Art Criticism - The State University of New York

15 Two of the most prominent proponents of dialogue for the constitution of ethical!
political life are Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jiigen Habermas. For good critical
discussion of their respecti ve theories, see Hans Herbert Kogler, The Power of
Dialogue: Critical Hemeneutics after Gadamerand Foucault, trans. Paul
Hendrickson (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1996).
16 The discussion in this section of practices, obligations, and the Good draws upon:
(I) Martin Hedeigger's existential analytic of Dasein: (ii) Emmanuel Levinas's
meditations on the ethical relation of asymmetrical obligation to the Other; and
(iii) Stephen David Ross's views on the heterogeneity of the Good as these have
been developed in the recent work of Jason Wirth.
17 On practical holism, see Hubert Dreyfus, "Holism and Hermeneutics," Review of
Metaphysics 34 (1980): 3-23.
18 Cf. Derrida's quasi-Levinasian remarks: "If I conduct myself particularly well
with regard to someone, I know that it is to the detriment of an other; of one
nation to the detriment of another nation, of one family to the detriment of
another family, of my friends to the detriment of other friends or non-friends,
etc. This is the infinitude that inscribes itself within responsibility; otherwise
there would be no ethical problems or decisions" (Jacques Derrida, "Remarks on
Deconstruction and Pragmatism," in Simon Critchley et aI., Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London and New York: Routledge, 1996],
p.86).
19 When this balance is achieved, however fragile the communal atmosphere, the
situation is set for nurturing critical thinking - a turn of phrase often
uncritically used these days. I would recommend that we return to the sense of
"critical" in its originary enlightened use that goes back to Kantian critique.
Critical thinking in this vein is radical, when thought comes to reflect on its own
conditions and procedures, when thinking comes to question itself in the process
of learning to think otherwise. Thinking critically is very difficult for all of us. In
our age of sound bites and fleeting images, where we passively consume media
messages, the ways we think and see are powerfully conditioned (despite our
liberalist fantasies to the contrary). It is fundamental to college teaching to
produce communal-civic environments where students (and teachers) can freely
exercise critical thought and learn to perceive anew. And this, I might add, is
best grasped as a collective project. For a Foucaultian proposal on what it might
mean to think otherwise, see my "Critical Reproblemization: Foucault and the
Task of Modern Philosophy," Radical Philosophy 91 (1998): 19-29.
20 Meyer Schapiro, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and
Vehicle in Image-Signs," in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and
Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994), pp.1-32.
21 As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it: "Now that art history is awake, at least to the
linguistic turn, what will it do? The predictable alternatives are already flooding
the learned journals in the form of discoveries that the visual arts are 'sign
systems' informed by 'conventions,' that paintings, photographs, sculptural
objects, and architectural monuments are fraught with 'texuality' and 'discourse.'
A more interesting alternative, however, is suggested by the very
resistance of the visual arts to the linguistic turn. If a pictorial turn is indeed
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Art Criticism