The Performing Arts in Western Civilization

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The Performing Arts in Western Civilization

• New York University

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Quote of the Day (4/12/05)

• As you get older three things happen,
• The first is your memory goes -
• and I can't remember the other two...
• - Sir Norman Wisdom

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Quote of the Day (4/12/05)

• As you get older three things happen,
• The first is your memory goes -
• and I can't remember the other two...
• - Sir Norman Wisdom

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Quote of the Day (4/12/05)

• Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
  After that, who cares?
• ... He's a mile away and you've got his
  shoes.
• - Billy Connolly

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Agenda

• Papers Returned
• Reactions to Thursdays presentation
• George Dickie - Art the Aesthetic
• Chapter Four - Psychical Distance In a Fog at Sea

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Edward Bullough

• Edward Bullough had a successful tenure as a
  professor at Cambridge and wrote Psychical
  Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic
  Principle in 1912.
• Psychical distance is akin to Kant's
  "disinterest," and Bullough uses a fog at sea to
  illustrate his concept. Feelings of fear or
  anxiety which make fog a dreaded terror of the
  sea are not compatible with the aesthetic
  experience. Instead one must see the fog as a
  thing of enjoyment, relishing the opaque veil of
  transparent milk it creates. The ability to see
  it thus, the ability to stand outside the context
  of personal needs and ends, is psychic distance.
• http//facultystaff.vwc.edu/ljordananders/is342/a
  sthass.htm

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Edward Bullough (contd)

• The language of Edward Bulloughs critique is
  rooted in the language of Schopenhauer, whereas
  others such as Virgil Aldrich seem more
  influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• This is due to the number of years (50) that
  separates the two approaches. (Modernism v.
  Postmodernism)
• Several theories at the turn of the (19th)
  century resemble Bulloughs, but his has been the
  most influential.

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Psychical Distance

• Bullough conceived of psychical distance as one
  of the essential elements of aesthetic
  consciousness (his term), as well as a criterion
  of the beautiful.
• Psychical distance is posited as a specific kind
  of consciousness which, when inserted between a
  subject and his/her affections produces
  aesthetic experience.
• In what way do Bulloughs ideas on Psychical
  Distance sound similar to issues discussed
  earlier in the semester?

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Psychical Distance (contd)

• For Bullough, aesthetic experience is due-if
  such a metaphor is permissible-to the insertion
  of Distance.
• He thought that distancing was a voluntary
  action. His follower, Sheila Dawson read him that
  way and went on to say that critics, actors, and
  members of the orchestra distance deliberately.
• Bullough analyzes the working of distance into
  two elements
• Negative, inhibitory aspect - the omission of the
  practical side of things and our attitude towards
  them.
• Positive aspect - the elaboration of the
  experience based on the inhibitory action of
  Distance.

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Negative, inhibitory aspect

• This first aspect involves the psychological
  blocking of practical actions. This is deemed
  necessary for the positive side of distance, that
  is, the experience of something as an object of
  aesthetic consciousness. The necessity of
  blocking is made clear when Bullough says that,
  by putting an object out of gear with
  practical needs and endsthe contemplation of
  the object alone becomes possible.
• Dickie cites the apparent belief among late 19th
  century aestheticians that we are so concerned
  with the reality of things that we cannot
  appreciate the qualities of things unless this
  concern is somehow blocked. When the objects
  being experienced are works of art, this belief
  takes the form of a persistent fear that people
  will mistake art for reality or will somehow
  entangle themselves with the art unless a
  specific psychological process blocks them from
  doing so.

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Trains and Tragedies

• There is a legend that when the Lumiere company
  projected their films in Paris at the Salon
  Indien for the first time on Dec. 26, 1895, one
  film caused a riot. When The Arrival of a Train
  at the Station appeared on the screen audience
  members supposedly rose from their seats and fled
  in terror, thinking an actual train was bearing
  down on them.
• I.A. Richards gives a bizarre account of what
  keeps a spectator in his seat at a performance of
  King Lear. He claims that the spectator feels
  pity and fear for Lear, that pity is an impulse
  toward Lear, and fear is an impulse away from
  Lear, and that the opposition of these impulses
  prevents the spectator from taking action to help
  Lear, or from fleeing the theatre.

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Bullough (contd)

• Psychical Distance plays a similar role for
  Bullough except that it is not the ordinary
  impulses (fear and pity) balancing one another as
  in the King Lear example rather, it is distance
  as a special psychological force that blocks
  these ordinary impulses.
• Although Bullough states that there are positive
  and negative aspects to distance, the alleged
  negative and inhibitory force has come to be
  identified as psychological distance.
• Just as people can be more or less hungry, happy,
  or tired, they can also be more or less
  distanced. Distance may be said to be variable
  both according to the distancing-power of the
  individual, and according to the character of the
  object.
• Ideally, according to Bullough, it is most
  desirable to attain the utmost decrease of
  Distance without its disappearance.

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In a Fog at Sea

• In an effort to illustrate his point further,
  Bullough asks us to imagine being in a fog at
  sea. He then details the dangers and anxieties of
  the situation. (Bullough Quote p. 154)
• In spite of all the danger, such a fog, Bullough
  claims, can be a source of great aesthetic
  enjoyment
• For Dickie, Bulloughs explanation is similar to
  Schopenhauers account of the sublime in which he
  speaks of the forcible detachment of the will
  necessary for appreciating a threatening object,
  except that Bulloughs theory is supposed to
  apply to all aesthetic experiences, not just the
  threateningly sublime.
• Bullough then turns to a discussion of psychical
  distance as it supposedly functions in the
  appreciation of art

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Drama

• In a drama, Bullough claims, the characters
  appeal to us like persons, and incidents of
  normal experience, except that the side of their
  appeal that would normally affect us in a direct
  and personal manner is held in abeyance.
• He maintains that Distance, by changing our
  relation to the characters, renders them
  seemingly fictitious, it is notthe
  fictitiousness of the characters which alters
  our feelings toward them.
• Bullough attempts to illustrate how the aesthetic
  appreciation of art can fail because of
  under-distancing and how it can occur when a
  person is properly distanced. Both hypothetical
  cases involve a jealous husband at a performance
  of Othello.

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Othello

• His jealousy may cause him to lose distance by
  a sudden reversal of perspective, he will no
  longer see Othello apparently betrayed by
  Desdemona, but himself in an analogous situation
  with his own wife.
• The jealous husband may be able to enjoy the play
  if he can maintain distance, but Bullough
  believes that this would be difficult.
• A case frequently used to illustrate
  under-distancing involves a spectator who loses
  distance and runs onto the stage to attack the
  villain and save the heroine.
• For Bullough, it is thoroughly plausible that if
  a spectator ceased being in a state of psychical
  distance, he or she might attack a stage villain.
  This different from both the fog and Othello
  examples since there it is only thoughts that are
  blocked, while here it is action.

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Othello (contd)

• In both the Othello and the attacker-spectator
  cases, it seems plausible to assume that a
  psychological force is required to suppress the
  husbands jealousy, and the spectators impulse
  to assist the heroine.
• However, when one watches a play, looks at a
  painting, listens to music, or gazes at scenery,
  there is usually no impulse to action that has to
  be overcome.
• When one enters a theatre, there are no practical
  impulses to overcome because watching plays is
  not a practical activity to begin with.

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More Fog

• The truth is, that spectators are always in their
  senses, and know from the first act to the last,
  that the stage is only a stage, and that the
  players are only players.
• Samuel Johnson
• Even in cases in which actual physical dangers
  exist, we are not, when we appreciate the
  qualities of the fog, restrained by a
  psychological force which cuts out the practical
  side of things.
• The failure of the jealous husband to appreciate
  Othello does not indicate that he has failed to
  achieve being psychologically restrained either.

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Even More Fog

• And so, there doesnt seem to be any real
  evidence to support Bulloughs claim that acts of
  distancing or states of being distanced really
  exist.
• Bulloughs belief in the occurrence and necessity
  of psychological forces to restrain spectators
  causes him to have a distorted view of the
  experience of art, which in turn causes him to
  draw unwarranted normative conclusions about
  certain aspects of certain works of art.
• Consider Sheila Dawsons assessment of a
  well-known scene from the play, Peter Pan

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Clap your hands!

• Read Dawson quote(p. 158)
• Dickie asserts that Dawsons observation is
  clearly false, and that only a hardcore theorist
  could believe that the children in the audience
  do not respond enthusiastically to what for them
  is a dramatic highpoint in the play.
• The playwright has given the audience members a
  rare opportunity to become a force in the story
  of the play, and the children accept it.
• The only reported case of a child being
  distressed by Peter Pans request is Susanne K.
  Langer!

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Langers Distress

• Langer claimed that as a child the appeal
  shattered the illusion of the play and caused her
  misery.
• Whether the young Langer was miserable or not,
  she reports that the other children clapped, and
  laughed, and enjoyed themselves.
• Langers remarks are less misleading than
  Dawsons because at least Langer supplies data on
  how other children responded, whereas Dawson
  simply deduces what the childrens response would
  be from the theory of psychical distance.
• It also seems clear that the comparison with King
  Lear is at best, pointless since there ar many
  examples of plays which effectively break the
  fourth wall without lessening the audience
  members experience of the play as a work of art.

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Othello Revisited

• Returning to the example of the jealous husband
  attending a performance of Othello, Dickie points
  out that this man may fail to appreciate the play
  for several reasons.
• His thoughts concerning his own situation with
  his wife may be distracting him from the play.
• The action of the play makes him uncomfortable
  with regard to his own situation. Here, the man
  recognizes the value of the play, but does not
  find it enjoyable or pleasant.
• A third example unrelated to the notion of
  marital stress may have the individual constantly
  viewing the play in relation to some real or
  imagined historical prototype, a social problem,
  or some other thing external to the play itself.

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Othello Revisited (contd)

• Here, Dickie asserts that distance theorists
  greatly exaggerate the pernicious effects on
  appreciation of concerns with things external to
  works of art.
• For him, this exaggeration is attributable to
  their imagining that appreciation requires being
  in a special mental state so delicate that the
  least external pressure destroys it.
• However, we almost always have a background
  awareness of things external to a work we are
  appreciating.
• There are also momentary distractions that that
  one may experience during the appreciation of a
  work of art.
• For Dickie, none of these necessarily interfere
  with the process of appreciation.

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Raising Kane

• Dickie goes on to cite attempts by Allan Casebier
  to defend a restricted version of the notion of
  distance.
• Casebier presents hypothetical examples of the
  viewing of the movie, Citizen Kane which he
  regards as examples of being distanced and
  non-distanced
• He cites as distanced viewing of the movie the
  case in which a spectator attends to certain
  recurring themes - the identity of snow with
  naturalness, the mystery of Rosebud, the
  two-sided character of Kane.
• For Casebier, the cases of distanced viewing
  involve attending to what he calls, the internal
  qualities of and the internal relations within
  the film, plus such external relations as can
  be attended to without distracting from the film.

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Raising Kane (contd)

• Examples of the non-distanced instances Casebier
  mentions are
• A case in which the spectator focuses his
  attention predominantly on the historical
  accuracy of the films portrayal of American life
  in the first half of the 20th century.
• A case in which the spectator is a filmmaker who
  focuses his attention onthe relations of visual
  and auditory qualities of the film to
  film-craft.
• Dickie points out that Casebier does not make the
  mistake of speaking of special acts and states of
  mind or of aesthetic consciousness. In fact,
  Casebier explicitly states that Bullough claims
  too much for his theory.
• Casebiers use of the words distanced and
  nondistanced are just ways of talking about
  attention and inattention to works of art and
  about the internal and external aspects of art.

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Conclusions

• Dickie concludes by asserting that there is no
  reason to think that psychological force to
  restrain either action or thoughts occurs or is
  required in the ordinary, non-desperate cases of
  aesthetic experience - the cases which constitute
  the overwhelming majority of such experiences.
• For Dickie, when Edward Bullough speaks of
  distancing as a criterion of the beautiful and of
  the merely agreeable being transformed into the
  beautiful by distancing, it sounds as if he holds
  a strong version of the aesthetic-attitude
  theory.
• However, the theory he actually displays is a
  weak version, a theory that presents distancing
  as a necessary condition for appreciating the
  qualities objects have independent of the
  distancing.

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Upcoming Assignments

• Dickie, Chapter 4, 5 or 6 (choose one), one full
  page summary due Thursday 4/14/05
• Your meta-critique of a published critique of a
  live or recorded performance one full page
  (minimum). Attach a copy of the critique you are
  assessing - due Thursday 4/21/05