Looking at the Limits of Autonomy: Response

He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. . . . D istant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

James Joyce, "The Dead" (1914)

Like so many of our most heartfelt processes of introspection, Gabriel Conroy's comes to a touchingly premature conclusion. He moves too quickly to resolve the mystery of his absorbed wife into a fantasy of aesthetic creation that allows him to avoid further reflection. But we don't have to stop. We might ask, using Gabriel's own tellingly infelicitous formulation: What is a man looking at a woman a symbol of? What is a man imagining a painting of a woman a symbol of? What is feeling, even, a symbol of, especially feeling that has to route itself through the imagination of a work of art?

Gabriel's mystified ruminations came to mind, along with the questions with which I have supplemented them, as I thought of the important methodological and historical issues raised by the three papers above. To say "I feel" will only express something of interest in response to a concern about numbness. Similarly, barring a prior worry about the faculties at issue, "I see" and "I know" are most usefully accompanied by some particular object of sight or knowledge. "I feel pain" (even "I feel your pain"), "I feel happy," "I feel sad"—an object of perception is evidently necessary for perception to take place. And yet, as Pamela Fletcher reminds us, the fact of having sensations or emotions has served at times to identify oneself as a kind of person—one who has feelings or who is not indifferent to feelings—rather than as a person experiencing something in particular. Feeling without specific content, knowing without knowledge, "seeing" by looking away: Fletcher, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, and Simon Goldhill bring us to a richer understanding of what it might mean to know, or even—in several senses related both to knowing and looking at art—to see.

It is difficult for the contemporary student of the nineteenth-century culture of art to engage a constellation of issues that we are not generally comfortable putting in relation, and that nevertheless may be most interesting when viewed together, precisely because of the challenges they offer to still current ideas of aesthetic autonomy. Although the evocation of emotion by the work of art and the material experience of the art object have both been recurrent topics of interest to artists themselves, these phenomena proved difficult to integrate into conceptual accounts of the significance of the aesthetic dominant in the twentieth century. The emotions have been consistently neglected for reasons Fletcher suggests at the opening and close of her piece. When the material nature of the experience of art has arisen as a topic of interest in criticism, it is paradoxically largely in relation to a fantasy of lost origins that tends away from the object as in itself it is experienced. The material is evoked as the basis for an unearned nostalgia for a lost realm rather than as part of any recognition of the actual condition of the work of art as it is.

It is a well-worn truism that the experience of what we call art today is quite different from what it was in earlier eras. Art comes to us in photographs in books or on computer screens, sometimes color, sometimes black and white, generally glossy, sometimes matte. Or it comes to us projected on a wall as we sit in the dark, its sequence controlled by the lecturer at the front of the room. Comparison, contrast, same artist, different artist, detail, large view: we may understand this kind of experience as a constraint or as a liberation. The page, the screen, the projector—all of these can magnify and shrink elements in ways that actual sight does not allow. But none can reproduce the experience of the texture of the work in itself, or of the kinds of contexts...