A work of art means what its artist means it to mean this is what the word artist means for the same reason this sentence means what I mean it to mean. This is what we mean by meaning it is what meaning means except insofar that it is not what is meant by meaning anymore and I don’t know what is meant by meaning anymore and that is the problem that has preoccupied me for some time such that for a long time I have been planning to write something about meaning by which I mean I’ve been planning to do a whole lot of studying and compiling of notes about the nature of meaning collecting the great thoughts from the great writers and the great artists for the purpose of producing something argumentative and definitive about meaning rather than endlessly prattling on about it at dinner parties in conversations that always seem to go awry and annoy people. In other words I would organize my thinking on meaning in an essay or a treatise that neatly juggled all those quotes because I’m forever seeing people comment on meaning in one way or another it’s a widespread preoccupation it seems and this essay or treatise of mine would amount to the final words I would have to say on the subject of meaning and from then on whenever I wound up in testy discussions I would be able to point my conversationalists in the direction of the highly organized and persuasive argument I had put together and that would be the end of it and we could talk of other things. But I never did that. I never compiled a note or took down a quote there was no reason to because I saw artists and writers commenting on meaning all the time so I never felt any kind of pressing impetus to begin the process of compilation because no moment seemed any more pressing than any other so to wit I have not organized my thinking on meaning at all. Nevertheless it is time to say some things about meaning and while I once thought that I would write something that I would compile and sort and collate the results of several months of research I now recognize that it was this impulse to think of writing as organization that stood in the way of my saying anything about meaning at all. This makes perfect sense because meaning is the ephemeral thing behind words it is not made of them and as soon as you start thinking that words can lead to meaning or will result in meaning or somehow cause meaning you’ve made a critical error a terrible mistake really and of course it is the fact that many people have made this mistake many people have actually thrilled at making this mistake that has caused the meaning of meaning to be lost such that some things now need to be said about it.
Now I have begun here with what probably for many or for some anyway is the nonsensical suggestion that the sentence I was writing and all my sentences really this one too meant what I meant it to mean. To my view this is the common sense view except in the sense that it is no longer common. Far more common now even if it is not universal even if in some disciplines it is on the run as they say but still has a firm grip in many of the foundational institutions of the Western world is the view that a work of art can and probably does mean something other than that which its artist means it to mean. There is so much wrong with this it is so maddening that it is hard to know how to begin to respond and that is why it is has been difficult to begin to respond. But I began by saying that a work of art is something like a sentence in that a sentence also means something I hope we can agree on that much and I would argue or no I won’t argue I’m not arguing here I would assert that we really can’t or shouldn’t separate a work of art from its artist in the same way that we can’t or shouldn’t separate a sentence from its sense. Sentences exist to make sense. They are artificial creations they exist only because someone had a fleeting and perhaps foolhardy hope of making some kind of sense of their thoughts for other people and the sentence is the evidence of that effort at sense-making. A sentence or a sensence. A work of art is also an effort at sense-making and in signing on to the nonsensical view that a work of art can and probably does mean things that fall outside what we probably for now have to flimsily agree to call the artist’s intent we by proxy suggest that a sentence can also somehow mean something other than that which its utterer means it to mean which to my mind puts it into the same category as square circles and married bachelors and many other things that just logically cannot be. This sentence means what I mean it to mean and a work of art means what its artist means it to mean and that is all I mean to tell you.
But I just did something there. I just used the word outside I said something to the effect of outside an artist’s intent and it is this somewhat inadequate term however innocent it may appear that reveals that there is more to be said about meaning. Because whenever you begin to talk about meaning you encounter even from people who should know better the argument and that’s what they’re doing arguing that it’s possible for an artist let’s say a writer to encounter a reader who has read his or her work and who says I got thus and thus out of your wonderful book and the writer says in turn well I never thought of that but it’s wonderful thank you very much. Hence a meaning that falls outside the artist’s intent. But that’s wrong that’s all wrong and the reason has to do with what we mean by intent because of course when we say intent we mean conscious intent and this reflects back on the use of outside because the suggestion is that anything outside of conscious intent is not intent and that’s obviously wrong it’s self-evident really because we know that there is more to artists than their consciousnesses there is also their unconsciousnesses and what goes unstated or assumed in these debates over what’s inside or outside conscious intent is the prevailing view that an artist is not responsible for and/or should not be credited with whatever is produced by his or her unconscious intent.
Stated thus the prevailing view would in fact appear to make sense and I’m sure that this is why it has prevailed. Intent itself would seem to mean conscious intent and even though people often use the phrase conscious intent as though it’s somehow different from regular intent for example please darling believe me that was not my conscious intent which of course does suggest that there is some other form of intent this other form of intent tends to only ever be indicated obliquely such that everyone can be forgiven for concluding that intent and conscious intent are synonymous when they’re clearly not. But it is not any indirect evidence of unconscious intent that I wish to emphasize here. The real issue our real subject is meaning not intent and the point is to demonstrate that when we discuss intent we are actually talking about consciousness and more pointedly we are relying on an old and fairly primitive theory of consciousness namely the conscious and unconscious minds which is entirely theoretical and not based on any repeatable experimental results. This is a problem only insofar as art itself is quite often one might even say exclusively concerned with consciousness it is in fact about consciousness it means consciousness and it is an attempt to depict consciousness and thereby add to the definition of consciousness and the problem is that attempts to understand art that rely a primitive notion of intention based in turn on an old and inadequate theory of consciousness cannot help but fail to comprehend the full scope and sweep not to say the intention of work that is itself attempting to expand what consciousness might mean. Furthermore a too heavy reliance on conscious intent in assessing whatever an artist might mean fails to recognize that every artist has in creating whatever art is in question attempted to shed whatever we mean by consciousness as part of the process of creation has in other words sat down and made a willful effort has consciously intended to get at this other part of his or her mind which the prevailing view would strip from them as though consciousness itself like meaning has a boundary outside of which the artist no longer has any jurisdiction. This is true even though the artist willfully and consciously intended to cross that threshold and even though the products of his or her having crossed that threshold are still clearly the result of a unique and recognizable identity or self.
And of course all this discussion of boundaries and thresholds is additional evidence of the basic problem of meaning.
And the basic problem of meaning then is how we talk about meaning by which I mean how we refer to or describe the ineffable thing behind the words that is the only reason words get used in the first place. Compounding the problem is the fact that words themselves have definitions words mean things and for many things that are not art words are completely suited to the task of conveying meaning. It’s still very tricky of course and misunderstandings happen all the time over the simplest of things but basically when I say that I will go to the store there’s a pretty good chance that I will be understood as having said that I will go to the store. However words that are used to express the meaning of a work of art or to take measure of the quality of a work of art’s meaning or even to indicate that a work of art has meaning is far trickier because art is created at least in part as a function of an artist’s realization that something needs to be expressed that cannot be expressed with words. So all attempts to get at the meaning of a work of art struggle with an inherent incongruity though I think we can all agree that discussing the meaning of a work of art is not therefore futile it can still be very rewarding to share one’s thoughts about the meaning of a work of art even when one recognizes that the words used to express one’s meaning a meaning that attempts to approximate another meaning are if not a failure then at least incomplete even if they seem wholly adequate to the task of conveying one’s subjective experience. And of course we should at least take note of the special case of words used to express the meaning of works of art that are themselves made of words the so called literary arts which is a special case because a work of literary art being made of words would seem to suggest that a writer’s meaning can in fact be got at with words though of course when we discuss the meaning of this kind of art we can’t simply use the same words the writer did so every attempt to express the meaning of a work of literary art is a unique form of translation though the full implications of this are not directly related to what now needs to be said about meaning.
To put it another way and to hopefully begin to make some progress here the problem is that when we begin to talk about meaning we usually rely on spatial metaphors such as outside or boundaries or thresholds or more generally we speak of work that seems to us to have a certain quality of depth or that strikes us as particularly high art. This is most often the case with art that elicits in us an emotional response such that we say it moves us. And right there is the problem because when we say that a work of art has moved us we are already in the realm of spatial metaphor. We are no longer where we once were is what we seem to mean. We have progressed or changed and it feels like motion. And our instinct though our instinct fails us in this instance is to convey the sensation of a work of art that succeeds in this way with resurrections of the dead metaphor of our having been moved and then of course we extend this metaphor with further resuscitations of deep books and elevated thoughts all of which long ago became their own cemetery of dead metaphors. The problem with these metaphors and it’s a terrible problem one we will be struggling with for generations is that they focus on the object rather than the action. The noun rather than the verb. It would be alien to us to say that we viewed a work of art and then moved rather than that a work of art moved us yet in attempting to describe the sensation inspired by a work of art that moves us we focus on the end result rather than the process and so it winds up seeming that yes we viewed a work of art and then moved. In other words a work of art that we would instinctually describe as deep would actually be better described as having given us a sensation of sinking or submersion. But we don’t say that. It’s too hard apparently. And the result of this mistake is that meaning has begun to seem tangible and once you begin to think of meaning as having corporeality you’re on your way to thinking that words lead to meaning or can somehow result in it or cause it. In short meaning is not something that a work of art has it is something that a work of art does. Art does not have something that it means. Art means something. Meaning is an action not a trait.
What is it about? A great deal can be gleaned from a careful consideration of this very simple and common question about meaning and it’s about time someone set about the problem of what the word about might be about. Quite clearly the it of the question what is it about references a work of art and its being an it and one presumes a noun is one way of allowing that many works of art are objects and therefore nouns though it’s also true that some works of art are not objects though they are nouns too and so these works of art are also subject to what the question what is it about means by it. The is and the what of the question what is it about both refer to the meaning of the it and the is would seem to ontologically insist that a meaning exists though it is crucial to note that a meaning’s existence does not necessarily mean that it has corporeality only that its existence is something that a preponderance of reasonable people would attest to even if they might not agree on anything else about it. The what is a similar problem because even though like the is a what can refer to intangible things concepts and so forth our instinct on hearing the word what which even with its breathy initial battery of letters followed by a hard consonant would seem to suggest a void that will be filled is that it references some solid object and the fact that we most often discuss meaning with questions like what is it about or even more commonly what does it mean demonstrates the deeply rooted nature of the problem of meaning. In short then the question what is it about’s what and its is and its it would all appear to suggest a meaning that exists in the same way that a rock or a hat or a cat exists and that’s obviously wrong.
So the question’s about must save it. What is this about about? At first glance the about would seem to be synonymous with meaning itself. But the difference the interesting difference between the two questions what does it mean and what is it about is that the latter is yet another spatial metaphor while the former is not. About is about space. We go out and about and a bug skitters about and when we turn our bodies one hundred and eighty degrees we have turned about face. In each case about would seem to have something to do with circularity and/or proximity as when for example we say they are standing all about me. In other words about has something to do with around. And in the context of meaning about takes on a whole new significance and dramatically changes the thrust of the question what is it about such that the question’s it would seem to indicate something or perhaps a whole bunch of things that are positioned about its what. What is it about? The what is still a void hoping to be filled and it still exists though it is an absence and the it of the work of art defines the what which is the meaning by being situated all about it without ever occupying it. Resurrecting the dead metaphor of about would then seem to suggest that the meaning of a work of art is something like a circular absence. The meaning of a work of art is then perhaps what happens when we answer the question what it is about is then perhaps the act of filling the round void described by the question what is it about’s it.
All of this is clearly confusing but we should expect nothing less than an impossible combination of clarity and confusion to result from a discussion of things that do not lend themselves easily to expression with words. Still though we do now have something solid to go on at least to the extent that envisioning meaning as a circular absence is a kind of solid.
Yet two problems present themselves. First defining meaning as the process of filling a void would once again seem to suggest that meaning is corporeal and second defining meaning as filling a void would seem to suggest that anything and everything a beholder of a piece of art puts into that absence is what the work of art means. The latter is obviously wrong as it’s possible to be completely wrong about what a work of art means and the former is wrong too as meaning that is defined as a process lacks corporeality by definition. So even though we might have arrived at something solid to build upon so as to be able to say some meaningful things about meaning we have also arrived at the terminus of the usefulness of spatial metaphors when it comes to meaning. We have no better way to discuss meaning and this is why people still discuss it in this way but it is also why discussions of meaning all seem inadequate and prove to be quite frustrating.
In light of this many artists and writers have tried to move away from spatial metaphors for meaning and that is why it has been difficult to begin to discuss meaning. The nature of this discussion has been to suggest exactly what I’ve suggested here that art is a process not a product that the artist and the beholder of the work of art co-create the art that art is an event and not an object even if there is an ostensible objet d’art. There is widespread agreement on this point at least among artists and writers though in no way has this agreement succeeded in upending the even more widespread assumption that a work of art is a vehicle for a meaning that can be extracted from it or can otherwise disembark from it. The basic plight of right now and the reason why some things about meaning have needed to be said is that these two mutually exclusive views exist at once in time and together amount to the problem of meaning.
It’s too easy to solve the problem of meaning by picking a side though this is what most do. It should be clear that for the most part I’ve rejected the view of corporeal meaning but that does not mean I’m wholly in the opposite camp and I’ve already noted that the problem of envisioning meaning as filling a void leaves too much of what a work of art might mean to the beholder of art. It’s true than an artist or a writer might be pleased with meanings proffered by beholders of their art even when those meanings do not perfectly align with whatever the artist or writer initially thought they meant but it’s also true that an artist or a writer can be very displeased can be violently opposed in fact to meanings proffered by beholders of their art when those meanings stand in opposition to whatever the artist or writer thought they initially meant. For example and this actually happened so this is not an example but a citation if a writer is told that his work demonstrates a predilection for raping children then that writer will likely protest in fact he did and say no no no that is not what I meant at all. So it would seem that even for those who are inclined to see meaning as a process the fact of its being a process does not mean that a work of art can be made to mean anything at all. There are limits and these limits are defined by what an artist means to mean in the same way the meaning of this sentence is limited to what I mean it to mean.
We would then seem to be back to spatial metaphors and the problem once we allow that there are limitations to what a work of art might mean is that meaning if it has corporeality or mass will very quickly fill up the roundish void that a work of art is about. While we can all agree that a work of art might mean very many things the limitations on what a work of art might mean translates to limitations on what works of art do mean such that the problem of meaning is that there is less meaning in the world than there otherwise might be because meaning is now suddenly finite. This is not even intuitive. Another way of expressing the problem is that in trying to get our minds around the problem of meaning we have used the logic of spatial metaphors on an entire discipline that exists maybe only because we recognize that logic cannot be used to express everything we wish to express. The result is that two things that appear to be mutually exclusive are both true and those two things are first that there are limitations to what a work of art might mean and second that works of art have infinities of possible meanings. The infinite within the finite. This is what we mean by paradox.
The great irony of all this is that the problem of the corporeality or mass of meaning is more or less identical to the problem of the corporeality or mass of mass. With mass when you move beyond the phenomenal experience of it and try to prove its existence you find that mass too is reluctant to have mass that as you zoom further and further in on mass it looks less and less massive. Hence and without I hope getting too technical it is more accurate when discussing the mass of an electron to describe its potential for mass rather than its mass because its mass be it made of mass or energy is entirely dependent on its acting like mass or seeming to be massive. In other words even mass is a mysterious thing that is better described as an action or an event and what that means is that spatial metaphors that are really metaphors about things filling space are no less mysterious than actual space. And it is worth humbly noting that electrons define atoms by being in an impossible to describe orbit about their nuclei just as on another scale celestial bodies define the finite infinity of space by falling into orbit about one another and thereby representing a system defined by a solar center. Space too is about aboutness.
In conclusion what I would like to assert is that when we talk about the meaning of a work of art we should talk less about what it means however intuitive that might be and instead talk about its potential for meaning or even better its range of potential meanings because once we envision meaning as a potential or a continuum we are still probably in the realm of spatial metaphor but we have not eliminated the possibility of an infinity of meanings even though we have also suggested that there are very likely to be interpretations of a work of art that fall outside its range of potential meanings and which are therefore wrong. Furthermore defining meaning as the potential for meanings solves the problem of finite meaning and what that means is that there can be more meaning in the world which is good.
But more meaning in the world does not solve the problem of jurisdiction because it could still conceivably be possible for an artist to stumble onto a range of possible meanings without meaning to. But this is not intuitive either. To understand this we must understand not only intent which as I’ve said is the artist’s intent conscious or otherwise we must also understand that just as there are interpretations of works of art which a preponderance of reasonable people would agree fall outside its range of potential meanings so are there works of art that fail works of art that don’t even have a range of potential meanings because they aren’t any what we call good. These are indefinite terms to be sure but they are intuitive and no one has to look far and wide to find examples of bad art and the question then is what is meant by good art and what I would assert in conclusion is that a work of art that is good is a work that strikes a preponderance of reasonable people as having been created by an artist who during the process of its creation which can be very quick but which can also last several years or even longer came either consciously or unconsciously to an understanding of its entire range of potential meanings such that there is no correct thought about its meaning that can pass through the mind of the beholder of the art that did not first pass through the mind of the artist however fleetingly and either consciously or unconsciously and at any point during the process of its creation.
And in short this is art and this is meaning and it is only by this set of thoughts or a set of thoughts like them that we can solve the problem of meaning and usher yet more meaning into the world.
