Roger Woods

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Notes on Post Modernism

Roger Woods' Life

   Essay towards a Freudian theory of art based on
  his extensive knowledge of psychoanalysis and art history

There are reasons in the history of philosophy for this state of affairs, no the least of which is the hatred of heteronomous explanations to which mechanism gives rise. It is not that some theories of art and assertions of criteria of judgement mad e by philosophers of art are necessarily false. They may well be partially or even wholly true… but this is not explained in the required sense.

Aestheticians nevertheless seem to agree that what is required is a theory of the nature of art- a theory which in the requisite sense is never forthcoming. Art seems to them to have no set of necessary and sufficient properties, and hence a theory of art is logically impossible and not just factually difficult. This difficulty stems, I think, from a refusal to apply psychological theories to art in any really thorough way. There seems to me no way to account for aesthetic or ethical judgements which is not psychological. As for the identifiable properties of art, and their evaluation, it is surely necessary to turn to Wittgenstein's 'games' theory to account for the 'family resemblances' between not only different media, but between styles within each art itself. There remains, of course, the problem of rules themselves, which are in fact, based on a decision at some level by the artist himself- he makes his own rules, or accepts someone elses, but he does so on the basis of a rule-making paradigm, which is ultimately involved in the psychological dynamics of the conflicts which give rise to art itself. But this is to jump ahead.

I think I have already intimated the kind of opposition which the psychoanalytical art theorist meets from assorted varieties of humanists, many of whom will find solace in some philosophical quarters, but such a theorist is in the worst of all possible worlds from the point of view of those from whom he might expect sympathy, since psychoanalysis is a thoroughly unpopular with academic psychologists. On the one hand Freud is mechanistic, deterministic, anti-humanist. On the other, he is some kind of vitalist, a dreamer, and ideological support of the bourgeoisie, a literary man, pre-scientific. Both often unite in condemning his C19th 'hydraulic' metaphors of the mental apparatus, though nobody actually specifies what, in that context, is exactly inadequate about such metaphors.

These arguments about creativity, determinism, the states of psychoanalysis, the philosophical supports for more traditional humanist ethics and aesthetics, all fall within classic epistemological concerns. Gellner (1974) argues very convincingly that non-regressive validation is probably impossible, and that what is really significant about epistemological formulations, if they are to really count, is that they are normative. He cites as the only important theories that the 'ghost' and the 'machine', referring to empiricism and rationalism ( in the sense of mechanism/materialism). These, along with 'logicism '(the 'skeleton') he calls selector theories. All the rest he consigns to the epistemological deserts. In the latter live mentalism, neo-mentalism, relativism, and all these residues,' forms of life' et alia which remain 'inviolate' when logicism or positivism have claimed their portion of ' meaningfullness'. Logicism, in the Russellian or Wittgensteinian versions, is false, but at least has the merit of being as attempt at 'selector' epistemology. Ryle, who anathematised 'ghost and machine' is revealed as neo-mentalist: he believes that psychological 'faculties' when they work well( or don't break down), are self-explanatory, so, despite his criticisms of the old-fashioned philosophical psychology of apprehension, conceptualisation etc, he is at one with a later version, behaviourism, in thinking that a third person, observation of behavioural-tendencies approach somehow solves the deficiencies of pure empiricism. What is 'normative' in the two epistemological traditions are the conditions of evidence -gathering and testability, which relate to empiricism, and the notion that the models or structures which explain the data should have the qualities of systemicity and impersonality, which relate to the mechanist tradition.
 
It is the confusion of the two different normative prescriptions which leads to conceptual chaos, a confusion mainly perpetrated by empiricist, it seems. Unfortunately, it appears that the two great theories contradict each other. Empiricism hold that it is experience which counts; it is all there is. The repeatable patterns of sensations and relations are organised by a sort of accumulation into 'fictions' for descriptive and mnemonic purposes. For the mechanist, the world is made of stuff which through its properties and relations gives rise to echos or epiphenomena in further structured stuff-our cognitive apparatus. The empiricists sensations are then no more than secondary effects of the structures- yet, if we decide for mechanism/materialism, it is we, ghosts, who do so. This paradox is irresolvable, according to the greatest modern philosopher, Kant. Its sources must be understood, but it is useless to strain against it. Like the man who speaks prose without knowing it, every empiricist is already a Kantian. There is now world before the' fictions- it is the fictions, in Kant's case the synthetic a priori particulars, which make an objective world possible; except that they are not fictions, but the necessary forms of our thought. Objectivity, the separation of self from object, implies causality, space and time. These latter are the 'particulars' in that the original 'synthetic a priori concepts', as abstract structures, do not achieve 'particularity' until they synthesise with sensations from without. That we may locate the structures in a neural mechanism seems justified by Luria's 'Man with the Shattered World'. Luria describes the experience of a brain damaged patient who actually seems to experience the wold without the categories of Kant- bits of sensation which he had lost the capacity to synthesise into objects, the actual distressing condition 'before' the empiricists'fictions'.

Kant does not suppose, however, that there is any way of proving that causality 'exists', out there, in nature. It is a necessary feature of our thought, and of any explanations by it, to employ the scheme of causality. Things 'in themselves' could not be in any way constrained and shown to be causal. We are not constrained, not in nature, it seems. ( To try and know, is fantastic; yet many, if not most people seem to mange it without difficulty). As for the argument form modern physics, often used incidentally as a stick with which to beat Freud, it only serves to vindicate Kant. The point at which determinism lapses and probability intervenes is the point where the observing mechanism's interference makes it impossible to determine all at once the speed and the location of a particle. In short, where objectivity lapses, so does causality, as Kant taught.

I must confess to some epistemological vertigo here, nevertheless, it seems to me possible that if, per impossiblile, we could remove our synthetic a prior spectacles, causality might still hold 'out there'. The inescapability of eternity, infinity, and first cause, which cause our minds so to boggle, seems to derive this effect from the fact that we are arguing from or trying to explain the limits of our thought with the very tools to which these limits give rise, and this cannot be done. Thus the objectivity of space, time and causality seem to be established as Kant holds. On the other hand, if Kant assumes, which he does, that perception is in part caused by things out there, in themselves, ( and partly by us, in ourselves) and if cause and effect are located in space and time of necessity, then things ' in themselves' must be located in space-time, which Kant holds they are not. Thus the notion that things in themselves act on our senses is contradictory, for they could not do so unless situated in time and space. The only way out of this seems to be to hold that causal relations giving rise to perceptions is us are different in kind or separate fro causal relations between things in themselves. The latter are of course unknowable.

*In short, the Kantian theory holds only if we assume that things in themselves do not' cause' our perceptions in the same sense of 'cause' which we apply to phenomena in the schema of our thought. Intuitively, I tend towards some view which maintains that causality does actually obtain in some sense, and the fat that science works would support such a view, even if the causality in our heads is not the same thing as ' out there', there is some kind of congruence pertaining.
We must, as a heuristic principle, assume the world is amenable to understanding,” as if and understanding ( not ours) had given them for our faculties of cognition, in order to make possible a system of experience in accordance with special laws of nature”.
Perhaps these considerations are irrelevant to the simple statement of determinism. If science is possible, if the world is eligible for scientific understanding, then free will, responsibility, and the validity of thought are impossible. The world is explicable scientifically precisely because it is assumed to consist of impersonal, repeatable structures giving rise to all phenomena. There is, in such a mechanistic world, no room for freedom or value, or creativity in the usual sense of the word. The protean variety and unpredictability of art, for example, must be seen as theoretically amenable to explanation by the attempted specification of a structure which would give rise to the infinite variables, and it is in this sense, I take it , that Chomsky speaks of the generativity and creativeness of language, not the 'creativity of the irreducible human spirit' sense of 'creativity'.

* Consider the possibility that this problem is in some way connected with the problem of whether as idea can be a cause. Wittgenstein holds that mental events cannot be causal (-neural events can.) What is the precise link?

Roger himself was psychoanalysed for many years at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. His life was a constant battle between intellect and desire fuelled by a massive library of psychoanaltic literature and art history. He believed that art was a largely about mental states: emotions, perception, memory and imagination.

Christopher Bollas ( Author of Being a Character and Shadow of the Object.)

"I want to thank you for ...sending me both the images of Roger Wood's works and also for his essays. Both are remarkable. Such a shame he did not have more time, I gather, to extend the essays as they give a glimpse into his remarkable mind, and one is left hoping to have more!"

    Further outline of the main problems of a philososophical psychology of art.

Stated boldly, what Freud describes is the way in which human life is inescapably flawed, a prey to perceptual discontent and frustration. The other side of this gloomy coin is the flowering of civilisation, culture, social organisation, art and science, which are the transforms of instinctual renunciation and repression. Freudian psychoanalytic theory is essentially the description of the vicissitudes of a primitive, instinct- ridden organisms interaction with pre-existing social structures, mediated by its parents, The long infancy of the organism makes possible the acquisition of remarkably complex powers, particularly language, but it also involves the diffusion and modification of many drives, which if left to themselves, as it were, would be capable of satisfactions forever denied to the adult human being. We are human in so far as we transcend our animal state, and miserable because of it to a greater or lesser degree. Of all the sublimations of instinctual desires described above, art is unique in attempting to integrate, in metaphorical form, the basis dualisms inherent in the human condition. The main form of this integration takes place at the levels of mind separately characterised in the Freudian system as the Primary process, which is the language of the unconscious, of id impulses, dreams and infantile object relations, and the conscious, rational, secondary process. Art us therefore not merely regressive, in the sense of being the expression of early impulses, nor is it sublimatory, in the sense of being a useful, rationally conceived artifact serving the ends of civilisation at the cost of instinctual renunciation or redirection of libidinal energy.

Psychoanalytic theory however, must always be historically located, that is to say, given the model of the id as an irreducible, primordial and body oriented set of impulses towards pleasure, the further elaboration, under the impact of civilisation, of the contents of the ego and super ego are variable according to the dialectical interplay of forces which construct social reality, redefining, sustaining or contradicting the existing definitions, values, cosmologies and epistemologies. New external realities thus create new forms which the artistic mediation adopts, but since the primary process also participates, the felt lacks in human experience are woven into the new forms, suggesting new and future realities as yet unrealised in the present, as James Joyce said ‘ he was creating the unformed conscience of the race’.
The scheme of study can be reduced to the following headings: The function of art objects and experiences in terms of philosophical, psychoanalytic and linguistic contexts. Subject to cultural and historical location ( the sociology of knowledge) and their interpenetration.

1.A Philosophical: the role ‘ objects’ play in the metaphysical ordering of experience, and the sense in which one of the symbolic functions of art objects may be its metaphorical representation of the epistemological process.

B. Certain concepts derived from Strawson and Hamphire will be used to delineate an ‘anthropomorphic’ model of man to underpin Freudian theory and locate it in a non positivist philosophical paradigm which refutes and criticizes behaviourist psychological theories, without going into this highly complex model here, it emphasises man as a language user, capable of meaning in his actions( which are socially) desired, which are not merely mechanistic responses but teleological in some degree at least.

C. Strawson’s analysis of the concept of a person ( individuals) .Persons form ideas of themselves as individual people, not just goal-seeking organisms- a person would have no idea of himself as a conscious individual if he were not thus referred to by others. Consciousness, in the full sense, can be seen as a particular linguistic capacity of the neural system capable of monitoring its self-monitoring, and this is the essence of the capacity to shape sounds and marks into articulated symbols. Freudian theory, however elaborates the genesis of the sense of self to include such defensive mechanisms as interjection and identification, the taking in of other objects ( persons), parental models, under conditions of loss of ‘ego boundaries’. The primary process of these introjections is in contradistinction to the conscious functions Strawson describes, though interestingly, the repression which of ten precedes introjection follows a similar linguistic form- the forgetting of one’s forgetting is a regressive construct like consciousness of consciousness, in which object and subject are the same agency. The incompatible aspects of the linguistic modes of conscious and unconscious levels are of crucial concern, since it is upon some symbolic integration or interplay that art seems to me based.

2 Psychoanalysis.
Many aspects have already been touched upon above, but the main emphasis of the psychoanalytic context of art objects devolves upon the study of the primary process and its manifestation, the roads to the unconscious: dreams, jokes, errors, symptoms, investigated by Freud. The analogues of primary process to art language will be considered. The genesis of secondary from primary process will be considered in terms of Freud’s neurological studies, as also will be the modelling process which accompanies libidinal organisation ( object relations theories of Klein and Fairburn which are elaborations of Freud).