By FLAVIO R. KOTHE*
One can only understand a great work by remaking the connections of its sign relationships and their meanings: a complex reading of something dense.
University departments may be faced with the proposal to update the teaching of aesthetics and may even be faced with the proposal that they recommend to students classic works of aesthetics and philosophy of art – such as Plato, Aristotle, Vitruvius, Alberti, Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel –, but they tend to opt for small anthologies and submit to the argument of Arthur Danto, a minor thinker from New York, that it is necessary to broaden the conception of what art is and that “contemporary art” is all the more current the more it is made of recycled trash. This is the mere inversion of Hippias’ proposal, in the sense that “beautiful is gold”. The smaller is always easier than the hard path of the great works, which endure for centuries because they have something more to say.
Socrates argued that Phidias could have used gold, rather than silver and ivory, in the sculptures of the gods in the Parthenon, but he did not do so because the materials must be suitable for their purpose. What Plato does not say is that the Greek gods were fair-skinned, blond, Aryan, as was the Greek ruling class, and it was more appropriate to use marble, ivory, and silver, while the slaves were dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and dark-haired. This led in ancient Rome, as Nietzsche noted, to the distinction between bonus e malus, which resulted in the opposition good x bad, that is, good was to be a master, bad was to be a slave. And it continues to be so.
That materials should be suitable for their purposes is key to architecture. Since students in the coming years will not even learn that there is such a thing as Hippias Major, will not have their neurons fed to think about this issue, which contains something very practical. Inhotim is having a succession of samples of recycled trash, pretending that it is current art. It may be current, but it is not art. It would be simplistic to think that the current world is only trash and that, therefore, only trash can express its nature. Trash can only be known for what it is by not being trash. Hence the invention that the “author” did not want to make art, but rather to provoke reflection. Now, thinking is sheltered in great works, not in easily deciphered artifacts.
An architectural work, a designer garment, a soap opera, a city are different things, but they can all be read because they are all texts and are meaningful. Analyzing works of painting can help us understand, for example, works of fashion, just as both can help us read cities, deciphering what is usually overlooked. But what is the meaning of the term text?
The idea of viewing the text as an expanded sign seemed quite clever. The sign has been seen as the core and synthesis of the text. Reduced to a “sign,” this has been understood by Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistics as something closed, formed by signifier and signified. Now, a sign is not something closed; it connects to other signs, to organs of perception and devices that produce and reproduce it. Depending on the context, something can be understood in one way or another. A complex text can be read in a simplistic way, as well as a complex reading of something that is quite simple. However, one can only understand a great work by reconnecting its sign relationships and their meanings: a complex reading of something dense.
The usual reduction of the concept of sign to signifier and signified, as if they were its body and soul, cannot account for procedures such as irony, jokes, or a meaning that is different from the set of meanings of the terms. In irony, the meaning of the word can be the exact opposite of its literal meaning. In a joke, a sudden meaning emerges that goes against everything that seemed to be being narrated. It is usually taught that the sign is arbitrary, since there are different words in different languages to designate the same things.
Now, when one is in a sign system, the sign is coercive, if the person wants to be understood and not ridiculed. No word means only one thing. It hides behind itself. When in a poem there are resonances of meaning in the sound configuration, the signifier becomes significant. What seems simple is not as simple as it seems.
To analyze dreams, Freud proposed distinguishing the levels of “manifest content” and “latent content”, that is, the dream text needs to be read in such a way that it perceives as an effective “message” something that may be quite different from what appears at first glance. The manifesto is the result of the conflict between the desire to say something and forces that want to prevent this from happening.
The result is neither one force nor the other, but the deformation of both into something that is no longer either of them, containing both within itself. This means that what manifests itself as a dream has meanings in the manifest itself, which does not coincide with the much-vaunted arbitrary character of the verbal signifier. The meaning of the dream is the drive that generates it, not just its result. What is generated also generates.
A text is a fabric, something woven. When you put a fabric under a magnifying glass, it looks like a net. Paul Celan has a poem in which the net is the central image of the “plot”, of the reported action:
“IN THE RIVERS to the north of the future
I cast the net, which you, indecisive, weigh down with shadows written in stones.”
The net that is cast into a river seeks fish. As an activity, it has a practical intention. The same, perhaps, cannot be said of the image that is conveyed. The net that is cast in the poem is not just into one river, but into the rivers to the north of the future, that is, into all the rivers that may lie beyond the future. It is a variation of Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that he wrote to be read in 300 years. It is pretentious to want to cast into all of them and well beyond the most immediate future: to the north, to where the ship sought reference to navigate.
This you, in Paul Celan, may be a way for the poet to refer to himself. This is the reading proposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer. This you may be a non-self. Since Paul Celan is a Jew, the other would be a “package”, someone who does not belong to the community of the elect. This is not, however, the only possible reading. The you is not just a duplicate of the I.
The net that is cast can be read as the poem itself. The stones have been interpreted as tombstones. So the “shadows” would be the dead. The Zionist reading says that the stones would be tombstones of the victims of Nazism. This is not the only possible reading: most victims of concentration camps did not have tombstones; they were smoke coming out of the chimneys. The stones do not have to be tombstones.
Shadows can be the dead that each person carries, but they can also be bad experiences, mistakes made, losses suffered. The text allows for the multiplication of its readings. Analysis tends to reduce it to a founding meaning. A good text always goes beyond any reading.
In the 18th century, it became crucial to know what the limits of conceptual knowledge would be. Leibniz, after observing that there is nothing in the mind that has not passed through the senses, except the mind itself, recommended that the structure of this mind be studied, paying special attention to the dark dimensions of the mind. In doing so, he went one step further than Descartes, who proposed the search for clear and distinct ideas within a mathematical model of truth.
What is clear to one may not be to another; where most see something uniform, another may see relevant distinctions and nuances that change the meaning of what seems evident. Christian Wolff made important distinctions in these obscure dimensions of the mind, his psychological metaphysics distinguished itself from the mathematical model of thought. When Baumgarten took this further and proposed the study of the products of the obscure part of the mind, upon discerning the need to develop aesthetics, he saw that it was also necessary to develop the deciphering of these new signs: he proposed the study of semiotics and hermeneutics.
Here we are merely briefly exemplifying a cultural heritage that is lost when the bibliography in the course program is reduced to one author, easy to read. It is always simplistic. By failing to deal with the difficult, it does not realize that it has already been overcome by the past before it begins. This vanguard waits in vain for armies to follow it. It does not realize that it has already been run over by what it has gone through.
* Flavio R. Kothe is a retired full professor of aesthetics at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Allegory, aura and fetish (Cajuína Publisher). [https://amzn.to/4bw2sGc]
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