Dove e quando

Talk by David Davies (McGill University)

ABSTRACT

Richard Wollheim defended the idea that the proper aim of criticism is ‘retrieval’, where the task of the critic is ‘the reconstruction of the creative process’ (Ibid.) Criticism as retrieval is essentially interpretive. It is, to use Michael Baxandall's phrase, `inferential criticism', something which aims at the `historical explanation' of the art object by representing it as the solutions to an unfolding set of problems in a situation. We ‘posit' agency issuing in the art object, Baxandall, maintains. But what constraints govern this positing, and what grounds the assumption that it results in an understanding of the particularity of the work? What justifies the critic's claim to be retrieving the work, and by reference to what standards can we distinguish a plausible retrieval from an engaging revision? As Wollheim himself asked, how is a piece of criticism as retrieval to be assessed and what determines whether it is adequate? We need to reconcile the distinctively interpretive nature of the task facing the retrieving critic with the latter's claim to be engaged in an activity accountable to the particularity of a work.

In exploring how one might address this concern, I draw upon the treatment of an analogous problem in another field. Addressing challenges to an interpretive methodology in ethnology, Clifford Geertz states that ‘the besetting sin of interpretive approaches to anything - literature, dreams, symptoms, culture - is that they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to escape systematic modes of assessment.’ Geertz agrees with those critical of interpretive ethnology that the explanatory credentials of social sciences, as with natural sciences, require that its accounts of particular phenomena are grounded in a more general explanatory theory. But, he maintains, ‘the essential task of theory building here is... not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them.’ I offer a reading of Geertz’s gnomic remarks according to which an interpretive account of a human practice is justified insofar as it adopts the heuristics best fitted to realizing our epistemic goals in inquiring into that practice. I then argue that Baxandall takes an analogous approach in his defense of inferential criticism in visual art. In each case I sketch the heuristic principles proposed. In the final section of the paper I link this to other philosophical defenses of human practices in terms of the adoption of a heuristics conducive to achieving the proper goals of those practices.