Why is Art Critical to Public Discourse?
Daniel Nolan
Summary
In this talk I attempted to provide a response to the following question: why we should
think that artistic works can and even should have an impact on public discourse? I began
clearing a space in which to pose this question first by posing a number of preliminary questions:
might we think that the public relevance of artistic works is something for which we need not
argue? Is the public relevance of artistic works not something we take for granted, especially in
literature programs, on college campuses, and in literary journals?
And there are good reasons to take the public relevance of artistic works for granted: for
instance, artists unsettle our understanding of the way we come to form values; artists unseat our
background assumptions, and in doing so they tend to foster discussion, which often leads to a
broader and more informed understanding of the issues that aggravate public debate. Artistic
works teach us to see the world in different ways; they unveil the implications inherent in the
very process of perception itself. And in doing so, artists help us to understand the specificity of
our own cultural background. In some cases, they even help us overcome the limiting effects of
the presuppositions we bring with us when we enter into discussion with others.
Those who would argue that there is a straightforward answer to the question this talk
takes as its title might pursue something like the following line of reasoning, sketched here in
very broad strokes: they might suggest that there is a kind of questioning inherent in what we call
art, and that that artistic form of questioning consistently offers something of value to public
discourse. In the practice of making, perceiving and reflecting on artistic works this artistic
questioning brings with it a kind of robust freedom, and an unrestricted, unfettered, unbounded
approach to the issues and decisions we face in public debates. Not only do artistic works teach
us to question the practices that inform our understanding of the world, they teach us to do so
with a freedom that would be untenable elsewhere. Artworks operate with a kind of freedom that
would not be admissible, for instance, in the marketplace. And the freedom of artistic expression
might easily seem out of place, for example, in the realm of religious ideas or even in the
philosophical pursuit of the good life.
There are many places in which the freedom we associate with artworks would appear
inappropriate. And, public debate, one might respond, is one of these places. This argument is
worth considering, if for no other reason than that this argument has repeatedly been offered by
the most famous theorist of public culture, Jürgen Habermas.
This talk attempted to rethink Habermas’s claims that artistic works do not attain
substantive relevance in public discourse. I did so not simply in order to show that Habermas was
wrong, or right, but rather to show 1) that Habermas demonstrates that we should not take the
public relevance of artistic works for granted, and 2) that Habermas misunderstands the way in
which artworks continually make important contributions to and in fact sustains public culture.
The first part of the talk aimed to convince the audience that the history of the public
sphere gives us reasons to think that artworks do not retain the kind of substantive relevance in
broader public debate outlined thus far. Then in the second part, I attempted to show specifically
what aspects of modern artworks make their appearance in the public problematic. Then, in the
final section, I argued that, despite the reasons we have for being wary of artistic insight in
broader public debate, there are some specific aspects of artistic works that do and in fact must
remain critical to public discourse.
In the first and second part of this talk I present not so much my own argument, as that of
one of Jürgen Habermas. It is his argument, for which he has been harshly criticized, that artistic
works do not achieve relevance in public culture. Habermas directs us to what he terms the
Wahrhaftigkeit, or sincerity, of the artwork. And it is this aspect of his approach to public culture
that I criticize most sharply, attempting to bring a new intervention to the apparent disconnection
between authors who work on public culture, like Habermas, and those working in aesthetic
theory.
Sincerity plays an unusual role in Habermas’s account, because sincerity cannot be tested
in a way that is fully public, but instead, like the private citizen, must always emerge from a
system of shared assumptions that themselves never become fully articulated. Assumptions about
sincerity are built into what Habermas calls, developing Husserl’s and Ernst Troeltsch’s term, the
lifeworld, die Lebenswelt. Assumptions about sincerity continually emerge from the lifeworld
into the public, but never fully arrive, and are never fully clarified. Sincerity, like the background
lifeworld to which it gives intersubjective expression, always remains on the cusp of public
discourse, not yet but always potentially tested, not yet but potentially established, rejected,
misunderstood, or forgotten and so on.
It is from within this tension, between the contingencies of the unarticulated background
of an individual life and potentially context transcendent value mediation in the public, that
Habermas comes to view sincerity as central to our understanding of modern works of art. For
Habermas, artworks speak to us in a way that is fundamentally different from the manner in
which a speaker might report on everyday states of affairs (truth versus truthfulness). The
distinction between instrumentally reported truth and the sincerity or truthfulness of the artwork
cannot, however, simply be reduced to a distinction between fact and fiction. Rather Habermas’s
understanding of the artistic nature of sincerity is explicitly articulated as part of his larger
historical perspective as a thinker, and as such should be understood in the context of his larger
engagement with modernity.
While the historical contingencies of public culture are diverse, the freedom of discourse
in the public sphere, as described by Habermas, is also reliant upon a complete and thus singular
shift away from pre-civic “publicness.”
This completion is achieved in the exclusion of
representative authority, the ability of the sovereign to appear in the full manifestation of the truth
of who he is and who he can become. Habermas calls the appearance of representative authority
“an aura,” using Benjamin’s term for the mythic and cultic background to the experience of
authoritative Echtheit (genuineness) of the artwork. In The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere Habermas only mentions Benjamin’s term in passing, but the artistic background
of his reflections on the exclusion of representative authority are evident in his discussion of
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and later in his essay on Walter Benjamin.
I suggest that Habermas’s account of modern aesthetics would greatly benefit from closer
consideration of thinkers who have dedicated more attention to the historically specific nature of
sincerity. For instance, Lionell Trilling’s differentiation between sincerity and authenticity gives
us more motivation to take seriously suggestions such as those made by David Ingram, that
Habermas’s notion of artistic sincerity is more complex than it might first appear. But rather than
solve the problem sincerity posed for Habermas’s understanding of modern works of art,
Trilling’s differentiation and Ingram’s suggestions heighten our sense of the problematic nature
of artistic honesty.
Reflecting on the value of sincerity is an inherently difficult task within the public sphere,
and yet the exposure of privacy is itself not exterior to the public, but rather central to it.
Exposing honesty as something other than honesty, or revealing the way privacy informs our
understanding of truthfulness, is inherently precarious in the public, because such an exposure
will always rely on public forms of judgment and the presuppositions about honesty that come
with them.
Artistic truthfulness is not “addicted” to scandal in and of itself, as Habermas suggests. It
is rather the view on artistic truthfulness as a public virtue that channels honesty towards what
Habermas, citing Benjamin, calls profanation. The public sphere is prone to exposure, but it
inherently excludes deliberations on the value and nature of exposure itself. Artistic truthfulness
exposes not only the private individual in their retreat away from public discourse, exposing the
public motivations of that retreat; it also exposes the public to the historical contingencies of its
own structure.
Artworks can and I argue need to play a critical role in public discourse, because the
public is incapable of informing itself about the changing status of sincerity, authenticity,
truthfulness, candor, honesty etc. Public discourse begins with the presupposition of honesty. If
we do not presume that private individuals can emerge from their specific cultural and familial
contexts to report reliably on their experiences, public discourse founders before it begins. It is
the artwork, in its historically conditioned function, at least in the some western traditions, that
continually offers us new perspectives on the nature of truthfulness. And without artistic insights
into the changing status of truthfulness, the public sphere will inevitably deteriorate.