Art as Perception and Technique (藝術的感知和技法層面)
Oct. 8, 2010
致理技術學院應英系
輔大德文系 陳淑純
Part One: What is Form? / Play with Form of Art
I would rather offer some examples as following to let us take a closer look into the ‘form’ of art instead of giving a definition of it. Though these cases do not always directly refer to Vygotsky or his contemporaries, the artistic dialogues before and after do validate his conclusion that theory of art which proceeds solely from the objective facts of the artistic form or content ought to be doomed to failure.
Eg 1: Poetry / Visual arts in Words: Ekphrasis
The Starry Night by Anne Sexton (1928-1975) vs. The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
The Dance by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) vs. Peasants Dance (The Kermes) by Pieter Breughel the Elder (1525-1569)
Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden (1907-1973) / Read by Auden vs. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Eg 2: Drama / Past time in Presence on stage: Bertolt Brecht’s (1898 - 1956) “Epic theater”/ alienation (Episches Theater / Verfremdung)
Eg 3: Fiction / Musical form in Language description: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (1819 /1821) (See Glenn Gould talks about So You Want to Write a Fugue or How to write a Fugue)
Eg 4: Visual Arts / Dynamic Images in Static Images: Zipper on stone
Eg 5: Musical / Painting on Music stage: Stephen Sondheim / James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George (1983/1985), End of Act 1 (plus video playing on the spot) vs. Georges Seurat’s (1859-1891) Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (1884-86) and Une Baignade, Asnières (1884)
Eg 6: Choral (Vocal Music) / Words in Music, Words destructed by Music: Luigi Nono’s (1924-1990) Il canto sospeso for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra read by Sir Ben Kinsley (1956) vs. ‘Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza Europea’ - Letzte Briefe zum Tode Verurteilter aus dem europäischen Widerstand (Steinberg Verlag Zürich 1955), part 9 (Letter by a German woman)
Elli Voigt
Aged 32, a woman worker from
My dear husband,
I've been allowed to say goodbye to you, a chance that, sadly, most people aren't given. I know that if it were in your power, you would relieve me of the heaviest burden. But everyone must stand up and answer for their own actions. My love for you makes it easier than I had imagined. That I'll love you until I die is something I'm sure I don't have to tell you. Always be to the children what you were to me: a comrade. ... I have hope in life as I go to my death. I go believing in a better life for you all.
Elli Voigt
32 Jahre alt, geboren in Berlin. Kam mit der geheimen Widerstandsbewegung der Arbeiter in Berührung. Zu ihrer Verhaftung und ihrem Prozeß gibt es keine Unterlagen. Am 8. Dezember 1944 enthauptet.
Mein lieber Kamerad,
Es ist mir vergönnt, mich noch von Dir zu verabschieden, was leider den meisten Menschen nicht möglich ist. Ich weiß, Du würdest, wenn es in Deiner Macht stände, mir das Schwerste abnehmen. Doch jeder muß für das, was er getan hat, selbst einstehen. Meine Liebe zu Dir macht es mir leichter, als ich glaubte. Daß ich Dich bis ins Grab liebe, brauche ich wohl nicht zu versichern. Sei den Kindern immer das, was ich an Dir hatte, ein Kamerad. In der Hoffnung auf das Leben gehe ich in den Tod. Ich gehe im Glauben an ein besseres Leben für Euch.
Part Two: Historical Background[1]
Vygotskky was a thinker. Psychology was just the most appropriate stage on which the drama of ideas could be played. The existence of a higher plane in Vygotsky’s thought explains the dazzling versatility of his intellectual sources and areas of activity: from Humboldtean linguistics to Köhler’s study of apes, and from the analysis of Shakespeare’s tragedies to the rehabilitation of handicapped children.
Between the 1910s and the 1920s was a period of intense searches by the Russian intelligentsia for new modes of thinking and new forms of art. Many of the leading ideas of twentieth-century culture, such as structuralism in linguistics and poetics, abstractionism in painting, existentialism and hermeneutic ideas in philosophy, originated in that period. In particular, the influence of the school of literary Formalists is easily discernible in Vygotsky’s first major project, The Psychology of Art (1925).
The name itself indicated a novelty of approach. Vygotsky’s subject was not the psychology of the process of creative work (the inception of an idea, inspiration, intuition, etc.), of which a great deal had been written. He believed that in art the texture itself of aesthetic objects is threaded with psychological elements.
A) Battle between the old and the new
At the moment when Vygotsky entered into the cultural life of
B) Intellectual influences on young Vygotsky: Hegel
Hegel was probably one of the most important intellectual affections of the young Vygotsky, who was concerned with fundamental questions such as “What is history?”and “What is the role of the individual in history?”
The principle on which Hegel’s philosophy of history rests is that Reason first manifests itself in nature but comes to its ultimate realization in man. The essence of history is the process of the self-expression of Mind. The universal law of history is a progression toward self-consciousness of freedom.
Historical development is not a straight ascending line, but a complex trajectory replete with detours and reversals. The dialectic of historical change predicts that an advance to a higher plane first requires that the opposite forces inherent in the former state get the upper hand.
Hegel’s another important aspect: the distinction between the natural world and the world of culture created by man. Being “the other”of man, nature is nevertheless a necessary precondition of conscious life. A purely cognitive, contemplative approach would not lead man to self-consciousness; what is needed in addition is motivation or desire. It is in work that man realizes his non-biological activity. Through work man begins to perceive the world as a world of independent objects and acting subjects. And in this act of differentiation man achieves his self-consciousness, and this is revealed in language.
C) Intellectual influences on young Vygotsky: Humboldt & Potebnya
One of the major intellectual influence on the young Vygotsky was his acquaintance with the book Thought and Language (Mysl I Yazyk) by Alexander Potebnya, an Ukrainian linguist. In the age of the growing influence of the positivist world-view, Potebnya brought the philological and humanistic ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) to
The relationship between language and thought is traditionally conceived of in three alternatives: a) thought coincides with language, b) language serves as an external envelope of thought, and c) thought achieves its becoming in language. Humboldt , and Potebnya after him, developed this latter alternative.
Nonverbal thought is as real as a pre-intellectual speech. For example, there is a nonverbal, puzzle-solving type of intellect, and pre-intellectual, emotive speech. Humboldt and Potebnya refused to accept the idea of language’s externality with respect to thought. Conceptual content is in no way independent of its linguistic form. To clarify this point Humboldt introduced a potent concept of the “inner form” of language.
The importance of the inner form of language for thought resulted in the different language-based world outlooks (sprachliche Weltnasicht) of different peoples. According to Humboldt, language is a world of its own which mediates the world of objective phenomena and the inner world of man. The idea served as a guideline for Vygotsky’s own inquiry into the dynamics of human comprehension of the world depending on changing systems of symbolic mediators.
D) Intellectual influences on young Vygotsky: the Formalists
David, his cousin, several years older than himself, had been a promising young philologist and critic, well connected in the literary and academic circles of
Boris Eichenbaum: “In principle the question for the Formalist is not how to study literature, but what the subject matter of literary study actually is.”One may find this position congenial to that of Vygotsky who, instead of simply studying child behavior or adult cognition, attempted to define what it is that ought to become the subject matter of psychological research.
In search of the “literariness”, the Formalists embarked upon a study of differences between “poetic”(literary) language and everyday conversational speech. By focusing on the difference they came up with the following schematic dichotomy. Everyday speech is automatic, predominantly referential, that is, oriented toward the material, and focused on a story (fabula). In literary language, language is de-familiarized, estranged; it appears in its poetic function oriented toward the form, and the predominant element is the plot (suzhet). The phenomena of de-familiarization and the study of plots versus stories became the focal point of the formalists’ study of prose.
E) Vygotsky and the Formalists
Vygotsky had long been interested in both the problems of language and in the psychology of emotions, but he interpreted both sets of problems in the context of a supertask that intrigued him from his youth to his last days — that of grasping the nature of relations between the individual and culture.
Previous psychology believed its subject-matter to be consciousness — the processes and phenomena of the inner world experienced by the subject. Any attempts to explain art on the basis of the dynamics of those processes deprived it of subject independent value. At the beginning of the 20th century, this subjectivism and the psychologists’ idea of consciousness were rejected everywhere. In literary theory, the reaction to “the crisis of subjectivism” took the form of the so-called formal school. It was marked by precise analysis, similar to the methods of natural science, of the devices used in the construction of literary texts, of art as object independent of the subject’s psychical states.
The experience of the formal school permitted the identification in a work of art of stable components (invariants) remaining the same despite differences in content. In Vygotsky’s view, their weak points were the manifestations of the crisis of objectivism.
Vygotsky believed the interpretation of form as a mode of construction and organization of material to be extremely fruitful from the psychological standpoint as well. Form, a reality of a special kind, should be distinguished from material — a distinction of the greatest importance to psychology. Previous attempts at a psychological analysis of art were reduced to the study of the subject’s reactions to the content of a work, to the impressions, emotions, ideas, etc. which it evoked. Vygotsky was the first psychologist to broach the question of the psychology of form.[2]
Part Three: Art as Perception
Principles of Criticism. Art as Perception. Rationalization of this Formula. Criticism of the Theory of Forms. Practical Results of this Theory. Deficiencies of the Psychology of Forms. Dependence on Associative and Sensualistic Psychology
I. Rationalization of viewing art: An intellectual theory (Art requires brain work)
II. Art begins where form / emotion begins — 藝術形式(形式衍生之情緒)的不可或缺
III. Objection to the assertion: Art is brainwork
IV. Conclussion
I. Rationalization of viewing art: An intellectual theory (Art requires brain work)
The first and most widespread formula of art psychology goes back to W. von Humboldt; it defines art as perception. Art is the perception of wisdom. One of the fundamental views of this theory is the analogy between the activity and evolution of language and art. (語言的活動和發展、進化與藝術的類比)
The psychological system of philology has shown that the word is divided into three basic elements: the sound, or external form; the image, or inner form; and the meaning, or significance. Psychologists of this theory have found the same three elements that make up a word are also found in a work of art. ‘There is a marble statue (outer form) of a woman with sword and scales (inner form) representing justice (content)’, says Potebnya.
In the psychology of language, what matters is how something is said, how it is thought, and how the content is presented, not what is said or thought. This analogy reveals the mechanism of the psychological processes that correspond to the creation of a work of art. It becomes obvious that the significance or descriptive power of a word equals its poetic value, so that the basis of an artistic experience is representation (再現), and its general character traits are the common properties of the intellectual and perceiving processes.
Thought is used in this one-sided intellectualism as a cornerstone in the explanation of the art phenomenon. The fact that art, whether created or perceived, is accompanied by strong emotions is said by these authors to be a marginal phenomenon and not a part of the process itself.
For example, the essence of lyrical art can be reduced to processes of perception, or to pure brainwork. The decisive role is played by emotion. Take the scene of Hector’s farewell from Andromache → Our emotions are of two distinct kinds: those caused by the subject matter (In reading it we may experience a strong emotion and may even be moved to tears. But this emotion has nothing lyrical in it since it is caused only by the emotional scene.), and those generated by Homer’s hexameters (accompanied by the rhythmic effect of the flowing hexameters, it causes lyrical emotion).
Music, architecture, and poetry, is totally excluded from the theory that explains art as the result of an exercise of thought. However, it is extremely difficult to draw a precise boundary between lyrical and non lyrical art forms. For instance, works as Goethe’s Faust, or Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, or The Covetous Knight belong to the syncretistic, or mixed, forms of art, semigraphic and semilyrical.
II. Art begins where form / emotion begins — 藝術形式(形式衍生之情緒)的不可或缺
Poetic thinking can not be completely independent of any external form. A work of art exerts its psychological effect only in its given form. Can we imagine a work of art, in which only the content is retained, the external form vanishing completely, would not lose any of its intrinsic qualities? In the visual arts the indissolubility of the form coincides with the indissolubility of the form of any lyrical poem.
Tolstoy about the form of the novel: “If the nearsighted critics think I wanted to describe only what pleased me, how Obionsky dines, and what beautiful shoulders Karenina has, they are wrong ... In nearly everything I wrote I was guided by the need of gathering thoughts and connecting them to express myself, but each thought expressed separately loses its meaning and becomes insignificant if taken out of the context to which it belongs. …The context itself is not made up of thoughts (I think) but of something else, and it is impossible to express in precise words the basis of this combination. But it can be done indirectly, using words to describe images, actions, and situations.”
Re-narration equals to violation of the combination of thoughts and words in a novel, equals to destruction of the form. The distinction between the effect of the most precise re-narration and that of the original work is the starting point for the analysis of the special emotion of form.
Intellectual processes are only parts and components, or tools, in those combinations of words and thoughts which are the actual work of art. But this combination, the form of a work of art, is, as Tolstoy says, made up not of thoughts but of something else. In other words, the psychology of art does involve thought, but it is not, as a whole, the result of the labor of thought.
It occurs to the degree and extent in which the artist finds those infinitesimal elements which make up his work. There is no way to teach by external means how to discover and find these elements, since they can be found only when a person abandons himself entirely to feeling. Art begins where scarcely starts (畫龍點睛), art begins where form begins.
The particular emotion of a form becomes a necessary condition for artistic expression. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii’s distinction:
(1) Intellectual or ‘graphic arts (理知藝術或形象藝術): the emotional process is governed by the formula: from image to idea, and from idea to emotion.
(2) Emotional arts (情緒藝術): the formula is different: from the emotion generated by external form to another, stronger emotion, which arises because the external form has become the symbol of the idea of the subject.
It would be more correct to say: during the perception of graphic and lyrical art the emotional process evolves by the formula: from the emotion of form to something following it. The starting point is the emotion of form.
III. Objection to the assertion: Art is brainwork
Vygotsky became solidly allied with the Formalists in their critique of the traditional interpretation of art as a system of images. He argued that those who sought to explain poetry as a system of images missed the point, because they neglected the immanent form of poetry, which is its organization by rhyme, rhythm and meter.
Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii disproves the assertion according to which art is brainwork: The emotion of art cannot be equated to the emotion accompanying “any act of predication, especially grammatical predication…”
Psychological difference between the intellectual pleasure derived from solving a mathematical problem and that derived from listening to a concert → the emotional elements of art. The intellectual operations and thinking processes misses the target (the emotional elements of art) and does not explain the psychology of art, like a horseman who wants to get on his horse but jumps over it.
Marx points out that the most important problem in art is to explain why the Greek epics and the Shakespearean tragedies retain the significance of a standard and unattainable model to this day, despite the fact that the circumstances from which their ideas and concepts developed have long since disappeared. Key point is that this theory operates essentially with an extra aesthetic moment.
Social ideology explains how and why changes in the psychological impression generated by the same work of art occur, despite the fact that the form of the work remains the same. The crux of the matter is not the content planned by the author but that attributed to it by the reader, it becomes obvious that the content of this work of art is a dependent and variable quantity, a function of the psyche of social man. The artist’s achievement is mirrored in the flexibility of the image, in the capacity of the internal form to inspire different contents. An interpretation of a riddle is not based on its objective meaning rather than on the personal feeling it brought about in us.
Stories live on for centuries, not because their literal meaning but on account of the significance attached them. Each generation, each reader has its own Hamlet. (Comparison with contagion by Tolstoy) Each generation, each era uses the work of art in its own way.
Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii: psychology of lyrics makes feeling a matter of work rather than of mind. The psychology of lyrics is characterized by certain special symptoms which distinguish it quite sharply from the psychology of other forms of creativity. Lyrical emotion is general artistic emotion, i.e., emotion of form. Psychology of form, remains immutable and eternal. What changes is the way it is used and applied.
A work of art by itself cannot be responsible for the thoughts and ideas it inspires. (we give meaning, structure, and expression to the most absurd, random, and senseless accumulations of forms, according to Rohrschach.)
If we replace its literal meaning with an allegorical one, the riddle will stop functioning as a work of art. There would be no difference between a riddle, a fable, and an extremely complex work if any and each of them could contain the greatest and most valuable thoughts and ideas.
We not only interpret works of art differently, but we also experience and feel them differently → the subjectivity (主觀性) and changeability (可變性) of understanding of a work of art → Is a faithful representation possible? → The subjectivity of understanding / Humboldt: “…the thoughts instilled in us by someone’s speech never coincide entirely with the thought in the mind of the speaker.”
If we dwell on the intellectual processes initiated by a work of art, we are likely to lose the precise symptom or sign which distinguishes them from all other intellectual processes. → the intellectual processes initiated by a work of art ≠ other intellectual processes
Connection between Potebnia's theory and the associative and sensualistic trends in psychology: image-bearing concept is a poetic concept.這種結合聯想與感官的心理學理論認為來自直觀的概念就是詩的概念（直觀表象就是詩的表象）
But the new psychology has shown quite correctly that the process of thinking, in its higher forms, occurs without the help of graphic concepts or images. The traditional doctrine, according to which thought is nothing but an association of images or concepts, appears to have been completely abandoned after the fundamental investigations of Bühler, Messer, Ach, Watt, and other psychologists of the Würzburg school. (Schopenhauer: We do not translate the speech we hear into images of fantasy.)
Nearly all artistic descriptions are constructed in such a way that their images cannot be translated into ordinary words or graphic concepts. The difference between poetic and prosaic descriptions: Gogol's description (In his Terrible Vengeance, Gogol gives his famous description of the
Words vs. Images:
Words, the basic material of any poetic work of art, are not necessarily graphic. Zhirmunskii: “The material of poetry is made up of words, not of images or emotions.” The sensations and images evoked by words may not exist at all. At any rate they are only a subjective addition made by the reader to the meaning and significance of the words he reads. “To build an art with these images is impossible. Art requires completeness and precision; hence it cannot be left to the mercy of the reader's imagination. The work of art is created by the poet, not the reader.”
The reader or spectator completes with his imagination the picture or image created by the artist. Christiansen, however, has convincingly shown that this takes place only when the artist remains the master of the stirrings of our fancy, and when the formed elements predetermined quite precisely the work of our imagination. This happens with paintings representing depth or distance. (→Romantic painting 1, Romantic painting 2) Christiansen: “the purpose of representing objects in art is to show the featureless impression of the object, not its sensorial image.”
Theodor Meyer: “… imagery and sensorial obviousness are not the psychological property of poetic experience and emotion” In the visual arts as well as in poetry the imageless impression is the final aim of representing an object.(神韻/氣) The most important part in music is that which we cannot hear, in sculpture, that which we cannot see or touch. Imagery or symbolism does not distinguish poetic language from prose.
Serious and shattering criticism has been leveled against the traditional theory of imagination as a combination of images. Heinrich Meyer: the basic tendency of the facts of emotional thinking is substantially different from that of discursive thinking. The process of perception is pushed to the background and not recognized. Consciousness performs eine Vorstellungsgestaltung, nicht Auffassung (representation of an image, not conception).
Whether emotions increase or decrease under the effect of affective concepts: In emotions as well as in thoughts an increase of the charge at the center leads to a weakening of the charge in the peripheral organs. Since the intellect is nothing but inhibited will, we might possibly think of imagination as inhibited feeling.
IV. Conclusion:
Theory vs. practice:
The best evidence of whether a theory correctly recognizes and understands the phenomena with which it is concerned is given by the extent to which it controls these phenomena.
The theory of graphic representation as well as the assertion concerning the rational character of aesthetic reaction runs into considerable opposition from psychologists then. Art is the work of the intellect and of very special emotional thinking. Theory should not distort the literature.
Any attempt at perceiving anything through a work of art will fail as long as we have not learned to distinguish the auxiliary artistic techniques used by the poet to process the material he has taken from life.
The general premise of this practical application of the theory, the typicalness of the work of art, must be taken with a good deal of circumspection and subjected to very accurate scrutiny. The artist does not give a collective photograph of life; hence, typicalness is by no means the feature he pursues.
Part Four: Art as Technique
Reaction to Intellectualism. Art as Technique. The Psychology of the Subject, the Hero. Literary Ideas and Feelings. Psychological Contradiction of Formalism. Shortcomings of the Psychology of Matter. Practice of Formalism. Elemental Hedonism.
I. Formalistic trend
II. Psychological aspect in viewing art
III. Critical thinking on the Formalists
IV. Conclusion
I. Formalistic trend
A new formalistic trend arose against intellectualism. This trend focused upon a previously neglected concept: the concept of artistic form. It proceeded from the fundamental psychological fact that if we destroy the form of a work of art, it loses its aesthetic effect.
The new theoreticians proclaimed that art is pure form, completely independent of content. Art was said to be a technique, an end in itself. These new investigators saw only a play of artistic form.
The viewpoints of the formalists:
A literary work is pure form; it is neither a thing nor a material, but a relationship between materials. They gave up the conventional concepts of form and content and replace them with the two new ideas of form and material. Whatever is readily available to the artist, such as words, sounds, plots, conventional images, and so on, is the material of a work of art and comprises the thoughts and ideas included in the work. The way in which this material is structured, placed and distributed is called the form of this work. Form in this new approach is considered to be the artistic arrangement of the given material, made with the purpose of generating a specific aesthetic effect. This then is called an artistic technique. Any relationship of materials in a work of art will therefore either be form or technique.
From this point of view a verse is not the ensemble of the sounds of which it consists but the sequence, or the alternating sequence, of their correlation. If we rearrange the words in a verse, the aggregate of the sounds composing it, namely its material, will remain un-violated, but its form, the verse or the meter, will disappear. Any artistic technique is a construction of available material, a formation.
The poet finds readily available the material, the events, actions, situations, and so on, which constitute his story. His creativity amounts to his forming that material and giving it an artistic arrangement. A poet does not invent words but only arranges them to form a verse. The plot of a story is "what actually happened," and the subject is "how the reader learned about it."
II. Psychological aspect in viewing art
We are to understand psychology only as a technique used by the artist, a technique in the sense that previously given psychological material is artificially and artistically transformed by the artist in connection with his aesthetic aims and purposes. we must seek the explanation of the psychology of characters and dramatis personae and their actions, not in the rules and laws of psychology, but in the aesthetic conditions set by the author's intentions. The reason for Hamlet's hesitating to kill the king must be sought not in the psychology of irresoluteness and lack of will but in the rules and laws of artistic construction. Hesitation, like avarice and jealousy, are, according to the formalists, the same raw material for an artistic construction as sounds are for a verse, or scales for a piano.
A similar change occurs in the conventional approach to a feeling that is said to be part of a work of art. Feelings, too, are only material or techniques. Sentimentality cannot be the content of an art, if only for the simple reason that art has no content. Art in its essence is unemotional. Art is non-pitiful except in those cases when the feeling of compassion or pity is taken as material for constructing a work of art.
"We are talking not about the method of studying literature but about principles concerning the structure of literary science," according to Eichenbaum (Boris Michailowitsch Eichenbaum, 1886-1959, a representative of Russian formalism) The formalists try to study the artistic form as something completely objective, independent of thoughts, ideas, feelings, and other psychological material of which the forms consist." Artistic creativity, says Eichenbaum, is supra-psychological in its essence; it does not belong to normal conventional emotional phenomena and is characterized by the fact that it rises above emotional empiricism. In this sense an emotional phenomenon, being a passive thing, must be distinguished from an intellectual phenomenon, and a personal phenomenon must be distinguished from an individual phenomenon."
The formalistic theory has no objective data other than a psychological explanation with which to determine the nature of verse and prose, the two most obvious and clear-cut formalistic devices or techniques. The formula "art as technique" triggers the question, "technique for what?" (Zhirmunskii quite correctly pointed out that technique for technique's sake, technique taken per se and not directed toward anything, is a trick, a gimmick.) The answer by them is that an artistic device or technique has its own purpose which determines it completely and which cannot be defined in any terms other than psychological.
The purpose of art is to put feeling into objects by using sight rather than recognition. ( → Here refer to 曾志朗’s brain research) One technique of art is the device of the 'estrangement / Verfremdung' of objects, a device which complicates the form that increases the difficulty and the duration of perception, since in art the perceptive process is an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a method of experiencing the making of a thing, but what is made is of no import in art."
There is a contradiction by formalists when they affirm that neither things nor material nor content is essential in art, and then claim that the ultimate purpose of artistic form is to "make a thing felt." This fundamental shortcoming of formalism, the failure to understand the psychological significance of the material, leads to a sensualistic onesidedness（片面性）similar to the intellectual onesidedness resulting from the failure of Potebnia's followers to understand form.
It is obvious that the technique or device is not an end in itself, but it acquires meaning and significance in relation to the overall task (assignment) to which it is subordinated. Zhirmunskii is quite correct in distinguishing two meanings in the formula "art as a device or technique": The first meaning regards a work of art as "an aesthetic system determined by the unity of the artistic task, that is, as a system of techniques and devices." The formula's second meaning: not the method but the final aim of the investigation is important, "everything in art is only an artistic technique, there is nothing in art but a totality of devices and techniques." In the processes both of creation and of perception there are many tasks of a non-aesthetic nature; thus, what is known as "applied arts" is a device or a technique on the one hand, and a practical activity on the other.
The formalists could only come to these conclusions by proceeding from such a nonfigurative, subjectless art as music or pure ornament, and by interpreting any and all works of art as if they were ornaments.
Broder Christiansen[3]: "the material of a work of art participates in the synthesis of the aesthetic object," "Although the effect of an object is independent of its non-aesthetic value, it can, nonetheless, become an important component of the synthesized object…If the subject were completely irrelevant, nothing could prevent a painter from creating an equally beautiful painting on any subject .... "
Perception of a form in its simplest way is not an aesthetic fact. (→ see Köhler’s experiment with chicken. They had been trained not to discern the absolute quality of color but its relative effect. → Ability to compare) These experiments show that the perception of forms and relations appears to be quite an elementary, and possibly even a primordial, act of the animal psyche, proving that not every perception of form need necessarily be artistic.
Form in its full significance does not exist outside the material of which it consists. Relations and proportions depend upon the material to which they refer. Any deformation of the material is at the same time a deformation of the form itself. There seemed to be an error in formalistic thinking. It is not form alone that creates a work of art, it is form and content.
III. Critical thinking on the Formalists
The Russian formalists preached abstruse / meaningless language, however, they brought sense and meaning in art to unattained heights of sophistication. They preached abstraction, but in fact composed exceptionally meaningful works, with both plots and subjects. Their theory gets entangled in its own contradictions and ends by asserting what it denied or refuted in the first place.
"The process of perception in art is an end in itself," asserts Shklovskii. This concept that the value in art is determined by the pleasure and delight it gives us reveals the psychological paucity of formalism. This elementary hedonism which we get from contemplating beautiful things, is possibly the weakest spot in the psychological theory of formalism. There is no denying that form transforms the material with which it operates, and the pleasure and enjoyment derived from the perception of this material can in no way be regarded as pleasure given by art. A far greater error, however, is the idea that pleasure or enjoyment of any sort be recognized as the basic and defining feature of the psychology of art.
Croce: The problem of the effect of material and form, as well as the problem of the poetic genre of the comical, the sweet and the tender, the humorous, the solemn, the ugly, and so forth in art can only be solved on the basis of psychology. This is also the case with formalism, which turned out to be incapable of correctly evaluating the effect of artistic form without resorting to psychological explanations.
Croce's other consideration opposes the formal trend taken by inductive aesthetics, because it started from the end, so to speak; it began by explaining the moment of enjoyment, which is precisely the point at which formalism stumbled. "It began quite consciously to collect beautiful objects, for example, stationery envelopes of different shapes and sizes. It tried to establish which of these generated the effect of beauty, and which generated that of ugliness…” This technique failed.
Since Fechner (Gustav Theodor Fechner, 1801-1887) formal experimental aesthetics had regarded a majority of votes as the decisive verdict concerning the truth and applicability of a psychological rule. It is as difficult to find the psychological truth by this method as it is to get a correct self-estimate of a person. The same happens when psychologists rely on statements from test subjects queried about enjoyment or pleasure, if they do not establish beforehand that the elements of such enjoyment, which are unexplained for the subject himself, are guided by forces incomprehensible to the subject and require a deep and thorough analysis if the actual facts are to be established.
Wundt also exposed the error of the hedonistic approach to the psychology of art. He applied the concepts of Einfiihlung (empathy) developed by Lipps and Fischer, and believed that the psychology of art "is best explained by the term 'Einfühlung,' which indicates that this psychological process is based on feelings, but that these feelings are projected by the perceiving subject onto the object."
Wundt, however, does not say that all sensations and experiences are feelings. He gives Einfühlung (the projecting of one's self into what is seen) a very broad and fundamentally correct definition. "The object acts as a will stimulator," says Wundt, "but it does not perform an act of will. It generates the urges or inhibitions of which action is composed, and these are projected onto the object so that it acts in different directions and runs into the opposition and resistance of extraneous forces. By this projection onto the object, the will stimuli make it come alive and relieve the spectator from performing the action."
IV. Conclusion
If the formal method is not supported by psychological explanations, it reveals the total inconsistency of elementary hedonism.
The Russian formalists began by pointing out the importance of the sound of a verse and claimed that "the perception of a poem usually amounts to perceiving its sound image…" According to Yakubinskii, "In poetic thinking, sounds rise to the luminous surface of conscience. We establish an emotional relationship with them, which in turn leads to bringing about a certain interdependence between the 'content' of the poem and its sound. The latter is enhanced also by the expressive movements of the organs of speech." If this is not supported by psychological explanations, the formal method would be impotent.
Thus, by means of objective form analysis, without resorting to psychology, we can only establish that sounds play an emotional role in the perception of a poem. To explain this role, we must resort to psychology. Unimaginative attempts to determine the emotional properties of sounds from their direct effect on us have no basis whatever. When Balmont determined the emotional content of the Russian alphabet, he claimed that "a is the clearest and warmest sound, m is a sound of pain, i is the "sound of astonishment or fear."〔→ Here refer to Christian Schubart: Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1777/78)〕
Eichenbaum correctly points out that neither sound imitation nor elementary symbolism is characteristic of the sounds of a verse. The purpose of the sound composition of a verse reaches far beyond the boundaries of the simple sensorial pleasure we may receive from sounds. The fundamental principle of formalism is completely incapable of revealing and explaining the social-psychological content of art that changes historically and depends upon the selection of the subject, content, or material. Conclusion: Russian formalism in its theoretical and practical failure, and despite its tremendous merits, reveals the weak spot of any theory of art which proceeds solely from the objective facts of the artistic form or content and avoids basing itself on the psychological theory of art.
[1] Alex Kozulin, Vygotsky’s Psychology. A Biography of Ideas. Cambridge/Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1990.
Mikhail Yaroshevsky, Lev Vygotsky. Translated from the Russian by Sergei Syrovatkin. Progress Publishers 1989.
[2] Mikhail Yaroshevsky, Lev Vygotsky. Translated from the Russian by Sergei Syrovatkin. Progress Publishers 1989, p. 141.
[3] Christiansen, Broder, Philosophie der Kunst. 1909. Broder Christiansen (1869-1958) war ein deutscher Philosoph und Sprachwissenschaftler.
