Berkeley Talks: How art allows us to see everyday things anew

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news-dev.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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Alva Noë: In the mid-1930s, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl wrote a book called The Crisis. He was living in exile at the time in Prague, I think. He’d been discharged from his professorship in Germany a few years earlier, in effect for the crime of being Jewish. The Crisis, his book makes a wild and crazy and audacious claim, namely that the crisis then facing Germany and Europe and the world, indeed the whole world, was in effect a philosophical crisis and indeed specifically a crisis to do with science.

The problem as Husserl understood it is that natural science, whether we think of the science of Galileo or Newton or Einstein or Schrodinger, has become all too successful. Its methods and its mathematical standards of precision, its determinacies and its certainties have come to seem like the only game in town. But science, Husserl insisted, has less than nothing to say about human values, about human experience, about subjectivity, about consciousness. And so science, precisely because it is so successful, threatens to impoverish, to deprive us of the very resources we need, not only to understand ourselves but to flourish.

We are today, I think, resident in a world very like Husserl’s. Paradoxically, this seems truer now than it has really at any time since the end of the Second World War. The pandemic, Chinese authoritarianism, the rise of anti-democratic movements here, ChatGPT, the obsession with counting steps, the loneliness born of social media, the climate crisis, inflation, war in Europe, fire, hate, surveillance, capitalism. Just tell me when I should stop.

And we too know the crisis of science. Science offers a very thin and finally unsatisfactory conception of the human. You can choose from a menu of three. You are a computer, you are a bag of genes or you are a network of neurons. Either way, you’re isolated, you’re a stranger in a strange land and you’re nothing at all like what you think you are.

I began work on my book, this new book of mine, The Entanglement, during this recent pandemic during the previous presidential administration and while rioters filled our streets in outrage after the George Floyd murder and other atrocities, and I did so with bags packed and a full tank of gas in case the fire evacuation order should come down. The Bay Area, you may remember, was ringed with forest fire at the time and we too had our orange sky days. I’m not going to connect the dots with these very brief introductory comments, but I did want to remind you, for you were all really there with me, that this is the background for these investigations that I wanted to share with you today about art, and it continues to be our shared background now.

Forgive me for such a heavy beginning. When she dances, a young child moves her body with a sensitivity to what is expected of her. Perhaps she has seen Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift in their videos. She has danced with her mom. She has a bank of personalities and images that supply her with a sense of what feels right. Remarkably, what feels right has everything to do with what would look right to others with her sensitivity, however unarticulated, to how others would respond to her.

What she actualizes, the child I’m imagining dancing, is nothing less than the embodiment of choreographic ideas of which she is not the author. This is a remarkable and distinctively human form of intelligence. The child’s dancing is the location of an entanglement between her spontaneous impulse to move and an artistic representation of what movement is supposed to be.

We come to embody choreographic ideas when we dance. We do so spontaneously and we can hardly avoid doing so, and this in turn gives more and new information to choreographers who, through their art, investigate what it is we are doing when we are dancing. This circular generative recursion gives us resources to be different going forward. In fact, it’s likely to compel us to be different going forward, to reorganize ourselves. The representation changes what is represented. The act of dancing and the art of dancing become entangled.

Life and art are entangled. My aim in this book, which has kindly been ordered and shared with many of you, is to understand this statement and to explore some of its, I think, very surprising implications. To say that life and art are entangled is to say not only that we make art out of life, all the habits and systems and meanings and certainties, but that art then works these raw materials over, art works us over, art makes us new. Art makes us.

Let’s take an everyday example. Something so evident, so straightforward, so familiar, a snapshot of Grandma. We know what this is. It sits there on the shelf or in the photo album. It’s a picture of Grandma. We easily forget that the picture only works against the background of our shared picture culture. We make pictures, we display them. A picture is a tool for showing and display, and pictures function as they do in the setting of our communicative lives with each other. That’s where they acquire their meaning. That’s where they acquire, if you like, their caption. Take all that away and you’re just left with a piece of paper.

And this, I think, is where art comes into the story. When we put a picture on the gallery wall, we in effect remove it from the communicative setting, alone in which it can discharge that conventional pictorial function. But when we do so, and this is kind of a miracle, we’re not left with a mere piece of paper. We’re left with an opportunity. It is an opportunity to reflect on everything our ordinary lives with pictures conceals. One of my mottos are these words of James Baldwin: The aim of art is to uncover the questions that have been concealed by the answers.

And so the artwork lets us come to grips with what pictures are, with how they operate in our lives, with how we use them and think about them and neglect to think about them, with how we look and see and also how we experience ourselves as looked at and seen. This is how art happens, a work of art in whatever medium is a strange tool, and in its strangeness, it unveils us to ourselves. But that’s not all.

In unveiling us in this way, art gives us resources to change, for it tends to free us from the habits of thinking and looking and feeling and talking and finally, ultimately being that holds us fixed. The very encounter with the artwork, something strange and inscrutable, is an occasion to reorganize and change. I’m going to come back to that. That’s one of my main themes. So we are, of our very nature, tied to art. We are products of art and for that very reason in a way really there’s no such thing as our nature at all.

Now, one curious, almost paradoxical, upshot of this line of thought is that pictorial art has both nothing and everything to do with pictures. Nothing, because pictorial works of art are not in a way pictures at all. That is, they’re not implements for showing this or that embedded within our normal picture transactions within that communicative context. But also everything, for painting and other pictorial arts would have no point at all if not for the organizing central role of pictures in our lives.

And so I think for all media of art, art stands to the life activities that provide them with their raw materials, in the way that painting as an art stands to picture-making activities, and they acquire what significance they possess from the importance of those first order organized activities that they take for granted or that they presuppose.

Let me give another example. Take dancing again. Dancing is something people habitually do. We do it for many different reasons in many different contexts. Weddings, funerals, depending upon the culture, clubs. We are dancers. We are, in my parlance, organized by dancing. We find ourselves dancing. Dance as an art, however, is not just more dancing, not just dancing taken to new heights, deploying new feats of virtuosity combined with stagecraft. Dance as an art or what’s called choreography, puts dancing on display. It stages it, but in doing so, it stages or displays us, we human beings who are organized by dancing. It puts the fact that we are dancers on the stage and it puts all the different meanings that dancing has for us there.

In this way we might even say, as I just said, analogous to what I said about painting, that choreography investigates us as painting investigates our lives with pictures. And so again, we come to the almost paradoxical conclusion that choreography has both everything and nothing to do with dancing. Everything, because there’s only an art of dance because we are in fact dancing human beings and that’s a personal, a psychological, a political, an anthropological, maybe even a biological fact about us. But choreography has nothing to do with dancing at the same time because whatever else is true, it’s true that dance on a stage is not just more dancing, not just more doing what we do when we’re at the club, not any more than a staged model rental unit in an apartment complex is a home.

I’ve been emphasizing that art practices are tied to making activities to human doing and tool use, for these latter are, in my conception, its sources, its preconditions, its raw materials. Choreographers make art out of dancing, out of the fact that we are dancers, and pictorial artists make art out of our material culture with the technology of pictures. 

But art is not itself merely a making activity. Artists make things not in order to surpass mere technology or manufacture, not because they can do it better in a more aesthetically pleasing way. Art makes finally because we are makers, that is we are beings whose lives, and this goes back to our ancient primordial beginnings, whose lives are given shape by the things we make and the ways we find ourselves organized by the things we make.

What makes art special finally is that making is special in our lives as human beings. We are makers. We are put together, literally made up, by the habits and skills of making that constitute us. So by making, and thus exposing what our lives as makers take for granted, art puts us on display in the way I said that the choreographer puts our dancing selves on display, and it does so as I’ve said now once already, in ways that hold out the opportunity of changing us, of liberating us. Liberating us precisely from the bonds of habit which our activities consist in.

How so? Here’s where what I’m calling the entanglement comes into the story. Art loops down, to borrow Ian Hacking’s phrase, and changes the life of which it is the artistic representation. Take the case of choreography again, how people dance in clubs and at weddings and at funerals is different in a world in which there is choreography. Our dancing, mine and yours like the child I imagined at the beginning of my presentation, incorporates art dancing, however implicitly, however tacitly, however indirectly. And then over time across generations, the entanglement of dancing and the art of dancing is affected.

The entanglement is not so great I think as to make it the case that the line between dance as an art and dancing at weddings is effaced, but now the line becomes for us a problem, something for the artists and the dancers at parties to play with. There’s so many examples of this in the history of art. Another nice example is the way the line between commercial design or industrial design and so-called fine art is a resource for something to be negotiated between these different undertakings, and we see that in so many different schools, from Bauhaus to Warhol, etc.

Now it’s very tempting to think that we can sharply distinguish what humans do at the first order, as it were, by nature or by habit, from the second order ways we think about and reflect on and experience our own lives. But my discovery, as it were, or at least my leading idea in this book and in my talk with you now, is this: In human beings, these two levels are entangled. There’s no first order without the second order, and the second order loops down and changes the first order. This doesn’t mean we need to give up the distinction. There is a distinction between party dancing and choreographed or between industrial design and fine art painting, but it does mean that we have no hope of isolating one from the other, and specifically we have no hope of isolating our true nature, say as animals who dance, in something like biological or anthropological terms alone.

The thing we need to appreciate is we are creatures of habit. We are organized in the large and in the small by technology, by culture and even by biology. But we are never only that. We are creatures of habit, who always find ourselves actively resisting, or at least questioning, our own habits. We find ourselves doing that spontaneously. In this way, art refuses culture, even as it feeds it. It does so by disrupting its habitual operations.

In this sense, it emancipates us from culture. Art enables the reorganization of the life, of which it is the representation and against which it is the reaction. This entanglement of life with non-life, technology with the reflective and disruptive work of art, becomes I think essential to life itself, or at least are distinctively human form of life. And it’s this entanglement which is the key to understanding our true nature, or rather, as I’ve already indicated, it’s the key to understanding why nature, the idea of a fixed way things just are once and for all, loses its application to creatures like us. Bringing into focus, in addition, the limits, and this connects to the reference to Husserl at the beginning, the limits to positive science and the inescapable need for other forms of reflective exploration of ourselves, such as art and such as philosophy.

Now most people, not always, but a lot of the time, are blind to so much going on around them. Yogi Berra once said, “You can see a lot by observing.” The joke is that observation isn’t easy. It requires effort and curiosity. It requires looking and interrogation, typically. It also requires other people. That is the natural setting of our aesthetic engagements, our social. A friend calls your attention to the variety of shades of green among the foliage, and remarks on this having to do with the age of the leaves and the onset of spring. And voila, now these different shades are salient to you.

Where someone mentions the canvas tarp covering that vintage VW bus and now you can see it and appreciate what a difference it makes to the overall character of the vehicle. To learn to see, or to be given an opportunity to look, is to learn to take an interest in things, and the world is full of different families of things for us to take an interest in.

On the framework I developed in this book, aesthetics is not the task of evaluating an object, say, it’s the task of achieving the object. Aesthetic experience does not consist in coming to know, as it were, that the work has a property such as beauty or that it carries a certain significance. If that were what the value of aesthetic understanding consisted in, then it would be possible for you to learn about aesthetic values just by being informed by experts.

Aesthetic experience refers, and this is another really important idea in this project, aesthetic experience refers I think, to the temporally extended practice of engaging oneself with what is there with oneself and one’s environment, with the goal of moving from not seeing to seeing, or not perceiving, to perceiving or perceiving to perceiving differently.

It’s the experience itself or the labor of achieving the object of the work. That’s the key thing. And this work typically unfurls in the setting of our communication and exchange with each other. Aesthetic experience isn’t something that happens in us. We work to articulate our aesthetic responses.

Now while the aesthetic is, as I’ve been suggesting, a general feature of our lives together in the world, it’s also true that art has a special tie to the aesthetic. Art targets the aesthetic. It works with it, it makes it a problem. Artworks stage occasions for that distinctive passage from not seeing to seeing or from not getting it to getting it, that is, as I’m understanding it, the hallmark of the aesthetic and they do something else too, as I’ve already indicated. Artworks afford an opportunity for us to catch ourselves in the act of doing all that, to catch ourselves in the act of moving, from not seeing to seeing, of bringing the world into focus for consciousness itself.

Art makes the aesthetic an opportunity for investigation. And at the same time, it makes us, we ourselves, into such an opportunity. What is characteristic of aesthetic experience is that by looking, describing, thinking, and interrogating a work of art, we end up making ourselves new. Works of art, whether pictures or writings or dances or songs, whatever, rework the raw materials of our default organization. The engagement with an artwork is an engagement with oneself that also tends to alter us, to reorganize us. This is why artworks offer finally something like emancipation.

Now, psychologists and neuroscientists who are interested in art tend to take for granted that the aesthetic response is a fixed data point, and they try to understand its causes and conditions. Why do people like X, or why don’t people like X, or what happens in us or to us when this aesthetic experience occurs? 

But what people like and why they like it changes through caring. It changes through questioning. It changes through reflection, through conversation, through criticism. It also changes through the historical counterpart of these through shared practices of reflecting on, discussing or evaluating artworks. It’s this unfixed character of aesthetic experience that I think provides the biggest reason why empirical approaches to aesthetics have been and continue to be such a failure.

There has never been in psychology any breakthrough comparable to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. Psychology has done an amazing job collecting facts and data, but it’s never quite established foundational principles. 

And as a result, and again, I’m trying to echo now to the comments I made about Husserl at the outset, and as a result, consciousness, subjectivity and value remain open questions, in some ways even mysterious, even now after so long. But the problem is not that psychology is young and immature, or that natural science is itself just achieving its maturity. The problem is deeper than that and more interesting. It’s because “human being” is an aesthetic phenomenon. It is not in any sense that we can take for granted a given straightforward natural phenomenon. And human beings are creatures of entanglement.

When it comes to perception, consciousness, love, sex, memory of the body, there are no fixed points, no settled places to begin or ways to move forward. 

Here’s another way of putting the problem. In the would-be sciences of the human, in contrast, say with physics, we never quite know how to stabilize our subject matter. So the problem is not with science, but it’s that we’ve yet to come to grips with, the fact that we are not a fit subject for science.

Our lives are shaped and reshaped by art and the aesthetic. The aesthetic is as basic and original as the facts of consciousness itself. The aesthetic is a live possibility and opportunity and a problem wherever we find ourselves. We are an aesthetic phenomenon. There can be, I think, no serious engagement with ourselves, whether in natural science, cognitive science or whatever that tries to sidestep this awesome and potentially deliberating fact that we are ourselves aesthetic phenomena to our always in the midst of becoming.

I’d like to make a few final comments very briefly to tie the perspective that I’ve just shared with you to some of the themes of this meeting. 

As I understand art and its place in our lives, art has always been in the business of appropriation. Art unpurposes, it unmakes. That’s how art works. And that’s why it is able to reorient us, reorganize us in relation to what we are, where we are and what we take for granted. The thing about art objects is that they are obscure on purpose. They have no caption or user manual. They defy category, and there are no criteria we can use in advance for their success or failure. I think this is true of avant-garde art, but I think it’s true of Vermeer, too.

To judge by its recent decision, it would appear that the Supreme Court of the United States doesn’t understand this, Elena Kagan’s dissent notwithstanding. But for me, this is a beautiful reminder that even art that is both iconic and familiar can continue to mystify and challenge, which in some ways is a good thing.

Another story which has not yet attracted attention, I don’t think, the Vermeer show that is now up in Amsterdam is the hottest art ticket anywhere on Earth. But not that long ago, the art historian Benjamin Binstock, I don’t know if you know who that is, went public with an argument that a good number of paintings attributed to Vermeer and included in that exhibition were actually painted by the artist’s unacknowledged apprentice, his daughter, as it happens, according to Binstock.

I won’t review the evidence he marshals. I won’t try to adjudicate whether he’s right or whether he’s wrong. It’s an astonishing claim. But what if it were true? Let’s go with the hypothetical. If we think of artworks as relics, items whose significance is a straightforward function of their causal history, of their provenance under some description, then Binstock’s finding would be tantamount to the revelation that the Vermeers in question were fake. Art markets would shudder, connoisseurs would be defrocked. 

But artworks aren’t art relics, at least this is the conception I’ve been urging. We’d be better off taking this hypothetical discovery as an opportunity to rethink what it would be to be by Vermeer or made by him or any other artist. And this in turn is an opportunity to rethink assumptions about authorship and authority and, even more profoundly, agency.

What a lovely possibility that it might be that a painting could turn out to be by Vermeer, even if it was not fabricated by Vermeer, or even if Vermeer had help realizing his own artistic ideas.

And this has a bearing. I’m running now rapidly through some different ideas I’m just throwing out, but this has a bearing on how we think about another burning issue of our day that I’m just going to mention and let sizzle in the room, I hope. It seems to me that the handiwork of an unnamed apprentice is in itself no threat to Vermeer’s creative legacy. 

Nor, I would say, is there any reason for us to feel threatened by the successes of ChatGPT or AlphaChess. These digital assistants are literally playing our games. Their accomplishments are to be measured by the light of what we find cogent, fascinating or of value just as the hypothetical contributions of Vermeer’s apprentice are moves in Vermeer’s problem space.

Now there’s certainly cause for anxiety about how AI will be put to use in our society, but our agency like that of Vermeer is not under threat even if we now have a rich occasion to rethink it. 

Finally, it’s worth reminding ourselves that AI doesn’t need to play games of its own devising, and no AI falls itself called upon to make art so that it might free itself from the ways it finds itself being, which is and has always been our lot. Thank you.

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news-dev.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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