I thought I'd share with the group some of my own recent philosophical work, whatever small value it may have. It seemed like a worthwhile alternative or supplement to Wittgenstein exegesis or endless debates of this or that, to provide an example of how Wittgenstein'
s thinking has informed my own. What follows does not profess to represent Wittgenstein'
s views nor even what I might suppose Wittgenstein would have said, but I hope that something of Wittgenstein'
s approach will be recognizable. (And in more than just style, though similarity of style seems to arise unbidden in seeking to apply his methods.)
I'd welcome any questions, comments, corrections, or criticisms. (I might hope for specifically Wittgensteinian perspectives, though approaches that would be counted as Ordinary Language Philosophy generally or even classic Analytic Philosophy in a wide sense would be more than welcome. But any sort of feedback could be of value in some way or another, regardless of the point of view.)
If I may, I'd also like to encourage any other participants who'd like to share examples of Wittgenstein'
s influence on their thinking.
Analogies between pictures and language.
(I am using "picture" in a narrower sense than Wittgenstein'
s. I mean "pictures" more as it would be used in everyday English: drawings, paintings, photographs and the like. And specifically, those drawings and paintings that would be called "figurative" or "pictorial".
)
There are picture languages. Ideograms, pictograms, rebuses, pictorial elements in sign(gesture)
languages. Perhaps even cinematic techniques such as montage could be usefully compared to (spoken and written) languages. Also we might wish to compare the rules governing pictures (drawings and paintings) in various styles to grammars.
Here I am more specifically concerned with what could be called "representation" or "depiction", in pictures and in (spoken and written) language. In what sense do pictures "refer"? What is the "grammar" (in the Wittenstein'
s sense) of pictures' referring.
A painting of NN." "A drawing of NN." "A photograph of NN." With the similarity of the expressions may fail to be struck by the very different rules governing their use. It is not, as one might suppose, as if the same rules were simply applied and the technology were a quite separate matter.
If I hire a model whose likeness is comparable to George Washington, first President of the United States, dress him in authentic period costume, pose him with suitable props for the place and period, and paint him, I can rightly call this a painting of George Washington.
If I do the same, except that I then photograph the model, it is not a photograph of George Washington!
It may be called "a photograph depicting George Washington." And where "depicting" seems needlessly verbose in "a painting depicting George Washington", it makes all the difference in talking of a photograph.
A child draws a stick figure we strain to recognize as a figure holding an axe and the figure is saying to another, "I cannot tell a lie, I chopped down the cherry tree."
Here, though we couldn't speak of a "likeness" and the story to which the drawing alludes is apocryphal, the drawing is still very much a drawing of George Washington.
The intention of the artist seems decisive in such a case.
But perhaps she identifies the drawing to her teacher as "Ben Franklin"? Perhaps she also draws another stick figure flying a kite with a key attached in a thunderstorm and calls this "George Washington"?
We can easily imagine such a mistake. But what are we to make of it?
Her teacher might well say, "That's not Ben Franklin. It's George Washington," rejecting the child's description of her drawing. Would he be wrong to say that?
Here, the use of "George Washington" is something like, "the man who did, or is commonly purported to have done, such and such".
Perhaps he'll simply explain to her that she has gotten the names and stories mixed up and comfort her by saying that the mistake is easily rectified, say by pinning the drawing of the figure with the axe among the drawings other students did, which they called "George Washington". Perhaps these are also drawings of the cherry tree story, perhaps also drawings of a figure crossing a river in a boat, and suchlike.
And perhaps the figure flying the kite will be pinned up alongside pictures of a round faced, balding man with spectacles, and so on, all labeled "Ben Franklin".
Such would be the easiest way to salvage the work - and the child's feelings - and it needn't involve a challenge to the child's intentions. That is to say, it needn't involve a choice between ascribing to the child false beliefs about George Washington or false beliefs about whom she drew.
If the assignment was not "draw one of the 'Founding Fathers'", but rather, "draw George Washington", and the child presented the drawing of the figure with the kite as "George Washington", confident in her completion of the assignment?
If he says, "George Washington never did that. You've confused him with Ben Franklin", that's perfectly right as far as it goes. And as a practical matter, he may need go no further.
As part of an exercise in learning the use of names, there may not be a "right" answer to the question, "Was she mistaken about whom she had drawn or mistaken about whether the person she drew had done such a thing?" Perhaps she has not yet learned enough for such a question to apply.
What else does she need to learn?
Is this painting of a woman holding a severed head a depiction of Judith with the head of Holofernes or of Salome with the head of John the Baptist?
(Erwin Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology" in _Meaning_in_
the_Visual_
Arts_ )
Here, the answer to this question is assumed to be the same as the answer to the question, "What was the artist's intention?" But the artist's intentions are the very question in dispute.
That the answer to the first question might also be "both" - or "neither" - is suppressed in Panofsky. But the possibility of such ambiguity need not shift the emphasis away from the artist's intention.
Where ambiguity in our answer to the questions posed by the child's drawing acknowledges her lack of sophistication, ambiguity in the painter's case involves considering greater sophistication. The painter versed in the symbolism of his time (and symbolisms of times familiar to him) may deliberately exploit them to make matters unclear. Or is that anachronistic here?
Or the design possibilities and visceral appeal of the image may hold such primacy for the artist, as to leave the "subject" (Judith or Salome) undecided even in his own mind.
Where we can turn to secondary documentation (etymologically-
speaking, a pleonasm, as Panofsky notes elsewhere) - contemporary correspondence, commissions, and such - to settle matters, the competence of the artist (and others) in using the names appropriately is presupposed. The very thing we cannot presuppose in the child's case.
But in some cases, historical scholarship might call into question the availability to artists and others of the period of religious, historical, and other literature. Whether "so and so did this and that" would be part of their standards for the correct use of "so and so" might be a matter for further inquiry.
Where such documents as correspondence and the like are unavailable for interpreting the painting in question, where we must turn to methods such as Panofsky's of comparing the use of various symbols across depictions of various subjects in various works of a given period and region, we are also addressing some of the same questions as historical scholarship concerning literary sources would address. That paintings (recognized as being) of NN in a given period portray NN as such and such, as doing this and that, give us criteria for recognizing other portrayals of NN.
But ambiguity is a clear possibility here, and Panofsky's work famously answers this ambiguity positing a previously unrecognized type of Judith image. The suppressed possibility of deliberate ambiguity on the artist's part turns on the same possibility of conflicting symbolism.
What if the child had drawn a figure standing in a rowboat crossing a river during an electrical storm holding a kite?
Jastrow's duck-rabbit. We can imagine an artist creating such an ambiguous drawing without intending to draw anything other than a duck. And the possibility that it could also be seen as a rabbit might not occur to her.
Suppose she has made a series of illustrations for a children's book. Through miscommunication, the editor has the duck drawing placed as an illustration of a chapter about a rabbit. Perhaps he even places the same drawing as well in the chapter about a duck, where it was intended to go. We can imagine him not even realizing that the same drawing has been used twice. (Astute children might notice and perhaps attentive parents will credit the artist with a clever joke.)
Has the editor made a mistake in taking the drawing for a drawing of a rabbit? Certainly, he has mistaken the artist's intentions, used her work in a manner other than she intended.
I want to say: his mistake is not like the mistake of taking the drawing for an elephant. But what would such a mistake be like? How do we imagine that?
The drawing could be used to illustrate a rabbit or to illustrate a duck. And if we set the artist's intentions to one side, we might be tempted to say, "The subject of the drawing is the use to which it is put." But how would we use this drawing as an illustration of an elephant? How is it like an elephant? According to what system of projection?
Perhaps someone could imagine some system of projection according to which it would make perfect sense to say it is picture of an elephant.
(In Tim Hawkinson "Self-Portrait (Height Determined by Weight)", the system of projection is the artist's own invention.)
A military historian analyzing movements in Revolutionary battles may use an arbitrary mark to represent General Washington's position. But we would not call such a mark a "picture" - though we may call it a "picture-element"
.
The drawings and paintings we have of Mozart agree on very little regarding the composer's appearance. Contrast to pictures of his contemporaries (Think of Haydn. Or later, Beethoven or Schubert) - where they may be recognized across different portraits as well as from their written descriptions. With pictures of Mozart, we accept the title of the work. Or we recognize the young man performing with his sister and father or other elements of Mozart's story. In this respect, Mozart could be compared to a figure of mythology.
(This somehow seems appropriate.
)
Could there be no photographs of George Washington?
Very far-fetched scenarios could be imagined. Extra-terrestrials visited the Earth during the 18th century and took photographs. Some genius invented the camera but the invention and all records of it were lost to history. Quite by accident, appropriate chemical are spilled onto a piece of paper and Washington sits in an adjacent room. A tiny hole in the wall between the rooms functions as a camera's aperture...
Suppose Washington's remains were photographed. (The controversy over moving his remains preceded the invention of photography by less than a decade.) Would we call this "a photograph of George Washington"?
A clone is made from a sample of Washington's DNA. A photograph of such a clone would no more be a photograph of Washington than a photograph of one identical twin is actually a photograph of the other.
But we could easily imagine mistaking a photograph of one identical twin for a photograph of another. Or any doppelganger.
If a man's twin shows up at the photographer'
s studio, the photographer'
s intentions have no bearing on whether the photograph taken is a photograph of the man or his twin.
The man goes missing and a photograph of his twin is used by searchers to identify him. Such a use does not make the photograph into a photograph of him.
But we can say that the photograph in this case "represents" the man. And a "photograph representing Washington" is entirely possible.
Photographs can be "altered" or "doctored". So can drawings and paintings. But how different are the uses of these expressions in the different cases!
A photograph can be discovered to be "a fake", as can a painting, but the cases are quite distinct.
A photograph can be "staged". Can a painting? Certainly, it makes sense to say that Leonardo's "The Last Supper" looks staged - in contrast to, say a Dutch genre painting.
But note that "looks" is not used as when one might say, "That looks blue, but I'd have to see it in a better light." What further evidence might one await? Nor yet is "looks" being used to acknowledge a contrast between appearance and reality.
Should we say that all (figurative) paintings are "staged" but that only some look it? I wouldn't say that...
(to be continued, work in progress)
JPDeMouy
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