[21a] Philip Pilkington, ‘Letter on Inscrutable Objects and Local Meanings’, Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 2, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 217-224.

Letter on Inscrutable Objects and Local Meaning (1)

Philip Pilkington

‘Given some solid figure (say a picture) that means nothing to me at present – can I at will imagine it as meaningful?... [It] might be imagined as a dwelling for beasts or men. Another class as weapons. Another as models of landscapes. Etc. So here I know how I can ascribe meaning to a meaningless shape.’
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, translated by G.E.M.Anscombe, Oxford, 1967, paragraph 201.

Hyperventilation is a postmodern symptom – breathlessly to say that there are many irreconcileable meanings of (say) a work of art, or a sentence, or a house, or etc., and that we have no foundation for deciding on which possible meanings have priority. However, the term ‘meaning’ in such circumstances of anxiety is treated as a universal primitive, and is not subject to analysis. This ‘meaning’ is detached from its specific application to a work of art A or a sentence S or etc. But meaning is not a predicate. So what is it a property of? Is having a meaning simply self-contradictory (do you have it and not have it)? Little or no consideration is given by the hyperventilating postmodernist to the logical and other forms of the meanings within the ‘Many-Meanings’ model. Are the meanings contradictory, or graduated (blue to green), or part complementary with (consistent with) discourse growth, or incommensurable, or anathemic, or paradoxical, or ... etc? And in what ether do meanings float, to be isolated and identified (the non-relationship of meanings being as problematic as their relationship within the reductive fundamentalism)? Such a lack of practical and historical curiosity occludes the motives and mechanisms whereby our cultural capital is reified, managed and controlled. Such critical details are irrelevant if you are busy (unreflectively or worse) constructing a culturally imperialistic metanarrative which asserts that there are Many Meanings.

Individual meanings – whatever that deterministic terms might imply – do not have stable functional relations to the historical point of their creation. (So where is the meaning?) If ‘meaning is use’, is the function or purpose of any given use merely to exemplify a reduction of meaning to use? We should ask a prior question: How can we imagine an object as meaningful? The answers may be mundane, historical and materialistic.

A characteristic postmodern response to the Diversity of Meanings is to invoke an end of history. This is an Hegelian idealisation. It assumes that we have all reached the same historically terminal trajectory and that we are all in the same position. This idealisation is based on a primitive assumption that meanings are discrete, inert, well-formed and complete, highly stable and independent of others. This is not formally or psychologically plausible. The sense in which A or S are in fact opaque is not that there is uncertainty as to what their meanings are, but rather that they are inherently inscrutable objects. The meaning attached to an A or S is opaque under specific conditions. In an idealised account of meanings, opaqueness is the partner concept of transparency. The growth or the future production of meanings is seen as an accretional increase which is not susceptible to evolutionary change or decay. This is not a Darwinian view of how meanings are produced, or of how they function. The question of how meanings are ‘thrown into existence’ is for postmodern management an anachronistic empirical concern. They have only a creationist view: that there is a warehouse stuffed with discretely packed meanings which supplies and sustains the globalisation of a Cultural Academy.

To suggest that the subjective infinity of meanings marks the ‘end of the Subject’ is as dramatic a response to the professional blots of aesthetics as is the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ (we know what’s wrong with both, but cannot entirely do without either). The consequences of this suggestion are neither ironical nor playful. It requires the abandonment of two forms of realism – internal and external – that allows the pairing of meanings to actions and objects from which flow normative conditions of truth, beliefs, concepts of adequacy, interests, and sense-reference-meaning (conceived as a well-ordered triple). Of course, the Cultural Academy requires that intentionality be renounced. But the consequences of this renunciation are dangerous if what it entails is that there can be no scrutiny of those intentions which express material interest, on the part of artists or academics or anyone else. In fact, the opportunities for finding fallacies in ascriptions of intention are anyway much more restricted and less interesting than tends to be suggested. The agents (or painters or producers or whatever they are) of an art-work A did not intend, we assume, to conquer Everest or to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem (2), nor to produce a lurid likeness of a crying clown (unless they did). To say of A, “t is a homage to Braque, but it looks like a dog’s breakfast” is to say something about the agency in A-production; about the agents and their competences and ambitions as well as your own. Interest has a certain priority in meaning production.

The ‘Many-Meanings’ form of the metanarratives asserts that meanings have no complexity of relations between or within each other. This is unproblematic if your interest is not in the cognitive content of meanings, but rather in the phenomenological brackets you can put round them, as it were; if your aim is to deny any dialectical interests and conflicts within the set of meanings, as a form of executive relief from the historical struggles which produce and identify them. (3)

The phenomenological-brackets theory must operate like a psychical realism if it is to individuate any meanings at all. (Perhaps it can single out ghostly meanings, but in what machinery? A corporate answer seem to lie within the Cultural Academy.) To say that meaning is irreducibly intentional is not, however, to fall back on a subjective individualism. The Art & Language work and discourse of the 1970s created a heuristic position to the effect that meanings (after much shaky semantic-theoretic puzzling) were and are reducible to a modified and provisional self-referentiality (vis-à-vis intentionality, or the Subject, or ‘Art & Language’). This does not entail that either the relevant agent(s) or the relevant object A must have an independent, unique set of meanings. Whatever approach you take, causal or functional, etc., no meaning conditions are sufficient conditions of meanings.

Self-reference classically involves absurdity or incompleteness. Explicit indexicality provided the latter outcome for meaning-production for Art & Language. The conditions of the Indexes and the indexing they brought about are as extensive as may be required for your own interests: spatial, temporal, propositional, dispositional, instrumental, etc. The modified self-reference of the Indexes entailed that meanings are complete only within the limits provided by certain conditions. Conversational indexing (in ‘natural languages’) happens in real time as a process which passes through evolving sets of co-ordinates; but the meanings are states which exist independently of the indexing process.

A feature of this modified self-reference is that the meanings we encounter (and ascribe) are not opaque but provisional. If we take a meaning in some propositional form p (a state) at an indexical point i (e.g. ‘here’ or ‘today’, or etc.), containing all the modalities required, then p is transparent as it maps itself at i. The stress and the pull of the meaning problem of p as a process is occasioned by the cognitively immanent meaning of p at a state at i. This is a short-hand way of describing what we considered as a ‘Turing-Machine’ read-out which could be produced by the Indexes (i.e. a kind of read-out which is a function of the number or etc. you put in); a process, within limits possible in i, which generates state descriptions. The meanings of an A or a S are either localised – at the point i – or they are inscrutable.

We will meanings by our resources. Meanings are interpretative production within an environment. The results of this production are neither arbitrary nor contingent, except for those production-conditions which are outside the limits of our meanings and which have a degree of opacity. That the environmental conditions may be considered contingent or accidental – ‘here at point i’ – makes any given meaning no less determined and determining on other meanings as a consequence of their respective truth, adequacy, interest, etc. A degree of opacity is relative to the conditions defined by indices i, etc. With modified self-referentiality, the state of affairs p at i is true, believed, etc., until the environment (or i) changes functionally for p.

There is a large family of failed reductive strategies – mentalese, functionalism, neurology, phenomenalism, etc. – which have all been claimed as successors to concepts of truth and reference. Truth functions are bonded to referential claims. The complexity of reference is not mere logical form but is internally and externally historical. A or S exist in virtue of our quantification of A or S as complex items. And in so far as truth functions within quantificational claims are generalisable beyond the referential point at which they are made, claims about A or S are inseparably about classes of A or S. There is no empty set of paintings and sentences prior to this act of quantification. In fact, this is a standard type-theory of description as modified self-reference in action. The meanings of A and S are ascribed to them, and to the set of all As and Ss. Intentional agency constitutively ascribes (creates) meanings within limits. This is not conceptual relativism. It might be, however, that you have your cognitive environment and I have mine. (And one of the complexities of my cognitive environment is that it may be the same as yours.)

(The Art & Language Indexes failed to set up a ‘meaning-in-the-head’ and ‘meaning-in-the-art’ dualism because their production occurred within an incomplete environment. The indexical production of an ‘in-the-head’ and ‘in-the-world’ combination was within a limit of operators (people and rules) and space-time. But an Index could not produce a real-time meaning-map of itself.)

I cannot will an object to be a microchip, nor can I will A to be a painting or S to be a sentence. Some meanings historically attached to A and S really are claims about and within A or S. This does not close interpretation, but it does allow that meanings refer to A under conditions relevant to what A is (at whatever minimal level). A is therefore complex; and it can be set-theoretically many objects. (Noses may be considered as objects separate from faces or mouths, and similarly meanings might be identified with competences in the production of A.)

We should not ignore the cognitive division of labour (4) in favour of the social-historical conditions of the environment (i). The environmental conditions of our meanings make up our ‘home’ language, into which we translate As and Ss. If we don’t do that, we have inscrutability and not opaqueness, or we have no competences at all, or we must say, self-refutingly, that there are no environmental conditions available, or we must entertain such doubt as to doubt that there are any meanings at all.

The Disquotational Theory of Meaning – that either you translate a given sentence into your own language with an unspecifiable degree of indeterminacy, or you simply quote back that sentence (5) – is an orthodox answer to these difficulties, but it just does not help. It implies that we change our language only by assimilation and ignores the possibility that changes may reverberate within an entire system. A characteristically postmodern view keeps the two parts (indeterminacy and quotation) separate, rather than acknowledging that the boundary between the two parts is fuzzy.

A somewhat technical point which has not been fully explored is the relationship between quantification and induction. (Seeing an A or an S as an A or an S is inductive. To see a painting as a ‘Picasso’ is a quantification which follows from some non-deductive belief about what a ‘Picasso’ is like.) That is, how we ascribe meanings quantifies objects-with-their-meanings, as in “There is a painting A which is p” (a complex description). The How and the What of “There is A which is p” bears upon future quantifications and their internal descriptions. Different descriptors lead to different inductive outcomes and determine different abilities to simply quantify, or to single-out types and tokens of A or S. Because of the fuzzy nature of induction, the meanings you claim for A or S are not exclusively relative to the co-ordinates of your belief-fixation.

The problem (and achievement) of making sense of an ‘inscrutable object’ such as A or S is not how to have the right abilities in hooking-up an ‘expression’ to the world – to find a poor substitute for the meaning of A. The hooking-up is not accomplished without dynamic changes to the internal self. A precious anxiety about our conceptual inability to reflect reality seems to be announced in the Cultural Academy as somehow more significant than the fact that our internal self (our cognitive evolution) is not pre-figured in our disposition or competence to see something in the world. The postmodern Academy’s reification or mechanisation of our cognitive abilities is consistent with its ‘End of the Subject’ mission (statement). But that we cannot reflect reality is not a justification for announcing the End of the Subject. Thankfully, there are other ways of dealing with instability in both external and internal conditions - with the instability of the world and of its intelligibility.

We are not trapped in the locale of our home language (our competences, beliefs, dispositions etc.). Meanings have identity in virtue of our competences and in differing cognitive environments, although they have no essence. When we explain (to) ourselves, justify reasons or experience another A or S, we go beyond the existing limits of our capacities and away from our incompleteness. To go further than Gödel allowed for meanings, we go beyond (transcend) what we formalise. (6) How does a Subject – or alternative nominations such as an agent, an intention, an interpretative capacity, etc. – ‘go beyond itself’? Or what does this ‘Going-on’ entail? This semantic bootstrapping entails that we transcend our locale, the home language. And this transcendence can flow from the constructed meanings which demonstrate the law-like character of our interpretations. We face the consequences that our meanings are generalisable (beyond the ‘home’ which is i).

The version of a modified self-reference which the Art & Language Indexes proposed transcends the reflexive Gödelian problem that we have no systematic foundation for our meanings.

If moving from one meaning to another involves some sort of inductivism – a sort of practical reasoning – it is because we are dependent upon our background set of interests. But background and foreground do not form a hierarchy, with the background the conceptual metalanguage for the foreground. Meanings are not exclusively propositional forms. There are dispositional functions as well, which generate propositional forms. The background can merge with the foreground. And the inductive relation between A and its meaning p at i - which is a fragment of an indexical chain of unknown length of (often highly undetermined) interpretative actions - has to count as a ‘meaning theory’.

Although we are bound by conventions of competences, is it foolish to impose a hierarchy of meanings, given that the inductive chain between meanings is weak? (Do you need to have a theory of – say – Cubism in order for – say – Frank Stella’s Jasper’s Dilemma to have a meaning? Might not anthropology do as well?) One answer may be that it is not foolish to impose a hierarchy of meanings relative to background. This is built into the idea of having a meaning. This is not to say that meaning conditions are sufficiently dependent on, or reducible to, having a specific – or preferable – knowledge background; it is just to say that meanings will be created dynamically in relation to epistemically significant (or otherwise determining) conditions of interest. Basic instrumental competences involve internal and external conditions. What counts as a knowledge background (as something cognitive) is dependent on what is referred to in a meaning. A Portrait of V.I.Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock can be successfully referred to as a representation of a type of Abstract Expressionism and as a type of depiction of a man with a beard and hat, with or without background knowledge of Jackson Pollock and/or of V. I. Lenin. And such knowledge may be of no help at all, and the portrait may remain internally inscrutable. What this means is that in such cases the background knowledge is not referentially functional. (7)

The Indexes were/are successful practical processors of a ‘natural language’ which we know as Art & Language (restricted to i). Some A might be referred to in that language. We still encounter the problem that our grip on the reality of A is a priori inadequate from the point of view of Realism. The competences are fragile and changing. If a postmodern Realism requires that a grip on reality is all the sets of  meanings of A, then this means that any referential success of our meanings is formally and psychologically absurd. A metanarrative view is that disputes over (the referential success of) what A means can occur and continue only in a community where there is a minimum of shared practical interests, and not where there is solely a universal disposition towards all the sets of meanings of A.

A pedagogical interest puts in place a hierarchy of competences, and the meanings that are pre-judged to flow from them. Pedagogic instrumentalities are criteria for competence which control access to the pedagogic domain and circularly legitimate that domain and its membership as psychologically stable and reified. Ironically, the learner internalises the required narrative by creating her own metanarrative for her own locale. (‘Narrative’ and ‘metanarrative’ are merely a highly relativised ordered pair, and do not contradict our holistic view of meaning-interpretation.)

Art & Language is not even at the margins of the managerial and executive control over the instrumentalities of its own meaning. At best, Art & Language is conscripted into the Cultural Academy, a global machine which houses cognitive ghosts and which makes meaning production ‘homeless’. Art & Language then becomes a reified nodal point in a prescriptive narrative. It is not insignificant that the supporters of the postmodern anxieties considered above largely exist within the university, that most Foucauldian of organisations of power over discourse, complete with its invisible surveillance routines and possessed of the black box of judgement which legitimates privilege. It is not surprising that the Cultural Academy functions for its membership as a Hegelian police force, defending the cultural capital – cognitive and historical – of its discourse. The intimate relationship which much current art production has with the Cultural Academy has resulted in a branch of Hegelian Art possessed of a self-image dangerously outside good and evil. The tendency of the art in question is to celebrate the self-reifying Bourgeois State, which requires no more than an empty finality-in-itself – an Absolutist end. That is, the contingencies of the historic subject-object relation (and the possibilities of meaning therein) are avoided by a descent to claiming that representations are inscrutable and are of the Geist. Our ideological struggles over meanings go unnoticed in the clamorous bids to create a hegemony sustaining an ontological myth of artefacts. The latter requires a powerful superstructure which is, as any management would assume, natural and rational.

There are some, however, who struggle within the Cultural Academy, which they experience as a significant local site of control of their meaning production.

When Art & Language has any position within the Cultural Academy it is as a dysfunctional or inscrutable ‘member’.



Notes



(1) In his inaugural lecture at the Open University, Charles Harrison recounted a remark made by Michael Baldwin, that what artist hope to produce is ‘that which is smarter than we are’, adding the rider, ‘Works of art being smarter than we are, it may take some time to catch up with them’ (‘If Quality were King’, October 1997). Much of this letter was written as an attempt to address Harrison’s suggestion. I assume that a thing-in-itself essentialism is not intended in the original, but I worry about the implication that there is a kind of priority of duties supervening localised experiences.

–––––

(2) There are always exceptions; consider, say, Mario Merz or Marcel Broodthaers.

–––––

(3) Eleanor Macdonald discusses an example of essentialism’s derecognition of intentions-as-meanings as a form of empowerment. See her ‘Derrida and the Politics of Interpretation’, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch eds., The Retreat of the Intellectual, London, 1990. The formal semantic problem of undecidability of meanings is related to formal systems, not to natural languages. Every formal system is embedded in a natural language (whatever that is), nor vice versa.

–––––

(4) This is a shortened version of the account of linguistic labour and the historical locations for ‘The Cognitive Environment’, in Hilary Putman, Representation and Reality, London, 1996, pp 23-24.

–––––

(5) There is some similarity between formalistic semantic theory and the postmodernism of Richard Rorty. For both, meanings are indeterminate or they are ‘paid a compliment’ and quoted in the home language. However, it is clear that meanings are not propositionally simple enough for such a division.

–––––

(6) ‘Gödel showed that the consistency of elementary mathematics could not be proved from within the system itself. This result followed from his proof that any formal axiomatic system countains undecidable propositions. It undermined the hopes of those who had been attempting to determine axioms from which all mathematics could be deduced.’ From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Mathematics, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1996, p 112. The Indexes were not axiomatic formal systems. One could get ‘beyond’ their systematicness without being concerned that one had left them behind.

–––––

(7) There is empirical evidence for this conclusion. Some people who know about both Lenin and Pollock cannot see Lenin (and some cannot see Pollock either). They must think that the title (and the work) is a whacky conceit. Some of those who know little or nothing about Lenin and nothing about Pollock can trace and identify the portrait successfully and consistently.