Against
Interpretation

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, LaPasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.

For Sontag, this challenge has been perpetually reissued ever since in terms of the theory du jour.

Ergo, what is ultimately important about the mimesis theory is not the

mimesis

part but the

theory

part.

By its very terms what theory does is to grab art by the scruff of the neck and hold it up against the backdrop of an a priori, a given, a necessity, an imperative: in this case, reality, or perhaps some particular relationship-to-reality which remains to be defined. Later theories perform the same maneuver with different unmarked constructs at their centers.

Hence there is a significant difference between
(1) questioning a theory ,
and
(2) questioning the ideal or entity at the center of a theory's universe.

e.g. It is one thing to question the boundaries drawn around jazz by Stanley Crouch; it is one thing to question the wisdom in such efforts generally, or to assess whether the rhetoric in Crouch's efforts is successful as rhetoric. It is quite another thing to question outright the value of, say, The Blues, instruments-imitating-voices, or voices-imitating-instruments.

I am at ease with the above ideals without being content with them. But who among my generation of university-educated artists has not occasionally found themselves sitting in a lecture wondering what is really so great about the thing that purportedly makes X music or composer or performance great?

In this way music school helped me to realize, at least, that I have a very different theory of Mozart than whoever coined the term "artless art." And though I tolerate Mozart well enough, I also realized that I probably wouldn't notice if Mozart and his music disappeared from consciousness entirely (or at least not until someone saw fit to tell me how wrong I am).

We can be thankful that internet memes and pop-proverbs about people who don't like pizza or chocolate chip cookies fail, for the most part, to hit very many marks. But we must also take note of how difficult it then becomes to discredit the Chocolate Chip Cookie Theory of Art. As sure as we are that this theory is wrong, it is that much harder to refute when its object is so, so right. There is a pop-proverb for this dynamic also, the one where the idiot brings you down to their level so as to win with experience. Theory being above his pay grade, he is incredulous that anyone claims to dislike cookies, reality , or artless art simply because he has never before met such a person or heard of such things. Should all human endeavors, art and otherwise, not aspire to find the most unobjectionable ideals at the center of their own theories?

If there is more yet for art to do, it is that which art is able to do and cookies are not. But then we must have a theory of this if we are to win any non-idiots over to our side, albeit at the unavoidable cost of driving the idiots further away.

Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious.

Is this to say that the Original Sin of theory really was a sin? A little white lie? An innuendo? An idealist tautology as opposed to a mere ruling following logically upon a deduction? Was there no moral ideal at the center of it after all? Or if there were, incidentally, moral ideals proposed in the course of Plato's disquisition on mimesis, was mimesis not actually (or not quite) one of them?

Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an "imitation of an imitation." For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle's arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato's view that all art is an elaborate trompe l'oeil, and therefore a lie.

So, there is this thing that happens, especially in more recent dime-store pan-theoretical neo-primitivist theorymongering but in some form starting at the very dawn of theory where Sontag has placed us here, whereby some rather decisive line is drawn between art and life.

The traditional goal of aesthetics is to produce, by means of art, impressions of certain past elements of life in circumstances where those elements are lacking or absent, in such a way that those elements escape the disorder of appearances subject to the ravages of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty that is inseparable from duration, and that even goes so far as pretensions of eternity. The goal of the situationists is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life by means of deliberately arranged variations of ephemeral moments. The success of these moments can reside in nothing other than their fleeting effect.

(Debord, Theses on
Cultural Revolution)

For Debord here, "art" (and/or "aesthetics") seeks to impose permanence and order, whereas "life" is a series of "ephemeral moments" and "fleeting effects."

Having thus identified a dualism, the Situs counter with an ecstatic art-life monism.

The time for art is over. The point now is to realize art, to really create on every level of life everything that hitherto could only be an artistic memory or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally. Art can be realized only by being suppressed. However, in contrast to the present society, which suppresses art by replacing it with the automatic functioning of an even more passive and hierarchical spectacle, we maintain that art can really be suppressed only by being realized.

("Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art"
J.V. MARTIN, JAN STRIJBOSCH, RAOUL VANEIGEM, RENÉ VIÉNET
6 December 1963,)

From the same moment in history, here is a more capital-friendly urbanist describing positively what the Situationists described skeptically:

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e. of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity from life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted.

(Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, pp. 372-3)

In the Situs' version, even calling art an instrument of ritual evinces a blinkered contemporary sense of instrumentality fragmented along class lines. Details of this fragmentation are hazy and the consequences contested, but suffice it to say that art of the diverged variety didn't just make itself. Somebody made it, made selections, therein evincing highly discriminatory selectivity while at the same time being in some sense controlled by said selections. Someone has a lot of explaining to do, not for their art per se but in fact for themselves, for their actions; not for their theory, but for the very ideal(s) at its center. Individual responsibility, that old conservative huff, is very much still a thing for the Marxist Debord.

This total refusal to compromise with the outside...would earn them countless rebukes and accusations of "Stalinism." ... Still, Lettrist discipline differs from the Leninist variety in that Leninist rigor is invariably bound up with tactical considerations and the desire to recruit as many adherents as possible, each of whom is expected merely to express formal agreement...whereas the LI or SI sought to retain a minimum of members only but required that the participation of each be flawless. (55)

(Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord (1993),
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999))

Artists themselves, in their own blinkered contemporary sense of instrumentality fragmented along class lines, seem a terrible imitation of reality. This was so for 1960s class revolutionaries, and it is true also for today's bourgeois quietists. The contemporary "reality" as such being ever more populist, personal, and subjective, the sheer number of subjects who feel themselves and their reality to be insufficiently imitated by past art has grown quite large. Never mind that the supposed divergence of art and life did not *actually* in any substantive or material way deprive non-artists of their subjectivity. It certainly did not deprive them of their theories. And if it seemed to threaten their ideals, then it is fair also to question this questioning, to suggest that perhaps that such a threat to individuals' sense of self, like the perceived threat of a foreign or domestic government, may be in the eye of the beholder.

The whole point of the classical art-life divergence, to the extent that that's what it was, was to create within strict personal boundaries a new reality. I would argue that where Debord seizes on the conceit to timelessness, he misattributes to artists the intentions of critics and interpreters. Sontag is hardly the first artist to come out Against Interpretation. Similarly, where Jacobs calls art "arbitrary," one hopes she is speaking on the societal rather than the individual level. On the individual level, art is the pure antithesis of "arbitrary." Creating something individual which is "arbitrary" in the eyes of others and has no survival value for the group or the species, this is not quite the same thing as seeking to escape reality or to divorce some part of reality from itself. It is nowhere near imposing such a divorce on others. But it seems that a truly tolerant attitude towards others' artistic creations is every bit as elusive as a universal religious tolerance, at which point the sensation of an art-life divergence becomes unavoidable (and extremely irritating) for many onlookers in direct proportion to their distaste for arbitrari-ness.

There is a way out of this miasma should we choose to follow it. Posing this division between "art" and "life" is something of the same fallacy as the old division between "man" and "nature." In the same sense that man is part of nature, so art is part of life and cannot actually be divorced from it in any material sense. Jacobs' account above, though one can imagine she did believe it, was more than anything an opportunistic weaponization of the art-life trope as proxy for a much grander theory of bottom-up governance as against the top-down variety. No doubt there is also plenty of anecdotal resonance here with what goes on inside of many artists' heads as they are making their work; but for these same artists I must think there is also, concurrently, a certain absurdity in such rhetorical uses of the art-life division as would banish the results of said process to some other realm, a realm which can only be parsed as uncanny by red-blooded cookie-and-kitten-loving people.

In short, the art-life duality is useful on the level of rhetoric and it is toxic on the level of social practice. The meaningful practical distinction, rather, is the one with which Sontag opens her famous essay, between art before and after theory challenged it to justify itself. I want to suggest this also points to a rare case where ontogeny indeed recapitulates phylogeny: there is perhaps no singular moment in our development when we realize in a flash the need to justify our actions, but there is a developmental process roughly along Erikson's lines, beginning at birth with a substantial (usually happy) freedom from the need to justify, which later on, normatively at least, is overtaken by a much longer (and usually quite unhappy) epoch of holding one's actual thoughts and actions up against abstract ideals

Here is one of many developmental arcs which have led to facile comparisons of the artist to, variously, the infant, the child, the adolescent, or the occasional lone-wolf adult who doesn't think babies are cute. Beyond the shallowest innuendo (which is of course perfectly apt in special cases and in small doses) many deeper realities give the lie to this charade, none more poignantly than the observations, per Erikson, that these various phases of life which critics and interpreters carelessly throw around interchangeably in fact represent quite distinct phases of moral development. And, to complete the circle, it seems that artists as a group are among the most profligate theory generators in post-agrarian society. This is unsightly to outsiders but also, crucially, an indication of an extremely strong (if admittedly vaguely adolescent) moral orientation.

What I am doing here is quite unsightly indeed, but rest assured that my ultimate aim here is indeed moral. The challenge of theory condemns art to the margins of pluralistic society, but this challenge is also a necessary moral reckoning which, unlike art itself, and unlike the maelstrom of shifting priorities in a pluralistic society, knows no season.

Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious.

Is this to say that the original sin of theory really was a sin? A lie? Or at least an innuendo? Was there no moral ideal at the center of it after all? Or if there was such an ideal, then this was not the ideal which was actually put forth? And that which was put forth itself, now, in our age of ultimate theory, seems quite arbitrary indeed? 

Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures,

This is one form of the art-life mumbo-jumbo.

even the best painting of a bed would be only an "imitation of an imitation." For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle's arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato's view that all art is an elaborate trompe l'oeil, and therefore a lie.

Takes one to know one.

But he does dispute Plato's idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.

So, already, confronted with a mere theory of imitation, confronted with nothing nearly so formidable as feminist separatism, the death of the subject, or the Masters of Business Administration degree in Music Business, an extrinsic benefits defense was still the best we could do?

Incidentally, if the Greeks indeed placed music among various educational gymnastics much as its place in today's educational schemata is secured for gainful rather than intrinsic reasons, then this again points (in both cases) to the presence of something more, some ideal or transcendent form, thought to be bigger, better, more necessary, than mere music or art.

There are a few remote corners of society where art itself has been so enshrined, but mass culture's sacred cows trample and graze on them with impunity. Commerce in particular has a way of both scorching the earth and taking a giant cow-dump pretty much wherever artists try to make artist-centric common cause. The AFM's International Musician magazine, e.g., used to allot a small amount of space each month to the blanket issuing of get-over-yourself browbeatings by a stringently commerce-oriented member-columnist against noncommercial ventures. To resort to the word which won't die, I would say that music lacks autonomy in such a milieu, starting on even the rhetorical level, to say nothing of the material or practical (or theoretical!) level. What else to say when organizations founded to defend the commercial interests of musicians have become moralizers for commercialism itself? Has this need for constant defense not suggested after all these years that something else may be awry? If Arthur Danto is within his rights to call Plato a "philistine," does that mean I can call Bob Popyk a "shill" without jeopardizing my employment prospects?

Paging through the various competing theories of art, we find this same dynamic just about everywhere else too; most obviously in political-activist theories of art, where pretty much everything is open to question except for The Cause itself. If we are being honest we find it also in the most apolitical aesthetic and formalist theories, like mine, which appeal to psychological needs that ultimately are more fundamental and wide-reaching in their implications even than the whole of "art" can provide for.

Whatever art is to us, in the age of theory we can only ever find it partially adequate to its own purpose, since purpose broadly, as in the mimetic, the therapeutic, and the commercial theory too, is definitionally extra-artistic. Reestablishing a pretheoretical nirvana is impossible, but nor is this kind of moral degradation inevitable. And while we may wish not to inherit the disheveled estate of all prior theory, at that point we find ourselves cut off at the knees by art's diversity of forms, which do not all seem equally self-justifying even in our most charitable mood. This is the fragmentary quality of art that Debord railed against, finding in it the reflection in negative of all extant human oppression and alienation at the hands of entrenched power. But that is, to be polite about it, not the most parsimonious explanation.

Appearances to the contrary, I assume that even the politician who makes Education a Kitchen Table campaign issue, even the artist-businessperson who rails against self-actualization as a decadence, even they are not claiming totality for their Theories. The point is not so much that art can or should be a total life project; rather that theories are most definitely not total either, not even close, and no matter if the rhetoric deployed to claim totality is Greek or Roman in nature. I hold out hope, at least, that this is the case even where it seems not to be, as above, wherein the businessman claims to be merely doing business even in those moments (rare for him, given the exigencies of culture-commerce) during which he is actually playing music.

The paradigmatic moment of escape from theory is the flow state, the moment of pure inspiration. Analogies to orgasm are always fraught and usually misplaced, but there is a therapeutic dissolution of the ego available here to artists which is not available too many other ways. It is therefore unsurprising to any student of historical morality that we have ready-to-hand all manner of theories of art which moralize against this and very few which advocate for it; that the art practices which after centuries of halting development have finally spat out something which is useful to the artist as well as the audience are canonically rendered as "decadent" and "self-indulgent" from a moral angle, and also pigeonholed from the sociological angle as third- and fourth-order epiphenomena of a broader social decadence which they thereby "reflect" one-to-one.

Puritanism:
The haunting fear
that someone,
somewhere,
may be happy.

the superior performance
has the quality
of being unobserved.

the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose

there is no important idea that stupidity does not know how to make use of, for it can move in all directions and is able to wear all garment of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has only one garment and one road and is always at a disadvantage.

Priority and totality are not the same thing. That is as tolerant as I can be here, and it is mere conjecture which enables even this modicum of tolerance to be assumed. But if so, then even the pure formalist who seems to be living out a near-total art-life division has brought their life with them into the gallery; lives cannot simply be checked along with the coats. Even the rich "elites" we are told are art's ultimate puppetmasters, even they cannot purchase an art-life division, because it is permanently out-of-stock. Everything is political, but politics is not everything. Most museum patrons may be rich, but most rich people do not visit museums. Each one of these rhetorical constructions is indeed of a partial rather than total quality. The only path I can see towards an ecstatic unity a la the Situs leads back to prehistory, and I am not quite hardheaded enough to want to make that journey for myself (though to be sure there are days out here in the year 2021 when that indeed seems like not the worst alternative).

In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a "realism" can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.

Yep.

The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such—above and beyond given works of art—becomes problematic, in need of defense.

I have tried to expand on this observation above. Expansion can be tricky and I talk too much. The important point is stated simply enough here.

And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call "form" is separated off from something we have learned to call "content," and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.

Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it's usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (What X is saying is . . . ," "What X is trying to say is . . . ," "What X said is . . ." etc., etc.)