Integral Art and Literary Theory

Integral Art and Literary Theory

Excerpt From: The Eye of Spirit
Chapters Four and Five
By Ken Wilber

Part I

In the process of understanding and interpretation, part and whole are related in a circular way: in order to understand the whole, it is necessary to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to have some comprehension of the whole. 

-David Couzens Hoy

Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole.  Our task is to extend in concentric circles the unity of the understood meaning.  The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding.  The failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed.

-Hans-Georg Gadamer

Introduction

With the death of the avant-garde and the triumph of irony, art seems to have nothing sincere to say.  Narcissism and nihilism battle for a center stage that isn't even there; kitsch and camp crawl all over each other in a fight for a representation that no longer matters anyway; there seems to arise only the egoic inclination of artist and critic alike, caught in halls of self-reflecting mirrors, admiring their image in a world that once cared.

The aim of this essay is to step out of the narcissistic and nihilistic endgame that has so thoroughly overtaken the world of postmodern art and literature, and to introduce instead the essentials of a genuinely integral art and literary theory—what might be called integral hermeneutics. 

I will cover both art and literature, but with an emphasis on visual art, which is actually a "trickier" and in some ways more difficult case, since it usually lacks narrative structure to help guide the interpretation.  (A subsequent essay focuses specifically on an "all-level, all-quadrant" analysis of literary signification and semiotics in general.)

It is no secret that the art and literary world has reached something of a cul-de-sac, a dead end.  Postmodern literary theory is a perfect, and perfectly typical, example of the "babble of interpretations" that has overcome the art world.  It used to be that "meaning" was something the author created and simply put into a text, and the reader simply pulled it out.  This view is now regarded, by all parties, as hopelessly naive.

Starting with psychoanalysis, it was recognized that some meaning could be unconscious, or unconsciously generated, and this unconscious meaning would find its way into the text even though the author was unaware of it.  It was therefore the job of the psychoanalyst, and not the naive reader, to pull this hidden meaning out. 

The "hermeneutics of suspicion," in its many forms, thus came to view artworks as repositories of hidden meaning that could be decoded only by the knowing critic.  Any repressed, oppressed, or otherwise marginalized context would show up, disguised, in the art, and the art was thus a testament to the repression, oppression, marginalization.  Marginalized context was hidden subtext.

The Marxist variation was that the critics themselves existed in the context of capitalist-industrial social practices of covert domination, and these hidden contexts and meanings could be found in (and therefore pulled out of) any artwork created by a person in that context.  Similarly, art would be interpreted in the context of racism, sexism, elitism, speciesism, jingoism, imperialism, logocentrism, phallocentrism, phallologocentrism (batteries not included).

Various forms of structuralism and hermeneutics fought vigorously to find the "real" context which would, therefore, provide the real and final meaning, which would undercut (or supersede) all other interpretations.  Foucault, in his archaeological period, outdid them both, situating both structuralism and hermeneutics in an episteme that was itself the cause and context of the type of people who would even want to do hermeneutics and structuralism in the first place.

In part in reaction to some of this, the New Criticism had said, basically, let us ignore all of those interpretations.  The artwork, in and by itself, is all that really matters.  Ignore the personality (conscious or unconscious) of the author, ignore the historical setting, the time, the place, and look solely at the structural integrity of the artwork itself (its regime, its code, its internal pattern).  "Affective stylistics" and "reader-response" theory reacted strongly to all that, and maintained that since meaning is only generated in reading (or in viewing) the artwork, then the meaning of the work is actually found in the response of the viewer.  The phenomenologists (e.g., Iser, Ingarden) had tried a combination of the two: the text has gaps ("spots of indeterminacy"), and the meaning of the gaps can be found in the reader.

And deconstruction came along and said, basically, you're all wrong.  (It's very hard to trump that.)  Deconstruction maintained that all meaning is context-dependent, and contexts are boundless.  There is thus no way to control, or even finally to determine, meaning—and thus both art and criticism spin endlessly out of control and into the space of unrelenting ambiguity, never to be seen or heard from again.

Postmodern deconstruction, it has finally been realized, leads precisely and inevitably to nihilism: there is no genuine meaning anywhere, only nested deceptions.  And this leaves, in the place of art as sincere statement, art as anarchy, anchored only in egoic whim and narcissistic display.  Into the vacuum created by the implosion that is so much of postmodernism, rushes the ego triumphant.  Meaning is context-dependent, and contexts are boundless, and that leaves art and artist and critic alike lost in aperspectival space, ruled only by the purr of the self-centric engine left driving the entire display.

The laments are loud and well-known.  Painter and critic Peter Fuller:

I feel that we are living through the epilogue of the European professional Fine Art tradition—an epilogue in which the context and subject matter of most art is art itself.

And art historian Barbara Rose:

The art currently filling the museums and galleries is of such low quality generally that no real critical intelligence could possibly feel challenged to analyze it....  There is an inescapable sense among artists and critics that we are at the end of our rope, culturally speaking.

But who knows?  Perhaps meaning is in fact context-dependent, and perhaps contexts are indeed boundless.  Is there any way that this state of affairs can be viewed so as to actually restore a genuine sense of meaning to art and its interpretation?  Is there any way to ground the babble of interpretations that has finally self-deconstructed?  Is there any way that the nested lies announced by postmodernism could in fact be nested truths?  And could this spell the endgame of the narcissism and nihilism that had so proudly announced their own ascendancy? 

Could, in short, an integral orientation save art and literary theory from itself?