Intention in Art and Poetry

In art of any kind, intension is not only opaque but, in terms of audience reception to a given work, largely irrelevant, as one’s audience will invariably reconstitute the supposed objectives behind that work in accordance with their own sensibilities. The latter are, of course, far from transparent or autonomous—in the Cartesian sense—as they are the result of the interface between western concepts of agency and their intersection with the circulation of myriad cultural and political discourses. The resulting development of reception oriented notions of meaning in art is determined, then, by a tableau of mediated, yet still vital, audience expectations. This is true for poetry as well since the import of an agglomeration of connected words can only signify within a framework that is mediated by audience expectations; thus, the signification of a work—the interpretational field in which it is situated as a sign—must organize itself, in art, within, or at least in reference to, a particular set of assumptions that together constitute the epistemological ether in which the orbits of various works are embedded; and which, as a result, largely determine the direction of their respective gravitational forces, although not their intensity. What this means is that art and literature—of all types—are constituted in relation to a set of conventions that exist in proximity to the work in question the way that gravity exerts its coercive pull on the mass of a given object, even as that object also coerces the other objects which act upon it, thus creating a labyrinthine gravitational matrix whose direction is in fact a product of modifying pulls from all directions simultaneously. In such a byzantine arena of interpenetrating and forceful motion, the mass of a body does not exist autonomously—as there would be no perfect vacuum against which its mass could be measured—but always within a gravitational field. My point here, of course, is in reference to an hypothetical audience, reception, and is not intended to reflect on the autonomy of an artist’s intentions—the latter being incidental to the former; and, their integrity not at issue.

Likewise, the meaning of the aesthetic sign—the way it signifies—can never be determined, even within the relatively hermetic sanctuary of pure artistic intentions; since, once the product of the artist’s desire, the work itself, is exposed to the scrutiny of others, its meaning is immediately distorted, amplified, overdetermined and re-cooked, in a sense, as a necessary function of the interaction between work and audience. This does not take away from whatever autonomy as an object the work may                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           possess, in the same sense that differing gravitational masses, in reference to the placement of heavenly objects, do not affect their volume, only the way in which that volume is mediated by the larger environment. In an analogous fashion all works of art, are contingent in reference to both import and intentionality. Thus, a work can have the most pointed intentions but still be creatively misconstrued by its audience. In fact, such misinterpretation is to some degree both foreseen and intended by the artist, since he/she knows that the lasting value of a work is an outgrowth of the complexity of the various interpretations it is availed of.  By extension, the overdetermined nature of the richest interpretive schemata are a product of translucence, even opacity, rather than purity of vision, since the latter can be obscured by the radio static that tends to overwhelm the narrowest of tonal signals, no matter how clear at the outset. Conversely, it is the broad band signal, transmitted in all directions by the large, expansive, sloppy, even vague, work—out of whose layered miasma emerges the mythical phantasms of self-recognition in an audience, often subsequently attributed to “genius”—which provides the most fertile ground for investing the feelings and emotions needed to create what one art critic has termed “the erotics of engagement.”

These aforementioned “erotics” are the basis for perceiving both meaning and complexity within a work. They are, in every sense, the outgrowth of the tension between the desire to attribute specific import to the work of art, and the ineffability produced by the invariably un-sayable essence that grows from the metaphorical field within which any specific work is conceived. Hence, the desire to place the work in context and to speak its significance is offset by—although rarely in harmonious balance with—the deep uncanny feelings that are the unique outgrowths of autonomous aesthetic productions. And here is where the autonomous work of art is at its most paradoxical, being both an intangible vapor and a palpable expression interwoven with the materiality of its container: that container being the language of the work, however singular, and however untranslatable into the argot of the Cartesian paradigm that informs the critical frame of reference into which it is often mistakenly placed. I say “mistakenly” because, however temporary the insertion into a particular discursive context, such contextualization marks the autonomous work with the grammar—ergo, the ideology—and the assumptions buried in any given mode of transcription. Thus, the procedure itself modifies the syntax, feel and balance of the work, making of it a transducer that processes its singular waveform into that of whatever energy is used in its alteration.

This “innocent” attempt to translate an aesthetic idiom—being mindful of the fact that aesthetic idioms are by nature untranslatable, a condition that underlies the subsequent paradox inherent in endeavoring to make them understood (since to be understood is to be controlled, to be known, to be caricatured and smoothed out, rendered comprehensible, and therefore sanitized)—strikes at the very core of the profound nature of positivistic criticism’s misunderstanding of art. This “mis-comprehension” is closer in nature to a willful attempt to squeeze all examples of autonomous aesthetic expression into the standardized napkin-holder compartments of the Cartesian ideological gestalt that undergirds much of the content of this theme-and-symbol based form of critique. This fact is often concealed beneath the misleadingly extensive pedigree of the aforementioned style of criticism and its many related forms. Consequently, adherents as disparate as Philip Rahv, Clement Greenburg and Lucy Lippard could be said to all share a certain basic constellation of assumptions regarding the comprehensibility of all art, despite the fact none of the diverse critics mentioned above, and few of their myriad bedfellows, would ever dare paint themselves into the same positivistic canvas with such a broad brush. And, it would be unfair to make of this category-of-convenience anything more binding than a heuristic device intended to underscore the way in which their distinct methods play into the myth of accessibility that has reduced the over-determined, allegorical, quality of much western aesthetic expression over the course of the last several centuries into a misleading and falsely reductionist gestalt.

The latter has subsumed the entropic beauty of the most difficult and thought provoking works within a series of discrete containers whose programmatic simplification of their byzantine metonymic, and metaphorically over-determined, range of motifs has partially imprisoned their full dioramic scope the way that the luckier of Soviet political exiles were once carted off to the frozen half-way houses of the ‘New Socialist’ industrial showcase cities. And, much like the Sovietized advance-guard, pioneers sent to domesticate newly urbanized Siberian spaces—coercively entrusted with tidying up the various cultural and technical infrastructures of these jerry-built cultural redoubts of the post-Stalinist era—the coterie of post-Cartesian critics who make diverse aesthetic visions palatable to specialized market-sensibilities, have at least created a space into which such works can be insulated from the isolating cold that characterizes the unfortunate lot of those artists and works that find themselves outside-of-history. Thus, the former are luckier than their Gulag-inserted predecessors since the ‘post-modern,’ critical gestalts, practiced by many self-proclaimed arbiters of artistic value, during the past half-century, have provided more hotel-like gilded rooms, and more freedom of movement, conceptually speaking, for the various films, paintings, poems, etc., whose value they have consistently mediated within a soft-pedaled positivistic framework, even when they have remonstrated to the contrary.

This partial imprisonment of artistic desire within the half-way house heuristic stop-overs of both the modern museum-instillation summary and its natural correlative in the gallery-show pamphlet has helped standardize the very language of artistic criticism in a manner consistent with a greater attention given to the marketing of art as an aesthetic lifestyle-accouterment. The promotional schemes used for various forms of literature have also followed in the footsteps of this slight paradigm shift towards a greater appreciation of the positivistic aspects of all of the arts both as marketable commodities and as “decorative appliances” or “aesthetic wallpaper.”  And, while this approach appears superficially at least, to embrace an exploration of nuance and complexity, it subtly re-shifts the focus of the entire discourse towards a newly re-christened nomenclature of the niche and its associated atmospheric sub-categories.

The full outcome of this permutation will, of course, remain stubbornly elusive, at least until the entire ramifications of the long-term marriage of art and commerce, potentiated by the broad dissemination of a marketing oriented “Wall Street” ideology—one, that has been around for quite some time but never in such a concentrated form or with such an obviously negative effect on aesthetics, as already seen in other aspects of the same “Total-Marketing”-Culture, approach—are fully felt in the realm of aesthetic production. This is just an extension of Capitalism’s ingenious built in, dynamic, mechanism for incorporating even those discourses that seem to have inoculated themselves against its much touted excesses of co-opted inclusion, concealing the Rice-Krispy’s-trajectory of their modus operandi in order to resist annexation into that very territory. (Marcuse, p57-61) Yet, it is capital’s complete disregard of ideology, position, or aesthetic placement that allows it to so successfully gentrify even the most artistically obscure neighborhoods, provided, of course, that some form of even the most minute sub-market already exists to justify the initial incursion into such ordinarily neglected communities. When the latter is not present, the invasion does not usually materialize in any but the most disconnected and marginal form—the obtaining of certain subsidiaries for example, or some other indirect means of benefiting from an already existing market which is otherwise thankfully ignored. However, even the appearance of the mass-merchandising paradigm in contiguous areas can effect a substantial change in niche markets that have always served distinct and non-mass-market oriented, bohemian communities. And while the world of mass-produced objects—however essential to, or even intertwined with, various intellectual and aesthetic disciplines and practices, such as experimental music CD’s or philosophical tomes published by university presses—is often seen as distinct from the more rarified forms of fine arts production, in many cases they are marketed in precisely the same way; both, presented as specialized works for unusual (meaning, educated, intellectual fringe, or elite, etc.,) audiences; all representing small sub-markets whose distinct demographics are rapidly being anatomized, or subdivided, if you prefer a metaphor culled from the competitive world of real-estate, into small discrete plots, each with their own unique, but ultimately reproducible (read: manufactured) aesthetic flavor.

In other words, the world of capital is just now, when it is beginning to teeter from greed and overly-aggressive market-saturation practices, becoming adept at the art of micro-marketing to specialized, minority (meaning, in this case, the extremely well educated, or the super-well alienated; and, yes, there is definitely a connection between the two) audiences—those whose aesthetics run towards the unique, avant-garde, or that which was formerly held to be completely un-marketable. This small category, then, intersects the fine arts, since appealing to consumers—if that word can actually be used to describe the not-quite literal consumption of ideas, say, transpiring between artist and audience at a Joseph Beuys instillation—of Anselm Keifer, for example,  is both in principle and in practice, much like attempting to sell pre-commoditized identity-constructs to the equally self-conscious (read: aware of the underlying processes involving, and therefore more cynical about, the machinations of marketing intangibles like cultural sensibility) audiences of avant-garde electronic rock bands like Nurse With Wound. Nonetheless, the trend is moving ineluctably in that direction.

The relationship between this new culture of stylized, marginal-niche reception, and the commoditized, self-reflexive, identity constructs, into which it is absorbed, forms a closed circuit. This circuit can be conceptualized as somewhat similar to the mythical uroboris; the worm who consumes its own tail continuously, until, presumably, it disappears entirely. This paradox is the consequence of the diminishing returns that often result when self-referential identities begin to consume their own past through the texts of contemporary aesthetic narratives. This feeding, on the cicada-corpse of one’s own history, tends to create a culturally incestuous sensibility, even as irony sets in to cleanse out the husk of what was once a more variegated and complete circuit of inter-communicative texts The subsequent gestalt, marginalizes its own production of discourse, by fetishizing it as the romantic consequence of the rapid evolution of an sentimentalized otherness that hectors its audience with the myth of its own un-corruptible purity—its staunch refusal to be absorbed into the play of commodities—even as it is being reproduced as a template to be further digested later into the bodies of other secondary cultural texts. (Debord, p 136, paragraph, 190) This gradual coopting is not simply hypocrisy, but rather the result of a process that emerges from the contradictions inherent in the niche-audience’s self-reflexively complex identification with the performance of marginality inherent in the aforementioned cultural texts.

Of course, there are certain analytical, pop-cultural, paradigms which would assert that such coopting encodes related forms of cultural production with a certain amount of resistance. (Kellner and Best, p273)  This is true, insofar as such ideas are still resonant in their newly encoded subtexts. More frequently, the alteration of context has a distorting effect on whatever subversive material remains intact, through whatever system of memes into which it has been re-inscribed, thus allowing for the absorption of traditional cultural codes into its now altered structure. (Marcuse, p64) This subtle transformation in coding makes the text’s subsequent diffusion into the larger play of commoditized signs more reflective of the latter’s dynamic elasticity, than of any kind of true resistance to the hegemony of the basic underlying assumptions that survive such cosmetic transfigurations, on an almost daily basis, in a culture dominated by new technologies and the ever more eclectic mingling of various aesthetic and discursive forms. (Foster, p 167)  In this context, the encoding of subversive material functions as a vaccination against the larger paradigm’s becoming infected by the otherness of this sub-textual, underground, remnant. Thus, the latter survives on a molecular level, so to speak, while being altered, in a cellular fashion, as if colonized by a virus. Hence, it is in this way, one might say, re-engineered, so that it can accommodate a new system of master meanings, or codes. One need only watch the subtle way in which the comedies of Judd Apatow use humor to re-codify the ever-changing boundaries between novel and more marginally subversive outsider discourses, to see how such dynamics work.

It is possible then to conceive of the dynamics of postmodern reception as a strategy for recuperating and balancing a discourse that seeks to re-establish a master-narrative based on the primacy of commodity-oriented cultural production, while at the same time functioning to confirm a homeostasis amongst competing social possibilities opened up through the use of novel technologies. This, of course, transcends the arena of the arts; and, it will be left to other critics and historians to continue the work of attempting to contextualize the confusing array of contradictory cultural codes and assertions now circulating through this economy of intertwined production. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that even in the presentation of avant-gardes—as semi-autonomous realms, not responsive to the ethos of the larger circulation of consumerist tropes—there is hidden in plain sight the same tendency to organize competing cultural claims into an equivalent hierarchy of values, and to observe, through an appropriately foggy matrix of aestheticized nomenclature, many of the same assumptions and principles. This is, of course, an old critique, in the sense that it re-affirms the process of gentrification and absorption in the arts; but it is one which attempts to assess the rapidly transformed appearance of these processes as a response to new technologies, and shifting codes of audience reaction. If the tendency is to comprehend these dynamics in terms of an unchanging process of Marcusian assimilation, it must be said that the rapid shifts in other areas of the culture are transforming the very nature of how such a process function, and in doing so, distorting it, perhaps, beyond recognition. This essay then, is intended only as a marker, a buoy of sorts, to map out the direction and dispersal of the tidal flow of such cultural transmogrifications, while asserting its ties to the already existing dynamics of what Marcuse referred to, perhaps clumsily, as Repressive Desublimation. (p56) Such theoretical constructs are, however, stretched to a point of distortion by the pressure placed on them by historical and technological change; and in this, lies the hope that such change will alter those very relationships and place aesthetics in a new position relative to the organizing hierarchies of twentieth-century capitalism—one which might be inspired by something other than the rigid unifying principles of other familiar ideological constructs, and instead create something entirely new. And, while the transitional ethos of the present time (the so-called postmodern period) suggests the possibility of such transformation, it also seems to reaffirm an older order that still undergirds and motivates the seismic shifts that bring about such change. Only time will tell if this kind of transition is a gestural illusion or a harbinger of a deeper new reality.

 

                                        

                                                                 Works Cited

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1991) Postmodern theory: Critical interrogations, New York: The Guilford Press.

Debord, Guy (1994, orig. pub. Date, 1967) The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books.

Foster, Hal (1985) Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Seattle: Bay press.

Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon Press.