Fraudulent Intents

Modernist Studies Association Conference
Nashville, 2008

In 1914, a writer for the St. Joseph, Michigan, News-Press grumbled that “The doggerel of words now being produced under the title of futurist poetry makes us shudder and wonder if it is all intended for a joke.” Now, I am not going to put this quotation to work as yet another of the many instances of modernism’s outraged public, inveighing against modernism’s pernicious new forms. That’s an old story, one that scholars have told, complicated, and tweaked over the years. Instead, I’d like to look not at the News-Press’s shuddering, but at something perhaps more telling — the reporter’s uncertainty whether modernism was sincere, or whether it was “all intended for a joke.” This kind of uncertainty, repeated in hundreds of locations, tells much about modernism’s rise. A profoundly destabilized reaction, uncertainty arose because a work’s very status, or the artist’s relationship to the work, seemed off, unsettling in some way that was hard to pinpoint. Uncertainty, then, not first about the properties of a work, but about the manner in which it was offered. Reviewing the 1912 Post-Impressionist show, Martin Hardie, writing in Queen, noted tentatively — with an echo of Ruskin on Whistler — that “One is bound to credit the Post-Impressionists with lofty motives, but one has constant suspicions of the pot of paint flung in the public’s face“ (1912). How to position oneself securely vis-à-vis the often-inscrutable intentions of modernism left many unsettled. Alan Clutton-Brock some twenty years later argued that Gertrude Stein

Why pay attention to this uncertainty, which can seem to point to nothing more than interpretive failure? Because uncertainty had a significant cultural life in modernism, providing
1 ) a key to understanding how sincerity and intention worked in the default aesthetic of the time and why uncertainty was such a major issue,
2) the inevitable consequences of these understandings to modernism’s reception,
3) insight into the place of intent in modernist aesthetics.
I’ll begin with how uncertainty shaped the reading experience of modernism’s contemporary audience. A primal interpretive crisis, uncertainty over intent blocked reading at its roots, because audiences needed some supposition of intent in order to proceed with what modernism’s artworks meant. Uncertainty whether a work was intended seriously wasn’t just a question of the particular ontology of the work of art before one, then. Without surmising intent, modernism’s audience had no basis from which to proceed to create meaning. Uncertainty over the manner in which a work was offered — at times stretching to wondering whether it might indeed be a fraud — paralyzed interpretation, then. In many readers uncertainty about a work’s sincerity upset strongly implanted expectations: in the default aesthetic of the time, intent was supposed to be both transparent and sincere, and this presupposition was so basic that the kinds of uncertainty I have cited consequently raised the question whether a given work was even being sincerely offered as a work of art — “sincere” and “work of art” being understood under the dominant terms of the day.

Modernism’s audience, drawing large consequences from its uncertainty, worried about a particular kind of intent.

A little background:
In aesthetic experience, audiences infer meaning based on two different kinds of intent. At one level, readers surmise intent in order to interpret what a work means to assert about the world (e.g., in “A Modest Proposal,” did Swift mean to suggest that eating Irish babies was a good option?). But at another level audiences infer intent as an aid to figuring out the category of the work under discussion (e.g., is this grouping of words before me intended to be a shopping list or a poem?). Jerrold Levinson characterizes these two types of intention as semantic and categorial intents. To desire to have one’s poem express rage is a semantic intention; to desire to write a poem is a categorial intention. Despite its utter simplicity, that categorial function is hardly trivial; it constrains meaning more profoundly than do semantic intentions, for categorial intentions shape? how a text is to be conceptualized and approached on a fundamental level and thus indirectly affect what it will resultingly say or express? At this more basic level, intent, in aesthetic experience, does a lot of work; inferring categorial intent is a more primary interpretive activity than inferring semantic intent. At the very least, a reader needs a supposition of intent to ascertain that what is before her is a work of art, and, in the default aesthetic of the early twentieth century, that meant a work that, at the very least, was sincerely offered.

Because it is foundational, necessary to audiences proceeding with meaning, categorial intent accounts for crucial — indeed, definitional — aspects of the default aesthetic of any time. Within the default aesthetic of the early twentieth century, the categorial intent for producing art was premised on sincerity, understood interpersonally and ethically. Sincere intent was the first thing to infer. Under this aesthetic, without a clear and sincere intent, one could not have the categorial intent to produce art. You could be clever, or produce theory, or drum up publicity, or perpetrate a fraud, but you could not create art. Since a supposition of categorial intent allowed one to proceed to interpretation, insincere works took themselves off the table. The question “is it art?,” directed at hundreds of modernist artworks, was a question about categorial intention, often founded on uncertainty about these works? sincerity. (Those asking the question were implicitly yet pointedly asserting what the appropriate categorial intention could not be — it couldn’t, for example, be an artist’s simple fiat — “it’s art because I say it is art”). During modernism categorial intentions were more baffling, received more scrutiny, and were contested more vigorously than would have been the case during a time of aesthetic stability. And, because inferring categorial intentions is so primary to human interaction, unclear aesthetic categorial intentions, as in all of life, unsettled their interpreters.

For critics like Hardy, Clutton-Brock, and the reporter for the News-Press, modernists produced works of art which could fit the categorial intent for art only through strained explanations. Art’s default context, to these critics, seemed so obvious that modernist literature and art must either be the product of a puzzling — or of a clearly insincere — intent. In this context of large cultural agreement, creating something that did not meet the commonly understood categorial intent for art — but yet made claims as art — could only be deliberate, unnatural — a common complaint against modernism.

But how could anyone today think this widespread uncertainty had some basis? After all, high moderns didn’t really create frauds or hoaxes, did they? Of course not, but the uncertainty didn’t appear out of the blue, either. In retrospect it has an inevitability, given the kinds of works to which readers were reacting. The phrase “kinds of works” needs some focus. Audience uncertainty didn’t appear solely as a result of the newness of modernist works, or an unstable social situation, or the kinds of large cultural and epistemological forces documented by critics such as Michael Leja or Miles Orvell. Those explanations all can do significant analytic work, but they don’t address a central aspect of fraud: the unclear signs of intent in the work at hand.

Works of art provide signs of intent. That should be no surprise — there being no pipeline directly into another’s mind, intent is always inferred contextually, and the works themselves are part of that context. In the early twentieth century, there was large cultural agreement about the formal features that indicated sincere intent, that consequently made a work of art a work of art. Categorial intents were, and are, culturally communicable. The formal characteristics of many modernist works, however, masked intent, a masking increased by the apparently unstable social and artistic milieu. Part of this masking was an inevitable product of newness: once artists stepped far outside the default conventions of ordinary art, it became hard to know what motivated not only large issues, such as the intent behind a work like Ulysses (realism? licentiousness? parody?), but it also became hard to know the intent behind highly specific aspects of works, such as individual line endings (Moore and Cummings), authorial commitment to a particular quotation in a work (Eliot, Joyce, and Duchamp), or unruly perspective (Matisse and Woolf), or the relationships among disparate elements (Picasso, Eliot, and Moore). Without a clear handle on what motivated these characteristics, it became hard to know what these texts meant.

But the different forms of modernist writing masked intent not just because of how far afield they wandered from the default aesthetic of the time. If modernism’s newness were the only factor, over time these works’ motivating intentions would become clear — or clearer than they are now, at any rate. Modernism’s unclear intent is not just a transient effect of history. Modernists created works where the formal properties of the work cause intent and its signs to have an unclear or flexible status. And this unclarity is central to their aesthetic effect.

Consider this unconscionably short cook’s tour of modernism’s masking of intent. Some of this masking is obvious enough, as in pieces like Stein’s Tender Buttons, works freed from the exigencies of logic and an articulable personality capable of motivating the relationships among phrases. But it stretches beyond Stein and Dada, to objectivist works that have a psychological flatness (like the poems of Williams), and to works like Ulysses or movements like cubism — manifestations of art that seemed to be set in motion by a theory.

Works that originated, spectacularly, from many sources also masked sincerity. The quotations in The Waste Land provide an unclear intent for the work as a whole since each phrase originates from a different psychological motivation, and Eliot’s harsh juxtapositions provide neither a clear narrative context nor a clear narrator nor quoter of these sources. Most of these maskings were based on removing psychological complexity, and turning these artworks into texts, not voice—paintings, not pictures. One could go further afield, to parodic works, difficult works, works with personae, works that seem to originate from several different perspectives, works with unstable hyperbole (such as BLAST or almost any manifesto). Most notable, perhaps, are works whose central strategy is irony, the dominant aesthetic feature and interpretive stance of the twentieth century. But in masking traditional functions of intent, many modernist works don’t remove intent from aesthetic consideration; modernism’sworks are about intent, and, at times, about the impossibility or irrelevance of default understandings of sincerity.

Modernism not only challenged default notions of sincere intent aesthetically, they also did so critically. Modernists attempted to change the default aesthetic (and therefore what counted as art’s categorial intent) by claiming either that the default aesthetic was an improper tool for determining categorial intentions, or, at times (and more modestly), that they really were fulfilling the requirements of the default aesthetic, albeit at a new and usually more profound level than did traditional art. That is what Conrad Aiken was doing, for example, when he claimed that Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations was “psychological realism, but in a highly subjective or introspective vein . . . .” (Aiken) (81). Modernist critics also redefined sincerity. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement argued that The Waste Land was “a collection of flashes” which gave “a complete expression of this poet’s / vision of modern life,” and therefore was “utterly sincere” (Anonymous Review of the Waste Land) (134-35). Even more extreme, Edmund Wilson claimed that The Waste Land was “untempered by irony or disguise.” Changes at this level don’t happen without a struggle, in this case a struggle between an earlier idea of sincerity that was based on “good faith,” and a later view of sincerity that was based on one’s relationship with one’s materials, or a theoretic discourse, or a procedure.

Modernism was more successful and ambitious, though, in its leaving sincerity behind as a categorial intention for art. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in looking at a work of art one still needs to surmise the categorial intent that the maker intended to present this as a work of art — but sincerity isn’t central to that inference. It’s not that sincerity is undesirable in art, it’s just that irony, personae, and a host of other devices for hiding intent have come in the way to cloud sincerity’s effortless function. Sincerity, as the guarantor of transparent motivation, is no longer the basis for proceeding with interactions with or interpretations of art. (Modernism, as a consequence of its clouding of sincerity, also engendered a default understanding that interaction with art meant interpretation of textual meaning.) Modernism redefined the basis for inferring categorial intent.

I do not mean to suggest that the default aesthetic was simple-minded or wrong on all accounts. It was right, on a pragmatic level, to insist on a place for inferring intent in aesthetic experience. But it tripped up in its very specific understanding of how intent should function: it understood sincere intention as a demonstrable fact, and, more important, as a categorial intent for art. Followers of the default aesthetic thought that violations should be banished from the category, instead of being evaluated according to different ideas of intent. Readers committed to the default aesthetic got no pleasure from how a desire for a sincere or a clear intent might interact with the blank intentions of much modernist art. For them, Duchamp’s “Fountain” was trouble, and nothing more.

To turn to modernist reading practices, it’s not that, as Wimsatt and Beardsley would later claim, that intent was irrelevant. A more rich understanding — one modernism only imperfectly understood — would be that a supposition of intent is necessary for performative reasons (to be able to proceed with reading). And in this supposition intent doesn’t need to be clear and sincere for it to do its work. While one could argue that in most situations in everyday life intent needs to be clear, art is fictive, and its intents can be productively fictive. You don’t always need to know the intent of a work, but you always have a struggle with intent, and at times this play is central to aesthetic pleasure.

© Leonard Diepeveen   2008