Sanda Berce

 

 

Explorations in the hermeneutics of vision:

The rhetoric of modernity (Dialogue, difference and the Other)

 

“The human gaze has the power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

 

Many of the creative debates in contemporary critical theory, postmodern philosophy, aesthetic theory and cultural studies intersect upon ‘visuality’ as one of the central, and yet contested, terrains of modern critical thought. Over the past two decades we have witnessed an explosion of interest in the phenomenological, semiotic and hermeneutic investigation of the ‘textures’ of visual experience in a new appreciation of the historical, political, cultural and technological mediations of human visual perception in the context of defining a more ‘holistic’ and ‘reflexive’ theory of the human condition. In the past years many studies of different conceptions of consciousness and self-reflection in the formation of modern thought have been published as a sign that the rhetoric of ‘inner perception’ and of ‘specular reflection’ expresses the increasing tension between videocentric and logocentric conceptions of the mind and that this tension still haunts the contemporary paradigm. Theories of representation drawing upon continental social and philosophical thought are meant to place perception and the field of visuality in our understandings of human reality and to also define the ‘fate of the visual’ in the contemporary world. For, in many respects our world and its increasing centrality of the visual culture is mediated through the image technologies of advanced communication in modern societies. This ultimately requires for the growing recognition of the need to differentiate between different ‘ways of seeing’ or ‘scopic regimes’ and to interrogate the problematics of anti- and post-ocularcentric position in the field of visual experience (Heywood: 1999, XI). This is what our research seeks to do.

Firstly, because of the changes in perspective which occurred in the last decade: from the mirror game of the reflective, representational subject which functions as a constitutive discourse for the project of modernity (related, in specular terms to the question of how the self can relate to itself and grasp its own ‘being’) to its most extreme formulation- the intentional, knowing subject with whom vision is inherently destructive of ‘otherness’(given the fact that visuality in the contemporary era is subordinated to the project of mastery). The ‘technical dominance of the look’ of which Levinas suggested in his interview of 1991, vision must be replaced by a relation of obligation and responsibility (Levinas: 1991, 16), one that is rooted in the spoken word and touch rather than sight. Levinas’s stance can be said to typify an influential position that has argued for a correlation between vision and the domineering aspects of modernity which is felt to denigrate the affective and intersubjective qualities of human life.

Secondly, in the context of an increased relation of obligation and responsibility that will encourage the affective and intersubjective qualities of the human, a ‘return’ to ‘eidetic’ memory practices, akin to “photographic memory” (because influenced by contemporary technologies of the media) may be noticed. Such practices are encouraged by techniques used in the visual arts and in the literature of the last decades. In psychology, “eidetic memory” is a term used to denote an ability to recall images with picture-like vividness and uncanny accuracy. It traces its linguistic origin to the Greek “eidos”, i.e. “something seen”. “Eidos” associates with all mental imagining, and sometimes- as in the case of the phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl- it is extended to the given relationships between essences- imagistically grasped as intuition. In the pictorial sense, “eidetic memory” refers to the sense of vivid recollected images, making the mind’s eye equal to the one’s physical eyes. Especially those features of “eidetic memory” which are most agreed upon as relevant to extraordinary capacity for perceptual memory recall, may offer insights into the aesthetic and thematic features of artistic practice. According to analysts, in the so-called advanced cultures the incidence of “eidetic” ability apparently drops to virtually zero. And yet, there is an increased ‘return’ to such practices in contemporary art, viewed as an expression of a profoundly ethical dialectics of the self and the Other.

In this context, we have to make clear that the term ‘hermeneutics of vision’ does not primarily refer to a specific philosophical tradition or theoretical framework; rather it designates an analytic attitude towards the field of experience in which visual experience is approached as a realm of interpretative practices. They draw the visual meaning and interpretation in the contexts of meaningful human action represented by arts (literature included). Nowadays we have to think about ‘hermeneutics’ in a much more diverse because dialogical and open sense than it often is the case. ‘Hermeneutics’ as an analytic procedure speaks of cultural mediation and dialogue and prevents the interpreter from any simple reductionism in pre-defining the parameters of visual experience as an emerging research field.

Among the most important themes posed by the concept of ‘visuality’ itself is the one which seeks to answer why the privileging of visual perception (often restricted to the model of an ‘act of seeing’ which is perceived as disembodied and fragmentary) is treated as the paradigm of human awareness, whereas the world of objects is increasingly approached as spectacle (with the respective support given to a hierarchical image of the senses).

The source of the philosophy of reflection, the ‘father of modern philosophy’ and therewith, the prototypical thinker of modernity is Descartes but the theme is a constant one from Schoppenhauer to Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. The ‘withdrawal into the theatre of the mind’ as a pre-condition of mastering oneself, the ‘mapping of physical space’ by means of the rules of perspective in order to create a ‘mindscape’ for the mind to dominate the body, even such idioms as ‘reflection’, ‘speculation’ and ‘introspection’ are historically derived from images of the mind as a mirror of nature and theatre of impressions (B.Sandywell, 1999: 36). The world-in-the-mind is uniquely determined as a private realm of mental (re)presentations which the mind observes in acts of reflection. Cognition appears as a type of ‘inner contemplation’ whereas reflective thinking occurs in an ‘interior space’- a camera obscura. The mind ‘can see’ or ‘look at’ its own operations and the ‘theatre of the mind’ has no place for other minds or relations with other persons. The world is literally ‘in the eye of the beholder’. Consciousness was construed in Gilbert Ryle’s phrase “ as a ghost in the machine observing its own shadowy images and reflections” (G. Ryle,1949:153). Subsequent solutions of the mind-body relationship were determined by monological directions- theological in Spinoza and Leibnitz, transcendental in Kant, dialectical and structural in Hegel and Marx.

Examination of visual concepts in the intellectual history of ‘specular’ conceptions of consciousness, knowledge and identity in the formation of modernity shows that the tension between ‘videocentric’ and ‘logocentric’ conceptions of mind and society influenced a wide range of thinkers from Adam Smith to Shaftesbury, Hutchenson, Vico, Herder, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (B.Sandywell: 1999, 43). But it was perhaps Nietzsche in the nineteenth century who first combined Hume’s insight with an explicit concept of communicative desire. For Nietzsche the ‘problem of consciousness’ or the dream of becoming conscious of oneself- is rooted in the everyday structures of language. With the German philosopher, self-reflexivity always stands in proportion to ”the capacity for communication or a human being (or animal), capacity for communication in turn in proportion to need for communication… Supposing this observation to be correct, I may then go on to conjecture that consciousness evolved at all only under the pressure of need for communication.”(F. Nietzsche, 1974:354). With this shift of perspective human reflexivity and its modalities are explained as ‘networks of everyday communication’ as socio-historical and linguistic formations:” Consciousness is really only a connecting network between man and man- only as such did it have to evolve: the solitary and predatory man would not have needed it… For, to say it again: man, like every living creature, thinks continually but does not know it;… for only this conscious thinking takes place in words, that is to say in communication-signs, by which the origin of consciousness reveals itself” (Nietzsche, 1974: 354).

I have suggested that one of the foundational problems of modernity lies in the question of how the ‘self’ can relate to itself and grasp its own ‘being’. Or, in ‘specular’ terms, how consciousness can turn upon itself as a mirror of certainty. But ‘knowing oneself’ is accomplished by means of a spiritual reflection unmediated by diference or alterity. This is associated with videocentric or ‘videological’ currents of modern European thought (B. Sandywell, 1996). In this view, the gaze of the Other is a prelude to struggle and violence: my being in the world with Others signals an absence- the Other has stolen the world from me’. Alterity can also be understood as the medium for dialogue and for communal existence. Indeed, if we further think, reflection is only possible within a relational field of others- a network of communication. “ It is not merely that we could not know the Self without the Other”, writes Sandywell. “We could not exist and relate to the world without the prior contexts of alterity. The ‘presence to self’ is ontologically indebted to the voices and activities of others. It follows that the possibilities of personal existence and freedom are not something won from others, but rather are gifts which emerge from exchange relationships rooted in my obligations towards others… The emergence of selfhood is founded upon the presence of the other in the self.” (B. Sandywell, 1999: 51; P. Ricoeur, 1992). This is where the theme of reflexivity, so characteristic of aesthetic modernism leads beyond the ocularcentric philosophy of subjectivity towards a dialogical conception of the world. The dialogical conception of existence is the one where knowledge is itself a process of struggle and becoming within which truth-claims are elaborated from the conflicting ‘stances’ of a dialogized consciousness.

In what follows the paper seeks to demonstrate (on basis of analytic observation of the phenomenon in the visual arts and literature) how visualization, understood as the perceptual strategy and technique of modernity par excellence, seems to involve an irreducible element of domination which is meant to ‘de-throne’ sight as a privileged sense. It has been argued that such manifestations of ‘ocularphobia’ negate what is valuable about the human capacity for sight because they merely favour vision over other senses and therefore reverse the existing hierarchy.

When, in 1984, Taking Stock (oil on canvas) by Hans Haacke was exhibited, unfinished, in a wooden gold-leaf frame, by John Weber Gallery, it immediately raised the question of representation , of what and how it represented the items within the frame. The critics focused on the wider issue of representation as they sought to undercut, first,  the authority of certain dominant representations (especially as they emanated from the media through photography beginning with Andy Warhol in the early 1960’s), and, second, to begin to construct representations which would be less confining and oppressive (in part by providing a space for the viewer, in part through signifying its own position and affiliation). This critique of representation forms the center of an alliance of theoretical and interpretative (critical) positions which have examined and influenced the art of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

The problematic aspect of Taking Stock is whether anything is wrong with it. What is really wrong (because misinterpreted when it was displayed) is that it provided a space for the viewer, a space the viewer is requested to fill without him or her knowing that the “ space” makes present an absence, signifying, thus, its own position: every single element of the painting is mis-placed because being dis-placed from its own temporal- cultural context. The notion of dis-order and dis-harmony are replaced by a sense of a dis-haromnious harmony which conflates the distinction between ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ into congruousness and constancy. For ‘fear of vision’, the viewer experiences a sense of lost power and attempts to frame an image ‘triggered by association’ (on basis of ‘eidetic memory’), this time as a ‘generalized memory of forms’(Jack H. Haeger, 1990:350). The notion of “ the absence made present “ is characteristic for the critique of representation in the 1990’s. « What’s wrong with this picture? », the question addressed in the 1980’s had drawn into the orbit of art criticism a critique of modernism and of modernist art, showing that any understanding of contemporary art is necessarily bound up with a consideration of modernism. For modernism is the cultural standard which even today governs our conception of what art is. Modernism was the great dream of industrial capitalism and the ideology  that placed its faith in progress and sought to create a new order. A self-consciously experimental movement, covering well over a century, it stimulated radical change. Today, its once provocative and outrageous products are displayed in the cultural institutions they once offended and, eventually, threatened. Picasso, Joyce, Lawrence, Huxley, Woolf are our contemporary classics. Now, no longer is the avant-garde radical, though its forms continue to be reproduced and simulated for an extended art market, and, in a final irony, modernism has become the canon, the official culture, the aesthetic reference. Today, our understanding of modernist art is shaped by the systematic critical theory that was applied to its history by Clement Greenberg (Modernist Painting, 1961) and his followers in a series of persuasive essays published from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. Greenberg argued that the terms of modernist art practice is objectively verifiable, that they conformed to certain laws. In this sense, he saw modernism as the fulfillment of the promise of the Enlightenment in which rational determinations governed all disciplines, all fields of knowledge- this applied to science, philosophy, history, as well as art. Self-criticism and self-definition is the landmark of quality and value. As Greenberg wrote, “ The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself- not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence “(C. Greenberg, 1961:48). In this way, modernism was constantly bound to its own formally reductive system. Transgression or critique could take place only within the terms of artistic creation already established. Stylistic change in this medium was based primarily on technical innovation, and progress was identified with advancements in technique that increased the degree of pure, aesthetic effect. Greenberg and his followers in the 1970’s are of the opinion that modernism marginalized the issue of artistic motivation or interests inside the art system and denied that artworks were, themselves, bound by a web of connections to specific historical and social contexts. As a consequence, modernism is perceived as an effective separation of the work from the « real » world to provide an imaginary space of ideal reflection: experience incorporates intersubjectivity as its medium; self-consciousness has before itself another self-consciousness, it has come outside itself but they (self and the other) do not recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.

Debate on representation, on the function of cultural myths in representation and the construction of representation in social systems as well as the significant crossovers between art and music, film and performance, sculpture and architecture, painting and popular culture, defined modernism within a larger context, of the Western tradition and in its historical and social context provided by the project of modernity. With some authors the lack of negation of the project of modernity is consistent to the idea that the problem lies in the individuation of the rational Subject of consciousness. In this respect, Habermas argued for a theory of «communicative action» which will relocate the Subject as the agent of an intersubjectively agreed reason, a reason whose basis lies in communication. “ Being modern “ becomes a value or rather the fundamental value to which all other values refer, and this value is defined in modernity with “the new“, a new seen as a symptom of secular progress (J. Habermas, 1994: 103)

The notion of modernity as the sense of the new mode, modality or attitude requested for an interdisciplinary examination of the dynamics of representation beginning with the early 1980’s. This type of examination gradually shifted from the critique of the rigidly structured forms of modernist art to a fully transformed conception of art founded on alternate critical premises and opened the alternating balances of power between aesthetic and anti-aesthetic forces.

Some years ago, the Norwegian artist Jeannet Christiansen exhibited coffin-shaped blocks made of jello with sharp edges of white marble dug into them, scoring their flesh. The ‘new art object’ challenged the lived experience of nihilism in the viewers, expressing a provocative condition in which our highest values lose their value. Particularity is the point at which singularity becomes something of value and that would be to connect artistic quality with a kind of exactitude. The point is at least as old as Aristotle’s famous remark in chapter VIII of the Poetics that the parts of the dramatic work of art “should be constructed that the displacement or removal of any one of them will disturb and disjoint the work’s wholeness. For anything whose presence or absence has no clear effect cannot be counted as an integral part of the whole” (VIII, 30-36). This sense that in the successful work questions about what is present as well as what has been excluded still seems to apply even in the context of late modernist and postmodernist developments when strict demands for formal unity and harmony have been long abandoned is more than surprising. The work still needs to ’hang together’.

In the context of visual art ‘particularity’ is something that has to be available through senses; in the last analysis, one has to be able to see it, at least potentially. By making the piece of material that will rot and decay, dissolve and perish, the Norwegian artist is both urging our visual attention against the work’s passing and awakens our sense of temporality- its standing as an event. The work standing as an event, as a spectacle and as a performative act, with each day is different, apart from the artist’s control. The work’s duration is a condensed ‘history’ in six weeks: it dies before our eyes. It is clear to anyone that the work’s particularity is employing a different temporal matrix with which the process of dying is incredibly slow and, unlike a classical sculpture, the coffin-shaped jello cannot be taken in at a glance. In this work of art the idea of achieved particularity connects it with a certain view of individual human beings, that they may, perhaps should, aim at self-realization. It is not enough simply ‘to be oneself’ rather the individual is called upon to realize his/her potential for individuality in such a way that the result is not only difference (as absolute uniqueness) but also difference in in the sense of Oneself as Another: in the work’s decay (the decolouring jello), in the work that is never completely present (as in the beginning), but always passing, dying, dead. The viewer sees oneself framed in history, a narrative of passed/past event. It sees oneself as another because such work can live only as a piece of memory and ‘narrative’ about the work- as the trace of the recall. Expressed in another way: visual images of mind legitimate the idea that the units of objectivity coincide with the limits of visual representation

The world confronts each of us with ‘a task to be accomplished’. The object world therefore only acquires a wholeness, a ‘determinateness’ through our active and concrete relation to it. As such we must understand ourselves as ‘embodied’ or incarnate beings that exist in a particular time or place, one that is experienced by no one in exactly the same way.

However, in engaging with the world as embodied beings, our ability to attribute meaning and significance solely through our thoughts, deeds and perceptions is subject to certain limitations, which is especially true with respect to the ‘imagining’ of our own selfhood: we feel a need to envisage ourselves as coherent and meaningful entities. In Bakhtin’s view, from the vantage point of our inner life and biological existence we are unable to develop a multi-faceted, holistic image of our embodied self. This idea was produced during the years 1919-1926 in a number of fragmented texts that remained unpublished in the former Soviet Union until the late 1970’s. They are an attempt to theorize the cognitive, ethical and aesthetic qualities of the relationship between Self and Other. In his view, what he calls ‘I-for-myself’ can only perceive and experience the world as disjointed, chaotic flow of episodic events because we exist on the ‘border’ between the ‘inner subjective life’ and the ‘external world’ as mediated by our perceptual apparatus. Bakhtin speculates that one result of this is that our inner life and our outer existence lie on different axiological planes. We cannot adopt an emotional-volitional attitude with respect to ourselves. We can only be concerned with self-preservation (from a pure inwardly position).

In matters of visual art, there is the projecting of human meaning onto an inhuman and indifferent material world: things only have meaning through what we project onto them, whereas the ‘optical space’ of contemporary art performs a limit condition of human interaction with the material world as such, a space functioning as an encounter between the two, the in-betweennes or the interval implied in the contemporary sensibility of I-Though relationship. This is an ontology of the two which is participation and not of the one with another which is negotiation. “What am I?” and “Who am I?” conflates the distinction between two versions of identity: sameness (or ‘continuity of character’) and selfhood (or ‘constancy of friendship’) (P. Ricoeur, 1992:124): ”Surfaces under tension are anthropomorphic: they are under the stress of work much as the body is in standing. Objects which do not project tensions state most clearly their separateness (i.e. difference) from the human. They are more clearly objects. It is not the cube itself which exclusively fulfils the role of independent object- it is only the form that most obviously does it well” (Robert Morris, 1992:821). From within ‘the image-retaining power’, the human mind projects the form as the unitary and holistic reproduction of the image.

‘Forms’ are viewed by Virgil Nemoianu as a characteristic of the mainstream of the Western cultural history. And in an age of the open debate on Canon, challenged by an anti-canonic perspective, the voice raised to defend the form by explaining its source and its value is not only necessary but also rewarding: “Both the emergence of and the attraction for the aesthetic form are continuous presences in literary and cultural history. The unyielded hostility to them is equally permanent: only its justification varies over the centuries: it may be religious, philosophical, ideological, socioeconomic, or otherwise. The reasons that I am inclined to the aesthetic form are the following: Contrary to superficial impressions, the growth of form is compatible with, perhaps necessary to, plurality, skepticism and the general freedom of existence, while its adversaries seek by all means simplification, reduction, limitation, and control. The condition they promote tends to diminish the potentialities of human society and growth. The beautiful, in general, is not opposed to the true and the good; it is their indispensable companion” (V. Nemoianu, 2000). And if we were only to consider the compatibility between the ‘growth of form and plurality and skepticism’ which basically characterize modernity, we would understand the value of the author’s statement in what concerns the contemporary debate on form and its meaning: it is viewed as an encouragement of exchange relationships, an openness that ‘grants a possible letting-appear’, the spacing of dialogical structuration itself, a sense of coherence, correspondence and cooperation.

To be able to conceptualize ourselves as cohesive meaningful wholes, which is integral to the process if individuation and self-understanding, we require an additional, external perspective in order to supplement our own constricted standpoint. This is because the Other exists in a relation of externality to us. Therefore to envision ourselves as a complete and meaningful entity, and to understand our relationship with others, and the world at large, one must seek ‘to look at oneself through the eyes of another’. The dialogical character of the self-other encounter is not simply a matter of the exchange of interlocking, reciprocal gazes. There is need of maintaining of a ‘radical difference’ between self and other in a manner that does not prevent a rich intersubjective life. This may explain the forms that art- visual and written- have lately adopted.

Thus, in literature they debate the conditions under which the relation between literary discourse (where writing is supposed to be free and even abandoned) and historical discourse (where actuality, realism and rational common sense are supposed to prevail) provides a model or a form (conceived aesthetically) of modern thought’s effort to relate imagination (the vision of what might be) and commonsense (of what goes without saying). They also focus on developments confronted with the confessional, memory, memoir and (auto)biography novelistic stream.

Such forms reveal the awareness that art as representation of the whole truth has become a thing of the past. In this context, the continuing application of a norm of interpretation which seeks to restore the universal claims which art has in fact abandoned is without real objectives, but gives anyone leave to study the versatility of the pictorial (in the visual arts) of the narrative (fictional, in literature) and to find that the artist/writer changes voices and moves backward and foreward in time. “The writer’s imagination”, opines one of the most active of the contemporary British novelists, Rose Tremain, “trust  to illuminate them to the point where both I and the reader can see them with a new clarity. The writers I admire most seem to have this kind of goal: to comprehend experience distant from their own, in nature, place and time, and to let the extraordinary cast new light on the quotidian“ (R.Tremain, 1990). ‘To comprehend experience’ is possible on condition it is ‘distant’, (not subjective, personal and private, but place-specific or time-specific), distance being a requisite of detachment.

We find that, under these circumstances, Rose Tremain basically writes about the presence of the absence and, therefore, about «difference»: an ontological «difference» referred to Being and Existing and about the narrative form as ‘difference’ as compared to the repetitive identical form of other novels. She is focused on the « difference » between ‘ reality’ and illusion or delusion as means to trans-form and dis-figure the Real, time and constancy, loss and regeneration, guilt and desire, story-telling and the magical-Other worldliness to her ‘created’/ replicated past, instead.

The inquiry into the problem of the sense of place in Rose Tremain’s latest novel, may reveal the writer’s intention within the background of contemporary philosophy and science, and may well speak about their impact on the novelist and the novel form, respectively. One would therefore conceive of a novel form that would no longer be founded on the classification and ordering of fact (historical or fictitious), of event (or of sequences) and , ultimately of stories. For, within story-telling no story seems to be more important than the other. We would set out from an epistemology of journeys, covering for the sense of space and forging new relations between character (Subject) and its world. In La Naissance de la physique, Michel Serres wrote that « The landscape contain spits, faults, folds, plains, valleys, wells and chimneys, solids like the earth and fluids like the sea. The metaphor is geographical here; it could be mathematical. In any case the model is complex. Here and there, locally, I identify fractures or discontinuities, elsewhere, on the contrary, relations and bridges » (M. Serres,1981: 200). The relations of the world to science and of space to knowledge is rendered so explicitly by a new paradigm: by means of the voyage which is the sum of all displacements. All of the above displacements are isomorphic since they all belong to pluralized spaces each constituted in a complex way and each related to the other according to a multiple set of relations. As a result, circulation along and among those displacements cannot be conceived as a high road, but only as a multiplicity of paths. What concerns in this space constituted of fragmented local spaces is less the circumscription of a region (read a story) that the circulation along and among paths. And what holds for space in general holds for the space of knowledge as well. To read and interpret the novel’s meaning is to move between local fragments of space (‘historical fact’ and ‘fictitious event’), to reject techniques of classification and separation (in what concerns the priority of facts over sequence of events) in order to look for units of circulation along and among displacements (“ this is why I am weighing silver. I weigh the same piece over and over again, to ensure that there is no error. No possibility of error? I am trying piece by piece and day by day, to re-impose order upon chaos “ R. Tremain, 1999). To understand such a novel form is to adopt the comparative and pluralistic epistemology of the journey, to replace the modernist paradigm of Oneself and the Other by the contemporary paradigm of Oneself as the Other and  to implement a philosophy of transport (so typical for the contemporary space devoid of well set boundaries and rather osmotic) over one of fixity in order to counter the dogmatism of unchangeable knowledge. I am referring to the new definition of the surface which demonstrates the contamination (by contingency) at work: “Each surface is an interface between two environments that is ruled by a constant activity in the form of an exchange between the two substances placed in contact with one another“ (P. Virilio, 1991:17). The new space of the model (or novel/art form) thus defined calls for a philosophy of communication that expresses exchange between the ‘theoretical world’ of history and the totality of the worlds created by the artist: “Exchange as the law of the theoretical universe, the transport of concepts and their complexity, the intersection and overlapping of domains… represent, express, reproduce perhaps the very tissue in which objects, things themselves, are immersed- the all-encompassing and diabolically complex net-work of inter-information“ ( M. Serres, 1981)

Such philosophy is foregrounded in the modern science. It discovers that all our knowledge (classical as well as modern), even the limits of this knowledge, is of the order of the message. Modern science is, thus, specifically concerned with the study of all aspects of transmission and propagation of message- information, noise, redundancy in order to define what communication is. In this context, we have only referred to it in order to define the epistemology of journey which we constantly associate with the new art forms. We understand that the association may well reveal that the narratological imaginary of the contemporary art/ novel appears to operate under the influence of the contemporary science and philosophy and, that, under these circumstances any traditional expository style of interpretation (W.Iser:1978) is irrelevant. The split between present-day art and traditional norms of interpretation and analysis requires for new norms that could replace the continuous application of a norm that involves, in Iser’s terminology, « scrutinizing the work of art for its « hidden » meaning ». The contemporary art-text denies ‘hidden’ meaning because, historically speaking, the  “absolutist claims of art” have been replaced by the work of art’s successful communication of even a partial reality while still carrying with it  “connotations of form, such as order, balance, harmony, integration, and, yet, at the same time constantly invalidate these connotations “ (W.Iser,1978:12-13).

 

 

 

Notes

1. J.Heywood, B.Sandywell (eds.) (1999), Interpreting Visual Culture, London: Random House

2. Barry Sandywell (1999), Specular Grammar, in op cit.,30-31

3. Frederic Nietzsche (1974), The Gay Science, New York:Random House

4. Emmanuel Levinas (1991), Interview in Raoul Mortley (ed.), French Philosophers in Conversation, New York and London:Routledge.

5. Gilbert Ryle (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinsons, 1990

6. Barry Sandywell (1996), Logological Investigations, London:Routledge

7. Paul Ricoeur (1992), Oneself as Another, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press

8. Jack H.Haeger (1990), The Picture of the Mind in F.Burwick and Walter Pape (eds.), Aesthetic Illlusion, Berlin: Walter de Gruiter

9. Clement Greenberg (1962), Modernist Painting, Arts Yearbook, No.4, New York, 1994

10.Jurgen Habermas (1981), Modernity-An Incomplete Project?, Th.Docherty (ed.) Postmodernism: A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994

11.Virgil Nemoianu, Loving and Hating Aesthetic Formalism, Modern Language Quaterly, March, 2000, University of Washington

13. Robert Morris (1992), Notes on Sculpture in Art in Theory, C.Harrison and Paul Wood(eds.), Oxford:Blackwell

14.Rose Tremain (1990), Contemporary Writers, The British Council (ed.), London: Book House

15.Paul Virilio (1991), The Lost Dimension, Semiotext(e)

16. Michel Serres (1981), Hermes, Literature, Science, Philosophy, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univerity Press