My rate of production of blogs has dropped off of late. This is probably in part because my attention has been diverted by COVID, but it’s also a function of the fact that I have been writing my book on critical realism and sport. I may be tiring more quickly too, but let’s not go there.
This effort has been encouraged by my reading of Bryan Maggee’s ‘Confessions of a Philosopher’, a book I donated to the local Oxfam bookshop and subsequently bought back because ‘it looked interesting’. It’s actually an excellent, readable introduction to philosophy. In it Magee cites a distinction drawn by Suzanne Langer that he and I find useful. Langer distinguishes between ‘discursive’ and ‘presentational form’. Consider discursive form. This applies to either a philosophical argument or a mathematical proof, each of which is expressed in a symbolic language. Magee elaborates on the notions of discursive and presentational forms as follows:
‘a structure within which import is constituted and communicated by the placing of one symbol after another in significant order. The difference between one order as against another is of the essence, and therefore such forms can exist and be apprehended only sequentially, and therefore in the dimension of time. They can be, or they can fail to be, carriers of a great many interesting things simultaneously – most obviously meaning, truth and relevance, but also emotional attitudes, impersonal elegance, economy, style, surprise, the distinctive personality of the human being putting them forward, even indications of (his) social class or the historical period in which (he) lived; and a great many other things besides. They can, for instance have aesthetic value. Now, says Langer, once the philosophical argument (or the mathematical proof, or whatever it may be) which is thus constituted, it stands before us as a finished structure, and this then presents us with a form of an entirely different kind, a ‘Gestalt’ – an organic whole, unitary, a single abstract object. This is what she calls ‘presentational form’. Because it is – indeed it must be, and can only be – perceived as a unity and apprehended as a whole, the dimension of time is not constitutive of it. It too has many different properties – originality or conventionality, complexity or simplicity, balance, economy, poise and so on – but because these are properties of the whole it has them in a different way from the way the discursive structure can be said to have the same properties. For example, a philosophical argument can be well balanced as an argument without the sentences of which it consists being well balanced sentences – and vice versa. It can be highly original yet written in platitudinous prose. Or the sentences can be stylish yet the argument crude. And so on and so forth. The presentational form of a philosophical argument is something exhibited by the argument as a whole and not something stated in any, or for that matter all, of its sentences. There is little I can do to tell you what it is, except repeat it. You have to ‘see’ it for yourself, and if you do not see it there is not much I can do to point it out to you.’
Sorry to go on a bit, but it’s a helpful summary.
Magee goes on to celebrate Langer’s application of this distinction between discursive and presentation forms to the arts. This is where it gets more interesting for me.
According to Magee, Langer argues that in all the arts, including the visual arts, a work is first and foremost a presentational form. She adds that ‘the ‘raison d’etre’ of presentational forms in art is to communicate not emotion but understanding, insight into the nature of something: she thinks that the something is emotion.’ Magee comments: ‘I think it may be another something, but we agree that art is cognitive before it is expressive: it conveys to us first and foremost something about the way things are – and then, perhaps, and only secondarily to that, some of the emotions of the artist in response to it.’
I will not pretend that I have this entirely sorted in my head (like Magee perhaps)! However, I’m attracted in particular by Langer’s notion of presentational form and its salience for understanding the arts in their multifarious guises. I would like, if time ever opens up before me, to explore its relevance to grasping the mode of communication, and significance, of jazz.