Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience”

1 Reading scholarship

Irvin’s essay is from this century, which means, among other things, that it will likely be more readable. I assume that much of what you will read as an undergraduate will be from material written this century, so learning to read scholarly material from our current scholarly climate will serve you well in this and other classes.

The first thing you see here, which is often labeled as such, is what we call the article’s abstract. The abstract of an article is a summary of its main claims. Missing from the abstract, generally speaking, is the actual evidence and/or arguments that the author uses to defend those main claims. If we only wanted to know what an author claims, for much contemporary scholarly work, we could simply read the abstract and be done. Let’s look at the abstract together (p. 29).

Notice that Irvin is highlighting a particular dimension of Dewey’s account that we didn’t dwell on: the fact that there are experiences that don’t qualify as genuinely aesthetic. “In much of our experience,” Dewey writes:

we are not concerned with the connection of one incident with what went before and what comes after. There is no interest that controls attentive rejection or selection of what shall be organized into the developing experience. Things happen, but they are neither definitely included nor decisively excluded; we drift. We yield according to external pressure, or evade and compromise. There are beginnings and cessations, but no genuine initiations and concludings. One thing replaces another, but does not absorb it and carry it on. There is experience, but so slack and discursive that it is not an experience. Needless to say, such experiences are anesthetic. (Dewey, “Having an Experience,” p. 40)

Dewey calls “the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure” all “enemies of the esthetic,” and he includes also under this heading “rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other” as “deviations in opposite directions from the unity of an experience” (ibid.).

Irvin is arguing that the lack of “unity or closure” does not exclude an experience from the domain of aesthetic experience. She is challenging the nature of aesthetic experience as well as its scope, claiming that:

it does not require the sort of unity and integrity Dewey claims it must, and that
it is more pervasive, more generally operative and active, in our everyday life.

Now, you understand something fundamental about what we do as scholars (in philosophy, in the humanities general, and in the sciences) if you understand that it is not enough just to state a view like this; you have to give reasons, arguments, evidence. And what you should note here is that the sixteen pages of the essay that make it up are not just Irvin narrating her point; she has already said what her point is. Instead it is constructing the argument that supports her point. That’s the substance of the article.

2 Reading a scholarly article

Reading a scholarly article involves two things:

Finding the structure and making sense of it.
Making sense of the particulars of each part of the structure.

Here’s some advice on finding the structure and making sense of it:

Read the abstract and/or the first paragraph or two. You should have a sense then of any number of these things:
1. What is the essay about? What question is it attempting to answer?
2. What disputes or challenges is the author addressing? What is the problem that makes answering the question difficult?
3. What is the author’s answer to the question they’re raising? (This is what we often call the “thesis” of the essay.)
Cross your fingers and see if there are sections.
1. If there are sections: You’re in luck! Read the beginning and end of each section. Two specific notes:
  1. The last section may be able to give you a sense of the whole essay, as well as the author’s sense of its stakes
  2. The first section may be able to give you a sense of the structure of the whole essay
2. If there aren’t sections: Too bad! Read the beginning and end of each paragraph. You should be able to tell from this what sort of paragraph each paragraph is. There are, roughly:
  1. Paragraphs that describe what the author is going to do or has done, and
  2. Paragraphs in which the author is doing things they have said they would do

Once you’ve done this, you’ll have a pretty good sense of what the article is doing and how each part of it is related to that task. You should then be able to blow through it pretty quickly.

Now, if you look forward to p. 30, you’ll see we do have sections in this essay. Wonderful. Let’s start with the first.

3 First section

It can be a not-bad idea to more or less skim the introduction, especially if, like this essay, you get two things in it:

a description of the main point, and
an outline of the essay.

Irvin here says:

¶1: Contemporary aesthetics has been dominated by considerations of art, and
¶2: That’s too bad, because “our everyday lives have an aesthetic character that is thoroughgoing and available at every moment”

That’s the main point. And then she gives us a nice long description of the structure of the essay:

§1: Examples
§2: Dewey
§3: MoreDewey
§4: More Dewey
§5 and §6: ‘This essay is important’

Let’s dig through each of these.

4 §1: Examples

This first paragraph gives the basic idea. And the following paragraph gives a bunch of examples. See pp. 30–31.

And then we get the basic question: But are these experiences aesthetic? ## §§2–4: Dewey and more Dewey Why Dewey? Because Dewey is sympathetic to the basic idea (the aesthetic is at least a possible dimension of everyday life) but he would reject the idea that putting your head on your knuckles is aesthetic, I guess.

(Now, as I read, I tend to register as placeholders my initial reactions and sometimes skepticism. And let me just mention right here that I’m immediately skeptical of the question whether putting your head on your knuckles is going to count as aesthetic or not, and not because I don’t think it won’t, but because I don’t think descriptions of objective acts will ever count as aesthetic. For example, if I rest my cheek on my knuckles as a professional cheek-on-knucklers-doer, that’s one thing; if I do it in the midst of riding a bus, maybe that’s another. Maybe in other words objective descriptions of acts are never going to coincide with aesthetic or non-aesthetic characterizations. That’s just my initial reaction.)

Here’s her way of reading Dewey: See p. 32. Now. She’s going to talk about Dewey and she’s going to talk about her examples. Read the end of this section, p. 34.

And then read the beginning of the next section, pp. 34–35. And let’s look at all of the end of this section, pp. 36–37.

Let’s jump immediately to the next section; see p. 37. And then let’s look at this passage at the end of that section, on p. 40.

Now, we have a basic idea of the claim and how it works: Her examples seem as if they’re going to be non-Deweyan-aesthetic, but maybe that’s just because took too narrow a view of the aesthetic. I don’t want to look at the next two sections because instead I want to understand each of the specific claims (about simplicity and complexity, for example) in these three sections. So let’s pause our overview here and go back through each of these sections.

5 §2

Dewey is meaningful for Irvin in two different ways:

He thinks the everyday can be a site of aesthetic experience, but
He wouldn’t (I guess) accept her examples (looking at ducks through the window) as aesthetic.

More substantively, Dewey distinguishes aesthetic from non-aesthetic in a more severe way than Irvin seems to want to. See the green passages on pp. 32–3. The distinction: Aesthetic experience is complete and ‘consummated’; non-aesthetic are ‘inchoate’ and ‘dispersed’. Irvin gives a three-item list:

complexity
unity
culmination

Irvin compares her examples to this list in pink on p. 33. She adds moreover that for Dewey aesthetic experience requires a certain sort of reciprocity (see p. 33 blue) and a certain sort of attention (see p. 34 green).

Given this list of attributes—complexity, unity, culmination, reciprocity, attention—Irvin gives the skeptical case in blue on p. 34: These aren’t (Dewey-)aesthetic experiences.

As we’ll see, by the way, there are really just two groups of criteria:

the consciousness criteria, and
the unity criteria

And §§3 and 4 respectively are going to challenge these.

6 §3

Irvin in the following section asks whether attention is an essential ingredient of aesthetic experience. Suppose it is, and then a number of possibly ‘aesthetic’ experiences aren’t actually aesthetic in nature.

Now, as a side note, any time an author says there are a certain number of things coming down the pipeline, and/or any time you see a number or an ordinal (‘first’, ‘second’, etc.), find all the members of the set, even before you read them. On p. 35, I’ve highlighted ‘three’ along with ‘first’ and ‘second’, and this is a very common sort of situation: a clear outline (“three things to be said” etc.), but something’s missing (“third”).

We want to know what Irvin’s response to the question of attention is. The question is whether little- or un-noticed things can count as ‘aesthetic’ experiences. Let’s work through “first” and “second”:

“sensing and adjusting” are not always “done automatically or unconsciously”; in other words, it is possible to “develop conscious awareness of one’s sensory experience”
conscious awareness “may not be necessary for one’s sensory experience to be aesthetically relevant” (things we are not conscious of can influence our experience in an aesthetically relevant way; Irvin mentions here an experiment involving headphones); punchline in green on p. 36.

Now, notice how at the beginning of the next paragraph she summarizes the two previous points and then adds our missing third. See pink on p. 36. Our third reason is:

vague awareness is of aesthetic relevance

And now we have, note, a much better idea of what’s being claimed at the end of this section, on pp. 36–37.

7 From reading to writing

Let me pause our work to take note of the following. I can imagine working through this essay and being unused to the sort of essay it is, seeing “three” and being relieved you’re about to encounter some structured thought, and then being annoyed for not finding the “third.” That is understandable!

What I want to emphasize about this is this: All of your ways of being annoyed as a reader are clues for improving as a writer. Take note of everything that makes reading difficult, and then make a point not to impose those difficulties on your reader. If you found it annoying (I did!) to see “three” and then find “first,” “second,” and no “third,” then, whenever you say you’re going to list three things, list them clearly. Or, more generally, if you find Irvin’s or Dewey’s prose unclear, figure out what’s unclear about it and then don’t write like they do.

8 §4

Same basic idea here (p. 37):

Dewey thinks aesthetic experiences require unity and complexity
My examples don’t seem to fit that bill

Irvin describes “two distinct notions of closure.” See a number, find the things numbered. The two notions are:

Weak closure: “boundedness”
Strong closure: “bounded” and “exhibits development and culmination of the material within those boundaries”

Why does Dewey require closure? Irvin gives one reason (‘to secure the potential objectivity of aesthetic judgments’) but suggests Dewey has a different reason. She doesn’t say what she thinks it is, but she does reject the unity criterion by appeal to works of art (the music of John Cage, for example) that seem not to have it. She also describes listening to a piece of music for the first time, which is a helpful example. See yellow on p. 39 for the musical example and green on p. 39 for the punchline.

What about complexity? Monochrome paintings are simple and yet aesthetic in the relevant sense. I’m not sure we’re talking about the same paintings, and her point has glided, note, from aesthetic experience to art objects, but anyway, see now the punchline on p. 40.

9 Conclusion

One thing we can always do, and easily, is read the end of an essay for further insight into what it’s about. See pp. 43–44.