Art, Intention, and the Constitutive “I”

Can the search for intention lead one closer to a work of art? The answer, which is, “yes, so long as you know where to look,” is, of course, widely contested. New Critics, influentially, thought that following the crumbs of intention lured one away from the work, into the obscuring wood of biography and document. Much post-Kantian critique, meanwhile, has tried to bypass or weaken the main premise supporting an intentionalist view of art, which is that humans are the producers of meanings. Thus, according to Adorno, the great achievement of late Beethoven was the discovery of a negative subjectivity: “Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work.”¹ Other instances of critique modify agency not through reversing it but by contesting exclusive human ownership of it. To that end, one critic proposes the idea of the “nonhuman actor” in order “to circumvent, as far as possible, polarities of subject and object, … [and] to place people, animals, texts, and things on the same ontological footing and to acknowledge their interdependence.”² Finally, neostructuralism rejects the possibility of an intending self altogether by trading intentions, meanings, and reasons for signs, codes, and discourses.

For all of their undeniable differences, these various schools take as settled law the priority of language over meaning. If nothing else, such a leveling move ends up producing an unusual syntax. Adorno cannot bring himself to say “Beethoven acts” but instead that, “in Beethoven’s music, subjectivity . . . acts not so much by breaking through form, as rather, more fundamentally, by creating it” (565)—an expression that, along with being elliptical, is also tautological, since creating forms is what subjects do. A phrase like “language speaks itself” cannot avoid that reflexive pronoun.³ Foucault’s question “what is an author?” is intelligible (just as is the question “what is a human being?”), but not “what wrote that?”, even as performative utterance. People write books, not author-concepts.

Some efforts to defeat intention produce ethical along with cognitive strains. The case of modernist art is especially illustrative. In the absence of nature and convention as guarantors that a work is credible, or even that it counts as art at all, what is left to secure assent is intention, even sincerity. Further to follow Stanley Cavell, modernist art is unusual in using an appeal to chance and especially improvisation in order to evade responsibility. As he elaborates, to compose is to risk something, and it is in what a person does with those opportunities that the quality of his mind and the character of his art are known. That is because, crucially, “the means of achieving one’s purposes cannot lie at hand, ready-made. The means themselves have inevitably to be fashioned for that danger, and for that release—and so one speaks of inventiveness, resourcefulness, or else of imitativeness, obviousness, academicism.”⁴ Yet much of Adorno’s music criticism takes as axiomatic the subordination of the individual to the material, as here: “[Musical material] is nothing less than the objectified and critically reflected state of the technical productive forces of an age with which any given composer is inevitably confronted.”⁵ Even were that so, the choice of material (not to mention its use) remains exactly that—a choice, not an imperative. It is a creative act for which the composer is responsible.

This detour into modernist art can be germane to an appreciation of eighteenth-century music because some of the values of the former have been imported into evaluations of the latter. Various metaphors inadvertently or consciously weaken the agency of the individual composer in the creative process (or, as their proponents might say, topple the false idols of hero worship by demystifying creativity): the composer as software user (and not even as software programmer), or as memorizer and deployer of formula (instead of artful arranger and concealor of formula), or as one who “plays with signs” (rather than, for example, operates...