Art and the Hand

When you look at a work of art, say the Mona Lisa, you are struck by its beauty, as by that of its subject. You may imagine that long-dead woman, or the artist who painted her. But you don’t generally imagine the hand that painted her (or it): you don’t form a mental image of that hand as it moves over the canvas. You could, but you don’t. Yet you know it’s true—a hand did apply paint to the canvas. The painting is of a woman and by a hand. I want to suggest giving a moment to the artistic hand; try to imagine it, give it its due, thank it.[1] To do this it helps to see the painting as a representation of the hand that painted it—to see the hand in the painting. The mobile delicate hand. Suppose that next to the Mona Lisa there is a depiction of the artist’s hand, still or moving; it might even be a video of the hand as it paints. Then it would be brought home to you that this painting is a manual production (backed by a mind or brain). No hand, no painting; and no art. The painting is like a piece of music: both are products of the hand. In a musical performance we see the hands and fingers move as sounds are made; not so in artistic “performance”. But we could, in principle; then we might bring the hand into greater prominence. We could imagine the brush strokes as we look at the finished product. Each mark on the canvas reflects a particular hand movement—as each note played on the piano reflects a particular hand movement. We like to observe the virtuosity of the expert guitar player, and we could likewise observe the expertise of the accomplished painter. In other words, the hand is part of the art form (it isn’t like the foot on which the artist stands). And the hand is part of the human body, so it too gets represented in the work of art. The work points in two directions: to the world and to the artist as embodied being (it has a double intentionality). It is a hymn to both. The painter is painting himself. You can’t separate the art work from its means of production. When we look at ancient cave paintings we learn about that bygone world and how it was seen, but we also learn about the hand that painted it; it was clearly a sophisticated piece of equipment, and a means of expression. The picture depicts the artist, anatomically, functionally.[2]

It is a different matter with photography: here the role of the hand is negligible. What was once done with the hand is now done with the lens and photographic paper (or electronics). The hand has disappeared from the picture. This is a new art form, belonging to a different artistic natural kind. It evokes a different kind of response from the viewer. Not surprisingly, photography caused a crisis in pictorial art: you don’t need the hand anymore to create a representation of reality! Accordingly, art became less realistic, less like photography. Modern art re-asserts the hand; it insists on the hand. Where older art was content to let the hand disappear, as if the work of art emerged from nowhere, the new art placed the hand at the center of attention: this was indubitably produced by an actual human hand—not by nature or God. The more abstract, the more human. Modern art is explicitly manual art—you can see the hand in the brush strokes. At the same time, it became more secular, more humanistic. You could easily see it as hand-crafted, so it distinguished itself from photographic art. In this respect it became more like music: palpably produced by the human body in action (e.g., action painting). It became possible to link the two art forms: painting as music and music as painting. I mean that the role of the hand is openly acknowledged in the two art forms. A musical piece is like a painting in sound; a painting is like a piece of music in shape and color. Then, photography is like the sounds of nature as opposed to musical sounds: not hand-generated. There is hand-produced beauty and non-hand-produced beauty. To put it differently, the role of the active creative subject is manifest in one sort of aesthetic object but is not present in the other. The same distinction exists in sculpture: the hand-sculpted object versus the naturally occurring object (Michelangelo’s David versus the beautiful flesh-and-blood youth). The hand is pivotal, determinative. It seems to us as if the hand is miraculous in its ability to create beauty (“How did he do that?”), but in the case of nature we don’t marvel in this way—we take nature for granted or invoke an all-powerful God. There is a difference in aesthetic attitude; the hand is the crucial distinguishing element. Ironically—and this may be the point—abstract art is more humanistic than realistic art, because in it the human hand features more prominently (nature does not produce Henry Moore sculptures or Kandinsky paintings). A child’s drawings are highly humanistic despite being unrealistic shapes, because the child is present in them. Moreover, the limitations of the hand are more obvious in non-realist art, because the hand is more part of the subject-matter. A hand inadequately drawing a hand tells you a lot about the human hand—its scope and limits. Modern art is thus more candid about the human condition (“Anatomy is destiny”, to quote Freud). We are not demigods but mortal creatures. We are flesh made of moving parts, notably the hands.

Handwriting versus printing, handmade clothes versus machine-made clothes, individual art versus mass-produced art, painting versus photography, hands-on medicine versus chemical medicine—the theme is universal. The hand runs through all civilization, or its absence. I am not saying, “Hands good, no hands bad”, but the difference is worth noting; in particular, painting is a manual art in its essence. Detached from the hand it becomes something else entirely.[3]

[1] This essay is intended as a continuation of my book Prehension (2015) and assumes that general perspective.

[2] It doesn’t depict the artist in the same way it depicts its subject-matter, but it does call the artist to mind by means of marks made. It provides signs of the artist, particularly his hand.

[3] Of course, the eye matters enormously, but without the hand the eye is artistically impotent. Painting is not so much a visual art as a visuo-manual art. When artists depict hands, they are engaging in a reflexive act. Sculpture could exist in the land of the blind, because of the sense of touch; that would be hand art without eye art.

Interviews

I have been conducting a series of interviews over the last few weeks with my Turkish associate (now friend) Ugur Polat. We have done four so far, each over three hours long (using Zoom). He plans ten in total. The actual interviewing is done by his neurologist wife Burcu, because her spoken English is better (very good in fact). We have been covering my intellectual life in detail. So far, we have dealt with my years in Manchester, London, and Oxford. The questions are probing and well-informed; I get to talk about my old friends and colleagues, many now deceased. He is planning to make a book of it to be published in Turkish and English. He is also interested in writing a book about the hand, starting with Sir Charles Bell and ending with me—an excellent project. In addition, I treated them to a mini-concert of songs in which a good time was had by all.[1] I urge all rabid feminist cancellers (bless their vicious little hearts) to contact Ugur and try to prevent him and his wife from carrying out their intentions—good luck with that! It’s nice to be in contact with decent people.

[1] I performed Black is Black, You Better Move On, Everything I Own, The First Cut is the Deepest, Leave my Kitten Alone, Stand by Me, Love Hurts, and Alone.

Buying a Language

I want to learn a language, say Spanish, but I can’t be bothered to do it the old-fashioned way, so I decide to buy it (expensive but labor-saving). I go to the language store (Lang-Mart, right next to the Chinese supermarket). I am told that I can buy either a grammar chip or a dictionary chip or both. I figure I will buy the grammar chip and use an English-Spanish dictionary for the word meanings—cheaper that way. I go home and insert the new chip into my brain: by pressing a button a whole lot of Spanish words crowd my consciousness; lo and behold, strings of them form in response to the environment and the utterances of Spanish speakers. I proceed to look up these words in my dictionary. But this is slow work and it quickly becomes apparent that it is impracticable; as expected, I don’t know the meanings of Spanish words. This is no use, I think, and return to the store. I swap the grammar chip for a dictionary chip that will install knowledge of what Spanish words mean in my memory, hoping that I can figure out the grammar myself. I go home and install the new chip: miraculously it gives me complete lexical knowledge of the Spanish language. But the grammar defeats me; I don’t know how to combine the words into grammatical strings (I have never been good with grammar). I trudge back to the store and reluctantly buy the grammar chip as well (pricey!). Now I am in business: I can now form grammatical strings that I understand. A language consists of a grammar and a lexicon, so both things have to be known in order to speak the language like a native: atomic knowledge of word meaning and combinatory knowledge of grammar working together.

If a machine (call it a computer) can only do the combinatory part, it won’t know the language properly, just a component of it. If another machine (call it a mental dictionary) can only do the atomic part, it also won’t know the language properly. Thus, the existence of either type of machine will not show that a machine could speak in the normal way: symbol manipulation is not enough, and lexical information (knowledge of word meaning) is not enough. Language mastery needs both. Accordingly, there can be a Chinese room argument against computers as competent speakers, but there can also be a “Spanish room” argument against machines that have lexical data banks (word meaning memories) but no grammatical competence. We would need a machine that combines both to have a genuine speaker-hearer. We actually have machines that do the latter (albeit without real grammatical knowledge), but we don’t (yet) have machines that contain the latter (knowledge of word meaning). In order to know what “red” means, say, a machine would have to be consciously acquainted with redness: but no machine yet built is (as far as anyone knows).[1]

Would a machine that has both types of knowedge know a language like a normal human? I’m afraid not, because in addition to syntactic and semantic knowledge a competent speaker needs pragmatic knowledge. Suppose I want to learn to speak Japanese like a native: I go the language store to pick up the necessary chips only to be told that I will need a pragmatics chip as well as the other two. Unfortunately, this one a really quite expensive—$2,000 a pop! But if I don’t have it, I won’t be able to use the language in ordinary conversation, because I won’t know the rules of appropriateness and politeness that govern social language use. I could get arrested if I say the wrong thing! I fork over the dough. Thus, there could be a “Japanese room” argument to the effect that a machine could never acquire pragmatic knowledge of a human language, even it could have syntactic and semantic knowledge. You might be fed syntactic and semantic information and be fully competent in those aspects of language, but this information omits the pragmatic aspects of speech, which require knowledge of culture, human psychology, etiquette, historical context. None of this is entailed by syntactic and semantic knowledge, which is machine-like in comparison to pragmatic competence. Pragmatics can’t be reduced to syntax and semantics, as semantics can’t be reduced to syntax; so, a machine that can do only syntax and semantics will not be a fully competent speaker. A machine that can only do phonetics will likewise not add up to a speaking machine, since syntax goes beyond phonetics; just because a machine can make the sounds of English it doesn’t follow that it can speak according to English syntax. The so-called Chinese room argument is one in a series of parallel arguments directed against claims that specifiable types of machine really have language mastery in the normal sense. It says, essentially, that there is more to semantics than syntax (grammar)[2]; but we could also argue that there is more to syntax than phonetics and more to pragmatics than semantics (and more to poetics than pragmatics). All true, but one wonders why any elaborate argument was needed in the first place. Speaking a language is a complex skill consisting of several components that can be independently possessed.

[1] It is clearly not enough to have a machine containing a dictionary, since it would need to know what the defining words mean. At a minimum this requires knowing what those words refer to. Translation knowledge is not the same as semantic knowledge.

[2] The only way to resist the argument is by claiming that computers do more than manipulate symbols; they also refer to things with those symbols. They do so by being embedded in the world in such a way that reference naturally follows, as the causal theory of refence maintains. Then the question will be whether this theory is true. I myself think that computers are nowhere near mastering a language as humans do, but there is no reason of principle why a machine can’t speak like a human (just build one that exactly resembles a human down to the last detail and then rely on supervenience).