Category: Aesthetics

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Nicholas Wiltsher – “The Aesthetic Constitution of Genders”

In this post, Nicholas Wiltsher discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Nick’s article can be found here.

photo of a woman and a man with overlapping geometric patterns
Detail of “121” by Ren Hang © 2023 Taschen GmbH

Sometimes, you write a paper because you think you’ve got the right answer. Sometimes, you just want to explore some ideas; whether you have them exactly right isn’t so important. This paper is of the second kind. It starts from the thought that genders are socially constructed. This means that they’re made from coordinated human thought and action—what we can call social practices. These social practices generate constraints, enablements, and norms: rules about things you can, can’t, should, and shouldn’t do, according to your gender. A gender is constituted by those rules, and thus constructed from social practice.

My general notion was to think about whether, and how, aesthetic practices such as judgements of attractiveness and dress codes contribute to the construction of genders by generating constitutive rules.

Now, you might think that it’s obvious that genders have something to do with aesthetics, but let’s be clear: the claim isn’t just that genders have aesthetic effects. The claim is that what makes genders substantial, what really makes them whatever they are, is in large part rules generated by the gendered aesthetic practices in which we collectively engage. In the paper, I try to justify this claim in three stages: first, by showing that there’s conceptual space for it; second, by showing that the conceptual space can be filled; third, by suggesting that it’s useful to do so.

Let’s start from conceptual space. We can divide human thought and practice into three domains: epistemic, practical-ethical, and aesthetic. Each has its own distinctive kind of value (truth, goodness, beauty), its own salient mental states (knowledge, virtue, appreciation), and so on. On my reading, most of the work on genders is either about epistemic practice or practical-ethical practice. On the epistemic approach, the categories woman and man are constructed from the explanations and predictions we make of people so categorised: for example, from explanations for action appealing to gendered character traits (emotionality, aggression). On the practical-ethical approach, the categories are constructed from the ways we treat and judge people so categorised: for example, from differential judgement of similar sexual behaviour in women and men (promiscuity). Very few people have thought about genders as constructed through their use in aesthetic valuation of people. So there’s the conceptual space.

How do you fill such a conceptual space? With a model, is my answer. A model is a selective account of something. You could think of it in terms of telling a story from a perspective. When it comes to complicated things, it’s worth making multiple models, telling multiple stories, which highlight different important aspects. A model of gender construction shows us one important aspect of it. So aesthetic, epistemic and practical models aren’t really in competition: they’re showing us different things.

The aesthetic model begins with an account of aesthetic social practices. These are coordinated patterns of thought and behaviour focussed on the creation and appreciation of things with aesthetic value. Making art is an obvious example of such a practice. So are lots of practices with humans at their centre. Think of fashion, grooming, perfume; think, in fact, of what people often mean by “aesthetics”. These are coordinated ways of finding aesthetic value in people: of finding each other beautiful, striking, interesting, stylish, expressive.

Lots of human-centred aesthetic practices are gendered. But that doesn’t mean they all contribute directly to constructing genders. The really important practices are those in which gender differentiation occurs essentially: those where it’s definitional of the practice that it’s done differently by people of different genders. It’s essential to the practice of professional dress that men and women do it differently—you can tell this because the very same action, say wearing red lipstick, has very different aesthetic consequences depending on the gender of the actor. Perhaps surprisingly, drag is another aesthetic practice in which gender differentiation is essential. It’s definitional of drag that aesthetic value varies depending on the gender of the performer.

These important aesthetic practices help to construct genders because they generate constraints, enablements, and norms. They tell us how people belonging to a given gender ought to look, dress, comport themselves, express themselves. You can see this most clearly by thinking of gender policing. Which transgressions of gender norms are most often and obviously punished by societies? I say it’s transgressions of aesthetic norms: norms of what we wear and how we present ourselves. 

So there’s a model of how aesthetic social practices in which gender differentiation occurs essentially generate norms that are sufficiently substantial to constitute genders. But is this model useful? The third part of the paper says it is, because it can bridge a troublesome gap between gender categories and self-identity.

We each establish our gender identity in relation to gender categories. Moreover, people want to identify with genders. They often put their gender at the core of their self-identity. But, ideally, we want our self-identity to be something we positively embrace. Yet if we think of genders as defined by epistemic or practical-ethical practices, it’s not clear why anyone would want to positively embrace them, rather than just accept them. 

The aesthetic model allows us to tell a fluent story about how genders can be embraced as constituents of self-identity. Identifying with a gender means embracing the aesthetic norms that constitute it. By embracing those norms, one adopts reasons to value oneself and makes assertions about how one wishes to be valued. Moreover, by participating in gendered aesthetic practices, one finds tools with which to construct and express one’s gendered identity, while also actively participating in the construction of gender itself.

So there’s the argument. There’s space for an aesthetic model of genders; there’s a credible model to be made; and the model can do useful work. I don’t think I’ve done everything right in this paper, and I’d be delighted if someone else were to do it better. But I think the basic idea is sound: whatever genders are, aesthetic practices substantially make them so.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6160/.

About the author

Nicholas Wiltsher is currently a lecturer at Uppsala University. He will take up a similar position at St Andrews in September 2025. He has previously worked in Belgium, Brazil, the USA, and the UK. His research encompasses several topics in aesthetics, and also the imagination.

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Michael Dickson – “Musical Notation”

In this post, Michael Dickson discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Michael’s article can be found here.

a painting of three musicians by pablo picasso
Three Musicians (1921) Pablo Picasso

While scholars have often discussed the artifacts created from musical notation (scores), philosophical exploration of the nature of notation is relatively sparse. My essay “Musical Notation” takes a step back to address foundational questions about notation: What is it? What and how does it express? And what are the implications of this expression?

In my essay, I do not offer an exhaustive philosophy of notation, but I develop a framework that accommodates the complexity and context-dependence inherent in musical notation. The essay focuses on notation in the Western tradition, itself quite diverse, and does not pursue a comprehensive treatment of other traditions.

My approach differs from Nelson Goodman’s work on this topic in two ways: firstly, it avoids his nominalist commitments and, secondly, it acknowledges that musical notation is not a formal language and resists being treated as such.  

To ground the discussion, I introduce four desiderata for any theory of musical notation:

  1. Diverse Uses: The theory must explain the various roles notation plays – e.g., prescriptive (as in scores), mnemonic, transcriptional, pedagogical, and analytic.
  2. Diverse Systems: The theory must accommodate the multitude of notational systems and their integration with specific musical practices.
  3. Extra-notational Interaction: The theory should account for how notation interacts with contextual information, such as titles, composer names, and stylistic indications.
  4. Entanglement with Practice: The theory must recognize that notation is deeply interwoven with the practices it supports, reflecting the cultural, historical, and practical contexts of its use.

I distinguish various types of symbol: for example, sonic symbols, such as quarter-notes, which relate directly to the production of a sound, and supporting symbols, such as staves and clefs, which provide context for establishing the meaning of sonic symbols.

I then turn to disentangling the components of musical notation.

  • Symbol-forms are the abstract shapes or other configurations (such as the shape of a notehead or a rest) that carry musical meaning.
  • Symbol-engravings are the physical manifestations of these forms, found in scores and other notational media.
  • Symbols themselves are abstract entities, created through the association of symbol-forms with meanings, intended for use within a notational system.

This model allows for a nuanced understanding of how notation functions. For instance, the same symbol-form (e.g., a dot) can have different meanings depending on context, as seen in late medieval mensural notation where dots signify various rhythmic values. Similarly, the variability of symbol-engravings, especially in historical manuscripts, underscores the flexibility of notation. A quarter-note engraved as an odd squiggle by Janáček might differ morphologically from the standard engraving, but it remains a quarter-note because of its role within the system.

Symbols are not reducible to their forms or engravings. They are abstract artifacts with meanings and relationships that evolve over time. A clear illustration of this can be found in the historical development of rhythmic notation in the 13th-century treatise De mensurabili musica, where symbols (like the semibrevis) were created by associating specific forms with new rhythmic meanings.

A key contention of my essay concerns the meaning of musical symbols. I call it

Instructional Meaning: the thesis that musical notation denotes imperative meaning.  

Musical instructions are open-ended and flexible.  A whole note, for instance, instructs the performer to sustain a pitch for a duration but leaves details like dynamics, timbre, and phrasing to the performer’s discretion. This abstraction aligns with the nature of performance, where expertise and context fill in the gaps.

I also explore how instructions are expressed. Musical notation employs symbolic, iconic, and sometimes ostensive modes of expression. A crescendo marking might iconically represent a gradual increase in volume, while a symbolic convention determines its precise interpretation. This interplay of modes underscores the richness of notation as a medium for conveying meaning.

One notable feature of musical instructions is their self-directedness. Unlike instructions for baking bread, where the aim is an external product, musical instructions aim at their own enactment. Performing a push-up or playing a scale exemplifies this self-directedness; the goal is the performance of the action itself, irrespective of downstream objectives like fitness or musical presentation.

I contrast Instructional Meaning with

Sonicism: the thesis that notation denotes fixed sonic structures.

Sonicism struggles to account for the variability of performance and interpretation. If scores were tied univocally to specific sonic outcomes, much of the nuance and adaptability of musical practice would be lost.

Instructional Meaning, by contrast, reflects the fact that performers interpret scores as flexible guides, not rigid blueprints. For example, debates about whether a modern piano performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations constitutes a ‘genuine performance’ illustrate the interpretative richness of musical instructions. These debates arise because the instructions encoded in notation (like all instructions) are always mediated by the norms and practices of interpretation.

Instructional Meaning also makes good sense of unperformable scores – notations that describe impossible actions, such as each performer playing louder than the others. Such scores reinforce Instructional Meaning because their interest lies not in any hypothetical sonic outcome but in the instructions themselves and the conceptual engagement they provoke.

Another strength of Instructional Meaning is its ability to account for extra-notational elements. Titles, composer names, stylistic annotations, and other markings often influence how performers interpret scores. For instance, the tempo marking “Maestoso” in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 shapes the performer’s approach, even though it is not part of the core sonic symbols. These interactions demonstrate how musical instructions (like all instructions) are embedded within broader interpretative contexts.

My essay emphasizes that musical notation is inextricably linked to the practices it supports. Understanding a notational system requires familiarity with the cultural and historical context in which it operates. For example, the rhythmic notation of the Notre Dame school of polyphony relies on an implicit knowledge of rhythmic modes specific to that practice. Similarly, contemporary chord symbols like “Fm7” depend on the tonal conventions of modern music.  This entanglement underscores the limitations of treating musical notation as a formal language. Instead, musical notation must be understood as part of a dynamic, context-sensitive practice.

In the conclusion, I speculate on the ontological implications of Instructional Meaning. If musical scores represent musical pieces, and if scores express instructions, then perhaps musical pieces themselves are instructions. This view aligns with the observation that musical pieces are created, instantiated, and contextualized within specific practices. By conceiving musical works as instructions, we gain a fresh perspective on their nature and the role of notation in their realization.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5706/.

About the author

Michael Dickson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.  For many years he worked in philosophy of science, especially physics.  More recently his work has focused on the philosophy of music and psychiatry.

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Ashley Atkins – “Race and the Politics of Loss: Revisiting the Legacy of Emmett Till”

Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”, part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial © Benjamin Norman / The New York Times / Redux

In this post, Ashley Atkins discusses the article she recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Ashley’s article can be found here.

The exhibition of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the 2017 Whitney Biennial sparked immediate and passionate criticism: a protest was staged in front of the painting on its opening day; a public discussion of the controversy surrounding the painting was held by the Whitney during its exhibition; and sometime in between, a public letter was penned that called for the painting’s destruction.

There are so few paintings of the dead in open casket that a painting of this kind was almost certain to capture people’s attention, even to shock. Helen Molesworth, a curator of contemporary art and former Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, articulates this shock in response to a recent exhibition of Alice Neel’s work, which included Dead Father (1946).

Image of a dead old man in an open coffin.
“Dead Father” (1946) Alice Neel © The Estate of Alice Neel

Though Molesworth “grew up in a tradition where you see dead people in coffin,” the act of making an image of this subject matter was felt to border on obscenity: “Nobody takes a picture of the dead person in a coffin, people don’t make paintings—oil paintings—of dead people in coffins. This is like […] almost taboo to me. Still, when I see that painting [Dead Father] I…I am a little shocked still.”

Obscenity was one of the charges presented against Open Casket (also an oil painting) but even so the feeling was that this bordered on something more sinister. Here we have a painting not of an intimate but of a stranger and, as Hannah Black—who led the call for its destruction—summed it up, a painting of a dead black boy by a white artist.

What propelled the controversy was the painting’s connection to its presumed—though not explicitly identified—subject, Emmett Till, a black teenager lynched in Mississippi in 1955, whose disfigured and badly decomposed body was laid in an open casket for the duration of a four-day public viewing at the insistence of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. What exactly, critics pointedly asked, is the artist’s relationship to this legacy? What does it mean to look at this painting?

Open Casket and the criticism surrounding it presents us with an opportunity to revisit this legacy and to examine, in particular, the significance of Mamie Till-Mobley’s public presentation of the body of her son, including her sanctioning of the publication of photographs of his body in casket, which continue to circulate. What can her actions mean to us today?

Schutz’s stated aims in painting Open Casket offer an illuminating starting point. Till-Mobley’s relationship to her son needed, in Schutz’s view, to be reflected in some way in this image; though the violence done to him was horrific and real and should be acknowledged as such—one of the reasons for its continuing political significance—the painting could not simply be grotesque (and I think we can see something in it of the tenderness that appears in Dead Father, what Fran Liebowitz unguardedly describes as beauty in her discussion of Neel’s painting). The image would also be, somehow, an American image.

We can find a basis for these ideas in Mamie Till-Mobley’s own reflections on these events, particularly in her declaration that all Americans needed to be impacted by the sight of the body as a whole so that they might together say what they had seen (Till-Mobley & Benson 2003: 140). As she reveals in her autobiography, Till-Mobley had herself studied the violence done to her son. She could describe it forensically, inch by inch, she tells us, but something other than this kind of engagement with the body of her son was intended by her invitation to Americans to look together and say what they saw. This was something she alone could not do. Americans also needed to see pictures of her son as he had been, she proposed, so that they could see what was lost to them.

It was through being initiated into rites of mourning, as we might put it, that Americans were to participate in this legacy. The most provocative aspect of Open Casket—what was experienced by critics as its intrusion into the mourning of others—is also, in my view, the central thread linking it to this legacy, namely, its engagement with Till-Mobley’s invitation to mourn her son’s legacy as an American one.

If this is right, why have critics neglected to consider that the painting might be a mournful one or to at least judge its failure in these terms?

One important reason is that these critics do not understand this legacy in the terms that I set out; they would reject the idea that “racial losses” are to be mourned collectively. The critical reception of this legacy is a divided one. It assigns two complementary functions to the photographs of Emmett Till in casket: on the one hand, these photographs are understood to facilitate mourning (to provide shelter, warning, and inspiration) among those vulnerable to white violence and, on the other hand, these photographs circulate as evidence and are meant to expose those implicated in this violence (as Schutz was said to be through her painting). The aim of exposure can be seen in the rhetoric surrounding the violence associated with the iconography of Emmett Till’s death. The violence, critics insist, speaks for itself, bears its own witness, without any need for subjective response (of which mournfulness is a paradigm). It is on such grounds that Schutz’s painting is criticized for being too subjective.

But if this is right, why was there any need for Mobley to invite all Americans to look together? What use do we have for the idea that the loss of her son might be conceived of as a common loss?

It is tempting to understand Till-Mobley’s invitation to Americans within a tradition of political thought that sees democracy as requiring continual sacrifice and, relatedly, as requiring that citizens cultivate a capacity to mourn such losses (Allen 2004; McIvor 2016). Though this tradition is acutely aware of the ways in which the burdens of loss have historically been shifted onto to African Americans, among others, legacies of racial violence and loss engendered in this manner are thought to be no less collective for being borne inequitably. It is on these grounds that even these losses are to be mourned—that is, acknowledged as losses—by all citizens.

This tradition misses, however, the significance of and the challenge presented by Till-Mobley’s invitation. She did not assume that the loss of her son could already constitute a collective loss. She proposed that it be seen as such; i.e., that Americans come to think of themselves as people who had suffered this loss and needed, collectively, to put into words what it was and how it impacted them—an act of political re-envisioning so bold that its fulfillment would perhaps have been understood as a political refounding of the country. In this sense, we might see her as participating in the political lineage of Abraham Lincoln, who, it has been argued, also used a concrete occasion of mourning, in Gettysburg, to offer a vision of the country so bold in its re-envisioning that it has been conceptualized in these terms (Wills 1992; Nussbaum 2013).

On July 25, 2023, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation establishing the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in both Mississippi and Illinois (the family’s home state). The new national monument “will help tell the story of the events surrounding Emmett Till’s murder, their significance in the civil rights movement and American history, and the broader story of Black oppression, survival, and bravery in America.”

We can’t yet know how this story will be told. Will it present Emmett Till’s death as a loss to be mourned and, if so, by whom (what nation)? Will it present these events with tenderness, with beauty, which helps us to bear the ugliness of death and violence? Will Mamie Till-Mobley’s contribution to the civil rights movement be memorialized, as is standard, as helping “catalyze” this movement? This implies not only that her gesture was of great significance but that it was significant mainly for what followed, what would conventionally be thought of as properly political actions. Seeing Till-Mobley in this way would reflect the view of her contemporaries, among them powerful leaders in the NAACP who eventually publicly cut ties with her. In describing her grief as a catalyst and a benefit to later generations—the living rather than to the dead—they were making the point that grief was not itself of political significance, but rather a dangerous distraction from these other, properly political ends.

The question of what Mobley’s gesture can mean to us today will depend on many things, including our understanding of the prospects for a mournful politics.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2250/.

References

  • Allen, Daniel (2004). Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. University of Chicago Press.
  • McIvor, David W. (2016). Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss. Cornell University Press.
  • Till-Mobley, Mamie and Christopher Benson (2003). Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. Random House.
  • Nussbaum, Martha (2013). Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Harvard University Press.
  • Wills, Gary (1992). Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. Simon and Schuster.

About the author

Ashley Atkins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan University. She received an NEH Fellowship this year in support of a book project that examines grief through the lens of contemporary memoir. “Race and the Politics of Loss” is part of a series of papers exploring legacies of racial violence and loss in democratic politics.