Aesthetics and Art
Lecture 7
PHIL 3681/2618
Professor David Macarthur
The Traditional Idea of an Author
• The traditional idea of the author is as having
an authoritative role in determining literary
meaning since they made or created it.
• Link to biographical criticism and the idea of
recovering a fixed unitary meaning from a text:
call this Monism.
• Authorial Monism: the view that the fixed
unitary meaning of the text is the one the
author intended – assuming this intention was
successfully realized in the text. E.g. Danto.
• French philosophers Michel Foucault and
Roland Barthes are associated with “the death
of the author”.
• This is a revolutionary way of thinking about
literary texts that dispenses with ANY
reference to the author in matters of
interpretation.
• How plausible is this position?
Death of the Author:
Michel Foucault & Roland Barthes
Death of the Author-God
• Note that the death-of-the-author is a variation on
Nietzsche’s famous claim that God is dead.
Analogy: Ordinary Speech
• In an ordinary speech act we have no trouble
thinking there is a speaker who intends to
convey a meaning by their words to a certain
audience: “I’d like an espresso please!”
• Plausibly literary acts (e.g. texts) have
communicative intentions also.
• Artist à literature à intended “meaning” à a
suitably sensitive audience recovers that
“meaning” by interpreting the text.
Art Demands Our Interest
• An artwork is an object that demands our
attention and interest.
• That’s one reason art is often felt to be
pretentious.
• It also explains why we can feel resentment
when art does not fulfill its promise of being
especially interesting.
Where does our interest lie?
Art vs Artist
• When we interpret art it is features of the art
that we are primarily interested in: its “content”
realized in this form.
• The artist is, at best, of secondary interest e.g.
artistic style, the artist’s oeuvre.
• A psychologist may look at artworks as
evidence for facts about authors. We can do
this too if we want to take a symptomatic
stance towards art.
• But this is not the way we look at art as art.
Expression: Art vs Artist
• “Expressivism”: on Collingwood’s theory we focus
on the communicability (or clarification) of
emotion in an artistic medium – the work’s
distinctive emotional expression is made
manifest.
• We need not put the whole weight on the artist
as the source of this expression, as Collingwood
does.
• Artist’s expression vs the artwork’s expression.
We can distinguish these since an artwork is a
work of imagination.
Qualifying Collingwood
• Why can’t an artist make an artwork that has its
own emotional expressivity which is not
attributable to the artist?
• This need not be craft since the artist might
explore the expressive power of an artistic
medium without having a fully worked out idea
of what they are making.
• There is the idea of art as having a life of its own.
Duchamp spoke about letting his artworks go out
into the world, like grown up children.
Communicative Action Model of Art
• Our response to art is akin to our response to
other people. Think about the terms we use to
describe art e.g. “mature”, “shallow”, “deep”,
“interesting”, “intriguing”, “philosophical”, “all
style and no content”…
• This motivates treating art as capable of being
interpreted along the same general lines as
human beings and their actions.
• In understanding human action we discover
the intention expressed by appeal to the
reason-requiring question “Why?” (cp.
Wittgenstein, Anscombe).
• We employ a principle of charity that aims to
make the most reasonable sense of the
agent/artwork under the circumstances.
Criticism of Barthes
• The metaphysical conception of the author as
God-of-meaning is arguably a straw man!
• Art criticism is not simply a matter of guessing
what was on the artist’s mind.
• The Cartesian conception of mind, which it
seems to presuppose, is flawed. What of the
unconscious?
• Art as artifact inevitably raises issues of
intention, purpose, aim; that is, issues of
authorship!
Criticism of Barthes
• Why put all the emphasis for the production
of meaning on either the author or the
reader? Why not both!
• Caveat: interpretation goes beyond
“meaning”. Our interest in art is wider than
that e.g. artistic style, use of an art medium.
And we can be interested in misfiring art
(e.g. B-grade movies).
Authorial Intention
• Irrelevancy view: the author's intentions are
completely irrelevant to interpretation
or
• No-Authority view: the author’s intentions,
although relevant, are not authoritative.
• What matters (most?) in criticism is the artist’s
intentions as realized in the artwork. That’s
only available on the basis of an interpretation
of the work, not by asking the artist.
• Joke: “You can’t think my novel is bad since I
intended to write a good one!”
The Nesting of Intention:
More or less specificity
• The intention to make something – distinguishes the
work from natural objects.
• The intention to make a work of art – distinguishes
art from craft (e.g. jewellery, tools, cars)
• The intention to make a work of art of a certain
category – distinguishes among different categories
of art.
• The intention to embody the theme of, say, the
vanity and paradoxical nature of human ambition –
something that we can discover in the work itself,
e.g., Macbeth.
The Mind: Descartes
On the Cartesian view:
• The mind is
metaphysically private
and fully transparent to
itself.
• One knows one’s own
mind better than anyone
else could ever do.
• Intention is a willing, an
“inner” cause of “outer”
behaviour.
The Expressive View of Mind:
Wittgenstein
• The mind is public (not
private!) and knowable by
others.
• Actions express one’s
intentions, thoughts and
feelings. E.g. gesture, tone,
facial expressions.
• Intentions are internally
related to action
explanations. The link is not
merely causal but
constitutive.
Anscombe on Intention
• When we describe
intentional action we are
pointing to something for
which reasons can be
given.
• By ‘reasons’ we do not
mean mere ‘causes.’
Two ideas of Intention
Distinguish:
• Cartesian: Looking for the intention behind the
action (artwork), say, in the artist’s ‘mind’.
Trying to guess a cause you cannot observe i.e.
an hypothesis.
• Wittgensteinian: Looking for the intention in
the action (artwork). Learning how to read this
expression of mindedness. Looking for the
reason for doing something. Knowing what one
is doing.
Action is intentional under a
description
• A particular action can be intentional under
one description, but not intentional under
another.
• E.g. What I did was to play a DVD… but I (also)
caused the baby to wake.
• I did not act in order to make the baby wake up
but that’s what happened (i.e. a causal effect).
• I might not have even known that the baby was
asleep in the next room.
Intention in Art: Questions
• What is artistic intention? (How do we
know? Often we can only look to the
artwork, not the artist)
• How well was it realized? Artistic failures
are surely possible.
• What is the value of the intention-as-
realized?
The very idea of art is something that has
value, that delivers on the promise of art.
Artist as God reprise
• Can an artwork have unintended features in
the way an action can?
• Yes and no. There are no excuses in art. The
artist is responsible for everything in the
artwork.
• So, it seems there is something right about the
idea of the author as God after all, the one who
is fully responsible for the world of the artwork
they have created.
• But, note, this is not to say that the artist is the
god of meaning.
Theories of Interpretation: Monism
• MONISM. There is one right interpretation
which must be found. Traditionally, this is
the author’s own interpretation.
• CRITICAL MONISM. There is one right
interpretation arrived at on critical grounds.
E.g. Nehamas.
Theories of Interpretation: Pluralism
• Critical Pluralism: Interpretations are partly
found and partly created by viewers, a kind of
pluralism.
• The critical task is to recover the intentions of
the artist that frame (without fully determining)
plausible interpretations.
• The frame constitutes a ‘rational core’ that any
reasonable interpretation, however divergent,
must agree about. Hence, it captures a monist
intuition.
Radical Pluralism:
“Interpretational Relativism”
• Interpretations are created by readers (e.g.
Deconstructivism, Barthes) on the basis of
experiencing the artwork.
• On this view there is no ‘rational core’ that
constrains disagreement other than an intention to
make art. Even the category of art is in question.
• Interpretations are still influenced by past
interpretations, critical traditions, cultural norms
and so on.
• So there may still be considerable overlap between
reasonable interpretations but this is now a
contingent matter, not a necessary condition.
Authorial Intention
Distinguish:
• the implied author: an abstract function
of interpretation. The idea of a “guiding
intelligence” responsible for the meaning
as expressed in the work.
• the writer: an historical figure or figures
who causally made the work in question.
Reasons for the Distinction
i) Multiple authors
e.g. the Bible was written by many writers but
interpretation still postulates a unitary
“implied author”, the ‘voice’ of the text.
Cp. Films, architecture, opera.
In this case all the creators involved are, as it
were, combined into a collective mind.
• ii) A distinction can be drawn between
what writers say they meant and what the
work is plausibly interpreted to mean.
• This is so even if, sometimes, one can
identify the writer with the implied author.
iii) When interpreting art as art our primary
interest is in the work, not the artist.
• There is a tradition of thinking that the artist
ought to disappear (Flaubert).
• Recall that Kant says art must appear
natural (as if unintended).
• This is a normative claim and it seems in
tension with Romanticism.
• iv) Mere self-display is exhibitionism,
something inartistic.
• According to Tolstoy, the artist must be
sincere so not pandering to an audience.
• According to Collingwood, the artist
explores their own emotion for themselves.
True art is not primarily directed towards a
specific audience.
Waiting for Godot (1952)
Playwright & Implied Playwright
Must we think the play’s
themes – life as a matter of
inventing ways to pass the
time, our hopeless hope for
‘metaphysical’ salvation in a
pitiless universe, etc. – are
ideas Beckett himself is
committed to?
Obviously NOT!
Where to Look for the Meaning?
• To Alan Schneider's question 'Who or what
does Godot mean?', Beckett replied, 'If I knew, I
would have said so in the play.’
• Another occasion when Beckett was asked
what the play meant he responded by reading
the play.
• Beckett: “I produce an object. What people
make of it is not my concern [...] I'd be quite
incapable of writing a critical introduction to
my own works.”

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