You very welcome to this meeting of the English faculty postcolonial writing theory seminar.
It's a slightly unusual context for us to be meeting.
And we usually meet a flat space in a slightly more convivial and snug space.
But the level of demand insisted that we that we shift venues to something, something a bit larger.
This seminar doubles up today as the final event in our Great Writers Inspire at Home
series that some of you will remember from last term and that many of you attended.
As you'll remember, we then looked at how we read reading, reception and identity,
race and engagement in conversation with a range of British writers and a number of
those talks and interviews and now captured on the the the writers at home websites.
And all of these concerns are central to the work of today's speaker and have indeed been shaped in conversation with that work.
So it's really delightful to welcome Professor Fels to the English faculty and the postcolonial seminar today to speak on art and attunement.
Rita Belski is William Arkin and junior professor of English at the University of Virginia in the United States, and also Niels Bohr,
professor at the University of Southern Denmark and Oden's,
where she leads a research group on the uses of literature and is also the editor at both venues of new literary history.
She's written extensively, as many of us will know, on literary theory and aesthetics,
on modernity and postmodernity, on feminist theory and on cultural studies.
And her honours and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the William Parker Ryley Prise for the best article in the melee.
A work has been very, very widely translated, and her most recent books include The Uses of literature,
comparison, theories, approaches, uses, the limits of critique and critique and post critique.
And she's currently completing and she'll be speaking to that today, a book called Hooked Art and Attachment.
And I think we're going to find out more about how attachment correlates with attunement in what follows.
Rita will be delighted to have questions later and plenty of discussion.
So please join me now in welcoming her very much. Thanks very much for turning out.
It's great to be here, so thank you alloca for the for the lovely introduction.
So, yes, I'm just finishing a book inside. It's called Hooked. And the argument is really that we're all hooked.
It's not just the people who watch Hollywood blockbusters who are hooked, but the fan of Ulysses is also hooked.
We're all hooked in different ways.
And so I look at three three different kinds of attachment attunement ID and interpretation is three ways we become attached to artworks.
And I try and defend attachment, which is tend to get a bad rap often in our field, I think.
And today I'm just going to talk about one of those hooks and that's this idea of attunement.
So I'll start now. So how does one get or failed to get a work of art?
Why is it that we are drawn to a certain painting or novel or piece of music and yet we're stubbornly unmoved by others?
The same on the face of it, not so very different. Can we do justice to what such a response feels like and why it matters?
Yet without counting all those prompts and pressures, a college syllabus and over the top review a parent's approving look or raised
eyebrow that inclines us the city as us to some works rather than others.
I'm hoping that attunement might give us a fresh slant on these questions.
So what kind of entitlements does this word bring?
To become attuned is to enter into a responsible relation, an affinity that's often not fully conscious or deliberate.
So we're talking about pre analytical levels of response, inclinations, propulsion, stirrings that often fall below the threshold of consciousness.
Attunement is not primarily about content, about the about ness of a work of art.
Rather, it's effective in a specific sense, in contrast to what we might call container theories of the emotion,
in other words, the idea of a person having an inner feeling about an external object attunement is a little bit different.
It's about things resonating, coming together, aligning, reading the opening lines of a novel, coming face to face with a painting.
We may find ourselves captivated or entranced in ways that we may find hard to verbalise or explain.
And this response can be contrasted to another reaction. Well, we certainly appreciate the scale or the sophistication of a piece of art.
Yes, we agree it's a good piece of art, and yet we don't feel ourselves to be touched or moved.
A worker might say then creates its own criteria to which you may or may not measure up, it makes demands on us even as we engage it.
And of course, we can also be not attuned. Right. Which happens pretty frequently.
If attunement implies receptivity, we can tune out rather than tune in.
There could be friction. It can be awkwardness. There could be lack of fit.
Attunement, moreover, is formed and informed by others as we're going to see toco created rather than a purely individual experience.
And finally, something that happens over time. It allows us to consider the rhythms of our attachments, the subtle infatuation,
as well as the steady attraction, the epiphany, but also the slow burn.
While on vacation in constant several years ago, I pick up a paperback called The Uncle Sold in an English language bookstore.
I've read and appreciated most of Assuras novels without being especially affected by them.
But this particular title is not known to me.
I find myself drawn abruptly and without recourse into a maze like narrative set in a central European city,
a concert pianist called Ryder has arrived to perform a major concert.
Yet he's utterly paralysed, sapped of will all his attempts at trying to rehearse, somehow coming to nothing.
Was squarely in Kafka territory to fuse anxiety conversations at cross purposes, enigmatic figures appearing out of nowhere,
although the novel also brings to mind the writings of the Swiss recluse Robert Wowza as writer takes the elevator up to his hotel room,
the porter's fussy, pedantic monologue on his personal rules of service.
Well, a good plot will never put down the guests bags, not even for a moment.
This could come straight out of this novel, Yakob from Gunton with its strange school for servants.
But how could this Portus monologue, which extends over five pages in the novel, be spoken during an elevator ride that could only take a few seconds?
And how during this time could writers fail to notice the young woman is pressed into the elevators corner?
I give myself up completely to the unconsolable it's warping of time and space,
it's pointless encounters and bungled rendezvous make perfect, intuitive sense.
I cannot not read kind of ruins my holiday until the book is done,
at which point I turn to the Internet eager for confirmation that others have admired what I admire.
My hopes are soon crushed. Pitilessly, the critics pile on the Barbes Issue Gurus, a new novel, has the virtue of being unlike anything else.
Snell's James Wood. It invents its own category of badness on TV.
Tony Parsons recommends that the UNcancel be consigned to the flames.
Meanwhile, The New York Times speaks of a shaggy dog narrative that solely tries the reader's patience.
I was not being taken unaware by their reaction to a novel, a film or a piece of music were enthralled by what we thought we would not care about.
We are left cold by what we were eagerly anticipating. Meanwhile, it's not uncommon to discover that others don't share our enthusiasm,
that what strikes us as remarkable they find unexceptional, even trite.
We are often confounded by ourselves and short as well as being confounded by others, and yet neither aesthetic theories nor social.
Seriously, much room for this kind of surprise. As Stephen Conroy remarks, a stance of much criticism has this boyscout quality be prepared.
The judgements of artwork's can be unpredictable.
It's not something that formalised approaches address because to engage in close readings of works is to assume,
after all, that they are worthy of attention.
And yet, no work is fated to be great, it must attract allies and enthusiasts, compete against rivals, counter the voices of naysayers and sceptics.
Such acts of squabbling disputation, though assoon soon lost from sight, these characters fade away into the shadows.
A few especially memorable cases are still marvelled at. Look at those dunderheads who trash the first edition of Moby Dick.
Yet, for the most part, we perceive only the work itself, not the grubby penumbra of hesitations, demurrals, disputations that once encircled it.
It's only in the present when we're faced with this mortifying clash between what we know to be exceptional and
the vigorous rebuttals of our friends or reviewers or teachers that the volatile nature of value becomes visible.
Now, other scholars, meanwhile, are only too eager to underscore the relative nature of aesthetic value,
but only in order to explain just politics by other means.
This ambition connects sociologist of culture, the injected Bordier to other kinds of mystifying, mystifying,
demystifying sorry accounts of the construction of taste and in account of artistic
experience in terms of beauty sensation of feeling is assumed to be misleading.
Right, because it simply reflects the illusions of everyday actors.
Again, an ultimate cause is nailed down, this time no longer in the work,
but in the social field or in the social system, which determines what we like and the reasons we like it,
power status, ideological belittlement, fear of being shamed again and certainties are smoothed over and explanations are delivered.
Now, it's certainly true that a fondness for Baako boys is not universal nor purely idiosyncratic, but shaped by class or class and education.
So I'll go with Bordier that far will always pre oriented by the Milia into which we are thrown.
But this line of argument only takes us so far.
It can't explain why some works within a general category can resonate far more powerfully than others.
That I'm entranced by the Unconsolable, for example, rather than by issue gross other works,
even though they give the same amount of cultural capital and status.
What have you know in such an approach account for the change of heart, the volte face, right.
Those times when our social circumstances are unchanged and yet we radically revise our judgement.
How facepalm could we have failed to see the obvious?
So both aesthetic theories and social theories of art tend to struggle to account for the unforeseen,
appealing to either the work itself or to social structures.
They presume regularities that don't always exist, foundations less stable than they assume.
And so I look elsewhere for guidance, weaving together elements of phenomenology.
An actor network theory. My hope is that the fuzzy word clouds of phenomenology,
its language of attunement and affinity of mood and world can be blended with a more empirical approach of actor network theory.
And such a mashup can enrich our understanding of what art does and why it matters.
I wouldn't go into an explanation back to network theory now,
but basically what it really tries to do is to try to trace out the ties between human and non-human actors,
people, things text as they are made, unmade, remade over time.
So action network theory is not really a theory in the traditional sense. It doesn't come with the whole kind of conceptual apparatus built into it.
It's really more about description, rather an explanation, the detailing of examples and what they tell us.
This book and writing is very much built on examples. As a group of actors come together or fall apart, new realities come into view.
A new attachments to artworks are made.
Let me move into my I guess my second example. My first major example.
The first time I heard her, I didn't hear her at all, right, Zadie Smith in an essay reflecting on a change changing response to Joni Mitchell.
During her 20s, she remembers Mitchell's music scene, tuneless discordant, a white girls warbling that was little more than noise.
At a certain moment, perspective underwent a shift. Nowadays, listening to music through listening to Mitchell, she writes, brings, quote,
uncontrollable tears, an emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy.
It joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty and of quote.
A quite ordinary album, Blue, owned by millions, unleashes extraordinary emotions, how, she wonders,
did she hates something so completely and then come to love it so unreasonably in a sense?
Smith writes, It took no time. Involving no progressive change, but instead a leap of faith.
A sudden, unexpected attunement. Now, as a writer, Zadie Smith made conscious efforts, she writes, to expand her knowledge,
to immerse yourself in various traditions by forcing myself to reread crime and Punishment.
She says, I now appreciate Dostoyevsky, a writer who, well into my 20s, I was certain I disliked literature.
After all, her area of expertise through an accumulation of examples, through exposure to the unfamiliar, she trains her perception.
She comes to admire what once seemed impenetrable or dreary or trifling.
And yet not all commitments are of this kind. Not all attachments come from effort or education.
I didn't come to love Joni Mitchell, Smith writes, by knowing anything more about her or understanding what an open tune guitar is,
or even by sitting down and forcing myself to listen to her songs.
I hated Joni Mitchell and then I loved her.
Her voice did nothing for me until the day it ended me completely.
And to quote transformation and it seems unrelated to will or intent that arrives as if out of nowhere.
Now, the usual way we have of talking about our various aesthetic preferences is that is the word taste, of course.
The affinities, we have a certain films or fashions or foods or even fonts that operate a semi-conscious level taste can have a visceral force,
as we all know, a draw with magnetic intensity to certain objects while recoiling with disgust or irritation from others.
Yeah, this word taste doesn't quite capture what interests me here.
Its connotations, on the one hand, tend to be a little bit too snobbish. You know, these condescending distinctions between good and bad taste.
I to superficial right. The idea of a whimsical preference for vanilla versus strawberry ice cream is no accounting for taste.
So the language of taste, in my view, reinforces the sense of the artwork as little more than an object to be sampled or consumed.
That's why I'm interested in this other word for the issue at hand.
As I mentioned, the idea that the art world, the artwork creates a world and lebas its own demands.
And so here I am after Zadie Smith and indeed after other people like Stanley Cavell turned to the language of attunement.
So cabel, for example, talks about achievement when he talks about how we come to agree about criteria.
It's not just a matter of reason, says, you know, we don't connect by reason simply, but by attunement in words and forms of life.
So Carvelle language is bound up with relations between persons.
Attunement is a real, if fragile achievement. When we kind of get someone, if you like, a testimony to our connexions with others.
Attunement is also a translation for the Heideggerian term, but Finley Caite,
how one finds oneself in relation to the world and here it overlaps with I'm
talking about Heidegger here overlaps with his account of dispositions or moods.
Shiman and I found his ideas of stimulant mood quite helpful in thinking about what I call the critical moods of scholarship and previous work.
The thing is, though, moods of a mood for Heidegger is not really directed at specific objects.
Mood is rather than overall orientation. It's kind of background rather than foreground.
What I'm interested in here, though, is how we get or fail to get a specific work of art.
So he will not reveal about background in quite that same way, because attunement here is related to a specific, a distinct other.
There's a directed response. There's a specific vector of attention right.
Towards the painting or the novel, wherever it might be. It also, of course, implies a process.
One can be more or less attuned. And finally, this process of a treatment can sometimes hum away quietly in the background, as I'll be saying,
but it can also burst into consciousness with a revelatory force where it's not background at all.
And so it's in here in this context that I actually find Zadie Smith essay Engaging and Accessible,
published in The New Yorker, an exceptionally useful,
really very rich account that I think is much richer in its implications for our thinking about art and much of what passes for aesthetic theory.
So let's go back to Smith in looking back at her earlier self, that stranger who disdained Joni Mitchell Smith is mystified.
Quote, I truly cannot understand the language of my former heart who was that person,
quote unquote, deploying a harsh word philistine that's fallen from favour in recent decades,
Smith wields it to voice a severe self judgement to her own failure to measure up to Mitchell's music, to hear its claims upon her.
Her approach to a younger self echoes that of her irritated husband.
It's Joni Mitchell, what's wrong with you?
Listen to it, it's beautiful, can't you hear that?
He was squarely in the Kantian realm of aesthetic judgement as being both subjective yet normative,
when we're entranced by an artwork, we cannot help wanting others to share our perception.
It doesn't just seem beautiful to us. It embodies a beauty that should be unmistakeable to us.
The issue is, how does this shed perception come about? And Carvelle reminds us here, that argument will only take us so far.
So what I'm trying to persuade a friend, a husband, whoever it might be, I can point to features or inspire or excite me.
I can try and justify my judgement. Perhaps my eloquence will have its effect.
But there's also an inescapable subjective dimension to aesthetic response,
a point at which disagreements cannot be resolved and justifications falter.
Famous quote from Carvelle here. Describing people having an argument about artwork, don't you see here deluging because if you don't see something,
even without my explanation, it's nothing further to discuss. So the same question, how many shifts from not seeing to seeing or in the Smith case,
not hearing to hearing Mitchell lies at the heart of Smith's essay.
Let's quote her words again, the first time I heard her.
I didn't hear her at all. She continues, My parents did not prepare me.
The natural thing in this situation is to blame the parents and the.
Here, Smith acknowledges the role of nurture in shaping taste while also interjecting about the tone of mild note of irony.
How tempting, after all, to ascribe all our failings to our upbringing, the sounds of her youth with those of Burning Spear and the Beatles,
Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald, the tastes she writes of the young black woman and the older white man who raised her.
There was no demographic in her home for white women's music.
Later at university, her friends press Joni Mitchell upon her fervently, zealously to little avail.
You don't like. My friends had pity in their eyes,
the same look the faithful tend to give you as you hand them back their literature and close the door in their faces.
She steadily resists. The cajolery of these believers is unwilling to be made over in their image.
So it's in her 30s that something changes, Smith is on her way to a wedding in Wales,
a husband who's a poet suggests they make a brief stop at Tintern.
Abbey Smith is intent on chasing down a sausage roll at the next motorway service station is reluctant Hammoudi Salwah,
not least because of that music, that shrill music, that shrill Peiping Jonie, again emanating from the car's music system.
As she wanders amongst flagstones, boarded with vessels looking out on Greenhills, Tintern Abbey,
her mind still preoccupied with the prospect of microwaved snacks, quote, and then what?
As I remember it, son flooded the area, my husband quoted a line from one of the Lucy poems.
I began humming a strange piece of music. Humming Joanny, not yet conscious of the transformation, end of quote.
A change has been brought about, an attunement as occurred, did a unique configuration of actors,
a ruin, a landscape, a husband, some lines of Wordsworth come together to affect a shift in perception,
or did the process start much earlier with a fervent testimony of friends that had no impact until combining mysterious alchemy with an afternoon,
a tintern abbey? A defence was suddenly breached to the Music Act alone?
Or did it resonate only because the ground was prepared, the viewer already receptive?
Well, the listener, I guess, in this case, receptive.
Shaped by the sounds of a childhood Smith remark, she had long resisted a different style of singing,
distrustful of music in a way she never been distrustful of words. Receptivity was a harder state to attain.
I don't think it's a coincidence, she says, that my Joni epiphany came through the back door, as it were, or my critical mind,
like undefended, focussed on another form of beauty in the words she's looking out the kind of visual spectacle of nature.
And so she's not tending to the music, which kind of sneaks into her is attunement cannot occur without a nation state of readiness.
Aesthetics cannot dispense with a first person response. This is what phenomenology gets, right?
No one can listen or read or look for you. No one else can have your aesthetic experience.
And yet Smith also conjures up a cavalcade of allies, helpers, mediators, the friends, the landscape,
the sun, the voice of the husband, the resplendent ruin, even the longed for sausage roll.
Meanwhile, attunement is also often indebted to a laying down of prior response.
As Smith notes, artworks at once seem scandalous or vacuous, are now widely admired.
If you paid a call on Picasso's studio in nineteen hundred and seven, she says, she would have been, quote, nonplussed, even a little scandalised.
But if I stand now before a Picasso painting at the Museum of Modern Art, it seems obviously beautiful to me.
All the difficult work of attunement and acceptance has been done by others, smart critics, other painters, appreciative amateurs.
They kicked the door open a century ago. All I had to do was to walk through it and of quote,
Do we perceive the beauty of Picasso because it's there or because others have inspired us to see Picasso this way?
Actor network theory would suggest the antithesis is false.
The question not only unanswerable, but an interesting as little as braunohler to a rights.
You look at a painting, a friend points out an aspect you had not seen before, you are this made to see something?
Who is seeing it? You, of course. And yet you freely admit that you would not have seen it without your friend, so who has seen this feature?
Is it you or is it your friend? The question is absurd, and I quote, Our own seeing depends on the seeing of others.
And yet, of course, friends also disagree with friends, critics and critics, museums will squabble over the merits of specific works.
And while are oriented to find some texts more resonant than others by education, class, background, pressures of gender,
race, religion, sexuality, nationality, glitches are also common, expected and actual affinities may not smoothly coincide.
It's these glitches that are likely to be missed by the academics questionnaire.
As the French sociologist Robert ESCAP noted years ago,
the cultured man who knows Rosene will never be so foolish as to admit that what he really enjoys is tinta.
Conscious beliefs about literary and cultural value don't line up perfectly with those works that truly captivate us.
So small alerts us to several aspects of attunement. I won't be able to talk about it all today, but I'll just focus on a couple.
There's the question of its duration, right? Are we talking about sudden infatuation or a slow acclimatising?
And what of the time lag? Right. That can occur.
So, for example, a work of art that has no impact on a first encounter, only to resonate months or years later.
Smith, it seems, could only really hear Joni Mitchell when she was ready to hear when the ground was prepared.
And what about the so-called inevitability of attunement, those seemingly seemingly mysterious or inexpressible aspects of aesthetic experience?
It's such told nothing more than romantic bluster, mystification. What does it point to something that we need to grapple with?
Can we acknowledge the presence of an artwork but without neglecting its social shaping?
Let's take these two questions and turn.
So I'm going to talk about the sort of temporality of attunement and about the question of the presence of an artwork,
how we should think about it, how we might think about it. So this question, how is that response unfolds over time is very hard to pin down.
And I think that's one reason why trying to gauge the impact of art in laboratory conditions, you know,
measuring whether people become more empathic after reading a paragraph of Jane Austen or wherever can seem so counterintuitive or absurd,
as if literary prose are injected into the bloodstream. Type effects on the brain cells a few minutes later doesn't quite work that way.
Right. Did that painting by Rembrandt influenced me as I stood in front of it,
or was it a change that took place imperceptibly over years as the painting took up a place in my memory and my thoughts?
Now, Smith says, I think one reason is rather appealing because it tells a captivating story of sudden conversion when it speaks to a long history,
of course, of spiritual or secular transformations that we're all familiar with.
These epiphanies share certain qualities. They resist being accounted for in rational terms.
Their authority does not lend itself to doubt, at least for the person who's experiencing them.
Their sudden and transformative an epiphany has ethical force.
It reveals to you what really matters. It's also aesthetic, writes dramatic.
It's contrast filled. It's soaked in effect. And yet so Joni Mitchell's music may come to seem extraordinary to Smith.
It's also utterly ordinary stream through headphones and speakers, an integral part of commodity culture.
And while Smith's epiphany takes place at Tintern Abbey, it does so in a mundane context of summer weddings,
motorway snacks, low grade irritation and marital squabbles.
So know, the Mitchell conversion is of a kind of very kind of dramatic story,
but I want to say that not all canola achievements are so dramatic beyond the drama of her Mitchell revelation,
I think Smith's essay is a great guide to the differing timeframes of how we can become attuned.
First of all, of course, there's the pressure of upbringing and unbeliever.
To be born is to be is to be thrown into a form of life with its preferences and its prohibitions, its idioms and its silences.
Becoming attuned in this sense is a precondition for any form of living with others,
whether we think of the young child's attuning to the facial expressions and gestures of a parent as described by the psychologist Daniel Stern,
or the late retuning to what counts in the world within which we must make our way.
Some of these responses are widely shared. Others are closely tied to certain ways of talking or laughing,
moaning or failing to mourn the foods that are consumed or in Smith's case, the music that is loved.
It's through a history of these attunement that we become the persons we are.
Second, though, there is a remaking of taste, a retuning, if you like, through education, obviously,
as a matter of getting to know and thus coming to light of experiencing what lies beyond the bounds of previous experience education,
be formal or informal institution or self taught.
Smith describes her eagerness to apprentice herself in a literary tradition to learn the complexities of a craft,
one becomes attuned to what once seemed opaque or irrelevant. One comes to admire what once seemed unworthy of admiration.
But education could also involve estrangement and shame. A Smith well knows embarrassment at one's lack of knowledge or bad taste,
disorientation or a failure to grasp what seems self-evident to others alienation from a family of origin.
Whose world one no longer shares.
And then finally, perhaps thirdly, there are those flashes that I've just been referring to that come as if out of nowhere,
unexpected and unprepared for what the language is often what to being transfixed, arrested, frozen in place.
He, for example, is the writer Patricia Hample. She's hurrying through the Chicago Art Institute on her way to meet a friend for lunch.
Brief quote from Hample, I didn't Holte didn't stop.
I was stopped, apprehended, I stood before the painting a long minute, I could not move away.
I couldn't have said why I was simply facing, though I wasn't in the habit of being moved by art, I wasn't much of a museum goer.
But perhaps only someone innocent of our history could have been so riveted by picture
as I was that day by Matisse gazing woman with her no nonsense post Great War.
Bob Chin resting on crossed hands.
I wasn't thinking in words, I was hammered by the image and a quote so indifferent to art haplessly brought up short by painting,
she says, hammered by an image. Such accounts and there are many others to be found.
I've been collecting a lot of them would appear to give the lie to the claim that appreciating art is always tied to appropriate schooling.
This is, of course, is pujas claim.
And he's very dismissive of the so-called pure gays, the belief that we could encounter a work of art without cultural baggage or education.
Now, I think it's true. Hempel's gaze is not pure in quite that sense.
She's obviously someone who has had a certain level of education, but she's nonetheless, she insists, pretty ignorant of our history.
And in fact, she says this ignorance actually makes them more receptive to a Matisse painting that's classified by insiders as a minor work.
The shift gears, though, not all examples of a treatment or as dramatic and sudden as those of Smith and Hample.
There's a book by the British art historian, actually, T.J. Clarke, The Site of Death,
which is an exercise in slow looking as Clarke returns every day over a period of
several months to look at two paintings by Puzzo in a Getty museum in Los Angeles.
The book is a painstaking record record of what he sees,
shimmering birch leaves the curls on the head of a goatherd, the smudge of sun on a horse's backside.
Slowness here does not negate surprise, but makes it possible.
Little has been written, Clark says, on a practise of repeated looking.
We need, he says, to throw the image back into the flow of time.
What time is known about the history of its making, but the time during which viewers look, look away, look back, shrug their shoulders,
move closer to look at a dog peeking out from behind a chair in the corner of a painting, stand back to appreciate a larger pattern.
Clark's book is also an account of an attunement, but one that's based on slowness rather than speed.
Another example that falls between these two, between the sudden revelation and a slow acclimatisation is offered by Geoff Dyer,
who's written quite entertaining book on his obsession with Tarkoff, his film Stalker.
A first, the film has no appeal, there's no immediate Hulk Dyer remains unmoved,
indeed bored, and yet some scrap or residue remains, in his mind, dormant in consciousness.
Sometime later, he says, as he's strolling through the park,
the flapping wings of a bird bring back the memory of a scene in stalker, and an enduring tie is forged.
A period of incubation, it seems, was needed before the film could do its work.
A pattern of movement sets up a kinaesthetic resonance, and attunement dies, Wilkie says,
is an effort to articulate both the film's persistent mystery and my gratitude to it.
So, as you can see, even from this handful of examples, the time span between encountering a work right and its impact is unpredictable.
We could be hooked immediately or after a week, a month, a year has passed.
DeLay time lag. A not uncommon aesthetic experience is aslant of clock time.
It follows its own rhythms and the duration of a tune which is also variable could be sudden or slow.
Attraction could be instantaneous,
or it can build over time some kind of a sceptical of various theoretical attempts to define aesthetic experience in terms of a specific temporality.
For example, I'm thinking here of maybe Scheffer, who insists that aesthetic experience is always a matter of slowness or delayed categorisation,
or do the opposite argument made by Karlheinz Borra,
who says the aesthetic experience is tied up all pretty much always with sadness and a sense of shock.
There is, I would argue, no pre-existing formula, no kind of nice theory.
We can we can point to only the unpredictability and the temporal variability of persons becoming attuned.
Know the language of events is being used quite a lot to talk about aesthetic experience. But in terms of thinking about events,
I think there's been enough attention to the sort of the complex temporality of the event in the White House, which can be delayed over time.
OK, I won't go too much longer, let me just go back five pages on my second a second second part of this discussion,
this question of presence, if you're. If you've been around for a long time, you know, that presence was a word that was kind of a very,
very bad favour in the heyday of deconstruction, but it's now kind of making a little bit of art.
So my presence, I don't mean simply that an artwork exists, obviously, but its presence, its existence is exceptionally vivid.
It seems to embody some kind of overwhelming than us. Right, that we can't overlook.
How do we make sense of this perception? Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht is one person who's offered a vigorous defence of presence as he defines it.
Presence space show more than temporal. It involves moments of intensity.
Going back to our epiphany idea, it relates to the materiality of art as something that is rather than represents.
Again, it's not about something. It is something that Gumbrecht mentions.
The pushback he started receiving from colleagues when he started writing about presence, raised eyebrows,
sceptical looks, accusations of mysticism and religiosity, concerns that he was taking a conservative turn.
Now, what lies behind his response?
I'm going to censor the vividness of art, I would argue, is an experience that crosses boundaries of class and ideology.
We are certainly not moved by the same work and perhaps were not moved in the same way.
But pretty much everyone right can point to a novel or a film or piece of music that they
consider special that affects them strongly in ways they find difficult to articulate.
So why then is talk of presence seen as risible or reactionary?
Well, one reason may be because when people talk about presents,
when I talk about the intense or ineffable aspects of artworks that I don't often go along with a turn away from social questions.
So, for example, in his book, Art Matters,
Peter Dibala set himself the task of arriving at a better understanding of what it means to be moved profoundly by a work of art,
which is also what I'm trying to I think it's a it's a good question.
And yet, if you look at that book, for example, the possibility that this experience might vary is never taken on board.
And this is where I think phenomenology becomes problematic by the author's own aesthetic experiences.
His own love of von Neumann and William Wordsworth and Glenn Gould comes to stand for
aesthetic experience as such as if everyone enjoy the same artworks in the same way.
So in other words, here you see an example I think is the same problem with Gumbrecht,
where the discussion of the presence of art is treated as a purely individual and a strangely a social matter.
So I want to consider another possibility, the arts,
power and presence is not weakened by its relations back she made possible by its relations that we find a piece of art to be extraordinary,
radiant, sublime, that it fills up our consciousness so the rest of the world briefly fades into nothingness,
does not mean other things were not involved. Rather than subtracting from Art's presence, they bring it into view.
The philosopher Oliver Noah puts it very well, I think when he says we achieve presence, it arises out of interaction, involvement.
So now he discusses the experience of listening to an album of music or looking at paintings in the gallery.
And at first, the songs, the pictures, they all look pretty much the same right there.
Undifferentiated. They're uninteresting. You don't get it. And I'll quote Noah, but suppose you don't give up.
You listen to the record again and again. You begin to notice different qualities in a songs.
As you familiarise yourself with them, they begin to engage your attention.
Perhaps you discuss the music or the paintings in the gallery with a friend, then the friends they might with.
Later, she draws your attention to patterns or devices or lyrics, whereas before the works were flat, opaque, differentiated.
Now they reveal themselves to a structured and meaningful as deep and involving.
And I think the point holds, I mean, I know the point holds not just for Noah's example's classical musical museum art,
but also for rap music or horror movies or science fiction novels or whatever is important to you.
Right. As you delve more deeply into a specific song, as you accumulate and are exposed to more examples.
So the works become more present, more vivid, more real.
Now, in one sense, the point seems totally obvious, you might think even commonsensical,
but why then to my arguing, why is it seem so hard to take on board?
Well, I think one reason, because much of thinking about these issues in literary studies and related
fields in the last few decades has been tied to a certain philosophical picture.
The picture of language is a kind of screed or veil that separating us from a reality we can never know in itself.
So to talk about presence then is to deny that this language screen exists and to believe with
a touching naiveté that we can gain access to the fullness of things as they really are.
This is like a much touted linguistic turn, which has been very influential in the humanities over the last few decades.
And the response of the sceptic that it's a slip.
Flip things around to say, well, you know, you think you have a president, but it's really a projection, an illusion.
It's just a specious fiction imposed on an unknowable world by this language that dictates what you see and what you are capable of seeing.
Increasingly, though,
I think the whole some of the premises of the linguistic turn are being questioned and that people are beginning to look askance at this picture.
Language, after all, is far from being a self-contained system. It's deeply intertwined with ways of engaging with the world.
We do things with work. We do things with words. Because these engagements are so varied, it makes no sense to speak of language as such.
Or we can do is talk about language and use language and sure is more like an interface than a firewall.
An array of devices, devices, a key term in the book I'm writing that connects us to things that matter to us.
And this, you might say, is a broadly pragmatist view of language,
rather so Syrian processor and one that's dominated in the humanities in recent decades.
Now we think of language in this way. We're no longer crestfallen to find out.
It doesn't match up perfectly to the things to which it refers to any more than a hammer need resemble a nail, an interface.
By definition, it's not a perfect representational reconstruction.
It's a device of society that facilitates certain forms of relation and interaction.
So let's think about language in that way and not just language.
As I'll come to say some ways of talking or writing a better suited to our purposes than others.
Some will sustain us, while others may lead us astray. But we're no longer held captive.
Aside by this certain picture, the idea of a thing over here, words here,
world there and a yawning gap between the supposed realms of world and words.
Rather, we have connexions between many kinds of phenomena, words linked up to objects, people, texts, ideas, things,
jostle, collide and combine that the world can surprise us or discomfort us revealed in ways we did not anticipate.
Right reveals the flimsiness of this projection thesis that we're just projecting language onto the world.
Things live their own lives. They can resist or evade our framing.
They are not just servile minions of all powerful linguistic schemes.
The same holds true of our engagement with artworks were images, for example, have a very different impact to words.
As T.J. Clark says, we don't need to wring our hands about the language of inevitability.
There's nothing wrong with saying that something's ineffable. Doesn't have to bring in a whole, like, cosmology with it.
It just making the point that some things like experiences of painting music are harder to put into words than others.
The point is not to say that these experiences are unmediated because of course,
one way we learn to look at paintings is by looking at other paintings. But what we see doesn't translate perfectly into what we say.
So mediation, right, I'm thinking about mediation, basically, mediation is tied to the qualities of different media,
cannot be fully captured by ideas of reading or text, so that when you watch a film.
Right, many aspects of the sensorium are involved.
Lighting, colour, camera angles, facial expressiveness, music, sound can conjure up a certain atmosphere long before a word has been spoken.
The point here is not just the obvious point that there are sensory and embodied forms of awareness, but these forms are active and reactive.
Our senses are not just recording devices. They distinguish and discriminate.
They are honed by habituation and training and unfamiliar genre of music.
Sounds perplexing, grating, discordant. I hear it over and over again.
It will start perhaps to resonate, to echo consistently in my mind.
Moving to a big city, I'm disoriented by the confusion of gaudy neon signs, flashing lights, video advertising screens.
As days pass by, the confusion dissipates. The kaleidoscope of colour comes to seem comforting rather than chaotic.
The presence, the force, the meaningfulness of aesthetic phenomena is not destroyed, but enabled by their mediation.
This precisely is what it means to become a tuned right, a synchronising,
a coordinating of senses affects bodies and objects that can happen with or without linguistic support.
Now, the historian James Elkins has written a book I'd really recommend to you if you're interested in art.
It's a book called Pictures and Tears. It's a fascinating compendium of examples of people crying in front of paintings.
And James Elkins in this book has some very harsh things to say about art history and criticism.
It's dry, it's alienating, is overly academic. It's self-involved and oblivious to the beauty of images.
And in this book, Alchin Elkins writes in a very moving way,
I think by his own fascination as a 14 year old boy with Bellini's is the ecstasy of Saint Francis,
which hangs at the Frick in New York, saying he's no longer capable of this kind of intense response.
You know, it's not as dried of academic. Like you no longer kind of respond to the painting the way he could when he was young.
Now, the temptation perhaps is to pass this change as a contrast between an intensely personal experience, what our historians call the innocent eye,
i.e. Wii and the cultural baggage that's later imposed upon this innocent eye when he becomes an academic art historian.
But this would be entirely misleading because his alchin admits the kind of love of lonely
words and romantic things that drew him to this painting as a 14 year old boy was also shaped,
obviously, by various sources, including, he says, the ideas of 19th century writers like Ruskin.
He was the unconscious heir of a tradition. His early response to Bellini may well have been more intense,
more emotional or more emotionally powerful than his later response as a scholar of art.
But it was not, therefore, unmediated. Consider how many things had to be assembled, art museums, techniques of display,
conventions of looking at paintings, prior exposure to linguistic and iconographic traditions,
encouragement from family or friends or from books so that his younger self could have this glorious epiphany at the Frick.
I'm just wrapping them, not two more pages, page and a half. I'm done now.
You probably noticed, you know, I've got more discussions of painting and music here,
which I think for various reasons led themselves especially well to accounts of attunement.
But I'd argue that forms of literature, as always, as well as ways of reading literature are also amenable to such an approach.
And I mentioned my my earlier infatuation with Ishiguro. Poetry is an obvious candidate giving its ties to the sonorous and the resonant.
But Sumant, I think, has a wider relevance for drawing out relations between mood and style.
For example, seatbelts abiding concerns include questions of spatial orientation and a person's attunement or lack of attunement to place.
It is writing also strives to retune the reader eye to deploying language in order to cast a pervasive mood.
Well, David James calls the solace of Ziebell style, it's slowly unfurling sentences and stately phrasing,
it's aloof and melancholic tone works both with and against the existential and political bleakness of a work such as Austerlitz.
Meanwhile, tumour can also manifest itself in very different ways, we might think of those collective attachments that are fleeting and ephemeral,
a catchy hit song, a new a new gadget, a YouTube video that are fleeting and ephemeral.
Are certain moments in vital, urgent, indispensable only to fade into oblivion a few weeks later again.
There's a mystery about how these waves of enthusiasm are sparked. Obviously, capitalism plays its role in promoting fashions and fans.
But economics, it seems to me, can tell us very little about why certain things catch on,
while countless, countless others are met with collective indifference.
Here again, I want to insist that there are contingencies at play and the constant possibility of surprise.
So I'm thinking about humans, I've tried to reckon with the stakes of the world to think about affinities that are emotionally powerful,
yet not always easy to pin down a value can work within, but also against pressures of education, class and culture.
Our aesthetic attachments don't always form along expected lines.
I consider differing rhythms and scales of attunement.
They can be a matter of stability, but also surprise that they could be collectively shaped, but also idiosyncratic.
At the same time, I've also tried to argue a thesis, the attunement is a result of things,
many things coming together in either expected or unexpected ways.
We often give our exceptional credit for ushering newness in the world as if it were the sole
agent of change in a world of sameness and soul crushing predictability that art can invigorate.
Surprise, astonish is not in dispute.
What I been suggesting, though, and this is where I find acto network theory helpful, is that the artwork cannot act by itself.
It needs allies, supporters, helpers. Attunement is a joint achievement and crucially, that our experience of art is coproduced in this way,
does not take away from the value of the work, but makes it possible.
Antoine Hennion owns a French cultural sociologist involved in the actor network theory approach.
I think Antoine Hennion puts it beautifully in one of his descriptions.
He talks about the someone who plays the piano on a rock musician or was sitting down at the keyboard.
Let me quote him here to finish. Hennion writes, The musicians sitting down at the keyboard knows there are his scales,
his score, his touch and the skills that he has acquired, that without them, he is nothing.
And yet, even if he starts with these mediations, nothing is settled, the music will have to emerge.
There is nothing there is automatic or guaranteed.
The surprise that peels away from the flux of things is the most ordinary of experiences and of quote,
and I think what anyone says here about playing the piano holds equally well to
the experience of listening to music or reading a novel or looking at a painting.
The surprise that peels away from the flux of things. Could there be a better description of the enigma of our students?
Thank you.