problem and suddenly he started doing all this wonderful writing. But
Donald was a far more open person than most from that perspective. But
yes, that was a nice idea, post-analytic philosophy, although I don’t think it
caught on as anything more than a slogan.
Tully: Well the idea behind it I think represents the effort on the part of
younger scholars to overcome this divide between analytic and Continental
thinking, where the Continental people were working on questions that were
deeper, or seen to be deeper in a more human way, more captivating, but
their methods were so shoddy that intellectual responsibility compelled you
to preserve the analytic idiom.
ACD: It’s something that I’ve found with the younger British philosophers.
They’re trying to do that, work things out. I’m very hopeful but I don’t see
their counterparts, really, in America.
Tully: You’ve talked about the influence on your work, not only from the
contemporary arts scene but philosophical influences like Sartre, for example.
ACD: That’s right. People always think of Sartre as being locked in the
period of World War II, but I’ve always thought of Being and Nothingness as a
great book. My book on Sartre was based mostly on L”Etre et le Neant, on
those ideas, and I use them all the time. For example, I just published a piece
in Artforum, in the September issue. They wanted to do a whole issue on
politics and the editor asked me to write the keynote statement on the
relationship between art and politics in America. I really began with a
Sartrean idea, where he talks about two modalities of consciousness: conscience
pour-soi and conscience pour l’autre. I used it in terms of nationalities. There’s a
certain American pour-soi, what it is to be an American , and there’s certainly a
pour-l’autre for being an American, and they don’t coincide at all. From the
pour-soi side Americans find it very difficult to understand why they’re hated,
and so forth—“we’re such good guys”—
(Laughter)
ACD: And that was a very beautiful piece of metaphysics that Sartre had
worked out, and I thought people would enjoy thinking about nationality in
that way, as a mode of consciousness. I find a lot of use for Sartre,
particularly in that distinction.
Tully: What about his writing on art or his literary work? He sort of gets a lot
of stick for it, as a committed writer who let his artistic choices be
determined by his political thought.
ACD: I wrote a piece towards the end of 2001 on Giacometti. That was an
opportunity for me to go back and read Sartre on Giacometti. I thought that
it was a great essay he’d written on him. Giacometti was such a kook that he
found what Sartre had written on him very offensive, although it had nothing
to do with the philosophy. It had to do with an automobile accident that
Sartre said happened at the Place Vendome, but it actually happened at the
Place des Pyramides, but you know “How could he have made a mistake like
that!” But Sartre’s essay on Giacometti is priceless. When I put it next to
what most people have written on Giacometti, there’s no comparison, it was
all about distance and space and so on, wonderful. And I thought his essay
on Tintoretto was wonderful. But I never got much out of the literary work.
These art essays were short and there was no temptation to go off and write
four volumes.
Tully: In the Notebooks for an Ethics he takes the ontological categories of
Being and Nothingness and he says that if we actually set them in motion
toward authenticity we’ll see that the point of the pour-soi is actually
something very much like an aesthetic construction. He says that you are
“revealing creation”…
ACD: He does say that, yeah, that aesthetics is very fundamental in a way
that most people wouldn’t think of. Actually, I was over in Ireland attending
a conference on the future of aesthetics, and I found these writings of Peirce
on aesthetics where he says that aesthetics is the most fundamental discipline.
Ethics builds on aesthetics, logic builds on ethics. It’s a fascinating idea. It
was in the lectures he gave on Pragmatism in 1909. I’ve been trying to come
to terms with those ideas for some time, but yes it’s true that Sartre thought
aesthetics was fundamental in some way. Both he and Peirce never spelled it
out that much, though.
Tully: Was Peirce a great influence?
ACD: Oh yeah. When I was developing an idea of sententional states, beliefs
as sententional states, that’s a very Peircean idea, that beliefs are made out of
language. That man is a sign. There are passages in pierce that are just
amazing.
Tully: What about aesthetics and ethics, after all, the relations between them?
We’re now at war. And I understand you were in the army during World War
II?
ACD: I was never an infantryman. I was trained as an Army engineer and
was overseas for three years. I was in the Italian campaign and in North
Africa.
Tully: What would you say about the thesis that there is an internal
connection between war and aestheticization? The pageantry of war, the use
of aesthetic elements in battle. In Fahrenheit 911, for example, there’s a scene
in the film where they’re interviewing an American tank commander and he
says that they play heavy metal during combat. You can put it on the PA
system in the tank, and while they’re destroying homes and such in Baghdad
they like to blast this heavy rock music. That struck me as a continuation of
the old drumbeat, the martial music played when armies were marching into
battle, and that the detachment that attends to the aesthetic relation helps
break down the barriers, the moral restraint against violence. Berel Lang
wrote a book which described the aesthetic elements of the Holocaust, of life
in the camps, where there was a band playing at Auschwitz, the use of irony
in “arbeit macht frei” and so on. You can see artisitic elements enabling the
perpetration of evil, precisely because of the autonomous or nonmoral
character of the aesthetic, its freedom.
ACD: I think that’s true, and the whole Nazi movement was an
aestheticization of society. The organization of rallies, the way people should
look, the banners. That was certainly true. I don’t know whether it
overcomes morality in battle, I mean if you’re a soldier you don’t think about
moral questions, really. You’ve got to destroy someone who is firing at you.
But I don’t know the answer to that.
Tully: Do you think art has a specific obligation, a moral obligation, to what
it’s representing in certain cases?
ACD: I do have that kind of feeling. I wrote an essay called The Naked Truth
about Avedon and an artist named Peter Hujar, a photographer who is dead
now. I was trying to argue that the subject has certain rights. People always
talk about the rights of the artist, but I thought that when you’re a
photographer you have an obligation in representing people, to take their
own estimation of how they should be represented into consideration. And
there’s a question about the human subject in science, how the subject has to
be treated, particularly in social psychology. There are certain famous
experiments in social psychology that can no longer be done.
Tully: Milgram.
ACD: Milgram would be one. Stanley Schachter would be another, where
you don’t inform the subject of what’s actually happening. You can’t do that
anymore. And I thought that there’s a lot to be said for that in art. I respect
the way Nan Goldin photographs people. If people object to the way they’re
represented she’s not going to go ahead and say, “Well I’m the artist”. I was
writing about Avedon and there were things I hated about him. I saw a
portrait he did of Isaiah Berlin, who was a friend of mine, and I thought it
was a terrible way to photograph Isaiah, I really objected to that. But in
particular I talked about one of the people named James Slattery, who was in
the Warhol entourage. He was a transvestite and he was called Candy
Darling. A very fragile human being, James Slattery, and there was a very
beautiful photograph of Candy On Her Deathbed by Peter Hujar, where he
takes seriously how Candy Darling wants to present herself, wants herself to
be seen. And Avedon just disregarded that totally when he went to the
Factory and said “take off your pants”, that kind of thing, which I thought
was cruel. It was a form of cruelty.
Tully: Would you say that it makes the photograph worse as a photograph?
That sense of violation.
ACD: I don’t even know how to look at it. It means that you’re abstracting
so much from the photograph when you say “Well, it’s a good photograph
anyway”, when you take away those things I don’t know what’s left of it as a
photograph. People say in a hundred years nobody will remember what any
of these people look like, but of course none of us are going to be around to
see what that means.
Tully: But that you can tell from inside the photograph, you can tell that
there’s something that the subject wants and that the photograph is refusing
that condition. It testifies against its own moral character.
ACD: In some way, yes, you feel that. I worked out this idea about looks.
There is no look that you would ever see in life that Berlin’s face has on it.
That’s because the speed of the shutter is faster than the human eye. We
compose our looks. So you can take something out of the contact sheet and
say “well, he looked like that”, but you would never have seen it. The camera
fixed it, but you wouldn’t see him that way. It doesn’t look like the look, so
when you rob people of their looks, the way they express themselves, its
transitional from look A to look B. Just because it’s in a photograph doesn’t
mean its real.
Tully: It’s a lie. Artistically. And good art can never lie.
ACD: It’s a lie, that’s right. It’s a funny kind of lie. It’s something I’d like to
go back too, but I’m not sure if I can develop it beyond the points I did in
that article.
Tully: You haven’t written much on literature, but you did claim in a recent
interview that Henry James was important to you, on your thinking and on a
personal level. Could you maybe talk about that importance and what we can
say about literature through that?
ACD: It’s very important as a guide to life. I remember reading The
Ambassadors after I’d been widowed. After a certain age you start to move
around with women again, and you start to think about how you work that
out. There are a lot of books about young people, but what about somebody
in their 50s starting a relationship, a sexual relationship? The Ambassadors was
one of the few books I’d come across that treated somebody of my age as a
romantic hero or at least with these kinds of problems. Later on, when I got
married again, my older daughter was getting married and The Golden Bough
talks about how you work out that relationship between a wife and a
daughter, the complexities of that relationship. Nobody had ever really
treated it the way James treated it. After a certain age, there’s really nobody
you can turn to but James for these kinds of analyses. The depth of his
insight always astounds me. I go back all the time to James and to Proust,
those are the two writers I read more than anybody. Just because of the
usefulness of it. My book The Abuse of Beauty has a lot of Proust in it.
Tully: Would you say then that it’s sort of defining of the literary novel, that
its main virtue artistically is to offer this psychological identification, to
instruct in this way?
ACD: That was the idea I working out in Philosophy As/And/Of Literature,
that it’s about the reader. That I am Anna Karenina, that my first wife was
the Duchess de Guermantes, that people see their lives in these terms. They
give you these metaphors, because how much opportunity do you have in a
single life to work out these roles for yourself? That, for me, is the main
consideration, that it is the psychological penetration and the way it gives you
an opportunity to see yourself in these various situations. It’s not just reading
for the pleasure of reading, it’s doing what philosophy ideally would do, that
is, to help you understand yourself a little bit better. I don’t know what I’ll do
when James runs dry on me.
Tully: Would you say that film does some of the work of the novel and some
of the work of the painting? I know you’re a fan of Shirin Neshat’s films.
ACD: Yes, but you know those are very different kinds of films.
Tully: They’re wonderful narratives.
ACD: They are wonderful narratives, yes. I loved Rapture. I loved Turbulent.
But it’s not an accident that you see them in art galleries, they’re short, you’re
physically situated with regard to them, I mean there’s a screen on one end
and a screen at the other and you sit between them and watch. I certainly
love Shirin’s work and I love her too, she’s a wonderful artist. And the films
of my youth were very important to me but I haven’t written much on them,
like Stanley has in that book…
Tully: Pursuits of Happiness. On the remarriage comedies.
ACD: The comedies of remarriage, that’s it. That was a knockout.
Tully: Yeah he writes interestingly on this aspect of life, on what’s involved
morally and intellectually in remarriage, and how it wasn’t treated since
Shakespeare up until this time in the 40’s and 50’s, in Hollywood. That
certain modes of life fall out of the main artistic forms and are recaptured
later on.
ACD: He thinks about remarriage in a very deep way.
Tully: He links it with the overcoming of skepticism.
ACD: And of cynicism, I would say, to tell you the truth. But philosophers
have said very little about marriage, basically, so Stanley is a very modern
figure for that reason, if you think marriage is a central question in life and in
ethics. I wrote something about marriage recently. I had a young friend, I
supervised his dissertation, and he was getting married to a California girl. He
asked me if I would marry them. He said you could do that in California, you
could get the license and anybody could do it. But I said “you want the
marriage to be built on a little more secure a foundation than that”—
(Laughter)
ACD: But I said I’d give a talk at the marriage, at the wedding. I went out to
Santa Monica and gave a lecture on philosophers and marriage at the
wedding. Everybody thought they were back at school. It was the first time
I’d tried to think out a little bit what could be philosophical questions about
marriage. I tend to think the relationship between a husband and a man is a
little bit like the relationship between the Brillo Box as an artwork and the
Brillo Box as a mere real thing.
Tully: Could you expand a little on that? That’s really interesting.
ACD: Well, he asked, why should a couple who are getting along well get
married? Why take the next step? My idea was that when you do marry,
you’re suddenly in all sorts of different relationships with other people, other
institutions. All sorts of things come in and you’re obliged to interpret it and
so forth, so it’s very much like the Brillo Box-Brillo Box structure.
Tully: Where there’s no perceptual difference between the normal
relationship and the marriage, right, but yet the whole thing is somehow
different.
ACD: Exactly. The whole thing is different.

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