British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. , No.

, January

THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
Brian Rosebury

I
IN THIS paper I shall argue that we should grant aesthetic value and significance to
the associations, sometimes widely shared and sometimes exclusively personal,
that become attached in our minds to the works of art we contemplate. Indeed I
shall argue that the contemplation at a given moment of a given work of art (or of
other objects, but I will not pursue the argument more widely) is inevitably a
historically contingent act which derives its distinctive content, and so its value,
partly from the associations which arise in consciousness as we contemplate.
This view will, I think, be recognized at once as controversial because it
conflicts, or might appear to conflict, with a number of influential beliefs which
dispose us to exclude associations from the realm of the aesthetic: with Kants
claim that aesthetic judgement is disinterested; with the formalist doctrines of
the sufficiency of form for aesthetic experience and the autonomy of aesthetic
emotion from the emotions of historical life; and, not least, with the common-
sense reflection that the work of art we are contemplating must be enjoyed and
valued for what it is, and not for some other, arbitrary reason. In defending
my view, I will try to suggest where the conflict with this Kantian/formalist/
common-sense consensus is a genuine conflict and where it may be an illusion. I
am actually not convinced that we yet have a satisfactory account of associations
and their role in our aesthetic life, and it may be that if one can be stated, some,
though not all, points of contention will disappear.
To establish that there is an unresolved theoretical problem, I turn first to a
recent formulation of the dominant, anti-associationist, viewa formulation that
promises to be forthright, but turns out to be unexpectedly ambivalent and
puzzling.

It is important to distinguish the meaning of a work of art from its associations. We

do not always do this, since we are not always concerned to distinguish the meaning
of a work from its meaning for me. Nevertheless, to say that a work of music is
associated for me with certain feelings, experiences, memories, etc., is to say nothing
about its musical character. . . .
Sometimes an association seems to fuse with the aesthetic experience. When you

British Society of Aesthetics

 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

hear the opening of Vaughan W illiamss Fifth Symphony you are likely to think of the
English landscape: and this thought is one in which the uncritical listener might
wallow unscrupulously, since it is the occasion of so many comfortable emotions. For
such a listener, the music is an excuse for his own emotion, a means to reverie. A
more critical listener may also be reminded of the English landscape: but he will think
of it only in so far as the thought involves attention to the music. The evocation fuses
with the musical experience, and association then becomes expression.1

Roger Scrutons brisk distinction between the meaning of a work (or its
musical character) and its meaning for me is one that most philosophers will
understand and most listeners readily accept, but it proves unexpectedly unclear
whether, and if so on what conditions, my associations can for Scruton ever be
legitimized as part of the aesthetic experience. At first glance Scruton may seem
to be invoking the disinterestedness criterion against them: though the landscape
images in his Vaughan W illiams example are not founded on interest in a
directly sensual or instrumental sense, it is certainly arguable that they are what
Kant calls personal conditions, conditions therefore of questionable relevance
to any judgement of value that can claim universal validity.2 Scruton eloquently
disparages the temptations of the associative response (uncritical . . . wallow
unscrupulously . . . comfortable emotions . . . an excuse). Yet he stops short of
actually expelling the thought about landscape entirely from the aesthetic realm:
rather it must, to be compatible with critical listening, involve attention to the
music. But how exactly can a thought about landscape involve attention to
music? Or an association fuse with the aesthetic experience? Or an evocation
fuse with a musical experience?
Metaphor does not seem to provide the answer. Elsewhere in The Aesthetics of
Music Scruton argues that description of music is inescapably metaphorical, not
because music resides in an analogy with other things, but because the metaphor
describes exactly what we hear, when we hear sounds as music.3 But that explana-
tion provides no aesthetic legitimacy to the images triggered by association, since
such imagesunlike, say, indispensable metaphors such as rise and fall
cannot be necessary to describe what we hear.4 Later, reporting that hearing the
sound of the curlew, [his] mind is filled with memories of the Yorkshire moors,
Scruton contrasts such association of separable ideas with the double inten-
tionality of aesthetic experience, in which we intuit meaning in and only in the

1
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. .
2
See Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp.
, .
3
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, p. .
4
Scruton suggests, for example, that we could not make musical sense of the opening theme of
Bruckners Seventh Symphony if we could not, empowered by our metaphorical resources of
movement, up, down, etc., hear the force that bears it aloft and then allows it to subside
(Aesthetics of Music, p. and cf. p. ).
 BRIAN ROSEBURY

perception of the sensuous object. We see the human figure in looking at, and for
only as long as we look at, the paint on the canvas; in contrast, according to
Scruton, the Yorkshire moors reverie, though triggered by the sensory event of
hearing the curlew s cry, can outlast our attention to it.5 Scrutons implied
suggestion, then, is that the aesthetic experience is strictly bounded by attention
to the sensuous object and the meaning it can bear: any element of the listeners
experience, however intense, that could survive the withdrawal of attention (even
if it is present in consciousness simultaneously with attention to the music) is
thus disqualified from the aesthetic realm proper. It is difficult to see that any
association aroused by music could qualify according to this criterion, or involve
attention to the music in the sense that seeing the figure involves attention to
the paint on the canvas.
Other writers have smiled at the navet of the associative response, while
acknowledging its power. In Prousts novel, Charles Swann hears in certain bars
of Vinteuils violin sonata the moment when night is falling among the trees . . .
the static side of moonlight . . . the Bois de Boulogne plunged in a cataleptic
trance.6 These images recall the circumstances in which, years earlier, Swann
heard the music played: his metaphorical reading of the music is an arbitrary, or
at least fortuitous, product of the associative memory. It is just this kind of
experience, of course, to which Prousts novel assigns the most profound value.
His narrator values the madeleine and the hawthorns not for their sensory
qualities, let alone their meanings, but for the vitality of the associations they
evoke.7 (The madeleine, considered as an artefact, may be said to carry a religious
meaning, but this is for Proust at most a handy fictional symbol for the
metaphysical transcendence glimpsed through involuntary memorywe know
that in the real world it was a mere piece of toast that Proust dipped in his tea.)
In another important passage Proust reflects on certain

pictures which were popular under the Second Empire because there was thought
to be something about them that suggested Pompeii, which were then generally
despised, and which are now becoming fashionable again for one single and con-
sistent reason (notwithstanding all the others that are advanced), namely, that they
suggest the Second Empire.8

All of us, Proust implies, have at the disposal of our imagination a collection of
supposed pastsnot only personal but collective pasts, assembled or blended
5
Ibid., p. .
6
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), vol. I, pp. .
7
Prousts metaphysical explanation of the joy of involuntary memorythat it makes a moment of
the past simultaneous with the present, and so allows us momentarily to transcend the order of
time, to be liberated from the fear of deathwill not be pursued here.
8
Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, p. .
 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

from memories, of artefacts, places, faces, sounds, smells, from recollected

representations, descriptions, narratives. (It is not surprising that we often
imagine with particular intensity the historical period just before we were born.
When we are small children, and to a diminishing extent thereafter, we are
surrounded by objects which pre-date our birth. We live amid pre-natal styles of
dress, furniture, technology, food and drink, architecture, speech, music, enter-
tainment; adults around us talk mainly of the pre-natal past. Equally, we are likely
to imagine vividly the pasts to which our present culture looks back most
persistently.) Each of these imagined pasts can impart its distinctive flavour to any
object we can associate with it, irrespective of whether the object, considered as
the outcome of an intentional act, can credibly be said to express or to mean any
part of the context our imagination provides. Charles Trenet, writing La mer in
, did not intend to express the atmosphere of post-war France, with which (or
with an imagined version of which) his song is irresistibly associated by most
listeners. Scruton remarks that a galliard or a gavotte to which people once
danced will not sound to our ears as it did to theirs; for we have only an imperfect
conception . . . of the social background which gave sense to this kind of
dancing.9 What he does not emphasizethough this is perhaps implicit in his
remark, and in his subsequent justification of playing Bach on the modern
piano10is that historical distance, for better or worse, adds as well as subtracts:
our own culture enables us to evolve a conception of a social background to such
music, even if it is a semi-fictional conception manufactured out of the materials
of a later time, out of academic histories or historical films and novels, and we
cannot readily divest ourselves of it when we listen.
Popular music is, of course, especially notorious for its power to evoke
associations. In certain cases (such as the song These Foolish Things), the
content of a song itself deals eloquently with the associative power of objects and
events, bringing about for many listeners a doubly Proustian response. Already
inseparable from their imagined sthe recorded singers voice and accent, as
well as the musical style, may contribute to this effectthe song motivates
them to think of their own comparable personal recollections. Are these associ-
ative significances, so much in harmony with the explicit verbal meaning of
the song, not part of the aesthetic experience? As Proust notes in discussing his
Pompeian example, we are inclined to be embarrassed about the associative
process, and to advance more objective reasons for our pleasure if we can. Are
we right to be embarrassed?
I will argue that we should be less embarrassed than we currently are, and that
the fact that our pleasure in works of art is contingent on our own historical
perspective, on (what we imagine, rightly or wrongly, as) their historical contexts

9
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, pp. .
10
Ibid., pp. , and cf. pp. .
 BRIAN ROSEBURY

should be celebrated as an essential and indeed unavoidable part of aesthetic

experience. I am using historical, here and throughout this paper, to refer to
personal as well as public retrospects: in this sense every persons total set of
historical resources is unique even if it greatly overlaps with that of others. It is a
commonplace of cultural theory that texts and other artefacts are understood and
appreciated against the background of historical myths, but I mean much more
than that, for example, many people are prone to read Shakespeare in the light of
some deconstructable Tory myth of Englishness:11 I mean that, for each of us,
objects of aesthetic attention subsist, like pearls in an ocean, in some part of a
more or less rich and idiosyncratic imaginative medium, which though composed
of common elements is unique for each of us because each of us is historically
differently situated. Equally, it is a familiar claim of a certain kind of historically
informed scholarship and criticism that the meaning of a past text can only be
recovered by situating it within its own intertext of contemporaneous texts and
discourses;12 but I am saying more than that, too: I wish to draw within the scope
of aesthetics the embedding of particular objects in an associative medium which
may scarcely at all reflect its recoverable intentional meaning.

II
I maintain that aesthetic experience is historically contingent: each of us is
situated at a unique point in space and time from which we imagine a personal
and collective history, and our enjoyment of any object of aesthetic attention is
capable of being influenced by associations, that is, by our locating it within some
part of that imagined history. The extent to which the historical associations
condition the quality of our experience is variable, and I do not deny the
possibility of the enjoyment of pure forms, such as those of abstract painting, in a
near historical vacuum. Even so, looking at a Mondrian in Amsterdameven if
one knows absolutely nothing about Mondrianmay not be quite the same
experience as looking at the same painting in New York or in a private house,
even if the painting is identically hung and lit in all three cases. (If the painting is
exhibited by itself in a white plastic cube, one still knows one is in a cube, at some
known location in space and time.) I maintain that such cases simply represent
the rarefied end of the associative spectrum, and that our understanding of the
aesthetic life is distorted and impoverished if we attempt to dissociate from
aesthetic experience the imagination of personal and collective history.
This claim might be seen as the converse of an insight disclosed by Dantos

11
See, e.g., J. Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester U.P., ),
chs , , , and passim.
12
Exposition and debate of various versions of this view are to be found in E. D. Hirsch, Validity in
Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale U.P., ); J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin
Skinner and his Critics (Oxford: Polity Press, ); H. Aran Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New
York and London: Routledge, ).
 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

discussion of indiscernible counterparts.13 Just as works with identical physical

properties can differ because of the historically contingent acts their creation
performs, so a single artefact can give rise to many diverse experiences because of
the historically contingent associations attached to it by each recipient. In each
case, what is repeated from case to case (the physical properties common to the
indiscernibles; the presentation of the artefact to a human beings attention) is
insufficient to account completely for the aesthetic significance of the event. The
aesthetic response, like the creative act, is necessarily embedded in (personal and
collective) history.
In the rest of the paper I will try to support and clarify this thesis by defend-
ing it against a number of objections, or groups of related objections, which I can
anticipate may be offered. I do not suppose this rough-and-ready procedure to
amount to a comprehensive defence of the thesis, but I hope at least to advance
discussion of some important questions. I begin with what may be the hardest
question of all to answer.

OBJECTION : Before coming to the question whether it is expedient for us to stretch the
concept of the aesthetic to include associationshow is the process whereby associations
enter into our contemplation of objects supposed to work? Arent contemplating an object
and associating other things with it distinct and independent types of mental event, which
we are perfectly capable of separating in our consciousness?

First, let us remember that, as I have shown by examples which most readers
will be able to supplement from their own experience, the process whereby
associations flavour our experience and judgement of an object does work. The
problem is to explain what is happening in terms of some plausible psychological
model. One such model might appropriate Scrutons double intentionality, as
an account of the act of apprehending in the sensuous properties of an object
some idea, image, concept, or qualium which those properties do not materially
contain, but add to the apparatus of psychological explanation a concept of
simultaneous intentionality. It is possible to attend to two things at once
(simultaneous intentionality), and then to apprehend them as compounded into a
third thing, or as one thing modified or flavoured or contextualized by the other
(double intentionality). This model allows the double intentionality to involve
associations as well as representations: as well as seeing a person in a painting
where there is literally no person, just paint, we may see in its light a remembered
light of our own, in the portrayed face a suffering we impute to the artist or recall
in ourselves, or indeed merge our apprehension of its sensuous properties with
the atmosphere of the house or gallery, the sound of falling rain, the days news.

13
A. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., ), pp. . I
am not, of course, saying Danto would accept this analogy.
 BRIAN ROSEBURY

Poet-theorists from Coleridge to T. S. Eliot (the noise of the typewriter and the
smell of the cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always
forming new wholes) have asserted just this possibility of the convergence of
distinct apprehensions into a unique compound apprehension, and seen in its
achievement a defining feature of the creative act.14
Such a theory implies a claim that the conscious mind can divide its attention,
that there can, and perhaps normally are, distinct agencies or levels of attention in
play at the same moment, and that there is a tendency for our consciousness to
bind the simultaneously existing apprehensions together.15 For example, if my
own experience is a representative one, the visual imagination cannot be entirely
shut down while one is listening to music, or, for that matter, thinking about
philosophy. (Closing ones eyes does not, of course, help it to do so.) Sometimes,
especially when one is merely thinking, the minds eye lingers, with minimal
attention, on some quite unconnected scene; often, and especially when listening
to music, there is an impression or illusion of convergence of the visual towards
the auditory. On some occasions one imagines the music synaesthetically as
visible (as E. M. Forster imagined apple-green piccolos and scarlet trumpets16);
or ones actual visual experience may look different, the movement of the
music seeming vaguely to modify the Gestalt of the collective body of musicians
or the line of roofs seen through the window; or fleeting images may present
themselvesmostly, in my case, images as vague and imperfectly realized as
those mental images we have of absent human beings, or of characters in novels,
which are so far from resembling photographic representations that one can
scarcely say that this or that feature is present, and which nonetheless have a
definite identity. It seems probable that no perception, with the possible
exception of intense pain or pleasure, can completely occupy the consciousness,
and that mental agencies other than the currently dominant one are therefore
always liable to generate material which is drawn into its gravitational field. The
capacity for such an illusion of convergence allows the non-auditory association
(such as the English landscape in the Vaughan W illiams example) to attach itself,
however irrationally, to the tones.
The cognitive dynamics of such convergence require research beyond the
scope or skill of this paper. I need hardly emphasize that I do not suppose that the
minds eye views a moving picture of Norfolk wheatfields while, in an adjacent
compartment of consciousness, the minds ear listens to Vaughan W illiams. I

14
S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
U.P., ), ch. , pp. ; T. S. Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets [], in Selected Essays
(London: Faber and Faber, ), p. .
15
See the discussion of the radically structured character of consciousness in J. R. Searle, The
Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), ch. .
16
E. M. Forster, Not Listening to Music, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, ),
p. .
 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

would put it this way: when I listen to music, I seem, often, not so much to be
looking into the music, as to be looking through the music into a world which is
constituted largely by the music but also by other intentional contents, not always
easily described, which seem to belong with the music. (Contrary to what the
denouncers of wallowing tend to suggest, I believe that I hear with attention
more, rather than less, of the musical argument and texture in such states of
reverie.) Alternativelyor simultaneouslythe actual world that enters my
awareness may condition what I hear in the music. Watching an ambitious
twenty-year-old pianist perform a late Beethoven sonata, we admire the perfect
technique while regretting the inevitable superficiality of expression, the imper-
ceptiveness towards those depths of human experience which only maturity can
penetrate. But if the performance were then to be broadcast, by mistake, as a
recital by Alfred Brendel, can we be quite sure that we would not sincerely hear
and commend in the very same tones the miraculous attainment of an ethereal
nonchalance, all passion spent? Of course, in such cases we can try to re-
nounce all associations, and attend to the music or the performance exclusively in
terms of the intrinsic sensuous properties which are the medium of its ex-
pression. My point is that it is not only difficult, but often unrewarding, to do so.
A person really capable of such self-denial would have a poorer, not a richer,
aesthetic life.

OBJECTION : Your claim, if true, renders aesthetic judgement wholly personal and
arbitrary, since it means that every aesthetic experience of every person is strictly speaking
unique: my aesthetic judgements cannot therefore have the claim to universal validity that
Kant attributed to them. Moreover, your view disables us from making distinctions of
value that we wish to make. For example, we praise great art for its timelessness, its ability
to survive the historical circumstances of its creation and to remain intelligible and moving
in other cultures and later historical periods: but if all aesthetic experience is historically
contingent, it is unclear how this practice can be sustained. A closely related distinction is
between serious art, which transcends contextual associations, and popular art which
sometimes depends for its effectiveness upon themas you point out yourself. Naturally
when we listen to Bob Dylan, much of our pleasure lies in remembering the summer of
, etc.that is what popular music is forbut when we listen to Mozart our pleasure
is focused on the intrinsic qualities of the music.

Several objections are grouped together here, but the answer in each case is that
admitting the contingency of aesthetic experience is not incompatible with the
distinctions and evaluations we are accustomed to making.
In the first place, we should note that Kants exclusion of personal interest from
the aesthetic is unaffected by my argument. (Indeed I will offer a version of that
exclusion later.) The aesthetic experience remains a contemplative one centred on
an object: if I begin to lust or feel hunger or make plans for action as a result of
 BRIAN ROSEBURY

my contemplation, then on my account as well as Kants the aesthetic mode of

experience has been replaced by another. As for the universal validity pre-
supposed by aesthetic judgement, that too is unaffected, since my claim to the
validity of my judgement is not affected by empirical restrictions, such as the
number of others actually in a position to have access to the experience in
question: if I, the only human being ever to visit Mars, find beauty in a Martian
landscape, the judgement makes no less claim to universal validity because it
happens that no other human being can in fact corroborate it. The value of a
historically contingent phenomenon, such as my pleasure in Trenets La mer, is
still objective and universalisable, in the sense that another person placed at precisely,
or approximately, the same historical locus (admittedly precisely is strictly impossible,
since it would require that person to have just my personal history as well as the
same perspective on collective history) would have access to precisely, or approxi-
mately, the same value. The difference between that value and the value which is
uniformly accessible by a million people contemplating the Parthenon (and the
uniformity of such contemplations may be less than we suppose) is a difference
only in the number of people with access.
It is true that we may then wish to found on that difference in number a
value-judgement of a non-Kantian kind (in utilitarian terms, for example) which
is reflective and so distinct from an immediately aesthetic judgement in Kants
sense. If I wish to move from the latter type of judgement to the former, I have to
abstract the object from my own unique set of associations, and consider its
publicly verifiable attributes or meanings as a possible cause of experience in
others who are differently situated historically. In so abstracting it, I suspend my
own aesthetic experience in order to make various third-person judgements,
about the possible relations of an object to human consciousness. I may reflect,
for example, that what this music provokes in me and perhaps a few people more
or less similarly placed, it may not provoke in others: and I may then be justified
in evaluating it less favourably.
Admitting the historical contingency of aesthetic experience is not incom-
patible with the evaluative judgement we try to express when we praise art for its
timelessness. On the contrary, it is precisely because we know that all works of
art and all aesthetic responses are embedded in historythat all works are acts by
historically situated persons, all responses the intentional states of other histor-
ically situated personsthat we are elated in a special way when we recognize
works whose meaning and power are effective across many different periods, cul-
tures, and temperaments. All we need to renounce is the notion of a categorical
distinction between eternal or transcendentally objective values and values
which are relative to a particular part of the known life-history of the human race.
We can retain (as we surely should) a sense that there are degrees of longevity
among the dispositions of thought, feeling and perception which make aesthetic
experience possible for the human species, and that while some are dependent, as
 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Johnson puts it, on personal allusions, local customs or temporary opinions,17

others may have a longevity equal to that of the human species itself. Critical
judgements such as Johnsons praise of Shakespeares just representations of
general nature,18 a judgement which incidentally involves no claim to
transcendental objectivity,19 remain legitimate.
These considerations help us to make sense of our ambivalence over such
questions as whether it is right, or makes sense, to say that Mozart is superior to
Bob Dylan. The intensity of the joy derived from each by individual persons may
be the same, or at least be reported with identical degrees of enthusiasm. The
claim that our enjoyment of Mozart, unlike our enjoyment of Dylan, is free from
associations is hardly convincing: who does not associate Mozart (or Debussy? or
Palestrina?) with the imagined contours, however dimly glimpsed, of a histor-
ically specific culture and sensibility? If we apply our utilitarian criterion of value,
however, the greatest work would be the one capable of giving joy (or however
one wants to describe the value of aesthetic experience) to the greatest number of
people. Arguably the experience derivable from Dylan is more dependent on local
historical associations than that derivable from Mozart, so that over time Mozart
will be seen to have given the human race more than Dylan. Of course, someone
might want to say that the intensity of the happiness provided by Dylan is greater,
and that when this is factored into the calculation Dylan wins. We might have
difficulty assessing that argument, because it is so hard to compare or to compute
intensities. But this is a feature of utilitarian arguments in general.

OBJECTION : You are overlooking the distinction, explained by E. D. Hirsch among

others, between meaning and significance (Scrutons meaning and meaning to me). The
meaning of a work is single and unchanging, and is codetermined by its creator s intentions
and the available expressive language, while the significances people find in a work are
varied, in part because of their different historical positions: significance is always
significance to someone at a particular time and place and may be conditioned by some
quite arbitrary connection. The associations you mention are aspects of significance in this
sense. But aesthetic attention is directed at the meaning, or expressive content, of the object
itself.

17
Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare [], in Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. A. Sherbo (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale U.P., ), vol. VII, p. .
18
Ibid.
19
Demonstration immediately displays its power . . . but works tentative and experimental must be
estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a
long succession of endeavours. . . . The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be
perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human
intelligence, but by remarking that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to
do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his senti-
ments (ibid., p. ).
 BRIAN ROSEBURY

Hirschs distinction is a valuable one, and its scope can be extended from verbal
texts to other artefacts if we are willing to define understanding the meaning of
a painting or piece of music as recovering its creators intentions in so far as the
available expressive language has been successfully deployed to express them. It
is striking, though, that so far from excluding the registering of significances from
the aesthetic life, it is rather the recovery of meaning that Hirsch himself
excludes. His argument is precisely designed to secure the independence of
interpretationthat is, the process of understanding the meaning of a textfrom
aesthetic response, which is a form of finding significance. First we set out to
understand the text, which means isolating the authors achieved meaning (unless
we prefer to ascribe our own meaning to the text: but to do that is not to
understand it, rather it is to rewrite it). Only after we have understood it are we
in a position to discern its significances for us, which necessarily involve situating
it in our historical context, applying it to our own lives and emotions.20 Aesthetic
attention, then, is indeed directed at meaning (in the sense that apprehending its
meaning is a necessary condition for aesthetic response to an object), but so also
is interpretation; the respect in which aesthetic experience differs from inter-
pretation is that the former brings into consciousness certain significances of the
meaning to a given observer, while from the point of view of the latter all such
significances are superfluous.
Hirschs argument for interpretation as a logical precondition for aesthetic
response to an object (since we are not in the fullest sense responding to that object
if we do not correctly interpret it) brings home the importance for our present
purposes of the distinction between significances found in the meaning of a text,
and pseudo-significances that may be ascribed to it: between responses to
something understood and responses to something misunderstood. If we find in
Macbeth (having attended carefully to its meaning) an illuminating commentary
on the career of Joseph Stalin, that is a legitimate finding of significance (signi-
ficance to me, to us): we need only be careful not to make the meaning-claim that
Macbeth is about Joseph Stalin, since Shakespeare cannot have intended it to be
so. If, on the other hand, we find the play applicable to the career of George
Washington because we believe Macbeth to be a doughty fighter for Scottish
independence, that is a pseudo-significance because the play does not in fact have
that meaning. Hirschs argument, in short, points to the necessity of attending
to meaning; it does not discredit the associative nature of aesthetic response.
Psychologically, of course, there is a certain artificiality in the idea that anyone
other than a scholar could establish meaning first and discern significances after-
wards: the point is rather that one is not having an experience of the object at all

20
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT and London: Yale U.P., ), pp. ,
, , and passim; idem, The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
), pp. .
 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

if one is not attending to it, whatever else ones consciousness may bring into
play.
We are accustomed in criticism of the arts to the idea that each generation finds
in certain past texts a special relevance to the preoccupations of its own times: we
associate Frankenstein with our anxieties over cloning, Goyas Disasters of War with
the recent Balkan conflicts, and so on. But an implication of my argument is that
such associative significances are not confined to major social or political con-
cerns, but are a far more prevalent and individualized phenomenon.21 The person
who brings a conception of Stalin to Macbeth, the person who brings an imagined
France to Trenets La mer, and the person who brings a personal memory of
to a Bob Dylan song are all bringing to the object something quite ex-
traneous to it: the third can no more be accused of arbitrariness than the first
(assuming that he or she is attending as closely to the musical and verbal meaning
of the song as the first is to the meaning of the play). If the cases are different, it
is only in the shareableness of the association. That shareableness may be
important for certain artistic purposes, for example in the production of a play:
one could effectively evoke, for most of an audience, an association with Stalin in
a production of Macbeth, but not an association with the directors physics teacher.
And there may be a socially bonding value in a widely shareable association.
Prousts buyers of Pompeian pictures are participating in a collective movement
of sensibility, while Swanns association with the sonata is more idiosyncratic. But
it does not follow that the latter is, for that reason, a less aesthetically valid or
pleasurable experience. One cannot separate the two associations by an appeal to
objectivity. The visit to the Bois de Boulogne is as objective an historical fact (or
would be, had Swann really existed) as the visual culture of the Second Empire.

OBJECTION : Intuitively, one still wants to protest at the arbitrariness that seems to be
legitimized by your argument. Are all associations, however random, to be regarded equally
as part of aesthetic experience?

No, there are types of association which are appropriately excluded from the
aesthetic, or have an attenuating effect on the claim of an experience to be aes-
thetic in nature, and here are some examples. After commenting on them I will
summarize the general principles underlying the analysis.

EXAMPLE : I look at a painting of Drake playing bowls before his summons to face the
Spanish Armada. (A) As I am a keen bowls-player, my heart lifts as I recognize the

21
In the same way I recognize the resemblance and perhaps indebtedness of my argument to the
fusion of horizons of Gadamers hermeneutics, but my thesis lacks the grandeur, simplicity,
and implied collectivism of Gadamers metaphor for the encounter of modernity with its pasts.
(See H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge [Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, ], especially chs and .)
 BRIAN ROSEBURY

balance of Drakes posture as he bowls, and the courteous, slightly stooped attentiveness of
the other players; memories of morning sunshine on innumerable fragrant, and slightly
damp, seaside bowling greens rise to the surface of consciousness. (B) Af ter a moment, I
take out a notepad, and, assessing the apparent trajectory of the bowl and the force of
propulsion implied by Drakes follow-through, calculate the chances that the bowl which
has just lef t Drakes hand will come to rest closer to the target bowl (or jack) than his
opponents.22

The distinction between (A) and (B) is the simple and obvious one that (A) is
the response of someone who takes pleasure in contemplation (of paintings or
other objects), whereas (B) is the response of a bowls-player who just happens to
be looking at a paintingeven if this is the same person a few moments later. It
is a question of the dominance of one or other of the various valued activities in
a persons life, and of the necessity or otherwise of this type of event to each
activity. My interest in competitive skill in bowls is best served by playing bowls
and by analysing bowling technique with the aid of pictures, diagrams, computer
simulations, and so on. I can apply this interest if I happen to stumble upon the
Drake painting, but the painting is essentially superfluous to this aspect of my
life: I can fully satisfy my interest in other ways, and if I had this interest alone, I
would never seek out paintings which did not depict bowls matches, or indeed
contemplate objects at all. On the other hand, the pleasure I experience in (A),
even though I could not have just that particular pleasure if I were not a bowls
player, is of a kind which does not require that I be a bowls player: it requires
instead that I be interested in contemplating objects which are representations of
types of actions and gestures and locales which I can recognize. (A) is part of the
aesthetic life; (B) is part of the bowls-playing life.

EXAMPLE : I learn that the previously unregarded painting I own is worth an in-
calculable sum of money, and now associate it with rapidly whirling dollar signs and the
clatter of cash registers.

The ready but inadequate explanation here is that it is the painting qua canvas
that has the monetary value; the visual image itself, as realized in my brain when
I look at the canvas, is not the kind of thing that can have monetary value (though
it may be the reason for the monetary value of the canvas), and it is the latter that
is the object of aesthetic attention: it is what I associate with the latter that forms
part of the aesthetic experience. Unfortunately, since association is not necessarily
constrained by logical distinctions, it remains true that I can associate cash
registers with the visual image, though if I have a sufficiently lively sense of the

22
I have adapted and amplified here an example in Colin Lyas, Aesthetics (London: UCL Press, ),
p. .
 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

logical distinction, or a sufficiently cynical sense of the lack of correlation

between monetary value and intrinsic worth, my mind may screen the association
out. The fuller explanation, therefore, is on the same lines as in the case of
example . I will indeed be liable to see the painting differently if I am aware of
the great monetary value placed on it by others, and that would be a modification
of the aesthetic experience. (I would see it even more differently if I learned that
its previous owner was a notorious serial killer. That association would be likely
to be more intrusive, because more imaginatively colourful, and would much
more readily attach itself to the visual image itself rather than to the canvas as
commodity.) On the other hand, if I begin to examine the painting with a view to
maximizing my profits (for example, I note that it depicts a horse, and reflect that
a particularly free-spending buyer has a passion for pictures of horses, or if it is a
triptych I consider the possible advantage of selling the panels separately) I have
moved from the aesthetic life to the money-making life.

EXAMPLE : Listening to Grainger s cheerful piece Shepherds Hey, I feel cheerful.

Listening to his equally cheerful piece Country Gardens, I feel sad, because I associate it
with my late kindergarten teacher, who used to play it.

As Danto, from whom I adapt this example, points out, we can distinguish the
claim that a piece of music elicits sadness from the claim that it is sad or expresses
sadness.23 As listener in this example, I can make the same distinction, and think,
This cheerful piece makes me feel sad, recognizing the disjunction between my
aesthetic response (which hears the piece as cheerful, and could accommodate
associations which are significances of that expressive meaning) andsomething
which now seems more important and overshadows aesthetic responsemy
associated memory of my kindergarten teacher. The distinction is between the
aesthetic life and the life of serious recollection, the life in which I focus on
mourning those I have lost. If I project my emotion about the teacher on to
Country Gardens, and suppose myself to be hearing it as sad, that is a case of
pseudo-significance, for the piece is not in fact a sad one and my supposing it to
be so must be a delusion. This is not to say that nostalgic or mournful recol-
lections cannot function as associations in an aesthetic response, but to do so they
must be associated (by my imagination) with the actual expressive meaning of the
object. A work of art can elicit sadness by virtue of its expressing sadness, and
indeed the puzzle over how this happens (why should its sad expression make me
sad?) is at least partly resolved by the hypothesis that on recognizing sadness in art
I am liable to associate with it occasions for sadness, which in turn make me sad.
So my regret for my late teacher could function within an aesthetic experience if

23
Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. .
 BRIAN ROSEBURY

the next piece I listen to is Oft in the Stilly Night, irrespective of whether she
ever sang it herself.
A common feature of my discussion of examples has been an appeal to
the notion of the aesthetic life: an association takes us outside the aesthetic life
as soon as it leads us to reflect, to assign values, according to interests which
are appropriately satisfied through other activities than the contemplation of
objects. And we can in general recognize intuitively when this is happening: a
person may move in an instant from admiring and enjoying a painting to calcu-
lating its market value, but he knows that he is moving from the aesthetic to the
money-making life, and if he equivocates with himself over the matter he is a
self-deceiving villain from a Henry James novel. I have sought in this section to
distinguish such cases of defection from the aesthetic from those in which
historically localized associations form part of the contemplative experience itself.
A final example is in a rather different category, and will lead us towards some
fairly speculative closing remarks.

EXAMPLE : I associate part of the W illiam Tell overture with the Lone Ranger, because
of its use in the popular television series.

This associative experience differs from the earlier examples in that it clearly
falls within the aesthetic life and no other. The expressive character of the
relevant part of Rossinis overture associates quite readily, indeed enjoyably,
with the visual image of the Lone Ranger galloping on Silver and firing his
six-shooter (in a way that Saties Gymnopdies would not do, for example) and it
may be hard to divest oneself of the association once it is established. What one
nevertheless wants to say is that the association is aesthetically inauthentic,
because it has not been spontaneously assigned to the object by my consciousness
(that is, by virtue of some appropriateness which my mind has found in it): it has
in effect been manufactured for me, by the programme-makers who have obliged
me to hear Rossini every time I wanted to watch the Lone Ranger. And for that
reason I may well want to be rid of it. The problem is not that I share this
association with many others, but that none of the millions who experience the
association have evolved it spontaneously from the materials of their own con-
sciousness. In contrast, Prousts admirers of Second Empire paintings each have
had independent access to the historical suggestiveness of a given style: they make
a common discovery because they share a common historical perspective.
The insight which unites example , in which we have an associative aesthetic
experience we rather resent, and the earlier examples of associations which lead
us away from the aesthetic, is that the aesthetic life is the exercise of a highly
specific natural faculty, the unforced and spontaneous operation of which is ex-
tremely important to our sense of well-being and self-esteem, but which is after
all only one faculty among others acting upon the materials of our experience,
 THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

and to some extent competing for mastery over them at any given time. It can
swiftly yield place to another faculty because of the multivalency of the materials
of experience, and it can be manipulated from the outside in a way which reduces
our enjoyment in the autonomous and idiosyncratic flow of our consciousness.
The human aesthetic life, like (for example) the human sexual life, has as its
motive force an appetite which for its own purposes selects, combines, and
assigns value to elements of the contingency that surrounds us at a given time.
The person for whom we feel sexual desire, and a fortiori the person with whom
we fall in love, is constituted to our imagination, at least in part, by a confection
of his or her social, cultural, and other historically contingent attributes and not
merely by ahistorical properties of body and soul. The aesthetic faculty, I believe,
is characterized by a similar rapacious openness, capacity for synthesis, and need
for the authenticity of spontaneity. In contemplating a work of art, as in loving or
desiring another person, we focus intently upon a single object, but its value to us
is enhanced, rather than diminished, by our seeing it from and through and in the
light of the imagination which for each of us is given content by our personal and
collective history.24

Brian Rosebury, Department of Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire,

Preston PR HE, UK. Email: b.j.rosebury@uclan.ac.uk

24
I am grateful to Terry Hopton and Paul Humble for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft
of this paper, and to Peter Lamarque for suggesting further improvements.