Entropy: A New World View by Jeremy Rifkin, Ted Howard (review)

Books 147 investigation. While acknowledging many basic differences between Marx’s and Wittgenstein’sviews,he seizesupon their shared tendencyto charcterize social phenomena in terms of events in a complexcontext of institutions and practices. Thus, for example, a gesture of submission is what it is, and has its significance,only within a set of institutions and practices. To try to identify it only with a set of physical events as objectivism does, only with some set of inner mental events of the gesturer as subjectivism does, is to fail to grasp its real character, function and significance. Adequate explanations of social phenomena must refernot onlyto discretephysicaland mental events,but also to the institutions and social structures whichconstitute theframework within which such events acquire their significance. The critical scholar will find several shortcomings in Rubinstein’s discussion. In a work of this length he could not, and did not, document the extent to which contemporary theory and research in the social sciences depends upon either objectivism or subjectivism as he has described them; nor could he offer adequate substantiation for his interpretation of the views of Marx and Wittgenstein, about both of whom there is much scholarly disagreement. Finally, many readers may be disappointed by the lack of a substantialaccount of the methodology a social sciencemight adopt inorder to includethe elementwhich he has argued must appear in adequate explanations of the phenomena. Nonetheless, his position is nicelypresented and argued, plausible, and worth careful consideration. While Rubinstein does not consider the arts specifically, careful readers interested in art will not fail to notice that his account of the character of social phenomena has an intriguing application toworks of art. That is, it suggeststhat a work of art is not to be characterized or explained solely in terms of its physical properties, or in terms of ‘mental’ events or experiencesof the artist or the viewer.Instead, a work of art must be apprehended as a complex of events, objects and experienceswhich gain their significanceagainst the rich background of institutions and practices in which it appears. Readers interested in this view of the significance of works of art may find much worth contemplating in Rubinstein’s work. Shockof the New. Robert Hughes. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1981.423 pp., illus. $29.95.Reviewed by Peter Lipman-Wulf* Robert Hughes says in his foreword: “I am not a philosopher, but a journalist, who has the good luck never to be bored by his subject.” But this is an understatement, because Hughes tries hard, and sometimes very successfully,to go beyond the merejournalistic approach, eager to show the deeper meaning of the development of modem art. He also succeeds in unravelling some of the relationships between social and environmental conditions and the interpretation of the different art forms. The importance of the book lies surely in the fact that it isbased upon the second-largest TV enterprise (after Kenneth Clark’s Civilisdon) that renders art criticism in a series of instalments. I first saw Hughes’ eight instalments of The Shock of the New and then read the book, which closely follows the television presentation. However, the book is more detailed and richer in its approach and comes off much better than the limited medium of the screen allows. There, the whole presentation relies too much on the narrator, his personality and appearance, in a variety of landscape settings before the camera. After the rather refined eleganceof Kenneth Clark, Hughes, inhisgenial,but slightlydisheveled manner, is less convincing. The use of an ever-present narrator creates doubts about the necessary continuation of this format for documentaries. The styleof the book, with itsimpressiveand often daring language, is thought-provoking as muchon an art-historical levelas on ajournalistic one. In each of the looselyorganized chapters,the author triestogo into the depth of different problems, and thesometimesartificial grouping is held together through the courageous, if also sometimes one-sided, appreciation of the different phenomena. The writer’s extensive background knowledge reaches, in its concentration, encyclopedic dimensions about the historical and cultural development of our century. This wealth of information issensiblylinked with the particular art forms developing at a given time. The author’s enthusiasm is often revealed in his descriptions and analyses...