cold world motherfucker
Truth and Responsibilty in Art
First, carrying over John Beverley’s first question from his paper on the Testimonio: “Do social struggles give rise to new forms of literature, or is there more a question of the adequacy of their representation in existing narrative forms like the short story or the novel[?]” And what is life but an ongoing social struggle? I think there is a point to be made here on tolerance and humanity that Levinas might endorse. That is, in encountering different forms of life, our immediate choice is to act either in violence or ethical responsibility. What I mean here is that David Stoll has radically misinterpretted Menchu, and that this is basically cultural violence. The general form of our problem seems to be attempting to force a culture and ideology that is indeed foreign to our own into modes of understanding primarily relevant to our lives. This precisely fails the criteria of responsibility (a moral imperative at this point) set out by our readings of Judith Butler and Levinas. In response to this, I will present a reading of Heidegger that is more sensitive to tolerance and understanding than to the brute knowledge those like Stoll are in search of.
Our problem can be seen taking root in the first sentence of the introduction to I, Rigoberta Menchu: “This book tells the life story of Rigoberta Menchu…” But does it? Menchu responds to this herself further on, saying that “it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people.” At this point we have reached an impasse; yet it is a telling one. What does the book do? It cannot both be a single woman’s story and the story of an entire people. Stoll and others seem to appeal to an intuition stating that “the work of art is the artist’s existence and the source of his or her life.”[i] However, from the author’s own mouth, this is not what the book is at all. And this appeal itself appeals to another intuition. Typically people think of truth as the correspondence of statements to “the facts,” whatever those might be. From this we can see how someone like Stoll might say that Menchu was wrong, or that her testimony is faulty. That is, if it were the case that Menchu’s testimony primarily stood in a relationship we might call truth or falsity to the states of affairs as they “really” were, there certainly would be some controversy about what she said. However, I think this is clearly not what is going on.
In his paper On Representation and Essence: Barthes and Heidegger, Nicholas Huckle makes many of the remarks I have already made. The force of the paper is that we mistakenly “first isolate and define an element in the structure [of the work] prior to gaining a proper understanding of the work as a whole.” In discussing Heidegger’s famous lecture on van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Shoes, Huckle points out that the wrong path to take in understanding art is to immediately ask a question like “who’s shoes are those?” These kinds of questions inevitably lead to a fault, in that they try to separate what the work is about and what the artist was doing in creating it from what can be taken from the work as a whole.[ii] “The desire is therefore to capture the individual ‘completely’ and there is no indication that this individual is to be understood in relation to anything else.”[iii]
What this means is that Stoll completely missed the point when he asked “Did any of this really happen to her?” or “Is she telling the truth?” Our take on Menchu should not be “motivated by any desire to possess an individual’s essence.”[iv] In van Gogh’s painting, the role of the owner of the shoes is of course important to getting a hold on what the painting means. But just as it is mistaken to solely focus on that aspect of the painting, it is also mistaken to focus solely on who this women – Rigoberta Menchu – is, apart from the work as a whole. The significance to be taken from the work is not reducible to a function of any of the discreet elements found therein.
For Heidegger, truth is aletheia, or unconcealment. Perhaps to oversimplify this point, we can think of Menchu’s book like this: her culture and heritage are readily understood by those already inside it, such that her book brings it to light in an intelligible manner to those outside it. What we have here is a showing, not a telling, as Wittgenstein might say. To avoid regress to subjectivity and relativism, we cannot look at the work as simply the private thoughts of one woman laid bare on paper. Prior to reading her book , we did not know or understand the significance of Menchu or her people. But in reading it, the being (to use Heidegger’s jargon) of her and her people is allowed to emerge from the nebulous and the ignored.
The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believes ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. [v]
What he means here is that what can be taken from the work of art is indeed nothing at all like what Stoll wants. What is taken from the work is an understanding of a world. A world is just the situation we find ourselves in that allows for meaning in our lives. That is, if I identify as student, I can only be a student because our culture provides me the possibility space to do so.
To understand a student is to understand the world of a student. I could tell you about myself to exhaustion, but you would have no understanding of what it is to be a student if you think I am trying to make a point about a person called Matt Brogan. I think this is importantly analogous to Menchu’s book. What the book tries to get across to the reader is what it is like to be an Indian woman in Guatemala. And this can only be done in the way Menchu does. That is, she cannot escape her culture, beliefs, dispositions, etc, and talk to us from a god’s eye view. She must tell us about herself to say anything about her people. In questioning her directly and specifically, as Stoll does, the truth is not allowed to be disclosed.
In the work of art the truth of beings has set itself to work. Some particular being … comes in the work to stand in the light of its Being. The Being of beings comes into the steadiness of its shining.[vi]
In Menchu’s book, there is a significance to be gained that is not entirely obvious to us. The particular being we notice here is Menchu in her individuality, though she properly functions as an entrance to an understanding. By focusing on her and her role in the work, the complexities of the work are drawn out. This problematizes the truth of the work, but at the same time allows for any truth to be taken from it all. She tells us a story about a group of people in an attempt to get us to understand these people. However, in doing so she inevitably opens the field for misunderstanding. The tendency is to get caught up in trying to understand her in particular. But by acknowledging her, we acknowledge that there is a broader truth to be had here. If we see the work properly as a whole, its being is unconcealed – it is allowed to stand and come to light, and the truth of the work can be had. The truth of the work then is not something that can correspond correctly to the facts. Rather it is something we can believe or doubt once it has been properly attended to.
At the end of the day, what we have is a woman trying to tell us something. And to doubt the work as Stoll does is tantamount to stripping her of her humanity, treating her as an object of study. The western tendency is to do just this, treat everything as objects to be looked at in a systematic manner in order to properly apprehend them. Carrying this over to people, as before, is a failure of ethical responsibility.
[i] From the introduction to Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, edited by David Krell in the Basic Writings. , p. 141
[ii] From Heideger’s The Origin of the Work of Art.
[iii] Huckle, On Representation and Essence. , p. 278
[iv] Ibid. , p. 279
[v] Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art. , p. 170
[vi] Ibid. , p. 162
(via teenagejesus)
