HTA 13.4; Dewey; Art as Experience [1934]; Chapters 1-3

Abstract

This episode is part four of four of the lecture series [HTA 13] on John Dewey's Art as Experience [1934], Chapters 1-3, of which the entire text's fourteen chapters were delivered in some format as a ten-lecture series in 1931 at Harvard for the honorary William James lecture series, with the assigned topic being the philosophy of art.

Guiding Questions

Ch. 3, Having an Experience

• What are the common patterns of every experience?

  • Doing and undergoing, not in alternation, but in simultaneous relationship, happening always at the same time and in the same action under different perspectives. Equal but opposite reactions, i.e., Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The lifting of a stone with my arm and with my hand is both an intentional doing as well as a responsive undergoing whereby I also feel the weight of the stone on my musculature, the data from which informs the forthcoming action, as a responsive mutual fine-tuning. In this way, artworks determine themselves by communicating to the artist the missing feedback of their achievement, the expectation of their arising re-creation.

• What gives meaning?

  • Meaning is perceived through the unified perception of cause and effect, especially as relations between mean and consequence or between method and outcome via creative, practical intention — i.e., being able to perceive the effect with the cause, simultaneously, as part of the same process, as one flowing, continuing act. Undergoing determines further doing insofar as the feedback informs the success of my actions and intentions through a given means. The excess of doing (e.g., a flurry of activity; mechanical; overstimulated) and the excess of undergoing (i.e., of receptivity; e.g., a flitting, a sipping) hinder one’s being given meaning or coming to perceive it for themselves. Further, Dewey’s instrumentalist view of knowledge and meaning are akin to Aristotelian and utilitarian means-ends reasoning.

• What kind of intelligence does the artist require?

  • Bonus question: Does listening to jazz piano make you more intelligent?

    • Listening to complexities in different sense-languages does increase mental activity and promote increasingly nuanced and complex thought-forms. Listening contours and shapes our perceptual and cognitive mental pathways.

  • Dynamic intelligence because they have to be able to engage with the world and interpret the qualitative, sensory aspects with sensitivity and causal reasoning (means-ends reasoning; doing and undergoing in relation, in alternation, and simultaneously). Awareness of the relations between what was just done and what is about to be done; of the relations between work and impact on the audience, which requires active listening; of the relations between process and product. See below.

  • Perception of the Relationships of Qualities (but what kinds of relationships?)

    • Process to Product (in process; envisioning the product, especially how the vision of the product changes in response to a present perception of whether the work is affecting the desired feeling)

    • Parts to Whole (in the product, how each part contributes to the whole, i.e., to the anticipated consequent end-result experience of the work of art)

    • Parts to Parts (how the qualities work together, whether auditory, visual, or tactile)

    • Artwork to Audience-Perceiver (how it will impact; between the independent product of the work of art and the experience of the viewer and/or artist)

    • Moment to Moment (technique; how methods achieve certain results; from one undergoing [of the brush on the hand and on the canvas] to the next doing)

    • Moment to Envisioned Whole (how a technique achieves the end)

    • Adaptation of the Whole Envisaged (in response to the present; see above, under Process to Product)

    • Technical Experimentation (to find new techniques to achieve a vision)

    • Historical Differentiations (how different histories in an audience will perceive a work)

    • Cause and Effect (Method toward an Intentional Purpose)

    • Doing and Undergoing (common elements of all experiences)

• How are the production and the perception of artworks interwoven?

  • Artistic (e.g., doing; production) vs. Esthetic (e.g., undergoing; perception)

  • Artistic Production (Undergoing Artist; Active-Receptivity):

    • The artist refines the production process in response to a present esthetic experience, and esthetic experience [of the work of art] is imbued in the work of art only insofar as the artist had an esthetic experience while making it.

    • The artist consciously, esthetically perceives the work of art in its production, to allow the perception of qualities to determine their own outcomes by informing the artist of whether such qualities reinforce esthetic experience through the work of art. Insofar as the artist has an esthetic experience in the process of production, they imbue the esthetic experience into the work (through a present perception of the work’s power), thereby allowing the work to produce esthetic experience in other viewers.

    • Artistic production by an artist is a doing, but it is also an undergoing insofar as the artist must refine their work in production through an active, ongoing process of esthetic perception. Insofar as they have an esthetic experience while making it, the work of art is more likely to produce such an esthetic experience in the viewer.

    • The measure of the value of what is prepared is found in consumption (cook and customer). The artist constantly takes up and furthers esthetic perception in the process of production, allowing to ensure esthetic effect and imbue the work with a capacity for esthetic experience. The viewer has esthetic experience insofar as the artist did while making it.

    • The measure of excellence in execution is determined by the consumer, viewer, or audience of the work.

    • “The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.”

  • Esthetic Perception (Doing Audience; Receptive-Activity): See below, How is [esthetic] perception also a form of doing-making (through surrender)?

• How do artworks make themselves?

  • “The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.”

  • Production is regulated by the qualities of the product as perceived.

  • Until the artist is satisfied in perception with what she is doing, she continues shaping and reshaping. The making comes to an end when its result is experienced as good, in direct perception.

  • “In as far as the development of an experience is controlled through reference to these immediately felt relations of order and fulfillment, that experience becomes dominantly esthetic in nature.”

  • “He makes it in a way so regulated by the series of perceptions that sum up the serial acts of making, that the bowl is marked by enduring grace and charm.”

  • Present esthetic perception of the work redirects what the artist does; the materials, in tandem and interaction with the artist, refine and determine the final product. Qualities are perceived either as belonging together or as jarring, as reinforcing or as interfering, and such perceptions determine making. Perception as gestation of a work of art is a form of organization, which in turn creates a further depth for a piece of art, possibly creating an entirely new piece.

  • Artworks make themselves by informing the artist of how the vision should change. They reshape what the artist intends. If they do not, then the artist is not undergoing esthetic perception in the act of production-doing-making, and the product will not produce esthetic experience in other viewers.

  • Recognition (reducing the present to the past for some other purpose) vs. perception (letting the present redirect the past; the past surging forth and enriching the consummate present moment [of esthetic perception which always involves consummation])

• What three traits are required of the artist?

  • Relations of Qualities (i.e., Causal Intelligence; Doings and Undergoings)

  • Skillful action; technique; mechanical prowess; powers of execution; dexterity in production (i.e., Excellent Doing)

  • Acuity and sensitivity of perception; unusual sensitivity to the qualities of things (i.e., Excellent Undergoing)

• How is perception also a form of doing-making (through surrender)?

  • “Taking in” requires activities comparable to those of the creator.

  • Receptivity is not passivity, but rather a series of responsive acts, otherwise there is not perception (past  [informs and empowers] present; can change directions) but recognition (present  [reduced to] past; narrow-minded; traditionalist; ritualistic; proceduralist; dogmatic).

  • “Recognition is perception arrested before it has the chance to develop freely.”

  • “An ordering of the elements of the whole[…]”

  • “Recognition is too easy to arouse vivid consciousness [no friction].”

  • “Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive, not a withholding of energy. To steep ourselves in a subject-matter we have first to plunge into it.”

  • “We must summon energy and pitch it at a responsive key in order to take in.”

  • “For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience.”

  • “Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art.”

  • Perception makes the present with the materials of the past. Perception is always interpretive. Experiences and perceptions change over time, even from the same person. Years later, you experience your hometown or familiar favorites (e.g., comfort foods; memorable songs; etc.) differently, strangely. (Present, unique, coherent) perceptions are the consummation-fulfillment of the original making, as fresh makings. The viewer creates a specific construction of the work of art unique to them.

  • Active yielding of the self to meet the demands of a present perception (effortful listening).

  • There is a different listening-making the first time a piece of music is heard (imperfectly) versus a later, more detailed perception when the same piece of music is heard and understood more perfectly.

  • The viewer must recreate the artwork in their own experience (learning).

  • Summon energies to match the demands of what you’re perceiving, pitch it at a responsive key. Receptivity is not passivity.

• How do emotions permeate their material occasions?

  • An act of perception proceeds by emotional waves that extend serially throughout the entire organism. If emotion does not permeate the material perceptions or is not thought of by proceeding in this way, then the aroused emotion is either:

    • Preliminary (developing; still in germ)

    • Pathological (delusional; not grounded or anchored in reality)

  • Experiences are material emotions, emotional material.

  • Superimposed permeation (pathological; recognition — reducing a present environment to a previously felt, predetermined emotion) vs. grounded perception of emotion (present perception redirects action, knowing, vision, feeling, emotion, quality).

• Which characteristics of experience are dominant in esthetic experience?

  • Esthetic experience emphasizes those characteristics which are subterranean, subordinate, architectonically proto-structural, and subdued in other common (i.e., intellectual and practical) experiences — namely the characteristics which make all experiences coherent and integral, integrated, consummate, and unified. The end, the terminus, is significant not by itself, but as the integration of parts. It has no other existence. Discretion is emphasized. Esthetic experience involves “the conversion of resistance and tensions into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close.”

  • Esthetic experience has worth only in itself; it does not produce a conclusion that can be acted upon for further work. The overlooked, subterranean elements which harmonize all integral experiences are emphasized in dominantly, distinctively esthetic experiences, controlling its production.

  • “The end, the terminus, is significant not by itself but as the integration of the parts.”

  • “That which distinguishes an experience as esthetic is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversion, into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close.”

  • Esthetic experience emphasizes those characteristics which are ignored, beneath the surface of all other experiences, but which are necessary for any integral experience, in themselves, for their own sake; the end, the terminus, is significant only as the integration of its parts.

• What do James’s birds’ flights and perchings symbolize or represent?

  • Growth involves nested back-and-forth rhythms, undulating within each other, always inchoate and developing in germ and out of germ.

  • Flights-Perchings

  • Doing-Undergoing

  • Making-Perceiving

  • Activity-Rest (Accruing Energy)

  • Accumulation-Consolidation

  • Intaking-Outgivings

  • Outgivings-Intakings

  • Producing-Incubating

  • Expressing-Impressing

  • Always in each other at every moment, in oscillating-alternating rhythms.

• When (i.e., under what conditions) is an object peculiarly and dominantly esthetic?

  • An object is peculiarly and dominantly esthetic “when the factors that determine anything which can be called an experience are lifted high above the threshold of perception and are made manifest for their own sake,” becoming relevant and beneficial to all live creatures.