The Many Faces of John Berger - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14761100
Berger wants us to understand why 50,000-year-old paintings are relevant right now. On one hand, this approach makes Berger’s essays feel very urgent. On the other, it shows us that art history, like all history, has to be continually rewritten. Only when the historian understands the needs of the present can he elucidate how these needs are answered by the art of the past.

...

“All history is contemporary history,” begins a famous paragraph from G, his 1972 novel that won the Man Booker that year. “For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.”


Thinking on this, it makes me wonder whether any work has an essential meaning. That it would seem that many works are open to interpretation and that this isn't necessarily a problem. It is what makes them great is how we can interpret them from different points in time and under different conditions.
Though it's not clear to me to what extent one can deduce the intended meaning of it's creator depending on the type of work being assessed, where one can attempt to find the premises contained with certain works and first operate within the limits of those premises. And whether the intended meaning is any more significant than the meaning one attributes to it as an audience/reader/observer.

If anyone has any suggestions on certain thinkers and concepts that are useful in trying to understand aesthetics better would be appreciated.
I'm kind of wondering about Derrida and his deconstruction based on this summary.
Spoiler: show
This is very important when we read a text by an author in philosophy because we are frequently led to ask the question “What did he intend to say?” and the deconstructive reading will lead us in the direction of not “what did he intend to say” but “what are these physical marks”; “how can I interpret these physical marks”. To use that example… and that by the way is an anti-hermeneutic remark; it’s a remark sort of against what might be called “the idea that there could be the right interpretation”.

This is another important part of Derrida’s take on language and language practices; the idea that there could be the right interpretation. In a way there is no more powerful idea in the discipline of philosophy than the idea that there could be the right interpretation. After all it’s that idea that allows us to give our student B’s and C’s as opposed to the A’s we would make if we had written the paper. It’s what keeps us – it seems – continually to read Aristotle and so on, in order to get them right, finally.

Derrida makes the outrageous claim that in the last analysis there is no such thing as the right reading; the right interpretation. There is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end. Good books, really great texts, do not cut off interpretation; they lead to multiple interpretations. Great examples of this would be The Bible, which I think it’s pretty obvious has not yet reached closure on interpretation. I mean, you know, I grew up in a community where there were Baptists, Methodists, Church of Christ. Took me a while to get into the city and meet Jewish people, Muslims, others. It became clear to me that reading the Old Testament; was difficult to come up with The Right Interpretation, and what was wrong was the very idea that there could be the right interpretation.

Now the converse is the claim that people find outrageous, but it’s not made by Derrida. That means that since there is no “the right way”, then any way is as good as any other. Now Derrida is not compelled to hold that view and he doesn’t. Not every way to speak and/or read is as good as any other! And let me just put it simply: no-one holds that view. Derrida, to the extent that he refuses to play a standard philosophical game just will not play. The fact that there is no final book, you know, one last master encyclopaedia containing all the wisdom, total coverage, final knowledge, the last book, none other ever needs to be written, Derrida considers that a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of perfect interpretation; the right interpretation.

This does not at all mean that we don’t in loose, rough and ready ways judge interpretations… all the time. And this does not at all mean that practically speaking that some interpretations are obviously slightly better than others. Let me return to familiar ones like the traffic light. If it’s red and you see it as green, the outcome can be disastrous; Derrida doesn’t deny it. You know, it’s a bad misreading… bad misreading. But this is a familiar mistake and it is made about a lot of Derrida’s work. Philosophers call someone a relativist by which they mean it’s a person that holds that any view is as good as any other view. My simple response to that is this: that is a straw person argument, no-one in the world believes it or ever has believed it.

No-one – Derrida or anyone else – believes that every view is as good as every other view. That’s only a view we discuss in freshman philosophy class in order to quickly refute it. I mean no-one believes it. There are no defenders of the view and since this tape will be going out, if we run into one it will be interesting, but we will likely find that person in one of the institutions Foucault discussed rather than in some seminar, okay. That’s where we will find them, if anybody believes that. No, Derrida’s kind of slippage is to remind us that the text of philosophy is not fixed; can not be fixed. It is of the nature of the text of philosophy and its relation to language that we cannot fix it once and for all. In a way it’s like the leaky ship where we haven’t got anything to stop the leak so we just keep bailing. I mean, the leak is in the language.

One way to give you an analogy that may make it come alive and be simpler for you – and that’s been hard for me to do with a philosopher who is very difficult like Derrida – is to think about it in the context of the way that Augustine attempted to develop a rhetoric about God, and then Augustine realised that it was already impasse to use finite human marks and sounds to praise an infinite being, entirely separate from those finite marks and sounds; so he was driven to silence. If one were to take that same picture of language without the thought of developing a rhetoric of God, but left with just with the finite marks and sounds and no inner teacher – Christ the inner teacher – to tell us when our signs worked and when our words referred, then we would have a language that operates by disseminating meaning, by moving meaning, by shifting it.

So if you were to have for example Derrida criticise Habermas, Habermas would say something like this, he would go “Understanding is a condition for our linguistic practices” Derrida would respond “If that is so, then so is misunderstanding equally constituentive”, because understanding won’t make sense conceptually unless misunderstanding does. They are correlatives – does that make sense? Well I hope it makes sense; I am asking a rhetorical question now about a philosopher who does rhetoric, but anyway… as well as argument.


It sounds like that John Berger might hold the same conclusion or thinks something similar to that of Derrida based on the reviewers quote at the start of this post. That even beyond art but to other things, that our manner of interpreting things can't be fixed also in part because how we make sense of the world is shaped by material conditions of the world we experience. That might be able to empathize with the viewpoint of someone who existed at a different time history, suspending my own views and conclusions on somethings to try and see things from their perspective based on works of their expressed views and recorded behaviours. But it's not likely that I would actually hold a worldview that accurately matches that of the person in the past, because the world we experienced is fundamentally different. And our abstractions are significantly shaped by how we experience reality.
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0309816814564128 p. 19
The fourth sense of ‘abstraction’, which Marx calls ‘real abstraction’, differs from the first three in coming from the frequent repetition of an important social activity, like buying and selling, that instills a particular pattern in our thinking about just that activity. Rather than replacing the other uses of ‘abstraction’, this one simply underlines the important role that the real world, and especially our repeated experiences in it, play in fixing on both the ideological and non-ideological abstractions in which we think about it as well as the mental process of abstraction by which we shape them
#14761137
But it's not likely that I would actually hold a worldview that accurately matches that of the person in the past, because the world we experienced is fundamentally different. And our abstractions are significantly shaped by how we experience reality.


I like to picture people from the past rolling on the floor in hilarity at our interpretations. If a current majority agree with my interpretation of reality then it must be the correct one. :?: Why?
#14761159
One Degree wrote:I like to picture people from the past rolling on the floor in hilarity at our interpretations. If a current majority agree with my interpretation of reality then it must be the correct one. :?: Why?

I think they'd have to overcome a great deal of confusion first because the world we live in now is so radically different that it'd almost be like an alien had come to learn about our human societies, not entirely, but significantly alien to them depending how far into the past we go.

Pragmatically having a majority agree with your interpretation of something does well to heuristically tell you that you're correct in your interpretation. But it doesn't make one invulnerable to the likelihood that you, along with the majority interpret something incorrectly.
No one would defend consensus as establishing truth without further qualifications. It's not clear whether consensus inherently brings people closer to the truth, because can have a bunch of idiots who make no effort to justify their belief in something.
Though I think somethings I would in practice accept as true because I had at least one other person to agree with me on something. I think the classic case is being on a desert island and asking whether the other person on the desert Island with you can see water, and they say yes. This is sufficient to prove that it's necessarily water though, they could be experiencing an illusion as much as me, seeing only a mirage.
To better confirm it's indeed water, we'd have to go over to it and experience the empirical sensations of water to confirm it. Some radical skeptical might try and push things further, but fuck those guys and their pushing the burden of proof super high Haha The proof is in the pudding (using our abstractions to act on the world congruent to our abstractions of it).

This is probably a tangent though and I should probably think of how it applies to aesthetics more, but I don't know all that much about aesthetics.
Though have the impression some speak of there being universal/objective beauty in some things, though not really that sensitive to nuance of what is being expressed by a universal approval of something as aesthetically beautiful.
Though in regards to interpreting something, I'm kind of wondering that attempts at fixed interpretations of things are a futile goal in that there can be no fixed meaning, that the meaning of things based on it's relations to other things. Just like the example at the end of the quote in the spoiler.
So if you were to have for example Derrida criticise Habermas, Habermas would say something like this, he would go “Understanding is a condition for our linguistic practices” Derrida would respond “If that is so, then so is misunderstanding equally constituentive”, because understanding won’t make sense conceptually unless misunderstanding does. They are correlatives – does that make sense? Well I hope it makes sense; I am asking a rhetorical question now about a philosopher who does rhetoric, but anyway… as well as argument.

The meaning of one word relies on it's relation to another word, that it doesn't have a fixed meaning in isolation. To continue more down this line of thought, follow this link, press ctrl+F and type in the box that comes up in the top right corner "DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION".
Am concerned that due to not having a firm grasp on deconstruction or Derrida's work that I don't know what mistakes I might be making should I try and transcribe his points on words to apply to aesthetics. Worried will have conceptual confusion by not first understanding how things apply.
Like this point about the meaning of words, I don't know if that is applicable to trying to interpret a painting where there are no words. Though i'm guessing that in providing an interpretation that one uses language and thus Derrida's point becomes relevant again.

But John Berger himself comes to mind in his Ways of Seeing...

Where in this episode Berger talks about the way in which paintings have an entirely different meaning in capitalist society. That historically works of art were unique, they was only one in a specific setting, you had to go to the Sisteen Chaple to experience the artwork on the ceiling. But now with photography, one can reproduce such images and put them in many contexts, where the meaning they initially had has been altered. Because in a new context, they are interpreted in entirely new ways, recreating classic artworks in say advertisements, where it promotes some commodity like coca cola.
A great example of how the meaning of something can change is to think of the image of Hitler, where one might think of him the person in his historical context but how he's interpreted is entirely diffrent when his image is recreated in memes or in advertisements in Thailand.
He also speaks to the manner of how the authenticity of an artwork now becomes a such importance, where the history of an item is traced and asserted through the examination of many experts to say that this is the true Leonardo Da Vinci and to also place some monetary value on it. Where the prestige of Da Vinci and his work thus gives prestige to many things associated with him that are then idolized in Museums and given a context that gives that helps make more real that aura of prestige we associate with the original Mona Lisa or what ever.
Berger also does a good job explaining how the framing of things can have one manipulate images to mean something, that adding music in the background when viewing an image changes its meaning. Something employed in films and games, the music sets certain expectations for mood. That emphasizing certain portions of a painting fragments it and doesn't provide a holistic sight of the work, meaning one doesn't necessarily consider it holistically way and thus might have a one sided interpretation that was manipulated by how the portions of the whole were presented.

This seems to at least line up with Derridas idea on language, that there is no fixed meaning, that meanings are always shifting, and that to deduce the meaning of something entails considering other elements that relate to it. Which for the painting would be what ever degree of context one wants to examine the work.
Where for example background knowledge about the painting might shape interpretation of their work. For example, Kurt Cobain's suicide changed how people viewed his music and its lyrics or even his life. A single event change the entire tone people prescribed to Kurt Cobain as a person and his work. This is a sort of thing where I've seen people speak about how much can we dissociate the artists from the art. Some draw distinctions between them, that when the artist does something terrible like support the Nazis in the war, it doesn't detract from their work considered within itself for them. Whilst for others its a slight stain on something beautiful.

Also an extra, should be noted that John Berger's views owe a lot to Walter Benjamin it would seem, but I'm not familiar with a lot of Walter Benjamin's work. Though it seems he might be a good thinker to think about aesthetics among other things.
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