghost rather than an actual person.  We hear the voices again and a few last explosions, then the screen goes black and the video is over.  —Not that the foregoing amounts to a thor­ough inventory of what Mixed Behavior offers to be seen and heard: for example, at various moments skyrockets or Roman candles whiz by at what seems dangerously close range, and in general more seems to happening than can be readily inventoried, even after repeated watchings.  Plus there is the impression the piece conveys, both visually and sonically, of all this taking place not just some distance away but also overhead, in close proximity to where we seemingly are.  (Of course, almost every time I have said “we” I have meant the camera.)

The question that now arises is how exactly Sala’s video relates to Schiller’s account in the “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” of the interaction among the three drives—the sensuous drive, the formal drive, and the play drive—assuming that such a relation between the two exists.  Let me say for a start that after I had watched Mixed Behavior several times, Schiller’s text irresis­tibly came to mind, and that when I sat down and reread the latter—it had been years since I had last done so—I was powerfully struck by the affinity between the two.  Take for example Schiller’s account of the sensuous drive, which you will remember he equates in the first place with the sheer suc­cession of sensations as well as with the flow of time (or succession as such): what could better exemplify these than a display of fireworks exploding in a night sky, which is to say successively albeit unpredictably rising from the ground, bursting into brilliant, different-colored outward-expanding patterns, the individual fragments of which then fall back to earth, losing brightness as they do so, as other fireworks arise and explode, to be replaced in turn by still others (fireworks as an “art” of pure sensation, visual and aural)?  And then there is the rain, which, like the fireworks, we both see and hear, with the further implication that were we actually on the roof we might be feeling the impact of the rain as well.  Indeed the sound of the rain on the plastic sheeting chimes with Schiller’s claim that the “perfection of that faculty that connects man with the world will have to consist in maximum change­ability and maximum extensity . . .  The more facets his receptivity develops, the more labile it is, and the more surface it presents to phenomena . . .”—the surface of the plastic sheeting serving in this context as a figure for the heightened or “extended” recep­tivity of the self.  (The presence of the sheeting both was and was not for­tui­tous.  The original idea for Mixed Be­hav­ior did not call for it; but as New Year’s Eve ap­proached Sala realized that rain was likely—it had been raining all week, apparently—and provided for that con­tingency.  Brilliantly, as matters turned out.)  As for the form drive, it is exem­plified in the first in­stance by the DJ, whom we soon come to perceive as seeking to use the music he is remixing as a means of gaining control over the fire­works, or at least of “including” the fireworks in the music; and up to a point the video may appear to suggest that he succeeds in this, at least some of the time, most notably at those moments when the fireworks go into reverse, or rather—to quote Sala from an unpublished discussion with Hans Ulrich Obrist—when their movements “go forward and backward depending on the movements of the music.”  In any case, we quickly sense that the DJ has no audience for his music beyond the immediate situation, however the latter is described.

Here it is crucial to get the sense of compe­tition or struggle between the two drives both in Schiller’s “Letters” and, in my account, as figured in Sala’s video exactly right.  Most important, it would be faithful neither to Schil­ler’s thought nor to the logic of the video if one came to see the DJ—avatar of the form drive (in this reading)—as simply or unequi­vo­cally mastering the flow of sensations as figured by the fire­works (and indeed the rain).  I think of him rather as fictively absorbed in pursuit of that aim; that he is forced to do so under the plastic sheeting in order to keep the rain off his equipment—a state of affairs that in obvious respects would tend to separate him from the fire­works (as would, for that matter, his wearing of earphones)—reinforces one’s sense of the difficulty of his project, hence of the magnitude of his absorption in it, even as our somewhat dis­tanced view of him from behind activates a familiar struc­ture from absorp­tive painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—think of Chardin, Courbet, Caille­botte, Hammershøi, others.  And from recent photography—Struth’s first museum series and various works by Jeff Wall, in parti­cular.  The rain doubly matters, in other words, as a figure for the successiveness of sensations and because it requires that the DJ work under wraps, so to speak.  Or rather triply, in that the sheeting comes to stand for the receptiveness of the self.  (Was Sala lucky that it rained, then?  No doubt.  But he has repeatedly shown, as in the dazzlingly opportunistic Air Cushioned Ride [2007], that he knows what do with his luck.  A topic for another occa­sion.)

More broadly, in Schil­ler’s text both the sen­su­ous drive and the form drive are understood to strive for maxi­­mum expression, and to the extent that in a particular instance this proves attainable—to the extent to which the two drives oper­ating at full strength turn out to be harmon­izable with one another—that will be the work of the play drive, which Schiller asso­ci­ates with the “aes­thetic qualities of phe­nomena and, in a word, what in the widest sense of the term we call beauty”—let us simply say with art.  And that, I want to suggest, is figured or expressed in Mixed Behavior by the work of the artist, Anri Sala, though of course it is also possible to see the DJ as a sur­rogate for the art­ist—but again only up to a point.  Indeed the non-docu­mentary or say fic­tional status of the DJ is insisted on at the end of the video when he is rendered ghostlike as he stands up to leave.  And even before that moment, though it is difficult to make out, the DJ’s actions themselves go into reverse whenever the fireworks do—Sala had no way of reversing the exploding fireworks other than by reversing the image track as such.  (One can see this in the way roman candles and the like streak downward toward their points of origin at those moments.)  Finally, the very theme of “connection” between the fire­works and the music is con­sistent with Sala’s larger concern throughout his career with the relation of image-track to sound-track; the special character of Mixed Behavior in this regard is that it thematizes that relation as one in which the sound of the remixing seeks to master the image, also in a sense the sound, of the fire­works.  But as I have said, it is crucial to recognize that this is only a fiction, and that Sala’s project, as distinct from the DJ’s, is at once to create that impres­sion and to acknow­ledge, in the mod­ern­­ist sense of the term, that the truth of the piece is more complex—more playful, one might say.  In this con­nec­­tion it is inter­esting to note that much of the post-filming work concerned the sound; for exam­ple, Sala went back to Albania with recording equipment and set off his own fireworks to make sure the sonic dimen­sion of the piece would be exactly as he wanted it.

(Something else one wouldn’t know simply from exper­iencing the video is that Sala himself was crouching under the plas­tic sheeting covering the battery and mixers throughout the duration of the shoot; it was he who filmed the opening seconds of Mixed Behavior from that cramped vantage point.  During the rest of the filming there was no one behind the camera—but of course the directorial intelligence through­out is his.)

It’s in this light, too, that I understand one of the features of Mixed Behavior that most surprised me when I first viewed it, and for some time afterward—I refer to the fact that the initial reversal of exploding fireworks occurs relatively early in the piece, after no more than two minutes and fifty seconds.  One might have expected that Sala would have chosen to make the viewer wait longer before intro­ducing that patently unnatural effect.  But then (after repeated viewings) I realized that introducing it early on meant that the viewer had ample opportunity to become accustomed to the fact of reversal, with the result that by the time reversal comes back at just over three and a half minutes and again just after four and a half minutes and five and a half minutes, and not only comes back but is increasingly activated in syncopation with the music, the viewer—I’m taking my experience as typical—has begun at least somewhat to lose hold of the “natural” tendency of the fireworks to explode outward and then fall to earth, and thus to accept reversal as something other than anoma­lous within the structural logic of Mixed Behavior as it unfolds over time.  In other words, the cumulative effect of tem­poral reversal in Sala’s video is not so much that of con­tra­­ven­ing or dominating the natural order of events—in Schiller’s ter­min­ology, the mastering of sensation and succession by a drive toward form—as it is some­thing like what Schiller pro­vocatively characterized in his fourteenth “Letter” as the “annul­ling of time within time,” which in this case I understand to mean pre­serving the effect of temporal succession while taking radical imagin­­ative liberties with temporality as ordin­arily exper­ienced.  (Trans­forming temporal succession from within, so to speak.)  More broadly, Schiller says of the play drive that it “will endeavor so to receive as if it had itself brought forth, and so to bring forth as the intui­tive sense aspires to receive”—a rather prescient para­phrase of the overall import of Mixed Behavior as I have described it.  As is the notion that if the two drives could be conjoined, “man . . . instead of losing himself to the world, will rather draw the latter into himself in all its infinitude of phenomena . . .”

Let me be clear about what I take all this to mean: I am not suggesting that Sala conceived of Mixed Behavior in terms of the argument of Schiller’s text—nothing could be less likely, or indeed more foreign to Sala’s general approach to his art.  In particular the fact that the video is set in Tirana has everything to do with Sala’s personal history as well with a certain “ethical” or “political” impulse—to neutralize or even to redeem artistically a situation, the firing of guns through­­out New Year’s Eve, of which he disapproved.  And as I have already noted, Sala’s work from the start has been concerned with relating image track to sound track in original and compelling ways.  I am suggesting, though, that the basic argument of the “Letters” with respect to the three drives bears a surprisingly close relation to Sala’s video, or to put this slightly differ­ently, that the medium of video in Sala’s hands turns out to have lent itself to an artistic pro­ject that can usefully be understood—I’d like to think that puts it mildly—in terms of Schiller’s exalted but also quite specific vision of the stakes of art and the mission of culture.  This may appear to defy common sense of a contextual sort: between Schiller’s “Letters” and Sala’s Mixed Behavior there looms a chrono­log­ical gulf of more than two centuries, not to mention the disparity in almost every cultural regard between the Weimar of Schiller and Goethe and the Tirana or Paris or Berlin (Sala’s cities) of the early 2000s.  But it may be that contextual considerations are an unreliable guide in sit­uations such as this one.  In my 2008 book Why Photo­gra­phy Matters as Art as Never Before I tried to show that as regards the practice of a number of leading contemporary photographers, the antithea­trical artistic regime or episteme that first emerged in the course of the 1750s and ‘60s in France and of which Diderot in his writ­ings on painting and drama was the most lucid advocate is still in force–dialectically trans­formed, that can’t be stressed too strongly, but never­theless in force.  And in my book Four Honest Outlaws I extend that account to cover the diverse work of Sala, Charles Ray, Joseph Mar­ioni, and Douglas Gordon.  I would not want to launch a com­parably sweep­ing claim about the contem­porary relevance of Schil­ler’s aesthetics, and yet there is an important sense—if I am right in reading Mixed Behav­ior as I have—in which it was pre­cisely the technology of video that established the conditions for the belated realization of his vision espe­cially with regard to the issues of play and tempor­al­ity as these are theorized in the “Letters.”

Needless to say, this is to take Sala’s achievement in Mixed Behavior extremely seriously—much more seriously than is usual in commentaries on contem­porary art.  And it is to take Schiller’s ideas extremely seriously as well—if not more seriously then in a dif­ferent, less strictly historicist spirit than is usual in com­mentaries on German post-Kantian thought.6 To which I will add that the treat­ment of tem­porality in Mixed Behavior is consistent with what in Four Honest Outlaws I seek to show has been Sala’s intense concern with one or another version, also dialec­tically transformed, of the high modernist ideal of “present­ness,” a major theme in my 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.”7 Just as the con­spicuous trumping of mechan­ical causality—the normal progress of exploding fireworks—by the artist’s inten­tions is in line with the high modernist insistence on intentionality all the way down, or rather with the redoubling of that insistence in the work of contemporary artists such as Thomas Demand and Charles Ray.8

A final pair of claims: the strongest art of today is far more philosophically interesting and at the same time more genuinely ambitious than standard accounts of the present situation often suggest; and Sala, not yet forty, is at the cutting edge of the developments that make it so.9

Notes

1.  Friedrich Schiller, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” Essays, trans. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahl­strom (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 118-21; the statement about annulling time and affirming persistence within change is on page 118.  Further page references will be in parentheses in the text.  See also the discussion of the “Letters” in Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).↑

2.  See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, rev. ed., ed. Georg Henrik von Wright with Heikki Nyman, rev. ed. of text by Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 91e.  Obviously Wittgenstein feels that it is imperative that we do so free ourselves, and I am with him on this.  Not that one might not be moved to say of certain con­temporary work—the paintings of Joseph Marioni, for example, or certain photographs by James Welling—indeed the entire photographic oeuvre of Robert Adams—that they are “beautiful.”  But beauty as a master concept, or indeed the master concept, for art and esthetics belongs to another age.↑

3.  I saw Mixed Behavior under ideal conditions at Sala’s 2009 exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati.  It was shown on a 4:3 format video monitor suspended in the middle of a dark (but not pitch black) room, with stereo speakers sitting behind the monitor more or less at the same (imagined) distance as that between the viewer and the DJ in the video.  It was hard to break off watching and listening.↑

4.  For a close analysis of Long Sorrow see Michael Fried, Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 32-49.↑

5.  The DJ is using two CD players and a mixer, not that there is any way of knowing this from the video itself.  Accord­ing to Sala, his choice of music was inspired by that of Kruder and Dorfmeister, an Austrian duo who came to the fore starting around 1993.  My thanks to Sala for providing this and other information about his piece.↑

6.  A notable exception: the writings of the philosopher Robert Pippin.  See for example Robert B. Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” Critical Inquiry 29.1 (Autumn 2002): 1-24.↑

7.  Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967) in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148-72.↑

8.  On Demand in this regard, see Michael Fried, Why Photo­graphy Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 261-76; and on Ray (in particular his sculpture Hinoki), see Four Honest Outlaws, 91-97.  The trumping of causality by intentionality is a crucial theme in Jennifer Ashton, From Modernism to Postmod­ernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 5: “Authorial inattention: Donald Davidson’s literalism, Jorie Graham’s Materialism, and cognitive science’s embodied minds,” 146-76.↑

9.  This essay was originally presented as a lecture in a series of talks on artistic modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago in April 2010; it was subsequently published in the catalogue for Sala’s 2011 exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery in London (Anri Sala, exh. cat. [Serpentine Gallery, London, October 1 to November 20, 2011], 97-104).↑

Fig. 1 Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock Painting, Summer 1950 (1950)

Pollock paints a picture. [Fig. 1] He intended to paint a picture, not to dance around the studio, tossing paint all over. When Robert Goodnough watched him actually toss paint all over his canvas, he was assuming that Pollock’s intention had been from the start to paint a picture. When Hans Namuth took the photograph, he was making the same assumption. Neither would have made the trip to Northampton otherwise. We art historians and critics think we know that Pollock intended to paint a picture, because a picture is what he did, not an oversized doodle. But in fact, Pollock’s picture is a picture not because we know but because we judge it to be one, and we so judge partly because we, too, like Goodnough and Namuth, assume that Pollock intended his work to be seen and appreciated as a picture. We must assume this, and the reason we do is that we have learned that pictures are intentional objects—in the sense that they are both the outcome and the bearer, the carrier, the medium of intentions on the part of their maker. As medium of intentions, pictures declare and make visible all sorts of intentions: say the intention to represent the world, or to tell a story, or to produce beauty, and the like. But before they are anything else, all pictures are declarations of the intention to make a picture. Pollock’s pictures are paradigms of such generalizations because they go a long way toward being reduced to declarations of the intention to make a picture, and nothing else. They push the issue to the point where judging that this intention has been fulfilled perhaps requires nothing but its recognition, as declared intention. Pollock puts considerable pressure on the viewer’s willingness to assume that his art consists of intentions made visible. It takes an eye trained in the history of this ever-growing pressure since Impressionism to make that assumption in confidence. The marks on the canvas are indices of intentionality, no doubt, but from what distance? The closer we look at the canvas, the more remote are the chances that this yellow stain, here, or this blob of white, there, were intended to have exactly the location and particular form that they have. Yet to an even closer look, total randomness seems excluded. To spot the intentional at the level of such detail is to marvel at the very slim chances that paint falling haphazardly on a canvas would form such fine rectilinear skeins as this one, here, not once, not twice, but eight times, in white, black, red and yellow. The true index of intentionality does not lies in the marks per se but in their improbability to be the product of mere chance.

To say that Manet intended to paint a picture is at first sight a lot more trivial than to say the same about Pollock. It is however less trivial when gauged by the number of times his critics accused him of not finishing his canvases, or of not being able to round up “un tableau” while nevertheless churning out wonderful “morceaux.” The Salon jury that rejected him so many times during his career must have recognized Manet’s intention to paint a picture and judged that he failed in his delivery. He himself must have often been torn by the contradiction between his intention to paint a picture that the Salon public would understand, and the Salon jury accept, and his intention to paint a picture according to the new definition of a picture he was working towards. We of course salute him for not having compromised on the latter intention, and we tend to forget the former. Yet this is where the analogy with Pollock clicks. Lee Krasner recalls this about Pollock: “He asked me: ‘Is this a painting?’ Not is this a good painting, or a bad one, but a painting! The degree of doubt was unbelievable at times.”1 Manet had more confidence in his own talent than Pollock and perhaps had only contempt for the jury, but even he could not guarantee posterity’s verdict without a leap of faith. Posterity’s verdict, precisely, became a pressing issue, one that would take the place of Manet’s expectations regarding his success with the contemporary public, from that moment in 1881 when he learned that the degenerative disease that had hit him had dramatically shortened his life expectancy. This is when he decided to paint Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, his pictorial testament, the content of which is the explanation of how to look at all his paintings in order to recognize in them the new definition of a picture he had invented. [Fig. 2]

Fig. 2 Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Follies-Bergère (Courtauld Institute of Art, London; 1882)

Lest you fear that I’m falling into what Wimsatt and Beardsley have dubbed “The Intentional Fallacy,” let me reassure you. I am calling Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère Manet’s testament basing myself on “external evidence”—the biography of the artist, his complaints to Baudelaire and others that he was misunderstood, the Salon criticism of the times, and so on—the kind of evidence Wimsatt and Beardsley say is not vulnerable to the intentional fallacy. But because Manet never explicitly said that Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère was his testament, I am also confronted with the task of demonstrating that it was, basing myself on “internal evidence.” The painting must show that it pertains to Manet’s intention to paint a picture, its failure in contemporary terms, and Manet’s hope that some day his intention would be recognized as having been successfully realized. And what must I show? Assuming that Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère is a picture whose intention was to paint a picture about the intention to paint a picture and how this intention should be recognized so as to be seen as successfully realized, I must show that the picture, therefore, uses clues as to how it was made in order to raise the question of why it was made the way it was. Throughout his life, Manet planted clues in his paintings, but they were not clues as to how the paintings were made, they were clues as to how the painting should be read so that his intention to paint a picture according to his own, novel definition of a picture, be understood. And throughout his life, these clues proved insufficient. The cat in Olympia was such a clue: it was there to tell the beholder that the painting had anticipated his presence before it, and that this preemption of the beholder, as Michael Fried calls it,2 belonged to the definition of a picture according to Manet. Contemporary criticism interpreted the cat in various ways, but always as part of the narrative content of the picture, never as part of the intended new definition of a picture. As I see it, Manet’s task when he projected to paint a picture-testament, was different: he first had to make sure that the question of why the picture was painted the way it was, the question of his intention, gets raised, by planting a clue to an indisputable proof of how the picture was painted the way it was. The clue in question would have to prove that chance must be ruled out as a plausible explanation. This is where Manet joins with Pollock.

How Manet painted pictures is of course light years away from Pollock’s drip technique. In 1881 and 1882, when he painted Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, Manet had embraced Impressionism since almost a decade, and Impressionism’s reputation is that its technique handles paint loosely, brings the aesthetic of the finished painting closer to that of the sketch, and disregards, even dismantles, traditional Renaissance perspective. In the case of Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, those features of Impressionism were compounded by an additional, and quite blatant impression that the construction of the painting was full of deliberate anomalies with regard to perspectival depiction of space.3 This was already noted by the Salon reviewers of 1882, and still approved by the twelve authors Bradford Collins rallied under the banner of “the new art history” in a book published in 1996 entitled 12 Views on Manet’s “Bar.” Those authors’ opinions converge with the one Anne Coffin Hanson had already presented as definitive in 1966, thirty years earlier:

The barmaid’s reflection does not seem to be where it should be, the reflected images of the bottles on the marble bar do not match their more tangible models. Historians have attacked the problem like sleuths, expecting to find some key to a logical and naturalistic explanation. There is none.4

Things changed with the publication in 1998, in Critical Inquiry, of an article that demonstrated that the spatial construction of the painting was not at all anomalous but, on the contrary, done according to the strict rules of one-point perspective. Here I must apologize and beg you for your indulgence, because a lot in my talk from now on will appear utterly self-serving: I am the author of that article. For today’s purpose, I would by far prefer not to be. You will see why in just a second. For now, please bear in mind that the subject of my talk is not the spatial construction of Manet’s Bar. The latter serves only to establish the indisputable visual clue, the “internal evidence,” to use Wimsatt and Beardsley’s terms, that raises the question of Manet’s intention. Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère offers the art historian a peculiar, possibly even unique case study, inasmuch as the clue it contains leads him or her to a binary choice as to the artist’s intention and, from there, to divergent interpretations of the work or indeed, possibly of the artist’s whole oeuvre. I say binary choice because in 2001 somebody else proposed another explanation of the painting’s spatial construction, and one that calls with equal rigor on the strict rules of one-point perspective and is geometrically just as correct as mine, if not more. I am talking about an Australian scholar, Malcolm Park, who wrote a PhD dissertation entitled Ambiguity, and the Engagement of Spatial Illusion within the Surface of Manet’s Paintings.5 I learned of the existence of Park’s dissertation when I was at the Getty last year from Scott Allan, who, in 2007, curated a show of Manet’s Bar at the Getty Museum. I am indebted to him for having given me Park’s dissertation to read. On the occasion of the show, the Getty published a leaflet that contained a version of Park’s reconstruction of the painting’s scenography, in the form of a bird’s-eye view. Here it is. [Fig. 3]

Fig. 3 Malcolm Park's diagram reconstructing the arrangement and viewpoint of the bar and the spectator in Manet's Bar at the Follies-Bergère

Malcolm Park 1) postulates that the spectator is placed far to the right of the scene, as in Manet’s sketch [Fig. 4] for the painting; 2) upholds that the visual pyramid corresponding to the painting has been cut from a wider frontal view; 3) therefore considers that the picture plane is an oblique section of the visual pyramid. (He shows it projected in the depth of the scene, whereas, as you will see, I treat it as a “Leonardo window” intersecting the counter’s surface, what amounts to the same); 4) arrives at the conclusion that the man in the top hat and the barmaid are not facing one another and don’t look at each other. [Fig. 5] Though strictly part of Park’s construction, the last point goes beyond geometry and opens the door to interpretation. Park’s four points taken together also make a fundamental conclusion: the painting abides so exactly by the laws of optics and the rules of perspective that it leaves no doubt that the construction was intentional and could not have been arrived at by chance.

Fig. 4 Edouard Manet, Sketch for A Bar at the Follies-Bergère, modifed by de Duve to show visual cone from projected viewpoint

Fig. 5 Malcolm Park's reconstruction of the bar

What was my reconstruction like? Let me juxtapose it to Park’s. [Fig. 6]

Fig. 6 Malcolm Park's reconstruction of the bar juxtaposed with Thierry de Duve's.

It 1) postulates that the spectator occupies a central position before the scene; 2) upholds that the painting is a composite image implying two (logical, not chronological) moments, where the reflection from moment 2 is “pasted” into the mirror from moment 1: at moment 1 [Fig. 7] the mirror is parallel to the picture plane and the man in the top hat is standing by the right side of the bar, outside the visual pyramid; at moment 2 [Fig. 8] the mirror has pivoted and the man has come to stand before the barmaid; 3) notices that what “locks” the composite image into place is the fact that one and the same reflection of the man in the top hat, in a mirror which in the meantime has pivoted, serves for his two successive locations “in reality” [Fig. 9]; 4) yields the hypothesis that the construction of Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, which is definitely Manet’s testament, is as unusual and precise as it is because the painter intended the double positioning of the man in the top hat to address some message to his posterity. Just as with Park, the last point goes beyond geometry and opens the door to interpretation. It also makes the same fundamental conclusion: that such a precise perspectival construction was intentional and could not have been arrived at by chance. And to that conclusion it adds another one, the fruit of reflection: that the locking into place of the man’s two positions by a single mirror-image was an intentional clue to the meaning of Manet’s testament.

Fig. 7 Thierry de Duve's diagram reconstructing the arrangement and viewpoint of the bar and the spectator in Manet's Bar at the Follies-Bergère, first moment

Fig. 8 Thierry de Duve's diagram reconstructing the arrangement and viewpoint of the bar and the spectator in Manet's Bar at the Follies-Bergère, second moment

Fig. 9 Thierry de Duve's diagram reconstructing the arrangement and viewpoint of the bar and the spectator in Manet's Bar at the Follies-Bergère, first and second moments combined

The interesting thing in the juxtaposition of Malcolm Park’s schema and mine is that although they are very different, they explain equally well the most blatant anomaly in Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, the off-center position of the couple in the mirror. Park’s schema actually explains more than mine. Above all, it accounts for the non-congruence of the bottles and their mirror image, an issue my construction bypasses.6 In the painting, the reflection of the group of bottles on the left side of the counter seems ill-placed: it should be near the counter’s edge that is the closest to the spectator, and not the furthest away. Park demonstrates that this group in fact sees its reflection pushed to the right, hidden by that of the barmaid. The bottles we see in the left part of the mirror actually form another group, an S-shaped garland that remains entirely outside the visual pyramid—a perfectly coherent solution, given the off-center position of the spectator, except that it forces Park to considerably stretch the bar on its left, with several unpleasant consequences. One of them seems to have been the victim of the Getty’s remarkable pedagogical concern for the public. Most of its shows come accompanied by explanatory wall texts or brochures catering to the widest audience, and the leaflet published on the occasion of the exhibition of Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère is no exception. This is probably the reason why the schema reproduced on that leaflet “cheats.” In order not to raise unwelcome questions with the average visitor, it runs the risk of raising a major objection from the specialist. Indeed, the schema one finds in Park’s dissertation is not that on the leaflet [Fig. 3]. I hope Park will allow me to correct the latter in conformity with figure F 38 of his dissertation [Fig. 10].

Fig. 10 Malcolm Park's diagram reconstructing the arrangement and viewpoint of the bar and the spectator in Manet's Bar at the Follies-Bergère, as corrected by de Duve

The trapeze-shaped outline of the bar’s tabletop, totally devoid of verisimilitude in the real world, imposed itself on Park on account of two features of the painting that contradict the schema published by the Getty. In the latter, the visual pyramid cuts through the left forward corner of the tabletop’s reflection. If this would be the case in the painting, we would see the bar’s mirror image being prolonged on about half its depth to the left border of the painting. But if we restored the tabletop to its rectangular form while respecting the distance between its reflection’s left forward corner and the left border of the painting [Fig. 11], two things would happen that are at odds with the visual evidence: first, the bottles, which we see sitting firmly on the bar’s tabletop in the mirror, would be floating mid-air in “real” space; and second, the vanishing line indicated by the left edge of the reflected bar would be much too flattened, as it is, indeed, in the photo reconstituting the scene, which the Getty’s leaflet reproduces [Fig. 12].

Fig. 11 Malcolm Park's diagram reconstructing the arrangement and viewpoint of the bar and the spectator in Manet's Bar at the Follies-Bergère, as modified by de Duve

Fig. 12 Photograph of a reconstruction of the bar according to Malcom Park's proposal. Photograph by Greg Callan.

The hypothesis of a trapeze-shaped bar “lifts up” the left edge in conformity with the painting, so don’t get me wrong, Park’s model is correct. And if you disregard the issue of the bottles, mine is correct, too. So, we now have two competing models, equally valid in verifiable, scientific terms, from which to choose [Fig. 13]. Please forget that I’m utterly biased in this affair and bear with me: the question really is not what model is going to win the competition. Of course it’s mine, but that’s irrelevant, it’s not the subject. The theory issue, which is the real subject of my talk, is what court is qualified to pick one model over the other. Whatever model will be proclaimed the best will be by virtue of a certain choice I or you or anyone will have made regarding that court. For us to judge—to judge what? To judge which model is best, and thus what Manet’s intention might have been, and thus what line of interpretation to adopt, and thus how to read Manet’s testament, and thus what to make of his whole oeuvre and legacy—for us to judge, we must first, or by the same token, elect the legitimate seat of judgment. To the one that I elect, I give the name: aesthetic intuition. I feel genuinely sorry for Malcolm Park that he made my case so easy by systematically choosing the counterintuitive path, but here again, theory is the issue. We all have our theoretical inclinations, our sense of professional ethics and politics, our more or less consciously theorized ideology, what Althusser dubbed the spontaneous philosophy of scientists. I try to be as upfront with mine as possible: its name is aesthetic intuition. If I were to risk a name for Park’s, I would entitle it: Against Intuition. By paraphrasing Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation or Feyerabend’s Against Method, I want to suggest that it makes a lot of sense to be against intuition. It is a real option, a serious theoretical choice.

Fig. 13 Malcolm Park's reconstruction of the bar, as modified by de Duve, juxtaposed with Thierry de Duve's.

Yet for both Park and myself, everything started from an intuition, which he must have had like me, and which, for example, Ann Coffin Hanson did not have, that in spite of its apparent inconsistencies, the painting makes perspectival sense. From noticing that you are apparently not seeing the barmaid and her mirror image from the same viewpoint, you ask yourself: “where is the vanishing point?” And you soon notice that the only clue leading to the vanishing point is the left edge of the reflected bar. It is the only clearly indicated orthogonal. In order to determine the vanishing point, either one orthogonal and the horizon, or two orthogonals are required, but Manet offers us neither horizon nor second orthogonal. What he does, though, and very firmly, is have us facing the barmaid—Suzon was her name—and by the same token, have us stand right in front of the middle of the depicted scene. He has emphatically underlined the painting’s visual median line: the ridge of the nose, the medallion hanging from Suzon’s neck, her corsage, the row of mother-of-pearl buttons, and the pleat in her skirt, bisecting the triangular opening of her vest, compose a felt alignment, broken at the medallion, that projects a sort of externalized spine for both Suzon and for us, who stand before her. Thus placed, we are left to intuitively posit the vanishing point at the convergence of the line drawn from the lateral edge of the reflected bar and the visual median of the painting, that is, squarely in the middle of Suzon’s face. [Fig. 14]

Fig. 14 Manet's Bar at the Follies-Bergère, with orthogonal and centerline, as identified by de Duve

The very strong impression of facing Suzon is an essential component of the emotional impact Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère has on us, and thus, of our appreciation of the painting. It is, typically, an aesthetic intuition. Aesthetic intuitions are first of all intuitions, in the everyday sense of hunch, in the psychological sense of an act of perception, and in the philosophical sense of an act of the imagination. What characterizes them not just as intuitions but as aesthetic is that they share with aesthetic experience their subjective, affective, non-conceptual nature, and with aesthetic judgments their reflexivity and their claim to universal validity, most often expressed as a claim to reflect factual truth. Our very strong impression of facing Suzon is a part of our aesthetic experience of the painting and is conducive to our aesthetic judgment on it. And while it is not a criterion—no one will claim that the painting is a masterpiece because we are facing Suzon—the fact is that we are facing her, and I challenge whoever has seen the painting in the flesh to dare contradict me.

Malcolm Park doesn’t: he thinks that Manet carefully fabricated our illusion of facing Suzon. It is not just that he settles for counterintuitive makeshifts such as the trapeze-shaped counter, it is that he actively fights intuition, his own included. At first he has had the same intuition as I, otherwise he would have been content with Anne Coffin Hanson’s opinion that it was useless to seek an explanation to the chaos. When he finds himself forced to have recourse to the expedient of the trapeze-shaped counter, Park has already judged that the oblique viewpoint is the only way to account for the painting’s construction. What surprised me most in his approach is that Park refuses to acknowledge the only clue leading to the vanishing point, and thus to the viewpoint: the left edge of the reflected bar. His reconstruction does not so much neglect the intuitive data as it actively denies them all relevance in favor of a very counterintuitive artifice that is difficult to believe. The result is that the extension of the bar’s left edge and the visual median of the painting are no longer intuitive indicators of the beholder’s position and become a lure intended to deceive him of her. Who would think of a trapeze-shaped table-top to account for a line that looks like an orthogonal but isn’t? The question arises: why such an artifice? And, more seriously: why, with what goal in mind, would Manet have wanted to deceive the beholder? The question is particularly acute regarding the lack of eye contact between the two protagonists, which, so far as I can recall, runs counter to all exegeses of the painting but is not without plausibility. The vexed question of the artist’s intention cannot always be avoided, as is demonstrated by the very rare, perhaps unique case of Manet’s Bar, where the choice between two reconstructions of the work that are equally plausible, geometrically speaking, rests by necessity on the historian’s speculation about Manet’s intention. In the absence of “external evidence” (a piece of writing by the artist, the reviews of the critics, the testimony of contemporaries, etc.), what access do we have to the artist’s intentionality? None other, I would argue, than what I called aesthetic intuition. Is it methodologically trustworthy? The question will not be settled here, but it is raised.

© Thierry de Duve

October 2009-February 2010

Notes

1.  Lee Krasner Pollock, interview with B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Black and White (exh. cat., Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1964).↑

2.  Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 338, note 28.↑

3.  The monographs and catalogues on Manet are too numerous to be cited here. I mention only Adolphe Tabarant, Manet et ses œuvres, (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). The first study devoted to Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère is Raymond Mortimer, “Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère,” in Edouard Manet, “Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère” in the National Gallery, London (London: Percy Lund Humphries & Co., 1944). T. J. Clark devotes the fourth chapter of his book, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, revised ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), to Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère. He also gives a collection of contemporary opinions on the painting (310-311, note 65). To this day, the most complete study devoted exclusively to the Bar is Bradford R. Collins, ed., 12 Views of Manet’s “Bar” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Its twelve contributors, listed in alphabetical order, which is also the order of their appearance in the book, are: Carol Armstrong, Albert Boime, David Carrier, Kermit S. Champa, Collins, Michael Paul Driskel, Jack Flam, Tag Gronberg, James D. Herbert, John House, Steven Z. Levine and Griselda Pollock; with a preface by Collins and an introduction by Richard Shiff.↑

4.  Anne Coffin Hanson, Edouard Manet, 1832-1883 (exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, November 3-December 11, 1966; Art Institute of Chicago, January 13, 1966-February 19, 1967), 185.↑

5.  Malcolm Park, Ambiguity, and the Engagement of Spatial Illusion within the Surface of Manet’s Paintings (PhD diss., University of New South Wales, Australia, 2001).↑

6.  However, I bypassed the issue only after having seriously envisaged that it had to be explained and having rejected that option because it seemed too remote from what we know of Manet’s working method. See my Critical Inquiry article (152-155) and the schema (154).↑

We have now had over 100 years to come to terms with Analytic Cubism, to make sense of its fragmented forms and shallow, intermittent spatiality, its dense value gradations and heavily worked surfaces.  Despite having had that century for reflection, however, there exists little consensus today regarding either Cubism’s underlying intentions or its successes and failures.  Picasso himself offered relatively little explanation of his project, and Braque was no better.  Presumably they talked to one another, even daily, and at considerable length; but neither ever penned a manifesto of the movement, say, or offered interviews elaborating their intentions, at least not until long after the fact. (In that regard, they were virtually unique among early twentieth-century artists, whose paintings were almost invariably accompanied by some written explanation—instructions, as it were, for the uninitiated.)  In the case of Analytic Cubism, interpretation was left to others: other artists, or critics, who felt the need for an account of this work that looked so radically different from everything preceding it.2

Fig. 1. Picasso, Glass of Absinthe (autumn 1911), Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College

The first serious attempts at explanation tended to fall into two opposing camps—or frequently, as Christine Poggi has pointed out, into both at once.3 On the one hand were claims for Cubism’s heightened “realism,” principally through its purported ability to offer multiple views of objects, rather than remaining confined to the singular vantage point normally considered endemic to painting.  According to this account, in a work like Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe [fig. 1], the “glass” in question—that conglomeration of black-outlined forms situated about two-thirds of the way between the leftmost edge of the canvas and the right—was to be understood as given both in “plan” (the circles and semi-circles suggesting the round base and the stem seen in cross-section) and in “elevation” (the vertical lines between and above the circular forms indicating the upright orientation of the glass).  Whether this was interpreted as indicating the painter’s movement toward and around the object or as the result of that object’s conceptual (rather than merely perceptual) apprehension, the implication was that Cubism had overcome painting’s earlier limitations, and so could now provide a more complete grasp of things in their totality.

On the other hand there was the widespread assertion that Cubist paintings were themselves totalities, autonomous things in their own right, “real,” if you will, because no longer tied to illusionistic description of the natural world.  Carl Einstein, in his “Notes on Cubism,” perhaps summarized this position best: “The totalization of the painting comes about,” he said, “as a consequence of its unverifiability, and the fact that the spectator never exits from the reality of the picture.”4 The claim was that, in contemplation of a work such as Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe, the viewer cuts him- or herself off from the external world, which consequently recedes in memory.  That world then ceases to be the yardstick against which the painting is measured.

Again, these two views—on the one hand, that Cubist pictures give us better or truer depictions of things as they actually are; on the other, that they are themselves independent or autonomous things—would seem inherently contradictory.  (The first emphasizes the representational function of the image, the second all but denies it.)  Of course, that didn’t prevent both views from being voiced by one and the same individual, often in the space of a single essay.  Rather than seeing this as a flaw of the criticism, however, I want to suggest that the contradictions inherent in the early interpretations of Cubism actually reveal something very important about the works in question.  They help us to see that Cubism was an art built out of, and sustained by, contradiction.  Consequently, the very best accounts of it we have are precisely those that emphasize the things most contradictory in its aims and ambitions.

As far as I know, the first person to explicitly acknowledge the contradictions of Cubism and to offer a compelling account of its development based on their interplay, was the critic Clement Greenberg.  In his 1959 essay, “Collage,” Greenberg described the dilemma he saw confronting Picasso and Braque over the course of their shared enterprise.  Every Cubist work, he said, in contradistinction to centuries of Western paintings preceding it, “had to spell out, rather than pretend to deny, the physical fact that it was flat”—that it was, in other words, a “real,” tangible object—“even though at the same time it had to overcome this proclaimed flatness as an aesthetic fact and continue to report nature.”5 We should pause briefly to take stock of that rather peculiar phrase in the last line: “aesthetic fact.”  It, too, has a hint of the contradictory or oxymoronic about it.  Plainly, in using it, Greenberg hoped to give the painting’s aesthetic qualities a weight comparable to that of its physical or factual existence.  It was not enough, he felt, for the Cubist work to be flat; a blank canvas, an ironing board, a piece of wallpaper, for that matter, are all flat.  To be a painting, the Cubist work would have to confess its flatness but also—somehow—overcome or negate it.6

Greenberg’s concerns at the beginning of his essay were with Picasso’s and Braque’s paintings from 1911, which is to say, with those from the height of what is sometimes referred to as Cubism’s “hermetic” phase.  According to Greenberg, works of this period took the particular form that they did as a result of an effort to achieve a balance between, on the one hand, flattened “facet-planes” that would echo and therefore emphasize the two-dimensionality and rectilinearity of the canvas and, on the other, a modeling that could potentially disrupt our awareness of the surface.  The modeling should do nothing more than that, however.  Were it to function successfully, creating a plausible illusion of solid, volumetric form, the painting would have to be deemed in denial of its physical flatness—masquerading as sculpture, then, rather than owning up to being the painting that it actually is.  Greenberg’s terminology is nicely counter-intuitive here: “The main problem at this juncture,” he said, “became to keep the ‘inside’ of the picture—its content—from fusing with the ‘outside’—its literal surface” (“Collage,” 71). If Greenberg designated the surface of the canvas as outside, and the work’s representational content within, it was presumably to emphasize that, for Picasso and Braque, representation remained the proper purview of painting.  Conversely, any work that abandoned that function would become simply an object and, as a result, fall outside the domain of art.

Fig. 2. Braque, Violin and Pitcher (late 1909 - early 1910), Kunstmuseum Basel

At the same time Greenberg wanted to call our attention to the way that “inside” and “outside” were coming into increasingly close proximity, and so he referred not to the painting’s “illusionistic depth” but rather to its “depicted flatness.” “Depicted flatness,” he said, “—that is, the facet planes—had to be kept separate enough from literal flatness to permit a minimal illusion of three-dimensional space to survive between the two” (“Collage,” 71-72). Early on, Braque had tried to address the problem by means of trompe-l’oeil.  In his Still Life with Violin and Pitcher [fig. 2], he painted a tack at the top of the canvas casting a highly illusionistic shadow below.  By effectively conflating the wall of the room—in other words, the rearmost of the painting’s represented planes—and the physical plane of the canvas itself, Braque was able to suggest a space forward or on top of the picture’s rendered flatness, between the depicted planes and the space that we ourselves inhabit.  But such devices, Greenberg felt, were mere “expedients,” more gimmick than actual solution to the problem at hand.  Still, they did bring Picasso and Braque to a crucial realization—namely, that there might be a way to overcome literal or physical flatness by, paradoxically, bringing it to the fore. It’s worth quoting this part of Greenberg’s argument at some length:

If the actuality of the surface—its real, physical flatness—could be indicated explicitly enough in certain places, it would be distinguished and separated from everything else the surface contained.  Once the literal nature of the support was advertised, whatever upon it was not intended literally would be set off and enhanced in its non-literalness.  Or to put it still another way: depicted flatness would inhabit at least the semblance of a three-dimensional space as long as the brute, undepicted flatness of the literal surface was pointed to as being still flatter. (“Collage,” 72)

Fig. 3. Braque, The Portuguese (autumn 1911- early 1912), Kunstmuseum Basel

Hence the printed or stenciled letters and numbers that, in 1911, first Braque and then Picasso began introducing into their compositions [see fig. 3]; the point was to draw attention through those inscriptions to the literal surface of the painting, so that everything less obviously adhering to that surface would appear to recede in depth as a result of the comparison.

Fig. 4. Braque, The Clarinet (summer 1912), Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

The only problem, according to Greenberg, was that familiarity seemed to weaken the effect.  By 1912 Picasso and Braque had begun selectively adding sand to their paint so as to give it a visible texture [see fig. 4].  The hope was that, by introducing an explicitly tactile element, still larger areas of the actual surface could be emphasized, thereby prolonging the desired spatial illusions everywhere else.  As Greenberg tells the story, this strategy too eventually proved insufficient; and, of course, it was bound to.  Insofar as the intention was to overcome (and not merely to deny) the literal flatness of the painting’s material support, the project was doomed to failure from the start.  Ontological failure, I hasten to add—not aesthetic failure.  On aesthetic grounds, I think we can agree, most of the works manage quite nicely.  Yet it was their nonreconciliation to flatness—to, we might say, the unavoidable conditions of their own existence—that Greenberg regarded as their most distinctive feature.  It is also what he saw motivating Cubism’s development.  Faced with the impossible demand to simultaneously spell out and overcome its literal flatness, Cubist painting was driven to ever more extreme measures; its history appears, as a result, as a succession of retrospective, dialectical responses to its inability to free itself from its all-too-literal, material support.

Fig. 5. Braque, Fruit Dish and Glass (September 1912), Private Collection

In the end, as Greenberg tells the story, the accumulation of stenciling and textures threatened to overwhelm and thereby collapse the distinction between depicted and undepicted flatnesses that it had been the explicit purpose of those devices to produce.  But it was just at this point, and presumably as a direct result of those earlier failures, that Picasso and Braque hit on the idea of papiers collés [see fig. 5].7 To be sure, the new ploy raised the stakes considerably.  The pieces of paper that were affixed quite tangibly to the surface declared that surface with an unprecedented literalness.  The risk was even greater now that undepicted flatness would become “the main event of the picture,” effectively subsuming any and all implications of depth (“Collage,” 75). The brilliance of the new medium, according to Greenberg, was that within the narrowing confines of an opposition between literal surface and illusionistic depth—and at the very moment when literal surface seemed on the brink of becoming the only term—papier collé delivered a solution in which illusionism was transformed but thereby preserved.  Again I think it’s worth quoting Greenberg at some length on these matters, particularly as he sees them playing out in a specific work:

In the upper center of Braque’s first collage, Fruit Dish [fig. 5], a bunch of grapes is rendered with such conventionally vivid sculptural effects [or at least effects sufficiently “sculptural”] as to lift it practically off the picture plane.  The trompe-l’oeil illusion here is no longer enclosed within parallel flatnesses, but seems to thrust through the surface of the drawing paper and establish depth on top of it.  Yet the violent immediacy of the wallpaper strips pasted to the paper, and the only lesser immediacy of the block capitals that simulate window lettering, manage somehow to push the grape cluster back into place on the picture plane so that it doesn’t “jump.”  At the same time, the wallpaper strips themselves seem to be pushed into depth by the lines and patches of shading charcoaled upon them, and by their placing in relation to the block capitals; and these capitals seem in turn to be pushed back by their placing, and by contrast with the corporeality of the woodgraining.  Thus every part and plane of the picture keeps changing place in relative depth with every other part and plane; and it is as if the only stable relation left among the different parts of the picture is the ambivalent and ambiguous one that each has with the surface. (“Collage,” 76)

Greenberg’s language in this passage is particularly compelling; it also signals a major turning point in his narrative.  Over the course of the next several pages of his text, he will go on to claim that the papiers collés managed to achieve, at last, what the earlier works had not, namely, an overcoming of the opposition between literal and depicted flatnesses that, until that moment, had been presented as the insurmountable contradiction driving Cubism’s development.  The key to the reconciliation, according to Greenberg, was papier collé’s peculiar illusionistic potential.   In the pasted-paper works, he conceded, “flatness may monopolize everything, but it is a flatness become so ambiguous and expanded as to turn into illusion itself” (“Collage,” 77). Mind you, the illusion at issue in these works is, for Greenberg, no longer pictorial, achieved through perspective and sculptural modeling as in the works of the past.  Rather, it is an optical illusionism, arising within formal configurations that openly declare their two-dimensionality, an illusionism capable of displacing surfaces so that they seem to hover in an imaginary (and decidedly non-physical) space.  In the later papiers collés, according to Greenberg, the last vestiges of sculptural shading that still clung to Braque’s Fruit Dish were progressively eliminated, thereby demonstrating that optical illusion could be produced without the aid of any pictorial illusion whatsoever—that the physical surface could be displaced and re-created out of shapes that were wholly and unimpeachably flat.

Admittedly, there are problems with this account of Cubism (including the reality that neither Picasso nor Braque ever did actually produce papiers collés devoid of all sculptural modeling).8 Still, it seems to me that Greenberg’s larger narrative, especially the part concerning the paintings of 1911 and 1912, is able to accommodate many of the eccentric features of those works—their stenciling, for example, and the addition of sand to their surfaces—that demand explanation yet that, prior to Greenberg’s essay at least, had seemed particularly inexplicable.  My own feeling (obviously enough) is that, because of this explanatory power, “Collage” deserves rather more attention than it has received, particularly over the last several decades.

Fig. 6. Picasso, Violin (December 1912), Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

The essay’s disregard or disfavor during that extended period is plainly the result of a kind of collective dissatisfaction over what we might call its “optical dénouement.”  Unhappy with the story’s conclusion, scholars have tended to overlook or discount even its more promising beginnings.  Certainly one way to understand the several semiotic interpretations of Cubism that appeared in the 1970s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s—notably those by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois—is as reactions to Greenberg’s “opticality” (and, we might add, his tendency to measure all modern painting against that single standard).9 Precisely at the moment where Greenberg saw the triumph of optical illusion—in Picasso’s and Braque’s papiers collés—Krauss and Bois would have us see instead Cubism’s unprecedented engagement with quasi-linguistic signs.  Indeed the very turn to papiers collés is to be understood, in their view, as driven by a desire to develop, if not for painting per se, at least for picturing, discrete signifying units analogous to the words or phonemes of written and spoken language.  They regard each shard of paper in Picasso’s Violin [fig. 6], for example, as just such a unit, neatly delimited, in contrast to the generally seamless continuity of an oil painting’s surface.  For Krauss especially it was also important that Picasso wasn’t using just any kind of paper; his preferred material was newspaper, the printed text insinuating that an analogous process of signification was operating in the context of each individual collage.

Fig. 7. Diagram from Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 66

It seems to have been important, too, for both Bois and Krauss that Cubism’s experiments with papiers collés were being conducted more or less concurrently with major developments in structural linguistics, notably in the work of Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure.10 Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was offered three times at the University of Geneva between 1907 and 1911 before its publication as a book in 1916, emphasized that language constituted at any particular moment a formal system, the elements of which drew their meaning only oppositionally, as a result of their differences from one another.11 Language was not, then, the simple naming process it was commonly taken to be—not a matter of a simple one-to-one correlation between a word (the Latin word “arbor” or “equos,” for example [see fig. 7]) and some thing in the world (i.e., the tree or the horse standing over there in the field).  In actuality, things are more complicated than that.  In his course [see fig. 8], Saussure distinguished, first, between the concept (designated as “arbor” in the lower left of his diagram) and the written or spoken word (“tree”); and, then (in the right-hand ellipse), between the concept (below) and its referent in the world (above).  He also underscored the fact that different languages cut things up differently, as illustrated in the diagram reproduced here as fig. 9: “A” represents the undifferentiated field of possible concepts, “B” the range of signifiers (sounds) that might potentially be used to designate them.  Again, different languages divide those streams differently.  English, Saussure pointed out, has two separate words—“sheep” and “mutton”—for the living and cooked forms of the animal, whereas French has only one: mouton. (The other example everyone always trots out—although, factually, it stands on shaky ground—concerns Eskimo languages, which purportedly have many different signifiers for everything encompassed by our one word “snow.”12)  These linguistic differences occur because the relation between signifier and signified is wholly arbitrary, which is to say, the word “tree” (whether written or spoken) in no way resembles the maple outside on the lawn.  Images, of course, are typically not of this order; they signify something precisely by resembling it.  One of the upshots of that condition, however, is that images, no less than words, are often taken to have a one-to-one correspondence (in effect, a quasi-nominal relation) to the things that they denote.  Patently enough, even Saussure, when he wanted to refer to a real tree rather than its linguistic signifier, used an image of a tree [fig. 8].  The metaphor of the painting-as-window, ubiquitous throughout the Western mimetic tradition, has similarly encouraged viewers’ tendency to regard images as more or less transparent to the things that they portray.

Fig. 8. Diagram from Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 68

Fig. 9. Diagram from Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 113

But is painting necessarily rooted in mimetic likeness?  Might it be possible for painting to develop and make use of essentially “arbitrary” signs, signs that, like words, would be capable of referring to things in the world but in the absence of illusionism, perhaps even foregoing resemblance altogether? These questions are the ones explicitly raised, according to Krauss and Bois, by Picasso’s papiers collés.13 From one work to the next, Picasso often re-used nearly identical shapes but had them signify different things in their different contexts.  Evidently enough, a shape such as the leftmost newspaper fragment in the Violin [fig. 6] could easily serve in another collage—were it re-positioned slightly rightward—not as the notched silhouette of a violin but rather as the front face and sound-hole of a guitar.  In that case we would want to say that the pieces in their separate contexts function like homonyms, like words that sound alike but have distinctly different meanings.  Historically, paintings and other works of visual art have not functioned in this manner, because mimetic resemblance precludes such multiple significations.14 In fact, Picasso’s Violin may represent the limit-case in Cubism’s effort to create an arbitrary visual sign.  As Krauss pointed out, the two newspaper fragments employed in the work evidently once belonged to the same sheet; we are readily able to re-join them in our imagination.  (Having scissored them apart, Picasso simply turned one over before pasting them both down onto the surface.)  Again, the leftmost piece designates in the context of this collage the surface and silhouette of a violin.  But what about the rightmost fragment?  Krauss convincingly argued that we are meant to see its parallel lines of type as more or less continuous with the charcoaled hatchings below (an effect that was undoubtedly even stronger before the newspaper yellowed with age), and therefore as signifying the shadowy space alongside of the instrument.  We have, then, two signifiers—materially indistinguishable in that they once belonged to the very same sheet of newspaper—but that in the context of this single work have been made to signify not just different things but opposites, objects and qualities essentially antithetical to one another: on the one hand, flat opaque surface and, on the other, shadowy, atmospheric depth.

Fig. 10. Picasso, Three Women (autumn 1907-late 1908), The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Krauss presented her reading of Picasso’s Violin at a 1989 symposium held in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art’s blockbuster exhibition, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism.15 As his contribution to that same symposium, Yve-Alain Bois provided an account of Cubism’s development, from roughly 1908 through 1912, which also drew heavily on semiotics.  (I should add that the more or less simultaneous presentation of those two papers contributed to the impression at the time that the semiotic angle was fast becoming the reigning orthodoxy among interpreters of Cubism.)  For his part, Bois wanted to show that, from the outset, Cubism had been working toward the development of a system of arbitrary signs, the discrete signifying units of papiers collés being but the culmination of that effort. What Bois designated the first phase of Cubism, represented by Picasso’s Three Women [fig. 10], was characterized, he said, by the repeated subdividing of the painting’s surface, the figures or other representational elements of the work seeming to emerge only as a result of that division.  In the case of the figures in the Three Women, Bois argued, their anatomical features are patently a byproduct of the canvas’s partitioning into multiple, triangular segments. That it was a matter of dividing a single, continuous surface is underscored not only in those places (e.g., in the area of the leftmost nude’s upraised elbow) where the figures still seem attached to their background, but also by that odd, shared contour that serves simultaneously to delineate the breast and torso of the rightmost woman and the buttocks and thigh of her sister alongside.16

Fig. 11. Picasso, Still Life with Liqueur Bottle (August 1909), The Museum of Modern Art, New York

In what Bois called Cubism’s “second semiological phase” the units became rectangular and, in certain instances, such as Picasso’s Still Life with Liqueur Bottle [fig. 11], the artist selected objects that were particularly well suited to the new geometric paradigm.  (That is, the cut-glass of the depicted bottle of liqueur was, in some sense, already Cubist.)  Over the course of the next ten or twelve months, the rectangular units of these Cubist paintings increasingly took on the overall form of a grid [see fig. 12].  As a result, they took on too a kind of double signification, simultaneously referring to the figure or objects represented (however elusively) and to the rectangular shape of the canvas itself, which the grid effectively replicated in miniature.

Fig. 12. Picasso, The Rower (summer 1910), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

At this point, according to Bois—following the summer that Picasso and Braque spent together in Spain, in the town of Cadaqués—Cubism arrived at a crossroads.  It could abandon representation altogether—stop figuring the world outside of the work—or somehow devise a means of signification that would allow painting to retain its representational function but without having to return to the illusionism of the past.  Clearly both Picasso and Braque felt that, were painting to renounce its traditional representational function, there would be neither any rules governing its production nor criteria by which to measure its success.  Any decisions regarding the placement of this line or that color could only ever be arbitrary, now in the negative sense of “entirely random.”

Fig. 13. Picasso, Portrait of D.-H. Kahnweiler (autumn 1910), The Art Institute of Chicago

It was at this point that Picasso and Braque both began introducing into their paintings small pictographic elements: in the case of Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler [fig. 13], for example, the black linear configurations denoting moustache, hair, watch chain, hands, etc.  These “signs” or, better, signifying elements are all still “iconic,” which is to say, they all represent something (a watch chain, for example) by resembling it; but they are doing so now in the conspicuous absence of sculptural modeling or any other form of illusionism.  Bois designated this Cubism’s “hieroglyphic” stage—precisely because, like hieroglyphs, the pictographic elements of these paintings seem to inhabit a territory in between illusionistic images and the arbitrary or unmotivated signs of writing.

Fig. 14. Picasso, Still-Life with Chair Caning (spring 1912), Musée Picasso, Paris

Again, like Krauss, Bois regards the papiers collés of the following year as being different in kind, in that, he says, they fully inhabit the territory of the arbitrary sign.  But he sees Picasso’s Still-Life with Chair-Caning [fig. 14]—a work of collage that preceded the papiers collés (indeed it was the very first collage ever produced)—as importantly transitional in this whole process.  As Rosalind Krauss first noted, the Still-Life with Chair-Caning makes itself available to two contradictory readings.  On the one hand, we can regard it as a more or less traditionally oriented still-life, a painting of so many objects (a glass, a newspaper, a pipe, a slice of quiche or tart) arrayed on a table at some distance in front of us, the line of our gaze at those objects being, then, essentially perpendicular to our upright bodies.  But it is also possible to see the painting otherwise.  That is, we might instead regard the rope-encircled, oval-shaped canvas as referring to the top of the table, perhaps a glass table, with the collaged piece of caning-imprinted fabric suggesting the edge of the chair pushed underneath.  In that case, we would not be looking out at the still-life objects but, rather, down at them, our line of sight now running more or less parallel to our upright bodies.   Christine Poggi has aptly described this collage as offering itself as both table and tableau, that latter term implying precisely the vertical orientation of the works historically associated with easel painting.  Bois, for his part, describes Still-Life with Chair-Caning as marking “the moment when something is about to topple, for in the collapse of the vertical and the horizontal, what Picasso is inscribing is the very possibility of the transformation of painting into writing—of the empirical and vertical space of vision, controlled by our own erect position on the ground, into the semiological, …horizontal space of reading” (“Semiology of Cubism,” 186-87). Again, for Bois, that “horizontal” space of reading and writing is the one that the subsequent papiers collés would come to fully inhabit.

Bois’s argument played an important role in shaping the last of the art-historical accounts of Cubism that I want to discuss, the one advanced by T.J. Clark in his essay “Cubism and Collectivity.”17 In a footnote to that essay, Clark explicitly credits Bois’s work with having helped him to sort out “the strengths and weaknesses of the semiotic account of Cubism, and the ways it does and does not connect with previous ‘modernist’ [i.e. Greenbergian] descriptions” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 424, note 9). In contrast to either Bois’s or Greenberg’s narratives, a certain “disconnected quality” characterizes Clark’s own, “precisely because,” he says, “it is the opposite quality that I most distrust in the accounts…we already have: that is, the way they are driven by a basic commitment to narrative continuity, by a wish to see Picasso’s works from 1907 to 1912 as possessing a logic or forming a sequence, as not being broken or interrupted in any important way—not, above all, encountering failure” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 175). If the Cubist works “are historical at all,” Clark adds a bit later in his text, “it is only insofar as they constantly seem to be moving toward some declaration of epoch-making failure—painting at the end of its tether, so to say, or in an ether where its means are hopelessly clotted or more and more impalpable” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 187).

Clark actually agrees with Bois that in Cubism the pictorial signs become highly—unprecedentedly—arbitrary.  But he insists that the works themselves suggest only a grudging acceptance of that arbitrariness, and do so always in a dark or sardonic mode. “The freer and freer play of the signifier is represented,” he says, “at the same time as it is embraced, as a mereness, a mechanizing or automatism of markmaking, an overall-ness which registers as the opposite of liberty or even ‘autonomy’” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 185), Clark’s basic claim is that Cubism never did achieve the status of a language, though, importantly, he says, it pretended to have done so.  It was essentially the counterfeit of such a language, feigning to offer some truer or more accurate description of the phenomenal world but in fact being unable to deliver anything of the sort.18

Fig. 15. Picasso, Man with a Pipe (summer 1911), Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

As Clark tells the story, in the summer of 1910, the one spent at Cadaqués, where Picasso’s work in particular became as arbitrary or abstract as it ever would—where paintings such as The Rower [fig. 12] perched on the edge of a wholly “unverifiable” relation to the things they purported to describe—the artist came “face to face with the disenchantment of the world.  Which meant, in Picasso’s case,” Clark says, “the disenchantment of painting—the revealing of more and more, and deeper and deeper, structures of depiction as purely contingent, nothing but devices” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 220). Subsequently light (and not just the stale academic simulacrum of it that was present in the works from Cadaqués) would return to illuminate Picasso’s paintings.  The representation of specific objects or figures was also reasserted, via the introduction of Bois’s “hieroglyphic” elements [see fig. 15]—all of those preposterous moustaches, cleft chins, and little beady eyes showing us quite explicitly, according to Clark, “what the pursuit of likeness looks like, in a situation where all versions of such a pursuit have proved impossible to sustain” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 221).

For all his care to separate himself from the so-called “semioticians,” Clark’s position here looks, at least from my vantage point, not so very distant from that of Rosalind Krauss.  In her essay “The Motivation of the Sign,” Krauss had presented Picasso turning to quasi-linguistic signifiers as a kind of last resort, a way of “writing” /depth/ on a field from which its illusionistic invocation had been effectively banished.   If we’re to grasp the full weight of her argument, it’s extremely important we recognize that the only claims Krauss made for wholly arbitrary signification pertained to precisely those signifiers that indicated depth or the related notions of obliquity and luminosity.  In “The Motivation of the Sign,” she is very clear on this point:

This matter of motivating the sign, raised by my title does not, then, refer to the import of the semiological turn heralded by collage.  Rather, it addresses the specific set of signifieds that Picasso seems most insistently to organize in the opening years of his exploration of collage.  Those signifieds—/depth/ and /atmosphere/ or /light/—are in no way random, but are prepared for, motivated if you will, by the experience of the preceding five years. (“The Motivation of the Sign,” 271-72)  —She means by the way that three-dimensionality had been progressively drained from the picture.  So, for example, when Krauss points to the two mismatched f-holes in Picasso’s papier collé Violin [fig. 6] and suggests that they are arbitrary signs, it is emphatically not the case that they are arbitrary signs for f-holes.  If they signify those holes, it is because they resemble them, however much the “typographic” quality of the rendering insinuates some connection to language and writing.  The mismatched f-holes remain, then, iconic signs insofar as they refer to those particular features of the violin.  In their disparity, however—in the mismatching designed to suggest the violin’s oblique turn into space—they become fully arbitrary signs, but now signs specifically for /depth/.  Together, the f-holes signify space or depth even as they assert its absence, even as they cannot or will not conjure it illusionistically for the composition.

Fig. 16. Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (spring 1910), Museum of Modern Art, New York

In Krauss’s account, Cubism’s progressive flattening—and so also its recourse to a form of arbitrary signification—is accompanied by a profound sense of loss.  Krauss would have us see that a distinctly melancholy air pervades works such as Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin [fig. 16], a melancholy made all the more poignant by those few places—in the area of the woman’s right arm, for example, or along the curve of her breast—where the machinery of illusionism is not malfunctioning, and so is yet able to conjure, miraculously, a palpably believable, tangibly present form.

Again, in Krauss’s description of these passages, we are not so very far, it seems to me, from the “dark mood” that Clark sees coloring Cubism, particularly in those years from 1910 to 1911 that are the focus of his attention.  In fact, I would argue that we are not on ground so very different, either, from that covered by Clement Greenberg in his essay on “Collage”—at least before “Collage” took its turn toward a triumphant “opticality.” In all three cases it is a matter of a kind of negative dialectic within Cubism, the works increasingly forced into a position of grudgingly acknowledging that which they most fear or revile: Clark calls it an abstract “unverifiability”; in Greenberg’s account, it is mere flatness; in Krauss’s, a two-dimensionality devoid of any carnal connection to the world.  In all three accounts, however, the works manage in such a way that both the acknowledgement and the antipathy are fully on view.  The works’ achievement—“triumph,” we might even say—resides precisely in their ability to make both things simultaneously apparent.  Admission or acknowledgement alone would have amounted to mere acceptance, resulting in something simply, flatly decorative, and detached from any engagement with the world.  Conversely, antipathy or avoidance on its own would have been tantamount to a denial of how much painting (and the world around it) had changed in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.  It is finally this doubledness, I would argue—the works’ acknowledgement of loss and their stubborn refusal to be reconciled to it—that makes them the compelling, occasionally haunting, images they are.  I tend to think that Krauss, Clark, and Greenberg might even all agree that it is also what makes them so wholly exemplary of modernity.

Notes

1.  The exhibition, which was curated by Eik Kahng and jointly organized by the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, opened first in Texas before making its way to California.  It will be on view in Santa Barbara through January 8, 2012.  There is also a fine accompanying catalogue, Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), with essays by Eik Kahng, Charles Palermo, Harry Cooper, Annie Bourneuf, Christine Poggi, Claire Barry and Bart Devolder.↑

2.  For a useful anthology of early writings on Cubism, see Edward F. Fry, Cubism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).↑

3.  Christine Poggi, “Frames of Reference: ‘Table’ and ‘Tableau’ in Picasso’s Collages and Constructions,” Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 311-322, especially 311-312.↑

4.  Carl Einstein, “Notes sur le Cubisme,” Documents, no. 3 (1929), 154; cited by T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 186.↑

5.  Greenberg, “Collage,” Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 70-83; this particular passage comes from page 71.  Italics added.↑

6.  On this point, see my essay “The Flattening of ‘Collage’,” October, no. 102 (Autumn 2002): 59-86.↑

7.  Art historians generally, and those interested in Cubism in particular, tend to draw a distinction between the practice of collage, which can involve all manner of materials, and papiers collés, whose elements are limited, as the name implies, to pieces of pasted paper.↑

8.  Most of the criticism of the essay has been directed toward the fact that Greenberg refused or, at minimum, failed to acknowledge the pop- or mass-cultural nature of the collaged materials in the Cubist papiers collés.  For an attempt to work out how Greenberg might have been able to make sense of those materials without abandoning the initial terms of his argument, see my essay, “The Flattening of ‘Collage’,” especially 59 and 74 ff.↑

9.  In “The Cubist Epoch,” a review essay for Artforum, 9, no. 6 (February 1971): 32-38, Rosalind Krauss first advanced an interpretation of Cubism informed by semiotics. “In the Name of Picasso,” which appeared in Krauss’s book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 23-40, built on that argument, as did (more fully) her essay, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 261-86.  Bois’s major statements on the subject are “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 65-97; and “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 169-208.↑

10.  I say that “it seems to be important,” although it should be emphasized that neither Krauss nor Bois is claiming that Picasso had read Saussure, for example, or had even heard of his work.  Rather, they treat Cubism and structural linguistics as cultural homologues, whose contemporaneity suggests some interconnection, but potentially quite diffuse.  It is the case, however, that Roman Jakobson knew of Cubism and even claimed that it was instrumental in reorienting his own thinking about language.  See Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” 177-178.↑

11.  Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale was first published in Paris (by Payot) in 1916.  See also the critical edition of the English-language translation, by Wade Baskin, of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).↑

12.  For a history of this dubious idea, see Geoffrey Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 159-171.↑

13.  Significantly, both Bois and Krauss argue that only Picasso’s papiers collés function this way; Braque’s, they assert, do not operate in even a quasi-linguistic manner.  See Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” 191-194; and Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” 264-272.↑

14.  The exceptions here—all of which postdate Cubism—are the double images produced by Salvador Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method.”  For illustrations and a pertinent discussion of those works, see Dawn Ades, ed., Dali’s Optical Illusions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).↑

15.  The exhibition ran from September 24, 1989 through January 16, 1990.  The symposium proceedings were subsequently published as Lynn Zelevansky, ed., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992).  Krauss’s essay, “The Motivation of the Sign,” appears on pages 261-286; see also the transcript of the discussion following her talk, 287-304.↑

16.  For an interpretation of the painting that makes much of these striking features, see Leo Steinberg’s “Resisting Cezanne: Picasso’s Three Women,” Art in America 66.6 (November 1978): 114-33.↑

17.  T.J. Clark, “Cubism and Collectivity,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 169-223.↑

18.  I should add, as Clark himself does at several points throughout his essay, that he sees this “failure” as not a weakness of the work but, in a sense, as its strength.  In Clark’s account Cubism remains the “classic moment of modernist painting” (213), but it occupies that position rather differently than others have claimed: it does so, he suggests, because its ambitions and shortcomings alike show us something crucial about what it meant to be modern.↑