Philosophical Review

The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art by Arthur C. DantoReview by: Guy SircelloThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 268-273Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185294 .

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fact would become manifest, triggering economic motives and leading to an exodus from the country.

In order for this type of explanation to work, there must be areas of activity where economic motives are the only ones that are likely to cause a change of behavior and it must be that if economic motives are activated, then they have some effect on what people do. But those will often be reasonable assumptions and it is worth paying attention therefore to the type of explanation in question. That explanation belongs within the in- terpretive framework, for while it is not itself a belief-desire explanation, it does not suppose the operation of anything but interpretive factors. And yet the explanation holds out the possibility of theory, for it suggests that we may be able to abstract from the hurly-burly of everyday reasons and identify a high-level explanatory pattern in certain areas of human behavior. It is a pity that it goes unconsidered here.

I have not tried to do justice to the many detailed discussions in this book, particularly the discussions in which the differences between various sorts of interpretive account are relevant. I do not have space to cover them, and I suspect in any case that they are of more interest to non- philosophers.

PHILIP PETTIT

Australian National University

The Philosophical Review, Vol. XCVIII, No. 2 (April 1989)

THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF ART. By ARTHUR C. DANTO. New York, N.Y., Columbia University Press, 1986. Pp. xvi, 216. $25.00.

This book presupposes, continues to develop, and builds upon a view of art that Arthur Danto worked out, more or less, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981). The main line Danto pursues in the present work, which is a compilation and expansion of eleven talks the author has presented over the past few years, has several major segments: (1) artworks are distinguishable from things that are not art solely with respect to some "interpretations" that constitute them as art (p. 23); (2) these constitutive interpretations are given and/or conditioned by art-historical contexts; (3) anything whatever might (in some possible art-historical world) be an artwork and, indeed, might be any number of different artworks (given enough different art-historical worlds). Theses (1) through (3) are brought over into the present book from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, with the slight modification

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that in this book Danto stresses more explicitly the constitutive effect of art-historical interpretations on art (ibid.). New in the present book is the idea that (4) modern art has itself (in its development) come to the point of recognizing the truth of (3). Therefore, (5) art history has ended, for art has turned into its own philosophy; but art, in so turning, renders itself obsolete (it "dies") and gives way to philosophy, which then develops the insight that modern art history has culminated in. The philosophy that art has brought us to is, unsurprisingly, Danto's own. Danto further claims that this whole "story" of art is (6) a "reenfranchisement" of art meant to counteract the "disenfranchisement" art has suffered at the hands of "phi- losophy" (p. xv). Danto's (apparently) summary explanation of what he means by "disenfranchisement" is (7) that philosophy has claimed either that art is "ephemeral" or that art does what philosophy does, but less well (pp. xiv-xv). Danto even has a suggestion about why "philosophy" has so disenfranchised art: "we may wonder," he says, whether (8) the disenfran- chisement comes out of a "fear" of a "deep metaphysical danger" that philosophers sense in art (p. 12).

The chief impressions that this book makes are, first, that its main ideas are, like those of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, highly interesting and stimulating and, second, that they are, to a far greater degree than in the earlier book, skimpily and confusingly developed. Part of the reason for the latter impression is, no doubt, the original character of the constit- uent essays-lectures delivered at different times, on different occasions, and to different kinds of audiences. However that may be, the stimulation value of Danto's ideas is not high enough to pay for the debt he leaves to exposition and argumentation. For as prima facie interesting as those ideas are, they are developed so poorly that they do not even begin to be con- vincing.

Take, for example, the eponymous thesis (7) about the disenfranchise- ment of art. Danto seems determined to accuse all philosophers of disen- franchising art. So, although his chief disenfranchised is Plato, and it is Plato to whom his thesis (as expressed in his Preface) most clearly applies, when he discusses Schopenhauer, who affirms of art precisely what Plato denies of it, namely, that it expresses (Platonic) Ideas, this affirmation is taken by Danto as yet another example of disenfranchisement. To make this point, Danto ignores his previous (and later) statements of the disen- franchisement thesis (as stated above) and comes up with another one: Schopenhauer's disenfranchisement consists of ignoring the artistic "me- dium." A similar shift in the disenfranchisment thesis is made in Danto's discussion of Kant. Kant, according to Danto, disenfranchises art by making it irrelevant to human "interests." What Danto ignores here is that, from Kant's point of view, to make aesthetic judgments a function of human interests might indeed be to "ephemeralize" the former, because

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for Kant nothing is more ephemeral than most human interests. One of Kant's motives, in insulating art from interest, is precisely to universalize the aesthetic feeling. None of this saves Kant in Danto's eyes, for Danto simply uses another interpretation of "disenfranchisement"; Kant's posi- tion is an instance, says Danto, of the view that alleges that art "makes nothing happen." (Of course, this view of disenfranchisement hardly fits the case of Plato, for whom art indeed "makes things happen"-very often the "wrong" things, to be sure, but only if it is the "wrong" sort of art.)

There thus seem to be for Danto at least four distinct ways of "disen- franchising" art-no matter what Danto says in his attempts at summary: alleging art's "ephemerality," ignoring its medium, saying it "makes nothing happen" and claiming it does what philosophy does, but poorly. These are not the same; they may be connected, but Danto certainly doesn't try to argue that they are. So-what finally is this thing that "phi- losophy" has tried to do to art? By generalizing from Danto's statements, the best I can come up with is this rather vague idea: philosophy alleges that art is not, in the whole scheme of things, very important and is not, especially, as important as philosophy; and these allegations, furthermore, are not true to the reality of art.

But what makes Danto's presentation of the idea of disenfranchisement even more frustrating is that after stating that his own enterprise is aimed at reenfranchising art, Danto himself disenfranchises art in his own theses about the death of art. Those theses imply precisely that art does poorly what philosophy can do better. For it is one of Danto's main ideas that although art can point out and recognize the notion that anything what- ever might be a work of art and the notion that interpretations constitute it as art, only philosophy can develop these ideas; and that is why, of course, art annihilates itself and turns into its own philosophy. Danto's own disen- franchisement of art is made, as far as I can tell, without the slightest sense of irony. To be sure, Danto does mention, very casually, in an introduc- tion to the essay "The End of Art" that his thesis "represents one form" of the disenfranchisement of art (p. 81). But we are never told which state- ment to take seriously-the admission that his own theory of the history of art is a disenfranchisement of art, or the statement that the book in which the latter occurs is an attempt to reenfranchise art.

All of this is very odd, but the oddest thing yet about Danto's book is that it constitutes-or could reasonably be held to-a profound disen- franchisement of art of a sort Danto does not mention and only barely suggests in his thesis (8) above. For what could be the "deep metaphysical danger" that "philosophy" might, Danto darkly speculates, suspect in art? Danto does not say, but I submit that it could be the suspicion that art gives us access to a level (or type, or ground) of reality to which philosophy

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either has no access, or has access only mediated by art and that philo- sophy therefore is subordinate to art in precisely that area that philosophy (including, significantly, Danto's own philosophy) thinks of as its proper domain, the discrimination of levels of reality. This latter kind of thesis has been maintained by several modern philosophers-in particular, and I think originally, by Schelling. This philosophical view (or family of views), moreover, could not be interpreted as a disenfranchisement of art on any reading of "disenfranchisement." Now it is important to mention such a philosophical view in a discussion of Danto's book, first, because Danto seems oblivious of it, even though it is construable as a salient coun- terexample to his disenfranchisement thesis and, second, because Danto's own art-historical thesis about the death of art ignores or misinterprets precisely those strains in modern art that might plausibly be said to exem- plify, roughly speaking, Schellingian views of art. In so doing, Danto's art-historical thesis arguably becomes, from a Schellingian point of view, a disenfranchisement of art: it fails to accord to art its genuine nature as the (sole) experiential route to a truer, or higher, or more fundamental re- ality.

The suggestion I am making here is that the real meaning of Danto's art-historical thesis about the end of art is that it is a (probably unwitting) attempt to disenfranchise art in a far more "aggressive" and "vicious" (Danto's terms) way than Danto himself has recognized in himself or in other philosophers. Interpreting Danto's end of art thesis in such a way, furthermore, could account for some puzzling facts about Danto's exposi- tion of his thesis: (a) the thesis is stated very obscurely and possibly inco- herently; (b) Danto makes no attempt to make an empirical case for what is, after all, an empirical thesis; and (c) on the face of it, the thesis is grossly false.

In Danto's clearest and most detailed statement of that thesis he says that in recent art ". . . what we see is something that depends more and more upon theory for its existence as art . . ." and that in this history ". . . objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself . . ." (p. 1 11). The conceptual problem with this thesis is how to interpret a feature, which Danto spent a book arguing is definitive of art, as a feature that can obtain of art in degrees. What can it mean to say of twentieth-century art, which like all art de- pends for its existence as art upon theory, that some of it depends upon theory more and some depends less? The second problem is to under- stand precisely how, quite apart from the problems it presents for Danto's definition of art, some earlier twentieth-century art depends less on theory and how some later twentieth-century art depends more on theory. For Danto states his thesis in terms of art's progress along a single parameter

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over the last several decades. Yet Danto makes no attempt whatsoever to analyze that progress, to sketch out its stages, or even vaguely to indicate what conditions the succession of art movements would have to satisfy in order to conform to his thesis. Prima facie, in fact, such a progression would not seem to obtain. For Danto's thesis would seem to hold much more clearly of an artist like Marcel Duchamp, working early in the cen- tury, than for Mark Rothko, working decades later. (It is no accident, of course, that Duchamp is a "favorite" of Danto's and that he bases a great deal of his whole analysis of art upon problems that he believes Du- champ's art raises.) On the other hand, it is also true that certain kinds of so-called "conceptual art" in the present and very recent past would seem to conform to what Danto sees as the end point of art (where the "object approaches zero . . ."). Yet, whereas such conceptual art can legitimately

be seen as carrying on, and looking back to, certain strains in Pop Art and Dada, it is probably a gross error to see such art as progressing along the same parameter as all other forms of twentieth-century art.

For there is a very powerful strain in twentieth-century art, which has not failed to affect even such cerebral artists as Duchamp and Warhol, but which finds its centers elsewhere. This is the strain I would call, for want of a better or more standardized or widely recognized term, "secular spiri- tuality."' This strain, while not excluding reflection on the nature of art, definitely subordinates that to more "meditative" concerns, which, fur- thermore, seem to carry "metaphysical" claims about a higher plane of reality that are of a far different order from the metaphysical claims that Danto is interested in, viz., claims about how art differs from non-art. A very selective list of the artists in whom this strain is dominant would in- clude Malevich, the very late Monet, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, as well as John Cage in music and Merce Cunningham in dance. Such artists are, with respect to both their intentions and their achieve- ments, much more in tune with a Schellingian view of art than with a Dantoesque view. And to assimilate such art to the cerebral superficialities of (some) conceptual art, as Danto's thesis tries to do, is to attempt one of the grander disenfranchisements of art in Western philosophy, a kind of disenfranchisement, furthermore, that Danto's book avoids even recog- nizing.

'This element has only begun to be explored in modern art. In fact, the only attempts I know to do so have been Maurice Tuchman's 1986 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985" and the 1988 exhibit at UCLA's Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery "Vi- sions of Inner Space: Gestural Painting in Modern American Art" curated by Merle Schipper and Lee Mullican. These shows make clear, however, that the concept of the "spiritual" in modern art is in very considerable need of further clarification, refinement and articulation.

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Danto at one point in this book denies that his own writing is literature. He admits it may be literary in manner or quality, but denies that it is art or literature. For literature, he says, embodies what it is about (pp. 181-182). To embody, furthermore, is not simply to exemplify, though Danto leaves the reader to guess the difference. My guess is that for a work to embody something, say an idea or an activity, is for that work to be informed through and through with that idea or activity, for that idea or activity to be the very motivating core of the work. In these terms, then, I think Danto is being too modest about his own book; The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art is, in Danto's own terms, clearly a work of litera- ture: it embodies what it is about.

GuY SIRCELLO University of California, Irvine

The Philosophical Review, Vol. XCVIII, No. 2 (April 1989)

DERRIDA AND THE ECONOMY OF DIFFERANCE. By IRENE E. HARVEY. Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press, 1986. Pp. xv, 285.

This book argues that Derrida's writings are an important philosophical contribution. The project is carried out in several ways: Derridean decon- struction is first compared with Kantian critique. Deconstruction is then explicated by a discussion of Derrida's early discussions of Saussure and Husserl. Derrida's central notions of writing and differencee," are then explicated. Part of this explication compares Derrida's views with those of, among others, Heidegger, Levinas, Hegel, Freud, and Husserl. The book is admirable in its project and accurate in many of its claims. The author has a good understanding of Derrida's thought and its relations to other continental philosophers.

Helpful commentary on Derrida is a difficult undertaking. The discus- sion must explicate analyses which claim that all of the explicating terms are inappropriate, since the presuppositions of the applicability of those terms are being challenged by these very analyses. It must describe argu- ments in a text in which the standards of good argument are among the very items being questioned. Derrida's work, which claims that the very language he writes embodies the conceptual scheme of the same "Western Metaphysics" that he challenges lends itself, to paradoxical formulations. Much of what the expositor says seems to need to be qualified, retracted, and denied.

Derrida-explication thus puts a special burden on the expositor, who is tempted to wax paradoxical and to clog the text with qualifying clauses

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