Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 2

[Here’s Part 2 of my short discussion of some of the theories of Susanne Langer. Occasional readers of ROT will find the first part, which covers art in general, posted on 30 December 2009. I make no apologies for the superficiality of this review, but I do recommend that frustrated readers turn to Langer’s own books to flesh out this introduction, especially Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form.]

If, as Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions, where, then, does beauty enter the equation? Well, in a way, it doesn’t. It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art. “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.” ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criteria Langer applies to art when she considers beauty. It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant. In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so. Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . . Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them. The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition. In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty. (I quoted Langer--and some others as well--in a brief consideration of this topic in “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Part 4,” ROT, 14 November.)

The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work. I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.” I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings 50 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive. When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it. Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism. We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in. Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging. She didn’t provide us with a definition of what qualifies--primarily because there aren’t any . . . and there don’t need to be. We’re all equipped to discern effective art. “The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer. This ability to appreciate art is natural, she said, though it can be enhanced or inhibited by various influences, including experience and upbringing. “Since it is intuitive,” Langer explained, “it cannot be taught; but the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.” I take this to mean that Langer thought we have to be open-minded to experience art in all its varieties. (That obviously doesn’t mean we have to like it all, but we shouldn’t be ready to dismiss any of it before we’ve contemplated it without preconceptions.)

We may not be able to teach artistic understanding, which Langer said is like creativity--though she stressed they are not the same thing--but we can direct or misdirect the ability to appreciate art by schooling--or the lack of it. If all we’ve learned about painting, for example, are the schools, genres, and styles of academic taxonomy, “we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.” As we’ve already seen, Langer felt that our scientifically-oriented society has led us away from appreciating the creative aspect of human endeavor:

Our scientific convention of abstracting mathematical forms, which do not involve quality, and fitting them to experience, always makes qualitative factors ‘content’; and as scientific conventions rule our academic thinking, it has usually been taken for granted that in understanding art, too, one should think of form as opposed to qualitative ‘content.’

This carries over into our education as well:

People who are so concerned for their children’s scientific enlightenment that they keep Grimm out of the library and Santa Claus out of the chimney, allow the cheapest art, the worst of bad singing, the most revolting sentimental fiction to impinge on the children’s minds all day and every day, from infancy. If the rank and file of youth grows up in emotional cowardice and confusion, sociologists look to economic conditions or family relations for the cause of this deplorable ‘human weakness,’ but not to the ubiquitous influence of corrupt art, which steeps the average mind in a shallow sentimentalism that ruins what germs of true feeling might have developed in it. Only an occasional devotee of the arts sees the havoc . . . .

Art education, as I’ve argued myself (see “Missoula Children’s Theatre,” ROT, 25 August, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children's Theater in America,” 25 November), is “the education of feeling,” Langer declared, “as our usual schooling in factual subjects, and logical skills such as mathematical ‘figuring’ or simple argumentation . . . is the education of thought.” She was adamant about the importance of this training and observed that the only way to get it is to be exposed to creativity and experience it in our lives. So kids' theater, and art museums, and concerts, and so on are necessary--and basically all that is necessary--for teaching people to enjoy and appreciate cultural and artistic endeavors:

Few people realize that the real education of emotion is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling. Art education, therefore, is neglected, left to chance, or regarded as a cultural veneer.

Up to now, I’ve been concentrating on Langer’s discussions of art and beauty in a general sense. Her theories, however, did separate the arts and she wrote about the characteristics of each genre. Each art form generates a “virtual” sphere of its own. The visual arts, for example, create “virtual space”; music, “virtual time”; and literature and drama (by which Langer meant the written texts, not the performing art), “virtual history.” (Langer devoted three chapters to drama in Feeling and Form.) Each art’s symbolic vocabulary is used by the artists to express their impressions of life and the world; it is the task of the perceivers to interpret these same symbols in order to absorb those impressions in their own ways.

(Langer, who wrote before computers became common and therefore before the term ‘virtual reality’ took on the meaning with which we’re familiar today, used the non-tech sense of these phrases: “Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.” Having recently posted on “Theater and Computers” [ROT, 5 December], I don’t want to commit an unintentional act of equivocation here. In Langer’s own use, a virtual phenomenon is a “semblance,” which she equates with the Aristotelian “imitation.” So, a theatrical act “imitates” a real act, or “resembles” one.)

Literature, Langer asserted, “projects . . . virtual memory,” a vision of life “completed, lived. . . events that compose a Past.” Drama, by contrast,

presents the poetic illusion in a different light: not finished realities, or ‘events,’ but immediate, visible responses of human beings, make its semblance of life. Its basic abstraction is the act, which springs from the past, but is directed toward the future, and is always great with things to come.

While literature “moves toward the present,” drama moves “toward something beyond; it deals essentially with commitments and consequences.” Drama, “though it implies past actions,” Langer indicated, is “directed toward the future”:

This future, which is made before our eyes, gives importance to the very beginnings of dramatic acts, i.e. to the motives from which the acts arise, and the situations in which they develop; the making of it is the principle that unifies and organizes the continuum of stage action. It has been said repeatedly that the theater creates a perpetual present moment; but it is only a present filled with its own future that is really dramatic. A sheer immediacy, an imperishable direct experience without the ominous forward movement of consequential action, would not be so. As literature creates a virtual past, drama creates a virtual future. The literary mode is the mode of Memory; the dramatic is the mode of Destiny.

“In the theater,” Langer believed, “most people--and especially the most competent spectators--feel that the vision of destiny is the essence of the work, the thing that unfolds before their eyes.” After all, a fundamental element of theater is action, which Langer saw as “oriented toward the future.” As she explained this:

In actual life the impending future is very vaguely felt. Each separate act is forward-looking--we put on a kettle expecting it to boil, hand someone a bill and expect to be given change, board a bus with casual confidence that we shall leave it again at an intended point, or board an airplane with somewhat more conscious interest in our prospective exit from its inside. But we do not usually have any idea of the future as a total experience which is coming because of our past and present acts; such a sense of destiny arises only in unusual moments under peculiar emotional stress.

In drama, however, this sense of destiny is paramount. It is what makes the present action seem like an integral part of the future, howbeit that future has not unfolded yet. The reason is that on the stage, every thought expressed in conversation, every feeling betrayed by voice or look, is determined by the total action of which it is a part--perhaps an embryonic part, the first hint of the motive that will soon gather force. Even before one has any idea of what the conflict is to be (i.e. before the ‘exposition’ has been given), one feels the tension developing. This tension between past and future, the theatrical ‘present moment,’ is what gives to acts, situations, and even such constituent elements as gestures and attitudes and tones, the peculiar intensity known as ‘dramatic quality.’

The characters in drama are also “makers of the future”:

We know . . . so little about the personalities before us at the opening of a play that their every move and word, even their dress and walk, are distinct items for our perception. Because we are not involved with them as with real people, we can view each smallest act in its context, as a symptom of character and condition. We do not have to find what is significant; the selection has been made--whatever is there is significant, and it is not too much to be surveyed in toto. A character stands before us as a coherent whole. It is with characters as with their situations: both become visible on the stage, transparent and complete, as their analogues in the world are not.

The notion of destiny and “futurality” (my word, not Langer’s) in theater was only a small portion of Langer’s discussion of drama as a form of art. (She also entered the debate about whether drama even is an art. She affirmed that it is.) Nonetheless, I’m focusing on that segment of Langer’s theories (and encourage curious readers to go back to her original books to learn more) because it’s one of the more uncommon aspects of her perspective on drama and theater. As she explained the concept, in contrast to reality:

In actual life we usually recognize a distinct situation only when it has reached, or nearly reached, a crisis; but in the theater we see the whole setup of human relationships and conflicting interests long before any abnormal event has occurred that would, in actual life, have brought it into focus. Where in the real world we would witness some extraordinary act and gradually understand the circumstances that lie behind it, in the theater we perceive an ominous situation and see that some far-reaching action must grow out of it. This creates the peculiar tension between the given present and its yet unrealized consequent, “form in suspense,” the essential dramatic illusion. . . . The future appears as already an entity, embryonic in the present. That is Destiny.

In reference to the Aristotelian dichotomy I mentioned earlier, Langer specified, “Destiny is, of course, always a virtual phenomenon--there is no such thing in cold fact.” But, she concluded, it is still “an aspect of real experience” and part of what separates humans from other animals because it enables us to sense “past and future as parts of one continuum, and therefore of life as a single reality.” Drama, therefore (if I may extrapolate a little), is a fundamental aspect of human intellectuality because it facilitates one of the basic distinctions of human existence. I think the evidence of this axiom can seen in plays like Eimuntas Nekrosius’s The Square, a Lithuanian play from around 1991 that depicts the difficulties of learning how to live in a free society after years of Soviet repression. Even more recently, the Iraqi National Theater is planning to reopen (after an abortive attempt a year ago) as if the drive to perform were too strong for Baghdadis to suppress for too long. In words that are the prosaic echo of Susanne Langer’s philosophical analysis, one actress said: “It’s as if the spectators want to send a message . . . they are not afraid, and life goes on.” Destiny, indeed.

Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 1

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was an art philosopher whose best known books are Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Feeling and Form (1953), the latter of which I want to discuss a little with respect to art, beauty, and theater. Her magnum opus, ranging across many academic disciplines, is Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, a massive study of the human mind that attempted to incorporate feeling into a grand scheme of human thought, published in three volumes in 1967, 1973, and 1982. A trained musician, Langer played the piano and the cello and music was an enduring pleasure of her life. She was a poet in her early life, composing poems before she knew how to write them down and her first published book was The Cruise of the Little Dipper and Other Fairy Tales (1923), a collection of children’s stories. She even wrote a play called Walpurgisnacht, performed by family members in a grove of woods near Lake George, New York, where her family vacationed. (Langer and her cousins also presented a Hamlet whose text they rewrote themselves.)

To summarize the work of any philosopher is to court distortion and oversimplification. Langer’s subject was vast and her ideas were complex and difficult to unpack, though her writing was straightforward and, given the complexity of her ideas, clear. But I’m pulling her words on one or two particular topics out of the entirety of her generally unified theories, which runs the further risk of misrepresentation. Nevertheless, I expect I’ll be quoting her directly a lot here because not only do I feel Langer’s own words are the focus, but I couldn’t articulate her thoughts better than she herself did. Furthermore, I guess that because privately I find enlightening what Susanne Langer has to say about art--she makes about the best intellectual argument for the significance of art in society, in human existence, that I’ve ever encountered‑‑I also think it’s something everyone should find worth contemplating, so I’m promoting her writing, not my own. (There’s no book-length biography of Langer--a subject I’d imagine would be interesting to research--so the best published source of details about her life is a lengthy interview article written when Langer was at the height of her career: Winthrop Sargeant, “Profiles: Philosopher in a New Key,” New Yorker 3 Dec. 1960: 67-100. Another, shorter article of note is James Lord, “A Lady Seeking Answers,” New York Times Book Review 26 May 1968: 4-5; 34.)

Langer, one of the most-read philosophers of the 20th century, was among the first to work in the field of aesthetics and write about how we perceive beauty and art. Until she began to write about aesthetics, it was all but ignored by philosophers. Langer, however, saw art as a fundamental human activity, equal in significance to the acquisition and use of language. In Philosophy in a New Key, she wrote:

I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolistic schema other than discursive language.

Of course, she’s talking about art, which she defines in Feeling and Form as “the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” Art, Langer felt, is what humans use to express things they feet that resist reduction to ordinary “discursive” language--everyday speech and writing. We need art, in other words, as much as we need language because without it, we can’t express much of what we sense, perceive, or feel. Indeed, for Langer, the drive to find meaning through symbols and art is a coequal endeavor for humans with the scientific impulse to find facts, both being at the apex of human intellectual refinement. She viewed art, among other disciplines, as a form of language:

[T]he term ‘language’ encompasses not only the written and spoken forms that most people use in everyday life, but also the less common symbolic forms of the mathematician, the physical scientist and others. These forms have been developed just because of the limitations of ‘ordinary’ language and permit their users far greater precision in expressing thoughts.

The symbolic language of art, however, “has no vocabulary, no dictionary definitions,” Langer explained. It is . . . an expression of non-discursive thought.” Discursive language--that is, the language of discourse--comprises only one portion of human expression, covering a limited aspect of human experience. Humans are symbol-makers--dreams and myth, Langer demonstrated, are other forms of non-discursive, symbolic expression; we perceive the world around us in symbols of all kinds and even think in symbols. “Freud . . . observed that in dreams speech has the same function as visual image,” Langer noted, for instance. Discursive language, she found, is inapt for communicating many of the activities of the human mind, aesthetic experience among them. “The making of this expressive form,” proclaimed Langer, “is the creative process that enlists a man’s utmost technical skill in the service of his utmost conceptual power, imagination.”

Ordinary discursive language also has an inadequacy in that is it linear. When we view a painting, a movie scene, a live performance, or even a landscape, we experience many things at once; the images hit us simultaneously. But try to describe that painting in words, either orally or in writing, and we are reduced to explaining the images serially--first the size and dimensions, then the colors and textures, the figures and shapes (or some version of that scheme). The same is true of performance description (which I’ve made something of a practice so I can attest to this predicament). Only the non-discursive, symbolic language of art can accomplish this simultaneity. Without it, we can’t communicate with one another a significant aspect of our lives.

While many philosophers before Langer began her writing saw art as mystical and non-rational, beyond coherent thought in the mysterious realm of emotion and intuition, Langer saw art as another form of human rationality, the form that deals with ideas that can only be expressed in symbols. Langer placed considerable value in art which has been informed by human thought. After all, she proclaimed, “‘feeling’”--the basis of art--“is not something opposed to reason.”

The foundation of Langer’s philosophy was the work of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a German-Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in the U.S. in 1941. (Langer’s own family left Germany in the mid-19th century during another round of revolutions and violence in Europe. She grew up speaking only German in her home--her mother never learned to speak English--and, though born in New York City, always spoke with a pronounced German accent.) Cassirer understood that disciplines which seemed to be in conflict with one another like art, religion, and science were really different forms of symbolic thought. By isolating artistic expression as some unknowable construct, Langer’s predecessors couldn’t contemplate the whole of human intellectual activity, as she saw it. And by accepting this dichotomy, relegating the arts to a lesser plane of human endeavor and stressing a world of science and logic only, we have developed a society devoid of symbolic expression, a poorer place for all of us to live in. “A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage . . . . Technical progress is putting man’s freedom of mind in jeopardy,” said Langer. “Indifference to art,” she declared, “is the most serious sign of decay in any institution.”

“[T]he function of art,” Langer wrote, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.” Langer observed that

there are two opposite perspectives from which any work of art may be viewed: that of its author and that of its spectators (or hearers, or readers, as the case may be). One perspective presents it as an expression, the other as an impression. From the former standpoint one naturally asks: ‘What moves an artist to compose his work, what goes into it, what (if anything) does he mean by it?’ From the latter, on the other hand, the immediate question is: ‘What do works of art do, or mean, to us?’ This question is the more usual, even in serious theoretical thought, because more people are beholders of art than makers of it, and this counts for philosophers as well as for any unselected public.

If, I think Langer believed, the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then omitting the part of life expressed by art--not just by those who make it but by the rest of us who perceive it--leaves a huge portion of our lives unexamined. “[I]t is the whole life of feeling--call it ‘felt life,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘direct experience,’ or what you will--which finds its articulate expression in art,” she insisted, “and . . . only in art.” As a crucial aspect of human existence, “art penetrates into personal life because in giving form to the world, it articulates human nature: sensibility, energy, passion, and mortality. More than anything else in experience, the arts mold our actual life of feeling.”

On the significance of artistic expression, Langer specified that “it clarifies and organizes intuition itself” by “formulat[ing] our conceptions of feeling and our conceptions of visual, factual, and audible reality together.” It puts everything together, she posited, and functions as an important societal asset “because the formulation of ‘felt life’ is the heart of any culture, and molds the objective world for the people. It is their school of feeling, and their defense against outer and inner chaos.” Langer concluded:

Art does not affect the vitality of life so much as its quality; that, however, it affects profoundly. In this way it is akin to religion, which also, at least in its pristine, vigorous, spontaneous phase, defines and develops human feelings.

But in Langer’s epistemology, “human feelings” isn’t a restrictive phrase. To be clear on this point, she specified that “by ‘feeling’ I mean everything that can be felt. This includes all mental acts and perceptions.”

Art, in Langer’s conception, “is envisagement of feeling, which involves its formulation and expression in . . . a symbol . . . .” But not all symbolic creations are equal. The “envisagement” can be distorted by interfering experiences which the artist hasn’t sorted out. “Candor is the standard,” wrote Langer. The feelings art “envisages” must be honest feeling: bad art is corrupted by false emotions.

In contrast, however, art which is merely imperfectly crafted by an insufficiently masterful creator is “poor art, which is not corrupt, but fails to express what [the artist] knew in too brief an intuition.” The product is “sincere enough,” said Langer, “but confused and frustrated” by “recalcitrant” media and lack of technical skill in the artist. While truly bad art must be “repudiated and destroyed,” insisted Langer, “as a lie may be exposed and retracted,” poor art is simply dismissed. (Langer also discusses non-art or false art, a creation which doesn’t fail to express an emotion because there’s no attempt to express anything. We’ve all encountered this: tourist art, airport art, junk art, artistic pabulum. It takes the form of an artistic object but not the content. Whether this is the creation of a charlatan or just an untalented producer is irrelevant from the perspective of aesthetics.)

I spoke just now of form versus content, which is misleading. In Langer’s artistic epistemology, while art may appear to be “formed content,” in actuality, the form and content are inseparable. She explained that

a work of art is a structure whose interrelated elements are often qualities, or properties of qualities such as their degrees of intensity; that qualities enter into the form and in this way are as much one with it as the relations which they, and they only, have; and that to speak of them as ‘content,’ from which the form could be abstracted logically, is nonsense. The form is built up out of relations peculiar to them; they are formal elements in the structure, not contents.

Furthermore, creativity doesn’t depend, in Langer’s theory, on either the form or the content being new, original, innovative, or novel. “A Greek vase was almost always a creation,” Langer observed by way of illustration, “although its form was traditional and its decoration deviated but little from that of its numberless forerunners. The creative principle, nonetheless, was probably active in it from the first throw of the clay.” The work need only be “symbolic of feeling,” even if “a thousand people may have used every device and convention of it before.” (Works of art, even great art, have come out of some of the most hide-bound traditional forms: canonical painting, Socialist Realism, Kabuki theater. Junk, in contrast, has come from some of the freest.)

Though art can be assessed as good or bad, however, doesn’t mean works should (or even can) be judged against one another.

Works of art are not usually comparable. Only prize-juries have to evaluate them with reference to some standard, which is inevitably arbitrary and in many cases inapplicable. A competent jury does not even define a standard. If it consists of people who have developed their powers of perception by long conversance with the order of art . . . in which their judgments are to be made, intuition will guide the verdict. There will be disagreements--not because good and bad works cannot be distinguished, but because among successful ones there is no sure principle of selection. Personal or social factors usually tip the balances; “ratings” are trivial.

(I’ve inveighed against turning art into a competition--the Tonys, Oscars, Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Carnegies, Pritzkers, and so on--on several recent occasions. I find it distasteful, but Langer makes an argument that it is also essentially impossible as well as meaningless--and I wholeheartedly agree.)

[This is only the first part of my brief discussion of some of Susanne Langer’s ideas. Please return in a few days for Part 2, which will cover Langer’s conception of beauty and one aspect of her analysis of drama and theater.]