Dear Peirce Listers,
Apropos of the recent messages regarding the Peirce
Society meeting at SAAP earlier this month in New York, yes, I was there too
and
heard Tom Short's responses after his paper (unsatisfactory, in my estimation;
but he told me that he hadn't slept the night before) with regard to
aesthetics.
One shouldn't forget that Peirce himself is completely unsatisfactory when it
comes to aesthetics (as he is on ethics).
Whenever I teach my course on Peirce's theory of
interpretation, I tell my students (only half in jest) that my definition of a
philosopher is someone who only solves problems of their own devising. By
contrast, someone who is confronted with the problem of having to explain the
facts of language or literature or music is in a rather different position
vis-à-vis the data. My long experience with the analysis of aesthetic objects
(mostly poetry and prose) convinces me that ultimately one has to deal with
them
axiologically, so to speak, by acknowledging the necessity of seeing them as
repositories of values. In that light, the question as to why the Mona Lisa is
admirable always comes under the concept of STYLE and its
HISTORY. It is, moreover, on the grounds of style that one
can begin to approach the problem of artistic truth in the spirit of
pragmaticism.
In case this line of thought is of interest, here are
some further observations on the specific role of style. (Comments always
welcome.)
Style suffuses so much of what it means to be human, and
has been the subject of so much analysis, that in order to move it away from
problems of introspection and self-awareness one needs to redirect the age-old
discussion into a more public arena where the contrast with custom allows
insight into the ontology of human activity in general. This can be
accomplished
when style as a phenomenon that cuts across disciplinary boundaries is viewed
TROPOLOGICALLY as a fundamentally COGNITIVE category. A global theory of style
entails arguing more
closely for the concept of STYLE AS A TROPE OF
MEANING; and demonstrating how stylistic analysis can reveal itself
not just as a compendium of traditionally taxonomized information but as the
means whereby individual manifestations of style, their structural coherences,
and their mirroring of signification can be identified and evaluated.
I. Form and content. Insofar as the
distinction can be clear at all, it does not actually coincide with but cuts
across the boundary between what is style and what is not. Style then comprises
characteristic features both of what is said or performed or made and of how it
is said/performed/made. If it is obvious that "style is the regard that what
pays to how" the faults of this formula are equally obvious. Architecture,
nonobjective painting, and most music have no subject, nor do they literally
say
anything. So the "what" of one activity may be part of the "how" of another. No
rule based on linguistic form alone could determine, for instance, whether or
not a discursive meaning is ironic. In considering linguistic style at least,
and perhaps even style generally, it soon emerges that the relation between
form
and content must in part be described metaphorically.
II. Content and expression. One famous theory of
style, that of the French scholar Charles Bally, identifies linguistic style
with "the affective value of the features of organized language and the
reciprocal action of the expressive features that together form the system of
the means of expression of a language." From this Roman Jakobson fashioned a
definition of style as "a marked––emotive or poetic––annex to the neutral,
purely cognitive information." Aside from the impossibility of consistently
separating cognitive from affective information without remainder, it is
equally
transparent that definitions of style that trade in feelings, emotions, or
affects go awry by overlooking not only structural features that are neither
feelings nor expressed but also features that though not feelings ARE
expressed.
III. Difference between stylistic and
nonstylistic. A feature of style may be a feature of what is said, of what
is exemplified, or of what is expressed. But not all such features are
necessarily stylistic. Similarly, features that are clearly stylistic in one
work may have no stylistic bearing in another locus. Nelson Goodman writes: "A
property––whether of statement made, structure displayed, or feeling
conveyed––counts as stylistic only when it associates a work with one rather
than another artist, period, region, school, etc." But there is no discovery
procedure for the isolation of stylistic features, nor is there a fixed
catalogue of stylistic properties or traits. Not every property that points in
the direction of a certain author/performer/maker is necessarily stylistic in
purport.
IV. Perception and recognition of style. The
registering and identification of some particular property as a stylistic
feature presupposes some collateral knowledge of the work at stake: the style
of
Haydn or Hardy or Holbein does not proclaim itself to the casual listener or
reader or museum-goer. This is true not only for high culture but for anything
that can normally be thought of as "having style," such as clothing. Styles are
normally accessible only to the knowing eye or ear, the tuned sensibility, the
informed and inquisitive mind. The entire enterprise of art and music
appreciation is built on the (often tacit but nonetheless correct) assumption
that the stylistic distinctions and values that inform works of art and music
cannot even be perceived, much less properly evaluated, without training.
V. Style and history. Not only is style
necessarily embedded in history, there is no way of discerning the presence of
style except in terms of what preceded a (provisionally) stylistic phenomenon
and the potential interpretation it prefigures. The categories of style are
invariably retrospective. The very assessment of style as "novel" requires a
historical backdrop by definition. It is only in such a context that it becomes
possible to evaluate the stylistic development of a given author's oeuvre. The
very term "classical" is a reminder that style cannot be understood except in
historical perspective, retrospectively. As Berel Lang has noted, "style, it
seems, is never pristine, never without historical reference; it never reveals
an object without also revealing a genealogy of means. For style,
intentionality
is destiny." But the historical embeddedness of style is not just an account of
origins; it enters into its ontology and into its structure in the same crucial
way that comparability, selection, combination, and hierarchy do. Petrified
stylistic features in artifacts and texts from historically remote epochs and
cultures are often the only source for subsequent recovery of meanings and
values.
VI. Norm and deviation. Numerous analysts have
concurred in the notion of style as a deviation from the norm (of stylistic
neutrality). Apart from the obvious difficulties attendant upon establishing a
norm, it is clear that the "unusual" character or quotient of a style is not a
matter of deviation (even less of deviance) but of innovation, which invariably
originates in the behavior of particular individuals and becomes a full-fledged
social datum only when it spreads to a significant number of the community at
large. Stylistic innovations are just as important, if not more so, for the
study of style and the construction of a general theory of style as features
that are fully coded stylistically. Indeed, one of the implicit assumptions of
this approach to style is that innovations and the context(s) of their
appearance furnish the investigator with the most reliable testing grounds for
any overarching conception of style.
VII. Style and troping. Underscoring the status
of stylistic features as units of meaning, the idea emerges of an organic link
between style and troping, that the two chief tropes, metonymy and metaphor,
have a structure and a dynamic that shed light on the development of style.
Metonymies and metaphors are constituted by semantic units that have to be
comparable potentially, then selected and combined in actual instances of
troping or figuration, and finally ranked vis-à-vis one another.
Style starts out as an innovation linked to an
individuated creative act that defines its uniqueness by establishing a
hierarchical contrast with some relevant aspect of norm or custom. This
external
connection––a metonymization––is invariably accompanied by or results soon
thereafter in the reevaluation of the datum's place in the overall system of
which it is a part. In order to go beyond its inchoateness as a piece of style,
the datum must effect a reversal of its status: it must cease to be primarily a
fact of physical substance and become one of symbolic form. In short, it must
be
metaphorized.
VIII. Style as figuration. The parallelism of
structure between style and troping makes clear the understanding of style as
figuration. Recall the connection between style and person that is emblematized
in Buffon's famous dictum "le style est [de] l'homme même" (‘style is [of] the
man himself'). Defining style as figuration points in the direction of and
ultimately substantiates Buffon's insight but does so through an emphasis on
figure (Latin figura), specifically in its meaning of the human form. Recalling
also that Latin fingere has a whole constellation of meanings that center on
notions of moulding (as from wax, clay, or molten metal), creating, producing,
and arranging as applied to the most diverse matter, including works of art and
literature, it becomes possible to assert the natural union of style,
figuration, and personhood or humanity.
Anyone seeking to discover and describe the style of a
work must attend explicitly to the matter of hierarchy, to the rank relations
among the elements or features uncovered. As a direct corollary, the analysis
implies that there is no such thing as "value-free" criticism, whatever the
artistic or behavioral sphere––just as there is no value-free perception or
conceptualization. In the sense that style has now come under the compass of
figuration, it ceases to be merely and essentially a series of accoutrements
and
assumes its rightful place as a central species of meaning through
symbolization.
PERSONAL ADDENDUM: I've been a musician (clarinetist)
since childhood. My parents were both classical musicians (piano, cello,
composition). My late wife Marianne Shapiro––the most versatile and
accomplished
American Italianist of the twentieth century––was a medievalist and Renaissance
scholar (and excellent pianist), from who I imbibed almost everything I know
about literature and art. We collaborated on a number of books and articles
(see
www.marianneandmichaelshapiro.com).
ANECDOTE: I still remember, forty years later, how
after my paper on "The Meaning of Meter" at an international conference of
Russian verse theory, the late Norwegian scholar of Russian literature Geir
Kjetsaa said to me (out of the blue) that I was "the only philosopher in the
group." You can imagine how much this remark endeared him to
me.
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