Sanat Eleştirisinde Öznelliğin Rolü

Abstract

Bir sanat eseriyle karşı karşıya geldiğimizde ne olur? Bu karşılaşmanın bileşenlerinin sanatçı, sanat eseri ve alımlayıcı olduğunu düşündüğümüzde, bu düzeneğin iki ucunda iki öznellik olduğunu görürüz; farklı tarih, gelenek, sosyal, politik şartlar, psikoloji, bilinç, bilinçaltı, vs. ye sahip iki farklı öznellik: sanatçı ve alımlayıcı. Sanatçı öznelliğinin dışsallaştırılması olan sanat eserini anlama, yorumlama ve eleştirme problemi halen tartışma konusudur. Tarihte çeşitli filozoflar sosyal bilimler hakkındaki görüşleri içinde başkasının öznelliğini anlama problemini tartışmışlar, döneme hakim olan felsefi teoriler içinde bu problemi çözmeye çalışmışlardır. Bu konuda çalışanların en büyük problemi metod olmuştur. Çünkü doğal bilimler (belki de başarıları yüzünden) paradigmayı oluşturmuş ve kendine bilim statüsü vermek isteyen her disipline metodunu dayatmıştır. Oysa ki sosyal bilimler nesnesinin farklılığı yüzünden farklı bir metoda gereksinim duyar. Yapılması gereken şey, iki öznelliğin etkin olduğu alımlayıcı/sanat eseri estetik karşılaşmasını, öznenin nesnenin bilgisine ulaşma çabası olarak düşünülebilecek doğal bilimlere ait epistemolojik kategorilerden ayırmak, bu şekilde de öznelliğin etkin olabileceği bir sanat eleştirisi teorisine yer açmaktır. Sanat eseri eleştirisi konusunda edebiyatçılar ve edebiyatla ilgili filozoflar görsel sanat teorisyenlerinden daha çalışkan davranmışlardır. Bu tezde amaç, anlamlı sosyal hareketlerin ve dolayısıyla tarihin anlaşılma ve yorumlanma problemi üzerine çalışmaların kronolojik olarak aldığı yolu incelemek ve zamanımızın önemli filozoflarından Paul Ricoeur'ün tezinin görsel sanatlar eleştirisi için düşünüldüğünde ortaya nasıl bir tablo çıkacağını görmektir.

Art criticism is initiated by the literature discipline and its origins are in the Reformism of Luther. When Luther rejects the dogma of the church in 1500's and asserts that the Bible can be read in a different way, he unknowingly started a new discipline which is "Art Criticism". Schleiermacher is the first thinker who took interpretation of literary and religious texts as a philosophical problem that rises above the particularity of the rules and recipes which governs the art of understand ing. He tried to formulate the universally valid rules of understanding, this was a critique of interpretation accompanied with Romanticism for, according to Schleiermacher, the object of the understanding was the unconcious of the artist. His importance lie not in his suggestion that understanding is a psychological emphatic inerpretation of the other's subjectivity but in his identifying understanding with interpretation as one and the same process. Furthermore, he formulated the famous hermeneutical principle that "the interpreter can understand the author better than the author himself". Romanticism was nostalgically linked to the past tradition in contrast to the enlightenment which rejected any prejudices, any remnants of the past, favoring human rationality as the only way to understand the new. To approach to the object of the understanding with an "open" mind a la Descartes was the motto of the scienticism of enlightenment. The subject-object relation in epistemological plane was such that the subject if she approachs with an open mind and always depending on experience and rational demonstration will discover the nature of the object, i.e. the way things phenomonologically are. The idea that the subject discovers the external reality constituted one of the basic tenets of positivism. The second important turning point of hermeneutics came with Dilthey who, was a thinker concerned with accounting for the great achievements of the nineteenth century German culture, namely the creation of history as a science first order. His historicist hermeneutics has the project of understanding "the chefs d'oeuvres of mankind" within their historical context, although the intelligibility of this historical context was shining as an epistemological problem. His conviction was that one can grasp the individual social event which was created by the free intention of others by transposing himself to the mental life of others. Understanding for him was the reproduction of other's experience, in its objective expressions; although understanding as such, is grounded in Lebensphiliosphie, its final task is the "rediscovery of the I in an objectified Thou". vi According to Dilthey, the knowledge of the mind had an undeniable advantage over the knowledge of nature due to the essence common in human. Heidegger finds it naive to suppose that "the other mind, as well as myself, is more known to me than any natural phenomenon". The relation of each person with every other is the region where inauthenticity reigns. So, understanding cannot be the duplication of another's subjectivity through transposing one's self into the other's mental life. The relation of "being with the other" is not generative of understanding what must be looked for in order to understand the nature of understanding is the relation of "being with" the world. This relation is a shared one. The question of the other is hence, replaced by the question of the world. This is the depsychologizing of understanding, making it concerned with this world. "Inhabiting the world" is the necessary condition which makes the situation of understanding and interpretation possible. Dasein, translated as "being in the world" is not a subject in the face of an object, there is no more object-subject dichotomy as in Dilthey, Dasein is a being within being. That which is fundamental is the relation of belonging to the world before the positing of an object for a subject. The way in which being existentially encounters being is more important tthan its confrontation as a subject facing an object. Understanding is the ontological characteristic of being in the world. It should not be conceived as grasping a fact, but an apprehension of a possibility of being. Gadamer, Heidegger's pupil, describes the method of hermeneutics as a dialogical situation of question and answer constituted by an "I and Thou" relationship. What links I to Thou is the tradition that is transmitted by means of the written texts. Prejudices are exactly what connects us to the tradition, hence to the "other" which is thought to be no more as "alien". Truth is concerned with, is based upon the "matter" of the art work itself. A final coherent understanding of the art work is offered as the sole criterion of truth. According to Gadamer, communication at a distance between two differently situated conciousness occurs by means of the fusion of horizons, that is, the intersection of views on the distant and open, and what enables these two conciousness to communicate at a distance is the matter of the text which belongs neither to its author nor to its receiver. During the dialogical situation in which the horizons melt into each other, "we become a dialogue". Gadamer rejects the concept of "alienating distanciation" as the necessary condition of understanding. This concept is implied by the methodology of positivistic sciences and by itself, destroys the primordial relation of belonging to the tradition without which there can be no relation to the historical as such. Gadamer takes from Heidegger two basic tenets which is assumed to constitute the "historicity of being": 1) Understanding involves the projection of possibilities. 2) Pre-conceptions or prejudices of understanding are related to the authority of tradition as the source of prejudices. vii From these two postulates, Gadamer infers that what has to be understood is not the psychological constitution of an alien subject but a meaningful content which is immersed in a tradition of its own. And the method of understanding is not an esoteric emphaty but the fusion of open historical horizons. Gadamer's traditional hermeneutics received its main criticism from Marxists as he lacks a critical dimension, and his hermeneutic is a traditional one. This can also be seen in his identification of authority with superiority. Ricoeur agrees with traditional hermeneutics on the basic con victions that a text is autonomous from a) The intention of its author b) Cultural situation and all the sociological conditions of the production thereof c) Original addresses. On the other hand, he is critical about the traditional hermeneutic's rejection of the concept of "alienating distanciation" as one of the necessary preconditions of interpretation, of the basic hermeneutical activity. He argues that distanciation is a positive component of being for the text, it belongs to interpretation as a condition. Hermeneutics of tradition adopts the term "appropriation" as opposed to the concept of "alienating distanciation". One cannot make the criticism of false conciousness if one rejects the "distanciation". According to Ricoeur, only distanciation can bring about the appropriation of the proposed worlds offered by the text and this is nothing but the disappropriation of the self, according to him, the possibility of the false conciousness can only arise from this kind of disappropriation or distanciation. A text can be seen as a "sign" scattered in our world of culture. The first principle of interpretation is that subjective intentions of the author must be subordinated to the objective meaning of the text. All interpretation result in a self comprehension, but this is not an immediate self understanding of the ego for it is mediated through the world of the text. The receiver by incorporating the world which the text unfolds understands himself in front of the text. In contrast to the tradition of cogito (Enlightenment) and to the pretension of the subject to know itself by immediate intuition (Romanticism), it must be said that we understand ourselves by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural work. Understanding is not a mere constitution of which the subject would possess the key. Rather, Ricoeur intends to say, "the self is constituted by the matter of the text". "As a reader I find myself only by losing myself". While reading a text, I face the imaginative variation of the ego that I am, and these variations are introduced to me through the text. VIII Reading therefore, brings about a metamorphosis of the ego, as such it implies a moment of distanciation in the relation of the self to itself. This follows also from the fact that understanding inheres moment of distanciation as well as a moment of appropriation. This is an important implication for Hermeneutics: facing the imaginative variations of the ego enables the subject to make a self-criticism. In other words, the subject finds the medium of a critique of its illusion (illusions in the Marxist and Freudian manner). However, it must be emphasized that self understanding of the subject is made possible not in virtue of the prejudices of the reader but that this understanding is formed by the matter of the text. In the theory of interpretation a text may allow several interpretations and it is always possible to argue against one interpretation. In fact, not all interpretations are of equal status. Some are inferior in status to others and the elimination of these depends on rational processes of argumentation and debate. There are two possible attitudes towards a text from the part of the reader: 1) The reader remains in suspension as regards any possible non-ostensive, second order reference of the text, and treats it wholly a "wordless" and "self closed entity". 2) The receiver actualises the non-ostensive references of the text that are rendered possible by the situation of the reading. According to Ricoeur, to understand a text is to move from its sense to its reference. Structuralism confines itself to the inquiry into the sense of the text and ignores any analysis of the reference whether it is of second or first order. Ricoeur argues that structuralist analysis is a necessary intermediate stage between a naive interpretation and a critical one, between a surface interpretation and a depth interpretation. Hence, the final movement in the dialectic of interpretation is an act of understanding which is mediated by the explanatory procedures of structural analysis. In this final act, that which is understood is "the self" and the self of the self understanding is a gift of the text. When what is encountered is a visual art object, Ricoeur's concept of interpretation does not exhaust the process of receiving it. The reason is the impossibility of a perfect translation between verbal texts and visual art objects. Truly, an art object changes one's life, but it is not possible to pin down the way it is changed while this does not take place in a literal sphere