Political Blind Spots by Raphael Sassower & Louis Cicotello

Author:Raphael Sassower & Louis Cicotello [Sassower, Raphael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

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THE UNIVERSAL FACES OF ART

I: REDUCTIONISM IN THE NAME OF UNIVERSALISM

As we have seen in the previous chapter, there are similar aesthetic elements that appeared in the propaganda materials of democratic and fascist regimes during the twentieth century. It’s not only that some specific images of strength and courage, power and resolve (the hammer, for example) have the same appeal across national boundaries, but that they almost speak to us or are read by us as if the grammar and the vocabulary of the visual language (what Nelson Goodman [1976] calls “the languages of art”) are clearly understood. One could think in this context of Noam Chomsky (2000) and his group of linguists who argue that the human mind is “hardwired” in the same way so that languages, however seemingly different, arise out of the same basis and therefore are translatable across the linguistic landscape. This way of thinking about humans and their cognitive apparatus has led some to speculate on an even grander or more profound level.

Both Noel Carroll and Ronald de Sousa suggest that there is an evolutionary foundation that explains the similar cognitive and emotive reaction to visual images across national and geographical boundaries. The reason there is a similarity, according to them, is that humans have developed adaptive mechanisms that allowed them to evolve in particular ways. Put differently, humans used aesthetically appealing images and visual representations so as to structure and explain the world around them, and that process ensured their survival over thousands of years. Just as J. J. Gibson (1966) argued about the adaptive visual framing and perception of the frog that spots flies as food and of pilots who orient themselves according to the terrain, so do these two suggest that art, in the general sense we appreciate it, plays this role for humans. Gibson’s so-called theory of information pickup suggests that perception depends entirely upon information in the “stimulus array” rather than sensations that are influenced by cognition. Gibson proposes that the environment consists of affordances (such as terrain, water, vegetation, etc.) that provide the clues necessary for perception. According to Gibson, perception is a direct consequence of the properties of the environment and does not involve any form of sensory processing. Appreciating the interactive elements in perception, he still puts more emphasis on external stimuli in comparison to the “internal” structural elements suggested by Carroll and de Sousa. Of course, on some level of analysis this is a difference in degrees of influence, not in kind (because of their mutual influences).

There are some issues we must outline at this juncture so as to consider this way of thinking. To begin with, we should reconsider what we mean by art. There are three general paths along the definition and classification of art. First, one can recount and survey artifacts, objects, artworks, material items deemed artistic, or even a wider range of “things” we can appreciate as having an aesthetic value, being “beautiful” in some sense of the term. It helps to

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