American Society for Aesthetics and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. http://www.jstor.org Review Author(s): William Day Review by: William Day Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Summer, 2004), pp. 300-302 Published by: on behalf of Wiley American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1559098 Accessed: 30-11-2015 15:37 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 192.231.124.250 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:37:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 300 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism The alternative to formalism is the view that absolute music has content. Presumably, absolute music has content in virtue of representing nonmusical reality . Music could do this in one of two ways. It could employ semantic representation or (what Kivy calls) pictorial representation. Kivy rightly rejects the suggestion that music has semantic content. Music does not tell stories. Musical works do not have plots. They do not even have plot-archetypes. Kivy is quite right when he says that a work cannot instantiate a plot-archetype unless it has a plot. Music has no semantic content because there is no language of music. Although Kivy does not make this point, there is no language of music because music is not characterized by semantic compositionality. That is, music does not have a finite stock of independently significant components. I believe, however, that Kivy too quickly dismisses the hypothesis that music contains pictorial or, better, illustrative representation. Illustrative representation does not require a finite stock of significant components . Such representation depends on a similarity between experience of the representation and experience of the object represented. Kivy has only one brief argument against the hypothesis that music contains illustrative representation. A picture, he suggests , can only represent things that can be seen. Similarly, music could only illustrate what can be heard: sounds. He then notes that it is difficult to come up with interesting examples of the illustrative representation of sounds in music-a few birdcalls and the odd steam engine are all that he can manage. He concludes that, if the case against formalism depends on use of illustrative representation in music, the case is thin indeed. This is too quick, even for an introductory text. A painting can do more than represent a person's visual appearance. It can also represent a person's character or a mood. This is so despite the fact that one cannot see a character or a mood. In principle, there seems to be no reason why a musical composition could not give an illustrative representation of something besides a sound. The challenge facing nonformalists is to give an account of how this is possible. Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect a formalist to anticipate what this account might be. In his penultimate paragraph Kivy writes: "Don't believe anything I have written" (p. 262). By the dog, I do not believe much of it, but I cannot recommend this fine book too highly to a wide audience. Though writing an introduction, Kivy simply cannot stop himself from developing arguments that will engage the professional philosopher. Philosophers familiar with Kivy's views will profit from the broad overview of his philosophy of music. Other philosophers will be introduced to the many interesting and difficult issues in philosophy of music and the work of one of the most important philosophers of art. At the same time, the book can be confidently recommended to any educated reader. Kivy's ordinary mode of presentation is so clear and easy to read that, even at its most philosophical, the book remains widely accessible. It is an excellent text for a graduate or undergraduate course in philosophy of music, though a more extensive bibliography would be nice. JAMES 0. YOUNG Department of Philosophy University of Victoria SHUSTERMAN, RICHARD. Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art. Cornell University Press, 2000, xii + 266 pp., $39.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. This is Richard Shusterman's fifth book, and the third reflecting what he calls "my pragmatist commitment to experience as both topic and method of inquiry" (p. ix). That self-description suggests a certain affinity with the work of Dewey and Emerson, the ur-pragmatist and the arch-philosopher of experience ; and there is a certain affinity. The topics drawing from Shusterman's experience this time around include rap, country music (and movies that feature country music), the city of Berlin, and the practices of body discipline advocated by the likes of Alexander and Feldenkrais. Reading Shusterman's book, that mix of topics comes off as less disparate than it sounds-aided, no doubt, by the obviousattractions to us new millennialists of pop music, Hollywood movies, post-1989 Berlin, and care for (or of or about) one's body. They sit together here as comfortably as they do in today's newspaper. The aims of the individual chapters are more varied . Some set out to redeem their subject-rap, country music-to philosophers, theorists of culture, and other "culturally elite" (p. 60) who resist what so many find irresistible. Other chapters perform the more conventional task of mapping a history of ideas-such as the declining importance of aesthetic experience in last century's theories of art-or of classifying a set of cultural practices-most notably, those in which the goal is, so to speak, to teach the body to know itself. Yet even these chapters describe themselves as not simply so much philosophical argument but "efforts to revive" (p. 202) an approach to philosophy (one that pays more attention to "meaningful experience that is nonlinguistic") and to living (one that pays more attention to "self-styling"). These strike me as commendable-and not wholly unfamiliar or alternative-ends of art. But in a book that advocates a pragmatist concern with experience, the most striking unifying trait of its ten essays is the absence of writing that conveys the This content downloaded from 192.231.124.250 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:37:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Book Reviews 301 aesthetic thrill or shock or delight of the practices are encouraged to recognize we can share "to some Shusterman means to be recommending. The sugextent" (p. 76), Shusterman attributes a distinction in gestion that rap or country music or body care offer affect or feeling to this pop musical genre, namely, recognizably aesthetic delights is, let us allow, an "an all-American, rustic authenticity... [in] contrast audacious and provocative thesis. But what are we to the much greater impurity and commercialization given to assess it? Counterarguments, certainly, such of other pop music" (p. 85). Here, rather than an as Shusterman's six sets of arguments against those argument by analogous credentials, we are asked who would claim the spuriousness of popular art's to consider that a genre of music may characterize satisfactions ("Don't Believe the Hype," pp. 37-59). itself by bearing a mark, on the whole, of authentic Also annotated lists-lists, for example, of devices expression "despite its factual incredibility" and the that help create "credence and authenticity" (p. 87) in "obvious impurities" of much country music (p. 84). country music. And classification systems--classifyThe argument relies, rather remarkably, on William ing the varied orientations, subjects, and goals of James's suggestion that we possess a more variegated somatic practices, say ("The Somatic Turn," pp. 158sense of (levels or depths of) reality than the philoso161 ). All of this is interesting, and much of it is genupher's "real/unreal" distinction allows. Thus country inely helpful; yet it is an odd way to convince a music may exhibit obvious impurities while still human being that this rhythmic articulation of words, being, in a sense, rightly said to be authentic (that is, this music, or this activity holds aesthetic treasuresas a meaningful term of criticism) because of its conas if our age has found alternatives to expressing an trast to (even more) degraded forms of pop musical aesthetic conviction too, beyond the old method of expression. But for this to be possible, one would conveying an experience through poetic, suggestive, have to forget that "authenticity," far from distinmetaphoric , phenomenological, ... language. guishing one style of music (country) from others, is We can turn to a couple of moments in Shustera term of criticism found equally within each musical man's book where a reader could feel, and probably style. (Is there a distinction less ubiquitous in the arts should feel, that this writing is not addressed or than that between "authentic" members of a style or meant to appeal to his or her sympathies (to new genre and "impure"~ or "commercial" candidates for ways of hearing, to new experiences). Consider membership? The charge of inauthenticity-"It ain't Chapter 3, "The Fine Art of Rap." In listing "certain jazz"-virtually defines the history of the progresthemes and stylistic features" of postmodernism that sion of musical approaches collectively known to us he then goes on to locate in the idea of rap music, today as jazz.) Shusterman would seem to be making an argument The problem, here as before, is not that "authenticity" for (some) rap's postmodern credentials, "even if we and "inauthenticity" articulate a distinction found in reject the whole category of postmodemnism" (p. 61). the criticism of musical styles other than country. An argument for credentials, however, does not The problem is that Shusterman's appeal to authenproduce an argument for aesthetic interest, whether ticity begs the question, exactly because that appeal aesthetic interest is conceived as traditional or as occupies the place where particular country music postmodtem. Kant seems to many of us simply right to candidates for the trait "authentic" ought to be notice that no descriptive trait of an object (e.g., "6an brought forward and discussed art-critically in such a eclectic mixing of styles," p. 61) confers aesthetic way that the reader has a chance, at least, to hear as interest on it; the proof is in the hearing (or, generally, authentic what before sounded to him or her, say, in the sensing). What the proponent of some music's commercial. At such needful moments Shusterman aesthetic interest needs to do, if his or her objective is relies, at best and tellingly, on others who know how to convince us of that interest, is to find the words that to write on country music with a sense of what is at can change our way of hearing. I am more than happy stake in a musical performance: "Jimmie Rodgers, to believe that someone speaking the right words or for example, is described [by Nolan Porterfield] giving me the right hints could alter my perception of as ... emotionally singing 'as if he'd lived every line an entire style of music (such as rap) or of an entire, and suffered every change"' (p. 85). But these brief mode of experience (such as of my body as subject). invocations of the less analytic (more authentic?) A defense of a whole genre of expression is not a priwriters on country music operate within Shusterman's ori dead in the water. But neither is it a simple thing, argument less like instances of aesthetic description reducible to lists of features and counterargumentsor insight and more like appeals to musical authority. that is, to the traditional devices of the analytically As a last instance of a moment in Peif~orming trained philosopher. Live where the reader may feel that a performance A second moment for us to weigh occurs in by the author is withheld, consider the closing Chapter 4, "Affect and Authenticity in Country chapter, "Genius and the Paradox of Self-Styling." Musicals." Throughout this defense of country music Shusterman's discussion of Emerson, Nietzsche, and and its "lowbrow" pleasures that "we intellectuals" Wittgenstein proceeds at a pedestrian pace, arriving This content downloaded from 192.231.124.250 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:37:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 302 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism at the thought-familiar to readers of Emerson and Nietzsche, but presented as a striking conundrum, which it undoubtedly is-that the task of the self is to become who one is, (though) the self is not fixed (p. 211). But what "solving" this "paradox" requires is that "one must build on [features of] one's already existing self... but one must not rest content with them" (p. 214). The rhetoric, in short, remains oddly cool and detached, even when it is illustrated with words as intimate as Wittgenstein's "A confession has to be a part of your new life." The coolness comes across in Shusterman's weird illustration of the above thought: "If one has no real talent for music but only for mathematics, one should seek one's higher self not as a musician but as a mathematician" (p. 214). This is advice for settling on a career, not for pursuing "one's higher self' as Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Nietzsche understand that. ("Coming to know oneself' does not mean facing one's limited talents; that is a conventional sense of "growing up"-albeit a not unimportant sense.) What makes the so-called paradox of self-fashioning paradoxical is that, for starters, it begins in disgust for oneself and for one's present limitations (limitations more of will than of talent). Self-disgust, while common to all three of the thinkers Shusterman mentions, is simply absent from his account of their otherwise quite distinguishable approaches. Shusterman is happy to focus attention rather, on Nietzsche's loathing of the common other B discovering, for example, that Nietzsche's problem was that he did not respect the simpler ways of life (p. 215). If "appreciate the simple " is the theme that unites Richard Shusterman's seemingly eclectic book, he may win his war, and so reverse the indifference of professional philosophy to his cultural interests, while failing to engage, and win, a single battle in the trenches where performance (of music, of the self) is felt. WILLIAM DAY Department of Philosophy Le Moyne College HAMMERMEISTER, KAi. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2002, xv + 259 pp., $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. The German Aesthetic Tradition surveys, in ten chapters, a group of fifteen familiar thinkers in the Northern European tradition of aesthetics: Alexander Baumgarten, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, S0ren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Cassirer, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Theodor Adorno. The combined influence of these thinkers upon contemporary aesthetics has been pronounced, so it is surprising that only a few books organize this intellectual territory into a survey form. Two of these were published over a decade ago: The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modem German Thought (University of California Press, 1989) by Josef Chytry, and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Basil Blackwell, 1990) by Terry Eagleton. To recall, Chytry's book considered Winckelmann, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Hegel, Schelling, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marcuse, and Spies. In a rough parallel, Eagleton's book included Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Adorno. Closely related to these two studies is Aesthetic Legacies (Temple University Press, 1992) by Lucian Krukowski, which developed an interpretation of twentieth-century aesthetics by using Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel as the sources for three different "legacies"-formalism, expressionism, and historicism-that developed in later aesthetic theorizing . I mention these other titles because The German Aesthetic Tradition introduces itself as "the only available systematic critical overview of German aesthetics from 1750 to the present." The book offers a series of fairly short (averaging about fifteen pages each), self-contained critical expositions of the theorists initially mentioned above. The quality of the chapters varies: some are useful synopses, while others do not match what is already available in other studies. In the former category are the revealing discussions of Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Schelling, Heidegger, and Adorno. These chapters help remedy a general lack of reliable, easily accessible , or extended expositions of the thinkers at hand. For those who are interested in Kant's aesthetics, or who happen to be teaching Kant's aesthetics, the chapters on Baumgarten and Mendelssohn are quick, welcome, and instructive reading, for Hammermeister succinctly assembles within a few pages an array of themes that later coalesce in Kant's Critique of Judgment. From these expositions, one can appreciate not only the power of Kant's philosophical imagination, but also how Kant's phraseology and philosophical problematic did not arise out of thin air. These briefs on Baumgarten and Mendelssohn can help soften the confusing intellectual jolt that often arises when considering the history of aesthetics with broad cross-continent strokes, as when approaching Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) immediately after reflecting upon Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757). The chapter on Schelling is also a highlight, since nutshell-style expositions of Schelling's aesthetics are rare, and since Schelling's ideas, as Hammermeister rightly shows, were more influential in later This content downloaded from 192.231.124.250 on Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:37:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions