Book Reviews

. Living in an Art World: Reviews and

carroll, noel
Essays on Dance, Performance, Theater, and the
Fine Arts in the 1970s and 1980s. Louisville, KY:
Chicago Spectrum Press, 2012, 338 pp., $22.50 paper.

Carrolls Living in an Art World consists of

Noel
reviews and essays on dance, performance, theater,
and visual fine arts taking place during the 1970s and
1980s. The book is organized into three main sections.
Dance is the subject of the first section, followed by
sections devoted to performance and theater and the
fine arts. Each section and a coda with essays on
postmodernism and globalization of art address important theoretical issues raised by the changes in the
arts during the second half of the twentieth century.
Carrolls reviews focus mainly on events taking
place in the New York artworld during a time of
transition from modernism to postmodernism and
beyond. Articles reprinted in this volume appeared
initially in Art Forum, Soho Weekly News, The Village Voice, The Drama Review, Dance Magazine, and
various journals and exhibition catalogues. Driven
by a passion for understanding contemporary avantgarde art and the workings of the artworld, he, like
other younger critics and theorists of the time, became a citizen of the avant-garde art world (p. 18).
Their passion and curiosity created writers bent on
exploring every dance, performance art, and gallery
opening that the Lower East Side artworld in New
York offered. They encountered an artworld where
art practices were informed by theory and vice versa.
Hence, it will be no surprise to find the reviews selected for this volume laced with questions belonging
also to art theory and aesthetics. In the introductory remarks prefacing the respective sections, Carroll interjects qualifications and sometimes doubts
about the views expressed in his earlier writings. Taking note of the importance of these writings for understanding the downtown art scene in New York,
Arthur Danto remarked in an introduction to the collection: His collected essays constitute a museum of
the unmuseumable (p. 12).

The twenty-three chapters devoted to dance

address singular performances of leading choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, Yvonne
Rainer, Twyla Tharp, and Trisha Brown, and also consider broader theoretical matters surrounding these
performances. Many of the dancers of the 1970s
were drawn to anti-theatrical, anti-illusionist dance.
They also acknowledged dance as an independent
art. Proponents of anti-theatrical dance who gathered at the Judson Church in lower Manhattan during
the 1960s and Yvonne Rainer in the 1970s accepted
any form of movement as dance. Concurrently,
they rejected expressive, theatrical virtuosity and
narrative spectacle. For formalists such as George
Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, abstract movement became the main focus in their approaches to
dance.
Among the theoretical concerns addressed is the
rejection of mimesis in favor of anti-illusionism
in the postmodern choreography of the 1960s and
1970s. At the center of the debate among competing
twentieth-century approaches to dance was the question of theatrical versus anti-theatrical approaches to
dance. Related to this issue was a disagreement over
whether dance should be considered an independent
art or simply a variant of theater.
Taking the discussion to a larger plane, Carroll
argues that changing practices in the art of dance
throughout history tend to reflect successively the
prevailing art theories of their time. Prior to the
twentieth century, the prevailing mimetic theories
(the view that art imitates or copies, resulting in
illusionist images) supported a theatrical approach
to dance. Yvonne Rainers anti-theatrical postmodern dance is in part informed by the modernist art
theory of Clement Greenberg (p. 35). Carroll cites
the influence of Greenbergs view that art was a
form of critique and that integral to critique was antiillusionism on Rainers approach to dance (p. 35).
However, the match is not seamless, as Rainers extension of dance to include everyday movements independent of any formal system of movement does
not fit well with Greenbergs formalism.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:3 Summer 2013


C 2013 The American Society for Aesthetics

292
In Chapter 22, Carroll observes that developments
in dance are occurring in many different directions
(p. 126). Among these is a new form of theatricalism.
As a result, minimalist anti-theatrical and formalist dance were displaced in the front line by dance
featuring representation, expression, and narrative
content. Examples of this new dance are cited in
the works of Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch, and Twyla
Tharp, among others. Carroll denies that this new
theatricalism in dance is simply recycling prior endorsements of mimesis. Rather, he argues that the
theatricality of contemporary dance invokes a new
paradigm that understands art pluralistically and as
anti-essentialist, one in which dance stands in tandem
with the reigning conceptions of the arts alongside
performance, theater, and gallery arts. The theoretical support for this new paradigm is in need of further
development. Also missing in this discussion is clarification of the origins of the concepts or theories of
art, that is, whether they emerge independently or
concurrently with the practices of the artists.
The section on performance and theater (Chapters
2448) consists of essays devoted to examining the relation of these two media. Performance refers to
a widely divergent medium that requires no particular training or setting. It can occur outside in the
street, in a gymnasium, or just as easily in any public
space where an audience can be assembled. It may
involve the unspecified actions of painters, sculptors,
filmmakers, musicians, dancers, or any combination
of these.
Carroll distinguishes two types of performance.
Art performances emerged as a reaction to objectionable practices in the art galleries. Performance art is a
response to mainstream theater where trained actors

perform a written text onstage with decor

and lighting (pp. 161, 166). Carroll, perhaps wisely, does not
offer a definition of performance. Rather, he chooses
to characterize performance artists as an emblem
for what is spontaneous, live, free, and authentic
(p. 169) and at the same time a reminder of the constraints imposed by a culture that seeks to impose a
countervailing direction.
The connections between performance and theater are elucidated as Carroll critically examines the
roots of performance and avant-garde theater in the
writings of Antonin Artaud, who offers a polemic
against literary theater; Julian Beck and Judith Malinas Living Theater; and Joseph Chaikins Open
Theater. As the discussion evolves, it becomes clear
that the theater component Carroll has in mind is
the avant-garde theater of the likes of Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman,
the Bread and Puppet Theater, and Michael Kirbys
structuralist theater. Since these theater works were
happening more or less at the same time as the performance art, it makes sense to view the two as a con-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

tinuation of a shared desire to advance avant-garde
arts.
Perhaps one explanation for the shift from performance to avant-garde theater is that, despite the criticisms of traditional theater, theater in its new forms
proved to be a more challenging medium. It allowed
for exploration of substantive issues in greater depth.
Indeed, the migration of avant-garde artists from
performance to theater enabled the artists to work
within the enemys own camp to engage in subversive activities aimed at unmasking the conventions of
the theater and altering its role in society from a vehicle directed toward entertainment to a vehicle for
critical reflection. Performance artists brought new
freedom that may have influenced changes in theater
itself. For example, action-oriented visual, bodily text
that is central to performance may well have altered
the theaters reliance on word text.
The section on fine art (Chapters 4956) addresses
the role of fine arts or gallery aesthetics in relation
to developments in dance, performance, and theater. Four theoretical essays on the topics, Antiillusionism in Modern and Postmodern Art, A New
Theory of Pictures, Illusions of Postmodernism,
and The Avant Garde and the Problem of Theory,
and three exhibition essays relating to contemporary
painting, photography, and sculpture make up this
part of the book. These essays pose key questions
pertinent to all of the arts addressed in this book. For
example, Carroll finds that theoretical assumptions
behind anti-illusionist and anti-theatrical postmodern dance, performance, and theater as well as the
gallery arts are all based on a critique of illusionism.
Illusionism (the view that art imitates or copies and
thus produces illusions) as perceived by the avantgarde artists of this era was thought to be epistemologically and perhaps even morally inferior because
of its ideological associations.
The assumed corrective was anti-illusionist abstract or reflexive art that exposed the distortions
of truth as found in illusionist art. In a corresponding
argument too complex to enumerate here, Carroll
advances the case for the cognitive significance of
anti-illusionist (abstract, reflexive) images based on
their quality and ingenuity, where they function as
symbols to emblematize metaphors or knowledge.
Thus, it seems that abstract and reflexive art may
contribute to knowledge as ritual observance or expressive enactment without being subject to logical
considerations of truth or falsity (p. 284).
The essay on Illusions of Postmodernism offers
a detailed critique of Hal Fosters poststructuralist
theory, namely, that we have entered into a new era
of postmodernism where the world consists of symbols or codes of representation. In this new world, the
capitalist social order is said to depend on controlling the symbols of cultural representations (p. 315).

Book Reviews
Within this context, artists may function to unmask
through their critique the ideological operations of
this system that serve as the means of social control.
Carroll remains skeptical of Fosters analysis of the
relation of postmodernism and late capitalist society
and raises doubts concerning the effectiveness of a
postmodern cultural critique.
In the essay A New Theory of Pictures, Carroll
offers a critical reading of Norman Brysons theory of
painting. But this discussion seems less cogent to the
main themes of the collection, so given the limited
space available, I will pass over it.
In Chapter 57, Polarizing Postmodernism? Carroll challenges the view that postmodernism is suitable as a designator of a global cultural epoch in
the sense of the enlightenment or modernism. In his
view, postmodern may serve useful purposes as a
style marker in given local artistic practices such as
postmodern dance. But it is not suitable as a label for
a coherent global epoch of history. Postmodernism
lacks both temporal and thematic coherence according to Carroll (pp. 340, 341). Its correspondence with
late capitalism (which began in the 1940s) versus the
beginnings of postmodernism in the 1970s is subject to question. Analytic philosophers of history also
share postmodernisms rejection of meta-narratives.
In short, Carroll concludes that global postmodernism as a historical construct rests on a mistake.
We are not in the requisite temporal position to construct a meta-narrative of the time in which we live.
The essay Avant-garde Art and the Problem
of Theory considers the role of avant-garde artworks in reference to the changing critical frameworks of the late twentieth century (i.e., Greenbergs
modernist essentialism, phenomenology, semiotics,
post-structuralism, and postmodernism). The central question in this essay is whether avant-garde
artworks can contribute to theoretical knowledge
(pp. 324, 325). Carroll opposes the notion, assumed
by some critics, that avant-garde artworks have the
possibility of making contributions to theory. In brief,
he argues that avant-garde works do not perform the
tasks expected of a theory, that is, proposing general claims, sketching systematic relationships, elucidating underlying principles and substantiating said
hypotheses with evidence and argument (p. 324). Instead, he finds that avant-garde artworks are parasitic
on existing art theories. As such, avant-garde artists
are not engaged in theoretical work while creating
art, although they may make references to theories.
Again, the question of the origin of such theories
remains in need of clarification.
At various points throughout the book, Carroll
offers his thoughts on criticism, a subject that he
addressed recently in the book On Criticism, reviewed in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (67:4, 2009: pp. 421423). Two essays devoted

293
to criticism, Chapter 23, Options for Dance Criticism, and Chapter 48, Organic Analysis, together
with the actual reviews written by Carroll, lend further insight into his views on the subject. In his discussion of dance criticism, Carroll introduces three
options: descriptive criticism, alternate cultural criticism, and situational criticism. The aim of descriptive
criticism is to provide information on what happened
in the dance (an account of the critics direct observations concerning the sensuous surfaces of the dance
movement and actions) with as little interpretation as
possible. Carroll finds descriptive criticism dull and
likely based on faulty assumptions about what will
contribute to viewers appreciation. Alternate cultural criticism takes criticism as applied to other arts,
such as applying a Marxist framework applicable to
Brechts theater to Merce Cunninghams dance. Carroll finds this form of criticism is also unlikely to
benefit viewers in their appreciation of dance.
In the chapter on dance criticism, Carrolls preferred approach is situational criticism. The dance
critic educates the uninformed audience by first calling attention to a choice that the choreographer has
made. That choice is then situated among a matrix
of alternative choices and the choice that is actually
made is explained in virtue of the choreographers
purpose (p. 143). In the essay devoted to theater
criticism, Carroll introduces organic criticism. Organic criticism seeks out the coherence among the
functional elements of a performance: text, blocking, lighting, set, and acting. Its aim is to supply the
viewers with a way of looking at the performance.
It is not clear whether the shift from situational
criticism to organic criticism is simply a result of the
shift from dance to theater or a rethinking of situational criticism introduced in the discussion of dance
criticism. In any event, I find the critical methodologies in both problematic. Who, for example, is the audience for such criticism? I doubt that such methoddriven critical discourse would be sufficient to fire
the imagination or interest of most dance audiences.
Nor is it clear how being informed of the choreographers choices and strategies and how she worked
them out would necessarily translate into aesthetic
appreciation for the dance audience. Perhaps this approach to criticism is aimed at an audience of artists
or theorists instead of the public who attends the
performances. In fact, during the period that Carroll
is writing about, the audiences for New York avantgarde performances might well have been composed
mainly of artists, critics, and like-minded individuals
gathered to experience the newest developments.
In respect to criticism, the readers might better
turn to some of Carrolls actual reviews or perhaps to
his more recent book On Criticism. I find especially of
interest some of the individual performance-theater
reviews, for example, those addressed to the dance

294
works of Trisha Brown (pp. 8890), David Gordon
(pp. 8284), Pooh Kaye (p. 100), and performancetheater works of Jim Burton (p. 197), Ping Chong
(p. 227), and Richard Foreman (p. 181), to mention a few examples. Unless I am mistaken, his
more successful reviews depend more on description and interpretation than the proposed structural
analysis dominating Carrolls preferred theoretical
approaches to criticism (situational or organic criticism). Indeed, to the extent that these strategies are
actually applied in the reviews, it is with such lingual adroitness that the bare strategies remain well
hidden.
Carrolls Living in an Art World documents an important moment in the changing landscape of avantgarde arts of the second half of the twentieth century in New York. It will be of value to scholars of
dance theory and history as well as for research into
the other arts. Simultaneously, it offers challenging
theses to aestheticians concerning the main theoretical underpinnings that provide connecting links for
dance, performance art and theater, and fine arts during an important period of avant-garde developments
across the arts. There is much more to ponder and debate than a short review can reveal, given the complexities of the text. For those familiar with Carrolls
extensive writings in aesthetics, it may be of interest
to note that the conclusions offered in the theoretical
essays published here seem consistent with his reformulated theories concerning representation, expression, and narrative found in his book Philosophy of
Art (Routledge, 2002) and throughout his extensive
writings on aesthetics.
On a personal note, the trail of avant-garde arts
that Carroll has documented in this volume is of special interest to this reviewer in that we have often
moved along similar paths with respect to the developments in dance, performance art, avant-garde theater, and the visual arts. The content of this book reflects my similar inclinations toward the avant-garde
arts, often grounded in first-hand knowledge of representative works from this era as producer, curator,
and writer. In the interest of full disclosure, the three
exhibition catalogue essays reprinted here were commissioned for exhibitions that I curated for the Haggerty Museum during my tenure as museum director.
CURTIS L. CARTER
Department of Philosophy
Marquette University
coplan, amy and peter goldie. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford University Press, 2011, xlvii + 382 pp., $99.00 cloth.

What is empathy? In explaining it, one usually contrasts it with its cousin, sympathy. Whereas sympathy

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

involves feeling pity or sorrow for anothers misfortune, empathy, it is often said, requires feeling as
another does. This volume of diverse papers calls
the foregoing conventional wisdom into question and
leaves one with a sense that empathy is not one precise phenomenon but a range of different emotive
responses that fall under a broad banner.
Does empathy require having the exact same
feeling as another? Or is a closely related one sufficient? Must empathy involve negatively valenced
emotions? Can I empathize with you by feeling
happy when you are happy? Do I just need to
imagine what you are feeling? Or do I need to put
myself in your place, imagining that I am feeling your
emotions or, indeed, that I am you? (It is of course
intuitive enough to say, Imagine yourself in my
place. But in trying to think through various ways in
which this suggestion might be made more precise,
the fragile logical and metaphysical coherence of it
all can be dizzying.)
Several of the papers (Amy Coplans and Heather
Battalys especially) take up these taxonomical and
definitional questions about empathy, but wisely hold
off from claiming to offer an exclusive definition. The
general tack of both these and the other papers is
instead to settle on or stipulate a working definition
of empathy and then to ask the philosophical and
psychological questions that surround that particular
notion.
The editors, Amy Coplan and the late Peter
Goldie, have prefaced the book with an extensive and
historically informed introduction. The term empathy, they note, is of fairly recent coinage. Its ancestor

is the German word Einfuhlung,

feeling into, first
used by Robert Vischer in the late nineteenth century
and later developed by Theodor Lipps. The English
word empathy is thanks to Edward Titchener, who
drew on the Greek empatheia in trying to find a sat
isfactory translation of Einfuhlung
to use in a 1909
text of his.
One also gleans from the introduction that the
conventional divide between empathy and sympathy
does not adequately capture an older sense of the
word sympathy. Some historical figures who wrote
on the topic of sympathy, most notably David Hume
and Adam Smith, likely had something much closer
to our notion of empathy in mind, in requiring a degree of emotional congruence between the sympathizer and the object of his or her sympathy.
Coplan and Goldies collection is partly the fruit
of a conference at California State University, Fullerton, where many of the papers were presented and
developed. It ecumenically brings together work by
philosophers, literary and film theorists, legal scholars, and psychologists.
The more empirically focused contributions
to the volume center on understanding the

Book Reviews
neurophysiological underpinnings of empathetic responses. If I see someone slam his hand in a car door,
I will not just feel badly for him. I seem to feel pain in
my hand too. Researchers have used fMRI scanning
and other sorts of testing of neural and electrical
activity in the body to understand this sort of phenomenon. If the subject in the experiment observes
someone being injured in the hand, there is increased
activity not just in the observers brain, but in his hand
as well. So too, the faces of others can be a powerful
stimulant; scientists have found that the same areas
of the brain are activated not just when inhaling disgusting odors oneself, but also simply when observing characteristically disgusted reactions on others
faces.
What might be the neural underpinning for all of
this? Several of the psychologically oriented papers
look to so-called mirror neurons as a potential explanation for how empathy might take root in the human
psyche. Some of the most extensive work has been
done on primates, since it involves the use of depth
electrodes that would be too invasive for research
use in human subjects. The mirror neurons fire not
just when the monkey performs an action but also
when it observes another performing the same action. One of the most interesting scientific findings,
as we learn from Marco Iacobonis paper, is that the
relevant mirror neurons fire not just when the same
action is being performed but when a related action
seeking to achieve the same goal is being performed.
However promising this avenue of research may
be, I was left with the concern that mirror neurons,
though able to account for fairly simple mirroring reactions, may not be able to explain the cognitively
complex reactions that involve understanding anothers perspective by bringing to bear knowledge
about his or her personal history, values, and social
situation.
The more conventionally philosophical portions of
the book attempt one or both of two tasks: attempting
to render precisely a concept of empathy (or cluster
of concepts) and then to ask about the role or value
of this concept in moral, social, political, epistemic,
and aesthetic contexts.
Martin Hoffman charts the important role that
empathy in legal contexts has played, both on the
part of legislators and the part of judges, in galvanizing progressive social change. But many, indeed,
the majority, of the papers question the truism that
empathy is vital to morality and to our understanding of others. Jesse Prinz considers whether empathy
is needed for moral behavior and convincingly draws
attention to the ways that empathy may be overrated.
Happiness, Prinz argues, is just as good a motivator of altruistic conduct as empathy. Citing a case
that has become famous in experimental philosophy,
Prinz notes that when people find a coin in a phone

295
booth, they are overwhelmingly more likely to help
an unfortunate person outside the booth who has
dropped his papers gather them up compared with a
person who has not found a coin. The sight of the hapless person alone apparently leaves many unmoved;
discovering the coin seems to be a more decisive predictor of the altruistic action. Empathy, Prinz argues,
is at the very least a double-edged sword. Even if it
does motivate people to moral action (and it is not
clear how reliably it does), empathetic responses are
prone to various biases that may be detrimental to
proper moral concern.
Just as empathy has, perhaps wrongly, been taken
to be indispensable to moral life, so too has it been
taken to be pivotal in understanding others. Empathy,
it is sometimes said, allows us to know what anothers
experience is like. Derek Matravers raises some important problems for the idea that empathy is a route
to knowledge in this way. If we know, as a propositional matter, what emotion another is experiencing, why are we in an epistemically better position
when we feel the corresponding emotion ourselves?
Although Matravers voices a sensible skepticism on
this score, he does allow that this sharing of feelings
can be helpful in understanding another persons psychology in a more derivative way. When we share the
emotion that another person is feeling, this may come
in tow with feeling certain desires. We will become
attentive to the connection between the emotion and
the desires it incites, and this will give us a richer
perspective on someone elses psychology.
When it comes to aesthetics, many of the books
best insights seem as much to be fruitful outgrowths
of thinking about empathy as direct discussions of
the topic.
In a very interesting piece, Dominic Lopes develops the idea of scene expression in paintings. It is a
sort of expression attributable to the depicted scene
as a whole, as opposed to some character depicted in
it. This can cue the viewer into what emotional response the scene warrants, and thus indirectly impl[y]
an assessment of the scene (p. 132). It can, in particular, allow for a kind of dramatic irony within pictures.
The genre of memento mori is a prime example. The
characters may themselves be oblivious to their fate.
But the picture, in contrast to the carefree emotions
it depicts the characters as having, can express the
transitory nature of life.
We do often share the emotions that characters
in works of art are presented as having. But there

are various ways of having the same emotion. Noel

Carroll distinguishes between two cases that might
be run together: If we are watching a film where a
bomb is threatening to level a city, we may share in
the emotion of the fictional president of the United
States as he worries about the fate of the inhabitants.
But this is not necessarily because we are identifying

296
with him. It could rather be because we are being
attentive to the same features of the (fictional) world
as he is. In other, more traditionally empathetic cases,
by contrast, our emotions are congruent because we
are directly identifying with the perspective of the
protagonist and seeking to get inside his or her psychology.
Graham McFee also treats the issue of just what
is required for this empathetic response to a character. McFee, in contrast to Carroll, requires a match
between the empathizers emotion and the emotion
of the person with whom he or she is empathizing.
Similarly, Susan Feagin is interested in the process of
simulation as a way of understanding the fictional
characters we are engaging with. This sort of simulation, Feagin notes, is broader than empathy, traditionally construed, because it is not simply limited to
negative emotions, such as sadness and despair.
Moving beyond empathy as well, Stephen Davies
uses the notion of emotional contagion to explain
how music can provoke emotions in us correlative
with the emotions expressed in the music, without
these emotions in the music being the object of our
response. The sadness of the music may cause us to
feel sad, but our sadness is not about or for the musics sadness. One wonders, though: Is it really true
that what is expressed in music is never the object of
our emotional response? Davies takes this as a starting point, but it seems to me too sweeping a denial;
our reactions to the most profound pieces of music
are often not simply caused by the music but are warranted by what we take the music to be about. There
is less of an asymmetry with our reactions to people,
situations, and events than it might seem.
With this discussion of emotion, one is naturally
led to questions not just about what the phenomenon
is, but what aesthetic value and significance it has. Although these issues are in the background in many
of the other papers, Gregory Curries contribution
treats these issues most directly and makes a strong
case that empathetic responses are often central to
a rich aesthetic appreciation of works of art. [P]art
of an aesthetically aware response to [Rubenss] Descent from the Cross is a vivid sense of the bodily
strain experienced by the mourners as they lower the
dead Christ (p. 93). Empathy is not just with characters but with the art objects themselves. To cite
a memorable example of Curries, we understand a
Henry Moore sculpture better by imagining it being
squeezed into shape.
The volume closes with a delightful piece by Adam
Morton, probing the difficult issue of whether we can
empathize with those who commit atrocities. Against
the partisans of the view that we always have a strong
form of imaginative resistance in identifying with immoral characters, Morton points out convincing examples, in art and in life, that this is not always so. For,

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

as Morton notes, whenever we are empathizing, we
are being selective. We focus on some details of the
situation to the exclusion of others. Mortons piece
contains a number of vivid vignettes, written with
a novelistic flair. There is sometimes a tendency to
try to mirror scientific precision in moral philosophy,
stripping the example down to the bare bones, with
as few confounding factors as possible. Although this
has its value and place, work like Mortons reminds
us, in thinking about and evaluating our actions as
moral beings, it can be just as important to focus on
the unruly and idiosyncratic details of a particular
agents situation and psychology.
There is much to be learned from this volume by
those working in aesthetics and other fields. In reading it cover to cover, though, I must say I had rather
an overdose of empathy by the end. Ideally, this is a
book for dipping into, guided by ones philosophical
interests and concerns.

ANDREW HUDDLESTON
Exeter College
Oxford University
leddy, thomas. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012, 275 pp., $32.95
paper.

In 1995, Thomas Leddy published in this journal a

curious essay on tidiness (Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities, Vol. 53, pp. 259268). Many aestheticians appraised the article at the time as simply
the foray of an ordinary language philosopher into
new usages. But the essay found other readers, who
saw it as a brilliant up-close examination of what has
come to be known as the aesthetics of everyday life.
Leddys analyses of cleaning and other mundane domestic chores offered a fresh way to look at neglected
parts of our aesthetic lives. Now Leddy has delivered
The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of
Everyday Life. Thanks to Leddys efforts, what may
have once struck readers as a bit odd is now a veritable subdiscipline in aesthetics, though how much of
one remains a hot question for aestheticians.
The Extraordinary in the Ordinary is certain to join
Yuriko Saitos Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2008) as one of the most reliable introductions to the aesthetics of everyday life. Leddys
now classic essay on tidiness is still here, alongside a brilliant bestiary, or compendium, of concepts in everyday aesthetics. The Bestiary contains
some of the most enjoyable short-form aesthetics that
Ive come across since Roland Barthes was indispensible to a grad students bookshelf. It is certain

Book Reviews
to become a useful tool for instructors seeking a
into everyday aesthetics for their
manageable entree
students.
The book has two parts, a discussion of everyday
aesthetics as a domain or field within aesthetics and
a collection of analyses. The theoretical discussions
in the first part of the book take an ambitious position, arguing for the aesthetics of everyday life as
a subdiscipline in aesthetics, alongside the aesthetics
of art and nature. For Leddy, everyday aesthetics is a
new field. It has its own object domain, which has
suffered neglect from our overemphasis on fine art.
From its inception, the argument goes, aesthetics
has been concerned mostly with the experience of
natural beauty and works of fine art. In so doing, it
has missed broad swaths of our aesthetic lives and,
consequently, misconstrued or distorted basic concepts in aesthetics. We might say that the error is
rooted in the iceberg fallacy, whereby the nature
of what we can easily see misleads us about what is
not readily evident. Consequently, our aesthetic lives
are marked by a negative feedback loop whereby
mistaken concepts lead us to ignore or de-emphasize
certain regions of our aesthetic lives, which in turn,
causes them to atrophy, further reducing our attention, and so on. For instance, an emphasis on fine
art overemphasizes the significance of critical or interpretive activity to our overall aesthetic life. The
art that we can easily recognize as art enjoys healthy
amounts of critical attention; therefore art criticism
must be an important part of our aesthetic lives.
This argumentative tack should be familiar to
readers of this journal, as it has been deployed in
the name of all kinds of cultural practices that are
not fine art. Decorative art, folk art, outsider art,
childrens art, craft, design, mass, industrial, or popular art in its many forms (and I have not yet taken on
the global axis) have been wrongly marginalized by
one or another hidebound architectonic of the arts
that presumably dominates and distorts our culture.
Applied to everyday aesthetics, the argument goes
something like this: by missing everyday life, aesthetics has missed not just art forms that happen to be
part of everyday life but also the distinctive nature
of aesthetic experience in everyday life. An examination of the aesthetics of everyday life encourages us
to question how we prioritize and evaluate aesthetic
objects and practices.
I am sympathetic to this argument, although I
think that it overstates the cultural influence of the
architectonic. Notwithstanding the priorities of critics and museums, everydayness does not strike me as
the sort of thing that we can easily marginalize, and
to judge by the commercial prominence of gourmet
food and home furnishings, it is not clear that everyday aesthetics is marginalized at all. Nevertheless,
each critique brings an opportunity to better under-

297
stand the aesthetic possibilities of different parts of
our lives. So, what does everyday aesthetics distinctly
add that would compel philosophers to rejigger their
aesthetic categories? What is it about everydayness
that requires us to rethink aesthetics on its terms?
Leddys definition of everyday aesthetics is extremely broad. He writes that the question of the
everyday aesthetics is determined in part by debates
over the definition of art (p. 22). Instead of everydayness itself, the aesthetics of everyday life is defined in part by negation, i.e., it is applied to objects
that are not art or nature (pp. 2122). Taking the via
negativa, Leddy names flower arranging and weddings among notable everyday aesthetic practices in
his opening pages.
Flower arranging and weddings are fascinating
practices, meriting all sorts of scholarly attention.
This willingness to seize upon unexpected activities
and draw out their aesthetic features makes for one
of the most valuable contributions of work in everyday aesthetics and one of the strong suits of Leddys
approach. At the same time, the capaciousness of the
field presents one of its greatest problems. It is all
fine and good to champion the aesthetic features of a
widening array of objects and practices. However, if
everyday aesthetics is to have meaning and be more
than a catchall for what is not discussed elsewhere, it
is because everydayness itself matters in some way.
In such an exhaustive study, I wished to see more
on everyday life itself. Without a sense of the everyday, it is not clear that everyday aesthetics constitutes a new field of aesthetics. The everyday is not
a vacuous concept. It is not a mere synonym for the
vernacular or ordinary. Far from a catchall, everydayness is fairly restrictive. It pertains to that part of our
lives marked by routines or daily patterns. Efforts
to enhance the aesthetic character of routines like
cooking, dressing, and cleaning are likely to be significantly different from efforts to enhance episodic
activity, like vacations or weddings. It is safe to say
that, for weddings, we tend to expend a lot of energy on a single day. But, in everyday life, the very
art lies is the economy of effort, the easy integration
into daily tasks repeated day in, day out. Although
they may vary widely, everyday aesthetic activities
are structured by the nature of our everyday lives.
And it is these core features of everyday life that aestheticians must address in order to characterize the
aesthetic dimension of everyday life.
The core of everyday life is nearly universal and is
composed of no more than a handful of basic activities. Nearly all of us eat and dress every day.
And, we dwell someplace, organizing and decorating that place. Finally, we go out into the world on a
daily commute or errands. Eating, dressing, dwelling,
and commuting are all activities that nearly all of
us do nearly every day. One might want to add

298
daydreaming. In any case, when these activities have
an aesthetic character, they are properly the subject
of the aesthetics of everyday life.
For an activity to count as everyday, it should be
able to pass the almost everybody every day test.
Nearly everybody eats every day is plausible. But
nearly everyone arranges flowers every day does
not ring true in the contemporary world. Nearly
everybody plans or attends a wedding every day is
not even remotely plausible.
The Extraordinary in the Ordinary lacks a firm
conception of everyday life. Nevertheless, to read
Leddys substantive analyses of everyday aesthetic
qualities is to slowly change how one looks at the
world. To answer theoretical questions about aesthetics of everyday life, we have to take a closer look at
what is going on in the domain of the everyday. If it is
true that the fine art bias weakens our capacity to see
and appreciate non-fine-art activities, then we need
powerful methods for getting beyond the bias. With
his ordinary language approach, Leddy shows us how
we can think about everyday aesthetic life with the
closeness once reserved for fine art. His analyses of
surface qualities and other features of everyday life
reorient perception to help us grasp these practices
and provide a valuable model for future work.

KEVIN MELCHIONNE
Hoff-Barthelson Music School
Scarsdale, New York
puolakka, kalle. Relativism and Intentionalism in
Interpretation: Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011, 191
pp., $60.00 cloth.

Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation is a

welcome addition to the literature. As the title suggests, the book is concerned with the issue of valid
interpretation, and it considers views ranging from
the relativism of Joseph Margolis and Richard Rorty
to the intentionalism of E. D. Hirsch, Jerrold Levin Carroll. In the end, the author, Kalle
son, and Noel
Puolakka, defends a moderate actual intentionalism
as allowing for a kind of pluralism.
Chapter 1, Does Joseph Margoliss Defense of
Relativism Fall into an Impasse? gives a hearing
to relativism, discussing the work of one of relativisms most respected advocates. Puolakka is willing
to grant Margolis the premise that relativism is not
simply self-refuting and cannot be dismissed with the
wave of a hand. After discussing Margoliss defense
of relativism as applied to interpretation in Interpretation Radical, but not Unruly, Puolakka finds relativism to be wanting in his consideration of recent

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

contradictory interpretations of Wagners Ring offered by Roger Scruton in Love in Wagners Ring
and Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht in Finding
and Ending: Reflections on Wagners Ring. Upon assessing both interpretations, Puolakka concludes that
if it is truly possible to provide evidence that can
speak against a given interpretation as strongly as
I think the composition process of The Ring speaks
against Scrutons view of Siegfried, why should we
feel there is a need to validate incompatible interpretations in this case? (p. 24). Puolakka argues that
Margoliss reliance on relativistic logic is unsatisfactory in such cases, nor will the ontological peculiarity
of artworks vindicate such relativism.
Chapter 2, From Humpty Dumpty to James
Joyce: Donald Davidsons Late Philosophy and the
Question of Intention, is the heart of the book and
its most important contribution. As someone not
well versed in Davidsons philosophy of language,
I was eager to learn what he could bring to the
intentionalist debate. Davidson has been employed
in discussions of philosophy and literature and in
discussions of Gadamers hermeneutics, but he has
not been widely discussed in analytic aesthetics concerning the issue of intention. As is well known, in
Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty declares to Alice that by theres glory for you he
means theres a nice knock-down argument for
you. When Alice protests that she couldnt know
that, Humpty Dumpty explains that of course she
couldnt until he tells her. Humpty-Dumptyism has
become the bugbear of intentionalism. Although
Hirsch does not endorse Humpty-Dumptyism, he is
seen as having no way of avoiding it, and so moderate actual intentionalists, such as Carroll, are at
pains to find a nonarbitrary way around HumptyDumptyism.
Why cant words mean whatever we want them to?
Puolakka finds Davidsons philosophy of language
to hold the answer: because according to Davidsons
requirement of interpretability, the intention . . .
has to be reasonable in light of the audiences capacity to understand (p. 49). A speaker or writer
must thus believe that his audience can in principle
comprehend what he means by the words he uses.
So even though James Joyces Ulysses is virtually incomprehensible to most readers, Joyce does supply
clues as to his intention. Contrast this with Humpty
Dumpty, who has no intention of being understood.
As Puolakka recognizes, the Humpty Dumpty example would need to be modified just a little for Humpty
Dumpty to succeed, such that the words do mean
what he wants them to mean. Most simply, for example, through repeated use, Humpty Dumpty could
establish the slang or idiolect convention of meaning
a nice knock-down argument by saying glory.
In Through the Looking-Glass, having said it once

Book Reviews
and established the convention with Alice, Humpty
Dumpty can have a reasonable expectation of being
understood next time.
What Puolakka does not recognizeand he is
in good companyis that Humpty-Dumptyism does
not pose a threat to intentionalism. Humpty Dumpty
does not intend theres glory for you to mean
theres a nice knock-down argument for you. He
wills that meaning. His problem is that one cannot
will a meaning; one must intend it. Inasmuch as intentions are composed in part of beliefs, Humpty
Dumpty does not intend those words to mean what he
says they mean. One of the crucial beliefs involved in
intending meaning is intending the possibility of being understood. Humpty Dumpty desires his words
to have the meaning that he says they have, but he
does not believe they can be understood as having
that meaning by anyone but himself upon their first
utterance. The upshot, I believe, is that Davidson is
appealed to in order to solve a problem that can be
solved more simply in the way that I suggest.
In Chapter 3, A New Look at Hermeneutic Criticisms of Intentionalism, Puolakka provides a clear
and intelligible exposition of Hans-Georg Gadamers
philosophical hermeneutics as articulated in Truth
and Method. The chapter is thus a valuable resource
for analytic philosophers wishing to acquaint themselves with Gadamers work without getting lost in
his dense tome. Hirsch came to prominence as a critic
of Gadamer, but Gadamer and his followers have
largely dismissed Hirsch as off base, claiming that
Hirsch is interested in something different. Specifically, they say that Hirsch is interested in validity,
a normative issue, whereas Gadamer is interested in
phenomenology, a descriptive issue. But, as Puolakka
makes clear, Hirsch cannot be so easily dismissed. Although Gadamer is chiefly concerned with describing
what occurs in interpretation, he is also concerned
with what should occur in interpretation. Gadamer
does not restrict himself to the descriptive realm, and
where he crosses into the normative realm, Hirsch
has a superior theory with his distinction between
meaning and significance. In short, for Hirsch, meaning is what an author intends, whereas significance
names a relationship between that meaning and a
person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable (p. 87). So readers have a plurality
of possible understandings open to them through significance, even though meaning is strictly limited by
authorial intention. In contrast, Gadamer has no effective way of limiting correct interpretations. For
Gadamer, ones interpretive understanding is always
reliant on prejudgments (Vorurteile), but one can and
should strive to employ true prejudgments as dictated
by ones tradition. As Puolakka shows, though, again
by appealing to conflicting contemporary interpretations of Wagners Ring, interpreters in the same

299
tradition can have contradictory interpretations well
grounded in true prejudgments. To settle such disputes, we need to appeal to intention.
Chapter 4, Richard Rortys Pragmatist Challenge
to Intentionalism, is the least interesting part of the
book, largely because Rorty does not have anything
worthwhile or novel to say on the issue of intentionalism. Most significantly, Rorty is concerned about
the role that literature should play in what he calls a
postmetaphysical culture. In such a culture, ethics
cannot be rooted in metaphysics but instead can be
taught and done through literature. Hence, Rorty
cannot allow for the limitations that intentionalism,
as he perceives it, would place on interpretation. Instead, we must understand literary works as best suits
our ethical concerns at any given time and place. Puolakkas response to Rorty is also the main point of his
short Chapter 5, Conclusions: How to Be a Pluralist without Being a Relativist. The response is that
Rorty can have his pluralism through Hirschs significance. Far from shutting down discussion or limiting
imagination, Hirsch intends appeals to significance
to keep literary texts alive and current. I wholeheartedly agree with Puolakka and Hirsch on this score.
Before parting, it would be remiss not to mention
that Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation
does not read as well as it could. The book should
have been better copyedited. There are a number
of infelicities and too many sentences that require
substantial effort to disentangle. The publisher, who
hired the copy editor, and not the author, whose
first language is not English, is to blame. That said,
Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation merits reading and attention for bringing Davidson to
bear on intentionalism and for vindicating Hirsch on
meaning and significance.

WILLIAM IRWIN
Department of Philosophy
Kings College (Pennsylvania)
berleant, arnold. Aesthetics beyond the Arts: New
and Recent Essays. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012,
xi + 222 pp., $99.95 cloth.

Can developing an aesthetic sensibility prevent environmental catastrophes and help ensure the survival
of our species? In his Aesthetics beyond the Arts,
Arnold Berleant argues it can if we accept an environmental aesthetics that acknowledges not only
the human presence embedded in the environment
but also that the environment is the context of experience. In such a way, his environmental aesthetics does not simply move beyond the arts; it moves
continuously with them despite all of the changes

300
and developments that art may take. While Berleant
draws much from his earlier work in regard to his
aesthetic theory, the subject matter is largely applied
aesthetics and ultimately calls for action not only to
enhance the aesthetic qualities of experience but also
to harmonize them with other values found in experience, such as social and economic values. The
book is a collection of self-contained essays written from the past decade and is organized in three
sections.
In the first section, The Arts as Experience,
Berleant uses architecture and music as examples
of environmental art. Both are not to be viewed as
objects, but rather as environments. The main purpose of this section is to introduce the idea that
environment is much more than ones natural surroundings. As environments, architectural structures
are to be not simply visually considered but engaged with by the appreciator. That is, to fully experience the structure, the appreciator aesthetically
engages with the structure by utilizing all her senses
by walking through, in, and around the structure, being aware of somatic changes and so forth. In such
a way, the appreciator is embedded within the architectural structure to such a degree that it is an
environment.
Berleant similarly demonstrates that music is an
environment, especially since the term music does
not denote any object per se. Rather, in order for music to be, it must be experienced. Such an experience
does not merely involve listening, but participation
from the appreciator. Much like in the aesthetic engagement discussed with appreciating architecture,
the appreciator participates in and is embedded in
the music, and this participatory situation is not only
a musical experience but also an environmental experience.
Ultimately, what is experienced is not a particular artwork per se but the environment, a situation
in which the experiencer is embedded. Experience
has a perceptual basis, and so aesthetics is the proper
inquiry into experience. Since experience is a participatory situation, it is shaped by the participants,
who bring their own perspectives. Every experience
is unique because it is structured by each persons perspectives. Berleant uses the metaphor of lenses to get
his point across. Experience is not only filtered but
also structured through a variety of cultural, social,
historical, and similar lenses. In such a way, Berleant
is committed to a generality and not to either subjectivity or universality. Since experience is uniquely
shaped by bundles of perspective carried by each
individual, Berleant is not committed to the notion
that aesthetic judgment is universal. Furthermore,
since experienceor the environmentis participatory, thus social, Berleant is not committed to the
notion that judgment is purely subjective. Although

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

people may share, for example, backgrounds and culture, such commonalities provide a basis for general
agreement.
Another consequence is that Berleant avoids the
subjectobject, or rather the appreciatorartwork,
dualism by his insistence on aesthetic engagement.
Such engagement is an experiential situation where
a Deweyan transaction takes place, thereby not only
obfuscating the distinction between subject and object, but where both participate and merge together
in experience. Berleant describes by way of a perceptual field, or what he calls more specifically an
aesthetic field, which he goes into a bit further in the
next section.
The second section, Environmental Aesthetics,
comprises much of the book, in which Berleant obviously puts forward an environmental aesthetics by
discussing largely environment and experience, landscape, and, to a lesser extent, beauty. Given his conception of environment, Berleant avoids the question
of whether nature can be appreciated in the same
manner as the arts because an aesthetic appreciation, by way of aesthetic engagement, can be applied
to the environment. In a sense, the environment encompasses art and nature, but more appropriately we
are limited to the environment, which provides the
context of experience, and anything within that context is a constituent that participates in the unity of
experience.
Since it strives for continuity with experience, an
environmental aesthetics is flexible compared to a
Kantian aesthetics. Aside from aesthetic value, the
environment is intertwined with other values such
as economical, practical, and ethical, so it cannot be
viewed autonomously like art. Hence, an environmental aesthetics has no need for the criteria of disinterestedness. For Berleant, it is important to recall
that along with sensation, our backgrounds, culture,
interests, and assumptions filter and structure experience. Such flexibility enables environmental aesthetics to keep up with the many challenges that artists
pose to conventionality. So, rather than focusing on
whether the object is nature or art, environmental
aesthetics examines aesthetic experience and value
in environment (p. 57).
Given what Berleant has discussed, what use is
there to appreciating the environment or landscape?
Additionally, if we have aesthetic experiences with
the environment, of what use is art? At this point, it
seems that Berleant uses landscape and environment interchangeably, although the former refers to
specific landscapes and the latter is a general term.
Berleant later discusses in some detail urban and
forest landscapes as two specific landscapes. At any
rate, Berleant argues that while appreciation requires
practice, learning, and development, an appreciation
for art will enable one to develop or hone an aesthetic

Book Reviews
appreciation for the environment and vice versa. This
leads one to have a richer, more fulfilling aesthetic
experience of either art or, in general, the environment.
It is quite apparent from his emphasis on experience that Berleant is not an absolutist or a subjectivist
regarding judgments of aesthetic value. While he appreciates the logical coherence of rationalistic theories of categorizing the universe, he proclaims that
unlike his notion of an aesthetic field, they do not
explain or account for empirical data. It is important
to remember that experience is perceptual. It may
seem that the aesthetic field has a foot in each camp,
but rather it recognizes continuity between them. The
aesthetic field is useful in explaining aesthetic experience because it identifies in experience four factors:
the appreciative, the focused, the creative, and the
performative. Not only does the aesthetic field take
into account personal, cultural, and societal lenses,
but also those biological factors that structure our
experience. It is inappropriate to say that beauty is
wholly dependent on the qualities of a particular object; rather, what is deemed beautiful is based upon
the factors that structure experience where the human is not only embedded but also an active participant. As Berleant succinctly puts it, beauty is the
positive aesthetic designation of a particular aesthetic
field (p. 89).
The third section, Implications, addresses some
of the effects of an environmental aesthetics. Apparent from his rejection of disinterestedness, Berleant
holds Kantian aesthetics accountable for making the
discipline of aesthetics acquiescent to rationalistic
preconceptions, such as subjectobject dualism. Instead, he argues that not only is Deweys aesthetics
directly related to the notion of aesthetic field but
also that it is a development upon Deweys aesthetics.
With this apparent rejection of dualism, Berleant
holds that dualistic thinking led to the worlds current
environmental and social problems. Perhaps only by
developing an aesthetic sensibility that acknowledges
human presence as not only participating in the environment but also embedded in it is there a chance for
human survival. Developing such a sensibility calls
not for another technological revolution but for a
philosophical one (pp. 176177). Abandoning dualism and embracing philosophical inquiry guided by
aesthetics will reveal that experience is a participatory and social activity, where everyone is entitled
to participate equally since the condition for experience, which is mere presence, is shared or common
to all.
For newcomers to Berleants work like me, the
book perhaps best serves as an introduction with
a ready overview of his thoughts on aesthetics. For
those already acquainted with his works, the book

301
serves as a well-founded example of applied aesthetics. However, those wishing for the detailed argumentation of his aesthetic theories would be served
best by referring to his earlier works, which he cites
throughout the book.
At any rate, it seems that Berleant holds aesthetic
values as fundamental to ethical ones. In the beginning, he speculates that aesthetic values may provide a foundation of intrinsic value for the ethical
value in environment . . . ethical values could be
considered to derive from aesthetic ones (p. 43).
Yet later he seems to affirm that all human experience consists in or derives from sensory perception,
the aesthetic domain is implicated in the fundamental
ethical goal of fulfilling experience (p. 113). It seems
that Berleant holds aesthetics to be foundational to
ethics, and this correlates with Charles S. Peirces
categorization of his normative sciences; aesthetics is
fundamental to ethics, and aesthetics and ethics are
fundamental to logic. Hence, for Peirce, ethics necessarily has aesthetic valueotherwise ethical action
would not be appealing in any sense. The correlation
with Peirce is reasonable since Berleants own theory
is a development from Deweys aesthetics.
A minor difficulty of reading the book is that
Berleant seems rather repetitive, especially when explaining such notions as aesthetic engagement, the
aesthetic field, or environment. This is because the essays are self-contained, which he fully acknowledges.
Yet, even if the essays were not self-contained, given
the current environmental problems, what Berleant
is saying is important enough to warrant repeating.

CHARLES KLAYMAN
Department of Philosophy
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
maynard, john. Literary Intention, Literary Interpretation, and Readers. Buffalo, NY: Broadview, 2009,
448 pp., $36.95 paper.

Literary theory seems perennially haunted by the

question of intention in interpretation. Even as writers on literature have lately moved out of direct discussion of the role of authorial intention to what has
been called the New Historicism, the visage of intentionalism appears zombie-like in the mirror. John
Maynards project in this book is not necessarily to
undermine the interest or importance of recent directions taken by literary theorists, but it is, in large part,
to resurrect the role and inescapability of interpretation itself and in the process to do away with that
intentionalist visage in the mirror. He insists that it is
impossible even to engage in the historicist program
in the absence of interpretation of texts and, hence,

302
that the activity of interpretation precedes the doing
of any proper history at all.
In all of this, Maynards central proclaimed focus
is to return attention to the reader and with it the
grand range of possible readings of texts. But, to do
so, he believes he must first loosen the residual death
grip of authorial intention on interpretation. So, after citing Barthes famous quote, The birth of the
reader must be requited by the death of the author,
Maynard goes on a killing spree. The substance of
the second section of this four-section book, a section that runs to 150 pages of text, with another 125
pages of footnotes (roughly seventy-five percent of
the entire book), is an extended search and destroy
mission. It first takes on practical difficulties associated with attributions of authorial intention and
then turns to various popular but disguised versions
of intentionalist doctrine and their associated problems.
He begins with a knowledgeable discussion of the
relevance of the different kinds of intentionality identified by philosophers. Thus, Maynard distinguishes
his target literary intentionality from other philosophical notions of intentionality (viz., aboutness and
general planned activity). Not at all inclined to deny
that language possesses the characteristic of aboutness or that there is such a thing as human motivation and motivated activity, Maynard is narrowly
concerned with a literary intentionalism that connects the particular meaning of a text to its author,
ties a parcel of language to the user [of that bit of
language] as personal, special . . . as a kind of fingerprint (p. 23) and thence to retain an intimacy with
the person as opposed to the words (p. 24).
Maynard is careful not to deny some interest in
such things as private writing, biographical details of
and by the author, and facts about contemporaneous
culture. Interpretations suggested by those things,
however, must always be tested by how well they
fit the work. Maynards stated goal is only to deprivilege the mental/biographical/cultural/historical
act in interpreting the text and not to altogether eliminate its consideration. He is here, and throughout
the book, what might be called a liberal inclusivist
regarding potential interpretations, at least insofar
as he can consistently maintain that view.
The fundamental intentionalist malady rightly
identified by Maynard is that, characteristically, intentionalist interpreters hide behind a merely presumptive appeal to authorial intention. That is, there
is a tendency to claim the aura of special authors authority as validating their particular interpretation,
when it actually most often appears that their interpretive process went the other way aroundfirst a
preferred reading, then an inference to an intention.
(One can see such a process most vividly in certain
constitutional arguments.) That tendency is to be de-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

cried as only an avoidance of reasoning rather than a
reasoned grounding for interpretation.
Maynard provides a pretty thorough survey of the
now standard problems faced by both intentionalist
theory and practice. I shall not closely rehearse those
here, beyond saying that he points at the difficulties of getting inside the head of the author, noting
the fact that even personal testimony amounts only
to another text itself in need of interpretation and
that the act of writing is a messy and mysterious phenomenon, one not at all likely to be the product of any
clear intention. Further, writers intentions are often
divided, reflecting as he says the multi-voicedness
of our natures (p. 52). And all of us recognize that,
even when we have clear intentions, our reach can exceed our grasp, and we simply get our words wrong.
Alternatively, we find ourselves pleasantly surprised
by what we write and come to grasp something anew
or even something we never knew. So there are multiple ways, both for good or ill, to say what we did not
mean.
This same section takes up interpretive issues
raised by everything from the presence of textual
ambiguity to the identifying of irony and deciphering
of allegories and parodies. With respect to the first
of these, Maynard points both to the fact that ambiguity is quite often a source of richness in a text and
to the additional potential that any ambiguity may
have been deliberate. Since that latter possibility always remains an option, no appeal to intention can
serve its needed disambiguating role. As Maynard
also notes, an author might have the single intention
to be ambiguous or double (and conflicting) intentions to which she gives no priority. Regrettably, Maynard handles irony less perspicaciously by ultimately
suggesting that whether a text is ironic may be in
the eye of the beholder (p. 122). Irony can indeed
present a challenge, but it can well be argued that
its proper attribution remains determinable through
careful reading for its textual and contextual signs.
Maynard similarly goes after the idea of culturally
determined meaning. While one can easily see that
texts and their meanings can provide insight into the
conditions of life at a historical period, the converse
fails to hold. Here his previous arguments against
biographical intentionalism find direct parallels in
refuting the attempts at historical validation of interpretation. Maynard does a nice job pointing out that
culture is both likely to be less coherent and easily
a good deal more complex than the subjective processes of an individual author; cultural values are as
diverse as the multiple intentions of any author, its
languages as distinct as her thoughts, and its potential
to produce revolutionary threads as common as her
neuroses and originality. He concludes that [w]e are
no mere puppets of culture, strings to be pulled or
computer figures programmed for certain responses

Book Reviews
and behaviors (p. 87) and that in the end, we will
trust the text . . . not the (old or new) historian
(p. 88).
For all the reasons given, Maynard is skeptical of
the possibility of outside sources recovering authorial intent and, if they did, that it would be of any use.
On the other hand, the option of seeking authorial
intention within the text itself has been lately proposed in various ways by other theorists, and he also
addresses this strategy. But it seems to me to be clear
that such a move by intentionalists, unadorned, is no
less than complete surrender to anti-intentionalism.
Having slain intentionalism and its historical fellow travelers, Maynard comes finally to his positive
proposal: the birth of the reader. The solution to the
problem of interpretation, the establishment of the
meaning of texts, is to be left to readers. Maynard
does not provide much space for his proposal, limiting it to only the last fifty or so pages of the book,
most all of which is spent criticizing classic reader
response theory. There he dismisses Stanley Fish and
others in that school for their faintheartedness. Almost all, though most notably Fish, seek in the end to
reign in the reader, to make certain that the readers
meaning conforms to their own scholarly readings,
and to set up their own strategies and practices as
prescriptive protocols for others to follow. In contrast, Maynard wants to reopen the windows that
those theorists once unlocked but then shut.
Early in this review, I noted Maynards broad inclusivist inclinations. Only by opening ourselves to
readings that arise among any and all readers can
we come to know the full richness of the possibilities of the text. Perhaps, but how then to sort these
possibilities, these readings? On the one hand, it is
clear that Maynard does not wish to claim they are
all equal in value but, on the other, he says the interpretive decision is the readers. At one point he
suggests a majority of us (p. 131) will make a determination, but that will never do, especially without
further specifying the designated us. Maynard asserts the possibility of a real meaning to the text and
the existence of well-argued interpretations (p. 162).
But it is not clear how either claim is compatible with
the liberality of his inclusivism.
From the very first section, Maynard declared that
he shares Richard Rortys faith . . . in . . . the emergence of better opinion while acknowledging that
[r]eal readers (like professional ones) can harbor
great stupidities (p. 14). Suffering stupidities is certainly worrisome, but the alternative strikes Maynard
as far worse: the stultification that results from
setting up protocols of how to read and interpret.
Perhaps. But, I would add the word arbitrary to
protocols, since it is not so clear that well-justified
protocols ought really to be avoided at all. My guess
is that Maynard thinks (or thinks he thinks) that jus-

303
tification when it comes to protocols is a vain hope,
and hence he sees no need to qualify the term in
that fashion. But what has he been doing all along
but implying a justification for a certain protocol,
namely, text-based interpretation, interpretation that
does not tilt arbitrarily in favor of intentionalist leanings or discard the absolute centrality of fitting the
meaning to the work in the best manner possible?
If we readers take seriously the hint in Maynard of
an idea of best fit, then a way out might be pointed.
But unless we intrepidly add a characterization of
value, a characterization of relevant argumentation,
a characterization of the elements of the text that the
interpretation must fit, the idea of best fit cannot yet
take us very far down the road. And the absence of
real meanings and justified interpretations may just
reawaken the intentionalist zombie behind us.
Finally, I cannot resist noting the odd format of
Maynards book. Very nearly half of the book consists of footnotes, many individual notes extending
for several pages. The main text, including appendices, covers only a little over 200 pages of this substantial book. It is worth considering what motivated
this sort of division of the text. Maynard suggests that
it is to reflect a division between his two audiences,
all readers and the narrower class identified as
professional readers. Thus, the main text is aimed
to be accessible to a general readership, and the footnotes to address the deeper issues and what Maynard
labels heavier hitters. Unfortunately, many general
readers will find that the main text itself has far too
many incomplete or obscure references to be properly accessible, and thus it fails to fulfill Maynards
goal of incit(ing) their empowerment against the
professional readers of our time (p. 1). That said,
the footnotes are often very good and very important,
and Maynard there displays a broad and often deep
familiarity with scholarship in areas of philosophy
as well as other disciplines not often touched on by
literary theorists. In fact, philosopheraestheticians
may wish to spend most of their time just studying
the footnotes.

DANIEL O. NATHAN
Department of Philosophy
Texas Tech University
nussbaum, charles o. The Musical Representation:
Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion. MIT Press, 2007,
xii + 388 pp., $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Charles O. Nussbaums The Musical Representation

(henceforth TMR) is an ambitious contribution to
the philosophy of music, aiming to provide nothing less than an account of the emergence of the

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musical experience from the audition of organized
tones (p. xi). Nussbaums theory, which emphasizes
the embodied nature of the musical experience, is
developed within a naturalistic framework, drawing
on the results of empirical research in anthropology,
cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and generative linguistics. The resulting volume is not for the
faint of heart: while Nussbaums synthesis of his material is impressive and his presentation generally
clear, readers not conversant in each body of literature will find TMR daunting. This will be particularly true for readers whose primary frame of
reference is analytic philosophy of music. Though
Nussbaum certainly engages with this tradition, considering Stephen Daviess work on musical meaning,
Jerrold Levinson and Peter Kivys debate concerning
the musical work, and various accounts of musical expression, these discussions are brief and do not supply
the primary point of departure for his investigations.
That role is played by the scientific literature, supplemented by work in metaphysics, the philosophy
of mind, and the philosophy of language. The literature on nonconceptual content, George Lakoff and
Mark Johnsons account of metaphor, and Ruth Millikans notion of a reproductively established family
all receive significant attention in TMR and are far
more central to Nussbaums project than the canonical texts and debates of the analytic philosophy of
music.
The book comprises six chapters, framed by a
brief introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 is preliminary, giving an account of Nussbaums perspective (naturalism), his methodology (reflective equilibrium), and the object of his concern (Western
tonal art music since 1650, henceforth WTAM).
Nussbaums account of musical experience begins
in the second chapter and runs through Chapters 3
and 5; these chapters discuss musical representation,
meaning, and expression, respectively. The remaining
chapters are ancillary. Chapter 4 develops an account
of the musical work in terms of an analogy with biological species and has little to do with Nussbaums
main argument. Chapter 6, on the other hand, attempts to build upon the discussions in Chapters 2,
3, and 5 in order to explain why many listeners have
found religious significance in the experience of listening to WTAM. While there is much of interest
in both of these chapters, I focus in what follows on
the heart of Nussbaums argument, that is, the theory
of musical experience presented in the second, third,
and fifth chapters of his book.
In Chapter 2, Nussbaum argues that three kinds
of representation are operative in the musical experience. Primary among these is the external representation that Nussbaum calls the musical surface, an auditory field structured in terms of time and pitch that
is produced and used (p. 82) by composers to carry

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

information. The musical surface is, for Nussbaum,
an example of a Gibsonian affordance: the field presented contains invariant elements that open up possibilities for (virtual) actions on the part of auditors.
While Nussbaum needs to specify these elements and
also to explain how a nonconceptual structure such
as the musical surface can permit the individuation
and reidentification of objects necessary for such
invariants, he postpones these issues until Chapter
5, focusing instead on connecting musical experience
and embodiment, the very connection that initially
made the notion of an affordance appealing.
Nussbaum draws this connection by positing two
sets of internal representations that mediate between
the information contained in the musical surface and
virtual actions that are thereby possible. The first
of these representations is the musical plan, which
delineates the structure of the musical surface. The
plan is specified by Lerdahl and Jackendoffs generative grammar for tonal music, with special emphasis placed on time-span and prolongation reductions.
These representations, which mark the internal organization of musical phrases and the relative harmonic
tension of musical tones, respectively, are structurally
analogous to the motor control hierarchies and tasklevel action plans involved in action. In virtue of this
similarity, the listener creates a second internal representation, a mental model of an environment in
which the actions suggested by the musical plan can
be simulated. These two sets of internal representations interact dialectically: initial versions of the
musical plan are updated in accordance with the actions simulated in the represented environment until
a final version of the musical plan is constructed.
Understanding a piece of music is just tokening this
musical plan.
While the second chapter establishes the kinds of
representation involved in the musical experience
and their operations, Chapter 3 offers an account
of the normative principles governing the interpretation of the musical surface. Nussbaum argues that
the musical surface is a nonpropositional symbolic
utterance that has meaning in virtue of a systematic and intentional exploitation of the natural elements of the representation. (As Nussbaum notes,
this makes musical meaning an instance of Stephen
Daviess meaning C.) Qua symbol, the use of the
musical surface is governed by a combination of
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic rules that can in
principle be explicitly stated by the user (p. 89)
and are specified as follows. The syntax of musical
representation is captured by Lerdahl and Jackendoffs preference rules, well-formedness rules, and the
hierarchical representations subsumed thereby. The
semantics of musical representation is indirectly exemplificational. This exemplification is indirect because it is not the musical surface itself but the

Book Reviews
internal representations deriving from the auditors
efforts to parse that surface that exemplify the relevant properties; it can occur in two ways. First, the
musical models constructed on the basis of the musical plan can share properties with semantic fields.
For example, music can exemplify the inferential relations that hold between different semantic fields
and thus model movements of thought (p. 117). In
such cases, Nussbaum says that music possesses extramusical form. Second, the musical plan can exemplify
conceptual content. Here Nussbaum relies on Lakoff
and Johnsons theory of metaphor, which grounds
all conceptual content, and ultimately metaphorical
content, in bodily experience. Since bodily experience can model conceptual content and action plans
are recipes for bodily performances, it follows that
the musical structures enjoining the simulation of
action can also model conceptual content. Finally,
the musical surface is governed by pragmatic principles insofar as it is a pushmipullyu representation,
both describing a state of affairs and commanding its
audience to perform certain actions, namely, to construct mental models in accordance with the musical
plan.
After his excursus on the musical work, Nussbaum returns to his account of musical experience
in Chapter 5. Like other pushmipullyu representations, the musical surface possesses an emotional
salience (p. 189) for auditors; Nussbaum advances
an arousalist theory of musical expression to account
for this aspect of musical experience. According to
Nussbaum, WTAM arouses emotions in two ways.
The first is what Nussbaum calls the musical touch
effect (p. 189). Psychological research suggests that
the timbral aspects of the musical surface, which derive from the musicians touch, are processed before
any cognition of the music and as a mediated expression of this touch. Insofar as the musician conforms
to the norms governing the performance of WTAM,
that is, even and unforced sound production, the listener feels that she has been touched in the same
fashion, the intimacy of which arouses joy. Unlike
the musical touch effect, the second way that music
arouses emotions relies directly upon the cognitivist
theory developed earlier in the book. Nussbaums
idea is simple: in simulating actions within the musical environment, one experiences the emotions that
would be aroused by the performance of those actions. Thus, Strausss Till Eugenspiegel is appropriately labeled mischievous because, in enjoining us
to simulate typically mischievous behavior, it arouses
the related emotions. Because this arousal relies upon
cognition, this is a weak arousalist theory.
There is much to like about TMR. Nussbaums
emphasis on embodiment and musical performance
are salutary in a subfield that is often tempted by intellectualism and to substitute score-reading for en-

305
gagement with music as a sounding phenomenon.
Moreover, his deployment of the resources of the
various disciplines he draws on is often ingenious. To
cite only one example, in his second chapter, Nussbaum provides a clever, naturalistic argument for our
perception of music as high or low based upon the
evolutionary homology between the lateral line of
fish and the organ of Corti in the human ear. Finally,
Nussbaum has a gift for seeing the musically salient
aspects of work that is not fundamentally concerned
with music, Chapter 6s discussion of the relationship between the existential horror of contingency
and the musical experience being a prime instance
of such insight. Despite these indubitable strengths,
questions can be raised about Nussbaums work in
TMR; I consider two clusters of them in the space
remaining.
The first set of questions concerns Nussbaums
method. In the introductory chapter, Nussbaum
claims that the method of the book is reflective equilibrium, that is, that the theory of musical experience offered will be developed by moving back and
forth between the theory and our judgments about
our musical experiences. Much of the theory presented is developed in precisely this fashion; Nussbaums evolutionary explanation of the spatiality of
musical perception provides but one example. Likewise, Nussbaums emphasis on the embodied nature
of musical experience enables him to explain why
a surprising piece of music retains the capacity to
surprise on repeated listenings. While the repeated,
passive audition of something may be boring, actually (or virtually) doing something repeatedly, as is
required to extract the information contained in the
musical plan, need not be boring: the interest lies
in the doing (p. 216). Whatever one might make of
Nussbaums substantive claims here, it is clear that in
both cases, he is adjusting his theory to accord with
our musical judgments. Unfortunately, he does not
always follow the dictates of reflective equilibrium in
this fashion. While these examples show that Nussbaum adjusts his theory in response to our general
judgments about musical experience (for example,
that it is spatial, that it engenders surprise), he rarely
works from specific cases that might put pressure on
his theory.
The second set of questions centers on the notion
of musical experience under consideration. First of
all, Nussbaums conception of experience is ambiguous. In the main argument of the book, presented
in Chapters 2, 3, and 5, Nussbaum is primarily concerned with the understanding experience of music.
Our off-line simulation of actions enjoined by musical structure is the condition of retrieving the musical plan embodied by the work; to understand a
piece is simply to token the same plan as the composer and performer. Elsewhere, as in the Chapter 6

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discussion of the religious aspects of musical experience, Nussbaum seems concerned with elements of
the musical experience that require no understanding at all. This has the effect of making TMR read, at
times, like two different books.
Moreover, Nussbaums description of musical experience is sometimes questionable. On his view, the
religious nature of musical experience hinges upon
our experience of the necessity of note-to-note musical progression. It is not clear that musical listeners
do experience such necessity, however. An awareness
of the fallibility, contingency, and conventionality of
many compositional decisions is sufficient to shake
the requisite sense of inevitability. Nussbaum could
evade this kind of difficulty by broadening the base
of musical experience from which he works. He often seems to rely on his own, admittedly formidable,
musical experience in developing his claims, rarely

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

citing competing accounts. The omission of any discussion of Adornos work is particularly lamentable
in this regard, as there are interesting affinities between his thought and Nussbaums, not least of which
is a shared emphasis on the embodied nature of musical understanding.
Despite these concerns and despite the imposing
technicality of TMR, Nussbaums work is a significant contribution to the philosophy of music that
more than rewards the effort it demands. Readers
looking for a novel approach to traditional problems
in the philosophy of music would do well to seek it
out.

THOMAS J. MULHERIN
Department of Philosophy
Georgetown University