Issue #5: Agency and Experience
In this issue Michael Fried, Ruth Leys, and Robert Pippin look at aspects of the relation between our agency–our actions, or emotions, our character–and our experience–of the world, of ourselves, of each other.
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.
Meaning and Affect: Phil Chang’s Cache, Active
What I’ve been calling the work’s performance is nothing other than the causal account of its production, the kind of account you can give for any work of art. The difference is just that Chang has folded the process through which the work was produced into the experience of seeing it. This is a difference that matters.
The Work of Art in the Age of its Real Subsumption under Capital
Whatever previous ages might have fancied, we are wise enough to know that the work of art is a commodity like any other. Chances are that we don’t have any very clear idea what we mean by that. Marx, however, does.
Charles Altieri on Jami Bartlett, Jennifer Ashton, and John Gibson
The critic can embrace aesthetic attention to the specifics of “how” the work unfolds and still avoid any trace of formalism: art is a means of combining and re-orienting imaginative spaces that attach us to features of the world.
Robert Pippin on Oren Izenberg and Paul Grimstad
But the question is deeper: whether an illusion, on the order of some post-Cartesian misdirected agenda in epistemology, is a proper matrix for understanding the sort of suffering chronicled in the modern literature of loss, absurdity, alienation, meaninglessness and simple heartlessness. (For that matter, the larger question here: could McDowell be right that the Cartesian agenda is simply an illusion, to be recovered from, to be exorcised? Is not that image itself telling, as if it is something like possession, witchcraft? Could that be right?)
London Calling: The Urban Chronotope of Romanticism
London is alienated from itself in its artificial opposition to the otherness of nature. But it can also be rendered alien or other by its deep historical past, a past still visible within it. This is a temporal dislocation rather than the geographical and ontological one that Wordsworth envisions in The Prelude.
Bazooka, Night Watering, and Admonition for My Children
An aristocratic nature does not like to be constrained
to the fewest syllables. His subjects encompassed
gods and men and horses, all victorious.
Issue #4: No Quarrel (Part 2)
Part 2 of our “No Quarrel” feature on literature and philosophy. Edited by Oren Izenberg and Rob Chodat.
The Question of Poetic Meaning
[W]e frequently do not, strictly speaking, hear the meaning of a poem so much as we hear a poem as occasioning a question of meaning, a question we devote ourselves to answering if we are to make sense of the encounter with meaning a poem initiates. In the context of poetry, we usually take meaning to be a destination and not a point of departure.
The Motive for Metonymy (A Parochial Theme in Two Parts)
But how can one person actually feel another person’s a? More plausibly, we might think that the causal chain involves a proliferation of effects from the same a — not different subjects having the same feelings about a, but the same a producing different feelings in different subjects. But then we also have a different source of pathos — how can I tell if my a is the same as your a? Not how can I feel another person’s a, but how can I know another person’s a?
