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KEITH LEHRER

REPRESENTATION IN AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Representation in the is a creative process of reconfiguring a subject, real or imagined, to yield some original content or inten- tional . The first question about representation is – what is the question about representation? Gombrich (1972), Wollheim (1980), Goodman (1968), Walton (1990), and Lopes (1996), have offered us diverse theories of representation in the visual arts. They all contain interesting ideas and insights, but the diversity of theories suggests that they may be asking and answering different questions. Moreover, that should not surprise us at all, for the painter, as well as other artists have diverse goals, and one of those goals is to change our conception of representation, to modify and challenge the conventions and constraints of representation. Lopes (1996), for example, suggests that the fundamental form of representation is depiction, demotic picturing, that would enable one to recognize and identify the object depicted. We are indebted to Lopes for this important proposal, but demotic picturing may be opposed to artistic representation. The artist may start with the external subject as the stimulus to find some , some feeling or emotion, some insight or idea, and so reconfigure and repattern what he or she has seen into something that has some new internal meaning or content. The stimulus for a painting, a model, for example, need not be depicted or be what the painting is about The content of a painting is one thing, and the model is something else. A painter is sometimes indifferent to producing a demotic picture of the model or subject, which has caused difficulties between famous portrait painters and those they portrayed, when what interests the artist is the reconfiguration or the reinterpretation of the model or subject. The painter may want to create a painting that has a content that did not exist prior to the painting. Put it another way, the painter attempts to interpret the subject, that is, to configure the subject in a new way that will result in a new meaning, a new content, rather

Philosophical Studies 117: 1–14, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 2 KEITH LEHRER than a demotic picture. Madame Pompadour thought that Boucher did not capture her likeness well, but he represented her the way she wanted to be represented. The content of his of her configured her, as she desired, though he was not good at demotic representation of her. The questions concerning artistic representation that concern me are these. What is the content of the painting? What is it for a painting to be about something? How does a painting represent what the painting is about, its content? Aboutness is an intentional notion, and so what the painting is about is an intentional object. It is like an object of thought, and this accords well with the views of Gombrich (1972) and Walton (1990). If a painter paints from a model, the painting need not be about model. The great paintings of the nude done from models are not about hired help. They are about the object represented in the painting, which is the content of the painting. The object may be an object or content, a god or goddess, who has no external existence. Suppose I paint Finger Rock Canyon in the desert. The content of my painting, what it is about, is in the painting, not in the desert. The canyon in the desert was the model or stimulus but not the content. Does my painting denote Finger Rock Canyon? It does not. The words “Finger Rock Canyon” denote it. Here is my sorting out of the matter. I distinguish what a painting is about, the intentional object or content, from what, if anything the painting denotes. I also distinguish the content from the external subject or model that serves as the stimulus for the painting. A painting need not denote the model, and the model need not be the content of the painting. Many paintings do not denote anything, though some, a painting whose function is the identification of some subject, an identification painting, may denote the subject. Some paintings may not be about anything for anybody. They are content- less paintings. Maybe some Rothko paintings are among those, and I shall return to this. That is the exception, however. We are inveterate interpreters secreting content when visually stimulated. At any rate, I am concerned with paintings that are about something. What I seek is to explain is how a painting represents its content, what it is about. I am not sure this is a pellucid objective, but it must do here. We need to distinguish representation from description. Descrip- tions have content as well as representations. The content of painting REPRESENTATION IN PAINTING AND CONSCIOUSNESS 3 differs, however, from the content of a description in the way in which the content of the painting is related to the painting. The content of the painting is specific to the particular painting in the way that the content of description is not. There may be many descriptions, different descriptions of the same descriptive content. One description may be exchangeable with another with respect to the same content. But the content of painting is not exchange- able with the content of another painting. We could add that the content of the painting is ineffable in the sense that no description of the painting, however detailed, would represent the content of the painting in the way that the painting does. The painting has a kind of representational opacity with respect to its content. In the case of the description, on the other hand, there is a kind of transparency of representation. Once you grasp the content of the description, you may ignore features of the description, the exact letters used, for example, when contemplating the content. The transparency of description is part of the explanation for why proofreading is diffi- cult. You read the description to find the content of it, and, once found, the features of the description may be ignored because of their transparency. The features of the painting are more directly related to the content of the painting than the features of the description are to the content of the description. The content of the painting is seen in the painting, not through the painting. The sensory experience caused by seeing the painting is part of the content. You can only tell what the content of the painting is like by seeing the painting. Goodman (1968), noting the difference between representation and description, has insisted upon the importance of the analog character of visual representation. I do not disagree that the analogue character is important, but I do not believe that this explains the particularity of content. A robust notion of analogue representation might have the consequence that any feature of the sensory experience of the painting could be relevant to the representation. That takes us a long way toward an account of the particularity of content, but not all the way. The reason is that analogue character, however detailed, admits of replication. The analogue replica would have the same content if the representation were analogue. The analogue character is a general character and does not capture the particularity of the artistic 4 KEITH LEHRER representation of content. The Cézanne painting of the mountain, Saint Victoire, gives you a representation of the mountain in the particular manner in which the painting is experienced. The differ- ence between the representation of content in terms of the particular sensory experience of the painting and in an analogue representation is like the difference between a most determinate character and a particular. They are not the same. In addition to the particularity of content, there is something conceptual in the content of the painting. We look at the painting and conceive of the content. Consider a painting, those of Jack Yeats illustrate the point very well, where there is something like a gestalt phenomenon that occurs in the perception of the painting. There is something you do not see at first, and then you do see it. When you do see, for example, two men in the painting, though at first you did not, the content of the painting is different for you. At first you lack a conception of the content which you later perceive. It would, therefore, be a mistake to infer from the nonexchangeability, ineffability, opacity, specificity and particularity of the content of the painting that the representation of the content is not concep- tual. It is. We conceive of the content of the painting by viewing it. The content of the painting is conceptual, and that means that it is also general. But the generality of the content cannot exhaust what the content is like because the content is also particular. These points have been observed by other estheticians. Blocker (1979), for example, insisted on the combined particularity and generality of the content. My goal is to offer an explanation of the role of the particular character of what the painting is like in the conception of the generality of content. We might formulate the problem of explanation as a paradox. On one hand, the content of the painting is particular. On the other hand, the content of the painting is something you conceive of. So it is something conceptual. If it is conceptual, then it is general. Concepts involve generalizing. The problem is to explain how the content can be both particular and general. The solution I want to develop is taken from Goodman (1968), though indirectly from Sellars (1963), and more remotely, Hume (1739) and Reid (1785). It uses the notion of exemplarization. The painting gives rise to an exemplar used to represent the content. Goodman (1968) uses the example of REPRESENTATION IN PAINTING AND CONSCIOUSNESS 5 singing a song and using the singing as an exemplar to represent a class of singings or the song. I shall say that the heard song is exemplarized. My objective is not to deny the views of others, though my view may be incompatible with theirs on some points, but to advance a theory of artistic representation that connects consciousness with visual representation and explains the emotional content of such representation while distinguishing such representa- tion from description. Let me begin with an example, which may seem unrelated, from Frank Jackson (1982) that concerns monochromatic Mary. Mary, a scientific genius, knows from descriptive representation all that there is to know about the physical universe but has lived in a monochromatic room all her life and has never seen color up until now. She leaves the room and sees something red. After Mary sees something red, she knows what the color red is like in a new way. My account (1997) of this is that she exemplarizes the sensory experience, and it becomes representational. So she has a new way of representing the color, by using the particular to stand for a class, feature or property, depending on how you want to do ontology concerning qualities. Exemplarization by Mary requires attention to the particular aspect of the experience, the color, and a generalization of it so that the particular becomes general. Now let us consider the painting. My view is that a sensory experience arising from the painting is exemplarized to obtain a conception of the content. Attending to the painting yields gener- alizing, which is a functional state that enables the observer to conceive of what the painting is about. The observer, whether the artist or another, might not be capable of describing the functional state. The functional state is the source of the meaning or content of the painting. The content of a painting, my self-portrait, for example, is a man, the artist, but what the content is like, though it might be described, is something a person can only know by seeing the painting. The sensory experience arising from attending to the painting is part of the functional state yielding the content. Moreover, the functional state that yields the content also contains the sensory state. The exemplarized sensory state loops back onto itself as a constituent of the functional state yielding the content of 6 KEITH LEHRER the painting. Sensory experience is coiled in a circle at the heart of content. I have spoken of the exemplarization of the sensory experience. I should like to offer some reflections, however preliminary and unsatisfactory, of exactly what is being exemplarized. Consider the sensory surface of the painting, that is, the illuminated surface. Is that what is exemplarized? A consequence of this view is that it is the actual painting that is part of the content of the painting and not merely the vehicle of representation. Here are some further consequences. First, the content of the painting is destroyed with the destruction of the painting. There is something plausible in the idea that what the painting represents is destroyed along with the destruction of the painting. A similar content might exist in a photo or copy but it would not be the same. The similar copy does not represent the exact content of the painting, the sunflowers in Vase With Fourteen Sunflowers by Van Gogh, for example, in exactly the same way that the Van Gogh represented them in the painting, though the representation is similar. In fact, each Van Gogh painting of the sunflowers represents them in a different if similar way and, therefore, has a different content. This account of exemplarization of the illuminated surface would explain the opacity or nonexchange- ability of the painting in representation. But it cannot be quite right for a simple reason. The functional state that yields the content is a state in the mind of the observer, and the exemplarized item is a constituent of that mental state. The illuminated surface is not a state in the mind of the observer or a constituent of such a state. Now consider the sensory experience of the illuminated surface yielding sensory qualia of color and shape. The experience of the qualia is in the mind of the observer. Moreover, these qualia are spontaneously enriched in the phenomenology of experience. In Yeats’ painting referred to above, there is a kind of phenomeno- logical gestalt shift. Before the shift, one sees colors and shapes, and after the shift one sees the face of man. It would be a mistake to construe this as just adding a conception of the face to the sensory experience of colors and shapes. For a person can be told that there is a face in the painting, even be told where it is, and not see it. The phenomenological shift requires more than adding conception to qualia. It requires a change in the qualia to yield the new phenome- REPRESENTATION IN PAINTING AND CONSCIOUSNESS 7 nology. What is exemplarized then? The sensory phenomenology of the illuminated sensory surface is what is exemplarized. Consider a spectator, who sees what the content of the painting is like, and tells another what the painting is like. The listener will know something about the content. The listener might even be able to identify the painting from the description. However, the listener will not know what the painting is like until she sees it in just the way that Mary does not know what red is like until she sees the color. Could the other know what the painting is about, what the content is, before seeing the painting? There is something she would not know about what the content is like before seeing the painting. The reason is that the sensory experience she lacks is part of the functional state yielding the content. The phenomenology of what it is like to experience the painting is a constituent of the content. You show the person the painting and say, “It is the House of Seven Gables like that.” The demonstrative calls attention to the sensory state exemplarized to yield the content. You can say the content is the House of Seven Gables and go on with the description, but there is something more to the content of the painting than the description supplies. There is knowing what the object represented is like in the painting. It is similar to the case of Mary. The sensory state, the phenomenology, is partly constitutive of the content. The content of the painting of the House of Seven Gables for a person is constituted in part by what the painting is like, by the phenomenology of the sensory state the person exemplarizes in his or her experience of the painting. The painting represents its content to the spectator in terms of the phenomenology of the qualia it presents to him or her. It is the House of Seven Gable like that to him or her. What that way is, what it is like, you can only know from the phenomenology of the qualia. A computational zombie, even an analogue zombie, would not know something Mary knows when she looks at the painting about what it is like. It is part of the content of the painting that it is like that. How we exemplarize is going to be influenced by our cognitive schemata. Some of them will be conventional, and that is the insight of Gombrich (1972). However, some of our cognitive architecture is innate, and some of our innate visual responses will be encapsu- lated. The stick looks bent in water before and after the shaping of visual representation by convention. Convention did not produce 8 KEITH LEHRER those responses and cannot override them. Such responses support Wollheim’s (l980) view about the primacy of psychology in visual representation. So, it is not entirely conventional, contra Gombrich (l972), and it is not entirely arbitrary, contra Goodman (1968). There are encapsulated visual responses that are partly constitutive of what the content is like because of their influence on how we exemplarize. The phenomenology is part and parcel of the content as we generalize from it. Gombrich is surely right that how we ordinarily generalize and what we see in the picture is influenced by convention, by conven- tional schemata. However, it is the purpose of the avant-garde artist and many of the most creative artists, to break through the conventional way of seeing and of seeing paintings. Convention challenging is the name of the game. So, how are we to explain what we see in a painting? What we see is an aggregation of vectors, some social, some innate and some that are novel, as we exemplarize the sensory phenomenology of qualia presented to us. One of the advantages of the account is that it explains the expression of feeling and emotion in the content of the painting. The first point is that there is an encapsulated relationship between sensory states and emotional ones. The frown evokes an innate crying response from the baby. As adults, we do not cry when frowned at. We may understand that no offense is intended, but an attenuated connection with the phenomenology of the sensory state remains. The frown feels unpleasant, as the stick looks bent no matter what our understanding of them might tell us. Whatever the complete psychological story of the connection between sensory states and emotions, the connection is there. It is not always just learned association. In some cases, the sensory state is connected with the feelings or emotions in an encapsulated way innately. So when we exemplarize the sensory state and see the content in the painting, the emotion connected with the sensory state becomes part of the content of painting. The latter contains the sensory state as part of it, part of the functional state yielding the content. There may be other emotions evoked or associated with the functional state, but those encapsulated in the sensory state inevitably constitute part of the content. Such emotional content, as Wollheim (1980) insisted, is part of the content of the sensory state. REPRESENTATION IN PAINTING AND CONSCIOUSNESS 9

What is relationship of the painting to the subject or model, the House of Seven Gables or Finger Rock Canyon, other than the model or subject being the causal stimulus for creation? We may have a new conception of the House of Seven Gables in Salem from the exemplarization of the phenomenology of the sensory state arising from the painting in Tucson. The exemplarization yields the content of the painting. Now that content of the painting can influ- ence how we perceive the external model or subject. We can see the House of Seven Gables in Salem as the object in the painting. The reconfiguration of the House of Seven Gables in the painting can have the result that we see the House of Seven Gables in Salem as it was painted. Thus, the resemblance between the house in the painting in Tucson and the actual house in Salem may be the result of the new conception, the new object, created by and in the painting. Resemblance is resemblance in some respect, under some conception. So the resemblance noticed may be due to our concep- tion of the object in the painting in Tucson rather than being due solely to the house in Salem. The house is the stimulus, but there is, as a result of the representation in the painting, a new way of seeing the house. The house in the painting can give the house in Salem a new content. A bit paradoxically put, I might ask myself what the house represents and answer the question by painting the painting. So the house comes to represent for me what is represented in the painting, the content of the painting. The content is a new concep- tion connected to a sensory state, and the new conception can be a conception of the house in Salem that I perceive. There is a causal stimulus, the house, which gives rise to the content of the painting. Then, in a representational loop, the house comes to have the content of the painting. By a kind of illusion credited to artistic reconfiguration we think the house in the painting resembles the house in Salem because the house in Salem is seen as the house in the painting. If a person asks whether the similarity to the house in Salem explains the content of the painting, or whether the content of the painting explains the similarity to the house in Salem, the answer is that both are explained by the way in which we exemplarize the phenomenology of the painting to obtain our conception and content of them. 10 KEITH LEHRER

The question that arises, and it is an important question about the mind and the way it functions, is what determines how we generalize. Innate and encapsulated processes are part of the story. Convention and context are also part of the story. Peggy Brand is repainting some famous paintings of women with a hole where the face should be. Looking at her paintings will tell us something about the context and conventions surrounding a take on women. It is clear that convention and context matter. Consider medieval paintings of Christ. Do they resemble Jesus of Nazareth? Once we exemplarize those pictures we have a conception of Jesus of Nazareth. We would try to see him as we conceive of him from those paintings. Political, religious and social influences act upon us when we generalize. That is one reason the avant-garde artist challenges our preconceptions. He or she seeks to reconfigure. And that is why ordinary, or as Lopes (1996) calls it, demotic representation differs from artistic representation. Artistic representation is reconfigured and reconfiguring representation. It adds something new to life and reconfigures our conceptions. Notice as an advantage of the foregoing account of representa- tion in terms of exemplarization that a continuity between realistic representation and abstract representation results naturally from the account. We may be more influenced by innate and encapsulated processes in the way in which we exemplarize realistic paintings, while other factors of convention and context may play a greater role in the way we exemplarize abstract painting. We may require more education to understand the content of the abstract painting. But, as Gombrich (1972) rightly insists, there is some convention exerting an influence, when, as Wollheim (1980) tells us, we see something in the painting. As the painting gets more abstract and comes to lack images of identifiable objects, we still exemplarize what we see and see the content of the painting. We can exemplarize a square and the color of it to appreciate the content of Albers. It is not enough to look at it in some cases. The person may not understand it because they do not know how to generalize. The functional state of gener- alizing fails and the person has no clear conception of what they are seeing. The clear conception may be of colors in space, colors in motion and feelings in colors. Any of this may result from the way in which the person exemplarizes the . Some paintings REPRESENTATION IN PAINTING AND CONSCIOUSNESS 11 may attempt to defy generalization, but once you see a few, they are exemplarized as readily as the painting of a house. Consider the paintings of Mondrian or sculptures of Nevelson. A person, who is puzzled at first, gets it, and they exemplarize the reconfigured space and spatial relations. I do not claim that every artist has reconfiguration of concep- tion as an intention. Some may be interested primarily in blocking configuration and conception as a teacher of Zen meditation might seek to do. I find the strength of Rothko to be that it so successfully blocks conception. As I look, I am lost in the paradoxical empti- ness and fullness of the sensory experience. To be sure, I come away with a conception of a Rothko painting, but he succeeds in blocking the usual conceptual responses as successfully as any artist does. Blocking conception is a remarkable achievement, and that it is remarkable calls attention to the fact that, unlike most art, even abstract art, concept blocking art it is not about anything. Rothko is a master content blocker. Even so, many viewers will find that the paintings are about something, perhaps about the flight from content. Paradoxically, for some of us, the content of the Rothko painting is the flight from content into the void. A question is pressing upon us. The account proposed, if that is not too fancy a way to describe my suggestion, has taken us as far as the content of a painting for a person who exemplarizes his or her phenomenology of the painting. But don’t we want to say that some may misunderstand the painting, fail to grasp the content represented in the painting? Surely we do. We may regard some as more expert in noting what the content of the painting is while others are less competent. One may incompetently exemplarize phenome- nology of a painting. An idiosyncratic exemplarization will yield a content for the exemplarizing individual, but he or she may get it wrong in some way. Someone who sees Picasso’s Quernica as a painting of a happy country fair has gotten the content wrong. So we still lack a complete account of the content of the painting. What is the role of the exemplarization by the artist in the content of the painting? Consider the artist, the painter, who, if he is like me, is a process painter. He paints and exemplarizes as he goes. He is a spectator, a special one, perhaps, of his or her own work as it develops. To be sure, I have some idea of what I am trying 12 KEITH LEHRER to paint, but the content of the painting for the painter, me in this case, may emerge in the process of painting. Collingwood (1938) in articulating his expressive theory noted that the esthetic object may come to exist as it is expressed in the medium. Creation is surely often like that; the content represented is conceived by artist, the painter, for example, in the medium as he paints. He looks and exemplarizes as he goes, and there is an interaction on the part of the artist between creation and exemplarization. Of course, artists differ in how they create. I knew a painter, Nora, who painted a painting starting at the left hand lower corner and gradually filled the canvas. Perhaps she had a clear conception of what she was going to paint and then just proceeded to put it on canvas. But most of us do not create it all in our heads first and then just put it in the medium as we have conceived it. The artist exemplarizes the work as and even after he or she produces it, and, therefore, his initial intentions are not the determinant of the content. Should we say that the content of the finished painting is the content the artist exemplarizes from the phenomenology of it? From my own experience, and the remarks of other artists, Matisse most especially, who remarked that his patroness understood his art better than he did, I would say that is too simple an account. The more adequate account would give great weight to the content that the artist intends and exemplarizes in his or her painting, but others may notice what he or she did not, and thereby offer some correction or amelioration of the exemplarization of the artist. This is especially obvious when, as in the case of Matisse, the artist, himself or herself, accedes to another and gives the interpretation, the meaning or the content, found or attributed by another, greater weight than the artist gives to his own interpretation of the content of the work. The preceding suggests that the content of the work of art depends on what weight people give to other people as interpreters of the work of art, to the way in which they exemplarize. The distinc- tion between individual content and genuine content is, in effect, a distinction between individual content and social content. The latter results from the way in which individuals evaluate other individuals as interpreters of the content of the work. A close analogy is the meaning of a word a person uses. What the person thinks his words means is a salient but not decisive consideration. We can and do REPRESENTATION IN PAINTING AND CONSCIOUSNESS 13 distinguish between how a person interprets the meaning of the word and the meaning of the word, between speaker meaning and social meaning. The social meaning or content of a painting or a word is determined by the weight individuals in the social group give to other members of the group. The speaker or the artist is salient. But some people who speak well interpret what they mean poorly just as some artists who paint well interpret the content of what they paint badly. They might agree. Speaking and painting are one set of talents, interpreting meaning and content are another. A speaker can fail to say what she intends, and a painter can fail to paint what she intends. Some interesting speeches and paintings result from such failures. Something influences the external product in a way that was not supervised by reflective thought. Painting and poetry are often like that, even at their best. So what is the social content? It is a kind of fictional social aggregation, a weighted average of exemplariza- tion and generalization, where the weights are the aggregation of weights people give to each other as interpreters of art. Such an account of meaning is developed in detail by Lehrer and Lehrer (1995). So which comes first the individual exemplarization or the social aggregation? A Gombrichian might contend that the individual exemplarization is determined by the socially determined cognitive schemata in the mind of the individual, and there is a point to this. But it neglects the impact of individual creativity, especially that of the artist, on the schemata of interpretation. The schemata of interpretation are determined by the minds of individuals shaped by schemata that they modify to challenge convention and introduce novelty. Artistic creativity and freedom of expression challenge convention, however subtle and unacknowledged the challenge might be. The flux of social schemata and the challenge of them by the individual exemplarizations interact. Each is involved in the explanation of the other. It is like the problem of the chicken in the egg. What comes first? Our reply, Lehrer and Lehrer (1995), is they fly and fry together. 14 KEITH LEHRER

REFERENCES

Bender, J.W. and Blocker, H.G. (1993): Contemporary Philosophy of Art, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Blocker, H.G. (1979): Philosophy of Art, New York: Scribners. Collingwood, R.G. (1938): Principles of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gombrich, E.H. (Ernst Hans) (1972): Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2nd edn., Princeton, NJ: Published for Bollingen Foundation by Princeton University Press. Goodman, N. (1968): of Art: An Approach to a Theory of , Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Hume, D. (1739): Hume’s Treatise, London: John Noon. Jackson, F. (1982): ‘Epiphenomenal Qualities’, Philosophical Quarterly 32, 127– 136. Lehrer, A. and Lehrer, K. (1995): ‘Fields, Networks and Vectors’, in F.R. Palmer (ed.), Grammar and Meaning: Essays in honor of Sir John Lyons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehrer, K. (1997): Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge and Autonomy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lopes, D. (1996): Understanding Pictures, Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press. Reid, T. (1785): Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Edinburgh. Sellars, W. (1963): Science, Perception and Reality, New York: Humanities Press. Walton, K.L. (1990): Mimesis as Make-Believe: on the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wollheim, R. (1980): Art and Its Objects: with Six Supplementary Essays, 2nd edn., Cambridge/New York; Cambridge University Press.

Department of Philosophy University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 USA E-mail: [email protected]