Only connect.
E.M. Forster, Howard’s End

1. Behind the Beyond

1For postmodern Aesthetic Theory, the problem of what to do with indiscern- ibles is not one to be taken lightly, in particular as more and more objects take on the guise of being mass-produced, minimally manipulated, found, stolen, plagiarized, repurposed, desecrated, detoured, détourned or otherwise rendered indistinguishable from things that do not bear the impress of a human hand acting at the behest of a creative consciousness tumescent with intention. Through the thought of Arthur C. Danto, whose Analytic Philosophy of Art in a work like his influential and experimental Transfiguration of the Commonplace recommends a transcending of the sensual surface and leap into a non-sensuous, cerebral set of semanticized interpretations, the art object ceases being an issue of form, color, scale, weight or retinal residue, and more a thought problem shaken free from the zone of theoretical physics and applied to questions of display, exhibition and aesthetic materiality, even subjectivity, if we extend his ideas to the fabricative mind producing art and poetry in the first place, an “aesthetic subjectivity,” in the language of Christophe Menke in his Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida. Via Danto, the problem of mechanical reproducibility, which for the Walter Benjamin of Illuminations was primarily a crisis in aural dissipation, becomes rephrased in the language of the thought problem, deflecting it toward the level of the conceptual, where seemingly identical items are divorced from intention and intension alike - in order to prove a point about contemporary aesthetic production and the total fusion of high and the low, extraordinary art and ordinary life, trash and class, all in a flash.

3The problem with Danto s transfigurational maneuver is that, along the way, «Danto» becomes «Dantos» Analytic Philosopher coming into conflict with Philosopher of Pop, as Tiziana Andina boldly rechristens him in her Andy Warhol: Philosopher of Pop, these dual, dueling Dantos playing their banjos in the cool moonlight as au revoir to an art that can figure historically and operate according to an aesthetic version of the correspondence theory launched by Gottlob Frege in his Foundations of Arithmetic: image corresponds with object (Representation), or emotion corresponds with deviation from objective presentation (Expression). That Danto uncannily doubles is something which first came to my attention when I was researching and writing my Warhol investigation, Sublime Superficiality (Intertheory Press, 2010). For me, it became apparent that it was only when Danto ceased being a philosopher, and in particular one of the analytic ilk, that he finally grasped the Pop phenomenon he found exploding all around him in art gallery and ultimately on the street where the popular thrives among the visual din of advertisements and the sonic cacophony of commercial noise: that is, the very Proustian street symphony of temptation, offer, bargain and commodity competition at work outside his window in La Captive and in our present lives filling the streets with all the stuff of pop, gross, indiscriminate and loud.

4Later, when I was reviewing Italian scholar Tiziana Andina’s book for JAAC, her own interpretation of Danto left me puzzled, for it suggested that the postmodern object literally required two systems of interpretation within philosophy proper, as opposed to philosophy calling upon some other discipline, like psychoanalysis or anthropology, to come to its rescue as it fails to do its assigned work without summoning an interdisciplinary comrade to speak for it. In Andina’s analysis, the two competing intra-philosophical disciplines required to talk about the postDuchamp object are: (1) an Aesthetics, or science of the surface, and (2) a Philosophy of Art eschewing physicality and committed to the Begriff, therein departing from surface concerns entirely in a leap toward the concepts and ideas giving rise to the object and carving out an ontological space for it within oikos and chrematistics. In Andina’s words:

6Andina is correct: Danto’s legacy is this perceptual bifurcation, as the philosophy of art distances itself from its roots in sensation, leaving Baumgarten in a cloud of dust and making the experience of the objet anything but an issue of form, color, sound or substance, as I discuss in my review of her book.

8What Richard Shusterman calls somaesthetics in his Body Consciousness or Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the End of Art is definitely a step in the right direction, and is an excellent corrective for Danto s philosophical and categorical leap into the incorrigibly abstract, but I would like to go even further than this Feldenkrais method of live thinking, returning to the sensational web that in the first place gives us the work of art, much as for the Derrida of Given Time it is the «donative consciousness» which presents the sense datum, making it materialize almost ex nihilo, as demonstrated by our use of the demonstrative pronoun in any of the expressions beginning with the words «There is» which we use to convey the fact that a presentation rising outside our own volition has occurred. “There is space,” “There is time,” etc.: the great parade of authorless noumeno, provided to the sensual apparatus as beneficent raw material through which a poiesis or making/gifting is possible is donated to consciousness, as is the objet, which, notwithstanding questions of aesthetic solipsism or noematic hallucination, can be described as a sensual “there” opening itself to the prosthetic workings of a sensorium instinctively programmed to process it. Re-somatizing the aesthetic is an important Deweyan move that allows the work of art to sync up with the many other sensations that are not related to the museum, gallery or atelier, revealing a sensual axis connecting the taste of lemon sorbet I devour as I sit on the steps of a closed pizzeria in Greenwich Village on a sultry August night that causes my hair glue to melt just a little, for example, with the feeling of awe the 18^th-century poet experiences while encountering the rocky crags of an Alpine expanse: in the Deweyan scenario, the two are of a piece, occupying slots on a spectrum of sensation: art is experience, and directly so.

2. Extending Extensionalism

9As I have already mentioned, reading Andinas thought-provoking book about Danto, a quintessentially Italian response to his theories about art and life, left me with an unshakable ponderousness about the fate of thinking-about-art after a sensual Aesthetics is abandoned in favor of an incorporeal Philosophy of Art; namely. Andina forced me to reconsider what it meant for the future of art if we accepted the thesis that the Brillo Box was this consequential both in terms of the dephysicalization of art and the proffering of an incorporeal solution to Leibnizs Indiscernibility Principle according to which sensual qualities are matched in a one-to-one correspondence and identity rests upon there being total bijectionality. Clearly, using Extensionalism to account for similarities and differences between the elements comprising the set of art objects that begs the question of indiscernibility and the those stuffing the brackets of the set of human implements that are rendered indiscernible from their aesthetic counterparts in the first place was an elegant move, yet along with it came the unfortunate developments that now unequal entities could or would be improperly equated and that competing qualia could be passed over without incident under the tyranny of the visible. In the case of the Brillo Box, for example, simply not weighing the object in question would produce a falsely extensional result, while ignoring the glossy, almost glossolalie allure generated by the phonetic texture of the product name “brillo” would create a glaring failure to account for why other boxes in the Brillo series, such as the Del Monte or Kellogg s ones, are passed over entirely and never precipitate or participate in the end of anything, except perhaps hunger.

10These issues and others make me wonder about the viability of Extensionalism in its aesthetic application, since to me at least it is apparent that when one stretches or extends the limits of object and context, there really are no indiscernibles: simply put, an art gallery and its contents will never be mistaken for a supermarket or stock room and its loot, not by an art expert, and certainly not by a Unionized worked charged with managing the bulk of wholeseale aggregations of items for sale, as again. Brillo viciously begs the question of massa and moles, primary and secondary matter, individual thing and aggregate, in this Monadology of steel wool wonders. What are the limits of Extensionalism particularly within the language-games of art history, aesthetics, philosophy of art and art criticism, all supposedly related yet unique, selbstandig spheres that sometimes but not always communicate with one another? How far much we extend our analysis of the physical features of objects — and not just the visual ones, which Danto obviously favors — before we jump to the conclusion that any two are identical and in essence interchangeable, the one just as easily inserted into the context of the other in such a way that no ripples tear through spacetime to alert us that any substitution has occurred? Is there real substitutability or synonymy here, where an empty silkscreened crate or Box of Boxes whose kinetic name draws us in with that energetic terminal “O” indicating that an object is about to perform a function that absorbs and programs its identity entirely, as the advertising and marketing nomenclature goes, can be mistaken for a box of kitchen implements which is not a crate, but a box presumably taken from the Box of Boxes in the stock room of a grocery store and placed upon a shelf for sale, the labor of store employee differing fundamentally from the acquisitional behavior of a shopper, both of whom approach Brillo from different and irreconcilable angles? Crate resides in stock room; box resides on shelf: how can this distinction be ignored in this, Warhol’s most labor-intensive piece, according to David Bourdon, a sculpture that would more accurately be called Brillo Crate or Brillo Boxes if we took the boxing of boxes under proper consideration? Furthermore, would anyone in charge of emptying the Box of Boxes ever call it a box, or “Brillo Box”, in the first place? What is the behind-the-scenes parlance of the stockroom? Even the Type Theorist must concede that its physical properties have bumped it up to the next level of thingness, where boxes are themselves boxed as a kind of mimetic mindbender. It’s almost a pastiched version of Russell’s Paradox: the Box of Boxes that itself is or is not a box. The Box of Boxes is thus less an art-historical interrogative where Abstract Expressionism is washed clean and more the place where ergonomics and economics meet workplace Mereology. Reading Andina, I realize that it is only by setting in motion an unfortunate act of aesthetic epoche and allowing it to extricate the object forcibly from its natural habitat only to reinstall it in the neuter space of aesthetic consciousness that any set of simultaneous equations is ever able to be produced, and that we might be better off if we had never begun the game of subtraction in the first place, since all it can end in are false identities, reassuring and inert, «art in a box» and also boxes of art, neatly contained portions of exsanguinated aesthesis forced to stand in for one another so that pluralism might make some kind of sense in its pulverizing democratization of taste.

11For Andina, the reason Danto waved adieu to Aesthetics in the first place was a simple one: following the Leibnizian principle of indiscernability upon which Extensionalism, an Analytic staple, is constructed, he had no choice but to draw the conclusion that relying on sense data would never solve the problem of why, for example, the Rembrandt made by a Maytag is different from the Rembrandt made by Rembrandt, or why the label designed by Abstract Expressionist and graphic artist James Harvey, that poor soul, who even on Wikipedia presides over an isolated page identified by the powers that be as an “orphan,” figured differently in the context of supermarket and art gallery, despite the fact that its sensual features were for all intents and purposes identical. In some ways, this was a line of interrogation with its own legalities, as in the case of Patricia Caulfield’s 1966 suit against Warhol for his — and her — Flowers, and with its own criminology, as in the respective violences of Dorothy Podber, whose shots produced the illustrious 1964 Shot Marilyns, and Valerie Solanas, whose shots were the result of intense anxieties about theft, ventriloquism and absorption, in that the destabilization of the border between real deal and simulative substitute carries with it a concomitant disruption of tectonic order within the psychologies and personalities of those people who comprise the artworld, populating it with their objects and papering it with their criticism.

13Danto takes a completely diametrical approach in all of his writings on Andy Warhol - in particular, his Andy Warhol, which contains a strangely anti-Exten- sionalist take on the fraught situation of the Brillo Box’s identity. For Danto, even actual differences between real and simulated boxes do not make a difference:

• 6 Danto 2009: 62-64

One could say something like this: Andy’s boxes were made of wood and the ordinary Brillo cartons were made of corrugated cardboard. But surely the difference between art and reality cannot consist in the difference between wood and cardboard! After all, there are plenty of boxes that are made of wood, in which, for example, wine is shipped. Or someone could say, Andy’s boxes are frill of accidentalities, while the commercial Brillo cartons are impeccable as far as printing is concerned. But Andy’s could have been impeccable as well. The difference between art and reality would stand6.

14How is it possible that things as important as real, substantive — literally, bearing weight, and speaking to age-old debates about substance — differences between art carton and carton carton be smoothed over so glibly? As Wilson has correctly highlighted, the mistakes incorporated into Warhol’s works are anything but accidental: they are intended, unmistakable reminders that someone’s hand has been at work, at that bright moment when Romanticism slips into the picture in the form of a human error irrecuperable by labor and completely outside alienation. Andy’s boxes could not have been impeccable — they could only house the aesthetic peccadilloes of bijective error. To say that these errors are something we can dismiss in the name of Theory is to subtract an entire dimension from the Brillo Box - something I am not prepared to do, as it would simply reduce this complicated work of art to the solution of a thought problem in which Readymades are mistaken for imperfectly fabricated reproductions whose co-aesthetic coordinates have been diminished to the point of non-meaning.

15With regard to the material of the Brillo Box, it is Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of a style of being and of the deep connection between the visual and the tactile which figure, as it is precisely the competing phenomena of cardboard-ness and wood-ness that matter from the perspective of the flesh. Think, for example, of what the red of the red dress means to him in The Visible and the Invisible in the place where Proust meets philosophy! Alive at the place where straits uniting interior and exterior horizons flow, the red of the red dress is like the wood of the Brillo Box or the cardboard of the carton of Brillo Boxes and of the individual box of Brillo pads: it punctuates a field vitally, calling forth cultural associations along with raw sensation, my point being that the difference between wood and cardboard cannot be passed over without incident, as it is a huge difference, especially when we consider it in light of Extensionalism and the analytic philosophy it supports and the empiricism it seems to want to embrace. Its ecceity cannot be ignored, nor can its tactility — even though the social rules governing the artworld prevent our touching what we do not yet own, a synaesthetic truncation that seems to give Danto the green light to leave sensation behind but which Co-aesthesis combats through a more total comprehension of the object in its environment.

16Beyond the poetics of the logo or slogan, though, the problem of indiscemibles is fundamentally an anthropological one, a fact Andina addresses via Wittgensteins observation in the Philosophical Investigations that a mathematical expression like J[F(x) + g(x)]dx = jF(x)dx + Jg(x)dx might also be used by a tribe unfamiliar with algebra as speleological ornament: of course it will mean different things to mathematician and tribal elder, despite the fact that there is a fundamental physical indiscernibility to the expression when and only when, or iffit is isolated from the synthetic web of sensations that constitute an existing, endemic context as opposed to an artificial, sterile neutral environment that is the abattoir of meaning. Andina’s point seems to be that two objects - in this case the identical calculus formula for simplifying the summation of integrations by way of a primal commutability making a complicated procedure more manageable - are in some productive way ontologically interchangeable, raising the issue of how two entities that are extensionally equivalent reveal a radical dis-equivalence and dissonance when they are viewed as semantic vehicles. For Andina, as for Wittgenstein, the natives do not “know” the expression, since they misappropriate it, although they do have a use for it, which is completely appropriate, and another way of knowing it, in fact causing the aesthetic value of mathematical form to materialize as sudden, unexpected disruption too easily read as trivialization and banalization. What Andinas example of a re-engineered calculus equation immediately calls to mind is what for Quine is the Lévy-Bruhl problem: that is, the ways in which the eager anthropologist struggles to translate the sets of propositions he encounters at work in a native tribe which is very often a «wild tribe». As philosophers, we err if we blame the tribe for being unable to understand the mathematical symbols they use as decor: use is a form of understanding, as 'Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations demonstrates. Hence use and knowledge need not be on the same page for equivalence to occur, so to speak, as within aesthetics there is every possibility of misfiring, loss and misdirection: and most vitally so.

3. Parallel Worlds in PostEuclidian Space

18According to Quine, the Lévy-Bruhl paradigm and the anthropology it supports go awry the second that we succumb to the belief that logics are translatable into one another, in particular as what we are dealing with are entire systems of thought and the mentalities they foster and nourish. In Quine’s anthropology, there is no way of successfully connecting tribal languages without remainder or residue: in essence, language is idiom, and idiom never translates, except comically, as when street jargon like «Talk to the Hand» becomes something no one says, like «Habla al Mano», or when, to use the famous Derridean example regarding suicide, the English «taking a life» becomes the French «giving a life» (donner le mori). The relevance of Quine’s assessment of the lexicographical situation for aesthetic theory and in particular the notion that aesthetic indiscernibles are possible in the first place is that it points to the fact that translations are themselves unique creations — parallel worlds, if you will, places where one- to-one correspondences of the type integral to Freges method fail and instead what results is a separate organization of space and time. If what the Aesthetician cannot bring us is truth — this despite the best efforts of a Romantic poet like John Keats to equate truth and beauty or of Kant to make the truth of beauty something communal, consensual and communicable — then perhaps what he or she can offer is something far superior: another world, a new facticity, a unique city of meaning or semantopolis. In fact, we are at the spot where beauty comes to constitute its own truth, groundless, non-consensual and ultimately communicable only through miscommunication.

19For the Victorians, this adjacent aesthetic world was a creation of ékphrasis, as art criticism itself became an art proper, producing a parallel universe of meaning that in its unfolding did not so much reveal the truth of art history or art object as much as it generated a separate work of art with its own principles of cohesion beauty and self-sufficiency, something to be judged in and of itself. Arguably the most refined and powerful statement of the ekphrastic phenomenon is Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, the essay in which he uses the writings of art historians John Ruskin and Walter Pater as prototypes for the aesthetic heights to which art-critical writing can soar. As we know from Wildes dialogue Decay of Lying, the sunset is already little more than a «very second-rate Turner» - and now it is the first-rate Turner whose own paintings are eclipsed by John Ruskin s ekphrastic effusions describing and interpreting them so well that his words become another painting entirely (Wilde 1989: 987). Clearly, Walter Pater adds something to the mysterious and elusive smile of Mona Lisa, a magical quantum that transcends the limits of philosophy or art criticism, but this supplement is something marvelous, the moment when philosophy and criticism transcend themselves in the production of a new work of art inhabiting its own parallel milieu.

20The ekphrastic method thus treats the work of art as incidental, raw material for a second-order creation that will pinch off in its own act of aesthetic pinocytosis and become a beautiful thing unto itself, sensuously separate and demanding its own critique which, if executed properly, will only necessitate the creation of another world. Fortunately, there are just not talented people in existence for these universes to multiply infinitely: so goes Wildean élitism. As the parallel universe theories of a physicist like Michio Kaku, whose Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the 10^h Dimension, details, parallel worlds multiply almost too rapidly, creating an unwieldy multiverse that defies conception along with Descartes’ geometrical hellion, the chiliagon, in the Meditations. The Wildean corrective to this physics would simply be that, aesthetically, very few human beings can successfully use ekphrasis to turn art object into art object, or AO into AO’, a fact of human nature that finitizes the infinite and makes the series [AO’] countable. The ekphrastic method is simple