Report From the Underground: Eat Y'self Fitter

Right off the bat, I understand what many people might say; that interpreting the guitarist's performance as intoxicated theatrics is uncharitable, and they may very well be right. To clarify the point though, I'm not advocating that rock music cannot break out of the genre conventions that make it rock music. Neither am I saying that the deconstruction of said conventions is a bad way to experiment with music. However, what I do decry is the illusion of creating experimental music, that is, of merely screwing around on stage in place of having a coherent idea of what the artist wants to accomplish, which is what I judged the guitarist to be doing based, in part, by his offstage actions, which were likewise bacchanalian.

This also brings up a second, yet closely related question: Does intention even matter at all? Regardless of whether or not the artist is intending to make something experimental or to break out of genre conventions, shouldn't a piece of art be judged solely by how the viewers perceive it? "I believe, in addition, that all these a priori discussions concerning the intent of literary execution are based on the error of supposing that intentions and plans matter a great deal. Let us take the case of Kipling: Kipling dedicated his life to writing in terms of certain political ideals, he tried to make his work an instrument of propaganda and yet, at the end of his life, he was obliged to confess that the true essence of a writers work is usually unknown to him. He recalled the case of Swift, who, when he wrote Gulliver's Travels, tried to bring an indictment against all humanity but actually left a book for children" (Jorge Borges, "The Argentine Writer and Tradition").

Many have weighed in on this topic, the most influential, the literary critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy." The fallacy is that we're supposed to believe that the intentions of the artist matter in gleaning meaning from the artwork. When the audience of a piece of art interprets it, they are all on equal footing when it comes to the interpretation; some interpretations will be more holistic, some more interesting and enlightening, others facile and non-thought provoking, but every interpretation is valid simply by dint of a person having a dialogue with an art work. However, in our culture (and probably most cultures) we afford a special status to one interpretation: the author's. Of course, this makes sense to us. Who else would know the meaning of a piece of art if not the author herself?

This is wrong though. First on a cultural level, we saw above in Borges's quote that artists may create things with one intention while they are received with a different and possibly better interpretation than the author's own. The philosopher Daniel Dennett gives an analogy. "Occasionally, an artifact loses its original function and takes on a new one. People buy old-fashioned sad-irons not to iron their clothes with, but to use as bookends or doorstops; a handsome jam pot can become a pencil holder, and lobster traps get recycled as outdoor planters. The fact is that sad-irons are much better as bookends than they are at ironing clothes—at least compared to the competition today. And a Dec-10 mainframe computer today makes a nifty heavy-duty anchor for a large boat mooring. No artifact is immune from such appropriation, and however clearly its original purpose may be read from its current form, its new purpose may be related to that original purpose by mere historic accident—the fellow who owned the obsolete mainframe needed an anchor badly, and opportunistically pressed it into service" ("The Interpretation of Texts, People and Other Artifacts.")

On a deeper level though, one can say that there is no necessary connection between our intentions and what we actually do. Without going too deep into philosophical theory, although stemming from the work of people such as Anscombe and Davidson, we can acknowledge that sometimes our intentions do not line up with out actions. It's actually a pretty simple empirical point to make. Everyone, at some point has formed a sincere intention to do something and then actually did something completely different. "I intended to take my keys with me, but I left them at home." We can lay the blame on absentmindedness in this case, but there are examples that make the point even clearer. Dennett adapts an example from Anscombe, "Suppose...that you say 'Now I press Button A' while reaching out and pushing Button B. We wonder which slip you made—a slip of the tongue or a slip of the finger. Both are possible, and typically you would know which you meant to say, and do, but we can imagine a case in which you find yourself perplexed: you were under pressure, there was a case to be made for either action, you simply don't know what you meant."

We're left with the idea that neither on a personal level, nor on a cultural level can the author of an artwork be truly authoritative in regard to the interpretation of his own creation. It follows then that trying to bring the author's intentions into the judging of a piece of art is a non sequitur; it just does not matter. When my friend and I were arguing, it mattered not if the artist was simply a drunk or a visionary when it came to interpreting the art. All that mattered was what we thought of the work itself, what its place was in a musical context, was it derivative or not, etc.. In lieu of this, it might be interesting to end by asking: What is the point of paying so much attention to the author if she is not necessarily better in interpreting it than we are? The first reason is pretty obviously that there is a large contingent of people that don't believe in or know of the intentional fallacy; however, a richer interpretation of the phenomenon may be that we use this information not to judge the art, but rather to judge the artist. In a social, rather than a hermeneutical ring, it is important to us whether the artist is a genius or a savant, the genuine article or a fraud. However, too many times do we confuse the artist with the art, for geniuses can make derivative, uncreative drivel and idiots can make works of great interest and beauty, and when making judgments about art, we must endeavor not to conflate the two.