Arnold Klein
– PERCEPTITATIONS

“Last Sunday I got high and looked at a doorknob.”

With this beautifully limpid sentence, a young friend of mine began the written part of his M.F.A. thesis. We may have reason to return to it.

For now, a snatch of overheard dialogue:

                    A: That’s Georgia O’Keefe.

                    B: That’s not Georgia O’Keefe!

Now, as the two “that”s in this memorable interlocution indicated the same photograph hanging in the Met, ten feet yonder, I will be told that their apparent antithesis can be reconciled: that the “is” in A is the photographic “is”, the “is” that really means “is of,” while the other “is” is just the workaday copula. In other words, to quote the famous defense, it all “depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

But that won’t quite do here. For taking A’s “that” to mean the photograph in question, what that photograph is “of” is of a torso. Whose torso it is does not appear; indeed, the image has been so managed as to remove any identificatory details: for example, the torso, in good classical style, has no head.¹

But of course A’s “that” did not refer to that photograph; rather it referred that photograph to a historical fact, or idea, about it; and the same would have been true had he said “that’s a Stieglitz.” Here the “is” is the “is” of “is one of,” and although it would function slightly differently than the plain “is of” would have—to predicate some quality or other assumed to inhere in many objects, in virtue of which they form a relevant set—B might equally have downright denied it, and with exactly the same “not.”

But how can that be? Granting that a photograph can be so managed as to render the identity of the subject unascertainable from the image alone, surely its authorship is stylistically available on inspection: after all, everyone who cares about these things knows what “a Stieglitz” looks like. But that won’t quite do either.

Perhaps we can see why not by asking, what it was eventually demanded of B that she supply, namely, what, exactly, her that denoted; and her answer was that “that” thar’ yonder (pointing to it) was a rectangular piece of paper of just those dimensions, covered with just those various grey shades and shapes in just that determinate relation to each other and to just those framing edges. So considered, that is certainly not Georgia O’Keefe, nor “of” her as she ever was while alive, and even death is not so “great a disguiser” as that picture is; nor is it “a Stieglitz”—if we must subsume it under some term or other, and there is no requirement that we do so, it would be more consistent with B’s approach to say that “that” is a photograph—or better, that photograph. And maybe best of all: just that.

So the issue between the two, at least in the first instance, wasn’t so much a question of what the meaning of “is” is, but of what the “that” in each case thatted.²

It may be that, even so elaborated, these two “that’s” could still be reconciled by some grammatical or logical finesse unknown to me; they certainly comprise two different approaches that it is the prerogative of any one of us to take up and put aside at different times, or use by turns, one after the other: after all, no one gets to the age of being admitted to museums unaccompanied by a parent or guardian without knowing what a photograph is, and certainly no one gets to be a second-year M.F.A. candidate in photography, as was A, or even just a normal museum-going human being, as was B, without knowing something about O’Keefe, Stieglitz, the whatchamacallit gallery, the Flatiron Building, broken marriages, New Mexico, longhorn skulls and so on. But a difference in their order, though prerogative, is still a difference, and not a reconciliation in the same sense that the attempted “is” one would have been had it succeeded, and for all I know might still be made out to be. Considered as different methods, that is, as different structures of inquiry, which is what I just suggested they ultimately are, the two cannot be shown to have the same meaning, for their order is part of that meaning. The issue between them, when used in sequence, is one of precedence, of which comes first and which comes second, either in time or in importance; which, I hope to show, makes as much actual difference in cases like this as it does in the case of “putting on your socks” and “putting on your shoes.”

But the approaches are prerogative in a further sense: taking either does not necessitate us taking the other into account at any point at all. Certainly each gives, not just precedence, but access, to different sorts of data and so to different sorts of elaboration, and there is no reason these latter should not develop independently. Taken as ordinals, the issue is precedential; but there’s an issue of cardinality (so to speak) as well: “a Stieglitz” implicitly thats numerous others, while it is not impossible, and indeed more in keeping with the spirit of the thing, for “just that” to that...well, as I said, just that, that is, nothing but that.

But those two accounts differ in more than just order and extension—they differ in what the lawyers would call their “predicates,” in, that is, the fundamental principle from which their respective démarches proceed; and on this level, what the meaning of “is” is is important: to tweak Gilson a bit, what the nature of the object is taken to be conditions the approach of the mind to it, and prior to these different approaches are different conceptions of what is an object and what an object is. For A, the artwork is taken sub specie originis, as evidence of its antecedents, none of which, in our case, however interesting, are present to sense,³ but nonetheless are, that is, real and relevant, whereas for B, the artwork is something whose esse est percipi, is such that all its intelligibilities are right there to behold and discover: a photograph is a thing made of and in perception, not in history; and the question here is how A’s genetic approach, which admits, indeed necessitates, consulting absent, always inferential, and not- impossibly supposititious, entities, comes to be thought unexceptionable, no less comely, and I say “comes to” because I do not think such a response is at all the spontaneous one, at least with respect to individual artworks,⁴ which are primarily, if not ultimately or exclusively, addressed to sense—seeing a piece of paper and saying “that’s Georgia O’Keefe,” even when we all know what you mean by it, is still kind of daft, if you think about it, at least in a museum setting (imagine what it would sound like if we all didn’t know what you meant by it), or, if not that, at least a little too assured, though I grant that the “a Stieglitz” sort of response is all too common in the galleries, and I will get back to it in a minute.

In short, I think the, let’s call it “noetic” approach arises from intellectual culture itself, as Gilson says all “transcendental philistinism” does. You have to learn it. But what exactly are you learning to do?

In an article in the Harvard Magazine, an art history professor relates that the first thing she asks her undergrad and graduate students to do is to go to the museum and spend “three full hours” looking at the work they have chosen to write their “intensive research paper” about—a length of time she describes as “painfully long.” “Many of the students resist” this assignment, she reports; and so, as any conscientious teacher would do, she performed what she (significantly, for us) calls her own “experiment” with a painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, one that she had already aproblematically subsumed under the rubric “Copley.”

Before noting some relevant features in her account of her explorations let me say 1)) that it would a good thing if all students received such an assignment, and maybe eight whole semesters’ worth of them, so bravo her, and 2) that I would not be surprised were art history students especially found to resist it (and to find three [full] hours looking at art “painfully long”). But let us listen to our professor.

She begins by telling us that it took her nine minutes “to notice” that the shape of the boy’s ear “echoes” the ruffs of the squirrel’s belly “—and that Copley was making some sort of connection between the animal and the human body and the sensory capacities of each.” OK; but notice that the objects of the verb “to notice” are not noticeable in quite the same way: you can see an ear, but not “the animal and the human body,” no less “the sensory capacities of each.” This elision of the concretely visible with the abstractly general occurs by means of “—and,” and continues when, after forty-five minutes, “the folds and wrinkles of the background curtain” are “realized” “actually” to be “perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye”—again, OK, though “perfect” might be a little strong, and why assume the precedence of the boy over the curtain, but mark the continuation—“as if [my italics] Copley had imagined those sensory organs distributing or imprinting themselves on the surface behind him.”

I will introduce some terms in which to characterize such noetical synaereses in a minute, but, following a biographical and geographical interlude in Copley’s colonial Boston, from which, we are told, the painting in question was shipped to London for critical appraisal, and concluding with the idea that the slow feedback involved was “thoroughly formative” of the painting, she returns to it with “we can see this [that delays can be productive] directly in the painting, which is full of allusions to time, distance and patience.” The painting shows a glass of water and the boy’s hand holding a chain: “across his long career, this is the only glass of water that Copley ever included in a painting. Why? Well, for one thing, this motif evokes the passage of a sensory chain across a body of water and thereby presents in microcosm the plight or task of the painting itself.” The flying squirrel has “obvious thematic resonances for the theme of travel and movement;” the boy is shown in profile: “the profile format of the portrait...in the eighteenth century was very strongly associated with persistence in time and space.” Then, by way of explaining such associations, “where was one most likely to see a profile? On a coin. What is a coin? In essence, a coin is a tool for transmitting value through space and time in the most stable possible way. Coins are technologies for spanning time and distance, and Copley borrows from these associations for a painting that attempts to do the same thing.” And the comprehensive formulation: “the painting is about its own patient passage through time and space.”

Now, despite the words that suggest it (“sensory,” “obvious,” “actually,” “presents,” “to see,” and “can see this directly”), appear is exactly not what any of these fancifications actually do. To be sure, a sensible chain appears in the painting (the boy fingers it, we see it), but not the “sensory chain,” whatever that is, which the motif is said to “evoke”—and the double shift (from presentation to evocation, from one kind of chain to what seems to be a very different one) comes in by way of the doubly imagined “as if Copley had imagined.” The motif, furthermore, having “evoked” something not shown, “thereby” goes on to “present” something not presented, and probably not depictable. Ditto “thematic resonances for the theme” of two abstractions (my itals). Ditto the weird incursion of coinage and its supposed “essence,” brought in by way of (doubly invisible) eighteenth century “associations” and by coins being the “most likely” “place” “one” would see a profile. Ditto the “allusions” to three unsensory, unpaintable and very abstract entities. Ditto the discovery, always pleasing to academics of this vintage (coinage?), that the artwork “is about” itself.

Now, it is true that each, or at least some, of these excursion into ideality begins with perceptions, but—mediated by notions such as evocation, resonance, theme, microcosm, essence, association and allusion, and explained by reference to a few speculative interludes in the painter’s life in colonial Boston—these soon vanish into what our professor calls her “interpretation,” the move from one to the other coordinated by question-begging expedients such as the dash-and thing, “thereby,” and “as if:” indeed, one has the feeling that the perceptions are adduced in order to rationalize, or at least, not to contradict, the antecedently known facts of the case; at least the structure of the presentation— going, as it does, from perceptual elements and their noetic associates, to colonial Boston, only to return, via that consummatory “about,” to the resonances, evocations and allusions of the squirrel-species and profile-coinage business—certainly makes it seem so.

There are many ways of charactering the move in question, but for our purposes, let us just say that perception is referred to, or seen under, a pre-existing grouping of general ideas, some almost personified (time, patience, movement and so forth), some distantly inferential (the historical causes and circumstances); that is to say, perceptions are pre-emptively and presumptively explained in their being apperceived; and this is where all my earlier pother about “ordinals” counts, for it is clear that apperception has had precedence of perception here, if not nominally in time,⁵ actually in operation (“thereby,” etc.), and certainly in importance (that summary “about”); and the question is, what conception of the object is it, that conditions just this approach of the mind to it—so conditions it that such shifts can sometimes take place unnoticed within single sentences.

I will suggest an answer to that question in a minute; but the blandness with which individual perceptions pass unawares (or perhaps worse, with full awareness) into abstract apperceived ideates is what makes this Copley business so illuminating of the reflex involved, all the more for its being offered as methodologically exemplary in a talk about the pedagogical advantages of patience, given before an audience of (in Gilson’s phrase) philistine educators at a conference held by no-less august a sponsor than the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, where it presumably went down like catnip.⁶ “Apperception,” of course, smacks of 19th facultative psychology, and I am aware that the neuroscientists have moved on from it to localized cerebral functions and from them to the “connectome.” But in so employing the term, I am not alleging a phrenology, or venturing a factual description of brain activity, but rather, as Doctor Richards excellently puts it, “framing a speculative apparatus to assist us in observing a difference”—in our case, between what different thats ultimately that, or, in the present instance, what comes to the same thing, what all those “the”s the. And apperception is a useful term here, since it names the activity by which we refer a perception to a mass of ideas we already possess; and how and when to give way to such masses, and feeling that you’ve earned a gold star for doing so, is what one has to learn to do, and in the classic way—by having teachers who do it teach it to you by doing it.

The usual defense of such cursory quasi-perceptions is that normally our interest in our surroundings is practical—“the degree of determination” needed for recognition, as Santayana puts it, is, on such occasions, much lower than that needed for comprehension; but then the question is, is an artwork such an occasion. Of course, it is not impossible to imagine academics whose practical interest in an artwork is precisely to generate their “interpretation” of it along such noetic lines—and the question there is, how to shield our youths from their influence.

But be that as it may, what happens to our two terms when the “that” thats just that artwork? Well, in that case, apperception follows perception, in both senses, of going along with and coming after; the ideates in question are precipitates, or—to indulge a coinage of my own (not the last, either, and certainly the least likely to catch on)—perceptitates of prior perceptions, their store progressively supplemented or edited as new perceptions direct. So, for example, to take up just one thread in the same painting, it may be noted that materials painted as impermeable to light (the very dark sleeve, the very white cuffs) are transformed in their (painted) reflections on the planar surface of the table, where they become transparent (the polished surface shows through), and materials painted as transparent (the glass and the water) gain materiality through their actual (painted) transparency (the lines by which they intercept the reflection of the cuff). With that in mind, the semi-transparency of the squirrel’s tail, which appears to be as much a reflection as that of the belly just next to it, but is not any kind of reflection at all, and perhaps the base of the water glass, may be seen as extensions of this, not “theme,” but concern for the transformations that are possible when different sorts of things are transferred to the planar surface of a polished table—or a canvas. With that concern in mind, the planarity of the boy’s profile, with its strangely folded auricle, becomes intelligible without recourse to coinage and its essence, and the “surface behind” the boy, on which his “sensory organs” are imagined to have been imagined to have imprinted themselves, can be seen to be located where it, and all the rest of the painting, actually would have been, and is now, namely, in front of the painter—and the viewer.

We seem to have covered something of the same territory that the professor did, only without any excursions into the invisible—perceptions were referred to other perceptions, that is, apperceived concurrently with their being perceived, and fed back into further perceptions, and it should be clear which faculty had precedence of which, and where their respective extensions ended. If we now⁷ took such an excursion, and we are free not to (and, really, what would all that gossip add to our perception of the thing?), the relevant facts adduced would be different from the professor’s (our “the painter” would not be the empirical Bostonian provincial hers is, but the figure whose shadow partially occludes one of the painting’s light sources), and, where the same (which is hard to imagine), would have different meanings, as they would appear in different relations.

But the difference is more than methodological or logical, ordinal or cardinal, and it is here that what the meaning of “is” is really begins to tell. The “is” in any “is about” statement such as our professor’s triumphal one, is an “is” that has a complement, namely, in our professor’s case, and usually in every such account, an abstract or absent entity of some sort, whereas the “is” in the cursory survey just attempted, were we called upon to provide it, and we didn’t churlishly refuse, would be the stative “is,” the “is” without a complement, and that “is” would conclude, as it began, by asserting simply “that painting is.”

Is what? The question asks for a complement. But if you must have one, then “that painting is that painting” or—to get purely nominalistic about it—“that is that.”

 With that in mind, we can address the question of what we earlier, borrowing a term from the lawyers, called the predicates of the two positions. The “is about” approach seems ultimately conditioned by the expectation that the work, in virtue of the kind of thing is, is such that it requires a complement of some kind to complete it—requires, that is, a context, a vita, a dossier, a provenance, a Sitz im Leben, a DOC appellation, an interpretation, and so forth; whereas the bare “is” approach regards the work as self-complete.

There are many ways to develop this distinction, but the one I think would do the most to develop our subject—namely, what, with respect to works of art, different thats that—is (with a few tweaks) Paul Valéry’s, under whose auspices we can say that the complementeans regard the artwork as just another denizen of “a world of signs,” while us ornery completionists regard any such work as itself “a world of significances.”

I will have to tweak this further in a second; but for now, it would seem that a sign is something that, qua sign anyway, depends for its character on some complement not itself, the thing it is a sign of or for—it would not be a sign otherwise; even the logician’s pathological sentences, that refer to themselves, exist in two moments, so to speak, as referrer and referent; their superposition does not annul the signifying function, but rather extends it. But it would seem that, in terms of our distinction, a thing’s significances would be the thing. In one, we have signs that signify, and are therefore, on their own, without complement, meaningless, in the other, significances without significata, and therefore, each on its own, without complement, a whole.

Now, terms like “evokes, alludes to, resonates with” and countless others in the professional and lay critical vocabularies testify to how commonplace the first approach is these days, and to how select, or at least few, they are, who go even this far with the poet of La Jeune Parque, whose fort, as we all know, was not stupidity. But “signification sans complément!” even without the exclamation point, and in plain American, would, besides look well on the barricades, furnish a sterner criterion than those that currently prevail in art and literary criticism, as it allows for a distinction between works, nominally of art, that function, and are meant to function, as signs, as things about things, from what I will tendentiously call the real thing. A cauliflower auricle rendered planarily, or two thighs becoming graphic forms as they darken below, whosever thighs they may happen to have been, mean just that, for renderings in paint and in prints are how painters and photographers mean, and certainly how their works do, and so for the arts of meter, tones, forms, gesture and the rest. In these sorts of thing, isness is import, and sense (in one sense) is directly embodied in sense (in the other). And “that” thats that.

But are artworks the only sorts of thing that have this—and here, as threatened, Latinists may want to cover their ears—this haecceity?

Well, to push the question somewhat drastically: is the world that we, under the pressure of practical life, take to be a world of signs, really a world of significances? Should it be, a doorknob in a Midwood flop is as much an object for contemplation as Untitled (Patio Door) in the Modern Museum.

That it obviously isn’t—that you’d have be high to think it was—will not do for a riposte, for the nature of what is obvious is actually in question here, and I do not see how it can be settled a priori in favor of some objects and not others. We have seen that our professor regards “thematic resonances” as “obvious,” and our old friend A replied to B’s assertion that that was not Georgia O’Keefe by saying that it “obviously” was—only to be told that it obviously was not. The obvious, in other words, is not so obvious—it has to be found. Langer, indeed, up to a certain point, sides with the doorknobs of the world here, for when “a perfectly normal” thing is cleared of its practical appeal, and “is so strikingly revealed that all one’s interest centers on” its visual aspect, “the object itself seems like a sheer vision;” but, although we then behold it as if it were “nothing but a form,” the forms of normal things, for her, are in service, or servitude, to practical purposes, whereof properly poietic artworks are completely freely created.

That, indeed, says something; but the intrusion of “one’s interest” into the business leaves our own question unsettled—after all, some free forms do not repay inspection, and some utile forms plainly do. The essentialist position, which would objectively distinguish artworks from other sorts of things, cannot be established in the terms we have been using, for approaches are many, and the choice among them ultimately prerogative, and the most we completionists can do is steadfastly to hope that the pale complementeans do not turn the whole world grey with the blasts of their historicizing, empirical-personalizing, psychologizing, contextualizing, interpretating breath. For my part, I give my “brothers and sisters of the hold-door trade,” our uncomplaining friens, the doorknobs, a provisional welcome; I like to think that all such things as are “subjected to bondage” (as St. Paul says the whole universe is, so why not them too), are “yearning” for a greater intimacy than they presently have been invited into, and are thus to be regarded as worthy of a closer acquaintance, until, upon closer acquaintance, they prove themselves unworthy of it, and, perhaps, even then, are at least to be respected for the aspiration I believe them all, or most, to have. But perhaps that amiable outlook is only a reflex of my desire to take artworks even further out of the universe than they currently are.