Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005
Special Issue: Literary Universals
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Livingston, Paisley, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study. New York, USA: Oxford UP, 2005. 251 pp. ISBN: 0199278067 £35.00 hardback
Reviewed by
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Paisley Livingston’s latest work Art and Intention continues his ongoing research into the area of art and artistic intention, and as such it is partly an extensive survey of recent developments and many of the more traditional arguments concerning art and its associated concepts, as well their treatment in various fields. Although he is a professor of philosophy, his work surveys the landscape for all pertinent discussions of the artist and his production of art, from literary criticism to film theory to poststructuralism to action theory to intentionalist psychology. From this wide berth for his research, almost any emanation of “art” comes into discussion, be it statues, painting, film, or fiction.
But the subtitle of the book is “A Philosophical Study,” and Livingston meticulously analyzes and takes to task those concepts of and approaches to artistic intention and artistic meaning he surveys, revealing the inadequacies and limits inherent to many critical stances. In the face of many rather extreme or absolutist views, Livingston mostly asserts a more pragmatic stance with regards to developing a more tenable meaning from a work of art. Anyone looking for strict interpretive principles with universal application will be sorely disappointed, or rather as Livingston reveals, they will not be interpreting art as much as they would be playing Procrustes to every artistic work they meet, stretching absurdly here, cutting off unnecessarily there, to make sure that the work fits the interpretation. Following the tried and true guide of common sense when it comes to something as dynamic as art and artistic intention, Livingston, given his rigorous analytical skills, comes to realize that successful interpretation must submit itself to rather unstable things like genre, context, and most of all, the artist’s interpretation. In the book’s penultimate chapter, “Intention and the Interpretation of Art,” Livingston positions his conception of the interpreter of art as if between two “fictions” that many interpreters have regarding the author, as I would call it, those of the anti-intentionalists (in which we are to recognize many contemporary literary critics and theorists), who see too much “risk” involved with conjecturing intentions from an author, and those of the absolute intentionalists (Stanley Fish, Umberto Eco), who assume a fictional author credited for creating the meanings that the interpreter perceives. The latter, obviously, make a phantasm of the author to lend a sense of unity to the meanings in the work, but the former seem just as well to falsify the reality of the work of art as a production of a real, individual being acting as the artist; for them, the work of art is just ‘there’ without connections to any intention. Livingston clears away rhetoric and politically inspired criticism to get back to the matter at hand, the reality of art as the complex congruence of various realized and unrealized intentions.
Livingston proposes the more pragmatic and realistic method of interpreting meaning, namely the approach of “partial” or “actualist” intentionalism (both terms seem applicable to Livingston). This “pragmatic” approach recognizes that intentions of the artist matter and above all do succeed in directing the reception of a work of art, although obviously these intentions can many times fail, or at times they can not be adequately expressed. Most importantly, such an interpretive stance regards “unintended meanings” as equally important as the intended ones. (Thankfully, one of the “myths” about artists that Livingston takes time to dismiss is that of the “genius” who goes into a trance or has a vision to produce his art: Livingston shows that any unconscious production or unintended meaning still comes from prolonged practice, reflection, and training. And as someone who has seen reams of papers with such fits of genius revised over and over again, I am glad that the point is made).
One of the other goals of this pragmatic intentionalism is to interpret and evaluate “in a non-anachronistic, historically contextualized manner.” This contextualization seems to echo the conclusions of much of poststructuralist theory, Continental philosophy, and literary theory, and Livingston freely cites from authors like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. In fact, his chapter “Authorship, Individual and Collective” focuses in the beginning on Foucault’s famous essay, “What Is An Author?” to show how the “author-function” of Foucault’s essay points to problematics posited by the actual “ historical emergence of some particular ways of treating texts or discourses,” ones that Foucault says are neither “natural or necessary.” Being familiar with Foucault, I would agree with Livingston’s assessment of this central tenet of “What Is An Author?” Even Livingston’s own translated excerpt from the original points to Foucault’s contention that the author is important as a concept which determines interpretations of works:
. . .what in the individual agent is designated as author (or what makes an individual an author) is but our projection, in more or less psychological terms, of the treatment to which we subject texts, the connexions that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we
recognize, the exclusions we practice.
I was perplexed to see, then, that Livingston dismisses this argument from Foucault by asking, “If the psychology of the author is a projection and never a discovery, how can Foucault coherently claim that the psychology of readers and interpreters is any different?” Within the very quotation is the answer, i.e. the argument limits itself to “the treatment to which we subject texts,” making the argument that the meanings readers derive from works are projected into a created psychology of the author. Foucault cannot create psychologies of the readers simply because the readers have written no texts from which one can generate a psychology—even more, no “psychology” is given by Foucault for the reader, only the reader’s source for interpreting the author’s psychology, which are obviously two separate things. Later on, Livingston quotes from Bertrand Russell, who says “When you have taken account of all the feelings roused by Napoleon in writers and readers of history, you have not touched the actual man.” Curious that one author cannot apparently make that kind of claim, while another can.
Despite recent remarks of his regarding his disdain for the desire to separate Continental philosophy from its Anglo-American counterparts, an opinion that I am very much sympathetic with, many readers may “categorize” him as part of the analytic or Anglo-American tradition, if not for the overly rational assessment of poststructuralists like Foucault, then perhaps for the intermittent reliance on more analytically structured arguments: “S’s utterance of U is fiction iff [if and only if] there is a feature of utterances, F, and there is a characteristic of persons, C, such that S utters U intending that anyone who has C would . . .” Even though such arguments are used, the book should not be perceived as purely a specialist’s tome, and the illustrative examples of artists like Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, Borges, David Bailly, and many others help the lay reader, or perhaps specialists from various disciplines, grasp the complexities that Livingston reveals behind such seemingly simple concepts as artist, author, work, intention, and interpretation.
Matthew Guy
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Biographical note: Matthew Guy holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University, and his dissertation “Translating Hebrew into Greek: the Hermeneutics of Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Readings” was nominated for the LSU Alumni Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2003. Currently, he is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, teaching literary theory, British Literature, and Western Humanities.