Vim and rigor

ArtForum, May, 1999 by W.J.T. Mitchell

My account runs the risk, of course, of drastically oversimplifying Goodman's elaboration of this distinction in numerous domains. (See my Iconology for a more detailed treatment.) His theory goes on to distinguish semantic and syntactic features, symbol "systems" and symbol "schemes"; it maps out "routes of reference," notions of "compliance," and a variety of criteria for notational systems, as distinct from linguistic and representational systems. Several things are striking about the results of this endeavor. Many possible worlds are constructed by the fabric of conventional signs we weave about ourselves in both the arts and the sciences. There is no one single world that is absolutely right, true, or correct. At the same time, despite what appears to be the embrace of laissez-faire relativism, not all representations are equally true or useful. Truth and rigor, precision and accuracy don't dissolve into a mindless subjectivism or indeterminacy. Scientific truth and aesthetic "rightness" do not disappear. Their criteria, limits, and systematic features simply become much clearer, and the structure of nonsense, error, or self-contradiction also becomes more perspicuous.

From the standpoint of one who is interested in the relations of verbal and visual symbols, the most notable consequence of Goodman's theory is that the old binary oppositions of semiotics (natural and conventional signs, icon and symbol, motivated and arbitrary signs) seem to dissolve and reemerge in surprising new ways. Instead of being opposed to pictorial representation, language begins to appear as a mixed and middle region between the realm of rigorously rule-bound notation systems and the relatively anarchic sphere of the image. Differences among art forms and media cease to be "essential" or "natural" (as they had been in neo-Kantian aesthetics, for instance) and become functional, operational distinctions among ways of perceiving and manipulating symbols. Within Goodman's framework, one can look at a diagram, a map, a line drawing, an engraving, a photograph, a painting, and a Rauschenberg combine and work toward a precise description of the multifarious distinctions and intersections among these forms. Goodman's theory of symbols has a curiously liberating effect on the range of aesthetic apprehensions available to a beholder. It frees one from a gamut of prejudices that tell us in advance what a picture must do or be, how a text can mean, how a score or script can be realized, what the ontology of "the" photograph is.

But perhaps the most important gesture of Goodman's theory is its explicit refusal to traffic in value judgments. Despite his reputation as a connoisseur and art collector - and he was, indeed, a serious patron of the arts whose interests ranged from old masters to modernist abstraction to the primitive and exotic - Goodman sequestered his "general theory of symbols" from the task of evaluation, just as he refused to engage in historical debates or genealogies. This (along with his technical difficulty) may be another reason for his lack of cult status. Goodman left no canonical series of texts or masterpieces, no lineage of precursors overcome. What he bequeathed us instead was something more subtle and perhaps more precious: a system that opens the cognition of works of art to more capacious and discriminating descriptions and frees it from certain predictable rituals. I think here of Foucault's famous refusal to resort to the closure of "proper name" and the discipline of historical reference in his analysis of Las Meninas. Foucault insists on "the medium of" a "grey, anonymous language" that will permit the painting to "little by little, release its illuminations." Goodman's vocabulary for the arts has a similar kind of grey anonymity. It seeks a certain wise passivity in the presence of the nonverbal symbol, a suspension of evaluation and even interpretation in favor of a long pause, a breath-taking prolongation of the "merely" descriptive moment. Not for him the instantaneous perception of aesthetic value, the flash of conviction to be enforced with every weapon in the arsenal of philosophical authority. He even invites us to substitute our own examples for his, but above all to play a different game of noticing when art is occurring (not "what it is"), how art is making meaning (rather than "what it means"), where its routes of reference lead us (not "what it stands for").