From a certain point of view, the realist mood is quite peculiar. Why would one wish to reproduce what is already immediately present to one’s senses? Is there something the painted mountain bestows that the real mountain withholds? Or is the reproduction a form of genuflection? — does its significance lie there in the act, not in the created thing, which might just as well be destroyed upon completion? On the other hand, realism is supremely natural, springing from perhaps one of our most basic impulses. As Aristotle taught, “Representation comes naturally to human beings from childhood, and so does the universal pleasure in representations” — the most realistic representation being, on the face of it, the best and most pleasurable. Aristotle’s uncontroversial claim, while obviously largely correct, is nevertheless unsettling, and it is no simple task to pursue this source of disquietude to any kind of satisfying resolution.
It is just such a task that Mark Taylor, professor of religion at Columbia University and author of some two dozen scholarly and not-so-scholarly books, sets himself in Seeing Silence, a glowing melange of philosophy, theology, and art criticism. Taylor, however, poses the question differently. He does not so much throw suspicion on the realist motive as he pulls the rug of the Real from under realism, thus forcing us to ask: “How does one see what cannot be seen, speak what cannot be said, hear what remains silent? How is it possible to figure the void?” For Taylor then, the reality of the realist is secondary to the unconceptualizable, unrepresentable void that underlies and makes it possible: “Far from a mere lack, this void, like the silence between words, is what makes the articulation of all forms and appearances possible.”
Seeing Silence is ostensibly a lively meditation on silence — our vexed relation to it and our vexed attempts to figure, master, and humble ourselves before it. Yet, as one reads on, faced with the soft torrent of materials and Taylor’s mantra-like interjections — “Does black consume red, or does red overcome black?”, “How do you listen to light listening?”, “Pause. Pause once again to ponder. Ponder a lingering question: What color is silence? Perhaps white? Perhaps black?” — one finds oneself somewhat vertiginously at sea. Taylor’s koanlike “silence” is not merely the familiar quiet, the quiet of negation, when no one is speaking and nothing is making a sound, and so it is not clear how or to what purpose we are to ponder it.
Our minds are rigorously engaged, yet despite Taylor’s imposing (never forbidding) learnedness, we are obviously not being asked merely to learn or think. Intellection is persistently qualified and set against a more primitive or primal contact with the world: “Education does not begin and end with ideas, but requires something deeper, something more profound that can be taught only through physical labor and bodily discipline.” As though introducing us to a friend about whom we have heard many charming things, Taylor plays the role of spiritual-aesthetic matchmaker, saying just enough to kindle the relation — yet the lover we are provided is, as Taylor quotes from the doomed knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, like “someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.”
Of course, the works — the beads of fascination strung together on the incandescent thread of the author’s own life and peregrinating passion — do appear one after another, conjuring a kind of postmodern performance piece in our minds: John Cage on a stage playing nothing, while a retro slide projector flings before us black-and-white images of abstract expressionist and minimalist masterpieces and a man dressed as Heidegger intones, “If the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms the sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void.” I do not tease lightheartedly, for Taylor’s book is a trenchant and perspicuous effort to probe what matters in unabashedly indeterminate terms, refusing to reduce the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of human experience to politics, history, morality, or unequivocally statable truths. In this, Taylor rises fully to the occasion of the negative half of the Nietzschean ultimatum he sets himself: to engage with life not as one seeking to correct or render it transparently knowable.
The positive, however, is more elusive — both for Nietzsche himself and Taylor — and it is here that we run up against the temptation to satirize, for the pursuit to lay bare life’s imperiled seriousness necessarily risks a kind of comic self-seriousness or mawkish affectation. Taylor concludes his introductory Chapter Zero with a question that recurs throughout, providing a single flame to entrance, to meditatively congeal, the otherwise amorphous array of artists and thinkers: “The question that lingers after (the) all has been said is: can the Via Dolorosa also be a Via Jubilosa?” In plain terms, we might put it thus: how to be properly serious — to hold oneself existentially accountable — without becoming pathologically glum? Can one engage in rigorous self-scrutiny without lapsing into self-laceration, viewing oneself always with a certain levity and creative freedom? In religious terms, the question is: how to believe in God, to protect what is sacred, after the death of God and Truth and just about every norm-governed institution of meaning? How then to believe in God without, as it were, believing in God? — what to do when unbelief is as unattainable as belief? Taylor’s response is to turn to the cryptic origin of the work of art, cryptic in the sense also of “crypt,” a concept-image that Taylor borrows from Derrida to conjure that which surpasses the logic of both either/or and neither/nor: “The crypt within the self is the silence tolling in every word and the fertile matrix of the most profound works of art.”
Taylor’s philosophical venture begins among the ruins of Hegel’s dream of absolute knowledge, a perfectly rational synthesis (overcoming) of subject and object. The Hegelian system signaled the zenith of Western thought’s suppression of silence. For Kant, the refractory “thing-in-itself” forced reason to redound critically upon itself, curtailing its metaphysical presumptions and appreciating the limits not merely of the knowable but of what knowledge is and the satisfaction it can ultimately afford us. Hegel, by contrast, made it his “philosophical mission … to break this silence by allowing the world to speak. Toward this end, he translates Kant’s subjective idealism into absolute idealism in which mind and world are isomorphic … in which everything and everyone become completely comprehensible.”
Though Taylor fundamentally objects to Hegel’s totalizing rationalism, it nevertheless plays a rather crucial negativerole in his account. For when Taylor asserts that “there is always an overlooked, exceeded, repressed remainder that cannot be articulated and, thus, forever remains silent,” he reinforces the Hegelian picture of the known world even as he qualifies it. Thus, “the unsayable, unnameable, unfigurable” which Taylor treasures is in fact dependent on the articulable rationality it spurns. In other words, what is namable — the world continuously present to our senses — is largely ceded to reason, while the devout artist sets up camp elsewhere, where “the Real [is] a distant Beyond that can be approached, if at all, only negatively.” Taylor sums it up thus: “Phenomenology is the study of the appearance of phenomena, but how does one study, ponder, reflect on what does not appear?” My complaint is that Taylor is a bit hasty in presuming to draw the line between what does and does not appear. Phenomenology, after all, is not the study of appearance in the sense of appearance as opposed to hidden reality; it pursues a level of experience that is deeper than (and prior to) the rational recasting of the experiential relation in terms of, on the one hand, a perceptual mechanism and, on the other, the data with which the objective world furnishes it.
Let us return now to the realist predicament with which we began. Although Taylor does not grapple directly with questions of genre, his fascination with (the impossibility of) figuring silence persistently nips at the heels of the age-old problematic of representation and its discontents (Taylor confines himself to just the discontents). The artists with which Taylor concerns himself, in a sense, are realists of the direst mold; they chase a pure realism, one that punctures and ultimately wishes to bypass aesthetic artifice in the hope of turning perception back on itself. As the book traces its “infinite conversation” from John Cage’s provocative 4’33”, a work that forces one to attend to the “ambient noise that usually is repressed,” through James Turrell’s sensory deprivation installations in which we discover “how the absenceof sound and light make hearing and seeing possible,” to Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, a 240,000-ton incision made on Mormon Mesa that suggests “a haunting anonymity, a terrifying impersonality, an inhuman intelligence,” one arrives at a somewhat inverted sense of creation. The task of the artist is not so much to add as to strip away, revealing a world that is already a work of art — shattering the petrified opulence that hijacks perception and drives subject and object irreparably apart. Such, I take it, is the danger Taylor sees in the contemporary world’s feverish need for ever more noise, speed, and virtuality.
Thus, the abandonment of representation, the splintering of literal realism into a shepherdless flock of avant-garde black sheep, need not signify mere fatigue, a generation of Solomonic disciples for whom there is nothing new under the sun to do or see and thus nothing worth representing. Rather, “the Real” has revealed itself as interstitial, just beyond the pale of visible forms and hearable words, predicated on a lacuna. Of Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (see left), Taylor writes:
“When viewed at close range, the painting engulfs you in a red glow where all distinctions and differences dissolve … Subject and object disappear to create a sense of at-onement. In this way, Vir Heroicus Sublimis becomes, impossibly, the experience of what I, or more precisely the I, cannot experience. Rather than the attempted representation of the sublime as in a Turner seascape, for Newman, the ‘experience’ of the sublime occurs in the painting itself. The painting, in other words, is an event, a happening.”
Although such descriptions give the reader a pleasantly impressionistic sense of the majesty of such works, one begins to wonder how Taylor conceives of the relation between his words and what he describes. If, as he says, “the pure black or white surface cannot be translated without leaving an inexpressible remainder,” then the philosopher or critic is somewhat distastefully positioned against what is meaningful, bringing to light the sacred remainder only by partaking verbally in the limited whole from which it is excluded. And so, it is not quite clear just what Taylor’s many suggestive aporias — absence that is presence, withdrawal that is approach, silence that is seeable, silence deeper than silence, voids that make plenitude possible — ultimately are meant to mean, what role they are to play in our lives, intellectual or otherwise.
Of Ellsworth Kelly’s chapel “Austin,” Taylor dramatically concludes: “In this space, the Via Dolorosa becomes the Via Jubilosa. Neither beyond nor within, neither above nor below, neither circumscribed nor limited to a place set apart, the sacred is all around us. To follow the stages on life’s way Kelly charts is to come through the dark night of the soul and to discover gaiety, gladness, joy — perhaps even hope.”
This may be true of the world suspended within Kelly’s chapel of light, but in what manner does this omnipresent sacredness persist elsewhere and otherwise? Taylor’s insistence on the experiential, his vehement sense of art’s capacity not merely to shed light greedily on itself but to generously purify “experience itself,” risks the sacrifice of specific experience — the unassimilable particularity of the work of art — to a disappointingly generic mystical whole. That is to say, there is a danger of absolutizing the work of the artist, until little remains to distinguish art from any other human activity, and so the figure of the supremely meaningful, the sacred, becomes diffuse, lacking the necessary contrast with ordinary, profane life.
Or perhaps I am the fly who simply will not leave the bottle, one of the disparagers of contentment to whom Taylor puts his question: “Why is despair profound but joy superficial?”
[Published by The University of Chicago Press on August 13, 2020, 328 pages, $35.00 hardcover]