1 00:00:10,750 --> 00:00:20,050 You very welcome to this meeting of the English faculty postcolonial writing theory seminar. 2 00:00:20,050 --> 00:00:23,800 It's a slightly unusual context for us to be meeting. 3 00:00:23,800 --> 00:00:28,600 And we usually meet a flat space in a slightly more convivial and snug space. 4 00:00:28,600 --> 00:00:38,290 But the level of demand insisted that we that we shift venues to something, something a bit larger. 5 00:00:38,290 --> 00:00:44,380 This seminar doubles up today as the final event in our Great Writers Inspire at Home 6 00:00:44,380 --> 00:00:50,950 series that some of you will remember from last term and that many of you attended. 7 00:00:50,950 --> 00:00:57,280 As you'll remember, we then looked at how we read reading, reception and identity, 8 00:00:57,280 --> 00:01:05,050 race and engagement in conversation with a range of British writers and a number of 9 00:01:05,050 --> 00:01:14,170 those talks and interviews and now captured on the the the writers at home websites. 10 00:01:14,170 --> 00:01:21,550 And all of these concerns are central to the work of today's speaker and have indeed been shaped in conversation with that work. 11 00:01:21,550 --> 00:01:35,470 So it's really delightful to welcome Professor Fels to the English faculty and the postcolonial seminar today to speak on art and attunement. 12 00:01:35,470 --> 00:01:44,230 Rita Belski is William Arkin and junior professor of English at the University of Virginia in the United States, and also Niels Bohr, 13 00:01:44,230 --> 00:01:48,040 professor at the University of Southern Denmark and Oden's, 14 00:01:48,040 --> 00:01:58,210 where she leads a research group on the uses of literature and is also the editor at both venues of new literary history. 15 00:01:58,210 --> 00:02:03,280 She's written extensively, as many of us will know, on literary theory and aesthetics, 16 00:02:03,280 --> 00:02:08,530 on modernity and postmodernity, on feminist theory and on cultural studies. 17 00:02:08,530 --> 00:02:16,120 And her honours and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the William Parker Ryley Prise for the best article in the melee. 18 00:02:16,120 --> 00:02:22,900 A work has been very, very widely translated, and her most recent books include The Uses of literature, 19 00:02:22,900 --> 00:02:29,080 comparison, theories, approaches, uses, the limits of critique and critique and post critique. 20 00:02:29,080 --> 00:02:36,250 And she's currently completing and she'll be speaking to that today, a book called Hooked Art and Attachment. 21 00:02:36,250 --> 00:02:41,980 And I think we're going to find out more about how attachment correlates with attunement in what follows. 22 00:02:41,980 --> 00:02:45,880 Rita will be delighted to have questions later and plenty of discussion. 23 00:02:45,880 --> 00:03:00,490 So please join me now in welcoming her very much. Thanks very much for turning out. 24 00:03:00,490 --> 00:03:04,150 It's great to be here, so thank you alloca for the for the lovely introduction. 25 00:03:04,150 --> 00:03:10,210 So, yes, I'm just finishing a book inside. It's called Hooked. And the argument is really that we're all hooked. 26 00:03:10,210 --> 00:03:15,970 It's not just the people who watch Hollywood blockbusters who are hooked, but the fan of Ulysses is also hooked. 27 00:03:15,970 --> 00:03:17,680 We're all hooked in different ways. 28 00:03:17,680 --> 00:03:28,210 And so I look at three three different kinds of attachment attunement ID and interpretation is three ways we become attached to artworks. 29 00:03:28,210 --> 00:03:35,530 And I try and defend attachment, which is tend to get a bad rap often in our field, I think. 30 00:03:35,530 --> 00:03:42,470 And today I'm just going to talk about one of those hooks and that's this idea of attunement. 31 00:03:42,470 --> 00:03:49,040 So I'll start now. So how does one get or failed to get a work of art? 32 00:03:49,040 --> 00:03:55,790 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? 33 00:03:55,790 --> 00:04:03,260 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? 34 00:04:03,260 --> 00:04:12,290 Yet without counting all those prompts and pressures, a college syllabus and over the top review a parent's approving look or raised 35 00:04:12,290 --> 00:04:18,650 eyebrow that inclines us the city as us to some works rather than others. 36 00:04:18,650 --> 00:04:24,350 I'm hoping that attunement might give us a fresh slant on these questions. 37 00:04:24,350 --> 00:04:27,740 So what kind of entitlements does this word bring? 38 00:04:27,740 --> 00:04:35,990 To become attuned is to enter into a responsible relation, an affinity that's often not fully conscious or deliberate. 39 00:04:35,990 --> 00:04:46,220 So we're talking about pre analytical levels of response, inclinations, propulsion, stirrings that often fall below the threshold of consciousness. 40 00:04:46,220 --> 00:04:53,730 Attunement is not primarily about content, about the about ness of a work of art. 41 00:04:53,730 --> 00:05:00,480 Rather, it's effective in a specific sense, in contrast to what we might call container theories of the emotion, 42 00:05:00,480 --> 00:05:07,350 in other words, the idea of a person having an inner feeling about an external object attunement is a little bit different. 43 00:05:07,350 --> 00:05:17,190 It's about things resonating, coming together, aligning, reading the opening lines of a novel, coming face to face with a painting. 44 00:05:17,190 --> 00:05:25,500 We may find ourselves captivated or entranced in ways that we may find hard to verbalise or explain. 45 00:05:25,500 --> 00:05:33,040 And this response can be contrasted to another reaction. Well, we certainly appreciate the scale or the sophistication of a piece of art. 46 00:05:33,040 --> 00:05:41,870 Yes, we agree it's a good piece of art, and yet we don't feel ourselves to be touched or moved. 47 00:05:41,870 --> 00:05:53,870 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. 48 00:05:53,870 --> 00:05:57,920 And of course, we can also be not attuned. Right. Which happens pretty frequently. 49 00:05:57,920 --> 00:06:03,590 If attunement implies receptivity, we can tune out rather than tune in. 50 00:06:03,590 --> 00:06:07,640 There could be friction. It can be awkwardness. There could be lack of fit. 51 00:06:07,640 --> 00:06:16,680 Attunement, moreover, is formed and informed by others as we're going to see toco created rather than a purely individual experience. 52 00:06:16,680 --> 00:06:26,900 And finally, something that happens over time. It allows us to consider the rhythms of our attachments, the subtle infatuation, 53 00:06:26,900 --> 00:06:36,650 as well as the steady attraction, the epiphany, but also the slow burn. 54 00:06:36,650 --> 00:06:46,160 While on vacation in constant several years ago, I pick up a paperback called The Uncle Sold in an English language bookstore. 55 00:06:46,160 --> 00:06:51,680 I've read and appreciated most of Assuras novels without being especially affected by them. 56 00:06:51,680 --> 00:06:55,330 But this particular title is not known to me. 57 00:06:55,330 --> 00:07:02,500 I find myself drawn abruptly and without recourse into a maze like narrative set in a central European city, 58 00:07:02,500 --> 00:07:06,820 a concert pianist called Ryder has arrived to perform a major concert. 59 00:07:06,820 --> 00:07:13,830 Yet he's utterly paralysed, sapped of will all his attempts at trying to rehearse, somehow coming to nothing. 60 00:07:13,830 --> 00:07:24,300 Was squarely in Kafka territory to fuse anxiety conversations at cross purposes, enigmatic figures appearing out of nowhere, 61 00:07:24,300 --> 00:07:33,180 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, 62 00:07:33,180 --> 00:07:38,160 the porter's fussy, pedantic monologue on his personal rules of service. 63 00:07:38,160 --> 00:07:42,570 Well, a good plot will never put down the guests bags, not even for a moment. 64 00:07:42,570 --> 00:07:48,690 This could come straight out of this novel, Yakob from Gunton with its strange school for servants. 65 00:07:48,690 --> 00:07:57,150 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? 66 00:07:57,150 --> 00:08:04,730 And how during this time could writers fail to notice the young woman is pressed into the elevators corner? 67 00:08:04,730 --> 00:08:10,280 I give myself up completely to the unconsolable it's warping of time and space, 68 00:08:10,280 --> 00:08:15,680 it's pointless encounters and bungled rendezvous make perfect, intuitive sense. 69 00:08:15,680 --> 00:08:20,330 I cannot not read kind of ruins my holiday until the book is done, 70 00:08:20,330 --> 00:08:27,800 at which point I turn to the Internet eager for confirmation that others have admired what I admire. 71 00:08:27,800 --> 00:08:36,830 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. 72 00:08:36,830 --> 00:08:42,560 Snell's James Wood. It invents its own category of badness on TV. 73 00:08:42,560 --> 00:08:47,090 Tony Parsons recommends that the UNcancel be consigned to the flames. 74 00:08:47,090 --> 00:08:55,910 Meanwhile, The New York Times speaks of a shaggy dog narrative that solely tries the reader's patience. 75 00:08:55,910 --> 00:09:04,100 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. 76 00:09:04,100 --> 00:09:12,650 We are left cold by what we were eagerly anticipating. Meanwhile, it's not uncommon to discover that others don't share our enthusiasm, 77 00:09:12,650 --> 00:09:18,050 that what strikes us as remarkable they find unexceptional, even trite. 78 00:09:18,050 --> 00:09:25,550 We are often confounded by ourselves and short as well as being confounded by others, and yet neither aesthetic theories nor social. 79 00:09:25,550 --> 00:09:36,880 Seriously, much room for this kind of surprise. As Stephen Conroy remarks, a stance of much criticism has this boyscout quality be prepared. 80 00:09:36,880 --> 00:09:39,220 The judgements of artwork's can be unpredictable. 81 00:09:39,220 --> 00:09:45,010 It's not something that formalised approaches address because to engage in close readings of works is to assume, 82 00:09:45,010 --> 00:09:48,270 after all, that they are worthy of attention. 83 00:09:48,270 --> 00:09:59,970 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. 84 00:09:59,970 --> 00:10:08,370 Such acts of squabbling disputation, though assoon soon lost from sight, these characters fade away into the shadows. 85 00:10:08,370 --> 00:10:14,970 A few especially memorable cases are still marvelled at. Look at those dunderheads who trash the first edition of Moby Dick. 86 00:10:14,970 --> 00:10:25,440 Yet, for the most part, we perceive only the work itself, not the grubby penumbra of hesitations, demurrals, disputations that once encircled it. 87 00:10:25,440 --> 00:10:31,320 It's only in the present when we're faced with this mortifying clash between what we know to be exceptional and 88 00:10:31,320 --> 00:10:39,660 the vigorous rebuttals of our friends or reviewers or teachers that the volatile nature of value becomes visible. 89 00:10:39,660 --> 00:10:45,570 Now, other scholars, meanwhile, are only too eager to underscore the relative nature of aesthetic value, 90 00:10:45,570 --> 00:10:49,860 but only in order to explain just politics by other means. 91 00:10:49,860 --> 00:10:56,370 This ambition connects sociologist of culture, the injected Bordier to other kinds of mystifying, mystifying, 92 00:10:56,370 --> 00:11:02,130 demystifying sorry accounts of the construction of taste and in account of artistic 93 00:11:02,130 --> 00:11:06,780 experience in terms of beauty sensation of feeling is assumed to be misleading. 94 00:11:06,780 --> 00:11:12,380 Right, because it simply reflects the illusions of everyday actors. 95 00:11:12,380 --> 00:11:17,240 Again, an ultimate cause is nailed down, this time no longer in the work, 96 00:11:17,240 --> 00:11:23,660 but in the social field or in the social system, which determines what we like and the reasons we like it, 97 00:11:23,660 --> 00:11:35,500 power status, ideological belittlement, fear of being shamed again and certainties are smoothed over and explanations are delivered. 98 00:11:35,500 --> 00:11:43,510 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. 99 00:11:43,510 --> 00:11:51,340 So I'll go with Bordier that far will always pre oriented by the Milia into which we are thrown. 100 00:11:51,340 --> 00:11:55,540 But this line of argument only takes us so far. 101 00:11:55,540 --> 00:12:02,350 It can't explain why some works within a general category can resonate far more powerfully than others. 102 00:12:02,350 --> 00:12:07,210 That I'm entranced by the Unconsolable, for example, rather than by issue gross other works, 103 00:12:07,210 --> 00:12:10,780 even though they give the same amount of cultural capital and status. 104 00:12:10,780 --> 00:12:17,440 What have you know in such an approach account for the change of heart, the volte face, right. 105 00:12:17,440 --> 00:12:24,850 Those times when our social circumstances are unchanged and yet we radically revise our judgement. 106 00:12:24,850 --> 00:12:29,860 How facepalm could we have failed to see the obvious? 107 00:12:29,860 --> 00:12:36,340 So both aesthetic theories and social theories of art tend to struggle to account for the unforeseen, 108 00:12:36,340 --> 00:12:40,060 appealing to either the work itself or to social structures. 109 00:12:40,060 --> 00:12:47,170 They presume regularities that don't always exist, foundations less stable than they assume. 110 00:12:47,170 --> 00:12:52,330 And so I look elsewhere for guidance, weaving together elements of phenomenology. 111 00:12:52,330 --> 00:12:57,910 An actor network theory. My hope is that the fuzzy word clouds of phenomenology, 112 00:12:57,910 --> 00:13:06,340 its language of attunement and affinity of mood and world can be blended with a more empirical approach of actor network theory. 113 00:13:06,340 --> 00:13:12,170 And such a mashup can enrich our understanding of what art does and why it matters. 114 00:13:12,170 --> 00:13:15,100 I wouldn't go into an explanation back to network theory now, 115 00:13:15,100 --> 00:13:21,640 but basically what it really tries to do is to try to trace out the ties between human and non-human actors, 116 00:13:21,640 --> 00:13:27,010 people, things text as they are made, unmade, remade over time. 117 00:13:27,010 --> 00:13:34,780 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. 118 00:13:34,780 --> 00:13:40,480 It's really more about description, rather an explanation, the detailing of examples and what they tell us. 119 00:13:40,480 --> 00:13:49,240 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. 120 00:13:49,240 --> 00:13:53,620 A new attachments to artworks are made. 121 00:13:53,620 --> 00:14:01,020 Let me move into my I guess my second example. My first major example. 122 00:14:01,020 --> 00:14:12,380 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. 123 00:14:12,380 --> 00:14:21,980 During her 20s, she remembers Mitchell's music scene, tuneless discordant, a white girls warbling that was little more than noise. 124 00:14:21,980 --> 00:14:31,140 At a certain moment, perspective underwent a shift. Nowadays, listening to music through listening to Mitchell, she writes, brings, quote, 125 00:14:31,140 --> 00:14:38,910 uncontrollable tears, an emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy. 126 00:14:38,910 --> 00:14:45,080 It joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty and of quote. 127 00:14:45,080 --> 00:14:53,780 A quite ordinary album, Blue, owned by millions, unleashes extraordinary emotions, how, she wonders, 128 00:14:53,780 --> 00:15:01,400 did she hates something so completely and then come to love it so unreasonably in a sense? 129 00:15:01,400 --> 00:15:11,060 Smith writes, It took no time. Involving no progressive change, but instead a leap of faith. 130 00:15:11,060 --> 00:15:21,170 A sudden, unexpected attunement. Now, as a writer, Zadie Smith made conscious efforts, she writes, to expand her knowledge, 131 00:15:21,170 --> 00:15:26,660 to immerse yourself in various traditions by forcing myself to reread crime and Punishment. 132 00:15:26,660 --> 00:15:34,220 She says, I now appreciate Dostoyevsky, a writer who, well into my 20s, I was certain I disliked literature. 133 00:15:34,220 --> 00:15:43,220 After all, her area of expertise through an accumulation of examples, through exposure to the unfamiliar, she trains her perception. 134 00:15:43,220 --> 00:15:49,100 She comes to admire what once seemed impenetrable or dreary or trifling. 135 00:15:49,100 --> 00:15:58,500 And yet not all commitments are of this kind. Not all attachments come from effort or education. 136 00:15:58,500 --> 00:16:06,810 I didn't come to love Joni Mitchell, Smith writes, by knowing anything more about her or understanding what an open tune guitar is, 137 00:16:06,810 --> 00:16:12,290 or even by sitting down and forcing myself to listen to her songs. 138 00:16:12,290 --> 00:16:16,970 I hated Joni Mitchell and then I loved her. 139 00:16:16,970 --> 00:16:23,430 Her voice did nothing for me until the day it ended me completely. 140 00:16:23,430 --> 00:16:33,280 And to quote transformation and it seems unrelated to will or intent that arrives as if out of nowhere. 141 00:16:33,280 --> 00:16:39,640 Now, the usual way we have of talking about our various aesthetic preferences is that is the word taste, of course. 142 00:16:39,640 --> 00:16:48,880 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, 143 00:16:48,880 --> 00:16:56,050 as we all know, a draw with magnetic intensity to certain objects while recoiling with disgust or irritation from others. 144 00:16:56,050 --> 00:16:59,860 Yeah, this word taste doesn't quite capture what interests me here. 145 00:16:59,860 --> 00:17:07,450 Its connotations, on the one hand, tend to be a little bit too snobbish. You know, these condescending distinctions between good and bad taste. 146 00:17:07,450 --> 00:17:15,310 I to superficial right. The idea of a whimsical preference for vanilla versus strawberry ice cream is no accounting for taste. 147 00:17:15,310 --> 00:17:22,610 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. 148 00:17:22,610 --> 00:17:27,020 That's why I'm interested in this other word for the issue at hand. 149 00:17:27,020 --> 00:17:36,670 As I mentioned, the idea that the art world, the artwork creates a world and lebas its own demands. 150 00:17:36,670 --> 00:17:45,190 And so here I am after Zadie Smith and indeed after other people like Stanley Cavell turned to the language of attunement. 151 00:17:45,190 --> 00:17:52,090 So cabel, for example, talks about achievement when he talks about how we come to agree about criteria. 152 00:17:52,090 --> 00:18:00,370 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. 153 00:18:00,370 --> 00:18:05,200 So Carvelle language is bound up with relations between persons. 154 00:18:05,200 --> 00:18:15,060 Attunement is a real, if fragile achievement. When we kind of get someone, if you like, a testimony to our connexions with others. 155 00:18:15,060 --> 00:18:19,530 Attunement is also a translation for the Heideggerian term, but Finley Caite, 156 00:18:19,530 --> 00:18:26,550 how one finds oneself in relation to the world and here it overlaps with I'm 157 00:18:26,550 --> 00:18:32,010 talking about Heidegger here overlaps with his account of dispositions or moods. 158 00:18:32,010 --> 00:18:41,130 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. 159 00:18:41,130 --> 00:18:48,300 The thing is, though, moods of a mood for Heidegger is not really directed at specific objects. 160 00:18:48,300 --> 00:18:56,220 Mood is rather than overall orientation. It's kind of background rather than foreground. 161 00:18:56,220 --> 00:19:01,020 What I'm interested in here, though, is how we get or fail to get a specific work of art. 162 00:19:01,020 --> 00:19:08,220 So he will not reveal about background in quite that same way, because attunement here is related to a specific, a distinct other. 163 00:19:08,220 --> 00:19:11,820 There's a directed response. There's a specific vector of attention right. 164 00:19:11,820 --> 00:19:16,590 Towards the painting or the novel, wherever it might be. It also, of course, implies a process. 165 00:19:16,590 --> 00:19:26,220 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, 166 00:19:26,220 --> 00:19:32,530 but it can also burst into consciousness with a revelatory force where it's not background at all. 167 00:19:32,530 --> 00:19:37,830 And so it's in here in this context that I actually find Zadie Smith essay Engaging and Accessible, 168 00:19:37,830 --> 00:19:41,100 published in The New Yorker, an exceptionally useful, 169 00:19:41,100 --> 00:19:50,970 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. 170 00:19:50,970 --> 00:20:02,390 So let's go back to Smith in looking back at her earlier self, that stranger who disdained Joni Mitchell Smith is mystified. 171 00:20:02,390 --> 00:20:10,370 Quote, I truly cannot understand the language of my former heart who was that person, 172 00:20:10,370 --> 00:20:17,450 quote unquote, deploying a harsh word philistine that's fallen from favour in recent decades, 173 00:20:17,450 --> 00:20:29,000 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. 174 00:20:29,000 --> 00:20:34,360 Her approach to a younger self echoes that of her irritated husband. 175 00:20:34,360 --> 00:20:38,350 It's Joni Mitchell, what's wrong with you? 176 00:20:38,350 --> 00:20:44,030 Listen to it, it's beautiful, can't you hear that? 177 00:20:44,030 --> 00:20:50,690 He was squarely in the Kantian realm of aesthetic judgement as being both subjective yet normative, 178 00:20:50,690 --> 00:20:55,340 when we're entranced by an artwork, we cannot help wanting others to share our perception. 179 00:20:55,340 --> 00:21:01,370 It doesn't just seem beautiful to us. It embodies a beauty that should be unmistakeable to us. 180 00:21:01,370 --> 00:21:08,920 The issue is, how does this shed perception come about? And Carvelle reminds us here, that argument will only take us so far. 181 00:21:08,920 --> 00:21:15,330 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. 182 00:21:15,330 --> 00:21:20,450 I can try and justify my judgement. Perhaps my eloquence will have its effect. 183 00:21:20,450 --> 00:21:24,470 But there's also an inescapable subjective dimension to aesthetic response, 184 00:21:24,470 --> 00:21:29,930 a point at which disagreements cannot be resolved and justifications falter. 185 00:21:29,930 --> 00:21:40,310 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, 186 00:21:40,310 --> 00:21:50,530 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, 187 00:21:50,530 --> 00:21:57,360 not hearing to hearing Mitchell lies at the heart of Smith's essay. 188 00:21:57,360 --> 00:22:01,200 Let's quote her words again, the first time I heard her. 189 00:22:01,200 --> 00:22:09,140 I didn't hear her at all. She continues, My parents did not prepare me. 190 00:22:09,140 --> 00:22:14,460 The natural thing in this situation is to blame the parents and the. 191 00:22:14,460 --> 00:22:21,810 Here, Smith acknowledges the role of nurture in shaping taste while also interjecting about the tone of mild note of irony. 192 00:22:21,810 --> 00:22:29,970 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, 193 00:22:29,970 --> 00:22:38,700 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. 194 00:22:38,700 --> 00:22:42,960 There was no demographic in her home for white women's music. 195 00:22:42,960 --> 00:22:51,100 Later at university, her friends press Joni Mitchell upon her fervently, zealously to little avail. 196 00:22:51,100 --> 00:22:56,080 You don't like. My friends had pity in their eyes, 197 00:22:56,080 --> 00:23:03,550 the same look the faithful tend to give you as you hand them back their literature and close the door in their faces. 198 00:23:03,550 --> 00:23:11,510 She steadily resists. The cajolery of these believers is unwilling to be made over in their image. 199 00:23:11,510 --> 00:23:15,950 So it's in her 30s that something changes, Smith is on her way to a wedding in Wales, 200 00:23:15,950 --> 00:23:19,220 a husband who's a poet suggests they make a brief stop at Tintern. 201 00:23:19,220 --> 00:23:26,450 Abbey Smith is intent on chasing down a sausage roll at the next motorway service station is reluctant Hammoudi Salwah, 202 00:23:26,450 --> 00:23:35,270 not least because of that music, that shrill music, that shrill Peiping Jonie, again emanating from the car's music system. 203 00:23:35,270 --> 00:23:41,720 As she wanders amongst flagstones, boarded with vessels looking out on Greenhills, Tintern Abbey, 204 00:23:41,720 --> 00:23:50,040 her mind still preoccupied with the prospect of microwaved snacks, quote, and then what? 205 00:23:50,040 --> 00:23:58,260 As I remember it, son flooded the area, my husband quoted a line from one of the Lucy poems. 206 00:23:58,260 --> 00:24:08,450 I began humming a strange piece of music. Humming Joanny, not yet conscious of the transformation, end of quote. 207 00:24:08,450 --> 00:24:14,240 A change has been brought about, an attunement as occurred, did a unique configuration of actors, 208 00:24:14,240 --> 00:24:20,960 a ruin, a landscape, a husband, some lines of Wordsworth come together to affect a shift in perception, 209 00:24:20,960 --> 00:24:29,930 or did the process start much earlier with a fervent testimony of friends that had no impact until combining mysterious alchemy with an afternoon, 210 00:24:29,930 --> 00:24:36,110 a tintern abbey? A defence was suddenly breached to the Music Act alone? 211 00:24:36,110 --> 00:24:42,230 Or did it resonate only because the ground was prepared, the viewer already receptive? 212 00:24:42,230 --> 00:24:45,670 Well, the listener, I guess, in this case, receptive. 213 00:24:45,670 --> 00:24:50,380 Shaped by the sounds of a childhood Smith remark, she had long resisted a different style of singing, 214 00:24:50,380 --> 00:24:57,940 distrustful of music in a way she never been distrustful of words. Receptivity was a harder state to attain. 215 00:24:57,940 --> 00:25:04,630 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, 216 00:25:04,630 --> 00:25:10,780 like undefended, focussed on another form of beauty in the words she's looking out the kind of visual spectacle of nature. 217 00:25:10,780 --> 00:25:19,940 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. 218 00:25:19,940 --> 00:25:26,150 Aesthetics cannot dispense with a first person response. This is what phenomenology gets, right? 219 00:25:26,150 --> 00:25:31,790 No one can listen or read or look for you. No one else can have your aesthetic experience. 220 00:25:31,790 --> 00:25:38,000 And yet Smith also conjures up a cavalcade of allies, helpers, mediators, the friends, the landscape, 221 00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:45,690 the sun, the voice of the husband, the resplendent ruin, even the longed for sausage roll. 222 00:25:45,690 --> 00:25:53,110 Meanwhile, attunement is also often indebted to a laying down of prior response. 223 00:25:53,110 --> 00:25:58,480 As Smith notes, artworks at once seem scandalous or vacuous, are now widely admired. 224 00:25:58,480 --> 00:26:06,790 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. 225 00:26:06,790 --> 00:26:13,360 But if I stand now before a Picasso painting at the Museum of Modern Art, it seems obviously beautiful to me. 226 00:26:13,360 --> 00:26:22,450 All the difficult work of attunement and acceptance has been done by others, smart critics, other painters, appreciative amateurs. 227 00:26:22,450 --> 00:26:30,280 They kicked the door open a century ago. All I had to do was to walk through it and of quote, 228 00:26:30,280 --> 00:26:39,210 Do we perceive the beauty of Picasso because it's there or because others have inspired us to see Picasso this way? 229 00:26:39,210 --> 00:26:43,140 Actor network theory would suggest the antithesis is false. 230 00:26:43,140 --> 00:26:49,540 The question not only unanswerable, but an interesting as little as braunohler to a rights. 231 00:26:49,540 --> 00:26:58,180 You look at a painting, a friend points out an aspect you had not seen before, you are this made to see something? 232 00:26:58,180 --> 00:27:06,200 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? 233 00:27:06,200 --> 00:27:14,850 Is it you or is it your friend? The question is absurd, and I quote, Our own seeing depends on the seeing of others. 234 00:27:14,850 --> 00:27:21,660 And yet, of course, friends also disagree with friends, critics and critics, museums will squabble over the merits of specific works. 235 00:27:21,660 --> 00:27:28,320 And while are oriented to find some texts more resonant than others by education, class, background, pressures of gender, 236 00:27:28,320 --> 00:27:38,640 race, religion, sexuality, nationality, glitches are also common, expected and actual affinities may not smoothly coincide. 237 00:27:38,640 --> 00:27:43,780 It's these glitches that are likely to be missed by the academics questionnaire. 238 00:27:43,780 --> 00:27:47,790 As the French sociologist Robert ESCAP noted years ago, 239 00:27:47,790 --> 00:27:55,110 the cultured man who knows Rosene will never be so foolish as to admit that what he really enjoys is tinta. 240 00:27:55,110 --> 00:28:04,350 Conscious beliefs about literary and cultural value don't line up perfectly with those works that truly captivate us. 241 00:28:04,350 --> 00:28:10,230 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. 242 00:28:10,230 --> 00:28:18,330 There's the question of its duration, right? Are we talking about sudden infatuation or a slow acclimatising? 243 00:28:18,330 --> 00:28:21,420 And what of the time lag? Right. That can occur. 244 00:28:21,420 --> 00:28:29,010 So, for example, a work of art that has no impact on a first encounter, only to resonate months or years later. 245 00:28:29,010 --> 00:28:37,700 Smith, it seems, could only really hear Joni Mitchell when she was ready to hear when the ground was prepared. 246 00:28:37,700 --> 00:28:47,540 And what about the so-called inevitability of attunement, those seemingly seemingly mysterious or inexpressible aspects of aesthetic experience? 247 00:28:47,540 --> 00:28:56,390 It's such told nothing more than romantic bluster, mystification. What does it point to something that we need to grapple with? 248 00:28:56,390 --> 00:29:02,900 Can we acknowledge the presence of an artwork but without neglecting its social shaping? 249 00:29:02,900 --> 00:29:04,520 Let's take these two questions and turn. 250 00:29:04,520 --> 00:29:09,240 So I'm going to talk about the sort of temporality of attunement and about the question of the presence of an artwork, 251 00:29:09,240 --> 00:29:17,520 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. 252 00:29:17,520 --> 00:29:22,520 And I think that's one reason why trying to gauge the impact of art in laboratory conditions, you know, 253 00:29:22,520 --> 00:29:30,080 measuring whether people become more empathic after reading a paragraph of Jane Austen or wherever can seem so counterintuitive or absurd, 254 00:29:30,080 --> 00:29:37,730 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. 255 00:29:37,730 --> 00:29:42,410 Right. Did that painting by Rembrandt influenced me as I stood in front of it, 256 00:29:42,410 --> 00:29:52,690 or was it a change that took place imperceptibly over years as the painting took up a place in my memory and my thoughts? 257 00:29:52,690 --> 00:30:00,730 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, 258 00:30:00,730 --> 00:30:05,620 of course, of spiritual or secular transformations that we're all familiar with. 259 00:30:05,620 --> 00:30:11,470 These epiphanies share certain qualities. They resist being accounted for in rational terms. 260 00:30:11,470 --> 00:30:16,030 Their authority does not lend itself to doubt, at least for the person who's experiencing them. 261 00:30:16,030 --> 00:30:20,620 Their sudden and transformative an epiphany has ethical force. 262 00:30:20,620 --> 00:30:25,210 It reveals to you what really matters. It's also aesthetic, writes dramatic. 263 00:30:25,210 --> 00:30:33,460 It's contrast filled. It's soaked in effect. And yet so Joni Mitchell's music may come to seem extraordinary to Smith. 264 00:30:33,460 --> 00:30:39,400 It's also utterly ordinary stream through headphones and speakers, an integral part of commodity culture. 265 00:30:39,400 --> 00:30:45,310 And while Smith's epiphany takes place at Tintern Abbey, it does so in a mundane context of summer weddings, 266 00:30:45,310 --> 00:30:51,790 motorway snacks, low grade irritation and marital squabbles. 267 00:30:51,790 --> 00:30:56,170 So know, the Mitchell conversion is of a kind of very kind of dramatic story, 268 00:30:56,170 --> 00:31:03,670 but I want to say that not all canola achievements are so dramatic beyond the drama of her Mitchell revelation, 269 00:31:03,670 --> 00:31:11,560 I think Smith's essay is a great guide to the differing timeframes of how we can become attuned. 270 00:31:11,560 --> 00:31:16,290 First of all, of course, there's the pressure of upbringing and unbeliever. 271 00:31:16,290 --> 00:31:27,630 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. 272 00:31:27,630 --> 00:31:33,450 Becoming attuned in this sense is a precondition for any form of living with others, 273 00:31:33,450 --> 00:31:43,350 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, 274 00:31:43,350 --> 00:31:50,850 or the late retuning to what counts in the world within which we must make our way. 275 00:31:50,850 --> 00:32:00,390 Some of these responses are widely shared. Others are closely tied to certain ways of talking or laughing, 276 00:32:00,390 --> 00:32:09,210 moaning or failing to mourn the foods that are consumed or in Smith's case, the music that is loved. 277 00:32:09,210 --> 00:32:17,040 It's through a history of these attunement that we become the persons we are. 278 00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:24,120 Second, though, there is a remaking of taste, a retuning, if you like, through education, obviously, 279 00:32:24,120 --> 00:32:33,120 as a matter of getting to know and thus coming to light of experiencing what lies beyond the bounds of previous experience education, 280 00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:38,280 be formal or informal institution or self taught. 281 00:32:38,280 --> 00:32:46,590 Smith describes her eagerness to apprentice herself in a literary tradition to learn the complexities of a craft, 282 00:32:46,590 --> 00:32:55,200 one becomes attuned to what once seemed opaque or irrelevant. One comes to admire what once seemed unworthy of admiration. 283 00:32:55,200 --> 00:33:05,010 But education could also involve estrangement and shame. A Smith well knows embarrassment at one's lack of knowledge or bad taste, 284 00:33:05,010 --> 00:33:12,420 disorientation or a failure to grasp what seems self-evident to others alienation from a family of origin. 285 00:33:12,420 --> 00:33:18,010 Whose world one no longer shares. 286 00:33:18,010 --> 00:33:23,830 And then finally, perhaps thirdly, there are those flashes that I've just been referring to that come as if out of nowhere, 287 00:33:23,830 --> 00:33:31,810 unexpected and unprepared for what the language is often what to being transfixed, arrested, frozen in place. 288 00:33:31,810 --> 00:33:39,490 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. 289 00:33:39,490 --> 00:33:44,550 Brief quote from Hample, I didn't Holte didn't stop. 290 00:33:44,550 --> 00:33:54,300 I was stopped, apprehended, I stood before the painting a long minute, I could not move away. 291 00:33:54,300 --> 00:34:03,870 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. 292 00:34:03,870 --> 00:34:08,070 But perhaps only someone innocent of our history could have been so riveted by picture 293 00:34:08,070 --> 00:34:13,650 as I was that day by Matisse gazing woman with her no nonsense post Great War. 294 00:34:13,650 --> 00:34:18,110 Bob Chin resting on crossed hands. 295 00:34:18,110 --> 00:34:29,070 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, 296 00:34:29,070 --> 00:34:34,430 she says, hammered by an image. Such accounts and there are many others to be found. 297 00:34:34,430 --> 00:34:42,210 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. 298 00:34:42,210 --> 00:34:44,540 This is, of course, is pujas claim. 299 00:34:44,540 --> 00:34:53,330 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. 300 00:34:53,330 --> 00:34:56,150 Now, I think it's true. Hempel's gaze is not pure in quite that sense. 301 00:34:56,150 --> 00:35:03,110 She's obviously someone who has had a certain level of education, but she's nonetheless, she insists, pretty ignorant of our history. 302 00:35:03,110 --> 00:35:15,120 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. 303 00:35:15,120 --> 00:35:21,500 The shift gears, though, not all examples of a treatment or as dramatic and sudden as those of Smith and Hample. 304 00:35:21,500 --> 00:35:27,350 There's a book by the British art historian, actually, T.J. Clarke, The Site of Death, 305 00:35:27,350 --> 00:35:32,450 which is an exercise in slow looking as Clarke returns every day over a period of 306 00:35:32,450 --> 00:35:39,760 several months to look at two paintings by Puzzo in a Getty museum in Los Angeles. 307 00:35:39,760 --> 00:35:44,350 The book is a painstaking record record of what he sees, 308 00:35:44,350 --> 00:35:52,510 shimmering birch leaves the curls on the head of a goatherd, the smudge of sun on a horse's backside. 309 00:35:52,510 --> 00:35:57,550 Slowness here does not negate surprise, but makes it possible. 310 00:35:57,550 --> 00:36:02,590 Little has been written, Clark says, on a practise of repeated looking. 311 00:36:02,590 --> 00:36:07,780 We need, he says, to throw the image back into the flow of time. 312 00:36:07,780 --> 00:36:16,960 What time is known about the history of its making, but the time during which viewers look, look away, look back, shrug their shoulders, 313 00:36:16,960 --> 00:36:26,110 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. 314 00:36:26,110 --> 00:36:34,260 Clark's book is also an account of an attunement, but one that's based on slowness rather than speed. 315 00:36:34,260 --> 00:36:41,400 Another example that falls between these two, between the sudden revelation and a slow acclimatisation is offered by Geoff Dyer, 316 00:36:41,400 --> 00:36:47,600 who's written quite entertaining book on his obsession with Tarkoff, his film Stalker. 317 00:36:47,600 --> 00:36:53,010 A first, the film has no appeal, there's no immediate Hulk Dyer remains unmoved, 318 00:36:53,010 --> 00:37:01,300 indeed bored, and yet some scrap or residue remains, in his mind, dormant in consciousness. 319 00:37:01,300 --> 00:37:04,140 Sometime later, he says, as he's strolling through the park, 320 00:37:04,140 --> 00:37:13,380 the flapping wings of a bird bring back the memory of a scene in stalker, and an enduring tie is forged. 321 00:37:13,380 --> 00:37:18,150 A period of incubation, it seems, was needed before the film could do its work. 322 00:37:18,150 --> 00:37:24,330 A pattern of movement sets up a kinaesthetic resonance, and attunement dies, Wilkie says, 323 00:37:24,330 --> 00:37:30,600 is an effort to articulate both the film's persistent mystery and my gratitude to it. 324 00:37:30,600 --> 00:37:38,520 So, as you can see, even from this handful of examples, the time span between encountering a work right and its impact is unpredictable. 325 00:37:38,520 --> 00:37:42,690 We could be hooked immediately or after a week, a month, a year has passed. 326 00:37:42,690 --> 00:37:47,880 DeLay time lag. A not uncommon aesthetic experience is aslant of clock time. 327 00:37:47,880 --> 00:37:54,650 It follows its own rhythms and the duration of a tune which is also variable could be sudden or slow. 328 00:37:54,650 --> 00:37:56,310 Attraction could be instantaneous, 329 00:37:56,310 --> 00:38:05,960 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. 330 00:38:05,960 --> 00:38:14,490 For example, I'm thinking here of maybe Scheffer, who insists that aesthetic experience is always a matter of slowness or delayed categorisation, 331 00:38:14,490 --> 00:38:18,060 or do the opposite argument made by Karlheinz Borra, 332 00:38:18,060 --> 00:38:24,090 who says the aesthetic experience is tied up all pretty much always with sadness and a sense of shock. 333 00:38:24,090 --> 00:38:28,110 There is, I would argue, no pre-existing formula, no kind of nice theory. 334 00:38:28,110 --> 00:38:35,940 We can we can point to only the unpredictability and the temporal variability of persons becoming attuned. 335 00:38:35,940 --> 00:38:40,860 Know the language of events is being used quite a lot to talk about aesthetic experience. But in terms of thinking about events, 336 00:38:40,860 --> 00:38:47,940 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. 337 00:38:47,940 --> 00:38:54,180 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, 338 00:38:54,180 --> 00:39:01,070 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, 339 00:39:01,070 --> 00:39:06,800 very bad favour in the heyday of deconstruction, but it's now kind of making a little bit of art. 340 00:39:06,800 --> 00:39:14,630 So my presence, I don't mean simply that an artwork exists, obviously, but its presence, its existence is exceptionally vivid. 341 00:39:14,630 --> 00:39:19,520 It seems to embody some kind of overwhelming than us. Right, that we can't overlook. 342 00:39:19,520 --> 00:39:28,280 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. 343 00:39:28,280 --> 00:39:32,990 Presence space show more than temporal. It involves moments of intensity. 344 00:39:32,990 --> 00:39:38,630 Going back to our epiphany idea, it relates to the materiality of art as something that is rather than represents. 345 00:39:38,630 --> 00:39:43,820 Again, it's not about something. It is something that Gumbrecht mentions. 346 00:39:43,820 --> 00:39:50,930 The pushback he started receiving from colleagues when he started writing about presence, raised eyebrows, 347 00:39:50,930 --> 00:39:59,510 sceptical looks, accusations of mysticism and religiosity, concerns that he was taking a conservative turn. 348 00:39:59,510 --> 00:40:01,670 Now, what lies behind his response? 349 00:40:01,670 --> 00:40:07,670 I'm going to censor the vividness of art, I would argue, is an experience that crosses boundaries of class and ideology. 350 00:40:07,670 --> 00:40:12,260 We are certainly not moved by the same work and perhaps were not moved in the same way. 351 00:40:12,260 --> 00:40:16,850 But pretty much everyone right can point to a novel or a film or piece of music that they 352 00:40:16,850 --> 00:40:22,100 consider special that affects them strongly in ways they find difficult to articulate. 353 00:40:22,100 --> 00:40:27,180 So why then is talk of presence seen as risible or reactionary? 354 00:40:27,180 --> 00:40:30,060 Well, one reason may be because when people talk about presents, 355 00:40:30,060 --> 00:40:39,760 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. 356 00:40:39,760 --> 00:40:41,710 So, for example, in his book, Art Matters, 357 00:40:41,710 --> 00:40:50,440 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, 358 00:40:50,440 --> 00:40:55,000 which is also what I'm trying to I think it's a it's a good question. 359 00:40:55,000 --> 00:41:02,980 And yet, if you look at that book, for example, the possibility that this experience might vary is never taken on board. 360 00:41:02,980 --> 00:41:07,870 And this is where I think phenomenology becomes problematic by the author's own aesthetic experiences. 361 00:41:07,870 --> 00:41:13,270 His own love of von Neumann and William Wordsworth and Glenn Gould comes to stand for 362 00:41:13,270 --> 00:41:19,360 aesthetic experience as such as if everyone enjoy the same artworks in the same way. 363 00:41:19,360 --> 00:41:22,720 So in other words, here you see an example I think is the same problem with Gumbrecht, 364 00:41:22,720 --> 00:41:30,700 where the discussion of the presence of art is treated as a purely individual and a strangely a social matter. 365 00:41:30,700 --> 00:41:32,800 So I want to consider another possibility, the arts, 366 00:41:32,800 --> 00:41:42,910 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, 367 00:41:42,910 --> 00:41:50,680 radiant, sublime, that it fills up our consciousness so the rest of the world briefly fades into nothingness, 368 00:41:50,680 --> 00:42:01,040 does not mean other things were not involved. Rather than subtracting from Art's presence, they bring it into view. 369 00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:10,520 The philosopher Oliver Noah puts it very well, I think when he says we achieve presence, it arises out of interaction, involvement. 370 00:42:10,520 --> 00:42:16,100 So now he discusses the experience of listening to an album of music or looking at paintings in the gallery. 371 00:42:16,100 --> 00:42:19,940 And at first, the songs, the pictures, they all look pretty much the same right there. 372 00:42:19,940 --> 00:42:27,020 Undifferentiated. They're uninteresting. You don't get it. And I'll quote Noah, but suppose you don't give up. 373 00:42:27,020 --> 00:42:32,990 You listen to the record again and again. You begin to notice different qualities in a songs. 374 00:42:32,990 --> 00:42:38,000 As you familiarise yourself with them, they begin to engage your attention. 375 00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:43,340 Perhaps you discuss the music or the paintings in the gallery with a friend, then the friends they might with. 376 00:42:43,340 --> 00:42:52,340 Later, she draws your attention to patterns or devices or lyrics, whereas before the works were flat, opaque, differentiated. 377 00:42:52,340 --> 00:42:59,610 Now they reveal themselves to a structured and meaningful as deep and involving. 378 00:42:59,610 --> 00:43:05,220 And I think the point holds, I mean, I know the point holds not just for Noah's example's classical musical museum art, 379 00:43:05,220 --> 00:43:09,930 but also for rap music or horror movies or science fiction novels or whatever is important to you. 380 00:43:09,930 --> 00:43:17,160 Right. As you delve more deeply into a specific song, as you accumulate and are exposed to more examples. 381 00:43:17,160 --> 00:43:23,010 So the works become more present, more vivid, more real. 382 00:43:23,010 --> 00:43:26,490 Now, in one sense, the point seems totally obvious, you might think even commonsensical, 383 00:43:26,490 --> 00:43:31,840 but why then to my arguing, why is it seem so hard to take on board? 384 00:43:31,840 --> 00:43:35,710 Well, I think one reason, because much of thinking about these issues in literary studies and related 385 00:43:35,710 --> 00:43:41,830 fields in the last few decades has been tied to a certain philosophical picture. 386 00:43:41,830 --> 00:43:49,690 The picture of language is a kind of screed or veil that separating us from a reality we can never know in itself. 387 00:43:49,690 --> 00:43:55,480 So to talk about presence then is to deny that this language screen exists and to believe with 388 00:43:55,480 --> 00:44:01,420 a touching naiveté that we can gain access to the fullness of things as they really are. 389 00:44:01,420 --> 00:44:09,730 This is like a much touted linguistic turn, which has been very influential in the humanities over the last few decades. 390 00:44:09,730 --> 00:44:11,830 And the response of the sceptic that it's a slip. 391 00:44:11,830 --> 00:44:17,390 Flip things around to say, well, you know, you think you have a president, but it's really a projection, an illusion. 392 00:44:17,390 --> 00:44:27,850 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. 393 00:44:27,850 --> 00:44:28,750 Increasingly, though, 394 00:44:28,750 --> 00:44:36,340 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. 395 00:44:36,340 --> 00:44:43,000 Language, after all, is far from being a self-contained system. It's deeply intertwined with ways of engaging with the world. 396 00:44:43,000 --> 00:44:50,620 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. 397 00:44:50,620 --> 00:44:57,490 Or we can do is talk about language and use language and sure is more like an interface than a firewall. 398 00:44:57,490 --> 00:45:03,940 An array of devices, devices, a key term in the book I'm writing that connects us to things that matter to us. 399 00:45:03,940 --> 00:45:06,850 And this, you might say, is a broadly pragmatist view of language, 400 00:45:06,850 --> 00:45:13,120 rather so Syrian processor and one that's dominated in the humanities in recent decades. 401 00:45:13,120 --> 00:45:16,990 Now we think of language in this way. We're no longer crestfallen to find out. 402 00:45:16,990 --> 00:45:25,210 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. 403 00:45:25,210 --> 00:45:30,520 By definition, it's not a perfect representational reconstruction. 404 00:45:30,520 --> 00:45:35,620 It's a device of society that facilitates certain forms of relation and interaction. 405 00:45:35,620 --> 00:45:38,620 So let's think about language in that way and not just language. 406 00:45:38,620 --> 00:45:44,650 As I'll come to say some ways of talking or writing a better suited to our purposes than others. 407 00:45:44,650 --> 00:45:49,450 Some will sustain us, while others may lead us astray. But we're no longer held captive. 408 00:45:49,450 --> 00:45:53,800 Aside by this certain picture, the idea of a thing over here, words here, 409 00:45:53,800 --> 00:45:59,710 world there and a yawning gap between the supposed realms of world and words. 410 00:45:59,710 --> 00:46:06,340 Rather, we have connexions between many kinds of phenomena, words linked up to objects, people, texts, ideas, things, 411 00:46:06,340 --> 00:46:15,050 jostle, collide and combine that the world can surprise us or discomfort us revealed in ways we did not anticipate. 412 00:46:15,050 --> 00:46:21,310 Right reveals the flimsiness of this projection thesis that we're just projecting language onto the world. 413 00:46:21,310 --> 00:46:26,440 Things live their own lives. They can resist or evade our framing. 414 00:46:26,440 --> 00:46:32,150 They are not just servile minions of all powerful linguistic schemes. 415 00:46:32,150 --> 00:46:37,850 The same holds true of our engagement with artworks were images, for example, have a very different impact to words. 416 00:46:37,850 --> 00:46:42,590 As T.J. Clark says, we don't need to wring our hands about the language of inevitability. 417 00:46:42,590 --> 00:46:47,140 There's nothing wrong with saying that something's ineffable. Doesn't have to bring in a whole, like, cosmology with it. 418 00:46:47,140 --> 00:46:55,100 It just making the point that some things like experiences of painting music are harder to put into words than others. 419 00:46:55,100 --> 00:46:58,490 The point is not to say that these experiences are unmediated because of course, 420 00:46:58,490 --> 00:47:07,890 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. 421 00:47:07,890 --> 00:47:14,010 So mediation, right, I'm thinking about mediation, basically, mediation is tied to the qualities of different media, 422 00:47:14,010 --> 00:47:19,410 cannot be fully captured by ideas of reading or text, so that when you watch a film. 423 00:47:19,410 --> 00:47:22,740 Right, many aspects of the sensorium are involved. 424 00:47:22,740 --> 00:47:32,340 Lighting, colour, camera angles, facial expressiveness, music, sound can conjure up a certain atmosphere long before a word has been spoken. 425 00:47:32,340 --> 00:47:39,240 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. 426 00:47:39,240 --> 00:47:43,290 Our senses are not just recording devices. They distinguish and discriminate. 427 00:47:43,290 --> 00:47:47,910 They are honed by habituation and training and unfamiliar genre of music. 428 00:47:47,910 --> 00:47:52,470 Sounds perplexing, grating, discordant. I hear it over and over again. 429 00:47:52,470 --> 00:47:57,270 It will start perhaps to resonate, to echo consistently in my mind. 430 00:47:57,270 --> 00:48:04,860 Moving to a big city, I'm disoriented by the confusion of gaudy neon signs, flashing lights, video advertising screens. 431 00:48:04,860 --> 00:48:12,090 As days pass by, the confusion dissipates. The kaleidoscope of colour comes to seem comforting rather than chaotic. 432 00:48:12,090 --> 00:48:22,540 The presence, the force, the meaningfulness of aesthetic phenomena is not destroyed, but enabled by their mediation. 433 00:48:22,540 --> 00:48:26,950 This precisely is what it means to become a tuned right, a synchronising, 434 00:48:26,950 --> 00:48:36,520 a coordinating of senses affects bodies and objects that can happen with or without linguistic support. 435 00:48:36,520 --> 00:48:40,930 Now, the historian James Elkins has written a book I'd really recommend to you if you're interested in art. 436 00:48:40,930 --> 00:48:48,760 It's a book called Pictures and Tears. It's a fascinating compendium of examples of people crying in front of paintings. 437 00:48:48,760 --> 00:48:54,130 And James Elkins in this book has some very harsh things to say about art history and criticism. 438 00:48:54,130 --> 00:49:00,640 It's dry, it's alienating, is overly academic. It's self-involved and oblivious to the beauty of images. 439 00:49:00,640 --> 00:49:03,490 And in this book, Alchin Elkins writes in a very moving way, 440 00:49:03,490 --> 00:49:09,880 I think by his own fascination as a 14 year old boy with Bellini's is the ecstasy of Saint Francis, 441 00:49:09,880 --> 00:49:15,040 which hangs at the Frick in New York, saying he's no longer capable of this kind of intense response. 442 00:49:15,040 --> 00:49:21,460 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. 443 00:49:21,460 --> 00:49:32,260 Now, the temptation perhaps is to pass this change as a contrast between an intensely personal experience, what our historians call the innocent eye, 444 00:49:32,260 --> 00:49:39,910 i.e. Wii and the cultural baggage that's later imposed upon this innocent eye when he becomes an academic art historian. 445 00:49:39,910 --> 00:49:46,480 But this would be entirely misleading because his alchin admits the kind of love of lonely 446 00:49:46,480 --> 00:49:52,000 words and romantic things that drew him to this painting as a 14 year old boy was also shaped, 447 00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:57,850 obviously, by various sources, including, he says, the ideas of 19th century writers like Ruskin. 448 00:49:57,850 --> 00:50:04,180 He was the unconscious heir of a tradition. His early response to Bellini may well have been more intense, 449 00:50:04,180 --> 00:50:10,360 more emotional or more emotionally powerful than his later response as a scholar of art. 450 00:50:10,360 --> 00:50:20,230 But it was not, therefore, unmediated. Consider how many things had to be assembled, art museums, techniques of display, 451 00:50:20,230 --> 00:50:26,240 conventions of looking at paintings, prior exposure to linguistic and iconographic traditions, 452 00:50:26,240 --> 00:50:35,070 encouragement from family or friends or from books so that his younger self could have this glorious epiphany at the Frick. 453 00:50:35,070 --> 00:50:39,270 I'm just wrapping them, not two more pages, page and a half. I'm done now. 454 00:50:39,270 --> 00:50:42,210 You probably noticed, you know, I've got more discussions of painting and music here, 455 00:50:42,210 --> 00:50:47,610 which I think for various reasons led themselves especially well to accounts of attunement. 456 00:50:47,610 --> 00:50:53,280 But I'd argue that forms of literature, as always, as well as ways of reading literature are also amenable to such an approach. 457 00:50:53,280 --> 00:51:02,220 And I mentioned my my earlier infatuation with Ishiguro. Poetry is an obvious candidate giving its ties to the sonorous and the resonant. 458 00:51:02,220 --> 00:51:08,910 But Sumant, I think, has a wider relevance for drawing out relations between mood and style. 459 00:51:08,910 --> 00:51:18,240 For example, seatbelts abiding concerns include questions of spatial orientation and a person's attunement or lack of attunement to place. 460 00:51:18,240 --> 00:51:27,090 It is writing also strives to retune the reader eye to deploying language in order to cast a pervasive mood. 461 00:51:27,090 --> 00:51:34,050 Well, David James calls the solace of Ziebell style, it's slowly unfurling sentences and stately phrasing, 462 00:51:34,050 --> 00:51:45,020 it's aloof and melancholic tone works both with and against the existential and political bleakness of a work such as Austerlitz. 463 00:51:45,020 --> 00:51:53,150 Meanwhile, tumour can also manifest itself in very different ways, we might think of those collective attachments that are fleeting and ephemeral, 464 00:51:53,150 --> 00:52:01,130 a catchy hit song, a new a new gadget, a YouTube video that are fleeting and ephemeral. 465 00:52:01,130 --> 00:52:07,250 Are certain moments in vital, urgent, indispensable only to fade into oblivion a few weeks later again. 466 00:52:07,250 --> 00:52:14,630 There's a mystery about how these waves of enthusiasm are sparked. Obviously, capitalism plays its role in promoting fashions and fans. 467 00:52:14,630 --> 00:52:19,700 But economics, it seems to me, can tell us very little about why certain things catch on, 468 00:52:19,700 --> 00:52:24,830 while countless, countless others are met with collective indifference. 469 00:52:24,830 --> 00:52:33,770 Here again, I want to insist that there are contingencies at play and the constant possibility of surprise. 470 00:52:33,770 --> 00:52:41,000 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, 471 00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:49,640 yet not always easy to pin down a value can work within, but also against pressures of education, class and culture. 472 00:52:49,640 --> 00:52:54,020 Our aesthetic attachments don't always form along expected lines. 473 00:52:54,020 --> 00:52:57,440 I consider differing rhythms and scales of attunement. 474 00:52:57,440 --> 00:53:06,980 They can be a matter of stability, but also surprise that they could be collectively shaped, but also idiosyncratic. 475 00:53:06,980 --> 00:53:13,370 At the same time, I've also tried to argue a thesis, the attunement is a result of things, 476 00:53:13,370 --> 00:53:19,220 many things coming together in either expected or unexpected ways. 477 00:53:19,220 --> 00:53:25,010 We often give our exceptional credit for ushering newness in the world as if it were the sole 478 00:53:25,010 --> 00:53:32,450 agent of change in a world of sameness and soul crushing predictability that art can invigorate. 479 00:53:32,450 --> 00:53:35,600 Surprise, astonish is not in dispute. 480 00:53:35,600 --> 00:53:43,310 What I been suggesting, though, and this is where I find acto network theory helpful, is that the artwork cannot act by itself. 481 00:53:43,310 --> 00:53:54,110 It needs allies, supporters, helpers. Attunement is a joint achievement and crucially, that our experience of art is coproduced in this way, 482 00:53:54,110 --> 00:54:01,030 does not take away from the value of the work, but makes it possible. 483 00:54:01,030 --> 00:54:07,030 Antoine Hennion owns a French cultural sociologist involved in the actor network theory approach. 484 00:54:07,030 --> 00:54:10,870 I think Antoine Hennion puts it beautifully in one of his descriptions. 485 00:54:10,870 --> 00:54:16,210 He talks about the someone who plays the piano on a rock musician or was sitting down at the keyboard. 486 00:54:16,210 --> 00:54:24,640 Let me quote him here to finish. Hennion writes, The musicians sitting down at the keyboard knows there are his scales, 487 00:54:24,640 --> 00:54:32,660 his score, his touch and the skills that he has acquired, that without them, he is nothing. 488 00:54:32,660 --> 00:54:40,760 And yet, even if he starts with these mediations, nothing is settled, the music will have to emerge. 489 00:54:40,760 --> 00:54:45,210 There is nothing there is automatic or guaranteed. 490 00:54:45,210 --> 00:54:53,370 The surprise that peels away from the flux of things is the most ordinary of experiences and of quote, 491 00:54:53,370 --> 00:54:56,760 and I think what anyone says here about playing the piano holds equally well to 492 00:54:56,760 --> 00:55:02,520 the experience of listening to music or reading a novel or looking at a painting. 493 00:55:02,520 --> 00:55:11,580 The surprise that peels away from the flux of things. Could there be a better description of the enigma of our students? 494 00:55:11,580 --> 00:55:20,360 Thank you.