Previous experiences, mood, the socio-political landscape, any accompanying stimuli - each plays a vital role in the wider contextual dialog of arts dissemination. To communicate anything, we must rely on a process of referral - that which is new is traced back to that which is old - the receiver interprets phenomena through a prism of prior experience. The mind, for lack of a better metaphor, consists of a series of compartments, a catalog of past experiences used to make sense of the future. In the words of the art theorist Grant Kester, as we seek “to assemble a detailed and comprehensive picture of the world around us... we rely on certain cognitive categories to help us organise and make sense of the chaotic flux of information provided by our senses. We are motivated in this endeavour by a demand for "internal coherence" that encourages us to reconcile new experiences with our existing conceptual worldview, which is itself the organised by-product of our previous experience”.
If I wish to be understood, and am aware that you will relate whatever I offer back to previous experiences, I am compelled to make the information contained in any new experience I am offering as similar to your past experiences as is possible without compromising the uniqueness its content. Whats more, without knowing the exact nature of any previous experiences you have undergone, I might choose to frame this information in the form of generalised symbols or representations that I presume to be more or less universally recognisable - by writing it in a common language, for instance. My meaning is housed inside linguistic symbols that, when placed in a certain order, point to agreed stations of sense that we might share - such as metaphors, or culturally-accepted phrases. In this manner, I can make efforts to ensure that whatever is experienced correlates more or less exactly with the categories of prior experiences with which it will be referenced. Thus, we can say that a series of representations - be they letters, words, images or sounds - "made" sense, in so far as their meaning was apparent in advance of the receiver, whose only task is to linearise the series as they are presented.
What I cannot control however, is the context in which my offerings will be received. The reception of my content will be appended by content of others - the painting I place on the wall of your experience will be tainted by the colour of your wallpaper, what you had for breakfast on the morning you first perceived it, and who you were with when you did so. This is the reality of intra-action - we experience multiple overlapping Others that both unitedly and radically shape our perceptions, even without changing the actual content of a designated ‘art’ object. Meaning is constructed as a totality, and while we can intellectually differentiate a work from its setting - a ‘good’ play in a ‘bad’ venue - experience is always perceived as a unified whole. By the same hand, even if we are unable to fully comprehend the individual parts of an artistic series (such as the pitches or chord structures of a musical work, or even the letters in a word), we are usually able to comprehend the full package - in short, whether or not this experience correlates to previous experiences or identifiable popular concerns and expectations sufficiently so as to me deemed ‘sensible'.
And yet if we as adults confront experience as a process of referent symbolism, children, arguably, do not. Lacking existing categories with which to refer, children treat letters not as symbols and representations, but as marks and lines, standing for nothing but themselves. Children learn through gesture - reproducing the movements of others, without any sense that they might ‘mean’ something more. Only later is there a conceptual shift from movement to object, and object to symbol, a final stage wherein the idea of a letter precedes the gesture that forms it - it takes on meaning independent of the act of perceiving it. With limited experience of external forms, children are faced with each experience in isolation, and must create, not reference, the sense implicit in each new encounter. As we age, we learn how to reference stimuli against previous encounters, yet do so not as a cognitive necessity, but as a shortcut. And shortcuts are seductive. There are simply to many forms in the world to experience them all, too little time to dedicate ourselves to each as yet encountered form entirely. Experience is divided - the object on one hand, and the idea of the object on the other, with the latter increasingly mistaken for the former. The sheer volume of a prior experience, combined with a culturally-enforced prioritisation of knowledge over ignorance, destabilises our ability to experience 'in the moment'.
The shortcut from a tangible thing to its mental representation requires that I have encountered a sufficiently similar object in the past, so as to allow me to define it as one category and not another. The leather-bound rectangle to my right falls into the category of ‘book’ only because I have experienced books before, even if this book is new to me. But what happens when we are faced with a class of thing for which their is no existing relation? A thing that simply does not fit within existing categories? What, in short, happens when we encounter something that cannot be referred back to self, something that is fundamentally Other?
For the Other to be Other, it must, by its very nature, be unknowable. By virtue of being a distinct system, the Other cannot be brought into the Self via the act of referral - to do so would be to subsume Other into the same, since we would be drawing our experience of them from categories constructed in advance of their being. For Emmanuel Levinas, it is for this reason that the Other is ‘infinite’, which we can take to mean infinitely unknowable, or everything-that-is-external-to-self. A representational or symbolically geared ontological system is therefore clearly inappropriate in dealing with the Other, since it reduces that Other to generalised categories of the same - a remembered "A" instead of unique "The". For Levinas, prior experience acts as a way of accessing that which would otherwise be beyond our reach - of providing form to formlessness - a task which sees traditional modes of ontology seeking a "reduction of the other to the same by the interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being".
by ensuring comprehension in such a manner, every new experience is reduced to categories of prior experience, and what doesn't fit is considered simply an improper variation of a 'correct' a prior category. Homophobia, racism, and classism are all displays of this sort of negative Othering, where one preemptive idea stands in for a million actualities. We can equate Burkha's to criminality only because we view them through a prism of known (but ultimately unrelated) previous encounters - a suspicious desire to hide the face for nefarious purposes, the outlandish and provocative garb of a cartoon villain, and so forth. That it might be an item of clothing with cultural and historic validity may well fall outside, or more likely exist as a lesser known within, our sphere of prior understandings. Likewise, the British working class can only be considered ‘chav’s’ once they have been reduced, in one foul swoop, to the media-produced image of work-shy scroungers. Lacking a relevant category, we instead depend on what Kester calls "generalised signs of difference rather than on a willingness to acknowledge the unique character of each individual".
Positive Othering
In 'what is art?’, Joesph Beuys embarks on a somewhat rambling monologue concerning a wooden box - starting with its materiality - the type of wood, it's colour and shape - he soon engages it with not simply for what it is, or what it was, but what it could be. From the reality of its material presence, Beuys conjures not only the intent of its creator - wether it is supposed to be functional, wether it has been deliberately artified and how successful this has been - but also what it could be in a different context, it's life cycle as a partition of a tree, how or what it represents, and so forth. The dialog with which he engages is in no way dependant on wether the box is a piece of art or a packing crate, since it's concern is with the creative potential of the object itself, not its surrogacy for another's artistry. His interest lies in the kind of awareness required to perceive externality with both immediacy and actuality - Beuys' focus on the materiality of the world alongside any latent connotations, referents or potentials an object may have, points to an existence beyond what is contained in either the prior or current experience of the Self. By opening oneself up to the entirety of a things potential, we are able to experience the specificity of Other precisely because we cannot experience its entirety. The tools of art - imagination, creativity - are the tools by which we can experience our own lack of comprehension in regard to Other as not a void, but an opening out of potential.
Beuys was heavily influenced by the philosopher and social reformer Rudolf Steiner. The practised creative awareness that Beuys cites as the function of art, directly correlates to Steiner’s notion of the ‘supersensible’, which posits the truth of things not only in our sense of them, but in our spiritual connection to them as well. Objects as they are perceived are equatable with use-value - which is to say, we are innately prone to consider how the external can be subsumed into the internal. We strive to understand the world of things, testing the reality of the external against a catalog of prior encounters. Steiner doesn’t so much reject this kind of scientific outlook, that sees objects merely as concrete things in the world to be studied and understood, as wish to add spiritual or subjective criteria to the accumulation of knowledge. A scientific method that eschews humanity is one that lacks true feeling, true heart, and as such is disingenuous - however concrete we perceive external stimuli to be, the fact remains that we still perceive it. The human cannot be abolished from the experience of phenomena.
Steiner’s anthroposophical approach advocates a concern with an ethical-religious life conduct - a belief in the unknowable aspects of reality, and a living out of that unknowability in the action of Being. To approach things as concrete, useful entities, is to disregard their Otherness, their unknowability, and amounts ultimately, to a totalitarian approach, incompatible with the pedagogic undertones of Steiner’s wider philosophies and social enterprises. In this manner, Steiner agrees with Levinas, since both are concerned with a faith that extends not only beyond Self, but beyond any future subsumption by Self - faith in the unknown that may never become known (i.e. objectively or scientifically useful). But if Steiner perceives spirituality as going hand in hand with the scientific, for Levinas, a relationship to Other must eschew utility altogether, since utility belays the infinite. Attempts to solve or know the Other are at there hearts attempts at subsumption, to do so would be the very ontological process of reducing the other to the same that Levinas rejects.
It is the bilateral nature of Beuys’ expanded concept of art that makes artistry more than the practise of subsumption - of finding new ways to internalise externalities, new objects to digest. The point for Beuys - and for much of the dialogic or relational art that has followed - is to reframe artistry as a way of being within the wider paradigm of life practises, a way of co-constructing encounters with a distinct Other rather than seeking to collapse that division. It is a renegotiation of a fundamental aspect of aesthetic appreciation - a move from the collective ‘beautiful' to the uniquely ‘strange’. And yet, to experience Other without unreservedly referring back to prior experience, is to operate without adhering to social normative ideas as to what best practise regarding any given encounter may be. In short, a supersensible approach - realised in ‘artistic’ terms or otherwise - eschews normative ethics, since terms such as 'right' and 'wrong' are judgements based upon prior collective experiences, not transitory, singular, instantaneous and malleable encounters. Such an approach is problematic for three reasons. Firstly, and most troubling for the Levinasian position, is that if Other is fundamentally unknowable, the Self can only approximate what might harm or hinder Other based upon prior experience. Levinas argues that the Self and the Other are innately responsible for one another, born of the fact that they are mutually defined by their relativity - without Other, Self would be endless, since there would be nothing that was not-self. Faced with an unknowable Other however, I cannot enact responsibility towards them without making informed guesses, referents, as to what responsibility might look like. Secondly, if art can be said to be concerned with testing ethical boundaries - and I firmly believe it can - it cannot also be concerned with the kind of awareness that would eschew ethics altogether. It cannot play with ethical norms, whilst at the same time operating from a position that is conceptually beyond such norms. Lastly, any discourse upon the merits of a supersensible outlook is itself a ethical position, since it posits one way of being as opposed to another. It is a judgement, and as such a non-ethical (or post-ethical) argument for the treatment of Other is a self-collapsing proposition.
These problems can be resolved however, not by abandoning ethics entirely, but by jettisoning the normative in favour of the relational. A lack of knowledge of a specific Other is not the same thing as a lack of knowledge of the concept of Other, and therefore strategies can be put in place to avoid harming the Other by our own ignorance. Rather than approaching Other from a fixed position, as a fixed entity, we can approach Other with instability and uncertainty. It is overtly simplistic to confront the world as either a set of known variables or with an overwhelming ignorance, since both positions overlook both what knowledge is and the process by which knowledge is accumulated in the first place. Knowledge doesn’t pre-exist experience, but is formed in tangent with it, and the fact that it can be accumulated points to the fact of our innate transience. We are always changing, never fixed, buffered about by the winds of the external. As the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared, “a mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions”. As such, Other can be faced with both immediacy and reflection, a moving forward and a looking back, an ongoing dance of distinct entity’s that can mutually co-construct sense as they go along. From an artistic perspective, such a position accepts the basic ethical proposition (that we must think about how we relate to Other) but rejects a fixed value system constructed of socially accepted norms in favour of relationally flexible conduct. Art becomes not a rebellious testing of our parents boundaries, but an example or practise of potential ways of being, of the openness required to maintain a relational position in the face of the grounding, static forces of memory and prior experience. By this same token, a discussion on ethics that eschews ethical social norms is no longer self-collapsing, since it acknowledge ethics as transient, amorphic pointers for general ways of being in specific contexts, as opposed to specific ways of being in general contexts.
